He wrote: "American Communists did many admirable things amidst the many brutalities & idiocies that are all too well known ...."
But Doug, it isn't true that their true history and legacy are all that well known. For instance, Howard Fast said he *didn't know* why the CP betrayed the March on Washington movement. Charles Brown says he *doesn't know* why the CP betrayed the March on Washington movement.
And if anyone would know, it would be people like them, right?
I do believe this lack of knowledge is one reason for judgments such as "On race, they were way ahead of their time." Since the Party betrayed the Black freedom movement when it was in its class interest to do so, one needs to examine seriously *why* they did good things at other times, and not take this at face value. Was it really because this time around they were fighting for Blacks, or was it because this time around the Blacks' freedom struggles happened to be consistent with the class interests of the Kremlin rulers?
So it isn't a quantitative matter of how many good things vs. how many bad things they did. It's a matter of what the Stalinists stood for and stand for when push comes to shove. I agree that the twists and turns in the Party line make its history seem complex and contradictory, but put it all into class terms, and I assure you that their legacy will begin to take shape as a whole.
In case people still *don't know* what I'm talking about, here is a section from _American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard_ (pp. 24-25):
A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, organized a March on Washington Movement. This all-Negro mass organization planned to mobilize 100,000 for its march on the nation's capital. Under its pressure President Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 8802 which barred discrimination in war industries. ...
The Communists Oppose the Independent Negro Movement
At the beginning of World War II, the slogan of the American Communists was "The Yanks Are Not Coming." They tried duplicating the treachery of the Stalin-Hitler Pact by joining with the fascistic "America Firsters" -- to Communists, anything at all which would keep America from entering the war on the side of the Allies was justifiable. If they opposed anything at all in the original organization of the March on Washington Movement, it was that it was not militant enough because it allowed itself to be led by A. Philip Randolph. All this was changed overnight when, in June, 1941, Germany invaded Russia. The imperialist war was now declared by these quick-change artists, who undeviatingly follow Russian foreign policy lines, to have become "a war of national liberation." They began demanding the immediate establishment of ä second front" -- everywhere, that is, except for Negroes in the United States.
Now they began to attack A. Philip Randolph as a veritable "subversive" and the March on Washington Movement as being "too belligerent." By its fight for jobs for Negroes, said the Communist Party's Vice-Presidential candidate and Negro Leader, James Ford, it was "creating confusion and dangerous moods in the ranks of the Negro people and utilizing their justified grievances as a weapon of opposition to the Administration's war program ..."
These "justified grievances" didn't seem to warrant, in the eyes of Communists, even so mild a program as that of the _Pittsburgh Courier_, which had launched the slogan of the "Double V": "double victory for democracy at home and abroad." This, said the _Daily Worker_, in its special symposium on the Negro question in March, 1942, destroys national unity! "Hitler is the main enemy and the foes of Negro rights in this country should be considered as secondary."
Many a sympathizer of the Communists and what they had done on such cases as the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930's were taken aback. As George Schuyler put it: "Whereas at one time they were all for stopping production because of Jim Crow employment policies, low pay or bad working conditions, they are now all-out for the Government's policy of no wartime strikes and have actually endorsed labor conscription, i.e., human slavery. Everything must be done to save Russia even if Negroes' rights have to go by the board."
The Communists proceeded also to rewrite Negro history. Robert Minor, in "The Heritage of the Communist Political Association," discovered the "the abolition of national oppression is a bourgeois-democratic reform" and therefore is achievable *within* the framework of American capitalism so long as the "Negro people pursue the correct course -- the Frederick Douglass course of full support of the war ..."
Outside of the slanderous statement about that great Negro Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, as if he uncritically supported the Civil War, *the Civil War did finally turn into a revolutionary war which abolished slavery. It thus merited also the support of the international working class which was given by the International Workingmen's Association headed by Karl Marx. World War II, on the other hand, remained an imperialist war, as was evident by the type of support given it by the American Communists. They came out (1) in support of the no-strike pledge by the trade unions, not to mention being for company incentive plans; (2) against any independent activities by Negroes for their rights either on the job, or in the army, or anywhere; (3) helping railroad the Trotskyists to jail under the Smith Act; and (4) vying with the D.A.R. in its "patriotism," that is to say calling "subversive" all who disagreed with them. Even the NAACP had become too militant for them.*
[...]
During the 1943 mass demonstration, the Communist Councilman Benjamin A. Davis appeared with Mayor La Guardia in Harlem and on the same platform spoke against the Negro outburst.
According to Earl Browder: "The immediate achievement in this period under the present American system of complete equality for the Negroes has been made possible by the crisis and by the character of this war as a people's war of national liberation." And just in case there was any illusion about the "complete equality for the Negroes" requiring *any* activity, the Negro Communist, Doxey A. Wilkerson, spelled it out for all as no more, and no less, than the "full support of the win-the-war policies of our Commander-in-Chief."
So eager were the Communists in their support of the Roosevelt Administration that they spoke not only of "war-time unity" but *post-war* plans. We don't mean those of the Cold War that they did not anticipate. No, in that same 1944 pamphlet, _ What the Negro Wants_, Wilkerson wrote "To draft idealistic war plans for the Negroes ... tends to divert much needed energy from the really urgent task of today: to win the war." Shades of the Bourbon South!
No wonder the Negroes by the thousands -- for they had joined the Communist Party during the 1930's -- tore up their Communist Party cards and were not again fooled by the new change in line that came with the Moscow Cold War which made the American Communists once again (for how long?) come out "for the Negro liberation."
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.