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of

RADICALAMEP\ICA

JULY-AUGUST, 1968

Volume 11 Number 4

Historical Roots

GEORGE RAWK -

C lR

JAMES

`~

J R HOOKER - JOHN WATSON

New Perspectives On Radical History

An SE?S Journal of American Radicalism

Black Liberation

RADICAL AMERICA, a bi-monthly journal of U .S .radicalism . General Editor . Paul Buhle . Culturaleditors . Dan Georgakas, Dave ''!agner, Hank Haslach .Associates . George Arthur (Seattle), Tom Christoffel(D .C .), Mark B Lapping (Pennsylvania), Paul/s1attick,Jr . (Boston), Don McKelvey (Ann Arbor),Mark Naison (New York City), Nick Norris (Chicago),James Pricke'tt (San Diego) .

As usual, the copy deadline for RA did not co-incide with the gathering of materials on Black Lib-

July-Abgust, 1968 Vol .II,no .4

CONTENTS

George Rawick, THE HISTORICAL ROOTSOF BLACK LIBERATION, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Diane DiPrima, REVOLUTIONARY LETTERS #15 . . . . .13

J .R . Hooker, AFRICA FOR THE AFRO-AMERICANS .GEORGE PADM.ORE AND THE BLACK PRESS . . . . ; . . .14

DOCUMENT . C.L .R . JAME S ON THE ORIGINS . . . . . .20

BLACK EDITOR . AN INTERVIEW. . . . . . . . . . . .30

David Henderson, BOSTON ROAD BLUES . . . . . . . .39

Paul Buhle, NE'dV PERSPECTIVES ON AMERICANRADICALISM,`AN HISTORICAL REASSESSMENT . . . . . .46

Dan Georgakas, THE POETS . . . . . . . . . . . . .59

Etheridge Knight, I SING OF SHINE . . . . . . . .64

CONVENTION RESOLUTION . MADISON SDS . . . . .. . .68

back cover . Sonia Sanchez, JULY 4TH

eration . Thus Mark Naison°s study of the Southern'Tenants' Farmers' Union' and several reviews Havebeen pushed back to future issues . Also held wasJames-O'Brien°,s second installment on the .historyof

the New J=ef t .

But we are happy to put

into printthe contrib-utions made, the credit for which :goeslargely 'to George Rawick who collected most andconducted the 'interview with John Watson . The poems`of Sonia Sarichez and Etheridge Knight �, published first,here,, and the reprinted poRm by David Henderson helpto add another dimension,we'th .ink, to our treatmentof the black-movement .

Just now there is no financially_ feasible wayfor us to expand beyo,nd16O-70 pages--the jump toprofessionally-done, ,,folding-, collating and stapling -would_ be far too expensive, But we hope to make upthe difference by launching a pamphlet series,infor-mation,on the first of the'pub:l ications being avai fablein - our next issue :-- Our initial aims are to,cooperatewith national, SDS in covering certain-,current prob-lems (the French crisis'-and - the European studen~ move-ment generally .) and make our own unusual, contributionin such- areas`as art/culture studies and publicationof, significant but,li,ttle-known American theoreticalfigures--for' instance, Paul Mattick and C .L .R . James .

CONTRIBUTORS

DAN GEORGAKAS, editor:of Z, is a rambl,i-ng agitator ;JAMES= HQOkER i`s Pr6fes,sor of African History at MSU ;DAVID,HENDERSON'°s poem i s repri nted,wi th the kindpermission of the publ-isAers, Poets Press, from Felix_of The Silent Forest . ETHERIDGE KNIGHT and SONIASANCHEZ are, as Georgakas° review'indicates, among thef i nes t o ~f,the

radical

black poets ; GEORGE" RAWICK

i s aMarxist Historian in Detroit,-who teaches at OaklandUniversity .

; ii", q1 it/ . . :a .~ UM1a

'

9

0 °rE-Yw

The Historical Roots of Black Liberation

George Rawick

The Black Revolution, particularly in itslatest phase, has challenged all previous inter-pretations of the history of black people, not onlyin the United States but everywhere in the Westernworld and in Africa . No longer is it possible towrite credibly the liberal, integrationist historywhich pictures only black contributions to Americansociety and stresses the victimization of the slaves .History written under the slogan "Black and White,Unite and Fight" does not give us grounds on which tounderstand the contemporary black movement . Unlesswe find the real historical roots of Black Power weare faced ?with a situation unparalleled in worldhistory : a massive revolutionary movement which comesfrom nowhere and is born fully grown . l

The central focus of the recent discussion ofslavery in the United States has been a discussion ofthe slave personality . What did slavery do to thedevelopment of the human being? One group of socialanalysts has refurbished the Sambo image, translatingit from "racial" to "psychological" terms . Using anamalgam of Freudian psychology and social-psycho-logical role theory, Stanley Elkins has essentiallyargued that slavery "infantilized" the slave per-sonality . Although Elkins allows himself escapemechanisms from the full implications of this theory,nevertheless his argument does amount to the claimthat slaves generally did not become full adults .Others such as Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan haveadded another dimension with a complicated discussionof the so-called matrifocal family . They concludethat a lack of social circumstances necessary to pro-duce mature adults has been reinforced from slaveryto the present . Black people, in these conceptions,are inherently maladjusted to American society,

implying that some figure or institution must shapethem up . Thus the theory of the slave and his de-scendents as Victim .

On the other hand, there has been a continua-tion of more traditional liberal theory . If theslaves acted as if they accepted their subordinatestatus, it has been argued, they were only feigningsuch accommodation--only putting on "the Man ." Likethe first theory, this does violence to the facts andcarries clear ideological implications . While Elkinsand his academic kin have attempted to produce asophisticated conservative defense of existing socialrelations, the second school's results suggest moder-ate reforms . Neither can be related to a revolu-tionary theory or practice .

Men do not make revolution for light and trans-ient reasons, but rather only when they can no longerstand the contradictions in their personalities dothey move in a sharp and decisive fashion . As Hegel,Marx, Camus and Farnon have well understood, thevictim is the rebel, indeed all rebels are men andwomen resolving the classic contradiction laid out byRousseau : "Man is born free and everywhere he is inchains ." As Hegel demonstrated in the famous dialogueof master and slave in _Phenomenol ogy of the Mind, theslave struggles against the master by struggling withhis own internal dilemmas . The social struggle begins,in an immediate sense, as a struggle within the slaveand only them becomes externalized and objectified .Therefore, unless the slave is simultaneously Samboand revolutionaly, Sambo and Nat Turner, he can beneither Sambo nor Nat Turner . He can only be a woodenman, a theoretical abstraction .

GENOVESE'S WORK

From the perspective of the Movement, the onlywork that seriously approaches a sufficiently highlevel of discussion is that of Eugene Genovese, whounites a study of Marxism with a respect for and deepknowledge of the concrete experiences of the slavesthemselves . Genovese's studies reach far beyond thoseof others, but his work has not yet developed into afully Marxist history . I hope to discuss first why I

3

believe this is so, and then briefly indicate analternative direction . 2

Like C . Wright Mills before him, Genovese con-centrates largely on the nature of the ruling class .To paraphrase some remarks he made at the Smith CollegeConference on Negro Slavery in February 1968, we mustbe primarily concerned with comparative studies ofthe ruling classes produced by Negro slave societies .This concentration seems to me undialectical, one-sided, and needlessly schematic . My counter-thesisis that the most important problems inherent in thestudy of plantation production based on slave laborcan be solved only by an analysis of the class strug-gle between masters and slaves ; such analysis mustbegin with the self-activity of the slaves themselves .If one writes frcm such a perspective, then allhistory is indeed the history of the class struggle :as E . P . Thompson, Georges Lefebvre, C . L . R . Jamesand other Marxist historians have brilliantly demon-strated, the defeats are inevitable and necessarystages in the struggle that leads to their ultimatetriumph .

This view is central to the above mentionedmaster/slave dialogue in Hegel, dialogue which formsthe basis of the Marxist dialectic . While Genoveseknows the importance of this discussion in Hegel (andhas quoted it in The _Political Economy of Slavery ),he shies away from exploring its full implications .A social passimism combined with what seems to me asectarian impatience with history flaws his work .For example, he sees the American Revolution in theSouth essentially as a reactionary slave-owners re-bellion . But it is apparent that the Revolution alsorepresented the success of small farmers, non-slave-owners . Similarly, one could maintain that it wasnot until the 1830's that the conflict betweenplanter and non-planter whites was decisively won bythe former . Moreover, as Genovese understands, thestruggle continued into the 1840's and 1850's withHinton Helper's _The Impending _Crisis, published in1857, as the manifesto of the non-slave-owning whites .But precisely because Genovese's work is not asterile academic enterprise but a personal attempt to

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intervene in the contemporary struggle, he allows hispessimism to interfere with his search for implications,presenting the South as a monolith .

Genovese handles the Sambo-rebel problem in avery brittle way, seeing it essentially as a problemof historical progression . Sambo could become therebel in certain situations, and Genovese seeks todiscover "the condition under which the personalitypattern could become inverted and a seemingly docileslave could suddenly become fierce ." He even sug-gests that had the French Jacobins taken power in 1790rather than 1794, they would have abolished slavery inSan Domingo and therefore liberated the slaves fromthe outside (rather than, as historical fact, theyliberating themselves) . If so, he comments, "we would. . .today be reading a Haitian Elkins whose taskwould be to explain the extraordinary docility of thecountry's blacks ." All previous indication of rebel-liousness in San Domingo is relegated by Genovese tounimportance :

"We find a Sambo stereotype and a weaktradition of rebellion . . .when the island suddenlyexploded in the greatest slave revolution in history,nothing lay behind it but Sambo and a few hints ."

This conclusion is fundamentally absurd, theabsurdity of sincere but pessimistic radical scholar-ship . Despite Genovese's stated respect for C .L .R .James, he seems to be turning the historian upsidedown . For the point James is making in The BlackJacobins --a point which cannot be missed by the carefulreader--is that the oppressed continuously struggle informs _of their _own choosing and surprise all mankindwhen they transform the day-to-day struggle into monu-mental revolutionary deeds . The pre-revolutionaryactivity was a necessary predecessor to the Haitianrevolt ; and without Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesseyand Nat Turner, there could have been no FredrickDouglass, Rap Brown, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver .

SAMBO?

This is not to argue that the slave was in nosense Sambo .

A man is Sambo precisely when he isat the very point of rebellion he is fearful of beingthe rebel . Rebel he must be, but self-confident he isnot . The greatest of all abolitionist leaders,

5

the ex-slave Fredrick Douglass, tells repeatedly inhis autobiography that when in the very act of flee-ing, he was not only afraid--he also felt he wasdoing something wrong . Everything seemed to tell himthat he was incapable of being a freeman ; but at thesame time, everything told him he must be a freeman .Unless we understand the contradictory nature of thehuman personality in class societies, we can neverportray reality . One never knows whether the victimor the rebel will manifest himself again, but thenagain one need never know . It does not matter . Inreal life, men engage and then they see . The man ofcourage is not afraid to act, not because he is cer-tain he will not be the coward, but only because heknows that, if he does not act, he most certainly willbe the coward .

The Sambo image is used often to give a facileexplanation for the fact that there were very fewslave revolts in North America .

Because men wereSambo--and to be Sambo in this view, as we have shown,has meant that one could not be simultaneously therebel--there were no successful slave revolts . This

6

is an example of finding a very complicated, cumbersomesolution when a more simple and direct explanation isat hand .

Slaves from the Caribbean and Brazil, areaswhere the Sambo image and reality were as present as inNorth America, engaged in great and at times successfulslave revolts . No talk of Sambo and infantilizationneed be brought into account for the failure of large-scale slave revolts in North America . The matter wasreally much simpler . Slaves in N~,rth America were inevery respect far outnumbered by the whites, who inany area could successfully hold off an attack untilhelp came from elsewhere .

The slave revolt was not the usual method ofdirect action on the part of slaves in the UnitedStates because it was obvious that such a small,isolated minority could not successfully struggle thisway . Rather the slaves usually chose other, moresuitable tactics . While the slaves did not engage,particularly after the defeat of Nat Turner in 1831,in large revolts, they did struggle in a most consciousfashion and in a most successful manner through theUnderground Railroad, strikes, and acts of individualwithholding of or destruction of production . Mostimportant, they fashioned their own independentcommunity through which men and women and their chil-dren could find the cultural defenses against theiroppressors .

The black community was the center of life forthe slaves . It gave them, marked off from the rest ofsociety, an independent base . The slave did not sufferfrom rootlessness - he belonged to the slave communityand even if he were sold down the river, would usuallybe able to find himself in a new community much likehis previous one, in which there would be people whoshared a common destiny and would help him find a newlife .

SLAVE SELF-ACTIVITY

The slave labored from sunup to sundown andsometimes beyond . This labor, which dominated part ofthe slave's existence, has often been described butnever in terms of its relationship to the slave

community nor to what the slave did from sundown tosunup . Under slavery, as under any other socialsystem, the lowest of the low were not totally

dominated by the system and the master class . They

found ways of alleviating the worst of the system and

at times of dominating the masters . What slavesaccomplished was the creation of a unified Negrocommunity in which class differences within the com-munity, while not totally eradicated, were much lesssignificant than the ties of blackness in a whiteman's world .

While slaves were oppressed and exploited underslavery, they fought back in a day-by-day strugglewhich did not lead directly to liberation, but which

in fact prevented that "infantilization" of person-

ality that many historians insist took place . While

there was, of course, an impact upon the slave per-sonality of the institution, "infantilization" hardlydescribes it . In fact, what must be seen is the factthat the result was quite contradictory . On the one

hand, submissiveness and a sense that one deserved to

be a slave ; but on the other, a great deal of angerand a great deal of competence to express this angerin ways that protected the personality and had ob-jective results in the improvement of the slave'ssituation .

The metaphors of static psychology such as"infantilization" are most dangerous ones for theyclaim too much for conditioning . In any societybased upon exploitation and social hierarchy, mostpeople at all levels of the society display extremeambivalence of personality . This "highest of the

high and lowest of the low" syndrome produces social

greatness as well as social incompetence . (ErikErikson, for example, in The Young _Man Luther, de-scribes the religious revolutionary Martin Luther asa man who felt himself to be both a subservientworthless child and a man chosen by God the Fatherto do His work . Only in fighting his heavenlyFather's enemies would the child become a man .Those who have raised the issue of the "infantiliza-tion" of the slave personality do so in connectionwith the argument that the Africans in being taken tothe New World were "deculturalized" and that the only

8

culture put in its place was the white man's culture .On this basis, no African culture and no new culturecould really matter ; thus cultural dependency, ward-ship, infantilization . The Negro in the United States,they argue, had no culture of his own and was simply avery deprived member of the majority culture .

This school of slavery historiography is de-pendent upon the curious notion that "personality" and"culture" are like old clothes that can be discardedeasily . However, one can never remove culture, al-though one can transform it . The ability of men tolearn the simplest tasks is dependent upon the utili-zation of the existing cultural apparatus . Newcultures emerge out of the older cultures gradually,never completely destroying'the traces of the past .Revolutions, at their best, do not obliterate pastsociety but liberate that which is alive from itsdomination by social classes no longer able to utilizethe achievements of mankind for human purposes . Inshort, culture is a profoundly historical reality andnot an ahistorical abstraction .

AFRO-AMERICAN CULTURE

The process whereby the African changed in orderto meet the new environment was dependent upon hisAfrican culture . While slavery altered social pat-terns, it did not wholly obliterate African culture .The Br'er Rabbit stories of North America are not asJoel Chandler Harris in his racist wisdom imaginedthem to be . They are not childlike tales for toddlers .They contain the insight of a people and express amost sophisticated view of human life .

There are a variety of myths and folktales fromNegro populations in Africa and the New World in whicha relatively weak creature succeeds in at least surviving in his competition with the greater beasts . Attimes he even wins, but he never really loses . He isabsurd, but he is filled with life and he keeps strug-gling with his destiny . In West Africa he is oftencalled Legba and is portrayed as a spider or a rabbitor at times as a little black man . He survives byhis wits and manages to live in competition with his

9

more powerful neighbors . He appears in Brazil and asPapa Legba in Haitian voodoo . Elsewhere in the Carib-bean we have Anansi, the spider trickster, who de-feats Lion, Tiger, and Snake in great contests of wits .

Sometimes in the Caribbean he becomes Br'erRabbit, the form in which he is known in NorthAmerica . In all cases we have a creature whose lifesituation is very much like that of slaves . He sur-vives, even occasionally triumphs, over the morepowerful beasts ; and whatever he does, he gains thesympathy of the non-powerful everywhere . In fact, healways seems to have a greater share of the classichuman virtues than the Great Beasts .

In myth and folklore the slave not only actedout his desires, He accomplished much more than that .In his laughter and pleasure at the exploits ofLegba, Anansi, and Br'er Rabbit he created for him-self, out of his own being, that necessary self-confidence denied to him by so much of his environ-ment .

We get another example, a most crucial one, ofthe relationship of the slave community to the slavestruggle in the slave religion . The religion of theslaves not only provided a link with the most modernof naturalistic and humanistic philosophy, but alsowith the concrete day-by-day struggles of the slavesthemselves . Slave revolts themselves were often re-lated to what has been called in several accounts the"African cult meeting" . We have an overwhelmingamount of evidence of regular late night or earlymorning "sings" and religious meetings held either inthe slave quarters or in nearby swamps or river banks .

But, above all, for the period from the defeatof the rebellion of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 tothe Civil War, the African cult and its related community provided the basis for social life of theslaves . In these thirty years the Negro slavesretrenched, struggled to maintain a coherent culture,infused human dignity and human possibility into theday-by-day life of the slave, and above all built theUnderground Railroad . The real Uncle Tom of HarrietBeecher Stowe's book was the leader of the slaves onthe plantation precisely because he was more

10

courageous than all the other slaves as well as wise inthe ways of protecting his people in their isolation .Also, Negro spirituals were the legitimate and neces-sary manifestations of this period . The slave per-sonality was kept whole by the conscious and deep-seatedrealities of the Afro-American culture as expressed inthe day-by-day and night-by-night life of the slavequarters . While the struggle was neither dramatic norheroic in an epic way, it was real and successful .

Through the instrumentality of the African cult,a concrete expression of a philosophy most adequate tothe task at hand, the Afro-American slave prepared theground and built the community out of which could comethe struggles of the abolitionist movement . Aboli-tionism was at all times dominated by Afro-Americans,not by whites . Every abolitionist newspaper dependedupon the support of Negro freedmen for its continua-tion . And these black freedmen received their impetusfrom the struggles of their brothers and sisters inslavery . Rather than stemming from the New EnglandBrahmin conscience, abolitionism grew from, andcarried, the necessity of black liberation whatever thecost . And in liberating the black community aboli-tionism transformed American society; it took the leadin creating a new America .

Although it will seem outrageous for those whothink of movements as primarily organizations, offices,finances, printing presses and newspapers, writers andpetitions, the heart of abolitionism was the slavecommunity itself . The Underground Railroad, the effortsof the slaves for their own liberation, and theirstruggles' impact on Northern Whites and slave blacks--these were the movement's indispensible core . Inthe South, it gave the slaves the hope that enabledthem to engage in the daily struggles that won forthem that amount of breathing space which made morethan mere continued existence possible .

With the defeat of Nat Turner's rebellion theslaves turned more and more to building their day-by-day resistance : to the Underground Railroad, toindividual acts of resistance, to slave strikes .There were countless strikes among the slaves, strikesthat were often successful . A group of slaves would

after some particular incident of brutality on thepart of master or overseer take off for the swampswhere they would hide out .

After a period they wouldsend in a representative to arrange for a conferenceat which there would be -"Collective bargaining" .Sometimes they lost, of course, and to lose meant tobe whipped and at times even more severely punished .But nevertheless the strikes went on .

Resistance of the slaves had its results .While the corruption of the master class and otherwhites in Southern society has often been commentedupon, the linkage with the activities of the slaveshas never been made . The slaves themselves createdthe conditions for the inner corruption of the MasterClass . While the rulers portrayed the institution ofslavery as beneficent, the constant rebellion of theslaves made them know they lied . And when there is noway in which men can believe in the fundamentalmorality of a social system, even one they profit by,that system begins to die because the masters losetheir ability to defend it . The slaves, in the strug-gle to the death with the rulers, repudiate thelatter's claim of moral justification, demonstrate toall the bad faith of the masters .

(Seen from thisvantage point, Twain's Huckleberry Finn depicts thesuperiority of the moral claims of the runaway slave,Jim, to those of the masters based on property rights .

BLACK CIVILIZATION AND WHITE

The southern slave owner was denuded of civi-lization by the very system he fostered . Instead ofthe southern plantation owner and the classes close tohim being made up of the knights in armor of racistfolklore, slavery produced a society in the AmericanSouth dominated by a class who lived in corruption andwithin an atmosphere worthy of the Marquis de Sade .The picture of the life of the master drawn by themaster class during slavery and by the romanticizersafter slavery clashes sharply with the portrait drawnby the slaves themselves .

In the few ways in which some genuine civiliza-tion and humanistic culture came through in the lives

12

of the masters, it was the result of the humanizingand civilizing influence of slaves . Slave women pro-vided some degree of a full humanity for the mastersof whom they were concubines ; they provided somegenuine love and training for the young masters andmistresses ; the slave children helped and taught theslave owners' sons and daughters .

In almost everyother way the slave owner was a cruel man who whippedhorses, slaves, and women, gambled and drank hard, andwas quick with the Bowie knife and the gun against anyreal or fancied opponent . The white women were notthe delicate ladies of the southern myth . The slavesalmost universally reported that the women enjoyedwhipping slaves more than did the men, that they oftentook out on their slaves their anger at their husbands,particularly when these men spent more time with theirslave women than with their wives . The myth of thegracious South dies hard, but die it must . The slavesas they report their experiences turn upon its headthe image of mint julep and magnolia .

2 .

It should be mentioned that the study upon whichthis article is based was begun before the slogan"Black Power" was born; it has a basis that pre-cedes slogans and ideologies in the same sensethat the concrete expression of Black Power inthe independent black community preceded anyinternal ideological discussion . Nonetheless,the contemporary black struggle has clarified andilluminated many matters, rendering the discussiona very different one than the one 'begun nearly adecade ago .The full defense of my point of view is developedin my forthcoming multi-volumed work, The AmericanSlave : From Sundown to Sunup whose volumes willbegin to appear in the spring of 1969 under theimprint of Greenwood Press . The full ten tofourteen volume work will contain a one-volumeintroduction by myself followed by many volumes ofannotated and edited slave autobiographies andnarratives in which thousands of slaves and formerslaves tell their own stories, which have either

never been published or have been out of print forover a century . It is a telling commentary aboutAmerican racism that no attempt previously has beenmade to develop a substantive history of Americanslavery based upon the records and artifacts leftby the former slaves ; indeed, most historiansconcluded that the material for such work did notexist . It is hoped that this work will be achallenge to others to revise history, based oneven more careful and detailed studies of men'sself-activity .

When you seize Columbia, when youseize Paris, takethe media, tell the people what you're doingwhat you're up to and why and how you meanto do it, how they can help, keep the newscoming, steady, you have 70 yearsof media conditioning to combat, it is a wallyou must get through, somehow, to reachthe instinctive man, w'jo is struggling like a plantfor light, for air

when you seize a town, a campus, get ho1-d -o-f thepower stations, the water, the transportation,forget to negotiate, forget howto negotiate, don't wait for De Gaulle or Kirkto abdicate, they won't, you are not"demonstrating" you are fightinga war, fight to win, don't wait for Johnson orHumphrey or Rockefeller, to agree to your termstake what you need, "it's freebecause it's yours"

Diane DiPrima

May, 1968

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14

Africa for Afro-Americans: Padmore and the Black Press

J. R . Hooker

One of the more striking testimonies to thecurrent insistence that all black men share a heritage,whether or not they live in America, is the amount ofAfrican material in the black press . While Africaalways has been with us, it always has been truer ofthe black than of the white American press . But,coverage frequently has reflected the same attitudesin both BASP and WASP papers . Being put in the whiteman's box meant that blacks read of savages who atemissionaries and opposed civilizing influences, orthey were regaled with accounts of European heroismin feverish climes . Africans were presumed to be in-ferior, different, very far away . True, the ancestorsof many Americans might have come from Africa, butthat was a long while ago and under shameful conditions .

There is, of course, a history of solidjournalism; exemplified by _The Crisis during DuBois'editorship, which carried a tremendous amount ofAfrican material

But, with this exception, and a fewothers to be mentioned below, until very recently whenMuhammed Speaks and Freedomw_ays achieved rationalcoverage, the Africa portrayed in the black press wasthe white man's Africa . I have suggested elsewhere)that Africa was seen either as an embarrassment, as aplace to exploit, as a symbol of white injustice or asa place to redeem (in the Christian sense) .

This has pretty much changed, so that 'Coday'sreader of the slick Luce-like weeklies stands a betterthan even chance of seeing something solid on Africanart, history or government, and is likely to recognizeindividual African leaders - especially those likeMboya or Nkrumah who have an American connection .

Andif any one man is to be credited with alerting blackAmericans to the significance of Africa during the lean

15

years between Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X (alwaysapart, that is, from Dr . DuBois), it is George Padmore(1902-59), the American-educated Trinidadian racespecialist for the Communist International, who isbetter known as "the father of African emancipa-tion ." 2

PADMORE

A journalist since his 'teens, on an Englishpaper at home and with the student publications ofFisk and Howard, Padmore was by the early 1930s thecommunist world's greatest authority on race matters .But, when he reluctantly concluded that the Stalinistswere insincere, acting in short as white men, he quit,and in association with other expatriate blacksadrift in London tried to bring blacks on both sidesof the Atlantic into common cause . To this end heorganized first the International African ServiceBureau (1937) and then the Pan-African Federation(1944) . The role of black Americans, though takenfor granted, was considerably altered however .Whereas, previously Americans had dominated suchscenes ( e .g . the first five pan-African conferences)and emphasized the American situation, it was Pad-more's notion that Africa's time had come . For theimmediate future, he argued, all black men shoulddevote their attention and energies to the attainmentof African liberation . So for the first time outsidethe pages of The Crisis anti-colonial and anti-imperial articles began to appear in the black pressunder Padmore's byline . Overwhelmingly his copy con-cerned Africa . He did not ignore the rest of theworld; indeed, his material on southeast Asia and theWest Indies remains strikingly topical, but most ofhis prose was devoted to African affairs .

He broke into American journalism through thegood offices of a former tutor at Howard, Dr . MetzLochard, who by the later 1930s was working cn theChicago Defender . Padmore already was in touchwith DuBois and had written for The Crisis as earlyas 1935, at the time of the Italo-Ethiopian crisis,

16

but these had been isolated contributions . Now in1938 he became European correspondent for The Defender,which began to carry considerable copy . Much of hismaterial also began to appear in the Baltimore Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier . In this way theblack press came to carry more African material thanits far larger white counterpart . Indeed, oncePadmore joined The Defender 's staff, the black pressheld a near-monopoly on such matter . Whether it wasa question of labor conditions in the South Africangold fields, increased taxes in Rhodesia, presscensorship in the Gold Coast or land alienation inKenya, Padmore was willing to write it up . Moreover,he was alone among the journalists of his time inpreparing background pieces, writing essays ratherthan articles . And while some of his more solemnofferings look a trifle incongruous juxtaposed to theflamboyant productions of his American colleagues,there is no doubt that his readership had at its dis-posal as much solid material as was available inAmerica . For example, they could judge the importanceof Kwame Nkrumah long before he attracted the whiteworld's attention .

Padmore was not uniformly appreciated for hisself-imposed efforts . His denunciations of French andBritish imperialism and revelations of Belgian injustice were welcome fare to his employers, but thephilosophy which underlay his themes was unpalatable .First of all, he was uncompromising in his defense ofAfrican ways (at least in public) . Then, too, he wasdistrustful of American intentions, as well as anti-capitalist and at least by implication anti-white .None of this could be expected to endear him to theblack establishment whose attitude he deplored andwhose checks he cashed .

PADMORE AND GARVEY

In writing this way he contributed, withoutusing the phrase, to a definition of black power .Though as a communist he had attacked and ridiculedMarcus Garvey's program, he nevertheless came to

1 7

recognize Garvey's substantial contribution to thecause of black dignity . However, where Garvey hadpromoted black capitalist ventures, Padmore stressedwhat has come to be called African socialism .3 Bothagreed that the elevation of black men was a blackresponsibility and that the very system of race rela-tions under present capitalist conditions guaranteedthe perpetuation of black degredation . It did notfollow that all whites were bad or that any whites hadto remain that way, merely that till now many hadbeen bad and all had shared in the benefits of exploi-tation . White men were not congenitally untrust-worthy, but the world certainly inclined them in thatdirection .

Padmore did not seek to place black feet onwhite necks, but he did insist that where black feetprevailed, they should dance to their own music andwear their own shoes . To the extent that all non-whites suffered from white exploitation, Padmorebelonged to the third world, but this concept wouldlose significance under conditions of global socialism .(It is impossible to prove, but permissible to sug-gest that some of Padmore's ideas wore off on FrantzFanon during their brief intimacy in Accra in 1959 .)Padmcre, then, was ecumenical over the long haul,inclined to be impatient with the notion of negritudeand scornful of what he termed the fascist notion ofracial distinctions . Though he frequently remindedpeople that he was the grandson of a slave, thepoint was made for historical purposes (and of courseto create unease in his auditors), not to explain hispsychological posture .

It could be argued that in all this he was beingWest Indian, thereby revealing a world view far morecomprehensive than his black counterparts in Americacould be expected to possess . There is much truthin the proposition that no matter what else thecolonial regimes have done in the Caribbean - and thecatalogue of injustices is formidable - they haveproduced men such as C .L .R . James, Eric Williams,Marcus Garvey, Henry Sylvester-Williams, ArthurLewis, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon and George Padmore .Indeed, Stokley Carmichael is best interpreted in

18

this light . The last, the most terrible indictmentwhich can be laid against white America is that thesystem creates black men who are, if possible, evenmore parochial than their white fellow countrymen .For generations in black America the past was a darktunnel, while the future could be imagined as a pro-jection of the hopeless present . Not so for the WestIndian boy with brains . He possessed a history,almost unimaginably harsh, to be sure, but neverthe-less a history linking him to the whole of theBritish Empire, which for a century meant the wholeof this earth . It is this infusion of self-confi-dence into the leadership of black American movementsby West Indians (tension-prcducing at the best oftimes) which must be grasped if their full dimen-sions are to be understood . By framing his questionsagainst the widest possible background, Padmore wasfulfilling a conventional Caribbean role : on the onehand working out his own destiny in exile ; on theother enlarging the understanding of men who system-atically had been denied the chance to measure theirown woes on a global scale .

AFRO-AMERICAN NATIONALISM

Finally, however, Padmore made conventional anidea long espoused by DuBois . Africa, if free,could redress the wrongs endured by those of Africandescent . Not perhaps through the sword of vengeance,but certainly by a moral pressure which theimperialists would find it impossible to ignore .Thus, when _The Black Panther (4 May 1968) prints aletter of support from the African National Congress,the impotence of this exiled nationalist body does notmatter . What counts is the feeling that southernAfricans are aware of and determined to change condi-tions in northern California . (Robert Kennedy'squickness to preceive the enlarged horizons of blackAmericans led him to make his South African trip .

Idoubt if very many other American politicians thenunderstood the way in which the US and South Africaare linked in the minds of black intellectuals .)

Today, then, even in the black bourgeois press

2 .

3 .

19

Africa is accorded respect, and its affairs aretreated seriously (see Tan, Ebony and the NegroDigest .) To this extent, Padmore's ghost must feelvindicated . But, where his influence really hasscored is in the newer radical press where theideas of Nkrumah, whom he publicized tirelesslyfor 12 years, find their most congenial abode .Africa must unite, Padmore constantly asserted,but this was in aid of a greater cause - blackdignity - by which he would have understood thephrase black power .

See my article "The Negro American Press andAfrica in the 1930s" in the Can adian Journal ofAfrican Studies (1967) .See my Black Revolutionary : George Padmore'sPath from Communism to Pan-Afri canism LondonTiff, ig67~- _His best exposition of this concept is printedas an appendix in W . H . Friedland and C . G .Rosberg, eds ., African Socialism (Stanford,1964) .

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Document : C.L .R . James on the Origins

Editor's Note : Born in Trinidad in 1901, C .L .R .James, after being educated and teaching in hisnative country, went to England in 1932 . Here he be-came involved in both the struggle for nationalemancipation of the West Indies and Africa and inthe revolutionary socialist movement . He was, alongwith George Padmore, one of a handful who organizedthe International Africa Bureau, a small agita-tion.al group which became a center of African revolu-tion . In 1938 his History _of _the Ne~~ro Revolt, thefirst significant study of sha ^_revolts, was~pub-lished ; later in the same year, _Th_e _Black Jacobins ,TTo_ussasaintnt _L'Ouverture and the San cmingo Revolution,best known of his works, appeared . -Soon he came toUnited States on a speaking tour, and remained until1953, involved in basic theoretical work, politicalstruggle, and even for a time as an organizer oftenant farmers and share croppers in southernMissouri . At the height of McCarthyism he was de-ported from the United States . From 1957 to 1961 hewas Secretary of the West Indian Federal Labor Partyand the editor of the official newspaper, The Nation .In 1 ;61 he broke with the Party's leadership and sincethat time has engaged in literary and politicalactivities in England and the West Indies . InJanuary of 1908 he was a delegate to the culturalCongress in Havana .

The following portion of a speech delivered inDetroit in January, 1967, is printed as a document ofthe internationalism of the black struggle and areminiscence of an important but too little-knownfigure .

W . E . B . DuBois wrote about Africa for along time, and he set himself to make not only Africa,but Western Civilization understand that the enslavement of the African people was not only a disgracebut a burden to Western Civilization itself . He helda series of Pan-African conferences . I hear peoplesay that DuBois was a great Race leader . That wasonly part of it . At the time DuBois was holdingthese Pan-African conferences, there were secretariesof state in the United States, there were journalists,there were writers, there were travelers--not one ofthem understood what Africa meant and would mean inthe years to come . DuBois stood alone . It is truehe was helping the Negro people, the African people,but it was not an African task . He was not anAfrican leader . In that respect as well as in thewriting of history, he was one of the foremost

CLR JAMES

22

Americans of his time . And in regard to what he wassaying about Africa he was one of the foremost men'among politicians, economists, sociologists and theothers who were dealing with world civilization atthe time and not confining themselves to the narrowlimitation of one country . In 1935 DuBois wroteBlack Reconstruction , a history of the Negro in theCivil War and its aftermath with general remarksabout the Civil War, and what happened in the statesNegroes governed or took part in governing after theCivil War . DuBois not only told that story ; hebroi-,ght into it many important matters -- the FrenchRevolution, the American Revolution, the ParisCommune, the Treaty of Versailles, the condition ofthe Communist International--and he knitted all ofthese into a structure in which he placed the contri-bution of the Negro people to their own emancipa-tion .

It is one of the greatest history books everwritten . . . .

The world needed the work of DuBois at thetime . It was what was required . The beginning ofthe twentieth century saw the beginning of the necessity of involving not only Negro people in WesternCivilization, but also the African people in theworld that was being born . DuBois saw the impor-tance of history, economics, sociology, etc ., and sawthat without an understanding of the role of theNegro people it was impossible to get a clear andconsistent and comprehensive view of American civi-lization as a whole . And that I believe was thecause of his strength and the remarkable range of hisaccomplishments . I insist that to call him only aNegro leader is to do him an injustice ; it is to doan injustice to the Negro people, to strike a greatblow against clear view of Western Civilization as awhole .

GARVEY

Next, I want to speak of Marcus Garvey, whomarks a new stage . What DuBois did in regard to thePan-African movement, in educating intellectuals,journalists and persons who were interested in Africa,

23

Garvey took up . He did not get it from DuBois .Garvey found his task because the West Indies werein a certain situation, and being a black man andlimited by this, Garvey felt it necessary to cleara space . And in clearing a space for himself andthe Negro people of the West Indies, he cleared upa lot of litter about the history and developmentof the African people .

Marcus Garvey was not a scholarly man, he wascareless in the things he said . He used to say"400 million Negroes"--multiplying the number by two .That is okay with me ; he could have multiplied bythree as far as I am concerned . He was saying some-thing that had to be said . He had picked it up fromvarious books he had read, but I don't think it wasso much a matter of scholarship with him . DuBoishad been writing scholarship about Africa for manyyears . Garvey said : the Negro was born free, but iseverywhere in chains, and he must break the chains torecapture a lost freedom . It was a conception, itwas a necessity he saw ; there was an encumbered spacethat had to be cleared up, and he did so with greatvigor .

Marcus Garvey at his height functioned fromabout 1917 to about 1923 . When he was finished, theNegro people and the people of Africa were an integral part of world history, where they have remainedever since . This despite the mistakes he made .

Garvey mobilized, he put forward schemes thatwere not very good . Many men have done that . Butwhat Garvey did was to make people understand thatthe African people had to be incorporated into thefuture, that they had had a civilization in the past .Garvey did not have the historical knowledge forspeaking about Africa's ancient civilizations (whichhave since been established by scholars), but hefelt it was right, that it was needed . Garvey,without scholarship, felt an empty space in thehistory of the Negro peoples, and according to hislimited historical ability, he filled it in the bestway he could . In doing so he accomplished, in myopinion, the greatest propaganda feat of thetwentieth century . . . .

24

PADMORE

And now I go quite rapidly to George Padmore .

I have to spend a little time here . You know, when I

was a boy I lived in Trinidad . My parents wereTrinidadian . We knew nothing about Africa except whatwe had learned from the British .

And what theytaught us was what they themselves believed aboutAfrica except what we had learned from the British .And what they taught us was what they themselves be-lieved about Africa--or perhaps what they wanted us tobelieve .

I knew a boy in Trinidad named Malcolm Nurse,who later became George Padmore . I knew his family,he knew mine .

He used to go to Arima (Trinidad) as aboy of 10 or 11 where my father used to teach andspend his vacation . During July and August, morningafter morning, Malcolm and I used to go to the ArimaRiver to bathe . At the bottom of the hill, which atthe top was an ice factory, we'd go walking up theriver about a mile -to the Blue Basin and swim . Wehadn't the faintest idea .that the time would come whenwe would be heading movements in Europe and Americafor the emancipation of the African people . Younever know where you will be and what will happen toyou . Well, we remained great friends . In about1922 he went to the United States and joined theCommunist Party . I think he was profoundly influ-enced by Garvey . I know I was . Because Garvey usedto publish a paper called the Negro World , theTrinidad government forbade it coming into thecountry, but I managed to buy my copy every Saturdaymorning down St . Vincent Street in Port of Spain .I'm pretty sure George used to read it, too .

Well, Padmore went to England, to America .Then in 1928 the Communist Party made him head of theNegro department of the Third International . I donot think any other Negro had such a position ofpower and influence in the International . Georgereally was one of the Communist leaders, and he didtremendous work organizing Negroes, stimulatingNegroes, writing in Negro journals, writing books,etc ., and all with the power and authority of Moscow .

25

I used to see him . In those days I was aTrotskyist, but we remained good friends and neverquarelled about our differences . He was a remarkableman in many respects . One day in 1935, I rememberit well, there was a knock at the door of my flat inLondon . I opened it and there was George . I said,"George, is something wrong?" He said, I have leftthose people, you know ." I was startled . He sup-ported Moscow, I was against them, and he had leftthem . So I said, Well, come in, sit down ." I said,"What is it?" He said, "They are changing theirpolicy ." And George told me that they had new toldhim they were going to make friends with the demo-cratic imperialists, Britain, France and the UnitedStates ; and that future pro-Negro propaganda shouldbe directed against Germany, Japan and Italy, andplayed quite softly in regard to the "democracies ."Padmore said, "But that is impossible ." He said,"Germany and Japan have no colonies in Africa, sohow can I say that the Negroes in Africa must beemancipated, but they have friends in the democraticimperialists of France and England?" They say, "Well,that is the line ."

He said, "Well, that may be yourline, but that is a mess," and packed up and left .

There was something else very important abouthim . Padmore remained a leader of the people whohad joined him when he worked as a leader of theCommunist Party, and no attempt of the CommunistParty to change them ever did . I think he was one ofthe few who were members of the Communist Inter-national, left it, and retained his influence overthe people he had built up while under their aegis .

At the time I was chairman of an organizationin London, "The International African Friends ofEthopia ." George joined the organization and whenit came to an end, formed the International AfricanBureau .

Padmore was chairman of that, and I waseditor of the paper, International African Opinion .The Bureau was at that time the only politicalorganization devoted to the emancipation of theAfrican people . A more tireless leader than Georgewould be hard to imagine :

anyone who came fromAfrica, whether as a member of the government or to

26escape persecution by the British police, found hisway to Padmore's house and received Padmore's advice .

In New York I met a man called FrancisNkrumah . I used to call him Francis in those days,

we all did . We became very friendly, and when hesaid he was going to London, I wrote a letter toPadmore saying, "George, this young man is coming to

you .

He is not very bright, but nevertheless do what

you can for him because he's determined to throw theEuropeans out of Africa ." I am not disturbed aboutsaying he was not very bright ; he used to talk a lotabout imperialism and Leninism and export of capital,and he used to talk a lot of nonsense . But he wentto England ; Padmore met him at Victoria Station . And

he began to work with Padmore . In 1945 there was aconference in Manchester, the Fifth Pan-AfricanCongress, organized by Padmore . Kwame Nkrumah de-livered a speech on imperialism which was an absolutemasterpiece . He had learned all there was to belearned from Padmore .

From that conference in Manchester in 1945Padmore got Dr . DuBois to come from the United Statesand be the chairman because of the work DuBois haddone on Pan-Africanism from the time before Padmorehad been born .

That was quite an event, in 1945 ; a littlelater something happened . Kwane Nkrumah was invitedto Ghana to work, the Gold Coast it was called then .The story runs that he didn't want to go particularly,because he was busy organizing in London and Europe .Padmore insisted that he should go . Francis went,and led the revolution, and while that was going onin the west of Africa, the Mau Mau were carrying ontheir activities in the east, and I want you to under-stand that we had no idea that the things which wewere fighting for would come with such rapidity .Naturally we backed Nkrumah, and Padmore worked withhim to the end ; I did what I could also . But wehad not the faintest idea that after it had takenplace in Ghana, before ten years had passed, seven-eighths of Africa would be independent . That demon-strates an important political lesson : do yourbusiness, do you work, and trust that things willcome your way if you have an idea that is ready to work .

You know, in those days they must havethought Padmore and the rest of us (Jomo Kenyattawas a member, Nkrumah became a member, but most ofus were West Indians at the time) were well-meaningbut illiterate people talking about the inde-pendence of Africa, Pan-Africa, a lot of nonsense .But it turns out that we were right and they, thelearned ones, were wrong . We were able to see itbecause we were members of an oppressed group ofpeople and knew what was in front of us had to becleared up . That is what made DuBois and Garvey thehistorical figures that they were . Now Padmorewent to Ghana when it was established, working withNkrumah, organizing the first Conference ofIndependent African States and the first Conferenceof African Freedom Fighters .

He worked in Ghanauntil he died, and I was then in the West Indies .Three or four days after I heard the news came abundle of pamphlets and documents about a confer-ence from Padmore, saying "We have finished and Isent this to you."

FANON

27

Finally, I wish to discuss Franz Fanon . Iwant you to follow the general trend . First,DuBois the scholar . A wide range of matters concerning Africa -- he dealt with each of them andlaid down lines which are valuable to this day .DuBois introduced Africa to the intellectuals .Then came Garvey, who translated a view of Africainto public property : that was a stage in thedevelopment of the consciousness of the world .The next, Padmore, who became a political organizer,was a man very different from Garvey and fromDuBois, but an organizer of the first class . Andthe last one, Fanon, from Martinique, French WestIndies, went to France and studied psychiatry .Fanon then went to Algeria and joined the AlgerianRevolution . While Padmore organized various peopleto prepare for the Revolution in Africa., Fanon wenthimself ; he went to Algeria, and as a doctor and arevolutionary he played a tremendous role .

28

Before he died, he left a book that has recently beentranslated, called _Les D_amnes_de la Terre .

In this

book Fanon went a stage beyond DuBois, Garvey and

Padmore .Fanon said : In the nationalist revolution of

the twentieth century, the people must be against not

only the imperialists . Some of the people's leaderswho come forward to lead the revolution have nowhere

to lead the people, and the revolution must be asfiercely against them as against the imperialists .

He said that some of the writers, having learned allthey could from Western civilization, will join therevolution, but bring nothing positive and corrupt therevolutionary movement . The intellectuals will have

to learn that they must dig deep among the mass of thepopulation to find the elements of a truly nationalculture .

While one can find many mistakes in Fanon'swork, his greatness lays in this total devotion tothe revolution, to wiping away everything but the massof the population, to creating a new and revolu-tionary nationalism . Nothing else will do . And thebook is, in its way, a hymn to the idea of revolu-tion . Sartre says that Europeans have to read thebook because the state in which civilization now is,demands on the part of "les damnes de la terre"--not only the colonial peoples but all who suffer theweight and bitterness of what Western Civilizationhas done--must feel all this totality of revolutionand of what government is as Fanon felt it .

Fanon was swept away by a certain conception,the necessity to finish off what is bound to corruptand pervert the development of a colonial population .And the value of the book is not only what it says tocolonials . It is recognized more and more byEuropeans that something of this spirit is needed torid from Western Civilization the problems and burdensthat are pressing down humanity as a whole!

Now I think that this is the final stage whichwe have reached so far . I don't know where we willreach tomorrow . That is a consistent sequence thattells not only the history of the development of theBlack intellectuals, but the history of the

development of ideas which are of the greatest valueto civilization as a whole . Fanon calls his book_Les Damnes _de _la Terre ; it is translated as the"Wretched of the Earth," but I prefer "The Condemnedof the World ." I want to end by saying this : thework done by Black intellectuals, stimulated by theneeds of the Black people, had better be understoodby the condemned of the earth whether they're inAfrica, the United States or Europe . Because if thecondemned of the earth do not understand their pastsand know the responsibilities that lie upon them inthe future, all on the earth will be condemned . Thatis the kind of world we live in .

sc_"�* . :?:St : . :, . . . . . . .:? :d : .:?cac* ::?: ::?c ..

?:::

::i59: :: .. .:

9. .. .; #S. .. .: .:?c

PICTURE CREDITS : on p .5 from Harpers , circa 1870,with permission of the State Historical Society ofWisconsin ; on p .21 from Mariners & Renegades ; onp .32 from Neues Deutschland $ on pp .34-35, from OPENPROCESS ; on-.p .45 from Kinq _Mob Hill ; on p .58,fromSocialist Labor Party Commerative Magazine (1940) ;on p .63, from The Comrade (1901)$ on inside cover,from Industrial Worker; back cover,from Inner CityVoice

29

30

Black Editor : An Interview

The following is from an interview with John

Watson, the editor of the Inner City Voice , Detroit's

black revolutionary newspaper . Watson has had a wide

experience in the movement, both in various aspects

of the black student movement and as a black auto

and newspaper worker .

In addition to being editor

of the Inner City Voice , Watson is now the editor of

the Wayne State University newspaper, the South End .

Q . What were the origins of the Inner City Voice ?

What are its aims? What has been its experience?

A . The Inner City Voice was created in response to

certain adverse conditions that black militants had

found in Detroit and in the country as a whole, condi-

tions stopping the further development of a permanent

and powerful revolutionary movement among black

people . In the last ten years there has been a rise

in consciousness among blacks, particularly students,

that created an entirely different political climate .

But this has serious drawbacks and hangups . The major

one is the general instability of the movement . As

far back as 1960 or 1959 there were people involved in

various organizations that were single issue oriented,

they had some particular object such as a sit-in

campaign, police brutality, war, the peace movement,

etc . These organizations had a life of their own --

internal organizational activity, with lots of people

doing concrete work against the system . But they

could not sustain themselves, they would fall apart .

Then there would be a new upsurge, a new organization .

31

There was a wave like character of the movement, ithad its ebb and flow, and because it had singleissues it had no clear ideology . There was everythingfrom bourgeois integrationists to black nationaliststo Marxist-Leninists . But the movement could notkeep up with either these single purpose organiza-tions or with the general movement of the blackcommunity . Before the July Insurrection we had anadvanced community but no organization or leadershipas advanced . Therefore, there was no organiza-tional continuity . That is one of the lessons thatthe July Insurrection reinforced .

How to build a party, a black Bolshevik Party?How to organize black workers coordinate theactivities of black students, how to break away fromthe old radical organizations? As students ofhistory we went back to see how people did thesekinds of things, how in particular they attainedrelative permanence . We had studied the history ofthe Russian Bolsheviks and found a specific pamphletby Lenin called "Where to Begin", written in 1903,before he wrote "What is to be Done?," where hedescribed the role a newspaper could play . A news-paper was the focus of a permanent organization, itcould provide a bridge between the peaks of activity .It creates an organization and organizes the divisionof labor among revolutionaries . Revolutionaries dosomething, not just a meeting on Sunday, makingspeeches and passing resolutions . It creates thekind of division of labor needed not just for thenewspaper but for a revolutionary organizaticn .

It was these tasks that we set out to performthrough the creation of the Inner City Voice . Thepeople who created it were Marxist-Leninists, revolutionary socialists, or at least thought of themselvesin this way . We wanted to build an organization ofblack workers, of black students, both in highschools and colleges, and ultimately to create ablack Marxist-Leninist Party, flowing from thenewspaper .

This was no easy task - we draw all our re-sources from the black community . And there was noexperience among us in terms of publishing, we had

32

no experience insofar as conducting a business opera-tion, we had no money . When we first began we wentaround to a lot of people . Lenin's idea about a news-paper seemed so logical to us but unfortunately manypeople didn't see it . Only some young black radicalsdid . We had only to face the question of going aheadand creating that kind of paper . We had a lot tolearn . We had an organization that operated day-to-dayrather than week-to-week and meeting-to-meeting . Andthat kind of activity got us involved in all theproblems of people working closely together on a day-by-day basis . We had to solve this .

We started work in May of 1967 .

We workedthrough the July Insurrection and came out finally inSeptember . There was a great deal of criticism of thepaper, we had too many typos, the articles had errors,etc ., etc ., but the important thing is that each issuehas improved from the experience of the last issue .We had to make our own experience, typos and all .

3 3

When we first began there was the questionabout whether we were a vague black nationalistorganization or a Marxist-Leninist organization .The revolutionaries won despite the fact that becausewe have not yet written out a program, many essen-tially reformist people came around to play off therhetoric of the movement .

The Inner City Voice has proven many things .It is a very`popular paper . We have been printing10,000 copies each recent issue and these have beenalmost all sold . We are popular despite the sporadicnature of production - we have only been coming outabout once a month . Even the most reformist cannotattack us because we have created an independentbase in the black community . No one can redbait us-- a lot of people read the paper and we can attackand hurt those who call us "Black Power Communists ."The power of the black left has been able to increasethrough the Inner City Voi ce .

We are well received in the black community .Most of our problems are financial . The organiza-tion of circulation is very diffuse . It is difficult to get back full value from sales . But we havemanaged to survive . And more than that . Since theinitiation of the Voice , several other things havehappened . All of them, including the developmentof the Voice ,. are part of an objective developmentaround which groups could coalesce . And this hasbeen so because the first problem has been solved :despite the ebb and flow of activity, we have apermanent organization .

Around the Voice there is a conglomeration ofactivity . We have our office in a large buildingwith our own coffee house and with our own school,teaching black history and now courses in Marxism-Leninism . The coffee house is very popular with thecommunity . Also housed in the same building is thenew publication, the Black Student Voi ce, whichcoordinates the activities of the spontaneous groupsthat have been formed in inner city schools . We areinvolved with organizing workers . At the Dodge Mainplant in Hamtramack, 60-700 of the workers are black .(continued on page 36)

Michael Kalmen

3 6

Some of the Inner City Voice people were working there

and were deeply involved in a wildcat strike . Out ofthis came the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and

now a weekly paper, DRUM . This is a very importantdevelopment because this_is the first time recentlythat black radicals, any radicals for that matter in

the country, have organized workers .What we know is that black workers have the

power to close down the American economy . Onlyworkers can end the war and black workers will be andare in the lead . Only the working class can carrythrough the revolution . Ultimately we must see allsegments united around the working class in a revolu-tionary party - workers, students, intellectuals,community organizations .

The newspaper is moving in this direction .The Inner City Voice has gone far to accomplish whatLenin described in "Where to Begin" . It has been thefocus of a permanent organization, it provided abridge between peaks of activity . It has organizedthe division of labor among black revolutionaries andcreated a network throughout the community .

Q . Stokley Carmichael in a speech to the BlackPanther conference in Oakland some months ago saidthat socialism and communism were not for black people,despite the fact that he had been going all over theworld, including to the OLAS conference in Havana,speaking for socialism . What is your reaction to allof this?

A . Our position on this is that it is bullshit . Tosay socialism or communism is irrelevent is foolishand we oppose this . We know, of course, that youdon't go around to the ghetto community and tell themwith every breath that socialism is the answer . Youorganize around concrete issues . But in a publicdebate in which this subject comes up, we opposeStokley . There are a number of different kinds ofblack nationalists . I don't know exactly whereStokley stands . There are black capitalists, thereare black mystics, there are black community organiza-tion types, there are those with no ideology, there

37

are

those who see it as a straight cultural matter,

a

matter of identity

.We

take a Marxist-Leninist position

.

The

question

of black people in the United States is a

caste

and class problem

.

Black men are exploited as

a

function of the capitalist system as a whole by

white

capital

.

Racism is a tool which the man uses

to

carry out his exploitation

.

And we are no more

for

integrated capitalism than segregated capitalism

.Neither

are we in favor of a separate state, based

on

the same class lines as in this society

.

We are

against

a separate state in which a black capitalist

class

exploits a black proletariat

.

We are opposed

also

to all sorts of haphazard analyses which certain

revolutionaries

talk, even in semi-socialist terms,

haphazard

talk which doesn't tell us what to do with

the

United States capitalism and imperialism

As

to separatism, we leave that question until it

can

be decided by the whole black people, after the

destruction

of capitalism

.If

Stokley comes to Detroit, in a city with

socialized

production, owned by capitalists, in which

speedup,

bad working conditions, automation,

"niggermation"

(in which one black man does the job

previously

done by three white men) prevail, what

does

he- say?

Is

he for the white capitalists?

Ishe

for turning the industry over to black capi-

talists?

Is he for destroying industry? Is he for

black

workers being exploited no more than white

workers?There

is a struggle over cultural nation-

alism

and it is not an abstract ideological question

.There

is all sorts of analyses but unless we see

slavery

and racism as extended under capitalism as

tools

of capitalism, we cannot go anywhere

.

What

should

we do? Work primarily with students? Work

primarily

with workers? Get students involved with

workers?

These are concrete questions

.I

don't know whether Stokley has capitulated

to

the cultural nationalists

.

I

am surprised by

someone

who goes around the world and makes all sorts

of

statements, revolutionary statements, and comes

38

back here and makes statements like the one at theBlack Panther rally . We note that Huey Newton, theBlack Panther leader, from jail said that blacks mustbe socialists . Not an abstraction which you preachat people but a concrete ideology which directs whatyou do .

A lot of black nationalists go around and saywe need a new ideology because the experiences ofblack folk are different . But these people havenever studied history, not even the history of blackpeople in this country . They talk of a new ideology,out of the sky, rather than looking to Marxism-Leninism . Not that the Marxism of the past had allthe answers . But we know that Marxism is a parti-cular method and that it is a newer and moreinherently revolutionary method of gaining blackfreedom than haphazard analysis .

Of course, thereshould be discussion in the movement but this is ourpoint of view .

There are all sorts of people who say thatwhat we need is black unity . But the thing is thatthe real world doesn't operate that way . There arereal differences in the black community and some ofthem are class or at least semi-class based . We areone contending force in that community . We have toput forward not a diluted reformist program based ona false unity, but our point of view and win thatstruggle . We cannot unify with everybody . That'sbullshit . Certain programs we can support whole-heartedly, certain programs we can support tacticallyand certain programs we can't have anything to dowith at all . We can coexist with cultural nation-alists but we are black Marxist-Leninists and there-fore when Stokley is attacking socialism he isattacking us . How can socialism be irrelevant? Wedon't understand that .

Sunday, 7 July 1968Detroit, Michigan

Boston Road Blues

Boston Road is as wide as a boulevardbut lacks the classic grandeur of verdureTenements and bleacher-like stoopsline the cobblestone expanse through Mid-Bronxthe cars & trucks sound faster then they gooften

cobbled stone runs up into pink brickof the Housing Authority's stadium

ride a speeding BonneviIlealong this main streetand you will see the Negroes waiting on either sideon stoops on dinette and aluminum beach chairslike the retired

bop cap and sneakered Jewsof the Grand Concourse

at 149th st Boston Road passes perpendicularunder th,e Elthen the Shadow Box Cabaret, Freddy's, the Oasis,Sylvia's Blue Morocco, Paradise Club, Goodson'son to Crotona Parkwhere one summer of the fifth decadethe burning Enchanters bopped dowryon the Crowns, the Bathgate Avenue Stompers,and the Scorpions from PRin rapid fury & successionand now

where the same adolescentsplay softball for the Youth Board .

4o

and the inlet to Public School 55the swinging "Cadillacs" always tookEarl at the fishtail wheelresponding to 'hey Speedo' when in realityhis real name was Mister Earlsinging as he was

his teeth jumbled & contortedthe Cadillacs personnel tall and shortsundry and aloofgleaming bemused hairthe only top to the convertiblethe only road map to the sun .parked in front of all-girl Jane Addamstheir marijuana their argot their ornate autorouted by a militant lady principal . . .All the quartets sang louderwhen the Cadi I lacs cruised Brook Avenue-

P .S . 55 is to integrated this Autumnthe Cadi I locs have passed (Earl now with the Coasters)and the Housing Authority has arrivedas influential as Jesusas gigantic as the Tennessee Valley Authority .1501 Boston Road is Bronx C. O. R . E .

(stompers haven risen to politics)Herb Callender

Isiah Brunson

knife ridingshit talking

genius pacifist-The road swirls until ghetto limitswhere

above two hundred streetit becomes tar smooth

single similar doublecaucasian family homesand Boston Road become Boston Post Road .

I IWhen I was a singerI stayed on Boston Road

among the cabarets & the singers : the Dells,the Mellotones, the CadiIlacs .,

our quartet calling ourselves Starsteppers(perhaps to insure a goal

other than a ghetto)evinced no concept of space save

where the cobblestone Roadand the bleachers-on-residence tampered to a pointwhere The Road became post-itself,

by twilight the clubs released their exotic luresSylvia's Blue Morocco sheds blue light both neon & realon sidewalk and cobblestones between Shabazz Beauty Parlor& Denzi I's Fabulous candystoreVelvet Blue drapes hang ceiling to floorand all to be seen inside is the spotlighted faceof the singer

the dim blue faces of the musicthe soloist

the master of ceremonies

-headstruncated in blackness

puppeted by galloping

Hessians from Scarsdale

And Freddy's white enamel front white lightsall outward

upwardharlem jazz exude bandstand tall

mixingwith moth & mosquito insect-serendipity

all white light reflected spill over bleacher sittersparked car residers, vigillers, standee's dispersed

and reassembled .The tenements soar skywardhalf white light half black dwindling to skystars dismissed by energy of mortals,

& for a moment Club 845 the combo in the window (display)sunday combination cocktail sips jam sessionsfor bored number players 4pm to 8pmafter church and before chicken .

IIIWe Starsteppers

wore the same type cord suit blueand as a rhythm 'n' blues singer my PAT BOONE endorsedone afforded uniform discomfort as just rewardfor being in a hurry in an 125th Street clothing store

(probably thinking the street was in Harlem)and contributing to the corny man (:Patrick Alphonse Boone

Columbia University 1959)who stole Little Richard's tunes& parodied them into a fortune .Little Richard receiving lyricist royaltiesbut no TV showno life insurance & old age compensationonly a backwater church Southernthe Godthe Holy Ghostthe Son

of a pagan country .

The Starstepper organization carried four singersthree managers and a lopsided Cadillac

Let's take a cocktail sipand talk of the crippled '55 Caddy in 1960

-the epoch of reform-Buddy, our main manager, wrote and recorded a songcalled "SCHBOOM"then the Crewcuts swept away the breadthe Man couldn't use a colored group on TV 1954Buddy got the writer's royalties

/thoand I would suppose that Sunset Boulevardin a brand new white caddy convertiblethings travel quicklyas that colored group did in L.A .singing the Crewcuts song .

Spenser-yet another manager-

Then one day I told Goodson, sirthe Starsteppers have a recording out nowand we are not accepting anymore

clubdateson Boston Road, our managers have instructed meto to I I you .

ZAP 1

torpedo-head lank lipped

sold "Let the Little Girl Dance"for one hundred bills

Fat Billy Bland & three young colored girls took overand Spenserbecause he had a hit record (moneywise not his)sported his long red conk all over Tin Pan Alleyharanguing the Bri ll Building

and shitborrowing the singled axled Cadillacby dayto return at nighthair out of gas

car out of gasspent

IVSoafter record hops (anywhere and everyone)community center and house party gigsbackground harmony (of our own invention) forBIG TIME RECORD COMPANYten dollars a daysteady gigging Goodson's (gay) Little Clubon Boston-Road-by-RandoIph

(The clientele loved fresh young talentedthey said / Goodson too)

We recorded Broadway in a white CadillacHigh School boys & old hustlersHandkerchiefs Sabu over Pozner-fresh conkblack and red

Outside the "Little" club on the Road that last nightI watched the tiny attracter lightswing its eerie strobic beam twenty times yellowa minute

to the street stones of steep 167thlong across Boston Road

the island in front of A&Pthrough the trees

catching the tenements highthen diffused and broken runs

to re/wingthe tiny canopy of Goodson's Little Club

then down 167th again(which in the Bronx has a common level of understanding)

take Sunset Boulevardto give a sense of dimension

Laterthe higher forms of publicityour managers had subsequently informedMr . Goodson ofconsisted of giving all available copiesof our hit record to friendsoccasional pilgrimages downtownfor pep talks about word-of-mouthwaiting days

waiting nightsNew York Radio stations

New Jersey Stations(WVNJ played it at six one morning)JOCKO MURRAY THE K ALLEN FREED CLAY COLEDR JIVE BRUCE THE MOOSE announcing to their

boys & girls the new boss hit by the starsteppers"You're Gone"

the flip side that you'll wig over"The First Sign of Love"

We were toldit often takes months

up to a yearfor a record to be picked up onsometimes they start big on the Coastwe waited

six months

a yearreading CASHBOX weeklywe waited (never to Goodson again)we waitedand after a whilestarted singing to ourselves once more .

David Henderson

New Perspectives on American Radicalism

Paul Buhle

Only the naive or the willfully blind canbelieve that the Left has not failed in America . Asuccessful radical struggle forcing U .S . withdrawalfrom Vietnam (and there is every reason to believe itis the victory of the Vietnamese, and not our ownfeeble protests, that can accomplish this end) wouldbe a striking exception to American history . Thegains in unionization of industrial workers havearrived alongside a massive dessecation and frag-mentation of American culture and an ever-increasingAmerican imperialism . As life at home mirrors asubtle social manipulation, and our government'sforeign policy teeters always on the edge of nuclearattack on People's China, the positivist notion thatsocialism can be gained by accretion, or gradualtransformation, becomes a ghastly irony . It is timefor a major reassessment of our traditions and thebasis on which we stand .

To a student of intellectual history, the mostglaring defect of American radicalism has been itsfailure in analytical terms, the almost total inability of radicals to grasp rudimentary problems ofrevolutionary development . It is significant that ofthe few countrymen who have made anything approach-ing independent contributions to Marxist theory--Daniel DeLeon, L . C . Fraina/Lewis Corey, Paul Baran,Paul Sweezy, Herbert Marcuse and C .L .R . Ja;,.es--only two were American educated (and even in thosecases, a major European influence could be argued) .The explanation cannot be that Marxism has been

47

"foreign" to American conditions, but rather thatAmerican radicals have been foreign to Marxism .

One key is the wide acceptance of a petrifiedversion of Marxism developed during the SecondInternational and challenged but only temporarilydefeated by Leninism .

As early as the 1890's, theimplications of this acceptance were clear . DanielDeLeon, widely known at the time as the mostorthodox of Marxists, freely admitted that he gainedhis first taste for Marxism from Lewis Henry Morgan,the anthropologist, and just as DeLeon continued tocall his methodology the "Marx-Morgan System," hesprinkled his famous speeches with continualanalogies between man and nature, modern historywith the pre-ancient history that Morgan described .The one Marxist classic which seems to have made agreat impression on DeLeon was not Capital butrather Engels' _Anti-Duhring , the very work whichdeveloped the notion of a "dialectic of nature," inwhich the history of man could be interpreted asmechanical and pre-determined . )

Concommitant with the use of a stultifiedMarxism which ''explained'the world in static termswas, in DeLeon and his successors in Americansocialism, a crude adaptation to American tradi-tions and history . In the early days of hisSocialist Labor Party leadership, DeLeon continuallyasserted that the SLP was the "third third party"of American history (hence, following the parties ofJefferson and Lincoln), that the socialists werethe abolitionists of wage slavery just as theabolitionists of earlier years helped banish blackslavery . It seems clear that Marxism to DeLeonmeant not a dialectical approach to human events,but a system which allowed in theory a nineteenth-century assurance that Science resided with thesocialist movement, and in practice a crudematerialism which was, in fact, a characteristicthrowback to the ideology of the bourgeois revolu-tions, 2 for DeLeon continued to hold in practicethat the mass ofwage-earners responded only totheir immediate material needs . In retrospect hisactions seem pragmatic, but tempered by a shrewd

48

consciousness of the implications of the proletariat'srelative economic position in society . 3

DeLeon'sfailure to build a leading socialist party reflectedthat not he, but Debsian socialism, was the successorto the American reform tradition .

DEBSIAN SCCIALISM

In recent years the Debsian socialist movementhas, for very good reasons, been debated in thesharpest terms . The Socialist Party at its height hada major press all across the country and grassrootsof socialist belief that no party has approachedsince, and therefore its successes and failures mustweigh heavily on those who look toward the creationof a new revolutionary movement . The central pointin the discussion of radical historians has been therapid transformation of the Socialist Party from aparty of largely American-born skilled workers,farmers and others in 1912 to a party of largely 4foreign-born industrial unskilled workers in 1919 .One solution to this puzzle has always been obvious,and was stressed b 7T the old socialist leader JamesMaurer three decades ago : the pre-World War Icivilization was dramatically, almost totally dif-ferent from our own in some ways . The mass slaughterof world war, the concentration camps and ovens, theextent of perversion of culture into a saleable com-modity, were scarcely imagineable in those times .There was, perhaps, good reason to believe thatcapitalism had gone through its heroic period in theworld and was "logically" due to disappear rapidly .More important than a timetable for the arrival ofsocialism was the linear mentality of the socialiststhemselves, who believed with historically under-standable optimism that things were getting better andbetter, that socialism was the logical fulfillment ofthe American Dream . The war, the Wilson administra-tion's ap-,peals, the repression in America, the comingof the Bolshevik revolution shattered the ideologicalbasis for a world-view ; and in the wake of those events,the American socialist movement was left a shambles .

49

Foreign-born workers, with fewer illusions and per-haps less to lose, took up the slack only so long asEuropean revolutions seemed in the offing .

Significantly, in the last years of Debsiansocialism there were those who reached out for anew understanding .

Louis C . Fraina began toanalyze capitalism as a system, picturing Progres-sivism as essentially a regulative device formonopoly's interests, viewing philosophy as a servantof the system, studying Futurism, the poetry ofRobert Frost, and even jazz dancing as symbols ofthe cultural stage through which Americans werepassing .s In 1917-1918 Fraina tried to develop anew strategy for revolution in the U .S ., piecingtogether syndicalist, Bolshevik and left-socialisttheories into the notion of "mass action," whichsought to return the motor of the revolution to theindustrial masses . Similarly, the talented editorsand contributors to the Masses and the Liberatordeveloped new dimensions for the political cartoon,a rudimentary social criticism of American mores(with a vague but real grasp of the generaticnalrevolt), and an alliance with the most creative ele-ments of the artisti9 community which the Left hasnever fully revived .

Of course, neither Fraina northe Masses editors went far, and their cultural in-sights were due more to an insightful socialisthumanism than a conscious use of Marxist methodology ;but the poverty of American radicalism can bemeasured by the failure of the Left to advance furtheranalytically until the 1960's .

Most of ail the failure of Americal socialismin the 1920's was that it could not outgrow thebasis of its strength, its links to American reformism . Liberalism on the one side, and theBolshevism of the Third International on the other,proved poles irresistable to the weakness of theAmerican movements . The most profound culturalcriticism of America in the decade was perhaps pro-vided neither by the New era liberals or the blindlygroping communist movement, but by T . S . Eliot andEzra Pound who attempted to grasp American culture

50

as a total entity and sought a monolithic rejectionof its modern tenets .

In time the Marxian critique of America becamean undialectical account of capitalist economics andits "inevitable" crash, along with a side-dish oftasty fictional sentimentalism provided by the pro-letarian artists for those who could not easily absorba turgid row of statistics . It was not an accidentthat DeLeon had translated for mass consumptionFerdinand Lasalle's Franz _Von Sickingen , condemned byMarx for historical inaccuracy, or Eugene Sue's pro-letarian vignettes whose fraudulent glorification ofthe common people was anathema to the leader of theFirst International . Similarly, it was a distinctsymbol of the quality of American Marxism (and notmerely "Stalinism") that good authors in the 1930'sdistorted their art for the sake of a politicalcause . For in both cases, as throughout most ofAmerican Marxist history, "culture" was viewed not asa critical social mechanism, but as a product ofcertain specialized types (as personally fragmented asthe tough-talking party bureaucrats) whose role was toinspire and not to teach .?

THE 1930's

In a political sense, the 1930's activitiesrepresent the watershed--but also the fulfillment--of a phase of American radicalism . The Depressiondescended at a time when the Left was at its weakest,most fragmented stage ; the Socialist Party was adecayed body, the Communist Party a bureaucratizedsect . The first half of the decade was spent in adesperate but futile attempt to break from the pattern .Communist Party internal life became increasinglyrigidified and intolerant of political deviations--Earl Browder commented proudly in 1935 that the Partyburned out factionalism "with a hot iron"--and whilethe Communists sought to gain hegemony over allsectors of a leftward-moving public, it mostly suc-ceeded in alienating its allies . But whatever itsfailings, it organized people most effectively and

5 1

very early established an almost total, unbreakablehegemony on radicalized workers . The Socialists'leadership shifted, by the middle of the 1930's, fromthe Old Guard, social-democratic chiefs to a newgroup of middle-class editors, churchmen andpacifists, allied with the municipal socialists whostill retained some local power in places likeMilwaukee, Reading (Pennsylvania) and Bridgeport(Connecticut) ; but the attempt to revitalize andrevolutionize the party was a distinct failure . Inneither case did really new attempts to assessAmerican life emerge : old Marxists repeated adnauseum the inevitable economic breakdown ofcapitalism, and young followers flocked to factoriesto proclaim the messianism of the industrial pro-letariat, to compuses to fight for a liberal-radical"no war" pledge .

The irony was that the radicals, far from avanguard, were the followers of events in America .While the Communist Party tightened its hold uponits followers and the sects, along with theSocialists, struggled for a reorientation that nevertook shape, the labor movement was preparing itself(albeit with the rank-and-file help of radicals) fora new leap . The General Strike in San Francisco,the victorious battles of workers in Minneapolis andToledo were not signs of a coming revolution butindications of the workers' determination forunionization . Over the next fifteen years, the powerof American liberal capitalism was once morevividly demonstrated : the industrial union idea,popularized by radicals like DeLeon and the I .W .W .,became the most effective means ever developed todiscipline workers in the industrial plants andintegrate a whole stratum of Americans into thesystem . The irony was that the socialists andccmmunists of the 1930's scarcely dreamed of theresults of their labor .

No doubt the situation was so tempting thatnew leftists today would have difficulty beingwiser . For many young radicals then, and especiallyintellectuals, working in a plant to organize theproletariat was a means of destroying their own

52

identity, of communing with a group which seemed morereal and powerful than their cwn . For others, walkingpicket lines and boycotting goods was a direct con-tinuation of the Progressive tradition of paternalismtoward the lower classes, a manifestation of middle-class guilt . For still others, who came out of theworking class, it was a career-fulfillment at thesame time as a radical promise (just as, for anearlier generation of skilled foreign-born workers,the American Federation of Labor was both a vehiclefor social mobility and a place where a certain kindof socialism could be advocated) . When millions ofAmerican workers seemed to need only a union tosalvage their humanity and put food on their tables,the role of radical organizations was simple :organize now, talk later .

Thus by the late 1930's, radicals had ful-filled their mission of introducing a countervailingbut non-revolutionary force which aided the antirevolutionary pluralism of the New Deal coalition .The Popular Front, which non-Communist party radicalshave always believed "sold out" the Revolution, wasonly a symbol of what already existed . In itswriting, in its style of politics, in its generalorientation, the Popular Front was nothing so muchas a _reassertion of the American reform tradition(real or imagined. James Weinstein and MartinSklar have pointed out that Communist Party policiesin the 1930's were foreign imports, having nothingto do with bringing socialism to America .9 But thatis only half the equation . The "foreign" inspiredalliance of liberals and radicals was also the frui-tion of the dreams of liberal-radical Americanintellectuals and of industrial workers who believedin American culture : the best of both worlds, thesecurity of the American tradition and the mili-tancy of anti-fascism . The Communist Party, whichby 1938 entirely dominated the American Left, was atrue replica of its vision that "Socialism isTwentieth-Century Americanism ."

Its positivism wastotal, its notion of achieving socialism a classicalbit of nineteenth century optimism based upon thesupposedly revolutionary traditions laid down by the

53

Founding Fathers and renewed by Andrew Jackson andAbraham Lincoln . If the New Masses , therefore,blew hot and cold on Roosevelt, depending uponwhether he was sending strikebreakers to Flint,Michigan or fighting the Supreme Court, it was not"communist jesuitism" but the incapability of aconsistent analysis bearing down upon the Party .Desperate to find an American heritage for their"revolutionary" politics, the Communists helped toprevent a realistic analysis of history and a setof strategy/tactics for mid-century America .

The 1940's and 1950's were post-fulfillmentfor the Left generations active in the 1930's . TheCIO was "radical" primarily in the sense thatsocialists and communists had power in the unions'leadership circles (or personal influence among theworkers) and not in the sense that rank-and-filersbecame committed revolutionaries . The strikes duringthe war, and especially 1945-46, indicated a per-sistent militancy, but the radicals by every indica-tion rode the crest of the wave, making gainsinsignificant to their losses from the previousdecade . For the Revolution was over . The dreams ofmost Leftists in the 1930's had been based on (1) theproposition that the American economy could notrecover ; and (2) the belief that the Soviet Unionwas building a socialist democracy . The Wartimeprosperity and the disillusionment in Stalinism(the Moscow Trials, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,adherance to the "no-strike" pledge) destroyed thebasis for radical faith, as the coming of World War Ihad destroyed the basis for Debsian Socialistoptimism . Given the continued economic growth afterWorld War II, it was probably inevitable thatradical union leadership would be stultified andbecome opportunistic ; the witchhunts and successful"Red Purges" indicated primarily that most leadersknew which way the wind was blowing .

54

ObT WITH THE OLD

Similarly, the intellectuals and middle-classelements of radicalism crumbled under the new condi-tions . As Kolko has phrased it, the socialists andcommunists by 1945 hoped to succeed with the middle-class as they had failed with the workers . Fromboth movements, the promise was essentially :socialism can give economic order to America, enddepressions and war, and eliminate exploitation(racial, class, national) . The Communists addedthat a first step from monopoly control, theProgressive program of Henry Wallace, would cool thewar tensions and renew the New Deal alliances . Butsocialists and communists made their offers frompositions of weakness, and their promises were soclose to those of orthodox Liberals that it must haveseemed the latter could fulfill the practical ones,anyway . The growing anti-Communism (which thesocialists helped promote) was close to a fundamentalanti-radicalism, and by 1950 the internationalspectre of Soviet "totalitarianism" (a term which was,ahistorically, used on Nazism and Communism alike)brought an almost-total American unity . Finally,those who dissented were silenced by various forms ofpersecution . By the mid-1950's the largest remainingsegment of the Left had the Guardian ; other groupletshad sectarian organs, or an emotional stake in one ofthe new journals ( Dissent , American Socialist ,_Monthly Review , or Studies On the Left whoseappearance in 1959 welcomed the end of the decade)which were the most hopeful signs of a future re-awakening .

The 1950's were for the Left a remarkablyfruitful period of depression, ultimately more pro-ductive than either the 1920's or the 1940's despitethe utterly low level of activity . The final deathof the old tendencies as significant forces even overthe Left freed new energies and created new pos-sibilities for development . The black movement, solong shunted aside or misused by the white Left,came to stage center and dominated the open

activities of American radicalism . Characteristi-cally, the movement at first assumed form remini-scent of the Popular Front : an appeal for ameliora-tion within capitalism until the Judgment Day(analogous to white radicals' vision of socialism)far off . But much more than the Popular Front theindigenous radicalism of the blacks was their ownproduct, thus capable of transforming itself . Con-commitantly, the figure Mailer called the "WhiteNegro," the hipster, appeared and attempted toreject American culture as a totality .

IN WITH THE NEW

5 5

By the coming of the 1960's, the forms whichemerged were not so nearly bound by the past . The"End of Ideology" doctrine of the mid-1950's had itsgrain of truth : the old mechanistic Marxist notions_did not _explain _re ality for most of the Americanpeople . Marxists could explain in the crudest termswhy "underdeveloped" countries were exploited, whyblacks in America were underprivileged--but theycould not explain the growing sense of emptinessamong the well-clothed and well-fed Americans, thedeeply cultural crisis that swept across America .Certainly, the early new leftists had no betterideas ; but they were not bound to repeat thestories of impending economic disaster, or thevarious versions of what the Soviet Union was (orwas not) . They had the potentiality (if by nomeans the certainty) of sensing and analyzing theways in which people's lives had been changed undermodern capitalism and ultimately reworking the half-truths of American mythology into a new Marxistsynthesis .

Most of all, the failure of the various"Old Lefts" in the 1890's, 1910's and 1930's was afailure to grasp the American reality and reformulatean analysis to transform it . The notions theypossessed of Marxism have made that methodology, inpopular eyes, synonymous with the crudestmaterialism of ascribing people's motives to their

56

immediate economic interests . When the notion of"culture" was dealt with at all, it was broken downmechanistically into class components with one (high)culture for the ruling class and another for the

toilers . Rarely if ever was culture seen as amediation between immediate economic concerns andideology, seen as the way in which people adjusttheir understanding to live their lives within asystem . Still less rarely was the possibility of amass cultural bourgeoisification recognized ; the roleof advertising and the mass media in penetrating theconsciousness, in making a group of people into amass , were apparently never considered . 10 Cneresult of this analytical failure was an inabilityto recognize the possibility that the most militantof union struggles may have been non-revolutionary innature, a striving for an updating of the SocialContract (with rights for the owners and workers, ina corrmon scheme of development) . Another has beenthe fluctuation of the Left between an ultra-mili-tant rhetoric (often in the periods of the greatestweakness) and as adaptation to the most unradical ofconditions and relationships . A ain, the liberalhistorians of radicalism have captured a half-truth :the inapplicability of mechanistic Marxism to theproblems of modern America (and indeed any developedcapitalist country) doomed the movements to bobbingon the seas of American development, intermittentlydeluded by the numbers gathered around their reformstruggles .

Cne would, ideally, be able to relate thisfailure of Marxists to some form of positivism in-herent in the American culture . Unfortunately thelinks between intellectual analysis and socialhistory, especially over two centuries, are diffi-cult to establish . At least one thing is clear :radicals have failed to oppose the perverse logic ofa culture which, in the twentieth century, hasassumed a deadly potentiality to all the people ofthe world . The drive for profits of corporationswhich do not depend upon certain individuals fortheir perpetuation and expansion, the thrust of

foreign domination which by its own logical develop-ment creates weapons which threaten the destructionof all civilization--these are the products ofAmerican society today . This is what Marcuse meanswhen he says that the death camps of Dachau are thesymbol of our civilization : there can be no simplereconciliation with the old radical notion thatAmerican society possessed healthy, democraticculture which only the militarists and corporationpresidents temporarily polluted . The worst of theNew Left's heritage is the Old Left's failure tobreak decisively with that culture, to willinglythrow aside old illusions about traditions and groupsand begin to propose alternatives .

2

3 .

4 .

57

For an account of DeLeon's activities and theoriesin the 1890's, see Paul Buhle, "The Struggle forSocialism in America : the 1890's," PL, July-August, 1967 . The notion that Engels inadvertantlyhelped lay the basis for mechanistic Marxism isdemonstrated in Donald C . Hedges, "Engels'Contribution to Marxism," _Soc ialist Register, 1965 .What are the implications of this? In somecountries (e .g ., Germany) the retrogression tomechanistic materialism could be credited to theincompletion of the bourgeoisie revolution . InAmerica, it can be explained partially by theGerman dominance of American socialist ideology--especially through Kautsky--and the difficulty ofMarxism penetrating a cohesive positivism verystrong in America by the turn of the century .DeLeon held that the economic position of theproletariat made its ascendence to revolutionmore difficult than that of the brougeoisie, be-cause while bourgeois economic power continued togrow and drag along its ideology, the proletariatwas perpetually weak and more susceptable tolures--and to capitalist ideological formations .See the brilliant Two Pages From Roman History,which Lenin sought to print in Russian around 1922 .One recent debate has been between Paul Buhle andJames Weinstein,'The Meaning of Debsian Socialism,"

5 8

Radical America, January-February, 1968 .5 . Fraina's role, so long ignored, is now being re-

examined . See especially a forthcoming collectionof Fraina's aesthetic works, edited with an introduction by Lee Baxandall .

6 . See Echoes of Revolt , an anthology of the Masses ,which despite its weaknesses makes available awealth of original material which new leftists canstudy for technique, style, etc .

7 . A brilliant interpretation of the cultural problemis contained in the various essays of T . W .Adorno, Prisms (London : 1967), the first collectionof essays in English by that author .

8 . I do not mean to imply that radicals should nothave helped industrial union organization, butthat the problems arising from it may well havebeen insuperable for a sustaining radicalism .

9 . Weinstein and Sklar, "Socialism and the New Left,"Studies On the Left , March-April, 1966 .

10 . Gabriel Kolko, "The Decline of AmericanRadicalism," Studies On the Left , Sept .-Oct ., 1966 .This invaluable article has now been reprintedas a REP pamphlet .

11 . See Adorno, Prisms , and Herbert Marcuse, "TheAffirmative Nature of Culture," in Negations,for an explication of this difficult concept .

The Poets

Dan Georgakas

Poems from Prison by Etheridge Knight, BroadsidePress,.Think Black & Black Pride by Don Lee, BroadsidePress, 1 each .Cities Burning by Dudley Randall, Broadside Press,Broadside Press, 12651 Old Mill Place, DetroitMichigan, 48238 .

59

The Black Revolution is unleashing creativeforces that have been deformed and bound forcenturies . The poetry that is beginning to emergefrom the Black Power phase shows how much we allhave to gain . One of the new voices belongs toEtheridge Knight who says of himself, "I died inKorea from a shrapnel wound and narcotics resur-rected me . I died in 1960 from a prison sentenceand poetry brought me back to life ."

Knight's work will not please the literaryprofs or the loveniks . His most moving poem is forHard Rock, "known not to take no shit from nobody ."Hard Rock is the tough nigger con who cannot be stop-ped by anything less than a lobotomy . The otherprisoners are heartbroken to see their "Destroyer"crushed. Only the myth of Hard Rock lives, "thejewel of a myth that Hard Rock once bit/A screw onthe thumb and poisoned him with syphlitic spit ."

In Knight's poems on Malcolm, in his harshlychisled haiku, and in the moving Idea _of Ancestry,the revolution smashes through prison walls andcomes out enriched . Knight's work is somewhatuneven . This is most evident when he indulges ataste for the kind of stuff found in textbooks orattempts to define his people with Europeanmythology . At those times his voice becomes

6o

self conscious and he loses the power that marks thissection of one of his Malcolm poems :

You rocked too many boats, man .Pulled too many coats, man .Saw through the jive .You reached the wild guysLike me . You and Bird .

(And thatLil LeRoi cat .)

LEE

Those who suspect an irrational reverse racist(hideous white term) beneath every natural mightbenefit from Don Lee's introduction to his first bookof poems, "I was born into slavery in Feb . of 1942 .In the spring of that same year 110,000 persons ofJapanese descent were placed in protective custody bythe white people of the United States ." One of theconcerns of poets like Lee is that blacks never sub-mit to that kind of treatment, much less the treat-ment accorded to Jews by the Nazis . Thus hisattacks on William Faulkner, Louis Lomax, FrankYerby, and Ralph Ellison are not a literary game buta matter of survival . The bouquets for Du Bois,Turner, and Fanon only emphasize the rich and variedsoil black poets are growing in .

Lee's poems are hard and exciting even thothere are few quotable lines or individual poemsthat stick with the reader . What does stick is thetotal impact of the creation .

His second book isbetter than his first . The symbols, forms, images,and words are coming together in ever strongercombinations . Lee has been spared the odyssey ofLe Roi Jones . He is spending his formative yearsdeveloping his power, listening to black people, andtalking to black people . And poets like Lee andKnight and all the others who are benefiting fromthe supreme and costly effort to return to Blackpioneered by Jones are talking to blacks . Theirbooks sell in the small militant bookshops found inevery ghetto, Moore's in San Francisco, Vaughn's inDetroit . Any whites who happen along are getting

a good ride cheap . Lee's work is the blackrevolution in process, just as Lee is the blackpoet as becoming .

RANDALL

61

The very title of Dudley Randall's firstcollection shows how far black writers have had totravel . Randall is of an older generation of blackpoets . He was in the fight to see blacks acceptedinto white anthologies as equals . He knew theneglect of M . B . Tolson and the strange roleLangston Hughes was cast in . Randall has livedthrough the Malcolm revolution and he has emerged,refreshed and renewed . With a trace of respect forBooker T ., Dudley has taken sides with W .E .B . Ifhis Dressed All In Pink and Ballad of _Birminghamseem too routine for some ears then his Black Poet ,White Critic and the Idiot prove he is indeed of thetime of the burning of cities . He writes, The agerequires this task : /create/ a different image ; /re-animate/ the mask .

Randall is a fine poet but he is an evengreater editor, perhaps the most important blackeditor now publishing . His Broadside Press wasresponsible for the dynamic For Malcolm : Poems onthe life and death of Malcolm X with tributes fromjust about every black poet now writing . Hisexcellent broadside series has featured the work ofover twenty different poets on posters . Inaddition to the books mentioned here and a possiblepublication of a collection of works by SoniaSanchez, one of the best black poets who writes notonly of the black revolution but of the revolutionof black women, Broadside Press is preparingBlack Arts , an anthology of black creations whichshould be as explosive as the Malcolm volume .

The titles of the books discussed here,Black Pride , Poems Frcm Prison , Think Black , andCities Burning are like touchstones of therevolution . The language of the books is thelanguage of the black masses . Their point of viewwill offend and frighten non-revolutionary whites .

62

A whole generation of black artists coming by way of

different roads is now completely in and of the black

revolution . They do not need the approval of the

outside, but they do not feel automatic hostility

to it . Their work has a living audience . They have

been forced to create their own press just as they

have created their own audience because white

America had no room for them, not even the white

America of the small magazines and mimeos . The

blacks are doing their own thing now and they are

doing it very yell .

DETROIT S VOICE*of BLACK

REVOLUTION

In~t~ C~~y~ioic+s

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DARK PROPHESY

I sing of shine

And, yeah, brothers,while white/america sings about the unsinkable molly brown(who was hustling the titanicwhen it went downI sing to thee of Shinethe stoker who was hipenough to flee the fucking shipand let the white folks drownwith screams on their lips(jumped his black ass into the dark sea,Shine did,broke free from the straining steel .Yeah, I sing of Shineand how the millionaire banker stood on the deckand pulled from his pocket a million dollar checksaying Shine Shine save poor meand I'll give you all the money a black boy needs--how Shine looked at the money and then at the seaand said jump in muthafucka and swim like me--

Shine swam on--Shine swam on--how the banker°s daughter ran naked on the deckwith her pink tits trembling and her pants roun her neckscreaming Shine Shine save poor meand I'll give you all the cunt a black boy needs--how Shine said now cunt is good and that's no jivebut you got to swim not fuck to stay alive--how Shine swam past a preacher afloat on a boardcrying save me nigger Shine in the name of the Lord--how the preacher grabbed Shine's arm and broke his stroke--how Shine pulled his shank and cut the preacher's throat-_Shine swam on=-Shine swam on--And when the news hit shore that the titanic had sunkShine was up in Harlem damn near drunk--and dancing in the streets .damn near drunk and dancing in the streets .

Etheridge Knight #32653

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68

MADISON AREA LABOR COMMITTEE (MAJORITY FACTION)

RESOLVED : That there has been entirely too muchempty rhetoric about the need to organize the workingclass . The Movement has had certain concreteexperiences in this area, and it is time for calmevaluation of these experiences rather than vague genergeneralities .

In the past the Movement has had particularsuccess among :(a) The new working class (fur trappers, explorers,

pony express riders, and workers in similaroccupations who can be reached on the basis ofsimilar life styles) and

(b) One-eyed workers (in 1917 three of the most mili-tant members of the General Executive Board ofthe I .W .W . were each blind in one eye :

Big BillHaywood, Frank Little, and Richard Brazier) .

It is true that there has so far been onlylimited success in reaching craft, industrial, white-collar, and two-eyed workers, but . . . Can the daybe far off? The pusillanimous outfit that recentlytried to impose its sectarian views on the MadisonArea Labor Committee, until being thoroughly dis-credited, found it expedient to answer this questionin an ambiguous manner . The manipulative psychologyof this group was such that we are still unclear asto its identity . Imagine their chagrin, however, whenone member of what is now the Majority Faction, whoseuncle is a worker, reported that the main obstacle tothe further progress of the radicalization of theworking class has been a simple matter of structure .

Father Thomas Hagerty's organizational plan,adopted overwhelmingly at the founding convention ofthe I .W .W . in 1905, called for a wheel-like structure .Sixty-three years later, S .D .S . quibbles over whetherthere should be one, three, or nineteen nationalsecretaries, in a desperate attempt to evade thebasic question posed by Father Hagerty . The toleranceof supposedly "revolutionary" students for empty rhe-torical flourishes is in sharp contrast to the atti-tude of the factory workers who ititerrupted a longharangue by a member of the minority faction withinthe Madison Area Labor Committee with repeated tauntsof "Talk about the wheel!" Anyone who thinks theywere merely expressing a desire for more nationalsecretaries is a crazed fanatic .

of murder :

aE&R YE :

HE" YEt

starting July 4th isbring is yr/guns/down/to/yr/nearest/po/lice/station/

no questions/asked/wk.*

and yr/po/lice/dept/will welcome

all. yr/illegal/guns . (and

cept maybeat the next re/bel/lionmaybe just

the small. sound

yr/own . . .

they won't say a thing)

--sonia sanchez