White supremacy shapes every aspect of imperialism and must be understood from a dialectical perspective if socialism is to ever become a possibility in the United States.
“White supremacy protects Joe Biden like a prison guard protects the warden.”
It is all too easy to forget that the birth of the United States is rooted in the perfection of white supremacy. A new generation of activists more friendly to the concept of socialism has not yet grasped the centrality of white supremacy in the fabric of U.S. society. Many of the most popular so-called “left” media analysts and activists hold the view that criticism of white supremacy is a “cultural issue” and one that divides workers amongst themselves. Failure to acknowledge white supremacy, however, only guarantees political defeat for the entire working class. White supremacy shapes every aspect of imperialism and must be understood from a dialectical perspective if socialism is to ever become a possibility in the United States.
Dialectical materialism is the most important tool in the scientific method of Marxism. Dialectical materialism assumes that all phenomena are comprised of contradictions or opposing forces which remain in a state of constant motion or change until they die and bring about a completely new set of contradictions, or what Marx called the “negation of the negation.” A principle premise of dialectical materialism is that ideas emerge from material reality. In class society, the contradictions of society are shaped by the struggle between contending classes bound together by mechanisms of exploitation and torn apart by their incompatible interests. White supremacy is a systemic outgrowth of U.S. imperialism and one that Malcolm X studied from the lens of dialectical materialism when he remarked that “you can’t have capitalism without racism.”
“Failure to acknowledge white supremacy, however, only guarantees political defeat for the entire working class.”
Capitalism in the United States is in its late stages, which is another way of saying that the development of capitalism has reached its limits. The stage of imperialism is driven by the concentration of monopolies and the placement of finance capital at the vanguard of capitalist development. Finance capital relies principally on war and austerity to ensure that the contradiction between labor and capital does not turn into its opposite. Decrepit conditions for workers have driven the production process into a state of stagnation and periodically produces mega-crises with ever more frequency. The advancement of debt and precarity which characterizes the late stages of capitalism is heavily guarded by the imperialist state, which acts as the organized and armed guard of white supremacy.
Two recent developments help us understand just how the dialectics of white supremacy operate to maintain social control amid the unprecedented crisis currently afflicting U.S. imperialism. The first is Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and the rape allegation currently plaguing it. The second is the U.S.’ continued obsession with the DPRK’s most well-known political leader, Kim Jong-Un, and the week-long rumor that he was either sick or dead. In both developments, white supremacy has been applied by U.S. imperialism in the most effective and insidious of ways to stifle political debate and socialist consciousness.
“Finance capital relies principally on war and austerity to ensure that the contradiction between labor and capital does not turn into its opposite.”
Joe Biden has arguably become the most protected politician of the ruling class. While neither the left nor the corporate media are shy in criticizing President Donald Trump as racist or a sexist, Joe Biden has spent over a year lying about his political record without consequence. Joe Biden is a segregationist and an architect in the mass incarceration regime. He also faces allegations of sexual harassment from at least eight women. This includes Tara Reade, a former staffer of Joe Biden who publicly came out with her story of being raped by her former employer in late March.
Yet Joe Biden remains not just a viable candidate in the 2020 election, but a favorite among Democrats as well. White supremacy protects Joe Biden like a prison guard protects the warden. Joe Biden’s commitment to white supremacy and its rich benefactors ensures that the plight of Black Americans behind prison walls or murdered by national security state forces brings no trouble to his political endeavors. In the eyes of Biden and his corporate masters, Black workers are nothing but a profitable exploited class at best and a domestic example of the wretched of the earth. Joe Biden is not merely a privileged white male; he is the preferred kind of white supremacist for the Democratic Party. No matter how much Biden fumbles his words and talks down to the working class majority, the Democratic Party’s financiers can count on him to keep key political blocs such as the Black misleadership class obedient to the aims of the Empire.
“Joe Biden is a segregationist and an architect in the mass incarceration regime.”
White supremacy has bolstered Biden’s political longevity from the potentially fatal consequences of his long history of sexual assault toward women. White feminism has always been more interested in lynching Black American males, tokenizing Black women, and elevating white women to an equal standing within the capitalist ruling class than in the cause of liberation. The Democratic Party has for the last forty years served as a political home for white feminism. This is why #MeToo movement organizations such as Times Up has rejected Tara Reade’s case and why prominent women such as Stacy Abrams, Elizabeth Warren, and Gretchen Whitmer have stated that they “believe” Joe Biden when only two months ago they staunchly promoted the slogan “believe all women.” These women are servants of the oligarchs first and women second. They understand that their careers in the Democratic party would be effectively over if they held Biden to the same standard as Donald Trump or Brett Kavanaugh.
White supremacy is more than just a powerful actor within the sphere of U.S. politics. The dehumanization of Black Americans and the oppressed that undergirds Biden’s entire career possesses a global expression in the imperialist endeavors of the military state. Kim Jong-Un, the chairman of the Korean Workers Party in the DPRK, is a prime target of white supremacy on the global stage. For one week beginning the last weekend of April, both Twitter and the corporate media participated in not-stop speculation about Kim Jong-Un’s possible death. No evidence was presented to verify the claim, but evidence is never needed when the DPRK or any other target of imperialism is involved. The people of the DPRK and its leadership are not human in the eyes of the ruling class and thus possess no rights that the U.S. imperial state is bound to respect—not even the right to exist.
“Kim Jong-Un is a prime target of white supremacy on the global stage.”
Kim Jong-Un’s death rumor exposed the ugliest face of U.S.-led white supremacy. Speculation of Kim Jong-Un’s death came with the routine characterizations of the KWP leader as a vicious monarch at the head of an equally vicious surveillance regime. The Washington Post kept the rumor going up until a few hours before the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released photos of Kim Jong-Un attending the grand opening of a fertilizer factory. Of course, the corporate media minimized the fact that Kim Jong-Un had been sending messages to state leaders in Russia and Syria throughout the week. White supremacy is not a fact-based ideology or system. It is a system designed to retain the power of a settler colonial nation and the class that sits atop of its throne.
The DPRK is perhaps the most vilified society on earth because it has never bowed to the dictates of imperialism. After having three quarters of Pyongyang annihilated and a large section of the population rendered homeless during the U.S. invasion of Korea from 1950-1953, the people of Korea developed a strong centralized state to rebuild society. Neither U.S. sanctions nor tens of thousands of troops stationed in South Korea has made any headway in overthrowing the DPRK. In fact, the DPRK’s socialist economy has experienced growth in recent years and shows no signs of collapse beyond the falsehoods presented in the U.S. and Western corporate media. Furthermore, economic resilience has been combined with military prowess and a nuclear capacity that makes the U.S. military state and its allies think twice before attempting a direct confrontation with the DPRK.
“White supremacy is a system designed to retain the power of a settler colonial nation and the class that sits atop of its throne.”
Kim Jong-Un and Joe Biden represent opposing forces of white supremacy’s murderous dialectic. On the one hand, white supremacy protects and empowers Joe Biden and the rest of the imperialist state to commit war crimes and destroy the lives of countless people with impunity. On the other, white supremacy dehumanizes an entire nation of people in the DPRK to justify war and capitalist penetration. This dialectic mobilizes white Americans and anyone else convinced of the U.S.’ inherent superiority to remain ignorant of or become willing participants in the ongoing project to overthrow the last remaining socialist and self-determined states abroad. And protecting Joe Biden regardless of how putrid he may be is a necessity under a system of white supremacy that cannot remain legitimate under the leadership of Donald Trump alone. In the United States, white supremacy and imperialism must be governed by two-wings to fly even if both of those wings lead to the same destination.
Dialectical materialism is first and foremost a study of how the contradictions of a given society ultimately lead to profound social transformations that produce new contradictions and arrangements. The dialectics of white supremacy are tethered to the crisis of legitimacy facing the U.S. imperialist state. War and austerity become less attractive within the context of a pandemic-induced economic crisis. Racist lies about the DPRK and the racist coverup of Joe Biden’s political record speak for themselves. The corporate media and Congress have glaringly low approval ratings and at least half of the Sanders camp of the Democratic Party is likely to reject Biden’s campaign in November. Conditions are ripe for a mass movement to emerge that places the questions of class struggle and self-determination in command of politics. More than an acknowledgement, this moment requires that left activists, intellectuals, and organizers prepare for a struggle against any force that refuses to fight for the lives of oppressed peoples targeted by the murderous dialectics of white supremacy.
Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He and Roberto Sirvent are co-authors of the book entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News--From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Skyhorse Publishing). He can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @spiritofho, and on Youtube at The Left Lens with Danny Haiphong.
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