BAR | The Black Liberation Movement in the United States has reached an almost unprecedented level of ideological confusion. Unlike in the 20th century, significant sections of the contemporary Black Left openly embrace an understanding of ‘identity politics’[i] that is based in philosophical idealism.[ii] A somewhat resurgent US Left has, correctly, begun to critique these perceived political errors. Unfortunately, social democrats such as DSA, Jacobin and Cedric Johnson in his award-winning article[iii] add to the ideological confusion. This essay asserts that contrary to the claims of advancing democracy and freedom, social democracy has consistently undermined the struggle for national liberation and socialism.
In 1896, Eduard Bernstein, the leading theoretician of social democracy,[iv] wrote that the 2nd or Socialist International[v] should adopt a pro-colonial policy. Under the banner of social democracy, Bernstein boldly proclaimed through colonialism the “savage races” can be “compelled to conform with the rules of higher civilization.”[vi] Fortunately, other, more principled socialists won the debate and the 2nd international officially espoused an anti-colonial position.[vii] Although this isn’t the first time that Western ‘radicals’ have betrayed colonized people,[viii] several leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution, saw this as a complete betrayal of the ‘national question’ and international socialism.[ix]
Lenin theorized that in the late 19th century, capitalism entered a new phase that he referred to as imperialism or monopoly capitalism.[x] Under imperialism, “capitalists can devote apart of these super profits to bribe their own workers to create something like an alliance between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the other countries.”[xi] In short, the capitalists use their extreme profits to create an aristocracy of labor in North America and Europe who sellout and look down upon workers in the global south. By the start of WWI, the process was complete: the Social Democratic Party of Germany and others had rejected their anti-colonial positions and voted to enter the war on the side of their own national capitalist class.[xii] In one of his most influential works, Lenin clearly demonstrated WWI was fundamentally a war to determine which colonizer would control what part of the world. He called these opportunistic social democrats, “social imperialists, that is, socialists in word but imperialists in deed.”[xiii]
A year before Lenin’s seminal work, WEB Du Bois in the “African Roots of War” contends that the African continent was the ‘prime cause’ of WWI. Similar to Lenin, Du Bois states:
“the white workingman has been asked to share the spoils of exploiting ‘chinks and niggers.’ It is no longer simply merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation; a new democratic union composed of capital and labor.”[xiv]
According to Du Bois, white workers condoning, if not outright, support for lynching, legal segregation, poll taxes, and racist politicians had a material basis in the imperialist system. Dubois claimed that African America was a semi-colony[xv] with, more in common with other Black and colonized people in the rest of the world than US white workers. Preceding Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s call by thirty years,[xvi] Du Bois believed Black people must practice a form of voluntary segregation[xvii] for at least a short period, then, unite with white workers. To be clear, like all the theorists discussed in this essay, Du Bois believed that the primary motivations for colonialism were economic.
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