To End the Rule of Capital, We Must End the Rule of White Supremacy: Revisiting the Work of Noel Ignatiev and Theodore Allen

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.”

Digital Capitalism Gives the Working Class a New Opportunity for Emancipation

Illustration by David Plunkert

By Jaime Caro-Morente

Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism, wondered if there was already no alternative to capitalism. This work captures the feeling of defeat that the international left has in the face of the failure of the experiments of real socialism in the Soviet world and the capitulation to the global neoliberalism that destroyed the Welfare State in the 70s.

Before this neoliberal world, which is nothing more than ultra-financed capitalism, it seemed that there was no possible alternative: the labor movement was disintegrated due to the impossibility of finding its enemies and the lack of true emancipatory examples. The 68´s Revolutions in the Western world showed that this supposed disintegration of the left, being incapable of developing a clear alternative to both capitalism and ultra-bureaucratic regimes, decided to find the emancipatory path by looking at all social constructs and bodies, which until that moment had kept quiet in their bosom under the premise of “your time will come when socialism arrives"; that is, the feminism and the anti-racist struggle, and after them the queer liberation movement, with a clear socialist surface. From the 70s to the present day, the left has advanced a lot in the field of conquering social rights for women, racialized bodies, and the LGTBQ + collective, but they have always found that there is one last impediment to achieving total emancipation: that monster that is the capitalist system.

Nowadays, the entire left knows perfectly well that none of the struggles can be carried out —that they can achieve their emancipatory objective —if they are not capable of destroying the system that oppresses them as a whole (capitalism), and afterwards creating another system free from these oppressions. But of course, the drive or strength that the labor movement had was totally overwhelmed by financial capitalism and delocalization: it seems that history repeats itself, in this case, we go back to the 30s, to the Steinbeck novel, The Grapes of Wrath. In this novel, all the inhabitants of a town found that there was a company that sent its workers to destroy their farms because “they were supposedly not productive.” Although they all had the same problem and wanted to fight against the company, when they demand to the guy who drives the tractor to see the boss to chat and negotiate — start a class struggle — he tells them that he doesn’t even know who the boss is; that the boss is someone in New York, or that he is Wall Street. They were facing a monster that they could not confront or even see; in fact, they say that if this guy continues with his work, they will shoot him. His response? That it will not matter because they will only be killing one of their own (since he was simply a worker from the town as well) and that the company will send another man to finish the job. In this world of crisis, these men were cannon fodder — they needed work to survive and no matter how much solidarity they had with their people, there was no one to fight against.

And this is how the international working class has felt since neoliberalism began in the 70s, without knowing who to fight against. It has been Wall Street, yes. It is capital. It is capitalism. But there are many Wall Streets, capital is everywhere, capitalism is all-encompassing, and everything is interwoven in a way in which you can blame the entire system while throwing punches in the air. Many people on the left have proposed a return to the Nation-States; that is, to broaden the Welfare State and attempt to wrangle the monster of neoliberalism, State by State. This solution seems practical until you realize that the United States, as a state, cannot prevent General Motors from taking production from Michigan to Mexico or Southeast Asia, in constant search of near-slave labor while leaving the industrialized and unionized working class in the dust. It has become obvious, in this late stage of capitalism, that states and their governments are totally subjugated by these industrial companies, which in turn only respond to the great neoliberal forces of capital… the objectives of financial capitalism.

At this point, we must introduce the work “No-Logo” of Naomi Klein, which shows in a fantastic way how this neoliberal financial capitalism operates in terms of production: jobs are not destroyed, but rather they migrate to other parts where the working classes are “not conscious” or have not fought for as much protection as the European or American ones. Therefore, at the end of No-Logo, there is only one possible way out: the proletarian internationalism that Marx and Engels once put as the most important “mission” of the working class. But of course, the labor movements in India and Southeast Asia have either been crushed as well, or companies have managed to once again migrate their productions to other areas where there is less class consciousness and/or greater degrees of interdependence due to colonialism and imperialism.

With the rise of digital capitalism, we find ourselves with an absolute realignment of a totally international class struggle, which allows the working class two clear advantages: 1) everything “digital” allows an interconnection and cooperation of the working classes from different parts of the world that was not possible before, and 2) digital technology (algorithms) can be used to manage the production of a new world that is not based solely on the invisible hand and the Market, in its capitalist sense. The second capability is essential as it would eliminate the need for tightly-wound bureaucracies that can stall the socialist transition to communism, while at the same time effectively coordinate where consumer goods are needed. If we apply this technological revolution to our productive capacities, we can overcome the fraudulent claims put forth by classical and neoclassical economists regarding capitalism, giving rise to an emancipation that could be classified as a sort of cybercommunism. We are on the cusp of such technology and must contemplate it for the future, while digital capitalism is giving the working class a unifying force like never before. The arrival of companies like Google, Amazon or Facebook have shown this potential. Google and Facebook are two paradigmatic cases — companies already based on the extraction of data from billions of individuals on the planet and the coordination of matching goods with these individuals anywhere in the world. Under capitalism, this potential is wasted, abused, and corrupted with the worst of intentions in its obsessive pursuit of profit. Under socialism, these models can represent forces of production and distribution that require minimal human labor. These companies have very few workers in relation with the old production chains of companies such as General Motors or General Electrics but they have the same amount of wealth or even more. A company like Google with 100,000 employees can generate the GDP of several countries in the world at the same time, just like Facebook, which with fewer employees generates the same amount of money.

The example of Amazon is even more pragmatic since it is the hybridization between the old forms of industrial capitalism with the digital one; a company that works like the digital ones, uses personalized ads to generate money, buys and sells items on its website, and even produces its own articles to distribute through a network of hundreds of millions of people. This is the perfect example of how the working class has to organize thanks to this rise of the new digital capitalism. It is useless to unionize workers in a single warehouse in the United States, but equally, it is useless to unionize all workers in Amazon in this country, since Amazon has all the resources to take production to any country in the world. In other words, to be able to twist their arms and amass genuine power, all Amazon workers — from all countries — should unionize in a single union that does not understand the distinction of nations. It would be a working-class, feminist, decolonial and anti-racist union, as the “working class” it represents. And of course, thanks to the digital technological revolution, through our mobile devices this union can perfectly coordinate all its actions around the world, to such an extent that even with different time zones it can call a strike on a global scale to bring even a goliath of capital like Amazon to its knees.

Digital capitalism is giving a golden opportunity to the world working class to organize internationally, as Marx and Engels insisted, and it is giving future tools for the total emancipation of work in an inherently decolonial, feminist, and anti-racist manner; that is to say, intersectional, where all efforts are put into the absolute emancipation of all human beings.