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In our bi-weekly class in the bay area we're going over Marx' writings on the US civil war and black slavery. One interesting insight is that chapter X of Capital ("The Working Day"), arguably one of 3 most important chapters in the book, was directly informed by black slavery: 
This chapter is one of marx' most major indictments of capitalism & an articulation of the history of struggle against it. In this history, the freedom of the black slave was central. He called the slave movement "the most momentous thing happening in the world today."
The working day and "absolute surplus value"--the idea the capitalist exerts ownership over labor through the temporal extension of the day--was directly drawn from this study of US slavery. Elsewhere, marx said that without slavery, there would have been no america.
In this way, the fight for the reduction of the work day ("an 8 hour day") is directly contingent upon the struggle against slavery. All this is the inspiration for Marx' famous quote, that "labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."
It's contingent because slavery is the total extension of the working day to 100% of the day. Marx is saying that as long as white (waged) workers didn't care about the specific situation of black (slave) workers, they sabotage themselves as well as the broader class struggle.
Not much has changed today, just look at the recent video of stop & shop strike where white workers tell black prison laborers who are called in to replace them to "get a real job" and that they are scabs. But what if the S&S workers had took up the demands of the prison workers?
If they had (as 1 example) took up the demands of the recent prison strike as their own it would have been far more challenging to get these prison workers to cross strike lines, at the very least. &The LA/Oakland teacher strike shows this importance of political demandz
in the '96 Oakland teacher strike the district was able to instrumentalize race by saying the strike was white teachers trying to get a fatter paycheck at the expense of black students. But this time the teachers did political demands like smaller class sizes & more support staff
As a result (at least in part because of this) the strike had the largest community support out of any mass action i've ever seen. Political demands can't be ignored.
