Fighting oppression: the Comintern and the US Communist Party

The fight against all forms of oppression was central to the Leninist concept of the role of the party—and to the task the Communist International (Comintern) set itself for the overthrow of capitalism.1 In a previous article, I looked at Comintern debates about anti-imperialist struggle in the colonial and semi-colonial world.2 Here, I look at the “Negro question”, as it was called at the time.3 It would not only be of crucial importance to the activity of the party in the United States, but it would also have broader implications for Comintern work in Africa.

The US party is the focus, because the theoretical relationship between the “Negro question” and the national question was first to become problematic in the US. For, if the “Negro question” was to be categorised as an instance of the national question, then the right of self-determination to the point of secession did not easily fit the realities of US society, with migration from the rural South irreversibly transforming the position of black people within US society. There were indeed calls for black people to have their own state, but these did not come from the early US Communists. Paradoxically, then, the US was the country where the “Negro question” was most fully developed, but it was simultaneously the least representative of the national question.

National narrowness went against the grain, and it is worth mentioning that many of the leading black activists drawn to the US Communist movement were not themselves US citizens. Claude McKay, Otto Huiswoud and Cyril Briggs, whose central role in the early Communist Party (CP) we shall look at later, came from the West Indies.4 Not only was their background in anti-colonialism, they also saw themselves as part of a black diaspora, a transnationalism that chimed with the Comintern’s internationalism. This would be of importance in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the Comintern’s work to organise the African masses was spearheaded by black Communists from the US party.5

As we shall see, though, the knottiest question, one that was never satisfactorily resolved, was the relationship between class and oppression.

Some context is needed. The world after the First World War was one of social upheaval—of workers’ struggles and revolt in the colonial and semi-colonial world. Ruling classes everywhere, terrified by the spectre of Bolshevism, resorted to repression. Revolutionaries were hounded and imprisoned. In the US in particular, racism was whipped up against the growing refusal of the “new Negro” to accept a subservient status. As the revolutionary tide ebbed and capitalism stabilised, the US party emerged from semi-illegality but adjusted to the non-revolutionary situation with difficulty. The 1929 Wall Street Crash ushered in mass unemployment and plummeting living standards. The US CP, now a Stalinist party, nevertheless made a breakthrough in this period of acute social crisis.

Ideological context is also important. The US CP, similar to those elsewhere, emerged as a split from the Socialist Party, in which issues of race and class had been much debated. Leading black socialists, such as Hubert Harrison, had already raised the question of what came first in fighting oppression: class or race.6 So, debates in the Communist movement about the “Negro question” came out of an existing tradition.

“The Negro question”

At the second congress of the Comintern, the first delegate to speak following the reports by Lenin and Manabendra Nath Roy on the commission on the national and colonial question was the US delegate John Reed. He spoke of the appalling conditions under which African Americans still lived, despite the abolition of slavery, but also of the changes brought about by black migration from rural areas to the cities (particularly cities of the north). This had produced a new self-confidence, with terrorist attacks against black people being met with armed resistance, and black people’s entry into the labour movement.

For Reed, the growth of both “a strong racial and social movement” and “a powerful proletarian labour movement that is rapidly gaining class consciousness” was reshaping African Americans as an “enslaved and oppressed people”.7 He went on:

Negroes have no demands for national independence. All movements among the Negroes aiming for separate national existence fail, as did the Back to Africa movement of a few years ago. They consider themselves first of all Americans at home in the United States. That makes it very much simpler for Communists…

For American communists the only correct policy should be to see them primarily as workers. Despite the Negroes’ backwardness,8 the tasks posed for agricultural workers and tenant farmers in the South are the same as those we must solve with respect to the white agricultural proletariat. Communist propaganda work can be carried on among Negroes working in industry in the North. In both sections of the country every effort must be made to organise Negroes into common labour unions with the whites. That is the best and fastest way to break down race prejudice and foster class solidarity. 9

So, for Reed, there was no “national” solution, only a class one. However, he added a caveat:

[T]he Communists must not stand aloof from the Negro movement for social and political equality, which is spreading quickly among the Negro masses today as race consciousness grows rapidly. Communists must use this movement to point out the futility of bourgeois equality and the necessity of social revolution—not only to free all workers from servitude but also as the only means of freeing the Negroes as an enslaved people.10

Class first?

Is there a problem with this “class first” politics? Reed showed ignorance about the Back to Africa movement and no sense of the feelings it tapped into: reliance on one’s own community and pride in what black people might achieve for themselves independently of a hostile white society. However, no disagreement with Reed was raised at the second congress, probably because no-one present knew much about the condition of African Americans. The only important article Lenin had written, in 1915, on capitalism and agriculture in the US noted that “for the ‘emancipated’ Negroes, the American South is a kind of prison where they are hemmed in, isolated and deprived of fresh air”, and that from these areas, the southern population was fleeing to regions of higher capitalist development.11 Reed’s analysis went no further. Nobody, including Lenin, challenged Reed’s rejection of national independence for African Americans.

However, the question of whether class is the only, or chief, prism though which struggle should be conducted is central. The early US CP failed to organise among black people, despite repeated promptings by the Comintern. As James P Cannon, the veteran US Trotskyist leader, would much later admit: “Under constant prodding and pressure from the Russians in the Comintern, the party made a beginning with Negro work in its first ten years; but it recruited very few Negroes and its influence in the Negro community didn’t amount to much”.12

Jacob Zumoff, author of a history of the US CP’s relationship to the Comintern, argues that “Communist neglect of the Negro question was in keeping with the social-democratic framework of American socialism, from which the Communists had emerged”.13 In other words, the neglect was not the result of what one might call overoptimism about class consciousness among African Americans, but rather a failure to break with the outlook of the pre-war Socialist Party. Even Eugene Debs, one of the latter’s most principled leaders, argued that “there is no Negro question outside of the labour question… The real issue…is not social equality, but economic freedom… The class struggle is colourless.” The Socialist Party therefore had “nothing special to offer to the Negro, and…cannot make separate appeals to all the races”.14

That socialism will eliminate racism is true in the abstract, but overcoming the racist division that binds a section of white workers ideologically to the ruling class is essential to forging the class unity needed to overthrow capitalism. The weakness of the Socialist Party, argues Mark Solomon, was that it failed to recognise “the distinctive dimensions of the black experience…the special needs and demands of African Americans were ignored”.15

Is Zumoff right to argue that this failure is due to theoretical continuity with the Socialist Party? That would assume continuity with the passive accommodationism of the Second International, to which the Socialist Party belonged. Reed’s speech, for all its weaknesses, reflects the activist, interventionist nature of the early Third International. Nothing in what Reed urged suggests African Americans having to sit by before their issues could be addressed. Indeed, Reed made the point that Communists had to relate to the consciousness of the “New Negro”, even if he did not go much beyond propagandism.

Failure to develop a strategy

We have to look to other factors. One was the existence of racism in the party—unsurprisingly in a country where prejudice was so deeply ingrained. A second was the factionalism plaguing the US party, stopping it looking outwards. The third was the fact that, throughout the 1920s, there were very few African Americans in the party. Only one attended its founding conference and, out of a membership of 15,000, there were fewer than 300 in the 1920s.16 It would not be until the 1930s that this would change and the, by then Stalinised, CP came to play a serious role in black politics, particularly in Harlem and Alabama.17

What drew in the black radicals I have already referred to (Huiswoud, McKay and Briggs) was less the party itself than the example set by the Bolshevik Revolution (and preached by the Comintern): that the working class was indispensable to the struggle for liberation. For example, in 1919, Briggs came to the realisation that, despite the racism of the US trade unions:

no force on earth could permanently hold apart black and white labour, “these two most powerful sections of the world proletariat.” Resolution of the contradiction between a separate black national destiny and unity with white labour seemed to be at hand. Blacks would win the most from “the triumph of Labour and the destruction of parasitic Capital Civilisation with its Imperialism incubus that is squeezing the lifeblood out of millions of our race”.18

This led Briggs to characterise the Soviets as “allies of black global aspirations”. If, he said, in response to red baiting, that “to fight for one’s rights is to be Bolshevists, then we are Bolshevists!”19

The fourth congress

The Comintern’s third congress had virtually nothing to say on the “Negro question”, apart from an intervention from a white South African delegate, who referred to the history of black people in the US as preparing them for a role “in the liberation of the entire African race”.20

The fourth congress, on the other hand, was notable for the presence for the first time of black delegates from the US, Huiswoud and McKay. The latter had briefly worked in London as a journalist for Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought and was best known for the poem, “If we must die…”, written in impassioned response to anti-black riots and murders, the last lines of which read “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting back!”21 Their presence was a sign of a more serious commitment by the Comintern to black liberation.

Huiswoud spoke first (under the pseudonym Billings), bringing an analysis rooted in experience. He argued: “If we try to work with these masses and carry out propaganda and agitation among them, we must necessarily take into consideration” what he called the “psychological aspects” of the “Negro question”, for example the racial hatred that stems from competition between black and white workers, with blacks, still bearing the mark of enslavement, being used by capitalists as a source of cheap labour “to put down the white working class in the daily struggle”.22 Hence, the hostility of white workers to black workers as lowering their living standards and as strike breakers.

However, black people were not solely responsible for this, argued Huiswoud. The blame fell on trade unions for excluding them. The capitalist class exploited the hostility of the unions by posing as a defender of black interests, creating organisations “infecting the black population with bourgeois ideology”. Together with the reactionary black press it sought “to turn black workers against the unions”.23 Therefore, the response when discussing with black workers joining the union was:

Don’t preach to me. Preach to the whites. The unions are useful to them, not to me. I am always ready to fight side by side with them, if they are prepared to let me join. But as long as they refuse, I will carry out work that has been struck [ie scab work]. And by God I have a right to do this. I need to protect my life.” That is one of their arguments, and we cannot ignore it. We can advance all the fine theoretical formulations that we have to hand, but yet, in the daily struggle, there are some harsh and stubborn facts.24

Contradictions in the Garvey movement

Huiswoud’s sensitivity towards the psychological dimension is reflected in his analysis of major black organisations. We shall focus on two of them: Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood (ABB).25 The first had a large mass base among black people. Huiswoud cautioned that despite being “ultra-nationalist” and promoting black capitalism, “it has awakened racial consciousness and utilised it on a broad scale, even into the interior of Africa, where one would hardly expect that an organisation formed in the US would find a base of support”.26 CLR James would much later note that though Garvey was a “race fanatic”, a “reactionary…opposed to the labour movement” who “counselled subservience to the bosses”, nonetheless:

[O]ne reason for his success was that his movement was strictly a class movement… He deliberately aimed at the poorest, most downtrodden and humiliated Negroes. The millions who followed him, the devotion and the money they contributed, show where we can find the deepest strength of the working-class movement, the coiled springs of power which lie there waiting for the party which can unloose them.27

Similarly, Zumoff points to the large working-class base UNIA had in some areas, such as the San Francisco Bay area and among the West Indian diaspora, which “intersected with the black labour movement”: “At this moment, there was no Chinese wall between Garvey and more radical black nationalists”, some of whom were friendly to him.28

The sense that it might be possible to shift the UNIA leftwards explains McKay writing to Garvey in December 1919, arguing that “radical Negroes should be more interested in the white radical movements” in the British Empire because “they are the great destructive forces within, while the subject races are fighting without”. Not that “our cause” should be put in their hands. Each is fighting its own battle “but at present we meet on common ground against the common enemy”. This was an argument he repeated in the Workers’ Dreadnought: “The [US’s] coloured workers are ready and willing to meet the white workers half-way in order that they might be united against capitalism”—this, despite the fact that racism means “the whites are reluctant to take the step that would win the South over to socialism”.29

Garvey was even persuaded to let a white Communist, Rose Pastor Stokes, address the UNIA convention in August 1921:

With passionate voice she greeted the delegates as fellow workers and called for a Communist-black alliance to destroy capitalism “root and branch”. In the name of freedom for all, she begged for cooperation “with the revolutionary working class of the world”. Directing herself to the soul of Garveyism, she continued, “Friends…you want Africa. Africa should be yours (great cheering)… You want a free Africa; you don’t want an enslaved Africa, do you? (cries of no! no!)… Go East and you will find the red armies of Russia are marching shoulder to shoulder with black men”.30

This opening to the revolutionary left was short-lived. Garvey soon turned on the anti-capitalist critics of his Black Star Line venture, despising them as “lazy, good-for-nothing Negro men being paid off by white Bolsheviks who sought to undermine black enterprise. Unlike those Negroes awash in white Communist money, the UNIA was a Negro organisation from top to bottom, financed by Negroes alone”.31

Garvey played on race pride for reactionary ends. The logic of his position not only led him to separatism but to a semi-accommodation with the most racist elements in US society. Following a meeting in 1922 in Atlanta with Edward Young Clarke, acting Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, he wrote approvingly that Clarke “believes America to be a white man’s country, and also states that the Negro should have a country of his own”.32 One can see why a separatism that dovetailed with segregation was anathema to black communists.

The second example Huiswoud analysed was his own organisation, the much smaller ABB, founded in 1919 by Briggs, whose paper, the Crusader, established the year before, “mixed black nationalism, pan-Africanism and community news”. It advocated “Africa for the Africans”, with freedom for Africa coming from the allied victory for democracy, “a renaissance of Negro power and culture throughout the world” and “the creation of an independent Negro nation” with black self-government, “which could be best attained and secured in our sunny motherland: Africa!”33 This Africanism no doubt was to help Briggs persuade Garvey, with whom he had friendly relations, to gain the invite for Rose Pastor Stokes.

However, the ABB stood not only for absolute race equality, fostering race pride and active opposition to the Ku Klux Klan. It also stood for fellowship “with the class-conscious white workers” and for liberation “not merely from political rule, but also from the crushing weight of capitalism”.34 Its black nationalism differed crucially from Garvey’s in that respect, and by seeking actively to fight oppression, it was more than just a propaganda group. At the fourth congress, Huiswoud drew delegates’ attention to the fact that the ABB was the only black organisation to wage a “brilliant and brave struggle” against the June 1921 pogrom of the black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which left over 300 dead and 10,000 homeless.35

Small nationalist organisations in Africa, Huiswoud claimed, were being inspired by events in the US, “the centre of political tendencies among the blacks”: “These organisations have expanded and developed as far as into the Sudan. They could be utilised by Communists, if the propaganda material was written carefully and with reflection and was then used intensively to bring these movements together”.36

Where Garvey’s direction of travel was rightwards, that of Briggs and the ABB was leftwards—into the Communist Party. These outcomes point to how black nationalist organisations could be pulled in opposite directions, with political leadership proving a critical factor.

Theses on the Black Question

The fourth congress was the first to formulate an ambitious programme for action by the Comintern. Yet, there was blunt criticism of the US party. McKay, for example, who spoke immediately after Huiswoud, questioned whether US Communists were, because of persisting racism in their ranks, as committed to the struggle against “racial division and race prejudice” as even reformist organisations were:

They do not want to take up the black question. In my dealings with American comrades, I have seen that, on many occasions, when white and black comrades come together, that prejudice was noticeable. And the greatest hindrance that Communists in the United States must overcome is that they must first of all free themselves from their attitude towards blacks before they can succeed in reaching blacks through any form of radical propaganda.37

The draft Theses on the Black Question, in which Huiswoud had a hand, was emphatic in its support for “every form of black movement that undermines or weakens capitalism and imperialism”. Crucially, organising black workers and work among blacks had to be “carried out primarily by blacks”.38 However, in the revised set of theses the congress voted on, this last demand was omitted. The official reason for referring back to the draft theses was that the “text seems somewhat theoretical and not easily understood by the working class as a whole and the more oppressed layers of the black race”.39 However, this hardly explains why the demand had to be omitted rather than revised.

Whatever the reason, this omitted demand reflected something implicit in Huiswoud’s analysis of the ABB: that black comrades would be best placed to intervene because they could not be suspected of prejudice. McKay warned in the International Press Correspondence:

[T]he future of the American Negro, whether they become the pawn of the bourgeoisie in its fight against white labour or whether they will become class conscious, depends on the nature of the propaganda that is conducted among them and the tactics adopted towards their special needs… The blacks are hostile to Communism because they regard it as a “white” working class movement and they consider the white workers as their greatest enemy.40

The stress here dovetails with Huiswoud’s proposal.

McKay also corresponded with Trotsky during his time in Moscow. The question he raised was how France could be prevented from employing black troops in Europe. McKay was appalled by the racist and sexualised language used to whip up British opposition to the presence of French troops in post-war occupied Germany. Headlines resorted to the worst stereotypes about black male sexuality. One read: “Black Scourge in Europe / Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine / Disappearance of Young German Girls”.41 Worse still, this was not a campaign led by the right but by a liberal left, anti-war journalist who had done much to expose Belgian brutalities in the Congo. His campaign was supported and publicised by leading Labour left-winger, including George Lansbury. Delegates at the 1920 Trades Union Conference were presented with copies of The Horror on the Rhine. Even the daily paper of the British Communist Party endorsed a racist appeal to save white women from African sexual savagery.42

In response, Trotsky argued that the black people must themselves resist and be made to realise that in helping French imperialism subjugate Europe they were helping to subjugate themselves. In addition, the European working class must realise their vital interests lay in enlightening blacks and in the self-determination of the colonial peoples. Trotsky then turned to the way in which French and English capitalism was calculatedly using African (and Asian) troops “against the revolutionary masses of Europe”. This exploitation of the “economically and culturally backward masses” in imperialist conflict nevertheless posed enormous risks for the bourgeoisie. The colonial masses would retain their conservatism only for as long as they were not ripped from the conditions to which they were accustomed. Faced with conflict between nations, and conflict between classes, “their spiritual conservatism gives way abruptly, and revolutionary ideas find rapid access to a consciousness thrown off its balance”.43

Trotsky did not ignore deeply entrenched white working-class racism, but the stress at the end of his letter was on recruiting and educating a black cadre capable of “enlightening the proletarian consciousness by awakening the feeling of human dignity, and of revolutionary protest, among the Negro slaves of American capitalism… [T]his work can only be carried out by self-sacrificing and politically educated revolutionary Negroes”.44 It is impossible not to see here what was omitted from the revised thesis, but Trotsky adds a caveat missing in Huiswoud: “the work is not to be carried on in a spirit of Negro chauvinism, which would then merely form a counterpart of white chauvinism, but in a spirit of solidarity of all exploited without consideration of colour”.45 Trotsky here seems to be warning against a surrender to black nationalism and to be emphasising the need for class politics, putting the working class at the centre of the struggle against oppression.46

Race and class

The revised theses were considerably longer than the draft version. They put renewed emphasis on the international dimension, assigning to black people in the US “an important role in the liberation of the entire African race” because of their spirit of rebellion (the theses referred to Tulsa) and integration into Northern industry.47 They committed the fourth congress to supporting every black movement weakening capitalism, to the struggle for complete equality and to compelling the trade unions to recruit black workers—or, if that proved impossible, to organise blacks in their own unions—and using the united front tactic to force the unions to admit them.48 As the mover of the theses, Rose Pastor Stokes, admitted, these final demands were very US-oriented.

How well did the US party respond? First, there was a major theoretical backsliding. The 1922 founding conference of the Workers Party (the legal arm of the Communists) omitted the demand for social equality for African Americans that the 1921 CP programme had included. The retreat, Zumoff speculates, was “perhaps a reflection of the spectre of interracial sex that racists raised against Communists and all others who opposed segregation”.49 Be that as it may, the omission was hardly likely to persuade black people that the Communists understand their interests. Moreover, little seemed to have been done to tackle ignorance of the “Negro question”. Zumoff points out that the CP failed to publish the book The Negroes in America, which Trotsky had commissioned McKay to write. With Moscow’s seal of approval, the book would have “appeal[ed] to the general Negro public”, as McKay told Karl Radek.50

Under such circumstances it is little wonder that Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a black delegate to the fifth congress in 1924, complained to Comintern president Grigory Zinoviev that the party had made “no serious or worthwhile efforts to carry Communist teaching to the great mass of American black workers”.51 He himself had been given financial support by a group of black Communists to go to Moscow in the hope that the Comintern would do what the Workers Party was failing to do: “take some practical steps helpful to our work among Negroes both in America and on a world scale”.52 According to Solomon, “a process begun tentatively in 1922 now revealed a pattern: African American Communists would look to Moscow for succour and settlement of their grievances”.53 Like Huiswoud at the fourth congress, Fort-Whiteman argued that the “Negro question” had unique psychological dimensions: “Blacks experienced and understood their suffering as rooted primarily in their race, not their class”.54

As we shall see, this orientation on Moscow by disgruntled black Communists is of relevance to the Black Belt thesis that would be adopted by the sixth congress.

The American Negro Labor Congress

In 1925, the Comintern argued that the US party “must not evade ‘the ticklish question’ of race antagonism; it had to expose ‘its class basis’”.55 Racism among white workers did not disprove the class character of the “Negro question”, it merely demonstrated how far white workers had been contaminated by bourgeois ideology. However, the US Communists’ failure to get to grips with racism dulled the class consciousness of black workers and played into the hands of petty-bourgeois nationalists.56

A World Negro Congress proposed by the fourth congress of the Comintern proved overambitious. As a kind of replacement, the US party was instructed by the Comintern, following the fifth congress, to set up the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC). The intention, says Solomon, was “to transform the entire American racial and social landscape”:

It would be a centralised movement of black protest led by labour; it would cleanse organised labour of racial prejudice and heal its crippling inner divisions; it would help lay the groundwork for industrial unionism; it would turn the black masses away from bourgeois misleaders and advance the “hegemony” of the working class; it would be black America’s contribution to training and leadership of the worldwide anti-imperialist movement.57

This was a tall order for a party riddled with factionalism, with an unimpressive record on the issue and virtually no experience of united front work. Leading black members such as Huiswoud begged the party leaders:

not to “place the stamp of our Party conspicuously upon the [founding] Congress,” thus playing into the hands of conservative union officialdom and “killing the movement from the very start”. White Communists should not be in the forefront of preliminary organisational work; black comrades should be on all Party committees responsible for the ANLC; and propaganda should be “simply written and adjusted to the psychology and status of Negro workers”.58

This advice was not heeded. White people were too dominant, and there were complaints about sectarianism, lethargy and ineffectiveness (it did virtually no work in the South).59 James Ford, a leading black Communist, complained in 1927 that the ANLC “was almost completely isolated from the basic masses of the Negro people”, unable to exploit the recent collapse of the Garvey movement.60 The ANLC was also “organised without sufficient attention and guidance in methods and tactics” and there was a “tendency to view the organisation of Negro workers arbitrarily and simply as a class problem”, while not attending to their “position as an oppressed minority”.61 Nevertheless, from it, the party recruited another important figure, Malcolm Nurse (better known as George Padmore), who would play a leading role in the international work of the Stalinised Comintern.62

The basic class analysis of the “Negro question” did not change in this period. The 1923 convention of the Workers Party championed the black workers’ “full, free and equal partnership with his white brothers in the future society”.63 In 1926, Fort-Whiteman emphasised that “the Negro in America is an American. He has grown up with American life. We must fight here for our space”.64 Yet, in 1925, perhaps reflecting arguments about the ANLC, the position was put in a more nuanced way by the US commission of the Comintern:

The Negro question in the USA, representing the most characteristic form of national oppression in a capitalist state whose historic roots are connected with the birth of class society, is becoming in the present period of imperialism and social revolutions the most actual question for the American proletariat, in the sense of exposing the class substance of racial antagonism on the one hand, and of counteracting the emergence of racial prejudices in the Negro population as a result of national oppression, on the other hand.65

One can see here an elision of the US “Negro question” with the colonial one. Solomon argues that with its full subsumption under the national question, the fifth congress “appeared to edge beyond a one-dimensional class analysis to grant that the American Negro question was at least a problem of racial oppression that transcended class in critical ways.” That opened the door to the possibility that the “Negro question” in the US involved more than just social equality. In a confusing manner, the Comintern’s instruction to the US party talked about the right to self-determination having to be “complemented for America by the demands of absolute social equality”.66 Complemented? Did that imply there was, after all, a national dimension to black oppression in the US, to ensure that the “Negro question” in the country was in alignment with (rather than an exception to) the global demand for national self-determination of oppressed peoples?

The relationship between the “exception” and the “rule” was of some significance, since the ambition of the Comintern was to get the Chicago founding meeting of the ANLC to call the “elusive World Negro Congress”. The Comintern “dreamed of using the ANLC as a catalyst for a global ‘Negrotern’—a mighty big order for a new, small and relatively isolated federation”.67

Instead, discontent with the ANLC resulted in bitter faction fighting, with leading black Communists seeking pastures new. Richard More, who displaced Fort-Whiteman (judged to be sectarian and incompetent) as leader of the ANLC, appeared as its representative at the International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism, held in Brussels in February 1927 (its successor body became known as the League Against Imperialism). Within a year, the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), an offshoot of the Comintern, set up an International Bureau of Negro workers, with another US black Communist, James Ford, as its leader.

In July 1928, a meeting in Moscow of the RILU executive with black US Communists, including Ford, decided on the establishment of an International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW). Its aim was to organise black workers around the world and organise a global conference for 1929. Prevented from meeting in London by Ramsay McDonald’s coalition government, the congress eventually met in Hamburg, Germany, with much reduced numbers (only 17 delegates got through). The congress set up an international commission, of which Padmore was one of two US delegates. Padmore succeeded Ford in 1931 as editor of the ITUCNW’s Negro Worker.68

The development of the ITUCNW and related work is beyond the scope of this article.69 However, it is worth stressing, in light of the next issue to be considered—the Black Belt policy—that the League Against Imperialism and the ITUCNW belong to, and, whatever their achievements, cannot be assessed separately from the degeneration of the Comintern and its Stalinisation.70 It was the needs of the Soviet bureaucracy that shaped their development. The same is true of the change in Comintern policy that led to the sixth congress of 1928, declaring that African Americans should have a state of their own carved out of the Southern US. Black people were now, presented as an oppressed nation, not simply an oppressed people—contradicting the existing policy of the US party.

The change of line was concocted in Moscow. Its origins date back to a discussion with Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin in late 1925. He told his audience of (mainly) African Americans, studying at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East: “The whole approach of the American party to the Negro question is wrong. You are a national minority with some of the characteristics of a nation.” One attendee, Otto Hall was sceptical (“it sounded like Jim Crow in revolutionary guise”), and others reacted unfavourably.71

Bryan Palmer argues that because of the way black people were recruited in the early days, mostly via the ABB, they “were never fully engaged in the political struggle to realign the [Workers Party] in the 1920s. Their loyalties were to Moscow”. He adds: “The possibilities of the development of African American communists as a Marxist cadre within the United States were overshadowed by a race question that was never accorded the serious consideration it merited.” Unsurprisingly, then, some extended loyalty to Moscow to “direct (and long-standing) loyalty to Stalin, whom they perceived as the leading Comintern figure responsible for pressing the United States revolutionary Left to address the ‘Negro Question’”.72

However, a pedigree for this position had to be invented to show that the Comintern had always perceived African Americans as an oppressed nation. Lenin, it was said, had told US delegates to the second congress that he “considered the American Negroes as a subject nation, placing them in the same category as Ireland”.73 The official record had instructed Communist Parties to support “the revolutionary movement among the nations that are dependent and do not have equal rights (for example, Ireland, the Negroes in America, and so forth), and in the colonies”.74 To interpret this somewhat ambiguous parenthesis to fit the new line was straining matters.

The promotion of the new line cannot be disentangled from the need of the emergent Soviet bureaucracy to bolster its position. In the late 1920s, Stalin’s alliance with Nikolai Bukharin against the Left Opposition was at breaking point. Bukharin had championed caution at home (an alliance with the peasantry built on continuing the New Economic Policy) with caution abroad (the search for non-proletarian allies as a substitute for proletarian revolution: the Guomindang in China and the British Trade Union bureaucracy are the best examples of this disastrous approach). The Black Belt thesis also belongs to this period. As Lee Sustar suggests: “The self-determination slogan was the American version of the Comintern’s ‘new theory’ that national liberation struggles had to go through distinct ‘stages’—first a bourgeois nationalist stage, and only after that the struggle for socialism”.75

The League Against Imperialism was also part of this policy, which the Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué called, in his history of the Third International, “the crowning point of this ‘Guomindang’-style global policy, and, at the same time, its last stage”.76 It was the last stage, because the agricultural crisis in late 1927, with peasants threatening to withhold grain, led to an abrupt turn against Bukharin’s rightist policies. No longer was the peasantry to be conciliated. Instead, there was terror in the countryside, with forced requisitioning of grain and collectivisation of peasant property. This was the basis for industrialisation of the economy and the advent of bureaucratic state capitalism. Now it was the turn of Bukharin, Stalin’s erstwhile ally against Trotsky and “leftism”, to be driven out.

That necessitated driving out Bukharin’s supporters abroad and enforce the loyalty of the Comintern’s foreign parties to Stalin. The sharp “left” turn in domestic politics necessitated an equally sharp “left turn” by the Comintern. The sixth congress (still under Bukharin’s nominal presidency) proclaimed that what was called the Second Period of partial capitalist stabilisation was at an end: contradictions and crisis in the capitalist world had opened a new period (the Third Period) of war between imperialist powers, war against the Soviet state, war between the classes and wars for national liberation. Yesterday’s rightest allies were today’s class enemies, particularly social-democratic and “progressive” forces that had been courted by the rightist Comintern (for example, by the League Against Imperialism). This hyper-sectarianism weakened Communist Parties by isolating them from broader movements, but, just like the previous rightism, the new “leftism” suited the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, which sought at all costs to avoid social upheaval abroad that might risk foreign intervention at a moment of acute, internal crisis.

This is where the fate of Jay Lovestone, leader of the dominant faction in the US party, and the issue of “correcting” the party’s line on the “Negro Question” converged. Lovestone had argued in 1927 that “the objective conditions prevailing in the US are not favourable for the development of a mass Communist Party, and it would be a crime against the Party to develop such illusions among the members if we were to say that the conditions of a mass Communist Party are favourable”.77 This echoed what Bukharin had told the Comintern in 1926, that “American capitalism is the stronghold of the entire capitalist system, the most powerful capitalism in the world. Our tasks in this country are for the present still very modest”.78

Consistent with Lovestone’s rightist position, his 1927 report to the fifth convention of the party stated: “The migration of hundreds of thousands of Negroes from the South into the industrial centres of the North and East is rapidly changing the Negro masses from a reserve of capitalist reaction into a reserve of the proletarian revolution”.79 This could be taken to imply, and it was, that nothing could be done in the South except wait for migration northwards. This appeared to make the Negro question a purely trade union (“class”) affair, minimising the question of oppression and any commitment to fight it.80 Yet, the South was still where most African Americans lived.

The alternative Black Belt thesis preceded the supposed Third Period, yet it survived and flourished in this new context. Stalin may have set the hare running, but it was the black US Communist Harry Haywood who did most to promote the theory that African Americans were an oppressed nation—a theory much contested in the tortuous path from its first articulation in a subcommittee to the final resolution presented to the sixth congress.81 Even Haywood himself, in his initial draft, did not mention “self-determination” and hedged his bets by stating that “the sum total of the economic, social and political relations existing between the Negroes and the white population make this question one of an oppressed national (or racial) minority”.82

The more coherent analysis Haywood provided retrospectively in his autobiography is as follows.83 Although the South had been defeated in civil war, pre-capitalist conditions remained, locking formerly enslaved people out of bourgeois-democratic development and confining them to share-cropping and peonage, a situation worsened by modern imperialism. This prevented black and white people forming a single nation, blocking the route to equality through assimilation. The cultural and psychological traits specific to their segregated condition meant therefore that they could be deemed a nation—a nation within another nation. Only separation could guarantee what they had been denied: equality.

The social content of this black struggle for national liberation would be “the completion of the agrarian democratic revolution in the South”.84 If, as objectors suggested, the underlying argument was false and capitalist development was rapidly eradicating the legacy of slavery, then the need for an agrarian democratic revolution in the South did not exist and the argument that black people were an oppressed nation would be without foundation. The US, including its African American population, must then, according to the argument, be ready for the proletarian revolution.85

What, though, were the forces that should lead this agrarian democratic revolution? On the one hand, said Haywood, the “Negro movement…is national in character and based on the peasantry”; on the other, the movement “must be supported, utilised and directed by the American Communist Party”, because although it is “potentially revolutionary it is yet easily liable to be directed into reactionary channels”.86 If the Communist Party had this directing role to overcome reaction, what remained of the idea that a national revolution was justified by its progressive content?

Another peculiarity is an implied stageism: first, the agrarian democratic revolution, then the socialist revolution, an orientation that belongs, as mentioned earlier, to the rightist Comintern under Bukharin, which, in 1927, instructed the Communists in South Africa to adopt “a demand for a Negro Republic independent of the British Empire…as a stage towards a Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic with full autonomy for all minorities”.87

The contradictions here may very partially explain the amendments put forward by John Pepper, the Comintern representative responsible for the worst blunders of the US party, now in the firing line as a Lovestonite and Bukharinite.88 Characteristically, he simply changed sides but added a twist that he perhaps imagined to be proof of his conversion to the new line: the US party should not just be for full social equality, he said, but in four or five states, where black people formed a majority, there could be “no objection to raising the issue for a Negro Soviet Republic”.89 This, for all its absurdity, had the merit of overcoming stageism, but it satisfied no-one.

The sixth congress and its aftermath

The chief merit in the new position was as a litmus test for loyalty to the new line from Moscow. Lovestone’s analysis was said to be flawed, as Haywood put it, not because of his position’s inherent flaws but because he had provided “a theoretical foundation for all the opportunist views prevalent in the Party”. His line “was based upon a social-democratic denial of the agrarian question among Negroes”, viewed as a cardinal sin during the Third Period.90

It was only after its sixth congress that the Comintern unambiguously declared that “the [US] Party must come out openly and unreservedly for the right of the Negroes to national self-determination in the Southern states where the Negroes form a majority of the population”.91 It was not until February 1929 that the official resolution appeared in the US party’s Daily Worker. A second and final version had to be issued by the Comintern in October 1930, such was the lack of clarity over what it meant in practice.92 Where the boundaries of this putative black state should be drawn was subject to widely varying answers.

Huiswoud claimed at the 1929 conference of the US party, the last under the control of Lovestone, that “its Negro work had improved since the Sixth Congress”.93 Briggs resumed a central role, calling on party units “to discuss the Negro question and turn to the ‘Negro peasantry in the South’, to campaign against lynching, and to picket Jim Crow theatres and restaurants”. Yet, Zumoff contends that “the theory had little effect on the party’s day-to-day work”. There was little mention of it in the party’s press. A comprehensive account of black workers’ global struggle by Padmore, as editor of the Negro Worker, the journal of the ITUCNW, referred “only to ‘national (race) oppression’ and [did] not focus on self-determination for American blacks”.94 Even a leading Communist from the period was forced later to admit: “Self-determination evoked hardly any response there [the author was visiting South Carolina, the heart of the Black Belt]. The croppers were mostly concerned with how they were going to get through the next winter.” Mentions in party literature were rare: the demand for self-determination “was not…considered a suitable agitational theme in the daily work of the Party, at least in the South”.95

However, as Ahmed Shawki explains, “the slogan did have one positive effect. By raising the importance of fighting racism, it helped transform the Communist Party into a major force among Blacks”.96 Mark Naison, in his study of the work of Communists in Harlem during the depression, argues that,

if the Comintern had handed them an albatross (‘self-determination in the Black Belt’ would be a singularly poor mobilising device in the North or the South), it also placed a powerful weapon in their hands. By defining blacks as an oppressed nation, even in this bizarre fashion, the Comintern had…endowed the black struggle with unprecedented dignity and importance. Dissatisfied with their position in the US Party, black Communists could, and would, use this to their advantage.97

Let us leave the last word on this to James P Cannon, who analysed in some detail the paradoxical outcome of the new policy:

The Communist Party, aggressively championing the cause of the Negroes and calling for an alliance of the Negro people and the militant labour movement, came into the new situation as a catalytic agent at the right time… The party became a real factor among the Negroes, and the Negroes themselves advanced in status and self-confidence—partly as a result of the Communist Party’s aggressive agitation on the issue… The expansion of Communist influence in the Negro movement in the 1930s happened despite the fact that one of the new slogans imposed on the party by the Comintern—the slogan of “self-determination”… The slogan of “self-determination” found little or no acceptance in the Negro community after the collapse of the separatist movement led by Garvey. Their trend was mainly toward integration, with equal rights… In practice the CP jumped over this contradiction. When the party adopted the slogan of “self-determination”, it did not drop its aggressive agitation for Negro equality and Negro rights on every front. On the contrary, it intensified and extended this agitation. That’s what the Negroes wanted to hear, and that’s what made the difference. It was the CP’s agitation and action under the latter slogan that brought the results, without the help, and probably despite, the unpopular “self-determination” slogan and all the theses written to justify it… The Communists turned Stalinists, in the “Third Period” of ultra-radicalism, carried out their activity in the Negro field with all the crooked demagogy, exaggerations and distortions which are peculiar to them and inseparable from them. But in spite of that the main appeal to equal rights came through and found an echo in the Negro community. For the first time since the abolitionists, the Negroes saw an aggressive, militant dynamic group of white people championing their cause… The party recruited thousands of Negro members in the 1930s and became, for a time, a real force in the Negro community. The compelling reason was their policy on the issue of equal rights and their general attitude, which they had learned from the Russians, and their activity on the new line.98

Trotsky’s supporters

Initially, despite their expulsion from the US party, Trotsky’s supporters accepted the new Comintern position. However, doubts soon appeared and the decision was taken “to defer final action until more exhaustive material on the subject can be assembled”.99 It was Max Shachtman, one of Trotsky’s most talented supporters, who took up the challenge. In a memorandum written in 1933, he set out a detailed and historically informed rebuttal of the Comintern’s position, concluding that “a ‘national revolution’ in the Black Belt is a reactionary utopia… The proletarian revolution is the road to freedom”.100

Trotsky, on the other hand, far from dismissing the demand for self-determination, adamantly defended it—but did so in a way that differed radically from the Comintern’s prescriptive stance:

We of course do not obligate the Negroes to become a nation; whether they are is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for. If the Negroes want that then we must fight against imperialism to the last drop of blood, so that they gain the right, wherever and however they please, to separate a piece of land for themselves.101

He insisted that US workers had to be made to

understand that the American state is not their state and that they do not have to be guardians of this state. Those American workers who say: “The Negroes should separate if they so desire, and we will defend them against our American police”—these are revolutionists… The argument that the slogan for self-determination leads away from the class point of view is an adaptation to the ideology of white workers.102

What followed, if anything, by way of practice from this theoretical defence? The black revolutionary CLR James, who had the advantage over Trotsky of deep knowledge of racial oppression in the US, did not believe that the issue arose in practice: “The Negro, fortunately for socialism, does not want self-determination”.103 He admitted the demand might arise exceptionally but that under existing circumstances it could be ignored. Correct though James may have been, what clearly concerned Trotsky was that unless revolutionaries defended the right of blacks to self-determination, even if blacks chose not to exercise it, they would be theoretically disarmed in the face of racist hostility and white allegiance to “their” state.

Conclusion

The CP eventually buried the Black Belt thesis in 1958, in belated recognition that a compact mass of blacks in the South able to form the basis of an independent state no longer existed. In effect, the thesis had been abandoned long before as part of the shift in the early to mid-1930s from Third Period sectarianism to popular front opportunism. Yesterday’s enemies became today’s friends, including “progressive” administrations (such as Franklin D Roosevelt’s) that might be tempted into an anti-Nazi alliance with Moscow. In line with this, the Comintern began to downgrade its anti-imperialism, alienating figures such as Padmore.

So, is national self-determination for black people in the US now anything more than a historical curiosity? Despite the fact the development of US capitalism confirmed what Lenin and others argued about migration and industrialisation transforming the lives of black people, what it has not done, and cannot do, despite legal advances, is end the burden of oppression. That requires a socialist solution, but, as the early debates in the Communist movement show, a solution that recognises the specific need to address oppression, while holding fast to the centrality of class.

Gareth Jenkins is a retired lecturer. His translation of Pierre Broué’s Histoire de l’Internationale communiste, 1919-43 is awaiting publication.

Notes