Click on the headlne to link to a Wikipedia entry for Harry Haywood.
Book Review
February is Black History Month
Black Bolshevik-Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist, Harry Haywood, Lake View Press, Chicago, 1978
If there is one name in the early American communist movement of the 1920’s associated with the theory of national self-determination for blacks (specifically in the then Southern Black Belt) it is the author of this autobiography, Harry Haywood. While I will discuss that theory below this is also an opportunity, during Black History Month, to analyze the political trajectory of an American black communist who tried, unsuccessfully, to bring being black and being red together. That prospect is still a key task for the American left today. That Haywood failed to so is due, in great part due to his willfully stubborn adherence to Stalinist politics, in the final analysis does not take away from the importance of today’s youth reading about his political struggles.
I have read a fair number of biographies of 20th century black American revolutionaries like Malcolm, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and others. Haywood’s autobiography is quite different from that of latter black revolutionaries; let us say the average Black Panther of the 1960’s biography. Although Haywood was brought up and came of age in the Middle West, notably in Omaha and Chicago he had many roots in the South and on the farm. Later black revolutionaries have a greater urban and more proletarian profile. Notwithstanding those differences Haywood’s tales about the various problems he had seeking and keeping work as a proud young black in a hostile white world will resonant with today’s black reader of his story. No question there have been some strides made by blacks in this country but Haywood’s tales of the racial prejudice down at the base of society that he confronted constantly could have been written today.
One thing that I have always looked for in reading about previous generations of radicals and revolutionaries is to find the spark that drove them over the edge away from bourgeois society and on the road to fighting for fundamental social change. Revolutionaries are made not born so I have found that the reasons span a wide range of human experiences from deep-seated class and racial hatreds to intellectual curiosity. Although it is easy to see how blacks and other minorities in this country could take a radical path without much effort it is nevertheless truth that, as with whites, most have not. It is thus interesting to compare notes. Haywood’s military service, unlike my own service during Vietnam, in a black regiment in World War I that was sent to France and which came under fire was not a decisive radicalizing experience in itself. However post-war white racial attitudes and the very real racial riots in major urban areas like Chicago, belied all the propaganda about the democratic nature of the war and acted as a catalyst to move him to politics and toward leftist politics.
Haywood became a communist in the early days of the American party, the time of the consolidation of the Communist International and the afterglow of the early heroic days of the Bolshevik Revolution. when black communists were few and far between. This was a time, unlike our own, when willing, capable young blacks, workers, women and others were systematically trained here and in the Soviet Union to become professional revolutionaries. Much of Haywood’s early experiences as described in detail in the book centered on his student days in Moscow.
Haywood went through the University of the Toilers of the East and the Lenin School in the Soviet Union at the time of the Stalinist consolidation of power there and his political development reflects that change. That experience does not negate the important of training to create cadre. My generation, the generation of ’68, and later generations have had to learn by the seat of their pants. There is a difference and its showed in our poor theoretical and organizations understandings.
In many ways the most interesting sections of Haywood’s book revolve around his factional activities in the early days of the party. I have read Cannon, Foster, Browder, Lovestone, Wolfe and other whites from the early days discuss their factional activities that dominated the early party. It was rather interesting to get a black perspective on these events. I might add that Haywood’s take, as a member of the Foster faction, on the matters confirms the thoughts of the others that the early party was a ‘hothouse’ of factional intrigue, if not a madhouse.
Every question, including Haywood’s pet theory of an embryonic black nation, was subject to the gristmill of the factional struggles in the early American party as well as by the dictates of the Communist International that served as a referee during these donnybrooks. The main fault lines though these fights can be summarized as first (and foremost) who would run the American party-the party functionaries or the trade unionists. Ultimately, as the Stalinization of the Communist International set in the fault line turned to who was loyal to Moscow and who wasn’t. Haywood always drifted with the winds and bent at the knee to Stalin
The thread that centrally runs throughout the early part of Haywood’s take on the early party is the black question. Specifically the question of whether blacks in this country in the 1920’s formed a nation or were a racial color-caste. That political fight might seem odd today when blacks are, at least formally, integrated (at the bottom) of American society but then, and perhaps only then, this question had a semblance of realism to it.
Haywood’s section on the development of communist work among blacks, the creation of a black cadre and the formulating of the question of a black nation with the right to national self-determination is an essential reading for any militant trying to find the roots of communist work among blacks. Although the 1920’s were not the heyday of black recruitment to the party, the pioneer work in the 1920’s gave the party a huge leg up when the radicalization of the 1930’s among all workers occurred.
The left-wing movement in America, including the Communist Party and its offshoots has always had problems with what has been called the Black Question. Marxists have always considers support to the right of national self-determination to be a wedge against the nationalists and a way to put the class axis to the fore. In any case, Marxist has always predicated that support on there being a possibility for the group to form a nation. Absent that, other methods of struggle are necessary to deal with the special oppression of black people. This special oppression, nevertheless, requires demands to address that situation not the benign neglect (at best) that it has received through most of American left history.
Part of the problem with the American Communist position on self-determination was that the conditions which would have created the possibility of a black state were being destroyed with the mechanization of agriculture, the migration of blacks to the Northern industrial centers and the overwhelming need to fight for black people’s rights to survive under the conditions of the Great Depression. Moreover, overall blacks were won to communist politics DESPITE the Communist Party’s position on black national self-determination. However, carefully read this section as it is the genesis for many of the theoretical threads of black nationalist positions today.
Above I mentioned that blacks began to follow the lead of the Communist Party despite its position on the black nation. The actual work of the party, and Haywood’s own work as an organizer of strike solidarity action on behalf of the National Mine Union, gives evidence of that contention. Although the slogan of national self-determination played a propaganda role in the background for holiday occasions during this period, called the ‘third period’ in communist parlance, the heart of communist work in the early 1930’s were struggles over wage equality, saving jobs, unemployed work the fight against lynch law in the South and labor and black defense work.
The most famous aspect of that defense work, which Haywood had a role in, was the case of Scottsboro boys, nine Alabama men who were being railroaded into the electric chair over the alleged rape of two white women. This was a case to hot to handle for the likes of the NAACP and other liberal organizations, until the fight against it became a mass movement and they tried to channel it in their direction. Nothing new here. If there has been one taboo in modern American politics greater than being black and red it is the question of interracial sex. Perhaps not as overtly this remains true today. The Communist Party nevertheless did yeoman’s work to save the lives of the Boys. Kudos here for their defense work.
In a very literal sense Haywood’s heyday was the so-called ‘third period’ when the Communist International, falsely as it turned out, predicted imminent socialism, or at least the fight for it. His personal political trajectory rose and fell on that note. The time of the popular front in the late thirties and its later manifestations in anti-monopoly coalitions and emergence into ‘progressive’ politics were not his times. From membership in the Political Bureau at the height of the 'third period' he thereafter became, in essence, a gadfly with this black belt self-determination strategy. Popular frontist politics, or one of its variations, is not a time for clear class lines or seemingly provocative proposals that would split off nations from the American body politic.
Most of the last third of the book, after detailing and defending Haywood’s murky service with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, his merchant marine service in World War II and his post war struggles against Browderite ‘revisionism’ (a Stalinist variation of class collaborationism) is spent in criticism of the policies of the American Communist Party.
Oddly, at least in partial and distorted sense, some of Haywood’s criticisms are those that left anti-Stalinists had been making for at least a few decades at the time of publication of his book. The problem with Haywood’s analysis (aside from the Black Belt fetish) is that it is essentially unreconstructed Stalinism. A basically correct critique of the popular front with Roosevelt, for example, commingles with a post hoc defense of the Moscow show trials of the same period. A critique of the anti-monopoly coalition strategy of the 1950’s with a defense of Stalin against Khrushchev’s 20th Party Congress criticisms. In the end despite snatches of agreement we part ways with Mr. Haywood over virtually every political issue. Nevertheless read this book and the memoirs of all the old communists you can get a hold of in order to find out what went right ( and what went wrong) with the early 20th century communist movement.
