Black Workers’ Leadership, STILL Key to Communist Revolution

In 2022, as was the case over 500 hundreds years ago, Black workers remain the most brutally attacked section of our class. Now as then, they must help take the lead in building an international communist movement. U.S. history is a chronicle of genocide, slavery, segregation, and enduring racist oppression. Black workers have less invested in the capitalist status quo. Since racism infects all relations within the profit system, they stand to hold fewer illusions about “justice” or “democracy” under the bosses’ dictatorship. 

Though not immune to the false hope of reformism, Black workers are better equipped to understand its limits. As the young rebels in Ferguson declared: “It’s the whole damn system!” And so: Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their basis for class consciousness—for class solidarity with all workers and class hatred of all capitalist rulers. 

Our Party has developed the understanding that racism and capitalism are bound together; one cannot exist without the other. Only an international communist revolution can liberate the world’s working class from the ravages of racist imperialism. Only a united, multiracial working class can win the fight for communism. Black workers are central to that struggle. 

Workers in general are degraded by capitalism; as a class, we have nothing to lose but our chains. 

Latin, Muslim, Asian, and women workers all suffer under special oppression by the U.S. ruling class. From the U.S. and Mexico to Europe and the Middle East, immigrant workers—most of them dark-skinned—are terrorized and scapegoated at the fault lines of rising fascism. 

Anti-Black racism is a global epidemic. Black workers have an especially urgent case to revolt and smash the bosses’ state. Throughout U.S. history, from the time they were brought from Africa by force as a pool of no-wage labor, they have served at the forefront of every working-class movement: the war against slavery, the struggle for civil rights, the mass strikes against the industrial bosses, the fights for jobs and housing and decent schools. Wherever workers have confronted the profit system and its parasites, Black workers have stood at the front lines. 

 Black Workers Have Always Fought Back

Workers everywhere have always fought back against the bosses, with Black workers frequently leading the way. This tradition dates to the time of enslaved workers running away, many of whom fled to the mountains. They created self-sufficient communities and defended themselves with armed violence, as necessary. 

• In 1739, the Stono Rebellion involved as many as 60 slaves in the British colony of South Carolina. The The colony’s legislature was so terrified that it placed a costly 10-year moratorium on the import of Black slaves from Africa. The bosses’ property and lives were at risk. 

• In the 1790s, the Haitian Revolution defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s army and repelled British and Spanish invaders, abolishing slavery in the richest colony in the Caribbean. These Black liberators spread fear among enslavers throughout the Western Hemisphere. They inspired hundreds of rebellions throughout the Americas, all of them violent.

•  In 1831, Nat Turner led more than 60 slaves and Black freedmen in blazing a bloody trail through Virginia. The rebels did away with Turner’s master and the master’s family, then terrorized the owners of 15 other plantations. Turner inspired John Brown, who led a multiracial group in an 1859 attack on a federal arsenal in West Virginia., The raid on Harpers Ferry sparked the American Civil War to end chattel slavery. 

• Over the two centuries preceding the Civil War, historians have documented more than 250 uprisings involving 10 slaves or more on U.S. territory alone.

• In the Caribbean, rebellions like the First Maroon War in Jamaica (1728-1741) grew into all-out military combat. After the Maroons repeatedly defeated British forces, the imperialists were forced to sign a peace treaty.

• In 1760, an even larger rebellion in Jamaica called Tacky’s War became “a massive shock to the imperial system.” Black workers from the North and newly freed slaves from the South played a vital role in the U.S. Civil War (see “Marx and Du Bois,” p. 18). In the aftermath, the victorious Union capitalists—Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie—relied on racism to keep workers divided.

•  In the North, mainly white and immigrant workers waged fierce battles against steel, railroad, and coal industrialists. In the South, mainly Black workers—often led by women like Ida B. Wells, a former slave—fought against lynching and other racist abuses throughout the Jim Crow era. 

• Between 1898 and 1902, rising U.S. imperialism defeated Spain and then attacked Filipino independence fighters in the Philippine-American War. The Filipino warriors, many of whom identified as Black, made anti-racist, class-conscious appeals to Black U. S. soldiers. As one wrote, “Why don’t you fight those people in America who burn Negroes, that make a beast of you, that took a mother’s child and sold it? In a foreshadowing of the Vietnam War, many Black U.S. soldiers deserted.

Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their role in the U.S. military, where they represent 17 percent of active-duty enlisted men and 30 percent of active-duty enlisted women. They will play a major part in the next global war—and in turning an imperialist war for profit into a class war for communist revolution. Black workers are a key revolutionary force because of their disproportionate numbers in basic U.S. industry and transportation. Within major U.S. cities and metropolitan areas, Black workers are concentrated in mass transit, health care, education, the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx. They retain the potential to shut down major population centers and critical infrastructure.

If our class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership are essential for another fundamental reason. Our class cannot possibly destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership.