A Simple Spark

From Ike to Mao to Chairman Bob

Review

"From Ike to Mao: My Journey from Mainstream America

to Revolutionary Communist"

Insight Press, 2006

Around 400 pages into his painfully self-absorbed and unfunny autobiography Chairman Bob Avakian briefly considers the issue of personality cults. Funny, that—as his Revolutionary Communist Party focuses almost solely on the “ideas” of this one man. He spells it out pretty simply: workers accept that some people are special. Some basketball players are simply the best, some scientists are simply brilliant, and some Maoists are bigger than others.

Ostensibly, this tome tells the story of a wholesome American boy. A young, cherubic sport-enthusiast who loved mom and the President. The New Left intervened and before long he was shrill, ambitious leader of the Maoist “new communist movement” collective based in the Bay Area called Revolutionary Union. At this point the story could belong to many left-swerving baby boomers. Like thousands of others, as SDS collapsed “Marxism-Leninism” beckoned. It was now time to build a ‘party of a new type’ which—it was hoped—would successfully replicate the parties of the old type.

Avakian, like Forest Gump with a little red book, paints himself in to the middle of the action. According to From Ike to Mao Avakian was even asked to join the Black Panther Party’s “secret national leadership” by none other than Eldrige Cleaver. The Panthers weren’t ready for him, Avakian intones, because his revolutionary vision chaffed against the Panthers conservatism. At one point Avakian concocts an unverified story about taking the ‘two line struggle’ right into a Panther meeting. He barbequed their pork-chop nationalism with his white-hot MLMTT.

One particularly telling anecdote comes from unity meetings held between Avakian’s RU and a number of majority Black and Latino groups. In a debate over who should represent RU, Avakian insists it should be him—because he’s white. These Black and Latino comrades needed more white people in their lives, due to their head-in-the-sand nationalism. They needed to “get comfortable” with white leadership. But then again the RCP aligned itself with Boston’s anti-busing movement, so let’s not be too surprised. Did I mention they opposed homosexuality and extramarital cohabitation, too?

Eventually, after a couple years attempting to pull other collectives into its orbit, the RU decided to go it alone and declared itself the official revolutionary vanguard of the US proletariat. Or at the very least the vanguard of the lumpenproletariat.

Of course Avakian’s RCP—and eventually it was solely Avakian’s—was not alone. From possibly hundreds of Maoist-influenced collectives, nearly a dozen made similar declarations. By the dawn of the 1980’s the “new communist movement” consisted of a handful of self-declared vanguards.

But don’t read this book to learn that history. Read Max Elbaum’s excellent Revolution in the Air. All you’ll get here is an infantilizing, hand-holding walk through why the RCP triumphed.

(above) American Maoism for beginners

A lot of people will claim the RCP went through a long ultra left period in the 80’s and 90’s. I don’t think so, I always mention the Shinning Path at City Council meetings. And where did the black motorcycle jackets and red kafeiyas go? And why is there basically only one photograph of Chairman Bob made available? Are we to believe he’s anti-revisionism’s Dorian Gray?

This book does not give you any of the inside scoop you were hoping for. No peeks inside rigorous criticism/self-criticism sessions, no believable snapshots of life with Bob the Exile in Paris, and definitely no hints as to what keeps the Avakian cult crawling along. All we see here is that one highly eccentric individual runs the show over at the RCP, and boy are his ideas important.

What I want to know is why is a split from the mid-1970’s given so much ink? After Mao died the RCP was divided over the new leadership in Beijing. Avakian, true to his Cultural Revolution roots, supported the ousted Gang of Four while the other 40% of the group still supported China’s government. It’s not that interesting, but it takes up a quarter of the book. Is Dengist Menshivism really a hot topic inside today’s RCP? I thought surely the RCP’s 1978 book “Revolution and Counter-Revolution: the Revisionist Coup in China and the Struggle in the RCP” cleared up any lingering questions about the dreaded “Jarvis-Bergman clique”.

Not surprisingly, this book does nothing to explain what the RCP is today and why, over the last two years, Avakian has gone from being undeniable leader to positively cultish Godhead. Avakian was always one to plaster his face around town, but there now exists a climate of total worship inside the RCP. It’s cultivated, clumsy, and curious.

Word on the street is it’s a cushion against a bombshell.

Let me explain.

If there is a successful Maoist movement in the world right now it is clearly the Nepalese movement. Of course in the true tradition of neo-Stalinism they ended up joining the capitalist government right when victory seemed certain, but that’s for another article. Anyway, everyone loves the Nepalese—they keep Maoism relevant. The RCP passionately promoted the Nepalese movement for years, selling their publication, covering their every utterance in their press, and otherwise publicly associating themselves with this broadly supported Maoist movement.

But here’s the problem: the Nepalese are on to Avakian. They may share an international—the Revolutionary International Movement—but they no longer feel the love. The Nepalese charge that Avakian is a cult leader whose ideological contributions amount to smoke and mirrors. Sensible, right? For the last couple years the Nepalese have been preparing to call Avakian out on the carpet, which would shatter the RIM. By the time the criticism/self-criticism hits the fan, Avakian hopes, he’ll be properly insulated from the criticism, thus saving his fiefdom.

Neither does this bland, creepy autobiography address the RCP’s transition from confrontationalist pose in the 1980’s to the celebrity loving “world can’t wait” fear mongerers they are today. It’s a long way from hailing peoples’ war to handing Sean Penn an orange jumpsuit.

(above) The paranoid liberalism of today's RCP, celebrities sold separately

Remember these are the folks whose newspaper masthead featured weapons well into the 2000’s, and here they are with pro-Democratic Party, lowest common denominator pandering. How does this happen? Well, how did it happen to the Nepalese Maoist movement?

“Out of the closets and on to the streets”
The Many Lives of Bob Kohler
By Brad Duncan


Liberation movements in the United States lost a brave and vibrant participant in the death of Bob Kohler, a leading figure of the American Gay Liberation Movement.
Bob lived dozens of lives in his 81 years on the planet. Although Bob was best known as an early leader of the Gay Liberation Front he was also a talent representative for mostly Black artists in the early 1960’s, a vintage clothing store owner, World War II veteran, a talented and empathetic listener, bath house proprietor, peoples’ historian, Stonewall uprising participant, and a link between the gay struggle and other liberation struggles. .
Much like the late New York activist and fellow Irish-American George Harrison, Kohler was a figure whose work touched on a wide range of social movements. His movement work stretched from CORE in the early 1960’s to ACT-UP in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Perhaps more than anything he want gay people who wanted freedom to link their struggle with all other people who want freedom. Beyond his extensive involvement with CORE and later the Black Panthers, Bob championed the struggles of New York’s Puerto Rican community, fought for immigrant rights, animal rights, and was last arrested at a demonstration against the police murder of African immigrant Amadou Diallo in 1999.
He was the first to build a bridge between the GLF and the Black Panthers, and he also led a demonstration against sexism inside a Panther meeting. He was determined to both challenge the left and radicalize it. The GLF pushed the issue with the left by refusing to be sidelined in the movement. In the late 1960’s Bob organized pickets against the Village Voice and won his demand for the right to use the word ‘gay’ in an advertisement.
An oral history from the early 1990’s speaks vividly to the era:

“Basically, we went where angels feared to tread… We organized marches and participated in other people’s marches. We had fistfights with the Communist Party at a demonstration once because they said that we were embarrassing them by being there.” (1)

One of Bob’s many lives was as an oral historian of the gay community in New York. He was connected to the street kids; he listened to them and understood them, just as he connected with activists and all types of social outsiders. He stood with his feet stretching across multiple generations of gay New York, and was an important community elder.
In the same oral history, Bob explains why dance parties were nessesarry fund raisers in the early days of the gay liberation movement:

“We would sometimes make as much as a thousand dollars, which was big money in 1970. Usually the money during the dance was kept in Sylvia’s panty hose or in my back pocket. We used the money as bail. We’d get a call that two Black Panthers had been arrested. One of us would take the money, go down, and bail them out. Or women were striking at the telephone company and one was arrested and beaten up. Or someone wanted to start a youth organization. We’d throw a dance and give them the proceeds. What little money we had we’d keep under my bathtub because we were afraid of banks”. (2)

Fighters for human liberation everywhere morn his passing, although no one could accuse him of leading a short or unproductive life.
Bob Kohler, Presente!

(1) and (2) from Over the Rainbow: Lesbian and Gay Politics in America Since Stonewall Boxtree, London 1993

“Red Flag, Black Nation: Communists, African Americans, And Self-Determination
1919-1939”

By Brad Duncan

Two Connected Themes

There are two story lines writ large across the world in the twentieth century: race and communism.

In the 1920’s and 1930’s white supremacy was the law of the land across the planet. From the French colonies of Southeast Asia, to the rubber fields of Angola, to the tin mines of Bolivia, to the tenant farms and meatpacking houses of the United States, Europeans and their decedents controlled the wealth and made the decisions. That people from Africa, Asia, and Latin America had no fixed rights was a common assumption to European colonial rulers, despite any democratic pretense. Through out the world, organized, state-sponsored racism was intimately related to economic exploitation. No where was this more clear than in the United States where the descendants of Africans slaves faced white supremacist violence, legal persecution, and ruthless economic exploitation.

The emergence of an American Communist movement in 1919 signaled the beginning of a new challenge to industrial capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy. The vision of the world offered by the new Communist movement was fierce in its racial egalitarianism. Not only did the Communist movement preach the common class bond between white workers and workers of color but Communists championed the right of national self-determination for all oppressed nations. The imperialists had mad noises to honor this democratic right in the wake of World War One, but it amounted to little. The Communist movement demanded freedom for colonies by any means, up to and including revolution.

By the end of the 1920’s the Party classified African Americans as an oppressed nation yearning to be free. This meant that any revolution against oppression in the United States would see African Americans and their unique struggle for freedom at the center. In the 1920’s and 1930’s the Communist Party, USA was a majority non-Black political party that dedicated itself in historically unprecedented ways to the liberation of Black people. This research paper aims to investigate the relationship between the CPUSA, African Americans, and the issue of National Self-Determination in the United States in the first two decades of the party’s history.

Labor, Socialists, and Black Workers before the CPUSA

By the time American Communism emerged in 1919 the Socialist Party had been the political party most associated with socialism and anti-capitalism for over twenty years. While the Socialist Party identified racism as a destructive force that helped divide the working class and should be done away with, they never developed a systematic program for fighting racist oppression. When it came to organizing unions and wining strikes and opposing the war, the Socialist Party had a program, platform, and strategy. When it came to organizing to combat lynching, analyzing the roots of white supremacy, and consistently fighting Jim Crow in the unions, the Socialist Party did not have much to offer.

Some early trade union such as the Knights of Labor had made limited efforts to specifically organize workers of color, as did the more radical IWW. The IWW had a handful of prolific and important Black organizers and the Socialist Party likewise had small amount of Black cadres and leaders such as A. Philip Randolph. But by and large, the workers’ movement and even the organized left of that generation was segregated and almost totally ignored workers of color, Black workers included. These unions, from the AFL to smaller craft and even industrial unions, helped reinforce—not challenge—the American color line that was so important to employers and the state. Unions that did seek to organize Black workers either independently or with white fellow workers were met with incredible repression and often shunned within the larger labor movement. Capitalists wanted to make white workers feel that segregation and Black oppression created material benefits for them, and most mainstream trade union leaders were happy to play along. Many unions made guaranteeing white privilege a central demand. A movement that held tremendous potential to attack white supremacy was in many ways another racist arm of the law for workers of color.

The Socialist Party was very proud of the fact that in an era of extreme racism they were a color blind political party. But that was just the problem. The “color blindness” of the Socialist Party meant they were unable to prioritize fighting Jim Crow, incapable understanding Black struggle, and willfully ignorant of the special oppression that Black people face in the United States. For the SP, Blacks were simply an oppressed group within the working class because of shallow white racism. The SP intentionally never developed a program to specifically combat white supremacy or a plan to further solidarize with existing Black struggles. They were, after all, color blind. Black labor legend A. Phillip Randolph felt that the socialist message of the SP was the answer for working class African Americans and he spoke out widely on the Party’s behalf. But time and again Black militants noticed plainly what was missing from the SP’s radical politics. Randolph recruited some already radicalized Black socialists to the Party, but it was generally a tough sell for many Black workers in the ranks of the labor movement where Randolph carried out his work as organizer. For all its militancy, the Socialist movement had a Black liberation problem.

African Blood Brotherhood

The African Blood Brotherhood was a secretive organization in the late 1910’s and early 1920’s that was primarily dedicated to propagating socialist and Black nationalist ideas to an increasingly politicized African American audience. They also aspired to be an armed force that could protect Blacks from lynching and racist violence. Although nominally an underground movement the ABB used it’s widely circulated newspaper The Crusader to build support for Black pride, Pan-Africanism, and class struggle against capitalists. The ideology of the ABB barrowed from nationalists like Martin Delany and socialists such as Eugene Debs, making them the first party ever in the United States to fuse the ideas of Black Nationalism with those of revolutionary socialism. Although the ABB would eventually established cells across the country the group was based in New York City. New York was a center for Black immigrants from the British Caribbean, many of whom had been radicalized by the anti-colonial movements and had already been exposed to socialist ideas. Many central ABB leaders were from this left wing immigrant Caribbean community in New York. Some had been involved with the Socialist Party but not surprisingly many found the Party’s lack of movement on the Black question off-putting. This milieu would increasingly come to the Communist Party as it emerged in Harlem later in the decade.

More than anything else the ABB came to be associated in the public mind with armed self defense to white supremacist violence. In 1921 white racist mobs attempted to entirely destroy the Black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although initially the pogrom was quite successful, militant defense was organized and white mobs were repelled. Because they preached armed self defense and because they had a cell in Tulsa it was widely reported in the newspapers that the ABB had been the force behind the brave resistance. The ABB was also quite famous for its public arguments with the much larger movement led by Marcus Garvey. The ABB, although largely sympathetic to Garvey’s militancy and posture, thought that ‘back to Africa’ were naïve, escapist, and essentially giving in to American racism. They also accused Garvey’s followers of having false middle class pretensions and essentially being aspiring shop keepers who had no sense of class struggle. Despite a grudging respect for his Black pride message, Garvey was a pro-capitalist reactionary who was misleading the Black masses in the eyes of the African Blood Brotherhood.

For the African Blood Brotherhood Black people in the United States needed more than formal equality or a ticket to Africa—they required liberation right here and now. That here and now seemed to flash before their eyes as Lenin and the Russian Communist Party seize state power in 1917. The ranks of the ABB were electrified by this daring achievement, just as they had been roused by news of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland the year before. Increasingly the ABB sought out leftist forces who orientated towards national liberation and internationalism. They sent representatives around the radical Black movement, but it was their nascent relationship with the Communist Party that established the deepest collaborative relationship. By 1922 the ABB—an exclusively Black organization—voted to join the Communist Party, USA, a predominately white organization. The Communists needed Black cadres to become the party they so desperately wanted to be. The ABB, feeling that most of their Black Nationalist brethren had little need for class struggle, needed a broader, more radical movement to build. As the CPUSA was shifting to the left on the issue of Black liberation, the ABB and the CPUSA seemed like a perfect fit.

Communist Party, USA is born

“…our experiences lately in the mass struggle show, first of all, how everything that touches upon the Negro question is for out Party a question of fundamental principle importance, a matter of life and death” (Communist Position on the Negro Question, page 8)

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the first time in human history that working class people seized control of a state apparatus and kept it. The Paris Commune of 1871 showed that workers could take power, the Russian Revolution showed they could take it and wield it. The Communist movement in Russia, know as the Bolsheviks, was led by V.I. Lenin, a central thinker and activist in the world socialist movement. Lenin’s ideas about how to organize for social change were different that those associated with the American Socialist Party of the era. Lenin had no faith in working within the system and believed only revolution could deliver the goods for the working class and oppressed peoples. The mainstream Socialist movement in the United States was much more likely to embrace legislative and legal tactics, alongside labor action. But when Lenin and the Bolsheviks successfully overthrew the government and declared that a socialist transformation had begun, American socialists took notice. The left wing of the Socialist Party, along with militants of the IWW and other radical working class forces, were now convinced that the SP did not have what it took to win for workers. What was needed was the kind of disciplined, explicitly revolutionary party like the won led by Lenin. By 1919, two years after the Russian Revolution, hundreds of American socialists, wobblies, and assorted radicals decided to form a new political party. Although it would operate somewhat clandestinely and used various names, this party would eventual debut to the world as the Communist Party, USA.

In its first decade the Communist Party carved out quite a niche as a political party that aligned itself with organizing unorganized workers, defending class war prisoners, and propagating the idea that workers could and must overthrow the government. They were more radical that the Socialist Party, more political that the IWW, and more ambitious that both combined. Defending political prisoners was a key area of work if for no other reason than sedition laws had hit communists and immigrant unionists so hard. They initiated the Trade Union Education League which help spread militant trade unionism and radical class politics throughout the nation, including regions previously void of unions. The TUEL and the Negro Labor Congress attempted to popularize industrial unionism—as opposed to narrow craft unionism—a decade before the CIO was born. Both preached strict anti-racism and opposed the collaborationist relationship unions like the AFL had with employers.

From the outset the Communist Party, USA stove to uphold a more radical position on the Black question than did the Socialist Party. In its earliest years the party put forward what was essentially a more strident version of the SP position. This evolved with the emergence of the United Negro Improvement Association led by Marcus Garvey. The spirit of militancy, pride, and self-determination that Garvey brought to the Black struggle was infectious. As much as the early Communist movement admired Garvey they were also sharply critical of his work, calling it bourgeois nationalism and escapist. In the wake of the collapse of the Garvey movement in the early 1920’s, the Communist Party focused on setting up Black pro-labor organizations. They sought to build national organizations that could organize Black workers where other unions had refused to do so, engage non-Black members in Black labor struggles, and most importantly popularize the concept of class struggle amongst the layer of radical Blacks that had been attracted to Garvey. For Communists, a central goal of early work amongst Black workers was to channel the pride and rage of Garvey into militant Black trade unionism. While Garvey offered escapist solutions, the Communists sought to lead a movement for Black liberation here in the US.

The influence of the African Blood Brotherhood, the Garvey movement, and a shifting focus in world politics meant that the Communist Party was increasingly viewing the Black liberation struggle as a National liberation struggle in the classic Marxist sense.

Birth of “National Self Determination for the Black Belt” Theory

The shift towards viewing African Americans as a nation and not ‘simply’ a racially oppressed sector of the working class was part and parcel with a shift in the international Communist movement. In an era when anti-colonial movement were beginning to make themselves known the Marxist right to national self determination was pushed to center stage in Communist thought and practice. Part of this hardening on what is called The National Question was linked to the rise of Joseph Stalin. Stalin, who was never a party intellectual or a prolific writer, had in fact been assigned to write an essay regarding Communist Party policy on the National Question years before 1917. This essay lays out the basics of what Communists think constitutes a nation and why such a entity has a democratic right to chart its own course and be independent if it so chooses. This idea was not created by Stalin—in fact he relied most centrally on Lenin’s notebooks—but as Stalin and the emerging beaurucratic clique around him rose to power in the Soviet Union in the mid to late 1920’s the idea and the essay became holy writ.

This period of the Communist movement was fraught with division over what course the first ever Communist country should take. It was in the climate that a young Harry Haywood ventured to Moscow to further study Marxism and Communist politics. Haywood had joined the Communist movement after first participating in the African Blood Brotherhood and had been an accomplished, autodidactic political student since the Red Summer of 1919 had opened the doors to his radicalization. For Haywood the language and scheme of national self determination sounded a lot like what the ABB had been advocating: Black self-rule and socialist revolution more broadly. Haywood was sent to Moscow to be a student of the Communist movement, but he ended up shaping Communist International (“Third International”) policy towards the Black question at least as much as he learned from it. Haywood felt that the Communist movement—and Lenin’s concept of revolutionary self-determination—was directly applicable to his life experiences as a Black farmer in the Black Belt. Haywood quickly became an authority on the topic in the halls of the Kremlin, but he also became a hatchet man for Stalin, whose rise to power Haywood defended vociferously. With all the approval Stalin’s Third International had to offer, Haywood returned to the US in the late 1920’s with a vision of Self-Determination for the Black Belt. In 1928, the Black Belt Nation Theory became official Communist International policy. Just as the Communist movement favored a free Ireland, India, Kenya, and Vietnam, so too did they now openly favor a free African American government in the United States South.

The Communist Position On the Negro Question

Published in 1932 The Communist Position on the Negro Question is a deep, detailed look at Communist policy towards and involvement in Black struggles of the period. Contained inside the eighty-page pamphlet are three lengthy essays, a campaign speech, and two Communist International resolutions on the Black question from 1928 and 1930. The essays and the speech seek primarily to accomplish three things. Firstly it makes the point that the liberation of Black people is directly connected to the liberation of all working class people, thus making strident anti-racism the duty of all workers everywhere. Secondly the pamphlet seeks to show that “white chauvinism”—or a white supremacist attitude—pervaded the labor movement and the Left. Every essay, speech, and resolution contained in the pamphlet makes note of this cancer that is eating away any future possibility of class struggle, much less potential revolutionary victory. Political forces from trade unions, mainstream parties, and even the Socialists are given a firm whacking on the Black issue throughout the pamphlet. Finally, the pamphlet enthusiastically and immodestly makes the point that the Communist Party, USA is the only political and social movement with the correct position on Black liberation. The CPUSA is presented as the only movement that brings together labor and the Black struggle, and is correspondingly both the only party workers can trust and the only party that could potentially lead a future revolution. The pamphlet states quite clearly that the Party has the politics, the passion, and commitment it takes to lead the working class to victory over capitalism, imperialism, and racism forever.

This collection was designed to prove the CPUSA’s credentials on the Black question to those already in the movement but also to bring new converts into the movement and demonstrate to them the centrality of the issue. But it was also designed to attack the CPUSA’s competitors on the left and in the labor movement. One audience was the radical worker who was unsure which radical party to pick, another audience was African Americans who were unsure of the Party’s sincerity, and a final audience was Party members who needed to know the correct and contemporary party line after years of theoretic changes and development. The CPUSA hoped to get a lot of mileage from this rather small publication.

Story of the Nation

Any nation conscious enough of itself to exert its right to self-determination has to have a creation story, a national narrative. The Communist Position on the Negro Question lays out the story of the Black Nation in the US South, know henceforth as the Black Belt Nation. The stories beginnings of course lay in the removal of millions of Africans to work as slaves in the US South. As the slave-owning ruling class of the South grew more ambitious Northern industrialists grew more concerned about the existence of competion in the form of slave labor. Fearing the future of slavery under Lincoln, most slave-holding states attempted to leave the United States in 1861. In Lincoln’s view at the outset of the crisis the most preferable outcome of the war was the unity of the United States and continuity of chattel slavery in the South. As the war dragged on it became clear to Lincoln and others on the Union side that smashing slavery was the only sure way to defeat the pro-slavery secessionists. Also important to the eventual Union victory was the mobilization of Black soldiers, including thousands of former slaves. Mobilized, armed, and ready to fight for freedom, African Americans were a determining factor in the war and its aftermath.

Reconstruction offered the promise of Black land-ownership and some degree of political enfranchisement. Rumors swirled of land redistribution and Black Congressmen and Senators—some former slaves—took office across the South. But the political, social, and economic egalitarianism promised by Radical Republicans and some Union Generals never materialized. In little over a decade the entire Reconstruction project—the first real experiment in multiracial democracy in the US—was scrapped. The Communist Position on the Negro Question argues that left the Southern Black agrarian population out of US society and therefore they congealed as a Nation. Pushed out of their one chance to become American, Africans in American are therefore still Africans and should be free to control their own land. Haywood strenuously argues in his fiery contribution to the pamphlet entitled “The Theoretical Defenders of White Chavanism in the Labor Movement” against fellow leftists that Black people in the South have all the characteristics of a nation as laid out in Communist theory. They share land, language, customs, an economy, a common history, and a “psychological makeup” that was bonded through the experience of slavery. But because of their overwhelming proletarian and peasant composition, they are a nation explicitly allied with working class struggle more generally.

The Black Belt with its majority Negro population constitutes the objective prerequisite for the realization of the struggles of the Negro masses for national liberation. The Negro toilers, once the allies of the Northern bourgeoisie but betrayed by the during the reconstruction period, have now become the allies of the proletariat. [emphasis in the original]

Harry Haywood, “The Theoretical Defenders of White Chavanism in the Labor Movement”, The Communist Position on the Negro Question

Who Are the Friends of the Negro People?

The campaign speech included in the pamphlet titled Who Are the Friends of the Negro People? was written to set the party apart from the other political parties of the day. The speech was delivered by party activist C.A. Hathaway as a public nomination of the party’s Vice Presidential candidate, Black comrade James W. Ford. An African American had never been on a presidential ballot before in the 20^th century, much less a radical Black labor leader running as an open revolutionary Communist. The speech lays out how both main political parties as well as the Socialist betray Black workers and help prop up white supremacy and Jim Crow., thus continuing the rule of capitalists over workers.

Firstly, Hathaway points out that the Communists are not running a Black candidate as a gimmick or a vote getter. Especially not since millions of Black workers can not even vote, as Hathaway points out. He says a Black worker and leader was chosen for the ticket because Black social, political, and economic equality is an absolute party principle. Hathaway wants the party’s motive to be plainly known:

That motive is the desire to clearly and forcefully bring forward the fundamental position of the Communist Party, and of those workers who support the Communist Party, on the Negro question. The Communist Party stands squarely for the complete and unconditional equality in some narrow and limited sense. We do not say that the Negro is all right “in his place”. We say that any place open to the whites must be opened for the Negroes. We stand unequivocally for the full political, economic, and especially—we emphasize—social equality (Applause) page 22

C.A. Hathaway, Who Are the Friends of the Negro People?

Hathaway also makes the case that running a Black candidate is a challenge to all of the Party’s white members and sympathizers. It pushes the envelope in the entire left and labor milieu and acts as a vehicle for making the Party’s position on racism known more widely. Throughout the pamphlet there are admitions that white chauvinist additudes still existing within the Party. There should be no doubt, the Party assures us, that such elements are being put on trial and forced to choose sides. The Ford campaign was a part of this effort to change the internal life of the Party.

Sectarianism

Although the Socialists may have formally been for Black suffrage, none of the parties actually fought for Black political rights. The reasons seemed simple to the Communists; the Republicans were run by the northern industrialists and bankers who profited from Black labor and the Democrats were run by former slave owners and lynchers. Democrats are presented as the front line defenders of Jim Crow segregation in the South. Republicans are considered the cynical exploiters who claim to be more civilized but profit off white supremacy nonetheless. Both tell Black workers to stay in their place, simply except occasional violence, and not to rock the boat (page 25).

“No Party lies more brazenly on the Negro question than the Socialist Party”

(page 24)

Seeing as the Socialist Party was the Party most likely to be competing for members and votes with the Communist Party they were singled out for a particularly harsh treatment. In fact, the Socialist Party—which was dramatically smaller than the Republicans and Democrats and was ostensibly a leftwing party—gets a rough, sectarian treatment throughout the pamphlet. One wonders what everyday workers who were new to radical politics would have thought about this bitter inter-left criticism. The Communist went so far as to say that the Socialists were the most serious enemies of Black workers because they claimed to be a friend of Black workers, yet were not. This meant that Socialists were the ultimate liars and therefore poisonous to the Black struggle. The Socialists said that Black freedom could be won with a Constitutional context (page 24). For Communists, only revolution could free Black people, therefore the Socialist were intentially trying to destroy the Black and labor movements by spreading lies that the system could be reformed (page 24). As shown above, the CP believed that the Socialist Party lied more than others to Blacks. Even more than the openly racist Republicans and Democrats. It may be hard to believe, but this was the Communist position in 1932.

But in the era of the “Third Period” it should not be so surprising. From the late 1920’s through the first half of the 1930’s the leadership of the Communist International to which the CPUSA was affiliated struck a disdainful pose towards other forces on the left or in the workers movement which were not Communist. Stalin—who by now had gained control of the USSR and the CI—insisted that the era of workers revolution called for no compromise with less radical socialists, less radical unions, or less radical labor parties. These kinds of political forces—of the working class but not actually Communist—were seen now to be enemies; those that would hold back the insipient revolutionary wave. This policy had disastrous consequences in countries like Germany, where the Communists refusal to cooperate with Socialists and non-radical unions removed a serious obstacle in Hitler’s rise to power. In the US the consequences of the CPUSA hostile policies were not as severe but were politically costly for the Communist cause nonetheless. There are snipes at the “lying” Socialist Party “misleaders” through the pamphlet in nearly every essay. One of the most serious charges brought against the SP by the CPUSA was their refusal to recognize that Black people were a nation and had the right to national self-determination. Not recognizing the Black Nation was an obvious sign of what chauvinism in the movement. In this passage Harry Haywood goes after the “Lovestonites”, followers of conservative Communist Jay Lovestone.

To any class conscious worker, the question is clear. To reject the right of the oppressed Negro majority in the Black Belt to set up their own government, means simply to accept the domination of white slave drivers in this territory, or in other words, to be (together with the imperialists and their allies, the slave-driving landowners) in favor of white supremacy. Truly the Lovenstonite renegades have won their spurs as the theoretical spokesmen of white chauvinism in the labor movement.

Harry Haywood, “The Theoretical Defenders of White Chavanism in the Labor Movement”, The Communist Position on the Negro Question

The Fight for Equality in the North: Nat Turner Clubs

Throughout the 1930’s the Communist Party, USA involved itself in a dizzying array of causes connected to the Black struggle in the North: organizing auto workers, fighting Jim Crow-style segregation by any means, defending the Scottsboro Boys, breaking the color barrier in unions, organizing Black workers, not to mention politically training thousands of young activists through a whole host of secondary and solidarity organizations. The CPUSA—Black comrades and white--immersed themselves in Black struggles north and south to an extent unsurpassed by previous multiracial political movements.

Like most spheres of Communist activity, there was open and clandestine organizing as well as some projects that feel in between. The Nat Turner Clubs were a classic mid-1930’s Communist Party operation. Based in Detroit, the Nat Turner Clubs were aimed at accomplishing two central tasks. Firstly they sought to bring radical African American activists into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions such as the autoworkers. Secondly they were set up to be an activist core for activities like stopping evicitions, political pickets, and direct action. They also were initially based on study groups. The Nat Turner Clubs could be called quasi-clandestine: not openly Communists, but openly radical.

They study groups would focus on Black history, not surprisingly seeing as the clubs were named after a famous rebel slave from the 1820’s. The study of radical currents within Black history—from slave revolts to African anti-colonialism—had become very popular things to study in the Communist milieu. Party historians like Herbert Aptheker and the Jack and Philip Foner wrote numerous books and pamphlets on these and related topics. Such studies were used in the Nat Turner Study clubs.

Once there was a cohesive group based around the study, further actions could be organized. There is of course the classic Depression-era direct action of stopping evictions physically, which was used. As well as building support for Black workers on strike. The Nat Turner clubs, in the tradition of the ABB, were both pro-Black and pro-labor organizations. They sought to fuse two arenas that did not always overlap: the CIO and the post-Garvey radical Black political scene.

Oral histories from the period show the Nat Turner Clubs as all-pourpose Black front groups for the CPUSA. They could act as an organizing cell for things like eviction actions, but also function as a study group.

The CPUSA tried many different avenues for challenging Black workers into unions, and in Detroit the Nat Turner clubs of the early to mid 1930’s were one of the most successful. The cadre trained through the clubs would go on to organize Black workers at Ford and General Motors. Eventually, as the Party moved deeper into the CIO officialdom and Democratic Party politics, the Nat Turner Clubs were disolved. As the part maneuvered to the political right during the New Deal more militant, direct-action projects such as anti-evictions became signigicantly less prominent.

The CPUSA’s contribution to the study of Black history should not be underestimated. Certainly they were one of very few national organizations putting on radical Black history study groups with a multiracial audience in the 1930’s. The Party, chiefly because of the focus of this period and into the 1940’s, produced a string a highly reguarded historians of slavery, slave revolts, and African history. The kinds of studies—and the kind of direct action—that the Nat Turner Clubs organized in Detroit were replicated across the country from Harlem to Oakland.

The End and a New Beginning

The Communist Party kept up its commitment to challenging racism in the labor movement and in society through the end of the Depression. The Party’s efforts to play a junior role in the New Deal coalition meant much of the revolutionary posturing had to be toned down considerably. It even got to a point where the Communist Party shunned A. Phillip Randolph’s anti-racist march on Washington, claiming it undermined Roosevelt and the war effort. Being a part of the mainstream came with a considerable price tag for the Communist Party and its affiliated groups and organizations. They softened their demands, only to be thanked with the Red Scare and decades of intense Cold War persecution.

The Black Belt Nation Theory was shelved in the 1940’s, with Communist leaders arguing that African Americans had indeed expressed their self-determination by deciding not to form a separate state. The Communist Party, USA never recovered from the Khrushchev revelations and the Red Scare. Despite being associated with hero Angela Davis, the CPUSA was eclipsed by other revolutionary forces during the New Left and Black Power periods of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Where the Communists claimed to be the most radical anti-racists in the 1930’s, by the 1970’s Black Nationalists and Maoists were more likely to claim that role.

The concept of African Americans being a distinct nation and needing to fight for self-determination did not die out entirely, in fact it was revived in the New Left/Black Power era. Black Nationalists like the Republic of New Africa (started in Detroit), Kwame Toure, and Amiri Baraka all argued for an independent Black nation. Revolutionary groups associated with the Maoist-influence “new communist movement” such as the Communist Labor Party (again, started in Detroit) and the Revolutionary Workers League all favored an independent state in the South. Although these forces have in many cases faded from the scene or been forced underground, many activists in the Black community and beyond remain influenced by the merger of Nationalist and Communist thought that was pioneered by the Communist Party, USA in the 1930’s.

Primary Sources

The Communist Position on the Negro Question International Publishers, New York [1932]

Mary Heaton Vorse Papers ReutherArchives Wayne State University

Henry Kraus Papers Reuther Archives Wayne State University

Billups, Joseph Oral History Reuther Archives Wayne State University

Marquart, Frank Oral History Reuther Archives Wayne State University

Haywood, Harry Negro Liberation Liberator Press, Chicago [1939] reprinted 1976

First Tier Sources

Bart, Phillip ed., Highlights of a Fighting History: 6o Years of the Communist Party, USA International Publishers, New York 1979

Cannon, James P. The Early Years of American Communism Prometheus Research Library, New York 2001

Davis, Ben Communist Councilman From Harlem International Publishers,

New York 1969

Georgakis, Dan ed. The Encyclopedia of the American Left New York University Press, New York 1994

Harris, William The Harder We Run: Black Workers Since the Civil War

Oxford University Press, New York 1982

Hooker, James Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path From Communism to Pan-Africanism Preaeger, New York 1967

Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1990

Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture Politics, and the Black Working Class

(specifically the essays “Afric’s Sons with Banner Red: African American Communists and the Politics of Culture, 1919-1934” and “It Ain’t Ethiopia But It’ll Do: African Americans and the Spanish Civil War”)

Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Beacon, Boston 2004

Maxwell, William New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism Between the Wars Columbia University Press, New York 1999

Naison, Mark Communists in Harlem During the Depression

Grove Press, New York 1983

Painter, Nell The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South Harvard, Boston 1979

Record, Wilson The Negro and the Communist Party Atheneum, Chapel Hill 1950

Second Tier Sources

Cruise, Harold The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (specifically the essays “Jews and

Negroes in the Communist Party”, “Richard Wright”) Quill, New York 1967

Deburg, Van ed. Modern Black Nationalism New York University Press, New York 1999

Robinson, Cedric Black Marxism University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997

Sternsher, Bernard The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution 1930-1945 Quadrangle, Chicago 1969