To figure out how to defeat America’s financial dictatorship, and end Zionist settler-colonialism, we must investigate the British empire’s role behind both. When we examine this story, we find the origins of the Gaza genocide, the intensifying war against socialist China, and the multiple genocides against America’s indigenous peoples, which in essence are still ongoing. We also find that if the American working class is to win, it must orient its practice around the struggle against finance capital, for which Britain itself is only one tool.
Finance created settler-colonialism, & extended its ideological hold over America
Zionism was a creation of British imperialism, which took up the centuries-old mission of the reactionary Christian elements that sought to turn Palestine back into so-called “ancient Israel.” And during the same time that the British were helping lay the foundations for Jewish settler-colonialism, they were also working to ensure that racial supremacy would fortify its control within America.
Both projects were about preventing the forces of national liberation and proletarian struggle from gaining further ground; which in America’s case meant proliferating white nativist politics that substituted working-class politics. This was an extension of a much older settler-colonial project, one that grew out from Britain’s core financial center the City of London. The City of London was the institution that first engineered settler-colonialism; when the coming of capitalism threw much of England’s population into destitution and vagrancy, the City responded by blocking efforts to re-incorporate them. The outcome was that these “excess” people would be compelled to migrate around the globe, and take on the role of shock troops for colonizing indigenous lands. The formation of the KKK, the implementation of Jim Crow, and the rise of anti-immigrant exclusion laws were how international finance acted to reinforce this racial paradigm in America.
This task presented a challenge for these reactionary forces, because by the end of the 19th century, the United States had come to no longer be settler-colonial in character. With the essential completion of the land accumulation process, and the coming of capitalism’s monopoly era, the USA’s primary contradiction had changed. Rather than colonizers vs. colonized, it was now mainly a conflict between a multiracial proletariat and an international financial ruling class. This doesn’t mean the legacy of American settler-colonialism hasn’t since remained important; the question of liberation and justice for the continent’s indigenous peoples is still something which must be reckoned with if we want to end financial rule. And to do so, we need to account for how the British empire worked towards extending settler-colonialism’s cultural lifespan; how these financial forces made it so that even long after America had objectively transitioned out of its settler-colonial form, there remains a subjective perception within our culture that aligns with this system.
Zionism, the version of settler-colonialism as it exists today, has managed to rally so much support among Americans because of a centuries-long psychological operation. Zionism’s support within the American masses is now slipping, but Christian Zionism still needs to be tackled; and if we try to fight for Palestine while unaware of the British connection, we’ll be handicapping our cause anyhow.
To understand how this long-term psyop started, we have to examine the moment within American history when capital came to feel unprecedentedly threatened. This was the era immediately following the economic crisis of 1857, when America’s workers mobilized and organized to a greater capacity than they ever had before. This was just prior to when America would fight its war against the British-backed slaveocracy, and to when Britain would merge with the U.S. ruling class in critical ways. After the Civil War, what Britain did was make a deal with America’s capitalists that would inextricably connect the experiences of the Chinese and American working classes. As described by John Foster in A Century of American Diplomacy:
The Anglo-French war with China of 1858-60, which resulted in the occupation of Peking by the allied forces and the opening of a number of additional ports to foreign commerce, was a rude awakening of the Celestial Empire from its seclusion and conservatism, and its public men began to see that a new policy of broader and freer intercourse with foreign nations must be adopted. Anson Burlingame, who since 1861 had resided at Peking as minister from the United States, and by his tact and friendly conduct had gained the confidence of the Chinese government, was invited by it in 1868 to become the head of an imperial embassy, to visit all the leading Christian nations, and through treaties and personal intercourse establish amicable and freer political and commercial relations with them.
This notable embassy first visited the United States, where it was received by the Executive, by Congress, and by the leading cities with distinguished attention. The government of the United States being in full sympathy with the objects of the embassy, a treaty (1868) was readily negotiated with its plenipotentiaries by Secretary Seward, wherein the rights of China were protected respecting all grants of lands or concessions to foreigners for internal improvements, freedom of conscience and religious worship were guaranteed, unnecessary dictation and intervention in internal affairs were to be discouraged, change of home and allegiance and free emigration were stipulated, and the privilege of unrestricted travel and residence in China and the United States, upon the basis of the most favored nation, was agreed to.
This arrangement was the next step in China’s “century of humiliation,” from which it’s only recently been able to truly recover. It was also what incorporated the Chinese working class into America’s working class, a development that the white supremacist movement took advantage of by stoking anti-Chinese resentment. When the anti-communist union bosses joined in on these racial hate campaigns, they were advancing a scheme set into motion by both the American and British ruling classes. As these classes had made the China deal not just to expand their market reach, but to manage America’s revolutionary masses.
These elites had seen the recent progression in the American workers movement, and the unprecedented progress towards racial equality which the country’s popular forces initially achieved via the Reconstruction. The capitalist class was also undergoing an internal transformation, wherein its economic system was evolving to the monopoly stage. So the financiers expanded their efforts to exploit China, and in doing so created new opportunities for ruling-class demagogy to be directed at America’s people.
This is the same tactic that our ruling class is using today when it blames China for the American people’s declining living standards. And combating this narrative is critical to combating the U.S. war machine, as well as to leading the masses towards communism. There is another aspect of today’s American working-class mission, though, that this country’s workers movement has never truly reckoned with. This is the part that involves truly understanding the nature of settler-colonialism, and coming to a synthesis that can let us combine the anti-colonial struggle with the proletarian struggle.
Using Palestine as a vehicle for the new war on China
Settler-colonialism may no longer be present in America, but it’s obviously still present in Palestine; and there’s a reason why it’s been able to live on, but only in the form of an imperial outpost. It’s because Zionism was finance capital’s project to revive a dying mode of exploitation, for the purpose of fortifying the new dominant mode (that being financial imperialism).
The only way we’ll be able to strike the decisive blow against the U.S. empire, and thereby let “Israel” be dismantled, is by making our anti-Zionist practice fundamentally tied in with working-class organizing. As J. Sykes has noted: “in the era of imperialism, the national question is bound up with proletarian socialist revolution. No longer is the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class. Imperialism closes off the path of independent capitalist development for the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations. The national liberation movements therefore must ally themselves with the working class struggle, with an orientation towards socialism – or find themselves diverted into neocolonialism. In the U.S. this means that the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the liberation movements of the oppressed nationalities is central to the united front against monopoly capitalism.”
To truly grasp this principle, and build a working-class movement that reaches into the broad masses, we must avoid dogmatically equating occupied Palestine’s conditions to modern America’s. This is a lesson that I’ve sought to convey by explaining how America transitioned out of its settler-colonial phase, and it’s the main point of the argument J. Sykes makes in the quoted article. That ultra-leftist perspectives on modern America’s conditions are so prevalent is why I’ve said American Marxists have yet to really address this continent’s indigenous genocides, even though these ultra-left arguments have the intent of addressing that history.
The objective effect of ultra-left politics is to isolate the organized minority from the masses, with the “critical” academic theories about modern American “white settlers” being a major part of this. Ultra-leftism, and its increasingly prevalent adventurist trends, grow out from the academic left; therefore, the workers movement must unpack this part of imperialism’s institutional power, and solidify a united front against the new war that these forces are waging against China.
This war is inextricably tied to Zionism, and it’s a connection that’s exceptionally insidious. The primary way Zionists attack China is not by calling China “antisemitic,” but by slandering China as a human rights abuser against Muslims; and usually, the Zionists who promote this lie are those who present themselves as the “progressive” Zionists, as the ones who supposedly want the best for the Palestinians. It’s a deception designed for a very different era than the 19th century, but it relies on the same deficiency that the psyops of old did: a failure to properly understand the process of violent extraction which finance unleashed upon our world.
The anti-Chinese, anti-communist, and white nativist narratives of old America were enabled by how even among America’s Marxists, there was an unwillingness to confront the holocaust of the indigenous; in his 1952 book History of the Communist Party of the United States, William Z. Foster observed how “For all their relative sensitivity to the position of the white workers, the Negroes, the immigrants, and all other oppressed sections of the population, the pioneer Marxists did not, however, become aware of the significance of the struggle of the Indian tribes, who during these years were being viciously robbed and butchered by the ruthless white invaders of their lands. Indeed, in the whole period from Jefferson right down to our own day, the long series of workers’ trade unions and political parties have almost completely ignored the plight and sufferings of the abused and heroic Indian peoples. The story of labor’s relations with the Indians is practically a blank.”
When China and other countries underwent revolutionary upheavals during the mid-20th century, and this greatly helped enable the progressive forces within America, the ensuing rise in left-wing U.S. politics was supposed to be what rectified this contradiction. The American workers movement had the opportunity to come to a synthesis with the indigenous struggle; and to a certain extent it did do this when the Panthers aligned with the American Indian Movement. But because American communism was then forced into retreat, and captured by left academia, what came about was a widespread ultra-leftist attitude towards the national question.
The modern U.S. “Marxist” organizations that proclaim their solidarity with indigenous peoples the loudest are actually doing a disservice to the indigenous struggle, because they’re using America’s Native holocaust as an emotional weapon for the “white settlers” rhetoric. This only serves to cut off the indigenous struggle from the potential for a proletarian united front, which is the same thing that the pioneer Marxists did. And this kind of imperialism-compatible left politics is connected with the covertly Zionist “pro-Palestine” elements that agitate for a Uyghur uprising in China.
It’s within this critique of today’s ultra-left “Marxism” that we can find the path to defeating our government’s anti-China war drive, defeating Zionism, and constituting the American nation in a way that it’s so far never been able to be. Winning workers victory in America will have to mean reconciling the fundamental contradictions which have always existed within the American project, contradictions so massive that they’ve involved the extermination of entire nations. Just because a society’s issues can take centuries for it to truly reckon with, though, does not mean time stands still for it. History is constantly in motion, and historical experience necessarily affects what happens next; this is the nature of dialectics.
Right now, America’s people are faced with a series of dangers that are existential, and that come from the ever-more destructive ways monopoly capital is responding to its crises. They’re realizing the urgent need to end our wars, and to reverse our society’s accelerating collapse. They haven’t yet come to Marxism, but they’re already much more advanced than many Marxists tend to think they are. And this will translate into a mass united front against the current schemes of the financial empire, if we provide them with the proper leadership. The British empire will be dealt another blow from America, this time the fatal blow. In the process, the Zionist project that grew out from the City of London will be ended, and American civilization will stop being pitted against Chinese civilization; because America will have overcome the Zionist mentality, and thereby reckoned with the colonial ideology which the City kept it tethered to.
————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures amid late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment