The Revolutionary Union, among others, cannot hide its belief that skin color defines oppressed nations within the U.S. state. Their contortions come from the same old line which places race lines above class lines and divides the working class. Consider some quotations:
–“...the country today is inhabited by at least two nations: the Black nation and the dominant white-European nation formed out of several nationalities.” (Red Papers V, p. 26.) The country is also inhabited by two sexes, several religions, and many other groups which the capitalists seek to set against each other to divide the working class. But Marxists emphasize that the country is inhabited primarily by two classes.
–“...work-a-day Black people whose average day in the white man’s world was just a struggle for survival.” (P. 38.) Marxists usually see the worker struggling for survival in the capitalists’ society. But the R.U. paints a picture of the factory, for example, as part of the “white man’s world,” as if white workers sit back on rocking chairs, cracking whips at the blacks, smoking cigars and drinking bourbon with white bosses. To the R.U., the factory is where black workers must “struggle for survival” against white bosses and white workers. The racist, anti-working class character of the R.U.’s line is clear.
Other organizations fall into the same confusion of race and nationality. The Communist League states, for example, “The factor in the U.S.N.A. that made simple the continued super-exploitation of the Negro national minority was the color factor.” Negro National and Colonial Question, p. 95.) Quite true, but no more proof of “nationhood” than the visible differences between men and women.
Without exception, groups which hold this line on racism believe that the Negro (or Black) Nation arose from traditional historical and capitalist factors of nationhood, but became especially vulnerable to imperialist domination because of skin color. They see the factors of nationhood arising out of slavery, Reconstruction, and the continued brutal force directed against black people since 1865.
No one can claim, short of non-Marxist Pan-African advocates, that blacks comprised a nation before their journey in bondage to North America. The social formations found in Africa were the tribe and empire, and Stalin clearly distinguishes these from nations. (SSW, Cardinal, p. 50.) Nor could a nation have arisen out of slavery itself. Black slaves suffered brutal oppression almost unique in the history of capitalist exploitation. But the degree of brutality and oppression suffered by people in certain circumstances tells us nothing about their nationhood, a concept based strictly on economic factors manifested in such things as culture, language, etc. Most who identify nationality with color assert that the Negro (or Black) Nation arose out of the experience of slavery molded by the economic forces of Reconstruction and consolidated by segregation to this day.
From the different peoples which were at different stages of economic development and had different languages, gods and cultural backgrounds emerged a people with a common Negro nationality forged by centuries of chattel slavery in North America. The lash and the slave pen, the auction block and the breeding farm was the melting pot from which emerged the Negro people. (Communist League, Negro National and Colonial Question, p. 43.)
...from chattel slavery to wage slavery, the historical development of Black people is a history distinct from whites in the U.S. It is the welding together of a people, a nation, from a common culture, experience of oppression and systematic economic exclusion. (Revolutionary Union, Red Papers V, p. 37.)
It was during this 350-year period of slavery, civil war and reconstruction, as well as capitalist development in the South, that Black people were forged into a nation. (October League, For Working Class Unity and Black Liberation, p. 7.)
In order to show that blacks possess historical experience unique from whites, most organizations with a pro-nationalist line say that a) only blacks suffered slavery, making it impossible for whites to understand the historical evolution of their consciousness, b) the racial divisions fomented during Reconstruction were based on, and in turn accelerated, national differences between whites and blacks, and c) the degree of violence and repression leveled at the black working class distinguishes thorn and sets them apart from the dominant white “nation.” All those points are distorted or false. In disproving them, we force advocates of a Black (or Negro) Nation back on the old bourgeois, racist criterion of skin color to define a nation.
What was the crux of the experience of slavery? Negro slaves were a specific, economic class, comprising nearly 50% of an overall economic system that also included slave owners (1.5%) and white yeomen (45%).
...the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers constantly grew through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme decline. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Civil War in the U.S., pp. 68-69.)
The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, between the system of slavery and the system of free labor. (Marx and Engels, op. cit., p. 81.)
The antebellum South represented a mode of production with several constituent classes; no one of the classes can claim nationhood because of its participation in that production. The slaves were one of the classes in this single mode of production; they were not the population of a nation comprising by themselves a whole separate mode of production under foreign heel.
What Marxist can look at the period of slavery in this country and miss the crucial fact that blacks were distinguished not by nationality but by their near-universal position in one particular relationship to the mode of production? The same is true today, but the class position of blacks is different now. They are overwhelmingly part of the proletariat. Further, they do not constitute a class in themselves as they did before 1865. Now they are intermingled among workers of all races and nationalities, sweating out profits for a single bourgeoisie.
We reject, then, the claim that slavery can be analyzed in national terms rather than class terms. The same can be said for Reconstruction and the special oppression reserved for blacks since the end of slavery. Scientific observers of Reconstruction point out that the destiny of freedmen and white “free labor” was one. William H. Sylvis, the class-conscious labor leader who helped found the National Labor Union in 1866, refused to distinguish between forms of slavery facing the proletariat. “The war abolished the right of property in man, but it did not abolish slavery.” (Sylvis, p. 80. )
The line of demarcation is between the robbers and the robbed, no matter whether the wronged be the friendless widow, the skilled white mechanic or the ignorant black. Capital is no respecter of persons and it is in the very nature of things a sheer impossibility to degrade one class of laborers without degrading all. To make labor dignified, therefore, we must dignify the laborer no matter what his calling or social position. (Todes, p. 76.)
Karl Marx pointed out the interest of white labor in emancipation:
In the United States of North America, every independent movement of ’the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. (Capital, Volume I, p. 301.)
Still, the idealists insist that the division between white and black workers is a fundamental division, dating back to Reconstruction. Reconstruction had two aspects. One was the common struggle of freedmen and white yeomen against the planters for land and political rights. The other was the wedge driven between them by the Northern bourgeoisie when their democratic movement went too far. We can analyze each of those aspects of Reconstruction in two ways. Some assert that the offensive led and organized by the bourgeoisie to cripple the democratic movement by splitting it along color lines represented some real interests of white southerners in linking up with “their” bourgeoisie. Some call it “bribery.” Or we can assert, as Marxists must, that the aspect of common struggle painted the true picture of material interests, white and black. The special oppression of blacks rested on force. Force was used to attack white allies of the freedmen. But the split between white and black occurred, as it occurs today, because of the lies, deceit, propaganda–the fraud–of a minority ruling class which must distract a mass movement too large to crush.
A Negro delegation petitioning President Johnson said in a published statement of February 7, 1866:
The hostility between the whites and blacks is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slavemasters. Those masters secured by their ascendency over both the poor whites and the blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each ....Slavery is abolished. The cause of the antagonism is removed. (Allen, Reconstruction, p. 78.)
Such naive optimism was short-lived. Wage slavery became just as much a cause of enmity between blacks and whites as chattel slavery. The industrial bourgeoisie needed to divide the labor movement on color lines even more than the planter bourgeoisie needed to divide slaves and white yeomen. Yet the spirit of the quotation is unmistakably correct for both situations. The division was and is artificial, created by a minority ruling class, not in the interest of either white or black workers. There can be no mistaking this point if we review the activities of the freedmen and poor whites during Reconstruction and note that their natural path of action, disrupted only by the industrial bourgeoisie, was one of common struggle.
The Communist League, among others, denies this.
...even during the periods of radical reconstruction, segregation remained a way of life. In the Union Leagues, in the Labor Unions, in the Farmers Alliance, there were Anglo-American and Negro locals. Because the decisive element of Negro-Anglo-American unity was not fought for, it was easy for the fascists to appear on the scene as the progressive leaders of the “poor whites”. (Negro National and Colonial Question, p. 26.)
Who would expect anything but segregation only eight years after the Emancipation Proclamation? All during the period of chattel slavery, whites had been taught that Africans were made slaves because black people are inferior. Slaves had been concentrated geographically in the plantation belt where color equaled class–that is, almost all whites were slaveowners or lackeys of slaveowners and very little yeoman farming or industrial production existed.[1] In short, freedmen and poor whites came together in a common political force during Reconstruction, and it was their first real contact with each other. Understandably, the blacks took the lead. Their needs and interests made them the most thorough force opposing the planters. Wherever blacks directed the thrust of the struggle during Reconstruction, we find the most thorough-going reforms.
But it is misleading to say that “the decisive element of Negro-Anglo-American unity was not fought for.” The words “fought for” imply that because no conscious decision was made in behalf of liberal integration, an integrated political response to the needs of the day was not forthcoming. Unity was not fought for on an abstract or moral basis, it was developing in the face of hundreds of years of habit and divisive propaganda because it represented the real, immediate, material interests of both groups. At that time, the industrial bourgeoisie saw fit to allow those interests to develop unimpeded for a period of time to consolidate the victory over the planters. When the mass movement got out of hand, the bourgeoisie stepped in with the same divide-and-rule strategy used by the planters. The fact that it worked, that the movement was divided and distracted, might be laid to the lack of a conscious understanding of class unity among the democratic forces, mainly the whites. But that is a far cry from saying that unity had no material basis and could only be artificially based on moral sentiment alone.
Look at the record of cooperation between whites and blacks during Reconstruction. Compare the statements of James Allen, noted during his Marxist period as an expert on Reconstruction, with the list of organizations the Communist League dismisses as having “different locals.”
They [the Union Leagues] represented the militantly patriotic and radical wing of the bourgeoisie, mobilizing support and supplies for the Northern troops, enlisting Negroes, caring for freedmen in camps in the North and carrying on an agitational campaign among the former slaves and poorer whites in the conquered territories ....As early as 1863 the Leagues took root in the South among the white classes opposing the slavocracy and spread as the Union Army occupied Southern territory ....Probably one-third of the white population of the upland districts in 1866 was in the Leagues. (Allen, op. cit., pp. 92-93.)
The 1869 Congress of the National Labor Union was an historic occasion if for no other reason than the participation of nine Negro labor delegates, the first to take part in the deliberations of a nation-wide labor assembly. (Ibid., p. 156.)
Shall we make them our friends, or shall capital be allowed to turn them as an engine against us? Taking this view of the question we are of the opinion that the interests of the labor cause demand that all workingmen be included within its ranks, without regard to race or nationality. .. (William H. Sylvis, ”Address of the National Labor Union,” July, 1867. Quoted in Ibid., pp. 154-155.)
By the turn of a phrase, the Communist League paints a picture of disunity all through Reconstruction. The facts paint a picture of common struggle. Add to the Union Leagues and the trade unions the common front of freedmen and poor whites in the Republican Party, the Constitutional Conventions and the People’s Militia, and we see clearly that the pattern of development was one of separation inflicted by the habits of chattel slavery, and political cooperation based on common interests. The second aspect dominated, as we see evidence of great progress in actual merger of white and black organizations and locals. That development was turned around with the Populist movement, which was used in the South to break the pattern of class unity and to ally whites with the bourgeoisie on the basis of old habits and prejudices.
Until the active, racist, and counter-revolutionary interference of the industrial bourgeoisie, integration a-long class lines was one of the dominant themes of Reconstruction. To stress instead the descending aspect, the remnants of organizational separation, helps the bourgeoisie push the idea that racial separation is natural and represents the interests of white workers.
What of the idea of fascism? Many analyses of the Reconstruction period insist that the violent repression of that movement by the industrial bourgeoisie, through the agent of the Ku Klux Klan and other reactionary terrorists, constitutes a special circumstance among freedmen that turned them into a different historical path from the white working class. We are not concerned here with some liberals’ preoccupation with fascism or the belief that nothing revolutionary can take place without it. We dispute the idea that the special oppression of blacks during Reconstruction or since proves nationhood for the oppressed.
Why is this violence against blacks singled out? Because it was more severe? Admittedly. Whenever a minority ruling class seeks to divide the mass movement on artificial grounds it discriminates in its application of force and fraud. By hitting one group harder than others, then using its media to monopolize reports of the repression, it can present the inferiority of the repressed group as a self-fulfilling prophecy. “We must stop them because they threaten us all.” The “stopping” easily becomes the proof of the “threat” to a non-class-conscious mind besieged daily by bourgeois lies. Yet when that ruling class is really threatened, it will strike out violently and with equal ferocity at the entire working class, regardless of artificial distinctions.
In fact, the claim that force was reserved for the freedmen is false. We have already seen how white yeomen and workers constituted a definite, if fluctuating, ally of the blacks. The blacks were the most thorough democratic force; the most thorough repression came down upon them, especially as a supplement to hundreds of years of racist propaganda against the slaves. Still, reactionaries never hesitated to attack whites if necessary, and we have access to information that this happened often and that just as often blacks and whites met the onslaught together.[2] Especially hard to swallow, though, is the idea that two separate systems were operating in the North and South based on the level of repression.
In the Anglo-American nation the capitalists in the main relied on deception, bribery and fraud, in short, on bourgeois democracy. This was not the case in the Black Belt. Here, the rule of finance capital was maintained by an unheard of reign of terror, legal and extralegal, both by police and the KKK. (Communist League, Negro National and Colonial Question, p. 26.)
Tell it to the Homestead strikers! Tell it to the striking Northern workers attacked by the Federal Army in 1877, just after it left the South to the mercies of reaction! Tell the delegates at the founding convention of the National Labor Union in 1866 about their “bribery”! Boyer and Morais outline the situation facing those workers one year after the end of the Civil War.
The year since victory had been a tough one, the new birth of freedom beginning with lockouts and the imprisonment of strike leaders in the North and the Memphis and New Orleans massacres of Negroes in the South. All during 1866 the labor press was filled with the refrain that labor must unite or die. Many locals had been shattered and the membership lists of national unions were low. (Richard D. Boyer, Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, p. 30.)
Repressive violence came more upon the heads of non-white democratic forces, as it does to this day. All aspects of oppression fall more upon selected groups, as they did upon the Jews in Nazi Germany. Can we claim nationhood for the Jews on that basis, in the face of all Lenin and Stalin said on the subject? Discriminatory oppression is a general tactic of the bourgeoisie in dividing the working class. When the persecuted group is a nation, the national question and the right of self-determination prevail. But persecution does not prove nationhood. Only social and economic evidence fulfills that definition.
Many who claim to be Marxist-Leninists use the issue of repression to bolster their confusion of skin color and nationality. This is especially evident in the R.U.’s attempt to prove that the U.S. is a multi-national state (see the previous section) on the tsarist model using the criterion of repression:
The long history of lynchings, beatings, tortures, rapings, and reprisals carried out against the Black people, even after the bitter years of slavery; the genocide against the Native-American Indians to secure the theft of their lands; the armed seizure of Mexican lands and the brutal suppression of the Mexican people, the Puerto Rican people and other Latin people within the U.S.; the hideous history of chain-gang labor and terroristic denial of democratic rights for the Asian-American people and for the first generations of successive European immigrant groups–all this bloody history writes a record fully equal to the several centuries of Tsarist barbarism. (Red Papers V, p. 22.)
The Revolutionary Union writes like a ballplayer who starts out running the bases but ends up in left field. They even generously include some Anglo Europeans in the “national” chronicle–only the first generation, of course. Not a word do they include, despite their claim to represent the U.S. working class, about the repression of white workers at the hands of Pinkertons, National Guards, Federal Troops, and goons! The R.U.’s selective analysis shows us how far some will go to bolster a sagging line.
Slavery, Reconstruction, and repression contain no proof of nationhood. Neither could all three factors, taken together, prove the existence of a minority nation in the United States. The only such proof Marxists recognize is economic and statistical proof of Stalin’s five criteria of a nation. We shall see in the next section that no such proof exists today. In the meantime, we want to investigate an example of the theoretical penalty paid for equating race and nationality.
All theories about the Negro or Black Nation must differentiate native white Southerners within that nation. On what basis? They share the territory and the language. Toiling whites did not escape the planter’s boot or the reaction of the industrial bourgeoisie. No basis exists except skin color and degrees of exploitation. The R.U. attempts to answer the thorny question, “What becomes of white Southerners when the Black Nation is established?”
The fact that large numbers of white people–who now outnumber Black people in the Black Belt–would have to be re-located in order to form a separate Black state there, is not unprecedented and does not eliminate the right to self-determination. The Palestinian people recognize that, in their struggle for self-determination, they must now work out a solution involving the Jewish settlers. (Red Papers V, p. 35.)[3]
The analogies in that passage defy logic. How can anyone compare Zionist colonization to an indigenous population? Such people as these writers of the R.U. have no conception of nations or the national question. More important, they have no conception of classes, the first requirement of Marxism. They seek only to create categories to contain their abject subservience to spontaneity.
Adopting the appropriate phraseology–e.g., “national minority”–does not hide that the minority is really racial. Neither does it make us forget that Stalin eliminated race as a basis for nationhood. Yet time after time we see the pro-nationalists squirm in the face of this contradiction: they cannot refer to these “nations” without referring to skin color. The R.U. and O.L. talk blatantly about the white nation and the black nation, ignoring a class analysis of either. The Communist League, hoping to cover its tracks, assures us their theory rests on territoriality, not race. Thus all whites in the South are part of the Negro Nation and all blacks in the rest of the country are part of the Anglo-American Nation. But such a designation does not account for discrimination against blacks all over the U.S., so CL. must add to their chimerical analysis the idea of “national minorities. ”
The Communist League does not refer to black people, or Negroes outside the South; they talk about “Negro national minority persons”– or, if you are lucky, “national minority workers.” Divorced from the territory of their “nation,” these members of the “national minority” link their destiny with the self-determination of the nation itself only on the basis of their special physical characteristics. Likewise, white Southerners are the “Anglo-American national minority in the Negro Nation”–even if they have never lived anywhere else! In 1974, they are not any kind of minority in any contiguous area of the South, including the Black Belt; and their political characteristics cannot be described as national–except to the most determined idealists–for their extraction clearly comes from as many diverse national stocks as any other people of European descent in the U.S. They are divorced from the Negro Nation only because they are white!
The C.L., by going around the block, arrives at the same corner, waiting for the same bus as the R.U. and O.L. They have defined their nations by skin color, i.e., by racial characteristics. When they speak of the “Anglo-American national minority in the Negro Nation” they are speaking the same language as the Revolutionary Union which fantasizes about the “dominant white-European nation.” No such thing exists. A dominant, nearly all-white capitalist class holds sway over workers of all nationalities and races. No doubt that class appreciates the pro-nationalist justification of its racist regime.
Racism is that lie which divides the working class along color lines. We have before us a proposal, in the form of the black nationalist and liberal racist line, that the left institutionalize this division by defining nations on the same basis. We have shown, historically and logically, that that program is invalid. Now we turn to specific economic and political data to prove that no Negro or Black Nation in the U.S. fulfills Stalin’s criteria for a nation.
[1] Allen, Reconstruction, pp. 107, 111.
[2] Allen, Op. cit., p. 96.
[3] As ever, chasing down the convolutions and “corrections“ in the R.U.’s position remains the most difficult part of analyzing their line. Here in Red Papers V, they go so far into a consideration consideration of territorial self-determination that they speculate on the fate of white Southerners when the black nation is formed. In Red Papers VI, they “re-affirm” their overall line of Red Papers V, but about self-determination they say, “... the ’essential thrust’ of the Black people’s struggle has not been for self-determination in the form of secession, but the fight against discrimination ... as members of the working class, suffering caste-like oppression within the class.” (P. 11.)