...William Maxwell's 254-page _New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars_ (including a handsome thirteen-page insert of photographs and illustrations), puts cultural flesh on the organizational and political scaffolding constructed by Mark Solomon. It also reconfigures in startlingly new ways the entire terrain of 1920s-'30s left-wing cultural production.
Maxwell's focus is on the movement of a number of African-American writers from a background of "New Negro" and "Harlem Renaissance" experiences toward the Communist movement in the interwar period. His unique orientation emphasizes a mutual indebtedness, a two-way channel "between radical Harlem and Soviet Moscow, between the New Negro renaissance and proletarian literature." This interchange is the reason why the explanation for such a development "cannot be pursued without acknowledging both modern Black literature's debt to Communism and Communism's debt to modern Black literature."
Moreover, the importance of the Harlem/Moscow transit in Black cultural history also explains the reason why the disillusionment of a handful of African-American Leftists was expressed so fervently after the 1930s and has received so much attention.
Maxwell's emphasis on "Black volition" and the "interracial education of the Old Left" corresponds to Solomon's research; but Maxwell aims to enhance our understanding of African-American and "white" modern literature as well as radicalism.
Included among the misrepresentations of the relationship of "New Negro" (the term for militants in the Harlem Renaissance days) and "Old Left" refuted by Maxwell, are the pre-eminent readings of novels by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison that view the relationship of the left to African Americans as one of manipulation; Black nationalist interpretations of the faults of earlier Black writing that are usually attributed to the malign influence of the white left; the claims of Black feminist and "vernacular" critics that the Communist tradition posited a hostility to Black folk materials; and the ironic exclusion of the Black/left relationship from recent arguments in literary theory about "mulatto modernism."
Maxwell's objection to these earlier treatments of the Black/left cultural relation is not due to a disagreement with the dismay of some of the critics about the left's illusions in the Stalin regime -- a dismay that Maxwell shares. His dissent is because of the failure of these earlier critics to recognize that the association had as great an impact on changing the U.S. Communist movement's culture and politics as vice versa.
Maxwell's effort to recuperate African-American agency in the relationship is based on his observation that Black pro-Communists were independently zealous in their support of what they took to be Soviet policy in the USSR and internationally; that neither Black nor white literary Communists took "dictation from Moscow"; and that earlier narratives of this symbiotic relationship have been too immersed in the Cold War fixation on evidence of "white seduction and betrayal of Black mouthpieces."
Moreover, what Maxwell calls "Black Communist initiative" is supported by the most compelling trend in historical and literary scholarship of the recent era, such as the aforementioned books by Robin Kelley and Mark Naison. (5)
This is a trend to which Maxwell wants to make additions and corrections, primarily by extending the time-line backwards from the 1930s. To Maxwell, the 1920s comprises the crucial moment when historical forces such as the Great Migration of Blacks to urban centers, and the Harlem Renaissance's pioneering of "Black routes into international modernity," produced a "Black working class protagonist" as a means by which socialism might be African-Americanized in the form of joining Marxism and the "vernacular culture of the descendants of African slaves." (6-7)
The resulting negotiations between Black militants moving toward Communism and the Communist institutions themselves can best be traced through literary-cultural expressions, especially the advent of "proletarian literature" and the Party's construction of a view of African America as a nation within a nation.
Maxwell's first and by far longest chapter begins the revision of the post-World War I cultural landscape through an examination of the poet-lyricist Andy Razaf, whose writings are used to present him "as a partial product and gauge of the place of Black bolshevism within the cultural field of the Harlem Renaissance." (15) Razaf, who had a special feeling for the experience of "service" work (he had held jobs such as operating an elevator), wrote first for Cyril Briggs' _Crusader_ and then for midtown music publishers.
Maxwell's view contrasts with those of Harold Cruse, George Hutchinson and others, who hold that an attraction to Communism destroyed the potential evolution of the Renaissance -- or else that the Renaissance came about by displacing post-World War I Black militancy. Razaf, however, expresses an important trend of mostly Caribbean immigrants around _The Crusader_ who saw the new Black Renaissance within a field of class relationships affected by the international crisis of capitalism and the impact of the Russian Revolution. Indeed, part of the attraction to Moscow was based on a conviction that the Soviet leadership would assist the "special interests" of U.S. Blacks in relation to the left.
The _Crusader_ view was that, with the Harlem Renaissance as a cultural center, the new urban African Americans (including Caribbean immigrants) would continue the struggle launched by Black World War I veterans, escalating it even into the international arena. Maxwell sees the efforts of Howard University professor Alain Locke to promote his interpretation of the Renaissance as partly in competition with the pro-Bolshevik trend; he also regards the version fostered by the group around W.E.B. Du Bois, which emphasized spirituals as the central Black musical achievement, as missing the boat in its failure to appreciate Razaf's focus on blues, jazz, films, broadcasting and vaudeville.
Chapter Two returns initially to _The Crusader_ to examine its favorite poet, Claude McKay, and his book _The Negroes in America_ (1923), as an example of the way in which Blacks shaped Communist policy. Maxwell, from the perspective now established, provides compellingly fresh interpretations of McKay's poems "If We Must Die" and "The White City."
McKay's experiences in the USSR are also recounted, after which Maxwell offers an important interpretation of McKay's long-neglected one-hundred page Marxist treatise on Black America. In particular, McKay viewed white workers as having developed a white supremacist "race-consciousness" on their own to defend privilege, and also in response to having assimilated a complex social psychology of Black sexuality rooted in the agricultural labor of early colonies in the South.
McKay's antidotes to racism involve "the modern upsurge of Black culture" (including sports) and "white feminism" (which needs to recognize that the "protective" role of white men against alleged Black rapists is posited on misogyny). Maxwell's case is strong that "McKay's pre-echo of more recent, more exclusively academic work in African-American history, whiteness studies, cultural studies, and a post-Soviet Marxism without guarantees is valuable for its challenges as well as its flattering symmetries." (88)
Moreover, Maxwell provides evidence of the little-known text's influence on the Bolshevik leadership (especially Trotsky) and the role of its author's ideas in preparing for the Black Belt Nation thesis....
Chapter Four is a turning point in the book, not only for its shift to the 1930s but also for introducing a gender critique of the Communist tendency to masculinize the very prospect of interracial radicalism. Maxwell's focus is on the effort by the left to deconstruct the "triangular lynch myth" that involves a Black male rapist, white female victim and white male protector; this in turn produced a homosocial "anti-lynch triangle" premised on the interracial bonding of male proletarians against a misogynist view of white female accusers.
Maxwell traces the function of such triangular mythologies (right and left), culminating in a consideration of Langston Hughes' Scottsboro writings. He concludes by considering the corrective work of Black Communist Louise Thompson, whose "reportage" managed to write "a way through Scottsboro's paired triangles against the exclusions of both the rape-lynch and the anti-lynch trios." (149)...
Building A New Interracial Left
These four books definitively establish the Communist-led anti-racist movement in mid-century as fundamental for any future interracial socialist left. This is not to dismiss the substantial literature documenting the mistakes and delusions of the Communist movement -- especially its reprehensible policies in World War II (including support of Japanese internment, opposition to the "Double V" campaign, and collaboration with the federal government's suppression of the civil liberties of Trotskyists).
Rather, it is to conclude that this unconscionable record only problematizes but does not negate the palpable achievements recorded in these remarkable books. Together they embody a series of "lessons" that might be carried over as the starting point of any radical movement in the new millennium.
In addition, there are the methodological contributions of this literature to ongoing considerations about the cultural and political history of the left.
Three of the most important lessons might be summarized as follows:
First, as we have seen from the experiences of the Communist movement in the 1920s, militancy, devotion to class struggle, and a fervent belief in equality are inadequate to build an interracial movement. The nature of racism as both material and ideological oppression requires that socialist organizations and projects take special measures in order to transform their membership composition and their relationship to the struggle of people of color.
It is not enough to preach the need for unity and promise fair treatment. Black history is replete with examples of betrayals by "white friends," and Communists were correct in understanding why there was the need for Black leadership of autonomous Black struggles.
Second, the Communist movement, prodded by the arguments of Black revolutionaries from the left nationalist movement, as well as by the Communist International, developed a basic theory to explain both the historical reasons why "special measures" must be taken, as well as to suggest what these measures should be.
That theory is basically the view of "national oppression," as opposed to the stance that the issue to be addressed is simply racism (dislike of people who look different), injustice, and so forth. Understanding African Americans as a nationality helps explain why nationalism of various forms has been an ongoing feature of the struggle, and why revolutionaries should not oppose this nationalist struggle but find ways to relate to it in order to assist its evolution in a radical, anticapitalist and internationalist direction.
The development of a proletarian-led nationalist movement with an internationalist vision is probably the prerequisite to a unified movement for socialism -- a stage over which Marxists may not be able to leap.
The Communists chose to put this theory into practice by building a working class movement in two complementary areas: On the one hand, they struggled for an integrated CIO, that put the cause of anti-racism among its priorities; on the other, they promoted a Black-led labor movement with a broad social agenda, culminating in the National Negro Congress after 1936.
(Here it is worth mentioning that the precise decision-making procedures in the NNC are not fully discussed, and Solomon believes that at least one public leader was a secret Party member. So the record of how, exactly, the Party maintained influence in an "independent" Black-led organization remains to be explored.)
From this perspective, it becomes clear why forms of affirmative action (such as taking special measures to insure that all barriers are removed from advancement to leadership of African Americans) are necessary within as well as without a socialist organization; why Black members should be the leaders in areas of Black work, but also in the general political life of the group; why cultural and psychological issues are of crucial importance; why "integration" or "assimilation" into the racist house of capitalism is an inadequate solution; and why an organization's membership must be re-educated to understand the complex and subtle ways in which paternalism and white privilege can exist despite one's best intentions. (Recent scholarship has especially emphasized how the choice of European ethnic groups to identify as "white" assisted, and still reinforces, the racist order.)
In regard to this last point, the Communists were especially effective in demonstrating to their own membership the truth that the struggle against racism is in everyone's interest, not just that of African Americans.
Euro-American members came to see that their own best hope for the future was interconnected with Black liberation, to the point of supporting Black self-defense against other Euro-Americans. In general, anti-racism became the duty of every Communist, not just Black members.
A third lesson from the Communist experience suggests the manner in which substantial numbers of African Americans will possibly come to join a socialist organization.
Some, of course, may join out of individual friendship with members who have won their confidence on the job, as neighbors, or in a common struggle. However, if the organization adheres to the kind of attitudes promoted by the Communists, broader layers of the most politicized vanguard of the Black struggle will come increasingly to respect the socialist movement; eventually cadres will enter, first by ones and twos, and then these will come to play the key role in the recruitment of thousands more. (But it is also the duty of Euro-American socialists to themselves actively assist in this effort to change the composition of the organization.)
With an organization, like the Communist Party, willing to defend the Black population from exploitation in general-not just around obvious "political" cases, but against police brutality, eviction-the culture of the movement will become increasingly hospitable to people of color....
[The full article is available at <http://solidarity.igc.org/atc/86Wald.html>.] -- Yoshie
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