What a Minority Can Do

Introduction

Chair: The next speaker at this Winter Educational Conference of the Midwest Young Socialist Alliance comes to us from Detroit. He's a former editor of the Militant, a long-time activist in the revolutionary socialist movement. He's speaking on what a minority can do. I give you George Breitman.

Why it is hard to see what a minority can do

1963 was the most eventful year in the history of the American Negro struggle. And as it ended, people all over the country were stopping to assess what had happened, to think over what was done and what was not done, what was accomplished, what was not accomplished. And our comrade Clifton DeBerry, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for president this year, had an opportunity at the end of 1963 to make a tour of most of the major cities in the North, from one end of the country to the other, and to learn something about the thinking and the consciousness and the moods of Negro militants.

And I met him soon after and asked him what was the most striking thing he had observed about their thinking. One of these was the [?] difficulty in getting across the idea about how much the Negro people can do even though they are a minority, how much they can do on their own, alone and unaided if necessary. This seems to be a tough point to persuade people of, even people who are prepared emotionally to act alone if necessary. That is, tough to explain in a logical, convincing, theoretically convincing way. It is certainly one of the reasons why the idea of the Freedom Now Party has not yet caught on with more Negroes. Even when they know political action is necessary, many haven't yet been able to see how or if independent political action in the form of an all-black political party can promote their goals and achieve their aims.

Now, why is it so hard for some, even militant Negroes, to grasp the full potentialities of determined and revolutionary activity of a minority, to perceive how vast the accomplishments of a minority can be, how they are capable of initiating changes that can transform the whole nation and thereby the whole world? I would say there are three reasons for this. First, the teaching, the influence, the education, the propaganda of the whole capitalist system from the cradle to the grave is directed to brainwashing the people and to convincing them that they must wait until they are a majority, that a minority can plead and beg but that they cannot accomplish any big changes by themselves until they have the consent of the majority. Above all is this idea burned into the minds and souls of Negroes, whose history is distorted or denied and who are made to feel not only that they are a minority but an insignificant minority who have never amounted to much by themselves and who, without the stern supervision or benign direction of the great white fathers, would hardly know how to flush a toilet.

In other words, for Negroes to comprehend how much a minority can do, they must buck everything that they are taught from the beginnings of consciousness. They virtually have to make a revolution in their thinking. There is a certain irony in these things that are taught by the capitalists, because the truth is that the capitalists are a minority themselves, in fact a much smaller minority than the Negro people, and yet this capitalist minority controls the whole country, lock, stock and barrel, controls its wealth and means of production, controls its political structure, and even controls our very lives by their monopoly of the decisions of war and peace, and therefore is a living refutation of what it teaches us about the limits of what a minority can accomplish.

The second reason why it is hard to see the truth about what a minority can do is because the present Negro leadership, almost in its entirety, is enslaved by the ideas promulgated and propagated by the capitalist class, repeats these ideas incessantly and like parrots, and does everything in its power to discourage the mass of the people from taking steps genuinely independent of all segments of the white majority. I'll return to these Negro leaders and their arguments in a moment.

The third reason is that the radical movement, I would say the whole radical movement with but one exception, the Socialist Workers Party, although approaching questions from a different standpoint than that of the ruling capitalist class, has failed to comprehend the essence of this question too, and instead of promoting and encouraging both theoretically and practically an understanding of the dynamics and potential of minority action, has on many occasions and in many ways misunderstood and even discouraged it. An example is their attitude to the Freedom Now Party. I do not know of a single organization in this country claiming to be Marxist or socialist or communist that supports the Freedom Now Party today except the Socialist Workers Party. The Communist Party, the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, the Socialist Labor Party, the Progressive Labor Movement, not one of these favors the development of an all-black Freedom Now Party, independent of the power structure and of the two major parties. And if you trace back the causes, you will find them to be most un-Marxist, un-socialist, and un-communist failures to grasp the revolutionary implications of the independent struggles of the Negro minority.

The Negro leaders against the Freedom Now Party

I want now to examine some typical arguments against such independent action by the present Negro leaders. When the Freedom Now Party was organized in Detroit a few months ago, for several weeks the press was very much concerned about it. And every big-name Negro who came to Detroit for several weeks thereafter was immediately cornered by the press and urged to make some statement against the Freedom Now Party. The one of these who arrived a few days after it was organized was Reverend Martin Luther King, and when they approached him he made the following statement: "I am opposed to anything or any party that teaches separation of the races because I am for integration. If the party is designed to get more Negroes interested in politics, fine, otherwise I can see no good that can come from an all-black party. One-tenth of the population will never be able to dominate nine-tenths." End of quotation.

Now in this statement, Reverend King is guilty of making a false counterposition between separation of the races, as he calls it, teaching the separation of the races, and integration. The Freedom Now Party does not teach the separation of the races. It recognizes that this is a society where the races are separate in fact and attempts to utilize the existing separation imposed by capitalism in order to change society and do away with the exploitation made possible by this existing and imposed separation. King himself is well aware of this. King is a preacher, the head of a church, and that church happens to be all black. He doesn't reject or oppose this church because it is all black. He knows there is nothing racist about this church being all black. It's the result of living in a racist society, and in fact he works through this all-black church and tries to build it, and at the same time he advocates integration.

Now, why can't an all-black party do the same things as an all-black church? That is, utilize the separation created by racist society in order to weld together the black victims of racism so that they can work to end racism altogether. Why not? Why is it permissible in King's eyes for Negroes to pray together, but not permissible for them to join together in political action in the way they find most effective for ending their oppression? Shouldn't King, if he's logical and consistent, propose that Negroes give up their all-black churches too because they're not integrated? Posed this way, King might answer, but we have all-black churches because it's the only kind available to us. And the answer of the Freedom Now Party could be, yes, and an all-black political party is the only kind available to us that we think has any chance of solving our problems.

But King's other remark is even more revealing when he said, one-tenth of the population will never be able to dominate nine-tenths. Maybe not, although I've already pointed out that one percent of the capitalists dominate 99 percent of the rest of us. But anyhow, that's not the issue posed by the Freedom Now Party. It is not the Freedom Now Party's goal for the Negro one-tenth to dominate the white nine-tenths. Just the opposite. Their goal is to keep the white nine-tenths from dominating the black one-tenth, which is a different thing. And how to do it? That's the difference between the Freedom Now Party and King. Can the minority end the domination of the majority by acting with complete independence from the majority, ideologically, organizationally, politically, or must the minority adapt itself in tempo and in perspective to the prejudiced majority just because it is a majority, and not do certain things because the majority will not like it? That's the real difference between King and revolutionary Negroes, and that's why King prefers to misstate and misrepresent the issues in the way he does.

Shortly thereafter another noted figure who came to Detroit was A. Philip Randolph, vice president of the AFL-CIO and president of the Negro American Labor Council, and he too dutifully came forward with a statement attacking the FNP. I'll just read the first two sentences of it. "Racial isolation in any form," said Randolph, "cannot register any influence on American political events. It is completely foreign to the political thoughts and actions of America." In his eagerness to damn the Freedom Now Party, Randolph here is really damning himself. What he calls racial isolation is all-black organization for the purpose of ending the isolation of Negroes produced by a racist society.

Randolph here is so blinded factionally that he forgets his own role, the thing that probably he will be best remembered for. Because it so happens that until Elijah Muhammad became prominent, Randolph, next to Marcus Garvey, was the leader to do the most for what he now calls racial isolation, that is, create all-black organizations. The first March on Washington movement, which Randolph organized in 1941, we must never forget was all black, and Randolph was foremost in insisting that it be all black. And that first March on Washington movement, even though it did not materialize in a march because Randolph capitulated to Roosevelt and called it off, nevertheless accomplished more than the interracial march that took place last August, because it forced Roosevelt to issue the first FEPC order, which is more than the recent march resulted in. The truth is, contrary to Randolph, that all-black organization, which he now mislabels as racial isolation, did more to influence American life than any interracial movement ever has done, and therefore is the very opposite of isolation.

I think it's instructive that in order to belittle the Freedom Now Party, Randolph has to belittle himself or his own past, or that part of his own past which he has the most reason to be proud of. It seems to be characteristic of the Kings and Randolphs that they don't argue the question of independent minority action accurately, but have to mislabel and confuse and misstate the issue. And the reason for that is that their own position is so weak, basically.

I will give only one more example of the kind of reasoning employed by Negro opponents of independent minority action, again from a statement issued shortly after the Freedom Now Party was organized in Detroit, by Alex Fuller, who is the vice president of Negro [?] and the vice president of the Wayne County AFL-CIO. And he said, "It is a serious mistake when minority groups, now on the threshold of making tremendous gains for Negroes, separate themselves from others who are working for the same objectives. We cannot afford to separate or isolate ourselves. We stand on the side of all democratic thinking people who believe and advocate first-class citizenship for everyone. We cannot do it alone." End of quotation.

Translated, what Alex Fuller means is this: we can't get anything unless we remain in the Democratic Party. We must wait until the Democrats are ready. Just the opposite is the truth. Negroes will never get first-class citizenship in a thousand years as long as their political power is tucked away in the vest pocket of the Democratic Party. If they have to depend on and wait for the Democrats or the Republicans, their children and their children's children will never have the taste of freedom in their mouths. Naturally, nobody in his right mind wants to separate from others who are working for the same objectives. But it is a lie, a foul and foolish lie, to pretend that the Democratic Party or the Republican Party has the same objectives as the Negro people. If that was the case, the present massive Negro revolt would have no purpose or meaning. The objective of the major parties is to quiet the Negroes with a few token concessions, while their objective is freedom. Surely there's a difference here.

And it is just this difference that separates Negroes from what Fuller calls democratic thinking people. Negroes want freedom now, and democratic thinking people want Negroes to have it later. The only way Negroes can prevent separation from the liberals on this issue is to give in to them and to let them decide when and where and how much freedom Negroes shall have. And that's what Alex Fuller and the other Negro leaders have done, that's what they want the Negro people to do or keep on doing. But the Freedom Now Party has decided that a hundred years of political subservience is enough. They have made their declaration of political independence, and they are striking out on their own, determined to use their political power for themselves, first, last, and all the time.

What kind of minority is meant

Now, before proceeding to our examination from a Marxist point of view of how much and not how little a minority can do, I should already have made clear before this that I am not talking about just any minority, but about a minority with certain characteristics, certain features, a certain history. And also, yes, I am talking about a minority of a certain size too. So let me get the question of size out of the way first. Obviously not every minority is big enough to do the things I am going to talk about. Size is important too. If there are only two or three million Negroes in this country, which is approaching a population of 200 million, they could not accomplish what a minority of 20 million can accomplish. But 20 million is a big force, big enough to tear things up, big enough and weighty enough so that what it does can appreciably affect other forces.

After all, how many nations in the United Nations, not only the new ones in Africa and Asia, but also the old ones in Europe and the Americas, how many of these nations have a population of 20 million? I made a fast survey yesterday, and I found that in the United Nations, which has over 100 countries represented, only 20 of those nations have more than 20 million people, and that therefore more than four-fifths of the countries represented in the United Nations are smaller in population than the Negro people of the United States.

Now, what are the other characteristics besides size of the kind of minority that we are talking about here? Because size and relative weight are not the only important factors to be considered. For example, a minority of even 40 million cannot accomplish much by itself if it is, or as long as it is, satisfied and contented with its conditions, or indifferent and apathetic about them. As important as size, or more important, in deciding what a minority can do are social, economic, political, historical, and psychological factors. In other words, what a minority can do depends on whether or not it is oppressed and exploited because of some minority trait or feature, is separated out by society for special inferior treatment, is denied equal treatment, opportunity, and status; whether or not it is at the bottom of the social structure, so that when it rises it shakes the whole setup; whether or not it is condemned to live under conditions worse than the rest of society; whether or not it is part of the most productive and progressive force in the modern world, the working class, and yet at the same time is denied the full benefits of membership in that class; whether or not it exists not only in an oppressive and exploitive society but in an oppressive and exploitive society in deep crisis, challenged on all sides by change and therefore no longer stable and able to maintain the status quo however hard its rulers try to maintain it.

Whether or not this minority believes it can take advantage of this crisis of society, is affected by and responds to the great tides of change and revolution sweeping the world, has a sense of kinship and solidarity with the masses changing the rest of the world; whether or not it has the consciousness of being an oppressed minority with common interests, can be knitted together for common action and goals; whether or not it is compact and contiguous geographically so that it can act with maximum cohesiveness and impact; whether or not it has learned to see through the brainwashing which the ruling class uses to keep this minority in its place; whether or not it realizes it has never made any gains except by fighting for them; whether it has lost patience with the majority and has lost respect for it, sees no further reason to believe in gradualism, is freeing itself from the influence of conservative leaders who have always held them back, and shows the capacity to produce new militant and revolutionary leaders; whether or not it has special privileges to make it conservative or cautious; whether or not it feels it has nothing to lose but its chains; whether or not it has the capacity to defend itself against terror and violence; whether or not it is developing a militant ideology and philosophy and methodology of its own that can motivate and spark sustained and audacious and independent struggle.

In short, I am talking about the characteristics that fit the American Negro people, or which the Negro people are in the process of acquiring at an extremely rapid rate and which are impelling them toward the kind of action that will make possible the full utilization of the maximum potential of this kind of minority.

What such a minority can do

And here are some of the things such a minority can do, not necessarily in the order of their importance. One, it can force serious concessions from the ruling class. It cannot, as long as the capitalist class is in power, win full and unconditional equality, because that is incompatible with the present social system, which rests on the basis of inequality. But it can force the present ruling class to lift some of the existing racial restrictions and barriers in the form of more rights, more jobs, better jobs, better schools, better housing, less police brutality, and a greater measure of formal equality before the law. Negroes will not settle for such partial gains and concessions, but they would be fools not to fight for them and take them and utilize them to press for more and more fundamental changes.

Two, a minority properly oriented and led can go much, much further than it has gone so far to make the present system unworkable and intolerable as a way of winning their own equality. Some people call this the strategy of social dislocation. Reverend Clegg [?] of Detroit has called it a strategy of chaos and has called for it. Others call it by the name of mass civil disobedience. Whatever you call it, it has barely been tried in practice in America up to now. It consists of making the system so expensive and so inconvenient that white people are forced to ask themselves whether it is worthwhile, and whether they should not in their own interests help to reform or do away with it altogether.

It means lying down, interposing your bodies on the airplane runways, on the expressways, at the plant gates, at the school entrances, at the point of production and the point of distribution and the point of transportation, and attempting to throw a monkey wrench into the wheels of the system to paralyze it, to bring it to a stop. It means saying, if we can't have decent and equal schools, then let's not have any schools. If we can't have jobs and job equality, then let no one be able to work. If we can't vote, then let nobody be able to vote. If we can't belong to the unions as equals, then we don't care what happens to the unions. It means carrying the principle of the sit-down strike, which stopped production, much further and into entirely new areas of social life.

I say this has been barely tried as a full-scale weapon of the Negro minority, but I have no doubt that it will be in increasing scope. Already some members of SNCC have projected such action and have had it rejected by the moderate leaders like Reverend King, who talks about civil disobedience but is mortally afraid of really unleashing it on a mass scale and without restriction. The sit-ins, the lie-ins, the wait-ins, etc., were just the faint and small and exploratory versions of what is still to come in a giant size and to the accompaniment of deep social convulsions and conflict. To avoid misunderstanding, let me just say that what I am talking about here is not pacifism, but an all-out struggle, which, when it reaches full flower, will be the equivalent of a general strike, and a general strike usually tends to lead to the posing of the question of who shall have the power in the land.

Three, a minority can, merely by carrying through its fight for democratic rights without compromise, help to educate and radicalize the American people, especially the youth in whose hands the future lies. In fact, it is already doing so. You in this audience of young socialists and young radicals know better than anybody else how profoundly your thinking about the whole world has been influenced by the Negro struggle, perhaps even before you were in direct contact with it. How your general ideas about capitalism and socialism, about the myths you were taught about bourgeois democracy and the free world, were clarified or formed or dispelled by the elementary struggle of the Negroes. Not only the Cuban Revolution, not only the danger of atomic war, but something much closer to home, the Negro revolt, and often this was the first factor, have helped to educate you and radicalize you and get you to dedicate your lives to the struggle for a better world. There can be no doubt that in this respect you were not so much unique as early, and that the deepening struggle of the Negro minority will have similar repercussions on other young people and on some of the not completely hopeless older people as well.

Four, a minority can not only educate other forces but set them into motion too. It can stimulate them to fight for their own needs and interests through the power of example as well as the power of pressure. A small illustration of the power of example you've already heard about was the reference by Comrade Vernon to the rent strike which began among Negroes in Harlem and now is spreading to other sections of the population in other parts of the city. Some of you may remember the cases concerning police brutality in Detroit last summer, which was written about in our press, where Negroes staged a militant demonstration in front of the police headquarters on a Saturday afternoon because the police had shot a young Negro woman in the back, and how only two days later a group of young white people staged an even more militant demonstration, because they were throwing rocks at the cops instead of just calling them names, because the cops had shot a young white man in the back.

More recently, I noticed a little item in the newspapers about some airline pickets outside of the Newark terminal who had been picketing up and down outside for a long, long time and then one day suddenly decided to go into the terminal, which was prohibited, and to sit down there. And they were quickly arrested and asked what was going on. And they said, well, they had seen that the Negroes were able to get action by sit-ins and by going places where they weren't supposed to, so they thought that it was a good idea and they would imitate them. Can anyone doubt, to give another example, that if unemployed Negroes win jobs by demonstrations that force the government to start new public works projects, that unemployed whites will be certain to follow suit and stage demonstrations of their own so that they can win jobs too?

Five, a determined minority, and this is most important, can also divide the majority, can split it at decisive moments and junctures, thereby greatly reducing the disadvantages of being a minority and changing the odds from unfavorable to favorable sometimes. Elsewhere and in our resolutions, we have shown how this process has operated historically. The clearest example was in the fight against slavery. The Civil War was not just a conflict between abstract forces, between northern capitalism and southern slavery. It was also a struggle between classes and living people. And in this, the role of the slaves and ex-slaves was crucial. Again and again in the three or four decades before the Civil War, the North and the South decided to compromise over the slave question and thus avoid any sharp showdown. But the slaves, who were not consulted about these great compromises, did not consent to them. They continued their own independent struggles and resistance through insurrections, sabotage, passive resistance and mass escapes by the underground railway, just as if these great compromises had not been enacted into law. And these independent actions of the slaves prevented the compromises from working. They reopened and sharpened the breach between the South and the North every time the great compromising statesmen tried to close it. They drove a wedge between the slaveholders and those who tried to compromise with the slaveholders and kept on widening the breach. That, above everything else, the bold action of those slaves, is what made the struggle become irrepressible and the breach unbridgeable [?] and the division among the whites insoluble except through resort to civil warfare.

And then the Negroes, at the crucial moment when the war began, pressured the northern government into accepting a revolutionary emancipation policy and completed the process by providing what the reluctant Lincoln later admitted was the military balance of power. We can expect, we can be certain, that the Negroes' struggle for equality in our own time can have a similarly divisive effect on the white majority. The majority is not homogeneous anyway. It is torn and divided and in conflict over a thousand questions of policy and interest. A skillful Negro minority will know how to pick the right place to drive new wedges, to deepen differences among the whites, to sharpen their conflicts, to set them fighting each other, and in the process, as our 1963 convention resolution says, to find alliances with those forces and classes whose interests are closer to the Negroes against those forces who are most hostile to the Negroes.

Six, a Negro minority is also in a position to upset the whole political structure of this country, and to do it, to start it, by going it alone, alone, by what the Negroes themselves decide to do with their own votes and their own minority political strength. We have dealt with this in our convention resolution too, but it bears restatement because it is such an effective refutation of the Kings and Randolphs and Wilkins who say Negroes cannot go it alone in politics because it means certain isolation and defeat. Negroes can form their own party. Negroes can run their own candidates. Negroes, because they are already a majority in many districts thanks to the segregated housing system, can elect dozens of candidates to Congress from these districts and hundreds of state and local representatives, and thus can have representatives responsible and accountable to the Negro community instead of to the major party machines, and through them can hold and wield a certain legislative balance of power and force real concessions from the power structure instead of just tokens and crumbs.

All of this, you notice, without any drastic change in political relations, just by refusing to vote Democratic or Republican, and by voting black and taking advantage of conditions created by segregation, this will mark a real advance, at least in the degree and quality of Negro representation in politics. But that's only a part of the result of going it alone in politics. By forming their own party, Negroes can paralyze the Democratic Party and rock the whole political structure to its foundations. Without their votes the bell will toll the doom of the Democratic Party. Without their votes the Democratic coalition with the labor movement will be undermined and destroyed. Without their votes, the unions will be forced to reconsider their whole political orientation, and that will give encouragement to the pro-labor party forces among them and eventually will lead to the creation of a new labor party. Without their votes, the present two-party system will pass from the scene and be replaced by something new out of which Negroes may be able to acquire new and more reliable allies than ever before. And all of this can be accomplished by the simple device of forming a Negro party and running Negro candidates. Really, you can almost pity the ignorance of the Negro leaders who preach that Negroes can do nothing by going it alone in politics.

A minority can lead the revolution

Seven. Time prevents me from discussing any but one more thing that a minority can do. And this one I'd like you to listen to carefully, because it's the most important one. And that is that the Negro people, although a minority, can, with a proper, that is, a consistently revolutionary leadership, lead the American working class or socialist revolution. Let me repeat that: the Negro minority can lead the American workers' revolution that will abolish capitalism.

To grasp this profoundly crucial idea, we must rid our minds of the conception that any social revolution in general, or any working-class revolution in particular, has to be led by a majority. Let me illustrate what I mean by going back to the Russian Revolution of 1917. That, as you know, was the first victorious workers' revolution in history. Its victory was possible because it had the support of a majority of the Russian people. But it was not led by any class or by any vanguard of a class that represented the majority of the Russian people. It was a revolution supported by the majority and couldn't have succeeded without that majority support. But it was led by a party that represented a class that was a small minority of the country. It was a working-class revolution. But out of 150 million people in Russia in 1917, the workers were a small minority.

I hope some students here will check the exact figures, which I wasn't able to locate in the last-minute preparation of these remarks. What I found were some figures in Trotsky's history of the Russian Revolution. He estimated that there were at most 10 million workers in Russia, out of 150 million people, 10 million workers, and in this he included agricultural workers, many of whom were only workers part of the time. So the number of industrial workers must have been much smaller than 10 million out of 150 million, maybe not much more than 5 million out of 150 million. Yet this class, with the proper leadership in the form of Lenin's Bolshevik Party, was able to lead a revolution that abolished capitalism in Russia.

This is one of the things that threw the Mensheviks, the Social Democrats, and the other white liberals of that day into confusion. As they understood Marx's predictions about social revolution, it could not take place and should not even be attempted until the country was industrialized to the point where the working class was a majority of the population, as in England then or as in the United States today. And if it was attempted before the working class was a majority of the population, it was bound to fail according to these people, and they were so sure that the Russian Revolution was not according to either Hoyle or Marx that most of them did what they could to make it fail. But they misunderstood Marx and Marxism, as fortunately Lenin and Trotsky and others did not.

A socialist revolution can be led by the working class even when the working class is a minority, provided that working-class minority can get an alliance with and support from the other non-capitalist forces and classes in the country. In Russia, this meant an alliance with the peasantry, who constituted, I don't remember and I wish again somebody would check and supply these figures, let's say, around 80 or 90 percent of the country.

The working-class minority was able to lead the Russian Revolution because it seized the advantages resulting from the crisis of the capitalist class in the war, determined that the revolution could and should be made, and worked out an alliance with the most oppressed sections of the peasantry. It worked out an alliance based on common interests of workers and peasants without making any concessions to the peasants about the need to end capitalism, and offered to satisfy their most pressing needs. But this alliance was based on the needs and interests of the working-class minority first of all, because the workers were the backbone of the revolution and the most revolutionary force in Russia.

Now why, in discussing the American revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, have I gone all the way back to 1917 and far-off Russia? Because I thought it would throw light on the distinction between making a revolution and leading a revolution, on the leading role that a minority can play, on how dogma can blind you to the leading role of a minority, and on how successful leadership of a working-class revolution by a minority class depends partly on the ability to make alliances with other exploited classes and groups. I'm not proving anything by this. I'm only trying to get us to look at the question of the role of revolutionary minorities in a fresh way.

Trotsky on the Negroes as a vanguard

The working-class revolution has to be led by workers through their party or parties or councils. That's one thing we learned from Marx. Marx did not say the working-class revolution had to be led by white workers. He said only by workers, by the most revolutionary workers. Now the Negroes in this country are a racial minority, but that's only one of their aspects. And it would be truly fatal to forget their other salient aspect, namely that they are in their overwhelming majority a group that is proletarian in composition. In fact, Negroes are more proletarian than whites, and they are a section of the working class as a whole. And unless we are blind, they are at present and will probably remain the most radicalized and revolutionary section of the working class, the section of the working class that has the most to gain from social revolution and the least to lose.

If this is true, and I maintain it's not only true, but crucial for the future of the American revolution, then why should it be hard, when we are discussing what a radical minority of the working class can do, to conceive of the possibility that this minority may lead the rest of the working class and its allies in the revolution to abolish capitalism? As a matter of fact, that's just what Leon Trotsky, who did so much to educate us in Marxism, taught us when we were trying 25 years ago to work out a correct and revolutionary analysis of the Negro struggle.

Things were a lot different in 1933, before the CIO, and in 1939, long before the current radicalization of the Negro people. But let me read you some things Trotsky tried to teach us then and see if they do not apply with even greater validity and relevance to the changed conditions of our time. The documents that I'm going to read you a few sentences from are collected in the Pioneer Publishers bulletin, Documents of the Negro Struggle, which is on sale in the other room. I'm going to read first from a discussion with Trotsky in 1933, 31 years ago, at the very depth of the Depression, before the CIO was formed. And the English is not too good because that was not Trotsky's native tongue, but the ideas were. He's talking about what will happen when a radicalization begins in America. He says:

I believe that by the unheard-of political and theoretical backwardness and the unheard-of economic advance, the awakening of the working class will proceed quite rapidly once it begins. The old ideological covering will burst. All questions will emerge at once, and since the country is so economically mature, the adaptation of the political and theoretical to the economic level will be achieved very rapidly. It is then possible that the Negroes will become the most advanced section. We have already a similar example in Russia. The Russians were the European Negroes. It is very possible that the Negroes also, through the self-determination, will proceed to the proletarian dictatorship in a couple of gigantic strides ahead of the great block of white workers. They will then furnish the vanguard. I am absolutely sure that they will in any case fight better than the white workers. That, however, can happen only provided the Communist Party carries on an uncompromising, merciless struggle, not against the supposed national prepossessions of the Negroes, but against the colossal prejudices of the white workers, and gives it no concessions whatever.

In other words, once the workers begin to move, he says they may move very rapidly. And "Communist Party," with a small c, he would say the Socialist Workers Party. That's 1933. Now, six years later, 1939, Trotsky is talking with another group of Americans, and he said:

If the workers' aristocracy is the basis of opportunism, one of the sources of adaptation to capitalist society, then the most oppressed and discriminated against are the most dynamic milieu of the working class. We must say to the conscious elements of the Negroes that they are convoked by the historic development to become a vanguard of the working class. What serves as the brake on the higher strata? It is the privileges, the comforts that hinder them from becoming revolutionists. It does not exist for the Negroes. What can transform a certain stratum, make it more capable of courage and sacrifice, it is concentrated in the Negroes. If it happens that we in the SWP are not able to find the road to this stratum, then we are not worthy at all. The permanent revolution and all the rest would be only a lie.

Let me just repeat those three things. It is possible the Negroes will become the most advanced section. It is possible that the Negroes will proceed to proletarian dictatorship ahead of the great block of white workers. The Negroes are convoked by the historic development to become a vanguard of the working class. What Trotsky was trying to get us to understand, therefore, 25 and 30 years ago, was the possibility that the Negroes could lead the proletarian revolution. And this our party tried to understand and express in the very first resolution on the Negro struggle it ever adopted, in saying which it was the first party to ever put this idea forward.

And now I'll read just the first two sentences of that resolution, which was adopted at our 1939 convention. It goes as follows: "The American Negroes, for centuries the most oppressed section of American society and the most discriminated against, are potentially the most revolutionary element of the population. They are designated by their whole historical past to be, under adequate leadership, the very vanguard of the proletarian revolution." So what I've been trying to say in the last of my incomplete list of things that a minority can do, that the black minority can lead the white majority of the working class in the coming social revolution, is not really new at all. Because we explicitly and plainly stated that concept in a formal party convention resolution in 1939, before most of the people in this hall were born.

Why the idea still seems new

Then why does it seem new to many of us? Because, I am sorry to say, there is a gap, and it can be a big gap, between thinking or hearing or even saying something, accepting it in a general but cursory way as logically correct, between that and grasping a profound truth that flies in the face of all prevailing opinion and pervading prejudice, grasping it in all of its concreteness and relevance and making it a part of you, of your blood and bone and gristle [?], and then guiding your action and your life in accordance with this truth. There's also a big difference between accepting a general possibility that may become true at some indefinite future time and absorbing this possibility as perhaps even a probability right now or in the relatively close future.

Because although in 1939 we accepted the idea that the Negro minority can lead the working-class revolution and willingly adopted that as the official position of the Socialist Workers Party, the truth is that it was only a surface acceptance and adoption, because we were not yet ready to fully understand what Trotsky was trying to teach us. And so, only one and a half months after that 1939 convention voted for this idea and adopted this resolution, J. R. Johnson, the principal leader of our party's Negro work at that time, wrote in our paper, which was then called the Socialist Appeal, that while the idea was correct, that Negroes would be in the forefront, it was an overstatement. And it would have been more correct, he said, instead of saying the Negro people are designated to be the very vanguard, to say that they are designated to be in the very vanguard, which was a real weakening of the idea Trotsky had tried to persuade us of, even though it still left the SWP with the most advanced revolutionary position on the Negro struggle.

But now, with Trotsky long dead, I think we are able to return to that original, unweakened idea and see it in an entirely different light, not as an overstatement, but as a cold, hard, factually correct appraisal of a vital possibility. Because what Trotsky could not teach us completely, we have now been able to learn from the actual development of the Negro struggle itself right before our own eyes these last two or three years. What we were not advanced enough to accept then as theory, we are now able to apprehend as concrete current event, because the fact is that the Negroes are already a vanguard. They are already out in front of most white workers. They are more radicalized than the white workers. They are more ready to fight and sacrifice and die in order to change this system.

And so today many of us, I am sure, will be able to grasp and act on the concept of Negroes as leaders of the workers' revolution, not just as a possibility, but as a probability. I shall not try to complete everything that necessarily flows from this concept, except to say that much does and that all of it is cause for optimism. I shall not try to delineate the kind of alliance that the Negro vanguard of the working-class revolution will have to effect with the white workers if the working-class revolution is to be led to success, except to say that it will not, cannot be an alliance that will make concessions in principle to the white workers who will be the allies of the Negroes, any more than the Bolshevik vanguard in Russia made unprincipled concessions to their peasant allies.

Instead, I shall conclude, with much left hanging, by saying that if the ideas in this talk are correct, if the concepts about what a minority can do will prove of practical and theoretical benefit in promoting the Negro struggle for freedom now, then what they demonstrate is the validity and even indispensability of Marxism to Negro revolutionists, whether or not they belong to the SWP. Because what they represent is an initial attempt, however crude and unpolished, to carry out what we called for in our 1963 resolution, that is, the Afro-Americanization of Marxism, by which we meant the application of Marxism to the specific conditions of the Negro people and the application of their experiences to further concretize and enrich Marxism as a tool of revolution.

[Gap in the recording]

Questions and discussion

Breitman: The party itself has been launched. The organization works as a government seems to be very slow [?]. Perhaps some of us are a little disappointed. Well, certainly it's slow, and I'm sure it's disappointing. But we should not underestimate the difficulties of building another party. You don't create a party in a few months, not even from August to January. It takes time to gather together the cadres, to hammer out the program, to bring together the people who will put flesh on the skeleton. And it is clear that in its first stages the Freedom Now Party pioneers must spread the idea. We can't expect that it's going to spring up full blown. It's necessary to spread the idea, which has been pretty well suppressed, isn't given publicity in the capitalist press and usually unfavorable publicity in the Negro press. It's been slandered, but the supporters of it have had very little opportunity to break through. This is going to be a long and difficult process. It's not going to happen all at once, and if there were some illusions about this, either by the members of the Freedom Now Party or by their white sympathizers, then they should begin to be dispelled now. The main job of the Freedom Now Party appears to be the spreading of propaganda. If it's able to get on a ballot here or there, that will be a good thing. But it would be expecting the impossible to have a party faced with so many odds and enemies run a national campaign less than one year after it was announced.

Question: My question is a little involved. But in Robert Vernon's speech, you pointed out that the schoolboy [?] boycotts didn't have the punch behind them that the rent strikes had, partly because the rent strikes strike at the profits of the landlords, and that this effective tool in the liberal [?] struggle was one that, because it was anti-capitalist in nature, because it struck the landlords' profits, had a logic of development that would spread, that other minorities and other oppressed sections besides the Negroes would take up this particular form of struggle. And that we project in a way the development of the Freedom Now Party as attacking the monopoly of politics by the capitalists, as providing another example that the workers can follow, and that this means of struggle in the political realm has a logic that will spread. But what about the struggle for jobs? How do we conduct a struggle for jobs so that it has a logic that will be anti-capitalist and spread to the other sections? What I'm thinking of particularly is, how do we prevent some kind of capitalist from being able to use white against black and stymieing this struggle?

Breitman: Well, we will not be able to prevent that completely. There will be black workers pitted against white, and there will be a lot of conflict and people hurt. The program for jobs of the Negro struggle still remains to be written. There are various approaches being taken to it. The Negro movement as a whole hasn't decided on which they should be. The fight at construction jobs last summer was one beginning of the attempt at what I called social dislocation, that is, an effort by Negroes to shut down jobs until Negroes could be employed on them in equality or in some rough proportion to their numbers. The idea being that if they were able to shut down the jobs, they would create ferment inside the white community and bring about a struggle between whites and whites, and that those who had been deprived of their jobs would be under pressure then to reopen the jobs and to make concessions to the Negroes.

Nobody has the final answer to this. We attempted in our convention resolution to indicate some of the lines along which the fight could be conducted most profitably for both Negro and white workers. We raise the idea that the slogan, the 30-hour week for 40 hours' pay, is one that should be raised not only by the labor movement, but should be raised by the independent Negro movement, that in their fight for jobs they should demand the 30-hour week. This is the kind of demand which would be entirely in their own interest and yet at the same time would make an approach to the interests of the white workers who, even if they were not fighting for the 30-hour week at this time, could understand that this was something in their interest too. The job of the future is to work out a full program of action along these lines. And this is something that the Negro movement will probably have to supply.

Question: [inaudible] When Malcolm X spoke [inaudible] it's a picture of the Negro situation and brought it home so tremendously to the audience there, [inaudible] standing ovation every five minutes [?]. And this is a tremendous revolutionary force. [inaudible] Is there anything positive [inaudible] that would join this [inaudible] to take a much better position within [inaudible] the political force?

Breitman: The Muslims are primarily a propaganda group, and their propaganda is very good and very effective on the whole, and it has had very positive effects on the rest of the Negro movement. It has pushed the whole Negro movement to the left. But so far, the Muslim movement remains predominantly a propaganda movement. That is, it does not engage in day-to-day struggles. It does not have a program of action for today. It has an ultimate goal of separation, a separate nation, and so on. But it does not do things like conducting rent strikes, although it is situated in the heart of the ghetto and would be in a very effective position to lead excellent rent strikes. But they don't do that kind of thing. They have a problem on whether or not they are going to pass from what we call a propaganda group to a group of mass action. And they are mulling this over. There is evidence that among them there are differences of opinion as to whether to take this next logical step.

I didn't attend that meeting at which Malcolm X spoke in Detroit, but I heard about it. And one of the things that Malcolm X seemed to be doing there when he spoke was to give wholehearted endorsement to the idea of a Freedom Now Party. But although he gave that appearance there, the sad truth is that the Muslims have not yet come out really in favor of the Freedom Now Party. They talk about the need for all-black action and an all-black party, but this particular all-black party they have not yet decided to support. And the evidence of that, if there's anyone who doubts it, as some might doubt it if they heard that speech, the evidence is that in Michigan the members of the Freedom Now Party are going around with petitions and trying to place a ticket on the ballot for the 1964 election. But the Black Muslims are not signing these petitions, nor are they circulating them. In other words, they still remain a propaganda group and therefore are as yet unable to play the full role that they could if they were able to make this transition to another kind of organization.

Question: In reference to your concept of the vanguard leadership of the proletariat, for which you created the analogy of Russia, I would like to ask the question in reference to China, and ask you what the lessons are to be learned from the Trotskyist failure in the large industrial centers such as Shanghai to develop the peasantry as well.

Breitman: Well, I would undertake to discuss those lessons on another occasion when that subject is up for discussion. I'm not at all eager to do it now. The Trotskyists were crushed in China before the revolution by the Chiang Kai-shek dictatorship. Its entire leadership was arrested and executed, and only a small number of them were able to make their way to exile. I don't mean by this to say that they didn't make any mistakes in their evaluations of the situation there, but it's too complex a subject and too remote from the topic we're discussing now for me to go into it any further than here.

Question: [inaudible] The word minority does not mean that it's weak, something to be ashamed of, something to dispose of yourself from, something to get out of, to get your identity. [inaudible] Does not tell us that since we are the minority, we are not creative, that we are not productive, that the Negro people cannot [inaudible]. [inaudible] I think they realize that they are the largest minority. I don't think we can let anyone come into our community and [inaudible] say, we'll forget about faith, forget about your history, come to the side where it's been most protected, and so forth, and the problems they all have to solve. This concept, I think, leads to [inaudible]. [inaudible] they have maintained their identity, that they have struggled with their particular [inaudible]. [inaudible]

Breitman: That's why I don't disagree with most of what was said. I did not think I gave any impression that the Negroes were not creative, that they did not have a history, that they had not made contributions. The term minority, as I used it, was strictly a numerical designation. That is, that although the Negroes are the biggest single minority in the country, they are still a minority of the population of this country. They're part of a majority of the world. But in national terms, numerically, they are a minority, and if I was saying anything at all I was saying that's nothing to be ashamed of, but on the contrary it's something that can be the product of great progress, both for them and for the white working class.

Question: You mentioned [inaudible] more leaders like Martin Luther King [inaudible]. Black Muslims are also [inaudible]. Perhaps because in a sense they would get the idea of socialism as a result [?]. But do you feel that because these two elements are not for the same [inaudible], that they may eventually want to start another political party, which is more for the Negro, another Negro political party, which is sort of Democratic-oriented, I mean, a Negro-Democratic party [inaudible]? First of all, do you feel that this will happen [inaudible], and lastly, if it occurs, will this be a serious threat to the United States?

Breitman: Well, yes, I think that there may be another party. That will depend largely on whether or not the present Freedom Now Party is able to build itself into an effective, large organization. If the Freedom Now Party, this present attempt by these present leaders, is not successful, if they are not able to gather around enough forces to make it an effective political instrument, if they're not able to get the Freedom Now Party off the ground, then in all probability the Freedom Now Party will fade away and we will see other attempts at independent black political action. I am sure that if this attempt to build a Freedom Now Party fails, there will be other and more successful attempts. Whether Martin Luther King would want to be associated with any Negro party, I very much doubt, unless something radical occurs to his thinking, because he's opposed to the idea as such of a separate party made up of Negroes. The Muslims, I don't know whether they may not yet come out in favor of the present Freedom Now Party. They are not opposed to it in principle. They have to make the decision for themselves as to what kind of role they want to play in this country. If they decide that they want to engage in immediate struggles, in day-to-day struggles, they may very well decide to go into the Freedom Now Party and to give their very excellent energies and forces to it. But that's something that we can only speculate about, because they haven't made the decision yet themselves.

Question: What do you think of the high points in 1963 [inaudible]? What lessons do you think [?]

Breitman: Well, there were many, and I'm sure that we would not all agree on which were the most important. I myself think that the two high points of the year 1963 were, one, the way in which the masses of poor Negroes poured out into the streets the night that the home of a Negro bourgeois figure, I think his name is Arthur Shores, the night his home was bombed during the early stage of the Birmingham events, poured out into the streets and attacked the cops and the troops. I think that this was a demonstration on the part of the Birmingham ghetto that the masses of the people have a different outlook and are prepared to use different methods than those of the present pacifist leadership of the Negro struggle in Birmingham. The other highlight of the year, as far as I'm concerned, was the beginning of the picketing at the school construction site in Philadelphia in May, because this represented the beginning of the new stage of the struggle in the North, just as the other earlier event represented the beginning of the entry of the masses into the Southern struggle.

I feel that these were the two most important developments, more important than the March on Washington, which was bigger and involved more people. I think symptomatically these were the most important things. And I think that Kennedy felt that way too, because it was right after the Philadelphia construction site picketing began that he changed his tactical line and immediately declared for the first time in history that the Negro struggle was a moral struggle and introduced bills into Congress. That shook them up very much, because they could see that the struggle was passing over from one where the center was the South to the North, and that immediately it began to hit at the crucial question of jobs. And those are two out of many important things that happened during the year that I would center out.

Question: [inaudible] the educational work of the Socialist Workers Party, documents such as your article in the Militant and documents that were adopted at the party convention, the Freedom Now document, there are probably as many white revolutionary socialists and adherents who are in favor of the Freedom Now Party [inaudible] and who are very enthusiastic about the building of such a party. However, the building of this party is the work of the Negro leadership of that party, and [inaudible]. Do you see any dangers of white socialists substituting themselves in this work? And if they're not careful of certain considerations [inaudible]?

Breitman: No, I don't see many dangers of that because of the wise provisions that the founders of the Freedom Now Party have taken, that its membership should be all black. When the Freedom Now Party is really organized in a solid way and has formed its ideas and shaped its cadres, worked out its platform and so on, I am sure that they will welcome the help of sympathetic whites. But in the meantime, I concur with them in feeling that if the Freedom Now Party is to have the trust of the Negro man and woman in the street, it must be founded on the basis of all-black leadership and all-black control.

Question: It seems that, again, over the years, your formulations on the [Negro?] question have become consistently more radical. [inaudible] The analogy between the Negro and [inaudible] the Russian workers, I think. On the other hand, we don't see any of our ideas [inaudible]. Can you comment on this perhaps? [inaudible] Or perhaps you can make some comment on it.

[Tape break]

Breitman: Well, it depends on what you mean by radicalization. If you mean by radicalization the adoption of the ideas worked out by Marx and Lenin and Trotsky and so on, then that hasn't occurred yet. I'm sure that at some stage the radical Negroes are going to realize the value for their own struggle of many of the ideas developed by these Marxist leaders. But when we talk about the radicalization of the Negro people today, we're not talking about it in the sense of the socialization or the Marxization of the Negro people. We're talking about it in relative terms. That is, the Negro movement, as compared with every other social force in this country, has been able to reject the ideology of liberalism, which is still the prevailing idea of, say, the labor movement, the civil liberties movement, the peace movement. Negroes, by their own experience, have been able to learn that liberalism is inadequate. They have to pass beyond liberalism. In other words, they're rejecting the predominant ideology in American life and going beyond it towards something else, something to the left of it. It's in that sense that very plainly one can see that the militants in the Negro struggle are radicalized, are being radicalized, are reaching conclusions more radical than those of the white workers. And this leads to a number of other things as they test this out. It's in that sense, certainly, I think even non-radicals will agree that the Negro movement is more radical than the labor movement or the peace movement and so on.

Speaker from the floor: [inaudible] there's a question back there about black political parties [inaudible] on the Democratic lines [inaudible] a party that's, you might call it, of actions within the Democratic Party, in some states [inaudible] which faces ideally just that, to have it all Negro, and to bring pressure on the Democrats, and hoping that they will soon change their lives [?]. [inaudible] completely aware of the Democratic Party, completely aware of the Republican Party. [inaudible] the only all-black political party [inaudible]. And I want to mention something about the [inaudible] socialism. [inaudible]

Speaker from the floor: [inaudible] I think I see. I can't think of it, but it's just a fear of being way out. [inaudible] Rather than being way out in a typical sense, you can go way out in a more conservative sense. I can personally speculate on what the Freedom Now Party is. [inaudible] But I can definitely say that the Freedom Now Party is not a socialist [party?]. The Freedom Now Party, what it represents, and what any other attempt at any kind of black political party would represent, is an eco-political [?] power under any condition, in all conditions, no matter what the level of struggle in the country in general might happen to be. That is to say, for now, hypothetically, if we got on the ballot this year, we would run a name for president on the national ballot, and of course we wouldn't win. But we'd also run in local elections and in city elections and in state elections where many candidates would win. This would be the purpose of the Freedom Now Party now. On the other hand, perhaps (this is where you start to speculate), in a period when this country is in motion in general, [inaudible] there is general [inaudible] disagreement or lack of support of the major parties, and questions being posed as to what is going to represent the interests of the people [inaudible]. If this were to happen, the [?] party might under those conditions assume different characteristics or take on more of this platform. It might decide on the question of socialism, to the point of taking power and what should be done in the [inaudible] means of production and distribution. We can't get too hung up on the academic or the terminology of what these [inaudible] mean.

Speaker from the floor: I want to hit on one other aspect of something which was pointed out by the speaker's insight [?], but which I want to hit on specifically. Generally speaking, I would say that your nationalists, or those very significant movements situated in the North, have become aware and are involved in the questions through a study of Negro history. That is, they have begun to identify with themselves as being [inaudible] and proceeding from that premise and no other premise. For example, looking at it from that point of view, you can say that, well, in this country perhaps we are a minority, but as a world as a whole, we are not a minority. From this point of view, in identifying with the colonial struggles overseas, you can overcome this on a world scale. Now on a national scale it probably becomes different when you study the fact, or one of these things that many nationalists accept, that is that the Negro [inaudible] for this country. You see, capitalism as it exists would not have been. In other words, the high development of the so-called advanced capitalist countries, which are so happy to be predominantly white, would not exist, and their relationship to the colonial world would not exist. Okay, you could say, well, that's [inaudible]. Okay, then we go further and we look at what happened in the very previous revolution in this country. The Civil War is the best example, because that is the one which is most held up by both nationalists and radicals when we're looking towards the next revolution in this country.

You had a situation there, realistically, where, looking at it from a theoretical aspect, what happened was that the Northern industrialists [inaudible]. But what happened in reality was a situation where some of what Mr. Breitman described [inaudible]. For example, in the Civil War itself, you had slaves who came over to the Union Army. The Union Army, you see, on one hand, was [inaudible] these people who had come over to them, [inaudible] these were the enemy who were supposed to be fighting. [inaudible] You can't emphasize it so much, because the general struggle of the country as a whole [inaudible], but it was the fact that you had more lynchings during periods of uprising, more race riots, than any other period. These are things which nationalists studying Negro history are aware of, and why they're very [inaudible] when they approach this question of Negro and white unity. This is why the Freedom Now Party, being a political question, cuts across most of it. Because if you accept or look at it and understand the Freedom Now Party, the point of view of it, [inaudible] an equal say in what goes on in this country. That is to say, we don't represent 10 percent of the population, but we have a 50 percent decision-making [inaudible].

[inaudible] And what the outcome is going to be is that today is the qualitative change. [inaudible] The whole idea works best when it's based on [inaudible] and doing what liberals can't do by itself. And at the same time, this runs into a problem on any sort of long-range idea. What are you going to do about the whole society? [inaudible] It's very good to say, well, socialism is going to be on some side, or national, or this, that, and so on, and at that point we'll begin with the ideas that it could only be put into practice if you had the rest of the population, because it's a future state. So you've got a kind of [inaudible] right-now program and what we've got to do all by ourselves. [inaudible] nationalize all the big industries, such as the [inaudible] jobs, which can only be done by drawing in a large number of [inaudible] and making a big change in the situation. [inaudible] the question of socialism [inaudible] people from the ghetto who have no previous experience. That idea sounds strange [inaudible].

Speaker from the floor: I would like to support Mr. Breitman's [?] comment on the [inaudible]. And [inaudible] a question about whether or not [inaudible] becomes as radical as Mr. Breitman feels. I'd like to put this whole idea to him. Negroes are more radical [inaudible]. And at the same time, we're becoming more highly selective among the white population. [inaudible] He begins to recognize that he does have a culture, and he does have something to be proud of. And from this, he begins to guide himself and build himself [inaudible].

Question: When the Socialist Workers Party [inaudible] in the early 40s, were you in opposition [inaudible] working to reestablish this in the last 20 years?

Breitman: No. Was anyone, or was it a development in the last few years? It's the position that Trotsky tried to get us to adopt. We adopted it, it's part of the record, it's written out in the introduction to these documents. I explained a year and a half ago, without expressing any agreement or disagreement, I merely explained for the record, that shortly after the convention, the party had modified this, not by adopting a new resolution, but by an expression in the newspaper. Nobody has raised this question since then. Until now, these last few years, the upsurge of the Negro struggle has enabled everybody who looks at it objectively to understand it better, to see what is possible, to see what is even probable, so that no one person should be singled out for his weakness, because the adoption of that position in 1939 was still the most advanced position ever taken on the Negro struggle by any radical group, anywhere, at any time in this country. And if we didn't understand it fully then, it was because a revolutionary party is also subject to the influences of the society in which it lives. Now we are better able to understand it because of the struggle of the Negro people. So what Trotsky tried to teach us theoretically 25 years ago, the Negro people are now teaching us in action. And I don't think that it's too late yet for us to learn it.

Speaker from the floor: [inaudible] She feels she wants a political party. She wants to show her political power [inaudible]. [inaudible] The party is not a radical party. [inaudible] It's a new thing within the system [inaudible]. It might tend towards it, you see. It's not a socialist black party, just like the Democratic Party, you might say, except all the members are black. And this way, the fact is, my opinion is that the focus is to show two nations [?] that there's a total power for blacks within this country. [inaudible] within the Democratic Party, and you don't know what the labor [inaudible] this to, or maybe it'll go for. [inaudible]

Breitman: [inaudible] The Freedom Now Party is only now being organized. It doesn't yet have a platform. It doesn't yet have a program. And I would urge all Negroes who are interested in independent political action to join it and to help decide its platform, to exert your influence in helping to shape what its program will be.

Speaker from the floor: Well, I agree that any group such as the Negro population, in order that it achieve its own self-realization [?], has to do it itself [?]. [inaudible] on this Marxist bit, if the inevitable revolution took place without the Negroes, without the Negro population at the [inaudible], at the leaders [inaudible], the Negroes will still be retaining their feelings of dependence regardless of all the Marxist theories.

Breitman: I don't think that the American socialist revolution can take place unless the Negroes play a leading role in making it take place. And they are not going to play a leading role in making it take place unless they have the kind of alliance with other sections of the population which they feel will assure them of equality in the alliance. So I can't conceive of a revolution from which they are absent in the leadership. And being in the leadership, they'll be in a position to shape the institutions that will develop out of the revolution, and we can be sure that they will exert their full power within the alliance to protect their position and their rights.

Question: I have felt for some time that one of the greatest obstacles of the [project?] is basically the intimidation by police and the courts, of the [inaudible] system. [inaudible] non-violence and [inaudible]. This isn't the most important consideration right now, because in the United States the system is so vulnerable that all you need is some group just to raise a little bit of [inaudible]. The Negro party, as a united front, I'm just wondering, do you think that as a tactic this party might be more effective to point out to the American public the intimidation of the police [inaudible]? Do you think it would be feasible or possible to work for this party to organize some capacity for some program related to the [inaudible] itself? [inaudible] The main focus of the movement, not only in the South but also in the North, shows some [inaudible] the power that the people have. They can focus no matter what its program is, no matter what its problem. In the South, against some of these ordinances, some people have a [inaudible] on the street. But even in the North, you have a right to demonstrate, and the street meetings and whatever, we'll have this type of protest, and the police will move in. [inaudible] I'm not advocating much violence here, but I'm going out of the fact that this intimidation [inaudible]. [inaudible] They wanted us to go downtown [inaudible] to protect the demonstrators from the New York Times. [inaudible] a large group would organize and let the power structure and community know what they were up to, even the press, that they would have sent the organizers to the center, going downtown, just to dare the police or anybody else who wanted to step in. And the New York Times decided to write stuff against the citizens' rights. And I was wondering if the Freedom Now Party, without being bogged down in all the serious politics, do you have to consider it?

Breitman: Well, the Freedom Now Party, in its very first circular announcing its formation, paid attention to the problem of police brutality, which is a serious one not only in the South but also in the North, and undoubtedly will in its program and through its candidates introduce legislative and other political action designed to curb police brutality. But the question of self-defense is not a question of the Freedom Now Party alone. It's a problem of the whole Negro movement. And there's a great deal of discussion going on among the Negro militants in the North as to what measures can be taken to defend Negroes. Not so much against attacks on demonstrations, because they are the exception rather than the rule in the North, but the whole problem of police brutality toward individuals whom a cop meets on the street at 3 o'clock in the morning and shoots down. The arrests, the brutality in the police stations and so on. There's a lot of discussion going on about this, and there are ideas circulating about the creation of defense guards.

In Detroit, just before Christmas, the organization GOAL [?] organized a public meeting downtown in connection with the Christmas boycott. And the meeting was so organized that the speaker was in the center and on each side of him were three people wearing helmets, six people who represented a sort of embryo defense guard. And I'm sure that the idea of protecting Negro organizations, Negro speakers and so on, is going to spread, not only on a political level, not only in connection with the Freedom Now Party, but with the whole Negro movement. [inaudible]