The Black Organic Intellectual Tradition and the Challenges of Educating and Developing Organic Intellectuals in the 21st Century
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.13169/jinte.2.1.0051 |
| Pages | 51-107 |
| Published date | 01 July 2018 |
| Date | 01 July 2018 |
| Author | Christopher Harris |
| Subject Matter | Black organic intellectual tradition,Communist Part of the United States of America,Black Power Movement |
The Journal of Intersectionality
51Volume Two, Number One
The Black Organic Intellectual Tradion and the
Challenges of Educang and Developing Organic
Intellectuals in the 21st Century
Christopher Harris, PhD
Freedom Justice Academy (FJA)
Abstract: By summarizing the legacy of the rst and second wave Black working class organic
intellectuals in North America in the 20th century, I will use this as a backdrop to discuss my eorts
in the rst decade of the 21st century to develop a third wave of organic intellectuals in the hip hop
generation. I will oer a case study of the Freedom Cipher Program at the Black Action Defense
Committee (BADC), and discuss the implications of this experience for organizing oppressed Black
working class and underclass youth into organic intellectuals today in this age of neo-liberal capitalism
and globalization. I hope this paper will contribute to the work of the revolutionary party-building Left,
and youth movements concerned with organizing the hip hop generations of the 20th century (born
1965-1984) and 21st century (born 1985-2004) into a new socialist hegemonic project.
Keywords: Black organic intellectual tradition, Communist Part of the United States of America,
Black Power Movement
Introducon
In this paper I will further explore the under-theorized organic intellectual tradition of Black
communist radicalism and militant anti-imperialism in North American communist parties
in the 1920s and 1930s. In this regard, we will see that as opposed to the conservative Black
nationalist ideology of Marcus Garvey that advocated racial separatism and Black capitalism,
Black working class communists in the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), an autonomous
revolutionary-nationalist organization inspired by Lenin and the Russian Revolution, unied with
the Communist Party of the United States of America (CP USA) to advance the revolutionary
process in the U.S. The alliance of Black and white communists in the CP USA was initiated
by forward-thinking Black revolutionaries at a time when racism and white chauvinism were
entrenched in the Party.1 The early history of Blacks in the CP USA was not the liberal
integrationist project that became hegemonic in the civil rights movement a generation later.
Instead, I argue that this historic alliance was a classic Gramscian project that created a multi-
national racially united front in the tens of thousands against U.S. monopoly capitalism during
the Great Depression. Gramsci’s (1971) theory of working class organic intellectuals, hegemony,
and the war of position in civil society to win proletarian hegemony in fascist Italy during the
1920s could be applied to understand the experience of Black communists in the CP USA.
1
While not oriented exclusively to the communist tradition, additional information on the challenges of rac-
ism and white chauvinism in North America historically can be seen in Palmer (2004) and Sawchuk (2009).
52 Volume Two, Number One
The second wave of Black working class organic intellectuals led the development of
the most inuential U.S. Black Power organizations of the 1960s. These Black Power organic
intellectuals were educated through informal inter-generational relations in the absence of a
revolutionary party. During this period, the CP USA did not support the development of U.S.
Black Power due to its liquidation in 1944 by General Secretary Earl Browder into a revisionist
social-democratic party that abandoned its support for African-American self-determination.2
Close examination of available (auto) biographical materials shows that, consequently, the U.S.
Black Power leadership’s ideological development as organic intellectuals was largely the result
of inter-generational and often informal learning relations created by elder civil rights organic
intellectuals Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, Grace and James Lee Boggs, to politicize Black
student organizations in the left-wing of the civil rights movement.
By summarizing the legacy of the rst and second wave Black working class organic
intellectuals in North America in the 20th century, I will use this as a backdrop to discuss my
eorts in the rst decade of the 21st century to develop a third wave of organic intellectuals
in the hip hop generation. I will oer a case study of the Freedom Cipher Program at the
Black Action Defense Committee (BADC), and discuss the implications of this experience for
organizing oppressed Black working class and underclass youth into organic intellectuals today
in this age of neo-liberal capitalism and globalization. I hope this paper will contribute to the
work of the revolutionary party-building Left, and youth movements concerned with organizing
the hip hop generations of the 20th century (born 1965-1984) and 21st century (born 1985-
2004) into a new socialist hegemonic project.
Leninism, Gramscism, and the Black Organic Intellectual Tradion
According to Harry Haywood, Lenin was the rst to theorize about African-American liberation
in the International Communist movement. Lenin’s Draft Theses on the National and Colonial
Question at the Second Congress of the Communist International was based on his study of Black national
oppression in America in the early 20th century. In “New Data on the Laws Governing the
Development of Capitalism in Agriculture,” based on the U.S. Census of 1910, Lenin compared
the Black peasantry in the southern U.S. to the semi-feudal serfs in the agrarian centers of
Russia, arguing these semi-slaves and sharecroppers were victims of an incomplete agrarian and
bourgeois democratic revolution.3 In “Statistics and Sociology,” Lenin contended that African-
Americans constituted an oppressed nation because they did not win equal rights when the
civil war ended. In addition, the accelerated development of monopoly capitalism in the late
19th century created vast national dierences between the oppressed and oppressor nations
within the U.S. and a particularly harsh form of national oppression for African-Americans to
endure.4
Lenin’s experience leading the Bolshevik revolution taught him the signicance of the
national question for advancing the revolutionary process in the U.S. So he critically advised
2
See CP USA 2009.
3
Haywood 1978: 224.
4 Ibid., 225.
Harris — “The Black Organic Intellectual Tradition”
The Journal of Intersectionality
53Volume Two, Number One
White American Communists and used his inuence to seek to transform the newly formed
party into an anti-racist vanguard that would eventually recruit Blacks en masse. When it was
brought to his attention at the Second Comintern Congress, the Party was not recruiting Blacks.
Lenin5 wrote the CP USA in 1921; encouraging them to prioritize work for this oppressed nation,
Lenin was aware of the national chauvinism in the Party that prevented white communists from
understanding the strategic importance of the African-American liberation movement as an
ally of the revolutionary proletariat in the struggle for socialism. It was through such eorts that,
eventually, Black communists were recruited by the CP USA under Comintern directives to do
research and policy work on the African-American national question at leading party schools in
the USSR to advance communist strategy in the U.S.6 Once these directives came from the 6th
Comintern Congress, White chauvinists were forced to organize Black revolutionaries into the
Party despite the reality that most of them had a negative view of Black nationalism.
Despite the rich history of Blacks in the CP USA, some scholars suggest the relationship
between Blacks and communism is incompatible. To give an example, the ideological tensions
between cultural nationalists George Padmore and Harold Cruse and the CP USA have been
used to argue that the interests of the Black radical intelligentsia and American communism
are contradictory.7 Perhaps even more important in terms of classic sociological theory on this
question, Robinson contends in Black Marxism that W.E.B. Dubois, C.L.R. James, and Richard
Wright are not Black Marxist intellectuals, but rather pioneers of an anti-Marxist “Black Radical
Tradition” that transcends the Eurocentric limitations of Marxism to increase our understanding
of Black radicalism in the Americas. Robinson dismisses Marxism as a theory based on a “violence-
prone Western metaphysic” embedded in European civilization, and argues the Black Radical
Tradition, is instead rooted in an anti-materialist metaphysical epistemology whose essence is the
absence of mass violence.8 Robinson contends the Black Radical Tradition is the antithesis of
Eurocentric Marxism because the two ideologies are mutually exclusive at the ontological level
rooted in pre-capitalist forms of racism and white supremacy.9 Since the Black Radical Tradition
is fundamentally rooted in African culture, resistance to both slavery and racial capitalism takes
the form of African spirituality, such as Obeah, Voodoo, and Black Christianity.10 According
to Robinson, from the rst slave revolts in the Americas to the Civil Rights and Black Power
movements, these revolutionary struggles were ideologically rooted in African cultural traditions
and civilization.11 Thus, revolutionary Black consciousness is the practice of African spirituality,
not a Europeanized version of “Black” working class consciousness and anti-capitalist struggle.
Consequently, Black communists are not “real” Black revolutionaries because they are a product
of Marx’s European radicalism. Robinson concludes the primary contradiction between the
Black radical tradition and Marxism is that the latter is rooted in materiality while the former,
5
Robinson 1983: 319.
6
Haywood 1978.
7
Hooker 1967; Cruse 1967, 1968; Padmore 1971; Robinson 1983.
8
Meyerson 2000: 3.
9
McClendon 2007: 3.
10
Robinson 1983: 310.
11
McClendon 2007: 14.
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