THE UNTOLD WORKERS’ HISTORY MULTIRACIAL UNITY

In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, major capitalist media outlets immediately blamed the working class, particularly white workers, for Donald Trump’s victory. It is a given in the U.S. that many workers—Black, white, Latin and others—are angry. That white workers are somehow responsible for a Nazi like Trump is ruling class nonsense.
The history of white workers is intimately bound in common struggle with Black and immigrant workers since the U.S. was a British colony. The bosses’ lies represent sharpening capitalist efforts to alienate Black, Latin, Muslim and immigrant workers, those hardest hit by racism, from their white working class sisters and brothers. While the bosses write working-class politics out of history, CHALLENGE strives to preserve and commemorate the long tradition of the all-necessary force of multiracial unity of our class.
The communist Progressive Labor Party fights back against capitalism across the globe for revolution for a communist world, where the international working class runs society. Part of our fight is dispelling the anti-working class lies spun by the bosses about one or another sector of the working class. The capitalists hate and fear communism with good reason—it means an end to their money, their borders, their empires, their racist and sexist ideas, and their class.
Trump: Creature of Capitalism
Donald Trump is rightfully hated by hundreds of millions of workers around the globe, and by masses of workers, Black and white, in the U.S. Donald Trump, however, is no more than a servant of the U.S. capitalist class. The capitalist controlled media, instead of analyzing the class nature of Trump’s presidency, has settled on finger pointing at the white working class.
“Call [the U.S. presidential election] the triumph of angry white men everywhere…The only thing that can be said for certain is that angry white men are now dominant” (Huffington Post, 11/9/16).
Or as former U.S. president Bill Clinton explained, “Trump doesn’t know much. One thing he knows is how to get angry, white men to vote for him” (Politico, 12/19/16).
While Trump’s brand of open racism and sexism represent a lethal danger to the international working class, white workers are not to “blame” for Trump’s election. Capitalism created Trump,  or specifically, laid the groundwork for the rise of open racism and sexism he could exploit. Trump is merely the latest in line to serve U.S. imperialism, whose history of creating racism and racist divisions within the working class dates back to the founding of the country.
Racism: Capitalism’s Greatest Weapon and Weakness

“Before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the [U.S.] Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures…They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy -- the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen.”
 —“The Road Not Taken” Lerone Bennett

Lubbers, clay-eaters, rubbish—these were the words and raw imagery used to describe the masses of workers, many of them children, arriving from Europe to the British colonies in North America in the 15-1600s. The promotion of America as a land of opportunity was in stark contrast to its reality as a sink hole of oppression for Europe’s displaced labor force, and growing African slave population. However, as Bennett notes above, the “color line” between white and Black took time to create.   
The development of capitalism in the U.S. coincided with genocide against the largely defiant indigenous population and laws defining color line among its labor force throughout the 1600s. This hastened after a major rebellion by a wealthy English planter in 1676. Known as Bacon’s Rebellion, over one thousand enslaved Black and indentured white labor (bound by bond contracts to the same bosses) burned Britain’s colonial capital, Jamestown, Virginia, to the ground. The multiracial rebellion took years to defeat, and terrified the local colonial bosses. This led to the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, the first laws enforcing a legal divide between slaves and indentured servants (see page 4).
Black chattel slavery exploited by the U.S. capitalists enabled the country, over time, to emerge as an industrial power. In the meantime, the working class showed no signs of stopping resistance. What follows are some examples from U.S. history, by no means complete, of how the history of white workers is inseparable from every other sector of the working class.
Racism Hurts All Workers
Immigration to the U.S. continued unabated throughout the 1800s. The southern slave states grew in wealth and power, as did northern industry. The first labor unions, formed in the northeast in the 1790s, struggled to negotiate with employers while in nearby Maryland, Black slaves were driven to exhaustion for the same work with no pay.
With the victory of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, nightmares of Bacon’s Rebellion haunted the rulers of the new United States. Then-president Thomas Jefferson, famed author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, shared the slaveholders’ fears that rebellion could spread via trade with Haiti. As Jefferson blockaded weapons shipments to Haiti, he cracked down on white workers. For the first time, in 1805, unions organized by shoemakers in Philadelphia were indicted as foreign conspiracies against the government, a tactic the bosses learned to love (Labor’s Untold Story, Richard O. Boyer).
By 1846, the New England Workingmen’s Association, organized by women and men mill workers of European descent, resolved: “American slavery must be uprooted before the elevation sought by the laboring classes can be affected” (Boyer). Others sought more radical means, while, in the meantime, hundreds of recorded slave rebellions, large and small, rocked the U.S.
Workers Enlist in Civil War
In 1859, a white abolitionist, John Brown, led a multiracial band of 22 men in an attempt to capture a federal arsenal in Virginia, at Harper’s Ferry. Their failure to end slavery by arming freed slaves and waging guerrilla warfare, however, made John Brown’s raid a rallying cry. During the U.S. Civil War that followed, between 500-750,000 northern industrial workers enlisted in the army. The first company of soldiers mobilized to defend Washington, DC, was an entire union local of textile workers from Massachusetts.
Trade unions enlisted unanimously in this way, many ceasing to exist for the duration of the war. Companies of the workers of the Illinois Miners’ Union and Brooklyn Painters’ Union resolved to smash “the slaveholders’ conspiracy” (Boyer). Masses of Irish, German, Polish and Italian veterans of revolutions in Europe, Jewish workers, English miners and deported trade unionists, and more than 40,000 Canadians, were the among the first regiments to enter the war and scored important victories.
By no means were all white workers committed antiracists. In 1863, the same week the first all-Black regiment of the war, the 54th, saw action alongside white regiments, lynchings and race rioting of the New York Draft Riots occurred. These riots indicate the extent to the danger that all workers, if not organized around class politics and fighting back, can be won to racism.

Hidden History of Multiracial Fightback
There are many more examples of how as the U.S. bosses turned the screws of their terror, intensified segregation and enforcement of race-based laws, Black and white workers resisted., From the multiracial New Orleans General Strike of 1892, to the several decades of armed struggle between workers and the bosses’ militias and police from the 1880s to the 1920s from Virginia to Colorado, white workers have shared writing our class’ history, in blood, alongside Black and immigrant workers.
One especially notable multiracial armed uprising of coal miners in 1921, West Virginia, known as the Battle of Blair Mountain (see box for one of its lasting consequences).  It was defeated in what became the U.S. Army’s largest engagement within U.S. borders since the Civil War. During the battle, striking white workers, partly inspired by the Soviet Union, joined with Black and immigrant workers sent to break the strike. They effectively created created a workers’ army 13,000 strong (immortalized in the 1987 pro-worker film Matewan).
The U.S. bosses, determined to crush armed insurrection, deployed planes armed with gas and bombs left over from World War I, some of which were captured by the workers’ army.
Red-Led Workers Fight Like Hell
The rise of the communist movement provided our class with a template for a new world—and nearly one century ago, a revolution in the Russian Empire led by the Bolsheviks (communists) who comprised many languages and ethnic groups seized power over one-sixth of the earth’s surface.
By the 1930s in the U.S., the communist-led mass multiracial organizing of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was openly joining Black and white workers, north and south, side by side into struggle.
Seizing power for communism will mean combating the bosses’ ideas and ultimately the bosses’ state. There is a growing base of racism in the U.S., but this truth is buried under capitalist anti-working class propaganda that paints all white workers with the same brush. Dismissing all white workers as racists deprives all workers of unity with, and learning from, their class sisters and brothers worldwide.
This is nothing new. Capitalists have always blamed the working class for the problems created by capitalism. Black workers, especially Black women, have particularly been singled out worldwide for capitalism’s worst racist and sexist devastation.
The ruling class of the U.S. is the world’s top global imperialist power. Its trillions of dollars worth of investments straddle the globe from the Middle East, to sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America.
PLP carries on this legacy of multiracial unity. With the sharpening attacks on the international working class and growing threat of all out inter-imperialist wars looming, our understanding of history is more important than ever as workers from every part of the working class seek out answers that only a new international communist movement can provide.