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The original was posted on /r/askhistorians by /u/Leonardo-di-capriolo on 2024-01-24 12:54:40+00:00.
Hi my fellow historians,
This is a subject that has always fascinated me, but I’ve never gotten around to research. Honestly, the absence of a massive Black Communism movement baffles me.
Of all the oppressed peoples of the world, it was the African-American community that suffered the greatest and in the most direct way of capitalism and bourgeois-democracy.
This is not an attempt to write a political pamflet, but an attempt to reason why Communist theory would appeal to this demographic:
- it was capitalism (the economic incentives of slavery) that brought them to the American continent in the first place.
- being enslaved, they truly were the the exploited within this system, not the beneficiaries
- after slavery was abolished, their economic situation therefore was dire
- the ‘democratic governments’ of the south were white only, thus not representing the black population
- these states enacted the Jim Crow laws, thus continuing the oppression
To conclude, it would only make sense to rebel against a system that has been pitted against you from the start and is still oppression you in a country that prides itself the bastion of freedom.