Editor's Note i

Internationalism
in Practice
k

Claudia Jones,
Black Liberation,
and the “Bestial” War on Korea
ii Internationalism in Practice
 Editor's Note iii

Internationalism
in Practice
k

Claudia Jones,
Black Liberation,
and the “Bestial” War on Korea

Claudia Jones
featuring contributions from

Betsy Yoon
Denise Lynn
Gerald Horne
Tionne Parris
Kim Il Sung
iv Internationalism in Practice

Published by Iskra Books 2024

All rights reserved.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Jones' articles in the present volume are reproduced kindly and with gratitude
from the theoretical journal, Political Affairs (1949, 1950, 1952), of the
CPUSA.

Iskra Books
www.iskrabooks.org
US | UK | Ireland

Iskra Books is an independent scholarly publisher—publishing original

works of revolutionary theory, history, education, and art, as well as edited
collections, new translations, and critical republications of older works.

ISBN-13: 979-8-8691-3160-7 (Softcover)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Cover Art by Ben Stahnke

Editing, Proofing, and Typesetting by David Peat
 Editor's Note v

CONTENTS
k

Editor’s Note vii

Section 1: Introductions
70 Years of Black and Korean Internationalism
Publisher’s Introduction 1
Essay on the 70th Anniversary of the Fatherland Liberation War
Victory
Betsy Yoon 8

Section 2: Theoretical Foundations

The Theory of Super-Exploitation
Denise Lynn 15
An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!
Claudia Jones 21

Section 3: Anti-imperialism at the height of the

anti-communist witch hunt
International Women’s Day as a New Day against Imperialism
Liberation School 41
International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace
Claudia Jones 46
For the Unity of Women in the Cause of Peace!
Claudia Jones 62
vi Internationalism in Practice

The Struggle for Peace in the United States

Claudia Jones 83
Statement Before Being Sentenced to One Year and a Day
Imprisonment
Claudia Jones 106

Section 4: Conclusions
“Negro Women Can Think and Speak and Write!”
Jones' Speech to the Court Before Her Sentencing
Gerald Horne & Tionne Parris 115
The Great Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Cause of Asian,
African, and Latin American Peoples is Invincible
Kim Il Sung 119

Contributors 132

Farewell to Claudia
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn 133
 Editor's Note vii

Editor's Note
k

Historical articles have been edited slightly for clarity. Additional contextual
information is provided by footnotes beginning with [Ed. Note:]. All other
footnotes have been preserved from the originals.
viii Internationalism in Practice

SECTION 1
Introductions
k
 Introductions 1

70 Years of Black and Korean

Internationalism:
An Opportunity and Responsibility
for the U.S. Left Today

Publisher’s Introduction

T hroughout the years of the global struggle between the oppressors

and the oppressed, 1953 was especially significant, situated as it was
in a complex and highly dynamic and unpredictable conjuncture. A
wide variety of elements across the world condensed into decisive turn-
ing points that solidified beyond all doubt the contradictory develop-
ment of the global revolutionary offensive and its counterrevolutionary
defensive. As far as years are useful for marking history, especially in
regular discussions, 1953 is one that, in many ways, continues to define
the revolutionary struggle of today. That was the year Stalin died, the
Korean resistance forced the U.S. to sign an Armistice Agreement, and
the year Claudia Jones was, along with other leaders of the Communist
Party, found guilty of violating the Smith Act and sentenced to over a
year in prison. A year of defeats and victories, these three seemingly dis-
connected events were intimately bound together, as the original essays
and Jones’ original articles assembled in what follows make abundantly
clear.
When much of the world awoke to the news on March 6, 1953, they
learned that the night before, shortly before 10:00 pm, Joseph V. Stalin,
who guided the Soviet Union for decades, had passed away. The world’s
official leaders awaited with anticipation and anxiety for what was to
2 Internationalism in Practice

come. Given Stalin’s prestige across the world and how many dissolved
his personality into the Soviet Union and the communist movement
(rather than the other way around), would Stalin’s death dissolve that
movement? Would internecine battles within the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union’s leadership empower reactionary forces or at least
open cracks for imperialist intervention? As it turns out, both happened
in some form, as the U.S. seized on the intra-party struggles to further
drive a wedge between the increasingly uncomradely debates between
the Soviet and Chinese communists.
Those from the progressive countries worried about the fate of their
primary ally and source of aid and solidarity for these reasons and others.
Most progressive forces worldwide were, of course, in mourning. This
includes those living in the heartland of world imperialism, the U.S.
Perhaps the most significant was Black revolutionary William Edward
Burghardt Du Bois. A long-time supporter of the communist struggle,
Du Bois wrote not one but two eulogies for the historic figure. “Joseph
Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his
stature,” opened one short statement. Published under the title, “Dr.
Du Bois on Stalin: ‘He knew the common man [...] followed his fate,’”
it appeared in the March 16, 1953 edition of the independent left-wing
newspaper the National Guardian based out of New York City.” As
one of the despised minorities of man,” Du Bois continued, “he first
set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation
out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality,” continued
Du Bois with a U.S. readership in mind.1 Whereas Du Bois noted the
Soviet Union’s emphasis on eliminating racial and national oppression
in his first eulogy, the second highlighted the international response and
appreciation of that concrete solidarity. “The death of Joseph Stalin,”
he begins, “shocked 15 million American citizens of Negro descent in a
peculiar way. Stalin had unequivocally advocated Peace while all other
rulers voiced two words for War to every one for Peace. These Negroes
want peace for more reasons than whites.”2 As contemporary revolu-
tionary communist scholars have noted, this wasn’t the first time Du
Bois went to bat for his friends in the Communist Party or the Soviet
Union, and it wouldn’t be the last.3
1 W.E.B. Du Bois, “On Stalin,” National Guardian 5, no. 16 (1953): p. 4.
2 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Stalin and American Negroes,” Pravda, 10 March 1953.
Reprinted in Peace, Land, and Bread 05 March 2021. Available here: www.peaceland-
bread.org/post/w-e-b-du-bois-s-stalin-and-american-negroes.
3 See Derek R. Ford, Communist Study: Education for the Commons, 2nd ed.
 Introductions 3

In 1950, an issue of the Negro Digest featured a symposium on a re-

mark Paul Robeson made the year before about Black people and their
inherent comradery with the Soviet Union. The Negro Digest was the
personal project of Black businessman John Harold Johnson, who col-
lected funding for the first installments with personal appeals for pre-
paid subscriptions before, eventually, partnering with Joseph Levy, a
magazine publisher. After hitting Chicago newsstands in late 1942, the
Negro Digest became one of many Black periodicals of the period, al-
though it distinguished itself by including a range of voices across the
political spectrum and the overall editorial line established by Johnson:
a patriotic belief that the U.S. could be a real democracy.4 The Digest
featured a regular column on the back page, “If I Were a Negro,” to
which Eleanor Roosevelt contributed in the magazine’s February 1943
edition. This provides a sense not only of the magazine’s political orien-
tation and its process of popularization and funding, but also the con-
text in which the symposium appeared.
Du Bois defended Robeson in the Symposium, which focused spe-
cifically a comment made in Paris on April 20, 1949. As he entered the
room, the audience erupted in thunderous cheers, which quieted after
approaching the stage. There, Du Bois recalls, “his great voice rose in
song—song of Black slaves, song of white slaves, songs of Russia and
France,” followed by a short speech in which he stated, “the black folk
of America will never fight against the Soviet Union!” again to great ap-
plause.5 Robeson was right; he knew what he was talking about. He
wasn’t afraid to speak the truth even though he knew it would—and
did—stir immense controversy in the U.S., within the political elite, the
Black bourgeoisie, and factions of the Black press. Robeson’s knowl-
edge, Du Bois insists, wasn’t abstract. His knowledge came from the
time he had spent in the USSR and the U.S. “He knew better than most
men,” Du Bois continues, “that of all countries, Russia alone has made
race prejudice a crime; of all great imperialisms Russia alone owns no
colonies of dark serfs or white and what is more important has no in-
vestments in colonies and is lifting no blood-soaked profits from cheap
(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022); and “Against the ‘Compatible’ Academic Left:
Rethinking Capitalism and Racism,” PESA Agora, 2023. Available here: https://pe-
saagora.com/columns/against-the-compatible-radical-academic-left.
4 Nichols Grant, “The Negro Digest: Race, Exceptionalism and the Second
World War,” Journal of American Studies 52, no. 2 (2018): pp. 358-389.
5 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, “Symposium: Paul Robeson: Right or
Wrong?” Negro Digest 7, no. 8 (1950): p.5.
4 Internationalism in Practice

labor in Asia and Africa.”6 Indeed, immediately after taking power, the
Bolsheviks unconditionally renounced their “rights” to foreign territo-
ries and exposed the secret imperialist agreements about what country
would get what colony.
The figure most thoroughly demonized and caricatured in the West,
Joseph Stalin, earned the respect of many Black U.S. and African revolu-
tionaries. This is why it is noteworthy that Du Bois, for example, joined
the Communist Party after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 'Secret Speech'
that established a right-wing critique of Stalin and irreparably damaged
the international communist movement because from then on, as Do-
menico Losurdo writes “it was only Stalin and his closest collaborators
who were confined to the museum of horrors” and the cause of every
problem faced by the Soviet Union or the imperialist U.S.7 The Soviets,
understandably eager to avoid another World War, pursued a nuclear
non-proliferation treaty with the U.S., something that was intolerable
to the People’s Republic of China for equally understandable reasons.
It was not that anyone wanted war or nuclear war, but that the USSR-
US pact was, in effect, an anti-China pact. The issue of peace was on the
forefront of the international progressive agenda in 1953 as U.S. war
against Korea reignited a long-standing Black desire for peace. Du Bois
enunciates the basis of unity between Black Americans and Koreans in
one of his obituaries. “Koreans were Colored People,” he writes, who
had “suffered from white nations, the same discrimination and con-
tempt as Negroes suffer.”8
Du Bois, like Robeson, knew how the Third International worked
to help the oppressed free themselves and the real material gains that
resulted. They were aware, too, of the contradictions that entailed, the
errors made, and the formulaic applications of abstract principles to dif-
ferent contexts. Nonetheless, from Cuba and Guyana to Zimbabwe and
Syria—not to mention China—there was an ideological and affective
bond linking them together. That bond is the Global Class Struggle that
continues to this day.

6 Ibid., p. 10.
7 Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, trans. H.
Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Madison: Iskra Books, 2023), p. 9.
8 Du Bois, “Stalin and American Negroes,” Pravda, 1953.
 Introductions 5

Revolutionary Black Internationalism and Korean Solidarity

Claudia Jones echoed Du Bois and Robeson’s shared understanding of
the Korean and U.S. Black liberation struggles. Shared, of course, does
not mean uniform, and one of Jones’ great contributions was her abili-
ty to identify the unique position of Black women workers in the U.S.
in the struggle against imperialist wars. She recognized her fellow Black
women workers as being those who would first spontaneously recognize
the internationalist position of Black people in the U.S. and their Kore-
an comrades, who were united in part by a common enemy: U.S. impe-
rialism largely. This system was, after all, built on the super-exploitation
of enslaved Africans, Black workers of all genders, and the colonial and
imperialist plunder of the world.
In the coming pages, we will see Claudia Jones emphasize this point
repeatedly, although she will add the unique position of Black women
in resisting imperialist wars and in being among the first to recognize the
shared position of Black people in the U.S. and their Korean comrades.
One prominent instance Jones did so was about a month before Du
Bois’ wrote the above passages and in quite dire circumstances. Having
been convicted of several charges, among them conspiring to overthrow
the U.S. government, with 13 other communist leaders in January,
Jones delivered a statement in front of Judge Edward J. Dimrock before
receiving her sentencing on February 2, 1953. Jones wasn’t speaking to
the judge or the U.S. state, both of which she viewed as impotent, but
to the real force in the world: the global peace movement. Jones begins
articulating her hope that her statement might “even one whit to further
dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace and to repel
the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country.”9
In her speech reprinted here and brilliantly contextualized and ex-
pounded upon by Gerald Horne and Tionne Parris, Jones mentions
how the prosecution used her 1950 International Women’s Day speech,
published in Political Affairs, as evidence against her. However, though
it was introduced, it wasn’t read aloud. Jones asserted this was because
“it urges American mothers, Negro women and white, to emulate the
peace struggles of their anti-fascist sisters in Latin America, in the new
European democracies, in the Soviet Union, in Asia and Africa to end
the bestial Korean war […] to reject the militarist threat to embroil us in
a war with China, so that their children should not suffer the fate of the
Korean babies murdered by napalm bombs of B-29s, or the fate of Hi-
9 Jones, Statement Before Being Sentenced... [see this volume, p. 106].
6 Internationalism in Practice

roshima.”10 The Korean people almost suffered from nuclear weapons

and most of the Pentagon and U.S. foreign policy establishment were
anxious to deploy them not only against Pyongyang but Beijing as well.
Yet there is no reason or basis on which to compare the destruction of
U.S. imperialism across the world.
A few months after Stalin’s death and Jones’ speech, the Korean peo-
ple, led by the Korean People’s Army and in collaboration with their
Chinese comrades, forced the U.S. to sign an armistice agreement that
finally halted their “police action.” What the U.S. calls the Korean War
and the north Koreans and progressives refer to as the Great Fatherland
Liberation War came to an end as “the heroic struggle waged by the
Korean people for three years in defense of the country’s freedom and
independence against the U.S. imperialist armed invaders ended in vic-
tory for us” and defeat for the imperialists.11 The war looked to many
like a conflict between two different states, each claiming sovereignty
over the other’s territory. This framing avoids the essence of the struggle
and distorts the global nature of the U.S.’s military aggression.
Kim Il Sung, the primary leader of the decades-long anti-colonial
struggle and later of the struggle to force U.S. imperialists out of the
northern half of Korea, endorsed this internationalist position. For
example, Kim begins his “1946 Report to the Second Congress of the
Workers’ Party of North Korea” with an assessment of the post-World
War II international climate and defined them relative to the radically al-
tered position of two camps. “The most essential of these changes,” Kim
begins, “is that the capitalist system, that is, the reactionary Imperialist
camp, has become markedly weaker, whereas the international demo-
cratic camp headed by the Soviet Union has come into being and has
definitely gained in strength.”12 Among the latter camp, Kim includes
“the great force of the oppressed peoples who have risen in the struggle
to achieve national freedom and independence against colonialism.”13

10 Ibid. [see this volume p. 109].

11 Kim Il Sung, “Everything for the Postwar Rehabilitation and Development
of the National Economy,” in Kim Il Sung Selected Works (Vol. 1) (Pyongyang: For-
eign Languages Publishing House, 1953/1976), p. 415.
12 Kim Il Sung, “Report to the Second Congress of the Workers’ Party of North
Korea,” in Kim Il Sung Selected Works (Vol. 1) (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Pub-
lishing House, 1955/1976), pp. 204-205.
13 Ibid., p. 213.
 Introductions 7

A Relation of Reciprocity: A Legacy of Inspiration

While Du Bois paid tributes and expressed his sorrow to the people
of the world in his obituaries of Stalin, Kim Il Sung wrote to Du Bois’
widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, after learning of his death in 1963.
“On receiving the sad news of Dr. William Du Bois’ Death,” Kim wrote
before clarifying the late Du Bois' credentials as a “distinguished peace
champion and scholar,” President Kim—or as the Premier of the Cab-
inet of the DPRK as he was known at the time—sent his “profound
condolences” to her and the family on behalf of the DPRK. He assured
her that Du Bois’ “unflinching struggle against the racial discrimination
policy and for the safeguarding of peace” would not be forgotten by the
Korean people. In the letter dated September 2, Kim concluded by re-
minding her that her late husband and comrade's contributions would
only strengthen the resolve of oppressed peoples until our collective “fi-
nal victory.”14 So too should the writings that follow and the outcomes
of their authors and theorists embolden our commitments to establish a
revolutionary wing in the rising social movements of the U.S. in a care-
ful and strategic manner and to wave unflinchingly, as Jones and Kim
did, against all manifestations of national chauvinism, sexism, white su-
premacy, and imperialism.
We are confident that—given Iskra’s growing reputation and audi-
ence, the tremendous scholars commenting on Jones’ works, and the in-
creasingly revolutionary, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist forces leading
the movements in the U.S. today—this book will do for contemporary
struggles what it did for President Kim and the Korean struggle. That
will not happen on its own, of course. So let this book not only be read
but acted upon in daily interactions as well as large-scale actions. The
authors and editors who have worked to assemble this superb, accessible
publication have done the international struggle for justice and libera-
tion an immense favor. We must, in every opportunity, seek to advance
the class struggle, which is inseparable today from the national libera-
tion struggles inside and outside of the U.S. prison house of nations.

14 Kim Il Sung, “Accra Madame Shirley Graham Du Bois,” 02 September 1963,

W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives (Uni-
versity of Massachusetts, Amherst Libraries), pp. 2-3.
8 Internationalism in Practice

Essay on the 70th Anniversary

of the
Fatherland Liberation War
Victory

Betsy Yoon

A lot has been written about Korea, the Korean War, and the armi-
stice. Yet an understanding of the armistice, the unresolved nature
of the war, and the implications for today remain absent from most
mainstream narratives about Korea. When either north or south Korea
appear in the headlines, the historical conditions that lay at the root of
today’s circumstances—and particularly the United States’ role in cre-
ating those conditions—are rarely mentioned. In fact, the Korean War
itself is also known as “the Forgotten War.” But what does forgetting
mean when the forgetting refers to an ongoing situation rather than a
past event?
The appellation of the Forgotten War is not accidental; what is high-
lighted and commemorated on a national level in the United States
serves to sustain imperialist interests. This pattern is not unique to Ko-
rea and manifests in discourses about many ongoing sites of liberation
struggle. In Palestine, for example, through this lens of selective forget-
ting and remembering, occupation is framed as “conflict” and acts of
resistance are framed as terrorism.
In terms of the Korean peninsula, the U.S. would like for it to be for-
gotten that Korea has been unified for longer than it has been divided.
 Introductions 9

The U.S. would like for it to be forgotten that the war remains unre-
solved. The U.S. would like for the realities of U.S. war in Korea to be
forgotten: massacres, carpet bombing, and the threat of nuclear war.
And the U.S. would like for us to think that the U.S. is an agent of peace
and humanity on the Korean peninsula. We are not to remember that
south Korea does not even have the sovereign right of operational con-
trol over its military should active war break out, or that north Korea is
burdened with debilitating sanctions that disproportionately affect the
most vulnerable.
Liberal narratives around past struggles commonly invoke the refrain
of, “Oh, if only we had known.” For example, with Iraq’s nonexistent
WMDs, if only we had known they didn’t actually have WMDs. The
implication is that a lack of information is at the root of past injustices
and that with sufficient information, things like massacres, displace-
ment, and murder through economic blockade would not be permitted
to happen. But as we see from the writings of Claudia Jones, there were
those who understood and named what the U.S. was doing in Korea as
it was happening, and how this related to conditions at home.
In the writings collected in this book, Jones lays out the need to
forge and develop links between arenas that are today often thought to
be separate. In particular, Jones makes clear that in order to be truly
anti-war, one must be anti-imperialist. In her March 1950 speech on
International Women’s Day, for example, Jones says, “a fundamental
condition for rallying the masses of American women into the peace
camp is to free them from the influence of the agents of imperialism.”
In this one speech—given months before the official outbreak of the
Korean War—Jones condemned the “bipartisan war policy” of the
Truman Administration, called for an end to atomic bomb production,
put forth the need for a united front firmly rooted in working class an-
ti-imperialism, and drew clear connections between the fight for peace,
U.S. wars, and class struggle. These were not separate topics but deeply
connected. Following the example set by Jones, this chapter will provide
some historical background and discuss both the past and present-day
implications of the armistice.

Historical Background
A dilemma that faces anyone writing or thinking about any national lib-
eration struggle is the question of where to start and what level of gran-
10 Internationalism in Practice

ularity is required for an accurate understanding of present-day circum-

stances. While this text offers some critical historical flashpoints, it is not
a history. The points offered here seek to answer the question of, what
is most helpful for understanding the context of the armistice? How
can we appropriately assess the unresolved Korean War and its continu-
ing impact? These flashpoints or components are framed through an
understanding that imperialism was a driving factor in developments
on the Korean peninsula from the beginning of the 20th century to the
present day. Given this understanding, I begin with the following flash-
point: the Taft-Katsura Memorandum of 1905.
In a desire to maintain a foothold in Asia, and in the face of Japan’s
military gains against China and Russia in the late 19th century, in 1905
the United States negotiated an agreement with Japan regarding spheres
of influence. Known as the Taft-Katsura Memorandum (named after
U.S. Secretary of War William Howard Taft and Japanese Prime Min-
ister Katsura Tarō), “the United States recognized Japan’s right to con-
trol Korea in exchange for Japan’s acceptance of U.S. hegemony over
the Philippines.”1 Japan turned Korea into a protectorate that same year
and formally annexed Korea in 1910, ushering in 35 years of harsh co-
lonial rule.
Taft-Katsura clearly locates the Korean struggle in U.S. imperial ex-
pansion, as Claudia Jones does. Thus we see that the struggle in Asia—
from the Philippines to China to Korea—is the same struggle against
U.S. imperialism. As Lenin noted, one of the features of imperialism is
“the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist
powers.”2 This moment demonstrates the common roots of present-day
struggles in the Philippines and the Korean peninsula and demonstrates
the need for solidarity across Asia against imperialism. We must be en-
gaged in the struggle that is before us: a global struggle against imperi-
alism in which the futures of all nations fighting for national liberation
are tied together.
The material conditions of colonization laid the groundwork for con-
ditions in a liberated Korea in 1945. While the Soviet Union was in po-
sition to receive Japan’s surrender and oversee Japan’s exit from Korea,
the United States, already thinking of their wartime ally as an enemy and
1 Martin Hart-Landsberg, Korea: Division, Reunification, and U.S. Foreign
Policy (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1998, p. 26).
2 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Paris:
Foreign Language Press, 2020).
 Introductions 11

not wanting the Soviet Union to operate unchallenged in the region,

proposed a division of Korea along the 38th parallel, wherein the United
States would accept Japan’s surrender below this dividing line. Thus we
see the direct path from Taft-Katsura to colonization to division to war,
leading to the past 70 years of an armistice and an unresolved war.

Armistice
The armistice is synonymous with a continued state of division; when
talking about the armistice, it is therefore necessary to also talk about
division and reunification. The state of the armistice and the continued
state of division is not only a structural feature that represses and limits
the full potential and self-determination of the Korean people on both
sides of the DMZ, but it also is a key component to sustaining U.S. im-
perialism in the Asia-Pacific region, and, given the strategic importance
of maritime access to shipping lanes in the area, on a global level.
This division has led to divided ways of remembering events on the
peninsula. As Kim Dong-Choon points out, in south Korea, the war
is often remembered just by the date on which it began, June 25.3 It’s
called either the Korean war or 6.25; in contrast, north Korea refers to it
as the Fatherland Liberation War. The narrative in south Korea is more
aligned with the U.S. narrative that frames the Korean war as a conflict
between Koreans that the U.S. intervened in for moral reasons. Under-
standing the war as a Fatherland Liberation War places the Korean war
in its historical context—that of a national liberation from Japan that
was interrupted by the United States. This differentiated national re-
membering of the Korean War manifests around the armistice as well.
Located north of the DMZ, the building in which the armistice was
signed has been turned into a site of remembering. Visitors are told that
the U.S. wanted to sign the armistice in a temporary structure, but north
Korea felt that it should be commemorated and preserved and so built a
permanent structure for the proceedings. Accordingly, the armistice in
north Korea is celebrated as a victory and is a national holiday. In con-
trast, this event is not celebrated in south Korea (there are organizations
in the south that do commemorate the armistice, but it is not a national
holiday). And in fact, south Korea was not a signatory to the armistice.
The fact that the armistice was implemented without the participation
of one of the two Koreas lends credence to the notion that this war was
3 Kim Dong-Choon, The Unending Korean War: A Social History (CA: Tamal
Vista Publications, 2000, p. 3).
12 Internationalism in Practice

not simply a war between Koreans but was in fact a liberation war.
When discussing the armistice, it is also important to remember that
the war could have been over by 1951, rather than 1953. The two sides
had reached a stalemate by mid-1951, and agreed to begin talks to end
the war. “Expectations on the North Korean side were that it would
take only a few days to reach an accord. [...] The war continued largely
because the U.S. government refused to stop fighting until all outstand-
ing issues [...] had been settled.”4 Again, this was knowable both then
and now: Jones was calling for an end to the Korean war in 1951, in full
awareness that this was a U.S. war and that the U.S. had the power to
end it.5 Every step of the way, the U.S. has been against peace in Korea,
and just as it obstructed efforts to stop active fighting in the Korean war
for two years, it has continued to obstruct efforts to formally end the
war for 70 years.
The armistice was meant to be one point along a continuum of prog-
ress toward peace, never the endpoint. And yet, after 70 years, we find
ourselves not only with an armistice still intact but with increasing mil-
itarization and tension. Heightened tensions and increased risk of war
are not unfortunate side effects of the armistice; they are the only pos-
sible outcome.

Impact of the Armistice

Since the armistice, the threat of north Korea has been regularly used as
justification for ongoing militarization of the peninsula. Most recently
this rationale was invoked when describing the formation of the Nucle-
ar Consultative Group in summer 2023,6 which was coordinated with
the docking of nuclear-capable ballistic missile submarines in Busan and
Jeju Island, returning nuclear weapons to south Korea for the first time
since 1994, when the U.S. announced the removal of nuclear weapons
they had previously covertly stationed in south Korea.
This same rationale was used when installing the Terminal High Al-

4 Hart-Landsberg, Korea, p. 130.

5 Jones, “For the Unity of Women in the Cause of Peace!” [see this volume, p.
62].
6 Victor Cha, “The U.S.-ROK Nuclear Consultative Group’s Successful
Launching,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 20, 2023. Available
here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-rok-nuclear-consultative-groups-success-
ful-launching
 Introductions 13

titude Area Defense system (THAAD), displacing residents of Seongju

and for the construction of the naval base that displaced villagers in
Gangjeong on Jeju Island. The United States is aggressively militarizing
its forces on the Korean peninsula, with north Korea as the justification.
But as we are reminded by Taft-Katsura, the U.S. is not just interested
in Korea itself, but in what Korea represents strategically and regionally.
North Korea, the armistice, and the unresolved war serve as a conve-
nient cover for the U.S.’s primary desire to contain China and maintain
the free flow of capital in the region.

Conclusion
Removing the condition of the armistice is one necessary component
to weakening U.S. imperialist designs in East Asia. As with any compo-
nent, resolving the armistice and the Korean War is only one step, it is
not the end goal. A peaceful resolution to the unresolved Korean war,
much less the dismantlement of imperialism, will require more than
moving from an armistice to some kind of peace agreement. But it is a
necessary component.
Let us follow in the footsteps of Claudia Jones, who demonstrates
not only that we don’t need to wait for the benefit of hindsight but also
how imperialism drove seemingly disparate struggles as the Korean lib-
eration struggle and class struggle in the U.S. Hindsight is only useful if
we use it to inform how we approach the present. We have had 70 years
of hindsight and the path forward is clear. Resolve the armistice and end
the Korean War!
14 Internationalism in Practice

SECTION 2
Theoretical Foundations
k
 Theoretical Foundations 15

The Theory of Super-Exploitation

Denise Lynn

C laudia Jones was one of the most prolific and impactful theoreti-
cians in the U.S. left. After joining the Communist Party (CPU-
SA), her work in its publications led her to engage with and challenge
Party policy and practice and its ongoing conversation with Marxist-Le-
ninist theory. Jones produced important work throughout her years in
the CPUSA, and her most influential article, “An End to the Neglect
of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”—published in 1949—laid the
foundation for expanding the Party’s analysis on Black women’s oppres-
sion. More importantly, as other scholars have noted, the article helped
to influence Black Left Feminism and movement-building among later
generations of activists.
While women’s World War II contributions have been celebrated in
U.S. culture, their crushed aspirations after the war have largely been
ignored. After 1945, women faced job loss, a suppression of political or-
ganizing, and the ascendance of a conservative ideology that reified the
white heteronormative nuclear family as the “traditional” familial struc-
ture and sought to isolate middle class white women within its confines.
Black women and working women remained outside that construction
and were deeply impacted by the loss of higher-paying war jobs and the
short-lived childcare subsidies that enabled war work. This evidenced,
for Jones, that women’s labor, both productive and reproductive, was
valued but expendable in the war state.
Anti-communism’s dominance in these years caused membership
16 Internationalism in Practice

problems for the Communist Party but created the possibility for wom-
en in its ranks to challenge sex chauvinism and to expand Marxist-Le-
ninist thinking on the “Woman Question.” Party women had been the-
orizing gender oppression within the Marxist-Leninist canon for years,
and, as Kate Weigand argues, the Party became more receptive to these
articulations after WWII, at a time when it was embattled by anti-com-
munist harassment but committed to movement-building and drawing
in new members.
Betty Millard published the pamphlet Woman Against Myth in 1948
which has since been credited with challenging the CPUSA to rethink
its assumptions that women were an oppressed class. Millard pointed
to the social and cultural infrastructures that operated alongside eco-
nomic disenfranchisement, working to keep women confined to limited
roles, and she challenged the traditional Marxist cosmology which as-
sumed that class struggle alone would emancipate women. Millard also
exposed sex chauvinism among her fellow leftists and noted that while
socialism created the conditions that could usher in liberation, social-
ists had to actively address sexism and sexist institutions. The pamphlet,
however, universalized women’s experiences and failed to account for
racist oppression; it also neglected to recognize racism within the ranks
of the left.1
These elisions were one inspiration for Jones to write her “Neglect”
article. The other inspiration was the lynch law case of Rosa Lee In-
gram. Lynch law was a phrase the Party used to describe the legal lynch-
ing of Black defendants in the U.S. criminal legal system.
Ingram was a widowed sharecropper who, along with her sons, killed
her white neighbor while trying to fight off his sexual advances. She and
her sons were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. Jones believed
that Ingram’s case embodied the peril in failing to acknowledge Black
women’s “super-exploitation” as a worker, woman, and Black Amer-
ican. As a Black sharecropper and a woman in rural Georgia, Ingram
struggled to achieve the economic wherewithal to support her family;
as a Black woman, she was vulnerable to the lecherous advances of her
white neighbor; as a Black American, she would not find justice in the
criminal legal system.2
1 Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of
Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2001), pp. 67-68.
2 Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the
Black Left, 1945-1995 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), p. 57.
 Theoretical Foundations 17

Jones’ “Neglect” article focuses on three themes—Black women’s his-

torical and contemporary triple oppression, white chauvinism among
progressives, and key areas of struggle where Black women’s leadership
could advance the movement. Jones’s analysis pivoted on the argument
that the triply oppressed Black woman had been radicalized by U.S.
white supremacist capitalism and that the fatal error of progressives
was ignoring the historical and contemporary leadership of the Black
woman. She believed that to focus on Black women’s emancipation
meant dismantling the class, race, and gender structures that delimited
all the oppressed and, therefore, created the space to liberate everyone.
Carole Boyce Davies describes this as the “neglect thesis” which posi-
tioned Black women’s emancipation as key to the liberation of all the
oppressed.
Activists had long recognized Black women’s unique oppression, but
it was Jones who integrated that analysis into the Marxist canon, thus
making her “Left of Karl Marx,” as Boyce Davies argues. Jones' col-
league Louise Thompson Patterson described “triple exploitation” in
a 1936 article on Black domestic laborers. After World War II, Jones
would take the analysis further and emphasize Black women’s “triple
oppression” and argue that it positioned them as uniquely capable of
leadership because of their historical militancy and resistance to that op-
pression.3
To prove this assertion, Jones argued that Black women were radical
militants with decades of experience in resistance because of several his-
torical conditions: the first was that the enslaved marriage was not rec-
ognized, and Black women were often kept from their partners or sexu-
ally assaulted and impregnated by white men. Under slave law, children
followed the condition of the mother—because of this, the children
resulting from sexual assaults or from partnerships with enslaved men
were themselves enslaved. After emancipation, Black women faced eco-
nomic and political disenfranchisement, legal and extralegal lynching,
sexual harassment, and assault. These historical conditions meant that
they had been at the forefront of racist, sexist, and capitalist resistance
to protect the precarious material conditions of the Black family. Jones’s
article counseled her white comrades to recognize this and to correct
their exclusion from Party leadership. Jones exemplified these possibil-
ities; she was radicalized by racist and sexist oppression and embodied

3 Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Commu-
nist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 38-39.
18 Internationalism in Practice

the leadership capabilities the Party needed.

Millard’s analysis recognized that sexism infected the United States
and that even in the socialist USSR, sexist traditions were slow to disap-
pear—but socialism also enabled women to achieve liberation. Jones’s
issue with Millard’s pamphlet was that it elided racist struggles and
demonstrated what Party members called “race chauvinism.”
Jones took Party members to task for their failure to recognize and
correct their own prejudices. She described paternalistic Party mem-
bers who dismissed Black women members and who engaged in racist
practices including condescension about domestic laborers, holding to
bourgeois beauty standards that valued light-skin, rejecting interracial
relationships, and continuing to educate their children in segregated in-
stitutions.
The treatment of domestic labor, a field dominated by Black women,
exemplified progressives’ white chauvinism. Jones argued that not only
was domestic labor ignored under federal and state protections, but la-
bor unions failed to recognize it, and that some Party members in fact
sought out domestics by asking their Black comrades if their relatives
could work for them. Jones argued that the problems in the Party went
beyond a failure to elevate Black women into leadership positions; it also
included a dismissal of Black women’s labor, a failure to organize them
as workers, and an ignorance of racism in its own ranks.
An important, and often ignored, critique that Jones included in her
"Neglect" essay was the need for the Party to center Black women lead-
ers in the peace movement. Jones argued that U.S. anti-communism
was propagandized as a resistance to authoritarianism, but was in fact
fascist authoritarianism under the guise of liberal democracy. This was
evidenced in the silencing of the Black Freedom Struggle by targeting its
adherents in the CPUSA; it also tempered and constrained the liberal
civil rights movement.
Liberal retreat in the face of anti-communism was worrisome; Jones
argued that some women’s organizations that had been anti-imperial-
ist favored anti-communist policies like the Marshall Plan and Truman
Doctrine which obfuscated the reality that the U.S. was fast becom-
ing an economic imperialist behemoth. Anti-communism became the
mechanism that allowed the U.S. to violate national sovereignty and un-
dermine liberation movements in the U.S. and Africa, Latin America,
and Asia.
 Theoretical Foundations 19

Women under fascist states, like the anti-communist state, found

their rights further delimited by domestic containment, while Black
women were exploited in domestic work where labor unions feared
to tread as they were under red-baiting attacks. The U.S. further used
anti-communism to justify its neo-colonial extraction of labor and re-
sources abroad, and U.S. intervention in the Korean War proved this for
communists. For Jones, this environment amounted to fascism; her vi-
sion of peace was of a country and a world without war, but, more than
that, she understood that capitalism thrived on war and therefore had
to be demolished to create the conditions for emancipation. She would
conclude that socialism was the “final and full guarantee” of liberation.
Scholars have recognized that what Jones theorized was like intersec-
tionality, but because her theory is grounded in the Marxist-Leninist
tradition, James Smethurst describes Jones as the “Black Marxist Femi-
nist ancestor of intersectionality.” Jones articulated a different feminism
that rejected universalizing women’s experiences and the early bourgeois
feminist assertions that reduced women and their oppression to essen-
tialist natures. Her analysis was grounded in, but also an expansion of,
the Marxist-Leninist canon.
Boyce Davies argues that Jones’s assertion of Black women’s super-ex-
ploitation highlights that they were exploited by others in the working
class. John Munro has positioned Jones’s argument within her anti-im-
perialism because she rejected U.S. anti-communism as democratic
and highlighted that it justified the U.S.’s anti-democratic incursions
overseas. The article was released a full year before U.S. intervention in
Korea, but Jones knew that anti-communism justified the exporting of
the exploitative conditions under U.S. liberal democracy to other places
similarly seeking liberation.4
The “Neglect” article has been influential for later generations of ac-
tivists and scholars who would adopt an intersectional analysis. Schol-
ars argue that the article has influenced leftists’ analyses of oppression,
becoming a foundation for Black feminism. But some of the challenges
4 James Smethurst, “Claudia Jones, The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian
Caribbean News and the Rise of a New Black Radicalism in the UK and US,” Science
& Society, Vol. 87, 2, April 2023, 266; Dr. Carole Boyce Davies and Dr. Charisse
Burden-Stelly, “Claudia Jones Research and Collections: Questions of Process and
Knowledge Construction,” Journal of Intersectionality, Vol. 3, 1 (Summer 2019): 6;
John Munro, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and
Global Decolonization, 1945-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017),
pp. 123-124.
20 Internationalism in Practice

Jones articulated still remain in the progressive movement today, as U.S.

fascism has renewed its assaults on the left.
White chauvinism, Jones argued, manifested among progressives as
well as conservatives. White women progressives failed to recognize that
Black women’s emancipation was essential to their own emancipation.
This white chauvinism often emerged as condescension from white col-
leagues who failed to understand that their racism amounted to com-
plicity with fascists. Despite these shortcomings, Jones believed that a
multiracial alliance was the key to mass struggle. Her theoretical work
was meant to challenge Party leadership and the rank-and-file to aban-
don their chauvinism; but, more importantly, to understand that the
tools to dismantle oppressive institutions could be leveraged by a coali-
tion devoted to anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-imperialism, and anti-war.
 Theoretical Foundations 21

An End to the Neglect of the

Problems of the Negro Woman!1
1949

Claudia Jones

A n outstanding feature of the present stage of the Negro liberation

movement is the growth in the militant participation of Negro
women in all aspects of the struggle for peace, civil rights, and economic
security. Symptomatic of this new militancy is the fact that Negro wom-
en have become symbols of many present-day struggles of the Negro
people. This growth of militancy among Negro women has profound
meaning, both for the Negro liberation movement and for the emerging
antifascist, anti-imperialist coalition.
To understand this militancy correctly, to deepen and extend the
role of Negro women in the struggle for peace and for all interests of
the working class and the Negro people, means primarily to overcome
the gross neglect of the special problems of Negro women. This neglect
has too long permeated the ranks of the labor movement generally, of
Left-progressives, and also of the Communist Party. The most serious
assessment of these shortcomings by progressives, especially by Marx-
ist-Leninists, is vitally necessary if we are to help accelerate this develop-
ment and integrate Negro women in the progressive and labor move-
ment and in our own Party.
The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and

1 Ed. Note: Originally published in Political Affairs, June 1949, pp. 51-67.
22 Internationalism in Practice

for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives
seem to know, that once Negro women undertake action, the militancy
of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is
greatly enhanced.
Historically, the Negro woman has been the guardian, the protector,
of the Negro family. From the days of the slave traders down to the pres-
ent, the Negro woman has had the responsibility of caring for the needs
of the family, of militantly shielding it from the blows of Jim Crow in-
sults, of rearing children in an atmosphere of lynch terror, segregation,
and police brutality, and of fighting for an education for the children.
The intensified oppression of the Negro people, which has been the
hallmark of the postwar reactionary offensive, cannot therefore but lead
to an acceleration of the militancy of the Negro woman. As mother, as
Negro, and as worker, the Negro woman fights against the wiping out
of the Negro family, against the Jim Crow ghetto existence which de-
stroys the health, morale, and very life of millions of her sisters, brothers,
and children.
Viewed in this light, it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie
has intensified its oppression, not only of the Negro people in gener-
al, but of Negro women in particular. Nothing so exposes the drive to
fascization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie
displays and cultivates toward Negro women. The vaunted boast of the
ideologists of Big Business—that American women possess “the great-
est equality” in the world is exposed in all its hypocrisy when one sees
that in many parts of the world, particularly in the Soviet Union, the
New Democracies and the formerly oppressed land of China, women
are attaining new heights of equality. But above all else, Wall Street’s
boast stops at the water’s edge where Negro and working-class women
are concerned. Not equality, but degradation and super-exploitation:
this is the actual lot of Negro women!
Consider the hypocrisy of the Truman Administration, which boasts
about “exporting democracy throughout the world” while the state of
Georgia keeps a widowed Negro mother of twelve children under lock
and key. Her crime? She defended her life and dignity-aided by her two
sons from the attacks of a “white supremacist.” Or ponder the mute si-
lence with which the Department of Justice has greeted Mrs. Amy Mal-
lard, widowed Negro school-teacher, since her husband was lynched
in Georgia because he had bought a new Cadillac and became, in the
opinion of the “white supremacists,” “too uppity.” Contrast this with
 Theoretical Foundations 23

the crocodile tears shed by the U.S. delegation to the United Nations
for Cardinal Mindszenty, who collaborated with the enemies of the
Hungarian People’s Republic and sought to hinder the forward march
to fuller democracy by the formerly oppressed workers and peasants
of Hungary. Only recently, President Truman spoke solicitously in a
Mother’s Day Proclamation about the manifestation of “our love and
reverence” for all mothers of the land. The so-called “love and rever-
ence” for the mothers of the land by no means includes Negro mothers
who, like Rosa Lee Ingram, Amy Mallard, the wives and mothers of the
Trenton Six, or the other countless victims, dare to fight back against
lynch law and “white supremacy” violence.

Economic Hardships
Very much to the contrary, Negro women—as workers, as Negroes, and
as women—are the most oppressed stratum of the whole population.
In 1940, two out of every five Negro women, in contrast to two out of
every eight white women, worked for a living. By virtue of their majority
status among the Negro people, Negro women not only constitute the
largest percentage of women heads of families, but are the main bread-
winners of the Negro family. The large proportion of Negro women in
the labor market is primarily a result of the low-scale earnings of Negro
men. This disproportion also has its roots in the treatment and position
of Negro women over the centuries.
Following emancipation, and persisting to the present day, a large
percentage of Negro women—married as well as single—were forced to
work for a living. But despite the shift in employment of Negro women
from rural to urban areas, Negro women are still generally confined to
the lowest paying jobs. The Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of La-
bor, Handbook of Facts for Women Workers (1948, Bulletin 225), shows
white women workers as having median earnings more than twice as
high as those of non-white women, and non-white women workers
(mainly Negro women) as earning less than $500 a year! In the rural
South, the earnings of women are even less. In three large Northern in-
dustrial communities, the median income of white families ($1,720) is
almost 60 percent higher than that of Negro families ($1,095). The su-
per-exploitation of the Negro woman worker is thus revealed not only
in that she receives, as woman, less than equal pay for equal work with
men, but in that the majority of Negro women get less than half the pay
of white women. Little wonder, then, that in Negro communities the
24 Internationalism in Practice

conditions of ghetto-living—low salaries, high rents, high prices, etc.—

virtually become an iron curtain hemming in the lives of Negro children
and undermining their health and spirit! Little wonder that the mater-
nity death rate for Negro women is triple that of white women! Little
wonder that one out of every ten Negro children born in the United
States does not grow to manhood or womanhood!
The low scale of earnings of the Negro woman is directly related to
her almost complete exclusion from virtually all fields of work except
the most menial and underpaid, namely, domestic service. Revealing
are the following data given in the report of 1945, Negro Women War
Workers (Women’s Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, Bulletin 205):
out of a total of seven and a half million Negro women, over a million
are in domestic and personal service. The overwhelming bulk—about
918,000—of these women workers are employed in private families,
and some 98,000 are employed as cooks, waitresses, and in like services
in other than private homes. The remaining 60,000 workers in service
trades are in miscellaneous personal service occupations (beauticians,
boarding house and lodging-house keepers, charwomen, janitors, prac-
tical nurses, housekeepers, hostesses, and elevator operators).
The next largest number of Negro women workers are engaged in ag-
ricultural work. In 1940, about 245,000 were agricultural workers. Of
them, some 128,000 were unpaid family workers. Industrial and other
workers numbered more than 96,000 of the Negro women reported.
Thirty-six thousand of these women were in manufacturing, the chief
groups being 11,300 in apparel and other fabricated textile products,
11,000 in tobacco manufactures, and 5,600 in food and related prod-
ucts.
Clerical and kindred workers in general numbered only 13,000. There
were only 8,300 Negro women workers in civil service.
The rest of the Negro women who work for a living were distributed
along the following lines: teachers, 50,000; nurses and student nurses,
6,700; social and welfare workers, 1,700; dentists, pharmacists, and vet-
erinarians, 120; physicians and surgeons, 129; actresses, 200; authors,
editors, and reporters, 100; lawyers and judges, 39; librarians, 400; and
other categories likewise illustrating the large-scale exclusion of Negro
women from the professions.
During the anti-Axis war, Negro women for the first time in history
had an opportunity to utilize their skills and talents in occupations oth-
 Theoretical Foundations 25

er than domestic and personal service. They became trailblazers in many

fields. Since the end of the war, however, this has given way to growing
unemployment, to the wholesale firing of Negro women, particularly in
basic industry.
This process has been intensified with the development of the eco-
nomic crisis. Today, Negro women are being forced back into domestic
work in great numbers. In New York State, for example, this trend was
officially confirmed recently when Edward Corsi, Commissioner of the
State Labor Department, revealed that for the first time since the war,
domestic help is readily obtainable. Corsi in effect admitted that Negro
women are not voluntarily giving up jobs, but rather are being system-
atically pushed out of industry. Unemployment, which has always hit
the Negro woman first and hardest, plus the high cost of living, is what
compels Negro women to re-enter domestic service today. Accompa-
nying this trend is an ideological campaign to make domestic work
palatable. Daily newspaper advertisements which base their arguments
on the claim that most domestic workers who apply for jobs through
U.S.E.S. “prefer this type of work to work in industry,” are propagan-
dizing the “virtues” of domestic work, especially of “sleep-in positions.”
Inherently connected with the question of job opportunities where
the Negro woman is concerned, is the special oppression she faces as
Negro, as woman, and as worker. She is the victim of the white chau-
vinist stereotype as to where her place should be. In the film, radio, and
press, the Negro woman is not pictured in her real role as breadwinner,
mother, and protector of the family, but as a traditional “mammy” who
puts the care of children and families of others above her own. This tra-
ditional stereotype of the Negro slave mother, which to this day appears
in commercial advertisements, must be combated and rejected as a de-
vice of the imperialists to perpetuate the white chauvinist ideology that
Negro women are “backward,” “inferior,” and the “natural slaves” of
others.

Historical Aspects
Actually, the history of the Negro woman shows that the Negro mother
under slavery held a key position and played a dominant role in her own
family grouping. This was due primarily to two factors: the conditions
of slavery, under which marriage, as such, was non-existent, and the
Negro’s social status was derived from the mother and not the father;
26 Internationalism in Practice

and the fact that most of the Negro people brought to these shores by
the slave traders came from West Africa where the position of women,
based on active participation in property control, was relatively higher
in the family than that of European women.
Early historians of the slave trade recall the testimony of travelers indi-
cating that the love of the African mother for her child was unsurpassed
in any part of the world. There are numerous stories attesting to the
self-sacrificial way in which East African mothers offered themselves to
the slave traders in order to save their sons and Hottentot women re-
fused food during famines until after their children were fed.
It is impossible within the confines of this article to relate the ter-
rible sufferings and degradation undergone by Negro mothers arid
Negro women generally under slavery. Subject to legalized rape by
the slave-owners, confined to slave pens, forced to march for eight to
fourteen hours with loads on their backs and to perform back-breaking
work even during pregnancy, Negro women bore a burning hatred for
slavery, and undertook a large share of the responsibility for defending
and nurturing the Negro family.
The Negro mother was mistress in the slave cabin, and despite the
interference of master or overseer, her wishes in regard to mating and in
family matters were paramount. During and after slavery, Negro wom-
en had to support themselves and the children. Necessarily playing an
important role in the economic and social life of her people, the Negro
woman became schooled in self-reliance, in courageous and selfless ac-
tion.2
There is documentary material of great interest which shows that Ne-
gro family life and the social and political consciousness of Negro men
and women underwent important changes after emancipation. One
freedman observed, during the Civil War, that many men were exceed-
ingly jealous of their newly acquired authority in family relations and
insisted upon a recognition of their superiority over women. After the
Civil War, the slave rows were broken up and the tenant houses scat-
tered all over the plantation in order that each family might carry on an
independent existence. The new economic arrangement, the change in
the mode of production, placed the Negro man in a position of authori-
ty in relation to his family. Purchase of homesteads also helped strength-
2 Today, in the rural sections of the South, especially on the remnants of the
old plantations, one finds households where old grandmothers rule their daughters,
sons, and grand-children with a matriarchal authority.
 Theoretical Foundations 27

en the authority of the male.

Thus, a former slave, who began life as a freedman on a “one-horse”
farm, with his wife working as a laundress, but who later rented land
and hired two men, recalls the pride which he felt because of his new
status: “In my humble palace on a hill in the woods beneath the shade
of towering pines and sturdy oaks, I felt as a king whose supreme com-
mands were ‘law and gospel’ to my subjects.”
One must see the double motive was operative here. In regard to his
wife and children, the Negro man was now enabled to assume econom-
ic and other authority over the family; but he also could fight against
violation of women of his group where formerly he was powerless to
interfere.
The founding of the Negro church, which from the outset was under
the domination of men, also tended to confirm the man’s authority in
the family. Sanction for male ascendancy was found in the Bible, which
for many was the highest authority in such matters.
Through these and other methods, the subordination of Negro wom-
en developed. In a few cases, instead of legally emancipating his wife
and children, the husband permitted them to continue in their status of
slaves. In many cases, state laws forbade a slave emancipated after a cer-
tain date to remain in the state. Therefore, the only way for many Negro
wives and children to remain in the state was to become “enslaved” to
their relatives. Many Negro owners of slaves were really relatives of their
slaves.
In some cases, Negro women refused to become subject to the au-
thority of the men. In defiance of the decisions of their husbands to live
on the places of their former masters, many Negro women took their
children and moved elsewhere.

Negro Women In Mass Organizations

This brief picture of some of the aspects of the history of the Negro
woman, seen in the additional light of the fact that a high proportion
of Negro women are obliged today to earn all or part of the bread of
the family, helps us understand why Negro women play a most active
part in the economic, social, and political life of the Negro community
today. Approximately 2,500,000 Negro women are organized in social,
political, and fraternal clubs and organizations. The most prominent of
28 Internationalism in Practice

their organizations are the National Association of Negro women, the

National Council of Negro Women, the National Federation of Wom-
en’s Clubs, the Women’s Division of the Elks’ Civil Liberties Commit-
tee, the National Association of Colored Beauticians, National Negro
Business Women’s League, and the National Association of Colored
Graduate Nurses. Of these, the National Association of Negro Women,
with 75,000 members, is the largest membership organization. There
are numerous sororities, church women’s committees of all denomina-
tions, as well as organizations among women of West Indian descent. In
some areas, N.A.A.C.P. chapters have Women’s Divisions, and recently
the National Urban League established a Women’s Division for the first
time in its history.
Negro women are the real active forces—the organizers and work-
ers—in all the institutions and organizations of the Negro people.
These organizations play a many-sided role, concerning themselves with
all questions pertaining to the economic, political, and social life of the
Negro people, and particularly of the Negro family. Many of these orga-
nizations are intimately concerned with the problems of Negro youth,
in the form of providing and administering educational scholarships,
giving assistance to schools and other institutions, and offering commu-
nity service. The fight for higher education in order to break down Jim
Crow in higher institutions was symbolized last year, by the brilliant
Negro woman student, Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher of Oklahoma. The dis-
dainful attitudes which are sometimes expressed—that Negro women’s
organizations concern themselves only with “charity” work—must be
exposed as of chauvinist derivation, however subtle, because while the
same could be said of many organizations of white women, such atti-
tudes fail to recognize the special character of the role of Negro wom-
en’s organizations. This approach, fails to recognize the special function
which Negro women play in these organizations, which, over and above
their particular function, seek to provide social services denied to Negro
youth as a result of the Jim Crow lynch system in the U.S.

The Negro Woman Worker

The negligible participation of Negro women in progressive and trade-
union circles is thus all the more startling. In union after union, even in
those unions where a large concentration of workers are Negro women,
few Negro women are to be found as leaders or active workers. The out-
standing exceptions to this are the Food and Tobacco Workers’ Union
 Theoretical Foundations 29

and the United Office and Professional Workers’ Union.

But why should these be exceptions? Negro women are among the
most militant trade unionists. The sharecroppers’ strikes of the ’30s
were sparkplugged by Negro women. Subject to the terror of the land-
lord and white supremacist, they waged magnificent battles together
with Negro men and white progressives in that struggle of great tradi-
tion led by the Communist Party. Negro women played a magnificent
part in the pre-C.I.O. days in strikes and other struggles, both as workers
and as wives of workers, to win recognition of the principle of industrial
unionism, in such industries as auto, packing, steel, etc. More recent-
ly, the militancy of Negro women unionists is shown in the strike of
the packinghouse workers, and even more so, in the tobacco workers’
strike—in which such leaders as Moranda Smith and Velma Hopkins
emerged as outstanding trade unionists. The struggle of the tobacco
workers led by Negro women later merged with the political action
of Negro and white which led to the election of the first Negro in the
South (in Winston Salem, N. C.) since Reconstruction days.
It is incumbent on progressive unionists to realize that in the fight for
equal rights for Negro workers, it is necessary to have a special approach
to Negro women workers, who, far out of proportion to other women
workers, are the main breadwinners in their families. The fight to retain
the Negro woman in industry and to upgrade her on the job, is a major
way of struggling for the basic and special interests of the Negro woman
worker. Not to recognize this feature is to miss the special aspects of the
effects of the growing economic crisis, which is penalizing Negro work-
ers, particularly Negro women workers, with special severity.

The Domestic Worker

One of the crassest manifestations of trade-union neglect of the prob-
lems of the Negro woman worker has been the failure, not only to fight
against relegation of the Negro woman to domestic and similar menial
work, but to organize the domestic worker. It is merely lip service for
progressive unionists to speak of organizing the unorganized without
turning their eyes to the serious plight of the domestic worker, who,
unprotected by union standards, is also the victim of exclusion from all
social and labor legislation. Only about one in ten of all Negro wom-
en workers is covered by present minimum-wage legislation, although
about one-fourth of all such workers are to be found in states having
30 Internationalism in Practice

minimum-wage laws. All of the arguments heretofore projected with

regard to the real difficulties of organizing the domestic workers—such
as the “casual” nature of their employment, the difficulties of organizing
day workers, the problem of organizing people who work in individual
households, etc.,—must be overcome forthwith. There is a danger that
Social-Democratic forces may enter this field to do their work of spread-
ing disunity and demagogy, unless progressives act quickly.
The lot of the domestic worker is one of unbearable misery. Usually,
she has no definition of tasks in the household where she works. Domes-
tic workers may have “thrown in,” in addition to cleaning and scrub-
bing, such tasks as washing windows, caring for the children, launder-
ing, cooking, etc., and all at the lowest pay. The Negro domestic worker
must suffer the additional indignity, in some areas, of having to seek
work in virtual “slave markets” on the streets where bids are made, as
from a slave block, for the hardiest workers. Many a domestic work-
er, on returning to her own household, must begin housework anew to
keep her own family together.
Who was not enraged when it was revealed in California, in the hei-
nous case of Dora Jones, that a Negro woman domestic was enslaved for
more than 40 years in “civilized” America? Her “employer” was given a
minimum sentence of a few years and complained that the sentence was
for “such a long period of time.” But could Dora Jones, Negro domestic
worker, be repaid for more than 40 years of her life under such condi-
tions of exploitation and degradation? And how many cases, partaking
in varying degrees of the condition of Dora Jones, are still tolerated by
progressives themselves!
Only recently, in the New York State Legislature, legislative propos-
als were made to “fingerprint” domestic workers. The Martinez Bill did
not see the light of day, because the reactionaries were concentrating on
other repressive legislative measures; but here we see clearly the imprint
of the African “pass” system of British imperialism (and of the German
Reich in relation to the Jewish people!) being attempted in relation to
women domestic workers.
It is incumbent on the trade unions to assist the Domestic Workers’
Union in every possible way to accomplish the task of organizing the
exploited domestic workers, the majority of whom are Negro women.
Simultaneously, a legislative fight for the inclusion of domestic workers
under the benefits of the Social Security Law is vitally urgent and nec-
essary. Here, too, recurrent questions regarding “administrative prob-
 Theoretical Foundations 31

lems” of applying the law to domestic workers should be challenged and

solutions found.
The continued relegation of Negro women to domestic work has
helped to perpetuate and intensify chauvinism directed against all Ne-
gro women. Despite the fact that Negro women may be grandmothers
or mothers, the use of the chauvinist term “girl” for adult Negro wom-
en is a common expression. The very economic relationship of Negro
women to white women, which perpetuates “madam-maid” relation-
ships, feeds chauvinist attitudes and makes it incumbent on white
women progressives, and particularly Communists, to fight consciously
against all manifestations of white chauvinism, open and subtle.
Chauvinism on the part of progressive white women is often ex-
pressed in their failure to have close ties of friendship with Negro wom-
en and to realize that this fight for equality of Negro women is in their
own self-interest, inasmuch as the super-exploitation and oppression of
Negro women tends to depress the standards of all women. Too many
progressives, and even some Communists, are still guilty of exploiting
Negro domestic workers, of refusing to hire them through the Domes-
tic Workers’ Union (or of refusing to help in its expansion into those ar-
eas where it does not yet exist), and generally of participating in the vilifi-
cation of “maids” when speaking to their bourgeois neighbors and their
own families. Then, there is the expressed “concern” that the exploited
Negro domestic worker does not “talk” to, or is not “friendly” with, her
employer, or the habit of assuming that the duty of the white progressive
employer is to “inform” the Negro woman of her exploitation and her
oppression which she undoubtedly knows quite intimately. Persistent
challenge to every chauvinist remark as concerns the Negro woman is
vitally necessary, if we are to break down the understandable distrust
on the part of Negro women who are repelled by the white chauvinism
they often find expressed in progressive circles.

Manifestations Of White Chauvinism

Some of the crassest expressions of chauvinism are to be found at social
affairs, where, all too often, white men and women and Negro men par-
ticipate in dancing, but Negro women are neglected. The acceptance of
white ruling-class standards of “desirability” for women (such as light
skin), the failure to extend courtesy to Negro women and to integrate
Negro women into organizational leadership, are other forms of chau-
32 Internationalism in Practice

vinism.
Another rabid aspect of the Jim Crow oppression of the Negro wom-
an is expressed in the numerous laws which are directed against her as
regards property rights, inter-marriage (originally designed to prevent
white men in the South from marrying Negro women), and laws which
hinder and deny the right of choice, not only to Negro women, but Ne-
gro and white men and women.
For white progressive women and men, and especially for Commu-
nists, the question of social relations with Negro men and women is
above all a question of strictly adhering to social equality. This means
ridding ourselves of the position which sometimes finds certain pro-
gressives and Communists fighting on the economic and political issues
facing the Negro people, but “drawing the line” when it come to social
intercourse or inter-marriage. To place the question as a “personal” and
not a political matter, when such questions arise, is to be guilty of the
worst kind of Social-Democratic, bourgeois-liberal thinking as regard
the Negro question in American life; it is to be guilty of imbibing the
poisonous white-chauvinist “theories” of a Bilbo or a Rankin. Similarly,
too, with regard to guaranteeing the “security” of children. This security
will be enhanced only through the struggle for the liberation and equal-
ity of all nations and peoples, and not by shielding children from the
knowledge of this struggle. This means ridding ourselves of the bour-
geois-liberal attitudes which “permit” Negro and white children of pro-
gressives to play together at camps when young, but draw the line when
the children reach teen-age and establish boy-girl relationships.
The bourgeois ideologists have not failed, of course, to develop a spe-
cial ideological offensive aimed at degrading Negro women, as part and
parcel of the general reactionary ideological offensive against women of
“kitchen, church, and children.” They cannot, however, with equanim-
ity or credibility, speak of the Negro woman’s “place” as in the home;
for Negro women are in other peoples’ kitchens. Hence, their task has
been to intensify their theories of male “superiority” as regards the Ne-
gro woman by developing introspective attitudes which coincide with
the “new school” of “psychological inferiority” of women. The whole
intent of a host of articles, books, etc., has been to obscure the main re-
sponsibility for the oppression of Negro women by spreading the rotten
bourgeois notion about a “battle of the sexes” and “ignoring” the fight
of both Negro men and women—the whole Negro people—against
their common oppressors, the white ruling class.
 Theoretical Foundations 33

Chauvinist expressions also include paternalistic surprise when it is

learned that Negroes are professional people. Negro professional wom-
en workers are often confronted with such remarks as “Isn’t your family
proud of you?” Then, there is the reverse practice of inquiring of Negro
women professionals whether “someone in the family” would like to
take a job as a domestic worker.
The responsibility for overcoming these special forms of white chau-
vinism rests, not with the “subjectivity” of Negro women, as it is often
put, but squarely on the shoulders of white men and white women. Ne-
gro men have a special responsibility particularly in relation to rooting
out attitudes of male superiority as regards women in general.
There is need to root out all “humanitarian” and patronizing atti-
tudes toward Negro women. In one community, a leading Negro trade
unionist, the treasurer of her Party section, would be told by a white
progressive woman after every social function: “Let me have the money;
something may happen to you.” In another instance, a Negro domestic
worker who wanted to join the Party was told by her employer, a Com-
munist, that she was “too backward” and “wasn’t ready” to join the Par-
ty. In yet another community, which since the war has been populated
in the proportion of sixty per cent Negro to forty per cent white, white
progressive mothers maneuvered to get their children out of the school
in this community. To the credit of the initiative of the Party section or-
ganizer, a Negro woman, a struggle was begun which forced a change in
arrangements which the school principal, yielding to the mothers’ and
to his own prejudices, had established. These arrangements involved a
special class in which a few white children were isolated with “select-
ed Negro kids” in what was termed an “experimental class in race rela-
tions.”
These chauvinist attitudes, particularly as expressed toward the Ne-
gro woman, are undoubtedly an important reason for the grossly insuf-
ficient participation of Negro women in progressive organizations and
in our Party as members and leaders.
The American bourgeoisie, we must remember, is aware of the pres-
ent and even greater potential role of the masses of Negro women, and is
therefore not loathe to throw plums to Negroes who betray their people
and do the bidding of imperialism.
Faced with the exposure of their callous attitude to Negro women,
faced with the growing protests against unpunished lynchings and the
34 Internationalism in Practice

legal lynchings “Northern style,” Wall Street is giving a few token posi-
tions to Negro women. Thus, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who played a
key role in the Democratic National Negro Committee to Elect Tru-
man, was rewarded with the appointment as Assistant to Federal Secu-
rity Administrator Ewing. Thus, too, Governor Dewey appointed Irene
Diggs to a high post in the New York State Administration.
Another straw in the wind showing attempts to whittle down the mil-
itancy of Negro women was the State Department’s invitation to a rep-
resentative of the National Council of Negro Women—the only Negro
organization so designated—to witness the signing of the Atlantic Pact.

Key Issues Of Struggle

There are many key issues facing Negro women around which struggles
can and must be waged.
But none so dramatizes the oppressed status of Negro womanhood as
does the case of Rosa Lee Ingram, widowed Negro mother of fourteen
children—two of them dead—who faces life imprisonment in a Geor-
gia jail for the “crime” of defending herself from the indecent advances
of a “white supremacist.” The Ingram case illustrates the landless, Jim
Crow, oppressed status of the Negro family in America. It illumines
particularly the degradation of Negro women today under American
bourgeois democracy moving to fascism and war. It reflects the daily
insults to which Negro women are subjected in public places, no matter
what their class, status, or position. It exposes the hypocritical alibi of
the lynchers of Negro manhood who have historically hidden behind
the skirts of white women when they try to cover up their foul crimes
with the “chivalry” of “protecting white womanhood.” But white wom-
en, today, no less than their sisters in the abolitionist and suffrage move-
ments, must rise to challenge this lie and the whole system of Negro
oppression.
American history is rich in examples of the cost—to the democratic
rights of both women and men—of failure to wage this fight. The suf-
fragists, during their first jailings, were purposely placed on cots next to
Negro prostitutes to “humiliate” them. They had the wisdom to under-
stand that the intent was to make it so painful, that no women would
dare to fight for her rights if she had to face such consequences. But it
was the historic shortcoming of the women’s suffrage leaders, predomi-
nantly drawn as they were from the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoi-
 Theoretical Foundations 35

sie, that they failed to link their own struggles to the struggles for the full
democratic rights of the Negro people following emancipation.
A developing consciousness on the woman question today, therefore,
must not fail to recognize that the Negro question in the United States
is prior to, and not equal to, the woman question; that only to the extent
that we fight all chauvinist expressions and actions as regards the Negro
people and fight for the full equality of the Negro people, can women
as a whole advance their struggle for equal rights. For the progressive
women’s movement, the Negro woman, who combines in her status
the worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to this height-
ened political consciousness. To the extent, further, that the cause of
the Negro woman worker is promoted, she will be enabled to take her
rightful place in the Negro proletarian leadership of the national libera-
tion movement, and by her active participation contribute to the entire
American working class, whose historic mission is the achievement of a
Socialist America—the final and full guarantee of woman’s emancipa-
tion.
The fight for Rosa Lee Ingram’s freedom is a challenge to all white
women and to all progressive forces, who must begin to ask themselves:
How long shall we allow this dastardly crime against all womenhood,
against the Negro people, to go unchallenged! Rosa Lee Ingram’s plight
and that of her sisters also carries with it a challenge to progressive cul-
tural workers to write and sing of the Negro woman in her full courage
and dignity.
The recent establishment of the National Committee to Free the In-
gram Family fulfills a need long felt since the early movement which
forced commutation to life imprisonment of Mrs. Ingram’s original sen-
tence of execution. This National Committee, headed by Mary Church
Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women, in-
cludes among its leaders such prominent women, Negro and white, as
Therese Robinson, National Grand Directoress of the Civil Liberties
Committee of the Elks, Ada B. Jackson, and Dr. Gene Weltfish.
One of the first steps of the Committee was the visit of a delegation of
Negro and white citizens to this courageous, militant Negro mother im-
prisoned in a Georgia cell. The measure of support was so great that the
Georgia authorities allowed the delegation to see her unimpeded. Since
that time, however, in retaliation against the developing mass move-
ment, the Georgia officials have moved Mrs. Ingram, who is suffering
from a severe heart condition, to a worse penitentiary, at Reedsville.
36 Internationalism in Practice

Support to the work of this committee becomes a prime necessity

for all progressives, particularly women. President Truman must be
stripped of his pretense of “know-nothing” about the Ingram case.
To free the Ingrams, support must be rallied for the success of the mil-
lion-signatures campaign, and for U.N. action on the Ingram brief soon
to be filed.
The struggle for jobs for Negro women is a prime issue. The growing
economic crisis, with its mounting unemployment and wage-cuts and
increasing evictions, is making its impact felt most heavily on the Negro
masses. In one Negro community after another, Negro women, the last
to be hired and the first to be fired, are the greatest sufferers from unem-
ployment. Struggles must be developed to win jobs for Negro women
in basic industry, in the white-collar occupations, in the communities,
and in private utilities.
The successful campaign of the Communist Party in New York’s East
Side to win jobs for Negro women in the five-and-dime stores has led to
the hiring of Negro women throughout the city, even in predominantly
white communities. This campaign has extended to New England and
must be waged elsewhere. Close to 15 government agencies do not hire
Negroes at all. This policy gives official sanction to, and at the same time
further encourages, the pervasive Jim Crow policies of the capitalist ex-
ploiters. A campaign to win jobs for Negro women here would thus
greatly advance the whole struggle for jobs for Negro men and women.
In addition, it would have a telling effect in exposing the hypocrisy of
the Truman Administration’s “Civil Rights” program.
A strong fight will also have to be made against the growing practice
of the United States Employment Service to shunt Negro women, de-
spite their qualifications for other jobs, only into domestic and personal
service work.
Where consciousness of the special role of Negro women exists, suc-
cessful struggle can be initiated which will win the support of white
workers. A recent example was the initiative taken by white Communist
garment workers in a shop employing 25 Negro women where three ma-
chines were idle. The issue of upgrading Negro women workers became
a vital one. A boycott movement has been initiated and the machines
stand unused as of this writing, the white workers refusing to adhere to
strict seniority at the expense of Negro workers. Meanwhile, negotia-
tions are continuing on this issue. Similarly, in a Packard U.A.W. local
in Detroit, a fight for the maintenance of women in industry and for the
 Theoretical Foundations 37

upgrading of 750 women, the large majority of whom were Negro, was
recently won.

The Struggle For Peace

Winning the Negro women for the struggle for peace is decisive for all
other struggles. Even during the anti-Axis war, Negro women had to
weep for their soldier-sons, lynched while serving in a Jim Crow army.
Are they, therefore, not interested in the struggle for peace?
The efforts of the bipartisan war makers to gain the support of the
women’s organizations in general, have influenced many Negro wom-
en’s organizations, which, at their last annual conventions, adopted for-
eign-policy stands favoring the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine.
Many of these organizations have worked with groups having outspo-
ken anti-imperialist positions.
That there is profound peace sentiment among Negro women which
can be mobilized for effective action is shown, not only in the magnif-
icent response to the meetings of Eslande Goode Robeson, but also
in the position announced last year by the oldest Negro women’s or-
ganization, under the leadership of Mrs. Christine C. Smith, in urging
a national mobilization of American Negro women in support of the
United Nations. In this connection, it will be very fruitful to bring to
our country a consciousness of the magnificent struggles of women in
North Africa, who, though lacking in the most elementary material
needs, have organized a strong movement for peace and thus stand unit-
ed against a Third World War, with 81 million women in 57 nations, in
the Women’s International Democratic Federation.
Our Party, based on its Marxist-Leninist principles, stands foursquare
on a program of full economic, political, and social equality for the Ne-
gro people and of equal rights for women. Who, more than the Negro
woman, the most exploited and oppressed, belongs in our Party? Negro
women can and must make an enormous contribution to the daily life
and work of the Party. Concretely, this means prime responsibility lies
with white men and women comrades. Negro men comrades, however,
must participate in this task. Negro Communist women must every-
where now take their rightful place in Party leadership on all levels.
The strong capacities, militancy and organizational talents of Negro
women, can, if well utilized by our Party, be a powerful lever for bring-
38 Internationalism in Practice

ing forward Negro workers—men and women—as the leading forces of

the Negro people’s liberation movement for cementing Negro and Wall
Street imperialism, and for rooting the Party among the most exploited
and oppressed sections of the working class and its allies.
In our Party clubs, we must conduct an intensive discussion of the
role of the Negro women, so as to equip our Party membership with
clear understanding for undertaking the necessary struggles in the shops
and communities. We must end the practice, in which many Negro
women who join our Party, and who, in their churches, communities
and fraternal groups are leaders of masses, with an invaluable mass ex-
perience to give to our Party, suddenly find themselves viewed in our
clubs, not as leaders, but as people who have “to get their feet wet” or-
ganizationally. We must end this failure to create an atmosphere in our
clubs in which new recruits—in this case Negro women—are confront-
ed with the “silent treatment” or with attempts to “blueprint” them
into a pattern. In addition to the white chauvinist implications in such
approaches, these practices confuse the basic need for Marxist-Leninist
understanding which our Party gives to all workers, and which enhances
their political understanding, with chauvinist disdain for the organiza-
tional talents of new Negro members, or for the necessity to promote
them into leadership.
To win the Negro women for full participation in the anti-fascist, an-
ti-imperialist coalition, to bring her militancy and participation to even
greater heights in the current and future struggles against Wall Street
imperialism, progressives must acquire political consciousness as re-
gards her special oppressed status.
It is this consciousness, accelerated by struggles, that will convince in-
creasing thousands that only the Communist Party, as the vanguard of
the working class, with its ultimate perspective of Socialism, can achieve
for the Negro women—for the entire Negro people—the full equality
and dignity of their stature in a Socialist society in which contributions
to society are measured, not by national origin, or by color, but a society
in which men and women contribute according to ability, and ultimate-
ly under Communism receive according to their needs.
 Theoretical Foundations 39

Claudia JoNeS, a dedicated member of the CPUSA, Black nationalist, and feminist, devoted her efforts to
establishing a broad, intersectional, anti-imperialist coalition led by working-class leadership and driven by
women's active participation. Jones tirelessly advocated for equal respect for Black women within the Party,
striving to empower women as mothers, workers, individuals, and organizers. Jones' campaigns encompassed
a wide range of issues, from job training programs and equal pay for women to government controls on
food prices and funding for wartime childcare. Jones championed women's rights through subcommittees,
theoretical training, mass organizations, daytime classes, and babysitter funds, leaving an indelible mark on
the party's commitment to gender equality, and to anti-imperialist struggles abroad.
40 Internationalism in Practice

SECTION 3
Anti-Imperialism at the Height of
the Anti-Communist Witch Hunt
k
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 41

International Women’s Day

as a New Day against Imperialism1

Liberation School

I n an article published for International Women’s Day [IWD] 2023,

Maddie Dery summarizes the various experiences of the women’s lib-
eration movement since the early 20th century: “The history of Interna-
tional Women’s Day teaches us that when we fight, we win.”2 This spir-
it, which threads through the historic struggle for women’s liberation
and socialism, is easily identified in the revolutionary origins, legacies,
and futures of International Women’s Day and can also be found in
Claudia Jones’ historic 1950 speech at an International Women’s Day
rally, which was also published in Political Affairs, the monthly journal
of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Jones’ speech, which follows
this article, rooted the contemporary moment of the class struggle in the
long history of the fight for Black liberation, women’s emancipation,
peace, and socialism, linking together fighters from Harriet Tubman
and Sojourner Truth to Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, from
Lucy Stone and Ida B. Wells to Williana Burroughs and Clara Zetkin.
Born in Trinidad in 1915, Claudia Jones moved to New York City
eight years later.3 She is one of the most significant revolutionary theo-
1 Ed. Note: This is a modified version of the article “International Women’s
Day and the Struggle for Peace” that was published by Liberation School on March
29th, 2023. The original article can be accessed at https://www.liberationschool.org/
claudia-jones-1950-iwd-speech/
2 Maddie Dery, “This year, IWD means building an anti-imperialist move-
ment,” Breaking the Chains, 07 March 2023.
3 Adiah Hicks, “Claudia Jones: Revolutionary Feminist and Fighter,” Breaking
42 Internationalism in Practice

rists and organizers of the 20th century. After joining the Communist
Party in 1936 through the struggle to free the Scottsboro Boys,4 she rap-
idly developed as an organizer and intellectual and within two years was
the associate editor of the CPUSA’s Weekly Review and after another
two years was the lead editor.
Claudia's activism and writings were pushing the Party to prioritize
struggles against male and national chauvinism, and, in the late 1940s,
Jones theorized the “super-exploitation” of Black working-class women
through their structural location in U.S. society. In her 1949 “Neglect”
article, she wrote that “the Negro woman, who combines in her status
the worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to […] height-
ened political consciousness.”5 For Jones, the heightened oppression of
Black women workers and their historic roles as leaders and organizers
of their communities made Black women’s participation and leadership
essential to the communist and progressive struggle.
At the time of her IWD speech, she was solidly recognized as a lead-
ing Party and movement intellectual. In addition to her organizing and
editorial work, she was elected to the CPUSA’s National Committee
in 1945. In this speech, she insists on building broad and international
unity against U.S. imperialist wars, unity that the Party could only forge
by fighting against national, racial, and gender chauvinism. She centers
the need for international and broad unity against U.S. militarism and
highlighted how IWD isn’t only a day to advance the struggle for wom-
en, but for all oppressed people. In the U.S., she states, “a fundamental
condition for rallying the masses of American women into the peace
camp is to free them from the influence of the agents of imperialism and
to arouse their sense of internationalism with millions upon millions of
their sisters the world over.”6 The heroic struggles of women through-

the Chains, 27 December 2018.

4 Ed. Note: The Scottsboro boys were a group of 9 Black male teenagers, who
were falsely accused and convicted by an all-white jury in an Alabama court. The case
became a famous civil rights campaign and their defense was assisted by the CPUSA
and NAACP. Though sentenced to death, vigorous solidarity campaigns led to their
sentences being appealed and overturned or commuted, however all served extended
sentences in various prisons. Their convictions were eventually pardoned, with the
last pardons being issued posthumously in 2013.
5 Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Wom-
an!” Political Affairs 28, no. 6 (1949) [see this volume, p. 35].
6 Claudia Jones, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace”
Political Affairs 29, no. 3 (1950) [see this volume, p. 48].
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 43

out the socialist and anti-colonial states in Europe, Asia, and Africa, she
held, resulted in “significant anti-imperialist advances” because they
were the product of united fronts. As a result, these struggles “should
serve to inspire the growing struggles of American women and height-
en their consciousness of the need for militant united-front campaigns
around the burning demands of the day, against monopoly oppression,
against war and fascism.”7
In the speech below, and in her writing and organizing, she critical-
ly assessed her Party’s attention to national chauvinism and sexism by
recommending concrete actions. Jones called on “progressive and com-
munist men” to “become vanguard fighters against male supremacist
ideas and for equal rights for women.”8 In the concluding section of
the speech, Jones declares “tremendous tasks fall upon our Party,” from
deploying Black women leaders to engage mass women’s organizing,
promoting Black women “in all spheres of Party work and mass activi-
ty,” engaging in education and study about women’s labor—including
domestic labor—and insisting that all Party outlets deal explicitly with
these matters, for these are the only ways to combat “bourgeois femi-
nism.”9
As a Black communist and immigrant woman living in the U.S. with-
out citizenship rights during the height of the anti-communist Cold
War hysteria, Jones was uniquely vulnerable to state repression. Along
with other leading members of the CPUSA, she was subject to heavy
surveillance. In January 1948, she was arrested for violating the McCar-
ran Act and was later convicted for violating the 1918 Immigration Act.
Held at Ellis Island awaiting deportation, the American Committee for
the Protection of the Foreign Born raised her $1,000 bail. Although she
was still facing deportation proceedings, Jones didn’t back down after
her release. She dove right back into organizing, published several key
articles on super-exploitation, among other work. Even though her de-
portation proceedings started in the middle of February 1950, less than
a month later Jones delivered the speech reproduced below.
In late June 1951, the state arrested Jones and over a dozen other Party
leaders (including her friend Flynn) under the anti-communist Smith
Act.10 The arrest occurred almost immediately after the Supreme Court
7 Ibid. [see this volume, p. 49].
8 Ibid. [see this volume, p. 59].
9 Ibid. [see this volume, p. 59].
10 Ed. Note: The Smith Act, or Alien Registration Act 1940, was a United
44 Internationalism in Practice

upheld the constitutionality of the Smith Act in Eugene Dennis v. Unit-

ed States. At the March 1953 conclusion of the trial she was sentenced
to a year and a day in prison. She started serving her sentence in 1955,
after the Supreme Court refused to hear her appeal, despite a significant
campaign waged outside prison walls by her comrades and friends.
As Carole Boyce Davies’ evaluation of Jones’ FBI file demonstrates, it
was “the cumulative body of her writings that provided the documen-
tary evidence the state used to argue for her deportation,” the penalty
for her crime of “practicing the ideas of communism.”11 Nonetheless,
one of these documents that prompted the arrest was her speech below.
In her pre-sentencing remarks before Judge Edward Dimock convict-
ed Jones, she condemned the sham trial and showed the cowardice of
the state. “Introduce a title page to show Claudia once wrote an article
during the indictment period,” she said, “but you dare not read even a
line of it, even to a biased jury [...] You dare not, gentlemen of the prose-
cution, assert that Negro women can think and speak and write!”12 She
continued with reference to her IWD article:

The prosecution also canceled out the overt act which accompanied the orig-
inal indictment of the defendant Jones entitled ‘Women in the Struggle for
Peace and Security.’ And why, your Honor? It cannot be read, your Hon-
or—it urges American mothers, Negro women and white, to write, to em-
ulate the peace struggles of their anti-fascist sisters in Latin America, in the
new European democracies, in the Soviet Union, in Asia and Africa to end
the bestial Korean war.13

In an interview after she arrived in Britain, she articulated several rea-

sons she was a threat to the U.S. state:

I was deported from the USA because as a Negro woman Communist of

West Indian descent, I was a thorn in their side in my opposition to Jim Crow
racist discrimination against 16 million Negro Americans… my work for re-

States federal statute which penalized activities that were perceived as intending to
subvert or overthrow the U.S. government, particularly targeting those who weren’t
naturalized U.S. citizens. Conviction could result in fines, prison sentences, and/
or deportation. This Act targeted many socialists and communists, and 9 CPUSA
leaders were targeted, tried, and convicted in 1949, with others to follow.
11 Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Commu-
nist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 151, 141.
12 Claudia Jones “Claudia Jones,” in 13 Communists Speak to the Court (New
York: New Century Publishers, 1953), 22.
13 Ibid., 23.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 45

dress of these grievances, for unity of Negro and white workers, for wom-
en’s rights… because I fought for peace […] because I urged the prosecution
of lynchers rather than prosecution of Communists and other democratic
Americans who oppose the lynchers and big financiers and warmongers, the
real advocates of force and violence in the USA.14

During the height of Cold War anti-communist witch hunts, Cha-

risse Burden-Stelly writes, “the West Indian’s embodied foreignness and
internationalism, and the U.S. Black radical’s ‘foreign’ and internation-
alist ideas, constituted a particular threat that was incompatible with
loyalty to the United States.” As such, they “were particularly targeted
because a multitude of Blacks in the Communist Party of the United
States of America (CPUSA), starting in the 1920s, were West Indian
workers that analyzed the struggle of the U.S. Black working class as part
of the larger fight of the international racialized proletariat against capi-
talist imperialism and coloniality.”15
The ruling class always tries to defang the radical foundations of events
such as International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, de-
ploying them in the exact opposite direction of their real origins and leg-
acy. In 2023, for example, U.S. President Joe Biden even had the nerve
to use International Women’s Day to launch a broad propaganda cam-
paign to support U.S. imperialist wars and plots against Iran, Russia,
Afghanistan, and Ukraine.16 The real spirit of International Women’s
Day is what Jones relays in her speech. It is one that is resolutely opposed
to imperialism and capitalism, sexism, racism, and national chauvinism,
and affirms that those systems of exploitation and oppression can only
be eliminated through the struggle for socialism, a struggle that requires
uniting the broadest masses of working and oppressed people. This is
the spirit in which we continue our struggle for the liberation of Black
working women and all exploited and oppressed people.

14 Claudia Jones, cited in Davies, Left of Karl Marx, 143-144.

15 Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Constructing Deportable Subjectivity: Antifor-
eignness, Antiradicalism, and Antiblackness during the McCarthyist Structure of
Feeling,” Souls 19, no. 3 (2017): 343.
16 “Biden Criticizes Conditions in Afghanistan, Ukraine on International
Women’s Day,” The Hill, 08 March 2023.
46 Internationalism in Practice

International Women’s Day and

the Struggle for Peace1
1950

Claudia Jones

O n International Women’s Day this year, millions of women in the

world-wide camp of peace headed by the mighty land of Socialism
will muster their united forces to make March 8, 1950, a day of demon-
strative struggle for peace, freedom, and women’s rights.
In our own land, there will be over fifty celebrations. On New York’s
Lower East Side, original site of this historic American-born day of
struggle for equal rights for women, and in major industrial states, such
as Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Massachusetts,
and Connecticut, broad united-front meetings of women for peace will
be head. “Save the Peace!” “Halt Production of the A-Bomb!” “Negoti-
ate with the Soviet Union to Outlaw Atomic Weapons!”—these are the
slogans of women in the U.S.A. on International Women’s Day.

The Struggle for Peace

The special significance of this holiday this year, its particular mean-
ing for labor, progressives, and Communists, and for American work-
ing women generally, is to be found in the widespread condemna-
tion, among numerous sections of the American people, of Truman’s

1 Ed. Note: Originally published in Political Affairs, March 1950, p. 32-45.

 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 47

cold-blooded order to produce the hydrogen bomb and to inaugurate a

suicidal atomic and hydrogen weapon race.
Not to the liking of the imperialist ideologists of the “American Cen-
tury” is the growing indication by millions of American women of their
opposition to war, their ardent desire for peace, their rejection of the
Truman-bipartisan war policy.
As in the Protestant women’s groups, many women’s organizations
are opposed to the North Atlantic war pact, which spells misery for
the masses of American women and their families. This development
coincides with the policy stand of progressive women’s organizations
that have been outspoken in demands for peaceful negotiations of dif-
ferences with the Soviet Union, for the outlawing of atomic weapons,
for ending the cold war.
Typical of the shocked reaction to Truman’s order for H-bomb pro-
duction was the statement of the Women’s International League for
Peace and Freedom demanding that Secretary of State Dean Acheson
“make clear by action as well as by words that the United States desires
negotiations and agreement” with the Soviet Union. This is necessary,
the statement added, to avoid “bringing down upon this nation the con-
demnation of the world.” This organization also expressed its opposi-
tion to Acheson’s suggestion for the resumption of diplomatic relations
between U.N. members and Franco-Spain, as well as to the proposed
extension of the peace-time draft law.
These and other expressions of opposition to the Administration’s
H-bomb policy by notable women’s organizations and leaders merge
with the significant grass-roots united-front peace activities developing
in many communities. For example, in Boston, as result of a “Save the
Peace—Outlaw the A-Bomb” peace ballot circulated last November, a
permanent broad united-front women’s organization, “Minute Women
for Peace,” has been established. In that city, within ten days, over 6,000
women from church, trade-union, fraternal, Negro, civic and middle-
class-led women’s organizations signed peace ballots urging outlawing
of the A-Bomb. In Philadelphia, a Women’s Committee For Peace has
addressed to President Truman a ballot to “Outlaw the H-Bomb—Vote
for Peace.” Similar developments have taken place in Pasadena and Chi-
cago. The wide response of women of all political opinions to these bal-
lots is but an index of the readiness of American women to challenge the
monstrous Truman-Acheson doctrine that war is inevitable. Emulation
of these developments in other cities, particularly among working-class
48 Internationalism in Practice

and Negro women, is certainly on the order of the day.

Indicative of the determination of women, not only to register their
peace sentiments, but to fight for peace, is the coalescing on a communi-
ty basis, following such ballotings, of women’s peace committees. The
orientation of these committees is to convene women’s peace confer-
ences, in alliance with the general peace movement now developing.
The widespread peace sentiments, particularly of the women and the
youth in their millions, must be organized and given direction and effec-
tive, militant expression. This is necessary, since the monopolist rulers
are doing everything possible to deceive the people to paralyze their will
to fight for peace. Particularly insidious agents of the war-makers are the
Social-Democratic and reformist labor leaders, the reactionary Roman
Catholic hierarchy, and the American agents of the fascist Tito gang of
imperialist spies,2 whose main task is to confuse, split and undermine
the peace camp.
Hence, a fundamental condition for rallying the masses of American
women into the peace camp is to free them from the influence of the
agents of imperialism and to arouse their sense of internationalism with
millions upon millions of their sisters the world over; to protest the re-
pressive and death-dealing measures carried through against the count-
less women victims by Wall Street’s puppets in Marshall-ized Italy, in
fascist Greece and Spain; to link them in solidarity with the anti-impe-
rialist women united 80 million strong in 59 lands in the Women’s In-
ternational Democratic Federation, who are in the front ranks of the
struggle for peace and democracy.
In these lands, anti-fascist women collect millions of signatures for
the outlawing of the A-bomb, against the Marshall Plan and Atlantic
war pact, for world disarmament, etc. In the German Democratic Re-
public, five million signatures were collected by women for outlawing
the A-bomb. In Italy, the Union of Italian Women collected more
than 2 million such signatures for presentation to the De Gasperi gov-
ernment. In France, women conducted demonstrations when bodies
of dead French soldiers were returned to their shores as a result of the
Marshall-Plan-financed war of their own government against the heroic
2 Ed. Note: Following the fallout of the Second World War, disagreements
between the Soviet-led bloc of Socialist nations and Tito’s Yugoslavia had formed,
with accusations of complicity with imperialism and fascism being thrown in both
directions between the nations. CPUSA at this time followed the USSR’s line on the
disagreement.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 49

Vietnamese. In Africa, women barricaded the roads with their bodies

to prevent their men from being carted away as prisoners in a militant
strike struggle charged with slogans of anti-colonialism and peace. And
who can measure the capitalist fear of emulation by American Negro
and white women of these peace struggles, particularly of the women of
China (as reflected in the All-Asian Women’s Conference held last De-
cember in Peking), whose feudal bonds were severed forever as a result
of the major victory of the Chinese people’s revolution?
These and other significant anti-imperialist advances, achieved in
united-front struggle, should serve to inspire the growing struggles of
American women and heighten their consciousness of the need for mil-
itant united-front campaigns around the burning demands of the day,
against monopoly oppression, against war and fascism.

Reaction’s Ideological and Political Attacks Against Women

American monopoly capital can offer the masses of American women,
who compose more than one-half of our country’s population, a pro-
gram only of war and fascism. Typical of the ideology governing this
war perspective was the article in the recent mid-century issue of Life
magazine entitled “Fifty Years of American Women.”
That “contribution” did not hold out the promise to American wom-
en along the demagogic 2000 A.D. line of Truman’s State of the Union
annual message, but brazenly offered the fascist triple-K (Kinder-Küche-
Kirche) pattern of war and a “war psychology” for American women!
The author, Winthrop Sargeant, drawing upon the decadent, Na-
zi-adopted “theorist,” Oswald Spengler, propounded his cheap philoso-
phy on the expensive Luce paper:

that only in wartime do the sexes achieve a normal relationship to each other.
The male assumes his dominant heroic role, and the female, playing up to the
male, assumes her proper and normal function of being feminine, glamorous
and inspiring. With the arrival of peace a decline sets in. The male becomes
primarily a meal ticket and the female becomes a sexless frump, transferring
her interest from the male to various unproductive intellectual pursuits or to
neurotic occupations, such as bridge or politics. Feminine civilization thus
goes to pot until a new challenge in the form of wartime psychology restores
the balance.

The real intent of such ideology should be obvious from its barba-
50 Internationalism in Practice

rous, vulgar, fascist essence. The aim of this and other numerous an-
ti-women “theories” is to hamper and curb women’s progressive social
participation, particularly in the struggle for peace. This has been the
alpha and omega of bourgeois ideological attacks upon women since
the post-war betrayal of our nation’s commitments to its wartime allies.
Such ideology accompanies the developing economic crisis and penal-
izes especially the Negro women, the working women and the working
class generally, but also women on the farms, in the offices and in the
professions, who are increasingly entering the struggle to resist the wors-
ening of their economic status.
Not always discerned by the labor-progressive forces, however, is the
nature of this ideological attack, which increasingly is masked as attacks
on woman’s femininity, her womanliness, her pursuit of personal and
family happiness. Big capital accelerates its reactionary ideological offen-
sive against the people with forcible opposition to women’s social par-
ticipation for peace and for her pressing economic and social demands.
None of these attacks, however, has been as rabid as the recent “for-
eign agent” charge falsely leveled by the Department of Justice against
the Congress of American Women on the basis of that organization’s
former affiliation with the Women’s International Democratic Feder-
ation.
Only the most naive, of course, are startled at the attack against this
progressive women’s organization, whose policies, domestic and in-
ter-national, were always identified with the progressive camp. The
C.A.W. leadership, in its press statement, answered the continuing
attack of the Justice Department, which demands “retroactive com-
pliance” with the undemocratic Kellar-McCormack Act, despite the
organization’s disaffiliation from the W.I.D.F. (under protest). The
statement pointed out that this organization has been harassed from its
very birth precisely because of its advanced policy stand and activities
for peace, child welfare and education, Negro-white unity and equal
rights for women. Incumbent on labor-progressives is the expression of
full support for the struggles of women against these and other attacks
and for the National Bread and Butter Conference of Child Care to be
held in Chicago on April 15–16. The call for this conference indicates
a broad, united-front sponsorship that includes C.A.W. leaders and de-
mands use of government surpluses and the diversion of war funds to
feed the nation’s needy children.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 51

Economic Conditions of Women Workers

Any true assessment of women’s present status in the United States
must begin with an evaluation of the effects of the growing economic
crisis upon the working women, farm women, workers’ wives, Negro
women, women of various national origins, etc. The ruthless Taft-Hart-
ley-employer drive to depress the workers’ wage standards and abolish
labor’s right to strike and bargain collectively, as well as the wholesale
ouster of Negro workers from many industries, was presaged by the
post-war systemic displacement of women from basic industry. While
women constituted 36.1 percent of all workers in 1945, this figure was
reduced to 27.6 percent by 1947. Despite this, there still remains a siz-
able force of 17 and a half million women workers in industry, approxi-
mately three million of whom are organized in the trade unions, the vast
majority still being unorganized.
The sparse economic data available show that the burdens of the crisis
are increasingly being placed on the backs of women workers, who re-
ceive unequal wages, are victims of speed-up, and face a sharp challenge
to their very right to work. Older women workers are increasingly being
penalized in the growing layoffs. Close to 30 percent of the estimated 6
million unemployed are women workers.
Side by side with this reactionary offensive against their living stan-
dards, women workers have increasing economic responsibilities. More
than half of these women, as revealed in a survey by the Women’s Bu-
reau of the U.S. Department of Labor, are economic heads of families.
The continued expulsion of women from industry, the growing unem-
ployment of men and youth, as well as the high, monopoly-fixed prices
of food and consumer goods generally, are impoverishing the American
family and taking a heavy toll on the people’s health.
Impoverishment has hit the farm women to an alarming degree. Al-
most 70 percent of all farm families earned less than $2000 in 1948,
when the growing agricultural crisis was only in its first stage.
Women workers still find a large gap between their wages and those
of men doing the same work, which the wages of Negro women are par-
ticularly depressed below the minimum wage necessary to sustain life.
There are increasing trends toward limited curricula for women stu-
dents and limited opportunities for women in the professions. Employ-
ment trends also show increasing penalization of married women work-
ers who constitute more than half of all working women.
52 Internationalism in Practice

The attempt by employers to foment divisions between men and

women workers—to create a “sex antagonism”—is an increasing feature
of the offensive to depress the wages of women and the working class
in general. Male workers are being told that the dismissal of married
women and the “return of women to the kitchen” will lead to an end
of unemployment among the male workers. But this whole campaign
against “double earning” and for a “return of women to the kitchen” is
nothing but a cloak for the reactionary Taft-Hartley offensive against
wages, working conditions, and social security benefits, with a view to a
wide-scale dumping of workers, male as well as female.
It must be frankly stated that there has been lethargy on the part of
progressives in the labor movement in answering and combating this
insolent demagogy. It should be pointed out that the German finance
capitalists also used this demagogic line prior to the rise of Hitler. By
perpetuating the lying slogan that “woman’s place is in the home,” mo-
nopoly capital seeks to conceal the real source of the problems of all
workers.
Consequently, this is a question of attacks, not only against the masses
of women, but against the working class as a whole. When we deal with
the situation of women workers, we do so not only to protect the most
exploited section of the working class, but in order to rally labor-pro-
gressives and our own Party for work among the masses of women
workers, to lead them into the emerging anti-fascist, anti-war coalition.

Trade Unions and Women Workers

There is every evidence that working women’s militancy is increasing, as
evidenced last year in strikes in such industries as electrical, communica-
tions, packinghouse and in strikes of teachers and white-collar workers.
Have labor-progressives grasped the significance of the vital need for a
trade-union program based on concrete knowledge of the conditions
of the woman worker, an understanding of reaction’s attacks on her,
economically, politically, socially?
Some Left-progressive unionists are beginning to tackle this problem
as a decisive one. In New York District No 4 of U.E., splendid initiative
was shown by the official establishment of a Women’s Committee. Men
and women unionists participate jointly to formulate a program and
to combat the growing unemployment trends, especially the ouster of
married women and their replacement, at lower wages, by young girls
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 53

from high schools—a trend that affects the wages of all workers. In this
union, also, conferences have been held on the problems of the wom-
en workers. Similarly, in Illinois, an Armour packinghouse local held
a women’s conference with the aim of enhancing the participation of
Negro and white women workers; as the result of its educational work
and struggle, it succeeded in extending the leave for pregnancy from the
previous three-month limit to one year.
But these instances are exceptions and not the rule, and it would be
incorrect if we failed to state that attitudes of male supremacy among
Left-progressives in unions and elsewhere have contributed to the gross
lack of awareness of the need to struggle for women’s demands in the
shops and departments. This bourgeois ideology is reflected in the ac-
ceptance of the bourgeois attitude of “normal toleration” of women in
industry as a “temporary” phenomenon. This dangerous, tenacious ide-
ology must be fought, on the basis of recognition that the dynamics of
capitalist society itself means the tearing of women away from the home
into industry as a permanent part of the exploited labor force. Marx
and Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, more than one-hundred
years ago exposed the pious hypocrisy of the troubadours of capitalism
who composed hymns about the “glorious future” of the family rela-
tionship under capitalism; they noted the fact, which many progressives
too readily forget, that “by the action of modern industry, all family ties
among the proletarians are torn asunder [...] The bourgeoisie has torn
away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family
relation to a mere money relation.”3
The absence of a special vehicle to deal with the problems of women
workers in the unions has undoubtedly contributed to dealing with these
problems, not as a union question, but solely as a woman’s question. It
is of course, both. But it must be tackled as a special union responsibil-
ity, with the Communists and progressives boldly in the forefront. In
many instances this approach would improve rank-and-file struggles for
wage increases, against speed-up and around other concrete demands,
and would also win militant unionists for active participation within
the emerging rank-and-file movements. In this connection, it is also nec-
essary to examine the just complaints of many women trade unionists,
particularly on a shop level, who are concerned over the trend toward
fewer elected women officers, and the relegation of women merely to
appointive positions, as well as the unnecessary pattern of “all-male or-
3 Manifesto of the Communist Party.
54 Internationalism in Practice

ganization” union structure on many levels.

This entire question requires that we take into account also the posi-
tion of the wives of trade unionists.
Indicative of the growing militancy of workers’ wives is the role of
miners’ wives, hundreds of whom, Negro and white, recently picketed
the empty tipples in the mining camps of West Virginia in support of
the “no contract, no work” struggle of their fighting husbands, sons and
brothers. Similarly, in the longshore trade, during the Local 968 strike
in New York, wives of workers, particularly Negro and Italian women,
played an outstanding role. Likewise, in Gary and South Chicago, wives
of steel-workers issued open letters of support for the miners’ struggle at
the steel plant gates, collected food, etc.
Reactionary propaganda is not at all loath to exploit the wrong con-
cepts of many workers’ wives, who, because of political backwardness
stemming from household drudgery, lack of political participation, etc.,
often adopt the view that it is the union, or the progressive movement,
that robs them of their men in relation to their own home responsibil-
ities.
Attention to the organization of wives and working men by labor
progressives and Communists therefore becomes an urgent political
necessity. And key to avoiding past errors is the enlisting of women
themselves, with the support of the men, at the level of their readiness
to struggle.

The Equal Rights Amendment

In the context of these developments and attacks upon women’s eco-
nomic and social status, one must also see the recent passage of the Equal
Rights Amendment in the U.S. Senate by a 63–19 vote. The original
amendment, sponsored by the National Women’s Party, proceeding
from an equalitarian concept of women’s legal status in the U.S., would
have wiped out all protective legislation won by women with the assis-
tance of the trade unions over the past decades. Objection to the original
amendment by labor-progressives and by our Party led to the formation
of a coalition of some 43 organizations, including such groups as the
Women’s Trade Union League, the U.S. Women’s Bureau, the Amer-
ican Association of University Women, C.I.O. and A.F. of L. unions,
the National Association of Negro Women, etc.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 55

A proper approach to such legislation today must primarily be based

on recognizing that it is projected in the atmosphere of the cold war,
carrying with it a mandate for drafting of women into the armed forces,
for the war economy. Without such recognition, the present Amend-
ment, which now urges no tampering with previously won protective
legislative gains for women workers, might serve as an effective catch-all
for many unwary supporters of equal rights for women.
Despite this danger, Left-progressives should not fail to utilize the
broad debate already taking place to expose women’s actual status in
law; some 1,000 legal restrictions still operate at women’s expense in
numerous states, and minimum-wage legislation does not exist for over
1 million Negro women domestic workers. A demand for legislative
hearings and the exposure of the reactionary attacks now prevalent in
numerous state legislatures against the legislative gains of women work-
ers are necessary to guarantee that no bill for equal rights for women
becomes the law of the land without proper safeguards protecting the
special measures meeting the needs of women workers. Perspective of a
necessary referendum carrying a 37-state majority necessary to the bill’s
passage should not obscure the possibility that passage of the legisla-
tion in its present form, or minus the protective clause, could serve as a
means of bipartisan electoral maneuvers for 1950 and the passage of the
Amendment in its original reactionary form.

A Rich Heritage of Struggle

Before 1908 and since, American women have made lasting contri-
butions in the struggle for social progress: against slavery and Negro
oppression, for equal rights for women and women’s suffrage, against
capitalist exploitation, for peace and for Socialism. Special tribute must
be paid those heroic women who gave their lives in the struggle for So-
cialism and freedom: Elsie Smith, Anna Damon, Rose Pastor Stokes,
Fanny Sellins, Williana Burroughs and Grace Campbell. In this period
of the U.S. monopoly drive to war and world domination, reaction pays
unwilling tribute to the role of the Communist women leaders by its de-
portation delirium. The present-day struggles of progressive and Com-
munist women merge with the traditions and contributions of such
great anti-slavery fighters as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, of
such militant women proletarians as the textile workers of 1848, of such
women pioneers as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of
such builders of America’s progressive and working-class heritages as
56 Internationalism in Practice

Kate Richards O’Hare, Mother Jones, Ella Reeve Bloor, Anita Whitney
and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
March 8 was designated International Women’s Day by the Interna-
tional Socialist Conference in 1910, upon the initiative of Clara Zetkin,
the heroic German Communist leader, who later electrified the world
with her brave denunciation of the Nazis in Hitler’s Reichstag in 1933.
Already in 1907, Lenin demanded that the woman question be specifi-
cally mentioned in Socialist programs because of the special problems,
needs and demands of toiling women. Present at the 1910 conference as
a representative of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, Lenin
strongly supported and urged adoption of the resolution inaugurating
International Women’s Day. Thus did the American-initiated March 8
become International Women’s Day.
The opportunist degeneration of the leadership of the Second Inter-
national inevitably reduced the struggle for the emancipation of women
to a paper resolution. Interested only in catching votes, the Socialist par-
ties paid attention to the woman question only during elections.
Lenin and Stalin restored and further developed the revolutionary
Marxist position on the woman question. Thus, Stalin declared:

There has not been a single great movement of the oppressed in history in
which working women have not played a part. Working women, who are the
most oppressed of all the oppressed, have never stood aloof, and could not
stand aloof, from the great march of emancipation.4

Lenin and Stalin taught that the position of working women in cap-
italist society as “the most oppressed of all the oppressed” makes them
more than a reserve, makes them a full-fledged part, of the “regular
army” of the proletariat. Stalin wrote:

The female industrial workers and peasants constitute one of the biggest
reserves of the working class […] Whether this female reserve goes with the
working class or against it will determine the fate of the proletarian move-
ment […] The first task of the proletariat and of its vanguard, the Communist
Party, therefore, is to wage a resolute struggle to wrest women, the women
workers and peasants, from the influence of the bourgeoisie, politically to
educate and to organize the women workers and peasants under the banner
of the proletariat […] But working women […] are something more than a
reserve. They may and should become […] a regular army of the working class

4 Joseph Stalin: A Political Biography, p. 65.

 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 57

[…] fighting shoulder to shoulder with the great army of the proletariat […].5

Women Under Socialism

Complete emancipation of women is possible only under Socialism. It
was only with the October Socialist Revolution that, for the first time in
history, women were fully emancipated and guaranteed their full social
equality in every phase of life.
“Women in the U.S.S.R. are accorded equal rights with men in all
spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life” (New Sovi-
et Constitution, Article 122).
But equal rights in the U.S.S.R. are not just formal legal rights, which,
under bourgeois democracy, are curtailed, where not denied in reality
by the very nature of capitalist exploitation. In the Soviet Union, full
enjoyment of equal rights by women is guaranteed by the very nature of
the Socialist society, in which class divisions and human exploitation are
abolished. In bourgeois democracies, equal rights for women constitute
at best a programmatic demand to be fought for, and constant struggle
is necessary to defend even those rights that are enacted into law.
In the U.S.S.R. equal rights articles in the law of the land are but cod-
ifications of already existing and guaranteed reality. No wonder Soviet
women express such supreme confidence in Socialism and such love for
the people. Their respect for other nations, their profound sympathy
with the oppressed peoples fighting for national liberation, is based on
the firm conviction that their Socialist country is the decisive factor and
leader in the struggle for peace.
Marxism-Leninism rejects as fallacious all petty-bourgeois equalitari-
an notions. Equal rights under Socialism do not mean that women do
not have special protection and social care necessitated by their special
function (child bearing, etc.) and special needs which do not apply to
men.

Comrade Foster’s Contribution

The Communist Party of the U.S.A. has many positive achievements to
record during the last 30 years in the field of struggle for women’s rights
and in promoting the participation of women in the struggle against
5 Ibid.
58 Internationalism in Practice

war and fascism.

Outstanding was the recent participation of Party women and of
the women comrades who are wives of the 12 indicted leaders of our
Party in the mass struggle to win the first round in the Foley Square
thought-control trial. And in the continuing struggle against the frame-
up of our Party leaders we must involve ever larger masses of women.
Under Comrade Foster’s initiative and contributions to the deep-
ening of our theoretical understanding of the woman question, a new
political appreciation of our tasks is developing in the Party. Party Com-
missions on Work Among Women are functioning in the larger districts
and in smaller ones. International Women’s Day will mark a high point
in ideological and political mobilization and in organizational steps to
intensify our united-front activities among women, particularly around
the peace struggle. As a further contribution to that end, a well-rounded
theoretical-ideological outline on the position of Marxism-Leninism on
the woman question is being prepared.
Comrade Foster called for theoretical mastery of the woman question
as vitally necessary to combat the numerous anti-woman prejudices
prevalent in our capitalist society, and the “whole system of male supe-
riority ideas which continue to play such an important part in woman’s
subjugation.” An important guide to the Party’s work among women
are the following words of Comrade Foster:

The basic purpose of all our theoretical studies is to clarify, deepen and
strengthen our practical programs of struggle and work. This is true on the
question of women’s work, as well as in other branches of our Party’s ac-
tivities. Hence, a sharpening up of our theoretical analysis of, and ideologi-
cal struggle against, male supremacy, will help our day-to-day work among
women […].

Comrade Foster particularly emphasized the ideological precondi-

tions for effective struggle on this front:

But such demands and struggles, vital as they may be, are in them-selves not
enough. They must be reinforced by an energetic struggle against all concep-
tions of male superiority. But this is just what is lacking…. An ideological at-
tack must be made against the whole system of male superiority ideas which
continue to play such an important part in woman’s subjugation. And such
an ideological campaign must be based on sound theoretical work.6

6 William Z. Foster, “On Improving the Party’s Work Among Women,” Politi-
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 59

Party Tasks
Following Comrade Foster’s article in Political Affairs, nine Party
Conferences on Work Among Women were held with the active par-
ticipation of district Party leaders. Two major regional schools to train
women cadres were held. An all-day conference on Marxism-Leninism
and the Woman Question held at the Jefferson School of Social Science
last summer was attended by 600 women and men. These developments
evidence a thirst for knowledge of the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the
woman question.
But it must be frankly stated that it is necessary to combat all and
sundry male supremacist ideas still pervading the labor and progres-
sive movements and our Party. The uprooting of this ideology, which
emanates from the ruling class and is sustained by centuries of myths
pertaining to the “biological inferiority” of women, requires a sustained
struggle. Failure to recognize the special social disabilities of women
under capitalism is one of the chief manifestations of male supremacy.
These special forms of oppression particularly affect the working wom-
en, the farm women and the triply oppressed Negro women; but, in
varying degrees, they help to determine the inferior status of women in
all classes of society.
Progressive and Communist men must become vanguard fighters
against male supremacist ideas and for equal rights for women. Too of-
ten we observe in the expression and practice of labor-progressive, and
even some Communist, men glib talk about women “as allies” but no
commensurate effort to combat male supremacy notions which hamper
woman’s ability to struggle for peace and security. Too many labor-pro-
gressive men, not excluding some Communists, resist the full partici-
pation of women, avow bourgeois “equalitarian” nations as regards
women, tend to avoid full discussion of the woman question and shunt
the problem aside with peremptory decisions. What the promotion of
a sound theoretical understanding of this question would achieve for
our Party is shown by the initial results of the cadre training schools
and seminars on the woman question, many of whose students have be-
gun seriously to tackle male supremacist notions in relation to the major
tasks of the movement and in relation to their own attitudes.
The manifestation of bourgeois feminism in the progressive women’s
movement and also in our Party is a direct result of the prevalence of male

cal Affairs, November 1948.

60 Internationalism in Practice

superiority ideas and shows the need for our women comrades to study
the Marxist-Leninist teachings on the woman question. According to
bourgeois feminism, woman’s oppression stems, not from the capitalist
system, but from men. Marxism-Leninism, just as it rejects and combats
the petty-bourgeois “equalitarianism” fostered by Social-Democracy, so
it has nothing in common with the bourgeois idiocy of “the battle of
the sexes” or the irrational Freudian “approach” to the woman ques-
tion. These false ideologies must be combated by women labor-progres-
sives and in the first place by women Communists. Key participants in
the fight against these ideologies, and in the fight to enlist the masses of
women for the pro-peace struggle, must be the advanced trade-union
women and women Communists on all levels of Party leadership. All
Communist women must, as Lenin said, “themselves become part of
the mass movement,” taking responsibility for the liberation of women.
We must guarantee that women cadres end isolation from the masses
of women, by assigning these cadres to tasks of work among women,
on a mass and Party basis. The Women’s Commissions of the Party
must be strengthened. All Party departments and Commissions must
deal more consistently with these questions, putting an end to the false
concept that work among women represents “second-class citizenship”
in our Party. A key responsibility of all Women’s Commissions is in-
creased attention and support to the growing movements of youth.
We must gauge our Party’s work among women by our effectiveness
in giving leadership and guidance to our cadres in mass work, with a
view to concentrating among working-class women and building the
Party. To this end, further, working-class and Negro women forces
need to be promoted in all spheres of Party work and mass activity.
An examination of our work among women is necessary in all Party
districts. There is need of Party conferences on the problems of working
women and housewives. The good beginnings of examining the long
neglected problems of Negro women must become an integral part of
all our future work among women. This arises as an imperative task in
the light of the militancy and tenacity of Negro women participating in
struggles on all fronts.
Experience shows that a major area of our work should and must be in
the field of education, where monopoly reaction and the Roman Cath-
olic hierarchy concentrate in a policy in inculcating militarist, racist,
pro-fascist ideology in the minds of our children; of victimizing pro-
gressive teachers, of conducting witch-hunts, etc. Where good work has
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 61

been carried on in this sphere, victories have been won, as in the defeat
of reactionary legislative measures directed at progressive teachers. In
developing struggles to alleviate the frightful conditions of schooling,
particularly in Negro, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and other working-class
communities, Communist and progressive women have an opportuni-
ty for developing an exceedingly broad union front for successful en-
deavor.
By connecting the struggle against the seemingly little issues of crowd-
ed schoolrooms, unsanitary conditions, lack of child care facilities, etc.,
with the issues of reactionary content of teaching—racism, jingoism,
etc.—the political consciousness of the parent masses can be raised to
the understanding of the interconnection between the demand for
lunch for a hungry child and the demand of the people for economic
security; between the campaign for the dismissal of a Negro-hating, an-
ti-Semitic Mae Quinn from the school system and the fight of the peo-
ple for democratic rights; between the protest against a jingoistic school
text and the broad fight of the people for peace.
In keeping with the spirit of International Women’s Day, tremendous
tasks fall upon our Party. The mobilization of the masses of Americans,
together with the enlisting and activation of women cadres, for height-
ened struggles for peace and for the special needs of oppressed wom-
anhood, is indispensable to the building and strengthening of the an-
ti-fascist, anti-imperialist, anti-war coalition. In working for a stronger
peace movement among the women as such, we must draw the masses
of women into the impending 1950 election campaign and thereby, on
the basis of their experiences in the struggle, help raise their political
consciousness to the understanding of the bipartisan demagogy and the
hollowness of Truman’s tall promises. Large masses of women can thus
be brought to a full break with the two-party system of monopoly cap-
ital and to adherence to the third-party movement. In the course of this
development, with our Party performing its vanguard task, advanced
sections among the working-class women will attain the level of Socialist
consciousness and will, as recruited Communists, carry on their strug-
gle among the broad masses of women upon the scientific conviction
that the final guarantee of peace, bread and freedom, and the full eman-
cipation of subjected woman-kind, will be achieved only in a Socialist
America.
62 Internationalism in Practice

For the Unity of Women in the Cause

of Peace!1
1951

Claudia Jones

T he growing surge for peace among the women of our country fully
confirms the premise contained in the Resolution that “the fight for
peace has a special meaning to the women of the country” and that “with-
out their full involvement no peace campaign can be effective.”
Why there is this elemental peace upheaval among American women
is of course no mystery. For the first time, on the bodies of their hus-
bands and sons, the women experience the price of attempted world
domination by an aggressive ruling class, which only a short time ago
boasted of “easy” victories and a “push button war.”
In thousands of working class homes, in the last few weeks, the “noti-
fication to next of kin” has meant that a father, son or husband will never
return from the Korean plains—5,000 miles away. Even as the Har-
risburg, Pennsylvania, mother of the first quadruple amputee learned,
such “slight injuries” are accompanied by callous War Department
statements that the soldier’s “morale is excellent.”
Negro mothers and wives are registering alarm, as they become aware
that lynching by court martial and wanton shooting of Negro troops
in Korea merge with the growth of terrorization of Negro veterans at

1 Ed. Note: Originally published in Political Affairs, February 1951, pp. 151-
168.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 63

home, as witnessed in the brutal police lynching of the Negro veteran,

John Derrick.
Life is cheap to the brass hats these days. Recently, the Daily Work-
er carried a story with a Peking dateline, in which the chairman of the
Peking Red Cross stated that one-third of the people killed by MacAr-
thur’s troops were children, and forty-five percent were women! Chil-
dren at play, women washing on the river banks, and peasants working
in the fields have been the targets of bombing and strafing by the Amer-
ican armed forces whose so-called “police action” was to bring “free-
dom” to the “unhappy” Korean people!
With the same cold calculation that planned these barbarous atroc-
ities, U.S. imperialism plans to use the sons of American mothers as
“blue chips” in their vicious plot of world conquest, fascism, war and
death. Over the radio, Gen. Lucius Clay, the protector of Ilse Koch, and
Gen. Mark Clark speak bluntly. Thus did Clark declare: “[...] in the in-
ternational poker game we’re playing today […] we need more blue chips;
blue chips are boys with guns in their hands.”

War Drive Places New Burdens on Women

This threatened militarization of American youth, who, according to
Federal Security Administrator Ewing, are to be prepared for a “lifetime
of mobilization” means not only personal grief for American women,
the breaking up of family life for young women and cheating them of
the possibility of marriage and motherhood, but the loss of loved ones
and increased economic hardships.
On the family-sized farms, the farm women express deep concern
over the fate of their sons in the armed forces. Here, in addition to this
general worry, the acute labor shortage, due to the loss of their drafted
sons, threatens to drive farm families off the land—since hired labor is
made impossible by their shrinking incomes.
In industry, women workers have felt the full blows of the growing
war economy—the undermining of their already precarious economic
positions due to discrimination, to unequal pay rates, lack of opportu-
nity, etc. They face with special impact the threat of wage freezes, rising
prices and additional tax withdrawals from their pay envelopes. Speed-
up and ever-rising norms, the Truman threat to increase the hours of
work, as well as the growing demands for night work, wreak special hav-
64 Internationalism in Practice

oc with the masses of working women, both as workers and as mothers.

And the Negro women—faced with intolerable assaults on their rights
and living conditions, and with a practical elimination of the few gains
secured in industry during the World War II years—are experiencing
growing white chauvinist, Jim-Crow obstacles in their efforts to rise
above domestic labor which is the lot of millions of Negro women.
These harsh economic conditions of Negro and white working women
are accompanied by the general male supremacist attitudes prevailing
toward all women workers.
But that is not all. Now new economic hardships face the 18 million
women workers. Truman’s dictatorial National Emergency Decree car-
ries with it a threat to draft women for total war production. Reminis-
cent of the bestial Nazi attitude toward women, Big Business, in their
profit-mad quest for new sources of cheap labor power and resources,
seek to emulate the Nazis who likewise drafted “mädchen in uniform”
by the millions, reversing their foul slogan that “woman must be neither
comrade nor beloved but only mother,” and kitchen slave.
These and other problems confronting women in industry make it
incumbent on progressives to take the initiative in the fight for the de-
mands of the women workers; to guarantee their integration into the
unions; to eliminate the age-old wage differentials and secure equal pay
for equal work; and to take special measures to protect the rights of the
triply-exploited Negro women workers, as stressed in the main report of
Comrade Hall. Side by side with this is the necessity to fight for special
social services for women workers, and to wage a struggle for the promo-
tion of women trade unionists to posts of union leadership.
A feature of the growth of fascization in any country, Dimitroff told
us, is the cynicism expressed toward the feelings and role of women.
A recent Mid-Century White House Conference on the Problems of
Youth dared to tell American mothers that their “love” can make chil-
dren “accept worry about war, put up with poverty and make the best
of mediocre schooling.”

Women are Speaking out for Peace

But to these and sundry ideological exhortations directed against wom-
en’s participation in the cause of peace and social progress, in the strug-
gle to ward off attacks on the living standards of their families, and in
defense of the democratic and civil rights of the people, American wom-
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 65

en are daily giving their answer. They reflect the new moods and express
the new possibilities for stopping the warmakers. More and more the
women are acquiring the consciousness that they will really be to blame
if they fail to speak up in defense of their children and their country.
That is why they have raised the mass slogans of the camp of peace to
end the war in Korea and to bring our boys home.
In the industrial heart of America, a Pittsburgh mother puts an ad in
a newspaper simply saying, “Will families of loved ones now trapped in
Korea, please call me” and in a single day over 300 mothers responded
to this call. Soon, this action is emulated in Akron, Chicago, Detroit,
Boston, demanding that Truman bring the boys home. Negro mothers
angrily forward letters from their sons in Korea to the N.A.A.C.P. urg-
ing speedy intervention against court-martial of their sons who are the
scapegoats of MacArthur’s military disasters. When in the shops, in the
packinghouse, electrical and garment industries, working women form
the active core of peace fighters who sent thousands of Christmas greet-
ing cards to Truman with the same demands; when in Eugene, Oregon,
84 Gold Star mothers voice the same demands, then here is confirmation
of a widespread peace ferment among the masses of working women.
American women have begun to expose the futility and immorality
of the A-bomb as a weapon to solve problems between nations. That is
why they are beginning to join their voices with that of their wrathful
anti-fascist sisters the world over whose role for peace cannot be over
estimated.
American women have begun the embattled cry for peace! And that
cry is growing in volume among the innumerable women of the land.
This determination to stop war—to impose peace—is growing not only
among working class women, Negro and white, but among Quakers,
church women, intellectuals, pacifist groups, every national group and
organized section of the women masses, young and old.

A Distinct Women’s Peace Movement

Comrades! We must now pose the question: How can we most effec-
tively reach the overwhelming majority of women to act for peace? How
can we help to convert desire for peace into organization and struggle?
How can we help to anchor a women’s peace movement, embracing a
majority of women, to a working class base which will guarantee it con-
sistency, principle and militancy?
66 Internationalism in Practice

To answer this question, we must pose yet another. Why must there
be a distinct women’s peace movement? Clearly, it is obvious that no
mass peace movement is possible among the Negro people without 51
percent of its population being involved; without its most highly ex-
ploited and highly organized sector, the Negro women being organized
for peace. No labor peace movement is possible without the millions of
women workers decisively represented in the textile, garment, needle,
laundry, packinghouse, food and other industries. No working class
base can be secured without the organization of seamen’s wives, railroad
workers’ wives, longshore men’s wives, wives of steel workers, miners,
etc. No movement for peace can be secured unless large masses of na-
tional group and farm women are organized for peace, as well as the
specially oppressed Mexican American and Puerto Rican women.
Yet, we do not find full agreement on the necessity to organize wom-
en, as women, in the peace camp. In numerous pre-Convention discus-
sions, in our National Women’s Commission, particularly, we have been
involved in discussions about the necessity for such a distinct women’s
peace movement. We all agreed that this perspective must be fully reg-
istered and fought for at our 15th National Convention, since it is no
secret that the present level of women’s peace activity, which represents
a new level in our work among women, has developed with little or no
help from male comrades. Indeed, they were often guilty of impeding
its development. But in the course of our discussions, we found that full
clarity did not exist among our women cadres on the character of such a
movement. How did this show itself?
Two tendencies emerged in our discussions. First was the tendency
which argued that, since an outstanding weakness of the past was the
failure to build united-front movements among working class and Ne-
gro women, it was now necessary to limit ourselves to the organization
of a working class women’s peace movement. Clearly such a tendency is
wrong. It fails to understand the full concept of our Party’s united-front
peace policy which is to create a movement based on the working class
in unity with all other peace-loving peoples. It reflects a lack of faith in
the working class women themselves who can and will lead all strata of
the women in their struggle for peace. This tendency has “Left”-sectari-
an implications. For to defeat the war makers, it is necessary to unite all
sections of the women under the leadership of the working women, as it
is necessary to unite its broad allies under the leadership of the working
class.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 67

Second was the tendency to see the need of bringing into being a peace
movement embracing all women. Such comrades argued that the broad
masses of women in our land, because of their oppressed social status
in present-day society, because of their role as mothers, as the creators
of life, are deeply opposed to war and can be won in their majority to
peace. However, in presenting this generally sound point of view, the
comrades underestimated the need that such a movement be rooted first
of all among working class women. Negro and white. This tendency
had certain Right-opportunist implications because there was absent
the understanding that the sharp turn to the working class, required in
all phases of Party work, applied to the field of work among women as
well.
In overcoming these wrong tendencies, after considerable discussion
our National Women’s Commission correctly stressed the primacy
of the working class orientation while recognizing the new opportu-
nities which exist to create a broad women’s peace movement among
non-working class women in every community, and on all levels. Major
attention must be given to organizing the millions of workers’ wives in
basic industry, the millions of working class housewives in industrial
cities, the millions of working class and Negro women who can be won
on the peace issue and around the struggle for their burning demands.

Organize Working Women for Peace

But this is still not all that needs to be said on the necessity for a distinct
women’s peace movement. Our comrades often tell us when we raise
this question of the necessity of a working class base for the women’s
peace movement that working women are already involved in peace ac-
tivities in their shops. True enough, we discover, as one comrade report-
ed in the splendid panel on Work Among Women, in the New York
State Party Convention, that the only peace committee in an upstate
electrical plant was organized by women workers—in the last two weeks.
And this is true of other plants. Working women, who have most sharp-
ly felt the effects of the war economy, who face the greatest grief in the
contemplated draft of millions of their sons and husbands, of course
have risen to spark the fight for peace now finding expression in the
shops.
But this does pose a problem, namely, how can working women partic-
ipate specifically in the women’s peace movement?
68 Internationalism in Practice

An example of a recent experience in Chicago may be worthwhile

as a guide in answering this question. Here, a Women’s Committee of
the National Labor Conference For Peace was established. This peace
committee’s role was mainly that of issuing general leaflets which met
with little response until they realized that general agitation was not
enough; that they had to develop a specific approach to the women, as
women. It was then that they issued a leaflet entitled: Must Babies Die,
which showed the senseless murder of children by the atom bomb and
linked the desires of women all over the world—the women of the So-
viet Union, China,
France, Africa, Latin America, who joined in the world-wide cam-
paign behind the Stockholm Peace Pledge—who want life for their chil-
dren, not death. The response was immediate. Over 100 working wom-
en responded, mostly from the working class communities, expressing
their wish to join peace committees.
Our comrades and other progressive women concluded that this expe-
rience is a clue to the organization of working women. It showed them
that women can be aroused to action, in their specific role as mothers
and wives who want peace, so that their children of today and those yet
unborn may grow up to manhood and womanhood. But more than
that. They also drew the conclusion that working women who have the
double task of working in shops and caring for the home and the family
can often better be organized for peace in the communities where they
live than in the shops. Those women trade unionists who spark the fight
for peace in the shops have a duty and responsibility to tie themselves
up with the general women’s peace movement, providing that work-
ing class leadership so essential to greater stability and militancy of the
women’s peace movement.
The great potential of this distinct women’s peace movement is yet to
be fully unleashed and can only be unfolded if women are specifically
organized as women.
Our responsibility to our own people, to the masses of women, to
the anti-fascist women the world over, is to guarantee that we influence
and give leadership to this wide peace sentiment expressed by women,
to transform that sentiment into a mighty movement for lasting peace
and defense of the needs of the children! Broad united fronts can be
developed on the issue of the draft, and against the militarization of the
18-year-olds; on ending the Korean war, and bringing the boys home;
on ending the court-martial of Negro troops; on seating the Chinese
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 69

Peoples Re public in the U.N. It is also necessary to unmask the war

propaganda of the ruling class, in all its forms. There is a grave lack in the
peace movement generally to carry through such an exposure.
In this wise, through the creation of a powerful women’s peace move-
ment, American women, Negro and white, will take their proper place
in the powerful world peace camp with their peace-loving sisters the
world over.

Women the World Over Fight for Peace

In over 60 lands, forming a strong sector of the world camp of peace,
democracy and Socialism, women are organized in huge federations
for peace, security, and defense of their children. Led by the Women’s
International Democratic Federation, the activities of these millions of
peace-loving, anti-fascist women serve to inspire American women to
emulate these powerful struggles of their sisters for equality, a happy life
for all children and, above all, for a lasting peace.
This new phenomenon—of world-wide identification and sisterhood
of women—grew out of the years of boundless suffering by women un-
der fascism and during the anti-fascist war. Women, in the technical-
ly advanced countries, suffered outrageous degradation. They learned
and experienced the lot of their sisters in the colonial and imperialist
oppressed countries. Coupled with this was the uprooting of all bour-
geois-democratic relationships involving women, the extermination of
whole families and generations of families. It was these and other costly
experiences that gave rise to the new determination of women through-
out the world that never again would they allow the use of their sons for
the imperialist slaughter of other nations and peoples.
Impelling these developments is the leadership of the world camp of
peace, democracy and Socialism by a workers’ state—the Socialist Soviet
Union, which has exemplified in life its concern for the well-being and
full equality of women and full protection of children in all spheres.
The world-shaking ex-ample of free Soviet womanhood, the new free-
doms achieved by the liberated woman in the lands of the European De-
mocracies who move toward Socialism, the historic strides—as a result
of the Chinese People’s Revolution—in the elimination of the feudal
bondage formerly experienced by millions of downtrodden women of
China—all are decisive contributing factors explaining why there now
exists a powerful international anti-fascist, anti-imperialist women’s
70 Internationalism in Practice

movement.
American women bear a heavy responsibility to the millions of our an-
ti-fascist sisters in the world camp of peace, precisely because the threat
to world peace stems from the imperialists of our land. The repeated
appeals to American women from the embattled mothers of Greece,
Franco Spain and the Marshall-Plan-saddled countries are staunch re-
minders of the responsibilities women in the United States bear to the
world struggle for peace and anti-fascism.
The pro-fascist Department of Justice attacks last year against the
international fraternization of women should lead us to conclude that
we face a great responsibility, in the sphere of work among women, to
the high principles of proletarian internationalism. In great measure,
our meeting of that responsibility depends on the support given by la-
bor-progressives, led by our vanguard party, the Communist Party, to
the emerging women’s peace movement. Through such support, the
struggle for the equality of women will merge with the general class
struggle of the working class which understands and defends the needs
and demands of the masses of women. Support to the peace struggles of
women in our country will thereby also help to bring in line with world
developments, based on American experience, a new advance in wom-
en’s status in our country.

A Women’s Peace Center

Comrade Hall properly stressed the necessity for our Party to help nur-
ture, support and encourage the development of such a movement. Al-
ready existing in our land is a progressive peace center of women which
should be seen in relationship to the whole perspective of winning and
organizing women for peace. The American Women for Peace, rep-
resents the center of coalescing women’s peace sentiment, composed
of broad peace forces who have identified themselves with a specific
women’s peace movement. Though not all-inclusive of the peace forces
among women, this center is already playing a signal role in the country.
It has led three major actions for peace—on the anniversary of Hiro-
shima, on U.N. Founding Day, and on November 28, when Truman
brazenly announced he was considering use of the A-bomb in Korea
and Manchuria. On that day, over 2,500 women, on 36 hours notice,
appeared before the U.N. demanding the outlawing of the A-bomb and
the ending of the inhuman Korean adventure. Here, the splendid ini-
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 71

tiative and leadership of this women’s peace center was clearly demon-
strated.
One should note that this activity has not gone unnoticed by the world
camp of peace. The returned women delegates to the World Peace Con-
gress tell audiences everywhere they speak, that the first toast by Soviet
Peace Chairman Tikhonov, given on their visit to the land of Socialism,
was to the delegation of women who went to the U.N. on its founding
day, “who got there before the men did.” The regularly issued News-Brief
of the Women’s International Democratic Federation reported the No-
vember 28 women’s peace action with the observation that this “was the
first news to reach them” of the world-wide outraged protest of women
against Truman’s madness. In quite a different vein, Eleanor Roosevelt
was forced to state demagogically, despite her Red-baiting adjectives,
that the November 28 U.N. women’s delegation “spoke the yearning in
the hearts of every woman in the land for peace.”
To expand the unity of women for peace, we must reject concepts
which deny the need for a distinct women’s peace center on the grounds
that we need a “broader movement and broader forces.” These argu-
ments come especially from those who stand on the sidelines, criticizing
what exists under the guise that the peace center is not yet all-inclusive,
while doing nothing to reach those “broader forces.” On the other hand
is the argument that the peace center is not “militant enough,” not suffi-
ciently advanced. This argument reflects a failure to understand that the
level of the present activity of this peace center, which is not anti-impe-
rialist or even anti-fascist but an expression of the general peace strivings
of women, is in keeping with their present level of experience. It will
reach a higher level of understanding and militancy as it expands its ac-
tivity and especially as it organizes peace committees below, of women
from the decisive working class strata. We cannot substitute our own
desires for militancy for a broad peace movement, as some of our com-
rades and advanced progressives sometimes seek to do artificially. If we
do that we will be militant by ourselves.
Precisely because this women’s peace center views its task not only
as one of serving as a center of women’s peace activities on a minimum
united-front basis, but also for stimulating and organizing women’s
peace committees on a community level, it merits the wholehearted
support of Communist and progressive women. Issuance of a splendid
regular monthly Bulletin by A.W.P., The Peacemaker, for $1 a year is a
splendid vehicle for exchange of experiences of women in the fight for
72 Internationalism in Practice

peace. It can serve as an organ which links the woman’s movement to

other developments and trends in the broad labor and people’s peace
movement. Progressive women everywhere should subscribe to this or-
gan as a major means of assisting its work.
In addition, Communist and progressive women everywhere must
give leadership to women in their communities, and their organizations
on such issues as the terror creating atomic air raid drills, the inade-
quate school appropriations, the skyrocketing prices, higher taxes, etc.,
and other such issues which affect the women and their families. These
issues in many instances, can serve as the starting point for involving
women in broader peace activities.

Negro Women Fight for Peace

In our efforts to help build a peace movement of women, we must once
and for all overcome the gap between the influence of the triply op-
pressed Negro women, expressed in their own mass organizations and
in the Negro people’s movement generally, and their role in the orga-
nized peace movement. We must multiply a thousand fold the leader-
ship of Negro women in the fight for peace. In examining our work in
the building of peace committees, our greatest weakness, second only
to that of building women’s peace committees in working class areas,
is the failure to establish peace committees among Negro women. Can
it be claimed that Negro women feel less strongly about peace than do
other sections of women? The facts contradict this absurdity. As the
wife of William McGee2 played an outstanding role in the fight against
the rising terror and intensified oppression of Negro citizens at home, so
it was the wife of Lt. Leon Gilbert whose initiative broke the case of her
court-martialed officer husband.
The outstanding peace heroines of the Stockholm Peace Petition
campaign were Negro women—Molly Lucas of Illinois and Jackie
Clack of California—who were sent as delegates to the Warsaw Peace
Congress and had the opportunity to visit the U.S.S.R. In Harlem,
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Boston’s South End, Philadelphia’s 4th Ward,
and similar areas, thousands of signatures of Negro mothers and wives
2 Ed. Note: William McGee (1916-1951) was a Black man falsely convicted
by an all-white jury, and executed by the state of Mississippi. His court case was
followed worldwide by progressive campaigners and was seen as representative of the
many miscarriages of justice and "legal lynchings" that were carried out by Jim Crow
courtrooms.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 73

were affixed to the world-wide petition which called for outlawing as

war criminals the atomaniacs who first use the bomb. In all peace dele-
gations of women, almost one-third were Negro women. Why then is
there no commensurate movement of Negro women for peace?
Contributing to this state of affairs no doubt was the white chauvinist
hesitation to raise the Negro question in the broad labor and people’s
peace movement, particularly in the context of America’s imperialist
aggression against the colored peoples of Asia. Additional reasons may
be found in the continued efforts of Negro reformists and bourgeois na-
tionalists to sell the Negro people the idea that this is “their war”; in the
whipping-up of false jingoistic moods of contempt even among Negro
troops for their Korean brothers; and in reaction’s veiled flattery of Ne-
gro troops in the early stages of the war—to cover what we now know
was tipping their hats to the expendability of Negro troops based on
chauvinist contempt for the lives and welfare of Negro soldiers.
Now, more than ever, the Negro people understand the full signifi-
cance of U.S. military aggression in Korea. They see in the bloody mas-
sacre of the people of Korea an extension of the foul white supremacy
Oppression and contempt for the Negro people to the colored people
of all of Asia. It is therefore possible to organize the broadest type of
peace activities among the Negro people, and particularly among Negro
women. This is necessary in the self-interest of the Negro people. And
the merger of this anti-imperialist current with the broader labor, peo-
ple’s, women’s and youth peace movements, will greatly strengthen the
peace camp as a whole.
In the growing anger of Negro mothers against military lynching
by court-martial, in the embittered recognition of Negro mothers and
wives that their fighting husbands and sons are dying for a cause that
is not their own lies the key to arouse and organize their sentiment for
peace. In such activity, a new understanding will arise; they will begin
not only to question, as they are already doing, why their sons are ex-
pendable, but why it is necessary to fight at all in Korea—why it is nec-
essary to fight in any far-off lands.
A hallmark of the recognition by the American bourgeoisie of the spe-
cial role women play in the Negro liberation movement is their “court-
ship” of Negro women. But this “courtship” is to be compared to the
white supremacist who prates his superiority, but sneaks into the homes
of Negro women, invading their privacy, impugning their dignity and
perpetuating their social degradation in our society. Thus did Truman,
74 Internationalism in Practice

Acheson and Dubinsky’s Pauline Newman attend the recent nation-

al convention of the prominent National Council of Negro Women,
in order to align this Negro women’s organization with the Truman
war program. The bourgeois chauvinist contempt of Negro women is
so great that even the U.N. appointment of an Edith Sampson is not
on the basis of leadership ability of Negro women but admittedly “to
counter Russian propaganda.”
To fully expose the false and lying purpose of this imperialist court-
ship, rejected by millions of Negro women, means a sharp unequivocal
struggle against the special forms of white chauvinism directed against
Negro women.
There is widespread evidence, as shown in experience in the wom-
en’s peace and other mass movements, also reflected in our Party, that
the struggle against the special forms of white chauvinism toward Ne-
gro women is not yet recognized as a struggle in the basic self-interest
of white women. Indeed this was glaringly evidenced in the shameful
white chauvinist remarks of an invited woman comrade to the splen-
did Women’s Panel of the New York State Party convention, who ex-
pressed herself to the effect that the Negro women on her P.T.A. board
were “mealy mouthed.” Imagine! Failure of a Negro woman to actively
participate in the activity of the P.T.A. is blamed on her, and not on
the crude white chauvinist atmosphere which permeates most of these
organizations.
The stifling white chauvinist atmosphere within these organizations
stems largely from their overwhelmingly petty-bourgeois composition.
It is likewise reflected in the failure to conduct struggles for the social
needs of Negro women and their children against dilapidated pre-Civ-
il War schools, against segregation within the school system, against
the practice of organizing in Negro, Puerto Rican, and Mexican com-
munities classes for the “retarded,” thus deliberately perpetuating the
discriminatory status in the schooling of these children. To state that
Negro women, even of petty-bourgeois composition, do not themselves
conduct such struggles is tainted with white chauvinism. It avoids the
prime responsibility of white women to lead in the fight against these
appalling conditions.
We can accelerate the militancy of Negro women to the degree with
which we demonstrate that the economic, political and social demands
of Negro women are not just ordinary demands, but special demands,
flowing from special discrimination facing Negro women as women, as
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 75

workers and as Negroes. It means first, to unfold the struggle for jobs, to
organize the unorganized Negro women workers in hundreds of open-
shop factories and to win these job campaigns. It means overcoming our
failure to organize the domestic workers who recently won for the first
time the begrudging official recognition of the status of “workers” in the
social security regulation changes. It means more than a pious sympathy
for Rosa Lee Ingram, imprisoned for over 3 years, and a revival of the
campaign for her speedy release. It means that we must not allow on the
Lower East Side a Settlement House to close because bourgeois Jewish
nationalists say: “It was meant for Jewish children and now there are
too many Puerto Ricans and Negroes.” Yes, and it means that a struggle
for social equality for Negro women must be boldly fought for in every
sphere of relations between men and women so that the open door of
Party membership doesn’t become a revolving door because of our fail-
ure to conduct this struggle.

Women’s Special Issues and Demands

Comrades, I have singled out three main questions in this sub-report
flowing out of the splendid report of Comrade Hall, namely: 1) the ne-
cessity to develop, strengthen and build a distinct women’s peace move-
ment; 2) the rooting of that movement among working women and the
wives of workers; and 3) the special necessity to bring the fight for peace
to the Negro women.
But we all know that analysis and experiences in struggle, sound
though these may be, are not enough. The key to nurture, expand and
coalesce these peace strivings of women means the raising of special de-
mands, of special issues and the development of special forms of organi-
zation. We have much to learn from the rich experiences of the interna-
tional anti-fascist women’s movement, especially from France and Italy,
as well as Argentina and Africa, where a feature of these movements is
the distinct peace struggle of women linked with defense of the needs
of children.
One of the key issues which grips the heart of every mother and fills
her children’s hearts with terror are the newly introduced atomic air-
raid drills now taking place in the nation’s schools. But can it be said
that progressive women have grasped the possibilities for peace struggle
inherent in the widely expressed new sentiment which shows that wom-
en and particularly mothers are not accepting this program? Newspaper
76 Internationalism in Practice

editorials, the statements of public figures as well as our own knowledge

from ties with the people, shows in city after city that despite whipping
up of anti-Soviet hysteria, volunteers are not forthcoming and there has
not been mass identification with the civilian defense apparatus. No
doubt what contributes to this is that millions of women and mothers
cannot see security from war in a civilian defense set-up that is national-
ly headed by the former Governor Caldwell—a Dixiecrat from Florida,
and in New York, by the anti-Semite Gen. Lucius Clay, and by similar
characters in other states.
We can neither encourage false security in a program which is based
on the false idea of the inevitability of war, nor ignore the sentiments
which impel response and concern, even though passive, by millions to
this program. We are duty bound, however, to expose the falsity of this
program and the instigators of this program, the very ones who threaten
the use of the atomic bomb.
Let us boldly place the question right side up. Let us tell mothers who
are worried about atomic warfare that the only defense—even with shel-
ters, drills and war preparations—is to ban the atomic bomb. In many
cities children die in congested streets, and mothers have to build liv-
ing islands of safety with their bodies before a traffic light is installed.
Shall we say nothing about such a city spending thousands of dollars
on a shelter—which in New York City costs $47,000? Shall we be silent
about the use of money for these shelters being built in swanky commu-
nities while working class children and Negro children cower in dank
pre-Civil War school rooms which need to be torn down?
The cost of a single battleship could provide 325 family-sized dwelling
units. Shall this money be used for a false national emergency in which
70 billions are being spent for bombs or shall the money be spent for
housing projects and homes?
In addition to this vital issue is the issue of high prices, another weak-
ness of the women’s movement. Yet experience shows that this issue
of high prices is one of the most powerful and effective issues around
which women will respond; and in seeing the connection between their
immediate demands and the struggle for peace, they will also see a neces-
sity for a change in the political administration that denies to them and
their families these basic needs.
Generally on the question of the defense of the needs of children
there is need for a new appreciation of the prime necessity of strength-
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 77

ening our support to progressive leadership in the parent-teacher field.

In numerous states, it has been the consistent activity of progressive
and Communist mothers, whose leadership, together with teachers,
has helped to counter the racist witch hunts, has fought disastrous
pro-fascist legislation which threatens to penalize progressive teachers,
and who have generally challenged the drive to fascize the minds of our
children. The fiasco of the Freedom Scroll campaign in Los Angeles and
San Francisco, opposed by the parent-teacher movement, is an example
of the readiness of women to struggle on these issues. Every city budget
hearing, where the axe is being put to school needs, finds women pres-
ent—aroused and fighting in defense of their children’s needs. These
and other examples should point up to labor-progressives and our Party
the wealth of mass issues to rally women and mothers on; and to the
possibilities in struggle to raise their political consciousness on the ne-
cessity of the struggle for peace.
Comrades, the politics of the women’s movement today is not at all
simple but complicated. All that Comrade Hall said relative to skill in
tactics is being raised as our women comrades, together with non-Party
women peace fighters, grapple with these and other problems. In New
England the organization, Minute Women for Peace, is under fierce at-
tack. The bourgeoisie, the state and city officials of New England—the
cradle of American liberty—are afraid because the present-day sisters of
Molly Pitcher, of Deborah Gannett, of the early textile women strikers
for the 10-hour-day are fighting for peace, to preserve liberty. To defeat
these and other attacks means to guarantee support to the struggle of
these women peace fighters. Involved here is the right of fraternal asso-
ciation with our sisters from other lands which received a severe blow at
the hands of the warmongers in the recent period. Winning this struggle
also means defending the principle of the right of Communist women
to work among, and earn leadership among the masses of women, in or-
der to help dissolve the foul tissue of lies about women’s capability and
leadership in women’s struggle for peace and progress.

Our Party’s Work Among Women

To help transform women’s peace sentiment into a mighty organized
movement for peace, security, equality and defense of children, means
we must change our Party’s methods of work and approaches to our
own women cadre.
78 Internationalism in Practice

In his report, Comrade Hall stated that:

the worst symptom of male superiority tendencies in our ranks is the speed
with which we released the bulk of our leading women comrades after
World War II—and our slowness to correct this error. The new level of work
achieved by our women comrades, and the new currents stirring among the
masses of women, must be reflected in our Party’s new level of understanding
of the woman’s question, This goes for our entire leadership and member-
ship.

What is necessary to achieve this “new level of understanding” in work

among women? It means, first of all, recognizing and applying the Le-
ninist concept that Communist women must “themselves be part of the
mass movement of women.” It means the virtual release of dozens and
dozens of our women comrades for work among women for peace and
to struggle for women’s special demands.
In many Party sections a consciousness exists that in order to make it
possible for women to participate generally in Party activities, the ob-
stacles to women’s full participation must be recognized. Party cadres
here understand that because under capitalism, care of children is more
than often the sole responsibility of women, and not viewed as a social
responsibility, as is the case under Socialism, it is necessary to provide
for baby sitters to help release women for general Party work. But ex-
amination shows that this practice, limited because of its costliness, is
not widespread. Nor is the same approach taken to release Party women
cadre for work among the masses of women. Coupled with this a general
underestimation of work among women is expressed in the practice of
taking practically all of our women comrades out of their natural hab-
itat thus robbing them of their mass contacts in P.T.A.’s and women’s
organizations while they function as general Party actives.
Then there is the general male supremacist approach which relegates
only certain phases of responsibility to women on the assumption that
women aren’t ready for top leadership responsibilities on a policy-mak-
ing level. The fact that in the basic units of our Party a great deal of
leadership is exercised by our women cadres refutes this assertion. But
what is required here is the elevation of women to policy-making bodies
of the Party organization.
There are literally dozens of women in every Party section who, view-
ing such practices, ask: How can women function fully in the Party—
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 79

women with families and children, whose problems cannot be fully

solved under capitalism? Of course women can and do function as gen-
eral Party activists and that is all to the good, but they function as gen-
eral Party activists, and not among the masses of women. The splendid
results shown in not a few communities where women were released
for work among women, shows how fully one-half of the Party’s effec-
tiveness could be strengthened if our Party leadership on all levels over-
comes this general under-estimation of work among women.

Combating Male “Supremacy”

Last summer, when Party reorganization was a prime concern, we
learned how costly such attitudes could be. They led to liquidationist
trends in our Party expressed in the automatic dropping of women
comrades. Male-supremacist attitudes ranged from proposals to pull
our women comrades out of mass peace work and work among women
generally, to ideas that true security means that women should “protect
the kids” by pulling out of Party activity. Here was a case of the intensifi-
cation of bourgeois feminist notions of what true security is and intensi-
fication likewise of male supremacist ideas that “women’s place is in the
home.” When some women resisted, some Party forces even held that
women felt the tension more than others even going so far as to hold up
as “proof” one woman who had a change of life which is the usual and
normal biological manifestation when a woman reaches a certain age!
But true security for the family, including families of Party members,
comes in the first place from participation of both male and female
members of the family in activity for peace and social progress. True
security for the Communist family means not liquidation of women’s
work but expanding that work on the basis of recognizing that the ac-
tivization of women generally confounds those who desire to keep one-
half of the population in passive acceptance of the false ideas of the in-
evitability of war and fascism.
Overcoming these male supremacist notions means to recognize
moreover that our Party, as distinct from those who hold petty-bour-
geois equalitarian notions, fights for the true equality of women. What
does this mean? It means fighting for the right of women to enjoy every
right and privilege enjoyed by men. Many shout equality in general, but
in practice show lack of understanding of the special aspects of equal-
ity. The petty bourgeois equalitarian denies the special problems and
80 Internationalism in Practice

needs of women. True recognition of the special aspects of equality for

women means fighting to squeeze out every concession right here under
capitalism relative to fighting women’s numerous disabilities and in-
equalities in the home, on the job, in the community. It means above all
fighting for the economic equality of women, because her economic de-
pendence on men in our society, her exclusion from production, makes
for a double exploitation of women (and triply so for Negro women)
in present-day society. It means support to her special demands, for
child-care centers, health centers, etc. It means elevation of women to
leadership on all Party levels. It means also taking into account biolog-
ical differences which contribute to women’s special problems. Great-
er education on what is meant by equality is also needed, with special
emphasis, directed as Lenin said, to the men in our Party who should
be more self-critical of these weaknesses, and who must overcome their
patronizing attitudes to women.
Our pre-Convention discussion raised anew the question of the
struggle against many male supremacist manifestations which Comrade
Foster over two years ago called upon our entire Party to overcome in
ideological struggle. We must register that Foster’s contribution made
for a decisive turn in our approach to the woman question throughout
our Party, as particularly reflected in all major reports to this conven-
tion, and in the stress being placed by our Party leaderships in many
districts. But there is no need to be complacent on this question since
we must use this new awareness to unfold an even greater ideological
understanding that there is a Marxist Leninist approach to the woman
question. This is not just the responsibility of the National Women’s
Commission which is already overburdened, and needs assistance on a
national level, which needs establishment on a permanent basis of State
Party Commissions on work among women, to serve as powerful arms
of Party leadership on state levels in work among women, but it requires
the conduct of such an ideological campaign by our entire Party.

For Ideological Clarity on Work Among Women

I propose that this Convention instruct our incoming leadership and
National Educational Department to launch such a campaign start-
ing on International Women’s Day, March 8, 1951. I.W.D. should
be the occasion for widespread tribute to the role and potentialities of
the masses of women, and to inculcate an understanding of the Marx-
ist-Leninist approach to women in society, as a duty and responsibility
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 81

of all Communist men and women. One such contribution to this end
is the forthcoming volume on the woman question (a collection of the
writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin) which will be published by
International Publishers in January, and which should receive wide cir-
culation and study.
Proper use of the Women’s Page of The Worker, under the leadership
of Peggy Dennis, now widely read; the organization of friends and read-
ers of The Worker to make this page the vehicle of exchange of experi-
ences in the peace and general women’s movement, can make this page
the avenue to increasing the circulation of the press among the masses of
women, particularly among Negro and working class women.
The Draft Resolution’s failure to deal adequately with the woman
question, overcome now with Comrade Hall’s report, consists in the
fact that it failed not only to deal adequately with women’s role—but
with her oppression—the crux of the question. It is true that the wide-
spread and justifiable criticism by many of our women comrades of the
Resolution’s weakness was due to their failure to find a corresponding
estimate of work among women on all Party levels. They saw therefore
the struggle for women’s equality solely as an inner Party matter, isolat-
ed, as too many of them are from the broad ferment of women for peace.
Where women, despite obstacles, plunged ahead, and did not fall into
the “battle of the sexes” bourgeois-feminist moods, there recognition of
women’s full role and contribution to the fight for peace was swiftest.
This should point up a great fact: namely, that it is the movement of the
women themselves for peace that has forced a new awareness upon our
Party and labor-progressive forces everywhere today. A real tribute for
this approach goes to Comrade Foster who told us that women must
fight for their own liberation, and to women Communist anti-fascist
leaders in the international women’s movement.
The attention and agreement of the entire Party organization must
be won to the solution of, and collective application to these problems.
Overcoming of these weaknesses will release the collective talents of our
wonderful women comrades to work, write, sing and fight for women’s
liberation; and they will want to do it not as second-class citizens but
as contributors to Party policy and mass work in our clubs and groups.

Promotion of Women Cadres

It is time our Party recognize the precious capital it has in its women
82 Internationalism in Practice

cadres. Important indications of an improved attitude in the Party

toward the promotion of women in leadership are seen in many parts
of the country. We have the advancement to the State Committee at
the recent New York Party Convention of such comrades as Lil Gates,
Johnnie Lumpkin and Mercedes Arroya; the splendid leadership of
such women comrades as Vickie Lawrence and Anne Garfield in work
among women in New York and New England; the recent elevation of
Comrade Mollie Lieber West to the post of Illinois organizational secre-
tary; of Grace Tillman to a similar position in Indiana and of Comrade
Vi to a leading post in a Southern Party district. We have comrades like
Rose Gaulden in the leadership in Philadelphia’s 4th Ward, of Doro-
thy Healy and Bernadette Doyle in key positions in California, of Betty
Gannett as our National Education Director, of women Communist
veterans like Dora Lipshitz and Rose Baron, and that of Martha Stone as
District Organizer of New Jersey. We also have emerging Negro wom-
en leaders like Mary Adams, the splendid young Party women cadre
like Jeanie Griffith and Judy; the inspiring role of the foremost woman
leader of our Party, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and of the great women
veterans like Mother Bloor and Anita Whitney. There are other women
cadres too numerous to mention.
Inspired and steeled by the powerful science of Marxism-Leninism,
which holds the key to the ultimate liberation of women in a Social-
ist society, where the basis of women’s exploitation is eliminated, ex-
ploitation of man by man abolished, and the true equality of the sexes
achieved, let us resolve at this 15th National Convention of our Party to
honor the Jane Higginses whose daily work is a measure of their desire
to master Marxist-Leninist theory, to participate in winning a glorious
future.
In this struggle, Communist women, by their leadership among the
masses of women, and learning from them to fight for their demands,
will fuse the women’s peace movement under the leadership of the
working class, and will thereby help to change the relationship of forces
in our land in such a way as to make for a new anti-fascist, anti-impe-
rialist people’s coalition, advancing through this struggle to Socialism.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 83

The Struggle for Peace in the

United States1
1952

Claudia Jones

P resident Truman in his capacity as chief political servitor of U.S.

imperialism, once again proposed, in his recent State of the Union
Message to Congress, a criminal crusade of force and violence against
the vast majority of the human race. Truman, though prating about
peace, glorified Wall Street’s aggressive expansionism which is now fla-
grantly directed against the colored peoples of Asia and Africa, and pro-
posed an unrestrained armaments race.
Mr. Truman cynically boasted of the colossal size of U.S. imperial-
ism’s armed strength, and its pile of A-bombs. By way of perspective
for peace, he urged even more intensive arming to be accompanied by
further cuts in consumer goods output and in real wages. While he lec-
tured the people about the need for “sacrifice,” in a year marked by the
largest total profits in the history of American capitalism, he proposed
an additional five billions in new taxes.
Truman used hundreds of words in an effort to justify further bur-
dens upon the people, but not a mumbling word did he voice about the
terrible repression of civil rights in our country, the political persecu-
tion, led by his Administration, of Communist and other working-class
leaders. The genocidal oppression of the Negro people, as highlighted

1 Ed. Note: Originally published in Political Affairs, vol. 31, no. 2, February
1952, pp. 1-20.
84 Internationalism in Practice

just before his Message by the killing of Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore,
was ignored, and not a phrase fell from his lips about F.E.P.C., or an-
ti-lynching and anti-poll tax measures. Dropped was all talk of the re-
peal of the Taft Hartley Law, but instead he indulged in a concern for a
“fair” version of that slave statute.
Nor could the farming masses derive any satisfaction from the Tru-
man message. A recent Federal report signed by James Patton, President
of the National Farmers Union, indicated that two million farmers (in a
total of 5-6 million farms) will be forced off the land and into industry
to meet the “defense” requirements. When one adds the already heavy
drainage of farmers’ sons for the armed forces, it is clear that further im-
poverishment awaits the already greatly harassed lower-income farmers.
Of course, Truman’s saber-rattling Message had its “peace-loving” in-
terludes, confirming the accumulating peace sentiment in our country,
to which hats must be tipped in accordance with the demands of good
campaign strategy. Thus, Truman declared: “[...] day in and day out we
see a long procession of timid and fearful men who wring their hands
and cry out that we have lost the way—that we don’t know what we
are doing—that we are bound to fail. Some say that we should give up
the struggle for peace and others say we should have a war and get it
over with.” Mr. Truman “struggles for peace” by putting aside a total
of eleven percent of his budget to meet all the needs of all social services!
In his pose as “savior” of the “American way of life,” Truman invokes
the divine right to impose war’s “blessings” on the Korean people and on
the rising national-liberation movements of the colonial and dependent
countries. Moreover, Truman seeks to convince the American people
of the “necessity” to rally behind Wall Street on the basis of a “peril”
which he dares term “internal aggression.” But Truman perpetrates a
gigantic and vicious hoax when he asserts that our nation is in “peril” be-
cause the Chinese people do not want Chiang Kai-shek, and the Korean
people do not want Syngman Rhee; because the peoples of Egypt and
Iran want to control their own natural resources, and because the peo-
ples of Indo-China, Burma, Spain, and Greece want a free, democratic
existence. The Truman war program, unless routed, dooms our nation
to endless war in which the rich become richer and the poor poorer; it
consigns the nation’s youth to death for the glory of Wall Street prof-
iteers. The Truman perspective is that of looting the national wealth,
of crushing the national aspirations of the freedom-seeking peoples,
of extending the Korean adventure into a World War. Stripped of its
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 85

demagogy, Truman’s Message confirmed our Party’s estimate that the

war danger has heightened, albeit its defensive tone reflects the growing
counter-struggle for peace of the masses of workers and the people gen-
erally. It likewise reflected growing contradictions of an inter-imperialist
character as well as within the US. bi-partisan war coalition, and in ef-
fect acknowledged the decisive and ever-increasing strength of the world
camp of peace, democracy and Socialism.
The utter futility of the 20-month war in Korea and Ridgway’s sev-
en-month stalling of the truce talks have increased the sharp uneasiness
of the American people, with whom the Korean war was never popular,
and who have long seen it as a threat to world peace.
The startling significance of the Truman-Churchill “secret agree-
ments” to A-bomb Manchuria and to take the war to China, to “save”
South-East Asia from its own peoples with the help of hired Chiang
mercenaries, armed with American weapons, must be viewed in the
light of Truman’s fundamental adherence to the criminal bi-partisan
war policy, ruinous to our nation and to all humanity. And it is in this
light that we must view the current Senate hearings for ratification of
the so-called Japanese Peace Treaty signed without the consent of the
major Asian powers and without the Soviet Union, the Dulles call for
“hardening” of US. policy to “overthrow” the Chinese People’s Repub-
lic, and the new wave of incendiary war talk.

Setbacks for Wall Street in the U.N. Assembly

The recently concluded Paris U.N. Assembly meeting graphically
revealed the real reason for the Truman warning to his NATO allies
against “faltering” since the road is “long and hard.” For there the ex-
ceedingly shaky nature of the coalition forming the U.S. imperialist bloc
in the U.N. became clear. It was evident that the satellite delegates could
not be held securely by the U.S. imperialist leash of economic sanctions.
Wall Street dollars could not eliminate the justified fear that these
representatives have of their impoverished and insulted peoples. Those
peoples of Western Europe, Latin America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and
the Near and Middle East do not want any part of a war on China. This
is shown by the extreme difficulty the U.S. had in forcing a U.N. vote
denouncing the Soviet Union for “violating” its 1945 treaty with the
Chiang regime, on the “theory” that it is “Soviet aggression” for the Chi-
nese people to sweep out the butcher-regime of Chiang Kai-shek and
86 Internationalism in Practice

to inaugurate a self-determined, independent, and democratic People’s

Republic.
It is in this light that the now tempered bull-dog bark of Churchill is
to be understood in his speech to Commons, following his U.S. tour.
Nor was this the only moral defeat suffered by the U.S. imperialist bloc
at the Assembly meeting. There was, too, the vote on U.N. admission of
Greece from which the entire Latin American bloc initially abstained;
and not to be forgotten is the significant presentation of the C.R.C. pe-
tition, “We Charge Genocide,” by William Patterson, precisely at a time
when the Wall Street delegation was boasting of “human rights” and
at a moment when the eyes of the world were on Florida, scene of the
genocide bombing of Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore.

New Moods for Peace

Over a year ago, Gus Hall, in his main Report to the 15th National Con-
vention of the Communist Party, said, truly and profoundly:

The clearer the war danger becomes, the more people move in defense of
peace. This new upsurge is based on a new appreciation of the war danger,
on a growing realization that the present course of the bi-partisans has led
to a dead end. It is based on a growing confidence that peace can be won.
The new turn of events in Korea packed a double wallop because millions
of Americans were never enthusiastic about this reckless adventure and were
never sold on the idea that this was a war for which they should willingly
make sacrifices. [...] We must be confident that we are going to win the work-
ing class as a class, the Negro people as a people. And that the poor farmers,
church groups, and large sections of the middle class are going to participate
in the organized peace movement. A powerful American peace front is clear-
ly emerging from these developments. This peace front will be based on the
working class, the Negro people, poor and middle farmers, and yes, sections
of the capitalist class. This is especially true of the capitalist elements who see
their imperialist aims best fulfilled on the “continent” and those closely tied
to agriculture. 2

The subsequent months have vindicated Comrade Hall’s analysis.

There has been and there is a maturing peace sentiment among the
American people, heightened during the U.S. imperialist deliberately
stalled Korean truce talks. A striving is evident amongst broader and
broader masses for an over-all negotiated settlement of all outstanding

2 Peace Can Be Won!, by Gus Hall, New Century Publishers, 1951, p. 24.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 87

differences among nations. Even the Gallup Poll reported seventy per
cent of the American people desired a Truman-Stalin meeting devot-
ed to resolving U.S.-U.S.S.R. differences, The growing peace sentiment
stems not only from new sections of the population as a whole, but pri-
marily from new sections of the working class and Negro people. More
and more the inequality of “sacrifice” and the genocidal policy towards
the colored peoples abroad and at home serve to expose the sickening
hypocrisy in the Truman bi-partisan foreign policy. These peace moods
are reflected not only in growing queries and doubts, but in an insistent
note that our country take a new path—that it reverse its present bi-par-
tisan war policy for a path of negotiation of outstanding differences
between nations and for a Big Five Power Peace Pact. This note has a
real grassroots quality and is being sounded more and more frequently
and openly by mothers, wives, veterans, youth, and G.I.’s themselves.
Despite continued and sharpened governmental harassment of the ad-
vanced defenders of peace, a “second look” is being taken as increasing
masses weigh the real alternative to the bi-partisan dead-end—the prin-
ciple of negotiation between nations, which, premised on the concept
of peaceful co-existence of states with different social systems, can lead
to the conclusion of a Five-Power Peace Pact.
These masses, faced by declining real wages and mounting unem-
ployment, demonstrate a growing awareness that it is the war economy
which is responsible for this suffering and are moving to challenge more
boldly the monstrous bi-partisan “alternative” of an “all-out war” to
“get it over with quick” or a huge armaments race and “more Koreas.”
The development of these peace sentiments is not the result of a sud-
den awakening but rather stems from a process of long duration. Among
the many forces stimulating the growth of these desires have been the
110,000 reported U.S. battle casualties, the cynical seven-month long
delay in the truce talks, the open alliance of the U.S. rulers with Japanese
and Nazi militarists and fascists, and the immense rise of the worldwide
peace struggle exemplified by the liberation efforts in Asia, the Near East
and Africa, the mounting hatred of U.S. imperialism throughout Eu-
rope, and the signing of the demand for a Five-Power Peace Pact by over
six hundred millions of world humanity.
What is taking place is the beginning of a basic re-evaluation of the
suicidal anti-Soviet premise of the Truman bi-partisan policy. And this
applies to large masses who have not yet broken with monopoly capi-
tal’s two-party system and are still attracted by the “peace” demagogy of
88 Internationalism in Practice

one or another bi-partisan spokesman.

While trade-union leaders in ever increasing numbers cry out for an
end to the Korean war and the anti-imperialist sentiments of the Negro
people reach an all-time high level; while Truman’s “holy war” propa-
ganda is delivered a blow by the defeat of his proposal to appoint Gen-
eral Mark Clark as Ambassador to the Vatican; while the whole State
Department effort to make peace “subversive” suffers a blow in the great
victory of the acquittal of Dr. Du Bois and his associates of the Peace
Information Center—at such a time Truman still waves the threat of
atom-bomb superiority and projects new proposals for extending hos-
tilities.
And Truman does not repudiate the hideous statement of his field
commander in Korea, Gen. Van Fleet, who felt the war in Korea was a
“blessing in disguise,” and that “there had to be a Korea either here or
somewhere else in the world.”3
A “blessing”—the annihilation and maiming of literally millions of
men, women and children! A “blessing” which has brought the horri-
fied condemnation of world opinion from a leading French Catholic
intellectual like Charles Favril to the Women’s International Democrat-
ic Federation!
U.S. peace forces must dissociate themselves from these “blessings,”
not only in the interest of common decency, but also of true patriotism
and internationalism. History will not excuse the American people any
more than it did the German people, if we fail effectively to dissociate
ourselves from our “own” racist imperialists in their drive for world
conquest and domination. This makes it necessary to deepen the under-
standing of all peace forces of the special white chauvinist content of the
Truman bi-partisan war-policy against the colored peoples of the world.
The sharpening crisis in Wall Street’s foreign policy, and particularly
in the solidity of its bi-partisan coalition, is seen in the blunt “admis-
sions” of failure from monopolists like Henry Ford II and Charles Wil-
son, accompanied by the attacks against “Truman’s war” by a Senator
Taft or a Herbert Hoover.
Reflecting the crisis amongst their masters are the lamentations of
such bourgeois ideologists as Demaree Bess of the Saturday Evening
Post and Walter Lippmann. More and more, these “confessions” take
the form of admitting that the danger of “Russian aggression” was a
3 New York Times, Jan. 20, 1952.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 89

maliciously conceived Big Lie. Such expressions, causing the “free enter-
prise” racketeers no little worry, mainly show that the peace movement
at home and abroad is making it difficult for Wall Street to choose, as
of today, the “all out war” alternative. It does not mean that the impe-
rialists have lost their urge to war. In this connection, it is useful to refer
to Comrade Hall’s summary address at our Party’s 15th National Con-
vention: “The speeches of Hoover and Taft do reflect the crisis in Wall
Street’s foreign policy. They are admissions of the bankruptcy of the
bi-partisan war policy. They are attempts to capitalize on the growing
peace sentiments of the American people. Speeches of this kind open
new doors for the peace movement. But these men belong to the war
camp. We can have no illusions about Herbert Hoover, Kennedy or any
one else in the war camp!4
It would be wrong, of course, not to pay close heed to these monopo-
list “admissions.” Some of the forces in the emerging people’s peace co-
alition hold that the Left does not accurately appraise these trends and
that the real choice is between Hoover and Truman. Thus, I. F. Stone,
starting from the correct premise that “the world can be saved by co-ex-
istence,” finds Hoover to be “much closer to Henry Wallace’s old posi-
tion, which was also F.D.R.’s, than to Truman.” “The Roosevelt-Wal-
lace position,” writes Mr. Stone “had sufficient faith in America not to
be afraid of Communism. Hoover has faith enough in capitalism to feel
that Communism, as he said ‘will decay of its own poisons.’ Pravda is
not afraid of that challenge but the Truman-Acheson Democrats and
the Dulles-Dewey Republicans are.”5
We agree, of course, with Mr. Stone’s basic premise of the possibility
of peaceful co-existence. Is this, however, as Stone holds, only a ques-
tion of “faith” in one or another society? No, in part the concept is in-
fluenced by “good business” reasons of trade. But this still is not the
core of the matter. The core of the matter is the mass will for peace and
the people’s power to impose this will on the war-makers. This must
be sealed in a Five Power Peace Pact. Then, and only then would it be
possible to conclude that the war danger had lessened. A key to Mr.
Stone’s error may be found in his conclusion that “the Hoover-Taft
policies might easily lead in the same direction [as Truman’s] if and as
new Communist victories abroad frightened the propertied classes here
into support of fascism.”
4 Political Affairs, February, 1951, p.15.
5 N.Y. Compass, Feb. 5, 1952.
90 Internationalism in Practice

But fear is at the heart of the present bi-partisan policy—a fear of the
peoples’ rule at home and abroad. History teaches that it is not the peo-
ples’ victories that lead to fascism, but their immobilization and disuni-
ty in the face of reaction’s assaults. The finance capitalists move towards
fascism when they become convinced that they can no longer rule in
the old way; they adopt fascist methods of terror and rule rather than
adhere to the most elementary democratic process at home and abroad.
In resorting to this policy of external and internal aggression, they raise
the hysterical cry of “aggression” against all who resist that very aggres-
sion. Thus, they howl “Soviet imperialism” and slander all movements
of peoples anywhere for national liberation and national reconstruction
upon democratic foundations as “internal aggression.”
This policy of imperialist onslaught and fascism at home is the pol-
icy of the Truman-Dulles camp as it is of the Hoover-Taft camp. The
differences between them are not of a strategic, but of a tactical, na-
ture. Their strife is a “family quarrel” of finance-capitalist groupings,
which fear and resist the peoples’ victories here and abroad, and some
of whom, like the Mid-Western industrialists, want at this time to con-
centrate upon the American and Asian continents for their “spheres of
interest.” They are fearful of losing all in “all out” war on the European
continent.
But it is a “family quarrel” which can ripen into a crisis for the entire
strategy of the bi-partisan war policy. An alert peace movement can and
should enter into debate on such questions, in order to strengthen their
growing advantage, to press for realization of the real alternative—the
alternative of lasting peace, based on co-existence of the U.S.A. and the
U.S.S.R., on the basis of peaceful competition, honoring of commit-
ments, negotiation of all outstanding differences, and recognition of
the basic democratic right of all peoples to choose their own form of
government. It is this deeper ideological meaning, underlying the real
concern of certain top monopolists with the “reckless pace” with which
the bi-partisan camp moves to the twin disaster of war and depression,
that a people’s peace movement must grasp hold of, in order to curb the
warmongers.

Main New Demagogic Arguments

The real essence of U.S. foreign policy is pro-imperialist, anti-Soviet,
anti-democratic—and anti-American. This bi-partisan foreign pol-
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 91

icy seeks to destroy every “Communist State” and to annihilate every

“Communist.” It seeks to “overthrow internal aggression,” and build
“situations of strength.” It poses as a “holy” crusade in order to cover its
chauvinist and racist ideology as it adopts the Mein Kampf concept that
“nationalism is the enemy of liberty.”
What of the Acheson-formulated anti-Soviet “situations of strength”
argument? This formula not only means continued unemployment
and hastening economic crisis, but it means perpetual arming-to-the-
teeth, perpetual war-mongering and forcible efforts to destroy existing
governments not to the liking of U.S. imperialism. Small wonder that
the “situation of strength” policy moves the high brass to express alarm
that “peace may break out” in Korea, and to issue “warnings” that the
flame in Korea “threatens” to end. This policy engenders, not strength,
but hatred, so that the peoples of the world already compare our youth
to the youth of Hitler. It is the policy of the Rommels and Mussolinis
who wrote sonnets to the “beauty” of bursting shells and who gleefully
watched the torture of Communists and non-Communists in concen-
tration camps—a policy which is unfolding in the actual present build-
ing by the bi-partisans of concentration camps for “Communists first”
and then for all who dare to oppose this ruinous war policy.
The more brutal “internal aggression” argument is nothing but a Tru-
man version of the racist Mein Kampf aim of domination over “inferior
peoples” who need the benign “blessings” of Anglo-American imperial-
ism to lead them to “salvation. It represents a naked “white man’s bur-
den” imperialist approach of bloodily—and vainly—trying to reverse
the triumphant world-wide colonial and national liberation movements
highlighted by the historic victory of the People’s Democratic Republic
of China, and inspired by the establishment of the Union of Soviet So-
cialist Republics.
U.S. imperialism, faced with ever-rising and growing struggles from
the oppressed Negro people within its own borders, must attempt to
hide from world view its own genocidal practices, fearful lest exposure
further pulverize its shibboleth of a free nation in a free world. Conse-
quently, the fable that “nationalism is the enemy of liberty” is designed
not to whittle away the concept of an arrogant boastful nation, who can
“take on the world” and “get it over with quick,” but in typical white
supremacist manner, to heighten chauvinist nationalism and white
chauvinism through the program of “imposing salvation” on “child-
like” peoples to whom self-government has been ruthlessly denied in
92 Internationalism in Practice

century-long suppression.
One and all, these demagogic arguments of the bi-partisans hide a pol-
icy of betrayal of the true national interests of the United States and its
people. It is the Hitler dream to destroy every “Communist” state, but
in the context of today it could culminate not only in world war, but
in a world atomic holocaust, from which the imperialists will not and
cannot emerge victorious, but in which tremendous suffering will result
to our people and all the world’s peace-loving peoples. What is in peril,
therefore, is not the “American way of life” but the wages of workers
who are asked to rob themselves of billions of dollars so that Truman
and the Wall Street monopolists can roam over the earth trying to crush
freedom-seeking peoples who want independence and peace and to ad-
vance socially on the basis of their choice. The peoples of the world will
never yield to these Wall Street terms. The vital interests of our own
country demand that a mighty peace front be built through which can
emerge a people’s peace coalition capable of curbing the Wall Street mo-
nopolists’ drive for a third world war and fascism. Such a peace front,
based on the working class and the inherently, anti-imperialist, growing
Negro people’s movement, will include broad sections of the farmers
and millions of people in intellectual and professional pursuits.

State of Progress Towards a People’s Peace Coalition

The question arises: How can we help to “build and expand” on this
perspective of a people’s peace coalition in the context of a day-by-day
peace struggle which, in the first place, must be rooted among the work-
ers? It must be frankly said in evaluation of the present organized peace
movement in the U.S. that the growing sentiment for peace among the
workers does not yet find expression in adequate peace organization of
this decisive class. Necessary for this orientation and for advancing the
peace movement in the U.S. by deepening its anti-fascist and anti-impe-
rialist content, is rooting the peace movement among workers and orga-
nizing peace activities on union and shop levels. Any tendency to liqui-
date labor peace centers, under the guise of real difficulties, means only
abandoning this perspective. There is no doubt that Right opportunist
tendencies are camouflaged in the advocacy of such “Left” sectarian
practices, while little enough is done to seek the precise forms of peace
organization to which the workers do readily respond. The struggle to
win the working class is fought, not in the realm of abstract theories of
the Right or the “Left,” but around specific issues, around policies as re-
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 93

gards wages, speed up, equal rights for the Negro people, foreign affairs,
inner union democracy, etc. In the words of Comrade Hall:
We must have confidence that we can win the entire working class to the poli-
cies and programs based on class struggle. We can do this, not in isolation, but
by organizing and leading in struggle the rank and file in the existing unions,
in the departments, shops, locals and Internationals.6

Every index shows an increasingly anti-war feeling among the work-

ers. More and more trade-union expressions as those emanating from
figures like Carl Stellato, William R. Hood, Frank Rosenblum, etc., call
for a Five-Power Peace Pact. Clearly, this higher anti-war militancy of
the workers emphasizes the interlocking of the fight for peace with the
fight for a decent standard of living, unshackled unionism, collective
bargaining, an end to discrimination and other elementary demands.
Numerous shop stewards’ peace conferences and peace ballot cam-
paigns confirm the ready response to the peace issue among the work-
ers. Growing mass unemployment and high taxes are undoubtedly the
reason for the gloomy complaints even of Social Democratic leaders like
Walter Reuther.
What bothers class collaborationist labor leaders like Reuther, of
course, is the growing rank-and-file pressure of the auto workers who
face mass unemployment, and who are questioning the bi-partisan for-
eign policy which has brought them, not the promised prosperity, but
worsening economic conditions. The workers see wages frozen, higher
prices and taxes, and the growth of repression against the people’s lib-
erties, heightened chauvinist oppression of the Negro people, and en-
hanced corruption in government. Even Reuther’s complaints can serve
to tear the mask from the eyes of many workers, who may well wonder
why Reuther and the class collaborationist labor leaders persist in trying
to hold the workers within the framework of the two rotten old parties
of capitalism.
In this connection it is useful to refer once again to the advice of Gus
Hall:

It was in Korea that the masses saw the greatest danger of a world war, and
a war with China. The Republican very cleverly identified the Truman Ad-
ministration with this central danger point, and this were able to capitalize
on the peace feelings of the masses. We must conclude that, yes, large sections

6 Political Affairs, December, 1949, p. 27.

94 Internationalism in Practice

were misled. But they are for peace. They will follow the correct road in the
struggle for peace if they get the right leadership. We must be able to offer the
masses a practical alternative one which they see provides a real chance to win
outside the two old parties. This alternative must correspond to their present
level of understanding in the arena of political action […] Large sections of
the working class are beginning to draw some very important lessons from
the last election campaign. The big lesson is not that the trade-union leaders
took a licking. The lesson is that there must be some road that does not lead
into the blind alley to which the workers have been brought by the labor of-
ficialdom. This is the outlook on which we must build, and which we must
help to expand.7

The Present Organized Peace Centers

A basic ideological weakness underlies the tendency of failing to concen-
trate the peace struggles and organization among the workers and the
Negro people. How is this to be observed in practice? Here is an actual
example: An organized peace coalition exists in a particular city. This
coalition in its present state experiences difficulty in getting a hall for a
certain project. A fight is carried through unsuccessfully—and private-
ly. Certain advanced forces in the coalition suggest that the peace issue
is so urgent and the need so great that “broader forces” be sought out
for this project. So far so good. Even the “private” negotiation, which
should be criticized, is not the main point. Broader forces are secured
and the existing peace coalition, which supports parallel peace actions,
supports this one. Lo and behold! however, there are certain forces in
the coalition who do not understand the Negro question, or the deci-
sive role of the working class. Where is the emphasis of the Left forces
in the coalition? They rightly express concern that this state of affairs
jeopardizes the new coalition which is emerging and some of the forces
in it. They themselves certainly appreciate that not all the components
of the coalition will fully understand all these questions, but it is expect-
ed that they will come into the coalition on the basis of its minimum
program. But its minimum program is premised on the fact that there
is a great ferment for peace especially among the masses of workers and
the Negro people; it is premised on the fight for labor’s rights and on the
effects of the war drive on the Negro people. Do the Left-progressives
battle on these issues? Yes, they battle, but unfortunately ofttimes in-
correctly. They usually “battle” by arguing that to struggle ideologically
on these issues, would “create a problem.” What they fail to recognize
and ofttimes fail to do, is to examine their own weaknesses which, hav-
7 Peace Can Be Won!, p. 54.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 95

ing their source in Right opportunism and “Left” sectarianism, usually

boil down to a retreat in meeting these arguments. Experience confirms,
however, that many of these broader forces respond to and learn from a
struggle for the correct ideological and practical position on these ques-
tions.
Errors such as this isolate the peace coalition from decisive working
class forces and the Negro people. Now, no section of a united front
coalition can be ignored or “asked” to accept second class citizenship
status. How much more serious this becomes when it affects the deci-
sive core of the coalition, the labor-Negro people’s alliance! Of course,
where the Negro people are concerned, this reflects white chauvinism
as well. Yet serious strains, affecting relations with top labor and Negro
peace leaders, having a mass base on national and state levels, exist be-
cause of this most costly error in peace activity.
A key reason for such serious errors lies in the lack of a common es-
timate of the character and role of the present organized peace centers
among labor, women, youth and in overall peace coordination. To be
concrete: can it be said that full clarity exists among progressive forces,
including Communists, relative to the programmatic character of the
American Peace Crusade, the American Women for Peace, the National
Labor Conference for Peace, the Youth Division of the Peace Crusade?
No, it cannot! The American Peace Crusade and the above-mentioned
independent organized peace centers, themselves coalitions, emerged
as a result of the need for an organized peace center, of a special kind,
shown particularly in the powerful, grass-roots response evoked by the
Stockholm Peace Petition campaign. This response came from lead-
ing forces among intellectuals and professionals, as well as among the
working class and the Negro people. Thus, the American Peace Crusade
came into being and dedicated itself to advancing a principled program.
Key elements of the A.P.C. program are the principle of peaceful co-ex-
istence and the negotiation of outstanding differences between the Big
Five Powers. The program, based also on a recognition of the war drive’s
ravaging effects on the working class and the Negro people, spurs the
struggle for Negro white unity. This peace coalition includes Left-pro-
gressive forces, and, in line with its principled advocacy of peace, pro-
grammatically rejects Red-baiting and all other divisive ideologies.
Many of the forces in the A.P.C.—and in varying degrees the other
peace centers—express unclarities, and disagreement, on several phases
of basic policy, including the whole question of the working class and its
96 Internationalism in Practice

relation to the peace coalition, the role of the Soviet Union, etc. This is
as we should expect in a genuine united front peace coalition.
But a grave persistent weakness is the lack of a working-class base and
real roots among the Negro people, The point is not only that these
weaknesses exist, but that many of the advanced Left-progressive forces
fail to accept their special ideological role and, on numerous issues, in
and out of the present organized peace coalitions, this weakness seri-
ously jeopardizes the continued growth of the coalition. Consequently,
entirely too much time is consumed in necessarily resolving these prob-
lems, on top levels, while the task of rooting and organizing a united
front working class base goes by the board.
Experience teaches that where these questions have been frankly sub-
jected to friendly discussion, the progressive forces in the coalition, to-
gether with the Left-progressives, resolve the matter satisfactorily.
All peace forces, and Left-progressives in particular, must be keen to
cooperate with every progressive tendency that may manifest itself, un-
der the strong pressure of the masses, in the trade-union leadership—on
all levels—and within the Negro people’s movement. All peace forces
must learn to cultivate such trends and utilize them for the building of
a broad peace coalition.
This is all the more decisive, since the new and increasing difficulties
of the warmongers do not imply the cessation or necessarily a lessening
of the war danger. On the contrary, the masses must be alerted as never
before to combat the machinations of the war incendiaries.
The task demands mastery of the united front and the bold grappling
with special ideological questions on all issues confronting the peace
movement. Some Left-progressive forces, including some Commu-
nists, argue that the present coalition peace centers are “too Left.” “We
must build broader ones and scrap the old,” they say. Frequently this
argument hides a tendency of capitulation to so-called “broad forces”
which, in fact, reject the peace coalition’s minimum program. Others
demonstrate in practice that to fail to build and expand present orga-
nized peace centers is to fail to take advantage of the current mass peace
upsurge. Thus, the development of “broader centers” is wrongly coun-
terposed to the strengthening of the present organized peace centers.
Some Left-progressives, including some Communists, even take the
initiative in dissuading groups who come into activity as a result of the
stimulus of these peace centers, from coming closer to them, in day-to-
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 97

day working relationship.

The “great debate” goes on and on, while at a standstill is the heart and
core of the real issue, that of not only moving with the stream, but of
building and consolidating united front peace organizations among the
workers and the Negro people, and of organizing united front activity
from below on the key peace issue and primarily on the economic and
social consequences of the war drive.
The Right opportunist danger, reflected in a neglect to come to grips
with basic ideological problems relative to the peace struggle, is mainly
expressed in the failure of many Left progressives, including some Com-
munists, to play their special ideological role of convincing people of the
correctness of the previously agreed on minimum program. Nor should
Left-progressives fail to note the effect that such wrong approaches have
on non-Left Negro and white forces in the coalition who see their own
roles being reduced and who quite correctly resent being “written off.”
No argument that such discussions will isolate “broader forces” holds
water. The existence of an organized peace center, or even of parallel
peace movements on special issues, does not excuse lack of ideological
struggle in all coalition peace movements.
Conversely, the “Left” sectarian danger reflects a narrow approach to
the peace movement and is based on a defeatist attitude that world war
really is inevitable.
The necessity for broader forms of peace struggle complements,
it does not contradict, the necessity of strengthening the present or-
ganized peace centers, particularly in terms of developing their work-
ing-class base. To pose these efforts as mutually exclusive is to endanger
not only existing organized peace centers, but the whole concept of the
united front, of an anti-fascist, anti-imperialist people’s peace coalition
based on the working class and Negro people.
Just as there is no contradiction between a mass united front coalition
policy and the special responsibilities of the Left-progressives in the fight
against white chauvinism, so is there no contradiction between the de-
velopment of broader movements around specific peace issues and the
building and strengthening of the existing organized peace centers based
on the working class and the deepening of their ideological leadership.
98 Internationalism in Practice

The Negro People and the Fight for Peace and Freedom
If it is true that the Truman war crusade, brutally exemplified in the
atrocious war against the colored peoples of Asia, develops in an at-
mosphere of rising counter-struggle for peace, it is also certainly true
that even greater counter-struggle by the Negro people is developing as
they resist the Wall Street bi-partisan attempt to destroy their liberation
movement, and their leaders—Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wil-
liam L. Patterson, Benjamin J. Davis, Henry Winston, James Jackson,
Ben Careathers, Pettis Perry, Roosevelt Ward, Mrs. Charlotta Bass, and
many, many others.
But against this white supremacist, chauvinist war drive upon the
peace-loving peoples of the earth, there also develops in our epoch, the
liberation movement of the peoples in colonial and dependent coun-
tries. It is clear, then, that this liberation movement “is inseparably con-
nected with the movement for peace. Therefore any forcible attempts
by the imperialists to keep these peoples in a state of dependence and
colonial subjection is a threat to the cause of peace.”8
Faced with rising anti-imperialist counter-struggle of the colonial
peoples and nations and at home with the growing, and ever-more con-
scious anti-imperialist Negro liberation movement, American imperial-
ism multiplies its hourly crimes against the Negro people.
At the same time there is taking place a sharpening in the whole Negro
liberation movement, and a dissociation from the Truman bi-partisan
war policy by increasing sections of the Negro people as expressed by
more and more Negro spokesmen. Thus, many State Department Ne-
gro spokesmen are competing widely in the Negro press in “warnings” to
Truman that his Point Four Program, which accompanies Wall Street’s
imposed “blessings,” is being rejected by the independence-minded
peoples of Asia, Latin America, the West Indies and Africa Thus, it is
not only the forthright Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard
University, who raises this issue, but even the State Department repre-
sentative, Dr. Dailey, on return from a tour of the Far East and Africa,
“warns” U.S. imperialism to reject this anti-national liberation path.
Further, Negro spokesmen such as P. L. Prattis, editor of the Pittsburgh
Courier, Dr. Benjamin Mays and numerous Negro journalists, com-
menting on recent Truman messages, warned that “Negro voters still
have to be convinced.” In the words of the influential Negro histori-

8 I. A. Seleznev, in Political Affairs, December, 1951.

 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 99

an and publicist, J. A. Rogers: “Colored voters are convinced that they

have been ruthlessly carried for a ride and exploited on the civil rights
appeal. Now they are face to face with the cold facts that not a single
civil rights measure has been passed in Congress. They also know that
these measures have been checked on all turns by the Southern Demo-
cratic bloc. President Truman admitted in his recent State of the Union
message that these issues had not been effectuated.”9
Nothing so points up the basic new element in the relationship be-
tween the struggle for peace and the Negro liberation and people’s
movements than this increasingly sharp criticism by the Negro people
of the Truman bi-partisan policy. The Negro people as a whole see the
struggle for their rights impaled on the blade of Wall Street’s greed, in a
war against the colored peoples of Korea which threatens to spread into
a war against the oppressed colored people of the entire world.
As decisively placed by Comrade Benjamin J. Davis in his Report to
the Party’s Fifteenth National Convention: “The new element in the re-
lationship between the struggle for peace and for Negro liberation is the
growing acuteness of the contradiction between American imperialism
in its war program, on the one hand, and, on the other, the struggle of
the Negro people and their supporters to defend their elementary liber-
ties and to advance the cause of full citizenship. This is by far the most
important single new factor to be noted in connection with the struggle
for national liberation of the Negro people.”
It is exactly the “new element” basically analyzed in Comrade Da-
vis’ Report that must yet be grasped by Left-progressive forces and the
Party cadres. The further significance of this fundamental relationship
between the struggle for peace and for freedom was documented and
analyzed by Comrade Pettis Perry. These profound contributions re-
quire study and mastery by all Left-progressives and Party cadres with-
out delay.
An appreciation of the great contributions of Comrade Davis and Per-
ry will do much to heighten the ideological level in the struggle against
white chauvinism, which still plagues the whole peace movement. We
cannot speak of the new militant features of the Negro people’s move-
ment without recognizing that this very fact places new and tremen-
dous responsibilities on our ideological and practical work. We must
sharpen the understanding of the national question, particularly as this

9 N. Y. Amsterdam News, February 2, 1952.

100 Internationalism in Practice

applies to the Negro people, in order to advance the leading role of the
workers in the Negro-liberation movement. This is of basic importance
in the specific context of the struggle for peace in order to guarantee
strengthening the alliance of the working class and Negro people. Such
an alliance must form the solid core of the emerging people’s peace co-
alition, which will reverse the present ruinous direction the imperialists
are traveling.
We must put an end to the false conception that “broader forces” can
not understand the Negro question. While it would be incorrect to de-
mand that the full program of the Negro liberation movement be part
of the program of struggle of the existing organized peace movement,
it is necessary to demand—and certainly to expect of Left-progressives
and Communists in the peace movement—an all-out battle against the
white chauvinist poison which permeates many of these movements.
To assert the impossibility of spreading an understanding of the Ne-
gro question is to excuse inactivity in the fight against white chauvin-
ism and to insult the broad masses eager for peace and democracy. We
must convince our allies in the anti-war struggle of the correctness of
the minimum program in terms of the rights of the Negro people and
Negro-white unity, which they are duty bound to fight for. The strug-
gle for peace requires a struggle against colonialism and rejection of rac-
ist warmongering. We must labor to deepen the understanding of the
masses as regards the inherent relationship between the attacks on the
Negro people and the attacks on the peace movement and democrat-
ic liberties, as regards the synthesis between the fight against a robber
war in Asia and the imperialist attempt to thwart the Negro liberation
movement and keep its leaders from exposing U.S. imperialist claims
that it is a “free nation” in a “free world.”
The superb people’s victories in the Du Bois case, in Stuyvesant
Town, and in the development of the National Negro Labor Council
Movement, fused with past struggles around Trenton, Martinsville,
McGee, etc., show how the struggle for Negro rights and Negro-white
unity advances and heightens political consciousness on the part of par-
ticipating Negro and white masses.
Merely to master the full significance of the State Department’s
“reason” for the denial of a passport to Paul Robeson on the grounds
that “racial discrimination” is a “family matter” the public exposure of
which is inimical to the interests of the security of the United States
Government, is to pose the question: Why have not the peace forces ful-
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 101

ly mounted a mass campaign that can lead to victory around this prime
issue involving the revered people’s artist and world peace leader—Paul
Robeson? All over the world, especially among the hundreds of millions
of darker peoples in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the West Indies the
U.S. imperialists are finding the Jim Crow system in this country a most
serious obstacle in their path of aggression. And it is the Communists
everywhere who, together with the Left-progressives, are the leaders of
the masses in this sharp condemnation of the Jim Crow outrage in the
United States.
Hence, ideological struggle on this front assumes urgent significance,
particularly in view of the leadership assumed in all peace centers by
outstanding Negro men and women. Their contributions cannot and
should not be concentrated on “doing battle” on these issues. Their
white co-workers must assume greater responsibility and initiative in
this regard, not only because this is proper in the struggle for Negro
rights, but also in order that these capable Negro men, women, and
youth fighters may be freed to give fullest leadership, in their authorita-
tive positions, to building a broad peace base among the Negro people;
to developing relationships with the emerging peace expressions from
very broad sections of the Negro and white forces, coming from church-
es, fraternal organizations, Negro women’s organizations, etc.
This is of prime importance, since as things are today there persists a
serious lack of an organized peace movement and organization in the de-
cisive Negro communities, particularly in the South. This lack exists in
the midst of rising intensity of mass actions of the Negro people against
the growing lynch murders and intimidation, as in Cairo and Cicero,
Illinois, Mims and Grove land, Florida, etc.
The warmakers, trying to offset this powerful anti-Jim Crow senti-
ment at home and abroad, have put forward a number of prominent
Negro figures to belittle and deny the existence of Negro persecution
in the United States. These shameful figures include Channing Tobias,
Mrs. Edith Sampson, Ray Robinson and the like. These sorry apologists
for white supremacy must be exposed far more vigorously than here-
tofore. This can best be done by the Negro people themselves, and a
peace base among the Negro people on the foundation of alliance with
the Negro people’s movements would help greatly in exposing such
misleaders. This is particularly true among Negro women, who in their
significant and developing Sojourners For Truth and Justice movement,
will have to deal with the burning problems of the war and its effects
102 Internationalism in Practice

on the Negro children and the family, on Negro mothers and wives,
among whom a fiercely powerful peace sentiment exists. All this will
strengthen the growing mass independent women’s peace movement in
our country and its present independent peace center, American Wom-
en for Peace. Coming to grips with the consequences of the war effort
opens up new and rewarding avenues of broad mass contact with the
overwhelming majority of working-class Negro women, whose militant
desires for freedom and peace are the most outstanding in the nation.

Five Power Peace Pact

The campaign for a Five-Power Peace Pact offers a magnificent oppor-
tunity to strengthen the whole organized peace movement in our coun-
try.
Barely five months old, the organized Pact campaign is receiving un-
precedented response among masses who thus again show the error in
hesitations on this question within the organized peace movement and
among Left-progressive forces, including the Party. There is no doubt
that influencing this vacillation was a certain amount of disorientation
among the organized peace forces following the significant Chicago
Peace Congress. Such moods as that of “hanging on hopes” that the
military would effect cease-fire following the “ebbs and flows” of the
truce talks, had to be quickly discarded, in the course of self-critical ex-
amination, for the plain truth that peace can only be won through mass
struggle. Basically influencing the hesitancy was not only this factor but
the underestimation of the decisive character of this Five-Power Pact
effort which will not end until peace is assured by the signing of such a
pact. Underlying all these factors, was a fundamental ideological weak-
ness in comprehending the full implications of the possibility of peace-
ful co-existence between states of different social systems, in addition
to a tendency to shy away from vigorous struggle, particularly among
the working class and the Negro people, against vile anti-Soviet lies and
fables about “Soviet imperialism.”
The American Peace Crusade leadership in the Five-Power Peace Pact
effort has been outstanding. It has stressed the many-sided approaches
to this campaign and has served to stimulate trade-union, farm, Negro,
women, cultural, and youth peace forces into similar activity. Numerous
A.P.C. conferences on a state level and peace workshops have been held.
Many petitions carrying special appeals, such as Peace Prayers, union
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 103

resolutions, etc., have been issued. Scheduled for March, in Washing-

ton, is a National Delegates Assembly involving the Crusade and many
other forces who do not adhere to the entire Peace Crusade program.
Here delegates from the entire country will convene to exchange expe-
riences in the signature campaign for a Five Power Peace Pact, with the
purpose of stimulating the campaign.
Great initiative behind the Five Power Peace Pact effort has come
from the American Women for Peace which has, in many cases, boldly
canvassed existing women’s organizations and urged them to partici-
pate, jointly or separately, in the campaign. Supporting the work, too,
is the World Youth and Friendship Book Campaign, where signatures
for a Five Power Peace Pact are gathered by young people for eventual
presentation to the United Nations.
Expressions of support have come from additional varied sources, no-
tably from trade-union leaders such as William Hood and Hugo Ernst,
and from many leading intellectuals, professional and cultural figures,
such as Professor Anton Carlson, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dr. Robert
Morss Lovett, Paul Robeson, Dr. Alice Hamilton, and Professor Philip
Morrison. Again, groups such as the Committee on Peaceful Alterna-
tives and the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) have re-
iterated their support of peaceful negotiations among the great powers.
Significant leaders in the religious life of the country such as the Rev.
Dr. Jemison, of the National (Negro) Baptist Alliance, Bishop Bromley
Oxnam and Rabbi B. Benedict Glazer, have also spoken out for agree-
ment amongst the great powers.
These, and many similar facts, not only confirm the growing pro-peace
upsurge, but show that where the initiative is seized boldly, around par-
ticular issues, broader forces do come forward, unity is achieved, and
wider and wider segments of the population are reached.
Two forthcoming international events offer further excellent oppor-
tunities for broadening and deepening the anti-war struggle. The first
is the American Inter-Continental Peace Conference, scheduled for
March. The prime responsibility of U.S. imperialism for the terrible ex-
ploitation of the peoples of the West Indies, and of Central and South
America, makes active participation by peace lovers of the United States
in this Congress all the more significant.
In April an International Conference in Defense of Children will be
held in Vienna. “To save the children, the most precious wealth of all
104 Internationalism in Practice

mankind,” declares the International Sponsoring Committee, “we ap-

peal to all men and women of goodwill, to all organizations which are
interested in the problems of children, to participate. . . . This Confer-
ence will study what can be done in order to defend the right to life, to
health and education of all children in the world.” Surely, profound in-
terest of all peace forces in the United States will be manifested towards
this great international event.

The Party and the Peace Struggle

The Communist Party, whose leaders are victims of Smith Act repres-
sion, can be proud of its modest contribution to the struggle for peace.
What would our nation have been, had we not had the inspiring lead-
ership of the Party led by William Z. Foster and Eugene Dennis? The
whole activity of the Party has been devoted to reversing the present
ruinous path of our nation, resulting from the Wall Street bi-partisan
policy. The membership, in and out of the organized peace movement,
have been selfless in their work for peace, and have experienced and are
experiencing many reprisals as the Communist Party fights for its legal
rights as an American political party, a fight which is itself, of course,
of the essence of the struggle against war. Communists must and do
bring to the peace movement the selflessness, enthusiasm and confi-
dence in victory characteristic of Marxists-Leninists, not because they
are self-righteous, but because the Party is correct, because its path is the
path of the development of human society.
As Communists we struggle for peace, equality, freedom and Social-
ism—we struggle for the best interests of the working class, the Negro
people, the farming masses, the vast majority of the American people.
To fulfill these high Communist principles, we must learn from the
people and we must shed all moods of “spontaneity” in the peace strug-
gle. The mastery of the united front tactic, the deepening of own ideo-
logical weapons, must be strengthened.
To work to unite all people who understand that our country is in
danger of war and fascism; to work so that our nation is not viewed with
fear and loathing by the people of the world; to root our peace struggle
basically among the working class and Negro people—this is the path
to the achievement of the correct main line of our Party in this period.
That main line seeks the emergence of an anti-fascist, anti-monopoly,
people’s peace coalition, that will lead to a people’s front against war
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 105

and fascism strong enough to curb the warmongers in 1952 and thus
open to all the American people a vista of happiness, security, equality
and peace.
106 Internationalism in Practice

Statement Before Being Sentenced to

One Year and a Day Imprisonment by
Judge Edward J. Dimock after
a nine month trial of
13 Communist leaders at
Foley Square, New York
February 2, 1953

Claudia Jones

Y our Honor, there are a few things I wish to say. For if what I say here
serves even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Amer-
icans to fight for peace and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and
thought in our country, I shall consider my rising to speak worthwhile
indeed.
Quite candidly Your Honor, I say these things not with any idea that
what I will say will influence your sentence of me. For, even with all the
power your Honor holds, how can you decide to mete out justice for
the only act to which I proudly plead guilty, and one, moreover, which
by your own prior rulings constitutes no crime—that of holding Com-
munist ideas; of being a member and officer of the Communist Party of
the United States?
Will you measure, for example, as worthy of one year’s sentence, my
passionate adherence to the idea of fighting for full unequivocal equali-
ty for my people, the Negro people which as a Communist I believe can
only be achieved allied to the cause of the working class?
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 107

A year for another vital Communist belief, that the bestial Korean
War is an unjust war? Or my belief that peaceful coexistence of nations
can be achieved and peace won if struggled for?
Another year for my belief that only under socialism will exploitation
of man by man be finally abolished and the great human and industrial
resources of the nation be harnessed for the well-being of the people?
Still another year’s sentence for my belief that the denial of the exer-
cise of free speech and thought to Communists only precedes, as history
confirms, the denial of the exercise of these rights to all Americans? Et
cetera, Honorable Judge?
Of course your Honor might choose still another path for sentence.
You will no doubt choose as the basis for sentence the concocted lies
which flowed so smoothly from the well-paid tongues of stool pigeons
and informers who paraded before you here and gave so-called evidence
which the Court has asserted was “amply justified.”
“Amply justified” your Honor? What has been amply justified? The
lies of degenerate witnesses like Younglove who can only be compared
to Van Der Lubbe of the Reichstag Trial? The despicable forced admis-
sion of the Negro witness Cummings who laughed at the thought of his
$10,000 Judas gold jingling in his pocket when he said he would turn
informer on his own mother for a mess of the prosecutor’s pottage?1
The ill-practiced and unspeakable droning of the other Negro inform-
er Rosser, who blurted out his well-memorized script, and even, on your
Honor’s prodding, would drift off into half-intelligible intonations, “I
don’t know what you are talking about,” to name but a few examples!
“Amply justified!” Indeed! This “evidence!”
There was no official stamp powerful enough, your Honor, to dignify
the obscenity of this trial of ideas. Hence, for me to accept the verdict of
guilty would only mean that I considered myself less than worthy of the
dignity of truth, which I cherish as a Communist and as a human being

1 Ed. Note: Thomas Aaron Younglove (died 1977) was an informant working
for the FBI who joined the CPUSA on their instructions. Marinus Van Der Lubbe
(13th January 1909 - 10th January 1934) was a Dutch communist building worker
who was tried, convicted, and executed by the government of Nazi Germany. He was
accused of causing a fire at the Reichstag building, which many historians now claim
was instead a false flag attack by the Nazi government aimed at discrediting the com-
munist party. William Garfield Cummings was a Black witness convinced to testify
against Claudia Jones.
108 Internationalism in Practice

and also unsuitable to the utter contempt with which I hold such sordid
performances.
That is why I find now, as throughout this trial of the ideas of Marx-
ism-Leninism, that it is we, the defendants, who are morally free and
conversely it is the prosecutors and the Court itself that stands naked
before the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the people of our
country.
It is this, your Honor, that explains the not-so-strange reason that you
yourself observed that we feel no guilt. For true though it is that the
prosecutor has its framed-up verdict on a framed-up indictment and
trial, it is not we Communist defendants who tremble at this final stage
of these trial court proceedings, but the very prosecutors of our ideas.
Truly, the prosecution’s victory sits shakily. For our ideas were con-
firmed in the course of this trial itself.
It was the world-renowned Karl Marx, founder of the Marxist-Le-
ninist science, for which application to American and world historical
conditions we were so fearfully convicted, who long ago predicted that
“The time would come when the powers that be would no longer live by the
very laws they themselves have fashioned.”
In the libraries and great institutions of learning and yes, your Honor,
particularly in the homes of Negro and white workers, will not such
reading—which will not stop with this or any other Smith Act trial—
will not men, women and youth think and ponder that such a time is
here?
The thinking process, as your Honor well knows, is a process that de-
fies jailing. When it is all boiled down, what shows is not the strength
of the policies and practices of our prosecutors—which are akin to
police-state practices—but their desperate fear of the people. Noth-
ing shows this more, your Honor, than our exposure of the biased jury
drawn from a system which virtually excludes Negros, Puerto Rican,
and manual workers. This virtual exclusion exists not because of lack of
qualifications or even financial hardship, but because of deliberate dis-
crimination based on consciously cultivated white supremacist ruling
class prejudice which sullies our boasted Western culture.
This conscious white supremacist prejudice, which Mr. Perry so well
pointed out, was shown in the gingerly handling by the prosecutors and
ofttimes, the Court of the Achilles heel of this alleged “force and vio-
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 109

lence” charge against us in relation to the Negro question.2

Introduce a title page to show Claudia Jones wrote an article during
the indictment period, but you dare not read even a line of it, even to
a biased jury, on which sat a lone Negro juror, there by mere accident,
since he was an alternate well through most of the trial. You dare not,
gentlemen of the prosecution, assert that Negro women can think and
speak and write!
Moreover, you dare not read it because the article not only refutes the
assertion that the ruling class will ever grant equality to 15,000,000 Ne-
gro Americans, but shows that what we are granted is unrequited force
and violence not only in the unpunished barbaric crime of lynching,
but in eating, in everyday existence, in living, in the armed forces, in jails,
in the denial of land, in recreation—yes, even in the nation’s cemeteries.
The prosecution also canceled out the overt act which accompanied
the original indictment of the defendant Jones entitled “Women in
the Struggle for Peace and Security.” And why, your Honor? It can-
not be read, your Honor—it urges American mothers, Negro women
and white, to emulate the peace struggles of their anti-fascist sisters in
Latin America, in the new European democracies, in the Soviet Union,
in Asia and Africa to end the bestial Korean war, to stop “Operation
Killer,” to bring our boys home, to reject the militarist threat to embroil
us in a war with China, so that their children should not suffer the fate
of the Korean babies murdered by napalm bombs of B-29s, or the fate
of Hiroshima.
Is all this not further proof that what we were also tried for was our
opposition to racist ideas, so integral a part of the desperate drive by the
men of Wall Street to war and fascism?
One thought pervaded me throughout this trial and pervades me still,
and it is this: In the nine and one-half months of this trial, millions of
children have been born. I speak only of those who live. Will the fu-
ture of those children, including those of our defendants and even your
Honor’s grandchildren, be made more secure by the jailing of 13 men
and women Communists whose crimes are not criminal acts but advo-
cacy of ideas? Is this not a tyrannical violation of the American dream of
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”?

2 Ed. Note: One of Jones’ co-defendants, Pettis Perry (1897-1965) joined the
Communist Party in 1932 and was sentenced to three years in prison for violating the
Smith Act.
110 Internationalism in Practice

It was in an American junior high school where I first learned of the

great traditions of popular liberty of American history, for which I then
received the Theodore Roosevelt Award for good citizenship.
That I have learned to interpret that history and to work to influence
its change for the betterment of the people with the indispensable weap-
on of Marxist-Leninist ideas, that is the real crime against me.
Of all other charges I am innocent.
It was here on this soil (and not as Mr. Lane3 would depict to the
Court, as a young child of eight years of age waving revolutionary slo-
gans), that I had early experienced experiences which are shared by mil-
lions of native-born Negroes—the bitter indignity and humiliation of
second-class citizenship, the special status which makes a mockery of
our Government’s prated claims of a “free America” in a “free world”
for 15 million Negro Americans.
It was out of my Jim Crow experiences as a young Negro woman,
experiences likewise born of working-class poverty that led me in my
search of why these things had to be that led me to join the Young Com-
munist League and to choose at the age of 18 the philosophy of my life,
the science of Marxism-Leninism—that philosophy that not only re-
jects racist ideas, but is the antithesis of them.
In this courtroom there has often flashed before me the dozens of
meetings of Negro and white workers in the great auto plants at the
Rouge, of New England textile workers, of students, and of women ac-
tive in the peace struggle which I have addressed on behalf of my Party.
Just as now, there flashes in my mind’s eye those young Negro women
I have seen at the Women’s House of Detention, almost children, of
whom, but for my early discovery of Marxism-Leninism, I might have
had to say now, “There might I have been.”
For what crimes? Petty crimes born of poverty, of the ghetto, of Jim
Crow living, the crime of being born black on American soil, of resist-
3 Ed. Note: Myles J. Lane, the prosecutor at Claudia Jones’ case, had previ-
ously been characterized by her as the “racketeer-associating prosecutor” on the trial
of Benjamin Davis, another Black Communist leader. Ben Davis was one of eleven
targeted communists under the Smith Act and was tried and convicted in 1948-49
(with the others being Eugene Dennis, Gus Hall, Henry Winston, John Williamson,
Robert Thompson, Gil Green, John Gates, Jack Stachel, Carl Winter and Irving Pot-
ash.) In the Davis case, Myles Lane made a “crass white supremacist inference” that a
Black juror could not possibly be impartial, as recounted in Claudia Jones’ pamphlet
Ben Davis: Fighter for Freedom, 1954.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 111

ing treatment, rebellion against which un-channeled, became lawless

against the very Jim Crow society that perpetuates their lawlessness.
One need only be a Negro in America to know that for the crime of
being a Negro we are daily convicted by a Government which denies us
elementary democratic rights, the right to vote, to hold office, to hold
judgeships, to serve on juries, rights forcibly denied in the South and
also in the North. And I want to concur with Mr. Perry’s proposal to
Mr. Lane that he recommend to the Department of Justice that they
show more zeal, since they have not ever prosecuted a single anti-Semite
or a Ku Kluxer in these United States with its total of 5,000 lynched
Negro men, women and children since the 1860s.
I am aware that these things are not to the liking of the prosecution or
even of this Court, but that cannot be helped, for one of the historical
truths of all history is that the oppressed never revere their oppressors.
Now I come to a close. The probation official who interrogated me
was a Negro official. Your Honor undoubtedly has his reports before
you. One of the questions that he asked me was did I ever believe in any
religion. I told him then that this was a personal, private matter and was
guaranteed under the First Amendment of the Constitution. I wonder
now, your Honor, if he somehow falsely reckoned, as many officials
falsely reckon, that a change of belief or conviction in one’s mature life
is like putting on a new dress or a new hat? I could have quoted Scrip-
ture to him, the Scripture applied by a leading Negro religious figure in
tribute and in observation of the Smith Act jailing of one of the out-
standing sons of the Negro people, Ben Davis, now incarcerated in the
Jim Crow Federal Penitentiary of Terre Haute, Indiana. The Scripture
runs: “Smite down the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered.”
And this, Honorable Judge, is exactly what is the purpose of all Smith
Act trials, this one in particular. I share the faith of Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn and Pettis Perry and all my co-defendants that America’s work-
ing people, Negro and white, will surely rise, not like sheep, but with
vigilance towards their liberty, to assure that peace will win, and that the
decadent Smith Act, which contravenes the Bill of Rights, will be swept
from the scene of history.
It was the great Frederick Douglass who had a price on his head, who
said, “Without struggle, there is no progress.” And echoing his words was
the answer of the great abolitionist poet, James Russell Lowell: “The
limits of tyranny is proscribed by the measure of our resistance to it.”
112 Internationalism in Practice

If, out of this struggle, history assesses that I and my co-defendants

have made some small contribution, I shall consider my role small in-
deed. The glorious exploits of anti-fascist heroes and heroines, honored
today in all lands for their contribution to social progress, will, just like
the role of our prosecutors, also be measured by the people of the Unit-
ed States in that coming day.
I have concluded, your Honor.
 Anti-Imperialism at the Height 113

Claudia JoNeS faced relentless persecution for her organizing and for her political activism. Arrested in
1948 and sentenced to four prison terms, she confronted threats of deportation to Trinidad. Despite, or
most likely because of, her significant role in Party activities for the CPUSA, Jones was found in violation of
the McCarran Act, leading to her deportation order in 1950. Undeterred, she continued her activism in the
United Kingdom, where, upon arrival in London in 1955, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain,
contributing to the expansion of the British African-Caribbean community and leaving an enduring impact
on the struggle for equality and justice.
114 Internationalism in Practice

SECTION 4
Conclusions
k
 Conclusions 115

“Negro Women Can Think and Speak and

Write!”
Jones' Speech to the Court Before
Her Sentencing

Gerald Horne & Tionne Parris

C laudia Jones had, by 1953, been a leading Black activist within the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA) for several years. Her writings
had frequently drawn attention to the injustices suffered not only by
African Americans, but by African American women in particular. Pre-
ceding this, Jones was arrested under the Smith Act in 1951 for deliv-
ering a speech titled “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for
Peace.” In this instance, she had argued that women were fundamental
to the advocacy of anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti-racist struggles
across the world. Therefore, it was no surprise that she evoked similar
themes in her sentencing speech in February of 1953. It remains one of
Jones’s most significant contributions because in a setting which might
have intimidated others, Jones expertly delivered a counter against her
prosecution by foregrounding the issue of misogynoir, which was in-
terlinked with the societal ills the Communist Party had tried to ad-
dress. Poverty, miseducation, and violence were conditions intended to
prevent African American progress within society, and Claudia Jones
stood in front of the court and made her case as a woman who had over-
come these circumstances. Most crucially, she was unapologetic about
having used the “philosophy of Marxism-Leninism” to have done so.
She underscored how, in a growing fascist state, she was punished for
116 Internationalism in Practice

this perceived transgression. Jones’ biographer, Carole Boyce Davies,

once wrote that “For Claudia all writing was directed at revelation” and
her speech on that day was intended to carry out that purpose.1
Firstly, she showed how the crime for which she was being indicted
was viewed as a danger precisely because she and her comrades had laid
bare the root cause of many problems in American life—capitalism. In
signposting the effects of working-class poverty, Jones alluded to the
growing momentum of CPUSA campaigns that had been directly fo-
cused on remedying poverty, across racial lines, in America. For exam-
ple, at its core, the case of the Scottsboro Boys, which attracted Jones
initially to CPUSA organizing, had been a labor issue. The young Black
boys traveling for work had been falsely accused of rape by women be-
ing transported on the same train. This fate was all too common for
Black men of the era and the case of Willie McGee reflected this fact too.
McGee had been executed in May of 1951. Invoking the poverty from
which she too had been shaped, Claudia Jones alluded that even she
could have faced a similar fate had she remained a factory worker, and
in these cases—the only crime was the crime of being poor and Black.
She had seen as much in the jail she was kept in while she awaited trial:

Just as now, there flashes in my mind’s eye these young Negro women I have
seen at the Women’s House of Detention, almost children, of whom, but
for my early discovery of Marxism-Leninism, I might have had to say now,
“There might I have been.”

In a cruel twist of fate, however, for Claudia Jones—all roads led to

Rome—and she too was imprisoned, although under different circum-
stances. This highlighted how any deviance from the norms prescribed
to African Americans by society ultimately led to incarceration, or
death. The philosophy of Marxism-Leninism was, for many attracted
to the CPUSA at the time, an uplifting force for those impoverished
by the capitalist system. Yet, as a woman, and a Black woman specifi-
cally, her autonomy came into question. The title of her speech called
out the sweeping accusation that was often levied against Black Com-
munists and agitators throughout the 20th Century: that they had no
mind of their own and instead were at the whims of foreign influences,
in this case the Soviets. In the very same year, Eslanda Robeson would
be asked by the House Un-American Activities Committee whether she
1 Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Commu-
nist Claudia Jones (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 109.
 Conclusions 117

had written her own book “all by herself.”2 Jones highlighted, there-
fore, that Black women were in fact capable of far more than they were
credited for. In fact, to confront the reality that Black women, who had
been dehumanized for centuries, might actually be people who were
cognizant and willing to fight for their rights, was troubling to accept
for some. Instead, it was easier to blame foreign manipulation for the
‘sudden’ struggle against the status quo. Alongside women like Louise
Thompson Patterson and Audley Moore, Claudia Jones had rallied
behind a myriad of progressive causes throughout the 1930s up until
1953. As a collective, these Black women had been at the forefront of a
multitude of protests and had shown, time and again, that they were ad-
ept at organizing their communities towards progressive action. More-
over, these women were organizing coalitions internationally. Less than
a decade prior, the American military had dropped two nuclear bombs
on Japan. For Claudia Jones this exemplified the mounting cruelty
towards non-white people at the hands of American aggressors. This
is why Jones highlighted the importance of anti-fascist allegiances of
women across the globe, all of whom saw the futures of their children
and families threatened ongoing wars. She stressed how relatable these
concerns were, by pointing to the fact the prosecution would not even
repeat her rousing speeches for fear of convincing the audience of her
legitimate perspective.
Ultimately, Jones was the canary in the coal mine—highlighting how
she had been criminalized for being a radically politically engaged Black
woman. In a fascist state, her existence, and the allowance of her activ-
ism, would set a dangerous precedent. Her case was mirrored by those
of Paul Robeson3 and W. E .B. Du Bois, the latter actually indicted and
tried in 1951 for being the agent of an unnamed foreign power—pre-
sumably the then Soviet Union—because of his anti-nuclear and peace
advocacy.4 While Robeson was hounded for similar reasons including
his passionate opposition to Jim Crow. This same contradiction would
be borne out through the Black Power era as the trial of Angela Da-
vis would echo the same repression levied against Black Communists
2 Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul
Robeson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 224.
3 Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary, London: Pluto,
2016.
4 Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American
Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963, Albany: State University of New York Press,
1986.
118 Internationalism in Practice

during the 1950s. Claudia Jones, in her speech in 1953, was sounding
the alarm.
 Conclusions 119

The Great Anti-Imperialist

Revolutionary Cause of Asian,
African, and Latin American Peoples
is Invincible1
October 8, 1968

Kim Il Sung2

The Treatise Published on the Occasion of the First Anni-

versary of the Death of Che Guevara in Battle in the Eighth
Issue of Tricontinental, the Theoretical Organ of the Or-
ganization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and
Latin America

I
t is nearly a year now since Comrade Ernesto Che Guevara, an indom-
itable revolutionary soldier and a true internationalist fighter coming

1 Ed. Note: Published in Kim Il Sung, Selected Works (Vol. 23) (Pyongyang:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang, 1985), pp. 15 - 29.
2 Ed. Note: While Kim Il Sung’s article, composed after Claudia Jones’s
passing and primarily commemorating the 1st anniversary of Che Guevara’s death,
doesn’t explicitly reference Jones, its arguments continue the essence of her lifelong
endeavors. The piece underscores the enduring themes of steering clear of narrow
national chauvinism and advocating for international solidarity among oppressed
communities worldwide—principles integral to Claudia’s tireless commitment. In
honoring the life of Che Guevara, another fervent internationalist and revolutionary,
the article highlights the shared belief that, as Kim states, “the liberation struggle of
the peoples has an international character,” a sentiment exemplified by both Guevara
and Jones during their lifetimes.
120 Internationalism in Practice

from the Latin American people, died a heroic death on the Bolivian
battlefield. In deep grief, and with burning hatred for the enemy, the
Korean people join the revolutionary people throughout the world in
commemorating the first anniversary of Comrade Che Guevara’s death.
Che Guevara followed the path of sacred battle to bring freedom and
liberation to the people, holding aloft the banner of the anti-imperialist,
anti-US struggle from early youth, and devoted his whole life to the rev-
olutionary cause of the oppressed.
Ever since the curtain rose on the bloody history of the modern bour-
geoisie—replacing the medieval exploitation camouflaged by religious
and political illusions with a naked, shameless, direct and cruel one and
turning the dignity of man into a mere commodity, many communists
and revolutionary fighters all over the world have shed their blood and
laid down their lives in the long course of the revolutionary tempest
which is sweeping away everything obsolete and corrupt and reorganiz-
ing the whole structure of society in a revolutionary way, crushing the
ruling circles of that former, cursed society and laying the bases of a free
and happy new society. Che Guevara dedicated his precious life to this
sacred struggle and thus became an honorable member of the ranks of
world revolutionary martyrs.
Che Guevara was an indefatigable revolutionary in battle and a true
internationalist champion completely free of narrow nationalist senti-
ments. His whole life was a fine example of the steadfast revolutionary
fighter and true internationalist.
With other Cuban revolutionaries led by Comrade Fidel Castro, Che
Guevara carried on a heroic armed struggle which contributed greatly to
crushing U.S. imperialism and the dictatorial regime of its lackey Batis-
ta, and which led to the triumph of the Cuban revolution.
Fired with revolutionary enthusiasm, Che Guevara left triumphant
Cuba in 1965 and moved the sphere of his operations, setting up a new
outpost where innumerable difficulties and harsh trials awaited him.
Everywhere he went in Latin America, he organized and mobilized
the masses in armed struggle against U.S. imperialism and its sycophants
and fought bravely in the vanguard to the end of his life.
Che Guevara’s revolutionary activities made a tremendous contri-
bution to further consolidating the triumph of the Cuban revolution
and stepping up the advancement of the Latin American revolution as
 Conclusions 121

a whole.
The Cuban revolution is the first socialist revolutionary victory in
Latin America, and it is a continuation, in Latin America, of the Great
October Revolution. With the triumph of the Cuban revolution, the
Red banner of socialism now flies high over Latin America, which was
regarded until quite recently as the hereditary estate of U.S. imperialism;
thus the socialist camp has been extended to the Western Hemisphere
and has grown much stronger. Today the Republic of Cuba, marching
firmly at the forefront of the Latin American revolution, is the beacon
of hope for the fighting people of Latin America and it casts its victori-
ous beam along the road of struggle. The triumph of the Cuban revolu-
tion shook the U.S. imperialist colonial system to its very foundations
in the Western Hemisphere and has thrown the whole of Latin America
into revolutionary turbulence, dramatically arousing the people to join
in the dedicated struggle for independence and freedom. Indeed, the tri-
umph of the Cuban revolution marked the beginning of the disintegra-
tion of the system of U.S. imperialist colonial rule in Latin America; it
sternly judged and sentenced to destruction that imperialism which had
exploited and oppressed the people in this area for so long.
Consolidation of the triumph of the Cuban revolution is not only
an important question on which the life or death, the rise or fall of the
Cuban people depend. It is also a key factor in influencing the general
development of the Latin American revolution.
Revolution begins with brilliant successes in one country but un-
dergoes a lengthy period filled with pain. Countries whose proletariat
seized power within the encirclement of international capitalism are
threatened with the danger of imperialist aggression and the restoration
of capitalism during the entire period of revolutionary transition from
capitalism to socialism. The exploiting classes which have been over-
thrown always attempt to recover their lost positions, and foreign im-
perialists continue to engage in invasion and subversive political and
ideological intrigue and maneuvers.
The U.S. imperialists and the reactionaries of Latin America deeply
hate and fear the very existence of the Republic of Cuba and are stub-
bornly and maliciously scheming to crush it. They are working hard to
destroy the Cuban revolution so that they may drive out the “specter”
of communism haunting the Western Hemisphere and check the lib-
eration struggle which is spreading like a prairie fire among the peoples
of Latin America. While scheming to strangle Cuba by directly mobi-
122 Internationalism in Practice

lizing their own armed forces, the U.S. imperialists are instigating the
reactionary dictatorial Latin American regimes under their domination
and subjugation to put political and economic pressure on Cuba and to
suffocate her with their blockade policy.
To attain the ultimate victory of the revolution, the peoples who have
gained power within the encirclement of international capital—while
reinforcing their own internal forces in every way—should be given sol-
id support by other forces of the world socialist revolution and broad
international assistance by the working class and the oppressed peoples
of all countries. In other words, successive revolutions should take place
in the majority of countries of the world, in several adjacent countries
at least, so as to replace imperialist encirclement with socialist encircle-
ment. The barriers of imperialism which surround a socialist country
should be torn down so that the dictatorship of the proletariat can be-
come a worldwide system; and one country’s isolation as the socialist
fortress within the encirclement should be ended with the formation
of strong ties of militant solidarity of the international working class
and the oppressed peoples of the world. Only then can it be said that all
imperialists’ armed intervention will be prevented and their attempt to
restore capitalism frustrated and that the ultimate victory of socialism
has been secured.
Just as the forces of capital are international, so the liberation strug-
gle of the peoples has an international character. The revolutionary
movements in individual countries are national movements and, at the
same time, constitute part of the world revolution. The revolutionary
struggles of the peoples in all countries support and complement each
other and join together in one current of world revolution. A victorious
revolution should assist those countries whose revolutions have not yet
triumphed, providing them with experiences and examples and should
render active political, economic, and military support to the liberation
struggle of the peoples of the world. The peoples in countries which
have not yet won their revolutions should fight more actively to defend
the successful revolutions of other countries against the imperialist poli-
cy of strangulation and hasten victory for their own revolutions. This is
the law of the development of the world revolutionary movement and
the fine tradition already formed in the course of the people’s liberation
struggle.
The Cuban revolution is an organic part of the world revolution and,
in particular, constitutes the decisive link in the chain of Latin Ameri-
 Conclusions 123

can revolution. To defend the Cuban revolution and to consolidate and

follow up its victories is not only the duty of the Cuban people but also
the internationalist duty of the oppressed peoples of Latin America and
all the revolutionary people of the world. In the same way that the de-
fense of the gains of the October Revolution in Russia—which made
the first breach in the world capitalist system—was an important ques-
tion decisive of the fate of world revolutionary development, so, too,
the defense of the gains of the Cuban revolution—which made the first
breach in the colonial system of U.S. imperialism in Latin America—is
crucial to the fate of the Latin American revolution.
It is of great importance to the defense of the Cuban revolution that
the revolutionary movement in neighboring Latin American countries
should advance. If the flames of revolution flare up fiercely in many
countries of Latin America where U.S. imperialism sets foot, its force
will be dispersed, its energy sapped, and the attempts of the U.S. im-
perialists and their lackeys to strangle Cuba by concentrated force will
inevitably fail. Furthermore, if the revolution triumphs in other Latin
American countries, Cuba will be saved from the imperialism which
hems her in on all sides, a favorable phase in the Cuban and Latin Amer-
ican revolutions will be opened, and the world revolution will be even
further advanced.
For a revolution to take place, the subjective and objective conditions
must be created. Each country’s revolution should be carried out to suit
its specific conditions in which the objective revolutionary situation is
created. However, this by no means signifies that the revolution can de-
velop or ripen by itself. It is always the case that the revolution can be
advanced and brought to maturity only through hard struggle by revo-
lutionaries. If, because revolution is difficult, we just wait for a favorable
situation to come about and fail to play an active part, then revolution-
ary forces cannot be developed.
Revolutionary forces cannot rise up spontaneously without a strug-
gle; they can be fostered and strengthened only through an arduous
struggle. Without preparing for the decisive hour of the revolution, pre-
serving revolutionary forces from enemy suppression while constantly
storing them up and building them through positive struggle, it will be
impossible to succeed in the revolution even when the objective situa-
tion has been created. To turn away from revolution on the pretext of
avoiding sacrifice is in fact tantamount to forcing the people to accept
lifelong slavery to capital and to tolerate cruel exploitation and oppres-
124 Internationalism in Practice

sion, unbearable maltreatment and humiliation, enormous suffering

and victimization for ever. It can be said that the acute pain experienced
at a revolutionary turning point is always much easier to endure than
the chronic pain caused by the cancer of the old society. Social revolu-
tion cannot be achieved as easily as going down a royal road in broad
daylight or as smoothly as a boat sailing before the wind. There may be
rough and thorny problems, twists and turns, along the path of revo-
lution, and there may be temporary setbacks and partial sacrifices. To
flinch before difficulties and hesitate in the revolution for fear of sacri-
fice is not the attitude befitting a revolutionary.
It is the task of revolutionaries of every country to define a scientific,
careful method of struggle on the basis of a correct assessment of the
internal and external situation and a proper calculation of the balance
of forces between friends and enemies; they must store and build up
the revolutionary forces by cultivating the nucleus and awakening the
masses through the trials of revolution, carrying on an active struggle,
yet circumventing the snags and avoiding unnecessary sacrifices at ordi-
nary times. And it is their task to make complete preparations to meet
the great revolutionary event.
Once the revolutionary situation is created, they must seize the op-
portunity without hesitation and rise up in a decisive battle to shatter
the reactionary regime.
The forms and methods of revolutionary struggle are also determined
not by the wishes of individuals, but always by the prevailing subjective
and objective situation created and the resistance of the reactionary rul-
ing classes. Revolutionaries should be prepared for all forms of struggle;
and they should effectively advance the revolutionary movement by
properly combining the various forms and methods of that struggle—
political, economic, violent, nonviolent, legal and illegal.
Counter-revolutionary violence is indispensable to the rule of all ex-
ploiting classes. Human history to date knows no instance of a ruling
class submissively turning over its supremacy, nor any instance of a reac-
tionary class meekly waiving its power without resorting to counter-rev-
olutionary violence. The imperialists, in particular, cling ever more des-
perately to violent means of maintaining control as they approach their
doom. While suppressing the peoples of their own countries, they bru-
tally suppress all the revolutionary advances of the oppressed nations
by mobilizing their military forces in order to invade and plunder other
countries.
 Conclusions 125

Under such conditions the liberation struggle of the oppressed peo-

ples cannot emerge victorious without using revolutionary violence to
crush foreign imperialists and overthrow the reactionary dictatorial ma-
chinery of their own exploiting classes which work hand in glove with
imperialism. It is imperative to meet violence with violence and crush
counter-revolutionary armed forces with revolutionary armed forces.
The revolutionary fires now raging furiously in Latin America are the
natural outcome of the revolutionary situation created in this area.
The overwhelming majority of Latin American countries have come
under the complete domination and bondage of U.S. imperialism.
Pro-US dictatorships have been established in many Latin American
countries and their economy has been completely turned into an ap-
pendage to U.S. monopolies. The U.S. imperialists’ policy of aggression
and plunder in Latin America is the major impediment to social prog-
ress in this area and has plunged the people into unbearable hardship
and distress. The U.S. imperialists and the pro-U.S. dictatorships in Lat-
in America set up extensive repressive agencies, including the army and
police, and suppress all forms of revolutionary advance by the people in
the most brutal way.
It is obvious that unless the ragged, hungry, oppressed, and humili-
ated people in Latin America bravely take up arms to fight against their
oppressors, they cannot attain freedom and liberation.
It is quite justifiable and admirable that under the banner of proletar-
ian internationalism, under the banner of an anti-imperialist, anti-US
struggle, Che Guevara, together with other Latin American revolution-
aries, took up arms and carried out an active, heroic revolutionary strug-
gle in various Latin American countries in the teeth of sacrifices in order
to defend the Cuban revolution and hasten the day of liberation for the
oppressed peoples in that area. The revolutionary people of the whole
world express profound sympathy with the brave act of Che Guevara
who waged a heroic armed struggle in company with other Latin Amer-
ican revolutionaries. The brilliant example of Che Guevara is a paragon
not only for the Latin American people in their revolutionary struggle,
but for the Asian and African peoples who are also fighting for libera-
tion. It inspires them to great feats of heroism.
Che Guevara is not with us now. But the blood he shed will never
be wasted. His name and the immortal revolutionary exploits he per-
formed will go down for ever in the history of the liberation of man-
126 Internationalism in Practice

kind, and his noble revolutionary spirit will live for ever.
Thousands, tens of thousands, of Che Guevaras will appear on the
decisive battle grounds of the revolutionary struggle in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America, and the revolutionary cause which he left uncompleted
will surely be won by the struggle of the Latin American revolutionaries
and revolutionary peoples the world over.
Today Asia, Africa, and Latin America have become the most deter-
mined anti-imperialist front. Imperialism has met with the strong re-
sistance of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples and has suf-
fered the heaviest blows from them. Nevertheless, imperialism is trying
desperately to recover its former footing and to regain its lost positions
in those areas.
The cause of liberation of Asians, Africans and Latin Americans has
not yet been realized. So long as imperialism exists anywhere in the
world and oppresses and plunders them, the people cannot stop their
anti-imperialist struggle for even a moment. The struggle must continue
until all shades of colonialism are wiped off the face of the earth once
and for all, until all the oppressed and humiliated nations establish their
independent states and achieve social progress and national prosperity.
Imperialism will never relinquish its domination over colonial and
dependent countries without being kicked out. It is the nature of impe-
rialism to commit aggression and plunder. Imperialism which was not
aggressive would no longer be imperialism. It will not alter its aggressive
nature before it dies. That is why one must dispel all illusions about im-
perialism and determine to fight it to the end. Only when a principled
stand is maintained against it and a staunch anti-imperialist struggle is
intensified can the oppressed nations win freedom and independence;
only then can the liberated peoples check imperialist aggression, consol-
idate national independence, and achieve prosperity for their countries
and nations.
U.S. imperialism is the most barbarous and heinous imperialism of
modern times; it is the ringleader of world imperialism. It is not only the
Asian or the Latin American or the African countries which are having
their sovereignty and territories violated by U.S. imperialism or which
are being menaced by U.S. imperialist aggression. There is no place on
earth to which U.S. imperialism has not stretched its tentacles of aggres-
sion, and wherever U.S. imperialism sets foot, blood is spilled.
The U.S. imperialists pursue their constant aim of bringing the whole
 Conclusions 127

world under their control. To realize this aim, they continue to carry
out invasion and subversive activities against the socialist and newly
independent countries and brutally suppress the liberation struggle of
the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This savage aggressive
design of U.S. imperialism must be conclusively frustrated. It is clear
that world peace cannot be safeguarded, nor can national liberation and
independence or the victory of democracy and socialism be achieved
without fighting against U.S. imperialism. The anti-U.S. struggle is the
inescapable duty and the principal revolutionary task common to all the
peoples of the world.
For the successful defeat of U.S. imperialism, it is necessary to pen-
etrate its world strategy thoroughly. U.S. imperialism’s basic strategy
for world aggression at the present stage is to destroy, one by one and
by force of arms, the small and divided revolutionary socialist countries
and the newly independent countries while refraining from worsening
its relations with the big powers and avoiding confrontation with them
as far as possible. In addition, it is to intensify its ideological and political
offensives in an attempt to subvert from within those countries which
are ideologically weak and are reluctant to make revolution and which
spread illusions about imperialism among the people and want to live
with it on good terms, noisily demanding nothing less than unprinci-
pled coexistence.
On the basis of this world strategy, the U.S. imperialists are greatly
increasing their armaments and further reinforcing their military bases
and aggressive military alliances so as to attack both the socialist and the
progressive countries. They are extensively preparing total and nuclear
war and have openly embarked on ‘local war’ and ‘special war’ in Viet-
nam and elsewhere.
At the same time, while desperately trying to bribe and manipulate
the cowards within the working-class movement who fear revolution,
the U.S. imperialists have resorted to a new form of cold war which
encourages “liberalization” and “democratic development” in certain
countries. They cry out for the “most favored nation” treatment and the
expansion of “East-West contacts and interchanges” and seek, by this
means, to infiltrate their reactionary ideology and culture, degrading
the peoples ideologically, hampering economic development and thus
subverting those countries from within. The imperialists are carrying
out sabotage and subversion to prise the newly independent states away
from the anti-imperialist front one at a time. While resorting to overt
128 Internationalism in Practice

force, they use ‘aid’ as a bait to penetrate these countries and meddle in
their internal affairs. The U.S. imperialists whip together Right-wing re-
actionaries and pit them against progressive forces, and seek to influence
certain newly independent countries to follow the road of counter-rev-
olution.
In other words, wielding an olive branch in one hand and arrows in
the other, the U.S. imperialists are plotting to swallow up the revolu-
tionary countries one by one through armed aggression and to subvert
the ideologically weak countries through ideological and cultural ag-
gression, combining nuclear blackmail with “peaceful penetration” and
repression with appeasement and deception.
The people of the whole world should maintain the sharpest vigilance
against such intrigues and stratagems by U.S. imperialism and should
be fully prepared to counter the enemy’s aggression in whatever forms
it might appear.
In order to develop the anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. struggle vigorously,
it is important to cement as firmly as possible the militant unity of all
areas, countries, parties, people—to cement all the forces which oppose
imperialism.
The revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American
peoples are closely linked on the basis of common desires and aspira-
tions. When Latin America groans under the imperialist yoke, the Asian
and African peoples cannot live in peace; and when U.S. imperialism
collapses in the Asian and African areas, a favorable phase will also be
created for the national-liberation movement of the Latin American
people. The militant unity and close ties of the Asian, African and Lat-
in American peoples will multiply the anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. revo-
lutionary forces several times, tens of times, and become an invincible
force which can successfully frustrate imperialist aggression and the
united front of international reaction. Therefore, wherever U.S. impe-
rialism is entrenched, the peoples should pool their strength and strike
hard at it.
In Asia, Africa, and Latin America there are socialist and neutral, large
and small countries. All these countries except the imperialists’ puppet
regimes and satellite states constitute anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. forces.
Despite the differences of socio-political systems, political views and re-
ligious beliefs, the peoples of these countries, because they are oppressed
and exploited by the imperialists and colonialists, oppose imperialism
 Conclusions 129

and old and new colonialism and jointly aspire towards national inde-
pendence and national prosperity. The differences in socio-political sys-
tems, political views or religious beliefs cannot be an obstacle to joint
action against U.S. imperialism.
All countries should form an anti-imperialist united front and take
anti-U.S. joint action to crush the common enemy and attain the com-
mon goal.
It is true that there may be different categories of people amongst
those who oppose imperialism. Some may actively oppose imperialism,
others may hesitate in the anti-imperialist struggle, and still others may
join the struggle reluctantly under pressure from their own people and
the peoples of the world. But whatever their motives, it is necessary to
enlist all these forces except the henchmen of imperialism in the com-
bined anti-U.S. struggle. If more forces—however inconsistent and un-
steady—are drawn into the anti-U.S. joint struggle to isolate U.S. im-
perialism to the greatest possible extent and unite in attacking it, that
will be a positive achievement. Those who avoid the anti-imperialist
struggle should be induced to join it and those who are passive should
be encouraged to become active. To split the anti-U.S. united front or
reject anti-U.S. joint action will only lead to the serious consequence of
weakening the anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. struggle.
To defeat U.S. imperialism, all countries, both large and small, should
fight against it. It is particularly important here that small countries
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America relinquish flunkeyism, that is, the
tendency to rely on big powers, and take an active part in the anti-U.S.
struggle. It is wrong to think that U.S. imperialism cannot be beaten un-
less large countries fight it. It would certainly be better if large countries
would join small countries to fight U.S. imperialism.
That is why small countries should endeavor to unite with large coun-
tries. But, this by no means signifies that only such a country can com-
bat and defeat U.S. imperialism. It is clear that a small nation will not be
able to make revolution if it depends on large countries and sits by doing
nothing; other peoples cannot and will not make the revolution for it.
Even a small country can defeat a powerful enemy once it establishes
Juche, unites the masses of the people and fights valiantly, regardless of
the sacrifice. This is a very simple truth of our times which has been
borne out by experience. The experience of the Korean war demonstrat-
ed this truth. And the triumph of the Cuban revolution and the Viet-
namese people’s heroic war of resistance against U.S. imperialism and
130 Internationalism in Practice

for national salvation have eloquently endorsed it.

Moreover, when many countries, however small, pool their strength
to fight imperialism, the peoples will overwhelm the enemy by superior
forces however strong he may be. The peoples of the countries mak-
ing revolution should combine their efforts to tear the left and the right
arms from U.S. imperialism, then the left and the right legs and, finally,
behead it everywhere it raises its ugly head of aggression. The U.S. im-
perialists are bluffing now. But when the revolutionary people of the
world join in dismembering them, they will totter and finally crash into
oblivion. We small nations must unite and counter U.S. imperialism’s
strategy of swallowing us up one by one, by each one of us chopping off
its head and limbs. This is the strategy small countries must employ to
defeat U.S. imperialism.
For more than 20 years, the Korean people have fought against the
occupation of south Korea by the U.S. imperialists and for the reuni-
fication of the country. The Korean revolution is part of the interna-
tional revolutionary movement, and the revolutionary struggle of the
Korean people is developing within the joint struggle of the peoples of
the whole world for peace and democracy, for national independence
and socialism. The Korean people are fighting to realize their cause of
national liberation and, at the same time, are doing everything in their
power to accelerate the advancement of the international revolutionary
movement as a whole. Our people unite with all forces opposing U.S.
imperialism and consistently support the peoples everywhere in their
struggle against U.S. imperialism. We consider this an important factor
in bringing victory to the Korean revolution.
Imperialism is a moribund force whose days are numbered, whereas
the peoples’ liberation struggle is a new force which aims for the prog-
ress of mankind. There may be innumerable difficulties and obstacles
and twists and turns along the path of this liberation struggle.
But it is the inevitable law of historical development that imperialism
is doomed and the liberation struggle of the peoples is certain of victo-
ry. The U.S.-led imperialists are desperately trying to check the surging
liberation struggle of the peoples, and theirs is nothing but the deathbed
tremor of those condemned to destruction.
The more frenetically the U.S. imperialists act, the more difficult their
position becomes. U.S. imperialism is going downhill. Its sun is setting,
never to rise again. The U.S. imperialists will undoubtedly be forced out
 Conclusions 131

of Asia, Africa, and Latin America by the peoples’ liberation struggle.

The great anti-imperialist revolutionary cause of the Asian, African, and
Latin American peoples is invincible.

k
132 Internationalism in Practice

CONTRIBUTORS
k

Betsy Yoon is an assistant professor at Baruch College and a member

of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development. She has been to
North Korea four times.

Denise Lynn is a Professor, the Interim Chair of History, and the Di-
rector of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern In-
diana. And she is an editor of the American Communist History Journal.

Gerald Horne holds the Moores Professorship of History and Af-

rican American Studies at the University of Houston. His research has
addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, poli-
tics, civil rights, international relations and war.

Tionne Parris is a Ph.D. student at the University of Hertfordshire,

specializing in African American history, specifically the Black Power
Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
 Farewell to Claudia 133

Farewell to Claudia

Nearer and nearer drew this day, dear comrade,

When I from you must sadly part,
Day after day, a dark foreboding sorrow,
Crept through my anxious heart.
No more to see you striding down the pathway,
No more to see your smiling eyes and radiant face.
No more to hear your gay and pealing laughter,
No more encircled by your love, in this sad place.
How I will miss you, words will fail to utter,
I am alone, my thoughts unshared, these weary days.
I feel bereft and empty, on this gray and dreary morning,
Facing my lonely future, hemmed in by prison ways.
Sometimes I feel you’ve never been in Alderson,
So full of life, so detached from here you seem.
So proud of walk, of talk, of work, of being,
Your presence here is like a fading fevered dream.
Yet as the sun shines now, through fog and darkness,
I feel a sudden joy that you are gone,
That once again you walk the streets of Harlem,
That today for you at least is Freedom’s dawn.
I will be strong in our common faith, dear comrade,
I will be self-sufficient, to our ideals firm and true,
I will be strong to keep my mind and soul outside a prison,
Encouraged and inspired by ever loving memories of you.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1955)