Books, Arts & Manners: Black Power and National Socialism

Rebellion or Revolution By Harold Cruse Morrow, $6.95 It has been remarked that the Negro’s panaceas are all behind him. But there is always one more apostle of instant — freedom on the horizon, and one more soul-shattering experience to confront | when the last one fails. This is due, perhaps, to the black man’s propensity to trust white men’s judgments of what — ails him—and how to cure it. When the Negro was about to make some giant strides forward under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, it was white men, on the whole, who held , him up to ridicule and called him Uncle Tom. Washington was not militant enough for them. They belittled his philosophy, which preached hard work, the acquiring of manageable skills, and _ the setting up of small shops and factories, as too demeaning for ex-slaves. Instead they joined with Harvard-educated. W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T.’s rival for Negro leadership, in a call for higher education for the “talented tenth” as the goal for the post-Reconstruction Negro in America. Together they founded the NAACP. Washington founded the National Negro Businessmen’s League. Concentrating on | “uplift” “and provided with liberal amounts of cash from Northern white gentlemen, the former flourished, while the Business League, although ‘it is still around, declined. (Later DuBois would ; borrow a bit of Washington’s economic outlook, not ever understanding it m terms of its essential American values, | and become a Communist, dying a stranger in a strange land, a fervent disciple of the exiled dictator Kwame | Nkrumah of Ghana.) Now it is Harold Cruse’s contention that the struggle is still the same, only he doesn’t see much difference between what each ultimately desired. He “elevates” Booker T. Washington into af) ideological forerunner of the “bourgeols democratic revolution,” which he says) (arguing mechanically and from books that would have frightened the dignified | former slave) was aborted and must now be put on the order of the day— if black power is to be understood in its true revolutionary dimensions. He even sees Washington as the originator of the concept of black capitalism, about which there is much talk today. Cruse, however, citing book, chapter and verse from the collected works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, argues the need to recognize the revolutionary character of the “bourgeois-democratic” phase of the black revolution. And in America, which is unique in that the Negro represents not merely an oppressed proletariat, but an “inner” colonially exploited racial minority, the revolution will have to be led by the black man, whether capitalist, worker, farmer, pimp, prostitute, or intellectual—especially the last. The author is critical of some of the black militants engaged in “guerrilla warfare,” whom he views through the traditional Marxian lenses as “petty-bourgeois anarchists,” whose _ street brawls and pig-sticking can only lead to the defeat of the revolution. The revolution itself is necessary for the transformation of our white society, he is fully convinced. He is further convinced that the white man in America has never produced a culture worth preserving. The defining of a “culture” haunts Cruse. In his formidable study, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (reviewed in NR March 26, 1968), which should logically have followed this collection of fugitive essays, and in which his thoughts are more clearly expressed, he also sought definitions that, on the whole, eluded him. Here the subject is pursued in much haste and with much passion. What it all adds up to is that ; we don’t have “culture” and the Negro Must, by exerting some kind of inner-directed control of his own artistic and politico-economic productions, provide us with what we, as a nation, have never had. How could we, lacking soul? Says Cruse: “The soul of a race, nation, people or nationality is its culture.” Now all this appeal to “soul,” to “people,” to “race,” coupled with a cry for “culture” and “socialism,” the world experienced to its horror only a short while ago. And Mr. Cruse is mistaken if he thinks overwhelming us with all the homework he has done in traditional Marxism—recapitulating the old fights from Bernstein to Lenin, from Revisionism to Bolshevism—will make us forget the sources of his appeal to national socialism—which is what much of his “black revolution” is all about. Even the mindless revolution and sloganeering of the New Left, on which he _ seems to rely, is highly reminiscent. Considering his many talents and his genuine efforts to come to grips with a difficult subject, it is unfortunate he feels the necessity to Americanize Marxism, instead of rejecting it outright. Committed to the black revolution, he never tells us why, except as a sort of mystique in which all “cultured” men must believe. He sums up his book of essays by telling us what is “behind the black power slogan.” In the first place it is a tactic, dating back to the demands of Booker T. Washington, who counseled the Negro to “cast down his bucket” where he was. Second, it must be understood as essentially a revolutionary slogan that is totally anti-integrationist. (His criticism of the old-line Marxists, whether Stalinist or Trotskyist, is that they see the struggle in European terms as a class conflict, whereas he sees it as part of a peculiar American anti-colonial struggle.) Third, the black power slogan provides an umbrella under which all elements of the Negro community can be sheltered while the leaders—the intellectuals—go about — hammering out a program for the final conflict, the emancipation of the black man in America. In the process, by a kind of dialectical transformation of values, the emancipation of all the rest — of us in deprived and cultureless Amer__ ica will be assured. That is his thesis—so far. But he is still developing. And since he is a man of considerable wisdom, having had to discard much ideological baggage in a hurry (he abandoned the Communist — Left in the late Fifties), it is tobe hoped that he will yet learn to cast off the remainder of his commitments to a movement that offers nothing to the white man or the Negro. Fetched ashe is by the notion of revolution, he might heed Camus, whom he frequently – quotes. The author of The Rebel said, “The revolution, too, is a form of slav-_ ery.” Only it will never permit an Emancipation Proclamation. In sum, it is not _ the American Negro who needs to be emancipated, he needs only to be freed from his emancipators.