I much prefer Denby's forthrightness and sharp class perspective to the equivocation and realpolitik coming from some quarters of this list.
Andrew ("Drewk") Kliman Home: Dept. of Social Sciences 60 W. 76th St., #4E Pace University New York, NY 10023 Pleasantville, NY 10570 (914) 773-3951 Andrew_Kliman at msn.com
"... the *practice* of philosophy is itself *theoretical.* It is the *critique* that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea." -- K.M.
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When I talk to Negro Stalinists, I know and feel that it is the party first, second, and always. With this the question of Russia is always tied in. But it is never the Negroes first, no matter what they say. A close friend of mine went into the Communist Party. He asked me to attend a meeting for Howard Fast ....
... [Fast] said the Negroes, if the Communists had their way, would have a section in the center of the United States all for themselves. He said that Dr. DuBois had just become a man in the last four or five years. He said Paul Robeson had just become a man, a real man, ten years ago. If the Negroes got their emancipation Paul Robeson would be the Negro who had led them to it.
Two things were hitting me. According to Fast, Dr. DuBois didn't become a man until he was eighty-five years old. The other was what would happen to fifteen million Negroes if Robeson should pass on. All our hopes for our rights would be done. Fast said some more about self-determination for Negroes and the rest of his talk was on the Soviet Union. ...
... After five or six questions, I asked: "Why didn't Paul Robeson support the March on Washington which was a mass struggle for Negro rights, and out of which came the 8802 order?"
"What is the relationship of Russian workers to production?"
Fast said he didn't know why Robeson didn't support the March on Washington movement. As to the second question: he would deal with the Russian miners first. He said the miners in Russia earned one hundred and fifty dollars a week. They all had beautiful homes, they had automobiles, and if the 1952 plan wasn't disrupted by war, there would be socialized bread, free bread. Then he sat down.
There were more questions asked by obvious CP members. Nearing the end, I raised my hand again.
I said, "You didn't answer my questions as I was thinking them, I'd like to know: Why didn't one of the leading Communists or why didn't the CP as a whole support the March on Washington Negro mass movement? Also, how much control do Russian workers have of production?
Fast said he didn't know why the Communist Party, or Robeson, didn't support the march on Washington. The production in Russia was controlled by factory committees. He sat down again.
I got up again, "Who controls the factory committees? Are they like the UAW today where the national staff controls from the top down through the shop committees and the chief stewards? Does this control come from the workers on the line or from the Kremlin on down?"
"Another thing, This self-determination as you speak about it. I don't think Negroes want segregation in one area as you propose it. You mean Negroes controlling Negroes, in a section of the country by themselves -- would you clarify that some too?"
At this time all the Negroes' and a few whites' eyes were real sharp like a bed of snakes, just tense. The Negro who brought me was shaky and nervous.
Fast jumped up, real vicious. "I don't know who you are or where you are from. But the Communist Party, like any other organization may make mistakes. But unlike any other organization we're only too damn glad to admit them."
One Negro jumped up and said in a vicious tone, "If you're after disrupting this meeting, I want you to know I supported the March on Washington movement."
I was very nervous and my friend and I were looking for an attack. Fast came down and asked someone near who I was. After we left my friend said he was really surprised at the way they acted. When he first went to the CP meetings they always tried to explain everything to him. He said he'd never go to another meeting.
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In discussing the Angela Davis case with some Blacks, I found that many, especially older Blacks, did not agree with her political beliefs. Some younger Blacks did support her beliefs. The big difference was that the older Blacks remembered only too well the betrayal of the Black struggle in this country by the Communist Party during World War II. They remembered how the Party had betrayed the "Double V" movement (victory abroad and victory at home), and the March on Washington that brought about the FEPC. They also saw the CP crush the Hungarian workers' revolt, killing thousands and imprisoning many more.
Angela said she was a Marxist. But the philosophy of Marxism is as far from Russian state capitalism, which they call Communism, as the earth is from the sun. Angela stated that she would work to free political prisoners all over the world. There is no better place she could have begun than in Russia, where there are more political prisoners than in any other country.
While Angela was on trial and being persecuted by Nixon, he was off to China, sipping tea with Mao Tse-Tung. He followed this up with a trip to Russia and champagne toasts with Brezhnev. And in neither country did any of them tell how they were planning to sell out North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese were supposedly Communist, yet here were the two giant Communist powers who certainly could have come out in principled support of North Vietnam, but instead permitted the greatest capitalist power on earth, the U.S., to senselessly slaughter the Vietnamese people.
I was discussing this with some younger Blacks, who said they didn't believe there would be such a massacre if the Vietnamese people were white; they saw racism as one of the most important aspects of the war. So disgraceful were Nixon's policies toward Africa, that they were denounced by two former secretaries of state, 12 former U.S. ambassadors to African countries and a former U.S. representative to the UN.
These were the objective conditions that Angela found herself caught up in and a victim of. I know I was amazed when she was freed by a jury and gave credit to the Communist Party for freeing her. The simple fact is that it was the mass Black support she got throughout the U.S. that freed her, not the CP.
When she was freed and a citizen of Czechoslovakia tried to get her to sign a petition opposing the jailing of political prisoners in that country, she wouldn't even look at him. This is like President Carter talking about human rights all over the world, but not speaking out against the inequality here in the U.S. As murderous as Uganda dictator Idi Amin is, he can still attack Carter by simply saying, "Why don't you do something about human rights in your own country?" And Carter can't answer him.
What Angela did was talk about human rights in the abstract, but her concrete actions exposed her for all to see. The point is that there are thousands and thousands of Blacks and other poor people throughout the country who suffer from race and class injustice. The same thing applies to the so-called communist and socialist countries, and just because Angela doesn't know it, doesn't mean that a majority of people in the world don't know it.
Angela also had a lot of things to say about Cuba, after she cut some sugar cane and had many pictures taken of her "joining in" with the ordinary Cuban workers. What came to my mind when I saw all that was the statement from the Blacks woman who asked the question about the Cuban revolution that is at the heart of any revolution that will ever happen. Her question was, "After the revolution, when I put down my rifle, will I have a broom pushed into my hands?" This is the question that has to be answered before, not after, the revolution. Because after it is too late.
You don't have to be a worker to understand the working class, but the working class can always tell, and expose those intellectuals like Angela Davis who claim to speak for workers with their words, but whose actions show that they are against the workers.