Question

2. Like the Socialist Party, the Communist Party sought to unite workers along class lines and cross race lines. What was the black response to this effort?

Answer 1

For Marx, slavery and its abolition were clearly phenomena of massive importance. Some of Marx’s critics will concede this. After all, slavery is mentioned in the Communist Manifesto as a form of class society. This, they argue, is the rub. Marx, and hence Marxists, can only see slavery as a class structure — as materialists, they necessarily miss or underplay its racial element. Leaving aside how the reverse mistake — seeing American slavery as primarily a racial structure, and missing its class dynamics — bedevils so much discussion of the issue, even this accusation is plainly false for Marx and for early American socialists as well. Marx saw the racial ideology birthed by slavery as one important factor in shaping the development of working-class politics in the United States. His discussion in his letter to Lincoln of racism and class consciousness is worth quoting in full.

While the workingmen, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

One might argue that Marx was too sanguine about the prospects for interracial working-class alliances after abolition, and there is no doubt some truth to the charge. But Marx’s error flows from his evaluation of the Civil War’s revolutionary nature. It is precisely because Marx thought abolition such a momentous event that he overestimated the possibilities for class struggle in its wake. Regardless of this revolutionary optimism, Marx was clearly sensitive to racism’s effects as an ideology.

Unfortunately, for all the effort Marx expended in understanding slavery and racism’s importance in the United States, his writings on this score did little to shape the early generations of American Marxists. Until the 1930s, American Marxists made little reference to Marx’s writings on the Civil War. In other words, Marx pioneered an analysis that understood racial oppression as interlinked with the development of capitalism, containing weighty implications for the working-class struggle. And then his followers, unaware of his labors, pioneered another such analysis decades later. Twice, in a half-century, Marxists effectively invented new analyses of racial oppression in the United States.

At the same time, it is something of a consensus judgment on the Left that before the 1930s, when the Communist Party (CP) threw itself into organizing the struggle against black oppression, American radicals largely failed Du Bois’s test. The record of the pre-Depression left is often summed up with Socialist Party (SP) leader Eugene Debs’s statement: “We [the Socialist Party] have nothing special to offer the Negro.” The SP, which was the largest organization of the American left until the growth of the CP in the 1930s, and the Left more broadly, are judged guilty of class reductionism and general neglect of the problems of black Americans.

The truth is considerably more interesting. Take Debs, for example. In the same essay from which his infamous statement is drawn, he also declares, “The whole world is under obligation to the Negro, and that the white heel is still upon the black neck is simply proof that the world is not yet civilized.” When an SP member wrote back to Debs, warning him, “you will jeopardize the best interests of the Socialist Party if you insist on political equality of the Negro,” Debs replied with scorn that the party would “be false to its historic mission, violate the fundamental principles of Socialism, deny its philosophy and repudiate its own teachings” if it failed to stand strong for black equality. These were hardly the words of a man who thought his movement should simply ignore black oppression.

In one sense, Debs was an outlier in early twentieth-century radicalism. Few other white socialists matched his deeply felt commitment to the emancipation of all oppressed groups, and fewer still took the kind of steps he did to bring it about, from fighting his union on the question of racial integration to refusing to speak in front of segregated audiences.

At the same time, Debs’s attention to what was then called “the Negro question” was hardly exceptional in this period of American radicalism. From the turn of the century to the advent of the Great Depression, there was a wide-ranging and extensive debate among American radicals on what the fact of black oppression meant for socialists. The answers to this question varied tremendously, from black socialists who argued for emigration to build socialism in Africa to some white socialists who wholeheartedly embraced white supremacy. Whatever might be said about this debate, the one thing early American socialism cannot be accused of is ignoring the race question.

Marx and Race The caricature of early American socialism as disinterested in race stem in large part from a more basic accusation that Marxism has never paid much attention to issues of racial oppression. Examples of this charge are legion. Cedric Robinson, in his influential work Black Marxism, contends that “Marx consigned race, gender, culture, and history to the dustbin. Fully aware of the constant place women and children held in the workforce, Marx still deemed them so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor and peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist, noncapitalist, and primitive accumulation.” Following a similar path, historian of slavery Walter Johnson argues, “If [Adam] Smith displaced the question of slavery, it might be said that Marx simply evaded it.”

These kinds of arguments cannot survive an even cursory confrontation with Marx’s writings. From his days as a radical journalist in Germany to his time studying political economy as an exile in England, Marx showed a significant interest in the politics and economics of slavery in the United States. When the Civil War broke out, Marx followed its progress intently, holding that its conclusion would determine the future course of working-class politics. And unlike so many commentators on the war, Marx understood from the beginning that it was about slavery and that it must, at some point, force the issue of emancipation to the forefront of American politics.

In January 1860, even before Lincoln’s election, he wrote in a letter to Engels, “In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is the slave movement — on the one hand, in America, started by the death of Brown, and in Russia, on the other. . . . I have just seen in the Tribune that there’s been another slave revolt in Missouri which was put down, needless to say. But the signal has now been given.” When Lincoln finally began to take steps toward abolition, issuing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation warning that any states still in rebellion by January 1, 1863, would be subject to immediate emancipation, Marx was ebullient. He declared the proclamation “the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution.”

Marx’s most famous commentary on the Civil War came through the letter of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) congratulating Lincoln on his re-election.

It is commonly asserted that the CP subordinated the fight for Black freedom to Stalin’s foreign policy. The problem is that for most critics, this is seen as a failure not of Stalinism, but of Marxism. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The party’s abandonment of militant Black struggle went hand in hand with its support for Roosevelt, its accommodation to liberalism, and its turn away from the working class—in short, its abandonment of Marxism.

Some left-wing historians argue that the popular front was a major step forward because it brought the CP out of its isolation and into the mainstream of American politics. Some, on the other hand, are more attracted to the Third Period because of the CPs ultra-militancy. The truth is that in both periods the CP—tied as it was to the dictates of Stalin—had ceased to be a party committed to moving the class struggle forward in the U.S. In its ultraleft Third Period, it squandered any possibility of building genuinely united fronts. In the Popular Front period, its unprincipled alliance with liberals and uncritical devotion to Roosevelt channeled the radical impulse of tens of thousands of workers away from revolutionary politics.

Revolutionary Marxists have always been at the forefront of fighting racism. At the center of Marxism is the idea that workers—the majority of society, multiracial in composition—can only achieve their emancipation if they unite against their common oppressors and exploiters. It is because of this vision that socialists have always placed fighting racism at the forefront. Without a consistent fight against racism, a unity based on equality cannot be achieved. Without overcoming the divisions which ensure capitalism’s rule—of which racism is the most poisonous—the working class cannot liberate itself.

The importance of the CP’s work in the 1930s—in spite of Stalinism—is that it showed that such a fighting unity is possible in the United States. Had the CP been a genuine revolutionary party going into the Depression, one which combined a commitment to fighting racism with a willingness to unite with other forces not yet won to revolutionary ideas, it could have grown even more massively, decisively winning workers—both Black and white—away from New Deal liberalism, the NAACP and the cul-de-sac of Black Nationalism. Because it wasn’t, an opportunity of great proportions was lost. If we understand both the CP’s achievements in fighting racism and the reasons for its ultimate shortcomings, socialists today can learn valuable lessons in the fight against racism and for socialism.