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Revolutionary Union

Red Papers 5: National Liberation and Proletarian Revolution in the U.S.


THE UNITY OF THE NATIONAL STRUGGLE AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE

Contrary to Trotskyite double-talk–and to what Progressive Labor said, even before they came out openly against all national struggle–national oppression does not affect only the workers of the oppressed nation. Stalin pointed out, speaking of the situation where the national question was in essence a peasant question:

Oppressed nationalities are usually oppressed not only as peasants and as urban working tradesfolk, but also as nationalities, i.e., as the toilers of a definite state, language, culture, manner of life, customs, habits. The double burden of oppression cannot but tend to revolutionize the toiling masses of the oppressed nationalities, cannot but drive them to fight the principal force of oppression-capital. (Stalin, “The October Revolution and the Problem of the Middle Strata,” Vol. 5, p. 352.)

This is exactly the case in the U.S. today; and this tendency toward revolution is all the stronger because the Black and Third World peoples within the U.S. are overwhelmingly not petty-producers and traders, but wage-workers, members of the single U.S. working class.

To ignore the inequalities that still separate Third World and white workers, to negate the national oppression and national struggle of Third World people–that is the essence of PL’s Trotskyite line. According to PL’s idealist view, the workers are already united, already organized into the same trade unions, so any separate organization of workers–under any conditions–is reactionary, because it divides the workers and makes them loyal to their nation–and even to the bourgeoisie of their nation–rather than to their class. The core of this argument is the assumption that the revolutionary unity of the working class can be built on the basis of inequality, of national oppression. The opposite, of course, is true. Only through the fight against inequality, against all forms of national oppression, can this unity be forged.

As we pointed out earlier, the national question in the U.S. is now in a third stage, when it is once again a “particular and internal state problem,” but now on an entirely new basis. The national question in the U.S. is a proletarian question. The struggle of Third World people against discrimination and the other forms of special oppression they suffer is both a national struggle and an advanced front in the overall class struggle.

As Lenin insisted, whoever does not fight against national oppression is not only not a socialist, he is not even a (bourgeois) democrat. And Lenin also answers the argument that the struggle against national oppression will divide the working class. He compares this, as mentioned earlier, to the divorce question:

The reactionaries are opposed to the freedom of divorce; they say that it must be ’handled carefully,’ and loudly declare that it means ’disintegration of the family.’ The democrats, however, believe that the reactionaries are hypocrites, and that they are actually defending the omnipotence of the police and the bureaucracy, the privileges of one of the sexes, the worst kind of oppression of women. They believe that, in actual fact, freedom of divorce will not cause the ’disintegration’ of families, but on the contrary, will strengthen them on a democratic basis, which is the only possible and durable basis in civilized society. (Lenin, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Vol. 20, p. 422.)

Lenin, of course, agrees with the democrats, and points out that, in fact, the proletariat is the only thoroughly democratic class in modern society; it is the most consistent fighter for democratic rights–especially for oppressed nationalities, and for women–because its interests are most consistently represented by the fullest attainment of these freedoms. So, in the U.S. today, the struggles against national oppression do not divide the working class and hold back its struggle against capital, they advance it tremendously and break down divisions within the working class.

And, at this early stage in the development of the present workers’ movement it is necessary in many cases for Third World people, including Third World workers, to form separate mass political organizations–even while they are in the same trade unions as white workers–to advance the struggle against national oppression as a crucial part of the overall struggle against U.S. monopoly capitalism. It is quite true that from the time Marxism established a mass base in the working class, and a single all-Russian Marxist Party had been formed on this basis, Lenin and Stalin fought for the amalgamation of the workers of all nationalities into this single Party and into the same mass organizations. In Marxism and the National Question, Stalin points out the harmful effects of separate organizations (including trade unions) of Jewish workers and other oppressed nationalities. The workers ended up opposing each others’ struggles and even scabbing on each other.

But in this same pamphlet Stalin notes that, at the early stages of the working class movement, the organization of workers along national lines played a different role:

Even before 1897 the Social-Democratic (Marxist) groups active among the Jewish workers set themselves the aim of creating a ’special Jewish workers’ organization. They founded such an organization in 1897 by uniting to form the Bund. That was at a time when Russian Social-Democracy as an integral body virtually did not yet exist. The Bund steadily grew and spread, and stood out more and more vividly against the background of the bleak days of Russian Social-Democracy. . . . Then came the 1900’s. A mass labor movement came into being. Polish Social-Democracy grew and drew the Jewish workers into the mass struggle. Russian Social-Democracy grew and attracted the ’Bund’ workers.. .. (Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, Vol. 2, p. 346, emphasis in original.)

While the situation in the U.S. is not exactly the same, the general lesson can still be applied. As the working class struggle grows, drawing inspiration from the struggle of Third World people and especially of Third World workers; as through this process, white workers join in increasing numbers with Third World workers to fight national as well as class oppression, the basis will develop for uniting the whole working class to form multinational mass organizations independent of and capable of challenging corrupt union leadership–operating inside the unions as active members, as well as independent, outside the union structure.

At the present time we support and are helping to build Third World mass organizations, among the Third World workers and especially in the Third World communities. At the same time we are working to build the multinational unity of the proletariat in active struggle against monopoly capital; and where the basis of unity exists, to build multinational mass organizations, especially among the workers. We stand with Lenin and Stalin on the need for a single, multinational Communist Party of the proletariat to lead the revolutionary movement, for the unity of the entire working class as the leading revolutionary force.

To sum up this point: the path to this unity, and to the development of a real vanguard party of the proletariat, lies through developing the struggle against national oppression as part of the overall class struggle, combining national forms of organization and struggle with multinational ones, and in this way forging the basis for the political and organizational unity of the proletariat, in alliance with the other sections of the Third World peoples. This alliance is the solid core of the United Front to overthrow U.S. imperialism and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, to take power into the hands of the oppressed people and abolish forever all forms of national and class oppression.

While the line of negating the national struggle is extremely destructive, no less dangerous is the line that the unity of the working class as the leading revolutionary force cannot be achieved. Those who put forward this view claim that white workers, as a whole, enjoy so much “white-skin privilege” that they actually benefit from and therefore support U.S. imperialism. In Red Papers 2 we dealt with this question of “white-skin privilege,” and pointed out that these so-called “privileges”–the petty advantages that many white workers are granted in exchange for a life-time of exploitation and oppression–are crumbs that will be tossed aside by the white workers. This will happen as their class consciousness is raised through struggle, and through the patient, determined work of Marxist-Leninists, joining in and leading that struggle. For many, the “white-skin privilege” line serves as a pseudo-Marxist cover for their contempt for the workers–Third World as well as white–and ultimately, for their fear of working class dictatorship.

In its most extreme form, this position reduces the revolutionary struggle to an idealistic vision of a world-wide war–evenly developed and the same everywhere–waged by a classless Third World people against “Honky America”–which includes not only the U.S. bourgeoisie as the enemy, but the workers as well (white workers, of course; the fact that most Third World people are workers does not find its way into this romantic apocalypse). To deny classes and class struggle, no matter what the subjective intent, is objectively to side with the bourgeoisie, to promote bourgeois ideology. This, of course, is natural and understandable for–bourgeois nationalists. But it is unforgivable for Marxists.

For a Marxist–the representative of the proletariat and therefore of the most thorough struggle against all forms of oppression–the over-riding principle is the class question: the victory of the proletarian revolution to build socialism and communism. While Lenin denounced as philistines and chauvinists those who refused to fight against national oppression, he just as consistently exposed as “bourgeois democrats” those who raised the national question above the class question. “Marx had no doubt as to the subordinate position of the national question as compared to the ’labor question,’” Lenin wrote. And Lenin went further, in theory and in practice. He insisted that:

If a Ukrainian Marxist allows himself to be swayed by his quite legitimate and natural hatred of the Great-Russian oppressors to such a degree that he transfers even a particle of this hatred, even if it be only estrangement, to the proletarian culture and proletarian cause of the Great-Russian workers, then such a Marxist will get bogged down in bourgeois nationalism. (Lenin, “Critical Remarks on the National Question,” Vol. 20, p. 33, emphasis in original.)

And when the imperialists and bourgeois nationalists tried to elect “national governments” in the border regions of Russia, in opposition to the newly established Soviet state, Lenin and Stalin and the masses of workers and peasants of all nations in Russia were not taken in by the phony banner of “self-determination” raised by these reactionaries. These bourgeois “governments” stood in the way of proletarian revolution; they stood for maintaining exploitation and oppression. They were smashed. And the unity of the workers of the oppressed nations and the Great-Russian nation, based on the common fight against national inequality, made this possible.

But some people say that the U.S. is different, that this unity cannot be built. This view is based on an incorrect analysis of history of the struggle for Black liberation in the United States, beginning with the period of slavery. Probably the strongest influence in this direction is the position formulated by W.E.B. DuBois, particularly in his book, Black Reconstruction in America.

As an answer to the slanderous filth that the bourgeois “scholars” and text-book writers have dredged up to discredit the Black people and their struggle for liberation, Black Reconstruction is very important. But as a thoroughgoing, scientific analysis of the question it falls short. DuBois completely demolishes the notion that the Black people were “the only people in the history of the world ... that ever became free without any effort of their own”; that “although the Negroes were now free, they were also ignorant and unfit to govern themselves”; that “thinking that slavery meant toil and that freedom meant only idleness, the slave after he was set free was disposed to try out his freedom by refusing to work”; and that “in the exhausted states already amply ’punished’ by the desolation of war, the rule of the Negro and his unscrupulous carpetbagger and scalawag patrols, was an orgy of extravagance, fraud, and disgusting incompetency.” (Excerpts from public school textbooks of the 1930’s, cited by DuBois in Black Reconstruction.)

But DuBois makes the crucial error of picturing the slave as a “Black worker,” simply a super-exploited proletarian. Slavery, he says, was only an extreme form of capitalist exploitation–that is, quantitatively, but not qualitatively different from the system of exploitation in the northern states. From this flows the basic error of DuBois’ analysis of Reconstruction. He sees it as an experiment in the “dictatorship of labor,” even a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” This error reflects the fact that, although Black Reconstruction contains some quasi-Marxist material and political analysis, this book is not a thoroughgoing Marxist analysis, and it suffers from that.

Its standpoint is more that of the Black petit-bourgeoisie, or more accurately, the aspiring but suppressed national bourgeoisie of the Black nation. To this class of small producers–and to the intelligentsia attached to it–the interests of “labor” (which it sees through its own eyes and projects in its own image) are identical, whether the “laborer” is a wage-worker, a farmer, or even a small capitalist, exploiting wage-labor. For this reason, DuBois confuses the democratic (bourgeois-democratic) Reconstruction governments with a working class dictatorship. A footnote DuBois attaches to the title of his tenth chapter makes his confusion very clear:

The record of the Negro worker during Reconstruction presents an opportunity to study inductively the Marxism theory. I first called this chapter, “The Dictatorship of the Black Proletariat in South Carolina,” but it has been brought to my attention that this would not be correct since universal suffrage does not lead to a real dictatorship until workers use their votes consciously to rid themselves of the dominion of private capital. There were signs of such an object among South Carolina Negroes, but it was always coupled with the idea of the day that the only real escape for a laborer was himself to own capital. (DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, chapter 10, which he finally titled “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina.”)

This “idea of the day” stemmed from the fact that in South Carolina, and the south as a whole (during Reconstruction), the governments of the states were not proletarian dictatorships but bourgeois-democratic governments, whose driving force was the petit-bourgeoisie–merchants, farmers, self-employed craftsmen and artisans–developing among Blacks and whites, in temporary alliance with the big bourgeoisie of the north. After all, if in the south the dictatorship of the proletariat was being built, it is difficult to explain the support for this–halting as it may have been–from the dictatorship of capital in the north.

DuBois’ class bias and the error that stems from it prevent him from correctly understanding the betrayal of Reconstruction. He sums it up this way:

Far from turning toward any conception of dictatorship of the proletariat, of surrendering power either into the hands of labor or of the trustees of labor, the new plan (of the Federal government) was to concentrate into a trusteeship of capital, a new and far-reaching power which would dominate the government of the United States. (DuBois, ibid., p. 583.)

And by the end of the book DuBois has lapsed very far into idealism and metaphysics. The southerners did not realize, he says, ”that a living working class can never lose its political power and that all they did in 1876 was to transfer that power from the hands of labor to the hands of capital, where it has been concentrated ever since.” And this “transfer of power” away from the “working class” was made possible, according to DuBois, because the white “proletariat” in the south (mainly small farmers and craftsmen) united with white capital on the basis of race (or nationality), rather than uniting with the “Black proletariat” on the basis of class solidarity. And so it has been, ever since, according to this view of history. (See the last two chapters of Black Reconstruction in America.)

It is, of course, true that a significant factor in the betrayal of Reconstruction was the division created, on the basis of national chauvinism (white folks are superior, Black folks are inferior), between white and Black farmers and laborers. But the view that comes through Black Reconstruction is that essentially the situation of the Black people in the U.S. has remained unchanged since slavery–with the brief exception of ten years or sd during Reconstruction. This static picture portrays a super-exploited Black proletariat condemned to the same bondage by the chauvinistic betrayal of the white proletariat, which continues to sellout its own interests, along with the freedom of Black workers, in exchange for a chauvinist “Gentleman’s Agreement” with white capital.

This is also the picture DuBois offers for the disintegration of the white-Black unity in the Populist Movement of the 1890’s and early 1900’s. Once again, it is true that the betrayal of Black farmers by the white Populists–misled by opportunists like the self-seeking southern lawyer, Tom Watson–was a key factor in the breakup of the Populist Movement, which, at its peak, unified several million small farmers, Black and white, on the basis of common political struggle (mainly electoral), if not of complete social equality.

But, once again, the Populist movement was a movement of the petit-bourgeoisie, of an unstable class constantly being driven down and broken apart by the growing domination of monopoly capital. It was not a movement of the proletariat, the class of the future, the strongest class in history–ideologically, organizationally and in numbers.

The class basis of the Populists is clear from their program. They centered their demands around the break-up of the monopolies, public ownership of the railroads (which were squeezing the small farmers by charging exorbitant prices for transporting their goods), etc. This is clearly the program of the petit-bourgeoisie. Lenin once pointed out that the proletariat opposes monopoly capital more thoroughly than any other class; but it opposes it by raising the demands, not to break up the trusts, but to move through them, beyond them, to the socialization of ownership of all means of production, in the hands of a government controlled by the working class.

In addition, there is all the difference in the world between the rising American bourgeoisie during Reconstruction–when it was expanding rapidly and beginning to develop monopolies–or at the time of the Populist Movement–when it was consolidating monopoly capital and emerging as a major imperialist power–and today, when it has long since become the most powerful imperialist force, and is now everywhere on the defensive, being driven out of country after country and challenged everywhere.

Under these present conditions, the ability of the bourgeoisie to bribe sections of the working class from the super-profits of imperialism and in this way to prevent the unity of its exploited and oppressed victims, is already being undercut. So the bourgeoisie resorts more and more to terroristic repression. If today the consequences for the proletariat of failing to build multinational unity in struggle against U.S. imperialism are greater than ever, the material basis for building this unity and for carrying through the struggle to overthrow imperialism is also greater than ever.

If the position of DuBois’ Black Reconstruction were correct, then the more than 100 years since the Civil War would have been a long period of stagnation, in fact of actual regression, for the Black people.[1]

But despite the betrayal of Reconstruction, the defeat of the slave-system was an historic advance for the Black people and for all oppressed and exploited people within the U.S., as Marx and Engels-pointed out at the time. Out of this period developed the Black nation and, at the same time, the growth of large-scale industry and the modern proletariat in the United States.

Over the past 100 years, through all the torture of semi-colonial and semi-feudal oppression, the Black nation has continued its struggle for emancipation. The very tendency of moribund U.S. capitalism to break up the Black nation, by driving it from the farmlands and dispersing it throughout the large industrial centers, also represents an important advance for the Black people, who once again stand in the front ranks of the class struggle–but now on a completely new basis. If the defeat of the slave-system, and the emancipation of the Black people from chattel slavery, meant the temporary ascendancy of the bourgeoisie–and not immediately of the working class–the emancipation of the Black people today means the defeat of the bourgeoisie and the end of all forms of slavery in the U.S.

Endnote

[1] This is not meant as a total picture of DuBois’ role. Despite certain errors in his analysis of the Black liberation struggle in the U.S., DuBois made very important contributions to that struggle, and to the fight of Third World people internationally against national and colonial oppression. He was one of the early organizers of civil rights and Pan-African organizations in the early 1900’s, when they played a very progressive role. He represented the second Pan-African Conference in bringing the case against colonialism before the Versailles Peace Conference, after World War I. At the end of his life, DuBois was a socialist and declared himself a friend of China. Even though he joined the Communist Party, USA, shortly before his death in 1963, he was living in Africa at the time, and he joined the Communist Party more out of protest against U.S. imperialism than out of agreement with the CP’s line. Overall, DuBois stands out as one of the most important leaders in the struggle of Black people in the fight for liberation and against the colonialist and imperialist system.