White Comrades, Not Allies

Within the Black Lives Matter movement, there is confusion over the meaning and significance of “white supremacy.” As communists, we need to understand what the term means to folks who are actually using it. Distorted ideas can weaken working-class struggle against racism, capitalism and for workers’ power. Yet many advocates of these ideas may simply not yet be familiar with the richness of class analysis, which includes anti-racism at its core. Our discussions with such potential comrades need to be clear and friendly, and help move the struggle forward.  
“White supremacy” can certainly be used to characterize obvious groups like the historic Citizens Councils and the KKK. The U.S. ruling class has used white supremacist ideology as a prop for capitalism. But some people who decry “white supremacy” miss its ideological function. They conclude that “white privilege” offers all white people advantages over Black and Latin workers in all aspects of life.  The Progressive Labor Party always tries to clarify that the condition for most white workers and their families is one of oppression—less, in general, than the oppression experienced by Black workers, but oppression nonetheless. There is, therefore, an objective basis for unity of the oppressed.  White workers and students who are anti-racist are not “allies”—they are comrades in the struggle!
At an AFL-CIO panel in DC, the white supremacy argument was directed toward the historically white leaders of unions who limited positions within unions to white workers. But the greater issue for the unions today is the failure to militantly fight the bosses. Union leaders should fight for economic and social justice for all workers and broaden the struggle for equality to issues beyond wages and benefits for their immediate members. But few do this as they capitulate to the needs of capital.  
A PLP member noted that many union leaders failed to support workers’ struggles in the Detroit auto strike and the DC Metro strike in the 1970s. He called for unions to attack capitalism itself and destroy it.  Both Black and white politicians and union leaders have attacked worker’s struggles. A better analysis would focus on the capitalist class and their supporters in labor—the class traitors  Marx called “the labor aristocracy.” Replacing white union leaders with Black leaders does not change the equation if they, too, play the role of sellouts.
What many people think of as “white privilege” cannot be denied in a day-to-day functioning of society. Disparities in health, housing, jobs and education are apparent.   That’s racism! Background checks hurt Black workers more than white workers because of racist attacks on Black workers in the so-called War on Drugs that led to mass incarceration.  But white workers are also oppressed by capitalism. They need to destroy capitalism and replace it with a communist society as well. How then to build unity and solidarity?
PLP recognizes that only by taking on the sharpest anti-racist struggles can we build this unity. Black and Latin leaders (including PLPers!) are crucial to success.  In DC we have supported the transit workers’ struggles for years and led the 1978 wildcat strike. This predominantly Black workforce is increasingly under attack with new job rules, extended wage progressions, rigid background checks and privatization.  The years-long struggle against racist police brutality was central to our work in Prince George’s County and DC. We have engaged in public health struggles over AIDS, housing and mass incarceration.  Multiracial unity has been essential to advancing these struggles.
Many Black workers do not see Black capitalism as a solution, but they may be influenced by the rhetoric to organize with nationalist formations.  This reinforces the divisions in the working class and limits the ability to build a truly revolutionary movement. Racism in Europe and Asia leads to similar nationalist formations. PLP has opposed this thinking for the past 40 years and continues to try to unite all workers against capitalism in a single international party.
We have to explore the meaning of the current language of “white privilege” with our friends, point out the reactionary direction such ideology takes the movement, and continue to struggle for multiracial unity among leaders and members of the mass organizations to which we belong.