With this understanding as a background, let’s look at the argument that white labor has always betrayed Black labor when the crunch came, and that this will always be the case.
No one can deny that white workers in the U.S., like workers everywhere, have acted against their own class interests: often they have been misled into opposing the progress and emancipation of Black people and other Third World peoples. But they have also fought heroically against the oppression of Black people.
There is the anti-Black New York draft riot of 1863; but there is also the dominant tendency of white workers–especially those influenced by the Marxists–to volunteer for the Union army, to enter the battle singing “John Brown’s Body,” and ultimately, to join with the Black troops to defeat the Confederacy.
There is the history of the narrow craft unions, the AFL in particular, in excluding Black members, and of unions generally in restricting Black workers from holding office and in failing to take up the fight against the special oppression and exploitation of Black workers. But there is also the history of unions like the United Mine Workers in the period 1890-1910, which had Black men like Richard Davis among its top officials and organizers; and of the communist-led CIO unions in the 1930’s and 40’s–the ILWU, the UE, even to a large degree the UAW, and others–which did take up the fight for preferential hiring and the other struggles of Black workers against discrimination and other forms of national oppression.
There is the 1943 anti-Black riot in Detroit, which began with the white workers’ rebellion against having to work alongside Blacks. But there is also the action of the progressive-led packinghouse workers in Chicago in the several-year campaign to organize the meat-cutting workers (one-fifth of whom were Black). When the big meat-packers (Armour and the rest) instigated a race riot and brought in thousands of troops to occupy the Black community, 30,000 white workers demonstrated their solidarity with the Black people, demanded the withdrawal of the troops, maintained the unity of the white and Black workers in the organizing campaign, and prevented the incident from turning into an all-out slaughter of the Black people.
The point is, where they have revolutionary or progressive leadership, white workers, like all workers, have proven capable of fighting, together with Third World people, in their highest class interests. Where they have not yet developed this leadership, where opportunists are still in command, and where bourgeois ideology is not systematically challenged, white workers, like all workers, may “spontaneously” act against their own class interests, may oppose the struggles of their own class brothers and sisters. The historical experience of the struggle against capitalism, throughout the world and within the U.S., demonstrates that through their own experience in struggle and with class-conscious leadership, the white workers in the U.S. can and will be united in revolutionary struggle with Third World people.
Of course, the ruling class bends every effort at preventing the unity of the proletariat; of course, it utilizes its flunkies and junior-partners in the ranks of labor–and even throws a few crumbs to sections of the working class–to split white workers away from Third World workers. But today, all this is being turned into its opposite. The ruling class, through its whole history of oppression of the Black and other Third World people, has laid the conditions for its own destruction. Today, it forces the Third World people into the lowest, most exploited sections of the working class. But today, these Third World workers are rising up, linking the national struggle with the class struggle, and raising the whole working class with them.
In 1971, at the beginning of the wave of strikes that swept the country, the Chinese Communist Party pointed out that in the United States:
The Afro-American struggle is gradually merging with the workers’ movement. In recent years, many clandestine organizations and rank-and-file committees have been formed by Black workers in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Newark and in many industrial branches . . . Under their leadership, the workers time and time again broke through the control of a handful of reactionary union bosses and staged powerful ’wildcat’ strikes which gave a great impetus to the workers’ movement. The first ’wildcat’ in the history of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which broke out in April last year was a case in point.
The just struggle of the Afro-American people enjoys the sympathy and support of white workers who in many of their big strikes adopted a clear-cut stand against political and economic discrimination against Black workers. (Peking Review, No. 17, April 23, 1971, “Afro-American Struggle Gathering Momentum.”)
It would be a mistake to overestimate the level of unity that has already been developed, but it would be an even more serious mistake to ignore the tendency, which is rising and developing, toward the greater unity of white workers with Third World workers. Black and Third World workers are leading struggles not only against the special oppression of Third World people, but generally against the increasing attacks on all workers which, because of discrimination, hit Third World workers hardest of all–lay-offs, speed-ups, wage cuts and compulsory overtime, anti-strike laws and further attacks on rank-and-file decision-making in unions, cutbacks in health care, housing, education, etc.
In the process of these repeated struggles, and with communist leadership advancing the struggle, helping the workers to get organized and to fight more effectively, raising the consciousness of the workers and educating them to their long-term and general class interests–a qualitative change will take place within ) the working class movement. White workers will increasingly recognize the struggle of Third World people against all forms of exploitation and oppression as the front-line of their own struggle. And Third World workers, seeing this growing support for their struggles–on the job and in the community–will take the lead in forging closer unity between the Third World liberation movements and the workers’ movement.
This is not a mechanical process, but a dialectical one, It will proceed step-by-step, through many twists and turns, but, beginning with and building on the present level of unity in struggle, it will certainly continue to advance from lower to higher levels. Once more: the question of communist leadership is crucial. With the correct leadership of Marxist-Leninists–Third World and white–linking theory with practice, and ultimately with the unified leadership of a multinational Communist Party, the main blow can be directed against white national chauvinism; and as this is challenged and defeated through repeated struggle, bourgeois nationalism will also be exposed and defeated, the national and class struggles will merge and the revolutionary unity of the working class will develop and advance.
One last historical example on this question. In his book on the 1919 steel strike, William Z. Foster points out that in the decades previous to the war, the waves of immigrants who flooded into the U.S. were forced into the lowest sections of the working class. For years the steel bosses succeeded in dividing the working class–“native” born against immigrant, and immigrant group-against immigrant group. But through their own experience, and with progressive leadership, the steelworkers, with the immigrants (the original “honkies”) in the forefront, burst through these bonds. Even though the strike was defeated in 1919, the steelworkers’ solidarity in struggle gave great inspiration to the whole working class and helped lay the basis for the great industrial organizing drives in the 1930’s.
Today the situation of Black people, and other Third World people, is both similar to and different from the situation of the immigrants after World War I. Both the similarity and the difference are crucial. We have seen how the development of U.S. monopoly capitalism since World War II has driven the masses of Black people off the southern farmlands and absorbed them into the lowest sections of the working class.
Today they are taking the lead in and giving inspiration to the workers movement. But the entry of the Black people even into the bottom layers of the working class was delayed this long exactly because, at the time the millions of European immigrants were flocking into the country to fill the demand of expanding industry for cheap labor, the Black people were held in semi-feudal peonage in the Black Belt. (In fact, this made it easier for the steel bosses to bring in Black people to work in the steel mills during the strike of 1919.)
Under today’s conditions, the development of capitalism cannot bring about the assimilation of Black people, as it did for the European immigrants. For the Black and Third World people in the U.S. today, just as much as for the oppressed nationalities in Russia after the February, 1917, bourgeois-democratic revolution, the national question cannot be solved within the framework of capitalism. The emancipation of the Black people and other Third World people means the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In Red Papers 1, our “Statement of Principles” affirms that the socialist state of the U.S. working class “will guarantee the right of self-determination to the oppressed nations–including self-governing territories if so desired.” We hold to this position, but we do not think that the demand for a separate state will become a mass demand of the Black people under socialism, because the working class will then be even more strongly united in the fight to eliminate all national oppression. A more likely demand of the Black people might be the establishment of an autonomous region, within the same socialist state (this is the experience of both the Russian and the Chinese revolutions). But even this may not be demanded by Black people, especially if the level of unity in struggle and equality of leadership in the anti-imperialist struggle is at the highest level at victory.
In any case, only with the victory of the working class revolution will the complete elimination of national oppression, and the right of the oppressed nationalities to decide the question of self-determination and autonomy, become a real possibility. On the other hand, only through the struggle for the rights of the oppressed nationalities, waged as part of the overall class struggle, will the proletariat forge its revolutionary unity and take its rightful place as the master of the society it has built.
To separate the national struggle from the class struggle is to hold back the development of both. This is true even when it is done under the guise that only Black and Third World people are revolutionary, or that only Black and Third World people are really proletarian.
Another form of denying the centrality of class struggle is the argument that the working class in the U.S., especially the industrial proletariat, is itself already a dying class which is being made historically obsolete by machines, and is being transformed into a tiny group of technicians, on the one hand, and a large group of unemployables, or “lumpenproletariat,” on the other. This line is put forward by some Third World groups and certain petit-bourgeois white intellectuals who tail after them.
We have already answered this argument in Red Papers 2. It is important to emphasize once again, however, that, while the number of industrial workers is declining relative to service and white-collar workers, the absolute number of blue-collar wage-workers of all kinds is continuing to rise. In 1970 it rose above 27 million (about one-third of the total work force). The number of industrial workers–factory operatives and laborers (excluding craftsmen and foremen) is more than 20 million, also an absolute increase.
It is true that U.S. capitalism, in its advanced stages of decay, throws several million people onto the scrap-heap, denying them employment permanently–permanently within the capitalist system. But imperialism because of the domination of parasitic monopoly capital, slows down the development of the productive forces (the introduction of new technology) and, in the inevitable crisis, actually reverses the process of development, through massive, enforced destruction of the productive forces (along with articles of consumption). Billions of dollars were spent in every imperialist country during the Depression of the 1930’s to destroy shipyards, factories, machinery, as well as food, clothing, etc.
And imperialism has produced the unparalleled destruction of world war, which wastes millions of lives of the producing class, along with billions of dollars of productive facilities that are blown to bits. In the present crisis and the development toward world war, the imperialist forces are sure to try to outdo their record for destruction. It will remain for the working class, once it has seized power, to fully re-build and develop the productive forces.
It is not surprising that the “working class is obsolete” line can arise from Third World groups, since Third World people are hit twice as hard by unemployment, and they make up a big part of the “permanently unemployed.” But, among the “non-white” work force today, the total number of factory and other industrial workers is about 3 million, far more than 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Third World workers today make up about 15% of the total industrial proletariat–again a higher percentage than ever before.
The total number of “Negro and Other Races” which are “not in the labor force” is only about 5.5 million, considerably less than the 9 million employed Black (and “other”) people. If the 2.5 million women who are not in the labor force because of “home responsibilities” are not included, the number of Black (and “other”) people “not in the labor force” is equal to the number of Black industrial workers alone. There are nine times as many whites as Blacks “not in the labor force,” and the percentage of whites is equal to Blacks in the major age category–25-54–although in the lower and higher age groups, the Black percentage is higher.
Even if these official figures are understated, it is obvious that the so-called “lumpenproletariat” does not constitute anything close to a majority of the Third World people. Long before this group (and especially the real lumpenproletariat–those who have given up on working and live by other, usually criminal, means) could ever become a majority, capitalism will be overthrown, and the previously “permanently unemployed” will be productively employed, building socialist society under the leadership of the working class and, especially, the industrial proletariat, the most concentrated, most socialized, most powerful class in history. (For a more detailed analysis of the leading role of the industrial proletariat in socialist revolution, see Red Papers 2, “Revolutionary Youth and the Road to the Proletariat,” and Red Papers 4, especially the article “Marxism vs. Opportunism.”)
The ranks of phony “revolutionaries” who try to divorce the national struggle from the class struggle–and cut the revolutionary heart out of both–are topped off by right-wing organizations that combine several strains of opportunism. We are referring mainly to the Socialist Workers Party (and its youth group the Young Socialist Alliance) and, most of all, to the Communist Party U.S.A. (revisionist).
The SWP promotes and tails after bourgeois nationalism, even reactionary nationalism, in a futile attempt to build itself and oppose communist revolution. For example, the SWP recently climbed onto the Indian-Soviet imperialist bandwagon and tried to drum up support for the reactionary secessionist movement in East Pakistan, led by the puppet Awami League. This, according to the SWP, was a “national liberation struggle.”
SWP doesn’t mind the fact that this movement was led by the tools of Indian-Soviet expansionism and that the result has been that the Bengali people of East Pakistan–and the minority people of “Bangla Desh” who are suffering even worse–are not liberated at all, but under the boot of the strongest reactionary forces in the area (even U.S. imperialism is moving in to get some of the spoils of this “national liberation struggle”).
The real reason for Soviet-Indian aggression to carve up Pakistan was clearly to set up another base for aggression against China and to expand their domination in the area. This is also the real reason the SWP is so delighted at the creation of the puppet state of “Bangla Desh.” (For more analysis of this situation, see China’s Foreign Policy: A Leninist Policy, a pamphlet by the RU.)
While deviating from classical Trotskyism, by being openly right-wing in form as well as right-wing in essence, the SWP also trots out the old ”left in form” slanders against China, leader of the world communist movement. China is a “degenerate workers’ state,” according to the SWP (and all brands of Trotskyites). We would like to ask: if it is a workers’ state, how can it be degenerate? Is the working class a degenerate class–or is it not in fact the most powerful class in history, the class of the future? Isn’t it the rule of the bourgeoisie that is degenerating with every day?
The only reason the SWP doesn’t come right out and call China “bourgeois” is because that would blow their “revolutionary” cover and expose them, for all to see, as agents of imperialism. For this same reason, the SWP parades around as supporters of the Vietnamese people, while whispering more Trotskyite slander about the leaders of the Vietnam Revolution (North Vietnam is only a “deformed” workers’ state, says the SWP; it has not been around long enough to become “degenerate.” But just give its “Stalinist” leaders time ...!).
The SWP realizes full well that the Vietnamese people are following the same path as the Chinese Revolution–and that, in both countries, the Trotskyites have been dealt with as the traitors that they are. But, again, to openly attack the Vietnamese Revolution would be to completely expose the SWP as just one more collection of counter-revolutionaries.
The SWP uses the same kind of double-talk to oppose the struggle for liberation within the U.S. They take ”credit” for the “discovery” of Malcolm X. But they never attempt to take the progressive ideas of Malcolm, and in the practical, day-to-day fight of the oppressed people, link the national struggle he inspired with the class struggle–in the way that Malcolm himself was beginning to move shortly before he was assassinated. The only consistent thing about the SWP, and all Trotskyites, is that they try to hitch-hike on the people’s struggles to promote themselves.
The over-riding feature of Trotskyism, as a special brand of petit-bourgeois opportunism, is not any particular program or form it assumes, but the fact that it will spout any program, assume any form; that it has no principles whatsoever, except the careerist principle of building itself at the expense of the people’s mass movement. As Lenin said in countering the opportunism of the original Trotskyite, Leon Trotsky himself, on the national question:
Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given difference of opinion, and desert one side for the other. (Lenin, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Vol. 20, pp. 447-48.)
The SWP is, however, less effective in its “left in form” aspect than Progressive Labor Party and other classical Trotskyites. In its openly right-wing aspect, SWP is far less influential than the so-called “Communist Party, USA.” In the long-run and increasingly today, the CP is the most dangerous, best organized and best-funded representative of imperialism within the revolutionary movement.
As it is challenged and defeated everywhere, as it faces growing crisis at home and internationally, U.S. imperialism actively prepares its fascist offensive against the working class and other oppressed people by directing its terror most viciously at the Third World people. To succeed in this offensive, the bourgeoisie desperately tries to strangle the revolutionary movement with the hanging rope of reformism and class collaboration. As the people rise up and cast aside openly reformist and reactionary misleaders, the imperialist ruling class promotes traitors within the ranks of the revolution, to shackle the people with bourgeois illusions. This is exactly the service the CP seeks to perform.
Recognizing that the rising revolutionary struggle of the Black people over the past 25 years has panicked the bourgeoisie into promoting a section of the Black middle classes, in a desperate attempt to dam up the surging Black liberation struggle, the CP falls in line and tries to appeal to the radicalized section of these bourgeois and petit-bourgeois Blacks for exactly the same purpose. This is unmistakable in the 1970 “New Program” of the CP. What in fact, is the CP’s program for the Black people and other Third World people?
The CP openly attempts to spread illusions about the possibilities of reforming imperialism, specifically for the “benefit” of Third World people. At a time when violent repression, and heroic resistance against it, is mounting daily in the Third World communities, when the bourgeoisie is using Third World people as a focus for its growing fascist attacks and fascization of the state, the CP can declare:
We believe there is much in the way of remedial action that can and must be undertaken even under a dying capitalism .. . these include . . . first, radical reallocation of the nation’s resources to provide special and preferential allotments for the economic development of communities and regions in which Black people reside.
Second, achievement of political power by Black people at least commensurate with their needs and their special requirements as an oppressed people.
Third, elimination of racist ideology through a most determined, resolute struggle.” (New Program of the Communist Party, May, 1970, “What Can Be Won Under Capitalism,” pp. 58-59.)
Remember, all this can be accomplished “under a dying capitalism”–a capitalism resorting to even more vicious attacks on the people, and especially the Third World people! This line amounts to drugging the people to set them up for the slaughter. Of course, a determined struggle must be waged to win political rights and freedoms for Third World people. Of course, an all-out fight must be waged against the attempt to drive their living conditions down even further. Of course, a thorough struggle must be waged to defeat white chauvinism, or racist ideology. But these struggles must be combined with a broader united front to overthrow monopoly capitalist rule in the U.S. This is the only road to full equality and real progress for the Third World people and all oppressed and exploited people in the U.S.
The CP’s “New Program” for the Third World people is not new at all–it is the same old revisionism, the same attempt to promote the petit-bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeois prejudices as a brake on the revolutionary movement. Later in the “New Program,” the CP openly panders to the petit-bourgeoisie. They promise that in their version of “socialism,” there would be no drive to reduce punitively (1) The living standards of moderately well-off middle-class persons willing to work for the socialist society.” And they guarantee that “socialism, does not require abolition of all privately owned means of production. In particular, it does not require nationalization of those owned by people who work for themselves.” (CP, ibid., pp. 100-101.)
Of course, once the proletariat has seized state power (and the CP does not call for the armed seizure of state power by the working class, or for the dictatorship of the proletariat), it uses the method of democratic persuasion to win over the middle classes and strata, and does not move against them “punitively.” But it does remold them, materially and ideologically, into workers; it does gradually eliminate the inequalities between their position and the masses of the working people. In fact, the whole period of socialism is a transition from capitalism to the full equality of communism. The whole purpose of the working class during this transition period is to gradually eliminate the petit bourgeoisie and all other non-proletarian classes and their ideology.
The point is: the CP is not interested in building the revolutionary struggle of the working class and the oppressed people to overthrow monopoly capitalist rule and build socialism and communism. In their “New Program” and in all their propaganda, they try to promote the illusion of “the possibility of the peaceful transition” to socialism. In May, 1971, the CP published a pamphlet, summarizing the major points of its “New Program,” and in this description of “How Socialism Will Come to the United States. The Viewpoint of the Communist Party,” it never once mentioned the “possibility” of armed revolution!
It would be nice if there were a possibility of achieving socialism peacefully, but the whole history of the revolutionary movement, and the whole history of reactionary rule in the United States–from slavery to the war in Vietnam and fascist repression at home–demonstrates beyond any doubt that the ruling class will never step down or be nudged out of power peacefully; that the building of socialism can only be accomplished after the working class and the oppressed people have organized revolutionary violence to defeat the counter-revolutionary violence of the bourgeois state and established the armed rule of the working people: the dictatorship of the proletariat.
To preach about the “possibility of peaceful transition” is shameless betrayal of the oppressed people. And the CP’s attempts to justify this betrayal force it to become even more shameless. In its 1968 “draft” of its “New Program,” the CP prattles about the “constitutional path” to socialism. Its justification for the idea that socialism can be won constitutionally? The elimination of slavery!
There is precedent for it in the Constitutional Amendment abolishing slave property, which in its day was just as sacrosanct as capitalist property is today. (“Draft” of the New Program of the Communist Party, U.S.A., 1968, “The Democratic Path,” p. 97.)
This is a crude distortion for two main reasons. First, it completely ignores the fact that the defeat of the slave system did not mean the end of exploitation, but in fact brought all power into the hands of the bourgeoisie and established the complete dominance of capitalist wage-slavery. The socialist revolution can only be carried through by eliminating all forms of exploitation: it requires the dictatorship of the laboring masses, representing the great majority of society, over the handful of former exploiters.
To accomplish this historic task, the working class must make a thorough-going and violent rupture with] all the previous forms of class society. It cannot simply take over the old state machinery–as the bourgeoisie did–but must smash it altogether and replace it with a new state machinery, the armed rule of the working people, in order to defend its rule and prevent the restoration of the old system of exploitation.
Second, the CP grossly slanders–in fact, wipes out with the stroke of a pen–the struggles of the people, and most especially the Black people, to overturn the: slave system. The heroic struggles of the Black people, the slave revolts and the Civil War–all this is nothing according to the CP. Constitutionalism is everything. Compare this to Marx’s comment to Engels on the Civil War in 1862:
The long and short of the business seems to me to be that a war of this kind must be conducted on revolutionary lines, while the Yankees have so far been trying to conduct it constitutionally. (Marx, Letter to Frederick Engels, August 7, 1862, in The Civil War in the United States, p. 253.)
Later on, as the revolutionary movement has surged ahead despite the CP’s efforts to stop it, and as the CP has been confronted with the greater danger of being exposed, it has tried to water down its legalistic approach. But there is no concealing its real stand.
As early as 1956, following in the footsteps of Khruschev and the other traitors in the Soviet Union, the CP boldly broadcast its repudiation of Marxism-Leninism. In a “Draft Resolution,” prepared for its 16th national convention (in 1957), the CP proclaimed:
Likewise the Communist Party will have to be bolder in re-examining certain Marxist-Leninist theories, which, while valid in a past period, may have become outdated and rendered obsolete by new historical developments. For entirely new and unprecedented problems are emerging today which were never treated by Marx, Engels or Lenin. They arise from the new world situation and its impact on all countries.
Already in response to these new developments, profoundly important and qualitatively new elements have been introduced into the body of Marxist theory by Marxists of many countries. For example, we as well as other Marxist parties have already discarded as obsolete Lenin’s thesis that war is inevitable under imperialism. We have long since rejected as incorrect Stalin’s thesis of the alleged law of inevitable violent proletarian revolution. Likewise, we are making important modifications in the theory of the state, as evidenced in our advocacy of the peaceful, constitutional path to socialism. (“Draft Resolution,” p. 56. This draft resolution was adopted on September 13, 1956 and if has remained the policy of the CP ever since.)
It is, without doubt, the duty of Marxist-Leninists to develop revolutionary theory, in accordance with genuinely new conditions that arise in the course of the revolutionary struggle. But it is also the duty of Marxist-Leninists to defend and apply in a living way the basic principles of revolutionary struggle that have been proved correct by the whole history of the revolutionary movement. No amount of fast-talking can cover up the fact that, in the name of “creatively developing” Marxism-Leninism, the CP has completely betrayed the revolutionary essence, the soul of Marxism-Leninism, and is desperately trying to betray the oppressed people’s long and bitter struggle for liberation.
But the puny attempts of the CP, and all other opportunists, are bound to fail. No force on earth can stop the struggle of the Black people, the Third World people, and the entire working class for freedom. No traitors in the ranks of the revolutionary struggle can prevent the workers’ movement and the Third World peoples’ movement from joining forces to smash down the final obstacle to freedom–imperialist rule–and to establish the rule of the working class and its allies: to build socialism and communism, and create a world without exploitation, discrimination, or inequality or oppression of any kind.
The Afro-American struggle is not only a struggle waged by the exploited and oppressed Black people for freedom and emancipation, it is also a new clarion call to all the exploited and oppressed people of the United States to fight against the barbarous rule of the monopoly capitalist class... the contradiction between the Black masses in the United States and U.S. ruling circles is a class contradiction. Only by overthrowing the reactionary rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class and destroying the colonialist and imperialist system can the Black people in the United States win complete emancipation. The Black masses and the masses of white working people in the United States share common interests and common objectives to struggle for. Therefore, the Afro-American struggle is winning sympathy and support from increasing numbers of white working people and progressives in the United States. The struggle of the Black people in the United States is bound to merge with the American Workers’ movement, and this will eventually end the criminal rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class. (Mao Tse Tung, “Statement in Support of the Afro-American Struggle Against Violent Repression,” April 16, 1968.)