By Musa T Bey

By the late 1930s, it was no longer possible to deny a fundamental truth: Black workers occupied the strategic center of American capitalism’s most brutal contradictions. They were not just the most oppressed; they were the most potentially revolutionary. It was Black labor — super-exploited, politically excluded, and violently suppressed — that revealed the true nature of American society: a racialized class system built to extract maximum profit through division and terror.

But by this same fact, Black workers also carried the greatest potential to ignite a revolutionary transformation. Their liberation could not be achieved through reformist promises of inclusion into the existing system. It demanded the destruction of the very structure that profited from their oppression — racial capitalism. And by confronting this system at its foundation, Black workers held the key to freeing not only themselves but the entire working class trapped by the same machine.

White Labor’s Historic Betrayal

Any honest analysis must begin with the bitter truth: white labor in America, time and again, chose the wages of whiteness over the solidarity of class struggle. From the post-Reconstruction period to the rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), white workers secured higher wages, better jobs, and political power by aligning with white supremacy.

White trade unions in the early 20th century explicitly barred Black workers, calling strikes to protest their hiring, and used racist violence to enforce racial job hierarchies. This wasn’t incidental — it was structural. The American capitalist class maintained its dominance by offering white workers partial privileges in exchange for their complicity in the subjugation of Black labor.

But this racial deal came at a price: it divided the working class against itself. As long as Black workers remained excluded and oppressed, the capitalist class faced no unified threat from below. It was this division that kept American socialism weak and American capitalism strong.

Black Labor and the Birth of Revolutionary Consciousness

Yet, within the crucible of extreme exploitation, Black workers began to forge a new revolutionary consciousness. Unlike white workers, whose privileges tied them (however tenuously) to the system, Black workers had no stake in racial capitalism. They experienced its brutality in full — from lynchings in the South to wage theft and police violence in the North.

This raw material of experience became the ground upon which radical Black leaders built a revolutionary critique. Figures like A. Philip Randolph did not just call for better wages; they named capitalism and racism as twin evils that had to be overthrown together. Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful Black-led union, wasn’t just about economic survival — it was an assertion of Black worker power in defiance of both white capital and white labor.

In the 1930s, many Black workers turned to explicitly socialist and communist organizations because these were the only spaces that openly declared solidarity across racial lines and targeted capitalism as the enemy. The Communist Party USA, flawed and at times opportunistic, nonetheless organized integrated strikes in Southern textile mills and defended Black victims of racial terror, recognizing that Black liberation and class revolution were inseparable.

The Great Depression and the Shattering of Illusions

The Great Depression functioned as a brutal teacher. As unemployment reached catastrophic levels, Black and white workers alike were cast aside by the capitalist class. Yet while many white workers still clung to the racist structures that gave them relative advantage, increasing numbers of Black workers saw the system for what it was — a machine that devoured lives to feed profits.

The New Deal exposed these fault lines. While celebrated as a triumph of liberal reform, it systematically excluded Black workers, preserving the Southern racial order and reinforcing segregation in Northern cities. Social Security left out Black agricultural and domestic workers. Labor protections empowered racist unions while Black workers remained unprotected. Federal housing policies drew red lines around Black neighborhoods, blocking wealth accumulation and confining Black families to permanent second-class status.

For Black workers, the message was clear: this system could not be reformed — it had to be broken.

Black Workers: The Vanguard Class

By the late 1930s and into the 1940s, a new thesis began to emerge among Black radicals and leftist thinkers: Black workers were not just part of the working class — they were the vanguard of it.

Why? Because their conditions of life — complete exclusion from political power, hyper-exploitation at the economic level, and violent repression at every turn — meant that their struggle could never succeed through partial reform. Their liberation required a total transformation of society. This made them the most consistently revolutionary sector of the American proletariat.

Moreover, because racial division was the principal weapon of American capitalism, only the smashing of racial hierarchy by Black worker leadership could unlock the broader unity of the entire working class. It was Black workers who had the power to break the chains binding white workers to racial privilege, exposing the shared exploitation beneath.

In this vision, Black liberation was not a “special interest” within the broader labor movement — it was the decisive front of the class war in America.

Toward a Revolutionary Program

The emerging Black worker-led revolutionary current did not merely demand civil rights; it called for:

Expropriation of Southern plantations and redistribution of land to Black sharecroppers and poor white farmers alike. Full unionization of Black labor, with Black leadership in integrated industrial unions. Public ownership of major industries and services, breaking the private profiteering of racial capital. Universal employment and housing rights, guaranteed by worker-controlled councils rather than racist government agencies. A workers’ party independent of both the Democratic and Republican parties, which had both preserved racial capitalism.

This program did not beg for inclusion in the American dream — it sought to destroy the nightmare machine that produced Black misery and white worker exploitation alike.

Conclusion: Black Liberation is Class Revolution

As America entered the 1940s, the conditions were ripening for this revolutionary vision to move from theory to practice. Black workers, forged in the fires of racial capitalism’s most brutal forms, stood ready not just to demand justice, but to lead a broader working-class uprising capable of tearing down the entire edifice of racial capitalism.

In the end, the liberation of Black people in America could not be separated from the destruction of the capitalist system that required their oppression to survive. Their fight was not merely for “equality” within the existing order — it was a fight to build a new order, one in which the wealth created by labor was controlled by those who produced it, and where race could no longer be weaponized to divide and conquer.

In this, Black workers were — and remain — the vanguard of America’s unfinished revolution.