Honor The Anniversary of John Brown's Liberation Fighters At Harpers Ferry

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the heroic revolutionary abolitionist, John Brown.

This is a repost of an earlier entry in order to honor the 150th Anniversary of John Brown's band of freedom fighters at Harpers Ferry

February is Black History Month. The name of the fiery revolutionary abolitionist John Brown is forever associated with that history.

Book Review

Reclaiming John Brown for the Left

JOHN BROWN, ABOLITIONIST, DAVID S. REYNOLDS, ALFRED A. KNOPF, NEW YORK, 2005

From fairly early in my youth I knew the name John Brown and was swept up by the romance surrounding his exploits at Harper’s Ferry. For example, I knew that the great anthem of the Civil War -The Battle Hymn of the Republic- had a prior existence as a tribute to John Brown and that Union soldiers marched to that song as they bravely headed south. I was then, however, neither familiar with the import of his exploits for the black liberation struggle nor knew much about the specifics of the politics of the various tendencies in the struggle against slavery. I certainly knew nothing then of Brown’s (and his sons) prior military exploits in the Kansas ‘proxy’ wars against the expansion of slavery. Later study filled in some of those gaps and has only strengthened my strong bond with his memory. Know this, as I reach the age at which John Brown was executed I still retain my youthful admiration for him. In the context of the turmoil of the times he was the most courageous and audacious revolutionary in the struggle for the abolition of slavery in America. Almost 150 years after his death this writer is proud to stand in the tradition of John Brown.

That said, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I can recommend Mr. Reynolds’s book detailing the life, times and exploits of John Brown, warts and all. Published in 2005, this is an important source (including helpful end notes) for updating various controversies surrounding the John Brown saga. While I may disagree with some of Mr. Reynolds’s conclusions concerning the impact of John Brown’s exploits on later black liberation struggles and to a lesser extent his position on Brown’s impact on his contemporaries, particularly the Transcendentalists, nevertheless on the key point of the central place of John Brown in American revolutionary history there is no dispute. Furthermore, Mr. Reynolds has taken pains to provide substantial detail about the ups and downs of John Brown’s posthumous reputation. Most importantly, he defends the memory of John Brown against all-comers-that is partisan history on behalf of the ‘losers’ of history at its best. He has reclaimed John Brown as an icon for the left against the erroneous and outrageous efforts of modern day religious and secular terrorists to lay any claim to his memory or his work. Below I make a few comments on some of controversies surrounding John Brown developed in Mr. Reynolds’s study.

If one understands the ongoing nature, from his early youth, of John Brown’s commitment to the active struggle against slavery, the scourge of the American Republic in the first half of the 19th century, one can only conclude that he was indeed a man on a mission. As Mr. Reynolds’s points out Brown took every opportunity to fight against slavery including early service as an agent of the Underground Railroad spiriting escaped slaves northward, participation as an extreme radical in all the key anti-slavery propaganda battles of the time as well as challenging other anti-slavery elements to be more militant and in the 1850’s, arms in hand, fighting in the ‘proxy’ wars in Kansas and, of course, the culmination of his life's work- the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Those exploits alone render absurd a very convenient myth by those who supported slavery or turned a blind eye to it and their latter-day apologists for it about his so-called ‘madness’. This is a political man and to these eyes a very worthy one.

For those who like their political heroes ‘pure’, frankly, it is better to look elsewhere than the life of John Brown. His personal and family life as a failed rural capitalist would hardly lead one to think that this man was to become a key historical figure in any struggle, much less the great struggle against slavery. Some of his actions in Kansas (concerning the murder of some pro-slavery elements under his direction) also cloud his image. However, when the deal went down in the late 1850’s and it was apparent for all to see that there was no other way to end slavery than a fight to the death-John Brown rose to the occasion. And did not cry about it. And did not expect others to cry about it. Call him a ‘monomaniac’ if you like but even a slight acquaintance with great historical figures shows that they all have this ‘disease’- that is why they make the history books. No, the ‘madness’ argument will not do.

Whether or not John Brown knew that his military strategy for the Harper’s Ferry raid would, in the short term, be defeated is a matter of dispute. Reams of paper have been spent proving the military foolhardiness of his scheme at Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s plan, however, was essentially a combination of slave revolt modeled after the maroon experiences in Haiti, Nat Turner’s earlier Virginia slave rebellion and rural guerrilla warfare of the ‘third world’ type that we have become more familiar with since that time. 150 years later this strategy does not look so foolhardy in an America of the 1850’s that had no real standing army, fairly weak lines of communications, virtually uninhabited mountains to flee to and the North at their backs.

The execution of the plan is another matter. Brown seemingly made about every mistake in the book in that regard. However, this is missing the essential political point that militant action not continuing parliamentary maneuvering advocated by other abolitionists had become necessary. A few more fighting abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, and better propaganda work among freedman with connections to the plantations would not have hurt the chances for success at Harper’s Ferry.

What is not in dispute is that Brown considered himself a true Calvinist "avenging angel" in the struggle against slavery and more importantly acted on that belief. In short, he was committed to bring justice to the black masses. This is why his exploits and memory stay alive after over 150 years. It is possible that if Brown did not have this, by 19th century standards as well as our own, old-fashioned Calvinist determination that he would not been capable of militant action. Certainly other anti-slavery elements never came close to his militancy, including the key Transcendentalist movement led by Emerson and Thoreau and the Concord ‘crowd’ who supported him and kept his memory alive in hard times. In their eyes he had the heroic manner of the Old Testament prophet. Now this animating spirit is not one that animates modern revolutionaries and so it is hard to understand the depths of his religious convictions on his actions but they were understood, if not fully appreciated, by others in those days. It is better today to look at Brown more politically through his hero (and mine, as well) Oliver Cromwell-a combination of Calvinist avenger and militant warrior. Yes, I can get behind that picture of him.

By all accounts Brown and his small integrated band of brothers fought bravely and coolly against great odds. Ten of Brown's men were killed including two of his sons. Five were captured, tried and executed, including Brown. These results are almost inevitable when one takes up a revolutionary struggle against the old order and one is not victorious. One need only think of, for example, the fate of the defenders of the Paris Commune in 1871. One can fault Brown on this or that tactical maneuver. Nevertheless he and the others bore themselves bravely in defeat. As we are all too painfully familiar there are defeats of the oppressed that lead nowhere. One thinks of the defeat of the German Revolution in the 1920’s. There other defeats that galvanize others into action. This is how Brown’s actions should be measured by history.

Militarily defeated at Harper's Ferry, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms nevertheless continued to galvanize important elements in the North at the expense of the pacifistic non-resistant Garrisonian political program for struggle against slavery. Many writers on Brown who reduce his actions to that of a ‘madman’ still cannot believe that his road proved more appropriate to end slavery than either non-resistance or gradualism. That alone makes short shrift of such theories. Historians and others have also misinterpreted later events such as the Bolshevik strategy that led to Russian Revolution in October 1917. More recently, we saw this same incomprehension concerning the victory of the Vietnamese against overwhelming American military superiority. Needless to say, all these events continue to be revised by some historians to take the sting out of there proper political implications.

From a modern prospective Brown’s strategy for black liberation, even if the abolitionist goal he aspired to was immediately successful reached the outer limits within the confines of capitalism. Brown’s actions were meant to make black people free. Beyond that goal he had no program except the Chatham Charter which seems to have replicated the American constitution but with racial and gender equality as a cornerstone. Unfortunately the Civil War did not provide fundamental economic and political freedom. That is still our fight. Moreover, the Civil War, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the reign of "Jim Crow" and the subsequent waves of black migration to the cities changed the character of black oppression in the U.S. from Brown’s time. Black people are now a part of "free labor," and the key to their liberation is in the integrated fight of labor against the current seemingly one-sided class war and establishing a government of workers and their allies. Nevertheless, we can stand proudly in the revolutionary tradition of John Brown (and of his friend Frederick Douglass). We need to complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the Civil War, not by emulating Brown’s exemplary actions but to moving the multi-racial American working class to power. Finish the Civil War.

*The Greensboro Massacre 1979- Anniversary -Never Forget

Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of some of the events of that day in 1979 when various right-wing paramilitary thugs murdered five communist workers.

Commentary

This is the 30th Anniversary of the heinous crimes of 1979 against communist workers in Greensboro, North Carolina

This is a repost of last year's commemorative commentary. The struggle remains the same. As does the message- Never Forget!

REMEMBER SLAIN LABOR MILITANTS-CESAR CAUCE, MICHAEL NATHAN, BILL SAMPSON, SANDI SMITH AND JIM WALLER

For those too young to remember or who unfortunately have forgotten the incident commemorated here this is a capsule summary of what occurred on that bloody day:

On November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, five anti-racist activists and union organizers, supporters of the Communist Workers Party (CWP), were fatally gunned down by Ku Klux Klan and Nazi fascists. Nine carloads of Klansmen and Nazis drove up to a black housing project-the gathering place for an anti-Klan march organized by the CWP. In broad daylight, the fascists pulled out their weapons and unleashed an 88-second fusillade that was captured on television cameras. They then drove off, leaving the dead and dying in pools of blood. From the outset, the Klan/Nazi killers were aided and abetted by the government, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who helped train the killers and plot the assassination to the "former" FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade of death and the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear. The five militants listed above died as a result. The Greensboro Klan/Nazis literally got away with murder, acquitted twice by all-white juries.

This writer has recently been raked over the coals by some leftists who were appalled that he called for a no free speech platform for Nazis and fascists (see below) and argued that labor should mobilize its forces and run these vermin off the streets whenever they raise their heads. Despite recent efforts to blur the lines of the heinous nature of and political motivation for these murders in Greensboro by some kind of truth and reconciliation process militant leftists should etch in their brains the reality of the Klan/Nazis. There is nothing to debate with this kind. The niceties of parliamentary democracy have no place in a strategy to defeat these bastards. The Greensboro massacre is prime evidence that any other way is suicidal for militants. No more Germany, 1933's. No more Greensboro, 1979's. Never Forget Greensboro.

REPOST FROM SEPTEMBER 15, 2006

In a recent blog (dated, September 4, 2006) this writer mentioned that one of the Klan groups in this country held a demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery over the Labor Day 2006 weekend around a list of demands that included bringing the troops home from Iraq in order to patrol the borders. Symbols mean a lot in politics and the notion that Klansmen were permitted to demonstrate at a key symbol in the fight to end slavery and preserve the union raised my temperature more than a little. As I said then Gettysburg is hallowed ground fought and paid for in great struggle and much blood. At that time the writer posed the question of what, if any, opposition to the demonstration leftists had put together to run these hooded fools out of town. In response, this writer was raked over the coals for calling for an organized fight by labor to nip these elements in the bud. Why? Apparently some people believe that running the fools out of town would have violated the Klan's free speech rights. Something is desperately wrong here about both the nature of free speech and the nature of the Klan/fascist menace.

First, let us be clear, militant leftists defend every democratic right as best we can. I have often argued in this space that to a great extend militant leftists are the only active defenders of such rights- on the streets where it counts. That said, the parameters of such rights, as all democratic rights, cannot trump the needs of the class struggle. In short, militant leftist have no interest in defending or extending the rights of fascists to fill the air with gibberish. Now that may offend some American Civil Liberties Union-types but any self-respecting militant knows that such a position is right is his or her 'gut'.

In the final analysis we will be fighting the Klan-types on the streets and the issue will no be rights of free expression (except maybe in defense of ours) but the survival of our organizations. A short glance at history is to the point.
One of the great tragedies of the Western labor movement was the defeat and destruction of the German labor movement in the wake of the fascist Hitler's rise to power in 1933. In the final analysis that destruction was brought on by the fatally erroneous policies of both the German Social Democratic and Communists parties. Neither party, willfully, saw the danger in time and compounded that error when refused to call for or establish a united front of all labor organizations to confront and destroy Hitler and his storm troopers. We know the result. And it was not necessary. Moreover, Hitler's organization at one time (in the mid-1920's) was small and unimportant like today's Klan/Nazi threat. But that does not mean that under certain circumstances that could not change. And that, my friends, is exactly the point.

*The Greensboro Massacre 1979- Never Forget

Click on title to link to a YouTube film clip of some of the events of that day in 1979 when various right-wing paramilitary thugs murdered five communist workers.

Commentary

This is the 29th Anniversary of the heinous crimes of 1979 against communist workers in Greensboro, North Carolina

This is a repost of last year's commemorative commentary. The struggle remains the same. As does the message- Never Forget!

REMEMBER SLAIN LABOR MILITANTS-CESAR CAUCE, MICHAEL NATHAN, BILL SAMPSON, SANDI SMITH AND JIM WALLER



For those too young to remember or who unfortunately have forgotten the incident commemorated here this is a capsule summary of what occurred on that bloody day:

On November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, five anti-racist activists and union organizers, supporters of the Communist Workers Party (CWP), were fatally gunned down by Ku Klux Klan and Nazi fascists. Nine carloads of Klansmen and Nazis drove up to a black housing project-the gathering place for an anti-Klan march organized by the CWP. In broad daylight, the fascists pulled out their weapons and unleashed an 88-second fusillade that was captured on television cameras. They then drove off, leaving the dead and dying in pools of blood. From the outset, the Klan/Nazi killers were aided and abetted by the government, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who helped train the killers and plot the assassination to the "former" FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade of death and the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear. The five militants listed above died as a result. The Greensboro Klan/Nazis literally got away with murder, acquitted twice by all-white juries.

This writer has recently been raked over the coals by some leftists who were appalled that he called for a no free speech platform for Nazis and fascists (see below) and argued that labor should mobilize its forces and run these vermin off the streets whenever they raise their heads. Despite recent efforts to blur the lines of the heinous nature of and political motivation for these murders in Greensboro by some kind of truth and reconciliation process militant leftists should etch in their brains the reality of the Klan/Nazis. There is nothing to debate with this kind. The niceties of parliamentary democracy have no place in a strategy to defeat these bastards. The Greensboro massacre is prime evidence that any other way is suicidal for militants. No more Germany, 1933's. No more Greensboro, 1979's. Never Forget Greensboro.

REPOST FROM SEPTEMBER 15, 2006

In a recent blog (dated, September 4, 2006) this writer mentioned that one of the Klan groups in this country held a demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery over the Labor Day 2006 weekend around a list of demands that included bringing the troops home from Iraq in order to patrol the borders. Symbols mean a lot in politics and the notion that Klansmen were permitted to demonstrate at a key symbol in the fight to end slavery and preserve the union raised my temperature more than a little. As I said then Gettysburg is hallowed ground fought and paid for in great struggle and much blood. At that time the writer posed the question of what, if any, opposition to the demonstration leftists had put together to run these hooded fools out of town. In response, this writer was raked over the coals for calling for an organized fight by labor to nip these elements in the bud. Why? Apparently some people believe that running the fools out of town would have violated the Klan's free speech rights. Something is desperately wrong here about both the nature of free speech and the nature of the Klan/fascist menace.

First, let us be clear, militant leftists defend every democratic right as best we can. I have often argued in this space that to a great extend militant leftists are the only active defenders of such rights- on the streets where it counts. That said, the parameters of such rights, as all democratic rights, cannot trump the needs of the class struggle. In short, militant leftist have no interest in defending or extending the rights of fascists to fill the air with gibberish. Now that may offend some American Civil Liberties Union-types but any self-respecting militant knows that such a position is right is his or her 'gut'.

In the final analysis we will be fighting the Klan-types on the streets and the issue will no be rights of free expression (except maybe in defense of ours) but the survival of our organizations. A short glance at history is to the point.
One of the great tragedies of the Western labor movement was the defeat and destruction of the German labor movement in the wake of the fascist Hitler's rise to power in 1933. In the final analysis that destruction was brought on by the fatally erroneous policies of both the German Social Democratic and Communists parties. Neither party, willfully, saw the danger in time and compounded that error when refused to call for or establish a united front of all labor organizations to confront and destroy Hitler and his storm troopers. We know the result. And it was not necessary. Moreover, Hitler's organization at one time (in the mid-1920's) was small and unimportant like today's Klan/Nazi threat. But that does not mean that under certain circumstances that could not change. And that, my friends, is exactly the point.

*The Contradictions of Malcolm X- His Life As Told To Alex Haley

The Contradictions of Malcolm X- His Life As Told To Alex Haley

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Malcolm X speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in 1964. He still speaks to some powerful truths about the black experience in America. Black is back, or it had better be.

Markin Comment:

Directly below is a review (February 1, 2008) based on Malcolm X’s autobiography as told to writer Alex Haley (originally written in 1964) "The Autobiography Of Malcolm X”, an imaginative literary treatment of his short, checkered life as a leader of the Nation of Islam, at that time a notorious (to white eyes and ears) so-called race-hating outfit led by Elijah Muhammad (with whom Malcolm had broken at the time of this autobiography). I am reposting the original review because in essentials I continue to stand by the main political (and literary) points made there. I have added a few other points below that repost as I have thought about this book more recently.

*****

“The Contradictions Of Malcolm X

MALCOLM POSED THE QUESTION-WHICH WAY FORWARD FOR THE BLACK LIBERATION STRUGGLE? OUR ANSWER- BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM

FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH

The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, Ballantine Books, New York, 1964

Let us be clear about one thing from the start, whatever contradictions Malcolm X’s brand of black nationalism entailed, whatever shortcomings he had as an emerging political leader, whatever mistakes he made alone the way as he groped for a solution to the seemingly intractable fight for black freedom he stood, and continues to stand, head and shoulders above any black leader thrown up in America in the 20th century. Only Frederick Douglass in the 19th century compares with him in stature. No attempts by latter-day historians or politicians to assimilate Malcolm along with other leaders of the civil rights struggle in this country, notably Dr. Martin Luther King, as part of the same continuum of leadership are false and dishonest to all parties.

Malcolm X, as a minister of the Black Muslims and after his break from that organization, stood in opposition to the official liberal non-violence strategy of that leadership. His term “Uncle Toms” fully applies to their stance. And, in turn, that liberal black misleadership and its various hangers-on in the liberal establishment hated him when he spoke the truth about their role in white-controlled bourgeois Democratic Party politics. The “chickens were coming home to roost”, indeed! The Jesse Jacksons, the Al Sharptons, the Obama the “Charmas” who represent today’s version of that misleadership please step back, step way back.

That said, who was Malcolm X? Or more properly what did he represent in his time. At one level, given the rudiments of his life story which are detailed in the Autobiography of Malcolm X, he represented that part of the black experience (an experience not only limited to blacks in immigrant America) which pulled itself by the bootstraps and turned away from the lumpen milieu of gangs, crimes and prisons into what I call ‘street’ intellectuals. That experience is far removed from the experience of what today passes for the black intelligentsia, who have run away from the turmoil of the streets. In liberation struggles both ‘street’ and academic intellectuals are necessary but the ‘street’ intellectual is perhaps more critical as the transmission belt to the masses. That is how liberation fighters get a hearing and no other way. In any case I have always been partial to the ‘streets’.


But what is the message for the way forward? For Malcolm, until shortly before his death, that message was black separatism-the idea that the only way blacks could get any retribution was to go off on their own (or be left alone), in practical terms to form their own nation. To state the question that way in modern America points to the obvious limitation of such a scheme, even if blacks formed such a nation and wanted to express the right to national self-determination that goes with it. Nevertheless whatever personal changes Malcolm made in his quest for political relevance and understanding whether he was a Black Muslim minister or after he broke for that group he still sought political direction through the fight of what is called today ‘people of color’ against the mainly white oppressor, at first in America and latter after travels throughout the ‘third world’.

However sincere he was in that belief, and he was sincere, that strategy of black separatism or ‘third world’ vanguardism could never lead to the black freedom he so fervently desired. An underestimation of the power of internally unchallenged world, and in the first instance American, imperialism to corrupt liberation struggles or defeat or destroy them militarily never seemed to enter into his calculations.

Malcolm’s whole life story of struggle against the bedrock of white racism in America, as the legitimate and at the time the ONLY voice speaking for the rage of the black ghettos, nevertheless never worked out fully any other strategy that could work in America, and by extension internationally. A close reading of his work demonstrates that as he got more politically aware he saw the then unfolding ‘third world’ liberation struggles as the key to black liberation in America. That, unfortunately for him, was exactly backwards. If the ‘third world’ struggles were ever ultimately to be successful and create more just societies then American imperialism-as the main enemy of the peoples of the world-then, as now had to be brought to bay. And that, my friends, whether you agree or not, requires class struggle here.

That is where the fight for black liberation intersects the fight for socialism. And I will state until my last breathe that the key to the fight for socialism in America will be the cohesion of a central black cadre leading a multi-ethnic organization that will bring that home. And it will not be from the lips of the Kings of today that the struggle will be successful but by new more enlightened Malcolms, learning the lessons of history, who will get what they need-by any means necessary.”

February 1, 2010

In re-reading the above review I feel that although I made the right political points I did not spent nearly enough time on the some of the problems addressed by Malcolm X's autobiography. Not the least of those problems is the one of socialists creating and honing of black revolutionaries like Malcolm out of the lumpen proletarian milieu. Or Malcolm’s perceptive take on the all pervasive nature of the imprint of white racism on the American experiment, for black and white alike then and now. And intimately tied up with that hard fact of political life is the problem of recruiting (and holding on to) cadre in the black milieu for nationalist or, in our case, socialist revolutionaries.

I noted in a review of William Styron’s novel of the great slave general Nat Turner a couple of years ago (See February 2008 Archives) that the historical problem of creating a revolutionary black leadership has always been a daunting one in America whether under slavery or Jim Crow (de facto or de jure, Northern or Southern version). Turner’s own life story, based as it was on creating himself by learning to read and write and thereafter learning a salable skill as a craftsman, violated every norm and expectation of ant-bellum slave existence. Turner was one of the “talented tenth”, as it were, of his time. The question is no less tricky is viewing the highlights of Malcolm’s transformation (in prison, to boot) from a street hustler, dope addict, womanizer and purely existential character seemingly doomed to the fate of many other Northern black youth of the mid-20th century. Those of us working the “black/ freedom/ labor” milieu at the beginning of the 21st century should well note that although Malcolm was an exceptional recruit away from that lumpenproletarian milieu we still have to understand, notwithstanding the Obama life story, that the life stories of our recruits to socialism will look a lot more like young Malcolm than young Obama.

There has been much talk, too much talk of late about this so-called “post-racial” society that has sprung up during the Obamiad. For about the one thousand and first time I will recognize that the election of a black man as President of the United States in race-conscious America is significant. But what of it? I will also concede that during the past fifty years or so, since the time of the hard civil rights movement, that especially among the young racial attitudes have softened. However, I will bet many a dollar that if old Malcolm X were still on the scene he would have more than a few choice words about “racial progress”. All he would have to do is look at the ghettoes, unemployment lines and the prisons. Those views don’t lie. I remember listening to Malcolm on late night radio (“The Jerry Williams Show” a call-in talk show in Boston that Malcolm mentions in his book). I swear I disagreed with virtually everything that Malcolm said in those days, except the pervasive nature of white racism that I was painfully aware of from my own white working class neighborhood in Boston. Malcolm told some home truths then, and I am sure he would tell them now as well.

*From The "Bob Feldman '68" Blog- A Song In Honor Of The Late Class-War Prisoner Marilyn Buck- Free Marilyn Buck!

Click on the headline to link a Bob Feldman '68 blog entry- A Song In Honor Of Class-War Prisoner Marilyn Buck.

*Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Oliver Law, Commander, Abraham Lincoln Battalion, Spain (1937)

Those Black Militants Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Oliver Law, Commander, Abraham Lincoln Battalion, Spain (1937)


Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Law

February Is Black History Month

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. February is Black History Month and is a time for reflection on our black forebears who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this February, and in future Februarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (Labor’s Untold Story, Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, the black liberation struggle here and elsewhere, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Immigration Rights And The Fight For Black Liberation- A Two Part Article

Click on the title to link to an on line copy of the "Workers Vanguard" Part TWO of the article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

Workers Vanguard No. 885
2 February 2007

Immigrant Rights and the Fight for Black Liberation

Part One

(Black History and the Class Struggle)

JANUARY 27—Three days ago, Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents descended upon the Smithfield pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, and arrested 21 workers who are now being deported. The Smithfield bosses have worked hand in hand with ICE, targeting workers on the pretext that their Social Security numbers cannot be verified.

After more than a decade of struggle by the United Food and Commercial Workers union to organize Smithfield, the company recently said it will allow a new union representation election. However, just prior to the ICE raid, the company said that beginning in February it will fire up to 600 workers, primarily those who walked out to protest the firing of 75 immigrants last year (see “Smithfield Walkout Saves Immigrants’ Jobs,” WV No. 881, 24 November 2006). Moreover, Smithfield has effectively blocked elections by appealing a National Labor Relations Board ruling that held that the company’s private cops had brutalized workers during an earlier walkout.

The arrests at Smithfield are the latest installment of a vindictive campaign launched by the government following immigrant rights protests last spring. More than 750 immigrants in Southern California were rounded up this month as part of “Operation Return to Sender,” a nationwide drive in which more than 13,000 people have been arrested since June, ostensibly for evading deportation orders or for having previously been deported for crimes committed in the U.S.

“Homeland Security” repression is also bearing down on unionized black workers. Late last year in Chicago, some 70 mostly black rail workers lost their jobs, many for supposedly violating new government guidelines barring ex-felons from holding such positions. As we wrote in “Protest ‘War on Terror’ Firing of Rail Workers!” (WV No. 884, 19 January): “The fight for the rights of workers, immigrants and black people will either go forward together—independent from and opposed to the capitalist class and its government—or fall back separately.”

The following is adapted from a forum given in Los Angeles on 16 September 2006 by Spartacist League Central Committee member Don Alexander.

* * *

Not a day passes without many horrible examples of the social barbarism inherent in this decaying, racist capitalist system. In the world arena, so-called civilized U.S. imperialism has been and is the outstanding example of imperialist rapacity, smugness, hypocrisy, torture and mass murder. In the U.S., the bipartisan “war against terror” is a war against immigrants, black people, the left and labor. It is no accident that following the nationwide immigrant rights protests last May, the capitalist government dispatched the National Guard to the Mexican border and also sent Guardsmen back to New Orleans. Not a mere coincidence. The racist capitalist ruling class has never missed a chance to play whites off against blacks, blacks and whites against immigrants, men against women, old against young, and vice versa.

The struggles against anti-immigrant chauvinism and for black freedom are intertwined. The key to unlocking the power of labor in the United States is the fight for black liberation, which can be a motor force for proletarian revolution. We say that the color bar in America, the special oppression of black people as an oppressed race-color caste, serves to obscure the division of society into irreconcilable classes and to keep the working class divided.

Today immigrants are 12 percent of the population, with about half coming from Mexico and Central America and the rest from Asia and Europe. In the 1950s, only 2.5 million immigrants arrived in the United States, with 60 percent coming from Europe or Canada, 25 percent from Latin America or the Caribbean and only 6 percent from Asia. By the 1980s, however, immigration to the U.S. had nearly tripled to 7.3 million people, only 12 percent of whom came from Europe or Canada, with 47 percent originating from Latin America and another 37 percent from Asia. During the 1990s, an additional ten million immigrants entered the country, exceeding the prior pace set in the previous decade by 37.7 percent. The vast majority came from Latin America and Asia.

Twenty years ago, the right-wing Republican Reagan administration introduced the Immigration Reform and Control Act. They came up with a “guest worker” program primarily serving the interests of huge agribusiness. But the Act legalized 2.3 million Mexican workers, who had to document at least five years of residence in the U.S. This meant that Hispanics—who had historically been concentrated in Texas, California and also Florida, with its large number of Cubans, Nicaraguans and others—could move elsewhere. During the 1990s, the Hispanic population increased by some 60 percent, rising from 22.4 million in 1990 to 35.3 million in 2000. By 2003, the new census counts confirmed that the Hispanic population surpassed black Americans as the nation’s largest minority.

Our Marxist program speaks directly to immigrants’ burning needs. We demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants, whether legal or “illegal”—for all who have made it here. We also say that if there were a real amnesty for undocumented workers, we would support that, while recognizing that such gains are partial. We stand for full equality of all languages in all spheres of public life and defend bilingual education against “English only” bigots. We stand unalterably opposed to the bourgeoisie’s anti-immigrant laws and regulations. Against the capitalists’ attempts to use undocumented, low-wage immigrant workers as a club against the trade unions, we seek to mobilize the labor movement to fight deportations and anti-immigrant raids through class-struggle means, and to organize such workers into unions with full rights and protections.

We fight to build a party—a multiracial revolutionary workers party—that champions the interests and the rights of all the oppressed and exploited, whether fighting for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, for defense of the besieged Latino poor, for defense of Asians, for defense of abortion rights for women, for women’s liberation through socialist revolution, for democratic rights for homosexuals, for black freedom. Immigrant workers, especially from Mexico and Central America, bring militant traditions of class struggle to the U.S. And they are not only a catalyst for class and social struggle, but also a human bridge linking the struggles of working people on both sides of the border. And this is why it’s so important to mobilize immigrant workers in struggle and to defend them.

It is not just a question of immigrant workers’ continued militancy and determination, but that they share common class interests with the proletariat as a whole. There must be a class-struggle mobilization of the labor movement to fight for jobs for all through a shorter workweek with no cut in pay, a unified struggle for our burning, fundamental needs.

Worldwide, the imperialists have perfected the art of playing upon national, ethnic, religious and sexual divisions to perpetuate their barbaric rule. At their disposal are various weapons of mass deception: their press, their political parties, their preachers and priests. Above all, they have their armed bodies of men who safeguard their “right” to exploit and live off the labor of others. As Trotskyists, we fight for international proletarian revolution.

We raise an implacable struggle against the U.S. capitalist rulers, both Democrats and Republicans, and demand the unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea and elsewhere. We stand for the defeat of imperialism through international proletarian revolution. While the imperialist troops butcher Iraqis, the racist cops gun down blacks and Latinos here in racist capitalist America.

Marxism and Immigration

Our revolutionary internationalist proletarian program flows from the reality of the world capitalist economy. As Marxists, we understand that imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, is not a preferred policy of capitalism but the inevitable product of the constant search for sources of cheap labor and raw materials. This has twice resulted in bloody interimperialist wars for the division and redivision of the world.

Whether it’s immigration or trade policy, we don’t seek to advise the bourgeoisie. There is no answer to the brutal immiseration produced by this boom-and-bust capitalist system without a proletarian socialist revolution that takes power out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters. Basing ourselves upon the lessons of history—the Paris Commune of 1871, and in particular the victorious October 1917 Russian Revolution—we understand that workers cannot achieve emancipation through a futile quest to reform the capitalist profit system. The fight must be for a socialist revolution that smashes the bloody capitalist state apparatus and constructs a workers state. This requires a consistently revolutionary program and the leadership of a Leninist vanguard party, a tribune of the people.

The system of capitalism long ago outlived any progressive historical role. Today, capitalism retards the development of the productive forces of society, which long ago outgrew the narrow shell of the bourgeois nation-state. We recognize that the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state and the East European deformed workers states, an unprecedented defeat of the international proletariat, has resulted in a retrogression of political consciousness, albeit unevenly. This has meant that the proletariat today does not view its struggles through the prism of the fight for socialism. Despite the bourgeois lie of the “death of communism,” there exists a rich body of theoretical and programmatic conceptions to draw upon in the struggle for the complete emancipation of the working class from capitalist exploitation.

The exploiters know this. And that is why they put out their anti-communist garbage. Outlived social classes fight back in defense of their obsolete systems, just like the pro-slavery ideologists in the pre-Civil War South did—those like George Fitzhugh, who wrote biting denunciations of the evils of the industrial capitalist wage-slavery system in the North in order to counter the slaveholders’ Northern bourgeois opponents. It was the Southern slavocracy’s desire to extend slavery that partly motivated the 1846 invasion of Mexico, which resulted in the United States government’s stealing half of Mexico’s territory. A workers government in the U.S. would return to Mexico certain predominantly Spanish-speaking areas along the border. It is worthy of note that in 1855 Texas slaveholders bitterly complained of the estimated loss of more than 4,000 black slaves, valued at more than $3.2 million, who escaped to northern Mexico. According to one account, by the mid 1850s several Texas counties had passed laws prohibiting Mexicans from communicating with slaves.

Capitalism, paraphrasing Karl Marx, came into the world dripping with the blood of the oppressed. In Volume One of Capital, Marx laid out how the development of capitalism entailed horrific consequences especially for women and children. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin quoted from this volume in The Teachings of Karl Marx (1915):

“‘The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set free for industrial capital, the laborers, their means of subsistence, and material for labor; it also created the home market.’

“The impoverishment and ruin of the agricultural population led, in their turn, to the formation of a reserve army of labor for capital. In every capitalist country ‘a part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat…. This source of relative surplus population is thus constantly flowing…. The agricultural labor is therefore reduced to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot in the swamp of pauperism’.”

This process also results in the amalgamation of the proletariat of different nations and brings to the fore their common interests as an international class. “The Thesis on the World Role of American Imperialism” (1938), one of the founding documents of Trotsky’s Fourth International, exposed the deceitful “good neighbor” policy of U.S. imperialism toward Latin America. (The name has changed over the years. I know under Kennedy they used to refer to it as the “Alliance for Progress.”) The Thesis stated:

“The ‘good neighbor’ policy is nothing but the attempt to unify the Western Hemisphere under the hegemony of Washington, as a solid bloc welded by the latter in its drive to close the door of the two American continents to all the foreign imperialist powers except itself. This policy is materially supplemented by the favorable trade agreements which the United States seeks to conclude with Latin American countries in the hope of systematically edging its rivals out of the market…. The struggle against American imperialism is therefore at the same time a struggle against the coming imperialist war and for the liberation of oppressed colonial and semicolonial peoples. Hence, it is inseparable from the class struggle of the American proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie, and cannot be conducted apart from it.”

This is still true. Currently there are some bourgeois-nationalist thorns in the side of U.S. imperialism, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, who spout anti-U.S. rhetoric as a way to conceal their own bourgeois rule.

We fight for the unity and integrity of the international working class against chauvinism and racism. The same racist U.S. capitalist butchers who brutally exploit the peoples of Latin America and elsewhere also let the poor and black people of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast drown, suffer and rot during and after Hurricane Katrina. They use their cops to torture black people in Chicago, and last January they sent white coal miners to their deaths in West Virginia.

The “Free Trade” Rape of Mexico

Mexico today is in turmoil. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) forced millions of Mexican peasants out of the countryside. NAFTA came into effect on January 1, 1994, and in its first two years more than 2.3 million Mexicans lost their jobs. The effect of NAFTA is an important component of increased immigration to the U.S. Also, capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe has accelerated immigration internationally, particularly to West Europe. NAFTA wreaked havoc for Mexican workers and peasants with the elimination of state subsidies for many goods and services. Mexican workers had their wages slashed, they were thrown out of work by the thousands, and many were forced into informal employment. The costs of basic necessities such as gas and electricity skyrocketed, and the masses today face increased starvation or are forced to emigrate.

This “free trade agreement” represented imperialist looting of Mexico. We opposed it from the very beginning from an internationalist, revolutionary standpoint. In 1991, the Grupo Espartaquista de México, the Trotskyist League of Canada and the Spartacist League/U.S., sections of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), issued a joint statement declaring, “There is a burning need for an internationalist proletarian opposition which stands with the working class and impoverished peasantry of Mexico against the imperialist assault” (“Stop U.S. ‘Free Trade’ Rape of Mexico,” WV No. 530, 6 July 1991). In contrast, the labor tops of the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters opposed NAFTA on the basis of poisonous chauvinism and protectionism.

Apparently, the U.S. imperialists are building what they call a NAFTA superhighway—the construction of major transportation corridors from Mexico’s Pacific coast port of Lázaro Cárdenas to Kansas City, and also to Canada. This is the inexorable logic of capitalist production. Capital migrates to areas of higher profitability. This demands of Marxists the organization of workers, from the Yukon to the Yucatán, for common internationalist class struggle and for socialist revolution throughout the Americas.

The labor lieutenants of the capitalist class—the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy—holler about foreign workers “taking American jobs,” with China being at the top of their list. It’s in the interests of the U.S. proletariat to unite with the workers of the world to overthrow the hideous system of capitalism. The imperialists especially seek to restore capitalist rule in China, a deformed workers state, and completely turn that country into a giant sweatshop of superexploited labor and a haven for super-profits.

Immigration and Women’s Oppression

Women workers in Mexico are brutally exploited, especially in the so-called free-trade maquiladora factory zones in the North. Women there as young as 16 suffer exposure to poisonous chemicals and endure wretched working conditions that maim and destroy them. They endure not only constant sexist abuse but outright murder by the police and their henchmen. Ideologically, the reactionary, anti-woman Catholic church and the bourgeois parties—the National Action Party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the Party of the Democratic Revolution—bolster their subjugation. The institution of the family is the main source of the oppression of women.

Many women from desperately poor Third World countries, including Mexico and the Philippines, endure racist, anti-woman abuse in the U.S. Some women opt for prostitution as a means to survive. Prostitution should be decriminalized and the bourgeois state should stay out of our bedrooms and our lives. Whether in Mexico, the Philippines or even the “land of the free,” the capitalist U.S.A., the fight for free abortion on demand, free quality medical and child care and equal pay for equal work requires winning the most conscious elements of the working class to carry out the proletariat’s historic task as the fighter for the interests of the oppressed. The working class must take up the fight for women’s liberation, which requires the overthrow of the capitalist order.

As Lenin explained in his classic work What Is To Be Done? (1902), revolutionary working-class consciousness is not a by-product of spontaneous struggle but must be brought into the proletariat from the outside, through the intervention of a vanguard party. Proletarian internationalism is not abstract. It is a necessity dictated by the increased economic integration of the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

In racist capitalist America, black rights and immigrant rights either go forward together or slide back separately. Black oppression is the cornerstone of U.S. capitalism, rooted in the very structure of the capitalist system and a key weapon of the ruling class historically to maintain its class domination.

The Labor Black Leagues, initiated by the Spartacist League and fraternally allied to it, promote and fight for common class struggle. On the masthead of the LBLs’ newsletters, we have Karl Marx’s statement that “labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” Our program for black liberation is the program of revolutionary integrationism, the fight for black liberation through socialist revolution. This program is in sharp counterposition to the program of liberal integrationism, which is based upon the lie that you can have equality between the oppressed and the oppressors, that you can have genuine black freedom under capitalism. Equality, as Friedrich Engels put it in his magnificent book Anti-Dühring (1878), can only be achieved by abolishing the capitalist mode of production.

Despite disproportionately bearing the brunt of racist cutbacks and job losses, black workers are a strategic component of the unionized proletariat and potentially can play a vanguard role in the struggle for the rule of the working class. However, black workers’ weight in the proletariat has undergone considerable erosion. The renewal of this layer of the proletariat has been checked by new forms of racial and social controls devised by the racist rulers. Not a day goes by in which their racist “war on drugs” doesn’t add to the total of broken black lives—and also Latino youths’ lives. American capitalism is a prison nation, a gigantic jailhouse for the poor and the oppressed. In New York City, nearly half the black men are unemployed.

There are various schools of liberal idealism that posit race and not class as the fundamental dividing line in society. From their standpoint, racism is primarily a product of bad ideas. This notion divorces racism from its material, economic roots in capitalist society. In his latest book, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, the scholar David Roediger reflects the bankruptcy of liberalism. How is it possible to write such a book and not mention slavery? It’s not even in the book’s index. He can’t explain how black people became a race-color caste forcibly segregated at the bottom of this society, victims of the institutionalized racial oppression that is fostered by the bourgeoisie. Black oppression is bound up with black chattel slavery and is a foundation of American capitalism. Slavery’s legacy persists: the racist segregation, the unparalleled levels of imprisonment, the racist death penalty.

Slavery was the defining reality at the founding of the United States, from the slave trade’s very earliest phase and its tenuous hold in the 16th century to its full flowering in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. For the majority of the history of this country, black chattel slavery made a mockery of the democratic ideology of the founding fathers. Most of the early presidents of this country were slaveholders, along with the chief justices of the Supreme Court. The ideology of black inferiority and white superiority was a rationalization for the brutal extraction of uncompensated slave labor in the production of commodities for an international market.

Today, on one hand we get the neocons and others proclaiming an “end to racism,” embodied in their obscenely misnamed “civil rights” initiatives that have abolished the remnants of affirmative action at many universities. The flip side of this is “people of color” liberal politics, which denies the distinct and different histories of different ethnic groups in this country and, especially, ignores the special oppression of black people. Its purveyors reject the fact that anti-black racism has been central to the maintenance of the bourgeois order in this country. Such an omission—color blindness if you will—is a backhanded concession to reactionary ideologues such as David Horowitz who openly and stridently deny the reality of black oppression.

Behind “people of color” politics is a political program. Race is viewed as the primary dividing line in capitalist society, as opposed to the class division between the capitalists and the workers. There is an implicit presumption that all non-white people have common interests against all whites. White workers and bosses are supposedly united in “white skin privilege.” Large sections of the white working class do buy into the racism of this society, which is fomented by the exploiters. However, what material stake do white workers have in the perpetuation of this incredibly unequal society, whose white ruling class enjoys unparalleled riches coming at the workers’ expense? None whatsoever.

That is not to say that the racist rulers don’t constantly fill their heads with the lie of white superiority and black inferiority, and this has its effects. But it would be news to many of these workers—who along with black people, Latinos and Asian workers, have lost jobs and hard-earned benefits—that they, as opposed to the Wall Street money sharks, are the beneficiaries of the oppression of minorities. The presumption is that blacks and Latinos have more in common with Chinese or Indian businessmen than with Irish- or Italian-derived white workers. The presumption is that Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales are “our people.”

“People of color” politics serves to perpetuate the divisions in the working class and can only help drive white workers into the arms of this country’s white ruling class. Unlike the liberals and the reformists, we fight to win the multiracial working class to a program and perspective of class struggle against a common enemy, the capitalist exploiters. We fight to win the workers, no matter what their color or sex, to the struggle for socialist revolution to abolish capitalism.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Click on headline to link to Part Two

*The Black Liberation Struggle- Up Close And Personal- A "Workers Vanguard" Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)for background information for this article.


February Is Black History Month

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

How the Liberals and Reformists Derailed the Struggle for Integration

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard Nos. 830 and 831, 6 August and 3 September 2004.

We print below a forum, slightly edited for publication, given by comrade Don Alexander of the Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee at a regional educational in New York City on April 3.

I had to take a little time off in preparing this talk to keep from getting too involved in it, and comrade Karen and I went to hear a Southern liberal academic, who had written a book on the history of intermarriage in the U.S., particularly the striking down of the laws on the books that culminated in the 1967 Loving case. It was a quite interesting talk, a lot of anecdotes. In listening to his presentation, I noticed that the words "slavery," "segregation," "racism" weren't mentioned once. That's a pretty tall task in America, especially when you're talking about black-white intermarriage, because it's really the question of the persistence of caste. They can't deal with it. It really goes to the heart of this racist capitalist system. He was a rather charming gentleman, as they say.

There is a lot of talk today about multiculturalism, diversity, whiteness and "racialized subjects" and other liberal jargon that essentially attempts to erase the centrality of anti-black racism and black oppression in racist capitalist America. Recently, in preparing this talk, I read something professor Barbara Fields of Columbia University wrote. She was one of the few professors who endorsed our rally at Columbia against the Conservative Club's anti-affirmative action "bake sale." She made the point that all of these academic types are talking about "whiteness" and all this stuff—how the Irish became white—but they never talk about how "African and African-Caribbean immigrants became black." I thought that was a very interesting comment.

The Spartacist League has consistently, over the years, fought for a class-struggle program for black liberation as an inseparable part of the fight for the emancipation of labor from capitalist exploitation. Our program flows from a Marxist understanding of the nature of class society, of the role of class struggle as a motor force of history and the necessity of working-class rule. Capitalists like to dress up their rule in terms of general abstract slogans, pretending that they represent the "general will," the "people" and the like. But in fact, they have an executive committee that runs their affairs to perpetuate their brutal class rule, and that's called the state. This hideously oppressive and unequal society has perfected the machinery of deception and repression. There's a huge mountain of lies claiming that the U.S. is an "open society," a shining beacon of democracy where there are no classes and everybody is either in the middle class or becoming middle class, and where racism has largely been eliminated through civil rights laws, which have leveled the playing field. I know that if I keep on going in this vein you'll run me out of here, because it does make your blood boil.

If you read our publications, Workers Vanguard, Black History, Women and Revolution (which continues to be incorporated in Workers Vanguard and Spartacist), you'll see that we apply a revolutionary program to fight against national, sexual, racial and all oppression because that is part of our fight for world socialist revolution. In particular, when we raise the slogan for black liberation through socialist revolution, it sums up our strategic tasks. It encapsulates our fight for a third American revolution, a workers revolution that will put an end to this very brutal, decadent and violent ruling class. The realization of the age-long dream of black freedom, that is, the complete smashing of the color bar, can only occur through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. This means confronting the unfinished business of the Civil War—finishing the Civil War, which was a social revolution that destroyed slavery; but the social relations of anti-black racism were incorporated into the capitalist mode of production.

I want to cite part of what the veteran Trotskyist Richard Fraser wrote, in particular in his lectures of November 1953, "The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution." We had a comment about comrade Fraser when we put out the bulletin, "In Memoriam Richard S. Fraser" (Prometheus Research Series No. 3 [1990]). We wrote that

"Although he was hampered by little formal scholarly training, his Marxist understanding and his broad experience in militant struggles with black workers sharpened his insight into the lessons of history. His dedicated study sprang from his conviction that in order to forge a program for black liberation, it is necessary to study the social forces that created the American institution of racial oppression.... To Fraser, understanding the roots of black oppression in the United States was no armchair activity; he carried his theory of Revolutionary Integration into struggle."

And that's really a very appropriate introduction to what I have to say.

We often quote Karl Marx's statement that "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." Fraser argued against the prevailing liberal ideology of his day that "prejudice" is the root of black oppression. He said:

"The racial division of society was born with capitalism and will die only with the death of this last system of exploitation. Before capitalism there was no race concept. There was no skin color exploitation, there was no race prejudice, there was no idea of superiority and inferiority based upon physical characteristics.

"It was the advent of Negro chattel slavery in the western hemisphere which first divided society into races. In a measure the whole supremacy of western capitalism is founded upon this modern chattel slavery. The primary accumulation of capital which was the foundation of the industrial revolution was accrued largely from the slave trade."

This was written in 1953 and is a powerful scientific, materialist analysis that has stood the test of time. It is particularly important because we hear this newfangled stuff about how race is somehow a "socially constructed category." Fraser also talked about how race was "socially constructed" and noted that as a biological category, race doesn't exist. But he emphasized the unique racial oppression of the American black population, the stigmatization of skin color, which was a product of the system of chattel slavery and was grafted onto the subsequent capitalist system.

Black Oppression and Capitalist Society

What are we fighting for? You have to look at the situation in this country where there is not a class-conscious proletariat today. The proletariat has yet to declare its political independence from the parties of the capitalist ruling class, thanks to the multiple betrayals of the reformists in this country, the petty-bourgeois liberal spokesmen for the black masses and, especially, the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, which works overtime to derail any serious struggle.

It was over one hundred years after the Civil War that black people got the right to vote, and today black former prisoners have to fall on their knees before Florida governor Jeb Bush to beg for their rights back. This is a reflection of the fact that under capitalism, democratic rights are reversible and that every step of the way we have to fight.

The class divisions in this society are increasingly sharp and hard to paper over. Therefore, the lies become more brazen and the repression more severe. The U.S. imperialists say that those who are resisting the imperialist occupation of Iraq simply don't want to see that freedom has taken root. If you're standing in an employment line here with no prospects for a job in sight—which is the fate of millions—this will sound pretty hollow because these sweet-sounding words of "freedom," "equality" and "democracy" are coming out of mouths of the parasitic ruling class of the most brutal imperialist murderers in history. No, what they mean by "freedom" is the right to starve and to have their boots ground into your face. We hear a lot today about how opportunities are there if you just have the pluck and the patience to grasp them instead of whining for a handout. You hear a kinder, gentler version of this coming from black capitalist politicians and their mouthpieces, who complain that black people don't stick together like other races, they engage in "self-sabotage," and they hold each other back. You also hear the N-word, which lends legitimacy to this lie of black inferiority and is a reflection of its internalization. This scapegoating of the oppressed black masses in the name of "black power" or "black pride" is a reflection of petty-bourgeois contempt for the poor and oppressed. It is also an expression of the fact that today the black population, no less than the white population, is increasingly class-divided—in fact, even more so in terms of income and other inequalities within the black population.

Recently, I read a comment made by a Howard University black student who attended the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech—an event that Malcolm X correctly dubbed the "farce on Washington." What she had to say was, perhaps, typical of a certain train of thought: "We are tired of the struggle for equality and we are tired of the struggle for integration.... If the response is positive, we must organize. If the response is negative, we must organize."

This despairing tone is a product of the utter absence of any militant black leadership today and the failure of liberal integrationist programs. It is understandable, but it must be combatted. Consider who spoke at the rally, and you can understand this. Among others, there was the quintessential political hustler, black Democrat Al Sharpton. He railed against the Bush administration, saying that the checks sent to black America have bounced and are coming back marked "insufficient funds." You also had Martin Luther King III preaching a "revolution at the ballot box" in 2004—in other words, vote Democrat. These pro-capitalist hustlers have time and again led anti-racist struggles into the pigsty of bourgeois electoralism and lesser-evilism precisely at the moment when record numbers of black and Latino youth are in jail—when, as one writer describes it, the ghetto and the prisons are on a continuum. In sharp counterposition, we fight to mobilize the power of the multiracial working class—the only class in society which, because of its unique, strategic role in production, can smash this racist capitalist system and establish in its place a collectivized, planned socialist economy that produces for human need and not for profit. This will take a fight to forge a revolutionary leadership of the working class that stands at the head of the struggles of all the oppressed and exploited.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the post-Civil War post-Reconstruction period, you had a certain conservative black leader, Booker T. Washington, who came out openly for segregation, abandoning the fight for social equality. His rise to national prominence came in September 1895 when he delivered a speech at Atlanta's Cotton States and International Exposition. Basically, his speech told black people to stay "in their place." Here is what Washington asserted that black people are:

"The most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen.... In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.... The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly...."

Now, the black nationalists today are cut out of the same cloth. Their bankrupt, petty-bourgeois program of "self-help" and black capitalism is pushed to line their own pockets and defend their own class interests against the ghetto poor. It tells the masses to accept the racist status quo, a product of centuries of racist oppression, and to stay in their so-called place. The Million Man March, organized in 1995 by the black-separatist, anti-woman, anti-Semitic bigot Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, stood in this retrograde tradition. No wonder that march met with favor from Bill Clinton's White House. It was an appeasement of the capitalist exploiters. Meanwhile, the jails are filled with American capitalism's victims, the so-called "surplus population" of black and Latino youth. In New York City alone, nearly one out of two black men is unemployed. In the entire country, 40 percent of black children live in poverty. Black women are the fastest-growing victims of the AIDS epidemic. This is a society characterized by unprecedented, truly monstrous class divisions. This is the reality of color-caste oppression. It is not negated by the partial reconfiguration of this caste with the growth of a black middle class, which finds out very quickly that there is an invisible, but very real, glass ceiling.

It is sickening to hear Colin Powell and other representatives of the U.S. imperialist military, which is soaked from head to foot in the blood of the oppressed around the world, talk about how integrated their killing machine is. This was one of the themes of General Wesley Clark on the campaign trail—especially in front of black audiences. Clark even had the nerve to say that the U.S. Army integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas high school in the bloody battle there in 1957. The truth is otherwise. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was president at the time, had opposed the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948. His whole attitude toward the Brown decision was to never publicly support it. He made some really gross comments about overgrown black males sitting alongside white girls. He sent the troops into Little Rock to prevent the black masses from fighting back against the rampaging white racist mobs.

Right now, it is this same supposedly integrated imperialist army that has invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Its racist, colonial occupation has spilled the blood of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, along with increasing numbers of Haitians. We demand that the imperialist troops get out—and that the UN stay out. The working class and oppressed here have a very direct stake in opposing this colonialist occupation which can only further embolden world history's most monstrous imperialist power.

The Class-Struggle Road to Black Freedom

Under capitalism—the system of private ownership of the means of production, in which the workers have only their labor power to sell as a commodity—a handful of capitalists are the dominant economic class. So it's futile to appeal to the nonexistent conscience and morality of the ruling class. It is not now and never has been in their interests to have a society based upon genuine peace, plenty and equality. Theirs is a system of production for profit and of anarchy resulting in inevitably recurring economic crises—a boom-bust cycle of overproduction of commodities giving rise to cyclical and structural unemployment and generalized impoverishment. Ending this requires a fight for the abolition of U.S. and world capitalism through international proletarian revolution.

Our interests lie in common, integrated class struggle against the racist capitalist rulers. The Spartacist League stands in the tradition of the early Communist International, the Comintern, under Lenin and Trotsky. Through insistent prodding, they reoriented the American Communist Party by uprooting the colorblindness characteristic of the early socialist movement. That movement had said that it had "nothing special" to offer to blacks and that their oppression was an economic problem. The Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky fought tooth and nail against this position, and actually laid the basis for the American Communist Party to lead an aggressive fight for black equality in the late 1920s and early 1930s. James P. Cannon—a founder of the Communist Party and early leader of American Trotskyism—wrote his seminal essay "The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement" in 1959, five years after the Supreme Court Brown decision, as that movement was unfolding. He pointed out:

"It is customary to attribute the progress of the Negro movement, and the shift of public opinion in favor of its claims, to the changes brought about by the First World War. But the biggest thing that came out of the First World War, the event that changed everything, including the prospects of the American Negro, was the Russian Revolution. The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, contributed more than any other influence from any source to the recognition, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a special problem of American society—a problem which cannot simply be subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labor, as it was in the pre-Communist radical movement."

— The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)

The Spartacist League's several decades of efforts and principled struggle to mobilize the working class in the fight for black freedom and in the liberation of the working class as a whole stands in this tradition and is unique.

As a consequence of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, which was a gigantic defeat for workers and oppressed around the world, the capitalists have been emboldened to intensify their attacks against hard-won gains. It is no mere coincidence that, beginning in 1991, they have more energetically pushed for the resegregation of the school system—not that they began then, but they stepped on the pedal. There is no Soviet Union today to embarrass U.S. imperialism about the endemic racism which is inherent to this system.

Because of the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, consciousness has been thrown back. And this has been in the making for a while. In 1983, Jesse Jackson, a former leader in King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, helped knife protests in defense of busing in Norfolk, Virginia. Coleman Young denounced busing in Detroit when he was the black Democratic mayor there in 1974, agreeing with the Supreme Court decision that struck down cross-district busing of black schoolchildren from the inner city to the white suburbs. In 1997, the historically integrationist NAACP held a debate that called into question integration.

Furthermore, this retrogression in consciousness has also affected the so-called "progressive," radical black intellectuals such as Robin Kelley and bell hooks, along with outright pro-Democratic Party hip-hop capitalists such as Russell Simmons. Simmons, who slams integration and also pushes black capitalism, helped organize a massive rally at City Hall in June 2003 (some of us sold Workers Vanguard at it) which was joined by Democrat Andrew Cuomo to call for not ending, but reducing the sentences of the draconian Rockefeller-era anti-drug laws. This is the same Cuomo who in the Clinton administration, in the Department of Housing, actually used the money that was supposed to go to building new housing to build prisons in upstate New York. So they were down there at City Hall supposedly trying to reform these drug laws. We say: Down with the racist war on drugs! We are for the decriminalization of drugs. The so-called New Democrat Clinton escalated the bourgeoisie's attacks on the ghettos and barrios "to end welfare as we know it," expanding the racist death penalty, and putting about 100,000 more cops on the streets.

In a recent interview, Simmons spelled out his program. He said his program is 40 acres and a Bentley. His undisguised hostility to integration is quite understandable in that light. This is what he said:

"Economically, some families in our community had more financial stability during segregation. We had the black dentist, the black lawyer, the black teacher. We had jobs. We had things we had to do for our community and services to provide. Integration tore that down. It damaged our economic stability in our little communities.... They took all of our business."

— Henry Louis Gates, America Behind the Color Line (2004)

Well, first, what jobs? Ghettos are impoverished hell holes, and in periods of labor shortage, they used to be some kind of reserve army of the unemployed—and I stress used to be. These people are pushing black capitalism, which is really about feathering their own nests and flipping a bone to the rest of us.

The so-called "left" black feminist, bell hooks, harking back to a mythical golden era of cross-class black unity, argued:

"That sense of solidarity was altered by a class-based civil rights struggle whose ultimate goal was to acquire more freedom for those black folks who already had a degree of class privilege however relative. By the late 1960s class-based racial integration disrupted the racial solidarity that often held black folks together despite class difference. Pressured to assimilate into mainstream white culture to increase their class power and status, privileged black individuals began to leave the underprivileged behind, moving into predominantly white neighborhoods, taking their money and their industry out of the segregated black world."

— Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000)

Well, this is an utterly fantastic description of what actually happened. Some of what she points out, such as who benefited from the civil rights movement, is true. But the notion that there was ever in the past, or that there ever will be in the future, a significant black capitalist class along the lines of the Carnegies, the Mellons and the Rockefellers is utterly fantastic and utopian. Moreover, there is no such thing as "separate but equal." And that's the point: they have capitulated to that.

Now, there's the very voluble left-nationalist academic Robin Kelley. He rhetorically asks, "Integration: What's Left?" (Nation, 14 December 1998). He deliberately conflates the struggle for racial integration with liberal integrationism and submission to white liberal gradualism:

"Although black civil rights activists had always emphasized ‘desegregation'—the removal of all barriers that kept black people from enjoying full access to public facilities, decent housing, education and so on—in most white liberal circles racial integration came to mean solving the ‘Negro problem' by bringing black people into formerly all-white institutions.... The goal was to produce fully assimilated black people devoted to the American dream. Sharing power was rarely part of the equation."

And what is his program?

"Rather than a new integrationist movement under a left-wing banner, I would like to see a new, revitalized left launching a full-scale assault on white privilege—a new divestment campaign in which white people refuse the benefits of a racist society."

In particular, what Kelley is saying to the mass of white workers, which of course happens to be the most numerous class in this society, is: Prove your commitment for the poor and the oppressed by voluntarily impoverishing yourself. This can only reinforce the hold of the white ruling class upon white workers. Moreover, if he took that to any picket line they'd run him out on a rail.

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which was a radical-nationalist organization in Detroit in the '70s, had the opportunity to actually make common cause with white workers. They refused to pass out their leaflets to them. Their program was for more black foremen, for blacks on the board of General Motors and the like. Our program of revolutionary integration, of class struggle, cuts across these kinds of divisive schemes. Our program is to get rid of class exploitation and the brutal racial oppression that props it up, not to pit sections of the oppressed and exploited against each other so that both can be conquered. The depth of the political bankruptcy is astounding, but not surprising.

From our inception in the early 1960s inside the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as the Revolutionary Tendency, a left-wing opposition that fought against that party's abandonment of a revolutionary working-class program, we have emphasized common class struggle against a common class enemy. We say that there is an alternative to liberal integrationism—which favors the gradual absorption of "deserving blacks," one by one, into this system—and pro-Democratic Party capitalist politics. And that's the program of revolutionary integrationism, the struggle for black liberation through overturning this racist capitalist system by linking the struggles of the ghettos to the organized labor movement under a class-struggle leadership.

I need to point out that the ruling class today is forced to admit that increasingly U.S. society is being resegregated. In a special education supplement (New York Times, 18 January) on the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision, a writer admits that "Millions of black students are celebrating Brown's anniversary in schools almost as segregated as when it was decided. It is now true, as the court held, that ‘separate but equal facilities are inherently unequal.' But 70 percent of black students attend schools in which racial minorities are a majority, and fully a third are in schools 90 to 100 percent minority." Professor Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, has done quite an extensive investigation of the growing resegregation in the U.S. He argues that, practically speaking, the U.S. today hasn't qualitatively progressed beyond the era of formalized segregation embodied in the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that sanctioned state-supported segregation in public accommodations.

When you look at what's going on as the schools become more segregated today, the fastest-growing, and now the largest minority affected are Latinos. We, as fighters for a revolutionary vanguard party, point to the common interests of all sections of the oppressed. Our task is to combat not only anti-black racism within the immigrant milieu, but the anti-immigrant chauvinism of many black workers and black people. This is critical from the standpoint of fighting for socialist revolution in this country. What we see is that the ruling class has thrown increasing layers of the population on the scrap heap.

In the annals of judicial history, what they call "Brown I" was the Supreme Court decision in 1954 that struck down Plessy v. Ferguson. And in "Brown II," the second decision a year later, the Supreme Court ordered desegregation with "all deliberate speed," i.e., slowly. In other words, they gave the green light to Southern segregationist foes of integration to obstruct the implementation of that decision. Consequently, by early 1964, a full decade later, only 1.2 percent of black children in the eleven Southern states attended schools with whites. So the law is one thing, and the reality on the ground is another.

These legal decisions are never made in a vacuum, but they are a product of social struggle. Thus, far from being friends of black people, many judges opposed Brown. For example, leading segregationist Mississippi Circuit Court judge Tom Brady, in line with the white-supremacist Citizens Councils, asserted that this was "Black Monday" and that the Supreme Court was leaning toward Communism. The segregationists in Little Rock were circulating questionnaires essentially asking whether black boys would be permitted to solicit the white girls at school soirées? Would they be allowed, white girls and black boys in drama classes, to get together? Someone could really do an interesting study on when was the first time, if ever, Othello was performed in that part of the country.

When the first Brown decision was handed down, it was trumpeted by U.S. imperialism as an expression of American democracy in its finest hour. In 1954 Secretary of State Dean Acheson underlined their interest in Brown:

"Other peoples cannot understand how [school segregation] can exist in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of freedom, justice, and democracy. The sincerity of the United States in this respect will be judged by its deeds as well as by its words."

— International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941-1960 (2000)

And of course, they were increasingly embarrassed because the Soviet Union reminded them quite frequently and regularly of the vicious, legalized segregation, while the U.S. rulers railed against "Soviet Communist totalitarianism."

The State Department didn't waste any time in trumpeting the progress in race relations: within an hour of the Supreme Court's decision, the Voice of America broadcast the news all over the world in 35 different languages. And Carl Rowan, a black journalist who was the face of the State Department abroad, traveled far and wide to convince the Third World that America was finally making progress.

Of course it was bull because, in the aftermath of the Brown decision, white racist defiance quickly developed. Autherine Lucy, a black woman who wanted to get into graduate school, was attacked by mobs at the University of Alabama when she tried to attend school there in 1956. That angered a lot of European and African governments.

A year earlier, in 1955, Emmett Till fared worse. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black youth from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi. He was lynched for the alleged "crime" of whistling at a white woman. His horribly mutilated body was shown. His mother insisted upon an open casket funeral, and all over the world people saw the barbarity of lynch law. Thousands of black people all over this country marched after that, and many say that the beginnings of the civil rights movement began with the demonstrations around Emmett Till. A couple of weeks ago the New York Times (22 March), in an editorial titled "The Ghost of Emmett Till," said that there is a reinvestigation of his murder being planned by the Justice Department because they have new information on Till's murder. If somebody is nailed, he'll probably be 95 years old, on a respirator with one lung, one kidney and one hour to live. And if it's not that, the system is still one of murderous legal lynchings and racist frame-ups that keeps on keeping on. Just look at the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal and the many other class-war prisoners in this country, like Jerry Dale Lowe.

Every step forward for workers, black people, women and all the oppressed has been won by militant struggle against the racist capitalist system. Reliance on the bourgeois courts politically disarms the workers and oppressed. The unions in this country were built by defying the bourgeoisie's laws against trade unions, laws that called unions "criminal conspiracies," which the capitalists could revive again.

Black youth hurled themselves against the infernal machine of the racist, segregationist, law-and-order establishment, playing a very important role in shattering the McCarthyite Cold War consensus and atmosphere in the South. The law had to adjust to the new facts on the ground. In other words, it was no thanks to good-hearted and benevolent judges that the walls of Jim Crow segregation came tumbling down.

Robert Weisbrot, the author of Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil Rights Movement, noted that before the Brown decision:

"Sporadic local protests also sent a message of growing Negro assertiveness, but few, black or white, received it. In November 1953 forty-eight black soldiers in Columbia, South Carolina, were arrested and fined more than $1,500 because one sat next to a white girl on the bus. That same year a Negro boycott of buses in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, lasted a week before officials permitted blacks and whites to occupy some seats on first-come, first-served basis."

Now, after several decades of bipartisan racist reaction and attacks on the standard of living of the working masses, sections of the ruling class openly embrace the "ghosts of the Confederacy" and their heirs. For example, Attorney General John Ashcroft has expressed his admiration for the Confederacy. Trent Lott, the Republican Senator, got a slap on the wrist for openly stating his support for the segregationist Strom Thurmond. Thurmond was the rabid segregationist who led Southern racist resistance to the integration of the armed forces under President Harry S. Truman and bolted from the Democratic Party to form the Dixiecrat Party in 1948. And none other than the current head of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, wrote a memo in support of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This is the ruling class that is in power.

The Failures of the Civil Rights Movement in the North

When the civil rights movement went North, it ran into a brick wall. It went up against the bedrock of the economic oppression of the black population. It was not de jure (in law) segregation but de facto segregation that they had to contend with. The collapse of that movement flowed from Martin Luther King's and the SCLC's bankrupt, liberal pacifist program of reliance on the racist federal government and the Democratic Party. That is what crippled that struggle.

As a result of the inability of the liberal-led civil rights leadership to address the capitalist roots of black oppression, many black activists embraced a separatist road and rejected integrated class struggle, which is not only in the interest of blacks but is in the interest of the entire working class. The result was that the best of an entire generation of young black militants, particularly embodied in the contradictory radical-nationalist Black Panthers, was cut down through murderous FBI Counter-Intelligence Program (Cointelpro) repression, facilitated by murderous internal factionalism.

Some of this history is being revised in the anarchist milieu. You have, for instance, the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC). They recently had an article, "A Synthesis of Race & Class: A Look at the Black Panther Party & Its Goal of Liberation" (Northeastern Anarchist, Summer/Fall 2003). What the anarchists say is quite interesting because it indicates why their rejection of a Leninist vanguard party makes them incapable of understanding the fact that what really led to the demise of the Panthers was not simply FBI repression. It was not simply what the anarchists call the Panthers' "authoritarian, top-down structure" or their advocacy of a vanguard party (which was of course vanguard in name only, because there was male chauvinism within that organization). What NEFAC says is this:

"The Black Panther Party was the most important revolutionary organization in America during the late 20th century.... [The party] was able to develop a truly revolutionary political platform that presented a more just and viable alternative....

"Perhaps the party would have benefited and maximized its potential as a Revolutionary Black Nationalist organization by broadening its struggles to both remedial and immediate programs as well as more militant activities so long as they were both aimed at a common and revolutionary goal: the necessity for black people to gain control of the institutions in their own communities, eventually transforming them into cooperatives, and of one day working with other ethnic groups to change the system."

This petty-bourgeois rejection of the working class is exactly the Panthers' type of New Left sectoralism. Thoroughly anti-working-class, it is based upon the utopian, classless notion of a "black community," or "black communities," which are really impoverished ghettos. What are you going to control? The Panthers were nationalists; they were radical nationalists. They wanted social revolution, but they rejected mobilizing the integrated working class to sweep away this system. This is the key reason for their political demise. It wasn't simply that the state was all-powerful. There was sympathy among white workers in the Bay Area. In the early 1970s we had supporters who worked in a General Motors auto plant in Fremont, California. This was a factory where the Panthers briefly had a caucus, which they later liquidated.

Today, the effects of the destruction of the Panthers' organization and the defeats of the movement are deeply felt. The black population is leaderless. Under the conditions of relentless racist attacks today in the name of the "war against terror" at home and abroad, it is vital to know who our friends and who our enemies are. Things didn't have to turn out this way. If you really look at the road forward, it has to be based on this program of class-struggle revolutionary integrationism, by forging a revolutionary workers party that tells the bitter truth. In that regard, we have to clear the ground of the reformist and centrist obstacles that block the road to power.

Don't be fooled by the occasional socialist rhetoric. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) is a good example of what we're talking about. Time and again, they stand with the Democrats against workers and the oppressed. On 23 October 1999, they were out there in the rally organized by Sharpton to defend the Klan's right to march. He went to court on behalf of the Klan, whereas the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee, along with the Labor Black League, mobilized a mass labor-centered mobilization that stopped the Klan.

So what does the ISO say is the way forward? In a recent article called "Racism in America Today" (International Socialist Review, November-December 2003), they say that, despite the persistence of institutional racism in America,

"It would be wrong, nevertheless, to conclude that things are just as bad as they were before the civil rights movement. Many of the legislative gains from that period—from affirmative action to ending segregation—are under attack. But the impact of the movement has been longstanding, fundamentally changing the attitudes and perceptions of millions of people about African Americans."

Where do you start, right? One thing to say is that the lie of black inferiority, the recrudescence of "scientific racism" in this Bell Curve book, which was a bestseller at the time it was published in 1994, which preached the genetic inferiority of black people, struck fertile soil. The point is that the civil rights movement failed to end black oppression because it was tied to the Democratic Party, and these fake socialists cover up that fact because they are busily tailing the Democrats today. There was nothing in that article about breaking with the Democratic Party. I think it is because the ISO's whole perspective is to reform this racist, capitalist system. And, of course, they supported every counterrevolutionary nationalist movement, every anti-Soviet struggle in the past, which culminated in the destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state.

So their program is very illustrative of what we are dealing with out there. We have so-called socialists in this country who practically ignore the growing resegregation of the U.S. In the case of the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP), they actually openly champion segregation—for example, opposing school busing in Boston. Their virulent hostility to integration is no accident since they are virulently Stalinophobic, anti-Soviet. Rejecting defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution led to accommodation to American imperialism at home on the strategic question for proletarian revolution in the U.S., the fight for black liberation.

The kind of "integration" that the ruling class is interested in aims to recruit the best of those minorities whose skills and training can be utilized to defend the capitalists' interests at home and abroad. This involves being able to intervene into countries with large non-white populations, sitting astride regions where there is oil, gold, diamonds and the like. So the white ruling class will drop the color bar to get a Colin Powell and a Condoleezza Rice to do their bidding in enslaving and murdering thousands of dark-skinned peoples, and other oppressed peoples, around the world. This has nothing to do, of course, with the obliteration of the color line, but rather the obliteration of horribly impoverished people around the world. So the class enemy has a consistently counterrevolutionary strategy and program, and we have to have a consistently revolutionary strategy and program.

If you want another example, look at the support from sections of the U.S. officer corps for retaining affirmative action at the University of Michigan last year. Why? They remember their long, losing and dirty colonial war against Vietnam—which was conducted with a racially torn military. Now, they have a Hispanic commander leading troops in Iraq.

The bourgeoisie wants "integration" insofar as it furthers their struggle for unbridled exploitation. We defend affirmative action as one of the remaining minimal and very inadequate gains of the civil rights movement, which were wrested from the white ruling class in struggle. However, affirmative action does not and cannot attack the race and class biases inherent in this system. In the universities, we fight for open admissions, free tuition and a fully paid state stipend, especially to enable minority and working-class youth to attend those schools. Very recently, the Spartacus Youth Club mobilized actions at Columbia University against an anti-affirmative action "bake sale" sponsored by the Conservative Club, which is in cahoots with an assortment of sinister racist imperialist elements, such as the pro-slavery ideologue David Horowitz. The Conservative Club had in their cross hairs blacks, Jews, Hispanics, gays and others. We mobilized against their racist provocation at Columbia while organizations like the ISO refused to endorse the SYC-initiated action because they were basically trying to pressure the administration to defend minority students.

Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

We fight to build a vanguard party that bases its program not upon the current consciousness of the working class, but upon its objective interests, its interests as a conscious revolutionary class. This is really the hallmark of what we're fighting for, a party that is a tribune of the people. Under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party, the workers of Russia smashed the outmoded capitalist system. This was the first and the only successful workers revolution in history. Today, U.S. imperialism is seeking to destroy the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states in China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. Despite the political misrule of the Stalinist bureaucracies in these countries, the smashing of capitalism there is a good thing for the workers internationally. We Trotskyists unconditionally defend those workers states against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution. It's a good thing that North Korea has nukes. Otherwise, the U.S. imperialist bandits would have obliterated them a long time ago. We fight for workers political revolution in those countries to oust the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracies whose anti-internationalist, anti-working-class program facilitates the imperialist drive toward capitalist restoration. To be a Marxist, a Trotskyist, a fighter for world revolution, you have to be a proletarian internationalist. Our task here is to build that revolutionary Trotskyist party and finish what the Bolsheviks started in 1917 by fighting for new October Revolutions.

The class-struggle program for black liberation is directly tied to the struggle for proletarian revolution. In this regard, every generation comes to revolutionary consciousness in their own way. My personal road was tortuous, starting as a follower of the petty-bourgeois radical-nationalist Frantz Fanon, who seemed to be offering an uncompromising assault on the citadel of racism and imperialism—looking for the "wretched of the earth" to rise up spontaneously to drive off the imperialists. Only when I joined the Spartacist League did I learn that Fanon's "radical" nationalism was an expression of the prevalent New Leftism which propagated the myth that the working class was not the agent of revolutionary change, but had been "bought off" and integrated into the racist capitalist system. I'll skip some of the other delusions that I had to discard along the way.

We've learned a lot from the Bolsheviks. When you look at some of the history of what the Spartacist League has fought for, such as the struggle for busing in Boston, it is really important to see how we swam against the stream. I was fortunate to spend some time with Dick Fraser, along with other comrades, in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. We tried to assist him in various ways—he was a very sick man at the time. We had one friend in common, a guy by the name of Earl Ofari [Hutchinson], who was a friend of mine, and Dick had done some writing with him too. In the early 1970s, Ofari played a role in breaking me from the dead end of "revolutionary nationalism" and in telling me over and over again that a woman's work is never done. He wrote a useful book called The Myth of Black Capitalism which really assisted me in developing a class perspective.

We had a big argument in 1974-75 about the demand, which Ofari supported, that the government send federal troops to Boston to protect black schoolchildren, who had been bused to integrate schools in South Boston, a white enclave. At the same time, Ofari denounced the Maoist Revolutionary Union, the predecessors of today's Revolutionary Communist Party, which capitulated to the racist anti-busing forces in Boston and came out with an infamous headline in their press: "People Must Unite to Smash Boston Busing Plan" (Revolution, October 1974). This was a gross capitulation to the racist scum from the Nazis and the Klan to Louise Day Hicks, who was a leader of the racist outfit called ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights).

Ofari's main fire, however, was directed at the so-called "sectarian" Spartacist League. We were in the forefront of fighting for mass integrated labor-black defense to defend the black schoolchildren against the howling racist mobs in South Boston. We fought for low-rent, racially integrated public housing, for quality integrated education for all, and for the implementation of busing and its extension to the suburbs as a minimal—although inadequate—step toward black equality. We weren't successful in getting the labor movement organized along those lines. However, this was in the interests of workers and the oppressed.

The trade-union misleaders in that city didn't lift a finger so as not to alienate the Democratic Party so-called "friends of labor," such as Teddy Kennedy and others. Initially, Kennedy made some mild support statements, and they ran his butt off the stage.

We linked this fight to the struggle for socialist revolution and a workers government. In contrast, the reformist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) called for federal troops to "defend" black people and tailed behind the petty-bourgeois liberal NAACP. In pursuit of their class-collaborationist bloc with the liberals, the SWP sought to rewrite history by claiming that through mass pressure the armed forces of imperialism could be made to fight for the oppressed. They consciously distorted history to suit their reformist appetites. They tried to erase the indisputable fact that every time troops were called in, particularly in response to black rebellion, it was to suppress those who were fighting back. The capitalist state—its cops, its courts, its armed forces—is not neutral. These bodies are instruments of capitalist rule and racist repression. The Workers World Party of Sam Marcy was tailing behind this black Democrat, Bill Owen, who opposed busing and was looking for a political career. Marcy put out a pamphlet, Busing and Self-Determination, which should have been titled "The Right to Tailism." In it, they stated: "Separation or Assimilation—It's Up to the Oppressed." So they simultaneously tailed the petty-bourgeois liberals of the NAACP and the Black Muslims. They betrayed the struggle for black equality.

Finally, the fight against the resegregation of America cannot be separated from the unrelenting ruling-class offensive against labor and oppressed minorities, which has resulted in increased concentration of wealth at one end of society and increased segregation and misery at the other. The recent five-month-long, bitter, sold-out UFCW grocery workers strike in Southern California indicates that there are today thousands of workers determined to resist the capitalist attacks. They fought, and it was not impossible for them to have won. But the treacherous trade-union bureaucracy isolated that strike, refused to extend it nationwide and played by the bosses' rules. That's why we say you need a class-struggle leadership of labor to unleash its power. Such a leadership is based upon the recognition that the fight for the emancipation of the working class is inseparable from the struggle against the brutal, racist oppression that is endemic to this capitalist system.

How can this power be brought to bear? A powerful message would have been sent to the bloodsucking capitalists had there been ten thousand transit workers, hospital workers, city workers downing their tools to protest the racist killings of black woman unionist Alberta Spruill and black youth Timothy Stansbury. Or, a few years ago, Amadou Diallo. Or the several Latino youth killed by New York's "finest" racist killers. Or in defense of class-war prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal. That social power must be mobilized. The capitalists would be forced to take notice if there were a significant presence of workers out there on behalf of women's rights—especially in the fight for abortion, which is under attack. The possibilities of integrated class struggle are palpable and, on a modest scale, very real. White, Latino and Asian workers were out there together on the picket lines during the recent UFCW strike. They fought, and their union wasn't broken, even though they were bitterly sold out.

How do we get that kind of leadership? By drawing the class line. By breaking with the program of class collaboration that preaches the lie of a "community of interests" between the workers and the bosses and of "lesser-evilism," which is pushed by the reformists and labor fakers. That party will be built by unmasking the enemies of the workers and the oppressed, no matter what their color or nationality is. A necessary task for the working class in this country is the forging of such a revolutionary workers party, a political weapon to advance a fight for jobs for all through a shorter workweek with no loss in pay, for free medical care, for free universal education, for full citizenship rights, for immigrant rights, for militant defense of the rights of gays. The fight for free abortion on demand, the fight for freedom of all class-war prisoners is a fight for a socialist America. And this fight will be realized through expropriating the capitalist class.

I want to end with this quote from a black youth in Roxbury, Boston, who was inspired by the struggle for integration in that city. It underscores one of the points that we've made, namely, that in the past, on most occasions, the black population has sought every opportunity to fight for integration and equality as opposed to opting for a separatist road. It is only in periods of defeat and out of despair that some have turned toward pseudo-nationalism. Reflecting the egalitarian sentiments of a significant number of black people in the civil rights era, an eleven-year-old black youth said: "Busing's just got to be, man. Got to be. We got it coming to us. We got to open up ourselves, spread out. Get into the city.... Go to good schools, live in good places like white folks got.... That's why they're busing us" (Brown v. Board of Education [2001]). To realize this dream of genuine equality, you must fight for a socialist revolution. You can't get it unless you have a party that swims against the stream and that bases itself upon the lessons of the class struggle and the fight to smash capitalism on a world scale.