Harry Haywood's Black Internationalist Thought

• In Event: Black radical politics, spirituality and environment

Description for Program

Harry Haywood is best known as a member of the African Blood Brotherhood and later, the CPUSA, as the architect of the latter's Black Belt Nation Thesis, and as the author of the pathbreaking autobiography Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Despite his immense contributions to Marxist thought generally, and radical Black thought particularly, there are few studies that take Haywood seriously as a political thinker and theorist of Black internationalism. This paper seeks to fill that gap through a focus on his writings on the Black Belt Thesis, Black self-determination, and the instrumental role of Black liberation in the broader proletarian revolution. Haywood's "anti-revisionist" insistence that the CP take seriously Black self-determination dovetailed with his analysis of the US South as the bastion of superexploitation, US imperialism as the basis of Black "national oppression," and global capitalism as the foundation of workers immiseration. His theoretical, autobiographical, and political writings provide tremendous insight into the Black internationalist implications the struggle of African descendants in the Unite States against capitalist domination rooted in racial hierarchy--and the entwinement of Black immiseration, global war, and colonial-impeiralism.

Author

• Charisse Burden-Stelly, Wayne State University