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Between Revolution and the Racial Ghetto
Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood Debate Class Struggle and the ‘Negro Question’, 1962–8
in Historical MaterialismThis article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse’s influential 1962 essay for Studies on the Left, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American’, which declared that the American Negro was a ‘subject of domestic colonialism’. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journal Soulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto.
Between Revolution and the Racial Ghetto
Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood Debate Class Struggle and the ‘Negro Question’, 1962–8
in Historical Materialism