Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald

16. Wrestling with the Legacy of Stalinism: Recent Scholarship on W.E.B. Du Bois and the Left

In the summer of 2013, Italian autonomist Ferruccio Gambino published “Reading Black Reconstruction on the Eve of 1968″ in a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly dedicated to W. E. B. Du Bois’s book. Gambino describes himself in the essay as a searching young activist of the 1960s European Left living in a world divided. The Cold War partition into “two Europes,” separated with a “line of barbed wire from the Baltic to the Black Sea,” was haunted by the specter of Hungary’s 1956 failed workers’ uprising against Stalinist rule, leaving a generation of leftists “even more divided and more closed in on themselves.”[2] The malaise made it difficult for radicals in Europe to assess their relationship to events worlds away, including African and Asian decolonization struggles and a southern US civil rights movement whose religious orientation made it pallid to a generation of historical materialists.

In the spring of 1967, Gambino was a student in residence in the United States under the mentorship of historian George Rawick. As Gambino recounts, Rawick strongly advised him to read two books: Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins. Suddenly, for Gambino, the “gray North Atlantic shroud of the early 1960s” was rent. “It was easy to see,” wrote Gambino, “that Black Reconstruction cast a bright light on crucial developments that were scarcely known or completely negated in the history books. Du Bois’s book put the slaves at center stage and sought to overturn the dominant opinion that continued racist prejudice and the consequent intellectual laziness.”[3] More important for Gambino, Du Bois’s book seemed to resolve a historical impasse plaguing his own political generation’s capacity to relate to struggles beyond the pale of home. The recognition that American slaves in 1848 had protested the US invasion of Mexico became for a generation steeped in another European trajectory from that year, a global license to dream:

Gambino’s potent account animates a recurring challenge for scholars and activists on the global Left, namely the influence of Stalinism on its political theory and practice. Black Reconstruction‘s emphasis on black agency and self-determination redeems hopes for internationalist solidarity and for Gambino, hopes seemingly emptied out by years of “socialism in one country” policy in which the Soviet Union used strategies such as the Popular Front to defend the Soviet state at the cost of support for anticolonial and working-class struggles. The effects of Stalinization were felt across Europe for years to come. During France’s war with Algeria, for example, the French Communist Party supported the French state, this after backing the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956. Like Terry Eagleton’s reflection in the epigraph to this chapter, Gambino’s memory also speaks to the inevitable relationship between thought and practice, historiography and history making. His identification of Black Reconstruction as a source of inspiration for a New Left’s internationalist commitments animates the core radicalism of Du Bois’s work long after its expiration date and demonstrates what Eagleton calls a capacity to “rewrite . . . narratives by our own actions in the present.”[5]

Yet this moment of backward glance also indexes the roots of a recurring problem in Du Bois scholarship, or what might be called more broadly commemoration. George Rawick notwithstanding, 1968 was a low tide in public appreciation for Du Bois’s legacy. That year Martin Luther King Jr. made a desperate, and futile, appeal to the American public to accept once and for all Du Bois’s turn to communism and his decision to join the Communist Party in 1961. That turn culminated more than a decade of public support for Stalin and the Soviet Union by Du Bois, including his hagiographic tribute “On Stalin” published on the former’s death in 1953. Public communist sympathies had cost Du Bois his role as a columnist at the Chicago Defender in 1946, his arrest in 1951 under the Smith Act, the cancellation of numerous speaking engagements, and an unofficial blacklisting of much of his writing. Were it not for the dogged efforts of Herbert Aptheker and International Publishers, it is possible that Du Bois’s autobiography would not have seen the light of day in the United States in 1968, some six years after its international publication in the Soviet Union. In the same year Du Bois’s book did appear, as Amy Bass has documented, a broad alliance of groups in Du Bois’s hometown of Great Barrington, including the American Legion, the Knights of Columbus, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, worked actively to oppose an emergent campaign to construct a memorial in his honor.[6] Du Bois’s letters, newspaper columns, and secondary writings—especially those published after his more open turn to socialist thought—appeared intermittently in collections, mostly by small leftist publishers and mostly shepherded single-handedly by the communist historian Herbert Aptheker, only in the 1970s and 1980s well after Du Bois’s death. Until 1998, Du Bois’s novel about the age of the Communist International (Comintern), Dark Princess, first published in 1928, remained out of print, virtually unread. Meanwhile, his blacklisted manuscript “Russia and America: An Interpretation” remains unpublished to this day.

It was also this “shroud” that was rent for Gambino by his chance encounter with Du Bois in 1967. Yet the rigid classification of Du Bois’s career and thought persists. The benevolent and soulful early work and the later dogmatic period, the “scholarly” Du Bois and the “polemical” Du Bois, the Du Bois of “racial uplift” and the “transnational” Du Bois, and the “humanist” Du Bois and the “Stalinist” Du Bois are categories themselves reflective of what Alan Wald has called the “polarized thinking” of scholarship and commemoration generated under the influence of the Cold War.[7] In the case of Du Bois, an obsessive conflation of Stalin and Stalinism with the idea of communism in the twentieth century is mirrored in an obsessive conflation of Du Bois with African American cultural and political history and an unnerving anxiety about too closely miscegenating the two. Great man narratives of both have helped hold in place simplistic analyses of communist internationalism (the general absence, for example, of Trotskyist scholarship on the US cultural and political Left) reflected in an unsubtle analysis of Du Bois’s own broad and shifting relationship to Marxism and twentieth-century struggles for global justice.[8] This is true despite the fact that Du Bois articulated support for a wide range of anticolonial and communist struggles, from India’s 1947 independence to China’s 1949 revolution to Pan-Africanism to the Gold Coast’s struggle to become Ghana in 1957.

In large part, the generation of scholars and memorializers of Du Bois born well after the Stalin era have begun that nuancing work. This scholarship is unified by its own revisionist impulse to create what Eagleton calls a “broader narrative” of history that throws into relief essential elements of the twentieth-century global Left’s theory and practice beyond the narrow parameters of Soviet or Stalinist influence: cross-border solidarity, collaborative political struggle, autonomous battles against racism and sexism, and the struggle for a redemptive, and often revisionist, relationship to both Marxism and its practice. In general, this scholarship has confronted political successes and failures of the revolutionary Left in the twentieth century by detaching from what might be called Stalinized historiography. In the case of Du Bois, for example, Eric Porter argues that “we must avoid the problem of making leftist ideas and affinities overly determinative of his thought . . . in either positive or negative ways. Du Bois might have praised Stalin, for example, but he was not a Stalinist in any systematic way.”[9] Porter’s insights clear the way for his own study of Du Bois’s late, more explicitly anticapitalist work. Porter’s 2010 book The Problem of the Future World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury undertakes a detailed study of Du Bois’s thought in the latter third of his life often eschewed by scholars as his “decline” into Communist influence. While acknowledging Du Bois’s denials of Stalinist crimes and atrocities, Porter perceives Du Bois’s turn to socialism as part of a desire for a “cosmopolitan” perspective on world events beyond the borders of American anticommunism and nationalism. Socialism, he argues, provided a means of understanding what Du Bois called the “race concept” as part of a larger fight for economic and political justice. Porter’s larger ambition in his book—much like Gambino’s 1967 epiphany—is to animate Du Bois’s ideas for our global moment. In the wake of the collapse of state capitalist Communism in the Soviet Union and China and in the face of current global neoliberal devastations to workers, social welfare, and the environment, Porter cites David Levering Lewis’s caution that “it may be suggested that Du Bois was right to insist that to leave the solution of systemic social problems exclusively to the market was an agenda guaranteeing obscene economic inequality in the short run and irresoluble calamity in the long run.”[10] Porter concludes his study by writing that “while the historically specific state socialist project through which Du Bois hoped his reconstruction of democracy would happen founders on the ruins of the Soviet Union and on Russia’s and China’s free market and imperialist adventures in the present, the project of transforming the state to better promote economic and racial justice remains a necessity.”[11] For Porter, this does not necessarily mean giving the previous era or our own what Eagleton calls a “classical happy ending” as much as it means studying afresh the residual pastness of the present in order to change it.

Porter’s book thus partially addresses a need for what Wald has called a “decolonization” of scholarship on the Left by creating new frameworks for understanding old political problems.[12] In recent years, scholars identifying with currents in postcolonial studies have done much to aid this “decolonization.” This scholarship, all of it generated in the official aftermath of the Cold War, has tried to reimagine the global Left (and frequently Du Bois’s place in it) by focusing on anticolonial liberation in Japan, China, India, Africa, and African America beyond the influence of Soviet and Stalinist policy. Among these are Yuichiro Onishi, author of Transpacific Anti-Racism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa; Dora Ahmed, author of Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America; Nico Slate, author of Colored Cosmopolitanisms: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India; and Etsuko Taketani, author of The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the Wars.[13] Their studies are united by endeavors to reframe African American political and cultural history within two broader twentieth-century narratives: Asian anticolonial struggles and transnational solidarity. Among the significant and original aspects of Taketani’s work, for example, is that it is one of the first to examine the Japan and China sections of Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript “Russia and America,” completed in 1950, in order to interpret Du Bois’s efforts to support twentieth-century Asian national liberation struggles. Taketani demonstrates that Du Bois’s writings on Asia show him seeking an independent theory of socialism influenced by Pan-Asianism. Slate and Ahmed, meanwhile, show how a range of African American activists across a broad political spectrum—including Du Bois—helped galvanize popular support for Indian decolonization. More broadly, these studies show an urge to recover a century of independent leftist political activism forged in collaboration between South and East Asian revolutionaries and African Americans in the West, a turn that Onishi calls “Du Bois’s challenge” to scholars of the twenty-first century. In turn, each of these studies spans the globe to give a new name to this form of political radicalism: Dohra Ahmed calls it “anti-colonial utopianism,” Onishi calls it “Colored Internationalism,” Taketani names it a “Black Pacific Narrative,” and Slate denotes it as “Colored Cosmopolitanism.” Cumulatively, these studies represent an effort to create a “subaltern” history of US colonial and postcolonial history, a reminder of the efforts of subaltern studies scholarship from the 1980s South Asian Left by figures such as Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, and Ranajit Guha. As has been documented elsewhere, subaltern studies was an effort to wrestle with the victories and defeats of the Indian Left, itself much shaped by Stalinist influence.[14] The new simultaneity of this body of scholarship across the globe today can be understood as a function of shared twentieth-century victories and defeats: both anticolonial liberation at midcentury and the collapse of Stalinist Communism in 1989 have taken on the sweet and sour tang of historical necessity for reassessing both the present and the past in this work.

The decolonization of scholarship on the twentieth-century Left has also not surprisingly deposed conventional, and masculine, means of commemoration, helping to replace “great man” theories alluded to earlier. It has specifically brought renewed attention to the role of women in building the international Left and to their contributions to leftist debates about women’s oppression. The recovery of Agnes Smedley’s career in recent years is a good example. Smedley entered the world revolutionary Left via participation in anticolonial organizing by Indian nationalist expatriates to the United States in the World War I era. She later worked for the Comintern in China and supported the Communist Party of China even while criticizing Stalin’s “United Front” strategy advocating alliance between the Party and the Kuomintang. Smedley also corresponded briefly with Du Bois in the 1920s and spoke with him at the 1948 National Conference on American Foreign Policy and the Far East, organized by the Communist Party. Smedley has been the subject of two biographies, by Ruth Price and Janice and Stephen MacKinnon.[15] Both provide unvarnished views of Smedley’s romantic infatuation with the Chinese Communist Revolution and her role in the Comintern. Smedley’s recovery and championing in the 1970s and 1980s by the late novelist and 1930s radical Tillie Olsen and living firebrand Alice Walker has also shown continuities between the Old Left and the civil rights era regarding the “woman question” and women’s oppression.[16] By and large, these explorations of leftist influence have provided a balanced assessment of Smedley’s tangled relationship to Stalinism.

In addition to Smedley, the recent biography by Barbara Ransby of longtime Left activist Eslanda Robeson (a strong public supporter of Soviet Communism), Carole Boyce Davies and Marika Sherwood’s separate biographies of Trinidadian-born Communist Party member and feminist theorist Claudia Jones, and Gerald Horne’s 2002 biography of Shirley Graham Du Bois are important for throwing into relief some of the most important women of the twentieth-century Left while providing a subordinated perspective on figures such as Du Bois and Stalin who connect to all of them.[17] These works have allowed scholars to see political influence on the Left as bidirectional, fusing anticolonial, antiracist struggles to the gender equity that these struggles strove to produce. In recent years, scholars such as Lise Vogel, Angela Davis, Martha Jimenez, Cinzia Arruzza, Sue Ferguson, David McNally, and Tithi Bhattacharya have also plumbed the line on the woman question back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to extraordinary revisionist effect.[18] Debates on the Marxist Left about women’s oppression and how to fight it have rarely been as robust as they are now.

Decolonizing scholarship on Du Bois and the US Left has also taken a lead from a vanguard of scholars who have filled a void in attention to black women’s proletarian internationalism, itself both shaped by and resistant to Stalinist influence. Recent books by Cheryl Higashida, Dayo F. Gore, Carole Boyce Davies, Marika Sherwood, and Eric McDuffie constitute a generational recovery of this work, emphasizing women who worked with and proximate to Du Bois but developed their own independent body of political thought.[19] Higashida’s study of First and Third World predominately working-class black women in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s demonstrates how an “impasse” on the communist Left regarding gender was resolved by rethinking the Leninist thesis on self-determination. While the figures in her book remained nominally committed to the Russian Revolution through 1953, hence to Stalinism, they also produced an independent body of thought that anticipated black feminism. Higashida has also mined more carefully than any scholar the lineage of Claudia Jones’s “triple oppression” thesis regarding black women and connects it to later intersectionality theory—a critical linkage for connecting Old Left and New Left, mainstream and dissident revolutionary feminism in the twentieth century. As Higashida writes, Jones’s feminism is “intersectional, but not in the sense espoused by cultural critics who value nonhierarchichal conjunctions of different modes of resistance. In specifically giving precedence to national liberation, Jones demonstrates that it is necessarily transformed by centering black women’s struggles within it instead of focusing exclusively on men.”[20]

Similarly, Eric McDuffie and Dayo F. Gore have significantly broadened our understanding of independent African American women on the US Left. McDuffie recounts Communist Williana Burroughs’s ten-year stay in the Soviet Union, from 1935 to 1945, as an early point on a century-long trajectory of black female expatriatism that Gore punctuates with an account of the life of Vicki Garvin.[21] Garvin was drawn to leftist circles and the Du Boises in the 1950s. In 1961, she moved to Nigeria after an offer of employment from fellow leftist Thelma Dale Perkins. After experiencing what Garvin called two years of “neocolonialism-disillusionment,” she moved to Ghana, meeting up briefly with Shirley and W.E.B. Du Bois, then in 1964, moved to China, where she lived in exile for six years.[22] Garvin was what Gore describes as a “behind-the-scenes” strategist in supporting both China’s Cultural Revolution and black liberation, the two conjoined, however crudely, after Mao’s 1963 declaration of support for Negro liberation. The experience of exile and affiliation caused Garvin to describe herself as both a “pan-Africanist” and a “proletarian, working-class, internationalist.”[23] Though all of the women in these studies hewed to procommunist politics in the Stalin era, collectively these works also help give credence to Alan Wald’s claim about the wider legacy of Stalinism for scholars treating the twentieth-century communist Left: “Despite its clarifying potential when used in a sophisticated manner to treat an ideology, social system or political organization,” he writes, “Stalinism can be an oversimplifying lens through which to evaluate the thinking, personalities and life activities of diverse individuals, not to mention works of the artistic imagination.”[24]

Likewise paradigmatic of this trend toward decolonization of scholarship is work on Claudia Jones by Sherwood and Boyce Davies. Jones was a cosignatory to the “We Charge Genocide” petition to the United Nations authored by Du Bois, William Patterson, and other members of the Communist Party to which she belonged. Both Sherwood and Davies offer self-consciously reflective accounts of Jones’s life, including her largely uncritical support for Stalinism, by placing it in the context of her wide field of political activism and the politics of our own time. Sherwood’s Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile, for example, consists of seven chapters based almost entirely on primary source documents excavated after her death and supplemented by transcripts of the 1996 Claudia Jones Symposium in London organized by friends and former colleagues. The symposium includes sessions on four aspects of Jones’s life: “My Friend Claudia,” a roundtable discussion of personal reminiscences by among others Rajana Ash, who recounts Claudia’s formation of the Committee of Afro-Asian and Caribbean Organizations; “The Political Activist,” including reflections by former comrades in the British Communist Party; “The West Indian Gazette”; and “Carnival.” Sherwood’s book is the best extant account of Jones’s place in the wider postwar British Left and the local activists who built it. The book’s combination of scholarly interpretation and commemoration as historical process makes it an important model for understanding and applying the lessons of diasporic internationalism to our present. Similarly, Boyce Davies analyzes the repression, surveillance, and deportation that Jones suffered during the 1950s in the context of post-9/11 US homeland security laws. She compares the Smith Act and the McCarran-Walter Acts to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and the USA Patriot Act of 2001, both of which increased deportation, surveillance, and the political demonization of dissidents and immigrants, especially from Arab states. Boyce Davies challenges romantic paradigms of transnational and diasporic scholarship to include deportation and involuntary migration (political refugees, for example) as a central category of “mobility.” She demonstrates that for figures forced into exile or quarantined by state repression, “diaspora” often involved involuntary dialectics of state repression and revolution.[25]

Finally, the “decolonization” of twentieth-century scholarship is an ongoing project enabled in part by the de-Stalinization of the last century’s archives. Many of these works have generated interpretations of the US and global Left made possible only by texts that have surfaced for public view in the wake of the post-1989 collapse of the Soviet Union. Ruth Price’s biography of Agnes Smedley draws upon materials from Soviet archives to document her role in the Comintern. Kate Baldwin’s Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain (2003) was one of the first to take advantage of the Soviet archival openings to reinterpret the relationship of Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes to the Soviet Union.[26] Baldwin also remains one of the few scholars to seriously engage Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript “Russia and America.” Another is Taketani, whose 2014 book also investigates documents related to Chinese suspicions that Hughes was operating as a Soviet Comintern agent in Shanghai during his time there in the 1930s (he was not). John Riddell’s magnificent restoration of the transcripts of the 1922 Comintern, published in 2011 under the title Toward the United Front, provides an indispensable record and interpretation of what C. L. R. James in 1935 called the “rise and fall” of the World Revolution.[27] Finally, Datta Gupta’s 2006 study Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India, 1919–1943 draws on extensive Comintern archives to revise understanding of the relationship of the Indian communist Left to the Comintern. Gupta’s first chapter, “Comintern: The New Historiography,” is especially essential reading. These examples provide a tip of the iceberg as scholars continue to construct the global dynamics of what the Comintern called “World Revolution,” the political horrors and errors of Stalinism, and the tendrils that connected many members of the diasporic international in a shared project. Collectively, this scholarship is also continuously motivated by political developments of the present. As Gupta writes, historical recovery of Comintern records is vital “because the Left in India is still heavily dominated by the spirit of Stalinism, the consequence of which has been the persistence of a fundamentalist mindset.” His book, he writes, “is addressed to all those who are prepared to rethink the history of Indian communism by going back to the basics, with the openness to look back at what happened and consider what could have possibly happened.”[28]

Postscript: On February 23, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the Centennial Address at Carnegie Hall in New York City at an event commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois’s birth. Du Bois had died at age 95 the day before the historic March on Washington of August 28, 1963. In his 1968 address, King famously appealed to listeners to set aside Cold War prejudice against Du Bois’s late-in-life decision to join the Communist Party USA. “It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist,” said King. “Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.”[29] Of course, the quagmire to which King alluded was all too real—the US war in Vietnam, a war, King noted, that the anti-imperialist peace activist Du Bois would have opposed with life and limb were he still alive.

King posed the question of how a Du Bois of our time would respond to current events shaped by those of the past, such as recent US imperial wars in Iraq and the Persian Gulf; ongoing drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; and the seemingly endless “war on terror” and Islamophobia that has helped to sustain it. The speech also raises the question of how scholars of our generation might continue to construct a Du Bois relevant to it. If, as David Blight has poignantly argued, “all memory is prelude,”[30] then we should be keen to Du Bois scholar Amy Bass’s caution that the making of reputations and commemoration are often keynotes to our own political present. “As the Cold War becomes grounded in the past, the sentiments and actions it created slide almost seamlessly into the post-9/11 era,” writes Bass. “Binaries of ‘us versus them’ exist in amorphous yet devastating ways: someone—on behalf of and for the good of the general public—is continually trying to figure out who the ‘us’ is, since the ‘them’ remains part of an imaginary state of emergency, albeit one with very real ramifications, as it continues to drive US foreign policy in much the same way that it did in the Vietnam era.”[31] Bass helps us understand how Du Bois’s 1951 status under the Smith Act as an “agent of a foreign government” can look a lot like post-9/11 designations of American citizens as “internal enemies” of their government for failing to rally around the flag of US empire. Thus, scholars interested in wholesale reappraisal of American empire today might do well to begin with a reassessment of W. E. B. Du Bois’s own dissident relationship to that empire and also attend to his own idiosyncratic application of communist thought in his work. I have attempted to review some of the more recent scholarship that has begun that endeavor, much of it in the name of emancipatory political movements of the twentieth century that not only survived the legacy of Stalinism but also superseded many of its worst aspects. Building from it, we might then begin to explore anew Du Bois’s own investments and assessments of some of the most important events generated by the revolutionary Left of his lifetime, such as the Russian Revolution, India’s decolonization, the Chinese Communist Revolution, and even the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, a topic seldom explored in his work. In all of these domains of political imagination and struggle, the legacy of Stalinism itself remains unfortunately central, a legacy whose own “decolonization” may allow us to turn the page toward both commemorating and building a better world.[32]