On the interrelation between race and mass consciousness

By Michael Wongsam

In Europe a great political realignment is taking shape, with the old traditional parties of government entering a moment of crisis, and with new parties, predominantly of the far right but sometimes of the left presenting a challenge. In the US the two party system is in rude health. However, the GOP have been totally taken over by the new MAGA forces, while the leading sections of the ruling class are swinging into line with this development.

In order to make sense of these developments it is of course necessary to appraise the objective material conditions which are driving them. These have been discussed in many places such as the drivers of the political crisis facing the main anglophone imperialist countries, and the increasing political turbulence in Europe. These will not be explored here.

However, it is also necessary to understand the fundamental subjective conditions – the state of mass consciousness – which shape political realignments. Here, two of the most important components of mass consciousness are considered, national consciousness and class consciousness. Moreover, a very important category which interrelates with and mediates the balance between national consciousness and class consciousness is race. The origin of the interrelation of race and these components of mass consciousness is discussed below.

National consciousness and its origins

National consciousness emerged as a tool for consolidating state power during the development of capitalism. The bourgeoisie, as a minority ruling class, needed to foster strong bonds between themselves and the broader population to protect their rule against both internal dissent and external threats. These bonds were often framed around shared language, culture, and territory—elements that defined national identity. For example, the unification of Germany in 1871 was preceded by the cultural and linguistic cohesion of German-speaking people. Similarly, England’s national identity crystallized after severing ties with France and the Roman Catholic Church during the Tudor era.

However, national consciousness is not neutral. It reflects the interests of the ruling class and often contradicts class consciousness. While the working class’s struggle for better conditions pits them against the bourgeoisie, national consciousness aligns all classes in support of inter-imperialist competition and wars of conquest. This alignment serves to suppress class consciousness, redirecting potential class conflict into nationalistic fervour. In times of crisis, this dynamic manifests in various forms of governance, from liberal democracy to fascism – depending on the precise correlation of forces, each designed to maintain bourgeois control.

Class consciousness versus national consciousness

The development of proletarian class consciousness – the ability of the working class to understand its historical role and act collectively in its interests – stems from the shared experience of workers dispossessed by capitalism and mediated through political struggle. However, this consciousness faces active resistance from the bourgeoisie, who promote national consciousness to override class solidarity. For instance, during imperialist wars, workers are faced with a choice: support their nation’s ruling class and succumb to national chauvinism, or assert their class independence and oppose the war drive. Specifically, the bourgeoisie actively enlists the consent and participation of all class in the nation in support of its competition against other imperialist nations, and in its pursuit of conquest, colonisation and exploitation of peoples outside of the nexus of imperialism. Therefore the development of class consciousness encounters the active resistance of the bourgeoisie, since it is in conflict with national consciousness which acts so as to reinforce bourgeois rule.

The antagonism between national consciousness and class consciousness, and its interrelation with the internal and external correlation of forces then leads to the different expression of bourgeois rule. Liberal democracy relies on the illusion of popular power while maintaining the dominance of national consciousness over class consciousness. In contrast, fascism emerges when class consciousness surges and signifies the emergence of class struggle forces into the leadership of the workers movement thereby threatening bourgeois rule. Under such circumstances the bourgeoisie seek to mobilise society under the guise of national unity in order to crush socialist movements and render the workers at least politically quiescent. As the history of classical fascism shows, its triumph represents a historic defeat of the working class.

During the 1930s every capitalist country experienced fascist movements to some degree, therefore it is not merely a cultural, or superstructural phenomenon, but is an irreducible systemic aspect of capitalism. It arises because of the fact that capitalism creates and is predicated on the existence of the working class. The bourgeoisie therefore seek to create bonds which bind every other class to them, and which overcome the bonds which unite other classes against them. When the vertical bonds between the bourgeoisie and the popular classes are threatened by strengthening horizontal bonds below, that is the time when liberal democracy is dispensed with and fascism is called forth.

Therefore, Fascism is not exceptional, but systemic, and has nothing to do with the barbarity of its methods. On a world scale and throughout history, liberalism has overthrown more democratic governments and subverted the development of more liberation movements than fascism. The imperialist media itself readily admits to overthrowing many democratically elected governments and replacing them with brutal dictators more amenable to the imperialist powers. Mossadegh, Arbenz, Lumumba, Goulart and Allende were all overthrown by coups inspired by imperialist powers under liberal democratic governments. The methods of suppression and extermination used by fascist governments in Europe, had all been pioneered and perfected by European liberal democratic governments in the colonialism and empire building of the 1880s and 1890s.

Race and the construction of whiteness

Race has been a key instrument in shaping mass consciousness, particularly and especially in the United States, through the construction and instrumentalisation of whiteness. Hence, white supremacy has been embedded in US law since its founding. Race is a socially constructed category (ie. is determined by what people believe and base social demarcations on, not what exists as physical fact). Law constructs race at every level, shapes the social meanings that define race, and renders concrete the privileges and disadvantages associated with different categories of race. It provides the infrastructure for the informal and instrumental function of race and its material consequences.

Furthermore, it arises out of the necessity for the early colonial administrations in Virginia and Maryland to build those vertical bonds between white workers and white elites so as to neutralise the horizontal bonds between white workers and black workers.

In early colonial America, labour relations initially allowed for some level of equality among free persons, regardless of race. However, events like Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) exposed the instability of such arrangements. To prevent future uprisings, colonial elites implemented laws that differentiated between white and black labourers, outlawing indentured servitude for whites while expanding the use of African slavery; prohibiting free blacks from holding public office, possessing a weapon, and testifying against whites. These prohibitions differentiated the status of whites from free blacks by reducing the status of free blacks with respect to free whites without increasing the status of white labourers with respect to the ruling elite. Furthermore, anti-miscegenation laws were passed in Maryland (1681) and Virginia (1691) outlawing marriages between whites and members of non-white communities. These laws laid the foundation for whiteness as a social category, creating bonds between white workers and elites that undermined solidarity with black workers.

This construction of whiteness was not limited to labour relations but extended to the legal and social fabric of the emerging United States. The ideas contained in the new laws were then reproduced in the material conditions of society, which further reinforced and entrenched those ideas. This construction of whiteness laid the basis for the foundation of a nation explicitly based on white supremacy. The Citizenship and Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by the first Congress of the United States, restricted citizenship to “free white persons”, reinforcing white supremacy as a national principle. Subsequent laws and policies, from anti-miscegenation statutes to restrictive immigration acts, perpetuated these racial hierarchies, ensuring that whiteness remained a prerequisite for full participation in the nation’s political and economic life. To be eligible for citizenship, a person had to be a free white person who had lived in the United States for at least two years. The American Colonisation Society, founded in 1816 by the President and President elect of the USA with generous support from many slave owners, proposed to resettle free blacks in West Africa. Moreover, white women who were citizens and that married non-white men lost their citizenship rights.

This national principle was confirmed in the Supreme Court decision of 1857 in Dred Scott vs. Sanford, which ruled that the US Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent. The idea was continuously reinforced by proscribing non-white naturalization and immigration. Restrictive immigration laws were intended to preserve this white national identity. In particular, among these are:-

  • The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) barred the immigration of Chinese labourers for ten years, marking the first significant law to restrict immigration based on ethnicity – it was extended multiple times, effectively banning Chinese immigration until its repeal in 1943.
  • The Immigration Act (1917) which created the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” restricting immigration from most of Asia and the Pacific Islands.
  • The Emergency Quota Act (1921) which capped immigration at 3% of each nationality’s U.S. population in 1910.
  • The Immigration Act (1924) which reduced the cap to 2% and based quotas on the 1890 census, skewing the caps in favour of older immigrant groups. The effect of the 1921 and 1924 Acts was to effectively exclude Asian immigrants and favour immigrants from Northern and Western Europe while severely limiting those from Southern and Eastern Europe.
  • The Nationality Act (1952, McCarran-Walter Act) which retained the quota system but abolished racial restrictions on naturalization. Thus, quotas continued favouring European immigration. It also introduced ideological restrictions, barring communists and suspected subversives.
  • The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA, 1996) which increased border enforcement and penalties for unauthorised immigration.
  • Trump Administration Policies (2017–2021) which restricted entry from several majority-Muslim countries, and restricted asylum claims and reduced refugee admissions to historic lows.

Because of the power of racial nationalism in the US, even Eugene Debs couldn’t convince the union that he led – The American Railway Union – to admit black workers. At the time of the second KKK, they had a membership – around 3.5 million – which was equal to that of the AFL (American Federation of Labor). At the same time the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League) had over six million members. This shows that racial nationalism in the US is at least as powerful an organising principle as class. Therefore black self-organisation is a prior question and precondition for the class unity between black and white workers, as outlined independently by Malcolm X; Lenin; and Trotsky, because the black struggle is in the first instance a special type of national struggle arising out of the specific circumstances of the USA being a settler colonial nation constructed as a white nation.

Colonialism, imperialism and the historic defeat of non-European people

The historical-material basis for white supremacy was already being laid beginning in 1492, through both the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula by Ferdinand and Isabella with the expulsion of the Moors, and the first voyage of Columbus to the Americas. This latter event laid the basis for the biggest genocide in world history, and the beginning of the conquest and colonisation of non-European land by Europeans.

This continued up to the twentieth century with the full conquest and colonisation of the Americas, the settlement of Australia and New Zealand, the absorption of India into the British Empire, the absorption of Indonesia into the Dutch Empire, the absorption of Malaysia into first the Dutch and subsequently the British Empire, the colonisation of South Africa, the subjugation of China through the opium wars, the absorption of Indochina into the French Empire, the partition of Africa between the European powers, the partition of West Asia by the British and French following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine being some of the notable events.

As a consequence of genocidal wars against the indigenous peoples in the establishment of settler colonial territories in the Americas, Oceana and Southern Africa, the transatlantic slave trade, and the expropriation of the land and resources of non-European peoples by Europeans, there resulted a world historic defeat of people outside of Europe.

Together with the construction of racial categories as outlined above, instrumentalised in order to secure the active participation of the mass of the white populations of Europe and the settler colonies in the oppression of the non-white populations of the settler colonies and the lands outside Europe, this constitutes the material basis for the oppression by the people of European descent of the non-European. This process not only enriched European workers but also conditioned them to identify with their bourgeoisie through a sense of shared racial superiority, and the endowment of it with an outward appearance of naturalness and immutability. This bond reinforced imperialist national consciousness, posing significant obstacles to the development of international class solidarity.

Contemporary implications

Today, the interplay between race and mass consciousness continues to shape global and domestic politics. In the United States, the election of Barack Obama and the subsequent rise of movements like the Tea Party, leading to the current MAGA movement, reveals a persistence of white anxiety. This has matured and festered since the decade of civil rights between the Supreme Court ruling of Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka (1954) and the passing by Congress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This decade contained burgeoning black activism and militancy spawning the black power movement and its identification with the rising tide of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

However, brief interregnums of ‘reconstruction’ (the post civil war reconstruction; the civil rights struggle, the summer of protest of 2020) are punctuations in an overall history of the dominance of white national consciousness over independent class consciousness. Decades of stagnating living standards, economic deindustrialization, cultural shifts, and demographic changes have exacerbated insecurities among white Americans, fuelling the return of white nativist and racist ideologies. The emergence of Trump to the dominant position of ideological leadership represents a reversion to the norm of American white sensibilities.

On a global scale, the rise of Asia in general and of China in particular pose a challenge to western hegemony. The expansion of the BRICS+ with its ever increasing proportion of global GDP, population and oil production, constitute the most significant challenge to western economic dominance since Bretton Woods. This is increasingly pushing imperialism onto the military field, where it still possesses overwhelming dominance through the military power and reach of the US.

Imperialist powers have therefore sought to strengthen national consciousness, often through appeals to white supremacy. Josep Borrell’s infamous metaphor of Europe as a “beautiful garden” threatened by the “jungle” exemplifies the racialised rhetoric used to justify imperialist aggression on the foreign policy front, while the obsession with immigration into Europe from Africa and Asia, and into the USA from Mexico are used to stiffen national consciousness on the domestic front.