Printable version
	Prometheus Research Series 3	HOME

Continued from left column

This is a complete fantasy. This nation which the Stalinists have dreamed up for the Negroes reminds me very much of the white man’s heaven: a story taken from the folklore of the slaves which features Jack, the immortal hero of this mythology.

The story says that one morning the master related to Jack that he had dreamed about the Negro’s heaven. It was a miserable place, dirty, sloppy, uncared for and generally run down. Jack made little comment about this dream, but the next morning informed the master that he too had had a dream. He dreamed of the white man’s heaven. It was a marvelous place to behold. Green grass, great buildings, marble statues, fountains and pools and gardens. Everything spotless. The only peculiar thing was that there was nobody there.

That is the con­di­tion of the Stalinists’ dream of a Negro nation.

It is equipped with boundary lines, an inde­pen­dent culture, a state power and all the attributes of nationalism. But there just isn’t anybody there. The Negroes will have nothing to do with it.

In the comparison of the Negro move­ment with the nationalist move­ments of Europe, their differences are clearly revealed. In every important case of national oppression in Europe in modern times, assim­ila­tion­ism on the part of sections of the oppressed nation, usually its upper classes, was the sign of accommodation to oppression. Conversely, nationalism and the demand for self-determination was the expression of the struggle against oppres­sion.

With the Negro move­ment it is the precise opposite. Historically, since the foundation of abolitionism, every militant struggle against oppression, with the single exception of the Garvey move­ment, has demanded the right of assimilation. The acceptance of separatism has been char­ac­teristic of accommodation to oppression and renunciation of struggle. The adoption of the separatist doctrine is the means by which Negro leaders seek peace with the enemy.

The Negro struggle arises from the position of Negroes in America, not from that of the Poles in Czarist Russia. Polish nationalism was the means by which the workers and peasants of Poland had to begin the solution to their problems. But the various theories of Negro nationalism and the idea of self-determination for Negroes have the effect of justifying the system of racial segregation, without which dis­crim­ina­tion could not exist.

The Negro question is revealed as historically unique. This flows from the unique “purity” of the race question in the United States. Militant assim­ila­tion­ism under the slogan of Full Equality is the driving force of a move­ment which can be fulfilled only in the struggle against capitalism and for socialism.

There are hypothetical historical circumstances under which, however, the Negro move­ment might become transformed into a national struggle, or a struggle for racial independence along national lines. As a matter of fact the separatism of both Washington and Garvey had an embryonic nation­al­ism which, if the isolation of the Negroes from the working class as a whole had been maintained in the form in which it existed in the 1920’s, might have developed much further.

Leon Trotsky enumerated two such historical possibilities. First: “Under the con­di­tion that Japan invades the United States and the Negroes are called upon to fight—they may come to feel themselves threatened first from one side and then from the other, and finally awakened, may say, ‘We have nothing to do with either of you. We will have our own state’.”

Trotsky said this in the period immediately preceding World War II. It revealed his concern over the Negro question in the United States, and his insistence upon considering all variants of the historical process. But this is now an historical impossibility.

Secondly, he said, “There is another alternative to the successful revolutionary one. It is possible that fascism will come to power with its racial delirium and oppression and the reaction of the Negro will be toward racial independence.... A ‘privileged’ con­di­tion will be created for the Amer­ican white workers on the backs of the Negroes.”

But Trotsky did not grant the defeat of the Amer­ican workers by fascism, and neither do we. On the contrary, the Amer­ican working class in alliance with the Negroes has the power to overthrow the rule of Wall Street and set up a workers government which will completely fulfill the needs of the Negro people for full equality.

As an oppressed racial minority having no home­land other than the United States, the Negroes find driving force in their struggle for eman­ci­pa­tion in the demand for full equality: the right to complete integration and assimilation into Amer­ican life.

Revolutionary socialists stand squarely upon this program: for immediate and uncon­di­tional eco­nomic, political and social equality. An important part of this stand is to reject and condemn every proposal for the solution of the Negro question through racial separation, whether it be the vicious segregationism of the bosses’ doctrine of “separate but equal” or the more subtle program of the Communist Party for “self-determination” for the Negro people. Both of these can only buttress the basic social system of Jim Crow whose main pillar of support is segregation.

We declare, however, with Trotsky that in the unlikely event that history should take a different course than the victory of the revolution in this epoch, and in consequence, the Negro move­ment might be pushed back into isolation again, bringing forth the move­ment for eman­ci­pa­tion along different lines, we will help the Negro people to achieve this eman­ci­pa­tion by whatever road they choose without giving up our own basic program for immediate full equality.

6.  The Question of Prejudice

Now we must go over to the question of the nature of race prejudice and its role in the Amer­ican system of race relations. The Amer­ican philosopher and pragmatist John Dewey has stated that “anything that obscures the fun­da­men­tally moral nature of the social problem is harmful....” Gunnar Myrdal, who edited an enormous book on the Negro question for the Carnegie Foundation, is a devout follower of John Dewey. In this book An Amer­ican Dilemma he uses this idea as his guiding principle: that social problems are fun­da­men­tally moral in nature.

We are familiar with the application of this theory to other fields. In the case of the exploitative evils of capitalism, it is claimed that the exploitation of wage labor by capital results from the greed of the cap­ital­ist. The inference is clear, therefore, that as long as people are greedy, and they have always been so, exploitation of man by man will continue.

Karl Marx proved conclusively, however, that it was not greed but property relations which make it possible for exploitation to exist.

When applied to the Negro question, the theory of morality means that the root of the problem of dis­crim­ina­tion and white supremacy is prejudice. This is the reigning theory of Amer­ican liberalism and is the means by which the cap­ital­ists throw the responsibility for the Jim Crow system upon the population as a whole. If people weren’t prejudiced there would be no Negro problem. This contention is fun­da­men­tally false.

The position in which the Negro people are placed in U.S. society is the direct result of the system of color slavery. Color prejudice under slavery resulted from the degraded position of the Negro. The Negro was virtually the entire southern working force and color prejudice reflected the degraded position of labor as a whole in society. The greatest humiliation that white men in the old South could undergo was being forced to do productive labor.

In this society before the Civil War, dis­crim­ina­tion thus had the advantage of being appended to a peculiar and special mode of production in which servile labor appears natural, and is in fact the basic labor of society.

The Garrisonians claimed that slavery was only a moral question. And while their militant actions were in violation of this concept, they maintained that all that was necessary was to show that it was morally wrong and slavery would cease to exist. But the Garrisonians were wrong. Because slavery was a matter of a social system, a mode of production, tremendous wealth amassed by its ruling class, and state power to protect it. They were also proven wrong by history, where war and revolution, not moral suasion, were necessary to end slavery.

Now, we know from a study of the history of cap­ital­ist devel­op­ment throughout the world that one of the important aspects of the emergence of capitalism is the creation of the free labor market, where the laborer has nothing but his labor power to sell, and may go and come through the country in search of a buyer for this commodity.

However, the triumph of capitalism in the South brought not the free labor market, but the adaptation of the plantation system of color dis­crim­ina­tion and compulsory labor to cap­ital­ist property relations. In this contradiction between the tendency of capitalism to operate with a free labor market and the reality of semi-slave labor, all the weird social relations and prejudices which originated under slavery were intensified by the victory of capitalism.

Prejudice is not the cause of dis­crim­ina­tion, as the liberals claim, but is the product of the reciprocal relation between dis­crim­ina­tion and segregation. At the foundation of the southern system are the great eco­nomic, political and social advantages which capitalism derives from color exploitation, and the advantages accruing to a small white middle class. The principal prop of this system of dis­crim­ina­tion is segregation. Without segregation the racial division of Amer­ican society is meaningless and withers away. Segregation is maintained basically not by prejudice but by force and violence and the legal structure of the South.

Prejudice is the product of this complex social relation. But although it is directed immediately against the Negro, its object is the working class as a whole. Through dis­crim­ina­tion and segregation, Negro labor is degraded and its wage falls to the bare subsistence level. But this sets the pattern and controls the con­di­tions of labor as a whole.

Color prejudice thus reflects both prejudice against labor as a whole and the degradation of the southern worker. In the South white labor is dis­franchised along with Negro labor and the standard of living of the white sharecropper or factory hand is little better than that of the Negro.

Discrimination and prejudice in the rest of the United States derives directly from the southern system, feeds upon it, and like racial dis­crim­ina­tion throughout the world is completely dependent upon it. The cap­ital­ist class adapts to its needs the fun­da­men­tal features of the southern system. In every possible way it perpetuates the division of the working class by establishing throughout the entire nation the basic reciprocal relations between dis­crim­ina­tion, seg­re­ga­tion and prejudice which are so successful in the South.

Discrimination within the working class itself is due to the adaptation of the labor aristocracy to the southern system as a means of preserving craft and bureaucratic privileges in industry and in the union move­ment. But in the North and West the basic social system of the South and its heritage from the past are missing. Therefore in these regions the Jim Crow system tends to break down under the forces generating working class soli­dar­ity.

The basic identity of interest of the industrial working class and the Negro people is revealed in the alliance between the Negroes and the white workers in the CIO. Craft unionism with few exceptions was lily white during the 1920’s. The emergence of the CIO was testimony that unionism in the mass production industries cannot exist upon either a craft or racial foundation.

But since dis­crim­ina­tion in the North and West derives from the southern system, it will never be eliminated until the southern system is uprooted and destroyed. Similarly with prejudice. Education against prejudice has its importance in the Negro struggle. But only the destruction of the eco­nomic and social foundation upon which prejudice is built will eliminate it. This will be accomplished only by the socialist revolution.

7.  The Negro Struggle, Capitalist Politics and the Labor Movement

I believe that I have already demonstrated how completely integrated the Jim Crow system is with Amer­ican cap­ital­ist production and its political super­structure. Nevertheless even after agreeing with many or even most or all of these facts there are still some who cling tenaciously to the false idea that in some way or another there is room for considerable progress towards the solution of the problem of racial dis­crim­ina­tion within the frame­work of the cap­ital­ist parties.

The police state of the South is administered by the Bourbons through the Democratic Party machin­ery under the protection of the national government. But it must be remembered that if it was the Democratic Party which created the semi-fascist southern system, it was the Republican Party which voluntarily turned the South over to the Klan.

The Democrats, it is true, are the main upholders of white supremacy. But it was the Republican Party which, during its purge of the Black Republicans during the 1890’s, caused the coining of the epithet “lily white.”

The so-called struggle between the Republicans and Democrats in the South is essentially a struggle between two cap­ital­ist political cliques for the allegiance of the most reac­tion­ary section of southern political society, the Dixiecrats. Whatever the ups and downs of this struggle, the basic political structure will remain intact until the working class, jointly with the Negro people, vanquishes and destroys the Republican-Democratic dic­ta­tor­ship.

One of the main struggles of the Negro move­ment in the South since World War II has been directed towards achieving the right to vote. This has had some success. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the mere addition of an increasingly larger number of Negroes to the voters list will materially change social con­di­tions in the South. Votes don’t determine or control anything of great importance in the South.

The battle for the vote is an absolutely necessary part of the Negro struggle in the South. But as long as it finds expression merely in the right to support one or another wing of the ruling Bourbon dic­ta­tor­ship, its scope is extremely limited, and it will change nothing essential.

There is no progressive tendency in the reac­tion­ary southern dic­ta­tor­ship. The Bourbons enjoy sending their “liberals” to Congress as a malicious joke on the nation. But at home they are united on the fun­da­men­tal questions. To the Negroes’ demand for equality they unanimously reply with the doctrine of “separate but equal,” for they well know that there is no equality with segregation.

The effectiveness of the struggle for the right to vote in the South will remain limited until it is coupled with the struggle for the right of the southern workers to establish their own inde­pen­dent party of labor with no compromise on the basic question of civil rights.

However, equality is not enough, either in the North or South. The Negro has the right to ask: “What is it to be equal to the undernourished white sharecropper in South Carolina? What is it to be equal in the disease-infested slums of Detroit?”

Southern workers are the victims not only of the racial division of society which intensifies cap­ital­ist exploitation. They are also oppressed by an historically outmoded system of land tenure. Southern agriculture is still suffering from the inability of the Civil War and Re­con­struc­tion to break up the landed estates of the slaveowners. Along with the demand for full civil rights must come the demand to destroy the plantation system, and an end to tenancy and sharecropping through the nationalization of the land. The nationalized land must be divided among those who work it and operated either as inde­pen­dent diversified farms or as state-operated industrial farms controlled by the workers. In this respect the problems of plantation labor in the United States are hardly less severe than they are in India.

In the North and West, equality of Negroes as wage workers can never become a reality under capitalism. For capitalism is a system of scarcity, and the Negroes, the last to be hired by modern industry, will continue to be the first victims of the periodic spasms of unemployment which char­ac­ter­ize cap­ital­ist production.

What would equality bring to the Negro middle class at a time monopoly capital is squeezing out the white middle class? A hundred years ago it would have had meaning. But today equality, even if possible under capitalism, which it is not, would be only the equality of destitution which is the future of the middle class of the United States.

Each of these examples demonstrates that dis­crim­ina­tion against Negroes in the United States is so ingrained in the social structure that only complete destruction of capitalism can lay the foundation for the solution of the Negro question.

A hundred years ago Karl Marx, in urging the Amer­ican workers to support the struggle of the slaves for eman­ci­pa­tion and to support the northern cause in the Civil War, proclaimed the following truth: “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” This is just as true today in the modern context of racial dis­crim­ina­tion as it was during the struggle against slavery.

At each point, the fun­da­men­tal interests of the industrial working class and of the Negro people are tied together. At no point is this revealed more strongly than in the problems of unionism.

Working class solidarity is a mighty antidote to race prejudice. Without the overthrow of prejudice unionism itself is always in danger. This is demon­strated in the great struggles against the giant corporations of auto, rubber, steel. Here the working class was forced, in spite of prejudice, to present a united front to the employers or meet sure defeat. This action was the beginning of the overthrow of race prejudice, just as it was the beginning of industrial unionism.

But this is also demonstrated in the heart of the South where unionism in Birmingham, through the agency of the coal miners and steelworkers, has thrust an imposing salient into the semi-fascist Bourbon empire.

The street-car conductors of Birmingham are one of the groups whose function it is to maintain the traditions of segregation. In the turbulence of Birmingham, which is just an overgrown U.S. steel “company town” in many respects, the street-car conductors are armed, or at least they used to be. It was common to shoot scores of Negroes every year to maintain segregation on the cars.

But during the period of the organization of the utilities, one day six Negro powerhouse workers struck against injustice, and within two hours every single street car was idle due to the action of solidarity of the white street-car crews with the six Negroes. This action illustrates the way that cap­ital­ist exploitation levels out the working class until finally the workers begin to shed even their race prejudice in the interest of class soli­dar­ity.

If industrial unionism could not exist upon a racial basis, neither can it be maintained on a regional basis. The low wages of the South are a constant pressure upon all unions throughout the country. Furthermore, the Bourbon dic­ta­tor­ship is the most consistent and steadfast of all the sources of anti-labor reaction in the country.

The central role of the southern Democrats in all the anti-labor legislation in Congress through the years is too well known to require comment.

During times of eco­nomic stability the pressure of the southern reaction may take only the form of undermining and limiting the labor move­ment. But in times of social crisis it can become the backbone of a great reac­tion­ary move­ment.

The open-shop Jim Crow South is therefore lifted as a Sword of Damocles over the head of the labor move­ment. But the example of the city of Birming­ham proves that it is by no means impossible to organize in the South.

Nevertheless, the CIO has failed in all its major attempts. This can only be explained by the limita­tions of the program of the union bureaucracy.

The organization of a labor move­ment in the South among the basic industrial and agricultural workers there must take its point of departure from a break with cap­ital­ist politics and cap­ital­ist parties. It must recognize that a whole social system must be overthrown before democracy and unionism will be possible. A social system involving a privileged middle class which, though weakened by cap­ital­ist devel­op­ment, is still the dominant social force, involving an archaic land tenure and a semi-fascist police state.

As adherents of the Democratic Party and partners of Amer­ican big business the union bureaucrats operate as partisans of the Bourbon Party of the South regardless of their wishes in the matter.

8.  Socialism and the End of the Race System

In concluding, I want to summarize my thesis on the question of racial dis­crim­ina­tion in the struggle for equality.

The racial division of society was born with capitalism and will die only with the death of this last system of exploitation. Before capitalism there was no race concept. There was no skin color exploitation, there was no race prejudice, there was no idea of superiority and inferiority based upon physical char­ac­ter­is­tics.

It was the advent of Negro chattel slavery in the western hemisphere which first divided society into races. In a measure the whole supremacy of western capitalism is founded upon this modern chattel slavery. The primary accumulation of capital which was the foundation of the industrial revolution was accrued largely from the slave trade.

The products of the slave system in the early colonies formed the backbone of European mercantilism and the raw materials for industrial capitalism. The three-cornered trade by pious New England merchants, consisting of rum, slaves and sugar cane, was the foundation of Amer­ican commerce. Thus Negro slavery was the pivotal point upon which the foundations of the U.S. national economy were hinged.

As the last surviving slave system in the modern world, U.S. Negro slavery in the first half of the 19th century was a worldwide center of reaction. The myth of racial superiority based upon skin color was adopted by the western imperialists as a means of stabilized colonial rule. They have never failed to justify their practices in the colonies by reference to the Amer­ican system. The Amer­ican plantation system was transported to India and was introduced by Amer­ican slave drivers. Attempts of the British to introduce the color concept into the castes of India made constant reference to the Amer­ican system of white superiority.

Having become the imperialist leader of the cap­ital­ist world, the U.S. exports race prejudice as naturally as it does death and destruction to the colonial world. Europe was virtually free of color prejudice until the white Amer­ican army began its indoctrination of the “Amer­ican Way.”

There is hardly a soldier, sailor or seaman who went through the campaign for the Solomon Islands who will ever forget his first entrance into the harbor at Tulagi after it was established as the principal P.T. base in the islands. As the ship slowly winds its way through the inlets and channels leading to Tulagi, surrounded by a beautiful and idyllic jungle, all at once a gigantic and shocking sign looms into sight. A sign twice or even three times the size of an ordinary roadside billboard, as I remember it.

A black background with enormous white letters. The sign screamed the jingoism of World War II: “Admiral Halsey says: ‘Kill Japs! Kill Japs! Kill more Japs! If you do your work well you will help to kill more of the little yellow bastards!”’

And in this way a little spot of the U.S.A. was carved out of the jungle, and the GIs knew they were at home; with the Ku Klux Klan and the fiery cross and the black and white symbols. And this is only one of the many ways that they were never permitted to forget that they were fighting for the restoration of white supremacy in Asia, regardless of the humanitarian talk from the White House.

In the Korean War the wholesale destruction and massacre of civilians gave the world a fore-taste of the ruthless contempt that the Amer­ican rulers hold for the darker people of the colonial world. The introduction of “Luke the Gook’s Castle” into official military and journalistic geography attests to the persistence with which the U.S. military spreads “the miasma of race prejudice,” as Trotsky called it.

But if the United States spreads race prejudice it also provokes a reaction against it. Throughout Europe the U.S. holds capitalism together in defiance of the wishes of the overwhelming majority of its people. The European peoples have no intention of becoming the battleground for World War III. Their justified suspicion of Yankee imperialism is expressed, in part, by their refusal to accept the doctrine of white supremacy and their demonstrative acceptance of Amer­ican Negroes on the basis of equality.

In Asia, if the doctrine of race is necessary to maintain a large military force intact, it also stimulates and fortifies the determination of all Asian peoples to struggle against imperialist domination. The great Chinese Revolution emerges in this respect as a body blow to the whole system of white supremacy.

The “Negro Question” in the United States exists because of the failure of the cap­ital­ist class to solve the most elementary problems of the democratic revolution in the South: the problems of land tenure and democratic rights. Thereby it has left the social heritage of color slavery intact as a malignant feature of social life.

But capitalism, even in the southern United States, has created the con­di­tions necessary for its own destruction. It has disrupted the old agrarian pattern, undermined the privileged white middle class, thus weakening the whole fabric of social repression. It has created great industries, pro­le­tar­ian­izing white, urbanizing black. This process has centralized the Negro community in positions of great strategic advantage in large city communities, whereas before they were dispersed over the countryside. Capitalism has likewise created the con­di­tions for the overthrow of race prejudice by working class soli­dar­ity.

It falls upon the shoulders of the proletarian revolution, in which the Amer­ican workers will join together with the Negro people in the abolition of capitalism, to uproot the Jim Crow system. It is our task to build the party to lead that revolution: the Socialist Workers Party.

Continue

---

back

But the middle class of shopkeepers, farmers, inde­pen­dent artisans, doctors and lawyers—small businessmen of all kinds—furnishes the only avenue of escape from wage slavery into the ranks of the cap­ital­ist class. Consequently, the lower the middle class the more intense and feverish is the com­pe­ti­tion for survival.

It is not hard to see that a tremendous advantage would be gained by a section of the actual or potential middle class if it could arbitrarily exclude half of the population from the right to compete with them for these occu­pa­tions.

Immediately after the Civil War privileged poor whites established themselves in middle class occu­pa­tions. They made of these positions a white monopoly by the organized terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. One of the most important achievements of terrorism during the later days of the Re­con­struc­tion was the complete exclusion of the Negroes from the general middle class.

It was principally this move­ment of the middle class organized into the Klan, channelized and controlled by the cap­ital­ists and landowners, which gave to these new rulers complete political control over the South.

The white monopoly of privileged middle class positions tended to extend down into the higher skilled sections of the working class itself, gaining additional points of support for the rule of the new Bourbons.

A further expression of the privileges held by the white middle class of the South is to be found in their traditional exploitation of domestic servants.

It has been usual in the South that for a couple of dollars a week, carfare and old clothes a white family can have a maid. And for slightly more, a gardener or a cook.

In this way, due to the extreme degradation of labor, it has been possible for the southern middle class to live in a con­di­tion of luxury and freedom from all domestic labor which is found only among the ruling classes of other social systems and the colonial agents of imperialism.

Thus, the mass base of the naked rule of the cap­ital­ists and landowners is revealed as a privileged middle class and labor aristocracy which owes its special position to the racial division of Amer­ican society.

Herein is revealed the sociological and historical antecedent of German fascism. The Nazi Party and the Storm Troopers are almost the exact prototype of the Bourbon Party and the Ku Klux Klan. The Nazis, like the Klan, were essentially of the middle class. They served the basic interests of the large cap­ital­ists while defeating and demoralizing the working class and creating the basis for the totalitarian dic­ta­tor­ship, just as the Klan operated against the Negroes and the white Populists. The principal ideological weapon of both was racism and their principal organizational weapon, terrorism.

It is well known that the Nazis sent official and unofficial observers to the United States to study and learn Amer­ican methods of racial dis­crim­ina­tion and segregation to be applied to persecution of the Jews.

But the comparison of the South with Nazi Germany must take account of two important differences. First, the white middle class had a genuine advantage to exploit in the southern states in maintaining a racial monopoly of its privileges. In Germany the “Aryan” middle class found only complete destruction and humiliation by the cap­ital­ists after the destruction of the labor move­ment and the Jewish people was completed.

The second difference is that Negroes are a fun­da­men­tal part of the southern working force. The object of terrorism is to make them more profitable workers. In the case of the Jews the object of the Nazis was not to put the Jews “in their place” but to exterminate them.

2.  The Indus­tri­al­iza­tion of the South

We said at the beginning of last week’s lecture that the material con­di­tions surrounding the Negro struggle have undergone a fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tion since the days of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta speech.

The change is to be seen not only in the great migration of the Negroes northward and westward which has created a new environment in the basic industrial sectors of the nation’s economy. Prin­ci­pal­ly, the change has occurred in the South itself.

The most notable facet of the present eco­nomic picture in the South is the entry of monopoly capital into all phases of eco­nomic life and the indus­tri­al­iza­tion which has taken place in this once exclusively agricultural area.

In search for cheaper labor markets, and to accom­mo­date the needs of the war economy, Amer­ican capitalism has been forced to abandon its earlier conception of the agrarian South as mainly a source of raw materials and very limited industrial devel­op­ment. Modern industry has pushed some of its most advanced devel­op­ments into the very heart of the cotton belt.

In building its new industrial empires in the South, however, big capital goes all the way. The new devel­op­ments tend to become large mass production units, organized around monopolistic company-dominated industrial towns. In these towns the worker is born in a company shack, buys his groceries at the company store, works in the company sweatshop, and is buried in the company graveyard.

In all fields of the modern South monopoly takes over. The recent hearings during the half-hearted anti-trust action against the A&P monopoly revealed the process by which the free farmers are being exterminated. In merchandising, as in everything else, it is the same story: big business invades the South. And there is no room for a white privileged middle class in this scheme of things.

Furthermore, the devel­op­ment of modern indus­try has destroyed the role of the artisan and skilled worker.

The mass base of the southern cap­ital­ist dic­ta­tor­ship has thus been undermined by the very process of cap­ital­ist production.

The next remarkable feature of the present-day South is the tendency for the functions of the lynch mob to be taken over by the police, the military and individual terrorists. This is interpreted by many people to be a sign of the strength of the southern social system; that now at last the lynchings can be done “legally” and the State takes official respon­sibility for them.

But in reality, this con­di­tion reflects the weak­ened power and reduced social weight of the white middle class. It is no longer able to maintain its traditional function of mass terrorism against the Negroes. The increased capacity of the Negroes for resistance by their concentration in industrial cen­ters has come hand in hand with this weakening of the white middle classes.

Thus capitalism, by the logic of its own devel­op­ment, has undermined the very social foundation upon which it depends for support and at the same time increased the ability of the oppressed to defend themselves.

Both German and Italian fascism were raised to power and stabilized by the terrorism of the middle class against the working class. But after achieving power, the fascist leaders, as representatives of monopoly capital, could give nothing to the middle class. The mass base was dissipated by the dis­il­lu­sion­ment of the middle class, and the rulers maintained their positions with only the support of the police and the military force. This was char­ac­ter­ized by Trotsky as a Bonapartist military-police dic­ta­tor­ship.

While the eco­nomic situation remains relatively quiet this type of rule gives the illusion of great strength. But it is really a regime of extremely unstable equilibrium, as was shown in both Italy and Germany where under con­di­tions created by World War II these military dic­ta­tor­ships fell easily. In Italy, under the pressure of the first revolutionary waves of the revival of the workers move­ment. In Germany, by the military pressure of the Allied armies.

So, also, the South today is revealed as a semi-military police dic­ta­tor­ship, its mass base under­mined and dissipated by the very logic of cap­ital­ist devel­op­ment. It too will fall under the first serious blows as the southern workers mass move­ments will arise in the period ahead.

Other far-reaching effects of the indus­tri­al­iza­tion of the South undermine the rule of capitalism. The proletarianization of poor agrarian and middle class whites by modern industry has created a clear identity of interest between white and black as exploited industrial workers. Capitalism has thus itself created in the South all of the con­di­tions for the emergence of the class struggle and the revival of the age-long struggle of the Negroes for equality, spelling the doom of capitalism.

3.  The Struggle for Equality

So far we have been concerned mainly with the objective nature and history of the race question. It is now time to consider the direction of the actual struggle of the Negro people against dis­crim­ina­tion.

The Negro struggle has been historically con­di­tioned by two main factors. First, the basic social and eco­nomic need of the U.S. ruling class to prevent the devel­op­ment of any cultural or eco­nomic base upon which inde­pen­dent nations might arise. Second, by the very nature of segregation. This is the means by which the assimilation of Negroes is prevented and their special racial exploitation maintained.

The interaction of these two factors has created the two poles of the Negro struggle: separatism and assimilation.

The European emigrant groups were required only to assimilate and to become “Amer­icanized.” But the Negroes, the most completely “Amer­icanized” section of the population, have been prevented from exercising Amer­ican citizenship, and thus are deprived of the right of assimilation. On the other hand the eco­nomic devel­op­ment of the country has prevented such a segregated group from developing any eco­nomic and social base by which they could take advantage of their segregation to develop the foundation for an inde­pen­dent national economy.

At every point, the ruling class has calculated to maintain this factor of racial separation. And conversely, the basic advances which the Negroes have made through the entire historical period from the founding of abolitionism in the 1830’s until the present day have been achieved in the struggle against separation, and essentially for the right of assimilation into Amer­ican society.

I want to trace briefly the historical devel­op­ment of the relation between separatism and assim­ila­tion­ism as the main two poles of the Negro struggle.

During the first decades of the last century there was one and only one organized move­ment in the United States concerning itself with the Negro question: the Amer­ican Colonization Society. This was an organization founded by slaveowners and basically expressing their interests.

Though this society was international its most important base was among the middle class humanitarians of the northern cities of the United States. The whole first half of the 19th century was an era of insecurity and unrest for the urban middle classes. The long depressions brought about by the fun­da­men­tal cycles of cap­ital­ist production, partially by the constant reduction in tariffs by the slave power, kept the middle classes in a state of constant crisis which resulted in a hysteria for reform.

It is char­ac­ter­is­tic of the middle class, however, that because they have no inde­pen­dent class position in society they cannot find the solution to their problems in terms of their own class interests. Today middle class hysteria born of eco­nomic insecurity finds its expression all the way from religious revival to support of fascist-type move­ments.

During the first half of the 19th century, the middle class attached itself to a number of panaceas, which it felt might solve its problems. They became preoccupied with temperance, with money and land reform, with utopian socialist move­ments; some attached themselves to nature, others to the uplift of women and factory workers; but the most powerful magnet of attraction for this middle class was the Negro question.

They felt, and quite correctly, that somehow the Negro question concerned their own insecurity. The truth was that the source of the terrible crisis of the middle class of this period was in the fact that the slave power, representing class interests hostile to cap­ital­ist devel­op­ment, was the dominant force in the nation, and inasmuch as the future of the middle class was tied up with the future of capitalism in general, the slaveowners were their enemies and the slaves were the only group in society with the power and position to overthrow this hostile class.

But the slaveowners were able at first to control and channelize this middle class discontent through the agency of the Amer­ican Colonization Society. The program of this organization was to solve the Negro question by the colonization of all free Negroes in Africa.

Among the achievements of this society was the founding of the colony of Liberia. Some 25,000 Negroes at one time or another were deported there, mostly against their will, and formed a ruling and privileged group in the colony. For more than a century they have ruled and exploited the African native population there in the interest of Amer­ican industrial enterprises. This colony, nominally an inde­pen­dent republic, is today owned for all practical purposes by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.

Neither the slaves nor the free Negroes would have anything to do with this plan for deporting them to Africa. They contended that they were Amer­icans as much as any and more so than most and demanded the rights accorded to all other Amer­icans. To the slaveowners’ demand for the deportation of Negroes, the slaves counterposed the demand for immediate and uncon­di­tional eman­ci­pa­tion. This was the genesis of the abolitionist move­ment and the program which the slaves and free Negroes fought on throughout the Civil War and Re­con­struc­tion.

This early conflict between colonization and abolition expresses the conflict between separatism and assimilation which have been the basic problems of the Negro struggle ever since 1830. This conflict appears today between those who struggle for immediate and uncon­di­tional eco­nomic, political and social equality, and those who will make some concession or adaptation to the demand of the ruling class for segregation.

In most instances the Negroes have found their most bitter foes ranged on the side of separatism, and have achieved their advances along the opposite line. In this historical context the Garvey move­ment appears in its true light as the abortive result of the decades of horrible reaction and the complete isolation of the Negro people which followed the Re­con­struc­tion. Separatism in the Negro move­ment is an adaptation to the segregation imposed by the ruling class. In the case of the Garvey move­ment it was the only channel through which the mass discontent of the Negro people could express itself.

The Stalinists thus find in their advocacy of separatism an embarrassing contradiction to their support of struggles against segregation.

The ruling class now proposes the spurious solution of “separate but equal.” But the Negroes are quite aware that separation is the con­di­tion of dis­crim­ina­tion, not of equality. They counterpose the demand for uncon­di­tional and immediate equality to all the doctrines of separation.

4.  Race Consciousness

Now we come to the question of race con­scious­ness. Many people wrongly assume that race conscious­ness among Negroes is a sign of their desire to create a society and state of their own, or, as the Communist Party puts it: for National Self-Deter­mi­na­tion.

Race relations are the artificial product of cap­ital­ist exploitation in the United States. They do not flow from the basic eco­nomic relations of pro­duc­tion but are superimposed upon the class structure. In the disfiguration of Amer­ican society by the scar of race antagonism we see that it fortifies and tends to stabilize the structure of Amer­ican capitalism by dividing the population into hostile racial groups, who find it difficult to get together in defense of their common interests against the master class.

Race con­scious­ness is one of the products of this arbitrary division of society into races. It bears some similarity to other forms of social con­scious­ness, and yet it is different.

Class con­scious­ness, for instance, has a thor­oughly material foundation whether it be of the cap­ital­ist class or among the workers. For either work­ers or cap­ital­ists, class con­scious­ness is the rec­og­ni­tion that because of eco­nomic position in society a person has certain basic problems which are common to all those of the same eco­nomic group.

In this case, the mode of production divides society into eco­nomic classes, and class con­scious­ness is the inevitable product of this division. Class con­scious­ness corresponds to the real relations of production.

But there is nothing in the mode of production itself which divides society into races. This division is the result of the disfiguration of the cap­ital­ist mode of production in the South by the influences of chattel slavery. It is maintained only by force and violence and is accompanied by prejudice, special exploitation, extreme ignorance and cultural barrenness. Race con­scious­ness reflects in one way or another the distortion of the mode of production and the violence and prejudice of the race system.

In the southern system and the race relations which derive from it, all Negroes are the victims of dis­crim­ina­tion. But except for a minority of cap­ital­ists and privileged middle class people, the white population as such does not derive benefit from it. On the contrary, the white worker and farmer are as much the objects of class exploitation as are the Negroes. A majority of the workers and farmers in the South are white. But their standard of living and general social con­di­tion is directly determined by that of the Negroes.

Therefore, while the dark race is the direct victim of dis­crim­ina­tion, the group which gains from it is not the lighter skinned race but a class: the ruling cap­ital­ist class of the United States. To be sure, this class is lily white, but it is not their color which distinguishes them from the rest of society, rather their great wealth, and the control which they exert over all finance and industry. It is not the race con­scious­ness of cap­ital­ists which comes to the fore in their relation with Negroes, but their class con­scious­ness: they are able to take advantage of the racial structure of Amer­ican society to extract super-profits from Negroes through cap­ital­ist production.

It is principally among the white workers and farmers of the South that white race con­scious­ness asserts itself. But I believe I have shown that the great majority of these white workers and farmers are victimized by the racial division in society nearly as much as are the Negroes. Race prejudice, which is the form of white race con­scious­ness, is one of the means by which the extreme exploitation of white workers themselves is maintained. It is in direct opposition to their material interests. We are there­fore justified in maintaining that there is no material foundation for race con­scious­ness among the white working class: it is just a matter of prejudice, which goes against their material interests.

But it is different with Negroes. The racial structure of the United States produces a race con­scious­ness among Negroes which corresponds directly to the special exploitation and dis­crim­ina­tion against them. It does not derive from their African cultural heritage or from an inde­pen­dent cultural devel­op­ment in this hemisphere, but simply from their position in Amer­ican society as the immediate and principal victims of the Amer­ican system of race relations.

Nor is race con­scious­ness in the United States the same as race con­scious­ness in Africa, or among the Chinese. In these cases race exploitation is the by-product of colonial oppression and is controlled by the national aspirations of these colonial peoples, though these may take the form of racial aspi­rations. It is related that the slaves of San Domingo, in their secret religious rites, chanted this song: “We swear to destroy the whites and all that they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow.” This is the voice of the slave aspiring to eman­ci­pa­tion—a class struggle which took the form of a race war. Finally, in San Domingo the whole revolution for the independence of Haiti took the form of a racial conflict.

Race con­scious­ness among Negroes in the United States is primarily their con­scious­ness of the desire for equality, and the universal expression of it is apparent in the militant struggle to achieve this equality. This is at the root of every important move­ment either of the masses or of the Negro intelligentsia which has arisen during the past twenty-five years. It is different from the mani­fes­ta­tions of race con­scious­ness in the colonial world, as for instance the anti-white struggle in Kenya unfolding before us.

The demand for immediate equality has been the cornerstone of the NAACP, was the premise of the March on Washington Movement, of the move­ment against dis­crim­ina­tion in industry, on the job and in the labor unions. Above all, it is the basis of the Negroes’ recognition and support of the CIO.

Thus in contrast to the Africans, where race con­scious­ness inevitably expresses nationalism, the primary expression of race con­scious­ness by Negroes in the U.S. is the demand for the right of assimilation into Amer­ican society.

Race con­scious­ness may take the form of race pride. In the white population this is a vicious tool of reaction, for race pride among whites is primarily the prejudice and chauvinism of white supremacy. But among Negroes, race pride may and usually does take an extremely progressive course. For race pride is the Negroes’ con­scious­ness of equality, and expresses itself in struggle against the cap­ital­ist system of inequality, and may express itself in the demand for the right to struggle jointly with white workers against the bosses, thus giving unionism an additional racial point of support.

Or this race con­scious­ness may take the form of a sympathy with the colonial peoples who are also the victims of white supremacy, though in a different form. This instinctive racial sympathy with the darker peoples of the colonial world by which Amer­ican Negroes strike back against their own racial oppression is in reality a great demonstration of internationalism, and a forerunner of the mutual sympathy and understanding which will char­ac­ter­ize the relations of different peoples after capitalism has been destroyed. This internationalism is a great thorn in the side of imperialism.

Again, race con­scious­ness may take the form of the vindication of the history of the darker peoples. Under the stimulus of Negro historians, African society, for so long expurgated from the official history of the world, is revealed as an important source of all modern civilization. All society advances scientifically and culturally by these discoveries and studies.

However, race pride among Negroes does not at all mean that they want either to return to Africa or to found an inde­pen­dent nation here in the U.S. It is rather another means by which Negroes justify their demand for full equality in the United States.

5.  The Question of Self-Determination

There are expressions of race con­scious­ness other than in the various phases of the struggle for equality. There is an expression of Negro race con­scious­ness which has a purely cap­ital­ist foundation, in a small section of Negro businessmen who hold eco­nomic advantage by maintaining a racial monopoly of certain commercial enterprises. It is to the advantage of this small group to maintain the basic features of segregation.

Booker T. Washington expressed the needs of this social group in his doctrine of acceptance of the Jim Crow system. However, for the mass of Negroes this doctrine has a different significance. It provides a means by which individuals or groups may express a willingness to cease the struggle for equality and ac­commodate themselves to the requirements of the white ruling class.

Booker T. Washington appeared on the scene at the termination of the Re­con­struc­tion, when the Negroes, having engaged in revolutionary struggle for thirty years, had met final defeat at the hands of the Klan. His exhortation to the Negroes to humbly submit was inspired by the master class. The Negroes accepted it, not because it expressed in any way their immediate desires or interests, but because in defeat and isolation they had no alternative.

Out of this isolation and defeat there finally emerged, after thirty years, a militant move­ment of struggle against suppression: the Universal Negro Improvement Association, led by Washington’s disciple, Marcus Garvey.

Garvey’s was the only major move­ment in the whole history of the Negro struggle since the Civil War which led a militant struggle while accepting segregation. This organization disappeared as rapidly as it arose. It disappeared because of the sharp contradiction between a militant struggle and the acceptance of segregation. Garvey’s program of “Back to Africa,” for the promotion of Negro commercial enterprise, his acceptance of the Washington creed, were inadequate for the forces which his move­ment unleashed.

In this respect the Garvey move­ment was a transition from the abject acceptance of segregation to the modern struggle for equality which was made possible by the emergence of the CIO. As a transitional move­ment it was transitory in its existence. The CIO, expressing the interests of the most exploited industrial workers, inevitably expressed the fun­da­men­tal truth of the race ques­tion, that the interests of the working class and of the Negro people are identical, not antagonistic.

The fun­da­men­tal content of the demand for full equality is the right of assimilation into Amer­ican society. The idea that this primary expression of race con­scious­ness will probably express itself in the form of nationalism as the struggle unfolds is false. It is based upon the mechanical identification of the Negro ques­tion in the United States with the national question in Europe and the colonial world.

The Communist Party has been the agent of more confusion on this question than any other group in the country outside the outright partisans of the southern system.

After belaboring the Negroes unsuccessfully for eighteen years with the proposal that they organize an inde­pen­dent nation in the cotton belt, the Stalinists came to the conclusion in 1946 that the Negroes weren’t smart enough to see how won­derful this kind of segregation would be. So, say the Stalinists, when the Negroes get smartened up they will realize that they are really an inde­pen­dent nation and demand self-determination and the Communist Party will be vindicated.

Top Right