What do we mean when we say that the Black people were forged into an oppressed nation’. What constitutes a nation, as distinguished from a “racial group”?
Modern nations arise and develop in the capitalist epoch. Why? Because as the productive forces of society develop to the stage of handicraft and early manufacture–at first within the feudal society ruled by a confederacy of the landed nobility–trading centers grow up in the towns, connecting the various feudal estates. The merchants, the earliest breed of capitalists, begin loaning money to the landlords, and begin investing their profits more and more into manufacturing. They break down the old guilds of the craftsmen and artisans and bring them into the manufacturies as the earliest form of wage-workers.
Over a period of time, the growth of these capitalists propels them into ever-sharper conflict with the estate system of the feudal lords. The capitalists require and demand a larger and larger market; but the feudal lords restrict this market by imposing taxes (tariffs) on goods passing through their estates. Finally, inevitably, the capitalist class joins its forces, mobilizes the peasants and working people generally, and overthrows the feudal system.
To consolidate its rule, and to ensure a large market, the capitalist class smashes the old estates and sets up a state apparatus to govern and administer the common territory. The territory of this modern capitalist state is generally determined by the surrounding natural boundaries–oceans, large lakes, rivers and mountain ranges–that set the limits of the unified capitalist market.
For the modern capitalist state to develop, and for trade and economic activity to be carried out in the interests of the new capitalist ruling class, the division of the society into wage-earning and wage-paying classes (workers and capitalists) must be developed, in the countryside as well as the growing urban centers; “and the urban centers, where the class of industrial capitalists is centered, must increasingly bring the countryside under its domination.
In addition, the people of the country, in order to form the unified capitalist market, must constitute a stable community, speak a common language, and share a common culture. These characteristics taken together, establish the basis of modern, (capitalist) nationhood for the people of the territory. The earliest form of the capitalist state, which developed in western Europe, was therefore the single nation-state.
But in Eastern Europe the development of the capitalist state occurred later generally in the second half of the 1800s, and there the capitalist state was formed in a territory inhabited by more than one national group. The general pattern was that the nationality that first developed capitalist relations in the common territory established itself as the dominant nation. The capitalist class of this nation overpowered the feudal forces and became rulers of the state, not only oppressing its own working class, but also dominating the less developed nations and preventing the capitalist classes among them from either sharing in the control of the government or breaking off to form separate nation-states.
For this reason, the question of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination became a burning issue in Eastern Europe, and especially in Tsarist Russia (the “prison-house of nations”) where the dominant Great-Russian nation suppressed over 100 other nationalities, many of which had reached the capitalist stage of development.
In formulating the Marxist position on the right of self-determination, Lenin pointed out that States of mixed national composition (known as multinational states, as distinct from national states–Lenin) are ’always those whose internal constitution has for some reason or other remained abnormal or underdeveloped’ (Lenin is quoting Karl Kautsky here). Needless to say, Kautsky speaks of abnormality exclusively in the sense of lack of conformity with what is best adapted to the requirements of a developing capitalism. (Lenin: The Right of Nations to Self-Determination Vol. 20, p. 397. All citations from Lenin, unless otherwise indicated are from Progress Publishers Edition, Moscow, of Lenin’s Collected Works.)
This applies to the development of the national question in the United States, a country which is–and has been, even before the Civil War–a single, multinational state. Since the Civil War, the state has been completely controlled by the (white) bourgeoisie, centered in the north. But, in the development of this society, slavery retarded the growth of capitalism and laid the basis for the maintenance of the south as a backward region, which is only now approaching the level of the rest of the country in the capitalist development of both industry and agriculture (more on this shortly).
The “abnormality” of slavery has also meant, as the other side of Lenin’s analysis implies, that the national question in the U.S. is also “abnormal” and extremely complex in its development.
The national question is as crucial a question in the U.S. as it was in Tsarist Russia. In both cases, the ruling classes combined the ruthless exploitation of the laboring people with barbarous oppression of the minority nationalities. In the first volume of The Civil War in the U.S.S.R., Stalin (and others) describe how “Tsarism consolidated its rule over the oppressed nationalities by inciting one nation against another, thus preventing them from uniting and forming a common front of the oppressed nations against the Russian autocracy.” This book records:
The ruthless and bloody vengeance which was wreaked on the native population (of the national minority areas) for the least attempt at protest. Whole villages were burnt to the ground because the dead body of a Russian had been found in the vicinity. (Chapter one, “The Eve of the Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution.”)
The long history of lynchings, beatings, tortures, rapings, and reprisals carried out against the Black people, even after the bitter years of slavery; the genocide against the Native-American Indians to secure the theft of their lands; the armed seizure of Mexican lands and the brutal suppression of the Mexican people, the Puerto Rican people and other Latin people within the U.S.; the hideous history of chain-gang labor and terroristic denial of democratic rights for the Asian-American, people and for the first generations of successive European immigrant groups–all this bloody history writes a record fully equal to the several centuries of Tsarist barbarism. And, like the Russian autocracy, the U.S. ruling class has consistently used the policy of divide and rule in a desperate attempt to prevent the oppressed nationalities, and the oppressed and exploited peoples generally, from forming a united front.
Because of these similarities–and because the comment directly on the national question in the U.S.–the writings of Lenin and Stalin point the direction for a correct understanding of the national question in the U.S. But there are important differences between Tsarist Russia and the U.S., and these significantly influence the development of the national question.
Lenin himself insisted that the national question especially, must “be examined within definite historical limits, and, if it refers to a particular county .. . account (must) be taken of the specific features distinguishing that country from others in the same historical epoch.” (Lenin, ibid., Vol. 20, pp. 400-401) And Stalin warned that “if the dialectical approach to a question is required anywhere it is required here, the national question.” (Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” Vol. 2, p. 325). For these reasons, it is the method of Lenin and Stalin in analyzing the national question that we must apply to our own situation.
In his pamphlet “Capitalism in Agriculture in the U.S.” Lenin describes the conditions of the Black masses, who at that time (1915) constituted an overwhelmingly peasant nation, concentrated in the plantation Black Belt. Lenin calls “the very opposite of the truth” the statement by a Mr. Himner, a bourgeois sociologist, that the U.S. “has never known feudalism and is free from its economic survivals.” (See Lenin, Vol. 22, p. 24). Lenin points out that the miserable conditions of the Black people in the U.S. stemmed from the “typically Russian, ’purely Russian,’ labour-service system, which is known (in the U.S.–RU) as share-cropping.” (ibid., p. 25.) Of course, share-cropping, a common feudal survival, occurred in the U.S. at that time (and survives in small pockets today) under the conditions of capitalist domination, just as slavery did in the U.S.–and as semi-feudal survivals did in Russia at that time (1915).
Lenin notes that in 1900, there were 1.5 million sharecroppers in the U.S., the overwhelming majority of them in the south. One million, or two-thirds, of these were Black. And at that time, Lenin points out, the number of sharecroppers was growing! By 1910 almost one out of every four farmers was a sharecropper. In 1880 the number had been less than one in five. And, again, during this entire period the majority of sharecroppers was Black. “The typical white farmer in America is an owner, the typical Negro farmer is a tenant,” Lenin remarks; and he concludes “Thus it turns out that there is a startling similarity in the economic status of the Negroes in America and the peasants in the heart of agricultural Russia.” (Lenin, ibid., p. 25.) Once again, this was in 1915, at the start of World War I.
But with World War I, a great transformation of the Black nation began. The war cut off the flow of immigrants from the combatant European countries–cutting down to a trickle the flood of immigrants that, between the U.S. Civil War and the First World War amounted to 15 million. This occurred at the same time as the war-stimulated industries centered in the north were recovering from the depression that preceded the war (and was temporarily relieved, even before the U.S. officially entered the war because, all during this period, the U.S. monopoly capitalist class was selling billions of dollars of war materiel to the “allies”).
This created a large demand for additional labor. For the first time, Black people in large numbers were allowed to enter into the industrial work force concentrated in the north. The out-migration of the Black people from the plantation Black Belt area i became a significant and irreversible trend. This of course, was a shift not only from south to north, but from rural to urban and, most importantly, from peasant to worker.
Still, by the beginning of World War II (1940), 77% of the Black people lived in the south–if we include Maryland, Delaware, Texas and Washington, D.C. And, at that time, Black people were still mainly rural residents and farmers. In 1940 nearly 22.5% of farmers in the south were Black, although this represented a drop of more than 5% since 1910. But the absolute number of Black people in the Black Belt area, while twice that in 1860 (5 million as against 2.5 million), had levelled off since 1910. And more significantly, it had actually declined, relative to whites in the area, since 1900. In 1880 the percentage of Blacks in the Black Belt was at its highest, 60%. By 1920 this number had been reduced to just above 50%, and by 1940, it had fallen to less than half, 48.7%, of the total population for the Black Belt and adjoining urban areas. (These figures are from Negro Liberation by Harry Heywood.)
To look at this last point from another angle: in 1900, Black people made up a majority of the population in 286 Black Belt counties, (in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and parts of Texas and Florida). By 1950, the number of Black Belt counties with a Black majority had dropped to 158, just over half the 1900 total–and the total Black population of these counties had been cut in half, from 4 million in 1900 to 2 million in 1950. (These figures, of course, do not include the more than 3 million Black people in the Black Belt, who live in counties where whites make up the majority.)
The 1930’s and 40’s–the years of the Depression and World War II- were years of great mass upsurge and tremendous victories for the industrial workers, especially in the north. Through the great labor struggles in auto, steel, rubber, longshore and transportation, joining together the employed and unemployed, the C.I.O. was built, including within its ranks 200,000 Black workers by 1940. In response to this, in the years following the war the big corporations began moving their plants to the south where the labor movement, despite some important gains, had not been able to break the “Jim Crow” oppression of the Black people that divided the ranks of labor and held all workers in conditions far more backward and miserable than in the rest of the country. Mechanization of agriculture began in the south on a large scale during these post-war years.
Although industrialization developed in the southern states far beyond pre-war levels in industries like electronics, steel and the artificial imperialist “defense” industry, it developed under the general conditions of imperialism–dying, parasitic capitalism. So even in the temporary “boom” years, it could not absorb the millions of Black people driven off the farmlands. This created a large, permanent “reserve army” of unemployed, which provided added pressure in holding down wages.
Millions of Black people went north beginning with the war years. But after the war even the more advanced northern industry could not develop fast or consistently enough to affect the long-term trend of a growing permanent army of unemployed. Consistently since the War, Black people have provided twice their share of soldiers for this army: the official Black unemployment rate has rarely dropped much below twice that of the white rate.
Still, Black people generally fared better in the north than the south, and they continued to move north over the 30 years, 1940-1969. During this period, the Black population in the south as a whole fell at the rate of one percent per year. While almost 8 out of 10 Black people lived in the south in 1940, in 1969 only slightly more than 50% of the Black people remained in the southern states (and Washington, D.C.).
At the same time, paralleling the south to north migration, the Black population steadily changed from rural/farmer to urban/worker. In 1940, there were three Black farmers for every ten white farmers. By 1964, there was only slightly more than one Black farmer for every ten white farmers. By 1969, the total Black farm population was less than one million, or only 4.1% of the total Black population. In the same year a higher percentage of whites (5.3%) lived on farms. And for the period 1960-69, the average annual decrease in farm population was at twice as high a rate for Blacks as for whites (5.4% for Blacks, 2.6% for whites). During these ten years alone, 1.5 million Black people left the farms.
The south is no exception to this general pattern. Although Black farmers are still concentrated in this region, in 1969 there were only about 185,000 “non-white” southern farm operators. Less than half of these, or 82,000, were tenant farmers of all kinds, and less than a third of the 185,000 were share-croppers. In 1940, by contrast, 3 out of every 4 Black farms were tenant-operated. In 1959, 7.2% of southern farms were operated by “non-whites”; in 1964, only 5.8%. White farm-operators in the south, who number just over one million, make up about one-third of the total farm operators in the country. But the number of white tenant farmers (of all kinds) in the south–171,000–though twice the absolute number of “non-white” tenants, is also so small as to be; practically insignificant.
While the number of farms and the total farm population is being drastically reduced–in the south as well as other parts of the country, and for Black as well as white–class differentiation among those who remain on the farms has become more marked. In 1910, only one-fourth of the Black farms were run by full or part owners; in 1964, more than one-half were. So the sharecroppers have been almost entirely eliminated and converted into wage-workers, while more large-scale (part and full) owners are surviving.
But the sharecroppers who are driven out are not, by and large, remaining on the farms as a rural proletariat. In 1960, taking the country as a whole, 12% of all “non-white” workers were farm laborers; by 1969 this figure was only one-third as high (or 4% of the total “non-white” work force). For whites, the decline was not quite as great: white farm laborers made up 7.4% of the total white labor force in 1960, and 4.2% in 1969.
Actually, while only 4% (900,000) of the Black people live on farms, the rural Black population, especially in the south, is still somewhat higher. Several million Blacks (4.5 million in the south) live in rural small towns; some are actually farm workers, others are ex-farmers forced onto public assistance. Another part of this group are actually “truck farmers” (who sell their products directly off their own trucks) or farmers who produce only for their own consumption; these people often aren’t included in the official farm census.
On the other hand, many Black people who live on farms work in non-agricultural industries rather than on farms. For the entire country, 1.7 million people (white and “non-white”) who lived on farms actually worked as non-farm workers. And, although 90% of the non-metropolitan Blacks live in the south, even in this region over half of the Black people (56%) live in metropolitan areas, and almost as many live in the central cities (41%) as in non-metropolitan areas (44%).
Taking the country as a whole, the number of Black people in the metropolitan areas and in the central cities has continued to rise over the past ten years. Today, more than half of the Black people live in the central cities; three-fourths live in metropolitan areas. Several large industrial cities have a majority Black population–Newark is 54%, Gary 53%, and Atlanta 51%. And a number of other key industrial cities are heavily Black: Detroit (44%), Baltimore (46%), Philadelphia (34%), Birmingham (42%), New Orleans (45%), St. Louis (41%), Richmond, Va. (42%), Cleveland (38%), Chicago (33%) and Houston (26%).