Divide and conquer

Like Chris Bertram, I'm worried about the BBC's "white" season of programmes about the white working class.
The problem's obvious. As Justin says, people aren't oppressed because they are white. But they are oppressed because they are working class - or if not oppressed then desperate, relatively poor, disempowered, exploited, stigmatized and marginalized.
Being white and being working class are wholly different things - one's about having advantage (on average), the other's about not having it.
There are millions of stories to be told about the condition of the working class. So why bring race into it?
The question gains force from the fact that immigration - at worst - is one of the smallest threats to the position of the working class.
Immigration is not to blame for the decline of trades unions, pit closures, bad schooling, an inefficient welfare state, high marginal taxes or deindustrialization. It might well be less to blame for low wages and poor job prospects than are capitalist institutions, greed, under-investment and incompetence. And  insofar as immigration does depress wages, the problem could easily be corrected by more progressive taxation.
Why, then, does the BBC focus upon race? A conspiracy theorist would have an obvious answer. The state broadcaster, like other state agencies, is acting to promote capitalists' interests. And this requires that workers blame powerless foreigners for their problems, rather than powerful capitalists. It's good old "divide and conquer."
Truth is, though, the BBC's probably not that clever. I suspect instead that it's just committing two cognitive biases - ones that happen to make better TV too.
One is the salience heuristic. Immigration is obvious (and televisual). The mechanisms through which capitalists have impoverished workers - bad management and under-investment - are less obvious.
The other is simple habituation. People don't notice what they have become accustomed to, but they do notice change. We have become used to workers' lacking power because of institutional structure of capitalism, but many people are less accustomed to immigration, so they notice it more.
Through routes like these, an ideology emerges that deflects attention away from the structure of capitalism and helps stoke up racial tension. And the BBC, stupidly, runs along with this.

Comments

[Kevin McCardle]

'The mechanisms through which capitalists have impoverished workers...'

For someone so intelligent you do talk nonsense sometimes. Unless you want to provide a time frame for that remark, it's just impossible to analyse empirically.

And I'm better off than my parents, who were better off than their parents, who were better off than their parents, and so on all the way back to the misty bogs of Donegal - and I'm of the first generation in my family to make the move into the middle class.

[Shuggy]

The series, as far as I can gather, has got rather a lot to do with culture, rather than class in the economic sense. Thing is, if there's one institution that continually shows contempt for 'working class culture', it's the BBC.

[ortega]

You use to have very good links along your texts.
Today I missed one directing me to some you tube with 'The International' on it. Without it, I felt a little silly, standing up with mi fist in the air.

[Scratch]

"Truth is, though, the BBC's probably not that clever."

Oh, I don't know, their class have a ratlike eye for which side their bread's buttered on and front enough to demonise any concievable threat to themselves.

After all it's only thirty odd years since we absent mindedly took our collective foot off their throats.

If this series does anything other than position the poor as anything other than a Englikaaner feral nazi rabble coursing towards the dustbin of history I'll gnaw my entire arm off out of sheer surprise.

[Phil Beesley]

The "white" series exists because a writer or producer has spotted the existance of "underclass", but doesn't quite get it. The underclass is predominantly white but comprises anyone with limited class/wealth mobility. Skin colour is incidental.

[Adrian]

Not everyone would agree that the BBC showa a bias towards capitalism.

[Mark Wadsworth]

'Capitalism' is a meaningless phrase. The people doing the oppressing are the 'rent seekers', which includes the 'establishment', the 'corporatists', politicians, 'Statists', welfare claimants, landowners, the race relations industry, pensioners and the BBC.

The entrepreneur, the investor, the employee and the consumer may quibble between each other as to how to divide the spoils (as do any parties to a freely negotiated contract), but these groups and their interests overlap and are basically the same. They ought to wake up and go for small-government free-market liberalism and chuck out the rent seekers, is all.

[Sam]

You don't need to invent capiltalist conspiracy theories. It's quite simple - the soft-left Guardianistas at the Beeb want to invent another victim class.

They already manage to pigeonhole ethnic minorities, women, and religious minorities as victims, and if they can just force the white working classes into that box, they'll find themselves in the happy situation of portraying the entire country as helpless victims of the rich white toffs.

Nothing warms the heart of a Guardianista more than to pretend that individuals don't exist.

[cjcjc]

Meanwhile Mr Dillow leaves clean, uncrowded, safe multicultural London for the hellhole which is monocultural Rutland...

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