The following is a slightly modified version of the introduction to Internationalism in practice: Claudia Jones, Black Liberation, and the “bestial war on Korea,” published on the anniversary of Jones’ birthday, February 21, 2024, by Iskra Books. We are grateful for their explicit permission to reprint the introduction to this important book, which you can find here.
Introduction
Throughout the years of the global struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed, 1953 was especially significant, situated as it was in a complex and highly dynamic and unpredictable conjuncture. A wide variety of elements across the world condensed into a decisive turning point that solidified beyond all doubt the contradictory development of the global revolutionary offensive and its counterrevolutionary defensive. As far as years are useful for marking history, especially in regular discussions, 1953 is one that, in many ways, continues to define the revolutionary struggle of today. That was the year Stalin died, the Korean resistance forced the U.S. to sign an Armistice Agreement, and the year Claudia Jones, along with other leaders of the Communist Party, was found guilty of violating the Smith Act and sentenced to over a year in prison. A year of defeats and victories, these three seemingly disconnected events were intimately bound together, as the original essays and Jones’ original articles assembled in what follows make abundantly clear.
When much of the world awoke to the news on March 6, 1953, they learned that the night before, shortly before 10:00 pm, Joseph V. Stalin, who guided the Soviet Union for decades, passed away. The world’s official leaders awaited with anticipation and anxiety for what was to come. Given Stalin’s prestige across the world and how many dissolved his personality into the Soviet Union and the communist movement (rather than the other way around), would Stalin’s death dissolve that movement? Would internecine battles within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s leadership empower reactionary forces or at least open cracks for imperialist intervention? As it turns out, both happened in some form, as the U.S. seized on the intra-party struggles to further drive a wedge between the increasingly uncomradely debates between the Soviet and Chinese communists.
Those from the progressive countries worried about the fate of their primary ally and source of aid and solidarity for these reasons and others. Most progressive forces worldwide were, of course, in mourning. This includes those living in the heartland of world imperialism, the U.S. Perhaps the most significant was Black revolutionary William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. A long-time supporter of the communist struggle, Du Bois wrote not one but two eulogies for the historic figure. “Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature,” opened one short statement. Published under the title, “Dr. Du Bois on Stalin: ‘He knew the common man … followed his fate,’” it appeared in the March 16, 1953 edition of the independent left-wing newspaper, the National Guardian, based out of New York City.
“As one of the despised minorities of man,” Du Bois continued, “he first set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality,” continued Du Bois with a U.S. readership in mind [1]. Whereas Du Bois noted the Soviet Union’s emphasis on eliminating racial and national oppression in this one, the second highlighted the international response and appreciation of that concrete solidarity. “The death of Joseph Stalin,” he begins, “shocked 15 million American citizens of Negro descent in a peculiar way. Stalin had unequivocally advocated Peace while all other rulers voiced two words for War to everyone for Peace. These Negroes want peace for more reasons than whites” [2]. As contemporary revolutionary communist scholars have noted, this wasn’t the first time Du Bois went to bat for his friends in the Communist Party or the Soviet Union, and it wouldn’t be the last [3].”As one of the despised minorities of man,” Du Bois continued, “he first set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality,” continued Du Bois with a U.S. readership in mind [1]. Whereas Du Bois noted the Soviet Union’s emphasis on eliminating racial and national oppression in this one, the second highlighted the international response and appreciation of that concrete solidarity. “The death of Joseph Stalin,” he begins, “shocked 15 million American citizens of Negro descent in a peculiar way. Stalin had unequivocally advocated Peace while all other rulers voiced two words for War to everyone for Peace. These Negroes want peace for more reasons than whites” [2]. As contemporary revolutionary communist scholars have noted, this wasn’t the first time Du Bois went to bat for his friends in the Communist Party or the Soviet Union, and it wouldn’t be the last [3].
In 1950, an issue of the Negro Digest featured a symposium on a remark Paul Robeson made the year before about Black people and their inherent comradery with the Soviet Union. The Negro Digest was the personal project of Black businessman John Harold Johnson, who collected funding for the first installments with personal appeals for prepaid subscriptions before, eventually, partnering with Joseph Levy, a magazine publisher. After hitting Chicago newsstands in late 1942, the Negro Digest became one of many Black periodicals of the period, although it distinguished itself by including a range of voices across the political spectrum and the overall editorial line established by Johnson: a patriotic belief that the U.S. could be a real democracy [4]. The Digest featured a regular column, “If I Were a Negro,” a column on the back page to which Eleanor Roosevelt contributed in the magazine’s February 1943 edition. This provides a sense not only of the magazine’s political orientation and its process of popularization and funding, but also the context in which the symposium appeared.
Du Bois defended Robeson in the Symposium, which focused specifically on a comment made in Paris on April 20, 1949. As he entered the room, the audience erupted in thunderous cheers, which quieted after approaching the stage. There, Du Bois recalls, “his great voice rose in song—song of Black slaves, song of white slaves, songs of Russia and France,” followed by a short speech in which he stated, “the black folk of America will never fight against the Soviet Union!” again to great applause [5]. Robeson was right; he knew what he was talking about. He wasn’t afraid to speak the truth even though he knew it would—and did—stir immense controversy in the U.S., within the political elite, the Black bourgeoisie, and factions of the Black press. Robeson’s knowledge, Du Bois insists, wasn’t abstract. His knowledge came from the time he spent in the USSR and the U.S. “He knew better than most men,” Du Bois continues, “that of all countries, Russia alone has made race prejudice a crime; of all great imperialisms Russia alone owns no colonies of dark serfs or white and what is more important has no investments in colonies and is lifting no blood-soaked profits from cheap labor in Asia and Africa” [6]. Indeed, immediately after taking power, the Bolsheviks unconditionally renounced their “rights” to foreign territories and exposed the secret imperialist agreements about what country would get what colony.
The figure most thoroughly demonized and caricatured in the West, Joseph Stalin, earned the respect of many Black U.S. and African revolutionaries. This is why it is noteworthy that Du Bois, for example, joined the Communist Party after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” that established a right-wing critique of Stalin and irreparably damaged the international communist movement because from then on, as Domenico Losurdo writes “it was only Stalin and his closest collaborators who were confined to the museum of horrors” and the cause of every problem faced by the Soviet Union or the imperialist U.S. [7]. The Soviets, understandably eager to avoid another World War, pursued a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with the U.S., something that was intolerable to the People’s Republic of China for equally understandable reasons.
It was not that anyone wanted war or nuclear war, but that the USSR-US pact was, in effect, an anti-China pact. The issue of peace was on the forefront of the international progressive agenda in 1953 as U.S. war against Korea reignited a long-standing Black desire for peace. Du Bois enunciates the basis of unity between Black Americans and Koreans in one of his obituaries. “Koreans were Colored People,” he writes, who “suffered from white nations, the same discrimination and contempt as Negroes suffer” [8].
Du Bois, like Robeson, knew how the Third International worked to help the oppressed free themselves and the real material gains that resulted. They were aware, too, of the contradictions that entailed, the errors made, and the formulaic applications of abstract principles to different contexts. Nonetheless, from Cuba and Guyana to Zimbabwe and Syria—not to mention China—there was an ideological and affective bond linking them together. That bond is the Global Class Struggle that continues to this day.
Revolutionary Black internationalism and Korean solidarity
Claudia Jones echoed Du Bois and Robeson’s shared standing of the Korean and U.S. Black liberation struggles. Shared, of course, does not mean uniform, and one of Jones’ great contributions was her ability to identify the unique position of Black women workers in the U.S. in the struggle against imperialist wars. She recognized her fellow Black women workers as being those who would first spontaneously recognize the internationalist position of Black people in the U.S. and their Korean comrades, who were united in part by a common enemy: U.S. imperialism largely. This system was, after all, built on the super-exploitation of enslaved Africans, Black workers of all genders, and the colonial and imperialist plunder of the world. In the coming pages, we will see Claudia Jones emphasize this point repeatedly, although she will add the unique position of Black women in resisting imperialist wars and in being among the first to recognize the shared position of Black people in the U.S. and their Korean comrades.
One prominent instance Jones did so was about a month before Du Bois wrote these passages, and in quite dire circumstances. Having been convicted of several charges, among them conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government, with 13 other communist leaders in January, Jones delivered a statement in front of Judge Edward J. Dimrock before receiving her sentencing on February 02, 1953. Jones wasn’t speaking to the judge or the U.S. state, both of which she viewed as impotent, but to the real force in the world: the global peace movement. Jones begins articulating her hope that her statement might “even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country” [9].
In her speech, Jones mentions how the prosecution used her 1950 International Women’s Day speech, published in Political Affairs, as evidence against her. However, it was introduced but wasn’t read because, Jones asserted, “it urges American mothers, Negro women and white, to emulate the peace struggles of their anti-fascist sisters in Latin America, in the new European democracies, in the Soviet Union, in Asia and Africa to end the bestial Korean war… to reject the militarist threat to embroil us in a war with China, so that their children should not suffer the fate of the Korean babies murdered by napalm bombs of B-29s, or the fate of Hiroshima” [10]. The Korean people almost suffered from nuclear weapons and most of the Pentagon and U.S. foreign policy establishment were anxious to deploy them not only against Pyongyang but Beijing as well. Yet there is no reason or basis on which to compare the destruction of U.S. imperialism across the world.
A few months after Stalin’s death and Jones’ speech, the Korean people, led by the Korean People’s Army and in collaboration with their Chinese comrades, forced the U.S. to sign an armistice agreement that finally halted their “police action.” What the U.S. calls the Korean War and the north Koreans and progressives refer to as the Great Fatherland Liberation War came to an end as “the heroic struggle waged by the Korean people for three years in defence of the country’s freedom and independence against the U.S. imperialist armed invaders ended in victory for us” and defeat for the imperialists [11]. The war looked to many like a conflict between two different states, each claiming sovereignty over the other’s territory. This framing avoids the essence of the struggle and distorts the global nature of the U.S.’s military aggression.
Kim Il Sung, the primary leader of the decades-long anti-colonial struggle and later of the struggle to force U.S. imperialists out of the northern half of Korea, endorsed this internationalist position. For example, Kim begins his “1946 Report to the Second Congress of the Workers’ Party of North Korea” with an assessment of the post-World War II international climate and defined them relative to the radically altered position of two camps. “The most essential of these changes,” Kim begins, “is that the capitalist system, that is, the reactionary Imperialist camp, has become markedly weaker, whereas the international democratic camp headed by the Soviet Union has come into being and has definitely gained in strength” [11]. Among the latter camp, Kim includes “the great force of the oppressed peoples who have risen in the struggle to achieve national freedom and independence against colonialism” [12].
A relation of reciprocity: A legacy of inspiration
While Du Bois paid tributes and expressed his sorrow to the people of the world in his obituaries of Stalin, Kim Il Sung wrote to Du Bois’ widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, after learning of his death in 1963. “On receiving the sad news of Dr. William DuBois’ Death,” Kim wrote before clarifying his credentials as a “distinguished peace champion and scholar,” President Kim—or as the Premier of the Cabinet of the DPRK as he was known at the time—sent his “profound condolences” to her and the family on behalf of the DPRK. He assured her that Du Bois “unflinching struggle against the racial discrimination policy and for the safeguarding of peace” won’t be forgotten by the Korean people.” In the letter dated September 2, Kim concluded by reminding her that her late husband and comrades’ contributions will only strengthen the resolve of oppressed peoples until our “final victory” [14]. So too should the writings that follow and the outcomes of their authors and theorists embolden our commitments to establish a revolutionary wing in the rising social movements of the U.S. in a careful and strategic manner and to wave unflinchingly, as Jones and Kim did, against all manifestations of national chauvinism, sexism, white supremacy, and imperialism.
It’s crucial for all peace-minded people to read Claudia Jones, the works of other U.S. Black and Afrikan revolutionaries, and of revolutionaries worldwide to learn from both their successes and missteps. Reading the book and studying these works don’t do anything on their own, however. So let this book not be read but acted upon in daily interactions and large-scale struggles. The authors, publishers, editors, and everyone who assembled this superb, accessible, short, and freely-accessible high quality publication have done the international struggle for justice and liberation an immense favor we must seize as an opportunity to advance the class struggle, which is inseparable today from the national liberation struggles in and out of the U.S. prison house of nations..
References
[1] W.E.B. Du Bois, “On Stalin,” National Guardian 5, no. 16 (1953): 4.
[2] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Stalin and American Negroes,” Pravda, 10 March 1953. Reprinted in Peace, Land, and Bread 05 March 2021. Available here.
[3] See Derek R. Ford, Communist Study: Education for the Commons, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022); and “Against the ‘Compatible’ Academic Left: Rethinking Capitalism and Racism,” PESA Agora, 2023. Available here.
[4] Nichols Grant, “The Negro Digest: Race, Exceptionalism and the Second World War,” Journal of American Studies 52, no. 2 (2018): 358-389.
[5] William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, “Symposium: Paul Robeson: Right or Wrong?” Negro Digest, 7, no. 8 (1950): 5.
[6] Ibid., 10.
[7] Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, trans. H. Hakamäki and E-D Mauro (Madison: Iskra Books, 2023), 9.
[8] Du Bois, “Stalin and American Negroes.”
[1] W.E.B. Du Bois, “On Stalin,” National Guardian 5, no. 16 (1953): 4.
[2] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Stalin and American Negroes,” Pravda, 10 March 1953. Reprinted in Peace, Land, and Bread 05 March 2021. Available here.
[3] See Derek R. Ford, Communist Study: Education for the Commons, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022); and “Against the ‘Compatible’ Academic Left: Rethinking Capitalism and Racism,” PESA Agora, 2023. Available here.
[4] Nichols Grant, “The Negro Digest: Race, Exceptionalism and the Second World War,” Journal of American Studies 52, no. 2 (2018): 358-389.
[5] William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, “Symposium: Paul Robeson: Right or Wrong?” Negro Digest, 7, no. 8 (1950): 5.
[6] Ibid., 10.
[7] Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, trans. H. Hakamäki and E-D Mauro (Madison: Iskra Books, 2023), 9.
[8] Du Bois, “Stalin and American Negroes.”
[9] Claudia Jones, “Statement Before Being Sentenced to One Year and a Day imprisonment.” Available here.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Kim Il Sung, “Everything for the Postwar Rehabilitation and Development of the National Economy,” in Kim Il Sung Selected Works (Vol. 1) (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953/1976), 415.
[12] Kim Il Sung, “Report to the Second Congress of the Workers’ Party of North Korea,” in Kim Il Sung Selected Works (Vol. 1) (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955/1976), 204-205.
[13] Ibid., 213.
[14] Kim Il Sung, “Accra Madame Shirley Graham DuBois,” 02 September 1963, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives (University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries), 2-3.
