Race and the American National Question
Haz Al-Din
Abstract
This article offers a Marxist–Hegelian reinterpretation of “race” in the United States, arguing that race is a passive, non-dialectical category rooted in geographic proximity rather than an active historical principle capable of generating political community. Drawing on Hegel’s distinction between true and false universality, Haz Al-Din contends that race expresses merely accidental commonalities, whereas nations emerge from an actively shared historical, cultural, and economic existence forged through struggle. Against contemporary decolonial and separatist currents that deny the existence of an American nation, the article examines the historical formation of national principles in France, the Russian Empire, and the United States to demonstrate that ethnic heterogeneity does not negate national reality. Haz Al-Din situates American racial conflict within the broader development of maritime commercial empires — especially the British Empire — which, he argues, produced an unprecedented “empire of alienation” whose logic later culminated in the United States. Because the U.S. population was assembled through colonialism, slavery, and migration rather than long-term geographic integration, race became unusually pronounced as a category of social division. Yet, the article maintains that the material basis of racial exclusion erodes as the United States becomes industrially self-sufficient, rendering race increasingly subordinate to class antagonism. In its contemporary form as a digital-information empire, the United States exhibits a novel form of “super-alienation” in which Americans are estranged even from their own racial identities, generating both exaggerated racism and a uniquely American anti-racism. The article concludes that the resolution of the American national question lies in reconstructing a shared, land-based, productive existence rooted in the multi-racial working class. Only through a socialist transformation — establishing a republic of labor and restoring material integration — can the United States fulfill its latent national destiny and ultimately generate a new, unified American “race” grounded not in passive proximity but in a common civilizational life.
Keywords
Marxism, race, nationality, american national question, dialectical universality, Hegel, maritime empire, British empire, alienation, american racism, national formation, proletariat, class struggle, decolonial marxism, Haz Al-Din
