Chapter seven

The Socialist, Communist, and Trotskyist Parties

In the four decades before the Civil War, several communitarian and utopian socialist societies were established in the United States. Utopian socialism found fertile ground in the United States and was the dominant current among socialists until 1850. “During 1820­–1850,” wrote historian Philip Foner, “the American countryside was liberally dotted with communities established by searchers for the utopias promised by [Robert] Owen and [Charles] Fourier.”1

In the 1850s, German immigrants, many of whom were exiles of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, established a Marxist movement in the United States. Joseph Weydemeyer, a comrade and friend of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, came to the United States in 1851 and was, until his death in 1866, the most important Marxist propagandist in the country. Weydemeyer and four friends formed the first explicitly Marxist organization, or proletarierbund, in the summer of 1852.2 A number of other organizations were established by Marxists, perhaps most importantly the Communist Club of New York in 1857. Communists set up similar clubs in Chicago and Cincinnati the following year.3

Marxists and utopian socialists had fundamentally different approaches to the questions of slavery and racism. The first difference involved the attitude toward Blacks and their involvement in the movement. Robert Owen opposed slavery but was a supporter of emigrationism and excluded Blacks from his own colony, New Harmony, in Indiana. Blacks could be helpers “if necessary,” Owen said, or “if it be found useful, to prepare and enable them to become associated in Communities in Africa.”4 In contrast, the Communist Club of New York invited Blacks to become members. Its constitution required all members to “recognize the complete equality of all persons—no matter of whatever color or sex.”5 In 1858, the Club unanimously adopted a resolution that stated, “We recognize no distinction as to nationality or race, caste or status, color or sex; our goal is nothing less than the reconciliation of all human interests, freedom and happiness for mankind, and the realization and unification of a world republic.”6 Another resolution demanded the repeal of all discriminatory laws, while another “favored the eligibility of all citizens...for office.”7

The second difference that separated utopians from Marxists was their attitude to abolition. Slaveholders, unlike Blacks, could become members of Owenite communities, and they were not required to relinquish their slaves.8 The Communist Club of New York expressly prohibited membership of slaveowners, but in addition expelled any member who expressed sympathy for the slaveholders’ point of view. Finally, while opposing slavery, the utopians did not call for its immediate abolition. Indeed, they tended to argue that wage slavery in the North was worse than chattel slavery in the South. One such utopian, the Associationist William West, insisted that American workers “do not hate chattel slavery less, but they hate wage slavery more.”9 This view led many of the utopians to stay aloof—if not stand in outright opposition to the abolitionists’ demands. In contrast, the Communist Club stood firmly in favor of abolition.10

In part, the strength of conviction of the Marxist current can be attributed to the attitude and position adopted by Karl Marx in favor of Black emancipation. “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a Black skin.”11

At the Colored National Labor Union convention in 1869, the Black trade unionist Isaac Myers put forward a similar argument. “Slavery, or slave labor, the main cause of the degradation of white labor, is no more,” he said. “And it is the proud boast of my life that the slave himself had a large share in striking off the fetters that bound him by the ankle, while the other end bound you by the neck.”12

Despite their revolutionary understanding of the situation, however, the small size of the early Marxist groups, combined with a language barrier for many émigré Marxists, meant that, as Mike Davis observes, “their heroic efforts had little impact upon the mainstream of the labor movement.”13 With the outbreak of the Civil War, the Communist Club of New York virtually disappeared. The Club did not meet for the duration of the war because most of its members had joined the Union forces. Several Marxists became high-ranking Union army officers, having gained considerable experience in the Prussian military.

By 1867, organizers had revived the Communist Club of New York, and voted to become a section of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), otherwise known as the First International. The IWA was formed in September 1864 and brought together a wide assortment of unionists, radicals, and socialists to establish a mechanism for international collaboration and coordination between different countries. But the organization was not to exist very long. In 1872, the International’s headquarters were moved from London to New York. Only four years later, the International was dissolved—after a serious split developed in the organization between the Marxists, other socialists, and the anarchists.

The approach adopted by the Communist Club of New York on slavery and Black emancipation could have provided a solid foundation for later generations of socialists. Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. The early Marxists never broke out of their isolation, and remained largely on the fringes of the labor movement. As Karl Marx’s lifelong collaborator, Frederick Engels, wrote in a letter:

I think also the K[nights] of L[abor] a most important factor in the movement which ought not to be pooh-poohed from without but to be revolutionized from within, and I consider that many of the Germans there have made a grievous mistake when they tried, in the face of a mighty and glorious movement not of their creation, a kind of alleinseligmachendes [necessary to salvation] dogma and to keep aloof from any movement which did not accept that dogma.... What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory—if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848—to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische [actual] starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme; they ought in the words of the Communist Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present.14

If the German émigré socialist movement went to pieces, a frustrated Engels told Friedrich Albert Sorge, a German socialist émigré to the United States, “it would be a gain.” Unfortunately, he concluded, “we can hardly expect anything so good as that.”15

The Socialist Labor Party

The target of Engels’ wrath was the Sozialistiche Arbeiter-partei, later renamed Socialist Labor Party (SLP). The SLP was the main socialist current in the United States from its founding in 1877 until 1900. The party emerged from the remnants of the IWA and was made up almost entirely of German immigrants. But the SLP was quite different from the early Communist Clubs in several respects. First, while the earlier generation of Marxists, most notably Sorge, helped found the SLP, virtually none of them were active in the organization by the 1880s. Second, the SLP’s forerunner, the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, was not a Marxist organization. Rather, it was formed at a unity conference of Lasalleans and Marxists. Third, the majority of the membership was composed of new immigrants from Germany, escaping Otto von Bismarck’s repression. More than anything else, they saw the SLP as a wing of the German Social Democratic Party, the mass socialist party established in 1875. It was not until the 1890s, under the leadership of Daniel De Leon—an academic who became leader of the SLP—that a conscious effort was made to refocus the SLP on American conditions.

The SLP’s founding meeting said nothing in relation to Blacks, but its 1879 convention platform declared the party in favor of “universal and equal rights of suffrage without regard to color, creed or sex.”16 While precise figures are not available, it is clear that the SLP attracted some Black support. One of the first Black people in the United States to publicly identify himself with socialism, Peter Clark, was a member of the SLP and one of the leaders of the 1877 railroad strike in St. Louis. When he joined the party’s National Executive, he became the first Black person to assume a leadership position in a socialist party. Clark was one of two congressional candidates in Ohio’s 1878 election.17

It is also clear that some members of the SLP were exemplary in their opposition to racism. Among the leaders of District Assembly 49 of New York’s Knights of Labor were several white SLP members like Timothy Quinn, a master workman, Victor Drury, a former leader of the French section of the First International in the United States, and Thomas Maguire, an Irish-American socialist. The district’s secretary treasurer was Frank Ferrell, one of the most well-known Black members of the Knights of Labor. Going against the massive anti-Chinese racism in the United States, the District Assembly 49 leadership argued for organizing Chinese workers into the Knights. They succeeded in organizing two groups of workers in New York, only to have the General Executive Board of the Knights refuse to grant them a charter. In a minority report, they argued that “the first and basic principle of the organization was the obliteration of lines of distinction in creed, color and nationality.”18 After the Chinese assemblies were dissolved, they were welcomed in District 49.

Another instance of District 49’s fight against racism took place at the Knights of Labor 1886 convention. A few months before the convention, Quinn had sent a delegation to Richmond, Virginia, to see what hotels would be available for convention delegates. They concluded an agreement with a Colonel Murphy, a former Confederate officer. When he discovered that Ferrell was one of the delegates, he canceled the contract, arguing that “customs here must be respected.” He offered to find accommodations for Ferrell at a “Black hotel.”19 District 49 unanimously rejected these terms and went to Richmond with tents, planning to sleep outdoors, rather than abandon their Black brother. Even the New York Times remarked, “The delegates are determined to fight the battle on the color line right in the midst of that part of the country where race prejudice is the strongest, and they will insist on carrying on what they claim is a fundamental principle of their Order—that the Black man is the equal of the white socially as well as politically, and that all races stand upon an equal footing in all respects.”20

Unfortunately, as an organization, the SLP did not generalize from the example set by its members in District 49. Neither the party leadership nor its press had very much to say about Blacks or racism. They didn’t even report on the struggles involving District 49.

Daniel De Leon’s assumption of the SLP’s leadership in the 1890s would transform the organization on many questions, including its relationship to Blacks. “Whatever his other weaknesses, De Leon deserves credit for bringing the Negro question to the attention of [the readers of the SLP newspaper] the People,” writes Philip Foner. “While James Benjamin Stolvey is correct when he writes...of De Leon that the People did not at any time make the Negro question ‘a special feature,’ it was nevertheless the first American socialist paper to feature it at all.”21

De Leon was an outspoken critic of the AFL’s adoption of exclusionary Jim Crow policies and opposed the formation of segregated locals in the South. He played an important role in opposing racist attitudes in the Second (or Socialist) International, the federation of the world’s socialist parties founded in 1889. De Leon argued against proposals for restrictions on immigration by “inferior races.”

Where is the line that separates “inferior” from “superior” races? What serious man, if he is a Socialist, what Socialist if he is a serious man, would indulge in “etc.” in such important matters? To the native American proletariat, the Irish was made to appear an “inferior” race; to the Irish, the German; to the German, the Italian; to the Italian—and so down the line through the Swedes, the Poles, the Jews, the Armenians, the Japanese, to the end of the gamut. Socialism knows not such insulting iniquitous distinctions as “inferior” and “superior” races among the proletariat. It is for capitalism to fan the fires of such sentiments in its schemes to keep the proletariat divided.22

De Leon’s opposition to racism flowed from his understanding that discrimination against one group of workers could only weaken all workers. Like most socialists in this period, though, he saw racism only as a class question. Black workers, he argued, were like white workers, and their problems were those of all workers. Racial oppression was simply a manifestation of class oppression. Therefore, he concluded, agitation around non-economic questions—segregation, lynching, or race riots—could only distract from the real struggle, the abolition of the wage system. De Leon’s views on the struggle against segregation and for Black equality were also shaped by his completely sectarian and doctrinaire politics. That is, he only saw the struggle for the ultimate goal—the struggle for socialism—as meaningful. “De Leon would invariably remind his listeners,” says Arnold Petersen, a national secretary of the party, “that there was no such thing as a race or ‘Negro question’.... There was only a social, or labor question, and no racial or religious question so far as the Socialist and labor movements were concerned.”23

De Leon’s approach to “the Black question” represented his failure to understand oppression in general. De Leon’s failure to understand this question led some in the SLP to challenge him. Thus, for example, Charles G. Baylor, a Black member of the SLP (actually, the only Black member of the SLP at the time), drafted a letter to De Leon at the height of the Populist revolt in 1895, expressing his desire to organize Southern Blacks into the SLP:

[We should] make the expression of Southern and the worse-known American oppression of the Southern Negro a special feature of the People.... This attitude of the SLP and the People will give us and the paper not only a stronghold on the southern Negro population but in the colored population of the north. I believe that it alone [will] add 10,000 names to your subscription list.24

De Leon didn’t answer Baylor’s letter. Later he argued, unconvincingly, that Blacks constituted a special division within the ranks of labor, but “In no economic respect is he different from his fellow wage slaves of other races.”25

In part, De Leon’s attitude stemmed from his opposition to any struggle for reforms: “The essence of this revolution— the overthrow of Wage Slavery—cannot be too forcefully held up. Nor can the point be too forcefully kept in evidence that, short of the abolition of Wage Slavery, all ‘improvements’ either accrue to Capitalism, or are the merest moonshine where they are not sidetracks.”26

The Socialist Party

While the Socialist Labor Party had the distinction of being the first Marxist party in the U.S., the Socialist Party founded in 1901 has the distinction of being the first socialist party to attract a mass following. Formed from the fusion of several smaller socialist groups, the Socialist Party (SP) was a peculiar organization, even by the standards of the Second International. Unlike the social democratic parties of Europe, the Socialist Party cannot be described as a mass working-class party. Founded in 1901, the SP was much broader (and looser) than any of the European parties. It was a heterogeneous organization, combining several tendencies in the working-class movement. Its radical wing emerged from mass working-class struggles, including the battles of the Western Federation of Miners led by “Big Bill” Haywood, and the railroad struggles that made the Indiana-born railroad union leader Eugene Debs a socialist. It had a right wing composed of municipal reformers based in several cities, led by Victor Berger. Its center was grouped around Morris Hillquit of New York, a former member of the SLP. Its biggest electoral support came from agrarian Midwestern and Western populists. And just before and during the First World War, a large number of new immigrants joined the SP, grouped around foreign language federations that had their own publications and were largely autonomous from the party. Despite this rather motley assemblage, the Socialist Party quickly became the largest and most important socialist organization in the United States as De Leon’s SLP declined in influence and size in the late 1890s.

Leon Trotsky was unsparing when describing the character of the Socialist Party:

To this day, I smile as I recall the leaders of American Socialism. Immigrants who had played some rôle in Europe in their youth, they very quickly lost the theoretical premise they had brought with them in the confusion of their struggle for success. In the United States there is a large class of successful and semi-successful doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers, and the like who divide their precious hours of rest between concerts by European celebrities and the American Socialist Party. Their attitude toward life is composed of shreds and fragments of the wisdom they absorbed in their student days. Since they all have automobiles, they are invariably elected to the important committees, commissions, and delegations of the party.... They think that Wilson was infinitely more authoritative than Marx. And, properly speaking, they are simply variants of “Babbit,” who supplements his commercial activities with dull Sunday meditations on the future of humanity.27

The Socialist Party’s approach to Black oppression mirrored the existence of different tendencies within the organization. There were those who professed a complete indifference to questions of racism and Blacks. Worse, was the right wing, which was openly racist. Victor Berger, the first socialist elected to Congress, wrote in 1902:

There can be no doubt that the Negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race—that the Caucasian and indeed the Mongolian have the start of them in civilization by many thousand years—so that Negroes will find it difficult ever to overtake them. The many cases of rape that occur whenever Negroes are settled in large numbers prove, moreover, that the free contact with the whites has led to the further degeneration of the Negroes, as of all other inferior races. The “Negro question” will one day give the Socialists a good deal of headache, and will never be settled by mere well-phrased resolutions.28

Berger was consistently racist, and argued at the party’s December 1907 National Executive meeting that the SP should favor sharply curbing immigration. “Berger warned that we would soon have five million ‘yellow men’ invading the country every year. We already have one race question, said Berger, and if something was not done at once, ‘this country is absolutely sure to become a black-and-yellow country within a few generations.’”29 He was not isolated in his views and reflected a common view, especially within the right wing of the Second International, which favored colonization and believed in the “civililizing” mission of the Great Powers.

Balancing between the different factions was the SP’s most famous propagandist, Eugene Debs, who, though a “romantic and a preacher,” in the words of Trotsky, “was a sincere revolutionary.”30 Unfortunately, Debs’ influence inside the SP was limited by his lack of interest in the day-to-day affairs of the organization.

Debs represented a different current, one that opposed Berger and the SP right wing. While on occasion Debs suggested that Blacks were not equal to whites because of the legacy of slavery, he opposed the view that Blacks were innately inferior. He opposed discrimination, and when he toured the South, encouraged Blacks to reject doctrines of “meekness and humility.”31 He argued that Blacks should join the Socialist Party and consistently refused to speak to segregated audiences. Philip Foner concludes:

Compared with the racist Berger, Debs was a forthright supporter of Negro rights. Despite all the ideological weakness of his 1903 writings on the Negro question, these writings also demonstrate that as early as 1903 he clearly understood that “the history of the Negro in the United States is a history of crime without a parallel.” His test for a socialist when it came to the Negro was simple: “Socialists should with pride proclaim their sympathy with and fealty to the Black race, and if any there be who hesitate to avow themselves in the face of ignorant and unreasoning prejudice, they lack the true spirit of the slavery-destroying revolutionary movement.”32

Debs argued that Blacks were not seeking “social equality” with whites and that socialism would not force whites to associate with Blacks in private. The cry of “social equality” was a red herring raised by the ruling class to divide workers.

The very instant that it [social equality] is mentioned the old aristocratic plantation owner’s shrill cry about the “buck nigger” marrying the “fair young daughter” of his master is heard from the tomb and echoed and re-echoed across the spaces and repeated by the “white trash” in proud vindication of their social superiority.

Social equality, forsooth! Is the Black man pressing his claims for social recognition upon his white burden bearer? Is there any reason why he should? Is the white man’s social recognition of his own white brother such as to excite the Negro’s ambition to covet the noble prize? Has the Negro any greater desire, or is there any reason why he should have, for social intercourse with the white man than the white man has for social relations with the Negro? This phase of the Negro question is pure fraud and serves to mask the real issue, which is not social equality, BUT ECONOMIC FREEDOM.

There never was any social inferiority that was not the shriveled fruit of economic inequality.33

This didn’t mean Debs closed his eyes to segregation or Jim Crow laws. No socialist worth the name could accept Jim Crow. “Absolute equality for white and Black, covering perfect uniformity not only in the opportunities for labor, but also in those public services such as education, transportation...entertainment, etc., which may be collectively rendered together with complete recognition of political rights,” he wrote, “must be insisted on more strenuously by the socialist than ever they could have been by any abolitionist agitator.”34

Debs shared De Leon’s view that Blacks merited no special attention. His approach is summed up in his most often quoted statement on Blacks: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the Party of the whole working class regardless of color.”35 Yet simply leaving an understanding of Debs at that quote ignores the fact that Debs was far from passive when it came to confronting racism. In response to the 1910 Socialist Party congress report on immigration, which he termed “utterly unsocialist, reactionary, and in truth outrageous,” Debs shifted his emphasis to the need to combat racism and to uphold full Black equality.36 In the summer of 1915, Debs was one of the few voices to condemn D. W. Griffith’s racist film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan for having saved “civilization” by reestablishing white supremacy in the South. Debs called on socialists to picket the film, and himself joined the NAACP when they organized a picket in his hometown, Terre Haute, Indiana. He authored several articles denouncing white supremacy, lynching, and Black oppression. In 1915 and 1916, Debs worked closely with Oklahoma socialists to challenge new ruses by the Democratic Party to achieve Black disfranchisement. Calling on Black and white workers to defeat “the capitalist conspiracy” to disenfranchise Black voters, the Socialist Party succeeded in defeating several attempts by the Democrats to limit the voting rolls—an impressive achievement given the widespread success of disfranchisement in other parts of the country.

The racism of sections of the Socialist Party can be attributed to their lack of what Debs called “true revolutionary spirit.” The right wing of the party was not only racist toward Blacks, but was also racist toward immigrants. Their racism was not simply an aberration in otherwise committed socialists, but was tied to their reformist politics.

The relationship between the search for respectability and the politics of the Socialist Party was well captured by one of the historians of socialism in the United States, Ira Kipnis. In summarizing the legacy of the SP, he writes:

As prospects for electoral success seemed to grow, Right-wing Socialist leaders dumped increasingly large sections of the program in a desperate effort to win votes. Was middle-class America frightened by strikes, industrial unionism, free speech campaigns? Left-wing members of the party were expelled, industrial unionism dismissed as unimportant, imprisoned labor leaders abandoned. Were some Americans prejudiced against Negroes and the foreign-born? Negroes were attacked as “lynchable degenerates,” and immigrants as saboteurs of America’s high standard of living.37

In contrast, the left in the Socialist Party was the most consistent in fighting racism and segregation. Many of these socialists were active in the labor movement.

Especially important were the efforts of socialists to organize Black and white workers into a common organization—the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW was established in 1905 as an alternative to the conservative craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Eugene Debs, Daniel De Leon, and “Big Bill” Haywood were among the many socialists in the IWW. The IWW considered the AFL “unreformable,” proclaimed the need to organize on industrial rather than craft lines, and declared itself committed to organizing all workers, regardless of skill, color, sex, or national origin. At its founding convention in 1905, the IWW adopted the slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all” (a modification—and improvement—on the Knights of Labor motto “An injury to one is the concern of all”). The first section of its bylaws stated unambiguously: “no working man or woman shall be excluded from membership because of creed or color.”38

The socialists who helped found and lead the IWW believed that the SP’s emphasis on electoral respectability was a mistake and that the true power of workers lay in organizing at the point of production. This left wing, to its credit, emphasized action rather than speechifying. But this division produced a dichotomy between politics and economics, as well as electoral work and industrial work, and it left the SP in the hands of the right wing.

The IWW vigorously opposed racism in all its publications, and its unflinching opposition to all forms of discrimination was not only verbal. Unlike some unions before and since, the IWW practiced what it preached, even in the Southern states. The Wobblies, as IWW members called themselves, launched an impressive campaign to recruit Black workers in 1910, and at no time in its history did the IWW organize a segregated union.

Perhaps the best example of the IWW’s activities was its organizing of lumber workers in the South. The Southern lumber industry employed 262,000 workers in 1910, more than half of whom were Black.39 Despite the poor conditions of these workers, the AFL showed no interest in organizing them. In 1910, a group of lumber workers sympathetic to the Socialist Party and the IWW organized a local union. The union spread to other states and in 1911 a national union, the Brotherhood of Timber Workers (BTW), was established.

The BTW allowed Black workers to join but it did not challenge Southern segregation, forming separate “colored lodges” for its Black members. The employers responded quickly to the union’s growth. Three hundred and fifty mills in three states were closed, and the union members were locked out. By the fall of 1911, between five thousand and seven thousand union members, Black and white, had been blacklisted.40 Attempts to force workers to accept a substandard contract or to divide them on racial lines failed. The employers were forced to end the lockout and rehire the workers in February 1912.

Sympathetic to the IWW, the BTW decided to affiliate, and invited Bill Haywood to its 1912 convention in Alexandria, Louisiana, to address convention delegates. At the convention, Haywood expressed surprise that no Black workers were in attendance. BTW officials explained that the Black members were meeting separately because Louisiana law prohibited Blacks and whites from meeting together. Haywood answered:

You work in the same mills together. Sometimes a Black man and a white man chop down the same tree together. You are meeting in convention to discuss the conditions under which you labor. This can’t be done intelligently by passing resolutions here and then sending them out to another room for the Black man to act upon. Why not be sensible about this and call the Negroes into this convention? If it is against the law, this is one time when the law should be broken.41

Covington Hall, a Mississippi-born former adjutant general in the United Sons of the Confederate Veterans who had become a socialist and Wobbly, told delegates he supported Haywood’s suggestion. “Let the Negroes come together with us, and if any arrests are made, all of us will go to jail, white and colored together.”42 The proposal was accepted. The Black and white lumber workers voted in favor of affiliation, and elected Black and white delegates to the upcoming IWW convention. That evening Haywood and Hall addressed a nonsegregated mass meeting at the Alexandria Opera House. This was an unprecedented event in the city’s history. Even the Louisiana Socialist Party did not hold mixed meetings. Haywood noted the meeting had “a tremendous effect on workers who discovered that they could mingle in meetings as they mingled at work.”43 Philip Foner continues:

[T]he feudal-minded lumber barons made intense efforts to destroy the unity of Black and white workers and to smash the union. They resorted to every weapon in the arsenal of anti-unionism: blacklisting of union members, Negro and white; eviction of union members from company houses; and spreading the charge throughout the South that the union was a revolutionary organization that sought, through its policy of equality for Black and white, to undermine the entire fabric of Southern society. None of the measures succeeded. In November 1913, 1,300 unionists struck at the American Lumber Company in Merryville, Louisiana. The company brought in non-union workers, mostly Black, in an effort to break the strike. To keep strikers from talking to the scabs, the company housed them in quarters surrounded by a high barbed wire fence charged with electricity. But these efforts failed, and many of these workers refused to scab and instead joined the union. Foreign-born workers and Mexicans who were brought in to scab likewise refused to scab. The IWW announced: “It is a glorious thing to see, the miracle that has happened here in Dixie. This is coming true of the ‘impossible’—this union of workers regardless of color, creed, nationality. To hear the Americans saying, ‘You can starve us, but you cannot whip us’; the Negroes saying, ‘You can fence us in, but you cannot make us scab!’ Never did the Sante Fe Railroad, the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association and the American Lumber Company expect to see such complete and defiant solidarity.”44

Unable to break the strike, the employers and city authorities resorted to violence. Union leaders were arrested and deported from Merryville. Five union organizers were kidnapped, four of them brutally beaten and deported. The fifth, F. W. Oliver, a Black unionist, was murdered. Armed mobs attacked unionists and the union’s headquarters were ransacked. “On February 19,” recounts Philip Foner, “all remaining union men in Merryville were deported under penalty of death if they returned.... The union tried to get Governor Hall to halt the reign of terror. But the governor, charging that the union, by allowing Negroes to meet with whites in the same union halls, was seeking to destroy the Southern way of life, refused to act.... By the spring of 1914 the Brotherhood of Timber Workers was effectively destroyed.”45

There are no reliable figures for the number of Black workers who joined the IWW. One estimate put the number of IWW cards issued between 1909 and 1924 at one million, 100,000 of which were issued to Black workers.46 Whatever the exact number, the IWW provided a glimpse of the power a united working-class movement can exercise. Unfortunately, the ideas and practice of the IWW did not become the accepted norm inside the Socialist Party. Leaders of the party frowned upon the militancy of the IWW, and they successfully organized to expel Haywood and other IWW members in 1912. But there was another reason for the relatively limited influence of the IWW inside the Socialist Party: in rejecting the narrow electoral reformism of the right wing, the IWW dismissed “politics” in favor of economic struggles. This led them not only to see elections as irrelevant, but led to a general deprecation of the need to provide an overall political alternative to the right wing of the party.

The Communist Party

In August 1919, the Socialist Party of the United States split. At the heart of the split was the SP’s attitude toward the successful 1917 Russian Revolution. The left wing of the SP supported the revolution and garnered a majority within the party. The right-wing minority, which controlled the party’s apparatus, responded by expelling the majority.47 Not one, but two, communist parties emerged from this conflict—the Communist Party (CP) and the Communist Labor Party. (The two would soon merge under pressure from leaders of the Russian Revolution and be renamed the Workers’ Party in 1922.) Though they were largely made up of left-wing SP members and revolutionaries, neither of which accepted racists such as Berger in their ranks, both organizations initially shared the position advanced by Debs on racial oppression. The CP’s position was summarized in the program adopted at its founding convention: “The Negro problem is a political and economic problem. The racial question of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each intensifying the other. This complicates the Negro problem, but does not alter its proletarian character. The Communist Party will carry on agitation among the Negro workers to unite them with all class conscious workers.”48

James P. Cannon, a founding member of the CP and later the leader of the Trotskyist movement in the United States, argued that the newly formed Communist Party had “nothing to start with on the Negro question but an inadequate theory, a false or indifferent attitude and the adherence of a few individual Negroes of a radical or revolutionary bent.” This false theory, Cannon argued, stemmed from viewing the oppression of Blacks purely as “an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequality this side of socialism.” In practice, he continued, this was “a formula for inaction on the Negro front, and—incidentally—a convenient shield for the dormant racial prejudices of the white radicals themselves.”49

The CP’s approach changed, however, largely because of two factors: the growth of the Black working class in the North and, crucially, the influence of the Russian Revolution. As Cannon put it:

Even before the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were distinguished from all other tendencies in the international socialist and labor movement by their concern with the problems of oppressed nations and national minorities, and affirmative support of their struggles for freedom, independence and the right of self-determination....

After November 1917 this new doctrine—with special emphasis on the Negroes—began to be transmitted to the American Communist movement with the authority of the Russian Revolution behind it. The Russians in the Comintern started on the American Communists with the harsh, insistent demand that they shake off their unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community.

It took time for the Americans, raised in a different tradition, to assimilate the new Leninist ideas. But the Russians followed up year after year, piling up the arguments and increasing the pressure.... [S]lowly and painfully [the CPers began] to change their attitude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the overall program—and to start doing something about it.50

The “new theory” Cannon refers to was the approach developed by Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks toward national struggles and movements for self-determination. It is worth reviewing Lenin’s ideas on this question in some detail because they not only form the basis of the revolutionary Marxist position on nationalism, but they would also play an important role in the Communist Party’s approach to Black oppression.

The Second International had no common position on the national question. The right wing of the Socialist Party in the United States, for example, supported the nationalism of its own ruling class but opposed any movements for self-determination in the colonized world. Gustav Noske similarly argued that the German Social Democratic Party would defend Germany “with as much determination as any gentleman on the right side of the House.”51 To right-wing reformists, socialism was not against colonies in principle.52 Left-wing socialists such as Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand, opposed any identification with the nationalism of their own state, but also opposed the slogan of self-determination. National independence, Luxemburg and other like-minded socialists argued, was the cry of a rising bourgeois class and should not become a demand of the workers’ movement. “Socialism gives to every people the right of independence and the freedom of independent control of its own destinies,” Luxemburg argued, but under capitalism, small nations could not attain real independence and became “only the pawns on the imperialist chessboard of the great powers.”53

Lenin’s view was a sharp break with both these positions. Revolutionaries, he argued, should support the right of self-determination as part of the struggle against imperialism. In the age of imperialism, capitalism would simultaneously reduce national differences, while giving rise to national struggles. “Developing capitalism knows two historical tendencies in the national question,” Lenin wrote. “The first is the awakening of national life and national movements, the struggle against national oppression and the creation of national states. The second is the development and growing frequency of international intercourse in every form, the break-down of international barriers, the creation of the international unity of capital, of economic life in general, of politics, science, etc.”54

The division of the world between oppressor and oppressed nations was the focal point of Lenin’s position. Introducing the “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” at the Second Congress of the Communist International, Lenin stated, “The characteristic feature of imperialism consists in the whole world, as we now see, being divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, the latter possessing colossal wealth and powerful armed forces.”55 In the oppressor countries, socialists had to support the demands of oppressed nations as a precondition to breaking the workers’ movement from chauvinism and the nationalism of its own ruling class. “In the internationalist education of the workers of the oppressor countries, emphasis must necessarily be laid on their advocating freedom for the oppressed countries to secede and their fighting for it.”56

Even if the movement for self-determination was led by a nascent bourgeoisie, Lenin argued, socialists supported their struggle against imperialism. “Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favor, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression.”57 He added, “The bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support.”58

Arguing against the idea that national struggles were a diversion from the class struggle, Lenin wrote:

To imagine that a social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.—to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution.... The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene.59

But Lenin’s emphasis on the importance of national struggles and his support for the right of self-determination did not involve any compromise with nationalist ideology. Support for the right of self-determination was a means to achieve international working-class unity, not to encourage fragmentation. In the oppressor nations, socialists upheld the right of self-determination both to combat chauvinism and to demonstrate their solidarity with workers in the oppressed nation. In the oppressed nation, socialists needed to combine opposition to imperialism with clear support for international working-class unity. Socialists “of the oppressed nations must attach prime significance to the unity and the merging of the workers of the oppressed nations with those of the oppressor nations.”60 A sharp distinction had to be drawn between upholding the right to secession and actually advocating it. “The right of nations to freely secede must not be confused with the advisability of secession by a given nation at a given moment.”61

Support for self-determination was thus a means to advance the struggle for socialism, not an end in itself. Moreover, support for national liberation should in no way compromise the political or organizational independence of the workers’ movement. The Communist International declared:

A resolute struggle must be waged against the attempt to clothe the revolutionary liberation movements in the backward countries which are not genuinely communist in communist colors. The Communist International has the duty of supporting the revolutionary movement in the colonies and the backward countries only with the object of rallying the constituent elements of the future proletarian parties—which will be truly communist and not only in name—in all the backward countries and educating them to a consciousness of their special task, namely, that, of fighting against the bourgeois-democratic trend in their own nation. The Communist International should collaborate provisionally with the revolutionary movement of the colonies and backward countries, and even form an alliance with it, but it must not amalgamate with it; it must unconditionally maintain the independence of the proletarian movement, even if it is only in an embryonic stage.62

A number of Communists from the United States attended the Comintern’s second congress. John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World,63 spoke on the status of U.S. Blacks in the session on the national question. Reed’s standpoint on Black oppression in the speech is often compared to that of Debs. He argued that “the only proper policy for the American Communists to follow is to consider the Negro first of all as a laborer.” Blacks, he said, “did not demand national independence” and “consider themselves first of all Americans and feel very at home in the United States.”64 Some writers have ridiculed Reed’s assessment of Marcus Garvey’s movement—which, he argued, “has met with little, if any success”—as evidence of the Communist Party’s detachment from Black struggles and as proof that the party was fundamentally no different from the reformist Socialist Party, at least on this vital issue. But this is a flawed assessment. Leaving aside his assessment of the level of support for Garveyism, Reed’s speech was unambiguous in its support of the Black struggle. He denounced segregation and disfranchisement, noting that the “clergy of Southern churches teach that there is also a heaven in which the Jim Crow system is in operation.”65 He criticized the Socialist Party for “never seriously” endeavoring to recruit Blacks, and condemned the existence of segregated sections of the party. Reed also condemned the lynchings and race riots that followed the First World War, and supported the right of Blacks to armed self-defense against racist attacks. Nor was Reed blind to the rise of “race consciousness,” arguing that the Black struggle offered socialism a “twofold opportunity: first, a strong race and social movement; second, a strong proletarian labor movement.”66

Reed’s argument didn’t take root until the Russian party intervened. “[T]he American Communists received a letter from Lenin some time in 1921,” historian Theodore Draper noted, “expressing surprise that their reports to Moscow made no mention of party work among Negroes and urging that they should be recognized as a strategically important element in Communist activity.”67

The Fourth Congress of the Comintern, held in 1922, adopted the National and Colonial Commission’s “Theses on the Negro Question.” The four theses stated:

(i) The fourth congress recognizes the necessity of supporting every form of the Negro movement which undermines or weakens capitalism, or hampers its further penetration.

(ii) The Communist International will fight for the equality of the white and Black races, for equal wages and equal political and social rights.

(iii) The Communist International will use every means at its disposal to force the trade unions to admit Black workers, or, where this right already exists on paper, to conduct special propaganda for the entry of Negroes into the unions. If this should prove impossible, the Communist International will organize the Negroes in trade unions of their own and use united front tactics to compel their admission.

(iv) The Communist International will take steps immediately to convene a world Negro congress or conference.68

Articles on Black struggles began to appear in the CP press, and the party established an organizer for its work among Blacks. The program adopted by the CP (then called the Workers’ Party) at its 1922 convention was much stronger than the one adopted in 1919. It read in part:

The Negro workers of this country are exploited and oppressed more ruthlessly than any other group. The history of the Southern Negro is the history of brutal terrorism, of persecution and murder. During the war tens of thousands of Southern Negroes were brought to the industrial centers of the North to supply the needs of the employers for cheap labor. In the Northern industrial cities the Negro has found the same bitter discrimination as in the South. The attacks upon the Negroes of East St. Louis, Illinois, the riot in Chicago, are examples of the additional burden of oppression, which is the lot of the Negro worker. Although the influx of Negro workers in the Northern industrial centers has laid the foundations for a mass movement of Negroes who are industrial workers, the anti-Negro policy of organized labor has made it impossible to organize these industrial workers.... The Workers’ Party will seek to end the policy of discrimination followed by the labor unions. It will endeavor to destroy altogether the barriers of race prejudice that have been used to keep apart the Black and white workers and weld them into a solid mass for the struggle against the Capitalists who exploit them.69

Despite the sentiment expressed in such resolutions, however, the Communist Party’s initial efforts to recruit Blacks met with little success. In 1925, for example, the party launched the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) to organize Black workers excluded from the racist American Federation of Labor. As James Ford, one of the small handful of Blacks who joined the party via the ANLC, put it, “For the period of its existence it was almost completely isolated from the basic masses of the Negro people.”70 The ANLC was met with hostility by the AFL and the “small segment of the Black community that expressed prolabor views,”71 including the most prominent Black trade unionist, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Sleeping Car Porters’ union. Even Black observers sympathetic to the ANLC’s aims found the “behavior of some of its organizers extraordinarily bizarre,”72 best expressed by the evening entertainment at the ANLC’s founding convention—a Russian ballet.

The CP did succeed, however, in recruiting a small number of Blacks who would later prove crucial in extending the party’s influence. The most important success in this period was its recruitment of several leaders of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). The ABB was founded by Cyril V. Briggs in the fall of 1917 (there is some controversy over the exact date) as “a revolutionary secret order,” and its platform called for the “absolute race equality” of Blacks and “fellowship...with the class-conscious revolutionary white workers.” The ABB also called for armed resistance to lynching, unqualified franchise rights for Blacks in the South, a struggle for equal rights against all forms of discrimination, and the organization of Blacks into the existing trade unions.73 In its first years, the ABB combined a radical Black nationalism with a strong sympathy to the ideas of the Bolshevik Revolution. Briggs became increasingly critical of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, and in 1921 joined the Communist Party. Most of the ABB’s leadership followed Briggs into the party, forming its first generation of Black leaders.

By the end of the 1920s, the Communist Party’s approach to Blacks underwent an important transformation. Unfortunately, the impetus for the change came not from an honest evaluation of party work in the United States, but from an international maneuver by the now Stalin-controlled Comintern. At its sixth congress in 1928, the Comintern declared that Southern Blacks in the United States constituted a nation and that the party should adopt the slogan of “Self-Determination in the Black Belt” for party work among Blacks. As Lee Sustar explains:

The self-determination slogan was the American version of the Comintern’s “new theory” that national liberation struggles had to go through distinct “stages”—first a bourgeois nationalist stage, and only after that the struggle for socialism. The problem with this approach is that it means subordinating the needs of workers to those of the middle class—who upon victory, will turn their backs, or worse, on their former allies.... In the 1920s, followers of Marcus Garvey demanded not self-determination in the South, but rather an exodus to Africa—for which the CP attacked them. In the early 1930s, the CP denounced the Ethiopian Peace Movement, a back-to-Africa group, and the National Movement for the Establishment of a Forty-Ninth State, which advocated Black migration to sparsely settled areas in the United States. The CP favored Black self-determination only if it meant acceptance of the Black Belt theory.74

There is considerable controversy over the origins of the Black Belt theory, but it is clear that the party initially opposed the slogan and that the theory had little bearing on the actual conditions or aspirations of Blacks. Until 1910, it might have been possible to speak of Blacks as a separate oppressed nation, given that 90 percent of Blacks lived in the South, with a majority of those living in rural areas.75 But any such basis was completely destroyed by the successive waves of Black migration northward, beginning with the First World War. Moreover, as Leon Trotsky was to argue, the slogan of “Self-Determination for the Black Belt” could easily be seen as a demand by whites for segregation!76

No real forces other than the Communist Party advanced the Black Belt proposal. The theory was effectively marginalized within the CP’s work, which was mainly focused in the Northern cities. But the slogan did have one positive effect. By raising the importance of fighting racism, it helped transform the Communist Party into a major force among Blacks.77

The Communist Party’s campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys is the most famous example of the party’s antiracist work in this period. The case involved nine young men falsely accused of gang rape and sentenced to death in 1931. The existing Black organizations shunned the case. The NAACP did not send a lawyer to help the men until after they were convicted in an Alabama court.78 The party undertook an international campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, and gained widespread respect among Blacks for its principled defense of the young men. A May 16, 1931, protest march in Harlem that began with a march of several hundred Communists, most of them white, ended with a mass rally involving more than three thousand Black Harlemites. At the rally, the throng heard from one of the Scottsboro mothers, and from Communist speakers who addressed the crowd in Finnish, Spanish, and Romanian.79 The Scottsboro campaign carried on for years with events like this one, which succeeded in stopping the Scottsboro executions and ultimately freeing the men.

The 1930s struggle to build industrial unions drew in thousands of Black workers. In workplaces like the Chicago stockyards, or the steel mills of the Great Lakes states, Communist organizers often proved crucial to forging a link between the unions and Black workers. The number of Blacks in unions jumped from one hundred thousand in 1935 to just under five hundred thousand in 1940.80 Black membership in the Communist Party also rose considerably, from slightly less than 1,000 at the beginning of the 1930s to 5,005 in 1939.81 As a result of its activism around the Scottsboro case and the union movement, the CP’s Black membership grew from two hundred members in 1930 (less than 3 percent of the total) to seven thousand in 1938 (over 9 percent). In some cities, the percentage of Black members was considerably higher. In Chicago in 1931, close to one-quarter of the city’s 2,000 members was Black. As Blacks constituted 11 percent of the total U.S. population at the time, these figures represented a small but important step in building a multiracial movement. At a time when segregation was rampant—legally in the South, de facto in the North—the CP was virtually the only integrated organization in the country.

The success of the Communist Party alarmed middle-class Black organizations. For the first time in the United States, a significant layer of Blacks saw a socialist organization as a viable political alternative. W. E. B. Du Bois, at the time still a member of the NAACP (he didn’t join the Communist Party until the early 1960s), wrote: “The task that I have recently been setting myself is to blunt the wedge that the Communist Party is driving into our group.”82

Indeed, some in the NAACP thought they could use the fear of the Communist Party as a means to win support for their organization. “Evidently the NAACP leadership was really delighted by the Communist Party’s activity in the South,” Philip Foner noted.83 In a letter dated June 6, 1933, Walter White assured James Weldon Johnson, secretary of the NAACP until 1931, “[E]verywhere I went in the South the white people are afraid of the effect of Communist propaganda on the Negro. As a result, they are willing now more than ever before to consider the program of the NAACP and to make concessions to it, if for no other reason than that in their opinion, it is the lesser of two evils.”84

But if some whites in the South were drawn to the NAACP as a result of the CP’s activities, Blacks perceived the CP differently. As Paul D’Amato has written:

The CP initiated a multitude of struggles against racism through the Depression decade. CP members led struggles against poor housing and evictions, for unemployment relief, against police terror and lynching. They organized mass campaigns for the defense of victims of racist injustice; they petitioned against segregation in baseball; they organized interracial meetings and dances, demonstrations, and social gatherings both in the North and in the South; they initiated campaigns to root out manifestations of racism inside the party. When Communists traveled to Washington to demonstrate on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, they stopped off on the way to sit down in restaurants that refused to serve Blacks—a tactic adopted by the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In these years, the CP was able to challenge traditional Black organizations like the NAACP and the Garveyites.85

The Communist Party demonstrated in practice the possibility of overcoming racism and the building of a multiracial political organization dedicated to transforming society. The problem is that, by the late 1920s, the Communist Party had begun the process of degeneration from revolutionary Marxism to Stalinism. This was to affect the entire work of the party, including its commitment to Black liberation. One marker of this problem was the already mentioned imposition of the “Black Belt” theory in 1928–29. Another example was the Comintern’s 180-degree turn in the opposite direction in 1935 when it called for the building of a broad “people’s front” against fascism. Motivated primarily by Stalin’s effort to seek allies among the bourgeois governments of the West for the impending war against Hitler, the “Popular Front” ended the CP’s sectarian lunacy of 1929–34 that equated reformists with fascists. But in moving away from sectarianism, the CP came to embrace as allies such figures as President Franklin Roosevelt.

With the formation of a “Popular Front” with bourgeois opponents to fascism, the party began to compromise its earlier commitment to combatting racism. It opposed a proposed march on Washington against segregation because, party officials argued, this would only disrupt the war effort. The Communist Party became the most ardent supporter of the Second World War, and subordinated everything to this aim, including the right of workers to strike and the struggle for Black civil rights. Not only did this make it easier for the government to witch-hunt the organization after the war, but it also laid the basis for the disillusionment of hundreds of Black workers who had joined the party during the 1930s.

The CP’s accommodation to Roosevelt and the New Deal liberals meant supporting the Democratic Party, which refused to challenge segregation for fear of alienating its Southern “Dixiecrat” wing. Roosevelt even refused to support anti-lynching legislation at a time when dozens of mob lynchings were being committed against Blacks every year.

The Stalinist opportunism of the CP disillusioned many Black members who had been attracted to the CP’s work against racism. Though the party continued to grow, its political zigzags, dictated by the bureaucracy in Russia, ultimately compromised and undermined its commitment to fighting racism. The CP’s credibility was further eroded when in 1939, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the party again reversed its policy of united front work and began denouncing Roosevelt again. With Hitler’s invasion of Russia, the party then became Roosevelt’s biggest cheerleader, calling on Blacks to subordinate their demands for integrating the army and war production industries to the success of the war effort. The party even supported the internment of Americans of Japanese descent.

In spite of its Stalinism, the CP’s work in the 1930s showed that building a fighting unity between Blacks and whites is possible in the United States. Had the CP been a genuine revolutionary party, 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. It could have provided a clear alternative to New Deal liberalism, the NAACP, and the cul-de-sac of Black nationalism. Because it didn’t provide this kind of alternative, an opportunity of historic proportions was lost.

Trotsky and Black Nationalism

Leaders of the Russian Revolution had successfully influenced American communists to change their approach to Black struggles in the 1920s. One of those leaders, Leon Trotsky, was to break with the Communist movement and lead an opposition to the bureaucratization and degeneration of the Russian Revolution. In 1933, Leon Trotsky had pushed his allies in the United States to address the issues of racism and Black oppression directly, challenging them to overcome their political passivity on these fundamental questions.

Trotsky admitted knowing little about the concrete situation of Blacks in the United States, and tried to learn what he could from organizers in the Socialist Workers Party. Unfortunately, they were not very familiar with conditions in the South either, and were unable to tell Trotsky whether or not Blacks in the South even spoke a different language.86 Through his analysis, though, Trotsky was able to reach some important conclusions. He argued that the slogan of self-determination for Blacks should be supported:

The Negroes are a race and not a nation. Nations grow out of racial material under definite conditions....

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

If the situation was such that in America common actions took place involving white and Black workers, that class fraternization already was a fact, then perhaps our comrades’ arguments would have a basis (I do not say that it would be correct); then perhaps we would divide the Black workers from the white if we began to raise the slogan of “self-determination.”

But today the white workers in relation to the Negroes are the oppressors, scoundrels, who persecute the Black and the yellow, hold them in contempt, and lynch them.87

“The argument that the slogan for self-determination leads away from the class point of view is an adaptation to the ideology of the white workers,” he added. “The Negro can be developed to a class point of view only when the white worker is educated.”88

The struggle for Black rights, Trotsky argued, should be viewed as part of the process of what he described in his theory of permanent revolution: “The [Black] petty bourgeoisie will take up the demand for equal rights and for self-determination but will prove absolutely incapable in the struggle; the Negro proletariat will march over the petty bourgeoisie in the direction toward the proletarian revolution.”89

This dynamic, Trotsky went on to argue, can transform Black workers from an excluded and oppressed group within the working class to its most advanced. “The Russians were the European Negroes,” he argued. “It is very possible that the Negroes will proceed through self-determination to the proletarian dictatorship in a couple of gigantic strides, ahead of the great bloc of white workers. They will then be the vanguard.”90

Finally, Trotsky warned that racism and Black nationalism were fundamentally different. As such, he urged a “merciless struggle not against the supposed national prepossessions of the Negroes but against the colossal prejudices of the white workers and [which] makes no concession to them whatever.”91

Trotsky further developed his views on Black nationalism in a historic dialogue with the Trinidadian Trotskyist C. L. R. James in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1939. The discussions between James and Trotsky covered three points: the position to be adopted toward the slogan of “self-determination”; a proposal to launch an all-Black political organization, indepen-dent of the Socialist Workers Party; and the structure, program, and activity of such an organization.

In the first set of discussions, Trotsky again argued in favor of Black self-determination. In preparation for the meeting, James had drafted a preliminary statement outlining his views on the question. On self-determination James wrote:

The Negro must be won for socialism. There is no other way out for him in America or elsewhere. But he must be won on the basis of his own experience and his own activity. There is no other way for him to learn, nor for that matter, for any other group of toilers! If he wanted self-determination, then however reactionary it might be in every other respect, it would be the business of the revolutionary party to raise that slogan. If after the revolution he insisted on carrying out that slogan and forming his own Negro state, the revolutionary party would have to stand by its promises...patiently trust to economic development and education to achieve an integration. But the Negro, fortunately for socialism, does not want self-determination.92

James concluded his arguments against self-determination by arguing that the Black population in the United States lacked the “tradition of language, literature and history to add to the economic and political oppression.”93 In his first contribution in the discussion, James went on to state that:

The danger of our advocating and injecting a policy of self-determination is that it is the surest way to divide and confuse the workers in the South. The white workers have centuries of prejudice to overcome, but at the present time many of them are working with the Negroes in the Southern sharecroppers’ union, and with the rise of the struggle there is every possibility that they will be able to overcome their agelong prejudices. But for us to propose that the Negro have this Black state for himself is asking too much from the white workers: especially when the Negro himself is not making the same demand.94

In response, Trotsky took up several points. Firstly, he found James’ views on the question confusing. Was James arguing for the elimination of the slogan of self-determination from the SWP’s program, or was he saying that the SWP would fight for self-determination if Blacks mobilized and fought around the demand? Secondly, Trotsky objected to the use of the term “reactionary” to describe the demand for self-determination. Thirdly, he argued that he was against making the demand the central slogan of the Trotskyists, but “only to proclaim our obligation to support the struggle” if Blacks themselves wanted it.95 In a shift from his earlier position, Trotsky went on to explain, “[I]t seems to me that the CP’s attitude of making an imperative slogan of it was false. It was a case of the whites saying to the Negroes, ‘You must create a ghetto for yourselves.’ It is tactless and false and can only serve to repulse the Negroes. Their only interpretation can be that the whites want to be separated from them.”96

James concluded by expressing his complete agreement with Trotsky, and argued that he only used the term reactionary to describe self-determination if seen from the vantage point of a socialist solution. Trotsky argued that this view was abstract; self-determination by Blacks could only be the result of a massive struggle, which would be “a tremendous revolutionary step.”97

The following day, discussion revolved around the possibility of the SWP helping to launch a Black organization. James put forward a number of proposals for such an organization. These included making plans for the study of the history of Blacks and the Black struggle, launching a weekly paper, and making International African Opinion the new organization’s theoretical journal. The organization would be open to all Blacks, James proposed, and would be an activist organization, intervening in trade unions, against fascism and war, fielding candidates, and fighting discrimination. In anticipation of tactics used in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, James argued that Blacks should go to segregated restaurants, sit in, “ordering...for instance some coffee,” and campaign around the issue of segregation.98

Differences between James and Trotsky emerged on two main points. First, Trotsky expressed some skepticism about the whole project of initiating a new organization. If a mass movement already existed, argued Trotsky, then of course he would be in favor of participation within it, but it was another question for the SWP to launch such an organization on its own. “But the question remains as to whether we can take upon ourselves the initiative of forming such an organization of Negroes as Negroes—not for the purpose of winning some elements to our party but for the purpose of doing systematic educational work in order to elevate them politically.”99 Were such an organization only to attract disillusioned Black intellectuals who had left the Communist Party, then it would not serve any purpose. “The real question,” he continued, “is whether or not it is possible to organize a mass movement.”100

The other argument involved James’ initial proposal to have the organization’s paper exclude socialist politics. Trotsky argued that it was one thing to acknowledge the heterogeneous character of the proposed organization, but it was quite another “to tie our hands in advance.”101

The immediate result of these discussions was the SWP’s adoption of a resolution largely based on these discussions at its convention in July 1939. The organization’s journal, New International, also devoted an issue to a discussion of the Black question in December of the same year.102 All the other plans, however, were shelved. The outbreak of war in Europe and the ensuing split in the SWP over whether the USSR was still to be considered a socialist country, saw C. L. R. James leave the SWP. He left the SWP with the breakaway organization called the Workers’ Party in 1940.

In 1947, James rejoined the SWP, and in 1948 he wrote its major resolution on the Black question. Entitled “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S.A.,” James described it as a “clear political program which summarized the political attitudes and ideas which I had placed before Trotsky in 1938.” The core of the resolution argued that unlike previous socialists in the United States,

We say, number one, that the Negro struggle, the indepen-dent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own....

We say, number two, that this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and is not led necessarily either by the organized labor movement or the Marxist party.

We say, number three, and this is the most important, that it is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that is has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.103

The discussions between C. L. R. James and Leon Trotsky marked an important advance in the understanding of the dynamics of the Black struggle in the United States. They also contained important insights that would later be validated by the emergence of the civil rights and Black Power movements in the 1950s and 1960s. The backwardness of the labor movement on the one hand, and the weakness of the left on the other, combined in such a way that a Black struggle emerged independently of these forces in the civil rights struggle. The general thrust of the movement challenged the capitalist system and its institutions, even if its leadership did not aim to do this. Blacks, in massive numbers, went from being politically inactive to being in the forefront of the struggle. In this context, the SWP’s understanding of the impetus to self-determination led the party to be generally sympathetic to the emergence of Black nationalism in the 1960s, as opposed to the Communist Party and the social democratic left, which denounced Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.

However, there were also several ambiguities and weaknesses in the James–Trotsky discussion, several of which can be identified in James’ subsequent political development. Most striking is the enormous gulf that lay between the proposal for a Black organization and the forces actually available to the SWP. The need for revolutionary leadership was apparent, but the forces of the Trotskyist Fourth International were weak. “The discrepancy between our forces and our tasks,” Trotsky wrote, meant that in practice the SWP could do little to implement the program he had suggested.104 Worse, the lack of real forces would lead some of Trotsky’s followers to exaggerate the importance of the “correct” program and set of demands in building real influence in the movement. Likewise, vying for control of the organization’s apparatus among various forces on the left could easily become a substitute for attracting Black workers.

Trotsky was aware of the dangers involved, but overestimated the capacity of the SWP to launch a mass Black organization. “It is a question,” Trotsky insisted “of awakening the Negro masses.”105 Considering the size and composition of the SWP, however, this was a utopian task.

One of Trotsky’s principal concerns was the SWP’s increasing adaptation to an “aristocratic” milieu and its continued isolation from the mass of workers, “of whom the Negroes are the most exploited.”106 But he hoped that the proper education of the core activists and organizers of the party would put them in a position to become the leadership of a new Black upsurge. “[T]he harsh and tragic dialectic of our epoch is working in our favor,” he wrote in late 1938. “Brought to the extreme pitch of exasperation and indignation, the masses will find no other leadership than that offered by the Fourth International.”107

Trotsky’s overestimation of the opportunities and prospects for revolutionaries at least had the merit of keeping alive the banner of Bolshevism. By contrast, James’ overestimation of immediate revolutionary prospects led him to embrace a theory of spontaneity. While Trotsky was wrong to expect the launching of an organization that would “awaken the Black masses,” James made the mistake of identifying a revolutionary potential with present actuality. Thus, for example, during the Second World War, James argued that the formation of workers’ soviets—that is, a worker’s revolution in Europe—was on the immediate agenda for socialists.108 And while Lenin was right to have built a revolutionary party in Russia before the October Revolution, James wrote, “The task is to abolish organization. The task today is to call for, to teach, to illustrate, to develop spontaneity—the free creative activity of the proletariat.”109

While James was undoubtedly correct in emphasizing the material basis for an independent Black struggle in the United States and in stressing the impact it would have, he left a number of important questions unanswered. A Black movement did develop in the United States, but it was not independent of class forces. The civil rights movement, as we shall see later, was above all of benefit to the Black middle class. Related to this is the question of socialist intervention in such a movement. What should socialists argue within such a movement? How should they relate to Black popular struggles? James did not deal with these questions because, as we have seen, he came to reject the need to build a revolutionary party.