Defending Portland; Where Racism Came From
Special Guest Commentary by Bill Fletcher, Jr.
————————Photo by: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland, Portland Mercury
Defending Portland from the Secret Police
By James R Smith
Portland, Oregon, known as the city of bridges, is a big enough urban area to call out thousands, when there are protests, and small enough that many of the activists know each other. It is a supersized community.
In Portland, there has not been a single lull in protests since George Floyd was murdered on Memorial Day. Last week, in a vain attempt to gain standing in the polls, Trump sent in federal officers, but not just any feds. They are the SWAT squad of the secret police. An elite corp of the immigration bullies who are known as ICE. The group that arrived in Portland were, indeed, secret. Apparently no one usually gets to see them in action except defenseless would-be immigrants.
Their cover is blown in Portland, but they are still trying to be as secretive as possible. Their activities include random arrests, grabbing people off the street and shoving them into unmarked cars with their destination unknown. It may well be the basement of the cavernous 18-story federal building. Unheeded demands for the removal of the Feds have come from Portland’s Mayor, Oregon’s Governor and two U.S. Senators, as well as prominent citizens and protesters.
In response, protesters have besieged the federal building, night after night. In the last few days, women have formed a “Wall of Moms,” to protect protesters from police violence and arrests.
In addition, an apparition (See photo below), called the Naked Athena appeared suddenly at 1:45 am on Saturday. After shooting at her, to no avail, the cops retreated to wherever they go.
Meanwhile, the Portland protesters, backed by strong community and political support are holding their ground. Portland is known for having a strong anarchistic movement, known more recently as antifa (anti-fascist), and a strong labor movement.
Divine Intervention
From out of a toxic fog, she came
and walked the streets of Portland
wearing only a mask, as we all should
The Goddess Athena, Holy Wisdom,
faced down the police and Feds
True to their nature
they fired upon the apparition
but their bullets couldn’t hurt her
so they turned and ran
Run policeman, Run far away
back to your evil Lord,
who hates us all.
Athena vanished into the crowd
but she shall return
as we build a better world.
Run secret policeman, run
your time is ending,
with the Goddess on our side.
________________________________________________
Race is about more than discrimination
Racial capitalism, the settler state
and the challenges facing
organized labor in the USA
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Though almost a cliché, it is worth reminding ourselves that “race” is a socio-political construct and not a scientific concept. It is very real because it is the name for a system of oppression and social control, the origins of which date back at least to the Reconquista in Spain, the invasion of the Western Hemisphere, the slave trade in Africans, and the English subjugation of Ireland in the 1500s.
The construction of “race” and “racism” was the construction of a system of total subjugation that was integral to the development of capitalism. It was never a system of prejudice alone. Various forms of prejudice appear to have been with homo sapiens throughout recorded history. But the creation of “race” as ideology & oppression (and later pseudo-science) was necessary as a means of constructing capitalist nation-states and introducing what would later be identified as “class collaboration” in order to ensure the relative permanence of the system. (1)
The invasion and subjugation of Ireland introduced a new element in the construction of race that had not taken form with the completion of the Reconquista in Spain. The English subjugation of Ireland turned out to be far more than the capture and absorption of a territory or kingdom, a practice with which humans were familiar since the commencement of class society. It was also different, in important respects, from the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere (which, until 1607, was largely about conquest, enslavement and annihilation on the part of the Spanish and Portuguese). It was the development of the “settler colony” and, ultimately, the settler state.
The English totally subjugated the Irish, rendering unlawful their political system, language, and land control. They also began a process of moving in settlers from England, Wales and Scotland who were given the best land, control of their own weapons and an overall privileged status vis a vis the indigenous Irish. (2) Central in the construction of this settler colony was the notion of “race” that the English used not in descriptive terms but as a way of designating allegedly superior populations (English) vs. allegedly inferior populations (Irish). The settler state, then, was racially constructed from its inception but was linked to the idea of displacement/expulsion of the indigenous population. This is what made settler colonialism different from other variants of colonialism where the Europeans (or later the USA) occupied territory, frequently ruling through local compradors and agents.
Racial settler colonialism in North America
There are several remarkable characteristics of settler colonialism. (3) One is the almost constant reference to God, i.e., that the Creator of all things endowed upon the setters the right to a specific piece of land and, by implication, to remove anyone or anything in the way of settlement. Such references appear time and again, whether one is examining Ireland, British North America, Israel/Palestine, South Africa, Australia, etc.
Settler colonies that evolve into full settler states exhibit no interest in a modus vivendi with the indigenous population. The indigenous population is to be removed or eliminated altogether, but in every case, is to be subordinated to the interests of the settler. In some situations so-called mixed race peoples, in a settler state, have played a role in social control, but the more effective means of social control over the entire settler colonial capitalist project is the creation of a population—the mass of the settlers—who give their allegiance to the larger system. (4)
The racialization imbedded in a settler state is regularly reaffirmed through the practice of creating what should be understood as the so-called legitimate and so-called illegitimate populations. This is a characteristic of racism generally, we should note. But the legitimacy question in a settler state is linked to the fusion of race and settlerism. As one sees in the USA, the critical image for white right-wing populists (fascists and non-fascists) revolves around the very notion of the USA as allegedly being a white republic. This carries many implications, including some that have direct relevance to organized labor in the USA.
It’s not just that organized labor began white…
A labor movement, as such, emerged in the 1600s as indentured servants and slaves rose in periodic revolts against the oppression that they experienced at the hands of the colonial elite. This movement took many forms ranging from open, armed revolts, to running away, to sabotage, to killing one’s ‘master.’ In time guilds were formed in certain crafts among free labor and, with the introduction of racial slavery-for-life, joint African/European uprisings largely declined into near non-existence, a point repeatedly raised by the late Theodore Allen. (5) That said, slave revolts and slave conspiracies became the cutting edge of the labor movement, broadly defined.
That segment of labor that came to be recognizable as trade unions or labor unions, made their appearance in the 1830s during the time of the so-called Jacksonian Democracy (the period of the Presidency of Andrew Jackson). These organizations included both men and women, sometimes segregated, other times together. What they lacked were what we would call today “workers of color.”
While most contemporary scholars and activists would acknowledge the reactionary nature of this exclusion, the broader implications of this exclusion are insufficiently explored.
The period of the Jacksonian Democracy represents a critical period in US history and an equally critical image for major right-wing movements in the USA today. Andrew Jackson became the quintessential conservative populist leader speaking out and allegedly representing the “little man,” particularly in the fight against larger elite interests. While Jackson did personify this role, and specifically sought to secure a mandate among those ‘common persons’ who could legally vote, this was an era of absolute terror associated with slavery, the westward expansion (which was aided by increased European migration to the USA), and the continued disenfranchisement of women.
Jackson played a major role in opening “new” land for settlers and removing Native Americans from the land to which they were legally entitled (not just morally, but as per treaties with the US government). A supporter of slavery, he reaffirmed the United States as a “white republic.” This was to be a country for whites which, given so-called Manifest Destiny, would ultimately expand to the Pacific, though that expansion was largely completed after Jackson left office.
The environment of the burgeoning trade union movement was set by the reality of the Jacksonian era. Even the context of the split that hampered organized labor prior to the Civil War was telling. As DuBois noted in Black Reconstruction in America, (6) organized labor in the USA split three ways prior to the Civil War on the question of slavery. One segment opposed slavery; another supported slavery; and a third believed that slavery was not an issue on which organized labor should take a stand.
Critical to the thinking lying behind the positions of opposing and supporting slavery was the matter of workforce competition, i.e., would the continuation of slavery represent competition with free labor that would lead to the degradation of the latter, or would the elimination of slavery bring about the introduction of a new workforce that would be in competition with free labor?
While there were certainly those in the anti-slavery segment of the movement who opposed slavery for moral and/or political reasons, the framework of competition is critical to appreciate. At a general level the working class is always in competition with itself over limited resources, limited as a result of the nature of capitalism. The competition that is engendered by capitalism results in various responses including but not limited to the formation of worker organization, e.g., trade unions. Nevertheless, as I and many others have raised, the formation of trade unions is grounded on either an “inclusionist” or “exclusionist” framework regarding how the unions view who should be organized into the union. (7)
The inclusionist/exclusionist framework is true in all capitalist states. “Race” was an additional element in the competition equation. To quote the famous statement by Karl Marx: “Labor in white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded.” (8) The attempt by a segment of organized labor to ‘emancipate’ itself in the absence of unity with other segments of the working class would inevitably fail. Marx’s statement, in that sense, is a truism under all conditions of racist and national oppression. Where a working class is divided along racial or nationality lines, attempts by one segment to go ‘solo’ inevitably serve the interests of capital and are encouraged by capital and limit the possibilities for working class power.
Yet the situation in the USA was not one of a ‘simple’ racial divide. The settler state was founded upon an ideology of ownership. The state—the USA—was the state of the white settlers. In the minds of the settlers, it was not just a matter of Africans being the ‘black race’ but that they, along with Native Americans, Mexicans and Asians, existed in contradiction to the white republic, i.e., to the settler state. While it was true that various European nationalities who, in migrating to the USA faced intense hostility, within a generation they were absorbed into the racial settler state to the extent to which they adopted and practiced ‘whiteness.’ (9)
Organized labor, that is the white exclusive (and later white-dominated, though not necessarily exclusive) trade unions, formed itself as part of the settler state, not in the sense of being an apparatus of the state (except in the sense that Louis Althusser discussed “ideological state apparatuses”), but in the sense of accepting certain important precepts. The unions took for granted the nature of the settler state and, as such, that the unions were to exist to serve the ‘legitimate’ population, or at least the working class of the legitimate population.
As the trade union movement emerged both prior to and following the Civil War, the acceptance of the racial settler state was part of its ‘DNA.’ It was not just a matter of racial prejudice but the identification of populations that were not acceptable for the union movement. It was also represented by the silence of the movement on the objectives of the settler state itself.
There are multiple examples of this challenge. The influx of Chinese labor was met with a very different response than was the influx of Irish and later Italian labor. Despite the hostility that Irish and Italians both encountered upon arrival, organized labor was, to a great extent, willing and able to configure itself in such a way to ultimately legitimize these immigrant workers and their descendants. This took very distinct forms.
Unions came to be dominated by specific European ethnic groups; local unions of the same parent union might have different ethnic domination as well. Nothing along those lines took place within the mainland USA when it came to Asians within the context of what was understood to be the “official” labor movement. Instead, most of white labor organized actively against Asians generally and Chinese migrants, in particular.
Beginning almost immediately after the Civil War, so-called non-whites either together or separately battled to organize labor organizations, including but not limited to unions. In many cases they fought to be included in white majority unions, e.g., African American workers and the Knights of Labor. In other cases, they chose to establish fully independent unions with the possibility of merging with white majority unions, e.g., the Japanese Mexican Labor Association (early 20th century).
The ‘official’ labor movement, that is the white majority or white exclusive formations, in effect pledged their loyalty to the racial settler state. In time this was treated as ‘patriotism.’
The official labor movement ignored—at best—the wars against Native Americans and the securing of land for settlers. In some respects the land question was viewed more from the context of the illusions that it presented to the settler-worker rather than from the standpoint of the implication of the genocidal war against the First Nations. (10) Whether in openly white supremacist terms or by omission, the ‘official’ movement situated itself as a movement of white working people in struggle with the white employer class, but joined together by the framework of the white republic against all others.
There are many similarities that one can see in other settler states. In South Africa, for instance, there was the notorious strike in the 1920s where the slogan was “Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa!” The trade union movement that evolved in South Africa, until the successful advent of what came to be known as the independent Black trade union movement in the 1980s, was either exclusively white or had provisions for a very subordinate role for African, Asian and so-called Colored workers.
The South African white trade union movement positioned itself within the colonial and later apartheid framework. A similar, though not identical role was played by the Histadrut (General Organization of Workers) in, first the British Mandate of Palestine and, later, in the post-1948 state of Israel.
The framework of the racial settler state helps one to understand that the militant economic struggle alone is insufficient to bring about any significant and long-term unity, a point we shall explore below.
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the executive editor of globalafricanworker.com, a former president of TransAfrica Forum, and a long-time leftist trade unionist and writer.
End of Part I. Part II will be available tomorrow.
Notes:An elaborated argument on this can be found in the work of the late Theodore Allen, particularly in his two-volume work: The Invention of the White Race. New York: Verso Press, 1994. Also, the late Cedric Robinson’s work, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
The terms “privilege” and “privileged” are not without controversy. In the context of racist and national oppression, they do not suggest or imply wealth and prosperity. They describe a relative differential in treatment between the settler or oppressor group, on the one hand, and the oppressed, subjugated population. As such, racial and national privileges do not depend on the strength of the economy because they are socially and politically constructed, working themselves into the culture of the oppressed and oppressor nations or peoples. The creation of racial and/or national privilege, as a system, becomes a means to secure the allegiance of the bottom strata of the oppressor society/state with the ruling circles, i.e., the lower strata, the laboring classes. The privilege system implies that no matter how badly treated, the lower strata of the oppressor population will not be placed into the same category of the oppressed, “Other” population.
There has been excellent work carried out over the years to better understand settler colonialism and settler states. The work of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz will be mentioned here specifically because of the way she has connected the struggle around gun ownership in the USA to whiteness and to the settler state. See: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Loaded: A disarming history of the Second Amendment. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018.
This can mean allegiance to the foreign colonizer, e.g., the allegiance of the pied noir (European colonists) in Algeria to the French colonial state AGAINST Algerian independence, or it can be the allegiance of so-called whites in the USA to what they see as a “white republic.”
There were exceptions, such as the 1741 conspiracy that involved African slaves and Irish indentured servants who were planning on a joint revolt. The critical feature here was that the Irish had not yet been declared to be “white.”
W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: A history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.
Referring to whether there is an effort to limit those eligible for union membership so as to increase the value of those who are positioned to collectively bargain, or whether the objective is to organize and unionize all those who have a common interest vis a vis an employer or industry so as to build a wider swarth of power.
Quoted in: David Roediger, “Labor in White Skin: Race and Working-Class History,” Verso blog, 13 July 2017, downloaded April 13, 2020.
By “practice whiteness” we mean the extent to which the European immigrants participated directly or indirectly in the perpetration of the white supremacist project. This could range from support for slavery to grabbing the lands of the Native Americans and Mexicans, to excluding so-called non-whites from access to rights and resources.
Most early Marxists in the USA also fell prey to this orientation, not appreciating the significance of the development of racial settler states in North America.