The Black Antifascist Tradition, by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen, is an extensive overview of the politics of anti-racist struggles by Black people in the United States. Published earlier this year by Haymarket Books, it is, first of all, a very interesting and well-written volume that contributes much to the study of Black freedom movements.
One of the most significant aspects of Hope and Mullen’s book is the way it reinforces the centrality of the Black struggle against racism to all other progressive struggles. For example, all the major radical movements of the 1960s, from the women’s liberation movement to the ecology movement, had their genesis in the Civil Rights Movement.
As Hope and Mullen remind us, the US was founded on two major processes of racial oppression: the dispossession, expulsion, and genocide of the Native population, and the enslavement of Africans. The wealth of the colonies and later the US was dependent on African slavery. Even after the legal emancipation of Black people, the struggles of this most oppressed part of the population impacted the whole political climate of the US. There cannot be liberation for workers in general or any other oppressed group without the liberation of the Black population. There can be no real democracy while the democratic rights of Black people are suppressed, as they have been since the 17th century.
In centering progressive struggles for Black liberation, the authors have reinforced this important historical truth. They have performed an important service to all who want to see the defeat of racism and a progressive transformation in the US and in the world.
The scope and scholarship of this volume is impressive. The Black Antifascist Tradition covers the movement against lynching in the late 19th and 20th centuries, anti-colonialism, anti-fascism during the Second World War, the “We Charge Genocide” campaign, the Black Power movement, anarchism, abolitionism, and Black Lives Matter. Their approach to all of these eras and movements are fascinating and reinforce the importance of the Black struggle.
Anti-fascism or anti-racism?
Unfortunately, there are major flaws in the book’s political argument. Instead of portraying these struggles as primarily being against institutional racism, Hope and Mullen frame them as anti-fascist struggles in all cases, whether appropriate or not. They even claim that anti-racist struggles predating the development of fascism in the early 20th century should be counted as part of the Black anti-fascist tradition. In doing so, they sweep up politically contradictory ideologies and movements into this tradition.
In fact, the authors admit that they are including people in the Black anti-fascist tradition who would not have thought of themselves as part of it:
We… begin to recast American history as one deeply rooted in Anti-Black fascism and more important to capture the multifaceted Black Anti-Fascist Tradition from Reconstruction to the present. At the center of this work are a multitude of writings that are explicitly Black Anti-Fascist texts as well as those that we have recast as being part of the broader Black Anti-Fascist Tradition.
It is one thing to look back in history and see struggles as part of a broad pattern, such as seeing ancient slave revolts as part of a continuum of class struggle that extends to modern proletarian struggle. It is quite another to shoehorn political writings into an ideological tradition that was developed decades or centuries later.
Even the portrayal of conscious Black anti-fascists is problematic. The authors are nearly uncritical of the positions taken by various writers — even when they contradict each other, while supposedly being part of the same tradition. In their effort to establish this tradition, they ignore inconsistencies and weaknesses within it.
In broadening the definition of fascism, especially in labeling Jim Crow segregation as fascist, the book disregards the essential aspects of fascism. Fascism is a specific phenomenon of capitalism in crisis, based on a mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie. It cannot be defined merely as state repression, which exists in all states, including under all forms of bourgeois democracy. Fascism arises when repression from the state is not enough to crush the threat of a rising working class.
As Trotksy wrote, “At the moment that the ‘normal’ police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium — the turn of the fascist regime arrives.”
Hope and Mullen even claim that anti-racist struggles predating the development of fascism in the early 20th century should be counted as part of the Black anti-fascist tradition. In doing so, they sweep up politically contradictory ideologies and movements into this tradition.
Hope and Mullen claim that the American form of fascism did not require this: “Throughout the book, we trace how Anti-Black Fascism is enshrined within American law… and how unlike European Fascism, there is no need for a singular Fascist regime or dictator to ensure its existence.”
This analysis ahistorically turns “fascism” into an amorphous influence on everything, rather than a specific structure and set of policies decided on by the ruling class in extreme circumstances.
This is wrong for two reasons. It is not dialectical — it draws conclusions by comparing surface features of racism in the US with surface features of fascism, rather than looking at their essence. And it is ahistorical and anachronistic. Let’s look at both of these errors in more detail.
Undialectical
Both US white supremacy and European fascism were based on racism. The former primarily oppressed Black people and other people of color. The latter was aimed mainly at Jews, but also targeted Roma people, as well as the disabled, and of course communists and socialists.
Both used laws to carry out their oppression. The Black Antifascist Tradition makes a point of the fact that the Nazis copied some of their race laws from the Jim Crow South. The Nazis, of course, secondarily oppressed people of color even though their main scapegoat was Jewish people. Pointing out these similarities is valid. They are similar phenomena. They were both strategies for upholding capitalism and increasing exploitation and oppression.
Fascism is a specific phenomenon of capitalism in crisis, based on a mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie. It cannot be defined merely as state repression, which exists in all states, including under all forms of bourgeois democracy. Fascism arises when repression from the state is not enough to crush the threat of a rising working class.
However, importantly, they are also very different phenomena. The goal of Jim Crow was to divide the poor people of the South, workers and sharecroppers, on race lines. It was to break up the unity between Black and white people that had developed during Reconstruction and the Populist period. It “divided both to conquer each,” according to Frederick Douglass. The goal was not the extermination of the Black race. The goal was not the destruction of working-class unions and other institutions or the atomization of the working class, as it was under fascism.
In order to succeed, the white-supremacist project needed to enroll the majority of poor white people in the oppression of Black people. It had to give white people marginal advantages to encourage and maintain racial division.
In contrast to Jim Crow, the Nazis could not grant the concessions necessary to allow even limited bourgeois democracy. This difference demanded different strategic choices by revolutionaries and others opposed to the racist regimes.
Claiming different phenomena are the same due to superficial similarities is not dialectical. It is true that different phenomena may share characteristics. All class societies are based on exploitation. This leads some to call modern capitalism “industrial feudalism,” missing fundamental differences between feudalism and capitalism. Anarchists oppose all states, ignoring the essential difference between capitalist states based on exploitation and oppression of the working class and workers’ states run by and for the working class. Anarchist opposition to workers’ states, if successful, would derail the revolution.
Genocide has been pursued by different classes for different reasons. The moral similarities between them sometimes hide their profound political and economic differences.
The dialectical approach is very different. It looks below the surface at the underlying dynamics of a phenomenon. Marx looked beneath the price of commodities to understand the value that was the basis of price. He noted that trade had existed in many different modes of production, but explained that capitalism elevated market competition to the central element and made the drive for profit “the law and the prophets.” “Universal commodity production,” which is another way of describing capitalism, changed the very nature of the interaction of commodities. Marx noted that wage labor had existed in previous modes of production, but only capitalism raised it to the dominant form. As Marx said, if it were enough to look at superficial similarities, there would be no need for science.
These are examples that back up the dialectical approach. Stacking similarities is no way to evaluate the identity of phenomena. The fact that Jim Crow and fascism shared racism, oppression, and moral repulsiveness is no more an argument for a common identity than the fact that feudalism, slavery, and capitalism are all based on exploitation.
Ahistorical and anachronistic
Anachronism is the imposition of later historical inventions or social structures on previous time periods. As a political approach, anachronism can also have serious consequences. It makes no sense to talk of anti-fascism before fascism existed. To use examples of Black people organizing against lynching in the late 19th century as “anti-fascist” is simply inaccurate.
An inaccurate analysis of a society, movement or condition can lead to ineffective strategies for change. Labeling a phenomenon fascist when it is not flows from moralism and vague politics rather than a clear analysis, and this can lead to problematic strategies for change.
To use an example from today, calling the US fascist or saying Donald Trump is a fascist can lead to incorrect strategies. On the one hand is the liberal error of voting for the Democrats as the only solution to oppose Trump. On the other are the ultraleft errors of extreme security culture, terrorism, or going underground prematurely. Describing all of US history as fascist or laced with fascism lays the basis for these detrimental strategies today.
Different strategies for fighting Jim Crow and fascism
Saying that Jim Crow is the same as fascism negates effective strategies against each. Instead, it substitutes abstract moral condemnation for effective political strategy.
Under Nazism, all opposition had to go underground. Because white supremacy under Jim Crow relied on Black labor, more open organizing was possible, even if extremely dangerous.
Under Jim Crow, open organizing was also possible because white supremacy rested on the support of the majority of white people. The ruling class instituted a very restricted form of bourgeois democracy for that majority. In contrast to Nazi Germany, there were some success stories of unified Black-white struggle on those few occasions when white people defied the system. This is shown by various historically significant strikes of New Orleans dock workers, sharecroppers, and timber workers, to name a few. Finally there was the success of the Black-led and white-supported Civil Rights movement. All of these had to take on racism to win anything.
Moralism versus effective political opposition
Too often, liberals and even some leftists use an exclusively moral lens to address racism and other evils. Staying on a purely moral level, chattel slavery, fascism, and the genocide of Indigenous people are all horrific and should have been opposed.
However, staying only on the moral level brings no successful political strategy. In order to see how these evils could have been stopped, and more importantly to stop future occurrences, we have to address them politically and economically. What caused them? How did they fit into political and economic conditions of the time? What social leverage was possible to use against them?
Refusing to address these questions leaves us without successful strategies to oppose them. Confining ourselves to abstract moral condemnation when effective strategies of opposition are available is itself ultimately immoral. It places personal conscience above effectively confronting immorality.
The history of Nazi Germany provides a horrifying example of these kinds of political errors. The failure to prevent the rise of Hitler was the result of disastrously bad strategy on the part of the German left. Instead of adopting a united-front policy as proposed by Leon Trotsky, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) pursued an ultraleft policy that isolated it from other parties and prevented the unity needed to stop Hitler. The other dominant party in the working class, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), was no better, likewise refusing to form a united front with other workers’ parties and fatally ceding ground to the Nazis.
The important takeaway from this is that the rise of fascism can be prevented if the best political strategy is pursued. A successful strategy would involve massive and direct confrontation of fascist groups by workers and the oppressed before they grow large enough to overwhelm opposition; presenting a clear radical political alternative to win the hearts of the majority; not relying on the capitalists, their political parties, police, or courts to suppress the fascists; and engaging as much of the working class as possible in the fight in a united front.
As Lenin said, “Without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement.” Successful organizing requires clear politics. In the case of the fight against fascism, it requires the use of the united-front method.
The united front versus the popular front
Historically speaking, the united front has represented Marxism’s attempt to overcome isolation while preserving its politics. Though Marx used this method during his lifetime, the united front was most thoroughly developed by the early Comintern and in Trotsky’s call to fight fascism. The slogan was “march separately but strike together.” The Marxist party would unite with reformists and others to defend union offices and strikes against fascists and bosses. It would unite to win demands for higher wages, better working conditions and better social services, and to oppose imperialist wars.
The two sides of the slogan were each vitally important. The working class could gain the most by “striking together” in united action. However, the politics of the uniting forces were very different, requiring them to “march separately.” During a deep crisis, Marxists wanted to push the struggle as far as possible — to revolution. The reformists only wanted to modify capitalism, to make it a bit more palatable to workers. This meant that united fronts were temporary. They would exist only to the extent that both parties agreed on particular demands at a particular time.
Labeling a phenomenon fascist when it is not flows from moralism and vague politics rather than a clear analysis, and this can lead to problematic strategies for change.
Just as importantly, Marxists would also use the united front to win reformist workers to revolutionary politics. They would try to show that revolutionary tactics were more effective and that mass struggle against the bosses won more than lobbying, electing better politicians, or appealing to ruling-class good will.
The purpose of the united front was not to amalgamate the politics of reformists and revolutionaries. The aim was not to develop a common political program between the two. This would have been illogical and opportunistic. It would have meant revolutionaries jettisoning basic elements of their politics in order to appeal to and unite with reformists.
The opposite approach is called the popular front. After the victory of the Nazis in Germany, the communist parties of Europe shifted to the right. Instead of forming a united front with other working-class parties, they formed coalitions with capitalist parties. Instead of a limited agreement to strike together around particular issues, the popular front developed a common political program with which to win workers over. Instead of working-class independence, it called for channeling of support to bourgeois parties in the coalitions.
Whenever revolutionaries adopted a popular-front approach, they lost their revolutionary politics. Popular-front governments ended up attacking working-class interests, this time with the official support of “communists.” This discredited communism in the eyes of workers and led to disaster for them.
There are many examples of this. In France in 1936, a popular-front government came to power on the back of a working-class strike wave. Because the coalition included capitalist parties, it tried to hold back working-class struggle. When struggle receded, right-wing forces influenced policy more and more, further demoralizing workers. The demoralization was deeper because the supposed working-class parties, the communists and socialists, went along with the attacks. This finally resulted in a fascist victory.
The popular front in The Black Antifascist Tradition
However, the politics of the popular front are not confined to coalition governments in office. Too often, Marxists try to increase their influence by attempting to form common politics with disparate progressive ideologies. Instead of uniting around particular demands, they try to form a common program with ideologies that are fundamentally different and, in some respects, antagonistic. This opportunism muddies the clarity needed for effective political action.
The Black anti-fascist tradition as presented in Hope and Mullen’s book is an example of this. Marxists in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky have always seen opposition to oppression as central to the fight for socialism and have been active in every fight for equality and liberation. From Marx onward they have argued that “a people that oppresses another cannot itself be free.” The working class can never overthrow capitalism if it has not opposed racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice within its ranks. To put a Marxist spin on Lincoln, a class divided against itself cannot stand.
However, fighting racism does not necessarily mean adopting the politics of other tendencies that also oppose racism. Marxists are Marxists because they believe that only the victory of the revolutionary working class and the elimination of capitalism can end institutional racism. Marxists do not believe that a separate Black nation-state can end the oppression of Black people, as some Black nationalists believe. They do not believe that the unification of Africa in a still-capitalist world will bring real liberation, so they do not see Pan-Africanism as a solution. They do not believe that racial diversity at the top of the class structure can end the suffering of a majority of Black people, as liberals believe. And in contrast to Stalinists and Third Wordists, Marxists do not believe that anti-imperialism or peasant movements alone can bring liberation.
The argument put forward by The Black Antifascist Tradition seems to be that other political movements can bring about liberation:
The Black Antifascist tradition intersects with and informs virtually every important Black social and political movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries… Campaign Against Lynching, the Pan-African Movement, Anti-Colonialism, Anti-Imperialism, International Communism, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, Black Feminism…
Early in the book, the authors write approvingly:
[Octavia] Butler challenges readers to become Black Antifascists, Anarchists, Abolitionists, Socialists and Afro-Futurists… The BAFT makes a similar call to its readers.
Later, they follow that up with this statement:
Fighting fascism and fighting anti-Blackness was a way to unite the fight of non-white peoples everywhere against racial capitalism in all its forms while imagining emancipatory alternative futures to it.
Is the central battle the one for working-class power, which of course includes anti-racism, or is it the fight against fascism, which can have a variety of politics? Is the fundamental struggle one of “peoples” or of classes? Populism or Marxism?
The Black Antifascist Tradition bends over backwards to accommodate other ideologies to the point that it abandons the necessity of Marxism as absolutely essential and central. Instead it includes Marxism as one element in a popular-front-type ideology:
Black Antifascism was beginning to merge Pan-Africanism and Marxism into a programmatic whole that equated fascism and colonialism and saw mass Black organizing across the diaspora as the only solution.
The book’s eclectic treatment of Marxism is echoed by its internal contradictions. It tries to incorporate widely disparate views in the same tradition. On the key question of whether the US is fascist or not yet fascist, Hope and Mullen want to include opposite answers. On its first page it cites different opinions:
“For certain people, America has been Fascist all along…” — Robin D. G. Kelley
“The only effective guarantee against the victory of fascism is an indivisible mass movement.” — Angela Davis
“Fascism was a monster born of capitalist parents. Fascism came as the end-product of centuries of capitalist bestiality, exploitation, domination and racism…” — Walter Rodney
Later, the authors quote Langston Hughes: “Fascists is Jim Crow peoples, honey.”
This attempt at amalgamation of contradictory tendencies is an adoption of the popular-front method in regard to ideology. If this theory is carried out in practice, it will lead to defeat, as it has in the past.
Notably, Hope and Mullen uncritically support historical instances of the popular front. In the US during World War II, the Communist Party’s popular front policy mandated that US communists abandon revolutionary politics and support President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the war effort. It led to the isolation of revolutionaries after the war and the onset of McCarthyism.
As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, the popular front ultimately betrayed the Black struggle in the US:
Through the period of the Popular Front… the CP [Communist Party] maintained its popularity among African Americans and many of the oppressed. But over time, the constantly shifting, contradictory positions of the CP and the Soviet Union, which were now led by the increasingly tyrannical Josef Stalin, led to a mass exodus from the party after the war. In the United States during the war, the CP had embraced the Democratic Party and called for unity at all costs. Its conclusion that American Blacks should therefore downplay the continuing fight against racial inequality would eventually erode the ranks of the CP’s membership. But the foibles of the CP should not be conflated with the validity of anticapitalism and socialism as political theories that inform and guide the struggle for Black liberation.
In Spain, the Communist Party’s support of the popular-front government in the 1930s isolated revolutionaries and led to the victory of Franco’s Falangists in the late 30s. In Chile in the 1970s, political support to Popular Unity led to demoralization of the working class, and then the victory of Pinochet’s fascist coup and the severe repression that the country is only now recovering from.
Is the central battle the one for working-class power, which of course includes anti-racism, or is it the fight against fascism, which can have a variety of politics? Is the fundamental struggle one of “peoples” or of classes? Populism or Marxism?
The Black Antifascist Tradition explicitly supports the application of the popular front in regard to anti-racism. For example, the book endorses Black American participation in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. This participation needs more criticism. Under the auspices of the Communist Party, it had dual and conflicting effects. To the extent that it opposed fascism, it was on the right side of history. To the extent that it reinforced the Communist Party’s influence and thus the isolation of revolutionaries, it was on the wrong side of history.
The same can be said of the Double V anti-fascist campaign. This campaign demanded equality for Black people in the US military and at home on the basis that they were patriots fighting for US freedom. It opposed racism at home but supported US imperialism abroad. It supported the US war effort to use it against racism. This was an abandonment of revolutionary opposition to imperialism in order to appeal to American patriotism. It tried to leverage Black progress in the US on the backs of hostility between workers internationally.
The Black Antifascist Tradition goes along with these examples of opportunism. At best, it mentions some criticism but does not take a stand on it.
The same lack of criticism applies to the book’s examination of later movements, including that of the Black Panther Party. As important as the Black Panthers were, they were weakened by a broad and imprecise definition of fascism. Their Maoist politics led to their adoption of the popular-front method and their final demise as a revolutionary organization in the face of severe government repression, including murder by the police.
Conclusion
The Black Antifascist Tradition is a compelling and highly engaging book that will acquaint readers with important figures and moments in the Black liberation movement. To its credit, it emphasizes the absolutely central and crucial role of the anti-racist Black struggle in US and world history. If read critically, it is a very worthwhile addition to the literature of the struggle.
However, its imprecise politics do not give a coherent guide to action, and may lead activists astray. Readers looking for an effective Marxist approach to the fight against racism should look at Black Liberation and Socialism by Ahmed Shawki and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. As Taylor writes in the conclusion of her book, “The day-to-day struggles in which many people are engaged today must be connected to a much larger vision of what a different world could look like.”
Image: Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction, 1935
