color-free society. It’s possible. I don’t think it’s going to happen,
but it’s perfectly possible that it would happen, and it would hardly
change the political economy at all—just as women could pass
through the “glass ceiling” and that wouldn’t change the political
economy at all.
That’s one of the reasons why you commonly find the business
sector reasonably willing to support efforts to overcome racism and
sexism. It doesn’t matter that much for them. You lose a little white-
male privilege in the executive suite, but that’s not all that
important as long as the basic institutions of power and domination
survive intact.
And you can pay the women less.
Or you can pay them the same amount. Take England. They just
went through ten pleasant years with the Iron Lady running things.
Even worse than Reaganism.
Lingering in the shadows of the liberal democracies—where there’s
this pyramid of control and domination, where there’s class and race
and gender bias—is coercion, force.
That comes from the fact that objective power is concentrated.
It lies in various places, like in patriarchy, in race. Crucially it also
lies in ownership.
If you think about the way the society generally works, it’s
pretty much the way the founding fathers said. As John Jay put it,
“The country should be governed by those who own it” and the
owners intend to follow Adam Smith’s vile maxim. That’s at the core
of things. That can remain even if lots of other things change.
On the other hand, it’s certainly worth overcoming the other
forms of oppression. For people’s lives, racism and sexism may be
much worse than class oppression. When a kid was lynched in the
South, that was worse than being paid low wages. So when we talk
about the roots of the system of oppression, that can’t be spelled
out simply in terms of suffering. Suffering is an independent
dimension, and you want to overcome suffering.