I heard a very interesting discussion today on the current political situation in France, particularly of greatly increased government repression. It appears that French leftists are making the same sorts of mistakes that American and South African leftists have made historically in which they assert that to raise issues of race and caste is to divide the oppressed class when the reality is exactly the opposite. If a class is divided by different degrees of oppression then those differences must be addressed in order to unify and strengthen the class.
The South African case was very stark, and it is no surprise that they figured it out first. When the new South African Communist Party was formed a century ago, it had the bizarre slogan, "Blacks and Whites Unite for a White Republic." Naturally very few Black South Africans joined such a party. The Comintern sent Gene Dennis, later a chair of the CPUSA, to South Africa. He got the party to change that line and to recruit Black members. The party grew tremendously and played a critical role in defeating Apartheid.
In the USA, the CPUSA often played a leading role in the civil rights movement. However, in the labor movement, they often failed to challenge more conservative and racist labor leaders who opposed organizing African-American workers. In my brother Mike's recent book, "The Southern Key," he describes and explains how that happened. One of the results was that efforts to organize in the South in the 1930s and 1940s failed, and all of us have paid a huge price for that.
We are still trying to learn that lesson in 2021. I'm thinking, for example, of the pejorative term "identity politics" which attempts to deny that the issue is different degrees of oppression rather than simply of identity. Instead, the correct way to view this is that a class for itself, i.e., one conscious that it is a class and working to advance its interests, must be concerned by uniting itself by addressing all the issues that face it. Thus, to acknowledge that workers of color are the most oppressed is necessary for the unification of the class, and that must not only be acknowledged but fought by the entire class.
In an era of Neo-Liberalism and global capitalism, classes are no longer simply national entities. To unite the international working class, we must also acknowledge and fight the unequal degrees of oppression around the world. The last 50 years have seen the almost complete draining of well-paid industrial jobs from the United States. The primary cause for that is the extreme inequality in which workers in some countries earn so much less than in others. Thus international solidarity is vital to raising those workers up.
Until we learn these lessons, there is little hope for far-reaching progressive change.
