Darity Calls Energy Woes Ploy to Oppress Workers

The United States does not face an energy crisis, but a social crisis, William Darity, assistant professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, told a Kennedy School audience of 60 people yesterday.

Darity said the nation's "managerial class" manipulates the country's energy policy to further its own status and power, at the expense of working classes.

"The raison d'etre of the managerial class"--whom Darity called "workers of the mind," as opposed to "workers of the body--"is domination and control," he said.

Harvard and other universities are tools that managers use to maintain their social and political superiority, he added.

Darity said managers also manipulate the U.S.'s energy policy to solve "what they see as a more serious problem than energy shortages--workers' rising power.

Current stress on the use of coal instead of oil is the goal of a managerial plan to deprive miners of their rights, Darity said. He explained the U.S. originally depended on coal, but when miners demanded better pay and working conditions, the managers switched to oil, thus crippling the miner's union by eliminating miners. Now managers are ready to burn coal again, but only on their own terms, Darity said.

Because poor people are hit harder by rising energy prices than the rich, they remain a cheap, hungry "reserve labor force," he noted.

Capitalists support and benefit from managerial policies, Darity said, adding, "The capitalists, however, want a stronger role in society than the managers will give them. This last election may be seen as a class struggle between the managerial class and the capitalist class." President-elect Reagan will be "the last capitalist president the United States will ever have," he said.