Beginning in the early 1950’s, shattering the surface calm, a storm has been gathering at the very heart of U.S. society. This storm is the struggle of the more than 20 million Afro-Americans for liberation, a struggle whose roots date back to the beginnings of capitalism in America.
Following the legal battle against segregated and inferior schools in the south, the Black people’s struggle erupted into a mass movement with the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955-56. This served notice that the Black people would never again be beaten or cowed into submission.
From there the Black people’s mass movement surged forward, through the voter registration drives, the freedom rides, the sit-ins and demonstrations, spreading from south to north, into the early and mid-1960’s. Then came the open proclamation of “Black Power”–that the aim of the Black people’s struggle was nothing less than complete emancipation, and declared as the enemy the white ruling forces in the U.S. And with “Black Power,” and the growing influence of Malcolm X, whose ideas and inspiration could not be assassinated, came the recognition that in the fight against the U.S. ruling class, the Black people have powerful allies; other Third World people within the U.S.–the descendants of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America who have been driven to the U.S. by colonialist and imperialist domination of their countries, and who, along with the Native-Americans, suffer vicious national oppression as peoples of color.
From the start, even during the first stages of the civil rights movement, the present-day struggle of the Black people has drawn great inspiration from the peoples and nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, who are casting off colonial domination and winning independence and national liberation, in a great wave of anti-imperialist revolution that has engulfed the biggest capitalist powers since World War II.
Black people who were shanghaied into the service of U.S. imperialism’s attempts to suppress this rising tide of revolution, who returned first from Korea to be treated like the “slant-eyes” they were forced to attack, who came back to the U.S., as Black veterans always have, to face more discrimination, unemployment poverty, extreme exploitation and police brutality, added a powerful militant thrust to the Black people’s struggles. And a dozen years later, as they returned from Vietnam, when the reactionary nature of the U.S. ruling class has been much more thoroughly exposed, both within the U.S. and throughout the world, Black veterans joined in a Black liberation struggle which had reached the level of widespread mass rebellions and armed resistance against police terror. The birth of the Black Panther Party signalled the development of armed, organized anti-imperialist forces within the Black liberation struggle.
Combining all these factors, the growing strength and numbers of the Black liberation struggle have shaken U.S. imperialist rule at its foundations. But the Black liberation struggle was still hemmed in and held back by the fact that, from the early 1950’s, it had been strongly influenced by middle class and capitalist forces among the Black people, who have tried to confine the struggle within bounds that would mean an improvement for themselves, within the system of U.S. imperialism.
Many of these bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces were directly encouraged and assisted by the U.S. imperialists. They tried to co-opt the slogan “Black Power and turn it into a phony program for “Black capitalism,” which meant in fact a few crumbs to the Black businessmen and the elevation of a section of the Black middle class, especially professionals, to roles as managers and officials in the bureaucracies of the corporations, banks and federal, state and local government agencies they control.
But all the efforts of the U.S. ruling class and its Black junior partners have failed to stem the growing tide of Black resistance. They have failed because there is no way to reverse the entire historical process that has given rise to the Black liberation struggle; no ay, within the system of monopoly capitalism, to eliminate the oppression that propels not only the masses of Black people, but the working class as a whole, and the great majority of society, into ever-sharper struggle for survival, progress and liberation.
The Black people’s struggle has become such a powerful force and has shaken U.S. society so fundamentally exactly because, since World War II, the Black people, while still suffering national oppression, have been transformed from peasant-farmers concentrated almost entirely in the Black Belt of the south, into wage-workers, concentrated overwhelmingly in urban centers and, more importantly, in the large-scale industry that makes up the cornerstone of power of the country’s rulers. For this reason, the Black liberation struggle is smashing the restraints that the ruling class and certain bourgeois Black “leaders” have tried to impose on it.
For this same reason, as the Black liberation struggle spreads, sinks deeper roots and begins to organize the tremendous potential power of the Black workers, it is beginning to shatter the divisions the ruling class has constructed and maintained among the ranks of the working people. Over the past decade the Black liberation struggle has propelled forward the struggle of the whole working class.
The liberation of the Black people and the emancipation of the white workers and all the other oppressed and exploited people in the U.S. are bound together and cannot be separated. From the beginning of our organization, the Revolutionary Union has recognized that the overthrow of U.S. imperialism and the establishment of the political rule of the working people, the dictatorship of the proletariat, would be achieved through the revolutionary alliance of the national liberation struggles in the U.S. with the working class movement as a whole. This will form the solid core of a broader united front, including all sections of the people who can be united in struggle against the rule of the monopoly capitalists.
In our Red Papers 2, published nearly three years ago, we stated clearly that we:
. . . recognize that the Black liberation struggle is both a national question and a class question . .. (and) we recognize (that this) is the key to understanding the dynamics of proletarian revolution in the U.S.
At that time, we also made it clear that while we are convinced this position on the dual nature of the Black people–as an oppressed nation and overwhelmingly as members of the single U.S. working class–is the foundation for a correct program, our own understanding of the dialectical relationship between the national and the class struggle was primitive and would have to be developed through the application of Marxism-Leninism, the science of revolution, to the struggles of the working class and oppressed peoples in this country.
With the growth of our organization and our deeper involvement in’ the struggles of the people, and especially with growing numbers of Third World people joining the ranks of our membership and leadership, we have become more sharply aware of the need to advance our theory and practice on this question. The development of our own organization, and much more importantly, the development of the revolutionary mass movement, means that it is both possible and necessary to investigate more thoroughly the historical roots of the national struggle in the U.S., and to grasp more firmly the crucial link between the national and class struggle at this stage in the battle against U.S. imperialism.
In this paper we are concentrating on the Black liberation struggle and its overall relation to the workers’ movement, because the Black liberation struggle has been the most advanced in the U.S. since World War II, “has delivered the greatest blows against the enemy and developed the greatest material basis for an entirely new level of working class unity. At the same time, we recognize the importance of the other Third World movements. We are now doing more investigation, and summing up our work more thoroughly, in relation to the Puerto Rican, Mexican-American and other Latin-American peoples in the U.S., as well as Native-Americans and Asian-Americans, including the Hawaiian people.[1]
But despite the differences between the various oppressed nationalities within this country, they share one decisive characteristic: they are all overwhelmingly working class. Their struggle for freedom is closely bound up with the struggle of the entire working class to abolish the system of wage-slavery. In the final analysis, the practical and theoretical leadership for uniting the national and class struggles, to lead the people in overthrowing monopoly capitalism and building socialism, will come from a single, multinational Communist Party. This Party will be forged through the common efforts of the several Marxist-Leninist forces in the U.S., having deep roots among the workers and other oppressed people, and applying the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism to all their struggles.
We are firmly convinced that advancing both theory and practice in linking up the class struggle with the national struggle will help to advance the mass movement and to lay the basis for the future Communist Party, which will lead the people to victory and, at long-last, to complete emancipation.
[1] We are now concentrating, especially, on making a more thorough investigation and summing up of the history of the more than 10 million Mexican-American people of the southwest and their struggle for liberation. Our basic position on this question is laid out in Red Papers 2 and 4: after the conquest of the southwest in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Mexican-American people in that area, the Chicanos, were welded into an oppressed nation. With the development of U.S. capitalism to its imperialist stage, and especially after the Depression and World War II, the Chicanos have been dispersed into concentrations in urban centers and transformed from a peasant nation to an overwhelmingly working class nation, part of the single U.S. proletariat.
For the Chicanos, as for the Black people, the right of self-determination remains and must be upheld, but the heart of the Chicano liberation struggle is the driving force it provides for the equality and revolutionary unity of the entire working class in struggle against U.S. imperialism. For these reasons, the Chicano liberation struggle has much in common with the Black liberation struggle. But there are also important differences, in both the historical development and the present-day forms of struggle, of the two nations. It is the concrete condition of the Mexican-American people, and the historical and material basis of their struggle, that we are now investigating more thoroughly. Because this is a very important question–the Chicanos are the second largest oppressed nationality within the U.S.–we are planning to publish a separate document on Chicano liberation. That is why there is only a brief analysis of this question in the present paper.