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S E C T I O N

D

Social Democracy, Racism
and Anti-Communism

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[Blank page]

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XXXI

R A C I S M   A S   T H E   L E A S T   C O M M O N
D E N O M I N A T O R   O F   S O C I A L   D E M O C R A C Y

While anti-Communism has become the general brake against abandoning the imperialist system itself, racist ideology is the specific bridle on colonial revolution and provides the background against which the world labor aristocracy and its friends, whether they know it or not, view all matters colonial. Racist undertones counterpoint the "humanity" beneath the banner of which capitalism originally paraded (making open racism not quite "polite" – a thing to be hidden where possible; deplored; where not).

From the 15th century until 1917, racism grew almost unchallenged. Once the black slave trade was under way, a new "color note" had begun to be heard in official pronunciamentos, and soon dominated colonialism's theme song. Within the shell, after 1917, of anti-Communism, its twanging monotone became, of all imperialism's ideological instruments, the most widespread, most effective "justification" for the Western labor aristocracy's continued receipt, enjoyment and protection of colonially rooted super-wages.

We have seen how, in industrialized areas, wherever colonial subjects live conveniently at great distances, polite – even liberal – Social Democracy and other "labor"-oriented groups could get along by and large without open racism in serving the labor aristocracy. In general, since all ruling class political and economic activities in such areas are basically inseparable from imperialist parasitism, generalized support for the Status Quo in and of itself "painlessly" supported colonialism. But even this condition was not, could not be, smooth, lasting or uninterrupted: sudden devastating manifestations of the system's real basis (lynchings, race riots, and the accepted clubbing down of colonial subjects) divulged in irrepressible flashes that imperialism's carefully-¬

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instilled racism was (and remains) necessary in itself to buttress colonialism, because the latter is inherently and potentially explosive.

Ideologically, such racism has been fostered through a collection of color myths, with anti-black prejudice as their underlying theme. Steeped in such fairy tales, American white workers and whose of Africa wherever black people confront a white labor aristocracy in significant numbers could (and, indeed, had to) dispense with Social Democracy. They openly flaunt their racism.

Nowhere is this truth so well-illustrated as in South Africa.[,] where two worlds confront each other as politically naked as anywhere under imperialism. It is a matter of record that white workers in South Africa enjoy a standard of living second only to the American. As labor aristocracies, both might be expected to be solidly Social Democratic. Not so. Their stock-in-trade has been an anti-Bantu attitude in the first case; anti-Negro in the second.

The impact of South Africa's white trade unions of employers' increasing use of black labor, including semi-skilled, has been to split them:

1. One faction, represented by the leadership of the Trade Union Council of South Africa (TUCSA), warned that

"unless the workers stood together ... many were going to be priced out of the labor market. South African industries were converting to advanced mechanization."¹

The result, of course, was failure to win support of black workers, a failure emphasized by the dissolution of the TUC-affiliated Federation of African Trade Unions of South Africa (FOFATUSA) in January 1966.

2. On the other hand, right-wing workers opposed the TUCSA position. For example, the Amalgamated Engineering Union with 20,000 members, TUCSA's largest single member, disaffiliated from the central body because it disagreed with "TUC's color policy". Here was a faction that would see automation – i.e., would "be priced out of the labor market" – rather than allow black labor to move ahead.

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The central concern of both these lily-white unions was to protect their own super-wages; as they were at odds on method. But that, precisely, we have seen, is the classical function of Social Democracy in Europe. Here is how that function is fulfilled by racism in confrontation with large numbers of super-exploited.

Unexposed color myths founded on anti-black prejudice have allowed racism to live on in our day even in the socialist world. There, the economically-based historical need of racism was destroyed by revolution, and socialist policy reflects this fact. Yet, left-over imperialist-instilled attitudes linger, weighting socialist people's relations with Africans – and their governments' attitudes toward Africa.

In Asia, centuries under European colonialism left some color mark. There, skin color was only one – not the major – form in which super-exploitation occurred. Racism against Asians could be, and to a degree was, offset by Western-type racialist feelings against black people, deliberately inculcated.

Because color played a lesser part, compared to the West, Social Democracy in Asia to this day retains some usefulness per se there. It can maintain local spokesmen in its own name: the Lee Kuan Yew's; the Drs. Wong Lin Ken.

Latin America is the earliest example of what is now called neo-colonialism. After about a century and a half of political independence, Latin American economies are more highly super-exploited by imperialism than ever. American finance capital operates in alliance with a small, predatory, local comprador élite and a so-called feudal aristocracy.*

Did Social Democracy as such develop any mass base in Latin America? Not to this writer's knowledge. Lack of a labor aristocracy would preclude that.

* Actual feudality of such classes has been lucidly challenged in Latin America by Professor Andre Gunder Frank, Visiting Professor of Economics and History at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. See his book, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, Monthly Review Press.

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At the same time, as in Brazil and Cuba, the colonisers introduced large numbers of black people into Latin America. They did not disappear. Color discrimination left its mark on the population, thereby doubly barring Social Democracy per se or en masse.

Social Democracy attained what ideological hold it has in Latin America both late and indirectly – perhaps ironically – through policies objectively Social Democratic but pursued by self-styled Marxist-Leninists. Fairly recently, public differences of opinion have broken out about how to achieve socialism in Latin America. An apparent majority of those claiming to be Marxists have favored a "peaceful" solution along the lines of European Social Democracy and the Soviet position. As might have been deduced from the lack of a labor aristocracy and from the partial black presence, these Marxists never developed mass parties of, say, the Swedish Social Democratic type (although they themselves would never accept the Social Democratic label).

In Europe, Social Democracy espouses class collaboration "in the workers' interests". The fiasco in a country like Brazil occurred because a Social Democratic position served an avowed aim of "genuine independence with a socialist orientation". Doesn't this prove that, regardless of subjective or proclaimed aims, Social Democratic policy can lead only to the support of imperialism?

In Africa, imperialism's most consistent brutality accompanied a super-exploitation founded unequivocally South of Sahara on pure "color justification". Among black people, Social Democracy could not sustain support for its own spokesmen as such; it had to link arms with racism.

When unbroken imperialist brutality, from Tory and Labor alike, lost its effectiveness, demagogy had to be found for Africa. What arose called itself "African Socialism", pretending to be unconnected with anything "non-African". While – under demonstrable foreign imperialist instigation – this "ideology for Africa" had originated in so-called French Africa, today's¬

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brand sprouts in neo-colonial Kenya under the "labor" sponsorship of European Social Democracy in alliance with and under the guidance of U.S. racism.*

Obviously, Social Democracy's modern involvement with racism in sub-Saharan Africa did not arise full-blown like Minerva from the brow of Jove. What has today become visible is merely the development of a phenomenon implied in and underlying Social Democracy from its inception. It is visible now because anti-colonialism has escalated to a point where black people (the very bottom of the colonial heap) for the first time in history have been in major motion.

Social Democracy's link to racism, especially the latter's anti-black content, by leaving it as naked as the legendary Emperor, strikingly clarifies its real role in other subjugated areas, even "at home".

So, in the decades when Marxism (as espoused by men like Dimitroff, Palme Dutt and Togliatti) was making predictions which happened to involve dark-skinned people, their judgment – like everyone else's – was weighted by their very existence in Western society. In their epoch, the destruction of colonialism had not yet risen (as it has today) to the very first place on History's agenda.

It is not the fault of these men if the overwhelming majority in countries where they fought for justice happened through the agency of Social Democracy more and more to benefit materially out of super-exploitation; it was not their fault if such benefits rose in direct proportion to the darkness of skin pigmentation of the super-exploited.** Neither was it any of their doing that the vast majority of the world's inhabitants in the colonial hinterland happened to wear dark skins.

None of this was "their fault". But all of it constituted a material context from which they, as human beings, could not be isolated. Of course, Marxism-Leninism can be, and sometimes is, an effective instrument by which individuals can and do¬

* A fact of more than passing significance, of which discussion must be reserved to a separate study.
** See Tables 10, 11 and 12, Pages 136, 138 and 139, above.

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overcome a substantial portion of their own prejudices, although they are under the same heavy ideological pressures as others inside a historically-evolved system. But this occurs only if or when specific attention is paid to achieving this particular aim: overcoming racism is NOT and NEVER CAN BE the automatic by-product of studying, espousing, or even practising Marxism-Leninism. Of course, overcoming it must eventually become prat of thta practice – or Marxism-Leninism will become eroded.

In fighting for socialism, and against super-exploitation, people subjectively overcome and negate a good part of their era's racism in themselves. But it is a general tendency for ideas founded on the material foundations of one age to survive well into the next, specifically retarding the evolution of the new ideology.

It should, therefore, not be too astonishing that Marxist predictions which failed were usually those tied to colonialism and its indispensable racism.

To understand this more fully, the next Chapter will consider the economic realities under imperialism's ideological atmosphere.

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XXXII

R A C I S M   –
M A J O R   T A C T I C A L   I D E O L O G I C A L   F A C T O R
O F   I M P E R I A L I S M ' S   S U P E R S T R U C T U R E

Racism in these pages is not viewed as "just one idea in imperialism's super-structure"; it is the warp of the fabric of which super-exploitation is the woof[l] (while anti-Communism is a "plastic cover" designed to preserve the entire fabric "forever").

History supports this analogy to the hilt. What is more, Lenin's prophetic warnings about parasitism in the dying system expressed his concern with related underlying economic facts.

Capitalism (it is often forgotten, frequently denied, and rarely admitted) was launched not only out of the brutal expropriation and subsequent inhuman exploitation of English peasants, but, in contrapuntal accompaniment, out of the black slave trade, involving an estimated 100 million Africans, about half of whom, after being kidnapped from their continent, survived to furnish through their literally-owned labor-power the inordinate profits of slavery itself.

The traffic in human beings began in the 15th century in time to help expand industries made possible by completing the already-well-advanced process of creating the English proletariat. By the beginning of the 17th century, that trade was fostering new industries, the growth of which obtained added impetus from intense exploitation of the new proletariat they had called forth at home.

For example, the ship-building industry made possible that portion of primitive accumulation called piracy; it aided and helped carry forward the huge search for a "path to the Indies", success of which flooded the formidable riches of Asia – notably of China and India – into a now-rapidly-burgeoning industrial world at whose head England soon marched; it made possible colonies in a "New World", which for two hundred years siphoned off and absorbed Europe's "trouble-makers"¬

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and "surplus" human beings, thus effectively n[m]uting in the West the sharpest edge of that class struggle which Karl Marx was one day to analyze.

So, not only moders[n] civilization itself, but also its major way of life – colonialism – arose in large part upon an originally BLACK BASE, which is the material foundation of the anti-black lies referred to previously.

To try to agree on apportionment of growing empire, Europe's major powers, with the United States already even then discreetly maneuvering in the background, came together in 1885 at the Berlin Conference. Having erected an already-unprecedented prosperity on the sufferings of dark-skinned people, they proceeded to carve up the continent of Africa, with an eye on the future, opening the era of colonialism.

As this historical sequence unfolded, the West grew richer while places like Africa grew poorer. Like that of Asia and Latin America, Africa's material wealth was literally physically removed to bolster Western well-being.

But, in addition, Africa alone was stripped of her HUMAN resources in such a way that their labor power was at the disposal of the rising new METROPOLES. America was but a numerically-pale shadow of the population decimation of Africa as the West's massive free labor-power well-spring.

The robbery of Latin America perpetrated by Spain, Portugal and then England, took place at first side-by-side with the black slave trade. Great Indian civilizations were annihilated and their populations enslaved to coin bullion out of Latin American stolen treasure as well as out of its silver mines. But the labor-power of these slaves ceased to benefit Spain and Portugal when English sea-power – virtually government-supported – made maintenance of Spanish and Portuguese New World colonies impractical. This was at least one reason why these two powers could not compete over the centuries with England, which successfully implanted kidnaped black people into the West Indies and other places in Latin America.

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It was this solid labor-power foundation which first allowed England to grab the lion's share of Asia's wealth via the naked robbery of India and the opium trade in China.

The "Pilgrim Fathers" from England and their descendants in the northern New World destroyed an indigenous population which stood in their way as they seized "Red Indian" land. But they were never able to make significant use of the labor-power of these people. For the New World to grow, we know, millions of black people had to be imported from across the waters and subsequently made the United States the world's foremost imperialist power.

More recent depopulations in the colonial world (for instance, the floods, droughts, diseases and famines that periodically decimated pre-revolutionary China) have been similarly unproductive – though often, as in Indonesia today, politically "necessary".

Hence, from the removal of both its physical wealth and its best people, including the successful use of black slave labor-power, it was primarily Africa which first made possible the rise of "Civilization As We Know It". This material fact of history is not taken into account as yet by Marxists anywhere when they consider the problem of the world colonial hinterland. Yet, it influences those problems in a way which has thus far left them unsolved.

For, another major aspect of the modern black slave trade has been that it was financed by and benefited exclusively white men, sometimes employing black agents (the role of such black people who aided this traffic is a separate, subordinate and derivative subject), but having mainly black victims.

Another undeniable material fact is that the colonialism which the slave trade soon made possible also arose, developed and decayed; and liberation therefrom now advances, over three-quarters of the earth, along the so-called Color Line between dark- and white-skinned people.

This Color Line expresses a real condition specifically, carefully and deliberately fostered by imperialism, because¬

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absolutely indispensable: without super-profits, imperialism cannot exist; without continual "justification" of super-profits, especially in the form of racism, imperialism cannot continue extracting them.

That is why, today, the imperialist-spawned Color Line constitutes a MAJOR very REAL aspect of the ideological atmosphere in which the struggle between imperialism and socialism proceeds; and it continues under this condition: that while imperialism does extract super-profits, socialism has not yet proven able to "overtake and surpass" imperialism: it does not, it will not, it cannot super-exploit. When it starts trying to, it is no longer socialism.

The strategic contradiction of our era – manifest as the conflict between imperialism and socialism – causes all other ideology to operate within the confines, and by the aid, of anti-Communism. But within that context, the major inner contradiction of the system, being expressed as conflict between the imperialist ruling class and the colonial peoples, finds its place in the superstructure via the supremacy of racism as the main ideology of imperialism, the least common denominator of imperialism's inner ideological atmosphere.

The fact that imperialist parasitism generally increases in direct proportion to the darkness of skin pigmentation has reinforced racism, further engraining it in the "ideological atmosphere". And it is Social Democracy which is primarily responsible for fashioning the mental outlook – the ideological atmosphere – of the majority of Western population. This causal sequence explains why the West's racist ideological mask for its underlying colonialism has an inseparable "anti-Red lining", and cannot be separated from Social Democracy in some form.

In order to develop the above points, we turn once again to and requote Lenin:*

"Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the world by a handful of 'advanced' countries...

* From Chapter III, Pages 27-28, above.

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"What is the economic base of this world-historical phenomenon?

"Precisely the parasitism and decay of capitalism which are characteristic of its highest historical stage of development, i.e., imperialism...

"Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are understood and its political and social significance appreciated, not a step can be taken toward the solution of the practical problems of the Communist movement and of the impending socialist revolution."¹

In the light of these words, racism is not only ideological; not only subjective; not merely some "portion of the ideological superstructure" of imperialism. Racism also has – and always has had – a material content. Certainly, it is expressed in a mountain of perverted ideology. But its materiality is its basis – and measurable.*

Facts of even the most elementary sort provide the imperialist-designed material relationship between the degree of super-exploitation and of skin pigmentation, expressed in the already-quoted well-known Afro-American saying: "The blacker the skin, the lower the wage".

The following table clinches the last point. It exposes the phenomenon in South Africa where, within the borders of a single country, all the major contradictions of the imperialist system as a whole are visibly concentrated.

                              Table 312                             
                                                                    
          RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COLOR AND SUPER-EXPLOITATION         
                             (1937-1948)                            
                                                                    
--------------------------------------------------------------------
             PERCENTAGE EACH RACE CONSTITUTES                       
                    OF CLASS OF SKILL                               
"COLOR"     ----------------------------------     WAGES     %  OF  
 GROUP                Semi-                      (British   EUROPEAN
            Skilled  Skilled  Unskilled  Total    Pounds)    INCOME 
---------   -------  -------  ---------  -----   ---------  --------
European      83.8    33.8       1.5     35.4    350. 3s.       -   
Asians         5.6    11.2       4.5      6.0     91. 5s.      26.1 
Coloreds       4.8    20.8      13.2     11.6     51. 4s.      14.7 
"Natives"      5.8    34.2      80.8     47.0     16. 2s.       4.6 
--------------------------------------------------------------------

* Again, refer to Tables 10, 11 and 12 on Pages 136, 138 and 139.

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The enormous differential between Western super-wages and the pittance grudgingly allowed colonial peoples – with Africa at the bottom of the imperialist economic heap generally – at least suggests that Western wages in our era already contain a larger portion of super-values not created by Western workers but accepted by them as a gift out of colonial super-exploitation than of the "original value" of its own labor-power. That is, the "bribe" portion of Western super-wages may now possibly exceed the value of labor power in the "unbribe" portion.* What other meaning can be attached to the fact that a black South African earns only 4.6% as much as a white one, even admitting that "other factors" besides the statistical gap itself may operate within the relationship between the two figures?

Today, the modern Western labor aristocracy would appear to have reached a point where, subjectively and within the limits of its understanding at least, it has a bigger stake in maintaining colonialism than in overthrowing the system. And this observation has not yet even taken into account the bigger-still difference between Western and colonial modes of life!

Moreover, this differential measures the materiality of racism, a fact of political significance in all events bearing on Africa or on people of descent from Africa.

This differential also proclaims racism as the major form in which black people have experienced, and still experience, super-exploitation.

Furthermore, racism's success in ensuring a limitless stream of super-profits for imperialism depends on the receipt of super-wages by workers "at home". Super-wages – being that part of super-profits shared out to "their own" workers by the ruling moguls – gives those same workers their stake in the Status Quo, successfully thus far keeping subordinate the main contradiction "at home" between rulers and ruled.

The result has been admirably expressed in 1935 by the great Afro-American scholar, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois:

* See Appendix I.

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"In the South the great planters form proportionately a quite small class, but they have, singularly enough, at their command some five million poor whites ... it would have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police the slave. But two considerations led him in the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave-driver and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters. To these Negroes he transferred all the dislike and hatred he had for the whole slave system. The result was the system was held stable and intact by the poor white."³

The clue to the poor white's role, of course, was that at all times his wages were maintained a bit above those of the Negro: he got his "crumbs" from the super-profits wrung out of his black class brothers.

Today, the U.S. economy stretches its tentacles into every corner of the earth in one way or another. Even its own internal quasi-colony benefits to a considerable extent out of super-profits derived from Asian, African and Latin American super-exploitation.

After Lenin's time, with imperialism's inevitable decay – colonialism becoming more and more indispensable to imperialism's existence – that universal racism always present in capitalism as its memorial to the economic fecundity of the black slave trade became more highly developed. Therefore, after the usual ideological time lag, such racism is inescapably visible in the present crisis of moribund imperialism wherever colonial peoples challenge the masters.

And because of its universality wherever the "black-white" factor enters the colonial picture, racism in such places, by its tenacious and widespread hold on minds on both sides of the Color Line, over-rides all other ideological concepts used by the international ruling class except – sometimes – anti-Communism. In alliance with the latter, racism has been a brake against the successful overthrow of colonialism. Specifically it warps the¬

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world anti-imperialist struggle on both sides of socialism's borders and on both sides of the Color Line.

To one degree or another, the imperialist system infects all individuals, even men who espouse Marxism-Leninism, with racism:

In all white people, however many its myriad forms, racism expresses itself as White Supremacy.

In all black people, it is mirrored in countless shapes as a Colonialist Mentality.

The next Chapter examines particular forms that White Supremacy and the Colonialist Mentality assume, analyzing them and their effects.

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XXXIII

T H E   B L A C K   S T E R E O T Y P E   A N D
T H E   C O L O N I A L I S T   M E N T A L I T Y

Basically, the material precondition for the ideological developments, White Supremacy and The Colonialist Mentality, was the export of capital from metropolitan economies to colonial areas, made possible, basically, by the slave trade. The extraction of super-profits resulted in an enormous differential between wages in both areas, translated into qualitatively different living conditions.

Ideological "justification" that was destined to prepare for these conditions was first attempted during the black slave trade. After the 15th century, the entire world outside Africa (though, in obverse sense, Africa too) in practice swallowed at first slave-trading, then colonialist, lies about black people. These lies permeated ALL the capitalist world; NO territory was exempt.

In Europe, such ideological "justification" first took shape in the sphere of religion: darker peoples were presented as "inferior beings" ordained "by God" as the concern of "superior" whites: "the White Man's Burden".

Religious myths of inferiority associated with skin pigmentation were soon reinforced by "science" and "history" with official backing. The result was a Black stereotype – a pervasive though entirely fanciful concept of what black people are like.

In Europe and the "New World", it became accepted that black people are all happy, docile, ignorant, obedient, and clown-like. They allegedly all hang breathlessly upon the "largesse" of their "betters", grateful for any small favor the latter may deign to bestow. These imaginary creatures all live in dense jungle, surrounded by animals to whom they are so "naturally" close that they can practically converse together. Nor have they any history of their own. Instead, they have merely existed for¬

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aeons, until the "Christian" white man appeared. Thereafter, they "developed" under his "civilizing influence", as ordained by the ruling white god. Naturally, no black person is capable of making decisions, even in matters concerning himself alone. That is why the "mission" of "Christians" has been to "liberate" the black "savage" when the "right time" happens along (which always seems to be only after massive revolt by the "docile blacks" is either under way or obviously imminent).

Around these falsehoods, an infinite variety of corollary hypocrisies sprang up. Together, they formed the indispensable context within which landlords and employers in metropolitan areas were able out of segregation and wage discrimination to coin additional super-profits whose amount they deliberately ranked by degree of skin pigmentation.

The resulting practical separation of peoples differing in skin colors has made it both slow and difficult to destroy the myths that nurture it.

Nor was the metropolitan area alone affected: White Supremacy exacted perhaps its most dreadful toll among subjugated peoples in the form of a "mirror image": the widespread Colonialist Mentality.

The latter's main characteristic among subjugated peoples, especially Africans, is it acceptance in practice over a fairly long historical period of the imperialist-imposed Black Stereotype. When people are thus conditioned to act like a false Stereotype, human dignity is crushed, but in a context wherein such people are torn by terrible, subjective contradictions: hatreds, frustrations, and above all hopelessness and lack of self-faith.

White Supremacy's basic crime in perpetuating the Colonialist Mentality has been the attitude toward work which it developed among subject peoples: Work is always presented as punishment (pupils in mission or government schools are forced to do manual labor for the teacher or head master when they break a school rule – "free" labor for the teacher or head master, of course – but its value here is for¬

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its effect on the punished). NOT to have work is held up as the "ideal" – the purpose for which education should strive (pupils in Africa are taught to aim above all for some petty "white collar" job, preferably "in government", the object being to have "lesser" members of one's own community subject to one's "authority").

At the same time, the colonial subject is encouraged to expect "something from nothing" (though, naturally, whatever his situation, he never achieves that).Nevertheless, the search for this "something for nothing" leads to a deep-rooted tendency to believe in promises and to wait for them to materialize before taking action. Such expectations, needless to state, are also encouraged among metropolitan workers – but in a different context, both politically and economically, as we shall see at once.

For in colonies, in practice, wherever such attitudes are inculcated, the vast overwhelming majority are forced to perform the most tasteless, monotonous, menial and back-grinding labor for a pittance, the very condition "theoretically" pictured for them as one to be avoided at all costs. Thus, a conflict, insoluble under capitalism, arises at the very source of value, operating to the detriment of colonial peoples.

Few colonial subjects can attain the demoralizing "working ideal" because it exists only among ruling classes. So, the conditions which colonialism has foisted on such peoples are ironically used to "prove" their "inferiority"! Thus, the poisonous blossoms of original rationalization for the black slave trade encumber the current ideological atmosphere with the crippling concepts of a bygone era.

The postulation of "inferiority" among subject peoples implies that the "superior" motherland's prosperity is due to the "efficiency, superiority and knowledge" of its people, machines and Way of Life.

The fact, however, is that – launched from the springboard of the black slave trade – the "technological mastery" boasted of by "Western civilization" which characterizes the epoch of imperialism has been occasioned NOT by its undeniable "efficiency" of which it is Social Democracy's role to brag, but by its unparalleled parasitism expressed in colonies, where¬

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"super-wealth" comes from an inexhaustible source of cheap human labor-power.

For example, the WASTE in the West's allegedly efficient economy, which has ben dealt with by innumerable Marxist economists, is so tremendous and glaring that one of imperialism's "popular" mouthpieces devoted a major article to it,¹ citing failures in education, the energies wasted in a vast bureaucracy, and useless luxury spending. Still, much of the waste attributed to the U.S. economy – this source claimed – was "really" being plowed back and used in one way or another. But naturally, there was NO mention of idle capacity, decreases in "labor force participation" (i.e., "retirement from the labor market" by millions of jobless), unemployment, and the real, far more basic waste implied in the irrationality of the system.

Far from being able to eulogize "resourcefulness", as such mouthings would have the public believe, such waste testifies to built-in inefficiency, irrationality and parasitism, even according to practical testimony taken "from United Nations sources"²:

1. In the first six months of 1963, the entire African continent experienced a trade deficit of 70 million dollars. From 1953 to 1963, this defe[i]cit averaged one billion dollars a year.

2. Yet, in the first six months of 1964, the continent of Africa, excluding South Africa, had a favorable trade balance of 42 million dollars. Total exports has been $3.671 billion; total imports, $3,529 billion, not including gold, diamonds and other mineral exports of South Africa. Could that country have been counted among the "free nations" of Africa, the increase in favorable trade balance would have been "staggering".

3. In 1965, Britain, to defend her pound sterling against devaluation, borrowed something like $532 million from the World Bank and a consortium of private bankers. In addition, she had a trade deficit of some £800 million. Nobody called this help from foreign sources to a Western power "aid to Britain". Commented the writer:

"Aid is a new expression coined deliberately by the Western countries in an effort to perpetuate the economic and political inferiority of the developing world.

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"It is far more important for the industrialized countries to give the so-called 'aid' than for the developing countries to receive it."²

Colonial areas can live without manufactured goods from metropolitan areas, the article continues, whereas the latter cannot survive without colonial raw materials. What is more, if the "developed" economies were not able to invest in the "developing" world, they could no longer secure against loss the finances of their "commercial" and savings banks, insurance companies, building societies, trust companies and fiduciary funds"². The colonial areas can also live without this form of financial "security".

4. If all of Southern Africa were liberated and its resources added to those of the rest of the continent and were used jointly in a socialist way, Africa

"would not only have the sum required for the development of Africa but would be lending the West money.

"In gold alone, the West receive over a thousand million pounds per annum from South Africa only. This does not stay in African banks but goes into Western banks to become part of the economy of the West.

"They therefore are lending us our own money and they call that foreign aid."²

The ruling class has marshalled all its forces to ensure continuation of a situation so favorable to itself:

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), representing the labor aristocracy in metropolitan areas, has in Africa deliberately nurtured the Colonialist Mentality: for those African unionists who "do as told", there have been cars, mimeograph machines, lush offices, typewriters, salaries high by colonial standards, and above all, "recognition": honors, titles, and the permission to hobnob with "superior" white Western officials.³

The French tactic of giving independence to thirteen of her African colonies in 1960 may have been at least partially in response to freedom struggles among those peoples. But it also had the real, observable, effect of "pulling the teeth" of such struggle;¬

— 292 —

of handing the countries so treated over to neo-colonialism (political independence tied to the metropolis by the same if not worse economic strings as before).

Until recently, the international ruling class was able to keep its own racist under-belly from public gaze except in places like the U.S. South or South Africa. But as issues sharpened in places like Watts in Los Ang[e]les, U.S.A., in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, etc., the effectiveness of the ICFTU and other Social Democratic agencies, fell off sharply – up to mid-1965, when a series of military coups in colonial areas began. In a word, imperialism directs its policy into whatever channel seems most likely to ensure that it retains Africa, the world's richest potential source of super-profits for the moribund West.

It is clear, then, that the imperialists not only created the Black Stereotype among white people everywhere, but also inculcated the same White Supremacy "principles" in reverse as a "mirror image" into peoples subjugated under their control. BOTH, to a single purpose: "enternal" super-exploitation of colonies.

Despite anything imperialism can do, however, material conditions in colonies makes clashes and conflicts inevitable and irrepressible. The imperialist tactic has been as successful as it has only due "at home" to that stream of super-profits which for so long has enabled the metropolitan ruling classes to wax fat virtually without challenge, simply by giving their "own" working class a substantial share in colonial loot.

Such super-wages and a "mode of life" completely out of reach for, though sought after by, colonial peoples, have acted as a material screen, hiding from the vast majority of those affected by knowledge of it on both sides of the Color Line, the fact that beneath these super-wages are working people, themselves exploited, while imperialist parasitism is the real source of Western well-being.

As the next Chapter will show, failure to discern the "real source" DID NOT AFFECT ONLY POLITICAL ILLITERATES in the West.

[— 293 —]

XXXIV

W E S T E R N   M A R X I S T   U N D E R E S T I M A T I O N
O R   R E P U D I A T I O N   O F   C O L O R ' S   R O L E

Western Marxists, by sharing in colonially-derived prosperity, were absorbed into the labor aristocracy. Gradually, their judgement became indistinguishable from Social Democracy's. On issues related to colonialism, they unwittingly contributed to its "justification" in many of their theoretical postulates.* In addition, they accepted in many implied ways, without fully comprehending, the "world outlook" toward Africa and Africans which has "rubbed off" on all past and present inhabitants of once-global imperialism; an acceptance which shows itself in regard to the "Color Question" as well.

It is instructive in this regard to read some remarks by a president of the East African Students Union in the Americas:

"The imported oligarchy who came (to Africa) as settlers and trading adventurers based their exploitation partly on their imported capital but mainly on the ideology of racial superiority – ideology because it is a belief and not a fact.

"It is indeed true as Jack Woddis states in the opening sentence of his book, 'Africa – The Roots of Revolt', that 'The history of African contact with the West has been a history of robbery – robbery of African manpower, materials and agricultural resources and land'. This epitomization may sound pontifical among well-known international militants, BUT THE AFRICAN STAGE HAS STILL ANOTHER SCREEN – that of color. For a race that has seen slavery, contempt, discrimination, lynching and colonial subjections, all these within living memory, the constant harping on capitalist exploitation is not moving enough."¹

* e.g., Chapter VIII, above.

— 294 —

The typical European Marxist responds to this approach variously. He may equate any mention of the "Color Question" with "overemphasis" on it. He may try to assure the black speaker that his experience is "the same" as that of his "white brothers":

"It is true that the great majority of black people of the world are oppressed by imperialism – but so are the great majority of white people."²

He will undoubtedly berate the black person for his "racialism":

"The notion that 'white racialism' is reactionary while 'black racialism' is progressive and even revolutionary is a complete illusion. All forms of racialism are equally reactionary in that they help the imperialists to 'divide and rule'."²

Then there is always that patronizing appeal to the black man "not to be emotional", good heavens!

"There have indeed been some highly emotional speeches at this Congress, and emotion can play a useful and valuable role in revolutionary struggle. We need to hate our enemies and cherish our friends. But it is necessary first to analyze coolly who are our friends and who are our enemies. Without this, one may be so blinded by anger that one strikes out at one's friends and allies and helps one's enemies."²

Finally, anyone who even dares call attention to color as a pervasive FACT of African life can be – and usually is – accused of "attempting to cover up the basic facts of exploitation".

To those who try to point out the damage done to liberation by racism, one stock "Marxist" answer up to now is that "racism is irrelevant" to the anti-imperialist struggle because the troubles of colonial peoples are not caused by white people as such, but by imperialists (who just happen to be mostly white).

Anyone who hints that imperialism itself has made racism relevant to any discussion of, say, anti-imperialist unity, is then charged with advocating racism, of "turning the struggle aside from anti-imperialism", an accusation "justified" by the truism that "only the demise of imperialism can correct¬

— 295 —

racism". It is useless thereafter to note that imperialism's demise in Eastern Europe did NOT automatically lead to the demise of racism; or that imperialism's very demise itself is being unnecessarily postponed by the same racism which that demise "alone" can supposedly destroy.

Moreover, such a reaction is not even theoretically justifiable. In his famous August 8, 1963, statement of support for the Afro-American Freedom Struggle, Chairman Mao Tse-tung of the Communist Party of China remarked that "in the last analysis, all national struggles are a matter of class struggle".

Facts and figures set forth in these pages prove the truth of this remark beyond question. For, today's nationalists globally, by and large, are the colonial peoples still fighting for real freedom despite some kind of political independence in some places for two decades or more.

But if national struggles "are a matter of class struggle"; if the struggles of black people are among national struggles; and if "the color factor" enters into the nationalist struggles of black people (to a degree determined by imperialism over centuries of lies and distortions about black people), then how can discussion of the Color Problem be "irrelevant" to discussion of national problems among "Colored" people – whose freedom struggles today form the heart of anti-imperialism?

Rather, if national struggles really are, in the final analysis, "a matter of" class struggle; if racial struggles are a majority special case of national struggles; then the racial point of view is NOT ipso facto either "irrelevant" or even condemnable; and it could even be correct to substitute a racial view-point for the class viewpoint temporarily when the latter obscures super-exploitation (e.g., as above, by equating "exploitation" and super-exploitation) – with the understanding that racial struggles are or lead to class struggle under correct leadership.

Those who announce "over-emphasis" on Color the moment it is mentioned merely expose their own need to listen and participate in such discussion – the sooner, the better. Anyone thus sententiously ducking behind "capitalist exploitation" to avoid discussion of the "Color Question" is revealed as one who objectively¬

— 296 —

reinforces the present role and status of the Color Problem itself by refusing to let it be aired.

For, no matter how much it may hurt those who objectively want the Status Qou[uo] to continue, the COLOR LINE CUTS DEEPER THAN CLASS LINES: it is founded on SUPER-profits, which Lenin specifically noted are "obtained OVER AND ABOVE the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers in their 'own' country". And super-profits, we know, are the fruit of parasitism, without which a qualitative upsurge in the class struggle "at home" could no longer be postponed, thus signaling the final doom of the ruling class.

Here is the meaning behind the above-quoted statement by an East African!

There are reasons why, after centuries of imperialism, very few Marxists, especially in the "white world", have as yet seen the need to take, let alone really taking, the specific time and effort for the difficult, delicate but exigent political surgery which alone, either before or after the world revolution itself, can reveal and excise racial prejudices which so successfully all over the West – and elsewhere – today reinforce colonialism.

This has not happened: not because such Marxists are "nasty", but because history has only very recently made such an exercise materially necessary:

1. Only during the past ten years has it finally become possible for such Marxists to meet individually actual black African people in any significant numbers, though while it lasted such contact was usually neither frequent nor, certainly, intimate. Imperialist policy did all it could to prevent actual meeting between real socialists – or (perish forbid) communists – and Africans. So, it was only after 1957 that such meetings could even begin. Significantly, one effect of the recent and continuing military coups in Africa has been again to cut back such contacts with the clear aim of ending it altogether if possible. Only the Russians remain inside most of West Africa, with a few Poles, Czechs or Bulgarians. Most citizens of formerly-colonial-countries-gone-socialist (Korea, China or Vietnam);¬

— 297 —

Cuba; or Albania) have been driven away from Africa. The ruling class, at least, is class conscious and precisely aware of what it is about.

2. The brand of Marxism-Leninism which arose after centuries of colony-fed colonialism, in Europe first and in the West in general, could not but be interlarded with aberrations, of which the main one today is revisionism, a new expression inside the socialist world of Social Democracy in our era.*

3. When contact did begin between socialism and Africa – in Europe, where African students finally travelled in significant numbers for education; or, in places in Africa, where Europeans from socialist countries serve as experts – it was assumed on both sides of the Color Line that, because good-will was present, because socialism and socialists theoretically and avowedly oppose racism, therefore the phenomenon itself somehow would or should automatically absent itself from such encounters. Only severe shocks, like those "student incidents" involving Africans in a number of Eastern European socialist countries, disclosed the depth and pervasiveness of the general, imperialist-spawned Black Stereotype and its continued existence under socialism in countries that once were also Western metropoles.**

Actually, only mass contact could make White Supremacy's existence evidence and reveal its basis in the Black Stereotype, which deliberately caricatures real black human beings. Finally, "incidents" were needed to prove that this Stereotype is the ideological reason why racism does not automatically evaporate on coming into the presence of Socialism.

To illustrate just how deeply the Black Stereotype has become ingrained in even the most advanced socialist lands, let us consider an example:

At a mass rally in Peking on August 8, 1966, celebrating the third anniversary of Chairman Mao's statement of support for the U.S. Negro Freedom Movement, Robert F. Williams, fugitive¬

* Revisionism itself as related to Social Democracy is to be treated in a separate study.
** See next Chapter.

— 298 —

from the infamous "incident" at Monroe, North Carolina, a decade or so ago, recorded certain facts known to black freedom fighters:

"We have some white Americans with us in our struggle ... (but) some so-called socialists, whom we thought to be our comrades and class brothers, have joined the international Ku Klux Klan fraternity for white supremacy and world domination. To our consternation, we have discovered that the bourgeois-oriented power structure of some socialist states, even one with a black and white population, would prefer to preserve a white reactionary anti-communist power structure in racist America."³

What was the response to this condemnation of the role being played by "white Marxists" toward black workers actually living in their proximity? Unfortunately – a traditional one: the black man is implied admonished for this "sin" in mentioning unpleasant facts.

Sidney Rittenberg, a Southern white American living in China, and then in charge of Radio Peking English broadcasts, said:

"Class conscious American working people know that America's future belongs to them, to people's power, black people's power, and white people's power, against racism, exploitation, oppression, and aggressive war."³

So, by implication, Rob Williams, a black leader, is NOT "class conscious". Rittenberg, incidentally, is currently in the lock-up in China, but nobody has as yet repudiated this sententious and patronizing lie of his.

Kuo Mo Jo, high in Communist Party circles in China's active cultural front, repeated from Chairman Mao's 1963 statement supporting Afro-American struggle of three years before, the main point which Chairman Mao omitted from his 1968 statement, with good reason:

"... in the United States it is only the reactionary ruling circles who oppress the Negro people. They in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals, and other englightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people."³

— 299 —

So Rob Williams, the black leader, impliedly does NOT know his friends from his foes, while Kuo Mo Jo of China feels competent – without the meticulous investigation which always preceded Chairman Mao's pronunciamentos on China – to tell him who they are.

In each of these replies to a black worker, there is also an implied rebuke, based on a false estimate of a situation which he had correctly characterized for their attention. Of course, the sentiments expressed by these non-black communists in Peking are "splendid" – even if they do merely repeat without documentation the attitude of the 30s among leading members of the U.S. Communist Party, which itself by its attitudes and policies drove thousands of Negroes OUT of the Party over some decades.

Of course racists do not represent the working class and progressives, and more than Social Democrats, spokesmen for the labor aristocracy, do. The point is hardly at issue; moreover, as used, it amounts to a lie, because it ADDS itself to a statement about "the working class and progressive" in the U.S. which, however desirable, is just NOT SO.

And hundreds of thousands of Negroes at one time or another involved in the countless recorded and unrecorded race riots in big and little U.S. industrial centers and rural backwoods, like Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, or anywhere in the benighted South, KNOW; and the families and friends of unnumbered Negroes who have died in unspeakable agony in lynchings and beatings, or suffered in their millions the ignominy of racial harrassment and segregation, KNOW that it is NOT "only the reactionary ruling circles" who "oppress" them. They KNOW that basic white workers in those cities, and poor white farmers and workers in the rural South perform the bestialities against them. This approach in Peking is on the same level as the one that sees a colonial army as a "people's army" because the imperialists have no other choice than to people it with "workers". There is a real difference between a condition and a potential.

Afro-Americans understand these things. In a best-selling novel, John Killens, Afro-American author, presented a detailed picture¬

— 300 —

of life among his people in the South. The Youngbloods are a family who represent the militants among Southern Negroes. A visit is paid to this family by an Afro-American teacher from New York who goes to Crossroads, Georgia, to the school for black children. The following conversation takes place:

"The young school teacher shook his head ... He felt like anything but a know-it-all...

'We're not exactly alone in this', he said.

"He cleared his throat.

'We have friends all over this country – colored and white.'

"...Thinking out loud...

'Where the white friends at?' Joe Youngblood asked.

'In the labor unions – the – the white workers – and some of the more educated liberal-minded white people.'

"He read the doubt in both their faces. Laurie smiled at the teacher, a thin bitter smile.

'I sure do hope it's true', she said. 'But I sure don't know where our good white friends hiding. Lord Have Mercy.'

"Joe Youngblood said,"

'I sure want to seem them crackers that's my nackerl-born friends. They must be kinda shame-facey ... Maybe it's different in New York City, but down here in Georgia the poor white peck is the black man's worstest enemy. Labor Unions – These people down there won't let you get one foot in the door. White workers. Hmph. Anybody'll tell you. It ain't the rich man that lynches the colored down here. It's the poor crackers. If they my friend, they sure got a real funny way of showing it. I sure do wish they would come out of the bushes and make themself known. I be looking for the high sign sure as you born."⁴

That "poor white crackers" and "workers in labor unions" are carrying out the policy of "the reactionary ruling circles" is a truism. Does that fact absolve them of their political, bribe-based responsibility for participation? Were the German masses implicated in Nazi bestialities? Does it lessen the blood debt¬

— 301 —

to the Afro-American people which "poor white crackers" have been piling up by their deeds over centuries? Don't these same deeds form the inseparable background for the gassings and napalmings carried out by "ordinary American workers" who, as GI's, murder their Vietnamese class brothers?

Rob Williams spoke in biting words of those who, without studying, investigating, documenting, experiencing or understanding the REAL situation, glibly admonish and advise those who already know:

"... there is a mighty tendency, promoted by the sinister American devil himself, to engender more sympathy and fraternalism for the so-called 'good reasonable American' than for the wretched victims of vicious and brutal U.S. imperialism...

"What is the motive of those who plead for the exemption of liberal Americans whose feigned liberalism merely serves as a cloak and shield around the naked power of savage and racist U.S. imperialism?...

"The myth of the good reasonable American who is yet to be heard is a ruse perpetrated by the psychological arm of the imperialist forces of tyranny...

"A good man who is silent and inactive in times of great injustice and oppression is no good man at all. He is no ally to freedom and justice, but is a silent partner to tyranny and oppression ... Those who are without principle and conviction to declare themselves for the righteous cause of the oppressed must be prepared to suffer the consequences of the gathering storm of violent and turbulent ... retribution."⁵

Moreover, Williams' feelings have been vindicated in international law – in the particular case of Vietnam:

"The first that should answer for these inexpiable war crimes are the American leaders who are liable for their policy of intervention and aggression in Vietnam and their barbarous orders to 'escalate' the war.

"Then come the executants – American or non-American – who have been acting on their orders and owe the Vietnam people a blood debt.

— 302 —

"The Statute of Nuremberg Court is unequivocal about this matter. According to its Article 8, the fact that the accused has acted in accordance with the orders of his government or his hierarchical superior does not clear him of his responsibility.

"... according to criminal law in most countries, the real criterion of penal liability has nothing to do with orders. It lies in moral liberty, in the faculty of choosing of the accused."⁶

Ideals of real brotherhood and anti-racialism are really held in the U.S. today only among the vanguard of the black Freedom Movement; a minority of militant students more and more supporting the Movement as they become more deeply involved in preventing themselves from becoming additional victims of criminal U.S. aggression; and a national assortment of honorable individuals, largely professionals. Certainly, this number must grow if the Vietnam situation and its contradictions deepen. Nonetheless, at the moment, and despite the fact that it represents the future, it still constitutes a small minority of Americans.

Expressing such facts usually evokes charges of "slandering the American people", charges too convenient as excuse for not examining the facts.

Facing facts now could help shorten the time needed for the progress that must come eventually, and thus help to decrease growing colonial casualties. Here we have a serious "contradic[t]ion among the people". Will closing one's eyes to it ensure that it is solved – or even tackled?

The illustration chosen was deliberate: in Peking, the world's most advanced Marxists now operate. If this is where the best is found, what of the worst? This example is also intended to illustrate that when a black worker states from his own experience facts which are unpleasant, even the most advanced, but non-black, Marxist ears still cannot hear him too well.

This is the result of the imperialist-spawned Black Stereotype. It affects not only white people in the Western world, but even socialist relations with Africa and Africans. The mass persistance of old racist myths in socialist locales drags practical¬

— 303 —

consequences in its wake which materially affect the course of revolution – at the very least, on the African continent.

Therefore, the next Chapter will delve concrete into the remnants of racism in once-socialist countries – mainly Eastern Europe, where it is most pronounced.

[— 304 —]

XXXV

T H E   B L A C K   S T E R E O T Y P E   A N D
" S T U D E N T   I N C I D E N T S "   I N   E A S T E R N   E U R O P E

Probably the most flamboyant examples of racism left over in Eastern Europe was embodied in a series of incidents in which African students in such countries allegedly "rioted", while violence erupted between Black Africans and white socialists.

Of course, anti-Communist stories in the Western press inevitably exaggerated such happenings. Nonetheless, they were only piling their lies over a core of truth. So, it is of primary significance that socialist countries, and their satellite apologists, chose to pretend that such things did not occur. When the facts could no longer be denied, they switched to the canard that none of it was their responsibility. A Czech with whom I was corresponding, and a Rumanian with whom I talked at length in Ghana, both told me in all seriousness that these "student incidents" were traceable solely to "CIA agents". But neither charges of CIA involvement nor exaggeration in the Western press explains why said CIA agents enjoy such success with their antics, or why "incidents" of such scope happen at all in "socialist" lands.

Africans see two implications:

1. The "CIA agent" argument suggests that "Africans are fools", easily manipulated by anyone, regardless of their own interests.

2. The insistence that such "incidents" are exaggerated calls into question whether Africans can have real grievances against a "socialist" country.

But thousands of black Africans witnessed the truth; and many of them, bearing physical evidence of serious mistreatment in "socialist" lands, returned home, where news travels fast even without newspaper coverage. (If Eastern Europe was even then revisionist, it must be remembered that, at the time of the "incidents", everything was not as clear as today, and all the evils were done in the name of socialism. Most Africans were not in a political condition, historically, to make the nice distinction.)

— 305 —

Since these occurrences offer clear-cut examples of left-over racism in action in the socialist world, let us examine as typical those in Bulgaria in mid-1962.

In Ghana, at that time under Nkrumah, the first Bulgarian "incident" received no press coverage whatsoever. During or directly after it, however, four Ghanaians who had been studying in Sofia returned home with bandaged heads. Within 24 hours, news of this event was known in the most remote corners of the country. That, in fact, was how I myself heard of it.

Six months later, early in February 1963, a more serious occurrence did receive news treatment in Ghana. This time, the trouble had been too widespread, had involved students from too many African countries, to be hushed up, even in Ghana. The Ghanian press, accordingly, discussed the matter: from February 14 through 18. Thereafter, official silence again fell.

The Bulgarian government issued at least two statements: one was to the United Nations and omitted any mention of Africans with bandaged or swollen heads. It claimed or implied that the whole affair was "CIA-incited" and NOT of serious proportions. The other was offered in Ghana by Peter Ivanov, Second Secretary of the Bulgarian Embassy at Accra. He said that it was

"slanderous to accuse the Bulgarian people of racial prejudice."

This remark, unfortunate in the face of the large number of Ghanaians who saw their countrymen's bandages and bruises, was printed only in the pro-West DAILY GRAPHIC, then just recently purchased by the Ghana government from the Cecil King newspaper empire of London.

Brief though they were, however, discussions in the Ghanaian press contradicted even the facts officially presented by Bulgaria. Yet, the Ghana government was at the time avowedly pro-socialist – and pro-European socialist, at that. It had permitted discussion during those few days solely to allay the flying rumors.

Where the Bulgarian version mentioned "a demonstration", Accra papers were quite specific that there had been a series. "Slanderous" though it might be to accuse Bulgaria's people of racial prejudice, the Ghanaian TIMES spoke openly and bitterly of¬

— 306 —

"the brutal suppression of African students during a non-violent demonstration in Sofia, Bulgarian capital, against a ban by the Bulgarian government on a recently-formed All-African Students Union in the Republic."¹

At least one African view of these incidents was offered by the Accra EVENING NEWS, official organ of the then-ruling Convention People's Party:

"While the pros and cons of the imbroglio are being sorted out, we wish to condemn in no uncertain terms this flagrant repudiation of socialist principles and unabashed disrespect by so-called socialists for the color of the African which, we are sure, is the underlying psychological factor creating a complex in the minds of those primitive partisans who provoked the demonstrations ... By indulging in the unedifying orgy of bacchanalian revelry, the Bulgarian Republic has brought disgrace on the whole socialist world."²

The most thorough analysis of the Bulgarian "imbroglio" was printed during the last day of press discussion. It was contained in a commentary by H.M. Basner,* and its most significant portion dealt with a question very agitating to African's minds: WHY did the Bulgarian government, supposedly socialist, ban the All-African Students' Union? WHY did the students need to form such a body? Said the TIMES writer:

"If African leaders make the question of African unity the main political motivation, how shall African students from different parts of Africa refrain from putting that unity into practice when they are gathered for a long time in a foreign country? If the constitution of the Bulgarian people forbids that, the Government of Bulgaria has no business to invite African students."³

The typical "answer" of Western Marxists who still insist that "socialists in power" (in European countries, at any rate) can do no (specific) wrong is usually expressed in words like the following:

* The white socialist lawyer from South Africa quoted on a different subject on Pages 290-291, above.

— 307 —

"Of course, there have been mistakes. Nobody should be surprised at this. But the peoples of socialist countries will learn from such mistakes. In time, they will come to act differently in some of these cases. Meanwhile it is urgent that such incidents do not get exaggerated as they often are in the capitalist press."⁴

In short: a general lip-service to the "inevitability of mistakes", but a real refusal to consider any specific one.

When I challenged a European Marxist about the last student incident in Sofia, he countered by citing a telegram from a delegation of African students sent from England to Bulgaria to investigate. This telegram declared that the investigators had found "no trace repeat no trace" of prejudice in Bulgaria. (In how many days there?)

At the same time, official socialist policy toward African students themselves was in itself (objectively; not necessarily intentionally) provocative. This policy was at least partially responsible if the Black Stereotype was able to rear its ugly head among so many ordinary citizens in a "socialist" land.

Almost every citizen from such countries to whom I spoke on this topic commented that African students were given allowances by the socialist governments noticeably larger than those for students of the country itself – who might be class-mates of said Africans.

Per se, there may be nothing wrong with this. It was a policy based on the theory that, since Africa had been brutally exploited, special allowances must be made for her subjects when far from home. As a matter of fact, special allowances are generally granted ANY foreign student away from home, and not just in socialist countries. Thus, they were actually given to, say, Zambians in Ghana. Yet even these were resented by Ghanaian students because of failure by the government or Party to explain carefully the reasons. The similar socialist policy took too little account of this – and of another reality applicable particularly to Africans: (a) that special allowances for Africans were given in a context where the "color factor" already¬

— 308 —

had conditioned Europeans unconsciously to "expect" Africans to live at a lower scale than themselves; thus, to ordinary resentment was added the COLOR variety; and (b) that most African students – at least, this was so in Ghana – sent to study overseas (whether in socialist or capitalist countries) came from those few colonial families which had benefited from colonialism: those who had been absorbed by the colonial administration to become part of a new elite; civil servants; and professionals (whose arrogance at home played a large part in discrediting the Nkrumah regime which made such broad use of them). Often, these students had, in addition to their allottments from socialist governments, allowances from their well-to-do families at home. As a result – and many a socialist citizen griped to me specifically about this – a number of such African students had cars and money to impress – and attract – the local girls; many Africans were living ostentatiously above standards possible to socialist students. When such things were done within a context of surviving barbarous prejudices – embodied in the Black Stereotype pervading all white people's minds – the outcome was virtually inevitable.

Yet, the incidents themselves were not nearly as deplorable as their aftermath: Because the West's monopoly press immediately reported, magnified, and "made hay" of these "incidents", it became fashionable among European and Western Marxists to deny all. In this way, a golden opportunity to advance the cause of socialism among brutally colonized black people in Africa went down the historical drain.

Since when did Marxists cease necessary and sharp self-criticism because ("naturally") the bourgeois press picks it up and sneers at it? At a crucial point in history, with Africa by no means settled on a socialist path, such a position, rather than open self-criticism (where so sorely needed), played into the hands of imperialism and neo-colonialism. Moreover, as we shall see, it furthered already-serious anti-Communism on the African continent.

[— 309 —]

XXXVI

T H E   B L A C K   S T E R E O T Y P E   A N D
E A S T E R N   E U R O P E A N   S O C I A L I S M   I N   A F R I C A

Such, then, is the background of the "student incidents" in Eastern Europe. Their significance went far beyond anything that appeared in the few days of press discussion permitted. For, they were not only one of innumerable instances I myself witnessed of unconscious racism by Eastern Europeans resident[s] in Ghana.

These, of course, were not vicious, deliberate incitements based on conscious race hatred. They were the results of never before having had personal contact with real Africans, combined in modern socialist – and non-socialist – Europe with the persistent Black Stereotype among people living there.

Just one of many examples: a Russian, in my presence, jokingly told his illiterate steward when the latter had brewed bad coffee, "Oh, Issaku, I will kill you for this". What impinged on the steward? Very familiar threats issuing from someone in a white skin ... in a situation where the African had no frame of reference for detecting the difference in intention: in this typical instance, he knows only what the words have always meant; in 65 out of 100 cases, he cannot read, so he knows nothing of socialist policy, or "aid without strings" or any of the political differences between imperialism and socialism. He has only the evidence of his senses and his intimate knowledge of the history of his people.

With this sort of personal relationship as background, more knowledgeable Ghanaians had their faith in socialism severely shaken by some of the following errors made by socialist countries:

At the big printing press in Tema put up by technicians from the German Democratic Republic, the statement was made by pro-socialist Ghanaians (not as a charge, but as a sorrowful and exasperated commentary at finding their own friends "pulling the rug from under" them) that the only machines in the plant¬

— 310 —

which worked correctly on installation came from West Germany and Britain. Equipment supplied by the GDR allegedly was never complete or would not work right. (In Hungary, in mid-1966, a citizen told my son when he brought this up during a visit there, that none of the European socialist countries were as yet producing quality goods.)

At Kumasi, it took five years to get the show factory which Ghana had bought from Czechoslovakia into operation. While this in itself cannot be laid at the Czechs' door, it was stated to me that the Czechs had "pushed too hard" in that – although they had been told that the ground had not yet even been broken for the building that was to protect the machinery from the weather – once they knew the money was available, they sent the machinery to Ghana almost immediately. As a result, the machinery sat out in the weather on the Tema docks for two solid years and took weeks to recondition before it could be used. Furthermore, one knowledgeable Ghanaian claimed that the Czechs made no effort to canvas the Ghanaian market before deciding on shoe styles. He said that they simply transplanted their own type of shoes onto a market previously conditioned to Italian styling. Considering that they were to sell these shoes at the same price as Italian shoes, this man (it was June 1967 at the time) predicted that Ghanaians wouldn't buy them. Perhaps this is a small thing. But it illustrates a mechanical approach based on failure to se any need to take African problems into account.

But most of the gripes I heard centered on the Russians. Having paid for up-to-date equipment, I was told the Ghanaians got mainly 20-year-old material obsolete on arrival even in European socialist countries. This included army equipment, which was an especially sore point. Enormous Russian lorries could sometimes be seen en route to the North, lumbering along a few miles an hour; when I commented on them and wondered why they weren't more used because their size would obviously save trips, the bitter comment was that they got all of six miles to a gallon on petrol – in a country where that fuel sold for close to a dollar per gallon.

Moreover, while Americans, English, Swiss, Italians, West Germans and other Westerners mingled freely and in apparent¬

— 311 —

camaraderie with Ghanaians, the personel[personal] exclusiveness of the Russians was the talk not only of Ghana from one end to the other, but even of socialists from other European countries like Rumania, some of whom privately told me that such "clannishness" was hurting the cause of socialism – and, indeed it was. In Tamale, where they were building what was to have been the largest air field in Africa, the Russians lived by themselves, went to work in closed vans, returned the same way, and almost never mingled socially with Ghanaians.

Instance after instance of a similar nature I either saw with my own eyes or had cited to me ruefully by Ghanaians who were trying, in Nkrumah's regime, to work toward socialism under heavy if then tacit, opposition from the rising new élite among themselves.

Is it any wonder, then, that the conclusion drawn by such Ghanaians was that European socialists, being white, felt that second-hand merchandise was "good enough for black people". Even if the change itself were not true, it must be understood that such would be the reaction of honest Ghanaians.

Another side-light on socialist relations with Africa: the big expatriate distributive firms, like Kingsway (United Africa Company, Lever Brothers) and UTC (Union Trading Company, a Swiss firm) utilized the entry of socialist goods into Ghana to buy large quantities of it at low prices. After the first month or so, during which lucky purchasers bought such things at the usual percentage markup and thus considerably below that of Western goods, the prices on them were raised to Western levels. Thus, the big capitalist monopolies found a way to make super-profits out of socialist goods! After the coup, these same stores put prices on socialist goods back to their original levels in "sales" to clean them off their shelves for good. So much for "peaceful economic competition" in Africa!

The overall approach to Africans implied in these typical cases is also reflected in Marxist discussion of African problems. Although the number of such discussions began growing about 1964, only just recently has the Color Question been mentioned – and then, only indirectly and by Africans.

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For example, the WORLD MARXIST REVIEW (known in Africa as PROBLEMS OF PEACE, FREEDOM AND SOCIALISM) ran a series reporting an extended conference under its auspices in early 1962 on "Paths of Development for Newly Emergent Countries". In it, not unexpectedly, Africa came in for some mention. Yet, the composition of participants failed to reflect the crucial nature of Africa's struggle in relation to the future of world socialism: out of a total 31 participants listed, only three were Africans – one from South Africa and two from the North. Their talks, moreover, dealt primarily with specific national questions; the continent was "represented" by a Frenchman and an Englishman!

Around the end of 1964 or beginning of 1965, short, purely reportorial items began appearing in this publication from certain "Black" African countries like Nigeria and Cameroon.

The AFRICAN COMMUNIST, official organ of the illegal South African Communist Party, printed two articles dealing with color in several years' copies spot-checked (1962 to 1967 inclusive); in Third Quarter 1966, "Bending the Color Bar", by Z. Nkosi (attitudes of white unions toward black labor in South Africa); and Second Quarter 1967, "Trade Union Apartheid", by R.E. Braverman (divisions in South African trade unions over the attitude toward black labor). Neither of these articles discussed the Color Problem as such; rather they recorded the fact that the existence of deep racial prejudice among white workers (industrial, at that), causes in the South African labor movement divisions among the white workers themselves, and more concentrated exploitation of black workers.

Other ideological symptoms testify to persistent chauvinism in World Marxist ranks. For instance, the colonialists (where politically ousted) left behind – especially South of Sahara – few reliable statistics. In Ghana, for instance, the first industrial census was made during the Nkrumah regime to determine the size of basic industry, the working class, etc. It required two years merely for gathering data. When, a few months before the coup, the contract of the Rumanian assigned by the UN to direct this census ended, he naturally had to leave. With the coup, apparently the census will be forgotten. It will be dubbed one of Nkrumah's "prestige¬

— 313 —

projects". So far as this writer has been able to ascertain, to this day the census has never actually been completed, let alone analysed. Undoubtedly, similar surveys must have been undertaken in other African countries. Most of these were Western-directed, which would result in figures far less capable of use for Marxist analysis. One of these carried out in Nigeria, for instance, was an internationally-notorious flop, resulting in what was claimed to be prodigious over statement of population – 58 million claimed; 40 million actual: a 45% error!

Yet, it is on such surveys that many airy conclusions have been made by "Marxist experts" on Africa. The fact is that, until completion of reliable, "people-directed" surveys on many economic aspects of "emerging" countries, any analysis of – say – Africa's "class composition" or the actual "orientation" of economic development in various countries can at best be "educated guesses", based on UN statistics – or wishes.

For example, any attempt to obtain meaningful vital statistics for South Africa out of the 1962 U.N. Statistical Yearbook – latest available when the writer consulted the Kumasi Public Library in 1966 – was frustrated by the fact that for most categories – life expectancy, etc. – figures were given for whites, colored, Asians and Africans all lumped together, so that the inordinately high levels for South African whites (conveniently) conceals the reality of the vast majority.*

Nonetheless, the lack of statistical data done from below has not thus far hindered European Marxists and socialists from continuing to make definite analyses of Marxist categories like classes and economic orientation. Such people, who include the numerous Russian Africanists and well-known Left authorities like Jack Woddis, Idris Cox, etc., may well make contributions to the solution of African problems. But when they "act the oracle" at all times, make hard and fast statements for African consumption and implementation (too often on the basis of mechanical application to available "African" statistics of conclusions from European conditions), they do not serve the cause of socialism in Africa.

* See Chapter XVII, Pages 135 ff., above.

— 314 —

Scientists must contribute to each other's work without regard to geography. What is being objected to here is that the world-be contributions under discussion fall short of being scientific because certain real material factors on the African scene are being omitted. Nor is it taken into account that, as a result of their history, Africans are extraordinarily sensitive, notable when white people are involved, to "interference" in anything they are doing, as the figures on the numbers of Communists in Africa suggest.* Perhaps the following statement expresses such misgivings:

"The Nigerian People's Party as the Marxist-Leninist political party of our Nigerian peoples shall help to enrich the international socialist pool BY ITS ORIGINALITY AND STAND AGAINST DOGMATIC AND BLIND COPYING OF POLICIES AND TACTICS OF THE MARXIST-LENINIST PARTIES OF OTHER COUNTRIES."¹

When challenged to explain such statements, European Marxists simply repudiate the Party concerned. This may get rid of the problem for such Europeans, but in effect it amounts to arrogating to themselves the decision as to who shall lead, or speak for, Africans.

* See Table 32, Chapter XXXIX, Page 331 ff., above.

[— 315 —]

XXXVII

T H E   B L A C K   S T E R E O T Y P E
A N D   T H E   S O V I E T   U N I O N

Although such was not their purpose, Russian authorities themselves have testified to the causes behind socialist blunders toward Africa and Africans. Chief among these causes is a theoretical ignorance on the subject of Africa which constitutes a perfect screen against seeing – let alone admitting – any error in that sphere.

Consider this:

"The study of the languages and culture of the peoples of tropical Africa has started comparatively recently in the USSR.

"Before the October Revolution many outstanding Russian scientists studied the history of ancient Egypt, medieval Ethiopia, and the history of the peoples of North Africa. But the life and culture of the peoples living South of the Sahara were never studied. This could be explained by the fact that the destinies of the people of North and Northeast Africa were always closely connected with the history of Europe and Asia Minor, while the countries lying south of the Sahara developed independently for a long time, being far removed from European culture."¹

The lack in Russia of any study of the "Languages and cultures of the peoples of tropical Africa" – typical of all European countries – was fostered by those in control of the educational and information media of the era, the Western European slave traders in medieval Europe's power centers whose countrymen became colonialists. The particular Russian lack merely marks that country, for a long period, as part – though a johnny-come-lately – of capitalist-imperialist Europe, where such sty[u]dy was systematically suppressed.

An honest explanation of such facts would have had to include the fact that there WAS a "close connection" between¬

— 316 —

Europe and Africa South of Sahara which completely destroyed that area's developing "independently ... from European culture" (manifested, e.g. by the great, world-renowed University at Timbuctu) – the incredibly profitable black slave trade, to participate in which Russia arrived too late on the capitalist world scene.

The only classical touch omitted from this "explanation" is in suggesting that there could have been development South of Sahara "independently ... from European culture". Otherwise, the whole thing is a mere sickly echo of the past.

But the "explanation" continues:

"Until recent times, the history of the African peoples could be studied only by the scientists of those countries who possessed African colonies."²

After 50 years of socialism, without a blush or a quotation mark, a Russian professor dubs misrepresenters of Africa "scientists". Liars about history receive the Soviet accolade. How does this differ from imperialist practice?

A pacifist publication in London, studying racism in Moscow, declared that

"It seems that most of the racial intolerance comes not from official quarters, but from ordinary people."³

Not in the least! It is from "official quarters" that "explanations" like the above come. It is in "official quarters" of Eastern Europe that new "scientists" have arisen to give "socialist" support to old saws about Africa.

And what do these new "scientists" have arisen to give "socialist" support to old saws about Africa.

"... the idea that it was the white race that had created the foundations of African culture."²

The new "scientists" don't say so; the old ones did. In a word – quite "scientifically", of course - ALL Europe wallowed for centuries in deliberately fabricated misconceptions about one of the¬

— 317 —

world's great continents, thereby developing everywhere in Europe certain traditional attitudes toward Africans, such as an overall acceptance of their "backwardness" and "helplessness", leading to doubts about African abilities in any field.

A British Communist who prefers not to be named answered my query why Africa was still "represented" in European Marxist discussions about Africa by Frenchmen and Englishmen by describing for me the "difficulties" involved in "trying to develop" African spokesmen. Africans, he complained, produce written work about their own problems which are "full of mixed-up ideas", which of course must be "corrected" at once. "And they thank us", he assured me. The present status of Western Communist Parties and their abysmal stand on Africa leads one to question the concept "mixed-up ideas" when uttered by one of their spokesmen.

There are two significant aspects to the problem of left-over racialism in the Western and Eastern European Left:

The first is that, after 50 years of socialism, a Russian "Africanist" is still mouthing the old myths. "Ordinary people" in such countries still express – because they still harbor – race prejudice. And anyone who tries to point out the reality is at once termed "anti-Soviet", thus ensuring NO discussion. SO, racism in Eastern Europe and the Western Left may be expected to increase.

Second, every error made by a Russian in Africa or toward Africans anywhere is resented by Africans on a color basis, even when they themselves deplore such a reaction. Many Africans who react that way know that what they are feeling was created by imperialism; but that knowledge does not automatically erase the historically-conditioned response.

Actually, neither of these is very surprising. As yet, all Europeans have lived under imperialism a lot longer than under socialism. Eastern European countries under capitalism had never developed fast enough or early enough to become colonizers. Yet, they lived in the "metropolitan atmosphere" and absorbed it. Till recently, Africa could hardly be of major concern to any socialist nation: after World Wars I and II, first Russia, then the smaller countries of Eastern Europe, had been kept militarily and¬

— 318 —

economically busy protecting the very life of their new social system. Where private ownership in the means of production had been abolished, the need for prejudice in any form went, too; and there official socialist policy at once expressed the opposition to racism. But this alone did not and cannot prevent racism itself from (inevitably) persisting in the mass consciousness, because it had been deliberately ingrained there during centuries.

In a word, neither the USSR not other European socialist countries which arrived at socialism later than Russia, have had time adequately to overcome, or even properly to lay bare, all the misconceptions embodied in unconscious approaches by socialist citizens to Africans – even supposing those nations had been anxious to do so.

On any other subject, socialists readily admit that many misconceptions are left over from the old way of life. Immediate mass education is undertaken. But it was only in 1957 that Ghana's independence, coupled with her orientation for the first time on that continent avowedly in a socialist direction, opened the way from the African side for any extensive interchanges with socialist Europe. Previous to that, none was permitted.

So, for forty years, mass education on this topic, not being urgent, could not be fitted in. Ironically, and perhaps significantly, by then, other "old" ideas had become rampant in the USSR. Did the hold of racism on European minds play any role in this ideological deterioration?*

Whether so or not, no mass educational campaign about Africa has yet, to this writer's knowledge, been undertaken anywhere in Eastern Europe. Many Africans and Afro-Americans will tell you that some Europeans – French, Russians, and others – do not "see color". But this turns out in practice simple to mean that living with these Europeans may be preferable, at least at first, to residing among outright racists from or in other metropoles. It certainly did not prevent the Russians, under socialism, from taking an "educational" road vis-a-visa Africa exactly like the West's: they¬

* An answer to this question will be sought in a separate study of Revisionism.

— 319 —

have created a small élite of "African experts" concentrated in their "Afrika Institut", whence floods of expertic[s]e, like that quoted above, issue.

The existence and nature of the Black Stereotype in the mass Western mind anywhere has yet to be acknowledged, let alone fought.

The "student incidents" in the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere offered a tremendous opportunity to have launched just such an educational program. My own experience was that when such ideas as the existence of a Black Stereotype were brought to the attention of socialist individuals personally, from the countries involved, they not only seemed very objective about it, so that thorough discussion was held, but they appeared most eager to rectify the now-understood position in which they usually acknowledged themselves. One Rumanian whom I came to know fairly well stated after such a conversation: "If only I had known these things before coming to Ghana, I would have done many things differently!"

Politically, however, this point has been left far behind in Eastern Europe by now. The only importance to airing it now is to expose the facts for possible later use.

The attitude of politically advanced Africans is another side to this story which must be understood. Africans from various countries, none of them anti-socialist, made to me in Ghana illuminating comments on the student incidents and other evidences of left-over imperialist prejudices in the socialist world. Many of them had spent time in one of the socialist countries, where they had met other Africans of similar background.

All of them concurred that, generally speaking, socialist Europe was in no way comparable in its racism to the West. Yet, all had experienced specific and repeated individual instances of prejudice from citizens in or from Eastern European socialist countries. They agreed that such instances were all, in and of themselves, trivial and so recognized by their victims. They were damning their aggregate.

— 320 —

A single illustration, told me by a number of Africans independently of each other, is the following: each claimed to have been asked by some socialist citizen in Eastern Europe whether it was true that "you people live in trees". (Later, Eastern Europeans in Ghana to whom I quoted this recurring remark categorically refused to believe that it could really have been said. But the story had come independently from more than one source, all reliable in other tested ways.)

Trivial though such incidents were, however, their importance lay in a total corrosive effect from piling up over an extended period of time. Certainly, they corroborate the existence in Eastern Europe among people calling themselves socialists, and representing to Africans a land of socialism, of definite, widespread and typical misconceptions about real Africans. All such socialists have in common, for better or for worse, as seen by Africans, a white skin. The major injury suffered by the Africans on account of these petty instances of racism did not stem from the prejudice itself, although that never ceases to hurt; it came from the fact that such errors originated in a socialist source which, in too many cases – especially officially, when the incidents were publicized – refused to admit any error, consequently denying the need for any corrective.

One Ghanaian who had been deeply involved in a well-publicized incident in Eastern Europe told me that, when he tried to explain African grievances to his Eastern European socialist comrades, their reply invariably was: "Oh, Comrade! You think about color too much!" In a word, exactly as in racist history everywhere in the West, anything bad that happens to Africans out of chauvinist mistakes by whites is "the African's fault": he is "too sensitive" about "color"! Any American who ever had contact with the Afro-American community readily recognizes this old saw.

The Black Stereotype was bound to come abruptly to the surface the moment real Africans, conditioned by centuries of imperialist brutalization, ran head-on into Europeans loaded with Western misconceptions about Africa deposited in their part of the world in super-exploitation's wake.

[— 321 —]

When Social Democratic outfits like the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions send their cohorts to Africa to undermine African progress for the benefit of the Western labor aristocracy – and naturally, therefore, of the imperialist ruling class – they quite easily exploit socialist errors derived from left-over racism, and can hook these mistakes into their virulent anti-liberation activities. Considerable real damage to the African freedom struggle results, especially insofar as the achievement of unity on a continental labor basis is concerned.

But even all this is not yet the total. Africans, only recently emerging from centuries of tight imperialist domination in its most vicious form, have[,] to an extent hard to realize until one is set down in its midst[,] had their minds filled with various far-reaching anti-Communist lies. It is into THIS context that "student incidents" and other socialist errors of racism fall. It is within these boundaries that remnants of the Black Stereotype and the strongly-persisting Colonialist Mentality both operate.

[— 322 —]

XXXVIII

S O M E   D I S C L A I M E R S   A N D   A   S U M M A R Y
O F   R A C I S M ' S   E F F E C T S   T O D A Y

Obviously, a detailed Marxist examination of racism, especially its relationship to Social Democracy, is long overdue. But experience since this attempt at it was started shows that it is vital to specify first certain positions which are NOT being espoused:

1. Racism is most blatant when there are differences in skin color. But it is not confined to such cases. Nazism, for example, shows that, even in the absence of color differences, racism can be a major ideological weapon for imperialism: color prejudice is a special case of racism. But while racism can not be equated to color prejudice, clearly it is related to it. Colonialist practice has illuminated this point because colonialism always "justifies" its extraction of super-profits from ANY subjugated people by referring to its victims' "inferiority", setting the degree of such alleged "inferiority" in general in direct proportion to differences in skin color. The overwhelming majority of peoples actually subjugated by colonialism did have and still do have pigmentation darker than those prevalent in metropolitan areas. So, under imperialism, racism is indissolubly tied to color of skin.

Furthermore, racism reduces to outright, straightforward color prejudice as its major content when the subjugated are black. Historically, the most basic and brutal super-exploitation has been practised precisely against black people.

Basically and specifically, racism is the subjective side of colonialism; in particular, of super-exploitation, which latter is its material base. Its ideological content is a mythical "superiority" postulated, in the overwhelming majority of cases, upon the degree of absence of skin pigmentation; and, in the rest, upon some physical – i.e. inborn – claim to speciality.

— 323 —

2. The writer has been accused of claiming that "racism is the major cause of all the strife in the world today". Let us set the record straight: Racism is the major tactical ideological pillar upholding the moribund imperialist system AT THIS TIME in history. Concretely, what does that mean? Is ideology "causative"? Originally, no; as it develops, it moves from the expressive state to an equally – dialectically – causative one. A knowledge of contradictions reveals that racism could not cause "all the strife in the world today"; but it's doing a masterly job of keeping it going. Racism – present not only in conscious agents of the system – and specifically color prejudice, play a major subjective role in most of the strife in "Black" Africa and among people of African descent. Racism is a derivative of imperialism. Imperialism is the father, teacher and husbandman, the real culprit behind colonial misery. But this basic fact is obscured, hidden, buried – and a very potent weapon thereby withheld – by the smokescreen, Racism.

Yet, because imperialism is the basic perpetrator of this condition, the World Left has thus far refused to tackle the material force which racism constitutes, especially in that area of anti-colonial liberation involving black people. There are probably endless numbers of people who think that this does not matter. But, being at the bottom of the economic totem pole, black people happen to play a far more crucial role in the in the immediate outcome of anti-colonial liberation than pervasive racial prejudice on both sides of socialist borders throughout the world has yet been willing to grant.

Recent events on the African continent bolster the contention that the outcome of the African and Afro-American struggles may, after all, be a decisive factor on the world scene today.

3. Analysis of racism and its relation to Social Democracy, plus insistence that racism is present even in advanced progressive quarters such as among Western Marxists and in socialist countries, does not constitute "over-stressing the race question" or "advocating racism", as has already been declared. Stating facts is no more causal than an accurate weather forecast: if people are¬

— 324 —

imagined who for ages had feared thunder and lightning, their motives would be readily apparent if they accused the meteorologist of "over-stressing" or "advocating" thunder storms. And if they imbued such "advocacy" with negative virtues, it still wouldn't change the objective facts.

If you ignore racism, it will NOT go away. If you tackle the problems it creates, you will come to see that they have no solution short of socialism. But if, consequently, you think you can wait until socialism before dealing with such a serious matter, you merely leave the field clear for its unchallenged rampage. WORDS ARE NOT ENOUGH. VERBAL CONDEMNATION IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR ANALYSIS, not for active proof of understanding. The pervasive Left refusal to face and fight racism as such is, in my opinion, testimony to just how deeply it has penetrated all human beings.

4. Although it has been stated in these pages that anti-colonial liberation is in fact advancing along a front defined by the Color Line, this is not attributable to the existence in itself of differing skin colors. That is, it is not claimed that being born white produces a congenitally color-prejudiced person. What is being said is that being born white in today's world constitutes a specific material fact in a specific material environment carrying in its train specific and unavoidable ideological consequences which have persisted from a historically-determined past, and which carry therefore certain material consequences predetermining the success of "Color" as a tactic. This is the meaning of the pervasiveness in the entire world today of the Black Stereotype. Its success stems from the fact that the black slave trade, and the colonialism that followed, allowed imperialism to use degrees of pigmentation as its excuse for extracting from the labor of peoples it had subjugated super-profits in direct proportion to the darkness of skin.

When Africans correctly note that certain Russians, Czechs, Poles, etc., "act like white people", they are referring to the facts we have been trying to make clear:

— 325 —

a) that the economic foundation of imperialism is colonialism, without which it will cease to exist; and

b) that ALL white people on this earth lived for LONG time under imperialism. Since white people, like any others, cannot be abstracted from their material environment, the fact that EVEN people from Eastern European "socialist" lands all too frequently do "act like white people" merely reflects the fact that they are "white people" who, during a long historical period, starting IN EUROPE, lived in metropoles which exported capital, the source of imperialist super-profits, as "justification" of which the ruling class created an artificial and mythical "Master Race".

5. Unfortunately, widespread racial prejudice exists among Marxists, as all black people know who have come into contact with them. But few white people, though they claim to be Marxists ready to face any objective fact, know it or will admit it even when it is pointed out, a symptom of great importance in proving the thesis.

In particular, the many serious "student incidents" in the 60s in Eastern European socialist countries have shown beyond question the persistence of racism and color prejudice into the socialist era. So, in order to forestall the usual refusal in these quarters to discuss the points raised herein, certain false objections must be disposed of:

a) Nobody, including Africans or this author, questions that genuine socialist policy opposes racism. By its nature, real socialism has no need of racism because it has no profit-based economic motive to divide people in order to squeeze super-surplus-value from them.

b) Nobody, including Africans or this author, denies that Africans make mistakes, including serious ones, any one of which, made abroad, could become the immediate spark setting off "incidents". But are their mistakes any worse than those of others? It is the exaggerated, and so usually physical, reaction to African mistakes which is of interest, because it "gives the game away". It ignores the fact that such mistakes, clearly derivative, are so handy for confusing the issue. The ISSUE is¬

— 326 —

the need to face and eradicate left-over White Supremacy among progressives in the West generally and in the post-capitalist world in particular. The latter, especially, constitutes the indispensable precondition for correct future relationships between peoples in former metropolitan areas and those in former colonies, with special emphasis on Africa.

c) One major response of actual Eastern Europeans and of Marxists in the Western Left when their attention is called to such left-over race prejudice in their own ranks has been to claim that "all these incidents are set off by the CIA". We have dealt in part with this shibboleth.* But the implication of the contention itself is that, were it not for the CIA, no such incidents would occur. Objectively speaking, it is quite apparent that CIA agents are NOT either the ONLY or the MAIN cause of these troubles. Activities of the CIA, etc. – as the Bolshevik Party under Lenin clearly proved – can be thwarted by correct policy accompanied by mass understanding of how history is made, and mass participation therein. Such activities can NOT be thwarted by pretending that the prejudices in question do not exist; nor by trying to out-maneuver the CIA.

In the long run, history is made NOT by the maneuvers and cheap intrigues of Hollywood-type political gangsters. It develops out of the world relationship of forces, among which the masses in politically-correct action cannot be defeated. The examples of China, Korea, Vietnam and Cuba stand witness.

With all the foregoing qualifications in mind, a summary of this discussion of racism suggests that:

A. Race prejudice is universal in the world which lived for centuries under capitalism. White people harbor it as "great nation chauvinism", the main subjective expression of which is White Supremacy in myriad forms that, together, constitute a Black Stereotype. Black people reflect it in an attempt to escape racism's results called "Black Nationalism"; more¬

* See Chapter XXXV, Page 304, above.

— 327 —

generally, in "The Colonialist Mentality", the negative or mirror image of the metropolitan areas' Black Stereotype.

B. This Stereotype, a pervasive accomplishment of imperialism, left-over even in the socialist world, especially its European part for so long integrated in Western capitalism, today has begun to play a material role in BRAKING the anti-imperialist struggle, of which the current MAJOR material content is anti-colonial liberation.

C. Social Democracy from its inception was basically intent on thwarting precisely this liberation struggle in any of its forms.

D. Because Social Democracy needs and supports colonialism to guarantee high Western living standards through the constant flow of super-profits into the metropoles, and because colonialism has in fact subjugated mainly the earth's darker peoples, Social Democracy unfailingly has RACIST features: at first, hidden; but as imperialism decays, more and more open.

E. In fact, the lowest common denominator of Social Democracy IS racism (subjectively expressed in the Black Stereotype). Conversely, the Black Stereotype has been and remains a material factor evoking mass support for Social Democracy. Its materiality is expressed in wages and living conditions differentials between metropolitan and colonial peoples.

F. The Black Stereotype has played, and still plays, a significant and thus-far-unrecognized role in promoting Social Democracy under specific conditions, as proven by the fact that, when confronted by black people in significant numbers, Social Democracy reduces to outright color racism. Witness recent history in England.

G. The Black Stereotype, and the Colonialist Mentality that complements it, are so deeply imbedded, so unconscious, and so irrational because emotionally based, that they cannot automatically disappear with the appearance of Socialism. They linger on, undetected in their carriers – and will continue to do so until consciously recognized, analyzed and uprooted – because until very recently, there was no material reason for any other course: other material factors, such as defending the very life of Socialism, were more urgent.

— 328 —

H. In the light of this background, it is not racism among Marxists that shocks; rather, it is the continued refusal among white Leftists to FACE it. What is more, exposure of racism's full content and its ways of manifesting itself would be a genuine spur to the struggle against colonialism; it could lay bare the real path to final, economic success for anti-colonial liberation.

Because racism is a disorganizing force which conceals imperialism's basic economic and political truths, this exposition is indispensable – and inseparable from Lenin's admonition to "understand" and "appreciate" the effects of imperialist parasitism. It is by the racist umbilical cord that hundreds of millions of victims on both sides of the Color Line are still bound to the cancer-ridden mother long since doomed, but kept alive by their misguided support, and by their equally misguided hatred and/or fear of their own natural allies across the Color Line.

As a result, among Marxists in that portion of the capitalist world where the foreign economic activities of metropolitan monopoly capital is crucial to maintaining outmoded imperialism; and, in those sectors of the socialist world where the need for foreign economic activities by "home" capital once dominated (i.e., before socialism) and hence, where racism was ideologically required, there has been a very significant failure properly to estimate the role of anti-colonial liberation as the KEY factor in current world revolution – a failure characteristic of Revisionism.

Revisionism can be proven to be a modern, intra-socialist form of Social Democracy; ipso facto, it must have specific racist elements.

I. Finally, Social Democracy, its racist variant, and its "intra-socialist" form Revisionism, all operate within a shell of virulent widespread anti-Communism, which both feeds on their misconceptions, and reinforces them.

Because anti-Communism is the major strategic ideological pillar of moribund imperialism today, we cannot leave the subject of racism without at least a cursory look at anti-Communism.

[— 329 —]

XXXIX

A N T I - C O M M U N I S M   A N D   R A C I S M

If racist errors are being made by Eastern European socialists or Western Marxists today, it is nonetheless no secret that racism and color prejudice do not benefit from, nor did they originate in, socialism, but in capitalism, which is founded, and continues to exist, on their fruits.

For, the basic fact of today's world is that, objectively, socialism constitutes for the whole colonial world, and for Africa in particular, its main bulwark against, and hope of destroying, imperialism.

On this fundamental truth the desperate international imperialist ruling class is acutely conscious. Its long-run program and all its major actions are directed first and foremost toward foiling colonial revolution, success of which would destroy imperialism completely: even though racism be successful for the time being in frustrating revolution in the colonies themselves; even though it enchains the ideologically-impoverished populations "at home"; nonetheless, as long as a socialist world exists, the permanence of colonies for imperialism's milking can not be assured.

In this light must be seen the role on the revolutionary front of anti-Communism. It forms a context in which the