The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (2 page)

But once you start talking about (WHAT?) socialism and multinational unity, you is definitely (a la DuBois) not to be seen or heard “enty” (as Al Hibber would say) more! This has happened to me with a vengeance. It is with a strict kind of exclusion, except to damn, that these wheels and heels deal with anything I (or even my post-Village Black family) do.

But this is one of the insistent points I draw in what I say and write. Why should you expect the cirtter you are trying desperately to waste to help you do that? So that the publishing and producing and distribution of revolutionary works must be the concern of these activists themselves. To whine about how Rocky ain't helping you kill him is, at the least, a sign of extreme naiveté cuddling with neon streaks of opportunism.

The transition to socialism was inevitable in my case because, in essence and emotional concern, I had been hovering around that open stance for a long time. But the rise of Black nationalism in the sixties with Malcolm X set me to contemplating myself with another kind of misunderstanding, though there was, at base, a road laid out that I could hit when I had reached a certain level of understanding and move to an emotional and ideological clarity I had not been able to achieve before. What remains important right this minute is what this transition has wrought, not only philosophically and psychologically, but what changes it has brought to my real life.

When I first assumed chairmanship of CAP in 1972, I began by putting out the slogans of Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Ujamaa. This moved, with my readings of Nyerere and Toure, to African scientific socialism. I had begun to conceive in my head by that time that I was moving even further to the Left. Not only my obsessive reading and peeping of this and that, but the experience of working in Black bourgeois politics as part of the whole democratic struggle, gave me an up close and very negative experience with them and their petty bourgeois managers.

Part of the burning union of my marriage to Silvia had been a yearning to be completely whole. To be able to struggle with my whole heart and soul, with my whole being, for what was deepest in me, which I took, then, as Blackness. The nationalist groupings I had been part of could never even concrete a consistent ideological illumination of what that meant. Though it should mean, at its most revolutionary, the possession of national consciousness that not only arises from the blunt patriotism of
nationality but the fierce determination not to submit to evil in this racist and oppressive dungeon of Dis.

But as I hoped I laid out, coming from where I was with that tendency to extremes that Lenin characterizes as petty bourgeois and that Fanon confirms (where before I had been, in my own estimation, absorbed within an inch of my senses with the EuroAmerican aesthetic and intellectual traditions, by school, by the negrossity of my socialization, super-White), now I turned furiously around and vowed to be BLACK, I guess like DuBois's “Smoke King.” We would prove our right to exist and be respected by hating these oppressors more openly and more violently than anyone else.

Yet the struggle in Newark had shown me, along with tireless work within the Black liberation movement and all political and intellectual work that went with that, that nationalism, no matter how justified, was not justifiable. The middle passage cannot justify nationalism just as the ovens of Auschwitz cannot justify the imperialist nature of Israel.

When I was about to come straight out and declare Marxism, I talked to Amina and told her how this move would have many of the Uberschwartzes saying, “See, I told you that dude would jump back White again.” But I had passed all that mindless Blackbaiting and was ready to make the step.

This struggle within the Communist movement has been continuous and rugged. Now I was attacked often not only for the Black nationalist I had been but the Communist I would become. This was not all. The organization split, but even worse my marriage was on the verge of it as well.

Even today, Amina and I have a level of constant polemic that rises and sets like time and the beat. And it is rooted most clearly in ideological and class struggle. For we are both Communists.

Throughout CAP's history, the cultural nationalist ideology and politics of that movement had a social expression, too. Chauvinism for most men — if expressed to them as part of their psychological patois of thought and practice — can be denied hotly or jokingly, or received legitimately or falsely, whatever. But for the cultural nationalism of our organization, this male chauvinism was glorified as a form of African culture.

We had followed the Karenga doctrine, which said that women were not equal but complementary to men (which could be called sophistry), and that their role in the struggle was to “Inspire the Men, Educate the Children, and Participate in Social Development,” which is almost “Kinder, Kirche, and Kuche.” Same base as cultural nationalism in H's Deutschland.

So as we entered into the antirevisionist Communist movement, moving away from the Black cultural nationalism movement, the criticism we
received from the misguided that we had abandoned Black people for a White ideology was now matched by the Left, which not only criticized us for our cultural nationalism but staunchly tried to beat us up about our not having the correct Marxist line.

The fact that most of the these Leftists were themselves out of the box and not near correct made it a swirling, finally destructive polemic that saw that movement, aided by the Fascist Bureau of Intimidation, all but disappear! Within these organizations (and this must be finally summed up and documented) during the middle and late seventies, the entire Left press was given over more to polemics against each other than against imperialism. Plus many of us still thought that revolution would be here in a few days, based on the fierceness of our rhetoric and posturing. Though, to be sure, there were a great many staunch, serious, capable, actual revolutionaries among our crowd. But the internal contradictions were such that with the external forces (e.g., Crazed Imperialist Assassins, Operation KAOS), the young forces of that movement were thrown apart, screaming defiance at each other, off into the wherever.

Many reasons can be cited in the specific example of our own organization; my leadership, of course. All are agreed to that, even me. Also the fact that we were still mostly nationalists. Remember, it was the very struggle we were involved in that helped free up the productive forces. Black capitalism in the nineties is much more developed than in the sixties and seventies; on the real side, not a figment of Nixon's imagination. The development of capitalism is contingent upon the broadening of democracy! And these developments are not only obvious; there is a positive aspect to them as well as the deadly negative. For one thing, until a certain level of productive forces (education of the workers and level of the tools they use, &c.) is reached, through the extension of democracy (what that is under capitalism), certain struggles will not be of a mass nature. The internal class struggle, for instance, inside the national Black community is muted by the struggle against the oppressor nation, White America.

For Amina, the shattering impact of our move to socialism brought a self-awareness of this intense and formal male chauvinism disguised as African traditionalism that disfigured our movement. The more we saw the atavism and cultural nationalism as backward, so the male chauvinism, in all of its ugly disguises and pretenses, the more — she will tell you this — she felt used and made silly by the whole of our ideological trend.

I tried to transform the organization. We read Engels's
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
; we studied the woman question
together, once a week. Each morning I had the men reading and discussing the Marxist texts. On the oppression of women, the overthrow of motherright as the denouement of the first class struggle, male against female. I thought this was critical, if we were to advance in our understanding and reform both organizationally and ideologically.

But the Marxist teaching outraged many of us, some openly. The national organization flew apart, and each local did, too. The “dizzy imbecility” of dialectical and historical materialism as a “White ideology” (I'd said it myself, even in print, a bunch of times) was all around us, inside and outside. Plus we did not understand completely what we were reading. We could not yet translate the theories into real-life understanding. We were dogmatic or liberal. Book worshippers or insufficiently critical of ourselves. We were also made deeply defensive by the rounds of criticism, some accurate, some F.O.S., that kept being poured at us.

I was called an opportunist, a traitor, a disguised nationalist, a police agent, a White-minded Negro, &c. The Left, in their frenzy of sectarian dogmatism and liberal empiricism, offered us no help. But the altered environs of the intraorganizational struggle among the Lefts was new to us. Not only the incessant call of socialist revolution and the much-talked-about struggle against opportunism and war against nationalism and cultural nationalism that rang around us, but even the personal and organizational style of the Lefts was new. A few of the cultural nationalist women including my wife embraced this because as the original practice changed and women were drawn more directly into day-to-day organizing, the long African clothes became a less central part, or at least a less obsessive part, of our thinking. Particularly when we began to come into contact with the young African students, many of them Marxists who denounced traditional feudal women-oppressing Africa with all their might. The Ethiopian students were especially strident in this regard, urging CAP women to fight against the male chauvinism and African atavism they were fighting at home.

There were so many strains of Marxist-Leninist, revisionist, Trot, and social democratic trends bent in the wind around us that it would take some time for us to accurately distinguish, so we were pushed from there to there in unpredictable currents. The advocates we sent to various meetings would likewise come back perhaps influenced by this line or that line and proceed to pump them into our superstructure without a peep.

The organization did change, on the topside. I made the structural changes Marxism and its democratic centralism called for. We were heavy
on the centralist side, as cultural nationalists. So that when the struggles arose within the organization they would reflect the various lines that whipped around us with surprising turbulence. It was a turbulent time for the whole movement, for the entire anti-imperialist movement. There was a sharp lurch to the Left, but also there was a pitiless retrenchment and overturning of solid anti-imperialist values as well. (An extreme or infantile Left position always comes back around to embrace the Right, in essence.) We were headed for the time when the sabotage and undermining and murders and buyouts and internal disruption caused by our enemies would take a qualitative leap and the period when Revolution Is The Main Trend would come, at least temporarily, to a halt.

I could no longer, as the leader, be seen as invincible and all-correct. The conference in D.C., “Which Way the Black Liberation Movement?” sponsored by the Left-leaning ALSC leadership, saw our last threads of cultural nationalist cant thrashed publicly by an outright socialist line. But under scientific scrutiny it was still an incorrect old CP line that in a few months I had penetrated and easily dispatched. As for our other leading attackers, likewise, in a relatively short period of time, I had brought enough genuine analysis into our studies to point out their flaws and ideological deviations. At least it seemed and still does seem that way to me.

But the top-down nature of our organization and the genuine disorder the introduction of the socialist line had caused by challenging and attacking deeply held nationalist lines meant that for many of our advocates real understanding of what we were doing and where we were going came too late, or not at all.

Amina took the new socialist learning to be a truly liberating factor. So that with the catalyst of now having the ultimate tool against male chauvinism, she was drawn to those political lines that seemed most at variance with the old CAP teachings. When I was under all kinds of attacks from organizations and sources from Left to Right, she took my furious response to be resistance to change, and often tried to point out the correctness of the critics, even though they might, at the same time, be saying I was some kind of collaborator with the police.

I took this as a kind of betrayal, chafing at the loss of the official male domination, which had never really taken root in our house in the first place. Still, I could not accept the public criticism of our line by someone I felt should always be in my corner. For instance, I upheld the new leadership in China after Mao's death and their attacks on the ultra-Left “Gang of Four.” Amina never did, and this caused deep conflict.

The call for the Proletarian Party by forces like RWL and WVO and the so-called “Revolutionary Wing” brought us into conflicts characterized by screaming rage, since she agreed with their premises, which I thought, and still think, were infantile Leftist, and since they were also relentlessly attacking me, personally and by name.

We were all ideologically confused, but I was struggling day and night for clarity, trying to keep the organization together the best I could. This is a book in itself. Finally, Amina resigned from CAP. Though she was now a member of our reorganized central committee, along with a few other women, she declared that she could no longer uphold the “bogus” cultural nationalist line and chauvinism of CAP.

She said that not only could she not uphold our “backward male chauvinist political lines,” but that as the last days of CAP rolled toward us, she was more and more openly attacked by both the women and the men in the organization. The women, because their men had left the organization and they blamed it on Amina. Often, rather than blame the men who were runaways (which many of them soon became as well), they began to point at Amina, not as the main spearhead of the anti-male chauvinist, anti-Kawaida line, but as a splitter of marriages.