[PEN-L:29949] national question again

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

>>I posted to articles by Jim Blaut to Lou's list but they haven't showed up
probably because they are too long, so I've put them on the A-List and they
can be accessed on the website:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2002-August/date.html

The first essay, "The Theory of National Minorities," was published as
Chapter 5 in J. M. Blaut, *The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory
of Nationalism*(London: Zed Books, 1987, copyright J.M. Blaut).  If you
re-transmit or copy this text, please indicate the author, title, and
publisher of the volume from which it has been extracted. The essay was
first published (in slightly different form) in Monthly Review in 1977,
with the title "Are Puerto Ricans a National Minority?" Spanish and Italian
translations have been published (paper copies on request).

THE THEORY OF NATIONAL MINORITIES

A. INTRODUCTION

  Some sectors of the North american Left are convinced that Puerto Ricans
in the United States do not belong to the Puerto Rican nation; that this
community is merely a 'national minority' -- an ethnic subdivision of a
different nation, the United States. This national-minority theory bears
some resemblance to the old idea of the 'melting pot', or at least to its
liberal variant ('Puerto Rican-Americans', 'ethnic heritage', 'minority
rights', etc.), but there is one crucial difference. The national-minority
theory is said to be grounded in Marxism, and specifically in a doctrine
derived from a 1913 essay by Stalin, 'Marxism and the National Question'.1
In essence, the argument is simple. Stalin listed the attributes which, in
his opinion, an ethnic group must possess to qualify as a nation. This was
Stalin's famous 'definition of the nation', which became the orthodox
Marxist concept of the nation, accepted by most Marxists, Stalinists and
non-Stalinists alike, down to recent times. Complementing the concept of
'nation' was the concept of 'national minority', a term which designated
>>ethnic communities that failed to qualify as nations. <<

end of quote



Reply or rather comment.


In my opinion the question of national minorities as a social category was definitively solved or articulated definitively well three decades ago. The African American people are not an ethnic community. Nor are the African American people a nation or have ever been a nation.

The concept of 'national minority' is not a term, which designated ethnic communities that failed to qualify as nations.

The concept of national-minority is a designation that codify or rather describes the people who immigrant or migrate from a colony to the imperial center. When the Irish worker immigrates to England he is an Irish national minority.

When the Irish worker immigrates to America he is an Irish minority, because the term national minority has a specific political and economic dimension. These dimensions are inexplicably bound with the imperial center and the area it colonizes.

When the African American worker and dirt farmers migrated from the historic center of the slave oligarchy they are referred to as African American or Negro National minorities in the imperial center of the North of the United States of North America.

In America the issue is complicated because of the ideology of race, which has no way to explain the Anglo-American national minority. That is the white workers and dirt farmers who migrated from the historic center of the slave oligarchy they to the imperial center of the North of the United States of North America. There are a lot of ugly terms invented to explain away the imperial colonization of the old slave centers and acknowledge the Deep South white masses in the imperial North. Country bumpkin, white trash, trailer park trash, etc.

The moment this simple economic and political relationship is rationally explained the whole edifice of US imperialism is exposed.

There are of course what is referred to as national groups and advanced national groups, whose evolution occurred within the framework of a conquering state or emerging state structure that excludes such groups as dominating factors in the states economic and political development. The term multi-national state refers to this general development.

The state of the Unites States of North America is a multi-national state. This multi-national state is the basic organ of violence and repression - economic exploitation and political subjugation, in the hands of the Anglo-American imperialist bourgeoisie. This state arose from and was based on the consolidation of the original separate 13 colonies.

The USNA is a multinational state, composed of the imperialist oppressor nation, the Anglo American nation; its direct colonies: the nation in the South that arose on the bases of slave based commodity production and Puerto Rico; the oppressed Southwest region and the Philippines, in fact a direct colony with a separated sham state tied openly and directly to the USNA imperialist. In addition this multi-national state exercises its dictatorship over a number of peoples, including the Mexican national minority, the Indian or rather Native Bands, the Alaskan Eskimos, the Aleutian and Hawaiian peoples. This state has reduced to dependencies many Islands.

The Puerto-Ricans who move to Detroit are referred to as Puerto-Ricans national minorities because they are no longer living in Puerto-Rico but in fact immigrated to Detroit. The national minority designation means they have moved to the imperial center in that colonized the area from which they come.

Political categories are meant to clarify - more than less, a material relationship. All of this is old hat, more than less defeated in the Marxist movement in America, in favor of various theories of race.

If I were to write that the African American masses are fundamentally more European than African and this phenomenon consolidated itself, between roughly 1890 and 1940 and then emerged as an obvious fact with the completion of the fundamental mechanization of agriculture, I would be run out of the Marxist movement because such a conception destroys race theory by separating the color factor from the ideology of race.

I am not saying such because to point out the obvious will result in one being forced to wear the madcap of the dunce and I do not want everyone to recognize me for the fool I am. Rather, it is easier for me to smile at the "Hispanic writer(s)" who have no problem speaking of the "black Anglo's" in America.

But, then again this question have been debated by generations of Marxist and observed and recorded over a long period of time. I think I might be among a handful of people left who keep the original Comintern documents (the 1928 and 1930 Resolutions on the Negro Question) on my desk, along with all of Lenin's major writing on this question and all the major writings of the other guy - who was in fact a national minority. UUUUUUUmmmmmmmmm:)

The black people who are indigenousness to American development are not a race, but a people. To say they are a new people increasingly Eur.., unique - separates the color factor in history from the authentic Marxist conception of race. Then again the Negro people are a new people on earth and as African American are utterly Euro... uuhhhh different or rather unique.

It's like don't the music tell anyone anything. Not African music or European music but rather American music, but for now lets just stick with the black race and white race.  Wait a minute . . . don't I supposed to be the one who is the reductionist? Give me back my hat.


Melvin P.