The most revolutionary weapon: An interview with Nelson Peery

Above everything else, a nation is a community. They say that the community is the black people, the African-American people, but I don’t think so. They live all across the country, they lack a common religion, etc. Nothing held the African-American people together except for segregation. The minute that segregation was lifted they flew into their respective classes. Even the term “African-American” is chauvinistic. Africa is not a nation! Africa is a series of nations, and warring nations at that. Am I supposed to call you European- American? No, you’re Polish-American, and only for one generation—after that you’re American! When am I going to be American? This color question is so deep in the consciousness of Americans, black and white, that they can’t see reality. Remember that there’s no color racism before 1400 or 1500! There was a racial distinction between Slavs and Romans, etc., but no color question. It was only to justify African slavery that the color question was created.

Is there a national question? I’m convinced there is. That national question concerns the community we call the Black Belt. It’s lying dormant right now; it’s going to erupt again later. Political reaction in America has its foundation in the Black Belt. Poor whites and poor blacks have a common history there. There is a community, but it’s not only black. It’s black and white. There’s a difference in saying the question is a national question but not a color question. We tried to prove this in Negro National Colonial Question (1975). You can’t solve an objective process subjectively. Your ideas are not going to make reality; reality has to make your ideas! That’s the difference between Marxism and all the rest. Marxism says: “It’s the interaction!” Yes, your ideas impact reality, but reality creates your ideas.

Meeting of the Second National Negro Congress (NNC), Philadelphia on October 15, 1937. The backdrop banners include Lincoln, John Brown, Richard Allen and Frederick Douglass. The NNC was created in 1935 at Howard University with the goal of uniting black and white workers and intellectuals to pressure the New Deal administration for labor and civil rights. It was affiliated with the Communist Party.

ER: I would expect that, like you and me, most people living in the Black Belt today wouldn’t see themselves as members of a distinct nation. They see themselves as Americans.

NP: In fact, they’re the most patriotic section of the country! Is it a mature nation? No, of course not, but I think all the elements are there. The poorest whites and the poorest blacks in the country are in the Black Belt. Of course things change, but have they been able to solve that question? I don’t think so. The most poorly educated, sickest, and most unemployed area in the United States is still the Black Belt. Just look at the statistics. This area is oppressed as a historically- evolved community.

ER: Moving forward to the late 1950s and early 1960s, how did you assess the emerging Civil Rights Movement? Do you think this movement posed a challenge to the Communist movement and did the Communist movement meet that challenge?

NP: The freedom movement was bringing the Civil War to an end. I don’t want to underestimate the subjective factor because I was part of it: the incredible bravery and tenacity of the African-American people, against all odds, to stand up, fight, and suffer the way they did— these are admirable things. But the real motive force was the mechanization of Southern agriculture, driving the blacks off the farm and into the smaller towns, and from there into the major northern cities. This made it absolutely inevitable that blacks would finally win that freedom. Marx points out in Capital, correctly, that you can’t free serfs without replacing them with more productive equipment. The freedom movement was only the political and social expression of the economic revolution that had taken place. Don’t treat it as a subjective question, although it’s expressed subjectively. It’s an objective process!

Tactically, every thinking revolutionary understood that the battle wasn’t over whether or not you were going to support the freedom movement but rather over which wing you were going to support. Were you going to support the black petit-bourgeoisie and their backers? Or were you going to support the emergence— they didn’t get very far—of certain black working-class and lower-middle-class groupings that had a much different view from the right wing (that was supported by the government)? It was a question of how we were going to work with them and what we wanted to get out of it. You have to work with objective reality, but you have to have a program and it can’t be a subjective program. The program had to be based upon the objective, motive forces behind the freedom movement. And the freedom movement was the inevitable prelude to some unity of the American working class. I’m afraid it might come too late. The result is a black president who is probably going to bring a fascist America into being. Is that what we fought for?

Greg Gabrellas: Given this trajectory of the movement for black liberation since the middle-to-late 20th century, how have developments within so-called “black politics” prompted you to reinvestigate or reconsider the problem of race and revolution over the years?

NP: Developments have only confirmed my perspective. If it’s essentially a national question and not a race question then we can expect the development of a national bourgeoisie that is going to be co-opted by the bourgeoisie of the imperial country. This happened in Angola, Algeria, Vietnam, everywhere. Given the development in the United States it was absolutely imperative that an upper stratum of blacks be created and that they be integrated into the bourgeoisie. I wasn’t disillusioned at all by the development of a Colin Powell or a Barack Obama or of black millionaires; these have only confirmed my perspective. Are the black masses any better off than they were before? In Chicago, sixty per cent are unemployed, their brains and bodies wasted. The black bourgeoisie is much better off, but not the black working class. In fact, we’ve lost one of the most precious things we had: our dignity as being “Negro.” We stuck together and we felt responsible for one another. We’ve even lost that.

GG: Granted that the Civil Rights Movement has led us where we are today, in which a small black bourgeoisie is able to make use of the privileges hard won through struggle while leaving behind the majority of blacks in a state of social desperation, a strain of black nationalist thought nevertheless remains more or less univocal in arguing that racism remains the problem of America. How has racism changed over the decades since the Civil Rights movement?

NP: What is racism? Is it cultural? Is it political? We have to come to the conclusion that racism is a political question. Racism in America is color-based, but does this mean there isn’t any racism in Ireland, or between French groupings in France? There is! When I was a youngster, we were taught there were a number of different races. The Mediterranean race of Spanish, Italians, Greeks, and so forth was considered much inferior to the Nordic peoples. Another form of racism in America evolved out of slavery. The point is that they can manipulate this term “racism” any way they need in order to reinforce the economic situation. Right now, we’re seeing a merging of the “trailer trash” and the “ghetto” blacks and the black bourgeoisie goes right along with it. It isn’t as if the black bourgeoisie isn’t just as racist as the white bourgeoisie. What does the black bourgeoisie do for the black worker today? They get as far away from them as possible! Jesse Jackson summed it up when he said that there’s nothing more terrifying than to be approached by three black youth.

ER: In 1974 the Black Workers Congress wrote a polemic against the Communist League and the Revolutionary Union, accusing the latter of “having reached the social- fascist level of recently spreading the imperialist- racist line that the bourgeois nationalism of the oppressed nationalities is the main danger within the U.S. Communist movement today.” ((Black Workers Congress, The Struggle Against Revisionism and Opportunism: Against the Communist League and the Revolutionary Union, May-June, 1974. <https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-2/bwc-2/index.htm>)) This polemic emerged out of the competition between anti-revisionist Marxist groups for the membership of workers and students. Many groups followed a strategy of theory, unity, and fusion: develop the correct theoretical line, unite revolutionaries behind this line, and then “fuse” these revolutionaries with working people in factories, neighborhoods, and communities of color. What do you make of those who would characterize your criticisms of the black bourgeoisie as "imperialist-racist"?

NP: The black bourgeoisie had to gain hegemony over the black movement in order to accomplish their economic goals and they had to do so on the basis of black nationalism. How else were they going to unite the disparate goals of the black bourgeoisie and the black worker? The black worker’s tendency is to unite with whatever workers are in the plant. The black bourgeoisie’s tendency is to separate the workers in order to gain some kind of foothold in American capitalism. So, yes, I think the black bourgeoisie was and is the most dangerous element as far as the black worker is concerned. The welfare of the black bourgeoisie depends on the destitution and poverty of the black worker. If the black worker became integrated in America then what would the black bourgeoisie stand on? They couldn’t continue to exist.

Most of the contradictions that arose between our group and the other anti-revisionist groups turned on whether or not the goal of the black workers was to fully integrate themselves into the American working class. Of course, they were a part of the working class. I never believed in this “white working class, black working class” business. They were all one working class. But black workers were isolated and subject to segregation. The black bourgeoisie had to maintain that isolation, that poverty of the black masses, as the foundation of their upward development.

The so-called Black Workers Congress was really the black petit-bourgeois congress! They all became professors and small businessmen. What happened to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, or to the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement, which was the foundation of this thing? They’re all unemployed, living in Detroit on handouts now. The black worker is still the black worker and the black bourgeoisie is still the black bourgeoisie.

ER: Reading Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air (2006) or Mike Staudenmaier’s Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986 (2012), it becomes clear that various tendencies within the New Communist Movement took up theoretical lines that emphasized black particularity and white privilege. Such theoretical commitments remain widespread among avowedly anti-racist activists and academics on the Left despite critiques of this approach by Adolph Reed and others. What, in your view, was the political result of the lines on race and racism developed within the New Communist Movement? Do you see the widespread emphasis on black particularity as a retreat, politically, from the universalism of the earlier Civil Rights Movement?

NP: I’m quite sure that if the proletarian elements of the African-American movement had been in control there would have been a different kind of political expression. It was petit-bourgeois all the way down, from top to bottom. Exclusiveness is an aspect of petit- bourgeois politics. Just as the British bourgeoisie had to fence off their market in order to develop, so the black bourgeoisie also had to fence off theirs. They had to use the motion of the black masses as their marketplace in order to get these concessions. Look at Jesse Jackson!

Black nationalism was the class movement of the black petit-bourgeoisie against the natural instincts of the worker. When Stokely Carmichael came to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party with his black nationalism, Fannie Lou Hamer fought like hell for an integrated movement and finally had to resign from SNCC. The Stokely Carmichaels split the movement and by splitting the movement they were able to defeat us. They couldn’t defeat us while we were united and organically connected to the white liberal intelligentsia and to the few workers who supported us. It’s just like a military maneuver: You split the enemy, destroy this section, then destroy that section. That’s what Stokely Carmichael did. This move toward nationalism was first of all in the interests of a black bourgeoisie but it was also indispensable to containing the entire movement. The worst part of it was that the white radicals supported the black nationalists.

ER: Many white radicals embraced separatist approaches to revolutionary organization—and, perhaps relatedly, embraced theories of racial particularity, inter-group oppression, and interpersonal privilege—out of a sense that it would be impossible for an integrated movement to overcome the racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice that manifested within many New Left organizations. You seem to have built a racially- and gender-integrated organization without adopting theories of racial particularism or interpersonal privilege. To many on the Left today this would seem to be an impossible feat. How has your organization approached internal conflicts over identity and privilege while maintaining this sharp line against black nationalism?

NP: What makes a leader capable of a contribution is that they just happen to have the characteristics needed at a particular time. When I was fifteen years old, I was walking with my father past a guy in the doorway of a tavern, drunk on a Sunday morning. I said, “That’s disgusting.” My dad said, “No! He’s a military genius, there just isn’t any war.” I grew up in Wabasha, Minnesota. Of 1,800 people we were the only black family. Black nationalism never hit a chord with me. I had too many white friends with high moral standards who were ready to die for their beliefs—and these beliefs included real democracy. I was eighteen when I went into the war and twenty-four when I came out. I went to a university for two years on the G.I. Bill of Rights but I finally decided to quit college and become a professional revolutionary. I soon learned that being a professional revolutionary is the same as being a professor or doctor. You have to practice with people who know what they’re doing. Amongst my comrades were people like Joe Dougher and Admiral Kilpatrick, a black worker who taught at the Lenin Institute. Kilpatrick was the political liaison between the Lincoln Battalion and the Fifteenth Brigade, which was the international brigade. These were Communists who spent their lives in combat and trade-union organization. Nobody could hand me this crap about black nationalism.

From the time we established our organization we were debating the question of women. As early as the 1960s, it was clear that the growth of women in the working class meant that they were destined to play a big role in the revolutionary movement. We had to start that training immediately, but we faced the same problem with women that we faced with blacks. We could elect them to office when they were prepared to carry out their duties but that would never happen on its own. So, I finally got a rule passed to the convention that fifty-one per cent of our leaders had to be women. This solved the problem. At the heyday of the Communist Labor Party, we were one third Latino, one third black, one third white, and fifty-one per cent women. Even Elbaum gives us credit for that, writing in a sentence or two that perhaps we were the only organization in the history of the revolutionary movement in America in which minorities and women constituted the majority of the leadership. Fifty-one per cent had to be women and fifty-one per cent had to be a national minority. It was a question of doing it, not a question of theorizing about it. But they’re not capable when you get them, just like nobody is. You’ve got to train them, criticize them, give them history, and insist that they read books.

A gang of black intellectuals has come through our organization. None of them stayed because nobody kow-towed to them. If you don’t submit yourself to the authority of democratic centralism then you can’t stay here. We’ve lost people with great potential who couldn’t get rid of their bourgeois side. They wanted privilege and didn’t get it here. We have a lot of smart black people, but they’re all workers – people like General Baker, the chair of our organization, who formed the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit.

GG: Based on the political orientation and internal structure you’ve outlined so far, when you formed the Communist Labor Party in 1974 and backed away from inter-group polemics with other New Communist Movement tendencies in order to concentrate on organizing the working class, what obstacles and challenges did you encounter? How do you account for the failure of the Communist Labor Party to organize the working class beyond a certain point?

NP: By that point it was clear that the struggle against revisionism in the Soviet Union had been lost. What lay before us, then, was the question of how to go about the struggle under existing conditions. The Communist Labor Party set about the task of what we call “teaching as we fight,” of putting the question of communism in the context of the history of the American people and of the American social order, not in the Russian or Chinese context.

A new class of people has developed in America by robotics and electronics. More and more people are being thrown out of bourgeois society or are just barely clinging on to it by their fingernails. The Europeans call it a “precariat,” and we call it a “new class.” For the first time, we’re seeing the development of machinery that is making capitalism impossible. The private ownership of the socially-necessary means of production is becoming impossible. But the communist class is ideologically anti-communist. So the role of any revolutionary party today is first of all in the intellectual field. I don’t mean “high intellectualism.” I mean the introduction of ideas that reflect the reality of the new economic situation in America.

GG: Much of the innovative theoretical work that came out of the CLP during the 1970s anticipated the increasing role of science and technology in transforming the character of the working class, in making it harder and harder for workers to organize and for working-class politics to play a leading role in transforming and improving society. What was the role and effectiveness of your intellectual grasp of these wide-ranging social transformations—what was the payoff, to use a very vulgar term, of your theoretical work—if you were still unable to make the most of the historical development that brought us where we are today?

NP: What is the revolutionary process? Essentially, it’s that the spontaneous development of the means of production—the economic revolution—produces a social revolution, creates a crisis. It begins with the destruction of the existing society. We’ve been in that situation for twenty or thirty years now. We’re seeing the destruction of one social order by the economic revolution. The contradiction between the old social order and the new economic order is eventually going to bring about a political revolution. That political stage is only a small part of the revolutionary process. The revolutionary process itself is a social revolution. So, under these conditions, any revolutionary who deals simply with the working class is not being serious. The working class is over with. You have to deal with society, with the social upheaval developing in America.

ER: What are the political implications of your concept of a “new class”?

NP: Any dictionary will tell you that a political party is a subjective expression of an objective process in society. In Entering an Epoch of Social Revolution (1991) we pointed out that the critical weakness of the world communist movement up to this point is that there have been communist parties (and they have had the ideology of Marxism) but there has never been an actual communist movement that these parties can represent. The Democratic and Republican parties weather these storms because they represent an actual motion in society—that is, the capitalist system is real, and they represent that! There’s a class in society that is capitalist! There has never been a socialist or a communist class—up until this point—because there has never been machinery, means of production, that will allow for the creation of that class.

We can mark the evolution of capital with the development of manufacturing. When manufacturing reached a certain point, capital became possible. Someone came up with the idea that instead of buying a person and enslaving him for life he would get much more out of him with the wage system. There was a practical motion towards the evolution of capital before there was a political movement for capital. The political movement sprang out of the practical movement. That is not true with the communist movement. In Russia, Stalin and Lenin wrote over and over again about the Russian proletariat being the most revolutionary in the world—but they never called that working class “communist” because they could not be.

Today we’re faced with machinery—productive equipment—that does not require human labor anymore. It’s accelerating. We’re looking at the practical possibility, within my lifetime perhaps, of the majority of labor (and a lot of intellectual labor) being done away with by electronics. How are people going to eat if one section of society owns the productive processes and the other side has nothing to sell? The only way that the majority of people can survive is if these marvelous means of production belong to society, the resources of society are distributed by need, and the individual contributes to society whatever he or she is capable of. We see the possibility of an actual communist class developing for the first time in world history. A different kind of communist party has to represent that. Every communist party in the past has been based on ideology. The Communist party that must evolve out of this practical situation has to be political, not ideological—not that ideology doesn’t play a role, of course it does! But the salient task of the party is going to be the pathbreaking and practical development of the communist society. In the same way, the task of the Republican Party was to break open the path for the practical development of modern industry based on the steam engine.

ER: It seems that much of your work, especially coming out of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, suggested that capitalist society has never yet been “ripe” for communism and that any revolution seeking communism has been “premature.” I want to play devil’s advocate. Lenin might have thought that if a revolution had succeeded in his lifetime in Germany, England, or the United States, then conditions might have been made ripe for communism fairly quickly. Likewise, Trotsky wrote in the late 1930s that “All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet “ripened” for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only “ripened”; they have begun to get somewhat rotten.” ((Trotsky, Leon, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, May-June, 1938. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm#contents>)) This was during the Great Depression, a period of mass unemployment that many associated with labor-saving advances in production. This would seem to signal that the “objective conditions” were ripe for socialism by the beginning of the 20th century, if not earlier, and that socialism did not fail on account of insufficient productive forces.

NP: No matter how bad the situation was in the U.S., the reality was that about two-thirds of the world—Asia, Africa, Latin America—was still ripe for expansion within the capitalist system. But they had to get rid of the closed colonial system. Looking back, the war against Hitler was essentially a war against this closed colonial system. It was a war against England, against France, against Germany, against all of the colonial forces. Hitler was only the worst of them. The Second World War was about whether global finance capital or global industrial capital would be in control. Japan, Germany, etc., represented the past. Roosevelt represented the future. Today we’re seeing the completion of the capitalist consolidation of the world. This is a dangerous thing to say, but I don’t think there’s anywhere for capital to expand.

ER: Are we really reaching the limits of capitalist expansion today? Jobs are still being automated across the world—in the U.S. alone, tens of millions of jobs stand ready to be automated based on current or near-future technologies—while people continue to be proletarianized across the world. But it’s easy for us to imagine that the slum conditions of much of humanity will simply persist and expand as these processes occur, leading to more of the same and worse. What would it mean to complete the social revolution?

NP: One of the most important elements in dialectics is the relationship between quantitative development and qualitative change. If you don’t have a nodal line or nodal point—a point where quality changes—then everything becomes quantitative. In Entering an Epoch of Social Revolution I was trying to say that, since capitalism is based on wage labor and the intensification of the labor process, it is in the interest of the capitalist system to constantly improve the means of production, to make wage labor more productive. But the nodal line is reached when machinery replaces wage labor rather than assists wage labor. Every day more and more of these labor-replacing devices are coming on the market. Cisco is advertising an assembly line that repairs itself. You can’t tell me that self-repairing robots are labor-assisting devices! There isn’t one person on that assembly line. It’s no longer capitalism when you have done away with wage labor. Cisco’s going to make money, but the money is going to be worthless, because money represents labor! The whole thing is headed for collapse. Revolution isn’t one act; it’s a whole epoch. It’s not an uprising but a process of economic revolution to political revolution to social revolution to the end of the social revolution through reconstruction.

The Communist Party USA usually thinks it’s better to ignore us but every now and then they’ll take a whack at us. They insist that electronics is nothing but another quantitative stage of development of capitalist industry. Our position is that a device that replaces the worker is qualitatively different from a device that assists the worker. It’s not a question of ideology, of what I think. It’s a question of objective reality.