[Reader-list] An Essay from the archive

[Jeebesh]

Fredy Perlman 1984
The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism

First published: in the Winter, 1984 Fifth Estate
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/perlman-fredy/1984/nationalism.htm



Nationalism was proclaimed dead several times during the present  
century:


after the first world war, when the last empires of Europe, the  
Austrian and the Turkish, were broken up into self-determined nations,  
and no deprived nationalists remained, except the Zionists;
after the Bolshevik coup d’etat, when it was said that the  
bourgeoisie’s struggles for self-determination were henceforth  
superseded by struggles of workingmen, who had no country;
after the military defeat of Fascist Italy and National Socialist  
Germany, when the genocidal corollaries of nationalism had been  
exhibited for all to see, when it was thought that nationalism as  
creed and as practice was permanently discredited.
Yet forty years after the military defeat of Fascists and National  
Socialists, we can see that nationalism did not only survive but was  
born again, underwent a revival. Nationalism has been revived not only  
by the so-called right, but also and primarily by the so- called left.  
After the national socialist war, nationalism ceased to be confined to  
conservatives, became the creed and practice of revolutionaries, and  
proved itself to be the only revolutionary creed that actually worked.

Leftist or revolutionary nationalists insist that their nationalism  
has nothing in common with the nationalism of fascists and national  
socialists, that theirs is a nationalism of the oppressed, that it  
offers personal as well as cultural liberation. The claims of the  
revolutionary nationalists have been broadcast to the world by the two  
oldest continuing hierarchic institutions surviving into our times:  
the Chinese State and, more recently, the Catholic Church. Currently  
nationalism is being touted as a strategy, science and theology of  
liberation, as a fulfilment of the Enlightenment’s dictum that  
knowledge is power, as a proven answer to the question “What Is to be  
Done?”

To challenge these claims, and to see them in a context, I have to ask  
what nationalism is – not only the new revolutionary nationalism but  
also the old conservative one. I cannot start by defining the term,  
because nationalism is not a word with a static definition: it is a  
term that covers a sequence of different historical experiences. I’ll  
start by giving a brief sketch of some of those experiences.

According to a common (and manipulable) misconception, imperialism is  
relatively recent, consists of the colonization of the entire world,  
and is the last stage of capitalism. This diagnosis points to a  
specific cure: nationalism is offered as the antidote to imperialism:  
wars of national liberation are said to break up the capitalist empire.

This diagnosis serves a purpose, but it does not describe any event or  
situation. We come closer to the truth when we stand this conception  
on its head and say that imperialism was the first stage of  
capitalism, that the world was subsequently colonized by nation- 
states, and that nationalism is the dominant, the current, and  
(hopefully) the last stage of capitalism. The facts of the case were  
not discovered yesterday; they are as familiar as the misconception  
that denies them.

It has been convenient, for various good reasons, to forget that,  
until recent centuries, the dominant powers of Eurasia were not nation- 
states but empires. A Celestial Empire ruled by the Ming dynasty, an  
Islamic Empire ruled by the Ottoman dynasty and a Catholic Empire  
ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty vied with each other for possession of  
the known world. Of the three, the Catholics were not the first  
imperialists but the last. The Celestial Empire of the Mings ruled  
over most of eastern Asia and had dispatched vast commercial fleets  
overseas a century before sea-borne Catholics invaded Mexico.

The celebrants of the Catholic feat forget that, between 1420 and  
1430, Chinese imperial bureaucrat Cheng Ho commanded naval expeditions  
of 70,000 men and sailed, not only to nearby Malaya, Indonesia and  
Ceylon, but as far from home ports as the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea  
and Africa. The celebrants of Catholic conquistadors also belittle the  
imperial feats of the Ottomans, who conquered all but the westernmost  
provinces of the former Roman Empire, ruled over North Africa, Arabia,  
the Middle East and half of Europe, controlled the Mediterranean and  
hammered on the gates of Vienna. The imperial Catholics set out  
westward, beyond the boundaries of the known world, in order to escape  
from encirclement.

Nevertheless, it was the imperial Catholics who “discovered America,”  
and their genocidal destruction and plunder of their “discovery”  
changed the balance of forces among Eurasia’s empires.

Would imperial Chinese or Turks have been less lethal had they  
“discovered America”? All three empires regarded aliens as less than  
human and therefore as legitimate prey. The Chinese considered others  
barbarians; the Muslims and Catholics considered others unbelievers.  
The term unbeliever is not as brutal as the term barbarian, since an  
unbeliever ceases to be legitimate prey and becomes a full-fledged  
human being by the simple act of converting to the true faith, whereas  
a barbarian remains prey until she or he is made over by the civilizer.

The term unbeliever, and the morality behind it, conflicted with the  
practice of the Catholic invaders. The contradiction between  
professions and acts was spotted by a very early critic, a priest  
called Las Casas, who noted that the conversion ceremonies were  
pretexts for separating and exterminating the unconverted, and that  
the converts themselves were not treated as fellow Catholics but as  
slaves.

The critiques of Las Casas did little more than embarrass the Catholic  
Church and Emperor. Laws were passed and investigators were  
dispatched, but to little effect, because the two aims of the Catholic  
expeditions, conversion and plunder, were contradictory. Most  
churchmen reconciled themselves to saving the gold and damning the  
souls. The Catholic Emperor increasingly depended on the plundered  
wealth to pay for the imperial household, army, and for the fleets  
that carried the plunder.

Plunder continued to take precedence over conversion, but the  
Catholics continued to be embarrassed. Their ideology was not  
altogether suited to their practice. The Catholics made much of their  
conquests of Aztecs and Incas, whom they described as empires with  
institutions similar to those of the Hapsburg Empire and the religious  
practices as demonic as those of the official enemy, the heathen  
empire of the Ottoman Turks. But the Catholics did not make much of  
the wars of extermination against communities that had neither  
emperors nor standing armies. Such feats, although perpetrated  
regularly, conflicted with the ideology and were less than heroic.

The contradiction between the invaders’ professions and their acts was  
not resolved by the imperial Catholics. It was resolved by harbingers  
of a new social form, the nation-state. Two harbingers appeared during  
the same year, 1561, when one of the Emperor’s overseas adventures  
proclaimed his independence from the empire, and several of the  
Emperor’s bankers and provisioners launched a war of independence.

The overseas adventurer, Lope de Aguirre, failed to mobilize support  
and was executed.

The Emperor’s bankers and provisioners mobilized the inhabitants of  
several imperial provinces and succeeded in severing the provinces  
from the empire (provinces which were later called Holland).

These two events were not yet struggles of national liberation. They  
were harbingers of things to come. They were also reminders of things  
past. In the bygone Roman Empire, Praetorian guards had been engaged  
to protect the Emperor; the guards had assumed ever more of the  
Emperor’s functions and had eventually wielded the imperial power  
instead of the Emperor. In the Arabic Islamic Empire, the Caliph had  
engaged Turkish bodyguards to protect his person; the Turkish guards,  
like the earlier Praetorians, had assumed ever more of the Caliph’s  
functions and had eventually taken over the imperial palace as well as  
the imperial office.

Lope de Aguirre and the Dutch grandees were not the Hapsburg monarch’s  
bodyguards, but the Andean colonial adventurer and the Dutch  
commercial and financial houses did wield important imperial  
functions. These rebels, like the earlier Roman and Turkish guards,  
wanted to free themselves of the spiritual indignity and material  
burden of serving the Emperor; they already wielded the Emperor’s  
powers; the Emperor was nothing more to them than a parasite.

Colonial adventurer Aguirre was apparently inept as a rebel; his time  
had not yet come.

The Dutch grandees were not inept, and their time had come. They did  
not overthrow the empire; they rationalized it. The Dutch commercial  
and financial houses already possessed much of the New World’s wealth;  
they had received it as payment for provisioning the Emperor’s fleets,  
armies and household. They now set out to plunder colonies in their  
own name and for their own benefit, unshackled by a parasitic  
overlord. And since they were not Catholics but Calvinist Protestants,  
they were not embarrassed by any contradiction between professions and  
acts. They made no profession of saving souls. Their Calvinism told  
them that an inscrutable God had saved or damned all souls at the  
beginning of Time and no Dutch priest could alter God’s plan.

The Dutch were not crusaders; they confined themselves to unheroic,  
humorless, and businesslike plunder, calculated and regularized; the  
plundering fleets departed and returned on schedule. The fact that the  
plundered aliens were unbelievers became less important than the fact  
that they were not Dutchmen.

West Eurasian forerunners of nationalism coined the term savages. This  
term was a synonym for the east Eurasian Celestial Empire’s term  
barbarians. Both terms designated human beings as legitimate prey.

During the following two centuries, the invasions, subjugations and  
expropriations initiated by the Hapsburgs were imitated by other  
European royal houses.

Seen through the lenses of nationalist historians, the initial  
colonizers as well as their later imitators look like nations: Spain,  
Holland, England, France. But seen from a vantage point in the past,  
the colonizing powers are Hapsburgs, Tudors, Stuarts, Bourbons,  
Oranges – namely dynasties identical to the dynastic families that had  
been feuding for wealth and power ever since the fall of the western  
Roman empire. The invaders can be seen from both vantage points  
because a transition was taking place. The entities were no longer  
mere feudal estates, but they were not yet full-fledged nations; they  
already possessed some, but not yet all, the attributes of a nation- 
state. The most notable missing element was the national army. Tudors  
and Bourbons already manipulated the Englishness or Frenchness of  
their subjects, especially during wars against another monarch’s  
subjects. But neither Scots and Irishmen, not Corsicans and  
Provencals, were recruited to fight and die for “the love of their  
country.” War was an onerous feudal burden, a corvée; the only  
patriots were patriots of Eldorado.

The tenets of what was going to become the nationalist creed did not  
appeal to the ruling dynasts, who clung to their own tried and tested  
tenets. The new tenets appealed to the dynast’s higher servants, his  
money-lenders, spice-vendors, military suppliers and colony- 
plunderers. These people, like Lope de Aguirre and the Dutch grandees,  
like earlier Roman and Turkish guards, wielded key functions yet  
remained servants. Many if not most of them burned to shake off the  
indignity and the burden, to rid themselves of the parasitic overlord,  
to carry on the exploitation of countrymen and the plunder of  
colonials in their own name and for their own benefit.

Later known as the bourgeoisie or the middle class, these people had  
become rich and powerful since the days of the first westward- bound  
fleets. A portion of their wealth had come from the plundered  
colonies, as payment for the services they had sold to the Emperor;  
this sum of wealth would later be called a primitive accumulation of  
capital. Another portion of their wealth had come from the plunder of  
their own local countrymen and neighbors by a method later known as  
capitalism; the method was not altogether new, but it became very  
widespread after the middle classes got their hands on the New World’s  
silver and gold.

These middle classes wielded important powers, but they were not yet  
experienced in wielding the central political power. In England they  
overthrew a monarch and proclaimed a commonwealth but, fearing that  
the popular energies they had mobilized against the upper class could  
turn against the middle class, they soon restored another monarch of  
the same dynastic house.

Nationalism did not really come into its own until the late 1700s when  
two explosions, thirteen years apart, reversed the relative standing  
of the two upper classes and permanently changed the political  
geography of the globe. In 1776, colonial merchants and adventurers re- 
enacted Aguirre’s feat of proclaiming their independence from the  
ruling overseas dynast, outdid their predecessor by mobilizing their  
fellow-settlers, and succeeded in severing themselves from the  
Hanoverian British Empire. And in 1789, enlightened merchants and  
scribes outdid their Dutch forerunners by mobilizing, not a few  
outlying provinces, but the entire subject population, by overthrowing  
and slaying the ruling Bourbon monarch, and by remaking all feudal  
bonds into national bonds. These two events marked the end of an era.  
Henceforth even the surviving dynasts hastily or gradually became  
nationalists, and the remaining royal estates took on ever more of the  
attributes of nation-states.

The two eighteenth century revolutions were very different, and they  
contributed different and even conflicting elements to the creed and  
practice of nationalism. I do not intend to analyze these events here,  
but only to remind the reader of some of the elements.

Both rebellions successfully broke the bonds of fealty to a monarchic  
house, and both ended with the establishment of capitalist nation- 
states, but between the first act and the last they had little in  
common. The main animators of both revolts were familiar with the  
rationalistic doctrines of the Enlightenment, but the self-styled  
Americans confined themselves to political problems, largely to the  
problem of establishing a state machinery that could take up where  
King George left off. Many of the French went much further; they posed  
the problem of restructuring not only the state but all of society;  
they challenged not only the bond of subject to monarch, but also the  
bond of slave to master, a bond that remained sacred to the Americans.  
Both groups were undoubtedly familiar with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s  
observation that human beings were born free, yet everywhere were  
bound in chains, but the French understood the chains more profoundly  
and made a greater effort to break them.

As influenced by rationalistic doctrines as Rousseau himself had been,  
French revolutionaries tried to apply social reason to the human  
environment in the same way that natural reason, or science, was  
starting to be applied to the natural environment. Rousseau had worked  
at his desk; he had tried to establish social justice on paper, by  
entrusting human affairs to an entity that embodied the general will.  
The revolutionaries agitated to establish social justice not only on  
paper, but in the midst of mobilized and armed human beings, many of  
them enraged, most of them poor.

Rousseau’s abstract entity took the concrete form of a Committee of  
Public Safety (or Public Health), a police organization that  
considered itself the embodiment of the general will. The virtuous  
committee members conscientiously applied the findings of reason to  
human affairs. They considered themselves the nation’s surgeons. They  
carved their personal obsessions into society by means of the state’s  
razor blade.

The application of science to the environment took the form of  
systematic terror. The instrument of Reason and Justice was the  
guillotine.

The Terror decapitated the former rulers and then turned on the  
revolutionaries.

Fear stimulated a reaction that swept away the Terror as well as the  
Justice. The mobilized energy of bloodthirsty patriots was sent  
abroad, to impose enlightenment on foreigners by force, to expand the  
nation into an empire. The provisioning of national armies was far  
more lucrative than the provisioning of feudal armies ever had been,  
and former revolutionaries became rich and powerful members of the  
middle class, which was now the top class, the ruling class. The  
terror as well as the wars bequeathed a fateful legacy to the creed  
and practice of later nationalisms.

The legacy of the American revolution was of an altogether different  
kind. The Americans were less concerned with justice, more concerned  
with property.

The settler-invaders on the northern continent’s eastern shore needed  
George of Hanover no more urgently then Lope de Aguirre had needed  
Philip of Hapsburg. Or rather, the rich and powerful among the  
settlers needed King George’s apparatus to protect their wealth, but  
not to gain it. If they could organize a repressive apparatus on their  
own, they would not need King George at all.

Confident of their ability to launch an apparatus of their own, the  
colonial slave-holders, land-speculators, produce-exporters and  
bankers found the King’s taxes and acts intolerable. The most  
intolerable of the King’s acts was the act that temporarily banned  
unauthorized incursions into the lands of the continent’s original  
inhabitants; the King’s advisers had their eyes on the animal furs  
supplied by indigenous hunters; the revolutionary land-speculators had  
theirs on the hunters’ lands.

Unlike Aguirre, the federated colonizers of the north succeeded in  
establishing their own independent repressive apparatus, and they did  
this by stirring up a minimum of cravings for justice; their aim was  
to overthrow the King’s power, not their own. Rather than rely  
excessively on their less fortunate fellow-settlers or backwoods  
squatters, not to speak of their slaves, these revolutionaries relied  
on mercenaries and on indispensable aid from the Bourbon monarch who  
would be overthrown a few years later by more virtuous revolutionaries.

The North American colonizers broke the traditional bonds of fealty  
and feudal obligation but, unlike the French, they only gradually  
replaced the traditional bonds with bonds of patriotism and  
nationhood. They were not quite a nation; their reluctant mobilization  
of the colonial countryside had not fused them into one, and the multi- 
lingual, multi-cultural and socially divided underlying population  
resisted such a fusion. The new repressive apparatus was not tried and  
tested, and it did not command the undivided loyalty of the underlying  
population, which was not yet patriotic. Something else was needed.  
Slave-masters who had overthrown their king feared that their slaves  
could similarly overthrow the masters; the insurrection in Haiti made  
this fear less than hypothetical. And although they no longer feared  
being pushed into the sea by the continent’s indigenous inhabitants,  
the traders and speculators worried about their ability to thrust  
further into the continent’s interior.

The American settler-invaders had recourse to an instrument that was  
not, like the guillotine, a new invention, but that was just as  
lethal. This instrument would later be called Racism, and it would  
become embedded in nationalist practice. Racism, like later products  
of practical Americans, was a pragmatic principle; its content was not  
important; what mattered was the fact that it worked.

Human beings were mobilized in terms of their lowest and most  
superficial common denominator, and they responded. People who had  
abandoned their villages and families, who were forgetting their  
languages and losing their cultures, who were all but depleted of  
their sociability, were manipulated into considering their skin color  
a substitute for all they had lost. They were made proud of something  
that was neither a personal feat nor even, like language, a personal  
acquisition. They were fused into a nation of white men. (White women  
and children existed only as scalped victims, as proofs of the  
bestiality of the hunted prey.) The extent of the depletion is  
revealed by the nonentities the white men shared with each other:  
white blood, white thoughts, and membership in a white race. Debtors,  
squatters and servants, as white men, had everything in common with  
bankers, land speculators and plantation owners, nothing in common  
with Redskins, Blackskins or Yellowskins. Fused by such a principle,  
they could also be mobilized by it, turned into white mobs. Lynch  
mobs, “Indian fighters.”

Racism had initially been one among several methods of mobilizing  
colonial armies, and although it was exploited more fully in America  
than it ever had been before, it did not supplant the other methods  
but rather supplemented them. The victims of the invading pioneers  
were still described as unbelievers, as heathen. But the pioneers,  
like the earlier Dutch, were largely Protestant Christians, and they  
regarded heathenism as something to be punished, not remedied. The  
victims also continued to be designated as savages, cannibals and  
primitives, but these terms, too, ceased to be diagnoses of conditions  
that could be remedied, and tended to become synonyms of non-white, a  
condition that could not be remedied. Racism was an ideology perfectly  
suited to a practice of enslavement and extermination.

The lynch-mob approach, the ganging-up on victims defined as inferior,  
appealed to bullies whose humanity was stunted and who lacked any  
notion of fair play. But this approach did not appeal to everyone.  
American businessmen, part hustlers and part confidence men, always  
had something for everyone. For the numerous Saint Georges with some  
notion of honor and great thirst for heroism, the enemy was depicted  
somewhat differently; for them there were nations as rich and powerful  
as their own in the transmontane woodlands and on the shores of the  
Great Lakes.

The celebrants of the heroic feats of imperial Spaniards had found  
empires in central Mexico and on top of the Andes. The celebrants of  
nationalist American heroes found nations; they transformed desperate  
resistances of anarchic villagers into international conspiracies  
masterminded by military archons such as General Pontiac and General  
Tecumseh; they peopled the woodlands with formidable national leaders,  
efficient general staffs, and armies of uncountable patriotic troops;  
they projected their own repressive structures into the unknown; they  
saw an exact copy of themselves, with all the colors reversed –  
something like a photographic negative. The enemy thus became an equal  
in terms of structure, power and aims. War against such an enemy was  
not only fair play; it was a dire necessity, a matter of life and  
death. The enemy’s other attributes – the heathenism, the savagery,  
the cannibalism – made the tasks of expropriating, enslaving and  
exterminating all the more urgent, made these feats all the more heroic.

The repertory of the nationalist program was now more or less  
complete. This statement might baffle a reader who cannot yet see any  
“real nations” in the field. The United States was still a collection  
of multilingual, multi-religious and multi-cultural “ethnicities,” and  
the French nation had overflowed its boundaries and turned itself into  
a Napoleonic empire. The reader might be trying to apply a definition  
of a nation as an organized territory consisting of people who share a  
common language, religion and customs, or at least one of the three.  
Such a definition, clear, pat and static, is not a description of the  
phenomenon but an apology for it, a justification. The phenomenon was  
not a static definition but a dynamic process. The common language,  
religion and customs, like the white blood of the American colonizers,  
were mere pretexts, instruments for mobilizing armies. The culmination  
of the process was not an enshrinement of the commonalities, but a  
depletion, a total loss of language, religion and customs; the  
inhabitants of a nation spoke the language of capital, worshipped on  
the altar of the state and confined their customs to those permitted  
by the national police.

Nationalism is the opposite of imperialism only in the realm of  
definitions. In practice, nationalism was a methodology for conducting  
the empire of capital.

The continual increase of capital, often referred to as material  
progress, economic development or industrialization, was the main  
activity of the middle classes, the so-called bourgeoisie, because  
capital was what they owned, it was their property; the upper classes  
owned estates.

The discovery of new worlds of wealth had enormously enriched these  
middle classes, but had also made them vulnerable. The kings and  
nobles who initially gathered the new world’s plundered wealth  
resented losing all but a few trophies to their middle class  
merchants. This could not be helped. The wealth did not arrive in  
usable forms; the merchants supplied the king with things he could  
use, in exchange for the plundered treasures. Even so, monarchs who  
saw themselves grow poor while their merchants grew rich were not  
above using their armed retainers to plunder the wealthy merchants.  
Consequently the middle classes suffered continual injuries under the  
old regime – injuries to their property. The king’s army and police  
were not reliable protectors of middle class property, and the  
powerful merchants, who already operated the business of the empire,  
took measures to put an end to the instability; they took the politics  
in hand as well. They could have hired private armies, and they often  
did. But as soon as instruments for mobilizing national armies and  
national police forces appeared on the horizon, the injured  
businessmen had recourse to them. The main virtue of a national armed  
force is that it guarantees that a patriotic servant will war  
alongside his own boss against an enemy boss’s servant.

The stability assured by a national repressive apparatus gave the  
owners something like a hothouse in which their capital could grow,  
increase, multiply. The term “grow” and its corollaries come from the  
capitalists’ own vocabulary. These people think of a unit of capital  
as a grain or seed which they invest in fertile soil. In spring they  
see a plant grow from each seed. In summer they harvest so many seeds  
from each plant that, after paying for the soil, sunshine and rain,  
they still have more seeds than they had initially. The following year  
they enlarge their field, and gradually the whole countryside becomes  
improved. In reality, the initial “grains” are money; the sunshine and  
rain are the expended energies of laborers; the plants are factories,  
workshops and mines, the harvested fruits are commodities, bits of  
processed world; and the excess or additional grains, the profits, are  
emoluments which the capitalist keeps for himself instead of dividing  
them up among the workers.

The process as a whole consisted of the processing of natural  
substances into saleable items or commodities, and of the  
incarceration of wage workers in the processing plants.

The marriage of Capital with Science was responsible for the great  
leap forward into what we live in today. Pure scientists discovered  
the components into which the natural environment could be decomposed;  
investors placed their bets on the various methods of decomposition;  
applied scientists or managers saw to it that the wage workers in  
their charge carried the project through. Social scientists sought  
ways to make the workers less human, more efficient and machine-like.  
Thanks to science, capitalists were able to transform much of the  
natural environment into a processed world, an artifice, and to reduce  
most human beings into efficient tenders of the artifice.

The process of capitalist production was analyzed and criticized by  
many philosophers and poets, most notably by Karl Marx [1], whose  
critiques animated, and continue to animate, militant social  
movements. Marx had a significant blind spot; most of his disciples,  
and many militants who were not his disciples, built their platforms  
on that blind spot. Marx was an enthusiastic supporter of the  
bourgeoisie’s struggle for liberation from feudal bonds. Who was not  
an enthusiast in those days? He, who observed that the ruling ideas of  
an epoch were the ideas of the ruling class, shared many of the ideas  
of the newly empowered middle class. He was an enthusiast of the  
Enlightenment, of rationalism, of material progress. It was Marx who  
insightfully pointed out that every time a worker reproduced his labor  
power, every minute he devoted to his assigned task, he enlarged the  
material and social apparatus that dehumanized him. Yet the same Marx  
was an enthusiast for the application of science to production.

Marx made a thorough analysis of the production process as an  
exploitation of labor, but he made only cursory and reluctant comments  
about the prerequisite for capitalist production, and the initial  
capital that made the process possible. [2] Without the initial  
capital, there could have been no investments, no production, no great  
leap forward. This prerequisite was analyzed by the early Soviet  
Russian marxist Preobrazhensky, who borrowed several insights from the  
Polish marxist Rosa Luxemburg to formulate his theory of primitive  
accumulation. [3] By primitive, Preobrazhensky meant the basement of  
the capitalist edifice, the foundation, the prerequisite. This  
prerequisite cannot emerge from the capitalist production process  
itself, if that process is not yet under way. It must, and does, come  
from outside the production process. It comes from the plundered  
colonies. It comes from the expropriated and exterminated populations  
of the colonies. In earlier days, when there were no overseas  
colonies, the first capital, the prerequisite for capitalist  
production, had been squeezed out of internal colonies, out of  
plundered peasants whose lands were enclosed and crops requisitioned,  
out of expelled Jews and Muslims whose possessions were expropriated.

The primitive or preliminary accumulation of capital is not something  
that happened once, in the distant past, and never after. It is  
something that continues to accompany the capitalist production  
process, and is an integral part of it. The process described by Marx  
is responsible for the regular profits are periodically destroyed by  
crises endemic to the system; new injections of preliminary capital  
are the only known cure to the crises. Without an ongoing primitive  
accumulation of capital, the production process would stop; each  
crisis would tend to become permanent.

Genocide, the rationally calculated extermination of human populations  
designated as legitimate prey, has not been an aberration in an  
otherwise peaceful march of progress. Genocide has been a prerequisite  
of that progress. This is why national armed forces were indispensable  
to the wielders of capital. These forces did not only protect the  
owners of capital from the insurrectionary wrath of their own  
exploited wage workers. These forces also captured the holy grail, the  
magic lantern, the preliminary capital, by battering the gates of  
resisting or unresisting outsiders, by looting, deporting and murdering.

The footprints of the national armies are the traces of the march of  
progress. These patriotic armies were, and still are, the seventh  
wonder of the world. In them, the wolf lay alongside the lamb, the  
spider alongside the fly. In them, exploited workers were the chums of  
exploiters, indebted peasants the chums of creditors, suckers the  
chums of hustlers in a companionship stimulated not by love but by  
hatred – hatred of potential sources of preliminary capital designated  
as unbelievers, savages, inferior races.

Human communities as variegated in their ways and beliefs as birds are  
in feathers were invaded, despoiled and at last exterminated beyond  
imagination’s grasp. The clothes and artefacts of the vanished  
communities were gathered up as trophies and displayed in museums as  
additional traces of the march of progress; the extinct beliefs and  
ways became the curiosities of yet another of the invaders’ many  
sciences. The expropriated fields, forests and animals were garnered  
as bonanzas, as preliminary capital, as the precondition for the  
production process that was to turn the fields into farms, the trees  
into lumber, the animals into hats, the minerals into munitions, the  
human survivors into cheap labor. Genocide was, and still is, the  
precondition, the cornerstone and ground work of the military- 
industrial complexes, of the processed environments, of the worlds of  
offices and parking lots.

Nationalism was so perfectly suited to its double task, the  
domestication of workers and the despoliation of aliens, that it  
appealed to everyone – everyone, that is, who wielded or aspired to  
wield a portion of capital.

During the nineteenth century, especially during its second half,  
every owner of investable capital discovered that he had roots among  
the mobilizable countryfolk who spoke his mother’s tongue and  
worshipped his father’s gods. The fervor of such a nationalist was  
transparently cynical, since he was the countryman who no longer had  
roots among his mother’s or father’s kin: he found his salvation in  
his savings, prayed to his investments and spoke the language of cost  
accounting. But he had learned, from Americans and Frenchmen, that  
although he could not mobilize the countryfolk as loyal servants,  
clients and customers, he could mobilize them as loyal fellow- 
Catholics, Orthodox or Protestants. Languages, religions and customs  
became welding materials for the construction of nation-states.

The welding materials were means, not ends. The purpose of the  
national entities was not to develop languages, religions or customs,  
but to develop national economies, to turn the countryfolk into  
workers and soldiers, to turn the motherland into mines and factories,  
to turn dynastic estates into capitalist enterprises. Without the  
capital, there could be no munitions or supplies, no national army, no  
nation.

Savings and investments, market research and cost accounting, the  
obsessions of the rationalistic former middle classes, became the  
ruling obsessions. These rationalistic obsessions became not only  
sovereign but also exclusive. Individuals who enacted other  
obsessions, irrational ones, were put away in madhouses, asylums.

The nations usually were but need no longer have been monotheistic;  
the former god or gods had lost their importance except as welding  
materials. The nations were mono-obsessive, and if monotheism served  
the ruling obsession, then it too was mobilized.

World War I marked the end of one phase of the nationalizing process,  
the phase that had begun with the American and French revolutions, the  
phase that had been announced much earlier by the declaration of  
Aguirre and the revolt of the Dutch grandees. The conflicting claims  
of old and newly-constituted nations were in fact the causes of that  
war. Germany, Italy and Japan, as well as Greece, Serbia and colonial  
Latin America, had already taken on most of the attributes of their  
nationalistic predecessors, had become national empires, monarchies  
and republics, and the more powerful of the new arrivals aspired to  
take on the main missing attribute, the colonial empire. During that  
war, all the mobilizable components of the two remaining dynastic  
empires, the Ottoman and the Hapsburg, constituted themselves into  
nations. When bourgeoisies with different languages and religions,  
such as Turks and Armenians, claimed the same territory, the weaker  
were treated like so-called American Indians; they were exterminated.  
National Sovereignty and Genocide were – and still are – corollaries.

Common language and religion appear to be corollaries of nationhood,  
but only because of an optical illusion. As welding materials,  
languages and religions were used when they served their purpose,  
discarded when they did not. Neither multi-lingual Switzerland nor  
multi-religious Yugoslavia were banned from the family of nations. The  
shapes of noses and the color of hair could also have been used to  
mobilize patriots – and later were. The shared heritages, roots and  
commonalities had to satisfy only one criterion, the criterion of  
American-style pragmatic reason: did they work? Whatever worked was  
used. The shared traits were important, not because of their cultural,  
historical or philosophical content, but because they were useful for  
organizing a police to protect the national property and for  
mobilizing an army to plunder the colonies.

Once a nation was constituted, human beings who lived on the national  
territory but did not possess the national traits could be transformed  
into internal colonies, namely into sources of preliminary capital.  
Without preliminary capital, no nation could become a great nation,  
and nations that aspired to greatness but lacked adequate overseas  
colonies could resort to plundering, exterminating and expropriating  
those of their countrymen who did not possess the national traits.

The establishment of nation-states was greeted with euphoric  
enthusiasm by poets as well as peasants who thought their muses or  
their gods had at last descended to earth. The main wet blankets  
amidst the waving banners and flying confetti were the former rulers,  
the colonized, and the disciples of Karl Marx.

The overthrown and the colonized were unenthusiastic for obvious  
reasons.

The disciples of Marx were unenthusiastic because they had learned  
from the master that national liberation meant national exploitation,  
that the national government was the executive committee of the  
national capitalist class, that the nation had nothing for workingmen  
but chains. These strategists for the workingmen, who were not  
themselves workingmen but were as bourgeois as the ruling capitalists,  
proclaimed that the workingmen had no country and organized themselves  
into an International. This International split into three, and each  
International moved increasingly into the field of Marx’s blind spot.

The First International was carried off by Marx’s one-time Russian  
translator and then antagonist Bakunin, an inveterate rebel who had  
been a fervent nationalist until he’d learned about exploitation from  
Marx. Bakunin and his companions, rebels against all authorities, also  
rebelled against the authority of Marx; they suspected Marx of trying  
to turn the International into a state as repressive as the feudal and  
national combined. Bakunin and his followers were unambiguous in their  
rejection of all states, but they were ambiguous about capitalist  
enterprise. Even more than Marx, they glorified science, celebrated  
material progress and hailed industrialization. Being rebels, they  
considered every fight a good fight, but the best of all was the fight  
against the bourgeoisie’s former enemies, the fight against feudal  
landlords and the Catholic Church. Thus the Bakuninist International  
flourished in places like Spain, where the bourgeoisie had not  
completed its struggle for independence but had, instead, allied  
itself with feudal barons and the Church for protection from insurgent  
workers and peasants. The Bakuninists fought to complete the bourgeois  
revolution without and against the bourgeoisie. They called themselves  
anarchists and disdained all states, but did not begin to explain how  
they would procure the preliminary or the subsequent industry,  
progress and science, namely the capital, without an army and a  
police. They were never given a real chance to resolve their  
contradiction in practice, and present day Bakuninists have still not  
resolved it, have not even become aware that there is a contradiction  
between anarchy and industry.

The Second International, less rebellious than the first, quickly came  
to terms with capital as well as the state. Solidly entrenched in  
Marx’s blind spot, the professors of this organization did not become  
enmeshed in any Bakuninist contradiction. It was obvious to them that  
the exploitation and the plunder were necessary conditions for the  
material progress, and they realistically reconciled themselves to  
what could not be helped. All they asked for was a greater share of  
the benefits for the workingmen, and offices in the political  
establishment for themselves, as the workingmen’s representatives.  
Like the good unionists who preceded and followed them, the socialist  
professors were embarrassed by “the colonial question,” but their  
embarrassment, like Philip Hapsburg’s, merely gave them bad  
consciences. In time, imperial German socialists, royal Danish  
socialists and republican French socialists even ceased to be  
internationalists.

The Third International did not only come to terms with capital and  
the state; it made them its goal. This international was not formed by  
rebellious or dissenting intellectuals; it was created by a state, the  
Russian state, after the Bolshevik Party installed itself in that  
state’s offices. The main activity of this international was to  
advertise the feats of the revamped Russian state, of its ruling  
party, and of the party’s founder, a man who called himself Lenin. The  
feats of that party and founder were indeed momentous, but the  
advertisers did their best to hide what was most momentous about them.

The first world war had left two vast empires in a quandary. The  
Celestial Empire of China, the oldest continuous state in the world,  
and the Empire of the Tsars, a much more recent operation, hovered  
shakily between the prospect of turning themselves into nation-states  
and the prospect of decomposing into smaller units, like their Ottoman  
and Hapsburg counterparts had done.

Lenin resolved this quandary for Russia. Is such a thing possible?  
Marx had observed that a single individual could not change  
circumstances; he could only avail himself of them. Marx was probably  
right. Lenin’s feat was not to change circumstances, but to avail  
himself of them in an extraordinary manner. The feat was monumental in  
its opportunism.

Lenin was a Russian bourgeois who cursed the weakness and ineptitude  
of the Russian bourgeoisie. [4] An enthusiast for capitalist  
development, an ardent admirer of American-style progress, he did not  
make common cause with those he cursed, but rather with their enemies,  
with the Anti-capitalist disciples of Marx. He availed himself of  
Marx’s blind spot to transform Marx’s critique of the capitalist  
production process into a manual for developing capital, a “how-to-do- 
it” guide. Marx’s studies of exploitation and immiseration became food  
for the famished, a cornucopia, a virtual horn of plenty. American  
businessmen had already marketed urine as spring water, but no  
American confidence man had yet managed an inversion of such magnitude.

No circumstances were changed. Every step of the inversion was carried  
out with available circumstances, with tried and tested methods.  
Russian countryfolk could not be mobilized in terms of their  
Russianness or orthodoxy or whiteness, but they could be, and were,  
mobilized in terms of their exploitation, their oppression, their ages  
of suffering under the despotism of the Tsars. Oppression and  
exploitation became welding materials. The long sufferings under the  
Tsars were used in the same way and for the same purpose as the  
scalpings of white women and children had been used by Americans; they  
were used to organize people into fighting units, into embryos of the  
national army and the national police.

The presentation of the dictator and of the Party’s central committee  
as a dictatorship of the liberated proletariat seemed to be something  
new, but even this was new only in the words that were used. This was  
something as old as the Pharaohs and Lugals of ancient Egypt and  
Mesopotamia, who had been chosen by the god to lead the people, who  
had embodied the people in their dialogues with the god. This was a  
tried and tested gimmick of rulers. Even if the ancient precedents  
were temporarily forgotten, a more recent precedent had been provided  
by the French Committee of Public Health, which had presented itself  
as the embodiment of the nation’s general will.

The goal, communism, the overthrow and supersession of capitalism,  
also seemed something new, seemed to be a change of circumstances. But  
only the word was new. the goal of the dictator of the proletariat was  
still American-style progress, capitalist development,  
electrification, rapid mass transportation, science, the processing of  
the natural environment. The goal was the capitalism that the weak and  
inept Russian bourgeoisie had failed to develop. With Marx’s Capital  
as their light and guide, the dictator and his Party would develop  
capitalism in Russia; they would serve as a substitute bourgeoisie,  
and they would use the power of the state not only to police the  
process, but to launch and manage it as well.

Lenin did not live long enough to demonstrate his virtuosity as  
general manager of Russian capital, but his successor Stalin amply  
demonstrated the powers of the founder’s machine. The fist step was  
the primitive accumulation of capital. If Marx had not been very clear  
about this, Preobrazhensky had been very clear. Preobrazhensky was  
jailed, but his description of the tried and tested methods of  
procuring preliminary capital was applied to vast Russia. The  
preliminary capital of English, American, Belgian and other  
capitalists had come from plundered overseas colonies. Russia had no  
overseas colonies. This lack was no obstacle. The entire Russian  
countryside was transformed into a colony.

The first sources of preliminary capital were Kulaks, peasants who had  
something worth plundering. This drive was so successful that it was  
applied to the remaining peasants as well, with the rational  
expectation that small amounts plundered from many people would yield  
a substantial hoard.

The peasants were not the only colonials. The former ruling class had  
already been thoroughly expropriated of all its wealth and property,  
but yet other sources of preliminary capital were found. With the  
totality of state power concentrated in their hands, the dictators  
soon discovered that they could manufacture sources of primitive  
accumulation. Successful entrepreneurs, dissatisfied workers and  
peasants, militants of competing organizations, even disillusioned  
Party Members, could be designated as counter- revolutionaries,  
rounded up, expropriated and shipped off to labor camps. All the  
deportations, mass executions and expropriations of earlier colonizers  
were re-enacted in Russia.

Earlier colonizers, being pioneers, had resorted to trial and error.  
The Russian dictators did not have to resort to trial and error. By  
their time, all the methods of procuring preliminary capital had been  
tried and tested, and could be scientifically applied. Russian capital  
developed in a totally controlled environment, a hothouse; every  
lever, every variable, was controlled by the national police.  
Functions which had been left to chance or to other bodies in less  
controlled environments fell to the police in the Russian hothouse.  
The fact that the colonials were not abroad but within, and therefore  
subject not to conquest but to arrest, further increased the role and  
size of the police. In time the omnipotent and omnipresent police  
became the visible emanation and embodiment of the proletariat, and  
communism became a synonym of total police organization and control.

Lenin’s expectations were not, however, fully realized by the Russian  
hothouse. The police-as-capitalist worked wonders in procuring  
preliminary capital from expropriated counter- revolutionaries, but  
did not do nearly as well in managing the capitalist production  
process. It may still be too early to tell for sure, but to date this  
police bureaucracy had been at least as inept in this role as the  
bourgeoisie Lenin had cursed; its ability to discover ever new sources  
of preliminary capital seems to be all that has kept it afloat.

Nor has the appeal of this apparatus been on a level with Lenin’s  
expectations. The Leninist police apparatus has not appealed to  
businessmen or to established politicians; it has not recommended  
itself as a superior method of managing the production process. It has  
appealed to a somewhat different social class, a class I will briefly  
try to describe, and it has recommended itself to this class primarily  
as a method of seizing national power and secondarily as a method of  
primitive accumulation of capital.

The heirs of Lenin and Stalin have not been actual Praetorian guards,  
actual wielders of economic and political power in the name and for  
the benefit of a superfluous monarch; they have been understudy  
Praetorians, students of economic and political power who despaired of  
ever reaching even intermediate levels of power. The Leninist model  
has offered such people the prospect of leaping over the intermediate  
levels directly into the central palace.

The heirs of Lenin were clerks and minor officials, people like  
Mussolini, Mao Zedong and Hitler, people who, like Lenin himself,  
cursed their weak and inept bourgeoisies for having failed to  
establish their nation’s greatness.

(I do not include the Zionists among the heirs of Lenin because they  
belong to an earlier generation. They were Lenin’s contemporaries who  
had, perhaps independently, discovered the power of persecution and  
suffering as welding materials for the mobilization of a national army  
and police. The Zionists made other contributions of their own. Their  
treatment of a dispersed religious population as a nation, their  
imposition of the capitalist nation-state as that population’s end-all  
and be-all, and their reduction of a religious heritage to a racial  
heritage, contributed significant elements to the nationalist  
methodology, and would have fateful consequences when they were  
applied on a population of Jews, not all of them Zionists, by a  
population welded together as a “German race.”)

Mussolini, Mao Zedong and Hitler cut through the curtain of slogans  
and saw Lenin’s and Stalin’s feats for what they were: successful  
methods of seizing and maintaining state power. All three trimmed the  
methodology down to its essentials. The first step was to join up with  
likeminded students of power and to form the nucleus of the police  
organization, an outfit called, after Lenin’s, the Party. The next  
step was to recruit the mass base, the available troops and troop  
suppliers. The third step was to seize the apparatus of the state, to  
install the theoretician in the office of Duce, Chairman or Fuehrer,  
to apportion police and managerial functions among the elite or cadre,  
and to put the mass base to work. The fourth step was to secure the  
preliminary capital needed to repair or launch a military-industrial  
complex capable of supporting the national leader and cadre, the  
police and army, the industrial managers; without this capital there  
could be no weapons, no power, no nation.

The heirs of Lenin and Stalin further trimmed the methodology, in  
their recruiting drives, by minimizing capitalist exploitation and by  
concentrating on national oppression. Talk of exploitation no longer  
served a purpose, and had in fact become embarrassing, since it was  
obvious to all, especially to wage workers, that successful  
revolutionaries had not put an end to wage labor, but had extended its  
domain.

Being as pragmatic as American businessmen, the new revolutionaries  
did not speak of liberation from wage labor, but of national  
liberation. [5] This type of liberation was not a dream of romantic  
utopians; it was precisely what was possible, and all that was  
possible, in the existing world, one needed only to avail oneself of  
already existing circumstances to make it happen. National liberation  
consisted of the liberation of the national chairman and the national  
police from the chains of powerlessness; the investiture of the  
chairman and the establishment of the police were not pipe dreams but  
components of a tried and tested strategy, a science.

Fascist and National Socialist Parties were the first to prove that  
the strategy worked, that the Bolshevik Party’s feat could actually be  
repeated. The national chairmen and their staffs installed themselves  
in power and set out to procure the preliminary capital needed for  
national greatness. The Fascists thrust themselves into one of the  
last uninvaded regions of Africa and gouged it as earlier  
industrializers had gouged their colonial empires. The National  
Socialists targeted Jews, an inner population that had been members of  
a “unified Germany” as long as other Germans, as their first source of  
primitive accumulation because many of the Jews, like many of Stalin’s  
Kulaks, had things worth plundering.

Zionists had already preceded the National Socialists in reducing a  
religion to a race, and National Socialists could look back to  
American pioneers for ways to use the instrument of racism. Hitler’s  
elite needed only to translate the corpus of American racist research  
to equip their scientific institutes with large libraries. The  
National Socialists dealt with Jews much the same way as the Americans  
had earlier dealt with the indigenous population of North America,  
except that the National Socialists applied a later and much more  
powerful technology to the task of deporting, expropriating and  
exterminating human beings. But in this the later exterminators were  
not innovators; they merely availed themselves of the circumstances  
within their reach.

The Fascists and National Socialists were joined by Japanese empire- 
builders who feared that the decomposing Celestial Empire would become  
a source of preliminary capital for Russian or revolutionary Chinese  
industrializers. Forming an Axis, the three set out to turn the  
world’s continents into sources of primitive accumulation of capital.  
They were not bothered by other nations until they started to encroach  
on the colonies and homelands of established capitalist powers. The  
reduction of already established capitalists to colonized prey could  
be practised internally, where it was always legal since the nation’s  
rulers make its laws – and had already been practised internally by  
Leninists and Stalinists. But such a practice would have amounted to a  
change of circumstances, and it could not be carried abroad without  
provoking a world war. The Axis powers overreached themselves and lost.

After the war, many reasonable people would speak of the aims of the  
Axis as irrational and of Hitler as a lunatic. Yet the same reasonable  
people would consider men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson  
sane and rational, even though these men envisioned and began to enact  
the conquest of a vast continent, the deportation and extermination of  
the continent’s population, at a time when such a project was much  
less feasible than the project of the Axis. [6] It is true that the  
technologies as well as the physical, chemical, biological and social  
sciences applied by Washington and Jefferson were quite different from  
those applied by the National Socialists. But if knowledge is power,  
if it was rational for the earlier pioneers to maim and kill with  
gunpowder in the age of horse-drawn carriages, why was it irrational  
for National Socialists to maim and kill with high explosives, gas and  
chemical agents in the age of rockets, submarines and “freeways”?

The Nazis were, if anything, yet more scientifically-oriented than the  
Americans. In their time, they were a synonym for scientific  
efficiency to much of the world. They kept files on everything,  
tabulated and cross tabulated their findings, published their  
tabulations in scientific journals. Among them, even racism was not  
the property of frontier rabble-rousers, but of well-endowed institutes.

Many reasonable people seem to equate lunacy with failure. This would  
not be the first time. Many called Napoleon a lunatic when he was in  
prison or in exile, but when Napoleon re-emerged as the Emperor, the  
same people spoke of him with respect, even reverence. Incarceration  
and exile are not only regarded as remedies for lunacy, but also as  
its symptoms. Failure is foolishness.

Mao Zedong, the third pioneering national socialist (or national  
communist; the second word no longer matters, since it is nothing but  
a historical relic; the expression “left-wing fascist” would serve as  
well, but it conveys even less meaning than the nationalist  
expressions) succeeded in doing for the Celestial Empire what Lenin  
had done for the Empire of the Tsars. The oldest bureaucratic  
apparatus in the world did not decompose into smaller units nor into  
colonies of other industrializers; it re-emerged, greatly changed, as  
a People’s Republic, as a beacon to “oppressed nations.”

The Chairman and his Cadre followed the footsteps of a long line of  
predecessors and transformed the Celestial Empire into a vast source  
of preliminary capital, complete with purges, persecutions and their  
consequent great leaps forward.

The next stage, the launching of the capitalist production process,  
was carried out on the Russian model, namely by the national police.  
This did not work in China any better than it had in Russia.  
Apparently the entrepreneurial function was to be entrusted to  
confidence men or hustlers who are able to take other people in, and  
cops do not usually inspire the required confidence. But this was less  
important to Maoists than it had been to Leninists. The capitalist  
production process remains important, at least as important as the  
regularized drives for primitive accumulation, since without the  
capital there is no power, no nation. But the Maoists make few, and  
ever fewer, claims for their model as a superior method of  
industrialization, and in this they are more modest than the Russians  
and less disappointed by the results of their industrial police.

The Maoist model offers itself to security guards and students the  
world over as a tried and tested methodology of power, as a scientific  
strategy of national liberation. Generally known as Mao- Zedong- 
Thought [7], this science offers aspiring chairmen and cadres the  
prospect of unprecedented power over living beings, human activities  
and even thoughts. The pope and priests of the Catholic Church, with  
all their inquisitions and confessions, never had such power, not  
because they would have rejected it, but because they lacked the  
instruments made available by modern science and technology.

The liberation of the nation is the last stage in the elimination of  
parasites. Capitalism and already earlier cleared nature of parasites  
and reduced most of the rest of nature to raw materials for processing  
industries. Modern national socialism or social nationalism holds out  
the prospect of eliminating parasites from human society as well. The  
human parasites are usually sources of preliminary capital, but the  
capital is not always “material”; it can also be cultural or  
“spiritual.” The ways, myths, poetry and music of the people are  
liquidated as a matter of course; some of the music and costumes of  
the former “folk culture” subsequently reappear, processed and  
packaged, as elements of the national spectacle, as decorations for  
the national accumulation drives; the ways and myths become raw  
materials for processing by one or several of the “human sciences.”  
Even the useless resentment of workers toward their alienated wage  
labor is liquidated. When the nation is liberated, wage labor ceases  
to be an onerous burden and becomes a national obligation, to be  
carried out with joy. The inmates of a totally liberated nation read  
Orwell’s 1984 as an anthropological study, a description of an earlier  
age.

It is no longer possible to satirize this state of affairs. Every  
satire risks becoming a bible for yet another national liberation  
front. [8] Every satirist risks becoming the founder of a new  
religion, a Buddha, Zarathustra, Jesus, Muhammad or Marx. Every  
exposure of the ravages of the dominant system, every critique of the  
system’s functioning, becomes fodder for the horses of liberators,  
welding materials for builders of armies. Mao-Zedong- Thought in its  
numerous versions and revisions is a total science as well as a total  
theology; it is social physics as well as cosmic metaphysics. The  
French Committee of National Health claimed to embody the general will  
of only the French nation. The revisions of Mao-Zedong-Thought claim  
to embody the general will of all the world’s oppressed.

The constant revisions of this Thought are necessary because its  
initial formulations were not applicable to all, or in fact to any, of  
the world’s colonized populations. None of the world’s colonized  
shared the Chinese heritage of having supported a state apparatus for  
the past two thousand years. Few of the world’s oppressed had  
possessed any of the attributes of a nation in the recent or distant  
past. The Thought had to be adapted to people whose ancestors had  
lived without national chairmen, armies or police, without capitalist  
production processes and therefore without the need for preliminary  
capital.

These revisions were accomplished by enriching the initial Thought  
with borrowings from Mussolini, Hitler and the Zionist state of  
Israel. Mussolini’s theory of the fulfilment of the nation in the  
state was a central tenet. All groups of people, whether small or  
large, industrial or non-industrial, concentrated or dispersed, were  
seen as nations, not in terms of their past, but in terms of their  
aura, their potentiality, a potentiality embedded in their national  
liberation fronts. Hitler’s (and the Zionists’) treatment of the  
nation as a racial entity was another central tenet. The cadres were  
recruited from among people depleted of their ancestors’ kinships and  
customs, and consequently the liberators were not distinguishable from  
the oppressors in terms of language, beliefs, customs or weapons; the  
only welding material that held them to each other and to their mass  
base was the welding material that had held white servants to white  
bosses on the American frontier; the “racial bond” gave identities to  
those without identity, kinship to those who had no kin, community to  
those who had lost their community; it was the last bond of the  
culturally depleted.

The revised thought could now be applied to Africans as well as  
Navahos, Apaches as well as Palestinians. [9] The borrowings from  
Mussolini, Hitler and the Zionists are judiciously covered up, because  
Mussolini and Hitler failed to hold on to their seized power, and  
because the successful Zionists have turned their state into the  
world’s policeman against all other national liberation fronts. Lenin,  
Stalin and Mao Zedong must be given even more credit than they deserve.

The revised and universally applicable models work much the same as  
the originals, but more smoothly; national liberation has become an  
applied science; the apparatus has been frequently tested; the  
numerous kinks in the originals have by now been straightened out. All  
that is needed to make the contraption run is a driver, a transmission  
belt, and fuel.

The driver is of course the theoretician himself, or his closest  
disciple. The transmission belt is the general staff, the  
organization, also called the Party or the communist party. This  
communist party with a small c is exactly what it is popularly  
understood to be. It is the nucleus of the police organization that  
does the purging and that will itself be purged once the leader  
becomes National Leader and needs to re-revise the invariant Thought  
while adapting himself to the family of nations, or at least to the  
family bankers, munitions suppliers and investors. And the fuel: the  
oppressed nation, the suffering masses, the liberated people are and  
will continue to be the fuel.

The leader and the general staff are not flown in from abroad; they  
are not foreign agitators. They are integral products of the  
capitalist production process. This production process has invariably  
been accompanied by racism. Racism is not a necessary component of  
production, but racism (in some form) has been a necessary component  
of the process of primitive accumulation of capital, and it has almost  
always leaked into the production process.

Industrialized nations have procured their preliminary capital by  
expropriating, deporting, persecuting and segregating, if not always  
by exterminating, people designated as legitimate prey. Kinships were  
broken, environments were destroyed, cultural orientations and ways  
were extirpated.

Descendants of survivors of such onslaughts are lucky if they preserve  
the merest relics, the most fleeting shadows of their ancestors’  
cultures. Many of the descendants do not retain even shadows; they are  
totally depleted; they go to work; they further enlarge the apparatus  
that destroyed their ancestors’ culture. And in the world of work they  
are relegated to the margins, to the most unpleasant and least highly  
paid jobs. This makes them mad. A supermarket packer, for example, may  
know more about the stocks and the ordering than the manager, may know  
that racism is the only reason he is not manager and the manager not a  
packer. A security guard may know racism is the only reason he’s not  
chief of police. It is among people who have lost all their roots, who  
dream themselves supermarket managers and chiefs of police, that the  
national liberation front takes root; this is where the leader and  
general staff are formed.

Nationalism continues to appeal to the depleted because other  
prospects appear bleaker. The culture of the ancestors was destroyed;  
therefore, by pragmatic standard, it failed; the only ancestors who  
survived were those who accommodated themselves to the invader’s  
system, and they survived on the outskirts of garbage dumps. The  
varied utopias of poets and dreamers and the numerous “mythologies of  
the proletariat” have also failed; they have not proven themselves in  
practice; they have been nothing but hot air, pipe dreams, pies in the  
sky; the actual proletariat has been as racist as the bosses and the  
police.

The packer and the security guard have lost contact with the ancient  
culture; pipe dreams and utopias don’t interest them, are in fact  
dismissed with the practical businessman’s contempt toward poets,  
drifters and dreamers. Nationalism offers them something concrete,  
something that’s been tried and tested and is known to work. There’s  
no earthly reason for the descendants of the persecuted to remain  
persecuted when nationalism offers them the prospect of becoming  
persecutors. Near and distant relatives of victims can become a racist  
nation-state; they can themselves herd other people into concentration  
camps, push other people around at will, perpetrate genocidal war  
against them, procure preliminary capital by expropriating them. And  
if “racial relatives” of Hitler’s victims can do it, so can the near  
and distant relatives of the victims of a Washington, Jackson, Reagan  
or Begin.

Every oppressed population can become a nation, a photographic  
negative of the oppressor nation, a place where the former packer is  
the supermarket’s manager, where the former security guard is the  
chief of police. By applying the corrected strategy, every security  
guard can follow the precedent of ancient Rome’s Praetorian guards.  
The security police of a foreign mining trust can proclaim itself a  
republic, liberate the people, and go on liberating them until they  
have nothing left but to pray for liberation to end. Even before the  
seizure of power, a gang can call itself a Front and offer heavily  
taxed and constantly policed poor people something they still lack: a  
tribute-gathering organization and a hit-squad, namely supplementary  
tax farmers and police, the people’s own. In these ways, people can be  
liberated of the traits of their victimized ancestors; all the relics  
that still survive from pre-industrial times and non-capitalist  
cultures can at last be permanently extirpated.

The idea that an understanding of the genocide, that a memory of the  
holocausts, can only lead people to want to dismantle the system, is  
erroneous. The continuing appeal of nationalism suggests that the  
opposite is truer, namely that an understanding of genocide has led  
people to mobilize genocidal armies, that the memory of holocausts has  
led people to perpetrate holocausts. The sensitive poets who  
remembered the loss, the researchers who documented it, have been like  
the pure scientists who discovered the structure of the atom. Applied  
scientists used the discovery to split the atom’s nucleus, to produce  
weapons which can split every atom’s nucleus; Nationalists used the  
poetry to split and fuse human populations, to mobilize genocidal  
armies, to perpetrate new holocausts.

The pure scientist, poets and researchers consider themselves innocent  
of the devastated countrysides and charred bodies. Are they innocent?

It seems to me that at least one of Marx’s observations is true: every  
minute devoted to the capitalist production process, every thought  
contributed to the industrial system, further enlarges a power that is  
inimical to nature, to culture, to life. Applied science is not  
something alien; it is an integral part of the capitalist production  
process. Nationalism is not flown in from abroad. It is a product of  
the capitalist production process, like the chemical agents poisoning  
the lakes, air, animals and people, like the nuclear plants  
radioactivating micro-environments in preparation for the  
radioactivation of the macro-environment.

As a postscript I’d like to answer a question before it is asked. The  
question is: “Don’t you think a descendant of oppressed people is  
better off as a supermarket manager or police chief?” My answer is  
another question: What concentration camp manager, national  
executioner or torturer is not a descendant of oppressed people?

Notes

1. The subtitle of the first volume of Capital is A Critique of  
Political Economy: The Process of Capitalist Production (published by  
Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906; republished by Random House, New York).

2. In Ibid., pp.784-850: Part VIII: “The So-Called Primitive  
Accumulation.”

3. E. Preobrazhensky, The New Economics (Moscow, 1926; English  
translation published by Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1965), a book which  
announced the fateful “law of primitive socialist accumulation.”

4. See V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow:  
Progress Publishers, 1964; first published in 1899). I quote from page  
599: “if...we compare the present rapidity of development with that  
which could be achieved with the general level of technique and  
culture as it is today, the present rate of development of capitalism  
in Russia really must be considered as slow. And it cannot but be  
slow, for in no single capitalist country has there been such an  
abundant survival of ancient institutions that are incompatible with  
capitalism, retard its development, and immeasurably worsen the  
condition of the producers...”

5. Or the liberation of the state: “Our myth is the nation, our myth  
is the greatness of the nation”; “It is the state which creates the  
nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made  
aware of their moral unity”; “Always the maximum of liberty coincides  
with the maximum force of the state”; “Everything for the state;  
nothing against the state; nothing outside the state.” From Che cosa A  
il fascismo and La dottrina del fascismo, quoted by G.H. Sabine, A  
History of Political Theory (New York, 1955), pp.872-878.

6. “... the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly  
cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beast of prey,  
tho’ they differ in shape” (G. Washington in 1783). “... if ever we  
are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never  
lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond...” (T.  
Jefferson in 1807). “... the cruel massacres they have committed on  
the women and children of our frontiers taken by surprise, will oblige  
us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats  
beyond our reach” (T. Jefferson in 1813). Quoted by Richard Drinnon  
inFacing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building  
(New York: New American Library, 1980), pp.65, 96, 98.

7. Readily available in paper back as Quotations from Chairman Mao  
(Peking: Political Department of the people’s Liberation Army, 1966).

8. Black & Red tried to satirize this situation over ten years ago  
with the publication of a fake Manual for Revolutionary Leaders, a  
“how-to-do-it guide” whose author, Michael Velli, offered to do for  
the modern revolutionary prince what Machiavelli had offered the  
feudal prince. This phoney Manualfused Mao-Zedong-Thought with the  
Thought of Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and their modern  
followers, and offered grizzly recipes for the preparation of  
revolutionary organizations and the seizure of total power.  
Disconcertingly, at least half of the requests for this Manual came  
from aspiring national liberators, and it is possible that some of the  
current versions of the nationalist metaphysic contain recipes offered  
by Michael Velli.

9. I am not exaggerating. I have before me a book-length pamphlet  
titled The Mythology of the White Proletariat: A Short Course for  
Understanding Babylon by J. Sakai (Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1983).  
As an application of Mao-Zedong-Thought to American history, it is the  
most sensitive Maoist work I’ve seen. The author documents and  
describes, sometimes vividly, the oppression of America’s enslaved  
Africans, the deportations and exterminations of the American  
continent’s indigenous inhabitants, the racist exploitation of  
Chinese, the incarceration of Japanese- Americans in concentration  
camps. The author mobilizes all these experiences of unmitigated  
terror, not to look for ways to supersede the system that perpetrated  
them, but to urge the victims to reproduce the same system among  
themselves. Sprinkled with pictures and quotations of chairmen Lenin,  
Stalin, Mao Zedong and Ho-chi Minh, this work makes no attempt to hide  
or disguise its repressive aims; it urges Africans as well as Navahos,  
Apaches as well as Palestinians, to organize a party, seize state  
power, and liquidate parasites.