Needed: Fresh Theoretical Look at Race and Nationality

Nil wrote: :

Coming from an anarchist millieu and deeply suspicious of communists, it was personally an intellectually shocking experience to run into _Settlers_ (published in 89 I believe) and _False Nationalism, False Internationaism_ (early 80s, I believe). The latter in particular focusing on a scientific examination of revolutionary organizations, but both of them blowing me away with the intensity, seriousness, intellectual honesty and commitment, and brilliance of their analyses. And by self-proclaimed _Maoists_, it was shocking to me at the time reading them (late 90s), associating Maoism with, well, honestly, RCP members and fellow travellers who I had known or worked with and did not have such a good opinion of. I don’t know enough about Avakian to say what he did or didn’t contribute. But I know it was reading those books, from Maoists as far as I know unconnected with the RCP, that I learned what scientific and materialist analysis of history (including criticism of comrades from a position of solidarity rather than competition) really WAS and that some communists had been doing it all along. A strength of intellectual engagement that anarchists have a lot to learn from. I still have to say, when recommending these books and others like them to comrades, “Yes, okay, they’re Maoists, but it’s not what you think, really. Give it a chance.”

tellnolies wrote:

I had a similar experience with both “Settlers” and “False nationalism, False Internationalism.” While I have subsequently become more critical of their positions they made a powerful impression on me as concrete analyses of concrete situations that I never got from reading Avakian, even where I have agreed with him. Avakian’s appeal to his followers is really as a visionary more than as a rigorous analyst of social reality. He is good at laying out a vision of a communist society that somehow or other will avoid the pitfalls of previous experiences and he is also good at cooking up the apocalyptic consequences of failure to pursue his vision, whether its is WW3 or Christian Fascism. But these are more impressionistic speculations than rigorous analyses. It is when examined closely that the dilletantism really comes out.

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Mike Ely writes:

I agree, in many ways.

I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing on American history, and particular on the struggle of Black people from slavery to now… And as part of that, I studied Sakai’s work and method closely — and learned a lot from reading and rereading Settlers in particular. His is a searing and needed refutation of populist CPUSA history (Anthony Bimba to Leo Huberman to Phil Foner to William Foster) where the U.S. is portrayed as a formation within which the people (as such) square off with the ruling class over and over. This whole historical view and method (and its corresponding political lines) negates the settle state origins of the U.S. — and the ways those origins still impact U.S. life and politics. It denies (or downplays) stratification, layers of corruption, deception and inclusion — and it denies the real history of class and race in America.

This populist view (often passing as Marxist) was always tied to a shameful blindspot toward the genocide of Native people (and even defacto support in various ways). Just read Leo Huberman’s We the People! This was tied (of course) to the politics of the times and movement that produced the CP — a left culture which repeatedly tailed the “volkish” aspects of white people (”This land is your land, this land is my land…“)

It is a pull similar to the one now slapping Obama — i.e. “you can’t, you mustn’t offend THIS self-conception of the America (its goodness, its progressiveness, its unity etc.) if you want to stand upright within this political arena.”

Now I appreciated this work (Settlers) without agreeing with its central thesis (i.e. that there has not been a multinational working class, and that white people of all classes were simply oppressors throughout their history). The U.S. started as a white settler and slave state — but it became a capitalist state (and an imperialist one) where the contradictions became even more complex and intertwined. I learned from it without embracing its method (which involves some cherry picking of history to serve its thesis — including its discussion of the struggles among coal miners that I have some direct experience with.) I have had a far less favorable view of “False Internationalism” — which is not a work of history, but a polemical argument against multinational revolutionary organization, an argument that I believe we must emphatically reject, along with its interpretation of Black Panther history etc.

This is not the point perhaps to dig into all this… but that point should come as part of our larger theoretical project.

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I want to expand this discussion (in unity with what has been said above) that we need a new and much less blindered theory of nationality in the U.S. — a fresh understanding of its mechanisms, history and dynamics that is closer to reality than the writings drawn fro a rather orthodox ML framework (i.e. rooted in Stalin’s once-path-breaking 1913 writings on the national question.)

The way the discussion of race and nationality has (so often and so simplistically) been reduced to “are they a nation or not,” — (are Chicanos a nation? are Native peoples actually nations? Are African Americans a nation or a nationality? and so on) — the way our vision and politics have been trapped within concepts of secession vs. autonomy etc. — or remained confined to formulations (and verdicts) drawn from turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe — all of that has been an awful constraint on thought around the most central questions of revolution in the U.S. It has stood in the way of getting to the heart of things — and also in the way of actually seeing developments. Where has there been any real analysis of what Rev. King actually represented among Black people (a real class analysis beyond his “ties to the Kennedies”), or what the demands for integration was about, and how all that can bee seen from two generations and many changes later?)

It shouldn’t be so shocking to say (among communists) that there are issues of race and color-line from the early development of the U.S. (that can’t simply be reduced to the forging of an oppressed nation in the period of reconstructions betrayal). The way the words “race” and “racism” have often been banned from the Maoist press (or dismissed with a simple nonsequitor “race is not a biological and therefore not a scientific category”) is simplistic in a profoundly anti-theoretical way that doesn’t even consider the arguments and basis for opposing views.

The argument of “no American exceptionalism” in the international communist movement after the late 1920s became a banner for dogmatically denying the particularity of contradiction. I don’t know what our verdicts should be on Gramsci or Mariategui, but I do know rereading those early communists (and their analysis of Italian fascism and Peruvian society respectively) that they made living analyses of real contradictions in a way we haven’t seen (or been allowed to do) with respect to the U.S. (including on the related questions of nationality in the U.S. or the dangers of fascism.)

I think there is a lot to understand about the “creation of the white race” and the ways in which imperialism has allowed (and compelled) the dominant culture (and assumptions) to expand what is included in the dominant, forged nationality within a highly multinational U.S. And it is remarkable and revealing, that the RCP never discussed, debated, appreciated or refuted the discoveries of Ted Allen and Noel Igntiev (and the larger school of “race traitor” thinking) — which some of us have been reading on personal time. In fact, it is stunning how little theory Maoists in the U.S. have produced around the understanding of nationality, race, and immigration in this rapidly changing multinational state — it has been frozen in the framework that emerged from the debates of 60s and in some ill-fitting concepts borrowed whole from the international communist movement.

This is not an argument (from me) for rejecting Maoist dialectics or Marxist materialism — but (on the contrary!) an argument for snatching our communist theory from a superficial and dilletantist dogmatism that veers far from the actual methods of a Marx, a Lenin or a Mao (even when, as tellnolies puts it, we might tend to agree with some of the verdicts and arguments, in the absence of something else.)

In a century, the dominant, defining, favored, normative “American” nationality has gone from being WASPs (i.e. English and German descended protestants, with tacit acknowledgement of the Irish in major cities) — to white people more generally (as Jews and Italians etc were included) — to honorary-if-contradictory status within a dominant nationality in some ways extended to sections of some “non-white” peoples — like Japanese-Americans, some people of multi-racial background, Chicanos in some areas, Texanos, Cuban Americans in Florida etc. I suspect that the dominant nationality remains the “white race” in many ways (and many places) but it is changing in other ways and places. with all the contradictions of that (both for the mainstream politics and for the revolutionary politics).

This is rooted in the system’s reactive needs for stability, and also in the use of color lines (and castelike legal status) to maintain a “real proletariat” within the U.S. class structure. This has intensified as they have forged a new “internalized third world working class” through the undocumented immigration, and as some sections of the oppressed nationalities (the Black p.b. for example) now function more as part of an integrated society than as the “talented tenth” of a segregated Black nation.

We can’t understand Obama (who he is and what he represents in the historic development of politics in this place) without understanding all this much better. Just saying “Jesse Jackson (or King or Obama or Colin Powell) is a representative of U.S. imperialism not the oppressed Black nation” –these are is (whether the verdicts are formally correct or incorrect) just phrases substituted for a living analysis.

The Black nation (forged in the deep Southern slave states) has now been dispersing from those rural areas for over a hundred years. First the urbanization of African American people and then the repeal of legal segregation (and break down of some social segregation for some Black people) have shaped that dispersal. Many millions of Black people remain bitterly segregated (in someways more intensely within impoverished enclaves than before the 60s). African American people as a whole face racist oppression (as do other “non-white” nationalities in distinctive and interrelated ways). But, at the same time, there have been changes — including the development of new forms of multi-culturalism and “race mixing” (in places like Californian cities and NYC) that need to be much more deeply investigated and understood.

We need to look at this fresh — and not just at new conditions, but with a sharp critical eye at the slightly modified “classic ML” approach to the national question (that always had a highly contradictory ability/inability to grasp the realities we are seeking to transform). The assumptions and instincts of 60s Black nationalism are exhausted in many ways. The issues of secession for the Black belt have only of the most tenuous relevance to any modern discussion. The U.S. has become a far more complexly multinational country because of the influx of Latin American and Asian immigrants — creating new conditions and new possibilities.

One thing I believe deeply: we need to draw out off all this a profoundly multinational revolutionary movement that is profoundly opposed to racial oppression. Both parts of that are crucial and difficult. And if it happens it will be a highly contradictory real-life process filled with different currents (including necessarily movements rooted in particular nationalities against their particular oppressions — including now with the demand for legality for the undocumented peoples.)

We need to understand what capitalism has been transforming, and what only socialist revolution can transform. And we have to break with old thinking and frozen theory to even start to consider these matters.