First Published: The Call, Vol. 6, No. 18, May 9, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The formation of our Party and the publication of our Draft Program represents a major and fundamental break with revisionism on every question of importance to the socialist revolution. Taking into account the history of U.S. capitalist society, none of these questions is of greater significance than the national question.
The Draft Program of the Communist Party (M-L) puts forth a scientific analysis of national oppression in the United States and charts the path towards victory for the national democratic movements within the heartland of U.S. imperialism.
It traces the origins of national oppression in the U.S. to the conditions of capitalism and the rise of imperialism, its highest stage. It exposes the trading in Black slaves, the conquest of Puerto Rico, Mexico, the Philippines, and the rest of imperialism’s bloody history, leading up to modern day national oppression.
By showing that the national struggle today “is in essence a class struggle,” the Program points to the victory of socialism as a precondition to winning freedom for all the oppressed nationalities. No piecemeal reforms under capitalism can end national oppression, because the whole system is so deeply rooted in the oppression of nations, the maintenance of large pools of cheap labor among minority workers, and the chauvinist ideology dividing white and minority workers and weakening the class struggle.
A component part of the Program is the view that the movements of the nationally oppressed people “constitute the main ally and a direct reserve of the U.S. working class.”
Communists must actively develop the alliance and merger of the workers movement and the national liberation struggles, welding them into a mighty force against imperialism. For this undertaking, the Program affirms the importance of relying on the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought on the national question.
The Program cites five of these key principles. It calls for the right of self-determination for all oppressed nations; for full democratic rights and equality for all nationalities; for independence for all U.S. colonial holdings; for regional autonomy or federation within the U.S. multi-national state for oppressed nations which don’t choose to separate, as well as for all oppressed national minorities in their areas of concentration; and for the creation of a multi-national Party of the proletariat.
The objectives of the Party on the national question are summed up in the following way: “To establish a socialist state, end all national privileges, guarantee equality and full democratic rights.” On the Chicano, Puerto Rican, Native American, Asian-American, Afro-American and other national questions in the U.S., the Program firmly defends democratic rights, including the right of regional autonomy in areas of minority concentration.
The Program also calls for active combat against all forms of discrimination, including inequality of languages and cultures, and forced deportation of foreign-born workers. It opposes the reformist schemes of the NAACP and other reformist and liberal elements who promote “integration” under capitalism as the final end-all and be-all of the struggle.
The Program staunchly defends the right of self-determination for the Afro-American people in their area of historic national development, the “Black Belt” or former slave South. It is precisely because of the revolutionary character of the Afro-American struggle as a bubbling volcano right in the midst of the U.S. that the imperialists have used every weapon in their arsenal to attack this liberation movement.
In conjunction with violent police repression and Klan terror, the ruling class has also launched an ideological barrage aimed at concealing the revolutionary essence of the national question. The imperialists’ spokesmen, for example, have tried to present the question as one of “white racism” in the heads of the white workers. This was the conclusion of the Kerner Commission’s study of the urban rebellions of the 1960s. In this way they try to cover over the class character of racism and oppression and pit worker against worker.
In his book, Class, Race and Black Liberation, the chairman of the revisionist Communist Party U.S.A., Henry Winston, unites with the imperialists’ theory, Of racism as the, cause of Black oppression and joins hands with U.S. imperialism in liquidating the national question. He goes so far as to call the right of self-determination “a fantasy” and says that this principle of Lenin’s applies only to Africa, Asia; and Latin America.
In the view of these revisionists and chauvinists, imperialism has been able to “solve” the national question through the development of advanced capitalist production; and all that remains is for the ruling class to “reorder its priorities” and pump a few more dollars into poverty programs. The revisionists support Black Democrats and other liberals for public office as a way of “ending discrimination,” and they advocate that the capitalists pass a law “to make racism illegal.”
But the actions of the CPUSA’s liberal darlings like Maynard Jackson, the Black mayor of Atlanta, exposes their bankrupt line. Jackson recently fired 1,000 mostly Black sanitation workers in an effort to break their strike. Despite all the praise the CP has heaped on Jackson about being “progressive” and a “Black spokesman,” his record shows that he is nothing but the capitalists’ henchman in carrying out the exploitation of the working class, and especially Atlanta’s large Black community.
Like the imperialists, the CPUSA claims the heart of the matter is that workers must be “reeducated“ to “repudiate” their racism. But it’s not the white workers who cause the brutal police repression, massive unemployment and discrimination in education, language, and employment faced by national minorities in this country.
This revisionist line is thoroughly exposed in the Draft Program. The program correctly shows white chauvinism to be an “ideological bulwark” of the bourgeoisie, promoted especially by the bribed upper strata of the working class, the labor aristocracy. It is these labor lieutenants of capitalism who have historically fomented racism among the masses of white workers: badly weakening the class struggle as a whole.
The Program points out that the task of combating white chauvinism, as well as narrow nationalism, must be carried out in the struggle against imperialism. While opposing the chauvinist view that the struggle for Black liberation must be “put off until after socialism,” our Program also opposes the reformist line that separates the struggle today from our ultimate aims.
Our defense of the right of self -determination for the Afro-American nation is not the same as advocating separation. As our Program states, “Recognition of the right to self-determination does not mean our Party advocates or supports separation as the solution to the Afro-American national question, nor does it mean that it will give its support to every bourgeois secessionist movement. The Party of the working class takes as its starting point the unity of the workers of all nationalities.”
Our Program also draws a line of demarcation from the phony communists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the centrists of the Guardian, and others who drag the red flag of Marxism into the mud of white chauvinism. The RCP has promoted notorious chauvinist theories on the national question – that Black nationalism and not white chauvinism is the “main danger” and that raising the special demands of minorities is “divisive.” These theories have led them down the bankrupt path of supporting school segregation and siding with the racist anti-busing movement.
The RCP and the Guardian echo Henry Winston in attacking the fight for Afro-American self-determination. All these opportunists share the common line that the advance of the productive forces has enabled Black people to become “integrated” into the system; and that the migration of Blacks out of the South means the Afro-American nation no longer exists and self-determination no longer applies.
Forcefully exposing this, array of chauvinist theories on the national question, the Program charts a correct course for the victory of the national liberation struggles. It shows that, under socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, all forms of national oppression and racial discrimination can be eliminated. A society can be forged where all the formerly oppressed peoples are brothers and sisters living in harmony and freedom.