EBDSA RC statement on the Program to Diversify our Ranks and Engage with Communities of Color
The working class — in the East Bay, in the US, and across the world — is not just racially diverse. It is racially stratified. From the colonial plunder upon which capitalism was founded, to the chattel slavery that was the economic basis of the early US, to the prison slavery and immigrant concentration camps of the present, the racial stratification of the working class has been a chief tool of the American ruling class in maintaining its dominance. The relative privileges some workers receive over others are used, time and time again, to prevent those workers from joining together to defeat our mutual enemies in the elite. Today in the Bay, where apartments inhabited by tech workers with extensive stock options sit ringed by the tent encampments of the poorest of the poor, this stratification is starkly apparent.
From what W.E.B. DuBois called “the general strike of the slaves” in the Civil War, to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, to contemporary struggles against police violence, time and again Black proletarians have been at the forefront of class struggle in this country. And from the Communist Party of the USA of which DuBois was a member, to the Black Panther Party, to contemporary activists against police violence, time and again it has been Black socialists who have emerged as some of the most prominent and militant leaders in these struggles.
In this context, it is imperative that those of us who would claim the legacy of socialism, here in the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, place the struggle against white supremacy front and center in the work that we do, and commit to following the leadership of the Black and brown proletarians already engaged in this struggle. As long as the racial stratification of the working class is left intact, no socialist transformation will succeed in America; there can be no such thing as a white socialist movement in this country.
With this in mind, the Refoundation Caucus of East Bay DSA fully endorses the proposed Program to Diversify our Ranks and Engage with Communities of Color. The current state of EBDSA is quite frankly shameful, and we support all efforts to transform EBDSA — in its demographics, in its theory, and in its practice — into an organization adequate to the task of the utter destruction of white supremacy, for socialism and liberation for all.
