How a workers' party related to Black liberation struggle

Based on part of a talk that WWP secretariat member Larry Holmes made in Detroit on Feb. 9 at a meeting of the local Workers World Party branch on Black History Month.

This is a special Black History Month, because not only is it Black History Month, it is also the tenth anniversary of the passing of Sam Marcy. There’s a lot that one could say about the connection between those two things.

Sam Marcy’s founding of Workers World Party and the early years of our party are completely intertwined with the Black liberation struggle in ways that I think only a number of people in the older generations appreciate. We will need to find a way to let younger generations know about this—that is our job.

What I mean by that is that Workers World Party is 50 years old, that is, we will be 50 years old at the beginning of next year. The party was founded in early 1959. What was 1959 besides a year when the U.S. was coming out of McCarthyism and in the pre-Vietnam War phase?

It was also the early days of the next phase of the Black struggle—the two wings of the Black struggle. The civil rights movement on the one hand, identified with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP and the march on Washington; and the Black liberation movement on the other hand, which didn’t begin with Malcolm X and the Panthers and Fred Hampton, but began with people like Mae Mallory and Rob Williams and others throughout the South and the Midwest who began defending themselves against racists with weapons, whether it was in Louisiana or Milwaukee.

And there became a need—whether symbolic or more substantive than symbolic—for some sector of the movement that was trying to represent the working class to come to the defense of people like Mae Mallory and Rob Williams.

Yes, this sector would say to those heroes, you have the right to defend yourselves with weapons against the Klan, against the police, against White Citizens Councils, against terrorists and fascists. Moreover those of us who know better, be we Black, white or whatever, if we understand the needs of class solidarity we will come and help you. We will stand with you.

If that is not possible, we will send you resources, we will get you a lawyer, we will rally support behind you, and at least, if it is the only thing we can do, we will tell people who have no other way of knowing that this is what is happening and this is the situation that you face.

The Black movement, both wings, evolved rapidly during the 1960s. Our role and our support behind all of the wings were very important to us. Workers World Party was a very small group at the time. We were going all over the country setting up defense committees, setting up public relations operations, press committees, getting lawyers, fundraising for all the Black warriors who were under the gun. Some were known, some less well known, some not known at all.

As the movement took on wind and more young people got involved, by the early 1960s Malcolm X had become known nationally.

Malcolm X was the bridge between the earlier Black nationalists, the Nation of Islam going back to Marcus Garvey and the new generation that was to be represented by the Black Panther Party and by George Jackson and Angela Davis and the struggles inside the prisons.

We were so busy as a party supporting Black liberation and supporting the program of the revolutionaries, even if it went so far as to demand separation, which we believe was the right of the Black nation or some sector of the Black nation if they thought it was part of the answer to their liberation.

We actually held back building the party. We didn’t put all our effort into just recruiting people to the party and having bigger party meetings and constituting ourselves as a growing entity. It seemed at the time that the thing to do was to be with the Black struggle.

It is important, perhaps the most important thing for us to remember and share is that Workers World Party’s support for the Black liberation movement was not based on idealism or romanticism. We weren’t caught up in the moment. We weren’t just excited about it. Oh, yes, it was exciting, but it was also dangerous and it was costly. Our support was based on class solidarity.

We understood that there could be no working-class progress in this country unless some sector of our class, those who understood, those who had the level of consciousness and courage, were able to extend the hand of solidarity to the Black liberation movement. We had to do this no matter what the odds, no matter who was with us and who wasn’t with us.

We were building the foundation for what would come. Part of what would come would be the flourishing of WWP.

You really can’t take the formation of Workers World Party, you can’t understand, you can’t locate the formation of Workers World Party outside of its relationship with the Black liberation struggle. Those two things have been and will be intertwined and connected.

It is unlikely that I would be standing before you if it were not for the work that the party did long before I came along. Because in so many ways and for so many other comrades, the work that they did in those critical years in the 1960s supporting the Black Liberation movement paved the way for people like me to come and say, “This is a place where I feel comfortable. This is a place where I have no contradictions. This is a place where I don’t have to pretend that I am this or that. We are one.”

Because of our work, of all the parties on the left we have had for half a century the closest relationships with the Black liberation movement.

We have been welcome. They have been welcome. We talk with everybody, all of the leaders, and break bread with them. We write about them in our paper. In this week’s paper you’ll see a picture of Monica Moorehead at one of the meetings held by the December 12th Movement, a nationalist organization in the New York City area that has a long history of struggle. D12 organized a book signing for the book that Monica Moorehead made contributions to and organized, called “Marxism, Reparations and the Black Freedom Struggle.”

That is just a sign of the relationship. We are the only multinational party present when many of the Black forces hold their rallies and their meetings—they invite us to participate. You won’t see other political tendencies there, unless it is just selling their newspaper or trying to explain why the Black people at the meeting should be following their leadership. But we will be on the platform and we will be there in solidarity.

Because we always realize that to build a party in this country without having a close relationship with the Black liberation movement, whatever its character was at the time, is simply not possible.

Unfortunately the Black liberation movement is in a defensive period, but that is because of the worldwide reaction. Still, there is no way to build a revolutionary working-class party without being a part of or without having a connection to that movement.

I believe Comrade Sam Marcy’s view and strategy in relationship to the Black movement is based on his understanding of what we call the national question applied to the Black question. But there is something more fundamental in it, consistent with it, but more fundamental.

You can see it in Sam Marcy’s view of the world when he was inside another party and he was arguing for a more revolutionary line on the world view.

What am I talking about? We go back to the early 1950s—Trotskyists, Stalinists, the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party and other formations were there—it was before the Maoist organizations that arose 10 years later more or less.

There was the Chinese revolution and shortly after that the Korean War, which was imperialism’s effort not only to overturn socialism in North Korea but also to roll back the Chinese Revolution.

The debate among some leftists in this country in relation to the Chinese Revolution was twofold. Some said it was not really a communist revolution and they didn’t really know what it was, so why should they get all involved in it. Others called it Stalinist, considering that is a mark against it, and asked why they would want to associate their party with that kind of revolution.

Sam said they were underestimating the social scope of the social revolution in China, that time would show this to be true. Then, are you going to disassociate yourself from a revolutionary or progressive process involving such a big slice of humanity because you think they follow some leadership you don’t agree with? Is that your criteria?

Shouldn’t you be thinking about the bigger question? What does this mean for the world?

What Sam Marcy was doing, and this was extraordinary on his part, particularly in the United States, Marcy was saying that the differences within the communist movement, both old and new differences, differences based on the Trotsky-Stalin split, on Lenin, however you characterize these differences and try to explain them, at some point it has gotten confusing and so open to interpretation that people who were not part of those struggles don’t know who to believe.

But if you are going to base yourself on those old differences and use them as an excuse not to be in solidarity with millions and billions of people struggling to liberate themselves from colonialism and imperialism, then what use are you? What good are you? Don’t we have to have a bigger view? Step back. We are in a worldwide struggle—who is generally on our side and who is generally on the other side?

It is not that the differences, old differences and new differences, are insignificant—some of them may be very significant. Some of them may be decisive.

But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Let’s step back and look at our class on a global scale. Who is with us and who is against us? It is within that context that you can understand Marcy’s view of the Black liberation struggle.

What you have to do is step back and ask who is with us on a world scale against our enemy—world imperialism led by the United States—and relate to each other on that basis. If you do that your chances of getting it right are about 90 percent.

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