[Militant International Review, No 37, Summer 1988, p. 22-27]
Twenty years ago Martin Luther King, America’s foremost black civil rights activist, was assassinated. Two decades later the successes of Jesse Jackson’s campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 1988 US Presidential elections has once again raised the question, which way forward for blacks in the USA?
King’s death on April 4th 1968 led to violent protests in over 100 cities. 146 people were killed in riots which shook the ruling class. In response to the increasingly bitter racial battles which had already crossed the US in the 1960s, the Kerner Commission had been set up by President Johnson to investigate the causes. It concluded that “our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal,” with the likelihood of more and more blacks “extending support to now isolated extremists who advocate civil disruption.” In other words the USA would face revolutionary upheavals unless major reforms were carried out.
Discrimination persists
Twenty years on the social position of blacks has not improved and for many living standards have deteriorated. Between 1970 and 1986 the proportion of blacks living below the poverty line of $10,000 pa earnings rose from 26.8% to 30.2%. Those on less than half the poverty wage rose by 45%! A former member of the Kerner Commission commented in March 1988, “It would have been a nightmare to have thought things wouldn’t change (but) we haven’t made much more than token advances.” Half of black children are born into poverty. Half are still illiterate by the time they are 17 years old. They have a shorter life expectancy than whites. Many live – in the world’s most advanced nation – in houses without electricity, sewerage or water.
Instead of blacks’ position improving vis-a-vis whites, there has been a deterioration. Black unemployment remains twice as high as the national average. In 1950, before Martin Luther King began his civil rights crusade, median black incomes were 60% of those of whites. The figure is 56% today. Black infant mortality, from being 58% higher than white infants in 1968, has risen to being 65% higher.
Blacks continue to face widespread repression and discrimination. Recently an 81 year old black man was shot dead by police in Dallas. The same police shot dead a 76 year old black woman at her back door. A Chicago survey showed blacks in the city were six times more likely to be killed by the police. Police repression is such that blacks, 12% of the population, fill half the country’s prison cells.
Many advances were made in the civil rights battle against apartheid laws in the South. But while South Africa lifted its ban on mixed marriages in 1986, it was not until last year that the Mississippi state finally amended the law banning mixed marriages there. The Bob Jones University in South Carolina recently faced legal action over its continued ban on students’ mixed marriages or even mixed dating! When Reagan’s office, under pressure, conducted an investigation into education in 10 states, six were found to be still not complying with the 1964 Education Segregation Act.
These conditions are the root cause of the almost unanimous black support for Jackson in the primary elections, indicating the deep sense of injustice felt by blacks.
The most advanced and powerful nation capitalism has known cannot alleviate the poverty and oppression of its national and racial minorities. What sharper indication could there be of the rottenness of capitalism? Last year an extra $41 billion was produced by the US economy. If this wealth, the most modern technology and science, and a democratic constitution guaranteeing the rights of all, cannot be harnessed by capitalism to eliminate national and racial oppression, then capitalism can rule out any solution to the national questions facing South Africa, the Middle East or Ireland.
The whole history of black people in the US vividly confirms the position outlined in Leon Trotsky’s theory of the Permanent Revolution. Trotsky in 1906 posed that the epoch of imperialism and world economy meant that those societies which had not carried out the basic tasks to establish a viable capitalist state-land reform, a unified nation state and democratic rule – would find these tasks impossible to successfully complete. Only the working class in our era, through implementing a socialist plan of production internationally, could take society out of this impasse.
For the US capitalist class their revolutionary mission ended with the mopping up of slave-owning society in the aftermath of the Civil War of 1861-1865. By 1871 they had finally established the domination of industrial capital over the key parts of the continent. But capitalism could not even then afford to give equality to blacks. The capitalists feared the unity of the radical propertyless Southern blacks with the Northern industrial workers as potentially revolutionary. These two trends run through the struggles of blacks in the USA: on the one hand, the remorseless attempts by capitalism to drive a racist wedge between workers, on the other, the continued attempts of black and white workers in struggle to achieve unity.
History of struggle
Prior to the Paris Commune, Marx referred to Lincoln’s 1863 Proclamation of Slave Emancipation as the greatest event of the 19th century. Lincoln had been elected as President in 1860. His aim was the long-term elimination of slavery. But the secession and declaration of the Southern states pre-empted him. For the slave-owners, the election of a Republican representing Northern industrial capitalism signalled the end of their domination of the army and judiciary.
Only through clinging onto control of the state machine, had the slave-owners been able to protect their system from the more powerful Northern capitalists. The plantation system’s rapacious exhausting of fertile land dictated it’s expansion northwards. Without control of the state this was impossible. ‘‘War is the continuation of politics by another means”. The Confederacy declared war to crush the Northern capitalists. The North was faced with revolution or counter-revolution. Either Lincoln would have to carry out the revolutionary destruction of the slave system or the North would face counterrevolution.
The organised white workers in the North understood what was at stake. “There is one truth which should be clearly understood by every working man in the Union. The slavery of the black man leads to slavery of the white man … If the doctrine of treason is true, that ‘capital should own labour’, then all labourers, white or black, are and ought to be slaves,” wrote The Iron Platform, a New York labour paper in 1862. Sixty per cent of trade unionists signed up for the Northern armies. Confronted with the rottenness of the federal state machine which was riddled with Southern sympathisers – for the fortunes of commercial capital in shipping and banking were tied to slavery – Lincoln initially hesitated to declare war against slavery itself, trying to avoid a revolutionary war.
Despite its advantages of wealth and population, the North suffered some heavy defeats. But, as Marx had predicted, the defeats finally forced Lincoln to engage in war to the death by declaring for the freedom of the slaves.
The declaration itself hastened the undermining of the Southern economy as hundreds of thousands fled the plantations. From this point on, 200,000 blacks formed the vanguard of the Union drive on the South. The freed slaves marched forward to seize the land from the retreating plantation owners.
While the final capitulation of the South in 1865 was followed by a pause in the revolution, in which reaction attempted to regain a hold and restore the old society, this only triggered a new lurch forward of the revolution – the period known as the ‘Radical Reconstruction’. Jesse Jackson and a section of black Democrats have called on the party for a ‘Second Reconstruction” programme. This indicates the confusion in their outlook and their mistaken illusions in big business.
‘Reconstruction’
Reconstruction was a continuation of the revolutionary civil war. It was a social revolution. Arms in hand black ex-slaves and poor whites fought to win the right to vote, education and land, summed up in the slogan, “40 acres and a mule’. The Northern capitalists backed the movement in so much as it erased completely any threat of restoration and consolidated the domination of Northern capita!. But the threat to capitalism was also apparent. For example. the blacks of South Carolina won a majority in the convention to draw up the new state constitution. Illiterate and mostly too poor to pay taxes, they established a thoroughly democratic constitution including the election of all state officials, rights for women, the breaking up of the large estates and free education for all children. In addition the movement of Southern blacks was paralleled by the industrial working class of the North. Consequently, once established in the South, the capitalists unleashed the Ku Klux Klan to wage a white terror against poor blacks and whites alike. Their aim was to divide and rule to prevent ‘an American Commune’.
Reconstruction represented a revolutionary democratic struggle in which the interests of industrial capital and those of the black slaves temporarily coincided. Today there is no basis for a coincidence of interests of the big business controlled Democratic Party and American blacks who are 90% working class. No matter how much capitalism may regret rearing the racial beast in its basement, emancipation today, rather than consolidating US capitalism, would challenge its very basis.
All the civil rights legislation has made but a dent in blacks oppression. Trotsky explained in The History of the Russian Revolution that the effect of the elimination of ‘de jure’ legal discrimination against the Jews – who in Russia faced 650 laws limiting their rights – only served to expose more sharply the ‘de facto’ reality of their oppression. In the US, blacks, confined to the ghettos with half the incomes and a third of the wealth of whites, can only achieve emancipation through massive wage increases, benefit increases, the replacement of six million slum dwellings and free health care – which would come to a bill equalling 10% of the national income! Marxists fight for such a programme of reforms. But while the ex-slaves’ struggle for the land of the plantocracy did not fundamentally challenge the profit system, a ‘second reconstruction’, because it locks blacks in a struggle with the capitalists for their share of production, can only be carried out by the working class in the revolutionary struggle to establish a socialist United States of America.
The Democrats committed to reforms would play the same treacherous role as the Republicans of the 1870s. Once the capitalist-led Republicans were consolidated these ‘progressives’ smashed every democratic right the blacks had won and propagated racialism at new unprecedented levels. By the end of the century most Southern blacks were unable to vote, to organise or to speak out. Every day a black would be strung up as the terror of the lynch law ran through the South. By 1890 only 20% of Mississippi blacks were voting. Electoral gerrymandering limited black representation even further.
Separatism
Only the organised movements of the working class and the small farmers cut across the racial divide. Big business tried to rule the workers via racial divisions. These they fostered especially in the workers organisations. The social divisions of segregation were perpetuated in the workplaces and even in the trade unions. Racism, as with other backward prejudices, was nurtured by the bosses. They deliberately used unemployed blacks as strikebreakers and sent provocateurs into unions to create racial splits. Today’s united non-racial trade union organisations in the USA represent a colossal gain for the working class after a century of struggle. They are a product of the continual pressure of black trade unionists in particular for united organisations. Unity as opposed to separatism has been the central feature of blacks’ struggles. Blacks only set up separate unions when firmly blocked by those who insisted on whites only trade unions. The Colored Labor Union, for example, was only established in the 1860s after many rebuffs from the National Labor Union.
The American working class has tremendous qualities of courage, audacity, innovation and determination, with powerful tradition of struggle from the Civil War through the Wobblies to the CIO. Only through rapid expansion abroad facilitating concessions at home, has US capitalism been able to pacify its workers. In particular the employers granted concessions to the middle classes and the skilled workers, the labour aristocracy. Leaning on the best-organised, better paid workers capitalism was able to maintain the subjugation of the great majority of the rest of the working class. To this labour aristocracy it gave the illusion of a stake in the development of capitalism and invited the workers and their families to ape bourgeois ways and prejudices. This particularly applied in relation to racialism. Long periods of relative class stability left the skilled unions’ leadership rotten with prejudice. Through the first half of this century, the leadership of the American Federation of Labour (AFL), the skilled workers’ unions, showed virulent racial prejudice. Gompers, the AFL leader, argued against a campaign to restore black voting rights on the grounds that blacks were too stupid to understand the US constitution. The AFL leaders accommodation to big business barred the way to class unity. Only in these conditions did black nationalism or black separatism develop.
In 1920 only 60,000 of 1.3 million black workers were in trade unions. Barred by the union leaders, blacks made repeated calls to open up the unions but eventually they had no alternative but to develop their own unions such as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters which once set up in 1925 quickly grew to 50,000 strong. The AFL remained passive while blacks, drawn to the cities after America’s entry into the First World War, found themselves living in terrible conditions, often unemployed and facing race riots and pogroms. The disillusion with the promised land of the North drew millions of Northern blacks to the ideas of Marcus Garvey and the United N***o Improvement Association (UNIA). From 1918 to 1920 the UNIA recruited 3 million members in 900 branches. Garvey raised the question of black unity and self-determination and the idea of blacks going ‘Back to Africa’. Under similar conditions, Malcolm X’s Black Muslims grew to 2 million members in the early 1960s, raising again the question of black identity and nationalism. Nor was it coincidental that in the 1980s at the height of the Reagan reaction, the right-wing black nationalist, Louis Farrakhan, drew tens of thousands to his rallies with the call for ‘Black Self-help’ and his ‘Blacks – the chosen people’ notion.
Nationalism is a blind alley for the working class. It obscures the real problem facing society – the need for a democratically run socialist plan of production – and at the same time provides a cover for reactionaries such as Farrakhan who praises Hitler, the butcher of the German workers’ movement.
It is the duty of every socialist to support the right of all peoples to live without oppression, whether on the grounds of sex, colour, nationality or religion, Lenin thrashed out and clarified the issue of the national question with Rosa Luxemburg prior to the 1917 revolution.
She argued that the international nature of capitalism meant a struggle for nationhood would not relieve the oppressed of the yoke of their own capitalists and therefore would divert from the struggle against imperialism, and in particular the tsar’s empire.
Refusal to support the right of self-determination if the oppressed nation demanded it would only place the Marxists in apparent sympathy with tsarist rule. Lenin consistently argued for the unity of nations, and for the superiority of a united proletariat against the empire, but he recognised that if the Bolsheviks wished to lead the workers and peasants in struggle, then the Bolsheviks would have to champion all the basic democratic demands of the masses, including an end to national oppression. At the same time he was for an iron unity of the working class movement. He totally opposed division of the movement on the grounds of nationality, religion or colour. Only in this way could the bourgeois nationalist poison be combatted and the maximum trust be created in the workers organisations. The victory of the Russian revolution which united 200 nationalities confirmed the correctness of Lenin’s approach.
Martin Luther King
The struggle against racial and national oppression is an inevitable stage that a nationally oppressed working class will pass through on the road to revolutionary struggle. Black movements in the US have always been a harbinger of the movement of the proletariat as a whole in which national and racial demands have merged with class demands. Thus Garvey’s movement heralded the great battles of the trade unions in the 1930s and the Civil Rights movement was followed by the huge struggles of the 1970s. These movements of the class as a whole served to undermine one of the causes of black separatism, the colour bar in the trade unions. The upturn which followed the Great Depression of 1929-33 draw millions of unskilled workers back into industry ready to fight to win concessions off the employers while industry was relatively ‘booming’. But the corrupt AFL leaders were as unwilling to organise this layer as they were the black workers. The leaders of the unskilled workers formed the Committee of Industrial Organisations (CIO) and split from the AFL, opening their doors to blacks who were a key part of the unskilled workforce. In 1934 there were still just 100,000 blacks in the trade unions, the same as 40 years previously. By 1946 there were 2 million. The militant struggles led by the CIO began to sear racism out of the unions. The post war boom and the relative passivity of the trade union movement could not restore the racial divisions in the trade unions.
Every major period of black struggle in the US has begun against racial oppression but has been forced to draw the conclusion of unity against class oppression. The anti-slavery movement, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, George Jackson all travelled down the road of nationalism to conclude the need for revolution and class unity. Jesse Jackson’s platform of ‘a little class warfare’ marks a decisive step forward. It owes its origin to the experience of the civil rights movement. One notable feature of Jackson’s campaign is the inspiration US blacks have drawn from the struggle in South Africa. Similarly the civil rights movement drew its sense of mission from the colonial revolution. The victory of national and social revolts in Africa and Asia brought black people to power forcing US and British imperialism to recognise the rights of nationhood for blacks. American blacks saw impoverished African blacks fighting and winning a dignity denied to them by segregation, discrimination and the lynch law.
Unfortunately Martin Luther King took part of his inspiration from the pacifist Gandhi to whom he mistakenly credited the liberation of India from the British. But in 13 years, from his pacifism at Montgomery in 1955, he was talking of revolution. In 1967 King commented: ‘For the last 12 years we have been in a reform movement … But after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill (1965) we moved into a new era which must be an era of revolution.” ‘‘What good,” he asked, ‘does it do a man to have integrated lunch counters if he can’t buy a hamburger?” Just after King’s death, his wife Coretta outlined the path she and King had trodden: “12 years ago in Montgomery, Alabama, we started out with a bus boycott, trying to get the right to sit down on the bus in any seat that was available. We moved through that period on to the period of desegregating public accommodation and on to voting rights so that we can have political power. Now we are at the point where we must have economic power … We are concerned about not only the N***o poor but the poor all over America and all over the world … The key to battling poverty,” had become “winning jobs for workers with decent pay through unionism.”
This vague confused groping for socialism was too much for the ruling class. King started to support marches of striking workers and was gunned down as he prepared to march with the refuse workers of Memphis. It was precisely the fear of a black explosion spilling over to the white working class and especially the disaffected youth that persuaded big business to make concessions in the field of voting rights. desegregation etc.
NALC
Faced with beatings, imprisonment and assassination, King’s pacifism had been rejected by many blacks. Foremost of these groups were the 1,000 strong Black Panther Party. The Panthers organised around the issue of armed self-defence and, while a black nationalist grouping, embraced the ideas of socialist revolution. The Panthers were met by vicious police repression and many were killed. The ruling class feared that the Panthers would find a road to the black workers. But tragically, with the international weakness of the forces of genuine Marxism at that time, and influenced by the writings of Mao and Castro, the Panthers did not see the processes taking place in the working class and confined themselves to organising the lumpen youth.
Twenty five per cent of the black population took part in the civil rights marches. What is not widely known is that many of these were organised by black trade unionists at 2 million strong the most cohesive force in the black population. Job discrimination, as the central issue of civil rights, gave the unions a crucial role. Attempts by black irade unionists to get the right wing leaders of the AFL-CIO to take up the issues were rebuffed. The collaboration of the AFL-CIO executive with big business rendered them a prop to the continuation of widespread racial discrimination. Only in these conditions did Philip Randolph, the black leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1959 set up the N***o American Labour Council. The NALC within a year grew to 10,000 trade union activists. It opposed black nationalism and sought unity with white workers.
In 1963 it was the NALC which called the 250,000 strong march on Washington in which 40,000 trade unionists took part. It was the biggest union march in US history. The United Auto Workers leaders came under such pressure from black stewards that they too were forced to participate in the movement. In 1964. when the NALC called for a one-day general strike if the Civil Rights Bill was not enacted by August 28th, the Act was passed with unprecedented haste. But Randolph hesitated – even looking to President Kennedy for salvation. In the absence of a clear leadership black workers, trapped in the ghettoes, went down the blind alley of rioting. One study showed that 70% of the rioters were workers. Only through repression and concessions did the ruling class buy a temporary peace in the 1960s.
Jesse Jackson’s successes are a product of the bitter struggles of the 1960s. That is why the movement of blacks in the 1980s expresses itself in a new way, with several new features in today’s developments. Principal in these are the growth of the black middle class and developments among the white working class.
The 1968 report of the Kerner Commission into the black movement concluded that it was unrealistic to abolish the ghettos, in other words, poverty. They recommended instead a strategy to take ‘substantial numbers of N***oes into the society outside the ghetto,” gathering together a group of blacks with a stake in the system to police the ghettos. Only in this policy has capitalism had a certain success. The number of black businesses rose 50% in the 6 years after 1970. Between 1970 and 1986 the proportion of blacks earning over $35,000 pa, in 1986 prices, rose from 15.7% to 21.2%.
Reagan
Blacks have especially been drawn into politics to take the steam off the protests against urban misery. Today there are twenty-one members of the House of Representatives, 300 mayors and in all 5,500 black elected officials-compared to 5 members of the House of Representatives and 1,000 officials 20 years ago. There are black Mayors in most of the major cities Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, even Los Angeles with a relatively small black minority. But black elected officials still only account for 1% of the total. And while black mayors control a certain largesse, for example 30,000 city jobs in Chicago, little else has changed. A new movement of blacks will now be confronted with the fact that it is not enough to have a black politician to exploit the system. What is required is politicians to replace the system. In future blacks will have to fight the pro-big business policies of the black Democrats. The limited experience of ‘black power’ will lead to the question of workers’ power.
Of decisive consequence for the future of the black workers has been the last 20 years experience of the white working class. For the white workers and youth ‘the American dream’ collapsed in Vietnam. The horrors of that war against a tiny peasant nation have to this day had a crippling effect on the ability of US imperialism to wage colonial wars. 58,000 Americans were killed and hundreds of thousands scarred with the lessons of capitalist brutality. Defeat in Vietnam was quickly followed by further defeats in South East Asia and and Africa. The 1975 recession finally put an end to the dreams of unending improvements in the US economy. The ruling class was shaken. The US workers began to unleash some of the power accumulated in the boom. Waves of strikes of miners, car-workers, lorry-drivers, steelworkers etc. made the US working class one of the most combative in the advanced capitalist world. In the 1970’s, the US strike rate was 50% higher than that of Britain. By 1975 union membership had reached an all-time high of 22 million.
All sections were drawn in: actors, musicians, writers, baseball players, even the police. Reflecting this movement, the leader of the UAW, Doug Fraser in 1978, called for an independent party of labour, and for a remake of the ‘Coalition of Selma’. Union activists began to squeeze out the old reactionaries and workers unity was forged in struggle.
Reagan was elected President in 1980 with the backing of big business to restore the military position of the US abroad and to shift the balance back in favour of the employers at home. Aided by recession, Reagan unleashed reaction against the trade unions. His first act was to smash PATCO. the air traffic controllers union. The drive against trade unionism resulted in long bitter struggles even in the upswing that followed the 1980-81 recession. After the initial gains of the early 1970’s, the years 1977 to 1988 have seen the average pre-tax real earnings of 80% of Americans fall. The top 1% have had a 50% increase, while the share of the bottom 40% has fallen by 15%. This compares to Britain, where the power of the labour movement even in Thatcher’s era has forced a 20% increase in earnings of skilled workers in the last 7 years. US imperialism, threatened by its capitalist rivals and the demands placed on it of policing the world, has been forced to lean heavily on increasing the exploitation of its own workers. Under similar conditions. the Labour Party was created in Britain.
The measure of the 65 month long Reagan ‘boom’ is that 47% of those polled recently by the Wall Street Journal said they would be more likely to vote for a Presidential candidate who blames big business for the country’s economic problems. Unemployment may have been reduced to 5.6% of the workforce but this has been achieved by driving workers into low paid jobs. Now economists, fearful of a recession. are equally terrified of any further fall in unemployment, in case it starts a new round of struggles for concessions by organised labour – which could even make pale the struggles of 1933 to 1938. Support for Jackson by up to 40% of white workers voting in the Democrat primaries is for his support of workers in struggle. It is a fanfare for the turn towards the creation of an independent party of labour which the workers will be ready to make in the next few years.
For blacks the Reagan administration has just served to clarify that the battles of the 1960s are not over. Reagan’s cabinet has attempted to roll back the social concessions of the previous decade. Reagan has tried to place a host of reactionaries in the Supreme Court. While he failed with the former segregationist Robert Bork, he succeeded in placing Justice William Rehnquist, who actively harassed black voters in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Chief Justice of the Court. The Civil Rights Commission set up by Eisenhower 30 years ago and the vehicle for many equal rights laws has been so turned round in its policies that most blacks now see it as hostile to their interests or, to quote Jesse Jackson, as the ‘Civil Wrongs Commission’. The administration has given the green light to racism.
Jackson’s campaign
Overt racist acts are now on the increase. In Chicago, the number of racial incidents has increased every year since 1983. National complaints of housing discrimination have risen 60% since 1980. And in Washington. a majority black city, over 50% of blacks can expect to face discrimination when trying to rent a flat. Racial disputes have become common even in the Ivy League Colleges such as Harvard. In 1986 only 18 of the 50 states recognised the annual Martin Luther King day national holiday and 80% of the private sector contemptuously ignored it!
Jesse Jackson’s vote represents the reaction to this onslaught. However. the support is mainly due to the programme he advances being more radical than the Democrats have seen for 60 years. It is much more radical than the platform of Edward Kennedy. the ‘left’ Democrat who Jackson opposed to support Carter in 1980. Jackson has campaigned for a 40% increase in the national minimum wage, a national health care system. doubling education expenditure, jobs and public works.
To pay for these reforms, he proposes that taxes for the rich be increased by 15%, increased corporation tax, and massive defence cuts including an end to Trident, MX, Cruise and Minutemen missiles. He condemns the invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Libya. His speeches are well to the left of Kinnock and the British Communist Party. He talks of the Democrats needing “a little class warfare and rallies the workers saying “two decades ago the people were divided on racial battle grounds, now they are divided on economic battlegrounds.”’ His slogans ring of class anger: ‘From the Outhouse to the Whitehouse’, ‘Peace, Jobs and Justice’. In Detroit 10,000 mainly white construction workers stood in the cold to hear him. Even in white rural areas he has got packed audiences in his campaign against “the barracudas”’.
The tactics of the Democratic leaders have backfired. Jackson was tolerated in the 1984 election campaign on the basis that he would get the black vote registered for the presidential campaign. But to get the black vote out Jackson had to put forward a radical programme in the primaries which in turn received an enthusiastic response. Black registration rose to 71%, compared to 77% of eligible whites. But the presidential campaign of 1984 was a disaster for the Democrats. Mondale put forward a programme of tax increases and little else. The Democratic leaders kept blacks off the platform, fearing them as a liability. Mondale got his just reward when the number of Southern blacks voting fell from 48% in 1980 to 41%. In UAW car-workers’ households, 52% voted for Reagan. For the first time in 60 years more skilled workers voted for the Republicans than the Democrats.
After the 1984 election, a coterie of rich Democrats around Richard Gephardt tried to pull the Democrats away from concentrating on the votes of workers and blacks. But noticeably in the 1988 campaign both Gephardt and Dukakis had to give themselves a thin veneer of radicalism to avoid losing support to Jackson. Jackson, on the other hand, successfully widened his audience from 1984, finding that white workers responded equally to his demands.
The Economist noted that Jackson was the only candidate able to make a decent speech. But this is a matter of content not style. In reality the other candidates had nothing to offer but Reaganism – the programme of big business. Their speeches were mainly designed to cover up that fact. There was no enthusiasm for any other candidate. Just the faint hint of Jackson in the White House scared The Economist: “The worry for the rest of the world is that by accident of economic recession or otherwise, the Republicans will stumble and a Democrat running on foolish policies (vis Jackson – PF) might gain the White House,” 2nd April 1988.
A black as US President would represent a powerful symbol of success to blacks. One of Jackson’s quips when posed with the ‘impossibility’ of getting a black into the White House was to reply, “We’re already there, but as cooks and servants. Aren’t we qualified to sleep in the beds we make up?” The world over it would be seen as a blow against racism and imperialism. But a black radical in the White House would terrify the ruling families even further. While Jackson has said that he is “trying to restore faith in capitalism’’, the costs are too high for the ruling class. His very election would be a sign, bringing black and white workers to their feet. All the embitterment of a century would spill out in a titanic wave of struggle and force the government at least temporarily to concede massive reforms. Imperialism would be shaken both domestically and internationally on a greater scale than in the aftermath of Vietnam.
But Jackson’s programme is totally inadequate to resolve the crisis facing US capitalism which is an international crisis. Reforms would turn to counter-reforms or Jackson would be removed from office to prepare a new period of reaction. The US ruling class would only tolerate even this scenario if they felt their whole system threatened. At present they would strive might and main to prevent a Jackson victory. If Jackson won the presidential nomination, which is extremely unlikely, the big business controllers of the Democratic Party would sabotage his campaign against the Republicans. While not abandoning the Democrats, temporarily they would withdraw their funds and backing, preferring to see a Bush victory.
While Jackson has said that he is “trying to restore faith in capitalism’’, the costs are too high for the ruling class. His very election would bring black and white workers to their feet.
The only vehicle for Jackson’s radicalism is a workers’ party based on the organised labour movement. Its all right to push ‘a little class warfare’ to rally support for the Democrats, providing that no one takes it too seriously. The last thing the rich Democrats want is to rally class warfare against themselves!
Some unions such as the AFSCME, the civil servants union, are already committed to support for an independent party of labour. They should call on the AFL-CIO to expose the Democrats’ long history of racism, anti-working class measures and warmongering, and the crisis big business has prepared for the US economy. They should point out the $2 trillion debts built up by the rich in government over the last 8 years and the waste of defence expenditure. They should point the AFL-CIO to the massive increase in support for the New Democratic Party, the labour party of Canada, and the need to break from the Democrats, and build a genuinely radical party based on organised labour. This would get an enormous response. The Democrats get 25% of their support from blacks, amounting to 90% of the black vote. But 60% of blacks do not even bother to vote given the lack of any real alternative. In the 1984 election only half the whole electorate voted and amongst the 12 million newly registered mainly young voters two thirds stayed at home. The prostitution of the black and white workers’ vote to big business could easily be brought to an end. In 1984 black Democrats at the Chicago Democratic Convention raised that Jackson should stand as an independent for senator in South Carolina. In 1988 the strains in the Democrats will be even greater. The only brake now on the creation of a mass labour party is the leadership of the trade unions. But they will not be able to resist the explosions of the next few years which will push many unions to the left and force on them the role of midwife to the labour party.
Once a labour party is created it will quickly move towards socialist ideas. It will not take decades to move to Marxism. It would rapidly conquer the cities of the US. An American mass party of labour would be a powerful voice not only for blacks but for all those oppressed by imperialism. America’s mighty working class, once armed with the goal of the socialist transformation of society, would eliminate racism from the workers movement and ensure that the future Martin Luther Kings, George Jacksons and Malcolm Xs will find a full role in leading a united workers struggle.
The creation of a democratic workers socialist state in North America would mean the end of capitalism internationally. It would bring the prospect of harnessing the power and technology of the most advanced nation to solving international poverty and disease; the creation of wealth in abundance through a plan of production; the elimination through bountiful education of all prejudice and mysticism and hence the unity of all the peoples of the world in a World Federation of Socialist Republics.
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