Frank Jackman comment:
Usually when I post
something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may
be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the
words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the
article speak for itself, or the let the writer speak for him or herself
without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not.
After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand.
Occasionally, and the sentiments expressed in this article is one of them, I
can stand in solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.
Workers Vanguard No. 1073 | 4 September 2015 |
Class-Struggle Road to Black Freedom
The roll call of recent victims of racist cop terror is well known: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and now 19-year-old college football player Christian Taylor to name just a bare few. Taylor, a Black Lives Matter activist, presciently tweeted last year: “Police taking black lives as easy as flippin a coin, with no consequences.”
The explosions of outrage following the police strangulation of Eric Garner in Staten Island, the gunning down of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson and the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore have triggered in the capitalist ruling class some post-traumatic stress disorder flashbacks to the hundreds of ghetto upsurges between 1964-68. Compared to the flames that engulfed Watts, Newark, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Cleveland and many other cities at that time, the past year’s events could be characterized as bonfires. However, in mobilizing the National Guard, enacting draconian curfews and brutalizing and arresting protesters, the capitalist rulers express their apprehension that everyday cop terror, grinding oppression and poverty have built up enormous social tinder that could ignite in a broader social explosion.
Our comrades joined protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and elsewhere, highlighting our class opposition to the racist Democratic Party of Obama/Clinton and combating illusions expressed in calls for federal oversight, “community control” of the police, and civilian review boards, whose role has always been to whitewash the killers in uniform. Notable was the occasional utterance of the epithet “white skin privilege” in attempts to silence our Marxist intervention.
Some younger comrades, though familiar with other methods of anti-communist censorship, had not been acquainted with what we older folk thought was a relic of the New Left of the 1960s-70s. Apparently, “white skin privilege” has become a regular feature of college curricula, radical-liberal conferences and the blogosphere. Now the term is even used in the mainstream media. “Privilege checking” has become one of the latest additions to the dictionary of political correctness. In early July, for example, the New York Times website ran a short documentary, A Conversation with White People on Race. One woman’s comment was representative: “I think we are all implicated in a racist system, and I play my part in it as a white person. So I do have individual responsibility and accountability.”
This increasingly common view flips the matter on its head. Prejudice is not the cause of black oppression; rather, the capitalist rulers’ special oppression of black people, integral to American capitalism, fosters anti-black discrimination. What she expressed is the smoke and mirrors by which the capitalists throw the responsibility for the oppression of black people upon the population as a whole—if white people weren’t prejudiced, there would be no problem. In the 1950s and ’60s, this refrain was common to the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which cautioned civil rights activists to “go slow” in pushing for change, claiming the need to patiently win over the hearts of segregationists.
For those like Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev) and Ted Allen, who around 50 years ago advanced “white skin privilege” theory while professing adherence (albeit tenuous) to Marxist revolutionary politics, the white working class was seen as materially benefiting from black oppression and to have a vested interest in perpetuating anti-black hostility. Ignatin & Co. eschewed any prospect of integrated struggle to further the common interests of black and white workers and dismissed the unions, which are the basic defense organizations of the working class, as bourgeois institutions—a way of making common cause with the class enemy. Similarly, they declared the Soviet Union (a workers state, although bureaucratically degenerated) to be capitalist, thereby writing it off and aligning themselves with their own imperialist masters.
The theory of “white skin privilege” serves only to conceal that the oppression of black people persists because it is a key prop for capitalist rule and profits. The forcible segregation of black people serves to divide the working class and suppress wages for black, white and immigrant workers alike. The horrific conditions of life—rotten schools and dilapidated housing, widespread unemployment and low-wage jobs, no health care—that blacks and immigrant workers have long endured are now increasingly faced by the working class as a whole. This reality exposes the lie that white workers materially benefit from the oppression of their class brothers and sisters. The unemployed white crystal meth addict in the Ozarks, whose father and grandfather haven’t had a regular job in decades, likely recognizes he isn’t very privileged. In fact, his perceived lack of privilege is soil for recruitment to the fascist race terrorists.
It used to be very fashionable to view the U.S. through the same lens as South Africa. A comparison with apartheid South Africa, whose development produced a near-complete overlap between class and race, is instructive. Practically the entire industrial proletariat of that country consists of black Africans, with some coloureds in the Western Cape and Indians in Durban. After 1948, what had been a sizable and privileged white working class, along with poor white Afrikaner farmers, was concentrated in the state bureaucracy. By the mid 1990s, one-third of the white labor force was employed in the government sector, mainly as useless pencil pushers. They enjoyed lives comparable to the upper layer of the American petty bourgeois—owning plush suburban homes, with swimming pools and household servants.
This strict racial hierarchy is not the case in the U.S. While blacks are on the bottom of society, whites as a whole are not on top. Millions of white women and children are on welfare (even after many were thrown off the rolls under Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform”), lack medical coverage and survive on food stamps. The large number of poor whites would be inconceivable in South Africa.
What black people have suffered for generations, continuing to this day, is defined by the particulars of U.S. history—slavery, the defeat of the Southern slavocracy by Northern industrial capitalism in the Civil War, and the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of Radical Reconstruction and its promise of equality. This history led to the racist segregation of black people despite the economic integration of black toilers into the proletariat at the bottom.
Race and Class in America
The racist contempt that is deeply embedded in American culture is rubbed in the face of the black population on a daily basis. It’s not just stop-and-frisk and physical abuse by the police for “walking while black”; the “zero tolerance” rules under which black children as young as five years old have been arrested for acting out a bit in school; the rotting public housing and the redlining to assure residential segregation. It is also expressed in the hideous demands recently made on the families of the victims of cop terror to forgive the killers. Forgive?! This from a ruling class whose Supreme Court has declared capital punishment—a legacy of slavery—to be one of the “principles that underlie the entire criminal justice system,” and that locks away fighters for black rights such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter and Albert Woodfox, among many others framed up for crimes they never committed. Some have been kept in solitary for decades.
The pro-slavery, pro-KKK movie Gone with the Wind is still revered as a classic, even by liberals who would soil their pants if a German film festival featured the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. “Classic rock” radio DJs wax on about their “peace and love” Woodstock experiences and then play Lynyrd Skynyrd’s segregationist anthem “Sweet Home Alabama.” The same contempt is seen in the Confederate flags that continue to adorn fairgrounds in New York State. It is also expressed in the vitriol directed at some of the greatest athletes of our time—foremost among them Barry Bonds, whose alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs is portrayed as violating the bogus ideal of American society as a meritocracy. Bonds and others are reviled by the same people who fawn so much over the parasitic British royal family (whose only accomplishment was to be born intact despite generations of inbreeding) that when Prince William’s wife sneezes they might as well tweet across the ocean “God Bless You Kate.”
Racism infects the working class precisely because the rulers of this country devised the myth of black inferiority to justify slavery and then propagated and constantly reinforce race prejudice to divide the laboring masses. As a result, the U.S. is the only advanced capitalist country never to have had a mass workers party representing even a deformed expression of the political independence of the proletariat. Writing in 1893 to a comrade in Hoboken, New Jersey, Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels counted among the obstacles to forging such a party “especially, immigration, which divides the workers into two groups: the native-born and the foreigners...who understand only their own language. And in addition the Negroes. Very powerful incentives are needed to form a single party out of these elements. There is sometimes a sudden strong élan, but the bourgeoisie need only wait passively, and the dissimilar elements of the working class will fall apart again.”
Wait passively is not what the American bourgeoisie does. The last 125 years have seen heroic integrated struggles—including the pitched battles in the 1930s that forged the CIO industrial unions, the greatest gain for black people since the Civil War and Reconstruction. At the same time, the bourgeoisie has undermined those struggles by pitting blacks, whites and immigrants against one another over scarce jobs and other resources. This divide-and-rule has resulted in atrocities—like the racist pogroms amid the massive strike wave of 1919 and the Detroit racist riot of 1943 over public housing.
Black and Red
“White skin privilege,” as propounded by Ignatin in his 1967 letter “White Blindspot” to the Progressive Labor Party and adopted by a current of the New Left, emerged in a particular historical context, the same as the ghetto conflagrations mentioned earlier: defeat of the liberal-led civil rights movement headed by MLK as it moved North. This defeat accelerated black separatist sentiment. The purge of leftists from the unions in the late 1940s and ’50s meant there was no significant left opposition in the labor movement to challenge the racist practices of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and fight racial oppression in society at large. One other factor was the absence of any revolutionary Marxist organization that intervened early in the civil rights movement before young black activists turned to black nationalism.
It was in the period of the civil rights movement that our organization emerged, originating as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) opposition within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the historic party of Trotskyism in the U.S. By the early 1960s, the SWP had lost its revolutionary bearings and was tailing non-proletarian class forces, seen domestically in its policy of abstention from the Southern civil rights movement as well as its later embrace of black nationalism.
By 1963, the SWP majority had explicitly renounced the fight for communist leadership of the black struggle, relegating itself to the role of a “socialist” vanguard of the white working class. Before its expulsion beginning in December that year, the RT fought inside the SWP for the party to seize the opportunity to recruit black Trotskyist cadre to its ranks. The RT put forward a series of demands linking the fight for black rights to the broader struggles of the working class and addressing immediate needs, such as organized self-defense and unionization drives throughout the South.
As we elaborated in “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” adopted at the founding conference of the Spartacist League/U.S. in 1966:
“Because of the generations of exceptional oppression, degradation and humiliation, Black people as a group have special needs necessitating additional and special forms of struggle. It is this part of the struggle which has begun today, and from which the most active and militant sections of Black people will gain a deep education and experience in the lessons of struggle. Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution.”
A Materialist Understanding of Society
The purpose of this talk is to motivate a Marxist materialist program for the fight for black freedom as opposed to the idealism embodied in both black nationalism and guilty white liberalism, including the concept of “white skin privilege,” which falsely substitutes individual psychology for struggle against the racial oppression rooted in the capitalist profit system. We fight for black freedom on the program of revolutionary integration including mobilizing the working class against every manifestation of racial oppression. This approach is counterposed to liberal integration, which is premised on the utopian notion that equality for black people can be attained within the confines of this class society founded on black oppression.
Our program of revolutionary integrationism flows from the understanding that the American black population is neither a separate nation nor a separate class but rather is a doubly oppressed race-color caste. Freedom for blacks in the U.S. will not come about without a socialist revolution. And there will be no socialist revolution without the working class taking up the fight for black freedom. As Karl Marx wrote shortly after the Civil War, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”
As Marxists, we view the motor force of history as the struggle between the oppressor class—today the capitalist class, which owns the means of production like land and factories—and the oppressed class. Under capitalism, that class is the proletariat, workers who have nothing but their labor power, which they sell to the capitalists in order to live. Capitalism is an irrational system based on production for private profit. It is incapable of providing for the needs of the world’s masses.
To preserve its class rule, the tiny capitalist class has at its disposal the vast powers of the state—the core of which is the army, cops, courts and prisons—as well as potent means of ideological subjugation in the schools, press and religion. The police truncheon, machine-gun fire, electric chair and firing squad have been the rulers’ rations for both white and black workers seeking to organize for their class interests. The capitalist state cannot be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed. It must be swept away by the proletariat and a workers government established in its place.
The proletariat is the only revolutionary class in society. This isn’t a moral question—i.e., exploitation and oppression do not make you more virtuous or progressive. Rather, it is a consequence of the proletariat’s unique role in capitalist production (and transport). Workers, toiling alongside one another in large numbers, generate the profits that go to the capitalists. It is because of this role in production that the working class has its social power. Indigenous peasants in southern Mexico may have harder lives, but they don’t have the social power or collective interest that the workers have in auto factories in that country’s north. Similarly, black people who left farms in the U.S. South for factories in urban centers found a potential social power that they could only have dreamed of before, along with a commonality of interest with their white co-workers. Shutting down production and transport through strikes and solidarity actions—these are the proletariat’s weapons in the class struggle.
Integral to capitalist production and class rule is ensuring that some part of the working class be unemployed—what Marx called an “industrial reserve army.” This “surplus population” is needed in order for capitalist production to expand during periods of boom and to hold down wages through competition for jobs. It also provides a pool from which to recruit strikebreakers and union-busters. Prior to the end of slavery, the U.S. recruited its surplus population from immigrants driven off their land in Ireland by famine; later, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe as well as Asia played this role. Emancipation of the black slaves gave the American bourgeoisie a new, domestic source for its industrial reserve army, one that became increasingly important in the late 19th century, as U.S. capitalism entered the epoch of imperialism. From then to now, black people have been the last hired and first fired.
Black People in the U.S.: A Caste, Not a Nation
In much of the world, the consolidation of capitalist nation-states by a nationally homogeneous ruling class was accompanied by the forced incorporation of other peoples, some constituting a nation and others not. Those making up oppressed nations are subject not only to greater terrorization and discrimination in employment and housing but also to the suppression of the national culture—language, schools, religion. For example, Turkey long denied the existence of the Kurds, calling them mountain Turks, forcing them to adopt Turkish names and prohibiting the use of the Kurdish language.
Tsarist Russia was a prison house of peoples encompassing oppressed nations (like Poland and Ukraine). At the same time, there were non-national groups who were brutally oppressed: religious minorities, Jews, Turkic speaking peoples, etc. The Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, which led the working class to power in the October 1917 Russian Revolution, proclaimed the right of nations to self-determination. Their irreconcilable opposition to anti-Jewish bigotry and pogroms, discrimination against Roma (Gypsies) and all national, religious and ethnic oppression was instrumental to uniting the working class, with the support of the peasantry, to smash capitalist rule and maintain proletarian state power in a civil war against reactionary forces backed up by 14 invading capitalist armies.
The Bolshevik Party is our model. As Lenin wrote in What Is To Be Done? (1902):
“The Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.”
The Russian Revolution was not made solely for Russia, but was considered the opening shot of a necessarily international struggle of labor against the rule of capital. It was an inspiration to the oppressed masses of the world and had a direct impact on the struggle of black people in the U.S. The intervention by the Communist International in the 1920s turned the attention of the American Communists to the necessity of conducting special work among the oppressed black population—a sharp break from the practice of the earlier socialist movement. (On that topic, I highly recommend the new book by Jacob Zumoff, The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919-1929 [see article, page 4].)
“Self-determination” is not an all-inclusive term applicable to the various oppressed sectors of the population: e.g., self-determination for gays, women, immigrants and so on. As Lenin described, self-determination is a democratic demand applying to oppressed nations that “means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state.”
As should be clear from the above, the American bourgeoisie didn’t invent the strategy of dividing the working class by national origin, religion and ethnicity. Race, however, is purely a social construct developed to justify the use of black Africans as slaves in the Americas. The oppression black people face in the U.S. is not the forcible assimilation of an oppressed nation, but rather is forced segregation. In contrast to the successive waves of immigrants who were met with ruthless discrimination only to later be welcomed into what’s called the American “melting pot,” black people have been deprived of the right of assimilation. The historic struggles of black people in the U.S. have been for immediate economic, political and social equality—not for an independent state. For good reason.
Black people do not share a common territory with which to form an independent state. In 1928, the Communist Party adopted the view that the states in the Deep South Cotton Belt formed the basis for a black nation, a notion adopted by the Maoists and some black nationalist groups in the 1960s. Max Shachtman, then a leader of the American Trotskyists, noted in his 1933 document Communism and the Negro (published in 2003 as Race and Revolution) that although the Cotton Belt once held the majority of black people, they had no particular attachment to it, as shown by the Great Migration to the North. Shachtman wrote, “A common territory the Negroes have, but it is the United States as a whole and not any section of it.” He added: “The Negro cannot be said to constitute a national question within the Black Belt and something else outside of it without making a caricature and a sport out of the conception of a people as a nation.”
Black people in the U.S. comprise a race-color caste, integrated into the lower rungs of the economy while socially segregated. What determines their caste status is skin color. All black people—from unemployed workers to a distinguished Harvard professor—face discrimination based on the color of their skin. Black workers face double oppression—exploitation as a worker and racial discrimination. And black women workers are triply oppressed.
The Social Construct of Race
There is no biological basis for dividing humans into separate races. The race concept itself arose out of the need to demarcate black people as slaves and accordingly keep them separate from the rest of society. As veteran American Trotskyist Richard Fraser described at the onset of the civil rights movement:
“First the black skin was despised because it was the mark of a despised mode of production. But this despised mode of production was the creator of untold wealth and prosperity, and capitalist society cannot despise riches for long. So they turned the whole matter on its head....
“It was not the mode of slave production which was to be despised, but the slave: that the reason the black skin was the mark of the slave was that it was first the mark of human inferiority.”
This white-supremacist ideology contaminated not only lower-class whites in the South but also the emerging proletariat in the North. Before the Civil War, the Democratic Party, then dominated by the Southern slavocracy, gained support among the Irish Catholic immigrants who made up the bulk of unskilled urban workers in the North. The Democrats combined a posture of hostility toward the Yankee ruling elite with racist demagogy that abolition would result in black freedmen taking white workers’ jobs and driving down wages.
Despite pervasive racist attitudes among all social classes in the North, the compelling historic interests of Northern capital led to a war against the Southern slavocracy. The Civil War was the last great bourgeois-democratic revolution, resulting in the abolition of black chattel slavery and the destruction of the old Southern plantation agricultural system. There followed a turbulent decade of interracial bourgeois democracy in the South implemented by freed slaves and their white allies and protected by federal troops, many of them black. This period, known as Radical Reconstruction, was the most egalitarian experiment in U.S. history.
The Compromise of 1877 sealed the betrayal of black freedom by the Northern capitalists. With the withdrawal of the Union Army from the South, a new system of racist oppression was established through the systematic repression of the freedmen’s fight for land, education and civil rights. The former slaves became tenants and sharecroppers, toiling on land owned by the white propertied class, which consisted of elements of the former slavocracy and a new Southern bourgeoisie with strong ties to Northern capital.
As Fraser observed:
“In the southern system and the race relations which derive from it, all Negroes are the victims of discrimination. But except for a minority of capitalists and privileged middle class people, the white population as such does not derive benefit from it. On the contrary, the white worker and farmer are as much the objects of class exploitation as are the Negroes. A majority of the workers and farmers in the South are white. But their standard of living and general social condition is directly determined by that of the Negroes.
“Therefore, while the dark race is the direct victim of discrimination, the group which gains from it is not the lighter skinned race but a class: the ruling capitalist class of the United States.”
Fraser added, “Race prejudice...is one of the means by which the extreme exploitation of white workers themselves is maintained.”
In the late 1800s, the Populist movement was initially multiracial, encompassing poor white and black farmers as well as small businessmen. The heroic efforts of its organizers in the South were defeated when an alliance of big planters, Southern capitalists and Northern financial interests initiated a campaign of violent race hatred, carried out by local Democratic Party enforcers, which destroyed the developing black-white unity. Black people were disenfranchised, stripped of all legal rights and denied access to adequate education. The racism stoked during this period has had an ongoing impact on the South, where wages are far below the rest of the country, effective union organization is lacking and rural poverty crushes black and white alike.
A rigid system of legally enforced racial segregation called Jim Crow was imposed and maintained by lynch-rope terror and police-state repression of blacks and anti-racist whites. The rise of Jim Crow, which was law in the South but whose white-supremacist and segregationist spirit infected the whole country, dovetailed with the emergence of the U.S. as an imperialist power and served to fortify colonial oppression and exploitation. In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld “separate but equal” segregation in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson.
This remained the law of the land until the civil rights movement led the U.S. ruling class to acquiesce to granting the same political and legal rights that existed in the North to black people in the South. But even in the North, black people faced pervasive racist oppression. Two weeks after enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, protests against the cop killing of 15-year-old James Powell in Harlem were met with a full-scale police riot. Within days of the enactment of the Voting Rights Act the following summer, the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles exploded after the arrest of a black motorist. MLK fully supported the brutal suppression of the enraged populace of Watts, declaring: “It was necessary that as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them.”
Workers Vanguard No. 1074
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18 September 2015
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Class-Struggle Road to Black Freedom
Part Two
Marxism vs. the Myth of “White Skin Privilege”
To some extent, the Black Power demand reflected an attempt to grasp for solutions outside the framework of U.S. capitalist society. But, as we warned in “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” “The slogan ‘black power’ must be clearly defined in class, not racial terms, for otherwise the ‘black power’ movement may become the black wing of the Democratic Party in the South” (1966, reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 9). This is exactly what happened. A case in point is Georgia’s longtime Democratic Congressman John Lewis, who had been a radical SNCC leader in the 1960s.
With the union officialdom failing to mobilize labor’s social power in support of the civil rights movement, black militants who lacked a class perspective gave up on the idea of a racially egalitarian society and accepted segregation and racism as an unchangeable norm. Organizational separatism became a psychological compensation for the manifest impossibility of acquiring a separate black nation-state. SNCC purged its white members. Other nationalist groupings emerged, most prominent among them the Black Panther Party, which formed in Oakland in 1966.
The Panthers courageously stood up to the racist ruling class and its kill-crazy cops. Counterposed to the petty-bourgeois “pork chop” nationalism exemplified by Ron Maulana Karenga, who joined in the cop/FBI COINTELPRO vendetta that killed 38 of their members, the Panthers groped for a way out of the hell of black life in America through means that went beyond what was acceptable to the capitalist rulers. That is, they were subjectively revolutionary. But the Panthers’ glorification of ghetto rage and their rejection of the working class as the agent of socialist revolution and black freedom left them more vulnerable to state repression. The Panthers ran up against a vicious government campaign of assassinations, provocations, frame-ups and imprisonment aimed at beheading black struggle. In the end, they could only alternate between adventurism, with its bitter consequences, and appeals to the liberal establishment. Many of the Panthers who were not killed or locked away eventually made their way to the Democratic Party.
Against this backdrop emerged the doctrine of “white skin privilege” as announced by Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev) in his 1967 document “White Blindspot.” This concept was soon adopted by a section of the New Left, which impressionistically wrote off the American working class in its entirety as a labor aristocracy.
Underlying Ignatin’s “theory” is disdain for the need for a programmatically cohered revolutionary leadership. As we set forth in “Black and Red”: “Our immediate goal is to develop a black Trotskyist cadre. We aim not only to recruit Negro members—a shortcut to the working class in this period—but to develop these black workers into Trotskyist cadres who will carry a leadership role in organizing the black masses, within the League itself and elsewhere.” The period may have changed, but this goal, restated in the early 1980s as an aspiration for a 70 percent black party, has not changed in the nearly half-century of our existence.
Communists and Integrated Unions
Ignatin & Co. ignore the contradictions of capitalism that make proletarian revolution both necessary and possible. They also efface the history of integrated struggles and the betrayals of those struggles by both the union misleaders and the Stalinists, from whose milieu Ignatin came.
The Great Migration of black people out of the rural South, beginning around World War I, led to black workers increasingly becoming part of the industrial proletariat in the North. A similar process happened in the South as new industrial centers developed there over subsequent decades. Thus, rural sharecroppers were transformed into proletarians in large-scale factories. With white and black industrial workers sharing a clear identity of class interests, there was a basis for integrated class struggle and the struggle for black freedom. The forging of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) through a series of militant strikes in the 1930s opened the door for the integration of black workers into powerful industrial unions.
The Communist Party (CP) was in the forefront of fighting for black workers and farmers and against racial oppression and lynch-law terror during the early 1930s. CP-initiated Unemployed Councils in major cities fought against evictions. In the famous Scottsboro case, Communists led the struggle to free nine black youths who were framed up in 1931 on charges of raping two white girls on a freight train and jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama (eight of them sentenced to death).
The CP built the Share Croppers’ Union (SCU), which represented thousands of evicted black farmers as well as cotton pickers, largely centered in Alabama. The struggle to organize the SCU was conducted in a state of perpetual civil war with both legal and extralegal armed vigilante groups. By 1935, the SCU claimed some 12,000 members. The black-led SCU also sought, with great difficulty, to recruit rural whites to its ranks. In counties where the SCU was active, the CP routinely received hundreds of votes from an all-white electorate. Those impoverished whites who didn’t dare join a black-led union demonstrated their solidarity by voting for CP candidates when and where they could.
Courageous as this work was, the Stalinist CP by this time was no longer a revolutionary organization. After Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, Stalin proclaimed the Popular Front—an alliance with a mythical “progressive bourgeoisie.” Its American incarnation was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal alliance. In 1941, the CP hailed U.S. entry into WWII (which came six months after Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union) and worked overtime to enforce a “no strike” pledge issued by the trade-union bureaucracy. The Communists demanded that black people forsake their struggle for equality in the interest of the imperialist war effort. The betrayals of the CP during the war years helped wipe out gains for black people and served to discredit radical movements generally, although hundreds of black workers joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
While calling on class-conscious workers to militarily defend the Soviet Union, the SWP opposed the interimperialist slaughter. For this, 18 Trotskyists and Minneapolis Teamsters leaders were imprisoned under the anti-communist Smith Act by the FDR administration in 1941. The SWP maintained a revolutionary course through the difficult WWII years and the immediate postwar period. During the war, the SWP took up and publicized the defense cases of black soldiers victimized for opposing Jim Crow segregation. In the aftermath of anti-black riots in Detroit in 1943, the Trotskyists fought for flying squadrons of union militants to stand ready to defend black people menaced by racist mobs. As a result, the SWP made a major black recruitment breakthrough in that city. However, under the intense pressure of the Cold War, most of these recruits left the party over the next few years.
In the late 1940s, on the heels of a massive postwar strike wave and at the outset of the anti-Soviet Cold War, the Democratic Harry S. Truman administration launched a massive anti-Communist witchhunt to purge troublemakers from the industrial unions and smash their militancy. The Taft-Hartley Act barred Communists from holding union office and banned a whole host of militant strike tactics. The CIO bureaucracy opposed Taft-Hartley in words but adhered to it in practice. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the United Electrical union and nine other CP-led unions with a total of around one million members—almost 20 percent of the entire CIO membership—were expelled from that union federation. A key figure in leading these red purges was United Auto Workers (UAW) president and social democrat Walter Reuther, who later headed the CIO and collaborated with Martin Luther King.
The anti-red witchhunt took place alongside the obscenely named “Operation Dixie,” the official (and unsuccessful) CIO campaign to organize the South. That campaign’s failure lay in the refusal of the union tops to take up the cause of black rights, a refusal bound up with their fealty to the Democratic Party, which then ruled in the South. Hard terrain the South was, but the region had already experienced significant union growth in industries such as coal, metal mining, oil refining, mass transit, pulp, wood and paper. In its November 1946 issue, Fortune magazine grudgingly described resistance to the unions as weak and predicted that complete organization of the South would be inevitable.
Rather than reviving the mass militant workers mobilizations that built the CIO in the 1930s-’40s, the union tops sought acceptance from the white Southern elite. To that end, the CIO mostly restricted its organizing efforts to white workers. It targeted the largely white textile mills, shunting aside the more racially mixed tobacco, transportation and wood industries, which held more promise for success. By excluding left-wingers from Operation Dixie staff, the CIO sidelined those with proven experience in organizing the South. Declining to appeal to black workers, the all-white, conservative leadership lost union elections in textile plants with a large percentage of black workers.
The union bureaucrats not only failed to organize the South but also destroyed existing outposts of opposition to the Southern racist hegemony by raiding left-wing unions. Militantly anti-racist white unionists with large followings among black and white workers were driven out of the maritime, metal mining and tobacco unions. The sharp decline of union membership in recent decades can be traced to the failure to organize the South.
What this meant was that when young liberal activists—black and white—entered the political scene during the civil rights struggles, they saw a labor movement that had no significant (or even insignificant) left wing sharing their own views toward racial oppression and Cold War militarism. All wings of the labor bureaucracy were rabidly anti-Communist and staunch anti-Soviet Cold Warriors. All wings defended the racist status quo in the North and only paid lip service to opposing legalized racial segregation in the South. Even racially integrated unions like the UAW were pervaded by racist practices. For example, the UAW skilled trades section in this period was almost exclusively white.
The History of “White Skin Privilege”
Ignatin’s “White Blindspot” theory hinges on a W.E.B. DuBois quote from Black Reconstruction in America (1935): “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.” Ignatin spins this thread to alibi the capitalist rulers by positing the poison of white chauvinism as “the ideological bulwark of the practice of white supremacy, the general oppression of blacks by whites.”
According to Ignatin:
“The U.S. ruling class has made a deal with the mis-leaders of American labor, and through them with the masses of white workers.... You white workers help us conquer the world and enslave the non-white majority of the earth’s laboring force, and we will repay you with a monopoly of the skilled jobs, we will cushion you against the most severe shocks of the economic cycle, provide you with health and education facilities superior to those of the non-white population...enable you on occasion to promote one of your number out of the ranks of the laboring class, and in general confer on you the material and spiritual privileges befitting your white skin.”
He goes on to disparage the prospect of integrated struggle, writing that white workers “have more to lose than their chains; they have also to lose their white-skin privileges, the perquisites that separate them from the rest of the working class.” In other words, no gains can be attained until white workers reject their purported white supremacy.
For Ignatin, the role of white leftists was to uncritically support the “black liberation struggle,” while confining their own efforts to organizing only white activists and admonishing white workers to shed their privileges. Of course, he and his cothinkers offer no prescription for how to do so, other than telling white communists to go up to workers and “say frankly: you must renounce the privileges you now hold.” In practice, this instruction meant calling on white workers to give up their jobs, accept lower wages, renounce upgrades and reject job protections like seniority rights, which had been won through hard-fought union struggles to shield militant workers (black as well as white) from dismissal at the whim of the bosses. During the Boston busing battles in the 1970s, Ignatin opposed a proposal to link the defense of busing to the fight for better quality education for all.
I feel a bit odd going on about Ignatin, as he would barely be a footnote in the history of the American left had he not sired this “white skin privilege” theory. His Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) was one of the more insignificant spin-offs from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the main organization of the New Left. Nonetheless, Ignatin is representative of a broader layer of his political generation.
SDS split at its 1969 National Convention as the Weathermen and the Revolutionary Youth Movement-II, headed by Maoists Mike Klonsky and Bob Avakian, broke away from the Progressive Labor Party (PL)-led Worker-Student Alliance. This anti-PL lash-up, which lacked even the semblance of a working-class orientation, soon dissolved into competing clique-organizations, supposedly differing on the “central question” of how best to tail black nationalist and “Third World” movements.
The New Left generally held that the working class had become completely “bourgeoisified” and no longer had any revolutionary potential. The 1968 upsurge of French workers largely punctured that belief. To be sure, many American radicals, and especially black nationalists, maintained that in America, unlike in France, the white majority of the working class benefited materially from black oppression. While the Weathermen maintained their hostility to the proletariat, by the early 1970s, a time of heightened labor struggle in the U.S., the Maoists turned toward the working class.
In doing so, Avakian, Klonsky and Ignatin, now leading separate organizations, continued to identify the working class with its most backward members. By 1974, Avakian’s Revolutionary Union (precursor to the Revolutionary Communist Party) decided to compete for leadership of the anti-busing forces on the streets of Boston. Denouncing the busing plan as a “capitalist hoax,” the front-page headline of the October 1974 issue of its paper, Revolution, demanded: “People Must Unite to Smash Boston Busing Plan.” We fought to defend the busing program that, however inadequate, was a step against racist segregation. We raised the call: “Implement the Busing Plan! Extend Busing into the Suburbs! Integrated Quality Education for All!” We also agitated for key integrated unions to organize labor/black defense of black schoolchildren terrorized by racist mobs in the streets.
Within a few years, the Avakianites adopted anew the “white skin privilege” mantle as they turned their back on the proletariat altogether and Klonsky’s group disappeared into the Democratic Party. For its part, STO left the factories to concentrate on “anti-imperialist” support to guerrilla forces in the Third World. They subsequently threw themselves into the 1980s anti-nuke movement, which to them had the virtue of being their target audience: almost entirely white and petty-bourgeois.
In a 1975 article “A Golden Bridge,” Ignatin described blacks who scabbed on the Great Steel Strike of 1919 as “heroic.” He later published the journal Race Traitor and became a bit of a celebrity with his book How the Irish Became White. As an academic, Ignatin was provided a platform to rail against “white skin privilege” for over two decades, first from behind the ivy-covered walls of Harvard University and then the Massachusetts College of Art.
The Fight for Working-Class Unity
No less than black workers, many white workers also live one or two paychecks away from the street. They, too, have rent or mortgage payments, car notes and repairs to pay, child support, medical bills, tuition, etc. Admonishing white workers that they are complicit in black oppression and should shed their jobs and other means of survival is, to be kind, not a very realistic way to convey the unity of interests of black and white workers and the need for joint class—and ultimately revolutionary—struggle. Rather than uniting black and white workers, such appeals echo racist lies that white workers’ interests are threatened by black equality, the stock in trade of racist demagogues like George Wallace, who had a good chance of winning the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1972 before he was shot and paralyzed, and more mainstream politicians up to the present day. As long as workers are pitted against each other in competition for a limited pool of jobs, the necessary consequence will be a divided and weakened labor movement.
Since I referred to the 1969 SDS convention, I thought I’d describe our intervention into it. The Revolutionary Marxist Caucus, which was formed by our supporters in SDS, issued a position paper stating:
“Given the insecurity of white workers, it is necessary to combine demands for equal opportunity for Blacks, with demands aimed at assuring white workers that the benefits accruing to Blacks will not come at their expense. Thus, in demanding that more Black workers be admitted into skilled jobs, we should also raise demands (such as a shorter workweek with no loss in pay) aimed at expanding total employment.”
We also pointed out that while fighting against discrimination in hiring, we would oppose firing a white worker to hire a black worker (which would fuel racial antagonisms). At the same time, we pointed out that the upgrading of black workers would provide a higher floor for wages in general and strengthen the position of all workers.
We seek to unite employed and unemployed workers—black, white and immigrant—in common struggle around demands that benefit the class as a whole. We call for union hiring halls, with special union-run programs aimed at reaching out to and training minorities, linked to the fight for jobs for all. The available work should be divided among all those capable of working through a shorter workweek with no loss in weekly pay.
We also seek to mobilize the labor movement to defeat attacks on what social welfare programs remain. However, our program is not the defense of the miserable status quo. At best, welfare (to the extent it still exists) relegates the least skilled section of the unemployed to poverty and exclusion from social production. We oppose the vindictive treatment of ex-prisoners and support the restoration of their full civil rights. We call for low-rent, quality, integrated public housing and free, quality, integrated public education for all as an essential part of the fight for a workers America. Under revolutionary leadership, struggles for these and similar demands would serve not only to win immediate gains but also to weld the class together and advance its consciousness, pointing toward the need to overthrow the capitalist system.
The Sectoralist Revival and Reparations
At the same time that Ignatin and his cothinkers were writing off the working class, considerable labor discontent and unrest was breaking out on the shopfloor. In 1968, there was a postwar high in wildcat strikes (work stoppages not authorized by the union leadership), especially in the Midwest auto plants.
But rank-and-file hostility to the Reuther regime in the UAW, and to kindred union bureaucracies in other industries, polarized along racial lines. In Detroit, black militants involved in the wildcats formed the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). The LRBW called for a separate union for black auto workers and combined legitimate demands against the bosses’ racist practices (e.g., for more black apprentices in the skilled trades) with demands for more black foremen and other supervisors. Unlike the Panthers and other black nationalists, these militant black workers recognized that black people had social power as part of the industrial proletariat. However, the LRBW union groupings actively discouraged militant white workers from following their leadership and denied membership to whites, who were deemed “the historic enemy, betrayer and exploiter of black people.”
Ultimately, the majority of the LRBW abandoned its connection to labor’s social power, leaving the plants in a turn to community work. The LRBW played a big part in penning a “Black Manifesto” presented to the 1969 National Black Economic Development Conference. It demanded reparations of $500 million from white churches and synagogues and called “upon delegates to find within the white community those forces which will work under the leadership of blacks to implement these demands by whatever means necessary. By taking such actions, white Americans will demonstrate concretely that they are willing to fight the ‘white skin privilege’ and the white supremacy and racism which has forced us as black people to make these demands.”
The late 1960s was the heyday of sectoralism: blacks should organize blacks, Latinos organize Latinos, women organize women, gays organize gays. It didn’t last long. Some components of the New Left went directly into the Democratic Party, while others were recruited to Marxist organizations. With the now decades-long dearth of any significant social and class struggle, and especially following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, there has been a recrudescence of all sorts of backward ideology, “white skin privilege” and sectoralist identity politics among them. The only difference is that with today’s “privilege checking” there is no pretense to revolutionary politics.
Which brings me back to reparations. We do not advocate reparations, which are a completely ridiculous proposition in a society where so many black people can’t find jobs, much less get welfare. What is really posed is the need to take the whole pie, that is, expropriate the bourgeoisie. And why stop at black people? From Native Americans to Koreans, there is a very long list of victims of the U.S. capitalist ruling class. The many crimes of the U.S. imperialists stretch from the slaughter in the Philippines at the turn of the last century to the WWII atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the ongoing devastation in the Near East. The only just deserts for the imperialists will be socialist revolution, putting the resources of U.S. society in the hands of the working class and in the service of the oppressed.
The proponents of reparations have an entirely different framework. As seen in the LRBW statement, the demand for reparations has ridden in tandem with the idea of “white skin privilege.” Both serve the purpose of laying the responsibility for black oppression not on the capitalist rulers but rather on the white population as a whole, whether desperately poor or in penthouse offices at JPMorgan Chase.
The reparations fad has come, gone and seemingly come again with an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic last year. In making his case, Coates declares: “What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to a spiritual renewal.” He cites as precedent the reparations paid to the Zionist state of Israel by the West German government in the 1950s, adopting the view that all Germans were guilty of the Holocaust. We reject the concept of collective guilt. It was not the German working class that was responsible for Hitler’s ascent and the Holocaust but the capitalist rulers served by Hitler, whose first victims included Communists and socialists.
A postulate of the whiteness studies and “privilege checking” crowd is that being white is a choice that one can reject. Coates adopts this outlook in his new book, Between the World and Me. He repeatedly refers to white people as “people who believe they are white” and who seek a piece of the “American Dream” at the expense of black people. Meanwhile, in the real world, Rachel Dolezal, then a leader of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington, who identified as black despite having been born white, received a torrent of abuse when exposed for trying to choose not to be white.
What rejecting one’s whiteness is all about is captured in “The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron,” a June 2003 contribution to Ignatin’s journal Race Traitor. Why an oxymoron? According to the author, to be white means to accept domination over non-whites; but even if you oppose this domination, you can’t not be white because you are white! So what can one do? The author has an answer: sympathetic whites “must be willing to do what the people most affected and marginalized by a situation tell them to do.” The writer added, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you. If we need your resources, we will contact you.” In the same vein, a leaflet passed out earlier this year at a Baltimore rally protesting the killing of Freddie Gray was titled “How to be a White Person in Solidarity With the Baltimore Uprising.” It asserted, “We are all upset about the injustice our fellow Baltimoreans face, and it is important to speak out against that injustice. But when you are supporting a movement led by oppressed peoples it is vital that you follow their leadership.”
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
This worldview, which rejects the multiracial working class as the agent of revolutionary change, necessarily leads to seeking redress through bourgeois electoral politics as well as placing oneself in bed with the agencies of the capitalist state. This is precisely where the black nationalist and New Leftist predecessors (and in some cases, braintrusters) of today’s activists ended up. For example, in a June 19 New York Times interview, Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale offered: “On the Black Lives Matter, I’m pushing for the youth in these groups to get more political and more electoral; you’ve got to take over some of these seats. And you’ve got to get more [Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn] Mosbys elected to some of these political offices. And you got to put some measures on the ballot.”
While the spawn of Ignatin & Co. were busy checking their privilege, the Spartacist League, together with our trade-union supporters and associated organizations, the Partisan Defense Committee and Labor Black Leagues for Social Defense, have engaged in work to impact the real world. Our comrades and allies organized workers defense guards in Chicago for a black worker beset by racist mobs when he desegregated a white neighborhood, mobilized auto workers to drive Nazi foremen out of a Detroit plant and initiated numerous labor-centered mobilizations against the KKK and Nazis. We revived a program, dating back to the early American Communist movement, of support to class-war prisoners—many of them former Panthers. We also launched an international campaign to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a onetime Panther spokesman who spent 30 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit before a federal court overturned his sentence, only to condemn him to what appears to be a rapidly approaching death behind bars.
We’re old school; we continue to look to the social power of the multiracial working class. The workplace remains the most integrated part of American society. Black workers are the most militant, experienced and advanced sector of the proletariat. They have the potential, when armed with a revolutionary program, to lead the working class to smash this capitalist system that is a hell for just about everyone. As we concluded in “Black and Red”:
“The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved through the united struggle of black and white workers under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of this struggle unbreakable bonds will be forged between the two sections of the working class. The success of the struggle will place the Negro people in a position to insure at last the end of slavery, racism and super-exploitation.”
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