Published: August, 1971.
Source: Pamphlet printed by New Outlook Publishers, American
Transcription and Markup: 2021 by Gavin G.
Public Domain: Marxist Internet Archive 2021. This work is completely free.
Under the Nixon doctrine, U.S. imperialism not only imposed the most barbarous war in history upon the peoples of Indochina. It has simultaneously brought the most advanced capitalist country, the last stronghold of racist imperialism, to a crisis of increasing magnitude at home and on a world scale. Its military genocide in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia is increasingly reflected in social and economic genocide and repression at home. And even its allies in Europe and elsewhere are fearful lest the dollar crisis involve their own countries in even more critical inflation, unemployment and poverty.
In the U.S., a new level of struggle against the war and its consequences is emerging. An ever-widening majority is turning against the Nixon attempt to “solve” the crisis at the expense of the people. Working people, including rank-and-file trade unionists, together with Black, Puerto Rican and masses, Vietnam veterans, women, students and others are moving into action.
Now, more than ever, the working class—Black, Brown and white—needs a guiding ideology that will enable it to transform the diverse struggles against war, poverty and racism into unity against the enemy. The enemy is trying to prevent such unity with its three-sided weapon of anti-Communism, racism and repression—all of which have been brought into play in the frameup of Angela Davis.
There is a revealing continuity in motive and timing behind the frameup of Angela Davis and the assassinations of Malcom X and Martin Luther King.
Malcolm X was murdered by the racist establishment, using a police agent to penetrate his personal bodyguard at the very moment he was turning away from separatism, against capitalism, and toward united mass struggle.
Dr. King was gunned down when he began to identify imperialism as the source of racism, poverty and war, and was translating this deeper understanding into an opposition of new dimensions to poverty and racist oppression at home, and the related imperialist aggression in Vietnam. He was linking these movements with the Black workers’ struggle to organize, and was pressing for the unity of workers of all colors as the essential force for meaningful change and liberation.
When Angela Davis affirmed her membership in the Communist Party, her UCLA teaching post was taken away from her. When the brilliant young Black professor continued to intensify her social and activity outside the classroom, the plot to murder her in the gas chamber was initiated. The racist ruling class could not tolerate the meaning, the inspiration, to the nation’s exploited and oppressed, of Angela’s membership in the Party based on the liberating principles of Marxism-Leninism. Angela Davis was right when she said, “They have taken my job. Now they want to take my life.” By dedicating herself not only to explaining the world but to changing it, Angela Davis won the love of millions—and the hatred of the ruling class.
Today, the need to build a mass movement to free Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, the Berrigan Brothers and Arnold Johnson—Catholic and Communist peace leaders, the Soledad Brothers, Ruchell Magee and all political prisoners is a vital starting point for speeding the formation of a great, popular movement to turn back the forces aiming to push the country into fascism. (This was written prior to the dismissal of charges against Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins in New Haven on May 25, 1971.)
It is within this context that many of those involved in the struggle have expressed their concern with Eldridge Cleaver’s attack on Angela Davis and the Communist Party.
Of equal concern is the fact that some leading figures in the Black Panther party have broken organizationally with Cleaver but have not yet made the break with his philosophy, which does such harm to the Black Panther Party and to the fight for Black liberation and against poverty and war.
Some leading Black Panthers are now jeopardizing the fight against racism and the defense of prisoners by combining their public attacks on Cleaver with invention of “new” arguments and rationalizations for anti-Communism.
Ironically, those in the movement who promote anti-Communism are picking up the traditional weapon of their racist imperialist oppressors. And when anti-Communism is encouraged by individuals who consider themselves militant fighters against imperialism, it becomes an even more disruptive weapon than when directly wielded by the ruling class and its mass media. No one can fight racism with anti-Communism. To fight racism, one must oppose and expose anti-Communism. There is no other way to liberation—in this country or any part of the world.
That the influence of Cleaver’s anti-Communist, anti-Soviet ideology extends to many leading figures in the Black Panther Party, as well as others on the Left, is particularly evident in much of the current discussion about the meaning of the San Rafael incident.
Too much of this discussion reflects Cleaver’s views—which unfortunately are “part of the problem” rather than “part of the solution.” Cleaver—echoed by some others—insists that the movement must “focus” on San Rafael as an exemplary “act of revolutionary violence.” “Only through actions,” he asserts, “can we take our freedom and liberation.”
Under cover of such “super-revolutionary” rhetoric, Cleaver in fact calls for the abandonment of struggle in the courts and the development of mass defense movements. He becomes an advocate of capitulation, of hopeless surrender to the government and the courts that are trampling upon the rights and lives of the political prisoners and of all the people.
Elitist, adventurist, anarchist tactics—individual terrorist actions of “revolutionary” suicide—cannot free political prisoners or advance the cause of liberation. Such tactics, or any form of accommodation to them—no matter who advances them—regrettably mesh with government provocations aimed at disorganizing the mass movement, which is the only basis for freeing political prisoners and achieving liberation.
Nixon and Reagan are also doing everything in their power to “focus” on such acts as the San Rafael incident. They have framed Angela, falsely linking her to this tragedy to divert the “focus” from their own responsibility for the conditions that create acts of desperation. At the same time, in framing Angela the racist ruling class seeks to falsely identify violence with the Left in order to camouflage the ruling class itself as the real source of violence.
Those who plot the fate of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for Angela Davis, Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins do so in order to take the country further along the road to fascism than in the McCarthyite era.
Those who are sincerely concerned for the lives of Angela, Bobby and Ericka must reject every form of accommodation to Cleaver’s anarchist advocacy of San Rafaels. Far from helping to win freedom, such views could open the door to the gas chamber and the electric chair for Nixon’s political prisoners.
There are also some of the Left who “differ” with the view that San Rafaels and other forms of “picking up the gun” are the only valid methods of struggle. Instead, these individuals advocate what they term “tactical differences”—in reality a perversion of the concept of flexibility into an open-ended invitation to sheer adventurism.
Those who play with adventurist concepts have learned nothing from the experience of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers’ rhetoric, focusing on “power coming out of the barrel of a gun,” helps only the ruling class. Calling for confrontations with the police supplants mass against the enemy, who controls the economy, the government and the police.
The Black Panther Party became a focal point for FBI Provocateurs and an easy target for nationwide frameups and genocidal attacks not because of the courage and militancy of its young members (although they possess these qualities in abundance), but because the party’s anti-Marxist, adventurist policies isolated it from the people and made it vulnerable to attack. Even more important, these policies helped make the total struggle against poverty, racism and war more vulnerable to enemy attack.
Further, the assaults on the Panthers resulted in the tragic loss of some of the movement’s best young fighters. The people cannot afford the sacrifice of Black youth like Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton, and Jonathan Jackson. This is another vital reason why the struggle for liberation must be guided not by emotion but by the science of Marxism-Leninism.
But those who advocate “tactical diversity” refuse to recognize these facts. Instead, they maintain that “tactical diversity” should include San Rafaels and other forms of “picking up the gun” provided that these tactics are not the “primary” or “sole” form of struggle, but are clearly with the mass movement. “The final significance of Jonathan’s revolt,” in the words of one who advocates this view, “was its clear connection with the mass movement—certainly a revolutionary act.”
While these words may seem to have a bold new ring, in reality they represent a revival of pre-Marxist variants of anarchism rejected by Marx, Engels and Lenin. For example, in 1902, 19-year-old Stephan Balmashov, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party—which considered Lenin and his Party too conservative—assassinated Dmitri Sipyagin, the Tsar’s Minister of Interior. The Socialist Revolutionaries immediately issued a leaflet supporting Balmashov’s act—which sounds as if it could have been written by one of those who advocate more San Rafaels. Lenin took a major part of two issues (Nos. 23, 24) of Iskra, a revolutionary journal, to answer the views expressed in this leaflet.
“The first thing that strikes the eye,” he wrote, “is the words, ’we advocate terrorism, not in place of work among the masses, but precisely for and simultaneously with that work.’ ” If this view were accepted, he continued, “all that history has taught will fall to the ground.” He said further:
. . . the Socialist-Revolutionaries are talking themselves blue in the face in asseverating that they recognize terrorism only in conjunction with work among the masses, and that therefore the arguments used by the Russian Social-Democrats to refute the efficacy of this of struggle (and which have indeed been refuted for a long time to come) do not apply to them. We are not repeating the terrorists’ mistakes and are not diverting attention from work among the masses, the Socialist-Revolutionaries assure us, and at the same time enthusiastically recommend to the Party acts such as Balmashov’s assassination of Sipyagin, although everyone knows and sees perfectly well that this act was in no way connected with the masses and, moreover, could not have been by reason of the very way in which it was carried out—that the who this terrorist act neither counted on nor hoped for any definite action or support on the part of the masses. In their naivete, the Socialist-Revolutionaries do not realize that their predilection for terrorism is causally most intimately linked with the fact that, from the very outset, they have always kept, and still keep, aloof from the working-class movement, without even attempting to become a party of the revolutionary class which is waging its class struggle. (Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1961-1970, Vol. 6, p. 189.)
There is an irreconcilable contradiction between isolated terrorist acts and mass struggle.
Today, in the context of our country, the San Rafael events must be seen as an act resulting from frustration. Jonathan Jackson “neither counted on nor hoped” to relate his act to the mass movement. In fact, Jonathan’s vastly courageous act must be considered in this light. Jonathan, along with Ruchell Magee, James McClain and William Christmas, took this path in the desperate and mistaken hope of finding a shortcut to expose conditions which prevail in the prison system. That system also unjustly and illegally holds Jonathan’s brother. At 17, Jonathan did not yet realize that in the battle for class and national liberation there are no shortcuts, no substitutes for militant class struggle.
That is why Jonathan Jackson’s action was one of futile self-sacrifice. The act that resulted in his tragic loss to the movement, and in the frameup of Angela Davis and her removal from the scene as a dedicated leader of the mass struggle, simultaneously jeopardized Jonathan’s aim—to dramatize the cause of freedom for his brother George and for all political prisoners.
The brutality of the racist ruling class is boundless. It is not enough for this class—with its institutions of exploitation, oppression and repression—to drive the Jonathan Jacksons into self-defeating acts of desperation. Its strategy also calls for a form of double jeopardy—exploiting the desperate acts themselves in order to defeat the mass struggle.
Those who fail to see through this strategy of the ruling class, and instead indulge in “super-revolutionary” rhetoric, obstruct rather than build the movement to free Angela Davis and all political prisoners.
This movement is an integral part of the struggle for an alternative for millions of Jonathan Jacksons caught between the dead-end pressures of rat and drug-infested ghettos and unemployment, or forced service in a racist war. These millions want an alternative to genocide in all its forms, and toward this end, white allies have a special responsibility.
Although the rhetoric of some would lead one to think otherwise, their role is to provide a cheering section for genocide in the form of “revolutionary” suicide. Their role is to join in building the united mass movement to end racism. They cannot meet this responsibility without rejecting all forms of “super-revolutionism,” which results in accommodation to, rather than struggle against, racism.
Some people create inapplicable analogies between the past and present, to the deeds of Nat Turner or of John Brown and his Black comrades-in-arms. They advance the mistaken view that San Rafael is an example of a revolutionary act today.
However, no analogy can mechanically be made between San Rafael and any previous event in the history of the Black liberation struggle in the U.S. In the fight for correct tactics, it is essential to understand that analogies often limp and are certainly inadequate unless accompanied by concrete analysis of each situation within its historic context.
Let us consider the context within which such events as the Turner Rebellion and John Brown’s Raid occurred.
The American War of Independence, which Lenin hailed as “one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars,” embodied a victorious bourgeois-democratic revolution. However, its historic task was not completed. Instead, it ended with the grafting of an historically outmoded system of slavery onto emerging capitalism. Hence there remained as a prime necessity the task of completing the revolution by putting an end to chattel slavery. The accelerating succession of slave revolts, which began before the Revolutionary War and continued after independence, was a vital component of the inevitable struggle to achieve this goal.
The heroic actions led by Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and countless others dramatized the slaves’ unceasing will to struggle for freedom. They also reflected the objective character of the slave system, which made it impossible for the slaves to mount a coordinated offensive for liberation, since the character of the production process and the form of exploitation made impossible communication and unity of action slaves on different plantations.
From top to bottom, every facet of the slave system was geared to suppress the unending resistance of the slaves. This resistance took on many forms, including slowdowns and runaway slaves as everyday occurrences. The Under-gound Railway for escaping slaves developed as a unique form of resistance and solidarity between slaves and non-slaves, Black and white.
More and more frequently, resistance culminated in slave revolts, the highest form that struggle could take within the separated slave camps known as plantations. Because the marriage between capitalism and slavery enabled the slave-owners to manipulate the federal government, the ruling class was able to confront the slaves with overwhelming power. Thanks to this, together with the intrinsic nature of the slave system, the slave revolts were inevitably fragmented and limited to isolated outbursts of resistance.
Yet these struggles were not diversions but were part of the central historical process of the times. Their accumulating impact profoundly accelerated the economic, political and social forces of that historical process—inside and outside the South—leading to the “irrepressible conflict.”
By contrast, in the North wider possibilities for struggle by former slaves and emerging working-class forces existed, and at the time, the slave resistance was stimulated and accelerated by the wider developments outside the slave area. For example, Turner’s Rebellion came four years after the appearance of Freedom’s Journal in New York, the first Black newspaper; two years after Walker’s Appeal, written by David Walker, a free Black man in New York; and only a few months after the meeting in Philadelphia of the first National Negro Convention.
Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 signalled the opening of the era of abolitionist struggle, while John Brown’s Raid at Harper’s Ferry in 1859—according to Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois—marked the beginning of the Civil War. Between these two events, the effectiveness of both Black and white abolitionist forces in influencing the course of history was increasingly determined by their ability to relate to the wider political developments, that is, by their exertion of their independent influence on the struggle between the rising capitalist system and the declining slave system, for the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
By the start of the decade before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass, only twelve years after his escape from slavery, had become the outstanding abolitionist leader in the country. He had emerged into this pre-eminent role because of his deep understanding of the need to combine every anti-slavery current with the centrality of the wider struggle—the forging of a political realignment to break the power of the slavocracy over the federal government. Douglass saw this as the precondition for the destruction of slavery.
That Douglass’ overriding goal was to bring about the greatest political realignment as a prerequisite for meeting the armed aggression being prepared by the slave power—and that this accounted for his decision not to join John Brown at Harper’s Ferry—has been confirmed by Dr. DuBois:
Why did Douglass not join John Brown? . . . He knew, as only a Negro slave can know, the tremendous might and organization of the slave power. . . . Only national force could dislodge national slavery . . . (John Brown, International Publishers, New York, 1962, p. 344.)
Yet, Douglass did not fail to note the connection between the Raid on Harpers Ferry and the wider struggle. He said in 1882: “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did, at least, begin the war that ended slavery. . . . When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared, the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union, and the clash of arms was at hand.” (Speech at Storey College, Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.)
Thus, Douglass came to view the Harper’s Ferry Raid, occuring as it did within the slave territory, as consistent with the slave revolts that preceded it. The action of John Brown and Shields Green—an escaped slave—and their comrades was, in fact, the climax to the long pattern of slave revolts. Harper’s Ferry made its impact, then, against the background of Douglass’ wider strategy, which culminated in national resistance to the slave power.
Today some radicals point to Douglass’ support of the slave revolts and the many abolitionist struggles that led to confrontations in the North, while ignoring his overall strategy and overlooking the wide mass character of the non-electoral which influenced the developing political realignment. In this way they attempt to justify actions that, within today’s context, divert from, rather than reinforce, mass struggle.
During the fight against the Fugitive Slave Law, for instance, there were many struggles that developed into direct mass confrontations to rescue fugitive slaves picked up by federal marshals in the North. Douglass, of course, supported these actions!
Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law—widely recognized as an extension of aggression by the slave power—generated the broadest resistance and unity between Black and white of the abolitionist era.
Struggles to prevent kidnapping of escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law were not undertaken by elite “vanguard” groups substituting for the masses. Thus, these struggles did not divert from but spearheaded, broadened and accelerated the work of the abolitionist forces, aimed at achieving a political realignment to take the federal government out of the hands of the slavocracy.
Some of today’s radicals not only the fact that these struggles took place within a fast emerging revolutionary situation. They also ignore the mass character of these rescue actions: anti-manhunt and vigilance committees had sprung up in every area of the North, involving the broadest strata of the population, and representing the peak of unity and influence of the abolitionist movement.
In Boston in 1854, for instance, the struggle to rescue a slave, Anthony Burns, from federal marshals has been described as without parallel in that city since the days of the Revolutionary War. Men from all over the state, including a large number of Blacks, poured into Boston to stop the slave-hunters. There was a great mass meeting in Faneuil Hall, from which the rescue operation was launched, organized by Wendell Phillips, Thomas Wentworth and Robert Morris, Boston’s outstanding Black attorney. Over 50,000 participated in a street demonstration, during which the Commonwealth Building displayed flags draped in black and flown at half mast.
Such mass resistance to the slave power continued to the point where South Carolina in 1860, just two months after Lincoln’s election, withdrew from the Union. In initiating secession, South Carolina asserted that the non-slaveholding states had permitted “agitation” which had “been steadily increasing until it has now secured to its aid the of the common government.” (John Daniels, In Freedom’s Place, The New York Times and Arno Press, New York, 1969, p. 66.)
If the “common government” headed by Lincoln did not fully reflect the aspirations of the most advanced abolitionist forces, it nevertheless vindicated Douglass’ strategy by putting “national force” against the slave power.
An example of the effect of Douglass’ strategy in the pre-Civil War period, his insistence that the abolitionists exert their independent influence in every possible way on the broader political alignments, can be seen in the following resolution passed by a group of Blacks in Boston in 1856:
Resolved, That while we regard the Republican party as the people’s party, the resolve in the Republican platform endorsing the Kansas free State Constitution, which prohibits colored men from going into that territory, and the determination of the Republican press to ignore the colored man’s interest in the party, plainly shows us that it is not an anti-slavery party; and while we are willing to unite with them to resist the aggression of the Slave Power, we do not pledge ourselves to go further with the Republicans than the Republicans will go with us. (Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the Unifed States, Citadel Press, New York, 1951, p. 383.)
It is clear that the mass confrontations throughout the North during the period of revolutionary realignment leading to the Civil War have nothing in common with the adventurist tactics encouraged by some radicals today. Such tactics are not related to and do not express the mass movement. They disrupt the struggle to advance the central strategy of our times—the formation of a political realignment to break the power of corporate monopoly over the federal government.
In fact, those who glorify the tactics of confrontation and individual acts of heroism are generally indifferent to or opposed to the wider political struggle for a realignment based on the working class, Black and white, together with the Black liberation movement. That is why they resist the total meaning of Frederick Douglass’ role, and draw distorted conclusions from the revolutionary struggles of the abolitionist era.
Douglass was at the very center of the struggle against every tendency—whether sectarian and anti-electoral or Rightist—that would have diverted from the strategy for a political realignment to challenge the slave power. His steadfast drive to relate every struggle to this strategic aim even brought him into temporary conflict with his own son, Lewis Douglass, who briefly supported the idea of emigration.
The way in which Douglass’ views on emigration are described in a book published in 1969 by New York Times and Arno Press offers an interesting example of how the ruling class media are currently falsifying his role in order to make him seem “too conservative” for today’s radicals:
Frederick Douglass, who by 1850 was the most prominent Negro leader on American soil, noted the upsurge of feeling on emigration, but had nothing better to offer in countering it than the traditional protests which had been voiced for twenty years. (Howard Holman Bell, A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830-1861, p. 100.)
The writer then goes on to describe Douglass as among the “more conservative” leaders of the period.
It therefore comes as no surprise that the Communists guided by Marxism-Leninism, seek to apply the heritage of Douglass to the struggle to abolish wage slavery and national oppression—are also portrayed as “too conservative” by the “radical” specialists for the mass media.
To the capitalist media, the “real revolutionaries” are those who accommodate to imperialism by advocating Pan-Africanism and Black capitalism, or (as an equal diversion) by calling for elitist actions instead of mass struggle.
In today’s context, many forms of mass struggle will develop in the fight for the revolutionary transfer of power—the highest form of class struggle—from the capitalist class to the working class, Black, Brown and white. According to specific historical conditions, the transfer may take the form of either armed or unarmed struggle.
So far as the role of armed insurrection is concerned, Lenin never conceived of it as aiming at anything less than the immediate goal of winning state power. He rejected armed insurrection in the form of an isolated act at a lower phase of the class struggle, when a revolutionary situation did not exist. He saw armed insurrection as valid only within certain revolutionary situations—that is, when the ruling class resorts to violence to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to the majority led by the working class.
Those who talk about “revolutionary” acts in the U.S. today have failed to assess the differences between the revolutionary situation that existed in this country in the middle of the 19th century and the present historical period, the non-revolutionary situation we are in today.
In this connection, for example, Engels, in his introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, compared the differences in that country between the conditions of 1895 and those of 1848:
. . . History has . . . completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. The mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete in every respect . . .
The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for, body and soul. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work that we are now pursuing. (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1969, Vol. I, pp. 190, 199-200.)
Applying Marxist-Leninist principles to the specific conditions in our country, the Program of the Communist Party states:
Revolution, as our Declaration of Independence affirms, is the ultimate and most fundamental of democratic rights. It is also the most democratic of historical acts because it involves the most fundamental choice by the people itself, exercising its sovereign authority. Reactionary coups can brought off by conspiracies, but not social revolutions. Coups are manipulations at the top. Social revolution is basic transformation of society, basic change in economic, political and social relationships. More, socialist revolution represents a transition in which not a tiny minority of exploiters but the overwhelming majority—the working class and all working people—become the rulers.
So profound a transformation cannot be made by a coup or conspiracy. It can only be effected through active participation of masses of Black and white together. It can occur only when millions ordinarily indifferent to the political process, or at most passive participants in it, are brought actively into political life. In the United States, where monopoly is so strongly entrenched, where there is a highly literate population and a long-standing democratic tradition, it would require the conscious effort of millions, supported at the very least by the sympathy of a popular majority. (New Program of the Communist Party, U.S.A., New Outlook Publishers, New York, 1970, pp. 91-92.)
While the interpretation of San Rafael as a revolutionary act has been advanced by both Black and white radicals, when it is by the latter it has the added implication of white chauvinism. In doing this, they are not carrying out their special responsibility of involving white workers in the fight against racist oppression, but are instead standing on the sidelines awarding medals to dead Black heroes.
Revolutionaries certainly must honor the memory of Jonathan Jackson. But they can do this only by interpreting the meaning of San Rafael in a way that will hasten, not weaken, the fight to free his brother George. Revolutionists have a sacred obligation to distinguish between the selfless nobility of Jonathan’s motives and the objective nature of the San Rafael Courthouse events.
Only those actions are revolutionary which advance the unity and consciousness of the masses involved in the revolutionary process. The revolutionary process is never advanced by actions which fail to strengthen militant mass struggle. The final test of every action or tactic, no matter how militant its motivation, is its effect on the mass movement.
Immediately after the San Rafael incident, the Communist Party’s Political Committee declared:
The violent scene played out to its deadly end in the shadow of the San Rafael courthouse is an American tragedy which arouses profound concern and deep sorrow in all people of conscience throughout the nation.
Behind the desperate deed of the imprisoned men and their youthful would-be liberator are the goading realities of a bestial prison system, brutal police handling, and a cynical and ruthless courtroom pattern devoid of justice or any touch of humanity or concern for the dignity, lives and liberty of arrested men and women; especially so when they are Black people . . .
The Communist party has always made clear its opposition to acts of desperation or resort to gunplay on the part of individuals, no matter how awful the provocation or lofty the ideal. Communists reject the concept of revolutionary suicide or revolutionary superman-ism.
Communists always stand for the extension and enrichment of life, and commit their lives to the cause of helping the masses to struggle in a winning way for a social system devoid of such tragedies and worthy of mankind.
We are confident that Communists and all honest leaders of the people will be vigilant against reaction’s efforts to exploit the tragedy of San Rafael and to undertake diversionary assaults upon the Communist Party . . .
This statement expresses the Communist Party’s unswerving adherence to the revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninism. Those who rule this country are doing all in their power to prevent militant fighters from learning the real meaning of these principles. They know they will be unable to hold on to either their barbarous prison system or their system of class and national oppression when the Black liberation movement and all working people are led by fighters like Jonathan Jackson, who have come to maturity in mass struggle, guided and steeled by Lenin’s teachings. In this connection, the following statement by Lenin is singularly appropriate:
. . . The greatest, perhaps the only danger to the genuine revolutionary is that of exaggerated revolutionism, ignoring the limits and conditions in which revolutionary methods are appropriate and can be successfully employed. True revolutionaries have mostly come a cropper when they began to write “revolution” with a capital R, to elevate “revolution” to something almost divine, to lose their heads, to lose the ability to reflect, weigh and ascertain in the coolest and most dispassionate manner at what moment, under what circumstances and in which sphere of action you must act in a revolutionary manner, and at what moment, under what circumstances and in which sphere you must turn to reformist action, True revolutionaries will perish (not that they will be defeated from outside, but that their work will suffer internal collapse) only if they abandon their sober outlook and take it into their heads that the “great, victorious, world” revolution can and must solve all problems in a revolutionary manner under all circumstances and in all spheres of action. (Collected Works, Vol. 33, pp. 110-111.)
There is a unique affinity in the bond that existed between the young Lenin and his brother Alexander and the bond linking George Jackson and his brother Jonathan.
In 1887, when Lenin was 17 years old, his brother was brought to trial for attempted assassination of the Tsar. Jonathan Jackson “picked up the gun” for an entirely different reason—not to assassinate the judge but to dramatize the cause of his brother’s freedom and of the freedom for all political prisoners. The judge, Jonathan and Jonathan’s companions were murdered on the orders of those who are determined that neither George nor his people shall live in freedom.
While there is no resemblance between the specific acts of Jonathan and Alexander, there is similarity in the nobility of their motives. Each was driven to his desperate act by a regime that held his people in bondage.
At Alexander’s trial, which ended in the death sentence, he reaffirmed his adherence to the concept of combat by individual terror, stating, “Russian society exists in such circumstances that it is only in these combats with the government that [the people] can defend [their] rights . . . In the Russian nation you will always find ten persons who are so loyal to their ideas and so filled with the unhappiness of their country that it is no sacrifice to them to die on behalf of their cause.”
These words reflect the selfless qualities that link Alexander and Jonathan in the long history of struggle against oppression. And Lenin never ceased to love and honor his brother—just as George Jackson loves and honors Jonathan. Yet Lenin dedicated himself to refuting the political views for which his brother so tragically sacrificed his life.
Writing in 1902 of his brother and his brother’s generation, Lenin stated that “almost all of them worshipped the heroes of terror. Repudiation of this enveloping tradition came only after a struggle and was accompanied by a break with persons who at all costs wished to remain true to the ’Narodnaya Volya’ ideas of terror.”
It is our fervent hope that George Jackson, unjustly imprisoned these many years, and himself a courageous symbol of indomitable will to freedom of his triply oppressed people, will take under consideration the lessons out by Lenin. In doing so he can fulfill the remarkable potential he has manifested in serving the cause of liberation.
The nature of George Jackson’s experiences—his unjust conviction and the means used to keep him behind bars—dramatizes the need for a deeper understanding of the relationship between the fight for those within and outside prison walls. Defense of the victims of the prison system cannot be isolated from the wider struggles of the oppressed and exploited.
A challenge to the inhuman, racist character of the prison system is necessary; such a Challenge cannot be dismissed as “reformist” or “liberal.” But it would be equally wrong to go to the other extreme and view this challenge as the primary feature of the struggle against racist, capitalist rule. It is the wider mass against racist and class oppression that is primary, and only through this wider struggle can there hope of achieving a noticeable impact on the prison system. Only mass struggles to advance the interests of all working people can offer an alternative to the conditions that result in imprisonment for so many of the poor and oppressed.
George Jackson’s experiences vividly illustrate the relationship between the laws, the courts and the prisons, and the total operation of the monopoly capitalist state.
What amounts to a life sentence has been imposed on Jackson by prison authorities, whose illegal power originates outside the prison, in the indeterminate sentence law unconstitutionally upheld by anti-working class, racist courts. This law is a vestige of slavery, keeping prisoners in the ruling class’s jails in much the same way that perpetual debt slavery forced sharecroppers to work the land of the former slaveowners. The indeterminate sentence law sanctions George Jackson’s bondage through imposition of unlimited imprisonment.
It therefore becomes clear that the defense of victims of the prison system cannot be undertaken apart from the people’s primary struggles for peace and against poverty and Oppression. These struggles call for great popular movements on both the non-electoral and electoral fronts.
It is important to remember that at the time Angela Davis was arrested she was not only leading the mass movement to free the Soledad Brothers, but had also initiated a struggle to abolish the indeterminate sentence law. The struggle against repression and for the strengthening of democracy is inseparable from the struggle for liberation and socialism.
Those Black and white radicals who would like to see the Communist Party retreat from its Leninist on San Rafael are playing directly into the hands of those who promote racist provcation and disruption. And, harsh as it may sound, white radicals who engage in “super-revolutionary” interpretations of San Rafael are in reality expressing views ideologically influenced by some of the same chauvinist manifestations that have plagued the New Left since its inception.
These white chauvinist influences (at the heart of the decline of SDS) are glaringly expressed in the book, The Rebellion in Newark, by Tom Hayden, an SDS founder. For Hayden the lessons of the ghetto rebellion in Newark are as follows:
The conditions are slowly being created for an American form of guerrilla warfare based on the slums. The riot represents a signal of this change. . . . The role of organized violence is now being carefully considered. During a riot, for instance, a conscious guerrilla can participate in pulling police away from the path of the people engaged in attacking stores. He can create disorder in the new areas the police think secure. He can carry the torch, if not all the people, to white neighbourhoods and downtown business districts. If necessary, he can successfully shoot to kill. . . . He can attack, in the suburbs or slums, with paint or bullets, symbols of social oppression. He can get away with it.
Hayden is oblivious to the most fundamental of Marxist principles—the responsibility of white revolutionaries to take the lead in the struggle against racism, in the winning of white workers away from the influence of racism, and for unity against the monopolists who exploit them, while doubly oppressing and exploiting Black Americans. Instead, like so many other petty-bourgeois radicals, he confuses taking the lead against racism with giving leadership to the Black liberation movement.
By presuming to provide “leadership” to Black people, Hayden demonstrates that instead of fighting racism he is greatly influenced by it. Failing to identify the white ruling class as the source of racism and as the common enemy, he conceives of the struggle against racism as one to be conducted by Blacks alone, with white workers remaining on the sidelines. And his “leadership” doesn’t end there; it simultaneously consists of urging Blacks to move along an adventurist, suicidal path.
It is unfortunate that certain white radicals—who would surely condemn the crudely obvious white chauvinism revealed in Hayden’s advocacy of this suicidal “strategy” for Black liberation fighters—fail to recognize that their own interpretation of San Rafael as a revolutionary act is also, in degree, affected by the same concepts of “strategy” permeated by the same chauvinist influences.
Such forces as Hayden and Cleaver have been isolated from the people, and most certainly from the Black liberation movement, by their advocacy of urban guerilla warfare in the U.S. To revive their declining influence, they have seized upon San Rafael as the type of action—the single heroic deed—that will inspire the masses to armed struggle.
Lenin long ago exposed the anti-Marxist, anarchist nature of such views. In one of his 1902 Iskra articles, Lenin quoted the following from a Socialist Revolutionary leaflet: “Every terrorist blow, as it were, takes away part of the strength of the autocracy and transfers all this strength to the side of the fighters for freedom.” Such a theory, Lenin said, “turns upside down, not only all past experience, but all common sense as well.” He said further: “ . . . we know from the past and see in the present that only new forms of the mass movement or the awakening of new sections of the masses to independent struggle really rouses a spirit of struggle and courage in all. (Collected Works, Vol. 6, pp. 191-193.)
As Lenin pointed out, strength cannot be transferred. It develops out of involvement in mass struggle, for which there is no substitute. Mass struggle generates greater and greater unity, strength and consciousness as the science of socialism is more and more closely linked to the struggles by the Party of the working class.
The anarchist theory of the “transference of strength” by the single heroic deed must also be challenged today for reasons stressed by Communist Party General Secretary Gus Hall:
The racist enemy works very hard to make the link between individual acts of terror and the mass movements that they try to suppress. Therefore, we should not play this game. This is the very meaning of the frameup of Angela Davis. Any concept of ’tactical diversity’ opens the doors to the work of police agents. Let us not open those doors in any way.
We Communists must have the deepest understanding, we must have the closest identity with the hopes, desires and frustrations of the thousands of young Jonathan Jacksons—victims of capitalist and racist oppression who are moving into struggle. (The Erosion of U.S. Capitalism in the 70’s, New Outlook Publishers, New York, 1971, pp. 38-39.)
We Communists can only measure up to our responsibility by bringing the science of Marxist-Leninist analysis to bear on San Rafael and all the experience of today’s struggles.
As Gus Hall has shown, the false linking of individual acts of terror and the mass movement is a key tactic of provocation by the racist enemy. Therefore the theory of the “transference of strength” through adventurist deeds serves as a weapon of reaction and counter-revolution, not of liberation and socialism.
Strength cannot be “transferred” to the working class. Strength emerges only from the unity and consciousness of the workers and all the oppressed in their struggle for a better life. As the Program of the Communist Party states:
We Communists, motivated by the elemental human needs of our class and our people, fight the evils of capitalism. Ours is the fate of our class and our people. The trials of their existence are ours. We strive for improvement of their condition here and now. Often this is a life-and-death question. At the same time, we are convinced that socialism, and beyond it communism, offers the only fundamental, lasting solution to the problems of exploitation and oppression, that it opens the only door to an immeasurable improvement in the quality of man’s life. Thus the struggle for revolution is the logical continuation of the struggle for a better life. (Op. cit., p. 88.)
The Trial of Angela Davis lasted more than three months. The pulse beat inside the court room was the same as that of tens of millions in socialist lands who have been victorious against imperialism, and the tens of millions still living under imperialist domination.
The titanic struggle for the freedom of Angela Davis was unprecedented. The air waves reverberated around the world with the news of the unanimous verdict of the jury declaring her not guilty. Simultaneously there was a spontaneous outburst of joy everywhere. Leaving the Courthouse in San Jose, Angela declared, “This is the happiest day of my life.”
The acquittal of Angela Davis was a dramatic and convincing demonstration of the power of organized masses to and defeat a racist, anti-communist conspiracy. Engineered by imperialist circles in the United States the attempt was to discredit, terrorize, and suppress the most conscious, consistent and militant leaders of the struggle in the fight against all forms of imperialist oppression.
The magnitude of this peoples’ victory can be and appreciated only when viewed against the background of the circumstances out of which the case against Angela Davis was and the array of forces that conspired to send her to the gas chamber.
The nature of the San Rafael events, and their link to Angela through her ownership of the guns brought into the and her leadership of George Jackson’s defense committee, presented reaction with a made-to-order opportunity which it exploited to the full. Every arm of government and the mass media was mobilized to whip up racist, anti-communist hysteria against Angela and to prejudge her guilt: the FBI’s highly publicized woman-hunt against the first of her sex to be placed on the ten most-wanted list; President Nixon’s TV to congratulate FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the apprehension of this political “terrorist” Governor Ronald Reagan’s and Governor Nelson Rockfeller’s unseemly haste in short-cutting all normal procedures for her extradition; the brush-off in five days by five successive courts of appeals (including the U S. Supreme Court) of the substantial constitutional arguments against extraditing her; the refusal of the California courts to transfer the trial to a county where a representative jury of Blacks and workers could be secured; and cruelest of all, the denial of bail and Angela’s 16 months of imprisonment, most of them in solitary and all of them under maximum security, that jeopardized her health and would have broken the spirit of anyone less dedicated, determined and courageous.
These facts give some indication of the odds that the fight for Angela’s freedom was up against. They were overcome only by a mass movement of unprecedented size and scope in the defense of a political prisoner. In this country it embraced the entire Black people, regardless of class, and at the same time was an outstanding example of Black-white unity that covered the political Spectrum from the Communist Party to the YWCA and the Presbyterian Church and included hundreds of leaders in the fields of organized labor, education, culture, religion, etc., especially among women and youth. Abroad the movement was on a scale surpassing the mobilization against the Reichstag fire frame-up. On the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and Australia, tens of millions marched, met and petitioned for Angela’s freedom.
An important feature of the mass movement was that it was brought into being with the speed required by the task before it. In contrast to the Sacco-Vanzetti and Rosenberg cases, where the mass movement did not arise until after the death penalty had been imposed, the mass for Angela’s freedom began to take shape immediately after her arrest and was a powerful force by the time her trial commenced.
It is sometimes difficult to pinpoint the effect of a mass defense movement upon events in the courtroom. Not so in Angela’s case. The impact of the movement upon her trial was made crystal clear by two episodes, each of which marked a turning point in the fight for her freedom.
The first occurred immediately after the decision of the Supreme Court of California outlawing the death penalty when the defense renewed the motion for bail. In reversing his earlier ruling and granting bail, the trial judge acknowledged (in an unusual display of frankness) that he had influenced by the thousands of communications he received protesting Angela’s imprisonment, Then, in a move prompted by Angela’s release, the Supreme Court Of California issued a supplementary decision stating that the invalidation of the death sentence did not change the rules relating to bail in what had previously been capital cases. This was an invitation to the prosecution to demand, and the trial judge to order, Angela reimprisoned. But after several tense days, the announcement came from Sacramento that no such demand would be made. This was no act of grace on Reagan’s part, but was compelled by fear of the worldwide reaction were Angela again to be placed behind bars.
The second episode provides an even more significant demonstration of the power of the mass movement. From the moment criminal charges were levelled against Angela, she was denounced as a Black political terrorist. Indeed, this characterization was essential for the purposes the frame-up was designed to accomplish. Accordingly, much of the evidence presented to the grand jury that indicted her, and the stories about her blazoned in the press, centered around her membership in the Communist Party and her militant speeches condemning U.S. racism and reaction. But by the time the trial opened, the prosecution was compelled to take a new tack and attempt to defuse the mass movement by camouflaging its monstrous endeavor to railroad Angela because of her color and political beliefs.
In his statement to the jury, Prosecutor Harris repeatedly pleaded that “this case is not a political frame-up, and it is not an instance of political persecution nor of racist persecution,” and “does not rest in any degree upon the nature of the political views of the defendant,” On the contrary, he urged, Angela was motivated by “a passion for George Jackson that knew no bounds, no limits, no respect for life.” Her “basic motive” he assured the jury, was “the same motive underlying hundreds of criminal cases across the United States every day—it was founded simply on passion.” Pursuant to this change of line, the prosecution abandoned presentation of any evidence of Angela’s party membership and political activities.
This abrupt about-face, forced upon it by the mass movement, hoodwinked no one. Moreover, it proved fatal to the state’s case. For Angela, in her statement and in her demeanor throughout the trial was the living refutation of the racist, male chauvinist stereotype which the prosecutor had pictured. And, toward the close of the trial, he ruefully acknowledged to the judge that his inability to prove the “crime of passion” theory on which he had been forced to stake his case would cost him a guilty verdict.
The acquittal of Angela Davis is a complete vindication of the mass line of the Communist Party. The tragedy is that George Jackson, a victim of class and racist bestiality, was murdered in prison in cold blood, shortly Angela Davis was freed by the intervention of world public opinion. This same mass movement, with new strength gained by Angela’s freedom, could have freed him as well. The results in this case refute the views of some that this is already a fascist state, or that fascism is inevitable, and denies that the U.S. bourgeois-democratic traditions and practices are a source of strength for the mass movement.
Angela’s acquittal gives the lie to the myth that it is impossible for the Communist Party to take the leadership in organizing a mass defense movement, and likewise impossible to build such a movement in defense of a Communist. For the Communist Party took the initiative and gave the leadership in building the movement that saved Angela. And it was her frank public acknowledgment of Party membership, her proud identification of herself with her Party, and her exemplary conduct as a Party and leader that helped to win her the respect and support of masses.
Finally her acquittal should set at rest the slander (circulated even in her case) that the Party is interested in the martyrdom and not the freedom of victims of ruling class injustice and that it “uses” these victims (Blacks in particular), in the guise of defending them.
Many factors went into making possible the mass movement that freed Angela Davis. There was the personality of Angela—her steadfast, militant and self-sacrificing devotion to the cause of her people and of all the poor and oppressed; her proud acknowledgement of membership in the Communist Party; her unflinching courage during the long months of imprisonment; her unyielding defense of her convictions; her dignity and pride in her Black womanhood; her charisma—all gave the lie to the frame-up and inspired and won the love of millions.
This was reinforced by the very fine work in the courtroom by her attorneys, Leo Branton, Howard Moore, Margaret Burnham and Doris Walker.
The growing strength and prestige of the socialist world made it much more difficult for U.S. imperialism to exploit anti-communism in this case, as was done so successfully in the Rosenberg, Smith Act, and other political cases of the 1950’s.
And then there was the crisis of confidence in the U.S. government. Prosecutors and the system of criminal justice have lost their credibility among the people. They have suffered the same fate that has befallen other capitalist institutions, as has been revealed by the Harris polls. This loss of credibility has manifested itself in acquittals or hung juries in a series of other recent political prosecutions, among them the Black Panther trials in New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans, the Seale Huggins and Newton trials, and the Berrigan and Soledad Brothers cases.
The foregoing factors were not only responsible for the unprecedented mass movement in Angela’s behalf but were at work in the courtroom and upon the minds of the jurors who acquitted her.
The work of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners was co-ordinated by Franklyn Alexander and Fania Davis Jordan. Its Executive Secretary was Charlene Mitchell. This committee helped to organize and guide several hundred local committees throughout the country, and helped to enlist the support of millions.
A Legal Defense Fund was established with a Board of Trustees led by Ossie Davis as Chairman, Syril Philip, Secretary-Treasurer, and Marvel Cooke as assistant Secretary-Treasurer.
The list of participants in this historic battle would fill volumes. The indefatigable efforts of Mrs. Sallye Davis, Angela’s mother, are perhaps symbolic of the great credit that must be given to the special role of Black women. Credit must also be given to the legions of men and women of all colors and varied political persuasions who helped make this victory possible.
The freedom of Angela Davis is an important development in the struggle for the freedom of all political prisoners. The lessons of that struggle have special meaning in the fight of humanity against racism and anti-Communism. That is why there was such a tumultuous outpouring of leaders and peoples in the Socialist world as Angela, accompanied by Franklyn and Kendra Alexander, two of her closest co-workers and defenders, toured their lands hailing the power of Socialism and international solidarity. That is why Angela Davis and Charlene Mitchell are now actively engaged in an all out effort to help build a massive movement to defend all victims of imperialism.