Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

to join the oppressor nation, to enlist in the ranks of the
Empire. The difference is the difference between revolution
and reaction.
The victorious U.S. Army inflicted barbaric
punishment on any of these European soldiers who had
defected that they later caught. Some eighty Irish and
other Europeans were among the Mexican Army prisoners
after the battle of Churubusco in 1847. Of these eighty the
victorious settlers branded fifteen with the letter "D," fifteen
were lashed two hundred times each with whips, and
then forced to dig graves for the rest who were shot
down.(66)
The U.S. Empire, then, at the dawn of industrialization,
had two broad strata of white wage-labor:
one a true Euro-Amerikan labor aristocracy, totally petitbourgeois
in life and outlook; the second, an "ethnic,"
nationally-differentiated stratum of immigrant Europeans
and poor whites of the defeated Confederacy, who were
both heavily exploited and, yet given the bare privileges of
settlerism to keep them loyal to the U.S. Empire. Once
nationally-oppressed labor was under the bourgeoisie's
brutal thumb, then white wage-labor could be put into its
"proper" place. In the wake of the great strike wave of
1873-77, the white unions were severely repressed and
broken up. The mass organizations of white iabor, once so
sure of their strength when they were dining at the White
House and attacking Afrikan, Mexicano and Chinese
labor at the bidding of the capitalists, now found
themselves powerless when faced with the blacklist, the
lock-out, and the deadly gunfire of company police and
the National Guard.
In taking over the tasks of the colonial proletariat,
1 the new white laboring masses found themselves increasingly
subject to the violent repression and exploitation that
capitalism inexorably subjects the proletariat to. Thus, the
industrial age developed here with this crucial contradiction:
The U.S. Empire was founded as a European settler
society of privileged conquerers, and the new white masses
could not be both savagely exploited proletarians and also
loyal, privileged settlers. As the tremendous pressures of
industrial capitalism started molding them into a new proletariat-which
we will examine in the next section-a fundamental
crisis was posed for Amerikan capitalism.
The experience of early trade-unionism in the U.S.
is extremely valuable to us. It showed that:
1. Trade-unionism cannot bridge the gap between oppressor
and oppressed nations.
2. Moreover, that even among Euro-Amerikans,
unionism, political movements, etc.inescapably have a national
character.
3. The organization of nationally oppressed workers into
or allied with the trade-unions of the settler masses was only
an effort to control and divide us.
4. That the unity of the settler masses is counterrevolutionary,
in that the various privileged strata of the
white masses can only find common ground in petty selfinterest
and loyalty to settler hegemony.
5. That whatever "advanced" or democratic-minded
Euro-Amerikans do exist need to be dis-united from their
fellow settlers, rather than welded back into the whole
lock-stepping, reactionary white mass by the usual reform
movements.
6. That trade-unionism became a perverted mockery of its
original self in a settler society, where even wage-labor
became corrupted. The class antagonism latent within the
settler masses had, in times of crisis, been submerged in the
increased oppression of the colonial peoples. Capitalistic
settlerism drastically reworked the very face of the land. A
continent that was at the dawn of the 19th Century
primarily populated by the various oppressed nations was
at the end of the 19th Century the semi-sterilized home of a
"New Europe". And in this cruel, bloody transformation,
history forced everyone to choose, and thus to com~lete
the realization of their class identity. Class is not like a
brass badge or a diploma, which can be carried from Old
Europe and hung on a wall, dusty but still intact. Class
consciousness lives in the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed-or
dies in the poisonous little privileges so eagerly
sought by the settler servants of the bourgeoisie.