Lydia, Isaac and Rudy join Emmanuel Farjoun from Matzpen for a discussion on his 1983 piece Class divisions in Israeli society and how the divisions have changed in the present day. We discuss the changing strength of the Palestinians inside Israel and how that is reflected in their changing political aims, the differences between whiteness in the US and the construction of race in Israel, and the BDS movement internationally.
Ian Szabo writes on the history of the African Blood Brotherhood as part of a broader tradition of black liberation that merged with International Communism after the Bolshevik Revolution.
From 1928 to 1934 the slogan “Self-determination for the Black Belt” became the core of the Communist Party of the United States’ (CPUSA) approach to Black Liberation. A common understanding among the non-Stalinist left of this strategy is that it was cooked up by Stalin in the late 1920s in order to purchase a positive image for his bureaucratization of the Communist International (Comintern) as he ascended to power.1 Because of this narrative, among many others, we are left in the communist movement with a false dichotomy between national liberation and social revolution, despite the reality that self-determination has always been a necessary part of the revolutionary transformation of society. Surrendering it to Stalinism betrays a fundamental basis of revolutionary Marxism rightly referenced by Lenin: “[to] not be a secretary of a tred-union but a people’s tribune who can respond to each and every manifestation of abuse of power and oppression[.]”2
Nothing exposes this false dichotomy between socialism and self-determination better than the history of black struggle and its relation to the US Communist movement. To fully grasp this history we must look at how black radicals developed a tradition of struggle on their own and merged it with the practice of international communism in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. This requires looking at the history of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), the first Black Communist organization, as well as its founder Cyril Briggs.
Briggs hailed from the Caribbean island of Nevis where he had refused to abandon his heritage as a black man and integrate into society with his lighter-skinned complexion.3 Alongside many other native West Indians of the period, he immigrated to the United States, eventually Harlem, in 1905. Due to a stutter that prevented him from being able to speak fluidly with others, Briggs chose to focus on writing rather than organizing, becoming an intellectual and writing for the Amsterdam News in 1912. The particular event that sparked his transformation into a Marxist was in the period just before the October Revolution in 1917; Briggs was faced with the ugly reality that Woodrow Wilson’s call for all nations to have the right to self-determination was bankrupt, revealed by the execution of 13 black mutineer soldiers in Houston, Texas.4 Although the unveiling of Wilson’s Fourteen Points later on would cause Briggs to waver, his primary political orientation would be towards the Socialist Party; and despite the SP’s tendency towards a class-first politics that failed to fully comprehend the oppression of African Americans, Briggs would put forward the argument that for black people, “no race would be more greatly benefited by the triumph of Labor”.5
Briggs’ disillusionment with liberal insincerity and movement towards socialist politics was accompanied by the development of what would become known as the Black Belt Thesis. During his last months at the Amsterdam News Briggs would write an essay entitled: “Security of Life’ for Poles and Serbs- Why Not for Colored Americans”, where he put forward the idea of a “colored autonomous state” somewhere in the upper northwest or far west. He chose these regions because he believed they had not been as settled as most regions in North America. Although there are differences in terms of the region this model aimed to use, this shows that the idea of an autonomous African American nation within the American continent was not simply a project cooked up by Stalin in the late 1920s. Rather than a foreign product, the Black Belt began as an attempt by an African American socialist searching to synthesize the aspirations of the African liberation struggle from which he came with the politics of revolutionary Marxism.
Eventually, socialist politics and opposition to WW1 would put Briggs in conflict with editors of the Amsterdam News. At the same time Briggs was forging friendships with the likes of Otto Huiswood, Grace Campbell, Richard B. Moore, W.A. Domingo, Hubert Harrison, Claude Mckay, and other radicals in Harlem. It was from this milieu that the journal Crusader was born. The period following the October Revolution in the United States saw a great deal of confidence and energy in the American left, signified in part by the Crusader and the ABB. This energy combined the turmoil that broke out after WW1 with the re-alignment of the global socialist movement and the birth of the Comintern. Briggs would be the intellectual powerhouse of the Crusader, continuing his arguments for the benefits of uniting with the workers’ struggle, while also theoretically uniting the African diaspora’s desires for self-determination with the Comintern’s goal of a Socialist Co-operative Commonwealth.6 For Briggs, Black liberation did not necessarily require a communist vision, but it was the preferable grounds or stepping stone by which to achieve it. In order to understand why Briggs believed that the communist vision of national liberation was superior to Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, we have to take a look at the radical transformations that had occurred in the Comintern.
It cannot be understated how profoundly the formation of Third International widened the international character of the historical socialist movement, to which Briggs was responding. As Donald Parkinson has pointed out, “the Third International was an improvement of the Second. Marxists moved towards a truly internationalist universalism which saw the entire world as having agency in the revolutionary process and struggled politically against internal European chauvinism.”7 Taking direction from Nikolai Bukharin’s remarks on the subject, the resolutions put forward in the fourth congress of the Comintern cemented the point that the global communist movement had everything to gain through an alliance with oppressed people seeking national self-determination in the colonized world, as the task of the “[Comintern] on the national and colonial question must be based primarily on bringing together the proletariat and working classes of all nations and countries for the common revolutionary struggle.”8 This allowed Briggs and those around him to find a place they felt they did not have in the old socialist parties connected to the Second International, while also pulling them away from reactionary forms of nationalism that failed to properly deal with the nature of imperialism and colonialism.
At the same time that the Comintern was making strides towards a more forward-thinking international, Marcus Garvey was revealing his political commitments to reject socialism and even anti-racism. Already before the founding of the Crusader, W.A. Domingo had been fired from Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World, for espousing socialist politics. He would later become a collaborator with Briggs and co-found the Liberator with fellow ABB member, Richard B. Moore.9 According to Briggs in the foundational documents of the ABB, Garvey’s form of capitalist separatism would necessarily lead to the downfall of any attempt to gain self-determination, as inevitable capitalist crisis would wreck such attempts and sap morale from the liberation movement.10 A decade later, Briggs would more brutally relitigate this issue, pointing out that the Garvey movement failed to combat racism by ceding the American continent to white people, resulting in at least tacit collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan.11 In these criticisms, Briggs remained consistent with his argument that although socialism is not necessary for black for liberation, a socialist commonwealth on an international scale nevertheless provided the best chance for that task.
Although Theodore Draper characterized the ABB as being a typical iteration of the propagandist organizations of early century Harlem, it was equally familiar to the history of intellectualism in the worker’s movement, from Marx’s own Communist League to the circles the Bolsheviks emerged from.12 Of course, like any political organization it also had a program which formulated its basis on four points: “(1) the economic structure of the Struggle (not wholly economic, but nearly so); (2) that it is essential to know from whom our oppression comes… and to make common cause with all forces and movements working against our enemies; (3) that it is not necessary for Negroes to be able to endorse the program of these other movements before they can make common cause with them against the common enemy; (4) that the important thing about Soviet Russia… is… the outstanding fact that [it] is opposing the imperialist robbers who have partitioned our motherland and subjugated our kindred, and… [it] is feared by those imperialist nations.”13 The 1921 program fully articulated the class-based form of Black liberation Briggs sought to convey, utilizing the anti-imperialist commitments of the Comintern to build a bridge with the Bolshevik Party in Russia.
To fully grasp the historical importance of the ABB we must look not only to Briggs but to the entire membership. Drawn into the orbit of the ABB through her activism with the Committee on Urban Conditions among Negroes in Harlem, Grace Campbell was a social worker, court attendant, and prison officer convinced by the ABB’s call for socialism, black liberation, and decolonization.14 Alongside Hermina Dumont, Campbell was further radicalized by the international character of the communist movement. However, despite her involvement, the ABB was unfortunately an organization dominated by men, and so Campbell was relegated to secretarial tasks despite being on the “Supreme Council” of the ABB.15 Campbell dealt with the male chauvinism of the ABB through her involvement behind the scenes, as she held Supreme Council meetings and distributed the Crusader from her home.
According to McDuffie, Grace Campbell took the role of a mother figure for the ABB and much of the early communist left in Harlem. Not only a hub for the movement itself, Campbell’s home was open to anyone in need of food and shelter. It is true that this was a deeply gendered role to be given and taken up by Campbell, but the flipside of this is that it was also a source of power for a woman in the ABB able to “consciously construct and strategically perform this matronly persona to exert influence with women and to challenge the sexist agendas of black male leaders and to exercise influence in male-dominated political spaces”.16 Although much of this essay deals with the political orientation of the ABB, what is present in its history, as in most early socialist history, is a profoundly male-dominated dynamic which may be highly capable of dealing with the questions of decolonization and imperialism but fails to factor in, let alone fully integrate, the struggle of women workers.
A number of Grace Campbell’s comrades in her time as a socialist organizer would join her in Briggs’ ABB, but few would grow as close to Briggs himself as Richard B. Moore. A fellow radical from the Caribbean that found himself in Harlem, Moore came into Briggs’ orbit through his journalistic work and eventual founding of the Emancipator alongside W.A. Domingo.17 One point made by Moore himself about the ABB is worth keeping in mind: that although most of the history of the organization generally paints it as either a response to Marcus Garvey’s UNIA or a recruitment operation for the communist movement, this ignores the actual dynamics that produced the ABB. The reality is much more complicated, as many of the figures that made up the ABB had worked together prior to the organization’s formal founding. This means that the ABB was not necessarily a response to another organization but something which emerged from the intellectual and practical work black socialists had been committed to for years beforehand. Although many of these members certainly saw an ally in Leninism and the Comintern, their project had already developed its own political lines which the communist movement spoke to.
The campaign against Garveyism is a particular subject in which one can clearly see what Moore was getting at when he made this claim, as he did not fall in line with it. The aforementioned campaign was certainly in the right with regards to principled communist politics, but Moore refused to take part, preferring not to “[join] with the oppressors of your own people” and “betrayal of the right to speech.”18 As these debates were in the pre-Stalinized communist movement, the assumption that there needed to be a principled black united front with a right to criticism and free speech was prefigured within the movement and Moore’s conception of black socialist politics. If the ABB were simply made to respond to the UNIA or recruit black people to the communist movement, Moore would not have had any incentive to refuse to engage in this campaign, as it would have been perfectly consistent with the raison d’être of the organization. Instead, Moore’s response at the time was perfectly consistent with an organization that had always had its own agenda and vision of liberation.
In 1919-20, the ABB’s vision of liberation was encapsulated by a moment in Bogalusa, Louisiana, discussed by Moore in an article named after the city. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners (UBCJ), International Union of Timber Workers (IUTW), and American Federation of Labor (AFL) had been organizing across racial lines in the city but were eventually attacked by an organization that synthesized both the redemption narrative and ethos of the Ku Klux Klan and the nationalism of the first red scare: the Self-Preservation and Loyalty League.19 Their target was the head of the union of African American sawmill workers and loggers, Sol Dacus, who would be saved by his shotgun-carrying white comrades, Stanley O’Rourke and J.P. Bouchillon. Gunfights broke out because of this, resulting in the deaths of O’Rourke and Bouchillon, alongside the president of the Central Trades and Labor Council Lem Williams and carpenter Thomas Gaines. Moore’s and Brigg’s own articles would have been known to the multi-racial workers of Bogalusa too, as they were avid readers of the Messenger and Crusader. After the killings, Moore’s article in the Messenger praised these men for having put lives on the line for their fellow black workers in his article “Bogalusa”:
Williams, Gaines, and Bouchillon have given their lives. O’Rourke imperilled his life, in the cause of true freedom. Not for white labor, not for black labor (though they died defending a [black worker]), nor yet for any race or nation, did they make the supreme sacrifice, but for Labor, that great university of fraternity of striving, suffering human-kind which though despoiled, despised, and rejected, alone holds promise for the emancipation of the race.20
This further demonstrates Moore’s argument that the ABB was a novel organization that neither responded to nor was subservient to another organization. Just as the theory of an autonomous African American nation was not cooked up by Stalin but a theory developed by Briggs, so too was the program of the ABB an expression of totally independent thinking of its members.
To further develop a rich image of the ABB we must look not only to understand its political dimensions, but also its cultural contributions. To do so we must look at another one of its members, the great poet Claude McKay. In the pages of the Liberator, Max Eastman’s newspaper, McKay would publish his seminal poem “If We Must Die” only two months after the founding of the African Blood Brotherhood, a poem which presented an explicitly revolutionary perspective which contained “no impotent whining… no prayers to the white man’s god, no mournful Jeremiad.”21
Shortly after its program was fleshed out and articulated, the ABB was integrated into the Communist Party. Earlier in May 1920, a convention was called among the various emergent communist parties that had not yet merged, the United Communist Party (UCP), Communist Party of America (CPA), and Communist Labor Party (CLP). The UCP had displayed a particular sensitivity to the question of Black liberation but the ABB remained officially distant due to the other parties’ lack of similar commitments. However, by 1921, Briggs would appear as a delegate for the ABB at the founding conference for the Workers Party of America (WPA) in 1921, later to become the Communist Party of the United States of America.25 Otto Huiswood became the head of the WPA’s “Negro Commission”, which was a good start for dealing with racial antagonism in the emerging party despite the persistent presence of neglect, and patronizing attitudes towards black members of the party.26
During this same period, the ABB experienced a bump in membership that forced it to choose between languishing in sectarian obscurity or fully integrating into the CP. A number of the leaders from Marcus Garvey’s UNIA had come on side to the ABB due to the former organization’s sketchy business practices, but these members were not particularly enthused with the idea of affiliating to the emerging Third International.27 To make things more difficult, the result of this growth convinced the ABB leadership to attempt a fundraiser for the creation of a new newspaper to named the Liberator, which not only failed to emerge but exhausted the continuation of the Crusader. With Briggs’ journal out of commission, he began working at the national office of the Friends of Soviet Russia in 1922, becoming an organizer at the Yorkville branch of the WPA, and managing to reclaim the name of his former journal in the form of the twice weekly Crusader News Service with the assistance of Grace Campbell.28 Although the UNIA continued to hemorrhage membership due to nonsense like bartering with the KKK, Briggs found himself unable to convince its membership to join the struggle for communism, and the ABB began to decline despite attempts to keep it afloat through sponsoring cooperative stores. By 1924, the ABB would become fully integrated within the WPA.
Ultimately, the ABB itself only existed for a short five years, but it left a huge impression on the American communist movement and its core membership would re-emerge in the nascent communist movement as the American Negro Labor Congress. Those who had built the ABB went on to become active organizers long after its demise, empowering African American workers throughout the southern United States. Their legacy is the idea that communism was, and still is, a vehicle towards self-determination and emancipation of all of the world’s oppressed. Solidarity of the entire international working class was at the core of their day to day political organizing, knowing that they could never be free so long as workers elsewhere were not.
The Ethiopian Revolution teaches modern leftists an important lesson about international solidarity, argues Ian Scott Horst.
Way back in 1848, the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels admonished in their Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” This basic prescription for political solidarity flows obviously and organically from the understanding of global political economy that they (and their ideological heirs) spent decades investigating, defining, and fighting for on street barricades. Marx and Engels diagnosed that the vast majority of the world’s population shared a mutual interest by virtue of its exploitation and oppression at the hands of a global class system, here in corrupt decay, there in bloody infancy. They suggested a liberatory class struggle as a path of resistance that was conveniently locked inside that global political and economic system and enabled by its own contradictions. To reject, indeed to overturn, that global system of exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of humanity by a tiny controlling minority of kings, political elites, and captains of industry, Marx and Engels prescribed not only moral outrage, but an understanding they called “scientific” of how those oppressed and exploited people could employ their vast majority in numbers and their strategic social relationship to the means of production to win the class struggle, and with it a better future for humankind based on cooperation and the communal good.
The phrase “Solidarity Forever” may have originated in radical trade unionism, but it was a damned effective compass for orienting one’s place in a combative world divided into potential comrades and bloodthirsty enemies. As leftist watchwords, the phrase reinforces an intuitive impulse growing out of the human experience of living and working together in a class-divided world, and neatly reinforces the deeper ideological explorations of theoreticians in the Marxist tradition. As a concept it rightfully suggests a deep connection between the daily struggles to survive, as experienced by the unpropertied classes and the political prescriptions of communist ideology. So why does it seem that so many of today’s heirs to Marxist tradition have discarded this time-proven compass when it comes to orienting themselves in today’s world of struggle? How did it happen that the first impulse of wide swathes of the Marxist left is to oppose the masses turning out into the world’s streets and avenues?
Leftists in the belly of the beast are morally (not to mention strategically) obligated to oppose the actions of our “own” imperialism. The dividing line this commitment creates is pretty easy to see in the separation of a “hard” left from a social-democratic one, even though the numbers of people identifying with either is much reduced in this post-Soviet century. But dialectical thinking should enable us to see that rejecting “our” government is actually not an automatic reason to express political support to every regime in conflict with the one we live under, and this is where much of today’s left seems to have stumbled away from the basic starting place located by Marx and Engels back in 1848.
It would be naive to suggest there are no differences in the mass popular mobilizations that have rocked the world’s streets in the last decade: The so-called Arab Spring and its stepchildren in Syria and Libya. Occupy Wall Street. Iran. Thailand. Zimbabwe. Venezuela. Nicaragua. The yellow vests of France. Hong Kong. But what unites these popular struggles is that, by degrees, much of the left reflexively rejected them out of hand, in some cases siding with the brutal police or military repression that would follow. Solidarity was discarded. In truth, some of these movements have had intensely reactionary elements, and in several cases that reactionary element is certainly at their core; but much of the left’s response was predictable, sudden, and utterly lacking in nuance, or importantly, any willingness to investigate the contradictory natures of these mass revolts or suffer any mild interest in the causes of mass grievance. The left has repeatedly rushed to identify the American CIA as the unquestionable locus of all global discontent. In several of these instances, the pretensions of the targets of mass resistance to some mantle of social progress were given greater credibility than the cries coming from the street. In many cases, the relationship of each country to the imperialist hegemon is factored larger than the class relationships within them. Let us not be naive: certainly, the CIA is engaged in subversion as a matter of routine. But what does it say about the possibilities for human liberation (and perhaps more importantly, about our abilities as professed revolutionaries to evangelize a universal message of revolt) that every spark of rebellion is reflexively dismissed? Put in another way, do “Black Lives Matter” only in the United States?
This phenomenon didn’t begin in the last decade. It really goes back to the halcyon days of left-talking military revolutionaries who dominated large swaths of the global South in the period between post-war decolonization and the fall of the Soviet bloc. With socialist revolution seemingly more distant than ever in the so-called liberal democracies of the global North, the left came to embrace many of these military figures with minimal critique or challenge, seemingly forgetting that printing up posters of Lenin isn’t quite the same thing as following his prescriptions for waging proletarian revolution or building socialism.
One of the clearer cases of this phenomenon — indeed one of the most tragic cases — was the embrace by much of the left of Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam and the military regime which ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991.
In February of 1974, a wave of labor strikes and mass protests swept the empire of Ethiopia. Tightly ruled by an aging Emperor Haile Selassie since the early decades of the century, now confronted with an increasingly harsh and vivid contrast between the haves and have-nots, the Ethiopian population stayed in the streets for weeks. They were soon joined by elements of the military which threatened a full-on mutiny. Taxi drivers, teachers, Ethiopia’s small industrial workforce led by what had been presumed to be a docile and captive trade union confederation in the pocket of the AFL-CIA, and most importantly, many thousands of dissatisfied high school and college students made economic and political demands, including that of popular democracy in the form of a people’s provisional government. There were mass demonstrations of priests and prostitutes, of minority Muslims; and the country’s vast peasantry began eyeing the land they worked in a variety of exploitative feudal land tenancy schemes. A country without political parties or press freedoms soon engendered a vibrant political culture in which underground publications written by communists soon dominated the national discourse.
In what has been described as a slow-motion coup, a committee of junior military officers known as the Derg began edging its way into the seat of power, forcing the autocrat to readjust his government repeatedly. They claimed that the spontaneous popular revolt needed direction and that the military was the only organized force in the country that could offer it. In September of 1974, the Derg pushed the emperor from power and shortly afterward proclaimed Ethiopia a state guided by “Ethiopian Socialism,” defined very loosely and not yet implying an imitation of, or connection to, the avowedly socialist countries of the Soviet bloc.
The new regime was ruled by a provisional military government, a triumvirate junta in which Mengistu was a junior partner. Mengistu had been trained in Fort Benning, Georgia, and displayed no apparent ideological sympathies. But ominously, in a year marked by remarkably little bloodshed, the Derg promptly executed sixty people, mostly prominent officials of the former regime and members of the nobility, but including a small number of leftists. In what was to set a pattern for government personnel changes in the Derg era, also killed was the head of the Derg himself, a liberal general named Aman Andom. While Mengistu remained a junior partner in the Derg, he was widely recognized as the agent of these executions. The military junta was now to be headed by another non-ideological figure, a brigadier general named Teferi Bente.
Over the next two years, the Derg government engaged in a number of revolutionary reforms, greeted with degrees of enthusiasm and skepticism by the revolutionary population. Some businesses were nationalized, but foreign and private investment was guaranteed. Feudal land tenancy was ended, but the land was turned over to the state, not the tiller. Students were sent to the countryside to evangelize Ethiopian socialism, but they, and the peasants they instructed, were punished for taking things too literally. The government tried to disband the independent labor movement and replace it with a captive state-run union that would focus on production and class peace. And all the while the regime continued the imperial wars against restive national minority populations, most notably the rebellious Eritreans in the country’s northern Red Sea region. The regime posed as anti-imperialist, but relied on U.S. aid, including all that military hardware being used against Eritrean peasants.
By the end of 1976, elements within the Derg lost patience with the quickly growing Ethiopian left which had continued its agitation for popular democracy and began to wage a brutal campaign of repression. This repression was met with violent resistance from the civilian left, which began its own urban guerrilla campaign against government officials guilty of acts of repression.
In February of 1977, Mengistu resolved some serious internal contradictions inside the regime with a preemptive coup d’etat, killing Teferi Bente and a handful of other officers of questionable loyalty. He immediately moved to make an alliance with the Soviet Union. He also unleashed what he would eventually christen as the “Red Terror,” a series of death squad campaigns against any and all civil opposition. While totals remain the subject of debate, the body count has been compared to that of the 1994 genocide in nearby Rwanda. By the time of the terror, the U.S.-trained Mengistu had become proficient at employing Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, and he claimed, invoking early Soviet history, that his purges were directed against counter-revolutionary “white terrorists,” which he defined variously as anarchists and Maoists as well as agents of imperialism and the former nobility.
When the quixotic and also avowedly Marxist-Leninist military leader of neighboring Somalia, Jaale Maxamed Siyaad Barre, invaded eastern Ethiopia and renounced his own Soviet sponsorship in favor of U.S. aid, Mengistu pleaded to Cuban leader Fidel Castro for assistance, and soon massive numbers of Cuban troops and Soviet bloc weapons flooded the country. Mengistu, with Soviet and Cuban aid, attempted to rally progressive global opinion against the Somali invasion, now marked as a proxy for imperialist meddling. Soon, Somali troops were driven out, and with massive donations of police surveillance technology from East Germany, the “Red Terror” found success by the end of 1978, wiping out all traces of opposition in the country’s urban areas.
A generation of political exiles fled the country, leaving behind a variety of guerrilla struggles polka-dotting the country’s rural expanses, one of which eventually snowballed into the rebellion that swept the regime from power in 1991. That rebellion also allowed the Eritrean rebels to consolidate their own victory and secede from Ethiopia. But in 1978 the future looked bright for Mengistu. He eventually built a captive state communist party (which he headed, of course), called the Workers Party of Ethiopia. Posters of himself, and Marx and Lenin were soon ubiquitous. Despite famine, economic disaster, and the occasional coup attempt, the regime lasted until about the same time as the Soviet bloc faltered. That global dust-plume of Soviet collapse undercut the stability of Soviet clients across the globe from Afghanistan to Benin, from Madagascar to South Yemen, from Kampuchea and Vietnam to Cuba; only the strongest survived and that did not include the Mengistu regime.
The great majority of the global left lauded Mengistu’s Ethiopia, accepting official government narrative as gospel. Socialist groups like the U.S. Workers World Party accepted state press junkets, interviewing regime members by day while nighttime neighborhood roundups left piles of bloody children’s bodies on street corners for the morning trash. Most Maoists and Trotskyists expressed degrees of critique, especially as regards the controlling influence of the USSR, and the global national liberation support movement anguished over the idea of the Cuban revolution suddenly in contradiction with the Eritrean national liberation struggle; but lasting orthodoxy seeping into 21st century leftist discourse holds that the Mengistu regime may have had its flaws, but it was another experience of Marxism-Leninism squelched by imperialism.
Most of the barebones narrative I have repeated above is not unlike the way much of the left recalls the Ethiopian Revolution in its totality, though perhaps I’ve been a bit more critical. They focus on the claims of the Mengistu and the Derg. They write off the dissent from the left. They are embarrassed by the violence, but since it was probably unreasonable infantile ultraleftists consciously or unconsciously acting in the interests of imperialism, it’s all well and good. As a model for socialism, well, it was a revolution from above, but it works that way sometimes.
As a verdict of history, let us be clear: an interpretation of Derg-era Ethiopia as actually socialist is completely shameful, and reflects miserably on the compass of solidarity used by the left. Nostalgia for Mengistu (still alive in a villa in Zimbabwe, by the way) is deeply and intensely misplaced. The global left embraced yet another left-talking military strongman, accepted his rhetorical claims at face value, and turned its back on what was one of the largest mass, civilian communist movements in African history. It’s worth remembering here one of the most useful axioms of Maoist praxis, “no investigation, no right to speak.” So let’s take a second look.
To really understand the Ethiopian revolution, one has to go back to at least 1960. While on one of his many foreign excursions, the emperor was briefly overthrown by military officers led by the Neway brothers. The rebellion was crushed and the Neways were executed, but it was a critical crack in the absolute rule of the emperor in a volatile period of continental decolonization. By 1965, a radical student movement formed the first of many clandestine organizations, the Crocodile Society, which organized demonstrations calling for “Land to the Tiller” and other democratic reforms. Against the backdrop of a growing world radicalization, resistance to the American aggression in Vietnam, the selfless albeit tragic guerrilla exploits of Che Guevara, the labor and student explosions of 1968, and the rise of a younger, more vibrant, New Left detached from Soviet orthodoxy, the Ethiopian student movement became the arena for revolutionary debate and discussion that was otherwise banned. Student publications were filled with nothing but theoretical articles debating the application of Marxism-Leninism to Ethiopia. This revolutionary student movement dominated academic culture in Ethiopia as well as among the many diaspora Ethiopians who were seeking higher education abroad.
The first Ethiopian left organization was formed secretly in France in 1968. Called Meison, the Amharic abbreviation for the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement, it was the brainchild of an Ethiopian linguist named Haile Fida, who would become a notorious figure in the revolutionary era. The group had distinct views it argued for in the student diaspora, but as an organization, it remained completely clandestine until after the events of 1974. In 1969, a group of radical students led by Crocodile Society veteran Berhane Meskel Redda hijacked an airplane from Ethiopia to Sudan. They soon found themselves in revolutionary Algiers, were given a vacated pied noir villa by the Algerian government, and set up a base from which to coordinate revolutionary activities while they hobnobbed with Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers and representatives of dozens of other global national liberation movements.
Things at home took a dark turn with the assassination at the end of the year of a popular student leader, Tilahun Gizaw, in what was presumed to be a government hit. A wave of repression killed many students, imprisoned more, and sent thousands of others abroad. Ethiopian student discourse took a serious turn: they knew a crisis was coming and with it the promise of a popular explosion, and they began to make plans to transform themselves from radical students to professional revolutionaries; they knew they needed a revolutionary party and started to plan how to build one. In 1972, they founded a second radical organization at a congress held in West Berlin, again in total secrecy. Calling itself the Ethiopian People’s Liberation Organization, its supporters were based everywhere there were Ethiopian students, from New York to Moscow, from Rome to Addis Ababa. It approached the most radical Palestinian organizations for military training, which it received. It competed for covert leadership of the movement with Meison, whose politics were not dissimilar but which had quite a different perspective. EPLO felt revolution was imminent, Meison prepared itself for a long march lasting many years.
It is true that the embryonic Ethiopian left did not lead the February 1974 uprising, though the ranks of people rising up included many young people who had spent their school years learning about revolution in the campus crucibles. Both Meison and EPLO immediately understood the importance of the moment, and most of their cadre who were based abroad returned home, where they began to publish and distribute regular underground newspapers and flyers. The most important of these was Democracia, published by EPLO, although that was, for the moment, left unsaid. They understood students couldn’t do it alone and they began to expand their social base. The revolutionary movement started to take off. It greeted the military coup with concern and suspicion; the welcome exit of the emperor tempered by the expectations about the predictable trajectory of a military regime. This was when the call for a people’s provisional government was formulated, at first supported by all factions on the left.
The left did not ignore the military. In Bolshevik fashion, they reached out to the military rank and file. EPLO even formed caucuses of revolutionary soldiers. Some oriented to various officers within the ruling military committee. Meison’s Haile Fida and one Senay Likke, a veteran of the diaspora student movement who had repeatedly clashed politically with partisans of EPLO, wound up becoming confidants of key Derg figures, including most importantly Mengistu, who was a veritable political tabula rasa packed with personal ambition. Shortly after some of the dramatic reforms announced by the regime, Meison dropped its calls for democracy in favor of cooperation with the military. Haile Fida and Senay Likke were soon referred to as the Derg’s politburo, and they and many of their followers were given portfolios in government ministries and charged with applying a socialist varnish to military rule.
In 1975, EPLO transformed itself into Ethiopia’s first political party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party or EPRP. It had an elaborate nationwide network of clandestine cells and semi-open mass organizations. They established the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Youth League which attracted tens of thousands of eager revolutionary youth. They had a mass organization for women and their cadre kicked the CIA out of the Ethiopian labor movement. After that was suppressed, they formed their own red labor movement. They attempted, though ultimately unsuccessfully, to build an alliance with Eritrean rebels. At one point they were even accused of seizing control of national distribution of red chili pepper. At their height in 1976, they had thousands of members and tens of thousands more supporters and sympathizers. A rural base area in the north of the country was home to the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Army, which hoped to replicate the Chinese successes of waging people’s war and building peasant support in the countryside. EPRP has been called one of the largest communist parties ever seen on the African continent. It showed up to mass demonstrations with huge contingents carrying red flags, warning of the dangers of fascism from the regime and calling for the people to take power.
The politics of both EPRP and Meison started where one might expect for groups originating in the late 1960s: heavily influenced by Maoism, holding Che Guevara and the US Black Panthers in high regard. Meison tended more toward a kind of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, but EPRP was ideologically quite iconoclastic. Its surviving propaganda materials reveal a commitment to revolutionary democracy and popular empowerment unparalleled in other left movements of the day. Surviving veterans of the movement talk of study groups where the reading lists may have started with Lenin and Mao, but ended with Frantz Fanon, new leftist economists like Huberman and Sweezy, and even Isaac Deutscher. Its ground-breaking 1975 program includes planks for workplace daycare to enable women to work and participate fully in society; it called for the recognition of the right to strike and laid forth a vision of a democratic society on a path to socialism. The EPRP’s formation threw off course the Derg’s own plans to form a political party; that didn’t fully materialize until 1984.
A comparison of how the EPRP organized for socialism with the way the Derg tried to impose it is stark. Again and again, Derg initiatives were clearly exercises in population control painted in red Marxist-Leninist language, devoid of popular empowerment but stressing obedience to “the revolution” and production. EPRP appeals called for the people to take what is theirs.
As Meison integrated into the state apparatus, simmering sectarian differences between the two groups became exacerbated. The EPRP accused Meison of compiling lists of its members to turn over to government agencies of repression, which were stocked with Meison supporters. The first person EPRP assassinated in reprisal for the government’s repression in late 1976 was a Meison cadre, a popular college professor, but one who was accused of having overseen a roundup of EPRP sympathizers.
1977 was a complicated year. Senay Likke lost his life collaterally during Mengistu’s coup. Meison eagerly participated in the first waves of “Red Terror” directed at the EPRP, but pulled back from supporting the government when Mengistu invited the Soviets in. Shortly before May Day, EPRYL youth preparing for celebrations were set upon by death squads and thousands were killed. During this period in general, the EPRP leadership was decimated. Its most important leaders were gunned down in the street; internal factionalism split the party, forcing Berhane Meskel off to the countryside to regroup and turning other factionalists into snitching enemies. Horrifying torture by the Derg including rape and genital mutilation was widespread. Parents were made to pay for the bullets used to execute their children.
When Meison broke from the regime, Haile Fida and its other leaders went underground. Meison lost its seat at the edge of power and joined the other victims of the terror. Thousands of its members and supporters were then killed or imprisoned, including Haile Fida himself. Ironically, both Berhane Meskel and Haile Fida were executed in the same prison in 1978, strangled by a graduating class of military cadets. Soviet advisors urged Mengistu to purge any traces of Maoism or Chinese influence, and so the last remnants of the civilian left were exterminated. By the end of the year EPRP was reduced to a struggling guerrilla force in the countryside; it survived through the end of the Derg era, but was banned by the new government. That, as they say, is another story; EPRP today calls itself social-democratic but it jettisoned the most radical Marxist parts of its program in the 1980s.
EPRP, Meison and the Derg all waved hammers and sickles. But an investigation of what they meant by those hammers and sickles reveals conflicting visions of socialism and a fundamental dishonesty on the part of the Derg. The Derg was always the creature of the military officer corps: it propounded a theory of the “men in uniform” meant to rationalize the role of the military as agents of social change. The Derg was not made up of the soldiers of the 1917-era Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, it was the creature of Kornilov’s officer corps. Like the emperor before them, it repeatedly and openly said that the Ethiopian people were not ready for democracy. It acted out of expediency, not principle. The EPRP’s base included a layer of the urban petty bourgeoisie, but the Derg’s base included the massive layer of lumpenproletariat displaced from the countryside and crowding Ethiopia’s cities who could be counted on, sometimes mildly coerced, to turn out to pro-government rallies. But even with the transformation of the regime from a provisional one to a formalized single-party state over the course of the 1980s, military figures kept a tight grip, making up the majority of “Workers” Party membership.
The EPRP certainly deserves scrutiny. It can be said in some ways that they were too little too late, and all their study and preparation failed to prepare them for the heavyweight of repression that was to fall on them. Although they made ingenious plans for clandestine organizing and had a clear vision of their final destination, they ultimately failed at people’s war and their detour into urban guerrilla war and terrorism lost them support among those concerned generically about “violence.” They wavered when confronted with strategic choices for a united front to keep the revolution on track.
The revolutionary left achieved hegemony over the Ethiopian student movement at a time when that movement was hugely influential, and this was remarkable. None of its factions believed that students would themselves be the vanguard of a revolution per se; they studied Lenin’s writings on the party and understood the limitations of student organizing. The whirlwind of events confronted the left with an array of choices for breaking out of their demographic limitations, but also a shrinking horizon of possibility. Some turned toward organizing the proletariat and the peasantry directly from their midst and simply ran out of time. Others turned toward the revolutionary state for leverage in organizing society from above; they would find themselves outmaneuvered and paying with their lives at the hands of institutions they helped create.
Those interested in reading more about the EPRP and Meison may have to wait for my own book-length documentary history to see the light of day; for now, the Ethiopian section of the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online hosted by the Marxist Internet Archive is definitely worth a perusal. The bottom line, however, is that an understanding of revolutionary Ethiopia — perhaps more accurately labeled counterrevolutionary Ethiopia — is not possible from taking the words and visuals provided by Mengistu and his allies at face value. There are complicated ideological issues here that a short article like this one can’t address. But there are also facts. And the worshipful appetite of segments of the left for a military ruler who held on to power by suppressing the left, by suppressing ethnic dissent, really makes a travesty of the foundations of our commitments as communists.
What happened in 1974 was a real revolution at the conjuncture of contradictions in Ethiopian society. That revolution continued with critical mass support for a few years, but the process was hijacked by a brutal military that sought to control and channel it for their own power. In 1991, the masses of Addis Ababa enthusiastically welcomed the toppling of the massive Lenin statue that had been supplied by North Korea in 1984. This is the cost of getting it wrong: socialism is remembered in Ethiopia as the dark time when untold thousands of people, including children beyond counting, lost their lives at the hands of people who claimed to be acting in the shadow of Marx and Lenin.
People have been in the streets around the world in the past decade in sometimes surprising places. Are some reactionary while others revolutionary? Sure. Without a dominating ideological resurgence of clear class-based revolutionary praxis, that’s likely to continue. But if you’re gonna pick a side that is a government against its people, you’ll need to have a deep and factual understanding of why and be prepared to fit that answer into an ideological matrix of human liberation. Or maybe you’ll have some explaining to do if you keep calling yourself a Marxist.
Ian Scott Horst is an independent communist living in Brooklyn, New York. He has been a supporter of a variety of defunct groups including the post-Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist League, Lavender Left, Queer Pagans, and the post-Maoist Kasama Project. He recently completed a book-length documentary history of the Ethiopian revolutionary left and is currently shopping for a publisher. Updates on his research and the progress of his book can be found at his Abyot—The Lost Revolution blog.
Renato Flores argues for self-determination and reparations for Black Americans as a key part of the revolutionary struggle in the USA.
The uniqueness of the Black condition in the United States is hard to understand for anyone foreign to the Americas. Its complexity is often lost in semantic distinctions on whether Black Americans are a Nation or not. A typical first avenue to assess Nationhood is to mechanistically apply Stalin’s checklist: “common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”1 When this is applied to the Black nation, the obvious question becomes: where is the territory?
A dismissive answer would be to say that there is no land because population migration has rendered the Black Belt thesis obsolete. This answer is not only insufficient, but it is also hardly new: it has been leveled at the Black liberation movement since its inception in different shapes. Harry Haywood, the CPUSA’s leading theoretician on the Black Nation repeatedly answered this critique in the decades between the 20s to the 60s.2 As he presciently pointed out, migratory fluxes and the passage of time had done nothing to integrate black people. Looking from the era of Trump and mass incarceration, it is clear that this point still holds: Black oppression morphs in shape, but it never disappears.
An alternative answer is the Black Belt still exists in the shape of the 60-70 counties that still have a Black population of over 50% and their surroundings. This answer is poisoned, not only because there is a limited geographical continuity between these counties, especially those outside the Mississippi basin and the plantation belt in the South, but because it implicitly accepts the settler division of this continent. It also doesn’t outline how land claims from the Black Nation are compatible with Indigenous claims. Even worse, mere accounting of people could very well be leveraged against American Indian struggles to deny their validity when they occur in territory where settlers are the majority.
Furthermore, even if one accepts that the Black Nation has its territory in the Southern states, it is hard to outline a path to self-determination while this land is held by an intensely racist ruling class. This is barely a new objection: Cyril Briggs, who pioneered the idea of a Black Nation on North American land chose the far West for his Nation to avoid this problem. The boundaries of the Black Nation were never clearly outlined by Haywood and the CPUSA, knowing that even if a black nation-state was formed, it could end up landlocked by Jim Crow states and isolated. The CPUSA insisted on the black belt hypothesis despite its impracticality because it was necessary to check off land in Stalin’s checklist. The right to a separate state requires land, which complicated self-determination. To remain faithful to the Black Belt thesis required spending significant time addressing geographical questions.
The answer to this antinomy is to move past land. One cannot fully grasp the concept of a nation materially: the persistence of Black nationalism despite internal migration means that the “idea” of a Nation is more resilient than land. Benedict Anderson defines a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves to be part of the group. In this sense, it is hard to deny that Blacks in the United States constitute themselves as an “imagined community”. Slogans of “buy black” or “black capitalism”, as well as black separatist groups such as the Nation of Islam are very alive today, and they speak more to the Black masses than socialists do. Those who see in them petit-bourgeois deviations are behaving like their counterparts a hundred years ago, which were hit by the realities of Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” mass-movement. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association was able to temporally attract over a million black people while communists struggled to recruit blacks at all. By looking at its aftermath, Harry Haywood acknowledged the mistakes of the communist movement and formulated the first comprehensive call for self-determination in the Black Belt.3
So what can we say about the Black nation today? And what is the minimum socialist program for Black self-determination? To begin to understand this, we must remember two things. First, that the United States was founded on (white) race solidarity, and by default excluded black self-determination. Second, that the debt of “forty acres and a mule” remains unpaid, causing a wide economic disparity between Black wealth and White wealth. Both of these problems are discussed today, but never together. Trying to answer one at a time is insufficient; we need both economic and racial justice or will end up getting neither.
Anti-blackness is embedded in the DNA of the United States. The exclusion of black people from the community of whiteness offers fertile ground for a Black “imagined community”. Unlike layers of Asians and Latinos, Blacks will never have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the United States. That would render the whole category of whiteness obsolete. Racial solidarity, the main stabilizer of class struggle, would disappear. The persistence of whiteness explains the persistence of Black nationalism.
The way race is constructed in the United States has few parallels, but they exist. In Traces of History, Patrick Wolfe elaborates on the founding of the United States, drawing similarities between the use of antisemitism to forge nations in Europe in the early 1900s, and the use of anti-blackness to forge race solidarity in the US. The question of European Jewry was tragically resolved through the horrors of the Shoah and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to establish the ethnostate of Israel. Following Wolfe, we can look at the debates around the Jews in the 1900s to find ways to answer the Black question.
In the early 1900s, the largest Jewish socialist organization was the Bund, located in Eastern Europe and comprising tens of thousands of Jewish workers willing to fight for their liberation.4 The Bund called for Jewish self-determination, but in a different shape from that associated with the Bolsheviks. Its prime theorist, Vladimir Medem, drew inspiration from the Austromarxist school of Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. Medem demanded Jewish “national and cultural” autonomy, with separate schools to preserve Jewish culture. His brand of nationalism was of “national neutrality”, and opposed both preventing and stimulating assimilation. He just refused to make any predictions on the future of Jews.
Otto Bauer’s writings on the national question and self-determination are more remembered today by Lenin’s polemics than on their own right. Lenin was correct to criticize Bauer for denying territorial self-determination to nations within the Austro-Hungarian empire, and restricting them to “national cultural autonomy”. But by throwing away the baby with the bathwater, a different definition of self-determination and approach to nationhood was damned to obscurity. Bauer’s historicist definition of a nation as “a community with a common history and a common destiny” remains underappreciated in the Marxist tradition, even if it has influenced people like Benedict Anderson.5 Medem drew from the Austromarxist school even if Bauer denied nationhood to the Jews on the grounds that they lacked a common destiny. By limiting his look to the Western European Jews, Bauer failed to see the power of his approach where it was adopted.
The Bolsheviks also failed to capture the intricacies of the Jewish nation. Lenin framed the Jews as something more akin to a caste than a nation. Stalin dedicated an entire chapter of his National Question to polemicize against the Bund and the Jewish nation. By contrasting the cultural autonomy demands of the Bund to the struggles of Poles and Finnish for territorial self-determination, Stalin found the Bund’s demands as insufficient under Tsarist authoritarianism and superfluous under democracy. He also claimed that Jews were not a nation because “there is no large and stable stratum connected with the land, which would naturally rivet the nation together, serving not only as its framework but also as a ‘national market.” Both Lenin and Stalin saw assimilation as the only solution and shut the doors on Medem’s middle way. This meant that even if the Bund started its history closer to the Bolsheviks, they were eventually repelled towards the Mensheviks who accepted their nationalist vision.
In the aftermath of the October Revolution, the Bund would undergo several splits and realignments. Their program for Jewish self-determination never saw full and consistent implementation. In a cruel irony, both Bolsheviks and Austromarxists were proven wrong by the Jewish version of Garvey’s return to Africa: Zionism. The return to a mythical Jewish land was able to take hold among sections of Eastern European Jews, showing that they were never fully integrated. Zionism not only matched the mass appeal of Garvey, the support of Western imperialism made it achievable. When confronted with this serious ideological rival, the Bolsheviks realized their mistake and attempted to provide a “Jewish autonomous oblast,” giving a land basis to Jewish self-determination within the USSR. But that was a large failure: at its peak, only fifty thousand Jews moved to the oblast in Eastern Siberia. When offered second-rate Zionism, why not choose the original?
If we read Stalin’s original criticism of the Bund, we can find many parallels to present critiques of Black nationalism. Applying his rigid framework to black people can lead us to the absurd conclusion that the Black nation, and the impossibility of racial integration in the United States, is contingent on the continued existence of a small number of sharecroppers connected to the land. Haywood was too faithful to his party to abandon the narrow confines of Stalin’s definition of nation and adopt a different one. Thus, he was forced to repeatedly argue for the persistence of sharecropping rather than abandon the Black nation. His opponents never abandoned the same framework, and the real debate became obscured by the interpretation of geographical statistics.
We must recognize that this is an absurd either-or. We can try to rescue the idea of “national personal autonomy” as a way of granting self-determination when the land basis is not sufficiently solid, and using it as a way to “organize nations not in territorial bodies but in simple association of persons”. This provides a working program for Black self-determination which avoids the question of the land. Indeed, self-determination means nothing without the right to separate, and the right to organize blacks separately has been demanded by many revolutionaries throughout history. This includes someone like Martin Luther King, who said that “separation may serve as a temporary way-station to the ultimate goal of integration” because integration now meant that black people were integrated without power.6
Socialists should not be afraid of this: Black Nationalist associations such as the Black Panther Party or the League of Revolutionary Black Workers have been amongst the most revolutionary forces of the United States. A reason they were so successful was their ability to organize separately in their initial stages, and reach out to other movements on their own terms. But it is essential to remember that separation is being demanded by those communities, and not enforced. Separation can very well be used to enforce racial injustice as shown by the use of “separate but equal” schools.7
However, self-determination alone does not address the wealth disparity between races. Experiments in black self-determination like those being conducted by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in Jackson, Mississippi are bound to fail due to economic constraints. Black communities lack the wealth necessary to jump-start their own structures. This is the second pillar that holds up the existence of the Negro nation: the debt owed from the legacy of slavery. When the shadow of the plantation enters, the analogy between Blacks and European Jews breaks down, and the question of reparations becomes central.
The most honest case against reparations is that of Adolph Reed.8 Reed never denies that the legacy of slavery has caused Black people to be at a significant economic disadvantage. However, he denies that the demand for reparations has progressive potential, and attributes it to petit-bourgeois nationalism (sound familiar?), where the middle classes attempt to rebuild a destroyed black psyche through back-room deals, in place of mass organizing.
Reed fails to see the potential for reparations to actually coalesce in a mass revolutionary movement. But fighting white supremacy need not begin from a revolutionary point. The original demands of the Montgomery bus boycott of the 60s were as mild as first-come, first-served seating, and did not even ask for desegregated buses. But anti-racism becomes a genuinely revolutionary movement by necessity if it is to reach its endpoint. We only have to observe MLK’s slow transformation to anti-capitalism. Every revolutionary movement in the history of this country has been led by black people and anti-racist organizing, be it the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, the strikes leading to the formation of the AFL-CIO, the second Reconstruction of Civil Rights or the Black Panther Party. History tells us that any path to a radical transformation of this country must go through anti-racist, anti-imperialist organizing or it is bound to stop halfway before reaching its goals.
Contrast reparations with Medicare for all. Medicare for all has the potential to immediately transform the lives of millions of people for the better. But Medicare for all does not fundamentally challenge capitalism. Sanders regularly points to Western Europe and other “industrialized” countries as examples that universal healthcare is possible (Cuba is a notable example he never mentions). As he accidentally shows, it is a demand that is perfectly possible to accommodate within the realms of capitalist societies. Settler-colonial states such as Canada and Australia provide universal access to healthcare for the “community of the free”. These countries are no less settler-colonial if they provide their settler-citizens with healthcare. The dispossession of indigenous people continues unabated, and Australia’s notoriously racist immigrant policy still holds. If this isn’t the definition of trade-unionist, economist demands then what is?
Decommodification of essential commodities is just ordinary Keynesianism: a way for capitalism to manage the inherent contradiction between laissez-faire economics and the existence of the hopeless poor.9 As Keynes and other economists faced down the Great Depression, the consensus became that state would mitigate the worst excesses of capitalism to save “the thin crust of civilization”. They would create poverty with dignity, incorporating the rabble into civil society by using government programs to provide them with their basic needs. The programs of the New Deal, and the creation of the post-war European welfare system are surely the largest bribes ever given to the working class, with the bill paid by the Global South. Guillotines were avoided, Keynesianism stabilized capitalism for over three decades. The proto-revolutionary proletarian rabble was turned into the social-democratic industrialized “middle” class, one that had gained an interest in preserving the system.
In 2019, neoliberalism has recreated on a massive scale the figure of the hopeless poor. Bernie and other progressives face the Long Recession with measures like Medicare for all and $15/hour minimum wage. “Democratic socialism” is the new word, twisted and redefined to mean anything. While this term means many different things for many people, the underlying ideal for Sanders is a system where we can manage the contradictions of capitalism and give it a human face through state intervention. Sanders tries to attract Trump voters by making class-based demands around which to unite the “99%”. Many socialists are trying to take advantage of Sanders’ cross-party appeal to revitalize the forces of revolutionary socialism. But as Lenin recognized, workers will not simply become revolutionaries by fighting for economist demands. Focusing on Medicare for All fails to outline a vision for a new society, and winning it could mean instead that sections of workers become disinterested in further challenging the system. The post-war era shows the limit of economist demands. Social-democratic Sweden went as far as the Meidner plan, a vision to turn the means of production into workers’ control. The Meidner plan failed, and business began its counteroffensive. Workers were too invested in the system to significantly challenge this failure, and as of today, capital has slowly chipped away at many of the historical gains of Swedish social-democracy. As Lenin stated in Left-Wing Communism, revolutions can only triumph “when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way”.10 In this case, the “old way” was good enough, and workers did not fight to move from “social democracy” to “democratic socialism”.
In a country like the United States, revolutionaries must fundamentally look to challenge the political structure and form a broader vision of how the system should look. Sanders’ race-agnostic politics do nothing to address domestic white supremacy or the pillaging of the Global South. Sanders is right in that universalist policies such as a $15/hour minimum wage will primarily help people of color. But this does not do anything to change systemic discrimination. We have enough evidence to show that remedies in policing do not address the institutionalized white supremacy of law enforcement. Medicare for All might transform the way white supremacy is enforced in the healthcare system, but it is naive to think that it will eliminate it.
Centering race-blind social-democratic projects as a model is not enough. The Swedish social-democratic project was based around a relatively homogeneous “community of the free”. Today it shows deep cracks due to its inability to deal with the cultural and racial diversity immigration has brought in. Universal politics assume that all subjects conform to the same standards, and believe in the same project. With the racial diversity of the US, any universalist race-blind project is doomed if it does not explicitly address the faultlines of the working class. The most marginalized sections will simply not trust economist projects to include them. There is over a century of failures to attest to this, from the failure of Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party to significantly attract black members to Sanders’ inability in 2016 to compete in the Southern states. And even if we do win universalist demands, the cracks will show up later and will be used to reverse any gains. We just have to remember how Reagan leveraged the “welfare queen” that had an explicitly racist subtext.
Instead of a form of subjugation that can be remedied by economic means alone, we have to recognize the political character of white supremacy. The issue of slavery is at the forefront of this election cycle. A Trump presidency is the elephant in the room: the Obama presidency did not mean that we are post-racial. The 1619 project is actively shaping how people think of the United States, tying the foundation of this country to the first shipment of slaves. Led by the New York Times, it is receiving attention from the highest spheres. Some type of cosmetic reparations will feature in a 2020 Democratic platform as an attempt to attract back the black voters the Democrats desperately need. Several candidates, the most notable of which was Marianne Williamson, have proposed comprehensive platforms on the debate floor.
An electoral platform centered around destroying whiteness through indigenous justice and reparations is of paramount importance for socialists today. Some plans are simply not worthy of the name of reparations. Black self-determination plays a key role in this platform to both decide what reparations actually mean, and what to do with the money. Tax credits do nothing to address collective injustice, while the US government coming in to repair infrastructure in majority-Black neighborhoods does not address Black self-determination.
As socialists, we should never oppose reparations, as that would mean isolating us from the Black masses. We have to remember how the Bolshevik’s refusal to address the Bundist concerns led them to the hands of the Mensheviks. A debt of forty acres and a mule is owed, and this is the whole material heart of the Black national question. We should center that it is essential for Black people to decide on what reparations mean. We should not be afraid of not having a seat at that table, because that either means that we do not have enough Black members in our parties, or that our members are not fighting for proletarian hegemony within the Black movement. A council for deciding how and where to apply reparations can be a seed to building alternative power if wielded correctly.
Reparations are not an end-goal but we can use them today to ground the fight for black self-determination and to struggle against whiteness. Ultimately, any non-reformist reform cannot remedy the US’s flaws of racism. This assumes that atonement can be reached within the confines of the current nation-state. The United States’ sins are not a choice it can reverse, they are deeply embedded in the DNA of this country. The platform to cure the character mistakes of the United States can only be fulfilled by the dismantling of the settler-colonial white supremacist structure. Even a comprehensive platform for reparations in its present state is not viable in the current political climate. The same way that “Black Lives Matter” caused a proto-fascist antithesis in the shape of “Blue Lives Matter”, a reparations movement should expect to be attacked both rhetorically and physically.
Even the most flawed reparations platform recognizes the issues of white supremacy as central to the United States and transcends economism in a way Sanders is not able to. While Sanders just wants to make an American Sweden, our movement must go much further. We need a vision for a better world, beyond wonkiness and towards a greater inspiration if we are ever to escape the confines of capitalism. Even if the first and second Reconstructions were unfinished revolutions, they changed society much more profoundly than the New Deal ever did by destroying slavery and Jim Crow.
At the same time, these anti-racist revolutions unleashed collectivized hatred in intense ways that contributed to their later failures. Fascism is capitalism in decay, and reactionary elements are inevitable in any pre-revolutionary situation. Socialists need a comprehensive economic program to pacify white reaction by offering to pay better than the wages of whiteness. Revolutions based on rural or marginalized people can succeed, like Cuba, fall short like Nepal, or fail completely like Peru, depending on their ability to attract the urban wavering classes. Ultimately, any successful socialist program in the United States must incorporate both racial and economic justice. In the first case, to center it politically, in a Leninist manner. In the second, to provide an incentive for the wavering classes to follow.
Abdullah Smith argues that the USSR’s relation to Palestinian national liberation was more about realpolitik than earnest dedication to the cause of the Palestinian people.
The relationship between the Soviet Union and the Palestinian national liberation struggle was a highly ambivalent one set against the backdrop of the Cold War. As the Western and Eastern Blocs vied for influence in the Middle East, the Soviet Union proclaimed in the late 1960s that they would resolutely support — materially, diplomatically, and ideologically — the Palestinian people in their war of national liberation, and the broader Arab world against “imperialism and Zionism.” This position, they proclaimed, stemmed from the Marxist-Leninist positions of “proletarian internationalism” and “self-determination of nations.” However, like much of Soviet foreign policy, reality was far different from rhetoric. Upon further examination of Soviet actions toward Palestine, this supposed solidarity with Palestinian revolutionaries was not one of revolutionary internationalism and anti-imperialism, but was, in fact, simply a cover for the realpolitik the Soviet Union utilized to make the Middle East one of its spheres of influence, with the Soviet Union often sidelining Palestinians in favor of keeping allied Arab states within their orbit. Even at the height of Soviet aid to the PLO, the relationship was one of conditional love and, in some ways, borderline cruelty in its pragmatism.
To gain an understanding of Soviet rhetoric concerning Palestine, one must take into account two major tenets of Marxist-Leninist doctrine: the concepts of proletarian internationalism and self-determination of nations. Proletarian internationalism is the notion that, as Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto, “the working man has no nation” and that the interests of the international proletariat take priority of the interests of one’s own nation. At the same time, Marxism-Leninism espouses that all nations have a right to determine their own destiny without fear of intervention from imperial and colonial powers. From its birth, the Soviet Union — at least ostensibly — believed that it, as a nation, had a duty to stand in solidarity with the anti-colonial and national liberation struggles of the Third World.
According to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s official policy, Zionism was “the most reactionary variety of Jewish bourgeois nationalism” and “distracts Jews from class struggle because it treats Jewish workers and bourgeoisie as both having the same interests.”1 While Jews were an officially protected national minority with their own small autonomous oblast in the Russian Far East and antisemitism was heavily disdained in Soviet discourse, Jews were not seen as a coherent nation-state with distinct ties to a particular region of the world. As such, the idea of a Jewish homeland within Palestine was, in a Soviet Marxist framework, completely unacceptable and could only act as an imperialist project for capitalist powers against the colonized Arab peoples. Soviet Jewish organizations, following the party line, were resolute in their opposition to Jewish migration to Palestine.
After World War II, however, pragmatism trumped principles. Reeling from the Holocaust and still unsure of how to deal with the massive displaced populations of Jewish survivors in the Eastern European states it had liberated from Nazi rule, the Soviet Union decided to recognize the State of Israel in 1948. The motive for this was two-pronged: the first reason was to appease the United States. Soviet leader Josef Stalin knew that the alliance with the West forged during the war would not last much longer, that a long Cold War was coming, and that he needed to buy time to prepare for the protracted confrontation. The second reason was to push the British out of Palestine and keep in check any further British or French colonial ambitions in the Middle East. Nevertheless, the Soviets were strong believers in the need for both a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem serving as the capital of both, and they opposed the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Israel in al-Nakba of 1948.2
The honeymoon period between the USSR and Israel was extremely short-lived. By the end of the year, 200,000 Jews had emigrated from the USSR and Soviet-occupied countries to Israel. The Soviets quickly feared strengthening Zionist organizations within their borders, and in 1949 the Soviet press denounced Zionism once more as “bourgeois nationalism.” Diplomatic ties between the USSR and Israel were broken in the 1967 war.
Across the 1950s and ’60s, with Nikita Khrushchev at the helm of the Kremlin, Moscow threw an enormous amount of investment and advisement into Egypt and Syria, particularly during the United Arab Republic period, as well as Iraq to a lesser extent. This was primarily done in order to curry the favor of these countries’ governments and convince them of the superiority of a socialist-based economy and the advantages of staying within the Soviet camp, albeit keeping class struggle by local communist parties on the sidelines of this broader strategy. For nearly fifteen years, the Soviet Union kept the Palestinian question as a minor one of little consequence to their broader Middle Eastern strategy, with only the occasional statement about the “legitimate rights of Palestinian Arabs” to a right of return.3
In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo, Egypt, as a coalition of Palestinian armed groups and political parties dedicated to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation. While most anti-colonial and national liberation organizations during this period were greeted with enthusiasm by the Soviets, the proclamation of a new chapter in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination was met with icy silence. The Soviets, it seemed, could not have cared less about the foundation of the PLO, and in UN meetings concerning the matter would only speak about the problem of Palestinian refugees and the right of return for Palestinians to their ancestral lands.4 If one were to take the USSR’s anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist credentials at face value, one might find this silence around the matter to be puzzling.
The warming up of relations between Moscow and the Palestinians was extremely gradual. The Soviets began to grant scholarships for members of the General Union of Palestinian Students and the General Union of Palestinian Women to study at universities in the USSR. However, even as late as the end of 1968, the Soviets openly chastised the PLO. Groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, despite themselves being Marxist-Leninist organizations, were particularly criticized for being too close with the Chinese and for their guerrilla warfare tactics, which were labeled “adventurist” and “ultra-leftist.”5 Indeed, nations like China, Cuba, East Germany, Romania, North Vietnam, and even North Korea were more happy to supply material aid to the PLO and were more vocal in their support of the Palestinian national liberation movement at large.6 Nearly all early PLO delegations to Moscow were neither officially hosted by the Soviet state nor by the Communist Party, but by the “Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee” in order to maintain an appearance of a diplomatic disconnect, where support for the Palestinian struggle arose from Soviet citizens who were party activists, not from state conduits.7
It was not until the defeat of the Arab states in the Six-Day War of 1967 that the Soviets realized that the PLO could become a useful tool in countering Israeli — and thus, by extension, US —aggression against their three main Arab client states. In 1969 the Soviets officially hosted PLO leader Yasser Arafat at a reception for Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser, whom he was accompanying on the journey.8 This trip to Moscow by Arafat still did not seal the deal, however — the Soviets acknowledged the PLO’s existence but did not recognize it as the international representative of the Palestinian people. Indeed, when the Syrian Communist Party began to enthusiastically back the PLO in 1971, Moscow almost immediately told the SCP to cease such endorsements and bluntly brushed off any discussion of Soviet support for a new Palestinian homeland. The establishment of serious Soviet-Palestinian ties was further stalled when the Palestinian Black September Organization murdered eleven Israeli athletes and diplomats at the 1972 Munich Olympics, an event which the Kremlin strongly condemned and implicated the PLO in being complicit in.9
By 1974, after the defeat of the Arab states once more in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Soviets realized just how desperately they needed the PLO within their Middle East machinations, and began to treat the PLO as the de facto representative of the Palestinian people on an international level (although they did not officially declare this until 1978, in response to the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt).10 Egyptian president Anwar Sadat began to cool relations with the Soviets after the Yom Kippur War and made significant overtures toward the US that same year. Without Egypt in its orbit and their relationship with Syria also strained, the Palestinians seemed like the logical choice as a group to support to keep Israel in check.11
With the friendship between the Kremlin and the PLO finally cemented after almost seven years of protracted back-and-forth, the Soviets maintained a clear policy: that the goal of any Palestinian national liberation struggle they supported would result in a two-state solution. The PFLP and DFLP’s refusal to relinquish their demand for the dismantlement of Israel and for a multinational socialist republic to take its place was admonished by the Soviets, who firmly planted their support in both rhetoric and financial/military aid behind Fatah, Arafat’s party which commanded the majority of the PLO. Fatah was also important to the Soviets not just because Fatah was the largest faction in the PLO, but because it was also the most likely of the PLO parties to be conducive to a two-state end to the conflict. Furthermore, Moscow understood Fatah as the “bourgeois-nationalist” faction of the PLO most likely to lean towards the West in the distant future; as such, Fatah became their biggest ally and their greatest liability in establishing themselves as allies of the Palestinian people.12
When the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, the Soviets found themselves juggling three allies now at odds with one another: the Syrians, the PLO, and the Lebanese Communist Party. During the first year of the war, the Soviets were comfortable in the ability to support the PLO-LCP united front.13 With Syria’s intervention into the conflict in 1976 resulting in the bloodshed of Palestinians, however, the Soviets began to feel a great sense of confusion and discomfort. Soviet newspapers such as Pravda began issuing criticisms of the Syrian role in the conflict and the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee released a statement calling on all progressive forces in the region to support the Palestinians. Leonid Brezhnev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party, sent a letter to Syrian president Hafez Assad demanding a withdrawal of all Syrian troops from Lebanon. When Syria refused to back down from its commitment to Lebanon, however, Moscow relented, deciding that it had little to gain from the situation. From 1977 onward, the Soviets kept a mostly hands-off policy toward the Lebanese crisis, pulling away aid from all sides after realizing that taking a position in the fight could be a liability to them.14
Despite the Soviet Union’s abandonment of the PLO in Lebanon, the two sides continued to work with each other in other endeavors, with the Soviet Union hosting a major official PLO delegation in November of 1978.15 After the Camp David Accords, the Soviets began to escalate public rhetoric in support of the PLO and to paint itself as the great ally of the Palestinian, and other Arab, peoples. The Soviets spoke of being “consistent advocates of the Arab people”16, began throwing even more financial and military aid toward Fatah, and recognized the Palestinian Communist Party’s induction into the PLO in 1982.17 In 1983, Communist Party leader Yuri Andropov brokered a deal between the PLO and Syria in Lebanon that staved off further bloodshed between the two parties.18 Finally, it seemed, the Palestinians had found a true friend in the Soviet Union.
With the rise of Gorbachev in 1986, Arafat and Gorbachev realized that both the USSR and PLO were in significant decline in terms of prestige in the Middle East: both had alienated many of their Arab allies and failed to construct new relations with other political trends within the region. The communist movement in the Arab world was nearly moribund, and the Soviets had only one socialist ally in the entire region: the relatively quiet and non-strategic South Yemen. While the PLO still received praise in the press of left-wing parties around the world, Arab state sponsorship of the Palestinian cause was at an all-time low due to the PLO’s refusal to relinquish the use of terrorism as a major tactic in armed struggle against Israel. Now, more than ever, it seemed that the USSR and PLO needed each other on the global stage if both were to maintain relevance in the region.19
In 1989, as the USSR was unraveling and communism was collapsing in the Eastern Bloc, the Soviets and the PLO seemed to continue their firm relationship and the Soviet Union seemed guaranteed a decisive role in the peace process, particularly with the 1988 First Palestinian Intifada uprising having made headlines due to its dramatic scope and scale. At first, Moscow was at first content with the Intifada, primarily due to it being a spontaneous uprising not initiated by the PLO, but the Soviets soon grew uneasy as the PLO became more tied to the uprising and Gorbachev gradually became more interested in ending to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through negotiations rather than armed struggle. Mixed feelings toward the trajectory of the Palestinian national liberation movement is noticeable in the Soviet press of the time, which extensively covered the Intifada but did not paint it in an enthusiastically positive light. The Intifada was, however, spun as a symptom of America’s insufficient work within the peace process: indeed, coverage of the Intifada was more anti-American than it was anti-Israel or pro-Palestine, and was meant to tout the USSR as the only trustworthy broker for peace in the region.20
Rekindled ties between Moscow and the PLO soured quickly in 1990 when, in response to rocky relations between the PLO and the US, Arafat aligned the PLO with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. When the Gulf War broke out in August of the same year, the USSR backed the anti-Iraq coalition forces, causing a great deal of consternation within the PLO. Indeed, the resentment towards the Kremlin became so sharp that when the August 1991 putsch by Party hardliners against Gorbachev was attempted, the PLO hailed the abortive coup against “the renegade” Gorbachev. The Palestinians were no longer simply displeased or disappointed: they felt unrelenting antagonism and antipathy towards the Soviets.21
With the USSR fully in tatters, in September of 1991 Gorbachev set into motion a policy of allowing full freedom of immigration for Soviet Jews to Israel. By the end of the USSR’s existence on December 25, 1991, the PLO viewed the Kremlin as an enemy of the Palestinian people, with the PLO seeming to only understand Moscow’s true intentions toward them once the Soviet Union was on its deathbed.22 In the end, it is clear that the Soviet Union was never truly the “consistent advocate” of the Palestinian people that Moscow so enthusiastically touted in its media. Indeed, compared to their support of national liberation struggles like East Asia and Africa (e.g. Vietnam, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, etc.), the Soviet Union’s support of the Palestinian national liberation movement is glaringly half-baked. It is an obvious fact that the USSR was a fair-weather friend only interested in realpolitik, and without concern for the well-being of the Palestinian people, much less for a legitimate peace in the Middle East.
Translation and Introduction by Medway Baker.
Georgy Safarov was born in St. Petersburg in 1891. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1908, and from 1910 spent many years exiled in Switzerland, returning to Russia alongside Lenin in 1917. Despite spending most of his political career up until the revolution in Western Europe, he took a keen interest in the national question, especially the plight of the Muslim population of Russian Central Asia. He was sent to Soviet Turkestan in 1919 to aid in the establishment of soviet power and the fight against the counterrevolutionary Basmachi movement. The complexity of carrying out these tasks—establishing soviet power, winning over the oppressed masses, building socialism, and combatting both counterrevolutionary nationalism and Russian chauvinism—led Safarov to engage in a comprehensive study of Central Asian economic and social conditions. The two pieces we present below were written around the time that Safarov was engaged in a struggle with Mikhail Tomsky, who also had come to hold a leadership position in Soviet Turkestan. Tomsky, as Matthieu Renault elaborates in his essay Revolution Decentered: Two Studies on Lenin, wished to transplant the methods used with regard to the peasantry in the Russian core—the tax-in-kind, etc.—directly to Turkestan, without consideration for the national chauvinism and economic dominance of Russian peasants, workers, and administrators, and the resentment of the native population towards these colonisers. To this proposal, Safarov counterposed the establishment of committees of the poor peasants and distribution of the lands of the large landowners to these peasants, in order to encourage class conflict within the Muslim population, against both their own elites and the Russian colonisers. As Renault demonstrates, Lenin—eternally concerned with Great Russian chauvinism and bureaucratism—attempted to mediate between the two, but clearly sided with Safarov. This was a struggle that he and Safarov were to lose.
The first essay, The Evolution of the National Question, published in the French publication Bulletin communiste in early 1921, is a brief sketch of the development of the national question throughout the revolutionary period, and concludes with a list of problems and a set of prescriptions for the Soviet government to act upon. The style, structure, and content suggest that it was rather hastily written as a call to action, a feature that we have attempted to preserve in this translation. The second, The East and Revolution, published in Bulletin communiste a few months after (and having been published in German in late 1920), greatly elaborates on the content of the first article, with references to anthropological, economic, and historical studies, especially of the Central Asian peoples of the Russian Empire. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, Safarov examines the nature of imperialism, its effect on the economies and societies of colonised nations, the changes in the global and Russian situations since the beginning of the First World War, and the experiences of the national-democratic and proletarian revolutions occurring worldwide in the wake of the war. He then discusses solutions to the national question, in an earnest attempt to resolve the tensions inherent to the national-democratic and socialist revolutions in Russia, and by extension the world.
A key part of his solution is the soviets, which he identifies as “a class organisation borrowed from the proletariat of the advanced countries.”
But the importance of the soviets, for Safarov, is not the particularities of the soviet form as manifested in Russia in 1917 (he in fact refers also to the anjoman, a type of revolutionary council that emerged during the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-09). Rather, it is their status as popular organs of the revolutionary masses, created in the actual process of the class struggle, and as anti-agreementist organs from which the exploiting strata are excluded. For Safarov, the significance of the soviet form is not in their size, nor in their organisational norms; it is in their class composition. Only the class-independence of the labouring masses (the proletariat, the peasantry, and the petty producers alike) from their exploiters can fully carry out the project of national liberation from imperialism. The native exploiters, Safarov demonstrates, will inevitably betray the interests of the majority of the nation in favor of their own class interests, and in so doing will side with imperialist dictatorship.
It is crucial to note that Safarov does not at any point confuse national liberation with the transition to communism, nor does he advocate liquidation of the proletarian struggle against exploitation into the pure struggle for national liberation. On the contrary, he stresses that “this entire programme [for national liberation] has not a single communist element,” and insists on the necessity of “conserving at all price the independence of the workers’ movement, even in its embryonic form.” For Safarov, the struggle for national liberation is a necessary component of the progression towards communism, of the development of the exploited masses’ revolutionary consciousness — but national-democratic revolutionaries are not to be confused with communists, and it is the duty of communists to struggle against these elements in order to win over the exploited masses.
It is notable that for Safarov, the national policy he proposes “coincides with another [task]: that of winning the masses of petty producers, the middle peasants of Central Russia to soviet rule.” In effect, the alliance of the Russian workers and peasants with the toiling masses of the oppressed nations is mirrored by the alliance between the proletariat and the peasanty (the smychka). Just as the Russian proletariat was incapable of exercising power without the support and active participation of the peasantry (unless they wanted to wage a brutal war against the countryside), it was also unable to exercise power without the participation of the exploited strata of the oppressed nations. Safarov, clearly referencing the Basmachi movement, insists that attempting to exercise proletarian power over the oppressed nations, without taking into consideration their particular conditions and tasks, “can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development” — that is, a struggle against the Soviet Republic. This applies not only to the Soviet Republic internally, but also to the international revolution. Even Soviet economic policy is mirrored in Safarov’s vision for the global socialist economy: the peasant soviet republics of the once-oppressed nations, he says, will trade raw materials to the proletarian soviet socialist republics in exchange for manufactured goods and technical expertise, just as the New Economic Policy was founded upon equal exchange between the workers and the peasants. Safarov claims that this will allow the peasant soviet republics to develop at their own pace, so that they can “prepare for communism.”
The tendencies that Safarov identifies constitute an early version of a thesis later elaborated upon by postcolonial revolutionaries and scholars, such as Frantz Fanon. The thesis rejects both stageism—the idea that the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions are and must be entirely distinct events—and the notion that proletarian revolution must be directly transplanted to the colonies by the advanced proletariat of the imperial core, to the exclusion of a native, national-democratic revolution. These two stages of revolution—national and socialist—are not identical, but neither can they be isolated from each other.
We thus present these works as not only a part of the Bolsheviks’ debate on the national question, but also as a study on the dynamics of national oppression and revolution. We contend that these articles are not only a historical curiosity, but can provide insight into questions of imperialism, uneven economic development, and national oppression even today, along with the larger body of scientific study on the national question.
Translated from “L’Évolution de la question nationale,” Bulletin communiste 2, no. 4 (January 27, 1921).
The experience of the revolution has not been sufficiently instructive with regard to the national question. At the beginning of the October Revolution this question had not been posed as concretely, nor with such tangible importance and keenness as today. In the first year of soviet power, the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination manifested itself above all as the liquidation of the colonial heritage of the old Russian Empire. Tsarist Russia oppressed and enslaved the “allogenous peoples” (inorodtsy). Soviet power gave them national equality, up to and including the right to create an independent state. The needs of the struggle against internal counterrevolution made this question a problem of prime urgency. Thanks to the concentration of the proletariat in the big cities and the industrial regions of Central Russia, to the favourable strategic position inhabited by this proletariat over the course of Russian history, the seizure of power could not have been easier. But these same circumstances determined in advance the historic path of the Russian counterrevolution, bourgeois and aristocratic, a path travelling from the outer provinces towards the centre. All the preceding history of Russia had been the history of Russian colonisation, and this fact distinguished itself from the moment of the proletariat’s seizure of power: it brought us face to face with the necessity of overcoming the existing antagonism between the Russian proletarian centre and the outer provinces, which are neither Russian nor proletarian; between the Russian city and the non-Russian country. The key to victory was in the resolution of the national question. But obtaining this resolution has not been easy. It has been necessary, firstly, to educate the Russian proletarian masses, infected—at least among their backwards sections—by an unconscious nationalism that makes them see the Russian cities as the focal point of the revolution, and the non-Russian villages as the focal point of the petite bourgeoisie; this leads them to apply the same methods of attack against these villages as are employed against capital. It has been necessary on the other hand to overcome the age-old distrust of the non-Russian villages towards the Russian cities and factories. The cities and the factories were developed and fortified on the immense expanses of the peasant world, as centres of Russian colonisation. The Bashkir knows this all too well, as the factories in the south Urals took away all their wealth and land; the nomadic Kirghiz knows it all too well, and looks askance at the Orenburg, Kazalinsk, Petrovsk, and Tashkent railways, which have always been nests of the scorpions called “police”; the poor Ukrainian peasant, too, knows it all too well. The assault against capital, advancing beyond the outskirts of the city, encounters an environment where the classes were not distinguished. It comes up against an impassable wall of national distrust. The primary attitude of the oppressed, non-Russian countryside was above all the desire for the Russian cities to finally cease commanding them, and to let the oppressed nations freely pursue their proper path towards national development. The poor sections of the oppressed nations considered soviet power to be a force hostile to their national character. The well-off sections and the nationalists of the intellectual stratum, having become the direct object of requisitions and confiscations, as well as of the struggle against counterrevolution, speculation, and sabotage, saw soviet power as a direct menace to their class domination or to their privileges as intellectual workers. This state of mind naturally facilitated, in a large way, the projects of the Russian counterrevolution. Crushed in the first declared encounter, they naturally seized upon the principles of separation, decentralisation, and independence. Kolchak, “Supreme Leader of the Russian Forces,” and Denikin, leader of “Russia One and Indivisible,” are figures of the second period of the Russian counterrevolution. Before selling their beloved “Fatherland” on the global market, where the demand was not yet enough, the counterrevolution first engaged in business among themselves, in the outer provinces of the old Russian Empire.
The experience of the civil war taught the labouring masses of the oppressed nations that the Ukrainian Rada led to Hetman Skoropadskyi and the German general Eichhorn, which wasn’t far from Kolchak’s Alash Orda or the Musavatist government of the English oil barons. The masses of Russian proletarians inhabiting the frontiers understood, too, that without the middle peasant it was impossible to hold firm against the aristocrats and the generals, that without the allogenous peoples it was impossible to create global proletarian power. The immediate collision of Soviet Russia with international imperialism compelled the oppressed nations to stand with the Russian proletariat against imperialist dictatorship, since the latter excluded all possibility of democracy and national liberty. The civil war was terrible, but it made the peoples of Russia pass through entire eras of history. Over the course of the civil war the possessing classes of the oppressed nations demonstrated to even the most backwards their internal, profound impotence in maintaining their positions of national independence in the struggle between capital and the soviets.
The conclusion of this experience has been clear and indubitable: all the bourgeois-national movements, led by the ruling class, have a natural tendency to adapt to imperialism, to enter into the imperialist system of the great powers, the buffer states, and the colonies. The natural tendency, unconscious from the first, of all national-revolutionary movements, is, by contrast, to draw on the revolutionary governing organisation of the proletariat of the more advanced countries, in order to obtain, by this course, their freedom to develop their nation in the global socialist economic system presently being constructed. The structure of the Federation of Soviets of Russia, the decisions of the Congress of the Peoples of the East, the existing alliance with the eastern revolutionary movements with the European revolutionary proletariat, are proof of this.
Three years of soviet power have presented the national question on a global scale, as a question of class struggle.
We can thus say that soviet power is the algebraic formula of revolution. The Second Congress of the Communist International recognised this, in concluding that the backwards peoples, with the aid of the proletariat of the more advanced countries, and by means of the formation of soviets, can jump over the capitalist stage to immediately prepare for communism. This is not a rationale understood by the “socialist colonisers,” who proclaim all national features to be counterrevolutionary prejudices, and who recognise nothing other than the national prejudices of the dominant nations. Our Russian colonisers in no way differentiate themselves from the bourgeois socialists of the Yellow International. To combat them is to combat bourgeois—however radical it appears—influence on the proletariat. If we transplant the communist revolution, unaltered, to the backwards countries, we can obtain but a single result: to unite the exploited masses with their exploiters in a common struggle for the freedom of national development. In these countries all the nationalisations and socialisations have about as much a basis as the nationalisation of the small peasant’s minuscule exploitation, or that of the cobblers’ awls. But the soviets are the class organisational form which permits the smooth advancement to communism, starting from the lowest stages of historical development. The semi-proletarian Kirghiz, the poor Bashkir, the Armenian peasant, each has wealthy classes in their country. These wealthy strata take away the former’s right to freely dispose of their labour, they enslave them as agrarian serfs, they divest them of the products of their labour, which they appropriate as a usurer’s profit; they keep them in ignorance; they maintain for themselves a sort of monopoly on the national culture, supported by the Mullahs, the Ishans, and the Ulamas. For the labourers of the backwards countries, bourgeois democracy can represent nothing other than a reinforcement of traditional domination, half-feudal, half-bourgeois. The brief experience of the “Kokand Autonomy”—which had more partisans among the Russian police than among the poor Muslims—, the experience of Alash Orda, the experience of Musavatist rule in Azerbaijan and Dashnak rule in Armenia, the recent experience of the pseudo-nationalist government of the Tehran merchants, taught in the imperialist countries of Europe, can all testify to this in perfect clarity. Six years of turmoil, 1914 to 1920, have brought hardship to the labourers of the backwards countries. The Kirghiz who were mobilised in 1916 to dig trenches have even now not been able to recover their lands, once given by the tsar to the rich peasants of Russia. The name “Kolchak” is well-known to the old allogenous peoples. The economic crisis, the absence of flour and cloth, has significantly exacerbated the subjugation of the poor class among the Kirghiz, in Bashkiria, in Turkestan, etc.… The lack of land, far from being resolved, has done nothing but grow, as the shortage grows, and as the nomads are forced to become sedentary. In the countries of the East, placed between life and death by the yoke of English imperialism, the crisis clears the market of European products, but at the same time it augments the appetites of the Western generals, the adventurers and the national usurers. The only remedy to all these afflictions is the labourers’ soviets, which by grouping the exploited together must end class inequality, give the land to the poor, free the artisan from the usurious intermediaries, liberate the toilers from drudgery and taxes, begin the education of the masses and the radical betterment of their conditions of existence, all at the public expense. This entire programme has not a single communist element. It is only after its realisation that the preparation for communism can begin among the backwards peoples. Here, as everywhere, we must terminate that which has not terminated — which has been incapable of terminating — capitalism. The communist revolution, throughout its entire course, must struggle against the exploiters of all historic periods and all types. The soviets are the revolution’s primary weapon, the universal form of this struggle.
Soviet power has become the form by which the right of the oppressed peoples to self-determination manifests. The soviet organisation of the oppressed peoples, from the national point of view as from the political point of view, sets itself against a slew of practical barriers, arising from class inequality and from traditional injustices.
There are enormous spaces, populated by the nations formerly oppressed by tsarism, a great distance away from the railroads. A characteristic example: the Semirechye line, impossible to construct, although the remoteness of this region with respect to Turkestan proper permits the large Russian peasants to maintain an autonomous existence. The nomads fear the city, because they see it as an erstwhile nest of police.
There are no Muslim printed letters, because printing was the privilege of the dominant nation.
There is no one literate in the native language; in Turkestan the cantons are forced to lend secretaries between each other for their executive committees.
There are no specialists for intellectual labour, and intellectuals count only in the dozens. There is no one who can teach others to read and write. This summer in Turkestan we trained a thousand Muslim schoolmasters, but even in just the already-existing schools, we are still missing about 1500.
As regards Russian specialists, we can employ them in the colonial provinces only with the utmost precaution, as they were all more or less agents of the colonial yoke—the colonial plunder. Their distinctly Russian sabotage, which they decorate with bureaucratic scruples and references to decrees, carries a criminally systematic character.
Finally, white-Russian “internationalism” has not yet been completely uprooted in the Communist Party.
The application of all these measures comes up against obstacles: the absence of primers, of scholars, of native specialists, etc.
The Communist Party must clearly understand these facts. It must declare that the soviet autonomy of the oppressed nations is an urgent task for the Communist Party and for soviet power. We must concentrate the attention of the labouring masses, of the proletarian vanguard, and of the entire soviet and communist apparatus on this problem, as we have done in the past in regard to the middle peasant. The liberation of the East, where there is more national and class slavery than anywhere else, is today the centrepiece of our international policy — the international policy of the socialist proletariat. It is there that we will practically address the problem of organising the International Republic of Soviets and the global socialist economy. In three years of soviet power, the national question has undergone many changes. Declarative formulas have passed into the practical organisation of nations. From the military struggle with the national counterrevolution, we have passed to soviet autonomy. From the struggle with the internal counterrevolution we have passed to global policy. The conclusions that present themselves must be taken up by the Commissariats of Agriculture and of Procurement, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, and all the other relevant organs, so that an excessive zeal to execute our labour mobilisations, our taxes-in-kind, etc., will not generate a so-called “counterrevolution.” Our entire party must be mobilised morally to the service of the national liberation of the oppressed.
Translated from “L’Orient et la Révolution,” Bulletin communiste 2, no. 17 (April 28, 1921). Originally appeared in German in Die kommunistische Internationale, no. 15 (December 1920).
The Second Congress of the Communist International recognised that “the masses of the backwards countries, led by the conscious proletariat of the developed capitalist countries, will arrive at communism without passing through the different stages of capitalist development.” We came to recognise this principle through the experience of the national soviet republics in the territory of the former Russian Empire, and through the revolutionary awakening of the colonial peoples and the oppressed nationalities of the East: India, China, Persia, Turkey, etc.… These peoples were cut off from the course of their historical development by European imperialism. They found themselves excluded from the technical revolution, from the rupture with the old social forms, and from the progress of civilisation. European capitalism did not at all revolutionise the mode of production in these countries. It did nothing but erect its own superstructure—in the form of an imperialist bureaucracy, of a commercial agency of European capital and a European “importation” industry—upon the feudal-patriarchal regime which had constituted itself over the course of centuries. It reinforced the exploitation of the agrarian population, by seizing the best lands, the sources of materials and fuel, but did not eliminate the old, reactionary feudal forms of exploitation. Where it could, for example in the Indies, it destroyed the local industry of petty artisans, by saturating the native markets with items manufactured in Europe, outcompeting the locally-manufactured items. Labour, rendered unoccupied by the elimination of petty production, became employed in agriculture. The establishment of industrial hegemony, and the military and political dictatorship of European capital in the colonies, led the great majority of the native population to become “attached to the land” so to speak, and inevitably also to emigration of the surplus population to the industrial centres (such as the exodus of Persians, reduced to finding work in Baku), and the horrific mortalities that periodically desolate certain countries in times of scarcity (India).
Therefore, European capitalism has retarded the economic development of the colonies, just as much as it has the development of culture; it has artificially maintained the old social forms and the old reactionary ideology. Certainly, it could not have manifested otherwise in this part of the world and, all things considered, it has fulfilled its role as unconscious revolutionary agent. Friedrich Engels himself recognised this “civilising mission,” even as it concerns former tsarist Russia. In a letter to Karl Marx on May 23, 1851, he wrote, “Russian rule, despite its wickedness, despite its Slavic dirtiness, has a civilising influence on the Black and Caspian Seas and on Central Asia, on the Bashkirs and Tatars.” But here he misses the point. Capitalism of “importation” has the particularity that, in the colonies, it does not in practice follow the same method as in Europe and America. It does not develop the land for capitalist production. The colonialists burn the land to clear it for agriculture, they grow all sorts of grains until the ground is rendered completely barren, and then they abandon it for new lands. It is intensive cropping in all its rapacious brutality. The ruined artisan is not transformed into the industrial proletarian, but is rather transported by force to the countryside, where he has to work as a half-serf day labourer, and becomes literally the rich landlord’s or director’s workhorse, a slave to European exploitation. The nomad who lost his herd meets the same fate. The autonomous petty producer, who does not go to sell his labour on a capitalist farm, is reduced to misery, and becomes the insolvent debtor to the local usurer and to the European commissioner. At the same time that it destroys the native small industry and ruins the agrarian economy, European capitalism reserves all the offices, all the honours and all the important posts to the bearers of “high culture”, to Europeans.
The European is engineer, overseer, commissioner, administrator; the native, labourer and farmer. Just as in capitalist society, the development of the productive forces is accomplished through the intensification of the dominion of capital over labour, in the colonies this development has augmented the class antagonisms between the dominating nation and the oppressed nation. European capitalism barely disturbed the native elites, nor the exploiters of the peoples it oppresses. The big landlords, the merchants, the native usurers, the clergy, and even the police are left at their posts, legitimised by habit, by religion and by history. Only, above them, new figures appeared; the representatives of the imperialist bureaucracy and European capital, the Christian missionaries and the commercial agents. To the feudal exploitation of the peasant by the big landlord, the usurer, and the despotic state was added the oppression of the whole nation by foreign capital. In addition, the European yoke, far from destroying the backwards civil and familial customs, the traditional ancestral ideology, did nothing but consolidate them, by making them dear to the oppressed masses, who see in them a form of conserving their national culture, as well as a weapon in their struggle for political autonomy and their own culture, against the violent assimilation by European capital. This is what explains the strength of pan-Slavism, pan-Mongolism, pan-Asianism (“Asia for Asians!”), and other analogous movements that tend to consolidate the position of the possessing classes in the oppressed nationalities.
“The desire to safeguard the old, backwards forms of production from the invasion of capitalism: this is the economic base that has realised, without difficulty, the unification of the immense masses dispersed across the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe.”1 Pan-Islamism as well as other, analogous movements are prominent examples.
European capitalism has not yet had the time to dissolve in the industrial furnace the population of the colonies and the half-enslaved peoples of the East, which the communist revolution and the European proletariat will break open. This is the fatal consequence of this imbalance in the development of different parts of the global economy, an imbalance that constitutes the very essence of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism has dug an abyss between developed industry and the backwards rural economy. Capitalism has created a contradiction between the production of articles of consumption and the production of the means of production themselves. It has created a collision between the industrial progress of Europe and the backwards economic state of the colonies. It is exactly the transformation of industrial capitalism into imperialism that has caused the world war.
During the imperialist war, many colonial peoples were forced to provide military contingents and working-class armies for the war in Europe. The imperialist war brought the national question to the forefront, on a world-historic and world economic scale. Relying on Turkey, German imperialism attempted to draw into its camp the peoples of the East. The Entente’s imperialism, by virtue of its international situation, naturally had to speculate instead on its relationship with the Latin and Slavic peoples of Europe.
The imperialist war stripped away from the colonies all the “advantages” of their connection with European capital—commodities, the technical and capital means of the Europeans—and at the same time added cannon-fodder and a multitude of raw materials to the usual colonial tribute. The political yoke was equally strengthened. The result of the war was, on the one hand, the spoils of Versailles, and on the other hand the proletarian revolution in Russia and the revolutionary crisis in Europe. Thus, the march of the revolution in the East was predetermined. The war inhibited the base, the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, not only for the national economy of each country in particular, but for the entire global economy. In Europe, the industrious and enterprising capitalist of peacetime—who, hiring labour everywhere and constantly searching for new available capital, would constantly flood the market with streams of commodities—has been replaced with the speculator, declared enemy of large consumption, conscious protagonist of the continual reduction of social production; likewise, in the East, the European travelling salesman, the “peaceful conqueror” has been replaced with the true conqueror, the peacemaker with gold epaulettes, clad in menacing armour made in the European military style, and equipped with a “mandate” for an indeterminate number of colonial slaves and for limitless territory. In Europe, civil war has created an economic necessity for military dictatorship. The awakening of the oppressed peoples of Asia to the struggle for their national existence has equally created an economic necessity of the strengthening of capital’s doctrine of conquest in the East. The military dictatorship in Europe, and the doctrine of conquest in Asia, have been the only means for capitalism to enlarge its base of production, amidst the global disorganisation and the general revolutionary crisis. Looting one to make gifts for the other, making gifts to this one to loot a third, and so on, without end: this is the real essence of the politics of international imperialism, obligated to zig-zag before the proletarian revolution in Europe and the colonial revolution in Asia.
From this peril emerges the community of interests and solidarity in the struggle. The alliance with the European communist proletariat has emerged as an urgent historical necessity for the peoples of the East. The grand course of world history has seen the collision of capitalism with its direct successors—the revolutionary proletarians—and with its bastards—the oppressed peoples. Capitalism has divided humanity into dominant and oppressed nations. The revolution has brought about the union of the workers of the dominant nations with the majority of labourers in the oppressed nations.
It is through the proletarian revolution in Russia that the global revolutionary crisis has begun. The victory of the proletariat in the empire of the tsars, this “prison house of nations,” has given this alliance a concrete manifestation. The Russian revolutionary A. I. Herzen wrote, “The Europeans consider Russia to be Asia; the Asians, for their part, consider Russia to be Europe.” This was the situation of tsarist Russia. In Europe, it fulfilled the role of the international gendarme; in Asia, it conducted the power politics of European bandits. As strange as it may seem, this ancient formula, if turned on its head, characterises the present situation. To the eyes of Europe, the bankers and the big proprietors, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic appears as the propagator of a terrible infection called “Asiatic bolshevism.” In the East, Russia finds itself as the bearer of the ideas of European communist revolution. It is in this phenomenon that we find the revolutionary importance of our geographic position between the East and the West. The Russian proletariat, the vanguard, had to practically resolve the accession of the masses of petty producers to the communist revolution; it had to resolve the question of the transformation of national movements from national-democratic into socialist-revolutionary…. The past march of historical development will sweep them to victory. Concentrated in the great halls of large industry, able to animate immense spaces, the proletariat, from the first, finds itself in a strategic position more advantageous than that of its enemies; the counterrevolution had to take the offensive from the outer reaches of the country, where it has attempted to draw upon the possessing and exploiting strata, upon the nations once oppressed by tsarism. In effect, all the prior history of Russia has been the “history of colonisation”!2
One of the first acts of the proletarian government was to enact “the declaration of the rights of the peoples of Russia” (2 November 1917), in which it recognised the right of self-determination, up to and including the right of separation from Russia—the right to form a distinct national state—for all the peoples of the old tsarist empire. Be that as it may, to manifest the right to national autonomy in the soviet form, it is necessary above all to overcome the historical contradiction between the Russian city and the non-Russian village, deprived of all national rights. It is necessary to win the confidence of the toiling masses of the oppressed nations, by eliminating the unconscious nationalism with which the backward elements of the Russian working masses are imbued; and by clearly demonstrating to the oppressed masses the true nature of soviet power, the power of the toilers. In truth, this task coincides with another: that of winning the masses of petty producers, the middle peasants of Central Russia to soviet rule; and it is this that will enable the solution. The counterrevolution will help to unmask bourgeois democracy before the eyes of the middle peasant, who sees, hiding behind the grand rhetoric of revolutionary socialism, a new landlord. The counterrevolution will contribute to eliminating the illusions of the labourers of tsarist-oppressed nations in national-bourgeois democracy. In effect, during the civil war, the counterrevolutionary nationalists have swerved to march openly behind the bellicose nationalist intellectuals, who present themselves as the old Russian police, as flag-waving Russian patriots, as European imperialists. Kolchak, Denikin, Mannerheim, Skoropadskyi, and the Allied and German generals have thus unmasked the Kirghiz “Alash Orda,” Petliura’s Ukrainian partisans, and many others.
We can say without exaggeration that the separation between the classes of the oppressed nations has occurred only over the course of the civil war. It is through direct struggle, as class interests collide, that the masses have acquired revolutionary experience; and because of this revolutionary experience, they have moved on to new forms of social organisation. The Kirghiz steppes gave birth to “Alash Orda,” declared partisan of the Constituent Assembly in Samara which brought about the rise of Kolchak; and it was under Kolchak’s boot that the labouring Kirghiz masses consciously rallied to soviet power. Bashkiria underwent the same experience. Ukraine had to pass through an even longer series of successive stages: in the first place, the struggle between the Rada and soviet power put pressure on the new workers; next, the German general Eichhorn, in league with the ataman Pavlo Skoropadskyi; after them, Petliura and the French generals took their turn; then, the brief establishment of soviet power, overthrown by the unrest of the rural magnates and Petliura’s partisans; after that, the representative of a Russia “one and indivisible,” Denikin; and lastly, through the inevitable logic of the events, Ukrainian soviet power. Vynnychenko’s metamorphosis from leader of the bourgeois Rada to the vice-president of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic is the most telling of all these displays.
It is over the course of the civil war between the dictatorship of the proletariat and imperialism that soviet power has become the form of national autonomy and of class differentiation among the toiling masses of the oppressed nations. On the territory of the old Russian Empire, the alliance of the oppressed peoples with the revolutionary proletariat has taken shape in the form of the socialist federation of national soviet republics. The soviet revolution among the peoples of the East, who once formed an integral part of the Russian Empire, has bridged the gulf between the communist West and the revolutionary East.
The Russian proletariat knew to take advantage of their special situation, to simultaneously challenge the imperialism of millions of communists—of the European proletariat—and the threatening wall that is the revolting toilers in the East. Comrade Lenin well noted the international significance of various essential traits of our revolution, when he spoke of “the inevitable historical repetition, on the international scale, of what has occurred here.”3 Soviet power, that is the state form of the labouring masses, has been victoriously tested in practice in the revolutionary industrial city of Petrograd, as well as in the Russian hamlet of the Vyatka Gubernia; among the Tatar peasants dwelling on the Volga, as in the Ukrainian villages; in the East so strongly attached to its national customs, in the East where patriarchy reigns and where blood ties are still so important to everyday life, in the lands of the Kirghiz, in Bashkiria, in Turkestan and Azerbaijan. Everywhere, soviet power has demonstrated its strength. Karl Marx already noted this peculiarity of proletarian government in his critique of Paris Commune. “The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favour, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”4
The revolution accelerates the progress of events to the highest point. It accentuates class contradictions to the extreme, even in the most backwards areas. The long, historic learning process makes way for a learning process governed by the revolutionary method. Peoples and social classes develop, over the course of a few months, more than over dozens of years of normal development.
The world revolution against imperialism places the oppressors and the oppressed on the same level.
The transformation of bourgeois-national movements into social-revolutionary movements has its origins in the conflict of class interests—conflict that manifests with a particular acuity among nations engaged in the struggle for independence, and which can equally be provoked by an external influence: that of the international situation. The elimination of bourgeois domination in the advanced nations necessarily pulls the more backwards nations along the road of the soviet revolution. The counterrevolution then involves itself as an aggressor.
The dictatorship of imperialism unmasks bourgeois nationalism in the West as well as in the East. The dominant strata of the oppressed nations endeavour immediately to seize control of the state machinery and their class victims. For them, the national revolution is the expansion of the national foundation of exploitation. This expansion consists in the manufacturer, the merchant, and the large landlord expelling the foreign interlopers and creating their own state apparatus of class oppression. On the other hand, at the same time, “a class of intellectuals develops and their own written language transforms into a necessity of the national culture, even if in substance this culture had to be very international. And if a nation feels the need for a national intelligentsia, this class, in turn, feels the need for a great, intellectually developed nation.”5
The national bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intellectual class want to have their market, their stock exchange, their bureaucracy, their officer corps, their writers and journalists, their ministers, their representatives, their teachers and their musicians. At the start, their national need finds its expression in bourgeois development. But this need, in the global economic disorganisation and revolutionary crisis, inevitably falls into class contradictions in a nation that has won its national independence. Democracy, in the name of the national interest, transforms into a national bourgeois dictatorship. Finland, a country with ancient democratic traditions, is a poignant example. “It seemed to us,” writes Comrade Kuusinen, on the beginning of the revolution in Finland, “that parliamentary democracy opened a wide and straight path for our workers’ movement, leading right to our aim. Our bourgeoisie had neither army nor police; what’s more, it didn’t even have the possibility of organising them legally, as to do so they would need the assent of the socialist majority in parliament.”6 And nevertheless, the bourgeoisie organised its white guard and defeated the Finnish working class with the aid of the German imperialists.
Bourgeois democracy is now unable to ensure national peace in the countries that have become independent and which contain national minorities. This is the practical experience of Ukraine: “Petit-bourgeois democracy cannot maintain its power in Ukraine, as the internecine struggle fractures it into hostile parties.”7 The intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie, in a nation that frees itself, profess an aggressive bourgeois nationalism, and this leads them to betray the cause of national liberation, to pass into the camp of the imperialists, from which they buy their bourgeois domination at the price of national freedom. The examples are legion: Latvia, Ukraine, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Georgia, the Musavat government in Azerbaijan, Greece, “the Israelite state of Palestine,” the pseudo-national state of Persia which, in fear of its soviet revolution, has thrown itself into the arms of the British, etc. The aggressive nationalism of the oppressed nations’ bourgeoisie and large landlords makes their countries into buffer states of the imperialist powers against the revolution. As a result, social conflict—class antagonism—manifests first of all in the domain of the national interest: the labouring masses reclaim their national independence from the yoke of the imperialists; the exploiting strata cling to their class privileges and, because the foreign yoke was, up until that moment, a powerful means of conserving the most reactionary forms of exploitation—in the east, feudal and patriarchal customs—, the revolutionary awakening of the labouring masses transports the revolution from the national terrain to that of social relations. The national question is raised as one of class inequality. The reason is perfectly clear: if industrial capital and the intelligentsia are, in the early stages, the protagonists of national liberation, the big landlords and the native bureaucracy are the declared partisans of European assimilation. The national revolution, waged against the foreign invaders and the native big landlords, therefore pushes the merchant class into the camp of imperialist puppets. Thus we reach this general conclusion: all the bourgeois-national movements led by the possessing strata—by the exploiting strata—have an objective tendency to adapt to imperialism, to enter into the imperialist system of the “great powers,” to transform into “buffer states” and colonies. At the outset, the strictly historic, unconscious tendency of all national-revolutionary movements of the labouring masses, in the colonies and in the half-enslaved countries, is to draw on a revolutionary state organisation, a class organisation borrowed from the proletariat of the advanced countries, to ensure the freedom of national development in the forming global socialist economy.
The advent of organs of autonomous revolutionary management—the anjoman of the first Persian Revolution, the experience of the eastern national soviet republics, the beginning of the revolutionary peasant movement in the East, the birth of communist movements in Persia, in Turkey, in China, and in the Indies—all this proves that the labouring masses of the East are marching towards the international federation of national soviet republics.
It was in understanding the above that the 2nd Congress of the Communist International decided to support national revolutionary movements in the colonies and in the backwards countries, but under the express condition that the truly communist elements of the future workers’ parties in these countries are grouped together and instructed in their special tasks, in the necessity that they combat the bourgeois-democratic movement in their own nations; the Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonies and the backwards countries, nevertheless without ever fusing with it; and in conserving at all price the independence of the workers’ movement, even in its embryonic form. In the East, as in the West, the way to soviet power has been paved by the process of capitalist development itself. In the West, it was paved by the transformation of “peaceful” industrial capitalism, of imperialism and bourgeois democracy into military dictatorship; in the East, by the implantation of capitalism as a foreign organisation of class domination, as a superstructure over the native society. In India, as the Indian communist Comrade Roy noted, “we are seeing, for the first time in history, an entire people being economically exploited by a true state power.”8 But it is not thus only in India. Russian Turkestan, up until the revolution, was in the same situation. Still today, we see the same state of affairs in Persia, in China, in all the colonies. As for the governmental organisation of the native exploiters, this is relatively weak in the East, where it adopts a purely feudal character.
On the subject of Persia, Victor Bérard had this to say: “Persia is neither a state nor a nation. It is the strange combination of a feudal anarchy and a centralised taxation system, the unstable mix of nomadic tribes and barely settled farmers, Moluk-us-Sawaif, as the natives say, monarchical federation or, more precisely, royal flock of nations.”9
The oppressive and exploitative character of state power is evident here. The base of all social life is the small farmer, ferociously exploited by the feudal state, by the large landowner, and by commercial capital, the true usurer.
The fact that, in the East, state power—as much the native feudal power as the power of the “invaders,” the European imperialists—manifests above all as the immediate exploiter of the population in the economic domain, has an immense political importance: no political revolution is possible in this situation without an economic revolution. Experience confirms this. “Just like their Western counterparts, the exploiting plutocracies of the Near-Eastern countries make every effort to give their rule the appearance of popular rule. The introduction of parliamentarism in Turkey and in Persia, as well as the transformation of Georgia (under the leadership of the Mensheviks), Armenia (under the leadership of the Dashnaks), and Azerbaijan (under the leadership of the Musavatists) into democratic republics, took place under the slogan of ‘Liberty and Equality.’ Nevertheless, every one of these politicians was incapable of providing even the illusion of democracy. The masses of people drown in unbelievable misery, while the agents of foreign imperialism swim in opulence. The land remains in the hands of its old owners, the old fiscal system remains in place, bringing immeasurable harm to the labourers, and the state not only tolerates, but encourages usury.”10
The “bourgeois-democratic” revolution, in the East, inevitably takes the form of a dynastic revolution: it expands the privileges of the exploiters, but does not alleviate the burden of exploitation for the oppressed one bit. Native feudalism does nothing but assume the cast-offs of “European democracy.”
The East is living history. In some places, we still find remnants of the primitive communitarian society (clan, patriarchy), where patriarchal and feudal customs are conserved in full force. The religion of the East is simultaneously social and political. It consecrates the existing civil and familial order. It is the direct support for social inequality. It plays about the same role as Catholicism in the Middle Ages. “From the point of view of the orthodox Muslim, the theocratic Muslim state is the community of believers, of which the earthly representative is the ‘sultan’ (sovereign, leader); he is no more than the representative of God on Earth, a representative with a mission to take care—in conformity with the exigencies of ‘sharia’ (religious law)—of the civil and religious affairs of the community entrusted to him by God. To accomplish this, he, the ‘amiliami’ (the collectors of the ‘zakat,’ a ritual tax), and other civil servants receive a modest compensation of forty kopeks per day. The ‘zakat,’ which is meant to be used to help the poor, orphans, and invalids; to wage war against the infidels; in short, to serve the needs of society and the state, has become, in the hands of the latest Muslim sovereigns, a personal revenue that they use as they please, without any control and in an absolutely illegal fashion; the troops and even the popular militia, created to war against the infidels, to propagate Islam by force of arms, and to protect the community from outside enemies, are transformed bit by bit into the sovereign’s bodyguards, used to oppress the people and serving exclusively the personal or dynastic interests of these sovereigns. The Muslim community has been transformed into rayat, into herds of docile, mute slaves.”11
The centuries-long domination of the total surplus-value of labour was necessarily an obstacle to the expansion of social production, and it hindered all technical and economic progress. The primitive hoe (ketmen) and plough (omach) are still practically the only agricultural tools of the Central Asian farmer. There, capital is naturally stalled in its development; it has not gone further than usury and the sale of produce at the bazaar.
Religious law (sharia) defines property rights thus: “Property (mulk) is all that man possesses, whether it be the thing itself or its fruits.” This definition is the loyal reflection of primitive forms of production: religion recognises the proprietor’s right to sell the things that belong to him, as well as its “fruits”; it recognises his right to dispose of the surplus product of his natural goods.
A multitude of peoples in the East have not completely reached agricultural life in their evolution (the Kirghiz, the Turkomans, the Arabs, the tribal peoples of northern India, the Kurds, etc.). Nevertheless, among these peoples the survival of the primitive communal society has, over time, become a source of exploitation of the poor majority by the rich clan leaders. For example, we will look at the Kirghiz of the steppes. “Possessors of an extensive economy, the rich Kirghiz has already completely renounced physical labour; he is no more than the manager, the administrator; those who do the work are the day-labourers. The number of these labourers varies on average from seven to nine by economy, but there are economies where twenty labourers are exploited, or even more. A curious phenomenon to observe in the economy of the rich Kirghiz is the union of traits characteristic of modern capitalism with those of primitive nomadic society… The clan, despite its evident decomposition, still remains the legitimate proprietor of a given territory in the Kirghiz consciousness. The rich Kirghiz, abiding by this boundlessness of the right to use the land, covets considerable advantages: he puts to pasture his numerous herds without obstacle on all the territory of his relatives. Even up to the present, he has nothing pushing him to close off his land from that of the mass of the Kirghiz people.”12
From the above, we can easily understand why the Congress of the Revolutionary Peoples of the East (Baku, September 1920) recognised that “the soviet system is the only one which truly gives the labouring masses the possibility of taking power from their natural enemies, the upper classes (large landowners, speculators, high functionaries, officers), and to determine their own fate. Only soviet power empowers the poor labourers to take and keep the land from the landowners. The amalgamation of the soviets in large federations, and their autonomy within the framework of these federations: this is the only means for the toilers of different countries, who once warred among each other in the East, to pursue a peaceful existence, to destroy the foreign and native oppressors’ power, and to defeat all attempts by these oppressors to restore the old state of things.” To the forceful organisation of petty production and exploitation from above, the revolution substitutes the autonomous revolutionary organisation of the petty producers—the half-workers—in the form of the workers’ soviets. “Eliminate the prime cause of all oppression and exploitation—the power of the invading foreign capitalists and native tyrants (sultans, shahs, khans, beys, with all their bureaucrats and parasites)—seize power and exercise it in all domains (administrative, economic, and financial); refuse to fulfil any obligations to the feudal landlords and overthrow their authority; eliminate all personal and economic dependence on the landlords; abolish the large estates, under whatever legal form they may take; take the land from the large landlords without compensation or indemnities, and share it among the peasants, the farmers and the day-labourers who cultivate it”13: this is the task at hand. The alliance between the peasant soviet republics of the East with the soviet socialist republics of the West: this is the path that communism must pursue, to take hold of the entire global economy.
The proletariat of the West will help the toilers of the East with their knowledge, their technical expertise, and their organisational forces. The peasant soviet republics will provide the socialist industry of the West with the raw materials and fuel that it needs. Such an international division of labour between the city and the village, on the basis of amicable collaboration, is necessitated by the logic of the struggle against global economic disorganisation—the evident manifestation of capitalism’s decomposition. It is solely by this division of labour that we can eliminate the dependence of the Eastern people’s economy on the guardianship of the European and American banks, trusts, and syndicates.
The path to salvation of European industry, which suffers from a lack of raw materials and fuel necessary for its development, is the socialist industrial colonisation of the East. The soviets are not a repressive regime against the national customs and traditions of the peoples of the East; they will not drag these peoples by force into the kingdom of liberty. On the contrary, they will make them find their own path towards communism, by the cooperation of petty producers, by the organisation of public works (irrigation systems), and the formation of state enterprises.
Josh Morris discusses the experiences of Latino/Latina organizers in the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlan and CPUSA, covering an often ignored aspect of US Communist history.
On June 20th of this year, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) will celebrate its 100th-year-anniversary founding at their old hometown in Southside Chicago. There, its current cohort of activists, writers, teachers, industrial workers, service workers, and unionists will meet to plan their next 100 years in America. Among those leading the current generation of American communists is Rossana Cambron, a member of the Party’s Central (or National) Committee since 2014. Cambron’s current work with the Party involves focusing on membership engagement and developing the Party from its current form as a series of interlinked clubs into a regional political party. Cambron, however, has a history that is quite remarkable not for the history of American communists, but also of Latino history. Cambron’s origins of interest in the CPUSA was in fact extremely personal; linked to her experiences as a Latino woman in Southern California and the efforts of El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlan (MEChA) to bring about equality and acceptance of her fellow students in the years subsequent to the Vietnam War.
During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, newly arrived Mexican immigrants made Hispanic Americans the fastest growing minority group in the United States. By 1980, Mexicans and Mexican Americans constituted about 60 percent of the country’s 14.6 million Hispanics. Many of these people took on the term Chicano(a), which Ruben Salazar noted as a term to describe “a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.” In the early 1970s, Hispanic organizers and intellectuals called for “a militant message of cultural pluralism,” ushering in a series of attempts to address ethnic concerns on California University campuses.1 MEChA emerged in 1969 as the result of Latino students from twelve University chapters across the country who decided to meet in California to decide a course of action for the future. The organization represented a vibrant aspect of the Mexican-American Civil Rights movement, also sometimes called the Chicano Civil Rights movement or El Movimiento. Latino students from the various university clubs met in Santa Barbara and drafted a document that highlighted the emotions and sentiments of their upbringings in an era where Civil Rights and second wave feminist reform seemed, to them, to focus more on the social dynamics of whites and non-whites. The founders of MEChA claimed that “[they] did not always have an organization to fight for their political rights” as Latinos, but instead commonly found themselves grouped in with all non-whites which ignored their unique cultural heritage, beliefs, and customs. MEChA set out to alter this course and provide Latinos access to a campus-based organization that would fight to sustain their civil rights as Latinos by promoting the expansion of ethnic studies programs at their local college campuses.2
The organization by its very nature was counter-cultural, anti-systemic, and in simple terms: radically progressive. They incorporated the traditional heroes of Civil Rights and minority justice, such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but also included Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong as their influential leaders. Because of this, MEChA is sometimes referenced as a contingent of the New Communist Movement (NCM), a grouping of radical organizations that emerged out of the New Left; identified by their rejection of both New Leftist approaches for progressive change as well as the “old guard” of radicals still found in the CPUSA.3 But MEChA did not achieve the broad levels of support it had by 1970 because of its ideological proclivities. Rather, many organizations throughout the NCM attracted students and marginalized youths for their message of embracing the ideals of the counter-cultural movement and rejecting the Old Guard of the Left. The promotion and defense of ethnic studies programs at Universities was one means of doing this; however, MEChA also promoted awareness of Latino history and culture during a time that numerous ethnic groups were searching for collaborationist means to achieve progress.
Between its founding in mid-1969 and throughout most of 1970, MEChA succeeded at gaining membership across University campuses through its promotion of ethnic studies but had little to work with in terms of a struggle for national attention. Between 1969 and 1971, MEChA operated sixteen campus chapters, including Berkeley, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, Northridge, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, and UC Santa Monica. Most of the effort to promote new ethnic studies programs were done on a campus-to-campus basis and the organization merely facilitated a cooperative approach to promoting ethnic and cultural diversity. The moment for a national spotlight came in August of 1970, when the organization began to participate in the Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War; one of the largest Chicano demonstrations in U.S. history. To draw the nation in, MEChA teamed up with the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) of Boulder , the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) of El Paso, and the Puerto Rican Student Union of New York. In total, the demonstration numbered over 25,000 Chicano students from across the country. In their mission statement, MEChA proposed to “link the struggle against U.S. aggression in Vietnam to the struggle for Chicano self-determination in the United States.” At the demonstration, the organizations popularized the phrases “Nuestra Guerra Esta Aqui, No Esta en Vietnam!” (Our War is Here not in Vietnam) and “Vietnam y Aztlan; Los dos Venceran!” (Vietnam as Aztlan; Both will Win!).4 By 1972, MEChA operated over 24 campus chapters and expanded their reach to community colleges and California State Universities.
As is common when a radical organization promoting civil rights obtains national spotlight, MEChA quickly saw political attacks subsequent to the organization’s involvement in the Moratorium. MEChA organizers later attributed the legal battles incurred in Southern California as the result of the FBI and local police who “used undercover agents and provocateurs to infiltrate [their] organizations and plant evidence later used to discredit the movement.” The tactics mirrored those used by the FBI against the CPUSA from 1941 to 1957, as well as the tactics of private “risk management” companies such as Corporations Auxiliary from 1916 to 1938. Although the era of the second red scare had long since passed by 1970, red-baiting, albeit in a slightly modified form, remained a canonical approach for dividing up activists. Subsequent to the political attacks, MEChA saw a decline in both membership and activities. Many organizers, lacking new students to fill the void, turned to part-time paid staff received from the Ethnic Studies departments at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, and UC Davis.
Outside of campus-based organizing, MEChA focused on the promotion of voter registration among California Latinos by urging students to join La Partida de Raza Unida, or LRUP, between 1970 and 1974. With the help of LRUP, MEChA formed a boycott committee for the Farah Garment Strike of 1972 in San Antonio, Texas, to support Cecilia Espinoza in her case Espinoza v. Farah Manufacturing Co (1973). Espinoza charged that the Farah Manufacturing Company violated her civil rights by refusing to hire her on the basis of her national origin (Mexico). The court held that the company’s refusal to hire Espinoza because she lacked U.S. citizenship did not constitute a violation of her rights under the Civil Rights Act. 5 The strike attracted the attention of numerous Latino rights organizations as far Northwest as San Francisco. Latino activists argued that the strike was akin to the efforts of the United Farmworkers and “a turning point in the struggle to organize the non-union Industries of the Southwest, where Chicanos work at the lowest-paid, hardest jobs.”6 It was around this time that numerous Chicano activists of MEChA, including numerous district leaders, turned to Marxism and began studying the works of Mao Zedong; attracted by its message of collectivist action to defend the rights of marginalized, ethnic workers. At first, the organization’s university clubs promoted courses on Marxism-Leninism and contemporary criticisms of American capitalism. By 1974, when MEChA organizers began participating in the August 29th Movement (ATM), the organization experienced an upsurge in both membership and community engagement throughout the Southern Southwest Latino community, which peaked two years later in 1976.7
MEChA’s moment to shine once again came when Allan Bakke claimed that he was the victim of reverse discrimination for his refused admittance into UC Davis, which was subsequently upheld by the California Supreme Court in 1976. MEChA’s mission was to resist efforts to attack affirmative action and special admissions and ultimately overturn the Court’s decision. In their mind, the decision represented a low point for Latinos specifically by opening the door for a return to pre-1960s conditions where Latino presence in Southern California Universities were less than 50 for every 30,000 students. Throughout 1977, MEChA organized thousands of statewide meetings and began to look for other supportive organizations to support their fight to overturn the Court’s ruling and maintain their courses on Marxism. The Los Angeles rally drew over 2,000 Chicano students and community groups who teamed up with Asian student organizations to make the movement a genuinely student-oriented, multi-cultural network of resistance. To continue their Marxist courses, MEChA turned to the Communist Party, which had the facility, staff, and more importantly the resources to teach summer-long courses. Additionally, MEChA worked with ATM to build a collaborative relationship with the Asian American communist organization, I Wor Kuen, in September, 1978. This latter move resulted in the formation of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist-Leninist). By the end of 1979, MEChA had begun a transition to maintain their independence as an organization while retaining community-based support for the League and its goals of collaborating marginalized ethnicities.
The first time Rossana Cambron heard about communists, it was that they ate babies and murdered people with disabilities like her brother, who has down syndrome. As she remembered it, it was parallel to what she was taught about fascism and the Nazi regime, which did execute its own citizens who had disabilities. The daughter of an abusive father, Rossana, her mother, and her siblings left Texas and their family in Juarez to settle in the heart of East Los Angeles, at the Madavilla housing projects on what was then called Brooklyn Avenue (today it is called Cesar Chavez Drive), in the mid-1960s. Rossana eventually learned through her mother how her grandfather worked with the Socialistas de Muerte, a segment of socialist groups in Mexico, and gave her courage to learn more about activism and the defense of those in need, such as her disabled brother. Through her public education experiences, including college, Rossana became slowly exposed to the works of Marx, Lenin, Malcolm X, and Mao Zedong. While studying at Loyola Marymount, Rossana identified with MEChA’s message and history of activism between 1970 and 1974, leading to her joining the organization in 1976 not long after the battle to overturn the California Supreme Court decision on Allan Bakke.8
Arturo Cambron grew up the son of a truck driver and a singer and enjoyed a somewhat reasonable upbringing despite a family of thirteen brothers and sisters. Arturo, however, had to change his name in school to Arthur to avoid ridicule from his fellow white classmates, who typically expressed their parents’ distaste for Latin American presence in their community. For both Arturo and Rossana, the riots of South Central in 1965 represented a pivotal moment where young students began to question what would push people to the brink of rioting. Due to his conservative parents, however, Arturo remained inactive until 1970 when the schools in Montebello walked out in support of East Los Angeles. The walkouts, which attempted to address the unequal treatment of Latinos in the Los Angeles Unified School District, attracted Arturo’s attention regardless of his upbringing. In his final year of high school Arturo moved to La Habra after his father was rejected by numerous landlords, where he met young activists from MEChA. Within two years, Arturo was accepted to UCLA to study medicine and became heavily active in the MEChA chapter of the campus.9
Arturo described the UCLA MEChA chapter as “very radical” and fundamentally “Marxist” in its worldview, although their program did not necessarily reflect this identity. Rossana and Arturo saw MEChA as a Chicano movement that coincided with the African American liberation movement as well as the anti-Vietnam War movement, and above all a movement that embraced the identity of Chicano as a rejection of the label “Mexican-American.” After joining MEChA, Arturo abandoned his goal of studying medicine to become fully involved in his community, specifically defending programs for special admissions in 1977 during the Allan Bakke incident. This particular issue was important for the Cambrons because it encapsulated the fear held by whites should their privileges be threatened by those who lack said privileges. Arturo and his MEChA chapter responded to accusations of reverse racism by organizing students at not only UC campuses but also at Cal State campuses and community colleges. On one of his rotations across Southern and Central California, Arturo teamed up with his club to meet with other MEChA contingents at UC Davis. On the car ride he met Rossana, and within a year they were married.10
Although both considered themselves radical prior to joining MEChA, the organization represented a rallying call that they both personally identified with and could further expand upon by integrating themselves into what they called “the broader movement.” MEChA was able to bridge the gap that Rossana and Arturo both had individually against the radical Left imposed by their parent’s generation as well as mainstream American Cold War Culture. Rossana’s upbringing of seeing communists as anti-Christian, anti-disabilities, anti-peace groups was likely destroyed by the links drawn between what she was taught in MEChA and what she later experienced in the CPUSA courses offered for MEChA. This invariably led to a more open-minded assessment of Marxism. By 1978, Rossana felt that Marxism, as explained by her courses with the CPUSA, provided “clarity” on the various societal norms she had questioned, such as how does a society develop, what function do poor people serve in contrast to the rich, and how equality generates from social movements. Prior to her courses, Rossana did not engage with the classical works of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx because “there was never a kind of motivation” for such things; she grew up believing “these people were beyond [her] reach of comprehension.” After her courses, however, Rossana no longer “felt threatened” by philosophy and theory, and instead took those lessons back to MEChA in order to reassess the organization as an operative tool for Latinos.11
To Rossana, MEChA developed her sense of collective action and power but lacked a refined political theory that could be translated into a plan for political action in the long term. Instead, MEChA focused on individual, short-term battles to slowly turn the tide away from white privilege. In her own words, by late 1977 Rossana felt she “was hitting a wall” with MEChA. MEChA’s goals for 1978 and 1979 seemed pale and minute in comparison to the grand fight envisioned for all working people presented by the theoretical system of Marx. Additionally, the CPUSA’s courses helped break the idea that such a fight was to be led by whites, as the Party has a rich and vibrant history with the struggle for both African American and Latino equality dating back to the early 1930s.12 By mid-1978, leaving MEChA and joining the CPUSA simply made sense to Rossana and her new husband, Arturo. In 1979, both began their first work with the CPUSA by gathering signatures in Southern California to place Gus Hall and Angela Davis on the presidential ballot. Throughout the 1980s, Arturo worked at an overnight delivery service called Lumas, where he focused his time and energy into the local Teamster’s Union. In a matter of years, Arturo went from pursuing a degree in medicine to battling corporate efforts to use company unions throughout California.13
A considerate component to Marxism was how its assessment of struggle translated into a viable political alternative that Rossana and Arturo believed many Americans deal with on a regular basis; a struggle of individualism versus collective action, of concern for the communities but enacting change at the national level versus the local level, and the endorsing of ideas and strategies that may be responded to with violence and hate. Rossana described being a Marxist in America as “very difficult,” where one can be firm in their stances on capitalism yet proud of their children for succeeding within it. This, in part, captures the complexity of being a radical. Rossana believes that a common misperception of communists in American history among the general public is that they lacked patriotism and respect for the United States. While throughout the early 20th century many communists made a name for themselves because of their pro-Soviet, anti-Western stances, this was not the case for the majority of American communists. Rossana did not see the entire second red scare from 1947 – 1957 as a judgment of patriotism among citizens of a certain political persuasion; she saw it as a violation of Constitutional rights. Rossana sees no contradiction in valuing the United States as a Christian nation while simultaneously upholding the virtues of Marxism. Much like a biblical sacrifice, Rossana believed “it is a selfless act to give up your time” for your fellow citizens build on “a passion, a love for humanity.”14
The experiences of the Cambrons reveal two important factors for American history and the history of Latinos in the United States. First, their experiences demonstrate how some Latinos, especially youths, were quickly radicalized and exposed to Marxist philosophy through student-based community organizations focusing on promoting ethnic studies and Latino rights such as MEChA, UMAS, and MAYO. Today, MEChA is going through its own internal changes as it addresses concerns about the organization’s identity that could be perceived as racially exclusive and homophobic. In April of 2019, the organization chose to end the use of certain gender-exclusive terms, such as Chicano/a. For MEChA organizers, the 1970s was a situational moment where the fight against white privilege in the Universities mixed with the CPUSA’s need for more dedicated members and organizers for community events.15 Radicalization can occur for a variety of reasons, but one of the easiest ways to understand it is by seeing how individuals such as the Cambrons link personal experiences with the broader message of struggle. Rossana and Arturo were attracted to MEChA because they believed it was a means for them to get personally involved in their community’s struggle against white privilege. When exposed to the works of Marx and Lenin, the personal links between struggle and oppression, already forged by MEChA, mixed with a theoretical solution to depict a plight shared by all Latinos and supported by the notion that it was not just Mexican-Americans or African-Americans experiencing this struggle: it was experienced by working-class Americans as a whole.
Secondly, the Cambrons demonstrated a continued tradition of radicalism among Latino youths that dates back to the 1910s and 1920s. Throughout its history, the CPUSA attracted Latino organizers from across the Southwest and in parts of Chicago, in large part due to the Party’s depiction of racial oppression as a component to capitalist hegemony that must be overcome. In 1939, Emma Tenayuca became one of the most prominent Latino organizers associated with the CPUSA when she published an article in The Communist on the how Latinos were in the same position as African Americans; subjugated as a nation within a nation struggling to both integrate into mainstream society while also maintaining their cultural heritage. The New Communist Movement (NCM) that emerged out of the 1960s seized on the momentum of these people in a wide variety of groups, including the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) the CPUSA, and the more radical sects of student organizations promoting ethnic rights such as MEChA. Rossana and Arturo’s entrance into the CPUSA by 1979 validated the fact that American communist groups still held attractive stances for minority youths, even those of modest backgrounds, and provided possible outlets to both vent their frustrations as well as study methods for engaging with their community for change.
Today, Rossana continues her passion as a Central (National) Committee member of the CPUSA, helping to try and modernize the organization’s engagement and outreach programs, including helping redevelop the Youth Communist League (YCL). Rossana’s work with the Los Angeles CPUSA centered on civic involvement, study groups, and advocating the rights of Latinos in the workplace and public sphere. Her election to the National Committee of the Party occurred in 2014 when the CPUSA held its first major nationwide conference in almost a decade at its founding town in Southside Chicago. Her election also marked the first Latino woman to hold such a ranking position in the Party. Despite a significant age gap in representation on the Committee, and a slow pace at reforming political theory, the work of members such as Rossana have led to a much more demographically diverse organization than the CPUSA of 60 years ago. This, if anything, is a positive development for a Party seeking to return to its ethnically and culturally diverse roots from 100 years ago.
