Recently, when Signalfire's most recent rejoinder to the Fire Next Time's analysis of race/racism in the US was posted on /r/communism , I was reminded of how much I appreciated Neftali's clear-headed response to Ba Jin's speculative quasi-materialist theory. At the time I had meant to make a few glowing comments about the Signalfire post but for some reason that I cannot recall (probably something to do with childcare which is what normally distracts me these days) I forgot about both the article and the planned post. But now that I have been reminded of the existence of this debate, and though I cannot recall precisely what I planned to say initially, I have the subject matter for a small post that, at the very least, will pad outentries in the past several weeks which are quite sparse.First of all, some background. This debate over how to concretely understand race and racism for the purposes of revolutionary organization began with an article written by the Fire Next Time's Ba Jin entitled. This was followed by an article written by Neftali, and posted on the excellent Marxist-Leninist-Maoist blog Signalfire, entitled. Ba Jin then responded with a two part rejoinder to the Signalfire critique. Now we have a further response by Neftali. Since I do not plan to thoroughly summarize these articles here, I would recommend that the interested reader, if s/he has not already done so, read them in order. If anything this exchange demonstrates how the problematic of race/racism is being examined in new and creative ways without being overly mired in simplistic applications of the analyses that cohered in the New Communist Movement.Most importantly, though, I feel that Neftali's interventions demonstrate the importance of examining the phenomena of race/racism in scientific manner based on a concrete analysis of concrete circumstances and a creative rearticulation of past revolutionary theory. Although it should be clear that I side with the critique and analysis posted on Signalfire, because I feel it is a clear and precise examination of the problem that demonstrates an awareness of revolutionary organization and thus reads as more concrete and systematic than speculative and eclectic––Neftali's approach is a stunning demonstration of how to apply Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to a particular instance––I also did find Ba Jin's initial analysis illuminating. Indeed, Neftali's first response to thesealso noted the importance of the Fire Next Time's attempt to escape identity politics by examining race in connection to class and it is worth recognizing this fact rather than dismissing Ba Jin's analysis altogether.For one thing, Ba Jin desires to move the historical materialist analysis of U.S. white supremacy away from the simplistic categories of the past period of struggle because they rightly note that the current historical context is not identical to the context of the 1960s-1970s, let alone the context in which Harry Haywood wrote his thesis on the "Black Belt". It is indeed important to note the changing dimensions of racism in the U.S. just as it is important to note the changing dimensions of sexism and any given oppression: we cannot pretend that today's struggle against white supremacy is identical to the struggle as it existed in and around the Civil Rights era for the same reason that we cannot pretend that today's struggle against misogyny is identical to the struggle waged by the radical feminist movement in the 1970s. I have often felt that marxist theory has been somewhat deficient these days in its ability to grapple with the problem of racial oppression at the centres of capitalism due to its tendency to speak only of the national question and treat the theoretical work surrounding the national question, as it was understood up until the 1970s, as sacrosanct. None of this is to say that historical materialist theories oforshould be dismissed and relegated to the dustbin of history (after all, I do side with Neftali's analysis which creatively rearticulates these theories in opposition to Ba Jin's over-eager dustbinning) but just that there is a history of applying them in rather formulaic and mechanical ways and that marxist theory has often refused to do the hard-work of social investigation by simplistically drawing upon these past analyses.We do need a more thorough understanding of race/racism that, while still being materialist, does not simply reassert, in a rather crude manner, the past understanding of nations and the national question. And though there were significant interventions in this debate in the 1960s and 1970s (i.e. Sojourner Truth's various analyses that, in attempting to circumvent the necessity of understanding the national question, actually came up with some creative ways to theorize race/racism that oddly [and perhaps unintentionally] partially proved some of the more radical Black Nationalist theories of the labour aristocracy––it is interesting, then, that Noel Ignatiev comments on the Fire Next Time's initial post) they also cannot be reapplied in a formulaic manner. The need for a more thorough understanding of race and racism is relevant to my concrete context, Canadian capitalism, where racialization and thus racism were articulated in a different manner than the United States. Here, north of the 49th parallel border, revolutionary theories of the national question seem to applyto indigenous nations because there does not seem to be a Black Nation, or Chicano Nation, or now even Quebecois Nation in a revolutionary sense. Moreover, since patterns of settler immigration were different in Canada than they were in the U.S., racialization emerged in a different way with different communities: the historical basis of the Canadian capitalist economy was not built primarily by African slaves, and while the U.S. also had its oppressed and over-exploited Chinese workers building railways, Canadian use of Chinese labour was arguably more prevalent.None of this is to say that I disagree with Neftali's new return to the concepts of nation and the national question in the concrete context of the U.S.––or that Neftali's analysis cannot teach us something about understanding the problematic of race in the Canadian context––only that it primarily applies to the United States… But this is also its strength. Rather than seeking some abstract theory of race that is applicable in every context, it locates the abstract and universal facts about race and then applies them in a concrete manner to a particular social formation. In contrast, Ba Jin's analysis seeks an analysis of race/racism in abstract categories and then mistakes these categories as concrete.But in rearticulating the concepts of nation and the national question, Neftali's analysis is significant in that it does not simply dismiss the larger problematic of race, reducing all of its vicissitudes simply to the moment of the national question, though Ba Jin makes this accusation in their initial response. The second response to Ba Jin on Signalfire clarifies what was meant in the initial critique, as well as demonstrating some of the muddled thinking of the Fire Next Time's analysis, and demonstrates a more thorough grasp of the problem.While a crude reduction of race/racism to the concepts ofandis indeed a problem (and again it is laudable that Ba Jin grasped this problem), throwing out these concepts altogether, as Ba Jin appears to do (though with some back-tracking), is quite anti-materialist. First of all, even leaving aside the Black or Chicano nations (which it seems that Ba Jin believes exist in a revolutionary manner) there is still the deeper and older materialist fact that the United States, along with Canada, was established through the process of settler-colonialism and that thus there is was the contradiction of colonizer-colonized at the moment these country's emerged. To pretend that indigenous nations are not nations, when they clearly are oppressed as such and even legally controlled as such (and have historically resisted attempts at liquidation), is a practice often endorsed by the most crude chauvinist marxists––as one dogmato-revisionist Trotskyite once told me, indigenous nations do not count as "proper nations" because they lack "a coherent political economy".With this colonial context in mind, Fanon reminds us that all countries established on the oppression of indigenous nations must necessarily bethrough and through because national oppression logically produces racism. Thus, even if we were to ignore the fact that there is such a thing as a Black or Chicano nation in the U.S. (and I don't think we should for the reasons indicated by Neftali's analysis), we would still have to recognize the importance of the concept ofin understanding the phenomena of race and racism which do not emerge in a vacuum. While it is important to note that Ba Jin, in hir response to Neftali, attempts to make sense of the theory of nation and back-peddle on hir initial failure to even speak about this concrete fact, s/he is still generally and troublingly silent on the indigenous nationhood, and thus on the originary moment of the United States as a national entity, which should be grasped as part of the basis of race and racism in the U.S. Neftaligrasp this, hence their citation of Fanon at significant moments, but it is unclear whether Ba Jin even makes the connection––it is indeed interesting to note that, as Neftali pointed out, Ba Jin does not seem to have a coherent understanding of the national question (going so far as to display a general ignorance with their arguments against Neftali, demonstrating the lack of a shared understanding of the history of revolutionary theory) despite the Fire Next Time's dabbling in New Afrikan theory.And yet Neftali also returns, but arguably in a new and creative manner, to Harry Haywood's "black belt thesis" in order to make sense of the Black Nation. Although I have no significant critiques of their use of this theory––since I do not live and organize in the U.S. I am not part of an organization that has produced a thorough social investigation in this area––I do find it quite interesting that they have chosen to (re)develop a theory that has been challenged by some contemporary Black Nationalists. In their most recent response to Ba Jin they claim that those who have challenged this thesis (such as James Yaki Sayles) have done so in an idealist manner. This might be the case but, as an outside observer, I would like to see a thorough critique of Sayles' position rather than what seems, at first glance, to be an off-hand dismissal. It is significant, after all, that some important revolutionary Black Nationalists have located the basis of revolutionary nationalism in spaces other than the black belt, and have felt that this thesis does not account for contemporary reality––are they completely erroneous, especially when some of them have been participants in significant revolutionary nationalist struggles? To be fair, since Neftali's object of critique was not these alternate theories of Black Nationalism, but the theories of Fire Next Time, it makes sense, in context, to understand these dismissals as necessarily tangental. Moreover, much of the work that was done in Neftali's initial critique did demonstrate good reasons to accept a version of the black belt thesis and, by extrapolation, demonstrated how an outright rejection from some quarters was a significant problem.All-in-all, beyond the subject that was being debated, what is significant about this exchange between Ba Jin and Neftali is what we can learn about historical materialism as a science. If historical materialism is a science, then examination of the phenomena that it concerns (i.e. social and historical phenomena) must proceed along rigorously scientific andlines rather than speculative andlines. Only the former approach can produce a coherent and systematic analysis of the object under scrutiny; the latter is about as useful as spiritualist conjecture. As much as I was intrigued by Ba Jin's initial thesis, I was far more impressed by the methodological rigour and precision of what was posted on Signalfire––a rigour and precision that proved to be absent in Ba Jin's analysis when they replied to Neftali and descended into a haze of nebulous speculation in which an incoherent theoretical eclecticism (where a smorgasbord of disunified concepts were cherry-picked seemingly at random in a wild attempt to respond to a systematic critique) was clearly dominant. Despite Ba Jin's initial understanding of the need to renew a historical materialist understanding of race/racism, it became quite clear that they were ill-equipped to spear-head this renewal due to an inability to grasp and apply theory, coherently and methodically, in the moment of practice––sometimes I even wondered if they were even aware of the theoretical background of the problematic.Unfortunately, we are living in a social context where theoretical eclecticism is predominant, and much beloved by the gate-keepers of revolutionary theory, which is thus also a context where anything that even slightly resembles a coherent historical materialist approach is dismissed out-of-hand aseven when it is not. This is a context where well-intentioned revolutionaries become enamoured with speculative chic theories that resonate only within academic settings and where "book worship" (as Neftali pointed out) becomes a common practice. Those dedicated to this hodge-podge theorization––analyses without rigour, without coherence, without a concrete understanding of historical processes and material facts––prefer to invent "new" theories by picking and choosing from innumerable theories that they like, mainly due to academic popularity, as if a brilliant new recipe can be concocted simply by throwing together all the ingredients, without any methodological coherency, that they like from a buffet of multiple theories.So in this context we must remember Lenin's reply to the pseudo-materialists inwhere he was forced to defend historical materialism against quasi-spiritualists who were claiming, based on their inability to grasp the transformation of scientific paradigms, that revolutionary materialism was. Most importantly, we must recognize the fact that the revolutionary masses will not be enamoured by this eclecticism and so what is popular for those trained in academic book worship will generally be enable to prove their theories in practice. What ultimately matters, then, is whether-or-not the political line proposed by Neftali is capable of answering the problematic of race/racism in practice… and if there is a political organization that takes up this line as part of its programme then I think it will prove significant.