Yes, divide and conquer is a time-tested technique to keep the proles in their place. It takes advantage of every social and economic, racial and cultural, divide in the society to further and preserve class hegemony and power.

Even gender issues can be harnessed to further ownership class interests. There’s been a lot of talk lately about the glass ceiling, and how women are systematically paid less than men for doing the same job. Liberals make the mistake that this is the result of sexism by old white males, but I submit it is purely driven by economic class interest. Women are paid less because the bosses can get away with paying them less, not because of sexism. If the boss is a woman, she will pay her women employees less, not because she wants to exploit women, but because it is profitable for her to exploit anyone she can. I have no doubt it may be subconscious (I don’t believe in conspiracies), or even administrative (HR departments are one of the ways these social divisions can be exploited with a cloak of impartiality). The same can be said of other class, ethnic, racial and religious fissures in the workplace.

In my first job as a scientific programmer, many of my colleagues were women. Even a substantial proportion of the supervisors were women. It was a new field, and industry was desperate for programmers, and was willing to pay a premium for them. Good ole supply and demand, we can’t allow that to go on, can we? Like airplane pilots in the 1920s, computer programmers in the 1970s were in a field where any woman who could do the job was welcomed. Whether they were paid commensurately or not is another question. One way the bosses get away with this is to enforce the social superstition that makes it bad manners to discuss with your co-workers how much you make.

No one denies that old prejudices and biases plague our society and must be systematically discredited and eliminated. But it is going to be very difficult to accomplish this until we fully understand how maintaining this bigotry is a tool to enforce economic control and exploitation and further class interests.

Like the man Guido says, “It’s nothing personal, it just business.”

As for your comment about a “weak and divided middle class”, we are about to see a critical phase change here. The middle class has been kept compliant and docile by offering them a future in the upper class, and the lower class has been kept quiet and malleable by offering them a place in the middle class. But in order to maintain its position of dominance, the ever-shrinking commercial elite is now being forced to welsh on some of these promises. Upward class mobility is becoming harder, and sliding back down the socio-economic scale is now becoming widely recognized, perhaps even inevitable, to more and more people. You can only tell people for so long that the reason they’re poorer than their parents is because they must be stupider or lazier, or because taxes and regulations on the rich are too high, or because the minorities are taking their jobs. Sooner or later they are going to wise up.