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Workers Vanguard No. 899 |
28 September 2007 |
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TROTSKY |
LENIN |
Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! (Quote of the Week)
From our inception, the Spartacist League has fought for the program of revolutionary integrationism, understanding that the fight against black oppression is central to the cause of proletarian revolution in the U.S. This perspective was codified in a document adopted at the SL’s founding conference in September 1966 in the midst of the struggles for black equality shaking the U.S. at the time.
The vast majority of Black people—both North and South—are today workers who, along with the rest of the American working class, must sell their labor power in order to secure the necessities of life to those who buy labor power in order to make profit. The buyers of labor power, the capitalists, are a small minority whose rule is maintained only by keeping the majority who labor for them divided and misled. The fundamental division created deliberately along racial lines has kept the Negro workers who entered American capitalism at the bottom, still at the bottom. Ultimately their road to freedom lies only through struggle with the rest of the working class to abolish capitalism and establish in its place an egalitarian, socialist society.
Yet the struggle of the Black people of this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class. Because of the generations of exceptional oppression, degradation and humiliation, Black people as a group have special needs and problems necessitating additional and special forms of struggle. It is this part of the struggle which has begun today, and from which the most active and militant sections of Black people will gain a deep education and experience in the lessons of struggle. Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution.
—“Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” Spartacist supplement, May-June 1967
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