[Marxism] Ted Allen - R.I.P.

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On 4 Feb 2005 at 7:35, eugene plawiuk wrote:




From:                   moderator@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[Cross-posted, with thanks, from Portside.]

Ted Allen, author of 'The Invention of the White Race,' dies at 85

[Ted Allen was an important teacher in my life. I learned things from him
that I never learned anywhere else, and that
changed the way I looked at history and society fundamentally. Our only
solace is that he was able to accomplish a major
goal in his life, the publication of the two Volumes of The Invention of the
White Race, which will endure long after him.
Like W.E.B.DuBois' 'Black Reconstruction,' no one can truly get a grasp on
our past history or future tasks in this country
without studying Ted's contributions. Let us meditate on the impermanence of
all things, not in despair, but to better grasp
the beauty of the present moment and our possibilities for liberation. He
will be missed by many. --Carl Davidson]

In Memoriam

Theodore W. Allen, 85, Author of 'The Invention of the White Race' Verso
Publisher, in Two Volumes

By Jeffrey B. Perry 1 February 2005

Theodore W. Allen, a working class intellectual and activist and author of
the influential two-volume history The Invention
of the White Race(Verso: 1994, 1997), died on January 19, 2005, surrounded by
friends in his apartment at 97 Brooklyn
Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. He was 85.

The cause of death was cancer, which he had battled for 15 years.
Announcement of the death was made by his close
friend Linda Vidinha.

Allen, an ardent opponent of white supremacy, spent much of his last forty
years researching the role of white supremacy
in United States history and examining records of colonial Virginia as he
documented and analyzed the development of the
"white race" in the latter part of the seventeenth century.

His main thesis, that the "white race" developed as a ruling class social
control formation in response to labor unrest as
manifest in Bacon's Rebellion of 1676-77, was first articulated in February
1974 in a talk he delivered at a Union of Radical
Political Economists meeting in New Haven. Versions of that talk were
published in 1975 in Radical America and in
pamphlet form as "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The
Invention of the White Race."

In the 1960s "Ted" Allen significantly influenced the direction of the
student movement and the new left with an article
entitled "Can White Radicals Be Radicalized?" which developed the argument
that white supremacy, reinforced among
European Americans by the "white skin privilege," was the main retardant of
working class consciousness in the United
States and that efforts at radical social change should direct principal
efforts at challenging the system of white supremacy
and urging "repudiation of white skin privilege" by European Americans.

Allen was in the forefront in challenging phenotypical (physical appearance-
based) definitions of race, in challenging
"racism is innate" arguments, in challenging theories that the working class
benefits from white supremacy, in calling
attention to the crucial role of the buffer social control group in racial
oppression, in documenting and analyzing the
development of the "white race" in the latter part of the seventeenth
century, and in clarifying how "this all-class association
of European-Americans held together by 'racial' privileges conferred on
laboring class European-Americans relative to
African- Americans--[has served] as the principal historic guarantor of
ruling-class domination of national life" in the United
States.

These contributions differentiate his work from many writers in the rapidly
growing white race as "a social and cultural
construction" ranks, which his writings helped to spawn. In The Invention of
the White Race Allen focused on Virginia, the
first and pattern- setting continental colony. He emphasized that "When the
first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there
were no white people there" and he added that he found "no instance of the
official use of the word 'white' as a token of
social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691." He
also found, similar to historian Lerone Bennett,
Jr., that throughout most of the seventeenth century conditions for African-
American and European-American laborers and
bond-servants were very similar.

Under such conditions solidarity among the laboring classes reached a peak
during Bacon's Rebellion: the capitol
(Jamestown) was burned; two thousand rebels forced the governor to flee
across the Chesapeake Bay and controlled 6/7
of Virginia's land; and, in the latter stages of the struggle, "foure hundred
English and Negroes in Arms" demanded their
freedom from bondage.

To Allen, the social control problems highlighted by Bacon's
Rebellion "demonstrated beyond question the lack of a
sufficient intermediate stratum to stand between the ruling plantation elite
and the mass of European-American and
African-American laboring people, free and bond." He then detailed how, in
the period after Bacon's Rebellion the white
race was invented as "a bourgeois social control formation in response to
[such] laboring class unrest." He described
systematic ruling class policies, which extended privileges to European
laborers and bond- servants and imposed and
extended harsher disabilities and blocked normal class mobility for African-
Americans.

Thus, for example, when African-Americans were deprived of their long-held
right to vote in Virginia and Governor William
Gooch explained in 1735 that the Virginia Assembly had decided upon this
curtailment of the franchise in order "to fix a
perpetual Brand upon Free Negros & Mulattos," Allen emphasized that this was
not an "unthinking decision"! "Rather, it
was a deliberate act by the plantation bourgeoisie; it proceeded from a
conscious decision in the process of establishing a
system of racial oppression, even though it meant repealing an electoral
principle that had existed in Virginia for more than
a century."

For Allen, "The hallmark, the informing principle, of racial oppression in
its colonial origins and as it has persisted in
subsequent historical contexts, is the reduction of all members of the
oppressed group to one undifferentiated social
status, beneath that of any member of the oppressor group." The key to
understanding racial oppression, he wrote, is the
social control buffer -- that group in society, which helps to control the
poor for the rich.

Under racial oppression in Virginia, any persons of discernible non-European
ancestry in colonial Virginia after Bacon's
Rebellion were denied a role in the social control buffer group, the bulk of
which was made up of working class "whites." In
contrast, Allen explained, in the Caribbean "Mulattos" were included in the
social control group and were promoted into
middle class status.

For him, this was "the key to the understanding the difference between
Virginia ruling-class policy of 'fixing a perpetual
brand' on African-Americans" and "the policy of the West Indian planters of
formally recognizing the middle-class status
'colored' descendant (and other Afro-Caribbeans who earned special merit by
their service to the regime)." The difference
"was rooted in the objective fact that in the West Indies there were too few
laboring-class Europeans to embody an
adequate petit bourgeoisie, while in the continental colonies there were too
many to be accommodated in the ranks of that
class." (In 1676in Virginia, for example, there were approximately
6,000European-American bond-laborers and 2,000
African- American bond-laborers.)

In 1996, on radio station WBAI in New York, Allen discussed the subject
of "American Exceptionalism" and the much-
vaunted "immunity" of the United States to proletarian class-consciousness
and its effects. His explanation for the
relatively low level of class consciousness was that social control in the
United States was guaranteed, not primarily by the
class privileges of a petit bourgeoisie, but by the white- skin privileges of
laboring class whites; that the ruling class co-opts
European-American workers into the buffer social control system against the
interests of the working class to which they
belong; and that the "white race" by its all-class form, conceals the
operation of the ruling class social control system by
providing it with a majoritarian "democratic" facade.

Theodore William Allen, the third child (after a sister Eula May and brother
Tom) of Thomas E. and Almeda Earl Allen was
born into a middle-class family August 23, 1919, in Indianapolis, Indiana.
His father was a sales manager and his mother a
housewife. In 1929 the family moved to Huntington, West Virginia, where, Ted
was, in his words, "proletarianized by the
Great Depression." He attended college for a couple of days after high
school, but, because he didn't believe that setting
encouraged independent thought, he didn't think it was for him and didn't go
back.

At age 17 he joined the American Federation of Musicians (Local 362)and
served as its delegate to the Huntington Central
Labor Union, AFL. He continued work in the trade union movement as a coal
miner in West Virginia for three years until he
was forced to leave because of a back injury. During that period he belonged
to United Mine Worker locals 5426 (Prenter,
West Virginia), 6206 (Gary, West Virginia) where he was an organizer and
Local President, and 4346 (Barrackville,
WestVirginia).

He also was co-organizer of a trade union organizing program for the Marion
County West Virginia Industrial Union
Council, CIO.  In 1938 Allen married Ruth Voithofer, one of eleven children
in a coal-mining family, whom he first met in
1934. Ruth was active in organizing and educational work among mining
families and women and, beginning in 1942, was
a prominent organizer for the United Electrical Workers Union.

They separated in the mid-1940s and Ruth Newell (her name after re-marrying)
died in 1999.In 1948 Ted moved to New
York. He had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and, after coming to New
York, he taught classes in economics at
the Party's Jefferson School at Union Square in Manhattan (1949-56). He was
also active in community, civil rights, trade
union, and student organizing work; he worked in a factory, as a retail
clerk, as a mechanical design draftsman, as an
elevator operator, and as a junior high school math teacher at the Grace
Church School in Greenwich Village.

In the 1950s Ted married Marie Strong, a poet, and became stepfather to her
son, Michael. In the late 1950s the
Communist Party went through major repression and internal struggle and Ted
left the Party in order to help establish a
new organization, the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the
Communist Party (POC). In this period he
wrote a number of economic and political articles on the economic situation
in the United States and he argued that
neither United States nor Latin American workers benefited from imperialism.

In 1962 Marie died tragically and Ted, suffering greatly from her loss,
discontinued work with the POC and traveled to
England and Ireland. By the mid 1960s, back in Brooklyn, and increasingly
affected by the political climate marked by the
growing civil rights movement, struggles for national liberation and
socialism, and the Vietnam War,Allen set about taking
a fresh look at the world and at his former beliefs. Nothing would be
sacred.

Though his formal education had ended with high school, he was a trained
economist, he read widely in history, politics,
literature, and the sciences, and he had a probing and analytical mind -- all
of which would serve him well in the work
ahead. Drawing on the insights of W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction on
the blindspot of America, which he
paraphrased as "the white blindspot," Allen began work on a historical study
of three crises in United States history in
which there were general confrontations of the forces of capital and those
from below -- the crises of The Civil War and
Reconstruction, the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, and the Great Depression of
the 1930s.

His work focused on the role of the theory and practice of white supremacy in
shaping those outcomes. He worked
together with his friend, the late Esther Kusic, and his work influenced
another friend, Noel Ignatin [Ignatiev]. Together,
Ignatin and Allen provided the copy for an influential pamphlet containing
both "White Blindspot," under Ignatin's name,
and Allen's article "Can White Radicals Be Radicalized."Allen argued against
what he referred to as the current consensus
on U.S. labor history -- one which attributed the low level of class
consciousness among American workers to such factors
as the early development of civil liberties, the heterogeneity of the work
force, the "safety valve" of homesteading
opportunities in the West, the ease of social mobility, the relative shortage
of labor, and the early development of "pure
and simple trade unionism."

He emphasized that each of these rationales had to be reinterpreted in terms
of white supremacy, that white supremacy
was reinforced by the white-skin privilege of white workers, and "that the
white-skin privilege does not serve the real
interests of the white workers."The pamphlet, which issued a call to action --
  "to repudiate the white-skin privilege" --, was
published by the SDS-affiliated Radical Education Project and it had
immediate effect on the left. It sharply posed the
issues of how to fight white supremacy and whether, or not, that fight was in
the interest of "white" workers. It also set the
terms of discussion and debate for many activists within SDS.  Allen
developed the analysis in his article into a still
unpublished book-length manuscript entitled "The Kernel and the Meaning"
(1972).

It was then, in 1972, in the course of this work, that he became convinced
that the problems related to white supremacy
couldn't be resolved without a history of the plantation colonies of the 17th
and18th century. His reasoning was clear --
white supremacy still ruled in the United States more than a century after
the abolition of slavery and the reasons for that
had to be explained. He proceeded to search for a structural principle that
was essential to the social order based on slave
labor in the continental plantation colonies and still was essential to late
twentieth-century America's social order based
onwage-labor.  Over the next twenty years Allen did extensive primary
research in colonial Virginia records (and his
unpublished transcripts of this work, with his eye for the conditions of
labor, are another of his important historical
contributions).

In this period he generated other unpublished book- length manuscripts
including "The Genesis of the Chattel-Labor
System in Continental Anglo-America" and "The Peculiar Seed," both of which
dealt with the early 17th-century
development of chattel bond-servitude in Virginia, under which workers could
be bought and sold like property. (This
chattelization of labor was done primarily among European American workers at
first.) When the first volume of The
Invention of the White Race appeared it drew on, and challenged, the work of
some of America's leading colonial
historians including Winthrop Jordan and Edmund S. Morgan.

It offered important theoretical and historical insights in the struggle
against white supremacy when it challenged the two
major arguments which tend to undermine the struggle against white supremacy
in the working class -- the notion that
racism is innate (as suggested by Jordan's "unthinking decision" explanation)
and the notion that European-American
workers benefit from racism (as suggested by Morgan's "there were too few
free poor on hand to matter").

Allen challenged these ideas with his factual presentation and analysis, by
providing a comprehensive alternate
explanation, and by skillfully drawing on examples from Ireland (where a
religion/racial oppression existed under the
Protestant Ascendancy) and the Caribbean (where a different social control
formation was developed based on promotion
of "Mulattos" to petit-bourgeois status).

He concluded that the codifications of the Penal Laws of the Protestant
Ascendancy in Ireland and the slave codes of
white supremacy in continental Anglo-America presented four common defining
characteristics of those two regimes: 1)
declassing legislation, directed at property-holding members of the oppressed
group; 2) the deprivation of civil rights; 3)
the illegalization of literacy; and 4)displacement of family rights and
authorities.

This understanding of racial oppression led him to conclude that a
comparative study of "Protestant Ascendancy" in
Ireland, and "white supremacy" in continental Anglo-America (in both its
colonial and regenerate United States forms)
demonstrates that racial oppression is not dependent upon differences
of "phenotype."

While working on The Invention of the White Race Allen taught as an adjunct
history instructor at Essex County
Community College in Newark, NJ, and worked several years each on the staff
of the Brooklyn Museum, as a postal mail
handler in Jersey City, NJ, and as a librarian at the Brooklyn Public
Library. Constantly at the edge of poverty his
scholarship was remarkable for its dedication and tenacity in the face of
great personal difficulties. During this period his
research in Virginia was facilitated by the generosity of Ed Peeples and his
family in Richmond and his work in Brooklyn
was encouraged by his former companion and close friend Linda Vidinha, her
family and her companion Marsha
Rosenthal, and a number of other close friends and neighbors who supported
his efforts in numerous ways.

For over thirty years his research, writings, and ideas were shared and
discussed with his close friend Jeff Perry. As an
individual, Ted Allen attracted a wide circle of friends. He presented
himself in a humble and homespun way, he was
thoughtful and generous in manner, he had a wonderful sense of humor, and he
took time to undertake many daily acts of
caring and consideration. He was true and loyal to his friends, but always in
a principled and forthright way. In many
respects, he was a model of the true working class intellectual.

He lived what he preached and he was rooted deep in the working class. He
challenged the division between thinkers and
laborers, his work was connected to labor and anti- white-supremacist
activists and actions, he was disciplined and
persistent in his intellectual work, and he was principled in his politics.
His life was dedicated to radical social change and
he remained true to the course.  Allen's The Invention of the White Race, as
well as his other pamphlets, articles, letters,
talks, and unpublished manuscripts on the theory and practice of white
supremacy in United States history have influenced
several generations of anti- white supremacist and labor scholars and
activists.

They have also impacted a wide range of academic fields including history,
sociology, politics, and legal, cultural, and
literary studies. His most recent work includes an almost completed book
length manuscript, "Toward a Revolution in
Labor History" and an article submitted for publication only weeks before his
death which focused on the individual and the
collective and addressed theoretical problems in the socialist movement.

Theodore Allen was pre-deceased by his elder sister Eula May of Harrisonburg,
Va. He is survived by his elder brother
Tom, his siblings' families, his stepson Michael Strong, his companion in
the1970s and close friend Linda Vidinha, and by
many friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers, and people influenced by his
work.

His literary works has been left to his literary executor, Jeffrey B. Perry,
and plans are underway to publish and
disseminate his writing sand to place the Theodore W. Allen Papers with a
repository. A "Theodore W. Allen Scholar
Program" has been established in honor of his "pioneering work" on race and
class as a "politically engaged independent
scholar and public intellectual."

That program, under the auspices of the Center for Working Class Life of the
Economics Department of the State
University of New York, StonyBrook, 11794-4384, 631-632-7536 (Michael Zweig,
Director), will support scholarship and
public presentations exploring the intersections of race and class.

Tax-deductible contributions to the Fund may be made out to "Stony Brook
Foundation" and marked "for Theodore William
Allen Scholar Program."Two commemorative events are being scheduled in Ted
Allen's memory. In the early spring, his
ashes (as per his request) will be spread over that area "three miles up
country" from West Point, Virginia where the "foure
hundred English and Negroes in Arms" demanded their freedom in 1676.

The second activity, planned for June 18, 2005, from 1 to 4 p.m. in the
community auditorium of the Brooklyn Public
Library, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, will commemorate Ted's life and work and
include testimony from family and friends
who desire to speak on his life, work, and influence.  A two-part "Summary of
the Argument of 'The Invention of the White
Race'" by Theodore W. Allen can be found in the electronic journal C-Logic on
the internet at

http://eserver.org/clogic/1-2/allen.html

http://eserver.org/clogic/1-2/allen2.html



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