Originally written as a Letter to organization of revolutionary Black youth – 1980s
The time is ripe and the time demands that African-American revolutionary leadership take on the full measure of political responsibility that history is increasingly thrusting upon it.
What follows from the idea the centrality of the struggle against racism and the centrality of the African-American leadership movement? What follows from the idea that the cause of social progress for all peoples in the United States is linked in the most fundamental way to the fate of the African-American people and their self-movement? It seems to me that what follows is an understanding of the indispensable role of African-American leadership in setting a revolutionary course for the country, in mobilizing all progressive sectors in the United States, in educating them and in organizing them.
It is increasingly apparent that the African-American community is advancing in its political understanding at a much more rapid rate than other. communities. It is also observable that certain forces in other communities, small as they may be at the present time, are for the first time’ in history beginning to grasp the true role of the African-American people in the democratic, progressive and revolutionary movements. For the first time there are forces in other communities on the basis of real political maturity (and not the political opportunism that characterized their acceptance of Jesse Jackson’s leadership in the past) which are prepared to accept African-American leadership.
In the past, African-American revolutionary forces were unable or unwilling to take national leadership. Some of that unwillingness, while understandable in the past, cannot any longer be justified. Nor can the country afford such unwillingness.
What does African-American revolutionary leadership mean? It does not mean simply the leadership of a number of outstanding African-American individuals. When we speak of African-American revolutionary leadership we mean the leadership of masses of African-American people. It is the motion of the masses, not just the dramatic rhetoric of individual leaders that will act as the catalyst, as the glue, as the battering ram, as the inspiration for all sectors of the working people and all strata with a democratic agenda.
Therefore it is of course the task of African-American leadership to prioritize educating, mobilizing and organizing the African-American masses. But along with this task, what can no longer be postponed is the struggle to assume the leadership of the democratic, the progressive, the revolutionary movement as a whole.
That movement has been plagued by two fatal weaknesses: opportunism, the continued trailing behind the liberal representatives of imperialism or those tied to the liberal representatives of imperialism, the unwillingness to adopt truly revolutionary tactics – which characterizes the great majority of the Left, and which basically reflects a middle-class orientation; and the “revolutionary” sectarianism busily contemplating its own navel, which has no understanding of what mass work is all about, and even how to talk to the masses, much less how to convince them.
What does African-American leadership of the country mean? It does not mean African-Americans lording it over other communities. It does not mean other communities bowing to African-American leadership. What African-American revolutionary leadership means is aggressively putting forward what it considers a correct line, a correct program, correct tactics, a correct style of work, and fighting all other tendencies in every community toward the end of having the correct positions universally adopted, at least by all genuinely revolutionary forces. It means fighting against opportunism and sectarianism everywhere, among all communities. It means taking the lead in forging a principled unity — not a unity of the middle class and the working class behind a basically middle class agenda, not a unity of Black and white behind an agreement to soft-pedal racism, not an agreement among all peoples of color that ignores the special oppression of African-American people and the need to fight anti-Black racism among all other peoples of color, not a unity of peoples of color that ignores the class composition of those communities or the real class divisions within all the communities – but a real unity of the working people and the oppressed based on an anti-racist, class-conscious struggle for fundamental political, economic and social change.
Revolutionary African-American leadership is exercised not by giving orders to the other communities but by winning them over on the basis of the clearest and sharpest political analysis, the greatest courage and staunchness, the greatest willingness to make the necessary sacrifices. African-American revolutionaries will lead by inspiring example, by commanding respect.
And so I urge my sisters and brothers in New African Voices, you who although still few in number have already amassed a rich political experience which other parts of the country, other organizations and other national and ethnic communities need to profit from, I urge you to begin to take steps toward asserting that leadership which is the subject of this paper.
I consider that you, representing young African-American revolutionaries, are the key force in the movement for the liberation of this country, in the movement for the liberation of the African-American people and also in the movement for the liberation of all oppressed and exploited peoples. I tell you this not to flatter you but to stress the heavy responsibilities that lie on your shoulders.
With these responsibilities comes the challenge of measuring up to them, the challenge of undergoing the intellectual and moral training, acquiring the political wisdom that comes both from books and from participation in ongoing struggles.
I’d like to begin with some indisputable facts, and forgive me if I bore you with elementary stuff but please bear with me…
1.) In this country, whites occupy the most important positions of wealth and power. They dominate the political institutions, from the courts to the Congress, from the political parties to the vast majority of pressure groups. They control the huge money centers, capital centers, the banks, insurance companies and big corporations.
2.) The great majority of the middle class, with its comfortable lifestyle and some degree of security, are also predominantly made up of whites.
3.) African-Americans are discriminated against on whatever level they achieve and by whites on every socioeconomic level. Even in the working class, the majority of better paying jobs are filled by whites and they get steadier employment, higher pay, less permanent unemployment. And white workers generally resist the efforts of Black workers to gain entrance to the skilled trades and all work from which they have been historically barred. White workers fight to keep control of the trade unions and resist allowing Black leadership.
4.) The overwhelming majority of whites are racist, and this is true on every socioeconomic level.
5.) The history of this country is the history of white supremacy, a record of unprecedented brutality, of humiliation of darker peoples, and especially the peoples of African descent. In certain ways this oppression is more threatening today to the survival of African-American people than at any time in the past.
6.) The country was built primarily on the backs of African peoples.
The conclusion from all of this would seem obvious: Whites are the enemies of the African-American people, and given that no people ever voluntarily gives up their wealth, power and privilege, then the AfricanAmerican freedom struggle can only take the form of a bloody armed struggle between the Black and white races/nations/nationalities. And so there can be no talk of alliances with whites since every layer of white society has a stake in the white supremacist system.
Now let us move on to another fact about which I believe there is no dispute. That is, that there are different degrees of racism among white people.
There are those so filled with hatred that they are quite prepared to exterminate every African-American now, if the choice were theirs. There are the Ku-Klux types and the Nazis.
Then you go down from there to the more typical reactionaries, down through the “moderates” and then to the liberals.
Liberals want to be “fair.” They oppose the more vicious (in their eyes) forms of racism. They are the people who supported the Southern Civil Rights movement while at the same time fighting African-American aspirations for power and self-determination in the North. They were the people who supported ending legal school segregation in the South while taking their kids out of the public schools in the North when the percentage of Black kids in those schools reached a certain level – “tipping” they call it.
Moving further, you have the white radicals, the “Left” who often support the African-American freedom struggles, who consider anti-racist struggle an “important” part of their political work, who condemn racism in any form, but who are plagued by a Eurocentric mindset (unbeknownst to them), and also unbeknownst to them are heavily influenced by their relatively comfortable economic circumstances, or if they do not enjoy such circumstances it is because they have voluntarily given up material comfort in the interests of the cause (and what a difference that makes). In other words, much of the whites on the Left live in conditions completely foreign to the African-American masses (and poor whites, for that matter). These white progressives are unable to give up their hegemonist pretensions to lead all peoples, nor do they understand the centrality of the struggle against racism nor the centrality of the African-American liberation movement.
Now we all agree that the liberation struggle is a war. And one of the first rules of war is that one must try to unify and strengthen your own ranks and also try to weaken and split the ranks of your enemy. For it is well known that a hundred “dissidents” within the enemy ranks are worth a thousand of one’s own soldiers. One of the reasons the Nazis were able to gain such easy victories in the beginning of World War II, was the existence of a significant number of German or Nazi sympathizers in the ranks of military, political and commercial circles all over Europe. So, too, in the war for African-American liberation it is extremely important to make contact with, encourage and work closely with white “traitors” – to accept white Liberal support in struggles against racist violence, police brutality and other issues on which they are prepared to struggle, to accept radical white support on a range of issues that they are willing to struggle on.
It will be my point, which I hope to demonstrate shortly, however, that those whites fighting the white supremacist system are not traitors at all but are the true champions of all working people, including white working people and all whites who identify their interests with the cause of democracy and social justice. It is the arch-racists who try to convince whites that they are traitors when they stand up for justice, and it is one of the most important tasks of white progressives to combat this deadly illusion, an effort which should be supported by African-American freedom-fighters.
Having indicated the importance of different types of alliances with whites, this does not mean that alliances are desirable on any terms nor that it is the whites who should dictate or determine the terms. Each alliance, at each step of the way toward national and social emancipation, has to be concretely analyzed. And there are no recipes that can be applied in advance to give specific guidance. But there are a couple of general considerations that apply in every case, it seems to me. One, the alliance must assist the national liberation and/or social liberation struggle move forward toward the final goal. This is kind of tricky because some- times what looks like a step forward is really a step backwards in the long run. Another consideration is that it must strengthen or at least not compromise African-American self-determination. Thirdly, it must strengthen the power of the masses of the African-Americans rather than just the Black elite or Black middle class.
Where did racism in the US come from? We all known it was promoted to justify the slave system which for a long time was the foundation of the Southern economy and a most important element for laying the foundations of the Northern economy. We need to remember that Africans were not seized and enslaved because Europeans had a prejudice against Black people, thought them inferior, etc. As a matter of fact, for hundreds of years stories circulated in Europe about a wondrous Black civilization in Africa that far surpassed anything in Europe. And indeed there were such civilizations in Northern, Central and Southern Africa. African slavery did not arise because African peoples were held in contempt but out of new economic facts: the opening up of the “New World” to European commerce, the possibility of raising cash crops with gang labor, the possibility of a plantation economy in the Western Hemisphere and a ready market for its products. For a number of reasons having nothing to do with the “inferiority” of Africans, they were the ones who became the plantation workers rather than Europeans, Native Americans or other peoples.
The slaveowners and their apologists had to devise an ideological or moral ground in order to justify their barbaric conduct towards the African peoples. First they tried to use religious beliefs.
The Africans were called “heathens” and their enslavement was really good for them because now their souls would be saved. The problem was that once converted – and many Africans did convert or pretended to convert to Christianity it was generally considered wrong to keep a Christian enslaved. So the color issue came to the fore, an easy badge to mark an inferior, savage people who required civilizing, required close supervision and control to ensure that the Africans did not revert back to their primitive ways.
The point is that the interests of the slave-holders who ruled and controlled southern political life required the elaboration and spread of racism. Racism was vital to the interests of the slave-holders, of the bankers and merchants of the North who were business partners of the slaveholders, and it later became vital to northern business interests in exploiting both Black and white workers. Racism was not hard for northern business interests to accept because the notion of an inferior being constituting the southern labor force could be borrowed to portray white workers as inferior beings as well and therefore worthy of their low position in life.
Gradually, over time, bondage and poverty were associated with the black skin color. The color itself became a stigma and whites from all walks of life developed racist attitudes. But was slavery in the interests of the common people who were the descandants of Europeans?
In the early colonial days and right through the Revolution, there was a large group of independent farmers who had emigrated from Europe. In fact, they made up by far the largest portion of the “white” population and they made up the largest group of whites in the South, as well. They were constantly at. odds with and in struggle against the rich planter aristocracy. As slavery developed, the position of these farmers deteriorated. They could not compete with plantations worked by slave labor. Many took to the hills, becoming the poverty-stricken “hillbillies” of Appalachia. Many stayed and sank into desperate poverty. Some emigrated north. Huge numbers of them (more than in any war thereafter) were slaughtered in the Civil War to defend the plantation owners’ property. If these white farmers had made common cause with the slaves against the big landowners, their fate would certainly have been much happier. But they had been infected by racism, had associated the horrors of slavery with the qualities of the slaves themselves, and for the sake of maintaining their own sense of dignity, which was being increasingly threatened by their declining social status in the South, looked down upon the slaves as inferior beings. These whites became part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
After the Civil War, these whites sank to the level of sharecropping and tenant farming, a step but not much above the condition of the freedmen, living in dire poverty, almost without any education, in terrible health, and even deprived of the right to vote. The tragedy was that the wealthy whites, while exploiting them and ruling over them, had convinced them that while they didn’t have a pot to piss in, at least they were blessed with white skin and were in the same social family as the rich whites. And just because they had nothing, the poor whites fought tooth and nail to hold onto that little status, and they became the foot soldiers of the KKK and similar organizations. When the Africans / African-Americans looked for a little help, a little protection, it was to the rich whites that they had to turn. And the rich whites played the Great White Father and kept control of the system securely in their hands.
Meanwhile in the North, the same kind of thing was going on. The condition of most white workers was grim, except for a small number of skilled workers. There were no unions for the great majority. They worked extremely long hours for pitiful wages that could not support their families, worked in dangerous conditions, with little protection from labor laws, had no unemployment insurance or Social Security. They were the industrial slaves of the new corporations. They hated their bosses but they feared the competition of Black labor. And they were heavily infected with the racism that had radiated from the South. When white workers tried to organize, the bosses brought in Black scabs to–break the strike. When the strike was broken, the boss would fire all or almost all the Black workers and bring back the former or else hire new white workers. Whites were similarly used to scab against Black workers.
Did the white workers benefit from this system?
The labor movement remained weak all the way to the 1930s because of the refusal to organize Black (and even European immigrant) workers. Finally, when white workers determined to organize heavy industry, the auto, rubber, electrical and steel industries with its many-million labor force, more far-sighted leaders realized that there was no way they could succeed without including Black workers. And they also realized that in order to do that, they had to fight the prejudices of backward white workers. So they had to wage an anti-racist educational campaign.
The Communists, those who had the best understanding of the long-range interests of the workers at that time, took the lead and succeeded not only in influencing white workers but in gaining the confidence of the African-American community, which no other socialist party has ever matched since then. That prestige lasted until World War II when the Communists sacrificed anti-racist struggle in the name of winning the war and they rapidly lost Black support.
What the history of the labor movement shows is that it is only as strong as its commitment to anti-racist struggle, that the African-American is vital to the labor movement and is playing an ever more vital role. It is clear that the revitalization of the generally weak labor unions lies in the hands of the African-American worker. Further, that a new, powerful labor movement where African-Americans will play an important leadership role will be a crucial part of the African-American liberation movement as well as the movement for a socialist society.
The bottom line is that the racist attitudes of millions of white workers are totally self-defeating. And getting them to understand this is the job of all revolutionaries, but one particularly fitted for white revolutionaries. White working people have a long way to go before they reach the necessary anti-racist consciousness (not absolute but necessary consciousness). Yet there are signs of breakthroughs, of important lessons being learned, of a new self-critical attitude.
The fact is that there can be no road to social emancipation in the United States without the participation of millions of white workers. At the same time those white workers cannot contribute to social emancipation – including their own emancipation – without shedding their racism along the way.
We all know how history has been written to “white out” the tremendous contributions that African-Americans have made to US development. What was done to African-Americans, what was done by African-Americans, the significance of the African presence in the US is either omitted through a conspiracy of silence or trashed in a tissue of lies.
The record of sincere and principled common struggle of Black and white – from the early cooperation of Black slaves and white indentured servants in the murder of their masters and/or escape together, to the often dangerous collaboration of white “conductors” with runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad, to the virtually unknown Southern white rebellions within and against the Confederacy, to the strong policy of non-discrimination in the militant International Workers of the World, that radical labor organization of the erly 20th century, to the formation of mixed-race sharecropper organizations in the South in the 1930s, or before that the tentative movement of southern white farmers toward unity with African-Americans in the period of the Populist movement, to the anti-racist struggles of the Communist Party in the 1930s — these examples, while relatively few, are all the more precious for being rare and require us to keep the knowledge of this tradition alive to serve as encouragement and inspiration to others.
What is it that produces and reproduces racism in this society? This is a crucial question because if we cannot understand the causes of a phenomenon, it is very difficult to find a solution. If one does not try to locate the cause of a disease, one will often mistake a symptom for the cause, and one cannot cure a disease by treating its symptoms. One cannot formulate a correct strategy or correct tactics without understanding the essence of the problem.
Of course, one can deal with white racism by exterminating all whites. One can also deal with racism in the US by leaving the country. Or one can suggest carving out a territory that whites will cede to African-Americans. These solutions are in my opinion not politically correct. I also believe they are impossible of fulfillment.
Racism flows not out of the genes of whites but are generated by an exploitative system whose dominant group has an important stake in its perpetuation and exercises substantial control over the ideas and attitudes of the entire society — controls the media, schools and universities, the entertainment industry, the art establishment, etc. This group of financiers and the corporate elite have a vital stake in every idea that diminishes people and disunites them, including racism, national arrogance, national and ethnic animosity, sexism, and the devaluation of many other groups: the working people, the elderly, children, the disabled, homosexuals, etc.
By devaluating people they are able to devalue their pay, make superprofits. Secondly, by sowing attitudes of contempt and hatred among the people, they are able to exercise the classical “divide and rule” strategy.
Racism and other anti-human sentiments are also nourished spontaneously, without the intervention of the dominant class because the capitalist system itself operates on the principle of ruthless competition, a dog-eat-dog struggle, survival of the fittest (the strongest). It is a sharply hierarchical system with everyone having a boss, who has a boss, who in turn has a boss. These bosses generally exercise the powers of a tyrant within their domain. It is a system where there is constant insecurity, where most people feel humiliated, where it is easy to arouse jealousy and antagonism among the people because the dominant relationship to one another is competition — competition for jobs, for living space, for services — and where there is never enough to take care of all.
Because they feel humiliated, people look for status in the ways taught by the capitalist system, by looking down on others.
Because the rulers within capitalist society maintain their rule by establishing a carefully arranged hierarchy, a pyramid, determined first by “race,” by ethnic group, by gender, etc., so that each group has its particular place, below some but above others, the efforts of those below to climb up seems threatening to those placed higher, and they fight to keep those below them down.
The fact is that all but a comparatively small number of people have a real stake in this system, for it is they who have the lion’s share of the wealth and power. The pyramid confuses the masses of people over their real interests, and even confuses politically progressive people who believe that social justice requires that the white working people make major sacrifices for the sake of social justice. Even they often believe that when African-Americans climb up, then white workers must be pushed down.
In addition to the efforts of the ruling class, in addition to the natural operations of the system, racism is carried from generation to generation through a sort of independent motion, transferred to the new generation by parents and elders so that even when conditions have changed there is a lag in consciousness. This is particularly true with regard to the remnants of the slave ideology, which capitalism finds useful to continue. In addition, capitalism and slavery share many common characteristics, so the ideologies of capitalism and slavery have many common characteristics. Even when capitalism is overthrown, the poison of racism and other backward attitudes will remain for a long time and will continue to need to be actively fought.
The most important thing is that as the struggle against capitalism intensifies, as the suffering inflicted by capitalism spreads to ever wider segments of the population, the growing class consciousness of Latino, Asian–American and European-American workers reveals ever more clearly the need to unite all the oppressed and exploited. This growing awareness does not happen by itself alone but requires intensive educational work by anti-racist forces.
Now I would like to touch on one other issue. There are three kinds of revolutionaries:
First, there are the – and here I will use a very scientific term – bullshit revolutionaries. these are people more concerned with their image than anything else. They are always posing, making sure they look the part, making sure they sound revolutionary, the more the better. It’s a game with them. They are a threat to no one except the revolutionary movement (archivists note: LARPers).
Then there are sincere revolutionaries, sincere but not serious. For they think it is enough to want revolution to make it happen. The main thing, they believe, is to be angry, to hate the system. I repeat, while they may be dedicated and really committed, they are still not serious revolutionaries.
When one decides to become a professional, a doctor, say, or a lawyer or accountant, one understands that there is a whole body of knowledge that must be mastered. One has to go to school and gradually, through hard study, one gradually acquires the fruits of hundreds of years of experience that has been gathered and put in systematic form, in books and lectures.
Even if one wants to practice a trade – such as mechanic, technician – there are courses to be taken. And with advancing technology it is getting to be impossible to rely on on-the-job training.
Yet so many people think that all you have to do to be a revolutionary is to proclaim it.
Just as there are laws governing the behavior of the physical universe, laws of physics, chemistry, laws of mathematics, so there are laws governing society’s behavior, society’s development, including the change from one society to another – revolutionary change. Human beings are subject to social laws. They cannot defy them but they can learn to use them to achieve their goals.
These laws are confirmed by deeply studying history. And it is only with these laws that one can make any sense out of history.
History is the record of human suffering, but it is also the record of human struggle. It is a record of oppression but it is also a record of resistance to oppression. African culture teaches that one must honor one’s ancestors, and this is a wise attitude. Not only wise, it is key to survival. For to honor one’s ancestors is to honor their struggles and to learn from those struggles taking heart from their victories and learning from their mistakes and defeats. To make revolution is to master history. And this requires that history be seen not as a meaningless collection of dates, events and personalities. It is not only that we must understand our past to understand our present. In a sense, we are the past, the whole past rolled up into today’s people, today’s machines, today’s institutions.
Fortunately, it is not required of us to figure out the laws of society from scratch. There have been giants of social science who have left us a rich legacy. They have taken the work of the ablest thinkers in their past and added their own discoveries, discoveries made from absorbing the best science of the past and adding to it the study of the struggles of the peoples throughout history and in their own time. They have provided us with an invaluable compass to guide us, have given us fundamental principles which are valid in every capitalist society. And the achievements of these giants have been supplemented by other great revolutionary thinkers, and continue to be enriched.
But the question arises: What can European thinkers tell peoples of color about their social existence?
To begin with, all knowledge, all science owes a tremendous debt to that which came before. The scientific advances made in Europe were possible only because of the great work done by the Arabs and North Africans before them, and the Africans of ancient Egypt, Ethiopia and other African centers of learning well before that. Every people has contributed to the great storehouse of world learning. Science cannot ignore what came before. It is built not only on the discoveries but on the mistakes of the past.
Secondly, the social theory devised by Europeans came not only from scientific theory but from practice, thousands of years of practice of class struggle, of revolts against tyranny, of revolutions. The sharpest struggles shedding the most light about the nature of the modern social system, the contemporary social system called capitalism, were waged by Europeans, for it was in Europe that capitalism first emerged and most fully developed. Experience revealed that notwithstanding national differences from country to country, there were some basic similarities. The great European thinkers, Marx and Engels ,and after them Lenin, were able to make profound generalizations about these similarities, similarities in the capitalist system’s structure and similarities in the dynamics of the class struggle and the laws governing capitalism’s motion. These thinkers were able to come up with their magnificent theory because they were on the side of the exploited, of the oppressed, of the poor. They had no need to lie to themselves or to others about the horrors of the system or to deny its inevitable destruction.
The laws they discovered require more than memorization. Above all else, the way these men thought, their method of analysis, is what we have to master. Their ideas are not magic. Their ideas are a compass. Without them, one can never find one’s way. With them one will be pointed in the right direction, but the particular road to liberation is something that each people have to find for themselves.
It is precisely the classes and groups whose position in society most cry out for revolution who most need revolutionary theory. In our society, the African-American people, at the bottom of the social and economic ladder, the most oppressed segment of our society, overwhelming working class in composition, strategically situated in large numbers in the urban centers of the nation, with hundreds of years of experience in this country, are the people destined to take revolutionary theory most seriously and creatively apply it to the specific conditions in the United States. There is nothing that so fills the ruling class here with dread as much as the prospect of African-American revolutionary leaders adopting Marxist-Leninist theory. And they work non-stop to discredit that theory, both from without and from within the African-American community.
Studying the laws of society is a lifelong job. It cannot be done in a library or in one’s living room alone. To understand that theory it is necessary to actively participate in revolutionary struggle. Through struggle, through contact with daily reality, theory comes to life, becomes ever clearer, is tested, and that which no longer applies is discarded and new generalizations, a new theory is adopted. But where new theory is born, it does not come about by throwing out the old but by absorbing the old in the new.
Many revolutionaries in this country are at a dead end, at least for the moment. They are at a dead end because those who claim to be Marxist – Leninists are most often only paying lip service to the theory. They pluck some things that they like out of the theory and reject or ignore things which are inconvenient to them. But Marxism is an integral theory. To reject any of its fundamentals is to turn one’s back on the whole theory.
There are other revolutionaries who deny the validity of Marxism–Leninism. They deny the existence of social laws. They toss aimlessly on the waves of current events going nowhere, learning nothing from decades of experience.
All of us have an enormous amount to learn. Lack of knowledge is not a serious problem, however, for it can be easily remedied where there is a will to learn. What is fatal is complacency, in my opinion one of the greatest of political sins. Mistakes can be forgiven – no one can avoid them – and mistakes are even the best source for learning. But self-satisfaction has nothing redeeming about it. It is the surest guarantee of failure.
