If American communists want to survive this state crackdown, we will need to work fast at rebuilding Marxism’s ties to the anti-racist struggles. We must make it a central priority to reach the Black, Latino, and Native masses, in a way that we haven’t done thus far during the 21st century.
For those within the American communist movement who’ve sought to break out of the petty-bourgeois radical model, and go into the real masses, a major focus in this stage has been on repudiating liberal identity politics. It has been completely necessary for us to combat the metaphysical, anti-materialist academic theories which the modern left has adopted; we’ve needed to fight against the attempts at divorcing the struggles by certain groups from the class struggle, and reducing “class” to just another identity among many. The next step beyond tearing down idpol is to build the structure we need; to create a multi-racial workers coalition that can defend against our ever-more violent repressive state.
This problem we’ve needed to confront within idpol, where the self-described Marxist movement willingly cripples itself through metaphysical theories, is a problem which became so prominent because state repression had already succeeded. There have been times throughout American history when a strong working-class force has emerged, and during those times our class enemies have needed to employ crackdowns as their main counterrevolutionary tactic. Otherwise, the repression in the United States hasn’t been anywhere near as large as it typically is in the imperial peripheries, and this is only because the U.S. empire has already managed to “mow the grass” very effectively within its own borders. In the absence of a strong working class, the biggest tool for attacking workers power becomes the proliferation of pseudo-Marxist ideas, designed to lead class-conscious workers to a political dead-end.
With the rise of militarized police, the project to make ICE into a paramilitary force, and the new wave of political persecutions, the fight is becoming more real. The discursive means for sabotaging revolution aren’t as effective as they were for a while in recent American history, and these escalations in state violence are a direct response to a new revolutionary threat. The ruling class views today’s conditions as so threatening not because the masses have become organized—the bulk of them are still far from gaining organization—but because there has emerged a new risk of restored popular power. Amid our never-ending depression, as well as the new imperialist wars that our ruling class has embarked on, the American people may find a kind of class solidarity which they haven’t yet achieved.
What the system fears is that working-class Americans of all races will join forces to an unprecedented degree, and wage a type of proletarian revolt which has reconciled its racial contradictions in ways that past worker endeavors have failed to. The American labor movement’s refusals to join with indigenous people’s fight against extermination, and the refusal by many 20th century socialist orgs to center the struggle against Jim Crow, were critical reasons why these efforts fell short. William Z. Foster explains these failures in History of the Communist Party, which provides context for how liberal idpol came into being.
The compatible left was able to propagate idpol in the midst of a concerted, strategic project to undermine white working class solidarity with the non-white workers. Before our ruling class corrupted Marxism with notions that reject workers struggle in favor of isolated identity projects, it recruited white chauvinist opportunists to put forth a “Marxism” which dismissed anti-racism as a distraction from class. This was among the great errors that led the Socialist Party to become irrelevant. When the Black Power movement managed to gain serious strength, the opportunists within the left changed their tactic. They now claimed to be in solidarity with the victims of racial and national oppression, so that they could redefine the anti-racist struggle to be something separate from the class struggle. We know that the “anything but class left” (as Parenti described them) are the modern version of the white chauvinist “socialists” because these two elements come from the same class.
Both worldviews are fundamentally bourgeois, informed by an experience that’s detached from the interests of the workers. The capitalist, liberal version of “anti-racism” was able to dominate because the authentic, working-class elements within America’s social movements had already been pushed to the margins. There has not been an American left since the Panthers and the other revolutionaries of their time got crushed. And in the absence of a real left, the compatible left is all that remains.
For the American communist movement to defeat capital’s terror campaign, we will have to build upon the work our forebears did in bringing these different liberation movements into a cohesive proletarian force. Otherwise, we’ll fall into stagnation, and be made into targets for the state without having the basis for fighting back. We can avoid such a catastrophe, if we direct our revolutionary work in a way that’s informed by what history has taught us about multi-racial solidarity. The achievements of the Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Brown Berets, and the other liberation groups of the 60s era can provide us with critical guidance, however much their gains have been destroyed.
Within Blood In My Eye, George Jackson provides such an insight, identifying the construction of dual power as instrumental towards bringing in the Black working class:
How can the black industrial worker be induced to carry out a valid worker’s revolutionary policy? What and who will guide him? The commune. The central city-wide revolutionary culture. But who will build the commune that will guide the people into a significant challenge to property rights? Carving out a commune in the central city will involve claiming certain rights as our own—out front. Rights that have not been respected to now. Property rights. It will involve building a political, social and economic infrastructure, capable of filling the vacuum that has been left by the establishment ruling class and pushing the occupying forces of the enemy culture from our midst. The implementation of this new social, political and economic program will feed and comfort all the people on at least a subsistence level, and force the “owners” of the enemy bourgeois culture either to tie their whole fortunes to the communes and the people, or to leave the land, the tools and the market behind.
The American communist movement has already been expanding its efforts to build those alternative economic structures, as I’ve talked about many times in regard to the American Communist Party’s innovative and diligent community service projects. We should draw attention to these gains; but every time Marxists have taken a new step forward, our first thought must be which step will come next. And a critical next step is to redouble all of our existing efforts at multi-racial worker organizing. This is what we were striving for all along when we entered into the struggle against idpol, and when we embarked upon a communist project that involved serious dual power. History has shown us what our task is; we must answer the call.
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