Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

A
WORD OF CACTIOX TO OUR FRIESDS, THE CIGAR-MAKERS.
Tnmugh tic rnokc it ir cnay to tee the (~ppooch of Chi>tcae chcnp labor.
fee" each year.(36) Many municipalities passed laws ordering
all Chinese to leave, enforced by the trade union mobs.
The decisive point of the Empire-wide campaign to
plunder what the Chinese had built up in the West was the
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Both Democratic and
Republican parties supported this bill, which barred all
Chinese immigration into the U.S. and made Chinese ineligible
for citizenship. The encouragement offered by the
capitalist state to the anti-Chinese offensive shows the
forces at work. In their frenzy of petty plundering, European
labor was being permitted to do the dirty work of the
bourgeoisie. The Empire needed to promote and support
this flood of European reinforcements to help take hold of
the newly conquered territories. As California Gov. Henry
Haight (whose name lives on in a certain San Francisco
neighborhood) said in 1868: "No man is worthy of the
name of patriot or statesman who countenances a policy
which is opposed to the interests of the free white laboring
and industrial classes.. . What we desire for the permanent
benefit of California is a population of white men ... We
ought not to desire an effete population of Asiatics ..." The
national bourgeoisie used the "Anti-Coolie" movement
and the resulting legislation to force individual capitalists
to follow Empire policy and discharge Chinese in favor of
Europeans. Now that the Chinese had built the economy
of the Pacific Northwest, it was time for them to be stripped
and driven out.
The passage of the 1882 Act was taken as a
"green-light", a "go-ahead" signal of approval to immigrant
European labor from Congress, the White House
and the majority of Euro-Amerikans. It was taken as a
license to kill, a declaration of open looting season on
Chinese. Terrance Powderly, head of the Knights of Labor
(which boasted that it had recruited Afrikan workers to
help European labor) praised the victory of the Exclusion
Act by saying that now the task for trade unionists was to
finish the job-by eliminating all Chinese left in the U.S
within the year!(36)
The settler propaganda kept emphasizing how
pure, honest Euiopeans had no choice but "defend"
themselves against the dark plots of the Chinese. Wanting
to seize ("annex") Chinese jobs and small businesses,
European immigrants kept shouting that they were only
"defending" themselves against the vicious Chinese who
were trying to steal the white man's jobs! And in case any
European worker had second thoughts about the coming
lynch mob, a constant ideological bombardment surrounded
him by trade union and "socialist" leaders, bourgeois
journalists, university professors and religious figures,
politicians of all parties, and so on. Having decided to
"annex" the fruits of the Chinese development of the Northwest,
the unusal settler propaganda about "defending"
themselves was put forth.
.
OF E THE ARGUMENT NATIONALITY.
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