Ignatiev, Noel

IGNATIEV, NOEL (1940-2019). An American historian and activist, Ignatiev accomplished major inter-connected scholarly and political projects that were, in essence, a variation upon the classical Leninist analysis of the “national question.” He developed a firm understanding of its manifestation within the history of the United States, especially with regard to the ideology and practice of white supremacy. He considered the dismantling of white supremacy to be the most important task of the American Left.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Noel Saul Ignatin, the son and grandson of Party members, he joined the local Communist Party shortly after high school graduation. As he understood his life, he was radicalized by intervening on behalf of a Black worker who was harassed by a policeman, for which he was fined twenty-five dollars.

From 1958 to 1966, he engaged with assorted factional efforts to re-organize and re-build the weakened and demoralized Communist Party. He joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) with the intent of transforming the organization into an anti-racist, revolutionary movement. Alongside Theodore Edward Allen and with support of Hilda Vasquez and Esther Kusic, he developed the “white skin privilege” thesis, seeking to explain postwar white supremacy and inter-personal prejudice within social movements. Simultaneously, and as a result in part of his own factional maneuvering, SDS began to implode. Ignatiev and his allies worked to exacerbate the tensions, so to drive the organization or some faction of it into more militant anti-racist politics, with catastrophic results.

Ignatiev and Allen would continue to develop their thesis, further grounding it in a theoretical matrix derived at once from the W.E.B. Du Bois, Antonio Gramsci, and C.L.R. James. The Sojourner Truth Organization (1969-1986), a small group known for its unique theoretical positions within the New Communist movement, sought to advance these ideas through members’ activities and the journal Urgent Tasks.

After twenty-three years of industrial work, including militant trade union activism, Ignatiev transitioned into the academy, earning his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995. His thesis, later published under the title How the Irish Became White (1995), sought to describe the process whereby ethnic assimilation of a European immigrant community included within its social contract a mandate to endorse and uphold white supremacist ideology. While in the academy, he also participated in the creation of two more periodicals. The first, Race Traitor, sought to promote a “New Abolitionist” politics seeking to “abolish the white race.” Hard Crackers publicized the notion “that in the ordinary people of this country (and the world) there resides the capacity to escape from the mess we are in, and a commitment to documenting and examining their strivings to do so.”

While sympathetic to the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg, Ignatiev argued that the revolutionary struggle in the United States should take inspiration from home-grown tendencies such as the antebellum abolitionists and the Industrial Workers of the World. He wholeheartedly endorsed C.L.R. James’s critique of the Soviet Union and Marxist-Leninism, but also the systems of power and privilege within American liberal democracy. Thus he combined within Autonomist Marxism both anarchist and Leninist sympathies. Critics of his analysis suggested that it lent itself to an individualist framework. Ignatiev himself begrudged the absorption of his ideas into mainstream liberal multicultural diversity discourse utilized by corporate human resources departments and the cottage industry of “anti-racism” pundits. After a prolonged battle with cancer, he died in Arizona while visiting family.

Ignatiev, N. “The POC: A Personal Memoir.” Theoretical Review, 12 (September/October, 1979). Retrieved August 12, 2020, from https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1956-1960/ignatin01.htm.

Ignatiev, Noel; Ted Allen. "White Blindspot" (PDF). In Davidson, Carl (ed.). Revolutionary Youth & the New Working Class: the Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM,Documents and Other Lost Writings of SDS. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Changemaker Publications, 2011, pp. 148–18.

Noel Ignatiev on ‘Race Traitor,’ White Supremacy, and Abolition [Interview by I.]. (2019, October 11). Retrieved August 12, 2020, from https://itsgoingdown.org/noel-ignatiev-on-race-traitor-white- supremacy-and-abolition/.

Staudenmaier, M., and J.J. Bracey, J. J. Truth and revolution: A history of the Sojourner Truth organization, 1969-1986. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012.