Black History Month is different this year. Trump’s rants about “diversity hires” and vision of a “color-blind” America are attacks on Black workers, 1 of 5 of whom work in the public sector. Schools are being threatened with defunding if they educate children about the reality of racial oppression of Black people or support transgender students. Social services such as Medicaid, food stamps, and public housing are facing the chopping block by the Department of Government Efficiency, led by a billionaire who salutes like a nazi, Elon Musk.
The Democrats cannot, and will not, defeat the growing far-right danger building up in the U.S. Black people have always faced tremendous odds in this country. It’s crucial that working people, youth, and activists look to the actual history of the Black liberation movement—it’s a history in which a key role was played by Black socialists, Marxists, and union organizers who realized the fight against racism could only be won by a multiracial movement against all capitalist exploitation. By examining this history, we can obtain key lessons about the way forward to defeat Trump and the system which spawns disgusting, racist creatures like him—capitalism.
Marxism & Black Liberation
Black people have been in a class struggle ever since the arrival of the first African indentured and enslaved servants in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. The enslavement of African Americans was rooted in the expansion of profits of the colonial elite. Black people fought against slavery ever since that moment in various forms—running away, refusing to work, launching slave rebellions, and spreading strategies to defeat the Southern slavocracy. Trailblazing figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth heroically took on slavery and anti-Black oppression by organizing a mass movement of abolitionism. They fought not only to eliminate slavery, but for the abolishment of all forms of racial discrimination.
Standing alongside these famous Black figures are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels repeatedly talked about the necessity of the emancipation of the Black worker. They were leading activists in England during the U.S. Civil War, when the Southern states tried to bribe the British and French governments to support the Confederacy in exchange for the continuation of cotton trade, which was under a Union naval blockade. Marx and Engels helped organize mass rallies of workers in the clothing industry in England that relied on cotton to stand against any support for the Confederacy.
Marx went beyond simply supporting the struggle of Black people because of injustice. Marx and Engels understood that the enslavement of African Americans was essential to the formation of the capitalist system, meaning not only that Black slaves needed to be emancipated, but that the power to overthrow the international system rested in the hands of workers and the oppressed, including Black people. For Marxists, the struggle for Black liberation inherently means the struggle against the foundations of international capitalism.
After Emancipation, Black activists began to come up against the reality that political rights alone could not win Black liberation—not without economic power. Some, like Booker T. Washington, looked to helping unskilled former slaves join the skilled, industrial working class as the key to liberation. Others like W.E.B Dubois drew more radical conclusions about liberation, but looked to education as the way forward. Hundreds of thousands of former slaves entered political life by building schools, co-ops, and political parties; and in general, drew increasingly radical conclusions about the next steps for the struggle.
The dawn of the 20th century saw massive developments for Black people as a whole. The Civil War had been the culmination of a revolutionary process to abolish slavery, but the exploitation of Black people continued in a different form. Wall Street made an alliance with the former slave owners of the South to ensure that they could exploit Black working people to an absurd degree. Former Black slaves were forced to either work poorly paid jobs or trapped in sharecropping.
The planter class and the Democratic Party encouraged the Ku Klux Klan, a reactionary mass movement involving millions of white people, and systematically crushed the limited economic and political gains Black people had made after slavery. Many Black working people fled the South, but were met with the grueling reality that racism and exploitation was present in Northern cities, albeit in a different form.
The Russian Revolution & The Role Of Black Socialists
In 1917, the world was stunned by the Russian Revolution. The Russian working class pulled off what was once thought impossible—overthrowing capitalism and imperialism. The leaders of this mass movement were the Bolsheviks, who were led by electrifying leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. They firmly shouted the slogan, “Workers of the world and the oppressed, unite!”
These revolutionary socialists fought against many forms of oppression because Tsarist Russia had subjugated a wide variety of ethnic minorities who faced oppression from the majority Russians, and the Bolsheviks understood the need to unite working people by defending their right to self-determination and equal rights. After the victory of the Russian Revolution in November 1917, the Bolsheviks formed the Communist International (Comintern) to fan the flames of revolution around the world. The Comintern stressed the absolute requirement for American communists to drop any racist prejudice, and to jump into the struggle for Black liberation by organizing alongside them.
Many Black activists were attracted to the Russian Revolution because it immediately followed through on its promise of self-determination of oppressed peoples. This led to the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood, an organization of Black American communists who argued against Black nationalism on the one hand, and liberalism on the other. They put forward the need to organize across racial lines.
Black nationalism puts forward the idea that integration is a pipe dream—Black people need to segregate from all other races, especially white people, and create a Black nation. Black nationalists proclaim pro-capitalist ideas, such as creating a Black capitalist class through Black workers buying exclusively at Black-owned businesses. Others may put forward a “return to Africa” approach in the belief that African capitalism is more culturally compatible with the consciousness of Black Americans.
Liberalism is an ideology that believes capitalism is a natural system that is overall a net positive, and its crises are more due to accidental events as opposed to systemic contradictions. Liberal civil rights organizations believe that capitalism can therefore be adjusted to allow Black people to climb the economic ladder and eliminate racism. Integration is seen as a panacea for all social woes.
Both of these philosophies ignore the reality that capitalism requires the existence of an exploited, oppressed working class that is divided between race and gender. Creating a separate Black nation doesn’t solve this problem, nor do reforms ultimately change the character of capitalism as a racist system.
From 1917 to the early 1930’s, tens of thousands of Black workers joined the Communist Party because it actually fought for Black liberation. They organized multiracial, desegregated unions at a time when the American Federation of Labor (AFL) failed to struggle against Jim/Jane Crow.
Mass campaigns were launched to defend Black people from the unjust U.S. judicial system such as the campaign to defend the Scottsboro Boys, who were wrongly convicted of the rape of two white women. Black workers organized alongside the NAACP and liberal civil rights organizations. They rejected the limitations of liberal politics, not by critiquing from the sidelines, but by actively struggling for farther-reaching demands that inspired millions of Black people, including liberal NAACP organizers.
Millions of Black people began to realize the cruel reality they were forced to live in, and began to create new mass organizations of struggle such as Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalist organization, the UNIA, and liberal civil rights organizations like the NAACP.
Communist Party activists played a key role in building multi-racial labor unions in the 1930s. Their determination in fighting racism as part of building a united struggle by all workers was key to the victory of the United Auto Workers and the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) in organizing manufacturing workers in the mid-1930s, many of whom were Black.
The CIO raised the living standards of millions of Black workers. The CIO and Black trade union activists played a key role in determining the character of the mass struggles for Civil Rights in the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.
Unfortunately, the rise of Stalinism had a disastrous impact on the Communist Party’s direct role in the Black liberation struggle. Rather than focusing on the main demands of the movement, Stalin pointed to Black nationalism and a separate Black nation as the main demand.
The Communist Party began to campaign for Democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt, since he was allied with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, Roosevelt was silent on the systematic discrimination of Black people in the United States. This confused many Black members and many ultimately left the Communist Party out of disgust and betrayal.
FREEDOM NOW — Socialists & The Civil Rights Movement
The Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s was a mass movement that was planned and carried out by Black working-class activists who organized direct actions, popular boycotts and mass protests. Civil Rights leaders such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks are often rightly cited as gigantic figures of justice, and are still seen as legendary Black activists. However, what is often left out is the fact that many of these Black Civil Rights leaders either were socialists, or worked extremely closely with socialists.
The story of Rosa Parks is often told as though one day she got “fed-up” and refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This is actually far from the truth! Rosa Parks was an active NAACP organizer, and the entire famous civil disobedience of that moment was planned as a single action in a larger mass movement. Rosa Parks and other Civil Rights activists learned tactics of mass civil disobedience from union and socialist organizers. For example, not many know that Rosa Parks attended organizing camps with union organizers and communists, such as the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.
What’s even less well-known about Rosa Parks was that her husband was involved in the Scottsboro Boys campaign, organized by the Communist Party. Rosa Parks got involved in politics first by campaigning alongside Communist Party members! This shows that socialists have a key role to play in creating strategies to fight racial oppression, and can radicalize many Black working people to struggle both for democratic rights and against the system of capitalism.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., toward the end of their lives, were both increasingly convinced that capitalism didn’t have answers for Black working people. Malcolm X broke from the Black nationalist Nation of Islam, and began to build international solidarity among all oppressed people. This clarified that capitalism is a system of oppression, which uses racism to keep people divided. He began to have meetings with socialist organizations, such as the Socialist Workers Party. He famously proclaimed about the need for worldwide revolution uniting working people around the world in his later speeches.
Years of fighting for Civil Rights also radicalized figures like Martin Luther King Jr. He stood against the complete surrender of the liberal civil rights organizations to the Democrats after the passage of the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act. He spoke out against the Vietnam war, and said plainly that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my own government.” King started to describe himself as a “Democratic Socialist.” He founded the Poor People’s Campaign to fight for unionized jobs, like sanitation workers in Memphis, and he fought for quality public housing in Chicago.
MLK Jr. and Malcolm X were becoming clearer threats to the whole system, and their assassinations represented a serious defeat for the Civil Rights movement. Young Black men were being sent to die by the thousands in Vietnam while being treated less than human at home. The liberal civil rights organizations supported the Democratic Party and focused on legislation that benefited wealthier Black people rather than Black workers. The failures of the Civil Rights movement to deliver gains for ordinary Black working people was clear.
Black activists learned through this process, and started creating explicitly revolutionary Black socialist groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. These were dynamic organizations of young Black people who sought to connect with the explosive movements around the world like in Latin America, China, and Africa. They posed such a threat that the U.S. government orchestrated an all-out assault on the Black Panthers. They were a threat mainly because of their revolutionary socialist politics, and their clear call for a multiracial, multi-gender working class revolution.
The ruling class used the carrot and the stick to snuff out the revolutionary potential of these groups. They assassinated Fred Hampton when he was 21 years old, and chased others, like Assata Shakur, into exile. At the same time, the ruling class opened up the Democratic Party to a new generation of Black politicians, on the condition that they defended U.S. capitalism. There were historic gains won as a result of the Civil Rights movement, and eventually Barack Obama was elected as the first Black president of the United States. But Obama raised the expectation of millions of Black people only to oversee the Great Recession’s decimation of Black communities. The Black Lives Matter movement, because it was co-opted by the Democratic Party, failed to win material gains, and Trump’s victory is in part the result.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The Black working class has watched countless Black people fall into one of three allotments in life: poverty, prison, or early death. Ruling elites are frightened by the immense anger this has caused in U.S. society—not just among Black people—and they are terrified of the potential for workers of different races to fight together in solidarity for Black liberation and the liberation of the entire working class. The George Floyd rebellion showed just a fraction of that anger being released, and the movement drew the support of millions of working people across all races and genders and backgrounds. What was lacking were the working-class methods to take the struggle forward, as well as an organizational structure and democratic leadership to carry out the movement’s demands and adjust in key moments of struggle.
Black liberation is a struggle against international capitalism. Anti-Black racism is global because capitalism is global. Linking up with struggles in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe will be key in order to learn lessons and to prevent the ruling class from dividing our movements. The only way to truly end racial oppression is to defeat capitalism as a whole and to build the foundations of a socialist society. We encourage all Black workers and youth interested in building this struggle to get involved with the Black Caucus of Socialist Alternative today.
Join us on February 27th at 7:30 PM ET for our next national Black Caucus meeting: Black Liberation and the Role of Socialism! Register here!