by Gordon Welty
Wright State University
Dayton, OH 45435 USA

It is becoming increasingly clear that there is an essence of settler colonialism that presents itself in southern Africa as well as in Palestine. While many scholars and progressive thinkers agree that the racist settler colonial regimes of South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe are the same in essence and differ only in appearance, it is only recently that the essential similarity of the Zionist regime in Palestine to the southern African regimes has been acknowledged./1/ In this intervention we will sketch that essence.

As a preliminary point, we must situate settler colonialism in its world-historical context. It is an archaic form of imperialism, deriving as it does from the social and historical conditions of the mercantile capitalist empires of the seventeenth century. This is obviously true of la nouvelle France, the Cape Colony, and the Plymouth colony. It is less obvious of the "Twentieth Century" Zionist entity in Palestine./2/

If settler colonialism is derived from these mercantilist conditions, then it will be reflected in the social thought of that epoch. While we can find allusions to settler colonialism in the prominent German philosopher Immanuel Kant,/3/ it is more straightforwardly addressed in the writings of the even more famous German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel.

This early Nineteenth Century philosopher is noted for his theory of the dialectic of master and slave. This theory has received several interpretations and found several applications since he first presented it in 1807. Not altogether anachronistically, however, its most modern reading and application may prove to be the same one that Hegel intended. Hegel, we propose, developed the theory in order to comprehend the world historic slave revolts in Santo Domingo after 1791./4/

Thus it is literally a theory of the future of a society basically if not exclusively characterized by the dominance of master over slave. The most appropriate application of the theory today is to the modern version of that social order, the so-called herrenvolk society, where one ethnic group as a master class dominates another ethnic group as the underclass./5/ Examples of such settler colonial regimes include those of southern Africa and of Palestine./6/ Thus it is well worth our while to consider Hegel's theory in our study of the essence of settler colonialism.

Three major interpretations of Hegel's theory have been advanced. One is a psychogenetic interpretation, which holds that the "master" represents the child's body; the "slave" is the child's mind. Thus youth are understood as enslaved by their passions and bodily impulses. This reading of Hegel is quite compatible with the system of his philosophy./7/

The dialectic of master and slave holds a slothful and arbitrary master on the one side and a hard working, carefully planning and abjectly fearful slave on the other side. Although the master is supreme in the beginning, he is doomed by the very relationship. At first he holds life and death power over the slave, and the slave fears and obeys him in turn. But the master stagnates through idle play while the slave continuously develops his abilities and resolution. On the psychogenetic interpretation, the body tends to expend itself impulsively, while the slowly maturing mind develops discipline, foresight, as well as great anxiety to exhibit self-control. Finally, the dialectic is inverted, as the self achieves "mastery" over the body. One important application of this interpretation is that of moderating the "pleasure principle" by the "reality principle" through psychotherapy. In addition, this psychogenetic reading of Hegel is compatible with historical interpretations of the theory of the master and slave dialectic, to which we now turn.

A second major reading, an historical one, is that associated with the Twentieth Century Frenchman, Alexandre Kojève and his epigones./8/ They hold that the master represents the capitalist class and the slave represents the working class in modern society. Taken historically rather than psychogenetically, the capitalist masters seek nothing but their own enrichment. They consume. Meanwhile, the workers, indeed sometimes called "wage slaves," steel themselves through hard work they produce. They grasp the science of modern industry and comprehend their own social position. Bourgeois ideals prove formal, empty; the ideal of the laboring class is rather to render them substantial and actual. The workers, alienated from their labor, fear and periodically experience unemployment. For Kojève, this dialectic is inverted by the revolutionary political action of the workers which finally overthrows their masters. On this reading of Hegel, the working class organizes itself so as to become the agency of historical change. It is immediately apparent that this formulation ignores the dialectic of class and nation which is recognized in Saddam Hussein's speech on the Law of Autonomy (March 11,1974), where he discusses not only the toiling masses of Iraq but also their presence as the Kurdish and Arab peoples./9/

As intriguing as this interpretation by Kojève and his epigones may be, it is not Hegel's own. Most likely it is not even compatible with his intention./10/ Consider first that the working class had not yet appeared in Germany during Hegel's time. Germany, in modern parlance, was "less developed." Hegel himself referred to the disorganized predecessor of that class as "urban rabble."/11/ Thus Hegel cannot realistically be read so that a working class which had not yet appeared for him becomes the agent of historical change required by the dialectic of master and slave. And Hegel, almost to a fault, was realistic.

Consider further that such an interpretation of Hegel concludes that the bourgeois masters will in the end be overthrown, succeeded in their place by their former wage slaves. But Hegel understood the bourgeoisie to be the endpoint of the dialectical unfolding of world history. Whether he deified the "Prussian State" as some have charged, or not, he surely argued for the supremacy of the bourgeois monarchy. Thus the capitalist bourgeoisie cannot be Hegel's "masters," doomed by history to fall. We must seek another interpretation.

Hegel hated slavery -- one reason, by the way, for his higher estimation of Prussia than slaveholding Britain or the United States./12/ The slave rebellions of Santo Domingo led by Toussaint L'Ouverture impressed Hegel deeply. Thus Hegel's theory, taken literally, comprehends both the first successful slave revolt in history, as well as the inevitable overthrow of any social order based upon the relationship of master and slave. How can this interpretation inform our political problematic, the current settler colonial states?

European settlers, plentiful cheap land, and the demand for cheap labor have led to the rise of a number of herrenvolk societies. The settlers subjugated and dominated an ethnically distinct underclass, which was condemned to forced labor under the pretext of "bringing civilization to the natives." We recall that the clerical Fascist Salazar, in his June 13, 1933 speech before the First Imperial.Conference, held that bringing Christianity to the "inferior races" was one of the "greatest achievements of Portuguese colonialization of Africa." We can observe historical instances of this social order based on the relationship of master to slave in the Caribbean, in continental North America, southern Africa, Algeria and elsewhere in the Middle East including the Zionist regime in Palestine. Notice that it is not the institutional form or appearance of slavery, for instance as manifested in the slave market, which characterizes the modern versions of the herrenvolk society.

Rather it is the relationship of master to slave, the restrictions on mobility, on citizenship, on occupations, as Foucart has shown in 1867./13/

We can also observe the stunning overthrow of colonies and settler colonial regimes, beginning with Santo Domingo and proceeding up to Angola in our own age. These inversions of the dialectic were characterized by the violent confrontation of the stagnant and demoralized herrenvolk on the one side and the political and military organization of the increasingly strong subjugated class on the other side. These confrontations takes forms ranging from the general strike such as we observed recently on the Palestinian West Bank up to the full-fledged civil war of Zimbabwe. The movement of the dialectic guarantees the inevitable outcome of this confrontation. The greater part of all the herrenvolk societies in the list enumerated have already actualized their historical finitude. Before we consider the historical fate of the settler colonial regimes that remain, we must dispel four myths about these societies.

The first myth is that the settler colonists necessarily subjugate the native peoples. In several of the cases such as Algeria and Rhodesia, the subjugation of the native peoples was straightforward (and protracted). However, in other cases, the European colonists have simply exterminated the greater part of the native peoples. Such cases occurred in many of the islands of the Caribbean, in New Zealand and in the United States. After the native peoples have been exterminated, however, the demand for cheap labor remains. This labor demand must be filled without allowing the wage level to rise. The exigences of the settler colony dictate that the underclass be replaced. If the demand for cheap labor power is satisfied through the slave trade, as was the case in the islands of the Caribbean and in the United States, the dialectic of master and slave is thereby resurrected for the new underclass. This enables us to understand the corollary myth of "Jewish labor."

The exigences of the settler colonial regime of (a) cheap labor power and (b) plentiful cheap land are jointly unattainable under a wide range of historical conditions, as Marx noted in the "Modern Theory of Colonisation."/14/ Thus they must be sequentially realized. In the case of the Zionist partitioning of Palestine, the first objective was plentiful cheap land, hence some of the Palestinian peoples were exterminated, as occurred at the Arab village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948 at the bands of Menachim Begin's terrorists./15/ The others were expelled. The policy of extermination and expulsion of the Palestinian peoples should not be taken, as Jabbour and others have done, as an "essential ingredient for establishing the Jewish national identity" through "Jewish labor."/16/ Rather, it is simply a policy of land appropriation. Once the land is seized, then the labor supply problem must be dealt with. The second objective of Zionism was to provide a labor force for the regime; this was filled by an underclass which, we must acknowledge, was captured as an aftermath of the June 1967 War. The reason that Jabbour and others assent to the myth of "Jewish Labor" is because (a) they fail to recognize the essence of settler colonialism and (b) they fail to recognize the historical and dialectical movement of this regime through its antagonisms. While one period of the regime's history was devoted to appropriating plentiful cheap land, the other period was devoted to capturing a cheap labor force.

The second myth concerns the racist and chauvinist consciousness of the European settler colonials. Some portion of the working class in the herrenvolk society will have European origins. Historically, these white workers did not always exhibit their current racist attitudes and behaviors towards the underclass. In Rhodesia, for instance, this racism did not fully crystallize until the late 1930's when the United Party established the white hegemony that feigned a policy of "neither socialism nor capitalism. " Needless to emphasize, this historical development does not imply that the vast majority of these white workers are not by now hopelessly corrupted by racism./17/

If we recall the psychogenetic interpretation of the dialectic of subjective Geist, we can appropriately situate the racist and chauvinist consciousness of the white workers in the historical (objective) dialectic of their herrenvolk society./18/ Suspended as they are between the colonial elite and the underclass, they fail to embody the abject fear of the initially, utterly subjugated. The proletarian fear of personal death through the termination of individual wage slavery, that is through unemployment and starvation, is the consequence of an unequivocal class position under capitalism. In the capitalist dialectic, the class (relations) survive and the person perishes. This fear is moderated for the white worker in the settler colonial regime, distorted into the vague apprehension of the racist "threat" of the underclass, complete with fantasies of raped wives and daughters. Consider the current position and consciousness of the Ashkenazi in Palestine, with his Histadrut and "national socialism." Such apprehension leaves this "labor aristocracy" stripped of its dialectical agency, doomed as a stratum although individuals may survive by fleeing back to their metropole.

The third myth is that the dialectic of master and slave operates under any modern historical conditions. In fact, a critical numerical ratio of herrenvolk to underclass appears to be required to activate the dialectic towards inversion. Since quality underlies quantity, Marx and Engels emphasize that the quality or throughness of an historical action corresponds to the quantity or numerical size of the mass of the people whose action it is. As quantity increases, the quality of the historical action is transformed from a limited action into a qualitatively distinct and all-embracing revolutionary action./19/ In the United States, and in Canada, the ratios of whites to Blacks in the former, and of English to French in the latter is literally overpowering. Given the geographical dispersal of the Black people in the United States, we can thus anticipate an intermittently explosive but unsustained political struggle of this oppressed ethnic group. The geographical massing or concentration of les Quebecois, of course, alters this anticipation for Canada.

Provisionally, we can take an approximate unity as the critical ratio. Thus Algeria, where les pieds noirs were vastly outnumbered, was prone to qualitative change as more and more of the underclass were pressed into the labor force. Likewise with Kenya, with Mozambique, the dialectic of master and slave commenced, and indeed the inversion occurred.

Thus Rhodesia's one to more than twenty ratio has inevitably sealed its fate. The lethal dialectic has already begun there. The aggressive Zionist expansion of June 1967 has incorporated an underclass of more than a million additional Palestinians into a regime of about three million settler colonials. Thus the other settler regimes cannot be far behind Rhodesia.

The fourth and final myth is that the inversion of the dialectic is altogether positive in effect. And the issue is not the bloodshed of a war of liberation: as Hegel put it, history is a slaughter-house anyway.

On the one side, the liberation of a people from settler colonialism within carries no assurance that the more subtle domination of neocolonialism will not be imposed from outside. The global situation of any liberation movement in the age of imperialism, however successful, provides many opportunities and many sources of subsequent domination. The European and North American homelands of the first colonial settlers remain intact, economically and militarily potent, the still active metropole. On the other side, the diaspora of the herrenvolk from the colony after the inversion can have devastating consequences for progressive movements in the homeland. The colonial settler states have always constituted an enclave of virulent reaction threatening the metropole; recall Franco returned from Morocco, and the returning Angolan herrenvolk truncated Portuguese liberation.

There is one countervailing force against the unfolding of this dialectic of master and slave in the colonial settler state. That force is external intervention in behalf of the herrenvolk and metropolitan investments. Recall, any colonial settler state is on the one side a colony, which implies a powerful metropole with military and economic interests in its continued dependency. On the other side, the colony has been settled by persons who retain ethnic ties to their European and North American homeland. Thus any threatened herrenvolk can call upon those ethnic sympathizers and can turn to its metropole for military and financial assistance. This assistance can be assumed to be forthcoming, since it appears to promote both ethnic and capital interests. This countervails against the inversion, if not the action of the dialectic, prolonging the police action and guerilla war.

There is however, one exception to this rule: assistance is not forthcoming during periods of metropolitan disturbance. Thus Santo Domingo was liberated while the metropolitans were preoccupied with their French Revolution. Kenya was liberated while the metropolitans were preoccupied with the post-war reconstruction of Britain. The Portuguese empire was liberated while the metropolitans were preoccupied with overthrowing Caetano's regime.

Thus the strategic significance of the "oil weapon" proposal by the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party, utilized with discretion after the Middle East War flared up again October 6, 1973. The metropolitan disruption was patent.

In conclusion, the resolute pursuit of liberation in the remaining settler colonial regimes through mass armed struggle and protracted war assures us that Namibia will be liberated. Zimbabwe will be liberated; South Africa will be liberated; Palestine will be liberated.

1. This was officially acknowledged in the historic U.N. General Assembly resolution of November 10, 1975 identifying Zionism and racism.

2. We shall discuss the world-history of settler colonialism elsewhere, and identify the roots of Zionist expansionism in Palestine in the historical conjuncture of the Crusades, medieval Germanic colonialism in Slavic Europe, and anti-Islamic aggression during the "Age of Discovery" all of which crystallized under the Second British Empire in the appropriation of the Suez Canal and the colonization of Palestine.

3. Metaphysik der Sitten (Akademie edn.) Bd. 6, S. 353, § 62.

4. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, New York: Capricorn (1963); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, New York: Capricorn (1966).

5. While racial distinctions are usually the basis of these ethnic differentiations as in the cases of white "Rhodesia," and Palestine, they are not necessary, as evidenced in the case of the oppression of les Quebecois.

6. George Jabbour, Settler Colonialism in Southern Africa and the Middle East, Beirut: PLO Research Center (1970).

7. George A. Kelly "Notes on Hegel's 'Lordship and Bondage'," Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 19 (1966).

8. Quentin Lauer, A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Fordham University Press (1976), pp. 100-109. Also Kelly, op. cit.

9. Saddam Hussein, On Current Affairs, Baghdad: Al-Thawra Publications (1974).

10. We reject however Lauer's identification of Kojève's particular interpretation with other "historicist" readings of Hegel. It is clear that Hegel understood this dialectic historically. See his Encyclopedia of 1830, especially §433 Zusatz.

11. Hegel, Philosophy of Right §244.

12. Slavery was formally abolished in Britain only in 1807, in the British Empire only by the 1830's, and in the United States only after the Civil War of the 1860's.

13. Paul Francois Foucart, Memoire sur l'affranchissement des esclaves, Paris: Imprimerie imperiale (1867)

14. Karl Marx, Capital, Chicago: Charles Kerr (1906), Chapter 33.

15. This act of Begin was denounced by the foremost Jewish leaders, including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, in a letter to the New York Times Magazine on December 4, 1948.

16. Jabbour, Settler Colonialism in Southern Africa and the Middle East, op. cit., p. 60.

17. Thus, as we noted before, the careful study of the dialectic of class and nation is critical for a correct political programme.

18. Georg Lukács, Der junge Hegel, Neuwied: Luchterhand (1967), S. 542.

19. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 4, New York: International Publishers (1975), p. 82.