The oppression of black people has been a fundamental part of capitalism in North America since its inception. Along with nationalism, racial division has historically been the key ideological tool used by the ruling class to prevent the emergence of a powerful united working class movement which could challenge its rule. Racism and the super-exploitation of the black population has also been the source of massive profits for the ruling class. The fight for black freedom has gone through many phases from slave rebellions to the abolitionist movement to the struggle of black workers alongside white workers to build industrial unions in the 1930s to Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s to Black Lives Matter today. The labor movement and socialists have been confronted from the beginning in the country with the strategic task of callenging racism as part of mobilizing working people in their class interests. This pamphlet by Socialist Alternative looks at the role of Marxist ideas and socialist organizations in the black freedom movement from a critical perspective. It outlines a materialist view of the origins and development of racist ideology and structural racism. Finally it explains the Marxist view of the tasks confronting the movement today.

Socialist Alternative is the organization that spearheaded the campaign to elect Kshama Sawant to Seattle City Council in 2013, the first independent socialist elected in a major U.S. city in decades. We then led the successful campaign to raise Seattle's minimum wage to the highest in the country, providing a massive boost to the $15 Now campaign that is spreading around the country. Kshama Sawant was successfully re-elected to the Seattle City Council in 2015 as a Socialist Alternative candidate, without any corporate cash, despite half a million dollars being spent on the campaign to unseat her. Socialist Alternative is a national organization fighting in our workplaces, communities, and campuses against the exploitation and injustices people face every day. We are community activists fighting against budget cuts in public services; we are activists campaigning for a $15 an hour minimum wage and fighting, democratic unions; we are people of all colors speaking out against racism and attacks on immigrants, students organizing against tuition hikes and war, women and men fighting sexism and homophobia. We believe the Republicans and Democrats are both parties of big business, and we are campaigning to build an independent, alternative party of workers and young people to fight for the interests of the millions, not the millionaires. We see the global capitalist system as the root cause of the economic crisis, poverty, discrimination, war, and environmental destruction. As capitalism moves deeper into crisis, a new generation of workers and youth must join together to take the top 500 corporations into public ownership under democratic control to end the ruling elites' global competition for profits and power. We believe the dictatorships that existed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were perversions of what socialism is really about. We are for democratic socialism where ordinary people will have control over our daily lives. Socialist Alternative is in political solidarity with the Committee for a Workers' International, a worldwide socialist organization in 47 countries, on every continent