Black Nationalism Fails Black Workers

As the Movement for Black Lives gathers for its founding convention in Cleveland, its rank-and-file stands at a fork in the road. If they follow the Movement’s leadership and splinter into a Black group with non-Black “allies,” they will move onto the dead-end path of nationalism and reformism—and, inevitably, into the capitalist bosses’ camp. From Haiti and Indonesia to South Africa and the Congo, from Vietnam’s National Liberation Front to the Black Panther Party in the U.S. (see CHALLENGE, p. 6), nationalism has derailed workers’ revolts and led them to death and exploitation by a new set of bosses.
By dividing us, nationalism conquers us.
But there is another choice for all workers: Black, Latin, Asian and white. It is the path of multiracial unity of the international working class, the only force that can end racism and ultimately smash capitalism with communist revolution. Progressive Labor Party is taking that path. Over the last fifty years, we have built a multiracial movement and fought racism and sexism in the streets, in factories and hospitals, in schools and colleges (see CHALLENGE, p. 8). Struggle has taught us there are no good bosses, regardless of color or nationalist identification. The latest wave of rebellion keeps teaching us that multiracial unity is indispensable and non-negotiable.
Black Lives Matter, Plus and Minus
As a leading element in the Movement for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter is faced with a contradiction—with a progressive appearance masking a pro-capitalist essence. Founded by three women after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin in 2013, the group has recognized both the special oppression of women and the role Black women have played as a driving force in workers’ struggles. It has helped to galvanize thousands of honest, anti-racist workers and youth—of all “races”—to the resistance against murders-by-cop. Black workers’ militant struggle has reverberated from Ferguson to Brazil to London to Israel; a global movement now looks to the U.S. Black working class for leadership. These are all very positive things.
But Black Lives Matter is fatally compromised by its capitalist ideas. Its emphasis on identity politics caters to capitalist individualism over working-class consciousness. The group has taken millions of dollars from its most notorious “ally,” liberal billionaire George Soros, who is best known for exporting capitalist “democracy” and diverting workers’ fightback into support for U.S. imperialism. As the Washington Times noted, “Soros-sponsored organizations helped mobilize protests in Ferguson, building grass-roots coalitions on the ground backed by a nationwide online and social media campaign” (1/24/15).
Black Nationalism: Just Another Jail
Class collaboration with the bosses works hand in hand with nationalist ideology. On its website, Black Lives Matter declares that it “goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities.” Then it proceeds to call itself “a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.”
But Black workers don’t need a new Black liberation movement; the old one gave rise to pro-boss sellouts like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. What’s needed is an alternative to a capitalist system that uses racism to super-exploit Black workers for super-profits—and to divide Black and white workers who need each other to bring the system down.
Like all workers, Black workers need communism, a system organized around workers’ needs. A society where the basis of racism and sexism—exploitation and inequality—will join the bosses in the dustbin of history.
Despite his reformist flaws, Martin Luther King understood how nationalism and separation play into the bosses’ hands, and how they undermine our class’s common goal of a society organized around workers’ needs. In his 1965 address at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march, he said:
“Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then….[T]he segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.”
After the Civil War, King noted, as the poor white masses and former Black slaves moved to unite politically, the Southern ruling class “began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society….Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy….They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level.”
In a reference to the legalized segregation in the South known as Jim Crow, King added: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.”
Let’s not do the bosses’ job for them. Let’s stay united, Black and white, Asian and Latin, as we fight together against racism and for a communist world!