A white communist envisioned ‘white privilege’ as the key to waging U.S. ‘revolutionary struggle’

Special to WorldTribune.com, April 5, 2023

Corporate WATCH

Commentary by Joe Schaeffer

Former President Donald Trump held his first 2024 campaign rally March 25 in Waco, Texas. Trump began his address before a large audience by vowing to continue his and his supporters’ 7-year battle against the forces who are “trying to destroy America.”

“We’ve been the ones in this fight standing up to the globalists, and standing up to the Marxists, and communists. That’s what they are. We don’t even talk about the socialists anymore. The train left that station a long time ago.”

Theodore W. Allen

Do Americans truly understand how much of their culture and society has been co-opted by hardcore communist ideology? The following example is meant to enlighten. It is not meant to merely point out that the man who coined a popular leftist phrase today was a Marxist but rather that the phrase itself, and the agenda behind it, is a key means to carrying out the communist revolution that aims to overthrow the American republic.

Theodore W. Allen is credited with coming up with the loaded phrase “white privilege.” Who was Allen? From a radical leftist website:

Theodore W. Allen was… a self-avowed Marxist, a historical materialist who believed that class struggle was the driving force of history. Starting in the 1960s, Allen began an important 40-years-long study and reflection on white supremacy, racial oppression, and the class struggle in American history. In this he was informed by the civil rights, anti-colonial, and national liberation struggles; by his prior experience as a communist, a labor activist, and a student of history; and by close readings of Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction and Marxian political economics.

Allen died in 2005 at the age of 85. Kyle Shideler, writing at The American Mind, elaborated on Allen’s beliefs:

Allen was a communist party member, a labor organizer, and eventually a researcher and teacher on labor organizing at the Communist Party-founded Jefferson School of Social Science.

From his experience working to educate the working class about Communism, and drawing from the work of W.E.B. Du Bios, Allen became convinced that the “white working class” would never be compelled to rebel as long as they accepted the “white-skin privilege” which the capitalist system had evolved as an artificial but deeply-rooted method of control to divide the white working class from the black working class, preventing a united proletariat.

This is a crucial point, for it illustrates that destroying white people’s sense of “whiteness” in the pursuit of a higher communist revolution is the driving force behind the racial agitation one sees today emanating from the radical Left. In a 1973 speech, Allen explained:

Socialist revolution is not possible where the majority of the workers do not want it and workers who want white-skin privileges do not want socialism. God knows, our experience at repudiation is all too limited, but like a non-swimmer in deep water we have to begin to move and learn to swim by saving our lives. A proletarian party not based on this principle cannot grow, survive and win in this country.

An excerpt from White Blindspot, a treatise Allen co-authored with fellow Marxist radical Noel Ignatiev, shows how truly insane the authentic meaning of the term “white privilege” is:

“The U.S. ruling class has made a deal with the misleaders of American labor and through them with the masses of white workers. The terms of the deal… are these: you white workers help us conquer the world and enslave the non-white majority of the earth’s laboring force and we will repay you with a monopoly of the skilled jobs, we will cushion you against the most severe shocks of the economic cycle, provide you with health and education facilities superior to those of the non-white population, grant you the freedom to spend your money and leisure time as you wish without social restrictions, enable you on occasion to promote one of your number out of the ranks of the laboring class, and in general confer on you the material and spiritual privileges befitting your white skin.”

This is the “enemy of the people” language of dehumanization so central to Soviet-style communism, and the would-be Red tyrants of America learned it well. As Joseph Stalin said as he called for the annihilation of the land-owning kulak farmers in 1929:

Now, the expropriation of the kulaks is an integral part of the formation and development of the collective farms. Consequently it is now ridiculous and foolish to discourse on the expropriation of the kulaks. You do not lament the loss of the hair of one who has been beheaded.

Isn’t it comforting to know you’ll be liquidated for “crimes against the proletariat” and not just because of the color of your skin?

Allen and Ignatiev emphasized the communist duty to wage this fight against whiteness as the “first task” for those waging the revolutionary struggle:

Communists (individually this is the task primarily of white communists, although collectively it is the responsibility of the whole party) must go to the white workers and say frankly: you must renounce the privileges you now hold, must join the Negro, Puerto Rican and other colored workers in fighting white supremacy, must make this the first, immediate and most urgent task of the entire working class, in exchange for which you, together with the rest of the workers will receive all the benefits which are sure to come from one working class (of several colors) fighting together.

Mike Gonzalez and Jonathan Butcher, writing for Law & Liberty in 2021, reveal Ignatiev had a future U.S. president as a fan:

The intellectual who synthesized this type of thinking for all eternity was Noel Ignatiev, who influenced the works of Roediger, CRT trainer Robin DiAngelo, and even Bill Clinton, who praised Ignatiev’s writings.

Again, it must be stressed that destroying a “bourgeois” sense of “whiteness” was about furthering communist revolution, and not racial destruction per se:

Ignatiev’s signature ideas were the need to “abolish the white race by any means necessary,” (the last clause a nod to the Caribbean Marxist Frantz Fanon) and the idea that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

By that, Ignatiev did not actually mean the mass genocide of whites, but to squeeze all the privilege out of whiteness. “Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and white skin would have no more social significance than big feet,” he wrote. Indeed, feelings of white superiority were, according to Ignatiev, “bourgeois poison aimed primarily at the white workers.”

To Ignatiev, there is “only one struggle, the proletarian class struggle, in which the rejection by white workers of white supremacist ideas and practices is crucial to the emergence of the proletariat as a revolutionary class.”

Fighting “white supremacy” equals implementing the worldwide communist revolution:

Ignatiev wrote that white superiority “is a crime not merely against non-whites, but against the entire proletariat.” Its elimination, therefore, certainly qualifies as one of the class demands of the entire working class. In fact, considering the role that this vile practice has historically played in holding back the struggle of the American working class, the fight against white supremacy becomes the central immediate task of the entire working class…. As soon as white supremacy is eliminated as a force within the working class, the decks will be cleared for action by the entire class against its enemy.

When Democrats hold congressional hearings on “Confronting White Supremacy,” as they did when they controlled the House in 2019, they are furthering the cause of communist revolution. When Democrat and Republican establishment politicians parrot the communist party line on the monstrous evil of “white supremacy,” they bring Marxist social upheaval one step closer to fruition.

To dismiss Allen as a relic is to completely misunderstand what is going on in America today. His spirit is more alive than ever within the ruling institutions of the elite.


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