One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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From Young Spartacus, September, 1974
Black Oppression & Proletarian Revolution-Part 6: The American Communist Party And Black Struggles In The American Great Depression Of The 1930s
[Markin: Title somewhat expanded for today's young audience who may not have been able to decipher the abbreviated original title]
Communist Party black work in the 1930's took place in the context of the so-called "Third Period." The Sixth World Congress of the by-then Stalin-ized Communist International (CI), held in 1928, heralded an impending "Third Period" of inevitable and final capitalist collapse in which the struggle for reforms was no longer possible. Thus, all reformist organizations, especially the "yellow" trade unions and social-democratic parties (which contained the majority of the organized labor movement), were now considered to be "social-fascist" organizations. Much of the CPUSA's work in this period was thus marked by sectarianism and ultraleftism.
While the CP of this period was deformed by dishonesty, political zigzags and egregious departures from Marxism, nonetheless in the area of black work the 1930's represents the CP's heroic period. Despite the erroneous "Black Belt" theory and the call for "Negro self-determination" in this territory (a call which was never raised agitationally but remained part of the CP's written propaganda), the CP's work in practice combined a proletarian orientation with an awareness of the strategic need to fight racial oppression throughout all layers of American society, especially to address the problems of poor and unemployed blacks.
Thus, the CP's black work took place in the labor movement, among the unemployed, in the South and in the area of legal defense. This work stands in stark contrast to the CP's subsequent plunge into abject opportunism (and even adaptation to Jim Crowism in WWII) and is rich in lessons on how to conduct and how not to conduct a genuine Leninist struggle against racial oppression.
The Depression, Blacks and the Communist Party
The catastrophic impact of the Great Depression on the U.S. working class was keenly felt by its most oppressed members, black workers. By March 1933 the Bureau of Labor Standards reported that 25 percent of the workforce, or 17 million workers, were unemployed. For those who could find work, wages on the average had fallen 45 percent. While separate statistics on the black population were not kept at this time, the National Urban League estimated that black unemployment exceeded white joblessness by 30 to 60 percent (a figure which has grown larger: since the Depression). Most black employment was in marginal "service" jobs: 25 percent of the black non-farm, wage-earning population were domestics. T. Arnold Hill of the Urban League pointed out:
"Heretofore [the black's] employment problem has been chiefly one of advancement to positions commensurate with his ability. Today he is endeavoring to hold the line against advancing armies of white workers intent upon gaining and content to accept occupations which were once thought too menial for white hands."
—quoted in Raymond Walters, Negroes and the Great Depression
The Depression was a period of massive social struggle on the part of workers and the unemployed in which blacks played a leading role. Much of this social struggle took place outside of the American Federation of Labor-dominated established labor movement. Only 10 percent of the non-farm workforce was organized and, of the 1.5 million non-farm black workers, only a little more than 3 percent or 50,000 workers were organized and one-half of the unionized black workers belonged to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Much of this social struggle, especially on the part of blacks, was dominated by the Communist Party. At the very beginning of the Depression the CP launched National Unemployed Councils and by 6 March 1930 was able to organize demonstrations in major American cities with 1,250,000 participants.
CP defense work, conducted through its defense arm, the International Labor Defense (ILD), was in the forefront of the struggle against Southern lynch "justice," a struggle which found its most dramatic expression in the Scottsboro defense case. The CP was the first organization since the populist Southern Alliance and the Colored National Farmers Alliance of the 1890's to go into the South to fight lynch law and vigilante terror, and to organize southern sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The CP's launching of the weekly Southern Worker in Chattanooga reflected the commitment to work in the South. During 1930 the CP recruited its first substantial number of black members—1,000 blacks joined the party. The moribund CP black organization, the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) was transformed into the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) at a convention held in November 1930 and the irregular publication of the ANLC, the Negro Champion, was transformed into a regular weekly,
The Liberator, edited by Cyril Briggs. The CP's struggle against Jim Crowism in the unions, though often conducted through the erroneous and sectarian "red unions" of the "Third Period," laid the foundation for the later success of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in organizing basic industry on a bi-racial basis.
The "Third Period" and CP Black Work
The Sixth World Congress of the CI, where the "Third Period" policies were laid out, also passed a "Resolution on the Negro Question in the U.S." which established the "Negro Self-Determination in the Black Belt" position. This was to haunt the CP until it was finally dropped in 1959 (see "Negro Self-Determination in the Black Belt," Young Spartacus, May-June 1974). But it was also this Congress and its special commission on the black question which spurred the CP into an aggressive orientation toward black work.
Prior to 1930 the CP had never had more than 50 black members. The "Resolution on the Negro Question" stated that the moribund ANLC "continues to exist only nominally" and called for the CP to "strengthen this organization as a medium through which we can extend the work of the party among the Negro masses and mobilize the Negro workers under our leadership."
The next national convention of the ANLC was not held until November 1930, where the ANLC was transformed into the LSNA. This convention capped a recruitment drive which had brought in 1,000 black members. Harry Haywood, the most faithful and consistent advocate of the "Black Belt" position, was made chairman of the LSNR.
In his report on the LSNR founding convention, Cyril Briggs, editor of the Liberator, defined the LSNR as follows:
"To begin with, it is a mistake to lay stress on the LSNR as a mass organization. The LSNR consists of groups of active supporters and followers of the Liberator. The aim is not to build a mass organization, but to build the Liberator into a mass organizer or the agitator and organizer of the Negro liberation movement. "The LSNR supports the Communist Party as the only political party carrying on a struggle against Negro oppression, but the LSNR is not a political party. Nor is it a substitute for any political party. The LSNR supports the revolutionary trade unions of the Trade Union Unity League in opposition to the treacherous, reformist and Jim Crow policies of the American Federation of Labor with its fascist leadership. But the LSNR is not a substitute for the TUUL or any of its unions." —Liberator, 11 November 1930
Part of the problem was that the CI under Stalin transformed the Leninist transitional organization from a vehicle for mass work into a substitute for mass work. Lenin saw the. need for special methods of work among the specially oppressed, e.g., blacks and women, and argued that the CPs should set up transitional organizations—led by party cadre and functioning as arms of the party— which would address the special needs of minorities and women and attempt to bring them into the communist movement. Depending upon the period, such organizations might or might not obtain a mass character. The CP under Stalin opted for the creation of front groups that only created the illusion (and probably only for CP members) of mass work but in fact represented an abandonment of genuine mass work. The problem of front-groupism was complicated by the tendency toward sectoralism or poly-vanguardism (a la the present-day Socialist Workers Party), as expressed in the 1928 "Resolution on the Negro Question":
"It is the duty of Negro workers to organize through the mobilization of the broad masses of the Negro population the struggle of the agricultural laborers and tenant farmers against all forms of semi-feudal oppression. On the other hand, it is the duty of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. to mobilize and rally the broad masses of the white workers for active participation in this struggle." This poly-vanguardism flowed from the attempt to fit the dynamic of the American revolution into Stalin's "two-stage revolution."
The first, “national-democratic" stage would be carried out by blacks in the "Black Belt" against "semi-feudal oppression." Hence, the principal axis of the black question was seen as agrarian, concentrated in the "Black Belt," and the principal enemy of blacks was not capitalism but "semi-feudal oppression"!!
It is easy to see from this schema how the ultraleft rhetoric of the "Third Period" in which Roosevelt, the NAACP and the AFL leadership were all considered "fascists," was easily converted in the post-1935 "People's Front" period where political blocs with the NAACP, Roosevelt and the AFL bureaucracy became "progressive."
To its credit the CP transcended in practice its poly-vanguardist theories and insisted on the bi-racial character of the LSNR. However, the CP could not decide whether to restrict the LSNR to a newspaper support club or to create a real black transitional organization, with its own organizational life and linked to the party through its leading and most conscious members.
CP Sectarianism on the United Front
The relationship between the LSNR and other black and non-CP labor organizations was shaped by the "Third Period" concept of the united front. Since, according to the CP, the acuteness of the capitalist crisis had converted the leaderships of all non-CP-led organizations into fascists, there could be no agreements with such leaderships, even for common action (the united front from above). Instead there could only be "united fronts from below," i.e., between the CP's Trade Union Unity League and the ranks of the AFL around the TUUL program, between the LSNR and the ranks of the NAACP or Pan-African Congress around the LSNR program.
Several years later when the CP had liquidated the LSNR into the pro-Rooseveltian National Negro Congress, James W. Ford, leader of CP black work during the "People's Front" period, stated:
"The original weaknesses of the LSNR were identical with those of the American Negro Labor Congress. Calling for affiliation on the basis of the complete program, the LSNR tended to make the ANLC. Its demands ran from a "boycott of newspapers and radios that portrayed the Negro in a derogatory manner" to "armed self-defense."
There was in fact enormous confusion in the CP on just what the LSNR was supposed to be aside from a weekly newspaper. While the Briggs report denied that the LSNR was supposed to be a mass organization, subsequent CP reports presented the LSNR in another guise. For example, the CP Party Organizer for May-June 1932 reports: "We have in the Party in Chicago alone approximately 500 members....We organized 13 groups of the LSNR with over 1,000 members, 80percent non-party, 20 percent Negroes."
In reality the weakness of the LSNR was that it was not transformed into a genuine Leninist transitional organization, seeking to recruit both individuals and groups to its complete program and at the same time pursuing agreements for common action even with the "social-fascist" leaders of the petty-bourgeois black organizations and the reformist trade unions. By attempting to address the ranks of these organizations without politically confronting 'their leaderships, the LSNR assisted the reformists in maintaining a hold on their memberships.
TUUL and CP Black Work
The LSNR was made additionally superfluous because many of the tasks which might have fallen to a transitional black organization were absorbed by the "Third Period" "revolutionary unions. “While the Sixth Congress still exhorted Communists to work in the "social-fascist"-led reformist unions, the CPs were expected to organize their own "revolutionary unions" even where reformist unions already existed.
In order to carry out this new turn the old industrial arm of the CP, the Trade Union Educational League, was converted into the Trade Union Unity League, at a convention in Cleveland in 1929. Departments of the TUEL, often no larger than the CP fraction in that particular industry were converted into "red unions." These unions were supposed to be more than just the most militant defenders of the economic interests of workers. They were to organize the unemployed, organize the unorganized, champion black rights and directly struggle for power. The program of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (which, like the TUEL and TUUL, was affiliated to the Red International of Trade Unions, the industrial arm of the CI) called for "Special Unions of Negro Workers" in the following cases:
"a. where white unions refuse Negro workers, b. in unions where Negroes are admitted but treated as second class members, without equal rights and privileges, special unions must be organized."
It combined the call for special black trade unions with the demand for "Negro Self-Determination in the Black Belt."
However, the CP" revolutionary dual unions" were the first serious effort to organize black workers and the first serious outside challenge to AFL Jim Crow unions since the demise of the IWW. The importance of this work was based on an objective reality which "was in direct contradiction to the CI's characterization of the black question as an agrarian question, namely, two-thirds of the blacks gainfully employed by 1930 were not in agriculture.
While many were in the marginal service sector, blacks were also concentrated in unskilled jobs in basic industry, previously considered too "menial" for whites but which were becoming increasingly important to modern industrial capitalism. In mining blacks composed 7.6 percent of the workforce, in transport 10.3 percent, in steel 16.2 percent, in the building trades 22.7 percent and in the unskilled jobs in meatpacking, 25 percent.
Communist Black Work in the South
One exhortation of the "Resolution on the Negro Question" was "the beginning of systematic work in the South." Such work required the greatest courage, tenacity and self-sacrifice. In the 1930's the South still contained a large majority of the black population, two-thirds of which lived in rural areas. A large portion of the black rural population was composed of the elderly, the young and the unemployed—capitalism’s "surplus population."
Those blacks who could find work on the land were subjected to peonage,
debt and convict slavery, vagrancy laws, disenfranchisements, segregation, lynching and mob violence. In the spring of 1931 the CP organized the Sharecroppers Union (SCU) in Tallapoosa and Lee Counties, Alabama. According to the Birmingham News of 20 July 1931, the unions were organizing blacks to demand "social equality with the white race, $2 a day for work, and not ask but 'demand what you want, and if you don't get it, take it'" (quoted in Jamieson, Labor Unions in American Agriculture).
The struggle to organize the SCU was conducted in a state of perpetual civil war with both "legal" and extra-legal armed vigilante groups. One of the most serious events in this war was the shoot-oat with vigilante gangs organized by the planters at Camp Hill, Tallapoosa County, in December 1932. Four blacks were murdered, twenty were wounded and five were given long prison sentences. The SCU was finally able to launch its first strike in the fall of 1934 when 500 cotton pickers struck for a wage rate of 75 cents per hundredweight, a demand won in a few areas. By 1935 the SCU claimed 10,000 members. In the spring of that year it led a strike of 1,500 cotton pickers for almost a month for a basic wage of $l/day.
The Scottsboro Case
The most famous CP black work during the Depression centered around a defense case: the Scottsboro nine. On 21 March 1931 nine black youth, all under the age of 21 (the youngest was 13) were charged with raping two white girls on a freight train and were jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama. Despite contradictory testimony at the trial, a local court found eight of them guilty and sentenced them to death. The CP, through its defense arm, the International Labor Defense, rapidly rallied to the defense of the Scottsboro youths and turned their case into an international symbol of the horrors of southern lynch law.
The ILD was begun by James Cannon, who later became the founder of American Trotskyism. At the time of his expulsion from the CP in 1928 for Trotskyism, Cannon was also removed from the ILD. The ILD rapidly followed the "Third Period" drift into ultraleft, phrasemongering and the sectarian "united front only from below" policies.
Thus, the ILD sent a telegram to the first trial judge threatening that he would be held "personally responsible unless the defendants were immediately released." Needless to say, such empty threats did nothing to win the release of the Scottsboro defendants. Just before he became the most groveling spokesman for the application of the "People's Front" to black work, James W. Ford wrote in an article inappropriately titled, "The United Front in the Field of Negro Work" (Communist, February 1935):
"... among liberal groups who still believe in democratic and civil rights, support will be gained when the fight for Scottsboro is bound up with the national liberation of the Negro people and with the struggle of the entire American working class for the dictatorship of the proletariat."
Nevertheless even the CP/ILD's most persistent and nagging critic at the time, the NAACP, gave the CP and ILD grudging support for the power and effectiveness of their defense efforts. For example, the NAACP publication Crisis (December 1935) stated: "The exploitation of Negroes by the South has been pitilessly exposed to the world. An important legal victory has been won against the lily-white jury system, As far as propaganda is concerned the whole Negro race is far ahead of where it would have been had not the Communists fought the case in the way they did."
The Scottsboro defendants were not executed, but were nevertheless given long prison terms; the last of the Scottsboro defendants was not released from prison until 1950.
CP Polemics in the Black Movement
There are important lessons for revolutionaries today in the CP's polemics with other tendencies in the black movement and in its ability to assimilate and transform a rapidly acquired black membership into a communist cadre. And in this area a most useful document is Harry Haywood's report on black work to the Eighth Convention of the CP in 1934, subsequently reprinted under a title which is in itself a polemic: The Road to Negro Liberation: The Tasks of the Communist Party in Winning Working Class Leadership of the Negro Liberation Struggles and tine Fight Against Reactionary Nationalist-Reformist Movements among the Negro People. Haywood's attack on black nationalism, especially the "self-help" schemes of cultural nationalists and community-control advocates, still rings true to-day:
"These movements for the most part advocate a voluntary acceptance of segregation and Jim Crowism as inevitable. The fight against it is a folly, make the best of it. The Negroes must draw in upon themselves, build
up their own life within the Jim Crow ghettoes. Hence they propose fantastic schemes for building self-sufficing economies among Negroes within the walls of segregation, in the Black Belt of the cities, under the leadership of businessmen and professionals, advancing all sorts of illusionary schemes for the establishment of cooperatives and industry along Jim Crow lines, holding forth the bourgeois Utopian perspective of eventually establishing industries which will be owned and operated by Negroes and furnish employment to Negro workers .... Here presumably... [black petty bourgeois] will have the opportunity of exploiting 'their own masses' free from competition and develop into a full-fledged bourgeoisie." Ironically, while no one denounced more vehemently than Haywood the "reactionary-Utopian schemes" of the black petty bourgeoisie to build up a black self-sufficient economy in the "Black Belt" of the urban ghettoes, there was also no stronger advocate of the reactionary-Utopian scheme of black "self-determination" in the rural ghetto of the southern "Black Belt." This highlights the contradiction between CP black work in practice and the erroneous theories developed to analyze the condition of southern blacks.
Party, Race and Cadre
CP black work during the Depression, work among tenants and sharecroppers, among the unemployed, the unorganized black proletariat, tenants' councils, and so on, attracted thousands of black members to its ranks. But the enduring test of the party which aspires to lead the proletariat to power is its ability to transform members into- cadre—into lifelong professional revolutionaries. And it is here that the CP in its "Third Period" may be judged and found wanting.
Many joined the CP but few stayed. Part of the problem was objective:
Social oppression which is the fuel or the spontaneous indignation and rebellion of the masses, the motor force of revolution, also cuts "across lie all-sided development of human capacities which are demanded of the professional revolutionary. A few individuals rise above their circumstances. But the evicted tenant, the
downtrodden sharecropper, a spinner working the 14-hour days of the Gas-
Tonai mills, found the yoke of social oppression so great that they could only follow the CP for the short-term struggle.
But part of the problem was with the CP itself. No matter how aggressively it might champion the black liberation struggle and call forth from its membership enormous dedication and sacrifice, the CP was bureaucratized arty which was led by men who had traded their revolutionary perspective and integrity for Stalin's good favor, and this loss of integrity and perspective permeated all sides of the organization.
Thus when the Seventh CI Congress heralded the new period of the " People's Front" where yesterday's "social fascists" became today's "friends" of democracy,” labor or blacks, surprisingly little commotion occurred within the CP—few left or expressed >position to this major turn. The "principle" of unprincipledness had already been established. The party members and leadership had become inured to the necessity (i.e., if one intended to stay in the party or, in some cases, stay alive) of going along with Stalin's previous turns and zigzags somewhat minor relative to the 1935 turn)—many of which contained the political kernel of the future "People's Front" policies.
The cynicized CPUSA went on to rather discredit itself by its adaption to Jim Crowism in WWII. The triumphant revolutionary proletariat will bring the CP leadership to account for its many crimes, not the least of which was squandering a whole generation of Black recruits.
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