I would also draw your attention to the first line of the quote in my original comment which explicitly calls out this “seeking a better life” fable, which is only true for the white settlers (“almost” all of them) if we consider a life furthering slavery and genocide to be better than what they had at home.
This is reductive. The American civil war and therefore slavery ended with 1865 – yes I know apartheid after that, but people emigrating back then surely didn’t do it with the idea of “I can become a slave-lord there”. In Germany, Bismarck introduced mandatory public healthcare 1883, one of the reasons was to slow immigration to the US: While in the US there was opportunity, there also wasn’t any kind of safety net whatsoever. (The other big reason was to cut political ground from under the social democrats’s feet, as well as to bring mutual insurances workers had founded under state control – he was, after all, Prussian).
So immigration from Germany was still an issue large enough for the empire to address it directly while slavery was already abolished. And the type of people this legislation addressed was squarely workers: People earning under 2000 Goldmark a year (about 17000 Euro now). Some pre-83 versions even only applied to miners, then steel workers, then it got expanded to all workers.
Another tidbit would be immigrants from North Germany in particular: While enforcement could certainly have been better any Hanse ship was generally forbidden to engage in slave trade, and people got dispossessed for so much as transporting slave chains. The whole idea of slavery just didn’t vibe with North German republicanism which had the motto “Neither master nor serf be” even while the free cities were still oligopolies. People took great pleasure and pride from passing laws such as forbidding nobles from living in the city, or going after their debts and actually putting them in prison until they paid up (by selling their land): Elsewhere, as a noble, you were above the law. Socio-economic differences were stark but a liberal notion of equality was universal (or, in the still feudal parts, desired) and any immigrant would’ve taken that with them to the US. They also didn’t tend to immigrate to the south, this is conflating North German and Scandinavian immigrants but a map of Lutheranism in the US should give an impression.
I am unable to dissect everything going on with your comment, I urge you to read the book for yourself. The profiting off slavery didn’t stop with slavery, it is core to the wealth of the US empire which attracted the european immigrants who were looking to be part of an economy which at its motor had slavery for centuries and, after that, the continued oppression and segregation of it’s non-white communities. The distinction is between chattel and wage-slavery where the working class was divided along racial lines. These immigrants came with the goal of taking the jobs of non-white people, tying their fortune to the continued oppression of non-white people. Again, please read the book it’s plain as day. To quote another section:
What was the essence of the ideology of white labor? Petit-bourgeois annexationism. … But, typically, their petit-bourgeois vision saw for themselves a special, better kind of wage-slavery. The ideology of white labor held that as loyal citizens of the Empire even wage-slaves had a right to special privileges (such as “white man’s wages”), beginning with the right to monopolize the labor market.
We must cut sharply through the liberal camouflage concealing this question. It is insufficient - and therefore misleading - to say that European workers wished to “discriminate against” or “exclude” or were “prejudiced against” colored workers. It was the labor of Afrikan and Indian workers that created the economy of the original Amerika; likewise, the economy of the Southwest was distilled from the toil of the Indian/Mexicano workers, and that of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest was built by Mexicano and Chinese labor. Immigrant European workers proposed to enter an economy they hadn’t built, and ‘annex’, so as to speak, the jobs that the nationally oppressed had created.
And that last line is meant literally, it’s about the riots and lynchings these immigrants took part in in order to take the jobs that had traditionally be held by non-white workers. Talking about the chinese workers who had built the railroad for example:
The time-distance across the continent was now cut to two weeks, and cheap railroad tickets brought a flood of European workers to the West. There was, of course, an established settler traditon of terrorism towards Chinese. The Shasta Republican complained in its Dec. 12, 1856 issue that: “Hundreds of Chinamen have been slaughtered in cold blood in the last 5 years…the murder of Chinamen was of almost daily occurrence.” Now the new legions of immigrant European workers demanded a qualitative increase in the terroristic assaults, and the 1870’s and 1880’s were decades of mass bloodshed.
The issue was very clear-cut - jobs. By 1870, some 42% of the whites in California were European immigrants. With their dreams of finding gold boulders lying in the streams having faded before reality, these new crowds of Europeans demanded the jobs that Chinese labor had created. More than demanded, they were determined to “annex”, to seize by force of conquest, all that Chinese workers had in the West. In imitation of the bourgeoisie they went about plundering with bullets and fire. In mining camps and towns from Colorado to Washington, Chinese communities came under attack. Many Chinese were shot down, beaten, their homes and stores set afire and gutted. In Los Angeles Chinese were burned alive by the European vigilantes, who also shot and tortured many others.
That you would paint the rise of the liberal capitalist class as something to be cheered on by the oppressed and as the beginning of an end to racism beggars belief, it were the workers fleeing capitalism in europe that formed the vanguard of the oppression against the non-white workers. The book goes into great detail about the workers that europe was bleeding, which forced it’s capitalist class to make the concessions you mentioned. They indeed brought the ideas of liberalism with them into the US, its just that these ideas of “equality” never were about solidarity among workers across the present racial lines.
With their dreams of finding gold boulders lying in the streams having faded before reality, these new crowds of Europeans demanded the jobs that Chinese labor had created.
Note how that’s not precisely not about what those people thought when they left Europe? They were American, at that point.
Don’t make the mistake of confusing why people left, and what they thought they would do in America, with what US material conditions drove them to do. This is precisely what OP’s post is addressing: That you should remember that people came in search of a better life, and that the conditions the American bourgeois in general (now represented by the GOP) instituted in the country made finding that better life impossible.
Also back then most Europeans weren’t even considered “white”, pretty much every group not from England went through an erm “Hispanic phase” – I’ll of course grant that Germans weren’t terribly affected by this, but ask the Irish or Italians. The racial card has always been used by the American bourgeois to divide and conquer as they please and I’d caution against playing into that narrative by deepening grudges. If you have to choose between class consciousness and identity politics, be a good Marxist and choose class consciousness.
I don’t know how we’re reading the same sentence and arrive at opposite conclusions. Even if you were right about the goldrush in indian land not being a motivating factor for droves of immigrants I think my larger point, how incomparable the motivation for white immigrants and the currently oppressed immigrants is, still stands by the actions the europeans undertook upon arrival. This is not about dividing people into racist groups, but clearly talking about the racial divide that was drawn up by the capitalist class. Not talking about the deep racism in the european immigrant movement, regardless of their class status, in fear of “deepening grudges” is revisionist.
Even if you were right about the goldrush in indian land not being a motivating factor for droves of immigrants
No it absolutely was the motivating factor. Setting out to pan gold is precisely not setting out to murder Chinese is what I’m saying, that was plan C or D thought up long after arriving. If the American dream had ever been real, or if American politics and society back then had not been as racialised, it would not have come to that – it’s not just up to the failed gold rushers now between a rock and a hard place but also the racist state institutions implemented by Anglo America who gave them at least implicit permission to do it, or even egged it on.
In my mind OP’s post wants to say “[this group] came here for that dream, they never got it, let’s finally make it real [for everyone]”. Are other interpretations possible? I’d say so, but I’d also say one should be charitable.
Also didn’t the Chinese come for that exact dream. Last I checked Chinese had white skin (sorry my Europeanness is shining through).
Setting out to pan gold is precisely not setting out to murder Chinese is what I’m saying, that was plan C or D thought up long after arriving.
Oh I see what you meant. To me that still reads like they were simply misled on who to plunder and what the loot would be.
But regardless I do agree that what you said was OPs message and I also agree with it, but I don’t think it will be achieved by appealing to sentiment, whitewashing history, especially where the wealth comes from, and in general trying to appease the crowd with false equivalences, because they serve to hide the root of the present injustices. Furthermore I see no reason to be charitable to someone like Robert Reich.
Edit I don’t know enough about the chinese immigrants to comment on what brought them to the US. In racist terms chinese and east asians are considered “yellow” not “white”.
To me that still reads like they were simply misled on who to plunder and what the loot would be.
“Plundering natives” is not a motive I’d expect, at least not from immigrants who read Karl May. More “get rich off the vast wilderness”. I think that accusation should, among labourers, be limited to people going for agricultural land, displacing communities already living there.
but I don’t think it will be achieved by appealing to sentiment, whitewashing history, especially where the wealth comes from, and in general trying to appease the crowd with false equivalences,
The majority of the wealth comes off the back of the workers. The miners, people working in industry, it’s the same in the US as it’s in Europe: Other sectors are important and even crucial (e.g. food production) but it terms of GDP and capacity to produce goods, industry it’s where it’s at.
Y’all should definitely be giving land back but say Detroit didn’t become an industrial powerhouse because natives were sent on the trail of tears, or southern farmers exploited black slaves. If all wealth the US had was only from those aspects then you’d still be an agrarian society.
Is it possible to come to a synthesis there, not ignoring the atrocities committed but acknowledging the important (not sole) role that skilled European labourers had in building the economic backbone of the US, a backbone without which implementing Utopian dreams would be, well, Utopian?
Because as I see it, if, as soon as someone says, “my grandfather was a miner” and you instantly bring up the one or other atrocity some mining community committed against other people you’re saying “we all would have been better off without you, you people contributed nothing”: It’s way easier to get people to acknowledge past or present wrongs when you leave them their pride in their accomplishments. “All that wealth is stolen” is the exact opposite of that, grandpa didn’t work backbreaking 14-hour shifts for that, without health insurance. He did it so that his kids would have a better life. Was he worse off than a slave on a cotton plantation? No, of course not, but it’s still where the bulk of the wealth comes from. Wealth is not created in proportion to suffering.
Furthermore I see no reason to be charitable to someone like Robert Reich.
I have no idea who the guy is and I probably don’t want to know.
Im going to disengage here. I am one last time going to urge you to read that book. Also just because there seems to be a misunderstanding here let me say that I’m not USian, I’m german.
Also just because there seems to be a misunderstanding here let me say that I’m not USian, I’m german.
My gods that’s even worse. Why, then, are you that steeped in reductionist, racialised, US analysis? Activists and theorists over there don’t see the water they’re swimming in, don’t realise how their unwillingness and/or incapacity to think outside of that framework perpetuates it. It allows people to stay depoliticised by engaging in performativism, segregating hair styles becomes more important than material fucking conditions. Idpol is the worst thing that happened to the left since Stalin and the exact opposite of what you should be steeped in, and that’s rapprochement. Which is exactly where I tried to carefully lead you.
This is reductive. The American civil war and therefore slavery ended with 1865 – yes I know apartheid after that, but people emigrating back then surely didn’t do it with the idea of “I can become a slave-lord there”. In Germany, Bismarck introduced mandatory public healthcare 1883, one of the reasons was to slow immigration to the US: While in the US there was opportunity, there also wasn’t any kind of safety net whatsoever. (The other big reason was to cut political ground from under the social democrats’s feet, as well as to bring mutual insurances workers had founded under state control – he was, after all, Prussian).
So immigration from Germany was still an issue large enough for the empire to address it directly while slavery was already abolished. And the type of people this legislation addressed was squarely workers: People earning under 2000 Goldmark a year (about 17000 Euro now). Some pre-83 versions even only applied to miners, then steel workers, then it got expanded to all workers.
Another tidbit would be immigrants from North Germany in particular: While enforcement could certainly have been better any Hanse ship was generally forbidden to engage in slave trade, and people got dispossessed for so much as transporting slave chains. The whole idea of slavery just didn’t vibe with North German republicanism which had the motto “Neither master nor serf be” even while the free cities were still oligopolies. People took great pleasure and pride from passing laws such as forbidding nobles from living in the city, or going after their debts and actually putting them in prison until they paid up (by selling their land): Elsewhere, as a noble, you were above the law. Socio-economic differences were stark but a liberal notion of equality was universal (or, in the still feudal parts, desired) and any immigrant would’ve taken that with them to the US. They also didn’t tend to immigrate to the south, this is conflating North German and Scandinavian immigrants but a map of Lutheranism in the US should give an impression.
I am unable to dissect everything going on with your comment, I urge you to read the book for yourself. The profiting off slavery didn’t stop with slavery, it is core to the wealth of the US empire which attracted the european immigrants who were looking to be part of an economy which at its motor had slavery for centuries and, after that, the continued oppression and segregation of it’s non-white communities. The distinction is between chattel and wage-slavery where the working class was divided along racial lines. These immigrants came with the goal of taking the jobs of non-white people, tying their fortune to the continued oppression of non-white people. Again, please read the book it’s plain as day. To quote another section:
And that last line is meant literally, it’s about the riots and lynchings these immigrants took part in in order to take the jobs that had traditionally be held by non-white workers. Talking about the chinese workers who had built the railroad for example:
That you would paint the rise of the liberal capitalist class as something to be cheered on by the oppressed and as the beginning of an end to racism beggars belief, it were the workers fleeing capitalism in europe that formed the vanguard of the oppression against the non-white workers. The book goes into great detail about the workers that europe was bleeding, which forced it’s capitalist class to make the concessions you mentioned. They indeed brought the ideas of liberalism with them into the US, its just that these ideas of “equality” never were about solidarity among workers across the present racial lines.
Note how that’s not precisely not about what those people thought when they left Europe? They were American, at that point.
Don’t make the mistake of confusing why people left, and what they thought they would do in America, with what US material conditions drove them to do. This is precisely what OP’s post is addressing: That you should remember that people came in search of a better life, and that the conditions the American bourgeois in general (now represented by the GOP) instituted in the country made finding that better life impossible.
Also back then most Europeans weren’t even considered “white”, pretty much every group not from England went through an erm “Hispanic phase” – I’ll of course grant that Germans weren’t terribly affected by this, but ask the Irish or Italians. The racial card has always been used by the American bourgeois to divide and conquer as they please and I’d caution against playing into that narrative by deepening grudges. If you have to choose between class consciousness and identity politics, be a good Marxist and choose class consciousness.
I don’t know how we’re reading the same sentence and arrive at opposite conclusions. Even if you were right about the goldrush in indian land not being a motivating factor for droves of immigrants I think my larger point, how incomparable the motivation for white immigrants and the currently oppressed immigrants is, still stands by the actions the europeans undertook upon arrival. This is not about dividing people into racist groups, but clearly talking about the racial divide that was drawn up by the capitalist class. Not talking about the deep racism in the european immigrant movement, regardless of their class status, in fear of “deepening grudges” is revisionist.
No it absolutely was the motivating factor. Setting out to pan gold is precisely not setting out to murder Chinese is what I’m saying, that was plan C or D thought up long after arriving. If the American dream had ever been real, or if American politics and society back then had not been as racialised, it would not have come to that – it’s not just up to the failed gold rushers now between a rock and a hard place but also the racist state institutions implemented by Anglo America who gave them at least implicit permission to do it, or even egged it on.
In my mind OP’s post wants to say “[this group] came here for that dream, they never got it, let’s finally make it real [for everyone]”. Are other interpretations possible? I’d say so, but I’d also say one should be charitable.
Also didn’t the Chinese come for that exact dream. Last I checked Chinese had white skin (sorry my Europeanness is shining through).
Oh I see what you meant. To me that still reads like they were simply misled on who to plunder and what the loot would be.
But regardless I do agree that what you said was OPs message and I also agree with it, but I don’t think it will be achieved by appealing to sentiment, whitewashing history, especially where the wealth comes from, and in general trying to appease the crowd with false equivalences, because they serve to hide the root of the present injustices. Furthermore I see no reason to be charitable to someone like Robert Reich.
Edit I don’t know enough about the chinese immigrants to comment on what brought them to the US. In racist terms chinese and east asians are considered “yellow” not “white”.
“Plundering natives” is not a motive I’d expect, at least not from immigrants who read Karl May. More “get rich off the vast wilderness”. I think that accusation should, among labourers, be limited to people going for agricultural land, displacing communities already living there.
The majority of the wealth comes off the back of the workers. The miners, people working in industry, it’s the same in the US as it’s in Europe: Other sectors are important and even crucial (e.g. food production) but it terms of GDP and capacity to produce goods, industry it’s where it’s at.
Y’all should definitely be giving land back but say Detroit didn’t become an industrial powerhouse because natives were sent on the trail of tears, or southern farmers exploited black slaves. If all wealth the US had was only from those aspects then you’d still be an agrarian society.
Is it possible to come to a synthesis there, not ignoring the atrocities committed but acknowledging the important (not sole) role that skilled European labourers had in building the economic backbone of the US, a backbone without which implementing Utopian dreams would be, well, Utopian?
Because as I see it, if, as soon as someone says, “my grandfather was a miner” and you instantly bring up the one or other atrocity some mining community committed against other people you’re saying “we all would have been better off without you, you people contributed nothing”: It’s way easier to get people to acknowledge past or present wrongs when you leave them their pride in their accomplishments. “All that wealth is stolen” is the exact opposite of that, grandpa didn’t work backbreaking 14-hour shifts for that, without health insurance. He did it so that his kids would have a better life. Was he worse off than a slave on a cotton plantation? No, of course not, but it’s still where the bulk of the wealth comes from. Wealth is not created in proportion to suffering.
I have no idea who the guy is and I probably don’t want to know.
Im going to disengage here. I am one last time going to urge you to read that book. Also just because there seems to be a misunderstanding here let me say that I’m not USian, I’m german.
My gods that’s even worse. Why, then, are you that steeped in reductionist, racialised, US analysis? Activists and theorists over there don’t see the water they’re swimming in, don’t realise how their unwillingness and/or incapacity to think outside of that framework perpetuates it. It allows people to stay depoliticised by engaging in performativism, segregating hair styles becomes more important than material fucking conditions. Idpol is the worst thing that happened to the left since Stalin and the exact opposite of what you should be steeped in, and that’s rapprochement. Which is exactly where I tried to carefully lead you.
Side note do watch Reservation Dogs.