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This is what Amerikans do when they aren't apathetic about migrants.
How class struggle manifests itself with settler Euro-Amerikan workers. Need we say more?
By a correspondent, September 26, 2006
Conscious national struggle is still percolating in San Diego. Large mobilizations around migrants and white nationalist attacks have centered around official Congress activity, and lately there has been little. The migrant movement is experiencing problems throughout North America, but locally a weak Maoist movement is partly to blame for the movement's sporadicalness and limited intensity and scope. Left-wing white nationalists and Latino comprador bourgeois dominate the migrant movement, but there is room for improvement of the proletarian-led united front that has yet to be tapped. There is a broad progressive nationalist tendency encompassing different groups, and one organization is saying some interesting things, however. More on that later.
The mayor of National City, which has a mostly Chicano and Mexicano population of more than 60,000 people and a large Filipino population, announced a few weeks ago that he wanted to make the city a so-called "sanctuary city," where local police aren't allowed to actively enforce federal immigration law. The local police union, an organization of the white labor aristocracy in blue, responded negatively.(1)
Last Saturday, the 23rd, Minuteman Project spin-offs and fans, Save Our State and other grassroots fascists, made up of settler labor aristocracy so-called workers and their parents, protested at the civic center. What they were there to protest were the mayor's words and what was actually a largely symbolic action in the face of the white nationalist onslaught; what this really was, was a settler demonstration in support of continued occupation of oppressed-nation land and higher living standards for U.$. citizens, particularly whites. As even some in the mainstream media and one activist pointed out, National City was already a sanctuary city in all but name. Many people clearly understood that the protest by the anti-migrant activists was an brazen attack. Dozens of people, mostly Latinos, Latin Americans and indigenous people, and some Asian-descended people, from National City and throughout San Diego gathered on the opposite side of the street to protest the Minutemen. Some of the fascists and lackeys held signs specifically aimed at Spanish-speaking people.
The local white TV media played it up like there was going to be a riot in National City. Then there was the usual bullshit involving police: concentrating on the angry dark-skinned people, protecting the fascists and giving them a cover for various attacks, allowing fascists to come over to the other side to take pictures and not the other way around, etc. Counter-protesters were confined to a space despite being greater in number than the fascists. Counter-protesting activists reported that prior to this there had been an increase in repression related to protest pens in the area, and a police tactic using crowds around people being arrested as an excuse for repression. One fascist came over to the counter-protest side to take pictures of children, to intimidate them and their families and undoubtedly for material to put in their racist and white nationalist propaganda.
As another anti-migrant fascist action, this event was just another blip among incessant petty-bourgeois white "worker" activism against migrant proletarians and oppressed nations. It is more of an insult to injury after Escondido, for example, elsewhere in San Diego County, moved to make preparations to deny undocumented migrants housing, and cities have passed or are trying to pass legislation to restrict day laborers. Outside Escondido City Hall weeks ago, white people held signs with messages such as "will work for rent." In tune with the fascists, settler nation "leftists" continued to talk about white people's rent problems.
This writer could have passed on commenting on this particular protest, but it presents an opportunity to talk about a few things. One is related to security. The others have more to do with politics and strategy.
Some of the anti-Minutemen/fascist/racist protesters expressed concern about Minutemen coming over and taking pictures. The white media journalists with identification and expensive equipment milling around are obvious. Yet, there were many others taking pictures and videos that didn't appear in any projects, or show up on web sites or even on blogs and MySpace pages days later. Some people have not fully understood the political coconut problem. There is a lot of picture-taking going on that can't be accounted for. Some people who look like friends are actually pigs or anti-migrant activists. Photographers who are going to take pictures should blur faces and put them in a progressive context, or don't take them. Otherwise, they are giving the pigs a cover.
One persyn at the protest tried to reason with the Minutemen, asking them who is fighting in Iraq. This played into imperialist manipulations trading citizenship for military service and using citizenship to buy off select people. The correct orientation is counter-recruitment and opposing military recruiters' targeting of Latino youth on an internationalist basis, not trying to persuade fascists that you are more patriotic than them.
One "progressive" web site's report on the protest focuses on the liberal and settler nation "socialist" presence at the protest. The report is obviously more concerned with giving Euro-Amerikans and their institutions credit for their role in the protest than examining the ideas and direction of the migrant movement and the struggles that are shaping it. The white-nationalist "Left" is willing to suppress and obscure the national struggle and anti-imperialist class struggle surrounding the migrant movement. One group the report didn't mention was Unión del Barrio, whose paper was distributed at the event. Unión del Barrio does not claim to be Maoist or communist, but its paper was more correct than many alleged Maoists and communists, and so-called leftists, who either don't recognize the existence of any separate or partitioned non-white nation inside U.$. borders or take an openly neo-colonialist approach to that.
The September 2005-June 2006 issue of ˇLa Verdad! is interesting in light of recent statements by supposed communists and anti-communists defending the integrationist multiracial or multinational working class idea in the context of the migrant movement. The English version of one article in this issue problematically talks about "the working class" and "the rich ruling class" in the United $tates in an ambiguous way that has the potential to obscure how the Euro-Amerikan majority directly benefits from imperialist exploitation.(2) Another article, on the mass protests and demonstrations last spring, locates the origins of the protests in a national struggle and opposes attempts to mold and control the protests as just a civil rights movement, but supports a minimum wage increase.(3) Looking at flows of wealth, even the current federal minimum wage is possible only because of the exploitation of Third World workers. On the whole, though, there is no discussion of a white working class specifically in this issue, only a white population benefiting from Third World labor. In fact, Unión del Barrio's Principles of Unity point to "the ever increasing overt and violent expression of racism by the masses of the U.S. white population."
The most interesting article in this issue is a reprint of a statement "originally written and submitted to the International League of People's Struggle, Second International Assembly in Eindhoven, Netherlands on November 10-14, 2004." It is a clear indication that representatives of the ILPS took a white-chauvinist position on the migrant movement despite being informed of a variety of progressive opinion within the united $tates on the subject.
Unión del Barrio's statement puts migration and borders in the American continent in the context of the Mexican national liberation struggle and colonialism, identifies both the United $tates and Kanada as "illegal settler nations," says that the wealth of the United $tates would not exist without past colonial plunder, and rejects the "immigrant" label as perpetuating the status quo of occupation. The real illegal aliens are the Euro-Amerikan settlers, and these and other European populations benefit from Third World labor. Unión del Barrio's statement rightly observes, "Even the North American 'Left', from all 'tendencies', has historically attempted to make the struggle of rights for 'immigrants' and strictly a 'class' question." MIM would go further than that and add that the class question and the national question are almost one and the same in North America. Not only is the principal contradiction between imperialism and oppressed nations, opposing class oppression means opposing the exploitation of oppressed-nation labor by the bourgeois U.$. and First World majority. The settler majority not only consists of oppressors; it consists of capitalist exploiters. This is the more complete material basis for the reactionary behavior Unión del Barrio points out.
"In order to maintain this 'docile' labor force, the ruling classes of the imperialist countries have put into effect forms of low intensity warfare against the 'migrant communities' (mass arrests, deportations, beatings, killings, and so forth). These military police operations have enjoyed the support (to one degree or another) from the most racist segments of the settler (white) population of the imperialist countries; and indeed, they voluntarily participate in this brutality in order to hold on to their high standard of living."(4)
Standing in contrast to Maoist and non-Maoist revolutionary nationalists are left-wing white nationalist "leftists" and liberals. They preach multinational and multiracial harmony with the white majority, and class peace with the bourgeois Euro-Amerikan working class that is behind the anti-migrant movement. Worse, this comes at a time when developing the national struggle of the internal semi-colonies and oppressed nationalities against imperialism is urgent for there to be genuine internationalism. As the struggle continues, the oppressed will cast off misleaders and pursue a path independent of the political trajectory and interests of the various imperialist bourgeois classes.
Notes:
1. Tanya Sierra, "Illegal-immigrant plan called 'whimsy'," 21 September 2006, http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20060921-9999-6m21protest.html
2. "The Colonization of the Mexican Working Class: Only An Organized Working Class Can Change Our Conditions As a People," 20 March 2006, ˇLa Verdad!, September 2005-June 2006, p. 4, http://uniondelbarrio.org/lvp/newspapers/06/sep05jun06.pdf
3. "What Comes Next? The People Will Answer This Important Question...," 5 May 2006, ˇLa Verdad!, September 2005-June 2006, p. 7, http://uniondelbarrio.org/lvp/newspapers/06/sep05jun06.pdf