The Benignimizer

Following up on my earlier post on the facts of immigration, lets examine the nativists. (Again, this is a reworked version of something I wrote a couple months ago. It will be followed, when I get around to it, by a new post on the role of the Democrats.)

China Mieville, on why the categories of ‘fascism’ and ‘vigilantism’ are essentially identical under capitalism:

Pashukanis [a Russian Marxist legal theorist of the 1920s first forced to recant and then murdered under Stalinism] argues that the logic of the commodity form is the logic of the legal form. Chris Arthur does an excellent job of expressing this complex relation:

Pashukanis argues that the juridical element in the regulation of human conduct enters where the isolation and opposition of interests begins. He goes on to tie this closely to the emergence of the commodity form in mediating material exchanges. His basic materialist strategy is to correlate commodity exchange with the time at which man becomes seen as a legal personality - the bearer of rights (as opposed to
customary privileges)… this is explicable in terms of the conceptual linkages
which obtain between the sphere of commodity exchange and the form of law.
The nature of the legal superstructure is a fitting one for this mode of production. For production to be carried on as production of commodities, suitable ways of
conceiving social relations, and the relations of men to their products, have to be found, and are found in the form of law…

As the product of labour takes on the commodity form and becomes a bearer of value, people acquire the quality of legal subjects with rights…

For Pashukanis, legal forms regulate relationship between autonomous subjects ‘ it is the subject that is the ‘cell-form’ of the legal system… the basic element in legal regulation is contestation – two sides defending their rights. In deliberately paradoxical fashion he says that historically law starts from a law-suit.

Pashukanis´s argument is that in commodity exchange, each commodity must be the private property of its owner, freely given in return for the other. In their fundamental form, commodities exchange at a rate determined by their exchange value, not because of some external reason or because one party to the exchange demands it. Therefore, each agent in the exchange must be i) and owner of private property, and ii) formally equal to the other agent(s). Without these conditions, hat occurred would not be commodity exchange. The legal form is the necessary form taken by the relation between these formally equal owners of exchange values…

Violence – coercion – is at the heart of the commodity form, and thus the contract. For a commodity meaningfully to be ‘mine-not-yours’ – which is, after all, central to the fact that it is a commodity to be exchanged – some forceful capabilities are implied. If there were nothing to defend its ‘mine-ness,’ there would be nothing to stop it becoming ‘yours’, and then it would no longer be a commodity, as I would not
be exchanging it. Coercion is implicit… taking the analysis from the individual to the social level, force must be a general condition for the maintenance of commodity
relations.

The reason is plain enough. Existing property relations [ie., not yet productive relations] systematically separate producers from the objects of their need, on an everyday and continuous basis. In commodity production, ‘need’ and ‘right’ stand opposed… The motive to trespass, steal, invade, oppress, rob and generally transgress property right is continually recreated through the pressure of material need. Hence this system of social production relations generates a permanent and general requirement for means of ´defence´, i.e. for means of violence and its organization…

In other words… coercion backed by force is implied in a generalized form and ‘addressed by one person to another’ – ie. By all owners of commodities to all other owners of commodities – in the very nature of commodity exchange and production…

[Pashukanis noted:]

In our time of intensified revolutionary struggle we can observe how the official apparatus of the bourgeois state recedes into the background in comparison with the ‘voluntary guards’ of the fascists and their ilk. This once more shows that when social equilibrium is disrupted it then ‘seeks salvation’, not by creation of ‘an authority standing above classes’, but by the maximum pressure of the forces of the struggling classes…

Thus there is nothing inevitable about the particular form of the bourgeois state… that very state will seek alternative, altogether less abstract methods to achieve its ends, without ceasing to be a capitalist state: it is the ‘official apparatus’ that recedes, not the state itself, which in this instance is the very body ‘seeking salvation’ through recourse to fascism…

(Between Equal Rights, pp. 78, 126-7, 125-6 [section on fascism moved to the end to fit the context; bracket inserts in Mieville are mine, but in the authors he quotes are his])

The anti-immigrant movement in the U.S. is a complicated one. It has three major components, all connected to a lesser or greater degree; a network of rich donor-funded foundations and lobby groups which have been around for decades, a number of small neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups which have also been around for decades, and a more recent and more popular grassroots network, with its roots in California in the 1990s and a rise to prominance with the appearance of the Minutemen in 2005. This has in turn been expressed in local and national electoral politics by a number of figures and pieces of legislation, most notably the 1994 California Proposition 187 and the 2005 Sensenbrenner Bill, HR 4437.

Foundations and lobbyists in Washington

In Washington, John Tanton has been the key behind-the-scenes anti-immigrant figure. According to the the Southern Poverty Law Center - a systematically alarmist and firmly liberal source but reliable and in fact invaluable for detailed factual information - writing in 2002 before the appearance of the Minutemen,

A four-month investigation by the Intelligence Report, conducted in the
aftermath of the September terrorist attacks, found that the appearance of an
array of groups with large membership bases is nothing more than a mirage. In
fact, the vast majority of American anti-immigration groups — more than a dozen
in all — were either formed, led, or in other ways made possible through
Tanton's efforts. The principal funding arm of the movement, U.S. Inc., is a
Tanton creation, and millions of dollars in financing comes from just a few of
his allies, far-right foundations like those controlled by the family of Richard
Mellon Scaife.

Those financers, the article goes on to mention, have included the Pioneer Fund, the notorious source of most of the money used for eugenicist and racist research in the U.S. since the Second World War. Groups founded, controlled and/or largely funded by Tanton and U.S Inc. include (but are not limited to!) the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the 21st Century Fund, Population-Environment Balance, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, NumbersUSA, The Social Contract Press (which publishes The Camp of the Saints), and Pro English. Several of these groups, in turn, have collaborated with various openly racist organizations, particularly the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens.

Tanton and his lobby groups work closely with Congressman Tom Tancredo, head of the 100+ member ‘Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus.' Tancredo believes that criminal immigrants are 'coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren,' that the West is engaged in a 'clash of civilizations,' and that 'If Western civilization succumbs to the siren song of multiculturalism... we're finished.' Tancredo is the most prominent spokesperson of a large, fanatically anti-immigrant minority in the Republican party, a minority which had sufficient influence to get the Sensenbrenner bill through the House but not enough to get it through the Senate, and to which Bush and the biggest corporate backers of the party are generally opposed.

California and grassroots nativism

As Mike Davis outlines in part one of No One Is Illegal, the history of populist vigilante anti-immigrant movements in the western United States, and particularly California, goes back to the nineteenth century, at times involving fights between thousands of demonstrators (e.g. in LA between the KKK and the IWW in 1919-23 and in the California fields between the CPUSA and CIO and the American Legion and Associated Farmers in the mid-30s). The latest incarnation can be traced back to the 1994 battle in California over the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, ¨Save Our State,¨ which was passed but defeated in court. The most prominent movement warrior for Prop 187 was Barbara Coe, a woman who remains prominent in the anti-immigrant movement. She is the head of the ‘California Coalition for Immigration Reform’, a major recipient of Tanton funds. She regularly refers to Mexican immigrants as ‘savages’.

The Minutemen and their spin-offs are a somewhat newer phenomenon, although most of their key activists have fought earlier battles in California. They appeared on the scene in April 2005 with promises to launch ‘citizen patrols’ of the border, and received a burst of media attention, but quickly split. The two largest remnants are now headed by Chris Simcox and Jim Gilchrist. Simcox, a regular Fox News commentator, heads the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. He believes that Mexican immigrants are "trashing their neighborhoods, refusing to assimilate, standing on street corners, jeering at little girls walking on their way to school." Gilchrist runs the Minuteman Project. He has said that "Illegal immigrants will destroy this country," and that "every time a Mexican flag is planted on American soil, it is a declaration of war." Probably the most active group since late 2005, however, has been ‘Save Our State’, named after Prop 187 though with no other connection, and run by Joe Turner, who (although he does not self-identify as white separatist) believes that "just because one believes in white separatism, that does not make them a racist." It primarily organizes protests at locations away from the border, such as day laborer meeting points. The Minutemen, etc, of course attend these, and organize some of their own.

The Minutemen and their various spin-offs and imitators are closely linked to the Washington nativists. Coe, with her Tanton connections, regularly appears at demonstrations; at one conference in Las Vegas in 2005, the featured speakers included Coe, Tancredo, and Simcox; several Republican House members have actually patrolled with the Minutemen. The Minutemen have been endorsed by Texas Governor Rick Perry and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and have received some cooperation from the Border Patrol, although Bush has denounced them as vigilantes. The Democratic governors of New Mexico and Arizona, Bill Richardson and Janet Napolitano, have both declared "states of emergency" on the border, providing cover to the Minutemen, although neither has directly endorsed the project. Nevertheless, the Minutemen are something new. However, there is a substantial difference.

The social character of the Minutemen and friends

According to the SPLC report on Tanton,

The vast majority of funding for most of these groups comes from just a handful of donors, many of them large, right-wing foundations.

• In 2000, the latest year for which tax returns are available, Vinson's American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF) received 90% of its funding from just three contributors.
  
• Five contributions accounted for 82% of U.S. Inc.'s income in the same year.
  
• Fifty-eight percent of FAIR's 2000 donations were provided by six donors.
  
• Fourteen donors account for 94% of the Center for Immigration Studies income for that year.

As a leaked memo from a now-defunct Tanton-founded group, Witan, said, these groups "have spent some time, money and effort trying to build a membership for purposes of political validity and power... but this has not been a major emphasis." These are lobby groups like any other, not a genuine movement (alone). The Minutemen and company have operated with an explicitly opposite framework. Save Our State´s website states:

Currently, the anti-illegal immigration movement is trapped in the Old Paradigm that primarily consists of apathy, inaction and reaction. The result is a disjointed movement, ineffective and mired, barely functioning in a defensive and reactionary posture.

Save Our State is committed to creating a New Paradigm, one that consists of one singular tenet: the transference of pain. Our enemies in the open borders lobby are not going to change their policies or behavior unless we make it painful for them to continue propagating their anti-American agenda.

We are dedicated to utilizing aggressive activism to accomplish our objectives. We believe in taking the fight to our opponents, fighting the battles on our terms and defining the language of the debate.

Mike Davis summarizes the research on the social roots of vigilantism:

In his study ofTampa, Ingalls finds a fundamental continuity of elite control: "vigilantes take the law into their own hands to reinforce existing power relationships, not to subvert them... Whether the particular target was a black prisoner, a union organizer, a political radical, or a common criminal, extralegal violence was supposed to preserve the status quo." More ponderously, Ray Abrahams, who looks at vigilante groups as an international phenomenon, concludes that "vigilantism is rarely simply a popular response to the failure of due legal process to deal with breaches of the law. 'The people' and 'the community' are, on inspection, complex concepts, and the populism of much vigilante rhetoric conceals... a self-satisfied elitism." Richard Brown, in an earlier study of vigilantism on the frontier, argued that "again and again, it was the most eminent local community leaders who headed vigilante movements... "

(No One Is Illegal, p. 19)

There also doesn't appear to have been any systematic study of the Minutemen specifically, but their are indications that the same applies. A New York Minuteman describes the group as made up of "middle-class people who are sick to death." This should be taken with a grain of salt, since almost everyone in the U.S. claims to be middle class, but various reports do seem to back it up. It´s also hard even to give an estimate of the number of people involved in groups like the Minutemen that isn´t a sheer guess, but they´ve certainly been much more active than earlier anti-immigrant groups. At demonstrations, they rarely bring out more than a few score people and are generally outnumbered by counterprotesters, but demonstrations have been frequent and widespread since 2005. They are closely associated with right-wing pundits with large followings, like Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, and Michelle Malkin, all of whom have recently turned from the disastrous war in Iraq to immigration as a source of red meat for their listeners. And their ability to force into the open tensions within the Republican party demonstrates a genuine independence that their Washington backers have lacked. Although public opinion on the whole has actually gotten relatively more friendly to immigrants in the last few years, polarization has been sharp.

Fascism in the U.S.

Though the leaders all disavow racism, the Minuteman-related organizations are shot through with neo-Nazis, who are generally allowed to participate in demonstrations and even organizing as long as they keep their swastikas under their jackets. Joe Turner, expressing the general spirit, said the following when neo-Nazis unfurled flags at one of his rallies:

So, if you are in [S.O.S.]...accept this reality [of Nazis being at our events]. If you cannot accept this reality or feel uncomfortable about it, then it is time for you to bow out and move on to another organization. No hard feelings. No grudges.

Or, from the other direction, one neo-Nazi wrote:

This is a movement every WN [white nationalist] should support and be active in.
It moves in our direction even as it does not even acknowledge, or even
know, that the WN movement exists.

The neo-Nazi or ¨white nationalist¨ movement in the United States is small and universally despised but not quite a joke. It has branches across the country, regularly holds small public demonstrations at which Nazis are always massively outnumbered by counterprotesters, and has influence inside the prison system and, apparently, in the Army. Nevertheless it has no popular appeal, and no corporate media figure or elected politician local or national will touch it. The Nazis have their heroes and their scapegoats wrong – American nativists aren´t concerned about Jews, but about Mexicans, and reserve their ultra-patriotism for the U.S., not for Hitler´s Germany. They´re out of date and out of place; to paraphrase Orwell, one of the few things we know about a new fascist movement is that it won’t be called ‘fascism.’ This is not to say that the neo-Nazis aren´t dangerous - only that they will not be the base of a serious national fascist movement in the U.S. The one area of significant success they have had, in visibility, a popular stance, and therefore probably recruitment, is in the anti-immigrant movement. However, they have had it at the expense of remaining largely secretive.

Although open Nazism is a dead end, as the ´WN´ quoted above implies, the Minutemen and the other various anti-immigrant vigilantes are the beginnings of a genuine American fascist movement in all but name. They are a group based in the insecure petty-bourgeoisie with an ideology built around scapegoating foreigners in defense of the nation, and a faux-populist hostility to the rich overmatched by a hostility to the left. They are organized as a pseuir tactics focus on street activism and violence - although for now the latter remains latent in preparations; the Minutemen patrol armed but there has been no proof yet that any have used their guns. The neo-Nazi connections serve at least to demonstrate the ideological and practical convergance of the movement with earlier forms of fascism. And they have the roots in genuine American traditions and the ruling class connections and acceptability that the neo-Nazis lack. It is nearly impossible to imagine a popular pro-Hitler movement in the U.S., but the Minutemen have already had a great deal of success.

The border vigilantes are classic proto-fascists; they are ready and willing to take over from the state the task of enforcing the rule of law and capital, and although the capitalist class is certainly not yet prepared to give them the opportunity, a crisis could turn that around. With the appearance of the Minutemen, anti-fascism in the U.S. has gained a great deal of urgency.

Posted by David on 9.21.2006 at 12:31 AM | Permalink