When I first began drafting my first manifesto, The Little Teal Book, I centralized my focus on what I termed the American Nation— the ultimate synthesis of the various national groups that exist in the United States of America. The original concept was that the United States functions as two entities that exist in dialectic opposition to each other— the Untied States of America as a representative of the ruling class, and the American Nation which consists of all those nationally and economically oppressed by the ruling class. The American Nation as originally theorized was fundamentally meant to represent the concept of a “united front” (to borrow terminology from the Marxist-Leninist Freedom Road Socialist Organization) between the multiethnic working class in American and those oppressed based on various other factors (including nationality).
It is only as I have developed my own study and consciousness that a distinction must be made between what was termed the American Nation and what is generally accept to define a “nation” by Marxists-Leninists. A nation is said to be “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” When used in conjunction with the definition given by Libyan Muammar Gaddafi, that a nation “irrespective of blood bond, is formed through a sense of belonging and shared destiny,” we can note that the American Nation as previously defined may potentially be a misnomer. I would still hold the broad masses of the United States are broadly creolized and that that comes as a result of the integration of various nationalities, classes, and identities existing in close proximity to each other all the while being oppressed by monopoly capital. Centrally, this creolized body does not necessarily represent a “nation” in the traditional sense so much as it represents a coalition thereof.
What we have termed the American Nation may be more accurately defined as a collectivity of the American masses, that the broad strokes of marginalized people in the United States do have significantly distinct experiences, economic activity, and “psychological make-up” than the ruling class. In my experience, it has been found that there is a common culture (or at least common cultural features) within the United States and that said culture has tended to lean towards strong feelings for democracy, freedom, and the ability for man to “shape his destiny” in a positive direction.
It must also be noted, however, that in the processes of exploitation that led to the construction of the United States new nations were created. Through the destruction of African cultures during the period of chattel slavery a new group of Black Americans was formed in what is affectionately referred to as “New Afrika,” or the “Black-Belt South” in the southeastern United States. Through the theft of land from Mexico in the late 19th century, the Chicano nation and its homeland of Aztlàn was formed, and the Hawai’ian nation was absorbed into the American empire when, in 1898 the Kingdom of Hawai’i was overthrown by American puppets. These nations are constituent in what we define as the American Masses, but still are nations in their own right and unequivocally deserve the rights of self-determination, and cultural preservation that ought to be afforded to every nation. In an effort to build a united front— a united collectivity of the American masses— we must make every effort to avoid slipping into a false liberalism that compels us to erase the interdependent national character of the oppressed nations in the United States.
We must remain united as a group to defeat monopoly capital, and we have more in common with each other than we do with the oligarchs of our present society, but we must remain scientific in our analysis and based in scientific socialist principles, it is safe to say that the idea of a single “American Nation” is frankly erroneous.
SIDENOTE: As of right now, The Little Teal Book is on an indefinite hiatus and I don’t expect to publish new chapters for the foreseeable future. It will remain archived at blog.romainelettuce.us and will feature the disclaimer that it may be out of date with my present views on certain issues and questions.
