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	Workers Vanguard No. 974	18 February 2011

Black History Month

Honor Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist Hero

One of the many contributions of our comrade Martha Phillips was her research and presentation on Harriet Tubman, a hero in the fight to smash slavery (“Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom,” Women and Revolution No. 32, Winter 1986-87, reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 5, February 1988). Martha was tragically murdered in Moscow in February 1992 under suspicious circumstances, as she led our struggle to bring the authentic communism of Lenin and Trotsky to Soviet workers facing the ravages of capitalist counterrevolution. In honor of Martha Phillips, and to commemorate Black History Month, we print below selections from her salute to Harriet Tubman, which provides a succinct analysis of the intersection of race, sex and class in America.

“General Tubman,” as John Brown dubbed her, stood in the revolutionary insurrectionist wing of the abolitionist movement in the struggle against the Southern slavocracy. A fugitive slave, Tubman played a crucial role in the Underground Railroad and became known as the Moses of her people. In the Civil War, she was a scout and spy for the Union Army and led 300 black soldiers in a military action on South Carolina’s Combahee River in June 1863. Tubman saw early on that the war for the union must become a war to free the slaves. But the promise of black freedom offered by the Union Army’s victory over the South was subsequently betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie, marked by the defeat of Radical Reconstruction. This betrayal was cruelly experienced by the impoverished Tubman, who suffered physical attack and brutal segregation and was compelled to wage a decades-long battle for the pension that her Civil War service entitled her to. As Tubman acidly stated: “You wouldn’t think that after I served the flag so faithfully I should come to want in its folds.”

To learn more about Martha Phillips, see Prometheus Research Series No. 6, “Selected Speeches and Writings in Honor of Three Women Leaders of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist): Martha Phillips, Susan Adams, Elizabeth King Robertson.” To order, send check for $7.00 to Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116.

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The situation of the triply oppressed black woman slave more than any other cried out for liberation. Even the right to raise their own children was often denied to these women, whose masters could sell them or any member of their family at will. The life of Harriet Tubman illustrates in a particularly acute fashion the tremendous obstacles black women faced regarding even the elementary decencies of life. Despite her courageous work for black freedom…she lived in poverty all her life....

Having completed their revolution against slavery—the last great bourgeois revolution—the Northern capitalists turned their backs on the blacks. Although they may have been opposed to property in human flesh, the robber barons of the late 19th century allied with Southern landholders for private property in the means of production. Even the most basic of political rights, the right to vote, was denied to all women at this time, both black and white. The capitalist reaction flowed from the inherent inability of a system based on private ownership of the means of production to eliminate scarcity, the economic source of all social inequality. Only abolition of private property will remove the social roots of racial and sexual oppression….

Marx said, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” The destruction of slavery signaled the birth of the American labor movement, the rise of unions and agitation for the eight-hour day. Blacks today play a strategic role in the American working class. Over the years mass migration from the rural South into the cities, both North and South, has transformed the black population from a largely rural, agricultural layer into an urban, industrial group. As an oppressed race-color caste integrated at the bottom of the U.S. economy, blacks suffer from capitalist exploitation compounded with vicious racial oppression—for them, the “American dream” is a nightmare! In precise Marxist terms black people are the reserve army of the unemployed, last hired, first fired, a crucial economic component of the boom/bust cycle of the capitalist mode of production. Thus Marx’s words are all too true today: the fight for black liberation is the fight for the emancipation of all working people. It is the race question—the poison of racism—that keeps the American working class divided. As long as the labor movement does not take up the struggle of black people, there will be no struggle for any emancipation—just as the Civil War could not be won without the freeing and arming of the slaves.

Today the oppressed and exploited must look to the red banner of socialist revolution for their liberation. The Spartacist League raises the slogans, “Finish the Civil War! Forward to the Third American Revolution!” to express the historic tasks which fall to the revolutionary party.