Between Revolution and the Racial Ghetto: Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood Debate Class Struggle and the 'Negro Question', 1962-8

• Published in: Historical materialism : research in critical Marxist theory Vol. 24; no. 2; p. 165
• Main Author: Johnson, Cedric
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Leiden Brill Academic Publishers, Inc 01.01.2016
• Subjects: 20th century; Activism; African Americans; Anti-capitalism; Black Power movement; Capitalism; Civil rights; Class politics; Class struggle; Colonialism; Independence; Left wing politics; Nationalism; Power; Protest movements; Rights; Slums; Social classes; Social environment
• ISSN: 1465-4466; 1569-206X
• DOI: 10.1163/1569206X-12341454

This article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse's influential 1962 essay for Studies on the Left, 'Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American', which declared that the American Negro was a 'subject of domestic colonialism'. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journalSoulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse's mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto.