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    Vol.62/No.32           September 14, 1998 
 
 
Vanguard Role Of Blacks In Next American Revolution  
The expert below is from the book The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions. In the section titled, "Prospects for Socialism in America," the book takes up the centrality of the struggle of oppressed nationalities - Blacks in particular - in the overall fight for the emancipation of the working-class in the United States. This section was adopted as part of the main political resolution of the Socialist Workers Party's 27th National Convention in 1975. It is copyright (c) Pathfinder Press, reprinted with permission.

The oppressed nationalities and national minorities have a dual character. They constitute a growing percentage of the working class itself and at the same time they are the most important allies of the working class. In this respect they differ from the oppressed layers of the petty bourgeoisie, and all other allies except the women. To see only one side of this duality, and to ignore the other, would be a fatal error for a revolutionary party. Oppressed nationalities and national minorities are exploited as proletarians. This exploitation is intensified by their pariah status since they are at the same time oppressed as distinct peoples. The struggle against this twofold oppression is one of the central driving forces of the coming American revolution. It is closely intertwined with all the problems and issues facing the American working class.

Their importance as allies of the proletariat stems from several factors: National oppression and the racism used to justify it are rooted in the historical development of American capitalism, in the uncompleted tasks of the second American revolution (the Civil War, which emancipated Afro-Americans from slavery but failed to lead to full equality), and in the rise of imperialism with its self-justifying racist ideology.

National oppression is used by the ruling class to divide the working class, to buy off leaders and privileged strata, thus weakening both the class consciousness and political independence of the workers, and bolstering capitalist rule. With or without legal sanction, a major component of the industrial reserve army has been kept in a pariah status. The overwhelmingly proletarian composition and superexploitation of the oppressed nationalities and national minorities mean that they will be the most consistent and cohesive of all allies of the working class in its struggles. More and more they will furnish leadership in the fight to transform the labor movement into a fighting social movement, using labor's power to back the struggles of all the oppressed.

`Jim Crow must go'

In the postwar years American imperialism drove to expand its domination in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. To do so it needed a new, less racist image. In addition, the changes taking place in the economic structure of southern society created the need for new forms of social control. The more alert representatives of the American ruling class began to recognize that Jim Crow, the southern system of legal segregation maintained through legal and extralegal terror, had ceased to be the most effective means of perpetuating the second-class status of the Black proletariat.

Under pressure from growing mass resentment, the U.S. armed forces were formally desegregated during the Korean War, and then in 1954 the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional.

But it was only the decade-long direct-action struggles, mobilizing millions of Blacks and their supporters, that downed Jim Crow. Their power and determination played a decisive role in altering Black consciousness and self-confidence. This was reflected in the rise of Black power and Black nationalist sentiments; in the popularity of Malcolm X; in the upsurges of other oppressed minorities and social groupings; in the moral questioning that has so deeply motivated the youth radicalization; and in the modification of the opinions of masses of white workers.

The effects of the mass struggle to end segregation, followed by the powerful rise of Black nationalist sentiment, were subsequently seen in the vanguard role played by Black GIs in opposition to the Vietnam War....

The ghettos explode
Rebellions in the Black communities, beginning in New York in 1964, spreading to Watts in 1965, and Newark and Detroit in 1967, and culminating in the 1968 nationwide outbreaks after the death of Martin Luther King, ushered in a new stage of struggle in which Black nationalist ideas spread rapidly. These spontaneous upsurges, along with intensified struggles by Black students and other sectors of the Black community, forced more concessions from the ruling class and brought forward new leaders who became targets of stepped-up government repression.

Riding the crest of the postwar boom, the ruling class co- opted a layer of the leaders or potential leaders of the rising Black radicalization by granting them economic, political, and social concessions.

The percentage of Black enrollment in the country's colleges and universities tripled in a five-year period at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. "Great Society" dollars were poured into poverty program funds, a good part of which went into salaries of "aspiring leaders," Black and white.

The face of the Democratic Party also underwent a significant change. The threat posed by the unconditional opposition of Malcolm X to the Democratic Party and the first halting steps toward independent Black political action, such as the Michigan Freedom Now Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, was adroitly countered. From the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the election of Black mayors in a half-dozen major industrial cities, to the emergence of the Congressional Black Caucus, and the election of more than 1,100 Black officials in the deep South-where less than a decade ago the masses of Blacks were barred even from voting-the lure of "working within the (two-party) system" attracted the overwhelming majority of a generation of potential Black leaders.

The following features should be added to the picture of the crisis of leadership of the Black movement:

1. The total default of the organized labor movement, whose class-collaborationist leadership was unable to rise above its own narrow concern of maintaining its privileged position and refused to mobilize the power of the labor movement in support of the Black struggle.

2. The calculated policy of the powers that be of eliminating any potential individual leaders-such as Martin Luther King, who inspired the Black masses to struggle, or Malcolm X, who was beginning to urge Black people toward independent political action against capitalist oppression.

3. The failure to effectively meet government harassment and murder of a layer of leaders in the generation of the 1960s. Groups like the Black Panthers, whose ultraleftism turned them away from any mass perspective, were left defenseless before the government's cold-blooded use of agent provocateurs and terror.

4. The numerical weakness of the revolutionary Marxists, which prevented them from providing a revolutionary leadership except in the realm of program and socialist perspectives.

But despite this crisis, the rise of Black nationalism and the massive ghetto explosions brought about a historic advance in the self-confidence of Blacks and their image of themselves as a people. The upsurges also changed the way white Americans viewed Afro-Americans. Despite the lack of adequate leadership of the Black movement, its power won numerous concessions and registered advances throughout the decade of the 1960s. This has been symbolized in the at least token participation of Blacks at every level of society and culture, from TV commercials to sports, from elected union posts to the Supreme Court. In the late 1960s even the income differential between Black and white workers narrowed by a tiny, though perceptible, amount. Blacks began fighting for preferential quotas, training, and upgrading in industry and the educational system, as necessary and irreplaceable steps along the road to real equality.

 
 
 
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