When the American Communist Party, opting under Stalin’s aegis for an alliance with American imperialism, abandoned the fight of the blacks as it abandoned the fight of the workers

When the American Communist Party, opting under Stalin’s aegis for an alliance with American imperialism, abandoned the fight of the blacks as it abandoned the fight of the workers

"American Hunger" by Richard Wright

Biography of Richard Wright

Motivated by the rejection of both racism and religious fundamentalism, the young man made the "great leap" to the North, attracted by the myth of freedom. With practically empty pockets but a head and heart full of enthusiasm, he arrived in 1927 in Chicago, then the bustling capital of crime and culture. His true motivation was simply to escape the South and its racist abuses, its discrimination imposed by law, and its customs inherited from the time of slavery.
It was in Chicago that Richard Wright collaborated with the Federal Writers’ Project; in 1932, he joined literary circles linked to the Communist Party (CP), in particular the John Reed Club (named after the famous revolutionary writer). He would later declare that the Communist Party was the path that allowed him to "get out of the ghetto." For at the time, in the midst of the economic crisis of the 1930s, only the Communist Party was making a real effort to discover hidden and deliberately discriminated-against talent among Black people. The John Reed Club and the Communist Party published in their newspapers and magazines - Left Front, Anvil, New Masses - the first writings of young and rebellious authors, often of proletarian origin, who did not hesitate to courageously denounce the contradictions of American society.

It was in this context that Wright began his literary career, before continuing it in New York where he was even, for a time, the Harlem correspondent for the PC daily, the Daily Worker, an experience which provided him with abundant material to fuel his later writings.

During this crucial period, he continued to denounce the condition of Black people and published Twelve Million Black Voices (1941). Wright then began to distance himself from the Communist Party, which had given him so much help. Hazel Rowley clearly explains the reasons for this distancing, which later became a painful break, recounted by Wright himself in The Fallen God (1950), and then in his second autobiographical work, American Hunger (1977), the sequel to Black Boy.

Contrary to the policy of the American Communist Party, linked to Stalin’s policy of agreement with the US government, Richard Wright refused to serve in the American army, an institution where, at the time, Blacks and whites were separated into distinct units, which condemned Blacks to the status of an "inferior race." To explain this refusal, Hazel Rowley cites a letter the writer addressed to a Black friend: "We are asked to die for a freedom we have never had."
Wright ultimately managed to be classified "unfit for military service" because of his open hostility towards the army, as a racist institution. Deemed "unpatriotic" in high places, his attitude also definitively ended his relationship with the Communist Party. At the time, the latter adopted a "line" of patriotic support for the war effort of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had also become the Soviet Union’s ally in the "common struggle" against Nazi Germany and militarist Japan. At the same time—and in the name of "national unity against Hitler"—the American Communist Party was toning down its traditional anti-racist stance, discouraging, for example, actions against racial segregation within the armed forces. The alliance of Stalinism on a global scale with American imperialism resulted in the abandonment of Black activists who had joined the Communist Party in large numbers and were soon to leave it. It had ceased to support both the struggle against the oppression of Black people and that of workers. It justified that the war required stopping strikes.

A few years later, in 1947, in the aftermath of World War II and on the eve of the Cold War, Wright decided to leave the United States. With the encouragement of French intellectuals—Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Claude Levi-Strauss, among others—he settled in Paris with his wife, a white, Jewish, communist American, and their daughter, Julia. The biographer takes no position on this decision, but to explain this "flight," she provides numerous examples of the harassment, persecution, and daily humiliation that Black people in America, including Richard Wright, commonly endured.

His literary success allowed him to turn his back on the United States without regret. His celebrity had translated into a relatively large income and an international network of friends and allies who facilitated this "transplantation." Hazel Rowley does not resolve the question often raised in literary circles, in the United States as in Europe, of the "duty" of a Black intellectual or artist to remain in his native land, his "hell," to continue the struggle for civil rights. But she explains this decision to settle in Paris with remarkable clarity. Wright, known as Hazel Rowley, had few illusions about the political freedom or humanism of France; he was present in Paris at the worst moments of the colonial war in Algeria. And, if he never publicly protested against the atrocities of the repression carried out by the French authorities against a people fighting for its independence, it was only to avoid the risk of being expelled immediately. His "exile" in Paris came at this price, and he knew it only too well. There, he frequented Jean-Paul Sartre and the intellectuals of the magazine Les Temps Modernes, fierce activists against the repression in Algeria. And he was a regular at the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in the Latin Quarter, where other Americans who had fled the United States because of McCarthyism and the witch hunts gathered...

For him, France meant, despite everything, a "breath of freedom" after the humiliations suffered in America. But the contradiction of living in a country that was both democratic and colonialist weighed on his conscience. On the eve of his death in Paris, on November 28, 1960 (10), he was thinking of moving to London.

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What was the relationship between black anti-colonial writers and activists and the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia and, more broadly, Bolshevism?

The answer to this question is, at first glance, very simple. The reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution was one of boundless enthusiasm. The Revolution was hailed as a masterful event that had the capacity to liberate the Black world. It is the specific anti-imperialist claim of the Bolsheviks that is most interesting. Russia was seen as a country uniting many peoples who had been oppressed by the Tsar and liberated by the Bolsheviks. The proletarian revolution was often named in relation to the question of national self-determination in Russia, raised by the revolution. The apparent disappearance of antisemitism in the wake of the Revolution was of particular interest to the Black radical press, and there are many articles on how, in McKay’s words, the Bolsheviks "made Russia safe for Jews." Again, what is so interesting, and even a little strange, about these articles is the determination to connect the experiences of the African diaspora with the experiences of other oppressed groups in order to outline common structures of oppression.

One particularly interesting point you make in the introduction to this book is that, before 1922, many Caribbean and African-American activists and writers were attracted to the Socialist Party of the United States, despite the fact that this organization was extremely limited on the racial question. You cite Eugene V. Debs’s famous statement: "We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals for each race. The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, regardless of color—the working class of the whole world." How can we explain this apparent paradox?

This paradox is a paradox precisely because of the politics these radical activists inaugurated. That is, a positioning of race at the center of class politics that had not existed until then. This is what makes Debs’s quote seem anachronistic. What’s important is that Debs didn’t say "we have nothing to offer black people," but "we have nothing special" to offer them. Debs and many members of the Socialist Party were anti-racist within this formula. The Socialist Party was a complex organization, within which both anti-racists and racists organized—it was a party famously factional. Its history is therefore controversial with regard to race. The Wooblies’ record on anti-racism is extremely impressive. This is not about "calling out" the American left, which saw race primarily as a class issue, as anti-racist, but about situating this new race/class politics within the existing left. Black socialists like Hubert Harrison constantly challenged the Socialist Party on its avoidance of the race issue, but this process sharpened its own highly influential political trajectory. These Black radicals were extremely frustrated with the traditional left precisely because they were enmeshed in its politics.

Was there a difference in anti-colonial and anti-racist policies between the Comintern and the socialist and communist parties of the United States? Were these differences reflected in the attitudes of Black radical activists toward the Comintern?

Here, it really depends on which “Comintern” one is talking about. The early Comintern played a crucial role in the emergence of Black radical politics. It was to the Comintern rather than local parties that the majority of Black activists turned. The Comintern’s commitment to the question of anti-imperialism and its interest in Black struggles in the United States contrasted sharply with the division and factionalism of the left in the United States. Thus, the iconic moment when Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud addressed the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International in Russia in 1922 is emblematic of the seriousness with which Black activists regarded the Comintern and shows how deeply they were interested in the possibilities this revolutionary internationalist organization offered for Black liberation. The Stalinized Comintern of the 1930s and 1940s was more interested in consolidating the power of the USSR than in initiating world revolution, and this is where much of the resentment that shaped communism and Black radicalism emerged. The most famous illustration of this is George Padmore’s break with communism in the mid-1930s following his (correct) assertion that the struggle for the USSR was of secondary importance. This is therefore a highly controversial history, and there is no single point in time where one can say that one passes from the "good Comintern" to the "bad Comintern." Nor is it accurate to say that Comintern directives mechanically shaped anti-racist policy on the ground. However, the period of the Popular Front, during which communists were asked to maintain an uncritical attitude towards Britain and France (colonial nations) in the fight against fascism, was difficult to digest for those who had turned to communism because of its anti-imperialist promises.

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“Where are the American people going?” by Daniel Guérin:

The Communist Party entered the Black community during the Great Depression. A dramatic action immediately won it the favor of Black people. In 1931, six young Black people from Scottsboro, Alabama, were sentenced to death for the alleged "rape" of white women. The Communist Party took charge of their defense, made a considerable effort to alert public opinion, collected enormous sums of money, and succeeded in arousing worldwide indignation. (…) The Communist Party has always fought for complete social equality for Black people, and, within its ranks, has put it into practice. Thus, it presented a Black man as its candidate for the vice-presidency of the United States. Its men in the CIO union contributed, in large part, to the new organization’s taking an attitude of combat against racial prejudice. It has constantly advocated the union of exploited Whites and Blacks against their common enemy. He was the first to teach Blacks, especially in the North, the techniques of direct action and mass action, which broke with the legalistic methods of the NAACP. In Chicago in particular, one of their strongholds, Black communists engaged in admirable struggles against tenant evictions and against discrimination in employment. Sometimes even the Black rank and file of the Party, carried away by his extraordinary combativeness, kicked up a fuss, wanted to form combat groups and implement military tactics that the leadership (fundamentally more reformist than revolutionary) disapproved of. If we want to measure the revolutionary potential of Black Americans, we must draw on the history of Black communists in the ranks. (…) The favorable prejudice that the Stalinists enjoyed among the Black masses and a fraction of the "intelligentsia" explains the ease with which they succeeded in securing control of a mass organization like the National Negro Congress. This result was not achieved solely by an artificial technique of "infiltration." Similarly, young intellectuals influenced by the Stalinists have maintained within the NAACP, since the 1930s, an opposition that, at times, caused serious embarrassment to the leadership. (…) Despite their success with Blacks, the American Communists were hampered by a number of handicaps and they made a number of mistakes. (…) The fact that the Party was led by Whites aroused the racist suspicion of many Blacks. Some suspected the CP of wanting to use Blacks. (…) Finally, more than one Black hesitated to add, in the words of A. Randolph, to the handicap of being Black that of being Red. (…) One of their main mistakes was the ultra-nationalist slogan of the "Independent Negro Republic" in the South, which never had any concrete meaning for Blacks. During the ultra-left "Third Period" of the Communist International from 1929 to 1934,The American Stalinists in fact became the champions of the most outrageous black nationalism, launching the slogan of the "49th State" in the "Black Belt". (…) In reality, the incessant exodus of Blacks towards the big cities of the South and the North continuously depopulates the "Black Belt" of its black population. (…) The Blacks instinctively guessed that this slogan had been fabricated in Moscow and the dependence of the Communist Party on the Russian State inspired antipathy in them. This antipathy increased each time the Party took turns that mechanically followed the fluctuations of Soviet foreign policy. (…) After 1934, when the “third period,” when they considered the Revolution imminent, was abandoned and replaced by the tactic of “popular fronts,” when the American Stalinists began to support Roosevelt, the slogan of the “independent Republic” was softened. (…) It was following the most memorable and sharpest of these turns—the conclusion of the German-Soviet pact of 1939, followed by a “defeatist” and anti-Roosevelt orientation of the American CP—that a man like A. Philip Randolph stopped collaborating with the Stalinists in the National Negro Congress and vehemently denounced their submission to Moscow.

“Because,” he wrote, “the American Communist Party derives from Communist Russia, its policies and programs, its tactics and strategy are as capricious, changeable, and unpredictable as Moscow’s foreign policy… Black people do not reject the Communist Party because it is revolutionary, or radical, or because of its supposed extremism. They reject it because it is controlled and dominated by a foreign state whose policies may or may not be in the best interests of the American people and the Black people.”

Already, for the first time, in 1933, stunned Blacks saw the Stalinists make a sudden about-face, to their detriment. Soviet filmmakers were then planning the production of a major pro-Black film, which was to show the way America treated its population of color. This undertaking had been announced to the world with great publicity. But suddenly, Stalin canceled it without ceremony. The Roosevelt administration was on the verge of recognizing Soviet Russia and the latter was committing to "refraining from all propaganda against the policies and social order of the United States." It was necessary to conciliate, in particular, the "Bourbons" of the South whose support was essential to the ratification of the government’s project. Blacks were sacrificed to this maneuver.

In 1941, Stalinism went much further. It did not hesitate to abandon the cause of Black people. During the period following the conclusion of the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939, the American Stalinists had denounced the war as "imperialist" and demanded that agitation for Black people be linked to the "struggle against imperialist war." Until the end of June 1941, they heaped their criticism on A. Philip Randolph and the leaders of the "March on Washington." The program of this movement was, in their opinion, too moderate and did not oppose the war clearly enough. But as soon as Hitler’s armies entered the USSR, everything changed. (…) Everything, according to the Stalinists, had to be subordinated to the crusade against Hitlerism. The struggle for Black liberation had to be postponed until better times. One of the black leaders of the Communist Party, James W. Ford, wrote in February 1942: "Four hundred years of Negro slavery are nothing compared to the persecution by the Nazis of the Jews and the peoples of the occupied countries." (...) In the collective collection "What the Negro Wants", published in 1944, a black Stalinist writer, Doxey A. Wilkerson, took it upon himself to define the Stalinist position: "Black people must give this war unconditional support... They must devote the maximum of their energies to winning the war... There are Black leaders who denounce the government and the whites for still existing racial injustices, and who organize mass struggles of the Black population... They are following a path which weakens the nation’s program for victory. "(…) During the Harlem race riot of 1943, the Stalinists sided with the authorities of the city and state of New York against the black masses.

This attitude deeply disappointed men of color and caused the Stalinists to lose support in the black community that they have not been able to regain since. (…) In recent years (work written in 1951), blacks have given multiple proofs of their belligerent mood. The 1943 riot in Harlem was not, like the previous ones, an inter-racial brawl, but a rebellion of the black community. Very recently, in Winston-Salem (North Carolina), blacks attacked and threatened to lynch a white man who had shot a young black woman, seriously wounding her. Young black students at Talladega College (Alabama) told me that, ever since the Ku Klux Klan planted, by surprise, a cross of fire in the middle of the establishment, they slept with loaded pistols under their pillows, ready to “use them at the first opportunity. (…)