When I arrived in New York in early September 1945, I went directly to Party headquarters on East Thirteenth Street. The receptionist informed me that Foster was expected at any moment and told me to have a seat. A few minutes later Foster appeared, looking haggard and tired.
I rushed to greet him with a warm, "Hello, Bill!"
He looked up, a frown crossing his face as he extended a cold, limp band. "Hello, Harry, what are you doing here? I thought you were out on the coast."
"I just got in from six m�nths in the Pacific," I explained. "I came east to see what the Party wants me to do in this fight against Browderism, what my assignment should be."
His frown deepened. "You had trouble in New York. You had trouble in Baltimore. You had trouble in California. Now I suppose you've come here to make some more trouble," he said accusingly.
I was taken aback, flabbergasted, but before I could protest he snapped, "I don't have time to talk now, l've got a meeting. You'll have to come back later." He turned and strode away.
Stunned by the brush-off, I left the office. I didn't know what to make of it. Foster had never been a warm person, but he had always been friendly to me before. I guessed that his cold reception reflected a change in the internat Party situation. The Emergency Convention to reconstitute the Party had taken place a little over a
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
month before and undoubtedly the new National Board had discussed the Party cadre. I suspected Foster's remarks reflected a hostile attitude on the part of the new leadership toward me.
I decided to find out what was going on. Throughout the war, I had been pretty much out of touch with the developments in the Party and felt strongly it was time to get back into things. When I discussed the Party situation with friends, I found most were dissatisfied with the manner in which the struggle against Browderism was being conducted. But it was not until a decade later that I and other comrades were able to fully understand the eff ect of Browderism on the Party.
M uch of the history of the struggle against Browder's revisionist line has been obscured by distorted and self-serving interpretations written by right opportunists and professional anticommunists. I want to trace this history as I now see it-from the point of view of the left, that is, the tendency which fought for a Marxist-Leninist line against the revisionism of the time. Muchof the analysis of the inner-Party struggles of those fateful war and immediate post-war years, of course, benefits from hindsight.
Browder's revisionism first appeared as a rounded-out theory in a speech he delivered in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on December 12, 1943. 1 Its fullest ideological expression was in his hook, Teheran, Our Path to War and Peace, published just a few months later. 2
Browder's theories were a systematic set of revisionist concepts which promoted collaboration with and accommodation to, the imperialist ruling class. It led to a series of right opportunist policies which culminated in the liquidation of the Communist Party. Browder's theory departed from the time-tested principles of revolutionary class struggle basic to Marxism-Leninism. His views emphasized liberal, reformist forms of struggle and left the Party tailing af ter the bourgeoisie, eventually abandoning entirely the road to revolution.
Browder drew upon the Teheran agreement, a pact hammered out between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in December 1943, establishing unity among the allied powers in World War II and opening the second front. He transformed concepts of an international and diplomatic character, important in the war against
BROWDER'S TREACHERY
531
fascist Germany, into a full-fledged domestic program.
Browder declared that a harmony of interests had been established between labor and capital. He called for a new
"national unity" to bring full employment, peace and an end to periodic economic crises. He boasted that he was even willing to welcome J.P. Morgan into this grand coalition and"clasp his hand on that and join with him to realize it."3 He promised that the communists "will not raise the issue of socialism in such a form and manner as to endanger or weaken that national unity," and assured the ruling class that his program was consistent with the fullest possible expansion of consumption by the wealthy and the accumulation of their private incomes.4
The starting point of his new "national unity" was to continue operating the American economy at full capacity-as during the war-by seeking foreign markets equal to the war market. He proposed giant industrial development corporations of government and business which would extend credit to and invest in "the devastated and underdeveloped areas of the world," thus creating
"generations of peace and well-being in the world." 5
Essential to Browder's line were the same elements that historically had lent themselves to right opportunism in America.
These included: A) American exceptionalism, which saw capitalism in the United States as exempt from the Marxist laws of growth and decay which govern the capitalist world. Abandoning all class analysis of bourgeois democracy, Browder put forward the view that "Communism is twentieth century Americanism." B) Fundamental overestimation of the power and stability of American imperialism, which led to the conclusion that revolutionary struggle for socialism was impossible. C) Basic great nation chauvinism which opposed the oppressed and colonized peoples'
struggles for liberation from the yoke of imperialism and instead portrayed the imperialist ruling class as the bearers of prosperity and democracy. D) The view that the United States would enter a period of class harmony-a long post war period of class peace during which time progress and prosperity could be achieved within the framework of the "free enterprise" system.
E) Browder's belief that Blacks had achieved f�ll equality
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
through "peaceful" development of capitalism and abandonment of the right of self-determination. Browder believed that Black people had already exercised the historie right of self-determination and opted for integration into the country as a whole. 6
The logical conclusion of Browder's principles was his contention that the Communist Party-a revolutionary vanguard party based on Marxist-Leninist principles-was no longer appropriate for American conditions. It should be replaced by a political association which worked for reforms within the prevailing two-party system of the U nited States. This is precisely what was done in May 1944, when the Party was dissolved and the Communist Political Association created in its place.
Browder's revisionist line had not developed overnight. His Teheran thesis was only the latest expression of a rightist trend that had been developing within the Party for several years. The origins of Browderism can be traced to his distortion of the united front policy of the Seventh Congress (1935) of the Communist International. This congress had called on communists to build broad united front movements of peoples, governments and parties to defeat fascism where it had come to power and to prevent its spread to other countries. But the congress had also explicitly warned against the danger of reducing the independent and revolutionary role of the communist parties within such fronts.
Despite these warnings from the Communist International, the CPUSA slipped into serious right reformist distortions of the united front policy under Browder's leadership. Browder led the retreat from the principles of class struggle which affected all areas of the Party's mass work.
The Party' s work in the Black liberation movement felt the first effects of this retreat. Scarcely a year after the Seventh Congress called on communists to strengthen their own ranks and maintain the initiative within the united front, the U.S. Party moved to liquidate a main revolutionary strongpoint of its work in the South, the militant and communist-led Sharecroppers Union.
In the years that had followed my visit to Alabama, the Sharecroppers Union had continued to grow. In 1936, it had a
BROWDER'S TREACHER Y
533
membership of roughly 10,000, spread over five counties in the Alabama Black Belt. It was growing throughout the lower South with 2,500 members in Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina. 7 But in October 1936, the SCU was dissolved and its membership merged into the Agricultural Workers Union and the Farmers Union of Alabama. 8 This latter was an organization of predominantly white small farm owners and tenants based in the northern part of the state, outside the plantation area. This union was strongly influenced by the racist and right-wing Coughlinite forces.9
In retrospect, I believe that those responsible for liquidating the Sharecroppers Union were motivated by a sort of crude trade union economism, a desire to restrict the struggle of Black soil tillers to economic issues (as if this were possible) and a feeling that the existence of an independent and mainly Black union with the explosive potential of the Sharecroppers Union would frighten off our new democratic front allies: the Roosevelt New Dealers, the Southern moderates and the CIO leadership. As Camp Hill, Reeltown, and Dade:ville amply demonstrated, even the smallest move to change the status quo could lead to armed conflict. In faet, any demand to give Blacks a voice in determining sharecropping conditions or wages was essentially revolutionary as it threatened the existiilg set-up. Orte could almost hear the opportunists sighing with relief upon the union's dissolution.
I recall in the late thirties listening to a garbled report by one of our agrarian specialists in which he trie.d to explain the reason for the move. The problem of Black soil tillers in the deep South was just a part of the general agricultural problem, a matter of getting Blacks and whites together against the common enemy.
The Sharecroppers Union with its militant program mainly emphasizing Black grievances had become an obstacle to the unity of Black and white Southern farmers.
I took issue with this chauvinist position, pointing out that it contained a crass underestimation of the national character of the struggle of the Black peasantry in the South. I expressed surprise to hear, ten years after the adoption of our revolutionary line on the Afro-American question, what amounted to a reiteration of the
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
old social democratic position which ignored the special position of Blacks in the name of unity. The problem of the Black peasantry in the South was not exactly the same as that of the poor white farmers in the South or in the rest of the country. It was a struggle against semi-slave conditions reinforced by racist barbarism, and in the long run, for the completion of the land revolution left in default by the betrayal of Reconstruction.
The Sharecroppers Union had represented a renewal of that struggle, a struggle that required special forms and methods of oi"ganization, and its own leadership. But by 1936, the union was dead and a grievous blow had been struck against the movement in the South. In the face of the fiercest repression, a sizable Party organization with an active YCL, ILD and remarkably high political development had been built in the Black Belt. When the Party backed down from the SCU, the whole Party structure began to atrophy. By the end of 1943, all the major Party concentrations in the South were formally dissolved and replaced by non-communist education and press associations.
Despite such backsliding, the Party entered the war period with a reputation as the leading fighter for equality and Black liberation. Yet as Browder's line developed, it continually pushed us into a position of tailing after Black reformist leadership. In the thirties, the Communist Party had often been looked upon as "the Party of the Negro people"; in the forties however, our line led to repeated betrayals of the struggle. For a broad assortment ofBlack reformists, it was just the opportunity they had been waiting for.
Still smarting from defeat in the Scottsboro campaign, they jumped in to fill the tremendous void left by our retreat.
When A. Philip Randolph called for a dramatic march on Washington to protest discrimination, the Party leadership backed away from the issue and urged "unity" in the face of the fascist enemy. The Party declared that the march would create
"confusion and dangerous moods in the ranks of the Negro people." 10 B�ack newspapers and the NAACP popularized a mass slogan of the "Double V" (Victory over Hitler abroad and Victory over Jim Crow at home), but the Party leadership rejected the slogan on the grounds that it detracted from the war
BROWDER'S TREACHER Y
535
cffort!
Occasionally the Browder revisionists would give lip service opposition to discrimination and segregation in the armed forces.
When it came down to a concrete situation, however, their support was considerably less vigorous. For example, four Black W ACs at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, were court-martialed for protesting their commanding officer's demand that they should "do all the dirty work." Outraged churches, unions, newspapers and civil rights organizations quickly organized and forced the Army to reverse itself.
The Party leadership, however, reprimanded the WACs. Ben Davis stated, "The U.S. general staff has on many occasions ...
proved that they deserve the full confidence of the Negro people ... we cannot temporarily stop the war until all questions of discrimination are ironed out." 11
The slogan of the right of self-determination was officially dropped in 1944. But i� was clear that the revolutionary line it symbolized had been suppressed for some years. James Ford explained the new perspectives for Black equality to the Party. He st�ted that the economic expansion which Teheran promised would "open up the South for unprecedented development that will raise the standard of living from the degradation and poverty which have held back the entire Southern people."
According to Ford, not only would reactionary Southern Congressmen be driven from office under such conditions, but
"American democracy as a whole will be strengthened and the Negro people will be fully integrated into our American society.
These advances will be irrevocably secured, providing the democratic, win-the-war forces, including the Negro people, stand solidly behind our Commander-in-Chief." 12
The Party's work in the trade union movement also suffered from Browder's opportunist distortions of the united front. 13 In 19,.39, the Party dissolved its system of trade union fractions, factory nuclei and shop papers as a concession to the CIO's leadership, a move which.seriously weakened the Party's strength in basic industry. This move also accentuated the tendency to bide the Party's face. In the U A W and TWU A (Textile Workers' Union
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
of America), the Party retreated from situations where it had the support to elect one or more of its members to leadership and supported other candidates.
During World War II, the Party supported the no-strike pledge.
While it was a generally correct policy for the situation, the Party refused to fight for reciprocal pledges from business to curb warprofiteering and ensure the workers' standard of living. Browder opposed any struggle to extract such agreements from business, viewing them as a disruption to war production. He attacked slogans like "equality of sacrifice" -which was being raised by some Pijrty trade unionists-as stemming from narrow factional considerations. Thus, the Party found itself tailing behind the la bor bureaucrats on the day-to-day issues of safety, speed-up and overtime pay for overtime work.
Browder's revisionist theories extended into the field of foreign policy, resulting in nothing Jess than his approval of American imperialism. 14 H e argued that the peoples of Latin America should place their trust in the Roosevelt administration and the continuance of the "good neighbor policy." He urged the Chinese communists to "trust America" and in 1945 openly endorsed U.S.
foreign policy as "pressing toward the unity and democratization of China." 15 Browder abandoned support for the struggles of the oppressed and colonized peoples, arguing that they should rely on the good intentions of the great nations to gain their liberation.
The ascendency of Browder's revisionism was based upon both objective and subjective factors within the Party. Objectively, bourgeois ideology had long penetrated the working class mavement in the United States, had been nurtured during the reformist years of the Roosevelt era and had thrived in an atmosphere of inadequate Marxist-Leninist training of Party members and leaders.
The liquidation of shop units and trade union fractions greatly weakened the Party's base among the industrial workers,. and weakened the leading role of the proletariat within the Communist Party. Combined with a large influx of professionals and white collar workers, this greatly broadened the social base for revisionism in the Party. The situation was further aggravated by the
BROWDER'S TREACHERY
537
leadership's ousting of some 4,000 Party members who were foreign bom because of a desire to "Americanize" the Party. This chauvinist move turned away many of the most experienced and ideologically steeled U .S. communists from Party activities.
Finally, a distortion of democratic centralism developed inside the Party under Browder's leadership. Democratic discussion, collective leadership, criticism and self-criticism, and ideological struggle were abandoned. Browder consolidated an encrusted and entrenched bureaucratic machine under the direction of his chief lieutenant, Eugene Dennis. Democratic centralism gave way to, as V.J. Jerome later put it, "dictatorial centralism." Browder himself was glorified as the "greatest living American" and became increasingly_infatuated with "contacting influential persons" while actually isolating himself from the working class.
By May of 1945, however, Browder's visions of an all-class postwar alliance were already beginning to clash with the harsh realities of everyday life. Even before the war ended, layoffs and strikes had occurred in a number of areas. Led by the U .S., the western allies made no secret of the faet that their main target in the post-war period would be the Soviet Union and the so-called
"communist menace" it represented. Under such conditions, Duclos's letter had a sensational effect on the membership of the CPUSA.
Upon its publication in May of 1945, the rank and file were plunged into a series of discussions and debates. Discussion bulletins were written and distributed internally; clubs and whole sections engaged in heated struggle. It was an honest attack on bureaucracy and for many this was the first time they had cxperienced such open political struggle inside the Party. 16
Opposition to Browder gained rapid support and soon resulted in the Emergency Reconstitution Convention which was held in
.July of 1945. At this convention, the Party was reformed and Browder's opportunism exposed. 17 Threatened by the growing rank and file revolt, the Party-and especially the leadershipwere forced to make self-criticisms.
The convention was significant in that it reflected the two trends which were to mark the future history of the Party struggles
538
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
against revisionism. On the one hand there was the rank and filespurred to action by the Duclos letter and with at least a partial understanding of the seriousness of the Part y's rightist errors-but as yet without any clearly defined leadership. On the other hand, there was the firmly entrenched Browderite leadership who saw their main task as the squashing of the rank-and-file upsurge and holding on to their positions at any cost. One day they spouted Browderism, the next day they were repudiating his line-with little genuine self-criticism in between. To me and many of my friends, such self-criticism seemed to be mere breast beating and verbal recantation.
It is no wonder, therefore, that there was much skepticism in the ranks as to the ability of the old leadership, particularly of Browder's ex-lieutenants like Eugene Dennis and John Williamson, to successfully wage a struggle against revisionism. The old leadership was carried over almost intact into the newly reconstituted Party. 18 But it was precisely these people who controlled the Party apparatus.
Their main preoccupation at this time was to short circuit the upsurge of the rank and file; to abort what was most needed at that time-a thorough, open ideological struggle, and a period of criticism and self-criticism which would be mainly directed against the right. Almost immediately after the convention, however, the new leadership began to shift the focus of the struggle away from right opportunism to the so-called left sectarian danger. Thus Browderism was exposed pragmatically (in specific manifestations like Teheran), but the revisionist line it represented was never repudiated in a fundamental way.
Along with this came a wholesale attack on the left which is best described by Harrison George, a former editor of the Daily Worker and People's World (the Party's west coast newspaper), in a document titled The Crisis in the CPUSA. Here George related the draconic measures that were taken against so-called Trotskyite and semi-Trotskyite elements in the Party, many of whom were selfproclaimed "premature anti-Browderites." As a left opposition grew in strength foliowing the reconstitution of the Party, a number of cadres were expelled. Many were veterans, even charter
BROWDER'S TREACHERY
539
I
members, who had laid their lives on the line for the Party. Such men as Vern Smith, veteran labor writer for the communist press, Bill Dunne, an experienced trade union cadre and at one time the Party's representative to the Profintern, as well as Harrison George himself, were expelled.
George states that these expulsions were followed by mass expulsions at the local level and the dropping of a number of dissidents. Many clubs were reorganized by national and district level leadership, some cadres were expelled with an "increasingly bureaucratic suppression of Party democracy, as membership opposition passed over from a passive to an active form." 19
Eventually all that remained of democratic centralism was centralism.
A later phase of this struggle began with the National Committee meeting of 1947. This period saw the leadership postpone the national convention and in so doing refuse to submit its policies and programs to the membership for renewal or rejection. The Fourteenth Party Convention was finally held in August of 1948. U ndou btedly the right felt the need for more time to consolidate its position. Such was the case in the period following the 1945 Convention when they postponed choosing the officers of the National Committee for a year.
PARTY CHAIRMAN WILLIAM Z. FOSTER
During this period, William Z. Foster rose as the unchallenged leader of the Party. In 1945 the rank and file looked to Foster, and Foster alone among-the leadership, to reconstitute the Party on a truly revolutionary basis. The Party was at a crossroads and Foster's task was a historie one.
He had a proud history in the Party and the revolutionary working class movement. From his years in the IWW and the Socialist Party, he came into the CP with a wealth of experience in the trade union movement. Foster was a leader of the great steel strike of 1919 which saw some 365,000workers walk offthejob: In the twenties, he led the struggle against dual unionism and fought
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
for a revolutionary program for work within the unions.
The development of the prestigious Trade Union Education League (TUEL) can be attributed to his leadership. As we have already mentioned, Foster made some rightist errors in this work.
Slow to see the need for independent left-led unions, he later criticized these errors and came to lead the campaign for industrial unionism. He was one of the chief architects of the CIO.
But the task he was faced with in 1945, the fight against revisionism, proved to be beyond his capabilities. While Foster was the best of the old leadership, he was certainly no fearless warrior against the right. Even before he was thrust into the leading role in the Party, his pragmatism had come to the fore as he consistently put political expediency ahead of ideological struggle.
For example, he and Sam Darcy had been the only two members of the National Board to criticize Browder's line before the fateful arrival of the Duclos letter. In January 1944, he submitted a letter to the National Committee which criticized Browder's line. Duclos himself had liberally quoted Foster. But publication of the letter was suppressed by the National Committee.20 Foster did nothing for fifteen long months, never fought for his line or fought to bring his case to the rank and file.
During the pre-Convention discussions of 1944-a period which, according to the Party Constitution, is supposed to be marked by the most open and frank discussions and scrutiny of the Party's line-Foster maintained his silence. He presided at the convention in May of 1944 which dissolved the Party and then went on to nominate Earl Browder for president of the new Communist Political Association-just four months after his letter criticizing Browder's line. In turn, Foster himself was nominated by Browder to serve as one of the association's vicepresidents. At this same convention, Foster chaired the committee which prepared the charges to expel Sam Darcy. Yet Darcy was expelled for espousing in a more active form the same criticism of Browder as Foster expressed in his January letter to the NC. 21
From the beginning of the struggle against Browderism, Foster consistently underestimated the seriousness of the right <langer. At the convention to reconstitute the Party, he cautioned against
BROWDER'S TREACHER Y
541
"overcorrecting" the Party's past errors, and, in this spirit, he swept the whole Browder crowd back into leadership on his coattails.
Not only was Foster denying the lessons of the Party's most recent period, he actually overlooked the whole historie trend of the working class movement in the United States. From the Socialist Party to Lovestone to Browder, the main deviation had always been right opportu.nism.
For a long time, Foster seemed to think that he could be a buffer between the various factions and grnupings in the Party without ever having to seriously confront the more rightist elements in the leadership. In reality, this centrist position led him to play a conciliationist role for the right. While paying lip service to the primacy of the right danger, he actually level ed most of his guns at the left. I assumed that his cold reception to me when I returned from the Pacific was because he associated me with the "disgruntled left sectarian" elements in the Party, some of whom, like Bill Dunne, were old friends of mine.
In his concluding remarks at the Fourteenth Convention of the CPUSA, Foster openly stated that rightism was the main danger facing the Party. But he never detailed exactly what the content of these right errors was. At the same time he informed the membership that "our Party has had to conduct a fight on two fronts" and that there were dangerous "Leftist moods" and
"Leftist renegade grouplets" in the Party, that this could be seen in the revolts in a number of districts, including New York and California. 22 He was referring to areas where some of the strongest opposition to rightism developed and where many cadre and clubs were either expelled or dropped out.
It is clear that Foster considered the threat from the right to be in abeyance once Browder had been removed from leadership. He saw the political struggle-the fight to oust Browder-as being primary. In effect, he didn't understand the importance of fighting the ideological influence of Browderism which still had a firm grip on the Party.
What led Foster to so seriously underestimate the right danger and to tacitly accept the expulsion of so many genuine communists? It can be safely asserted that these errors were rooted in.his
542
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
own tendency towards rightism. Like Browder, he underestimated the leading role of the vanguard party. In his 1944 letter criticizing Browder's line there is no mention of the dissolution of the Party!
Foster wrote a postscript to this letter and the two werepublished in the July 1945. Political Affairs. In this postscript, Foster said that he had opposed the dissolution of the Party at a board meeting, but didn't actively pursue the matter because he thought it was a lost cause. He ends with these words: "So I left the whole question out of my letter to the National Committee. The immediate task, as I saw it, was for me to help to keep the C.P .A., in faet, if not in name, the Communist Party."23 Foster obviously believed that the Party could continue to play a leading role even when it was liquidated organizationally.
Again, while Foster correctly criticized Browder for overestimating the progressive aspects of the monopoly capitalists, he himself overestimated the role played by FOR and the "liberal labor combination." In the same letter in which he criticized Browder, Foster writes,"We must understand clearly and definitely that the basic forces of a progressive national unity are those grouped, in the main, around Roosevelt's banners and we must fight to help them extend and solidify their ranks. " 24
Foster was indeed a produet of the times-of a period in the Party's history when the attack on Marxist-Leninist theory, rightism and bureaucracy had seriously undermined the inner workings of the Party. In all fairness, it must be said that his ability to lead the Party was also greatly affected by his poor health.
Foliowing a heart attack in 1932,"Foster's activities were seriously limited and he was forced to spend much of his time at homeremoved from the operative leadership of the Party.
In the final analysis, however, it was his pragmatism-empirical and superficial methods of evaluating conditions in the Party and the country-which led him to agree with the main tenets of the right, most importantly the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism. It was this view that "the struggle is everything, the final aim nothing," along with an unwillingness to rock the boat, which most consistently guided his actions.
His failure to fully break with the right opportumsm of Browder,
BROWDER'S TREACHER Y
543
with revisionism, left the door open for the resurgence of a line which eventually liquidated the Communist Party as the revolutionary vanguard of the working class once and for all. His continued vacillation and conciliation to the right helped to lay the groundwork for the final victory of revisionism in the U.S. Party.
It is a sad note that this outstanding leader of the American working class was in the last years of his lif e putting forward such revisionist theories as peaceful transition to socialism.
No one who li ved through the years 1945 to 1948-with per haps the exception of Harrison George or a very few others-had a full understanding of what was going on in the Party at the time. I know that I observed right errors, but I merely saw them as mistakes and tendencies which could be corrected, not as reflecting a whole line that would lead to liquidation of the Party.
I didn't really trust the leadership, especially Eugene Dennis (though I had little actual personal contact with the man). He seemed to me to be the kind of guy who could never make a direct statement. I knew that he had been Browder's right band man and one of the leaders of the whole right deviation. Once all the breastbeating was over, he became general secretary of the Party, nominated by Foster. I wondered then how he had managed to weather the change so well.
When the struggle first began against Browder in the latter part of 1945, I was withdrawn-still reluctant to become involved in the inner.-Party struggle. But I had seen an article by Claudia Jones, a young Black woman communist from the West lndies who had challenged Browder's lin� on the right of self-determination. The article had greatly stimulated my interest.25 I knew that the ideological struggle inside the Party was far from over, and I thought that I could play a role in restoring our position on the Afro-American question. But I was still leery of plunging into the struggle because of the self doubts that hung over me after my battlefield experiences in Spain and my work in Baltimore. My heart attack also held me back somewhat, and Foster's brush-off had renewed some of the deep personal wounds that I felt.
I was therefore somewhat apprehensive when in DecemJ,er 1945, Charles Krumbein, my old Lenin School friend, and then
544
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
district organizer for New York, called me into a meeting. When I arrived, I found in addition to Krumbein: Bob Minor, (I had always had warm feelings toward Bob which I thought were mutual, despite his close association with Browder); Steve Nelson, former brigade commissar in Spain; and James Ford, one of the few "casualties" from among the Browder leadership.
Charlie began the meeting by saying that they wanted to-discuss my future work and resolve the Spanish problem once and for all.
As I recall, he said that he did not believe the rumors that I had left the front without permission, and that Bob and Steve were in Spain and could substantiate this.
It seemed to him that the rumors had been irresponsible accusations directed at "one of our leading Negro comrades."
"One can just look-although it certainly isn't necessary-at Harry's W orld War II seaman's record and see that the rumors were not true," he said.
He concluded by saying that he felt it was time for all disparaging rumors, none of which were ever made into direct charges, to cease. And that "Harry should be encouraged to make the kinds of contributions to the Party we all know he is capable of." Bob Minor said a few words along similar lines and Steve Nelson agreed. Only Ford expressed reservations but did not make any specific charges.
Bob suggested that a restatement and elaboration of a revolutionary position on the Afro-American question was urgently needed. It had been nearly ten years since such a presentation had been made. 26 I agreed. It seemed to me that there was every indication of a renewed upsurge among Blacks and important struggles were beginning to unfold which required a clear understanding of the question if the Party were to play a leading and decisive role. The rank and file, especially the young Black cadres, were aware of the crucial place th.e question held in the struggle to root out the influence of Browderism. For all of these reasons, I anxiously took up the task of writing such a hook.
I felt at the time that Krunibein and Minor were surely not acting on their own, but rather as a committee of the Po lit buro set up to investigate the matter.
Therefore, I considered this
BROWDER'S TREACHERY
545
meeting as an official clearance of all accusations stemming from S pain, and felt free to concentrate all my eff orts toward writing the book. For the next two years I spent the major portion of my time working on the manuscript and did a great deal of reading and research while I was still sailing. I had decided then to concentrate on developing an exhaustive examination of the agrarian situation in the South as a basis for the restatement of the correct position on the Afro-American question.
But in the meantime, I still had to earn a living. Belle had come in from Los Angeles and set up a small apartment on West 138th Street. She had gotten a job in a shoe factory and I decided to sign on another ship.
CUBA
In early March 1946, I signed on the inotor ship the Coastal Spartan, bound for Havana, as a cook and baker. She was a small freighter of the same class as the Turk's Knot, the ship I had sailed on my last voyage in the Pacific.
This was my first trip to Cuba. When we docked in Havana, a young mulatto police sergeant who was in charge of the dock area came aboard. The chief cook, a Filipino, introduced me to him as Sergeant McClarran. This was not the cook's first trip to Havana, and he whispered tome that McClarran was a good fellow. "He looks af ter our people ashore," he confided. "And to show our appreciation we always make sure he gets a couple of pounds of butter, which costs a kit here."
The sergeant was a tall strapping fellow who spoke fluent colloquial English. He explained to me that he had spent two years in the United States at the Cuban Pavillion of the 1938 World's Fair. Curious, I asked how he got his name. "Oh, my old father was a Scotsman," he said, laughing.
On hearing that this was my first time in Havana, he off ered to show me the city. We walked out of the harbor area and along the Prado, the main street. W e sat down at a sidewalk cafe and ordered some food. While we were talking the sergeant rose and hailed a
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
nattily dressed man with a military bearing.
He introduced me as a writer from the U.S. and we exchanged pleasantries. The man passed on and I asked who he was.
''Oh, last month he was chief of police. I don't know what he's doing now. I never liked him; he was a real reactionary, one of the hangovers from Machado's times."
A few minutes later, after we had left the cafe, the sergeant stopped to greet another man. When I asked who that was, he said,
"Oh, that's our new chief of police."
The sergeant seemed to be a progressive fellow, and he had undoubtedly sized me up as a man of the left. As we walked, we proceeded to discuss the current political situation. The periodjust after the war was one of popular upsurge as the Cubans sought to realize the democratic aims they had fought for in World War II.
Grau San Martin's people's front government was in power and the Popular Socialist Party (communist) inspired and led many struggles of the period. It was just prior to the reactionary offensive, sparked by the cold war, which swept Latin America.
I told the sergeant that I was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and he insisted on taking me to a bar where some Cuban veterans hung out. As we entered I saw one familiar face, a beautiful Black woman whom I had met in Valencia. I had known her only slightly; she was actually in the company of the General El Campesino. The story was that she had played quite a role fighting in the trenches against the fascists .
. Recognizing me at once, she exclaimed, "El Capitån!" We stood at the bar with the sergeant, who seemed to kno� everybody, and he translated when I needed it. I asked about other Cuban Spanish Civil War veterans. I had met a few, but I had forgotten their names. Most had transferred from the Fifteenth Brigade to Campesino's brigade after Jarama.
Out in the street again, I thanked the sergeant and asked if he could direct me to the Communist Party headquarters. Not only would he direct me, he said, but it would be an honor for him to escort me. We walked up a main boulevard along the bay and stopped to look at the statue of Antonio Maceo on horseback.
Maceo had been a Black leader in the war of independence
BROWDER'S TREACHERY
547
against Spain.
A few blocks further on we came to the headquarters of the Popular Socialist Party. It was located in what appeared to be an old mansion. We entered the door which opened into a large foyer.
There were large stairways apparently leading up to offices on the second floor. But the stairs were blocked off by a barricade.Behind it were a few husky-looking young security guards. They seemed to know the sergeant who told them, "This is Comrade Haywood from the American Party. He wants to see Blas."
One of them picked up the phone and repeated the message.
Finally, he turned and motioned us up the stairs. We went as directed and entered an open door where Blas Roca, the general secretary of the Party, was standing behind a desk. He shook my hand and also the sergeant's, whom he seemed to know. Roca was a light brown mulatto, as I recall, of short and stocky build.
"Sit down. Sit down," he said. He said that he had heard of me, and asked about James Ford, whom he knew. Ford had attended a congress of the Cuban Party as a fraternal delegate several years before. I told him that Ford had stuck too long with Browder and was not in the new leadership.
"Y es, we were also stuck with Browder, but we got unstuck before you comrades did," he said. 27
He then asked about Foster. I told him what I honestly thought at the time, that Foster seemed to be all right and that under his leadership we were finally pulling out of the revisionist swamp.
We continued talking and he told me about the situation in Cuba, how the Party had come through the revisionist period more or less intact, and that they were now in an uneasy alliance with Grau San M<J,rtin. It was getting shaky, however, "We're under no illusions," Roca told me, "With the war ended we're cxpecting a reactionary offensive."
He also asked about our work among Blacks. I told him that despite the backsliding with Browder, the Party's prestige remained high among Blacks. "There's a debate going on now, and we're looking forward to restoring our position."
After we had talked for about an hour, I felt I had taken enough of his time, and rose to leave. "Be sure to give my greetings to
548
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Foster," Rqca said in closing.
The sergeant and I walked back to the docks to sightsee along the Prado and take in the night life of Havana. The ship pulled out the next day for Matanzas, the sugar port in Oriente Province where we loaded sugar for the States. The ship docked in Jersey City on April 2, 1946.
THE FIGHT FOR OUR REVOLUTIONARY LINE
On my return, I began hearing more and more about the attack on the left and rumors about old friends of mine who were under attack. From what I could see, all was not well with the Party nor was the rank and file satisfied with the course of the struggle against Browderism.
To me, the one bright spot in all this was the struggle to reaffirm our revolutionary position on the Black national question, for the Party to once again take up the fight for the right of selfdetermination in the Black Belt. I followed this whole question very closely and it was clear to me that the impetus came mainly from the Black cadres and particularly from the new blood that had come into the Party in the last decade.
At that time, Blacks made up fifteen percent of Party membership. Despite Browder's liquidationist policies, the Party still maintained its reputation as a leader in the struggle for Negro rights.28 I felt that this was largely due to the outstanding reputation the Party had built for itself during the campaigns of the thirties-Scottsboro, the ILD, the Unemployed Councilsand its yeoman work in building the CIO and organizing the unorganized.
The Party maintained its fighting reputation through much of the war, despite the opportunist errors that were made. During the thirties and forties, this was the basis for the recruitment of large numbers of outstanding young Blacks who quickly matured as leaders at every level of the Party and the mass movements. This core ofBlack cadres was further strengthened by the return of Black veterans who were acutely aware of the gains made during the
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549
course of the war and of how these gains were now being threatened.
These cadres played a leading role in the working class struggle and their role in the Party's strong fight for seniority rights after the war was particularly important. The layoffs of the late forties had a harsh effect on Black workers, many of whom first entered industry during the war and were often the lowest in seniority. A spontaneous Black caucus movement arose in these years as the top leadership of both the AFL and the CIO steadfastly refused to take up the special demands of Black workers. In 195 l , these caucuses united into a national organization, the National Negro Labor Councils.
Such struggles deeply aff ected the cadres and reflected the rising sense of struggle and militancy of Black people in general. I myself was very much aware of this new spirit.
When my ship first docked, I spent a lot of time walking the streets of Harlem. I was struck with the visible optimism on the faces of the people passing me in the street. Black people would no longer be cowed and bullied by Jim Crow. They had experienced a mass political awakening as a result of their wartime experiences and this was reflected in their manner.
The war served to· break the historie isolation of the Afro
American people from the struggles of the peoples of the world.
Black men and women served over a million strong in the armed forces and the wartime expansion of industry saw an unprecedented number of Blacks, close to a million workers, come into Lhe U.S. labor force. Through such involvement, Black people were able to see more than ever that they had allies in the colonially oppressed people abroad and in the U.S. working class at home in their struggle against Jim Crow and monopoly capitalism.
Black people were deeply influenced by the colonial and semi: colonial upsurge of World War II as people in India, China, I ndonesia, Africa, Latin America and the liberated countries of castern Europe rose up to oppose fascist and imperialist domination. National minorities within the boundaries of the Soviet Union had been liberated by the socialist revoluti,on and were now cxercising one form or another of self government. More than ·
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ever, Afro-Americans were determined to fight for equality and full democratic rights at home. There could be no turning back, no return to the past.
During the course of the war, momentum had been building toward an upsurge in the Black liberation movement and it burst into full bloom once the war ended. There was a firm commitment by Blacks to carry on the fight against Hitler at home. The postwar period saw the !argest strike wave in history and Black workers played a leading role in it. In militant strikes and actions led by the Negro Labor Councils, Black workers demandedjobs, upgrading and training into skilled jobs, along with greater representation in unions and in the leadership thereof. At the same time, they played a very important role in the liberation movement as renewed struggle developed against lynchings, frame-ups, police brutality and the general denial of equality and democratic rights.
As early as 1946, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was formed to replace the ILD which had largely been liquidated under Browder. The CRC was headed by my old friend William Patterson and in 1951, it su bmitted We Charge Genocide, a petition to the United Nations "For relief from the crime of the United States Government against the Negro people."
This formidable document, inspired by Patterson, recounts much of the terrorism of this period when lynchings and Klan activity were on the rise throughout the country and especially in the South. The frame-up in the case of a self-defense slaying and subsequent life sentence of Mrs. Rosalee lngram and her sons in Georgia, the burning and destruction of the entire Black community of Columbia, Tennessee, and the frame-up on rape charges and execution of the Martinsville Seven are but a few examples. 29
This spontaneous upsurge made it all the more pressing that the Party once again take up the fight for the right of self-determination. Without such a revolutionary program, the Party would never be able to play a leading role in the struggle or to unite Black and white workers.
Many veteran Black cadres played an important role at this time, but I especially remember the young people. For instance, as I have already mentioned. Claudia Jones's discussion article that
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551
kicked off a hugh debate in the summer of 1945, attacking Browder's ideological and political stand on the Black national question. Jones contended that Browder's line on self-determination was "based on a pious hope that the struggle for ful/
cconomic, social and political equality for the Negro people would be 'legislated' and somehow brought into being through reforms from on top." 30 Jones upheld the revolutionary position as "a scientific principle that derives from an objective condition and upon this basis expresses the fundamental demands (land, equality, and freedom) of the oppressed Negro people."31
The debate began as an important phase of the struggle against Browder. It continued in the clubs, the sections and the districts for over a year. Almost every issue of the PA from the middle of 1945
through December 1946, carried an article relating to some aspect of the struggle. Under the cover of a ringing denunciation of Browderism, the right came forward to continue his liquidationist line on the Black national question and to oppose the right of self-determination. This time the banners were carried by two college professors-Doxey Wilkerson, a Black man and formerly a professor at Howard University, and Francis Franklin, a white professor from the U niversity of Virginia.
While couched in sociological and theoretical jargon and with constant allusions to "new" developments in the Black Belt, their arguments were just another rehash of the assimilationist deviation on the question. While opposing the right of self-determination, both Franklin and Wilkerson discussed the growing trend toward integration and disintegration of the Black majority in the Black Belt, the breakup of the sharecropping system and semi-feudal relations of agriculture, to support their arguments.
Both tended to downplay the role of the national aspirations of Black people and to portray the direct integrationist trend as the only significant aspect of the mavement. They totally negated the possibility of a national revolutionary upsurge, that the Black liberation struggle would ultimately take an autonomous direction towards political power as a guarantee for equality. Wilkerson and Franklin failed to understand that in the Black Belt this
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could mean nothing less than the right of self-determination, that is, the option of autonomy, federation or secession.
Franklin's analysis was different from earlier liquidators only in that he discovered a new dimension to the right of self-determination, "the right of amalgamation with the dominant nation."
While the struggle for unity has always been implicit in the right of self-determination, Franklin had something else in mind. By calling for the "right to amalgamate," he was actually advocating the right to disperse, to disintegrate and blend into the rest of the country.
Max Weiss, a member of the National Committee and formerly a leader of the YCL, wrote a substantial article refuting Franklin's line. In it, he stated what he perceives as Franklin's meaning: "The right of self-determination means the right not to be a nation, the right to put an end to its existence as a nation."32
Rather than seeing it as a question ofthe masses of Black people fighting for the right to control their destinies, Franklin saw it as a struggle of the national bourgeoisie to control its own markets. In a sort of inverted Jim Crowism, Franklin argues that a Black nation can only develop under Jim Crow because that brings about the development of a separate Black capitalist class. "It is this separate Negro capitalism which has formed the economic base for the emergence among the Negro people of the Black Belt of separate national characteristics of their own."33 Clearly, in Franklin's estimation, the system of Jim Crow was breaking down, and this was bringing about the elimination of the national bourgeoisie and, with it, the possibility of the development of a Black nation.
Wilkerson's line was slick, but even more bankrupt, as, based on a few token gains, he painted a blissful picture of the uninterrupted progress of Black people under imperialism. Wilkerson's perspective on the question is that the nation is new and embryonic and it is therefore possible for it to develop in any number of directions. In the case of the Black nation, it is going more and more in the direction of full integration with Black people becoming a national minority. Thus he states, "The perspective for the Negro people in the United States is neither toward
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553
disintegration as a people nor toward statehood as a nation; it is probably toward further development as a national minority, as a distinct and increasingly self-conscious community of Negro Americans. " 34
Wilkerson went so far as to state that the Black nation is too embryonic even to be conscious of its own rtationhood. The implication from this being that if Black people don't demand self government, why should communists do it for them. In faet, there had been strong waves of nationalism in the Black liberation struggle-the Garvey movement,
the
Forty-ninth Staters
and the Sufis were but a few examples. Wilkerson would have been astounded to hear of the number of subject nations that had even less developed national characteristics, but nevertheless were still afforded the right of self-determination by communists.
In the twenties a Yugoslavian communist, Semich, had raised similar arguments concerning the Croats and Slovenes in his own country. Stalin spoke to Semich's argument in a speech entitled,
"Concerning the National Question in Yugoslavia."
In 1912, when we Russian Marxists were outlini'ng the first draft of the national programme no serious movement for independence yet existed in any of the border regions of the Russian Empire. Nevertheless, we deemed it necessary to include in our pro gramme the point on the right of nations to self-determination, i.e., the right of every nationality to secede and exist as an.independent state. Why? Because we based ourselves not only on what existed then, but also on what was developing and impending in the general system of international relations; that is, we took into account not only the present but also the future."35
Wilkerson's theories were refuted in two well documented and well formulated articles by James Allen. 36 To Wilkerson's claim that more and more Blacks were leaving the Black Belt, Allen countered that this has been an historie trend since the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, the Black Belt was still an area of Black majority and still maintained the remnants of slavery in the sharecropping system. While Wilkerson contended that the right
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
of self-determination can only mean secession, Allen correctly pointed out that federation and various forms of autonomy were also encompassed within the right of self-determination.
Linking the working class struggle with the Black liberation movement, Allen stated, "History has taught us, and our present political experiences teach us, that every forward step of the progressive movement, every advance toward the unity of white and Negro workers, and every democratic gain ... makes self-determination of the Negro people more realizable." 37
I had been doing a lot of study and writing at this time and saw that the Party needed to have a basic program for agrarian reform in the Black Belt; the kind of program that had been liquidated with the dissolution of the Sharecroppers Union. "Toward a Program of Agrarian Reforms for the Black Belt," a two-article series, was my contribution to developing such a program. 38 La ter, much expanded and deepened in Negro Liberation, these articles re-examined the agrarian system in the South based on current data.
The essential thesis of thearticles was that lying at the root of the oppression of Blacks is the unsolved agrarian question in the South. The Southern plantation system, with its deeply-rooted semi-feudal characteristics, is being forcibly maintained by the imperialist ruling class in alliance with the Southern oligarchy through the system of Jim Crow laws and lynch terror. It is, in faet, continually reproducing Black inequality in all walks of life, condemning Blacks to Jim Crow in the South and throughout the country. With a long range program of self government for the Black Belt, the articles also included such immediate demands as reduction of land rentals, written contracts between landlord and tenant, and abolition of all laws and practices supporting peonage.
The culmination of this intensive period of debate and struggle was the restoration of the revolutionary position on the Afro
American question. At a National Committee plenum in December 1946, the Party adopted a resolution which reaffirmed its support of self-determination for the Black Belt. This victory in great measure must be attributed to the militancy and determination of the younger comrades who played such an important
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role.
The Party's rededication to this revolutionary fight had particularly important consequences for work in the South, which had been most seriously affected by dropping the position. In 1947, two years after the Party was reconstituted in the South, membership was up to 2,000-higher than it had ever been. Cadres began playing a leading role in building the fight for equal rights and in the anti-lynching campaigns, in the trade unions and organizing the unorganized. Communists led two important strikes in North Carolina which saw some 17,000 tobacco workers come under union contract for the first time. Miranda Smith, a young Black woman and a member of the Southern Negro Youth Conference, was an outstanding and militant leader in the strike.
Unfortunately, she died soon thereafter. 39
A part of the brief upsurge of Party work in the South was the 1948 Progressive Party campaign in which communists were very active. Paul Robeson and Wallace made an unprecedented joint tour of seven Southern states-loudly refusing to obey the Jim Crow laws governing meeting, eating and sleeping places, and attacking white supremacy head on. The Wallace campaign in the South was in many ways a mass protest movement against segregation.
Party members also helped build the New Orleans Youth Conference, an organization of over 500 Black and white youth. It picketed New Orleans stores in protest of discrimination against Blacks and integrated busses and street cars in defiance of local laws. Eventually the NOYC merged with the Southern Negro Y outh Conference.
In the spring and summer of 1948, I participated in two important meetings on the agrarian question. These meetings were valuable because they were part of the struggle to reconstitute the Party in the South. I was very enthusiastic about the first of these which was held in Atlanta, because I hadn't been in the South since the thirties. There was still harsh Jim Crow but there was something else afoot. Though I was only there a short time, I could see it on the streets�a part of the general post-war upsurge of Black people. but with its own special Southern character. Busses
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
were still segregated, but Black people no longer waited until all the w hi tes were on board before they themselves got on. This was a small step, but I knew it wouldn't stop there.
The meeting, which was attended mainly by Southern cadres, was to summarize some of the past mistakes and begin to draw up a program. It was at this meeting that I first learned in some detail of what had happened when the SCU had been liquidated.
Following this, there was another meeting in New York to discuss the agrarian question. At this meeting, I found the rightist tendency to lump the special oppression of Black sharecroppers and tenants in the South into the more general farm question was still prevalent. I remember that we held a very long discussion on this point and after considerable struggle, we were able to win the majority to the correct line.
Out of these meetings came general agreement with the need for a revolutionary program of agrarian reform in the South-based on the right of self-determination for the Black nation. As a result of these discussions, the Agrarian Commission developed such a program and it was published in Political Affairs in March of 1949.40 Unfortunately this program was never put into practice, nor did it ever take on any organizational form.
In general, this victory in the field of Afro-American work was to be only short lived as the right opportunist trend hovered forebodingly in the wings. The main political thrust of the leadership at the time was to build a coalition with the forces arrayed around the Truman Administration. This was merely a continuation of the rightist united front policies of the Browder period and had important implications for the Party's work.
Faced with such a strong movement among the rank and file, however, the Party leadership was forced to accept reaffirmation of the revolutionary line. I strongly suspect that their intentions from ihe beginning were to subvert that line.
This is evident in Dennis' remarks at the December 1946
Plenum of the National Committee. "I think we would make a serious and harmful mistake if we were to associate the realization of the right of self-determination solely with the realization of socialism in the United States," he stated. And further:
557
If the American people, the la bor movement in alliance with the great Negro people and all progressive and democratic forces, can check and defeat the onslaught of pro-fascist monopoly reaction, and bring into power, as an important phase of that struggle, a progressive presidential ticket and Congress in 1948, with all that this would entail, many things will be possible, including, at least, tremendous strides toward the full realization of equal rights of the Negro people in the Black Belt. 41
This statement clearly cuts away· at the revolutionary heart of the right of self-determination and puts it in the context of a program of electoral reform. It was a crude attempt to make the slogan acceptable to the liberal and reformist leaders the Party saw as its allies. It is an utter denigration of the slogan, reducing it to a reformist character and fastering the illusion that such profound changes in the lives of the Black masses can occur without mass revolutionary struggle against monopoly capitalism.
Dennis's position had sounded a little off to me from the start. I felt all along that he had never agreed with the slogan, and certainly I had never heard him defend it befare. In the same speech, he seemed to be hedging on the question. It appears to me now in looking back that it was some form of apology for the period of backsliding and vacillation under Browder.
In a manner that could easily be used by the right to justify dropping the principle of self-determination, Dennis referred to past sectarianism in application of the slogan, as though this had been widespread.42 lt's true that there had been some sectarianism when the position was first adopted in 1928 and then again in the early thirties when we had little practical experience.
There were those who tried to decide in advance what the final solution would be for Black people; for instance, Pepper's demand for a Negro Soviet Republic. But these "left" sectarian errors had never been the main deviations in our work. It seemed to me that Dennis was again trying to raise a straw man on the left to avoid dealing with the main danger of right opportunism.
The Party leadership had already undertaken the liquidation of left-led centers in the mass movement, and soon after the plenum the once influential National Negro Congress was dissolved. The
558
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
leadership contended that Black comrades should move into the
"mainstream of Negro life" (as hest represented by the NAACP) and not become isolated in so-called sectarian organizations like the NNC.43
That this was not the view of the majority of cadres was dramatically illustrated to me a couple of years later at an enlarged meeting of the National Negro Commission in New York. This meeting was attended by thirty or forty of the Party' s top cadresmostly Black-in the field of Afro-American work.
I remember that I made a speech questioning the liquidation of the NNC and calling for the formation of a left-led united front organization to take its place. Paul Robeson, a great human being and an ardent fighter for Black liberation, had just returned from Europe and was at the height of his popularity. 44 I reasoned that we might take advantage of Robeson's acclaim by asking him to head such an organization and to build a broad, mass based movement.
Betty Gannett and Pettis Perry, representing the leadership at the meeting, spoke vigorously against this proposal, saying that it was sectarian and that there was no need for another organization among Black people. I had expected such a response from them, but I was surprised by the overwhelming support my proposal received from the cadres, especially the young Blacks. They spoke so forcefully in support of my proposals that Gannett and Perry had to retreat, saying that they certainly would bring the mattter before the national leadership. I don't know whether or not they did, but this was the last time I ever heard anything about it.
Despite the important gains made in the field, the rightist tendency re main ed very persistent. It expressed itself mainly in the form of the "coalition concept" and affected not only the work among Blacks, but all areas of mass work, the trade unions in particular.
This policy was actually an extension of Browder's liquidationist line which was never thoroughly rejected by the new leadership and left the Party tailing the liberal and reformist leaders.
The political basis for such a concept could not be found in the
BROWDER'S TREACHER Y
559
harsh realities of the cold war and the attack on communism worldwide, but only in the minds and hearts, and the most wishful thinking of those who propounded it. The 1945 Reconstitution Resolution states, "The Truman Administration, like the Roosevelt government from which it is developing, continues to receive the support of the Roosevelt-labor-democratic coalition, and responds to various class pressures. " 45 Not only does this reflect the Party's classic overestimation of the Roosevelt forces in particular, but also a failure to understand the role of such forces as representatives of the imperialist class as a whole.
Un,derlying this outlook was the "failure to recognize the realignment of class forces, especially the sharp swing to the right on the part of the top leadership of the CIO and labor generally," as well as the old line reformist leadership of the N AA CP. 46 While the Party remained spellbound by this line, seemingly oblivious to the world around it, anti-communist resolutions were passed in the trade unions. So called progressive-center labor leaders like Walter Reuther and Phillip Murray bolted with lightning speed to the side of the imperialists. The NAACP leaders involved themselves in a vicious red-baiting campaign, .as the government began gearing up the machinery for full enforcement of the Smith Aet. 47 All such measures were fully backed by the courts, the police, federal agents and all lev els of government.
CLASS STRUGGLE IN THE NMU
I could see the obvious effects of this policy in the National Maritime Union (NMU). The cold war realignment of forces was bringing on a crisis of the left in the trade union movement-a clear employer-government drive against communists, a drive to break up the left-center coalition.
While this shift had already begun before the war ended, it was clear that they really meant business at the 1946 CIO Convention in Atlantic City, when the CIO Declaration of Policy on Communism was passed. The statement held that the convention delegates
"rcs.ent and reject efforts of the Communist Party or other
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
political parties and their adherents to interfere in the affairs of the CIQ."48
This mave signaled the first round in the post-war attack: on the wages and living standards of the working class and was a clear victory for the monopoly capitalists. In faet, there was no organized opposition to the right wing block which was led by social democrats, Trotskyites, Christian Fronters and Coughlinites. The CP delegates also voted for the resolution, while the Party press took an "it could have been a lot worse" kind of stand. This left the masses of delegates a confused and easy prey to the demagogy of the right wing.
Thus sacrificing democratic rights for "unity," and an independent stand for coalition at any price, the Party suffered blow after blow at the hands of the Reuthers, Murrays and Currans.
When in 1948 it had become clear that the trade union bureaucrats were unalterably lined up against the left, the Party halfheartedly tried to shift gears-calling for a rank-and-file upsurge in support of the communists. But this mave was unsuccessful in that the Party refused-even in the face of vicious reaction-to fully break with its policy of tailing the bureaucrats, leaving large sections of the rank and file to become consolidated behind the right-wing leadership of the unions. The Party refused to play the bold independent role that was necessary if we were to exert any kind of leadership in the labor mavement.
The NMU was a crucial arena of this struggle. Built by the Communist Party, it was the most left and democratic of all the unions. Communists were in the majority on the National Board. NMU ships were a school for ideological and political struggle-not only around the day-to-day issues on the ship, but on the broader political questions as well. Communism, Trotskyism, Stalin and the Black national question were regular topics of mass ideological debate. NMU seamen had served proudly in the Spanish Civil War.
The NMU had a reputation as the finest, most progressive and democratic union in the country. Ships crewed by the union were the first in the maritime industry to have checker board (Black and white) crews. Jesse Gray, a Black seaman and friend of mine who
BROWDER'S TREACHERY
561
began sailing when he was sixteen or seventeen years old, described the general f eeling that Blacks had about the union at that time.
"One thing that was really exciting ... you had to have been in the NMU to really feel, it was like another world. lt's like going to China, to the Soviet Union on a trip if you've never been there. If you've always lived in the South in the U.S. where racism was so sharp, and to go to the NMU where Blacks and whites were on the ship, they were together, worked together-it was a real hig thing.
And that was only as a result of the sharp struggles of the more advanced political forces."49 As to the role of Black workers, Jesse said, "Black workers in particular gave leadership to the NMU, and arose then as a tremendous, conscious force-Black workers and their allies were the most powerful bloc on the waterfront." 50
One would have thought that we communists were so strong that we could never have been driven out of the union. We built it, we fought for it, but we reckoned without our host. They had a plan which had been developed over a number of years and which included the use of government training schools to develop cadres of seamen. This was an organized attempt to create a split among members in the union with payoffs to right wingers and union thugs. While the Party vacillated and refused to take a stand against such chicanery, the shipowners and the government scored victory after victory. And NMU President Joseph Curran was their man.
Curran had been a leader of the union since its founding days in 1936 as a militant split off of the bureaucratic and corrupt Seaman's International Union (SIU). A rough and tumble sailor whose home ashore had once been Battery Park, Curran had experienced a rapid shift in fortunes since the founding of the union. He had once been a militant fighter and before the break up of the left-center coalition had been counted among the left in the union. The Party was very slow to understand what was happening and to change its strategy accordingly when Curran began shifting to the right in late 1945 and 1946.
I noticed this changed atmosphere as soon as I got back on ship in the fall of 1946. We were sailing on the USS Washington. She
562
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
had been a troop ship during the war and had been reconverted by her owner, United States Lines, to her old status as trans-Atlantic passenger liner. She traveled the New York-Southampton-Le Havre route, sometimes stopping at Cobh, lreland, in County Cork. It was a sixteen or seventeen day voyage and I stayed with it off and on for a year, while I was writing my hook.
She was a hig old ship, damp and drafty, with a crew of about 700. Conditions in general were poor and seamen were always being injured. Accommodations in the crews' quarters, the glory hole, were unbearable. Under such conditions there was quite naturally a good bit of struggle on board. And here is where we clear ly saw the new alignment of forces-it was the rank and file against the Curranites all the way.
Curran's men would faithfully tail the company's line. At that time the ship owners had a major campaign to put all their ships under foreign flags in order to enjoy cheap wages and get rid of the union. This necessitated temporarily shutting down a number of ships which sailed under U.S. flags. When the company would threaten to take the Washington to the ships' graveyard up the Hudson River, the Curran forces would say that we should withdraw all pending grievances or face the loss of700 jobs. "Save jobs at all costs," they said. We of course oposed this line; as lang as we had jobs, we would fight for our rights.
Curran had a willing and ready accomplice in the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party. The Washington crew in 1947 represented for the first time a large concentration ofTrotskyites and they were clearly out to get the Party. They thought if they could tail behind Curran, even get a few places on the Curran slate, they could help in wiping communists out of the industry and emerge as the sole, unchallenged, left wing leadership. The second half of their plan was never to come to fruition, but they certainly served the cause of Curran and the ship owners well.
lnstead of joining us on the basic issues, they firmly took up the collaborationist policies of the Curranites in opposing strikes and other such actions in order to save jobs. They became Curran's goons. When the Coast Guard screened all the communists out of the industry, the Trots were saved-partially in payment for their
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meritorious service to the government and partially because thcy represented no threat to the Curran leadership.
But the progressive, communist-led left was very strong on thut ship. We controlled the stewards' department-400 men, about two-thirds of whom were Black and Puerto Rican-and also had strong forces on deck and in the engine room. The right couldn't openly oppose us so they had to resort to more underhanded tactics. Often they would use guys like Frank Ryan to try and infiltrate our ranks. An able-bodied seaman and a very capable bastard, he had been around the trade union movement for quitc a while and had been port agent in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Ryan wus elected ship's chairman for one voyage of the Washington. Later he became a lieutenant of New York City Transit Union boss, Mike Quill. As far as the right was concerned, he was a flaming radical; but when it came down to brass tacks, he was just another Curran man in disguise. He caused a lot of trouble, but he never fooled us.
Jesse Gray, who was then about twenty-one years old, wus chairman of the steward's department and, on one or two voyages, had been elected ship chairman. He was a militant organizer and a great strike, leader as I recall. Many years later Jesse and I reminisced about all the many strikes we had on ship. "We had all the workers joining us and we could tie the ship up in a minutenail it to the pier," he said.
I recall one occasion when the crew went straight to the union hall-right up to the national board to present their grievances.
Curran was there and, as could be expected, opposed the strike.
After a lot of milital)t anti-Curran rhetoric, the board nevertheless went along with him and voted against the strike. I remember Jesse talking to the crew after that, he sure didn't want to go along with the board. But the majority voted to accept their decision and cverybody went back to work.
The NMU held a convention in October 1947 at the Manhattan Casino. It was a Curran sweep both locally and nationally, uccomplished with the able bodied support of the local police and C'urran's own henchmen and thugs in the union. He would carry his men from port to port, just to vote in and help "supervise" local
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elections.
A friend of mine tells a story about a seaman meeting a shipmate of his in New Orleans. "I thought you were just in New York the other day. How did you get down here so fast?" he asked.
"I caught a fast freighter," was the terse reply.
Despite this offensive, the left slate which was headed by Blackie Myers and Ferdinand Smith, a Black man, won 15,000 out of 60,000 votes nationally. 5'
I was at the national convention and remember that there were a couple of dozen police scattered around the hall where the voting took place. Paddy wagons waited expectantly on the outside. A police lieutenant would from time to time take the microphone and warn the crowd against creating disturbances, as brawls between the Curranites and the rank and file broke out all over the room. Curran was at his demagogic, red-baiting hest, foretelling the dire consequences of a communist takeover of the union. He warned that the ship owners would never bargain with the reds.
With this election, union democracy was thrown out the window. The constitution was rewritten with the bureaucrats now firmly in charge of what had once been the most democratic union in the country. The Coast Guard began backing up the attack on the left by issuing passes. It became mandatory for merchant marines to carry Coast Guard passes and none were being issued to militants. By the late forties, communists were effectively barred from shipping out of any port in the country.
THE 14TH PARTY CONVENTION
I stopped sailing on the Washington in March 1948, to devote full time to writing the hook. This was made possible by Paul Robeson. I had met him through Bill Patterson, the two were close friends and Bill had helped bring Robeson into the left progressive movement.
Many tributes have been written about Paul and I knew them all to be true. He was a great musician, singer and actor. But more importantly, I knew him to be a great human being and an ardent
565
fighter for Black rights. We had often discussed the book I was working on. Robeson was sympathetic to what I was doing and anxious to see the book, the first of its kind by a Black Marxist, in print. When Bill explained it would be possible to finish the manuscript in a f ew months ifl could work full time on it, Paul was more than willing to subsidize me, offering a hundred dollars a month.
Du ring the next f ew months I worked hard on the manuscript. I was very fortunate to have a good editor who was of invaluable help to me and a very capable political consultant as well. The encouragement of my wif e Belle and other friends was also most important and helpful to me. At the same time, I was teaching classes on the Afro-American question at the Jefferson School and Party training schools in the district. I found these tasks complemerµed each other nicely. In the classes I was able to use material I was working on for the book. The lively discussions provided useful criticisms and the questions helped to clarify my ideas and formulations.
·In the fall of 1948 my book, Negro Liberation, was published.52
It received great acclaim in the communist press, both here and abroad, and was published in a number of languages: Russian, Polish, German, Czech and Hungarian. It came to be regarded by the Party as a basic text in its field. Meetings and seminars were set up which discussed the book. Shortly after its publication, I spoke at mass meetings in Detroit, Ann Arbor and Chicago.
The position of the book was not new, but a reaffirmation of the revolutionary position developed at the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928. The heart of this position is that the problem is fundamentally a question of an oppressed nation with full rights of self-determination. It emphasized the revolutionary essence of the struggle for Black equality arising from the faet that the special oppression of Blacks is a main prop of the system of imperialist domination over the entire working class and the masses of exploited American people. Therefore the struggle for Black liberation is a component part of the struggle for proletarian revolution. It is the historie task of the working class movement, as
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
it advances on the road to socialism, to solve the problem of land and freedom of the Black masses.
What was new in the book was the thorough analysis of the concrete conditions of Black people in the post-war period. I made extensive use of population data; the 1940 census, the 1947
Plantation Count and other sources, in order to show that the present day conditions affirmed the essential correctness of the position we had formulated years before.
I was very happy when the book was finally finished and in print. I felt that combined with the positive ideological struggle on the question which resulted in the 1946 resolution, the book laid a solid foundation for the Party' s future work in the field. I felt that as future crises developed and the op pression of the masses intensified, the Black movement for equality and freedom would take a nationalist direction towards a struggle for political power and some form of self-government. For this reason, a program based on the principle of self-determination is an essential weapon in welding together the powerful revolutionary alliance of the Black masses and the working class movement.
Just prior to the publication of Negro Liberation, the Party's Fourteenth Convention was held in New York City. The convention took place in the midst of a growing reactionary offensive.
It was a period of mounting cold war, Taft-Hartley anti-labor legislation, loyalty oaths and direct measures to illegalize and destroy the Party. At the same time, every effort was being made to discredit and wipe out all progressive traces of New Deal legislation.
The sharp swing to the right had just recently resulted in the expulsions of the left from the Cl O unions, a crushing defeat for the communists. At the same time, top leadership sections of the Black reformists were shifting to support for Truman's anti-communist campaign and imperialist designs as embodied in the Truman Doctrine (early 1947) and the Marshall Plan (June 1947).
And if clearer indication of the growing attack on the left generally and the communists in particular were needed, the Justice Department provided it with the indictments of almost the entire Party leadership. In July 1948, the entire National Board
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was indicted on violations of the Smith Aet. 53
This was the setting for the Fourteenth Party Convention held August 2-6, 1948, in New York. With the reactionary offensive intensifying, the Party clearly needed to make a sober and accurate assessment of its strengths, of its base of support and its ability to rally the masses ( especially workers and oppressed nationalities) against the ruling class attack. Rather than do this, the Party leadership sank further into the illusions of the "grand coalition"
which had so dominated their policies since the reconstitution of the Party in 1945.
There were of course a great deal of militant sounding phrases to cover the retreat. Rhetoric about being "the party of socialism," 54
building a "fighting Communist Party" 55 and deepening "our theoretical understanding of the role of the Party," 56 was common in the speeches and reports. But underlying all of it was the fundamental rightist orientation that placed a premium on being in the "mainstream" of the people's coalition.
This was clearly seen in the grandiose assessment of the Wallace campaign. Wallace was not seen as representing the advocates of free enterprise, non-monopoly capital, nor was it understood that his campaign was the tail end of the wartime progressive coalition, the last breath of the dying liberal reformist movement.
Rather, the convention's draft resolution portrayed the Wallace Party as a powerful movement on the verge of launching a sweeping attack on the monopolists' reactionary war-mongering policies. "The formation of this new party ... marks the beginning of the end of the two-party system through which Big Business has so long ruled ... .it represents a permanent structural force in American politics. "57
This obviously rightist assessment is furthered by Dennis's characterization of the Progressive Party as having a strong working class base of support. "The new Progressive Party, is becoming a mass people's party, and already embraces the most active and politically conscious sections of the new labor and people's coalition. " 58
In work among Blacks, the Party was still in the vise grip of the
"coalition concept." Despite the faet that most ofthe leadership of
568
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
the N AACP had swung behind Truman's anti-communist demagogy and launched a vicious ted-baiting campaign, the Party pursued a policy of conciliation to the reformists.
In practice this meant the liquidatiqn of any left-led organizations. Speaking at the convention, Ben Davis criticized "left"
errors which were "reflected".in the failure to give main attention to aiding and supporting the N AACP. This organization is the largest, most authoritative, and most representative among the Negro people. It must be assisted and built."59
No better example of the Party leadership's inability to accurately assess its strength can be seen than Foster's concluding remarks in his discussion of the upcoming struggle to prevent conviction of the Party's indicted leadership. "There are tremendous powers arrayed against us-the Government, the press, the trade-union bureaucratic leadership, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the courts, and all the rest of the machinery of capitalism. But we have one great force on our side-the great masses of American people."60
Why was the Party so divorced from reality-so unable to accurately assess its position and strength in the working class and oppressed masses and make the necessary steps to defend itselfl To do this would have required a sharp break from the rightist and tailist policies which had eroded the Party's base and influence. It would require a thorough-going self-criticism and struggle to break the grips of the rightism which had been carried over from Browder and still remained strong in the new leadership.
This the Party's leadership was unable to do for they were themselves the architects of the policy. They had short circuited the emerging rank-and-file struggle against Browder and had led the attack which brought the expulsion of the so-called disgruntled left guilty of nothing more than attempting to complete the struggle against Browder. And now they were just as fervent in their refusal to re-evaluate post-war policies.
Foster led the way by declaring that it was "utterly false" to say that at the 1945 Emergency Convention, the Party had not carried through the struggle against Browder. He arrived at a centrist solution, attributing such a view to "leftist renegade grouplets." He
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steadfastly declared that "events since then have proved the correctness of the coursc we then took" and that any weaknesses stemmed from "failures .and shortcomings in carrying out a fundamentally correct line."61
Thus the 1948 convention set the stage for another inner-Party crisis. The upcoming trials would provide the opportunity for expression of a full theoretical rationale---.---that of peaceful transition to socialism-for these basically liquidationist policies, and leave the Party in the depths of a crisis from which it would never recover.
