Against Class Collaboration, For a Proletarian Anti-Racist Movement

The Black Lives Matter (or BLM) is a human and civil rights movement, which took shape within the African-American community around 2013. It grew as a reaction to the infamous verdict that granted full acquittal to the local man who, on February 26 of the previous year in Sanford, Florida, had shot – certainly not in self-defense, as established by the court – 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, killing him on the spot.

The demonstrations which have filled the streets of the great European capitals with young people in recent days are partly linked to the BLM. The intentions of what began as an online campaign were, in 2013 as today, to stir the “consciences” of American and international public opinion to denounce the episodes of “war on Blacks”, the systematic attacks on the lives of black men and the police brutality that acts in the indifference of justice.

The individual local “structures” that adhere to the BLM and the multitude of organizations that participate in the network do not respond to any central body, a refusal that corresponds to localistic prejudices, but also to the interest of withholding funding from external subscriptions. This has not prevented in the last few days between the member structures a coordination in the organization of the protests, the request for signatures on petitions, unified under the same slogans and claims.

But what kind of claims? We read on the Black Lives Matter website: “The mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in the violence inflicted on black communities by the state and its agents. By fighting and reacting to violence, creating room for Black imagination and innovation, and putting Black joy at the center, we achieve immediate improvements in our lives.”

Here, we call together the black communities, in their inter-classist totality, to defend against the attack of “white supremacy”. It is an interclassist movement, therefore bourgeois, expression of a persecuted racial minority, bourgeois who want their small slice of local power recognized by the White State, without being cut or massacred by the police.

Therefore, the BLM has little to offer the black proletariat, imagination and innovation aside.

Both the demands and the ways to go, sometimes delirious, in the movement often diverge. But widely shared are the criticism of the Trump regime; a reform of the justice system; stricter penalties for violent police officers; the containment of systematic racism; the definition of local police departments (in the city of Los Angeles, 53% of the expenditure goes to the police department, a value in line with that of other American cities); support for businesses and small businesses owned by African-Americans.

These popular claims have also attracted many young white, petit-bourgeois and proletarian youth to the demonstrations, ready to express their solidarity with the cause of antiracism and their discontent with the American picture as a whole.

From media multinationals, Apple, Nike and Adidas and others, promises of long-term investment in black communities where they wave the flag of anti-racist progressivism in exchange for good business have recently arrived.

It is inevitable that the social and racial discontent tries to vent in the electoral swamp: we hear the need for the black communities to complete the electoral registration practices so that they can vote, in the next presidential elections, “blue” against the tyrant Trump, guilty of giving voice and protection to the white supremacists. In short, the Democratic Party has as its objective, nothing new, but to bring home as many African American Voters as possible.

Without continuing to plough through the various utopias of social reform within the BLM movement, one more unlikely than the other, today more than ever, the need for revolutionary theory and the Marxist party, in America and beyond, arises.

We associate ourselves with the denunciation of the condition of poverty of the black proletariat, violently affected, first, by the ongoing economic crisis of world capitalism, and then, by the Covid-19 pandemic – which in the USA has seen about a third of its victims being members of the African-American population – which has marked a surge in unemployment, already historically very high in the black communities. We denounce the absence of essential services, particularly in the health sector, the absence of housing…

The prevailing Democratic ideology pushes the proletariat of every race towards the traps of interclassism and boasts progressivism. Only if led by its class organ, the International Communist Party, only by overthrowing capitalism and its state, can the proletariat be freed once and for all from the grip of racist brutality, its murderous violence, and the moral misery of obtuse bourgeois prejudices.