Workers World Dec. 14, 2000: Excerpts from a talk by Monica Moorehead

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------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Dec. 14, 2000 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------

Put fight against racism front and center

Excerpts from a talk by Monica Moorehead

Who could have imagined that three weeks after the election there would still be no president-elect? This means that the Jan. 20 mobilization against the inauguration of the next president will be even more highly scrutinized by the media, the progressive movement and the world.
But besides the timing, there is also the political motivation for the counter-inaugural.The motivation is reflected in the main slogans that really help to popularize the Party's political program.
The Jan. 20 mobilization is attempting to take the anti-globalization struggle to a higher political level. How? By elevating the struggle against racism and national oppression. This includes showing solidarity with those who are heroically resisting the political and military hegemony of U.S. imperialism in Colombia, Vieques and Palestine.
Putting the struggle against racism and national oppression right up front has been a glaring omission from the anti-globalization program.
If the struggle against racism is not a conscious and integral part of your political orientation, how can you expect to be taken seriously by people of color in particular and the workers in general? When I spoke as the presidential candidate of Workers World Party about the relationship between racism and national oppression and the class struggle, I stated that if you are serious about getting rid of capitalism, opposing racism and national oppression has to be the number-one priority.
In fact, you really can't talk about what's wrong with capitalism without mentioning in the same breath the strategic role that racism plays. As a Party, we don't take a strong position against racism solely on the basis of it being morally repugnant or a violation of human rights. We take a Marxist stance against racism because it is so interwoven within the very fabric of capitalist society. It is the biggest obstacle that we face in terms of forging unity within the multinational working class to prosecute the class struggle.
Our Party has consistently pointed out to white workers that it is in their interest to unite with their super-exploited sisters and brothers of color to fight racism, in order to fight their class enemy--the ruling class. At the same time, it is important for anti-racist whites and all communists and progressives to support and defend the Leninist view of the right to self-determination of the oppressed peoples in recognition of the reality that inequality based on one's nationality does exist within the working class.
During the 19th century, when U.S. capitalism was in its early competitive stage of development following the overthrow of Southern slavery, the big question on the minds of many Marxists was: Would capitalism move in a more progressive direction in terms of bringing about real equality?
The capitalist class certainly had the economic and political material means and opportunity to rid this society of racism. For instance, suppose the former slaves had won full social rights during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Instead Reconstruction was tragically cut short when the U.S. military and the government abandoned the Black masses and left them at the mercy of extra-legal terrorist organizations like the KKK. This unfinished revolution ushered in almost 70 years of legalized apartheid in the Deep South.
This is why we must pay a lot more attention to the growing demand of the Black community for reparations to address the legacy of slavery and Jim Crowism. We must find ways to intervene in the most helpful way.
In 1984 Sam Marcy, the late chairperson of Workers World Party, summarized how a working-class party must consistently connect the struggle against racism and national oppression with the class struggle.
"A working-class party such as Lenin tried to build should promote every right that a Black person is deprived of that a white one has achieved," he wrote. "We promote and must propagate the right to self-determination, but which road to take for liberation must be decided by the oppressed nation itself.
"A revolutionary working-class party promotes class solidarity irrespective of which option an oppressed nation chooses. The neutrality of the party in this respect is the strongest pillar of working-class multinational solidarity in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
"The bourgeoisie denies and closes the road to both separatism and integration. They neither wish to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution for political equality ... nor will they permit the development of a movement for an independent separate state. ...
"The whole struggle of the working class as well as the oppressed people and their allies everywhere is to recognize that there can be no real independence, freedom or equality as long as the monstrous system of capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression remains. The struggle for any and all concessions must and will go on, and each concession won is a building block in the struggle for emancipation from imperialist finance capital."

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