First Published: Workers Viewpoint, Vol. 5, No. 18, May 26,1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Encore, a black magazine, published an article titled, “Can Blacks and Communists Unite?” in their April 1980 issue. Their article is the latest of a number of articles written by black intellectuals grappling with the fundamental question of the new decade, the role of the Communist Workers Party as the new moral authority to lead the struggle of Afro-American people in the 80’s. The activity of these black intellectuals is a reflection of the fact that communism and the role of the CWP have been brought to the forefront to the broad masses of Afro-Americans since the murders of the CWP 5–Jim Waller, Bill Sampson, Cesar Cauce, Sandy Smith and Mike Nathan by KKK/Nazi/FBI assassins on Nov. 3, 1979. We applaud Encore for its effort, and want to exchange our views with them on the direction for the Afro-American people’s struggles in the 80’s.
Encore points to “severe hardship, a new wave of racism and oppression and the threat of foreign war” as some of the factors driving millions of Afro-Americans to want to know about the Communist Workers Party after the murders of the CWP 5. The three things that Encore points to are all true, but we would like to go deeper into the scope and intensity of national oppression for Afro-American people as the 80’s begin.
The U.S. is locked in the grip of an economic crisis deeper and more extensive than the Great Depression of the 30’s. During the Depression, prices fell, and today, inflation is 18% and rising while half of Detroit is unemployed. Cities like Mahwah, New Jersey and Youngstown, Ohio, once centers of auto and steel will die as the stagnation of the economy intensifies. 60% of black youth are unemployed and the Carter administration claims that the recession has just begun. NO COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, NOT EVEN PRE-WAR Nazi Germany has seen the police murder so many youth for no other reason than that they are black.
The ray of hope that the gains of the 60’s provided has been crushed. Ten years ago, as black students went to college in large numbers for the first time, no dream was beyond reach for those who were young, gifted and black. Then those dreams were shattered and turned into the nightmare of reverse discrimination. The illusion of black progress through electoral politics was crushed in the 70’s. With high hopes and great expectations, Afro-Americans raised the number of black elected officials by almost 1000% between 1968 and 1979. And what has come of it for black people? None of the black legislators has been able to deliver on any of their promises, while the black mayors of big cities have proven themselves to be even bigger tormentors of Afro-American people than their white predecessors.
National oppression weighs so heavily that Afro-Americans are questioning their entire lives. Their own experience has taught them that the system can’t work for black people. Life is already beyond intolerable. The suffering of Afro-Americans is so intense that 912 people would take a chance on Jonestown, rather than continue to live like slaves. Life in America is driving black mothers to roast their babies alive to exorcise the evil that torments their lives.
Afro-Americans have no choice but to demand new leadership for the 80’s and the old guard knows it. For this reason, the murders of the CWP 5, threw the established black leadership into a state of disarray. It was by no means an accident that all of the civil rights organizations scrupulously avoided any mention of the CWP in press statements on the murder of the CWP 5, as Thomas Johnson noted in his New York Times article on Nov. 18, 1979, and none of the so-called Big Five has taken a stand on the Greensboro 6.
We definitely agree with Encore that the Feb. 2 anti-Klan rally was a reflection of the sharpened struggle for leadership in the Black Liberation Movement and other progressive movements in the 80’s and that the demonstration was the broadest coalition of rights activists to come together in 20 years.’’ However, we think Encore is wrong to believe that the “age-old split between Black moderates and Communists” is what “threatened to weaken” the coalition. It was the maneuvering by political speculators like Joe Lowery of the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and Lucius Walker of IFCO (Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization) to isolate the CWP and pressure the CWP to keep a ’low profile’ that threatened to weaken the coalition. There can be no question that the murders of the CWP 5 was the impetus for such a tremendous turnout at the Atlanta Conference of last December that gave rise to the Feb. 2 demonstration, yet the CWP was not invited and we had to fight for our right to participate.
The reformists wanted to turn Feb. 2 into a circus by trying to impose the thoroughly discredited philosophy of non-violence on the coalition. The CWP actively worked to build a peaceful, non-violent demonstration, but we have no illusions whatsoever about the nature of the KKK or the state. The right of armed self-defense is a principle that the CWP will never compromise. Our victory over their opportunism was the decisive factor in maintaining the unity of the coalition and insuring that the demonstration was peaceful and non-violent. These speculators hate each other almost as much as they fear the CWP. Left to themselves, they will only squabble, stab each other in the back and turn off anyone who is serious about fighting the KKK.
The fact that they were forced into such desperate moves reveals how precarious their political position is. On the one hand, the Afro-American masses have rejected non-violence and have splendidly proven in armed rebellions in Idabel, Oklahoma, and Wichita, Kansas, that they will meet the attacks of the 80’s with determined armed resistance. And on the other hand, the capitalist class has made it clear to the established black leadership that they will have no money for reforms or any use for reformists in the 80’s when the three presidential candidates refused even to appear at the Richmond Black Leadership Conference. The fact that the reformists “expelled” the CWP on the eve of the rally and repeatedly lost their composure on the day of the rally shows the depth of their desperation to keep the CWP from assuming the leadership in the Black Liberation Movement.
However, the so-called “expulsion” didn’t make any difference because as Encore noted the CWP appeared in full force, and were the only ones at the rally to boldly advocate socialist revolution as the only road for Afro-American people.
The struggle in the Feb. 2 mobilization in essence reflected two fundamentally different programs that have profound implications for the 80’s. The movement of the 80’s will be vastly different from the movements of the 60’s. The movement of the 60’s was essentially a movement of oppressed nationalities and students, and the working class as a whole was in a dormant state. Because of the relatively better economic situation inside the U.S. and its position of world hegemony, the U.S. was in a position to offer reforms to coopt the revolutionary anger of the Afro-American people. In the 80’s the historic lever of economic crisis has shaken the entire working class out of the routine of day-to-day survival and forced even the most backward strata into politics. The U.S., unable to export the crisis because of the irresistible rise of the national liberation movements in third world countries and resistance from second world countries, cannot grant reforms to cool the anger of the U.S. people anymore. The question for the 80’s is not a few poverty programs as it was in the 60’s. The question for the 80’s is which class is going to come out of the 80’s with state power.
The capitalist class got out of the Great Depression with the New Deal, which revived productive industry with billions of dollars in taxes robbed from the U.S. people. There will be no New Deal in the 80’s because the economy has been thoroughly poisoned by 30 years of Keynesian economics, deficit spending and speculation. Also the infrastructure of industry such as transportation, machine tools and factories are so stagnated that no monopoly capitalist or the government either dares or has the ability to invest the billions in long term investment to get the economy going.
The only hope for U.S. imperialism is world war with the Soviet Union to redivide the world, and seize new markets of raw materials from Europe and the third world so the U. S. can get out of the crisis and effect a temporary stabilization of capitalism like they did in World War I and World War II.
The obstacle that keeps the U.S. from going to war now is not the military superiority of the Soviet Union. It is the resistance of the U.S. people. Chairman Mao said; “To go to war, the U.S. reactionaries must first attack the U.S. people.” To crush the resistance of the U.S. people with ruthless terror, the bourgeoisie is trying to impose fascism now. That is why the FBI stormed a Harlem apartment building in the middle of the night, holding several blacks at gunpoint and indiscriminately ransacking apartments, just 72 hours after the Supreme Court declared that it is unconstitutional to enter a person’s home without a s 2arch warrant. To weaken the resistance of the U.S. people, they have to eliminate the people’s leadership. That is the meaning of the murders of the CWP 5 on Nov. 3 in Greensboro, North Carolina during a Death to the Klan rally.
The experience of World War I and World War II, when the danger of fascism was not nearly as great as it is now, clearly shows that world war means that the capitalist class will set up Afro-Americans as scapegoats for the anger and frustration of white workers. The current anti-Iranian hysteria and the fascist killing of Jimmie Lee Campbell as human game in Chico, California is only a glimpse of what is to come. Scapegoat politics in the 80’s will make the Red Summer of 1919 when hundreds of blacks were lynched and 25 anti-black riots swept the U.S., and the attacks against the Black Panther Party of the 60’s pale in comparison.
There are only two roads for Afro-Americans in the 80’s, SOCIALISM OR FASCISM. There is no middle course.
The question of leadership for Afro-American people is a matter of life and death. Reformism in the 80’s will not be the painful but historically necessary stage in the political awakening of Afro-Americans that it was 20 years ago. Reformist leadership, no matter how militant they may appear to be, will lead black people into concentration camps and wholesale slaughter under a fascist dictatorship of the Hitler type.
Under the leadership of the Communist Workers Party, Afro-American people will actively prepare for the dictatorship of the proletariat, dealing telling blows to the state and to the KKK/Nazis as the Party did in Kokomo, Indiana, and train the U.S. people through their own experience in communism.
Encore is not sure about the 80’s. They know that the present leadership is pitifully inadequate, yet they hesitate to draw the conclusion that reformism and nationalism are incapable of leading a consistent struggle against national oppression. Though it is not clearly stated, their hope for the 80’s is that a more militant and dynamic black leadership, another Malcolm will spontaneously rise up to assume leadership. They cling to this view because they see the state of the present leadership as the mistakes of individuals rather than the inevitable result of their reformist program. Unless the fight against national oppression is linked to the overthrow of the capitalist system, over a period of time militant black nationalism will either become isolated terrorism, or will sink into reformist grovelling for crumbs at the feet of the bourgeoisie. This is why black power inevitably sank into black capitalism, and why so many of the old SNCC leadership like Marion Barry and Julian Bond are hopelessly locked into electoral politics.
The Black Liberation Movement is composed of many classes that are welded together by national oppression. Invariably the petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie will hide their class interests under the banner of nationalism. The history of the 60’s was full of petty bourgeois nationalists who repudiated the Afro-American people’s struggle after they got jobs as poverty pimps or as government officials. The multi-national working class is the only class whose class interest demands the abolition of all classes, all class exploitation and national oppression to free itself. No other class is capable of waging a consistent struggle against national oppression. It is possible in the 80’s that the black petty bourgeoisie could lead a secessionist movement to break away from U.S. imperialism, but this alone will not eliminate the differences between rich and poor, because the class interest of the Afro-American national bourgeoisie is to capture the home market and exploit the labor of black workers.
The origin of the oppression of Afro-American people ^e is bound up with the rise of the capitalist system on a world scale, and nothing less than the destruction of the system of monopoly capitalism will end the suffering of the Afro-American people. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat–the alignment of the working class and oppressed nationalities–will end the criminal rule of the monopoly capitalist class, which is the basis for the national oppression of minorities. Under a socialist system, the vast wealth produced by the working class will be used to tremendously raise the standard of living of Afro-Americans and the entire working class in a way never before heard of. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the full might of the creative genius of black people will shine for the entire world to see. The proletariat will exercise its dictatorship over the superstructure and wield the state machinery to wage a determined struggle to eliminate the evil of racism step by step. The proletariat must continue the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat until all classes, all class differences, all exploitative ideology and practices which flow from class society are abolished, until there is no turning back to the ways of the old world. The complete emancipation of Afro-American people is bound up with elimination of all classes, the realization of communism.
We do not share Encore’s skepticism about the 80’s. We anxiously await the challenges of the next 10 years, because the crucible of the 80’s focuses with crystal clarity not only the danger of world war and fascism but the glorious prospect of the emancipation of the working class and oppressed people. By no means do we consider it a “double stigma to be black and communist.” As Encore notes, the finest minds of the Harlem Renaissance, literary and artistic giants such as Langston Hughes. Claude McCay and Paul Robeson did their best work in connection with communists. Nor was it accidental that the best revolutionaries that the 60’s and 70’s produced like Nelson Johnson and Sandy Smith who persisted in struggle to solve the question of what road for black liberation are members of the Communist Workers Party. Today Afro-American intellectuals have the same choice to make, either to follow the tradition of the revolutionary intellectuals such as Paul Robeson or be swept away by the tidal wave of class struggle. As the 80’s begin, Afro-Americans are wary as Encore notes. But that wariness is being transformed with great speed into a tremendous outcry for political clarity and direction. The fact that more than 3,500 people took part in a massive 12-hour forum in Oakland, California on the anniversary of the murder of Melvin Black by the Oakland cops, and more than 4,000 people attended the wake of a drug dealer killed by the police in Washington, D.C. are sure signs that the latent energy of the Afro-American people is at a higher level than ever before. To meet this excellent situation, the Communist Workers Party is intensifying its preparation for the dictatorship of the proletariat a thousand fold. There is no question that the Afro-American masses will step forward and embrace communism, particularly the CWP on a mass scale in the 80’s, as proven at the funeral march for the CWP 5 and on Feb 2. We are fully confident that when the fury of the Afro-American people’s struggle is clearly focused at the monopoly capitalist class, Afro-Americans will fight shoulder to shoulder with the multi-national proletariat to sweep U.S. imperialism off of the face of the earth.