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Abstract
This article aims to understand why Black Marxists and white Marxists had different theoretical and practical responses to 1930s fascism. I argue this stemmed from different conceptualizations of colonialism. Following Marx and Lenin, many white Marxists viewed colonialism as an imperial extension of capitalist conditions from western Europe to non-Europe. In contrast, Black Marxists viewed colonialism as the site of capitalism and race: the practicing of white dominance and capital accumulation through territorial dispossession, material extraction, and forced labor in the colonies. Black Marxists understood fascism as extending these racial-colonial practices into Europe, while white Marxists failed to see this because of their foreclosure of race. In viewing fascism as primarily a threat to the spread of European communism, the Soviet Union made anti-fascism a priority exceeding anti-colonialism. The interwar Black Left therefore produced a more expansive conception of colonialism, widening the spatial and temporal horizons upon which to understand the emergence of fascism and remain committed to anti-colonialism.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Sherwin K. Bryant and Barnor Hesse for their persistent and critical feedback in the making of this article. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of Souls for their detailed comments, particularly in helping me clarify and organize the argument.
Notes
1 C.L.R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Oakland, CA: 2012), 105, 69.
2 Minkah Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), 165-194.
3 Cedric J. Robinson, “Fascism and the Response of Black Radical Theorists,” in Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, ed. H.L.T. Quan (London, 2019), 149-159. In addition to the texts cited more directly below, see: Nikhil Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (2006), 79; Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, 2009), 23; Vaughn Rasberry, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 2016), 19; Robinson, “Fascism and the Intersections of Capitalism, Racialism, and Historical Consciousness,” in Cedric J. Robinson, 87-109; Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism,” Boston Review (October 28, 2020), https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/alberto-toscano-long-shadow-racial-fascism/ (January 4, 2023); Aaron B. Retish, “‘Black radicals not only anticipated the rise of fascism; they resisted it before it was considered a crisis’: an interview with Robin D. G. Kelley,” The Volunteer (November 14, 2020) https://albavolunteer.org/2020/11/robin-d-g-kelley-on-fascism-then-and-now/ (January 4, 2023); Vaughn Rasberry, “Colonial Fascism: A Syllabus” (undated), https://manifold.umn.edu/read/ces0701-colonial-fascism/section/4a86d0b0-f1b4-44f2-b7bd-88237d51470d#h-17 (January 5, 2023).
4 Robinson, “Fascism and the Response of Black Radical Theorists,” 149.
5 Robinson, “Fascism and the Response of Black Radical Theorists,” 152.
6 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York, 2000), 36.
7 Leslie James, “What lessons on fascism can we learn from Africa’s colonial past?,” Africa Is A Country (January 24, 2017), https://africasacountry.com/2017/01/what-lessons-on-fascism-can-we-learn-from-africas-colonial-past/ (January 12, 2022); Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom, 195-224; Leslie James, “Blood Brothers: Colonialism and Fascism as Relations in the Interwar Caribbean and West Africa,” American Historical Review 127, no. 2 (2022): 634-663.
8 Alberto Toscano, “Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 23, no. 1 (2021): 2.
9 Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom, 74-77.
10 Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials, eds., The U.S. Anti-fascism Reader (New York: Verso, 2020), 271.
11 It is important to recognize that the Frankfurt School and Cultural Studies, following interwar fascism, produced a new interest in the relationship between capitalism and race among some white Marxists in the postwar period. They often drew upon the writings of Antonio Gramsci and some were in dialogue with Black Marxists. However, I selected Marx, Lenin, and Neumann for my analysis of white Marxists because their theories help to explain the Soviet Union’s limited practices of anti-colonialism and the colonial fracture on the 1930s Left between Black and white Leftists.
12 Robert J. C. Young, “Marx on Colonialism and Imperialism,” in Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (New York, 2016), 110.
13 Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom.
14 Franz Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944 (New York, 2009), 20-29; George Padmore, “Hands off the Colonies!,” New Leader, 25 February 1938.
15 Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 8. Theo Williams’ recent book shows that some white Leftists in the Independent Labour Party eventually incorporated the ideas of Black radicals in London. See: Williams, Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation (London, 2022), 7, 25, 30, 122-180.
16 This extends Cedric Robinson’s argument that the Black radical tradition “is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black. Rather, it is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inception of Western Civilization.” See: Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 72-73.
17 Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York, 2008), xxxix. Also see: Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York, 2003); Patrick Bernhard, “Colonial crossovers: Nazi Germany and its entanglements with other empires,” Journal of Global History 12 (2017): 206-227; Daniel Hedinger, “The imperial nexus: the Second World War and the Axis in global perspective,” Journal of Global History 12 (2017): 184-205.
18 Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 46-63.
19 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1998), xii.
20 Adolf Hitler, in Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 46.
21 This contradicted the pre-1914 German attempt to colonize parts of central and southern Africa as well as some of the Pacific islands. This had resulted in the Herero and Namaqua genocide in Namibia between 1904-1908. See: Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, eds., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York, 2011).
22 James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, 2017); Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, eds., Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960 (New York, 2013), 232-237.
23 Karl Marx, in Young, “Marx on Colonialism and Imperialism,” 101.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 102.
27 Ibid.
28 V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Sydney: 1999), 87.
29 The colonial construction of race depended upon colonial practices of enslavement, confinement, (sexualized) violence, territorial dispossession, indentured servitude, surveillance, and cultural assault that became reserved for non-white populations and rationalized on the basis of such peoples being culturally, politically, and economically inferior. See: Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (New York, 2016).
30 Ibid., 132.
31 Young, “Marx on Colonialism and Imperialism,” 111.
32 Peter Hayes, “Introduction,” in Neumann’s Behemoth, xii.
33 Neumann, Behemoth, 117.
34 Ibid., 184-218.
35 Ibid., 216.
36 For more on the counter-revolutionary argument, see Ibid., 20-29.
37 Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990); Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994); Mark I. Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communism and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson, MS, 1998); Marika Sherwood, Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile (London, 1999); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC, 2007); Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York, 2008); Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’: Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918-1939 (New York, 2008); LaShawn Harris, “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party during the Great Depression,” The Journal of African American History 94, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 21-43; Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York, 2011); Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC, 2011); Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom; Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: the Communist International, Africa, and the Diaspora (Trenton, NJ, 2013); Holger Weiss, Framing a Radical African Atlantic: African American Agency, West African Intellectuals and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (Boston, 2014). Many historians have focused their attention either on Europe through the Moscow archives or on the US through New York City archives. The benefits of looking at the Moscow archives are that scholars get a better sense of the international power dynamics at play, including the importance and activities of the Soviet Union in the formation of the Black Left and the difficulty that white Leftists in Europe had with confronting race. However, in drawing from the Soviet archives, Weiss, Derrick, and (to some extent) Adi largely reduce the Black Left to a small number of male actors who spent time in Moscow, emphasizing these individuals’ critiques of Garveyism, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and largely constructing a narrative in which Black Leftism is dependent upon the Comintern. Moreover, such scholars at least implicitly present Leftism as a white phenomenon and Black Leftism as something which ends with the collapse of the Soviet’s Black institutions. In comparison, personal collections in the US and London privilege the voices of Black actors. These collections include far greater correspondence between Black actors, their political meetings and lectures in Harlem and London, and often copies of periodicals and booklets they created and shared with one another. For that reason, Black Leftism has appeared less fringe, dogmatic, and male-centric in the works of McDuffie, Gore, Harris and Makalani. The difficulty with the US archives is that the Black Left can become quite detached from its institutional structures and global contexts, including not only those privileged in this article but also the Black Atlantic orientation of universities such as Howard and Lincoln in this moment. While Black Left thought may appear “international” from the US personal collections, this internationalism is often presented within the realm of the political imagination rather than evidenced through the various communist and socialist organizations that the Black Left participated in and/or established throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa in this period. For further relevant literature on Black Left individuals, see: Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (Yale, 2014); Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (London, 2016); Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Boston, 2018); Winston James, Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik (Columbia, 2022).
38 Lenin, in Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom, 76.
39 Sanjay Seth in Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom, 79.
40 Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom, 80, 82.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 90-97.
43 Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 13-14; Joyce Moore Turner, Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Urbana, 2005), 155; Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 87; Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 133-134.
44 Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Third International and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa, 1921-1928,” Ufahamu 15, nos. 1-2 (1986): 99-120; Barry Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation: Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communism, and the Sugar Industry, 1925-1934,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 78, no. 1 (Feb., 1998): 99; Holger Weiss, “Framing Black Communist Labour Union Activism in the Atlantic World: James W. Ford and the Establishment of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 1928-1931,” International Review of Social History 64, no. 2 (2019): 260, 272. It is worth noting here that Padmore came to later criticize the BBN thesis, arguing that Black South Africans and Americans “looked with deep suspicion upon the new Communist slogan of a ‘Native Republic’, which they interpreted as an attempt to segregate them into some sort of Bantu state, for they knew that Europeans—even those calling themselves Communists—would resent living under an All-African Government.” See: Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (New York, 1971), 329-330.
45 Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom, 136.
46 Ibid., 289.
47 It was Lenin who had described the League of Nations in this way. Minkah Makalani, “An International African Opinion: Amy Ashwood Garvey and C.L.R. James in Black Radical London,” in Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem, eds. Davarian L. Baldwin and Makalani (Minneapolis, 2013), 83. For more on the League of Nations as a racial-colonial project, see: Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, 2019), 37-70.
48 Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’, 325-332.
49 Ibid.
50 Barnor Hesse, ‘Racism’s Alterity: The After-Life of Black Sociology,’ in Racism and Sociology, eds. Alana Lentin and Wulf D. Hund (Berlin, 2014), 148.
51 While the Soviet Union would later sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, this stemmed from the belief that the earlier plan to curb fascism in Europe was failing, particularly given the Rome-Berlin axis agreement in 1936, the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany, Japan, Italy, and Spain by 1937, and the loss of Republican Spain to the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-39. By 1939, the Soviet Union therefore took a defensive approach with Nazi Germany in an attempt to maintain Soviet communism in Eastern Europe, a territory the Nazis had increasingly been infiltrating in the late 1930s.
52 Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), 37-48.
53 Ibid., 49.
54 Weiss, Radical African Atlantic, 619, 647.
55 Ibid., 650-51, 657.
56 Ibid., 708, 714.
57 Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism, 411.
58 Cedric J. Robinson, “The African diaspora and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis,” Race & Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 51-65; William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1941 (Bloomington, IN, 1993); James H. Merriweather, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Aric Putnam, “Ethiopia is Now: J. A. Rogers and the Rhetoric of Black Anticolonialism During the Great Depression,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10, no. 3 (Fall, 2007): 419-444; Sylvia Frey, ‘The American Revolution and the Creation of a Global African World,’ in From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution, eds. Michael O. West, William G. Martin, Fanon Che Wilkins (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), 52-53.
59 David Henry Anthony III, Max Yergan: Race Man, Internationalist, Cold Warrior (New York, 2006), 170-184.
60 Lindsey R. Swindall, The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955 (Gainesville, FL, 2017), 48, 102, 143; Charles Denton Johnson, “Re-Thinking the Emergence of the Struggle for South African Liberation in the United States: Max Yergan and the Council on African Affairs, 1922-1946,” Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 183-191.
61 Jomo Kenyatta and Wallace-Johnson spent time in Soviet Moscow at the University of the Toilers of the East, which promoted Marxism to non-Europeans. See: Holger Weiss, “Between Moscow and the African Atlantic,” Monde(s) 10, no. 2 (2016): 89-108. It should also be noted that Kenyatta would later become far more conservative on colonialism. See: W. O. Maloba, The Anatomy of Neo-Colonialism in Kenya: British Imperialism and Kenyatta, 1963-1978 (New York, 2017).
62 Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom, 211-212.
63 Paul Robeson, Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey, 1898-1939 (New York, 2001), 211, 239
64 Makalani, In The Cause of Freedom, 198.
65 Tony Martin, Amy Ashwood Garvey: Pan-Africanist, Feminist and Mrs. Marcus Garvey No. 1 Or A Tale of Two Amies (Dover, MA, 2007), 169-182; Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia, 2018).
66 Makalani, “An International African Opinion,” 86.
67 Ashwood Garvey, in Martin, Amy Ashwood Garvey, 142-143.
68 Ibid.
69 Jamaica Gleaner, April 6, 1939, in Ibid., 150.
70 Joy Carew, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Soviet Experiment,” in Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (Rutgers, NJ, 2010), 49-66.
71 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Inter-Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis: A Negro View,” Foreign Affairs, October 1935: 84.
72 Ibid., 86.
73 Ibid., 88.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., 92.
76 Ralph J. Bunche, “French and British Imperialism in West Africa,” Journal of Negro History 21, no. 2 (1936), 38.
77 Ibid., 45.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., 31.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., 31.
83 For more on Yergan’s political journey, see: Anthony, Max Yergan.
84 Ibid., Max Yergan, 168.
85 Yergan, in Ibid., 169, 170.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid.
89 George Padmore, “The Black Man’s Burden in South Africa,” The Crisis, March 1942, 80, 102.
90 “Politics and the Negro, Manifesto Against War,” International African Opinion 1, no. 4, October 1938, 9.
91 George Padmore, “Fascism in the Colonies,” Controversy 2, no. 17, (February 1938).
92 “Notes on the West Indies,” International African Opinion 1, no. 1 (July 1938), 12.
93 George Padmore, How Britain Rules Africa (New York, 1969), 129. For more on Padmore linking fascism to colonialism in this text, see: 129-130, 192-196, and 322-324.
94 Metropolitan Police Report, 8 May 1938, IASB: Reports, MEPO 38/91, The National Archives, UK.
95 Ibid.
96 Metropolitan Police Report, 26 June 1938, Ibid.
97 George Padmore, “Hands off the Colonies!,” New Leader, 25 February 1938.
98 Ashwood Garvey, found in Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (New York, 2019), 367; George Padmore, How Britain Rules Africa (London, 1936), 3-4.
99 Williams, Making the Revolution Global, 7, 25, 30, 122-180.
100 Keith Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice (Durham, NC, 2017), 122.
101 Gopal, Insurgent Empire, 382.
102 Diana Stock (Dinah Stock), “Anti-fascism Begins at Home,” New Leader, 6 May 1938. For the influence of the IASB on Jawaharlal Nehru, see Michele L. Louro, Comrades Against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (New York, 2019), 204-205.
103 Hunter, in Kelley, Race Rebels, 123. For more on this history, see: Kelley, “This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do: African-Americans and the Spanish Civil War,” in Race Rebels, 123-160.
104 McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 105.
105 Gregg Andrews, Thrya J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle (Columbia, MO, 2011), 98.
106 “Negroes Heroes in Spanish War Says I.W.O. Head,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 7, 1937.
107 “Nurse in Heroic Role,” Amsterdam News, January 2, 1937.
108 Edwards to Arthur Mitchell, May 17, 1938, Edwards Papers, Box 1, Folder 3, Chicago History Museum.
109 Thompson, Radio Speech, Madrid, 1937, in Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson, 125.
110 Edwards to Claude Barnett, October 15, 1937, in Andrews, Thrya J. Edwards, 101.
111 Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’, 365.
112 “Politics and the Negro, By the Watchman,” International African Opinion 1, no. 1, July 1938.
113 Edwards, “Moors in the Spanish Moor,” Opportunity 16, 1938, in Andrews, Thrya J. Edwards, 105.
114 Ibid.
115 Torres, Er Rif, August 1936, in Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’, 362.
116 Ibid., 364.
117 Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 8.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Christopher Montague
Christopher Montague is a PhD Candidate in Northwestern University’s newly renamed Department of Black Studies. Chris is a twentieth century historian of anticolonial movements, Black political thought, and practices of white sovereignty in the Anglophone world. His doctoral dissertation analyzes these histories through the Black Marxist movement in Kingston, Jamaica, and the Black Women’s movement in Southwest Nigeria, 1938–1962.