Joseph McCarthy, by United Press - Library of Congress, Public Domain
Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the FBI tweets out something stupid about the Civil Rights hero’s legacy. This year was no different. And every year, leftists attempt to recapture his radical teachings and legacy from the counter-revolutionaries who would reduce the man to one line from one speech, divorced from all context. It’s a necessary, if somewhat depressing, intellectual battle to fight. The best way to celebrate the day, other than organizing, is to listen to King’s Beyond Vietnam speech, delivered at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights in upper Manhattan. Every year, Democracy Now! (“democracy now dot org, the war and peace report, I’m Amy Goodman”) [force of habit — JK] replays the speech, and it’s as powerful now as it was in 1967.
One of the great revolutionaries of the early 20th century who appreciated the degree to which radicals would be de-fanged and co-opted in death was Vladimir Lenin. He opens The State and Revolution (1917) with a brief passage on exactly this dynamic (h/t to Greg Grandin for the reminder).
“What is now happening to Marx’s doctrine has occurred time after time in history to the doctrine of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for liberation. The oppressing classes have constantly persecuted the great revolutionaries in their lifetime, reacted to their teachings with the most savage malice, the wildest hatred, and the most shameless campaigns of lies and slander. Attempts made after their death to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to speak, and to confer a certain prestige on their names so as to ‘console’ the oppressed classes by emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”
King was not a communist, though the FBI desperately sought to uncover or manufacture ties between King and Communist Party. He did, however, do and say plenty of things that support a reading of him as a socialist, or at the very least someone profoundly opposed to what we now call racial capitalism.
Lenin, and I hope you’re sitting down for this, was very much a communist. You don’t often read about his influence on Black liberation struggles in the United States, partly because even among Southern communists his influence was limited, but more-so because praising any aspect of communist theory or practice is still one of the great taboos in US political life.
There’s a fascinating scene from Robin D.G. Kelley’s groundbreaking Hammer and Hoe that’s particularly memorable for this very reason. The book is a history of the role the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) played in Black freedom struggles in Alabama in the 1930s and 40s.
In the preface, Kelley reflects on an interview he conducted with Lemon Johnson, a “former member of the Communist-led Share Croppers Union.” Kelley describes Johnson’s “run-down shack with battered wooden walls,” one of which had a faded picture of Martin Luther King tacked to it.
“[Johnson] told stories about the 1935 cotton pickers’ strike, Stalin’s pledge to send troops to Mobile to help black sharecroppers if things got out of hand, and the night a well-armed group of women set out to avenge their comrades who had been beaten or killed during the strike. When I asked Mr. Johnson how the union succeeded in winning some of their demands, without the slightest hesitation he reached into the drawer of his nightstand and pulled out a dog-eared copy of V.I. Lenin’s What Is To Be Done and a box of shotgun shells, set both firmly on the bed next to me, and said, ‘Right thar, theory and practice. That’s how we did it. Theory and practice.’”
It’s important not to overstate the role Lenin or other non-Black, non-US communists played in the long fight against racist oppression in the United States. Those fights have always been led by Black people, and, as Kelley notes, the Bible was a more important book for southern Communist organizers than anything Marx or Lenin ever wrote.
Still, the above passage, and Kelley’s book more generally, is fascinating because it offers a historical grounding that’s absent from mainstream history. There can be a tendency for liberals to over-correct when discussing anti-communist ferver, and discount the very real interventions the CPUSA played in the South in the interwar period especially. In addition to organizing share cropper strikes, the party also worked with radical lawyers to represent Black clients and victims of white terror that more respectable organizations wouldn’t go near, most famously the Scottsboro Nine in 1931. Communists also led voter registration drives, opposed evictions and fought for tenants rights, and led some of the most important early union organizing efforts in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
The CPUSA’s numbers were always fairly modest, and it often operated underground, so even for historians like Kelley it can be difficult to discern the party’s full reach. Obviously, it was never capable of mass infiltration of the US Government or insurrection, despite Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy’s rants to the contrary.
It’s difficult now to capture how fully anti-communism animated nearly every aspect of American life throughout the early and mid-20th Century. J Edgar Hoover built his career, and the FBI, almost entirely around suppressing communists, socialists, and anarchists during the first Red Scare in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. These left wing groups and ideologies were seen as a threat not only because they were explicitly anti-capitalist, but because there were all closely associated with Black people, Jews, immigrants, and women’s liberation.
Anti-communism was prevalent in liberal institutions as well. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was the more reactionary national trade union relative to the CIO, and was adamantly anti-communist. So was the NAACP. Liberal academic and cultural elites helped build the intellectual framework of the first red scare, and liberal politicians worked alongside conservatives in the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the 1950s to demonize, harass, and prosecute real and imagined communists and radicals.
But for as much blame as liberals and moderates deserve in perpetuating anti-communism, the animating fire of the movement has always come from the right. There are two dominant historiographies of the right. One version, popularized by historian Rick Perlstein, argues the conservative movement began in earnest with the Goldwater campaign in ‘64, developed into an anti-media, anti-liberal national force with Nixon in ‘68, and found its champion in Reagan in ‘80. The other story of the right, which Perlstein wrote about in a mea-culpa of sorts, following Trump’s election, tells a different story about a more explicitly racist, ethno-nationalist right. That version finds the seeds of modern conservatism in the first iteration of the KKK during Reconstruction, and sees as its major figures crypto-fascists like Father Coughlin, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan. Whichever story of the right one tells, anti-communism, and anti-Blackness, is at the heart of it.
This brief history I think helps explain some of why the contemporary right has latched onto critical race theory (CRT) as its latest boogeyman. If you’re unfamiliar with the anti-CRT discourse, there’s two important things to know about it. One, the main propagandist against CRT is Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who who created a strawman based entirely around the term itself, not the underlying arguments. He told the New Yorker in June, 2021:
“Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’ Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.”
The other important thing to know is that CRT was a non-entity on the right until the George Floyd uprisings in June 2020. Three months later, in early September, Rufo went on Tucker Carlson to espouse the evils of CRT. You can see in the Google Trends graph below that the early peak was then superseded by a spike in June 2021, when Florida and other states began drafting and implementing laws that ban teaching CRT in schools, and again in the run-up to the Virginia gubernatorial election, where Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin made CRT a central issue. It’s also worth noting that Youngkin’s first act as governor was to sign an executive order banning the teaching of CRT that specifically references the “ills of communism.” (Blue line is searches for George Floyd protests, red is CRT)
Rufo and others have made no secret that they see CRT as closely linked with Marxism, and the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse. It’s no surprise, then, that many of the laws that ban teaching what conservatives are calling CRT — but in reality is usually just the history of racist oppression in the United States — also explicitly ban any teaching about communism, other than to demonize it.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would, in his words, force high school teachers to instruct students on the “evils of communism and totalitarian ideologies.” He also signed legislation surveying state universities, and threatened them with budget cuts if they were found to be “indoctrinating” students into a “stale ideology,” clearly referencing Marxian ideas. Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson made the subtext plain when he called the state’s public universities “socialism factories.”
In Indiana, state Republicans introduced a bill that would teach "socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are incompatible with and in conflict with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded."
In New Hampshire, Republican Alicia Lekas introduced a bill that would not only prevent teachers from teaching “that the United States was founded on racism,” but would also update “a piece of Cold War-era law that bans educators from advocating for communism in schools, and adds additional bans on advocating for socialism and Marxism,” according to NHPR.
In Nebraska, Governor Pete Ricketts published a column equating CRT to communism. “Sadly, communism isn’t something that’s just studied in history books. There’s growing awareness across our state and country that it’s reinventing itself right here at home under the label of Critical Race Theory (CRT),” the Governor wrote. “Instead of the old narrative of class warfare, CRT envisions a race-based Marxism that divides people along racial lines.”
(It’s also worth mentioning that several of the anti-CRT bills explicitly prohibit or circumscribe teaching the 1619 project, which re-frames the founding of the United States as the date that the first enslaved Africans were brought to the colonies.)
I’m not alone is drawing parallels between previous Red Scares and CRT, and I suspect that in the run-up to the 2022 midterms the anti-CRT rhetoric will spike once again. My goal here is to argue that it’s a mistake to see these battles as a side show, or what is dismissively referred to as “the culture wars.” For one thing, most “culture wars” are profoundly important liberation struggles. And when it comes to anti-CRT actions specifically, even if all these efforts were barely disguised attempts to re-inscribe racist hierarchies, that would be reason enough to oppose them with all the force the left can muster. (Set aside the liberal, NGO-consultant “anti-racist” quackery for the moment.)
The anti-CRT fights are even more broad than that though. Much as anti-communism offered a totalizing worldview that ordered domestic and foreign policy in the United States for decades, anti-CRT risks becoming something similar for the contemporary proto-fascist right in the United States. Because CRT for the right is a floating signifier that can be deployed incredibly broadly, these fights could have profound implications for social safety net spending, public education funding (obviously), immigration and refugee policy, and any number of any areas. As is often the case, when it comes to predicting the future of conservative and fascist movements, look first to what they do to the communists.