Communism and Racial Equality in the South

We've had an eye on the historian Robin D.G. Kelley since...well, not just since we read his book on Thelonious Monk last year, but since we had first discovered--many years ago--Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism (Kelley wrote the introduction to the most recent edition).

When a few links to an NPR program on "How 'Communism' Brought Racial Equality to the South" popped up in the feeds today (not to mention on I Cite), we figured that Kelley must have been involved in some form. When I thought I'd make a joke about how some Republican hack was going to find this out and turn it into one of those rousing primary non-issues (LOOK! NPR IS PUSHING COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA!), I discovered that the interview is originally from February 2010. 

It's a short reminder (in fact a discussion of Kelley's Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression) that the Communist Party played an important role in organizing civil rights struggle in the 1930s, and something to think about as the Occupy movement reorganizes for 2012.

Prof. KELLEY: In 1928, the communist position internationally was that African-Americans in the South have the right to self-determination. Meaning: they have the right to create their own nation in the South. In this position that came out of Moscow, it came from other black communists around the globe.

And with that idea in mind, they sent two organizers to Alabama and they went to Birmingham. And they chose Birmingham because it was probably the most industrialized city in the South. And they went there thinking they would organize white workers. And from white workers, black workers would follow. But no white workers had come forward.

And so, the first two organizers was a guy named James Julio(ph), who was a Sicilian worker who had migrated to Alabama, and another guy named Tom Johnson(ph), and together they went out looking for white workers and black workers came.

And black workers came in fairly large numbers right away because to them, they had a memory of reconstruction, the memory of the Civil War. And in that kind of collective memory, they were told that one day the Yankees will come back and finish the fight. Well, when they saw these white communists, they said, oh, good, the Yankees are here. We cant wait to join.

And it was no small part of the movement:

Prof. KELLEY: Well, theres a couple of ways to think about this. One, in terms of actual dues-paying members, they never had more than 600, 700. But then, if you look at all the other auxiliary organizations, the International Labor Defense, which focused on civil rights issues, they had up to 2,000. The Sharecroppers Union had up to 12,000. You had the International Workers Order. You had the League of Young Southerners. You had the Southern Negro Youth Congress. If you add up all these organizations, it touched the lives easily of 20,000 people.

Finally, the moral:

MARTIN: Hmm. So, what would you hope people would take away from all the work that youve done, documenting this history?

Prof. KELLEY: Well, first what I really emphasize is the fact that these were ordinary people, most of whom could not read or write, who were able to, on their own, form a very strong and productive movement that saw not just black peoples problems, but all peoples problems as connected. They saw joblessness and Civil Rights, and the right not be raped or lynched, self-protection - that all these things are part of one big struggle. And they really did succeed in building an interracial movement. Even if the whites were in the minority, those whites were there with them. And that vision, that ordinary people can make change, was a legacy they left us.

Infighting about Trotsky

It was amusing to read (at Lenin's Tomb) of some recent infighting occasioned by a damning scholarly review of Robert Service's Trotsky: A Life (Harvard, 2009), involving a pair of fellows from the same nook of the anticommunism industry, the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace.  While Service's book has been criticized by several leftist reviewers, it had generally been well-received in academic circles. This changes with Bertrand M. Patenaude, who writes, in The American Historical Review (see here):

In his eagerness to cut Trotsky down, Service commits numerous distortions of the historical record and outright errors of fact to the point that the intellectual integrity of the whole enterprise is open to question. 

By the end, he concludes (but read the whole review, it's worth it):

Harvard University Press has placed its imprimatur upon a book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship. 

At Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee puts the review in context and requests comments from the author, the review's author, and Harvard. Service's response is to accuse Patenaude of being a 'Trotsky romantic.' From Harvard, McLemee gets no response.

Happy New Year: 1980's Soviet Commercials

It is now 2011. I thought it would be great to reflect on how much has changed in the world during the past several decades. This post of 1980's Soviet Commercials might seem to be random, but I think they are quite apropos. In the 1980s who could have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union or the global advances in technology to be made? Nothing is permanent and nothing can be predictable in a precise way. As I observe the military might of the US, the destructive momentum of large scale capitalism, environmental dangers, the so-called war on terror,the rise of global war and insurgencies along with all that is still beautiful and good, I'm reminded that everything is finite.

Eduard Bernstein, Revisionist

Over the weekend, I read Eduard Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism (the original title is Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie-- The Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy). The purpose was to get a better grasp on the debates of the Second International. If you don't already know, Bernstein, who published the book in 1899, is the central figure of revisionism, and is, along with the renegade Kautsky, constantly the target of the scorn and polemics of Lenin and Lukács. 

The reason I picked up Evolutionary Socialism was to find out if all the accusations are true.

And they are.*

Bernstein lists most of the typical objections to Marx's political thought: dismissing its method as Hegelian obfuscation, mistaking 'vulgar' materialism for historical materialism,  claiming its so-called predictions didn't come true, arguing against revolutionary violence without grasping the systemic violence of capitalism, and accusing his more radical opponents of utopianism.

It almost makes me think that Lukács revised "What is Orthodox Marxism?" for History and Class Consciousness with Bernstein's book in front of him.

But most importantly, Bernstein argues that the basis of social struggle was the capture of democracy for socialism. That is, even if democracy's history is that of bourgeois class advantage, it is the premise of socialism: "democracy is a condition of socialism to a much greater degree than is usually assumed, i.e., it is not only the means but also the substance” (page 166).** In large part, the Social Democrats accepted the idea that the means of production, and the democratic regime of rights, would gradually lead to more democratic organizations. But this required presupposing that history was a story of progress (which is why Bernstein-- who took a rather chauvinistic view on these matters-- couldn't grasp the problems of internationalism and colonialism). The problem with progress is that its proponents tended to wait; accelerating the process of social change through revolutionary struggle becomes, for somebody like Bernstein, more pernicious on principle than the systemic violence of capitalism.

The point of Marx, Lenin, Lukács, and Benjamin (just to name those I am reading lately) is that history is not a story of progress, it is a story of social struggle, with both advances and reversals. In addition, the emphasis on the progressive realization of rights ignores that capitalism is not defined by its juridical relations, but by the combined and uneven development of, and conflict between, social forms and capital accumulation.

Notes

* It doesn't help Bernstein's intellectual legacy that Sidney Hook, CIA cultural frontman and FBI informant, wrote the Introduction to the 1961 edition published by Schocken.

** 'Democracy as substance'...does this make Hardt and Negri Bernsteins with a 21st century twist?

Piero Gleijeses, "The Cuban Drumbeat"

Let's just get it out the way now: Piero Gleijeses's The Cuban Drumbeat (Seagull, 2009) is one of best political pamphlets I've read in several years. It's the second installment in Seagull's "What was Communism?" series, but this concise volume puts the question in the present, if not the future tense.* Gleijeses shows that, far from being exhausted, the internationalism and anti-colonialism of Cuba's foreign policy has succeeded in transforming the relationships between formerly colonized and underdeveloped regions and the imperial powers that seek to exploit them.

The extent of Cuba's internationalism has not always been recognized, nor even understood. Even if the US government, according to internal documents, had recognized from the beginning the reason for the popular support for Fidel Castro's leadership, it has nevertheless spent decades propagating outright misinformation. Lost in this state-media echo chamber are the accomplishments of  Cuban socialism both domestically and internationally. For a balanced account of the successes and failures of Castro's domestic policy, see Richard Gott's Cuba: A New History (Yale, 2004); The Cuban Drumbeat recounts the history of Cuba's internationalism.

As both the United States and Castro recognized, the "power of Cuba is the power of its revolutionary ideas [and] the power of its example" (Castro quoted on p. 11). In the 1960s, the determination of the United States to stifle this power led to the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the embargo, and continuous attempts at subverting the socialist government; the determination of Cuba led to small scale assistance to revolutionaries in Latin America and Africa, the most notable of them led by, and led to the death of, Che Guevara. It is worth noting that Gleijeses tactfully avoids that retrospective and romantic distinction between Che, the permanent revolutionary and the statist-bureaucratic Castro brothers (Recall here Fanon's comment from 1961 in Wretched of the Earth: "Castro attending the UN in military uniform does not scandalize the underdeveloped countries. What Castro is demonstrating is how aware he is of the continuing regime of [imperialist] violence. What is surprising is that he did not enter the UN with his submachine gun").

The living tradition of tradition of Cuba's anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism might have its roots in Latin America, but it first came to fruition in Africa in the 1970s. To understand Cuba's support of African revolutionaries, it is important to look beyond the interests of the Cold War superpowers. Gleijeses argues that Castro saw, from very early on, that revolutionary action also required an attentiveness to the relationships between what we now call the Global North and Global South. Cuba's fate in the post-Soviet era has largely rested on the kinds of alliances and internationalism that it established in the 1970s in Africa. Gleijeses writes:

Cuban leaders were convinced that their country had a special empathy for and a special role to play in the Third World beyond the confines of Latin America. The Soviets and their East European allies were white and, by Third World standards, rich; the Chinese exhibited the hubris of a great and rising power, and were unable to adapt to African and Latin American culture. By contrast, Cuba was non-white, poor, threatened by a powerful enemy and culturally both Latin American and African. It was, therefore, a unique hybrid: a Socialist country with a Third World sensibility. This mattered, in a world that was dominated, as Castro rightly understood, by the 'conflict between privileged and underprivileged, humanity against imperialism' and where the major fault line was not between socialist and capitalist states but between developed and underdeveloped countries (18).

While today we can recognize how these ideas, from a humanitarian side, have shaped the relationships between Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia (see, on this score, of course, Tariq Ali's Pirates of the Caribbean),  in the 1970s and 1980s the most stunning examples of Cuban internationalism were its military interventions in Angola, which took place within a complex set of relationships between three rival independence parties in Angola, Namibia (a former German colony then under the mandate of South Africa), the United States, and South Africa.

After the collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974, a power-sharing agreement was arranged between the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), for joint rule of Angola until November 1975. However, the arrangement was short-lived; civil war broke out in spring 1975 between the Soviet-backed MPLA and the UNITA-FNLA, the latter which had the covert backing of South Africa  (who felt that an MPLA victory would endanger its control over Namibia) and the United States (this probably goes without saying, but the US interpreted the conflict only through the lens of the Cold War). Despite the these powerful allies, UNITA and FNLA could not defeat the MPLA, so in October, at the quiet urging of the United States, South Africa invaded Angola. While Cuba had been giving  small-scale medical and tactical assistance to the MPLA, in November 1975, Castro sent thousands of troops to combat the invasion. This "unprecedented" military action took both Washington and Moscow by surprise, and it proved decisive. Within a few months the MPLA-Cuban force had turned back South African aggression, and on 27 March 1976, South Africa withdrew, defeated, from Angola.

The victory of the MPLA-Cuban alliance was, Gleijeses notes, a turning point in the fight against  Pretoria's  domination of southern Africa. He argues that neither realpolitik nor "narrow interests" can explain Cuba's motivation; rather "Castro sent troops because of his commitment to what he called 'the most beautiful cause,' the struggle against apartheid" (30).

But this would not be the end of the struggle. Because Angola gave support to the the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), who were fighting for Namibia's independence, in 1981, again with the support of the United States, South Africa invaded Angola again. And yet again Cuba's military prowess proved crucial. In September 1987 the South African Defense Force (SADF) launched a major offensive in Southeastern Angola, cornering the Angola Army in Cuito Cuanavale. Despite the sense of inevitability that South African and Western Diplomats claimed for the fall of Cuito Cuanavale (62), Cuban forces beat back the SADF, and then marched southwest toward the Namibian border, forcing South Africa out of Angola, then to the negotiating table, and finally out of Namibia. Gleijeses writes that:

As a child, in Italy, I heard my father talk about the hope he and his friends felt in December 1941 as they had listened to the radio reports of the German troops leaving the city of Rostov on the Don. It was the first time in two years of war that the German superman had been forced to retreat. I remembered his words--and the profound sense of relief they conveyed--as I read the South African and Namibian press from these months in early 1988. For the blacks of Namibia and of South Africa, the advance of the Cuban columns towards the border, pushing back the troops of apartheid, was a clarion call of hope (64).

In recounting the victory of social solidarity over the powers of colonialism and imperialism, The Cuban Drumbeat captures a rare moment of hope in the long struggle against oppression.

Notice the date, however; soon after the victory in Angola the Soviet bloc would collapse, jeopardizing Cuba's economy and infrastructure; while Havana often acted internationally without consulting Moscow, it still remained dependent on Soviet economic assistance. Nevertheless, just at that time a new kind of revolutionary movement was beginning to gain strength across Latin America. Cuba has, since the 'fall of communism', depended on relationships build through the humanitarian side of its internationalism, for decades training doctors and funding education for African, Asian, and Latin American students. Its kind of internationalism still represents, in the era, we might say, of the Bolivarian Revolution, a direct challenge to the hegemony of the neoliberal world. The question is whether this revolution can create a lasting international infrastructure that can create a more egalitarian future.

Note
* I criticized this choice of tense in the title of the series in my review of Tariq Ali's The Idea of Communism.

Slavenka Drakulic, "Two Underdogs and a Cat: Three Reflections on Communism"

(Seagull Books, 2009)


The four title Seagull Books series "What was Communism?" risks giving something of a wrong impression of its editor. Tariq Ali remains an "inveterate socialist", and this would suggest that the backward-looking orientation of the series cannot be the last word. As Devin pointed out in his review of Ali's own contribution to the series, one is left wanting a "What is Communism", or even "What will Communism Be?" Despite the pitfalls of a backward-looking emphasis, I recommend all four books in the series for their clarity, breadth of scope, concise delivery and - the bibliophile in me can't resist! - the excellent graphics and packaging. I'll only speak here of the fourth installment, Drakulic's Two Underdogs and a Cat.

Whereas the first three titles in the series are straight-up assessments of the history of communism, Drakulic delivers her reflections on communism in eastern and central Europe by using a time-honoured ploy: speaking from the perspective of animal characters. She invokes Orwell of course, but one is also reminded in places of the magical realism of Mikhail Bulgakov. This makes Drakulic's book the most fun of the series, but despite employing this whimsical literary device she has much to teach the reader about real historical conditions (and with a surprising degree of subtlety). Animals, because of their unique subject positions within any given society, would be in a privileged position to explain much of what goes unnoticed in everyday life if they only had a voice. Drakulic indulges in imagining what they would say if they had this voice; in the case of the first two chapters at least, her gesture amounts to constructing a history from below - way below.

The book is divided into three first-person narratives: a mouse living in the Czech Museum of Communism tells a visitor about life under a Soviet proxy government, and the failed hope of a genuine Czechoslovak socialism; an old dog in Bucharest traces the hundreds of thousands of stray dogs roaming about the city to the urban policies of Ceaucescu; finally, the house cat of divisive polish general Wojciech Jaruzelski writes a letter to the courts explaining the extenuating circumstances and character traits which led her owner to declare martial law in 1981. Drakulic manages to deliver history lessons through the mouths of her protagonists without overlooking the many grey areas of life under actually existing communism. To say that her book is an indictment of the communist system in eastern and central Europe would be too simplistic; she rightly points out that the complicity of citizens under such regimes was not solely the result of state terror but also because of the very real securities that the regimes could afford. Post-communism is rightly portrayed by Drakulic as at best a mixed blessing, and at worst a major regression for the vast majority of citizens.

Readers could probably polish this book off in an hour or two. It gets my stamp of approval for making history - even the dreary history of communist satellite states - at once humorous, serious, thought-provoking and digestable.

Ideas of Communism: Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali's The Idea of Communism (2009) serves as the introduction to the Seagull Books series "What was Communism?," which includes three other volumes evaluating the history of communism in Cuba and the former Soviet Union. Ali outlines a short history of communism, including its successes and its failures, as an antidote to the  de-politicized amnesia that surrounded the occasion for the book, the fall of the Berlin Wall, not least the irony that such celebration took place during one of the deepest crises of capitalism since the Great Depression.

Much of Ali's argument is summarized in the following passage:

A twenty-first-century socialism based on a socially just economic structure coupled with a radical political democracy would offer the most profound and meaningful challenge to the priorities of the capitalist order in the West, which triumphed largely because of the bureaucratic despotisms that led to the besmirching of socialism in the former Soviet Union. The price paid for the survival of capitalism has not been a small one: two World Wars, genocide against colonial peoples...the use of nuclear weapons against Japanese civilians (while protecting the Emperor who unleashed the war); the use of chemicals in Vietnam; institutionalized misery in the 'Third World'; and the threat of a nuclear conflagration that could obliterate all life on this planet (89-90).

"Nor has the twenty-first century started well..." he continues, citing the continuing human cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, not to mention the latest financial crisis. With such a mounting cost, it is clear that an alternative vision and understanding of the world is necessary. The idea that society ought to be organized around the principle 'from each according to ability, to each according to need' is no less valid than it was when worker's struggles began to shake the industrialized world. Nor should we dismiss Marxist critique, which is one of the few that can explain why capitalism continues from crisis to crisis, with increased ruin behind it: capitalism is a system of distribution structured by inequality (be it by class, geography, etc.).

The brevity of Ali's account is both its virtue and its vice. For his intended audience, those who are not familiar with the history of communism, the arguments and the narrative are clear and concise,  never falling into  tired debates or jargon; there are no long digressions on how Leninists or Stalinists or Trotskyites or Maoists scored theoretical points against each other. Sometimes, however, the brevity requires Ali to simplify or schematize his account (so one is left with the impression that a self-interested bureaucracy is the primary fault of state communism, which is true to a degree but there are other sides of the failure of communism that could be explored, including continued class struggle and constant capitalist/imperialist aggression...). 

Nevertheless, Ali makes sure to underline the advances that these societies experienced under communism (standard of living, health care, housing, etc.), because these are precisely the features that point toward the future. Hopefully the series "What was Communism?" will be followed by "What is Communism?" and "What will Communism be?"