Needed: Fresh Theoretical Look at Race and Nationality
Posted by Mike E on March 18, 2008
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.
* * * * * *
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.
Jaroslav said
I second this call.
The historical ICM method of defining nations & nationalities, seems to have the concepts of ‘deserving’ & ‘capability’ at heart. I.e. if it is a nation as Stalin defined, they will be more ‘able’ to run a country on their own with the cohesive properties of common economy, common land, common language, etc. Similarly if they been living in a place for so long then they ‘deserve’ to be in charge of it.
This is fine for many areas, but doesn’t work for many others. What is the time limit for the common land & history? What if you had a common language but it has been stolen from the majority of your population? How can oppressed peoples hope to meet a standard of ‘common economy’ when even many oppressor countries have thoroughly interpenetrating economies?
To bring it down to practical implications. The various Native American peoples deserve in the historical & moral sense, 100% of US territory. But where would everybody else go? It just doesn’t work. At the same time, it would be a stupid arrogant crime to propose their liberation to come about through ‘autonomy’ over the pitifully small & infertile lands which US imperialists ‘reserved’ for them.
It would be an historical crime, to an extent, to not give the whole territory to Native peoples. After all it’s similar to the Israeli practise of creating ‘facts on the ground’. ‘Sure you been the victims of genocide & continued to be kept at the bottom of society,’ it boils down to, ‘but hey you can’t just ignore these white folks had their surplus labour value swindled, so they just get to keep Idaho (or wherever)’. Speaking of Israel, again, what’s the time limit? If the Apartheid State of Israel manages to stick it out another couple decades, is the Palestinian Right Of Return suddenly null & void?
Also I should point out, it would be absurd to think that we’ve somehow surpasses historical relevancy of national question & can simply build socialism by seeing everyone as member of ‘multinational proletariat’ or ‘the oppressed in general’. There is also some value, I think, in recognising the right to secession, for Lenin’s reason that the association must be voluntary & not forced. In this sense I think the RCPUSA is correct to argue for the right to secession of Black people but also argue against the actual implementation of that. The question of where this physical territory would be, is as Mike said very problematic.
Our eventual goal is to have communism all over the world with no States. Is this best achieved in every circumstance through multinational socialism from the get-go, or should there be a period of separate development followed by a later conjoinment? There are also various possible degrees of separateness & togetherness, e.g. the federation model, autonomous zones, a single state but with preferential programmes/laws like affirmative action, etc.
As may be clear to the reader, I think the Native American / First Nations question is central. I mentioned on the ecology & city-countryside threads how these things interpenetrate also. Though it would be silly to do some caricature nationalist plan of, say, letting the existing Native leadership bodies make all the decisions about the whole territory, I think that there’s also a certain moral imperative for white folks to in many areas just give the land back. We can say we’ll rely on Native communists to ensure that it will be socialism & not capitalism which takes hold, but without a proper line (including application of mass line) on the issue, there won’t be as many Native communists in the first place; such negative consequences always occur when relying on spontaneity.
saoirse said
Reading Settlers and FN, FI shook me up as a younger activist. I still respect there contributions and encourage people to read them.
That said I tend to see both as having a habit of cherrypicking history and subsitituting moralism for rigorious argumentation when they see fit to prove the central thesis that white people of all classes were simply oppressors throughout their history.
Looking at the orientation of the authors and practice of organizations that take such lit as foundational documents can be illustrative of my point.
Look no further than MIM and Weather.
Mike E said
I agree (as I said above) with the criticism of Sakai for some cherry picking. With trimming the data to fit the argument.
As part of the research i did for the “Blacks and Jews: a Revolutionary View” piece, I did a careful study of the Nation of Islam’s book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews Vol. 1. And I expected the book (which focuses on Jewish participation in African slavery) to be just a pile of false assertions. In fact, it was filled with real data… and some of it was interesting about the role that certain Sephardic Jewish families had in creating the modern slave North American trade (by moving from south America to the British colonial east coast) etc. And in its discussion of Jewish people in the confederacy etc.
But it was an outrageous anti-semitic work because of its method of cherrypicking — combing the history of enslaved Africans to uncover every place Jewish people made an appearance. And after extracting those data bits (from the overall context) you could create a picture where it SEEMED as if the slave trade was run by Jews. In fact it wasn’t… it was a slave trade by European merchant capitalists (and feudals), largely Christian of course, among whom were (not all that many) Jewish participants. And there were huge parts of the historical picture left out (including the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africans focused in East AFrica, but also including the role of Jewish people in the war against slavery, in the civil rights struggle, in abolitionism etc.)
And I don’t want to compare Sakai with Farrakhan (for many reasons) — but there was an element where his book Settlers extracted (in vivid and important ways) every occassion where the struggle of Black people in the U.S. was opposed (or betrayed) by “white workers” (or trade unions, or multinational socialist/communist movement). It is an important record — that had largely been written out by the Foner/Foster “political truths” (as I mentioned elsewhere). But it was partial, and its partial nature allowed it to be presented as proof of a false theory (i.e. that there is no multinational proletariat, and that white working people have simply presented themselves in history as oppressors.)
It is true, and needs to be understood, that the trade union movement in the U.S. was never just a movement for the protection and improvement of worker wages and conditions. There was always a major element where the trade union goals were the RESTRICTION OF THE LABOR MARKET — which often meant support Asian exclusion and Jim Crow exclusion of Black people. The notorious racist outlook of the skilled trades in the twentieth century was the general outlook of trade unions in the 19th century (with the exception of the United Mine Workers — which is why Sakai has to focus on that to affirm his thesis.) The workers movement of the western states (i.e. california) was born (in many ways) as a racist anti-asian political (and even pogromist) movement (far more than as a combant organization of struggle against employers).
So I think Sakai uncovered and documented very important sides to the U.S. (and the nature of “the people” in this complex place)… but at the same time, you can’t get at the OVERALL truth (in its complexity and contradiction) without an overall view.
Finally, I think it is important that scientific theories are developed by the induction method — where people start with a theory, and then marshal the data, and then they (or others) uncover what data doesn’t fit the theory. Sakai has done this. And it is a contribution. The fact that there is data that “doesn’t fit” does not make his theories a crime (or dishonesty). It is all part of the process by which we refine and develop our insights. (And, overall, his theories are raising data that doesn’t fit the populist CPUSA distortions of history — and it is part of the scientific process from that side to.)
I think we can learn from Gould who sees even the incorrect theories put forward during the scientific process as part of how the truth develops. We should not assume (or dwell on) the motives of those putting forward flawed theories — and assume that they are (consciously) agents of falsehood. This approach (which flowered in the Stalin-era comintern) treats errors of theory and politics as proof of “alien thinking” and sinister intent — and quickly moves toward treating opponents as criminals (not as partners in a complex struggle for the truth).
Just as I learned from Sakai’s refutation of the CPUSA’s historical verdicts, I think we could all benefit by critically examining Sakai’s work, and developing a more dialectical understanding of how a working class emrged from a settler state, and how it became multinational, and how the lines of nationality entwined with stratification and divergent interests, and also ways and places where that was overcome. (The wobblies is one interesting place to look but there are other examples.)
And it is a question of levels of interest. In a related thread Rosa Lichtenstein comments that it is a mystery to her why any of us would use the expression “false consciousness.” I wholeheartedly agree — though my argument doesn’t rest on whether or not Marx used (or embraced) the concept. It is because i think the notion of “false consciousness” posits a linear connection between “thinking and being” — and has an undialectical view of being (that doesn’t allow for complex experience, and conflicted interests in various classes.)
That was, in part, the point of my essay Linc and Me: On the material basis of incorrect ideas.
To put it less anecdotally. it is not the case that working people have one simple and clear and monolithic set of “interests” (to which a particular set of theories, programs and ideas correspond and which could then be labeled “true consciousness”) or that all other ideas belong to a category of “false consciousness” because they “don’t correspond” to those class interests.
Just one simple example: Working people (by the nature of capitalism) are attempting to sell a commodity (individual labor power). And as such, meet and confront others of their class as competitors in the labor market. This is objective, and gives rise to all kinds of ideas (largely backward ideas of serving self or “my group” over other sections of the workers.) Every time a worker asks “how do we keep our jobs at home” or “how do we stop immigrants from taking our jobs” — Similar ideas are in play when workers “suck up,” or “snitch,” scab on each other, oppose affirmative action, or support tarrifs on trade. This is not simply “false consciousness” but it is an internalization of the competitive divisions created by capitalism rooted in the workers’ position as highly individualized sellers of a commodity. It is rooted in the ways workers think they have common cause with “their” employers selling “their” products on the world market to protect “their” jobs.
And there are different interests that arise from the ability to suppress competition through the struggle and attainment of certain reforms — so that workers can develop a sense of common purpose and common cause in the demand for standardized wages, seniority systems, a solidarity that rejects scabbing. These interests are in complex relationship with the “my group” mentality — since the solidarity of workers in one industry or country can coexist with their acceptance of conflict with other workers (in other trades, or countries or whatever.) Sakai takes apart the example of Southern coal miners in the U.S. (in the 1970s in a movement i saw personally) opposing the importation of South African coal. This was done in the name of opposing apartheid, and boycotting goods from South AFrica (and so was promoted as a breakthrough example of “black and white” workers uniting against racism.) But as Sakai digs into, it was never clear if this was really coming from a place of solidarity and anti-racism, or a place of “buy american” (i.e. protecting U.S. coal prices and jobs from imported coal from the third world). There clearly WERE workers (both Black and white) who were involved for internationalist reasons, and who raised their own consciousness about imperialism in the process. But the situation was far more complex (including certainly in the miners union officials of the Southern gulf coast who gave their support to this movement).
And then, beyond these contradictions, there are other (“higher”) interests at play, of course, that correspond to the possibility of abolishing class society — where working people have common global interests in revolutionary movement and self-sacrifice. How we uncover this, how we encourage it, how it relates to the other forms of solidarity that emerge spontaneously (from their lives as workers in conflict with capitalists and market competition) is an issue we need to uncover.
Part f what we need to dig into is the treatment and evolution of the concept “proletariat” or “working class” within the international communist movement. Because there is a process by which it goes from being a description of actual workers acting as a class on the political landscape (largely in the European context before WW2) to being a far more abstracted concept that ultimately often means little different than a communist line or party. It is worth taking a close look at Mao’s long march in china and grappling with the question of “Does this long march represent an event of proletarian revolution? And if so, how exactly? By what levels of mediation, abstraction and representation?”
By the time we get to the RCP of today, “proletarian leadership” of the united front means little more or less than leadership by their party, which is simply assumed to objectively represent both proletarian ideas and proletarian interests, with or without actual workers, with or without concrete proof. This is one of the places where the “classic” phrases and assumptions seem rather exhausted — stretched to the limits of their current usage by big changes in society.
In short, we need to revisit the historical processes and mediations by which “tools come to speak through humans” (as Mao jokingly put it) — the process by which the historically developing contradictions between rising forces of production and increasingly outmoded relations of production) give rise to class struggles that have the potential for a new social order, and the process by which that potential (and its intellectual recognition) gives rise to ideas that “objectively correspond” to the “higher interests” of a particular class within global society.
That question of how a specific part (class) in society becomes the agency of objectively posed changes and how the ideas that correspond to that emerge and come to lead…. is something we need to return to, and dig into afresh.
Mike E said
Two points of specific response:
Jaroslav:
This is a bit confused. Because the historical approach of Marxism Leninism does (correctly, i believe) take up a materialist discussion of “capability.” And this is not (as Jaroslav contends) equated with, or confused with “deserving.”
If you want to discuss (politically) within a revolutionary movement whether an oppressed grouping should become independent in the course of a revolutonary process, then simple materialism demands that you analyze whether they are CAPABLE of existing as an independent state. This is the importance of Stalin’s 1913 discussion of national market and class structure within oppressed nations. We can’t simply adopt the idealist notion that oppressed groupings (because of their oppression) have a “right” to whatever they want. (I.e. we can’t assert that self-determination is the highest goal of the oppressed). Serious politics demands that we recognize that the new world emerges from the old — within the contraints imposed by objective reality.
If you want to raise the question of secession and independence (for Finland, Puerto Rico, Tibet, Chicanos in the Southwest or the Hopi of Four Corners) you actually must consider whether they will be “‘able’ to run a country on their own with the cohesive properties of common economy, common land, common language, etc.”
If Chicanos were deprived of rights over U.S. history, if they have been oppressed (as in fact they have!) this must be reversed and ended in the revolutionary process. But you do have to consider that the Southwest states have tens of millions of people of many nationalities — including many other oppressed people (native people, asian immigrants, Black people, white working people etc.) and it is simply not a matter of “clearing out everyone back to Day One.”
Jaroslav gets hmself into a bind when he writes:
The genocide against Native people was horrific and real. And the oppression has continued in real and intolerable ways. But we can’t approach the solution to these problems in moralistic ways. It is true that the U.S. created “facts on the ground” — including by bringing millions of Africans into the South. Does the U.S. south “belong” to Creeks and Choktaws and Cherokees (and *not* to African American people)? Is our main method to identify “facts on the ground” so we can ignore or reverse them? In fact one of the reasons that the oppressors “create facts on the ground” is because they are so hard to reverse — once the Mandan disappeared as a people, it is hard to return to the situation before.
This is an important and highly charged question. And i don’t think it has a simple answer because there ARE questions that are made moot by history. African American people are not going to “return to Africa.” They can’t. The conflicting claims of French-speaking people and the Native People of Quebec can’t simply be resolved by “who was there first?” or “who fucked who in the 17th century?” The French Quebecers aren’t simply “euro-setters” who should “go back where they came from.” These are issues that need to be resolved in a contemporary way, based on the conditions now, from the high plane of internationalism, on the basis that peoples can resolve deeply rooted grievances in a revolutionary way.
The case of Palestine is clearly not a place where historical questions have been made moot. (Though the Jewish claims to Palestine based on ancient land claims two thousand years ago ARE moot.) In Palestine — where the creation of Israel IS a relatively contemporary injustice being reinforced constantly by the same imperialist powers involved in the carving up the Middle East in the last century. But even here, it is still true that the Israeli civilians are no longer simply “invaders” who should be “driven into the sea” and “go back where they came from” — or who should be considered the functional equivalent of soldiers.
In fact a revolutionary solution in Palestine will be hard to fully envision before the conditions for a successful revolutionary process emerge. Revolutionaries have historically called for some form of multinational, secular, Palestinian state — a one state solution based on revolutionary power of the oppressed with major elements of repatriation and return of properties.
A revolutionary movement can respect the demands of Native People for independence. But that doesn’t answer the question of what an “independent” Ojibwe nation would look like in Wisconsin and Minnesota, or whether there is a basis for a national market at Four Corners. Whether such “independence” would be real, or defacto autonomy within a large multinational socialist state.
Clearly the goal of revolution is to END the wrongs (not necessarily return to some idealized status quo before capitalism crashed in upon us all). We want to end the oppression of all the many nationalities in the U.S. — we want to organize a common life without exploitation or domination — upon this soil that was once the U.S.
So I think Stalin’s discussion that some national groupings have a material basis for independence as a country (nation-state) is a valid one — i just don’t think it is the only one. And the blanket rejection of cultural solutions (based on the controversies the Russian Bolsheviks had with the socialists within the Austro-Hungarian empire) seem to have carried over too generally into communist verdicts (once again the too-rapid slide from particular insight to “universal principle” and then the application of these supposedly “universal principles” to obliterate the consideration of particularity in the present.
On a minor point of Saoirse:
I think there are reasons why MIM and Prairie Fire promoted Sakai’s work (particularly Settlers). It jibed with their own views on the non-existance of a multinational working class in the U.S. But methodologically, we can’t judge Sakai’s work on the basis of “who takes it up” — it has to be judged in relationship to reality.
As a basic matter of method, i don’t believe we should ever judge a theory by looking askance at its proponents. That was (for example) the Lysenko story (where the Lamarkian supporters of Michurian biology were the new revolutionary intellectuals from the working class, and the supporters of “a special genetic material” were the old aristocratic academicians). In fact, there was a special genetic material (soon named DNA) and the Lsysenko forces (however proletarian in origin) were wrong on the science.
Or to bring it closer to home: The RCP’s whole false method in regard to the 9 Letters is to argue “look at the motley crew upholding these theories.” They smear me personally. They say the people around 9 Letters are “parasitic” because they have no common articulated political program and political work yet. And (more recently) they argue that the 9 Letters should be distained and dismissed because the motives of those involved are to “destroy” the RCP. These charges are all false. But more importantly, the method is false: you can’t disprove the 9 Letters by looking at who upholds them. The 9 Letters can only be judged in comparison to reality — are they a correct description of real contradictions, processes and problems or aren’t they?
tellnolies said
A few academic books that have illuminated the national question for me:
Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities”
Howard Winant “The World is a Ghetto”
and
Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s “Racial Formation in the United States.”
The last one in particular is useful as a survey of both academic sociological and left-wing theories of race/nationality in the US. There is a very useful discussion of theories that seek to explain racial divisions in terms of the labor market and their ultimate inadequacies.
Finally, Saoirse, I don’t think your characterization of the Sakai’s central thesis as “that white people of all classes were simply oppressors throughout their history” is correct. This has certainly been how many readers of Sakai have interpreted his argument, but his real thesis is that the compromised nature of settler society prevented the emergence of a “white proletariat.” This is not a verdict on every individual white worker but rather on a process of class formation. Sakai even suggests that the Southern and Eastern European immigrant working class travelled part way down the path of proletarian formation in the first third of the 20th century before being integrated into settler society. While I think Sakai makes major errors that are indeed rooted in a sort of cherry picking of the data (particularly his exclusion of white women workers from consideration) I think it is important to be clear what he is really saying. Now it should also be said that there is a moralistic streak that runs through Sakai that encourages the misreading of his central thesis and that this is a defect. But I think Mike is right that Sakai must be read first in relationship to the CP’s wretched take on working class history.
saoirse said
In Palestine — where the creation of Israel IS a relatively contemporary injustice being reinforced constantly by the same imperialist powers involved in the carving up the Middle East in the last century. But even here, it is still true that the Israeli civilians are no longer simply “invaders” who should be “driven into the sea” and “go back where they came from” — or who should be considered the functional equivalent of soldiers.
Mike. Well said. there is alot I unite with here around contemporary challenges to the national question.
My point was to say what is the practical applications of the settler theory? what is the theory’s practice in campaigns and in movements. Sakai had a purpose in writing these works to influence activists to move people in a certain direction. I was moved by both books and many others of this ilk. However I dont unite with the main theory nor do I unite with other white skin privlege theories such as put forth in Noel Ignativ’s book on Irish Americans.
I realize that WUO, PF and MIM all have there own reasons for taking up various aspects of Sakai’s work. I am sure they have there own critiques and views on the subject. However I think those organizations embody the politics of Sakai’s central thesis — there is no white working class. And other such varations on the theme. They articulate a political positions and strategy based on it.
I say this not to imply that PF, weather, or MIM should be dismissed because of there unity with Sakai nor imply that Sakai is somehow tainted by assumed errors of those organizations.
I understand your point about the 9 letters but I come to different conclusions. I see the practice of Kasama. I see it as reflecting a politic of the people contributing just as the rw reflects a politics of the RCP. I see the practice of Kasama as embodying a methodolgy.
Now I am a joiner always have been dating back to catholic school. So I do think communists should build communist organizations. I think we should struggle with the ones we have and work to transform them into being the best we believe they can be. But I have also left organizations both mass and revolution when I realized a break was necessary. In that sense the RCP’s criticism is wrong b/c of both your struggles prior to leaving and b/c of the principled method of engagement that exists on this site. Kasama embodys many of my ideals for revolutionary change. I think an organization reflect of these politics may or may not emerge but I have my hopes.
saoirse said
tellnolies you may be correct in arguing that Sakai’s “central thesis is that the compromised nature of settler society prevented the emergence of a “white proletariat.””
Though the subtitle of the book “the mythology of the white proletariat, the banner quote the true story of the white nation” certainly say something about how the theory was sold (more on this further).
Although as you acknowledge I tend to see FN, FI, Settlers and Bottomfish Blues as a ideological package embodying a developing politic. And by the way didnt Settlers come first?
I guess my question here is twofold. If they are not proletariat than what are they? and how do we understand and engage “bread and butter” white working class issues or whatever we want to call them?
MIM certainly has a practice. Race Traitor has a practice. PF does as well. Some organizations have more nuanced politics on these questions as well as better approaches in organizing.
I do agree that Sakai’s work is viewed best as a corrective to the rose colored glasses of CPUSA history’s of the US working class. Settlers is certainly the deepest work and deserves our attention. However as much as it serves as a corrective it never struck me as balanced. Call me an idealist (or dancing in the romance of the politics of hope) I hasten to throw out the baby with the bath water.
tellnolies said
I think there are two ways of reading the claim that there isn’t a “white proletariat.” The most common and the one that I think Sakai encourages is that white workers can be largely disregarded as a potential revolutionary force. The second one that I’ve come around to is the view that white workers must be won to viewing themselves as members of the multinational proletariat if they are to become a revolutionary force. this means more than “Black and White, Unite and Fight” though. It means a recognition of the reactionary nature of white privilege and racial identity.
saoirse said
I think we agree. It’s challenging to engage the both the reactionary nature of white privilege and the very real history of white racism and at the same time uplift including white working people – uniting with them on a common ground if you will AND anti-racism as we win people to viewing themselves as members of the multinational proletariat.
I’ve often found myself very good at pointing out white privilege And uniting with white people around issues that matter in a bread and butter way. Not so good at uniting the two and making it all work in practice.
lightning louie said
Just a note: In the early days RU and OL both went out of their way to disassociate themselves from STO’s white skin privilege thesis. (I believe this was raised in Red Papers 2 or maybe a later issue.)
At a meeting with RU friends during the pre-party founding period, I raised the issue and was told that if I were to suggest to a white worker that he (sic!) was privileged, he would punch me out and I’d deserve it. That shut me up.
Around the same time Revolution ran an attack on a movement figure who joined OL, headlined ‘Creature from the White Skin Privilege Lagoon.’
But their line on the Boston busing crisis made RCP the contemporary model of class-reductionist-from-the-left politics, replacing PL, who had won the prize in ’68-69 for their line that the Panthers split the working class.
Nando said
LL’s comment above is a perfect example of “arguing by anecdote.” It has all the main ingredients:
1) A saftig personal story where opponents acted like complete jerks. By nature it is not verifiable (would the others in that meeting recognize themsleves from this account?) And by nature UNLESS IT IS AN EXAMPLE OF A GENERALIZED PRACTICE it is irrelevent.
2) Characterization of two or three political conflicts without any real, substantive or revealing discussion of the content and lines involved.
What assholes theSE RU/RCP people must have been (judging from this account)! But since we actually CANT judge from this account… we are left with nothing, but more nasty mud slung around subjectively.
I was involved in the various line struggles of this period…
On the main point in discussion: The issue for the RU/RCP was not mainly whether there was “white privilege” (which there is, and which the RU/RCP generally acknowledge, outside their most economist currents) — but the issues was “what do we do about it?”
The problem with those associated with the “white skin privilege” analysis is that their suggestion for practice revolved around demanding that white people “renounce their white skin privilege” (i.e. in a moral and rather vague way reject their whiteness.) What that would actually mean, how it would become a mass process, etc was always very vague to me…
In opposition to that, the RU/RCP put out a call “workers unite to lead the struggle against all oppression” — meaning that people would focus their attention on fighting the system, and the national and gender oppression it imposed. It did not involve some personal “repudiation” of white skin (or foreskin) privileges as the key step in that process. (Examples of that were the fight against the Bakke Decision opposing affirmative action etc.)
there is much to criticize in the politics of the early RU/RCP — but i am not sure that on THIS particular question it was not more correct to deal with the stratifications and relative privileges among the people by urging a common struggle against a system of relative privileges and major oppressions.
Anyway, those are some of the line questions as I remember them.
I confess I thought it was funny (at the time) to call Carl Davidson “the creature from the white-skin privilege lagoon” — though looking back, it was part of a culture of spleen-filled tone that really did not help clarify line and reality. It led to a shallowness and an ‘us/them’ mentality that was not always rooted in major questions of line.
Alex said
A critique of J.Sakai’s work: http://www.newsocialist.org/newsite/index.php?id=101
lightning louie said
Nando is right – I was being anecdotal, so I made the point that this was ‘just a note’ ie, not a full-blown argument. But I am not just throwing spitballs. I was trying to show that hostility to the wsp thesis was part of RU’s shtick from the start, or at least after RYM II – the arena where wsp first found circulation in the movement – collapsed.
And this is where I disagree: They didn’t have their own version of it – they opposed it. I can’t speak to generalized practice, but as to theory, I have never seen an acknowledgment of privilege in RCP lit. The main faction fights up to Jarvis-Bergman were all against lines that saw black oppression as central in a non-economist way… ‘black nation,’ ‘black vanguard,’ ‘bundism.’ [I am not defending these positions, but noting the pattern in the group’s line-struggle history.]
STO had valuable things to say about antiracist practice at first–they were simply dismissed by RU [and most of the new communist groups] on what I believe were economist grounds. IMO STO’s approach to wsp began to get vague and moral [here again I agree with Nando] with Noel Ignatin’s essay ‘Black Worker, White Worker.’ But if RU/RCP ever presented an alternative that recognized a racial divide favoring whites – including workers, that necessitates the centrality of antiracist politics at all levels of work, I’d like to see it. [IMO the RU’s ‘nation of a new type’ was a hollow gesture, not a serious thesis.]
And I see a direct connection between RU/RCP’s history of distancing itself from these positions, and their anti-busing capitulation when faced with a mass of angry working class whites.
I hope this clarifies my minor historical point. I decided not to join RU in the early 70s for various political reasons and ended up in Line of March a few years later, so I don’t share the Kasama concern with reclaiming Maoism. But I recognize a serious political discussion, and I didn’t intend to drag the level down as Nando suggests. My politics have continued to evolve since the collapse of LOM, but I think their approach to privilege still holds up and bears reexamination. See: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0107wing.htm
tellnolies said
Nando is correct to to call out the method of “argument by anecdote.” But its not to hard to draw out a real question of line. I’ve had a lot of arguments, mainly with Trotskyists, on the question of white-skin privilege which started out as arguments over whether there was such a thing and devolved into arguments over whether talking about such things was an effective way to win over white workers to revolutionary politics. I will freely concede that there are better and worse ways to struggle over this question and that many proponents of variations on the theory of white-skin privileges do fall into advocating a moralistic approach of “repudiating” such privileges. That said, it seems to me that if these privileges serve an ideological function of binding white workers perceptions of their interests to those of capital that we are not going to really get around the question simply by organizing everybody “against the system,” precisely because unless we take on that ideology in a frontal way it will get deployed against us at critical moments. While abstractly calling on people to “repudiate their privileges” doesn’t make a lot of sense, there are moments in the course of struggles where revolutionary white folk can say and do things that involve such a repudiation concretely. Mike’s description of the white communist who announced his intention, gun in hand, to defend a bar full of black workers against a gathering white mob is an example of that. There are many less dramatic examples. These sorts of words and deeds can create a culture where it becomes increasingly imaginable for whole groups of white folks to “do the right thing” but even then we should expect to have to argue for the neccessity of doing so.
On a related tip, why is this the only place where people AREN’T talking about Obama’s speech yesterday?
Nando said
please kick off the obama discussion, tellnolies…..
lets dig into it.
Rosa Harris said
A People that “don’t fit”
The Gypsies, or rather Romani as they are also known, are a people that cannot be considered to have a homeland. Although there are attempts now to associate us as having a homeland in India and a culture and language that is descendant from India, it has been said that most people who want to make that association want to send us back to India. By and large, Romani do not want to go back or have a homeland, we want to be culturally and politically recognized and accepted where we are rather than stigmatized socially and excluded.
There is still a very bad image that many people hold of “gypsies” that I have even run into with one so-called-communist. Thankfully it is not the opinion of most communists. I have even been told by this person – who claims to be Maoist but obviously has some problems in that area that, “gypsies cant be communist” by the same so-called-communist.
Our history is one of attempts at banishment, forced assimilation, persecution, deportation, slavery, and attempted extermination. As recently as the 1930’s and 1940’s the Nazis of the Third Reich imprisoned and murdered on the order of 500,000 Roma. We continue to be victims of persecution, especially in the eastern European countries of the former “soviet block”.
Romani do have a common language – although many of my generation and younger do not speak it or in many cases do not even know it. And while there is a large variety in culture based from mixing with other cultures and peoples in the areas that we have lived in, there are still very strong cultural threads that are common throughout the Romani population worldwide. The Romani population, like the Native American population exists in a number of “tribes” which have their own internal tribal structure and means of punishing those within the tribe and settling disputes.
So, as a people, we don’t ‘fit’ what has been the historical analysis. We are a nationality but not a nation, which to me does not seem right at all… why not? It does not make sense, as we are distinct as any other people culturally. I don’t have the answers on this one but I wanted to add this perspective to the thread since as a people we are not often discussed.
Also, there are quite a few of us within the US but due to discrimination we often stick to ourselves and keep quiet about it -in fact it is common when asked for many American Romani to say that they are Cherokee if asked. It is as if as soon as you tell people (not all people of course) that you are a ‘gypsy’, the trust ends right there. It was very hard for me to come out publicly about this as well for fear of how people would react.
Rosa Harris
Nil said
Thanks for this. Somehow I agree with you AND with the central perpsectives of both Settlers and False Nationalism. (which I’m not sure I agree with you on the central premise of the latter, but I should re-read it).
But what I was originally talking about is what _I_ got from both those works was the shocking realization that there WAS such a thing as a ‘scientific’ approach to revolution and analysis (ie, praxis), and that this was what actual ‘dialectics’ was all about, and that this was in fact communist tradition (I later found this in Lukacs too). This was a far different thing than the opportunistic approach to the truth (which Mike talked about in the other post) which I had seen called ‘science’ from self-proclaimed Maoists and communists I had dealt with up to then.
I suppose there’s a certain irony in me finding this from works that Mike considers to in fact have just such an opportunistic relationship to truth, an irony I’d see myself if I had come to agree with Mike, but in fact I still see both works as intellectually honest and serious.
So going back to False Nationalism as an example (and again, I should go back to it to see if my memory matches what I see there now; but I’ve AGAIN lent it out to someone who never returned it; that’s what happens to all my favorite books)—what I got from it was not an indictment _against_ multi-racial (‘multi-national’) organizing, but an illustration of what some of the potential pitfalls of it ARE. This is a different thing, not “don’t do it”, but “if you do it, here are some things to watch out for.” In fact, one thing that impressed me at the time was the lack of trying to _tear down_ the people being critisized, the tone I got was “you’re our comrades and we respect what you were trying to do and some of us may have even been involved with those efforts, but here are some problems we see, and we’re bringing them up so we can all do better next time.” (I have an expansion on this idea in my comment on a blog post here.)A tone rarely seen in the truly stupid sectarian political infighting (ironically, among self-proclaimed anarchists!) I had been used to up to then.
But now I want to go get a new copy of False Nationalism to see if my impressions now would match up to what I remember getting from it. It would indeed be ironic if my impressions now were the exact opposite of the important political lessons it taught me on first reading it.
Nil said
PS: “If they are not proletariat than what are they? and how do we understand and engage “bread and butter” white working class issues or whatever we want to call them?”
The “Settlers” perspectives is that the u.s. white working class is a ‘labor aristocracy’. A category which was introduced by Marx and Engels. But. One of the parts of the developing “Settlers” perspective is that class analysis can not stop with Marx and Engels, because class formation and re-formation did not stop a hundred years ago (and over the past 100 years was not the same everywhere; although it increasingly comes to be now with ‘globalization’).
For a Settlers-grouping analysis of contemporary class formations addressing the labor aristocracy, (which, among other things, takes gender into account much more than _Settlers_ did, as Sakai and others have generally done since then), see:
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/texts/notebooks.html
For an interview with Sakai done 10 years (or more? there’s no date on it) after _Settlers_, revisiting some of the themes from Settlers but to some extent correcting some mis-perceptions (or over-statements, depending on how you want to look at it):
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/books/raceburn.html
In particular, on the lack of a white proletariot in the u.s. and what that means:
“Now, there obviously is a white working class in the u.s. A large one, of many, many millions. From offshore oil derricks to the construction trades to auto plants. But it isn’t a proletariat. It isn’t the most exploited class from which capitalism derives its super profits. ”
[…]
“It never occurs to anyone to believe that the metropolitan middle classes are going to overthrow the system that privileges them. No one says, “The white doctors and professors and managers are the revolutionary class.” Yet, without any big fuss or posturing, middle-class radicals just organize in those classes when and where they can, all around themselves. Students just form issue groups in even the most elite universities. Teachers try to open minds to social justice, while even some doctors volunteer to serve in refugee camps or argue with the majority of their criminal profession about being healers not rip-offs or stock market addicts. For better or worse, success or defeat. No big political deal, it’s just living the life, the meal that’s set before us.
But when it comes to the working classes, whoa, then it’s all this ideological ca-ca. To believe what we’re told, no one should want to organize or educate workers unless they can be sure that the entire class is “bound for glory” as the main force for revolution! (which you won’t see here in this lifetime, trust me). So the white workers as a whole are either the revolutionary answer—which they aren’t unless your cause is snowmobiles and lawn tractors—or they’re like ignorant scum you wouldn’t waste your time on. Small wonder rebellious poor whites almost always seek out the Right rather than the left….”
“If radicalism can build small counter-currents of liberation in the overwhelmingly corrupt middle classes, why should similar work be questioned in the white working class communities? What i am fighting is the slick “Marxist” or “anarchist” opportunism, which sees aligning with the white settler majority and reform politics as the absolute necessity.”
Jaroslav said
So Mike, what are these other methods you allude to besides Stalin’s?
There is what I call the ‘CNN method’, by which state power = nationhood, which is to say that if you don’t have state power you’re not really a nation, & when you do get state power somehow you’re magically declared a nation on CNN (e.g. Kosovo, East Timor). Obviously this is just status-quo-ism, along with a dose of historical revisionism when the status quo changes.
Then there is the ‘I’m a nation, you’re a nation, everybody’s a nation method’, by which any social grouping can be considered a nation which deserves independence, whether it’s a native group with 3 remaining survivors or some modern localist construct like ‘Cascadia’. This just helps out the imperialists attempts at divide & conquer.
Then there is ‘Stalin’s 5 points method’, which I find to be overall correct, but having some problems. I don’t claim to have worked out better solutions, but from looking at the objective state of the world, I think he has dogmatically set the bar too high.
Both the positive & negative aspects of his approach are to be found in this concept of ‘capability’ (which I do not equate with ‘deserving’ just because I mention both of them nearby each other). The positive aspect is that this is a perfectly materialist approach, which will prevent silly attempts of artificial ‘nation’-building. But the negative aspect is that historical reality shows that there are plenty of viable states & economies which are not run by ‘nations’ as defined by Stalin’s criteria. In fact, there may even be a kernel of truth to the ‘CNN method’ in that some nations have become nations exactly through the process of running a state. The ruling classes of the settler states like US/Canada Euroamericans, Afrikaaners, Israelis, were decidedly not nations in Stalinist sense when they began their bloody rule, but this didn’t make them any less ‘capable’ of ruling, & of coalescing into nations through such rule.
So what about under socialism? Obviously we want to do away with national oppression, but do we really want to do away with national distinctions, which seems to be the ‘traditional Marxist attitude’ towards the question? Is the ‘bigger is better’ principle really true? That is, is the best way to get to communism to have large multinational socialist states, or would it be better in some circumstances to have more medium-sized socialist states, also multinational but not quite as ‘multi’…? For example in the USSR, originally the Central Asia was a federation separate from the rest of USSR, but they joined together (keeping autonomy) under this ‘bigger is better’ principle. Was that the best course of action? More importantly, would it be the best course of action in the future ex-US?
If new nations can develop out of non-nation groupings under capitalism, can’t this also happen under socialism? Again, this is normally viewed as a fusing of the multinational milieu which finds itself in possession of a socialist state power, but why should it be ‘the more the merrier’?
Also, Stalin’s definition is specifically for capitalism. He specifically contrasts ‘modern nation’ to the social bases of ruling classes of feudal & slave states.
So, especially in regard to Native Americans / First Nations, we can see how this is objectively in line with (regardless of whatever Stalin’s subjective wishes may have been, or even of the great practise carried out in national question in USSR) the Eurocentric view of ‘Progress’, wherein the ‘proper’ sequence of development will land the ‘capable’ nation into a position of having a capitalist economy, & then the revolutionary view (the ‘progressive’ view?) is to build socialism around this same nation, part of which is to remedy all the wrongs caused by this nation’s path of development.
Let’s talk about treaties. The treaties were a legal concession by the US, that objectively in practise recognise the Native Americans with whom they made treaties to be sovereign nations. As everyone knows, the US swindled & coerced so that they are unfair treaties, & broke them anyway despite their unfairness. The ‘sovereignty’ has been steadily but not slowly ground away. On average only about 25% of the land on reservations, which are themselves pitiful remainders of former territories, are actually owned by Natives. The maximum penalties which Native authorities can dole out are something like $5000 & 2 years in prison, & even this can only be for members of their own tribe for acts taking place on the reservation itself. Anyway, without rambling on about all the injustices, the point is that the US, as in many other aspects, is violating its own laws; nonetheless on paper they recognise the sovereignty. Therefore if a revolutionary state were to actually say ‘you are not nations’, this would be a step backwards in national equality, failing to recognise even on paper sovereignty which was previously recognised at the international level. And I do not think it adequate to use excuse of ‘US imperialists signed those treaties, we’re not them, we’re the proletariat’ or something to that effect.
I have to get going, but here’s a final thought. Under socialism we are (if we do it right) not going to have national oppression, regardless of who gets ‘nation’ status or independence or autonomy; we will not be having forced exoduses regardless of which ‘nation’ gets ‘control’ of which piece of land. So why not then foster the further development of the Native peoples, why not give them prominence over their former lands. Why not, for example, in a stage-wise manner let Native languages become the official languages which everyone will speak in school?
Jaroslav said
Regarding the Romani people a couple things. First, Al-Jazeera English recently did a good story on anti-Romani discrimination in Romania: part 1, part 2. (By the way the word ‘Romania’ comes from ‘Roma’ the capital of the Roman Empire, but ‘Rom’/’Roma’/’Romani’ is of an unknown but certainly different origin; ‘Gypsy’ comes from early mistaken belief that Romani were from Egypt.) Rosa, was your prejudiced ‘Maoist’ from Europe? I ask because there is a widespread prejudice in Europe against Romani, portraying them as beggars & thieves not to be trusted (whereas in the US I’ve never really heard much about them one way or the other). In any case, as Rosa said they are ‘a people who don’t fit’ into the traditional Stalinist analysis of nations & the solutions used in USSR & PRC, mainly because of the ‘common territory’ question. This is a case where ‘cultural’ solutions make more sense, where the autonomy would not be over a particular land area but over particular areas of life, where funding & other resources would be available so that things like education in medium of Romani language was offered (as just one example). I think this would apply to sizable immigrant groups as well — although first generation folks may want to return to their countries if there’s a revolution there (& a successful revolution in US would likely be either preceded or followed shortly by revolutions in its many neocolonies), but many have made their homes here & want to stay, but still don’t want to give up their identities. So there should be some way of having autonomy in certain spheres to Chinese people for example, without making a silly patchwork of ‘Autonomous Region of Chinese America’ in the Chinatown of every city. Because neither would it be correct, in my opinion, to just (de facto) assimilate minority peoples into the multinational ‘People’ which would just be a ‘socialist’ version of the melting-pot thesis.
I’d like to point out that the ability to falsely claim being Cherokee & be believed is because of a particular decision on the part of the Cherokee, which is interesting in itself. Historically, the Cherokee (like many other Native American peoples) defined membership as a political-cultural thing rather than a racial/genetic thing, similar to attaining citizenship in most modern nation-states which also have no racial/genetic prerequisite. One famous example is the mass granting of Cherokee citizenship to Black ex-slaves after the Civil War (including the 100% Africans). Currently the requirement for enrollment in the Cherokee Nation is to prove a lineage relationship to some already-proven citizen of the Nation (either still alive or historical). This is a big difference to the majority of Native American peoples’ enrollment requirements, which have some kind of ‘blood quantum’ minimum requirement like ‘one must have at least one-eighth blood from this particular tribe/people/nation’, which is not only a different way of thinking about membership in a particular society, not only harder to actually be (for one thing it rules out people who are 100% Native American but don’t have the blood quantum necessary for a specific Nation), but also much harder to prove given all the adoptions/kidnappings & so on. In any case, this more open definition had led a much larger membership in Cherokee Nation (& yes, some individuals have questionable claims), which makes for greater believability for just about anybody to say ‘Me too, I’m a Cherokee.’
However this is not to put their inclusive practise into a negative light at all. The whole ‘blood quantum’ thing is very much encouraged by the US government as part of divide & conquer. As I said above, the inclusive policy is also much more resembling citizenship of a modern nation-state defined not just or mainly by blood but by common cultural & political practises, than the blood quantum policy which is more resembling of a ‘primitive tribe’ that is like some extended family roaming around & nothing more. As you can see, the latter is not the actual truth of pre-conquistador Native American societies, rather the caricature of them by Euroamerican settler ‘intellectuals’ & propagandists. One interesting benefit of the Cherokee citizenship policy which has been noted by Cherokees & other Native Americans is that it actually provides a kind of ‘buffer zone’ of people for the protection of the ‘solid core’ (if you will) of traditionalist Cherokee who live on the rez, speak & write Cherokee language, follow Cherokee cultural practises, & so on.
However Rosa I must point out an error where you said ‘like the Native American population exists in a number of “tribes” which have their own internal tribal structure’. You are correct about the Romani, but the analogy to ‘the Native American population’ is simply not true. The Romani have a common language (with some different dialects), a common religion, a common self-identity as a single people, & so on. There are Native American peoples with subgroupings (often called ‘bands’), e.g. Goyakle (Geronimo) who was a member of the Apache nation’s Chiricahua band. However what you said implies that the Apache & the Mohawk & the Salish & everyone in the Native American population as a whole is a single people, with many subgroupings; this is not true. There are many peoples within this population, having different languages (in fact, even from different language families), different religions, etc etc. That there are some overarching similarities is nothing special, similarities are to be found also between all Europeans, all South Asians, etc. In addition they had different types of economies & different types of socio-political organisation, so that even using the Stalin criteria, some of them are nations, while others are nationalities.
With that segue, let me get into this definition of nationhood thing some more.
The world in 1913 (& the decades immediately preceding) which is surely what Stalin had to base his analysis on, was very different than the world today in important ways. It isn’t fundamentally different in the sense that it is still capitalism, still the imperialist stage of capitalism controlled by an extremely small minority of the population of an extremely small minority of the world’s nations/peoples. So we’re talking about nations here. Back then, for the most part it was very clear where a nation stood in the hierarchy. There were only a very few neocolonies (e.g. Thailand), for the most part a country was either independent or it was directly controlled & administered by a colonialist power. Some of the independent countries might be weak, they might be influenced, threatened, & cajoled into doing things; but they were still independent in more than name only. They (well their ruling class anyway, but it was a native ruling class) determined their own political structure, raised their own armies, made their own economic decisions (yes based on considerations benefits & consequences of external origin, but even the imperialists must do this), etc. Whereas today, how could anyone say this about ‘independent countries’ like the Philippines, Uzbekistan, or Namibia? Even Venezuela is at most a neocolony whose local government is currently attempting to become an independent country.
Today’s world presents the biggest problem to the Stalin model in its criteria of common economy, which states (emphasis in original):
Jaroslav said
Oh dammit. The blockquote inside the other blockquote should just be regular text, it’s not a quote at all. Please insert a frontslash for me in the appropriate spot, please & thanks.
Nil said
What are the implications of whether a community consitutes a nation or not? Why does it matter? Maybe this is a stupid question. But it seems that the _implications_ of whether a community is a nation or not matter for determining the proper criteria for whether they are a nation or not. If this matters.
Mike writes that “The way the discussion of race and nationality has (so often and so simplistically) been reduced to ‘are they a nation or not,’ — all of that has been an awful constraint on thought around the most central questions of revolution in the U.S” First I would point out that discussion of race and nationality only gets reduced to that question within certain doctrinaire communist circles. It certainly is not generally reduced this question within the general population, who would find this statement weird! But the end of Mike’s sentence there suggests that reducing things to that question has a negative impact on our general critical faculty. What if we suggest for the sake of argument that this question doesn’t even matter? What does it matter?
Certainly if there are members of an oppressed community (a community which is understood as a community by both the oppressors and the members of it, and assigned a place in a caste system on those grounds)–and members of that community believe that community to be a nation—who is anyone else to say otherwise? And why does it matter? Unless you are Stalin deciding whether they deserve an autonomous government or should instead have any exhibition of community membership suppressed. Is the latter ever appropriate, regardless of whether a community is ‘really’ a nation? Is the former really about no more and no less than whether the community is ‘really’ a nation? Are either of those questions of importance to us in deciding how to understand and act where we live now?
Jaroslav said
Nil, thanks for focusing the discussion.
I agree that if strategy regarding national liberation is reduced to a talk shop of ‘are they a nation or not’, which goes hand in hand with the ‘my oppression is bigger than your oppression’ competitive mindset, it’s of not much use.
You ask, what does it matter? Well it matters because a nation has the right to self-determination, & other social groupings do not. So actually the general population of many oppressed peoples do debate this question, but they usually talk about ‘independence’ & ‘self-determination’ rather than ‘nation’. But communists said there should be concrete criteria to determine who has the right to self-determination, & termed that which meets the criteria to be a ‘nation’.
A nation is interacted with in the international arena, & other social groupings in the domestic arena. This has been a key question with indigenous peoples, both in the US & all over the world: nations are simply decreed by the conquerors/colonialists to be internal matters only. That the BIA is a subsection of the Department of the Interior is a structural expression of this.
So it actually does make a difference whether a given people constitutes a nation or not. The association of peoples in a multinational socialist state must be voluntary or it means nothing. CPN(M) has talked about, for example, that there was an involuntary union brought about by consolidation of the monarchy, & that communists today are going for transforming this into a voluntary union. Well if you’re not a nation the question of voluntary or involuntary union doesn’t even arise, only the question of minority rights or cultural rights or religious rights etc within the society that you’re already a part of.
However this does not answer the question of what should that people do, or at least what outcome should communists struggle for? It has been generally accepted that for a socialist state, the bigger the better. I’m not sure if that applies in all situations, but maybe it does.
The RCPUSA position on Afro-Americans for example, is that they are a nation with the right to self-determination (even if they decide to be an independent capitalist state) but that the best path to communism for this nation is to join in a multinational socialist state.
In any case, once a nation chooses to become part of the multinational union, then I would agree that their ‘nation-status’ is no more special than others’ ‘nationality-status’. If they’re part of a union then the decision-making process of how to right the wrongs is not theirs alone — neither are they dictated to by the central government nor are there referendums involving the general Euroamerican population etc, but still they would be acting in the internal sphere of political affairs. They’d have a big say over their own destiny — after all this is socialism we’re talking about! — but even if their voice was given disproportionate weight it’d still be one voice in the collective discussion, whereas in an independent country it would constitute the entire discussion. (‘Discussion’ being the political & economic decision-making.)
One question in all this to consider is somewhat similar to what’s being discussed on this site about Nepal, i.e. feudalism, semi-feudalism, capitalism, new democracy, & socialism. If some nations are at different stages of economic development than others, it may not be a wise idea to implement the same policies in the two places. However, differing policies could be implemented regardless of whether you have a single state with autonomous zones, a federation, or completely independent (but cooperative) states.
carldavidson said
I agree that this question has to be revisited. I run into far too many revolutionary youth–who had no direct connection with the Black Revolt of the 1960s, the Civil Rights struggle in the Deep South, and the wide-ranging debate among communists then to restore a revolutionary approach–who lack an understanding of very basic things, such as what the right to vote means, and doesn’t mean, among African-Americans.
There’s no need to resurrect old dogma, but I’ve long held that an understanding of this country requires the reading and a grasp of ‘Black Reconstruction’ by WEB Dubois, ‘Blues People’ by Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), and ‘The Invention of the White Race,’ by Ted Allen. ‘Black Bolshevik’ by Harry Haywood is a big help, too.
leftspot said
I agree with Carl, for solid historical grounding and analysis of the oppression of Black people in the U.S., Dubois, Baraka
and Haywood are excellent places to start. For reference, there is some material by both Amiri Baraka and by Harry Haywood on the Left Spot Special Collections site. Here’s what you can find by Baraka and Haywood there:
Harry Haywood:
Chapter VII from Harry Haywood’s 1948 book ‘Negro Liberation’
Documents from Amiri Baraka / League of Revolutionary Struggle (ML):
Nationalism, Self-Determination and Socialist Revolution by Amiri Baraka, Forward Magazine.
RWH on the Black Liberation Movement: Wrong Again! By Amiri Baraka, December 1981.
Revolutionary Communist League on the Afro American National Question (RCL later merged into the LRS)
—
all the above can be found via this link: http://www.leftspot.com/blog/?q=specialcollections
Ehem said
The entire construct of nation is a European(Eurasian)idea, there is no debating this. Losers like Ernesto Che and others like him just extended their own fixations on colonized people giving life to that lifeless view of human agency. There were no PAN groupings of people pre conquest.
It’s sad that what fucked up the 3rd international is still even being talked about, its like those annoying questions on organization. When one puts a fixed reified view of oneself in struggling against this existing order you rob yourself of that necessary dynamic needed to change conditions. The destruction of capital state, political power and so on is a movement of the imagination to create new things and work with no fixed borders physical or other wise.
Oh and read Freddy Perelman
Nando said
I have to say that these suggested work have some historical value…. as a record of previous attempts to theoretically understand the situation of Black people.
But I think all those works are deeply flawed — they were flawed when they were written, and they are dealing with a historical reality that has changed a great deal since.
Basically the Comintern decided to impose a theoretical construction the world that was developed to deal with Eastern European nations within the Tsarist empire. And in particular, it was thought that Black people in the U.S. had the conditions of internally oppressed nation within a multinational state — so that the theoretical constucts could rather directly be applied.
So African American people were said to have fit the five “criteria of a nation” (set by Stalin in his 1912 analysis of nationalities within the Russian empire and his polemic with those analyzing nationalities within the Austrian empire). And so the political approaches of the Bolsheviks were assumed to carry as well.
There is a lot wrong with this — which has become clearer over time. It has to do with a number of particularities of the existence and developments of the African American people, the settler history of white people in the U.S., and the existence of a “color line” for defining status.
Harry Haywood’s book is (to put it simply) terrible. As the CPUSA became more and more openly liberal in its politics (together with its embrace of the New Deal and “American Democracy) this translated directly to a rather crude rapprochement with all kinds of reformist (and even racist) views and practices. And so Haywood’s book (written after WW2) emerged as a repudiation of the CP’s course, that demanded a return (theoretically) to the assumptions of a “classic” framework and solution to the problems of internally oppressed people in multinational states.
The comintern’s approach to self-determination (i.e. focusing on independence and rejecting forms of cultural self-determination at a community level) was rooted in the existence of a particular national territory where the oppressed people (poles, georgians, etc) had emerged historically as a culture, national market and stable majority. For Black people (who were kidnapped, enforced into a castelike status as slaves and sharecroppers, with little developed class structure in many areas, who always lived in close proximity with white people etc.), these approaches were really crudely applied.
Haywood’s book is a throwback to early comintern theory, wielding it as a weapon against the liberal and backward policies rising to the fore in the CP. In that sense it was commendable (and on some levels more “left”) — but it was really dogmatic and inevitably out of touch with the specific conditions.
WEB DuBois made tremendous contributions to the Black Liberation struggle — but that particular work cited On black Reconstruction is rooted in the idea that there was a single capitalist ruling class in the U.S., and that the Civil War was therefore not fundamentally a revolutionary war against slavery, but a split between different kinds of capitalists. It is filled with important historical information (which were once suppressed and virtually unknown) — but as a model of materialist analysis it is deeply flawed.
One current of people infatuated with this kind of politics took it far to the right, latching their dogma onto an equally problematic infatutuation with American life and democracy. Amiri Baraka (in particular) always had a streak of American nationalism (seeing Blues as a quintessentially American phenom), a singleminded interest in tickering within establishment politics (by electoral and other means) especially at the city level (Newark), and a belief (which we need to radically challenge) that the completion, refinement and extension of bourgeois democracy is a key path to unfolding socialist revolution.
I think people SHOULD read these works, and should critically dissect and debate them. But my belief (after a study of them) is that the represent the kind of thinking we need to move away from, break with.
And there is an eclecticism here too:
Carl advocates both Haywood and Ted Allen’s work. Ok. Again, people should read them both. But who can miss that these are incompatible ideological and analytical frameworks?
I agree with the 9 letters (particularly the 9th letter) which call for theoretical work to create “a vibrant new communist coherency” — that coherency can’t emerge by overlooking those kinds of incompatibility. The insights and questions raised by all kinds of work and authors need to be synthesized… but precisely to identify the actual conditions and develop a theory that coherently encompasses that reality.
* * * * * *
And finally, I think we have to grapple deeply with changes in the objective situation.
The historic issues around “is this people a nation?” is the question of whether there is a material basis for an existence as an independent country. If there is not material basis for independence (no national market, class structure, common language, historically constituted community etc) then what would be the point of upholding national independence as a political possibility (or “right”)?
Black people WERE in many waged forged as a distinct nation through the experience of slavery, reconstruction and the reversal of reconstruction. They were (obviously) concentrated in the southern black belt — in a territory of majority population.
But that was a long time ago. Black people have not formed a contiguous national territory in almost a century. they have not been a rural people in the deep south for many generations. And there has been a tremendous class differentiation since the 1960s, which is not a class differentiation WITHIN a coherent nation (or national market), but involves some sections of the black middle classes assimilating into the larger society, and sections of the most poor being more and more isolated and impoverished through marginalization from regular work.
These developments affect the degree to which the term “nation” applies to Black people (whether as metaphor or scientific terminology) — and certainly affects the degree to which national independence exists as a viable (or potentially popular) solutions.
National independence (“Free the Land”) has always been a marginalized demand, which had very little attraction among Black people. It simply is not the cutting edge of their struggle or demands, and does not appear to most people to offer a solution to the intense problems of inequality and exploitation that African American people face. It was a real diversion when some radical forces got infaturated with independence (whether among communists in the 1930s, or among PanAfricanists in the 1960s).
The demand for “self-determination” raised by people who felt independence was NOT the best solution was a convoluted, and abstracted exercise in loyalty to “Leninism”, while being disloyal to the creative spirit of Lenin (and those like him).
All of this is very old, very irrelevant. Reading these particular works has some historical interest — especially as we break with such approaches. but presenting them as a valuable starting place is to suggest we return to exactly the cell we are trying to escape from.
big L said
This is one of the most important tasks for anyone serious about “reconceiving”or “regrouping” any type of militant marxist movement.
One of the best critiques of the Black Nation thesis, which touches on many of the points folks raise here, can be found here – http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/CBNT75.html
That piece was collectively written in the 70’s, but very much led by little-known marxist Harry Chang – who was extremely influential with folks such as Omi & Winant. (Check out an article on him here – http://www.monthlyreview.org/0107wing.htm)
In addition, the works of Adolph Reed Jr., Theodore Allen, and E. San Juan jr., represent some of the best marxist analysts from the academy dealing with the race/class nexus. Most of the stuff I’ve read from these folks has been off of places like JSTOR, so I can’t post any at the moment, but will try to locate some PDFs.
I’m working on writing an inquiry into this question with some folks, so any other suggestions would be very much appreciated.
BobH said
A number of years back I skimmed through a book called “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition” by Cedric J. Robinson, which as I recall, had a very lengthy critique of Marxist views on nationalism in general and Black nationalism in particular, and lays out a view of Black resistence that looks at African, Caribbean and American (north and south) history as one coherent popular, African movement. I don’t remember too many details, but it seemed like there were many good critiques of Marxist view of nationalism. I’m curious if anyone here has read this book, or written a critique of it? It might be useful as part of the attempt to create a coherent theory of oppression in American history.
Mike E said
I believe that the work of the “race traitor” scholars (including ted allen and Noel Ignatiev) deserve a close look — because of their willingness to look at the actual development of white supremacy in the U.S., its use of the color line as a means of enforcing a class/caste ghettoization of Black people, and in its discussion of the (little appreciated) emergence of a concept of “white people” (out of the concept of English, German, WASP and so on).
Part of the significance to is that it gives us a way of looking at the ongoing change in the U.S. and helps us develop a revolutionary critique of the growing emergence of a “multicultural” approach to “race matters” within the framework of American capitalism.
Linda D. said
NANDO–could you please elaborate on the following, and more specifically the U.S. Civil War:
“WEB DuBois made tremendous contributions to the Black Liberation struggle — but that particular work cited On black Reconstruction is rooted in the idea that there was a single capitalist ruling class in the U.S., and that the Civil War was therefore not fundamentally a revolutionary war against slavery, but a split between different kinds of capitalists. It is filled with important historical information (which were once suppressed and virtually unknown) — but as a model of materialist analysis it is deeply flawed.”
carldavidson said
A few notes are appropriate here:
I suggested Haywood’s Black Bolshevik, not Negro Liberation, although it is still important as history. If you read BB, you’d also know the Haywood, and a number of other African-Americans, along with Zinoviev, had a hand in the 1928 Comintern Resolutions and later ones as well. And that the theory was being developed, not as part of European realities, but in the context of the rise of nationalism in the colonial world. I’m not saying we should return to this line, but at least get it right. In BB, you also get an account of how the line was applied, and not applied, in the Deep South, and the struggle within the CPUSA as Haywood and others predicted the Black Revolt, and were punished for it.
DuBois does indeed call the slaveowners capitalists, which they were. They (or their slaves) produced a commodity, cotton, for the world market, and accumulated profits for reinvestment from its sale. What else would you call them? The more interesting question is whether the slaves were also proletarians, although not of the wage-slave variety. Pointing this out does not diminish the conflict between industrial capital and slave capital at all. There is much ‘peculiar’ when it comes to our ‘peculiar institution.’
Amiri Baraka has his strong points and weak points, but Blues People is a strong point, showing the birth of African-American culture in the experience of slavery, and its unique and far-reaching influence into jazz, R&B, Rock and roll and even Country and Western. I wouldn’t diminish the African American content of this one bit.
Ted Allen was not part of ‘the academy’, although Ignatin has joined in later in life. Among various jobs, Ted was a West Virginia coal miner and communist, a self-taught worker-intellectual. Later he taught Math at a high school in NYC as a way to finance his own self-education and independent research, producing work far better than ‘the academy’ (which he also took seriously). He’s the only Marxist I know to spend weeks pouring through all the original proceedings of the Virgina colonial legislatures to find out exactly how slavery came into being, how it was debated at the time, and what else was going on in relation to it.
Yes, ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ are social constructs anchored in economic life, just as ‘male’ and ‘female’ are social constructs of gender anchored in biology. That doesn’t make them any less powerful or easy to dismiss.
I agree that our theory has to evolve and change thorough time. That’s why ‘revisionist’ is a label that doesn’t bother me all that much. But if you’re going to declare certain analyses or perspectives ‘outmoded,’ then it’s also incumbent upon you to offer something better, something new, and not just retreat to ‘class-vs-class’ on these matters, which is even older and more outmoded.
Mike E said
carl — a brief moderators note: you really need to ease that tone you adopt, as if you are the veteran who has seen it all, and as if you assume that everyone else is a newbie who needs your jaded instruction. It is patronizing.
If you really think you are the only person in the room who has read black Bolshevik, or knows the history of the 1928 Comintern resolutions, you really don’t know your audience.
And for those who don’t know these things, it is possible to share such information, without posturing as if you are the fount, and the others are impudent for questioning you.
One of the things we are fighting for on Kasama is the understanding that it is not “all there for the taking” — meaning that this new generation has profoundly important insights to bring to the game — both about the world and also about the summation of the past.
TellNoLies said
I’m going to read the piece on Harry Chang. I’d be interested in what other folks here think of Omi and Winant’s book (or Winan’t’s more recent book). I’ve found them enormously helpful in understanding this stuff and figuring out what to take and what to leave behind of earlier Marxist analyses of race/nationality in the US. I’d be interested in any Marxist (or other rev) critiques of them.
In another direction there is Benedict Anderson’s book “Imagined Communities” that I found very valuable in shaking off the mechanical view reflected in Stalin’s “five criteria.”
Both of these seem useful also as examples of the importance of paying attention to debates in academic circles that overlap or bear on questions that matter to revolutionaries.
Linda D. said
Thank you Mike. And I want to add that sometimes because of Carl’s posturing (which he may not be aware of) that many important subjects get reduced to some debate bet. him and other contributors to Kasama, thus reducing the subject matter to pablum or a review of his resumé.
So could Nando or someone else please clarify about the U.S. Civil War? Reason I’m asking is because I think all these years have had a pretty mechanical summation on what that was about in terms of the “Capitalists.”
Mike E said
On the issues being discussed:
There was a major problem in the Third International of overestimating the “universality” of insights developed so successfuly during the Russian revolution. Zinoviev was one of the forces at the center of that. Under his leadership of the comintern the Soviet experience was turned into a model of thinking and doing, of analysis and organization.
This was a complex process — and there was a great heavy weight of social democratic gradualism and parlimentarism that the Bolshevik experience helped overthrow. There as a great deal of value in forming a COMMUNIST current out of these cataclysmic events (in which significant sections of workers in Europe became consciously revolutionary, and after which colonial people around the world were ‘awakened’ to the possibility of taking the socialist road).
However….
There was a whole element of assuming the “universal” character of key things. As if the “form” had been discovered: soviets as a form, insurrection as a form, the bolshevik party distilled as a form, Marxism-leninism as a finished ideology and so on.
so the process of popularization and struggle for a more revolutionary approach went over to codify whatever was the current line of the CPSU(B). And (needless to say, perhaps) the concept of the “Leninist Party” enshrined by Zinoviev in the 28 points was not the same as the process by which the Bolshevik Party emerged and operated… since the Bolsheviks had a living process of development, that changed over time (not a single model that popped out of Lenin’s head and was implemented).
On the national question:
the socialists of the U.S. had a long history of coexistance between indifferent neglect to black people and open white racism. Black people were considered backward, difficult to organize, inclined toward scabbing in union project, and peripheral to what “really’ mattered (i.e. the industrial movements of the overwhelmingly white and immigrant workers). When some Black workers started to organize (sleeping car porters, etc.) they were reluctantly included in the circle of socialist concerns…
but the existence of a horrific system of forced labor and sharecropping peonage across the U.S. south — one of the major pillars of U.S. capitalism and a major source of revolutionary potential — all that was virtually a closed book to the socialists of the U.S.
And there were different shades of this: the “native-born” socialists who soon gave rise to the Browder school of communism, had a tendency to adopt the standard american view of black people (alternating between patronizing and raw white supremacy).
The immigrant socialists came with their home countries as a framework, and often were only distantly aware of the particularities of the U.S. — and at that time, very little was written or known about the truly monstrous conditions of Black people in the south. and, as happens when people don’t grasp the particularities of a situation, they often fell back on abstractions, or notions of how thing should be done, imported from some other time and place.
there were, in fact, major parallels between Black people and eastern Europe. Once radical Jewish immigrants actually understood the similarities between pogroms and lynchings (and between antisemitism russian-style and the hatred of Black people), they became (for many decades) a major ally of Black people, and an energetic force among communists for organizing in the ghettos and Black belt.
and it was valuable for the comintern to demand (literally demand) that the american socialists think of Black people as a “national question.” Until then, the socialist theory in the U.S. went little further than thinking that black and white should unite, and that black people should be integrated into the trade union movement (on the terms of that existing movement). But the idea that there was a whole system of national oppression to overthrow, and that Black people might create a powerful current (separate from “the workers movement”) that could undermine and help overtrhow American capitalism — that was rarely considered before stalin and the comintern congresses of the 1920s. (Lenin made a brief passing reference to Black people and Indians as nationalities internal to the U.S. in his remarks to the early 1920s Congresses.)
So this is a complex process: Mao spoke movingly about how the salvoes of the russian revolution brought marxism (and marxism-leninism) to the people of the world. and this is profoundly true. Marxism had been a rather parochial european movement before the russian revolution — and truly became an International for the first time.
But at the same time there was a codification, and this became more problematic as time passed — when Marxism itself in the soviet union became codified in ways increasingly used to legitimized whatever the momentary policy was. And as the international movement (unfortunately) came to be seen, increasingly, as something in the service of protecting the Soviet Union (and therefore subordinate to Soviet state policies at each point).
One of the accompanying problems was the decision (in the third period of the comintern, and in the struggle against Bukharin in the USSR and Lovestone in the USA) to focus on equating “American exceptionalism” with revisionism. any notion of investigating the PARTICULARITIES of countries was made suspect among communists — and equated with resistance to “bolshevization” and with non-revolutionary pessimism. so if you wanted to deeply investigate the dynamics of the U.S. (which is a rather large, complex and unique country) you were saddled with this charge of “American exceptionalism” — and, as a result, the Marxism that emerged was particularly formulaic, rigid, obedience. And as the American communists accomodated themselves to the American landscape (which the inevitably had to do) it was on the basis of adopting rather naked bourgeois democratic and patriotic notions right out of mainstream politics (not on the basis of a revolutionary communist analysis of this place and that time).
So, in passing, i think it is rather silly for Carl to argue that since harry haywood and some other “black bolsheviks” attended the comintern meetings, that this shows it was a living analysis of U.S. conditions. gee, what a simple test! In fact it was highly contradictory: it was an advance over the previous indifferent-or-racist policies of earlier U.S. socialists, but it was a mechanical and primitive attempt to apply marxism to those conditions (and were quickly abandoned).
Let me just say that haywood’s work was always a terrible mix of dogmatism and self-promotion. In his book (black bolshevik) he makes himself out to be much more of a player in the process by which these lines were developed — for reasons that are easy to see, but which have little credibility.
When in the 1950s, Harry Haywood tried to help resurrect those Comintern resolutions (which he was closely identified with), it was doubly mechanical. Since the problems of Black liberation were taking radical new turns, and the question of “self-determination” (and independence) was never to emerge as the central one. And the radical left forces of the Haywood type were never able to comprehend or influence the emerging civil rights movement.
Then it became DOUBLY mechanical, when (in the 1970s) some forces tried to resurrect Haywood’s work as a solution to the problems of the 60s — the theory of 1912, squeezed through a dogmatic press in 1950, was suddenly offered as the solution to the mounting dilemmas of Black Liberation in the 1970s. It was a terrible turn — and the fixation with 1928 comintern documents swept over once revolutionary currents (like BWC, and the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, formerly Young Lords Party) and helped accellerate their decline into shriveled dogmatic cinders.
Let’s put it like this:
There were in the 1930s people who thought that they could solve major theoretical problems by slavishly adhering to scripts written (supposedly) on the basis of taking the bolsheviks as a model. (The awful book “History of the CPSU(B)” was central to that process by the late 1930s.)
Then there arose (within the revolutionary movement of the 1960s) people who called on communists to solve the problems of those times by resurrecting the communist politics of the 1930s — either the revolutionary politics of the early 30s, or the reformist/liberal CP politics of the later thirties and CIO drives. There was Label Bergman inside the RU/RCP, and the Klonsky’s who led the October League, Nelson Perry of the CLP (who preferred the CP of the late forties) and Harry Haywood hanging around promoting himself and his theories.
But this method of approaching problems was a disaster. The Black Liberation struggle of the 1960s arose out of conditions radically different from what the Comintern was examining in 1928 — and the methods that were already mechanical in 1928 were bizarrely out of step and out of time by 1970. (Avakian’s early work “Living Socialism vs. Dead Dogma” blew the covers off of that — in a very initial way, that however didn’t dig into the roots in method and theory within the comintern itself.)
So for us now, to promote a Harry Haywood as a lesson or a symbol or a theoretical model for now is exactly wrong. His work and legacy is dogmatism and mechanical thinking. This was true in 1928 (when it was at least an advance), it was terribly true in 1950s (when dogmatic thinking was an impotent response to browderism), and it was positively ridiculous by the 1970s, when some utterly uncreative forces tried to promote him and his work, as the Black Liberation Movement started to stumble and sink.
I don’t think that now (a full thirty years later) we should resurrect all this — as a theory, as a model or as a legacy. I suggest people study it, as a way of understanding what the conditions of Black people once were, and as a cautionary tale of how marxism can be a mechanical religious approach, not a scientific one.
Mike E said
Linda: on the controversy on WEB duBois:
DuBois is a towering figure in the Black Liberation struggle, and in the revolutionary movement generally. And the controversy you are probing into exists (imho) in that context. And his work on the REconstruction period was an extremely radical and correct “revising” of standard American history: which saw the REconstruction period as a horror of corruption and carpetbagger opportunists. In fact the radical reconstruction after the U.S. civil war was one of the few sterling movement of revolutionary change in U.S. history, and an opening to a future that was never realized (since reconstruction was crushed with all the horror and murder of Lynch Law.)
But within his analysis, DuBois views the slaveowners as capitalists. And this is profoundly different view from a marxist analysis: which sees that the U.S. has had a number of different modes of production on its soil — including slavery (rooted in the literal enslavement of human beings), capitalism (rooted first in merchantile exchange, but then in wage slavery in both field and factory), and semi-feudal sharecroppiing (which emerged in the south after the overthrow of slavery and the reversal of reconstruction.)
I have not gone back to look over Dubois work, in writing this post, but my recollection is that he viewed the ruling classes north and south as capitalist — and so he did not see the civil war as the collision of two modes of class society (capitalism vs. slavery).
the slaveowners ruled a slavery system that was highly particular — in the sense that chattel slavery in the americas operated on the basis of an emerging capitalist work market (which was not true of earlier slavery in the Mediteraniean, or among native peoples, or among African peoples or whatever). This connection of slavery with capitalism (and capitalist production in the cotton textile factories) gave chattel slavery in the U.S. south a particularly brutal and murderous character (plantations emerged around the whole Gulf coast and islands producing commodities for the world market).
The slaeowners operated in a world where there was capitalism (banking, finance, commodity markets of a particularly complex kind, and so on) — but that did not make the slavery itself a form of capitalist exploitation. And the slave owners were (just that) slave owners, not capitalists.
and in the literature of that time, of course, there is constant bickering over whose mode of production was worse. The slave owners did massive exposure of the conditions of women and children in the New england factories (for example) and compared it to the (supposedly) patriarchal treatment of “their” slaves in the South.
TellNoLies said
The question of the nature of the planter class I think suggests the importance of Wallerstein’s view of capitalism as a “world system” in which different relations of production coexist but are all subordinate to an overall regime of capital accumulation. The process of value extraction that existed on the planatations was certainly not the one emerging in the capitalist centers of the North Atlantic, but in some respects the plantation complex pre-figured features of mass production that actually emerged later in Europe. So while enslaved Africans were not proletarians in the sense of being sellers of their own labor power, their experiences under and resisting the brutal discipline of mass production have more to teach us about communism as a movement than, say, the German peasant wars.
There is a tendency in Marxism to concentrate on the sphere of production to the exclusion of the spehere of circulation in ways that produces an overly schematic view of modes of social organization and their transformations. I think this often intrudes into our attempts to understand the role of slavery in constituting the particular social formation that is the United States.
carldavidson said
If my tone is offending anyone as patronizing, I apologize. It’s certainly not my intention. I simply felt that a number of things were being misrepresented, and some still are.
Disagreeing with Haywood’s line as mechanical or dogmatic is one thing. That can be debated. But to reduce his involvement, and the involvement of other American Blacks, to attending a few Comintern meetings is wrong. He spent years there at the ‘Universities of the Toilers of the East,’ the adjunct to the Lenin School for people from the oppressed nations. And part of their work was developing a line on the national question in the U.S., and in comparison to everything else around at the time, they moved things forward. Haywood certainly got the Black Revolt of the 1960s right. Looking back, who was better? In the 1970s, he thought himself that the way some groups carried on about the Comintern Resolutions was dogmatic, and he kept looking for new ways to understand self-determination. He thought the ‘Black Power’ slogan particularly important, especially when seem as the political empowerment of the Black masses in their areas of concentration, North and South. We published a number of later writings by him to this effect.
I think we still need to do more work on this, but the contributions of communists like Haywood and Allen are some of the best building blocks we have to start with. I thought Avakians’s ‘Nation of a New Type’ argument didn’t help, because it got the multiclass character of the African American people wrong, and thus the importance of various alliances wrong, too.
As for DuBois, I think we can all agree that the American slave-owning class was unlike any other slave-owners in earlier periods, and even different in important ways from slaveowners in Latin America at the same time. But in what way? I think he was on to something about what exactly was ‘peculiar’ about the ‘peculiar institution,’ namely that it was slave capital producing for a world market, and that wage-labor is not the only form of exploited labor, done not by peasants or serfs, but by ‘people of no property’ and in their case, the slave proletarians, they didn’t even own themselves. Their masters owned 100 percent of their labor power and everything else as well.
DuBois was trying to make a point to white labor. He called the slave rebellions and runaways to the union lines the ‘general strike’ of Black labor, with the obvious importance for white labor to make common cause under Marx’s guidline: ‘Labor in the white skin can never be free while in the Black it’s branded.’ Even more controversial was his chapter ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in South Carolina.’
The title alone gets you thinking in new ways.
Linda D. said
MIKE SAID:
“But within his analysis, DuBois views the slaveowners as capitalists. And this is profoundly different view from a marxist analysis: which sees that the U.S. has had a number of different modes of production on its soil — including slavery (rooted in the literal enslavement of human beings), capitalism (rooted first in merchantile exchange, but then in wage slavery in both field and factory), and semi-feudal sharecroppiing (which emerged in the south after the overthrow of slavery and the reversal of reconstruction.)”
Hey Mike…YES!! Exactly. Frankly I wasn’t so much thinking of DuBois, but more along the lines of what were the real underpinnings of the U.S. Civil War. So thanks… And also, maybe I missed something but am curious why there hasn’t been any mention of Marcus Garvey and that movement–or did I just not see it?
Saoirse said
Coming of age as an anti-racist activist in the 90s I would argue that the national question thesis still had a refreshing quality to it especially when I was operating within a student movement where other ideologies where contending. Books like the Making of Black Revolutionaries, the writings of Baraka, Haywood and others literally blew my mind. I don’t we learn from them only as negative examples but then again I’m an Irish nationalist with a capital N so I;ve been accused of being “soft” on the national question in many instances.
Ted Allen and Noel Ignatiev too made important contributions in examining the particulars of the “white race,” while in practice the later, as a political trend, seemed to get bogged down where somehow most/all white people are reactionary and somehow a small group of revolutionaries who also happen to be white are the exception. Throw in white guilt which was always there and you get a political formation with a limited shelf life.
Without sounding like I am tooting my own horn, as a former anarchist I think there is a rich and virtually unknown discourse and practice that struggled to learn the best lessons of previous anti-racist movements in the US that is worth a once over. And I would also say the RCP deserve credit for “blazing there own path” on many of these questions. I can’t say I agreed/agree with them but I think they expressed original thought and creative application which are noteworthy.
BobH said
Mike Ely says:
I’m by no means deeply informed about the U.S. Civil War and the social structure of the time, but the above strikes me as somewhat simplistic. I wonder to what extent it reflects carrying along RCP baggage?
Is is not possible that in the early U.S., there were two forms of the capitalist mode of production: one rooted in plantations for export to the emerging world market and slavery in the south, and the other rooted in manufacturing and shipping in the north? That the Civil War represents the point where the northern mode, which is of course more dynamic because of the reliance on wage slavery rather than chattel slavery for surplus value, has begun to surpass the south and then seeks to impose political dominance. Remember that Lincoln, et al, were willing to live with slavery as long as northern capitalism had the upper hand.
I find it curious that while orthodox Maoism holds that the USSR was a form of capitalism after 1956, and China after 1976, for Mike the idea the the Confederacy was not really capitalist until slavery was abolished, but was an entirely different mode of production, seems obvious.
It’s my understanding that for Marx, there were three broad forms of exploitation: slavery, serfdom and wage slavery, and that all three of these can exist within a given mode of production (as we certainly see in early capitalism). I point this out to suggest that the thesis that the Civil War was a revolutionary war between modes of production seems overly simplistic, although of course there were revolutionary currents with radical abolitionism, etc. It seems if we get this history wrong, our subsequent analysis of the U.S. class structure, the Black nation, etc. will probably be flawed as well.
Mike E said
bob writes:
Well I guess it is theoretical possible — but i believe it is not, in fact, in reality, the case.
And I think tellnolies gets at the heart of the issue when he says that marxism situates such matters in the mode of production and the character of the class relationship — not in the sphere of distribution.
The slave plantations of the Deep South operated in a world where their product circulated as a commodity in a world market within which modern capitalist industry was (just) beginning to emerge. They operated in a world of capitalist banks, loans, etc. (i.e. the slave traders operated as stockholding companies in britain — and drew investments from prominent people, including Locke). And the money from this slave trade formed the basis on which modern CAPITALIST industry was born in britain.
this led Marx to his famous “rosy dawn” point:
This meant that modern slavery in the new world (producing rum, cotton, indigo, etc) was a form of slavery rather different from the “patriarchal slavery” of (say) greece, or the forms of slavery that operated in West Africa. It was different because the plantation business was conditioned by its context, and by the restless pressures of price and profit in a capitalist world market. This is very different in some ways from a slaveowning household in 17 century Morrocco, or a family farm in 18th century Virginia.
Tellnolies writes:
Perhaps there is such a tendency somewhere. But i am not arguing here for the “exclusion” of the sphere of circulation, but an understanding of the RELATIONSHIP between those two spheres. Both influence the mode of production i nthe Deep South. You can’t understand that mode of production without understanding that it was not (in the Mississippi Delta) just subsistance farming but (on the part of the largest plantations) commodity production for export to a world market.
[Yes, there are as tellnolies suggests reductionist arguments made on such matters — but it is not reductionist to suggest that the form of ownership defines the class relations and the mode of production, while the changing forms of circulation shape and transform those underlying class relations in new ways.]
The massive plantations described so vividly by CLR James in “Black Jacobins” were something new, and quite horrific — with a work intensity so great that enslaved african women were unable to bear children, and a death rate so high that the plantations required a steady stream of new captives. That is why slaves were “sold down the river” from eastern farms to the massive slave plantations of the Mississippi. And that is why (in some places) a slave’s life expectancy was 5 years after they arrived in this new environment.
So no one is saying that this form of slavery was not conditioned in many ways by its capitalist environment (by the pressure of investors, by the fluctuations of commodities on a world capitalist market, by the demands of the industrial capitalists purchasing the cotton, by the profitteering merchant capitalists of Rhode Island and Liverpool, Rotterdam and copenhagen who entered the slave trade for profit, and so on.) the huge new plantations (with hundreds of slaves) were not “family farms” using slaves as “farm hands” for the subsistance of an entwined “family” of slaveowner and slave.
But, having said all that, it was not “wage slavery” — where labor power was sold as a commodity on the labor market. It was chattel slavery — where the laborer himself-herself was being sold. Just like serfdom is not capitalism, so slavery is not capitalism.
Emerging capitalism made Southern slavery “blossom” in new and horrific ways — it gave it new power, wealth, vitality of a particularly twisted kind. And then after a few decades, as capitalism further extended its reach and further developed its needs, the capitalist state reached in with hardened hands and strangled its former allies, the southern slaveocracy, through a bitter and determined military struggle.
the underlying differences were rather deep: First, under slavery, the laborer has no mobility. While capitalism knocks down the restrictions on labor mobility (enclosure acts, infrastructure, ending of sale of laborors with the land), slavery enforces the lack of labor mobility (paddy rollers, black codes, road blocks and passes etc.)
While slavery forces the owner to maintain the health (and therefore salability) of the expensive “property,” capitalism can (in a remarkably new and efficient way) simply dismiss “redundant workers” (and let them starve!) and then rehire a new workforce when business picks up.
To give one practical illustration: Black slave labor build a great deal of the U.S. infrastructure, especially in the south. Black slaves cleared the forests, built levees, drained the swamps, dams, etc. in vast chain gangs (that continued into the 1930s despite the formal abolition of slavery, with loopholes, in the U.S. constitution).
But there were places where the work was exposed to malaria, and the workforce died. Under those conditions the slaves were simply too expensive to be used on the draining of swamps. and in several cases, Irish immigrants were brought in to do the heavy work — becuase if THEY died, there was no cost to the owner, their bodies were simply allowed to float down the river, and a new worker was hired right off the boat.
such differences mark a profound difference in ownership and mode of production — that get carried into every detail of social life. the basic difference between slavery and wage slavery MARKED and UNDERPINNED major differences of other kinds between North and South.
Yes, modern slavery was an ancient form “aufgehoben” under new conditions (of an emerging capitalist world market) and therefore transformed by those conditions. But it WAS slavery. there were two ruling classes in the U.S. — slave owners and merchant capitalists. They were entwined in many ways (including because the merchant capitalists built much of their wealth by transporting slaves and the products of slave labor) — but they were also different in their interests in many ways. And as the merchant capitalists gave way to (and morphed into) industrial capitalists that CLASS WTRUGGLE between slave owners and capitalist became more acute — and gave rise to more and more acute political antagonism, and then military antagonism (in the form of a revolutionary war against slavery, led by Lincoln and the Republican Party).
Kasama Essays on Black History: Oppression, Resistance & Visions « Kasama said
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Mike E said
I’m reposting here a comment I wrote somewhere else: