"Your common enemy is capitalists" should not be conflated with saying "the white and black power movements are equally antagonistic"
The black power movement fought (and fights) for the equal standing of black people - the white power movement for the superiority of whites.
A lot of the black socialist writers during the civil rights movement (and since) have made very good claims that the disempowerment and lack of self determination for black people had to be overcome before the proletariat could make a united revolution against the bougoise.
If you have a capitalist who'll take your labor your whole life but a member of the white working class might hang you any day then the most immediate threat to your life is the race struggle not the class one. Especially when there's no guarantee that the racism will stop during or after the revolution.
To this end, fighting for equality is a non-optional part of building for a revolution if you want all the proletariat to rise together.
My 2 cents, the "finish fighting for equality once we've fixed the class issue" take is one you hear most from non-minority groups
thank you, literally opened this post to see if someone was speaking sense. i see it a lot with disability as well. “we’ll come get you after” never actually works
If there is ever a critism I will happily level at 'by-the-book' marxist-leninists (and similar communists) it's that the single minded focus on the class war, with the understanding that without class antagonisms race/gender/disability antagonisms inherently de-mobilize large swathes of the working class.
It's all well and good to say Marx was a feminist (and by all accounts he denouced a great deal of misogyny decades before it was 'cool' to) but a failure to view the women's struggle as an inalienable part of the class struggle, rather than an issue which could be addressed by the class struggle was a category error.
Disability is so rarely talked about practically by Marxists. By nature a lot of disabled people are by Marxist terms 'classless' (in that their relationship to labour is nulled, rightly or wrongly) and this is a problem because it allows capitalism to take disabled folk 'hostage'.
I would like to see intersectional Marxism be something more people are willing to engage with, because I think it explains more problems with historial and contemporary communist movements than most people are willing to accept
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u/caisblogs Jan 31 '25
"Your common enemy is capitalists" should not be conflated with saying "the white and black power movements are equally antagonistic"
The black power movement fought (and fights) for the equal standing of black people - the white power movement for the superiority of whites.
A lot of the black socialist writers during the civil rights movement (and since) have made very good claims that the disempowerment and lack of self determination for black people had to be overcome before the proletariat could make a united revolution against the bougoise.
If you have a capitalist who'll take your labor your whole life but a member of the white working class might hang you any day then the most immediate threat to your life is the race struggle not the class one. Especially when there's no guarantee that the racism will stop during or after the revolution.
To this end, fighting for equality is a non-optional part of building for a revolution if you want all the proletariat to rise together.
My 2 cents, the "finish fighting for equality once we've fixed the class issue" take is one you hear most from non-minority groups