Harry Haywood was a long time member and leader of the
Communist Party-USA and other communist organizations from the 1920’s until his
death in 1985. He was the key figure in developing and popularizing the concept
that Blacks represented a separate “nation” inside the United States.
While Haywood merits almost no mention in many accounts of
Black history, his theoretical innovations probably did more than any other one
individual to frame the terms of the debate about the historical character of
the “Black community.” (To read more about Haywood’s life and legacy, click this
link.)
The “Black Belt thesis”
 The “Black Belt thesis” established the oppression of African Americans as a “national question” of utmost importance for revolutionaries in the United States. |
What became known as the “Black Belt” thesis has its roots
in the conception of Black Americans initially conceived by Haywood and other
communists of various nationalities in the Communist International.
Basing itself on the conceptions developed by Lenin and
grounded in the Soviet experience with oppressed nations, this theory held
Blacks in America made up not simply a racial or ethnic group, but comprised an
oppressed nation. The thesis was adopted at the Sixth Congress of the
Communist International—under Stalin’s leadership—in 1928.
This conception did not mean “nation” in the sense of the
“nation-state” as today’s common usage would suggest, but rather had its roots
in the concept of how nation states were formed by capitalism. As feudalism
gave way to capitalism, the new social system smashed the barriers of
innumerable fiefdoms, and through a long process of war and market growth took
people of different historical backgrounds and across relatively large areas
and molded them into one people with a common language, national market,
culture, etc. Each nation-state that developed in this way— the most common
examples of this process being Western European countries, such as France and
England—had a unique historical development.
Lenin’s traditional conception had held that “multi-national
states” appeared in countries where the process of capitalist development had
been uneven, where non-capitalist or semi-capitalist economic forms played
major roles economically and socially. This held true for tsarist Russian
empire, where the Romanov monarchs sought to introduce advanced capitalism,
without making any changes to the country’s feudal character. Russia thus
created a fusion of the most advanced capitalist methods, alongside the social
structure and agricultural life of the 13th century. This historical unevenness
created a multinational nation-state, spanning an entire continent, involving
over 100 different distinct nationalities and ethnicities.
Haywood saw a similarity in the situation of African
Americans. Although brought to America from many different ethnicities and
cultures, the unique experience of slavery overtime forged Africans into a new
distinct people. For Haywood, this was not only a cultural phenomenon—in which
Blacks developed a common identity based on their common experiences and
struggles—but also had a geographic basis. The transformation of Africans of
disparate backgrounds into a common African American nation occurred over a
defined land base in the Deep South where Blacks maintained a majority of the
populace.
After the overthrow of Reconstruction, debt peonage in the
south and the Jim Crow system further ingrained the super-exploitation of
Blacks in the “Black Belt” south as a dominant and enduring feature of U.S.
capitalism. The region in question, Haywood argued, in fact represented an
internal colony. What followed from this was the notion that if Blacks made up
a “nation” within the United States, they also had the right to self-determination—that
is the right to form their own nation-state in the Black Belt South.
A full discussion of the Black Belt thesis and its modern
relevance is far beyond the scope of this article. But in this author’s
opinion, Haywood’s concepts still represent the best starting point to
understand the Black “national question.” One can debate the south-centered
“land base” of a potential Black nation, but one cannot debate the unique
historical evolution of African Americans as a distinct nation within a multi-national state.
It is also worth mentioning that, unlike almost all other
theories propagated on this issue since Harry
Haywood first addressed it, Haywood’s concepts were based on a detailed and systematic class
analysis of the actual conditions of Blacks in America. His skillful use of the
historical materialist method sets a high standard for all Marxists to
follow.
Distinctions from Black nationalism
Harry Haywood did not develop his theoretical conceptions on
the Black nation out of any desire for Black separatism; he was totally
committed to the idea of a united working class party. However he realized only
a party that bases itself on a life and death struggle against white supremacy
could overcome the obstacles to class unity. Such a struggle was necessary to
earn the trust of the Black masses on one hand, and to break white workers away
from ruling class ideology on the other.
 Communist Party cartoon from 1936 |
While Black communists collaborated with all sorts of other
forces in the mass struggle, Haywood made a clear distinction about the program
of communists. The communists’ efforts to win working-class leadership of the
Black liberation struggle and their advocacy for socialism as the only
resolution to national oppression, brought them into conflict with bourgeois
Black leaders of both the “integrationist” and “nationalist” type.
Haywood subjected both the bourgeois integrationist trend
and the “ghetto nationalist” trend in the 1930s Black community to a
class analysis. The integrationist NAACP and Urban League, represented by
“successful businessmen, top-echelon leaders, upper-bracket educators, and
local politicians,” typically commanded leadership of the Black movement,
due to their deep linkages to Wall Street and white philanthropic
organizations.
On the other hand, the nationalists were rooted among
“small businessmen, the intelligentsia, professionals and the like”
and expressed the desires of the Black petit-bourgeoisie, stunted by modern
imperialism, to control the economic life of Black urban communities. In conditions of crisis especially, Haywood noted, the
nationalists’ appeal to race solidarity or Back-to-Africa schemes had the
capability of attracting large sections of the Black poor, for whom the
integrationists provided no economic answers.
Haywood asserted it was necessary for communists to
recognize the anti-imperialist, revolutionary potential and historical legitimacy of the Black
nationalist movement. At the same time, Haywood warned the Party that the militancy of its petty bourgeois stratum “is very misleading” (424) and repeatedly
pushed the Party to not make the opposite mistake of “surrendering to the
propaganda of local nationalists.”
Haywood’s point is further reinforced by the fact that “Black capitalist” schemes have on several occasions found support amongst the most
reactionary elements of the white community, from the Ku Klux Klan to Richard
Nixon, who proclaimed in 1968 that many Black militants merely wanted a
“piece of the action” rather than an overturning of the social
system.
One good example of Haywood’s departure from petty bourgeois
Black nationalism is in the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the
1930’s, which took root in Harlem, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
These campaigns, led by local Black nationalists who shunned work with whites,
took aim at the white-owned stores that excluded Blacks from employment while
selling products in the ghetto. Nationalist leaders called for the white
employees to be replaced with Black employees at the targeted stores, a demand
that quickly developed a significant following.
Haywood knew that the campaigns thrived on the “justly
felt anger” of the Black working-class, but argued that “the ruling
class was overjoyed with this type of movement” because it blurred the
class line and “tended to quickly become anti-white.” They
“directed the struggle against these small establishments, which had only
a small fraction of jobs,” as well as white workers, and thus “the
broad struggle of Black unemployed was diverted away from the large
corporations located mostly outside the ghetto.”
Haywood knew the Communist Party must not stand aloof from
this struggle for Black jobs, instead calling for the Party to focus on a
broader campaign, spearheaded by Black and white unionists,
which did not call for the firing of any existing workers.
Many then and since have criticized the CPUSA for this,
considering it an unnecessary concession to white workers that weakened the
struggle. Ira Kemp and Arthur Reid, two nationalist leaders, were some of the
leading critics of the CPUSA. They had started something known as the Harlem
Labor Union, which won some jobs for the community by convincing store owners
to hire Black workers at lower than the prevailing wage.
In contrast, Haywood’s tactics always started with the
Party’s strategic outlook: building Black-white unity in the fight against both
national and class oppression. Indeed, Haywood devoted a good deal of his
political energies, as well as his later autobiography, to this fundamental
question facing revolutionaries in the United States.
‘Black and white, unite and fight!’
Building class unity has never been an easy task. For one,
white supremacy has long functioned as an unofficial state religion. Secondly,
Black people in the United States face “special oppression” above and
beyond the “normal” forms of oppression meted out by capitalist
society; the resistance to these forms of oppression will thus take a unique
form.
Finally, looking over the country’s history, a pattern
emerges in which Black people surge forward in struggle, become the engine for
radicalism in society as a whole, but are crushed by the combined forces of the
ruling class before a sizable enough section of white workers recognize their
common interests with the Black freedom movement.
Liberals and nationalists tend to accept this pattern as
inevitable and irreversible, but draw opposite conclusions: either that Black
people should go slow and not demand so much (the liberal argument), or that
Black people should focus on carving out spaces or states independent of the
existing social order (the nationalist argument). Revolutionary Marxists
support the right of self-determination, but also propose a different solution to
the uneven development of political consciousness among different sectors: a
fighting organization that has fused together the workers leading in each
sector, maintains significant influence in each, and frames tactics that
promote the common benefits of class struggle and Black liberation.
This perspective of promoting multinational unity is easy to
uphold on paper, but must be fought for in practice. Stirring up racism among
white workers has long been the most powerful weapon in the ruling class’s
arsenal. Further, Haywood recognized that the nationalist sentiments of the
Black working class inevitably would find some expression within the Party—a
phenomenon that he warned against most emphatically in the Party’s 1934
Convention.
Haywood wrote:
“Just as the ruling class ideology
of white supremacy had its influences on white comrades, it was not unusual
that Black comrades would similarly be affected by petty bourgeois nationalist
ideology. These moods were and sentiments were expressed in feelings of
distrust of white comrades, in skepticism about the possibility of winning
white workers to active support in the struggle for Black rights, and in the
attitude that nothing could be accomplished until white chauvinism was
completely eliminated. This latter was particularly dangerous because it failed
to understand that white chauvinism could only be broken down in the process of
struggle.”
The two trends of white chauvinism and petty bourgeois
nationalism were not equivalent, but both “deviated from the line of
proletarian internationalism” and needed to be tackled. As a leading Black
member of the CPUSA, Haywood played his part in upholding the long-held
division of labor in the communist movement with regards to national
oppression: comrades of the oppressor nation would lead the fight against
chauvinism inside the Party’s ranks, while comrades of the oppressed nation
must combat narrow nationalist deviations.
Haywood stressed that any slacking on the part of the Party
in leading the practical struggle among Black workers would disarm their
ability to combat both considerable dangers.
Haywood recognized that multi-national unity is not a
feel-good exercise, or simply a helpful secondary factor. Rather, a united
working class is the only road to an overthrow of capitalism, which holds the
only chance for the full liberation of the mass of Black workers, who
constitute the vast majority of Blacks in America.
This is the legacy left to us by Harry Haywood: a critical
and uncompromising dedication to the total liberation of Black workers, the
working class, and humanity itself.
