Strategic role of Black labor

Saladin Muhammad WW photo

The system of national oppression is anchored by African-American national oppression; not because it was the first experience of national oppression in what became the United States-we know that the Native peoples were the first. It is because of the role that Black labor has played in the historical development of U.S. capitalism, as the economic base for the institutionalized racist political superstructure, and for the consolidation of white supremacy as an expression of white national social consciousness.

There can be no real revolutionary working class unity without a consistent struggle against African American national oppression. However, the African Amer ican liberation movement must have an internationalist character, so that it helps the African American masses to see immigrant workers as their allies in a struggle against the same system of national oppression.

White workers whose political conscious ness is also shaped by bourgeois democracy and white supremacy, which is further encouraged by the trade unions, see these voting blocks of oppressed nationalities as a threat to white skin privilege, and associate its diminishing character with the increased immigration of Latinos and the social programs won by the African American struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, which racists claim is the reason for the U.S. government debt crisis.

The Latino communities’ call and massive mobilization for a general strike and boycott on May Day was very significant. It made the issue of mobilizing working class power a central component of the Latino struggle against national oppression. This can help set the tone for other struggles against national oppression and hopefully the trade union movement -which has become weakened by its failure to exercise power as a working class, as was shown during the PATCO strike in 1981 and more recently in the New York transit-workers strike.

How to unite the masses into a revolutionary anti-imperialist movement is a continuing question facing the revolutionary struggle in this country. Should it take the form of a multi-national struggle of workers and oppressed nations against U.S. imperialism, or as a multi-racial working class struggle? The failure to support the right of self-determination of oppressed nationalities has been a major impediment to building revolutionary working class unity.

This raises the question about the role of conscious political forces-revolutionaries-in the spontaneous national movements. Too often, there has been a practice of mainly trying to recruit from the spontaneous movements into the revolutionary organizations, with little or no effort to help organize the working class leadership and organizing capacity of the national movements.

The working class of the oppressed nationalities must be organized to popularize the slogan of self-determination within the national movements.

The strategic alliance between African American and Latino national movements must be concrete and built around real struggles that are able to help both communities and the broad movements for social justice see the strategic importance. That is why itso important to focus this alliance today around the struggle for Reconstruction in the Gulf Coast and the struggle for immigrant rights.

—Saladin Muhammad, chair,
Black Workers for Justice; Black Workers League, Raleigh