Color and Ideology
BRUMBERG, ABRAHAM
ECHOES OF THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT Color and Ideology By Abraham Brumberg Sometime ago a friend of mine showed me a French-language edition of Revolution, a slick and expensively produced...
...Essential pipelines will be severed and blown up and all manner sabotage will occur...
...Yet the exploiter, it turns out...
...India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Burma, and Japan taken together could fit into the expanses of the Asian part of the USSR," etc...
...All transportation will grind to a complete standstill...
...in defense of its claim to being no less Asian than European...
...And the exploited has been, of course, the American Negro...
...What is fascinating, however, is the way the Chinese have been capitalizing on this tendency in their attempt to seize control over the revolutionary movements in underdeveloped areas...
...The Chinese leaders are turning to the filthiest and most discredited arsenal—the arsenal of racist speculation and fabrication...
...Clearly, this where the shoe has pinched most...
...The Chinese, on the other hand, have gleefully welcomed the riots as an expression of "revolutionary violence which will no doubt develop both in scale and in intensity till final victory...
...on the one hand, a classic Marxist analysis of American capitalism in which one class (as in all capitalist and colonial countries) has presumably enriched itself at the expense of another...
...ECHOES OF THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT Color and Ideology By Abraham Brumberg Sometime ago a friend of mine showed me a French-language edition of Revolution, a slick and expensively produced monthly published (in English and Spanish editions as well) by a pro-Chinese Communist group in Paris...
...In an article called "USA: Revolution Without Violence?," also published in Revolution (March, 1964), Williams, uniquely blending pseudo-scientific terminology with traditional revolutionary prose, denounced the "cult of non-violence" as "a religion that brings glory and gratification to latent masochists" (!), and revelled in his vision of a bloody racial Armageddon: "When massive violence comes, the U.S.A...
...Despite some echoes, fortunately neither Boggs nor Williams have much to do with the civil rights movement in the United States...
...As a rule, however, Moscow has preferred the offensive to the defensive...
...a mimeographed sheet entitled Hammer and Steel...
...Its author, James Boggs, is one of the leaders of a small, dissident group with headquarters in Boston and (as befits every radical party, regardless of size) with its own "organ...
...The telephone workers and radio workers will be afraid to report...
...The new concept creates conditions that involve the total community, whether they want to be involved or not...
...For whatever the purity of the current brand of Soviet Marxism (of which the less said, the better), the fact remains that the Chinese have—at least in this aspect—stood Marx on his head by encouraging, in effect, solidarity of race rather than of class...
...Not content with that, Williams even outlined the methods which Negroes are to adopt: "The new concept of revolution...
...The Chinese, to be sure, have not remained silent...
...Working-class unity, says Boggs (no doubt unaware of the extent of his own "revisionism"), is a myth...
...How this new ideology expresses itself with regard to American Negroes is illustrated by a remarkable article...
...Violence and terror will spread like a firestorm...
...The old method of guerrilla warfare, as carried out from the hills and countryside, would be ineffective in a powerful country like the U.S.A...
...The article accompanying the drawing was titled "An Ideal of Obesity," and the text taunts Khrushchev for proclaiming his love for goulash while starving peasants and workers in Africa and Latin America (all dark-skinned, of course) arc fighting for elementary human rights...
...This back-climbing has only been possible because there has always been a Negro under-class at the bottom of society to take the leavings of the jobs, homes, schools, public buildings, etc., as technological development and economic expansion created better opportunities for the whites...
...The economy will fall into a state of chaos...
...The very titles of the songs are characteristic," complains the anonymous writer: "The March of the Wind from the East," "The March of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America," "Forward-marching Asia, Africa, and Latin America...
...The Negroes, he asserts, must give up hope of ever enlisting the white proletariat in their struggle for equal rights...
...Yet it does not take much perspicacity to see that it is Moscow which has the better of this argument...
...This takes the form of either turgid theoretical discourses assailing Peking's revision of the "classics of Marxist-Leninism...
...is lightning campaigns conducted in highly sensitive urban communities with the paralysis reaching the small communities and spreading to the farm areas...
...Night brings all-out warfare, organized fighting and unlimited terror against the oppressor and his forces" (Italics added, A.B...
...turning the tables on their challengers, they have accused the Russian leaders of arousing fear of the "Yellow Peril...
...This last is taken from a Chinese statement on the preparatory meeting for the Second AsianAfrican Conference that took place in Jakarta last April—one of the many international gatherings from which Russia has been blocked by its erstwhile ally...
...Soviet reports on the riots in Harlem have been singularly restrained, and the subsequent violence in Rochester hardly received any mention in the Soviet press...
...will become a bedlam of confusion and chaos...
...such large Asian states as China...
...This article is remarkable in that it is...
...Nor, in all fairness to Boggs, does he come out clearly in favor of unrestrained violence...
...of "inciting racial hatred among the white people...
...only serve to underscore this fact...
...Stores will be destroyed and looted...
...The task of envisioning such violence was left to Robert Williams, the ex-Army sergeant from North Carolina who was expelled a few years ago from the NAACP, and who now makes his home in Cuba where he is broadcasting regularly over Castro's "Radio Free Dixie...
...In this exchange of charges and insults, Peking has undoubtedly laid its finger on an existing phenomenon—the deeply imbedded fear, on the part of the Soviet population as a whole, not only of the Chinese Communists but of the Chinese people...
...and so on...
...or of more straight-forward accusations unhindered by dialectical lexicology: "Mao Tse-tung endeavors to stir up racial currents in the struggle of the world's peoples against colonialism...
...During the hours of day sporadic rioting takes place and massive sniping...
...The Chinese have vehemently denounced it as "nothing but a fraud...
...Not only have they ridiculed the Soviet accusations but...
...He must engage in a massive "revolutionary offensive," deliberately "risking conflicts and clashes with white workers...
...In Boggs' words: "The classless society, of which Americans are so proud, is the society in which white workers have been able to climb on the backs of others out from the working class into the middle class...
...With the intensification of the Sino-Soviet conflict, the Russians have suddenly found themselves grouped with the "whites," openly or half-openly identified by their Chinese adversaries with the enemies of the colonial peoples, and—most cruel of all—being forced out of Communist-sponsored or supported international gatherings on the ground that (to cite Peking) "the political center of the Soviet Union . . . has always been in Europe and therefore it has traditionally been acknowledged as a European country...
...The factory workers will be afraid to venture out on the streets...
...The new concept is to huddle as close to the enemy as possible so as to neutralize his modern and fierce weapons...
...Its cover caught my eye: Superimposed over a particularly disagreeable likeness of Khrushchev were the mocking words, "we whites . . ." Inside, I found a large drawing of a corpulent man lying on his back, his stomach protruding, and on his face a smile of smug satisfaction...
...An editorial published in the June issue of the theoretical journal Kommunist, for example, accused Chinese poets of imparting a nationalistic and anti-European spirit to their work...
...Or take the protest in which Moscow offered a staggering array of statistics ("the Soviet Union accounts for approximately 40 per cent of Asia's territory...
...The Soviets acknowledge that the Civil Rights Bill has at least some merit...
...Moscow's reply to the campaign has been abusive and frequently—as is often the case in Communist rhetoric—full of unwitting comedy...
...has not been the capitalist, but the white worker...
...There is nothing new or surprising about the tendency to identify the "class enemy" with the white man...
...Indeed, the respective commentaries from Moscow and Peking on recent racial developments in the U.S...
...The Meaning of Black Revolt in the USA," which appeared in a recent English-language issue of Revolution...
...And since the American Negro can depend neither on the white worker nor on the "white liberal [who] is just as hostile as the white reactionary," the only road left open to him is to identify himself with "the colored peoples all over the world...
...How a continuous struggle between the white and black workers will bring about a classless society, and—more importantly—how it is going to usher in what Boggs calls the "era of Dialectical Humanism" in which national and racial differences will presumably be eradicated forever, the author does not tell us...
...Their views are essentially a reflection of the Sino-Soviet conflict, which shows no sign of abating...
...Abraham Brumberg edits the review, Problems of Communism...
Vol. 47 • August 1964 • No. 16
