Pro-nationalists are driven by their desire to find a special explanation for the oppression of minorities. The class struggle is not enough; there must be a “national struggle” as well. What they do not realize is that this analysis understates, it does not expose, the full impact of racism and the fight against it.
Primarily, it underestimates the class interests of white workers in fighting racism. Crude ultra-leftists like the Communist League dismiss the whole question with the theory on “bribery.” To C.L., better conditions for whites are a sop from the ruling class to win support for imperialism. Today, according to C.L., white workers can be won to class consciousness only on the basis of morality and renunciation of their bribe. At some future date, probably as a result of national liberation struggles, the bribe will be crushed under the boot of fascism and all workers will have an interest in overthrowing the system.
Other pro-nationalist groups seem to seek class solidarity between whites and blacks in this pre-revolutionary situation, but they have no idea how to achieve it. Their nationalist line gets in the way. The Revolutionary Union counsels that communists “must ’divide one into two’ on the question of white workers. On the one hand, their privileges as members of the oppressor nation; on the other hand, their common exploitation and oppression, their common interests with the workers of the oppressed nationalities.” (“National Bulletin 13,” Red Papers 6, p. 12.) They never define what those “common interests” are, except that the oppressor is the same. But when the “common oppressor” grants privileges to some, oppression cannot be so common after all.
This line is nothing more than a variation of the theory of White Skin Privilege. It is based on a capitalist misinterpretation of the differential that does exist between white and black workers. The material basis of racism lies in this differential. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of reform struggles to fight this differential. One is the struggle against the super-exploitation of black people. Communists lead such struggles, and they explain to white workers their material interest in supporting and joining this struggle–at all times, against discrimination in the plant and throughout society, whether a contract is up for negotiation or not. This requires a class analysis of racism. Pro-nationalist theories merely isolate the black people in their struggle against super-exploitation. White Skin Privilege theories sound militant, but they tell the white working class that to fight racism it must give up privileges, which is false.
The other kind of reform struggle against racism is the struggle for a united working class against the capitalists. Communists lead this struggle for unity, showing all workers the need for it and exposing the capitalists’ overt and subtle attempts to divide workers in contract fights, school and community issues, etc. The nationalist and liberal racist analyses mostly ignore this struggle for working-class unity. At best, they make only a moral appeal for it.
Of course, the two kinds of struggle against racism go together. One cannot appeal solely for class unity, ignoring the differential between white and black workers. Racism exists in the United States and must be analyzed and fought. On the other hand, if one fights solely against super-exploitation, then it will be found that a class analysis is lacking, and class unity will not be attained. Communists blend the two kinds of struggles. They fight super-exploitation, bringing white workers into this fight on the basis of an explanation of their class interests. Then they unite workers to defeat racism and win gains in class struggles. This combination shows all workers that racism is a tool of the capitalists and heightens the storm of struggle against them on all fronts.
The class-conscious program for fighting racism therefore consists of the following:
1) Expose the class nature of racism, explain that nationalism where there is no black nation is a form of racism, and teach all workers their class interest in fighting discrimination and racist division.
2) Show the working class that its unity does win victories, as it did in the 1930’s in labor struggles in organizing the C.I.O. and in struggles like the defense in the Scottsboro case. Expand and exercise the tactics of building struggles that unite the proletariat–in the plant, in housing, for education, against police repression, etc.
3) Point out in these struggles that our victories are only temporary and partial until the material basis of racism is completely smashed by working-class revolution. Only socialism, in removing the material basis of racism, the discrimination and super-exploitation of some workers in the competition for jobs, can achieve full equality between different sections of the working class.
Here we come to the second area where the pro-nationalist analysis falls short–the question of socialist revolution. Real national questions can be and often are solved under capitalism. Some like to assert that national liberation depends on proletarian revolution in the oppressing nation. It is certainly a good thing that the Indochinese people do not believe this! If a black nation did exist, if that were the material basis for the extra oppression of black people throughout the United States, then that oppression could be smashed by liberating that nation, with or without socialism in the U.S. Obviously, however, self-determination for the Black Belt would not fundamentally change the conditions of blacks in this country. The condition of black people comes from racism, not national oppression.
Black people are oppressed not because of thwarted economic development of an alleged nation but because of the systematic maintenance of a differential between black and white workers by the employers. This is the basis for racist ideology, which further reinforces the maintenance of the differential. Racism has been made part of the relations between classes in the United States, and the employers are not going to give it up. So long as the wage relation exists, so long as there is unemployment and hence job insecurity, so long as the capitalists are the ruling class, there is going to be racism in the U.S.
Reform struggles, including anti-racist struggles, are going to occur. It is up to communists to educate the working class in these struggles to prepare for revolution. This requires a class analysis of racism in the United States, just as India’s communists, for example, must give a class analysis of Hindu-Moslem and caste divisions.
The only correct strategy for communists in the U.S. is to fight racism. “Fight racism?” a friend of ours cried. “How can you expect to win black people to a program that does not speak of self-determination?”
We expect to win workers, white and black, to fight the source of their exploitation. To believe that black people will cling to a petty-bourgeois line after its pro-capitalist, pro-racist content has been exposed, simply because they are black people, is racist. A more relevant challenge might be, how does anyone expect to win white workers to an incorrect line that speaks of “the dominant white-European nation” or the “white man’s world” and does not identify class interests, which depend on one’s class and not one’s skin color? No line can unite the proletariat which incorrectly identifies one segment as the oppressor of others; no line can succeed which sacrifices class consciousness the better to tail nationalism.
Communists will persist in the anti-racist struggle. In campaigns against inferior education, substandard housing, and discrimination in employment, as well as in united class struggles of all types, communists will work to raise class consciousness among all sections of the working class. Communists seek the participation of all honest revolutionaries in fighting racism and all other special conditions of class oppression in this country. We ask pro-nationalists who see fighting racism as essential in this pre-revolutionary situation to join forces. In the end, we hope that they will join forces as well with the working class in the fight for socialism.