Marxist Bulletin No 5 Revised
For Black Trotskyism
-Against the P.C. draft "Freedom Now" -In defense of
programmatic fundamentals -For building a black Trotskyist cadre
by James Robertson and Shirley Stoute 3 July 1963 from SWP
Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 24, No. 30, republished in Marxist
Bulletin No. 5
"If it happens that we in the SWP are not able to find
the road to this strata [the Negroes], then we are not worthy at all. The
permanent revolution and all the rest would be only a lie." by L.D.
Trotsky, quoted in the SWP 1948-50 Negro Resolution
I. General Introduction
The Negro Question has been posed before the party for exceptional
consideration and with increasing sharpness as the gap has widened over the
past ten years between the rising level of Negro struggle and the continuing
qualitatively less intense general Trade Union activity.
1. Basic Theory: National or Race-Color Issue? Breitman vs. Kirk,
1954-57
*[The reference is to internal discussion in the SWP between
George Breitman and Richard Fraser, whose party name was Kirk--IBT
2003]*
To our understanding, what was involved then was a shading
of theoretical difference. Breitman saw the Negro people as the embryo of a
nation toward whom the right of self-determination was acknowledged but
not yet, at least, advocated. Kirk interpreted the Negro question as a race
issue which, under conditions of historic catastrophe (e.g., fascism
victorious) could be transformed into a national question. Hence he agreed to
the support of self-determination should it become a requirement in the Negro
struggle, but he assumed it could conceivably arise only under vastly altered
conditions. Both parties agreed to the inappropriateness of self-determination
as a slogan of the party then.
The present writers agree essentially with Kirks view of the
time, in particular with the 1955 presentation, "For the Materialist Conception
of the Negro Question" (SWP Discussion Bulletin A-30, August 1955). We concur
in noting the absence among the Negro people of those qualities which
could create a separate political economy, however embryonic or stunted. This
absence explains why the mass thrust for Negro freedom for over a hundred years
has been toward smashing the barriers to an egalitarian and all sided
integration. But integration into what kind of social structure? Obviously only
into one that can sustain that integration. This is the powerful reciprocal
contribution of the Negro struggle to the general class struggle.
It is the most vulgar impressionism to see in Negro moods
of isolationist despair over the winning of real points of support from other
sections of society today as some kind of process to transform the forms of
oppressive segregation into a protective barrier, behind which will occur the
gestation of a new nation. Negro Nationalism in ideology and origins is
somewhat akin to Zionism as it was from the turn of the century until the
Second World War. The large Negro ghettos of the Northern cities are the
breeding grounds for this ideology among a layer of petit-bourgeois or
declassed elements who vicariously imagine that segregated residential areas
can be the germ sources for a new state in which they will exploit
("give jobs to") black workers. Hence it is that separatist moods or currents
among Negroes have a very different foundation and significance than as a
national struggle.
As for the specific issue of self-determination, we find that the
1957 party resolution makes a good and balanced formulation:
"Theoretically the profound growth of national solidarity
and national consciousness among the Negro people might under certain future
conditions give rise to separatist demands. Since minority people have the
democratic right to self-determination, socialists would be obliged to support
such demands should they reflect the mass will. Yet even under these
circumstances socialists would continue to advocate integration rather than
separation as the best solution of the race question for Negro and white
workers alike. While upholding the right of self-determination, they would
continue to urge an alliance of the Negro people and the working class to bring
about a socialist solution of the civil rights problem within the existing
national framework."
2. From Theoretical Weakness to Current Revisionism
However, it is of immediate importance to point out that this
background dispute is far from the central issue in our criticism of the 1963
Political Committee Draft Resolution, "Freedom Now: the New Stage in the
Struggle for Negro Emancipation and the Tasks of the SWP." Thus the 1948-50
party resolution, titled "Negro Liberation Through Revolutionary Socialism,"
even though it contains the theoretical outlook that Breitman upheld, is a
solidly revolutionary document in its intent and aims. What has happened in the
interval is simply that the present party Majority has made the earlier
theoretical weakness the point of departure for the profound degradation now
arrived at in the 1963 Majority document of the role of the working class in
the United States and of its revolutionary Marxist party as well. With evident
loss of confidence in a revolutionary perspective by its authors, the essential
revision in the 1963 draft is, however qualified, nothing other than the
substitution of the axis of struggle as oppressed versus oppressor to
replace class versus class.
3. The 1963 Revisionism
The essence of what is "new" is found in the following portions of
the 1963 PC draft:
"But here, as in Africa, the liberation of the Negro people
requires that the Negroes organize themselves independently, and control
their own struggle, and not permit it to be subordinated to any other
consideration or interest.
"This means that the Negroes must achieve the maximum unity of
their forces--in a strong and disciplined nationwide movement or congress of
organizations, and ideological unity based on dividing, exposing and isolating
gradualism and other tendencies emanating from their white suppressors. This
phase of the process is now beginning.
"Having united their own forces, the independent Negro movement
will then probably undertake the tasks of division and alliance. It will
seek ways to split the white majority so that the Negro disadvantage of being a
numerical minority can be compensated for by division and conflict on the other
side." [emphasis added]
and
"The general alliance between the labor movement and the
Negro fighters for liberation can be prepared for and preceded by the cementing
of firm working unity between the vanguard of the Negro struggle and the
socialist vanguard of the working class represented by the Socialist Workers
Party."
The lesser sin of this schema of the future for the Negro struggle
is the complete capitulation to Negro nationalism. (For one to see this
vividly, re-read the quotations above substituting, say, "Algerian" for "Negro"
and "French" for "whites.") It is serious enough that the draft envisions no
effort to compete with the black nationalists understandable reaction to
liberal-pacifist toadying. Certainly it is the duty of Marxists to struggle to
separate militant elements from a regressive ideology. To say that the Negro
struggle must not be subordinated to any other consideration is to deny
proletarian internationalism. Every struggle, without exception,
acquires progressive significance only in that it furthers directly or
indirectly the socialist revolution internationally. Any struggle other than
the workers class struggle itself has, at best, indirect value. Lenin and
the Russian Bolsheviks were obligated to wage a two-front ideological dispute
in order to free the revolutionary vanguard from misconceptions on this
score--against the petit bourgeois nationalist socialists who saw the national
struggle as having a progressive historical significance in its own right; and
against the sectarian view of Rosa Luxemburg and the workers party in
Poland which, from the correct premise that the nation-state had become
reactionary in the modern world drew the over-simplified and erroneous
conclusion--"against self-determination (for Poland)." Lenin pointed out that
independent working class involvement in the struggle for national
self-determination in several important ways furthered the class struggle and
thereby acquired justification. Similarly Trotsky pointed out that
defense of the Soviet Union was subordinate to and a part of the proletarian
revolution internationally and that in the event of a clash of interests the
particular lesser interests of the part (and a degenerate part at that) would
for revolutionists take second place.
It is worthy of note that the Negro struggle in America is more
directly related to the class struggle than any essentially national question
could be--for the Negro struggle for freedom is a fight by a working class
color caste which is the most exploited layer in this country. Hence any
steps forward in this struggle immediately pose the class question and
the need for class struggle in sharpest form.
The graver consequence of the proposed Majority draft is its
necessary corollary that the Majority would see the revolutionary workers
party excluded from one more area of struggle. In their 1961 Cuban question
documents the Majority made it clear that for them the Cuban Revolution and, by
implication, in the Colonial Revolution as well, the revolutionary working
class party is, prior to the revolution, a dispensable convenience. This view
has now been explicitly generalized and confirmed by the Majority, as in
Section 13 of their "For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement":
"13. Along the road of a revolution beginning with simple
democratic demands and ending in the rupture of capitalist property relations,
guerilla warfare conducted by landless peasant and semi-proletarian forces,
under a leadership that becomes committed to carrying the revolution through to
a conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and precipitating the
downfall of a colonial or semi-colonial power. This is one of the main lessons
to be drawn from experience since the Second World War. It must be consciously
incorporated into the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in
colonial countries."
By their extension of this line to include the Negro question in
the U.S., the SWP Majority has made the most serious overt denial yet of a
revolutionary perspective. What they have done is to a priori exclude
themselves from struggling for the leadership of a most crucial section of the
American working class, and instead to consign that struggle to a hypothetical
parallel united Negro Peoples Organization which would "probably" one day
work with the socialist working class leadership in the U.S. In essence the
erroneous conclusions drawn by the Majority from the Cuban Revolution will now
be incorporated into the partys American perspective in the form of
"waiting for a black Castro." Thus the partys supreme responsibility, the
American revolution, is being vitiated!
II. To the Socialist Revolutionand the Broad Masses
1. Method of Objectivism versus Analytical Approach
In surveying current developments the descriptive articles and
reports of Breitman have been valuable (for example, his "New Trends and New
Moods in the Negro Struggle," SWP Discussion Bulletin, Summer 1961). However,
the material is flawed and limited by its shaping and presentation through an
approach which is "objective, "sociological," "descriptive." This stands in
contrast to the indicated analytical approach for Marxists. Underlying
this difference in method of treatment is the closely correlated difference
between viewing the developments as an external observer--now given formal
codification in the PC draft resolution--as against conceiving developments
from the standpoint of involvement in their fundamental solution. For the Negro
struggle to this solution integrally involves the revolutionary Marxist party
which is missing in Breitmans approach to current events.
2. Our Point of Departure--The Socialist Revolution
Our point of departure comes in turn as the conclusion that
the Negro question is so deeply built into the American capitalist
class-structure--regionally and nationally--that only the destruction of
existing class relations and the change in class dominance--the passing of
power into the hands of the working class--will suffice to strike at the heart
of racism and bring about a solution both real and durable. Our approach to
present struggles cannot be "objective." Rather it rests on nothing other than
or less than the criteria of what promotes or opposes the socialist
revolution.
Therefore we can find an amply sufficient point of departure in a
key statement of the 1948-50 resolution:
"The primary and ultimate necessity of the Negro movement
is its unification with the revolutionary forces under the leadership of the
proletariat. The guiding forces of this unification can only be the
revolutionary party."
3. Negro Mass Organizations and the Revolutionary Party
It would be fool-hardy and presumptuous to seek after any pat
schema detailing the road to be traveled in going from todays struggles
to our ultimate goals. But there are certain qualities and elements which, as
in all such social struggles, do and will manifest themselves along the way.
One such matter is that of the basic approach to organizations of
Negro workers and youth. The generality is that in an American society in which
large sections of the working people are saturated with race hatreds and
intolerance of the particular needs of other parts and strata, special
organizations are mandatory for various strata. This consideration finds its
sharpest expression in the Negro struggle. Today in the wake of the upsurge in
mass civil rights struggles there is a felt and urgent need for a broad mass
organization of Negro struggle free of the limitations, weaknesses,
hesitancies, and sometimes downright betrayal which afflict the currently
existing major competitors. This need will be with us for a long time.
Participation in the work of building such a movement is a major responsibility
for the revolutionary party. Very likely along the way a complex and shifting
combination of work in already existing groups and the building of new
organizations will be involved. But as long as we know what we are aiming for
we can be oriented amidst the complexities and vicissitudes of the process.
At bottom what the Marxists should advocate and aim to bring about
is a transitional organization of the Negro struggle standing as a
connecting link between the party and the broader masses. What is involved in
working from a revolutionary standpoint is to seek neither a substitute to
nor an opponent of the vanguard party, but rather a unified
formation of the largely or exclusively Negro members of the party together
with the largest number of other militants willing to fight for that section of
the revolutionary Marxist program dealing with the Negro question. Such a
movement expresses simultaneously the special needs of the Negro struggle and
its relationship to broader struggles--ultimately for workers power.
This approach to the special oppression of the Negroes stems from
the tactics of Lenins and Trotskys Comintern. It was there that the
whole concept was worked out for relating the party to mass organizations of
special strata under conditions where the need had become evident and it
becomes important that such movements contribute to the proletarian class
struggle and that their best elements be won over to the party itself. The
militant womens organizations, revolutionary youth leagues, and radical
Trade Unionists associations are other examples of this form.
Parenthetically, it should be noted how little there is in common
between this outlook and that of the 1963 PC draft. Thus even in the
hypothetical case that a separate social and material base was somehow
created sufficient to generate a mass Negro national consciousness, the
Bolshevist response is not just to back away and talk of facilitating
eventual common work between a "them" of that nationality and an "us" of the
(white) socialist vanguard of the (white) working class. Even if a new state--a
separate black Republic--were created, our Negro comrades, even at this
greatest conceivable remove, would become nothing other than a new section of a
politically common international party--the Fourth International. And their
struggle for socialism would continue to be our cause too.
4. Toward a Black Trotskyist Cadre
To return to the realities of the Negro struggle as it is and to
the SWP as it is, there is one vital element without which the basic working
program remains a piece of paper as far as actual involvement in the
struggle is concerned. That element is an existing section, however modest, of
Negro party members functioning actively and politically in the movement for
Negro freedom.
Viewed from this aspect the current PC draft is at once a
rationalization and an accommodation to the weakness of our party Negro forces,
and, moreover, will exacerbate this weakness. This organizational abstentionism
is obtrusive in the drafts direct implication that it doesnt really
matter about the SWP because the Negro movement can get along well enough
without the revolutionary working class party and one day the Negro vanguard
may turn in our direction anyway. The key paragraph of the PC draft quoted in
this article sums up a permeating thread of the entire resolution, places the
partys role as one of fraternal relationship between two parallel
structures: the (white) working class and its vanguard on the one side, and the
Negro people and their vanguard on the other. This conception denies the
fundamental necessity that the party will lead, must lead, or should even try
to lead the decisive section of the working class in America. The resolution
gives credence to the concept that "we cannot lead the Negro people." This is
absolutely contradictory to a revolutionary perspective. Our leadership
means the revolutionary class struggle program carried out by
revolutionists in the mass movements, fused into the revolutionary party. Just
as trade unionists will not join the revolutionary party if they do not see it
as essential to winning the struggle, so Negro fighters for liberation will not
join the party on any basis other than that the only road to freedom for
them is the revolutionary socialist path of struggle through the combat army.
Negro militants will not see any advantage in joining a party which says
in effect: "We cannot lead the Negro people. We are the socialist vanguard of
the white working class, and we think it is nice to have fraternal relations
with your vanguard (that of the liberation movement)."
Likewise, once we have recruited Negro militants to the party, the
line expressed in the PC draft serves not to help them to develop as Trotskyist
cadre and to recruit other black workers on the basis of our program, but
rather would serve to waste and mislead them. When the party denies its role of
leadership of the black messes, then for what reason do we need a black
Trotskyist cadre? The logic of this position means that there is no role for a
Negro as a party member that differs from that he could play without entering
the party, or, as in the case of the position taken on southern work,
membership in the party would actually isolate him from important areas
of work because "the party is not needed there."
Some comrades, in response to the criticisms made here, will say
that the party is not giving up a revolutionary perspective, but is only being
realistic and facing the fact that the majority of our membership is white and
that we have only a tiny and weak Negro cadre. We must seek to become in
reality what we are in theory, rather than the reverse--i.e.,
adapting our program to a serious weakness in composition. If we take this road
of adaptation the party program in a process of gross degeneration will become
based on a privileged section of the working class.
Negroes who are activists in the movement, such as, for example,
the full-time militants around SNCC, are every day formulating concepts of
struggle for the movement. The meaning of the line of the PC draft is that we
are not interested in recruiting these people to our white party because we
have the revolutionary socialist program for the section of the working class
of which we are the vanguard, and they (Negro militants) must lead
their own struggle, although we would like to have fraternal relations
with them. This is the meaning of the PC draft.
To the concept of the white party must be counterposed the concept
of the revolutionary party. For if we are only the former, then black workers
are misplaced in the SWP. There are three main elements which we recruit to the
party: minority workers, white workers, and intellectuals. In the process of
the work which brings these elements to the party there are special
considerations which must be made with reference to the suspicions of minority
peoples ("white caution") in regard to personnel, etc. However, once inside
the party we are all only revolutionists. All of these elements are fused
in the struggle to achieve the revolutionary program into revolutionists who as
a whole make up the revolutionary party. Thus the "white caution" in Negro
organizations is wrong inside the party. An internal policy of "white caution"
equals paternalism, patronization, creation of "party Negroes," etc., and has
no place in a Bolshevik party.
The statement by Trotsky, quoted at the head of this article, that
if the SWP cannot find the road to the Negroes then it is not worthy at all,
finds its concurrent counterpart in the choice now before us. Either the
revolutionary perspective in the U.S. has become blunted and lifeless or else
its expression today as a living aim of the party pivots, in the context of
relative working-class passivity and active Negro struggle, upon the
development of a black Trotskyist cadre.
The principal aim of this article is to show that this deficiency
in forces is not the fault of objective conditions--isolation and the like--but
is rooted in the complex of related political and organizational faults
stemming from a loss of confidence and orientation toward the proletarian
revolution by the SWP majority.
*****
[Because of the pressures of other work upon the authors, the last
two sections of this article have not been completed in time for the bulletin
deadline even in the rough form of the first sections. The sections which it
had been hoped to include are:
III. The Party
(1) External and inner party aspects of winning and building a
Negro cadre.
(2) Against "ours is a white party" end against patronization.
(3) Qualitative difference of required approach inside and outside
the party.
(4) Priorities in Negro work--defining the most recruitable layers
by the party.
IV. Mass Work Today
(1) Essential and common flaw in agitation based on either Federal
Troops to the South!" or "Kennedy--Deputize and Arm Birmingham Negroes!"
(2) Against Union decertification hearings as a way to fight Jim
Crow; for mass picketing to break racial exclusion in unions.
(3) Specific aims and balance of our work--North and South.
(4) Appraisal of existing organizations, including SNCC, the
Muslims, etc.
In lieu of these developed sections, we are concluding with a few
fragmentary notes. It is our hope that the coming party Convention will act to
continue a literary discussion following the Convention in the fast changing
Negro Question. In addition, for a brief statement of views on mass work,
attention is directed to the Minority Tendencys amendment to the PC draft
on the American Question (in Discussion Bulletin Vol. 24, No. 23, June 1963).]
1. The Black Muslims are, with many contradictions,
primarily a religious organization. Their political activity is primarily
limited to the propaganda sphere. They do not have a program for struggle to
meet the demands of the black masses in the community today, although their
promise of political candidates would represent somewhat of a turn. We take
exception to comrade Kirks statement that, "The foundation of the Muslim
movement is basically a reflex of the lumpen proletariat to gradualism, to the
betrayal of the intellectuals and the default of the union movement." The
Muslim movement has a petit-bourgeois program--black business, black economy,
separate on this basis, for this goal, is the answer to the oppression. Their
internal organization is bureaucratically structured, with heavy financial
drainage on the rank-and-file membership to the enrichment of "The Messenger."
On the other hand, while they call to all levels of black society, businessmen,
workers, even socialists and communists, as long as theyre black, in
reality the appeal is attractive mainly to the working class and especially to
the lumpen layers, but they are no longer lumpen when they join the movement.
One tendency of the leadership represented by Malcolm X condemns American
capitalist society and shows favor toward Cuba and Red China as opposed
to Chiang Kai-shek. Another tendency claims that international affairs
dont concern them and the black mans problems in America have no
relation to the Cuban Revolution, etc. It is realistic to expect that we may be
able to win some of its periphery and membership to the revolutionary program,
but because of the religious, non-action oriented, exacting and bureaucratic
nature of the organization, this can best be done through discussion and common
action where possible, rather than on the inside.
2. R. Vernon as prosecuting attorney of "The White-Radical
Left on Trial."
In his article comrade Vernon states: "The absurdity of a
Militant talking trade unions and Negro-White unity at the same time
that it sounds like the very voice of the depths of the Negro ghetto is offered
with a straight face." This is but one blatant indication that comrade Vernon
is not making criticism from the point of view of a revolutionary and does not
see the struggle for socialism--the class struggle--as having any essential
connection to the Negro struggle for equality. Vernons current writings,
"Why White Radicals are Incapable of Understanding Black Nationalism" and "The
White Radical Left on Trial," are based on the premise, or attempt to prove,
that Marxism and revolutionary socialism have no place in the struggle of the
most exploited section of the American working class nor in the colonial
revolution either. For Vernon the building of a revolutionary party aiming
toward the American revolution is at best irrelevant and international working
class solidarity meaningless. In short, there is little in comrade
Vernons articles that is common to Marxism. Furthermore, his views are
saturated with the spirit of the treacherous justification "that ours is a
white socialist revolutionary party"--the logic of which is liquidationist.
Lest any comrades think we are too harsh in criticizing Vernon as
having theoretically surrendered to black Nationalism and rejected Marxism
(with or without quote marks), let them ponder such a remark as, "The problem
of revolutionary nationalism has never been dealt with adequately in any
Marxist or Marxist movement anywhere. Lenin only scratched the
surface...." Of the entire, penetrating, historically verified theory of the
Permanent Revolution, Vernon says not a word! Yet, above all, Trotskys
theory tackles "the problem of revolutionary nationalism" and lays bare its
solution.
Moreover, even if "Lenin only scratched the surface," our luck has
finally turned. Vernon coolly informs us that the SWP has now proved its unique
worth: "It is the only group whose internal life can, and did, produce the WWR
[Why White Radicals...] document...." Apparently Vernon, the author
of WWR, has capitulated to his own ego even more fully than to nationalism!
We are happy to accept comrade Vernons finding that the
Tendency we support is the most distant from his views of any in the party.
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