This is a part from the book that I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: How the Pro-Palestine Movement Failed to Stop a Holocaust, & How it Can Still Win.”
Why have U.S. workers always had the capacity for revolutionary action, even during the time when the white workers were settlers? Why did Western Massachusetts undergo Shay’s rebellion in 1786, where citizens rose up in response to the debt crisis the ruling class had imposed upon them? Why did it become a real problem for the American settler-colonial enterprise that whites kept defecting to live in tribal society? Why did John Brown emerge to help catalyze a multiracial struggle against slavery? It’s because the United States, never had a role which was exactly equivalent to that of the Zionist project.
Whereas the Jewish settlers revolted against Britain mainly over its immigration restrictions, the colonists in America had a more direct and substantial contradiction between their interests and the monarchy’s interests. Britain’s exploitative tax policies were a key part of what motivated the Americans to rebel, and their anti-colonial revolt nurtured a revolutionary spirit that was already there; if not for the yeoman, the small farmers who were being squeezed out by Britain’s tax policies, the revolution wouldn’t have been able to get a sufficient mass base. It’s unsurprising that just ten years after 1776, something like Shay’s Rebellion happened. The white workers and the colonized workers already had a mutual interest in defeating the reactionary elements, which was why so many whites were receptive to the message of John Brown.
When Brown led his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, and got executed for it, he was made into a martyr in the eyes of much of society. Then two years later, the Civil War began, giving the Americans who’d been inspired by Brown an opportunity to face off against the slavocracy and its minions. Mass consciousness had been successfully turned against slavery, like it’s now in the process of being turned against Zionism. I don’t know if our present national dispute will lead to a civil war, but debates like this one have brought such levels of upheaval in the past. Wrote Eugene Debs in 1887 about how swiftly the national climate had changed in favor of the abolitionists:
In days, not so far away as to be forgotten by millions of men and women, the term ‘abolitionists’ was one of crushing reproach, and he who dared plead guilty to the charge of being an abolitionist, was everywhere ostracized, and over a vast extent of territory the charge ranked with crimes which could be expiated only by imprisonment or death. Notwithstanding all this, abolition thrived, abolitionists accepted all the penalties, dared every peril, gloried in chains, prisons, exile and death. Their motto was no truce, no compromise. They saw the wrong, the curse, the crime of slavery, and they attacked it resolutely, continually, ceaselessly. They shaped events, they created circumstances, they grasped fate and destiny, and wrung from them decrees that slavery in the United States should cease. For all this they were maligned, persecuted and killed.
With this new stage of class confrontation, centered around the fight against the bourgeoisie’s most reactionary wing, the country’s revolutionary elements found themselves fighting against an old enemy: the British. It was the British empire that backed the Confederates, providing crucial support in the war against the Union. This foreign meddling effort by the Crown was not an isolated example; it was part of a larger trend, one where British capital has tried to prevent further revolutionary progress in the United States. From the perspective of the capitalist class, U.S. Americans have always been a dangerous population, at constant risk of rising up and completing their revolution. So the most retrograde parts of the U.S. bourgeoisie have always been willing to collaborate with the Crown in fighting this country’s revolutionary masses, and in trying to divide the USA’s workers.
It was right around the time when the anti-slavery struggle gained critical traction, and the British consequently experienced a strategic defeat in North America, that the Crown became compelled to start acting in a fashion more consistent with capitalism’s monopoly era. (These two developments weren’t causally related; rather they both came about during the same moment in capitalism’s evolution.) As recounted by the diplomat John Foster in his book A Century of American Diplomacy, the Crown decided it now had to embrace a policy of more open global commerce.
This meant establishing a greater presence of capital in the United States, to the effect that the Chinese and U.S. workers came to have their collective experiences fundamentally tied together. It also let the British gain far greater influence over the United States; whereas during the Civil War, the British were invested in the victory of one wing of the U.S. ruling class, in this new era they could act in full unison with American capital. The British and U.S. bourgeoisie had become fused, sharing a mutual interest in the globalized, proto-monopolist system that was emerging. Foster reported that the leaders of the United States were enthusiastic about building this trans-Atlantic special relationship, because they knew it would let U.S. capital expand:
The Anglo-French war with China of 1858-60, which resulted in the occupation of Peking by the allied forces and the opening of a number of additional ports to foreign commerce, was a rude awakening of the Celestial Empire from its seclusion and conservatism, and its public men began to see that a new policy of broader and freer intercourse with foreign nations must be adopted. Anson Burlingame, who since 1861 had resided at Peking as minister from the United States, and by his tact and friendly conduct had gained the confidence of the Chinese government, was invited by it in 1868 to become the head of an imperial embassy, to visit all the leading Christian nations, and through treaties and personal intercourse establish amicable and freer political and commercial relations with them.
This notable embassy first visited the United States, where it was received by the Executive, by Congress, and by the leading cities with distinguished attention. The government of the United States being in full sympathy with the objects of the embassy, a treaty (1868) was readily negotiated with its plenipotentiaries by Secretary Seward, wherein the rights of China were protected respecting all grants of lands or concessions to foreigners for internal improvements, freedom of conscience and religious worship were guaranteed, unnecessary dictation and intervention in internal affairs were to be discouraged, change of home and allegiance and free emigration were stipulated, and the privilege of unrestricted travel and residence in China and the United States, upon the basis of the most favored nation, was agreed to.
It was under these conditions, where the British had collaborated with the U.S. ruling class to import Chinese workers to America, that this capitalist alliance also gained an opportunity for undermining U.S. proletarian solidarity. The capitalists created an anti-Chinese psyop, designed to target the white workers through narratives about Asian immigrants hurting the white proletariat. And a microcosm of this destructive campaign can be found right in my own hometown inside Humboldt County, California, where the government carried out the Eureka Chinese expulsion of 1885. Which was an act of injustice that would serve as widespread inspiration within the broader anti-Chinese movement.
When Humboldt’s rich families sought out to get rid of the Chinese workers, they used the newspapers to propagate the idea that the economy was being drained by parasitic foreign intruders. It’s one of the same justifications our government today is using for putting immigrants, both illegal and legal, into inhumane secret prisons. My making this comparison is not meant as an endorsement of the slave labor system that our ruling class coerces human trafficking victims into; I’m not a liberal, so I don’t use the “but who will pick our crops?” argument. I’m emphasizing this part of history in order to illustrate one of the oldest and most effective ways our ruling class has psyoped the country’s workers.
Through this manipulation method, where they’ve painted foreign workers as a threat to the “real” American workers, they created an important ideological tool for the U.S. labor movement’s pro-imperialist elements. It was the fear of foreigners hurting U.S. workers that Samuel Gompers, one of the right-wing labor tendency’s foundational figures, would use to help justify his reactionary policies; Gompers worked to spread animus towards both the Black and Asian workers, saying that “the Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by Negroes, China-men, Japs or any others.” And through propaganda efforts like the one directed at Humboldt County’s workers, the capitalists had created the narrative basis for this.
This narrative’s core argument—that the white working class depends on white supremacy—was proven wrong by empirical reality. Like all the other Chinese exclusion policies, the forced relocation didn’t benefit the white workers; it only left a hole in the economy, with the sole winners from this being the capitalists who could take advantage of the crisis. This is what finance capital does: suppress industry so that those with the backing of international banking interests can secure their monopolies. And though the capitalists in tiny Humboldt weren’t monopolists, their aspirations aligned with those of the much larger forces which were agitating for racial supremacist policies.
It wasn’t just the newspapers or the politicians which were taking part in the demonization of Chinese workers. There was also a religious current, affiliated with Protestantism, that sought to rally the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” workers around an agenda of exclusion. This current was led by the Orange Order, a British chauvinist group that had been doing what the Ku Klux Klan did centuries before the Klan was formed. Today, the Orangeists are mainly active in Ireland, where they hold marches to further the country’s anti-immigrant movement. But during the 19th century, they also took on a pivotal role in the project to divide the U.S. working class.
Named after William of Orange, the Protestant English king who came to power through the revolution of 1688, Orangeism has embodied not just a religious or racial agenda but an economic one. The 1688 upheaval was pivotal in the ascension of the capitalists, letting them solidify their control and get rid of the limits that feudalism had put onto them. Like the 1776 revolution, this development was progressive, but the new power structure which came out of it could easily be turned towards counterrevolutionary ends. Orangeism was one of the key forces that ensured the workers wouldn’t manage to sufficiently assert themselves following the bourgeoisie’s takeover, at least not in the short term.
One of Orangeism’s central teachings is “unionism,” the belief that Ireland must remain united with Britain; which is what the Orangeists preach to the workers as a substitute for the other kind of unionism. Over the centuries, they’ve used religious and racial bigotry to help fortify British colonial rule over Ireland, and to thereby aid in the expansion of the broader colonial project. Though the Orangeists have declined since the 19th century, they were successful enough that they indirectly provided crucial assistance to Zionism, colonialism’s next step.
The U.S. Orangeists were the types of political actors who wanted the United States to be more like “Israel”; to have a white working class that stays loyal towards settler-colonialism, and to the imperial legacy this system would leave behind. When the Orangeists came to America, they were often alternatively known as “Williamites,” which is where the term “Hillbilly” came from. In this way, they’ve been able to culturally associate themselves with the white workers well enough that the two have become subconsciously tied together in the popular perception; a perception that’s used by the “Settlers” camp to spread cynicism which helps the ruling class. This camp views the white working class as inherently reactionary, inseparable from the legacy of groups like the Orangeists.
The reality is that the Orangeists never represented the white workers at any point. Even during the late 19th century, at the height of Orangeism’s influence in the United States, the country had just experienced a moment of unprecedented multi-racial popular struggle. There were white workers who held Orangeism’s beliefs, but these beliefs were the product of a propaganda campaign; one that was very strategic, and that was orchestrated due to fears of the U.S. population’s great revolutionary energy. It was the successes of the abolitionist movement that these racist campaigns were undertaken in reaction to. And this campaign of counterrevolutionary warfare came not just from the national bourgeoisie, but from the global capitalist network; which was coming to take on a distinctly monopolist form, and therefore had gained unprecedented means for exerting societal influence.
In Humboldt, the connection to this network could be found within the Orange Order, and within the larger system of fraternal orders that Orangeism inhabits. The Orangeists had an instrumental role in the Chinese expulsion; this is evidenced by how H.A. Libbey, the local Orangeman, was in the committee of 15 prominent Humboldt residents who officiated the expulsion proposal. Libbey and the others “investigated” the supposedly negative effects that the Chinese residents were having, then concluded that taking these residents away was what had to be done.
This idea that certain peoples are unworthy of living on the land, and must be shoved aside to make way for those who deserve it, has its origins in the global migration process that created the Orange Order. The Williamite settlers, like the Zionist settlers, reached their destinations because of global capital’s efforts to export those who it views as excess residents. Britain facilitated the Zionist project because it wanted a place to send its Jewish population; which was a continuation of what Britain had been doing for centuries to many different ethnic and religious groups. Ever since capitalism first began majorly upending the feudal order, and creating people who didn’t fit into the new economic system, Britain had been working to place its perceived undesirables elsewhere. And like the settlers in Palestine, these groups were assigned the role of doing global enforcement work for imperialism, establishing racial and religious supremacist structures so that capital could expand into the settled territories.
The institution that centrally orchestrated this migration campaign, and thereby brought settler-colonialism into being, is so deeply embedded in our global economic system that it’s older than capitalism itself. It pre-dates the colonization of the Americas, and even the colonization of Ireland. It’s also older than the Norman Conquest of 1066, which is why it holds a truly exceptional level of legal sovereignty. This institution is called the Corporation of the City of London, and it functionally stands above even the Crown; William the Conqueror gave the City the right to elect its own Lord Mayor, deciding to respect the sovereignty which it had enjoyed since ancient times. It was from this unaccountable corporate entity, which is now a core part of the global banking system, that settler-colonialism got birthed. And the catalyst for this birth was the social instability that capitalism created, wherein great masses of people throughout England suddenly became unemployed economic refugees.
I describe the City of London as being above the Crown because when the Crown tried to respond to this crisis in a way that was even relatively equitable, the City defied this policy with total impunity. As the Marxist Tim Russo has observed, it was this decision that made Orangeism able to rise, and that brought settler-colonialism itself into being:
In 1637, the Corporation explicitly refused the Crown’s request to deal with London’s now teeming suburbs by incorporating the suburbs around the City into the City’s charter. Known as “The Great Refusal”, instead, the City of London Corporation forcibly sent thousands of capitalism’s first refugees to England’s new colonies, themselves chartered by the City as subsidiary corporations, such as Northern Ireland. Instead of seeking to integrate the new arrivals, the Corporation put large resources into transferring its unwanted excess population to the Ulster Plantation and the Corporation of Londonderry, which were established for that purpose.
The bowler hats and umbrellas of the Orange Orders derive from their sponsorship by the Corporation of London. This is precisely the same legal machinery that created the trans-Atlantic slave trade of British colonial imperialism, born in the exact same legal manner as the Orange Orders and bowler hats of the Great Refusal, at the very same time, the articles of incorporation even drafted by the very same people. During this period, every single corporate entity of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was chartered by the City of London Corporation; the Virginia Company, the Maryland Company, even beyond America to the East India Company, and so on.
This historical context behind how settler-colonialism got created, and how settler-colonialism’s ideology has been used to undermine worker solidarity, disproves not just the left-wing “Settlers” thesis but also the right-wing “Jewish Question.”
If settler-colonialism came from the City of London, and the City of London has needed influence tools like the Orange Orders to prevent interracial class solidarity, then the central contradiction is not the character of the white workers; it’s global monopoly finance capital. The American white supremacist ideology of today shares the form of the original settler-colonial ideology, but since settler-colonialism is no longer the system in which we materially live, this is an ideology that’s being artificially kept alive. It’s a cultural phenomenon that transnational capital is perpetuating, through modern versions of the Humboldt anti-Chinese psyop, in order to prevent a second American revolution.
The far right would argue that finance capital’s power proves the existence of a Jewish anti-white conspiracy, but it in fact disproves this narrative. Finance capital is not about racial power, but about economic power; this becomes evident when you scrutinize the arguments of the Sakaists, and find that the system in which we live is ultimately driven by economic relations. The economic aspect trumps all else. And if finance capital isn’t truly about race, then it can’t be considered something fundamentally Jewish in nature.
This is even more apparent when one investigates the City of London’s human trafficking activities throughout the 17th century, wherein working class Jews were exploited along with the City’s other victims. Russo explains how the City carried out
…industrial shipping of human beings for profit, ranging from indentured to lifetime slaves, the first of whom were by far mostly English men. These first refugees of clearing land for capital mixed in America with Africans brought both as slaves and freedman by other subsidiary corporations and indigenous tribes to become the first cross cultural working class revolt against capitalism in history. From 1607 to 1682, the City’s shipped humans were not just, nor in the first instance, Africans; they included tens of thousands of political trouble makers, prisoners of war, Catholics, Jews, Germans, Swiss, Quakers, Irish, petty thieves, even ‘vagrant’ English children, whose going price the City of London Corporation negotiated with its subsidiary the Virginia Company to be £5 – a gigantic sum if given to the homeless child, a trifle to the City of London shipping that child to slavery.
This piece of history tells us so much about our present conditions because it reveals what the foundations of our modern economic system look like. These are the same things capitalism is doing today: exploiting and sacrificing peoples of all races, creating seemingly contradictory exceptions within the racial hierarchy. While the U.S. empire elevates Jews to oppressor status in Palestine, and fully lets American Jews into “white” society, in Ukraine it’s backing a Nazi junta. (Adding to the contradictions, this junta’s presidential figurehead is Zelensky, a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors). The empire continues to weaponize racist sentiments among whites, yet in the last half-century it’s engineered an unprecedented economic decline for the white workers. Throughout this time, the Black workers have been brought to an even worse state; yet in the 21st century, the empire has allowed for the election of its first Black president.
The nature of the system is to selectively aid and harm different peoples, and at its core this system is not about race; race is one of the system’s most useful tools, but the system is fundamentally economic in nature. Any attempts to explain the system’s contradictions through race alone will fail, as such explanations always obscure the central role of capital.
One symptom of the pro-Palestine movement’s failures is ideological camps which present demagogic answers for why Zionism still hasn’t been defeated. There’s a camp that says this is proof of the white workers being inherently aligned with settler-colonialism. There’s also a camp that says this proves the Jews are behind it all; which parallels the most stereotypical kinds of “wokeist” leftism, in that it sees race as the core contradiction.
This similarity between these two kinds of opportunism is no coincidence. Capitalism has always used the tactic of instigating ethnic or racial divisions, with this tactic taking on many different, newer forms during the monopoly era. It was when capitalism reached its highest stage, and became ripe for workers revolution in an unprecedented way, that we started seeing the reactionary forces invent additional counterrevolutionary ideologies. Ideologies that could be used to manage discontent during a historical phase when something like the Russian Revolution had become realistic.
Chinese exclusion, the Jim Crow laws, the creation of Orangeism’s updated version the KKK, and the era’s other racist institutional actions were about preemptively stopping something like the 1917 Russian workers victory from occurring in the United States. 1917 hadn’t come yet, but the ruling classes in America and abroad could already see that their power was now under serious threat.
This is what explains the seemingly contradictory nature of the U.S.-British capitalist alliance’s behavior towards the Chinese. Our ruling class imported so many Chinese workers, only to expel or exclude them right after, because these immigrants were always disposable. Forces like the Orangeists were there to make the white workers feel elevated due to witnessing this cruelty against their fellow workers, and rally in solidarity with the capitalists against the undesirables.
Given the fluid nature of the situation, though, there was no telling how long these class warfare tactics would work. With the progression towards capital’s monopoly stage, the proletariat had come to have more of an objective, materially based reason to unite than ever. The racial supremacist psyops couldn’t change this reality, they could only obscure it. From here on, there would always be the risk that capital’s schemes would fail. That the country’s people would again undergo the type of transformative process which John Brown helped create, and gain another great victory.
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