Can you point out where in the book he says this? I skimmed over it reading a few chapters the first time. Going back over it now.

Edit: damn you may actually wanna read this

There is a second unique form the purity fetish takes in the US. Gramsci’s work helps us understand that communists must appeal to the common sense understanding and feelings of the masses, and from there, critically rearticulate kernels towards socialism. If rejecting socialist experiments abroad and large chunks of the working class at home was not enough, the purity fetish Marxists add on to their futility in developing subjective conditions for revolution by completely disconnecting themselves from the traditions the American masses have come to accept. Bombastic and ultra-left slogans such as “Abolish America” have become more and more popular in American communist spaces. For them and their one-sided outlook, the U.S. is reducible to settler colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, slavery, and all the crimes of the ruling class and its state. Some have even gone as far as saying that white workers don’t actually exist – that they’re just ‘settlers.’ Since US history is not pure enough for their purity fetish outlook, it must be discarded wholesale. This is done through synecdochally treating the history of the owning class and its state as the whole history of America. Paradoxically enough, although US history is too impure for contemporary US communists to accept, it was always praised by the leaders of the global communist movement, from Marx, to Lenin, to Mao, to Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel. For instance, in his 1918 ‘Letter to American Workers,’ Lenin would say: The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world… The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in the nineteenth century. In some respects, if we only take into consideration the “destruction” of some branches of industry and of the national economy, America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65![273] A century and a half after the American Declaration of Independence from the English crown, in 1945, Ho Chi Minh would quote its ideals in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence from France and Japan, where he sums them up in the following manner: “All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”[274] Almost a decade after, in 1953, Fidel Castro would quote this document at length in his eminent ‘History Will Absolve Me’ defense, following the assault on the Moncada barracks. A little more than a decade after, Mao Tse-Tung would say in a 1965 interview with American journalist Edgar Snow that the US Had first fought a progressive war of independence from British imperialism, and then fought a civil war to establish a free labor market. Washington and Lincoln were progressive men of their time. When the United States first established a republic, it was hated and dreaded by all the crowned heads of Europe. That showed that the Americans were then revolutionaries.[275] For all the undeniable and condemnable flaws of the ruling class’s history, we must not forget that in the underbelly of this history lies its opposite – a long, arduous history of struggle against various forms of exploitation and oppression. This is the history of figures like Thomas Paine, Thomas Skidmore, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, August Willich, Daniel DeLeon, Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Flynn, William Foster, Henry Winston, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, and thousands more. This is the history, further, of the abolitionist movement, of the workers movement, of the civil war and reconstruction period, of the suffrage movement, of the various socialist, communist, and anarchist organizations that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century. This is the history, in essence, of the struggle against capital, the state, and the various tactics used to keep the working mass divided amongst race, sex, religion, and other factors which hinder the collective class struggle. This is a history which should raise the spirits of today’s communists with pride, letting us feel that the struggles we wage today continue the legacy of those who, for centuries, have fought the same fight in the same land. It should offer our struggles a new dimension of historical urgency, grounded on the commitment to not let struggles of previous generations of compatriots be in vain. An honest glance at our history will help one recognize that the country has been composed of a unity of two opposed struggling poles – one which fights to defend the interests of the accumulation of capital, the other which seeks to defend the interests of working and oppressed peoples. These poles represent the political struggles of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the “two Americas” – one which is “perishing on a lonely island of poverty” in the “midst” of the other, which wallows in “a vast ocean of material prosperity.”[276] The history of those who have fought for socialism, peace, workers’ rights, indigenous, black, and women’s rights, is not a separate history which stands outside of America fighting against it. Instead, this history is an immanent extension of the injustices that have permeated our country. The workers who partook in these struggles, in their great majority, saw themselves as the real representatives of the American people and of the American values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, sovereignty, the right to revolution and to a government genuinely of, by, and for the people. They saw themselves as taking the progressive side of the 1776 revolutionary tradition forward, to socialism, which they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion. As the late historian Staughton Lynd wrote, For almost two hundred years all kinds of American radicals have traced their intellectual origins to the Declaration of Independence and to the Revolution it justified. They have stubbornly refused to surrender the memory of the American Revolution to liberalism or reaction, insisting that only radicalism could make real the rhetoric of 1776.[277] In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois (unquestionably one of the greatest American socialist theorists and literary writers – sometimes called the American Lenin) says that “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.”[278] Three decades after, in his Black Reconstruction – not only his magnus opus, but one of the most important books for understanding modern America – Du Bois would express a similar sentiment, saying that “democracy died save in the hearts of black folk.”[279] In this text, Du Bois lucidly describes how the Civil War (or, America’s second revolutionary war) was won thanks to the general strike of the black proletariat (i.e., southern slave), who fled north, and, in so doing, became “doubly valuable” for the union – as they both weakened the south by destroying its productive capabilities (i.e., the south lost the labor power of the black worker), and added strength to the north in the form of an added mass of black labor, soldiers, spies, etc.[280] This not only forced emancipation upon the north, but ultimately led to a dictatorship of labor in the south, spearheaded by the Freedman’s Bureau and defended militarily by the federal government until the counterrevolution of property in 1876 (i.e., northern capital’s betrayal of southern labor and alliance with the southern oligarchy). This revolutionary movement towards a higher form of socialist democracy was understood by Du Bois – as well as by progressive figures of the time like Sumner, Stevens, Phillips, and Douglass – to be the genuine route that the American experiment should take to fulfill the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. It would entail not only the full realization, for the first time, of the ideals of 1776 in the world; but the concretization of the ideals themselves, which would now have to account for questions of property, class, and race within the democratic creed of Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. While socialists celebrate the Paris Commune every year as the first modern dictatorship of the proletariat, the fact that the dictatorships of labor in the reconstruction south are ignored – despite having arisen first (1865-1876), lasted almost a decade, and being much broader in scope – speaks volumes about the extent to which the ruling class has ignored and whitewashed our revolutionary history. In addition, it is also telling of the extent to which American socialists – let alone those of the rest of the world – have allowed the owners of capital to conceal such a tremendously important period of not only American or socialist history, but of world-history in general. The unearthing of this legacy, conjoined with the re-discovery of Du Bois, not just as some theorist, but as t