Aptheker Sr. was quite wrong on many things - mostly because of his adherence to the political line of the CPUSA, which committed him to grotesque positions on Stalin and Hungary; the social chauvinism that informed the CPUSA's commitment to the US war effort manifested itself in ugly xenophobic slurs against Gunnar Myrdal, for example.
^^^^ CB: Aptheker's was quite right about more than what he was wrong about. I'm thinking Aptheker's position on Hungary was not so bad in a difficult situation.
The Soviet Union had just 13 years or so earlier lost 27 million dead , much material destruction from the fascist (including Hungarian fascists) invasion. The U.S. had recently invaded Korea in an anti-Communist international crime, and had dropped atomic bombs on Japan. The SU leaders had a responsibility to retain a military buffer in Eastern Europe between itself and the imperialist warmonsters in the West to help guarantee peace for the worldhistorically ,war weary Soviet People. After such an enormous crime is visited upon a country, self-defense becomes paramount.
Next to this strategic situation we have some workers in revolt in Hungary initiated by students who want elections. Could these have been a front for imperialist inspired takeover ? They might not even know it. When we look at the 1980's, when counterrevolutions succeeded all the way through the SU itself, it seems much more possible that the 1956 efforts were like an early "Solidarinosc"- some or many well-meaning people who did not appreciate the depth of Western "intelligence", so to speak, and mass rightwing social base still there.
What position on Stalin are you talking about ?
^^^^
Aptheker disguised the underlying reformism he was committed to in the present with a rhetorical leftism in the history of slavery. Unfortunately that leftism meant that he projected an unrealistic proto-revolutionary consciousness onto slaves that was in truth only very intermittently present. That was why it was Eugene Fox-Genovese who was more often correct than Aptheker in their long-running debates over history of slavery (however
unfortunate the later development of Genovese's thinking).
^^^^ CB: James is hanging with the loser in that debate. Aptheker is famous for initiating an revolution in the historical discipline's version of American slavery. The line had been that slaves were basically happy, which is to say , academic history had the same position as the slaveowners had had on the matter. Aptheker showed with historical and documentary evidence that there had been many slave revolts, insurrections, and resistence to slavery. His book used the term "revolt". He didn't so much project revolutionary consciousness there as demonstrate the central thesis of _The Communist Manifesto_, history is a history of class struggles because oppressed classes resist, intermittently, yes. He didn't say slave revolts were continuous. Resistence of some type was no doubt continuous. He did write a book _Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement_, which focussed not on the revolts but, the Abolitionists, Black and White. The end of U.S. slavery was a revolution in the Marxist sense, in that a fundamental form of private property was abolished. This is also an Aptheker thesis. So, Aptheker is correct and Heartfield wrong. There was proto-revolutionary consciousness in some sense in the American slave revolts.
Heartfield's claim that Aptheker was committed to reformism "underlyingly" is typical, ultra-leftist claptrap. Aptheker was committed to reforms as part of an effort to build revolution.