Leon Trotsky, Barack Obama, & the Black “Vanguard of the Revolution”

Leon Trotsky

From Vdare.com, November 16, 2009

Last summer, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, introduced Barack Obama at a San Francisco fundraiser as “a leader that God has blessed us with at this time” (‘Blessed’ Barack Obama sounds a note of caution as the cash rolls in, by Tom Baldwin, London Times, August 19, 2008).

And just few days ago, the rock singer Sting echoed her: “In many ways, he’s sent from God because the world’s a mess” (Sting: Obama ‘Sent From God’ To Fix World’s Mess, WCCO, Oct. 30, 2009).

It took a lot of time and effort to establish the type of moral hegemony that permits such absurd claims about a black left-wing politician not merely to be made, but apparently to be entertained by a credulous, or at any rate cowed, public.

I believe it goes back to strategic decisions made by revolutionary intellectuals decades ago—adapting Marx’s original vision of a proletarian revolution to the apparently unfavorable political realities of the early twentieth century.

A key figure was Leon Trotsky. His Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism & Self-Determination, was first published in 1967. Trotsky’s views on the American “Negro Question” were recorded in two discussions with American Marxists, the first held in Prinkipo, Turkey in 1933, the second in Coyoacan, Mexico in 1939.

In the second edition, published in 1977, editor George Breitman reported that it “had four printings and greater sales in the United States than any other Trotsky compilation in the last decade.” Breitman supplied some significant background—such as the fact that Malcolm X had read the book in 1963, before he spoke on “The Black Revolution” in 1964.

Breitman noted, that after the Bolshevik Revolution on 1917, the Leninist doctrine of affirmative support for “oppressed peoples”—with special emphasis on the Negroes—began to be transmitted to the American Communist Movement. The Russians in the Communist International demanded that American Communists shake off their unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community.

According to Breitman, Trotsky was a particularly strong advocate of this:

To show his American comrades how he thought revolutionists should react to the oppression of the Negroes, he denounced the prejudiced white workers in more scathing, more bitter terms than any American Marxist, black or white, had ever done; even in his Black Muslim days Malcolm X never used harsher language. It is unrealistic, he said, to expect the Negro to reach ‘a class point of view’ ahead of the white worker; that can happen ‘only when the white worker is educated’ (class-conscious and anticapitalist), and understands his duty to his black brother. Despite that, the oppression of the Negroes is such that they can become revolutionary ahead of the white workers, furnish the vanguard of the revolution, and fight better for a new society than the white. But, he added, for that to happen, the revolutionary party must carry on ‘an uncompromising, merciless struggle not against the supposed national prepossessions [Black Nationalism] of the Negroes but against the colossal prejudices of the white workers and makes no concession to them whatever.’

Trotsky’s attitude was reflected in a resolution adopted by the Socialist Workers Party Convention, an arm of the Trotskyite Fourth International, in New York City in July, 1939. It began:

The American Negroes, for centuries the most oppressed section of American society and the most discriminated against, are potentially the most revolutionary element of the population. They are designated by whose historical past to be, under adequate leadership, the very vanguard of the proletarian revolution. [The SWP and Negro Work]

What Leon Trotsky was apparently proposing for America was that, if white workers were stripped of “prejudices”, then they could be made to tolerate Negro leadership in a real social revolution. Such a social revolution would consist of a reversal of the former social status of the two races, i.e., the Negroes would end on top and the white workers on the bottom.

Did Trotsky and his followers really mean something like that? Appendix B of Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism & Self Determination, a selection of Trotsky’s writings, indicates that he was, in fact, viscerally hostile to the white race—using emotive terms like “white chauvinism”; “white oppressors”; “domination by the whites is terminated”; “mutual struggle against the domination of the white exploiters”; and “closer to the proletarians of the colored races”—by which he meant he preferred the proletarians of the colored races.

Trotsky also wrote:

It is impossible not to arrive at the conclusion that white missionaries, preachers of eternal morals, participated in the corruption of the Kaffirs…No, we prefer the Kaffirs to all missionaries… The worst crime on the part of the revolutionaries would be to give the smallest concessions to the privileges and prejudices of the whites… The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order and therefore calls for the complete unconditional, and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race. [Their Morals and Ours]

In talking with leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in June 1940, Trotsky stated:

The white slaveholders accustom the Negroes not to speak first…We must approach them everywhere by advocating that for every lynching they should lynch ten or twenty lynchers.

The Fourth International was Leon Trotsky’s attempt to duplicate the First International Workingmen’s Association, founded by Karl Marx in London in 1864 and envisioned as a global industrial army under his command. By founding the Fourth International, Trotsky aspired to command a global proletarian army of his own His vicious attacks on the “prejudices” of white workers were his way of attempting to mobilize all of the world’s colored races under his banner—undoubtedly because the colored races outnumber the white race by far. Trotsky’s international Marxism had, as its effective goal, the elimination of the white race’s former domination of the world, so that its opposite, domination by the majority colored races, could be brought about. This required the submission of the white race through the elimination of “prejudices.”

Trotsky’s was a natural reaction for a fanatical Marxist who absorbed the dogma that the white Christian capitalist West was guilty of imperialist oppression. But there is more to it. Trotsky was also a Leninist, who grasped Lenin’s strategy of destroying the colonial empires of the white West and then mobilizing those former colonies to enable the Third World to cut off energy and mineral resources vital for the white West’s industrial factories. In Lenin’s view, this would bring the white West to its knees. (This, of course, could still be accomplished by a combination of radical Moslems, the Red Chinese, and a Marxist South Africa, with or without the cooperation of post-Soviet Russia.)

Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International had much more influence on events in the US than is commonly recognized. One example: the notorious Studies in Prejudice, supported by the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee, in 1943. The ostensible purpose of Studies in Prejudice was to address anti-Semitism in America. The basis for Studies in Prejudice, according to Martin Jay in his book The Dialectical Imagination, was a 1939 essay by Max Horkheimer, the former director of the Marxist Institute of Social Research, entitled “The Jews and Europe”. This institute was founded in 1923 at Frankfurt University, Germany and came to be known as the Frankfurt School. Its original purpose was to bring Marxism to Germany, but with the advent of Hitler its members emigrated to America. . . . Read the whole article.