They are plots because their accepted definitions, how they are perceived by progressives, tend to obscure their true causes and ultimate results. They are capitalist because of who benefits from these definitions. Sexual and racial discrimination are not attacks on minority workers, they are attacks on workers.

Old white guys have been getting a lot of bad press lately, and perhaps some of it is even deserved. But I am convinced that much of this liberal outrage and indignation only obscures the true causes of the fundamental injustices that continue to bring society down. In fact, I am starting to come to the opinion that attacking racial and gender discrimination as a purely social disease may be counter-productive. At the very least, it draws attention away from the real causes of the these social injustices, which in turn will make it harder to combat their effects. Liberals need to back off. Their indignation is being manipulated.

Old white men are not necessarily male chauvinists or racial bigots. I don’t believe they are any different in those respects than anyone else. Their collective social behavior is the result of entirely different forces. They are not strictly cultural or social, they are to a great extent commercial and economic. It has to do with the old tactic of divide-and-conquer. To put it bluntly, creating and maintaining racial and sexual injustice is good for business because anything that divides the work force and prevents it from coming together and fighting collectively for equal rights and equal pay keeps salaries down and profits up. And keeping salaries down and profits up is not necessarily a bad thing. Businesses that do not prosper do no one any good.

Maintaining that policy is not necessarily a conscious decision by evil (old, white) men. It just happens because that is the way the system is set up. These economic forces are insidious and universal, and they affect everyone subtly but inevitably. Most of the time we aren’t even aware they are there. The market has many invisible hands and not all of them work unseen to do us good.

Women and minorities get paid less on the job because anything that helps to divide the workforce into competing populations helps keep labor costs down by undermining worker solidarity. Management would love to dismiss all efforts by labor to negotiate higher salaries as a perversion of market forces. But negotiation IS a market force. The only other alternative is executive fiat, and we all know what they want. I would be willing to bet that if anybody actually took the time to survey enterprises owned or run by women or minorities they would find that women and minorities working in those firms would still earn less than the average worker in that field. Everyone can point to individual managers and workers who contradict this general observation, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. I’m sure we can all recall examples of particularly talented individuals from oppressed minorities who have clawed their way to the top of the corporate ladder, and guess what; they now have every incentive to maintain the status quo. Those who administer and maintain these injustices may genuinely feel insulted when others accuse them of bigotry. But the collective result of their actions yield the same results as if they were deliberately planned by malicious conspiracies..

I will close with my customary caveat. Yes, there are real bigots and chauvinists out there, but not all managers and capitalists see themselves that way, or can even be fairly described that way. Activists for social causes should be aware of this, because they risk alienating many in positions of power who might otherwise be natural allies, and because they need to understand that their true enemies are not personalities, but institutions. It is not necessarily hypocritical when a businessman or capitalist bristles at the accusation of prejudice or discrimination. They may very well be a genuine and decent individual with democratic and progressive opinions doing their best to conduct his (or her) business affairs in an egalitarian fashion. But the collective behavior of a class does not always reflect the individual principles of its members. In a self-described meritocracy, the meritorious tend to discount the effect of social and economic currents pulling them in unforeseen and unexpected directions. And of course, the privileged always perceive equality as oppression.