In Praise of Treason

“Noel Ignatiev grew up in Philadelphia in the 1940s. He wrote in his memoir, Acceptable Men, that “from the time I was a youngster I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to revolution.””

“A man ahead of his time, he maintained a steady focus on the fight against racial oppression. In the mid 1960s, together with Theodore Allen, he popularized the phrase “white privilege,” a concept he saw as “a weapon in the class struggle.””

“The group he helped found in 1969 in Chicago, the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO), became a model for radical shop-floor organizing in the 1970s. And the journal he co-founded in the 1980s, Race Traitor, as well as his influential book How the Irish Became White, inspired both a scholarly interest in “whiteness” and a revival of abolitionism on the American left”

“Ignatiev was not merely a man ahead of his time, he was proudly untimely”

“In his last years Ignatiev expressed regret that his writings had contributed to a “diversity industry” that, despite throwing around terms like “social construction,” ultimately treats “race” as an unavoidable fact of life and reduces racial oppression to the problem of a prejudiced mindset”

“Ignatiev, a lifelong revolutionary, saw the practical abolition of racial divisions as a necessary step in the unification of the working class, the one that will enable it to finally destroy the present capitalist system and build in its place a society where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”

“Ignatiev moved to Chicago in 1966, having been expelled from a small and stultifying Marxist Leninist party, and he described breathing in the heady air of revolt, like a “fish that managed to crawl up onto dry land.” But the role of the white ally in the movement was changing. The civil rights movement took a more nationalist turn as it traveled North, and shortly after Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 “Black Power” speech, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) opted to become a black-only organization, asking affiliated white activists to go and “organize in white communities.” While most were keen to take up this challenge, the question, to which Ignatiev’s first writings were devoted, was: what did this mean?”

“Many, including Ignatiev, argued that it meant organizing white workers to build class power in the workplace, with socialist revolution as the ultimate goal. Some student activists chose to drop out of college and get jobs in factories (a practice that then had the unfortunate name of “colonizing”). Ignatiev was already working in factories by then, having made a similar choice in the late 1950s, but he disagreed with the organizing strategy of most of these militants when it came to race.”

“The conventional wisdom was that if organizers focussed on bread-and-butter issues racial divisions in the workplace would naturally dissolve, for Black and white workers would see that they have a common interest in opposing the bosses”

“Ignatiev knew from his own factory experience that white workers indeed typically sided with Black workers in such struggles. But he also knew that many of those same white workers would sometimes fight to exclude Black people from their neighborhoods and schools”

“Furthermore, if whites held a monopoly on skilled positions within a workplace (which they typically did) they would often resist attempts to open up these positions to Black people. He concluded that the only way to achieve genuine class unity was to fight white supremacy in the workplace head on”

“White supremacy gave white workers a monopoly on certain jobs, but those jobs remained unsafe, poorly paid, and subject to arbitrary decisions of bosses and foremen”

“white workers have it worse in the US and South Africa than Europe for the same reason that Southern whites experience the worst working conditions in the US: “the greater and more firmly established” the system of white privilege, “the greater the misery” of white workers”

“In accepting racial hierarchies in the workplace, the American labor movement had failed to live by the maxim “an injury to one is an injury to all.””

“But this was not merely a moral failure, it was also a practical one. In so far as whites maintained a quasi-monopoly on certain jobs they were prevented from fighting as a class, and this meant they lost far more than they gained, both in the short and long run”

“In an oft-quoted version of this argument Ignatiev writes:

White supremacy is the real secret of the rule of the bourgeoisie and the hidden cause behind the failure of the labor movement in this country. … To suggest that the acceptance of white-skin privilege is in the interests of white workers is equivalent to suggesting that swallowing the worm with the hook in it is in the interests of the fish”

“Since white privilege undermined class solidarity and class power, to accept it was tantamount to collaborating with the bosses or acting as a scab”

“Ignatiev’s encounter with the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James, who helped him shed the vanguardism of his youthful Stalinism and embrace what James called the “self-activity” of the working class”

“Ignatiev met him shortly after his release from the house arrest imposed by his former friend Eric Williams, then Prime Minister of Trinidad, who had objected to James’s criticisms of his policies. By then James had moved politically from Trotskyism to something close to council communism, inspired by the Hungarian workers councils of 1956”

“James no doubt had a romantic conception of the working class, and of the American working class in particular. He was enamored both by its industrious creativity and its history of violent resistance”

“This was important to Ignatiev, who describes his encounter with James as allowing him to relate to his own American identity with “neither facile apologetics nor masochistic self-hatred.” But it was not the romanticism (common among leftists at the time) that changed Ignatiev’s view of the white working class. It was rather James’s understanding of the workplace as a site of collective self-transformation, in which “the new society” (by which he meant communism) is already present in embryo”

“One way to understand James is to recognize that the problem workers faced, in trying to build class power, was that they needed to trust one another. But such trust couldn’t be imported by union officials or well-meaning anti-racist activists. It could only be the hard-won result of daily interactions between workers in conflict-ridden workplaces”

“Yet it was precisely in gradually building a sense of solidarity that workers came to recognize their collective capacity to remake society”

“Thus whereas Ignatiev had seen his task (and the task of the revolutionary organizations he was part of) to demonstrate to white workers their true collective interests, James argued that the collective action problem the workers faced could only be solved iteratively, by workers demonstrating to each other that they could stay the course”

“James had two reasons to be optimistic about the capacity of white and Black workers to find a solution to this problem”

“First, he saw that most white workers were not deeply or consciously committed to white supremacy. He agreed with Allen and Ignatiev that racial hierarchies only served the bosses, such that a commitment to whiteness was simply a sign of the low level of working-class organization”

“Second, he knew that white workers had a track record (albeit blemished and broken) of supporting Black workers under the motto “an injury to one is an injury to all.””

“He had witnessed this himself in the formation of the CIO, and from his studies of American history he knew about the Knights of Labor, the Populist movement, and the IWW”

“Most importantly for Ignatiev, he reminded us that thousands of white workers had intoned this principle as they marched to war for the Union singing, “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.””

“Ignatiev asked James what role he envisaged, if any, for revolutionary organizations. James’s response was that, rather than try to lead the workers, such organizations should seek to “recognize and record” the new society as it emerges within the shell of the old”

“This would remain Ignatiev’s motto, both in his writing and his organizing, for the remainder of his life”

“Ignatiev could turn to earlier works by James’s associates in the US, such as Grace Lee Boggs’s and Phil Singer’s The American Worker (1947) and Martin Glaberman’s Punching Out (1952).”

“These gave detailed firsthand accounts of factory life, showing how workers continually sought control over the production process, independently of union leadership and without necessarily adopting a “radical” political consciousness”

“The point wasn’t to change worker’s minds, but to recognize that they would change their own minds when the opportunity to build working-class power through interracial struggle presented itself”

“Race Traitor. For all its brilliance, the journal foundered on an ill-defined central concept. “Treason to whiteness” functioned more as a provocation than an actual program”

“While it makes sense that Ignatiev defended Rachel Dolezal, especially given the way many of her critics naturalized race, this proposal now reads as cringeworthy at best”

“To his credit Ignatiev came to recognize these weaknesses, and some would say he ended up bending the stick too far in the other direction. In his late writings he frequently complained about “identity politics,” “political correctness,” “trigger warnings,” and yes, even “wokeness.””

“The burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis was a signal flare that Ignatiev would have recognized as proto-revolutionary”

“for Ignatiev, the treason that mattered most was the refusal of regular-ass-people to play the roles imposed on them by bosses and police. Like James, he believed that the power to build a new world lies in the disobedience of ordinary workers”

“And while the level of disobedience has dimmed since the George Floyd rebellion, both the need and capacity for it are visible in the daily violence of working-class American life. Ignatiev liked to say that the quality he most appreciated in the American people, the one that gave him hope for the future, was their lawlessness”

“Du Bois called the “American blindspot for the Negro and his problems” the “kernel and the meaning” of the labor problem in the US. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, Harcourt 1935.”

“The key example of this was the seniority system. This was supposed to protect workers from arbitrary dismissal and ensure that companies couldn’t use automation or the threat of a downturn to replace more costly skilled workers, who had achieved seniority, with newer less skilled workers. The system meant that workers displaced by machines would have to be reassigned and, in the event of downsizing, workers that were let go would have to be rehired, based on seniority, when production recovered. While all workers with tenure clearly benefited from these rules, they meant that recent Black migrants who had acquired little seniority in Northern factories would typically be the last hired and first fired”

“Ignatiev often insisted that “privilege doesn’t exempt people from exploitation, it reconciles them to it.””