RE: [Marxism] Did Cannon have a "liquidationist" position on theBlack question in the U.S.?

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Apologies for the delay in getting back to these issues. Let me take up
some of Wayne Rossi's points: 

"And Cannon was basically right:  the CP succeeded mostly because they
were radicals coming at the race issue with a hard line, *not* because
of the specific nationalist position." 

The attempt to separate out the Cap's underlying programmatic position,
which illuminated and inspired their practical work, is not right in my
opinion. The practical work was the result of the understanding they
achieved thanks to repeated interventions by the Russians throughout the
1920's beginning with Lenin's draft theses on the national and colonial
question, which specifically includes viewing the Black question as a
national question.

Cannon himself notes this: "The compelling reason was their policy on
the issue of equal rights and their general attitude, which they had
learned from the Russians, and their activity on the new line." However,
the political HEART AND SOUL of that new attitude was
self-determination, which flowed from viewing the "Negro question" as it
was called at the time as a *national* question.

Note that: a *national,* not "nationalist question" as Wayne Rossi would
have it. I know there's been some movement in academia to liquidate the
*national* question of Blacks as a people into a purely subjective
phenomenon of "nationalism," of whether or not there are strong
"nationalist movements."

That is the wrong way to approach it. The starting point must be whether
Black people are *a people,* separate and distinct from white Americans,
and specifically a people oppressed by white Americans. That is what
must be challenged and disproved; otherwise Cannon is quite simply and
flatly wrong.

This is the reality that Rossi and others *refuse to recognize*. Saying
"The 'nationalism' of the CP in the Third Period era was a very
different monkey from the nationalism of the 1960s" shows a complete
lack of understanding of this underlying reality, that Blacks are a
separate and distinct people oppressed by imperialism.

Yet this has been a stable and long-term feature of the U.S. as a social
formation; it had already long been true in 1905 when the SP was set up
as a White People's Socialist Party (the party even had Jim Crow
segregated branches in some places and its rules forbade spending party
funds on doing propaganda among Blacks); it was true in 1920 when Lenin
put it in his draft theses for the Comintern Congress; it was true in
1922, when the U.S. Government sent Marcus Garvey to prison to break up
UNIX (Universal Negro Improvement Association), which was much more than
the "Back to Africa" movement as it is often portrayed; it was true in
the late 1920's and 1930's when the CP adopted and propagandized for the
position that Blacks should create their own state in the South; and it
has been true continuously ever since.

To speak of the "nationalism" of the CP is silly; the CP was a
majority-white party; in promoting the right of Black people to create
their own state in the part of the country where the overwhelming
majority of Blacks lived (and where the majority of Blacks live today,
it should be noted) the CP took not a nationalist but an
*internationalist* position.

Nor is it correct to dismiss the principled position of defending the
right of the Black nation to self-determination to be some aberration of
Third Period Stalinism. That position is pure, unadulterated, 100%
genuine Leninism.

And to blast the CP for raising in a propagandistic way the right of
this people to control their OWN destiny because WHITE TERRORISM had
succeeded in silencing Blacks from expressing such thoughts is quite
outrageous.

Especially because we're told on the one hand the CP did this absolutely
bizarre thing of ADVOCATING that Black people do the same thing white
people had already done AND SET UP THEIR OWN STATE. Maybe they did it in
a poor or goofy way, but IN PRINCIPLE I don't have a problem with the
underlying position. Yet ON THE OTHER HAND we're told that the CP didn't
REALLY have such a position because they didn't interject it in an
insensitive, provocative or irresponsible way in the actual day to day
struggles that Black people were waging. Which to me says that the
Capers had a good understanding of applying self determination also in
their practical relations with the community.

And, --you simply can't twist his words in any other way-- Cannon DID
have a problem with it IN PRINCIPLE in 1959. Which he expressed quite
clearly, by every single time saying the problem was the CP position on
self-determination; rather than saying it was okay to be for
self-determination but the *way* the CP expressed it (advocating that
Blacks set up their own state in the "Black Belt") was wrong. 

The truth is by 1959 Cannon had come to the same sort of
integrationist/assimilations outlook that the CP also held at the time
except that Cannon maintained it would take a socialist revolution to
achieve it. 

Nor was this a new position for Cannon. The early CP had this sort of
position; as did the Communist League of America in the early 1930s. By
the late 1930's, under pressure from Trotsky, around the time the SWP
was founded, Cannon and his friends apparently had at least agreed to
formally support the right of Blacks to self-determination but they saw
absolutely no need to make a big deal out of it. 

Cannon's bombastic 1946 "American Theses" do not devote even a
parenthetical expression to the struggles of Blacks as a *people,*
Blacks are mentioned only in their capacity as workers, and mentioned to
make the argument that the importance of divisions within the working
class was *decreasing* -- as completely false and disorienting guideline
to what U.S. politics would be like over the next decade or two on this
score as one could possibly want. 

The claim that "Cannon was right: there was no nationalist consciousness
in the Black community in 1929-1933," and citing the situation of
Alabama's terrorized and all-but enslaved Black population to "prove" it
is a shameful thing for a revolutionary from the oppressor nation to
say. 

"The fight for unionism and the barest of human rights was
all-consuming, and dangerous enough as it was. 
Alabama in the early 1930s was not a place or time when the Black nation
slogan could be raised safely." 

In other words, white terrorism has succeeded in preventing Blacks from
even bringing up the subject that they want to control their destiny as
a people. And, given this success of the white supremacist terror and
enslavement, the mostly white revolutionaries up North who DON'T get
lynched if they try to speak out or vote, who don't have a boot to their
neck and a gun to their head, THEY agree to keep quiet too about the
right of Black folks to control their own destiny because, you see, not
even the Blacks in Alabama are raising it.

Isn't this really adaptation to the racism of the dominant society, in
fact, abject capitulation to white supremacy?

This argument, --that Blacks could not possibly have had the freedom to
raise the question of self-determination for themselves-- in my opinion,
completely demolishes any possible *criticism* of the CP for doing
propaganda in favor of Blacks setting up their own state, especially if
Rossi's description of their not doing this in an irresponsible and
provocative way that created even more problems for the community is
accurate. 

But, in addition, Rossi is wrong in his sweeping generalization that
there was no nationalist consciousness in the Black community. In the
North, where Blacks did have relatively more freedom to organize
politically, what emerged was the Garvey movement, which was a clearly,
unambiguously nationalist movement; and beginning in the 30's, the
Nation of Islam arose. So the claim that "there was no nationalist
consciousness in the Black community" back then is false; the
overwhelming majority of Blacks living under a reign of savage white
terrorism in the South may have had no way to give expression to it and
perhaps even too subjugated to even think about it; but in Black
communities with a little more freedom in Harlem, Detroit and Chicago,
organizations that expressed the national consciousness of Black people
did arise. That they only expressed this desire for self-determination
in utopian forms or religious garb is testimony to the impact of the
savagery of the white race and the depth of the subjugation of the Black
community. But its political meaning is unmistakable, this was a people
seeking ways to express their desire to control *their own* affairs,
i.e., achieve self determination. 

It seems to me that Rossi's political approach on the Black question is
pure impressionism:

"Cannon was polemicizing not against the Russian thinkers, who were in
fact well ahead of their time, but against the adoption of a call for a
Black nation in 1929.  Cannon, in his own words, is looking at the
relationship in that particular period as 'an anticipation of things to
come' - endorsing militant work for the Black cause, and downplaying the
importance of a really great slogan about 'Black nationalism.' 
Moving into the 1960s with sloganary caution and dedication to work on
the ground with regard to race was the right thing to do, as was
championing the Black nationalist movement *when it was seen as a
reality* as the SWP did."

The "Russian thinkers" were not "well ahead of their time" in insisting
that the American movement defend the right of Black people to
self-determination. This is not a question of whether some slogan is
opportune, but one of principle. The principle involved is defending the
right of all oppressed peoples to self determination.

In presenting his theses on the national and colonial question to the
Second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin highlighted this principle.

"What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our Theses? It is
the difference between the oppressed and the oppressor nations. We
emphasise this difference ? in contrast to the Second International and
bourgeois democracy. It is especially important for the proletariat and
the Communist International during the epoch of imperialism to establish
concrete economic facts and to approach all colonial and national
questions not from the abstract but from the concrete point of view."

Approaching "all colonial and national questions not from the abstract
but from the concrete point of view," means, among other things, if
there doesn't seem to be an outcry from an oppressed people to control
their own destiny, whether this might not be due to the mass, genocidal
terrorism of the oppressor nation. 

It is disturbing, to say the least, that in 2005 people can look at
Cannon's adaptation to the backwardness of white workers, to his failure
to defend the ABC's of a revolutionary program towards Black people, and
try to invent all sorts of excuses for it, going so far as to deny that
Cannon meant what he said in castigating the CP for defending the right
of Black people to self-determination. LISTEN to what he says:

"The expansion of communist influence in the Negro movement in the ?30s
happened despite the fact that one of the new slogans imposed on the
party by the Comintern?the slogan of ?self-determination??about which
the most to-do was made and the most theses and resolutions were
written, and which was even touted as the main slogan, never seemed to
fit the actual situation. The slogan of 'self-determination' found
little or no acceptance in the Negro community after the collapse of the
separatist movement led by Garvey. Their trend was mainly toward
integration, with equal rights."

Cannon is quite thoroughly mistaken about the character of the Black
movement. The first and most salient feature he fails to recognize is
that it is precisely an independent Black movement, a NATIONAL movement,
the political expression of a PEOPLE.

THIS is what was blatantly obvious to Lenin and Trotsky, that these were
expressions of a people awakening to political life as a people. 

The movement was never "for" integration, which in the way Cannon uses
it here, counterposed to self-determination, means *assimilation,* but
rather for equality for Blacks as individuals and as a people.

Black nationalism did not suddenly arise out of nothing in the early
1960's; it had been there all along, not just in the Garvey movement but
later in the nation of Islam and the growing number and strength of
Black organizations, institutions, media outlets, and even businesses.
This was clearly invisible to the SWP as an overwhelmingly white
organization, or if anyone noticed, they did not ascribe any
significance to it. However, by 1959 the evidence was overwhelming,
inescapable, that you had this mass movement OF A PEOPLE fighting for
equality against a regime of white supremacy and racist terror.

Contrary to Cannon's mistaken assessment, the trend was NOT towards
"integration" but rather towards the self-organization of Blacks as a
people. "Integration" was merely one of the forms that the demand for
equality took -- NOT AT ALL the overall trend, not in reality, not
materially, not in the real world, in the actual social organizations
and political expression of the Black community.

Joaquín



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