Vol. 79/No. 26      July 27, 2015

BY JACK BARNES  
Trotsky’s starting point in the discussions with Swabeck was the fact that racist oppression and anti-Black prejudice in the United States were the largest obstacle to revolutionary unity of the working class. As a result of such oppression, Trotsky pointed out, few “common actions [take] place involving white and Black workers,” there is no “class fraternization.” “The American worker is indescribably reactionary,” Trotsky said. “This can be seen now in the fact that he has not yet even been won to the idea of social insurance.” And, Trotsky added, “The Negroes have not yet awakened, and they are not yet united with the white workers. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the American workers are chauvinists; in relation to the Negroes they are hangmen as they are also toward the Chinese, etc. It is necessary to make them [white workers] understand that the American state is not their state and that they do not have to be the guardians of this state.”

Those conditions, of course, have changed substantially since 1933 as a result of class battles. They began shifting in the mid-1930s as a product of the labor struggles that built the CIO, growing opposition to fascism and the spreading imperialist world war, and motion toward a labor party independent of the Democrats and Republicans. These changes accelerated in the 1950s with the conquests of the mass civil rights movement and Black liberation struggles, which had their roots in the massive urbanization, migration to the North, and shifts in the composition of the industrial workforce that began prior to World War II. As a consequence of these struggles, and as a component of them, workers in the United States did fight for an important form of social insurance: Social Security. And as a result of the labor battles of the 1930s and civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s, they came to see an expanded version of that Social Security, including Medicare, Medicaid, and related programs, as rights.

With the rise of industrial unions, more and more workers who are Black, white, Asian, and Latino — native-born and immigrant — today do work alongside each other in many workplaces, often doing the same jobs. They do engage in common actions and class fraternization. But the fight to combat multiple forms of segregation and racism, and to overcome national divisions in the working class — through mutual solidarity and uncompromising struggles using any means necessary — remains the single biggest task in forging the proletarian vanguard in this country.

Trotsky, in his exchange of views with Swabeck, went on to point out that during a major rise of revolutionary struggle and proletarian class consciousness in the United States,

But this can only happen, Trotsky emphasized, “provided the communist party carries on an uncompromising, merciless struggle not against the supposed national prepossessions of the Negroes but against the colossal prejudices of the white workers” — prejudices brought into the working class by the bourgeoisie and the imperialist masters, through their petty-bourgeois agents — “and makes no concession to them whatsoever.”

This is what Trotsky had learned from [V.I.] Lenin, the central leader of the Bolshevik Party and Communist International, and from his own long revolutionary experience in the tsarist prison house of nations.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Removal of Confederate battle flag is victory for working class’
‘Now take down the monuments to enforcers of white supremacy!’
Family protest no charges in killing by Georgia cop
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home