j.sakai when race burns
WHEN RACE BURNS CLASS
“Settlers” Revisited
An Interview With J. Sakai
EC: In the early eighties you wrote Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat,
a book which had a major impact on many North American
anti-imperialists. How did this book come about, and what was so new
about its way of looking at things?
JS: Settlers completely
came about by accident, not design. And what was so “new” about it was
that it wasn’t “inspiring” propaganda, but took up the experience of
colonial workers to question how class really worked. It wasn’t about race, but about class. Although
people still have a hard time getting used to that–it isn’t race or sex
that’s the taboo subject in this culture, but class.
Like many radicals who struggle as organizers, i had wondered why our
very logical “class unity” theories always seemed to get smashed up
around the exit ramp of race? At the time i’d quit my fairly isolated
job on the night shift as a mechanic on the railroad, and was running a
cut-off lathe in an auto parts plant. The young white guys in our
department were pretty good. In fact, rebellious counter-culture dope
smoking Nam vets. After months of hanging & talking, one night one
of them came up to me and said that all the guys were driving down to
the Kentucky Derby together, to spend the weekend getting drunk and
partying. They were inviting me, an Asian, as a way of my joining the
crew. Only, he said, “You got to stop talking to those Blacks. You got
to choose. White or Black.” Every lunch
hour i dropped in on a scene on the loading dock, where a dozen brothers
munched sandwiches and had an on-going discussion. About everything
from the latest sex scandal to whether it was good or not for Third
World nations to be getting A-bombs (some said it was good ending the
white monopoly on nuclear weapons, while others said not at the price of
endangering our asses!). Plus the guy from the League of Black
Revolutionary Workers in our plant area had recruited me to help out,
since he was facing heavy going from the older, more established Black
political tendencies ( various nationalists, the CPUSA–who had great
veterans, good shop floor militants –etc). And, why would i go along
with some apartheid agenda anyway? Needless to say, the white young guys
cut me dead after that (though they later came out for me as shop
steward, which shows you how much b.s. they thought the union was).
That kind of stuff, familiar to us all, kept piling up in my mind and
got me started trying to figure out how this had come about in the u.s.
working class. So for years after this i read labor history and asked
older trade union radicals questions whenever i could. Finally, an
anarchist veteran of the autoworkers’ historic 1937 Flint Sit-Down
strike told me that the strike had been Jim Crow, that one of the
unpublicized demands had been to keep Black workers down as only
janitors….or out of the plants altogether. This blew my mind. That’s
when it hit me that the wonderful working class history that the
movement had taught us was a lie. So i
decided to write an article (famous writer’s delusion) on how this white
supremacy started in the u.s. working class. i didn’t know–maybe it was
in the 1920s?, i thought. So Settlers was researched
backwards. i knew what the conclusion was in the mid-1970s, that white
supremacy ruled the white working class except in the self delusions of
the Left. “No politician can ever be too racist to be popular in white
amerikkka”, is an amazingly true saying. Settlers was researched going
back in time, trying to find that event, that turning point when
working class unity by whites had dissolved into racial supremacy.
1930s, 1920s, pre-World War I, Black Reconstruction, Civil War, 1700s,
1600s, i kept going back and back, treading water, trying to touch
non-white supremacist ground. Only, there wasn’t any! By
then it was years later in our lives, and i’d been recruited into doing
national liberation movement support work. And was reading Black
nationalist writings. One day i caught a speech in which u.s. whites
were referred to as “settlers”, meaning invaders or interlopers, as in
South Afrika and Rhodesia. Of course, white history always talks about
settlers with the non-political connotations of pioneers or explorers or
the first people to live in an area (native peoples didn’t count as
real people to euro capitalism. They were part of the flora and fauna). This was a moment of the proverbial light bulb turning on in my mind!
First chance i got, i asked the UN representative of an Afrikan
liberation movement if he thought u.s. whites as a society, including
workers, were settler oppressors in the same way as Rhodesians,
Boers,or Zionists in Israel? He just said, “Of course.” Upset, i
demanded to know why he didn’t tell North Americans this. He only
smiled ironically at me, and i won’t even bother telling you what
certain Indian comrades said. So Settlers didn’t involve any
great genius on my part, just finally listening to the oppressed and
what the actual historical experience said about class. Finally. From there it was hard research work, but no conceptual leap at all to see that in general in u.s. history the colonized peoples have been the proletariat,
while the white working class has been a labor aristocracy. This has
been camouflaged in capitalist history by retroactively assigning white
racial membership to various european immigrant peoples who weren’t
“white” at the time. For instance, when leading u.s. capitalists started
the “Interracial Council” to promote patriotic nationalist integration
during World War I, the “races” they wanted to bring together were the
Irish race, the Welsh race, the Polish race, the Lithuanian race, the
Hungarian race, the Sicilian race, the Rumanian race, and other
Europeans that we now think of as only nationalities within the white
race. Shows you how race is another capitalist manufactured product. So
groups who we think of as “white” today, were definitely not considered
“white” in the past. Like in the Midwest steel mills just before World
War I, when native-born American WASP men were all foremen and skilled
workers—what was called “white man’s work”–while the back-breaking
laboring gangs were made up of “Hunkys”, Eastern Europeans. Like
immigrant Finnish workers, who weren’t citizens, didn’t speak English,
weren’t considered white but “Mongolian”, who were oppressed like draft
animals in small town mines and mills in the Northern Midwest, and who
made up something like 60% of the total membership of the early
communist party. They wanted armed revolution right then, just like
against the Czar, and most of them were actually imprisoned or deported.
Wiped out as an oppressed class and national group. It’s a long
distance in real class from those oppressed revolutionary women and men
to the middle-class pedants and would-be commissars of today’s Left. Settlers goes through this real class history.
EC: How is settlerism different from racism?
JS: This is a useful
question, because people are confused about the two. Some people think
that “settler” is just a fancy way of saying “white people”, and that
it’s all just about racism anyway. Racism as we know it and settlerism
both had their origins in capitalist colonialism, and are related but
quite distinct. Settler-colonial societies started as invasion and
occupation forces for Western capitalism, social garrisons usually in
the Third World, as Western capitalism expanded out of Europe into the
Americas, Afrika and Asia. Racism as we experience it today didn’t
exist before capitalism, which is why many revolutionaries see rooting
out the one as requiring rooting out the other. To Europeans before
modern capitalism the most important “races” were what we would call
nations. Indeed, until well into the 20th century it was widely assumed
by Europeans that even different European nationalities were
biologically different, and had different mental abilities and
propensities. Slavs were thought to be biologically different from
Nordics, and Jews were thought to be an exotic race all by themselves.
Pre-capitalist and even early capitalist Europe was a lot different
from our racial stereotypes. It wasn’t that oppression and bigotry
didn’t exist. Obviously, for example, there was a long tradition of
anti-semitic and anti-romany persecution in “Christendom”. But the
whole context of “race” was unlike what we usually think of. i was
astonished to learn that in early 18th century Germany, a leading
philosopher, Anton-Wilhelm Amo who lectured at the University of Halle
and the University of Jena, was a Black German ( born in Africa, he also
signed his name in Latin as “Amo Guinea-Africanus”
or Amo the African). Or that Russia’s greatest poet, the 19th century
aristocratic Pushkin, was Black by American standards. And nobody cared.
And in the time of Marx and Bakunin, the major leader of early German
radical unionism was also very visibly Black, and his part-Afrikan
heritage accepted. Well, what we’ve been
saying all along is that “race” in modern capitalism was originally
changed from an undefined difference into a disguise for “class”.
Capitalism, after all, always prefers to restructure class differences
in drag of some kind (all the better for their manipulations). Like
Northern Ireland, where there is supposedly a “religious” or “ethnic”
bloody conflict between Catholic Irish Republicans and Protestant
Loyalists. Actually, this has been an up-front class
conflict between British capitalism’s historic settler garrison
population (the Prots) and the historic colonial subjects (the
“Catholics”). Both sides European, both “white”. The Northern Ireland
Protestant settler working class has always had relative privilege,
including the best jobs (sound familiar?). Belfast’s traditional
blue-collar “big employer”, the Harland & Wolff shipyard, had always
been so dominated by Protestant settler workers that the shipyard union
called a pro-imperialist political strike in the 1970s, closing down
the yards, to oppose granting any democratic rights at all to Irish
Catholics. ( Now, of course, the obsolete shipyards are going out of
business, and a globalized British imperialism has much less need for
their loyal Unionist servants).
The”Orangemen” settlers in Northern Ireland have hated the Irish with
just as much crazed viciousness as white u.s. workers hate the
oppressed. Irish revolutionary Bernadette Devlin McAliskey picked up on
this same comparison in real class when visiting the u.s. in the 1970s.
She said afterwards: “I was not
very long there until, like water, I found my own level. ‘My people’—the
people who knew about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty
and the frustration and despair that they produce– were not Irish
Americans. They were black, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos. And those who were
supposed to be ‘my people’, the Irish Americans who knew about English
misrule and the Famine and supported the civil rights movement at home,
and knew that Partition and England were the cause of the problem,
looked and sounded to me like Orangemen. They said exactly the same
things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home. In New
York I was given the key to the city by the mayor, an honor not to be
sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers.” So
settler-colonialism usually has taken racial form, but it doesn’t have
to. In fact, one of the newest examples—the Chinese capitalist empire’s
Han settler occupation of Tibet–is all Asian. What we never should lose sight of is that these may be socially constructed differences—but they are real.
There’s a certain trend of fashionable white thought that claims that
race (or nation) is nothing more than a trick, an imaginary construct
that folks are fooled into believing in. So we even find some
middle-class white men claiming that they’ve “given up being white” (i
can hear my grandmother saying, “More white foolishness!” with a
dismissing headshake). Needless to say, they haven’t given up anything. Race
as a form of class is very tangible, solid, material, as real as a tank
division running over you … tank divisions, after all, are also
socially constructed! About another form of this same white racist
game—white New Age women deciding to play at “becoming Indian”—Women of
All Red Nations activist Andy Smith used to wearily suggest that if they
really really wanted to “become Indian” they should live on the rez–the
u.s. colony– without running water or jobs, without heat in the winter
or education for their children, with real poverty, alcoholism, and
violent oppression. So both racism as we
know it and settlerism each had their origins in capitalist colonialism
and are related, but are also quite distinct. Settler-colonial
societies have a specialized history, because they started as invasion
and occupation forces for Western capitalism. Usually as social
garrisons in the Third World, as Western capitalism expanded out of
Europe into the Americas, Afrika, Asia.
EC: Some critics have argued that your book suggests that “racial issues” should take precedence over “class issues”…
JS: This liberal intellectual
polarity that “race issues” and “class issues” are opposites, are
completely separate from each other, and that one or the must be the
main thing, is utterly useless! We have to really get it that race
issues aren’t the opposite of class issues. That race is always so
electrically charged, so filled with mass power, precisely because it’s
about raw class. That’s why revolutionaries and demagogues can both
potentially tap into so much power using it. Or get burned. You
can’t steer yourself in real politics, not in amerikkka and not in this
global imperialism, without understanding race. “Class” without race in
North America is an abstraction. And vice-versa. Those who do not get
this are always just led around by the nose, the manipulated without a
clue — and it is true that many don’t want any more from life than this.
But wising up on race only means seeing all the class issues that
define race and charge it with meaning. Why should it be so hard
to understand that capitalism, which practically wants to barcode our
assholes, has always found it convenient to color-code its classes? When
i started high school way back in the daze, it was up North and in
theory there was no segregation. But our city school system had five
intellectual levels or “tracks”—from the highest college-prep track to
the lowest remedial vocational ed track. In a high school that was 85%
Black, the top college-prep track never had more than one or two New
Afrikans. In fact, those classes would literally close for Jewish
holidays. When we started high school all of us non-white types were
automatically assigned to the bottom two tracks, which we could only
rise out of by “achievement”. Those two “colored” tracks (although there
were a few hillbillies in them, too) were non-academic, which meant
that after four years of attendance you “graduated” high school—but
instead of a diploma you only got a paper “certificate of satisfactory
attendance”. This was real good for getting you your slave job as a
porter or at the garment factory — my first full-time job, the summer i
was 14 — but in fact you couldn’t qualify for college with it even if
you had somehow managed to get literate. So
college education and middle-class careers just “accidentally” happened
to be legally forbidden to most New Afrikans in our city. Everyone knew
this who wanted to, it was just a fact of life. So much so that when i
started working for the neighborhood gang council (some small gangs, but
mostly the big vice-lords and cobras and d’s) as a nerdy ten year-old,
the leader said that they wanted me to go on to graduate from high
school since none of the rest of them would (obviously, even then Asians
were designated to finish school). Of course, now neo-colonial
capitalism has had to get much slicker and share some loot, create
neo-colonial bourgy classes. Starting a new movement, a new radicalism, we need a better map of class. Which means we need to see what’s really happening with race just for starters. Settlers
did that for u.s history, particularly for the Black-Indian-white main
structure of colonial capitalism here, but that’s only a beginning. An
outline not a full map. It might be good to come at this from a
different angle than the customary Black/white situation. Let me use an
obscure example from my own life in which race and even anti-racism
played out a different kind of subtle class politics. A
number of years ago, i was trying to help a group of young
Chinese-American activists on an anti-racist campaign. This was an
interesting case of how a pure “race” issue only fronted for class
politics. Now, these folks were “paper Maoists” in every worst way you
could think of — and all my friends know that i’m someone who has warm
feelings for the old Chairman. Not only did they have what Mao once
called “invincible ignorance”, but were also arrogantly full of Han
nationalism. They did have physical courage, at least. Their project was
to protest the sports racism in the famous industrial town of Pekin,
Illinois—which was originally named in the 19th century after Beijing,
and whose high school sports teams were colorfully named “the Chinks”!
(capitalism, what an ever-amazing civilization—what next? “Auschwitz! The Perfume!” ). Every
week a few carloads of young Asian protesters would arrive in Pekin to
picket the high school and city hall, hold television news conferences,
and keep the issue simmering in the news. You see, the small flaw in the
campaign was that all the protesters had to be imported from New York
and Chicago. There were only eight Chinese families in town, and all
were refusing to have anything to do with the anti-“Chinks” campaign
(not wanting to lose their livelihoods, homes, and be driven out of
town by the controversy). By accident, not
in any political way, i had casually met two vaguely liberal young white
guys there. One was a teacher in that very high school. The second was a
UAW (United Auto Workers union) shop steward at the nearby giant
Caterpillar tractor assembly plant, which was Pekin’s main industry. So i
thought maybe they could be persuaded to get some local people to take a
moderate wishy-washy public stand, anything just to give the Chinese
families some local community cover if they wanted to speak out (there
was zero local support of any kind, including all the unions and
churches of course). When i suggested it to
this Maoist group, there was a moment’s startled stony silence. Then
the leader barked, “We do not work with white people!” Discussion over.
So, is this a good example of that error of “racial issues taking
precedence over class issues”? i know some radicals might think that,
but they’d just be getting faked out. First off, to those activists running it, “race” was not
what was central to their thinking. After all, if those Asian American
dudes had really been into either “race” or anti-racism they might have
started by organizing and working with the local Asian families. They
might have tried to help find some survival strategy for these
families, who couldn’t just drive off into the sunset after each press
conference (being an isolated Asian family in a heavy white racist scene
is no joke, obviously). This is just a normal problem in anti-racist
work, which folks had to deal with all the time in small towns in 1960s
Mississippi, for instance. It also wasn’t
true that those Chinese-American leftists “didn’t work with white
people”. They did that all the time, when they wanted, and these Han
nationalists even argued for the “revolutionary” nature of the white
working class . What i came to realize was in that situation they didn’t
want any broad community support for the Chinese families there, or to
let others into “their” issue. Because they had a really different
agenda. Which was to get sole public credit for this and other
anti-racist issues, so that their little Maoist “party” could vault into
political dominance over the Chinese-American communities. Later, when
they thought it necessary, they even used physical violence and death
threats to drive other Asian groups away. They intended to be the people
in ethnic power, in effect like replacing the tongs . These “paper
Maoists” had a pure class agenda, all right, only it was a bourgeois
agenda. Although they themselves might have honestly believed what they
did was “revolutionary”, they had anti -working class politics hidden by
“anti racism” and left people of color talk. And this Maoist group really did get their Andy Warhol-like “15 minutes of fame”, becoming large in part because the more dishonest and destructive their “anti-racist” maneuvers became, the more
support they got from white middle-class liberals and “progressives”
(coincidentally?). i mean, from many white social-democrats, those
white anti-repression “experts”, academic leftists, etc. Those types
that subject us to those endless droning lectures about “the working
class” (which they aren’t in and don’t get, of course). As a sage
comrade of mine always says, “Like is drawn to like” even if their outward appearance is very different. This
is a more difficult, easy to slip and fall on, even dangerous way of
seeing things than radicals here are used to. But either we learn it
well or we’re lost in this post-modern decaying civilization. That dead left way of thinking about “race” and “class” not only isn’t radical, it’s corrupt and anti working class. Why
the giant United Auto Workers local down there near Pekin never saw
anything wrong with Asian children being forced to go to school in a
white supremacist haze, surrounded by constant references to “the
Chinks”, was just business as usual for the labor aristocracy in
America. In the 1960s and 1970s all those government regulated American
unions fought even elementary Civil Rights tooth and nail. Including
the most liberal, including those run by white “socialists” like the
East Coast garment workers and West Coast longshoremen. Many
dissenting Black longshoremen in the 1960s and 1970s were literally
barred from the industry for life by the dictatorship of the settler
“socialist” labor bosses of the ILWU. As outrageous as it may be, those
“socialist” union dictators could just issue orders that this New
Afrikan or that Chicano was not to be allowed to work on the docks again
ever. Oh, they loved Martin orating and marching
non-violently far off in Washington, but they fought Civil Rights inside
their industries & unions every bitter step of the way (it’s also
true that in places, in Detroit, San Francisco, Flint, New York City,
there were small handfuls of maverick white socialists and anarchists
who sided with the Black and Latino workers even against their own white
left ). The funny thing is that for all
the constant “Marxist” blah-blah about government unions as “main roads
of the class struggle”, in our lifetime the AFL-CIO unions have been on
the wrong side of just about every major mass movement. That’s why they
have been back-slapping with Pat Buchanan and helping to legitimize
white racism in the current anti-WTO campaign. i guess because that’s
their job. Many people conveniently forget
that these business unions were rebuilt to conform to tight capitalist
laws, are constantly u.s. government regulated and monitored, have
involuntary “membership”, and are about as democratic as the USSR (which
had elections, reforms and repairs, too, before it broke down under the
mismanagement of primitive capitalist empire). Once workers’ “unions”
were free associations, were wild, were outside bourgeois law and part
of a counter-culture of the oppressed, but these genetically modified
creations only use the same name.
EC: Speaking of white workers, another
criticism I have heard is that you are denying that there even is a
white working class in the United States. Would you say this is an
accurate reading of your work, or are people missing the point?
JS: 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. Far fucking from it. As a
shorthand i call it the “whitetariat”. These aren’t insights unique to Settlers, by any means. Unfortunately,
whenever Western radicals hear words like “unions” and “working class” a
rosy glow glazes over their vision, and the “Internationale” seems to
play in the background. Even many anarchists seem to fall into a daze
and to magically transport themselves back to seeing the militant
socialist workers of Marx and Engels’ day. Forgetting that there have
been many different kinds of working classes in history. Forgetting that
Fred Engels himself criticized the English industrial working class of
the late 19th century as a “bourgeois proletariat”, an
aristocracy of labor. He pointed out how you could tell the
non-proletarian, “bourgeois” strata of the English working class—they
were the sectors that were dominated by adult men, not women or children. Engels also wrote that the “bourgeois”sectors were those that were unionized. Sounds like a raving ultra-leftist, doesn’t he? (which he sure wasn’t). So
that this is a strategic and not a tactical problem, that it has a
material basis in imperialized class privilege, has long been
understood by those willing to see reality. (the fact that we have
radical movements here addicted to not seeing reality is a much larger
crisis than any one issue ). EC:
Don’t some of the benefits of living in an imperialist metropole trickle
down even into some of the internal colonies, causing some of the
distorting effects of settlerism to be replicated within, for instance,
the non-white working classes within the United States?
JS: Yes, absolutely. Radical workers themselves have often understood
this, although the official “Marxist” left has always worked to silence
them. Way back in the 1970s two Detroit auto workers wrote a short pamphlet about politics, addressed to “fellow workers who have begun to wonder whether they are going to spend the rest of their lives just hustling for more money…”
What was so striking about this was the authors, James Boggs and James
Hocker, who between them had over fifty years experience in the plants.
Strikes, militant factory caucuses, revolutionary organizations, Black
nationalism, mass ghetto rebellions, they had taken part in it all. One
of them, James Boggs, had been a close comrade and co-author of the
Pan-Afrikan revolutionary historian C.L.R.James. Boggs was one of the
leading working-class theoreticians of the 1960s Black Revolution. The
role of the white racist construction trades unions back then, who were
used by the u.s. government as their unofficial goon squads to beat up
Anti-Vietnam War protesters, was infamous. But Boggs and Hocker don’t
let their fellow factory workers escape responsibility, either . They
remind them (and the rest of us) that all the AFL-CIO unions, even the
liberal ones, completely backed u.s. military aggression in Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Nor
did it stop there, since Boggs and Hocker saw a direct relationship
between the opportunism of all the unions and the opportunism of a
bribed u.s. working class. What was so refreshing was that Boggs and
Hocker expressly rejected the time-worn and worn-out “radical” argument
that u.s. workers are free from all sin ( sort of like the ultimate
condom of immaculate conception ), since supposedly “it is only sellout
by the union bureaucracy which has kept the workers in check.” “Workers
coming into the auto plants today receive economic benefits undreamed
of by their predecessors. These benefits tie workers to the company,
particularly the high senority workers. It also creates in them a vested
interest in the system which exerts a growing influence on how they
view the social reality around them. More and more they think only about
their own interests. They worry only about how to ‘get mine’ or, at
best, ‘get ours'” The two pointed
out how auto workers in Detroit refused to fight for better mass
transit, because, although they know how much poor people need this, “they also think that adequate public transportation might mean fewer jobs for them.” “This
opportunism is clearly demonstrated in dealing with the most important
issues of our time, such as the war in Indochina and the inflation
caused by the war. “The
war in Indochina took the lives of thousands of youth in this country,
many of them sons of working class families. But it was the workers and
their organizations who demonstrated enthusiastic support for the
clearly illegal war perpetrated by the United States government, even
when other groups in the society, especially students, were showing by
their actions increasing distaste for the war. “Many
workers, when challenged individually, would deny that they supported
the war. But at the same time they refused to take any actions to
exhibit opposition to the war and clearly were hostile to the students
who opposed the war. The attitude of most workers was ‘The President
knows best’ and in any case what mattered was their jobs—even if their
job was making bombs or napam to burn up the Vietnamese…
These guys were seriously pissed off at their own class, at their
brothers and sisters, and not afraid to lay it all out. But saying that
u.s. industrial workers are not as a whole revolutionary or “class
conscious”—and check out that Boggs and Hocker, who worked in the
Detroit auto factories that were Black-majority, are definitely not
just exposing the “whitetariat” alone but Black workers as well— isn’t
the end of the road. i’m not saying that we should forget about working
class organizing. What i am suggesting is that radical working
class politics here needs different strategies than the traditional
left has understood. Everything that we’ve discussed just
clears away all the middle-class left underbrush, so people can see the
actual path before us and get down to work. Settlers didn’t directly deal with all this, naturally, since it’s historical analysis of the oppressor class structure and history .
EC: Would you say that organizing within the present-day white working class is hopeless?
JS: We need to talk about how people unthinkingly objectify the working classes. 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. There’s
an underlying assumption that revolutionary movements worldwide share,
that’s always there for us, that we are part of the working classes.
That we live our lives in these communities, hold those jobs, try to
live productive lives not just do capitalist bullshit, struggle within
these class situations. We’re talking in a wide arc here, maybe, but to a
point: to how we need to build movements that have the learned skill
of the recognition of reality. That understand revolutionary politics
as more than abstract ideology, in more than an academic or reform
movement way. 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. Malcolm
X and Women’s Liberation, ACT-UP and Wounded Knee II, Anti-Vietnam War
draft card burning and radical ecology, were all shocking to the
majority of North Americans. Radical threats to “the American Way of
Life”— and loudly condemned not only by the majority but more
specifically by the white working class — these political offensives by
the few turned everything upside down. Because in the metropolis,
radical and democratic change can only come against the wishes of the bribed majority. That may be tough to swallow for white folks, but reality is just reality. This
obsession with needing a social majority has nothing to do with being
“practical”. What it has to do with is bourgeois and defeatist
thinking.This is like the left thinking that could not build a practical
anti-fascist movement in Weimar Republic Germany during the 1920s and
1930s, although millions hated Nazism and wanted to do something,
because that German left was too preoccupied with fantasies of either
seizing or getting elected into state power for itself. That
left was too lost in delusions of success almost within their hands,
delusions of maneuvering together a majority, to bother even really
understanding fascism coming up fast in their rear view mirror. The
urgent need was to organize a working minority to counter fascism in a
much more radical way. Not by trying to defend liberal bourgeois rule.
All the real things that had to be done by scattered German
anti-fascists later after the Nazis were put into power—such as to
survive politically, to significantly sabotage the war effort, to rescue
Jews and Romany and gays, to build an underground against the madness
of the Third Reich–all these things were attempted bravely but largely
unsuccessfully, because they had to be done too late from scratch. This
is a much larger subject, too large to dive into now, but it is on the
horizon, like the smoke of a distant forest fire.
EC: Are the settler societies of North
America different from the racist and imperialist countries in Europe in
any kind of fundamental way which should be important to anti-fascists?
JS: Which takes us into
somewhat different ground. i’m not knowledgeable enough on European
politics–or on Canada– so that i could do a list of point by point
comparisons. What i’d like to do instead is to talk about u.s. society,
and readers themselves can see if the comparisons make any sense. And,
yes, i’ve run into young fascists of the “stormtrooper” variety, with
their gray semi-waffen s.s. uniforms, open veneration of Hitler, open
talk of “mud races”, etc. i still think that fascism here has been very
influenced by its birth within a settler society, instead of being just
some lame copy of the German experience. Just as Israeli settler
neo-fascism has a very different language and public look from that of
their Nazi tutors (taking a religious fundamentalist form). The most conspicuous difference between Europe and North America was class in the outward form of race.
In the centuries before World War II, the overwhelming mass of the
European populations were poor and in misery. They were the proletarian
classes, the laborers, poor peasants, and oppressed industrial workers.
But in the settler colonies and nations, the lowest classes, the
proletarians, were the natives, the conquered, or the imported colonial
laborers. While white settler workers were automatically, from birth,
no matter how poor, a whole level up. As W.E.B. DuBois remarked about
poor white workers in the post-Civil War South. Thanks to imperialism.
Which is why the mass of French colons in Algeria solidly supported
imperialism against the Algerian people. Why millions of working class
and poor whites in the segregationist u.s. South were more than willing
to help police and kill and terrorize Black people. And even today, a
century and more later, if we left it up to the white majority, the u.s.
would secede from NAFTA and the WTO all right—and fly the Confederate
flag! In many settler societies, historically the white population not only supported the police, in part they were the police. Unlike
in Old Europe, where in general the masses of people were kept disarmed
and landless, in settler colonies often the entire euro-male culture
revolved around common and cheap access to land and rifles and the
bodies of the oppressed. Posses or militias or “Committees of
Correspondence” or lynch mobs of armed men enforced the local settler
dictatorship over Indians, Latinos, Afrikans, Asians, North Afrikans,
women, etc. And white men of all classes joined in, to affirm their
membership in the most important “class” of all. Settlerism filled the space that fascism normally occupies. So
in the 1920s and 1930s large fascist movements arose in Old Europe out
of the bitter class deadlock in war-torn societies. But in the u.s.
then, while there were small fascist groups and certainly real currents
of sympathizers (enough to fill Madison Square Garden in Manhattan on
one occasion), there was no mass movement for fascist seizure of power itself.
Nor was the ruling class close to implementing fascism. The sputtering
flareups of attempted fascist coups by ruling class elements against
the reformist Roosevelt New Deal (Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune newspaper
calling for the assassination of the President, or the DuPont abortive
seizure of Washington using suborned u.s. marines) were easily shrugged
off. There was major u.s. imperialist support for Italian, Spanish and
German fascism before and even during World War II, as opposed to
support for fascism at home. Fascism was distinct from racism or white
supremacy, which were only ” As American as apple pie.” Neither the ruling class nor the white masses had any real need for fascism. What for?
There was no class deadlock paralyzing society. There already was a
long standing, thinly disguised settler dictatorship over the colonial
proletariat in North America. In the u.s. settlerism made fascism
unnecessary. However good or bad the economic situation was, white
settlers were getting the best of what was available. Which was why both
the white Left and white Far Right alike back then in the 1930s were
patriotic and pro-American. Now only the white Left is. The
white Left here is behind in understanding fascism. When they’re not
using the word loosely and rhetorically to mean any repression at all
(like the frequent assertions that cutting welfare is “fascism”! i mean,
give us a break!), they’re still reciting their favorite formula that
the fascists are only the “pawns of the ruling class”. No, that was
Nazism in Germany, maybe, though even there that’s not a useful way of
looking at it. But definitely not here, not in that old way. The
main problem hasn’t been fascism in the old sense–it’s been neo
colonialism and bourgeois democracy! The bourgeoisie didn’t need any
fascism at all to put Leonard Peltier away in maximum security for life
or Mumia on death row. They hunted down the Black Panthers and the
American Indian Movement like it was deer hunting season, while white
America went shopping at the mall–all without needing fascism. And the
steady waterfall of patriarchal violence against women, of rapes and
torture and killings and very effective terrorism on a mass scale,
should remind us that the multitude of reactionary men have “equal
opportunity ” under “democracy “, too. They don’t need fascism–yet. Right
now under neo-colonial “democracy”, the system of patrolling and
confining the Black Nation is at a fever pitch. Every known narcotic is
being shoved and shoveled onto the streets of the Nation like it was
confetti at parade time—coke, heroin, malt liquor, Bud, crack,
commodified sex, you name it. The huge 2 million inmate u.s. prison
system contains the largest single Black community of all. One out of
every four Black men in Washington, D.C. is in jail, prison, on parole
or probation, or awaiting trial–i.e. under direct supervision by the law
enforcement system . Even Ronald K. Noble, the new Secretary
General-designate of INTERPOL, has written that he regularly gets
stopped, questioned, and sometimes even searched by u.s. police (in
Europe, too, of course). And if the top law enforcement official in the
capitalist world gets routinely stopped as a Black man for u.s. racial
police checks, guess what happens to the unemployed, to young working
class Black men. The old Black industrial
working class has been largely wiped out, and warlord armies and gangs
given informal state permission to rule over much of the inner city at
gunpoint. A few years ago i went home with a comrade. When we got off
the bus, all the passengers started walking home down the middle of the
street. My friend explained that all the sidewalks were “owned” by one
or another dope gang or dealer, reserved for their crew and customers.
You walked in the street or you got taken down by a 9mm. While the new
Black middle class takes itself out of the game, flees the old
communities and disperses itself into the suburbs.Why would capitalists
need fascism? “Democracy” is doing the job for them full gale
force–and let’s not forget that North America has at the same time
become the conscience of the world lecturing everyone else on human
rights. “How sweet it is!” ( Guess Leonard Peltier must be a prisoner in
China ). But i am not saying that the situation is static, or that past history isn’t being razed and rebuilt. All
variants of capitalist metropolitan societies are becoming slowly but
surely more alike, Quebec and Raleigh, Tokyo and Frankfurt, as capital
expands, develops, and merges. While Western European farmers
complain about McDonalds and agrobusiness, they willingly accept the
most significant “Americanization”–the replacement of Western European
labor with Algerians, Turks, Albanians, etc. Throughout Europe the
proletariat has been pushed outside of national boundaries socially–just
as euro-settlerism once did in the Third World–and is being redefined
as Arab, Filipino, Algerian, Turkish, Albanian, Afrikan, and so on. And,
as Arghiri Emmanuel has noted, imperialism is gradually abandoning its
own kith and kin, its settler societies. We first saw this in Kenya in
1960, where the British settler colony was unceremoniously dumped after
the Mau Mau Rebellion in favor of an Afrikan neo-colonial regime. Then
in Algeria, where French imperialism gave up on what had by their laws
been an actual province of France–and left a million French Algerian
settlers to lose their farms and homes and possessions, to flee in a
frenzied mass evacuation. Capitalism has no loyalties, after all, only
interests (to paraphrase a famous statesman). It was only then that the colons
and their military sympathizers sought an end to French bourgeois
democracy, to start a new fascist interlude. Even in North America
settlers are being told by imperialism to move over and make room for
new immigrants from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Afrika. To
pay the bill as the state gives back some land and reparations and tax
concessions to Native nations. And they certainly hate it! So
there is a certain convergence, of settler and non-settler metropolitan
societies becoming more alike. In the u.s. the increasingly global
ruling class has no need of domestic fascism– so far. But white mass
politics is not confined to taking phone calls from the ruling class.
Far from it.
EC: How do you view the rise of the Far Right, specifically the American Far Right?
JS: We can see that neo-fascism is a growing factor in u.s.politics. Still
marginal, but already more significant than,say, white Marxism. The Far
Right is politically strong enough, represents so much mass sentiment,
that its momentary electoral champion—Pat Buchanan—has become the hero
of some trade unions and the closet ally of white socialists and
anarchists in the anti-WTO campaign. [for more details on the right
wooing the left in the anti-globalization movement, see My Enemy’s Enemy,
published by Anti-Fascist Forum] And again, to understand this dynamic
we have to lay aside 1930s’ political formulas and take the social
reality in a fresh way. Were Timmy McVeigh and his comrades “tools of
the ruling class” when they dusted the federal building in Oklahoma
City? Does finance capital & the big bourgeoisie pull the strings
behind the Militia Movement as it spreads doctrines of tax resistance,
seizing federal land, and targeting the imperialist state as white man’s
main enemy? You’d have to be nuttier than they are to believe that! The
old “pawns of the ruling class” 1930s analysis of European fascism do
not apply right here in the old way. This
is too big a subject for me to go into fully here, but the broad outline
is obvious. The Far Right is growing steadily, moving on the offensive,
as white settler society itself is fragmenting and being forced to
gradually give up its old national form under immense pressures from
the new global imperialism. In this fragmentation, some sectors and
classes of the old settler society are now more open to neo-fascism in
their desperate search for a new civilization for themselves in which
they will still be masters of the land. While
in Europe the much larger fascist current has manifested itself by
violent attacks on immigrant labor and on defending the concept of the
old nations, in the u.s. the New Right is primarily concerned with
attacking the u.s. state itself, using both armed struggle and mass
political organizing, and founding new self-governing cults and
societies . That is to say, it is an emerging revolutionary movement,
albeit still a small one. The Left has little daily contact with the
fascists, because they are in different classes and live in different
geographic areas and are in diverging societies. In
the best guerrilla fashion, this New Right is by-passing the major
cities, with their massive Third World populations, corporate economies
and large state machinery. Rather, their focus is on winning de facto
power inside the marginalized white male populations. Romeoville,
Illinois rather than Chicago. Prisons rather than Ivy League colleges. Theirs is a re-statement of the early settler vision,
of setting up independent outposts of a racially-cleansed culture, on
re-pioneered white land. With heavily armed bands of once again
masculine white men pushing out the mercenary u.s. authorities. For a
period of time we could see both white fascist Right and the white
Left–working in geographically separate cultures on this vast continent–
grow without impinging on or really clashing with each other. Both
mostly white “Free Mumia” campaigns in the old major cities and the
quiet ouster of federal agents from Western lands. The
old Right of the 1920s Klan or 1960s White Citizens Councils or
Minutemen or Jewish Defense League were patriotic & pro-u.s.a. They
saw themselves as “saving” the traditional America, and often cooperated
closely with and were led by local business, police, the f.b.i. and
government officials. In a major reversal, the new Far Right is radically anti-American. It sees their white male settler empire of “America from sea to shining sea”
as really lost. Its cities taken over by the sub-human millions of the
“mud races”, its economy drained by the “Jew banks” and the alien
corporate economy, its culture polluted by hostile genetic
contaminants, its once-proud citizens increasingly without rights and
dictated to by the shell of the former “u.s.government” which is now the
“Zionist Occupation Government”. And while the masses of conservative
euro-amerikans are not yet fascist, neither are they anti-fascists. And
the hard-core of the new Far Right is very fascist, since neo-fascism
represents the basic ideology that the aspiring white
“lumpenbourgeoisie” need to restart and reorganize a part of settler
society as their own private fiefdom. The u.s. constitution just doesn’t
work for them. Just as Trudjman and Milosevic, who once were
Yugoslavian patriots and “socialists” when that met their class
interests, turned to neo fascism and genocidal ethnic nationalism to
be “born again” as the local “lumpenbourgeoisie” under global
imperialism. Take the David Duke phenomenon. As we all know, in 1990 Louisiana state representative David Duke ran for the u.s. senate. In
losing Duke still won a large majority of the statewide white vote,
some 57%. His highest percentage of votes came from white workers with
incomes under $15,000 a year. This despite the fact that Duke
was and is notorious not “merely” as a racist, but as someone who has
spent his entire adult life as a very public neo-nazi organizer,
propagandist, and leader. He was opposed by both Republican and
Democratic Parties, and the churches, civic and business organizations.
The entire media machine kept exposing and criticizing him, repeatedly
running old photos of him in his American Nazi Party uniform. Yet, if it
wasn’t for the Black voters, David Duke–naked fascist agenda and all–
would have emerged as one of the most powerful politicians and in the
u.s. senate. You can see why granting Black people the vote was so
important to u.s. imperialism–and why the white masses were carefully
never given a chance to directly vote on it! For
sure, the growth of fascism here has many class contradictions of its
own, and their Aryan future is far from certain. But it is significant
that while the masses of euro-amerikans are not fascists, being neo-fascist
is quietly acceptable to many of them. Today the radical future is
dividing into those who–whatever their strategies and
ideologies–recognize that fact, and those who still wish to avoid facing
it.
