EXCERPT taken from National Chair of the Communist Party, Henry Winston's 1973 book, Strategy for a Black Agenda
"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.)
Marx and Engels on the US Civil War
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