Black Liberation and Socialism. Ahmed Shawki
activist and scholar Manning Marable wrote,
the political mood across Black America ha[d] grown more pessimistic. Allies of the Black freedom struggle have abandoned their previous support for affirmative action and expanded civil rights legislation. Among Blacks there is a deepening sense of social alienation and political frustration, generated partially by the continued popularity of President [Ronald] Reagan, the conservative trend in the Democratic Party, and the intense economic chaos which plagues Black inner cities despite three years of national economic “recovery.”5
And if the mood was pessimistic in the late 1980s, it is altogether bleaker today. There is a greater sense of alienation and powerlessness in Black America and an even greater fragmentation of organized forces—at the very time the need for an organized movement of resistance has grown more urgent.
Over the past three decades, the left has largely abandoned revolutionary politics in favor of some variety of reformism—what is often described as the politics of “realism.” This development did not occur overnight. Many activists on the U.S. left, for example, supported Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential bids, arguing that the Rainbow Coalition was the historic continuation of the struggles of the 1960s. To quote Marable again,
The essence of the Jackson campaign was a democratic, anti-racist social movement, initiated and led by Afro-Americans, which had assumed an electoral mode. Its direct historical antecedents—the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56, the formation of SNCC and the sit-in movement of 1960, the Birmingham desegregation campaign of 1963—were revived in a new protest form within bourgeois democratic politics.6
Leaving aside the validity of this argument for now, what is clear today is that supporting candidates like Jackson, once seen as a means to achieve left-wing or radical aims, by 2004 had morphed into supporting anyone who declared he or she was opposed to the right wing, regardless of their actual positions. Thus, virtually the entire left in the United States called for, and worked for, a vote for Democrat John Kerry against President George W. Bush, despite the fact that Kerry had virtually identical positions to Bush on the war in Iraq, the USA PATRIOT Act, marriage rights for gays and lesbians, and a host of other questions.
In this way, much of the left radicalized in the 1960s and 1970s has migrated wholesale into the Democratic Party, the party that in the 1960s prosecuted the war in Vietnam and upheld Jim Crow in the South. In so doing, this left severed itself from the tradition of struggle that the 1960s revived.
This book seeks to reaffirm the need for a struggle against racism and the economic and political system that maintains it—capitalism. An examination of the history of the fight for Black freedom in the United States confirms the need for such a strategy. This elementary (but often forgotten or ignored) truth was summed up memorably by the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass in 1857:
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.7
This book also makes the case that such a struggle needs to aspire to the radical reconstruction of society if racism is to be overcome and Black liberation truly realized. This is not to suggest that advances, reforms, or real victories cannot be achieved under capitalism. Rather, it is only to underline that whatever reforms are won can, will, and many have been taken away—unless there is a fundamental restructuring of a system that relies on exploitation and oppression to survive.
This book is not a comprehensive history of the Black struggle in the United States. Nor is it a comprehensive history of all socialist currents and organizations and their relationship to the Black movement. Rather, its aim is to highlight some of the political issues—ideological and organizational—in the relationship between socialism and the struggle for Black liberation. The most commonly written-about example of the relation between socialism and Black liberation is the Communist Party (CP) in the 1930s. There is good reason for this. The CP was the largest and most influential left-wing party that was fully committed to fighting racism and had a sizeable Black membership. Its accomplishments—most critically in the 1930s—showed in practice that it was possible to forge unity between working-class Blacks and whites and advance their common interests. There are several important studies of the work of the CP in this period, notably by Robin Kelley and Mark Naison.8
But as important as the CP’s work was during this period, it suffered from the fact that its perspective and outlook was shaped by the needs of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union rather than those of workers’ interests in the United States—Black or white. This book looks more closely at a current that emerged from the Communist movement in the late 1920s—the Trotskyists—who have not been as carefully studied, but who helped shape and inform the politics and activities of several important currents both in the civil rights movements and in the Black Power movement.
Another aspect of this book should be explained. I chose to quote extensively from some of the key figures that are discussed in the book. I did so because I felt that those who were actually involved in the struggle best advance many of the arguments that I make in the book. It is also the case that their words are less well known than they should be.
Lastly, and on a more personal note, I want to acknowledge the significance of the 1960s struggle in helping shape a whole generation for the better. Even if many of the advances made in the 1960s have been rolled back today, the movement’s impact cannot be measured only by its impact on government policy, or even by its effect on the economic and social conditions for Black people in the United States. One of the most important legacies of periods of mass struggle is that those involved are transformed—and that their actions also help shape and transform others. Speaking, or writing, for myself, the example of Muhammad Ali standing up to the U.S. war in Vietnam, or the outrage that exploded with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, had a profound and lasting impact. Growing up outside the United States, two images of this country were etched in my mind. One was the image of war—Vietnam, napalm, and the massacre at My Lai—captured so famously in the image of a naked young girl, running for her life, weeping in pain. The other is of the Black struggle, of courage and heroism, of a wronged people standing up to a juggernaut.
The United States is today’s only military superpower. It is seen around the world as a bully abusing its power for profit and empire. But the United States of 2006 is no different from the United States of 1968 with regard to who prosecutes and who benefits from its wars. And, in reality, just like 1968, there isn’t one United States of America, but two. The difference is that those forces that represent opposition to the U.S. war machine are weaker today than those of the late 1960s. So there are two questions to contend with: one in changing reality, the other, which flows from the first, in changing perception.
There is no doubt that the Bush administration and its policies are very unpopular with a very large segment of the population. Among Blacks, the Bush administration scores all-time lows—with an approval rating in the single digits.9 But disapproval