When we speak of deviations on the national question, we must speak mainly of the CPUSA modern revisionists, the principal ideological enemy we face in the overall struggle for Black liberation. The CP views the liberation of Black people as something that can be achieved under capitalism through peaceful appeal for “radical reform” of the system.
The degeneration of the CPUSA, from the once proud vanguard of the workers and oppressed peoples into the social chauvinist nestling place for betrayers of Afro-Americans, began with Earl Browder (an early revisionist leader of the CPUSA). Browder’s first move in the direction of smashing the CP as a working class vanguard was to attempt to liquidate the Afro-American question as a national question – dropping the party’s militant fight for the right of self-determination in the Black Belt, dissolving the party in the South and liquidating the most left centers in the Black liberation movement. Describing Browderism on the Afro-American question, Party leader William Z. Foster wrote:
In the work among the Negro masses, Browder’s theory that the Negro people, having abandoned (satisfied) their national aspirations were now integrated into the white population, threw confusion into the ranks of communists and their sympathizers and undermined their fight for the rights of the Negro people.[1]
In 1946, as part of the overall struggle against Browderism, the Party’s revolutionary line on the Afro-American question was restored. But the struggle proved to be superficial and incomplete, with most of the old bureaucratic leadership still holding the controlling positions in the party. The initiative of the rank and file was suppressed in the early 1950s, as revisionism continued its rise in the party. Once again the party dropped the fight for the right of self-determination, gave up its independent work in the Afro-American movement and again liquidated the party in the South which had been reconstituted in 1945. In its place, the party developed the perspective of “peaceful, democratic, direct integration” – a theory which went hand in hand with the party’s line of “peaceful, parliamentary, democratic and constitutional transition to socialism.” Afro-American communist and theoretician Harry Haywood pointed out at that time that it was only political power won through a mass, revolutionary struggle led by a Marxist-Leninist vanguard that Black people would achieve liberation.
In direct contradiction to this, the CPUSA contends that the national question disappears peacefully through development of the productive forces – as opposed to political and revolutionary struggle. To the revisionists, the Afro-American people have “already exercised the right of self-determination” and have opted for integration. The CP believes that the problems of the Afro-American people can be resolved under “anti-monopoly rule,” a liberal-led peacefully elected coalition of so-called anti-monopoly forces. This line has left the party to tail the most conservative elements of the Black movement - groups like the NAACP and the Urban League, which represent the direct integrationist elements of the Black bourgeoisie.
As for revolutionary nationalists like Malcolm X, SNCC and others, the CP could only condemn them as “extreme nationalists,” “super radicals,” and “separatist disparagers of the civil rights movement.”
The CP’s program for Black liberation consists of a defensive struggle for democratic rights through “re-ordering of priorities” to get a bigger piece of the pie through more government spending. Aside from a few remarks about a “more radical solution” and socialism, the main thrust of it is to call for increased Black representation at all levels of government. Their idea of “political power” is exposed from the pages of their own program:
Partial winning of the right to vote in the South has opened up new forms of struggle. Here, Black political control assumes special importance. In many cases it could lead at once to the election of Black mayors, sheriffs, councilmen, assessors and other officials, and to the appointment of Black superintendents of schools and police chiefs. In general, it could lead to the complete attainment of bourgeois-democratic rights in the South, which had been cut short by the betrayal of Reconstruction in 1876.[2]
The logic of the revisionist position is that Black liberation depends on waging a fight against “racial discrimination” in the superstructure; that this is a remnant of a nearly-extinct feudal system whose material base is being eradicated by the forces of capitalist expansion. So, the few remaining relics of plantation slavery need only be mopped up through “progressive land reforms.” this position, in essence, rejects revolution and substitutes gradual reforms within the imperialist system.
In reality, the CP program in no way differs from that of the Democratic Party liberals with their poverty programs and other schemes to “cool out” ghetto rebellions. In place of the revolutionary alliance of the working class and the Black liberation movement, they see the working class and its communist party as “supporters,” endorsing this program out of some sort of vague appeal to conscience and morality. Their main appeal to white workers is to not “hate your Black neighbor or fellow worker” because it’s wrong to have those bad ideas. This line condescends to white workers, making them aliens to the struggle, and doesn’t focus on the material basis for class unity between Blacks and whites.
Through misleaders like Henry Winston and Angela Davis, the CPUSA uses every sort of demagoguery to cover over its attempts at disarming the Black masses and making them an electoral base for the Democratic Party. In May, 1973, the CP published Henry Winston’s Strategy for a Black Agenda, which manages to go on for some 300 odd pages without ever raising any concrete demands, while at the same time attacking every progressive trend in the Black liberation movement. Winston lumps nationalists, pan Africanists of different political positions and Maoists in a mass condemnation of Third World struggles around the world. Denying the fact that the Black revolt is part of a world-wide anti-colonial revolution, Winston says regarding the Black liberation struggle and the anti-colonial movement, “...the differences in status outweigh the similarities in oppression.” The view goes right in line with the Soviet social imperialists who attempt to drive a wedge between the oppressed nations of the world, encouraging them to rely on “detente” or superpower negotiations for their liberation. Indeed, Winston attacks any armed struggle as “provocative” and “adventuristic.”
The CP’s practice is also characterized by a patronizing and tailing behind the Afro-American movement, often playing it off against the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements in the same fashion as OEO and other government programs do. With the CP’s increasing isolation and the rise of Black power as a mass demand, it has from time to time raised the slogan of “self-determination” which, with a pandering and patronizing type of liberalism, is interpreted to mean more Black elected officials, Black capitalism and in general a call to Blacks to “do your own thing.” It is an example of raising a slogan to degenerate and defeat that slogan – in this case, to cut out its revolutionary heart.
[1] William Z. Foster, History of the CPUSA.
[2] New Program of the CPUSA, 1970.