By Fred Wei-Han Ho

This essay has will seek to address four general topics:

One: What is the National Question(s) and why is it important to the U.S. socialist revolution?

Two: What have been incorrect positions and distortions that liquidate the National Question(s) in the U.S.?

Three: To propose a correct understanding to the National Question in theory and in practice.

Four: To analyze and discuss specific National Questions in the U.S.

I have chosen to enumerate the “notes” or points I will be making in order to convey that this essay is a work in progress and to welcome direct debate and discussion upon specific points.

What is the National Question(s) and Why is it Important to the U.S. Socialist Revolution?

1. National oppression defined is simply the oppression of nations and nationalities. It is the systematic, historical oppression of an entire people—of all the classes of the oppressed nation or nationality. Historically, national oppression includes all of the forms of oppression including discrimination, racism, ethnocentrism, stereotyping, disenfranchisement, genocide, violence, injustice, and inequality. It is fundamentally a by-product of the division of the world between oppressed and oppressor nations, accentuated and globalized by the advent and growth of the imperialist stage of capitalist development. This division is marked by intense inequality between the affluent imperialist and developed capitalist “centers” and the impoverished “periphery” of the “third” and “fourth” worlds (a more recently coined term that refers to the indigenous peoples who are oppressed nationalities and nations within third world countries, and in the case of Australia and the U.S., oppressed nationality indigenous peoples within first world nation-states).

1. The national question has changed from “an internal question” of rising capitalist western/western European nation-states which underwent a bourgeois democratic revolution that consolidated the rule of the capitalists class by replacing the former feudal ruling class, monarchy and theocracy, to an external question” of a world-wide imperialist system of finance capital. The national movements in the former period of rising capitalism were bourgeois: the ascendancy of the new capitalist class to consolidate its territorial market, to construct its infrastructure to administer, facilitate, coordinate and manage its capital expansion. The struggle of workers in such nation-states was to overthrow their exploiter bourgeoisie. Marxism is the theory and practice of class struggle that arises in the period of rising capitalism. It is “European” because it originated in the heart of the bourgeois revolution, industrialized western Europe. Under the worldwide system of imperialism, imperialism and not the local bourgeoisie, is the principal enemy of the national movements. Leninism is Marxism applied to the struggle against imperialism, no longer rising capitalism, but multi- and trans-national capitalism. Leninism is revolutionary because it demands real equality (the elimination of national oppression and privileges) and not just judicial or legal national equality (bourgeois democratic rights granted by a nation-state ostensibly to all” of its citizens). Under imperialism, stronger nations oppress weaker ones and different nations and nationalities are forcibly annexed, even bought (as Alaska was by the U.S. from Russia), and joined into one nation-state. Entire peoples are dispersed, through forced migration (contract and coolie labor) or split asunder (the U.S. seizure of the southwest territories from Mexico).

Imperialism, from a Marxist viewpoint, is not simply a nation carrying out a policy of nastiness and aggression towards other nations, but a system of monopoly capitalism in which large corporations (finance capital) extend across the planet and dominate and control vast areas far beyond their home borders. Lenin revealed five essential features to imperialism:

1. Concentration and centralization of production and capital developed to a monopoly stage;
2. The merger of banking and industrial capital to form finance capital or financial oligarchy;
3. Export of capital, as distinguished from the export of commodities (which of course continues as well in the flood of western consumer goods and cultural commodities across the globe). The main feature of capital export are the huge loans with vampire interest rates large banks and monetary organizations such as the IMF make to poor, developing countries;
4. International capitalist monopolies or cartels (the multi- and trans-national corporation) which divide the world as their spoils;
5. Constant re-division of the world (into First World vs. Third World; between regions and countries) which leads to small and world wars as the physical expression of economic conflict; and the intensification of all the world’s contradictions which sets the conditions for socialist revolutions. Competition between economic giants leads to greater and greater monopolies which compete with each other in their quest for cheaper labor, greater raw materials and expanded export markets, which leads to wars of control and domination; and the possibility of revolution, or the opposite of imperialism: wars of national liberation.

In Lenin’s analysis, imperialism is a “dying, moribund” system for its parasitism and decay in creating a class of idlers, professional “coupon clippers” who play no role in production, living off of speculation, usury, quicksand credit advancement, ruthless interest rate gouging, cultivation of debt dependency, and a layer of white-collar managers, administrators, ideologues, propagandists, promoters, who contribute nothing healthy, worthwhile or useful.

Imperialism (economic domination and indirect rule) has its roots in colonialism (political domination and direct rule), but it is not colonization, though it may be metaphorically described as such. Colonization set the stage for the massive accumulation needed for imperialism. Land, resources and labor had to be captured and controlled. The super-profits of imperialism fuel opportunism. So great are the trickle down spoils of these super-profits that entire sections of the working-class are bribed and “bought off” (the political meaning of opportunism). The are corrupted with racism, infected with oppressor nation patriotism, trained to identify with the bourgeoisie, and live materially better off than most of the world and thereby have a vested interest and stake in First World supremacy. This “labor aristocracy” began to rise at the end of Marx’s life as rising capitalism was transitioning into monopoly capitalism. In today’s world, the labor aristocracy is particularly large and potent in the west, being both a stratum of well-paid workers in highly elite trades as well as union bureaucrats with large salaries and company stock options, etc.

While a few colonies still remain in the world, and the U.S. still has colonial territorial possessions including Puerto Rico, “American” Somoa, Guam, the Marshall Islands, the “U.S.” Virgin Islands, its largest control extends over “oppressed nations” that have been annexed and geographically incorporated into the American empire nation-state, including Hawaii, the southwest territory Chicano liberationists refer to as “Atzlan,” and what I and others argue as the oppressed New African (Black-belt) nation, and the on-going prison house of Native First Nations. At one point, some American radical sociologists (confused by the methodology of bourgeois sociology and not radical enough to study the national question) described the oppressed black nation as an “internal colony” as it seemed to share features of other external colonies such as an external police force, external businesses profiteering from ghetto cheap labor and consumers, etc.

3. Stalin’s criteria of a nation overwhelmingly focuses on western European nations, especially in the period of rising capitalism, and lacks much focus on the rest of the world especially in the era of imperialism and from the impact of western European colonization, which drew up many artificial borders to benefit colonial powers. For example, much of the borders known today as nation-states within Africa began by the repartitioning of European colonial powers in the Berlin Conference of 1885. They were artificial and problematic: grouping vastly different cultural, linguistic, ethnic and nationalities into forced unions that exacerbated divisions, conflicts and hostilities. Stalin never took up the task of investigating the national movements in the “Third World.” While his “four criteria” (common territory or land-base; common economic life; common language; and common psychological make-up” or culture) are a useful guide to understanding the emergence of nations, especially for western Europe, they are fundamentally flawed for the rest of the world which had national development disrupted and distorted by colonialism and imperialism. Therefore the oppressed nations and nationalities that have emerged in much of the world will not consistently reflect all or any of the “four criteria.” Dialectically, they will reflect unevenness, partial and inconsistent features. Indeed for oppressed nations under imperialism, much of their “common” features are a result of coercion and oppression such as a “common language” either of the former colonial power (such as English, French, etc.) or the ruling nationality, all of which makes for intensified national struggle.

Stalin’s evidence” and “research” of the national question ignores the vast majority of the world: Africa, Asia, the Americas, Oceania. Not only is his empirical foundation problematic, his overall method may be extremely problematic. A more developed critique of Stalin and “Stalinism” must unfold. It is my position that Stalin’s method is fundamentally flawed as being un-dialectical and anti-materialist. Much of the U.S. M-L movement was raised on Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism study primer, which even Mao eventually rejected. Stalin elevated all forms of struggle and contradictions to the level of antagonistic contradictions (as evidenced in Stalin’s practice of jailings, repression and killings), an “either vs. or” proposition. Therefore, to quote Stalin as “truth” or “scientific” is very problematical.

Lenin never advanced criteria or a definition for “nation” but focused on “national movements” and the “right to self-determination” which included at least three options (secession, federation and some form of autonomy). Lenin vigorously fought the liquidation of any or all of these options as fundamental opposition to the right of self-determination. He repeatedly condemned as “national chauvinist” the preclusion of or preference for any of these options when the national movements themselves haven’t made their determination.

Even if Stalin’s criteria for “nation” is upheld and used as Harry Haywood did on the Black Nation, as the August Twenty-Ninth Movement did for the Chicano nation, etc., then the “right to self-determination” should be upheld without qualifications or caveats. The rebuttals to the existence of a Black and Chicano Nations primarily are statistical, citing out-migration and integration into the general U.S. population. While Bob Wing, Max Elbaum and others particularly around The Line of March Organization almost two decades ago tried to rebut the Black Nation thesis, in favor of the Black struggle as anti-racism and for integration, they never won over any substantial sector of the black liberation movement. Time and time again, any political position that refuses to respect “the right of self-determination” has been incapable and ineffective of providing leadership to the national struggles in any revolutionary way as such white chauvinist Leftist positions are taken to be overwhelmingly integrationist and assimilationist.

Why did Lenin not advance any specific criteria for nation? I believe that Lenin knew that new nations would continue to rise under imperialism and that they would take many forms, of which the struggle for land would still be central, along with new demands. New nationalities have definitely emerged out of the cauldron of the multinational U.S.A., and white supremacist settler-colonial national oppression has constantly spawned new national movements. For example, the Asian Movement that emerged in the late-60s and early-70s was a movement that combined the Chinese, Japanese and Pilipino, along with other Asian and Pacific Islander nationalities, national movements respectively. The Chicano Movement seeks to unify Mexican-born, American-born people of Mexican descent and Indigenous Peoples of the Southwest. The on-going debate in the U.S. Left is which of these national movements are “nations.” Irregardless of whether we will be able to determine “oppressed nation status” for a particular national struggle and unite around its having “the right of self-determination,” the national movements continue to be a constant source of anti-imperialist struggle. A more focused discussion of what oppressed nations do exist within the U.S. follows.

The U.S. proletariat is multinational and cuts across the various oppressed nations and nationalities. It is still highly debated as to whether it is even correct to cite a “white proletariat” as some argue that settler-colonialism may have made most “whites” part of the labor aristocracy, or worse, “settlers.” Others argue that the white oppressor nation, whose government sits in Washington, D.C. (and refuses to grant statehood to this mostly black district, ruling it like an occupational force purely for its own benefit), has a disproportionately smaller proletariat than the oppressed nations and nationalities. It is my position that among the U.S. proletariat, there are white, European Americans. However there is no such thing as a distinctive “white proletariat.” Indeed representing and signifying anything to be “white” is racist, such as saying “white American music,” which is really the music of appropriation. While there does exist European traditions and forms such as the regional music of Appalachia that is predominantly practiced by white, European-descended Americans, to call it “white” is to mean “dominant” and “legitimate.” White members of the U.S. proletariat suffer exploitation. They create surplus value that is appropriated by the capitalist. The struggle is to win them away from their historical primary identification with being “white” for a (multinational) class identity and consciousness that consistently rejects national oppression, white privilege and white supremacist racist exclusion.

What is the basic problem with the formulation of “racism” and the struggle as “anti-racism”?

National oppression means oppression over nations and nationalities, and is not reducible to racism as the “race/class/gender” non-Marxists would have us think. Racism is a part of the particular historical and social development of U.S. national oppression. The material basis of racism is national oppression. To reduce the national struggles as one of “anti-racism” is both wrong and objectionable for diminishing the extent of national oppression, for narrowing and limiting the political solution to be integration and assimilation as opposed to national liberation and the seizure of state power and control over territory/land.

Race is a myth, a pseudo-science developed by European colonialism to justify the domination of the world’s people by the “white” peoples of Europe. There are no pure “races” as humanity is hybridity. Physical features exist along a spectrum of variation and mixture. Furthermore, physical features don’t cause social hierarchy. Race, as a “bio-political” construction, is manipulated. Besides, as one young activist posed the matter, “What race are Puerto Ricans?” They are a mixture of native, African and European. Why were Japanese legally considered white in South Africa under apartheid, while Chinese and Asian Indian were classified “colored,” even though they are the same “race”? Eastern and southern Europeans, prior to the 20^th century, were deemed inferior races, but were subsequently incorporated into white supremacist-colonist U.S.A. when they were sufficiently assimilated as “whites.” As Kalamu ya Salaam points out, “The de-ethnicization of Europeans is the process of them becoming white.”

The Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, often accused by then-Soviet supporters as “nationalist” advanced the slogan, “Only one race: the human race!” Therefore, Marxists as “scientific materialists” should reject race as spurious and falsehood. In the socio-historical development of the U.S.A., the indigenous peoples had to be wiped out or forcibly removed from their lands in order to allow for the expansion and building of white settler-colonial society (the founding 13 colonies). Whether a white settler-colonial proletariat developed and to what degree continues to be debated and argued. Much of the white settlers were not workers (transplanted proletarians from Europe) but property owners, large and small farmers, craftspeople, merchants and mercantilists and aspiring industrialists. It remains to be settled in scholarly debates as to when and how a white working class took root in U.S. society. However, in my view, a large influx of white immigrants beginning with the Irish in the mid-19^th century to on-going waves of southern and eastern Europeans during the late-19^th and early 20^th centuries, and today’s post-Iron Curtain immigrants, came to the U.S. as workers from Europe and continued to be workers in the burgeoning U.S. steel, automotive, manufacturing and service industries. The demand for labor by U.S. industry during its surging rise in the late-1800s and early-1900s was so great that European, along with Caribbean, Asian and Latin American, workers had to be recruited in massive numbers, repopulating both the nation-state and dramatically increasing the size of the U.S. proletariat, including workers of European ancestry (who were predominantly Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish, and Eastern European).

The “anti-racism” Leftists virtually ignore the struggle around land rights. They are glaringly silent especially with regard to the struggles of Native peoples, not even attempting to do study and to understand how Native peoples in the U.S. relate to the national question. They tend to see the national question as “race” with a focus not on fighting all forms of national oppression, but only issues of “racism” and racial discrimination” with a program anchored on “integration” as the solution. When the national movements or oppressed nationalities don’t ally with them (i.e., with these white left groups) or adopt their positions, they are dismissed and dissed as nationalist.”

NATIONALISM VS. NATIONAL LIBERATION: BUILDING THE NATIONAL MOVEMENTS

1. Revolutionary socialists/ Marxists/communists are internationalists and thereby reject nationalism per se. Nationalism is the exclusivity, primacy and privilege of nations and nationalities over the working class, which is multinational and international. Nationalism, no matter if it is revolutionary nationalism” and recognizes and fights imperialism, is still “my nation or nationality first.” Internationalism is both “the class first over nation or nationality,” as well as “my national liberation is supported by and must in turn support the fight against the oppression of all nations.” Therefore, the internationalist is the most consistent and leading fighter against his or her particular national oppression, “a patriot” of the oppressed nation or as Lenin put it, “internationalism applied” to the national struggle. The international (multinational) working class wants to abolish nation-states, as quickly as possible, in favor of a classless world without boundaries, class divisions, nation-state armies and governments. However, as active historical materialists, we recognize that the abolition of the nation-state can only happen after the destruction of capitalism (which today is multinational or trans-national capitalism, namely imperialism). Capitalism grew upon the construction of the nation-state and the nation-state dialectically supports capitalism. Colonialism and imperialism constantly re-divides and redraws the world map. The phenomenon of nation-states is that they splinter and divide, as well as merge and expand via annexation and merger (both political and economic). The leading role of Mao as theorist and national liberation struggle leader distinguished and demarcated Marxism-Leninism from Trotskyism (Trotsky and his supporters consider Trotskyism to be M-L). Mao rejected the “skipping of stages” advocated by Trotsky and upheld the revolutionary importance of waging the war of national liberation as a necessary stage in the process of socialist revolution. Without removing the external threat of imperialism (in the case of the Chinese revolution, most immediately Japanese fascist aggression and the penetrating claws of Euro-American imperialism through the foreign concessions exacted upon China), socialism would never be achieved. Unlike Western Europe, the white settler-colonial societies of North America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan (which was never colonized), the rest of the world had its history “interrupted” by the conquest of colonialism and western imperialist penetration. Therefore the bourgeois democratic revolution (the coming to power and dominance of capitalist democracies) in the “third world” would not be possible as the nascent forces of indigenous capital were made to serve the First World. Entire societies and lands were carved up by western powers, their indigenous leadership replaced by compradors (a class of carpetbaggers and native puppets), and their resources drained for the benefit of foreign profiteers resulting in “underdevelopment” (the process in which a country is made poor and kept poorer). Only with the removal of both colonialism (direct rule from the outside) by independence and of imperialism (native rule but economic rule from the outside) by national liberation can the conditions be paved for socialist revolution by foregoing the stage of bourgeois democratic capitalist revolution that the west and Japan had undergone.

1. The old Revolutionary Union (RU) had the position that “all nationalism is reactionary” and proceeded to condemn all forms of national-in-form organizing and struggle and alienated large sectors of both nationalists and the national movements. They became easy “straw man” targets for such critics as Native American nationalist (“Indigenist”) Ward Churchill in his book, Marxism and Native Americans (South End Press). Thus, in many but unfortunate and understandable ways, the Marxist-Leninist left became viewed as “the white left.” The various progressive, radical and revolutionary groups in the national movements are not all nationalists. The national movements are not predominantly nationalist either. The national movements are a united front consisting of different ideologies and class forces, objectively united against imperialist national oppression, but with very different strategic goals. It would be a serious mistake to equate nationalism with all militants who prioritize national-in-form struggles. Nationalism is not national consciousness, identity and pride. The former is a consolidated bourgeois worldview that justifies the primacy, exclusivity and privilege of one nation, nationality or national struggle over others. National consciousness, identity and pride, however, is the consciousness that “I am not what my oppressor makes me to be.” It is consciousness, identification and pride in the assertion “I am an African,” and not a “Negro”; “I am an Asian,” and not an “oriental”’ “I am Latino/a” and not “Hispanic”; etc. There are many individuals and forces in the national movements that aren’t nationalist though their focus is national-in-form struggle. White chauvinism in the U.S. Left has concentrated its attack upon “nationalism” and “nationalist deviations” as the principal error in the debate around the national question. The principal attack and criticism should be on white chauvinism and racist manifestations of the theory and practice of the U.S. left. Time after time, the most consistent threat to the unity and advancement of the U.S. Left has NOT been nationalism or nationalist errors made by Marxists, but white chauvinism.

1. Revolutionary nationalists are anti-imperialists and many do express internationalist sentiments. Malcolm X and the Black Panthers were great revolutionary nationalists, the Panthers even espousing support for socialism and Huey P. Newton expressed willingness to send Panther cadre to Vietnam to join the fighting forces of the Vietcong. This internationalist proclamation by Newton was both bold and historic in connecting the black liberation struggle with the worldwide struggle against U.S. imperialism and for its expression of Afro-Asian solidarity. However, revolutionary nationalism pulls up short in the revolutionary process of eliminating all classes, for unqualified support for the leadership of the proletariat over all other classes, and for contextualizing the national struggle and its demands and tactical and strategic objectives within the context of the broader international struggle against capitalism. For example, would African American revolutionary nationalists support the struggle of Asian factory workers against black capitalist elites, or even more particularly of Haitian workers against the black American petty-bourgeoisie who own wealthy vacation homes and property interests in Haiti and the Caribbean. Internationalists fight within their own nation and nationality to support the freedom of other oppressed nations and nationalities. Huey P. Newton recognized that the Vietnamese were closer to defeating U.S. imperialism than the black liberation struggle in the U.S. and it was his internationalism (somewhat later bizarrely self-described as revolutionary inter-communalism”) that impelled him to commit Black Panthers to join the Vietcong should they be asked.
2. Cultural nationalism and cultural nationalists have earned a particular scorn from many Marxist-Leninist sectors. Such a position of blanket disdain and condemnation for cultural nationalism and cultural nationalists fails to recognize any anti-imperialist aspects to this component of the national movements. In more recent, post-sixties times, Afrocentrism and Afrocentrists have been viewed as cultural nationalism and cultural nationalists, respectively. One unique caveat to the position that cultural nationalism is the most reactionary and narrow form of nationalism is the history of the Congress of Afrikan Peoples, the largest black cultural nationalist formation in the U.S. during the 60s-70s. CAP would go through much internal struggle and a Marxist-Leninist direction would emerge around its then-General Secretary and Chairman Amiri Baraka, changing its ideology and name to the Revolutionary Communist League (Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought) and in 1979-80, merge with the League of Revolutionary Struggle (which came out of the Asian and Chicano movements). By the mid-1980s the LRS would become both the largest M-L organization in the U.S. in the New Communist (anti-revisionist) Movement and have a majority oppressed nationality membership and leadership. All nationalists and forms of nationalism—whether labeled revolutionary” or “cultural”—must be evaluated by their objective, practical role in the struggle against imperialism. For example, the CAP always supported the national liberation struggles in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and Vietnam. Maulana Karenga, a reknown and controversial “cultural nationalist” ideologue and leader, has consistently supported socialist China. He and Kalamu ya Salaam were part of U.S. delegations that visited the PRC. What probably earned the ire of the “white Left” was the anti-white” positions of the cultural nationalists, their seemingly atavistic promotion of pre-colonial Africa and their refusal to submit to white guidance and acceptance (probably very justified given how white chauvinist the white Left is). The cultural nationalists emphasized the need to fight imperialist cultural aggression and promote African identity, pride and consciousness. They were very capable on-the-ground organizers, leaders in struggles for political representation, schools and community control, building housing, cultural and educational institutions, alternative presses, etc. When many of the newly Marxist oppressed nationalities renounced nationalism as “narrow and backward,” and abandoned their former work in such communities and institution-building projects, the more apolitical and reformist cultural nationalists took over these “spaces.” That is why their influence is felt so strongly in today’s Afrocentricity movement instead of more revolutionary views. Indeed, some of the great “Afrocentricists” were Marxists, as quiet as it’s kept, such as Cheikh Anta Diop. These more apolitical and reformist cultural nationalists, after the revolutionary cultural nationalists turned Marxists abandoned the national movements, took over and maintained small community bookstores, organizations, college programs, publications, etc. The difference is remarkable when in the late 1980s I visited both Marxist Abdul Akalimat’s (now defunct) 21^st Century Bookstore and cultural nationalist Haki Madhubuti’s Center for Positive Thought bookstore, both in black Chicago. The former was a barely-functioning dustbin, the latter an oasis (albeit Bundist, namely that they refused to carry books of black writers contrary to their political and ideological liking).

1. Oppressed nationality Marxists must be both political AND cultural leaders in the national movements. The mass popularity among poor and ghetto blacks for Garvey or Malcolm X, in contrast to the more white Left support for DuBois and Robeson, stems from the former two leaders as seen by the masses as symbolic and cultural projections of national pride and militant national consciousness, though Garvey was a criminal and Malcolm’s life was cut short before any real alternative institutions were built post-Nation of Islam. When an oppressed nationality militant is seen as tied to whites, be it through marriage, funding, celebrity, or what have you, they are dismissed as dupes or dependants of white society. This is the damage of integrationism” as the primary goal of seeking closeness, acceptance and approval by whites, by the oppressor. The oppressed nationality masses seek consistent and militant alterative cultural symbols and representation, counter to the white supremacist, Eurocentric, oppressor nation lifestyles, values, images and aesthetics. Oppressed nationality culture, for the vast majority of it, creates, defines and elaborates a tradition and continuum of resistance and struggle. The most vital and significant cultural traditions and forms affirm humanity against inhumanity, of freedom against oppression, of beauty against degradation, stereotype distortion and minstrelsy. Atavistic and backward cultural nationalist constructs and propositions (such as polygamy, male dominance, pre-germ romanticism of pre-colonial societies, etc.) must be opposed as anti-historical and oppressive. Concurrently, a self-proclaimed “anti-essentialist” multiculturalism, which disavows a heritage, continuum, and tradition of resistance and struggle must also be opposed for being nothing more than a neo-melting pot thesis. Marxists stand for multicultural/multinational unity/voluntary amalgamation FREE of white supremacy, national oppression and nationalism!
2. Oppressed nationality Marxists uphold the best and most progressive aspects of national culture, music, the arts, literature, and personify and uphold these values as part of being at the forefront of building a revolutionary culture of national liberation. In an interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark, the prominent black social psychologist, who is politically mainstream and integrationist, Malcolm X asserted that those blacks in inter-racial marriage (viz., with whites) can’t be leaders of the black masses. While any person has the right to love, have sex with and marry anyone they chose, oppressor nationality (white) and oppressed nationality romantic relationships and marriage are especially fraught with problematic issues about the degree of white assimilation and integrationism on the part of the oppressed nationality person. Hypergamy and sociological analyses of out-marriage as forms of social mobility and as indicators of white assimilation are all part of the complicated matrix of national oppression. While it is incorrect to have a policy discouraging inter-racial” (i.e., oppressed nationality-white) relationships, it is not incorrect to have a policy encouraging national culture, identity, pride including national-in-form romance and relationships. To share a brief anecdote, a member of the Trotskyist Freedom Socialist Party attributed the demise of the LRS to “nationalism”. As a former LRS member, I would disagree and attribute it to integrationism,” as almost all of the Asian-majority Central Committee leadership, both men and women, were married to or relating to whites. That part of the revolutionary decline stemmed from the belittlement of national culture except for the more white mainstream-acceptable forms, and the decision to interpret empowerment” for oppressed nationality communities as becoming integrated into the reformism of the Democratic Party through David Dinkins, Jesse Jackson and electoral and academic careers.

BUILDING THE NATIONAL MOVEMENTS, NATIONAL-IN-FORM ORGANIZATIONS AND “INSTITUTION BUILDING”

1. The national struggles inevitably spawn revolutionary national-in-form organizations when there does not exist the leading presence of a genuine multinational communist party in a multinational state as the U.S. Such upsurges occurred in the 20^th century in two periods. First in the early 1910s and 1920s with the rise of the African Blood Brotherhood, a collective of black revolutionary socialists and revolutionary nationalists. The second, in the late-1960s and early-1970s, by far the greatest upsurge, included the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Black Panther Party, I Wor Kuen/Red Guard Party and other Asian revolutionary groups, Chicano groups such as the Brown Berets, the August Twenty-Ninth Movement and others, Puerto Rican groups such as the Young Lords Party, the League of Puerto Rican Revolutionaries, and others, and the American Indian Movement and the League of First Nations, etc. This will continue to happen as we see today upon the ashes of the Left and nationalist movements, the rise of the New African Peoples Organization and the New African Liberation Front, some new Chicano revolutionary nationalists groups, and other fledgling revolutionary national-in-form organizations, many revolutionary nationalist, some proclaiming themselves a hybrid of nationalists and Marxists, etc.

1. “Institution building,” empowerment,” “self-reliance” and “community control” are all mass slogans raised by the national struggles against integration, assimilation and national oppression and for political and economic independence and “self-determination.” A great tradition of self-help and independent institutions exists, including the African Free School movement, community cultural centers and social programs, media/cultural/arts projects, the serve the people” and “survival programs,” etc. However since the revolutionary upsurges of the late-60s/early-70s, many of these efforts have faded out or worse, been hijacked by reformism. The U.S. ruling class (its government and foundations) initiated the Great Society” programs in order to undercut and usurp the popularity and mass support for many of these revolutionary-initiated community programs and institutions. The not-for-profit programs and organizations that followed, heavily funded and propped up by the U.S. ruling class, fostered a new strata of “poverty pimps,” funding hustlers and Democratic Party brokers. Black Studies and other Ethnic Studies, the struggle for which was led by revolutionaries, have now become academic ivory towers in striving for legitimacy with the Administration and academia as a whole. The departments, once a bastion for radical education and activism, first eliminated student and community activist control and decision-making input, then removed leftist and committed faculty and finally replaced both curriculum and personnel with bourgeois acceptable standards and staff.

1. When revolutionaries liquidate the national question by abandoning community organizing in the belief that such a focus is “narrow” and “nationalist,” for multinational industrial workplace focus, they abdicate leadership of the national struggles to the cultural nationalists.

1. National-in-form mass organizations must be built as LIBERATED ZONES. They must become beacons to all who want to seriously fight for national liberation by joining the guerillas. They can not be 501(c)3 non-profits that received the majority of their funds from the government or private foundations but rely upon membership support and their own entrepreneurial savvy and grit. As liberated zones, they function with discipline and seriousness and thereby earn the respect of the masses. “Serve the people/survival” programs must always include a strong dosage of revolutionary propaganda and agitation. People’s cultural constructions (such as Kwanzaa, etc.) must be clearly anti-imperialist projections. Such community-building (via health clinics, food coops, community schools, cultural spaces, housing, etc.) must create better alternatives than the mainstream social services. A high standard of red-and-expert must be held for all cadres doing such institution and community building to avoid the cooptation of reformism and reliance upon outside funding. Those revolutionaries working in the universities and non-profits should devote all of their energies to expanding space and resources for revolutionaries, direct organizing and channeling material aid to the liberated zones and to the guerillas who don’t get jobs in the system. Indeed, there is much to learn from the struggles and experiences of immigrant oppressed nationalities who have built underground economies, their own language presses, schools, etc.—the very “institutions” that American-born oppressed nationalities are so wanting.

BUILDING NATIONAL CULTURE, IDENTITY AND PRIDE

In theorizing and leading the war of national liberation of Guinea-Bissau against Portuguese colonialism and Euro-American imperialism in Africa, Amilcar Cabral proclaimed: national liberation begins as an act of culture.” Cabral, and all who have seriously fought colonialism and imperialist national oppression, recognized that oppressed peoples must de-colonize their consciousness first, to no longer worship or fear their oppressors, to discard the image of themselves fostered by the oppressor nationality, as a first step in the process of national liberation. National consciousness, discussed considerably by Frantz Fanon in his brilliant unity of psychological theory and Marxism, is essential to building the national liberation movement. Oppressed people will not fight for their liberation if they are deracinated, cut from the roots of their history and culture, brainwashed and inculcated by the language, values, cultural practices and symbols of their oppressor-colonizer. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the great Kenyan writer and cultural activist, was imprisoned by the Kenyan government for asserting that native African languages (Kikuyu in the case of Kenya) be promulgated among the people in an attempt to erase the colonial influence of English and European cultural propaganda. The Kenyan government, in homage and in service to European imperialism (aka neo-colonialism”) couldn’t accept this affront and challenge to the cultural supremacy of their western masters.

Marxists never support nationalism qua nationalism, but are the staunchest progenitors of national culture, pride and identity. The nationalism of oppressed nationalities is progressive only so far as it opposes imperialism. However, to lead the national movements in a consistent revolutionary direction, the proletariat must lead. The job of the communists must be to assume the role of being the fiercest upholders and fighters for national culture, community, democracy, inclusion, and to oppose narrowness, privilege and rivalry, to lead the national movements in a clearly revolutionary direction, i.e., heightening the struggle against imperialism in all its forms: cultural, social, political and economic. To unite the national movements, the communist leadership must show that it will fight for the class interests of the oppressed nationality petty-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie when they are consistent with opposing imperialism and promoting democracy.

For those oppressed nationalities in which a large number of the people are immigrants, such as Asian Pacific Americans, or Latinos, uniting the American-born and immigrant is critical, as these peoples are often sharply divided within their communities.

White assimilation, the loss of language and cultural heritage, is a function of national oppression. Ridiculing and looking down at immigrants is a function of the internalized oppression. A unique, distinctive and revolutionary Asian Pacific American culture expresses a synthesis of traditional cultures and contemporary western ones, especially “western” forms originating from other oppressed nationalities in the U.S.(primarily African American, c.f. American national music is essentially African American).

Much of the Black Arts Movements and its attendant cultural pride movements among other U.S. oppressed nationalities has been criticized by liberal academics as advocating “essentialism,” namely a “blacker than thou” proscriptive cultural policing. While some of the forms of nationalism are guilty of being narrow and extreme, the Black Arts Movement was part of a cultural revolution that ushered in a flood of multi-ethnic and heretofore excluded expressions. Quite the contrary to “telling people what to write and to think” (Amiri Baraka’s succinct paraphrase of the accusation of essentialism), such cultural movements promoted a national culture and identity that included collective experiences with both shared and unique particularities. If one is to affirm the presence and importance of oppressed nationality culture and identity, then a common and shared heritage and history is redoubtable and essential to a people’s ability to find unity. The struggle for ethnic studies is simultaneously a struggle for inclusion (an area of scholarship onto itself) and a curriculum of correction/liberation (as part of the struggle to find the truth). The dominant mainstream curriculum is white studies. Perhaps a core curriculum of correction/liberation in the humanities would include the following:

The Mahabarata and Ramayana epics from India; Chinese novelist Wu Cheng’en’s 16 century epic novel, Journey to the West and other Chinese literary classics as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Dream of the Red Chambers; Sufi poet Attar’s Conference of the Birds; the Arabian Knights; The Rubiyat by Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayan (1050-1132); Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet; certainly Solomon; Ibn Batuta, the 14^th century Muslim who visited India and China; the Nahuatl poems by Netzahualcoatl (13^th-14^th century) poet and king of Texcoco (pre-Spanish Mexico City) documented by Spanish missionaries; 5^th century B.C.E. Chinese philosopher-writer Lao Tsu; Lady Murasake’s 11^th century Japanese novel, The Lady Genji; Confucius (7^th cenury B.C.E.); Egyptian St. Augustine (1600s); Rumi, sufi poet; Chinese philosopher Mencius (300 B.C.E.); prophet Muhammad and the Koran; Indian ascetic philospher Siddartha; the Mayan 16^th century dance drama El Rabinal-Achi written in script form; the I-Ching Chinese book of changes; the Mexican painted books “Codex” of which there were once 1000 books, all but 13 were burned by the Spanish who deemed them to be works of the devil; Popolbuh who compiled the Book of the People, a collection of poetry and creation myths of the Mayans; Indian prophet Guru Nanak (1469-1538), the Native American Coyote Tales; and to name a handful of greats in the modern era, Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian writer (1861-1941); W.E.B. DuBois; Pablo Neruda; Amos Tutuola; and the list goes on.

MULTINATIONAL UNITY VS. BOURGEOIS WHITE INTEGRATIONISM

1. “Integration” was the U.S. government (liberal ruling class) policy put forward as the “answer” to the struggles of oppressed nationalities, particularly led by African Americans, to end forced segregation (the systematic separation and inferiorization of oppressed nationality peoples from the dominant white settler-colonial society). The U.S. federal government, with the support of the U.S. National Guard and federal troops and agencies, implemented forced integration. Why is this forced integration”? The burden of “integrating” schools was the busing of oppressed nationalities to mostly or all-white schools and areas. Seldom was busing the forcible transit of whites to mostly or all-oppressed nationality communities since those schools were deemed inferior “quality” facilities. The burden of “integrating” was put upon oppressed nationalities. While many racist white communities strongly objected to these federal enactments, and the image of black children being escorted by armed national guardsmen into hostile schools is indelibly etched into our media consciousness, few white anti-integration protestors and purveyors of racist violence and invective were arrested and imprisoned. Integration has the presumption and effect of enforcing white assimilation: that white society is the “promised land”; that acceptance by whites and into white social settings is desirable and the goal of “freedom.” As many Azanian liberation fighters asserted, the goal isn’t integration but liberation. Liberation (i.e., national liberation) is the freedom and power to decide a people’s destiny, to choose whether they want to integrate with their oppressors, or to ultimately exercise their most fundamental political freedom: the right to self-determination (up to and including the right to secession, i.e., political independence). The premise of integration/separation is that oppressed nationalities are free to choose. At this moment, however, oppressed nationalities can neither integrate nor separate. Both integration and separation are responses to white national oppression.
2. Internationalists and revolutionary socialists stand for revolutionary integration: the unity of the working class and oppressed through voluntary union, and not forced social policies of integration that presume that social proximity between peoples is the solution to national inequalities and national oppression. Revolutionary integration is often referred to as multinational unity.” However, much of the U.S. left, infected by white chauvinism, has an incorrect and white integrationist view of multinational unity, which I will subsequently discuss.
3. The main white chauvinist view is that “multinational” is a higher form of organizational relations (i.e., more revolutionary) than “national-in-form.” Meaning, that a mixed (and historically predominantly white) organization is more revolutionary than an all-African or all-Asian formation. However, given the legacy and social weight of white supremacy in the U.S., majority or all-white groups are putatively white chauvinist. It never ceases to amaze me how white Leftists are constantly perplexed about why they can’t attract or recruit more oppressed nationalities when they are majority or all-white. They try to scrutinize their organizational “culture,” dissect possible racism among their members, etc. What they fail to realize is key is their political line on the national question. Some even give token lip service to the revolutionary importance of the national question and the national movements, but are superficial, never ever recognizing, much less upholding in theory and practice, the independent revolutionary character of the national movements. This failure in line results in a failure to accept national movement leadership, the notion that the national movements should and need to relate to whites as a primary focus.
4. The cosmetic reforms that white chauvinist integration produces, such as trying to change organizational culture, to be more sensitive to and inclusive of oppressed nationalities presumes that a white home is the best home. Rather than shift the organization’s base to organizing in the national movements (which is what the CPUSA did in its revolutionary period following its adoption of the Comintern Resolutions), and attract the support of and recruit among poor oppressed nationality workers, predominantly white Left groups keep spinning their wheels in psycho analysis about how they are being racist.
5. Integrationist multinational unity presumes that simply adding more oppressed nationality members to their ranks is building multinational unity. Multinational unity is not simply accumulating more “people of color” members, but uniting with people who have roots in the national movements and are leading militants within the national struggles. Increasing the membership numbers of oppressed nationality individuals who aren’t recognized leaders and have no base in the national movements doesn’t make for genuine multinational unity, only having more people of color who’ll accept white leadership and an incorrect or shallow line on the national question. While I don’t mean to disparage those oppressed nationality individuals who are struggling in predominantly white organizations (e.g., sectors of the mostly-white environmental movement or the mostly-white anarchist groups), they have no base in the national struggles and therefore in some ways abdicate the responsibility of a Left presence in the national movements. It is also mistaken to assume that any struggle (environmental, gay liberation, etc.) or any political movement (e.g., anarchist) doesn’t have a sector of which is grounded in the national struggles (e.g., the anti-environmental racism struggle of Native peoples, Africans and Asians).
6. Multinational doesn’t mean mostly white. Indeed four-fifths of the world is “dark.” If we are to be true internationalists, multinational formations would be “third world” (e.g., predominantly Afro-Asian; or Afro-Latino; or Latino-Asian; or Black-Native; or Black-Asian-Latino-Native). Europeans and whites would be the definite minority.
7. The fact that so many white left groups are majority white is both a political error and a manifestation of the particular history of white-settler colonialism in the U.S. There is no separate or special role for whites in the U.S. revolutionary movement. Indeed, given the legacy of white supremacy and racism, a mostly or all-white left group is an expression of white supremacy. There have no doubt been genuine white revolutionaries (e.g., John Brown and so many others) who have played both behind the scenes support roles and who have been at the forefront of anti-racist struggles and have fought alongside (and a few even inside) the national movements (e.g., John Sinclair, Edna Silvestri, Pam Martinez, and others). While white leftists are in the best position to struggle against the racism within the white Left and workers movements, contrary to the nationalist view that that’s the only role white leftists should play, all leftists (be they white or oppressed nationalities) should and must be setting and developing the conditions to build the revolutionary struggle of the national movements, especially the working class leadership of the national struggles. The nationalist advocated position that white leftists should only organize among whites generally leads to tailing nationalism and usually the more reformist sectors of the national struggles (who would rather have whites as syncophant supporters). Thus so-called white Leftists become politically white liberals, mired in guilt from a faulty and flimsy political line on the national question, thinking their role is to acquiesce to the flavor of the month leadership in the national struggles rather than addressing the political questions of developing the revolutionary proletarian leadership of the national struggles. White members in predominantly oppressed nationality organizations work to build the national movements and to build support for these movements among whites.
8. Building multinational unity among the working classes of oppressed and oppressor nations can only be based upon national equality, the elimination of all forms of national privilege, exclusivity, primacy, and rivalry. White privileges will have to be eliminated. The standard of living gap between the First and Third World will have to be closed.
9. Time after time, the discussion of the American Left has been a white presumption. Scholarly and analytical discussions of generic Leftist culture and history mean white folk music and the white Left. The failure to understand the national question in theory and practice has committed the white Left, both theoretically and politically, to see the main problem in the U.S. working class movement as primarily a “divided working class” and not national inequality. “White-skin privileges” as a concept, while it recognizes material inequality, fails to recognize the system of national oppression as fundamental and essential to imperialism. National oppression includes oppressor nation privileges but is not limited to this as the main and dominant aspect of national inequality, which is super-exploitation and land robbery. National oppression is systematic, pervasive inequality, privilege and racism. The theoretical and political limitation of anti-racism” relies upon “racist” attitudes, ideas, behavior and policies and not upon systemic exploitation and inequality. The legacy of white chauvinism in the U.S. proletarian struggle has produced two substantial and insidious errors: white guilt, which results in politically tailing nationalists and reformists in the national movements; and white chauvinism, the dominant aspect, which considers the national movements not revolutionary enough without whites.
10. Support for the “right to self-determination” in words, but denying certain or all oppressed nations the option of independence, as evidenced in the RCP’s Chicano national question. Lenin repeatedly denounced such selective application of the “right to self-determination, including secession,” as imperialist opportunism. The right is meaningless and hollow without the complete freedom of a people to decide its relationship to the oppressor nation. Communists can disagree with how the right is exercised, but not with the right itself, including all of its options.

THE WHITE OPPRESSOR NATION AND “WHITENESS”

Why is it in the interests of most whites to struggle against national oppression and to be anti-imperialist? For the following two basic reasons:

One, political. To paraphrase Lenin, no people or nation can be free if they oppress another simply because the perpetuation of massive inequality requires tremendous amounts of resources devoted to oppressing entire nations and peoples. The oppressor nation inevitably faces the unremitting resistance of the oppressed, and the constant threat of revolt in all forms, at all levels.

Two, moral and ideological. One culture’s mistaken view of another is its mistaken view of itself. The cultural and ideological distortions and lies an oppressor society maintains towards the oppressed is its own mythification. As Fanon put it, “It is the racist who creates his inferior.” The oppressor culture is basically incapable of a realistic understanding of the world since it must maintain a massive cover-up, prettification, justification and denial of its iniquities. By diminishing another’s humanity, it necessarily diminishes its own.

White Americans belong to the oppressor nation in the multinational U.S.A. It’s government currently sits in power in the ambiguous territory of Washington, D.C., which interestingly, with its black majority population, has been waging a struggle for statehood as it realizes its disadvantageous position as a “service” to the federal government with no benefits. White settler-colonialism, beginning with the arrival of Columbus and the European colonization of the Americas, proceeded differently in the rise of today’s nation-states in the western hemisphere. The territory of the U.S.A. grew from a small corner in what came to be called “New England” into the 50 states and several colonies and “protectorates” that exists today. The 50^th state was the complete annexation of Hawai’i after U.S. marines in support of five white settler-colonial plantation families overthrew the constitutional Hawaiian monarchy of Queen Lili’okulani in the late 1800s.

The dominant America is the white oppressor nation with its white oppressor nationality. There never has been one united America, one united nation-state, but rather a multinational state of one white oppressor nation and several oppressed nations and even more oppressed nationalities (referred to in de-politicized terms as “people of color” or “racial or ethnic minorities”).

While much detailed discussion and critique of nationalism was made in the front of this essay, it must be emphasized that white racist chauvinism, and not nationalism, is the primary aspect of the division and derailment of the U.S. Left and working class movement. The history of U.S. labor struggle, unfortunately, has been marred by consistent and constant betrayal of the struggle against national oppression in favor of oppressor nation workers’ white-skin privileges. Oppressed nationalities are always the first to be sacrificed while whites (as a nationality) are protected. A greater percentage of the labor aristocracy, of skilled and better-paid workers, is white.

The thesis expounded by Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai is that there is no white proletariat because white workers are objectively “bought off” and super-privileged as part of the white oppressor nation, similar to other settler-colonial societies such as Australia, apartheid South Africa and Israel. However, in the U.S. both white and black workers are exploited, i.e., both don’t control or benefit from the value of their labor power, albeit due to national oppression, with considerable unevenness.

The U.S. Civil War was the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution for the white oppressor nation (and its male populace) ONLY. Enslaved African labor restricted the productive forces under capitalism. As Ted Allen explained (in a talk given at Red Bookstore, October 22, 1976) “slaves can’t take complicated instruments as they could sabotage them; the products of slave labor went to the mills of England and were not used for American northern industry; and that the rate of industrial expansion was greater for the North.”

Whites who choose to identify with and relate their lives to oppressed nationalities, while they may garner disfavor, prejudice and suspicions about “racist love” or exoticism”, their lack of “white identification and pride” is positive, and they risk a certain amount of ostracism from the oppressor nation society. For example, white female citizens who married Asian immigrants (“aliens ineligible for citizenship”) form 1922 to 1936 lost their own citizenship and took on the political status of their oppressed nationality spouses. At one point in the early stages of white settler-colonial consolidation, the settler ruling class greatly feared the possibility of large numbers of whites defecting to live with Indians and adopt the Native way of life. There were many attractions to Native life, including the absence of hierarchy and increased democracy; the according of more status and power to women; the absence of religious-social discrimination and persecution; and the acceptance of racial mixture as “half breeds” were not stigmatized as they were in white society. “Hernando De Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native Societies. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair.” (p. 109, Joseph Loewen, The Lies My Teacher Told Me, NY: Touchstone, 1995.) Indeed, today we in modern “civilization” are forced to adjust our attitudes and perspectives about “primitive” peoples and societies in view of all of the undesirable outgrowths and problematic features of “modern civilization.”

Today, the consolidation of white supremacy has made the enjoyment of white privilege so “natural” that only deliberate and sustained acts by white anti-racist “race traitors” will undue and sever the indelible and pervasive physical identification so crucial to the maintenance of white supremacy. However, the more culturally and politically whites reject and oppose white supremacist values, ideology, culture and privilege, the more fractious is their relationship to the rest of the white oppressor nation.

The racism of the “white Negro” (Norman Mailer) has been sufficiently exposed and discussed, namely the cultural imperialist privilege of whites to take freely oppressed nationality resources (cultural identity, music, dialect, etc.), adopt them as their own, posture as hip, and never have to support the struggle against imperialism and for national liberation. This is why Paul Simon was targeted for violating the U.N. Commission on Apartheid’s cultural boycott of recording and performing in then-apartheid South Africa. He both artistically and financially profited from the musical resources of Azanian musicians (even if they were paid far better than what they’d normally receive) and while he claimed to “love” the culture, music and people, could not find it in himself to commit to anti-apartheid politics. And above all else, Simon kept the lion’s shares of the royalties and payments from the “Graceland” recording. None of the Azanian musicians, while paid good first world fees, had any percentage rights or residuals to the music they so greatly contributed to and which dominated the aesthetics of the album much more so than anything contributed by Simon.

The work of Ted Allen, Noel Ignatiev, et. al., offers much valuable and interesting examples and processes about whiteness. However, their overall political framework of anti-racism” is formulated as “abolition of the white race,” whereas a more correct stand would be “the abolition of race” which will only occur with the destruction of imperialist national oppression. Calls to commit “race treason” are incorrect and insufficient to completely destroying white supremacy and national oppression, and fails miserably as any political use to the national movements. They base their overall political framework about white construction in the U.S. as simply on promulgating white-black racial division in order to weaken and split the working class as a whole. This white-black paradigm, besides disallowing for other oppressed nationalities and nations, weakens any conception of national oppression, reducing black oppression simply to racism as an outgrowth of white ruling class interests to divide and conquer. Such a framework reduces and oversimplifies the complexity of the construction of white supremacy and therefore the construction of U.S. imperialism and its domestic and international empire. The politics of anti-racism is not necessarily anti-imperialist (in the premise that imperialism is made to be an outgrowth of white racism, and not correctly, the reverse). Anti-racism or “race treason” and “abolition of the white race” is oriented to whites and offers no program of struggle for the national movements, particularly overlooked is the struggle for land. It also chauvinistically presumes that the U.S. proletarian movement must be predicated upon overcoming “divisions” and thereby is nothing more than a call for integration with white workers. This view dovetails and supports the nationalist position that “white leftists should only or primarily organize and struggle with racist white workers.” Implicit in this position is that communist or leftist oppressed nationalities are dupes of integration and don’t merit leading the national movements, thereby dismissing and discrediting the ideological and political struggle for socialism within the national movements. While tactically, white leftists working among whites might be appropriate and necessary, the overall role of white leftists in terms of strategy and line on the national question is no different from that of the revolutionary movement as a whole, i.e., to build the revolutionary leadership and strength of the national movements against U.S. imperialism. There is no separate “line,” “program,” or “agenda” differentiated between whites and oppressed nationalities, however, there may very well be different tactical approaches.

The consolidation of white supremacy, towards the end of the 19^th and certainly by the beginning of the 20^th century, was a historical process that combined creating a white majority population in the U.S. with the smashing of Reconstruction and the oppression of the New Afrikan nation along with the final victory in the wars against the Native nations by the 1890s with the complete defeat and pacification of the Sioux and Apache and the end of their autonomy, the complete annexation of the southwest territory and incorporation into the United States, the colonization of Hawaii and other Pacific Islands (including Guam and other German colonies after World War I and many of the Micronesian possessions of Japan after World War II), Puerto Rico and the territories seized after the Spanish-American War of 1898, the purchase of Alaska from Russia, and the complete disenfranchisement of Asian/Pacific Islanders in the U.S.

The tremendous need for labor in the enormous growth of U.S. capitalism was unprecedented in the history of the world. Such a massive transportation of labor in turn greatly fueled western European and American capitalist expansion by rapidly expanding a wide range of industries and businesses, including ship-building, private and state-sponsored labor procurement, financial investment, administrative and management services, as well as labor and goods security from extralegal pirate and marauding enterprises. The trans-continental transfer of labor began with the Slave Trade (which some estimate was in the 100s of millions and which the great Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney attributed to the underdevelopment of the entire continent of Africa), and extended to the importation of workers from around the world in the exploitation of two continents and thousands of islands (the “New World”). By the 20^th century, the competitive rise and industrialization of western European nation-states with sufficient local proletarians limited the flow of immigrants from these nation-states to the U.S., with the exception of the oppressed nation of Ireland. Fewer WASPS (Anglo-Saxon Protestant Whites) were migrating to the U.S. as was in the first period of European settlement of North America. Eastern and Southern European newer nation-states, such as Italy, Greece, Poland, etc., provided the second wave of European immigration from Europe during the late 19^th and early 20^th century. The third wave of Eastern European immigration was in the 1980s with the fall of the so-called Iron Curtain. While many of these “white” immigrants did face aspects of national oppression, they never became oppressed nationalities. The price for admittance into the “white” race or American white society was the de-ethnicization of the European ethnic immigrant. Europeans could also more easily inter-marry among different European nationalities and blend into white American society. In Europe, the varying nationalities as part of the rise of nation-states, were a mix of languages and ethnic groups.

“White” people became the majority by the 20^th century, and many were encouraged to “go West” and claim the territories taken from the Natives and the former northern territory of Mexico. The small and scattered Asian communities were razed to the ground and certainly by World War Two, facilitated by anti-Asian laws that excluded or hindered Asian land ownership, the vast and profitable agricultural lands developed by Japanese American farmers were confiscated literally overnight. The Nikkei (Japanese Americans) were rounded up and herded into Relocation Camps” (the white racist reasoning being to prohibit the potential activities of a “Fifth Column” as well as allegedly for their own protection against the racist anti-Japanese hysteria of World War Two). With the purchase of Alaska and the growth of fishing and oil industries in that territory, and the colonization of Hawaii, white settlement was encouraged to these far and distant areas. The victory of Americana in the western hemisphere required genocide, land theft, repopulation of the hemisphere by “white people” and the complete oppression of all others deemed “not white” (the range of classifications have shifted and varied, including “colored,” “heathen races,” etc., some including certain Europeans for a period of time, but all consistently applied to “people of color” as oppressed nationalities who aren’t allowed to assimilate into American/white society). For all intents and purposes, in its historical process, both in legal definitions of citizenship and in practical reality, for all intents and purposes, America” is synonymous with “white.” It was Malcolm X who so clearly and sharply pointed out that New Afrikans are not Americans, but rather are “victims of America.” Malcolm X recognized the fundamental schism and conflicted reality of America: the simultaneity of an oppressor (dominant white) nation along with oppressed (not-white) nations and nationalities.

Can the white left extirpate its white chauvinism? While it is possible for whites to be anti-racist (as historical example in certain bold and important cases has demonstrated, such as John Brown), it is not possible for whites (including leftists) to be non-racist. And as I discussed earlier, even the self-avowed white “anti-racists” can liquidate the national question and make white racist political errors and construct fundamentally white chauvinist-flawed analytic frameworks. I would ask add from my experience in the one majority white revolutionary socialist organization that on paper seemed to uphold the correct general positions on the national question, that it was white integrationist at its best, and white chauvinist as its worse in terms of specific and practical aspects on the national question(s).

The weight of white supremacy and privilege has a history of over five centuries. As discussed earlier, the very meaning, identity, fabric and social matrix of American” is polluted and shaped by national oppression. Therefore “race” matters in everything “American” because everything American is thoroughly racist. The heroic history of anti-racist struggle is not the dominant perspective or discourse in any aspect of American History, American Studies or American anything (fill in the blank: music, art, literature, science, intellectual history, etc.). While in theory, it is possible that a white majority left organization or leftist might have a correct position on the national question, in practice this is not probable.

There is a reason why this has not occurred yet in the entire history of the U.S. left with the exception of certain organizations and individuals from the national movements.

A number of groups that were once national-in-form born of the great national movements of the late-1960s and early-1970s, quickly proceeded to liquidate the national question once they became Marxist-Leninist (e.g., the Revolutionary Workers League, the Puerto Rican Workers Revolutionary Organization, the Black Workers Congress, the League for Proletarian Revolutionary, and others). This essay is not able to fully summarize why this process occurred except perhaps to hypothesize that the majority-white U.S. left may have quite possibly abetted this liquidation in its inadequate and incorrect (white chauvinist) positions on the national question. It is the experience of this author that the then-Workers Viewpoint Organization (a group that was notorious for liquidating the national question through its majority Asian-black-and other oppressed nationality cadres) worked zealously in liaison meetings with many newly M-L groups to “win them over” to its political line, including temporarily influencing the then-Revolutionary Communist League (formerly Congress of African Peoples) and the then-August Twenty-Ninth Movement (from the Chicano Movement) which would break with the WVO and the Revolutionary Wing (a multilateral collection of local and national organizations taken over by WVO) and merge with the League of Revolutionary Struggle.

The League of Revolutionary Struggle was the merger of three nationwide M-L new communist movement organizations, all of which had long histories and deep ties in their respective national movements: I Wor Kuen from the Asian Movement; The August Twenty-Ninth Movement from the Chicano Movement; and Revolutionary Communist League from the Black Liberation Movement. I united with the line and was a member of I Wor Kuen and the LRS from summer of 1976 to spring 1989. It is my contention that for the majority of its history, the LRS and IWK in particular, held the correct line on the national question to the extent that it had. Its strengths, as well as its weaknesses and errors which led to its eventual demise, I discuss elsewhere (c.f., Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America, AK Press). But in particular, the extent of its correct positions on the national question reflect a strong anti-integrationist and anti-assimilationist stand, and unlike the rest of the M-L movement, vigorously upheld and built national-in-form organizations, and led them. It boldly and consistently propagandized support for the right of self-determination for the black nation, the Chicano nation, the Hawaiian nation, the Aleutian nation. How did it come to this correctness? Its majority oppressed nationality composition was a reflection of the particularly deep histories and ties of the respective member organizations, and especially IWK to the Asian Movement. But other M-L groups had such histories and even brilliant leading theoreticians from the national movements, yet repudiated the national question and adopted liquidationist positions. I am not able to answer the specifics of how and why, but I believe a key component must be an understanding how internally, and what specific theoreticians, defended, upheld and achieved unity around the vital importance and significance of national-in-form organizations. Until this is grasped, then the tendency to “integrate” and subordinate to the white left will have both theoretical and practical vulnerability and susceptibility. The LRS collapsed eventually, not from nationalist deviations as some have suggested (who expectedly liquidate the national question or tend to criticize any one’s politics as nationalist that defends such points as I do on the national question), but from reformism, specifically collapse and conflation with the Jesse Jackson/Rainbow Coalition component of the Democratic Party. Such reformism was perhaps more readily rationalized by the seductive rhetoric of “people of color political empowerment” put forward by Jackson and supported by our cadre. We should have known better, but because the majority of the leadership and cadre were enamored by electoral politics and careerist opportunities than they were to fighting reformism and defending revolutionary socialism, the LRS capitulated and soon split and dissolved.

In the final analysis, as the historical record has born, the white left, Marxist or otherwise, cannot accept subordination to oppressed nationality leadership. This was the problem in the integrationist Freedom Road Socialist Organization, in which I was a member post-LRS. This remains a problem when white leadership figures vigorously fight other white leftist leadership figures for liquidating the national question but then quickly pronounce the debate about the existence of the black nation to be something that will be decided “in never-never land.” It abounds and continues to be a problem with the FRSO whose white leaders want to choose and select oppressed nationalities to serve in distinguished leadership roles, more from tokenistic likeability than merit or political correctitude. White leadership will not abdicate to oppressed nationalities unless they are “their” oppressed nationalities, namely the ones who don’t overshadow or challenge basic white privilege and position. White leadership cannot accept that perhaps a movement or organization won’t have any qualified whites, that the presence or absence or whites is politically irrelevant to correctitude on the national question. This would violate any and all desires for integrationist “multi-national unity.” It would mean a new movement, one we have yet to experience and direly need to build if we are to end the rule of U.S. imperialism.

SPECIFIC NATIONAL QUESTIONS IN THE U.S.

The application of “the right to self-determination” and full equality” for oppressed nations and nationalities in the U.S. has been hotly debated. These debates center on several issues for the national question:

1. Do oppressed nations actually (still) exist? 2. The right to self-determination” includes 3 possible options: secession, federation and regional autonomy. How shall these forms be expressed in the respective national movement demands? 3. Is it practical and advisable to support the dismemberment of the U.S.A.? 4. How would a plebiscite be conducted as corruption-free from the machinations of the U.S. imperialists?

I do not purport to be able to fully address or discuss these important practical and programmatic questions in this essay, but choose to limit my focus to important features of the specific U.S. national questions in hopes of expanding our political understanding and achieving greater clarity on their inter-relationship.

Imperialism in the U.S. currently operates through (forced) assimilation as its dominant method of rule rather than direct genocide, direct subjugation (legal discrimination, segregation, disenfranchisement and denial of civil rights). While violence and brutal oppression continue, as a bourgeois democracy in the post-civil rights era” after the dismantling of formal segregation and discrimination, the U.S. ruling class and its nation-state (government) function to “integrate” and “absorb” oppressed nationalities. Imperialist education, social institutions and policies promote that everyone in its borders are “all Americans” entitled to the same opportunities in a common pursuit of “the American Dream.” Americanization is actually assimilation into “white” society and the adoption of a primarily western European-derived heritage. Toleration and acceptance of ethnicity” exists as long as it doesn’t contradict or challenge the basic rule of imperialism and the apriori-ness of U.S. borders. “Cultural diversity” is touted and promoted as long as it doesn’t include territorial liberation, political self-government and seizure and control over resources. Just as colonialism operated via native agents, imperialist assimilation requires token diversity to more smoothly and effectively disguise national oppression and inequality. Under imperialism, assimilation and integration are forced: a result of systematic and historical powerlessness to determine a people’s own identity, resources, territory and socio-political relationship to the U.S.

THE NATIVE AMERICAN/INDIGENOUS FIRST NATIONS NATIONAL QUESTION

The construction of white settler-colonial society and the rise of U.S. imperialism began with the conquest of the Indigenous/Native nations and peoples of the Americas. The U.S. socialist revolution and the fundamental essence of the national question must have the liberation of the oppressed Indigenous Nations as its cornerstone and foundation. The horrors of national oppression are most brazen with the genocide, annexation and subjugation of the Native peoples across the Americas, from Alaska to South America. The Native nations represented the first national question, the first resistance movement to white settler-colonial rule and the system of capitalism, and represent the longest and continual on-going struggle for de-colonization and national liberation.

The last mass execution in the U.S. was December 26, 1862 when President Lincoln ordered 38 remaining Dakotas, reduced from the 300 captured, all hung simultaneously. The on-going war against the Native nations would continue for almost another half century until the last formal surrenders to the U.S. army by the Apache. Simultaneous with these wars of conquest were the relocation, removal and exodus of the Native nations that were not completely obliterated onto “reservations,” euphemistically referred to as new “homelands.” From the very beginning, the original white settler governments recognized the many Native nations via trade and treaty agreements, for which, as so tragically documented, honored none of them. “The white man made many promises to Indian people, but he only kept one: he promised to take our land, and he did.”

White chauvinist leftists, including those who espouse the use of Stalin’s criteria of nationhood, refute the existence of nationhood among Natives totally from a Eurocentric bias. The Native nations, they argue, don’t resemble European or western nation-states. They are more “tribal,” nomadic,” less “stable.” Never mind the fact that the Native nations themselves recognized mutual territories and had a different concept of national territory that allowed for fluid migration and common usage between various nations. The Eurocentrists (who claim to be using the supposedly Marxist criteria of Stalin) also argue that Native nations didn’t have class formations (or at least those that they could recognized as similar to western capitalist nation-states) or have a common economic life as demonstrated by a national market. Where they do concede is that Native peoples do share a common language and common culture. But the mechanical and Eurocentrist position is that all four criteria need to be evidenced for nationhood to be conceded. Not that the Native peoples have to prove worthy of nationhood status to these chauvinists, but let me refute or at least point out the problems of such arguments.

Trade and exchange took place within and across Native nations. At the time of Cortes arrival, Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City) had a population of 350,000, five times greater than that of London or Seville of that time. While certain south and central American nations had vast cities and class stratification (from the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs of the Yucatan Peninsula to the Andean Incans), but were decimated soon after the arrivals of English conquerors, the northern hemisphere Native nations also had stable communities, including major cities and trading centers (such as the Anasazi and the Pueblos in the southwest of the U.S., the resident urban center at Cahoika of present-day Illinois, or the mound-building Mississippian cultures circa 700 to 1700) though for the most part not necessarily resembling European or Asian cities with large-scale population density, industrial factories, and commercial shipping and transportation. The population density in the northern Americas was far less than Europe, Asia and northern and coastal Africa.

While it remains still an area of much needed historical research and scholarship on the development and character of Native nation-states, it is abundantly clear that white capitalism did much to destroy the physical, economic, cultural and social fabric of Native societies. In trading with Europeans, the consequences to Native nations would be devastating and irreversible. On a physical level, European communicable diseases were nothing Native peoples had ever encountered, introduced to the peoples of the western hemisphere via European domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, horses, sheep, goats and chickens, none of these animals ever being present before the arrival of Europeans and Africans prior to 1492. Diseases passed between humans and livestock, such as anthrax, tuberculosis, cholera, streptococcosis, ringworms to the various poxes, never present in the Americas, became a wildfire that wiped out or decimated entire nations in a matter of a few years. This destruction was on the magnitude even greater than the Bubonic and other plagues that swept Europe and is perhaps only matched by today’s AIDs crisis in Africa and parts of impoverished Asia. The entire physical destruction and weakening of millions of Native peoples can in part explain the interrupted, arrested and faltering process of capitalism to arise in Native America. But the capitalism of the white settlers would become the death of the Native nations. Trading for a kettle instead of expending the time and labor needed and done traditionally to make a watertight basket or skin container led to the atrophy of skills and deformation of Native productive forces and relations. A Native working class involved in mass production could not possibly develop under such a physical onslaught. The uprooting and forced migration of hundreds of thousands of Native peoples (e.g., “The Trail of Tears” in the 1830s) has had few historical precedents in any parts of the human history. Native mass production existed in agriculture, hunting and crafts, and exchanged was conducted via a market economy both first with other tribes and later with the Europeans. However, nascent Native capitalism was restricted by limited markets as populated urban centers and concentrations were far more spatially distant and tenuous than in Europe, Asia and in other parts of the world, and due to continental separation by two vast oceans, trade routes with other continental trading centers was not possible. The arrival of European colonization began the conquest of a weaker Native proto-capitalism by a much stronger and better armed one.

The colonization of the Americas meant both the physical and cultural destruction of the Native nations, as well as appropriating all of the benefits of Native production, expertise and resources. Native class and social relations were altered as the entire social fabric of Native society changed to fit white colonial expansion. Women political leadership was replaced by male in imitation of white social relations, and as war skills expanded in importance and because white male leaders wouldn’t negotiate treaties with women. In the 20^th century, the U.S. government notoriously anointed its Native “leaders”, deemed progressives” who promoted even greater assimilation and accommodation with white society against the “traditionalists” who sought to defend Native sovereignty and cultural integrity. The current rise of Native capitalism via casinos is the latest distortion of oppressed nationality capitalism and class stratification.

While wars over resources and territorial claims did occur between Native societies, they were certainly less acute and severe compared with other societies with far greater imperial legacies.

The national oppression against the Native oppressed nations and nationalities is possibly one of the brutal and horrific in the entire history of humanity. The physical aggression via the so-called Indian Wars is well documented. The effects today are reflected in numerous forms of oppression ranging from disproportionate rates in illiteracy, alcoholism, domestic violence, suicide, mental illness, poverty, income disparity, and in just about every social indicator. Cultural genocide was justified by the mindset of “Killing the Indian to save the man.” Indian prisoners of war had to submit to cutting their hair in order to be fed. Native children were not allowed to speak their native tongue, deemed “the language of the insane.” Dakota school children were physically beaten if they spoke Dakota. The wars against the Native nations by the U.S. white settler-colonial government and oppressor nation society took away their way of life, suffocated their spirit, forcing them to suffer as a defeated, beaten, disgraced people. The U.S. government and society banned their culture to exterminate their identity. Capitalism found a way to make money by placing a $200 bounty on scalps. By 1862, the Minnesota governor called the Dakota the disappearing race.” In forced labor camps, Native workers were paid 3 cents for beaded moccasins. Native women and children had to make at least 500 mocassins a week to make $15 to feed a family. (From “Dakota Exiles” by Kristian Berg, producer, Twin Cities Public Television,). Thus the eventual and grotesque proletarianization of Native oppressed nationalities, energized by the liberation movements of both the Third and Fourth World (the indigenous peoples of Third World nation-states, as well as the indigenous peoples of western industrialized First World nation-states such as the U.S. and Canada), have been galvanized and amalgamated into a united front of indigenous movements both in the Americas and across the globe.

As research and new analyses of Native social history emerges to help our understanding of the national development of Native nations and to further clarify the strategic issues for the Native national question in the U.S., what is clear with our present understanding of the Native American struggle against national oppression in the wars against the Europeans, that new, larger confederations and nation-states were formed, and like their counterparts in the “non-western” world, took on the characteristics of what Lenin so powerfully described and argued for as rising “national movements.” The beginnings of this First Nations/Native American/Indian national movement emerged with the amalgamation of smaller Native nations into larger ones that became ethnic melting pots” which even included taking in whites and blacks as well as other Indians. New confederations and nations developed, such as the Creeks, Seminoles and Lumbees. The Sioux and Apache were also a vast and great amalgam of tribes that extended from the southwest up to the Rockies united in fighting the U.S. aggression upon its lands, who fought heroically down to the remaining few warriors eventually captured or killed. The modern day Native American national movement includes the American Indian Movement, the League of Indigenous First Nations, various Hawaiian sovereignty and independence organizations, among others. The slogan of AIM is “Many Nations, One Destiny” in its conception of the Native American struggle as a united front waging a struggle for national liberation and de-colonization.

THE NEW AFRICAN (OR BLACK-BELT) NATION

The existence and significance of a New African” or Black Nation is the touchstone of the debates and differences around the national question in the U.S. left. The New Communist Movement that emerged in the early 1970s revolved its positions around either acceptance or rejection of the Comintern Theses, expounded and elaborated upon by African American communist Harry Haywood. The Comintern and Haywood both based their thesis for the Black-belt Nation upon Stalin’s definition/criteria for nation. In the 1950s, Haywood, and a small circle of communists who rejected the CPUSA’s degeneration into reformism and its attendant liquidation of the national question, and the Black Nation specifically, issued a polemic “Toward a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Nation” to defend the assertion of the Black-belt Nation and to rebut arguments denying its existence and importance. Much of this polemic continues to be relevant in rebutting the various positions that argue against the Black Nation. I summarize below this debate:

The out-migration from the South has dispersed African Americans, making the population now primarily northern, urban and less cohesive and certainly no longer a concentrated territorial majority, but rather “minorities.”

Few argue that out-migration, similar to Third World immigrants coming to the U.S. and other affluent countries, is not forced migration. In the case of African Americans, job openings in northern industry provided the attraction from the poverty and brutality of national oppression in the south (racist terror, oppressive and discriminatory taxation, land confiscation and robbery, etc.). Even fewer would argue that life in the north was any “better.” This forced exodus is common to imperialism, as the labor needs of the capitalist centers attract migrants from the super-exploitation and crushing poverty of their homelands pillaged for the profits of the imperialists. The number of counties in which blacks are a majority has decreased. Migration between the south and the north goes back and forth between generations, and black land ownership in the south declines (due to robbery, cheating, defrauding, and exploitation), these are all symptoms of national oppression. These are characteristics particular to the oppressed black nation.

Such an intensification of national oppression quite the contrary energized the black national movement. The civil rights movement and the 1960s black liberation struggle arose both within the south and in the ghettos of the north. The black national movement has always embraced aspirations for land and nationhood (whether it be within the borders of the U.S. or seeking a new homeland elsewhere) from the beginnings of slave revolt and escaped slave societies to manifestos of black nationhood in the 19^th century to Garvey’s Black Zionism to black radical and communist-formulated black-belt national territory to the Nation of Islam’s 5 states demand, to the actual ownership of land in Mississippi and its armed defense by the Republic of New Afrika, etc. The historical aspirations for land and nationhood are incontrovertible.

The oppressed black nation began in the south, after the period of formal slavery and during the rise of U.S. imperialism from the latter half of the 19^th century and into the mid-20^th century. Large numbers of enslaved Africans even became the majority of certain areas of the U.S. South, and after the abolition of formal slavery, continued to live on and work the lands. Post-slavery, while never granted “40 acres and a mule” as promised by the U.S. government in its Emancipation Proclamation, nonetheless, blacks managed to come to own land to build their homes and to farm and develop their land as an economic resource. It was this period of Reconstruction that ushered in an unprecedented level of black political assertion and economic activity, and is in which black nationhood arises. Few of the liquidation positions either argue against or even address this historical process. But the smashing of Reconstruction, so powerfully analyzed by DuBois and later by Haywood, thwarts black national aspirations and signals the historical development of the black nation as an oppressed nation and black people in general both inside and outside the south as an oppressed nationality.

Despite out-migrations, and while perhaps no longer as concentrated a majority in certain southern areas, large numbers of African Americans still live there and many northern blacks retain direct family relations to the south as well as connections to the land. The south has not lost its political importance as still a region of severe poverty and national oppression. The struggle to defend black land ownership and to get back stolen and cheated property is unmitigated. Large out-migrations have occurred in many oppressed and colonized nations, including the massive dispersal of Palestineans from once-Palestine, to a third of the Puerto Rican population residing outside of the island, to the majority of Hawaiians living now on the U.S. mainland.

Black self-government had a nascent beginning during Reconstruction, and the number of black elected officials has never been matched since that time. The smashing of Reconstruction (and the failure of blacks to received “40 acres and a mule”, i.e., land and means of production) postponed the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution until the 1960s in which the black national struggle rose to an even higher level of struggle and forced the dismantling of all vestiges to formal segregation and inequality of Jim Crow, i.e., ending dejure segregation and inequality, all the while defacto national oppression continued.

The Reparations Movement is based upon an entire people’s claims for recovery and recompense against both the U.S. government and corporations for historical oppression and exploitation from slavery and the effects of post-Reconstruction black land dispossession and the consequences of oppressing an entire people and thwarting their social, political, economic and cultural development. In a University of California-Berkeley study made several years ago, it was found that black income lost due to discrimination in the years between 1929 to1969 alone comes to about $1.6 trillion (from “The Opposite of Racism Isn’t Colorblindness” by Sean Consalves [sgonsalves@capecodonline.com], August 21, 2001).

While the legacy of slavery continues to devastate African Americans, particularly acute has been the loss of black-owned property. According to a three-part article on this subject by Todd Lewan and Dolores Barclay entitled “Investigaton Shows Pattern of Violence: Blacks’ Land Loss Hidden in History”,

“In 1910, black Americans owned at least 15 million acres of farmland, nearly all of it in the South, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census. Today, blacks own only 1.1 million acres of farmland and are part owners of another 1.07 million acres…The number of white farmers has declined, too, as economic trends have concentrated land in fewer hands. However, black ownership has declined 2 ½ times faster than white ownership, according to a 1982 federal report, the last comprehensive government study on the trend.”

The variety of land confiscation techniques has ranged from direct terror and violence to force black families to abandon their homes to a myriad of financial and legal maneuvers to dispossess blacks of their land titles. The loss of black land, contrary to the white racist notion of using this argument to justify the liquidation of the national question and the specific existence of an oppressed black nation in the South, requires that progressives and revolutionaries support the Reparations and land defense and recovery struggles of African Americans. National oppression cannot resolve or “whither away” the national existence of an oppressed nation; just the opposite, it continually renews and intensifies the national movement. The struggle for black control over land remains central to the black liberation struggle. The extirpation of black political control over a region or territory since the smashing of Reconstruction remains the political basis for black oppression and political powerlessness. Black electoral representation in the current U.S. political system is a dilution and diversion of black self-government and empowerment over its own resources and territory. It is but another effect of and ploy by imperialist integration/assimilation to undermine the national movement.

The key to understand the Black Nation isn’t statistics and demographics (though by all accounts, these support and verify national oppression and inequality), but politics. The Black Liberation Movement has never opted for integration. The fact is that it continues, with nationalists and non-nationalist forces, to be a national movement fighting for liberation for an entire people, of which the basis of its liberation cannot be won simply via “civil rights” or imperialist absorption via integration” but through the exercise of political control over a region or territory along with its resources. It also requires an unremitting struggle for reparations (beyond affirmative action) to rebuild its nation, to restore its national culture, integrity and dignity and to correct hundreds of years of economic, social and political oppression and inequality, with its concomitant effects of psychological induced-inferiority, white washing and overall weakened national pride, identity and consciousness.

The political assault on black political and territorial power began with the smashing of Reconstruction, with the state-sanctioned rise of white racist paramilitary forces, most infamously the KKK. In 1876, the Ku Klux Klan was formed. From 1880-1915, 3000 blacks were lynched. It remains today a legal organization. It is well known that J. Edgar Hoover as long-standing director of the F.B.I. targeted the black civil rights and liberation struggle with considerable vehemence and viciousness. Official state-sanctioned terror, intimidation and harassment continue with police racial profiling, the use of excessive force against oppressed nationalities, unfair convictions and sentencing and the overall warehousing of oppressed nationalities in the prison industrial complex.

Even if one is to adopt and use Stalin’s basic four criteria of nationhood (i.e., common territory, common economic life with the presence of classes tied to a national market, common language and common “psychological make up”, i.e., culture), then the New Afrikan Nation not only possesses all of these criteria as argued by Haywood in response to the CPUSA’s formal liquidation in its 17^th National Convention in 1959. As I have discussed above, though the territory has certainly been reduced via national oppression, and a greater majority of African Americans may be dispersed throughout major U.S. cities, as long as one acre of black historical resided land exists, then the nation exists; as well as its ongoing struggle for the return of stolen lands. Class development in the New African Nation, as in any imperialist oppressed nation, unfolds unevenly and in a stunted way, with all classes, including the indigenous bourgeois, suffering from national oppression. The black national bourgeoisie, as the bourgeoisie of an oppressed nation, is more like a petty bourgeoisie, and cannot even qualify to be in the Fortune 500. Its ability for capital expansion is restricted and thwarted by the giant, mighty white imperialists corporations. As the black bourgeoisie is disproportionately smaller than its white counterpart, conversely, the black proletariat among the black nation is far greater in proportion that white workers are to the oppressor white nation. In all of the oppressed nations, the working class is far greater in proportion to its national population than the percentage of white workers are to the white oppressor nation. One could argue that the proletarian base of the national movements is greater than that of the white oppressor nation, perhaps explaining also the greater militancy on the part of oppressed nationality workers than of the white workers especially after the consolidation of white supremacist imperialist rule by the 20^th century.

The revolutionary elements of the American communist movement throughout the 20^th century have “proved” and defended the existence of an oppressed black (New Afrikan) nation, even on the basis of the perhaps flawed and mechanical Stalin criteria (principally utilized by Harry Haywood). The liquidation positions have based their main refutations on out-migration and arguments for assimilation and integration. The political end result is to invalidate the black liberation struggle as nothing more than the figment of the aspirations of misguided nationalists, to disregard or diminish the struggle for land, and thereby contain and restrict the “liberation” struggle to simply (primarily) uniting with white workers for anti-discrimination and economist demands with the goal of integration.

THE CHICANO NATION (AZTLAN)

The existence of an oppressed Chicano nation is well documented. The oppressed Chicano nation emerged from the severance of the northern territories of Mexico in the mid-19^th century and the subsequent political and economic annexation and social-cultural absorption of this regions and its people into the U.S. The national rights supposedly guaranteed to the inhabitants of this territory by the U.S. government, including the right to Spanish language, land ownership, cultural valuation, and so many others, have been completely denied and attacked by white settler-colonialism as the Chicano people were forged into an oppressed nation by U.S. imperialism. In recent years, the Chicano national question has deepened its relationship to the Native national question. The Chicano people and culture are an amalgam of Spanish conquest of the indigenous peoples of Mexico and the Chicano nation. The region of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, California was shared by descendants of Mexico and by a number of Native nations, many of whom never accepted Spanish rule and continued to wage wars of resistance to the U.S. well after the absorption of these areas as states in the U.S. federate political system. Furthermore, increasing numbers of Chicanos are choosing primary identification with their Native heritage than with the Spanish-colonial aspect of their Mexican background. Increasingly, the concept of the Chicano Nation has become interconnected and united with the liberation of the Native/Indigenous Peoples as it is maintained that “Chicanos are indigenous”: “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” as the saying goes. The struggle for Chicano liberation takes on an added dimension of deciding what the Chicano nation’s relationship will be to both the U.S. and Mexico. The massive infusion of Latinos from other central and south American nation-states as part of effect and consequence of imperialism’s underdevelopment and de-stabilization of oppressed nations contributes to massive growth of the U.S. Latino population, which for the first time, has exceeded African Americans. Many of the poorest Latino immigrants are of indigenous ancestry, oppressed and persecuted in their respective homeland nation-states from the respective legacies of their European settler-colonialism. In many aspects, they share close proximity to the Chicano communities and struggles, in other aspects, they are more kin to the heterogeneity of the Asian/Pacific Islander communities. The Chicano movement must therefore embrace simultaneously pan-Indian and pan-Latino political and cultural dynamics. The programmatic demands in the struggle for homeland includes political and economic control over a wide territory of the southwestern U.S.A., perhaps as far north as northern Colorado across to northern California. As closer links are forged between the Chicano movement and the Native movement, the specific inter-relationships of national demands and forms of self-governance and political expression will need to be developed.

ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICANS

The various anti-Asian Exclusion Acts passed into law by Congress (e.g., preventing families from immigrating into the U.S.) had the effect of denying the stable development of community formation for the Asian Pacific Islander immigrants in the U.S. For the first century of API struggle in the U.S., as Asian American historian Gary Okihiro describes, Asians turned waste lands and waste products into ‘Chinese Gold.’” Racist violence and legislation prohibited and restricted Asian property ownership. Asians were driven off the lands they worked and settled, and many of their innovations and contributions to American production were seized for the benefit of white profiteers. The rise of anti-Asian racism initially coincided with the need to scapegoat Asians during times of general economic downturn in the U.S. In the post-World War Two era of economic prosperity and U.S. world empire consolidation, a new form of insidious racism promoted the “model minority myth” of Asian “success” in order divide APIs from other oppressed nationalities, and to foment jealousy and anxiety about Asian advancement. The last relocation and removal of a mass population in the U.S. was the Japanese American interment in concentration camps during World War Two. Today, Arabs and Muslims are demonized as “terrorists” just as the Japanese were once targeted. Anti-Asian violence and hate crimes continue to escalate, the worst of any oppressed nationality group in the U.S.

Asian Pacific Islanders do not have a claim to historical homeland territory in the U.S. The lands that they did work and live on were part of the Chicano/Native nations, though most of the Asian settlements were not at the loss of Chicano/Native habitation. The small communities of Truckee, Napa, Marysville, Placerville and Stockton were in desolate or wilderness areas, remnants of mining towns and small farming communities. However, APIs are essential and critical to the economic development of the west coast and Hawaii for U.S. capitalism. Their demands are for reparations (only partially won in the Japanese American redress and reparations struggle without proper restitution for the values of their property and land, lives lost and oppression and exploitation suffered); control over their own institutions and communities; support, expansion and control of cultural representation and production (including language rights); abolition of unfair and discriminatory immigration legislation and treatment; fighting racist violence, racial profiling of street youth, and discrimination and persecution in employment and services.

One of the greatest struggles faced by API radicals and revolutionaries today is combating the internalization of the model minority myth within the API nationalities and the critical need to raise national consciousness and unity with other oppressed nationalities in fostering Afro-Asian and Third World consciousness and solidarity. The presence of Asian capital from the Pacific Rim has dramatically increased with overseas investments into the U.S. and Canada, much of which is oriented towards an Asian/Pacific immigrant market. This sets the conditions for increasing anti-capitalist struggles of API workers and communities against petty-bourgeois API capitalists in anti-sweatshop labor organizing, in anti-gentrification housing struggles, etc. With the rise of a significant petty-bourgeoisie in the API communities, the struggle for leftist politics will undergo severe competition and contention from reformist and assimilationist forces. API leftists also face difficulties with the increased anti-communism in API immigrant communities with refuges and evacuees with negative experiences with socialism and communist forces in their former home countries.

PUERTO RICO AND PUERTO RICANS IN THE U.S.

Internationally recognized as a colony” by much of the world community, and with a continuous independence movement (albeit “small” in terms of current non-binding plebiscites initiated and controlled by the U.S.), Puerto Rico’s “commonwealth” status to the U.S. evinces the complexities of imperialist absorption via dependency. While disallowed certain national rights (such as controlling its own elections and implementing any real political independence), Puerto Rico “enjoys” paying no federal taxes to the U.S., social security and welfare, free travel between the island and the U.S. mainland and the “benefit” of being protected by the U.S. military. The pro-commonwealth mentality favors the status quo of foregoing national sovereignty for the “protections” and benefits of U.S. dependency as long as English doesn’t supplant the Spanish language. Accepting “commonwealth” status reflects the insecurity inculcated now by several generations of dependency in the belief that Puerto Rico could not survive on its own, that it “needs” the U.S. Such an inculcation of dependency has come massive welfare enrollment, the systematic disintegration of any indigenous economic activity for domination by U.S. corporations, the rampaging of the island’s eco-system by U.S. military bombing exercises and sea dredging.

Due to the economic attraction of the U.S. mainland society, large numbers of Puerto Ricans travel back and forth between the island and U.S. urban centers, and large numbers of families are split between both. Differences have emerged within the Puerto Rican national movement based both in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico around the positions of “the right to self-determination” and the specific call for “independence.” The former tends to include the pro-Commonwealth forces, which is aligned with U.S. imperialism, arguing that the Puerto Rican people have, via past non-binding plebiscites,” overwhelmingly chosen commonwealth status (i.e., the status quo). Pro-independence forces criticize these “votes” for promoting the deception that “independence” would mean socio-cultural-economic losses, restricted bilateral travel, etc. Anti-imperialist forces have stood for independence as the correct appraisal of Puerto Rico’s true colonial status and to support the on-going pro-independence movement that has been undermined and attacked continually by U.S. imperialism, including repression and jailing of its leaders and activists. The current upsurges against U.S. military occupation and maneuvers on the Puerto Rican isle of Vieques only serve to underscore the colonial condition of the nation and the need for independence to remove U.S. political control.

For Puerto Ricans on the mainland, the right to return home to a truly free, independent Puerto Rico must be upheld. The struggle of Puerto Ricans in U.S. cities and mainland areas parallels the struggle of African American and other oppressed nationalities dispersed outside of their national territories: the need to revolutionize these respective struggles in building unity across national movements and with the struggle in the land territories. Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico are an oppressed nationality in the U.S. mainland and struggle for full equality and empowerment, with common interests and struggles shared with other oppressed nationalities.

POST-SCRIPT NOTES:

1. How should the national question in the U.S. be resolved? What is the inter-relationship between the Native national liberation, the first and longest struggle against U.S. white supremacist settler-colonial rule, and that of the other oppressed nations and nationalities? The resolution of the national question cannot be predicted or guided as to which national struggles will erupt with the most velocity and ferocity against U.S. imperialism. However, leftists must not stand opposed to the reconfiguraton of the U.S. nation-state. Indeed, leftists should welcome it as part of the general weakening and dismemberment of imperialism. Marxists stand for and must build the working class leadership of the national movements, emphasizing and leading by example the need to unite with workers from all nationalities and with other national movements. The Marxists must wage an unremitting struggle against all forms of ideological and political chauvinism and opportunism that diminishes or liquidates the national question. While it is the contention of some forces like the All-Afrikan Peoples Revolutionary Party that the Native national question must be the first to resolved, one cannot predict or control the outgrowth and outcome of the national movements and Marxists must remain clear to lend full support to any national movement that has erupted to a level of challenging U.S. political rule by igniting, supporting and leading a “multiplicity of wars of independence” (Ward Churchill). The liberation of Indigenous Nations is fundamental and integral to the overall question of the socialist revolution in the U.S. and the resolution of the national question(s). Currently, it seems that the Native Hawaiian struggle is at the forefront. Different forces are vying for sovereignty v. independence as part of the internal struggle to decide how to exercise the “right of self-determination.” All national movements must lend support to further such a victory of the Native Hawaiian nation over more than a century of U.S. colonial rule and imperialist domination.The black liberation struggle has historically been the vanguard and spearhead for much of the U.S. left and progressive development. Whether it will continue to play this role depends on the type of forces that vie for leadership within that movement and to the extent the black proletariat advances, gets organized and exercises leadership. Perhaps the now numerically dominant Latino population will exert greater overall socio-cultural-political influence on the U.S. movement, expanding the multi-lingual capacity of the U.S. left, making deeper ties and correcting its bad historical record towards the Native nations. Perhaps and perhaps not. The destiny of the U.S. left depends on large part how much self-criticism it can make and the degree and lengths to which it will apply a program of rectification. The hope is that these “Notes” will provide a basis for such a self-criticism and exploration of a new way forward.
2. How does the U.S. national question(s) relate to the question of imperialism today in its international manifestations and consequences? The rise of nationalism is directly related to the rise of national oppression. The national question in the first half of the 20^th century has been primarily the rise of new nation-states and national movements in the context of anti-colonial struggles. In the final decades of the 20^th century, the rise of nationalism and religious fundamentalism is a direct result of the failures socialist revolution (which stem from a combination of all-out anti-communist reactionary assaults supported and often engineered by western imperialism and from the internal unraveling of much of the former-Soviet bloc governments). Throughout the global, U.S. economic, political and military hegemony was firmly established following World War Two. Socialist, communist and nationalist independence movements and leaders were destroyed and killed by U.S.-CIA and western European plots in cahoots with domestic reactionaries. From Noreiga of Panama, to Saddam Hussein of Iran, to the Taliban of Afghanistan, and a myriad of other despots, dictators and strongmen across the globe, were in the beginnings of their careers all clients and creations of U.S. geo-political clandestine (and not-so-clandestine) operations to counter local communists and as part of the then-superpower rivalry with the now-defunct Soviet Union.What are the “new” forms of opportunism related to national question theory? Theories of superimperialism” and “imperialist economism” which the Bolsheviks fought in the early 20^th century (proponents of which have included Rosa Luxembourg to Eric Hobsbawn) continue today in three assertions: one, that imperialism resolves the national question and therefore the national question will eventually diminish and cease to exist; two, all nationalism is bourgeois and reactionary; and three, capitalism, having become international, no longer needs the nation-state (and therefore, the nation-state declines and becomes obsolete).

   While corporations traverse the global and seemingly transcend national boundaries, they still are headquartered in a nation-state and rely heavily upon a wide range of services” and protections afforded by the nation-state. These include trade protections and tariffs against foreign competitors, political “aid” to influence market penetration, the availability of military force to open new markets and to construct neo-colonies (as with the invasions of Grenada, Panama, Iran, Kuwait, Afghanistan, etc.). The nation-state has NOT become less relevant or useful to international capital, but even more important to facilitating capital penetration and dominance by ensuring compliant consumer populations, crushing competition and political challenges (such as by leftists and progressives), constructing necessary infrastructure for the flow of goods and services, developing culturally appropriate marketing and consumption, etc. Indeed, the number of nation-states as seen in the membership of the United Nations, has never decreased but always steadily increased.

   Nation-states as entities are transient and malleable. The borders constantly change and can never be construed as fixed, ordained, natural or permanent. Indeed, the territory and border of the U.S.A. has gone