II.   U.S. Responsibility for National Oppression and Racism Within the United States

What can the organized Left and the social movements demand of the institutions of U.S. imperialism to counter national oppression and racism within the United States?

Current conditions

Within the U.S., we analyze the principal contradiction to be between the ruling class of U.S. imperialism and its operations and apparatuses on the one hand, and the exploited and oppressed multiracial working class and oppressed nationalities on the other. The Program Demand Group's unity resides in our shared focus on the particular nature of imperialism that places the oppression of nations, both external and internal to U.S. borders, at the center of the complex interrelationships between class, race, and gender oppression. We characterize the U.S. as a settler state which fed the growth of European empires that gave birth to capitalism and its system of nation-states. The United States was built by extracting superprofits gained from genocide of the indigenous peoples, the stealing of lands, the enslavement of African peoples, and profiteering from speculation in slave trade.  We live with this inheritance as a foundation of both the U.S. economy and the global capitalist system.

As a result, we see the United States as a multinational state comprised of many peoples, many of whom have not been incorporated into the "one nation, indivisible"—as defined by the colonial settler revolution for independence from the British Empire and for the formation of a modern bourgeois nation-state.  Therefore, by definition, the U.S. nation-state is an illegitimate and unstable form of government.  Further, given that the colonization of the Americas provided a material foundation for European capitalism  and its 500 year history of development, we believe that class relations in the United States are defined by the subjugation of nations, especially as the U.S. exercises its role as the greatest imperial nation.

Recognizing peoples of color within the U.S. as well as Third World peoples outside of the U.S. as oppressed nationalities acknowledges that whole nations and peoples within this "one nation" continue to suffer under U.S. imperialism.  We carry out our work based on the belief that all oppressed-nationality peoples within the United States have a "conditional" relationship to the state. This conditional relationship is the most basic concept we use to acknowledge the history of forced enclosure (or participation) within a falsely unified state as well as the variety of forms of exclusion experienced today by the different oppressed nationality peoples who reside within the so-called "homeland."

As a group, we have not developed clarity about the particular character of national oppression specific to the wide variety of different peoples living inside the U.S.—Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, Jamaican, Haitian, Trinidadian, Barbadian, Grenadian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Pakistani, Saudi Arabian, South African, Nigerian, Chicano, black and indigenous peoples—and other peoples who, taken together, are commonly referred to as "people of color." These distinctions are important for any particular people in determining their demands, yet the basic principle remains the same: the attitude of the Left toward specific oppressed nationality peoples must be one that recognizes their conditional relationship to the state and supports expansion of their rights, whatever specific forms that might take.  At this point, we cannot be clear about many important questions: which peoples constitute an actual "nation" internal to the U.S.; which could be coalesced as a national minority "autonomous region"; which peoples are dispersed and suffer national oppression and racial discrimination wherever they reside in the U.S.; which peoples are foreign-national immigrants; which peoples are super-exploited workers imported as cheap labor or forced from their homelands by U.S. foreign policy-created poverty. But we do know that we share commitment to the recognition of national oppression internal to the United States; this recognition gives an explanation to the complex relations we see everyday as organizers and allows for the possibility of self-determination, regional autonomy, or reparations—demands that, if fought for, would not be within the right of the white majority electorate to deny! 

Also, we believe that the various oppressed peoples movements of resistance are critical to the Left in this country, and that the working class strata within these movements has an historic role to play in both the class struggle and the various struggles for national liberation, equality, and freedom from Great Nation supremacy. The widening divide of classes in the United States locates peoples of color, particularly women, in the lowest strata of the working class, making the importance of the oppressed nationality working class to the class struggle of the multinational laboring force evident. While the entire working class is exploited, the capitalist drive for superexploitation leads to many of the most egregious "class" attacks, which are directed against the working class of color, and against women of color in particular—that is, the strata comprised of various indigenous peoples, descendants of slaves, and immigrants from Third World nations—with negative impacts on poor white workers as well. Of equal importance, this group comprises the working class strata within each multi-class oppressed nationality. For these reasons, we see the oppressed nationality working class,  predominantly female, as the main force for the successful development of an antiimperialist united front within the U.S.  This force is capable of leading both the multinational working class movements and the liberation movements of specific nationalities.  These movements, which are so often counterposed, become natural allies under common leadership with a common enemy .

Given the importance we place on national oppression, we are working to understand the relationship between national oppression and racism.  We recognize that the system of European colonial domination long-ago elaborated a variety of systems of demarcation for peoples designated as inferior for the purposes of subordination. Patriarchy legitimates the supremacy of men over women by creating a "gender" distinction. National oppression establishes another system of domination/subjugation justified through theories of fundamental biological difference based on reactionary pseudo-scientific "race" categories.

Within the U.S., racism takes the form of white supremacy which gives privileges to even the least fortunate if they are designated "white." "Not-white" people of color, including the bourgeois strata, are subjected to racism by the dominant white Great Nation culture, which is institutionalized in all corporate and state apparatuses. Because racism takes on a power that can be disconnected from any immediate self-interest of the perpetrators, it has become relatively autonomous from its economic imperative.  It then becomes a material force in its own right, through which discrimination determines who gets food, shelter, transportation, healthcare, education. White supremacist ideology is completely interwoven with the development of imperialism. While the mechanisms of national oppression we have just described are hidden (by many progressives as well as the ruling class), racism's vicious power is in our face and impossible to deny. This is why we affirm our basic unity as a group in the struggle against racism; we are committed to building an antiracist movement within the United States.

We believe that the relationship between racism and national oppression is illustrated in the U.S. criminal justice system, which is the primary method of state repression of people of color—particularly those who refuse to consent to the U.S. system of superexploitation.  The U.S. ranks the highest country in the world  in the percentage of its population in prison; every effort to overturn mass convictions on the grounds that blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans are overwhelmingly overrepresented in the prisons has been rejected by the courts.  Racial profiling and laws like California's Three Strikes target men of color regardless of their class. While blacks comprise only 7 percent of California's population, they are over 60 percent of inmates imprisoned under the Three Strikes law! This is certainly institutionalized racism; it is also the subjugation of entire groups of historically-constituted oppressed nationality peoples.

Liberals often lament, correctly, that the U.S. is one of the few advanced industrial nations that still has the death penalty.  But that hides the fact that the U.S. is the most racist advanced capitalist country with the largest "minority" populations of blacks, Latinos, and Asian/Pacific Islanders. The massive explosion in public executions is part of the counterrevolution against the antiracist victories of the New Left in the United States, which had at one time effectively pressured many states and the Supreme Court to revoke the death penalty.  Of course there are also white people murdered by the state, but the driving force is consent to the U.S. history of genocide that takes the particular form of fear and hatred of black people by the white majority. This is certainly racism; it is also the consent to annihilation of an oppressed nation.

Despite this oppression, resistance continues on a daily basis in communities across the country.  We believe that challenges to this racist and genocidal criminal justice system are fundamental to any strategy for ending racism and national oppression in the U.S.

In order to combat racism, national oppression, and their economic underbelly—class exploitation, we form organizations that bring together many peoples to find bases for unity while learning about each other's specific different needs.  Since its inception, the Labor/Community Strategy Center has worked to build democratic structures that challenge racism at its core as it impacts all communities of color, each in specific ways.  If the Left can't figure out how oppressed nationality peoples can work together to defeat racism, the Right will present multiracial "opportunities."

The U.S. ruling class has a long history of organizing potentially oppositional forces into their U.S. imperialist coalition, for example, the AFL-CIO and the bourgeoisie of color. The Bush administration offers the latest example in understanding the value to imperialism of a racially diverse, but ideologically unified, ruling class. Many working class blacks take pride in the accomplishments of Secretary of State Colin Powell, yet it was his job to make the decision to pull the U.S. out of the UN World Conference Against Racism. As this ruling junta accelerates its war plans, the rush to assimilate oppressed nations into its imperialist plans includes the invitation to rulers of all nations to be part of the U.S. regime—or risk being bombed for harboring so-called terrorists!

Dilemmas for the Left

Again, we have the dilemma of how to proceed when progressive people are not unified around a shared understanding of the interrelationship between class exploitation, national oppression, racism and patriarchy internal to the U.S. This divide is surely the greatest obstacle to the advancement of struggles of resistance in the United States.  Many progressives believe that the principal contradiction within the U.S. is simple—between the working class and capitalism. They believe that a focus of antiracism "divides" the working class, and, conversely, that campaigns for affirmative action on the basis of race lead to charges of "reverse discrimination," which these progressives believe have helped consolidate the white electorate who have been allowed to vote to eliminate any such policies. And, there are many revolutionary nationalists who are so righteously furious with the longstanding chauvinism of the U.S. Left that they reject working in multiracial campaigns, much less with white progressives.   Also, there are antiracist activists who believe that racial oppression within capitalism—as distinct from national oppression inherent under imperialism—is the central problem within the U.S.  All of these forces are potentially part of an antiimperialist united front.

We believe that any real left unity will be achieved by sharing the understanding that racist ideology, institutions, and policies are powerful historically constructed forces in U.S. society and politics, rooted in the oppression of nations which is fundamental to the strength of the U.S. political economy. In this context, we focus on demands that challenge U.S. hegemony at its racist core. We recognize that the feverish relegation of slavery to a momentary moral lapse and the consequent refusal to produce serious plans for redress and reparations for the continuing legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is central  to international white supremacy.  Assassination of the U.S. Black Left in particular, and imprisonment of colonial subjects in general, is a cornerstone of U.S. police force tactics for dealing with "insurgents." Thus, we regard the struggle for reparations as a fundamental aspect of the struggle for self-determination among peoples of African descent.

With regard to issues like language rights, we uphold the equality of languages as a form of equality of nations and peoples. By framing these types of demands as a means to remedy national oppression, it becomes clear that there is no such thing as "reverse discrimination" within the United States; there is no such thing as suffering discrimination for being part of the dominant nation; there is no discrimination for speaking English.

Constituting another dilemma, demands on the bourgeois State to intervene against  other sectors of the State and corporations involve tactical alliances with sectors of the same capitalist State we aim to challenge. Examples from our work include asking federal courts to uphold the Civil Rights Act to restrain and compel the MTA; asking the MTA board to curtail rail contractors; asking the Air Quality Management District (AQMD) to regulate the MTA and the diesel bus industry. This produces tremendous confusion. On the one hand, it's easy to fall into the ideology that the State will rescue us from racism or "truth will win"; on the other hand, it is easy to think that if we are opposed to state-institutionalized national oppression, we can't fight to advance democratic rights or make demands that expand the social welfare state without succumbing to capitalist domination.  At the Strategy Center, we spend a great deal of time experimenting in our campaign development so as to avoid both of these dead-end positions.  We often devise plans that use the state to expose the state. This involves a complex dialectic of confrontation and compromise, winning immediate reforms while developing new structures of resistance from which to make greater demands on the system. 

Strategic demands around which the strategy center's program demand group is unified

We call upon the U.S. government to reveal and repeal all policies that structurally reinforce national oppression and racism. We call upon the U.S. government to recognize the principle of self-determination for all nations of indigenous peoples, for Puerto Rico and Hawaii, for people of African descent enslaved in the United States, and for the Chicanos of the southwest whose land was stolen by the U.S., and to take responsibility for redress and reparations. We call upon the U.S. government to establish full and effective equality for all oppressed nationality peoples inside the United States.

Focal Campaigns We Prioritize

n U.S. government, eliminate immigrant-nationality and racial profiling, especially the current wrongful detention of people who appear to be Middle Eastern; abolish the Immigration and Naturalization Service and open the borders!

n U.S. federal and state governments, free the U.S.  Two Million—immediately release from prison all indigenous, black and Latino colonial subjects and unconditionally fund community controlled education, detoxification and job placement programs.  Free political prisoners Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal!

n U.S. governmental bodies, recognize specifically the sovereignty and control of all lands claimed by the nations of Native American peoples.  Grant full equality to all U.S. nationalities and the right of self-determination to any oppressed nation.

n U.S. government, make reparations to African nations and to black people in the U.S. and throughout the African Diaspora for centuries of the barbaric Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.