The struggle against racism is a vital struggle for the black people and the entire working class. What is racism? It is the businessmen’s tactic of dividing the working class along color lines and undermining the workers” united struggle. The material basis of racism–the difference in wages which the ruling class maintains between white and black workers–supports an entire system of economic and social discrimination against black people[1]. It appears in the super-exploitation of black workers and other blacks: higher unemployment rates, unequal pay, the worst working conditions, ghetto housing, more blatant police repression, discriminatory school systems, and countless other forms.
On this material basis, on these facts visible to all, the businessman builds his racist ideologies. He tells white workers to fear the struggle of black workers “from below.” He incites black workers against white workers. If successful, the businessman divides the working class. Who gains? The businessman. Who loses? All workers. Where workers are divided, their struggle is weakened, and only united struggle brings the working class better wages, improved working conditions, and socialism.
There are three major forms of racist ideology. One is outright, reactionary racism. The Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, Shockleys and other tools of business are examples of open racism. A second form of racist ideology is liberal racism. This is the view that only black people suffer materially from racism. White workers are said to gain from racist practices or at least be indifferent to them. The Kerner Commission indictment of “White America” and the television program “All in the Family” are examples of liberal racism. The third form of racism is racist attitudes by black people toward white persons. These attitudes are called reverse racism.
If we are going to organize the struggle against racism and lead it to victory, we must have a correct analysis of racism. We must have a class analysis of racism, of the black liberation struggle, and the road to socialism. In the communist movement in the U.S., a struggle is going on between two approaches to the analysis of racism: the class analysis and the nationalist approach. Are black people overwhelmingly workers and part of one working class in struggle against one, domestic capitalist class? Or are the black people a distinct nation, and is their struggle against an outside, invading, colonialist oppressive class? In short, racism or the “national question”?
In the past two years at least three political organizations have issued long analyses of the “national question” of black people in the United States. These books, packed with information and misinformation, display an absence of a class analysis of racism. As much by what they omit as by what they say, these lengthy works ignore the material basis of racism and do not explain to all workers, white and black, their material interest in defeating racism. Although there are important differences between these treatments of the “national question,” in sum they are a mass of liberal racism and nationalism –bourgeois ideology.
To combat these forms of bourgeois ideology and build struggles against racism, The New Voice has mainly emphasized the class analysis of racism. We still do. This analysis gives us the only way to wage an effective struggle against the oppression of black people, to explain convincingly to white workers their material interest in fighting racism, and to unite the entire U.S. working class for its economic and political struggle.
But we also face the question: are the black people in the United States a nation? For if so, here would be the material basis of the problem. Once the question of material basis is answered, a correct strategy for the black liberation struggle and for socialist revolution in the U.S. can be determined.
Are the black people a distinct nation? Or is racism a system of discrimination and unequal rights to divide the working class? The facts tell us that black people in the United States are overwhelmingly workers, and these workers are dispersed throughout the country and at the heart of the one working class in the United States. The black people are not a distinct nation, separate from a “white” nation and facing an external, invading oppressive class.
In the course of the investigation it has been necessary, of course, to examine the nationalist and liberal racist ideas peddled by those who talk about the “national question.” The ideology of internal nations serves only the bourgeoisie in its strategy of fomenting racial divisions within a single revolutionary class. The working class needs class consciousness, not nationalism or liberal racism.
A great struggle against U.S. imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism rages in the world today. Since World War II, the contradictions of the world capitalist system have been concentrated in the colonies and neo-colonies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The New Voice has outlined this struggle elsewhere (see the pamphlet, Imperialism Today: An Economic Analysis). We must point out how the analysis of the black liberation struggle in the United States is different than that of the worldwide struggle against U.S. imperialism. Only those who put color lines above class lines merge the two. A basic tenet of science, of Marxism, is the analysis of concrete conditions. Our goal here is to see what the specific situation in the United States is. Let us make a class analysis of racism and take a Marxist-Leninist approach to the national question. Then we will be able to unite the U.S. working class in the struggle against racism and capitalism and for socialism.
[1] This pamphlet is about the national question only for the black people in the United States. A similar analysis often applies to other minorities in the U.S., but every case has to be studied individually.