How
important are the founding myths of a nation? What happens if those myths become
founding crimes? Consider the Soviet
Union and Khrushchev’s famous speech in 1956 denouncing the crimes of Stalin –
the show trials, the mass executions, the gulag. According to philosopher Slavoj
Žižek, “After [Khrushchev’s] speech, things were never the same again, the
fundamental dogma of infallible leadership had been fatally undermined.…” In the short run, this exposure of the seamy
side of the Soviet state “strengthen[ed] the communist movement…the Khrushchev
era was the last period of authentic communist enthusiasm of belief in the
communist project.” But Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, and a “resigned
cynicism” set in “until Gorbachev’s attempt at a more radical confrontation
with the past” led to the utter collapse of the system. By contrast, the
Chinese Communist Party managed to throw overboard the whole communist project
and take up “Western-style ‘liberalization’ (private property, profit making,
hedonist individualism, etc.).…[But] the Party nevertheless maintained its “unconditional
political hegemony…as the only guarantee of China’s stability and prosperity.”
This
required, Žižek continues,
a close monitoring and regulation of the ideological
discourse on Chinese history, especially the history of the last two centuries:
the story endlessly varied by the state media and textbooks is one of China’s
humiliation in the Opium Wars onwards, which ended only with the communist
victory in 1949, leading to the conclusion that to be patriotic is to support
the rule of the Party.
And here’s
the point I want to emphasize:
When history is given such a legitimizing role…, it cannot
tolerate any substantial self-critique; the Chinese had learned the lesson of
Gorbachev’s failure: full recognition of
the ‘founding crimes’ will only bring the entire system down. (Slavoi Žižek,
Lenin 2017 (Verso, 2017), pp. viii-xi.
“Full
recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ will only bring the entire system down.” What
would be the effect of a full recognition of the founding crimes of the United
States? Those crimes, of course, being, first, the displacement and near
genocide of the native peoples on the continent to make room for white
settlers, rationalized by the idea that only white Europeans were capable of
putting the land to its most productive use. And second, over two centuries of
making the land productive with cotton, sugar, and tobacco, and the US a
wealthy nation by the brutally forced labor of millions of enslaved Africans,
followed by another hundred years of Jim Crow and structural racism that
continues to this day.
In 2009,
both houses of Congress passed a strongly worded apology for slavery and Jim
Crow, though with the disclaimer that it did not authorize anything like
reparations. Of course most of us have
forgotten this noble gesture by now since no further action was ever taken to
make amends for the ongoing consequences of slavery. Moreover, the act was hardly “full recognition of the ‘founding
crimes’” of the nation. Not only has there been no apology to Native Americans
for their treatment, but full recognition of the nation’s founding crimes would
need to acknowledge that the wealth of the nation, largely owned and controlled
by the top tenth of one percent of the world’s people, was essentially stolen
from the lives and labor of people, mostly people of color, and that the
continuing growth of that capital depends on the availability of people whose
social status is diminished by their skin color enabling capital to pay them
less than a living wage to (among many other things) assemble our toys, grow
and harvest our food, and care for our children and our aged parents.
This
unheroic and ignoble story of the nation we call America is coming to be
understood by more and more people, even though it is still a minority position
in mainstream media, most classrooms, and certainly in our political campaigns
– the rhetoric of the state. The American founding myth is the nation was
founded by wise and freedom-loving men who set the stage for a steady march
towards universal prosperity and human
rights. But the story of America as a settler nation built on genocide, enslavement
and theft is being more widely and better told, from popular books like Howard
Zinn’s People’s History of the United
States to accessible books about American conquest by historians like Ibram X. Kendi, Edward Baptiste, Paul Frymer, Edmund Morgan, Gerald
Horne, and many others. Progressive teachers in high schools, colleges and
universities are making these critical perspectives available to young
people.
There is an
increasing awareness in the land that the corporate state that governs so much
of our lives does not respond to the needs of the vast majority of us, but is a
system designed to exploit us where it can and to imprison or destroy us when
we are in the way, and that its services and benefits are proportioned to our
wealth and the paleness of our skins. That people are waking up to this is not
going unnoticed by the people in charge. We can read the rise of the
nationalist right – Trump and his crew, the Koch brothers and their legions of
paid propagandists, as a concerted effort to counter the loss of faith in the
system of white supremacist capitalism. The attack on immigrants is just one of
the measures aimed at disempowering and demoralizing the people who have the
least reason to support the way power and wealth are now organized.
The
repressive machinery of the corporate state is, for now, overwhelming. But will
the people who serve that State in an enforcement capacity – police and
military personnel, for example – lose their enthusiasm for defending the
Bastille of Capital as the nation’s population darkens demographically in the
years ahead? We might like to imagine that as this terrible system fails more
and more to provide a decent living for the multitude and as people have less
and less reason to feel loyalty to a nation conceived in liberty for propertied
white males, the power of the State might wither away, leaving us free to build
a cooperative society dedicated not to the aggrandizement of the few but the
flourishing of us all.
Sadly, this
utopian vision of a gradual blooming of a better society forgets that power
never concedes anything without a struggle; for every revolution there is the
counter-revolution. Alarmed by the rising proportion of people of color and by
their increasingly organized and visible demands to be counted and represented
equally, the forces of reaction have been galvanized. We see them in the
various forms of in-your-face White Nationalism and in the slightly subtler and
implicitly racist language and policies
of the Trump administration.
Where does
this leave our aspirations for a more harmonious world? It leaves us with a
political challenge: We need to build a broad-based, coherent movement on the
Left that is, at one and the same time, anti-capitalist and anti-racist. And
more than that, it needs to be a movement that is open and inviting to all
parts of the working class.
It’s not a
small task, but it is necessary.
Presented
on the Old
Mole Variety Hour, April 2, 2018
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