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A People’s Government

Harry Haywood and the radical vision of Black communism

Harry Haywood and the Radical Politics of Black Communism

For Haywood, a truly radical working-class politics in the United States also required a program of self-determination.

In 1946, the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb published Studies in the Development of Capitalism, his explanation of feudalism’s decline and capitalism’s rise. In it, he argued that it was the class relations involved in the feudal mode of production in England that primarily caused lords to overexploit their serfs, leading the serfs to desert their estates. With the rise of global trade, this flight ended feudalism and established the foundations of a new capitalist age.

However groundbreaking its account, Dobb’s book proved controversial. Four years later, Paul Sweezy, a fellow Marxist economist and the founding editor of Monthly Review, offered several detailed critiques. Dobb had argued, Sweezy claimed, that feudalism and serfdom were synonymous, which misunderstood, in Sweezy’s words, that serfs “can exist in systems which are clearly not feudal.” For Sweezy, what led the lords to overexploit their serfs and the serfs to desert were primarily external, not internal, causes: the rise of trade, pushing the lords to garner even more from their serfs, and the growth of towns to which the serfs could flee.

Though Dobb took Sweezy’s critiques in stride (and, taken together, both accounts offer compelling insight into the rise of capitalism), Eric Hobsbawm, Georges Lefebvre, Rodney Hilton, and other historians soon weighed in on the Dobb-Sweezy debate, as it came to be known. At stake were not only questions of historiography for these mostly Marxist and socialist historians, but also questions of what exactly constituted capitalism (and, therefore, what constituted anti-capitalist politics) and how capitalism might be ended. “We live in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism,” Sweezy confidently proclaimed in his critique, “and this fact lends particular interest to studies of earlier transitions from one social system to another.”

Around the same time, another Marxist thinker offered a different account of serfdom and the agrarian question. In Negro Liberation, Harry Haywood did not look to the English past but to the contemporaneous American South and especially to the so-called Black Belt, the majority-Black region extending from Virginia to Louisiana. There, Haywood found the modern-day equivalent of the feudal system: sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and agricultural laborers working across the fertile area—many, though not all of them, Black—who were, in Haywood’s eyes, serfs who remained unfree, not least because of the vagrancy laws, debt, and physical violence that bound these workers to the lands they worked. Haywood wondered how these serfs might be freed from that seemingly feudal position and how doing so might aid in the fights against capitalism and fascism. Not surprisingly, his account of feudalism differed greatly from those in the Dobb-Sweezy debate. But for Haywood, as for Sweezy, economic transition was imminent, and the question of feudalism’s end had direct implications for his present.

Originally published in 1948 and now newly republished, Negro Liberation surveyed the post–World War II landscape and found that little had changed since the war began. The Black Belt, which had served as a heartland for enslaved agricultural labor in the South, remained an internal colony of the United States. There, the racist treatment of Black Southerners buttressed the continued economic exploitation of workers, providing dramatic profits to a small number of planters and to Northern finance capital while immiserating everyone else. By making this argument, Haywood, a Communist Party member, was not only making the case for Black emancipation but also explaining how anti-Blackness contributed to the oppression of all laborers. The white supremacy legitimating the exploitation of Black people in the Black Belt was also the very mechanism that ensured the working class’s segregation in the North and prevented Black and white workers from uniting to win collective power.

Yet alongside this account was also a specific argument for Black liberation. Taking his cues in part from Lenin’s claim that colonized countries had a right to determine their own governance, Haywood argued that the Black workers of the Black Belt needed to exercise self-determination, as Lenin put it—that the Black people in the majority-Black regions of the South ought to have autonomous socialist governments. To prevent the rise of fascism, which Haywood argued was manifest in the Jim Crow South as well as in interwar Europe, Black agrarian and industrial workers had to unite and organize toward Black self-determination in the Black Belt. This would weaken US imperialism—for instance, by withdrawing the region’s production—and thereby aid other workers subjugated by the United States across the globe.

To fully understand Haywood’s position on the Black Belt and on workers more generally, it’s necessary to first understand his life. Born in 1898 to formerly enslaved parents, he grew up in a society that imparted a sense that Black people could never fully assimilate into America. The Omaha, Nebraska, of Haywood’s youth had not yet become the city in which Malcolm X’s pregnant mother endured an attack by the Ku Klux Klan. But his parents’ tales of slavery and his grandparents’ displaying their scars from the chattel regime soon educated him on American race relations. Reinforcing this lesson, his school taught that “Blacks were brought out of the savagery of the jungles of Africa,” Haywood recalled in his autobiography, Black Bolshevik, “and introduced to civilization through slavery under the benevolent auspices of the white man.”

An incident when he was 15 further educated him on Black people’s place in the country. During the summer........

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