Black Question and Social Revolution in the USA...

Black Question and Social Revolution in the USA

Every day, the assassinations of Black people and the abuses and inequalities against them remind us that the so-called American democracy remains the heir to slavery, even if it was able to bring to the presidency a capitalist leader in a black mask.

Every day, the situation of the poorest in the United States worsens, with or without COVID-19. It’s one of the most unequal countries in the world, but also one of the most socially volatile. It’s no wonder the upper middle class is turning to the far right.

It is equally essential that the workers’ struggle be anti-racist and that the black struggle be directed in a revolutionary and proletarian direction.

In both cases, one encounters not only prejudices but also organizations deeply tied to the American ruling class and the system of exploitation and oppression.

Ending one of the two oppressions, social and racial, is only possible by eliminating the other, and these are not two separate battles, nor should they be fought one after the other or alongside the other.

The Black question and the social question have always been deeply intertwined in the United States, and are more so than ever. There is no solution to one that does not closely depend on the other. Yet, from trade unionists to the political left and the supposedly purist Marxist and classist far left (such as the communist left), not everyone wants this connection, even though it is deeply rooted in reality.

It is important to first affirm that, as long as white workers consider themselves first as white and black workers first as black, there will be no class struggle or class party of the proletariat in the USA but only a struggle of capitalists and pro-capitalist parties and unions.

Needless to say, socialism without Black liberation would be nothing more than a complete sham. And unionism that does not include the struggle for Black liberation as one of its objectives is simply an endorsement of the US’s slave-owning past and an endorsement of the current oppression of capitalism.

Needless to say, the oppressed Black people cannot successfully fight racist capitalism and its state apparatus without joining forces with the American revolutionary proletariat.

All this doesn’t mean that it’s easy for white working-class activists to join the Black struggle, but the recent uprisings in the United States against the murders of Black people didn’t just concern Black people, far from it. Many white activists and a segment of the non-Black population also mobilized against these crimes, particularly those committed by the police.

If the fight for Black freedom and the union and left-wing struggle are opposed, the opposite is true for the revolutionary class struggle, which can only be propelled forward by the explosion of Black revolt. Any revolutionary alliance of the Black question and the social question is a mortal threat to American capitalism and the global system of domination and oppression. And it is also a threat to all left-wing or falsely far-left political and union deception agencies.

There will be no effective struggle of the working class without a connection with the struggle of black people, and no effective struggle of the black population without a connection with the struggle of the working class.

Of course, this presupposes the independence of the working class struggle from reformist and electoralist apparatuses, and the independence of the Black struggle from reformist and Black nationalist apparatuses. It is a difficult but indispensable struggle.

It is only by building a proletarian revolutionary party linked to the struggle of black people that the two struggles, divided by many organizations, can unite and be victorious.

Because this connection, explosive and even deadly for big capital, can only be based on a high-level political awareness.

Of course, some will say that a democratic and non-revolutionary struggle, not aimed at the overthrow of capitalism, would involve more people, more easily, and would bring more easy successes than an insurrectional and proletarian struggle.

Some will also say that we cannot condition the struggle of black people on the ability of white workers to get rid of their prejudices, nor condition the class struggle of workers on the ability of black people to link their struggle to the proletariat and its white fraction.

This is precisely where the error (or more precisely the betrayal) of both workers’ reformism and black reformism lies, and this leads to the rut into which both struggles have reached !

And the so-called extreme left, Marxist purists or not, who reject this connection by claiming that they are two different struggles that can simply be "in solidarity" with each other in a platonic way, thus support this betrayal.

The Black question, which is a thorn in the side of the class struggle as long as the reformists lead the working class because white power can manipulate the repression of Blacks as much as it wants and obtain the support of whites, would be a real bomb for capitalist domination as long as a truly revolutionary policy directs the class struggles.

Such a revolutionary politics should consider the connection between class struggle and anti-racist struggles as a crucial point of its program.

Other key points of this revolutionary program

in the class struggle as in that of blacks and anti-racists, self-organization in assemblies, committees and councils independent of established organizations, capitalists and state power

combat objective : the transformation of these autonomous organizations into new power

goal : the overthrow of the capitalist state and the domination of capitalists in the USA and throughout the world

linking struggles with those of the whole world ; revolutionary internationalism, to oppose the pseudo-solidarity of pseudo-democrats and reformists

The Black Trotskyist activist CLR James already stated in the 1930s and later :

"As long as the question of the independent political organization of workers is not resolved, the Black question cannot be resolved."

“To talk about the Black Movement as something that only concerns Black people is an absolute denial. It’s the history of Western civilization. It’s the history of Black people and white people. To say that it’s some kind of ethnic problem is monumentally stupid.”

"To focus solely on the racial aspect means abandoning the treatment of the question on the one hand to liberals who see only the extension of Rights, and on the other to black leaders who see only the extension of race."

"It should be mentioned that when a racial riot occurred in Chicago, it was deliberately provoked by the bosses. Some time before it broke out, meatpacking workers, both white and black, had struck and marched through the Negro neighborhood of Chicago, where the black population had cheered the whites in the same way and where they had applauded the Negroes. For the capitalists, this was a very dangerous phenomenon, and they set about creating racial friction. At a later stage, cars with whites inside would drive into the Black neighborhood, shooting on sight. The capitalist press played on the differences, and it was they who initiated the riots in order to divide the population and force the Negroes to withdraw into themselves."
CLR James - The Negro Question (August 22, 1939)

"Labor with white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor with black skin is marked" - Karl Marx

The American Negro and the Proletarian Revolution

"Black people are designated by their entire historical past as being, under proper leadership, the very vanguard of the proletarian revolution." – from the resolution on Black labor adopted by the Socialist Workers Party convention of July 1-5, 1939.

This decision of our recent congress will be one of the high points in the history of the American revolutionary movement.

There is, in the quoted sentence, an exaggeration, in my opinion. It would be more correct to say "in the vanguard." But the place of the Negro is at the very front. This is the truth that must be engraved in the consciousness of every member of the party before the party can successfully address the Negro question. When we have absorbed this, we will know how to approach the Negro.

It is the underprivileged, disinherited masses who are least corrupted by the dominant ideas of a society. They are, among the masses, the most ready to fight most desperately for the overthrow of any social system.

The example of the French Revolution

The Parisian masses were the battering ram of the French Revolution : the Sansculottes, that is, the people without shoes. In that manual of revolutionary theory and practice, The History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky describes the entry of these oppressed masses onto the historical stage of the French Revolution (p. 210) :

“But before the war and the guillotine, the Paris Commune entered the scene—supported by the lowest urban strata of the Third Estate—and with increasing audacity contested the power of the official representatives of the national bourgeoisie. A new dual sovereignty was thus inaugurated, the first manifestation of which was observed as early as 1790, when the upper and middle bourgeoisie were still firmly established in the administration and the communes. How striking is the image—and how defamed it has been !—of the efforts of the plebeian levels to rise out of the cellars and social catacombs, and stand in that forbidden arena where people in wigs and silk breeches decide the fate of the nation. It seemed as if the very foundation of society, trampled underfoot by the cultivated bourgeoisie, was stirring and coming to life. Human heads rose above the solid mass, horny hands stretched into the air, hoarse but courageous voices cried out. The districts of Paris, bastards of the revolution, began to live their lives. They were recognized—it was impossible not to recognize them !—and transformed into sections. But they continued to break the boundaries of legality and receive a stream of fresh blood from below, opening their ranks despite the law to those who had no rights, the destitute sans-culottes. At the same time, the rural communes became the screen for a peasant uprising against this bourgeois legality that defended feudal property. Thus, from beneath it, a second nation was born a third. Horny hands stretched into the air, hoarse but courageous voices cried out. The districts of Paris, bastards of the revolution, began to live their lives. They were recognized—it was impossible not to recognize them ! – and transformed into sections. But they continued to break the boundaries of legality and receive a stream of fresh blood from below, opening their ranks despite the law to those who had no rights, the destitute sans-culottes. At the same time, the rural communes became the screen for a peasant uprising against this bourgeois legality that defended feudal property. Thus, from beneath them, a second nation was born a third. Horny hands stretched into the air, hoarse but courageous voices cried out. The districts of Paris, bastards of the revolution, began to live their lives. They were recognized—it was impossible not to recognize them !—and transformed into sections. But they continued to break the boundaries of legality and receive a stream of fresh blood from below, opening their ranks despite the law to those who had no rights, the destitute sans-culottes. At the same time, rural communes became the screen for a peasant uprising against this bourgeois legality that defended feudal property. Thus, from beneath a second nation a third was born.They were recognized—it was impossible not to recognize them !—and transformed into sections. But they continued to break the boundaries of legality and receive a stream of fresh blood from below, opening their ranks despite the law to those who had no rights, the destitute sans-culottes. At the same time, the rural communes became the screen for a peasant uprising against this bourgeois legality that defended feudal property. Thus, from beneath it, a second nation is born a third. They were recognized—it was impossible not to recognize them !—and transformed into sections. But they continued to break the boundaries of legality and receive a stream of fresh blood from below, opening their ranks despite the law to those who had no rights, the destitute sans-culottes. At the same time, the rural communes became the screen for a peasant uprising against this bourgeois legality that defended feudal property. Thus, from beneath a second nation a third is born. The rural communes became the screen for a peasant uprising against this bourgeois legality that defended feudal property. Thus, from beneath a second nation a third is born. The rural communes became the screen for a peasant uprising against this bourgeois legality that defended feudal property. Thus, from beneath a second nation a third is born.

These are the millions who flocked to French trade unions between June and August 1936, at a rate of 40,000 a day. These are the masses who will rally to the most conservative organizations of the most privileged workers and energize them for the proletarian revolution.

Revolutionary History of the American Negro

And in America, "under proper leadership," Black people will come en masse to the revolutionary struggle.

Of the fifteen million of them in America today, with the exception of a thin layer of petty-bourgeois capitalists, intellectuals, and well-paid servants of the American bourgeoisie, the great majority of Negroes will fight for a new society with a vigor and endurance that will be unsurpassed by any other section of American workers or farmers.

Their ancestors did it. Lincoln doubted the North could have won without the 220,000 Black men in the Northern Army and the support of the slave population. How the Black soldiers fought ! "It would have been madness to attempt, with the bravest white troops, what I succeeded in doing with the Negroes." This is the testimony of Colonel Higginson, and there are about twenty similar assessments. Such bravery and endurance can be counted on from any people who, for centuries, have suffered all kinds of oppression and have finally found a way out.

This was, or should have been, generally known at least by Marxists. But it is only in recent years that research has begun to uncover and make known the revolutionary hostility against former slaveholders that characterized the ex-slaves after the Civil War. The fear of servile insurrection hung like a storm cloud over the defeated plantation magnates in the years following their defeat. With the slightest encouragement from any political party in the North, the Blacks of the South would have carried the revolution to its conclusion, annihilating all vestiges of the plantation system and with it the theory and practice of white supremacy.

Negroes not deceived by “democracy”

Today, the lives of more than 90 percent of the Negroes in this country offer no soil on which illusions about bourgeois democracy can flourish. Negroes need not dream dreams and have visions of a new society. It is always before them—to be able to live as white America lives. But this desire, however modest, they will never fall under capitalism. The majority do not understand their position in these terms. But those who reflect know that they will win their emancipation only by a merciless struggle against their masters. What terrifies them is that they see all of white America, white workers and all, as their enemies. When white workers realize, as Lincoln realized, that their emancipation is impossible without Negroes, they will seek them out and find them, as Lincoln did. They are already doing so, as the hundreds of thousands of Negroes in the CIO testify. The revolutionary party seeks to accelerate this process.

American Marxists underestimated the Negroes

What Lincoln learned by experience, we, the revolutionary vanguard, should know by analysis. Yet even when it was a revolutionary party, the Communist Party took ten years to seriously address the Negro question, and then only through the vigorous intervention of the Communist International. The SWP has followed an identical course—ten years of neglect and then an impulse to action from our international movement. This is not accidental in the least, and any superficial explanation would be a dangerous sophism. It is due in part to the influence of that chauvinism which characterizes American bourgeois society and is present even in a movement as advanced as ours. Marxists are not exempt from the laws of history and can combat a prevailing prejudice in all its aspects only by conscious and arduous thought and action constantly renewed. It is not a question of personal relations between whites and blacks in a party, however important it may be. There are a number of non-revolutionary Americans who maintain fairly liberal personal relationships with the Black people they know. Yet they are steeped in chauvinism. We will have to look into this question further.We will have to look into this question further.We will have to look into this question further.

When, as a party, we realize how pervasive and subtle the chauvinism fostered by American capitalism is, even among revolutionaries, then and only then will we be able to pull it out by the roots and begin to win the Negro for the revolution. But the first condition for this is to tear from our minds the false conceptions of the Negro which we have unconsciously adopted from American capitalism. To see the Negro in the vanguard of a great international political movement is to do him justice for the first time in American political thought. This is where the Fourth International begins.