Older Black Voters and the Democratic Party Establishment
Commentators have been quick to point out the large support for Biden among Black voters in the 2020 Democratic Primary. According to a Vox article, Biden received nearly two-thirds of the Black vote in the South Carolina primaries, with his main supporters in the demographic being older people. The article attributes this to a greater familiarity with and confidence in Biden than Sanders, due to both his association with establishment members like Obama and his less ambitious policy goals. Many older Black voters do not believe that Sanders can successfully challenge Trump.
However, many leftists have taken this to mean that these voters support the continuance of deficient healthcare, violent police terror, and systematic racism in employment, courts, and residencies. Because Sanders’ campaign seeks to address these issues, not supporting the Sanders campaign is equivocated to not supporting those issues — and blame is laid on those that don’t support him. This rhetoric takes an incorrect and moralistic understanding of this phenomenon.
The view that these voters have “Stockholm Syndrome” or are “deluded” into loving the corrupt Democratic Party and therefore the cause of their own condition, is racist and infantilizing.
To understand why Biden is popular among elderly Black voters, we must understand that Biden represents the Democratic Party status quo. To understand what that status quo is, and what its relation is to the Black community is, we must understand neocolonialism.
Neocolonialism is the present condition of Black people in the US. Neocolonialism is not the same as colonialism, nor is it self-determination. For a definition of neocolonialism, as opposed to colonialism, it would benefit us to refer to a figure with experience in struggling against both and theorizing them within a Marxist framework: Kwame Nkrumah, the former Prime Minister and President of Ghana.
In Neocolonialism: The Highest Stage of Imperialism, Nkrumah writes,
On the question of the effects of imperialist domination on the social structure and historical process of our peoples, we should first of all examine the general forms of imperialist domination.
There are at least two forms: the first is direct domination, by means of a power made up of people foreign to the dominated people (armed forces police, administrative agents and settlers); this is generally called classical colonialism or colonialism is indirect domination, by a political power made up mainly or completely of native agents; this is called neocolonialism.
Nkrumah formulated his theory of neocolonialism in the context of ongoing African decolonization struggles in the mid-20th century. The old form of colonialism being successfully defeated, the imperialist powers were forced to switch to the tactic of penetrating newly freed countries through the method of employing largely native “middlemen.” These “middlemen” worked within their countries to further dependency of developing countries on Western powers. While the colonized had been able to eject the colonizers on a “formal” level, colonialism — or its new form, neocolonialism — attempted to regain domination over developing countries through informal means. In other words, the victory of political independence was not the conclusion of the struggle for national liberation, but the signal for a new phase.
Complementary to imperialist attempts to financially dominate ex-colonial countries is the role of academia and ideology in reproducing the pro-colonizer social relations and ideas. Concepts like European civilization being inherently superior and granting superior characteristics to the colonized and others are exemplary of this. Like sugar with medicine, these imperialist “theories” serve to make neocolonialism more palatable for consumption.
It would be a mistake to assume these “middlemen” were actively bad actors. While many of them — and often the most prominent — had direct ties to imperialist institutions like the CIA, the majority of them are not aware of the social function they unwittingly serve. Rarely do they have the intent of producing and reproducing neocolonialism, which they may not even be recognized as actually existing today.
The African decolonial struggles were against external nations, in sharp contrast with the situation of black people in the US, who formed an internal neo colony as part of the wider US.
The transition to neocolonialism for the Black colony of the US occurred in the context of national liberation against imperialism. Before we get to that transition, we need to briefly review colonial conditions of Black people before the mid-20th century.
The period of explicit enslavement of Black people in the US is a classic example of a franchise-colonial relation. Black people were excluded from citizenship both in the legal sense and socio-political sense of belonging and benefit. They were ‘anti-citizens’, a group to be feared and repressed. The colonizer US state kept them around so that the slave economy could continue to subsidize the young bourgeois nation.
Eventually, this outdated social relation came to grate with the rest of US society. A series of slave revolts made terror of the Black colony outweigh the products and profits extracted from their labor. The industry was beginning to stagnate in terms of productivity by the 19th century, and the growing industrial bourgeoisie looked upon it in disgust. Political conflicts, largely over state representation, between said bourgeoisie and associated classes and the landed, slave-owning estates and associated classes culminated in the Civil War. After the war, slavery, aside from use as punishment for a crime, was banned by the 13th amendment.
Black people remained in a colonial rather than neocolonial relation, although neocolonialism existed in some urban areas. When Black people were freed from slavery, they were not “freed” from the parasitic deprivation of value from themselves which had occurred through centuries of slavery. The White nation had accumulated capital through this, and the Black nation had almost nothing to their names. After the fall of the Confederacy, most Black people became peons, debt slaves, or prison slaves. The Black sharecropper did not have a neocolonial relation with the landed estates, they had a colonial relation.
By the 1950s, the National question and struggle of Black people came to the forefront of American political discourse. Most USAmericans understood this simply as a question of integration and of Black people as a minority. Black uprisings kept pushing the question. It became urgent for the US state to address it.
The integration of Black people as neocolonial subjects into US society was not only political. It was primarily in the promotion of a new Black economy, seemingly in the interest of independence, which in reality was dependent on the direct support of the colonizer bourgeoisie and state.
An author who contemporarily dealt with this transition was Robert L. Allen. In his work Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Allen explains:
To summarize: The black rebellions injected a new sense of urgency into the urban crisis and prompted the corporate elite to reassess its role in handling the problems of the cities. The strategy evolved by the corporatists calls for the establishment of a black elite which can administer the ghettos. Where possible, black workers will be integrated into the economy. Those blacks who can’t be absorbed into the work force may be pensioned on some type of income maintenance program.
From the corporate viewpoint, this strategy is more efficient, less costly, and more profitable than either traditional welfare stateism or massive repression. With the federal government (i.ee., taxpayers) footing the bill, the corporations have all to gain and little to lose. This strategy is fraught with difficulties and contradictions, some of which have been discussed in the preceding pages. In essence it devolves into the equivalent of a program of neocolonial manipulation, not unlike what transpires in many underdeveloped countries in the Third World.
Whether it will succeed depends partly on the ability of corporate America to overcome the difficulties mentioned, and partly on the black communities themselves. In the long run, this strategy cannot help but intensify class divisions and class conflicts within the black communities. Increasingly, the majority of the black population will find itself dominated by a new oppressor class, black instead of white. But whether this class conflict can be combined with the nationalist sentiments of the black masses to become the motive for social change depends on the ability of black radicals to devise a program which appeals to the popular black masses.
The political parties of the US cannot be divorced from this process of transition. In the mid 20th century, parties began to consolidate around relatively well-defined ideologies. Some have described what happened here as a “switch”. But “consolidation” is much more accurate, as before there were conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. Regardless, with Richard Nixon’s first campaign as a Republican in 1960, the transition had begun to solidify relatively well, although Dixiecrats and Blue-Dog Democrats confused the characterization somewhat.
The Democrats were now the “liberal” party and the Republicans “conservative.” The Democrats were now the political face of neocolonial “representation” and “integration” for the Black nation. The party, particularly with the Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, pushed the initiative for this promotion of neocolonial “middlemen” and indirect rather than direct dependency of the Black nation on the colonizer bourgeoisie.
The neocolonial body did not adopt the “I’ve got mine, I’ll take yours, suck it up” worldview of the older colonial order. Instead, it offered a vision of total integration of Black people, and the colonized broadly, into American citizenship. In reality, as Allen identified, it was only for a small “middleman” section of the colonized, who were to reproduce neo colonial ideology of “equity” within the colonial order within the colonized nations. The neocolonial view offered something to the colonized. It was not so much “you get the stick, don’t even look at the carrot,” but rather “you can try for the carrot, but if you don’t want to, then take the stick.”
This diluted alternative, designed to break Black people off from national consciousness, worked well in tandem with the destruction of national movements and co-option of what remained. The new program was one of co-optation and recuperation. It heard, saw, and felt the colonized struggling for their national self-determination and said, “Follow the evolutionary approach! Change is gradual! You’ll be fully equal to us someday!”
This “evolutionary” perspective is common to both the Democratic party and neocolonial society as a whole. It is taken as “common sense” that racism comes from ignorance and backwardness; and as society progresses, it will easily fade away.
The transition to the production and reproduction of these social relations was in the period where the current elderly Black voters were in their young adulthood. They spent their formative years in the heat of the transformation which the state and bourgeoisie was struggling for in their communities. It is no wonder that this neocolonial worldview is particularly strong with them.
In the aforementioned Vox article, it is identified that Bernie Sanders polls higher among Black voters below 30 than Biden. This is not a result of young people being “naturally progressive.” It is because there has been a new challenge to the neo colonial facade. This took the form of the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in response to brutal colonial police brutality and terrorism against Black people across the US. The movement disrupted the idea that US society is colorblind or that the colonial condition of racialization has ended by forcing US society to recognize the continued specifically racial oppression of Black people.
We should not act like Sanders is a supporter of Black national liberation. No Democrat and no bourgeois politician can offer self-determination to the Black nation. Sanders himself is actually part of that neocolonial process of co-optation. He is simply the radical wing of it, while Biden is part of the old, ossified apparatus.
Black self-determination cannot come from a white Communist Party. Black self-determination must be from the Black nation itself. This does not mean non-Black socialists should not support Black national movements, materially or ideologically. Instead, it means the national movement must emerge from the nation itself, not be a “socialist neocolonialism.”
People do not turn to communism until it demonstrates itself as materially viable. People’s primary concerns are with material practicality and daily needs, not abstract ideology. A Communist Party must make material gains in the course of struggle, and by this win significant sections of the population over.
For Communists to break people off from the Democratic Party, it is not enough for us to simply deconstruct the neoliberal and neocolonial functioning of it and to point out its limitations in policy. While demonstrating this is necessary to the building of revolutionary consciousness, it is not enough. People do not leave what they know unless they have a viable alternative.
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
- Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
The consciousness of people is not changed in the realm of consciousness alone, but in the realm of material behavior and alteration of conditions. Revolutionary consciousness is developed in the course of revolutionary struggle.
A Party cannot succeed unless it can connect with and capitalize on the spontaneous national-revolutionary uprisings of the colonized. A Party must engage in base-building work through the service of the community if it wishes to be viable to any degree.
The struggle against neocolonialism must be one for an independent national economy. This cannot be based on conditional subsidies from the bourgeoisie or bourgeois state, or its trained managerial and petit-bourgeois class. Instead, where a Black national movement is to make demands of the bourgeois state with regards to Black communities, they must be for unconditional technical training, reparations for colonial and neo colonial expropriated value along with grants-in-aid, and the social and community ownership of properties.
Where the state does not meet these demands as right, they must demonstrate its irreconcilability with national self-determination and use this to heighten the struggle. In the political struggle, the demand for self-determination cannot be conditional on the recognition and legitimization of the bourgeois-colonial state, but entirely based on the will of the colonized themselves.
For those of us who are non-Black colonized, we must also take up this project of a national movement, and work toward the need for it to be in conjunction with other colonized peoples, including the Black nation. For those who are colonizers or non-colonized, we must unconditionally support the national struggle of the colonized in a material sense, and become a traitor to colonizer social citizenship and identity.
Socialists in the US must be anti-colonial, or else they will not fully grasp the scope and character of capitalism in this empire, nor how to combat it.