Keith Woods discusses a number of sociological studies and meta-studies which strongly suggest that ethnic diversity lowers trust and destroys traditional working class (and perhaps lower middle class) communities in the Western world. Note also that diversity seems to lower political and civic engagement!
One aspect not covered is that immigrants (or native Blacks in the US) often want to live in predominantly immigrant (or native Black) neighborhoods, which of course is further proof that most people most of the time prefer their own kind...
"Bowling alone", the book mentioned, is a classical study of the decline of American working class communities, but weirdly I have never read it!
Totsky said something about the diversity of the american working class making it difficult for them to organise in their class intrest. This would make USA the last country in the world to become communist.
ReplyDeleteAnd it was the diffrences between mostly various european workers Trotsky meant were an obstacle for socialism.
I wonder what he would say about the diversity of the ptesent day working class.
Don´t recognize the quote. Trotsky was very anti-racist and "pro-Black". I know that Cannon wanted to "Americanize" the socialist or Trotskyist movement, since it was dominated by recent immigrants who still identified too much with their countries of birth. Each socialist group had "Language Federations" of recent immigrants who often dominated their respective parties. So Cannon wanted a more Americanized culturally homogenous socialist movement. I suppose you could call him an "assimilationist", but he of course believed that the assimilation would work...
ReplyDeleteThis somewhat proves that you can be a leftist antiracist and still against mass immigration.
ReplyDeleteYes, if you (in contrast to Cannon) draw the conclusion that assimilation doesn´t work, or only works in some cases, or works only if the immigrants are, say, less than 30% of the working class, or something like that.
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