By Michael Novick, ARA-LA/People Against Racist Terror

I would like to struggle about what I feel are some potentially fatal weaknesses in the Bring the Ruckus statement. I focus on those rather than on areas of agreement, because I think it is vital to have some real political discussion, and I hope this will help contribute to it. Similar to the Race Traitor perspective which it derives from, the BTR statement is predicated on two fundamental political errors. First, it situates “whiteness” exclusively in relation/opposition to Blackness and racial slavery. Second, it proposes a strategy based around the notion of an “American working class” as an agent of revolutionary change.

These positions discount the central importance of land and of settler colonialism in the creation of capitalism and of white supremacy. Whiteness developed internationally, (and not only in America or the US), not only out of race-based chattel slavery, but out of the conquest and settlement of a vast land mass and the genocidal annihilation of its people. Empire was a project not solely of the ruling class but of other classes whose relationship to the means of production was and is mediated not only by white skin privilege but by a social relationship among people and between people and nature based on private ownership of land, and particularly of the private expropriation of commonly held land and of OTHER PEOPLE’S LAND.

Regarding the question of Marxism and/or anarchism, I think it is vital to critique and transcend the eurocentrism that plagues both those schools of thought. Marx, for example, although he opposed racial slavery and the slave trade, and supported the Union in the US civil war, also supported the US conquest of Mexico (which was a war of aggression to expand the purview and territory of slavery) because, he said, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers from the US would make better and more productive use of the resources of the territory that the semi-feudal Catholic Mexicans, and thus hasten the development of productivity that would lay the basis for socialism.

Any revolutionary cadre organization in this continent must be based on a recognition that the state and society that exists here is based on settler colonialism; that the sovereignty and rights of the indigenous people must be respected; that not only the imperial state but the entire social order must be toppled. The liberation of Native land, of Hawaii, of Puerto Rico, of occupied northern Mexico, the decolonization of African people are central to a revolutionary project in this society, polity and land mass.

The odd formulation of the BTR/Race Traitor/New Abolitionist perspective, that whiteness is apparently simultaneously the strongest bulwark and the weakest link of class society in the US, grows out of an essentially topsy-turvy, tail-wagging-the-dog approach to this question. Whiteness and white supremacy are the consequence, not the cause, of colonialism, land theft, genocide, and racial chattel slavery based on the kidnapping of millions of Africans. Whiteness and white supremacy will end as a consequence, not a precondition, of decolonization, indigenous sovereignty, reparations and the destruction of capitalism and imperialism.

The question of colonialism and the idea of decolonization are vital because they help us understand the real nature of this state and of the class relations undergirding it. The Irish did not only become white because they feared competition from Black labor. They became white (in Ireland as well as America) because of the lure of land, and their willingness to participate in a settler colonial project initiated by the British empire, despite their own colonization by that empire and its implantation of settlers within their land and society. Irish settlers in colonial era Pennsylvania, for example, sought to break up the existing agreement between native people and the Quaker regime in order to be free to expel more indigenous people and seize more land for cultivation, and they eventually drove Ben Franklin out over that issue. Such a “safety valve” for the class and national contradictions of Ireland itself had inevitable negative consequences on the consciousness and struggle of the Irish in Ireland as well. And the same process took place throughout European societies, as the American safety valve, the American ability to satisfy the land hunger of European peasants turned-proletarians, defused the revolutionary potential and resistance of European workers (along with the booty of other imperial conquests and holdings in Africa, Asia and Latin America). Far from being merely the US equivalent of European social democracy, whiteness, white supremacy (and the settler colonialism unacknowledged by the RT/BTR position) formed the basis for social democracy and class collaborationism in Europe itself. The European bourgeoisie AND proletariat (and obviously even more so the Euro-American equivalents) owe their existence to conquest, settlement and slavery.

And this is not just ancient history. Talking about this as something that happened in the past is the real white blind spot. The US is a settler colonial society to this very moment. It constantly and continously violates by force of arms the sovereignty of the indigenous people. American identity and white identity are a settler colonial identity in every aspect of current consciousness and social, economic and political relationships. The reason Copwatch is a strategically important project is because the police ARE an occupying army in communities of color and an internal border guard in more privileged areas. The reason the prisons have swollen in the last two decades is as part of a consciously genocidal program of ’spatial deconcentration,’ ethnic cleansing and colonial mass incarceration.

The other important point about anti-colonialism and decolonization is that they set the tasks and strategies of ‘white’ people on the same ground as everyone else. The ‘old’ abolitionism was led by Black people because they were the slaves and they were seeking to abolish their own servitude and a legally imposed situation that denied their fundamental human rights. There is not today a comparable mass movement of Black people or other people of color to abolish the white race, whiteness or white privilege; there is a movement of people of color to terminate their oppression, exploitation and colonization.This is the cutting edge of the class struggle throughout the world, and “whites” who seek to imbue themselves with revolutionary class consciousness, who seek to end their own exploitation and oppression, who want to secure a future for their children and the planet, need to embrace the same exact struggle against settlerism, colonialism, and imperialism/capitalism.

The indigenous societies of Asia, Africa and America met colonization with a primarily military resistance that failed in the face of superior military technology and the colonizers’ ability to divide and conquer using pre-existing contradictions, as well as to numerically overwhelm using settler populations. Once European and American capitalism developed on that foundation of conquest, the Euro-American working class launched a struggle (whether led by anarchists or Marxists) that was predicated on a Eurocentric model of an army of labor. More recently the wave of national liberation struggles for independence have crested and broken, exposing the inability of those struggles to overcome neo-colonialism, “globalization,” and the entrenched power of the imperial political, economic and social system.

If we are getting ready to launch a new wave of struggle that can carry through to the successful overthrow of this system, we better make damn sure we learn the lessons of those past failures. Prairie Fire Organizing Committee was a “predominantly white” cadre organization, but at least it had the context of operating in direct solidarity with particular revolutionary national liberation forces inside and outside the borders of the US. It grew out of and struggled with a large, preexisting “white left.” Times are much different now. It is great that there are growing movements again, but to the extent that there is still time to forestall the consolidation of a “white left” predicated on privilege, we should make sure that our efforts are consistent with a strategy to do so. Constructing a predominantly ‘white’ cadre organization out of a predominanty ‘white’ anarchist tendency is not likely to move us toward where we want to go.

The reason politics is vital is because the color line is not the only line in the world. Would it were so. The battle would’ve been won long ago. The class struggle, the struggle for human liberation and planetary survival, goes on within individuals of all nationalities, ethnicities and “races,” and within those social formations as a whole. Any thinking human being, whether born into colonizing or colonized groups, privileged or oppressed, must make ultimately independent political decisions about what is correct or incorrect, right or wrong, liberatory or oppressive, not only in their own actions but those of others. Being victims of Hitler’s genocide and of many other pogroms did not turn Jews into saints; being victims of zionism and colonialism does not sanctify Muslims or Arabs. A vast array of political positions, ideologies and practice can be found among Black people, in the US or elsewhere. Yet one can and must distinguish between Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson; or between Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan; or between the Taliban and the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan. This is not national chauvinism, white nationalism, or anything else than upholding one’s social, political and moral responsibilities as a human being.

I am neither a Marxist nor a Leninist (though that does not mean I do not believe in class struggle). But Lenin made a great contribution to understanding the nature of class struggle, which was substituting’the slogan, “Workers and Oppressed People of the World Unite — You have a World to Win” for “Workers of the World Unite, You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Also, the Bolsheviks were advocates of “revolutionary defeatism” — wanting to see the defeat of “their own” bourgeoisie at the hands of other imperialists if it would advance their ability to smash the power and the state of that bourgeoisie (or that national sector of the imperialist bourgeoisie). So Lenin and Trotsky, unlike the Mensheviks, were prepared to sue for peace with the Germans on any terms rather than allow the Russian workers and peasants to be bled another minute by the imperialist war. To win that peace they were prepared to sign away enormous tracts of Russian imperial territory to the Kaiser.

I do not put forward either the analysis of Sakai in “Settlers” that all white workers are a reactionary labor aristocracy, nor the view espoused by MIM that all workers in the US without exception, even including Black, Latino, Asian and indigenous people, are bought off by a bribe provided by the super-exploitation of workers in the exterior Third World, so that nobody in the US is exploited but actually all enjoy material privileges in excess of the value they actually produce. These views are incorrect.

What is the case is that throughout the international working class, and indeed throughout the human race, privilege and oppression/exploitation are commingled and inter-related, existing in a complicated and contradictory unity. One particularly central form this takes is “white skin privilege” or “whiteness.” But it takes many other forms, including neo-colonialism, warlordism, patriarchy, etc. Individual members of all oppressed and exploited groups participate in oppression and exploitation, including their own oppression. The class struggle does not take place only between classes, but within classes and within the individuals comprised in a “class.”

There is a material basis for reaction in the working class, alongside and interpenetrating with a material basis for revolution. Struggling to consciously realize and strengthen the latter means consciously struggling to identify and uproot the former. This does not distinguish working class white people in the US from anybody else on the face of the planet struggling to become a freedom fighter and (self) liberator, and to help transform society; it just has certain particularities and tenacities among white people — and certain ramifications for the global anti-capitalist, anti-oppression struggle for human and planetary liberation because of the enormous wealth, power and reactionary impact of the US empire.

But the course of all revolutionary struggles in human history demonstrate quite clearly that without unremitting struggle, revolutionary organizations and even societies turn into their opposite because of the material roots of oppression and exploitation even within the exploited and oppressed and their organizations. Redemption is not a one-time shot. We redeem ourselves through a struggle for class consciousness, and the effort to liberate ourselves by struggling to end all exploitation and oppression, not only our own. And that will go on for many lifetimes.

There is neither a white working class, nor an “American” working class. There is an international working class, within which real material divisions exist based on colonialism, particularly settler colonialism, patriarchy, and many other factors. People who participate in their own oppression, or who identify with their own oppressors (worse yet, who identify as oppressors) can never be free. This is true for white people, Black people, Palestinians, Israelis, Irish, English, Boers or Azanians. But people who are struggling for freedom, however, can begin to see a way out of participating in their own oppression or holding on to their privileges at the expense of their future.

I am not pessimistic in the least. On the contrary, my optimism is based exactly on the enormous and insoluble contradictions inherent within capitalism, imperialism and settler colonialism, material contradictions which make the so-called “white working class” and the “white race” inherently unstable and in a sense self-destructive social formations. In this regard, they are fundamentally unlike he bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, and the labor aristocracy, of all nations, but particularly oppressor and colonizing nations, which are strata and class fractions whose position in society is based on a generally unified coincidence of class, national, and imperial interests, and from whom only a minute fraction of class/race traitors can be won to participation in revolutionary struggle as anything but rank opportunists. Oppressed and working people, of all nations and “races,” on the other hand, embody an explosive contradiction in our lives, psyches, and social and economic realities and relationships. It is this contradiction which it is the task of revolutionaries to expose, clarify, heighten and ultimately resolve in favor of mass self-liberatory action that will eradicate all pre-existing forms of oppression and exploitation in favor of a classless, “race”-less, and stateless human society. However, this process will take a lot more than “convincing” people to “surrender” their privileges.

My point in engaging in this struggle is not to dismiss the politics of BTR or to bid them adieu. I have learned a great deal from Race Traitor analyses and political thinking and its antecedents over many years. I believe there are affinities and that you are grappling with and struggling for an analysis and practice that holds great promise. I would hope that you would rethink some of the seemingly self-contradictory formulations you adhere to, and that you would hopefully go slowly in constituting a cadre organization around them without a great deal of additional struggle (and I would point out that you have not even addressed the question of the relationship of a cadre organization apparently based in the white working class to revolutionaries from oppressed and colonized nations and people within the US). By setting this struggle on the grounds of a difference in analysis and “pessimism” about the white working class, in fact, you have liquidated the argument and discussion about the nature of the struggle and goals of colonized peoples and what form their decolonization and liberation will take. This is a huge and fundamental flaw in your thinking, upon which many other well-intentioned efforts at revolutionary struggle in the US have come a-cropper.

Via Anti-Racist Action

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