THE DIALECTICAL RISE OF A WHITE NATIONALIST STATEA Historical Overview of the Origins of White Nationalism in America
Written by Collectivist Action
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"Nationalism is, in my opinion, nothing more than an idealistic rationalization for militarism and aggression." ~~Albert Einstein
"White nationalism is a political orientation based, primarily, on the twin ideas that: 1) people classified as white constitute a separate, superior species of humans; iow, white supremacy 2) nation states, like the United States, exist, first and foremost, as the collective province, and/or property, of 'white' people" ~~ (excerpt from introduction)
PART 1:In the Beginning. . . Capitalist Colonialism
"Today there are over 500 federally recognized Native American nations in the United States. At the time Columbus arrived in the West Indies there were approximately 15 million indigenous people in the U.S. After reaching a low point around 1900, the population of Native Americans in the U.S. is around two million according to government census figures (2000), although these figures are highly contested. . The population of Native Americans in the continental United States decreased from twelve million to 237, 000 during the first four centuries of our history."(1)
Before the European invasion of what came to be called North America the people who occupied it were arguably a sprawling independent and interdependent, vast network of nations; geographically-based with distinct common cultures. Not unlike people on other continents - but not identical - these nations featured different levels of social development. Some were patriarchal, practiced human sacrifice and were class stratified, i.e., economically based on private ownership of property and natural resources.
Nevertheless, where the first English colonists settled, on the eastern seaboard of the continent, there existed mostly communalistic, virtually classless, societies, many of which had prospered for several centuries.
The Haudenosaunee are a good case in point.
"The Haudenosaunee exemplified the formidable tradition of limited government and personal autonomy shared by many cultures north of the Rio Grande. To some extent this freedom simply reflected North American Indians' relatively recent adoption of agriculture.
Early farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty to an unusual extent. . . The Haudenosaunee would have the second oldest continuously existing representative parliament on Earth. (Only Iceland's 'Althing', founded in 930 A.D., is older." (2).
The Haudenosaunee constitution featured a decentralized governing structure, rule by consensus, rather than simply a majority; a simultaneously elected bicameral legislature, and the empowerment of women (they could recall chiefs.) And unlike the U.S. constitution, which partially drew on its concepts, the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee did not sanctify private property.
The latter would be a principal factor in the long-standing colonial war to displace and/or exterminate them.
"The Ancestral Puebloans Chavo Canyon on the Colorado Plateau - in the present-day Four Corners region of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah - thrived from AD 850 to 1250. Ancestors of the Pueblos of New Mexico, they constructed more than four hundred miles of roads radiating from Chavo. Averaging thirty feet wide, these roads followed straight courses, even through difficult terrain such as hills and rock formations. The highways connected some seventy-five communities . . . Pueblo trade extended as far west as the Pacific Ocean, as far east as the Great Plains, and as far south as Central America." (3)
One of the most fertile regions on Earth lay between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. In 12 A.D. the Mississippi Valley featured one enormous city, Cahokia, along with several cities which had pyramids similar to those in Mexico. The population of Cahokia was tens of thousands of people, exceeding that of London during the same period. In the southeastern region there were large agriculture-based nations. These included the Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Chickasaw and Muskogee Creek.
"Beginning around the 15th century, the foreign policies of the major 'Christian' European monarchies were driven by the desire to investigate, map and claim lands occupied by non-Europeans. A papal bull in 1455, for instance, permitted the Portuguese monarchy to enslave West Africa. The subsequent voyages of (Italian) explorer Christopher Columbus to the Americas, represented the extension of similar permission given to Spain, which sponsored his trips.
Finally, the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas, of 1494, divided the Earth between Portugal and Spain. All of this constituted the 'Doctrine of Discovery', which stipulated, in no uncertain terms, that these nation states had the right to colonize, enslave and exterminate whole populations of people. Ultimately, other European governments joined the colonizing project. . .such as the British in North America.
"Richard Hakluyt, the younger, an Oxford fellow and clergyman, who devoted his life to compiling the travel narratives of explorers, prepared a treatise for Queen Elizabeth, the First, and her top advisors, on his working theory of colonialism.
Hakluyt's America required what he classified as 'waste people'. . .He pictured paupers, vagabonds, convicts, debtors and lusty young men doing the work. . Merchants would be sent to trade with the Indians, selling trinkets, venting cloth goods, and gathering more information about the interior of of the continent. . .As the 'waste firm' of America' was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the 'waste people' of England could be converted into economic assets. The land and the poor could be 'harvested' together" (4)"
Corporations, chartered by Great Britain, established most of the east coast settlements in North America. They transported many 'involuntary' laborers from the British Isles to work on their colonial properties. Most historians now agree that more than half of all persons who came to the colonies were in bondage to planters, speculators and proprietors.
Thus the primary reason poor English people were sent to the 'New World' was to serve mercantile interests, or to die in the process. Known as "first comers" (before they were called "Pilgrims"), most of those who took the hazardous trip across the Atlantic Ocean succumbed to starvation and disease.
Many indigent people in Britain sold themselves into indentured servitude, whereby their passage was paid in exchange for, typically, anywhere from four to nine years of virtual slavery in the British colonies. "Labor shortages led some ship captains and agents to round up children from the streets of London and other towns to sell to planters across the ocean; known as 'spiriting'. Some children were shipped off for committing petty crimes".(5)
Once in the colonies, wives and children of indentured servants were held accountable for their husband's or father's period of indentured labor. After the violent encounter between the indigenous population and the Jamestown settlers in 1622, a European settler named Jane Dickinson was held in captivity, by indigenes, for almost a year. When she was returned to the colony she was told that she owed 150 pounds of tobacco to her husband's former owner. With no ability to repay she was forced to work it off.
British convicts were among the first wave of people brought from Europe to the colonies. They were used to do heavy labor; work in gold, silver, iron, copper mines; fell trees and burn them for tar, soap and ash, etc. They were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were required to repay the English commonwealth for their 'crimes' by producing commodities for export. Their compensation was that they could avoid longer prison sentences and/or execution.
"The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves. When indentured adults sold their anticipated labor in return for passage to America, they instantly became debtors, which made their orphaned children collateral assets. It was a world not unlike the one Shakespeare depicted in The Merchant of Venice, when Shylock demanded his pound of flesh. Virginia planters felt entitled to their flesh and blood in the forms of the innocent spouses and offspring of dead servants" (6)
It is estimated that about 92,000 European immigrants were brought to Virginia and Maryland, through the servant trade, between 1607 and 1682. The great majority of them were English. These laborers could be classified in two major categories: those who who were convicted felons, and political prisoners, including captives taken in civil war or rebellion in England, Scotland or Ireland.
"Brought together in the dungeons of the coastal castles - Goree, Elmina, Cape Coast - or the corral-like barracoons of Bonny and Calabar, they were a melange of people. They might seem to have little in common save color. Yet even that sameness, given the shades of blacks and browns, was remarkable only in that they shared in not being white. One who would search out to one of his own would not attend to color. He would rather listen to language, the special inflections that were his and no other's, and look for familiar markings and mannerisms" (7)
The people who were brought to the New World beginning in the 15th century, via the Transatlantic Slave Trade, primarily came from the western part of the African continent. Although the great majority were brought to South America - mostly Brazil - by Portuguese slave traders, many would be taken to Central and North America by Dutch, French and British traders.
Slavery, as Karl Marx informed us, was an economic category of prime importance. Moreover, the Transatlantic Slave Trade not only represented the beginnings of real world trade, but also global capitalism.
The trade essentially consisted of Europeans exchanging pots, pans, beads, cloth, guns, ammunition and powder, to African rulers, for men, women and children, who possessed within them the capacity to produce, and reproduce, wealth.
"African merchants and chiefs who acted as merchants had about them the fantastic aura of the caliph of The Arabian Nights . . Wealth's power mirrored personal pride and could be reflected both in the ceremonial reverence of others. To have wealth, to use it, to destroy it, were all symbols of power, and it was either in luxury and dissipation or in gross avarice that wealth and power were enjoyed most.
The Europeans with whom they traded, however, had a different calculus of value. Capitalists all, they made a distinction between a simple 'thing', and one that produces other things that create wealth. There was for them a different kind of wealth; spectral and impalpable & founded on credit and investment." (8)
It is important to note that the life-long hereditary chattel enslavement of Africans - as contrasted with the temporary 'enslavement' of Europeans - did not emerge all at once in the British colonies. There were many contradictions, and much confusion, over their status during the early days of slavery. Although slavery initially existed in all thirteen original colonies, some Africans were initially treated no worse than white indentured servants. A considerable number of enslaved Africans had come from the West Indies, spoke English and were occasionally able to transcend enslavement by religious conversion. There had always been nominally free Blacks in northern colonies, and a small number in the South. There were black slave owners.
When religious conversion was not available, some enslaved people were freed by masters who had a change of heart, or were willing to sell the enslaved person back to him or herself ( a kind of reverse 'reparations!') The latter was usually not feasible considering the rare opportunities, on the part of the enslaved, to accumulate enough money to 'buy themselves back' from a slave owner. There is ample evidence that the African captives brought to America in 1619 were not classified as life-long slaves, but indentures.
Nevertheless, as historian Nathan Irvin Huggins elucidates, exploitation of labor was generally accepted, by colonial leaders, as a fact of life:
"It was never, to them, a question of whether labor should be free or unfree, whether the poor and unpropertied should be indulged with humanitarian considerations or not. They were men of a society that regarded servants and laborers as base people for whom hunger and the lash could be the only goad to productivity. They were accustomed to a system of labor in which people served long terms under a master's authority without what we would call liberty. . .
It required no leap of imagination, no reordering of mind or values, to introduce Africans into the society as exploitable labor without liberty, to serve the will of a master on the pain of cruel suffering or death. This is not to say that the weight of class and servility did not fall more lightly on white laborers than black. . .But in this respect the differences were more in degree than in kind. Nothing was to prevent the full weight of oppression from falling on any given white man or woman, as it routinely did on blacks." (9)
Nonetheless, in addition to enclosures of peasant lands in Europe, slavery in the New World laid the economic foundation for the early growth - or primitive accumulation, of capitalism. Enslaved people produced wealth not only through their labor power and work-without-wages, but also as 'commodities', bought and sold for profit in the capitalist marketplace. . . Collectivist Action
( Part 2. . . . Indigenous Resistance and Multicultural Rebellions will be posted at the Class Struggle Blog next week)
(1) Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism, pg. 116
(2) Charles C. Mann, 1491, pg. 235
(3) Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous History of the United States, pg. 22
(4) Nancy Isenberg, White Trash, the 400-Year Untold History of Class
in America, pgs. 18-19
(5) Ibid, pg. 20
(6) Ibid, pg. 5
(7) Nathan Irvin Huggins, Black Odyssey, pg. 4
(8) Ibid, pg. 21
(9) Ibid, pg. 87
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