An Unmet Challenge: Race and the Left in America

Marxism was at first a transplant to the United States, brought with the arrival of radicals who were compelled to leave Europe after the failed revolutions of 1848. However, as an organized political movement, it was forged with the great inspiration and impetus given by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, and the subsequent revolutions that swept through Europe and the world. These profoundly radicalizing events led to the formation of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CP), first in 1919 as two separate and competing tendencies, and then as a unified Workers Party in 1921. According to James P. Cannon, one of the Communist Party’s leaders in the 1920s, and one of the leaders of the Trotskyist fight against Stalinism from 1928 onward, the first years of the Communist Party were dominated by foreign émigrés with direct experience in Europe’s mass Marxist parties. Their experience within Marxism led them to believe that it was their duty to preserve the integrity of Marxism against any misinterpretations by its new, less experienced American practitioners. However, this inadvertently led to a neglect of specific aspects of the historical development of the United States, most crucially the struggle against slavery, segregation, and racism. This theoretical deficiency remained even after the growth enjoyed by the CP in the 1920s and 1930s.

Thus limited by its theoretical outlook, the American Communist Party neglected the critical question: How should Marxists account for the specificity of national historical development, while, at the same time, attempting to overcome the nation-state as a political framework? In the case of anti-black racism and segregation, this requires us to critically reevaluate the dialectic of separatism and integration/assimilation in the race politics of the United States.

Concurrent with the formation of the Communist Party in the United States was a reactionary intensification of segregation, the roots of which extended back to the defeat of the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War. As a result of that defeat in the 1870s, many black ex-slaves fled the penury of the sharecropper system in the South to enter into northern industrial production. This process accelerated with the increased need for industrial labor generated by World War I. During this period the racist attitudes of the white working class were inextricably bound up with the assault on the liberties, freedoms, and personal safety of black Americans. So, while there were certainly many important examples of racial solidarity among members of the working class at the time—such as the black and white working class’s defense of the black population during the Chicago race riots of 1919—still, in the eyes of many of its black counterparts and their leadership anti-black racism characterized America’s white working class. The exclusionist practices of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) were a particularly egregious example of this in the labor movement itself. The AFL claimed at the time of its founding in 1886 to follow in the tradition of the Knights of Labor, and to practice the principle of labor solidarity without racial prejudice. However, this soon became a dead letter, as many of the affiliated craft unions refused to include black workers. Historian Theodore Draper has emphasized the equivocations made by the organization when confronted by this problem, describing how “[a]s early as 1900 the AFL’s leaders resorted to the futile and tainted device of issuing its own charters to separate Negro locals. As a result, the AFL for half a century largely evaded the problem of, or blocked the way to, organizing Negroes.”[2] The concessions made to Jim Crow in order to placate racist workers and advance labor’s short-term goals combined with the paranoia of white workers who feared having their position undercut by cheap black labor to produce extremely difficult obstacles for the communist movement to overcome.

It was in this context of Reconstruction’s failure and the racialized division of the working class that the Jamaican black separatist Marcus Garvey first gained for himself and for his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) a mass following in the United States under the slogans “Africa for the Africans” and “Back to Africa.” Garvey’s movement was both courted and contested by the Communists in the immediate post-war years.[3]

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