Kasama

We are posting the piece, Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution by Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, in four parts. This piece was first published in Souls, Vol. 1, No. 4, and was re-published in the book Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans. A printable PDF is available.

Due to its length, we are presenting this as four separate posts.

Go here for Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4.

Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution

By Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch

Return of the Black Belt

By most accounts, an explicit Maoist ideology and movement did not emerge on the U.S. political landscape until Mao initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966.  A precursor to the revolution had erupted in China nine years earlier, when Mao appealed to his countrymen to “let a hundred flowers blossom” and “let a hundred schools of thought contend.”  That campaign was just a flash in the pan, however, and it was quickly silenced after too many flowers openly criticized the Chinese Communist Party.

But the Cultural Revolution was different.  Hierarchies in the party and in the Red Army were ostensibly eliminated.  Criticism and self-criticism was encouraged-as long as it coincided with Mao Zedong thought.  Communists suspected of supporting a capitalist road were brought to trial.  Bourgeois intellectuals in the academy and government were expected to perform manual labor, to work among the people as a way of breaking down social hierarchies.  And all vestiges of the old order were to be eliminated.  The youth, now the vanguard, attacked tradition with a vengeance and sought to create new cultural forms to promote the revolution.  The people of China were now called on to educate themselves.  The Cultural Revolution intensified the constituent elements of Maoism: the idea of constant rebellion and conflict; the concept of the centrality of people over economic laws or productive forces; the notion of revolutionary morality.

No matter what one’s view of the Cultural Revolution might be, it projected to the world — particularly to those sympathetic to China and to revolutionary movements generally — a vision of society where divisions between the powerful and powerless are blurred, and where status and privilege do not necessarily distinguish leaders from the led.  The socialists Paul Sweezey and Leo Huberman, editors of the independent socialist journal Monthly Review, recognized the huge implications of such a revolution for the urban poor in the United States: “Just imagine what would happen in the United States if a President were to invite the poor in this country, with special emphasis on the blacks in the urban ghettos, to win the war on poverty for themselves, promising them the protection ofthe army against reprisals!”  Of course, the United States is not a socialist country and has never pretended to be one, and despite a somewhat sympathetic President Lyndon Johnson, black people in the United States were not regarded by the state as “the people.”  Their problems were a drain on society and their ungrateful riots and the proliferation of revolutionary organizations did not elicit much sympathy for the black poor.

For many in the New Left, African Americans were not only “the people” but also the most revolutionary sector of the working class.  The Cultural Revolution’s emphasis on eliminating hierarchies and empowering the oppressed reinforced the idea that black liberation lay at the heart of the new American revolution.  Mao Zedong himself gave credence to this view in his widely circulated April 1968 statement “In Support of the Afro-American Struggle Against Violent Repression.”  The statement was delivered during a massive demonstration in China protesting the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at which Robert Williams and Vicki Garvin were among the featured speakers.  According to Garvin, “millions of Chinese demonstrators” marched in the pouring rain to denounce American racism.  Responding to the rebellions touched off by King’s assassination, Mao characterized these urban uprisings as “a new clarion call to all the exploited and oppressed people of the United States to fight against the barbarous rule of the monopoly capitalist class.”  Even more than the 1963 statement, Mao’s words endowed the urban riots with historic importance in the world of revolutionary upheaval.  His statement, as well as the general logic of Lin Biao’s “theory of the new democratic revolution” justified support for black nationalist movements and their right ofself-determination.

It was in the context of the urban rebellions that several streams of black radicalism, including RAM, converged and gave birth in Oakland, California, to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.  Perhaps the most visible black organization promoting Mao Zedong thought, by some accounts they also were probably the least serious about reading Marxist, Leninist, or Maoist writings and developing a revolutionary ideology.  Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, a former RAM member, the Black Panther Party went well beyond the boundaries of Merritt College and recruited the “lumpenproletariat.”  Much of the rank-and-file engaged in sloganeering more than anything else, and their bible was the Little Red Book.

That the Panthers were Marxist, at least in rhetoric and program, was one of the sources of their dispute with Ron Karenga’s U.S. organization and other groups they derisively dismissed as cultural nationalists.  Of course, the Panthers not only had their own cultural nationalist agenda, but the so-called cultural nationalists were neither a monolith nor were they uniformly pro-capitalist.  And the divisions between these groups were exacerbated by COINTELPRO.  Still, there was a fundamental difference between the Panthers’ evolving ideology of socialism and class struggle and that of black nationalist groups, even on the left.  As Bobby Seale explained in a March 1969 interview, “We’re talking about socialism.  The cultural nationalists say that socialism won’t do anything for us.  There’s the contradiction between the old and the new.  Black people have no time to practice black racism and the masses of black people do not hate white people just because of the color of their skin…. We’re not going to go out foolishly and say there is no possibility of aligning with some righteous white revolutionaries, or other poor and oppressed peoples in this country who might come to see the light about the fact that it’s the capitalist system they must get rid of.”

How the Panthers arrived at this position and the divisions within the party over their stance is a long and complicated story that we cannot address here.  For our purposes, we want to make a few brief points about the party’s embrace of Mao Zedong thought and its position vis-a-vis black self-determination. For Huey Newton, whose contribution to the party’s ideology rivals that of Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson, the source of the Panther’s Marxism was the Chinese and Cuban revolutions precisely because their analysis grew out of their respective histories rather than from the pages of Capital. The Chinese and Cuban examples, according to Newton, empowered the Panthers to develop their own unique program and to discard theoretical insights from Marx and Lenin that had little or no application to black reality.  Indeed, a quick perusal of the Panthers’ “Ten Point Program” reveals quite clearly that Malcolm X continued to be one of their biggest ideological influences.

Eldridge Cleaver was a little more explicit about the role of Maoism and the thought of the Korean communist leader Kim Il Sung in reshaping Marxism-Leninism for the benefit of the national liberation struggles of Third World peoples. In a 1968 pamphlet titled “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party (Part I),” Cleaver makes clear that the Panthers were a Marxist-Leninist party, but he adds that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and their contemporary followers did not offer much insight on understanding and fighting racism.  The lesson here is to adopt and alter what is useful and reject what is not.  ”With the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948 and the People’s Republic of China in 1949,” Cleaver wrote,” something new was interjected into Marxism-Leninism, and it ceased to be just a narrow, exclusively European phenomenon.  Comrade Kim II Sung and Comrade Mao Tse-Tung applied the classical principles of Marxism-Leninism to the conditions of their own countries and thereby made the ideology into something useful for their people. But they rejected that part of the analysis that was not beneficial to them and had only to do with the welfare of Europe.”  In Cleaver’s view, the sharpest critique of Western Marxism’s blindness with regard to race came from Frantz Fanon.

By seeing themselves as part of a global national liberation movement, the Panthers also spoke of the black community as a colony with an inherent right to self-determination.  Yet, unlike many other black or interracial Maoist groups, they never advocated secession or the creation of a separate state.  Rather, describing black people as colonial subjects was a way of characterizing the materialist nature of racism; that is, it was more of a metaphor than an analytical concept.  Self-determination was understood to mean community control within the urban environment, not necessarily the establishment of a black nation.  In a paper delivered at the Peace and Freedom Party’s founding convention in March 1968, Cleaver tried to clarify the relationship between interracial unity in the U.S. revolution and, in his words, “national liberation in the black colony.”  He essentially called for an approach in which black and white radicals would work together to create coalitions of revolutionary organizations and to develop the political and military machinery that could overthrow capitalism and imperialism.  Going further, he also called for a United Nations-sponsored plebiscite that would allow black people to determine whether they wished to integrate or separate.  Such a plebiscite, he argued, would bring clarity to black people on the question of self-determination, just as the first-wave independence movements in Africa had to decide whether they wanted to maintain some altered dominion status or achieve complete independence.

Cleaver represented a wing of the Black Panther Party more interested in guerrilla warfare than in rebuilding society or doing the hard work of grassroots organizing.  The Panthers’ attraction to Mao, Kim II Sung, Giap, Che, and for that matter Fanon, was based on their writings on revolutionary violence and people’s wars.  Many self-styled Panther theoreticians focused so much on developing tactics to sustain the immanent revolution that they skipped over a good deal of Mao’s writings.  Recognizing the problem, Newton sought to move the party away from an emphasis on guerrilla warfare and violence to a deeper, richer discussion of what the party’s vision for the future might entail.  Shortly after his release from prison in August 1970, Newton proposed the creation of an “Ideological Institute” where participants actually read and taught what he regarded as the “classics” — Marx, Mao, and Lenin as well as Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietszche.  Unfortunately, the Ideological Institute did not amount to much; few Party members saw the use of abstract theorizing or the relevance of some of these writings to revolution.  Besides, the fact that Quotations from Chairman Mao read more or less like a handbook for guerrillas didn’t help matters much.  Even Fanon was read pretty selectively, with his chapter “Concerning Violence” being the perpetual favorite among militants.  George Jackson contributed to the Panther’s theoretical emphasis on war since much of his own writings, from Soledad Brother to Blood in My Eye, drew on Mao primarily to discuss armed resistance under fascism.  Efforts to read the works of Marx, Lenin, or Mao beyond issues related to armed rebellion did not always find a willing audience among the Panthers.  Sid Lemelle, then a radical activist at California State University in Los Angeles, recalls being in contact with a few Panthers who had joined a study group sponsored by the California Communist League.  The reading, which included Mao’s Four Essays on Philosophy and lengthy passages from Lenin’s selected works, turned out to be too much and the Panthers eventually left the group amid a stormy debate.

Perhaps the least-read section of Quotations from Chairman Mao, at least by men, was the five-page chapter on women.  In an age when the metaphors for black liberation were increasingly masculinized and black movement leaders not only ignored but also perpetuated gender oppression, even the most Marxist of the black nationalist movements belittled the “woman question.”  The Black Panther Party was certainly no exception.  Indeed, it was during the same historic meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, where the Panthers invoked Marx, Lenin, and Mao to expel the Progressive Labor Party for their position on the national question, that the Panther minister of information Rufus Walls gave his infamous speech about the need to have women in the movement because they possessed “pussy power.” Although Walls’s statement clearly was a vernacular take-off from Mao’s line that “China’s women are a vast reserve of labour power [that] … should be tapped in the struggle to build a great socialist country,”  it turned out to be a profoundly antifeminist defense of women’s participation.

While China’s own history on the “woman question” is pretty dismal, Mao’s dictum that “women hold up half the sky” as well as his brief writings on women’s equality and participation in the revolutionary process endowed women’s liberation with some revolutionary legitimacy on the Left.  Of course, Maoism didn’t make the movement: the fact is, women’s struggles within the New Left played the most important role in reshaping Left movements toward a feminist agenda, or at least putting feminism on the table. But for black women in the Panthers who were suspicious of “white feminism,” Mao’s language on women’s equality provided space within the party to develop an incipient black feminist agenda.  As the newly appointed minister of information, the Panther Elaine Brown announced to a press conference soon after returning from China in 1971 that “the Black Panther Party acknowledges the progressive leadership of our Chinese comrades in all areas of revolution.  Specifically, we embrace China’s correct recognition of the proper status of women as equal to that of men.”

Even beyond the rhetoric, black women Panthers such as Lynn French, Kathleen Cleaver, Erica Huggins, Akua Njere, and Assata Shakur (formerly Joanne Chesimard) sustained the tradition of carving out free spaces within existing male-dominated organizations in order to challenge the multiple forms of exploitation that black working-class women faced daily.  Through the Panther’s free breakfast and educational programs, for example, black women devised strategies that, in varying degrees, challenged capitalism, racism, and patriarchy.  And in some instances, African American women radicals rose to positions of prominence and, sometimes by sheer example, contributed toward developing a militant, class-conscious black feminist perspective.  The most important figures in this respect include Kathleen Cleaver, Erica Huggins, Elaine Brown, and Assata Shakur.  In some instances, the growing strength of a black Left feminist perspective, buttressed by certain Maoist slogans on the woman question, shaped future black Maoist formations.  One obvious example is the Black Vanguard Party, another Bay Area Maoist group active in the mid to late 1970s whose publication Juche! maintained a consistent socialist-feminist perspective.  Michelle Gibbs (also known as Michelle Russell, her married name at the time) promoted a black feminist ideology as a Detroit supporter of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and as a member of the Black Workers Congress.  As a red-diaper baby whose father, Ted Gibbs, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and who grew up in a household where Paul Robeson and the artist Elizabeth Catlett were occasional guests, Gibbs’s black socialist-feminist perspective flowed from her political experience; from the writings of black feminist writers; and from a panoply of radical thinkers ranging from Malcolm, Fanon, and Cabral to Marx, Lenin, and Mao.  Conversely, the predominantly white radical feminist organization Redstockings not only was influenced by Mao’s writings but also modeled itself somewhat off of the Black Power movement, particularly the movement’s separatist strategies and identification with the Third World.

Ironically, the Black Panther Party’s greatest identification with China occurred at the very moment when China’s status among the Left began to decline worldwide.  Mao’s willingness to host President Nixon and China’s support of the repressive governments of Pakistan and Sri Lanka left many Maoists in the United States and elsewhere disillusioned.  Nevertheless, Huey Newton and Elaine Brown not only visited China on the eve of Nixon’s trip but also they announced that their entry into electoral politics was inspired by China’s entry into the United Nations.  Newton argued that the Black Panther’s shift toward reformist electoral politics did not contradict “China’s goal of toppling U.S. imperialism nor [was it] an abnegation of revolutionary principles.  It was a tactic of socialist revolution.”  Even more incredible was Newton’s complete abandonment of black self-determination, which he explained in terms of developments in the world economy.  In 1971, he concluded quite presciently that the globalization of capital rendered the idea of national sovereignty obsolete, even among the socialist countries.  Thus black demands for self-determination were no longer relevant; the only viable strategy was global revolution.  ”Blacks in the U.S. have a special duty to give up any claim to nationhood now more than ever.  The U.S. has never been our country; and realistically there’s no territory for us to claim. Of all the oppressed people in the world, we are in the best position to inspire global revolution.”

In many respects, Newton’s position on the national question was closer to Mao’s than that of most of the self-proclaimed Maoist organizations that popped up in the early to late 1970s.  Despite his own statements in support of national liberation movements and of Lin Biao’s “theory of democratic revolutions,” Mao did not support independent organizations along nationalist lines.  To him, black nationalism looked like ethnic/racial particularism.  He was, after all, a Chinese nationalist attempting to unify peasants and proletarians and eliminate ethnic divisions within his own country. We might recall his 1957 statement in which he demanded that progressives in China “help unite the people of our various nationalities … not divide them.”  Thus while recognizing that racism is a product of colonialism and imperialism, his 1968 statement insists that the “contradiction between the black masses in the United States and U.S. ruling circles is a class contradiction…. The black masses and the masses of white working people in the United States share common interests and have common objectives to struggle for.”  In other words, the black struggle is bound to merge with the working-class movement and overthrow capitalism.

On the issue of black liberation, however, most American Maoist organizations founded in the early to mid 1970s took their lead from Stalin, not Mao.  Black people in the United States were not simply proletarians in black skin but rather a nation-or as Stalin put it, “a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a community of culture.”  The anti-revisionist groups that embraced Stalin’s definition of a nation, such as the Communist Labor Party (CLF) and the October League, also resurrected the old Communist Party’s position that African Americans in the black belt counties of the South constitute a nation and have a right to secede if they wished. On the other hand, groups like the Progressive Labor Party — once an advocate of “revolutionary nationalism” — moved to a position repudiating all forms of nationalism by the start of the Cultural Revolution.

The CLP was perhaps the most consistent advocate of black self-determination among the anti-revisionist movements.  Founded in 1968 largely by African Americans and Latinos, the CLP’s roots can be traced to the old Provisional Organizing Committee (POC) — itself an outgrowth of the 1956 split in the CPUSA that led to the creation of Hammer and Steel and the Progressive Labor movement.  Ravaged by a decade of internal splits, the POC had become a predominantly black and Puerto Rican organization divided between New York and Los Angeles.  In 1968, the New York leadership expelled their L.A. comrades for, among other things, refusing to denounce Stalin and Mao.  In turn, the L.A. group, largely under the guidance of the veteran black Marxist Nelson Peery, founded the California Communist League that same year and began recruiting young black and Chicano radical workers and intellectuals.  Peery’s home in South-Central Los Angeles had already become somewhat of a hangout for young black radicals after the Watts uprising; there, he organized informal groups to study history, political economy, and classic works in Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought and he entertained all sorts of activists, including Black Panthers and student activists ranging from Cal State Los Angeles to L.A. Community College.  The California Communist League subsequently merged with a group of SDS militants called the Marxist-Leninist Workers Association and formed the Communist League in 1970.  Two years later they changed their name again to the Communist Labor Party.

Except for, perhaps, Harry Haywood’s long essay “Toward a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question,” Nelson Peery’s short book The Negro National Colonial Question (1972) was probably the most widely read defense of black self-determination in Marxist-Leninist-Maoist circles at the time.  Peery was sharply criticized for his defense of the term “Negro,” a difficult position to maintain in the midst of the Black Power movement.  But Peery had a point: national identity was not about color.  The Negro nation was a historically evolved, stable community with its own unique culture, language (or, rather, dialect), and territory — the black belt counties and their surrounding areas, or essentially the thirteen states of the Old Confederacy.  Because southern whites shared with African Americans a common territory, and by Peery’s account a common language and culture, they were also considered part of the “Negro nation.” More precisely, southern whites comprised the “Anglo-American minority” within the Negro nation.  As evidenced in soul music, spirituals, and rock and roll, Peery insisted that what emerged in the South was a hybrid culture with strong African roots manifest in the form of slave folktales and female headwraps.  Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone, as well as white imitators like Al Jolson, Elvis Presley, and Tom Jones, are all cited as examples of a shared culture.  Peery saw “soul” culture embedded in forms of daily life; for example, “the custom of eating pigs’ feet, neck bones, black-eyed peas, greens, yams, and chitterlings are all associated with the region of the South, particularly the Negro Nation.”

Peery’s positioning of southern whites as part of the Negro Nation was a stroke of genius, particularly since one of his intentions was to destabilize racial categories.  However, at times his commitment to Stalin’s definition of a nation weakened his argument.  At the very moment when mass migration and urbanization depleted the rural South of its black population, Peery insisted that the black belt was the natural homeland of Negroes.  He even attempted to prove that a black peasantry and stable rural proletariat still existed in the black belt.  Because the land question is the foundation upon which his understanding ofself-determination was built, he ends up saying very little about the nationalization of industry or socialized production.  Thus he could write in 1972 that “the Negro national colonial question can only be solved by a return of the land to the people who have toiled over it for centuries.  In the Negro Nation this land redistribution will demand a combination of state farms and cooperative enterprises in order to best meet the needs of the people under the conditions of modern mechanized agriculture.”

The Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) also promoted a version of the black belt thesis, which it inherited from its earlier incarnation as the October League. The CP (ML) was formed out of a merger between the October League, based mainly in Los Angeles, and the Georgia Communist League in 1972.  Many of its founding members came out of the Revolutionary Youth Movement II (a faction within SDS), and a handful were Old Left renegades like Harry Haywood and Otis Hyde.  Haywood’s presence in the CP (ML) is significant since he is considered one of the architects of the original black belt thesis formulated at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1928.  According to the updated CP (ML) formulation, Afro-Americans had the right to secede “to their historic homeland in the Black Belt South.”  But they added the caveat that the recognition of the right of self-determination does not mean they believe separation is the most appropriate solution.  They also introduced the idea of regional autonomy (i.e., that urban concentrations of African Americans can also exercise self-determination in their own communities) and they extended the slogan of self-determination to Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and indigenous people in U.S. colonies (in the Pacific Islands, Hawaii, Alaska, etc.).  They were selective as to what sort of nationalist movements they would support, promising to back only revolutionary nationalism as opposed to reactionary nationalism.

The Revolutionary Union, an outgrowth of the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) founded in 1969 with support from ex-CPUSA members who had visited China, took the position that black people constituted “an oppressed nation of a new type.”  Because black people were primarily workers concentrated in urban, industrial areas (what they called a “deformed class structure”), they argued that self-determination should not take the form of secession but rather be realized through the fight against discrimination, exploitation, and police repression in the urban centers.  In 1975, when the Revolutionary Union transformed itself into the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), it continued to embrace the idea that black people constituted a nation of a new type, but it also began to uphold “the right of Black people to return to claim their homeland.”  Not surprisingly, these two contradictory lines created confusion, thereby compelling RCP leaders to adopt an untenable position of defending the right of self-determination without advocating it.  Two years later, they dropped the right of self-determination altogether and, like the PLP, waged war on all forms of “narrow” nationalism.

Unlike any of the Maoist-oriented organizations mentioned above, the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) — founded and led by none other than Amiri Baraka — grew directly out of the cultural nationalist movements of the late 1960s.  To understand the RCL’s (and its precursors’) shifting positions with regard to the black liberation, we need to go back to 1966 when Baraka founded Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey, with the help of local activists as well as folks he had worked with in Harlem’s Black Arts Repertory Theater.  While Spirit House artists were from the beginning involved in local political organizing, the police beating of Baraka and several other activists during the Newark uprising in 1967 politicized them even further.  After the uprising they helped organize a Black Power conference in Newark that attracted several national black leaders, including Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party,and Imari Obadele of the newly formed Republic of New Africa (partly an outgrowth of RAM).  Shortly thereafter, Spirit House became the base for the Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN), a new organization made up of United Brothers, Black Community Defense and Development, and Sisters of Black Culture.  In addition to attracting black nationalists, Muslims, and even a few Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, CFUN bore the mark of Ron Karenga’s U.S. organization.  Indeed, CFUN adopted Karenga’s version of cultural nationalism and worked closely with him.  Although tensions arose between Karenga and some of the Newark activists over his treatment of women and the overly centralized leadership structure that CFUN had imported from the US organization, the movement continued to grow.  In 1970, Baraka renamed CFUN the Congress of African Peoples (CAP), transformed it into a national organization, and at its founding convention broke with Karenga. Leaders of CAP sharply criticized Karenga’s cultural nationalism and passed resolutions that reflected a turn to the left-including a proposal to raise funds to help build the Tanzania-Zambia railroad.

Several factors contributed to Baraka’s turn to the Left during this period.  One has to do with the painful lesson he learned about the limitations of black “petty bourgeois” politicians.  After playing a pivotal role in the 1970 election of Kenneth Gibson, Newark’s first black mayor, Baraka witnessed an increase in police repression (including attacks on CAP demonstrators) and a failure on the part of Gibson to deliver what he had promised the African American community.  Feeling betrayed and disillusioned, Baraka broke with Gibson in 1974, though he did not give up entirely on the electoral process.  His role in organizing the first National Black Political Assembly in 1972 reinforced in his mind the power of black independent politics and the potential strength ofa black united front.

One source of Baraka’s turn to the Left was the CLP East Coast regional coordinator William Watkins.  Harlem born and raised, Watkins was among a group of radical black students at Cal State Los Angeles who helped found the Communist League.  In 1974 Watkins got to know Baraka, who was trying to find someone to advance his understanding of Marxism-Leninism.  ”We’d spend hours in his office,” Watkins recalled, “discussing the basics like surplus value.”  For about three months, Baraka met regularly with Watkins, who taught him the fundamentals of political economy and tried to expose the limitations of cultural nationalism.  These meetings certainly influenced Baraka’s leftward turn, but when Watkins and Nelson Peery asked Baraka to join the CLP, he refused.  Although he had come to appreciate Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-Tung thought, he wasn’t ready to join a multiracial organization. The black struggle was first and foremost.

It is fitting that the most important source of Baraka’s radicalization came out of Africa.  Just as Baraka’s first turn to the Left after 1960 was inspired by the Cuban revolution, the struggle in southern Africa prompted his post-1970 turn to the left.  The key event was the creation of the African Liberation Support Committee in 1971, which originated with a group of black nationalists led by Owusu Sadaukai, the director of Malcolm X Liberation University in Greensboro, North Carolina, who traveled to Mozambique under the aegis of FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique).  The president of FRELIMO, Samora Machel (who, coincidentally, was in China at the same time as Huey Newton), and other militants persuaded Sadaukai and his colleagues that the most useful role that African Americans could play in support of anticolonialism was to challenge American capitalism from within and let the world know the truth about their just war against Portuguese domination.  A year later Amilcar Cabral, the leader o fthe anticolonial movement in Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands, said essentially the same thing during his last visit to the United States.  Moreover, Cabral and Machel represented explicitly Marxist movements; they rejected the idea that precolonial African societies were inherently democratic and that they practiced a form of “primitive communism” that could lay the groundwork for modern socialism.  Rather, they asserted that African societies were not immune from class struggle, nor was capitalism the only road to development.

The African Liberation Support Committee reflected the radical orientation of the liberation movements in Portuguese Africa.  On May 27, 1972 (the anniversary of the founding of the Organization of African Unity), the ALSC held the first African Liberation Day demonstration, drawing approximately thirty thousand protesters in Washington alone, and an estimated thirty thousand more across the country.  The African Liberation Day Coordinating Committee consisted of representatives from several nationalist and black Left organizations, including the Youth Organization for Black Unity (YOBU); the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP), headed by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure); the Pan-African People’s Organization; and the Maoist-influenced Black Workers Congress.  Because the ALSC brought together such a broad range of black activists, it became an arena for debate over the creation of a black radical agenda.  While most ALSC organizers were actively anti-imperialist, the number of black Marxists in leadership positions turned out to be a point of contention.  Aside from Sadaukai, who would go on to play a major role in the Maoist-oriented Revolutionary Workers League (RWL), the ALSC’s main leaders included Nelson Johnson (future leader in the Communist Workers Party) and the brilliant writer/organizer Abdul Alkalimat.  As early as 1973, splits occurred within the ALSC over the role of Marxists, though when the dust settled a year later, Marxists from the RWL, the Black Workers Congress (BWC), the Revolutionary Workers Congress (an offshoot of the BWC), CAP, and the Workers Viewpoint Organization (the precursor to the Communist Workers Party) were victorious.  Unfortunately, internal squabbling and sectarianism proved to be too much for the ALSC to handle.  Chinese foreign policy struck the final blow; its support for UNITA during the 1975 Angola civil war and Vice-Premier Li Xiannian’s suggestion that dialogue with white South Africa was better than armed insurrection, placed black Maoists in the ALSC in a difficult position.  Within three years the ALSC had utterly collapsed, bringing to an inauspicious close perhaps the most dynamic anti-imperialist organization of the decade.

Nevertheless, Baraka’s experience in the ALSC profoundly altered his thinking. As he recalls in his autobiography, by the time of the first African Liberation Day demonstration in 1972, he was “going left, I was reading Nkrumah and Cabral and Mao.”  Within two years he was calling on CAP members to examine “the international revolutionary experience — namely the Russian and Chinese Revolutions — and integrate it with the practice of the Afrikan revolution.”  Their study lists expanded to include works such as Mao Zedong’s Four Essays on Philosophy, Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, and History of the Communist Party Soviet Union (Short Course). By 1976, CAP had dispensed with all vestiges of nationalism, changed its name to the Revolutionary Communist League, and sought to remake itself into a multi-racial Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movement.  Perhaps as a way to establish its ideological moorings as an anti-revisionist movement, the RCL followed in the noble tradition of resurrecting the black belt thesis. In 1977, the organization published a paper titled “The Black Nation” that analyzed black liberation movements from a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist perspective and concluded that black people in the South and in large cities constitute a nation with an inherent right to self-determination.  While rejecting “bourgeois integration,” the essay argued that the struggle for black political power was central to the fight for self-determination.

The RCL attempted to put its vision of self-determination in practice through efforts to build a Black United Front.  They organized coalitions against police brutality, mobilized support for striking cafeteria workers and maintenance workers, created a People’s Committee on Education to challenge budget cuts and shape educational policy, and protested the Bakke decision.  The RCL’S grassroots organizing and coalition building brought them in contact with the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), a California-based movement formed out of a merger between I Wor Kuen, the Chinese-American Maoist organization, and the predominantly Chicano August 29th Movement (Marxist-Leninist). In 1979, the RCL and the LRS decided to unite, and one of the foundations of their joint program was their support of the black nation thesis.  As a result of the merger and the debates that preceded it, the RCL’S position changed slightly: southern black people and Chicanos in the Southwest constituted oppressed nations with the right to self-determination.  By contrast, for black people locked in northern ghettoes the struggle for equal rights obviously took precedent over the land question.

Invariably the merger was short-lived, in part because of disagreements over the issue of self-determination and the continuing presence of what LRS members regarded as “narrow nationalism” in the RCL.  The LRS chair Carmen Chang was never comfortable with the black nation thesis but accepted the position for the sake of unity.  Baraka’s group, on the other hand, never abandoned black unity for multiracial class struggle.  And as an artist with deep roots in the Black Arts movement, Baraka persistently set his cultural and political sights on the contradictions of black life under capitalism, imperialism, and racism.  For Baraka, as with many of the characters discussed in this essay, this was not a simple matter of narrow nationalism.  On the contrary, understanding the place of racist oppression and black revolution within the context of capitalism and imperialism was fundamental to the future of humanity.  In the tradition of Du Bois, Fanon, and Harold Cruse, Baraka insisted that the black (hence colonial) proletariat was the vanguard of world revolution, “not because of some mystic chauvinism but because of our place in objective history…. We are the vanguard because we are at the bottom, and when we raise to stand up straight everything stacked upon us topples.”

Moreover, despite Baraka’s immersion in Marxist-Leninist-Maoist literature, his own cultural work suggests that he knew, as did most black radicals, that the question of whether black people constituted a nation was not going to be settled through reading Lenin or Stalin or resurrecting M. N. Roy. If the battle ever could be settled it would take place, for better or for worse, on the terrain of culture.  While the Black Arts movement was the primary vehicle for black cultural revolution in the United States, it is hard to imagine what that revolution would have looked like without China.  Black radicals seized the Great Proletarian Revolution by the horns and reshaped it in their own image.

For the whole essay, a printable PDF is available.