Here is an essay that few people would have read and fewer would have appreciated back in January when it was written. However, by the general election, when Democratic unity became a key to winning the White House, everyone would have appreciated the author’s point.
Simply put, horizontal hostility happens because the frustration of breaking barriers makes it easier to fight each other horizontally than it is to fight The Man vertically. You know that famous glass ceiling? It’s called that because ceilings are up, and glass because you can see what’s happening. Women, gays and people of color can see clearly what’s above them, staring at the shoe bottoms of straight white men. If you’re in the “out” groups, you’re pissed off, not getting very far, and it’s really convenient to start socking each other on your own level. At least you feel like you’re doing SOMETHING.
Snip
Who benefits from horizontal hostility? The establishment does. Make no mistake about it. The mainstream press loves this tit-for-tat between Clinton and Obama. Divide and conquer is a strategy that’s as old as any game, war or campaign. The status quo can just sit back and watch other people duke it out.
Ellen Snortland
http://69.94.124.246/cms/story/detail/unite_and_conquer/5613/Ms. Snortland was talking about how a divided party could lose an election. Think 1980, Carter vs. Kennedy or 1972, every Democratic candidate for himself. When Republicans win, wages go down and wealth disparity goes up. The corporate classes benefit from Divide and Conquer in other ways, too. I will spell out some of their win-win scenarios below:
Laws, policies and prejudice against
minorities such as Blacks, Latinos and Asians have been used to help the elite make money in this country. Since the bosses had a poorly educated, easily intimidated group of workers who could be paid low wages and who could be forced to work in dangerous conditions, employers could force
all workers to make concessions, i.e. accept low wages and poor conditions. The white workers were encouraged to blame the minorities, not the bosses, who conspired with law enforcement and politicians to keep the minorities in an oppressed situation. They were told “If only those ____would go back home, your wages would be higher.” Early unions fell for this Divide and Conquer trick and kept minorities out. This allowed the companies to bring in minorities as scab labor, which increased hostilities. In the South, employers kept unions out of their plants by telling their employers that the union would bring in minority workers. Since the economic rivalry for work was even more intense in the South and therefore the animosity between the groups was more fierce, this was enough to cause many white employees to see unions as a threat to their jobs.
Fear lead some white working class voters to go against their own economic best interest when they went into the polls. If the political left promised equal rights for minorities, that meant that whites were in danger of losing their jobs, at least according to the myth which the employers had carefully nurtured. It became us versus them.
So, a large segment of the working class began to vote against its own economic interest, because it had been fooled into thinking that any party which kept the minorities down was good for all white people. Obviously, if these people stopped to think about this, they would see that this was completely illogical. But, as Engels wrote, Americans do not make political decisions based upon reason. They use their emotion and their experience.
As equal rights for all races are finally becoming the rule in fact as well as the rule of law, discrimination against
immigrants has replaced racial discrimination as a tool of choice in the Divide and Conquer game. Back in the heyday of the KKK in the 1920s, the most recently arrived immigrant groups, such as the Italians, were the frequent targets of attack. Now, Latinos are used by employers to keep wages down----and redirect anger away from the bosses towards fellow workers.
The government deliberately keeps the southern border porous to let in the low paid undereducated workers that business demands, but then the same government applies lots of pressure on those workers so that they will not make demands upon their employers. If they agitate for better wages or work conditions, they are rounded up and sent home. As non-citizens, they make a convenient serf class. Once again, the corporate masters act as if they have no choice but to hire the immigrants for lower than market wages, and this depresses all wages. The right wing convinces a fair number of citizen workers that the employers are not to blame---it is the duty of the capitalist to cut costs wherever he can in order to stay in business---no, the fault lies with the illegal aliens. See number 1 for the results.
Women have been oppressed workers since the start of the industrial revolution. Decreased strength does not keep women from performing factory jobs. By limiting their educational opportunities and by denying them access to birth control, women are forced into poverty. They can either marry, or they can get extremely low wage jobs. If they elect to do the latter, they drive down the wages of men, at which point another Divide and Conquer situation is set up. Until recently, many unions were not interested in having women members. Women workers were the enemy.
Good women were supposed to marry and stay home and let (white) men get the jobs, which would then pay higher wages if there were no women or Blacks or immigrants competing for them. Groups like the IWW---Industrial Workers of the World or the Wobblies, unions which accepted women and minorities were ruthlessly persecuted by the government, because they saw through the Divide and Conquer tactics. If all the workers of America were ever to unite, then the corporations would be on the ropes.
Note that women still make a fraction of what men make, and that wage parity for women is still not the law of the land in the United States. Gays have been targets of discrimination by the Christian Churches for hundreds of years. A few European countries like France abolished laws against homosexuality when they became secular states. In the past couple of decades, as race has become a less profitable way to Divide and Conquer the working class, the corporate class has begun to exploit several “values” issues, many revolving around sexuality. These include
abortion ,
teenaged pregnancy prevention ,
pornography and
homosexuality . By including a referendum about any one of these issues on a state ballot, the right wing can increase the turn out of certain voters to help its candidates. So, for example, a law that requires teenagers to get parental consent for an abortion may be on the ballot at the same time that a GOP Senate candidate is in a tight race. In addition, some workers can be persuaded to vote against their own economic self interests and for the party which represents the interests of their employer (with whom they may have serious disagreements) if they can be convinced that the Republicans represent God on one of these values issues. So, Monsanto, which dooms millions of third world farmers to starvation with its Terminator seeds or Exxon which contributes to global warming, will support anti-gay candidates or anti-abortion candidates, hoping to pull some Catholic votes from the Democrats. These voters will sacrifice their economic self interest for what they believe is a higher good, not realizing that the Democrats, with their commitment to economic justice and environmental responsibility actually represent a
higher higher good. The GOP values issues above are mostly fear issues. They are not intensely spiritual. They are not deeply satisfying to people who want meaning in their lives. If the Democrats were to form an alliance with religious communities, they could put some serious spiritual matters on the table that would make people forget all about gay bashing and abstinence only sex ed. Unfortunately, Democrats sometimes feel uncomfortable talking about moral responsibility, and so they have allowed the Republicans to label them the party of Godless communism.
Up until the 1960s and 1970s, the Christian left was powerful in this country, instrumental in such groups as the Abolition movement, multiple anti-war movements, the Civil Rights movement. In Latin America, the Liberation Theologists have been able to overthrow right wing governments that have withstood challenges from traditional leftists, like the socialists and communists. Unlike other industrialized countries, where the union of church and state has left most people sour on religion, in the U.S. most people have very positive views towards the Church
which they are allowed to select . Religion is a powerful force when you want to convince people that it is better to look out for the good of the whole community rather than selfishly seek immediate gratification for yourself.
The left made a tactical error in allowing the right to claim all religion as its own, and it needs to correct that mistake if it ever wants to succeed in rallying the people of America to unite for the good of all workers. People who use recreational drugs are another oppressed class that is often overlooked. Specifically, I refer to the members of minority communities who are sent to prison for possession of small amounts of controlled substances. The prison industrial complex competes with workers, since it can be used as a super-cheap labor force. And then, once the prisoners are released, they may find that their educational and job prospects are limited, not to mention their voting privileges. The creation of a huge felon population, many of whom are guilty of a victimless crime, contributes to the public perception that certain racial groups are “criminal” when in fact they are simply the victims of selective prosecution by the criminal justice system. Since one of the medical complications of wealth disparity or living in poverty in a wealthy country is substance abuse (others include depression, alcoholism, domestic violence) anyone who grows up in
poverty is more likely to experiment with drugs, meaning that minority victims of poverty have the deck stacked against them with poorly funded schools, limited access to health care, an increased likelihood that they will try drugs and a criminal justice system that is likely to convict and incarcerate them if/when they do try drugs. Therefore, poverty becomes an endless cycle in this country, since the poor are offered punishment instead of assistance for the medical complications of living in poverty. The result of that punishment decreases workers’ wages and benefits the corporate class. Republicans can also use the huge felon class which they have created to cite “rising crime rates” in an attempt to provoke fear in the white electorate, which demands more enforcement, tougher sentencing and an end to the permissive attitude that has brought the country to its current state. Blacks see this for what it is and decry the institutionalized racism. Whites who fear crime more than they fear someone else being the target of racism disagree---and we get a Divided and Conquered working class. If the whites realized that the intended result of all this was to keep their wages as low as possible, they might think twice before lauding the Department of Justice’s latest “Get Tough on Drugs” program. They might even demand that recreational drugs be legalized.
So called
white collar employees may not realize that they are oppressed. But, when you work unpaid overtime that may add up to thirty or forty hours a week, and you are grateful that you have a job, you are being screwed by the system. When you work for twenty years, and then your company "reorganizes", and your job is eliminated just before you would have qualified for your pension, and suddenly you are fifty, and you have no job prospects, you have been doubly screwed by the system. The boss tells you "Sorry, those blue collar union factory workers are killing me with their $80/hour time and a half over time. That's why I have to let you do." Meanwhile the CEO just cut himself an eight figure bonus check, but you are supposed to vote Republicans, because the unions (that you were never allowed to join) cost you a job, and now you are working at the grocery store.
White collar vs. blue collar. Straight vs. gay. Men vs. women. White vs. Black. Citizen vs. Immigrant. Old vs. young. We have all been there. And in every one of those conflicts the RNC is standing somewhere off to the side whispering "Vote for us. We'll see that the other guy gets what's coming to him. Then you'll get what you deserve." Only, when the other guy gets his reduced wages and benefits, somehow your wages and benefits always wind up getting cut, too. Funny how that works out.
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