I would like to see a discussion based on Du Bois' acknowledgement and agreement with the stance that Hobson made, that entire nations could become proletarianized or bourgeoisified in the context of the colonial politics of white labor in conflict with colonized labor.He, in African Roots of War, tends to make many of the starting arguments and analysis that Lenin does in State and Revolution, but then points out that the colonial character, in other words, how white people's very existence is dependent upon the historical build up of colonialism, means that white people's social and class relations sit atop this historical build up, creating a stark distinction between the white worker who helped found the American Republic and the non-white worker, who was chained into the labor pool and forced into the position of a proletarian that could be used as a placeholder to take over work at incredibly low wages in case of unionizing workers (will address later).Fanon later made a similar argument, saying that the white workers very existence - in other words his property - was the result of the historical progression of colonial relations. Here's a few quotes to demonstrate this relation."Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together--that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler--was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing "them" well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system. " Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Ch 1"[14]It is this paradox which allows in America the most rapid advance of democracy to go hand in hand in its very centres with increased aristocracy and hatred toward darker races, and which excuses and defends an inhumanity that does not shrink from the public burning of human beings.[15]Yet the paradox is easily explained: The white workingman has been asked to share the spoil of exploiting 'chinks and niggers.' It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation; a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor. The laborers are not yet getting, to be sure, as large a share as they want or will get, and there are still at the bottom large and restless excluded classes. But the laborer's equity is recognized, and his just share is a matter of time, intelligence, and skillful negotiation.[16]Such nations it is that rule the modern world. Their national bond is no mere sentimental patriotism, loyalty, or ancestor worship. It is increased wealth, power, and luxury for all classes on a scale the world never saw before. Never before was the average citizen of England, France, and Germany so rich, with such splendid prospects of greater riches."W.E.B. Du Bois, The African Roots of War, Paragraphs 14-16"And while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental equities of the whole capitalistic system the lowest and most fatal degree of suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers. It is white labor that deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies him affiliation with trade unions, expels him from decent houses and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination."WE.B. Du Bois, Marxism and the Negro Problem, Paragraph 17Now, I'm going to post links to both of Du Bois' texts, and one to Wretched of the Earth for those who would like to read the context and surrounding arguments, but Du Bois' argument is further bolstered by arguments made in texts like Sakai's Settlers, such as examples of how black labor was kept as an entity to disrupt white organizing, allowing capitalists to fire unionizing workers to replace them, by bringing them in at much lower labor-cost. Du Bois addresses this by saying, in The African Roots of War,"[27]The resultant jealousies and bitter hatreds tend continually to fester along the color line. We must fight the Chinese, the laborer argues, or the Chinese will take our bread and butter. We must keep Negroes in their places, or Negroes will take our jobs. All over the world there leaps to articulate speech and ready action that singular assumption that if white men do not throttle colored men, then China, India, and Africa will do to Europe what Europe has done and seeks to do to them."To back this up, he makes the claim that what creates this racial solidarity is not praise for their ancestral commonwealth, but class. That its class that creates this alliance, driven by the historical build up of centuries of colonial plunder in the Global South, that its the existing wealth resultant of centuries of apartheid, enslavement, and genocide, and imperialism that makes European nations and nations of colonial relations hotbeds for colonial leftist politics that fail to usher in a socialist revolution, because they fail to address and answer this very question, back in previously paragraph 16.I think this is something that needs to be addressed in leftist politics, and an acknowledgment that, without centering the voices and actions of our colonized comrades, by withdrawing leadership of colonizers, centering the praxis and ideas of the colonized, and working to actively decolonize, we may never successfully wage a revolution, by rejecting to answer questions of the Color Line, of the global and racial division of labor, and of the divisions of the plungers of colonialist imperialism between the Capitalist West and the rest of the world. Decolonization must be a priority. Without it, we fail to address this global division of Europe to the darker nations of the World, and fail to formulate a praxis to address it in action.Links:The African Roots of WarMarxism and the Negro QuestionPDF link to Wretched of the Earth via /r/communism https://ift.tt/33OUyXb
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