Re: Mass murder, jokes and immigration [WAS: Re: Massive Starvation

On Wed, 14 May 2008, Stephen R. Diamond wrote:

> On Tue, 13 May 2008 19:42:38 -0700, John Holmes
<jholmes@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> wrote:
>
>> 
>> 
>> On Tue, 13 May 2008, stephen wrote:
>> 
>>> U.S. capitalist immigration control will always be racist, just like
>>> the penal system is. To me, the racial composition of prisoner
>>> populations is the greater affront to democratic norms. Maybe some
>>> kind of program can reach these problems transitionally, but I haven't
>>> seen any. They end up in the class of tasks, as opposed to demands,
>>> per another discussion.
>> 
>> There are some minimal negative democratic demands one can raise,
>> which hardly deserve calling "transitional."
>> 
>> Such as for example ending capital punishment.
>> 
>> And ending the drug war and freeing all drug offenders, and committers
>> of other victimless crimes like prostitution. This would radically
>> reduce the size of the American prison population and, quite likely,
>> even change its racial composition.
>
> I agree with the specific demands, but not the libertarian
characterization, 
> "victimless crimes." Their defining characteristic is not the absence of

> victims--laws against, e.g., motor-vehicle speeding, are acceptable
although 
> they define victimless crimes. Defeating oppressive laws should not be 
> confused with the libertarian victimless-crime project.

Is motor vehicle speeding a victimless crime? Given the extremely high 
accident death rate on American highways, this is open to question. If 
one is driving alone on the Indianapolis speedway, driving at 300 
miles per hour, although probably fatal unless one is an extremely 
good driver, is a victimless crime. On a public highway, it is not.

It is true that the phrase "victimless crime" is heavily used nowadays 
by libertarians. It goes back I believe to John Stuart Mill, who was 
the father of liberalism as a political philosophy.

It is a peculiarly American term and concept, which, despite Vangelis, 
I do not think is in and of itself a bad thing.

However I am not wedded to it. If you prefer to formulate it as simply 
opposing oppressive laws that is fine, in fact it is probably 
theoretically better. But AFAIK, it is six of one and half a dozen of 
the other.

>
> What role does racist imprisonment play in the current capitalist state?
I 
> wonder if the topic has been the subject of any serious analysis.

Yes, it has been, extensively and at length. Certainly by the 
Spartacists, but by many others as well. Indeed I think there is 
hardly an American left political tendency, or serious liberals for 
that matter, who have not written on this extensively. There have been 
many often quite intelligent pieces in the Nation magazine for 
example. Or the Progressive, or Z, or whatever you like. Or even a few 
in the New York Review of Books and other such journals.

The short answer to the question is that it plays a big part.

> ...
>> Now, we are at the stage in the cycle where the previous layers,
>> now more or less all joined together as "white Europeans" have become
>> more conservative, while the Latin immigrants in particular have
>> become pretty much the vanguard of the organized American working
>> class,
>
> Very im****tant claim. If it is true, it would refute a position calling
for 
> control of Mexican immigration--by whatever means, if any, turns out to
be 
> principled and viable. I've been waiting for vngelis or Dusty to
respond.

You are right, it is an im****tant claim. I should state that it was a 
fairly casual and impressionistic statement on my part, based more on 
practical observations and reading than on some kind of comprehensive 
study, and is not some sort of strongly held political position. So I 
would be interested in comments on it by others--preferably by others 
who have knowledge of things in the USA, a category vangelis and Dusty 
do not fit.

By the way, the practical examples I see of them functioning as a 
vanguard of the working class tend to come from what is and has been 
the most militant regional sector of the American working class over 
the last 10-20 years or so, namely the working class of Los Angeles.

Stephen, maybe you need to get out more...

>
> I think it contradicts David's view, that the Mexicans constitute a sort
of 
> parallel economy, which does not compete with the other economy, because
the 
> Mexicans do work no one else wants to do. David's doesn't accord with
your 
> view of the skilled Mexican worker. It doesn't com****t with my
observations 
> of Mexicans--that they function as a separate community, generally 
> manifesting no desire or willingness to assimilate culturally or even to

> learn more than the rudiments of English. Hence, whatever their
militance, 
> they cannot function as class vanguard, analogous to blacks circe 1966.
It is 
> true that the more established Mexicans may be skilled workers. But from
my 
> perspective, they are no longer "immigrants." The discussion concerns
the 
> time slice that divides our views, whether begins with a border crossing
or 
> taking on real employment.

I think David's view, or better I would stay implication, of a Mexican 
parallel economy is misplaced. It is pretty much what liberals 
defending Mexican immigration tend to say. It is a convenient thing to 
argue when arguing with chauvinists.

Here in the Bay Area at least, most Mexican-Americans seem quite well 
assimilated, indeed most speak better English than Spanish, and I know 
quite a few who speak no Spanish at all. The ones who speak no English 
are the recent immigrants. As for wanting to learn English, I have 
heard of incidents, I think in the LA area actually, of Latin 
parents protesting *against* their children being in bilingual 
classrooms!

I somehow doubt that things are that different in LA. Granted the 
higher Latin percentage in the general population in LA than most 
other American cities means that Spanish monolingualism is liable to 
be more prevalent. But everybody knows that learning English is the 
way to get ahead and escape being a member of the working class, which 
has been the great American ambition for hundreds of years, and which 
working class immigrants, Latin or otherwise, almost always share. 
Indeed one can argue that it is what makes them "American." (Here I 
suspect Vangelis will fulsomely agree with me.)

-jh-