Harry Haywood

Harry Haywood (February 6, 1898 – January 4, 1985) was a leading figure in both the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). His goal was to connect the political philosophy of the Communist Party with the issues of race.

Quotes

• Every one of these Negro workers was murdered as a direct result of the class struggle as expressed in his demand for wages or better conditions from the white landlords who exploit take Negro masses with even greater animosity than they rob of white workers.
  • Lynching (1932)

• The "white supremacists" insist on presenting the Negro question as one of race. This makes it possible for them to "justify" the notorious color-caste system in the name of spurious race dogmas which depict the Negros servile status in American life, not as the result of man-imposed prescription, but as a condition fixed by nature. Negro inequality is supposedly due to natural inherent differences. In this credo, Negroes presumably are a lower form of organism, mentally primitive and emotionally undeveloped. "Keeping the Negro in his place" is thus allegedly prescribed by nature and fixed by Holy Writ. Color of skin is made an index to social position. Race, a strictly limited biological concept, becomes a social factor and used as an instrument for perpetuating and intensifying Negro subjugation. The Negro problem is explained in terms of natural conflict between races, the result of inborn peculiarities.
  • Negro Liberation (1948)

• It is clear that the Muslim leader conceives the projected Nation of Islam as a neo-colonial dependent of the dominant white power elite, and that with all their professed hatred of the white devils they are unab1e to transcend the idea of natural white overlordship.
  • Nation of Islam: An Estimate

• The drive of the ghetto petty-bourgeoisie for a Black controlled economy is a main dynamic of the most vocal, aggressive current within Black nationalism today - the Black Muslim movement, led by Elijah Muhammad. Profit and business, enterprise is one of the most important aspects of Muhammad's teaching.
  • Nation of Islam: An Estimate

• Their emphasis upon strict separation of the races, their rejection of support of all whites, is in itself a capitulation to the white racist doctrine of inherent racial antagonism. Objectively, this dogma lays the basis for practical agreement with the most rabid Negrophobes, the troglodities of the fascist right, the Birchites, the American Nazi Party, the White Citizens Councils and the KKK. The racist, ultra-right has already acknowledged their unholy kinship with the Black Muslims.
  • Nation of Islam: An Estimate

• Behind Trotsky's revolutionary rhetoric was a simplistic social-democratic view which regarded the class struggle for socialism as solely labor against capital. This concept of class struggle did not regard the struggle of peasant against landlord, or peasant against the Czar, as a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. This was reflected as early as 1905, in Trotsky's slogan, "No Czar, but a Workers' Government," which, as Stalin had said, was "the slogan of revolution without the peasantry."9
  • "Trotsky's Day in Court", Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist, Ch. 6
• We had seen that the Black liberation struggle would be, as it had always been, a spark, a catalyst pushing forward the whole working-class and people’s struggle in the U.S. Far from being simply a struggle for reforms, as the revisionists claimed, it was, as Chairman Mao called it, a clarion call to all oppressed peoples throughout the world to rise up and defeat imperialism.
  • Harry Haywood’s Speech at Congress: ’We Have Taken First Step on a Long March’ (1977)

External links

• Texts from Harry Haywood at marxists.org
• Harry Haywood Archive at marxistleninist.wordpress.com