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Black Liberation and the Struggle for Workers Revolution (Quote of the Week) Veteran Trotskyist Richard Fraser explained the material roots of racial oppression in this country in a lecture delivered on the eve of the struggles of the civil rights movement. Those struggles uprooted legally enforced Jim Crow segregation in the South. Yet since black oppression is ingrained in the U.S. capitalist economy, black people remain segregated in the main at the bottom of society. Fraser advanced the program of revolutionary integrationism: a proletarian-centered struggle against all manifestations of racist oppression based on the understanding that the complete integration and equality of black people can be realized only through socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist system, which would lay the material basis for the elimination of racial oppression and class exploitation. 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.... 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.... 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. —Richard S. Fraser, “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (November 1953), printed in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3 (1990)
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