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From International Socialism (1st series), No.51, April-June 1972, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism
Theodore Draper
Seeker and Warburg, £2.10
The ideology of Black Nationalism dominates the American Black movement. It developed concurrent with the integrationist civil rights movement and picked up momentum as the civil rights movement faltered, unable as it was to break through the institutional racism of American capitalism. Theodore Draper examines the recent nationalist development from the vantage point of a current which has existed in America for over two centuries. His material helps clarify why Black nationalism has come to the forefront as the primary expression of the American black movement.
The recent Black Nationalist upsurge comes in many forms, but all have the common theme that blacks cannot integrate into American society as so many ethnic groups have done. Mobility into the middle class and large sections of the skilled working class is essentially closed.
Paradoxically, the Black Nationalist movement in the United States takes roots in the Northern urban black ghettoes, and not in the South, where the largest number of blacks have historically been concentrated, and where the rural life of share-cropping and tenant farming afforded some tenuous sense of community. Instead the rank-and-file membership of the two most important mass nationalist organisations, the Garveyite ‘Back to Africa’ movement of the 1920s and the Black Muslims of the 1960s were composed largely of recent immigrants from the South to the Northern ghettoes.
In 1913 Stalin, writing under the supervision of Lenin, defined the central core of a nation as a historically evolved stable community. Common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up are characteristics of this central core.
The urban black ghettoes in America are neither historically evolved or stable. They possess no separate history and owe their existence only to the industrial city for which they are designed as an auxiliary to production. The location of the black population in these ghettoes represents a sharp discontinuity and not an evolution of the previous black communities in the South. Modern American capitalism has incorporated blacks into its very vitals; it has not permitted an external class structure within the black community to develop to any real extent. The class structure of the ghetto is integral to the society rather than existing as a controlled separate unit. Therefore the ‘economic life’ of the blacks in the United States at this time is external to the ghetto ‘community’. The absence of such a stable community is the most obvious characteristic of urban black life. And it is in fact this absence which has led to the false consciousness of nationalism as a way of coping with the frustrations of urban ghetto existence, and the embedded racism of American capitalism.
Draper concludes correctly that there does not exist a ‘black nation’ or ‘black colony’ within the United States, although the situation of blacks may take on certain aspects of a national question. There is a need for black self-organisation, respect, identity, group self-consciousness arid group combativity. This was the essence of the ‘black power’ movement. When black workers in America perceived their plight it was because they were ‘black’ and not in class terms. The black power movement has helped to strip away this layer and prepare the ground for black consciousness to merge into class consciousness as victories are won and confidence is built, although black self-awareness at certain levels will remain. Substituting black territoriality for this is the false path of nationalism.
Draper is left in a quandary, the quagmire of his own politics. Because he is committed to the maintenance of American capitalism, he is faced with the dilemma of how to achieve the delicate balance between black ‘self-government’ and the larger capitalist superstructure within which it must at the same time exist. He cites as encouraging signs the election of black officials in the black community, and the development of a black petty-bourgeoisie in ‘Nairobi’ California (formerly known as East Palo Alto, a city near Stanford with a nearly two-thirds black population).
In fact, there is no need for such tightrope walking. A Socialist analysis provides an alternative strategy to the ‘separate but equal’ community development which Draper envisions as the solution for American blacks. As long as one concentrates on the black ghettoes as the units for a solution one must come to an impasse. Fortunately history is bypassing this line of thinking. The focal point of the struggle is shifting to the factory, where the question of class-wide action is brought to the forefront.
The real strength of black Americans is the central role of black workers in the American economy. Therefore black workers must organise at the workplace. This does not mean that black workers should subordinate their just demands for an end to the racist practices of both employers and trade unions which have relegated them to the bottom rung of the ladder. But the strategy for liberation must be from a perspective of class-wide action.
As American capitalism sinks deeper into crisis and as the non-viability of a black nationalism approach becomes clearer, only a socialist strategy can point the way forward for black people. And only a socialist strategy can offer an alternative for both black and white Americans to the distinct possibility of fratricidal race war.
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