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International Socialist Review, Fall 1964

 

Robert Vernon

Race and Radicalism

 

From International Socialist Review, Vol.25 No.4, Fall 1964, pp.122-124.
Transcribed by Daniel Gaido.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Race and Radicalism: The NAACP and the Communist Party in Conflict
by Wilson Record
Cornell University Press, 1964. 237 pp. $5.95

In recent years there has been a flood of subsidized studies on “communism” in American life. Another contribution to this plethora is Race and Radicalism – The NAACP and the Communist Party in Conflict [1], by Prof. Wilson Record, author of a similar work entitled The Negro and the Communist Party which appeared in 1951. This particular job was subsidized by the Fund for the Republic as part of a series called Studies in Infiltration. It will become a gospel text for liberal “students” of “communism” in the period ahead. Reading it will make the white “anti-communist” liberal feel good, even complacent, but will not help him to understand much about either Negroes or radicalism.

Like most professional anti-communist “research,” this contribution will soothe the anxieties and shore up the smugness of pseudo-liberals and reactionaries who lap up its contents. But these readers will remain utterly impotent in the face of the new and dynamic movements of radicalism now stirring throughout the land. The generation of anti-communists raised and fed on this pap will be poorly equipped to stem the next surge of radicalism. Readers of these subsidized anti-communist treatises will be equipped only to deal with conventional, old-fashioned Stalinist-Khrushchevite movements, and will not be too well equipped even for that. But then that is their problem.

The professorial author states:

“This study is part of a much larger, collective inquiry into the impact of communism on American life and institutions, sponsored by the Fund for the Republic. If the studies now in process are as enlightening as those already published, the project will enhance scholarly comprehension of a complex phenomenon in a seminal way.”

Such comprehension would require an understanding of what radicalism is and an understanding of the complexities of the struggle of black people in white America. Prof. Record, like most white liberals, demonstrates himself inadequate for either task. [2]

The questions posed are nevertheless interesting and of importance. What is the Communist Party and what relation does it have to radicalism? How does the NAACP relate to the black struggle?
 

CP Zigzags in the Negro Struggle

In order to develop a meaningful context, we must first briefly review the history of American leftism in relation to the Negro movement. The Communist Party was the first white radical organization in American history to enter into any significant interaction with Negroes. The CP started off on a good footing as a revolutionary organization in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917, but by the end of the Twenties had ceased to be a revolutionary party and had become instead an opportunist pseudo-radical organization whose radical phrases and behavior depended on the state of international relations between the US government and the Soviet Union more than on any other factor.

Isolated in a backward economy and surrounded by a sea of hostile capitalist enemies, the Soviet power succumbed to an internal bureaucracy concerned about its domestic problems and its own “goulash,” to use Khrushchev’s revealing expression, i.e. its own privileges and standard of living higher than that of the Soviet masses. This petty-bourgeoisified privileged bureaucracy, exemplified in Stalin and later in Khrushchev, cynically regards the “communist” parties beholden to it as so much small change in its dealings with capitalist “friend” and enemy nations. If the capitalist country in question is temporarily “friendly” toward the Soviet Union in its foreign policy, the politics and behavior of the “communist” party in that country will reflect that warm state of affairs, as seen in the Browderite phases of the CP in 1935-1939 and 1941-1945. When the particular capitalist country is more openly hostile toward the Soviet Union, the “communist” party in that country will display more militancy and more “leftist” demagogy, as seen in the behavior of the CP in 1939-1941 and during the initial cold war period, 1947-49.

These zigzags of party “line,” completely indifferent to the needs and interests of the mass movements and working class of each country, wreaked enormous havoc in the workers movements in all countries since the late Twenties and are still doing so, wherever Stalinized “communist” parties have influence. Black people in the US have gone through their own experience with this phenomenon.

In early 1941, during the Stalin-Hitler pact Negroes organized a March on Washington to demand some of that equality and a crack at the jobs opening up because of booming war industries. The CP was anything but enthusiastic about this movement because it was not geared to opposition to the war per se. The instant the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union began in June 1941, the CP reversed its position on this and many other things. Now the CP flatly opposed and sabotaged the March on Washington movement because it was interfering with the “war effort.” Throughout the war the CP not only held back from, but actively discouraged or sabotaged efforts by Negroes to take advantage of the situation and press for more rights and more opportunities. This caused severe conflict with the Negroes in and around the CP, leading to an unhealing rupture between the CP and that sector of integrationist Negroes which the CP had been able to influence up to that time.

The NAACP is a liberal, not a radical, organization. While controlled and financed by white liberals, it has a large Negro following in the south and a middle-class Negro and white following in the Northern cities. Its integrationist goals fit the needs of the Southern struggle, although in recent years newer and more militant organizations have been elbowing it aside. In the North, the NAACP has little contact with the working-class black people in the ghettos, and frequently evokes hostility from black ghetto militants. The Association is openly hostile to black nationalism and to any attempts by black people to break free from (and not into) the American Way of Life.

The concept of NAACP “membership” is confusing. Anyone can become a “member” of the NAACP by donating two dollars to the Association for that purpose, so that the yearly “membership” figures of the NAACP run to six figures. But this is actually a matter of fund raising. The dedicated active membership is relatively small.

The NAACP is an organization which has rendered enormous and invaluable services to the cause of Negro equality, it its areas of competence. But it is pointless to attribute to the NAACP a role which it is incapable of fulfilling – that of an organization adequately representing all aspects of the black struggle.


Prof. Record, bringing the liberal viewpoint to bear, addresses himself to an imposing and exacting task: an analysis of the interaction between anti-capitalist radicalism and Negro protest in the United States. His main thesis is that radicalism, represented in Record’s eyes by the CP, is alien to the American scene altogether and in particular alien to American Negroes, whose protest is “nothing more than a radical Americanism.” In the other corner, the Negroes are completely and unambiguously represented by the NAACP. It remains to fill in the blow-by-blow details of the slugging match between the CPUSA and the NAACP, with the latter winning by a knockout.

Prof. Record does have a standard technical sociological training which makes him competent in the usual academic sense. But his background and abilities are completely inadequate for handling phenomena which are not limited to the scope of the American Way of Life and to white American “culture,” and this holds for both radicalism and black people.

Record not only equates the CP with radicalism, but displays an unscholarly ineptness in his complete inability to distinguish those aspects of the CP’s activities which might be inherent in radicalism (even black radicalism) by the simple fact of its being radicalism, as against those which are due to the Stalinist and pseudo-radical character of the CP alone. Record is not enough of a scholar even to pose, much less to grapple with and answer, such questions as: how would any other mass radical movement differ from the CP in its relations and approach to Negroes and to a NAACP-type movement? How would a black radical movement differ from the CP and from other white radical movements in its approach, methods, and relations? But then that’s not what Prof. Record is being subsidized for. His mentors are not hip to those questions either.
 

Omits Black Nationalism

Record’s absence of any understanding of spontaneous black radicalism is so complete that he fails to mention Robert F. Williams, until 1961, the rebellious president of the Monroe, N.C. NAACP chapter, even in a footnote, despite the fact that his study of the NAACP and radicalism takes us up to date in 1963. His denial of the existence of black radicalism, his inability to grasp the significance of the Garvey movement, of the Black Muslims, of the current generation of Afro-American rebels in the North, reflects severely, but still indirectly, on his competence to deal adequately even with a liberal organization like the NAACP. But there is no excuse for failing to deal with the problem posed by a radical NAACP fighter like Rob Williams in a book written explicitly about the NAACP and radicalism – except that this would explode the ludicrous fiction that radicalism and the CP are identical.

Today, new radical forces are sweeping the Negro communities North and South. The militant integrationists North and South have developed completely outside of any control or guidance by any white radicals, and are seeking to break free from influence by white liberals and Negro liberals. As it becomes increasingly clearer to integration fighters that their goals cannot be attained within the framework of the existing society, the gulf between them and their liberal “friends” becomes progressively wider and wider.

The black nationalist tide in the Northern ghettos represents not only a new stage in the black struggle, but a vital component and a new stage in radicalism as a whole. Black nationalism is not new, and has always reflected the fact that the American Way of Life is hostile to and inadequate for black people. It has always been an expression of the black ghetto, the most compact, the most combative, and the most explosive working-class concentration to be found anywhere in these United States.

What is new is the sweep and quality of the present-day black nationalist upsurge. Although numerically weaker than the organized movement of Garvey’s days, black nationalism today is on a much higher political level and vibrates in tune with the urbanized black working class packed into the ghettos, whose problems can be tackled successfully only by taking on much bigger goals than integration into Bwana’s Way of Life. In its ideological onslaught against the status quo, black nationalism is not only far more radical than the pseudo-radical CP could ever be, but is more revolutionary than any white radical tendency cast in the image of the conservatized and privileged white trade unionists.

It is against this background that we examine the scholarly efforts of a liberal to “analyze” radicalism and Negro revolt.
 

The Liberal Viewpoint

The picture seen through Record’s liberal eyes blocks out this unpleasant nightmare of black radicalism and substitutes an idyllic landscape:

“... if successful, [the Negro revolution] will strengthen the bourgeois order and the American middle-class ideology, enabling one-tenth of the citizenry previously excluded to live in tract houses, wear grey flannel suits, shop in the supermarkets, and achieve ‘togetherness.’”

Don’t laugh – there’s more:

“The performance of democratic capitalism ... has been, despite its many faults and limitations, so impressive as to cut the heart from radical reform movements. American society ... offers to its members such ... material wealth, mobility, opportunity, and personal freedom that few Americans are inclined to shop elsewhere ... The mainstream of racial dissidence as the United States pursues the seventh decade of the twentieth century is unquestionably integrationist. The freshet of radicalism has virtually dried up: separatism is a brackish slough ... The American black man severed his African roots in the dim past ... the American Negro is an American. In his thirst for cultural assimilation he follows the traditional pattern of American ethnic minorities ...”

Before he got completely carried away, Prof. Record did manage to add:

“... of course, the interracial millennium is not likely to begin next year or next decade.”

One wonders how (and why) a black worker holding his last unemployment check (after his job has been eliminated by advancing automation) will make the payments on that split-level house with picture window and that grey flannel suit. And granting a minority of successful Negroes able to break into Charlie’s middle-class world, where will the white liberals move to, to get away from that horde of grey-flannel-suited attaché-case-toting Negroes invading their all-white suburbias?

A constant theme of liberal “experts” on communism is that the US Communist Party made progress only when it concealed its “real” radical aims in its right-wing zigzag periods, because then it was swimming in the mainstream of American life, and that it failed to make a good pitch to the masses when it became too outspoken or too radical. But the fact is that the CP gained its mass following in the Thirties as the product of a radicalization of large sectors of both black and white workers beginning to recover from the trauma of the Great Depression. The degree to which these workers associated the CP with the Russian Revolution and with the Soviet Union was an advantage for the CP at that time. Friction between the CP and its mass following came about not because the CP was too radical but because it was too unpredictably at odds with the radical needs and aspirations of its following and membership.

The liberal attitude betrays a total lack of understanding of radicalism in general, The task of a radical organization seeking a mass following is not to follow the mass at its lowest political level or to conform to whatever popular opinion is, but to win the support and loyalty of that large minority of radicalized rebels who will form the backbone of a radical movement. A radical organization is to be judged a failure when it alienates that kernel of rebels who are in conflict with capitalist society. The CP, through its dishonesty, its unreliability, its class hostility to the needs and aspirations of the black working-class ghetto population, sealed its doom when it alienated the vanguard of black radicalism. How middle-class people in the NAACP felt about the CP was of secondary importance.

It is no advantage for radicals to conform to the “mainstream” of American life. The mainstream of American life happens to be directed against black people, and it is nothing new or alien for black radicals to swim against it. They have no choice.
 

Radicalism or Reformism?

From his liberal perch, the learned professor conjures up a grotesque death duel between the liberal NAACP and the pseudo-radical CP in which the survival and prospering of the NAACP is somehow evidence of a defeat of radicalism. Nonsense. In any radical upsurge, there is always plenty of room for reform organizations like the NAACP which do a commendable job of winning short-term reforms. These organizations draw in all those partially but not completely radicalized elements who abound in any period when radicalism is rampant, and who, as aptly described by Fidel Castro, “quieren la revolución, pero no tanta” [“... are for the revolution, but not so much revolution” – from speech to Metal-workers Union, Havana, July 1960]. These organizations are not deadly enemies of the radicals, or vice versa, unless the radicals concerned are hopeless and blinded sectarians unable to cement their ties with the masses.

In Record’s fanciful view, the CP is continually pictured as “lambasting” the NAACP, as the “archenemy” of the NAACP. all of which is moreover completely out of character with the prolonged right-wing opportunist behavior of the CP since 1941. This distortion is necessitated by the central purpose of the book: to picture the NAACP and the CP as prime antagonists representative of Negroes and radicalism respectively, whereas in fact neither today occupies the leading place either among radicals or Negroes.

A common fallacy of the white liberals is that the CP failed in its approach to Negroes because Negroes are so American and so loyal (to Bwana) and so nonviolent, the little darlings. But it is precisely the rejection of America and of Bwana’s Way of Life which attracted masses of black people to the Garvey and Black Muslim movements. It is precisely this feeling which sweeps the Northern ghettos today. Black militants are 100.000 times more radical than the CP. They reject the CP because of its alien middle-class, pseudo-radical, and therefore to them white, politics.

The Communist Party orientation toward the Negro struggle is strictly toward the integrationist wing of that struggle. The CP displays an undisguised hostility toward the black nationalist wing generated by the black workers of the Northern ghettos who do not feel themselves a part of American society and draw appropriate conclusions. This hostility is in part the class hostility of petty bourgeois white radicals (privileged white workers, middle-class radicals, radicals taking their lead and inspiration from privileged “socialist” bureaucracies abroad) toward a movement they are incapable of understanding, and is in part the reflex of a bureaucratic pseudo-radical movement, against a rival which it cannot control or manipulate.

In their common class hostility toward this aspect of the black ghetto, Prof. Record and the CP are not quite poles apart. Record slanders the Black Muslims as in “alliance” with “George Rockwell and the American Nazis” – a slander also circulated by the CP – and links Marcus Garvey with “the Ku Klux Klan, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, lynching” in the same breath. For Prof. Record, no other black radicals exist. The words “black ghetto” do not even appear once in all of his 237 pages.

Prof. Record’s incompetence is also evidenced in his equation of the CP “theory” of an independent black nation in the southern “black belt” to “Negro nationalism.” This “theory” was neither generated by nor accepted by any segment of black people, and is completely alien to black nationalism, which is a product of the black ghettos of Northern cities and not of isolated Southern farm communities.


The continuing vigorous development of an independent black radicalism, both organizationally and ideologically, is one of the greatest advances in the black struggle, and therefore in the class struggle, in the Sixties. The Freedom Now Party, GOAL and Rev. Cleage in Detroit, RAM in Philadelphia, Malcolm X, Liberator magazine, and countless other individuals and organizations are attempting to articulate the needs of the black ghettos of the North and to organize their potential. In general, this trend aims toward a hard-headed, eyes-open, realistic approach to building independent black power, and away from the Negro protest techniques of begging, pleading, working on the guilt feelings and “conscience” of white America, coddling of white liberal “friends,” or other ineffective methods.

In this arena, nationalism and race pride coincide with the class struggle. The black ghetto is the most solidly concentrated, compact working-class formation in American life; today far more proletarian and revolutionary in potential than the trade-union movement or white radical milieu. All-black or black-led movements spur the struggle forward by eliminating the petty-bourgeois influences of all white liberals (and their middle-class Negro friends) and almost all white radicals. “Marxist” quacks offering a pre-frozen, prepackaged, white man’s political “science” bearing no relevance to the experience of black people in America find no buyers. Shrill insistence on Negro-White Unity with nonexistent white allies (implying the subordination of black militants to the leadership of petty-bourgeois white radicals, privileged white workers, or Negro political zombies tutored by disoriented white radicals) fall on deaf black ears.

These are some of the salient features of the new black radicalism in development. While putting new life and new power into the class struggle, it still has a long way to go toward consolidation: political leadership and organization are sorely lacking, the untapped wildcat energy of the ghetto has to be organized and channeled, the ghetto welded into a solid power and muscle; new roads have to be opened up for the blind struggle in the south; black militants must eventually meet the challenge of taking over the leadership of all American radicalism. A realistic, serious socialist movement can use Marxism to good advantage, but this Marxism will have to be Afro-Americanized, imbued with SOUL, revitalized and reinforced with the contributions and outlooks of black radicals.

It is in this turbulent cauldron that the future of American radicalism is being forged. Where does the learned Prof. Record’s “scholarly comprehension” and, in general, the liberal view of the world, fit in here? Nowhere. The professor looks at the withered rump of a past failure and pronounces radicalism dead.

 

Footnotes

1. Race and Radicalism: The NAACP and the Communist Party in Conflict, by Wilson Record. Cornell University Press, 1964. 237 pp. $5.95.

2. When more liberal sources prove inadequate, Prof. Record frequently cites from William Nolan’s Communism versus the Negro. But this anti-communist treatise is a HUAC-level, facetious, ignorant and sloppy work which reeks from every page of smug American chauvinism and patronizing contempt for Negroes, with the attitude that “our Negroes” are “too intelligent and too loyal to fall for that Commie stuff.” Citing this as an authority does no credit to Prof. Record’s scholarship.

 
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