Introduction to Theodore Allens Notes on

Base and Superstructure

Jonathan Scott

He made proposals. We
Carried them out.
Bertolt Brecht

Theodore Allens magisterial two-volume work of US labor

history, The Invention of the White Race, is the product of three
decades of empirical research in the colonial archives of Virginia and
many years of arduous writing and revision. Published by Verso in
1994 and 1997, Invention made its appearance, fortuitously, just as a
new discipline was being established in the US academy a field
called whiteness studies. One of the great ironies of Allens scholarship is that he hadnt the slightest idea his work would find a receptive
audience in English and comparative literature departments. As a historian, his ambition was to make a direct intervention in US labor
history from the standpoint of what he termed a class struggle
approach to American history and society. The irony is that while
US academic historians (his intended audience) have neglected his
work, in the field of cultural studies (a discipline foreign to Allen) it
is highly regarded. Indeed, in many scholarly books and articles in
whiteness studies Allen is cited as a major theorist and one of the
fields founding scholars.
Allen was close to 80 by the time the second volume appeared
a fact that was startling to me, assuming naively as I did then that
cutting-edge scholarship is performed in an intellectuals prime.
Allens iconoclasm was evident in every aspect of his being.
Shortly after the second volumes publication, I conducted a series
of interviews with him at his Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment in
Brooklyn, New York. By that time my review essay on his first
volume had been published in the Minnesota Review, which was
the first engagement in the US academy with Allens thesis. Also
by that time I had developed a friendship with Ted that had to do
Socialism and Democracy, Vol.21, No.1, March 2007, pp.7585
ISSN 0885-4300 print/ISSN 1745-2635 online
DOI: 10.1080=08854300601116738

# 2007 The Research Group on Socialism and Democracy

76 Socialism and Democracy

not with professional scholarship and labor historiography but

with watching basketball, partaking in the pleasures of ice cream
and curry goat, doing dishes and going to the laundromat, Mark
Twain, and Duke Ellington. In fact, I became a regular visitor to 97
Brooklyn Avenue and would miss a Friday afternoon with Ted
only if stricken by a serious illness, to which fortunately I have not
been prone.
It turns out that Ted wanted to talk a lot about the individual
and collective, and many conversations passed between us devoted
to this favorite subject of his. He told me one day that, were it not for
the persistence of white supremacy, he could have given himself
over completely to an exhaustive study of this dialectic, which he
considered the base of socialist society. He hated white supremacy
for all the best reasons. And as I think about Ted today, two years
after his death, its clear to me that our friendship was sealed on this
simple understanding: that the worst thing about racial oppression
is that it makes every workers life a misery, try as people might to
blame their suffering on one proximate cause or another. To be a
class-conscious American worker means that you cant begin to
figure out what you really want to do with your life until white
supremacy is overthrown and every part of it completely eradicated,
all its ghosts exorcised and its immoral and antidemocratic customs
ruthlessly attacked on every front. For Ted, to be white meant to
be a boss to lord a privileged social status, conferred by the capitalist
ruling class, over all those who are by racist law and custom deprived
of basic civil rights and responsibilities. In this way anybody can act
white, without reference to complexion.
I began to see although I admit it took too long that Teds lifelong work on the historical origin of racial oppression in the United
States and its logical outcome, the invention of the white identity,
was a necessary labor in order to free his mind for work on his principal
passion and positive obsession: the social relations of production under
socialism, or the individual and the collective. Tragically, just as Ted
was beginning this study, satisfied that his work on white racial
oppression was in excellent shape for present and future use,
cancer invaded his body and in a matter of months took his irreplaceable life.
Before the cancer took control, Ted was able to deliver a lecture
on the individual and the collective at Michael Zweigs superb biannual conference on How Class Works, at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook. Zweig had read both volumes of Invention
and was excited to have Ted come out to Stony Brook for the

Jonathan Scott 77

conference.1 Its obvious, I think, based on the ideas in his lecture as

well as his brilliance and efficiency as both a researcher and writer,
that had Ted evaded the cancer we would be reading today the first
of several volumes on this critical and fascinating subject. Below is
Allens lecture as he delivered it at Stony Brook on June 11, 2004.
Allen was born on August 23, 1919, in Indianapolis, but came of
age in the small coal-mining town of Huntington, West Virginia,
where his father in 1929 had relocated the family. Eschewing college,
after high school he went to work in the mines instead. In Prenter,
West Virginia, he became an active member of the United Mine
Workers and a few years later, in Gary, Local President. During these
years (the late 1930s), he joined the American Communist Party and
helped set up the trade union organizing program for the Marion
County West Virginia Industrial Union Council, CIO. While working
in the CIO, Allen met Ruth Voithofer, a well-known communist organizer for the United Electrical Workers. They fell deeply in love and
in 1939 married. But just a few years later Allen and Voithofer came
to face an anguishing dilemma not uncommon to young communist
organizers in love. Voithofer was offered a key position organizing
mineworkers in Pennsylvania, while Allen was invited by the party
to move to New York to work there in its anti-white-supremacist
organizing drives in schools and factories. Ruth took the job in
Pennsylvania, Ted left for Brooklyn, and their dynamic marriage
came to a sudden end. They never saw each other again.
Throughout the 1950s, Allen worked in the party as a labor organizer and civil rights activist in New York, teaching classes in economics
at the partys Jefferson School at Union Square in Manhattan, and
working a variety of jobs: factory, retail, and drafting. Yet by the end
of the decade Allen had left the party to join a new organization
called the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the
Communist Party (POC). Allens participation in the POC ended
abruptly when his position on the relations between US imperialism
and white racial oppression came into conflict with the organizations
official stance. In fact, Allens strong disagreement with the POC on
how to approach the struggle against white supremacism provided
the seed for the full flowering of his main thesis in Invention: that
rather than benefiting from US ruling-class colonialist conquest,
white workers are in their effort to gain political power and an upper
hand in the class struggle severely crippled by it. The essence of this
1.

After Allens death, Zweig, who is Director of the Center for Study of Working Class
Life at Stony Brook, helped establish the Theodore W. Allen Scholar Program.

78 Socialism and Democracy

thesis was first proposed in February 1974 in a lecture he delivered

at a Union for Radical Political Economics meeting in New Haven,
a version of which was published a year later in Radical America and
then in pamphlet form as Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial
Slavery: The Invention of the White Race.
Two departure points, or intellectual premises, might be noted
before pondering Allens speculative thesis in the 2004 lecture below.
The first has to do with the distinction between base and superstructure; the second is the theory of working-class revolution.
Allens main thesis in Invention, which he substantiated empirically
through archival research in Virginia, is a clear example of Marxs
base/superstructure distinction. In this study, Allen shows that the
white race is a ruling-class social control formation and hence an
ersatz middle-class identity manufactured politically by the AngloAmerican capitalist class. This project began during the early 18th
century in direct response to a massive slave uprising in 1676 known
as Bacons Rebellion, which had been led by a multiethnic front of
African American and European American bond laborers.
In the age of so-called post-Marxism, created by the wholesale
importation of French theory into the US academy, the base/superstructure distinction is supposedly a false one or rather is merely a
discursive formation or social construct. At all events, Allen to
his great advantage had never bothered with Foucault or Derrida
and thus retained this conceptual distinction in his every approach to
philosophic as well as political problems and questions. In the case of
the political invention of the white race, the white identity is part
of the superstructure (or the imaginary relations) that administers the
base (the social relations of production) worker and capitalist. This
distinction when applied to white racial oppression is immensely
important because, from this starting point, it can be seen lucidly that
whiteness is not a material benefit or advantage to the European
American worker who adopts it. Rather, whiteness is a baited
hook, as Allen put it.
Moreover, this perspective underscores the crucial fact that African
American workers have been an essential part of the base from the
nations inception. In this respect, Allen was always asking: why
would a capitalist pay one worker more than another worker for the
very same labor-power? Why wouldnt he, as is par for the course historically, keep all workers at the same minimum level of compensation,
raising wages only when forced to by a mass labor movement? Allen
agreed with Dr. Du Bois that whiteness is the Achilles heel of the
US labor movement. Hence, failure to begin with Marxs concept of

Jonathan Scott 79

base and superstructure, when understanding the question of race in

the US, leads to a monumental cul-de-sac: if white workers benefit
from racism, why would they ever do anything against it?
Now its possible to put it more precisely. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the race problem in US society is not a black one but
rather a white one. Americas Peculiar Institution is not black
slavery but whiteness. In other words, while the base of US capitalist
society is no different than the base of any other capitalist society
(worker and capitalist), its racialized superstructure is completely
anomalous, with only one or two parallels internationally: Protestant
religio-racial oppression in Ulster against the Catholic Irish, and the
South African apartheid regime yet the latter parallel is imprecise
due to the majority Black South African population. Likewise, the parallel to Israeli racial apartheid in Occupied Palestine is limited for the
same reason: Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem
greatly outnumber the Jewish Israeli settler-colonialists.
The US system is therefore wholly unique: a situation in which
the immigrant settler-colonialist population (poor and propertyless
European Americans) has been deliberately made to significantly outnumber the native (American Indian) and enslaved (African American)
populations. In fact, this essential component of the US nation-states
establishment in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is the centerpiece
of Allens first volume of Invention, in which he analyzes what he terms
the Irish mirror (English/British colonialism in Ireland), as well as
the compelling parallels between racial slavery in the British
Caribbean and racial slavery in the US. In the case of the Caribbean,
Allen shows that, as a result of the British ruling classs failure to maintain in its plantation colonies a white colonial-settler population large
enough to socially control the masses of African chattel-bond laborers,
racial slavery was abolished in 1808 and then in 1830 the system of
racial oppression in the British Caribbean was phased out and replaced
by national oppression.
The 800-year-long English colonial project in Ireland is more
complex. Allen demonstrates that it served for the British colonizers
as a laboratory of social control experimentation, on a vast and horrifying scale. The first half of Vol. 1 is devoted to understanding the
crucial lessons learned by the English ruling class during its genocidal
conquest of Ireland and then throughout its centuries-long murderous
subordination of the Catholic Irish to the British plantation system of
capital accumulation. The main lesson was that racial oppression is
indeed the ideal order from the standpoint of any capitalist ruling
class, since under it the super-exploitation of colonized labor-power

80 Socialism and Democracy

does not require the costly employment of a colonial army. Yet, racial
oppression is extremely difficult to maintain precisely because it
depends not on a paid army of plantation patrollers but, rather, on
the constant reproduction of a new civil society social control
group a class of collaborators with colonialism drawn entirely from
the colonial-settler population itself, which in the case of the Irish situation was the Scots. Eventually the British were forced to give up on the
Scots as a social control group, for many different reasons. One should
consult Allens first volume for a thorough explanation. Suffice it to say
that the Scots, being so close to home, could always abandon the Irish
plantation system once they had had enough of it, or conversely they
could join the Catholic Irish, as they often did, producing what
became known as the Scotch-Irish. In short, the British in Ireland
tried but failed (except in Ulster) to produce a numerically superior
class of local enforcers, or, in Allens terms, a buffer social control
stratum.
Thus by the time Allen turns to the continental colonies of
Anglo-America, the stage has been already set: the task for the
Anglo-American ruling class was to produce facts on the ground
which made certain that rather than too few colonial-settlers there
were too many. As he documents, this was achieved with specific
articles to the Constitution that classified all European arrivants as
immigrants and all Africans as imports. These first immigration
policies christened each European immigrant, upon his arrival in the
US, with special rights and privileges of citizenship, no matter how
poor and propertyless he was. As Allen has it, they were the new
nations first white-skin privileges, and they ended up determining
the peculiar shape of the American South, in which the capitalist
slave-owning class worked constantly to keep poor Euro-Americans
in the majority, however slight that majority actually was. In fact, the
highest rate of slave uprisings in the South was in areas where
a white majority could not be delivered. But in the areas with a
white majority, the slave empire functioned with relative ease.
Still, the question persists: how have Euro-American workers come
to join en masse and thus further enlarge this peculiar anti-worker
social monolith? After all, the majority of European Americans has
gained almost no social mobility over the course of three centuries of
mass immigration to the US: they remain firmly ensconced in the
social relations of production as workers. But they do not act socially
and politically as workers. In fact, they continue to oppress other
workers in the base who are like themselves in every respect except
skin tone: black workers. Allen called this a classic case of class

Jonathan Scott 81

collaborationism: white workers doing the dirty social control work of

bossing and patrolling workers necessary for the capitalist class to stay
in power and accumulate profits. In return, the capitalist class treats the
white workers like pets.
In this regard, Allens thesis helps to answer a lot of political
questions in the current conjuncture. For instance, seeing that the US
capitalist class is unwilling and perhaps unable, structurally to
prevent the further erosion of white working-class wages, isnt the
time ripe for a new attack on corporate profits by white workers?
Where is their political leadership on the question of rising corporate
profits and rapidly declining real wages? As the white-skin privilege
bribe loses its ideological value, isnt exposing it been made easier?
Allens answer is that the problem lies in the superstructure, or political
education. Since the Democratic Partys abandonment of the African
American civil rights agenda, symbolized by the birth of the Reagan
Democrats in 1980 and then in the 1990s by the establishment of
Clintonism (the Crime Bill and the repeal of Welfare), anti-racialdiscrimination discourse has gone from central to marginal. And
with the marginalization of civil rights has come the displacement of
class as the main analytic category of the American Left.
To put it differently, which is to say nothing profound or surprising, the Democratic Party is dead precisely because of its failure to
offer white workers a class struggle vision of social change, which is
the simple and clear thesis that white workers have been bamboozled
once again by a new class of the rich and their politicians fooled into
thinking that their socioeconomic problems are racial and not class:
that is to say, by the use of the anti-Affirmative Action rhetoric of socalled reverse racism, as well as all the anti-immigrant hysteria.
Allens work demonstrates that while the white supremacy racket is
indeed 300 years old, it is today very close to exhausting itself. Hence
the urgent need for political education on the white identity and
how it has always worked to the disadvantage of white workers
perhaps never more clearly than now.
Allens second departure point is the theory of working-class
revolution. Allen was optimistic about a swift and relatively bloodless
socialist revolution in the US precisely because of whitenesss artificial
character. He proposed a cunning theory: that you dont need all white
workers to defect from the white social control group, only about
one-third. Being a monolith superstructural and not material (i.e.
not economic, biological, or psycho-cultural) the white identity is
always vulnerable to sudden political collapse. The African American
civil rights movement is the best example of this; but Allen also

82 Socialism and Democracy

pointed to two other historical conjunctures: the great populist movement of the 1890s and the communist movement of the 1930s. In each
mass movement, white-skin privilege was identified as a ruling-class
stratagem as a race card that had to be pulled from the deck if
working-class self-emancipation was to be realized.
Thus, Allens foray into the base of socialism the dialectical unity
of the individual and the collective did not grow out of his historical
scholarship on racial oppression but rather preceded it or, better, was
its precondition. As Herbert Marcuse put it at the end of his An Essay
on Liberation:
The social expression of the liberated work instinct is cooperation, which,
grounded in solidarity, directs the organization of the realm of necessity and
the development of the realm of freedom. And there is an answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people
in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of
the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life,
we shall be free to think about what we are going to do.

Its useful, then, to consider Allens proposal below, the last

proposal he left us, as the beginning intention of all his work: to turn
our attention to preparing in advance new social relations of
production that enable each of us to be free to think about what we
are going to do.

Base and Superstructure

and the Socialist Perspective 
Theodore W. Allen

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material
powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society the real foundation, on which rise legal
and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness.
Karl Marx, Preface to A Critique of Political Economy (1859)

What is to be the base over which a corresponding socialist superstructure may

rise?
The assumption that the periodically intensified chronic crisis of
overproduction marked by increasing manifestations of parasitism
and decay would eventuate in proletarian ascendancy (rather than
in the mutual destruction of the contending classes), just as the
ascendancy of the bourgeoisie resulted from the transformation of
labor-power into a commodity, has not been validated by history in
the century-and-a-half since the promulgation of the Communist
Manifesto.
That fact cannot be attributed to a lack of heroic revolutionary bids
for working-class ascendancy. Yet, even though those mighty efforts
have failed, they provide us with one valuable lesson, one that has
not been sufficiently studied. Marx and Engels themselves wrote that
the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the
sway of the proletariat (Communist Manifesto), apparently assuming
that the conquest of state power would clear away the fetishism of
commodities, whereunder the relations between persons take the
form of the relation between their products, and usher in a rational
order of social relationships. Or, consider Lenins slogan, Soviet
power plus electrification equals communism!1 The essence of that

Notes for a presentation at the Conference on How Class Works, held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, June 1012, 2004.
1. Speaking at the Eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, December 1920.

84 Socialism and Democracy

concept is that a capture of state power, together with the necessary

instruments of production, would provide the basis of a socialist
society. After the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia, Lenin
declared, We shall now proceed to build the Socialist order! But it
was not to be; instead, beset by enemies in all directions and lacking
elementary resources and technical personnel, the Bolsheviks
embarked upon what would prove to be the irretrievably slippery
slope into bourgeois habits of administration and production in the
hopeless expectation of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat
over a population 90% peasantry.
The lesson to be learned is that, while the seizure of state power
may bring beneficial results land reform, ending a war, and the overthrow of a colonial regime yet it is no short-cut to socialism.
In Europe, the bourgeoisie was able to overthrow the feudal order
only because their mode of production had developed in the womb of
the old order until it could emerge to claim hegemony over the given
society. In short, they proved that the wage-labor/capital relation of
production was irresistible by the order based on the serf/feudal lord
relation of production. The seizure of power was the outcome of the
development of this novel relation of production; not the other way
around. In like manner, the basis of the necessary socialist relationship
of production must be defined and developed within the womb of the
capitalist order before the gravediggers of capitalism can become the
builders of socialist society.
But precisely how is that relation of production to be defined? Like
the historical succession of dialectical opposites slave and master,
serf and feudal lord, wage worker and capitalist the base of socialism,
over which the socialist superstructure will rise, must2 also be a dialectical unity of opposites: that of the individual and the collective. And,
after the fashion of the bourgeois revolution, the revolutionary theory
and practice of that new base must develop in the womb of bourgeois
society. But unlike the blind, blundering, hesitant manner of the bourgeois revolutions, this development of the base for socialism, benefiting
from Marxist historical materialist insights, will be a preconceived,
conscious, foresighted process.
The collective is a group of individuals who are ready and willing
to join in a common purpose, even though each individual knows that
the effort will most certainly require a subordination of some degree of
individual differences in a common interest. Yet the basic constitutional vitality of the collective depends upon the tension between the
2.

Because of the eternal unity of opposites of consumption and production.

Theodore W. Allen 85

individual and the collective. Inherently, therefore, the most difficult

problem for collectives becomes that of dealing with the individual
deviation. Not every individual deviation serves to advance the
cause of the collective; yet it is in the nature of the collective that
every step in the progress begins with an individual deviation.
(Indeed such deviation may be seen as a necessary attribute of leadership.) It follows as a corollary that one test of a good collective is not
how many differences it can overcome, but how few it must overcome
in order to minimize the frequency of those instances in which the
unity of opposites becomes the opposite of unity.
What does this fundamental concept of base and superstructure imply for the
day-to-day struggles implicitly or explicitly directed against capitalism,
whether in the form of resistance to the present-day worldwide absolute
impoverishment, disguised as globalization and austerity, or in the
form of working-class cooperative enterprises?
In answer to this question, let us apply the advice offered by Marx
and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. First, In the national struggles
of the proletarians of the different countries, [Communists] . . . bring to
the front the common interests of the entire proletariat. Second, In
the various stages of development which the struggle . . . has to pass
through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the
movement as a whole.
First, this means grasping the rudimentary fact of the centrality of
the struggle against white supremacism, the historic Achilles heel of
democratic and socialist movements in the United States. Second,
whatever the anti-capitalist issues in which particular collectives,
including political parties, may be engaged, and despite setbacks
they may encounter, they can take courage in knowing that the realization of the collective as a dialectical unity of opposites of individual
and collective is the building of the base of a socialist society, whatever may be the precipitating events that usher in the ascendancy of the
working class.