THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. Matthew Quest (round III)

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#9, MARCH-MAY/2020

Matthew Quest is a brilliant radical historian and political theorist who teaches History and Africana Studies at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Known for his original research on C.L.R. James, Quest has also written on a variety of African-American thinkers from Ida B Wells, E. Franklin Frazier, Kimathi Mohamed, and Harold Cruse, to Caribbean thinkers such as Joseph Edwards and Eusi Kwayana. Recently, he has written articles on Antigua and Barbuda's struggles with enclosure and disaster capitalism. Quest is the co-author, along with Lenni Brenner of Black Liberation and Palestine Solidarity.

Brotherwise Dispatch - In light of contemporary controversies surrounding the rhetoric of the #ADOS (ie. American Descendants of Slavery) movement and the cultural resurgence of social clamor for Reparations, how might your trenchant critique of Harold Cruse, from your book Black Liberation and Palestine Solidarity, especially about his discussion of Black intellectuals and Jewish thinkers in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), be revisited as anticipating this ever popular Black Nationalist political strategy of pluralist assimilation and economic empowerment within the imperial mainstream that ultimately constitutes a retreat from the horizon of Black liberation?

Matthew Quest - The ADOS/Reparations controversy amounts to this. It is a trend that inquires into what tangible rewards have those who are descendants of the human beings that were forced into slavery in the United States ever attained from coalition politics? Harold Cruse talks about the problems of coalitions in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in a manner that subverts commitment to principled Black radical politics.

Clearly, anyone informed by Black radical thought is shocked that the ADOS manifestation of the Reparations idea or movement (there are other formations) openly wrap themselves in the American flag, discard both anti-imperialism and identification with the African and Third World, and apologize for anti-immigrant xenophobia in pursuit of ethnic patronage politics. I find it odious, but as a scholar of intellectual and social movement history and political thought I am not surprised. I find that this popular conception of retreat, despite stiff resistance by some, can be said to have a genealogy of which Harold Cruse contributes.

The late Bruce Dixon in some of his last writings in Black Agenda Report speculated that the ethical lapses of ADOS had something to do with how they understand the nation-state of Israel and the Zionist movement. Do some Black thinkers jealously observe Israel as a worthy example to be emulated of reparations for the historical oppression of Jewish populations in Europe? Is the Zionist movement a certain type of reparations movement that collaborates with the empire of capital and fatefully embraces the state?

Zionism is a nationalist political philosophy that begins with the establishment and defense of the state of Israel as the sole legitimating basis of Jewish identity and heritage. This philosophy was first created by Theodor Herzl in 1897. Herzl was a playwright and journalist who tried to overcome his own dread and anxiety based upon failed attempts at Jewish assimilation into European society by articulating a new mode of nationalism for his people.

What is important to grasp historically is that Herzl’s Zionism, while imagining a Jewish utopia or dystopia in the Middle East, could not have anticipated the forces that established the state of Israel in 1948, and did not have the power to do so. Zionism can neither be projected back into history before 1897 to explain other world developments, the empire of capital, etc. When people project backward in this way, they do not understand historical causation and this is irrational.

Fascist and conspiracy theory literature often builds upon this irrationality and links up its characterization of Zionism with other views marked by anti-Jewish bigotry that have both an older and in some cases an even newer genealogy. Somehow, white nationalist and fascist authors have gained an ideological foothold, no matter how tenuous, within a popular imagination that is shared by certain segments of Black Nationalist thought, without sparking any real concern by these so-called Black Nationalists that these myths about a Zionist conspiracy are coming directly from racist propagandists who have little to no human regard for Black people and wish to maintain, sometimes under the pretense of Christianity and American patriotism, unambiguous reconfigurations of white supremacy in the U.S.

All Jewish people do not subscribe to the philosophy of Zionism. It is mistaken to equate Jewish culture, identity and heritage with Zionism – however that is what Zionists believe and promote. Many well-meaning people fall into this false logic even as they claim to oppose Zionism.

The same logic can be brought to historical and political observation of the many forms of Black Nationalism. While I don’t believe any form of Zionism has any merit, some Black Nationalist ideas have merit and some do not. It is not because I evaluate nationalisms about society differently. I am not fond of nationalism myself. But I understand that oppressed people’s national sentiments are not the same as that of the nation-state or capitalist leaders above society. National liberation can have a mass democratic character, even a socialist expression, and we should fight to make these movements as democratic, socialist, and ethical as possible. We can do this best by resisting those who aspire to enter the rules of hierarchy and domination, as we unite to fight racism and colonialism. Zionism, even in its more liberal and socialist forms, has embraced the nation-state as a frontline of American empire.

The fact that some Black Nationalists, Zionists, and Palestinian nationalists, all claiming to be “progressive,” seek to lobby the empire separately or together for “inclusive human security” while they accept, in fact, U.S. imperial national security frameworks is alarming and does not amuse.

In the post-civil rights, post-colonial era, almost all Black Nationalist expression that I am aware of have also fatefully embraced the state and capitalism – even those that claim to be “socialist.” The next development or rupture in political thought to clarify this has not yet emerged, but this seems accurate.

Every African American, just like the unproductive conflation of Zionism with Jewish people, does not subscribe to Black Nationalist ideological projections – though some wish to persuade us this is so, and that Black folks should or already do accept these worldviews.

Black Nationalism is not simply synonymous with a prideful anti-racist identity. Some Black folks have this disposition but reject the nation-state itself. And some Blacks already identify with the U.S. nation-state and its American Exceptionalism without being Black Nationalists, the same government the same seemingly more “militant” Black Nationalists are trying to get patronage from.

I am aware that some scholars have made the point that Black Nationalism and Zionism, while placed in conversation at various points historically, cannot be fruitfully compared as having the same moral and ethical trajectory in relation to empire. And further, African Americans and Jewish Americans in the U.S. have not known the same status or burdens. I would just say that a valid and accurate materialist reading of history only goes so far where we observe the actual ambitions of certain trends in political thought. We should wish to clarify actual political strategies in social motion, not merely by what some believe are the limits of whole epochs of history economically or hegemonically. One of the reasons I don’t believe in hegemony myself, though I recognize that humans have blind spots through miseducation, is it is an elitist discourse that justifies hierarchy and domination, states and ruling classes as progressive.

Even leading up to establishment of the state of Israel, before World War II most Jewish people did not identify with Zionism. Still, many mistakenly function under the assumption that Jewish culture, identity, heritage, and politics and Zionism are synonymous. Jewish people are not united across class lines (any more than any other group), maintaining the same sense of ethnic or religious identity, or politics.

When Jewish people behave in a racist fashion, often animated by white racism and/or an overstated cosmopolitanism, this may or may not be informed by Zionism. In any event racism, like any other ideology or behavior, is not biologically determined and is not characteristic of a people. Where settler-colonialism, informed by white supremacy or not, is the characteristic of many people who appear to look alike, we must be clear it is a political choice of people and not their inherent or biological nature.

Sadly, there are reactionary white and black intellectuals who promote that pathological behavior among certain racial or ethnic groups has a biological source, or involuntary cosmological source, like Satan for example. Where it is admitted there are exceptions to this rule, the illogic of the biological or cosmological determinism of politics is easily exposed. Many speak about “Zionism” in irresponsible “conspiracy” stereotypical tones as if to suggest sinister “Jews” control the U.S. government or manipulate the world in pursuit of both capitalism and/or communism. This outlook tells us that “Jews” control Wall Street and “Jews” control Hollywood.

This is not to say that I am unaware that on occasion, and in public, individual Jewish people do take pride culturally in “their” group’s disproportionate role in media or economic institutions where as specific individuals they have no ownership share whatsoever. One can see parallels in the Black working class and unemployed peoples aspirational fascination with an illusory Black capitalism and so when a few Black people manage to succeed in the actual accumulation of capital, this is often mistakenly seen and painted in an emancipatory light that ignores its exploitative dimension in relation to the grassroots.

When evaluating Jewish or Black people in relation to capitalism, communism, or cultural institutions a major way we can avoid “conspiracy,” and other forms of unethical thinking, often invented by racists and fascists, is not to count the numerical representation of a people in an institution. Some make these evaluations more accurately than others. It is indeed peculiar when people claim to oppose institutions and wish simultaneously greater elite representation inside them.

Rather, Black folks might ask whether or not “we-ourselves” value the behavior, practices, and institutions that Jewish people are often accused of “controlling” or “empowering”? Do Black folks maintain different philosophical ethics and values or do “we” ultimately just want what ruling power elites appear to have achieved for themselves? This assimilationist view does not condemn an unjust hierarchy but rather condemns lack of representation within an unjust hierarchy.

How we understand the Zionist paradigm of nationalism is paramount, not simply for the project of Palestine solidarity. It is crucial for understanding our capacity to resist trends that ultimately constitute an attractive retreat away from the horizon of human liberation in Black political thought.

Harold Cruse’s discussion of Black intellectuals and Jewish thinkers within the United States, in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, is fascinating but not because of what it suggests on the surface. As a peculiar cultural nationalist argument, Cruse submits that Black emancipatory aspirations have been historically betrayed by both capitalist and communist political orientations of modernity – but that in of itself doesn’t teach us much about either.

Recognizing the pessimistic status of modernity may suggest that the empire of capital and the nation-state cannot guarantee peace, collective economic security, colonial freedom, or ecological sustainability. However, the question of whether modernity has posed the means for humans to politically redeem ourselves is more complex. Future creative innovations must be joined with past dissident notions that were not fully implemented or had not won in past struggles.

But crucial to our understanding here is redemption and liberation, not the conventional pursuit of survival alone in collaboration with existing institutions. Sometimes, peculiar as it sounds, “radical” political thought is studied by some only for insight, animated by pessimism, for narrow empowerment within the dominant order.

Cruse argues that both Caribbean and Jewish intellectuals, often as communists and progressives, have too much influence shaping Black radical politics, to the extent that both pragmatically defer to European paradigms of thought and progress as universal in relation to African American culture. However, this line of critique can lead to a blind alley because Cruse doesn’t highlight any specific European revolutions or suggest even more pragmatic political philosophies for discussion.

It is difficult not to call out Cruse for his cultural nationalist bias against Jewish and West Indian intellectuals, and it’s even easier to point out that Crisis of the Negro Intellectual can be read as a pluralist transition away from his previous, and some would say tenuous, critical engagement with Black radical discourse and Marxist theory as exemplified in his lesser known work, Rebellion or Revolution. As such, we need to be alert to what Cruse means by “an American tradition of politics.” Cruse means that under American Exceptionalism, where social revolution is not taken seriously, politics is not in search of a new society, but is concerned with the terms people access goods and services under capitalism and the nation-state.

In 1967, was Cruse really being insightful where he recognized that Jewish people had a disproportionate influence in the cultural apparatus of American society? Although, you can argue the relevance of such an observation in New York City and Los Angeles. What about in Little Rock or Dallas, or even cities in Wyoming and Idaho? By focusing on groupings jostling for privilege within the cultural apparatus, rather than class orientations or structural relations of power, Cruse’s analysis immediately risks failing to rise above the level of postulating basic ‘racial’ stereotypes.

Cruse, the cultural nationalist, argues that Black artists and intellectuals have to learn to project their own concepts of culture towards political empowerment. But Cruse’s cultural nationalism was never particularly concerned with Africa, or an alternative liberating identity for Black people. And yet, without either an overriding concern with the Mother Continent or an emancipatory reading of Black identity, we are forced to ask just what kind of African American cultural nationalism is this?

Cruse’s discussion of Jewish and Black intellectuals is profoundly interesting because he apparently believes that the historical failure of Black leadership, in the Civil Rights era in particular, is the failure of Black intellectuals to emulate the Zionist paradigm as a road map towards an evolving engagement within the political mainstream of the American nation-state.

As someone who is anti-Zionist and for Palestinian liberation this concerns me; Cruse appears to also be anti-Zionist and for Palestine solidarity. And yet, how can this be when Cruse actually valorizes Zionist political strategy as crucial for the emancipatory project of African Americans?

One of the great failures most make in criticizing Zionist politics, aside from falling prey to common derogatory anti-Jewish stereotypes, is not to clarify that Zionist politics are not exclusively the domain of those who actually espouse literal Zionist ideology. For Zionist politics are ultimately derived from the same western imperialist continuum that positions the nation-state of Israel as the frontline of American empire in the Middle East. Against popular conceptions, Zionism is less about religious belief, and more about political orientation, as such, there is no contradiction between so-called ‘Christian’ countries like the United States being implicated as a main protagonist in furthering the Zionist project.

It is contemptible for anyone to endorse Harold Cruse’s ideological contention that Black Power advocates should learn from the Zionist project. In fact, many Black radical thinkers have assimilated Cruse’s contention as good coin; this is why it is worth revisiting this proposition. But how this plays out is not always so easy to discern.

Stokley Carmichael, Maulana Karenga, Amiri Baraka, and Chokwe Lumumba at different times have each critically engaged with Zionist discourse, and even in their opposition to Zionism have each shown an awareness of the distinction between Jewish people and Zionist thought. In various ways, while acknowledging a historical materialist reading of capitalism and how it impacts and limits the prospects of ethical party politics in the U.S., they have conceived a Black united front as including Democratic Party politicians in Newark, Los Angeles, Detroit, Washington, DC, Jackson and elsewhere.

While there have been conflicts and disagreements with Zionist activists within the Democratic Party, there have also been alliances and ultimately capitulation (and less resistance) to American empire, as a desire to secure the bag of ethnic patronage politics increased over time. To be clear the movements inspired by these thinkers offered disparate and uneven critiques of Barack Obama and maintain differences with ADOS. But the divide over Pan African and anti-imperialist principles can be more imagined than real in practice. A Black united front with aspiring capitalists cannot be without people with chauvinism and narrow ideas. And if it can be said that the Jewish community accepts Zionism of various expressions, and the racism and overstated cosmopolitanism that comes with that, why should Black folks be especially criticized for harboring their own narrow and contradictory nationalisms?

Cruse’s argument in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual implied that Jewish activism within the Civil Rights movement was an overstated cosmopolitanism that rarely transcended Zionist thought towards consistent anti-imperialist politics. And yet, Cruse’s critique wasn’t intended to strengthen African American anti-imperialism, but rather to displace anti-imperialist orientations from political prominence within Black liberation discourse.

Lest we forget, solidarity with Palestinian liberation contributed towards strengthening the Black freedom movement’s anti-imperialism during the era of opposition to the Vietnam War. Whatever BDS advocates may say today, Palestine solidarity is in retreat as an anti-imperialist force. Criticism of human rights abuses in Israel, where sanctions are proposed in response, no longer question the existence of the settler-colonial state itself as before President Obama was elected. BDS was created not to ask President Obama to divest and so they did not. Neither is Palestine solidarity promoted with a deep anti-imperialism exactly because it is assumed the US State Department should be an “honest broker” and give Palestine its independence somehow side by side with the empire. The Palestinian struggle is also learning from Zionism to the detriment of their historical radical convictions. Critical observers of Black politics and reparations politics should be informed by this trend among Palestine solidarity. Do Palestinian nationalists wish for “a Zionist Lobby” of their own? This was not the image of Palestinians as recorded in Black Panther newspapers of the past.

Cruse argued Jewish thinkers influenced by Zionism promoted nationalism (establishment and defense of the State of Israel) for themselves but encouraged Blacks to avoid Black Nationalism and promoted instead a social and cultural integration that was dishonest about the role of nationalism in ethnic empowerment in the U.S.

This seems a profound insight by Cruse and was a major challenge to the “melting pot” theory of ethnic success that always blames the Black community for not overcoming violent structural barriers of racist dehumanization towards a more complete and total assimilation. Cruse uncritically underscored what he perceived to be the “success” of Jewish community in every endeavor, whether they were communists or capitalists. However, by this time, Cruse’s thought is now characterized by his apparent abandonment of Marxist critique (his Marxism was never concerned with class struggle) in the face of just what success means within the capitalist cultural mainstream of America.

Also, Cruse argues that adherence to a Zionist paradigm encouraged Jewish activists to promote non-violence within the Black freedom movement while still supporting armed revolt and even guerilla activity in Israel (the Stern Gang, Irgun, etc), thus confirming Zionist politics as yet another reconfiguration of western imperialist power, and as such, antithetical to notions of Black liberation that embrace armed revolt or self-defense as a challenge to the very premise and sovereign legitimacy of Empire itself.

Cruse also noted that even though some Jewish civil rights activists also considered themselves as Zionist, they never regarded the need for armed struggle in the Middle East in the name of the nation-state of Israel, as mutually exclusive from needing to lobby the American nation-state on behalf of their political interests – a non-violent activity. On the surface it seems Cruse is saying, like Malcolm X, “by any means necessary.” But Cruse is confusing a few matters.

Not every member of the Jewish community who embraced Zionist aspirations automatically supported armed struggle to establish Israel in the transition from British colonialism. There were also debates about why armed self-defense, guerilla actions, and lobbying the empire were necessary and what these should be for among Zionists themselves. Some Zionist guerilla groups attacked representatives of the British empire and some collaborated with both the British and American empires. Some Zionist activists got training from Mussolini’s fascists and some even collaborated with Nazis in Germany as a means to support migrants to Israel. Lenni Brenner’s scholarship has subsequently surveyed much of this. Observers of Black Nationalism, should expect, that as with all nationalisms, politics produces strange bedfellows.

Cruse felt, aware that the forerunners of today’s Labor and Likud parties in Israel did not have the same politics, that Black activists could still learn from the diversity of thought within Zionist activism itself. Of course, a scholarly observer of politics can learn things about power from humans across the ideological spectrum – one can even learn by studying fascism or colonialism without becoming a fascist or colonizer. However, this doesn’t clarify if learning is being used for conservative and pragmatic empowerment, for reform or revolution, and if the latter, what kind?

The unseen problem in Cruse’s argument was that his Black Power perspective was willing to learn from Zionist activists about how to propagate an imperial project abroad, while rhetorically supporting a type of cultural nationalism at home that thoroughly and fatefully embraces capitalism. What type of Black Power theorist did not think it was a disaster to embrace the white supremacist capitalist state for concessions? Even this radical disposition saw a significant decline in popularity from 1969-1975. Cruse should be seen as an advance theorist of this systematic retreat that sees Black power as cultural nationalist assimilation rather than radical internationalist confrontation.

Cruse was really one of the first to interrogate whether Zionist activists from the Jewish community in America sought to identify more with the imperial mainstream as “white” or with the humanity of being “an oppressed nationality” and to show, as of 1967, that such an identification with the oppressed was in decline among those in the Jewish community who supported the Zionist paradigm as the power and legitimacy of Israel became politically ascendant in the world. The Zionist paradigm served to politically isolate or disorient the disproportionate amount of members from the Jewish community who formed a bulwark among ‘white’ anti-racist activists during the ‘civil rights era’ of Black liberation struggle.

Cruse anticipated in certain respects the critique found in Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry, that past historical oppression in Europe falsely and unethically fueled political justification for the nation-state of Israel as embodying Jewish self-determination and the pursuit of social and cultural capital in American politics. If historical suffering of Jewish people could be exploited as social capital toward unethical politics, why might this be different for Blacks or Palestinians? Cruse even drew distinctions between the cultural discrimination that the Jewish community faced in the U.S. and the more severe oppression experienced in Europe, though he acknowledged that the Jewish community would never be fully embraced by Christian or Catholic America and noted some instances of institutional racism that Jewish people certainly faced up to 1967.

Also, Cruse was interrogating what today we recognize as “privilege” politics. White privilege seems to be this notion that whites place their own possessive individualism, and maintaining an identity of psychological superiority, over solidarity with the most oppressed, and other interests they may have such as the need to fight capitalism or patriarchy themselves. Historically conquered peoples have to search for a liberating identity and struggle with self-esteem. But aside from this, people of color also tend to place pursuit of profit, property, and privilege over solidarity with the most oppressed. Something happened historically to conceptions of Black Power between 1967 and 1975, and certainly long before the next millennium and the Age of Obama. Cruse’s ideas should be a touchstone of such an investigation.

Concerns with “privilege” among progressives seem to create a perennial peculiar situation that exposes an irrationality. On the one hand, it seems that whites should be encouraged to have anarchist, communist, and socialist politics inform their anti-racism, the integrity of which must be proven, while people of color in the name of self-determination can support capitalist electoralism and ethnic patronage politics without criticism as a form of “black power.” Did Black autonomy mean a deeper conception of liberty or an evasion of ethical criticism for those speaking for the most oppressed? How do those who pursue forms of ethnic patronage maintain the pretense of a radical ethics?

At an extreme historical disadvantage, any form of political and economic empowerment it appears can be sufficient for African Americans as individuals. This may be a truth of survival under capitalism. But this cannot be a basis of ethical discussions about coalition politics or for that matter social revolution. But ethnic patronage politics has never had a particular ethic. This latter idea needs to be explored further where it intersects with the Black Power movement.

Now short of taking social revolution seriously, the overthrow of state power, the designing of a new society, Cruse underscores that ethnic power in the U.S. comes from patronage politics, what one accesses from electoral coalitions and hierarchical politicians. And Israel is a product of ethnic patronage through a fateful embrace of the capitalist-imperialist state. Cruse also let us know, that he was aware that ethnic patronage also is preceded by the politics of street gangs, most often not with the ideals and program of the Black Panther Party.

Cruse argued the mobilization of street gangs or use of guerilla warfare can be used for pragmatic ends, as leverage in negotiation with the state. Cruse reminded: Had not the Zionist Jewish activist done this in British Mandate Palestine/Israel? Why couldn’t this happen with the enforcement of Black civil rights after legal freedom but not actual freedom had come? Cruse was conflating too many things unproductively. Cruse was comparing Black liberation in the U.S., as a national liberation struggle, with Zionist Jewish militias fighting to get control of Israel, which was a settler-colonial struggle that was seeking to defeat Palestinian sovereignty. Further armed self-defense was righteously justifiable for Blacks fighting racist brutality in the U.S. But Cruse was also suggesting that street gangs and guerilla warfare could be used in the urban ghetto, perceived as a Black domestic colony, against the small merchant labeled a stranger and exploiter. Profound community control under empire is not a fight over who is the shopkeeper in Black communities; this is an identification with petty capitalism. (There are a few Black Nationalists that wish an ethnic cleansing of non-Black merchants in their community – they need not be encouraged.)

It is my reading that Cruse’s “two can play at that game” doctrine suggested that before 1967 the Jewish community, or some who strived to speak for it, became powerful in American ethnic politics by being the forerunners of corporate diversity and multiculturalism – although it was not clear at the time because this was still being consolidated in the 1980s and early 1990s in most places. As interpreters of the historically oppressed for the cultural apparatus of the state, Jewish intellectuals impacted how protest was seen as legitimate or not. Jewish thinkers were in affect the first professional critics of white privilege (as a loyal opposition to the state) and to Cruse, these thinkers could play both sides (the cultural nationalist and ethnic integration arguments) to their personal advantage.

Cruse anticipated the day would come when Black intellectuals, if they knew the right tactics, would supersede Jewish thinkers, in interpreting for the American nation what was appropriate cultural nationalism and ethnic patronage for the historically oppressed. On some level Cruse was theorizing, if one reads his “Blacks and Jews” chapter carefully, in search of a “Black Herzl” for “Black Rothschilds.”

The Rothschilds, who have had debates about the merits of Zionism among themselves and some relatives did not wish to support this doctrine, are a capitalist-imperialist family who have funded much of the initial government architecture in Israel, and have been used as a trope in much anti-Jewish bigoted literature that does not even disavow capitalism for white Christians or Black Nationalists. Only recently have a few Black capitalists emerged with enough wealth and power to be significant imperialists under the right circumstances. But Black people, through their perceived moral authority, have effectively joined the ruling class. Their membership need not be based on personal or family wealth. John Lewis, Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King are examples.

While Cruse’s analogy in search of a Black Herzl was tentative and imprecise, for it had to be tangled up in a certain type of Black Marxism, he was prophetic that soon most Black Power activists would mobilize the street force as leverage for visions of community control that did not disavow Black capitalism, promising empowerment both to the Black poor and aspiring wealthy.

Since Cruse’s time, Black intellectuals, as a social class, like Jewish intellectuals, have also declined in centering consistently the most insurgent heritage of their people for resistance, as they preserve their own patronage from the capitalist state and wield their historical oppression as social and cultural capital primarily for personal advancement.

Cruse’s actual vision of empowerment was very unethical from the point of view of social revolution and turned out very poorly when seen as a radical political strategy. Cruse irritated a lot of people because he exposed the dubious idea, accepted uncritically among African Americans and even most Black radicals of his time, that no culture, in and of itself, including Jewish culture, is inherently progressive in relation to the dictates of capital and established power.

But a close reading of Cruse’s politics should lead us to conclude that it is very dangerous to think of African Americans, or even Palestinians, as inherently “progressive.” This is because the heroic and radical social movement commitments of individuals and small groups are not inherently representative of the character or heritage of a people as a whole or for all time. Those who tend to think so, wield this distortion of history as cultural capital for personal advancement under ethnically plural capitalism, and in reality, seek to lobby the empire not overturn it.

As a historian I rarely have witnessed any activity termed “progressive” that was not in fact a definite retreat from previously held radical values or a cover up for despicable practices. Conquered or victimized peoples do not inherently receive a special insight or consciousness of what to do politically and strategically from their experience of exploitation. Further, the labeling of “progressive peoples” is always a maneuver of aspiring rulers trying to justify hierarchical government. The herd does not inherit political self-mastery (or the hard work to approximate it). It is obvious that bureaucratic thinkers who attribute a progressive character to their people do not think highly of their capacity for direct self-government.

Cruse can be seen as a theoretical forerunner of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka coming into his own. Cruse noted that the founder of Zionism Theodor Herzl, like Baraka, was a playwright and literary man who once accepted uncritically assimilation before his emergence as a visionary nationalist for his people’s self-determination. The doctrine of self-determination for oppressed nationalities has always been a socialist doctrine and in theory rejects self-determination sponsored by empire; it is supposed to be a rejection of empire.

The historical truth is more complicated than this and has much to do with patronage politics under the capitalist-imperialist state at home and abroad. Whether some armed struggle was present or not, political freedom gained by former colonies has often facilitated a process of transition into a more complete socio-economic domination sponsored by the empire. It would benefit observers of African American history, where neo-colonial theory is perceived as valuable (it may be a mystification in certain respects), to pay attention to the transitional process to ersatz independence, who facilitated it, and on what terms.

Advocates of neo-colonial frameworks (some say they are fighting neocolonialism, we cannot be too sure) tend to take inventory and are too preoccupied with perceived “national” capital, its further accumulation and defense. Reparations, like post-civil rights America, is framed as a peace treaty not just with those who have historically conquered Africans, but like in a post-colonial situation, are still doing so. Reparations, like civil rights and Black power, is a discourse that cannot sustain a vision of Black toilers holding the reins of society but instead damaged people who need to be the subject of development.

Baraka had so many phases of his political thought I cannot cover them with nuance here. Baraka was not like Cruse where the former actually had moments where he contributed to ideas of class struggle within the Pan African movement in the global arena. But often overlooked is the basic continuity of Baraka’s politics from the post-civil rights moment, whether as Black Nationalist, Pan Africanist, Maoist, or a Communist that accepted American Exceptionalism to some extent (and Barack Obama), is that Baraka led the Black Power movement into the Democratic Party as early as 1968-1972.

While it is not our concern here that Baraka, as is well known, expressed unprincipled thoughts about Jewish people and firmly disavowed them later, even as he sustained his rejection of Zionism and Israel, we should be alert to what Cruse proposed we learn from Zionist thought and how this can lead Black thought of a radical disposition to fatefully embrace the capitalist state and the Democratic Party.

Finally, Cruse, while no expert on the policies of radical traditions on a world scale, did learn some things from the Popular Front era of Moscow oriented American communism from which he emerged where Paul Robeson was a popular leader. He learned that this form of “communism” never advocated a deep anti-capitalism in the U.S. from World War II to the McCarthyism era. These communists, while an enemy of the Jim Crow white racial state had fatefully embraced a section of the state and ruling class, particularly those who wished to labor for a more ethnically plural future.

McCarthyism smeared these American communists as unpatriotic. This was wrong because they were far more patriotic than most realized. Their internationalism could be an inconsistent cultural decoration between election cycles where the New Deal Democratic Party and its aftermaths were defacto supported. This included, Cruse observed, communist support for the state of Israel and having a stake in local ethnic patronage politics. (The CPUSA’s support for the state of Israel may have been intermittent and changed qualitatively over time.)

That these communists functioned in U.S. government offices was not a figment of McCarthyism’s imagination. There were communists in the State Department. Some of the leading forerunners of the CIA (and its forerunner) were well known Moscow oriented communist scholars who had joined the government to fight fascism abroad. Later some of them founded “independent socialist” magazines and were prominent New Left mentors.

A certain form of communism did control a cultural apparatus and was part of ethnic patronage politics before the ascendancy of the Black political class beyond tokenism. Beyond Zionist Jewish activists, and how they politically functioned, these contradictions in the American communist movement were the origins of Harold Cruse’s Black cultural nationalism, a Black Marxism which desired to play the game of ethnic patronage politics. Before we reconsider Black Marxists’ nationalist and capitalist deviations we should be alert to Euro-American Marxists’ nationalist and capitalist deviations.

But we can’t parse these out until we understand the distinction between white blind spots and liberal and nationalist policies, carried out by purported radicals of different races and colors in exactly the same fashion, and presented as conscious strategy so we can discern this from conscious and unconscious bias. There is so much nonsense carried out in the name of progressivism today it is difficult to reconsider this history in brief except to remind that even bad and unethical politics can have a “radical” history.

Today almost all Black Nationalist and Black radical formations, not simply ADOS, are far more patriotic in relation to the US empire and capitalism than most realize. This is especially so where Marxism or a critique of capitalism appears to be present. A significant genealogical factor in this contradiction is what Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual argued Black radicals needed to learn from Zionism if they did not want Black political leadership to historically fail.

This is the final part of a three part interview through email correspondence from April 28th, 2018 – August 12th, 2018 originally then extended until December 2019 between Matthew Quest and A. Shahid Stover for The Brotherwise Dispatch.