Where oppression comes from

[IndianaGreen]

Where oppression comes from

Oppression is built into the social fabric of the societies in which we live--and therefore needs to be explicitly and openly challenged.

October 9, 2009

Capitalism needs oppression. The Industrial Workers of the World used to have a saying that if all the workers of the world spit at the same time, the tiny capitalist class would drown.

In order to prevent such a scenario, the working class is split apart and set against itself, by means of race, sex, nationality, sexual preference and so on. Without these divisions, capitalism could not survive. At the moments they are overcome, capitalism is threatened.

The origins and specific features of each form of oppression is different, but they are all tied together by their utility to the system. This is not to say that capitalism invented oppression. But capitalism has taken older forms, and reshaped and remolded them to its own needs, as well as creating new ones. Divide-and-rule no doubt predates capitalism, but capitalism perfected it.

The British deliberately fostered enmity between Hindus and Muslims as a means of maintaining their rule in India. "I am sorry to hear of the increasing friction between Hindus and Mohameddans," wrote a British official to Lord Elgin in 1897. "One hardly knows what to wish for; unity of ideas and action would be very dangerous politically. Divergence of ideas and collision are administratively troublesome. Of the two the latter is the least risky."

Karl Marx wrote of how in Britain itself, the capitalist class stoked the fires of hatred between English and poorly paid Irish workers, the English worker being encouraged to see the Irish worker as a "competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself."

Marx compares the attitude of the English worker to the Irish worker to that of poor whites in the South to the former Black slaves:

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.

The U.S. 19th century robber baron Jay Gould was more blunt, stating, "I can get one half of the working class to kill the other half."

http://socialistworker.org/2009/10/09/where-oppression-comes-from