The Scars of the Erasure_web

Erasure_4a 10.1.11 20:29 Page 33REGISTERED AS WORKERS, ERASED AS NON-SLOVENES33attributes (Wieviorka 1995). For example, the American labor movement wasinitially organized (1881) as a white workers’ movement exclusively. As late as1935, black workers were excluded from trade unions, while at the same timeaccused of betraying the working class because they did not observe the rulesof strikes and undertook low paid jobs thus lowering the price of wage labor. 17While in the US racism was inherent in the beginnings of organized worker movements,in the case of the Polish Solidarity movement, the chronology of eventswas the opposite: anti-Semitism acquired a new lease on life (once again) onlywhen in the late 1980s the movement began to dissolve, the economic crisisflared (bringing food shortages and closures of factories), and nationalistsstrengthened their ranks and began to resort increasingly to populism, recurringto community, “Polishness,” homogeneity, occasionally even emphasizing theneed for a “firm hand” by the government and a return to order.Michel Wieviorka (1995) also mentions the French worker movement,which until the late 1970s had importantly co-shaped political and cultural aspectsof life in France. French society was structured around the main conflict:workers stood firmly in opposition to employers. Both classes were politically andculturally active. Immigrants were not the central issue at the time; they werementioned in the context of employment but not in terms of the population(which usually carries racist undertones). The crisis of industrial society accompaniedby the dissolution of the worker movement organization left a vacuum inits wake, which was quickly filled by individualism. This marked a transition froma class society to a society of ethnic/religious differentiations and exclusions.With the decline in social movements typical of the 1970s, the middle and thelower classes, including their poorest members, attempted to distinguish themselvesfrom immigrants, even to separate physically from them, as they beganto perceive immigrants as an ethnic and/or religious threat.Wieviorka’s argument suggests that the decline in social movements, whichas a rule generate social conflicts, and vice versa, the differentiating logic (newcomersvs. locals, dominant vs. racisized groups) which suppresses and concealsconflict, is connected with populism and the expression of racism. This is becausethe lower the level of social or class conflict, and the less these conflicts co-shapethe political system and the state, the greater the space left for racism to proliferate(ibid., 81). Wieviorka even speaks about social anti-movements whose referencepoints are a nation, a race or a religious group, and where the Other is nolonger understood as a potential protagonist but as a threat. The promoters of17 An opposite example would be the Russian worker movement during the 1890s. Since anti-Semitic pogroms in thecoal mining region of southern Russia represented a serious political and organizational obstacle for strikes anddemonstrations, the main task of social-democratic activists was to prevent demonstrations from spontaneously tur -ning into anti-Semitic pogroms. Charters Wynn (1992) writes about the specific nature of the situation in Russia, whereduring the time of the first revolution (in 1905), the early departments of armed revolutionary workers were formedas self-defense units of Jewish workers in southern Russia. The workers armed themselves to protect their communitiesagainst frequent pogroms, which, however, were not solely a spontaneous reaction of the masses, but were instigatedby the Czar’s police apparatus. Therefore, it is possible to establish an analogy between Black Americans and RussianJews. Both were the targets of racism in their countries, the main difference being that Black Americans were excludedfrom the labor movement, while the Russian Jews were active and important in the field of worker organization.