File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-04-08.224, message 84


Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 10:03:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Trotskyism and Black Nationalism


I have decided to step into the breach left by the departure of Scott
McLemee from the list and present a series of posts on the American
Trotskyist view of black nationalism. The first two in the series will serve
as background.

1) The CPUSA's attitude toward black nationalists, especially Marcus Garvey

2) An analysis of the Garvey movement

3) CLR James' attitude toward black nationalism (In this post I will draw
>from Scott's important new book "CLR James on the Negro Question", published
by University of Mississippi Press.)

4) The SWP and Malcolm X

Gerald Horne has an interesting article on the CPUSA's involvement with the
black struggle in the collection "New Studies in U.S. Communism", (Monthly
Review Press) edited by Frank Rosengarten and Michael Brown. I strongly urge
comrades to look for this book. It is a paradigm of the sort of post-cold
war historiography that is so desperately needed to put the CPUSA in
historical context.

Horne spends a fair amount of time explaining the "Black Belt". What
interests me, however, is that even when this nationalist slogan was being
advanced, there was a lot of resistance to it within the CP Afro-American
leadership. At a Comintern meeting when the idea was first discussed, the
only CP'er in favor was Harry Haywood. Most CPers, especially the
better-educated ones from the north like Benjamin Davis, had a visceral
hatred toward black nationalism.

While the black belt slogan might have struck a responsive chord in the
south, where other black activists had raised a similar slogan in the past
(Cyril Briggs of the African Blood Brotherhood had raised a similar slogan
in the early 20s), there was not much support for it in the north.

What *was* popular in the north was Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA) movement and Horne speculates that the black belt thesis
was seen as a counterweight to this mass "Back to Africa" movement. Most
black Communists had experience with this movement. Claude Lightfoot, a
major figure in the party, was a member in his youth and reports: "I had an
aunt who was a top leader; I had an uncle, a top leader and so forth and I
used to go to the meetings and sing the songs and chant the slogans, etc.,
etc." He said that he learned about "Black Pride" from the movement.

Party leader Israel Amter, not black (how could he be with a name like
that!) wrote glowingly about the Garveyites: "There was always something
splendid about them...The men and women who followed [Garvey] were
wonderful. I felt privileged to be invited to their meetings..They received
me warmly...Members of the UNIA came to speak at united front meetings
organized by us on problems of those years, when the shadow of the big
depression was descending on all of us."

Even though there were common actions from time to time, the CP rejected the
*politics* of Garveyism. Their hostility to his politics had to be kept in
check, because he was such a major force in the black community. Lesser
figures did not fare so well.

During the "don't buy where you don't work" campaign in Harlem in the 1930s,
the Daily Worker went on the attack: "We denounce the present methods of
barring those sympathetic whites--workers, intellectuals, and
professionals--who have manifested a desire to sincerely fight for the
rights of the Negro people by picketing stores where whites are only
employed at the present time. These [campaign] leaders are taking advantage
of the nationalist feelings of the much oppressed Negro people in order to
gain security for themselves."

Benjamin Davis was the bitterest enemy of black nationalism. When Garvey
died in 1940, Davis wrote an attack that expresses the attitude of the CPUSA
(and most Trotskyists outside of the SWP intellectual and political
tradition as well) on the national question:

"He organized perhaps the biggest movement of Negroes in the history of this
country...The Negro people were sound and progressive in their feelings for
a government of their own and for independent existence as a nation... [But
this] fantastic dream of a trek to Africa [was] ridiculously impossible...He
neither saw nor understood the class struggle, but instead saw as the
solution the building of a parasitic Negro imperialism [which amounted to]
petty bourgeois nationalism...Garvey's methodology was a sort of inverted
segregation...The real blow to Garveyism was given by the Communist Party..."

In my next post, I will take aim at this rather anti-Marxist analysis and
present a more nuanced understanding of Garveyism.

Louis Proyect




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