By Jaime Caro-Morente
“The greatest ideological barrier to the achievement of the proletarian class consciousness, solidarity and political action is now, and has been, white chauvinism.”
-Noel Ignatiev
This phrase that remains relevant was written by Noel Ignatiev in 1966-1967 in his pamphlet “White Blindspot.” Due to the capitalist systemic crisis of 2008 and the awareness that racism is still strong in the US, with help from the Black Lives Matter movement, we find ourselves in a new protest cycle. Although this cycle differs from others that have existed in the US: at the beginning of the 20th century, it was a movement for labor rights and socialism, in the 60s for the emancipation of all human beings from the modern categories of race and gender. This new protest cycle is the crystallization of the idea that neither of the these things that have been fought for in the past have been achieved: there are no meaningful labor rights to speak of, just as there is no emancipation from the oppressive nature of white supremacy (race), patriarchy (sex/gender), and capitalism (class), because the only system capable of remedying each — socialism — has still not been realized.
Ignatiev once proclaimed, “traditionally the Negro people, for very real reasons, have carried forward the demands of the entire working class.” We are at a time when again, there are various theoreticians who think about race and gender, trying to deconstruct and dissolve them. But they always emphasize this deconstruction “of the otherness”, as if deconstructing the otherness could eliminate oppression. We must go further, we have to deconstruct and reduce to ashes the system that had produced that otherness, in this case, White Supremacy and whiteness.
“Thanks” to the Alt-Right interpretation of identity politics: they themselves have assumed they are one more identity. That implies that they interpret their ontologically oppressive position as equal to the oppressed identities, just because the latter are recognized as legally equal to the first by law, even though those laws do not establish a radical equality among them. But the Alt-Right proposal to take whiteness into account as one more identity opens up a world of enormous political possibilities, since it can be easier to deconstruct because “it is an identity and the ones that hold the white privilege see themselves as an identity.”
In the 1960s, both Ignatiev and the independent scholar, Allen, were already studying whiteness and White Supremacy with the hope of being able to destroy it, understanding that only in this way could be achieved a real conscious and combative working class. They both knew, and so they left it written, that whiteness and its associated White Supremacy was an artefact, a device, invented to divide the working class. Whitenesss has a class inception, that is, giving some privilege to a portion of the working class to divide it. Nowadays there are many academics who maintain the interpretation of the history of the United States as a country whose revolutionary history is almost non-existent because the category of race and gender “divided” the US working class, that is: the existence of blacks and women as collectives “with unique demands” divided the working class. Ignatiev and Allen flipped this argument: rather, what divided the working class, and continues to divide it, is (the invention of) the white race.
Allen dedicated almost forty years of his life to chronicle the invention of the white race, and doing so in his book The invention of the white race, he opened with a controversial phrase: “When the Africans arrived at America, there were no whites there.” According to Allen's studies, during the colonial history of the United States, once the colonists realized that the Virginian land was not full of gold as the lands conquered by the Hispanic Empire, they had to decide how to make this land attractive to Europeans and manage to populate it — hence, conquer it. Since the entire expedition almost died in the first year in the very first colony in North America (at Chesapeake, not Plymouth), they had to use indentured servants contracts to bring Europeans and Africans to these lands. Along with these contracts, the discovery of tobacco was what marked the history of the United States and its “special institution.” This monoculture was what enriched the colony, since all the workers were enslaved for a period of time, little by little, in a class struggle, it was tried that this slavery would become for life. The Bacon´s Rebellion, according to Allen, was the final struggle between one class that was driven to slavery against the one that wanted to enslave it. At this time, the class that fought for their liberation was made up of both Europeans and Africans, with no distinction of origin or skin. At the end of this rebellion, the first laws appeared with the term "white,” and the white race was created based on a skin color that will always provide privileges to divide the class without property.
Ignatiev is more political than Allen, and in his work White Blindspot, written in the heat of the Black Liberation movements, he finally flipped all the racist arguments of the whites in the communist parties against these movements of black nationalism such as the Black Panther Party. Ignatiev's main teaching is clear: “only by destroying white supremacism and the white race can solidarity and unity of the working class be achieved.” And the destruction of white supremacism cannot be achieved only by supporting the black liberation movements; it is achieved if the white bodies renounce their privileges, become traitors of their race, and end up destroying it since it is an invention in which sustained privileges on skin-color divide the working class. This statement was polemic in his time, instead of the fashionable argument that the black liberation movement and black nationalism were dividing the working class, the Ignatiev argument says: the white race is an invention, it was invented in order to divide the working class, so the only thing that can divide the working class is the white race, not the black liberation movement.
White Blindspot suggests that White Supremacy is also an artefact that disciplines white bodies. Although whiteness has given to the white bodies privileges as freedom to spend money and leisure of time as they wish without social restrictions for two centuries. Whiteness disciplines these bodies since, although there are white workers who are exploited proletarians and victims of capitalism and the "Law and Industry system," they see themselves as something more than a “simple proletarian.” Ignatiev, paraphrasing Marx, said: “They have more to lose than their chains; they have also to “lose” their white-skin privileges; the perquisites that separate them from the rest of the working class, that act as the base material for the split in the ranks of labor.”
And, of course, this discipline of the white bodies operates in the class struggle, making the white people within the communist and socialist movements say that there are "parallel struggles" to the “working-class one” that divides the workers and disorients them in the real fight that to bury capitalism. Ignatiev rejected this idea of the "parallel struggle" saying that there are no white workers fighting for socialism and black workers fighting for more jobs, housing, and full political rights. There is no distinction in the fights of both collectives. This is a fallacy since "it is not correct to reduce the demands of the Negro liberation movement to more jobs, housing, and full political rights — these are demands of ALL workers.” Here Ignatiev points out that the main demands of the black liberation movements are and have been for centuries, the ending of the white supremacy. And, of course, this demand does not concern only black people, since the struggle against white supremacy affects the entire working class, being the spearhead that would destroy one of the main pillars of capitalism — that of the social control of the working class, which is exercised through whiteness, endowing part of the working class with privileges, which although they cannot fully materialize into freedom because the capitalist system prevents it — to have leisure of time, or spend money on whatever you want, you first have to have that money and capitalism is a system that condemns the majority of the population to a false freedom, which cannot be exercise without money, making the white worker fear "losing something more than their chains."
It is time to recover the writings of theorists like Ignatiev and Allen, mixing them with those of the Black Liberation Movements and the spirit of the rainbow coalition of Fred Hampton, to draw a better future in which there is no oppression, and where human emancipation will be total, burying capitalism and modernity with all its oppressions.
We have to remember that nowadays the most serious terrorist threat is that of white supremacism and the extreme-right connected with the Alt-Right. The Black Liberation Movements and the US 68´s movement inspired philosophers who built the Critical Theory that deconstructed social relations which created the category of race and gender. Now that the Alt-Right and white supremacism are more threatened than ever (and they feel that way), we must continue to deconstruct and destroy whiteness and White Supremacism, including within the ranks of the left and of any movement that aspires to destroy capitalism. Because capitalism cannot be destroyed if whiteness and white supremacism are not removed from the struggle.
In response to criticism of their work, which stated that they “exaggerate the negro question,” Allen contended: “the centrality is the “white question” since white supremacy and white-skin privilege have historically frustrated the struggle for democracy, progress, and socialism in the US,” ultimately reaffirming that, “I venture to state that socialism cannot be built successfully in any country where the workers oppose it – and workers who want to preserve their white-skin privilege do not want socialism.”
