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Vol. 79/No. 26 July 27, 2015
How Black struggle has strengthened working class
Below is an excerpt from Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to
Workers Power by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist
Workers Party. It describes discussions between Leon Trotsky and Arne
Swabeck, a leader of the communist movement in the United States, which
took place in 1933 in Turkey, where the Bolshevik leader was living in
exile after being expelled from the Soviet Union by the
counterrevolutionary regime of Joseph Stalin. Copyright © 2009 by
Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY JACK BARNES
Trotsky’s starting point in the discussions with Swabeck was the fact
that racist oppression and anti-Black prejudice in the United States
were the largest obstacle to revolutionary unity of the working class.
As a result of such oppression, Trotsky pointed out, few “common actions
[take] place involving white and Black workers,” there is no “class
fraternization.” “The American worker is indescribably reactionary,”
Trotsky said. “This can be seen now in the fact that he has not yet even
been won to the idea of social insurance.” And, Trotsky added, “The
Negroes have not yet awakened, and they are not yet united with the
white workers. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the American workers
are chauvinists; in relation to the Negroes they are hangmen as they are
also toward the Chinese, etc. It is necessary to make them [white
workers] understand that the American state is not their state and that
they do not have to be the guardians of this state.”
Those conditions, of course, have changed substantially since 1933 as a
result of class battles. They began shifting in the mid-1930s as a
product of the labor struggles that built the CIO, growing opposition to
fascism and the spreading imperialist world war, and motion toward a
labor party independent of the Democrats and Republicans. These changes
accelerated in the 1950s with the conquests of the mass civil rights
movement and Black liberation struggles, which had their roots in the
massive urbanization, migration to the North, and shifts in the
composition of the industrial workforce that began prior to World War
II. As a consequence of these struggles, and as a component of them,
workers in the United States did fight for an important form of social
insurance: Social Security. And as a result of the labor battles of the
1930s and civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s, they came to see
an expanded version of that Social Security, including Medicare,
Medicaid, and related programs, as rights.
With the rise of industrial unions, more and more workers who are Black,
white, Asian, and Latino — native-born and immigrant — today do work
alongside each other in many workplaces, often doing the same jobs. They
do engage in common actions and class fraternization. But the fight to
combat multiple forms of segregation and racism, and to overcome
national divisions in the working class — through mutual solidarity and
uncompromising struggles using any means necessary — remains the single
biggest task in forging the proletarian vanguard in this country.
Trotsky, in his exchange of views with Swabeck, went on to point out
that during a major rise of revolutionary struggle and proletarian class
consciousness in the United States,
it is then possible that the Negroes will become the most advanced
section. … It is very possible that the Negroes will proceed through
self-determination to the proletarian dictatorship in a couple of
gigantic strides, ahead of the great bloc of white workers. They will
then be the vanguard. I am absolutely sure that they will in any case
fight better than the white workers.
But this can only happen, Trotsky emphasized, “provided the communist
party carries on an uncompromising, merciless struggle not against the
supposed national prepossessions of the Negroes but against the colossal
prejudices of the white workers” — prejudices brought into the working
class by the bourgeoisie and the imperialist masters, through their
petty-bourgeois agents — “and makes no concession to them whatsoever.”
This is what Trotsky had learned from [V.I.] Lenin, the central leader
of the Bolshevik Party and Communist International, and from his own
long revolutionary experience in the tsarist prison house of nations.
Related articles:
‘Removal of Confederate battle flag is victory for working class’
‘Now take down the monuments to enforcers of white supremacy!’
Family protest no charges in killing by Georgia cop
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