Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism by Frank Chapman

Author:Frank Chapman [Chapman, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Published: 2021-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 10 – Grace Campbell

“The Bolsheviks,” writes Harry Haywood, “had destroyed the czarist rule, established the first workers’ state, and breached the world system of capitalism over a territory comprising more than one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Most impressive as far as Blacks were concerned was that the revolution had laid the basis for solving the national and racial questions on the basis of complete freedom for the numerous nations, colonial peoples, and minorities formerly oppressed by the czarist empire.”[110]

Lenin’s views on the National Question took into consideration how the rise of modern imperialism polarized the world into oppressed and oppressor nations. Marx said white workers could not be free while Black workers existed as chattel slaves. Only Black and white workers united can defeat the capitalist bosses. Lenin, updating Marx in the age of imperialism, said the white workers of Europe cannot be free while the great mass of humanity (being people of color) is enslaved and super-exploited in the colonies and oppressed nations by the imperialists.

At the Seventh International Socialist Congress of the Second International held in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1907, Lenin, leading the Bolshevik faction, called for an alliance between workers and peasants—an alliance between the proletariat of the advanced industrialized countries of the West and the predominantly peasant-based national revolutionary movements of the East. Lenin saw this alliance as the pathway to bringing about a socialist revolution and defeating imperialism. To be successful the revolutionary socialist movement must be consciously linked to the revolutionary national democratic and anti-colonial movements. In 1917 the Bolsheviks turned this proposition on the National Question into policies of the new revolutionary government. But not without considerable difficulties.

With regard to developing a sound policy on the question of Black liberation in the United States, John Reed wrote to Gregori Zinoviev on February 25, 1919 regarding the oppression of Black Americans and the growing militant fightback against lynching and other forms of violent repression. Reed pointed out that Black publications like the Messenger were even preaching revolutionary socialism and that their ideological orientation was “semi-nationalist, semi-communist.” Responding to Lenin’s call for unconditional solidarity with the nationally oppressed peoples of the world, Reed also noted that Black Americans had developed “a strong racial and social movement” with a rapidly growing class consciousness. He then went on to point out that Black people did not seek a separate national existence. Therefore, Black people should be viewed as a vital part of the working class and brought into the labor movement. Communists should argue the futility of bourgeois democracy and the necessity of socialist revolution because this is the only way to get rid of the burden of racial oppression. Although garbed in revolutionary rhetoric, in essence Reed’s position was no different than the color-blind economism of the Second International Social Democrats. Reed was still caught in the snares of a one-dimensional class analysis that at its best could only grant that Black people were racially oppressed. However, the principal ideological flaw is Reed’s denial of the reality of Black people seeing themselves as an oppressed nation within a nation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.