Revolutionary communism and the Black liberation
struggle
By
Vanessa Lewis
The struggle for Black liberation in the United States has
been and continues to be central to the class struggle and to
the struggle against U.S. imperialism.
Slavery not only marked the beginning of Black people's
quest for liberation in the United States, but was also a
contributing factor in the development of capitalism. For 300
years, the captive work force of slaves created abundant wealth
for the slavocracy as well as the capitalist class abroad, and
ultimately defined class relations.
The Civil War was a class war between two conflicting class
property systems, slavery and capitalism. The war would result
in the abolition of slavery in a period known as
Reconstruction. But then, in a betrayal of the Black freedom
struggle, the Northern industrial capitalists would merge with
the former slavocracy to create a united capitalist ruling
class.
Reconstruction was a revolutionary period for African
Americans. Black people took part in a social revolution,
organizing themselves to gain democratic reforms that would
also benefit many Native people and poor whites. Their struggle
against feudal-like conditions included demands for education,
equality and ownership of the land they had worked as slaves,
which had been so prosperous to the slavocracy.
These demands for equality under the law were coupled with
the forming of Black militias, armed seizures of land and
organized self-defense against racist, terrorist organizations
like the Ku Klux Klan. Their organizing was such a threat that
the capitalist ruling class aligned itself with the former
slavocracy and carried out a counter revolution.
Blacks--faced with relentless racist terror, no protection
by Union forces and failure of the Union to uphold the laws
made to protect them--were forced to remain in indentured
servitude on the plantations they had worked as slaves. After
the end of slavery, the brutal and violent exploitation and
subjugation of Black workers would continue.
The end of slavery during the Civil War would compel Karl
Marx to write: "In the United States of North America, every
independent movement of workers was paralyzed so long as
slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor cannot
emancipate itself in the white skin where the black skin is
branded."
Garvey's response to
Russian Revolution
In the early part of this century, as Black workers
continued to be terrorized, suffering from extreme unemployment
and super-exploitation, Black nationalist movements arose.
As Black workers were organizing themselves into Pan-African
and nationalist organizations for their liberation, the workers
of Russia were making a successful revolution. For many Black
nationalists, the Russian Revolution served as a beacon to
their struggle for equality and justice, even though they did
not embrace communism.
Marcus Garvey, leader of the anti-colonial Universal Negro
Improvement Association, would write: "Bolshevism, it would
appear, is a thing of the white man's making. It is going to
spread until it finds a haven in the breasts of all oppressed
peoples, and then there shall be a universal rule of the
masses."
For others the Russian Revolution became the path they would
follow. Liberation through a united class struggle was a path
that some, like W.E.B. DuBois, Harry Haywood and Langston
Hughes, would champion in their lives, becoming Black
communists.
Before the Russian Revolution, the predominantly white
socialist organizations in the United States did not understand
the Black struggle in relation to the class struggle. Even
those who were militantly anti-racist took the view that racism
would just end after a revolution born out of the class
struggle. This view did not take into account the special
oppression and struggle of Black people in the United States or
provide them support accordingly.
At that time V.I. Lenin in Russia developed the Marxist
theory of self-determination: that a systematically oppressed
grouping or an oppressed nation has the right to decide its own
destiny and carry out its own liberation.
It was only after the Russian Revolution, when the Communist
International spread Lenin's teachings, that revolutionary
working-class organizations in the United States began to
understand the Black struggle as the struggle of an internal
Black colony against an oppressor white nation. They called on
socialists in the United States to support the Black struggle
under the banner of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, as
they would any oppressed nation overseas.
Some communists in the United States answered this call by
uniting Black and white workers in labor councils for the
unemployed as the Great Depression took hold. Such organizing
strengthened the labor movement and saw it through the gains
made in the 1930s.
Communism and
self-determination
Lenin's development of the national question and
self-determination laid the basis for solidarity between
revolutionary communists and the Black liberation movements in
the second half of this century. As the civil-rights movement
awoke in the 1950s, a number of elements constituted the Black
movement. Blacks all over the country organized against the Jim
Crow system of racist segregation that had become the model for
South Africa's apartheid. They took to the streets demanding
equality and an end to racism and economic oppression.
The civil-rights movement had many faces, but many of these
leaders eventually took up or acknowledged the class struggle
as an element in their struggle for national liberation.
Leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X incorporated
multinational unity and anti-imperialism into their views of
Black liberation.
King opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam and was murdered while
supporting the struggle of Black sanitation workers in Memphis.
Malcolm X was assassinated by the state after his travels to
Asia and Africa left him with the vision of oppressed
neocolonies around the globe uniting to fight the U.S. ruling
class.
After revolutions in China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959, the
great advances in these previously oppressed nations served as
examples and allies to the Black movement in the United States.
In 1961, after the racist state of North Carolina attempted to
hunt down Robert F. Williams--an advocate of armed self-defense
in the Black community--he took asylum in Cuba. In 1965 he and
his family moved to China where he became a friend of Mao
Zedong.
At Williams' request, Mao wrote a message in solidarity with
the African American struggle against violent repression. He
wrote the statement just days after Martin Luther King was
assassinated.
In 1960, Fidel Castro and a delegation from Cuba arrived in
New York for the 15th session of the United Nations General
Assembly. Liberated socialist Cuba was one year old. Fidel had
a historic meeting with Malcolm X in solidarity with the Black
masses at the Hotel Teresa in the heart of Harlem.
Thousands of community members filled the streets and held
banners reading "Castro has shown the way to Freedom," and
"Cuba practices real democracy, No race discrimination!"
They celebrated the victorious Cuban Revolution and Castro's
historic visit to Harlem. Needless to say it petrified the
ruling class. Malcolm's later writings and understanding of the
right to self-determination and armed self-defense would
inspire Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to found the Black Panther
Party.
The Panthers put into practice Malcolm's declaration of
self-defense. They modeled themselves after Mao's writings. The
Black Panthers were the most advanced expression of Black
liberation movements in this century. They were not only
national revolutionaries in practice, but a Marxist party with
an internationalist perspective.
Their revolutionary program and efforts to link the Black
struggle with groups of other colonized peoples in the United
States, like the Young Lords, is the reason the state continues
to persecute their leaders today--like Assata Shakur, currently
in asylum in Cuba, and former Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, a
political prisoner we are fighting to free from death row after
17 years.
Defense against racist repression
Today defense against institutionalized racism and
reactionary repression remains central to the Black
struggle--as exemplified by our sister and brothers Tayisha
Shenee Miller, Amadou Diallo, Donta Dawson and James Byrd, to
name just a few. But repression and suffering extend to white
workers as well. The struggle against racism must be the
politics of all the oppressed. As the rights of women, lesbian,
gay, bi and trans people, and all people of color are pushed
back, living standards are lowered for everyone.
As Marxist-Leninists, Workers World Party will support the
right of Black people to self-determination by any means
necessary, including the formation of a separate state or
country. In his 1968 statement Mao wrote: "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. It is a tremendous support and
inspiration to the struggle of the people throughout the world
against U.S. imperialism and to the struggle of the Vietnamese
people against U.S. imperialism. On behalf of the Chinese
people, I hereby express resolute support for the just struggle
of the Black people in the United States."
The militant struggle for Black liberation has always been
at the forefront of every political upswing for all workers and
oppressed people in the United States. It has dealt some of the
most satisfying blows against U.S. imperialism in the domestic
struggle. The struggle of all workers against the imperialist
ruling class will surely end only with the complete liberation
of Black people in this country.
We commend the revolutionary history of the Black struggle.
And we know that it will continue to play a decisive role in
the class war and our victory over our capitalist oppressor.
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Long live the Black Liberation Struggle!
Long live the struggle against imperialism and colonialism!
Workers and oppressed people of the world unite!
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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