I met Noel Ignatiev sometime in 2001. Loren Goldner, whom I met in 2000, had turned me on to Race Traitor, the journal John Garvey and Noel had founded. I was fascinated. I never knew white folks like these.

I achieved consciousness in the stew of vague Afrocentricity and cultural nationalism swirling about in the late 1980s and early 1990s, after growing up in an evangelical household. I knew something was wrong with the cultural nationalist stream and black nationalism in general, but I couldn’t figure it out. When I got to college that was literally the only black consciousness I encountered. I couldn’t fight it, so I didn’t, and I entered politics from the right of center, as a sort of farcical nationalist, with my Farrakhan tapes and everything. I could fight my Christianity, though, so I found Marx’s and Engels’s critique of religion, and this led me into the rest of the European radical tradition.

Which is why I couldn’t understand Race Traitor at first. I was stunned that white people could be so critical of racism, first of all. I had only ever heard liberals and “progressives” speak of such matters. It took me a while, but then it finally clicked. Race Traitor was a communist project, just like Italian operaismo, and with exactly the same emphasis on how the working class is composed historically.

We wrote one another occasionally over the years, and I wrote a couple of things for Race Traitor and Hard Crackers, but I wish I had been closer to Noel. I considered him a friend, and I admired his work and enjoyed our meetings in person. He was charismatic and funny, and possessed a deadly combative intellect, which I admire greatly. He was simply fun to be around.

But I am most grateful to him for Race Traitor. His work there literally unified my intellect, by putting flesh on the bones of all the radical theory and simultaneously illuminating American history. American racism is extremely strange, overwhelming, distorting, and perhaps unique, but it is also, of course, class struggle. Noel helped me to understand.

The following is more a reminiscence than an obituary.

I first became aware of Noel Ignatiev (then known as Noel Ignatin) during the crackup of the New Left ca. 1968 or 1969. At the final conference of sds (Students for a Democratic Society) in Chicago in June 1969, Noel broke through to national prominence as a spokesperson for rym II (Revolutionary Youth Movement), where the Progressive Labor Party (plp or more commonly pl) took over sds just as it was disintegrating, in the larger context of the disintegration of the 1960s “Movement,” in effect taking over a corpse.

I had spent the 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area, more specifically in Berkeley, in the Independent Socialist Clubs (isc), which around that time changed their name to International Socialists (is) and which over the course of the 1970s spawned five or six break-away groups, the most visible for a time being the International Socialist Organization (iso). Many is comrades left Berkeley in 1970 to organize in Detroit auto plants and, with more success, in the Teamsters. I became an independent, and stayed in Berkeley until I decamped for New York in 1976.

I pretty much lost sight of Noel until he appeared in Cambridge, Massachusetts, around 1984. I was working in the Harvard Library system, and Noel came to Harvard to do a PhD. As he put it, in one of his many memorable formulations, “In Russia, when you fail in politics, you go to Siberia; in America, when you fail in politics, you come to Harvard.” We were introduced one evening by a mutual friend from Italy.

I was initially standoffish, knowing little about Noel as a person, and still harboring bad memories of his association with Maoism and with the term “white skin privilege” which over decades has morphed into “white privilege,” of near universal acceptance today on both the soft and hard left, and which appears as such in the New York Times. Noel was in that way a pioneer, even if he rejected most of the currents which picked up the term and integrated it into a left-liberal respectability he loathed. Loathing was a leitmotiv of his political judgments; when I would criticize some formation such as Labor Notes (cf. below), Noel would say “I want to hear some loathing.”

We began to meet, off and on at first, as refugees from the post-1970 shipwreck of the left. My hero from the history of revolutions was (and remains) Rosa Luxemburg; Noel’s was John Brown. I was oriented to the radical currents of the European revolutionary movements, and the American groups which looked to them; while Noel was knowledgeable about them, and had had ties to Italian Autonomia, he was far more rooted than I in American currents, from the pre–Civil War Abolitionists onward. He talked at times of re-creating for the present John Brown’s action at Harper’s Ferry, by which he meant some kind of action that would polarize the situation as Harper’s Ferry had done in 1859. We converged around a recognition of the iww as the most radical current to date in the history of the American working class. The decades of absence of any mass radical movement in the streets in the United States never put these divergences to the test.

My past association with the currents growing out of the 1960s isc kept me focused, from afar, on their organizing in the Midwest, above all, again, in Detroit. In 1993, I persuaded Noel to attend a conference of Labor Notes, one of the most successful mini-mass creations of the “industrialized” is comrades. We conferred on the sidelines, unenthused. Noel reminded me of some 1960s conferences in Chicago where the tone had been set by black radicalism and where “it was the is types who were relegated to the sidelines.”

Noel was no hard-nosed Marxist philistine; he listened to Mozart day in and day out; I was occasionally puzzled by his lack of interest in black-inspired music, which was then my orientation; he showed no interest in jazz, which in those Cambridge years was my focus. He said once “jazz is about being cool,” which did not interest him. African culture was also a dead key for him. He read widely, far more than I, in contemporary novels, while I settled in to writing a PhD thesis on Herman Melville, on whom we did converge. My choice of Melville did grow out of an interest in the questions of race and class, which owed a great deal to my discussions with Noel. I could honestly say that Noel got me intellectually and culturally interested in America, which had previously been eclipsed for me by Europe.

We staked out a bench by the Charles River, on which we proclaimed hegemony. Noel referred to Harvard as the “boneyard,” to which we had come to retire. Noel had a personal warmth and humor which was infectious. He was very successful in attracting women, an ongoing topic of conversation between us. He was also intent on having children, and had a son and a daughter in the 1980s. He quoted Joe DiMaggio, who said that of all the things in his life of which he was proud, his grandchildren were the most important.

We traveled together on occasion, once to Philadelphia, from where we visited the nearby Amish country, because the radical religious sects already in the late seventeenth century had attacked slavery. In 1989, we drove down to Pittston, Virginia, where a long and militant miners’ strike was underway. One striking miner invited us to his home, where Noel held back from expressing his thoughts on the limits of trade unionism. The miner offered to meet us again the next day and show us around, then caught himself and said “No, wait, I have a date with a wild turkey!” What struck me most of the way back to Cambridge was the contrast between the miners’ scene in Appalachia, truly a separate world, and the endless stretches of suburbia.

Noel could be overbearing, and told me more than once that “I could still save my soul, by which he meant (I suppose) becoming an “Ignatievite.” I attended a founding editorial meeting of what became Race Traitor, which appeared from 1993 until 2005 (I had my own plans, and held back, though I did submit a couple of articles, my two-part series on “Race and the Enlightenment,” and in 2010 co-founded Insurgent Notes, with a number of comrades).

In the year 2000, I left Cambridge for New York, which had always been my intention. My contact with Noel over the remaining two decades of his life was mainly on the phone. Not a week before he died, he was trying to draw me out once again on the issue of Lenin vs. Luxemburg on the national question; he was relentless when there was any kind of serious disagreement. It was to be our last phone call. I wrote to him a day or two before he died, care of his son John Henry:

Dear Noel,

John told me 1–2 hours ago about your decision to forego any further surgery and let nature take its course. Very courageous, as your dealing with your deteriorating condition over the past weeks has been courageous.

I just wanted John Henry to read this to you as I doubt we will talk or write again.

I plan to write an article or some such about our friendship for Insurgent Notes.

We became friendly in Cambridge in the early ’80s and have been friends, with ups and downs, ever since. For me, it goes without saying, it was a great privilege. You taught me to see America and American history in a way I never had. Beyond that, your very magnanimous spirit and warmth were always infectious. When I was down and out because of crises with different girlfriends, you were always there to help and above all to listen. Those days on our “bench” next to the Charles, during our enforced retirement after the 1970s collapse of the left, will always stay with me, as all the other shared memories will stay with me.

I am glad we were able to write and above all talk until quite recently. I will always remember you, with great affection.

Your friend and comrade always.

Love

Loren

I first met Noel in 1960, at the second national conference of the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in the United States (known as the poc, pronounced pee-oh-see; only enemies called it pock). Noel had just returned from Cuba. He gave an enthusiastic report about the revolution, spiced with humor that poked fun at Fidel and Che as leaders trying to figure out how to guide an economy they did not understand:

Fidel: Che, I put you in charge of the bank because you said you’re an economist. Why is everything screwed up?

Che: Economist? I thought you said “communist.”

Most poc leaders used pseudonyms. Ted Allen was “Comrade Molly” (Molly Pitcher), who penned the “Economic Situation in the United States” column in the poc tabloid Marxist-Leninist Vanguard under the byline Milton Palmer. But Noel was always Comrade Noel. They were Stalinists; I was not. But I admired poc members’ militancy, discipline, and enthusiasm for the daunting challenges of mass work.

The poc leader I admired most was Tom Scribner from the West Coast, an old Wobbly who published a mimeographed monthly bulletin called Lumberjack News and Unemployed Worker, always a livelier read than Vanguard. Tom sided with Noel on most issues, which elevated my respect for him despite his rigid Stalinism. Over the course of the following year, the poc became more sectarian, faction-ridden, and insular, so I drifted away.

I joined the Industrial Workers of the World and the Young Peoples Socialist League, quickly becoming an iww organizer and a leader of the ypsl’s Libertarian Socialist tendency. Noel became a Maoist in search of a political home after the poc expelled him in about 1966. In the lingo of ultra-left sects, we became one another’s “contact” (prospective recruit, allied in mutual mass work) after Noel moved from Philadelphia to Chicago.

In 1967, on his way home from the post office, he brought me a bundle of his new pamphlet, White Blindspot, that had just arrived in the mail from New York. This time he had used a pseudonymous byline, J.H. Kagin, in honor of John Henry Kagi, an abolitionist who had been second in command of John Brown’s raid on the Harper’s Ferry arsenal in 1859 where he was shot and killed by Robert E. Lee’s militia. The pamphlet reprinted a political letter Noel had sent to Progressive Labor followed by a letter of support by Ted Allen (signed “M”).

White Blindspot publicized and popularized the phrase “white-skin privilege,” for which Noel has written his name into history although Ted had coined it originally. I thought at the time, and still do, that it was didactically useful but counterproductive politically (that is, for the purposes of agitation and mass propaganda), which is also my criticism of Noel’s later formulations of the same line, such as Race Traitor. Not only was it a step beyond what can be achieved agitationally, its very ambiguity leads to misconstruction.

Thus, in a Students for a Democratic Society Revolutionary Youth Movement reprint of White Blindspot two years later, under Noel’s and Ted’s real names, Noel explained in an introductory author’s note:

Some people mistakenly speak in terms of “giving up” or “sacrificing,” rather than repudiating the white-skin privilege. The distinction is not merely semantical. In spite of the Mad Hatter, words are not simply a question of who is to be master. The choice of language is both a result of, and an influence upon, the train of thought.

When workers are on strike and the police attack them with clubs, do the workers respond by “sacrificing” the blows? White-skin privileges are blows against the working class. They are the real secret of the rule of the bourgeoisie. That is why the bourgeoisie will not let the white worker escape them, but instead pursues them everywhere, raining white-skin privileges unremittingly down on his head. To repudiate these privileges is an act of class struggle, requiring at least as much militancy as the defense against a police attack.

Today’s widespread common propagation and usage of “white privilege” requires the same corrective. Even Michael Staudenmaeir’s sympathetic book published in 2012, Truth and Revolution, fails the same test:

But the traditional idea of privileges granted by capital and the state may come to mean less and less as the new century progresses (page 312).

Privileges are not “granted.” As a means of class rule, they are imposed more widely than ever, not only by color of skin, but by every social category subject to divide-and-rule dominance. If a historian immersed in study of the political line that Noel originated has failed to grasp that point, how could we have expected it to serve as a lever for mass mobilization?

My criticisms notwithstanding, in 1967 I regarded Noel’s political trajectory as positive and in some respects congruent with my own. In the summer of that year I had joined Facing Reality, the organization led by C.L.R. James. I returned Noel’s favor by presenting him with some of our literature, which represented a fresh revolutionary viewpoint for him to ponder, notably Negro Americans Take the Lead. Those exchanges cemented a comradeship that endured dozens of fierce clashes and wrong turns.

August of 1967 brought the National Conference for New Politics to Chicago. Among the participants was Don Hamerquist, then a dissident member of the Communist Party’s national leadership, who remained afterward to work with the leaders of sds, hoping to align the cp with the younger generation of New Left revolutionaries. Noel brought Don to my home, introduced us, and left with me his copy of Don’s 74-page, single-spaced, legal-size mimeographed manifesto Notes For Development Of A Revolutionary Strategy, with Noel’s annotations in red ink. I was happy to meet Don, but unimpressed with his paper. He had framed his analysis in the context of European Marxist theoretical debates that Facing Reality had by then repudiated.

In 1968 I brought C.L.R. James to Chicago as a guest speaker, and invited Noel to his public lecture. From the floor Noel spoke admiringly of Mao Tse Tung, to which C.L.R. waved his finger and said, “That was a great revolution, but it isn’t Marxism.” Noel has written about that encounter as a watershed. He subsequently became more enamored of C.L.R.’s theory of state capitalism than I was.

In the wake of sncc’s Black Power challenge, Noel and I became founding members of the Union of (White) Organizers, a citywide mainly sds council of activists, which persisted until sds splintered in 1969. (Many years later, Noel tried to compose a song about that experience, but to my knowledge he wrote only the opening lines: “In nineteen hundred and sixty-nine, Bernardine Dohrn was a friend of mine….”) Don and Noel founded Sojourner Truth Organization rooted in workplace organizing. In 1971 I moved to Mississippi as a staff member of the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Before I left, I gave Noel a scef memorandum by Walter Collins that fleshed out and made explicit the challenge to white organizers.

Less than a year after I left Chicago, Facing Reality dissolved. By the time Noel and Don recruited me to sto in 1975, sto’s principal orientation had been redirected into anti-imperialist solidarity, which I regarded as positive, but Noel resisted. Although Staudenmeier names Don, Noel, and me as the sto “heavies,” there was never a time when the three of us agreed on the line and strategy of the organization. For that period of our comradeship I can’t do better than refer to my remarks in the Insurgent Notes symposium on Truth and Revolution.

Despite our differences, maybe because of them, Noel and I continued to correspond and debate privately after he had departed for academia and sto disintegrated. He paid three visits to us in Pennsylvania during recent years. The last time he came, we had family members and guests who were sympathetic to radical politics but had no movement experience, which led to a lively dinner conversation, and a chance to promote his book.

From summarizing his analysis, he pivoted to an explanation of his name change. When he moved to Harvard, he decided he could honor his father’s Russian Jewish forbears, surnamed Yignatievsky, by adopting more of their name, which in turn emphasized his political brand as he stood in solidarity with Palestinians.

Over the half-century that Noel and I shared ideas and disagreed, the benefit for both of us was that we could discuss undeveloped threads of analysis without fear of embarrassment.

Our final political exchange rekindled our differences over Stalinism. Noel was still mired in a state-capitalist analysis; I regarded Stalinism as socialist Bonapartism. Noel’s dilemma was how to extricate himself from abstention during World War II (whereas for me, any and all anti-Nazi positions were preferable, including the most opportunistic).

He explained, “The times were complicated, and I’m not sure how I would have responded even without my hereditary Stalinism. Someone recently asked me where, knowing what I know now, I would have been in, say, 1937, and it got me thinking.”

I sent him the transcript of Leon Trotsky’s forceful argument in 1940 that the Socialist Workers Party should support the cp presidential ticket despite the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Popular Front policy, and Hal Draper’s article, “The Myth of Lenin’s Revolutionary Defeatism,” but pressed my own Bonapartist analysis. Noel replied: “In order better to understand Bonapartism I am trying once again to read War and Peace.”

I first met Noel Ignatiev in the Re-Imagining Ireland conference at the University of Virginia in 2003 when he spoke in the panel on race I had been asked to convene. It was a huge honor to meet the author of How the Irish Became White (1995), a work that assisted Robbie McVeigh and me in our work on racism in Ireland and enabled my teaching race and racism in the postgraduate Ethnic and Racial Studies program I had founded in 1998 in Trinity College Dublin. As program director I invited Noel to give a lecture on the realities of African American lives and he went on to speak in Belfast at the invitation of Robbie McVeigh.

It took me a while, however, to comprehend Noel’s concept of race traitorship and to focus on race rather than racism, particularly as we were all captivated at the time by Paul Gilroy’s 1989 dictum that “race ends here,” which made us put race in scare quotes on this side of the Atlantic. It also took me quite some time to position race front and centre of my analysis of Israel’s permanent war against the Palestinians, but doing so eventually led me to writing my 2018 book Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism. When Noel invited me to guest-edit the special Palestine issue of Race Traitor (volume 16, 2005), which focused on the one-state solution, I still didn’t see myself, as I certainly do now, as a race traitor in the context of my Israeli-Jewish pro-Palestine activism and scholarship.

I am writing this just after Trump’s “deal of the century” partition plan, which allows Israel to maintain its hold of an undivided Al Quds–Jerusalem, negates the Palestinian right of return, creating a literal apartheid state, celebrated by official Israel and its Zionist followers and rejected by the Palestinians and their supporters. However, although the plan is clearly based on racial categorization and segregation that has underpinned the Zionist ideology since its early days—something Noel understood a very long time ago—none of the analyses I have read so far use race to explain the white Judeo-Christian supremacy characterizing Trump’s deal.

Noel’s introduction to the volume makes clear that he was well aware that Israel was a racial colonial enterprise quite some time before the late Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe published his seminal comparative study of race and settler colonialism (though not before the work on the Israeli colonization of Palestine by Palestinian scholars Constantine Zurayek, Fayez Sayegh and Elia Zureik, Israeli sociologist Gershon Shafir and French historian Maxime Rodinson). Given his understanding of race as neither biological nor cultural, Noel saw Zionism as based not on religion or language but rather on descent, hence race. Revealingly in view of the Trump deal, Noel viewed the United States as the first Zionist state, the first place settled by people who conquered indigenous lands that they regarded as terra nullius with the certainty that God had promised them the land and authorized them to dispossess and eliminate the indigenous population. For him this was similar in origin to the two-state solution, the precursor of Trump’s partition plan. Another thing that Noel understood was that drawing a dividing line between the state of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory was artificial—it was all occupied territory, a reality familiar to anyone who knows the history of the displacement of the Native Americans.

Israel, Noel emphasized, does not belong to those residing in it but is rather defined as the state of the Jewish people based on descent, a definition copper-fastened with Israel’s passing of the recent Nation State Law. Thus the elimination of the indigenous Palestinians is a building block of the Zionist project, as is the expansion of the Jewish population.

Reading his introduction to the special Palestine issue of Race Traitor shows that Noel understood the Zionist definition of Jews as a race long before I (or even Patrick Wolfe) did. Desperate to increase the state’s loyal population, Israel admitted hundreds of thousands of migrants from the former Soviet Union whose Judaism was dubious and whose nationality was therefore under consideration. In fact the recent introduction of dna tests by Israel’s orthodox state-funded rabbinical establishment to ascertain these migrants’ Jewish descent provides additional proof of the racial nature of the Zionist enterprise. Israel understands being Jewish is being relied upon to repress the indigenous Palestinians, and at the same time the supremacy of Orthodox Judaism was the price to pay for the Biblical justification of the Zionist occupation.

In my own recent work, following David Theo Goldberg’s theory of the racial state and Faez Saegh’s much earlier work on Zionism as a racial project, I trace the historical roots of the Zionist construction of Jewish people as a race through the writings of the early Zionist ideologues Theodore Herzl, Max Nordau and Arthur Ruppin. It is astounding, however, to realize how well Noel understood the racial nature of the Zionist state, where rights are assigned on the basis of being a white European Jew, where Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews, as well as non-white, non-Jewish labor migrants and asylum seekers are also racialized, albeit in different ways to the indigenous Palestinians, in whose oppression non-European Jews, otherwise discriminated against, partake, thus acquiring a privileged position in Israel’s racial hierarchy.

Noel was also aware, already in 2005, of the risk of being labeled antisemitic if you criticize Israeli Zionism. The current hysteria about antisemitism—weaponized by the Israeli state—not only ignores the far more widespread realities of Islamophobia and anti-migrant racism, it also overrides the real dangers facing real Jewish people, regularly attacked by the far right. Likewise, his awareness of the imperialist interests of Israel’s supporters, amongst whom are extreme-right politicians and Christian evangelists whose blatant antisemitism doesn’t stop Israel from allying itself to them, is another reason for considering him one of the sharpest analysts of Israel’s racial project, whose analysis becomes more relevant as time goes by.

Trump’s partitionist “deal of the century” is ultimately a two-state blueprint in the guise of a peace plan, which Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy called the start of the third Nakba: “The Palestinians weren’t just missing entirely from the ceremony, they were also nowhere to be found in the plan that could seal their future and that heralds the elimination of their last chance for some belated decency, for a bit of justice, for a drop.”

Noel and I, like many Palestinian, Israeli and international activists, were fully committed to campaigning for one state in historic Palestine, from the river to the sea, where full equality will replace the current apartheid regime, the topic of the Race Traitor volume I guest-edited. This solution was championed since the 1970s by the Israeli Socialist Organization Matzpen, one of whose members, Eli Aminov, is a contributor to the volume.

It is clearly up to the Palestinians to decide their own fate and many of them do favor an independent Palestinian state, hence a two-state solution. And as I write in my introduction to the volume, even supporters of the one state (including the Palestinian scholar As’ad Ghanem, one of the volume’s contributors) favor a bi-national state, not letting go of the idea of nation, thus conceptualizing Jews as a nation.

In the introduction I theorized Israel as one of the world’s paradigmatic racial states where racial segregation and categorization operate at all levels. My understanding of race and of Israeli-Jewish racial supremacy has since progressed well beyond understanding race as a social construct, preferring to see it as a political concept, invented in order to preserve white supremacy. However, unlike Noel, with whom I had many discussions on the topic when we became Facebook friends, I have always understood the Jewish tragedy in terms of the dialectic racialization of Jewish people and by Jewish people of their others—Palestinians, but also non-European Jews and non-Jewish, non-white migrants and asylum seekers. Like the British-Jewish Marxist Isaac Deutscher, I must ask what makes a Jew, which he, and probably Noel, too, understood in terms of unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and the oppressed.

Both Irish and Jewish people arguably became white in the usa, though the latter was not Noel’s concern. Racial rule and white supremacy became forcibly clear in the recent ceremony in Jerusalem commemorating the Nazi genocide where no African, Asian or non-white heads of state were among the guests, arguably enabling Israelis to finally become white, to finally assume white supremacy and racial rule. I am sure Noel Ignatiev would have been as angry as I was watching these two ceremonious events that further sold the Palestinians down the river.

Dr. Ronit Lentin is a retired associate professor of sociology, Trinity College Dublin. Among her books: Racism and Antiracism in Ireland (2002), After Optimism? Ireland, Racism and Globalization (2006), Thinking Palestine (2008), and Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism (2018).

The following exchange was initiated when Staughton Lynd, one of the great historian activists of the twentieth and now twenty-first century, wrote to a number of other historians, including Noel. We have deleted the names of the others. Several days later, Noel responded. We do not know if any of the others responded or if the discussion was continued.

December 24, 2015

From: Brother Staughton (Lynd)

As you all know from a variety of interactions with me, I have been stewing about certain questions having to do with the practice of history from the bottom up, the relationship of anarchism and Marxism, and the concept of accompaniment.

I know that these questions take a distinctive form in my encounters with each of you. But I am 86. I am in good health but do not know how much time I have. Two of my closest friends, David Dellinger and Howard Zinn, died when they were about a year older than I am now. Hence the consuming desire to offer my thoughts to all of you for what use they may be.

The Many-Headed Practice of History from the Bottom Up

As a group, we who practice history from below have recently lost David Montgomery, Alfred Young, and Howard Zinn. All of them grew up in the era of the Popular Front, 1935–45. David Montgomery almost blocked the publication of a book I edited on the “alternative unionism of the early 1930s” because my introduction was so critical of the template John L. Lewis imposed on the cio: collective bargaining agreements with no-strike and management prerogative clauses. I tried to confront Al Young with the dissonance between his loving portraits of revolutionary artisans and the fact that in city after city the artisans not only supported the new constitution of 1787 but staged elaborate parades on its behalf. He restricted his comments to the artistic ingenuity of the artisan floats in the parades: he thought they signified the emergence of a working-class culture. The last book on which he worked, Revolutionary Founders, continued to celebrate the artisans as a revolutionary vanguard, disregarding the alliance of artisans with the moneyed class in 1787. Finally, I was unable to induce Howard Zinn to discuss, either with me or publicly, why sncc disintegrated so rapidly after the mountain-top experience of Freedom Summer. My own conclusion is that sncc failed to develop an economic program comparable to “40 acres and a mule” after the Civil War.

I would like to see those of us who continue to do history from the bottom up make some effort to develop common perspectives. This would be a comradely endeavor, like the history workshops and journals of British Left historians after World War II.

I believe that The Many-Headed Hydra represents the most ambitious and effective attempt at synthesis historians from the bottom up have attempted. Marcus and Peter, if I present my thoughts in the form of a response to your book it is not because I disrespect it, but for the opposite reason: I see in it the best work to date.

One more preliminary thought. I have been very much affected by reading Harper Lee’s “new” (actually, first) book, Go Set A Watchman. It is more raw and, I suspect, truthful than To Kill a Mockingbird. There is a heart-breaking sequence in which Atticus offers to defend a black man who, when drunk, ran over and killed another African American. Scout (here in her mid-twenties) initially celebrates her father’s apparently principled offer. Then she learns that he wants to take the case to prevent the naacp from providing representation and challenging an all-white jury. Atticus, who unforgettably confronts a local lynch mob in Mockingbird, in this book is revealed to be the chairman of the local White Citizens’ Council. Scout denounces him. He elicits from her agreement with his two key assumptions:

1. The federal government must be decentralized;
2. African Americans are not yet ready to be full citizens.

It is the ideology of the Solid South from Jefferson to the Tea Party. And the Left, I fear, offers nothing so deep-rooted and imbedded.

The Stadial View of History

When Alice was going to Pitt Law School, she and I shared several meals with Marcus at a little Near Eastern restaurant in the neighborhood.

Marcus used two terms I had never heard before: a “stadial view of history” and “antinomianism.” He said that he and Peter rejected the first and embraced the second.

The stadial view of history is presumably that which posits a sequence of historical “stages”: slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, Communism. Once again looking at Hydra I think I understood for the first time what the issue concerning “stadialism” is all about.

Why might Marcus and Peter reject stadialism thus defined? They will have to speak for themselves but I suspect the answer is that they discern some qualities in the life of lower-class humanity circa 1640 to 1800 that were lost in subsequent eras. What were these qualities? Perhaps, it seems to me, what might be called (with Peter’s permission) a “commons of experience.” That is, like the ocean currents that are displayed as the book opens, human beings during this century and a half of primitive accumulation circulated throughout the Atlantic world as slaves, seamen, soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners, and so on. This wide exposure to a brutal and hierarchical world generated an ever-renewed insurgency on behalf of comradeship, compassion, intrepid resistance, and as Edward Thompson says of Blake, love.

The view of the Communist Manifesto is that such confrontations as are set forth in Hydra were preliminary skirmishes, and that as time passed working-class resistance became broader, more continuous, more clearly defined. In contrast, anti-stadialism as I now understand it seeks to acknowledge the reality that as workers were so to speak penned into unvarying locations of struggle—that is, as enclosure drove the working class to cities and the factory displaced artisanship—a certain cosmopolitan sense of the class divide was lost. And it is not only a matter of class. Marcus and Peter insist that the three founders of the London Corresponding Society were a white man, a white woman, and a much-traveled black man whom even Edward Thompson seems to overlook.

This critique of stadialism would have a good deal in common with what C. Wright Mills, Perry Anderson, Simone Weil and many others propose regarding Marxist “stages”: the working class, they say, was more radical during the onset of capitalism (for instance as exemplified by Chartism) when artisans were living through the denigration of their autonomy and craftsmanship than they were later, after they had become “factory hands.”

Then too there was the parallel exchange of views between Russian radicals and Marx concerning the possibility of building on the institution of the village mir, and transitioning directly to socialism without having to endure a capitalist stage of development. I think the only thing I learned at Harvard was from a presentation by the Marxist scholar Karl Korsch. He had spent time with manuscripts left by Marx and concluded:

1. As Marx aged he more and more lost the ability to conceptualize and synthesize, busying himself with endless note-taking and, in the case at hand, learning Russian so that he could read Russian statistics and better respond to Vera Zasulich and other Russian correspondents. (This came home to me because my own father had passed through something very similar.)
2. Marx wrote draft after draft of a response to the Russians, in the end sending them a short and enigmatic note that avoided definite conclusions.

Antinomianism

I believe it is the case that Marcus and Peter derive their emphasis on antinomianism from Edward Thompson, and in particular, from Thompson’s posthumously published book, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Thompson writes that he believes Blake belonged to “a particular intellectual tradition: antinomianism” (Witness, p. xiii).

“Antinomianism” was a term used by seventeenth-century religious radicals, and as such, ought to be attractive to the world’s only Quaker Marxist, myself. (This is a joke.)

What does it mean? In a less-than-thorough search in Witness I found only one example of a definition by someone who believed in it. William Walwyn, “the quiet and rational theorist of the Levellers,” wrote in a pamphlet published in 1649:

I, through God’s goodnesse, had long before been established in that part of doctrine (called then, Antinomian) of free justification by Christ alone; and so my heart was at much more ease and freedom, than others, who were entangled with those yokes of bondage, unto which Sermons and Doctrines mixt of Law and Gospel, do subject distressed consciences (Witness, p. 23).

Elsewhere in his chapter devoted to a definition of the term, Thompson offers his own paraphrase: “antinomianism” reflects “the argument between law and love” and the “old opposition, Moral Law/Gospel” (Witness, pp. 19, 25). The “central theme” of the tradition was expressed in what had become, by the early 1650s, “fairly commonplace antinomian terms: those who are justified not by Works of the Law but by faith are ‘risen with Christ, they act in love’ ” (Witness, p. 30).

What does all this have to do with social justice and the oppression of the poor? For this we turn to The Many-Headed Hydra. The first mention of “antinomianism” appears to be a reference to “libertarian antinomianism” in the British city of Bristol during the Civil War of the 1640s. There the authors state that those who would later become Baptists and Quakers “were directly associated with the revolutionary victories of the New Model Army and with the organization and birth of the Levellers” (Hydra, p. 80). Their meetings in Bristol were said to be “filled with controversies, insomuch that every meeting almost was filled with disputes and debates [so] that they were in great confusion.” But in these meetings any brother or sister was free “to propose his doubt of, or their desire of understanding, any portion of scripture,” and members of the congregation would speak “one by one and then be silent” (Hydra, pp. 80–81).

Unrest among slaves and indentured servants in the New World was blamed on Fifth Monarchists, Muggletonians, Quakers and Ranters, all antinomians in the Hydra narrative. The Virginia legislature “banned the entry of Quakers into the colony, called for the imprisonment of those already there, and forbade their meetings and publications” (Hydra, pp. 135–138).

James Otis’s famous 1761 address in which he asserted “the rights of the Negroes” is said by the authors to have offered “an antinomian account” of the state of nature in which man was “subject to no law, but the law written on his heart” (Hydra, p. 224). Thomas Paine, whose father was a Quaker, “awakened an antinomian abolitionism from a previous age” (Hydra, p. 227). While these attributions of antinomianism to secular radicals are not particularly convincing to me, the long chapter on Robert Wedderburn is very much so. Child of an enslaved woman and a white doctor, Wedderburn believed he had ascended “from a legal state of mind, into a state of Gospel Liberty,” and had experienced deliverance “from the power or authority of the law, considering himself to be…under Grace” (Hydra, p. 322).

Let us assume that a tradition of religious radicalism helped to keep alive all manner of resistance to the world of emerging capitalism and slavery. Where does this leave us today?

Today

What Marcus and Peter describe reminds me very much of the South in the 1960s, when everything happened in African American churches, and sncc staffers, whatever their personal beliefs, functioned as preachers. However, this one experience apart, what is our situation today when religion seems to be a possession of the Right?

Spokespersons and the Rank and File

First, what is the relationship between the radical prophet and insurgent social movements?

What is celebrated in Hydra is certainly not the mere fact of being poor, or being oppressed. Nor is it simply a set of ideas. It has something to do with the spirit in which persons who were poor and oppressed acted, sang, and spoke in difficult circumstances. In what they did they embodied, at least for an historical moment, a better society.

Think of how Edward Thompson pursued so persistently the obscure Protestant sect known as Muggletonians, and the friend and family relationships that may have existed in the urban neighborhood in which Blake grew up. Surely Thompson was looking for a connection between Blake and social movements, so to speak a demographic platform from which Blake could be presumed to have spoken.

Think as well about the relationship between Karl Marx and other participants in the First International, and between Friedrich Engels and the German Social Democratic Party. In each case I think that the views of the Marxist spokesperson were only partially accepted by the organization for which he wrote position papers. (But one of the great and most moving facts of radical history is Marx’s defense of the Paris Commune even though its creators and martyrs by and large belonged to the anarchist faction that opposed him in the First International.)

I have lived with this problem for almost fifty years when I consider the relationship of John Sargent, Marty Glaberman, Stan Weir, Ed Mann and John Barbero to the rank-and-file labor movements that arose in the 1930s and have continued in some form to the present.

And here’s what I think, deriving my explanatory paradigm from men I have known personally and then asking to what extent that formulation also applies to persons I know only through written historical sources.

Sargent, Mann, and Barbero were repeatedly elected to local union office. They were also socialists with a small “s.” But I submit that they were not elected because of their socialism but because of their militancy, and indeed, that if confronted with their socialism most of those influenced by them would have rejected it. (See accounts in Lynd and Lynd, ed., Rank and File, and my Solidarity Unionism and Doing History from the Bottom Up.) Likewise Weir movingly describes the intimacy he and his fellow workers experienced when Stan laid aside the political program his Leftist sect had directed him to advocate, and what he called the “family at work” would go to one of their homes at the end of the night shift and share a meal.

I understand that for the men I have named a belief in socialism, and militant leadership on the shop floor, were twisted together into a single braided rope. I don’t contest that: I glory in it. But the same was not true for the men who worked with, elected, and followed them when Sargent (assisted by shop steward Nick Migas, also in Rank and File) was able to orchestrate wildcats because there was no contract with a no-strike clause, or when Ed Mann got up on a bench in the washroom and led the men out of the mill to protest Tony’s death.

It was the same way for Tom Paine. He was unable to understand why the Founding Fathers (with the partial exception of Jefferson) embraced him when he wrote the Crisis pamphlets on a drumhead as the Continental Army retreated across New Jersey, but ignored or condemned him when he was imprisoned in France for opposing the execution of the king or returned to the United States for a lonely old age. The author of Common Sense was celebrated. The author of The Rights of Man, Agrarian Justice, and The Age of Reason could not find readers in the new bourgeois republic.

To sum up in a sentence: We should beware of a tendency to ascribe to a movement that on occasion accepts a man or woman as a militant leader all of that leader’s radical thoughts and writings.

Faith and Facts

Marcus and Peter discovered radical passions in the lower depths of society that conventional historians had ignored.

My own historical research more often than not convinced me that a person or movement, assumed to have been motivated by ideology, in fact was prompted by economic interest. I concluded that the Northwest Ordinance was not a partial step toward abolition as has been assumed but a betrayal of the slave by opening the Southwest to plantation slavery. And it was not just a matter of the motivation of the rich. I also concluded that tenant farmers and artisans viewed as groups were interested in the completely understandable pursuit of economic survival, not in the prophetic ideas of a few spokespersons. And the same is true of steelworkers as I have known them since the early 1970s.

It can be misleading to connect militant dots and understand them as a radical pattern. There is no group of significant size in the United States at the present time permeated by a praiseworthy social idealism that has survived over time. Measured by social density and longevity, the Right has had a far more coherent and durable presence than the Left.

“Anarchism,” I believe, has a number of regrettable characteristics but is an indispensable element in any social movement because it preserves the concept and practice of exemplary action. Some things are better communicated when they are acted out than by any conceivable set of words.

“Marxism” demands that the phenomena of the moment be set against an institutional backdrop without which the morning’s news, the most recent strike, or the forthcoming election cannot be accurately assessed. However, not all Marxist analyses are equally valid. A National Liberation Front spokesman whom I met on the way to Hanoi in 1965 was a far more accurate forecaster (“we are going to win, professor”) than any Marxist analyst I have come across in the United States.

What is fundamentally at issue is what it means for radical historians to unearth ideologies that they admire but do not personally believe or do not find to be available in the societies in which they live. Antinomians rejected not only secular laws but also what they called the Moral Law, presumably including the Ten Commandments and Jewish ritual observances. But what about the mandates of Matthew 25: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the poor and the imprisoned. Catholics call these the Works of Mercy. Antinomians rejected Works as well as the Law, privileging naked faith.

I believe that the place to begin building community on the Left has something to do with family. Family is given to all of us by nature as a community within which life places us without special effort by ourselves. When we join more artificially-created entities we imagine them as partaking in the best aspects of the natural family. In the labor movement even stodgy bureaucrats address one another as “brother” and “sister.” sncc used to describe itself as “a band of brothers and sisters standing in a circle of love.”

Alice counters: How do we overcome feuds within families (e.g., Cain and Abel)? How do we overcome ethnicity—either you are a member of the clan or you are regarded as other (e.g., Greek or barbarian)?

Conclusion

I would be happy to pursue these matters with any of you on paper or in person, one on one or as part of a small group process.

December 27, 2015

Dear Brother Staughton (and all),

From Fellow Worker Noel (Ignatiev)

Thanks to Staughton for inviting me to take part in this “comradely endeavor.” I have always been better at exploring differences, even to the point of drawing lines (which can be useful), than I have been at seeking areas of agreement; out of respect for him I shall try to take part in the spirit I think he intends, so that even when pointing out differences I hope to do so in a way that sheds more light than heat on the subject. As prelude, it is difficult for me to imagine a world without Staughton, but, as Prince Hal reminded Falstaff, no longer able to number myself among the youth (tomorrow marks my seventy-fifth birthday), I must face reality; as Othello said, “No more of that.” (I hope you enjoy the Shakespeare references; some of Shakespeare’s characters are more real to me than people I pass daily in the street. In that connection, I recommend a book by Ashwin Desai, Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island, about the uses prisoners of varying persuasions, denied “political” materials, made of Shakespeare and other classics of European literature.)

I agree with Staughton that the popular front imposed a limitation on the leftist historians he names (and others); I would specify that this limitation—one might call it a blindspot—was manifest especially in regard to what used to be called the “Negro Question,” and made it difficult for those who shared it to see a pattern from the Constitution to suffrage (both universal white male and female) to the New Deal, in which many of what were hailed as progressive victories were achieved at the expense of black people, whose interests were routinely sacrificed in the name of popular unity. Jesse may remember an email exchange between us a few years back in which in response to his claim that supporters of the British tended to be from among the dominant classes I cited the example of the slaves (many of whom considered themselves Loyalists), and maintained that placing them at the center of the story would lead us to reassess the Revolution beyond acknowledging the limitations we all recognize. (Gerald Horne calls it The Counter-Revolution of 1776 and compares Washington to Ian Smith.) Is the world a better place because the Patriots defeated the Loyalists? Is the question beside the point?

In 1786 the rulers of Massachusetts hired a private army to put down Shays’ Rebellion; six years later those same rulers passed a law requiring every able-bodied “white” man to possess a weapon and serve in the militia. Tom Paine, the best of the revolutionary generation, appealed for relief to Jefferson, and was disappointed (surprised?) when it was not forthcoming. I remember (or misremember—if I am wrong I hope he will correct me) asking Peter if he had addressed Paine’s waffling on slavery and his replying that he mostly evaded it. Only Staughton, in his work on the Hudson River tenants, does not identify the Revolution with Progress, however limited and with whatever reservations, and treats working-class Loyalists with as much sympathy as he does Patriots. (As added exceptions I would note Horne and, curiously, Simon Schama, Rough Crossings. In this connection I call your attention to a novel by M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves, in which the central character, a slave, refers to “the slave-driving general and his rebel army.”)

Staughton asks, “What is the relationship between the radical prophet and insurgent social movements?” That is the key question. Whiteness no longer plays the same role it once did in cementing capitalist hegemony, and the categories of race, nation and even class are no longer fixed as they were during the period of the Petrograd/Detroit proletariat. In this regard we are back (or forward) to the eighteenth century, the period of Hydra. Nevertheless the task remains, to refract working-class activity into those aspects that point toward the possibility of a new society and those that reinforce existing social relations. Refract. I derive the notion from Capital, volume I, chapter 1, where Marx examines the two-fold character of the labor embodied in the commodity; the worker is at the same time a producer of use-values for a human community and a producer of commodities and seller of the commodity labor-power.

Staughton takes Peter and Marcus to task for exaggerating continuities and “inventing” a tradition where none exists. I have a different complaint. My complaint is that they do not take into account that both sides are grounded in capitalist social relations. I agree that Hydra is the best book yet produced on the class struggles of the period; I have used it for ten years as the main text in a class I teach. Its weaknesses are most evident in the chapter on the Revolution. Hydra recovers and celebrates the role of sailors, slaves and commoners in sparking the movement for separation from Britain. It also documents the actions of the slaves who ran away on their own or joined Dunmore. Yet in failing to examine the relation between these two classes of activity it leaves unanswered the question, how did the actions of sailors, slaves and commoners reproduce their own oppression and that of others.

I view the role of tradition differently from Staughton, and also from Peter and Marcus. In my view tradition ordinarily plays little role in shaping popular struggles. For example, I do not think that popular memory of the iww was important in shaping the struggles of the cio period. I do not think that the memory of Abolition played a large part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The masses learn from life, not books. The radical prophet learns from life and books. Nevertheless, the role of the revolutionary prophet is crucial. It works like this: the tradition lives in the memories of the revolutionary prophets, and guides them in their interventions in the mass movement. Thus the memory of the iww tradition of direct action shaped the Flint sitdown. Knowing the histories of Nat Turner, John Brown and the Underground Railroad guided James Foreman and others in drawing a line between direct action and the course of legalism and reformism. Once a new level of struggle is attained, it changes the world so that a return to the old is no longer possible.

At one time slavery was thought of as natural. Today, not a single person can be found who shares that view. Not even the most extreme of white supremacists, who wish to ship black people to Africa or exterminate them entirely, seeks to restore slavery. That may be obvious, but it is worth thinking about: the actions of millions during the Civil War period so transformed the world that what once seemed natural is now inconceivable. But those actions did not grow out of tradition; they arose out of necessity—either accept the domination of the slave system over the whole country or overthrow it entirely—and overturned centuries (millennia) of tradition.

Take a less grandiose example: Collective bargaining and features that arose out of it, including seniority, paid holidays, etc., are established as norms, even in places where unions do not exist. (Perhaps my generalization does not apply in all spheres and among all groups of workers, but on the whole I think it does.) In spite of the bumper stickers proclaiming “Unions, the people who brought you the weekend,” the acceptance is not due to millions of workers knowing the history of past struggles but because those struggles established a certain standard that cannot be overturned (even though it can be chipped away at). The same is true of the electoral system, religious tolerance, free public education, the rights of women and other things now widely taken for granted. All these pose a problem for prophets of revolution in that all of them, which arose out of popular struggles, have been transformed into obstacles. The prophets of revolution have to take a critical stance toward all of them, with a view toward transcending them. How to do that is, of course, open for discussion: for example, I think Staughton’s effort a few years ago to promote solidarity unionism was misguided in that it attempted to infuse revolutionary content into an identity that could not encompass it. For me the task is to transcend unionism, not revitalize it. I much prefer the notions of councils, or solidarity committees, or family, or some term no one has yet thought of, as expressions of what is needed for the next step. Is the approach I advocate vanguardism, which everyone here has rejected? I don’t think so, because the starting point is not something dreamed up by the Party but an attempt to refract traditions and present expressions in order to determine what is valid for today, and help to generalize them.

I recommend three books I read recently: the first is Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, by Kristin Ross. Two things struck me about it: first, for several years before the Commune erupted, the prophets of revolution (mainly gathered in the First International) devoted themselves to encouraging people to imagine what a new society would be like, organizing discussions that addressed issues like combining intellectual and manual training, the function of art, and relations between the sexes; a number of the ideas that emerged out of those discussions were implemented in the few weeks of the Commune’s existence, and became part of the heritage (tradition) of the working class in France and elsewhere; the second is Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All, by David Roediger. The Civil War and Reconstruction (taken as a single process) was, along with the Commune, perhaps the only revolution not disgraced by the actions of its supporters; its history is worth studying and Dave’s book is a useful contribution. The third is Karl Marx and the Future of the Human, by Cyril Smith. Smith (now deceased) was a Dunayevska follower; his book is an effort to bring out the contrast between Marx and the “Marxists.” He stresses that Marx was not primarily concerned with hatching schemes to reorganize society but trying to examine the conditions under which human beings could establish new relations among themselves, “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” He also separates Marx and “historical materialism,” which he says was a subsequent contribution of Engels, Plekhanov and Lenin (brought to its ineffable peak by Stalin), and documents that Marx was in continual dialogue with great idealist and even mystical thinkers of the past. If Staughton describes himself (jokingly) as the world’s only Quaker Marxist, I call myself an Anabaptist, which you can take as a joke if you like.

I have become increasingly interested in the First International. (Some of you may recall that about fifteen years ago I launched the “Committee for the First International.” It went nowhere.) The fi was open to all real tendencies that were not mainly concerned with recruiting to their sect. (As I understand it, Marx’s battles with Bakounin were not over anarchism per se but over Bakounin’s determination to rule the International or destroy it.) It was possible because at the time it was formed every workers’ organization was in some sense opposed to private property and favored a different society. That is obviously no longer the case today. Moreover, I would say that, notwithstanding his mistakes, Lenin’s drawing the line against organizations that supported their own bourgeoisie during the Imperialist War seems valid. (I read that Lenin invited the iww to join the Third International. He might have done better enrolling the International in the iww. Staughton, what is the title of that book you recommended on the iww?) I would not be opposed to meeting with Maoists and Trotskyists so long as they are doing real work, but I’ll be damned if I will have my skull battered by Avakian or the Spartacist League. It might be useful to study the First International and sncc together; both were born out of an upsurge, were formed to accomplish a specific task, neither had a “line,” both made great contributions while they lasted and left a legacy we can be proud of.

Well, as the boys on Cartalk say, it’s happened again. You’ve wasted another perfectly good hour, listening to me rant about historians I look up to. My defense is that I am motivated by the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad.

All,

The title requested by Noel is Eric Chester. The Wobblies in their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era (Praeger, 2014).

Brother S.

Noel Ignatiev1 left a conflicted antifascist legacy. As a member of the Sojourner Truth Organization (sto), Ignatiev made important contributions to understanding fascism, above all its autonomous political character and contradictory relationship with capitalist interests. His insights remain valuable today and have directly or indirectly influenced many antifascist activists and researchers, including myself. But in later decades, Ignatiev moved away from the view that fascists represent a serious threat that needs to be combated directly. In addition, several times he gave a platform to far-rightists or even endorsed them, actions that undermined antifascist work and bewildered and angered many of us who respected his commitment to critical thought and revolutionary politics. These changes of priority and instances of bad antifascist practice highlight the complex and changing nature of Ignatiev’s political work, but they offer some useful lessons, and they don’t negate the value of his theoretical contributions.

sto was active in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the us radical left was dominated by Marxist organizations, nearly all of which regarded fascism as essentially an extreme form of pro-capitalist politics. The Communist Party and the various Maoist groups upheld the Comintern’s 1933 definition of fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” This definition had served both the Comintern’s Third Period strategy of denouncing social democracy as “social fascism” (and attacking it more aggressively than real fascism), and also the Popular Front strategy of abandoning revolutionary politics in favor of defensive, antifascist alliances with social democrats and liberal capitalists. Trotskyist organizations, meanwhile, followed Leon Trotsky’s conception of fascism as a mass movement based mainly in the petty bourgeoisie, which exploited middle class resentments of big business but whose main purpose was to smash the workers’ organizations in the service of capitalism. Some leftists were also influenced by Black Panther George Jackson’s argument that fascism’s “most advanced form” already ruled the United States, operating through a combination of police repression, consumerism, and mass spectacle.2

Until the late 1970s, sto argued that fascism posed no real threat in the United States, because the system of white skin privileges gave capitalists an effective system of social control that made fascism unnecessary. As sto member Maryon Gray noted in a 1981 talk, this position “stood in contrast to that of most sections of the New Left who applied the term fascism to every instance of state repression.” But as the Ku Klux Klan and other hardline rightist forces began a resurgence, sto changed its position. In the words of sto member Ken Lawrence, “we failed to understand fully that the system of white supremacy, once firmly established by the bourgeoisie, develops a life of its own; it is not simply a complaisant tool of the ruling class.”3 Lawrence and other members of the organization made important contributions to this analytical shift, but—judging by the documentary record—Ignatiev’s role was key.

Ignatiev helped initiate sto’s theoretical reassessment of fascism with the 1978 essay “Fascism: Some Common Misconceptions,” which criticized the us left’s reliance on 1930s Comintern policy. Three years later, Ignatiev moved beyond critique to sketch the outlines of an overall analysis. He offered a set of “Draft Theses on Fascism in the United States” to sto’s April 1981 general membership meeting, and the organization adopted them with a few additions. The adopted theses were published in Urgent Tasks, the group’s theoretical journal, together with a 2,800-word “Comment on Theses” by Ignatiev. Taken together, these documents broke new ground in a number of areas.4

Challenging orthodoxy

One of Ignatiev’s most basic contributions to antifascist politics was to challenge received Marxist orthodoxy. In “Some Common Misconceptions,” pointing out that Communist parties in one country after another had failed to stop fascism’s rise in the 1930s, he described Comintern writers’ major works on fascism as “an official blueprint of failure.” And he tore apart the Comintern definition of fascism quoted above, arguing that “every element in the definition is either mistaken, inadequate or subject to serious questioning.” For example, he disputed point by point the Comintern’s claim that fascism represented the ruling class’s “most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist” wing. In Germany, he noted, fascism was actually resisted by the bourgeoisie’s most reactionary sector—“the traditionalists, the old officer corps, the Prussian nobility”—because the fascists sought (in brutal fashion) to modernize everything from production to warfare to social engineering. Nor were the Nazis chauvinistic (in the sense of promoting extreme nationalism), because their aim to establish a master Aryan race transcended nationalities and was, in fact, internationalist. Even imperialist didn’t fit, because Lenin’s (and thus the Comintern’s) concept of imperialism centered on the profitable export of capital, whereas fascism sought the opposite: importing capital through the systematic plunder of conquered countries. “If this was imperialism, it was a new stage and deserved to be recognized as such, something which the Comintern definition does not do.”

This kind of critique may not seem particularly noteworthy today, when us leftists who treat 1930s Comintern policy as received wisdom are fewer in number and widely ridiculed as “tankies,” and when many leftists have incorporated ideas about fascism from unorthodox Marxists such as Moishe Postone or non-Marxists such as Roger Griffin and Robert Paxton. But in 1978, Ignatiev’s iconoclastic approach challenged a lot of people’s assumptions. Like a lot of what sto did, his article called on revolutionaries to stop repeating what movement authorities told them and think for themselves. It’s a lesson worth remembering.

Fascism’s relative autonomy

The crux of Ignatiev’s anti-Comintern critique in “Some Common Misconceptions” was the issue of fascism’s relationship with the capitalist class. Against the orthodox Marxist assertion that fascism represented a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, Ignatiev argued that a key distinguishing feature of fascism is its “relative autonomy” relative to all classes. Focusing mainly on the German example as representing fascism in its most developed form, Ignatiev argued that although the fascists were forced to compromise with the bourgeoisie to take state power, they did not abandon their program but simply waited for a chance to implement it—which they got with the outbreak of war. While some wartime measures benefited capitalists, others “definitely ran counter to the bourgeoisie’s interests.”

For example, the diversion of trains for the transportation of Jews, at a time when German supply lines were dangerously strained, was not in the rational interests of the bourgeoisie. The execution of Polish and Jewish skilled workers, which was carried out on ideological grounds, did not serve the interests of the Krupps and Farbens, who hoped to use those workers for production. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of the contradiction between the fascist program and the rational needs of the bourgeoisie was Hitler’s plan, in the event of Germany’s defeat, to reduce the country to rubble, “to slam the door behind us, so that we shall not be forgotten for centuries.”

These are not the actions of a class which is motivated by the drive for profits; they are the actions of a party with a vision.

The idea that fascism clashed with capitalist interests was a sharp departure from Marxist orthodoxy, but it wasn’t completely new within the Marxist tradition. Ignatiev himself cited the work of the Hungarian philosopher Mihaly Vajda, whose 1976 book Fascism as a Mass Movement argued that while fascism was a product of capitalist society, it “cannot be regarded as a movement which is actually launched by the ruling class, and…it openly contradicts the interests of the ruling class in certain cases.” Ignatiev’s argument about fascism’s autonomy also echoes, and may have been influenced by, British historian Tim Mason’s 1966 essay “The Primacy of Politics” or German Communist August Thalheimer’s writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s, both of which argued that fascism protects the bourgeoisie’s economic power within the workplace but takes away its power to determine state policy.5

Ignatiev continued to emphasize this theme in the 1981 theses, declaring that while fascism has “intimate connections with the needs of the capitalist class,” it also “contains an anti-capitalist ‘revolutionary’ side that is not reducible to simple demagogy.” sto members were among the first us leftists to identify us fascists’ revolutionary side in concrete form. In a speech to the June 1982 National Anti-Klan Network conference, for example, Ken Lawrence emphasized the resurgent Klan movement’s promotion of William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, a novel that envisions a future Nazi armed struggle to overthrow the us government. As Lawrence argued, the resurgent Klan had shifted from backward-looking defense of the segregationist old order to a new fascist vision and strategy of genocidal revolution. The significance of this shift, which few leftists grasped at the time, was born out in 1983–84, when a new underground organization known as The Order started robbing armored cars and killing people in a bid to put The Turner Diaries into practice, and in 1995, when neonazi Timothy McVeigh and others blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people.6

Trans-capitalism

Ignatiev’s (and sto’s) third major contribution to understanding fascism was to raise the possibility that it might transform capitalism into some other form of class society. In the 1981 theses adopted by sto, Ignatiev argued that fascism “brings about important structural changes both within the ruling class and in the mode of exploitation,” but the extent of these changes, as he noted in the accompanying comment, was left “deliberately vague.” German Nazism had crushed its anti-capitalist wing (the Strasserites), but, Ignatiev argued, “such an outcome is not necessarily determined in advance.” He declared that “Fascism in power in the United States will be both more genocidal against people of color and more radical in its attacks on capital than anything seen so far,” and speculated whether a movement organized around the slogan “the dictatorship of the white proletariat” might at some point share power, or even take power on its own.

Paralleling this question of political power was the economic question, “is fascism capitalism or does it represent a new form of class society based on the appropriation of a surplus product through some mechanism other than the value form?” Here Ignatiev drew on a work that several sto members had cited in their writings about fascism: German Marxist Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism, which was published in English in 1978.7 Following Sohn-Rethel, Ignatiev saw in Nazi Germany the incomplete realization of a shift from a system of exploitation based on market relations and wage labor to one based on centralized state control and direct force. If fully realized, Ignatiev asked, would such as a society still “operate according to the laws of capitalism, in particular the law of value and the law of the tendency of the falling rate of profit,” or would it, as Sohn-Rethel argued, represent a new “trans-capitalist” system? Ignatiev noted further that “the whole question of trans-capitalist elements comes up again in attempting an analysis of Soviet society. Some of the fascists themselves were and are aware of the parallels between the two.”

Two decades later, former sto member Don Hamerquist explored Sohn-Rethel’s idea of fascist trans-capitalism further in his essay “Fascism & Antifascism.” Under the Nazis’ genocidal policy of working whole populations to death, not just labor power but workers themselves were “consumed in the process of production just like raw materials and fixed capital,” thereby obliterating “the distinctively capitalist difference between labor and other factors of production.” Although “normal” capitalist development involves genocide “against pre-capitalist populations and against the social formations that obstruct the creation of a modern working class,” the Nazis brought colonial-style mass killing into industrial Europe, resulting in “the genocidal obliteration of already developed sections of the European working classes.”8

I’ve argued elsewhere that it’s an open question whether these dynamics could foreshadow fascists establishing a genuinely new system of economic exploitation.9 The point here is that the possibility can’t just be dismissed, and Ignatiev was one of the few Marxists willing to raise it.

Antifascist strategy

Ignatiev’s fourth major contribution was to help outline a radical antifascist strategy based on recognition of fascism’s contradictory relationship with capitalism. The 1981 theses called for forging a “left pole” within a broader united front, which would

1. emphasize both the fascist movement’s autonomous character and its “organic connection [with] ‘ordinary’ bourgeois rule,”
2. defend parliamentary institutions and labor unions against fascist attacks while posing a revolutionary alternative to them, and
3. be able to fight the fascists militarily.

These points were both informed by and offered broad direction to sto members who were by then participating in various anti-Klan coalitions and initiatives.

In his “Comment on Theses,” Ignatiev elaborated that antifascists need to “bear in mind the relation between fascism and official policy. At times the two are complementary, at other times contradictory.” Thus struggle was needed on two distinct fronts: “sto considers it necessary to oppose both fascism and official government policy, and to do so in such a way that weakening one does not thereby result in strengthening the other. We question whether it is possible to accomplish the end by directing the same tactics against both enemies, or by attempting to wage the struggle against both through the same organizational framework.” These words offered—and still offer—a far more useful framework for antifascist action than either liberal calls to “defend democracy” or the leftist cliché that “the cops and the Klan go hand in hand.”

In all of these ways—a willingness to go beyond old assumptions, exploration of fascism’s complex and contradictory relationship with capitalist interests, and recognition that fighting fascism and fighting the capitalist state are interconnected but distinct arenas of struggle—Ignatiev played a pioneering role in the us antifascist movement. Directly or indirectly, his ideas have influenced a modest but significant subset of antifascist activists and researchers. These included, for example, activists in the Anti-Racist Action (ara) network, whose discussions helped bring about the 2002 book Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement. That book centers on an essay by former sto member Don Hamerquist and a reply by independent Marxist J. Sakai, both of which place the insights outlined above at the heart of their analysis. Confronting Fascism, in turn, led to the Three Way Fight project and blog, based on the concept that liberatory movements must contend not only with the established capitalist order but also far-right oppositional forces of insurgent or even revolutionary fascism.10 Ignatiev’s ideas about fascism have also influenced a number of organizations that drew inspiration or former members from sto, such as Bring the Ruckus, the Black Orchid Collective, and Unity and Struggle, among others. To varying degrees, the influence of these ideas can also be seen in other radical antifascist sectors, such as Shane Burley’s book Fascism Today and some of the writings published by CrimethInc. and It’s Going Down.11

Antisemitism debate

In the documents prepared for the 1981 sto general meeting, Lawrence noted that Ignatiev’s draft theses failed to address the problem of antisemitism. This was corrected with the addition of Thesis 7, which argued that “virulent anti-Jewish policies, sometimes masquerading as anti-Zionism,” played an important unifying role in the new fascist movement and were “accompanied by a wave of anti-Semitic terror unequaled in recent years.” The thesis declared that “the anti-fascist movement will need to expose and vigorously fight the new wave of anti-Semitism,” and specified two major forms of anti-Jewish propaganda to be combated: “denial of the Nazi Holocaust” and “a bogus expression of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people.”12 This thesis on antisemitism was important, in part, because it highlighted fascists’ tendency to present some of their views in progressive-sounding terms—terms that could mislead leftists and disrupt or distort liberatory social movements. Over the intervening three decades, fascists have made repeated efforts to pitch their version of oppositional politics to people on the left, and antisemitic conspiracy theories rooted in far-right ideology have repeatedly found their way into leftist and liberal circles.13

Ignatiev’s “Comment on Theses” bracketed Thesis 7 in a way that proved controversial within sto: “To the extent that fascism establishes its independence from the bourgeoisie as a whole, to that extent it is likely that anti-Semitism will diminish in importance within the fascist program, although since it has already developed a life of its own, it may well continue as an ingredient of fascist ideology.” In an exchange of letters published in the next issue of Urgent Tasks, another sto member countered that this prognosis underestimated antisemitism’s centrality and staying power within the us fascist movement, and warned that “although there is not yet a mass anti-Semitic movement in the United States, there is a large potential for one.” Ignatiev’s reply was dismissive, and the dispute contributed to a split within sto in which the group’s whole Kansas City branch resigned.14

[Correction: three former STO members have informed me that only some of the Kansas City members resigned, and the resignations resulted from a disagreement over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not the question of antisemitism within the U.S. fascist movement.]

In retrospect, it’s clear that Ignatiev’s prediction was wrong that us fascism would become less antisemitic as it cemented its autonomy from capitalist influence. Forty years later, us fascists remain deeply at odds with the capitalist ruling class, and their antisemitism remains just as strong. Thanks largely to fascist propaganda efforts, the mainstream taboo against overt anti-Jewish bigotry has significantly eroded in recent years. Anti-Jewish scapegoating and violence has intensified and, with the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October 2018, Jews became a target of mass murder for the first time in us history. Ignatiev can hardly be faulted for failing to predict these developments, but his tendency to underestimate antisemitism’s importance would show up repeatedly in later years, as discussed below.

“Caricatures of reality”

Ignatiev left sto in 1983 and moved on to other political projects, such as the journal Race Traitor, which he cofounded and co-edited with John Garvey from 1993 to 2005, and the Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, which was active through most of the 1990s. In his post-sto work, Ignatiev rarely treated fascist politics as a major focus, and by the mid-1990s it appears he had abandoned sto’s position that the organized far right represented a significant threat distinct from the established system of social control. An editorial in the Spring 1994 Race Traitor declared that “Racist and far-right groups in the main represent caricatures of reality in this race-defined society; at most they are efforts by a few to push the race line farther than what is currently considered proper.”15 Ignatiev took this argument a step further in an article for the Love & Rage newspaper’s October/November 1994 issue:

The fascists are the vanguard of the white race; however, the big problem right now is not the white vanguard, but the white mainstream. Any anti-fascist struggle that does not confront the state reinforces the institutions that provide the seedbed for fascism. Moreover, every time the fascists are able to depict their opponents as defenders of the existing system, or mere reformers, they gain support among those whites who believe that nothing less than a total change is worth fighting for. An anti-fascist counter-rally where people gather to hear speeches, chant slogans, and shake their fists in rage is a display of impotence, and the more people who attend, the more they reveal their futility.

Fascism and white supremacy will only be defeated by a movement aimed at building a new world.16

This position contrasts dramatically with Ignatiev’s earlier view. In 1982, Ignatiev had written that “sto considers it necessary to oppose both fascism and official government policy, and to do so in such a way that weakening one does not thereby result in strengthening the other.” In 1994 he continued to uphold one side of that formulation—opposing fascism must not strengthen the state—but was silent about its obverse—opposing the state must not strengthen the fascist movement. Now, instead of a two-pronged strategy, he regarded the struggle against far-right forces as firmly subordinate and secondary.

Ignatiev’s change of strategy might make sense if the fascist movement had collapsed between 1982 and 1994, but that was not the case. In the early and mid 1990s, neonazi and Klan forces were again on the upsurge—holding marches, organizing electoral campaigns, and forming a major faction within the rapidly growing new militia movement—a dynamic that culminated in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. This upsurge was countered by newly mobilized anti-fascist forces ranging from liberal and pacifist groups to the militant and largely anarchist-influenced Anti-Racist Action network. Yet Ignatiev asserted all groups that focused on countering the white-supremacist right were pursuing an “erroneous strategy” and “seriously misreading the roots of the race problem.”17 (This was very much a minority position within Love & Rage, which had a significant presence within ara.)

Ignatiev’s new position kept some important elements from before: a recognition that fascist politics grew out of the existing social order and could not be destroyed without overturning that order, and that reformist politics was dangerous, in part, because it allowed fascists to present themselves as the only real oppositional force. But the conception was too narrow in its conception of how racial oppression operates, and too mechanical in its conception of how political movements develop. In calling far-right groups “caricatures of reality,” Ignatiev ignored the concrete, immediate threat of harassment and violence they often pose to oppressed communities. And in describing the relationship between established institutions and fascists as one-directional, as a seedbed and its offshoots, he ignored the dynamic interplay between the two. Fascist forces don’t just grow out of the existing order; in pulling against it they also help to shape it. us fascists in the 1970s, for example, helped pioneer demands to end “reverse discrimination” and to crack down on “illegal immigrants” crossing from Mexico, both of which were then taken up more widely by system-loyal rightists, and later influenced official policy.

Conversely, in dismissing Anti-Racist Action for pursuing an “erroneous strategy,” Ignatiev ignored ara’s reality as a living, evolving movement of predominantly young people responding to a concrete threat. ara didn’t confront white supremacy or capitalism as a whole, but it was militantly anti-authoritarian, refused to rely on the courts or the police, and included significant tendencies actively pushing for a more systemic radical analysis. Ignatiev’s refusal to acknowledge ara’s potential contrasted with his starry-eyed celebration of the militia movement, which a 1996 Race Traitor editorial called “a rebellion against the massive, faceless, soul-destroying system that is sucking the life out of ordinary people in this country and around the world.”18

Dialogue with a Nazi

But Ignatiev didn’t just devalue antifascist activism. There were several instances over the following decades when he interacted with far rightists in ways that were at cross purposes with the antifascist principles that sto had put forward. In 1996, Race Traitor published a lengthy correspondence between Ignatiev and “Arthur Pendragon,” a self-described member of the National Socialist White People’s Party. The dialogue, which Pendragon initiated after reading an interview with Ignatiev in Utne Reader, centered on the meaning and significance of race and race treason. The published exchange was highly controversial: some readers praised it as “brilliant” or as a bold confrontation with “white supremacy at its core,” while others found it deeply offensive. Ted Allen, Ignatiev’s longtime comrade and author of the pioneering The Invention of the White Race, resigned as contributing editor of the journal in protest.19

I don’t think it was inherently wrong for Ignatiev to correspond with a Nazi (whose responses, he wrote, challenged him to formulate some of his ideas more precisely), but publishing the exchange was another matter. Ignatiev explained that the aim was to show readers “that national socialism is oppositional, even revolutionary, and that it possesses a comprehensive world view and morality that its opponents had better take seriously.”20 This has actually been one of my top reasons for studying and writing about far rightists myself, because we need to understand our enemies to combat them effectively. But publishing the dialogue with Pendragon was a bad way to make the point, because it had real costs that Ignatiev ignored. At the same time, the incident challenges antifascists to explain what such costs are, rather than just declare “no platform for fascists” reflexively.

In publishing the exchange, which was conducted in Ignatiev’s words “with mutual respect,” Race Traitor provided a committed, hardcore fascist a public statement of legitimacy. It also gave a public platform for several thousand words of Nazi propaganda, above all including extensive and virulent antisemitism. Pendragon declared, among other lies, that Jews constitute a distinct race with an innate hatred of whites and drive to dominate all other peoples; that Jews hold power in the United States and use materialism, tv, usury, porn, and alcohol to keep non-Jews under control; that white women are being degraded by “the semitic slime coming from Hollywood”; that Jews reaped most of the profits from slavery; that Jews pretend to advocate equality to mask their drive for dominance; that the reason black people complain about racism is that Jews pay them; that Jews engineered the Russian Revolution and then carried out racist slaughter of Russians; that the horrors of World War II were the Jews’ fault; and much more.

Ignatiev left most of these falsehoods unrefuted, a choice that is distressing for those of us who experience an extended stream of Nazi propaganda as a direct attack. He did initially challenge Pendragon’s denial of the Nazi genocide but then conceded, strangely, that “there seems no point in arguing over what actually happened.” In his editorial reply to critics, Ignatiev scoffed at the idea that Race Traitor readers might be “led astray” by Pendragon’s claims, but it’s not clear why. Even if we assume that all of the journal’s readers were committed Marxists and race abolitionists, which is unlikely, there is a long history of leftists moving to the far right, from Benito Mussolini to Lyndon LaRouche (and hundreds of his followers).

Ignatiev was more concerned to refute Pendragon’s claim that his views represented Jewish interests, and to make clear that, although of Jewish descent, he did not consider himself a Jew. More disturbingly, he declared “I hate the propensity of American Jews to whine about the past sufferings of the Jews (which they mostly get wrong and in any case did not experience personally) while enjoying all the privileges of membership in the white race.” As a direct reply to an avowed Nazi, this statement falls painfully short of sto’s recognition that antifascists must “expose and vigorously fight the new wave of anti-Semitism.”

Supporting antisemitic writers

Another type of bad antifascist practice that Ignatiev engaged in was to support anti-Zionist writers who scapegoated and demonized Jews. As sto recognized in 1981, us fascists often frame their antisemitism as opposition to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and use anti-Zionism to spread elements of their ideology to a broader audience. This means that delineating liberatory anti-Zionism from Jew-hatred is a key point of defense for combating fascism.

Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon are both writers who have long combined anti-Zionism with antisemitic propaganda and lies. Both have repeated poisonous anti-Jewish claims: for example, that Jews dominate us society, that Judaism teaches Jews to commit evil acts, and that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which claims that a conspiracy of Jewish leaders has for generations been working to establish a world dictatorship through financial manipulation, war, revolution, and undermining Christian civilization) is true in substance whether or not it is a forgery. Both writers have been denounced and repudiated by many left-wing anti-Zionists and Palestinians as a result. As far as I know, neither Shamir nor Atzmon is a fascist by ideology or affiliation, but Shamir, at least, has repeatedly cozied up to fascists: he borrowed the term “zog” (Zionist Occupation Government) from neonazis to describe Jews’ supposed political dominance, claimed that all antifascist organizations were funded by Israeli intelligence, and urged Palestinians and their allies to work with the National Alliance, the neonazi outfit headed by Turner Diaries author William Pierce.21

Ignatiev publicly supported both Shamir and Atzmon, but in different ways. In 2005, at Ignatiev’s urging, Race Traitor published an article by Shamir titled “Russians in the Holy Land” as part of a special issue on Palestine. The article itself was inoffensive; it described the contortions that the state of Israel made to accommodate 1.2 million Russian immigrants, many of whom are not Jewish, and calls for “a non-racist, democratic state, in which ‘Jewishness’ has no legal value…” Thus publishing the article, unlike Ignatiev’s dialogue with Arthur Pendragon, did not put thousands of words of antisemitic propaganda in the pages of Race Traitor. Instead, it lent Race Traitor’s imprimatur of legitimacy to Shamir, and thus misled readers interested in abolishing systems of racial oppression about the character of Shamir’s politics. Ignatiev’s lengthy introduction to the special issue didn’t caution people about Shamir’s other writings or mention any of the criticisms of him from leftist anti-Zionists. And this time there were no angry letters in the next issue, because the issue on Palestine proved to be the last one Race Traitor published.22

Ignatiev’s support for Atzmon went further. In 2012, as Atzmon prepared for a North American book tour, I helped organize a campaign urging leftist organizations to disavow Atzmon and refuse him a platform to promote his work. The purpose of the campaign was to draw a sharp delineation between anti-Zionism founded on liberatory politics and anti-Zionism founded on antisemitic scapegoating. A statement we circulated to this effect was signed by over 130 leftists in multiple countries, and a separate statement by twenty-three Palestinian activists denounced Atzmon in similar terms.23

Ignatiev spoke out against this campaign. Although he eventually broke with Atzmon for endorsing neo-Confederate statements and coded white supremacism, he had no problem with his antisemitism. Paraphrasing Atzmon, Ignatiev declared his agreement that “the Zionist settler-colonial state is an outgrowth of ‘Jewish ideology’ going back to antiquity,” and that “European Jews…by their actions bore some responsibility for the hostility of their neighbors, which the Nazis were able to mobilize as a political force.” He was silent about most of Atzmon’s other stated beliefs about Jews. Even after breaking with Atzmon, Ignatiev published statements by four Israeli and Palestinian activists defending Atzmon and dismissing the antisemitism accusations against him as “cynical.”24 With these actions, Ignatiev trivialized concerns about antisemitism and, more specifically, undermined an international organized effort to combat anti-Jewish bigotry within the anti-Zionist movement—an effort that was squarely in the tradition of sto’s 1981 “Theses on Fascism.”

Concluding thoughts

I first read Noel Ignatiev’s “Fascism: Some Common Misconceptions,” sto’s “Theses on Fascism,” and Ignatiev’s accompanying “Comment” about thirty years ago. Rereading them now, I’m struck by how foundational they are for my own work on fascism—how many of their ideas I absorbed without being fully aware of it. These writings are relatively short and offer only the beginnings of an analysis, but they are a vastly better starting point for understanding fascism than many book-length works that are better known and celebrated among leftists.

This makes what I consider to be Ignatiev’s later missteps with regard to antifascism particularly distressing. He abandoned part of sto’s groundbreaking analysis, failed to recognize the dangers of giving a public platform to fascists and their allies, and failed to recognize the strategic importance of identifying and combating antisemitism. Yet the theoretical insights that preceded these missteps remain useful and important.

In “Black Worker, White Worker,” which was probably his best-known piece of writing before How the Irish Became White, Ignatiev described the “civil war” in the mind of white workers, the tension and contradiction between class solidarity and defense of white-skin privilege.25 This was one example of sto’s larger insight that the contradictions of capitalism play out not only in struggle between classes, but also within the working class and even individual workers.

It’s tempting to try to explain Ignatiev’s mixed legacy with regard to antifascism as an example of such contradictory consciousness. But my aim here has been to assess and analyze his actions and public statements, so that we can learn from them and try to apply those lessons in our own work. I’ll leave assessments of his consciousness and motivations to those who knew him better. Whatever the reasons behind his actions, it’s helpful to remember the value that Noel Ignatiev placed on critical thinking, including a willingness to question those whose contributions we respect.

Thanks to Cloee Cooper, John Garvey, Michael Staudenmaier, and Xtn for helpful discussions and/or comments and criticisms on an earlier draft of this article.

Matthew Lyons is the principal blogger at threewayfight.blogspot.com, an insurgent blog on the struggle against the state and fascism.

1. Ignatiev’s original name was Noel Ignatin, and he changed it after leaving sto. For the sake of simplicity I refer to him here as Noel Ignatiev throughout.↩︎
2. See Extract from 13th Enlarged Executive of the Communist International (ecci) Plenum (held in December 1933) on “Fascism, the War Danger, and the Tasks of the Communist Parties,” reprinted in International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, edited by Roger Griffin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 59; Leon Trotsky, “What is National Socialism?” 1933, published 1943; reprinted in The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology, edited by Isaac Deutscher (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1964), 181; George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (New York: Random House, 1972).↩︎
3. Michael Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012), 288–92; Maryon Gray, “Current Debates Within sto,” Speech given in the Twin Cities, December 12, 1981, Urgent Tasks, no. 13 (Spring 1982); Ken Lawrence, “Critique of the Draft Theses,” in Sojourner Truth Organization Internal Discussion Bulletin [hereafter “IDB”], April 1981. A version of Lawrence’s statement was incorporated into the final “Theses on Fascism” adopted by sto.↩︎
4. Noel Ignatin, “Fascism: Some Common Misconceptions,” Urgent Tasks, no. 4 (Summer 1978); Ignatin, “Draft Theses on Fascism in the United States,” IDB, April 1981; Sojourner Truth Organization, “Theses on Fascism” and Ignatin, “Comment on Theses,” Urgent Tasks, no. 13 (Spring 1982); see also Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution, 291.↩︎
5. Mihaly Vajda, Fascism as a Mass Movement (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976); August Thalheimer, “On Fascism” (1928) and “So-called Social-fascism” (1929), reprinted in Marxists in the Face of Fascism: Writings by Marxists on Fascism from the Interwar Period, edited by David Beetham (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984); Timothy W. Mason, “The Primacy of Politics—Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany,” in The Nature of Fascism: Proceedings of a conference held by the Reading University Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 165–95.↩︎
6. Ken Lawrence, “The Ku Klux Klan and Fascism,” Urgent Tasks, no. 14 (Fall/Winter 1982).↩︎
7. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism (London: CSE Books, 1978).↩︎
8. Don Hamerquist, “Fascism & Anti-Fascism,” in Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2017 [originally published 2002]).↩︎
9. Matthew N. Lyons, “Two Ways of Looking at Fascism,” in Insurgent Supremacists: The US Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (Oakland, PM Press, 2017).↩︎
10. Don Hamerquist, et al., Confronting Fascism; Three Way Fight.↩︎
11. See for example “Debates on Fascism,” Bring the Ruckus, 10 October 2008; mamos206, “Anti-Repression, Anti-Fascist Strategizing Suggestions,” Black Orchid Collective, 16 October 2012; “Morbid Symptoms: The Rise of Trump,” Unity and Solidarity, 15 November 2016; Shane Burley, Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2017); “‘Fighting in a Way That Makes Us Stronger’: CrimethInc. on the Current Wave of Uprisings” (podcast), It’s Going Down, 27 December 2019.↩︎
12. Lawrence, “Critique of the Draft Theses,” IDB, April 1981; sto, “Theses on Fascism.”↩︎
13. Chip Berlet, “Right Woos Left,” Political Research Associates, 27 February 1999; Spencer Sunshine, “The Right Hand of Occupy Wall Street: From Libertarians to Nazis, the Fact and Fiction of Right-Wing Involvement,” The Public Eye, Winter 2014; “An Investigation into Red-Brown Alliances: Third Positionism, Russia, Ukraine, Syria, and the Western Left,” Ravings of a Radical Vagabond, 15 January 2018.↩︎
14. [An sto member] and Noel Ignatin, “Correspondence on Fascism and Anti-Fascism,” Urgent Tasks, no. 14 (Fall/Winter 1982); see also Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution, 295–96.↩︎
15. “Anti-Fascism, ‘Anti-Racism,’ and Abolition” (editorial), Race Traitor, no. 3 (Spring 1994).↩︎
16. Noel Ignatiev, “To Advance the Class Struggle, Abolish the White Race,” Love and Rage, October/November 1994.↩︎
17. “Anti-Fascism, ‘Anti-Racism,’ and Abolition.”↩︎
18. “Aux Armes! Formez vos Bataillons!” (editorial), Race Traitor, no 5 (Winter 1996); on ara see Rory McGowan, “Claim No Easy Victories: An Analysis of Anti-Racist Action and its Contributions to the Building of a Radical Anti-Racist Movement,” The Northeastern Anarchist, 22 July 2003.↩︎
19. Noel Ignatiev and “Arthur Pendragon,” “Exchange with a National Socialist,” Race Traitor, no. 5 (Winter 1996); Ted Allen, et al., “Letters,” Race Traitor, no. 6 (Summer 1996).↩︎
20. “And Now the Editors Reply,” Race Traitor, no. 6.↩︎
21. On Israel Shamir see for example the following articles by him: “The Marxists and the Lobby,” Unz Review, 20 November 2003; “Bloodcurdling Libel (A Summer Story),” The Writings of Israel Shamir, undated; “Christmas Greetings to Hellenes,” Unz Review, 5 January 2004; “The Shadow of Zog (Exegesis of Besson),” Unz Review, 24 April 2003; and “Rock of Dissent,” The Writings of Israel Shamir, [2002]. See also Roland Rance, “Israel Shamir: Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” Socialist Viewpoint, vol. 4, no. 8 (September 2004); and Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish, “Serious Concerns About Israel Shamir,” www.abunimah.org, 16 April 2001. On Gilad Atzmon, see the following articles by him: “Swindler’s List,” Gilad Atzmon (website), 3 April 2008; “The Herem Law in the context of Jewish Past and Present,” Gilad Atzmon, 16 July 2011; “Never Again,” PeacePalestine, 17 July 2006; “Credit Crunch or rather Zio Punch?” Gilad Atzmon, 16 November 2009; and “Dreyfus, The Protocols and Goldstone” Dissident Voice, 13 February 2010. See also Shabana Syed, “Time for world to confront Israel: Gilad Atzmon,” New Age Islam, 19 June 2010.↩︎
22. Noel Ignatiev, “Introduction,” and Israel Shamir, “Russians in the Holy Land,” Race Traitor, no. 16 (Winter 2005).↩︎
23. “Not Quite ‘Ordinary Human Beings’—Anti-imperialism and the anti-humanist rhetoric of Gilad Atzmon,” Three Way Fight, March 2012; “Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon,” us Palestinian Community Network, 13 March 2012.↩︎
24. Noel Ignatiev, “Exchange with Gilad Atzmon,” Noel Ignatiev’s Blog, circa March 2012; and Ignatiev, “More on the Atzmon Controversy,” Noel Ignatiev’s Blog, circa March 2012.↩︎
25. Noel Ignatin, “Black Worker, White Worker,” Speech, 1972.↩︎

In 1982—in the wake of the Irish Hunger Strikes—I traveled with a friend down the Nile from Alexandria to Kampala. Somewhere in the Ugandan highlands near Gulu the train stopped at a platform where we found an old railway toilet which bore a weathered but still officious plaque reserving use to British and Irish subjects. I didn’t have a particularly sophisticated analysis of race at the time—beyond knowing that racism was “wrong’—but this seemed incongruous even then. More than anything it seemed bizarre that anyone would care about the specific right of Irish people to use this toilet—some 4,000 miles up the Nile Valley and perhaps 10,000 miles away from Ireland. To my knowledge there was almost no Irish connection with the colony and yet here—apparently in the middle of nowhere—Irish racial privilege mattered to someone. With hindsight I assume that the toilet was erected sometime after 1922—when Uganda was still a colony but southern Ireland had become a “Free State” but remained a “white dominion” of the British Empire and before the state left the Empire. Somebody, somewhere in the colonial regime had decided that this new status was worthy of recognition on the side of a toilet that was forbidden to all Ugandans.

The point of all this is that I had for the first time been forced to confront the interface between Irishness and whiteness. It was sometime later that I found this properly explained and theorised in Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish became White. It is also not immaterial that my initiation had happened some distance from Ireland. Here we might paraphrase Kipling—someone from the other side of the interface of race and empire—to ask, what do they know of Ireland who only Ireland know? It is certainly true that any assessment of race in Ireland—north or south—is incomplete without reference to Ignatiev’s definitive exploration of the synergy between whiteness and Irishness that developed in the United Statesa. His historical study of immigration from Ireland reminded us that the Irish were not initially accepted as white by the ascendant English American population. Rather, it was through their violence against free blacks and support for slavery that the Irish gained acceptance as white. Whiteness was to be understood as access to white privilege—in particular, access to housing, education and employment. Whiteness was also inseparable from political power in a polity that had been formally framed as a “White Republic.”

Noel’s work was ground-breaking—it helps unpack the interface of Irishness and race anywhere. More specifically, it begs the question, how did the Irish outside of America become white? Did they simply absorb a new racial consciousness from emigrant letters? Of course, some of this kind of diffusion did occur. People addressing racism in Ireland often drew on Noel’s work to signal how this racialisation of the Irish in the United States was “reimported” back to Ireland. It was clear that some of the racialization of Irishness in Ireland was a direct consequence of the American Irish experience—what happened in New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Chicago didn’t stay there. But this wasn’t the whole story. Thus, Noel’s work generated a whole series of further problematics: Did the rest of the Irish diaspora become white? Did the Irish become white in Ireland? And what about those Irish who were palpably not white—despite the hegemony of the construction—what was to be made of their Irishness?

In this vein, this short essay reflects on Noel’s work on whiteness and Irishness in the United States to unpack and deconstruct the assumed identity of whiteness and Irishness elsewhere. We do not have space here to detail this in the precise and scholarly way that Noel did in his classic text but we can begin that analysis by signaling a couple of “bleaching” events. We can suggest three key stages in this process. First, alongside the process detailed by Noel in the United States, the Irish came to assume a specific relationship with whiteness in the context of colonialism. In particular, the us experience provided a template for Irishness across the “white dominions” of the British Empire. Outside of the United States, Irishness was recruited to whiteness by empire—at a crucial stage in the transition between colonisation and decolonisation. The algorithm of race set in place by empire was to be maintained in the post-colonial, post-wwii settlement. Here Irishness would make a significant contribution to the evolution of “white dominion”—as well as the rest of Empire—as politicians, soldiers and administrators.

Second, the defeated anti-imperialist struggle of the 1916–23 period resulted in the failure to establish an Irish Republic independent of the British state and empire. The Republic which had been declared in 1916 and subsequently endorsed by the Irish electorate in 1918, was expressly anti-imperialist and anti-monarchist in character. But a combination of imperial repression and the fracturing of anti-imperialist political and military forces meant that the revolution remained unfinished. Instead, a negotiated compromise saw the partition of Ireland and the emergence of the “Irish Free State.” While “Northern Ireland” remained locked inside the double bind of union and empire, institutions which both embedded a profound connection to whiteness, the “Free State” was hardly an antithetical counter. As an imperial rather than anti-imperial construction, the free state became expressly constructed as another white dominion of the British Empire—alongside Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa. It bears emphasis that these dominions were never “democratically white”—they included South Africa which had a very clear Black majority. Rather, they anticipated William F. Buckley’s 1957 notion that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” In other words, they were spaces in which colonial relations could be reconstituted around an “independence” premised on white privilege rather than democracy. In this regard, of course, they bore a marked similarity to the racial algorithms of Ignatiev’s “White Republic.” With this late imperial finesse—and with little subjective commitment toward whiteness—even the “free” part of Ireland had been forced to become white.

Third, in 1973, both parts of Ireland joined the European Community, subsequently the European Union. (The south joined as an independent country, the north as part of the uk.) From this point onwards any prospect of post-colonial non-alignment faded—now, the whole of the island would be directly tied to European notions of whiteness. As the eu integrated and tightened into a racially-coded “Fortress Europe,” Ireland was dragged with it. Thus, the “Dublin Convention” in 1990 provided an Irish metonym for the whole process of eu anti-refugee and anti-immigrant policy. (This convention was a key building block of “Fortress Europe” designed to prevent refugees from making multiple asylum applications or targeting more “friendly/lenient countries.”) This reality became much starker when the citizenship referendum in 2004 created a new context for whiteness in Ireland. As the 26 counties experienced multi-ethnic immigration for the first time in the context of “Celtic Tiger” economic growth, a moral panic developed around a tiny number of Irish citizen children with migrant and refugee parents. The debate focused on children of colour born in the Six Counties of “Northern Ireland” who acquired Irish citizenship on that basis. This was constructed as an “abuse” of Irish and eu citizenship since it was suggested that these children did not have “sufficient connection” to Irishness to qualify for citizenship. In consequence, the referendum profoundly undermined the Good Friday Agreement since it removed rights to citizenship guaranteed by the peace agreement. The change meant that people born in the island of Ireland after the constitutional amendment took effect would not have a constitutional right to be Irish citizens, unless, at the time of their birth, one of their parents was an Irish citizen or was entitled to be an Irish citizen. This moment also confirmed that Irish citizenship is still not controlled by the Irish state but rather “co-managed” with the uk. Since the British State continues to control access to and residence in the six counties, it—rather than the Irish state—defines who might or might not be “entitled to be an Irish citizen” north of the border.

The innate racism of this position was sharply exposed when the British decision to leave the eu in 2016 created a further dynamic. In this context the ambiguous relationship between Britain and Ireland saw a veritable stampede of uk subjects keen to apply for Irish passports—both from the north of Ireland and from the rest of the uk. (It bears emphasis that any of them could have done this at any time.) It was difficult not to see this as an “abuse” of Irish and eu citizenship since there was no suggestion of potential statelessness for any of these applicants—rather they were characterised by people wishing to avoid passport queues in the event of a uk Brexit. Again, this dynamic was profoundly colour coded. The moral panic over the tiny number of Irish migrant children before 2004—all children of colour—has not been replicated in the context of this “flood” of British nationals, since 2016. But then this growing number of “new” Irish—nearly one million in 2019 alone—is overwhelmingly “white.”

So, in 2020 there is little contesting the thesis—after Ignatiev—that the Irish have become white in Ireland. For example, in the census in both polities on the island we find ethnicity almost completely constructed in terms of “whiteness” and “non-whiteness”—colour-coding is substituted for any more informed or complex consideration of the reality of contemporary ethnicity. Thus, the southern census office headline figure is that, “the largest group in 2016 was ‘White Irish’ ” with 3,854,226 (82.2 percent) usual residents. This was followed by “Any other White background” (9.5 percent). There is at least a recognition of the possibility of Irishness of colour but this remains an asymmetrical oddity with the assumed naturalness of white Irishness. In the Northern Ireland census, the categories “white” and “Irish” are disaggregated. But here we find ethnicity solely constructed in terms of colour. In a polity routinely—if somewhat hyperbolically—identified as “the race hate capital of Europe”—the state imposes a stark racial divide upon all the cultural and ethnic complexity of contemporary Northern Ireland—with 98 percent in the white category. Even more bizarrely the state provides a detailed breakdown of the 2 percent minority—“the ethnicity of all non-‘white’ usual residents”—but the other 98 percent are left in an unvariegated mass of whiteness—their ascribed colour is apparently all that we need to know about them. In both parts of Ireland, therefore, the census confirms the Ignatiev thesis—the Irish have “become” white—if only by definition of the state.

In this regard, it is, perhaps, more useful to paraphrase Ignatiev and suggest that Irishness has become white. Thus, while only the most committed racists are saying “You have to be white to be Irish,” there is a common-sense acceptance that the default location of Irishness is within whiteness. Without too much thought, Irishness has been integrated within different formations of white dominion—“Europe,” “the United Kingdom” and the “Anglosphere.” But this whitening of Irishness has, of course, an antithesis. Noel illustrated this in his study of the nineteenth-century United States—the recruitment of some Irishness to whiteness entails a concomitant denial of Irishness of colour. As some of the Irish became white in the United States, others simultaneously had their Irishness erased. A similar dialectic of inclusion and exclusion bears scrutiny in contemporary Ireland. This confirms for us that whiteness is a process not a state—it remains an indication of location within a matrix of power rather than indication of subtle gradations of skin tone. Of course, Irishness and Blackness have interfaced in a whole series of ways that are far from unproblematic. Indeed, documenting this interface was a core part of Noel’s work. Crucially, however, this history has also produced a whole community of people for whom Irishness and Blackness are both significant referents—people inhabiting what he characterised as a “common culture of the lowly.” His observation holds a fortiori in contemporary Ireland. Any assertion of an elective affinity between Irishness and whiteness is immediately undermined in the face of a veritable profusion of Irishness of colour.

Where does this leave us? It hardly needs recognition that Noel’s was an activist analysis—he wanted to change the world as much as interpret it. So, what is to be done? In the manner of Noel’s work, any intervention involves both an observation—the statement that all Irish people are white is empirically false—and a prescription—Irish people should not think of themselves as white. Of course, this situates our task within the wider call to abolish “whiteness.” If “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” then a small part of that fidelity is for the Irish to reclaim their Irishness purged of any aspiration to whiteness. Insofar as other people subscribe to the reactionary and essentially racist identity of whiteness, Irish people should distance themselves from it. To be Irish is to be “not white”; to be Irish is to be “of colour.”

This is not, however, a reworking of the old suggestion that the Irish should regard themselves as “politically black.” (It bears emphasis in passing that this notion of political Blackness means—or meant—slightly different things in Europe and North America.) There is no need—or indeed justification—for most Irish people to claim to be Black—not least because there were times in which this provided an easy defence for Irish racism: “I can’t be racist because I’m Irish.” Rather we need to reclaim the mestizaje quality of Irishness. We might start with St. Patrick himself—who was, of course, not “racially” Irish at all—but a Briton brought in chattel slavery to Ireland. But this racial and ethnic complexity holds through Irish history—Pearse was half-English, De Valera Spanish American. More recently, our greatest sporting (Paul McGrath) and musical (Phil Lynott) icons were both Black Irish. That provides some sense of our macaronic character before we even begin to address the complex history of the construction of a political Irishness. The “Irish people” invoked in 1916 emerged out of the interface of Planter and Gael, native and settler, immigrants and emigrants, coloniser and colonised constituted by Ireland’s experience of colonialism and imperialism.

In recognising this racial and ethnic complexity, we should, of course, be pushing at an open door. As we have already hinted, the common-sense equivalence of Irishness and whiteness detailed by Noel has deconstructed in front of our eyes over recent years. In 2017—without any great sense of angst—Ireland elected a person of colour as Taoiseach. (If this seems a trivial gain, it should be contrasted with the inability of the British to integrate Meghan Markle within its own contrasting hierarchies.) In other words, the notion that there is any simple correlation between Irishness and whiteness should be difficult to sustain in 2020. But the profusion of Irishness of colour—both in Ireland itself and abroad—has hardly encouraged any great unpacking of the central truths in Noel’s book. The task that follows from Noel’s lead obtains—the obligation to sever any connection between whiteness and Irishness. This would return to Irishness a complexity which is much closer to the Gaeilge word breac—“speckled” or “multicoloured”—than white. We don’t have the space here to address the political implications of this approach comprehensively. But we can suggest that it would be a fitting tribute to Noel to continue his work in this vein. His scholarly “Afterword” to How the Irish Became White remains the starting point for any engagement with this question. But the project should also be focused with his sense of political engagement. In recognising the macaronic, mestizao aspects of Irishness, we are simultaneously deconstructing Irish whiteness and helping to mitigate its toxic, racist implications. Moreover, as our friend and comrade showed us over a lifetime of activism, this kind of work is as much a political struggle as it is an exercise in historiography.

I first met Noel Ignatiev in December 1987. I was a sophomore undergraduate at Harvard living in Dunster House, one of the university’s residential houses. Noel was a resident tutor there in American History and Literature. Give that my focus was on the Middle East, there was no particular reason for us to interact, but politics dictated otherwise. It was the beginning of the First Palestinian Intifada and I was going around Dunster House putting up posters of Israeli soldiers breaking the arms of Palestinian kids. Some Dunster residents responded angrily and there were some confrontations and complaints to the Housemaster. Noel approached me and informed me that he had made a point of taking my side and that he supported what I was doing. He had a remarkable ability to identify and seek out like-minded people and engage with them both politically and socially.

In the three years I lived in Dunster, I got to know Noel much better and we had many conversations about race, class, and politics in general. He offered a much more critical, and much more interesting, interpretation of American history than the liberal, triumphalist version I had learned in Massachusetts public schools. In 1991, when I returned from a year studying in Cairo, Noel informed me of a new project that he and John Garvey were initiating, a journal called Race Traitor with the motto, “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity!” The journal would encourage people to renounce whiteness with the aim of destabilizing, and eventually abolishing, the white race as a social formation. Naturally, I was enthusiastic, although I didn’t have anything to offer the journal at the time and went off to graduate school.

With his customary generosity, Noel kept me informed about the progress of the journal and we discussed the many controversies that it generated. Some on the left, including Noel’s old friend and comrade Ted Allen, were unhappy with Noel’s willingness to engage people on the far right, including one avowed Neo-Nazi and the militia movement that flourished in the mid-1990s. Noel saw race treason as a way to contest the racial division of the American working class and build a class movement against capital. He had no illusions about the people he was debating, but he also recognized that they were responding to the neo-liberal policies of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years, and to the overwhelming force the federal government employed to repress any display of armed opposition. For someone whose greatest hero was John Brown, there was no way to side with the government.

In 1995, I contributed an article to the fourth issue of Race Traitor, entitled, “Abolish the Jewish Caste in Palestine.” Noel and I had often talked about the comparative significance of racial regimes and we agreed that one could compare American whiteness with Protestant supremacy in Northern Ireland, Apartheid in South Africa, and Zionism in Palestine. Race Traitor argued about the white race that “Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to a system that degrades them.” We distinguished racial oppression from national oppression. An oppressed nation might hope to free itself from its colonial oppressor through independence, but under racial oppression, only the abolition of the ruling caste (I intentionally avoided the term “Jewish race” because of its association with anti-Semitism) could address the problem. In my article, I rejected the idea of a Jewish nation and predicted the failure of the “two-state solution,” which called for a repartition of Palestine. Instead, I argued for a movement that would transcend the division between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and result in one state with equal rights and responsibilities for all, “a society free of race and caste.” Race Traitor continued to take an active interest in Palestine, and 2005 it published a special issue on the subject whose sole editor was Noel. He wrote an introductory editorial, reiterating the parallels between the United States, Ireland, South Africa, and Israel. In an article on “Zionism” for The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, he wrote that Israel is a “racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of ascribed descent or the approval of the superior race.” After a long campaign of pressure by Zionist groups, the publisher removed the article from the encyclopedia.

Eventually, I became convinced that that the role played by race in American politics was diminishing and that while whiteness was not irrelevant, race no longer occupied a central place. I continue to think this analysis is correct in spite of the tendency among “progressives” today to interpret almost everything through the lens of “white privilege.” The rise of Trump has led to a lot of discussion about white nationalism, fascism, and authoritarianism. Some have argued that white nationalist groups now constitute a “terrorist” threat similar to the so-called Islamic State and should be treated in a similar manner. Noel would have had little patience for that.

In conversations I had with Noel in recent years, we agreed that Trump is no fascist, even if there are actual fascists who seek to ride his coattails. Noel believed that it was not impossible that Trump’s appeal to nativism could win over some black Americans tired of seeing generation after generation of immigrants leapfrog them in ascending the social ladder. We debated whether the propensity of the police to kill black men could be explained best by race or class. Although Black Lives Matter and Palestine activists have noted that American police forces have been trained in military-style methods in Israel, we agreed that the description of police methods in the United States as “settler colonialism” is far-fetched.

Today, Trump presides over a presidency with remarkably broad powers. To explain this development, however, one need only recall of the bipartisan support for the expansion of the national security state, especially since 9/11. The Patriot Act, the Global War on Terror, and fbi and police surveillance of American Muslim communities all provided pretexts for the further expansion of executive power. Liberals who expected the courts to overturn Trump’s immigration policies have been shocked to discover the constitutional powers the president possesses. That said, Trump presides over an aging, minority party that maintains its hold on power by exploiting the electoral college and preparing the electoral battlefield through redistricting. There is little indication that Trump can or would resort to calling his people into the streets.

As Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the United States continue to distance themselves from their former status as herrenvolk democracies, Israel moves in the opposite direction. Settlement continues apace, Palestinians are evicted from what remains of their land, and it is now clear to virtually everyone that the two-state solution is an illusion. It might seem that we are moving closer to a one-state solution, in which every citizen enjoys the same rights and has the same responsibilities. Yet Israel’s Jewish critics have been silenced or driven abroad. For the first time, there is more criticism of Zionism among American Jews than there is among Israelis. Trump’s Deal of Century not only provides Israel with a pretext to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank, it also provides for a transfer of territory from Israel to a potential Palestinian Bantustan. If implemented, this clause would deprive more than 100,000 Palestinians of Israeli citizenship and leave them with the status that West Bank Palestinians possess. In short, Israel remains a racial state in every sense of the word, and mountains are being moved to preserve the domination of the Jewish caste over Palestine. Noel always warned that it was possible that the Palestinians could suffer the fate of the American Indians. Palestinians now or soon will outnumber Jews in historic Palestine. When and if they will ever exercise their right to equality in their own land remains an open question.

Jeremiah Moss came as a young man to New York City in 1993, in search of the Bohemia of which he had dreamed, growing up in a small, sleepy town in New England. Though he came at the first opportunity, by his own admission, he arrived too late. By the early 1990s, Bohemia, such as it has existed since perhaps Walt Whitman held forth at Pabst’s Brewery in the 1850s, was comatose, destroyed by various social and economic forces, large and small, but above all by the transformation of the city into a theme park that systematically eradicated the haunts of writers, artists, gays and a host of other sub-cultures which had previously survived there, catch as catch can, on the affordable margins. In a word, Bohemia was eradicated by gentrification.

And unlike many previous and premature obituaries for Bohemia, in Moss’s view, what distinguished the 1990s and thereafter from the demise of earlier generations of “garrets and pretenders” was conscious policy from City Hall, working with the banks and big real estate, aimed at destroying the “ecology” that had sustained Bohemia for well over a century, a policy enforced, when necessary, by those “husky workers in blue,” the New York Police Department (nypd). This policy was conceived and carried out by a series of mayors from Ed Koch in the 1970s through such luminaries as “Mayor Mussolini” (and now top Trump advisor) Rudy Giuliani, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg, up to and including the current, hapless liberal Bill De Blasio, who came in talking about the city’s soaring income gap and promptly forgot such rhetoric once in power.

As Moss tells it, New York Bohemia did not die, it was murdered. This murder was complemented by the arrival, for the first time, of legions of young people from suburbia and the hinterland, no longer aspiring writers with unsold manuscripts, but a new generation of men and women, mbas, lawyers, fledgling bankers, stock brokers and cpas, happy to dance on the grave of Bohemia (if they even knew it had existed or what it was) in blind weekend drunks, vomiting on the doorsteps of Moss’s and others’ remaining rent-stabilized apartments, shouting obscenities at the owners of older cafes (whose coffee did not compare, in their view, with Starbucks) and generally acting like the philistine, boorish, well-heeled “frat bros” and riffraff that they were and are. “I moved to New York,” writes Moss, “hoping to avoid such people for the rest of my life.”

Moss is, moreover, quite aware that this gangrenous affliction is no mere New York phenomenon, but has its global counterparts throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America as well. But he has 400 pages of material on the one city he knows best, and leaves the critique of the gentrification of Paris, Berlin, Seoul or Sao Paolo to others.

On Paris, Guy Debord had already written:

Paris no longer exists. The destruction of Paris is only an exemplary illustration of the mortal disease which is currently carrying off all the great cities, and this disease is itself merely one symptom of the material decadence of a society.

One dimension that Moss does not discuss is the change in capital accumulation, beginning in the 1970s, in which capital could increasingly no longer be profitably invested in “advanced” countries (advanced above all in social decay) in industry, agriculture, or extraction (mining, etc.) but rather in unproductive sectors such as “services,” the military and real estate, the latter a purely parasitic activity that creates no wealth but merely appropriates wealth produced elsewhere (in this case, construction) for income or resale. Thus it is not merely writers, artists, dancers and musicians who are seen off, but increasingly the urban working class, whose neighborhoods, not without tension, co-existed with Bohemia, and whose factories have closed down or relocated to the Dominican Republic or Sri Lanka or Myanmar.

It is often forgotten that as late as 1945, New York was the number one manufacturing city in the United States. Over the decades since the Second World War, New York was de-industrialized as surely as Detroit or Chicago, led in this case by the departure of the “needle trades” or the “schmatta” (clothing) industry, and the militant unions that emerged in them, first to the “open shop” American South and then overseas to Central America and beyond. They were replaced by miles of chains (Rite-Aid, Starbucks, Walgreen’s, etc.) and hundreds of self-service bank branches, decimating the once tight-knit working-class communities they displaced.

This was part of America’s transformation into a “post-industrial” society, where the percentage of men and women producing “value” (in Ricardo’s or Marx’s sense) constantly declined in favor of those consuming it, probably 70–80 percent of the workforce today. And nowhere was the concentration of the unproductive “creative classes” (to use the economically illiterate Richard Florida’s early and now discredited term) greater than in New York City. It is however not our purpose to linger over such lacunae in Moss’s generally outstanding book, but merely to pose a somewhat different backdrop to our review. Moss’s rich detail is like a banquet table sagging under a huge feast, from which we hope to extract a few choice morsels, urging others to further partake; a mere review can hardly do this book justice.

Moss makes no pretense of pseudo-objectivity; he is patently “shaking a fist” at the people and institutions that have ruined a once great city. His New York is one of “dark moods.” Gentrification evolved over several decades into what Moss calls “hyper-gentrification,” embodied in “luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture.”

Gentrification is quite distinct from the older pattern of one poor group pushing out another, such as the immigrant Chinese takeover of most of Little Italy; gentrification is about class and power, as when an influx of techies and yuppies pushes out poor blacks and Latinos with few or no options for where to go. While for now “the city’s soul still haunts pockets of the outer boroughs,” Moss’s book is “not a Baedecker to those pockets. It is a journey among the ruins, a dyspeptic trip though the parts of town hardest hit during the Bloomberg years.”

Moss highlights, for starters, the East Village, which today is full of “hedge fund managers, millionaire celebrities, and marauding dude-bros” but they had been preceded long before by “Jewish lefties, Italian agitators, theatre people, avant-gardists, anarchists, mobsters, as well as the very poor…Emma Goldman, who hung out at Justus Schwab’s Saloon on East First Street” found there “a Mecca for French Communards, Spanish and Italian refugees, Russian politicals, and German socialists and anarchists…”

Moss describes the old/new dialectic that has emerged instead, as the gentrifiers see it: “[T]he stuff of old New York is smelly and bothersome, and probably should vanish. The new stuff, the extruded-plastic simulation that has nothing to do with New York, is so desirable you can never have too much…” Moss calls the litany of new stuff “a meme, a self-replicating thought virus”: “Old New York is bad…New corporate chains are good. Tenements are bad. Luxury condos are good. Preservation is bad. Gentrification is good.”

The new luxury apartment building, Red Square, whose very name embodies the cynical victory cry of yuppiedom over the radicalism of the old neighborhood, was built in 1989 on Houston Street:

the dividing line between the East Village and the Lower East Side…one of the first modern luxury buildings in the neighborhood, and probably the first to thoroughly exploit the poverty and socialist history in its marketing materials… [Red Square] created an image that would appeal to the rich by selling them on the grit, poverty and risk of the Lower East Side…designed to appeal to a narrow audience of people with resources who wanted to live in a hip, extreme
and even dangerous neighborhood…Sweatshop workers, Latinos, musicians and poets become animatronic characters in a theme park designed for world-conquering Mr. Wall Street and his Dutch model girlfriend.

For Moss, “Red Square was revolutionary in the way it marketed the authentic culture of the Lower East Side—socialism, bohemianism, the working class—in order to sell it to an invading culture that would then destroy it.” Here we have the cynical post-modern penchant for “quotation,” in this case in architecture and urbanism.

One poet, Taylor Mead, lived around the corner from Houston, on Ludlow Street, for thirty-four years, “until he was displaced from his rent-stabilized apartment at age eighty-eight by…[a]…real estate tycoon… [Enduring] …construction noise and poor conditions, for as long as he could…Mead eventually surrendered his apartment, accepting a buyout and leaving New York with the hope of returning one day. He never did. Within a few weeks of moving out, he was dead from a massive stroke.”

The fight over the Bowery Bar in 1994–95, which had taken over the site of an old gas station, is another chapter in Moss’s account. Its opening was resisted by activists and artists, “in the courts and in the streets.” A central figure was Carl Hultberg, living in a “rent-controlled apartment he’d taken over from his grandfather, jazz historian Rudi Blesh,” who had moved there in 1944. In an email to Moss, Hultberg wrote that the nightclub developers Eric Goode and Serge Becker “in a few short months…had transformed our once sleepy Bohemian district into an open sewer of American crap culture.” The building had been sold to Mark Scharfman, “a man who’d made New York Press’s list of the “50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers” and its prototypical heartless landlord. Goode and Becker transformed it “into the ultra-exclusive boutique hotel Lafayette House.” “The match struck by Bowery Bar in 1994,” writes Moss, “had met gasoline. In the 2000s, the Bowery went supernova.”

As if on cue, artists of the Establishment arrived. As one landlord-artist gamely put it, “now that the neighborhood is nice enough for galleries, there aren’t many artists left.” Luxury hotels proliferated. “From the beginning,” says Moss, “the locals hated the Cooper Square Hotel, viewing it as “an arrogant, entitled, fuck-you middle finger to the neighborhood.” Despite further protests, “all that righteous anger could not bring the tower down, even when the developers’ bank claimed they defaulted on $52 million in loans and filed a lawsuit to foreclose.” It was taken over by a hotelier with sites in Hollywood, Miami Beach and New York’s Meatpacking District, and “renamed the Standard East Village, with a new restaurant aptly called ‘Narcissa’…” This ongoing “quotation” of the earlier life of the East Village was shameless, an expression of contemporary capitalism’s own cultural emptiness.

Moss cites Neil Smith, the late cuny professor of anthropology and geography, for an historical overview of gentrification:

The class remake of the city was minor, small scale, and symbolic in the beginning, but today we are seeing a total class retake of the central city. Almost without exception, the new housing, new restaurants, new artistic venues, new entertainment locales—not to mention new jobs on Wall Street—are all aimed at a social class quite different from those who populated the Lower East Side or the West Side, Harlem, or neighborhood Brooklyn in the 1960s. Bloomberg’s rezoning of, at latest count, 104 neighborhoods has been the central weapon in this assault.

Moss takes the idea of a fourth wave of gentrification from London urbanist Loretta Lees, who described hyper-gentrification as: “the consolidation of a powerful national shift favoring the interests of the wealthiest households, combined with a bold effort to dismantle the last of the social welfare programs associated with the 1960s.” For Moss, hyper-gentrification is: “the return of the white-flight suburbanites’ grandchildren and their appetite for a ‘geography of nowhere’…in which monotonous chain stores nullify the streets,” Neil Smith’s term “the revanchist city” ultimately traces back to the French bourgeoisie after the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871. A century later, Giuliani’s New York took revenge on “people of color, the poor and working class, immigrants, feminists, homosexuals, socialists, bohemians.” Moss’s vanishing New York is, then, “the twentieth century city, the metropolis born from a confluence of restless, desperate people who arrived as underdogs and became the city’s life force,” the people who don’t mince words and occasionally say “fuck you, you fuckin’ fuck” in a moment of proletarian poetry.

Thus we have glimpses of Moss’s exceptionally rich material, hopefully giving the flavor he maintains relentlessly for 400 pages. It is to be hoped that the book will be read far and wide, and beyond spurring the rage felt by this reviewer at the victory (to date) by the massive assault of big capital and finance on a once working-class town without equal, will also inspire the activism initiated by anti-gentrification groups such as Take Back the Bronx and the Crown Heights Tenants Union listed in an appendix.