Paul Robeson Going Home
Tonight, on my final show of Black History Month, I’m
going to talk about two lesser known African-Americans who you won’t hear about
in school. In the current witch-hunt
atmosphere in America today, both of these men would most likely be demonized
as traitors and foreign agents, just as Paul Robeson was in his own time. But Harry Haywood and Oliver Law would no
doubt smile at this slander and laugh, for both of them knew what they were
fighting for. They were communists. Black Bolsheviks. Internationalists. And they were fighting for the liberation of
their people just as they were fighting for the liberation of all the wretched
of the earth. They understood how it was
all connected.
Harry Haywood was a long time member and leader of the
Communist Party-USA and other communist organizations from the 1920’s until his
death in 1985. He was the key figure in developing and popularizing the concept
that Blacks represented a separate “nation” inside the United States.
While Haywood gets almost no mention in many accounts
of Black history, his theoretical innovations probably did more than any other
one individual to frame the terms of the debate about the historical character
of the “Black community”.
The “Black Belt thesis” established the oppression of
African Americans as a “national question” of utmost importance for
revolutionaries in the United States.
What became known as the “Black Belt” thesis has its
roots in the conception of Black Americans initially conceived by Haywood and
other communists of various nationalities in the Communist International.
Basing itself on the conceptions developed by Lenin
and grounded in the Soviet experience with oppressed nations, this theory held
Blacks in America made up not simply a racial or ethnic group, but comprised an
oppressed nation. The thesis was adopted at the Sixth Congress of the Communist
International—under Stalin’s leadership—in 1928.
This conception did not mean nation in the sense of
the “nation-state” as today’s common usage would suggest, but rather had its
roots in the concept of how nation states were formed by capitalism. As
feudalism gave way to capitalism, the new social system smashed the barriers of
innumerable fiefdoms, and through a long process of war and market growth took
people of different historical backgrounds and across relatively large areas
and molded them into one people with a common language, national market,
culture, etc. Each nation-state that developed in this way— the most common
examples of this process being Western European countries, such as France and
England—had a unique historical development.
Lenin’s traditional conception had held that
“multi-national states” appeared in countries where the process of capitalist
development had been uneven, where non-capitalist or semi-capitalist economic
forms played major roles economically and socially. This held true for tsarist
Russian empire, where the Romanov monarchs sought to introduce advanced
capitalism, without making any changes to the country’s feudal character.
Russia thus created a fusion of the most advanced capitalist methods, alongside
the social structure and agricultural life of the 13th century. This historical
unevenness created a multinational nation-state, spanning an entire continent,
involving over 100 different distinct nationalities and ethnicities.
Haywood saw a similarity in the situation of African
Americans. Although brought to America from many different ethnicities and
cultures, the unique experience of slavery overtime forged Africans into a new
distinct people. For Haywood, this was not only a cultural phenomenon—in which
Blacks developed a common identity based on their common experiences and
struggles—but also had a geographic basis. The transformation of Africans of
disparate backgrounds into a common African American nation occurred over a
defined land base in the Deep South where Blacks maintained a majority of the
populace.
After the overthrow of Reconstruction, debt peonage in
the south and the Jim Crow system further ingrained the super-exploitation of
Blacks in the “Black Belt” south as a dominant and enduring feature of U.S.
capitalism. The region in question, Haywood argued, in fact represented an
internal colony. What followed from this was the notion that if Blacks made up
a “nation” within the United States, they also had the right to
self-determination.
Harry Haywood did not develop his theoretical
conceptions on the Black nation out of any desire for Black separatism; he was
totally committed to the idea of a united working class party. However he
realized only a party that bases itself on a life and death struggle against
white supremacy could overcome the obstacles to class unity. Such a struggle
was necessary to earn the trust of the Black masses on one hand, and to break
white workers away from ruling class ideology on the other.
While Black communists collaborated with all sorts of
other forces in the mass struggle, Haywood made a clear distinction about the
program of communists. The communists’ efforts to win working-class leadership
of the Black liberation struggle and their advocacy for socialism as the only
resolution to national oppression, brought them into conflict with bourgeois
Black leaders of both the “integrationist” and “nationalist” type.
Haywood subjected both the bourgeois integrationist
trend and the nationalist trend in the 1930s Black community to a class
analysis. The integrationist NAACP and Urban League, represented by “successful
businessmen, top-echelon leaders, upper-bracket educators, and local
politicians,” typically commanded leadership of the Black movement, due to
their deep linkages to Wall Street and white philanthropic organizations.
On the other hand, the nationalists were rooted in the
Black “ghettos” among “small businessmen, the intelligentsia, professionals and
the like” and expressed the desires of the Black petit-bourgeoisie, stunted by
modern imperialism, to control the economic life of Black urban communities. In
conditions of crisis especially, Haywood noted, the nationalists’ appeal to
race solidarity or Back-to-Africa programs had the capability of attracting
large sections of the Black poor, for whom the integrationists provided no
economic answers.
Haywood asserted it was necessary for communists to
recognize the anti-imperialist, revolutionary potential and historical
legitimacy of the Black nationalist movement. At the same time, Haywood warned
the Party that the militancy of its petty bourgeois stratum “is very
misleading” (424) and repeatedly pushed the Party to not make the opposite
mistake of “surrendering to the propaganda of local nationalists.”
Haywood’s point is further reinforced by the fact that
“Black capitalist” schemes have on several occasions found support amongst the
most reactionary elements of the white community, from the Ku Klux Klan to
Richard Nixon, who proclaimed in 1968 that many Black militants merely wanted a
“piece of the action” rather than an overturning of the social system.
One good example of Haywood’s departure from petty bourgeois
Black nationalism is in the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the
1930’s, which took root in Harlem, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
These campaigns, led by local Black nationalists who shunned work with whites,
took aim at the white-owned stores that excluded Blacks from employment while
selling products in the ghetto. Nationalist leaders called for the white
employees to be replaced with Black employees at the targeted stores, a demand
that quickly developed a significant following.
Haywood knew that the campaigns thrived on the “justly
felt anger” of the Black working-class, but argued that “the ruling class was
overjoyed with this type of movement” because it blurred the class line and
“tended to quickly become anti-white.” They “directed the struggle against
these small establishments, which had only a small fraction of jobs,” as well
as white workers, and thus “the broad struggle of Black unemployed was diverted
away from the large corporations located mostly outside the ghetto.”
Haywood argued that the Communist Party could not
stand aloof from this struggle for Black jobs, instead calling for the Party to
focus on a broader campaign, spearheaded by Black and white unionists, which
did not call for the firing of any existing workers.
Haywood’s tactics always started with the Party’s
strategic outlook: building Black-white unity in the fight against both
national and class oppression. Indeed, Haywood devoted a good deal of his
political energies, as well as his later autobiography, to this fundamental
question facing revolutionaries in the United States.
Building class unity has never been an easy task. For
one, white supremacy has long functioned as an unofficial state religion.
Secondly, Black people in the United States face “special oppression” above and
beyond the “normal” forms of oppression meted out by capitalist society; the
resistance to these forms of oppression will thus take a unique form.
Finally, looking over the country’s history, a pattern
emerges in which Black people surge forward in struggle, become the engine for
radicalism in society as a whole, but are crushed by the combined forces of the
ruling class before a sizable enough section of white workers recognize their
common interests with the Black freedom movement.
Liberals and nationalists tend to accept this pattern
as inevitable and irreversible, but draw opposite conclusions: either that
Black people should go slow and not demand so much (the liberal argument), or
that Black people should focus on carving out spaces or states independent of
the existing social order (the nationalist argument). Revolutionary Marxists
support the right of self-determination, but also propose a different solution
to the uneven development of political consciousness among different sectors: a
fighting organization that has fused together the workers leading in each
sector, maintains significant influence in each, and frames tactics that
promote the common benefits of class struggle and Black liberation.
This perspective of promoting multinational unity is
easy to uphold on paper, but must be fought for in practice. Stirring up racism
among white workers has long been the most powerful weapon in the ruling
class’s arsenal. Further, Haywood recognized that the nationalist sentiments of
the Black working class inevitably would find some expression within the
Party—a phenomenon that he warned against most emphatically in the Party’s 1934
Convention.
Haywood wrote:
“Just as the
ruling class ideology of white supremacy had its influences on white comrades,
it was not unusual that Black comrades would similarly be affected by petty
bourgeois nationalist ideology. These moods were and sentiments were expressed
in feelings of distrust of white comrades, in skepticism about the possibility
of winning white workers to active support in the struggle for Black rights,
and in the attitude that nothing could be accomplished until white chauvinism
was completely eliminated. This latter was particularly dangerous because it
failed to understand that white chauvinism could only be broken down in the
process of struggle.”
Haywood recognized that multi-national unity is not a
feel-good exercise, or simply a helpful secondary factor. Rather, a united
working class is the only road to an overthrow of capitalism, which holds the
only chance for the full liberation of the mass of Black workers, who
constitute the vast majority of Blacks in America.
This is the legacy left to us by Harry Haywood: a
critical and uncompromising dedication to the total liberation of Black
workers, the working class, and humanity itself.
The Coup - Dig It
Oliver Law was a communist, labor organizer and the
first Black person in the United States to lead an integrated military force in
the country’s history. Unlike Harry
Haywood, he was not a theorist, but, like him, he was a fighter.
Having joined the U.S. Army prior, in 1919, it
wouldn’t be till he long left it, that he would join the Communist Party in
1932.
His work with them, as well as his political
activities through the International Labor Defense, kept cops constantly on his
coattails. In once incident, the Chicago Police Red Squad severely assaulted
him.
In another incident, Law was arrested while speaking
at a demonstration in Chicago on August 31, 1935, against Italy's occupation of
Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. He was involved with
organizing mass protests against the occupation.
A year later, Law joined the joined the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade, the thousands of international volunteers that traveled to
Spain to fight against Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco and the rise of the
fascist Nationalists.
Fighting alongside the Republic in the Spanish Civil
War, which occurred between July 1936 and April 1939, Law was named commander
of the entire Brigade for several days and commander of its Machine Gun
regiment for much longer.
The Black communist fighter led the Brigade during the
initial days of the Brunete offensive. But on the fourth day of the campaign,
he was fatally wounded while leading his command in an assault on Mosquito
Ridge.
Five decades after his death, Law's historic
achievement was recognized when Chicago Mayor Harold Washington declared
November 21, 1987 as "Oliver Law and Abraham Lincoln Brigade Day.”
John McCutcheon - The Abraham Lincoln Brigade
