Perspectives for the Black Struggle

I titled this report “We Do Mind Dying—Tasks and Perspectives for the Black Struggle.” I was inspired by comrade Don A.’s document of the same name. I called it that because I think it’s important to render conscious the pressures that weigh on black comrades, especially during this time when everything’s going to hell.

The attacks on the oppressed are getting worse and worse. Black people are being killed in the streets every day. No one is doing anything about it.

A cop can kill a black baby, and nobody cares. People are thrown into jail, people are thrown out of their homes—you just watch your people get attacked day in and day out, and nobody does anything about it. It’s very demoralizing and draining.

While we do very good work with the stuff we do around “Open Police Archives” (OPA), housing and everything else, the reality is it’s honestly just a drop in the bucket of what’s needed. And this can be very demoralizing—who is gonna save your people? Who is gonna do it? I know it made me feel like what’s the point in fighting anymore. How are we gonna do this? It’s been 400 years plus of oppression. What is it gonna take to get us out of this?

What helped me was looking at the stuff we’re doing. Well, there is something to do. Yes, it’s a drop in the bucket. Yes, it’s small. But this is the work we need to do in order to actually turn things around. When I read Don A.’s document, he was like, we need to do something, and yes, we do mind dying.

I felt like that too. Actually, yes, I do mind dying. I do mind my people being slaughtered. And I want to do something about it. So, that’s why we’re here.

Importance and Difficulties of Winning Black Communists

To transition from that, I will quote Leon Trotsky on the black question. In 1939, he asserted:

It is the duty of every revolutionary in this country to fight to win black people over to communism, not out of moral obligation but out of recognition that doing so is crucial to make a revolution.

The entire foundation of American capitalism rests on the disenfranchisement, segregation and brutal oppression of the black masses. Black oppression is the key source of strength and stability for the ruling class and is used to undermine the conditions of the entire working class. Black people are kept in miserable conditions (paid less, last hired and first fired, segregated in dilapidated ghettos, randomly murdered by police, etc.) in order to degrade conditions throughout all of society. The bosses can force white workers to accept less or be replaced. And by pitting races against each other, the bosses ensure that there will be no united fight against them.

To improve the situation for black people, there must be a struggle against the interests of the capitalists, who are the only ones who benefit from black oppression. Bettering conditions of black people will bring improvements for all, which is why the working class as a whole has a vested interest in fighting for black liberation. The black struggle must be fused with that of the working class in order to have enough force to smash the system that is responsible for black oppression and the oppression of the whole working class.

The task of winning black people to communism and unifying the working class across racial lines is even more pressing now that we are in a reactionary period and attacks are raining down on workers and the oppressed. While this is our task writ large, it is clearly very difficult in the current context.

Currently, there is very little to no integrated struggle, and the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights Movement have all been gutted or overturned. Look at what just happened to the Voting Rights Act.

Trump has made it his mission to stoke fear among the oppressed in his quest to tear up the liberal world order. Liberals, who used to be all about diversity, have dropped all talk of opposing black oppression now that they no longer have anything to gain from it, and the left seems to have followed suit. Black people mainly want to keep their heads down, do their job and go home. They do not see that it is possible for any white person to fight for them. In fact, they think that white people are responsible for their oppression.

Black people have a bunker-like mentality from being constantly attacked and feeling like nobody else has their back. This situation creates a mood of despair and a view that the only thing you can do is mind your business and maybe vote Democrat in order to maybe get some relief. Because many white workers went for Trump, black people see them as voting against their existence and conclude that there is no possibility of white people fighting in their interests. The same way that it is divorced from the working class, the left is also divorced from the black community, which sees the left as either irrelevant or class-reductionist and unwilling to fight for black liberation.

Why “Unite and Fight” and Liberal Appeals Fail

Socialists must fight to overcome this divide and forge working-class unity. The question is: How?

Many on the left push an economist perspective in the unions and in working-class struggle. They think that to overcome racial divisions, you just have to focus on what everyone has in common, i.e., economic demands like the fight for higher wages. They say things like “unite and fight,” “the only war is the class war” and other such slogans. This is all well and good. But if you tell a black person that they gotta unite with white people, they’ll look at you like you got three heads.

To many black people, this just sounds like aligning with the enemy. Growing up in this horribly racist society, black oppression defines the daily life of all black people and shapes their entire consciousness. They are brutally segregated into the lowest rungs of society, forced to fight twice as hard to get basic opportunities that they see their white counterparts get with ease and must deal with everyday racism.

Experiencing all this without any white person standing up for them only reinforces the false idea, pushed by the liberal wing of the racist white ruling class, that the white population as a whole is responsible for black oppression. Because of this reality, black people have developed a strong distrust of white people, who they often see as their oppressor or, at best, not willing to fight against racist conditions. To overcome this distrust, you cannot just will this reality away but must directly confront it.

Just yelling “class war” while offering no real perspective on how to fight against black oppression only maintains the racial divisions within the working class and deepens black mistrust of socialists. To insist that the working class unite across racial lines without proposing a single demand directed against racial oppression amounts to calling on black workers to abandon any fight for their specific needs because it might offend white workers. For black workers, this means that they should shut up in the interest of unity and puts the responsibility for “getting past race” on them. All the current divisions are kept in place.

We must also be aware that talk of the working class fighting on behalf of the oppressed sounds like a complete joke to many black workers, especially when lots of their coworkers went for Trump. The union bureaucrats inspire no confidence. They range from liberals to raging chauvinists, and they usually help the bosses fuel racial divisions in some form. All this only reinforces black people’s view that the unions cannot be mobilized to fight against racial oppression or, even worse, that the unions enforce their oppression. If left groups were serious about making a revolution, one of their main tasks would be to go into the unions and fight to overcome the existing divisions between the working class and the left and between the working class and the specially oppressed. Above all, the left must put up a fight in the concrete against the union bureaucracy.

So, you shouldn’t drop the black question, but you shouldn’t be a liberal about it either. Making moral appeals to white workers to care about black people will do nothing but intensify the racial divide. This moral browbeating is what paved the way for the right-wing shift in society to begin with. White workers do not want to be told to care about minorities while their material conditions are deteriorating. Telling them that concern about their economic conditions is racist has led many working people to see the struggles of the oppressed as opposed to their own interests. The liberals have instilled into the working class the belief that whatever a black person gets has to come at the expense of a white worker. The left has only made the problem worse by echoing liberal arguments and calling anyone who is concerned about their own declining conditions a chauvinist.

A Positive Example of What to Do

So, how to unite the working class across racial lines? I think our friend’s campaign to get coworkers to defend immigrants is a good example. While it was done in defense of immigrants, its method can be applied to try to get the working class to defend any oppressed group. Our friend was able to get coworkers to sign a card or donate money because the case hit close to home and signing a card or donating money was something doable that was in their comfort zone. The detention center is in their backyard; it directly affects them.

Our friend didn’t tell coworkers to look deep into their hearts and care about immigrants, or carry on about how we need to fight for open borders or declare that immigrants are welcome here. Instead, our friend played on the contradictions of coworkers who supported mass deportations but didn’t like when “good ones” or people they know are rounded up and brutalized. Our friend argued that if ICE and the cops are able to do this to pro-immigrant protesters right next door, the next stop would be the cops brutalizing the unions. This was convincing to several workers. The aim was to get them to see that an injury to one is an injury to all.

The positive response made an impression on black workers, who thought that their Trump-supporting white coworkers would never do anything for minorities. Black people will gain trust in white people only when they see white people actually fighting for them. In this case, they could see white workers supporting an oppressed minority that had been incarcerated. It’s a small start, but it’s a start.

This action is an example of how to chip away at the racial divide and bridge the mistrust between black and white workers. It is a guide for getting the working class to take up the defense of minorities and rank-and-file organizing independently of the bureaucrats.

Get Involved in the Struggle

Just like it is miles away from the working class, the left is very distant from the black masses. There is a reason that the left is lily-white and that the few black people who even know that the left exists distrust it. The left is seen as outsiders and wreckers who care more about peddling newspapers than getting involved in fighting to better the lives of the oppressed. The left has virtually no ties to the black community because it does not do work in it. For the left to actually win black people to communism, they have to actually go and talk to some black people. The left must consciously orient to the oppressed, especially now that we’re in a period of reaction where the most oppressed will be hit the hardest.

We’ve been doing concrete work around housing and anti-police brutality. Public housing has been under attack across the country, and it’s no different in New York [see back page]. The “socialist” mayor is pushing through privatizations that will kick black and brown residents out onto the streets in order to replace them with richer, whiter residents. The leaders of the tenant groups involved in the fight against privatization usually look to the Democrats for help, which is a completely suicidal prospect since the Democrats are the ones who have been destroying public housing in the first place. The residents of the projects are angry and want to fight. They hate the Democrats and think that Mamdani is a traitor who they know won’t do shit for them.

People want to fight back, but they don’t know how. A response you often get is that the privatizations are gonna happen anyway, so there’s nothing you can do. But there is something you can do. There are over 350,000 residents in NYCHA buildings. A lot of them are union workers with natural ties to the working class. If we mobilized together with the working class behind us, we would have the power to stop the privatizations dead in their tracks.

Residents are at risk of losing everything if they don’t fight. The black and brown residents of the projects need leaders who aren’t gonna screw them, leaders who help them mobilize independently of the Democrats and connect their struggles to those of the working class. It is urgent that socialists join the fight.

Another aspect of our work has been trying to rebuild the movement against police brutality with our OPA campaign. Everyone knows that police brutality still runs rampant; cops slaughter black people in droves. Just recently in Mississippi, cops shot a one-year-old black baby over his mother allegedly shoplifting. Being suspected of stealing Pampers now means the cops can execute your baby. This disgusting shooting is just another example of how the cops terrorize black people day in and day out. Something must be done about this. But ever since the collapse of BLM, the left has no longer had something to tail, and they suddenly grew deaf, dumb and blind to the subject.

The purpose of OPA is to rebuild the movement against police brutality on a class-struggle basis, while exposing lying liberal politicians. While we have not won the masses to this understanding yet, we have begun to build roots in the anti-police brutality milieu and trust with the mothers and other family members affected by police brutality. We are not seen as outsiders, but are trusted and relied upon by the family members, who even go so far as defending us when we’re excluded by other left groups.

So, while we have not turned every grieving mother into a communist, these connections allow us to grow our influence and prepare the ground for when struggle arises. We look for specific cases and opportunities to advance our perspective and fight for justice for these families. While our forces are small, we were a major factor in getting Eric Duprey’s killer convicted.

Even though every black person knows just how much the cops make our lives a living hell, OPA protests tend to be small. A lot of black workers do not come out. It’s not ’cause they don’t care, it’s ’cause people are afraid to stick their necks out, especially against the cops. Some might even think: what’s the point of protesting when BLM didn’t amount to anything? But the thing is, you have to fight back or the cops will continue to kill with impunity. Without pushback, they’re allowed to terrorize our community any way they want. We cannot allow this. We cannot allow the death toll to keep climbing and another one of our brothers or sisters to be gunned down in the street without causing a stir. This is life or death. We must fight back.

Wake-Up Call to Left

But black people don’t want to stick their neck out just to get it chopped off. American Trotskyist James P. Cannon addressed this in 1932 when he wrote of the Scottsboro Boys:

While white workers are not coming out en masse to OPA protests, we have to use an approach similar to that previously described to motivate to them why doing so is in their interests. Even the tiniest amount of working-class support—whether that means taking a mother to a union meeting to state her case or having one worker join her at a protest—helps build confidence that the family is not alone and something else can be done instead of looking to the D.A.s and the courts.

It is the duty of every communist to intervene into the black struggle in order to fight to make sure it gets put on a road that can succeed. The black struggle has experienced enough failure; we do not need any more. But this will change only if communists consciously intervene into the struggles that affect black life. This is the only way to fight for the liberation of the oppressed and show the black masses that communism is not just a thing for white people.

While the general mood of black people right now is to keep their heads down in order to weather the reactionary storm, that doesn’t mean we are satisfied with the way things are. We do mind racial oppression. We do mind being last hired and first fired and being at the bottom of the workforce and society. We do mind living in dilapidated, roach-infested, segregated housing. We do mind getting tortured and killed by the police. To every single leftist: We do mind dying; now, what are you going to do about it?

Black History & the Class Struggle No. 27

February 5, 2026