[Reader-list] An Essay from the archive

[inder salim]

when i started reading the essay, i did not realize where i was, but
sooner i saw myself in a plane leaving, let us say  London, and i kept
on seeing the whole of europe, its land, sea and history from above.
When it touched Marx , the plane was already over an unknown territory
with only spectacle of lights visible below. It exposed poets  even
who are consumed in Nation Sate machine, like i was tied with my
safety belt, no where to go.

  but it indeed when the palne landed in Delhi,  i had a poem like
thing in my hand , which i will never forget

"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?


thanks a lot for this essay, it was really urgent, i wish a copy of it
is given to all the student in  all the college to read at least once.

love
is

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 5:14 PM, Jeebesh <Jeebesh at sarai.net> wrote:
> 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 superseded by struggles of workingmen, who had no country;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.
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