First Published: Workers’ Press, Vol. 1, No. 1, September 1975.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The most recent clashes in Boston and Louisville raise most sharply the special oppression of the Black people in the USNA. As is well known, Black people number over 22 million, and comprise between 10-12% of the population of the USNA. Nearly half of them still live in the South, and the rest are crammed into big city ghettoes. Both within and outside of the South, Blacks are subjected to systematic discrimination, legal lynchings and police terror. As regards schools, Blacks have the poorest facilities; in terms of housing, they are segregated and forced to pay high rents for substandard and slum dwellings. Politically, in many areas, particularly the South, they are still denied the right to vote and hold office Economically, the Black workers, who make up over 90% of the Black population, suffer super-exploitations on the average, they are paid two-thirds of the wages of their Anglo counterparts, they are given the hardest and dirtiest jobs, and they are the “last hired and first fired” as the economy goes down.
We are now confronted with the question, what is the basis of the cruel exploitation and oppression of the Black people? We Communists say that the terrible plight of the Black people finds its source in the subjugation of the Black Nation in the Southern USNA. It is our view that there is a Black Nation within the multi-national USNA. You may ask, “what is a nation?” Joseph Stalin, a great revolutionary leader and teacher of the working class, stated that a nation is “an historically developed community of people with a common language, territory, economic life and an historical tradition reflecting itself in a common culture.” Any class conscious worker will admit that Black people and other minorities (poor whites, Indians, Mexicans) of the deep south constitute a nation. Because of the harsh repression within the South and better job opportunities in the Eastern, Northern and Western USNA, many Blacks have, since World War I, left their homeland in the Black Belt and emigrated to the big cities where they form a national minority, as in Watts, Chicago, Roxbury, etc.
The monopoly capitalists of the Anglo-American nation in the North super-exploit the peoples of the Black Nation by enforcing lower wages on the workers and a lower standard of living on all the toiling classes – the small farmers, tenant-farmers, small handicaftsmen. The USNA state, with all its military forces and bases in the South, serves to hold the Black Nation in check, preventing it from liberating itself.
As Communists, we declare that it is not in the interests of the Anglo-American section of the working class to maintain the oppression of the Black Nation Our revolutionary movement will be weakened so long as the Black Nation is held in chains. Therefore, we demand independence for the Black Nation! In the Black Belt area the Black majority must have full governmental control, which means the right to set up a government and organize armed forces to protect this right, As for the Anglo and other minority peoples of the Black Nation, they will have equal rights as toilers with the Blacks, and in fact more freedom than they enjoyed under the rule of the Anglo capitalist class, For Blacks living outside the Black Nation, we demand full equality.
The demand for independence for the Black Nation may be new to many workers, but it is the only just demand, If the USNA working class wishes to emancipate itself from the exploitation of the capitalist system, it must have a united class free of the divisions between workers. The cruel exploitation and oppression of the Black Nation by the Anglo capitalist class is the basis of that division. Therefore, in the interest of the unity of the working class, this oppressive relation must be done away with. The Black Nation must be freed!