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 3.

Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution

By Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch

The Great (Black) Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Less than a year into the Cultural Revolution, Robert Williams published an article in the Crusader titled “Reconstitute Afro-American Art to Remold Black Souls.” While Mao’s call for a cultural revolution meant getting rid of the vestiges (cultural and otherwise) of the old order, Williams — not unlike members of the Black Arts movement in the United States — was talking about purging black culture of a “slave mentality.”  Although adopting some of the language of CCP’s manifesto (the “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, published August 12, 1966 in the Peking Review), Williams’s essay sought to build on the idea rather than on the ideology of the Cultural Revolution.  Like Mao, he called on black artists to cast off the shackles of the old traditions and only make art in the service of revolution.  “The Afro-American artist must make a resolute and conscious effort to reconstitute our art forms to remold new proud black and revolutionary soul. … It must create a new theory and direction and prepare our people for a more bitter, bloody and protracted struggle against racist tyranny and exploitation. Black art must serve the best interest of black people. It must become a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the Black Revolution.”  The leaders of RAM concurred.  An internal RAM document circulated in 1967, titled Some Questions Concerning the Present Period, called for a full-scale black cultural revolution in the United States whose purpose would be “to destroy the conditioned white oppressive mores, attitudes, ways, customs, philosophies, habits, etc., which the oppressor has taught and trained us to have.  This means on a mass scale a new revolutionary culture.”  It also meant an end to processed hair, skin lighteners, and other symbols of parroting the dominant culture. Indeed, the revolution targeted not only assimilated bourgeois Negroes but also barbers and beauticians.

The conscious promotion of art as a weapon in black liberation is nothing new-it can be traced back at least to the Left wing of the Harlem Renaissance, if not earlier. And the Black Arts movement in the United States, not to mention virtually every other contemporary national liberation movement, took this idea very seriously. Fanon says as much in The Wretched of the Earth, English translation of which was making the rounds like wildfire during this period.  Still, the Cultural Revolution in China loomed large.  After all, many if not most black nationalists were familiar with China and had read Mao, and even if they did not acknowledge or make explicit the influence of Maoist ideas on the need for revolutionary art or the protracted nature of cultural revolution, the parallels are striking nonetheless. Consider Maulana (Ron) Karenga’s 1968 manifesto “Black Cultural Nationalism.”  First published in Negro Digest, the essay derived many of its ideas from Mao’s “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art.”  Like Mao, Karenga insisted that all art must be judged by two criteria-”artistic” and “social” (“political”); that revolutionary art must be for the masses; and that, in Karenga’s own words, art “must be functional, that is useful, as we cannot accept the false doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake.’ ” One can definitely see the influence of Maoism on Karenga’s efforts to create an alternative revolutionary culture. Indeed, the seven principles of Kwanzaa (the African American holiday that Karenga invented and first celebrated in 1967) unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, collective economics (socialism), creativity, purpose, and even faith-are nearly as consonant with Mao’s ideas as they are with “traditional” African culture.  And it is not a coincidence, perhaps, that at least one of the principles, Ujamaa, or “cooperative economics,” was the basis of Tanzania’s famous Arusha Declaration in 1964 under president Julius Nyerere-with Tanzania being China’s earliest and most important ally in Africa.

Although Karenga’s debt to Mao went unacknowledged, the Progressive Labor Party took note.  The PLP’S paper, the Challenge, ran a scathing article that attacked the entire Black Arts movement and its theoreticians.  Titled “[LeRoi] Jones-Karenga Hustle: Cultural ‘Rebels’ Foul Us Up,” the article characterized Karenga as a “pseudo-intellectual” who “has thoroughly read Mao’s Talks on Literature and Art.  In fact he can quote from this work as if he wrote it himself. What he did with this Marxist classic is to take out its heart-the class struggle-and substitute no-struggle. In addition he has put ‘art’ above politics and has MADE ART THE REVOLUTION.”  “‘Cultural nationalism:” the article continued, “is not only worshipping the most reactionary aspects of African history.  It even goes so far as measuring one’s revolutionary commitment by the clothes that are being worn! This is part of the ‘Black awareness.’ “

Of course, revolution did become a kind of art, or more precisely, a distinct style.  Whether it was Afros and dashikis or leather jackets and berets, most black revolutionaries in the United States developed their own aesthetic criteria.  In the publishing world, Mao’s Little Red Book made a tremendous impact on literary styles in black radical circles.  The idea that a pocket-sized book of pithy quotes and aphorisms could address a range of subjects, from ethical behavior, revolutionary thought and practice, economic development, philosophy, etc., appealed to many black activists, irrespective of political allegiance. The Little Red Book prompted a cottage industry of miniature books of quotations compiled expressly for black militants.  The Black Book, edited by Earl Ofari Hutchison (with assistance from Judy Davis), is a case in point.  Published by the Radical Education Project (circa 1970), The Black Book is a compilation of brief quotes from W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon that address a range of issues related to domestic and world revolution. The resemblance to Quotations from Chairman Mao is striking: chapter titles include” Black Culture and Art,” “Politics,” “Imperialism,” “Socialism,” “Capitalism,” “Youth,” “The Third World,” “Africa,” “On America:’ and” Black Unity.”  Earl Ofari Hutchison’s introduction places black struggle in a global context and calls for revolutionary ethics and “spiritual as well as physical unification of the Third World.” “True blackness,” he adds, “is a collective life-style, a collective set of values and a common world perspective” that grows out of distinct experiences in the West. The Black Book was not written as defense of black nationalism against the encroachments of Maoism.  On the contrary, Earl Ofari Hutchison closes by telling “freedom fighters everywhere, continue to read your red book, but place alongside of it the revolutionary BLACK BOOK.  To win the coming battle, both are necessary.”

Another popular text in this tradition was the Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah: Freedom Fighters Edition. Bound in black leather with gold type, it opens with a line in the frontispiece underscoring the importance of revolutionary will: “The secret of life is to have no fear.” And with the exception of its African focus, the chapters are virtually indistinguishable from the Little Red Book. Topics include “African Revolution,” “Army,” “Black Power,” “Capitalism,” “Imperialism,” “People’s Militia,” “The People,” “Propaganda,” “Socialism,” and “Women.” Most of the quotes are either vague or fail to transcend obvious sloganeering (e.g., “The foulest intellectual rubbish ever invented by man is that of racial superiority and inferiority,” or “A revolutionary fails only if he surrenders’ More importantly, many of Nkrumah’s insights could have come straight from Mao’s pen, particularly those quotations dealing with the need for popular mobilization, the dialectical relationship between thought and action, and issues related to war and peace and imperialism.

On the question of culture, most Maoist and anti-revisionist groups in the United States were less concerned with creating a new, revolutionary culture than with destroying the vestiges of the old or attacking what they regarded as a retrograde, bourgeois commercial culture.  In this respect, they were in step with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.  In a fascinating review of the film Superfly published in the CP (ML) paper The Call, the writer seizes the opportunity to criticize the counterculture as well as the capitalists’ role in promoting drug use in the black community.  “Looking around at all the people overdosing on drugs, getting killed in gun fights among themselves. and getting shredded up in industrial accidents while stoned on the job, it’s clear that dope is as big a killer as any armed cop.”  Why would a film marketed to black people glorify the drug culture?  Because “the imperialists know the plain truth — if you’re hooked on dope, you won’t have time to think about revolution — you’re too busy worrying about where the next shot is coming from!”  The review also included a bit of Chinese history: “The British did everything they could to get the Chinese people strung out [on opium].  It was common for workers to get part of their  wages in opium, turning them into addicts even quicker.  It was only revolution that got rid of the cause of this misery.  By taking their countries back, and turning their society in to one that really served the people, there was no more need to escape into drugs.”

Maoist attacks were not limited to the most reactionary aspects of mass commercial culture.  The Black Arts movement — a movement that, ironically, included figures very much inspired by developments in China and Cuba — came under intense scrutiny by the anti-revisionist Left.  Groups like the PLP and the CP(ML), despite their many disagreements over the national question, did agree that the Black Arts movement and its attraction to African culture was misguided, if not downright counterrevolutionary.  The PLP dismissed black cultural nationalists as petty bourgeois businessmen who sold the most retrograde aspects of African culture to the masses and “exploit[ed] Black women-all in the name of ‘African culture’ and in the name of ‘revolution.”’  The same PLP editorial castigates the Black Arts movement for “teaching about African Kings and Queens, African ‘empires.’  There is no class approach — no notice that these Kings, etc., were oppressing the mass of African people.”  Likewise, an editorial in The Call in 1973 sharply criticized the Black Arts movement for “delegitimizing the genuine national aspirations of Black people in the U.S. and to substituting African counter-culture for anti-imperialist struggle.”

While these attacks were generally unfair, particularly in the way they lumped together a wide array of artists, a handful of black artists had come to similar conclusions about the direction of the Black Arts movement.  For the novelist John Oliver Killens, the Chinese Cultural Revolution offered a model for transforming black cultural nationalism into a revolutionary force.  As a result of his travels to China during the early 1970s, Killens published an important essay in The Black World (later reprinted by the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association as a pamphlet titled Black Man in the New China) praising the Cultural Revolution for being, in his view, a stunning success.  In fact, he ostensibly went to China to find out why their revolution succeeded “while our own Black cultural revolution, that bloomed so brightly during the Sixties, seems to be dying on the vine.”  By the time Killens was ready to return to the United States, he had reached several conclusions regarding the limitations of the black cultural revolution and the strength of the Maoist model.  First, he recognized that all successful revolutions must be continuous-permanent and protracted.  Second, cultural activism and political activism are not two different strategies for liberation but rather two sides of the same coin.  The cultural revolution and the political revolution go hand in hand. Third, a revolutionary movement must be self-reliant; it must create self-sustaining cultural institutions. Of course, most radical nationalists in the Black Arts movement figured out most of this independently and Killens’s article merely reinforced these lessons.  However, China taught Killens one other lesson that few other males in the movement paid attention to at the time: “‘Women hold up one-half of the world.”’  “In some very vital and militant factions of the Black cultural revolution, women were required to metaphorically ‘sit in the back of the bus.’ … This is backward thinking and divisive.  Many women voted with their feet and went into Women’s Lib.  And some of the brothers seemed upset and surprised.  We drove them to it.”

The other major black critic of the Black Arts movement’s cultural nationalism who ended up embracing Maoism was Amiri Baraka, himself a central figure in the black cultural revolution and an early target for Maoist abuse.  As the founder and leader of CAP and later the RCL, Baraka offered more than a critique; instead, he built a movement that attempted to synthesize the stylistic and aesthetic innovations of the Black Arts movement with Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought and practice.  Just as his odyssey from the world of the Beats to the Bandung World provide insight into Mao’s impact on black radicalism in the United States, so does his transition from a cultural nationalist to committed communist.  More than any other Maoist or anti-revisionist, Baraka and the RCL epitomized the most conscious and sustained effort to bring the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to America’s inner cities and to transform it in a manner that spoke to the black working class.

Having come out of the Black Arts movement in Harlem and Spirit House in Newark, Baraka was above all else a cultural worker.  As he and the Congress of African Peoples moved from cultural nationalism to Marxism, this profound ideological shift manifested itself through changes in cultural practice. Dismissing the “Black petty bourgeois primitive cultural nationalist” as unscientific and metaphysical, he warned his comrades against “the cultural bias that might make us think that we can return to pre-slave trade Afrika, and the romance of feudalism.”  Further, CAP changed the name of its publication from Black Newark to Unity and Struggle to reflect its transition from a cultural nationalist perspective to a deeper understanding of “the dialectical requirements of revolution.”  The Spirit House Movers (CAP’S theater troupe) was now called the Afrikan Revolutionary Movers (ARM), and a group of cultural workers associated with Spirit House formed a singing group called the Anti-Imperialist Singers. They abandoned African dress as well as “male chauvinist practices that had been carried out as part of its ‘African traditionalism’ such as holding separate political education classes for men and women.”  And CAP’S official holiday, known as “Leo Baraka” for Baraka’s birthday, became a day devoted entirely to studying Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought, the “woman question,” and the problems of cadre development.

By 1976, the year CAP reemerged as the Revolutionary Communist League, Baraka had come a long way since his alliance with Ron Karenga.  In a poem titled “Today,” published in a small book of poetry titled Hard Facts (1976), Baraka’s position on cultural nationalism vis-a-vis class struggle is unequivocal:

Frauds in leopard skin, turbaned hustlers w/ skin

type rackets, colored capitalists, negro

exploiters, Afro-American Embassy gamers

who lurk about Afrikan embassies fightin for

airline tickets, reception guerrillas, whose

only connection w/ a party is the Frankie

Crocker kind.

Where is the revolution brothers and sisters?

Where is the mobilization of the masses led

by the advanced section of the working class?

Where is the unity criticism unity. The selfcriticism

& criticism? Where is the work & study. The

ideological clarity? Why only poses &

postures & subjective one sided non-theories

describing only yr petty bourgeois upbringing

Black saying might get you a lecture gig, ‘wise man.’ but will not alone bring revolution.

 

Baraka tried to put this manifesto in practice through intense community-based cultural work.  One of the RCL’S most successful projects was the Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union (AICU), a New York-based multinational cultural workers’ organization founded in the late 1970s.  In November 1978, the AICU sponsored the Festival of People’s Culture, which drew some five hundred people to listen to poetry read by Askia Toure, Miguel Algarin, and Sylvia Jones along with musical performances by an RCL-created group called the Proletarian Ensemble.  Through groups like the Proletarian Ensemble and the Advanced Workers (another musical ensemble formed by the RCL), the RCL spread its message of proletarian revolution and black self-determination and its critique of capitalism to community groups and schoolchildren throughout black Newark.  New York, and other cities on the Eastern seaboard.

Theater seemed to be Baraka’s main avenue for the Black Proletarian Cultural Revolution.  Among the AICU’S many projects, the Yenan Theater Workshop clearly projected Mao’s vision of revolutionary art.  The Yenan Theater produced a number of his plays, including a memorable performance of What Was the Lone Ranger’s Relationship to the Means of Production? In 1975-76, Baraka wrote two new plays, The Motion of History and S-1, that perhaps represent the clearest expression of his shift. as he stated, “from petty bourgeois radicalism (and its low point of bourgeois cultural nationalism) on through to finally grasping the science of revolution, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-Tung Thought.”  The Motion of History is a long epic play that touches upon just about everything under the sun-including slavery and slave revolts, industrial capitalism, civil rights and Black Power, and Irish immigration and white racism.  And practically every revolutionary or reformist having something to do with the struggle for black freedom makes an appearance in the play, including John Brown, H. Rap Brown, Lenin, Karenga, Harriet Tubman, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner.  Through scenes of workers discussing politics on the shop floor or in Marxist study groups, the audience learns about the history of slavery, the rise of industrial capitalism, imperialism, surplus value, relative overproduction, and the day-to-day racist brutality to which African Americans and Latinos are subjected.  In the spirit of proletarian literature, The Motion of History closes on an upbeat note with a rousing meeting at which those present pledge their commitment to building a revolutionary multiracial, multiethnic working class party based on Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought.

S-1 shares many similarities with The Motion of History, although it focuses primarily on what Baraka and the RCL saw as the rise of fascism in the United States.  As a play about a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist group fighting antisedition legislation, Baraka wrote it as a response to the Senate Bill “Criminal Justice Codification, Revision & Reform Act,” known as S-1, which would enable the state to adopt extremely repressive measures to combat radical movements.  S-1 gave police and the FBI greater freedom to search and seize materials from radical groups, as well as permission to wiretap suspects for forty-eight hours without court approval.  The bill also proposed mandatory executions for certain crimes, and it revived the Smith Act by subjecting any group or person advocating the “destruction of the government” to a possible fifteen-year prison sentence and fines up to $100,000.  The most notorious aspect of the bill was the “Leading a Riot” provision, which allowed courts to sentence to three years in prison and a $100,000 fine anyone promoting the assembly of five people with the intention of creating “a grave danger to Property.”

We don’t know how activists and working people responded to Baraka’s plays during the ultraradical period of the AICU and the RCL, and most cultural critics act as if these works are not worthy of comment.  No matter what one might think about these works, as art, as propaganda, or as both, it is remarkable to think that in the late 1970s a handful of inner-city kids in Newark could watch performances that advocated revolution in America and tried to expose the rapaciousness of capitalism.  And all this was going on in the midst of the so-called “me” generation, when allegedly there was no radical Left to speak of. (Indeed, Reagan’s election in 1980 is cited as evidence of the lack  of a Left political challenge as well as the reason for the brief resurrection of Marxist parties in the United States between1980 and 1985.)

Farewell for Mao, the Party’s Over?

Depending on where one stands politically, and with whom, one could easily conclude that American Maoism died when Mao passed away in 1976.  In China that rings true; the crushing of Mao’s widow Jian Quing and the rest of the Gang of Four and the rapid ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping suggests that Maoism doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance of returning.  And while some protesters in Tiananmen Square in the mid 1980s saw themselves in the tradition of the student radicals of the Cultural Revolution, the vast majority did not-nor did they invoke Mao’s name in the service of their own democratic (some might say “bourgeois”) movement.

But to say that Maoism somehow died on the vine is to overstate the case.  Maoist organizations still exist in the United States, and some are very active on the political scene.  The Maoist Internationalist Movement maintains a Web site, as does the Progressive Labor Party (though they can hardly be called “Maoist” today), and the RCP is as ubiquitous as ever.  Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that the RCP played a role in helping to draft the Bloods and Crips’ post-L.A. rebellion manifesto, “Give Us the Hammer and the Nails and We Will Rebuild the City.”  The former CLP, now called the League of Revolutionaries, has a strong following in Chicago as well as some incredibly talented radicals, including General Baker and Abdul Alkalimat.  More importantly, even if we acknowledge that the number of activists has dwindled substantially since the mid-1970s, the individuals who stayed in those movements remained committed to black liberation, even if their strategies and tactics proved insensitive or wrong-headed.  Anyone who knows anything about politics knows that Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign was overrun by a rainbow coalition of Maoists, or that a variety of Maoist organizations were represented in the National Black Independent Political Party.  In other words, now that so many American liberals are joining the backlash against poor black people and affirmative action, either by their active participation or their silence, some of these self-proclaimed revolutionaries are still willing to “move mountains” in the service of black folk.  The most tragic and heroic example comes from Greensboro, North Carolina, where five members of the Communist Workers Party (formerly the Workers Viewpoint Organization) were murdered by Klansmen and Nazis during an anti-Klan demonstration on November 3, 1979.

The fact remains, however, that the heyday of black Maoism has passed.  The reasons are varied, having to do with the overall decline of black radicalism, the self·destructive nature of sectarian politics, and China’s disastrous foreign policy decisions vis-a-vis Africa and the Third World.  Besides, most of the self-described black Maoists in our story — at least the most honest ones — probably owe their greatest intellectual debt to Du Bois, Fanon, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Harold Cruse, not to mention Stalin and Lenin.  But Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution left an indelible imprint on black radical politics — an imprint whose impact we’ve only begun to explore in this essay . At a moment when a group of nonaligned countries sought to challenge the political binaries created by cold war politics, when African nationalists tried to plan for a postcolonial future, when Fidel Castro and a handful of fatigue-clad militants did the impossible, when southern lunch counters and northern ghettoes became theaters for a new revolution, there stood China — the most powerful “colored” nation on earth.

Mao’s China, along with the Cuban revolution and African nationalism, internationalized the black revolution in profound ways.  Mao gave black radicals a non-Western model of Marxism that placed greater emphasis on local conditions and historical circumstances than on canonical texts.  China’s Great Leap Forward challenged the idea that the march to socialism must take place in stages, or that one must wait patiently for the proper objective conditions to move ahead.  For many young radicals schooled in student-based social democracy and/or antiracist politics, “consciousness raising” in the Maoist style of criticism and self-criticism was a powerful alternative to bourgeois democracy.  But consciousness-raising was more than propaganda work; it was intellectual labor in the context of revolutionary practice.  “All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience,” Mao said in his widely read essay “On Practice” (1937).  This idea of knowledge deriving dialectically from practice to theory to practice empowered radicals to question the expertise of sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc., whose grand pronouncements on the causes of poverty and racism often went unchallenged.  Thus in an age of liberal technocrats, Maoists — from black radical circles to the women’s liberation movement — sought to overturn bourgeois notions of expertise.  They developed analyses, engaged in debates, and published journals, newspapers, position papers, pamphlets, and even books. And while they rarely agreed with one another, they saw themselves as producers of new knowledge.  They believed, as Mao put it, that “these ideas turn into a material force which changes society and changes the world.”

Ideas alone don’t change the world, however; people do.  And having the willingness and energy to change the world requires more than the correct analysis and direct engagement with the masses: instead, it takes faith and will.  Here Maoists have much in common with some very old black biblical traditions. After all, if little David can take Goliath with just a slingshot, certainly a “single spark can start a prairie fire.”

For the whole essay, a printable PDF is available.