In the same week Jeremy Clarkson and Carol Thatcher each voiced discriminatory sentiments; one against the disabled, our PM, who is blind in one eye, and the other against people of another race. One stayed in his job and no disciplinary action was taken, the other was fired from hers. The BBC may have been demonstrating sexism; the level of outcry over each may have been different; the commercial utility of each may have had a role to play in determining different outcomes.
Nevertheless, both Clarkson slagging off Gordon Brown and Thatcher talking about “golliwogs” showed a disregard for differences within our society. And yet, some forms of discrimination seem different to others, whether because they can be tied directly to economic exploitation or because they seem purely ‘cultural’. This is not an attempt to render any one acceptable, nor to rank them and declare that people should be more or less offended by one or the other; no, it is a search for insights into the structural location of each within our social totality.
Racism, for example, seems to have a firm economic basis; it can appear as competition for jobs. Disorganised and desperate for a foothold, immigrants will take badly paid jobs and work their way up. This undermines unionisation efforts and adds a level of competition to native labour. From the top down, racism is the ideological legitimization of this increased degree of exploitation. This is not to say that capitalism could not survive without racism of course; it only needs the poor, regardless of race.
Multi-ethnic, multi-national workforces are increasingly common. If capitalism and the planet each survive a hundred years, it’s possible that the racial disparity in America might even out so that the poorest rung of society is white, black, latino or chinese in a proportion corresponding to the total income-independent demographic constitution of the United States. On the other hand, the continual crisis and depredations demanded by capitalism will probably forever hold Africa in subjection, so maybe not.
Sexism can also be seen as somewhat economically determined. The role that women play in the lives of men - whether fathers, brothers, husbands or sons - is somewhat controlled by the roles they are forced to or can choose to play elsewhere. A working woman is unlikely to be willing to pick up the washing, cooking and ironing for her husband as well as maintaining her own job. Yet there are women who forego careers in order to do just those things. There is every variant in between.
These roles that women play can affect the attitudes of the men around them, in the same way that the economic dominance of men can affect the consciousness of women. Subservience in one woman before a male can affect how a child expects all women to behave; there are other myriad ways that sexism can be created, but all of them essentially rely on the economic and corresponding ideological hegemony of men. In both cases, sexism and racism, the working class is divided.
What about heightism, lookism, classism, ageism or ableism? Do they bear the same structural role within capitalism? Take ableism first.
It probably says something that I am not nearly as informed about the Disabled Rights movement as I am about anti-racist activism or feminism. Yet disabled workers are among the most vulnerable parts of the working class. Some 11 % of adults in employment bear some disability, and when employers look to lay off staff, it’s worth noting that the disabled can suffer, especially if they cost their employer extra money because of a need for different working arrangements.
Similarly it bears pointing out that Remploy reached its height standing beside an active trade union movement, and has since been on the decline alongside that trade union movement. The continuing closure of many Remploy factories even in such key areas as York, and the switch to finding disabled workers employment in mainstream jobs - which are often less suited, shows an attempt to claw back concessions won by activism in previous generations.
A drive towards the most efficient forms of surplus extraction means the disabled can get left by the wayside; this form of discrimination is probably even more intrinsic to capitalism, at its current level of technological development, than the other two. Ageism runs along the same lines, though I’m not convinced by rhetoric that suggests older people want to work for longer, and thus the pensionable age should be raised. When I’m 65, I may or may not choose to continue working - but damn sure I want to be able to collect a pension I can live on, if I so choose to.
Each of these forms of discrimination are tied to physical differences or character differences. Resentment against such differences can doesn’t require explicit sustenance through attacks upon a minority though, as with Thatcher and Clarkson, such attacks are not unknown. Resentment can implicitly be sustained by emphasizing concepts such as ‘human nature’ or the characteristics and qualities commonly thought of to be the properties of the majority, so that the voice-deprived minority simply functions as an abyss into which one can dump any distasteful qualities.
Racism doesn’t have to be created by statements such as “All black people are more predisposed towards theft.” It can be created by ignoring the economic/sociological element of crime, and thereafter reporting all major crimes as they happen. Without the crucial knowledge that poorer families are more likely to engage in crime regardless of race, crime becomes a property of an Idealist human nature, which can be seen as different between the races rather than socially constructed.
If we consider classism as a function of taste, the correspondence of structural processes to lifestyle is difficult to establish. After all, the ‘legitimate’ culture (as Bourdieu’s La Distinction might have it) is hardly that of the intellectual. One only has to be familiar with the treatment of so many intellectual journalists by their bosses to see that one can still be a billionaire and display many qualities of a philistine. Many working class people are likewise suspicious of complicated theories and learning.
Classism, like taste or racism, is a social construct. It would be tempting to think of it as the inchoate reaction of both oppressed and oppressor to oppression; socialist revolutionaries are oft derided even by the high-brow press as intellectual, middle class oiks as well as by the popular media, playing at once upon the imputed suspicions of the working class and upon the distaste of the ruling class for meddlesome wannabes who are fatally detached from reality, in their own personal Ivory Tower.
These social constructions rely on inequality for their promulgation; some because they perform the objective and directly economic function of undermining proletarian unity, some because those inequalities, experienced day after day, create and sustain discriminatory ideologies by privileging through social origin and educational capital our tastes in relation to the tastes of others, potentially of different social origin and educational capital.
It would be tempting to say, therefore, that some forms of discrimination, far from being ‘active’(e.g. in the sense that racism actively pursued the notion of racial superiority and justified harsher exploitation in those terms), are byproducts of a system which relies in inequality to produce cheap labour. In this, I suggest they demonstrate typological differences - but I would stress that this does not reduce their effect upon those discriminated against, nor our moral imperative to fight discrimination wherever it is found.