COMMENTARY
BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM
This article is a reprint, with slight editing for the blog, from the
journal BLACK HISTORY AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE first published in 2001 in Workers
Vanguard. The thrust of the historic points in the article speak for
themselves. Markin.
"Everything new on the Negro question came from
Moscow—after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and
equality for all national minorities, all subject
peoples and all races—for all the despised and rejected of the earth." —James P. Cannon, "The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement" (International Socialist
Review, Summer 1959; reprinted
in The First Ten Years of American Communism [1962])
These words, describing the revolutionary ideas which inspired a
generation of radicals in the early 1920s, were written by American Trotskyist
leader James P. Cannon as the historic
struggle for black freedom and equality in
the U.S.
entered a new chapter with the civil
rights movement. The October
Revolution of 1917 was a beacon to
the exploited and oppressed
throughout the world, the greatest victory ever achieved by the working
people. As the multinational working class,
led by the Bolshevik Party of V. I.
Lenin and Leon Trotsky, smashed the
bloody rule of the capitalist masters and
erected its own state power, it opened the
portals of liberation to all the many oppressed
peoples of Russia.
In
the U.S.,
the reverberations of the Russian
Revolution coincided with the great migration of Southern black sharecroppers
to the cities of the North and the return of
some 400,000 black World War I vets.
This combination of events gave birth
to the rise of a new black militancy.
It also gave birth to the far-flung web
of repression that a half century later took the form of the FBI's
COINTEL-PRO (Counter-intelligence Program)
terror operation. From the time of
the slave revolts before the Civil War, the sight of black people armed not only with guns but
with "radical" notions of freedom and
equality has struck fear into America's racist rulers. In a 1919 Senate report, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, author of the infamous 1920 Palmer Raids, warned that "the Negro is 'seeing red'."
Many black radicals in the early '20s did indeed look to the Russian Revolution, and a few joined the early
American Communist Party (CP). Among them were leaders of the African Blood Brotherhood
(ABB), mainly composed of West Indian
immigrants, which advocated race pride
and armed self-defense against racist terror. As black people took up arms in self-defense against a series of racist pogroms and lynchings that swept American cities from Washington
to Tulsa, Oklahoma at the end of World War I, the ABB defiantly proclaimed in an article headlined "The Tulsa Outrage"
(Crusader, July 1921):
"As at Washington, D.C., so at Tulsa,
Okla. The entire power of the State, all of the forces of capitalist 'law and order,' were turned upon the Negro in the process
of 'putting down' race riots that were started and most actively prosecuted by white mobs.... That is the kind of
justice the Negro gets in capitalist
America! That is the kind of
justice the Jew used to get in capitalist-Czarist Russia, until the workers of all races arose in their wrath and
overthrew the capitalist-Czarist combination and set up Soviets. Now the workers of
all races get equal justice—in
Russia.
How long will the Negro in America
continue to fall for capitalist bunk? How
many more Tulsas will it take to line
up the Negro where by all race
interests he belongs—with the radical
forces of the world that are working
for the overthrow of capitalism and the
dawn of a new day, a new heaven and a new earth?"
These questions are posed with no less
urgency 80 years later. The last great struggle for black equality in the U.S., the civil rights movement, resulted in the formal
elimination of entrenched Jim Crow segregation in the South. But it did nothing to ameliorate the de facto segregation of the black masses at the bottom of American society—massive and chronic unemployment, segregated and substandard housing and schools, rampant
cop terror in the ghettos—rooted in the very foundations of
this capitalist system. Thousands upon thousands of civil rights activists faced down
shotgun-wielding cops and Klan lynchers in white robes. But the movement was
steered away from a revolutionary challenge to racist American capitalism by Martin Luther King
Jr. and other liberal civil rights leaders, aided by the long-since
reformist Communist Party, and into the dead end of Democratic Party
liberalism.
The Spartacist League
was born in good part in a fight for a revolutionary proletarian intervention into the
civil rights
movement. The SL originated as the Revolutionary Tendency within the Socialist Workers
Party (SWP), which had been founded and led for many years by Cannon, in struggle against the
party's descent
from Trotskyism into centrism in 1961-63. Weakened by years of isolation during the McCarthyite
witchhunt, the SWP criminally abstained from the struggle to win the thousands of left-wing
militants
who rebelled against King's liberal pacifism, instead adapting to the liberals and later the black
nationalists.
Today, the material
conditions of the mass of the black population are by every measure worse than they were in the 1960s, while even the
minimal gains achieved then have either been rolled back or are under
incessant attack. Meanwhile, King's political heirs—Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc.—seek
to bind a new generation of black youth to the Democratic Party as a capitalist "lesser evil" and to convince them that "communism is dead."
The destruction of the Soviet Union, the
final undoing of the October Revolution,
was an enormous defeat. But the
lessons of the Russian Revolution remain
no less vital. It will take nothing short
of a new October Revolution that sweeps
away the U.S.
bourgeoisie to bring about freedom and equality for black people and all working people.
The First COINTELPRO
If the class-struggle road to black
freedom
was first charted in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, it was in this period
as well that the American capitalist state constructed the deadly apparatus of
political repression— with its vast army of spies and informers, local police
"red squads," wiretaps and mail interceptions—that was later deployed by J. Edgar
Hoover's FBI in the '60s. COINTELPRO singled out the Black Panther Party,
the best of a layer of radical black militants who spurned the accommodationism of
King & Co., for defiantly asserting the right of armed self-defense. The FBI's
war of terror left 38 Panthers dead and hundreds more framed up and imprisoned in America's dungeons, ultimately including onetime
Philadelphia
Panther spokesman Mumia Abu-Jamal, who now fights for his life from a prison cell on Pennsylvania's death
row.
Theodore Kornweibel's "Seeing
Red": Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy 1919-1925 (1998) presents a history of the first
edition of COINTELPRO. Kornweibel opens: "Modern America's political
intelligence system—surveillance, investigation, and spying on individuals because of
fear or dislike of their beliefs, resulting in harassment, intimidation, or
persecution—came of age during World War I and the Red Scare of 1919 to 1921." America's entry
into World War I, the first interimperialist world war, in 1917 gave impetus to the creation of
a far-flung
domestic espionage apparatus— including the Bureau of Investigation, the Military
Intelligence Division (MID) and the Office of Naval Intelligence—which grew from a handful
of agents to a staff of thousands by war's end in November
1918. At its center was the newly formed Bureau of
Investigation—to be recast in 1935 as the FBI amid a new wave of working-class
radicalization—and its General Intelligence Division (GID), headed by the same
J. Edgar Hoover.
Within months of its formation in 1919. the GID had compiled a list of 55,000 names. Initially aimed at antiwar dissidents, left-wing Socialists and IWW members, Hoover's
political police went on to pursue the fledgling American Communist movement. As always, black militants were a particular target. The federal agencies were assisted by local red squads and private anti-Communist outfits like the American Defense Initiative. The Palmer Raids in the first week of
January 1920 resulted in the arrest of over 6,000 Communists and the deportation of thousands of foreign-born anarchists and other radicals. All of this was carried out under "progressive" Democratic president Woodrow Wilson.
Foreshadowing the "human rights" rhetoric which was
later used to justify a host of imperialist military interventions by the Clinton White
House, Wilson proclaimed that the imperialist war for re-division of colonies and spheres of
exploitation
was fought to make the world "safe for democracy"—even as he presided over the
brutal subjugation of American colonies like the Philippines and Puerto Rico and Jim
Crow terror against black people in the U.S. Wilson's "14 Points,"
including the right of national self-determination, were cynically crafted to counter Bolshevik
influence among working people and colonial slaves around the world. As a staunch supporter of segregation, Wilson was representative of ascending U.S.
imperialism, whose racist wars of conquest abroad, beginning with the Spanish-American War
of 1898, were
accompanied by the intensification of racist repression at home.
Based on previously
unavailable government documents, Kornweibel presents a powerful exposition of how the
federal government
mobilized its resources— from the armed forces to the postal service, from the State
Department to the Justice Department—to defend the racist capitalist status quo and to
crush the new movements for black emancipation and red revolution. A liberal anti-Communist, Kornweibel argues
that the Feds had "reasonable grounds for monitoring" black Communists
because they supposedly advocated the' violent overthrow of the American
government and acted as spies for Soviet Russia. He condemns the capitalist
government only for spying on large numbers of liberals and non-Communist radicals.
Kornweibel sneers that "the Bolsheviks failed to convert more than a handful
of blacks to communism in the 1920s."
It is true that as late
as 1928, the CP had only some 50 black members. The Palmer Raids and the anti-red witchhunt had served their
purpose. The decade of the '20s was marked by an ebb tide in labor struggle,
as union membership shrank to barely 10 percent of the workforce. Emboldened by
the right-wing climate, the Ku Klux Klan reached a peak of power and popularity, with several
million
members, including in the urban North. In 1925, the Klan staged a march of 40,000 in Washington, D.C.
But in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution,
the bourgeoisie's fears that the black masses might "see red" were not
misplaced. The black GIs who had been sent to die in the "great war for democracy" in Europe and were now determined to fight .for some democracy at home were, in Wilson's
eyes, the "greatest medium in
conveying bol-shevism to America."
As Kornweibel himself recounts, the
Bolshevik Revolution was popular
among wide layers of urban blacks and
even among moderate black newspapers
and organizations. The accomodationism
of Booker T. Washington, who
preached acceptance of Jim Crow
segregation and lectured impoverished
blacks to pull themselves up "by the bootstraps," had held sway in the years following the elimination of the last remaining gains of Reconstruction in the 1890s,
when the downtrodden masses of black
sharecroppers in the South entertained
little hope of social struggle. But the end of World War I ushered in a new spirit of militancy, the "New Crowd Negro," in the words of black social democrat A. Philip Randolph.
Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The experience of the Bolshevik Party in leading the first victorious
proletarian revolution
provoked a polarization and regroupment within the workers movement internationally. In the U.S., many left-wing Socialists and members of the revolutionary-syndicalist
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) joined together to forge an American section of the
Communist International (CI). Of particular
importance was the profound change
inspired by the Russian Bolsheviks
in the way American radicals viewed the
black question.
Samuel Gompers' American Federation of Labor was largely composed of
lily-white craft unions.
Even the IWW, which
fought heroically to organize black and immigrant workers, had no program to address the special oppression of black people. The Socialist Party ranged
from open racists like
Victor Berger, who considered
black people "a lower race," to "colorblind"
socialists like Eugene V. Debs. Debs
staunchly opposed racist discrimination
and the exclusion of black workers
from the unions but denied that black
people suffered from any form of oppression
other than as workers, going so far
as to challenge: "What social distinction is there between a white
and a black deckhand on a Mississippi steamboat?" (Jean Y. Tussey, ed., Debs Speaks [1970]). This Debsian outlook was manifested in the 1919 founding program of the Communist Party, while the program of the rival Communist Labor Party (the two
groups merged in 1920) simply ignored the
black question.
As Cannon, a former Wobbly who became an early
leader of the CP and then founder of the American Trotskyist movement, noted in
his 1959 article:
"The earlier
socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was,
formed, never recognized any need for a special program
on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an
economic problem, part of the struggle between
the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done
about the special problems of discrimination and inequality
this side of socialism.... "The difference—and it was a profound difference—between
the Communist Party of the Twenties and its socialist and
radical ancestors, was signified by its
break with this tradition. The American communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Russians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their atti tude; to assimilate the new
theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited
second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the
over-all program—and to start doing something about it."
Though the early Comintern tended to conflate the black struggle in the U.S. with the colonial struggle in Africa, the manifesto adopted by the First Congress of the CI in 1919, drafted by Trotsky, was a clarion call to the dark-skinned masses throughout the world, proclaiming: "Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe
will strike for you as the hour of your own emancipation!" The first full discussion of the black
question from a Communist viewpoint took
place not in the U.S. but in
Moscow,
at the Second Comintern Congress in
1920. At Lenin's personal request, American
Communist John Reed—author of Ten
Days That Shook the World, the first
popular account of the Russian Revolution—was
designated to report on the "Negro
Question." Describing the horrors of lynch law and Jim Crow segregation as
well as the effects of
proletarianization and imperialist
war, Reed said:
"If we consider the Negroes as an
enslaved
and oppressed people, then they pose us with two tasks: on the one hand a strong racial
movement and on the other a strong proletarian workers' movement, whose class consciousness is quickly growing. The Negroes do not pose the demand of national independence.... "The Communists must not stand aloof from the Negro movement which demands their social and political equality and at the moment, at a time of the rapid growth of
racial consciousness, is spreading rapidly
among the Negroes. The Communists must
use this movement to expose the lie of
bourgeois equality and emphasize the necessity
of the social revolution which will
not only liberate all workers from servitude
but is also the only way to free the enslaved
Negro people."
In the years before and during World War I, more than a million blacks fled
the rural Jim Crow South
to enter Northern industry.
In his 1915 pamphlet, New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture, Lenin wrote: "To show what the South is like, it is essential to add that its population is fleeing
to other capitalist areas and to the towns....
For the 'emancipated' Negroes, the
American South is a kind of prison where
they are hemmed in, isolated and deprived
of fresh air." The black question in
the U.S. Was thus transformed from primarily
a Southern agrarian question left unresolved in the aftermath of the
Civil War and the radical-democratic Reconstruction
era to a key question of the proletarian
revolution.
Particularly with the formation of the integrated CIO industrial unions in
the latter half of the 1930s, black workers became a strategic component of the multiracial proletariat. The special oppression
of black people as a race/color caste—segregated
at the bottom of this society while integrated into the economy—is the
cornerstone of American capitalism. Black workers serve as an industrial reserve army, the last hired and first fired as economic need demands. As well, America's rulers foster racial divisions in order to obscure the fundamental and
irreconcilable class division between labor and capital and to head off united working-class struggle.
The Spartacist League's proletarian, revolutionary strategy for black
liberation derives from
the seminal understanding laid
out by Reed in Moscow
in 1920 and powerfully
developed by the later writings of veteran Trotskyist Richard Fraser. In the late 1940s and early '50s, Fraser
pioneered the
perspective of revolutionary integra-tionism upheld today by the SL. We fight to mobilize the multiracial
proletariat in struggle
against every manifestation of racist oppression, a struggle which can only be victorious through the full social, political and economic integration of
black people in an
egalitarian socialist society.
Won to a revolutionary program, doubly
oppressed black workers
will play a leading role in the fight to
emancipate the black masses and all working
people by sweeping away the entire
system of capitalist exploitation.
There can be no socialist revolution
in this country without united
struggle of black and white workers
led by a multiracial vanguard party, and
there is nothing other than a workers revolution,
smashing the capitalist state and expropriating the capitalist class,
which can at last realize the historic struggle
for black equality and freedom.
Racist Terror and Black Self-Defense
The Red Scare hit full stride in 1919. That year saw the crest of the wave of labor radicalism which swept Europe in
response to the great carnage of the war and under the impact of the Russian Revolution. In the U.S., the ranks
of the Socialist Party swelled to more than
100,000, mostly foreign-born workers,
with two-thirds supporting the pro-Bolshevik
left wing. The U.S.
was hit by the biggest strike wave up
to that time, as four million workers
walked off their jobs in response to
the mounting cost of living induced
by war inflation. Drives to organize unions in meatpacking and steel culminated
in a huge steel strike that year which was smashed by federal troops. Shunned by the Jim Crow craft unions of the AFL, many black workers had first been
hired by the bosses as scabs and worked in
non-union "open shops." Many more had been brought in to
replace white workers drafted into the
military.
In the South, the sight of armed and uniformed black soldiers drove the racists into a frenzy. In Houston, 13 black soldiers were
hanged in September 1917 and 41 imprisoned
for life for defending themselves against a racist mob, and the number of lynchings escalated over the next couple of years. Conflicts over housing and jobs set the stage for a series of bloody
pogroms and racist massacres, beginning in East St. Louis in July
1917, where over 40 blacks were
killed. These conflicts intensified
with the end of the war, as white
workers demobilized from the army
demanded jobs at the expense of black
workers and a postwar economic downturn
set in.
The Red Summer of 1919, so called for the blood of black victims that flowed through city streets, saw a series of racist rampages that left hundreds dead across the
country. In Washington, D.C., the entry
of black workers into lower-level civil
service jobs during the war provoked a
riot by returning soldiers in which six blacks were killed. A five-day riot in Chicago, which broke the back of the meat-packers organizing drive, left 23 blacks and 15 whites dead and over 500 people seriously injured. In Elaine, Arkansas,
the formation of the black Progressive Farmers and Householders Union was met with a racist onslaught. Following a
mob attack on a union meeting in
October, in which some 200 black
men, women and children died,
federal troops were called in and 12 sharecroppers
were sentenced to death and another 80 to prison for "inciting to insurrection." They were finally freed after prolonged efforts by the NAACP.
The
worst of these racist atrocities came in Tulsa, Oklahoma
in May 1921. As false rumors spread
that a young black man had attacked a white female elevator operator,
lynch mobs looted and burned black homes and
businesses. Black residents, many of
them army vets, organized to defend
themselves. The police, commandeering
private planes, dropped dynamite on
the heart of black Tulsa. By the time it was over, the once-thriving black business district, known as "the Negro Wall Street," had been razed. Over 200 black men, women and children (as well as some 50 white attackers) were killed, and over 4,000 more were thrown into concentration camps.
What alarmed the bourgeoisie was not the murderous ferocity of the racist attacks but that they were met by
blacks with growing resolve for armed
self-defense. The Chicago Whip, one of a number of small black newspapers which typified the "New Crowd Negro," drew the ire of the
Feds when it headlined a report on a 1920
racist riot in Jersey City in which
three whites were badly beaten in
self-defense by besieged blacks: "Started
by White Hoodlums, Finished by Tough
Negroes." Following the Tulsa
pogrom, the paper carried a scathing indictment
of racist American "democracy": "Americanism! Is that
the thing which lynches, burns and murders the weak? If so, then give us Lords
and Kings with guillotines and dungeons" (quoted
in the Crusader, July 1921).
Claude McKay gave voice to the new spirit of militancy in his famous
poem "If We Must
Die" (1919):
"If we must die, let
it not be like hogs....
Like
men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!"
Though
never a member of the CP, McKay was
outspoken and eloquent in his support
for the Russian Revolution and was
invited to attend the CI's 1922 Fourth
Congress as a special delegate. When
McKay met Trotsky, the Bolshevik
leader and Red Army commander talked
of his hopes of training a group of American
blacks as officers in the Red Army and invited McKay for a three-week tour of Russian military facilities. But, stressed Trotsky, "The training of black propagandists is the most imperative and extremely important revolutionary task of the present time."
Even the cravenly legalistic NAACP ran an editorial in its Crisis in
May 1919 in which editor
W. E. B. DuBois called for
black vets to "battle against the forces of
hell in our own land" and declared, "We
return from fighting. We return fighting."
This was deemed so inflammatory that the New York Postmaster / ordered 100,000
copies of the issue withheld, despite the
NAACP's record of loyalty to the racist rulers. During the war, DuBois had
urged blacks to "close ranks" behind U.S. imperialism, while NAACP chairman Joel Spingarn served as an officer in military intelligence, briefly heading up subsection M14E, which specialized in "investigations of blacks' loyalties,"
as Kornweibel reports.
After the war, DuBois appealed to the victors of the imperialist bloodbath to apply the "principles" of their
robbers' peace—Wilson's "14
Points" and the Versailles treaty—to Africa and played a leading role in the Second Pan-African Congress in 1921, which demanded nothing more
lofty than the "right" of the colonial slaves "to participate in the [colonial] government as fast as their development permits." Writing about this period in 1972, even a scholar sympathetic to Pan-Africanism,
Harvard political science professor Azina Nwafor, observed:
"These were, after all, the historical moments when the
Bolsheviks had just triumphed in Russia and were exhorting all subject and colonial
peo-•ples
to rise and overthrow their oppressors, their respective feudal and imperialist regimes, and to
'expropriate all the expropriators.' Such revolutionary principles and appeals were
the real radical demands of the epoch—and not a wind of these blew through the civilized halls of the Pan-African
Congresses."
—"Critical Introduction" to George
Padmore,
Pan-Africanism or Communism (1972)
When McKay criticized
the Crisis in 1921 for "sneerjmg] at the Russian Revolution, the greatest
event in the history of humanity," DuBois replied that "the immediate work for
the American Negro lies in America and not in Russia" and pronounced it
"foolish for us to give up this practical program...by seeking to join a revolution which we do not at present understand" (Crisis, July
1921; reprinted in Philip S. Foner
and James S. Alien, eds., American
Communism and Black
Americans: A Documentary History, 1919-1929 [1987]). This the liberal DuBois
would never understand, even after
joining the by-then thoroughly reformist
CP in 1961, shortly before his death.
Hoover's Witchhunt Against Black Militants
As racist mobs
rampaged against blacks in 1919, Hoover
directed his agents to pay "special attention" to "the Negro
agitation which
seems to be prevalent throughout the industrial centers of the country and every effort should
be made to ascertain whether or not this agitation is due to the influence of
the radical elements such as the IWW and Bolsheviks." In a report to
Congress that year, Hoover
railed that "a certain class of Negro leaders" had shown "an outspoken
advocacy of the Bolsheviki or Soviet doctrines," had been "openly, defiantly
assertive" of their "own equality or even superiority" and had demanded "social
equality" (quoted in Robert Gold-stein, Political Repression in Modern America: 1870 to the
Present [1978]).
In its venomous crusade against anything smacking of
black self-assertion, the government even targeted Marcus Garvey's Negro
World as "probable Bolshevik propaganda." In fact, Garvey was an early exponent of
the reactionary separatism and black capitalism today espoused by Louis
Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. In 1922, Garvey even staged a meeting with the head of the KKK. Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association tried to get blacks to move to Africa and
establish themselves as a new
colonial elite with himself as their emperor.
The only 'black nationalist movement
in the U.S. ever to attain a mass base,
the Garveyites fed off the disillusionment
and demoralization which followed
the defeat of the postwar strike wave
and the 1919 riots. After a years-long
vendetta, the Feds imprisoned Garvey
in 1925 on fraud charges, deporting him
to Jamaica
three years later.
The main targets of
government repression, intimidation, infiltration and frame-up were black
leftists, especially those like McKay who had traveled to Moscow and were suspected
of bringing back instructions from Trotsky to set up a "colored Soviet."
The small number of black agents and informants recruited by the Feds were kept
busy infiltrating numerous organizations, in some cases simultaneously, and reporting on
public meetings and discussion circles. A particular focus of government spying
was Martin Luther Campbell's tailor shop in Harlem, where regular
discussions were attended by a wide range of black radicals and Communists, including McKay and leading CPer
Rose Pastor Stokes.
Among those targeted
by the Feds were left social democrats A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, who published the Messenger. The second issue of
the Messenger (May/June 1919) featured headlines like "The March of Soviet Government" and
"We Want More Bolshevik Patriotism." It was from the Messenger group and the Harlem branch of the Socialist Party that the Communist Party recruited its first black members, including founding CPer Otto Huiswoud, a union printer from Dutch Guiana (now Surinam). The post office withheld permanent second-class mailing status from the Messenger for two years for the following piece puncturing the racist hypocrisy of American bourgeois society:
"As for social equality, there
are about five million
mulattoes in the United States. This is the product of semi-social equality. It shows that social equality galore exists after dark, and we warn you that we expect to have social equality in the day as well as after dark."
Though initially an admirer of the Bolshevik Revolution, Randolph sided with the
reformist wing of the SP in the 1919 split that led to the formation of the CP. In 1923, he and Owen
ran an editorial titled "The Menace of Negro Communists." By the 1950s, Randolph was a Cold War liberal and
Democratic Party stalwart.
The African Blood Brotherhood
The CP's real breakthrough in black recruitment came from
the African Blood Brotherhood, founded in 1919 by West Indian militant Cyril Briggs,
publisher of the Crusader. Announcing the formation of the ABB, the Crusader
wrote: "Those only need apply who are willing to go the limit!"
Briggs was led by his uncompromising hostility to imperialist capitalism to embrace a
revolutionary outlook, and he and other ABB leaders joined the CP. When the CP,-
before then underground, set up the Workers Party as a legal party, the ABB sent
a fraternal delegation to its founding convention in December 1921 and many ABB members
joined the new legal party.
Briggs himself came
under surveillance in 1919 when the MID was alerted by a British intelligence report on
"Negro Agitation" which described the Crusader as a "very
extreme magazine" for its opposition to imperialism, its admiration of Bolshevism
and its "abuse of the white man." Garvey's pro-capitalist separatist movement was a
chief target of the Crusader's polemical fire. This political struggle soon
became muddied as Hoover's provocateurs
tried to push it toward a violent confrontation, just as 50 years later FBI
provocateurs seized on the antagonism between the Panthers and Ron Karenga's
"cultural nationalists" in Los
Angeles to foment murderous feuding. DuBois and
Randolph were trying to get the Feds to prosecute Garvey. Indefensibly, in 1922
Briggs joined with them in this, according to Kornweibel, alerting the "New York authorities
that the Negro World had violated the law by printing advertisements for a
cure for venereal disease."
In the wake of the
1921 Tulsa
massacre,
the ABB was subjected to even closer government scrutiny and a hysterical press
witchhunt for supposedly organizing black self-defense efforts there. But the ABB's
membership soared as it defiantly affirmed the right of armed self-defense. The CP
distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of its own leaflet, "The Tulsa
Massacre," which called for blacks "to resist the armed assaults upon their
homes, their women and children." Three CPers were convicted and sentenced to five months under Connecticut's
sedition law for distributing this leaflet.
While the ABB retained a separate existence and
identity through 1924, it was closely associated with and served as a recruiting
ground for the Workers Party. In 1925, the CP attempted to launch a black
transitional organization, the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), in line with
the CI's recognition of the need for special organizational forms to draw into the revolutionary movement
specially oppressed layers. Today's Labor
Black Leagues initiated by the Spartacist
League are an example of such
transitional organizations, which
are linked to the proletarian vanguard
party both programmatically and
through their most conscious cadres. The
ANLC opposed the color bar in the AFL, calling for unionization of black
workers, demanded full social and political equality for black people and nailed "the workers' and farmers' government of Soviet Russia." Its founding conference declared, "The white workers cannot
free themselves without the aid of us dark-skinned
people, and we cannot liberate
ourselves unless they join with us in an assault of the world bastions
of imperialism" (Daily Worker, 14
November 1925; reprinted in American
Communism and Black
Americans: A Documentary History,
1919 to 1929).
The CP did not have enough black cadre to get the ANLC off the ground, making little headway
overall in this period marked by a sharp decline in union membership and massive growth of the KKK. Moreover, by
this time the Bolshevik leadership of Lenin and Trotsky which had sought to guide and educate the American Communists had been replaced by the bureaucratic regime headed by Stalin.
Hostile imperialist encirclement and the
failure of revolution to spread beyond backward Russia to the
advanced capitalist world led to the consolidation of a parasitic, nationalist bureaucracy which usurped power through a political counterrevolution
consummated by the smashing of the
Trotskyist Left Opposition in January 1924.
The Stalinist bureaucracy proclaimed
the nationalist dogma of "socialism in one country,"
transforming the Communist parties in the
capitalist world from instruments for
socialist revolution into appendages of the Kremlin's diplomatic maneuvers.
The
Stalinists' conservative policies found an
echo among American CP cadre weighed
down by the reactionary pressures
of an expanding and self-confident imperialism.
The Soviet bureaucracy manipulated the ongoing and politically unclear factional warfare within the American
party for its own ends. In 1928, the CI
decreed the so-called "black
belt theory," insisting against all reality and the opposition of the
majority of the CP's black cadre that the black population in the South
constituted a nation and that the key task
was to fight for black
"self-determination." But
as Cannon noted in his 1959 essay, "The
Russian Revolution and the American
Negro Movement," it was the CP's "aggressive
agitation for Negro equality and Negro rights on every
front...that brought the results,
without the help, and probably despite, the unpopular 'self-determination' slogan."
Cannon explained that the profound changes in the attitude of the American Communists to the black question introduced in the early 1920s, "brought about by the Russian
intervention, were to manifest themselves
explosively in the next
decade." As the Great Depression led to a new period of struggle in
the early '30s, the CP took the lead in
fights against evictions, in struggles of the unemployed and in the Scottsboro and Angelo Herndon defense campaigns. When the tumultuous battles that gave rise to powerful new
industrial unions erupted, "the policy
and agitation of the Communist Party
at that time did iriore, ten times
over, than any other to help the Negro
workers to rise to a new status of at
least semi-citizenship in the new labor movement."
But, as Cannon put it, "the
American Stalinists
eventually fouled up the Negro question, as they fouled up every other question." By the mid-1930s, the CI had adopted the overtly
class-collaborationist "people's
front" line, manifested in the U.S. in a
policy of subordination to Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" Democratic Party, whose Southern wing was the Klan-infested Dixiecrat segregationists. The CP played a key role in subordinating the CIO unions and the fight for black rights to the Democratic Party, opposing
labor and black struggles during
World War II in order to promote the war effort of racist U.S. imperialism.
Break with the Democrats— Forge a Workers Party!
In their introductory note to American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919 to 1929, Stalinist academics Philip Foner and James Allen seek to
justify this history of sellouts by spitting on the heroic and pioneering
work of the early CP. They deep-six the
central role of the Russian Bolsheviks
in reorienting the American Communists
on the black question and criticize them for "requiring adherence to their full program" in the ANLC. They attack the early CP's "negative attitude toward the Black middle class"—i.e., its revolutionary proletarian perspective— and
counterpose the need for a class-collaborationist
"united freedom front." Because
they uphold the Stalinist class collaborationism of the later CP, Foner and Alien are necessarily hostile to the
perspective of black liberation through proletarian revolution which animated the American Communist movement under he guidance of Lenin and Trotsky.
The Stalinists' sellout of the fight for
black rights in the service of FDR's Democrats
cast a heavy shadow over the American workers movement. That goes a long way to explaining why, in the subsequent
years, many blacks—and white workers as well—turned their backs on the Communist Party and the left in general,
leaving the field open to Democratic Party liberals like Martin Luther King
Jr. and, today, Jesse Jackson. In concluding
"The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement," Cannon wrote:
"In the next stage of its development,
the
American Negro movement will be compelled to turn to a more militant policy
than gradualism, and to look for more
reliable allies than capitalist politicians
in the North who are themselves allied
with the Dixiecrats of the South. The
Negroes, more than any others in this
country, have reason and right to be revolutionary.
"An honest
workers' party of the new generation will recognize this revolutionary potential of
the Negro struggle, and call for a fighting alliance of the Negro people and the labor movement in a common revolutionary struggle against the present social system.
"Reforms and
concessions, far more important and
significant than any yet attained, will be by-products of this revolutionary alliance.
They will be fought for and
attained at every stage of the struggle.
But the new movement will not stop
with reforms, nor be satisfied with concessions.
The movement of the Negro people and
the movement of militant labor,
united and coordinated by a revolutionary party, will solve the Negro
problem in the only way it can be solved—by
a social revolution."
The forging of an authentically communist vanguard party to iead the multiracial proletariat to power requires breaking working people and the black masses from the grip of the racist capitalist Democratic
Party. This is the task of the Spartacist
League. As we state in the SL/U.S. programmatic statement "For
Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World
Imperialism!": "The shell
game through which the Democratic
Party—the historic party of the Confederate slavocracy—is portrayed as
the 'friend' of blacks and labor has been essential to preserving the rule of racist American capitalism. Our principal
task in the U.S.
is to break the power of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy over the
labor movement. It is this bureaucracy—itself a component part of the
Democratic Party—which politically
chains the proletariat to the bourgeoisie and is the major obstacle to
revolutionary class consciousness, to the forging of a revolutionary workers party." For black liberation
through socialist revolution! •
