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One thing ordinary white people seem prone to forgetting, is just how deeply they are despised by the elite class of their own societies, a thing that has led to immense historical delusions with many disastrous consequences.
You would think this should not be possible given the very stark examples reaching out from their history. The entire experience of the cruelties endured under European feudalism was just one big case study.
After their revolutions in which that feudal order in much of Western Europe was overthrown by capitalism, things only got a little better (partly because some democracy was part of the mobilising tools), and a lot more intense. The Industrial Revolution saw the seizure of commonly owned lands, which were then enclosed, and the ordinary people forced into factories, mills and mines under atrocious conditions that were to last another century. Basically, the stuff of not just Charles Dickens, but the more forensic and prosaic works of Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson.
While that was underway, the ordinary Europeans were then used as the raw material for the first experiments in industrial-scale warfare.
Between 1914 and 1918, they organised a war that took the lives of perhaps nine million soldiers. Of course, being empires, they dragged a lot of African and Asian colonial subjects into the affair as well. But my point is that such treatment was to be expected on our colonised side. The issue here is how the elites of the rich Western countries have historically related to their own kith and kin while making them believe they were one and the same people, and how this has shaped the politics of the major Western countries around questions of belonging and exclusion being played out even up to now, as best seen in Donald Trump’s dramatic return to the presidency of the United States.
The horrors of their next big war (1939–1945) are somewhat better known. But since then, working-class white people are among those that have been mobilised into a series of lesser conflicts from south-east Asia, eastern Africa, and, of course, the Middle East. These wars have usually been against non-white people (and, of course, the Irish) resisting Western power.
The white-settled colonies bring a modification to this. It was as though the very same elites that had impoverished them, then weaponised all the oppression and suffering they had internalised over the previous two centuries and facilitated them to cathartically unload it on to all the indigenous peoples of the world outside Europe (plus the Irish) crossing their path through war, enslavement, and genocide.
However, this is not merely a question of war; a similar contempt for the ordinary white person can be seen in the economic policies that have evolved since the initial catastrophe of the establishment of capitalism as described above, based on the monetisation of all aspects of the human body, retail and wholesale, via healthcare, housing, nutrition, gender identity, education and transportation.
Again, and as usual, things took a particular twist among the white people of the wealthiest of the white settler project – the place now known as the United States of America.
In his opus The Grapes of Wrath, the American writer John Steinbeck painted the picture of how the dream fell apart:
And now the squatting men stood up angrily. “Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away. And Pa was born here, and he killed weeds and snakes. Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money. An’ we was born here. There in the door – our children born here. And Pa had to borrow money. The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we raised.”
“We know that – all that. It’s not us, it’s the bank. A bank isn’t like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn’t like a man either. That’s the monster.”
And now the owner men grew angry. “You’ll have to go.” “But it’s ours,” the tenant men cried. “We–” “No. The bank, the monster owns it. You’ll have to go.” “We’ll get our guns, like Grampa when the Indians came. What then?”
“Well – first the sheriff, and then the troops. You’ll be stealing if you try to stay, you’ll be murderers if you kill to stay. The monster isn’t men, but it can make men do what it wants.”
“But if we go, where’ll we go? How’ll we go? We got no money.”
“We’re sorry,” said the owner men. “The bank, the fifty-thousand-acre owner can’t be responsible. You’re on land that isn’t yours. Once over the line maybe you can pick cotton in the fall. Maybe you can go on relief. Why don’t you go on west to California?
You can see the tragedy; these white settlers did everything their elites told them to do: migrated from Europe, stole land (“Granpa took up the land“) by engaging in a genocide (“and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away”), imposed change on the natural environment (“And Pa was born here, and he killed weeds and snakes”); brought their labour on that land into the emerging capitalist economy (“And Pa had to borrow money. The bank owned the land then”); respected or even physically defended the system upon which all this was based (“Well – first the sheriff, and then the troops. You’ll be stealing if you try to stay”); etc. But then when it came down to a choice between the financial oligarchs continuing to make profits, and the protection of the livelihoods of ordinary people, those ordinary people were treated like they were not also white people (“We’re sorry,… The bank, the fifty-thousand-acre owner can’t be responsible… Maybe you can go on relief.”).
Setting the story in Oklahoma was particularly apt; even though the territory had been initially officially acknowledged as fully Indian (i.e. indigenous) territory in the period after America became independent from Britain, the Euro-Americans later decided that they wanted the land for the development of the capitalist economy by importing even more European settlers, and began the mass driving out of the indigenous peoples.
This is why the Homestead Act of 1862, which gifted millions of acres of land to European migrants, did not apply there until later. But from 1889, the US government granted the territory to settlers through the Oklahoma Land Rush, which was a literal physical scramble by hordes of landless white vagabonds. The Homestead Act was then applied to the Oklahoma Territory, allowing settlers to claim land for free, provided they lived on it and farmed it for five years.
Those events and processes became very deeply embedded in the white psyche. Up to today, Oklahoma University has a series of sporting and other activities in which various aspects of the Land Rush are re-enacted. Even the student body proudly bears the nickname originally given to the first European settlers.
White Americans are therefore misunderstanding this Trump moment. Instead of seeing in it a continuation of the long con-game that has been played on them. They have chosen to misunderstand it as an opportunity to return to the 1950s, the tail end of that period in which they could safely imagine themselves as capitalism’s favoured child.
There is a reason for this. We have to firstly remind ourselves that Trump was the end product of an across-the-board initial 2008 revolt by the political performers against the idea of the possibility of a black president.
The basic point is that a significant number of white American voters are still heavily invested in the historical power of their whiteness – because being white had actually offered – and in many ways still offers – real material advantages to their communities. The prospect then of a non-white president for the first time ever, came as a symbolic challenge to that reality. Their revolt was just a visceral unplanned reaction to the idea that certain things were no longer the assumed preserve of whiteness, a perceived loss of the petty privileges America gave to its white citizens during its days of official American apartheid.
The absurdity was that Obama was, of course, no threat to the actual interests of the oligarch establishment that owns the American empire and hires the middle-class populist politicians who run it for them.
Nevertheless, his appearance on the scene was unsettling, causing greater anxiety in the Republican Party than in the Democratic Party. But there still was some (such as the important Democrat figure suddenly appearing at a Republican Party rally after the Obama nomination).
On the Republican side, there emerged a parade of folk stepping up to be the “Great White Hope” who would restore “normality”: John Boehner, Mitt Romney, John McCain (with his oddball sidekick Sarah Palin), Newt Gingrich, etc., came and went. It was essentially a white racism meltdown.
Unfortunately for them, their collective challenge (best seen with McCain) was the need to make racism still look normal and reasonable. So there was a lot of double-talk and indirect speaking, as well as a desire to follow “civilised” procedure.
So, the results were always anaemic. Their style was basically a rehash of the 1950s: stiff and “cardiganed”, unable to wholly mobilise nostalgic whites into a substantive voting bloc, or to match Obama’s ability to sweet-talk other types of voters to switch sides and support them.
It is into that vacuum that Trump steps – an outsider, brash, deliberately unsophisticated in speech, as personally and financially chaotic as the ordinary crisis-ridden average white voter he was appealing to, and not scared to be called a racist. And so he basically uses these cultural “attributes” to overthrow the authority of the traditional high priests of the Republican Party, and seizes control of its base. He then gets enough requisite corporate and corporate media backing to get them to weaponise his message and mobilise his natural voting bloc.
He became the voice that brings out significant voters based on hopes that his xenophobic, racist, bullying posture will deliver Americans from ruin.
Trump’s real problem – just like the first time round – is that he does not fully understand that he’s in charge of a global empire, as opposed to simply being a big dog among other big dogs in an alley, fighting for space. There was enough internal dissent from within the civil service, during his first presidency to frustrate him, so he perhaps never had enough time to reflect on this. But even if he gets a more compliant team this time round, he will still have to think about his role, because the fundamental problem is that the underlying crisis of the American racialised socio-economy, which economy feeds off the empire, will not go away.
Trump’s “deal maker” ethos means that his grasp of the workings of high finance (which is what now owns and has hollowed out the American economy, driving debt through monetising everything) is diminished or even sketchy. So he will not easily manage to get it out of American people’s lives, if at all. And, with his use of American foreign aid as a blunt instrument, he risks driving the already hard-pressed the leaders of the Third World leaders upon which the American empire depends, into China’s embrace.
Team Trump really need to make a decision. If they are to keep running an empire, then they’ll need to be organised in a way that sustains it. If, on the other hand, they have chosen the path of being just another player on the world stage, then all the language and thinking behind the empire status, as well as the institutions they historically put in place to bolster it, should be abandoned.
At the moment, the signals are a mixture of imperial declarations and the spirit of American isolationism.
Some relief may come for a while from bullying immigrants. And those that stay will have to work for even lower wages and longer hours. And Americans will work even more, too. They don’t realise that like the Oklahoma farmers of Steinbeck’s novel, they are slowly but steadily being abandoned by capitalism.
White chauvinism has been capitalism’s longest, and most frequently used, mechanism to advance capitalism’s ambitions. But this should not mean that capitalism cannot survive or even thrive without it, should this become necessary. Ordinary white folk are yet to realise this, and remain committed to the system far more than it is actually committed to them.
But the American economy has lost much of its mojo and cannot easily get it back without some major adjustments to things like labour rights.
Trump is now the unwitting manager of a process of decline that really begins with the 1973 military defeat in Vietnam that left America with huge debts, forcing it to abandon the gold standard and start falsifying the value of its currency.
The dollar’s value has really a militarily backed theory since then, kept alive through being physically inserted into all major oil transactions globally, with Israel as the big stick to keep the major oil exporters in line.
Now that too is coming to an end.
One big question now hangs over President Trump: What happens once those wholly invested in the idea of “America” (mainly, much of its white tribe) eventually realise that Trump’s primary job-role is to try and save the elites, even if it means feeding them ever more of the Grapes of Wrath?
Will Trump be able to stand firm, or fall apart like last time, when things get really rough? Will he then resort to exporting his essentially realtor mentality to land-grabbing globally?
The simple fact is that America lives beyond not just its own means, but also beyond the means of the whole world. Nothing can be done to bridge the debt gap currently covered by exporting printed dollars.
Until a massive reform movement emerges from the grassroots, there is going to be nothing but political gambling and demagoguery among the leadership class, and increasing horizontal barbarism among the ordinary folk.
The current “illegal immigrant” dramas must be understood as both an example of this, as well as an attempted response to it.
The profitability of the American economy runs on racialised labour, capital and industries. The long game of the American elite was to make the ordinary white people as deeply invested in racism as possible, so as to distract and mobilise them. Or mobilise them to distraction. Just as the native British worker was distracted with drinking and sports, it would seem that the average white American worker was misled into a mindset of feeling better than other peoples, at home and abroad.
Immigration addresses the challenge of finding ever-new supplies of cheap skilled and unskilled labour. It is an old story reaching back to the origins of American capitalism in human slavery where many of the enslaved were actual workers skilled in cattle-keeping, growing rice and other agricultural things, but whose enslavement was justified by race.
These periodic bouts of letting in hordes of “illegal” workers and then later deporting them are aimed at keeping the base together, while also driving down the cost of labour overall, even for the white worker.
These conclusions have been fed by my realisation over the years that there are people I have known personally whom I would not allow into my country if I were an immigration officer. Unfortunately, since we are all Ugandans, I am stuck here with them.
Yet, I have often been surprised, over the years, to see some among such people, get the opportunity to leave Uganda and resettle in some other country, usually the United States or somewhere in Western Europe, which they take up most enthusiastically.
I know one who suffered periodic mental health episodes, sometimes requiring his placement in a mental institution. I know another who simply lost interest in any kind of education (or work) and lived with her widowed mother in the family home. Her source of income was entertaining customers in a little bar her mother operated nearby, and sometimes assisting in financial scams run by either her mother, or the West African money counterfeiters she and her sisters had as friends (one of whom ended up serving a prison sentence for it).
(OK. I’ll say it before you do: I do – or did – keep some “interesting company, sometimes. But this was now well over 20 years ago).
My point is not that mental health challenges should automatically rule someone out from travelling or migrating. Rather, how does such a person assist with the enrichment of the society to which they have migrated (which, we are told, is the premier selling point offered by those arguing for greater immigration)? And what about the lady who hung out with scammers? She is now in London, where she has birthed seven children with another West African. Still no steady job.
The reason is straightforward: the capitalist economic system, especially in this stage of high financialisation, needs to churn with regularity, so that all the profiteer-stakeholders tied into it via banking fees, share dividends, brokerage fees, commissions, board allowances, investment returns and taxes, can receive their expected portion.
There is a minimum level of money circulation below which the economy – as it is – begins to suffocate. Kind of like oxygen supply to a vehicle engine. Or oil in a machine. And once that process sets in, it may be very difficult, if not impossible to reverse.
By just having new humans of whatever skin colour in the economic space driving cabs, using banks and credit cards, buying food, clothes, heat for their homes and all the rest of it, there is a regular turnover. And as I have said, in the end, white people will find that capitalism does not love them as much as it has made them love it.
As I said, it did not necessarily have to be like this. Ordinary white Americans must find a new language to express their right to humanity also; a language that does not draw from, or fall back on the racism often fed to them from birth. For example, the steps proposed in the Indian Removal Act were actually met with widespread opposition among even the white settlers of Oklahoma. Their material gain did not even then blind them entirely from a basic humanity.
However, as for today’s white people, they will need to face a few more disappointments, starting with this second Trump presidency, before they begin to get to the point of recovering their humanity, and working with others.
