28.06.2018

Used by Clintonites against Sanders campaign

Mistaken versions of Maoism

Two books on intersectionality reviewed: 'How we get free: black feminism and the Combahee River Collective' by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Haymarket, 2017, pp191, £9.70) and Asad Haider's 'Mistaken identity: race and class in the age of Trump' (Verso, 2018, pp132, £9.90)

My second article in this series addressing recent critiques of ‘identity politics’ and ‘intersectionality’ ended on the note that the 1996 Labor Party US attempt to subordinate issues of race (and imperialism) to class was derailed by the 9/11 attack and what followed.1

Asad Haider’s journey through these issues begins at exactly this point: when, as a US-born child of Pakistani immigrants, still at school, after 9/11 he began to be more sharply targeted by racism - and not long afterwards accidentally came across a library copy of Black Panther leader Huey P Newton’s autobiography Revolutionary suicide.

By 2012, having moved to California for postgraduate study, Haider had encountered and been unpersuaded by ‘third camp’, ‘anti-anti-imperialist’ ‘Marxists’, and still thought race was the big problem with the Occupy movement. By 2014, in the Black Lives Matter movement, he encountered the use of racial identity politics and ‘black leadership’ demands as a demobilising force and one which brought mobilisations in behind professional politicians and NGO-bureaucrat ‘community leaders’ - a phenomenon reiterated in the Clintonistas’ baiting of the Sanders movement as white and male in 2016 and since.

Haider’s book thus represents a young man’s effort to get in contact with the lost radicalism of the 1970s, against what hasbecome of identity politics. He makes the attempt by working through a wide range of books and articles between then and now.

The Boston black feminist Combahee River Collective (CRC) is commonly credited with launching the idea of ‘identity politics’ in its 1977 CRC statement, but towards the end of his book Haider cites CRC participant Demita Frazier for the view that “we never ... really practised what people now call identity politics” (p111) and Barbara Smith for the claim that “the reason Combahee’s black feminism is so powerful is because it’s anti-capitalist” (p113).

Both quotes come from the book How we get free, which includes the famous 1977 CRC statement, an introduction by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (another younger-generation writer) and her interviews with three CRC participants, Barbara Smith, her sister Beverly, and Demita Frazier, and with more recent activist Alicia Garza (one of the initiators of Black Lives Matter), and a comment from historian and activist Barbara Ransby. The whole is derived from a panel at the US International Socialist Organization’s Socialism 2017 event.

Combahee River

Combahee River Collective started as the Boston branch of the New York-based National Black Feminist Organization (which formally existed in 1973-75) and broke from them in the mid-1970s because they wanted more radical politics. They took the name ‘Combahee River’ from the 1863 Union army raid on Combahee Ferry, during the US Civil War, in which a leading role was played by the pre-war ‘underground railway’ organiser, Harriet Tubman, and in which black Union troops rescued around 700 slaves.2

The CRC statement (pp15-27) offers in essence a lucidly written combination of ideas about the combined effect of multiple oppressions, which were in fact widespread in the 1970s left.3

I noted in the first article in this series4 that the older women involved in the Science and Society symposium on the issue linked these ideas to ‘class, gender and race’ ideas already current in the Communist Party of the USA and its milieu before. I pointed out there that there was also a link to ‘soft Maoist’ interpretations of ‘labour aristocracy’ theory - the idea that the bulk of the actual organised working class movement was corrupted by privileges. Without using the terminology, the CRC statement says: “We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action” (p22).

The CRC statement is brief; it is well-written; and it has the political authority within this general paradigm of being written by black women (and some of them lesbians too ...). This might be enough to have given it its subsequent celebrity and ‘foundational status’. But there are also both silences in the statement, and positive elements, which will have made it more widely acceptable.

For example, the Maoist left in the US was sharply split by the Boston ‘bussing crisis’ over school segregation, of 1974 and after.5 One might imagine that school segregation would be a matter which was significant to Boston black feminists, but the issue is absent in the CRC statement.

The statement says that the group are socialists, and Barbara Smith in the interview insists on anti-capitalism, while Demita Frazier says that she considers herself a socialist “with a lot of qualifications”. These amount, essentially, to saying that socialism is attractive, but an issue for the unforeseeable future (pp125-26). But the original statement was already extremely guarded about socialism and Marxism.

Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory, as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analysed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as black women (p20).

But they offer no actual explanation or even illustration of how Marxist theory needed to be “extended” for this purpose. The statement may be true. But a little earlier in the text we have: “Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources” (p20) - which is purely Lassallean. It is then unsurprising that the next sentence is: “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”

Again this is a commonplace of the feminist and anti-racist left of the period. Beverly Smith in her interview similarly says:

… for example, if someone’s a socialist, it’s only about economics. It’s only about work. It’s only about material conditions. It’s only about capitalism. And it’s often only about men (p101).

There are, of course, no guarantees what socialist revolution - or any other form of struggle - can deliver.

The language of ‘reading down’ socialism in the CRC statement iscomplete nonsense by comparison with the Communist manifesto, Critique of the Gotha programme, Engels’ Origins and so on. I flag these texts because they were neither hard to get hold of nor inaccessible to read in the 1970s. And both Barbara Smith (p52) and Demita Frazier (p130) comment on the amount of reading and ‘movement education’ which went on in the 1970s (to which I can testify myself in respect of Britain from my own political engagements in the Trotskyist left and in what was then called the ‘gay movement’).

It follows that the vulgarised version of ‘Marxism’ and ‘socialism’ in the CRC statement is not a politically innocent result of ignorance. Rather, it is a conscious choice. In this choice, it has a Eurocommunist aspect - like ‘dual systems feminism’, which emerged in the same period - and actually forms part ofthe transition to neoliberal intersectionality. It is likely that it is this aspect of the CRC statement which has influenced its popularity as a foundation-text for black feminism widely used in the US academy.

The interviews with the authors add some background to the statement. I have already referred to references to the educational quality of the 1970s movement, something which the left has certainly lost since. There is more on the CRC’s involvement in ‘coalitions’, meaning single-issue campaigns of the sort that the ‘Leninist’ left tends to call ‘united fronts’, and local organising work. And there is more elaboration of how the authors came from their experiences with the ‘white women’s movement’ and ‘white left’, and with male-dominated black nationalist groups, to the conclusion that they had to organise separately as black feminists.

Barbara Smith says:

[W]e were socialists. We were part of the organized left. We were not sectarian. We did not belong to any parties or groups. Both Demita and I have never belonged to any party or organized formation (pp43-44).

And

Because we were black women. Our value systems were not shaped primarily by the airless ideological sectarianism of the white European male left (p59).

But CRC was itself a small group (p54). And it does not seem to occur to her that the refusal of membership in any broader party was itself a form of sect construction.

Similarly, Barbara Smith and others around 1980 set up the publishers, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press; and were almost immediately confronted with the issue: who counts as a “woman of color” (pp45-48)? The press did not survive the death of Audre Lorde in 1992.6 The experience might have led to Smith thinking about what institutional conditions can sustain a prolonged publishing operation and maintain continuity. But, from the interview, it does not seem to have done so.

Frazier takes the view that really radical organisations are bound to be short-lived and burn out (p132). She discusses “the need to re-establish our relationship with cooperatives” (p140) - but, again, the issue of institutional forms to enable a degree of stability of cooperatives is posed - and not addressed.

The fourth interview, with Alicia Garza, and the comment by Barbara Ransby, illustrate modern identity politics: not the black women’s organisation as an element of the broader movement engaged in coalition-building, as the three CRC authors describe it, but as demands for leadership and veto. Thus Garza says, for example,

… we don’t just want a seat at the table.

We want the table. And we want to decide who is sitting at the table.

[laugh] Right? And then maybe we want to get rid of the table.

It should be obvious that this political method will lead only to splits, demobilisation, and hence - in the absence of solidarity, which it destroys - dependence on “saviours from on high to deliver”.

Haider

Haider’s book takes the form of a patchwork or congeries of references to different writers Haider has read - to the point that the shape of the argument is not clear. Here the hat-tipping deference, about which I complained in my June 7 article, has become an actual intellectual pathology: Haider selects authors he finds useful, but he cannot really read them critically, except insofar as they may run up directly against his (inevitably limited) personal political experience. This is because the method of deferential hat-tipping prevents him not only from direct rejection of favoured authors’ claims, but also from working up a serious theoretical framework in relation to which they could be criticised, or even be seen to offer arguments inconsistent with each other.

These references are organised in an introduction and six chapters: ‘Identity politics’; ‘Contradictions among the people’; ‘Racial ideology’; ‘Passing’; ‘Law and order’; and ‘Universality’.

The introduction, starting with 9/11 and Huey Newton (as already indicated), goes on to the autobiography of Malcolm X and to Hanif Kureishi’s My son, the fanatic, and to Noam Chomsky as an anti-war and anti-imperialist writer.

Chapter 1, ‘Identity politics’, starts with the CRC statement and its challenge to “empty class reductionism”, before moving to this politics being (allegedly) turned “upside down” by the Clintonites. He moves immediately to Foucaultian Judith Butler’s arguments that liberal individual subjecthood as an idea subjects us to the “disciplinary apparatus of the modern state”. From this it is made to follow that “we have to reject ‘identity’ as a foundation for thinking about identity politics”. Hence Haider does not accept the “Holy Trinity of ‘race, gender and class’ as identity categories”, since they “name entirely different social relations” (p11).

This last point is question-begging, and fails to engage with the arguments for necessary intersection with class made by the CRC authors he has previously referred to.

Haider now turns successively to Malcolm X’s movement to the left shortly before his assassination; to the Black Panther Party’s critique of the black nationalists; to the long history of the civil rights movement, of which ‘official history’ shows a misleading early-60s snapshot; and to the role of the Communist Party and of other radicals in that prolonged struggle. The result of the victories of the civil rights movement was the emergence both of reactionary forms of black nationalism and of black elites. Hence,

Making sense of this bewildering history requires us to draw a line of demarcation between the emancipatory mass movements of the past, which struggled against racism, and the contemporary ideologies of identity, which are attached to the politics of a multicultural elite.

From here we move to Wendy Brown’s ‘anti-foundationalist’ critique of identity arguments (in her 1995 book States of injury)as among other things being “dependent on the demise of a critique of capitalism” and as implicitly coding the white male as the neutral (pp21-22), seeking only inclusion in the middle class. From here in turn, Haider returns to CRC and the problem of ‘coalitions’.

Chapter 2, ‘Contradictions among the people’, is more directly personal-political history. I have already referred to this narrative at the beginning of this article and will not repeat it; but it is worth quoting Haider’s response to the ‘anti-anti-imperialist’ argument that the contradictions of the economic base were primary to the real problems of people of colour:

I couldn’t relate to this and couldn’t see what it had to do with Marxism. I had not encountered anything to convince me to reject [Huey] Newton’s definition of socialism as ‘the people in power’ ... (p28).

Haider’s ‘Marxism’ is thus merely populist.

Chapter 3, ‘Racial ideology’, starts with the very marked inconsistencies of who is treated as ‘white’ and/or ‘black’ and the forms of constitution of different colonialisms. Hence Peggy McIntosh on ‘White privilege’ (1989) and its antecedents in the arguments of 1960s US Maoists Theodore Allen and Noel Ignatiev, and the adoption as a ‘white guilt’ approach by the Weathermen in 1969.

Haider argues that there are no inherent common interests: “A common interest is constituted by the composition of these multitudes into a group. This is a process of political practice” (p50). White supremacy was such a political practice; its impact has been reduced by “the self-organized struggles of oppressed people”, but not eliminated:

It was no accident that these struggles ultimately put forward the insight that it was necessary to constitute a common interest through class organization, which extends to an opposition to the whole capitalist system ...

This claim is, bluntly, historical rubbish. The idea of class organisation came first, and its presence in the US anti-racist movement and elsewhere is a reflection of the influence of the socialist and communist movements in the anti-racist movements; not the other way round.

Haider proceeds to the subsequent work of Allen - the two-volume The invention of the white race (1994, 1997); Ignatiev - How the Irish became white (1995); David Roediger’s The wages of whiteness (1991); Nell Irvin Painter’s The history of white people (2011); and Barbara and Karen Fields’ Racecraft (2014) to support the argument that race is socially constructed through racism.

Early socialist organisations, he argues (without evidence), “failed to recognize that there was anything unique about the demands of black workers” and had no “analysis of white supremacy” - a story which flattens out right-left divisions in the pre-1914 socialist movement and erases their efforts.7 This is the usual ‘official communist’, Maoist and Trotskyist understatement of the communist movement’s debts to the pre-war socialist movement.

But the CPUSA, as RDG Kelley has documented in Hammer and hoe (1990), threw itself into the anti-racist struggle - though early Maoist leader Harry Haywood identified a later shift into substituting ‘white guilt’ manoeuvres within the party for actual struggle on race issues within the rightward-moving trade union movement: “In the absence of mass organizing, racial ideology rushes in to fill the vacuum” (p62).

This issue then returns to “social constructivism”, relying on Paul Gilroy’s Against race (2001) and Judith Butler’s Psychic life of power (1997): the Foucaultian play of ‘power’ on us constitutes our selfhood and agency, creating a “passionate attachment to racial identity” through “the nebulous terrain of the unconscious ... poetry, fantasy and illusion”.

Chapter 4, ‘Passing’, starts with the case of Rachel Dolezal who self-identified as black for political purposes despite having no recent black ancestry, but then moves rapidly on to Philip Roth’s The human stain, a novel of a black academic ‘passing’ as white; the political context of Roth’s ‘Newark trilogy’; the polemical exchange between Roth and Leroi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, and Jones’s sense that his early career was one of ‘passing’; but conversely, the idea that Ron Karenga’s ‘African nationalist’ “US Organization” cult, which Baraka was involved with for a time, was “a contrived performance - in essence an attempt at passing for African” (p74).

Haider argues that black nationalism appeared at first as a potentially revolutionary ideology; but, as it became clear that a black elite was developing, Baraka and the Newark organisation he led moved into the (Maoist) New Communist Movement through fusions. But, in spite of this, Baraka was still drawn into Jesse Jackson’s 1984 ‘Rainbow Coalition’. Haider concludes:

Perhaps it’s our nostalgia for the mass organizations of the 1960s and 1970s that prevents us from facing our contemporary reality. For intellectuals seeking a way of being political in the absence of such organizations, passing is an understandable temptation. Strange as it may seem, Rachel Dolezal could actually be the typical case ... (p80).

I remark merely that the 1950s-60s civil rights movement was a mass movement; but the various 1970s left groups and fronts, including the Black Panther Party and so on, whatever their pretensions to ‘mass work’, were not mass movements.

The New Communist Movement failed; participant Paul Saba now argues it failed because it did not understand Reaganism, and that the analyses of Stuart Hall and similar Marxism Today writers can be used for the purpose (pp81-82). Chapter 5, ‘Law and order’, makes a rough attempt to deliver on this idea. The UK is to be seen as showing more “persistence of its labor and socialist movements” in contrast to the US, but as failing to establish a “viable mass anti-capitalist organization” - ie, a mass communist party - in contrast to the European continent (p84).

The chapter then proceeds to discuss, uncritically, the 1978 book by Hall and others, Policing the crisis. Haider makes an analogy between the authors’ discussion of inner-city street ‘policing’ issues versus trade union struggles, with the US choice between the Black Panther Party (street resistance) and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (of 1969-71: work at the point of production). After further description, we arrive at Hall’s ‘The great moving right show’ (1979) and the idea of Thatcherism as ‘authoritarian populism’. (It should be said that, given the present development of real authoritarian populism, Thatcherism looks much less like a variant of the species.)

Hall’s criticisms of the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85, Haider argues, “were probably true”; and Ralph Miliband’s critique “left unexplained ... how the working class would be organized, in the context of the disorganization from above that Thatcherism had pioneered” (p96).

It is hardly surprising that Miliband did not see a need to explain, given that the miners’ strike had, in fact, demonstrated self-organisation in the localities on a real mass scale. Because the working class as a class includes women and men, black and white, and so on, and its immediate enemy is the class which exploits us all, the class action of the working class on a large scale pulls potential allies into its orbit and into organisation - as happened with the Women’s Support Groups and with Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, as well as with numerous other groups, which Haider, following the Eurocommunist writers, radically misunderstands.

For Hall, “the strike was doomed to be fought and lost as an old rather than as a new form of politics” (quoted by Haider on p99). Haider continues: “As a result, the progressive languages of the new social movements, uprooted from their grassroots base, would be appropriated as a new ruling class strategy” (p100). He goes on to refer to Clinton.

This reasoning is utterly unsound. The appeal to the “new social movements” against “old politics” in the hands of the Eurocommunists was already by 1984 - and indeed well before - an argument against class politics. The “new social movements” were to form part of the “broad democratic alliance”, in which the working class was to subordinate itself to what was needed to get liberals, church leaders, etc, onside. If anything, Hall and his co-thinkers’ ideas contributed to the defeat of the miners’ strike by providing a ‘left’ cover for the idea that the strikers were ‘industrial dinosaurs’ being promoted by the capitalist press.

Haider, however, takes his illusory narrative not as an occasion to reflect on Eurocommunism as a road to Clintonism and Blairism (very literally for several ex-communist or ex-fellow-traveller Blairites), but rather to move into the cultural-constructionist zones inhabited by Paul Gilroy and Wendy Brown. What has been lost, he suggests, is the aspiration to overcoming capitalism (true, but because of the failure of the ‘socialist bloc’ rather than for any other reason) and to universal emancipation.

Chapter 6 turns precisely to universal emancipation. It starts with migration and the defence of migrants in big demonstrations in January 2017 (subsequently diverted into delusive litigation tactics, as happens to most ‘social movements’ in the USA); moving from there to the migrants’ “right to escape” and to the contradiction between the ideas of “the people” as demos (political citizens) and as ethnos (members of an ascribed nationality).8 From here we move to Marx’s On the Jewish question, and then back to Wendy Brown - and claims to rights as claims to victimhood - and in turn to Alain Badiou’s Ethics (as translated in 2001)9 and the critique of ‘humanitarian intervention’.

From here we arrive (p108) at Massimiliano Tomba’s suggestion that the two versions of the French revolutionary Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789 and 1793 can be read against each other, with the first read as ‘juridical’ and the second as ‘insurgent’ (I have to say that to me the second just reads as more ‘Anglo’ in making concrete limitations on the state power, like the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and the US Bill of Rights of 1791).

We return again to Judith Butler, here for the Jewish critique of Zionism; to Pakistani leftist poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s use of the poetic language of Islamic culture; and to Paul Gilroy’s The black Atlantic (1993). On the basis of Gilroy, he counterposes an appeal to insurgent universality to that part of the left (chiefly but not only the ‘anti-anti-imperialists’) who want to celebrate the European Enlightenment as such. Universality “does not exist in the abstract ... it is created and recreated in the act of insurgency ...” (p113). The book closes with reference to CLR James, with his observation in The black Jacobins that “Political treachery is not a monopoly of the white race ...” and with James’s exchanges with Martin Luther King Jr in 1957, insisting on the creativity of the mass movement as fundamental.

But then it suddenly stutters to what would be a correct conclusion if it was at all explained:

Program, strategy and tactics. Our world is in dire need of a new insurgent universality. We are capable of producing it; we all are, by definition. What we lack is program, strategy, and tactics. If we set the consolations of identity aside, that discussion can begin.

Party

“Program, strategy, and tactics” for what? The answer, if it is anything, is: for a party of working class political independence: what before 1914 was called a social democratic party, and from 1918 was called a communist party. That was what the US New Communist Movement (which Haider seems to like) was after. It was what the Trotskyists were after. Of course, both were subject to the episodic delusion that their groups of a few thousand or less were enough to be a real party.

In turn, why? In the first place, because (contrary to the delusions) the Communist Party of the USA, and before it the Socialist Party of America, made possible mass political organisation on a scale greater than the single locality and than ‘circles’ like CRC. It is quite clear from the materials cited in the Science and Society discussion that movements with the CPUSA at their intellectual core constructed the class-gender-race ‘trinity’ and played fundamental roles in the history of feminism and of black liberation.10

It is easy because of the present weakness of the US left to imagine the CPUSA as a force on the same scale as the old CPGB or even smaller. That is mistaken. The CPUSA had 12,000 members at founding, where the CPGB had 4,000. CPUSA membership was to peak in 1947 at 75,000. CPGB membership peaked in 1942 at 66,000.11 Moreover, the CPGB was always a long way behind the Labour Party. By 1934 the CPUSA had unambiguously overtaken the Socialist Party of America.12

Secondly and following on this point, Haider is entirely correct that ‘intersectionality’ without anti-capitalism turns into nothing but appeals to this or that wing of capital against other parts of the subordinated classes and groups. The truth is that without focussing on an alternative to capitalism as such, people are generally bound to fall in behind one side or another of capital’s political representatives (as I discussed last week): either the free-marketeer ‘party of liberty’, or the national-patriarchal ‘party of order’. These trends are spontaneously developed (in all sorts of different forms) by the two sides of the social order, the liberty of the market and the hierarchy of the realm of productive labour (whether the factory or the patriarchal small farm or business).

That programme has to be an alternative to capitalism, not a mere reform programme and not mere ‘anti-capitalism’, which could be feudal, Islamist or whatever.

Wecannot restore petty family production. Leave aside that to do so would probably be undesirable (petty family production is at the foundations of patriarchalism). The point is merely that the increased productive power of capitalism supports a larger population (and greater military power). The consequence is that an alternative has to be founded on human cooperation. ‘Socialism’ or ‘communism’ are the common tags.

It is the fact that any alternative to capitalism will have to be cooperative which poses the question of a workers’ party. Precisely because the workers lack ownership of means of production sufficient to produce independently for themselves, they are forced to cooperate to achieve immediate ends - wage rises, rent reductions, welfare provisions, and so on. This is simply untrue of - for example - dentists, who successfully seceded from the national health service with the backing of the banks. Other elements of the middle classes - academics, politicians, bureaucrats, etc - own immaterial forms of turf and, by defending their turf against each other and against the hoi polloi below, they block cooperation.

It is not that workers are “most oppressed”. They are not necessarily. It is that they are driven to cooperate, and this cooperation poses the possible alternative. Hence, a workers’ party based on a socialist/communist programme can assemble a much broader movement, because “the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race” (Programme of the Parti Ouvrier 1880). An attempt to create a broad ‘coalition’ of diverse groups of the oppressed, including middle class members, without such a common project, will necessarily break down in turf wars.

The party has to be a political party: one which aims to intervene in high politics and win legislative reforms (and eventually power). Any organisation which abstains from these aims will, necessarily, be merely a pressure-group appealing to the party of order or the party of liberty.

The CPUSA was from the 1930s the bearer of two profoundly contradictory ideas. On the one hand, it continued to be the bearer of the idea of a workers’ independent party aiming for communism. It was in this capacity that it could be profoundly influential. On the other, it was committed to the idea of the party monolith (ban on factions), and to the people’s front (subordination of the working class to its supposed allies, usually in the party of liberty). The logic of the party monolith was the liquidation of the party through splits - the fate of the Maoists and Trotskyists.

The logic of the people’s front was the liquidation of the party into a (or the) Democratic Party. ‘Intersectionality’ was already in the early 1980s an instrument of the advocates of this approach. Foucaultianism on the side of theory was also such an instrument, to provide intellectual closure against Marxism. Haider’s appeal to the Foucaultian theorists, Hall and so on is in reality an appeal within the enemies of independent class politics - to keep digging the ‘intersectional’ hole we’re in.

Mike Macnair

mike.macnair@weeklyworker.co.uk

Notes

1. ‘Race and class’ Weekly Worker June 21.

2. Outline at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Combahee_Ferry.

3. Also online at several places: eg, http://circuitous.rg/scraps/combahee.html.

4. ‘Intersectionality is a dead end’ Weekly Worker June 7.

5. Some materials collected at www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-2/index.htm.

6. Summary account at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Table:_Women_of_Color_Press.

7. See, for example, the recent discussion by Paul Heidemann: ‘Socialism and black oppression’ Jacobin April 30 2018 (www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/socialism-marx-race-class-struggle-color-line).

8. Discussed by Étienne Balibar in Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’état, le peuple (2001) - translated in 2004 as We, the people of Europe.

9. L’éthique: essai sur la conscience du mal (1993).

10. Kelley’s Hammer and hoe, cited above; Heideman’s essay, above; K Weigand Red feminism: American communism and the making of women’s liberation (2002). I add that the early US homosexual rights movement, the 1950s Mattachine Society, was founded by CPers (though independently of the party and against the official line).

11. http://depts.washington.edu/moves/CP_map-members.shtml for CPUSA membership; A Thorpe, ‘Stalinism and British politics’ History Vol 83 (1998), pp608-27. See p610 for CPGB membership.

12. www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/spa/spamembership.html.