ernest kaiser racial dialectics - the aptheker-myrdal controversy

7/28/2019 Ernest Kaiser Racial Dialectics - The Aptheker-Myrdal Controversy

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Clark Atlanta University

Racial Dialectics: The Aptheker-Myrdal School ControversyAuthor(s): Ernest KaiserSource: Phylon (1940-1956), Vol. 9, No. 4 (4th Qtr., 1948), pp. 295-302Published by: Clark Atlanta UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/271955 .

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PHYLONFOURTH QUARTER VOL. IX, NO. 4

By ERNEST KAISER

RACIALDIALECTICSThe Aptheker-MyrdalSchool ControversyHE Aptheker-Myrdal school controversy is an inevitable develop-ment from what has gone on before in liberal and leftist politicsand literature. This polemicizing is gratifying to one who has writtenletters to the Daily Worker and the now defunct New Masses on the sameissues which are now being discussed. These letters were written bothbefore and after the Communist war line changed as a result of theDuclos article and the subsequent discussion. In these letters I attemptedto discuss the left's reviews and criticisms of Wright's Black Boy, thechauvinistic and stereotyped series of articles that Richard O. Boyer, aCommunist journalist, wrote on Duke Ellington for the New Yorkermagazine in 1945, and the failure up to that time of New Masses and theDaily Worker to review or deal in any way with Myrdal's An AmericanDilemma, or Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis. None of theseletters was ever published.The Myrdal School consists of J. C. St. Clair Drake, Horace R. Cayton,Richard Wright, Gunnar Myrdal and other scholars and writers bothNegro and white. They constitute the liberal school of thought on theNegro question. The current Aptheker-Myrdal school controversy isimportant for two reasons: first, it gives us an opportunity to clear up

the ideological confusion that exists on the Negro question in America;and second, it enables us to see the Negro question in perspective, tounderstand more thoroughly the egregious mistakes of the past and tocorrect and avoid these mistakes in the present and future.Let us take up some of the issues that have been broached. One neednot accept the idealistic ideology of Myrdal, Cayton and others of theschool, but we must admit that they are correct when they say thatAptheker over-simplifies the Negro question, that it is much morecomplex than he admits. There is a dilemma for American whites insofaras the Negro question is concerned. The racial attitudes of Americanwhites are a part of their psychology now. Their prejudices are deeply

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PHYLONingrained, stemming from a long anti-Negro tradition and culture. In theChicago Defender of July 12, 1946, there appeared an interview with theSoviet writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, by Thyra Edwards and Murray Gitlinafter Ehrenburg's tour of the South. In this interview Ehrenburg isquoted as saying that here in America racism is in the hearts of thepeople. And he says that racism in the hearts of the people is muchworse than having racism in the law. Here Ehrenburg is discussing thefascists unconscious in America. A little later in one of his Izvestiaarticles reprinted in Harper's (December, 1946), Ehrenburg summed upthe race question in America in these words:I am convinced that in the end racialism will be overthrown inAmerica; but it must be understood that this disease has penetrateddeeply into the mind of the average American. I did not meet a singlewhite in the South who was not contaminated with racialism. One ofthe most fervent opponents of the slave owners admitted to me in afrank and intimate conversation: "Yes, I defend the Negroes, but justthe same, for me these are not people. I was playing yesterday withour Negro maid's child and found myself thinking that I was playing,not with a child, but with a nice puppy." Racialism has infected eventhe persecuted; I met Negro anti-Semites and Jews convinced of thesuperiority of whites over blacks.In another newspaper article written while in America, Ehrenburgpointed out that Russian intellectuals before the Revolution of 1917 neverswallowed anti-Semitism even though the Russian masses fell for it.But he said that here in America the intellectuals have swallowedracism along with the American masses.Communist Party pronunciamentos and speeches have stated againand again in no uncertain terms that white chauvinism is somethingthat must be resolutely fought without and especially within the Party.But Aptheker says with finality that a psychological dilemma or whitechauvinism is no problem at all for white Americans who believe indemocracy and full rights for all people, and who presumably under-stand the Marxist view of the Negro question. However, William Z.Foster had this to say in Political Affairs (June, 1946):We must not brush aside the question of race, as we have done toooften in the past. On the contrary, we must fully evaluate the roleracial prejudice plays in the oppressionof the Negro people and showits relation to the larger, more basic political question of the nationaloppressionof the Negro people.In this connection, Oliver C. Cox's chapter on Myrdal in Caste,Class, and Race represents a distinct improvement over Aptheker'scritique of Myrdal. Cox shows that Myrdal has no clear definitions forthe sociological concepts he employs such as caste, class and race preju-dice, and that Myrdal's whole approach to the Negro problem in Americais idealistic, abstract and psychological. Cox not only gives the economic,political-class interpretation of race relations as fundamental but admits

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RACIAL DIALECTICSthat social ideologies are significant although subsidiary factors. How-ever, even Cox writes off the psychological or race prejudice factoremphasized by Myrdal as nothing but a trick or divisive tactic that canbe stepped up or minimized among poor whites and Negroes at will bythe ruling class - psychology having no appreciable autonomy of its owneven after people have been thoroughly conditioned.White chauvinism will be mitigated and finally dealt a death blowby the long and intensive class struggle in America. But some anti-Negrofeeling will be carried over into socialism just as some anti-Semitism wascarried over into socialism in the Soviet Union. This was pointed up andexplained very clearly by Robert Thompson in a speech which waspublished in Political Affairs (February, 1947). Thompson's statementson white chauvinism within and without the Communist Party should bestudied carefully by everyone interested in the Negro question. For it isincorrect to say, as Aptheker does, that the rich in America are preju-diced-drenched while the poor are virtually free of prejudice. Thepoor whites, stripped of everything and reduced to poverty, cling totheir white skins, straight hair and the anti-Negro prejudice that goeswith these as a drowning man clings to a proffered life-line. But ifMarxism has any validity, Negro and white workers are driven togetherby an oppressive capitalist system. Their common misery and oppressionforce them to stop fighting each other in a race war fomented by the richAmerican rulers and band themselves together against their commonenemy - the overlords and bosses of America. And so we find in Detroitboth gruesome, bitter race riots and Negroes and whites organized in thepowerful U. A. W. Union. So much for the psychology of whites.In considering the psychology of Negroes in his critique of Myrdal-The Negro People in America, Aptheker, while seeming to admit thatthe social environment conditions people and determines their psy-chology, denies that the Negroes' bad, ghetto social environment has hadany appreciable deleterious effect upon their psychology. Apthekerpoints to intelligence tests in which when environmental conditions wereapproximately the same, the scores of Negroes equalled and sometimessurpassed those of whites. But that is exactly the rub. The environmen-tal conditions of Negroes and whites are not the same. Hence the de-ficiencies. Aptheker also points to limited studies which show thatNegro secondary and college students have more emotional stability thancomparable white students! Thus, in addition to flying in the face of allof modern scientific psychology, Aptheker falls over backward intosocial Darwinism. For if Negroes, in their admittedly bad environment,show more emotional stability generally than whites; if there isn't aniota of truth in the Negro stereotypes; if the Negroes' basic integrityremains untouched; and if there isn't proportionally an even largerlumpen-proletariat among the Negro people than among the whites, then

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PHYLONthe Negroes' terrible living conditions really make them stronger andbetter than the whites as the social Darwinists say, and there is no pointin changing the social conditions under which Negroes live and die. AndNegro stereotypes are non-experiential abstractions that can be easilyeradicated.

However, the Negro people are not destroyed completely by industrialcapitalism and southern share-cropping as Wright (introduction toBlack Metropolis), Cayton ("The Psychological Approach to RaceRelations," Reed College Bulletin, Nov., 1946) and others think. On thecontrary, the Negro proletariat and peasantry learn how to struggle withwhites against agrarian-industrial capitalist oppression. But agrarian-ism-industrialism under capitalism takes a frightful toll of the Negropeople, and the psychological casualties are high.Aptheker describes the Negro people generally as the beautiful people- as little angels even under terrific oppression. His characterization issimilar in some respects to that in Wright's 12 Million Black Voices-a book quite different from Wright's other books. But Negroes arehuman, all too human. They are maimed by oppression both materiallyand psychologically. All of them do not run amuck, for they fall intovarious patterns of partial adjustment to segregation and suppression.They become religious, belligerent, servile or just militant. But if allwhites are psychologically sick on the race question, having been driveninto this racial sickness as the psychiatrists Erich Fromm and KarenHorney have shown, by the competitiveness, contradictions, isolation andinsecurity of American capitalist society, all Negroes are surely neuroticand frustrated no end under their double oppression as exploited workersand farmers under capitalism and as Negroes jim-crowed and segre-gated. If this is not true, then Negroes are not really human beings.They are real slaves. Of course, the other alternative is that the oppres-sion of Negroes isn't as bad as it has been described. But running likea thread through all of Aptheker's writings is the idea that the commonpeople, both Negro and white are psychologically simple. Only the upperclass and the highly educated are psychologically complex. Here areboth an idealization of the common people and a condescension to them- attitudes typical of middle-class liberals.Historically, Aptheker is also superficial and liberalistic when hestates that Negro slaves revolted merely because they were humanbeings with "developed reasoning faculties" and "the glorious urge toimprove themselves and their environment." This is un-Marxian andliberal in tone. It doesn't explain the system of slavery as a Marxistshould. The Negro slaves' fight for life was a class struggle waged bythem against their masters. The slaves were forced to struggle againstthe intolerable, inhuman conditions in which slavery kept them.Aptheker is not unique in failing to deal adequately with psychology.

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RACIAL DIALECTICSSome Negro leftist and Communist writers ignore and refuse to dealwith Negro psychology thus revealing their middle-class hangovers.W. E. B. DuBois, in his New York Herald Tribune review of Wright'sBlack Boy and in his newspaper columns and magazine articles repri-manding ill-mannered, drunken Negroes, Doxey Wilkerson in his intro-duction to Aptheker's The Negro People in America and Lloyd Brown,a Negro editor of Masses and Mainstream, in his lecture on the Negrocharacter in American Literature to Contemporary Writers are all ex-amples of this failure to deal with Negro psychology. Aptheker andthese Negro writers think that they can eschew psychology and closethe psychological gap between Negroes and whites by saying that thereis no difference and letting it go at that. But we must recognize thepsychological differences between Negroes and whites and deal withthem before we can hope to close the gap. Furthermore, the Negropeople are supposed to constitute a developing nation having, amongother characteristics, a common psychology which stems from theircommon history and culture. How can Communist writers embrace thenotion of the developing nationhood of the Negro people and yet at thesame time refuse to admit that Negro psychology is unique and differentfrom that of the whites?A Marxist cannot limit himself merely to completing and deepeningthe economic explanation of problems and issues begun by present-dayand erstwhile liberal writers such as Charles A. Beard, Leo P. Crespi,Louis Hacker, Lewis Corey and others. While this broadening of eco-nomic materialism or vulgar economic determinism is an important andnecessary task, it is not enough for a real Marxist or dialectical ma-terialist. In addition, the Marxian writer must come to grips with whatEngels called "the various elements of the superstructure" (letter to J.Block, September 21, 1890) and "proceed," as Plekhanov said, "fromeconomics to social psychology." (The Materialist Conception of His-tory). Only in this way can a problem be dealt with adequately in itscomplete configuration. This should be elementary to Marxists. ErichFromm's Escape From Freedom attempts to deal with "the role whichpsychological factors play as active forces in the social process" as well aswith "the problem of the interaction of psychological, economic, andideological factors in the social process." None of these factors can beoverlooked or ignored any longer by serious Marxists. The omission bywould-be Marxists of social psychology is even more reprehensible whenwe consider the great strides that have been made in this field bysociologists, anthropologists and psychologists who have synthesized andintegrated the findings and data of their three fields.

Over-simplification and sanguineness on the Negro question led Com-munists during the war to blame all anti-Negro riots and the like onfifth column agents in this country. The Harlem riot, a different kind of

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PHYLONriot, became, in the words of Michael Gold, a hoodlum-led Negro pro-gram against the Jewish shopkeepers of Harlem! Even liberals hadbetter understanding of the different types of riots. But Communists ledby Browder refused to face the complex and contradictory truth of thewar situation.Samuel Sillen's "Richard Wright in Retreat" piece in New Masses(Aug. 29, 1944) was erroneous and left much to be desired. Here Sillenattempted to deal with the first of two Atlantic magazine articles (Aug.-Sept., 1944) by Wright entitled --"I tried to be a Communist," an inter-view with Wright published in the New York Herald Tribune andWright's novelette - "The Man Who Lived Underground"in the anthol-ogy Cross-Section for 1944. Wright in his tortured and confused wayhad a strong point against Communists during the war when he statedthat Communists had suffered a lamentable regression on the Negroquestion. Sillen retaliated by quoting Browder's "Teheran"and accusingWright of retreating. But who was in retreat? Both were partiallycorrect. But both were also wide of the mark. Sillen should admit hiserror (which I have not seen in print) since he is still a Communist justas Aptheker has admitted that American Communist policy on the Negroquestion during the war left much to be desired and was pushed fre-quently far to excess (New Masses, July 23, 1946). Similarly, HarryPolitt, the British Communist, has admitted that his party erred duringthe imperialist phase of World War II. American Communists have yetto do this clearly although all of these questions came up during thesummer of 1945 when Browderism was being analyzed and discarded.However, I think that these mistakes were inadequately dealt with atthat time and too quickly forgotten. The far-reaching, disastrous errorsof revisionism are important if the Party is to prevent errors both duringthe present period and in the future. It must deal seriously with theseerrors and not go over them superficially and quickly push on toother things.

Aptheker says that during the war, Communists decided that it waspreferable to diminish the pressure for immediate full equality forNegroes lest this might interfere with the war effort. He then admitsthe errors and excesses (New Masses, July 23, 1946). But this is not theway the Negro problem was formulated during the war. The war writ-ings of Communists will document my thesis here to the hilt. On thecontrary, as Browder formulated it, Communists were going along withRoosevelt and the Negro-oppressing bourgeoisie because they knew thatthe American bourgeoisie, in order to win the war, would be forced toabolish jim-crow in the armed services and really liberate the Negropeople in the process of winning the war. Browder said that the Negropeople had exercised their right of self-determination and had decidedto integrate with the rest of the American people. Communist policy on

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RACIAL DIALECTICSthe Negro question was not stated in the light of expedient choice, asAptheker says, but rather as the dialectics of this special anti-fascist war!Furthermore, capitalists were becoming enlightened and would see thedemocratic light with Roosevelt - see the necessity of liberating Negroesin order to preserve capitalism and their hegemony in American society.No preference was stated at all. No one thought of Communist warpolicy as pragmatic and expedient, and Communist leaders urged partymembers to read Lenin if only for flexibility of thought. No one dis-cussed the relationship between capitalism and the exploitation andsubjugation of Negroes. All of this was conveniently forgotten by Com-munist thinkers and scholars who should have known better.

Incidentally, Aptheker's naive and schoolboyish (or is it sophistical?)insistence (both in the now defunct New Masses and in his critical book)upon Webster's bourgeois dictionary as the final authority for worddefinitions and meanings is in poor contrast to Drake and Cayton'sapproachto and caution against common sense and dictionary definitionsof words as completely definitive and accurate in the social sciences. Ofcourse, social scientists who break with Webster don't necessarily arriveat the full truth and meaning of things. However, Soviet linguists andpsychologists as well as American Marxists Margaret Schlauch and V. J.McGill have pointed out that while the problem of meaning involves apsychological factor, meaning is basically determined by the social-historical context or milieu at any given time. And since this social-historical milieu is dynamic and constantly shifting and changing to agreater or lesser degree thus making also for psychological change,it is clear that semantic and linguistic changes are occurring all the time.On the Myrdal school side, Cayton and Drake attempt an almost com-plete separation of psychology from sociology (New Masses, July 23,1946) instead of considering psychology as a part of the sociological field,which it most certainly is. The psychoanalytical articles in New Masses(Oct. 2, 9, 30- Nov. 6, 1945- Jan. 8, 22, 1946) by Drs. Joseph Wortis andJ. B. Furst plus the psychological books by Fromm and Horney aresufficient proof of this. How do people get the way they are? Is thepsychological pattern instinctual or a result of social conditioning? Thepersonality pattern is not immutable human nature at all. It is almostcompletely the complex end-product of all of the shaping social influ-ences - economic and superstructural (i.e., cultural). That is why philo-sophic materialists and sociologists are correct when they insist uponthorough social change in the long run knowing that psychologicalchange will follow inevitably in its wake. That is why Aptheker isbasically correct in emphasizing socialism as the eventual way out of thecapitalist morass and jungle of jim-crow, cruelty, cynicism and exploita-tion of workers, Negro and white. This solution to the Negro problemshould be of great interest to sociologist Cayton and anthropologist

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PHYLONDrake unless they are suffering from professional myopia and can't seethe forest for the trees.

Myrdal and his disciples may offer idealistic, moral, psychologicaltheses on the Negro question in America; and Aptheker, Wilkerson andother near-Marxists may offer socio-economic antitheses in rebuttal. Buta real Marxist or dialectical materialist who attempts to deal with theAmerican Negro question must try to see the problem in all of its ramifi-cations and complexities. He must see the whole configuration of theNegro problem in the United States- the socio-economic basis and thesuperstructural rationalizations -psychological and ideological. In aword, the real Marxist must strive to achieve a synthesis of all of thefacets and factors of the American Negro problem giving each its properimportance.This exploratory article may be considered as notes toward such anintegration.

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