Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Mar 10, 2023 In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on two fantastic guests, Prof. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Prof. Jodi Dean. We discuss their co-edited collection, Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, which is an absolutely indispensable resource for those of us serious about achieving liberation!  This collection includes writings focused on the period from 1919-1956, which argue that racial and economic equality can only be achieved by overthrowing capitalism.  Pick up the book! Dr. CBS is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University.  She is an organizer with Black Alliance for Peace and a Co-Author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History alongside our mutual friend Gerald Horne.  She can be followed on twitter @blackleftaf or on her website https://www.charisseburdenstelly.com/. Dr. Jodi Dean is a Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.  She is the author of numerous books including Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging, Crowds and Party, and The Communist Horizon.  She can be followed on twitter @jodi7768. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE

You don't remember Dinn-Vin-Bin-Bou? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history, podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use

the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined, as usual by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Henry. It's a pleasure to be with you. Absolutely. It's always a pleasure seeing you. And also joined as usual by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. I'm a little under the weather. I have two young boys. I feel like I'm always constantly sick, but I would not miss this episode for the world. I'm a huge fan of both Jodi, Dean, and Dr. CBS, and I cannot wait to

dive into this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. These are also two scholars that I'm a big fan of. Before I bring them in, I want to mention that this is the second edition of our new series of sources and methods. Adnan, would you mind if I turned it over to you to give a very brief reminder to the listeners of what the sources and methods series that we're running is. Sure. It's just a series that highlights primary sources, documents themselves, writings of radical activists in the past. In the past, we've had lots of different kinds of episodes and often related to books. People had written historians, characterizing events and so on. But this is a special focus and attention on the writings and documents produced by activists themselves.

So I think it's an interesting series. This is the second edition. Our first one came out last week on the collected works of the Black Liberation Army. And I think it's terrific to actually engage with the writings of these peoples themselves and learn from them. Absolutely. And I highly recommend listeners to go back and check out that episode. that we did on the Black Liberation Army and their collected works. If you haven't already listened to that episode, it really was a fantastic one.

Now, turning to our guests, we have, as Brett mentioned, two outstanding guests today. We have Professor Jody Dean, who is a professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith College's author of numerous books, including Comrade, Crowds and Party, the Communist Horizon. And we're also joined by an old friend of mine, somebody who I haven't seen in a long time, Dr. Charisse Burden Stelly, Dr. CBS, who is an associate professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University, co-author with another one of our friends, Professor Gerald Horn of W.E.B. Du Bois, A Life in American History. And they are both co-authors, or co-editors, I should say, of a new collection of works, which fits within the Sources and Method series,

organize fight win black communist women's political writing which will be the topic for today's discussion so hello professors how are both of you doing it's a pleasure to have you both on the program doing great thanks so much for having us on yep doing great great to be here absolutely so to get us underway within this discussion of organized fight win i'd like to just turn it over to you to kind of give an introduction to what this work is so what is in this text who is this text. As I mentioned, it's an edited collection of texts. And what was the impetus and the process for creating this text? Because, you know, this certainly was a very big labor-intensive process of collecting, editing, compiling these works, introducing these different periods. And it's

really a fascinating work, a very important work in my opinion. So what is in this text? What was the impetus for creating it? And what was the process for creating? on. Sure. So organized fight win, black communist women's political writing. This is what, like our third title, Jody? I think we started with like triple jeopardy and world revolution and then some variation of organized fight win and then we settled on this one, primarily because of how it looked on the cover. We had to blops and stuff off. So anyway, you know, this is a really important work for me. Number one, because of the very collaborative nature of the text, but also because from its inception, it was compiled with activists and organizers

in mind. So even as it came, the idea came out of a classroom setting, which Jody will speak to more, it definitely, as we are putting it together, we definitely had sort of non-academics in mind. So Jody and I always just like to start the conversation by reading the names of the people who are collected in this work. So I'll just do that quickly. We've got Ella Baker, Carlotta Bass, Dorothy Burnham, Williama Burroughs, Grace P. Campbell, Alice Childress, Marvell Cook, Esther Cooper Jackson, who just passed away in August of 2022 at the age of 105. We have Thelma Dale Perkins, Tyra Edwards, Vicki Garvin, Yvonne Gregory, Lorraine Hansberry,

my personal favorite, Dorothy Hunting, Claudia Jones, Ahmaud White Katz, Louise Thompson Patterson, and Aslonda Good Robeson. And in terms of the types of texts that are collected, we have an array, primarily because we wanted to think broadly about sites of theorizing and knowledge production. So we've got committee reports. We have some newspaper articles. We have journal articles. So from the theoretical journal political affairs. We have speeches. We have excerpts from memoirs. We've got pamphlets or excerpts from pamphlets and even a couple of fiction columns. So it's a wide array of writings that constitute just a very thin slice of the theoretical and sort of political contributions that black communist and communist adjacent women made to communist theorizing and organizing. So I'll pass over to Jody to speak a little bit about how this collection came together. So we, Cherise and I met sometime around 2017, 2018 at Red May, which is organized by Philip Wollstetter and it's held in Seattle.

And we were both speakers there and met. And then I invited Cherise to speak at Hobart William Smith. And so one of the things that I learned is Cherise knows the archives of 20th century communism and quit 20. a century radical black struggle, like better than anybody out there. And so that was kind of something that I was learning over time. And then I taught a seminar at HWS on socialist feminism. And one of my students was looking for particular texts from Louise Thompson Patterson and couldn't find it. And my first guest was like, well, she's probably just being lazy and not doing proper research. This would be easy. I'll find it in about five minutes and didn't. I

didn't find it in an hour. I didn't find it in two hours. So I contact Cherise and she's like, oh, I'm sure I have it. And I was sure she would have it too. And then weirdly enough, she didn't have it. And then Cherie starts talking to various other people that she knows who do this work and people didn't have it. And then it's just like, it becomes really clear that this is not okay, that these text should be easier to find and they need to be in a volume that can be useful in classrooms and even more. And this came as we were talking about it, it really needs to be a volume that'll be useful and accessible to activist. And so that was really the genesis of the idea. And then COVID hits. And I, because both

of us had me, particularly Sharis, had a whole bunch of stuff in the pipeline that she's working on. And what happened with COVID is I really was not able to do that much of my own work, but I'm like, okay, I can start, you know, contacting archives and looking that way. And my daughter was at home from college because she got, you know, had to leave school and is miserable at home. I'm like, so I've got labor here who can do transcription. And so this combination of we already had the idea. And now one of us has, one of us has knowledge that, Cherie, some of us has times and an unpaid worker here in the house. So actually we paid her.

We were able to actually get the work done. So that's the kind of sort of, you know, material conditions of putting this together. And maybe like Cherise described the kind of text that we started looking at. And one of the things we realized there was so much, we kind of had to make some time distinctions. And we had to stop it at a particular point. And so we stopped it in 56. That seemed like parts of reasons that we can go into if we want to in the content discussion,

like a good time to start to stop it. And we knew we wanted to get in with the women who were some of the family. of the party like Grace Campbell and then early person like William and a Burrough. So that's how the time framing started off with the book. I just want to emphasize we did pay Sadie. It was not super expectation. Yeah, well, that's fascinating. It's a fascinating collection. I'm really interested also before we get into talking about some of the texts and the themes is the arrangement. You pointed out in the introduction that you could organize. it thematically, perhaps, and I've seen a lot of collections that are like that of like,

you know, 60s radical writings, and they try and, you know, put them around certain kinds of themes and so on. But I liked so much the fact that these were more or less in chronological order of publication and when they were produced and so that you could use them as primary source documents effectively by situating them. And one thing that I noticed in a lot of these kinds of political writings that I've seen elsewhere, say, for example, Fanon's, you know, writings for al-Mujahid, you know, that there's so many, like, relevant contemporary references that, you know, would kind of be lost if you just, you know, put them in anti-colonial writings or in, but by having them in order, you can see and follow kind of world events, local events, and the

history. So I wondered if you could reflect a little bit more about how these documents can be used and anything else you might say about the value of arranging them in the way that you did that maybe you had something in mind about how these could be read or used as documents both of their time and for contemporary readers. Yeah, I mean, I could say a little bit about that. I think that one of the good things about not being historians is that we don't have to just look at change over time, we can really map out striking continuity. And I think that part of organizing it chronologically is that you see some of the repetitions of the types of issues and problems that these women are looking at in different epochs. So Jody does a good job with introduction

of like talking about patterns, right? And so broadly conceived, section one is kind of that post first red scare moment at the intersection of the Harlem Renaissance, the consolidation of Monopoly capital and coming out of what the historian Rayford Logan calls the Nadeer, right, the low point of race relations, which is basically 1890 to 1920, which ironically coincides with a progressive era. So it's sort of that moment coming, it's that conjuncture coming out of those particular events. The second section is really the Great Depression. It's the 1930s. And it's the Great depression, as well as the Spanish civil war in the evasion of Abyssinia. And then relevant to our story is really the start of the civil rights movement, which is Scottsboro. There's less about

Angelo Herndon, but Angela Herndon is in there too, but sort of Scottsboro as the basis of nonviolent direct action and mass protests, that becomes the sort of signal approach in the civil rights movement, right? And so that's the 1930s moment. Section 3 is roughly... Sorry, maybe it's worth for readers who are not familiar with that era of American history, just to say what the Scottsboro incident was. Read the book. I'm just kidding. Just kidding. So Scotsboro is these nine young black boys who were arrested for and convicted of raping two white women in 1931. There It was this long, long process of getting them freed. Eight of the nine ultimately were freed.

It took over two decades. But the international labor defense and the NWACP were variously involved in litigating these cases. It was the ILD and the Communist Party that pushed to not only battle this out in the courts, but also in society through mass organizing, thereby turning into an international struggle. And so you see people making leads between like Scotsboro. the invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish-American War, and the overall, you know, the overall, you know, deteriorating conditions of the Great Depression. So there's way more to say about Scottsboro,

but that's basically what that is. The third section is really about World War II and the immediate aftermath or the demobilization that happened after World War II and then that uptick in racial oppression and workers' workers' oppression and the connections that our women are making between the ostensible fight for democracy abroad and it's failure to realize that at home and then the double V campaign, right, the victory at home and victory abroad. The next section is roughly the rise of McCart, the McCarthy period, which generally speaking is 1951 and 1954, but part of what our women convey is that that confluence of anti-worker, anti-radical, anti-black repression is really ongoing. But this is the traditional

height of McCarthyism. And then that follows through in the fifth section. And then there's a couple of kind of outliers. There's a piece from 1986 that references the 1950s, but it's from Dorothy Huntin's biography of Althea's Huntington. And then there's a piece from

1960 by Carlotta Bass that where she was sort of pushed out of a sorority and then is for anti-communist reasons and then it's sort of reflecting back. So that's the sort of timeline and the different kind of epochs or conjunctures that are engaged in each section. Yeah, that's what's wonderful. I kind of want to ask zooming out a little bit and just kind of to center this at the

more or less towards the beginning of this conversation is can you just kind of give us your input, both of yours, on the utter importance of centering, you know, black communist women's perspective for revolutionary organizations and movements in the United States, in particular, given its history. You know, maybe you can tie it to the concept of triple exploitation as well. And because I just, I think it's undervalued. I think a lot of communist organizations and people don't pay as much attention to these sort of thinkers as they should, which is another reason why this book is so important and essential. But yeah, just kind of getting your thoughts on that. One of the reasons that it's important is that you start to see

a different version of what the working class actually is than if you start with the assumption that working class just means white men in factories. I mean, that's never been an accurate description of the working class in any country. There's always been agricultural labor and there's always been domestic labor. And so by bringing out these writings from organized black communist women, you see a really different approach to what the working class is. You also see a really different approach to what the Communist Party is. When you're starting with the black women organizers, you see like, oh, these are people who are concerned with people's lives in their neighborhood and using these concerns to galvanize a large-scale struggle. You are not seeing a bunch of people getting dictation from Moscow telling them what to do that they're blindly following along with. And so it's such a different way of recognizing what's going on with communism in the U.S. that I think anybody who's interested at all in radical politics needs to begin actually.

actually with this book, Organized Bite Win, because you don't fall into the kind of stupid conceits of Cold War historiography that has unfortunately actually impacted left organizing and left thinking in ways that it never should have. Yeah. And just to add to that, I think it's important because, so I shudder when you say centering, like, because this whole centering discourse can come out of this sort of identity reductionist, like liberal logic that's overtaken. in a lot of organizing spaces. But when you read our women, they never say, as a black woman, you need to listen to me. Or we can only, you know, it's only about black women.

They're always making connections to the colonized, right? To other oppressed workers, to the way that black men have been structurally unemployed and pushed out of the workforce, thereby creating particular material conditions for black families, i.e. and black women, right? they're talking about how they're linked to their sisters fighting against fascism in Europe. So it's always, even as they're taking their own historical and material conditions as a starting point, it's not just to say that we are the subjects of history. It's to say that we are part, we certainly need to be considered.

We are part of this broad-based proletarian struggle. And if it is that you ignore black women, if, for example, the party does not recruit black women and make concerted efforts to do so. through its social relations as well as its political strategy, then you will have an incomplete proletarian revolution at best. And so it's not this identity reductionism. It's not this ontological claim of knowing or of radicalism. Their analysis comes through their lived experience, but it also comes through organizing. It comes through criticism and self-criticism. It comes to being in an organization. It comes relationally. And so I think what this book shows

us a way that we don't have to reinvent the wheel when we think about the ethics, epistemology and politics of organizing, people are already doing it, right? And it doesn't have to be this permutation of identity. We simply need to have a broad understanding, as Jody said, of who counts as a worker and what is to be done. Yeah, I want to follow up briefly. Since you touched on the nebulous concept of, well, I shouldn't say the nebulous concept of identity, reduction, and how they really do a good job of avoiding identity reductionism within these works. It's something that we have to be very clear in stating that they do avoid identity reductionism because some people that have not read the book are going to look at something like the

subtitle, Black Women Communist Writings and think, oh, you know, they're centering the fact that they are black. And this is going to then, you know, dive, dive. devolve into identity reductionism. There's another thing that I wanted to also hit, which is the concept of feminism, which is something that you bring up in some of the introductions to various of the chapters, as well as in the introduction of the book as a whole. One thing that you state, and I think that this is something that's very important and has actually been in some kind of online discourse relatively recently, is that while these

women did not go out of their way to call themselves feminists, it is very useful to frame these women as feminists in their own right, particularly as a way of trying to not allow the term feminism to be subsumed into a hegemonic, white, bourgeois conception of feminism. These women really did do some tremendous work, a lot of tremendous work, that is very vital to understanding in order to advance the struggle for women and liberation of women. But we have some people that are on the left that will claim that feminism in of itself is a bourgeois concept and therefore anything that is associated with feminism can therefore be thrown out as a bourgeois concept. I think that this work is a really important tool to combat that notion. I don't know if either of you have anything that you want to say on that, but I thought that that was something that was interesting that was brought up several times in here and something that's been brought up, like I said, in some online kind of foolish discourse.

of you can't ever use the word feminism without it being a bourgeois concept or referring to bourgeois feminism. I'll say a little bit about this or what comes to mind as I hear you thinking about this. And that is, I mean, you know, Marxist historically have been concerned themselves with the woman question. And particularly in the 19th and very early 20th century, they didn't, they put. pushed against feminism because it's bourgeois feminism, but never pushed against the woman question. In fact, London has this great interaction with Clara Zedkin. That's a really important

piece. I mean, there's obviously Engle's own writing on the origins of the family and the kind of historical defeat women as a class. So there's a long history of Marxist concern with the woman question. That's just a fact. And to act like anything that's associated with women gets involved in bourgeois feminism is, is incorrect. So that's the first thing I think that needs to be an important kind of clearing line. That said, one of the things that's really important about any of the communist analysis is it doesn't begin with identities. It begins with relations of production and reproduction.

And that's the communist, you know, that's a communist approach. And our black communist women are writing in the United States, they're writing under conditions writing obviously under capitalism, and they're writing under conditions of imperialism and colonialism, and they see the connections between the experiences of workers all around the world, and these are experiences that are impacted by colonialism and by imperialism and by racism and white supremacy. And so the question isn't kind of, if it's funny, I found myself kind of balking a bit about your, they do a good job in avoiding identity. It's like, I don't know, they didn't have to try to avoid it. It doesn't come up because that's not where their analysis is. That's not how they look at the problem. They don't look at, like, identity reductionism is when people that begin with themselves as individuals

and worry about this individual approach rather than think, how do we organize the working class for revolution? Now, what does it take to overthrow capitalism? What does it take to end imperialism? And those are the concerns. And what it takes is overcoming racism so that in ways that divide the working class, recognizing how capitalists want to divide us, and actually fighting to build unity. And so that's one of the things that I really love about these early analyses is that you see, oh, this is what a naturally radical analysis looks like.

And a radical analysis looks like, how do we build unity to fight this fight? Not, oh, you know, what about me? Well, I have painstakingly. in various places took pains to, like, disentangled triple oppression from intersectionality and anti-imperialist women who understand the importance of women's liberation from feminism. I'm up to, there's two ways to go about this. I am not a feminist, and so I don't have a dog in the fight of expanding the politics of feminism. I'm not a feminist.

It's not my bag. And I think that we need to understand that people who deeply care, about women liberation don't have to be conflated with the rubric of feminism. And in fact, having these different forms of struggle around gender and sexuality is actually good. Like, feminism does not have to be the only tool that we have. Or, you know, the problem becomes when we when feminine, when we conflate, well, we think intersectional feminism is the apotheosis of liberation. That becomes the problem because a lot of intersectional feminism is liberal and bourgeois. It just is. That's not to say all of it is, because

There's revolutionary feminists. So that's one thing. On the other hand, for people from feminists, feminism is there the way that they've come to consciousness. It is the primary means to which they understand the world. Understanding these women as revolutionary feminists will help to expand that politic for them. And so I don't, I don't have a dog in the fight of saying, how dare you call them feminists, right?

I have a critique of that. But at the same time, if this is for organized. if this is for ordinary people, and for them, feminism is an important part of their praxis. And these women help them to expand their feminist practices. Well, I might just say you can't do that, right? I guess, well, I'm waiting for one of the co-house to hop in. I just want to clarify that I was not saying that we should not combat bourgeois feminism. Like, obviously, we should be combating bourgeois feminism. I just think that we have to be a little bit. And again, I agree with you, Dr. CBS, but I think that what we have to keep in mind, and this is not

disagreeing with you, I just want to underscore this point, is that we have to be able to allow for the expansion of the term feminism or repurposing of the term feminism, even if we ourselves don't use that term to describe ourselves or various theorists that wouldn't use it to describe themselves. But we do have to keep in mind that we are combating bourgeois feminism when we are discussing feminism. Well, I think, I just want to say, sure, but we cannot be a historical and decontextual. And so in expanding, right? And so again, these are political questions. These are ideological questions. And so again, I think that one would be justified in defending these women as not feminists. And I think that won't be justified in expanding feminism through the inclusion of the

women that we cover in this text. I think that both are acceptable. And there's really, room for both. Yeah, absolutely. Adnan? Yeah, I was just interested in maybe another component also of how they situated themselves. And maybe it gets at a little bit of the interest, you know, the way in which they imagined black liberation within the context of, you know, workers liberation is also, you know, there were other radical movements contemporaneous to black communists.

in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and particularly various different strands of black nationalism. And I just wondered if they had any critiques or, since you do talk about some idea of, you know, framing some of their analysis through a sense of a black nation that needed to be liberated, i.e. a kind of colonial question of black folk in, you know, the United States. And so what distinguish their perspectives, although I think I could probably figure out what that was, but how did they respond to some of these other kinds of movements? They offer analysis in those in attempting to kind of broaden the scope of black liberation and introduce more kind of class perspectives. I was curious about that, especially since the CPUSA. you know, at one point, you know, seems to abandon the idea of characterizing, you know, of using

that, you know, Lenin's kind of endorsement, you know, of thinking of black people in America as a nation. I'm just wondering about that concept and how they worked with that. Maybe we just started the earliest period, like the early founding period. Grace Campbell was one of the founding members of the African Blood Brotherhood, along with Cyril Briggs. And their analysis was that black liberation required socialism, and socialism required black liberation. So they've got, and this was pre-Bulshivik. So, and so they developed this analysis in the, I guess the magazine was the Crusader. I think I've got that right.

And so they do that work. And then this makes the links that the Bolsheviks are the, you know, the American communists want to form with them really quite strong. And so they start to, the groups kind of merge. But so they come together, not because of Lenin's analysis. It's not like Lenin's analysis came first. There was this specific analysis of the necessity of socialism for black liberation. And then the attractiveness of Lenin's thesis. becomes clear and the good reasons for merging become really quite clear.

And then you have the involvement of people like Harry Haywood in the formulation of the Black Belt thesis. And so I'll maybe stop there if Cherise wants to pick up from that point. Well, what's important to note is that the early Communist Party tried very hard to kind of infiltrate the Garby movement of the 1920s and to siphon off black workers to the Communist Party. And when that was unsuccessful, so George Padmore writes about this, many people write about it, but George Padmore writes about this in Pan-Africanism or communism. And this is when he's, you know, he was in the party for, he was a communist for a long time.

But anyway, when that didn't work, that's when the Communist Party itself begins to formulate its own, to think, to come up with its own position on the Negro question. First, 1922 is a sort of first pass at this. Then they form the American Negro Labor Congress. And then this culminates with the 1988 Black Belt Nation thesis. And so I think there's a way that coupled with the sort of integration of the African Blood Brotherhood folks who dissolved that organization to merge with the Communist Party, I think that there's a way that they understood the Negro question as central and black liberation as central to proletarian struggle, which is different than a bourgeois or a liberal black nationalism that they were deeply critical of. And part of the reason they were deeply

critical of Garveyism was because it had had this sort of bourgeois or sort of capitalist orientation, same to the sort of don't buy where you can't work type of black nationalist iterations that were happening throughout the 1920s that were very top down. And so I think that there was a understanding of the Negro question as central that's different than, sort of a bourgeois black nationalist consciousness. But what Jody was talking about, the African Blood Brotherhood, that's what we would call a revolutionary nationalist approach

at the Black Panthers and other, and revolutionary action movement in 1960s take up. And so it was a little bit, so they were critical of a top-down, petty bourgeois, black nationalism. But it's also important to note that the overwhelming majority of black communists did not support the Black Belt Nation thesis because they thought it would, it just lent too closely to Jim Crow, right?

But I think that what was Harry Haywood won, but I think that what was appealing was this question of self-determination and how to actually specify the content of black oppression that it's not just discrimination. It's not, they're not like other ethnic groups. It's national and character. And the other thing that the Black Belt Nation thesis did was push the work to the South. It, you know, and this is out of this is where you get the organizing of the share. Copper's Union. You know, Hammer and Ho is a really good text on this. But it also, it was a way to

sort of push the work to the South and be intentional about organizing black workers more than the sort of seceding from the nation. That part was sort of secondary to the actual work that the Black Belt Nation thesis and the self-determination thesis afforded. And I want to want to add one other thing, namely it was important also for organizing white workers and that it told white workers, that they had to prioritize black workers, that they had to be willing to fight and even die for black workers, that they needed to recognize the centrality of the race question for organizing the working class.

So in some ways, there is an element of the Black Belt Nation thesis that was really important for combating racism in the working class and making sure that workers knew how important, building unity is. So I want to encourage everybody to go out and get this full text, and I think it really is essential to have this wonderful collection of these writings in full on the bookshelf of everybody, at least in the U.S., who considers themselves a communist and beyond. But to give a little taste of the text, I was hoping that each one of you maybe could highlight a specific essay or even a specific thinker in the text in the collection that you found particularly

surprising or that you were inspired by or that you think is like an undervalued you know contribution to to communist theory um in this text i'd really love to uh to hear both of your thoughts on on what you would pick out so there are just so many of these texts um that i found to be so so a text that i was really important i think to include in here two texts one was the bronx slave market um and one was toward a brighter dawn Twitter Brider Don is really one of the earliest articulations of triple oppression. So triple oppression and triple exploitation are both used.

So Twitter Brighter and the important thing about Twitter Brider Don is it's actually a report back from the National Negro Congress, the Women's Commission and the National Negro Congress. So it's also a collective thing. But this is like the earliest articulation of triple oppression, which the thing Pottia Jones's peace and anti-neglect to the problems of the Negro woman is probably the most popular rendering of that, which is not in this volume because it's easily accessible. And then the Bronx slave market is actually just a case study of that. It comes the year before, but it actually, if you read back,

it's actually a case study of how triple oppression works in real time. And Chord of Brighter Dawn actually references the Bronx slave market, right? So, but that's not my piece, right? I just, but those are pieces that I had in my possession that I'm like, these need to be in the collection. A new piece that I think we actually got from Mika Makalani, maybe, or maybe this is one that you found, Jody. How shall the Negro woman vote by Grace Campbell?

This might have been one that you got from Inside Library alone. But this piece is really important. And I read from this often when we do these interviews. Shout out to Verso, by the way. They did a really good job of organizing our press stuff. So I just want to read this part that Grace Campbell writes. And this is in 1928. She says the Democratic and Republican parties have been in power

through Negro votes since the close of the Civil War. Negroes have voted for both parties during this long period. Out of Democratic and Republican administrations alike have come Jim Crowism, mobbing, segregation, lynching, southern disenfranchisement, and general terrorism. Lack of opportunity of making a living in poor educational facilities. At the same time, a stamp of inferiority has been placed on all Negro people. This is the past record of the capitalist parties. In the present campaign, they promise nothing better.

So she is basically, so later on in the next. In 1960s, Julius Naderde says the United States is a one-party state, but in typical U.S. excess, it has two. She's basically making that point. And I think that that piece is particularly relevant now because everybody wants to talk about the Republican Party as the fascist party. It is under the Democratic Party that we are at, we're fighting this. Okay. I don't know what to stay on this podcast. That we're at war with Ukraine right now, however it is that you want to frame it.

It is under the Democratic Party that the build back basic or build back better, whatever the thing is called. did not come to fruition. It is under the, it is under the Democratic Party that the impending railroad, railroad worker strike was crushed. It is under the Democratic Party that we saw this, this probably the largest ecological catastrophe in history in East Palestine, Ohio, be virtually ignored by the federal government. That's the Democrats. That's the so-called lesser of two evils. And in 1928, okay, this is what, 90, 90, almost 100 years, ago at this point that this was realized, and we somehow think we're more politically civilized now. And so I just, that's a really important piece by Grace Campbell. You know, I just want to

mention quickly before Professor Dean Hobson that I had that exact same quote highlighted in my book and was one of the things that I was planning on bringing up. So it's really funny that, you know, we have this 300 plus page book and we had that exact same quotation pulled up to talk about. So that is really nice. Anyway, Professor Dean, sorry for interrupting. No, no, there, there's so many pieces, and at different points in time, I feel drawn to different ones. The ones that Shuri started to mention that we got from Minka Makalawe are three reports on Negro workers from Willie Anna Burroughs. And those are really great. He got those out of the archives. Those have not ever been published before. And one of the things that I like about them is that you see,

she's just, she's repeating the problems that organizers have all the time. Like, we don't have enough people. We don't have enough resources. We need more people to get involved. We need more people to do this. And one of the things that I think that's important is for folks to recognize two things. One, the Communist Party was not this all-controlling thing that gave everybody resources all the time, right? Parties have to be built. Second, the problems that they encounter are the ones that we encounter. And any activist and organizer has these issues. And it's not something brand new. It's something that we have to deal with rather than kind of wish away and think, oh, it's just something peculiar to us and our weakness of our group. No, it's always

there. And so I think keeping those things in mind and seeing how people don't with that is really crucial. But my favorite piece, and I'm going to take the liberty of actually just reading a tiny bit of it, is unrest in Africa due to oppression from Islanda Good Robeson. It's from Freedom Magazine, published in June of 1953. That was the magazine put together by her husband, and founded by her husband and Louis Burnham. And so it goes like this. The struggle of the African people in Kenya for the return of their land,

the struggle of the African Indian and colored people in South Africa against segregation and discrimination. nation, the struggle of the North African people in Tunisia and Morocco for control of their land, resources, and internal affairs, the struggle of the people of Indochina and Malaya for control of their natural wealth. All these are closely related to the struggle of the Negro people here in these United States for truly representative government and full equality. And these struggles are essentially another part of the successful struggle of the peoples of India and of Indonesia for self-government and independence. Their victories are

our victories. And to go a little further back in history, the successful struggle of the Chinese people under the warlords, of the Russian people under the Tsars for control of their land, resources, and government were and are part of the whole picture, and their victories are also our victories. I just love this so much as the way Link struggles, because it's something we need to do more. And sometimes when the U.S. left is not doing well, it's like we think their victories, like some other group in the West, their victories are our defeats. But here, it's the opposite. And I think this is what we need more and more in our politics. I agree. I thought I really loved this essay, too. And I noted that it's 1953. And I believe

Aslanda Good Robeson actually mentions at some point about, yes, the Arab Asian African bloc in like geopolitics and world sort of politics. And this is before the Bandung conference in 1955, two years before you actually have the Afro-Asian kind of conference sort of trying to promote this sense of political solidarity in the, you know, in the in in the post- colonial era. And so I just thought this was really just so prescient and not only prescient in its time in recognizing the need for these kinds of solidities for global anti-colonial revolution, but also, as you're pointing out, for our own time, because we haven't necessarily developed all of those relationships, you know, in the left. And so I just wondered if, you know, there was more to say, you know, about this essay. And I'm just thinking a little bit here at the end, the very last paragraph. I found this very, you know, useful statement here. I believe all this double talk of the Western nations about free nations, free world

democracy, the four freedoms, which I think that is that a dig at FDR. and the four freedoms, human rights and peace is reverberating and will echo back to blast the colonialism and oppression right on out of existence. So this kind of also recognition of what the kind of Cold War ideology is promoting about U.S. Empire abroad and counterposing to it the genuine struggles for liberation that are taking place, I just thought that was such a sharp and wonderful contrast there. So I don't know if you have any other sort of thoughts about the value or an importance of this, you know, of this essay. What's the real kind of methodological and theoretical outcome in her analysis? But I thought it was a very really brilliant essay.

Well, I think that there are two prior connections that, so one is the 1945 Pan-African Congress is important because at that 1945 Pan-African Congress, which was also in conversation with at International Trade Union Conference that happened like a few months before, there were, you know, they send these greetings. They both send and receive greetings from various countries, one of which some came from Egypt, some came from India. So there's already that sort of third world solidarity sentiment, right? Because the 1945 Pan-African Congress in contradistinction to the previous ones was that it was, the emphasis was on peasants and workers, the emphasis was on Africa and the third world as

the sort of leaders of independence as opposed to like Africans in the diaspora. So you, U.S. or, you know, primarily U.S. or Caribbean Africans at the forefront. So there was that precedent. And of course, W.B. Du Bois was a primary driver of that. And of course, where there's W.E.B. DeBois, there's Shirley Graham DeBois. Shirley Graham DeBois and and many of the other women in his writings have a close relationship. Secondly, is the we-charged genocide petition of 1951, and the we-charged genocide petition of 1951 makes a close connection between the genocide of African-Americans and the Korean War. And so they say a few times throughout that the jelly bomb and the linch rope are connected.

And so there again, we see this even before the Vanden Conference. There's this notion of Afro, not only Afro-Asian solidarity, but of solidarity amongst those who are subjected to imperialism and this idea that the oppression of African Americans is the foundation of the ravaging and murdering of racialized and colonized people abroad, not least through warmongering. And she's a signer of We Charge Genocide. She's a member of the Civil Rights Congress. She's a member of the Council on African Affairs. So again, I think that what's important is that these people are belong to organizations. The organizations are, they're linked, right, because they have a lot of the same members, for example, Alphiis Hunton is a member of the CRC, as well as the CAA.

Dorothy Hunting is his wife who's in here. But so she has this analysis because she's doing work within the Council on African Affairs. They're doing anti-apartheid work, for example, in 1948, right? This is decades before the, the burgeoning anti-aparthe-partite struggle in 1980s. And so she's in these organizations. So, of course, she has this analysis. And that sort of analysis creates the conditions for something like the Bandung Conference, right? And it's also a kind of bandung from below because Bandung was a bunch of leaders, right? It was leaders and kind of diplomats and those types of people.

And this is a band-dung from below. As a side note, this was what was really interesting. a good development of the Tri-Continental Conference of 1966 because it wasn't just heads of state. It was also guerrilla groups and other types of organizations. And prior to that, the all-African People's Party or the All-African People's Conference held by Klaman Kruba, 1958 was a similar thing, right, as African people. So anyway, I'm just rambling at this point. But Aslonda was part of all of these networks, not just Paul, right?

Aslonda and then her close relationship with people like Lorraine Hansberry and Shirley Graham Du Bois and Louise Thompson, And all the women in here, like, they're doing stuff. They're part of, they are proletarian. They're part of this mass struggle. And that's why they have this really prescient and insightful analysis, I think. Well, it's just such a contrast. I mean, thinking of, you know, Richard Wright's the color curtain, you know, which is like such a terrible kind of account of the Bandung conference.

And you have these really, you know, much more perceptive, solidaristic analysis. is going on about colonialism. And it just reminds me also of another piece that I really liked and was interested in and wanted to ask you about was the Lorraine Hansberry's Egyptian people fight for freedom. This was just a very exciting, you know, kind of, it's almost like you can watch, you know, what's been, what's happening, what's taking place and how it's registering and what the analyses are, you know, for black communist people. in you know in the u.s observing observing it and just the things that they that she points out here you know that often get forgotten in the histories you get it portrayed right here you know

I thought this was wonderful about you know women's movement in Egypt and how they were contributing guerrilla fighters you know in the resistance to British colonialism imperialism in the canal zone, you know, the kind of thing that in subsequent nationalist histories often don't get told as much as they should be, but it's clearly known, you know, among people who are expressing their solidarity, are paying attention because they see this as part of their struggle as well. So, you know, the interest in Egypt, I mean, what did you think was the particular kind of valence and interest in Egypt? Was it

as a kind of African country, was it because of British imperialism? You know, what were the ways in which this was, you know, rendered meaningful for their audience, you know, here at home? One thing I would say, I don't know if this is an exact answer to your question, but

for me, one of the reasons that I really liked this piece was, in fact, the training of some 250 young women for guerrilla combat service against the British. I just thought that was really exciting. And to me, it puts in person, I was thinking, as we were selecting pieces, one of the reasons I like that is it made me think about people whose activism is just online and they think of this is like a really big deal. And it was like, talk to me when you're, you know, you're training 250 guerrilla combat fighters.

And then let's kind of put that activism in perspective. I mean, that's not an answer to your question, but it was one of the things that made this appealing to me. The other thing is just thinking about, you know, the last line of that piece is, in other words, the Egyptian people intend to be free. And in both this piece and the Islama Good Robson piece, the fundamental thematic is the struggle for liberation. And this struggle for liberation is going on in the United States. and it's going on abroad, it's an anti-colonial, it's an anti-racist, it's an anti-imperialist struggle, and they need to be thought together. And I think just that, and both of these are from Freedom, you know, Freedom Magazine, and they're hammering home the kind of international

dimension of the freedom struggle and making it very clear that the struggle against white supremacy in the U.S. is part of the same struggle. You know, I just want to reiterate the Council on African Affairs. It can't be underestimated. It folded in 1955 because of state repression and precisely the state targeted the CAA, precisely because of these types of international connections and international analyses. And the CAA is important because Paul Robeson was a member, as Landa Good Robeson was a member, Louise Thompson Patterson, W. V. Du Bois, Shirley Graham DeBois,

these people who are writing in freedom. So freedom becomes, so they had Spotlight Africa, which was the actual organ of the Counts on African Affairs, but freedom becomes a popular form of sort of bringing these issues to ordinary people, to ordinary workers, especially black workers, black people, right? And so those connections, like, can't be underestimated. And Lorraine Hansberry is sort of handpicked by Paul Robeson to be like, she was initially like his kind of like general secretary,

but then very soon was very integral to keeping the paper afloat because it was constantly under resource and et cetera, et cetera. But the other interesting thing just about this piece is like, when you hear about Lorraine Hansberry, you know about like a raisin in the sun and to be young, gifted in black. Like she's a revolutionary, right? There's another piece by her where she's at this peace conference in South America in Paul Ropes instead because at that time his passport had been revoked. But what we might call intellectual McCarthyism works in two ways. One is the complete erasure of revolutionary people like a Dorothy Burnham, who, mind you, is still alive. But then it's also the sanitizing of people like W.B. Du Bois on the one hand, where we only know of souls of black folk, but nothing else. But also Lorraine Hansberry. She wasn't just this, she wasn't a bourgeois playwright.

She was a revolutionary. She was a culture worker. And part of those politics were developed in and through the type of work she was doing at freedom. I just want to add one other thing on this revolutionary theme. I sometimes feel like there's this image of what revolutionaries look like and act like. And that that image was shaped a lot by particular media reactions to the Black Panther Party. And so that's like that's clearly visual as revolutionaries. and that these communist women in the 40s and 50s don't look like what people expect revolutionaries to look like, right? They, you know, they're dressed nicely.

They look more like from like the gays of 50 years, like they'd be going to church, not that they're going to a Communist Party reading. They're doing work like, you know, in Louis Thompson's Patterson's memoir, we have the piece about organizing around the Scotspur, her boys campaign. And she's talking about like, you know, arranging the buses, where people are going to sleep at night, getting people from here to there. I mean, these kinds of mundane

tasks, people don't think about revolutionaries like that. But this is actually the work of building an organization, building a class, building a unity, fighting the fight. And I think it's important that people maybe broaden the sense of what is a revolutionary activity. What does a revolutionary look like? And reading this and learning from these women is one way to do it. Yeah, I think that that actually, it shows that last week's episode that we had on the Black Liberation Army and this week's episode on these communist women go well together in terms of their two very different cohorts of individuals that are both, they're both revolutionary sets of individuals, both fighting for liberation, but in very different ways than

they do, as you were pointing out, Professor Dean, look very different and they dress very different. So this is a, you know, nice that we have in these two consecutive weeks, these two different cohorts of people that are both undertaking revolutionary action for liberation. But actually, I wanted to point out something that you were talking about in terms of the struggle for liberation and a couple of quotes from another one of the pieces that's around the pieces that we were just quoting from. So this is the acceptance speech of Mrs. Bass, Charlotte Bass, Progressive Party nomination for Vice President, talking about looking at liberation struggles abroad, looking at the role of the United States in oftentimes holding

these back, and also the conceptualizing, and this is not something that only happens within this essay, but I think that this is a very concise way of summarizing it. Many of these thinkers are pointing out that the United States is becoming in this period of time, like a new breeding ground for fascism or the burgeoning source of fascism in the world. So I have two very short quotes from this and then would be interested if either of you would want to respond to these because I think that they fit within the similar theme that we've been talking about. One says, two Negroes were the first Americans to be decorated for bravery in France and World War I.

That war was fought to make the world safe for democracy. But when it ended, we discovered we were making Africa safe for exploitation. by the very European powers whose freedom and soil we had defended. Then on the next page, yes, we fought to end Hitlerism. So this is moving up temporally a little bit. But less than seven years after the end of that war, I find men who lead my government paying out my money and your money to support the rebirth of Hitlerism in Germany to make it a willing partner in another war.

And then this is where I find it to be quite interesting. We fought to destroy Hitlerism, but its germs took root right here. I look about me at my own people, at all colored peoples all over the world, I can see the men who lead my government supporting oppression of the colored peoples of the earth, who today reach out for the independence this nation achieved in 1776. So tying these threads together in terms of what these women are really trying to point out is that all of this is a struggle for liberation, liberation for these varying peoples globally as well as in the United States. And then at this period of time, really highlighting the fact that the United States is one of the leading countries in holding back these people from achieving liberation. And as she points out in the latter part of the second quote that I had pulled up, that the United States is becoming almost like a new breeding ground for fascism, which has really borne itself out. I think it's fair to say as we look what has happened since this came out in 1952. So if either of you have anything that you want to say on that, I found those quotes to be very concise, but they did a good job of explaining some of the things that we were seeing more fleshed out in various essays around this part of the book, just in a very short way.

Well, you know, there's, there's, this is April Pope, nothing you just said, but what's really interesting is that, you know, part of the discourse and the language that she's using, she's appealing to like American mythology about like, she talks about like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and 1776. But it's funny because though like that usage became for like Hoover and the anti-communist like markers of communism, right? This was they would call it like this double speak. And so, you know, it's like when this was how, yeah, anyway, so it's just really funny that they use that discourse. But part of what that, but part of that, what they're doing strategically is showing like communism and this iteration is holding the United States the ideals that it proclaims, right? It is, and it's interesting because now we have this whole like patriotic socialism stuff. And this is, this is one of the quagmires of that approach, I think. And it is true that some of these communists and communists-adjacent people actually do believe 1776 was an incomplete bourgeois revolution and not a counter-revolution, as Gerald Horn would say. So it's really interesting to see.

So part of also, we're not holding these women up as perfect heroes, right? There are contradictions even in their own organizing, their own writing, their own theorizing. there are contradictions in the Communist Party. But I think that we have to know what they said to even be able to critique or to interrogate it. And secondly, I think it's very representative of where we are today, right? Because there are some of our, as Gerald Horn says,

our friends on the left who have some very similar ideas to this, right? And I think it also just shows a range of like a black women's thought. It's not monolithic. So when we talk about a black women's intellectual tradition, there's not a black woman's intellectual tradition. There are many traditions, right? And so anyway, so that's a little bit rambly.

But I think that the other interesting thing, too, is that, you know, she's the vice president for the Progressive Party. The Progressive Party was targeted as like the Communist Front type of organization. W.B. Du Bois was pushed out of the N. W.A.C. in 1948 for advocating the so-called Wallace line Charlotte Graham Du Bois defense him, like has his whole defense of him. So it's just, it's interesting that so a lot of these, a lot of the people in the story

were sort of active in and around the Progressive Party as the last viable third party candidate. And then it's interesting, so, and then Charlotte Abbas is actually the first black woman to run for vice president, not Kamala Harris. So again, this is resuscitating a sort of black radical revolutionary communist

politics, historiography, and mode of theorizing that combats a lot, that combats liberalism, as I will say, right? That combats a lot of the distortions that we see and here today. And that in and of itself is an important aspect of this project.

Yeah, I agree. And this car lot of bass pieces also, there's a lot of basis for it for earlier in the book, as you suggested, as well, Henry. So already you have in the 40s, Claudia Jones in particular, but also Thelma Dale, talking about the way that the U.S. was essentially becoming fascist or actually fascist or supporting fascists in the reconversion process, that the ways that women were being forced back into the home just repeated the Hitlerite, you know, Kinderkukha-Kirche ideology.

That it was being that the whole version of masculinity that was being forced on society in the late 40s was straight up fascist. And so it's interesting as, you know, Carlotta Bass is saying this in a more mainstream place than Claudia Jones was. Because Claudia Jones was speaking, you know, as a leader of the Communist Party, making the argument that, like, look, we were supposed to have fought a war to defeat fascism and look what's going on in our own country. So it was a big part of the analysis. And you see an even earlier version before the war in Esther Cooper Jackson's speech for the Southern Negro Youth Conference where she's saying like, look, you know, the United States is saying it's going to fight for democracy. Okay, let's say that because if you're going to fight for the democracy, that means they're going to have to be fighting for the rights and possibilities and equality of our young black people in the South. Right? They can't have it both ways. And one of the things that's actually so great about the Esther Cooper Jackson version is it's like you see you see the politics of it. It's like let's argue about this politically. This is what the country says. Let's hold them out their words and use that to advance. And so I don't think one has to say, do what does it mean? Do they truly believe? Do they not truly believe? But what's the political wedge? What's the political opportunity? What's the tool here that we can use to fight this fight in the circumstances we're in?

Just to add just very quickly, the important thing is how they theorize fascism. You see, I'm used to say this, right? I miss to say to sort of paraphrase him. He says like fascism is a term that Euro-Americans use when they start getting treated like the colonized. But if you take the black women's theorizing of fascism, they're looking at the intersection of big business, the attack on black people, up to an including racial terrorism, war mongering and the increased war machine and ongoing imperialism and colonialism.

And that confluence of domestic and foreign policy is actually the foundation of fascism. It's in a U.S. articulation of fascism in general. And I think that that still passes mustard today. Yeah, I just want to point out one quick thing before I ask a follow-up question, which is that when Professor Dean says that people like Claudia Jones were calling out the United States for being Hitler right, she was not being tongue in cheek when saying this. This is a direct quote from Claudia Jones in terms of the Hitlerite slogan of the United States project, women's places in the home, et cetera, et cetera.

That was in chapter 21 of the book, another one that I had highlighted. But one thing that Dr. CBS pointed out ties in with a question that I've been meaning to ask for a long time during this conversation, which is that as you pointed out at the beginning of this conversation, both of you. This book is periodized in a very interesting way. You know, it's chronological, but also it's split up into these different time segments. But what you just said in your last answer, Dr. CBS, is that there was not a monolithic, not a hegemonic thought among all of these black communist women, which is of course true. They are, you know, individuals after all.

This is not, you know. But what also is interesting is that there's also shifting focuses throughout these different periods. Of course, there's differences between the individual women, but even if you look at what's being focused on during these different periods, there are shifting focuses, shifting priorities. So you see things like, you know, dual unionism versus popular front being highlighted at various times, whereas anti-colonial struggles are being highlighted at other points. You sometimes see, you know, early in the book, less of outright, I don't want to say less of an outright critique of various CPUSA. lines in terms of saying that they're just wrong about things and saying rather early on in this book, you know, some of the earlier pieces that they need to focus more on certain things, whereas later pieces will outright criticize some of the lines that the CP USA was

taking. And I'm thinking particularly of some of the Claudia Jones pieces where she does criticize some of the shifting priorities within CPUSA. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit either or. both of you on how the shifting priorities and shifting focuses take place across these different periods that, you know, you periodize within this book because there is a deaf, there are definite shifts in terms of what are the things that are being talked about within these pieces and also some of the ways that these different conceptions are being discussed, like dual unionism

versus popular front, which is one that was very prominent relatively early on in the book. And maybe we could also think as we're answering these questions, also think about what does it mean and what's at stake in asking about critiques of the Communist Party? Because that was part of your setup, but not exactly the place where you landed. Of course, of course. Feel free to add that in there. Yeah. And I think that's interesting because it is sometimes the case. And I'm not implying that it's the case at all on this. podcast, but it's sometimes a case that people on the left sound like liberals and make it the case that if someone's critical, that being critical of the Communist Party is what makes someone a unique and creative and free thinker and that not being critical somehow means

all you're doing is repeating a party line. And so the task of the liberal scholar then is finding the places of criticism rather than say situating. Claudia Jones' criticism and what was at the time that her attack in the party in the 40s, that's part of the repudiation of Browderism, and it's a shift. I mean, it's also true, and she's also repeating arguments that have been there for a while. But one of the important things is these, the criticisms are appearing in party publications. And that's, and that lets us know that criticism was part of the party culture and part of the discussion. And it's not something that's either utterly unique and individual and detached from what's going on in larger discussions, nor is it something to be kind of ignored either way, right?

It's part of a larger context instead of arguments that needs to be looked at in general. So I guess I'm trying to make sure that we don't associate uniqueness with being. a critic of the party or being a critical of the party as the sound of freedom. Because what's clear for the women in and adjacent to the party is that they thought that it was crucial to work in organizations, that they thought that they could not be alone and isolated and do the work that was important. And they wanted the organizations to be as good as they could be. And just to underscore what one thing that you said very quickly before I allow you and Dr. CBS to continue. It's very important that we consider where she was making these critiques. And as you

mentioned, it was internally. And this is something that we've talked about on the podcast before in terms of being willing to criticize, you know, socialist movements, communist movements in the past, as long as it's from a position of, you know, critical support for these projects and not allowing it to become a tool to be used against socialism or communism as a project. And this is exactly what you were highlighting here is that by doing this within a kind of more internal debate, she's allowing for discussion within these topics and repudiating various tendencies within the party, but not allowing it to be, you know, she's not airing it in the New York Times or something like that, where there's a natural tendency towards anti-communism

in the first place. So it's worth remembering for the listeners also, when we have these criticisms that will sometimes level or, you know, talk about the failures of various movements. We're doing this from a position of critical support. And we're doing this in order to analyze what can be improved moving forward. We're not doing it for the purpose of using it as a stick to beat a specific communist movement or a socialist movement. So it's really important that you underscore that professor. Anyway, sorry for that, you know, interruption.

Yeah, it's, you know, waging principles struggle because elsewhere, right? So Louise Thompson Patterson in 1937 says, you know, as Comrade Browder said, as Bolsheviks, blah, blah, blah. So like, they're working within the party lines, right? Even as they have there, if you look at correspondence and all this stuff, they have lots of critiques. But a part of having discipline is sort of doing the work within the context of the party. So the other thing that I wanted to, so there's a number of things. One is that you have to realize that these pieces. we were systematic, but they're also relatively cherry-picked, right? And so we can't think about

these as representative. We can think about them as representative in terms of the broad range of thought, but there was a lot more going on. We just couldn't fit everything in here. That's one thing. The second thing is, as we know, like, you know, the dialectical movement of history is that there are different things that are more pressing. So, for example, in 1930s, there's just lots of writing about labor organizing because labor was relatively strong at that period. This is when we see the rise of the CIO. This is when we see the relative shift of the entire kind of like body of workers to the left at that moment in the context of the Great Depression. And so I think that there's just during World War II and then immediately after, this is kind of the first time in a systematic way in a mass way that black Americans are having contact with.

colonial black folks. It happens in World War I, but in much smaller numbers and primarily men. Now it's men and women who are being involved in the war effort who are having context with Africans and Caribbean folks in the colonies. And so there's a different type of anti-colonial consciousness that's developing and that's possible. In 1945, we have the fifth Pan-African Congress. And so I think all of these are influencing the types of questions that are being raised. The other thing that I wanted to say in terms of diversity is, the diversity of orientation or diversity of sort of where the women fit in the party. So Claudia Jones and even LTP can take a particular line because they are leaders in the party,

which is different than like rank and file, people who are rank and file. Most of these women are positioned relatively highly or married to people who are placed relatively highly in the party or in their founders of adjacent organizations like to join us for truth and justice. The other diversity to mention is the diversity of like class position. Claudia Jones is a worker straight up. She's not formally educated in terms of like college degree.

She is a work, like she is solidly working class. Whereas Louise Thompson Patterson and Esther Cooper Jackson have college degrees. We have an excerpt from Esther Cooper Jackson's master's thesis in here, right? And so another, and then Marville Cook is somebody who's petty, comes from a petty bourgeois family in Minnesota.

So it's important also to acknowledge, like, class suicide that is very prevalent in the way that these women are participating in the Communist Party and the types of organizing in which they're engaging. So class suicide is this concept from a milcar Cabral. I think that's really important as well. And the relative class diversity, Williamna Burroughs is working class. And so Harold Cruz has this really heavy-handed critique of black people involved in the communist party that's primarily petty bourgeois.

black people. But I think that there's a representative sample of black women in this in this text that it's not just petty bourgeois women. There are solidly working class women who are able to move up through the ranks and who are representing the types of struggling which not only black women, but the party in general are engaging. Yeah, tremendous. So we've got just two questions left for you. I know that we've, you know, held you here for a little while now. And we honestly could go for much, much longer, but we just have two questions that we'll get in here quickly and then we'll allow you to get out of here. One question that I wanted to ask quickly before Brett takes us out with the final question

is that one thing that I think is really important that was done even in the very earliest articles of this work is that these women were very, very strong in pointing out how the capitalists were deploying racialized differences in order to prevent workers from organizing with one another and as an extension, uh, doing things like unemployed or unemployed Americans and using this as a method of building a racialized reserve army of unemployed labor that could then be used for scabbing purposes and like that and then utilizing these divisions to undermine class solidarity. So I thought that this was a really important, really important aspect of this work. And you could see that this was like in the

very earliest essays of this book. And it was something. that was then carried on throughout it. So I think that we would be remiss to not at least mention that during this conversation before we wrap up, because I think that that's something that we can also, you know, think about today as well. I think that's so important. It also is a part of the audience for the book that I think we sometimes risk underestimating, which is that people who work in labor history and people who are interested specifically

in union organizing. Because that's like, you mentioned, like, from early on in these pieces, they're very attentive to the way that capitalist use race to split the working class. And so like Tyra Edwards, talking about organizing in the needle trades in 1930s, is very explicit on this. And it goes through to some of the pieces by Thelma Dale and Vicki Garvin as they're just trying to hammer home the necessity of unity. and it's a necessity that is coming from experience and organizing unions, right? It's not just this kind of, it's not like a fluffy unicorn kind of unity. It's like really practical unity that's necessary for standing strong in building worker solidarity in the face of working class struggle.

And so I'm really glad that you brought that up. But the other part to that, I'm ambivalent about my own analysis. I'm ambivalent about that sort of top down. Part of what I discovered in my research is both top. racism is top down and is bottom up. It is also bottom up. So a lot of racist-ass white workers push their political representatives to enact both anti-communist and racist legislation. So it's top down and bottom up. But fine, for the purposes of this analysis, and I understand, again, this is a particular political line. But also, even in their own analysis, it is the responsibility

of white workers to not be racist, to not let the bosses dupe them. It is their responsibility. Even if it's the case of the bosses use it to split the workers, the workers are falling for it. And it's the responsibility of black workers to struggle on the basis of class and not align with petty bourgeois leaders

simply on the basis of race. So it's a responsibility. of struggle, right? That a methodology of struggle that's necessary, irrespective of what the source of the racial antagonism is, the racial antagonism is there and both sides have internalized it to a certain degree. And so something like the Black Belt Nation thesis is meant to put that repudiation of white supremacy and practice whereby white people will have to follow black people, right? And black people will have to understand themselves as part of a,

multi-racial worker struggle as well as subjects of black liberation. Yeah, I think that's crucial. I'm glad you brought back up the Black Belt thesis because the organizers have to make sure, have to train, basically train the white people to see the white workers. It is in your interest. You might be a racist, but it is in your economic self-interest to be on the side. of the black workers and to unionize the black workers

and to be of the black liberation side. It's like to my mind, it's like they're saying it's not that the importance of the black belt nation thesis is that it's a national struggle that you have to be on the side of no matter what your own attitude is. It's not like about your perception or your attitude.

This struggle is in your self-interest and you will be dooming yourself. You will be brought out of work. by an army of labor who will come in and replace you when you go out on strike if you don't put the stupid racism aside and actually unify. It's in your self-interest. And that would seem so strong about the way they bring this out. Yeah, I just wanted to say, I thought, you know, what was so great, I'm so glad Henry brought this up, because the texture of their critique of the way in which racism is used to divide class unity is a bit different because of that experience

and because of their organizing. So it has a very different flavor. It's not just some doctrinaire kind of statement, you know, it comes from this real position of struggle. And that was, I think, very evident in these early writings, well, in the writings throughout. So I think that's a key sort of point, you know, to raise, to raise. Anyway, Brett, I didn't want to interrupt.

Go ahead. That's fine. And I echo those sentiments for sure. We do want to be respectful of both your time. I know you guys have probably a lot to do and you do a lot of these interviews. So this is the last question I want to ask. But I do want to say just first of all, like, thank you both so much for coming on. And importantly, more than other episodes, I feel myself falling into the role of audience slash listener slash student. And sometimes I forget, I'm the host trying to come up with the next question. And that's a testament to the depths of both of your knowledge and your expertise at teaching. But the last question, I think a nice way to wrap up this conversation would be just to ask you, what do you think or what do you hope readers take away from the text?

And specifically, what lessons do you think that we can and should learn from this collection of writing as organizers and communists today? I know you've alluded to that throughout this entire discussion, but maybe we could put a fine point on it to wrap up. For me, I think the most important part is build unity. Build unity. That means in the analysis, look for patterns. Don't look for strange specificity, exceptions. Look for the patterns that let you build unity and bring people together and strengthen the struggle. Yeah. And I think, you know, related to that, well, first of all, like I, you know, it's really, I think you all are sort of modeling one of the lessons as non-black, I don't want to assume anybody's racial identity, but like, I think you're all non-African people, non-black people, to take this work seriously, right? Because what can happen

is when you do something about black women. And this is the sort of ubiquity, I think, of multiculturalism and identity reductionism is that it becomes a black, the black women thing that doesn't pertain to anybody else. And again, what these women convey is that this is deeply important to anybody who cares about black liberation and socialism, this struggle. It's not just about black women, right? They just happen to be black women, and they take that seriously in terms of the material conditions, but this is deeply crucial for workers, for everybody, right? But, you know, the takeaway, I think, is join an organization, broadly conceived, whether that's a party, what's the organization, you know, for the anarchist, homies, some collective thing,

if you don't want to call an organization, whatever. You have to join, that is the vehicle through which the math base is built. And wage principled struggle in those organizations. The point of waging principal struggle is to hold those organizations and those entities up to the ideals that they state, up to the principles of unity that they state, up to the objectives that they put forth. It's not to collapse the organization because there are contradictions. If there are no contradictions in an organization, it is a CIA front, period. We are in a racist, settler colonial patriarchal society, there are going to be contradictions. The point is to engage an ethical struggle within the organization to overcome those, right? To engage in self-criticism,

to engage in reflection within the organization. And I think that these women model that very well. They do raise a lot of critique. They offer, they always offer solutions. They always have they always have steps in terms of what is to be done, right? And so I think that that's super important is that we have to join organizations. We have to wage principal struggle within our organizations. And, you know, the other thing is, like,

the book is called Organized Fight Win. Like, we have to believe that we'll win. Otherwise, what's the point? You know, Fidel Castro says revolutionaries are always optimistic, but we have to believe that we'll win. Otherwise, it's just sort of like, like, you know, chaotic movement.

Yeah, and just to echo, you know, that you mentioned that none of us are black comrades who are all not black. You can say, black, it's okay. Yes, I know, I know. But I wanted to just pull up that in one of the earliest essays, it was Negro work has not been entirely successful by Williamna Burroughs. One of the points that she makes in here, and I'm just going to quote it, it's point 23, a determination to keep white comrades from important places or prominence in Negro work is a wrong attitude. We need the help of white comrades for many reasons. White comrades must be active in Negro work, just as Negro comrades should take part in

general party work. And I think that what we're trying to do here is to get a deeper understanding of what these women, and in this case, and then last week, you know, the theories that were put forth by the Black Liberation Army, immerse ourselves in this ideology, immerse ourselves in these theories and think to ourselves what we can do given our positions to aid in the liberation of all oppressed peoples. So Adnan, it looked like you wanted to say one quick thing. And then I'll ask our guests how the listeners can find them. Oh, just to pick up on that point that they offer solutions. And I think the other thing I had wanted to say before, but neglected to,

is that when they're talking about combating racism, it's not an idealist. kind of confrontation. It's not just, oh, we've got to change people's minds or we've got to combat these ideas. They're talking about solving those things by actually engaging in, you know, collective action to change those material conditions. And those are the solutions. And that's something that I think we could really learn a lot from today, I think. So yeah, that's really all I wanted was to say. I really appreciate that point about offering solutions. And it reminded me that these are usually understood as material problems. They have an ideational dimension.

I mean, people have bigoted ideas, race consciousness, but they saw it's being effectively combated through, you know, working for material changes, which I think is the real materialist kind of approach to that issue, yeah. Build power and take power. I think that that's a great note to end on. So, again, our guests were professors Jody Dean and Cherise Burdenstelli, Dr. CBS. Professor Dean, how can the listeners find you? And is there anything that you would like to direct them to in terms of, you know,

work that you want them to take a look at and any upcoming projects that you're working on? I don't know if I want them to find me. Okay, never mind that. But they could look at my recent books are Comrade. Crowds and Party and the Communist Horizon, and they should be easily available in the Versa would play. Yeah, I'm sure that our listeners all love you, Professor, so it's okay if they find you. It'll be comrades finding you.

It's not like, you know, pitchforks and torches coming your way. Dr. CBS, how can the listeners find you and what do you have upcoming for us? Just check out Black Alliance for Peace.com and Community Movement Builders.org. that's all you need to know and join an organization. Yeah, fabulous. Brett, how can the listeners find you in your other podcasts? You can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. Fantastic.

Highly recommend everybody do that. Adnan, how can the listeners find you in your other podcast? Well, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussain. And you can check out the M-A-J-L-I-S, which is a podcast about Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim Diaspora. us. You know, we have a recent episode on the Khafala system of labor and trying to situate it in a kind of more global regime of labor. So check it out. You can find it on pretty much all the platforms, M-A-J-L-I-S. And not the Radio Free Central Asia one, the one hosted by the Muslim Society Global Perspectives Project at Queens University. As for me, listeners,

you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. I would like to remind you, you that guerrilla history has recently launched a spin-off show called Gorilla Radio. We just put out an episode yesterday as of the time of recording with Palestine action, talking about the direct action that they're doing to shut down Elbit systems in the UK, which is a weapons manufacturer and death profiteer that, you know, makes profit on the death of Palestinians as well as utilizing those weapons in Kashmir as well. So that's something to check out. you can find that by looking for guerrilla radio wherever you get your podcasts.

And of course, you can follow guerrilla history on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod. G-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. There you'll get updates about our episodes as well as the guerrilla radio episodes. And last note, you can support the show by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And on that note, listeners, and until next time, solidarity. You know, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.