culture fix

"For America to Live,
Europe Must Die"

The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is [said to be] Russell Means's most famous speech...

The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

So what you read here is not what I have written. It is what I have said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don't really care whether my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read (of course, there are exceptions, but the exceptions only prove the rule). I'm more concerned with the American Indian people, students and others, who have begun to be absorbed into the white world through universities and other institutions. But even then it's a marginal sort of concern. It's very possible to grow into a red face with a white mind; and if that's a person's individual choice, so be it, but I have no use for them. This is part of the process of cultural genocide being waged by Europeans against American Indian peoples' today. My concern is with those American Indians who choose to resist this genocide, but may be confused as to how to proceed.

(You notice I use the term American Indian rather than Native American or Native indigenous people or Amerindian when referring to my people.) There has been some controversy about such terms, and frankly, at this point, I find it absurd. Primarily it seems that American Indian is being rejected as European in origin - which is true. But all the above terms are European in origin; the only non-European way is to speak of Lakota - or, more precisely, of Oglala, Brule, et. - and of the Dineh, the Miccousukee, and all the rest of the several hundred correct tribal names.

(There is also some confusion about the word Indian , a mistaken belief that it refers somehow to the country, India. When Columbus washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492. Look it up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met "Indio," from the Italian in dio , meaning "in God.")

It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations: it cannot come from the pages of a book or a thousand books. No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master's degree in "Indian Studies" or in "education" or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into the traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an outsider.

I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I'm not allowing for false distinctions. I'm not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I'm referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and "leftism" in general. I don't believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the European intellectual tradition. It's really just the same old song.

The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, "revolutionized" physics and the so-called natural science by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation.

[JS Dill note: ...we are not witnessing a peculiar twist in the fortunes of postwar Europe and America, an aberation that can be tied to such late twentieth-century problems as inflation, loss of empire, and the like. Rather, we are witnessing the inevitable outcome of a logic that is already centuried old, and which is beng played out in our lifetime.

The collapse of capitalism, the general dysfunction of institutions, the revulsion against ecological spoilation, the increasing inability of od the scientific world view to explain the things that really matter, the loss of interest in work, and the statistical rise in depression, anxiety, and outright psychosis are all of a piece.

The Reenchantment of the World, Morris Berman, ISBN 0-8014-9225-4]

Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these "thinkers" took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into a code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they "secularized" Christian religion, as the "scholars" like to say - and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!.

This is what has come to be termed "efficiency" in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment - that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one - is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why "truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.

Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology - and that is put in his own terms - he secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel's philosophy in terms of "materialism," which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel's work altogether. Again, this is in Marx' own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, But American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining . The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx' - and his followers' - links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel, and the others.

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But lets look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.

The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, "Thou shalt not kill," at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.

In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it become virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to "developing" a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be "developed" through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open - in the European view - to this sort of insanity.

[JS Dill Note: For more than 99 percent of human history, the world was enchanted and man saw himself as an integral part of it. The complete reversal of this perception in a mere four hundred years or so has destroyed the continuity of the human experience and the integrity of the human psyche. It has very nearly wrecked the planet as well.

The Reenchantment of the World, Morris Berman, ISBN 0-8014-9225-4]

Most important here, perhaps, is the fact that Europeans feel no sense of loss in this. After all, their philosophers have despiritualized reality, so there is no satisfaction (for them) to be gained in simply observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a people in being . No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining material. So the mountain becomes gravel, and the lake becomes coolant for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through the indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools.

But each new piece of that "progress" ups the ante out in the real world. Take fuel for the industrial machine as an example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood -a replenishable, natural item- as fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel, as production became the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was ripped open to provide coal whereas wood had simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil became the major fuel, as the technology of production was perfected through a series of scientific "revolutions." Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows what the environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run. Now there's an "energy crisis," and uranium is becoming the dominant fuel.

Capitalists, at least, can be relied upon to develop uranium as fuel only at the rate at which they can show a good profit. That's their ethic, and maybe that will buy some time. Marxists, on the other hand, can be relied upon to develop uranium fuel as rapidly as possible simply because it's the most "efficient" production fuel available. That's their ethic, and I fail to see where it's preferable. Like I said, Marxism is right smack in the middle of the European tradition. It's the same old song.

There's a rule of thumb that can be applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposed to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effect it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe's tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true.

So now we, as American Indian people, are asked to believe that a "new" European revolutionary doctrine such as Marxism will reverse the negative effect of European history on us. European power relations are to be adjusted once again, and that's supposed to make things better for all of us. But what does this really mean?

Right now, today, we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation are living in what white society has designated a "National Sacrifice Area." What this means is that we have a lot of uranium deposits here, and white culture (not us) needs this uranium as energy production material. The cheapest, most efficient way for industry to extract and deal with the processing of this uranium is to dump the waste by-products right here at the digging sites. Right here where we live. This waste is radioactive and will make the entire region uninhabitable forever. This is considered by industry, and by the white society that created this industry, to be an "acceptable" price to pay for energy resource development. Along the way they also plan to drain the water table under this part of South Dakota as part of the industrial process, so the region becomes doubly uninhabitable. The same sort of thing is happening. The same sort of thing is happening down in the land of the Navajo and Hopi, up in the land of the Northern Cheyenne and Crow, and elsewhere. Thirty percent of the coal in the West and half of the uranium deposits in the United States have been found to lie under reservation land, so there is no way this can be called a minor issue.

We are resisting being turned into a National Sacrifice Area. We are resisting being turned into a national sacrifice people. The costs of this industrial process are not acceptable to us. It is genocide to dig uranium here and draw the water table - no more, no less.

Now let's suppose that in our resistance to extermination we begin to seek allies (we have). Let's suppose further that we were to take revolutionary Marxism at its word: that it intends nothing less than the complete overthrow of the European capitalist order which has presented this threat to our very existence. This would seem to be a natural alliance for American Indian people to enter into. After all, as the Marxists say, it is the capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This is true as far as it goes.

But, as I've tried to point out, this very "truth" is deceptive. Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of the very industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to "redistribute" the results - the money, maybe - of this industrialization to a wider section of the population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around; but in order to do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system. Once again, the power relations with European society will have to be altered, but once again the effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-Europeans elsewhere will remain the same. This much the same as when power was redistributed from the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois revolution. European society changed a bit, at least superficially, but its conduct toward non-Europeans continued as before. You can see what the American Revolution of 1776 did for American Indians. It's the same old song.

Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to "rationalize" all people in relation to industry - maximum industry, maximum production. It is a materialist doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, out cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called up "precapitalists" and "primitive." Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists; we have always been economically retarded in Marxist terms. The only manner in which American Indian people could participate in a Marxist revolution would be to join the industrial system, to become factory workers, or "proletarians," as Marx called them. The man was very clear about the fact that his revolution could occur only through the struggle of the proletariat, that the existence of a massive industrial system is a precondition of a successful Marxist society.

I think there is a problem with language here. Christians, capitalists, Marxists. All of them have been revolutionary in their own minds, but none of them really means revolution. What they really mean is a continuation. They do what they do in order that European culture can continue to exist and develop according to its needs.

So, in order for us to really join forces with Marxism, we American Indians would have to accept the national sacrifice of our homeland; we would have to commit cultural suicide and become industrialized and Europeanized.

At this point, I've got to stop and ask myself whether I'm being too harsh. Marxism has something of a history. Does this history bear out my observations? I look to the process of industrialization in the Soviet Union since 1920 and I see that these Marxists have done what it took the English Industrial Revolution 300 years to do; and the Marxists did it in 60 years. I see that the territory of the USSR used to contain a number of tribal peoples and they have been crushed to make way for the factories. The Soviets refer to this as "the National Question," the question of whether the tribal peoples had a right to exist as people; and they decided the tribal peoples were an acceptable sacrifice to industrial needs. I look to China and I see the same thing. I look to Vietnam and I see Marxists imposing an industrial order and rooting out the indigenous tribal mountain people.

I hear a leading Soviet scientist saying that when the uranium is exhausted, then alternatives will be found. I see the Vietnamese taking over a nuclear power plant abandoned by the U.S. military. Have they dismantled and destroyed it? No, they are using it. I see China exploding nuclear bombs, developing nuclear reactors, and preparing a space program in order to colonize and exploit the planets the same as the Europeans colonized and exploited this hemisphere. It's the same old song, but maybe with a faster tempo this time.

The statement of the Soviet scientists is very interesting. Does he know what this alternative energy source will be? No, he simply has faith. Science will find a way. I hear revolutionary Marxists saying that the destruction of the environment, pollution, and radiation will be controlled. And I see them act on their words. Do they know how these things will be controlled? No, they simply have faith. Science will find a way. Industrialization is fine and necessary. How do they know this? Faith. Science will find a way. Faith of this sort has always been known in Europe as religion. Science has become the new European religion for both capitalists and Marxists; they are truly inseparable; they are part and parcel of the same culture. So, in both theory and practice, Marxism demands that non-European peoples give up their values, their traditions, their cultural experience altogether. We will all be industrialized science addicts in a Marxist society.

I do not believe that capitalism itself is really responsible for the situation in which American Indians have been declared a national sacrifice. No, it is the European tradition; European culture itself is responsible. Marxism is just the latest continuation of this tradition, not a solution to it. To ally with Marxism is to ally with the very same forces that declare us an acceptable cost.

There is another way. There is the traditional Lakota way and the ways of the other American Indian peoples. It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth, that there are forces beyond anything the European mind has conceived, that humans must be in harmony with all relations or the relations will eventually eliminate the disharmony. A lopsided emphasis on humans by humans - the European's arrogance of acting as though they were beyond the nature of all related things - can only result in a total disharmony and a readjustment which cuts arrogant humans down to size, gives them a taste of that reality beyond their grasp or control and restores the harmony. There is no need for a revolutionary theory to bring this about; it's beyond human control. The nature peoples of this planet know this and so they do not theorize about it. Theory is an abstract; our knowledge is real.

Distilled to it's basic terms, European faith - including the new faith in science - equals a belief that man is God. Europe has always sought a Messiah, whether that be the man Jesus Christ or the man Karl Marx or the man Albert Einstein. American Indians know this to be truly absurd. Humans are the weakest of all creatures, so weak that other creatures are willing to give up their flesh that we may live. Humans are able to survive only though the exercise of rationality since they lack the abilities of other creatures to gain food through the use of fang and claw.

But rationality is a curse since it can cause human beings to forget the natural order of things in ways other creatures do not. A wolf never forgets his or her place in the natural order. American Indians can. Europeans almost always do. We pray our thanks to the deer, our relations, for allowing us their flesh to eat; Europeans simply take the flesh for granted and consider the deer inferior. After all, Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science. God is the Supreme Being; all else must be inferior.

All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things will come full circle, back to where they started. That's revolution. And that's a prophecy of my people, of the Hopi people and of other correct peoples.

American Indians have been trying to explain this to Europeans for centuries. But, as I said earlier, Europeans have proven themselves unable to hear. The natural order will win out, and the offenders will die out, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by over-populating a given region. It's only a matter of time until what Europeans call "a major catastrophe of global proportions" will occur. It is the role of American Indian peoples, the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don't want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear. That's revolution.

American Indians are still in touch with these realities - the prophecies, the traditions of our ancestors. We learn from the elders, from nature, from the powers. And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian people will survive; harmony will be reestablished. That's revolution.

At this point, perhaps I should be very clear about another matter, one which should already be clear as a result of what I've said. But confusion breeds easily these days, so I want to hammer home this point. When I use the term European , I'm not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I'm referring to is a mind-set, a worldview that is a product of the development of European culture. Peoples are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook, they are acculturated to hold it. The same is true for American Indians or for the members of any other culture.

It is possible for an American Indian to share European values, A European worldview. We have a term for these people; we call them "apples" - red on the outside (genetics) and white on the inside (their values). Other groups have similar terms: Black have their "oreos;" Hispanos have "coconuts" and so on. And, as I said before, there are exceptions to the white norm: people who are white on the outside, but not white inside. I'm not sure what term should be applied to them other than "human beings."

What I'm putting out here is not a racial proposition but a cultural proposition. Those who ultimately advocate and defend the realities of European culture and its industrialism are my enemies. Those who resist it, who struggle against it, are my allies, the allies of American Indian people. And I don't give a damn what their skin color happens to be. Caucasian is the white term for the white race: European is an outlook I oppose.

The Vietnamese Communists are not exactly what you might consider genetic Caucasians, but they are now functioning as mental Europeans. The same holds true for the Chinese Communists, for Japanese capitalists or Bantu Catholics or Peter "MacDollar" down at the Navajo reservation or Dickie Wilson up here at Pine Ridge. There is no racism involved in this, just an acknowledgment of the mind and spirit that make up culture.

In Marxist terms I suppose I'm a "cultural nationalist." I work first with my people, the traditional Lakota people, because we hold a common worldview and share an immediate struggle. Beyond this, I work with other traditional American Indian peoples, again because of a certain commonality in worldview and form of struggle. Beyond that, I work with anyone who has experience the colonial oppression of Europe and who resists its cultural and industrial totality. Obviously, this includes genetic Caucasians who struggle to resist the dominant norms of European culture. The Irish and the Basques come immediately to mind, but there are many others.

I work primarily with my own people, with my own community. Other people who hold non-European perspectives should do the same. I believe in the slogan, "Trust your brother's vision," although I'd like to add sisters in the bargain. I trust the community and the culturally based vision of all the races that naturally resist industrialization and human extinction. Clearly, individual whites can share in this, given only that they have reached the awareness that continuation of the industrial imperatives of Europe is not a vision, but species suicide. White is one of the sacred colors of the Lakota people - red, yellow, white and black. The four directions. The four seasons. The four period of life and aging. The four races of humanity. Mix red, yellow, white and black together and you get brown, the color of the fifth race. This is the natural order of things. It therefore seems natural to me to work with all races, each with it's own special meaning, identity and message.

But there is a peculiar behavior among most Caucasians. As soon as I become critical of Europe and its impact on other cultures, they become defensive. They begin to defend themselves. But I am not attacking them personally; I'm attacking Europe. In personalizing my observations on Europe they are personalizing European culture, identifying themselves with it.By defending themselves in this context, they are ultimately defending the death culture. This is a confusion which must be overcome, and it must be overcome in a hurry. None of us has energy to waste in such false struggles.

Caucasians have a more positive vision to offer humanity than European culture. I believe this. But in order to attain this vision it is necessary for Caucasians to step outside European culture - alongside the rest of humanity - to see Europe for what it is and what it does.

To cling to capitalism and Marxism and all the other "isms" is simply to remain within European culture. There is no avoiding this basic fact. As a fact, this constitutes a choice. Understand that the choice is based on culture, not race. Understand that to choose European culture and industrialism is to choose to be my enemy. And understand that the choice is yours, not mine. This leads me back to address those American Indians who are drifting through the universities, the city slums, and other European institutions. If you are there to learn to resist the oppressor in accordance with your traditional ways, so be it. I don't know how you manage to combine the two, but perhaps you will succeed. But retain your sense of reality. Beware of coming to believe the white world now offers solutions to the problems it confronts us with. Beware, too, of allowing the words of native people to be twisted to the advantage of our enemies. Europe invented the practice of turning words around on themselves. You need only look to the treaties between American Indian peoples and various European governments to know that this is true. Draw your strength from who you are.

A culture which regularly confuses revolution with continuation, which confuses science and religion, which confuses revolt with resistance, has nothing helpful to teach you and nothing to offer you as a way of life. Europeans have long since lost all touch with reality, if they ever were in touch with it. Feel sorry for them if you need to, but be comfortable with who you are as American Indians.

So, I suppose to conclude this, I would state clearly that leading anyone toward Marxism is the last thing on my mind. Marxism is as alien to my culture as capitalism and Christianity are. In fact, I can say I don't think I'm trying to lead anyone toward anything. To some extent I tried to be a "leader," in the sense that white media like to use that term, when the American Indian Movement was a young organization. This was a result of a confusion that I no longer have. You cannot be everything to everyone. I do not propose to be used in such a fashion by my enemies. I am not a leader. I am an Oglala Lakota patriot. This is all I want and all I need to be. And I am very comfortable with who I am.

- Russell Means

A revolutionary organization for the 21st century needs to forge a path between the Leninist vanguard party favored by traditional Marxist parties and the loose "network" model of organizing favored by many anarchists and activists today. The purpose of a revolutionary organization is to act as a cadre group that develops politics and strategies that contribute to mass movements toward a free society.

It is not a vanguard group. It does not seek to control any organization or movement, nor does it pretend that it is the most advanced section of a struggle and thus has the right to act in the interests of the masses. Instead, it assumes that the masses are typically the most advanced section of a struggle and that the cadre perpetually strives to learn from and identify with the masses. At the same time, a cadre organization does not pretend it doesn't provide leadership for larger movements, nor does it pretend that leadership is inherently authoritarian. A cadre organization does not seek to control any organization or movement, it aims to help lead it by providing it with a radical perspective and committed members dedicated to developing its autonomous revolutionary potential. A cadre group should debate those politics and strategies that best imagine and lead to a free society and then fight to enact them in mass-oriented organizations and movements.

A cadre is not an umbrella organization. It does not participate in any and all kinds of progressive social activism. Instead, a cadre group seeks out, helps develop, and supports those forms of agitation that undermine the rule of official society and that in some way prefigure the new society. In other words, the organization would not actively support any kind of activism but only those struggles that hold the potential of building a dual power. We imagine that such a revolutionary organization would be to contemporary movements what the FAI was to the CNT in Spain or the First International was to the European working class movements: a membership organization of like-minded persons committed to developing and encouraging the autonomous revolutionary tendencies in our present society.

A democratic structure

In the proposed organization, all power and authority should be transparent, accountable, distributed democratically, and effective. We believe the structure for a new organization should be based on the following principles:

1. Direct democracy. All members should have an equal say in those affairs that affect the organization. Unlike democratic centralism, this would include the right to freely express disagreements with decisions made by the majority. This type of democracy doesn't mean that a minority faction can disrupt the decisions of the majority, which tends to occur in loose network structures (i.e. consensus processes).

2. Membership. The organization should be a membership organization. Only members ought to make decisions about and act on the behalf of the organization. The organization should be controlled only by those who commit themselves to it. Criteria for membership should be clearly established, along with criteria for suspending or expelling members who violate the organization's principles. Membership criteria should include both political and financial commitments to the organization.

3. Local branches. The group should be organized into local branches. One criteria of membership would be to join a local branch or to form one if one doesn't exist.

4. Effectiveness and accountability. A democratic means of making decisions and carrying them out should be established. Members who do not meet their responsibilities should be held accountable for failing to do so.

Against the white race

The proposed organization's priority should be to destroy white supremacy. White supremacy is a system that grants those defined as "white" special privileges in American society, such as preferred access to the best schools, neighborhoods, jobs, and health care; greater advantages in accumulating wealth; a lesser likelihood of imprisonment; and better treatment by the police and the criminal justice system. In exchange for these privileges, whites agree to police the rest of the population through such means as slavery and segregation in the past and through formally "colorblind" policies and practices today that still serve to maintain white advantage. White supremacy, then, unites one section of the working class with the ruling class against the rest of the working class. This cross-class alliance represents the principle obstacle, strategically speaking, to revolution in the United States. Given the United States' imperial power, this alliance has global implications.

The central task of a new organization should be to break up this unholy alliance between the ruling class and the white working class by attacking the system of white privilege and the subordination of people of color. This is not to say that white supremacy is the "worst" form of oppression in this country, nor is it to imply that if white supremacy disappears then all other forms of oppression will magically melt away. Instead, it is a strategic argument, based on an analysis of U.S. history, designed to attack the American death star at its weakest point. The glue that has kept the American state together has been white supremacy; melting that glue creates revolutionary possibilities.

Against the state

The proposed organization should be anti-statist. The function of the state is to 1) perpetuate the rule of the oppressing class and 2) maintain its own power. It therefore has nothing to do with a free society and should be abolished. A revolutionary strategy seeks to undermine the state by developing a dual power strategy. A dual power strategy is one that directly challenges institutions of power and at the same time, in some way, prefigures the new institutions we envision. A dual power strategy not only opposes the state, it also prepares us for the difficult questions that will arise in a revolutionary situation.

The organization should also support the principle of self-determination, or the right for people to control their own life and destiny. Movements for self-determination have often assumed the politics of nationalism. Anarchists have traditionally rejected nationalism as a tool of oppression. We recognize that anti-statism and nationalism are often contradictory tendencies, since nationalism often supports the creation of nation-states. However, nationalism has also been a liberating force in world history, particularly in the struggle against colonialism. Thus, despite its contradictions nationalist struggles cannot be rejected out of hand by anti-authoritarian revolutionaries. The task is to develop anti-statist tendencies within nationalist movements, not to denounce the struggles of oppressed peoples because they assume a nationalist form.

A feminist organization

Any new organization should be explicitly feminist, in several ways. First, a revolutionary organization should have a radical feminist analysis of our society that challenges male dominance, compulsory heterosexuality, and the bipolar gender system that forces humans into "male" and "female" and "masculine" and "feminine" categories. Second, its internal operations (organizing structure, allocation of positions of leadership, meeting procedures, debating habits, etc.) should ensure women's participation and be strongly aware of practices that tend to favor men's voices over women's. Third, it should be committed to feminist political work, particularly those kinds of agitation that connect struggles against sexism with struggles against white supremacy. Finally, a revolutionary organization needs a feminist vision. It should imagine a world not only without sexism or homophobia but one in which gender relations are completely transformed. Toward this end, it should encourage resistance to masculine/feminine gender borders and encourage people to critique and explore their desires rather than repress them.

Strategy

The proposed federation should recognize that political theory, no matter how strong, can accomplish little if it is not combined with effective strategy. The actions taken by the organization, its involvement in mass movements, and its public statements should all be determined on a strategic basis. The focus of our work should be involving ourselves in movements and activism where there is the potential to work toward the building of a dual power. Social reforms won by progressive movements may be important, but if they do not work toward a dual power they are not the concerns of a revolutionary organization. For example, animal liberation is a worthy cause. However, it is difficult to imagine how a campaign for animal liberation could threaten state power and foreshadow a new society. Thus, while a revolutionary organization may applaud animal liberation activities, it would not devote energy toward animal rights. On the other hand, a program to develop local Copwatch chapters could represent a dual power strategy, since monitoring the police undermines state power by disrupting the cops' ability to enforce class and color lines and also foreshadows a new society in which ordinary people take responsibility for ensuring the safety of their communities.

Thus, campaigns developed by the organization that do not contribute toward the building of a dual power should be abandoned. If a popular protest movement has little hope of building a dual power, it is not one we should be collectively involved in. We may morally and politically approve of such movements but as a small group with limited resources, we must reject the liberalism of reform activism and concern ourselves with revolutionary strategy.

Vision

One of the great failings of modern radical organizations has been the failure to provide a strong vision of a new society. We are able to say what we are against but rarely what we are for. One purpose of a revolutionary organization is to provide people with a vision of a world worth fighting for. Lack of vision is one of the reasons why radicals have historically failed to win the working class to their politics. Unfortunately, the fascist right has not failed in this task; they offer a clear vision of the world they want to create. If we continue to fail to offer a vision of our own, we cannot expect to win people over to revolutionary politics.

Bring the ruckus

This proposal is the product of our readings and discussion on various radical organizations and movements over the past year, ranging from works produced by the Black liberation struggle, women's liberation, the abolitionists, and both classical and contemporary revolutionary anarchism. The praxis addressed within is also based on our experience with grassroots political work, particularly in Phoenix Copwatch.

To see our archive of some of the documents we have read and studied, go to: Bring The Ruckus

If you are interested in the politics of this proposal and would like to discuss it further, we encourage you to contact us.

1. What would make it worth your while to participate in this project?

2. What are ideologies, tendencies or dynamics that you refuse to see replicated in this initiative?

3. What are the arenas of struggle where you want to support the contestation of power?

4. Describe a project that doesn't already exist which you would undertake given adequate resources.

5. What support and space needs to exist for you to maintain your specific identities while collaborating in the larger organization?

6. Under what conditions will you be satisfied that the struggle is complete and peace is possible?

7. Choose for yourself a point of our argument that you consider important and develop some arguments and possible expansions of it. (one page minimum, no maximum).

8. Choose for yourself out of our proposal a point that can be criticized and destroy that position. (same conditions as above).

contact us with your responses

Creating Liberating Contexts:

It is not possible, at this time, to create truly liberated spaces. We currently cannot, for example, eat without some participation in capitalist modes of production and distribution. And, on top of the material barriers to full liberation, any grouping of human beings will, presently, be tainted by oppressive thought patterns and behaviors such as racism, sexism and class privilege. However, it is possible to partially re-shape the behavior of human beings by creating different contexts for them to operate in, and these spaces already exist, all throughout the world.

However brief or single-issue they might be, the following can all be liberating contexts to some extent: food co-ops, housing collectives, radical/queer/Black bookshops, high school "anarchy clubs," farms, Earth First! "free states," independent media centers, free schools, worker's strikes, political workshops, identity-based support groups and caucuses, cultural centers, community gardens, underground or "militant" cells, small/cooperative businesses and even monastic orders.

We propose a thorough and critical evaluation of all of these different models, so that we can support, enhance and enlarge these tendencies. Any thing that either currently exists, or that we will create, will address well certain issues and not be able to adequately deal with other problems. For example, Earth First! is healthily and tangibly fostering uncompromising resistance to eco-cide, but the movement is greatly plagued by it's own whiteness and drunkenness. Within each institution, tensions such as this will always exist. It is our choice as to what we prioritize and what we sacrifice towards that end, so we ought to choose with care.

Some possible priorities are:

Education:
Trapped between the coercion and indoctrination of public schools and the market driven, privilege-ridden universities, young people desperately need more wholesome, useful, and radical educational opportunities. Likewise, working people are systematically disempowered and perpetually made to feel stupid in our society. Alternative educational opportunities exist for both groups, but they tend to be, in one way or another, fettered to the old world (such as training Latinos to be more "employable," or the re-creation of adult dominated, anti-creative schools for young people). The creation of a multi-faceted, autonomous and revolutionary school (or study group, or popular education center) is an excellent hypothesis to experiment with.

Labor:
In a money economy, dignified labor is both vital and virtually impossible to find. Both the privileged and the under-privileged individual are tracked into a lifetime of de-skilled and alienated labor. And, both non-profit organizations and capitalist unions survive off of the continuation of the very system that we oppose, and thus can never truly address our need for meaningful work. it would be tremendously inspiring to see the birth of independent, cooperative work opportunities that provide both decent wages and skills to all involved.

Housing:
Many of us learned the largest portion of what we currently understand about how to be hateful, nasty, addicted, selfish, violent, victimized fuckers from our childhood homes. The home is one of the most intimate forums for either fostering or destroying oppressive behaviors. By struggling to create radical housing initiatives, we can begin to define the conditions for healthful boundaries, sexuality, solidarity, communication, commitment, power-sharing, trust, eating, and so forth. And these struggles exist, both within the home, and in relation to the larger neighborhood, city and state. Currently, there are very low standards put on "collective" living. For the most part, if certain mediocre requirements are met, a house is deemed "cooperative." Working to rise above this insulting self-definition would be a brilliant and intriguing experiment.

The SI fought against all ideologies (including situationism) and party lines, all of which reduce the individual's capacity to think for herself. They fought for full self-management of society, not only in the factories, farms, and schools but in all aspects of our everyday lives.

"The SI is an international association of individuals who, having demonstrated an equality of capabilities - in general, not in every detail - are equal in all aspects of it's democratic management." -SI

The SI was organized into various national sections that could operate fully autonomously within their home country and that came together for general assemblies of the "international" where theoretical and policy decisions were made. The membership of the SI was always intentionally small, and exclusions from the organization were fairly common.

"Our 'exclusions' only express our freedom to distinguish ourselves from the confusionism around us or even among us. We merely refuse to be ourselves mixed up with ideas and acts that run contrary to our convictions and tastes…

A year doesn't go by when people we loved haven't succumbed, for lack of having clearly grasped the present possibilities, to some glaring capitulation. But the enemy camp objectively condemns people to imbecility and already numbers millions of imbeciles; the addition of a few more makes no difference." -SI

The high point of the SI came in May/June 1968 when large-scale student takeovers of universities inspired some ten million workers to go out on wildcat strikes. While the state and the Communist labor unions fought to repress this revolutionary energy, the SI helped to form worker-student action committees and advocated for the occupation and liberated recreation of all the institutions of France.

After this brilliant upsurge of revolutionary activity, the membership of the SI skyrocketed. But not long afterward, tensions and division grew and the organization fell into decline by 1971.

"The numerous deficiencies that have marked the SI were invariably produced by individuals who needed the SI in order to personally be something; and that something was never the real, revolutionary activity of the SI, but it's opposite … as for us here, we can take part in the SI only if we don't need it. We must first of all be self-sufficient; then, secondarily, we may lucidly combine our specific desires and possibilities for a collective action …" -SI

… BUT NOT THE SI

We strive to be situationists because we choose to be actors in our own liberation. We reject both the passivity of the dominant way of life and also the passive means of resistance so far offered up by those who specialize in "protest" and make careers out of "activism."

We reject such tired goals as "social change" (a non-statement, in that societies changing should be taken for granted) and "social justice," (all too often implies, in practice, the socialization of the warped systems of punishment and dehumanization referred to as "justice" by the state).

"Everywhere there are social confrontations, but nowhere is the old order liquidated, even within the very forces that contest it. Everywhere revolutionaries, but nowhere the revolution." -SI

Inspired by the SI we seek to create an organization in which individuals can still exist and think for themselves, and where an uncompromisingly revolutionary viewpoint can be articulated and fought for. We have no desire to lie about our desires or our demands. We are absolutely fucking sick of this sick society, and we are tired of the lame restructurings of americanism that pass for resistance and exhaust our patience daily.

But the Diaspora Confederacy is not the SI reborn. There is no use in rebirthing the SI, and even if there were, we break with their theory and practice on two rather large points.

First, we reject the SI idea that materialism, and a certain hedonistic, anti-spiritual way of life is somehow revolutionary. The decimation of spiritually centered nations, and the excessive accumulation of material goods is exactly what got us into our present mess. We will not participate in the continued genocidal assault on indigenous peoples worldwide out of some warped notion of revolutionary "progress."

And second, we seek to build an organization much more clearly international than the SI. By this we mean that we can't imagine a revolutionary organization that does not explicitly struggle to destroy whiteness and create one world in which many peoples and nations can exist as liberated equals. The Diaspora Confederacy needs to be, from start to finish, composed of people from many nations and working fully for all of their interests.

In this effort we can take direction and inspiration from numerous individuals, such as Marcus Garvey, Noel Ignatiev, Gayatri Spivak, C.L.R. James, Vine Deloria, Cherrie Moraga, Charles Payne, Nawal el Saadawi, Walter Rodney, Mab Segrest, Franz Fanon, Emiliano Zapata, Rod Coronado, Souad Rashed Dajani, Carter G. Woodson, Leslie Marmon Silko, and many more.

· We are radical. We seek to dig up the root sicknesses, crimes, and failures of this society and do away with them. We seek nothing less than the full re-organization of all elements of life such that the oppressive society may never take root again.

· We want to live. We are determined to do what is within our power to live, day by day, to the fullest and most dignified extent possible, despite the continued existence of the oppressive society.

· We view the reclamation of land as fundamental. We seek to be grounded in a place and willingly dependent on the resources that the land provides. We are determined to cultivate and honor the practices and skills that are necessary to have a right relationship with the earth.

· We honor those who came before us. We seek to ground our work in a deep understanding of the past. We look to the past to learn of the ways of our people, both the life-affirming aspects of culture and the destructive choices that brought us to our present wretched state. Particularly, we study the struggles of those who fought for freedom: John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the May '68 uprising in France, Tecumseh, the Intifada, Emma Goldman, the Haitian Revolution, Miss Ella Baker, Crazy Horse, the Mirabel sisters, to name a few.

· We honor the spirit. Recognizing that spiritually based societies created a much more liberated existence for the earth, animals and people, we validate and support those who integrate spiritual practice into their daily lives.

· We change where we are. While revolution is global, we have no pretenses that our work will profoundly change anything beyond our immediate locale.

· We seek human connections. we strive towards mutual vulnerability, intimacy, revelation and challenge among our co-participants in the liberation process.

Some things we challenge:

We reject reform. we are not looking for incremental changes, because incremental changes inevitably increase, rather than decrease, the longevity of the oppressive society. We resist the totality of our present conditions in order to gain total liberation.

We reject all creations of a category of human beings that is "most oppressed," by the system and we reject all of the ways in which this ideology fosters passivity among some and victim-ness or vindictiveness among others.

At the same time, we refuse to participate in a project that doesn't seriously address issues of privilege. We seek to both describe the poverty of the affluent, and to undermine and undo all systems of privilege (particularly capitalism, whiteness and patriarchy).

We reject tactical conformity. In all situations (but particularly in matters of self-defense or self-preservation) we have no pre-set response as an organization, and fully assume that any autonomous individual can and should act as they see fit, regardless of the actions of anyone else in the confederacy.

We question mass mobilization. While large scale demonstrations of solidarity and confrontations against the State clearly play an important role, building and/or engaging in protest organizations will never be our primary purpose. We have no desire to ask the power elites for our freedom, nor do we wish to influence public opinion through media which we do not control, and which speaks a language that we can not.

We question intoxication. In an effort to stay focused on the problems that face us, both individually and collectively, we question the dominant tendency in our society that says there is benefit in "escaping" our reality through drugs, alcohol, television or other addictive processes. We seek to participate in the joyous adventure of undermining this society and building a new one, rather than trying to "escape" something which will still be there when we come down from our high.

Of course, the vicious irony of the situation is that people flee their impoverished home conditions and enter the u.s., the country that crafted the conditions at "home," crafted a way of life here that is rooted in flaunting the affluence gained from the theft abroad, and is armed beyond compare to guarantee the perpetuation of such poverty.

The offensive posture of the u.s. state toward the third world migrant - in terms of making her feel thoroughly unwelcome (the violent excesses and policies of intimidation of the INS, the militarization of the Mexican border, English-only laws, deportations, etc.) - is fairly well understood and described by american progressives and radicals. More complicated, and perhaps more revealing of the true nature of the migrants' presence in the u.s. is the offense of the posture that encourages him to stay.

It is this "middle path" of simultaneously damning you and also needing you to survive so that you can be exploited that is the essence of imperialist domination. The "guest worker" programs geared towards the gross exploitation of Latinos, and the acceptance of Indians, Asians, Africans and West Indians into the scientific and computer engineering fields are two prongs of this same attack.

The Latina is "niggerized," both to extract enormous profits without having to set up operations abroad, and to establish the foundations of a (veiled) neo-nazi platform. The legitimate rage of the descendents of slaves in america is redirected, (downward) while continuing, virtually unabated, the total tyranny and assault on Black people in this country. The Spanish-speaking "nigger," and the Third World migrant in general, is used as the context for the forces of reaction to actually intensify the open hostilities and murderous delights that has existed here, to various degrees (almost entirely among white people) ever since the invasion.

And though it is less blatant, the existence of a Third World intelligentsia in america is part of the same process. Because although the Third World educated class enters the american university to flee the poverty at home (and at times do actually achieve a degree of material prosperity here) their presence in the first world ultimately aids in the mass impoverishment (materially or otherwise) of the bulk of the world's population. From the standpoint of the empire, the educated migrant is merely the exception that proves the inherent niggerdom of the entire third world.

The migrant is also made to feel welcome to the extent that he becomes american, which is the same as saying, "the extent to which he becomes not himself." Much like in the economic sphere, the migrant then becomes trapped between two identities, both of which are not enough to keep her alive. Economically she is not quite a slave and yet not quite a second class citizen. Culturally she is never again fully of her people, and yet never allowed to forget her exclusion from full participation in amerika.

In practice, this paradox tends to play itself out in ways that appear contradictory, or confused. First generation immigrants create communities in which some portion of home is kept alive: the languages, the foods, the religions, the celebrations, and so forth. here, there is almost a vibrancy, and, at times, even an atmosphere of community self-defense that is inspiring and liberatory. And yet, almost as soon as possible, and certainly by the second or third generation, these practices fade away in favor of the quasi-americanism that becomes possible. Sadly, in the narrative of immigrant communities' survival, it is inevitably emphasized that it was the assimilation, and not the community self-defense that kept the people alive.

For example, there is the story of the Irish peasants crammed into ships strikingly similar to slaving vessels (often a third to a half of the "cargo" died or was sickeningly ill upon arrival) and sent to america during the famine of the 1840s. These Irish folks were forced to migrate to america because it was cheaper for the landlords to ship them abroad than to wait for starving people to pay rent.

Then there's the English revolution - technically understood as the civil war to overthrow the king - that gave birth to a number of more radical currents among the English peasantry. Many of the soldiers who fought against the king became disillusioned by the fact that once the king was gone, the new parliamentary system still treated the poor as slaves and benefited the state church and the landowners. These folks mutinied and were violently repressed. Many of their leaders were killed, and the living were given two choices: go to Ireland to put down freedom fighters there, or go to america. Most chose america rather than murdering their Irish brothers.

These stories, as well as the simple understanding that what is now Georgia began as a British penal colony, begin to make clear that at least a good portion of the European Diaspora came downtrodden and persecuted, rather than (or as well) as greedy, racist Christians. In fact, the concept of race as we now understand it, and particularly of whiteness, grew out of this interaction between European migrants and African slaves on stolen Turtle Island.

The creation of "white" people in america began as an attempt to maintain the fragile balance of the slave economy in which the vast majority of the population were either slaves, indentured (or landless) Europeans, or natives. The slaving class had to ensure that events such as the Baker's Rebellion, where poor Europeans linked up with Africans and natives in revolt against the rich, would not continue.

Colonial lawmakers created this category of white people and gave white people certain material privileges, such as the ability to own land and the "right" to work slightly less menial industrial jobs and Europeans became white to the extent that they aligned their own interests with those of the slave holders and industrialists. Early in the colonial process, there were dozens of examples of European migrants organizing in vocal opposition to slavery, but by the turn of the twentieth century, this almost entirely gave way to a situation in which, even most so-called revolutionary white people advocated for the "naturally inferior" status of Negroes to be maintained.

So, becoming white had two key components. one was this acceptance of certain human beings as "niggers," barely above animal status, and fit only for brutal exploitation. Second was the decimation of all European cultural or spiritual heritage and the willingness to assimilate into america. Both were dramatic shifts from their condition upon arrival to this country.

For example, many of the Irish migrants identified not necessarily as Irish but more specifically by the county that they had left. They mostly spoke Gaelic and practiced a version of Catholicism that was a combination of Roman Catholicism and the pagan spiritual customs of pre-colonized Ireland. Many of the Irish peasants had lived in townlands, which were stateless, communal means of living, almost entirely unaffected by British rule. All of this had to be either forgotten or undermined in order to consider oneself a white american.

This transition from an identity firmly rooted in land, spirit, ritual and ancestry to an identity of loose affiliation to all peoples from Ireland, and then all of Europe, and then more abstractly to all of those currently deemed white, is a rather gross perversion of the notion of solidarity.

Inherent in the alliance of all European migrants in america into one distinct group of white people is the violent suppression of all that once allowed the European to know herself (ancestral history, custom, language, and spirit) as well as the violent subjugation of all those classed as "non-white." Thus, fundamental in this agreement to be understood as of the white race is the absolute negation of the possibility of legitimate connection with the majority of the world's peoples.

So while the localism of indigenous systems of living in Europe guaranteed the individual's survival through the vibrancy of the community, the transition to whiteness guarantees only the mutual alienation of all those participating. And perhaps the third key component of whiteness is that very near to everyone must participate or the power of the consensual lie tends to dissipate.

Africans were stolen from dozens of nations throughout the west coast of Africa, as well as somewhat from the internal regions. The numerous languages, cultural and spiritual practices of the Africans were systematically undermined by the slave system. In the West Indies, Africans were "broken" for their eventual task of cultivating vast quantities of cotton, tobacco, indigo and sugar cane on plantations throughout the Caribbean and the southeastern united states.

It is this breaking of human beings that best exemplifies the experience of the Diaspora. Nations and families ruthlessly divided, the women raped by the master, the children sold "down the river." Native dance and music forbidden and forced underground, indigenous names obliterated by the master's name. Native religions and languages banned and replaced by the slaveholder's Christianity and English.

Having endured nearly three centuries of slavery, and another full century of apartheid terror, descendants of Africans in america have been almost entirely stripped of all legitimate sense of being African and have been given, in trade, the offensive and meager identity as an African-American.

AFRICANS:

The largest, and the most important migration of peoples to conquered Turtle Island were the 80-100 million captured Africans sold as slaves in the emerging capitalist economy of the "New World." Without the theft of millions of people's labor, without the systematic desecration of their humanity, the invaders could not have created the empire of affluence and global terror that we now refer to as the "u.s." The historical enslavement of Africans is, both materially and psychologically, the most pervasive and foundational ingredient of our present miserable condition in this society.

The mass robbery of human beings instigated by European Christian invaders grew to be such a profitable endeavor that some among the African population began capturing and offering up their own for the thousands-of-miles journey to the insane degradation of the New World. Confined in a state of wretchedness comparable only to the likes of modern factory farms, more than half of the African "cargo" of the slavers died on passage to "the Americas" and were thrown into the sea like simple debris of a business enterprise.

Africans were stolen from dozens of nations throughout the west coast of Africa, as well as somewhat from the internal regions. The numerous languages, cultural and spiritual practices of the Africans were systematically undermined by the slave system. In the West Indies, Africans were "broken" for their eventual task of cultivating vast quantities of cotton, tobacco, indigo and sugar cane on plantations throughout the Caribbean and the southeastern united states.

It is this breaking of human beings that best exemplifies the experience of the Diaspora. Nations and families ruthlessly divided, the women raped by the master, the children sold "down the river." Native dance and music forbidden and forced underground, indigenous names obliterated by the master's name. Native religions and languages banned and replaced by the slaveholder's Christianity and English.

Having endured nearly three centuries of slavery, and another full century of apartheid terror, descendants of Africans in america have been almost entirely stripped of all legitimate sense of being African and have been given, in trade, the offensive and meager identity as an African-American.

EUROPEANS:

One way or another, either taught by the left or by the racist public schools, the history of Europeans in the Americas always begins with the history of those who initiated and profited from the genocidal slaving conquest. This is a piece of the history that cannot be ignored or understated. Yes, two continents were conquered and another was robbed of millions as slaves, and yes, the conquistadors were from Europe.

For sure, there has always been a class of Europeans that stockpiled stolen gold and silver, that burned natives alive and buried the corpses in mass graves, that owned vast plantations and sold the sugar, rum, tobacco, cotton and indigo on the international market, that owned the ships that carted Africans across the Atlantic as cattle, that called for the mass distribution of smallpox blankets, that came to brutally Christianize "ignorant savages," that slaughtered millions of buffalo and harp seals with reckless abandon, that established themselves as the new government, and so forth.

And yet, saying this only tells the very crudest beginning of the story of Europeans in this country. The vast majority of settlers, in general, and even among the armies of colonization, were not the wealthy speculators and bishops that really spearheaded the initiative. Many millions of European migrants were impoverished folks, criminals or criminalized revolutionaries and religionists, thousands of whom were forced to migrate for exactly these reasons. Very little has been done to understand and describe this process (certainly by the white radical movement in the u.s.) but we can begin with the sparse knowledge we do have, and build from there.

For example, there is the story of the Irish peasants crammed into ships strikingly similar to slaving vessels (often a third to a half of the "cargo" died or was sickeningly ill upon arrival) and sent to america during the famine of the 1840s. These Irish folks were forced to migrate to america because it was cheaper for the landlords to ship them abroad than to wait for starving people to pay rent.

Then there's the English revolution - technically understood as the civil war to overthrow the king - that gave birth to a number of more radical currents among the English peasantry. Many of the soldiers who fought against the king became disillusioned by the fact that once the king was gone, the new parliamentary system still treated the poor as slaves and benefited the state church and the landowners. These folks mutinied and were violently repressed. Many of their leaders were killed, and the living were given two choices: go to Ireland to put down freedom fighters there, or go to america. Most chose america rather than murdering their Irish brothers.

These stories, as well as the simple understanding that what is now Georgia began as a British penal colony, begin to make clear that at least a good portion of the European Diaspora came downtrodden and persecuted, rather than (or as well) as greedy, racist Christians. In fact, the concept of race as we now understand it, and particularly of whiteness, grew out of this interaction between European migrants and African slaves on stolen Turtle Island.

The creation of "white" people in america began as an attempt to maintain the fragile balance of the slave economy in which the vast majority of the population were either slaves, indentured (or landless) Europeans, or natives. The slaving class had to ensure that events such as the Baker's Rebellion, where poor Europeans linked up with Africans and natives in revolt against the rich, would not continue.

Colonial lawmakers created this category of white people and gave white people certain material privileges, such as the ability to own land and the "right" to work slightly less menial industrial jobs and Europeans became white to the extent that they aligned their own interests with those of the slave holders and industrialists. Early in the colonial process, there were dozens of examples of European migrants organizing in vocal opposition to slavery, but by the turn of the twentieth century, this almost entirely gave way to a situation in which, even most so-called revolutionary white people advocated for the "naturally inferior" status of Negroes to be maintained.

So, becoming white had two key components. one was this acceptance of certain human beings as "niggers," barely above animal status, and fit only for brutal exploitation. Second was the decimation of all European cultural or spiritual heritage and the willingness to assimilate into america. Both were dramatic shifts from their condition upon arrival to this country.

For example, many of the Irish migrants identified not necessarily as Irish but more specifically by the county that they had left. They mostly spoke Gaelic and practiced a version of Catholicism that was a combination of Roman Catholicism and the pagan spiritual customs of pre-colonized Ireland. Many of the Irish peasants had lived in townlands, which were stateless, communal means of living, almost entirely unaffected by British rule. All of this had to be either forgotten or undermined in order to consider oneself a white american.

This transition from an identity firmly rooted in land, spirit, ritual and ancestry to an identity of loose affiliation to all peoples from Ireland, and then all of Europe, and then more abstractly to all of those currently deemed white, is a rather gross perversion of the notion of solidarity.

Inherent in the alliance of all European migrants in america into one distinct group of white people is the violent suppression of all that once allowed the European to know herself (ancestral history, custom, language, and spirit) as well as the violent subjugation of all those classed as "non-white." Thus, fundamental in this agreement to be understood as of the white race is the absolute negation of the possibility of legitimate connection with the majority of the world's peoples.

So while the localism of indigenous systems of living in Europe guaranteed the individual's survival through the vibrancy of the community, the transition to whiteness guarantees only the mutual alienation of all those participating. And perhaps the third key component of whiteness is that very near to everyone must participate or the power of the consensual lie tends to dissipate.

REFUGEES:

That millions of people find the conditions in their country so undesirable that they choose to migrate elsewhere is not a surprise. The daily conditions imposed by the dominant society, particularly in the vast portions of the world where this domination is blunt, undisguised thievery, are absolutely noxious towards all things that live or might wish to live. Capitalism is war. Whether it shows itself in open violent conflict or not - and (taken globally) it does daily - the continuation of this system is both rooted in, and inherently violence. As a result, refugees of war are everywhere.

A refugee of war is a time-bomb. Every war that the colonial and neocolonial masters have instigated over the past hundreds of years has simultaneously sown the seeds of resistance in millions of survivors. In places such as Palestine where the people have faced over 50 years of military occupation, apartheid and genocidal "removal" campaigns, the rage felt among the people is truly awe-inspiring. At this point, more than 50 percent of the population of the occupied territories are 18 years old or younger. They have known nothing but Israeli oppression and have nothing to look forward to but the Intifada.

And there are many, many Palestines, just as there will be many, many Vietnam-style wars of national liberation.

Of course, the vicious irony of the situation is that people flee their impoverished home conditions and enter the u.s., the country that crafted the conditions at "home," crafted a way of life here that is rooted in flaunting the affluence gained from the theft abroad, and is armed beyond compare to guarantee the perpetuation of such poverty.

The offensive posture of the u.s. state toward the third world migrant - in terms of making her feel thoroughly unwelcome (the violent excesses and policies of intimidation of the INS, the militarization of the Mexican border, English-only laws, deportations, etc.) - is fairly well understood and described by american progressives and radicals. More complicated, and perhaps more revealing of the true nature of the migrants' presence in the u.s. is the offense of the posture that encourages him to stay.

It is this "middle path" of simultaneously damning you and also needing you to survive so that you can be exploited that is the essence of imperialist domination. The "guest worker" programs geared towards the gross exploitation of Latinos, and the acceptance of Indians, Asians, Africans and West Indians into the scientific and computer engineering fields are two prongs of this same attack.

The Latina is "niggerized," both to extract enormous profits without having to set up operations abroad, and to establish the foundations of a (veiled) neo-nazi platform. The legitimate rage of the descendents of slaves in america is redirected, (downward) while continuing, virtually unabated, the total tyranny and assault on Black people in this country. The Spanish-speaking "nigger," and the Third World migrant in general, is used as the context for the forces of reaction to actually intensify the open hostilities and murderous delights that has existed here, to various degrees (almost entirely among white people) ever since the invasion.

And though it is less blatant, the existence of a Third World intelligentsia in america is part of the same process. Because although the Third World educated class enters the american university to flee the poverty at home (and at times do actually achieve a degree of material prosperity here) their presence in the first world ultimately aids in the mass impoverishment (materially or otherwise) of the bulk of the world's population. From the standpoint of the empire, the educated migrant is merely the exception that proves the inherent niggerdom of the entire third world.

The migrant is also made to feel welcome to the extent that he becomes american, which is the same as saying, "the extent to which he becomes not himself." Much like in the economic sphere, the migrant then becomes trapped between two identities, both of which are not enough to keep her alive. Economically she is not quite a slave and yet not quite a second class citizen. Culturally she is never again fully of her people, and yet never allowed to forget her exclusion from full participation in amerika.

In practice, this paradox tends to play itself out in ways that appear contradictory, or confused. First generation immigrants create communities in which some portion of home is kept alive: the languages, the foods, the religions, the celebrations, and so forth. here, there is almost a vibrancy, and, at times, even an atmosphere of community self-defense that is inspiring and liberatory. And yet, almost as soon as possible, and certainly by the second or third generation, these practices fade away in favor of the quasi-americanism that becomes possible. Sadly, in the narrative of immigrant communities' survival, it is inevitably emphasized that it was the assimilation, and not the community self-defense that kept the people alive.