Every society has a class configuration, and it is the interests of those classes and their mutual contention which explains social dynamics. The history of the world is the history of class struggle. The reasons for strife between nations, between ethnic, religious, racial groupings, lies in the material interests of the dominant classes of one or more parties to the national strife. The non-dominant classes of a national or ethnic group may share to a greater or lesser degree in the benefits of oppressing or plundering other peoples, but the impetus, the driving force comes from the dominant class, to whom goes also the lion’s share of the booty.
In order to justify war and conquest, particularly when it involves sacrifice by the general population, the ruling class of a given nation must contrive a rationale, instill an ideology in the masses to gain their support. Of course, once the process is begun, the ideology develops as an independent factor, although subordinate, interacting with material interest. Nevertheless, the underlying and fundamental cause is to be found in material interest.
Imperialism did not develop in the world because of notions of white supremacy. White supremacy emerged as an ideology and became strengthened as a rationale for and in aid of imperialist conquest. And imperialism arose at a particular moment in history (modern imperialism I am speaking about) when a certain class had arisen whose economic needs and capacities demanded conquest and expansionism. Slavery as a commercial system in its modern form arose when certain economic requisites had been met and when a class had come into being which demanded and could implement a slave system. Racism arose out of the slave system; the slave system did not arise out of racism.
Ideas do not immediately reflect changing realities. There is a force of tradition, of habit. New conditions do not spring up uniformly. They appear in one or several centers and only gradually do they spread to other areas. Sometimes old conditions remain as vestiges, and these find reflection in obsolete ideas.
The destruction of a class system based on exploitation will, to the extent of its thoroughness, eliminate the basis for all ideologies that justify or mirror exploitation, including racism and national chauvinism. In the real world of the 20th century, exploitation was dealt a severe blow (although not eliminated) in a portion of the globe where socialism was introduced. But socialist construction existed alongside a still
powerful exploitative system which continued to purvey its ideological poison and, owing to the weaknesses and contradictions of the relatively non-exploitative societies, owing to their still early stage of development, owing to the difficulties which imperialism continues to impose-upon them, could not remain immune to the ideological poison.
There is no gene for racism. Attitudes of contempt toward darker people have not always characterized lighter-skinned people — another well-kept secret.
As I have attempted to show, racism in this country benefits the elite. It is a detriment to the vast majority of people, including a large number of white people. That this is perceived by only a handful at the present time does not weaken my argument but only testifies to the skill of the ruling class in developing a hierarchical structure that encourages people to aspire to the strata above them and reject the strata below them. It is not only a matter of being indoctrinated by those who control public opinion. The system itself is based on ruthless competition and that is the most accessible reality to people. It is only through long and painful struggle, together with the educational efforts of “prophetic” forces, that people develop the ideas of cooperation, association, solidarity, that people gradually extend the boundaries of the “us” and ever more accurately direct their anger at the hostile “them.”
The precise role of national or racial oppression and its economic, social and political significance varies from country to country. The precise role of oppressed nationalities varies from country to country. There are national struggles which are progressive and some which are reactionary. The criterion for evaluating specific national struggles is the effect of such struggles on the various classes in both the oppressed and the oppressor nations or simply between rival nations. Every analysis of the role of racism, of national oppression, of the role of the nationally oppressed, must be based on very concrete historical and current determinations. There is no all-encompassing formula valid for all times and all places.
The term “skin color politics” I borrowed from Elombe. The dialectic opposite of “skin color politics” is not color-blind politics. Genuine Marxism (unlike the Social-Democratic theory of the past) does not collapse national and ethnic struggle into the class struggle. What it does is place national struggle in a class framework and uses as its political criterion the advance of world socialism, the advance of the interests of the world working class, the working people of the world generally, the struggle for socialism within one’s given country, the interests of one’s own proletariat and the working people generally. the cause of democracy.
Every national struggle is a class struggle. It is not equivalent to class struggle but it is a component of, an aspect of class struggle. The struggle of an oppressed people against its oppressor is the struggle of specific sectors of the oppressed against specific sectors of the oppressor. The character of that struggle, its militancy, social demands, methods of struggle, are conditioned by which strata leads the movement and the weight of other strata in the struggle.
