SL summary by Don Alexander:
So we heard the discussion on all fronts for the LRP. Oppressor nations, they don’t have a right to exist. If you really think about what’s been put forth here, they’re in the wrong business. Here’s the argument. You can’t wait on the white workers. Well see, we pointed out in this discussion what happened. Our strategy for black liberation, why it’s key to the American proletarian revolution. They could care less about what actually happened in terms of a generation of young black militants who were lost to the revolutionary movement. They could care less about that. The mass-based civil rights movement, it ran into a dead end in the mid-’60’s and went north, and it ran right up against the bedrock of black oppression. Legalized segregation was gone, but there was rampant police brutality and mass unemployment, et cetera.
The inability of that movement to go forward was because it was crippled by pro-Democratic Party liberal reformism and pacifism. So that subsequently led to a separatist mood, in which black activists, they despaired of any greater social struggle. You had people like John L. Lewis, who were saying – 1963, march on Washington movement, which Malcolm X called the Farce on Washington – where’s our party? The Democratic Party is the party of Eastland. Well, as the Revolutionary Tendency inside of the Socialist Workers Party, our forerunners fought for the program of revolutionary integration, fought for a communist intervention in the Southern civil rights movement, to win away those radicalized black youth who had broke from the liberal pacifism of King but hadn’t yet turned toward black separatism. A whole generation, it was a crime, the Socialist Workers Party, their failure.
So what you’re doing, and what you’re saying, is that you don’t have a program for proletarian power. You tail behind petty-bourgeois black nationalism. It reminds me of what our tasks are. I was thinking about it. This organization that extends, and embraced segregation. Think about, yes, yes, the busing question, the whole question of fighting for elementary democratic rights for blacks, everybody, we’ve spoken about this. If you look at the history of this country and building a genuine communist party. In the early period, look at people like Angelo Herndon, the black communist in the South, who fought with his white coworkers, who were under reactionary influence, in order to organize the unemployed. Because there was this gut instinct, he wanted to make a proletarian revolution. This is what the Spartacist League stands on, the whole question of like, Lenin’s party, is built upon. Uniting the working class across the color line, to fight against all national antagonisms, which are fomented by the capitalist ruling class.
You talk about self-determination doesn’t apply to Hebrew-speaking workers. Well, this is an interesting thing, when we talk about the whole immigration question, and what happened as far as Israel itself. What happened to the Palestinian refugees, as a result of the Jewish population being wiped off by the Nazi Holocaust, and U.S. imperialism, and other countries closing their borders. That’s where they ended up. So the question is posed: revolutionary internationalism versus capitulation to bourgeois nationalism, capitulation to one’s own ruling class. You can’t have a socialist revolution in this country, you’ve denounced the only program that can bring it about. Which is a program of united working-class struggle. It is poison.
The nationalists, nationalism is a form of bourgeois ideology. It would not come out of their mouths, because they’re not communists. And this is the whole thing about making a revolution. We pointed to our February 9th demonstration. All of this social chauvinist baiting of the Spartacist League. It’s in the interests of the labor bureaucracy, who of course are the political agents of the American imperialists, inside of the labor movement. That’s who. You look at the Internationalist Group. As far as what they support, all of their hot air about hot cargoing, it’s addressed to the fake militants in the union out in ILWU like Jack Heyman. People who won’t wage a political struggle against the bureaucracy.