Chapter 9: The Material Conditions of American Exceptionalism: Part V

J. Sakai, in his liberal trashfire Settlers, points to these nazbol beginnings of America as reason to discard the very concept of America wholesale. One of his favorite things to do is to point out how this or that white American leftist gave in to nazbollery here or there, as reason to say white America is irredeemable. Sakai misses the forest for the trees: this is the process that makes socialism possible. Eugene Debs once sympathized with the violent explusion of Chinese-Americans from the country (William P. Jones, "Something to Offer," Jacobin, August 11, 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/debs-socialism-race-du-bois-socialist-party-black-liberation/). Abraham Lincoln may have once advocated shipping the freed slaves to Liberia. But Marxism-Leninism is the left wing of the possible, and it was simply not possible to change the nazbol basis of the American republic at the time too hard without flipping it towards liberalism. America's socialist antecedents were fighting for socialism, not liberalism, and a more liberal direction would have immiserated the entire working class, as indeed ended up briefly happening during the Gilded Age. Socialism had to grow out of nazbollery and the social democracy of people like Thomas Paine who nonetheless complained about the King's Ethiopian Regiments threatening slavery. As ugly as that particular sausage-making process was to behold, without it American socialism would be even weaker and even less able to organize today.

The liberal bougies of the Gilded Age were well aware of this intra-socialist issue, and set about ratcheting up race tensions as high as possible to prevent a more mature socialism from developing. However, the sheer labor needs of World War II made them enlist black labor in wartime production, and the money they earned thereby grabbed them a large enough toehold in society to force a reckoning on race relations in the 1960s. Then, the bourgeois flip across the nihilistic void from the nazbol position to the liberal position began.

The liberal bougies changed their positions and embraced black civil rights, forcing the social democratic labor intelligentsia to support the Democrat Party and forcing the less advanced nazbol-influenced segments of labor into becoming Reagan Democrats and eventually the base of the modern GOP. Oddly enough, this solves the biggest contradiction in American labor, the race issue. By declaring racism to be the most problematic of problems for their own vanity (as opposed to genuine concern), the liberals forced the middle class to rhetorically concur, and open racism is mostly a thing of the past. Even naked racism's attempt to make a comeback under Trump has failed spectacularly, and the 1960s liberal consensus on race has been ratified in the Minneapolis riots. Racism is now an 80-20 issue in America, burning the cop shop where George Floyd's murderer worked is supported by a majority of American voters, and except for workers confused by fascist rhetoric in the GOP, socialism's class base in America is no longer meaningfully divided by it (Matthew Impelli, "54 Percent of Americans Think Burning Down Minneapolis Police Precinct Was Justified After George Floyd's Death," Newsweek, June 3, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/54-americans-think-burning-down-minneapolis-police-precinct-was-justified-after-george-floyds-1508452).

The nazbol-liberal coalition that America and Britain were founded on has begun to flip in our late capitalist era. The workers are weaker than ever and the liberals have come to the fore. As undoubtedly motivated Debs' concessions to nazbollery, this has indeed stepped up our repression for decades. But it has also undone the typical nazbol structures that keep the workers subdued to capital.

Liberals, for their own vanity, act as if they were revolutionary communists, but it's just a front. Nevertheless, this front forces their hand on every axis of oppression that buttresses both liberalism and nazbollery save class: not only are all races and sexes theoretically equal in law, but so are my fellow queers equal to straight people in the law, thanks to Trump's appointees no less. Even my fellow spectrum folk and other categories of disabled people are getting their rights! Of course, the old nazbol attitudes linger and can't be simply dispelled by law, but the times are clearly changing. Even a reactionary like Trump concedes our rights in practice, if not always rhetorically.

What this means is that the days when the rich could simply break apart socialist movements by getting one group of workers to hate another group of workers are over. That has been bought at the cost of forty years of neoliberal Reaganism, in the same way that enough democracy to prepare us for revolution was bought by two thousand years of nazbollery.

Settlers dwells too much on the sausage-making process and not enough on the delicious socialist sausage end product. Socialism arising anywhere would have necessarily had to be preceded by capitalism, and all capitalism is necessarily brutal. Socialism had to come out of some kind of capitalist nastiness; it appears from history that it emerges most successfully and vigorously out of the corpse of nazbollery. Instead of concern trolling the revolution, the middle class socialist Settlers readers should help it along by not confusing the class war with the destruction of the very concept of America.

This is not to say that America won't change after we win the civil war, or that those changes will be limited to economics. But we will owe too much of a debt to the millions of American workers who will have fought and bled for their country and socialism to abhor the very concept of America or deny its continuation in some form.

Continue reading Part VI