The Marxist Theory on the Negro Struggle

What Marxism is, and is not

I will be distracted by my beard from what I'm going to say. I could justify this beard, if this was a class in dialectics, by asking you to determine at what stage you can say that I merely was unshaven and when it became a beard. Or, to come to the subject of tonight a little closer, there's a kind of thinking that could be carried to the absurd: that Marx had a beard and Engels had a beard, Lenin and Trotsky, and therefore you need a beard in order to be a Marxist.

That kind of thinking is not too remote from some of the objections to Marxism that we're going to take up. I want to say a word or two about the teacher and the class. A year or two ago, one comrade remarked to another that I seemed to understand a lot about the Negro struggle, but didn't seem to be so effective in communicating it or explaining it so that others could understand it. My initial reaction was hurt; my feelings are as tender and bruised just as easily as any other man's or woman's.

But after a while I concluded that this is probably true, in my case, and generally true, that important things can be learned only by ourselves. No substitute can do it for us. No teacher is a substitute for reading and thinking. Classes only introduce us to a subject. We have to do the study by ourselves. So with that, I would like to ask, how many people have read the assignment for today? Well, that's pretty good. I would suggest that those who haven't read it yet read it in preparation for our next session.

The title of these classes should really be The Marxist Theory of the Negro Struggle rather than The Theory of the Negro Struggle. In order to approach this theory, I think it's necessary for us to examine what Marxism is, what we mean by Marxism, which is quite different from what most of the opponents of Marxism think it is. In this case, quite different from what Harold Cruse, the author of one of the things assigned for reading, "Marxism and the Negro," thinks it is. He apparently, at one level, considers it to be some kind of a dogma. Marx said so-and-so, that's Marxism, and if you don't say what Marx said, that's not Marxism.

The attitude of the Marxists is entirely different. We don't consider Marx to be infallible, and we certainly don't think that there was anything magic about him that he could a hundred years ago foresee the conditions and problems that exist today and provide the answers for them. He didn't write any book that provides such answers. There is no book like that.

I would like to add to the list of reading that you have another pamphlet which illustrates the approach of genuine Marxists to what Marx said. The pamphlet I refer to is by Trotsky. It's called The Communist Manifesto Today. This is an introduction which Trotsky wrote in 1938 to the first publication of the Communist Manifesto in South Africa in the Afrikaans language. He was asked by his comrades there to write an introduction, and he took as his subject what there is in Marx that is alive and valid today and what has to be changed. This is the real approach to what Marx said that is constructive.

What Trotsky does in this pamphlet is begin by saying, what are the things now, 90 years after the Communist Manifesto was written, that are still valid and applicable to our time? And then he goes ahead and lists them, one, two, three, four, five, down on. He lists about 12 things which he says are just as true in 1938 as they were in 1848. Then he continues as follows:

"Thus we see that the joint and rather brief production of two young authors, Marx was then 29, Engels 27, still continues to give irreplaceable directives upon the most important and burning questions of the struggle for emancipation. What other book could even distantly be compared in this respect with the Communist Manifesto? But this does not imply that after 90 years of unprecedented development of productive forces and vast social struggles, the Manifesto needs neither corrections nor additions. Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with idol worship. Programs and prognoses are tested and corrected in the light of experience, which is the supreme criterion of human reason. The Manifesto, too, requires corrections and additions. However, as is evidenced by historical experience itself, these corrections and additions can be successfully made only by proceeding in accord with the method lodged in the foundation of the Manifesto itself."

"We shall try to indicate this in several most important instances." And then he goes ahead, one, two, three, and so on, making a list of the things on which Marx was wrong, on which he foresaw incorrectly, incompletely, in which he predicted wrongly, in which he omitted important things. Marx, for example, expected the revolution very soon. They thought that the bourgeois revolution in Germany of 1848 was going to be followed very quickly by the proletarian revolution throughout Western Europe. Well, this obviously was an error in prediction, and Trotsky points out what the error was and why it occurred. And so on, he goes through a number of important points on which Marx has to be corrected and added to. For example, point number seven of these. He says:

"While depicting how capitalism always draws into the vortex backward and barbarous countries, the Manifesto contains no reference to the struggle of colonial and semi-colonial countries for independence. To the extent that Marx and Engels considered the social revolution in the leading countries, at least, to be a matter of the next few years, the colonial question was resolved automatically for them, not in consequence of an independent movement of oppressed nationalities, but in consequence of the victory of the proletariat in the metropolitan centers of capitalism. The questions of revolutionary strategy in colonial and semi-colonial countries are therefore not touched on at all by the Manifesto. Yet these conditions demand an independent solution. For example, it is quite evident that while the 'national fatherland' has become the most baneful historical break in advanced capitalist countries, it still remains a relatively progressive factor in backward countries compelled to struggle for an independent existence. 'The Communists,' declares the Manifesto, 'everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.'"

End quote. And Trotsky adds, "The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order, and therefore calls for the complete, unconditional, and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race. The credit for developing revolutionary strategy for oppressed nationalities belongs primarily to Lenin."

Cruse, Lenin and Trotsky, and the development of Marxism

Now, there are those who take the opposite attitude and conclude that those who do not merely repeat what Marx said are not Marxists. This is the view held by Harold Cruse in his articles in The Liberator. He says that people like Trotsky tampered with Marxism so much that they can no longer be considered Marxists, that they deviated from what Marx said so much that they are not Marxists really, and that Marxism has been led into an insoluble crisis as a result of these deviations and this tampering.

What he means is understandable from the only example he gives of such tampering, that is, the making of the Russian Revolution. This, to him, is a real deviation from Marx. Why? Because Marx said that the revolution is going to come first in the advanced capitalist countries, and Russia was not an advanced capitalist country. It was a backward country. Marx said it was going to come in the advanced countries because that's where the industrial system was most developed and where a strong working class was created, and that these workers were the ones who were going to overthrow the capitalist system in those countries. Then it would spread to the rest of the world.

Trotsky and Lenin, who lived later than Marx, came to a different conclusion. They came to the conclusion that this prediction of Marx was not an essential part of Marxism. They considered this a minor part, a prediction merely. They came to the conclusion that it was not only possible but probable that the revolution could take place first in a backward country. Now this did create a crisis among the Marxists of that time. Many of the Marxists, the Mensheviks in Russia, Social Democrats in Western Europe, said that it's ridiculous, it's un-Marxist, it's wrong, it's harmful to make a revolution in a backward country. But at any rate, they said, whether it was all these things, it certainly was not Marxist to do so. And this is one of the charges that was leveled against the Russian Revolution: it was not a Marxist revolution.

Well, of course, we are not in that school. We understand what happened. We understand why Marx made this prediction. And we understand that a great deal happened between the time that Marx was alive and the time that Lenin and Trotsky were considering the question of revolution in backward Russia. One of the things that occurred during this one-third of a century was that capitalism became imperialism, became monopoly capitalism, went from the industrial to the monopoly stage. During this same period, the subjugation and division of Africa and Asia was completed. The advanced capitalist powers fought it out among themselves or agreed among themselves and took over the last independent sections of these colonial areas.

The development of imperialism, the final division of the world among the imperialists, the capture of the colonial areas, created a new situation which was different from the one that existed in Marx's time. It lodged new tensions inside the world capitalist system. It created new problems and it created new opportunities. And Lenin and Trotsky, looking at this new, different world, were able to see among the opportunities that capitalism was weaker in the backward countries than it was in the industrially advanced countries, and that therefore it would be possible to break imperialism, the world system, at its weakest link, which was not in the advanced countries but in the backward ones. In the backward ones, the capitalist class being weaker would have fewer resources at their command to oppose a revolution. So they went ahead on this application of Marxism to the new conditions of their time, and they made the revolution. And of course world history has been different as a result of this new evaluation by Lenin and the others.

The whole world history since that time, in my opinion: Marxism would have died if these additions and corrections and changes had not been introduced into the body of Marxist thought in this century. By this time, Marxism would be defunct. So what Cruse called the tampering and the deviations from Marx are actually the application of Marx's method to different conditions and different situations than the ones that existed in Marx's time. And the crisis that they created is not a crisis of Marxism, but a crisis of capitalism. Ever since that time, capitalism has been bleeding, because the withdrawal of the Russian Empire from the world capitalist market is the beginning of the end of capitalism as a world system. We can see that more clearly today than people could 50 years ago. It's certainly unquestionable today that that's when the process of the end of capitalism began.

Now, I would like to ask that for the next class, you read the pamphlet Dynamics of World Revolution Today. This is the resolution which was adopted by the Fourth International Unification Congress last summer, and it's printed in the fall 1963 ISR and in this pamphlet. The first five pages in particular deal with the very question that I've been talking about. They deal with the question of what was expected, the classical expectation about where the revolution would occur first, and why it didn't occur there, what it meant. Then it takes up another question, which I will report here very briefly or read from, as another example of Marxist analysis which somebody who has the mechanical approach of Cruse to it would not understand.

Following the Russian Revolution, and following the defeats that occurred to working-class revolutions during the next 20 years after the Russian Revolution, the Marxists came to the conclusion that only under a revolutionary Marxist leadership could a revolution take place. Then a number of events occurred which challenged that idea. The Yugoslav revolution did not take place under the leadership of a revolutionary Marxist party but under the leadership of a Stalinist party. Revolutions in other countries, down to and including the revolution which began in Cuba in 1957–59, were not begun and not carried to military victory under a revolutionary Marxist leadership. This resolution, in its first five pages, attempts to understand and explain what had happened here, and it points out that we can understand it and explain it and benefit from it if we understand the difference between the strength of capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries and its strength in the backward countries. In the backward countries the capitalist class is unable to achieve any kind of stability. Reading now from the resolution:

"In the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the very weakness of capitalism, the whole peculiar socioeconomic structure produced by imperialism, the permanent misery of the big majority of the population in the absence of a radical agrarian revolution, the stagnation and even reduction of living standards, while industrialization nevertheless proceeds relatively rapidly, create conditions in which the failure of one revolutionary wave does not lead automatically to relative or even temporary social or economic stability. A seemingly inexhaustible succession of mass struggles continues, such as Bolivia has experienced for ten years. The weakness of the enemy offers the revolution fuller means of recovery from temporary defeat than is the case in imperialist countries. To sum up, the victories and defeats since 1917 express the relationship of forces between the old ruling class and the toiling masses on a world scale. The fact that the revolution won first in backward countries and not in the advanced is not proof that the workers in the advanced countries have shown insufficient revolutionary combativity. It is evidence of the fact that the opposition which they have to overcome in these advanced capitalist countries is immeasurably stronger than in the colonial and semi-colonial world. The weakness of the enemy in the backward countries has opened the possibility of coming to power even with a blunted instrument. The strength of the enemy in the imperialist countries demands a tool of much greater perfection."

And so the point is made and developed here for really the first time, explaining why it is that revolution has been successful in a number of the colonial and semi-colonial countries with a leadership which was less than the kind that existed in the Russian Revolution; why they were able to be successful there while the same kind of leadership in an advanced capitalist country was not successful. Now this is the kind of development of Marxist thinking which is inherent in the Marxist method, but which obviously Marx could never have foreseen. It would be impossible to expect such things from a human being, that we should be able to foresee complicated, complex relations of forces and changes a hundred years ahead of time.

Americanizing and Afro-Americanizing Marxism

Marxism is much richer and much more varied, much more flexible than Cruse gives it credit for being. It is not only what Marx learned and developed a long time ago, not only what was added by figures 50 years ago like Lenin and Trotsky when they applied Marx's method, but also what subsequent Marxists did, down to our own time, and what future Marxists will do with problems that do not even exist yet or that cannot be foreseen in all of their complex detail. Marxism is a theory in the process of development. It's not something finished and fast. You don't slap it down on the table and say, here, Marxism is a finished science, sit down and study it. Now of course you should study it, but it is not a finished science, it is a developing science. It grows in power and scope as it is applied, correctly applied, to new situations.

I've already pointed out in The Militant the names that are given to these additions to Marxism. When Lenin went ahead with his theories of imperialism and Trotsky with the theory of permanent revolution and so on, it was said that they were Russianizing Marxism. They were applying Marxism to the peculiar conditions of Russia, which it was said did not apply elsewhere. And we have attempted to utilize that concept in the way in which we develop Marxism, so that for many, many years we have talked about and tried to carry through what we call the Americanization of Marxism: the application of the basic ideas of Marxism to American conditions, which are unique, which are not duplicated anywhere else in the world, which have never existed before. And beginning a year or two ago, we began to further develop that concept by introducing what we call the Afro-Americanization of Marxism. That is, the application of the Marxist method to the peculiar, unique conditions of the Negro people in the United States, which are different, despite some similarities, in many important respects from that of any other people in any other country in the world. We have tried to apply it to these particular conditions and to learn from them.

That's because for us, theory is not a blueprint which gives you the specifications on how to build and what to build and so on. It's a guide. And Marxists have always developed the theory of Marxism scientifically by studying what is new in the world, what develops, trying to learn from these things; not merely reading what Marx had to say and learning his method, but looking at the real world and trying to learn lessons from it. For example, Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1847 developed the idea about the dictatorship of the proletariat. They said, we have a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie now; we will solve the major social problems by creating a dictatorship of the proletariat. A dictatorship of the proletariat in our language would be a workers' government, a workers' state, but that's the language that Marx and Engels used to describe what we mean by a workers' state. Now that was written at the end of 1847. Nowhere did Marx and Engels try to say, well, this exactly is what the dictatorship of the proletariat is going to look like. This is how it's going to work.

They waited for experience. In fact they waited 24 years after introducing the idea about the dictatorship of the proletariat until the Paris Commune, until the workers in Paris set up the first attempt at a dictatorship of the proletariat or a workers' state, a very short-lived attempt, a very rough and rude model of it, but the first one that had occurred in the experience of the working class. And later on, Engels, writing an introduction to Marx's writing about the Paris Commune, said, I didn't look up the exact quotation, but he said something like, well, gentlemen, you've been asking about what the dictatorship of the proletariat is. There, gentlemen, there is the dictatorship of the proletariat, what the workers of Paris attempted to set up. It wasn't until then that they began to have some clearer concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which could be learned only from actual experience of the struggle.

And today, of course, we have a much better conception than Marx or Engels ever could have about the nature and the problems of a workers' state, because there's been a whole wealth of experience and struggle by the workers in many countries to set up such a state. Marx studied the conditions and the struggles of the workers in Western Europe. Lenin studied the conditions of the Russian workers and of the Russian peasants. And we, as part of our contribution toward the development of Marxism, have been studying the conditions of the American workers and particularly the conditions and struggles of the American Negroes.

Already throughout these 25 or 26 years that the Socialist Workers Party has been in existence, we have incorporated into our theory and into our program many lessons that have been learned from the Negro struggle in this country and from the ideas and the thinking of the masses in the ghetto. That has been true since the beginning of our party and it continues to be true as the Negro struggle undergoes some extremely important and sharp changes during the last five years in particular. The nature of the Negro struggle has developed far beyond what it was in 1954, even in 1959. It's different in many ways. Elements which were previously latent have come out in the open and have become very strong. Other elements which appeared to be in the ascendant have grown weak and have receded. There's a whole new character to many aspects of the Negro struggle.

The SWP has been studying these changes. We've been trying to understand what produced them. We've been trying to fit them into the part of our theory that explains them, and we've attempted at the same time to expand the theory to explain what isn't already explained by existing theory. We have been listening to non-Marxist spokesmen of the working class in the ghetto and trying to learn from them, and we have been attempting, to use that phrase again, to Afro-Americanize Marxism. I'm pleased to report now that within the next few weeks Pioneer Publishers is going to publish a collection of Robert Vernon's articles on the black ghetto from The Militant of the last year. It will be a separate pamphlet which we'll have on sale. This really is one of the pioneer efforts at the Afro-Americanization of Marxism, at its application to the black ghetto, one of the most fruitful applications of Marxism that has yet been made. And I'm sure that many of you will agree with this when you read it.

Who Cruse is

Now, these attempts on our part to bring the theory of Marxism up to date with respect to the Negro struggle in this country are not touched on or dealt with in any way in the article by Harold Cruse on "Marxism and the Negro." He refuses to consider what we have attempted to add to Marxism. He prefers to speak about what Marx had to say rather than about what the modern Marxists have to say. He ignores our contributions to an understanding of the nature and the direction of the Negro struggle. He refuses to tell his readers what these are, although obviously some of them would be of interest to his readers. In proceeding further with our classes we will attempt to take up some of these things that he does not want to discuss as well as the things that he does want to discuss. For today I will just say a few more words about Cruse, and then we have three reports that are supposed to be made by members of the class.

Cruse is an intellectual who is attempting to supply an ideology, a theory, to the Negro struggle. At one time he was a member of the Communist Party, and this is evident in some ways in his article. In one place he speaks of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party as twin branches on the withering trunk of Western Marxism. And some of the things that he attributes to the SWP are things that do not apply at all. When he says that Marxian theory has been upset, he's not talking about the Marxian theory of the Socialist Workers Party, although that's what his article is supposed to be about, but apparently some kind of Marxian theory which he learned from the Communist Party.

Now, he is not a member of the Communist Party anymore. He and the Communist Party parted ways a number of years ago, and he has been an independent figure in the Negro movement, attempting to fill the role of a theoretician. And you'll notice in his article that he believes that that is the main need. He speaks rather contemptuously of what he calls the street men, the strugglers, what we would call activists. He doesn't think that the movement is going to get anywhere by just going out in the street and fighting and so on. What's necessary is to think the whole thing out and develop a new theory. He left the Communist Party by being expelled from it.

There's a certain incident about it that I'll mention. When he was in the Communist Party, their national headquarters was a half a block away from our national headquarters in New York. Cruse had an assignment from the Communist Party to go out of their headquarters and go down the half block, come to our headquarters, and buy a small bundle of The Militant, then go out of our headquarters and go back and deliver it. They didn't want it delivered through the mail, because at that time their policy toward the Socialist Workers Party was that we were fascists and that genuine communists could have nothing to do with us and should not read our literature. During one period, members of the Communist Party could be and were expelled for engaging in discussion with members of our party. So they had to have a special arrangement whereby The Militant could be gotten by the top bureaucrats of the CP so that they could see what we were saying.

Well, Cruse used to do that every week. When finally the time came for him to be expelled, one of the charges against him was that he had been seen regularly entering the headquarters of the Trotskyite fascists. This was one of the bases on which he was expelled, along with the usual charges about stealing funds from workers' organizations and all the other things that they add whenever they throw somebody out of their organization for disagreeing with their policies. Since then, Cruse has developed independently. He went to Cuba early during the Revolution, and he developed some ideas on nationalism, which he began to expound around 1960, 1961.

Three reports: Socialist Party, Socialist Labor Party, Communist Party

That's enough on Cruse's background. Now, I've asked three people to prepare a report. One, a report on the position of the early Socialist Party on the Negro question, the position that they had in the days before the Russian Revolution. That report will be followed by another report on the Socialist Labor Party and then a report on the Communist Party. These will be not too long and I think we'll be able to finish in time. And then we'll have some questions and discussion. The first report then will be given by John on the old Socialist Party.

John: Before reading my report, I just want to mention

[Tape break]

John: A couple of facts about the situation in the United States before World War I will make the Socialist Party position a little easier to understand. The first is the fact that previous to World War I, there were very few Negroes living either in the northern states or in the western states where the Socialist Party was essentially active. And the second factor was that in the north, where the industrial working class mainly existed and was organized, there were large numbers of immigrant workers. In fact, the majority of the Socialist Party at the time, or at least for substantial periods, was composed of immigrant workers, and at this time there was a large amount of national prejudice other than racist prejudice in this country, Irish versus Polish, etc.

The general position of the old Socialist Party on the Negro question was basically as follows. The position and role of the Negro worker within American society displayed nothing significant to distinguish it from that of the working class as a whole. Racism, like any form of national prejudice, was looked upon as purely a, quote, class question. Black and white, native and immigrant workers were all equally exploited by capitalism, and their mutual emancipation would occur simultaneously through a socialist revolution. Since racism was the product of capitalism, the destruction of capitalism would free not only the Negro worker, but all Negroes. Meanwhile, there were no basic democratic demands, immediate issues, or forms of organization which could or should form the basis for a struggle on the part of the Negro people as a whole. Indeed, by implication, any specifically Negro demands would be doubly suspect. One, they would involve attempting to reform the system, which was viewed as anti-socialist by a large segment of the party, including Debs, and two, specifically Negro demands would, quote, divide the working class, and would appear to sanction the black worker shifting his solidarity from the white worker to middle-class Negroes and Negro businessmen.

This position was false and destructive on at least two different counts. One, methodologically, in terms of what it displayed about the party's limited understanding of and ability to apply Marxism, and two, socially, in terms of the hostile and corrupting pressures it reflected. Methodologically, it represented a sterile, one-sided abstraction, away from any consideration of the concrete economic, social, political, and cultural history of the American Negro. Refusing to examine the complex interrelationship of national and class factors as they affect the Negro worker and farmer, ignoring their real position in American society, and refusing to recognize the demands and aspirations flowing from that position, the Socialist Party attempted to dissolve the question out of existence. Socially, the position represented an easy way of accepting the racist currents among its members, sympathizers, and milieu without admitting or recognizing what was occurring. These errors made it impossible for the party to consciously recognize and combat racism internally and externally, and in the process they damaged the cause of the Negro people, that of the working class as a whole, and the development of the party itself.

They made it impossible for the party to apply Marxism in a really fruitful manner to American life and to immerse itself in the struggles of the Negro people. They were one important example of the inability of the old Socialist Party to develop a transitional program, combining the fight for concrete immediate issues with the basic goal of the socialist revolution in such a way that each struggle and development leads organically upward toward a higher stage in consciousness, organization, and development.

The only basic resemblance that I can see between Cruse's position and that of the Socialist Party is that they both made a similar methodological error. While the Socialist Party took the class question in the abstract as being the only meaningful consideration, Cruse does a similar thing with the colonial revolution and the national question. The Socialist Party refused to examine the concrete reality of the Negro people and how this expressed itself in relation to the general class question and the socialist revolution. Cruse refuses to examine the concrete interrelationship of class, national, and racial factors, either in the imperialist centers or in the colonial world. Both make the same basic mistake of substituting a one-sided abstraction from reality for reality itself. Other than that, the context and content of the two positions are, of course, quite different.

Breitman: If anybody wants to ask John any questions about the position of the old Socialist Party... Is there any question of fact or any question of interpretation? Does anyone want to raise it? Well, if not, yes?

Question: [inaudible] ... the similarities between...

Breitman: The question is whether John would go into greater detail about the relation between Cruse's position and the position of the old Socialist Party. I think I'll relieve John of the necessity of doing that, because we'll go into it at greater length either later today or in the next session.

Question: [inaudible]

John: The question was, when was this position formulated in relation to the Negro question in the old Socialist Party? I think it's more a question of an approach and a position being evolved rather than one consciously and theoretically being arrived at. It was a position that was inherent in the general attitude taken by the Socialist Party, or the majority of it, and it was something that was then explained after the fact for the most part in terms of this abstract class question. There was a time, I think in 1903, where a program was passed with a specific plank that involved Negro demands and supported certain limited demands, and this was opposed by Debs among others as being divisive, because it involved one section of the working class and singled it out in a concrete way from the others.

The Socialist Party was different as a party from what we conceive of as a Marxist party. It included many tendencies, many different trends, and had no organizational or political discipline. Therefore it's difficult to talk about a specific party policy. It's a question of the general orientation and what it did objectively.

Breitman: I think it should be added that the tendencies inside the old Socialist Party were quite wide and varied on this question. Inside the party, there were some elements, the most reprimandist [?] types in the party, who believed, as Cannon quotes it in this article that you have for your reading, that the Negro was inferior. These were people who considered themselves socialists and who held that position during the first quarter at least of this century and even beyond it. Debs did not hold the view that Negroes were inferior. His mistake was in not understanding the need for a program to meet the conditions that Negroes lived in. He said it was not necessary, but he was not in any way anti-Negro, and he did defend Negroes wherever they were attacked. Then there were a whole variety of positions in between combining these. But there never was within the old Socialist Party any significant tendency which understood what had to be done.

Question: In your criticism of the Socialist Party, you were criticizing them for their position, but it wasn't just because of any mistake when they were applying Marxism, in error, but because the class forces at that time, and particularly the Negro movement itself, wasn't at a level where they even perceived this... [inaudible]

John: The question was whether this was so much a factor of the Marxists within the Socialist Party misapplying Marxism, or whether the objective conditions were such, and the Negro movement was such, that their incorrect position almost flowed naturally from the situation. My answer would be that it was a question of both. It's a question of them not fully understanding the Marxist method and taking it in a more or less one-sided way. You see this in many other positions that they had, their position on the trade union movement and on many other questions. And it was also a fact that the Negro movement at that time was not of a scope and a power that forced itself upon them, that forced them to recognize reality and to change their position accordingly. It was a combination of the two factors, both working together, reinforcing each other: them being able to have an incorrect position because they didn't understand Marxism fully, at the same time reality not hitting them over the head, because there was no large mass Negro movement at the time which impinged upon them.

Breitman: All right, the next report, a brief one, will be by Derek on the Socialist Labor Party.

Derek: In order to understand the logic of the Socialist Labor Party position on the Negro struggle, you must observe the fact that they consider Daniel De Leon their chief theoretician on this subject and other subjects. Since De Leon died before the Russian Revolution and was a member of the Socialist Party, one can expect his position on the Negro struggle to be one of indifference to the black man's racial oppression and of placing great importance on his class oppression. He and a lot of other socialists at that time did not understand that the Negro was doubly exploited in capitalist society. They did not understand that the proletariat in the United States represented a contradiction because of the fact that it consisted of black and white workers. They only understood one aspect of this contradiction, which was the white workers. They could not divide the one, as Lenin said, into its contradictory parts and analyze each part. Out of this subjectivism and superficiality and one-sidedness, the position on the Negro struggle was produced by the SLP.

They still hold this position today, with few modifications. In their position today, they maintain that all civil rights demonstrations such as sit-ins and picketing will get the Negro nowhere, and they maintain that black nationalism is the same as white racism. This, and the fact that they don't look at the racial oppression that Negroes suffer in society, can be seen in a quote from the article in the [?], in which they say: "But in America, where the population is mixed and where, moreover, Negroes have a host of supporters and allies among whites, all black political action is racist. In its brochure, the Freedom Now Party forcefully repudiates both Republicans and Democrats. This is plainly a step forward. The next step forward should have been to declare that the American Negroes, in the overwhelming majority, are wage workers whose salvation, for good or ill, is bound up with that of the whole working class." As was illustrated in John's talk, they expound on the fact that Negroes belong to the proletarian class, and they don't look at the other side of the oppression.

What they maintain is that in order for Negroes to achieve full equality in society, and in order for anybody to get their equal rights in society, they must vote Socialist Labor Party. This stems from the fact that they say the Constitution says that an American revolution is legal, and therefore they think that you can change the system through legalistic ways. And they don't think that, let's say, when they get in power, there will be a civil war rebellion by the capitalists as such. This is the logic of their position. Are there any questions?

Speaker from the floor: Just a comment. Sometimes you can learn a lot by reading the press of the parties, but you can also learn a lot by seeing what they actually do in their day-to-day work. It's not just a question of having a theory about the Negroes' trouble, but what do they actually do? What do the SLPers actually do when they're faced with a case of racial oppression? How do they react to the Negroes' struggle for better lives? We had a very sharp example of the way they act during one of our previous election campaigns, when a youth committee had an afternoon tea party for different socialist candidates. The SWP candidates were invited and the SLP candidates were invited. To this afternoon meeting came a young Negro who at that time was very active in a defense group, one of these cases where a Negro had been railroaded into jail [?]; he was one of the [inaudible] and the defense group said they were trying to save him from death. This Negro had a petition [?], addressed, I think, to the governor of Florida. He approached different people at this meeting. He expected that everybody there would sign, because they were all socialists and everybody was for the Negro. And the SLP candidate refused to sign the petition. The Negro was very shocked and he couldn't understand why, and they started to explain their position to him. And this developed into a ferocious argument, I'll tell you, between this young Negro and the SLP candidate; he wouldn't swallow their line at all. And here you had a real-life demonstration of exactly what the political line means when it is applied to a human being [?].

Breitman: Any other questions?

Question: It seems that Cruse's method and the method of the Socialist Labor Party are very, very similar. Both of them, for instance, in relation to the Russian Revolution, take just about the same approach. The Socialist Labor Party says it was doomed to degenerate because it occurred in a backward country, and, contradicting Marx, who said it had to come in a developed [?] country, Cruse says the same: that because it came in a backward country, it was doomed to degenerate. Both of them seem to have the same type of dogmatic approach towards Marxism.

Breitman: Any other questions? Yes. I think that the SLP position is a variant of the old Socialist Party position, the one-sided class approach. It's even starker than the old Socialist Party position, because the Socialist Party, even with their wrong theories and policies, at least participates to some degree in the living Negro struggle. They attempt to connect themselves with people who are fighting against racial oppression. Of course, their aims are different than ours, but they are intelligent enough to understand that if you want to try to win recruits, you go to where the people are who are fighting. The Socialist Labor Party, in line with its general policy, refuses to have anything to do with Negro struggles, demonstrations, sit-ins, and so on, in the same way that it refuses to have anything to do with student demonstrations and protests or workers' picket lines and so on. In addition to their wrong one-sided theoretical approach, they turn their backs on the Negro struggle as it develops. They stand off on the sideline, and as Derek said, they say, vote Socialist Labor Party. That's the only answer. Come down to our hall and we'll tell you what Marxism is. That's the only answer. Vote SLP. So they are pretty hopeless, and we won't devote any more time to them in these classes. The next report will be by Danny on the Communist Party.

The Communist Party and the Negro question

Danny: The American Communist Party formed itself and drew its inspiration from the first socialist revolution in history. One of the major lessons of the Russian Revolution was Lenin's teachings on the question of the role of the oppressed nationalities and of the colonies in relation to the struggle for socialism on a world scale. Lenin taught that the struggles of peoples, of nations, who had a historical continuity of being oppressed, of being bound together by ties of a common culture, of common oppression, were independently valid, that they shouldn't be subordinated at all times to the class struggle as a whole. He countered the attitude that's been described as the attitude of the old Socialist Party, that the Negro struggle in the United States was just part of the overall class struggle, that nothing could be done about it before socialism, that no special demands should be advanced. Lenin said, no, this is incorrect. In the case of any struggle of an oppressed nationality, where demands come forward out of the very oppression of this nationality itself, socialists should support this, should enter into these struggles actively, should enter into struggles for improvements of oppressed nationalities within capitalism, and should point out the catalytic effect of the struggle of any oppressed nationality in moving the whole struggle for socialism forward, putting the general class struggle itself on a higher level. In this way, the American Communists pioneered the attitude of Marxists in America today, looking upon the Negro struggle as the struggle of an oppressed people with their own history, their own conditions of life, formulating their own

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consciousness that would lead to distinctive forms of struggle around distinctive demands advanced out of the consciousness of this historically oppressed minority. This was reinforced when the American Communists observed that the period of the First World War had led to a mass migration of Negroes from the South to the North, the participation of a large number of Negroes in the war, an increasing proletarianization of Negroes in the South itself, and the rise in the North of a mass nationalist movement, the Garvey movement, which has probably been the largest single Negro movement in the history of the United States in terms of membership, whose demand was the creation of a separate Negro state.

In 1928, the Communist Party took a left turn, and our movement has historically described it as an ultra-left turn. The slogan that they advanced at that time was one of self-determination. Historically, self-determination has meant that any oppressed people, if it should decide that it wants to be independent and create its own nation, should have the right to do so, and socialists should defend that right without reservation. The Communist Party advanced this not only in the form of the right of the Negro people to form their own state, if they should so wish, but in the form of the advocacy of the formation of such a state. That is, the Communist Party, which was a predominantly white organization in that period, with very few Negroes in it, actually went out and advocated that the Negro people in the South form a separate state whose basis would be what was called the Black Belt of the South, which contained at that time two-thirds of the Negro population, and today contains slightly less than half.

This demand at that time was a misapplication of the Marxist theory of self-determination. They didn't say that if the consciousness of the Negro people should be such that they overwhelmingly decide for a separate state, the Marxists would support it. The Communist Party, a predominantly white organization, went out and advocated the formation of a separate state. And in doing so, on this one side of their program on the Negro question, they alienated many Negro militants, because the Negro militants that they came into contact with at that time were primarily integrationists. They tended to be militant, but to want to integrate into American society and to look for a unity of black and white workers. But at the same time, the Communist Party pursued a very aggressive campaign for Negro equality and Negro rights within the existing society. Some examples of this were the Scottsboro case and the Herndon case in the South, where the Communist Party took up a legal defense of Jim Crow victims in the courts. They fought to have Negro unemployed get fair consideration at the relief offices. They put evicted Negro tenants back in their homes. It was this type of action that gained the Communist Party the support of the overwhelming majority of the radical Negroes. That is, thousands upon thousands of Negroes passed through the Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s and looked upon it as the only political party and the only predominantly white organization that would go out and fight for Negro rights.

At the same time that this was going on, the Communist Party was going through a process of evolution. Really, this process had culminated in the late 1920s, and the observation of it was the foundation of the Trotskyist movement. What it was is that the Communist Party was being transformed from an independent revolutionary party to an instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy. The leadership in the Soviet Union had been transformed from a revolutionary internationalist leadership to one that was conservative and privileged within Soviet society itself. This reflected itself in the policy of all the Communist parties as tending to subordinate themselves to the material interests of this Soviet bureaucracy. What that meant is that any particular national struggle in any country was examined not upon its own inner forces, what was actually going on, but the Communist Party would pursue a policy that would reflect the empirical needs of this Soviet bureaucracy.

The best example of this, and one that affected the role of the Communist Party in the Negro struggle in this country, was what developed in the late 1930s and during the period of the Second World War. The course of the Soviet bureaucracy was to seek an alliance with the so-called democratic imperialist countries in the coming war against fascism, and they thought that the best way to achieve this alliance would be to subordinate all the Communist parties in these countries to their ruling capitalist classes. What that meant was that the Communist Party in this country began to support Roosevelt and the New Deal around 1935. The Communist Party in France participated in the governments. The Communist Party in Spain sabotaged and destroyed a revolution. This rightward policy, what we call class-collaborationist policy, had its effect on the Negro struggle too. The Communist Party changed its orientation from being one that was toward the Negro masses, trying to draw a very sharp class line between the middle-class Negro leadership and win over the Negro workers, to being one that was toward the existing Negro middle-class leadership. During the war the Communist Party told the Negroes that they should stop struggling, that the main enemy was Hitler fascism, that any differences that Negroes had with so-called American democracy should be subordinated till after the war, completely forgotten about.

There was a campaign that was begun by the Pittsburgh Courier called the Double V campaign: victory against fascism abroad and victory against Jim Crow at home. The Communist Party opposed that. They were just for, at that time, victory against fascism abroad, and told the Negroes to forget about victory against Jim Crow at home. The Communist Party during that period of the Second World War criticized the NAACP from the right, saying that the NAACP wasn't fully mobilized enough in support of the Roosevelt administration in the war. The Communist Party called for calling off the March on Washington, a march that was being led by an all-Negro organization formed by A. Philip Randolph to fight for a Fair Employment Practices Act. Once the Soviet Union had been attacked, the Communist Party said this would disrupt national unity.

Since this period, the evolution of the Communist Party on the Negro question, as on most every other question, has been one of an evolution in the direction of what can only be called liberalism. That is, for instance, today the Communist Party opposes any manifestation of the independence of the Negro movement: its independence from the Democratic Party, its independence from the existing reactionary union leadership, its independence from any form of domination from the existing liberal-labor coalition, as it's called, which itself always seeks to subordinate the Negro struggle to its own interests. The Communist Party opposes development of a move towards independent political action like the Freedom Now Party, saying that it's disrupting the unity of the black and white workers, a unity which really doesn't exist. It opposes the programmatic development of a figure like Malcolm X in his development of anti-capitalist conclusions, saying that his ideas would divide the black and the white workers.

Breitman: Well, Danny covered a somewhat broader area than his report called for. It was mainly around the question of self-determination, and he didn't quite finish that part of it. That is, during this ultra-left period, starting at the end of the 1920s, the Communist Party arbitrarily and without regard to the desires and the consciousness of the Negro people said, you must create your own separate republic. This was their understanding of self-determination. They had determined for the Negro people what the Negro people should have. This theory and the application of this theory receded into the background when the Communist Party moved to the right and became supporters of Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. Then after World War II, with the beginning of the Cold War, the Communist Party moved to the left again. Thereupon they had a big discussion inside their party and they said, we've made a terrible mistake in dropping this slogan for a separate Negro republic. This is all a result of Browderism. We've let it lapse and it should be reinstated. And in the late 1940s, therefore, they again brought forward this idea. They didn't present it quite so crudely then, but they continued to present it, more or less, depending on conditions, until the late 1950s, when their adaptation to the Democratic Party had reached a new height, where they had given up all idea about independent struggle. I think it was in one of the conventions, either 1957 or 1959, around that time, that the Communist Party finally buried, repudiated and abandoned this concept of self-determination, and thereafter has been increasingly hostile to any manifestations of nationalism, so that they are extremely opposed to the Muslims, they're opposed to Malcolm X's movement, they're opposed to the Freedom Now Party, as has been pointed out.

So that's the history of their theory of the right of self-determination as applied to the Negro people in the United States. In our next class, we will take up further the question of the right of self-determination, attempt to define it, to understand it, and then see how it applies, to what degree it applies in the United States. We'll begin doing that by examining the discussion that took place in 1933 between Trotsky and a representative of the American party, Arne Swabeck, a discussion that covered the question of self-determination as it was understood some 30 years ago. Yes?

Question: Are we going to have any discussion during the next class on the further question of the relationship of the CP and the Negro problem, how it is affecting us today?

Breitman: Well, I hadn't planned that, but anybody who wants to will have an opportunity to bring up any question that he wishes sometime during these classes. Yes?

Question: Why do you say that in the late '50s ... [inaudible] ... the same for Du Bois? Did Du Bois [inaudible]?

Breitman: The question concerns the CP's attitude toward Du Bois, and whether or not Du Bois stood for a separate republic. Du Bois did not accept this version of self-determination that was presented by the Communist Party throughout these years. Du Bois was rather hostile to the American Communist Party in this country throughout the 1930s, at the same time that he himself was moving toward Marxism and beginning to apply what he considered to be the Marxist method to the treatment of American history, particularly in his book Black Reconstruction. The closer he came to Marxism in that period, the less use he had for the Marxism, so-called, of the American Communist Party. His evolution has been independent of the Communist Party on this question. When he did join the Communist Party a couple of years before his death, it did not signify any agreement with their theory on this question, whatever it was.

On the whole, I think it would be correct to regard W. E. B. Du Bois as a nationalist, as a militant nationalist, viewing his career as a whole. And the Communist Party is opposed to nationalism, militant or otherwise. So that's their problem. They canonize and idolize Du Bois, but it's not because of his ideas, but merely because of the fact that he joined the Communist Party as a protest against American capitalism. Are there any other questions about the Communist Party, reserving the right of other comrades to bring this up on subsequent occasions?

Now, we haven't covered very much of the reading that was given for this session, so you can read it again or read it the first time. We may have some reports similar to the ones we had today, I'm not sure yet, but an assignment that I would like to have everyone in the class fulfill between now and the next session is that each of you write out one question about the material that's being covered in these classes. One question which you want clarified for yourself, or which you think it would be beneficial for other comrades to be clarified on. Turn it in, in writing, to me before the next class begins. Put your name on it and put it on paper and turn it in.

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Self-determination: from Trotsky and Swabeck to the 1939 resolution

We had a review of the position on the Negro struggle taken by the early Socialist Party; the position that was taken by the Communist Party beginning around 1928, 1929, of a separate Negro republic in the Black Belt; and the Socialist Labor Party position, which is a variation of the old Socialist Party position. Now, the fault of the old Socialist Party position was that it saw only one aspect of the Negro question, the class [?] aspect. [inaudible] They believed that that was the only important element in the situation, that the only way in which the Negroes could overcome their oppression was by acting on the class line as part of the working class [?]. The Communist Party, acting under the impulse of the Russian Revolution and Lenin, saw another aspect to the Negro question, the racial or national aspect, and they developed their policy about that. They did not put forward the idea of self-determination in the spirit in which of course it is intended, that this is something that the Negro people decide for themselves. They decided what the Negro people wanted and needed and told them what they should get.

Now, if you have read the assignment in the documents on the Negro struggle, the discussion that took place between Trotsky and Swabeck in 1933, you will find there the early beginnings of the Marxist position on the question held by the SWP. That discussion revolved around the attitude that the leaders of our movement in America had toward the way in which the Communist Party was putting forward its slogan about the Negro republic and the Black Belt. Trotsky utilized the occasion of this discussion in order to put forward the idea of self-determination, even though the Communist Party had put it forward in a wrong way. There he expressed the opinion that it was the duty of Marxists in the United States to support the right of the Negro people to separate from this country, to create a nation of their own if they wish to, and that if they wish to, when they wish to, it would be the duty of the Marxists to support them completely in this struggle.

We support the right of the Negro people to determine their own destiny, to separate from this nation if they wish to, to remain in this nation if they wish to; the decision is theirs to make, and we have the obligation to support whatever decision they make on this point. Trotsky thought and said that the fact that the Negroes had not yet raised such a demand was not evidence that they never would. He believed that they had not yet entered a profoundly nationalist stage because they did not yet see the possibility of winning freedom from the oppressors. He thought the time might come when the Negro people would be aroused to a desire for a state of their own, would enter a nationalist period, and he considered various possible conditions that might stimulate such a development.

The party did not develop a position immediately after this discussion. These ideas were to some of our members rather startling. They were not sure that Trotsky's thinking on this question was really applicable to the situation in the United States. If you've read that discussion, you see that he is talking about a different period than today; that was before the CIO was organized. But you'll also see that a great deal of what he says there about the nature of the oppression of the Negro people is still valid. Anyhow, the SWP was organized in 1938, and at its second convention in 1939, the question of adopting a position on the Negro struggle came before the delegates. Prior to that, in preparation for that convention and for a discussion of resolutions on this question at that convention, a delegation headed by J. R. Johnson went to Mexico and met with Trotsky to discuss the question again, and this time more concretely. The result of that discussion is also printed in the documents of the Negro struggle. As a result of that discussion, a few months later, the resolution was introduced at the party convention in 1939, that's 25 years ago, in which we adopted our first and our basic position on the Negro struggle. In it, we, for the first time, adopted the view not only that Negro nationalism is progressive, but also that a period might come when the Negro in the United States might want to separate and that it would be our duty to support them in their efforts to separate when they did so. In the meantime, we did not advocate that they separate. We said the decision is up to them. We are not going to tell them that we think they should separate or that they should not separate. The decision is theirs. The obligation for us is to support whatever decision they make.

At that time in 1939, the nationalist trends among the Negro people were very small, scattered, weak, isolated. We adopted this position, but in the subsequent years, between 1939 and the 1960s, there was little that occurred which excited our interest in the question of self-determination. The major thrust of the Negro people was to knock down all of the Jim Crow walls that existed in this country during that period, to try to integrate, to use a rather indefinite word, and there was very little interest in separatism, in separate organization or in the possibility of a separate nation.

However, in the late 1950s, a number of important influences came together. First of all, there was the failure of the government to carry out the Supreme Court school decision against segregation, and the reaction among Negroes who had hoped that the government finally would do something along these lines. Combined with what was going on internationally, the fact that in large parts of the world, colored people were beginning to overthrow their white oppressors, to drive them out and to obtain their freedom. These influences began to come together, and the feeling began to develop among an important part of the Negro people that as things were, they were never going to get their freedom in this lifetime, if ever, in this country, along the paths that had been followed up until then. Then began a serious rise in what we can call black nationalism: the feeling, on the one hand, that Negroes must control their own movement, that is, must have their independent or separate organizations, and that these organizations must be responsible to them and not to anyone else.

What "integration" means

This was one manifestation of the nationalist mood. At another end was a growing manifestation of the idea that not only must we have separate organizations, our own leadership, our own program and so on, but also that it is impossible, it will always be impossible, to achieve equality in this society, that we have to break from this society. Some say create a separate nation of our own, others say go back to Africa, but we have to put an end to our inequality, which will never be ended by remaining here; we have to separate. Those are the two sides of what is called nationalism, and since then this spirit has been growing in the United States. It becomes more and more important.

Now there seems to be some confusion even among our own members as to what our position is. I understand one of our comrades recently was arguing in the kitchen with somebody and saying, but the SWP stands for integration. We stand for integration. And the person with whom she was arguing said, well, I didn't understand it that way. I didn't understand that you stand for integration. CORE stands for integration. The NAACP stands for integration. The Democratic Party stands for integration. But I thought that the SWP position was different. And she said, no, that's absolutely clear. We stand for integration. Now there's a problem of definition. It used to be that everybody knew what was meant by integration, but now there are many different definitions of it, many different ideas about what is meant, and you have to be very clear about what you're talking about. Are you talking about integration into American capitalist society? Do you think that is possible? Do you think that equality can be achieved within capitalist society? Is that what you're advocating, is that what you believe is possible? Or by integration do you mean only knocking down every single Jim Crow restriction that exists, merely removing all of the discriminatory barriers to Negro equality without necessarily implying that genuine equality is possible within this society?

Now we have to be very clear what we're talking about, what we mean. In one sense, the SWP is for integration. That is, we are in favor of ending every Jim Crow law, practice, and custom. We are in favor of doing that now. We'll be in favor of doing it ten years from now. We'll always be in favor of it, under capitalism or after capitalism. But that doesn't mean that we think that equality can be achieved under capitalism, which is what most people mean when they talk about integration. Most people who talk about integration mean that it can be achieved eventually, gradually, by militant methods, by peaceful methods, by violent methods, that it can be achieved in this society. But we don't think that. We don't stand for the kind of integration that is possible in capitalism. We stand for ending every restriction, but we don't believe and we don't try to convince anybody that equality is possible under this system.

Now we will be in favor of ending all of these restrictions even if the Negroes decide to leave this country. Suppose out of 20 million Negroes in this country 19,990,000 [?] decide we're going to break out and leave and have a nation of our own. And they do it. And only 10,000, say, are left in the entire United States. We would still be in favor of ending every restriction. In that sense, you'd say we're in favor of integration. But not in the sense that we are in favor of integration in the belief that capitalism can provide equality. When a Negro worker listens to us, we have to make clear what we mean. So we can be in favor of the separation of the Negro people if that is what they determine that they want, and at the same time be in favor of ending all of the restrictions that remain in whatever is left of the United States after they go out.

All right, so the right of self-determination means the right of the Negro people to decide how they want to live. Do they want to live in the United States, or do they want to be in a country of their own? That's the right of self-determination, the right to make that decision. The duty of revolutionary Marxists is to support the Negroes in whatever decision they make and to fight with them to help them achieve whatever they want. Because if they decide for separation, that's not going to be a very easy thing to accomplish. That's going to require revolutionary struggle, because the capitalists are not about to give up any part of their country. It would require a revolutionary struggle, just as revolutionary a struggle as it will be to end capitalism in the United States, which is the other way in which Negroes can win equality, by ending this system. But both require a revolution. Both are very difficult. And we support both. All right. We may return to the question of self-determination at our next class, but that's about all I'm going to say on it now.

Will the white workers become radical?

What I want to take up next is the question which Harold Cruse deals with in his article right at the very beginning. I don't know if any of you have that with you, but it's in the second paragraph of the first of his two articles. Toward the middle of the second paragraph he says: "the theory and practice of revolutionary Marxism in America is based on the assumption that white labor, both organized and unorganized, must be a radical anti-capitalist force in America and must form an alliance," in quotes, "with Negroes for the liberation of both labor and the Negro from capitalist exploitation." Cruse takes the position that when we speak about a future radicalization of the American white workers, we're just living in a dream world, that it cannot happen. There was a period when labor was radical, in the 1930s, but that has finished. That's gone forever. White workers have become conservative, pro-capitalist, and hostile or indifferent to the Negroes. There was a time, Cruse thinks, when it was reasonable to expect that the white workers could usher in socialism, but it's too late now. The only ones capable of revolutionary action in this country are the black people, says Cruse.

And then he turns and lets the Marxists have it. He says we are obsessed by a working-class socialist myth, by this grand illusion, this white labor mystique, so much so that we've lost touch with reality. We just don't know what the world is like any longer as a result of this obsession. And then he says that that is what the theory and practice of revolutionary Marxism in America is and must be; if it doesn't have this assumption, then it can't be Marxist, it means giving up Marxism: the assumption that white labor must be a radical anti-capitalist force in America and must form an alliance with Negroes.

Now, if somebody says that something must be, that is, the assumption that white labor must be radical, and it obviously isn't true, then everybody concludes that that man is some kind of a nut, and everybody is right. But if he's obviously a nut, then why spend so much space and time trying to answer it? If we believe what Cruse says, we must believe that white labor must be radical. Now the truth is that the SWP does not believe that the workers must be radical and anti-capitalist. We are well aware that the overwhelming majority of white workers in this country today are not radical, thanks to capitalist brainwashing, relative prosperity, treacherous labor leadership, and political immaturity. That's one of the reasons why socialism in general, and our party in particular, are so weak. What we believe is not that the workers must be radical but that they must become radical if they are to solve their problems, and that they will become radical under certain conditions and at certain times. Now "must be" is quite different from "must become."

Marxists have never believed that the workers in capitalist countries must be or have been radical all the time. We don't idealize the workers, knowing very well and from painful experience that they can be and often are infected, corrupted, demoralized, exhausted and disoriented. Their radicalism waxes and wanes, rises and sinks, depending on their conditions, leadership, and level of consciousness. This is about the white workers I'm talking. But isn't this also true of the Negro masses, that their radicalism is not a constant and invariable thing? The American working class has not been radical during most of its existence. And even when it was much more radical than it is today, in the 1930s and the first part of the 1940s, the white workers in this country never reached the point of breaking with the politics of the capitalists whom they were battling on the picket lines and forming a party of their own, a non-capitalist party of their own. And the most radical sector of the working class today, which is the workers in the black ghetto, haven't always been as radical as they are today.

Socialists believe that the working class can become revolutionary. Not always, but sometimes. And that on an occasion like that, which does not occur all the time or last forever when it does occur, the workers can, in cooperation with other non-capitalist forces and with a consistently revolutionary leadership, abolish the system that breeds racism and poverty and unemployment and war and so on. The question of leadership is crucial precisely because such revolutionary opportunities do not knock at the door often or keep knocking for long, and a leadership must be ready on those rare occasions to take advantage of them, or they go by with the advantage not taken. Our assumption, therefore, unlike the one that Cruse imputes to us, is not that the working class can or will be radical all of the time or most of the time, but that the conditions created by capitalism must radicalize them some of the time, and that even though revolutionary situations occur rarely, one revolutionary situation can be turned into a successful revolution. As the Cuban experience demonstrates, a successful conquest of power can then quickly alter conditions enough so that the revolutionary consciousness and will of most of the workers will remain high and can become permanent, which is not possible under capitalism.

Now, Cruse does not consider such a working-class revolution possible, like most Americans, or even like some of the new left spokesmen like the late Professor C. Wright Mills. Together with other sophisticated opponents of Marxism, Cruse lives in a world that is changing with dizzying speed, but he thinks everything is going to change except the workers. Talk about a grand illusion! Even the most ignorant capitalist knows better than that. The future of this country will be determined in large part by the relations among its three major forces: the capitalists, the white workers, and the Negroes, who are mostly workers too. At present the capitalists dominate and have the support of most white workers. Cruse thinks this is going to last forever. It won't, because of the internal contradictions of this system. The central contradiction is the material readiness of our society for socialism and the ideological and political unreadiness of the white workers to fight for it. Tied up with this is another acute contradiction: the readiness of the Negroes to fight for jobs and justice with the most militant means, and the unreadiness of organized labor and the white workers as a whole to support the black people.

From our analysis of the social structure, we conclude that the contradiction prevailing between white workers and Negroes is not absolute but relative, not permanent but transitory. The alienation between the white workers and the Negroes is no more enduring than the political and ideological partnership between the white workers and their bosses. In fact, these two states are interconnected. Any deepening of antagonism between the white workers and the ruling class, any cutting of ties between them, any opening or widening of breaches between the white workers and the capitalists, objectively sets the stage for a lessening of the antagonism and a narrowing of the gap between the Negro movement and the white workers.

The outlook of the white workers is going to be altered from two directions. One is from the independent struggle of the Negroes, which tends to upset the status quo and introduce unsettling elements into class relations. The disruptive patterns of politics in this election year testify to the power of the independent Negro struggle to disarrange and overturn customary modes of thought and action. Is there any reason to think that white workers will not also be shaken up and divided and some of them torn out of their ruts as the Negro struggle continues to develop and explode? The second and more basic modifying factor comes directly from the operation of the capitalist system itself. In the next decade, automation will create vast armies of unemployed and undermine the security of all workers, even those of high seniority, skill, and privilege, that is, mostly white workers. America's share of the world market will continue to be shrunk by the colonial revolution on one side and by growing competition from other capitalist countries on the other, and this will drive the capitalists to attack the wage rates and living standards of the employed workers. Isn't this certain to provoke anti-capitalist sentiments and attitudes, not only among the youth and the unemployed, but also among unionists still on the job? Won't such radicalization make white workers more susceptible to suggestions for joint action with the Negro movement? Won't the possibility be open for a change in the present situation, for united action by the two anti-capitalist movements against the upholders of the system responsible for their common insecurity?

We hope that what I've just said will not be distorted. It is a perspective to be worked for, not an existing reality. We do not think that the achievement of joint action between the Negro people and the white workers will be easy or quick. We are not suggesting that the Negroes should wait until the white workers are ready for collaboration, until they build their own movement with its own leaders, ideology, and program. We are not proposing and we don't favor any alliance where the white workers call the shots and the Negroes comply. We are talking about an alliance of equals, an alliance with radicalized, not conservatized, white workers, an alliance against all capitalist parties, not behind the Democratic Party. Therefore, what we are talking about is the future, which may be less distant than it appears now to some of us. We're talking about the future and not about today. We concur 100 percent with the decision of militant Negroes to concentrate on building their own movement and working out tactics based, first of all, on the situation as it is today, where there is no real unity with white workers. A correct overall strategy has to take into account, however, that the situation will not remain as it is today, for the reasons which I've already cited. A correct overall strategy has to include in it, too, that things are going to change. The Negro movement therefore has to be prepared for the changes that are coming and help to promote them, because they'll be to the benefit of Negroes as well as white workers.

In our 1963 convention resolution, "Freedom Now," we stated that the first stage of the coming alliance that we foresee and predict will probably be the knitting of ties between the black vanguard and the revolutionary socialist vanguard. Not an immediate coming together of the two movements, the whole Negro movement and the whole working-class movement, but in the first stages there will be a coming together of the vanguards, the radical vanguard of the black movement and the revolutionary socialist vanguard in and around the SWP. We continue to seek such ties. We are on the side of the Negroes wherever they clash with prejudiced and privileged white workers. We support and work with black radicals even though they have crossed off the white workers forever as any help to their struggle. We will work with black radicals and black nationalists even though they believe that the white workers will never change. We don't feel that there's any inconsistency in doing this, because we are confident that their own experience will teach them, as it will teach the white workers, that collaboration between both camps is ultimately indispensable if the power structure in this country is not just to be shaken up or renovated, but actually toppled. Experience will prove that the monopolists cannot be dislodged from their seats of power except by a transformation of the relations between the three main forces, a dialectical transformation of the capitalist–white worker partnership into its opposite, a Negro–white worker alliance against the capitalist regime.

So that's what I would say in part about the point which Cruse makes in his article about the basic assumption of Marxism in America, and also about the question of what will happen to the white workers in the years to come, what the prospects are for unity between them and the Negro movement, about an alliance, and what kind of an alliance will be possible.

"I am not a Marxist"

There are a number of ways in which Cruse's article misrepresents the position of the Socialist Workers Party. I hope you noticed that, just to take a small example, he misrepresents Marx's position entirely, not only the SWP's. Did you notice that in his articles he twice makes use of the remark that he attributes to Marx, "I am not a Marxist"? You notice he does this not once, but twice, and he accepts it as good coin and repeats it. Marx said, I am not a Marxist; then what the hell are other people saying that they're Marxists for? They've got even less right to say, I am a Marxist, is the view that Cruse takes. Now, what is the fact about this quotation? What does it mean? What are the circumstances under which it was made?

In the first place, this is from a letter not by Marx but by Engels, written in 1890, some seven years after Marx's death. Engels is writing a letter to somebody by the name of Conrad Schmidt. In his letter he discusses a book that has been written by somebody dealing with historical development and maybe even historical materialism. The only thing that Engels knows about the book is what has been written in a review of the book by a man named Moritz Wirth, whom he doesn't think much of. That is, he's not ready to accept Moritz Wirth's evaluation of this book that he hasn't read, because he doesn't have much confidence in Moritz Wirth's opinion. So he says, "little Moritz is a dangerous friend. The materialist conception of history has a lot of them nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history." This was Engels's complaint against a lot of people who picked up historical materialism as a fad, and he said instead of using it to investigate history, they use it as a reason not to study history, merely to make abstractions. So Engels says "to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history," just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late '70s, "all I know is that I am not a Marxist." In other words, if they are Marxists, these French Marxists in quotes, then all I know is that I'm not a Marxist. So the intention of the quotation is not that Marx was not a Marxist or that there can be no such thing as a Marxist, which is what Cruse seems to say, but rather the opposite, that Marx did not consider himself that kind of so-called Marxist.

The independence of the Negro movement

Now let's take up a few other of Cruse's allegations. Cruse says that the growing independence of the Negro movement produces a crisis for Marxists. He says this over and over again in the article. That's the theme. He says, and I'm quoting now, "the greater the Negro movement becomes as an independent force, the deeper does the crisis become for the Marxist movement itself. For the alliance," in quotes, "it attempts to forge with the Negro must be one where the Marxists dominate." End of quotation. In other words, we are opposed to the Negro movement being really independent. The more independent it becomes, the less we like it and the more of a crisis we are flung into, because the only kind of relations we want with the Negro movement are where we will dominate it, we Marxists will dominate it.

Now, the facts, fortunately, are readily available, and the record bulges with facts that refute Cruse's claim that the SWP is opposed to the independence of the Negro movement, to the independence of the Negro movement from the labor movement or from anything else, including the SWP. Throughout its entire existence, the SWP has thought, said, and argued just the opposite. It was the first radical organization in this country to assert the correctness and necessity of Negro independence. In the resolution I referred to before, as long ago as 1939, when the SWP was a year old, we said in the unanimously adopted resolution:

"The awakening political consciousness of the Negro, not unnaturally, takes the form of a desire for independent action uncontrolled by whites. The Negroes have long felt, and more than ever feel today, the urge to create their own organizations under their own leaders and thus assert, not only in theory but in action, their claim to complete equality with other American citizens. Such a desire is legitimate and must be vigorously supported."

That's what we said 25 years ago. And we've never wavered in this position once throughout those 25 years. What we said just a year ago in our convention resolution was: "The liberation of the Negro people requires that the Negroes organize themselves independently and control their own struggle and not permit it to be subordinated to any other consideration or interest." Now you can't speak any more plainly than that. And it's pretty hard for anybody to say that the SWP is not in favor of an independent Negro movement, unless everything we've been saying throughout our entire life is the opposite of what we believe, from the first year to the 26th. That would be a strange way for a political party to proceed

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one thing and believing another, because we educate our members on the basis of what we say. Why do genuine Marxists take this position? Why do we advocate that the Negro movement must be independent even of us? Because of the history of this country, the history of the oppression of the Negro people in this country.

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Breitman: Well, this is a very inadequate response to a rather modest request. And if there isn't a better response, then we'll just discontinue the class.

Speaker from the floor: Well, I don't have a question. I'm writing a question. [inaudible]

Breitman: Well, that's all right. If you think there's something that other people might benefit from hearing explained, write it down. No, don't ask me. Write it down. I want everybody to write down one question. That's not a big demand. If nobody has any questions that you want to ask about what was discussed tonight, then I would suggest you do it right now, so that I can have them tonight and so that I can make some use of them for the next class. Yes.

Question: I have a question. What relationship does Harold Cruse have with the Socialist Workers Party?

Breitman: He has not had any relation with the Socialist Workers Party. He's attended a few forums in New York. He's bought some literature and I hope read it. He's had discussions with some of our people about his ideas informally. I think he spoke once at a forum in New York sponsored by the party, but that's about all. He considers himself the authority on Marxism in the Negro movement, and he's attempting to utilize that authority to influence people against Marxism. He has no other authority than what he can convince people of by what he says. The unfortunate thing is that instead of arguing against Marxism on the basis of what it stands for, he attributes certain things to it which we do not stand for, and insists not only that we do, but that we must believe these things that he says we must believe. If we don't believe them, then we're not Marxists. If we do believe them, then we're jerks. That's the alternative that he presents to us. That's his dictum: this is Marxism; you don't believe that, then don't call yourself Marxist; if you do believe that, then obviously you're out of this world. He's got you coming and he's got you going. Yes?

Question: How much weight does Cruse carry?

Breitman: Well, in New York, where people know him, I think he carries less weight than outside of New York, where people do not know him. No, I say this in all seriousness. That is, he reads more impressively to the readers of Liberator outside of New York who have not had any contact with him. Those who have had contact with him, when he was for a time a member of the Freedom Now Party and spoke with great authority on what the Freedom Now Party does and doesn't think and does and doesn't allow and so on, during that time people got to know him and developed certain conceptions about him on the basis of their knowledge. But outside of New York he is not known personally. And unquestionably, somebody who writes with seriousness about Marxism is read with attention. Among black radicals who are searching for ideas and trying to avoid the mistakes of past generations, and many of the past generation went into the trap of Stalinism, which was considered to be the genuine article as far as Marxism is concerned, trying to avoid that, there's probably a certain predisposition to believe what Cruse writes, because there is a prejudice against Marxism as a white theory, a white philosophy. I hope to take up that question next time, about the whiteness of Marxism, or the redness, or the blackness.

All right, then we'll cut it off. During the 15-minute period before the next thing that occurs here, there's something in the hall here at 9 o'clock [?], rack your brain and find a pencil or pen and put it on a sheet of paper and give it to me before 9 o'clock. Put your name on it too when you give it to me. Very good. We've now got three already. That's more than we've had before. You want to announce that?

The dual aspect of the Negro struggle

As I appeared last week, my beard did prove to be distracting. I got more questions about that than I did about the subject after the meeting. In fact, one of the questions was very discouraging. It was, are you growing a beard? So discouraging that I cut it off the next day. The psychologists, the psychoanalysts especially, have all kinds of very shocking explanations to give about the growing of a beard, even sinister, but I have a kinder explanation of the impulse to grow a beard. I think it's a desire to change yourself, to make improvements. When a woman feels like that she can change her hairstyle or hair color or something like that. I can't do that, so that was the impulse to improve myself. And I'd like to apologize for the quality of this class so far. I'd like to suggest that we complete it tonight. Make this the last session, because I'm not feeling very well, and I don't know whether I would really be able to do anything properly for next Wednesday night.

Well, tonight I just want to go over two or three things before taking up the questions which some of you submitted under duress. We'll try to cover as many of them as we can, and if there are any that you want to ask on the floor, we'll also try to find room for that. One of the key ideas in the theory of the Negro struggle is the dual aspect of it: the fact that it has two basic characteristics that are different, although connected. On the one hand, it is a racial and national question, and on the other hand, it is a class question, a proletarian question. Now, this seems fairly simple to state, but there's a great deal of confusion and disorientation that sets in as a result of the difficulty in keeping these two things in mind all the time, especially because these two aspects are not equal. They don't operate equally. They don't have the same influence on the development of the struggle equally. Sometimes one is greater than the other, and there is a tendency, when one comes to prominence, to forget about the other. I say this seems very simple, but I know that I myself, in thinking about it many, many years, have found that I have difficulty in always retaining in mind these two aspects and combining them properly.

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During the 1930s and 1940s and part of the 1950s, the class aspect was the dominant one. Most of the struggle moved along class lines, through class organizations, particularly the unions, and working-class organizations that were related to the unions. In recent years, the other aspect has come to the fore, and it is proving to be a more dynamic one. In the final analysis, it probably will be the one which creates the greatest transformation in the thinking of the Negro people. But what happens now is that people tend to forget about the other side of it, not merely tend to forget about it but tend to deny that it has any importance whatever. That's because of things as they are now. But when the working class begins to move again as a result of the conditions that are created by capitalism, the Negro movement will look at the class question in a different light, and then we will see a greater or more equal combination of these two aspects in the determination of the way that the movement develops further.

Cruse's error, as was pointed out last week, is not just that he sees that the class aspect has receded, that it's not as important. His error is to say not only that it is not the dominant one now, but that it never again will play any part. It never will have any effect on the outcome of the struggle. What he's saying, therefore, is that there never really will be any important class struggles anymore; the only struggles that will take place of importance will be racial struggles. And of course as Marxists we know that that is wrong. We will work together with people who hold that view. We will work together with black radicals who say, ah, the white workers, they're not ready now and they never will be. We'll work together with them because we are confident that they will learn, not from our telling them. We could tell them day and night and they're not going to be influenced until they begin to see some changes inside the working class, but they will learn as a result of what happens inside the working class. And of course, partly what happens inside the working class is going to depend on the independent development of the Negro struggle, which will have its impact on the class as a whole.

Integration, separation and self-determination again

All right, the second thing I want to mention concerns these categories: integration, separation, right of self-determination, and so on. I told you a conversation was overheard in the hall here, one comrade telling another, the SWP stands for integration, and the other comrade saying, no, I understood that the SWP stands for the right of self-determination. And they were arguing with each other. Well, the other night, Wednesday night, we tried to explain what this problem of integration means, how there's a difference of definition. The term is used in different ways. So I'll try to repeat that now, perhaps a little more clearly than I did then.

The SWP does not believe that the Negroes will get equality through integration in capitalist society. We reject that notion just as strongly as the most pure and simple nationalists. We don't believe that that's going to happen. It's going to take a socialist revolution to achieve integration. What people call integration is very often only desegregation, that is, the removal of Jim Crow barriers. But we are of course in favor of the removal of Jim Crow barriers, and that's why some comrades think that the formula "we are for integration" is adequate. But it's not adequate. Although we are in favor of the removal of these barriers, we know and we say that they are not going to be removed completely and not going to be removed satisfactorily in this society.

Is the SWP in favor of separation, or not in favor of separation? Well, that also has to be explained and understood very carefully. We're in favor of separation in the sense, and this is the sense in which many people mean it, that we favor Negroes forming their own organizations under their own leadership, conducting their own struggle independently of what other groups do and separately from them if necessary. We're in favor of that kind of separation. Are we in favor of the separation of the Negro people into a separate nation? Yes and no. We're in favor of that if that is what the Negro people want. But we say that that hasn't been decided yet. The Negro people haven't yet decided that they want a separate nation, and until they decide it, we are not in favor of it. We say now that if they decide in favor of it, we will support it and we will help them to achieve it. We will support it under capitalism and we will try to help them achieve it under capitalism, and we will support it after socialism comes to power and help them to achieve it after socialism comes to power.

On the right of self-determination: yes, we are for the right of self-determination, and that means that if the Negro people decide they want to achieve their equality through integration in American society, we are for that, but we say it can't be achieved under capitalist American society. And if they want to separate, we are for that, and we will fight for that. We are not advocating that the Negro people separate, because that would be a denial of the right of self-determination. They have to determine first what they want to do. Then our obligation will be to support it in a revolutionary way.

Cruse's four charges on the Freedom Now Party

The last point I want to make before we start taking up the questions: what are Cruse's main points against the SWP in reference to the Freedom Now Party? Well, he has four charges. They are as follows. One, that we, the SWP, don't believe in and don't want a truly independent black political party. Whatever we say, we don't really want it. Two, that we engage in maneuvers against the Freedom Now Party. Three, that we compete with the Freedom Now Party, even before it's been nationally established or on a stable basis almost anywhere, by running a Negro candidate for president; that this constitutes competition with the FNP. And fourth, that we disrupt the Freedom Now Party's development. Those are the four main charges that I've been able to cull out of his article. Maybe others have been able to find more than that, but those are the basic four.

Now, Wednesday night I went into some detail on the record about the SWP's well-known position in favor of the independence of the Negro movement in general: how that has been our policy now for 26 years, how we've never changed at any time, how we were the first radical party to assert the need for the independence of the Negro movement and the correctness of it. This well-known position of ours in favor of Negro independence, of course, applies with full force to black political action, too. For many years, we have endorsed and supported independent Negro candidates running against the capitalist party candidates. To support such candidates when, instead of running individually, they band together in a party, or to defend their right to do so in any way they choose, is only an extension of the position that we long have held, and it comes almost automatically for us. There was very little dispute over this at our convention last year, where we decided to endorse the formation of such a party before one even existed.

Every politically informed person in the country knows this, that we're in favor of that. If you look at a social democratic magazine called New Politics, the latest issue that's appeared, the spring issue, two writers in that, anti-Marxist Social Democrats by the name of Tom Kahn, K-A-H-N, and August Meier, a professor, write in that article that the all-Negro Freedom Now Party idea, and this is a quotation, "was originally projected by the predominantly white Trotskyites and for some months received its chief organizational support from them." Now this is not true. In our convention resolution last year, where we endorsed this idea, we very specifically noted, and I'm quoting now, that the idea of a Negro party, a civil rights party, or an equal rights party had been raised in previous years by Adam Clayton Powell and by Liberator magazine among others, and had been raised earlier than our convention in 1963 by Elijah Muhammad and William Worthy. So this New Politics statement that we originally projected it is obviously inaccurate. We would be glad to claim credit for conceiving the idea of an FNP, but it wouldn't be honest for us to do so. The only thing that we can claim credit for is that we publicly supported the idea of an independent black party before anyone took any organizational steps to create it.

Now, however, if we did that, then why, even before the new party has been established nationally, would we rush in to compete with it, which is the charge that Cruse has? Cruse says that we are the most astute of all the Marxists. But what is astute about encouraging the formation of another party if your very first response, even before it's been fully assembled, is to compete with it? The charge is ridiculous logically on the face of it. There isn't the faintest trace of competition with the FNP in DeBerry's presidential candidacy, except inside Cruse's head. When DeBerry was nominated by the SWP last winter, it was perfectly plain that the FNP would not be able to run a presidential candidate this year. It had hardly been able to form small groups in a dozen cities. And we, out of our experience in knowing how much work is involved in organizing a presidential campaign, knew in advance that the FNP would not be able to run a presidential candidate this year. So the idea that his candidacy was put forward in order to compete with the FNP has no basis whatever, either logically or factually.

Moreover, every chance that he gets, everywhere that he goes, DeBerry expresses his complete support and the SWP's support for the effort to create a mass independent black party and calls on black militants to help create it. And of course, when he does this, he gets criticized by Cruse for doing so, so that he's placed in a position where if he wants to please Cruse, he has only two choices. One is to keep silent, never mention the FNP, or maybe to oppose it. Maybe that would satisfy Cruse, because when he speaks for it, that doesn't. As you know, the FNP has won a statewide place on the ballot only in Michigan. As soon as they had filed their petitions last spring, the Michigan SWP announced, "We are not campaigning against the Freedom Now Party, which in our view has valuable contributions to make to the electoral struggle for a world free of oppression and exploitation. We welcome its entry into the election campaign and hope it will get a fair hearing from whites as well as Negroes." And you know, most of you, that we are planning to support most of the candidates of the FNP in the coming election. So there is no basis whatever for this charge.

Now to the third one. DeBerry has already refuted the charge of maneuvering against the FNP. The claim by Cruse is that DeBerry linked himself with the Freedom Now Party without the party's permission to do so. This is one of his charges. It rests in its entirety on the fact that DeBerry, when his candidacy was announced, said, without pretending to be a spokesman of the FNP, that he supported the building of an FNP. Cruse apparently has some kind of expectation that DeBerry has to get permission from the FNP before he can speak about it. That, of course, is an unrealistic expectation. DeBerry is going to speak about the FNP, and he's going to speak about the Democrats, and he's going to speak about the Republicans, whatever he thinks about them, without getting their permission. That's all this charge amounts to.

The fourth and final charge, of disruption, is equally baseless. DeBerry and the SWP are said by Cruse to be disrupting the development of the FNP because when they discuss the FNP, quote, "they must attempt to project the idea of the Freedom Now Party in their own Marxian image with the old, worn-out, discredited theme of Negro labor unity," end quote. Now what this means is that when DeBerry and the SWP discuss the FNP, they do so as Marxists. But what's wrong with that? I don't know how else he expects them to discuss it, since they are Marxists. Does DeBerry discussing it as a Marxist prevent other people from discussing it from whatever angle they want, including Cruse discussing it from an anti-Marxist angle? Or how does it in any way interfere with the right of any FNP member to discuss the FNP in any way that he pleases? How is DeBerry's exercise of his right to express his opinion, whether the opinion is right or wrong, disruptive to the FNP's development?

The whole charge becomes more ridiculous when you observe that Cruse bases it exclusively on a phrase in a New York Times report which had him saying that he supports the FNP as a step toward independent political action by labor and Negroes. Twisting this a little bit, Cruse paints this as opposition to the FNP. He says, quote, "The Trotskyist theoreticians realize very well that a truly independent black political party, which functions irrespective of what white labor does and does not do, will further deepen the already serious crisis of Marxist creed in the West. It could show that Marxian ideas about capitalism in advanced countries are not to be taken seriously." Now, even if DeBerry made this statement the way the Times reported it, that is, I support the FNP's creation as a step to independent political action by labor and Negroes, rather than the other way around, that is, his saying a step to independent political action by Negroes and labor, Cruse knows very well what is meant. And that is that DeBerry and the SWP believe that a mass black party will upset and then destroy the Democratic-labor-Negro coalition and that this will give impetus to the formation of an independent labor party too.

Now what's so old, terrible, discredited and worn out about such a prediction? Does Cruse think that the stimulation of an independent labor party by the growth of an FNP would be a bad thing? In that case he ought to argue that. Or does he think that such a development is impossible? In that case, he ought to argue that. But he ought not to substitute for such arguments, which would be fruitful, his unfounded claim that we cannot be for a truly independent black party because it would deepen the crisis of Marxism. The only crisis it would deepen would be the crisis of capitalist politics, the crisis of the Democrats, the labor bureaucrats, the liberals, the Negro gradualists, which is precisely one of the reasons why we are so strongly for the FNP. Because the breakup of the two-party system and the radicalization of American politics in this way are high on the list of Marxian ideas about capitalism that Cruse says will be discredited by the creation of a truly independent black party.

Questions and discussion

All right, and now I'll go on to pick up some of the questions that have been asked, and perhaps get some answers from the audience and perhaps answer some myself. Here's a question I would want to help someone from the audience, on the tape.

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Breitman: What answer do we give to the sincere white radical who claims that black nationalism is racism in reverse? The sincere white radical who claims that black nationalism is racism in reverse. How would we answer him? Yes. Stand up and speak loud, please.

Speaker from the floor: [inaudible]

Breitman: Has anyone got more? Yes.

Speaker from the floor: [inaudible]

Is Marxism a white man's philosophy?

Question: [inaudible] ... opinion on the accusation that Marxism is a white man's philosophy.

Breitman: Aside from the concrete flaw in this accusation, which is that there are real, live black and yellow Marxists today... Well, let's just dwell a little bit more on the second part. It's true that Marxism arose and developed originally in Western Europe, where the population was practically all white, and that Marx was classified as a white. But it was never intended to be a philosophy, or whatever you want, a theory, exclusively for the people of Western Europe. It was intended as a philosophy, and it is a philosophy, for the whole world. It applies to wherever there are struggles against oppression and exploitation. Since Marx's time, the situation has changed very much. Marxism has spread all over the world. And I believe, and I say, that in today's world there are more non-white Marxists and supporters of Marxism than there are white Marxists or supporters of Marxism. Numerically, if you want to look at it that way, the argument is entirely false.

DeBerry, as I mentioned last week, was invited by Liberator to write a reply to Cruse, and he wrote it and he submitted it quite a while ago. One issue of Liberator came out and it wasn't in that; another issue of Liberator came out and it wasn't in that; and now the latest one has just arrived and it's not in that. So I think we would be safe in concluding that they're not going to print it. DeBerry touched on this question in his reply. Perhaps the reply will eventually be printed in The Militant. Here's what he said in reply to Cruse. He says, "If Marxism is white, Western, and obsolete, as Cruse contends, how can he account for the fact that from China to Cuba, where capitalism has been abolished by mass revolution, this was done under the banner of Marxism? How does he explain the fact that socialism is becoming the most popular mass creed in almost all the countries and continents where colored peoples are fighting for freedom?" And then, since Cruse considers the American Negro struggle to be a semi-colonial revolt, DeBerry said, "If Marxism has been so helpful and correct as a guide in the fight against imperialism and white supremacy in the colonial world, what prevents this method from being equally useful in the Freedom Now struggle here in the heartland of imperialism and white supremacy?" Perhaps this is so decisive that it may be one of the reasons why they're not going to print the reply. I don't know.

Now in one place in his article Cruse refers to Ward [?]. He just calls him Ward; he doesn't say which Ward, so that the reader would hardly know who he's talking about unless he's a member of our party or our movement or around it. And he quotes Ward to the effect that dialectics and Marxism apply to all periods and places, or something like that. You may remember, you've probably noticed it, and Cruse replied, yes, but who's going to decide that, or something like that. Well, Ward was correct. The theory is applicable, when properly utilized, to all of the social situations in this world today, to those pre-socialist situations, to those capitalist situations. And when Cruse says this, he adds, if I can find the remark... yes, here it is. He says, "If historical science or dialectics is to be considered really scientific, it must be developed and verified in life by the inclusion of the social experiences, the history, the ideas and political philosophies, the points of view, of the backward peoples, not just of those in the advanced capitalist countries." And among the so-called backward peoples, he specifically includes the American Negroes.

Well, that's just what we've been saying too, and we said it a little ahead of Cruse. That's what we mean when we talk about the Afro-Americanization of Marxism. We are trying to demonstrate that Marxism does apply to all of the experiences, to all of the philosophies, to all of the ideas, to all of the needs of the so-called backward people as well as the advanced people. And I think that in the year or two in which we have been demonstrating it, we have made considerable progress along this line. And I think Comrade Vernon's articles in The Militant on the black ghetto are a very fruitful example of the application of the method to a specific condition. I don't know whether that answers the whole question, but we'll pass on.

If the Negro people decide to separate

The question: in what way would we enter into supporting the decision of the Negro people to form a separate nation, if such a move was decided upon? Would we actively work in the forming of such a nation? Would we attempt to influence them to stay and work toward change here while at the same time supporting their decision? Would we merely defend their right to such a move but not enter actively, etc.? Well, we will enter into the decision of the Negro people in the following way: our Negro comrades, as part of the Negro people, will help to make that decision. They will help to make that decision in consultation and in collaboration with other Negro revolutionists. And if such a move is decided on and carried through, our comrades, acting for the party, and therefore the party through them, will participate in the separation if it takes place.

Would we actively work in the forming of such a nation? Yes, in that way we would, very definitely. And the white comrades would work to help them in whatever way they could from outside the Negro community, by giving them active support, active material aid, collaboration, active military aid, and so on. Would we attempt to influence them to stay and work toward change here while at the same time supporting their decision? Well, in this sense, we would. We would immediately, upon coming to power, do everything we could to sweep away every remnant of Jim Crow, in the same way that Castro did it so quickly in Cuba. That would be the best contribution we could make toward helping them arrive at the decision to stay in a unified country. But merely doing that is not necessarily going to remove the suspicions or the demand for a separate nation. It will be a positive contribution, to show them that there is a possibility for them to achieve equality within the socialist United States. But if they don't accept that and want to separate into their own nation, we will support that.

Why recruit from the Freedom Now Party?

The next question: if the SWP does not want to dominate the FNP, why does it seek to recruit the leadership of the FNP and other Negro organizations? You remember, Wednesday night I went into the charge by Cruse that we seek to dominate the FNP or any other Negro organization with which we have any relations. I attempted, I think successfully, to demonstrate that that is not our concept. We are not in favor of dominating the Negro movement, because that is not the kind of relation which we seek. We seek a fraternal relation with other movements, not to dominate them. We think that a dominated movement isn't worth having. It won't be a good movement. It won't be a revolutionary movement. And particularly, the Negro movement, the more independent it is of anybody, the better it is for the struggle, both of the Negro people and the whites. So this question comes up, following what we said on Wednesday: if the SWP doesn't want to dominate the FNP, why does it seek to recruit the leadership of the FNP?

Well, we seek to recruit the leadership of the FNP for the same reason that we seek to recruit the leadership of any other mass organization. Because we want them to accept our ideas, just as we want that movement to accept our ideas. We seek openly to influence them, to win them over to our ideas, even if we don't have a single member in them. The fact that we seek to recruit them, and that we seek to influence them where we can't recruit them, is not a sign that we want to dominate the movement, but that we want to influence it. Yes?

Question: [inaudible] ... Does the leadership influence the FNP or the party?

Breitman: I don't think it refers only to the leaders. It refers to the members, too, I think the question does. That is, we seek to recruit people to the SWP: members of the FNP, members of the Communist Party, members of the Socialist Party, even members of the Socialist Labor Party.

Question: [inaudible] ... to go out and try to recruit the leaders?

Breitman: Well, if the leaders were revolutionary socialists, we certainly would try to recruit them. Why not?

Question: [inaudible] ... to this white organization ... and not let them recruit?

Breitman: Well, that's a matter that they will decide for themselves. If they think it'll be detrimental to their work in the FNP, they probably wouldn't join. [inaudible] Well, I think we take essentially the same attitude toward the union movement. We attempt to recruit members of the union movement, and of course people say that means that you want to dominate the union movement. If we are to refrain from recruiting people who belong to other organizations, we had better give up. Well, the principle is the same. Yes?

Question: [inaudible]

Breitman: [inaudible] Most of the people we try to recruit are precisely people who belong to other organizations, because they are among the ones who actually are willing to go out and do something about [inaudible] and who actually want to change [inaudible] through organizational power [?]. The question is, what kind of recruit leaders of the FNP [?]... Particularly, if you stop and think about following through a few more steps, what if we do recruit people? Let's say we've been here in Detroit, we're in the Detroit branch. Well, realistically, what does that mean? That means that they then come into our branch with full democratic rights. They will then bring their ideas in here, they will then convince our comrades, discuss with us, and go on. In other words, we are opening up our organization to them so that they can dominate us. We have no intention that we had to remain an all-white party [?]. We have been trying to become an integrated party, and we have no worries about having the majority of the people within our organization [inaudible]. In a sense, our kind of recruiting is our way of allowing them to take over our organization.

All right, let's try to keep it short. And stand up when you talk, please.

Speaker from the floor: [inaudible]