Bourgeois Liberalism vs. Black Liberation

(Quote of the Week)

In a 1933 document called “Communism and the Negro” (published by Verso in 2003 under the title Race and Revolution), Max Shachtman, then a Trotskyist leader, exposed the hypocrisy of bourgeois liberals who claimed to support black rights. While the civil rights movement later shattered Jim Crow segregation in the South and won formal legal equality for black people, the role of bourgeois liberalism today remains, at bottom, as Shachtman described it some 75 years ago: defense of the American capitalist order. Black oppression, a fundamental component of American capitalism, can only be eradicated with the overthrow of bourgeois rule through socialist revolution.

The liberal wing of the bourgeoisie does not rise to greater heights than outright reaction in the essential aspects of its “solution.” The greatest concern of these “friends of the Negro” is to pour cold water on his flaming protests; to console him with soothing phrases in the moments of his anguish and misery, to beseech the Negro to have patience, while they are in turn beseeching the big bourgeoisie to make enough concessions to the black to prevent him from revolting. They insinuate into the mind of the Negro the treacherous idea that nothing is to be gained by flying in the face of prejudices, that the Negro must wait until his oppressors have evolved to a “higher understanding of his problems.” They give him significant warnings that the “right people” will not be won to the cause of sweetness and light if the Negro does not behave like a good Christian, bearing his cross with dignity and grace, until those who have burdened him with it relent their unfairness. The best of the liberal friends of the Negro (save the mark!) reveal their fundamental white chauvinism the minute the latter turns toward the revolutionary movement or engages in a genuinely militant struggle which requires that the pretended friends lend their assistance in more concrete form than mere oratory and literature….

What they warn against is that the master class will be “offended” if the Negroes “offensively insist” upon those elementary rights which should be the common property of the citizens of even a democratic capitalist republic. And what the Negro must always bear in mind, teach these auction-block liberals, is that it is foolish to “butt one’s head” against the social and economic system of the ruling class.

—Max Shachtman, “Communism and the Negro” (1933)