Settlers¶
Metadata¶
- Author: J. Sakai
- ASIN: B00N980EQK
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N980EQK
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
What lured Europeans to leave their homes and cross the Atlantic was the chance to share in conquering Indian land. At that time there was a crisis in England over land ownership and tenancy due to the rise of capitalism. — location: 185 ^ref-25586
The coming of capitalism had smashed all the traditional securities and values of feudal England, and financed its beginnings with the most savage reduction of the general living standard. — location: 198 ^ref-20435
the ultimate economic objective of colonial workmen was security through agriculture rather than industry … As soon as a workman had accumulated a small amount of money he could, and in many cases did, take up a tract of land and settle on it as a farmer.” — location: 219 ^ref-36025
this lie is precisely the same lie put forward by the white “Afrikaner” settlers, who claim that South Africa was literally totally uninhabited by any Afrikans when they arrived from Europe. To universal derision, these European settlers claim to be the only rightful, historic inhabitants of South Afrika. Or we can hear similar defenses put forward by the European settlers of Israel, who claim that much of the Palestinian land and buildings they occupy are rightfully theirs, since the Arabs allegedly decided to voluntarily abandon it all during the 1948–49 war. — location: 249 ^ref-9021
Spanish “reduced” the Indian population of their colonies from some 50 million to only 4 million by the end of the 17th century. — location: 266 ^ref-52863
It was the unpaid, expropriated labor of millions of Indian and Afrikan captive slaves that created the surpluses on which the settler economy floated and Atlantic trade flourished. — location: 331 ^ref-5552
While the cream of the profits went to the planter and merchant capitalists, the entire settler economy was raised up on a foundation of slave labor, slave products, and the slave trade. — location: 338 ^ref-61795
how European capitalism as a whole literally capitalized itself for industrialization and World Empire out of Afrikan slavery. — location: 344 ^ref-42488
The colonized Afrikan nation, much more than the new Euro-Amerikan settler nation, was a complete nation — that is, possessing among its people a complete range of applied sciences, practical crafts, and productive labor. Both that colonized nation and the Indian nations were self-sufficient and economically whole, while the Euro-Amerikan invasion society was parasitic. — location: 351 ^ref-13746
Afrikans were the landless, propertyless, permanent workers of the U.S. Empire. They were not just slaves — the Afrikan nation as a whole served as a proletariat for the Euro-Amerikan oppressor nation. This Afrikan colony supported on its shoulders the building of a Euro-Amerikan society more “prosperous,” more “egalitarian,” and yes, more “democratic” than any in semi-feudal Old Europe. The Jeffersonian vision of Amerika as a pastoral European democracy was rooted in the national life of small, independent white landowners. — location: 369 ^ref-47103
Every European who wanted to could own land. Every white settler could be a property owner. — location: 385 ^ref-6627
“Every man in this colony has land, and none but Negroes are laborers.” — location: 395 ^ref-49164
In the early decades of Virginia’s tobacco industry, gangs of white indentured servants worked the fields side-by-side with Afrikan and Indian slaves, whom in the 1600s they greatly outnumbered. — location: 456 ^ref-32235
even the very lowest layer of white society was lifted out of the proletariat by the privileges of belonging to the oppressor nation. — location: 467 ^ref-62935
the material basis for the lack of class consciousness by early Euro-Amerikan workers, and how their political consciousness was directly related to how much they shared in the privileges of the larger settler society. — location: 469 ^ref-25007
capitalists proved to their satisfaction that dissent and rebelliousness within the settler ranks could be quelled by increasing the colonial exploitation of other nations and peoples. — location: 471 ^ref-61991
No one, we note, has yet summoned up the audacity to maintain that the Indians too wished to fight and die for settler “democracy.” Yet that same claim is advanced for Afrikan prisoners (slaves), as though they either had more common interests with their slavemasters, or were more brainwashed. — location: 482 ^ref-59943
Bacon’s Rebellion define its main program. This was a classic settler liberal-conservative debate, which still echoes into our own times, — location: 556 ^ref-7078
Nothing raises more enthusiasm among Euro-Amerikan settlers than attacking people of color — they embrace it as something between a team sport and a national religion. — location: 562 ^ref-10748
“Bacon and his men did not kill a single enemy Indian but contented themselves with frightening away, killing, or enslaving most of the friendly neighboring Indians, and taking their beaver and land as spoils.” — location: 583 ^ref-9609
Killing, enslaving, and robbing was the exact central concern of this movement — which Euro-Amerikans tell us is an example of how we should unite with them! There’s a message there for those who wish to pick it up. — location: 595 ^ref-10373
those Indians who did give themselves up to unity with the oppressors, becoming the settlers’ lackeys and allies, were not protected by it, but were destroyed. — location: 636 ^ref-26309
How meaningful is a “democratic” extension of voting rights amidst the savage expansion of a capitalist society based on genocide and enslavement? — location: 650 ^ref-46878
the dialectical unity of democracy and oppression in developing settler Amerika. — location: 664 ^ref-62567
The enrollment of the white masses into new, mass instruments of repression — such as the formation of the infamous Slave Patrols in Virginia in 1727 — is obviously anti-democratic and reactionary. Yet these opposites in form are, in their essence, united as aspects of creating the new citizenry of Babylon. — location: 665 ^ref-13445
1776 War of Independence, a war in which most of the Indian and Afrikan peoples opposed settler nationhood and the consolidation of Amerika. In fact, the majority of oppressed people gladly allied themselves to the British forces in hopes of crushing the settlers. — location: 669 ^ref-52951
The decisive point came when British capitalism decided to clip the wings of the new Euro-Amerikan bourgeoisie — they restricted emigration, hampered industry and trade, and pursued a long-range plan to confine the settler population to a controllable strip of territory along the Atlantic seacoast. — location: 672 ^ref-59218
the settler bourgeoisie was, in the main, conservative and uncertain about actual war. It was the land question that in the end proved decisive in swaying the doubtful among the settler elite. — location: 678 ^ref-13563
The British Quebec Act of 1773, however, attached all the Amerikan Midwest to British Canada. The Thirteen Colonies were to be frozen out of the continental land grab, with their British cousins doing all the looting. — location: 686 ^ref-49622
as the first flush of settler enthusiasm faded into the unhappy realization of how grim and bloody this war would be, the settler “sunshine soldiers” faded from the ranks to go home and stay home. Almost one-third of the Continental Army deserted at Valley Forge. — location: 696 ^ref-43363
enlistment bribes were widely offered to get recruits. New York State offered new enlistments 400 acres each of Indian land. Virginia offered an enlistment bonus of an Afrikan slave — location: 698 ^ref-4021
In South Carolina, Gen. Sumter used a share-the-loot scheme, whereby each settler volunteer would get an Afrikan captured from Tory estates. — location: 700 ^ref-8670
Far from being either patriotic Amerikan subjects or passively enslaved neutrals, the Afrikan masses threw themselves daringly and passionately into the jaws of war on an unprecedented scale — that is, into their own war, against slave Amerika and for freedom. — location: 704 ^ref-4182
the Euro-Amerikan settlers, sitting on the dynamite of a restive, nationally oppressed Afrikan population, were terrified — and outraged. — location: 709 ^ref-23276
Tom Paine, in his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, raged against “…that barbarous and hellish power which hath stirred up Indians and Negroes to destroy us.” — location: 713 ^ref-30985
By the thousands upon thousands, Afrikans struggled to reach British lines. One historian of the Exodus has said: “The British move was countered by the Americans, who exercised closer vigilance over their slaves, removed the able-bodied to interior places far from the scene of the war, and threatened with dire punishment all who sought to join the enemy. To Negroes attempting to flee to the British the alternatives ‘Liberty or Death’ took on an almost literal meaning. — location: 723 ^ref-51152
The signers of the Declaration of Independence were bitter about their personal losses: Thomas Jefferson lost many of his slaves; — location: 729 ^ref-58993
George Washington had to denounce his own brother for bringing food to the British troops, in a vain — location: 734 ^ref-55807
effort to coax them into returning the Washington family slaves. — location: 734 ^ref-56659
nations. It has been estimated that 100,000 Afrikan prisoners — some 20% of the slave population — freed themselves during the war. — location: 740 ^ref-6488
Washington declared that unless the slave escapes could be halted the — location: 746 ^ref-56043
British Army would inexorably grow “like a snowball in rolling.” — location: 746 ^ref-1905
“The Negro can take the field instead of the master; and therefore, no regiment is to be seen in which there are not Negroes in abundance…” Over 5,000 Afrikans served in the Patriot military, making up a large proportion of the most experienced troops — location: 754 ^ref-55274
(settlers usually served for only short enlistments — 90 days duty being the most common term — while slaves served until the war’s end or death). — location: 756 ^ref-20831
Many Afrikans were disarmed and put back into chains at the war’s end, despite solemn settler promises. John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress, may have presented Afrikan U.S. troops with a banner — which praised them as “The Bucks of America” — but that didn’t help Afrikans such as Captain Mark Starlin. He was the first Afrikan captain in the Amerikan naval forces, and had won many honors for his near-suicidal night raids on the British fleet (which is why the settlers let him and his all-Afrikan crew sail alone). But as soon as the war ended, his master simply reclaimed him. Starlin spent the rest of his life as a slave. — location: 765 ^ref-39627
three hundred Afrikan ex-slaves fought an extended guerrilla campaign against the planters in both Georgia and South Carolina. Originally allied to the British forces, they continued their independent campaign long after the British defeat. They were not overcome until 1786, when their secret fort at Bear Creek was discovered and overwhelmed. — location: 786 ^ref-33643
South Carolina’s Lynch stated that since Afrikans were property they shouldn’t be taxed any more than sheep were. Franklin acidly replied: “Sheep will never make insurrection!”[71] — location: 811 ^ref-10935
What was pushing and pressuring his capitalist mind was the contradiction between his greed for the easy life of the slave-master, and his fear for the safety of his settler nation.[72] — location: 815 ^ref-21214
a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events…” That is why, as U.S. President in 1791, he viewed the great Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture as a monstrous danger. His Administration quickly appropriated relief funds to subsidize the French planters fleeing that island. — location: 818 ^ref-36851
President Jefferson’s solution to this dilemma was to take all Afrikan children away from their parents for compact shipment to the West Indies and Afrika, while keeping the adults enslaved to support the Amerikan economy for the rest of their lives. — location: 824 ^ref-51946
Jefferson mused: “…the old stock would die off in the ordinary course of nature … until its final disappearance.” The President thought this Hitlerian fantasy both “practicable” and “blessed.” — location: 828 ^ref-12692
“…I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every two years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” — location: 834 ^ref-64380
President Jefferson, who believed that the planters should restrict and then wipe out entirely the Afrikan colony, ended his days owning more slaves than he started with.[73] — location: 835 ^ref-3487
The new Haitian Republic proudly offered citizenship to any Indians and Afrikans who wanted it, and thousands of free Afrikans emigrated. — location: 846 ^ref-28197
Frederick Douglass, we remember, had been a carpenter and shipyard worker in Baltimore before escaping Northward to pursue his agitation. — location: 876 ^ref-61225
So many Afrikans were involved in that planned uprising that one Southern newspaper declared that prosecutions had to be halted lest it bankrupt the Richmond capitalists by causing “the annihilation of the Blacks in this part of the country.”[79] — location: 879 ^ref-63765
One immediate response in the 1830s was to break up the Afrikan communities in the cities. In the wake of the Vesey conspiracy, for instance, the Charleston City Council urged that the number of male Afrikans in the city “be greatly diminished.”[82] — location: 893 ^ref-60280
In New Orleans the drop was from 50% to 15% of the city population; — location: 897 ^ref-52494
It is a measure of how strongly the threat of Revolution was rising in the Afrikan nation that the settlers had to restructure their society in response. — location: 904 ^ref-28483
They viewed themselves as the founders of a future Amerika that would become a great civilization akin to Greece and Rome, a Slave Empire led by the necessarily small elite of aristocratic slave-owners. — location: 930 ^ref-13007
The planter capitalists who tantalized themselves with these bloody dreams had little use for great numbers of penniless European immigrants piling up on their doorstep. — location: 939 ^ref-7757
“Between the rich and the poor, the capitalist and the laborer … When these things shall come — when the millions, who are always under the pressure of poverty, and sometimes on the verge of starvation, shall form your numerical majority, (as is the case now in the old countries of the world) and universal suffrage shall throw the political power into their lands, can you expect that they will regard as sacred the tenure by which you hold your property?”[87] — location: 945 ^ref-40389
“One of the greatest benefits of the institution of African slavery to the Southern States is its effect in keeping away from our territory, and directing to the North and Northwest, the hordes of immigrants now flowing from Europe.”[88] — location: 952 ^ref-16463
Between 1830–1860 some 4.5 million Europeans (two-thirds of them Irish and German) arrived to help the settler beachhead on the Eastern shore push outward. — location: 958 ^ref-49599
while there were great differences in wealth and power, there was a shared privilege among settlers. Few were exploited in the scientific socialist sense of being a wage-slave of capital; in fact, wage labor for another man was looked down upon by whites as a mark of failure (and still is by many). — location: 969 ^ref-51033
day of the farmer began to wane rapidly after 1850. If he had not already obtained good land, it became doubtful he could ever improve his fortunes. — location: 979 ^ref-59816
At the beginning of the 1800s it was still true that every ambitious, young Euro-Amerikan apprentice worker could expect to eventually become a master, owning his own little business (and often his own slaves). — location: 984 ^ref-52985
by 1860 the number of journeymen workers compared to masters had tripled, and a majority of Euro-Amerikan men were now wage-earners.[92] — location: 988 ^ref-62254
the new millions of immigrant European workers, many with Old European experiences of class struggle, furnished the final element in the hardening of a settler class structure. The political development was very rapid once the nodal point was reached: From artisan guilds to craft associations to local unions. — location: 993 ^ref-36345
crushed by the iron hand of force, the most advanced sons of labor fled in despair to the transatlantic Republic…”) — location: 997 ^ref-29272
new Euro-Amerikan workers as a whole were a privileged labor stratum. As a labor aristocracy it had, instead of a proletarian, revolutionary consciousness, a petit-bourgeois consciousness that was unable to rise above reformism. — location: 1001 ^ref-63567
this new class of white workers was indeed angry and militant, but so completely dominated by petit-bourgeois consciousness that they always ended up as the pawns of various bourgeois political factions. Because they clung to and hungered after the petty privileges derived from the loot of Empire, they as a stratum became rabid and reactionary supporters of conquest and the annexation of oppressed nations. — location: 1006 ^ref-10804
classic bourgeois democracy — that is, direct “democracy” for a handful of capitalists. — location: 1016 ^ref-26393
“Reform Convention” of 1821, where the supporters of Martin Van Buren swept away the high property qualifications that had previously barred white workingmen from voting. — location: 1020 ^ref-58385
free Afrikan communities in the North opposed these reform movements of the settler masses. The reason is easy to grasp: Everywhere in the North, the pre–Civil War popular struggles to enlarge the political powers of the settler masses also had the program of taking away civil rights from Afrikans. These movements had the public aim of driving all Afrikans out of the North. — location: 1026 ^ref-65086
1821 New York “Reform Convention” gave all white workingmen the vote, while simultaneously raising property qualifications for Afrikan men so high that it effectively disenfranchised the entire community. — location: 1028 ^ref-48706
Van Buren paid for this in his later years, when opposing politicians (such as Abraham Lincoln) attacked him for letting any Afrikans vote at all. — location: 1033 ^ref-44375
supported a bill for Afrikan suffrage. Frederick Douglass pointed out that civil rights for Afrikans was supported by “neither Republicans nor abolitionists.”[95] — location: 1036 ^ref-51312
ensure settler prosperity by annexing new territory into the Empire. — location: 1045 ^ref-58188
much-needed expansion of cash export crops (primarily cotton) and trade was being blocked as the settler land areas ran up against the Indian–U.S. Empire borders. — location: 1049 ^ref-7700
The Cherokee, who had chosen a path of adopting many Western societal forms, had a national life more stable and prosperous than that of the Euro-Amerikan settlers who eventually occupied those Appalachian regions after they were forced out. — location: 1055 ^ref-33162
report in 1826 records that the Cherokee nation had: 7,600 houses, 762 looms, 1,488 spinning wheels, 10 sawmills, 31 grain mills, 62 blacksmith shops, 18 schools, 70,000 head of livestock, a weekly newspaper in their own language, and numerous libraries with “thousands of good books.” — location: 1057 ^ref-49423
In magnitude this was as sweeping as Hitler’s grand design to render continental Europe free of Jews. — location: 1065 ^ref-35125
“find his fortune.” That’s a common phrase in the settler history books, which only conceals the reality that the only “fortune” on the frontier was from genocide. — location: 1072 ^ref-23192
The leader of “Jacksonian Democracy” had a clear, practical appreciation of how profitable genocide could be for settlers. — location: 1075 ^ref-39021
some of Hitler’s Death Camp officers are said to have made lampshades out of the skins of murdered Jews, the practicalities of frontier life led Jackson and his men to make bridle reins out of their victims’ skins.] — location: 1079 ^ref-52216
U.S. military campaigns in Florida against first the Spanish and then the Seminole, were in large part motivated by the need to eliminate this land base for independent Afrikan regroupment. — location: 1082 ^ref-38117
Seminole Nation, under the leadership of the great Osceola, refused to submit to U.S. removal to Oklahoma. A key disagreement was that the settlers insisted on their right to separate the Seminole from their Afrikan co-citizens, who would then be reenslaved and put on the auction block. — location: 1092 ^ref-44966
U.S. Commanding General Thomas Jesup conceded that none of the Afrikans would be reenslaved, but all could relocate to Oklahoma as part of the Seminole Nation. With this most of the Seminole and Afrikan forces surrendered and left Florida. — location: 1097 ^ref-24290
The war — which Gen. Jesup labeled “a Negro, not an Indian, war” — location: 1102 ^ref-21557
In his second State of the Union Address, Jackson reassured his fellow settlers that they should not feel guilty when they “tread on the graves of extinct nations,” since the wiping out of all Indian life was just as “natural” as the passing of generations! — location: 1108 ^ref-6234
Underneath the surface appearance of militant popular reform, of workers taking on the wealthy, these movements were only attempts to more equally distribute the loot and privileges of Empire among its citizens. — location: 1129 ^ref-55196
Far from joining the democratic struggles around the rights of the oppressed, the white workers were firmly committed to crushing them. — location: 1134 ^ref-59352
Even as they were gradually being pressed downward by the emerging juggernaut of industrial capitalism — faced with wage cuts, increasing speed-up of machine-powered production, individual craft production disappearing in the regimented workshop, etc. — those Euro-Amerikan workers saw their hope for salvation in non-proletarian special privileges and a desperate clinging to petit-bourgeois status. — location: 1136 ^ref-54446
workingmen’s movement was how large would their share of the looting be? It is one thing to be bribed by the bourgeoisie, and still another to demand, organize, argue, and beg to be bribed. — location: 1141 ^ref-42449
the backwardness of white labor is not a matter of “racism,” of “mistaken ideas,” of “being tricked by the capitalists” (all idealistic instead of materialist formulations); rather, it is a class question and a national question. — location: 1150 ^ref-6071
It’s startling how narrow and petty its concerns were in an age when the destiny of peoples and nations was being decided, when the settler Empire was trying to take into its hands the power to decree death to whole nations. — location: 1153 ^ref-22544
If the clearing away of the Indian nations had unlocked the door to the spread of the slave system, so too it had given an opportunity to the settler opponents of the planters. — location: 1167 ^ref-43941
their vision was not of a reborn Greek slaveocracy, but of a brand-new European Empire, relentlessly modern, constructed to the most advanced bourgeois principles with the resources of an entire continent united under its command. This new Empire would not only dwarf any power in Old Europe in size, but would be secured through the power of a vast, occupying army of millions of loyal settlers. — location: 1168 ^ref-26091
It was not freedom for Afrikans that motivated them. No, the reverse. It was their own futures, their own fortunes. — location: 1175 ^ref-31791
“We are all personally interested in this question, not indirectly and remotely as in a mere political abstraction — but directly, pecuniarily, and selfishly. If we do not exclude slavery from the Territories, it will exclude us.” — location: 1176 ^ref-57366
How natural for a new Empire of conquerors believing that they had, like gods, totally removed from the earth one family of oppressed nations, to think nothing of wiping out another. — location: 1182 ^ref-27717
Four frontier States — Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Oregon — passed “immigration” clauses in their constitutions which barred Afrikans as “aliens” from entering the State. — location: 1186 ^ref-58491
to most settlers in the North these attacks were just temporary measures. To them the heart of the matter was the slave system. They thought that without the powerful self-interest of the planters to “protect” Afrikans, that Afrikans as a whole would swiftly vanish from this continent. — location: 1200 ^ref-11360
Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the major abolitionist journal National Era, promised his white readers that after slavery was ended all Afrikans would leave the U.S. — location: 1210 ^ref-45980
Rev. Theodore Parker was one of the leading spokesmen of radical abolitionism, one who helped finance John Brown’s uprising at Harper’s Ferry, and who afterwards defended him from the pulpit. Yet even Parker believed in an all-white Amerika; he firmly believed that: “The strong replaces the weak. Thus, the white man kills out the red man and the black man. When slavery is abolished the African population will decline in the United States, and die out of the South as out of Northampton and Lexington.” — location: 1213 ^ref-56632
they saw no contradiction between emancipation and genocide. — location: 1221 ^ref-8650
Free Soil Party, which fought to reserve the new territories and States of the West for Europeans only. This was the main forerunner of the Republican Party of 1854, the first settler political party whose platform was the defeat of the “Slave Power.” — location: 1229 ^ref-64918
“The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element, like the Indian incapable of assimilation…” Both would, he promised his fellow settlers, “altogether disappear.” — location: 1234 ^ref-18528
even after the Civil War settlers promoted Indian, Mexicano, and Chinese enslavement when it was — location: 1239 ^ref-56018
useful to colonize the Southwest and West. — location: 1240 ^ref-28421
… It was officially estimated that 2,000 Indian slaves were held by the white people of New Mexico and Arizona in 1866, after 20 years of American rule — unofficial estimates placed the figure several times higher … ‘Get them back for us,’ Apaches begged an Army officer in 1871, referring to 29 children just stolen by citizens of Arizona; — location: 1242 ^ref-41098
Prostitution of captured Apache girls, of which much mention is made in the 1860s — location: 1246 ^ref-28985
and 1870s, seemed to trouble the Apaches exceedingly.” — location: 1246 ^ref-54461
at the same time that the U.S. was supposedly ending slavery and “Emancipating” Afrikans, the U.S. Empire was using slavery of the most barbaric kind in order to genocidally destroy the Apache. It was colonial rule and genocide that were primary. — location: 1248 ^ref-54878
By 1860 half of the populations of New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis were new immigrant Europeans. — location: 1254 ^ref-6427
“Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room perhaps for some newly arrived immigrants, whose hunger and color are thought to give them a title to — location: 1258 ^ref-8183
especial favor. — location: 1259 ^ref-21687
In New York City Afrikans were the majority of the house-servants in 1830, but by 1850 Irish house-servants outnumbered the entire Afrikan population there. — location: 1262 ^ref-37838
“Occupational exclusion of Blacks actually began before the Civil War. — location: 1267 ^ref-58873
The 1870 New Orleans city directory, Woodward pointed out, listed 3,460 Black carpenters, cigarmakers, painters, shoemakers, coopers, tailors, blacksmiths, and foundry hands. By 1904, less than 10 per cent of that number appeared even though the New Orleans population had increased by more than 50 per cent.” — location: 1270 ^ref-5017
Beneath the great events of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the genocidal restructuring of the oppressed Afrikan nation continued year after year. — location: 1272 ^ref-5298
The ideological head on this giant body, however, still bore the cramped, little features of the old artisan/farmer mentality of previous generations. When this giant was aroused by the capitalists’ cuts and kicks, its angry flailings knocked over troops and sent shock-waves of fear and uncertainty spreading through settler society. — location: 1287 ^ref-58175
What was the essence of the ideology of white labor? Petit-bourgeois annexationism. — location: 1291 ^ref-63530
the heart of national oppression is annexation of the territory of the oppressed nation(s) — location: 1292 ^ref-36838
their petit-bourgeois vision saw for themselves a special, better kind of wage-slavery. — location: 1295 ^ref-18076
Immigrant European workers proposed to enter an economy they hadn’t built, and “annex,” so as to speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created. — location: 1302 ^ref-22571
Since the ideology of white labor was annexationist and predatory, it was of necessity also rabidly pro-Empire and, despite angry outbursts, fundamentally servile towards the bourgeoisie. — location: 1305 ^ref-15009
When the famous Lewis & Clark expedition sent out by President Jefferson reached the Pacific in 1804, they arrived some sixteen years after the British established a major shipyard on Vancouver Bay — a shipyard manned by Chinese shipwrights and sailors. — location: 1311 ^ref-60598
that Chinese had been present at the founding of Los Angeles in 1781. — location: 1314 ^ref-7224
settler capitalists used Chinese labor to found virtually every aspect of their new Amerikan economy in this region. The Mexicano people, who were an outright majority in the area, couldn’t be used because the settlers were engaged in reducing their numbers so as to consolidate U.S. colonial conquest. — location: 1316 ^ref-37085
the Chinese were not only victims of Amerika, but their very presence was a part of a genocidal campaign to dismember and colonize the Mexican Nation. — location: 1322 ^ref-43046
decades later Mexicano labor — now driven from the land and reduced to colonial status — would be used to replace Chinese labor by the settlers. — location: 1323 ^ref-55280
The California textile mills were originally 70–80% Chinese, as were the garment factories. As late as 1880, Chinese made up 52% of all shoe makers and 44% of all brick makers in the State, as well as one-half of all factory workers in the city of San Francisco. — location: 1325 ^ref-50868
in the 1870s when California became the largest wheat growing State in the U.S. over 85% of the farm labor was Chinese. — location: 1332 ^ref-28803
their greatest single feat in building the economy of the West was also their undoing. Between 1865 and 1869 some 15,000 Chinese laborers carved the far Western stretch of the Transcontinental rail line out of the hostile Sierra and Rocky Mountain ranges. — location: 1339 ^ref-35554
its Dec. 12, 1856, issue that: “Hundreds of Chinamen have been slaughtered in cold blood in the last 5 years … the murder of Chinamen was of almost daily occurrence.” — location: 1348 ^ref-26924
new crowds of Europeans demanded the jobs that Chinese labor had created.[122] More than demanded, they were determined to “annex,” to seize by force of conquest, all that Chinese workers had in the West. — location: 1352 ^ref-30477
The decisive point of the Empire-wide campaign to plunder what the Chinese had built up in the West was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. — location: 1369 ^ref-17841
Now that the Chinese had built the economy of the Pacific Northwest, it was time for them to be stripped and driven out. — location: 1377 ^ref-17337
now the task for trade unionists was to finish the job — by eliminating all Chinese left in the U.S. within the year! — location: 1381 ^ref-5064
the Chinese who once built the foundation of the region’s economy were being driven out. — location: 1405 ^ref-34133
if the “respectable” Euro-Amerikan trade unionists and “Marxists” were scrabbling on their knees before the bourgeoisie along with known criminals such as Kearney, then they must have had much in common (is it so different today?). — location: 1431 ^ref-63474
Some Reasons For Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice, American Manhood vs. Asiatic Coolieism — Which Shall Survive? — location: 1436 ^ref-47087
in truth, settlers will eagerly swallow any falsehoods that seem to justify their continuing crimes against the oppressed. — location: 1443 ^ref-22892
All over the Empire immigrant European labor was being sent against the oppressed, to take what little we had. — location: 1448 ^ref-44427
in this scramble upwards those wretched immigrants shed, like an old suit of clothes, the proletarian identity and honor of their Old European past. Now they were true Amerikans, real settlers who had done their share of the killing, annexing, and looting. — location: 1453 ^ref-26692
the unique position of the Afrikan colony. Where the Chinese workers had been a national minority whose numbers at any one time probably never exceeded 100,000 (roughly two-thirds of the Chinese returned to Asia), Afrikans were an entire colonized Nation; on their National Territory in the South they numbered some 4 million. This was an opponent Euro-Amerikan labor had to engage more carefully. — location: 1462 ^ref-48744
The end of the Civil War and the end of chattel Afrikan slavery were not the resolution of bitter struggle in the colonial South, but merely the opening of a whole new stage. — location: 1468 ^ref-43149
It is more accurate to point out that the war was between two settler nations for ownership of the Afrikan colony — and ultimately for ownership of the continental Empire. — location: 1472 ^ref-46702
the protracted struggle for liberation by the colonized Afrikan Nation in the South. — location: 1473 ^ref-60598
The U.S. Empire faced the problem that its own split into two warring settler nations had provided the long-awaited strategic moment for the anti-colonial rising of the oppressed Afrikan Nation. Just as in the 1776 War of Independence, both capitalist factions in the Civil War hoped that Afrikans would remain docilely on the sidelines while Confederate Amerika and Union Amerika fought it out. — location: 1475 ^ref-4742
“Freedom for the slave was the logical result of a crazy attempt to wage war in the midst of four million black slaves, and trying the while sublimely to ignore the interests of those slaves in the outcome of the fighting. — location: 1479 ^ref-30007
It was the fugitive slave who made the slaveholders face the alternative of surrendering to the North, or to the Negroes.” — location: 1485 ^ref-21699
he said to me that the enlistment of Negro troops by the United States was the turning point of the rebellion; that it was the heaviest blow they ever received. He remarked that when the Negroes deserted their masters, and showed a general disposition to do so and join the forces of the United States, intelligent men everywhere saw that the matter was ended.” — location: 1487 ^ref-29787
“…the blacks must be enfranchised or they will be ready and willing to fight for a government of their own.” — location: 1495 ^ref-34921
All over their Nation, Afrikans had seized the land that they had sweated on. Literally millions of Afrikans were on strike in the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat. The Southern economy — now owned by Northern Capital — was struck dead in its tracks, unable to operate at all against the massive, stony resistance of the Afrikan masses. This was the greatest single labor strike in the entire history of U.S. Empire. — location: 1502 ^ref-9240
Afrikans refused to leave the lands that were now theirs, refused to work for their former slavemasters. — location: 1506 ^ref-28131
The U.S. Empire’s strategy for reenslaving their Afrikan colony involved two parts: (1) The military repression of the most organized and militant Afrikan communities. (2) Pacifying the Afrikan Nation by neocolonialism, using elements of the Afrikan petit bourgeoisie to lead their people into embracing U.S. citizenship as the answer to all problems. Instead of nationhood and liberation, the neocolonial agents told the masses that their democratic demands could be met by following the Northern settler capitalists (i.e. the Republican Party) and looking to the Federal government as the ultimate protector of Afrikan interests. — location: 1512 ^ref-36042
all those communities where the Afrikan masses had seized land in a revolutionary way came under Union Army attack. — location: 1518 ^ref-5615
In August 1865 around Hampton, Virginia, for example, Union cavalry were sent to dislodge 5,000 Afrikans from liberated land. — location: 1522 ^ref-59235
In the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast some 40,000 Afrikans were forced off the former plantations at bayonet point by Union soldiers. — location: 1524 ^ref-29417
The special danger to the U.S. Empire was that the grassroots political drive to have armed power over the land, to build economically self-sufficient regions under Afrikan control, would inevitably raise the question of Afrikan sovereignty. — location: 1526 ^ref-59663
a worried President Lincoln had written to one of his generals: “I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace unless we get rid of the Negroes. Certainly they cannot, if we don’t get rid of the Negroes whom we have armed and disciplined and who have fought with us, I believe, to the amount of 150,000 men. I believe it would be better to export them all…” — location: 1530 ^ref-39499
In New Orleans some members of the U.S. 74th Colored Infantry were arrested as “vagrants” the day after they were mustered out of the army. — location: 1535 ^ref-35037
end the 14th Amendment to the Constitution involuntarily made all Afrikans here paper U.S. citizens. This neocolonial strategy offered Afrikan colonial subjects the false democracy of paper citizenship in the Empire that oppressed them and held their Nation under armed occupation. — location: 1539 ^ref-2840
The U.S. Empire’s solution was to turn their Afrikan colony into a neocolony. This phase was called Black Reconstruction. Afrikans were promised democracy, human rights, self-government, and popular ownership of the land — but only as loyal “citizens” of the U.S. Empire. — location: 1546 ^ref-13404
members of the Assembly issued forth from the State House. About three-quarters of the crowd belonged to the African race. — location: 1553 ^ref-55571
What was most apparent about Black Reconstruction was its impossible contradictions. — location: 1566 ^ref-9595
This neocolonial bourgeois government of Black Reconstruction was doomed from its first day, since it promised that Afrikans would share the land and the power with settlers. — location: 1570 ^ref-20094
It is not our desire to be a discordant element in the community, or to unite the poor against the rich … The white man has the land, the black man has the labor, and labor is worth nothing without capital.” — location: 1577 ^ref-31412
This desire to be accepted by the planter elite was far too common. Henry Turner, the “most prominent” Afrikan politician in Georgia, opposed seizing tax-delinquent planter estates and campaigned to free Jefferson Davis from prison! — location: 1580 ^ref-41145
In town after town, county and parish one after another, then in State after State, Reconstruction was broken in bloody killings. — location: 1584 ^ref-49120
Although it took ten years for Reconstruction to be finally defeated (and another twenty years before its advances were all erased), the guerrilla war between planter and Afrikan forces was disastrously one-sided. The war could only have had one end, since Afrikans were disarmed militarily and politically. — location: 1589 ^ref-35302
(Afrikan Congressmen were elected from the South until 1895), — location: 1608 ^ref-966
Black Reconstruction not only bent over backwards to treat the entire white community, from planters to poor whites, with great respect, but introduced social reforms which gave a real boost upwards to poor whites. — location: 1613 ^ref-33865
the National Colored Labor Union. — location: 1663 ^ref-55922
Lewis Douglass (the son of Frederick Douglass) was repeatedly denied admission to the Typographers’ Union. A printer at the Government Printing Office, Douglass was not only denied by the local, but his appeals were turned down by two successive conventions of the Typographers’ Union — and even by the entire NLU convention. — location: 1690 ^ref-49384
Defeat, however, is not the same thing as failure; — location: 1742 ^ref-31735
The Eight-Hour campaign, the “Anti-Coolie” and anti-Afrikan campaigns were not separate and unconnected events, but linked chapters in the development of the same movement of white labor. — location: 1776 ^ref-51059
a middle position — between the colonial proletariat and the settler bourgeoisie — and it had its roots in the middle position of these white masses in the class structure. It is important to see why white labor could only unite on a petit-bourgeois and opportunistic basis. — location: 1796 ^ref-38124
White workingmen were sharply divided by nationality; (2) The upper stratum of workmen, which contained most of the native-born “Americans,” had a definite petit-bourgeois character; (3) Even the bottom, most exploited layer — who were largely new European immigrants — were politically retarded by the fact that their wages were considerably higher than in Old Europe; (4) Immigrant labor did not constitute a single, united proletarian class itself because they were part of separate national communities (German, Swedish, etc.) each headed by their own bourgeois leaders. — location: 1800 ^ref-18004
two factors which for a long time prevented the inevitable consequences of the capitalist system in America from being revealed in their true light. These were the access to ownership of cheap land and the flood of immigrants. — location: 1809 ^ref-25758
Amerika as it entered the industrial age was a literal Tower of Babel. In the hellish brutality of the mines, mills, and factories, the bourgeoisie had assembled gangs of workers from many different nations — torn away from their native lands, desperate, and usually not even speaking a common language with each other. — location: 1819 ^ref-34451
And as wretched and bitter as life in Amerika was for white workers on the bottom of settler society, it was still far, far better than life back in Old Europe. — location: 1826 ^ref-51155
one million Irish died from famine. Those who emigrated did so under sure sentence of death as the alternative. — location: 1834 ^ref-32202
the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. — location: 1841 ^ref-23320
during the mid-1800s the Irish workers of the North, under the leadership of the Church and other bourgeois elements, were surpassed by none in their vicious hatred of — location: 1855 ^ref-49405
Afrikans. — location: 1856 ^ref-14464
In 1841 some 70,000 Irish patriots signed a revolutionary petition to Irish-Amerikans: “Irishmen and Irishwomen, treat the colored people as your equals, as brethren. By all your memories of Ireland, continue to love Liberty — hate Slavery — Cling by the Abolitionists — and in America you will do honor to the name of Ireland.” — location: 1859 ^ref-28614
The genuine national feeling towards colonial Ireland was taken over by bourgeois elements, who shaped it in bourgeois nationalist directions, and who used the appeal of “the Cause” to promote their own political careers and pocketbooks. — location: 1870 ^ref-44530
Patricio Corps, the hundreds of Irish soldiers in the U.S. Army who broke with the Empire during the Mexican-Amerikan War. Revolted at the barbaric invasion of 1848, they defected to the Mexican forces and took up arms against the U.S. Empire. — location: 1873 ^ref-48280
The U.S. Empire, then, at the dawn of industrialization, had two broad strata of white wage labor: one a true Euro-Amerikan labor aristocracy, totally petit-bourgeois in life and outlook; the second, an “ethnic,” nationally-differentiated stratum of immigrant Europeans and poor whites of the defeated Confederacy, — location: 1881 ^ref-8468
Empire. Once nationally oppressed labor was under the bourgeoisie’s brutal thumb, then white wage labor could be put into its “proper” place. — location: 1884 ^ref-48486
Trade unionism cannot bridge the gap between oppressor and oppressed nations. — location: 1894 ^ref-52817
unionism, political movements, etc. inescapably have a national character. — location: 1895 ^ref-62127
organization of nationally oppressed workers into or allied with the trade unions of the settler masses was only an effort to control and divide us. — location: 1896 ^ref-2198
unity of the settler masses is counter-revolutionary, in that the various privileged strata of the white masses can only find common ground in petty self-interest and loyalty to settler hegemony. — location: 1898 ^ref-9118
Class consciousness lives in the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed — or dies in the poisonous little privileges so eagerly sought by the settler servants of the bourgeoisie. — location: 1908 ^ref-37914
On the other hand, there is the tendency of the bourgeois and the opportunists to convert a handful of very rich and privileged nations into “eternal” parasites on the body of mankind, to “rest on the laurels” of the exploitation of Negroes, Indians, etc., keeping them in subjection with the aid of the excellent weapons of extermination provided by modern militarism. On the other hand, there is the tendency of the masses, who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars, to cast off this yoke and to overthrow the bourgeoisie. It is in the struggle between these two tendencies that the history of the labor movement will now inevitably develop. — location: 1911 ^ref-57558
Communists have never believed that the working class was some “holy,” religious object that must be enshrined away from scientific investigation. — location: 1926 ^ref-46721
This tossing of a few crumbs to the British workers resulted in a growing ideological stagnation, conservatism, and national chauvinism. Engels was outraged and disgusted, particularly at the corrupt spectacle of the British workers slavishly echoing their bourgeoisie as to their alleged “right” to exploit the colonial world “…There is no workers’ party here … and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.” — location: 1937 ^ref-26999
in the early stages of capitalist development the bourgeoisie exploited the English workers to the point of early death. Workers, women and children in particular, were overworked and starved as disposable and easily replaced objects. — location: 1948 ^ref-20121
By 1875 both the common wages and the cost of living were up to 15 shillings per week — an event that historian Arnold Toynbee points to as the first time in British capitalist history that unskilled laborers earned enough to survive. — location: 1953 ^ref-25640
Engels divides the workers into two groups — the “privileged minority” of the labor aristocrats, and the “great mass” of common wage labor. — location: 1962 ^ref-63158
With the coming of imperialism and the tremendous rise of the most modern colonial empires, the trend of social bribery of the working classes spread from England to France, Germany, Belgium, etc. Between the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the eve of World War I in 1913, real per capita income in both England and Germany doubled. — location: 1975 ^ref-15356
“The class of those who own nothing but do not labor either is incapable of overthrowing the exploiters. — location: 1979 ^ref-6250
Lenin remarked that in any case the future of the world would be decided by the fact that the oppressed nations constitute the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. — location: 2012 ^ref-63257
Even as modern industrialization and the Northern factory boom were in full swing, it was still true that the “superprofits” wrung from the oppressed nations (plus those wrung from imported labor from Asia) were the foundations of the Empire. Everything “American” was built up on top of their continuing oppression. — location: 2025 ^ref-17955
While roughly 80% of all skilled workers in the South had been Afrikan in 1868, by 1900 those proportions had been reversed. — location: 2035 ^ref-1330
The settler masses of the South, in the tradition of the slave patrols, the Confederate Army, and the KKK, were still in the main the loyal garrison over occupied New Afrika. — location: 2042 ^ref-41312
agricultural area of Southern California the majority of farm labor was Chicano-Mexicano. — location: 2055 ^ref-62616
the settler economy in the Southwest even in the imperialist era was still concentrated in the conquest and looting stage. Here the conquered Chicano-Mexicanos were necessary to the settlers as ranch labor and domestic labor (just as in the rural South with Afrikans). — location: 2060 ^ref-2470
Once driven out of much of the West by settler terrorism, Mexicanos were now being brought back to their own national land as “immigrant” or “contract” labor. Mexicanos became 60% of the miners, 80% of the agricultural workers, and 90% of the railroad laborers in the West. — location: 2067 ^ref-1957
sun.” As late as the 1920s Afrikan farm laborers in the South earned 75 cents per day when employed. For both Afrikans and Mexicanos at the turn of the century, even in industry and mining it was common to earn one-half of “white man’s pay.” — location: 2075 ^ref-35725
the “privileged stratum” of Euro-Amerikan labor aristocrats (skilled workers, foremen, office staff). They usually earned $15–20 per week, with the majority being homeowners and voting citizens of the Empire. This top stratum dominated the trade unions and the socialist organizations, consistently supporting the U.S. Empire. — location: 2080 ^ref-7114
on April 25, 1898, the U.S. declared war on Spain while moving to invade Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. It was just in the nick of time as far as U.S. Imperialism was concerned. — location: 2104 ^ref-10924
Under the pretext of being “allies” of the Filipinos, U.S. troops landed and joined the siege of the Spanish remnants. It is a fact that in the siege the Filipino patriots held 15½ miles of the lines facing the Spanish positions, while the U.S. troops held only a token 600 yards of front line.[166] More and more U.S. troops arrived, even after the hopeless Spanish surrendered on Dec. 10, 1898. Finally, on Feb. 4, 1899, the reinforced U.S. “allies” moved to wipe out the Filipino forces, even ordering that no truces or ceasefires be accepted. — location: 2109 ^ref-19023
The same genocidal “Population Regroupment” strategy (as the CIA calls it today) that settlers first used against the Indian nations was revived in the Philippines — and would be used again in Vietnam in our times. The general outlines of U.S. strategy called for destroying all organized social and economic life in guerrilla areas. Villages would be burned down, crops and livestock destroyed, diseases spread, the People killed or forced to evacuate as refugees. Large areas were declared as “free fire zones” in which all Filipinos were to be killed on sight. — location: 2121 ^ref-24352
Filipinos would be subjected to the “watercure” (having salt water pumped into their stomachs under pressure). — location: 2128 ^ref-50340
In Samar province, where the patriotic resistance to the U.S. invaders was extremely persistent, U.S. Gen. Jacob Smith ordered his troops to shoot every Filipino man, woman or child they could find “over ten” — location: 2135 ^ref-4297
Anti-Imperialist League. The League had over 40,000 members in some forty chapters, — location: 2142 ^ref-56199
“We need not praise the Filipinos as in every way the equals of the ‘embattled farmers’ of Lexington and Concord … but there is an abundance of testimony, some of it unwilling, that the Filipinos are fully the equals, and even the superiors, of the Cubans and Mexicans.” — location: 2156 ^ref-64953
They believed, incorrectly, that the settler economy could be sustained without continuing Amerika’s history of conquest and annexation. — location: 2176 ^ref-15739
the inseverable bond between imperialism and the trusts, and, therefore, between imperialism and the foundations of capitalism, while it shrank from joining forces engendered by large scale capitalism and its development — it remained a ‘pious wish’.” — location: 2179 ^ref-57792
“The white people dare not revolt so long as they can be intimidated by the fear of the Negro vote.”[177] — location: 2220 ^ref-38344
“Populism, however, was a movement of the farm-owning proprietors, not property-less workers. It attempted to reassert local community control against the economic and political centralization of corporate capital…”[178] — location: 2231 ^ref-51990
their limitation — and their special importance — is that they represented the eruption of class contradictions within the camp of the enemy. — location: 2234 ^ref-40416
If we become confused about their basic nature, we damage our strategic self-reliance. If, like the Vietnamese comrades, we can make these contradictions serve us, we will have seized an essential element of revolution. — location: 2236 ^ref-36981
Amerikan mercenaries, engineers, and technologies played a major role in the European exploitation of South Afrika — location: 2243 ^ref-8423
British South Africa Corporation. By 1896 one-half of all the mines were run by Euro-Amerikan mine experts. Much of the equipment, as well, came from the U.S. Empire. — location: 2247 ^ref-17438
The Boer society stressed settler family agriculture, and opposed any proletarianization of the Afrikan peoples — while it was only with mass, enforced integration of Afrikan labor into the corporate economy that the Western imperialists could fully exploit South Afrika. — location: 2254 ^ref-18463
There was so much popular sympathy for the Boer settlers among the U.S. settlers that the 1900 Democratic Party platform saluted: “…the heroic Burghers in their unequal struggle to maintain their liberty and independence.”[182] — location: 2271 ^ref-27541
Imperialism knows no gratitude, not even towards its servants. — location: 2293 ^ref-51886
The white “communists” marched through the streets with banners reading “Workers of the World Fight and Unite for a White South Africa!”[188] — location: 2299 ^ref-10424
The “Color Bar” act was passed, which legally enforced the settler monopoly on highly-paid wage labor. Toil was now to be reserved for the Afrikan proletariat. “Afrikaner” wage labor had stabilized its position as a subsidized, non-exploited aristocracy of labor. — location: 2308 ^ref-50634
The main function of the “Afrikaner” masses was no longer to produce and support society, but only to serve as the social base for the occupation garrison that imperialism needed to hold down the colonial peoples. — location: 2310 ^ref-28766
The expansion of the U.S. Empire into a worldwide Power tried to provide those. Yet the new industrial Empire also needed something just as essential — an industrial proletariat. The key to the even greater army of wage-slaves was another flood of emigration from Old Europe. This time from Southern and Eastern Europe: Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Serbs, Hungarians, Finns, Jews, Russians, — location: 2324 ^ref-50766
1880s to the beginning of the First World War some 15 millions of these new emigrants arrived — location: 2327 ^ref-61530
industrial proletariat — the bottom, most exploited foundation of white wage labor — was nationally distinct. — location: 2348 ^ref-36456
12 cents per hour. A physician, Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh, wrote: “A considerable number of boys and girls die within the first two or three years after starting work … 36 out of every 100 of all men and women who work in the mills die before reaching the age of 25.” — location: 2366 ^ref-32857
In South Works nearly one-quarter of the new immigrant steelworkers were injured or killed on the job each year. — location: 2377 ^ref-17340
In the U.S. Empire nationality differences have always been disguised as “racial” differences (so that the Euro-Amerikan settlers can maintain the fiction that theirs is the only real nation). The Eastern and Southern European national minorities were widely defined as non-white, as members of genetically different (and backward) races from the “white” race of Anglo-Saxons. This pseudo-scientific, racist categorizing only continued an ideological characteristic of European capitalist civilization. The Euro-Amerikans have always justified their conquest and exploitation of other nationalities by depicting them as racially different. This old tactic was here applied even to other Europeans. — location: 2387 ^ref-8417
as double failures in the “survival of the fittest,” these new European immigrants were only capable of being industrial slaves. — location: 2394 ^ref-52258
Scientists were prominent in the new campaign. Professor E.A. Hooton of Harvard University claimed that there were actually nine different “races” in Europe, each with different mental abilities and habits. — location: 2400 ^ref-38675
The bourgeoisie had a dual attitude of fearing these new proletarians during moments of unrest and eagerly encouraging their influx when the economy was booming. — location: 2409 ^ref-12685
their possible corruption into Amerikan citizens would make them more loyal to U.S. Imperialism. — location: 2421 ^ref-3901
settler trade unions themselves started picturing these new proletarians as the enemy. — location: 2442 ^ref-35092
The U.S. Empire’s policy of relegating the work of “supporting society,” of carrying out the tasks of the proletariat, to oppressed workers of other nationalities, was thus continued in a more complex way into the 20th century. — location: 2462 ^ref-13030
We can sum up the shortcomings by saying that they flirted with socialism — but in the end preferred settlerism. — location: 2477 ^ref-4664
Unlike the restrictive craft unions of the AFL, the IWW organized on a class basis. — location: 2480 ^ref-51819
The IWW urged workers to reject any loyalty to the U.S. Unlike the majority of Euro-Amerikan “Socialists,” the IWW linked “American” nationalism with the bourgeois culture of lynch mob patriotism. — location: 2490 ^ref-6611
by 1920 the IWW had declined sharply. Not from failure in an organizational sense, but from both it and the strata that it represented having reached the limits of their political consciousness. — location: 2514 ^ref-42241
The Euro-Amerikan aristocracy of labor and its AFL unions viciously fought this upsurge from below. — location: 2520 ^ref-2147
The European immigrants represented perhaps only one-seventh of the white population, and were greatly outnumbered. — location: 2525 ^ref-51692
If the IWW had fought colonialism and national oppression, it would have lost most of its white support. What it did instead — laying out a path that the CIO would follow in the 1930s — was to convince some white workers that their immediate self-interest called for a limited, tactical cooperation with the colonial proletariats. — location: 2531 ^ref-21096
they were united by two things: their exploited state as “foreign” proletarians and their desire to achieve a better life in Amerika. — location: 2536 ^ref-40329
It was a public, fully legal union open to all. It was, therefore, just as dependent upon bourgeois legality and government toleration as the AFL. The IWW could be very strong against local employers or even the municipal government; against the imperialist state it dared only to submit in unhappy confusion. — location: 2542 ^ref-22665
in a war for expanding empires it was the absolute duty of all oppressor nation revolutionaries to oppose the aggression of their own empire, to work for the defeat of their own bourgeoisie, and for the liberation of the oppressed nations. This is the issue that created the international communist movement of the 20th century. On this most important struggle the IWW was revealed as being immature and lacking as a revolutionary organization. — location: 2546 ^ref-24931
since the IWW was a totally legal and public union, it was totally unable to withstand any major government repression. — location: 2554 ^ref-49526
They never organized to oppose U.S. imperialism because that’s not what even the immigrant proletarian masses wanted — they wanted militant struggle to reach some “social justice” for themselves. — location: 2564 ^ref-29160
“The point may be made here, that we should all be interested in stopping the production of war munitions. Yes, of course, but that’s only a dream … so the only thing the workers in these factories can do is to try to improve their condition…”[217] — location: 2573 ^ref-48679
Far from fighting U.S. imperialism, the IWW was spreading defeatism among the workers and urging them to concentrate only on getting a bigger bribe out of the imperialist superprofits. — location: 2577 ^ref-44160
The IWW’s pathetic efforts to avoid antagonizing the bourgeoisie did them little good. The U.S. Empire tired of these pests, viewing the militant organization of immigrant labor as dangerous. Finally cranking its police machinery up, the imperialist state proceeded to smash the defenseless IWW clear into virtual non-existence. — location: 2582 ^ref-53061
July 1918, 101 IWW leaders past and present were convicted in Chicago Federal Court of sabotaging the Imperialist War effort in a rigged trial — location: 2586 ^ref-48144
The IWW never recovered from these blows, and from 1917 on quickly declined. — location: 2596 ^ref-36400
their inability to confront the settleristic ambitions within themselves reduced these sparks of real class consciousness to vague sentiments and limited economic deals. — location: 2603 ^ref-39089
that the IWW’s goal was to control colonial labor for the benefit of white workers — and that Afrikans were viewed as “dangerous” if not controlled. — location: 2609 ^ref-53548
while the IWW wanted our cooperation, they did not want the hated Japanese workers inside the IWW. In order to keep amicable relations with the mass of white supremacist settlers in the West, the IWW limited their relationship to us. — location: 2641 ^ref-55127
while the Japanese laborers lived, and worked, and went out on strike with the others, that the IWW statement separates “the Japanese” from “the strikers.”[226] — location: 2658 ^ref-14385
In the South the Afrikan proletariat was the bedrock of everything. The IWW experience there highlights the strategic limitations of its political line. — location: 2665 ^ref-17961
The IWW’s refusal to recognize colonial oppression or the exact nature of the imperialist dictatorship over the occupied South, meant that it completely misled the strike. — location: 2682 ^ref-50747
but the defeat was due to the incredibly bad leadership and the betrayal by the better-paid settler workers. — location: 2720 ^ref-64969
While the treachery of the labor aristocracy was very evident in this defeat, the most important event took place after the strike. — location: 2727 ^ref-11192
The bourgeoisie was guiding the white workers in this. Company officials passed the word that: “Niggers did it.” In Pittsburgh one mill boss announced: “The Nigger saved the day for us.” — location: 2730 ^ref-33253
They were taken without food or water to Pittsburgh, unloaded under guard behind barbed wire, and told that they were to work at the mills. Seeing that a strike was going on, many of them wanted to quit. The guards told them that any Afrikans attempting to leave would be shot down. — location: 2738 ^ref-4323
injured. The hand of the capitalists was evident when the Chicago Tribune editorially praised the white attackers, and told its readers that Afrikans were “happiest when the white race asserts its superiority.”[231] — location: 2751 ^ref-23596
organized Euro-Amerikan workers as the social troops of one faction or another of the imperialists. — location: 2753 ^ref-17475
The authorities did not move to “restore order,” incidentally, until after Afrikan World War I vets broke into the 8th Illinois Infantry Armory, and armed themselves with rifles to take care of the white mobs.[233] — location: 2766 ^ref-15303
It was typical settleristic thinking to make Afrikans responsible for the failure of a white strike, which was never theirs in the first place. — location: 2771 ^ref-23081
Revolutionary fervor, as distinct from economic activity, declines sharply among them from this point on. — location: 2808 ^ref-35525
the importation of hundreds of thousands (soon to be millions) of Mexicano, Afrikan, Puerto Rican, and other colonial workers into Northern industry gave the Americanized Europeans someone to step up on in his climb into settlerism. — location: 2824 ^ref-30353
Mexicanos and Afrikans made up perhaps 25% of the workers in Indiana and Illinois by 1925. They were the bottom of the labor there, making up for the immigrant European who had moved up or left for better things. — location: 2826 ^ref-47316
Successful imperialist war was the key to Americanization. — location: 2841 ^ref-50759
Never again would white labor be anti-Amerikan and anti-capitalist. Although it would organize itself millions strong into giant unions and wage militant economic campaigns, white labor from that time on would be branded by its servile patriotism to the U.S. Empire. — location: 2845 ^ref-10679
material conditions, including the relation to production, shape and reshape all classes and strata. These classes and strata then express characteristic political consciousness, characteristic roles in the class struggle. — location: 2867 ^ref-48635
The political unification of the white workers thus had its material roots in the enforced unification of labor in the modern factory. — location: 2888 ^ref-5655
The increasing centralization of monopoly capitalism repeated aspects of feudalism on a higher level. — location: 2900 ^ref-33873
During the 1920s it was not unusual for the persistent speed-up by management to double production per worker, even without taking mechanization into account. — location: 2902 ^ref-54734
Ford, perhaps the most extreme of the industrial despots, every tenth employee was also a company spy. Workers overheard making resentful remarks would be beaten up right on the production line — location: 2903 ^ref-20831
settler workers would not passively accept being reduced to a colonial wage. — location: 2912 ^ref-56224
The great ’30s labor revolt was far more than just a series of factory disputes over wages. It was a historic social movement for democratic rights for the settler proletariat. Typically, these workers ended industrial serfdom. They won the right to maintain class organizations, to expect steady improvements in life, to express their work grievances, to accumulate some small property, and to have a small voice in the local politics of their Empire. — location: 2955 ^ref-31044
the Euro-Amerikan proletariat would have the life they expected as settlers. That is, a freer and more prosperous life than any proletariat in history has ever had. — location: 2960 ^ref-4778
it was only with this shake-up, these modernizing reforms, and the homogenized unity of the settler masses that U.S. Imperialism could gamble everything on solving its problems through world domination. — location: 2972 ^ref-64216
Millions of settlers believed that only an end to traditional capitalism could make things run again. The new answer was to raise up the U.S. government as the coordinator and regulator of all major industries. — location: 2997 ^ref-3278
With the conspiracy shot down and keeping in mind the high position of the inept conspirators, the Roosevelt Administration let the matter just fade out of the headlines. — location: 3013 ^ref-43901
A significant factor in the success of the 1930s union organizing drives was the U.S. government’s refusal to use armed repression against it. No US. armed repression against Euro-Amerikan workers took place from January 1933 (when Roosevelt took office) until the June 1941 North American Aviation strike in California. — location: 3046 ^ref-37440
compare the ’30s to earlier periods. Whenever popular struggles against business grew too strong to be put down by local police, then the government would send in the National Guard or U.S. Army. Armed repression was the drastic but brutally decisive weapon used by the bourgeoisie. — location: 3079 ^ref-48892
necessary. All during the 1930s, for example, they directed an ever-increasing offensive against the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. Unlike the settler workers, the liberation struggle of Puerto Rico was not seeking the reform of the U.S. Empire but its ouster from their nation. The speed with which the nationalist fervor was spreading through the Puerto Rican masses alarmed U.S. Imperialism. — location: 3115 ^ref-51881
The goal of — location: 3131 ^ref-22012
paralyzing the pro-Independence forces through terrorism was obvious. — location: 3132 ^ref-37318
The U.S. government used violent terror against the Puerto Rican people and mass repression against the Mexicano people during the 1930s. But it did nothing like that to stop Euro-Amerikan workers because it didn’t have to. The settler working class wasn’t going anywhere. — location: 3137 ^ref-22960
The Euro-Amerikan proletariat during the ’30s had broken out of industrial confinement, reaching for freedoms and a material style of life no modern proletariat had ever achieved. The immense battles that followed obscured the nature of the victory. The victory they gained was the firm positioning of the Euro-Amerikan working class in the settler ranks, reestablishing the rights of all Europeans here to share the privileges of the oppressor nation. — location: 3157 ^ref-22699
the settler tradition, sharing the Amerikan pie with more European reinforcements so that the Empire could be strengthened. — location: 3161 ^ref-31326
This formula had partially broken down during the transition from the Amerika of the Frontier to the Industrial Amerika. It was the brilliant accomplishment of the New Deal to mend this break. — location: 3161 ^ref-41540
colonial proletarians could only be controlled by disorganizing them — separating their economic struggles from the national struggles of their peoples, separating them from other Third World proletarians around the world, absorbing them as “brothers” of settler unionism, and placing them under the leadership of the Euro-Amerikan labor aristocracy. — location: 3189 ^ref-20245
I got the colored pastors to send colored men whom they could guarantee would not organize and were not bolsheviks.” — location: 3222 ^ref-1258
Afrikans were not allowed to work on the production lines, and were segregated in foundry work, painting, as janitors, drivers, and other “service” jobs. They earned 35–38 cents per hour, which was one-half of the pay of the Euro-Amerikan production line workers. This was true at Packard, at GM, and many other companies. — location: 3257 ^ref-2923
The new union now told the Afrikan workers that the contract made it illegal for them to move up beyond being janitors or foundry workers. — location: 3312 ^ref-60477
The general colonial labor policy of the U.S. Empire has been to strike a balance between the need to exploit colonial labor and the safeguard of keeping the keys to modern industry and technology out of colonial hands. — location: 3337 ^ref-31052
The contradiction between the decision to stabilize the Empire by giving more privilege to settler workers (ultimately by deproletarianizing them) and the need to limit the role of Afrikan labor was just emerging in the early 20th century. — location: 3340 ^ref-36827
In spite of the huge numbers of men in service, second only to Russia among the Allies, only a limited number of them saw combat … For the vast majority of Americans it was a good war, if there can be such a thing. — location: 3402 ^ref-47648
The millions of civilians who died from bombing raids, disease, and famine in war-torn Europe, Asia, North Afrika, and the Middle East have never been fully counted. The full death toll is often put at an unimaginable 60 million lives. Amerika was spared all this, and emerged triumphant at the war’s end with citizenry, colonies, and industry completely intact. — location: 3410 ^ref-28240
More Russian soldiers died in the Battle of Stalingrad alone than — location: 3414 ^ref-2903
total U.S. military casualties for the whole war. — location: 3414 ^ref-47634
The general prosperity that characterized Amerikan society all the way up to the 1970s began right there, in the war economy of WWII. — location: 3417 ^ref-55384
“Production for civilian use, while diminishing, remained so high that Americans knew no serious deprivations … At the peak of the war effort in 1944, the total of all goods and services available to civilians was actually larger than it had been in 1940.” — location: 3422 ^ref-34041
That same year Macys department store in New York City had a sale on Pearl Harbor Day — location: 3427 ^ref-28708
Once again, the exceptional life of settler Amerika was renewed by war and conquest. This is the mechanism within each Amerikan cycle of internal conflict and reform. — location: 3429 ^ref-26400
“The dictatorships FRANKLY DECLARE that if they win THEY will do as the democracies HAVE DONE in the past. “The democracies as frankly declare that IF they win they will CONTINUE to do as they HAVE BEEN doing.” — location: 3452 ^ref-43417
The “War to Save Democracy” was an obvious lie to those who had none, whose nations were enslaved by U.S. imperialism. — location: 3456 ^ref-42055
Afrikan GIs would loudly root for the Japanese “zero” — location: 3469 ^ref-29002
fighters overhead in the aerial dogfights against U.S. settler aviators. — location: 3469 ^ref-54254
To the oppressed masses of the U.S., British, Dutch, French, German, and other Western Empires, this war was not their war. — location: 3474 ^ref-47892
the two main arguments for the war were: (1) It was a war for European freedom, to defeat the Nazis and save the Soviet Union. (2) It was a just war of self-defense after the U.S. military was attacked by the Japanese Empire at Pearl Harbor — location: 3476 ^ref-789
German fascism was defeated by the Russian people. — location: 3479 ^ref-26787
As late as April 1943, Soviet forces were fighting 185 Nazi divisions while the U.S. and British Empires were together fighting 6. — location: 3481 ^ref-40699
the Russian military lost 6 million troops fighting Germany, while the U.S. lost 160,000. — location: 3483 ^ref-37971
Those U.S. and British divisions faced a vastly inferior German opposition (only 40% as large as the Allied force), because the bulk of Hitler’s forces were tied up with the main war front against Russia. — location: 3488 ^ref-2142
Allies kept paratroop divisions in England, ready to be air-dropped into Berlin if Russia finished off the Nazis before Allied armies — location: 3490 ^ref-44903
could even get into Germany. — location: 3491 ^ref-53354
U.S. imperialism’s main concern was not to “liberate” anyone, but to dominate as much of Europe as it could once the Russian people had, at such terrible cost, defeated Hitler. — location: 3491 ^ref-26845
As the war approached, on April 23, 1939, the U.S. State Dept. announced that quotas were so “filled” that Jewish immigration was to be halted except for special cases. — location: 3497 ^ref-47780
the Roosevelt Administration announced that no tourist visas to Amerika would be issued to German Jews — only those Germans with “Aryan” passports could greet the Statue of Liberty. — location: 3501 ^ref-25148
fascists). Although this proved the U.S. military’s ability to strike at the Nazi death camps, U.S. imperialism still refused to interfere — location: 3505 ^ref-60027
And this was when the Nazis were feverishly slaughtering as many as possible — at Auschwitz as many as 24,000 per day! — location: 3506 ^ref-18602
On October 20, 1942, the U.S. Embassy in London complained to Washington that Ford was using his plants in Switzerland to repair 2,000 German Army trucks. — location: 3510 ^ref-4424
GM President William Knudson told a press conference on October 6, 1933, that Nazism was “the miracle of the 20th century.” — location: 3512 ^ref-46584
Even after the European war broke out in 1939, Roosevelt privately urged Mussolini to be neutral and try to mediate a British-German detente. — location: 3516 ^ref-41381
In Italy, Greece, and other nations the “liberating” U.S.-British forces put the local fascists back into power while savagely repressing the anti-fascist guerrillas who had fought them. — location: 3522 ^ref-46646
The Allies invaded already-liberated Greece in order to crush the independent government; Greece was “liberated” from democracy and returned to being a fascist neocolony of Britain and the U.S. — location: 3524 ^ref-32696
The Allies killed more Greek workers and peasants than the Germans had. — location: 3527 ^ref-29246
the question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first — location: 3538 ^ref-55257
shot…” — location: 3539 ^ref-36554
The New Deal wanted and expected not only an all-out war for the Pacific, but a “surprise” Japanese attack as well. Their only disappointment on Dec. 7, 1941, was that instead of concentrating on the Philippines, the Japanese military struck first at Hawaii. There was no question of “self-defense” there. — location: 3548 ^ref-14060
To President Roosevelt the prize was worth the risks. China was his first goal, just as it was for Japanese imperialism. A friend of the President recalls: “At the White House, the making of FDR’s China policy was almost as great a secret as the atom bomb.” — location: 3551 ^ref-26694
that if China were nominally free but under U.S. hegemony (via the Kuomintang regime), it could be the center for an Amerikan takeover of all Asia. [FDR was always appreciative of China’s potential value because of his family’s direct connection. Roosevelt often mentioned his family’s long “friendship” with China — on his mother’s side, the Delano family fortune was made through a leading role in the opium trade in 19th century China.] — location: 3554 ^ref-37347
The New Deal was prepared to do whatever necessary to modernize and stabilize U.S. imperialism’s home base, because it was playing for the biggest stakes in the world. In the Pittsburgh Courier’s words: “The stake is the right to EXPLOIT the darker peoples of the world.” — location: 3568 ^ref-28991
the New Deal’s policy was not only to help subsidize the war effort out of the misery of the Puerto Rican people, but to use starvation to beat them into political submission. — location: 3593 ^ref-1136
In desperately poor Puerto Rico the local taxes collected by the imperialist occupation forces were used for their own military needs rather than clinics or food. This policy was actually quite common for WWII: for example, both the Nazi and Japanese armies also forced the local inhabitants in conquered areas to support military construction for — location: 3600 ^ref-52006
them. — location: 3602 ^ref-8669
some 110,000 of us were forcibly “relocated” into concentration camps by the U.S. government in 1942. — location: 3626 ^ref-13633
The Federal Reserve Bank loosely estimated the direct property loss alone at $400 million 1942 dollars.[313] The real loss was in the many billions — and in lives. — location: 3640 ^ref-63561
The U.S. government calculated that just in the three Spring months of 1943 alone, some 2.5 million man hours of industrial production were lost in “hate strikes.” — location: 3671 ^ref-52785
and one Afrikan who was pulled off had both eyes cut out. Finally, the social chaos — and the intensely angry wave of anti-U.S. feeling in Mexico — grew so large that the U.S. military ordered their troops to stop. — location: 3681 ^ref-3099
In Mao Zedong’s famous analogy, the guerrillas in People’s War are “fish” while the masses are the “sea” that both sustains and conceals them. Population regroupment (in the CIA’s terminology) strategy seeks to dry up that “sea” by literally uprooting the masses and disrupting the whole social fabric of the oppressed nation. — location: 4112 ^ref-56785
Africans were the targets of imperialist New Deal policy. — location: 4137 ^ref-58208
increasingly the Afrikan masses were involuntarily dispersed, scattered into the refugee camps of the Northern ghettoes, removed from established positions in industries and trades that were an irreplaceable part of the modern Nation. It was not just a matter of dollars, important as income is to the oppressed; what was happening ravaged the national culture. The “sea” of Afrikan society was stricken at its material base. — location: 4173 ^ref-14521
the essence of neocolonialism is an outward form of national self-determination and popular democracy concealing a submissive relationship with imperialism on the part of the new bourgeois forces. — location: 4183 ^ref-11045
“imperialism is quite prepared to change both its men and its tactics in order to perpetuate itself … it will kill its own puppets when they no longer serve its purposes. If need be, it will even create a kind of socialism, which people may soon start calling ‘neo-socialism.’” — location: 4374 ^ref-28348
The U.S. Navy instituted a new policy in its shipyards wherein all “Negro” workers would have to wear an arm badge with a big letter “N”. — location: 4478 ^ref-7500
The flashy production of robots and automation, of oppressor nation technicians and workers drawing advanced wages, draws sustenance from the ordinary physical labor and skills of the Mexicano proletariat. “Nations become almost as classes.”[431] — location: 5242 ^ref-36209
Within the unoccupied zone the area of Western Sinaloa alone supplies some 50% of all winter vegetables consumed in the U.S. Thousands of peasants have been displaced, driven off traditional lands to make way for the large plantations (and their gunmen) that are neocolonial agents for the U.S. supermarket chains. — location: 5255 ^ref-13858
the peculiar chemical-mechanized U.S. agriculture is itself highly specialized, primarily oriented around the subsidized mass production of feed grains. Two-thirds of all U.S. agricultural exports are feed grains used in raising livestock. Most of these exports are to the industrial powers — Europe, Japan, and the USSR — while much of the $16 billion in foodstuffs the U.S. imports each year is from the Third World. In Mexico the neocolonial economy imports grain from the U.S. to raise meat for the upper and middle classes, while exporting significant amounts of its own food productivity.[434] — location: 5273 ^ref-26191
all over the Third World the oppressed not only supply U.S. imperialism with raw materials, but increasingly labor in both the factories and “the factories in the fields” to send the U.S. a growing stream of consumer and industrial products, and even foodstuffs. The world plantation is still very real in the age of the computer. We say that the first makes the second possible. — location: 5278 ^ref-44451
graduate students are essential labor in university laboratories, much research vital to the national interest would ‘grind to a halt,’ — location: 5301 ^ref-64552
Even when it comes to high technology, it turns out that part of the U.S. Empire’s superiority comes from looting the Third World. — location: 5310 ^ref-60059
Technical education becomes only a step to swell the numbers of Euro-Amerikan businessmen, while the Third World is drained of educated men and women to do essential parts of the actual technological work for the U.S. Empire. — location: 5321 ^ref-31210
As Lenin pointed out: “The class of those who own nothing but do not labor either is incapable of overthrowing the exploiters. Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, has the power to bring about a successful social revolution.” The meaning of this for us is obvious. — location: 5361 ^ref-47237
Just as in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, the U.S. oppressor nation is again a non-proletarian society that is purely capitalistic in character. — location: 5402 ^ref-35914
25% of Euro-Amerikan women employed as clerical-sales personnel are married to men who are managers or professionals. 17% of the wage-employed wives of male managers (includes small retail businesses) are blue-collar workers.[447] — location: 5425 ^ref-45446
The masses share a way of life that apes the bourgeoisie, dominated by a decadent preoccupation with private consumption. — location: 5475 ^ref-21793
Euro-Amerikan life is no longer centered around production but around consumption. This is the near-final stage of decadence. — location: 5509 ^ref-46478
The most exploited Euro-Amerikan workers live whole levels above the standard of the world proletariat, since they may be on the bottom, but they are on the bottom of a privileged nation of oppressors. Nation is the dominant factor, modifying class relations. — location: 5535 ^ref-41237
the mass, extra-proletarian privileges of Euro-Amerikans have structurally insulated them within their exceptional way of life. “Problems” like high mortgage rates for homes are problems of a particular way of life. — location: 5538 ^ref-29675
While the Women’s Movement both expressed anger at sexism and greatly improved Euro-Amerikan women’s lives, it was largely co-opted as a political movement by imperialism at its birth. — location: 5547 ^ref-57111
at a time when the Empire had decided that Afrikans were again too rebellious to be employed in any great numbers in key industrial, commercial, and professional institutions, Euro-Amerikan women were recruited to stand by their men in filling up the jobs. “Equal Opportunity” in medical schools, law schools, business, etc. meant a large influx of Euro-Amerikan women — and few Afrikans. — location: 5552 ^ref-8074
the percentage of women in these restricted crafts rose at a rate 3 times that for Third World workers. This was like a new wave of European immigration to reinforce the settler hold on their job market. — location: 5555 ^ref-29313
“Behind just about every successful woman I know with a public as well as a private life there is another woman. The dirty little secret is, all but one of the female leaders interviewed here has household help…” — location: 5560 ^ref-5065
in 1967, when imperialism ran aground on the Vietnamese Revolution. For the first time since World War II rapid inflation was eating at the upward spiral of Euro-Amerikan income. — location: 5568 ^ref-21788
The Euro-Amerikan family continued its way of life by becoming a two-wage-earner family (at a time when Afrikan proletarian families, for example, were increasingly becoming the reverse). — location: 5571 ^ref-22737
the long-range trends of world polarization and internationalization mean that all oppressor nation societies have become more alike and will become even more so. — location: 5583 ^ref-25329
In Amerika this bribery, this bourgeoisification, took place within the context of a settler society, which has its own history, culture, and traditions — based not on class struggle, but on their material role as the privileged garrison over the continental Empire. — location: 5584 ^ref-17742
intra-oppressor class distinctions have always been muted on the mass level by the fact that the main distinction was whether you were a settler or a subject, whether you were in the slave patrols or enslaved in the fields, whether you were in the frontier garrison community or imprisoned in the reservation. This was the all-important identity, to which everything else was subordinate. Only someone with no contact with reality can fail to see this. — location: 5587 ^ref-9258
On the mass level, however, a certain type of supra-class Euro-Amerikan community has been characteristic for over a century. It is a small home-owning, small-propertied community. — location: 5601 ^ref-8094
This is where community life is supported by the conspicuous concentration of state services — parks, garbage collection, swimming pools, better schools, medical facilities, and so on. In contrast to the reservation or ghetto, the settler community is full of the resources of modern industrial life. — location: 5603 ^ref-11135
the suburban population is 103 million, roughly half of the U.S. population. These suburbs are fundamentally “all-white,” averaging around 90% Euro-Amerikan. — location: 5606 ^ref-8534
The social character of the typical suburb is relentlessly, monolithically “white.” — location: 5609 ^ref-48588
Nominal class distinctions on the common level pale beside their supra-class unification as a settler mass, most characterized by the labor aristocracy. — location: 5613 ^ref-48154
White Amerika is not a political “blank.” — location: 5630 ^ref-4687
Settlers are not waiting passively for “the Movement” to come organize them — the point is they already have many movements, causes, and organizations of their own. That’s the problem. — location: 5631 ^ref-53721
CPUSA’s “Red Unions” — the National Miners Union — led the coal miners into the bitter, violent Harlan County strike. — location: 5645 ^ref-57688
Loyalty to U.S. imperialism and hatred of the colonial peoples is very intense. We can see a derailment of the connection between simple exploitation and class consciousness. — location: 5653 ^ref-38610
Martin County, Kentucky. — location: 5654 ^ref-17214
“They’ve treated the region as if it were a colony. When they finish taking what they want from it, they’ll just let it go to hell.” — location: 5665 ^ref-51256
the majority of them welcome such exploitation, whatever the future price. Their community may have nothing, may be sliding back into an eventual future of undeveloped desolation, but right now those who have jobs are making “good bucks.” The 5,000 coal miners have been earning around $30,000 per year, while the county’s per capita annual income is up to $7,000. — location: 5669 ^ref-19720
what is poverty-stricken about settlers is their culture. — location: 5674 ^ref-28137
concentrating on “getting theirs” while it lasts. In the settler tradition it’s “every man for himself.” They have no class goals or even community goals, just private goals involving private income and private consumerism. — location: 5675 ^ref-15836
the real consciousness of the Euro-Amerikan masses is how anti-communal and private it is. — location: 5678 ^ref-19323
Lower taxes are more important than food for their own elderly. This is a diseased culture, with a mass political consciousness that is centered around parasitism. — location: 5682 ^ref-21231
Others, who have spent years as working class “experts,” find proletarian vision in every joke about the bosses told during coffee breaks. This is not politics, whatever else it may be. — location: 5690 ^ref-53121
There is nothing mystical, elusive or hidden about real working class consciousness. It is the political awareness that the exploiting class and its state must be fought, that the laboring masses of the world have unity in their need for socialism. The Red Army is class consciousness. An action for higher wages or better working conditions need not embody any real class consciousness whatsoever. Narrow self-interest is not the same as consciousness of class interests. “More for me” is not the same slogan as “liberate humanity.” — location: 5691 ^ref-51635
The answer to their actual consciousness, to what class awareness the Euro-Amerikan workers had, can be found in what side they supported in the wars to overthrow “their” U.S. Empire. — location: 5709 ^ref-2258
the conquering and killing of Arabs, Afrikans, etc. is felt by Zionist settlers as therapeutic “rehabilitation,” restoring them to European dimensions. This is the same virile restoration through mass murder that was so ecstatically praised by Adolf Hitler. — location: 5729 ^ref-628
two-thirds of all Russian Jewish emigrants have come to the U.S. rather than Israel. — location: 5739 ^ref-24265
The settler nature of the Euro-Amerikan oppressor nation is the decisive factor in their political struggles. It is the decisive factor in relations between Third World struggles and the Euro-Amerikan masses. — location: 5746 ^ref-7711
It is only by grasping this that the question of broader unity can be correctly answered. This is a particular problem for Asian-Amerikans, who as relatively small national minorities within the continental Empire have a high organic need for political coalitions and alliances. — location: 5749 ^ref-49082
tactical unity should be understood as temporary, short-run unity around a specific issue by forces that can even be fundamentally antagonistic. — location: 5777 ^ref-9555
If “both Black and white workers” were indeed moving towards socialism in their respective nations, then the unity would be more than tactical. In reality this is not the situation. — location: 5781 ^ref-17015
While Afrikan workers had the strategic goal of liberating their nation from the U.S. Empire, the settler workers had the strategic goal of preserving the U.S. Empire’s exploitation of the oppressed nations. The mythology that they had “common class interests” proved factually untrue. — location: 5807 ^ref-44894
Euro-Amerikan labor used that tactical unity to get Afrikan workers to carry out the strategy of preserving the settler Empire. — location: 5882 ^ref-64729
Correct alliances must be based on correct strategy. — location: 5914 ^ref-34960
Could it be the other way around? That despite their tactical contradictions with the bourgeoisie, that Euro-Amerikan workers and revisionistic radicals have strategic unity with U.S. Imperialism? Most importantly, how has imperialism been so successful in using this tactical unity against the oppressed? — location: 6061 ^ref-8196
Self-reliance and building mass institutions and movements of a specific national character, under the leadership of a communist party, are absolute necessities for the oppressed. — location: 6065 ^ref-16957
it is the advocates of oppressor nation hegemony over all struggles of the masses that are promoting the narrowest of nationalisms — that of the U.S. settler nation. — location: 6067 ^ref-32769
the principal characteristic of imperialism is parasitism, we are also saying that the principal characteristic of settler trade unionism is parasitism, and that the principal characteristic of settler radicalism is parasitism. — location: 6068 ^ref-28137
My ambition is to live my life in one of those military colonies, among my compañeros whom I love, who have suffered so long and so deeply with me. — location: 6083 ^ref-3407
“the patriots proclaimed themselves the champions of white supremacy against the British Government…” — location: 6764 ^ref-46843