Herbert Aptheker – Anthony G. Flood

The “point” of what, exactly? What “matters”? The groundless ethical imperative of Marxist revolutionaries.

The autograph of the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophen haben bisher nur die Welt anders interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern”

Marx and Engels’s oft-cited 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, penned in 1844 but not published until 1888, is perhaps the closest thing we have to words that function as holy scripture for communists: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”[1] Changing the world is allegedly what “matters,” but it’s dogmatically assumed, never argued for. It’s as de fide, as much a matter of faith, as, for example, the Immaculate Conception is for Catholics, and just as ungrounded in Scripture.

The aim of this series is to expose Marxism as an instance of the “foolishness of the wisdom of this world” (1 Corinthians 1:20) from the Bible’s standpoint. No Marxist as such has warrant for pontificating that “the point” is to change the world. The point of what? What can be “the point” in an ultimately pointless world, as distinct from the world in which God works all things according to the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11)?

My focal points, as you know by now, are C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, and Herbert Aptheker, men who understandably (only because they lived in God’s world and were created in His image) raged against the indignities of racial subjugation, colonialism, and imperialism that they experienced, witnessed, or studied. (That’s an inclusive “or,” by the way.) For several decades of their lives, they believed that they found in Marxism the conceptual tools they needed for addressing those evils.

Their biographies make for stimulating reading, but how does Marxist revolution answer the moral outrage of interracial subjugation, cruelty, and savagery, especially since we know that it has only added to the history of moral outrage? How can Marxist theory articulate any ethical complaint without borrowing from the Christian worldview they thought was beneath their notice? Continue reading “The “point” of what, exactly? What “matters”? The groundless ethical imperative of Marxist revolutionaries.”

“They will kill you”: Stalinists and the implicit threat of violence. Four retrospections.

This continues the study I began here and here.

This, to me, was a spectacle of glory; and yet, because it had condemned me, because it was blind and ignorant, I felt that it was a spectacle of horror. The blindness of their [Communists’] limited lives—lives truncated and impoverished by the oppression they had suffered long before they had ever heard of Communism—made them think that I was with their enemies. American life had so corrupted their consciousness that they were unable to recognize their friends when they saw them. I knew that if they had held state power, I should have been declared guilty of treason and my execution would have followed.—Richard Wright, 1944[1]

Forty-seven years later, another Stalinist uttered those three words:

Had that leadership [of the Communist Party] held state power, past history suggests that those signers [of “An Initiative to Unite and Renew the Party”] would now be dead.—Herbert Aptheker, 1991[2]

About a year after Wright arrived in New York, an anti-Stalinist revolutionary was also New York-bound from England, but a Stalinist graciously but firmly warned him:

There was a black man who had joined the CP [Communist Party of Great Britain]. He said to me that you could do that in Britain and keep breaking up their meetings, but in America, if you carry on like that, they will kill you. As far as the police were concerned, if a Stalinist killed a Trotskyist, they would have no part of that, so just take it easy. The difference between British democracy and democracy in the United States is that there you have to be aware, not of the government, but of the Stalinists.—C. L. R. James, circa 1938.[3]

In 1978, on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in Manhattan’s financial district, where I would listen to Gabe Monheim expound the Scriptures and soon come to Christ, an older Stalinist I had known a few years earlier—his face contorted in hatred and words dripping in bile—volubly branded me a “counterrevolutionary traitor.” I have no doubt that had “tough Tony from Da Bronx” taken the bait, he would have met the fate that James’s Stalinist acquaintance predicted.

Notes

[1] Richard Wright, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1944, 54; italics mine. This was the second part of a two-part series that became a chapter of The God That Failed, Richard Crossman, ed., Columbia University Press, 2001; originally, The God That Failed: A Confession, Harper & Brothers, 1949.

[2] Herbert Aptheker, December 14, 1991, cited in Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 2015, 335; italics mine. For an account of that “initiative” and its denouement, see Jaiveer Kohli, “The Last American Communists: The Story of the Fall of the Communist Party USA,” The Journalist as Historian, May 22, 2019.

[3] Interview of C. L. R. James by Al Richardson, Clarence Chrysostom, and Anna Grimshaw in South London, June 8 and November 16, 1986; italics mine.

Three years before that interview, that is, in 1983, James received an honorary degree from Hull University. At the podium is Baron Wilberforce, a great-great-grandson of abolitionist William Wilberforce. For the background, go to https://www.africansinyorkshireproject.com/clr-james.html

Whence “revolutionary” moral outrage? An attempt at a biblical answer.

That’s the question underlying my current project. Answering it might explain why I was drawn to revolutionary Marxism (of interest at least to me, if not to you). Youngsters can be at once hypercritical and credulous. Revolutionary rejecters of the existing order, they fall for one or another “explanation” hook, line, and sinker.

Rummaging through the lives of Marxist intellectuals is no mere romantic, antiquarian interest of mine (although it is partly that). I will draw upon but not add to the biographies already written. I’m trying to understand, to the extent it is intelligible, the demonic madness we see on college campuses, draped in the language of moral outrage. (“F— finals! Free Palestine!,” announced one savage disrupting Columbia University students who were trying to use the main library to prepare for final exams, to cite only one example. I find the categories of intelligibility in Christian theology, specifically anthropology.

Created in God’s image and living in His world as (we all are), the miscreants have a sense of moral outrage (however misinformed), but they have nothing in which to ground it. On Monday, they’ll affirm that it’s wrong to starve children; on Tuesday, that an unborn child’s natural protector has the right to procure the services of an abortionist to destroy that child chemically, or cut him or her to pieces, or leave him or her to expire on a metal table. Most of them, if pressed, will say that, strictly speaking, we don’t know that we have more moral dignity than that of “evolved,” i.e., rearranged, pond scum. They merely dogmatize that we do.

I’m stepping back from the news and noise of the day to reflect on more civilized specimens of humanity, however much their careers betrayed the civilizing impulse. I want to explore why they thought Marxist revolution adequately addressed the moral outrage of interracial subjugation, cruelty, and savagery, evils that energized them? That it was such an answer is the conclusion at which my three very different intellectuals arrived. It all starts with outrage at one or another fact in one man’s experience: colonialism, imperialism, slavery, peonage, Jim Crow.

I will also ask whether these men, if they were alive today, would embrace today’s savages. I fear they would have, as counterintuitive as such a conclusion might strike some. Continue reading “Whence “revolutionary” moral outrage? An attempt at a biblical answer.”

Richard Wright: Herbert Aptheker’s Other (Almost) Invisible Man

Richard Wright (1908-1960), Lido, Venice, 1950. (Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images)

The subject line is the working title of a projected study of three fascinating writers and their interactions. I will undertake this as an exercise not only in historical exposition but also in Christian apologetics.

That is, as an epistemologically self-conscious Christian individualist living in the dispensation of the grace of God in anticipation of His inauguration of the Manifest Kingdom of God, I will explore the intellectual and personal trajectories of three radical intellectuals—Herbert Aptheker (1915–2003), C. L. R. James (1901–1989), and Richard Wright (1908–1960)—whose materialist epistemologies rendered their political projects not only impossible of realization, but also absurd. Christians can nevertheless learn from them, if only indirectly.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

United by secularism and engagement with black history, they were collectivists philosophically, but individualists in how they lived their lives. But their individualism was not enough to save them. They all failed to discern the true dividing line of their times and ours: not the “color line” that W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) predicted would define the 20^th century, but rather the line in the sand drawn by the God-breathed Scriptures (Matthew 4:4).

Their rejection of the latter marks a common, tragic undercurrent. I will examine their shared but divergent paths, focusing on their anti-Christian secularism, Marxist commitments (Stalinism, Trotskyism, non-Communist revolutionary thought), and struggles with racism, ironically and tragically, they could not interpret soundly, let alone condemn, apart from the worldview they rejected. Their second-rate epigones among our contemporaries are no less intellectually bankrupt, but their frank embrace of the horrors to which their plans lead enhances the relevance of this study, which is of more than antiquarian interest.

Continue reading “Richard Wright: Herbert Aptheker’s Other (Almost) Invisible Man”

A page-turner (or screen-swiper) on an endlessly fascinating subject

This review of James Heartfield, Unpatriotic History of the Second World War, London, Zer0 Books, 2012, a socialist’s deep dive into the real history of the Second World War appeared on Amazon today.—A.G.F

As an editor and bibliophile, I agree with the many critics of this book’s infelicities (typos, organizational issues, lack of index, and so forth). Nevertheless, I thank God James Heartfield wrote it, that he spilled his cornucopia of insights out of his head and onto paper. Let some publisher step forward to polish its contents so it passes conventional muster. Until then, however, students of this endlessly fascinating subject should benefit from the author’s vast knowledge of how things hung together eighty and ninety years ago—I say this even though the underlying worldview is not mine.

At odd moments, I’d pull out my phone on which this book’s Kindle version resides and say, “Okay, I have ten minutes.” An hour later, I’d see that I couldn’t stick to that budget but had continued swiping left, page after page.

The author of other meaty historical tomes (for example, Britain’s Empires: A History, 1600–2020, 2022; The Blood-Stained Poppy: A critique of the politics of commemoration, 2019; and The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 2016—to cite a few), Heartfield gives off no whiff of the Olympian stuffiness of many academics, as we expect of the lecturer we find on YouTube. I recommend watching his 2016 talk on C.L.R. James and the Left’s opposition to taking sides in the Second World War and the ethical issues that opposition posed. Heartfield’s reference (on page 151) to James’s 1940 penny-pamphlet “My Friends” A Fireside Chat on the War—written under the pseudonym “Native Son” (which momentarily confused me, since in 1940 Native Son’s author, Richard Wright, was still a “The Yanks Aren’t Coming” Stalinist)—led me happily to the tattered copy available on archive.org.

United Auto Workers strikers and picketers demonstrate in front of the Ford plant in Windsor, Ontario, 1945. (AFP via Getty Images)

Capitalist pig that I am, I found myself delightfully caught up in Heartfield’s retailing of the dialectic of industrial and military labor: the strike threat versus the Nazi threat—even if opportunities to avoid global conflagration were missed. Brits at the battlefront, Heartfield notes, well understood why those on the home front might withhold their labor from their industrial employers to wrangle out of them more favorable terms. (I’m just not crazy about commandeering the property of others to prevent equally hungry workers from taking the strikers’ place. Nor about the dehumanization of the would-be replacements as “scabs,” but we can’t debate that here.)

I was trained in philosophy, but it has been the historians I’ve known, not the philosophers, who have struck me as “omniscient.” (I first got this impression when working for—don’t laugh—Herbert Aptheker. Feel free to search <Anthony Flood C. L. R. James Herbert Aptheker>.) Historians can talk seemingly non-stop about events from centuries ago as if they were current. And that’s how Heartfield’s grasp of his material strikes me.

I’m not used to socialists making me review my grasp of history, but always happy to praise those who do that. Heartfield is one of them.

When Aptheker dissed James, revisited. (No April Fool’s joke.)

On the tenth anniversary of my old (but extant) site anthonyflood.com (NB: no middle initial), I celebrated the publication of my Aptheker-James article in the C. L. R. James Journal. (It forms chapter 2 of my 2019 book, Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, a second, expanded edition of which I’m trying to finance.) Those familiar with this story may skip this “old news,” although I believe its historical “feel” sets it apart from accounts posted elsewhere on this site, as does my digression into metaphilosophy. (A search for <James Aptheker> will return all of them.) There are, of course, always those who are hearing about this for the first time. I’d be happy to hear from either class of visitors.

Marking a Decade (January 17, 2014)

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of this site, I am pleased to report the publication of my article “C. L. R. James: Herbert Aptheker’s Invisible Man,” in the Fall 2013 issue of the CLR James Journal. It arrived in the mail two days ago, and I purchased access to the online version of my essay this morning (sort of an anniversary present to myself). Hazily aware for four decades of C. L. R. James (1901-1989), author of The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the umpteenth sighting of his name in my reading material (this time it was in a piece by Dwight Macdonald) over the course of a few months in 2012 triggered an odd reverie and query. (In the late thirties and early forties Macdonald and James’s circles partly overlapped.)

Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), once one of the leading intellectuals in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), was a ground-breaking Marxist historian of American slave revolts. So why hadn’t James’s work figured into his writings (virtually all of which I had read before I was twenty)? Why hadn’t James’s name ever crossed Aptheker’s lips during our many conversations about the early years while I served as one of his research assistants in the early seventies? After some research, I concluded that Aptheker’s neglect of James was deliberate. Continue reading “When Aptheker dissed James, revisited. (No April Fool’s joke.)”

Every Wind of Doctrine: A Former Captive of Philosophy and Vain Deceit Remembers

Yesterday, I thought out loud about this question; bit by bit, I’ll begin to answer it: How did an Irish-Italian Catholic kid from the Bronx break with the world of Marvel comics in the 1960s, discover philosophy, come under the influence of a notable communist, and a few years later follow an obscure dispensationalist Bible teacher and then a leading anarcho-capitalist theoretician—all while studying guitar theory under a jazz giant, working as Folk City’s doorman and later for a world-class architect?

A day later, I can think of at least a dozen major influences that I mercifully omitted from that already intolerably overlong sentence.

Sixty years ago, I could not ask, let alone answer, such a question for the simple reason that I was unself-conscious. It’s hard to recall what unself-consciousness felt like because memory tends to impose mature, reflective categories onto what we selectively remember. Yet, I must make the effort. There is a transition from directly experiencing what we enjoy to reflecting on how we might shape our lives and the world around us.

I had a notion that there were struggles, but also that they were all “settled” by authority—parental, ecclesiastical, social, or governmental. That made my world full of interest but, more importantly, safe. Dangers existed, but they were manageable. Unmanageable dangers belonged to movies and comic books.

That romantic sense of safety was hard to maintain after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, followed within five years (from my 10^th to my 15th year) by the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. It was bewildering for a pre-teen and teenager to live through. And what I found confusing or unsettling, I put out of my mind. The world as mediated by movies and television was my norm. I vaguely sensed that reality could be different, but I couldn’t work up enough interest to pursue the idea. My unself-consciousness was a blissful state, one I subconsciously knew better than to disturb. It rarely, if ever, occurred to me that one day I would have to make my way in a world beyond the television or movie screen. Continue reading “Every Wind of Doctrine: A Former Captive of Philosophy and Vain Deceit Remembers”

A letter from Herbert Aptheker

Yesterday a letter, dated October 1, 1992 (see a jpg and annotated transcription below), fell out of my diary for that year. In it, Herbert Aptheker, my former comrade and “boss,” said he “was delighted to hear” from me—17 years after I left the Communist Party, nine years after I had become a decidedly anti-Communist Rothbardian libertarian—and “should be delighted” to do so again. I hope my diaries will dissolve the “mystery” of my apparent “outreach.” He thought the Committees of Correspondence “will interest” me. He cites three of his books, underscoring their titles. This perfectly composed hand-written note is from a 77-year-old recovering from a stroke he had suffered exactly six months earlier.

Continue reading “A letter from Herbert Aptheker”

Otis Q. Sellers, the Scottboro Boys, and me

undefined — The “Boys” with their attorney, Samuel Liebowitz, and Alabama State Militia Guard, 1932.

Ninety-three years ago today, nine Black teenagers, “hoboing” on a freight train between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, were attacked by a mob of white youths who strongly disapproved of their presence on “a white man’s train.” Thrown off it by their intended victims, the hooligans falsely reported to police in Paint Rock, Alabama, that the teenagers has attacked them. After a search of the train, the police rounded up not only the Black youths but also two white women who then falsely accused them of rape. The prosecution of “The Scottsboro Boys,” the first international cause célèbre of the American Civil Rights Movement, afforded an opportunity for the Communist Party to leave its mark, the first of many, on that movement. This complex historical episode eventually became the subject of academic study, and one of the first scholars to study it was my friend and fellow Aptheker research assistant, Hugh Murray. [1]

Jane, Otis, and Mildred Sellers, probably late 1930s

On that very day, March 25, 1931, Otis Q. Sellers turned 30. He was not yet the grey eminence I knew in the 197os, but the young man finally out of his twenties and on his way to becoming the Bible teacher from whom I learned much. About his life and thought I’ve been blogging into existence, for the past six years, a 96,000-word manuscript. (I’m raising funds to publish it as a book, I hope this year.) Two years into the Great Depression, Sellers was in the middle of his stint (1928-1932) as pastor of Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky, which he left (to shorten a long story brutally) “to do my own studies.” On his milestone birthday, what was transpiring 400 miles south of him was on the mind of few Americans, and his wasn’t one of them. That would soon change.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers, the Scottboro Boys, and me”

Besides race, what did Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King have in common? Hugh Murray on the relationship between civil rights activists and Communists.

New Orleans Woolworth’s sit-in, September 9, 1960: Jerome Smith, Ruth Despenza, Joyce Taylor, Hugh Murray, Archie Allen, William Harrell

My friend Hugh Murray (b. 1938), a native New Orleanian, is a veteran of the African American civil rights movement (CRM), a critic of its betrayal by “affirmative action” (its latest incarnation being “diversity, equity, and inclusion”), and scholar of the 1931 trial of the Scottsboro Boys, the first international American civil rights cause célèbre. Our paths first crossed over a half-century ago in the reading room of the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS) on East 30^th Street in Manhattan. Its director, Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), hired us (and others) as research assistants for the massive project of preparing for publication the correspondence, bibliography, and published writings of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963). For the past few years, Hugh and I have been preparing an anthology of Hugh’s writings for publication later this year, Deo volente.

On his blog, Murray recently explored the tension between the noble, justice-seeking motives of the CRM and the ignoble motives of the Communist movement to which some CRM activists were attracted to one degree or another. (For the CRM one could substitute the labor movement.) It’s a tension I’d rather ignore. It’s easier to concentrate on the horrors of Communism uncomplicated by the fact that many Communists were drawn to it to fight the horrors of lynching and other violence. It was easy for me to call them dupes (among whom I was once numbered) and leave it at that.

Continue reading “Besides race, what did Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King have in common? Hugh Murray on the relationship between civil rights activists and Communists.”