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Jeffrey B. Perry Blog

Insights From Theodore W. Allen on the “five-stage cycle”


Insights From Theodore W. Allen on the “five-stage cycle”


In recent articles, including pieces in “Counterpunch” and “Black Star News,” the author David Rosen addresses the themes of a “deepening social crisis gripping the U.S” and “that white skin privilege is being eroded.”

Theodore W. Allen, whose anti-white supremacist, class struggle-based, theoretical approach pioneered “white skin privilege” analysis in the mid-1960s offered important insights relevant to the currently developing conjuncture. In an instructive 1974 talk on the economic situation, and in a 1997 update that he presented before the Union of Radical Political Economists, Allen suggested that “the history of class struggle in the U.S. could be interpreted as a five-stage cycle in which:

1) The normal course of capitalist events brings on a deterioration of the conditions of the laboring classes.
2) The substance of the white-skin privileges becomes somewhat drained away by increased insecurity and exploitation.
3) The laboring-class “whites” manifest, to a greater or lesser extent, a tendency to make common cause with laboring-class Blacks against capital.
4) The ruling class moves to re-substantiate the racial privileges of the white workers vis-à-vis the Blacks.
5) The white workers take the bait, repudiate solidarity with Black laboring people and submit themselves without radical protest to exploitation by the privilege-givers.”

Allen emphasized the crucial importance of anti-white supremacist, working class struggle at all stages, but particularly between phases 3 and 5. For Allen, this was an especially key period to challenge the re-substantiation of “white race” privileges and to heighten anti-white supremacist struggle.

For more on Allen’s discussion of the 5-stage cycle and the fullest IN-DEPTH TREATMENT of his forty-plus years of writings on “white skin privilege” and class struggle see “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” by Jeffrey B. Perry in PDF format at the TOP LEFT Here
or at “Cultural Logic” HERE
For writings by and about Theodore W. Allen see HERE

For a video of a slide presentation/talk on Theodore W. Allen’s “The Invention of the White Race” see HERE

For information on “The Invention of the White Race” Vol. II: "The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America" (including comments from scholars and activists and Table of Contents) see HERE

For information on “The Invention of the White Race” Vol. I: “Racial Oppression and Social Control" (including comments from scholars and activists and Table of Contents) see HERE

For information on Theodore W. Allen’s “Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race” Part 1 see HERE and for Part 2 see HERE

For a video of a Slide Presentation/Talk on Hubert Harrison see HERE

For comments from scholars and activists on "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918" (Columbia University Press) see HERE

For articles, audios, and videos by and about Hubert Harrison see HERE

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On Theodore W. Allen's "The Invention of the White Race" Excerpt from "Counterpunch" Article by Jeffrey B. Perry

Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume "The Invention of the White Race," republished by Verso Books in a New Expanded Edition, presents a full-scale challenge to what Allen refers to as “The Great White Assumption” – “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the ‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural attribute rather than a social construct.” Its thesis on the origin and nature of the “white race” contains the root of a new and radical approach to United States history, one that challenges master narratives taught in the media and in schools, colleges, and universities. With its equalitarian motif and emphasis on class struggle it speaks to people today who strive for change worldwide. . . .

With stunning international and domestic examples he shows how racial oppression (particularly in the form of religio-racial oppression) was developed and maintained by the phenotypically-similar British against the Irish Catholics in Ireland; how a phenotypically-similar Anglo bourgeoisie established national oppression in the Anglo-Caribbean and racial oppression in the continental Anglo-American plantation colonies; how racial oppression was transformed into national oppression due to ruling class social control needs in Ireland (while racial oppression was maintained in Ulster); how the same people who were victims of racial oppression in Ireland became “white American” defenders of racial oppression in the United States; and how in America racial oppression took the form of racial slavery, yet when racial slavery ended racial oppression remained and was re-constituted in new form. . . .

[To read the "Countepunch" piece CLICK HERE]

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On Recent David Rosen Articles in "Counterpunch" and "Black Star News" and Theodore W. Allen's Five-Stage Cycle

Insights From Theodore W. Allen on the “five-stage cycle”


In recent articles, including pieces in “Counterpunch” and “Black Star News,” the author David Rosen addresses the themes of a “deepening social crisis gripping the U.S” and “that white skin privilege is being eroded.”

Theodore W. Allen, whose anti-white supremacist, class struggle-based, theoretical approach pioneered “white skin privilege” analysis in the mid-1960s offered important insights relevant to the currently developing American conjuncture. In an instructive 1974 talk on the economic situation, and in a 1997 update that he presented before the Union of Radical Political Economists, Allen suggested that “the history of class struggle in the U.S. could be interpreted as a five-stage cycle in which:

1) The normal course of capitalist events brings on a deterioration of the conditions of the laboring classes.
2) The substance of the white-skin privileges becomes somewhat drained away by increased insecurity and exploitation.
3) The laboring-class “whites” manifest, to a greater or lesser extent, a tendency to make common cause with laboring-class Blacks against capital.
4) The ruling class moves to re-substantiate the racial privileges of the white workers vis-à-vis the Blacks.
5) The white workers take the bait, repudiate solidarity with Black laboring people and submit themselves without radical protest to exploitation by the privilege-givers.”

Allen emphasized the crucial importance of anti-white supremacist, working class struggle at all stages, but particularly between phases 3 and 5. For Allen, this was an especially key period to challenge the re-substantiation of “white race” privileges and to heighten anti-white supremacist struggle.

For more on Allen’s discussion of the 5-stage cycle and the fullest IN-DEPTH TREATMENT of his forty-plus years of writings on “white skin privilege” and class struggle see “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” by Jeffrey B. Perry in PDF format at the TOP LEFT CLICK HERE

For a video of a slide presentation/talk on Theodore W. Allen’s “The Invention of the White Race” CLICK HERE

For information on “The Invention of the White Race” Vol. II: "The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America" (including comments from scholars and activists and Table of Contents) CLICK HERE

For information on “The Invention of the White Race” Vol. I: “Racial Oppression and Social Control" (including comments from scholars and activists and Table of Contents) CLICK HERE

For information on Theodore W. Allen’s “Summary of the Argument of The Invention of the White Race” Part 1 CLICK HERE
and for Part 2 CLICK HERE

For a video of a Slide Presentation/Talk on Hubert Harrison CLICK HERE

For comments from scholars and activists on "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918" (Columbia University Press) CLICK HERE
and CLICK HERE

For articles, audios, and videos by and about Hubert Harrison CLICK HERE

Sample David Rosen discussing “white skin privilege” and the developing crisis can be found CLICK HERE and CLICK HERE

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"The Lautenberg Amendment" by Jeffrey B. Perry

“The Lautenberg Amendment” by Jeffrey B. Perry was recently published by both Counterpunch and by BlackAgendaReport (under the title "Two-Tier U.S. Immigration: The Lautenberg Amendment Legacy").

Adam Clymer’s New York Times article on the death of New Jersey Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (June 4, 2013) briefly mentions a “Lautenberg measure [that] gave refugee status to people from historically persecuted groups without requiring them to show that they had been singled out” and noted that the senator “estimated that 350,000 to 400,000 Jews entered the United States under the 1990 law” and that “Evangelical Christians from the former Soviet Union also benefited from the law.”

The article does not mention some of the most significant aspects of the little-known Lautenberg Amendment, Public Law 101-167, which was enacted November 21, 1989 and has been renewed annually by the U.S. Congress.

According to the Congressional Research Service (report on “Refugee Admissions and Resettlement Policy”) the Lautenberg Amendment, allows those groups covered by the legislation (nationals from the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania who are Jews, Evangelical Christians, Ukrainian Catholics or Ukrainian Orthodox; nationals of Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia; and Jews, Christians, Baha’is and other religious minorities from Iran) to prove they are eligible for special refugee status “with a credible, but not necessarily individual, fear of persecution.” By contrast, the Immigration and Nationality Act “requires prospective refugees to establish a well-founded fear of persecution on a case-by-case basis.” Those covered by the Lautenberg Amendment are eligible for Special Cash Assistance and for Federal Public Assistance Programs including, but not limited to, Social Security, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

CRS statistics indicate that over 370,000 refugees were admitted from the Former Soviet Union in the first ten years of the Lautenberg Amendment. In October 2002 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that “The Lautenberg Amendment allowed some 350,000 to 400,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union to gain entry into the United States without having to prove they were individually persecuted.” In 2010 the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society cited Eric Rubin, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow stating that the amendment had resulted in almost 440,000 refugees from the former Soviet Union and other regions of the world.

In the year 1992, according to an article in The Christian Science Monitor, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that there were 16 to 17 million refugees worldwide of whom the U.S. planned to fund the admission of 122,000, half of whom were to come from the Commonwealth of Independent States (states of the former Soviet Union), with approximately eighty percent of that number being Jewish applicants. The UNHCR pointed out at that time that almost no one emigrating from the CIS was a refugee as defined by the U.N., but that “once an individual asserts that he is a member of the covered class and asserts that he has been persecuted or has a fear of persecution, that individual shall be deemed a refugee.”

Of particular interest in this regard was Senator Lautenberg’s statement in his December 17, 2011, Press Release that “I created this program to allow religious minorities to come live safely in the United States and I am proud that it helped hundred of thousands of people.” Although Lautenberg maintained that his amendment was religion-related, the UJA-Federation of New York’s Jewish Community Study of New York: 2011 Community Report indicates that “almost a fourth” of Russian-speaking Jews in New York “consider themselves belonging to no religion.”

Charles Kamasaki, Executive Vice-President of the National Council of La Raza, in an article in the American Jewish Committee publication Latinos and Jews pointed out that “the admission of former Soviet Jews” under this “special” status meant that “former Soviet Jews were eligible for eventual permanent resident status as well as access to cash assistance, language courses, and job-training programs normally provided only to bona fide refugees.” He added, “To some Hispanic advocates, the inequity was obvious.”

Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow describes how “Mass incarceration marginalizes large segments of the African-American community, . . . and then authorizes discrimination against them in voting, employment, housing education, public benefits, and jury service.” Here too, the contrast with the treatment afforded to those covered by the Lautenberg amendment is “obvious.”

A brief look at the Lautenberg Amendment on immigration reveals disparities in classification and treatment between those who are covered and those not covered by the amendment and related special programs and assistance. A much closer look at the disparities in classification and treatment can provide important information for those struggling for more equal and just immigration, refugee, and domestic policies.

For those interested in further investigation of the Lautenberg Amendment on Immigration, the following information was provided by the Public Service Division of the Law Library of Congress –

The Lautenberg Amendment on immigration is part of Pub. L. 101-167 and 8 CFR 245.7.

8 CFR 245.7 is a Federal regulation on the “Adjustment of status of certain Soviet and Indochinese parolees under the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 1990 (Pub. L. 101-167). Federal regulations are issued by federal agencies and the issuing agency has authority to make the regulation under laws issued by Congress. This authority can be very direct as in the case of this regulation or more indirect.

Pub. L. 101-167 can be found on the Law Library of Congress’ website THOMAS. Select the option “Public Laws” under the heading “More Legislative Information.” At the next screen select the 101st Congress and then select the range that includes 167. At the following screen scroll down to 167 and click on H.R. 3743 which is the original bill number. At the following screen you will get Bill Summary & Status information with links to additional information. You can access the final text of the legislation by clicking on “Text of Legislation.” The final version of the bill is the enrolled version, version 2 in this case. The legislative history of the bill can be found under “All Congressional Actions with Amendments.”

Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry is an independent, anti-white supremacist, working class scholar. His writing focuses on the lives and work of the anti-white supremacist, working class intellectuals and activists Hubert H. Harrison and Theodore W. Allen. For his website -- Click Here Read More 
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Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race New Expanded Edition (Verso Books) discussed by Jeffrey B. Perry in Counterpunch

Theodore W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race, New Expanded Edition (Verso Books), discussed by Jeffrey B. Perry in Counterpunch of May 21, 2013. CLICK HERE
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