Workers of the World, Unite for Communism to Break the Chains of Wage Slavery
The photograph shows two railroad tracks, “intersecting but going in different directions, toward different outcomes.” This, concludes the New York Times 1619 Project, is “a fitting metaphor, perhaps, for black and white life in America.”
Or perhaps not.
This final image reveals the project’s driving purpose. In 100 pages of history, personal
narrative, photographs and poems, the NYTimes Magazine (August 18, 2019) argues that black and white workers in the United States have nothing in common. Other ethnicities are virtually invisible here.
Four hundred years ago, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. This is the first recorded evidence of enslaved Africans in what would become the United States.
The slave trade began long before 1619. It was a global system, building capitalism in Europe, devastating Africa, and transporting millions to Central America, the Caribbean and South America—especially Brazil. Less than 10% of kidnapped Africans were shipped to British North America.
As Marx pointed out in Capital, chattel slavery was part of the murder, theft and looting that provided the initial capital for the capitalist system. It included the displacement of European peasant farmers and the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas.
Today, global warming and a world-wide refugee crisis remind us that capitalism is still a global system. But The NYTimes promotes a view of history that rejects both internationalism and class struggle. Its 1619 Project is designed to build US patriotism around an identity-politics non-class outlook.
The introductory essay makes this clear. “[D]espite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed.” The author emphasizes that “we [black people] have helped the country to live up to its founding ideals.” She calls for a continuation of “the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans” to improve American democracy.
How to win black workers and youth to “patriotic efforts?” A few truths and many lies.
A few truths: Articles on mass incarceration, health care, urban planning, the gap in black-white wealth and others detail the legacy of slavery in racist US society today.
Many lies.
One lie is the boot-strap narrative: if you are smart and work hard you will succeed. The centerpiece of the issue shows portraits of four graduates of the prestigious historically-black Howard University Law School. These young people trace their heritage to ancestors who had been enslaved, but, in three of the four cases, had been able to become landowners and in one case a public official.
Another lie is that black people did not fight back. The magazine includes sixteen original compositions—art and poetry—inspired by historic events in black history. Only two of these –Gabriel’s Rebellion in 1800 and the formation of the Black Panther party in 1968—have anything to do with struggle. The others either celebrate black culture—from colonial black poet Philiss Wheatley to Hip-Hop—or portray black Americans as victims.
The most glaring lie is “For the most part, black Americans fought back alone”—as if their struggles were not part of the class struggle of all workers.
The NYTimes claims that “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” This echoes the idea, advanced by Democratic Party politician Stacey Abrams in Foreign Affairs, that black and white Americans are separated by an “intrinsic difference.” It is, at its core, a fascist idea.
“Race” is not a biological fact of life. Capitalists created it to justify the brutal super-exploitation of some of us and to divide us so that we’re not able to overthrow them. Racism was the justification and the result—not the cause—of chattel slavery.
Before the legalization of chattel slavery in the 1660s, black and white unfree people worked together, had sex together, fought back together, and ran away together. Native Americans welcomed runaways, African and English. The purpose of the laws that institutionalized slavery was to keep our ancestors apart, ending that solidarity.
The movement to abolish slavery was clearly interracial—John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry is only the most famous instance. So was the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th century.
From the coal mines of Tennessee in the 1890s to the massive Communist-led sit-in strikes in the 1930s to the 1970 postal workers’ strike, among many others, workers of all “races” (including black and white workers) have joined together to fight their common class enemy.
It is the role of the NYTimes to separate us and to argue that we have nothing in common. It aims to use identity politics to win black workers and youth to support racist capitalism.
The 1619 Project concludes that “black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow…believe in its best.” This is a call to vote for the Democrats. To legitimize the Democratic Party’s effort to construct an electoral coalition based on prioritizing personal identities—gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and race.
Capitalism needs racism. Communism—and the fight for communism—needs the unity of workers of all races, nationalities, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations.
As the crisis of capitalism intensifies, the rulers are working overtime to divide us. Red Flag must put forward our vision of how communism can end racism. Read our pamphlet, To End Racism, Mobilize the Masses for Communism at icwpredflag.org/rpe.pdf. Join our Party. Fight for Communism.
Front page of this issue
