Proletarian Road to Black Freedom

(Quote of the Week)

Writing in the decade after the civil rights movement, we noted how black and working people have been chained to the bourgeois order through the agency of the Democratic Party. What is necessary is a fight to forge a revolutionary, multiracial workers party that leads the struggle against capitalist exploitation and racial oppression, which in the end can be eradicated only with the overthrow of the American capitalist order through socialist revolution.

Since Roosevelt’s New Deal and the mass migrations of blacks into the cities, insofar as black people have not been excluded from the American political process they have been tied to the Democratic Party. In large part due to opportunist betrayal by the American Communist Party, Roosevelt was able to transform the Democrats into a rejuvenated “people’s party” embracing Stalinists at one end and Dixiecrats at the other. Even after decades of Democratic administrations have brought nothing but bloody imperialist wars and token amelioration of racial discrimination combined with real deterioration of black living standards, black people still vote Democratic. Their resistance to the assault upon the limited gains of the civil rights movement is channeled into the dead end of liberal Democratic Party politics by black Democrats like Coleman Young and Ron Dellums who cohabit in the same party with George Wallace and “ethnic purity” Carter....

Unlike chattel slavery, wage slavery has placed in the hands of black workers the objective conditions for successful revolt. But this revolt will be successful only if it takes as its target the system of class exploitation, the common enemy of black and white workers. The struggle to win black activists to a proletarian perspective is intimately linked to the fight for a new, multiracial class-struggle leadership of organized labor which can transform the trade unions into a key weapon in the battle against racial oppression. Such a leadership must break the grip of the Democratic Party upon both organized labor and the black masses through the fight for working-class political independence. As black workers, the most combative element within the U.S. working class, are won to the cause and party of proletarian revolution, they will be in the front ranks of this class-struggle leadership. And it will be these black proletarian fighters who will write the finest pages of “black history”—the struggle to smash racist, imperialist America and open the road to real freedom for all mankind.

—Preface, Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism” (September 1978)