Black Liberation and the Struggle for Workers Revolution

(Quote of the Week)

As fighters for black liberation through socialist revolution, we are indebted to American Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser who first developed the program of revolutionary integrationism. In two talks for the L.A. branch of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party in 1953, when Jim Crow segregation was still the rule in the South, Fraser explained the material roots of black oppression and underlined the centrality of the fight for black liberation to the struggle for proletarian revolution.

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....

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 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