Former President George W. Bush had a tongue-tied moment at a speech on Wednesday and millions on social media took notice.
When condemning Russia's attack on Ukraine, Bush mistakenly referred to the decision to launch an "unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq" before quickly correcting himself to say "Ukraine," in what was a bungled criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bush-condemns-unjustified-brutal-invasion-iraq-ukraine-speech/story?id=84831140
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
V. I. Lenin on the ‘Black Question’ Joe Pateman Pages 77-93 | Published online: 21 Jan 2020
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03017605.2019.1706786
Abstract In his revolutionary activities and writings from 1913 to the fourth Comintern Congress in 1922, V. I. Lenin didn’t merely analyze the function of black labor in the process of capitalist development. He also had something to say about the role that black people themselves would play in their own emancipation. His posthumously published article Russians and Negroes is particularly insightful. The guiding motto of the Comintern under the direction of Lenin—‘Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite!’ fused the destinies of the racially subjugated black communities and working class in their struggles against imperialism. This article argues that Lenin showed a keen interest in what was then called the ‘Black Question’. It shows that he adopted a non-reductive approach that highlighted the special character of black oppression in comparison to other forms. It concludes that his ideas remain relevant for the black liberation struggle today.
Keywords: LeninBlack PeopleOppressionWorking ClassEmancipation Previous article Next article Notes on contributor
Joe Pateman is studying for a PhD in Politics at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include Marxism, democratic theory, and the political economy of race. Joe is the co–author of the recently published book, Managing Cultural Change in Public Libraries: Marx, Maslow and Management (Routledge, 2019). Email: joepateman@yahoo.co.uk
Abstract In his revolutionary activities and writings from 1913 to the fourth Comintern Congress in 1922, V. I. Lenin didn’t merely analyze the function of black labor in the process of capitalist development. He also had something to say about the role that black people themselves would play in their own emancipation. His posthumously published article Russians and Negroes is particularly insightful. The guiding motto of the Comintern under the direction of Lenin—‘Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite!’ fused the destinies of the racially subjugated black communities and working class in their struggles against imperialism. This article argues that Lenin showed a keen interest in what was then called the ‘Black Question’. It shows that he adopted a non-reductive approach that highlighted the special character of black oppression in comparison to other forms. It concludes that his ideas remain relevant for the black liberation struggle today.
Keywords: LeninBlack PeopleOppressionWorking ClassEmancipation Previous article Next article Notes on contributor
Joe Pateman is studying for a PhD in Politics at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include Marxism, democratic theory, and the political economy of race. Joe is the co–author of the recently published book, Managing Cultural Change in Public Libraries: Marx, Maslow and Management (Routledge, 2019). Email: joepateman@yahoo.co.uk
Lenin: Russians and Negroes
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/feb/00b.htm
Russians and Negroes
Written: Written late January–early February 1913 Published: First published in Krasnaya Niva No. 3, 1925. Signed: W.. Published according to the manuscript. Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1975], Moscow, Volume 18, pages 543-544.
Translated: Stepan Apresyan Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2004). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. • README What a strange comparison, the reader may think. How can a race be compared with a nation?
It is a permissible comparison. The Negroes were the last to be freed from slavery, and they still bear, more than anyone else, the cruel marks of slavery—even in advanced countries—for capitalism has no “room” for other than legal emancipation, and even the latter it curtails in every possible way. With regard to the Russians, history has it that they were “almost” freed from serf bondage in 1861. It was about the same time, following the civil war against the American slaveowners, that North America’s Negroes were freed from slavery, The emancipation of the American slaves took place in a less “reformative” manner than that of the Russian slaves. That is why today, half a century later, the Russians still show many more traces of slavery than the Negroes. Indeed, it would be more accurate to speak of institutions and not merely of traces. But in this short article we shall limit ourselves to a little illustration of what we have said, namely, the question of literacy. It is known that illiteracy is one of the marks of slavery. In a country oppressed by pashas, Purishkeviches and their like, the majority of the population cannot be literate.
In Russia there are 73 per cent of illiterates, exclusive of children under nine years of age.
Among the U.S. Negroes, there were (in 1900) 44.5 per cent of illiterates. Such a scandalously high percentage of illiterates is a disgrace to a civilised, advanced country like the North American Republic. Furthermore, everyone knows that the position of the Negroes in America in general is one unworthy of a civilised country—capitalism cannot give either complete emancipation or even complete equality.
It is instructive that among the whites in America the proportion of illiterates is not more than 6 per cent. But if we divide America into what were formerly slave-holding areas (an American “Russia”) and non-slave-holding areas (an American non-Russia), we shall find 11–12 per cent of illiterates among the whites in the former and 4–6 per cent in the latter areas! The proportion of illiterates among the whites is twice as high in the former slave-holding areas. It is not only the Negroes that show traces of slavery! Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes!
Russians and Negroes
Written: Written late January–early February 1913 Published: First published in Krasnaya Niva No. 3, 1925. Signed: W.. Published according to the manuscript. Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1975], Moscow, Volume 18, pages 543-544.
Translated: Stepan Apresyan Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2004). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. • README What a strange comparison, the reader may think. How can a race be compared with a nation?
It is a permissible comparison. The Negroes were the last to be freed from slavery, and they still bear, more than anyone else, the cruel marks of slavery—even in advanced countries—for capitalism has no “room” for other than legal emancipation, and even the latter it curtails in every possible way. With regard to the Russians, history has it that they were “almost” freed from serf bondage in 1861. It was about the same time, following the civil war against the American slaveowners, that North America’s Negroes were freed from slavery, The emancipation of the American slaves took place in a less “reformative” manner than that of the Russian slaves. That is why today, half a century later, the Russians still show many more traces of slavery than the Negroes. Indeed, it would be more accurate to speak of institutions and not merely of traces. But in this short article we shall limit ourselves to a little illustration of what we have said, namely, the question of literacy. It is known that illiteracy is one of the marks of slavery. In a country oppressed by pashas, Purishkeviches and their like, the majority of the population cannot be literate.
In Russia there are 73 per cent of illiterates, exclusive of children under nine years of age.
Among the U.S. Negroes, there were (in 1900) 44.5 per cent of illiterates. Such a scandalously high percentage of illiterates is a disgrace to a civilised, advanced country like the North American Republic. Furthermore, everyone knows that the position of the Negroes in America in general is one unworthy of a civilised country—capitalism cannot give either complete emancipation or even complete equality.
It is instructive that among the whites in America the proportion of illiterates is not more than 6 per cent. But if we divide America into what were formerly slave-holding areas (an American “Russia”) and non-slave-holding areas (an American non-Russia), we shall find 11–12 per cent of illiterates among the whites in the former and 4–6 per cent in the latter areas! The proportion of illiterates among the whites is twice as high in the former slave-holding areas. It is not only the Negroes that show traces of slavery! Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes!
Archives 1974: Communist leader Gus Hall on the Nixon impeachment and resignation
Archives 1974: Communist leader Gus Hall on the Nixon impeachment and resignation
December 19, 2019 2:44 PM CST BY GUS HALL
Share
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/archives-1974-communist-leader-gus-hall-on-the-nixon-impeachment-and-resignation/
Email Archives 1974: Communist leader Gus Hall on the Nixon impeachment and resignation A Nixon-era demonstration by members of the Communist Party USA. Gus Hall, then the party's general secretary, is second from the right, wearing a hat. | Courtesy of CPUSA Archives
Editor’s Note: President Richard Nixon resigned from office on Aug. 9, 1974, just hours before the House of Representatives was to consider and approve formal articles of impeachment against him for his Watergate conspiracy. The article below was written by Gus Hall, the General Secretary of the Communist Party USA, and appeared in Daily World on the day of Nixon’s resignation. In the article, he called Nixon’s exit a “positive step,” but warned that the forces behind his conspiracy” were still in power. He called for a “people’s unity” of all democratic forces to “turn the country around.” On the occasion of President Donald Trump’s impeachment, People’s World shares this article from our archives with readers.
The exit of Nixon is an historic step in the right direction. An evil, anti-working class, racist, bigoted force has been discarded into the garbage can of history. This is an important victory for the democratic forces of our land.
It is of critical importance to place this unprecedented event in its proper perspective.
The leading conspirator stands exposed and condemned. But the forces behind the conspiracy remain in their positions of power.
The Aug. 9, 1974, edition of Daily World. Hall’s article appeared on the front cover, along with an editorial and the lead story from Washington Bureau Chief Tim Wheeler. | People’s World Archives Nixon’s exit is a most positive event. But to believe that Nixon and his political henchmen in the executive branch and in the United States Congress acted alone as a narrow group without a power base and therefore to conclude that Nixon’s leaving the scene will solve the serious problems facing the country, or to think that the danger to democratic rights and institutions is now in the past is to have dangerous illusions.
The Nixon conspiracy operated behind the shield of a “strong presidency.” The forces operating behind the concept of a “strong presidency” are the financial-industrial-military complex.
It is the very top circles of monopoly capital which gave the hundreds of millions of dollars that financed the conspiracy. It is the people from the big corporations who staffed the conspiracy.
We must not now forget that it was the leading people in the Democratic and Republican Parties who gave their support, either openly or by silence, to the Nixon conspiracy—as long as that conspiracy was directed against the working people, the people who are the victims of class and racial oppression. In fact, they continue to support the Nixon policies of taxing the poor, of runaway inflation, racism, and the $100 billion military budget. And at this very moment, it is these same forces of monopoly capital, the corporate kingmakers, who have supported Nixon, who are making the decisions about replacement. 2019 marks a century since the founding of the Communist Party USA. To commemorate the anniversary of the longest surviving socialist organization in the United States, People’s World has launched the article series: 100 Years of the Communist Party USA. Read the other articles published in the series. The people must not be fooled by the last-minute fascist and ultra-rights jumpers on the bandwagon [right-wing forces abandoning Nixon – Ed.]. Like rats, they are jumping off a sinking ship. They want to use the crisis to turn the country into even more fascist-like channels. The people must be alerted to the new conspiracy that is being spun by the Cold War gang—who are trying to use the exit of Nixon to turn the country back into the Cold War channels with its policies of tension and nuclear brinkmanship. The exit of Nixon must be a new beginning. It is a moment for a people’s crisis alert. This is a moment when the people must take a deeper look at the questions of who runs our government, our economy, and our lives. What is the source of corruption? Of the endless crises? The fraudulent 1972 elections were a definite part of the Nixon conspiracy. The forced resignation of a president is without precedent. The election fraud can be undone only by an immediate, unprecedented, new mid-term presidential election. Without such election, we will have a corporate-appointed, non-elected president and vice president [Nixon’s vice president and successor, Gerald Ford, had been appointed to the role after Nixon’s election and was not himself elected by the voters. –Ed.]. Only a militant, people’s democratic movement can safeguard the democratic rights and institutions of our country. Only a united people’s movement can turn the country around by destroying the grip the big corporations have on our country. “Impeach Nixon” election materials from the 1972 CPUSA presidential campaign. Only a fighting people’s movement can guarantee that the United States will move toward détente [with the Soviet Union]. Only a people’s movement can fight to cancel the $100 billion war budget. Only a people’s movement can end the disastrous course of inflation. Only a people’s movement can end the rise of racism. As long as the monopoly corporations are the masters of our land, there will always be the danger of reactionary, anti-democratic conspiracies. There will always be the ugly pressures of racism, escalating prices and taxes, and economic crises. This can be a new beginning if it results in a new unity—a unity of all democratic forces, a unity of all working-class forces, a unity of the racially oppressed, a unity of peace forces, and a unity of the younger generation. August 9, 1974 TAGS: Communist Party C
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/archives-1974-communist-leader-gus-hall-on-the-nixon-impeachment-and-resignation/
Email Archives 1974: Communist leader Gus Hall on the Nixon impeachment and resignation A Nixon-era demonstration by members of the Communist Party USA. Gus Hall, then the party's general secretary, is second from the right, wearing a hat. | Courtesy of CPUSA Archives
Editor’s Note: President Richard Nixon resigned from office on Aug. 9, 1974, just hours before the House of Representatives was to consider and approve formal articles of impeachment against him for his Watergate conspiracy. The article below was written by Gus Hall, the General Secretary of the Communist Party USA, and appeared in Daily World on the day of Nixon’s resignation. In the article, he called Nixon’s exit a “positive step,” but warned that the forces behind his conspiracy” were still in power. He called for a “people’s unity” of all democratic forces to “turn the country around.” On the occasion of President Donald Trump’s impeachment, People’s World shares this article from our archives with readers.
The exit of Nixon is an historic step in the right direction. An evil, anti-working class, racist, bigoted force has been discarded into the garbage can of history. This is an important victory for the democratic forces of our land.
It is of critical importance to place this unprecedented event in its proper perspective.
The leading conspirator stands exposed and condemned. But the forces behind the conspiracy remain in their positions of power.
The Aug. 9, 1974, edition of Daily World. Hall’s article appeared on the front cover, along with an editorial and the lead story from Washington Bureau Chief Tim Wheeler. | People’s World Archives Nixon’s exit is a most positive event. But to believe that Nixon and his political henchmen in the executive branch and in the United States Congress acted alone as a narrow group without a power base and therefore to conclude that Nixon’s leaving the scene will solve the serious problems facing the country, or to think that the danger to democratic rights and institutions is now in the past is to have dangerous illusions.
The Nixon conspiracy operated behind the shield of a “strong presidency.” The forces operating behind the concept of a “strong presidency” are the financial-industrial-military complex.
It is the very top circles of monopoly capital which gave the hundreds of millions of dollars that financed the conspiracy. It is the people from the big corporations who staffed the conspiracy.
We must not now forget that it was the leading people in the Democratic and Republican Parties who gave their support, either openly or by silence, to the Nixon conspiracy—as long as that conspiracy was directed against the working people, the people who are the victims of class and racial oppression. In fact, they continue to support the Nixon policies of taxing the poor, of runaway inflation, racism, and the $100 billion military budget. And at this very moment, it is these same forces of monopoly capital, the corporate kingmakers, who have supported Nixon, who are making the decisions about replacement. 2019 marks a century since the founding of the Communist Party USA. To commemorate the anniversary of the longest surviving socialist organization in the United States, People’s World has launched the article series: 100 Years of the Communist Party USA. Read the other articles published in the series. The people must not be fooled by the last-minute fascist and ultra-rights jumpers on the bandwagon [right-wing forces abandoning Nixon – Ed.]. Like rats, they are jumping off a sinking ship. They want to use the crisis to turn the country into even more fascist-like channels. The people must be alerted to the new conspiracy that is being spun by the Cold War gang—who are trying to use the exit of Nixon to turn the country back into the Cold War channels with its policies of tension and nuclear brinkmanship. The exit of Nixon must be a new beginning. It is a moment for a people’s crisis alert. This is a moment when the people must take a deeper look at the questions of who runs our government, our economy, and our lives. What is the source of corruption? Of the endless crises? The fraudulent 1972 elections were a definite part of the Nixon conspiracy. The forced resignation of a president is without precedent. The election fraud can be undone only by an immediate, unprecedented, new mid-term presidential election. Without such election, we will have a corporate-appointed, non-elected president and vice president [Nixon’s vice president and successor, Gerald Ford, had been appointed to the role after Nixon’s election and was not himself elected by the voters. –Ed.]. Only a militant, people’s democratic movement can safeguard the democratic rights and institutions of our country. Only a united people’s movement can turn the country around by destroying the grip the big corporations have on our country. “Impeach Nixon” election materials from the 1972 CPUSA presidential campaign. Only a fighting people’s movement can guarantee that the United States will move toward détente [with the Soviet Union]. Only a people’s movement can fight to cancel the $100 billion war budget. Only a people’s movement can end the disastrous course of inflation. Only a people’s movement can end the rise of racism. As long as the monopoly corporations are the masters of our land, there will always be the danger of reactionary, anti-democratic conspiracies. There will always be the ugly pressures of racism, escalating prices and taxes, and economic crises. This can be a new beginning if it results in a new unity—a unity of all democratic forces, a unity of all working-class forces, a unity of the racially oppressed, a unity of peace forces, and a unity of the younger generation. August 9, 1974 TAGS: Communist Party C
Slaveowners monopoly to Finance Monopoly Capital - Imperialism
Slaveowners were superptifiteering the monopoly capitalists of their place and time.
https://www.cpusa.org/article/from-anti-slavery-to-the-anti-monopoly-strategy/
What It Means to Be a Communist
https://www.marxists.org/archive/winston/1951/02/what-it-means-be-communist.htm
What It Means to Be a Communist
by HENRY WINSTON
Written: February, 1951.
Source: Pamphlet published by New Century Publishers, 832 Broadway, New York 3, N.Y. February, 1951.
Transcription: 2021 by Gavin G.
Markup: 2021 by Philip Mooney
Public Domain: Marxist Internet Archive 2021. This work is completely free.
Contents
Introduction
I. People - The Most Valuable Capital
Integration of Cadres Needed
II. Down the Road to Betrayal
Loses Communist Perspective
Sees Only Power of Enemies
Rationalization for Betrayal
III. Communists - People of a Special Mold
We Must Perfect Our Leninist Methods
IV. Profile of a Bureaucrat
Bureaucrat Ignores the Workers
Bureaucrat Refuses to Work Collectively
Introduction
The Foley Square trial and the McCarran Act have brought many questions about the internal life of the Communist Party to the attention of the general public. What is the real truth about the Party’s attitude toward its individual members? How does it approach the problem of their education? How does it select and train leaders?
According to those who seek to destroy the Bill of Rights, On the ground that there is “no other way” to save our country from a fictitious “Communist conspiracy,” the vanguard party of the American working class is a “training school for saboteurs and spies.”
We can think of no more effective way to nail this Hitlerite Big Lie than by giving wide distribution to that section of Henry Winston’s report to the 15th National Convention of the Communist Party which deals with the training of Communist cadres.
For here the National Organization Secretary of the Party comes to grips with key questions of Communist concepts of personal integrity, loyalty to and confidence in the working class, and the relations between membership and leadership which are at the heart of all the Party’s concern for the ideological development of its individual members.
Henry Winston’s vivid portrait of a certain Communist who followed the step-by-step course to personal corruption and class betrayal is an object lesson of concern to all workers, non-Communist as well as Communist. It dramatizes the high standards of devotion to the workers and common people, of ceaseless struggle against Big Business ideology and influence, which the Communist Party seeks to instill in all its members and followers.
In making this portion of the 15th National Convention Proceedings available in pamphlet form, we believe that it will be of invaluable use not only to all Communists but also to many non-Communist shop workers and fighters for peace, who seek to learn the truth about the Communist Party.
I. People - The Most Valuable Capital
In the face of the unprecedented attacks by Big Business reaction, our Party members have fought courageously and won the respect of hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the country. Communists have manned picketlines in the face of growing terror. They have led successful united front actions against the Peekskill mobsters. Mothers with babes in arms have led united front actions for outlawing the atom bomb and for seating People’s China in the U.N. In meeting halls and on street corners, actions have been organized to defend peace, to fight for U.S.-Soviet collaboration, to defeat the McCarran Bill, to repeal Taft-Hartley, and stop police killings of Negro men and women. Communists have fought for the people’s rights to assemble and voice their opinions.
On every front Communist leaders of groups and clubs, section and county organizations, as well as the leaders of our State and National Committees, have defended courageously the democratic liberties of the American people against the threat of war and fascism and have waged a tireless and vigorous struggle for peace. Our Party has stood up, with the membership rallying as one.
It became necessary to readjust the organization of our Party so that it could more effectively influence and organize the masses of working people. We had to break down the clubs of our Party into smaller ones. This has resulted in a mass expansion of cadres leading the basic Party organization. Hundreds and hundreds of new people have for the first time assumed posts of leadership at the head of our smaller clubs.
This poses in a new way the need for unfolding a cadre training program. When we speak of cadre training, we do not have in mind any idea of learning by rote. The first element in a cadre training program must be the active involvement of leadership and membership in the struggles of the working class, and this must be based upon a mastery of our Party’s policies. But to master these policies our cadre must be politically and organizationally integrated in the life of the Party, and fully involved in the formulation of policies and in the fight for their execution.
The first element in cadre training and development is the political relationship of leadership to membership based on the involvement of clubs in the formulation of policy, and on the fight for the execution of those policies through systematic political checkup. This becomes very vital for us today, when a new cadre is blossoming forth.
Integration of Cadres Needed
We should realize that we have not succeeded in integrating both the new and the old cadres on all levels of leadership. Let me cite an instance:
Here is a shop worker, a jewel in our Party, a comrade who has spent more than twenty-five years in the movement. She works during the day. She comes from work directly to the office, eager to participate in discussions and find out what is new, so as to give more effective leadership among the workers in her industry. But a number of policy and tactical questions have already been discussed during the day. When this comrade comes in, there is no disposition to discuss questions already settled. There is no attempt to readjust schedules of the full-timers in order to assure the contribution of this comrade who comes fresh from the shop. This particular situation goes on for more than six weeks.
Finally, the comrade comes to the conclusion that you have to be a “glib talker” or “know someone” in order to be able to break through and make a contribution.
Another case: I received a letter from a woman comrade who appealed to me to intervene. She wrote: “I have no assignment in these days, after 28 years in the movement. [ was released from my last assignment and told that I would be given a new task in a few days. Three weeks have passed and I have not heard from the State organisation. I hate to be idle in this period.”
If we look around, we will find many cadres, who pioneered in the building of our Party anxious to be active in political and organizational work now. But these comrades have not been placed. Perhaps many such older comrades cannot keep the same pace as the younger ones, but then, a fast pace is not the only element we need today.
The fight to blend the old and the new presents itself as a must for our Party. This valuable capital must be made the most of so that the younger cadres can learn from the old, and the older cadres can learn from the new.
The training of cadres also requires a struggle against Right-opportunist and “Left”-sectarian tendencies. Under the pressure of enemy blows, there will be casualties, and we should not be taken by surprise. But lying at the bottom of such casualties are bourgeois influences which have captured those individuals and shaken their confidence in the working class.
II. Down the Road to Betrayal
Let me give you an example of one such individual, as reported by one comrade whom we will call John Daniels.
He is a man who reads Lenin and considers himself a man of principle-a Communist in the true sense. In the days of open-shop terror, he started out as a worker, a rank-and-file Communist. He had to build his union through “underground” groups of workers, starting from scratch in an unorganized field. The trust he worked for was merciless. It maintained a company union and tolerated no independent organization. After many struggles in the early ‘30s, finally in ‘36 and ‘37, with the upsurge of labor in this country, his union arrived. It gained recognition, broke the company union, established itself. Naturally, he found himself in the top leadership of the union.
Times were such that many less experienced and conscientious than he were able to build unions because the masses were clamouring for organization. Numerous were the Communists who had built union organization in shop after shop, during that period. Yet he began to attribute the success of his union to his own genius. Less and less he came to depend on his Party club. He merely took it for granted that in every department where there was a Party member the interests of the union would be well cared for.
Then, little by little, he began to see the Party club in a new light. He found he could do without the Party members very nicely. Every now and then he needed them when he had to win an election. But otherwise, the club was pretty much of a nuisance. In the old days, he had looked at his comrades and had seen great courage under the most difficult conditions, absolute dependability, native wisdom, self-sacrifice and devotion. He now saw different traits among them. They seemed inarticulate, had little finesse, sometimes didn’t agree with him and gave their first loyalty to the defense of the workers’ interests. When he wanted advice now, he could get it from “better brains.” He believed that to a large extent the Party relied on him for a correct policy in the union. He did not see the need for a mass Party in the industry, because, said he, the union leadership is more capable, more effective in bringing the policies of the Party to the workers.
In the union he made smart moves. He had a good lawyer. He got gains for the workers without much difficulty and with little struggle. Sometimes, it was not even necessary to mobilize the workers in action to back up the negotiations. The brief was filed, the arguments were made around the table. Things were going fine. He was in the mainstream - not only in the labor movement, but generally. Mrs. Roosevelt invited him to lunch with her now and then. And life was good. There were problems, difficulties, but if he was on the ball and shrewd enough, he could maneuver.
Loses Communist Perspective
He naturally began to lose Communist perspective. He began to get flabby. Suddenly - boom! The bourgeoisie launched a ferocious drive against the labor movement. Somehow, the smart negotiations no longer worked. They didn’t produce. He could get practically nothing from the companies except through a real fight. The reactionary drive supported by Social-Democracy and other company agents began to make inroads among the membership. A new alignment took place in the labor movement. Left-Center unity was broken. And he not only had to face the attacks of the trusts, but also the C.I.O. leadership - the Murrays and Reuthers. The A.C.T.U. began to play a role and challenge his leadership. He had to deliver the bacon if he was to retain the leadership of the union.
In the meantime, the old militancy of the union has been dulled. The Party organization has been weakened. The old type of union organizer who built the union when the going was tough has been retrained into a Philadelphia lawyer or has been changed altogether. Now our man faces a difficult problem. What to do?
Mind you, this guy is not merely trying to hold on to his job - at least, not consciously. He is really very much worried about the danger of his own and the Party’s isolation from the masses. He must avoid that at all costs. In the early days he knew that workers got nothing without a fight. Though he faced the powerful trust and a company union, though he looked at the workers and saw inertia, disunity and backwardness, yet he knew that “there was gold in them thar hills.”
His whole life and work in those early days was based on the fact that he relied on the workers. He called on them to overcome their disunity. He aroused their courage, called for self-sacrifice, knew that eventually it would be forthcoming. He had unbounded faith in eventual victory. In fact, that was what gave him the courage to withstand poverty and starvation, police clubs and injunctions. He was not afraid of any isolation because he considered an attack on him by a labor faker as the greatest tribute. He built his cadres from among the workers. And as long as he had the respect of the workers, he felt he was anything but isolated.
Sees Only Power of Enemies
Now, in a new situation, he found a great deal of fat around his political mid-section. Now, all he sees is the ignorance of the workers, their disunity, their reluctance to lose their jobs. They don’t understand. And he doesn’t feel he can make them understand. Yet, they expect him to get something for them. He is convinced they are not going to fight. Above all, he sees the power of the enemy. He can see no way of breaking that power to force even the slightest concession. The only way to get concessions is through some deal. But that is no longer easy, either. One way is to join the Murrays and Careys and then life will be much easier.
But he is a “man with a conscience.” He hates a rat. He therefore sees no way out, has no perspective, and loses his bearings completely. He begins to rationalize.
After all, Socialism is clearly not on the order of the day. So what is wrong with leaving the future to the future and dealing today with the problems of today, giving honest, conscientious leadership to the workers on economic issues and leaving political questions to the Party?
And what is this honest, conscientious leadership? It turns out to be: Get anything you can that the company is willing to give. Get anything you can get without a fight and with no politics. Well, perhaps that will include support to the Marshall Plan, the U.S. invasion of Korea, and support for anything Murray orders you to support-because refusal to accept any part of C.I.O. policy means bringing politics into the union.
Rationalization for Betrayal
To console his conscience he needs an elaborate rationalization, so that he may go down the road of betrayal and still look in the mirror. So he says: The Communist Parties in Europe are really doing a fine job. I am proud of them. But the American Communist Party - that’s a horse of a different color. Later, he says: I accept the leadership of the Party on general policy, but on specific tactics and propositions, why that’s inference. The Party is trying to run the union for me. Then he adds: I fully recognize the role of the Party, especially on general policy. The trouble is that at present we have a Party leadership that is inexperienced and is steering a wrong course. I am sure the Party will correct itself in time. But in the meantime, I am not going to lose my position of leadership in the union.
Pretty soon he says: What is wrong with making a deal with O’Dwyer on the 10-cent fare if that is the only way to improve the conditions of the workers. After all, the business of the union is to get wage increases. Let the Communist Party or the A.L.P. handle the high cost of living. A day comes when he also says: What is wrong with doing a little Red-baiting. It’s only lip-service. Billions of reactionary words are poured into the minds of the workers every day. Will my few words make any difference? There is so much war-mongering propaganda that my weak criticism of the Soviet Union couldn’t possibly make a difference. Yet it may win the election or save the union.
He now finds that some of his best friends of the earlier days are cooling off to him. He seeks new allies. To please his new allies he begins to remove from positions of leadership some of his old stalwarts. And for the same reason, it becomes necessary to ease some rank-and-file militants out of their jobs and, in fact, out of the industry. He begins to make peace with Murray. But that’s not simple, either. How do Mr. Murray and J. Edgar Hoover know this is not another “Communist Trick”? Well, there is but one way to convince them - and now he denounces the Party and its work. As a token of good faith, he names a few names. From here on out, the road all the way down is clear.
This is the evolution of a betrayal of working-class trust.
III. Communists - People of a Special Mold
I cite this example because there have been others who deserted the struggle in the past two years. And the lesson to be drawn is the need for a merciless struggle for Communist methods and practices and against every manifestation of opportunism - a merciless struggle to enhance the strength of the workers in the industries, involving them democratically in the struggle of their unions, inspiring them, fighting to create confidence in the working class, not only on the economic front, but in the general democratic struggle. And all this will, at the same time, make it more difficult for the workers to be taken in by charlatans
This example is important for us because it raises many serious questions in the fight for a correct cadre policy. Chief among them is the need to guarantee that the closest ties are maintained between leadership and membership, and with the mass of the workers. When these ties are broken, then it is impossible to continue in the position of leadership. For the job of leadership is not alone to guide and direct the work of others - it is also necessary to learn from others - learn from the members and the workers. Separation from the membership, from the workers, can result only in bureaucracy, in placing oneself above the Party, above the interests of the workers.
Secondly, it is necessary to show the utmost vigilance in noting and checking the corrupting influences of our present day society on the thinking and living habits of some comrades, to expose these influences in the interest of the comrade himself, but primarily in the interest of the Party as a whole.
Thirdly, it is necessary to eliminate all self-complacency, cliquish and “family circle” atmosphere in relationships between Communists, especially rooting out all elements of false praise and flattery. For, as one wise comrade put it, flattery corrupts not only the flattered but the flatterer as well. Of course, we must continue to guard against any annihilating type of criticism which undermines the confidence and abilities of our cadres, which creates subjective personal reactions hindering their growth and development.
Fourthly, it is necessary to apply criticism and self-criticism in the moulding of Party cadres. Criticism and self criticism are not to be applied on occasions - on holidays - so to speak. They must be applied daily, as indispensable weapons in the examination of the work of our Party and the individual cadres, with the aim of isolating our errors and weaknesses, and helping comrades overcome their weaknesses and mistakes at the time the mistakes are committed. Only by learning the lessons from mistakes can our Party cadres develop Communist methods, habits, and qualities of leadership.
Finally, only those leaders can withstand the pressures of enemy ideology, can relentlessly fight against opportunism in practice, who constantly strive to master Marxism-Leninism the great liberating science of the working class, which alone gives us the confidence in the inevitable victory of the working class, headed by its Communist vanguard. Those who see only backwardness, immobility and disunity in the working class, are bound to ignore the essential truth that it is the working class that possesses all the necessary qualities to bring about the transformation of society, and build Socialism.
In connection with a sound cadre policy, our Party must undertake an intensive campaign of schools, classes and the organization of self-study for the whole of our membership. We need week-end classes, one-week classes, two-week classes, full-time schools of longer duration, with the aim of involving the entire Party. These classes should be based upon a study of our Party’s policies, beginning with this Convention, and should be undertaken to deepen the politid line of our Party on the basis of the classics of our movement. This should not be a short-time campaign but a permanent part of the training and development of Communist leadership.
We Must Perfect Our Leninist Methods
Basic to the realization of the line we formulate here is the need for perfecting our style of work - of mastering the Leninist method of work. This requires a conscious development of Communist zeal as against slovenly routinism in our work. It means further to develop collective work as against individualistic petty-bourgeois habits and methods of work.
The fight for a Leninist style of work also requires the widest development of criticism and self-criticism, as a constant practice in the work of the Party. Such criticism and self-criticism should include a political check-up on our decisions to help eliminate sloppy methods and liberalism in our work, and assure that decisions are not honored in the breach, but in the observance.
Moreover, this new style of work envisages the fight for the purity of our Party, the weeding out of unhealthy anti-Party elements on the basis of vigilance, which is possible if the entire Party is involved in this struggle. These are the main elements that must be developed insofar as style of work is concerned.
However, we can realize this only if a struggle is waged against bureaucratic methods of work.
IV. Profile of a Bureaucrat
I should like to give this Convention the physiognomy of a bureaucrat.
When you try to tell the bureaucrat something he listens carefully for about fifteen seconds. Then he proceeds to tell you. Sometimes, he appears to hear you through with the closest attention. But his mind is really off on more important matters. And when you finish, the bureaucrat neatly puts you in your place by saying of your views: “That’s obvious.”
The bureaucrat really believes that collective discussions are a waste of time because, since he already knows all the answers anyway, he could really spend his time better in other ways. Sometimes he welcomes discussions - not so much to develop a collective opinion, as to develop a collective audience for his own views. Or, when he listens to others in a discussion, it is not so that he may learn from others, but so that he may tell others what is wrong with them. Often, the bureaucrat considers informal discussion an intrusion on his private thoughts and brushes them aside with the proposal that: “We must have a formal discussion of that.” To the bureaucrat, collective work is limited to formal discussion. One thing that escapes him entirely is that the basis of all collective work is the collection of views of the masses, is collective work with the masses.
Nothing is easier for the bureaucrat to figure out than what the workers should be struggling for. If they don’t struggle, when and how he believes they should, he comes to the conclusion either that there is something wrong with the workers, or there is something wrong with those who are supposed to carry out his directives among the workers, or there is just something wrong with everybody except himself.
Bureaucrat Ignores the Workers
He doesn’t understand that the fundamental thing is to know what disturbs the workers - to know around what issue the workers are ready to struggle, and that his job is to help them in their struggle, to help them find the channel for expressing their needs and desires. He fails to realize that his job is to learn from the workers not only about the issues, but even the organizational forms that are appropriate. To help infuse that struggle with a Marxist content, not to impose his preconceived concept of the struggle upon them. And through all of these to bring leadership and to win leadership.
The bureaucrat believes that the use of book terminology marks him as a veteran. He does not worry whether anybody understands him when he talks. He is afraid that if he talks to a new member in terms that the new member will understand, he himself might be mistaken for an equal of that new member. It never occurs to him that a new member may know much more than he does about the masses from whom he has long been isolated. And, of course, it never occurs to him that he himself has as much to learn from the masses.
When the bureaucrat speaks or writes for an audience, he is less concerned with how his messages may help them, than with how his words may impress his audience with his own worth. The bureaucrat resents having his work criticized; if he ever makes mistakes, they are usually minor ones, of little importance. His main mistake, he usually believes, is in not having caught the mistakes of others quickly enough. He believes he is too tolerant of the weaknesses of others and that others are too intolerant of his own weaknesses.
The bureaucrat either ignores organizational problems entirely, or believes the answer to every problem is solely organizational.
Since his problem never gets solved, he will continue to revise his previous organizational answers, ignoring the fact that the political answers must come first, and that these dictate the proper organizational forms.
When the bureaucrat finds himself catapulted among the masses by force of circumstances, he believes he will be instantly recognized as God’s gift to the working man. The more insulated he has been from the masses in the past, the more the masses will appreciate the fact that he is coming among them now, and the more readily will they greet every word of wisdom issuing from his lips.
Bureaucrat Refuses to Work Collectively
Among the masses, the bureaucrat exhibits the same traits as he does in the Party organization. In moments of crisis or emergency, he feels that collective work can only hold up getting things done. In a strike, for example, he feels that meetings of a strike committee, or a Party club, interfere with all the work that has to be done. The time for collective discussion is after the emergency is over, when there is the leisure to discuss collectively how to have avoided the mistakes that collective work at the time might have prevented.
The bureaucrat in the union sees no grievances among the workers, either because he has none himself, or because the settling of grievances can have an unsettling effect upon his own comfortable routine. He views himself as someone who services the union, like a doctor, instead of a leader of struggle.
Of course, the perfect bureaucrat whom I have here sketched does not exist. In fact, he could not exist because he would burst from his own self-importance and evaporate into thin air. But little pieces of him, of varying size, do exist in almost everyone of us. And to the extent that they do, they act as a barrier to the realization of the mass line this convention is formulating.
This means that in the realization of our Party’s policies there must be put in practice a method of work in which leadership has direct contact with the basic organs of the Party and in the first place, the shop club of the Party. The implementation of this line means that every leader of our National Committee, of the State Committees, of County and Section Committees, must develop an intimate relation with, must thoroughly master the problems of, and give concrete guidance to, our comrades working in the shops.
The present period requires that we depend less and less upon full-time cadre, but give greater weight to volunteer, non-full-time workers on the job, assisting them in their development, helping in their training for leadership among the masses. The point that we are making is the need to develop the maximum initiative from below in our clubs, to enable them to make policy decisions as well as carry out their execution. The underlying principle here involved is indestructible confidence in the working class - in the basic proletarian members and cadres of our Party.
There’s more evidence that the economic narrative could be undergoing a major shift.
For months, we’ve been living in an economy in which strong demand has been met with lagging supply, causing inflation inflation to surge. We now appear to be shifting to a phase where demand growth is cooling and supply chains are easing, which should cause inflation to come down.
According to Census Bureau data released Wednesday, orders for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft — a.k.a. core capex or business investment — climbed 0.3% to a record $73.1 billion in April.
While the 0.3% growth rate represents a deceleration from the 1.1% rate in March, it’s the kind of slowing that’s welcome news for folks like the Federal Reserve, which is actively working to cool economic growth in its effort to bring down inflation.
“That is consistent with our view that economic activity is bending rather than breaking under the impact of higher rates,” Michael Pearce, senior U.S. economist for Capital Economics, said in a note on Wednesday.
Core capex growth represents a massive economic tailwind. And the fact that it continues to grow, albeit at a decelerating pace, is a good sign for economy-wide growth.
According to S&P Global Flash US Manufacturing PMI report released on Wednesday, these emerging economic trends have continued into May. Specifically, the composite output index fell to a four-month low of 53.8 in May. For this index, any reading above 50 signals growth, and so the declining number suggests growth is decelerating.
“Growth has slowed since peaking in March, most notably in the service sector, as pent up demand following the reopening of the economy after the Omicron wave shows signs of waning,” Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, wrote on Wednesday.
Consumer spending growth cools as excess savings get tapped
Growth appears to be cooling on the consumer front too.
According to a BEA report released Friday, personal consumption expenditures (i.e., consumer spending) increased by 0.9% in April from the prior month to new record levels. However, this was a healthy deceleration from March’s 1.4% growth rate.
The spending came as the saving rate (i.e., the difference between income and spending) fell to its lowest level since September 2008.
While this development on its own is unsettling, it comes after consumers spent over two years accumulating over $2 trillion in excess savings.
“It looks like households have been eating into the ‘excess saving’ that was built up at earlier stages of the pandemic in order to fuel consumer spending in recent months,” Daniel Silver, economist at JPMorgan, wrote in a note on Friday.
As we’ve discussed frequently on TKer, these excess savings represent a massive economic tailwind. For a while, you could argue that it was exacerbating inflation. But now it appears to be bolstering spending as the economy slows.
News of a slowdown is not exactly the kind of thing that warrants a celebratory tone. But it’s exactly the kind of thing that should help bring inflation down.
More signs that supply chains are easing
S&P’s PMI report also suggested there could be some daylight in the disrupted supply chains.
“Manufacturers in particular also report that capacity continues to be constrained by supply shortages, though these bottlenecks showed further encouraging signs of easing,“ S&P’s Williamson said (emphasis added).
It’s also been a while since we’ve heard about ships idling outside of ports waiting to be unloaded.
“U.S. port data suggest easing backlogs,” JPMorgan economists wrote last week. “Notable examples are the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which process about 40% of total imports into the US.”
And it’s not just ocean freight that’s loosened. Trucking freight seems to be loosening too.
According to BofA’s Truck Shipper Survey for the week ending May 19, “shippers find it much easier to secure capacity (its highest level since June 2020).“
Unfortunately, at least some of these signs of loosening supply chains can be explained by easing demand for goods. But again, this is the dynamic that should make for easing inflation.
More signs that the labor market is cooling
Bloomberg reported that tech behemoth Microsoft was slowing hiring in its Windows, Office, and Teams businesses.
PayPal laid off 83 employees at its headquarters in San Jose.
These are anecdotes. But the developments are in line with the Fed’s aim of cooling inflation by first cooling the labor market.
Subscribe now
Signs that inflation peaked
Last month, I wrote about how economists across the board were saying that inflation — as measured by year-over-year increases in prices — had peaked.
On Friday, we got more evidence to confirm that may be the case.
The core PCE price index — the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation — climbed 4.9% in April from a year ago. This is down from the 5.2% rate in March and the 5.3% peak rate in February.
On a month-over-month basis, the core PCE price index has climbed by a cool 0.3% over the past three months.
It’s still too early to claim victory on inflation
“Many have touted March as the peak in inflation and are looking for inflation to cool from here,” Grant Thornton Chief Economist Diane Swonk said on Friday.. “We are not as convinced given the risks we still face due to the war in Ukraine and lockdowns in China. Either way, it is important to note that any cooling we see will have a high floor. Both the overall and core PCE indices remain well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.”
Indeed, inflation has a long way to go to get to 2% from 4.9%.
And so, we’ll have to keep an eye on the incoming data to see if a major shift in the economic narrative is indeed underway.
—
More from TKer:
Why consumers and businesses will prevent any slowdown from becoming economic calamity💰
The complicated mess of the markets and economy, explained 🧩
Bear markets and a truth about investing 🐻
Good news is bad news in the economy right now 🙃
Rearview 🪞
📈 Stocks surge, ending 7-week losing streak: The S&P 500 rallied 6.6% last week, ending a seven-week losing streak. It was the biggest one-week gain since November 2020. The index is now down 13.3% from its January 3 closing high of 4796.56, but 6.6% above its May 19 closing low of 3,900.79. For more on market volatility, read this and this. If you wanna read up on bear markets, read this.
💰 Corporate insiders are buying their companies’ stock: From JPMorgan: “…corporate insiders are holding a non-consensus view across most sectors and actively buying the dip with net insider buying activity reaching 1STDev above trend level.“
📈 Mortgage rates are still high, but tick down: The average rate for the 30-year fixed rate mortgage declined to 5.10% from 5.25% the week prior. Here’s Freddie Mac: “Mortgage rates decreased for the second week in a row due to multiple headwinds facing the economy. Despite the recent moderation in rates, the housing market has clearly slowed, and the deceleration is spreading to other segments of the economy, such as consumer spending on durable goods.“
🏡 New home sales slump: Sales of newly built homes fell 16.6% month-over-month to an annual rate of 591,000 units, according to Census Bureau data.
😤 Consumer sentiment tumbles: The University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment fell to 58.4 in May, its lowest level since August 2011. From the survey: “This recent drop was largely driven by continued negative views on current buying conditions for houses and durables, as well as consumers’ future outlook for the economy, primarily due to concerns over inflation.“
Keep in mind that deteriorating sentiment hasn’t come with a decline in spending in recent months. For more on sentiment, read this.
🛫 People are doing stuff: From Yahoo Finance’s Emily McCormick: “On Thursday, both Southwest Airlines and JetBlue raised their quarterly guidance, citing strong demand heading into the critical summer travel season. Both upward revisions came just weeks after the companies initially reported their forecasts last month.“
This follows a similar announcement from United Airlines last week. Altogether, it’s apparent that people are refusing to put their lives on hold.
Up the road 🛣
It’s jobs week in America. Wednesday comes with the April Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey and Friday comes with the April employment report. Employment growth has been very strong and record-high job openings have enabled workers to earning higher wages.
However, there are nearly two job openings per unemployed. This good news is being blamed for high inflation, which is bad, which is what the Fed is aiming to address with tighter monetary policy.
U.S. financial markets will be closed on Monday for Memorial Day.
Sam Ro is the founder of Tker.com. Follow him on Twitter at @SamRo.
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
National Chair of the Communist Party, Henry Winston. The article below is taken from Winston’s 1973 book, Strategy for a Black Agenda.
2012 was the 101st year since the birth of the former National Chair of the Communist Party, Henry Winston. The article below is taken from Winston’s 1973 book, Strategy for a Black Agenda. It is a critique of the strategy and tactics necessary to advance the revolutionary process in the face of right-wing extremism and white supremacy from the time of slavery to the upsurge of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Although the world has changed since the book was first published, it continues to offer many lessons for fighting right-wing extremism today and moving forward along the road to socialism.
Henry Winston, born in Mississippi, became active in the unemployed struggles of the 1930s and soon became a leader in the Young Communist League. He worked with William L Patterson and others to help free the Scottsboro defendants, displaying extraordinary political and organizational skills.
In the 1950s he served eight years in prison under the Smith Act, during which time he lost his sight because of medical neglect. A campaign to win his release was waged in the U.S. and abroad. Writer Richard Wright headed a French/American committee to free him and his sentence was finally commuted by President John F Kennedy.
On learning of Winston’s death in 1986, African National Congress leader Alfred Nzo remarked, “We had come to regard Winston as one of our own.”
Download this article to print and distribute---
"Now, over a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, racism and oppression are more than ever essential to the ruling class, as U.S. state monopoly capitalism enters a new and more acute phase of the crisis and decline of capitalism. U.S. imperialism, facing a world in which the forces of socialism and class and national liberation are on the ascendancy, and in which foreign imperialist powers are challenging its domination, certainly can’t do today what the slave power was unable to do over 100 years ago – solve its problems through aggression and expansion.
The monopolists are equally unable to solve their problems at home, where they are not only imposing a wage freeze, but are also attempting to impose a far more repressive racist freeze on Black liberation struggles than that of the McCarthy period.
By perpetuating and intensifying racism, monopoly aims to stop the advance of the Black liberation movement, to destroy organized labor and suppress every struggle of the oppressed and exploited.
Monopoly’s New Assault
Monopoly capital, within today’s context, aims to repeat the kind of assault on the people’s rights that led to the betrayal of Reconstruction. Reaction of that period, through racism and violence, prepared the way for the Supreme Court to void the Civil Rights Act of 1875, whose passage had been won by the supporters of Reconstruction to solidify the gains they had made. Reaction’s aim then was to push the country into a long era of segregation and semislavery.
Today state monopoly capitalism seeks to wipe out every trace of the struggles of the recent Civil Rights Decade. The increasing political repression, the attempted frameup of Angela Davis and other political prisoners, Nixon’s racist nominations to the Supreme Court, are all part of monopoly’s attempt to obliterate every advance made through Black and white struggle since Reconstruction was destroyed.
The betrayal of Reconstruction, it should be remembered, was the signal for a three-sided attack against the masses. The Old Slave Codes were replaced by the new Black Codes, and the former chattel slaves were forced into semi-slavery, segregation and racist oppression. At the same time, the escalation of the military plunder and massacre of the Indians was entering a climactic stage. And simultaneously, the courts that upheld the betrayal of Emancipation were declaring that workers, Black and white, did not have the right to organize. In other words, the courts had not only revived Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s pre-Civil War doctrine that the Black man “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” They had also extended this into another phase of repression — that labor, whatever its color, had no rights that capital was bound to respect.
In 1875, when the robber barons were joining with the former slave owners to prepare for the 1877 betrayal of Reconstruction, Judge Holden Owen, presiding over the trial of striking Pennsylvania miners, declared: “Any agreement, combination or confederation to increase the price of any vendible commodity, merchandise or anything else is a conspiracy under the laws of the U.S.” Of course, this doctrine — like Nixon’s wage-“price” freeze — was applied only to labor, never to the capitalists’ profits.
Because of the perpetuation of racism and the resulting division between the triply-oppressed Black workers and the exploited white workers, it took more than 60 years of struggle against the bosses’ government-supported violence to win the right to organize. Today, the rights of labor are once again under grave attack, and labor’s fate, as in the past, is inseparably bound up with that of the Black liberation movement.
Dimensions of the Crisis
The crisis of poverty and unemployment Black Americans now face is, save for the almost total genocidal elimination of American Indians, without precedent for any segment of this country’s population.
“The unemployment rate among Black workers in the ghetto now exceeds the general rate of unemployment of the entire nation during the depression of the 1930’s,” reported Herbert Hill, NAACP Labor Secretary, at the organization’s 1971 National Convention.
“The rate of unemployment of Black workers in 25 major centers of urban non-white population concentration is now between 25 per cent and 40 per cent,” stated Hill, “and the unemployment rate for Black youth will be in excess of 50 per cent by the middle of this summer. In 1933, the national unemployment rate was 24.9 per cent, the highest officially recorded unemployment in the history of the United States.” Hill also pointed out that tens of thousands of Black workers are classified as employed but never have an income that could lift them above the poverty level.
Yet, stark as this statistical report is, it cannot possibly convey the disaster of racism, poverty and oppression affecting every aspect of the lives of Black Americans today. The end of the decade of civil rights struggles left the Black masses with a feeling of vast frustration; not only had their condition failed to improve, it had worsened.
This frustration was simultaneously experienced by many militant young fighters, Black and white, whose despair turned to disillusion with the preceding years of struggle. They were unable to differentiate the gains of the Civil Rights Decade – in terms of unity, militant mass action and consciousness – from the deepening crisis. They did not realize that under capitalism the most important fruit of struggle is the people’s advance in unity and consciousness. In their frustration, they attacked the Civil Rights struggle itself, instead of seeing that it had created a bridge to the period ahead.
Two-Sided Pressure on King
Thus, even before the hunger and frustration of Black masses led to the spontaneous outbursts in Watts, Detroit and Newark, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. encountered attacks not only from reaction but from segments of militant youth under the influence of sectarianism and pseudo-revolutionism.
While the open attacks from the latter were a relatively new development, King had long experienced pressure from the establishment liberals, the NAACP, the Urban League and others to limit mass struggle and to rely on the courts and “friends” within the two major parties. In this period as the war in Vietnam continued and domestic conditions worsened — this pressure from the Right increased, and was particularly aimed at preventing King from linking the Black liberation movement with the anti-war struggle.
At the same time, the frustrations of radical youth were intensified by the escalation of the Vietnam war in 1965 — immediately after the new Civil Rights Act was passed. Many Black and white radicals, including Carmichael, Cleaver, Newton, Forman and Hayden, began to step up their attacks on the Civil Rights struggle. They placed themselves in opposition to King, who was determined not to abandon, but to strengthen, the forces of the Civil Rights Decade, to deepen and broaden them into a realignment that could carry the struggle against poverty and racist oppression to a new level.
If King was not without error in coping with pressure from the Right, and later with that of the pseudo-radicals, his overall record was one of firm adherence to militant non-violent mass struggle. The maturing of his leadership, his recognition of the decisive role of the working class, his evolvement toward an anti-imperialist position, all of his steady and remarkable growth reflected his rejection of both the opportunist pressures to limit mass struggle and the super-revolutionary pressures to substitute the rhetoric of violence for the power of mass struggle.
King has been dead more than five years, but the attacks on his strategy and objectives continue from the Right and the pseudo-left. In fact, while Nixon is bent on destroying the advances of the Civil Rights Decade, it is ironic that the new “revolutionists” are so certain there is nothing worth saving from it! But Nixon recognizes — and fears — what the super-militants refuse to see — the Civil Rights Decade created the pre-conditions for the much higher level of struggle needed in the period ahead.
Pressing for a New Beginning
When King was assassinated in the spring of 1968, he was leading the strike of the predominantly Black sanitation workers of Memphis. His commitment to this courageous working-class struggle was a vibrant indication that, in pressing for a new beginning in the strategy against racist oppression, poverty and war, he had come to a full realization of the meaning of his first major struggle, the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. This landmark battle was sparked by Mrs. Rosa Lee Parks, a Black working-class woman, and carried on with courage and tenacity by, primarily, Black working class men and women. In the course of a decade of leadership of the liberation struggle, King came to understand that it was workers, more than any other stratum, who possess these qualities.
King recognized that since these special qualities of workers had brought about the historic turning point in Montgomery, leading to the nationwide involvement of many other sections of the population, including Black and white youth in the struggle for equal rights, the new stage — the struggle for jobs, for an end to poverty, racism and war — demanded a new strategy based on the working class, Black and white.
Although King’s views were not identical with the Marxist conception of the role of the working class — which sees this class not only as the main social force but as the leader in the anti-monopoly struggle — he had come steadily closer to this outlook. Moreover, it is especially meaningful that King moved in this direction at the time when Marcuse and others, with the assistance of the mass media, were making their greatest headway in promoting the idea among radical youth that the Marxist concept of the working class was outdated.
Democracy, Liberation and Socialism
Another ironic contradiction in the role of many of the new radicals emerged at the end of the Civil Rights Decade: As they lost sight of the historic significance of that period, and more and more heaped abuse on it and its preeminent leader, they became the inadvertent helpmates of the ruling class, whose conscious aim it was and is to distort the meaning of that period to the masses.
It should not be forgotten that for many long decades the ruling class hid the true history of Reconstruction from the people of this country. Now, at a time when the Black liberation movement has forced at least the beginnings of attention to the Reconstruction era, it would indeed be strange if the rhetoric of the pseudo-revolutionaries helped the monopolists conceal the true meaning, the heroism and achievements of the Civil Rights Decade. This must not be allowed to happen.
It is important to understand the meaning of this period, and the vital leadership role in it of Martin Luther King, who came to an awareness of the revolutionary relationship between the fight for rights, for security, for peace and the liberation struggle. Despite their “revolutionary” rhetoric, this is something the pseudo-radicals have failed to comprehend. In rejecting this central meaning of the civil rights struggle, these radicals caricatured the Marxist principles they so often proclaimed.
As Lenin persistently emphasized, the fight for democracy is at the heart of the class struggle. He continually warned against the ideas of those who ignored the connection between the struggle for democracy, national liberation and socialism. In “A Caricature of Marxism,” he wrote:
All democracy consists in the proclamation and realization of rights which under capitalism are realizable only to a very small degree and only relatively. But without the proclamation of these rights, without a struggle to introduce them now, immediately, without training the masses in the spirit of this struggle, socialism is impossible. (Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 74.)
Lenin also emphasized that Marxists must:
. . . know that democracy does not abolish class oppression. It only makes the class struggle more direct, wider, more open and pronounced, and that is what we need. . . . The more democratic the system of government, the clearer will the workers see that the root evil is capitalism, not lack of rights. (Ibid., p. 73.)
Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass
Martin Luther King’s sectarian opponents proclaimed their Marxism, but their policies and practice were contrary to its principles. On the other hand, King’s philosophy was that of moral suasion, but in practice he came to rely more and more on the liberating force of mass struggle as the foundation for Black freedom and social advance for all the oppressed and exploited.
Though not a Marxist, King was steadily moving toward a strategy that tended to coincide with the Marxist-Leninist concept of an anti-monopoly policy, one involving the Black and white sectors of the working class, the Black liberation movement, the Puerto Rican and Chicano masses, and all others opposed to war and poverty. This strategy continues in today’s terms – when the working-class is the leading force – the strategy developed by Frederick Douglass during the Abolitionist period, when he struggled to form a broad coalition of Abolitionists and other strata to break the slave owners’ control of Congress and the Federal Government.
Just as it is impossible to understand the Civil Rights Decade without understanding the role of Martin Luther King, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the antislavery struggle without understanding the role of Frederick Douglass, the great genius and architect of the anti-slavery strategy.
Like King, Douglass matured in struggle against sectarian, separatist and accommodationist tendencies within the movement of his time. As one example, his writings show that throughout the crucial decade of the 1850s, he resisted the separatist alternative of emigrationism which would have weakened the anti-slavery front. Douglass saw that emigrationism, a forerunner of Pan Africanism, objectively meant accommodation to the slave power.
And, as early as 1848, Douglass began to oppose the sectarianism of William Lloyd Garrison and other anti-slavery forces who were against both electoral action and any coalition with those whose objectives stopped short of abolition.
In this connection, Douglass himself had at first feared that the Free Soil movement, which opposed the extension of slavery but did not demand its abolition, might divert from the anti-slavery struggle. However, he came to under stand the objective role of this movement within the anti slavery strategy and called upon the Abolitionists to support it:
We may stand off … and in this way play into the hands of our enemies . . . [or] remain silent and speechless, and let things take their course. . . . In neither of these ways can we go. (The North Star, August 18, 1848.)
While calling for a common front of the Abolitionists with the Free Soilers and others opposed to the extension of slavery, Douglass at the same time relentlessly advanced the Abolitionists’ independent goal of an end to slavery. He wrote:
Free Soilism is lame, halt and blind, while it battles against the spread of slavery, and admits its right to exist anywhere. If it has the right to exist it has the right to grow and spread . . . The only way to put an end to the aggressions of slavery is to put an end to slavery itself. (Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 24, 1855.)
Douglass never relaxed in his drive for the development of the strategy which eventually led to a political realignment, one from which the Republican Party headed by Lincoln emerged to challenge the two major parties of the period. At the time this realignment was in the process of formation, he wrote:
We rejoice in this demonstration . . . to bury party affinities and predilections, and also the political leaders who have hitherto controlled them; to unite in one grand phalanx and go forth, and whip the enemy. (Ibid., July 27, 1855.)
Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx
In 1846, two years before writing the Communist Manifesto, the young Karl Marx had already revealed his deep understanding of the struggle against slavery in the U.S. His thinking closely paralleled the direction Frederick Douglass was taking, and this remarkable parallelism in the liberation strategy of these two giants of world history continued throughout every phase of the anti-slavery struggle.
Marx, too, saw the Free Soil movement as an objective force against slavery, and opposed the sectarianism of those who resisted coalition with it. At the same time, he warned against the utopian views of some of the Free Soilers. For example, writing of Herman Kriege, editor of the Volkstribun in New York, Marx said:
. . . he continues to chant his paean: And so the old dreams of the Europeans would at last come true. A place would be prepared for them on this side of the ocean which they would only have to take and to fructify with the labour of their hands, so as to be able proudly to declare to all the tyrants of the world, “this is my cabin, which you have not built; this is my hearth whose glow fills your hearts with envy.”
He might have added, This is my dunghill, which I, my wife, my children, my manservant, and my cattle have produced. And who are the Europeans whose “dreams” would thus come true? Not the communist workers, but bankrupt shopkeepers and handicraftsmen, or ruined cottars, who yearn for the good for tune of once again becoming petty bourgeois and peasants in America. And what is the “dream” that is to be fulfilled by means of these 1,400,000 acres? No other than that all men be converted into private owners, a dream which is unrealizable and as communistic as the dream to convert all men into emperors, kings and popes. (Quoted in: Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 327.)
Thus Marx’s aim, like Douglass’, was to develop a strategy that would bring together a coalition to stop the spread of slavery as the precondition for its abolition.
At the same time, Marx s polemic against Kriege has profound significance to the struggle against white chauvinism: it demonstrated his irreconcilable opposition to every form of accommodation to the influence of racism. Marx was battling against the seepage of racist poison into the Abolitionist movement, in this case in the form of the illusion that Western land could be won for the white masses — while the Indians were driven off this same land and the Blacks remained enslaved.
While the Free Soil movement aimed at keeping the Western land from the slave power, Marx saw that it could not halt the eventual takeover of this land and economy by the rising capitalist class. He attacked the petty-bourgeois illusions of the Free Soilers because they carried the seed of the racist division which would weaken the strategy for the most democratic outcome in the struggle against the slave power. And any weakening of this strategy would jeopardize the fight for Black liberation, further the plunder and genocide of the Indians, and profoundly disfigure the struggle for unity of the Black and white working class, whose mission it would be to lead in the battle for the abolition of wage slavery after the abolition of chattel slavery
2012 is the 101st year since the birth of the former National Chair of the Communist Party, Henry Winston. The article below is taken from Winston’s 1973 book, Strategy for a Black Agenda. It is a critique of the strategy and tactics necessary to advance the revolutionary process in the face of right-wing extremism and white supremacy from the time of slavery to the upsurge of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Although the world has changed since the book was first published, it continues to offer many lessons for fighting right-wing extremism today and moving forward along the road to socialism.
Henry Winston, born in Mississippi, became active in the unemployed struggles of the 1930s and soon became a leader in the Young Communist League. He worked with William L Patterson and others to help free the Scottsboro defendants, displaying extraordinary political and organizational skills.
In the 1950s he served eight years in prison under the Smith Act, during which time he lost his sight because of medical neglect. A campaign to win his release was waged in the U.S. and abroad. Writer Richard Wright headed a French/American committee to free him and his sentence was finally commuted by President John F Kennedy.
On learning of Winston’s death in 1986, African National Congress leader Alfred Nzo remarked, “We had come to regard Winston as one of our own.”
Now, over a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, racism and oppression are more than ever essential to the ruling class, as U.S. state monopoly capitalism enters a new and more acute phase of the crisis and decline of capitalism. U.S. imperialism, facing a world in which the forces of socialism and class and national liberation are on the ascendancy, and in which foreign imperialist powers are challenging its domination, certainly can’t do today what the slave power was unable to do over 100 years ago – solve its problems through aggression and expansion.
The monopolists are equally unable to solve their problems at home, where they are not only imposing a wage freeze, but are also attempting to impose a far more repressive racist freeze on Black liberation struggles than that of the McCarthy period.
By perpetuating and intensifying racism, monopoly aims to stop the advance of the Black liberation movement, to destroy organized labor and suppress every struggle of the oppressed and exploited.
Monopoly’s New Assault
Monopoly capital, within today’s context, aims to repeat the kind of assault on the people’s rights that led to the betrayal of Reconstruction. Reaction of that period, through racism and violence, prepared the way for the Supreme Court to void the Civil Rights Act of 1875, whose passage had been won by the supporters of Reconstruction to solidify the gains they had made. Reaction’s aim then was to push the country into a long era of segregation and semislavery.
Today state monopoly capitalism seeks to wipe out every trace of the struggles of the recent Civil Rights Decade. The increasing political repression, the attempted frameup of Angela Davis and other political prisoners, Nixon’s racist nominations to the Supreme Court, are all part of monopoly’s attempt to obliterate every advance made through Black and white struggle since Reconstruction was destroyed.
The betrayal of Reconstruction, it should be remembered, was the signal for a three-sided attack against the masses. The Old Slave Codes were replaced by the new Black Codes, and the former chattel slaves were forced into semi-slavery, segregation and racist oppression. At the same time, the escalation of the military plunder and massacre of the Indians was entering a climactic stage. And simultaneously, the courts that upheld the betrayal of Emancipation were declaring that workers, Black and white, did not have the right to organize. In other words, the courts had not only revived Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s pre-Civil War doctrine that the Black man “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” They had also extended this into another phase of repression — that labor, whatever its color, had no rights that capital was bound to respect.
In 1875, when the robber barons were joining with the former slave owners to prepare for the 1877 betrayal of Reconstruction, Judge Holden Owen, presiding over the trial of striking Pennsylvania miners, declared: “Any agreement, combination or confederation to increase the price of any vendible commodity, merchandise or anything else is a conspiracy under the laws of the U.S.” Of course, this doctrine — like Nixon’s wage-“price” freeze — was applied only to labor, never to the capitalists’ profits.
Because of the perpetuation of racism and the resulting division between the triply-oppressed Black workers and the exploited white workers, it took more than 60 years of struggle against the bosses’ government-supported violence to win the right to organize. Today, the rights of labor are once again under grave attack, and labor’s fate, as in the past, is inseparably bound up with that of the Black liberation movement.
Dimensions of the Crisis
The crisis of poverty and unemployment Black Americans now face is, save for the almost total genocidal elimination of American Indians, without precedent for any segment of this country’s population.
“The unemployment rate among Black workers in the ghetto now exceeds the general rate of unemployment of the entire nation during the depression of the 1930’s,” reported Herbert Hill, NAACP Labor Secretary, at the organization’s 1971 National Convention.
“The rate of unemployment of Black workers in 25 major centers of urban non-white population concentration is now between 25 per cent and 40 per cent,” stated Hill, “and the unemployment rate for Black youth will be in excess of 50 per cent by the middle of this summer. In 1933, the national unemployment rate was 24.9 per cent, the highest officially recorded unemployment in the history of the United States.” Hill also pointed out that tens of thousands of Black workers are classified as employed but never have an income that could lift them above the poverty level.
Yet, stark as this statistical report is, it cannot possibly convey the disaster of racism, poverty and oppression affecting every aspect of the lives of Black Americans today. The end of the decade of civil rights struggles left the Black masses with a feeling of vast frustration; not only had their condition failed to improve, it had worsened.
This frustration was simultaneously experienced by many militant young fighters, Black and white, whose despair turned to disillusion with the preceding years of struggle. They were unable to differentiate the gains of the Civil Rights Decade – in terms of unity, militant mass action and consciousness – from the deepening crisis. They did not realize that under capitalism the most important fruit of struggle is the people’s advance in unity and consciousness. In their frustration, they attacked the Civil Rights struggle itself, instead of seeing that it had created a bridge to the period ahead.
Two-Sided Pressure on King
Thus, even before the hunger and frustration of Black masses led to the spontaneous outbursts in Watts, Detroit and Newark, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. encountered attacks not only from reaction but from segments of militant youth under the influence of sectarianism and pseudo-revolutionism.
While the open attacks from the latter were a relatively new development, King had long experienced pressure from the establishment liberals, the NAACP, the Urban League and others to limit mass struggle and to rely on the courts and “friends” within the two major parties. In this period as the war in Vietnam continued and domestic conditions worsened — this pressure from the Right increased, and was particularly aimed at preventing King from linking the Black liberation movement with the anti-war struggle.
At the same time, the frustrations of radical youth were intensified by the escalation of the Vietnam war in 1965 — immediately after the new Civil Rights Act was passed. Many Black and white radicals, including Carmichael, Cleaver, Newton, Forman and Hayden, began to step up their attacks on the Civil Rights struggle. They placed themselves in opposition to King, who was determined not to abandon, but to strengthen, the forces of the Civil Rights Decade, to deepen and broaden them into a realignment that could carry the struggle against poverty and racist oppression to a new level.
If King was not without error in coping with pressure from the Right, and later with that of the pseudo-radicals, his overall record was one of firm adherence to militant non-violent mass struggle. The maturing of his leadership, his recognition of the decisive role of the working class, his evolvement toward an anti-imperialist position, all of his steady and remarkable growth reflected his rejection of both the opportunist pressures to limit mass struggle and the super-revolutionary pressures to substitute the rhetoric of violence for the power of mass struggle.
King has been dead more than five years, but the attacks on his strategy and objectives continue from the Right and the pseudo-left. In fact, while Nixon is bent on destroying the advances of the Civil Rights Decade, it is ironic that the new “revolutionists” are so certain there is nothing worth saving from it! But Nixon recognizes — and fears — what the super-militants refuse to see — the Civil Rights Decade created the pre-conditions for the much higher level of struggle needed in the period ahead.
Pressing for a New Beginning
When King was assassinated in the spring of 1968, he was leading the strike of the predominantly Black sanitation workers of Memphis. His commitment to this courageous working-class struggle was a vibrant indication that, in pressing for a new beginning in the strategy against racist oppression, poverty and war, he had come to a full realization of the meaning of his first major struggle, the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. This landmark battle was sparked by Mrs. Rosa Lee Parks, a Black working-class woman, and carried on with courage and tenacity by, primarily, Black working class men and women. In the course of a decade of leadership of the liberation struggle, King came to understand that it was workers, more than any other stratum, who possess these qualities.
King recognized that since these special qualities of workers had brought about the historic turning point in Montgomery, leading to the nationwide involvement of many other sections of the population, including Black and white youth in the struggle for equal rights, the new stage — the struggle for jobs, for an end to poverty, racism and war — demanded a new strategy based on the working class, Black and white.
Although King’s views were not identical with the Marxist conception of the role of the working class — which sees this class not only as the main social force but as the leader in the anti-monopoly struggle — he had come steadily closer to this outlook. Moreover, it is especially meaningful that King moved in this direction at the time when Marcuse and others, with the assistance of the mass media, were making their greatest headway in promoting the idea among radical youth that the Marxist concept of the working class was outdated.
Democracy, Liberation and Socialism
Another ironic contradiction in the role of many of the new radicals emerged at the end of the Civil Rights Decade: As they lost sight of the historic significance of that period, and more and more heaped abuse on it and its preeminent leader, they became the inadvertent helpmates of the ruling class, whose conscious aim it was and is to distort the meaning of that period to the masses.
It should not be forgotten that for many long decades the ruling class hid the true history of Reconstruction from the people of this country. Now, at a time when the Black liberation movement has forced at least the beginnings of attention to the Reconstruction era, it would indeed be strange if the rhetoric of the pseudo-revolutionaries helped the monopolists conceal the true meaning, the heroism and achievements of the Civil Rights Decade. This must not be allowed to happen.
It is important to understand the meaning of this period, and the vital leadership role in it of Martin Luther King, who came to an awareness of the revolutionary relationship between the fight for rights, for security, for peace and the liberation struggle. Despite their “revolutionary” rhetoric, this is something the pseudo-radicals have failed to comprehend. In rejecting this central meaning of the civil rights struggle, these radicals caricatured the Marxist principles they so often proclaimed.
As Lenin persistently emphasized, the fight for democracy is at the heart of the class struggle. He continually warned against the ideas of those who ignored the connection between the struggle for democracy, national liberation and socialism. In “A Caricature of Marxism,” he wrote:
All democracy consists in the proclamation and realization of rights which under capitalism are realizable only to a very small degree and only relatively. But without the proclamation of these rights, without a struggle to introduce them now, immediately, without training the masses in the spirit of this struggle, socialism is impossible. (Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 74.)
Lenin also emphasized that Marxists must:
. . . know that democracy does not abolish class oppression. It only makes the class struggle more direct, wider, more open and pronounced, and that is what we need. . . . The more democratic the system of government, the clearer will the workers see that the root evil is capitalism, not lack of rights. (Ibid., p. 73.)
Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass
Martin Luther King’s sectarian opponents proclaimed their Marxism, but their policies and practice were contrary to its principles. On the other hand, King’s philosophy was that of moral suasion, but in practice he came to rely more and more on the liberating force of mass struggle as the foundation for Black freedom and social advance for all the oppressed and exploited.
Though not a Marxist, King was steadily moving toward a strategy that tended to coincide with the Marxist-Leninist concept of an anti-monopoly policy, one involving the Black and white sectors of the working class, the Black liberation movement, the Puerto Rican and Chicano masses, and all others opposed to war and poverty. This strategy continues in today’s terms – when the working-class is the leading force – the strategy developed by Frederick Douglass during the Abolitionist period, when he struggled to form a broad coalition of Abolitionists and other strata to break the slave owners’ control of Congress and the Federal Government.
Just as it is impossible to understand the Civil Rights Decade without understanding the role of Martin Luther King, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the antislavery struggle without understanding the role of Frederick Douglass, the great genius and architect of the anti-slavery strategy.
Like King, Douglass matured in struggle against sectarian, separatist and accommodationist tendencies within the movement of his time. As one example, his writings show that throughout the crucial decade of the 1850s, he resisted the separatist alternative of emigrationism which would have weakened the anti-slavery front. Douglass saw that emigrationism, a forerunner of Pan Africanism, objectively meant accommodation to the slave power.
And, as early as 1848, Douglass began to oppose the sectarianism of William Lloyd Garrison and other anti-slavery forces who were against both electoral action and any coalition with those whose objectives stopped short of abolition.
In this connection, Douglass himself had at first feared that the Free Soil movement, which opposed the extension of slavery but did not demand its abolition, might divert from the anti-slavery struggle. However, he came to under stand the objective role of this movement within the anti slavery strategy and called upon the Abolitionists to support it:
We may stand off … and in this way play into the hands of our enemies . . . [or] remain silent and speechless, and let things take their course. . . . In neither of these ways can we go. (The North Star, August 18, 1848.)
While calling for a common front of the Abolitionists with the Free Soilers and others opposed to the extension of slavery, Douglass at the same time relentlessly advanced the Abolitionists’ independent goal of an end to slavery. He wrote:
Free Soilism is lame, halt and blind, while it battles against the spread of slavery, and admits its right to exist anywhere. If it has the right to exist it has the right to grow and spread . . . The only way to put an end to the aggressions of slavery is to put an end to slavery itself. (Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 24, 1855.)
Douglass never relaxed in his drive for the development of the strategy which eventually led to a political realignment, one from which the Republican Party headed by Lincoln emerged to challenge the two major parties of the period. At the time this realignment was in the process of formation, he wrote:
We rejoice in this demonstration . . . to bury party affinities and predilections, and also the political leaders who have hitherto controlled them; to unite in one grand phalanx and go forth, and whip the enemy. (Ibid., July 27, 1855.)
Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx
In 1846, two years before writing the Communist Manifesto, the young Karl Marx had already revealed his deep understanding of the struggle against slavery in the U.S. His thinking closely paralleled the direction Frederick Douglass was taking, and this remarkable parallelism in the liberation strategy of these two giants of world history continued throughout every phase of the anti-slavery struggle.
Marx, too, saw the Free Soil movement as an objective force against slavery, and opposed the sectarianism of those who resisted coalition with it. At the same time, he warned against the utopian views of some of the Free Soilers. For example, writing of Herman Kriege, editor of the Volkstribun in New York, Marx said:
. . . he continues to chant his paean: And so the old dreams of the Europeans would at last come true. A place would be prepared for them on this side of the ocean which they would only have to take and to fructify with the labour of their hands, so as to be able proudly to declare to all the tyrants of the world, “this is my cabin, which you have not built; this is my hearth whose glow fills your hearts with envy.”
He might have added, This is my dunghill, which I, my wife, my children, my manservant, and my cattle have produced. And who are the Europeans whose “dreams” would thus come true? Not the communist workers, but bankrupt shopkeepers and handicraftsmen, or ruined cottars, who yearn for the good for tune of once again becoming petty bourgeois and peasants in America. And what is the “dream” that is to be fulfilled by means of these 1,400,000 acres? No other than that all men be converted into private owners, a dream which is unrealizable and as communistic as the dream to convert all men into emperors, kings and popes. (Quoted in: Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 327.)
Thus Marx’s aim, like Douglass’, was to develop a strategy that would bring together a coalition to stop the spread of slavery as the precondition for its abolition.
At the same time, Marx s polemic against Kriege has profound significance to the struggle against white chauvinism: it demonstrated his irreconcilable opposition to every form of accommodation to the influence of racism. Marx was battling against the seepage of racist poison into the Abolitionist movement, in this case in the form of the illusion that Western land could be won for the white masses — while the Indians were driven off this same land and the Blacks remained enslaved.
While the Free Soil movement aimed at keeping the Western land from the slave power, Marx saw that it could not halt the eventual takeover of this land and economy by the rising capitalist class. He attacked the petty-bourgeois illusions of the Free Soilers because they carried the seed of the racist division which would weaken the strategy for the most democratic outcome in the struggle against the slave power. And any weakening of this strategy would jeopardize the fight for Black liberation, further the plunder and genocide of the Indians, and profoundly disfigure the struggle for unity of the Black and white working class, whose mission it would be to lead in the battle for the abolition of wage slavery after the abolition of chattel slavery
Racist “Disfigurement” of Class Struggle
In addition, Marx saw that the greater the democratic gains of the masses, the less would the future struggles of labor with a black skin and labor with a white skin be distorted by the divisive ideology of racism. And later, applying Marxism to the imperialist stage of capitalism, Lenin placed the struggle for democracy, in the way Marx viewed it, at the center of the struggle for the socialist revolution. Racism, on the other hand, results in what Marx many times described as the “disfigurement” of the class struggle — diverting it away from the class enemy into division and fragmentation of the exploited and oppressed.
That is why Lenin tirelessly emphasized that the struggle for democracy is indivisibly bound up with the struggle against racism, and class and national oppression. Lenin saw this struggle as the key to advancing the unity of the workers of the oppressor nation with the workers and the people of any oppressed nation or nationality.
In an article that appeared in the New York Daily Tribune in 1861, Marx forewarned that the United States would continue to suffer from racist disfigurement if the abolition of slavery was in any way compromised:
The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic Party is, so to say, the general formula of United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slaveowner. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Civil War in the United States, International Publishers, New York, 1971, p.6.)
The confirmation of Marx’s analysis can be found in the “successive compromises” which led to the betrayal of Reconstruction and, finally, the transformation of the Union into the slave of state monopoly capitalism.
The history of this country has been warped and distorted, first by slavery, then the survivals of slavery and the ceaseless propagation of racist ideology. And from this history it can be clearly seen that the class interests of white workers, as in the struggle against the super-monopolies today, can only be advanced in unity with Black workers and as an integral part of the fight to end the oppression of Black people.
In writing of Marx’ simultaneous support of the land reform movement and opposition to those who saw that movement as a means of realizing their petty-bourgeois dreams instead of a way to struggle against class and racist oppression and exploitation, Lenin said:
While mercilessly ridiculing the absurd ideological trappings of the movement, Marx strives in a sober, materialist manner to determine its real historical content, the consequences that must inevitably flow from it because of objective conditions, regard less of the will and the consciousness, the dreams and theories, of the various individuals. Marx, therefore, does not condemn, but fully approves communist support of the movement. (Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 328.)
At the same time, Marx saw that even an uncompromising struggle against all vestiges of slavery, against the plunder and murder of the Indians, and to gain land for Black and white toilers, could not change the nature of commodity production which would inevitably lead to the take-over of the land and the economy by the rising capitalist class. Lenin wrote:
With remarkable penetration, Marx, who was then only the future economist, points to the role of exchange and commodity production. The peasants, he says, will exchange the produce of the land, if not the land itself, and that says everything! The question is dealt with in a way that is largely applicable to the Russian peasant movement and its petty-bourgeois ideologists. . . . Marx, however, does not simply repudiate this petty-bourgeois movement, he does not dogmatically ignore it, he does not fear to soil his hands by contact with the movement of the revolutionary petty-bourgeois democrats – a fear that is characteristic of many of the doctrinaires. (Collected Works, Vol. 8, pp. 327, 328.)
Douglass and Black Power
While Douglass was the champion of Black and white unity within the Abolitionist movement, as well as the architect of the strategy to bring about a national political realignment, he also advocated the self-organization of Black people.
By 1849, Douglass was already calling for such a group, to be named the National League of Colored People. He had even suggested a constitution for it, with a preamble that stated:
. . . we have long deplored the distracted and divided state of the oppressed, and the manifold evils resulting there from, and desiring as we do to see an union formed which shall enable us better to grapple with the various systems of injustice and wrong by which we are environed, and to regain our plundered rights, we do solemnly agree to unite in accordance with the following. (The North Star, August 10, 1849.)
Douglass was certain that in their struggle for liberation, and as part of the struggles of all oppressed and exploited, Black people would achieve self-union. “We shall never despair of our people, and union will yet be affected — our ranks cannot always be divided,” he wrote in The North Star (November 19, 1849).
It is clear that Douglass was the original advocate of “Black power” and that his concept had nothing in common with the disruptive sloganizing of Stokely Carmichael. Douglass rejected all tendencies that viewed Black power in a separatist way. “It is evident,” wrote Douglass, “that white and black must fall or flourish together.” (The North Star, November 16, 1849.)
Douglass not only opposed separatist concepts of Black power, he also polemicized against those who feared that the press would falsely portray Black self-union as anti-white. This group included a prominent Black friend who wrote to The North Star, saying, “I believe that the motto, ‘Union of the oppressed for the sake of freedom,’ will be interpreted by the pro-slavery press, to mean an union of the black against the white.” Douglass, continuing in his insistence that there was no contradiction between the self-union of the oppressed Blacks and unity with white opponents of the slave owners, responded by stating that “it seems worse than timidity for us to hesitate to adopt measures for our improvement and elevation, from fear of misinterpretation.” For Douglass, self-union of the oppressed Black people — as the starting point of Black power — was fully consistent with unity with white Abolitionists and coalition with other white strata in order to advance liberation. He saw that Abolition could not be achieved if Blacks pursued a separatist policy.
Douglass saw that all struggle, including that for self organization, was a process. It would be self-defeating, he realized, for Black people to reject the strategy of coalition until some vague future date when they had achieved complete internal organization.
Douglass did not waver in his conviction despite bitter attacks by Garrison and other sectarians in the Abolitionist movement who opposed a coalition strategy against the slave power. The passive acceptance of their views, he was convinced, would lead to the perpetuation of slavery for an indeterminate length of time.
Douglass also realized that refusal to enter into coalition with forces that did not, at that stage of the struggle, accept the goal of abolition would contradict and undermine an anti-slavery strategy. Had Douglass advocated the anti coalition concept of Black power advanced today by Carmichael, Forman, Boggs and others, the coalition of forces that led to the defeat of the slave power would not have been achieved.
In today’s struggle against the genocidal economic and social aggressions of state monopoly capitalism, those socalled radicals advocate the type of “Black power” strategy that Douglass so relentlessly opposed — a separatist concept that would dissipate instead of strengthen Black power, and would result in the perpetuation of unequal power of the oppressed and exploited in the battle against the racist ruling class.
According to Stokely Carmichae, “The major mistake made by the exponents of the coalition theory is that they advocate alliances with groups which have never had as their central goal the necessity for the total revamping of society. At bottom, these groups accept the American system and want only – if at all – to make peripheral, marginal reforms in it. Such reforms are inadequate to rid society of racism.” (Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power, the Politics of Liberation in America, Random House, New York, 1967, pp. 60-61.)
Carmichael is vague about what he means by the “total revamping of society.” The only way that can be accomplished is by establishing socialism, which he opposes. Carmichael also states that “reforms are inadequate to rid society of racism.” Of course this is true, since only the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by socialism can totally abolish racism. The majority of Black as well as white masses, however, are not ready to wait for socialism as the solution to their exploitation and oppression today. They continue to search for answers to the problems imposed by their common exploiter and oppressor, state monopoly capitalism.
Despite this fact, Carmichael calls upon Black people to reject the struggle for reforms in favor of the “total revamping” of society. In the same breath, he advocates interracial disunity pending the achievement of complete Black selfunity.
But this self-unity will come about only as a part of the revolutionary process in which the struggle for the racial and class unity of the oppressed and exploited is an aim and result of every battle against the racist oppressor. Those who do not understand the role of coalition in the people’s fight to improve their condition fail to see the relationship between reforms and revolution.
Long ago, Douglass answered those who persist in the illusion that the destiny of oppressed Black people is separate and unrelated to the destiny of exploited whites. “We deem it a settled point,” wrote Douglass, that the destiny of the colored man is bound up with the white people of this country . . . and the question ought to be . . . what principle should dictate policy . . .” (The North Star, November 16, 1849.)
Frederick Douglass and Paul Robeson
In our time, the towering figure of Paul Robeson has personified the link between two significant periods – from the betrayal of Reconstruction to the era of Black liberation begun with Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Decade.
Frederick Douglass had himself been a slave and Robeson is the son of a slave. Like Douglass in his time, Robeson has devoted his life to the cause of Black liberation. And, like Douglass, he recognizes that Black liberation cannot be achieved via a separatist path, but through Black power in alliance with the oppressed and exploited of all colors. Robeson has always seen Black independence and Black white alliance as related, indispensable components of the liberation struggle.
The principles that should dictate policy,” Robeson has declared, are the following: “Dedication to the Negro people’s welfare is one side of the coin; the other side is in dependence. Effective Negro leadership must rely upon and be responsive to no other control than the will of the people. We have allies – important allies – among our white fellow citizens, and we must seek to draw them close to us and to gain many more. But the Negro people’s movement must be led by Negroes, not only in terms of title and Position but in reality.” (Paul Robeson, Here I Stand, Othello Associates, New York, 1958, p. 111.)
Robeson struggled for self-union of his people at home, and for solidarity with the oppressed and their allies at home and abroad. Whereas Douglass travelled widely in Europe to win support for the anti-slavery cause, Robeson travelled even more extensively, rallying support for Black liberation and championing liberation from imperialism everywhere.
That Robeson’s travels were more extensive than Douglass’ was of course made possible by the October Revolution, which replaced the czar and serfdom with socialism, opening the way for the end of racism and oppression in a major part of the globe, and becoming the most decisive support for the oppressed and exploited throughout the world.
Wherever he went, Robeson earned the hatred of the U.S. imperialists — and never more than in Paris in 1949, when he declared: “It is unthinkable that American Negroes could go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed them for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has raised our people to full human dignity.”
When Robeson asserted that Black men would never fight against the country of socialism — the Soviet Union, the chief supporter and champion of liberation from imperialism, oppression and racism — he was expressing what is at the heart of today’s Black resistance to fighting a war to oppress others.
For a Strategic Breakthrough
In Douglass’ time, the strategy to break the slave power’s control of Congress and the Federal Government was the precondition for the abolition of slavery. Today, the precondition for opening the path to the abolition of wage slavery and racist oppression through socialism is the strategy to defeat the threat of fascism and to break the monopolists’ domination of Congress and the Federal Government.
“Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism [in its] preparatory stages,” stated Georgi Dimitrov, “is not in a position to prevent the growth of fascism, but on the contrary, facilitates that victory.” (United Front Against Fascism, New Century Publishers, New York, 1950, p. 9.)
The anti-coalition views of Carmichael, Forman, Boggs and others are nothing less than opposition to a united front against the “reactionary measures” with which monopoly prepares for its imposition of fascism.
However, regardless of the disruptive nature of the views of such Black radicals, it must be recognized that the main obstacle to Black and white unity against the common enemy is the influence of racism on white workers. And it is the primary responsibility of white revolutionaries to lead the fight against racist ideology and to mobilize white workers in the struggle against racism and in support of Black liberation as indispensable to the advance of their class interests.
The aim of monopoly is to force a reversal of every aspect of bourgeois democracy, limited as it is, in order to open the way for fascism. The aim of the anti-monopoly program, as advocated by the Communist Party, is to bring about a strategicbreakthrough to a deeper and wider degree of democracy, one that would powerfully accelerate the revolutionary process, opening the way to Black liberation and socialism.
Once this anti-monopoly strategy succeeds in breaking the control of state monopoly capital over Congress and the government, the forces exist, internally and internationally — in contrast to the anti-slavery period — that can prevent the betrayal of the struggle. There is such a perspective, and this is so, first of all, because the forces of class and national liberation, headed by the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries, have changed the world balance of power.
Reprinted with permission. Originally published in Strategy for a Black Agenda: A Critique of New Theories of Liberation in the United States and Africa, International Publishers, 1973.
PHOTO: Henry Winston, 1972. Daily Worker/People’s World collection at Tamiment Library.
http://www.cpusa.org/article/from-anti-slavery-to-the-anti-monopoly-strategy/ On Henry Winston 2012 is the 101st year since the birth of the former National Chair of the Communist Party, Henry Winston. The article below is taken from Winston’s 1973 book, Strategy for a Black Agenda. It is a critique of the strategy and tactics necessary to advance the revolutionary process in the face of right-wing extremism and white supremacy from the time of slavery to the upsurge of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Although the world has changed since the book was first published, it continues to offer many lessons for fighting right-wing extremism today and moving forward along the road to socialism.
Henry Winston, born in Mississippi, became active in the unemployed struggles of the 1930s and soon became a leader in the Young Communist League. He worked with William L Patterson and others to help free the Scottsboro defendants, displaying extraordinary political and organizational skills.
In the 1950s he served eight years in prison under the Smith Act, during which time he lost his sight because of medical neglect. A campaign to win his release was waged in the U.S. and abroad. Writer Richard Wright headed a French/American committee to free him and his sentence was finally commuted by President John F Kennedy.
On learning of Winston’s death in 1986, African National Congress leader Alfred Nzo remarked, “We had come to regard Winston as one of our own.”
http://www.cpusa.org/article/from-anti-slavery-to-the-anti-monopoly-strategy/
https://www.marxists.org/archive/winston/1951/02/what-it-means-be-communist.htm
https://www.cpusa.org/authors/henry-winston/
https://digitaltamiment.hosting.nyu.edu/s/cpoh/item/3793
Although the world has changed since the book was first published, it continues to offer many lessons for fighting right-wing extremism today and moving forward along the road to socialism.
Henry Winston, born in Mississippi, became active in the unemployed struggles of the 1930s and soon became a leader in the Young Communist League. He worked with William L Patterson and others to help free the Scottsboro defendants, displaying extraordinary political and organizational skills.
In the 1950s he served eight years in prison under the Smith Act, during which time he lost his sight because of medical neglect. A campaign to win his release was waged in the U.S. and abroad. Writer Richard Wright headed a French/American committee to free him and his sentence was finally commuted by President John F Kennedy.
On learning of Winston’s death in 1986, African National Congress leader Alfred Nzo remarked, “We had come to regard Winston as one of our own.”
Download this article to print and distribute---
"Now, over a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, racism and oppression are more than ever essential to the ruling class, as U.S. state monopoly capitalism enters a new and more acute phase of the crisis and decline of capitalism. U.S. imperialism, facing a world in which the forces of socialism and class and national liberation are on the ascendancy, and in which foreign imperialist powers are challenging its domination, certainly can’t do today what the slave power was unable to do over 100 years ago – solve its problems through aggression and expansion.
The monopolists are equally unable to solve their problems at home, where they are not only imposing a wage freeze, but are also attempting to impose a far more repressive racist freeze on Black liberation struggles than that of the McCarthy period.
By perpetuating and intensifying racism, monopoly aims to stop the advance of the Black liberation movement, to destroy organized labor and suppress every struggle of the oppressed and exploited.
Monopoly’s New Assault
Monopoly capital, within today’s context, aims to repeat the kind of assault on the people’s rights that led to the betrayal of Reconstruction. Reaction of that period, through racism and violence, prepared the way for the Supreme Court to void the Civil Rights Act of 1875, whose passage had been won by the supporters of Reconstruction to solidify the gains they had made. Reaction’s aim then was to push the country into a long era of segregation and semislavery.
Today state monopoly capitalism seeks to wipe out every trace of the struggles of the recent Civil Rights Decade. The increasing political repression, the attempted frameup of Angela Davis and other political prisoners, Nixon’s racist nominations to the Supreme Court, are all part of monopoly’s attempt to obliterate every advance made through Black and white struggle since Reconstruction was destroyed.
The betrayal of Reconstruction, it should be remembered, was the signal for a three-sided attack against the masses. The Old Slave Codes were replaced by the new Black Codes, and the former chattel slaves were forced into semi-slavery, segregation and racist oppression. At the same time, the escalation of the military plunder and massacre of the Indians was entering a climactic stage. And simultaneously, the courts that upheld the betrayal of Emancipation were declaring that workers, Black and white, did not have the right to organize. In other words, the courts had not only revived Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s pre-Civil War doctrine that the Black man “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” They had also extended this into another phase of repression — that labor, whatever its color, had no rights that capital was bound to respect.
In 1875, when the robber barons were joining with the former slave owners to prepare for the 1877 betrayal of Reconstruction, Judge Holden Owen, presiding over the trial of striking Pennsylvania miners, declared: “Any agreement, combination or confederation to increase the price of any vendible commodity, merchandise or anything else is a conspiracy under the laws of the U.S.” Of course, this doctrine — like Nixon’s wage-“price” freeze — was applied only to labor, never to the capitalists’ profits.
Because of the perpetuation of racism and the resulting division between the triply-oppressed Black workers and the exploited white workers, it took more than 60 years of struggle against the bosses’ government-supported violence to win the right to organize. Today, the rights of labor are once again under grave attack, and labor’s fate, as in the past, is inseparably bound up with that of the Black liberation movement.
Dimensions of the Crisis
The crisis of poverty and unemployment Black Americans now face is, save for the almost total genocidal elimination of American Indians, without precedent for any segment of this country’s population.
“The unemployment rate among Black workers in the ghetto now exceeds the general rate of unemployment of the entire nation during the depression of the 1930’s,” reported Herbert Hill, NAACP Labor Secretary, at the organization’s 1971 National Convention.
“The rate of unemployment of Black workers in 25 major centers of urban non-white population concentration is now between 25 per cent and 40 per cent,” stated Hill, “and the unemployment rate for Black youth will be in excess of 50 per cent by the middle of this summer. In 1933, the national unemployment rate was 24.9 per cent, the highest officially recorded unemployment in the history of the United States.” Hill also pointed out that tens of thousands of Black workers are classified as employed but never have an income that could lift them above the poverty level.
Yet, stark as this statistical report is, it cannot possibly convey the disaster of racism, poverty and oppression affecting every aspect of the lives of Black Americans today. The end of the decade of civil rights struggles left the Black masses with a feeling of vast frustration; not only had their condition failed to improve, it had worsened.
This frustration was simultaneously experienced by many militant young fighters, Black and white, whose despair turned to disillusion with the preceding years of struggle. They were unable to differentiate the gains of the Civil Rights Decade – in terms of unity, militant mass action and consciousness – from the deepening crisis. They did not realize that under capitalism the most important fruit of struggle is the people’s advance in unity and consciousness. In their frustration, they attacked the Civil Rights struggle itself, instead of seeing that it had created a bridge to the period ahead.
Two-Sided Pressure on King
Thus, even before the hunger and frustration of Black masses led to the spontaneous outbursts in Watts, Detroit and Newark, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. encountered attacks not only from reaction but from segments of militant youth under the influence of sectarianism and pseudo-revolutionism.
While the open attacks from the latter were a relatively new development, King had long experienced pressure from the establishment liberals, the NAACP, the Urban League and others to limit mass struggle and to rely on the courts and “friends” within the two major parties. In this period as the war in Vietnam continued and domestic conditions worsened — this pressure from the Right increased, and was particularly aimed at preventing King from linking the Black liberation movement with the anti-war struggle.
At the same time, the frustrations of radical youth were intensified by the escalation of the Vietnam war in 1965 — immediately after the new Civil Rights Act was passed. Many Black and white radicals, including Carmichael, Cleaver, Newton, Forman and Hayden, began to step up their attacks on the Civil Rights struggle. They placed themselves in opposition to King, who was determined not to abandon, but to strengthen, the forces of the Civil Rights Decade, to deepen and broaden them into a realignment that could carry the struggle against poverty and racist oppression to a new level.
If King was not without error in coping with pressure from the Right, and later with that of the pseudo-radicals, his overall record was one of firm adherence to militant non-violent mass struggle. The maturing of his leadership, his recognition of the decisive role of the working class, his evolvement toward an anti-imperialist position, all of his steady and remarkable growth reflected his rejection of both the opportunist pressures to limit mass struggle and the super-revolutionary pressures to substitute the rhetoric of violence for the power of mass struggle.
King has been dead more than five years, but the attacks on his strategy and objectives continue from the Right and the pseudo-left. In fact, while Nixon is bent on destroying the advances of the Civil Rights Decade, it is ironic that the new “revolutionists” are so certain there is nothing worth saving from it! But Nixon recognizes — and fears — what the super-militants refuse to see — the Civil Rights Decade created the pre-conditions for the much higher level of struggle needed in the period ahead.
Pressing for a New Beginning
When King was assassinated in the spring of 1968, he was leading the strike of the predominantly Black sanitation workers of Memphis. His commitment to this courageous working-class struggle was a vibrant indication that, in pressing for a new beginning in the strategy against racist oppression, poverty and war, he had come to a full realization of the meaning of his first major struggle, the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. This landmark battle was sparked by Mrs. Rosa Lee Parks, a Black working-class woman, and carried on with courage and tenacity by, primarily, Black working class men and women. In the course of a decade of leadership of the liberation struggle, King came to understand that it was workers, more than any other stratum, who possess these qualities.
King recognized that since these special qualities of workers had brought about the historic turning point in Montgomery, leading to the nationwide involvement of many other sections of the population, including Black and white youth in the struggle for equal rights, the new stage — the struggle for jobs, for an end to poverty, racism and war — demanded a new strategy based on the working class, Black and white.
Although King’s views were not identical with the Marxist conception of the role of the working class — which sees this class not only as the main social force but as the leader in the anti-monopoly struggle — he had come steadily closer to this outlook. Moreover, it is especially meaningful that King moved in this direction at the time when Marcuse and others, with the assistance of the mass media, were making their greatest headway in promoting the idea among radical youth that the Marxist concept of the working class was outdated.
Democracy, Liberation and Socialism
Another ironic contradiction in the role of many of the new radicals emerged at the end of the Civil Rights Decade: As they lost sight of the historic significance of that period, and more and more heaped abuse on it and its preeminent leader, they became the inadvertent helpmates of the ruling class, whose conscious aim it was and is to distort the meaning of that period to the masses.
It should not be forgotten that for many long decades the ruling class hid the true history of Reconstruction from the people of this country. Now, at a time when the Black liberation movement has forced at least the beginnings of attention to the Reconstruction era, it would indeed be strange if the rhetoric of the pseudo-revolutionaries helped the monopolists conceal the true meaning, the heroism and achievements of the Civil Rights Decade. This must not be allowed to happen.
It is important to understand the meaning of this period, and the vital leadership role in it of Martin Luther King, who came to an awareness of the revolutionary relationship between the fight for rights, for security, for peace and the liberation struggle. Despite their “revolutionary” rhetoric, this is something the pseudo-radicals have failed to comprehend. In rejecting this central meaning of the civil rights struggle, these radicals caricatured the Marxist principles they so often proclaimed.
As Lenin persistently emphasized, the fight for democracy is at the heart of the class struggle. He continually warned against the ideas of those who ignored the connection between the struggle for democracy, national liberation and socialism. In “A Caricature of Marxism,” he wrote:
All democracy consists in the proclamation and realization of rights which under capitalism are realizable only to a very small degree and only relatively. But without the proclamation of these rights, without a struggle to introduce them now, immediately, without training the masses in the spirit of this struggle, socialism is impossible. (Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 74.)
Lenin also emphasized that Marxists must:
. . . know that democracy does not abolish class oppression. It only makes the class struggle more direct, wider, more open and pronounced, and that is what we need. . . . The more democratic the system of government, the clearer will the workers see that the root evil is capitalism, not lack of rights. (Ibid., p. 73.)
Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass
Martin Luther King’s sectarian opponents proclaimed their Marxism, but their policies and practice were contrary to its principles. On the other hand, King’s philosophy was that of moral suasion, but in practice he came to rely more and more on the liberating force of mass struggle as the foundation for Black freedom and social advance for all the oppressed and exploited.
Though not a Marxist, King was steadily moving toward a strategy that tended to coincide with the Marxist-Leninist concept of an anti-monopoly policy, one involving the Black and white sectors of the working class, the Black liberation movement, the Puerto Rican and Chicano masses, and all others opposed to war and poverty. This strategy continues in today’s terms – when the working-class is the leading force – the strategy developed by Frederick Douglass during the Abolitionist period, when he struggled to form a broad coalition of Abolitionists and other strata to break the slave owners’ control of Congress and the Federal Government.
Just as it is impossible to understand the Civil Rights Decade without understanding the role of Martin Luther King, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the antislavery struggle without understanding the role of Frederick Douglass, the great genius and architect of the anti-slavery strategy.
Like King, Douglass matured in struggle against sectarian, separatist and accommodationist tendencies within the movement of his time. As one example, his writings show that throughout the crucial decade of the 1850s, he resisted the separatist alternative of emigrationism which would have weakened the anti-slavery front. Douglass saw that emigrationism, a forerunner of Pan Africanism, objectively meant accommodation to the slave power.
And, as early as 1848, Douglass began to oppose the sectarianism of William Lloyd Garrison and other anti-slavery forces who were against both electoral action and any coalition with those whose objectives stopped short of abolition.
In this connection, Douglass himself had at first feared that the Free Soil movement, which opposed the extension of slavery but did not demand its abolition, might divert from the anti-slavery struggle. However, he came to under stand the objective role of this movement within the anti slavery strategy and called upon the Abolitionists to support it:
We may stand off … and in this way play into the hands of our enemies . . . [or] remain silent and speechless, and let things take their course. . . . In neither of these ways can we go. (The North Star, August 18, 1848.)
While calling for a common front of the Abolitionists with the Free Soilers and others opposed to the extension of slavery, Douglass at the same time relentlessly advanced the Abolitionists’ independent goal of an end to slavery. He wrote:
Free Soilism is lame, halt and blind, while it battles against the spread of slavery, and admits its right to exist anywhere. If it has the right to exist it has the right to grow and spread . . . The only way to put an end to the aggressions of slavery is to put an end to slavery itself. (Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 24, 1855.)
Douglass never relaxed in his drive for the development of the strategy which eventually led to a political realignment, one from which the Republican Party headed by Lincoln emerged to challenge the two major parties of the period. At the time this realignment was in the process of formation, he wrote:
We rejoice in this demonstration . . . to bury party affinities and predilections, and also the political leaders who have hitherto controlled them; to unite in one grand phalanx and go forth, and whip the enemy. (Ibid., July 27, 1855.)
Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx
In 1846, two years before writing the Communist Manifesto, the young Karl Marx had already revealed his deep understanding of the struggle against slavery in the U.S. His thinking closely paralleled the direction Frederick Douglass was taking, and this remarkable parallelism in the liberation strategy of these two giants of world history continued throughout every phase of the anti-slavery struggle.
Marx, too, saw the Free Soil movement as an objective force against slavery, and opposed the sectarianism of those who resisted coalition with it. At the same time, he warned against the utopian views of some of the Free Soilers. For example, writing of Herman Kriege, editor of the Volkstribun in New York, Marx said:
. . . he continues to chant his paean: And so the old dreams of the Europeans would at last come true. A place would be prepared for them on this side of the ocean which they would only have to take and to fructify with the labour of their hands, so as to be able proudly to declare to all the tyrants of the world, “this is my cabin, which you have not built; this is my hearth whose glow fills your hearts with envy.”
He might have added, This is my dunghill, which I, my wife, my children, my manservant, and my cattle have produced. And who are the Europeans whose “dreams” would thus come true? Not the communist workers, but bankrupt shopkeepers and handicraftsmen, or ruined cottars, who yearn for the good for tune of once again becoming petty bourgeois and peasants in America. And what is the “dream” that is to be fulfilled by means of these 1,400,000 acres? No other than that all men be converted into private owners, a dream which is unrealizable and as communistic as the dream to convert all men into emperors, kings and popes. (Quoted in: Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 327.)
Thus Marx’s aim, like Douglass’, was to develop a strategy that would bring together a coalition to stop the spread of slavery as the precondition for its abolition.
At the same time, Marx s polemic against Kriege has profound significance to the struggle against white chauvinism: it demonstrated his irreconcilable opposition to every form of accommodation to the influence of racism. Marx was battling against the seepage of racist poison into the Abolitionist movement, in this case in the form of the illusion that Western land could be won for the white masses — while the Indians were driven off this same land and the Blacks remained enslaved.
While the Free Soil movement aimed at keeping the Western land from the slave power, Marx saw that it could not halt the eventual takeover of this land and economy by the rising capitalist class. He attacked the petty-bourgeois illusions of the Free Soilers because they carried the seed of the racist division which would weaken the strategy for the most democratic outcome in the struggle against the slave power. And any weakening of this strategy would jeopardize the fight for Black liberation, further the plunder and genocide of the Indians, and profoundly disfigure the struggle for unity of the Black and white working class, whose mission it would be to lead in the battle for the abolition of wage slavery after the abolition of chattel slavery
2012 is the 101st year since the birth of the former National Chair of the Communist Party, Henry Winston. The article below is taken from Winston’s 1973 book, Strategy for a Black Agenda. It is a critique of the strategy and tactics necessary to advance the revolutionary process in the face of right-wing extremism and white supremacy from the time of slavery to the upsurge of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Although the world has changed since the book was first published, it continues to offer many lessons for fighting right-wing extremism today and moving forward along the road to socialism.
Henry Winston, born in Mississippi, became active in the unemployed struggles of the 1930s and soon became a leader in the Young Communist League. He worked with William L Patterson and others to help free the Scottsboro defendants, displaying extraordinary political and organizational skills.
In the 1950s he served eight years in prison under the Smith Act, during which time he lost his sight because of medical neglect. A campaign to win his release was waged in the U.S. and abroad. Writer Richard Wright headed a French/American committee to free him and his sentence was finally commuted by President John F Kennedy.
On learning of Winston’s death in 1986, African National Congress leader Alfred Nzo remarked, “We had come to regard Winston as one of our own.”
Now, over a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, racism and oppression are more than ever essential to the ruling class, as U.S. state monopoly capitalism enters a new and more acute phase of the crisis and decline of capitalism. U.S. imperialism, facing a world in which the forces of socialism and class and national liberation are on the ascendancy, and in which foreign imperialist powers are challenging its domination, certainly can’t do today what the slave power was unable to do over 100 years ago – solve its problems through aggression and expansion.
The monopolists are equally unable to solve their problems at home, where they are not only imposing a wage freeze, but are also attempting to impose a far more repressive racist freeze on Black liberation struggles than that of the McCarthy period.
By perpetuating and intensifying racism, monopoly aims to stop the advance of the Black liberation movement, to destroy organized labor and suppress every struggle of the oppressed and exploited.
Monopoly’s New Assault
Monopoly capital, within today’s context, aims to repeat the kind of assault on the people’s rights that led to the betrayal of Reconstruction. Reaction of that period, through racism and violence, prepared the way for the Supreme Court to void the Civil Rights Act of 1875, whose passage had been won by the supporters of Reconstruction to solidify the gains they had made. Reaction’s aim then was to push the country into a long era of segregation and semislavery.
Today state monopoly capitalism seeks to wipe out every trace of the struggles of the recent Civil Rights Decade. The increasing political repression, the attempted frameup of Angela Davis and other political prisoners, Nixon’s racist nominations to the Supreme Court, are all part of monopoly’s attempt to obliterate every advance made through Black and white struggle since Reconstruction was destroyed.
The betrayal of Reconstruction, it should be remembered, was the signal for a three-sided attack against the masses. The Old Slave Codes were replaced by the new Black Codes, and the former chattel slaves were forced into semi-slavery, segregation and racist oppression. At the same time, the escalation of the military plunder and massacre of the Indians was entering a climactic stage. And simultaneously, the courts that upheld the betrayal of Emancipation were declaring that workers, Black and white, did not have the right to organize. In other words, the courts had not only revived Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s pre-Civil War doctrine that the Black man “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” They had also extended this into another phase of repression — that labor, whatever its color, had no rights that capital was bound to respect.
In 1875, when the robber barons were joining with the former slave owners to prepare for the 1877 betrayal of Reconstruction, Judge Holden Owen, presiding over the trial of striking Pennsylvania miners, declared: “Any agreement, combination or confederation to increase the price of any vendible commodity, merchandise or anything else is a conspiracy under the laws of the U.S.” Of course, this doctrine — like Nixon’s wage-“price” freeze — was applied only to labor, never to the capitalists’ profits.
Because of the perpetuation of racism and the resulting division between the triply-oppressed Black workers and the exploited white workers, it took more than 60 years of struggle against the bosses’ government-supported violence to win the right to organize. Today, the rights of labor are once again under grave attack, and labor’s fate, as in the past, is inseparably bound up with that of the Black liberation movement.
Dimensions of the Crisis
The crisis of poverty and unemployment Black Americans now face is, save for the almost total genocidal elimination of American Indians, without precedent for any segment of this country’s population.
“The unemployment rate among Black workers in the ghetto now exceeds the general rate of unemployment of the entire nation during the depression of the 1930’s,” reported Herbert Hill, NAACP Labor Secretary, at the organization’s 1971 National Convention.
“The rate of unemployment of Black workers in 25 major centers of urban non-white population concentration is now between 25 per cent and 40 per cent,” stated Hill, “and the unemployment rate for Black youth will be in excess of 50 per cent by the middle of this summer. In 1933, the national unemployment rate was 24.9 per cent, the highest officially recorded unemployment in the history of the United States.” Hill also pointed out that tens of thousands of Black workers are classified as employed but never have an income that could lift them above the poverty level.
Yet, stark as this statistical report is, it cannot possibly convey the disaster of racism, poverty and oppression affecting every aspect of the lives of Black Americans today. The end of the decade of civil rights struggles left the Black masses with a feeling of vast frustration; not only had their condition failed to improve, it had worsened.
This frustration was simultaneously experienced by many militant young fighters, Black and white, whose despair turned to disillusion with the preceding years of struggle. They were unable to differentiate the gains of the Civil Rights Decade – in terms of unity, militant mass action and consciousness – from the deepening crisis. They did not realize that under capitalism the most important fruit of struggle is the people’s advance in unity and consciousness. In their frustration, they attacked the Civil Rights struggle itself, instead of seeing that it had created a bridge to the period ahead.
Two-Sided Pressure on King
Thus, even before the hunger and frustration of Black masses led to the spontaneous outbursts in Watts, Detroit and Newark, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. encountered attacks not only from reaction but from segments of militant youth under the influence of sectarianism and pseudo-revolutionism.
While the open attacks from the latter were a relatively new development, King had long experienced pressure from the establishment liberals, the NAACP, the Urban League and others to limit mass struggle and to rely on the courts and “friends” within the two major parties. In this period as the war in Vietnam continued and domestic conditions worsened — this pressure from the Right increased, and was particularly aimed at preventing King from linking the Black liberation movement with the anti-war struggle.
At the same time, the frustrations of radical youth were intensified by the escalation of the Vietnam war in 1965 — immediately after the new Civil Rights Act was passed. Many Black and white radicals, including Carmichael, Cleaver, Newton, Forman and Hayden, began to step up their attacks on the Civil Rights struggle. They placed themselves in opposition to King, who was determined not to abandon, but to strengthen, the forces of the Civil Rights Decade, to deepen and broaden them into a realignment that could carry the struggle against poverty and racist oppression to a new level.
If King was not without error in coping with pressure from the Right, and later with that of the pseudo-radicals, his overall record was one of firm adherence to militant non-violent mass struggle. The maturing of his leadership, his recognition of the decisive role of the working class, his evolvement toward an anti-imperialist position, all of his steady and remarkable growth reflected his rejection of both the opportunist pressures to limit mass struggle and the super-revolutionary pressures to substitute the rhetoric of violence for the power of mass struggle.
King has been dead more than five years, but the attacks on his strategy and objectives continue from the Right and the pseudo-left. In fact, while Nixon is bent on destroying the advances of the Civil Rights Decade, it is ironic that the new “revolutionists” are so certain there is nothing worth saving from it! But Nixon recognizes — and fears — what the super-militants refuse to see — the Civil Rights Decade created the pre-conditions for the much higher level of struggle needed in the period ahead.
Pressing for a New Beginning
When King was assassinated in the spring of 1968, he was leading the strike of the predominantly Black sanitation workers of Memphis. His commitment to this courageous working-class struggle was a vibrant indication that, in pressing for a new beginning in the strategy against racist oppression, poverty and war, he had come to a full realization of the meaning of his first major struggle, the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. This landmark battle was sparked by Mrs. Rosa Lee Parks, a Black working-class woman, and carried on with courage and tenacity by, primarily, Black working class men and women. In the course of a decade of leadership of the liberation struggle, King came to understand that it was workers, more than any other stratum, who possess these qualities.
King recognized that since these special qualities of workers had brought about the historic turning point in Montgomery, leading to the nationwide involvement of many other sections of the population, including Black and white youth in the struggle for equal rights, the new stage — the struggle for jobs, for an end to poverty, racism and war — demanded a new strategy based on the working class, Black and white.
Although King’s views were not identical with the Marxist conception of the role of the working class — which sees this class not only as the main social force but as the leader in the anti-monopoly struggle — he had come steadily closer to this outlook. Moreover, it is especially meaningful that King moved in this direction at the time when Marcuse and others, with the assistance of the mass media, were making their greatest headway in promoting the idea among radical youth that the Marxist concept of the working class was outdated.
Democracy, Liberation and Socialism
Another ironic contradiction in the role of many of the new radicals emerged at the end of the Civil Rights Decade: As they lost sight of the historic significance of that period, and more and more heaped abuse on it and its preeminent leader, they became the inadvertent helpmates of the ruling class, whose conscious aim it was and is to distort the meaning of that period to the masses.
It should not be forgotten that for many long decades the ruling class hid the true history of Reconstruction from the people of this country. Now, at a time when the Black liberation movement has forced at least the beginnings of attention to the Reconstruction era, it would indeed be strange if the rhetoric of the pseudo-revolutionaries helped the monopolists conceal the true meaning, the heroism and achievements of the Civil Rights Decade. This must not be allowed to happen.
It is important to understand the meaning of this period, and the vital leadership role in it of Martin Luther King, who came to an awareness of the revolutionary relationship between the fight for rights, for security, for peace and the liberation struggle. Despite their “revolutionary” rhetoric, this is something the pseudo-radicals have failed to comprehend. In rejecting this central meaning of the civil rights struggle, these radicals caricatured the Marxist principles they so often proclaimed.
As Lenin persistently emphasized, the fight for democracy is at the heart of the class struggle. He continually warned against the ideas of those who ignored the connection between the struggle for democracy, national liberation and socialism. In “A Caricature of Marxism,” he wrote:
All democracy consists in the proclamation and realization of rights which under capitalism are realizable only to a very small degree and only relatively. But without the proclamation of these rights, without a struggle to introduce them now, immediately, without training the masses in the spirit of this struggle, socialism is impossible. (Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 74.)
Lenin also emphasized that Marxists must:
. . . know that democracy does not abolish class oppression. It only makes the class struggle more direct, wider, more open and pronounced, and that is what we need. . . . The more democratic the system of government, the clearer will the workers see that the root evil is capitalism, not lack of rights. (Ibid., p. 73.)
Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass
Martin Luther King’s sectarian opponents proclaimed their Marxism, but their policies and practice were contrary to its principles. On the other hand, King’s philosophy was that of moral suasion, but in practice he came to rely more and more on the liberating force of mass struggle as the foundation for Black freedom and social advance for all the oppressed and exploited.
Though not a Marxist, King was steadily moving toward a strategy that tended to coincide with the Marxist-Leninist concept of an anti-monopoly policy, one involving the Black and white sectors of the working class, the Black liberation movement, the Puerto Rican and Chicano masses, and all others opposed to war and poverty. This strategy continues in today’s terms – when the working-class is the leading force – the strategy developed by Frederick Douglass during the Abolitionist period, when he struggled to form a broad coalition of Abolitionists and other strata to break the slave owners’ control of Congress and the Federal Government.
Just as it is impossible to understand the Civil Rights Decade without understanding the role of Martin Luther King, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the antislavery struggle without understanding the role of Frederick Douglass, the great genius and architect of the anti-slavery strategy.
Like King, Douglass matured in struggle against sectarian, separatist and accommodationist tendencies within the movement of his time. As one example, his writings show that throughout the crucial decade of the 1850s, he resisted the separatist alternative of emigrationism which would have weakened the anti-slavery front. Douglass saw that emigrationism, a forerunner of Pan Africanism, objectively meant accommodation to the slave power.
And, as early as 1848, Douglass began to oppose the sectarianism of William Lloyd Garrison and other anti-slavery forces who were against both electoral action and any coalition with those whose objectives stopped short of abolition.
In this connection, Douglass himself had at first feared that the Free Soil movement, which opposed the extension of slavery but did not demand its abolition, might divert from the anti-slavery struggle. However, he came to under stand the objective role of this movement within the anti slavery strategy and called upon the Abolitionists to support it:
We may stand off … and in this way play into the hands of our enemies . . . [or] remain silent and speechless, and let things take their course. . . . In neither of these ways can we go. (The North Star, August 18, 1848.)
While calling for a common front of the Abolitionists with the Free Soilers and others opposed to the extension of slavery, Douglass at the same time relentlessly advanced the Abolitionists’ independent goal of an end to slavery. He wrote:
Free Soilism is lame, halt and blind, while it battles against the spread of slavery, and admits its right to exist anywhere. If it has the right to exist it has the right to grow and spread . . . The only way to put an end to the aggressions of slavery is to put an end to slavery itself. (Frederick Douglass’ Paper, August 24, 1855.)
Douglass never relaxed in his drive for the development of the strategy which eventually led to a political realignment, one from which the Republican Party headed by Lincoln emerged to challenge the two major parties of the period. At the time this realignment was in the process of formation, he wrote:
We rejoice in this demonstration . . . to bury party affinities and predilections, and also the political leaders who have hitherto controlled them; to unite in one grand phalanx and go forth, and whip the enemy. (Ibid., July 27, 1855.)
Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx
In 1846, two years before writing the Communist Manifesto, the young Karl Marx had already revealed his deep understanding of the struggle against slavery in the U.S. His thinking closely paralleled the direction Frederick Douglass was taking, and this remarkable parallelism in the liberation strategy of these two giants of world history continued throughout every phase of the anti-slavery struggle.
Marx, too, saw the Free Soil movement as an objective force against slavery, and opposed the sectarianism of those who resisted coalition with it. At the same time, he warned against the utopian views of some of the Free Soilers. For example, writing of Herman Kriege, editor of the Volkstribun in New York, Marx said:
. . . he continues to chant his paean: And so the old dreams of the Europeans would at last come true. A place would be prepared for them on this side of the ocean which they would only have to take and to fructify with the labour of their hands, so as to be able proudly to declare to all the tyrants of the world, “this is my cabin, which you have not built; this is my hearth whose glow fills your hearts with envy.”
He might have added, This is my dunghill, which I, my wife, my children, my manservant, and my cattle have produced. And who are the Europeans whose “dreams” would thus come true? Not the communist workers, but bankrupt shopkeepers and handicraftsmen, or ruined cottars, who yearn for the good for tune of once again becoming petty bourgeois and peasants in America. And what is the “dream” that is to be fulfilled by means of these 1,400,000 acres? No other than that all men be converted into private owners, a dream which is unrealizable and as communistic as the dream to convert all men into emperors, kings and popes. (Quoted in: Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 327.)
Thus Marx’s aim, like Douglass’, was to develop a strategy that would bring together a coalition to stop the spread of slavery as the precondition for its abolition.
At the same time, Marx s polemic against Kriege has profound significance to the struggle against white chauvinism: it demonstrated his irreconcilable opposition to every form of accommodation to the influence of racism. Marx was battling against the seepage of racist poison into the Abolitionist movement, in this case in the form of the illusion that Western land could be won for the white masses — while the Indians were driven off this same land and the Blacks remained enslaved.
While the Free Soil movement aimed at keeping the Western land from the slave power, Marx saw that it could not halt the eventual takeover of this land and economy by the rising capitalist class. He attacked the petty-bourgeois illusions of the Free Soilers because they carried the seed of the racist division which would weaken the strategy for the most democratic outcome in the struggle against the slave power. And any weakening of this strategy would jeopardize the fight for Black liberation, further the plunder and genocide of the Indians, and profoundly disfigure the struggle for unity of the Black and white working class, whose mission it would be to lead in the battle for the abolition of wage slavery after the abolition of chattel slavery
Racist “Disfigurement” of Class Struggle
In addition, Marx saw that the greater the democratic gains of the masses, the less would the future struggles of labor with a black skin and labor with a white skin be distorted by the divisive ideology of racism. And later, applying Marxism to the imperialist stage of capitalism, Lenin placed the struggle for democracy, in the way Marx viewed it, at the center of the struggle for the socialist revolution. Racism, on the other hand, results in what Marx many times described as the “disfigurement” of the class struggle — diverting it away from the class enemy into division and fragmentation of the exploited and oppressed.
That is why Lenin tirelessly emphasized that the struggle for democracy is indivisibly bound up with the struggle against racism, and class and national oppression. Lenin saw this struggle as the key to advancing the unity of the workers of the oppressor nation with the workers and the people of any oppressed nation or nationality.
In an article that appeared in the New York Daily Tribune in 1861, Marx forewarned that the United States would continue to suffer from racist disfigurement if the abolition of slavery was in any way compromised:
The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic Party is, so to say, the general formula of United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slaveowner. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Civil War in the United States, International Publishers, New York, 1971, p.6.)
The confirmation of Marx’s analysis can be found in the “successive compromises” which led to the betrayal of Reconstruction and, finally, the transformation of the Union into the slave of state monopoly capitalism.
The history of this country has been warped and distorted, first by slavery, then the survivals of slavery and the ceaseless propagation of racist ideology. And from this history it can be clearly seen that the class interests of white workers, as in the struggle against the super-monopolies today, can only be advanced in unity with Black workers and as an integral part of the fight to end the oppression of Black people.
In writing of Marx’ simultaneous support of the land reform movement and opposition to those who saw that movement as a means of realizing their petty-bourgeois dreams instead of a way to struggle against class and racist oppression and exploitation, Lenin said:
While mercilessly ridiculing the absurd ideological trappings of the movement, Marx strives in a sober, materialist manner to determine its real historical content, the consequences that must inevitably flow from it because of objective conditions, regard less of the will and the consciousness, the dreams and theories, of the various individuals. Marx, therefore, does not condemn, but fully approves communist support of the movement. (Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 328.)
At the same time, Marx saw that even an uncompromising struggle against all vestiges of slavery, against the plunder and murder of the Indians, and to gain land for Black and white toilers, could not change the nature of commodity production which would inevitably lead to the take-over of the land and the economy by the rising capitalist class. Lenin wrote:
With remarkable penetration, Marx, who was then only the future economist, points to the role of exchange and commodity production. The peasants, he says, will exchange the produce of the land, if not the land itself, and that says everything! The question is dealt with in a way that is largely applicable to the Russian peasant movement and its petty-bourgeois ideologists. . . . Marx, however, does not simply repudiate this petty-bourgeois movement, he does not dogmatically ignore it, he does not fear to soil his hands by contact with the movement of the revolutionary petty-bourgeois democrats – a fear that is characteristic of many of the doctrinaires. (Collected Works, Vol. 8, pp. 327, 328.)
Douglass and Black Power
While Douglass was the champion of Black and white unity within the Abolitionist movement, as well as the architect of the strategy to bring about a national political realignment, he also advocated the self-organization of Black people.
By 1849, Douglass was already calling for such a group, to be named the National League of Colored People. He had even suggested a constitution for it, with a preamble that stated:
. . . we have long deplored the distracted and divided state of the oppressed, and the manifold evils resulting there from, and desiring as we do to see an union formed which shall enable us better to grapple with the various systems of injustice and wrong by which we are environed, and to regain our plundered rights, we do solemnly agree to unite in accordance with the following. (The North Star, August 10, 1849.)
Douglass was certain that in their struggle for liberation, and as part of the struggles of all oppressed and exploited, Black people would achieve self-union. “We shall never despair of our people, and union will yet be affected — our ranks cannot always be divided,” he wrote in The North Star (November 19, 1849).
It is clear that Douglass was the original advocate of “Black power” and that his concept had nothing in common with the disruptive sloganizing of Stokely Carmichael. Douglass rejected all tendencies that viewed Black power in a separatist way. “It is evident,” wrote Douglass, “that white and black must fall or flourish together.” (The North Star, November 16, 1849.)
Douglass not only opposed separatist concepts of Black power, he also polemicized against those who feared that the press would falsely portray Black self-union as anti-white. This group included a prominent Black friend who wrote to The North Star, saying, “I believe that the motto, ‘Union of the oppressed for the sake of freedom,’ will be interpreted by the pro-slavery press, to mean an union of the black against the white.” Douglass, continuing in his insistence that there was no contradiction between the self-union of the oppressed Blacks and unity with white opponents of the slave owners, responded by stating that “it seems worse than timidity for us to hesitate to adopt measures for our improvement and elevation, from fear of misinterpretation.” For Douglass, self-union of the oppressed Black people — as the starting point of Black power — was fully consistent with unity with white Abolitionists and coalition with other white strata in order to advance liberation. He saw that Abolition could not be achieved if Blacks pursued a separatist policy.
Douglass saw that all struggle, including that for self organization, was a process. It would be self-defeating, he realized, for Black people to reject the strategy of coalition until some vague future date when they had achieved complete internal organization.
Douglass did not waver in his conviction despite bitter attacks by Garrison and other sectarians in the Abolitionist movement who opposed a coalition strategy against the slave power. The passive acceptance of their views, he was convinced, would lead to the perpetuation of slavery for an indeterminate length of time.
Douglass also realized that refusal to enter into coalition with forces that did not, at that stage of the struggle, accept the goal of abolition would contradict and undermine an anti-slavery strategy. Had Douglass advocated the anti coalition concept of Black power advanced today by Carmichael, Forman, Boggs and others, the coalition of forces that led to the defeat of the slave power would not have been achieved.
In today’s struggle against the genocidal economic and social aggressions of state monopoly capitalism, those socalled radicals advocate the type of “Black power” strategy that Douglass so relentlessly opposed — a separatist concept that would dissipate instead of strengthen Black power, and would result in the perpetuation of unequal power of the oppressed and exploited in the battle against the racist ruling class.
According to Stokely Carmichae, “The major mistake made by the exponents of the coalition theory is that they advocate alliances with groups which have never had as their central goal the necessity for the total revamping of society. At bottom, these groups accept the American system and want only – if at all – to make peripheral, marginal reforms in it. Such reforms are inadequate to rid society of racism.” (Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power, the Politics of Liberation in America, Random House, New York, 1967, pp. 60-61.)
Carmichael is vague about what he means by the “total revamping of society.” The only way that can be accomplished is by establishing socialism, which he opposes. Carmichael also states that “reforms are inadequate to rid society of racism.” Of course this is true, since only the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by socialism can totally abolish racism. The majority of Black as well as white masses, however, are not ready to wait for socialism as the solution to their exploitation and oppression today. They continue to search for answers to the problems imposed by their common exploiter and oppressor, state monopoly capitalism.
Despite this fact, Carmichael calls upon Black people to reject the struggle for reforms in favor of the “total revamping” of society. In the same breath, he advocates interracial disunity pending the achievement of complete Black selfunity.
But this self-unity will come about only as a part of the revolutionary process in which the struggle for the racial and class unity of the oppressed and exploited is an aim and result of every battle against the racist oppressor. Those who do not understand the role of coalition in the people’s fight to improve their condition fail to see the relationship between reforms and revolution.
Long ago, Douglass answered those who persist in the illusion that the destiny of oppressed Black people is separate and unrelated to the destiny of exploited whites. “We deem it a settled point,” wrote Douglass, that the destiny of the colored man is bound up with the white people of this country . . . and the question ought to be . . . what principle should dictate policy . . .” (The North Star, November 16, 1849.)
Frederick Douglass and Paul Robeson
In our time, the towering figure of Paul Robeson has personified the link between two significant periods – from the betrayal of Reconstruction to the era of Black liberation begun with Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Decade.
Frederick Douglass had himself been a slave and Robeson is the son of a slave. Like Douglass in his time, Robeson has devoted his life to the cause of Black liberation. And, like Douglass, he recognizes that Black liberation cannot be achieved via a separatist path, but through Black power in alliance with the oppressed and exploited of all colors. Robeson has always seen Black independence and Black white alliance as related, indispensable components of the liberation struggle.
The principles that should dictate policy,” Robeson has declared, are the following: “Dedication to the Negro people’s welfare is one side of the coin; the other side is in dependence. Effective Negro leadership must rely upon and be responsive to no other control than the will of the people. We have allies – important allies – among our white fellow citizens, and we must seek to draw them close to us and to gain many more. But the Negro people’s movement must be led by Negroes, not only in terms of title and Position but in reality.” (Paul Robeson, Here I Stand, Othello Associates, New York, 1958, p. 111.)
Robeson struggled for self-union of his people at home, and for solidarity with the oppressed and their allies at home and abroad. Whereas Douglass travelled widely in Europe to win support for the anti-slavery cause, Robeson travelled even more extensively, rallying support for Black liberation and championing liberation from imperialism everywhere.
That Robeson’s travels were more extensive than Douglass’ was of course made possible by the October Revolution, which replaced the czar and serfdom with socialism, opening the way for the end of racism and oppression in a major part of the globe, and becoming the most decisive support for the oppressed and exploited throughout the world.
Wherever he went, Robeson earned the hatred of the U.S. imperialists — and never more than in Paris in 1949, when he declared: “It is unthinkable that American Negroes could go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed them for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has raised our people to full human dignity.”
When Robeson asserted that Black men would never fight against the country of socialism — the Soviet Union, the chief supporter and champion of liberation from imperialism, oppression and racism — he was expressing what is at the heart of today’s Black resistance to fighting a war to oppress others.
For a Strategic Breakthrough
In Douglass’ time, the strategy to break the slave power’s control of Congress and the Federal Government was the precondition for the abolition of slavery. Today, the precondition for opening the path to the abolition of wage slavery and racist oppression through socialism is the strategy to defeat the threat of fascism and to break the monopolists’ domination of Congress and the Federal Government.
“Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism [in its] preparatory stages,” stated Georgi Dimitrov, “is not in a position to prevent the growth of fascism, but on the contrary, facilitates that victory.” (United Front Against Fascism, New Century Publishers, New York, 1950, p. 9.)
The anti-coalition views of Carmichael, Forman, Boggs and others are nothing less than opposition to a united front against the “reactionary measures” with which monopoly prepares for its imposition of fascism.
However, regardless of the disruptive nature of the views of such Black radicals, it must be recognized that the main obstacle to Black and white unity against the common enemy is the influence of racism on white workers. And it is the primary responsibility of white revolutionaries to lead the fight against racist ideology and to mobilize white workers in the struggle against racism and in support of Black liberation as indispensable to the advance of their class interests.
The aim of monopoly is to force a reversal of every aspect of bourgeois democracy, limited as it is, in order to open the way for fascism. The aim of the anti-monopoly program, as advocated by the Communist Party, is to bring about a strategicbreakthrough to a deeper and wider degree of democracy, one that would powerfully accelerate the revolutionary process, opening the way to Black liberation and socialism.
Once this anti-monopoly strategy succeeds in breaking the control of state monopoly capital over Congress and the government, the forces exist, internally and internationally — in contrast to the anti-slavery period — that can prevent the betrayal of the struggle. There is such a perspective, and this is so, first of all, because the forces of class and national liberation, headed by the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries, have changed the world balance of power.
Reprinted with permission. Originally published in Strategy for a Black Agenda: A Critique of New Theories of Liberation in the United States and Africa, International Publishers, 1973.
PHOTO: Henry Winston, 1972. Daily Worker/People’s World collection at Tamiment Library.
http://www.cpusa.org/article/from-anti-slavery-to-the-anti-monopoly-strategy/ On Henry Winston 2012 is the 101st year since the birth of the former National Chair of the Communist Party, Henry Winston. The article below is taken from Winston’s 1973 book, Strategy for a Black Agenda. It is a critique of the strategy and tactics necessary to advance the revolutionary process in the face of right-wing extremism and white supremacy from the time of slavery to the upsurge of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Although the world has changed since the book was first published, it continues to offer many lessons for fighting right-wing extremism today and moving forward along the road to socialism.
Henry Winston, born in Mississippi, became active in the unemployed struggles of the 1930s and soon became a leader in the Young Communist League. He worked with William L Patterson and others to help free the Scottsboro defendants, displaying extraordinary political and organizational skills.
In the 1950s he served eight years in prison under the Smith Act, during which time he lost his sight because of medical neglect. A campaign to win his release was waged in the U.S. and abroad. Writer Richard Wright headed a French/American committee to free him and his sentence was finally commuted by President John F Kennedy.
On learning of Winston’s death in 1986, African National Congress leader Alfred Nzo remarked, “We had come to regard Winston as one of our own.”
http://www.cpusa.org/article/from-anti-slavery-to-the-anti-monopoly-strategy/
https://www.marxists.org/archive/winston/1951/02/what-it-means-be-communist.htm
https://www.cpusa.org/authors/henry-winston/
https://digitaltamiment.hosting.nyu.edu/s/cpoh/item/3793
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)