Re: Common Dreams xenophobia

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Hartmann's also big on how the furriners are buying up 'murica.
>
> I'm just reading Peter Kwong & Dusanka Miscevic's Chinese America, a
> history of the Chinese in the US. It's distressing to be reminded
> once again how anti-Chinese agitation was practically the founding
> act of the US labor movement. This toxic stuff has a long history.
>
> Doug

It also received the benediction of Marxists at one point:

While the Sorge faction held the black struggle at arm's length, they at
least gave lip service to it. No such concessions were made to Chinese
workers whom they treated as outright enemies of the white worker.
Woodhull's group took a strong stand against immigration bans, but the
"orthodox" Marxists caved in completely to white prejudice. Unfortunately
Karl Marx was little help in standing up to bigotry, since he regarded
Asians as locked in "hereditary stupidity" and the unproductive Asiatic
Mode of Production, an economic theory that had no basis in fact. Marx also
warned about the importation of Chinese workers as "rabble" who could
"depress wages."

At the NYC branch of Sorge's section, a San Francisco worker addressed his
comrades:

"The white working-men see and feel daily the effects of the Chinese labor
in that State. We cannot only perceive how it affects us, but know
assuredly that it will seriously affect the destiny of the working classes
of this country. The Chinese have driven out of employment thousands of
white men, women, girls and boys.... They are in all branches of the
manufacturing business, and it is only a matter of time when they will
monopolize all branches of industry; as it is impossible for white men to
exist on the same amount and sort of food Chinamen seem to thrive upon."

The Yankees refused to go along with the anti-Chinese xenophobia and viewed
the Chinese as brothers and sisters in struggle. Woodhull wrote:

"The population of the country is forty millions. If the Chinese should at
the rate of five thousand a week, even that figure will nothing near equal
the present ratio of the Irish and German immigration, and it would a
hundred and fifty years to import forty millions. . . The economical idea
of immigration is that every new comer is a producer; he directly
contributes to the wealth of the community; he will not consume all that
produces. . . As for any immediate influence of John Chinaman on the labor
market and rate of wages that is an impossibility. The workingmen of New
York protest against two or three hundred foreigners. What injury can
accrue to them?"

Sorge's group picked up a new recruit in 1872, an English immigrant and
cigarmaker named Samuel Gompers. Gompers was impressed with the
"working-class" and trade union tilt of the German-American followers of
Marx, while regarding the Woodhull section as "dominated by a brilliant
group of faddists, reformers, and sensation-loving spirits." He was as
repelled by them as some old leftists were repelled by the 1960s New
Leftists. Gompers was tutored by Ferdinand Laurell, a fellow cigarmaker who
he met at the Manhattan Lower East Side factory where both were employed.
Laurell initiated him into the profound scientific socialism of the
Communist Manifesto and placed special emphasis on the centrality of the
trade unions. "Study your union card, Sam, Laurell said, "and if the idea
doesn't square with that, it ain't true."

What gradually happened is that Gompers let the revolutionary socialism
fall by the wayside while allowing trade union fundamentalism to take
charge, including the virulent racism of the time. As Gompers climbed the
ladder into officialdom, he found that anti-Chinese racism gave him a foot
up. He endorsed the labeling of cigar boxes as made by white men, to be
"distinguished from those made by the Chinese." After Gompers attained the
AFL presidency, women, ethnic minorities, African Americans and those who
did unskilled work found themselves without a friend in organized labor.
The Bolshevik revolution inspired a new Communist movement in the US 50
years later, which began to remedy this injustice. The Cold War reversed
this progress.

full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/woodhull.htm

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