Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.
In 1946, the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb published Studies in the Development of Capitalism, his explanation of feudalism’s decline and capitalism’s rise. In it, he argued that it was the class relations involved in the feudal mode of production in England that primarily caused lords to overexploit their serfs, leading the serfs to desert their estates. With the rise of global trade, this flight ended feudalism and established the foundations of a new capitalist age.
However groundbreaking its account, Dobb’s book proved controversial. Four years later, Paul Sweezy, a fellow Marxist economist and the founding editor of Monthly Review, offered several detailed critiques. Dobb had argued, Sweezy claimed, that feudalism and serfdom were synonymous, which misunderstood, in Sweezy’s words, that serfs “can exist in systems which are clearly not feudal.” For Sweezy, what led the lords to overexploit their serfs and the serfs to desert were primarily external, not internal, causes: the rise of trade, pushing the lords to garner even more from their serfs, and the growth of towns to which the serfs could flee.
Though Dobb took Sweezy’s critiques in stride (and, taken together, both accounts offer compelling insight into the rise of capitalism), Eric Hobsbawm, Georges Lefebvre, Rodney Hilton, and other historians soon weighed in on the Dobb-Sweezy debate, as it came to be known. At stake were not only questions of historiography for these mostly Marxist and socialist historians, but also questions of what exactly constituted capitalism (and, therefore, what constituted anti-capitalist politics) and how capitalism might be ended. “We live in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism,” Sweezy confidently proclaimed in his critique, “and this fact lends particular interest to studies of earlier transitions from one social system to another.”
Around the same time, another Marxist thinker offered a different account of serfdom and the agrarian question. In Negro Liberation, Harry Haywood did not look to the English past but to the contemporaneous American South and especially to the so-called Black Belt, the majority-Black region extending from Virginia to Louisiana. There, Haywood found the modern-day equivalent of the feudal system: sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and agricultural laborers working across the fertile area—many, though not all of them, Black—who were, in Haywood’s eyes, serfs who remained unfree, not least because of the vagrancy laws, debt, and physical violence that bound these workers to the lands they worked. Haywood wondered how these serfs might be freed from that seemingly feudal position and how doing so might aid in the fights against capitalism and fascism. Not surprisingly, his account of feudalism differed greatly from those in the Dobb-Sweezy debate. But for Haywood, as for Sweezy, economic transition was imminent, and the question of feudalism’s end had direct implications for his present.
Originally published in 1948 and now newly republished, Negro Liberation surveyed the post–World War II landscape and found that little had changed since the war began. The Black Belt, which had served as a heartland for enslaved agricultural labor in the South, remained an internal colony of the United States. There, the racist treatment of Black Southerners buttressed the continued economic exploitation of workers, providing dramatic profits to a small number of planters and to Northern finance capital while immiserating everyone else. By making this argument, Haywood, a Communist Party member, was not only making the case for Black emancipation but also explaining how anti-Blackness contributed to the oppression of all laborers. The white supremacy legitimating the exploitation of Black people in the Black Belt was also the very mechanism that ensured the working class’s segregation in the North and prevented Black and white workers from uniting to win collective power.
Yet alongside this account was also a specific argument for Black liberation. Taking his cues in part from Lenin’s claim that colonized countries had a right to determine their own governance, Haywood argued that the Black workers of the Black Belt needed to exercise self-determination, as Lenin put it—that the Black people in the majority-Black regions of the South ought to have autonomous socialist governments. To prevent the rise of fascism, which Haywood argued was manifest in the Jim Crow South as well as in interwar Europe, Black agrarian and industrial workers had to unite and organize toward Black self-determination in the Black Belt. This would weaken US imperialism—for instance, by withdrawing the region’s production—and thereby aid other workers subjugated by the United States across the globe.
To fully understand Haywood’s position on the Black Belt and on workers more generally, it’s necessary to first understand his life. Born in 1898 to formerly enslaved parents, he grew up in a society that imparted a sense that Black people could never fully assimilate into America. The Omaha, Nebraska, of Haywood’s youth had not yet become the city in which Malcolm X’s pregnant mother endured an attack by the Ku Klux Klan. But his parents’ tales of slavery and his grandparents’ displaying their scars from the chattel regime soon educated him on American race relations. Reinforcing this lesson, his school taught that “Blacks were brought out of the savagery of the jungles of Africa,” Haywood recalled in his autobiography, Black Bolshevik, “and introduced to civilization through slavery under the benevolent auspices of the white man.”
An incident when he was 15 further educated him on Black people’s place in the country. During the summer of 1913, a group of white men beat Haywood’s father, who stumbled home bruised and bloody. “They said they were going to kill me if I didn’t get out of town,” his father told him. Haywood suggested calling the police, to which his father replied, “That ain’t goin’ to do no good.” His parents decided to leave their jobs and sell their home for a small sum, and then the family departed for Minneapolis. The incident not only uprooted their lives; it suggested that their stability in the United States was only ever temporary.
As a young adult, Haywood found American racism hard to escape. In Minneapolis, he recalled, his white classmates mocked him with a minstrel-like performance of an “old darkie plantation song.” Unsurprisingly, Haywood dropped out in the eighth grade and went to work as a “bootblack, barber shop porter, bell hop, and busboy,” then as a waiter on a train. Bored by Minneapolis, he moved to Chicago and, in 1917, joined a Black Army regiment. Training in the South, Haywood was exposed to Jim Crow before going on to serve in France, where the US Army warned the French that its Black soldiers were a threat to white French women. An ailment sent Haywood to a segregated Army hospital in Brest. Eventually, he and other Army patients returned on a segregated ship to the United States. Upon their arrival stateside, Haywood had his “first view of the New York skyline. Overcome with emotion, tears welled up in my eyes.” Then segregated reception committees greeted the soldiers. Despite expanding his geographic horizons, Haywood’s experiences in the Army reinforced his sense that American racism was structural, far-reaching, and could only be overcome by radical change.
After his 1919 discharge, Haywood grew even more convinced in this belief. Shortly after he returned to the Windy City, the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 broke out. Haywood joined a group of other Black veterans who armed themselves and planned to defend a Black neighborhood from a rumored invasion. While Haywood’s group saw no fighting, another group did, opening fire on a gang of white people, including off-duty cops, in a truck; elsewhere, “two Black cops with a history of viciousness” were killed. Meanwhile, Black people throughout the city were “standing before the burned-out buildings of their former homes.” If Haywood’s early exposures to American racism had opened him up to an incipient radicalism, the Red Summer changed his life. “I began to see that I had to fight,” he wrote in Black Bolshevik. “I had to commit myself to the struggle against whatever it was that made racism possible.”
Haywood eventually found his way to a school of thought that crystallized this burgeoning sense of struggle. After bouncing between jobs and marrying his first wife, Hazel, in 1920, he was introduced to socialist politics by his brother Otto, who was a member of the Communist Party. When Haywood sought an explanation for American racism in literature, Otto replied, “You ought to quit reading those bourgeois authors and start reading Marx and Engels.” Influenced in part by his admiration for the Bolsheviks’ triumph in 1917, whose example offered “a completely clear solution to the problems facing American workers, both Black and white,” Haywood told his brother that he wanted to join the party.
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Haywood’s introduction to socialism opened him up to a wide milieu of communist organizations. Otto suggested that Harry join the African Blood Brotherhood, “a secret, all-Black revolutionary organization” founded by the journalist Cyril Briggs, whose members included the poet Claude McKay, which Haywood soon did. In the winter of 1923, he also joined the Young Workers League, and in 1925, the party proper.
The CP provided Haywood with an education. In 1926, he traveled to Moscow to study at the University of Toilers of the East, which also educated Ho Chi Minh, Deng Xiaoping, and Jomo Kenyatta. In his readings on Marxist-Leninist thought and practice, he learned “that the formation of peoples into nations is an objective law of social development” and that nations required four qualities: “a common territory, a common economic life, a common language and a common psychological makeup (national character) manifested in common features in a national culture.” These early lessons proved foundational to Haywood’s thinking on the plight of Black Americans and its solution.
Those ideas crystallized in the Black Belt thesis. In 1928, Haywood, his old associate Charles Nasanov, and others in the Negro Commission of the Communist International drafted and revised a version of this thesis. Later that year, at the Sixth World Congress, the Communist International passed “The 1928 Resolution on the Negro Question in the United States,” adopting the Black Belt program as official policy. American capitalists subjected Black agrarian Southerners to, as the resolution put it, “the most ruthless exploitation and persecution of a semi-slave character” in order to extract extreme profits, and it legitimated this exploitation through racist myths. Black workers in the Black Belt should therefore pursue a politics of self-determination whose achievement would weaken American capitalist imperialism, the resolution held, and strengthen Black workers so that they could better participate in the necessarily interracial and global struggle against global capitalism. In short, Black self-determination would help to end capitalism more generally.
In drafting this policy for the Communist International, Haywood rapidly became one of the most influential communist thinkers in the United States. Over the coming decade, his Black Belt thesis would continue to influence many communist works on the South that appeared in The Daily Worker and other leftist publications. The framing of Black oppression as national oppression also influenced Haywood’s own writing, even when it putatively concerned other subjects.
Here, Haywood’s writing on the Scottsboro Boys is exemplary. After nine Black teenagers were tried and convicted in Scottsboro, Alabama, of sexually assaulting two white women and then sentenced to death, the CP’s legal arm in the United States took on the case and sought appeals. As the attorneys, Joseph Brodsky and George Chamlee, fought for the teens in the courts, Haywood put his pen to their defense. In his 1932 article “Scottsboro and Beyond,” he argued that “lynching and lynch frame-ups” resulted from “class struggles. Lynch law is the threat facing the Negro workers who attempt or dare to struggle.” Both lynching and legal “frame-ups” kept Black people “in terrorized subjection” and divided workers by race.
In his 1934 pamphlet “The Road to Negro Liberation,” Haywood advocated for a solution: Black and white workers, he argued, must organize around “the abolition of lynching.” Rather than merely passing legislation, he continued, “the best ‘bill’ against lynching is militant demonstrations of tens of thousands of white and Negro toilers on the streets and in the factories, beating back the lynchers.” While his belief in Black self-determination led him to focus on the problems that especially affected Black people, his insistence that Black self-determination was not enough—that ending global capitalism was also necessary—ensured that he also advocated for interracial movements and solidarity.
In response to the international rise of fascism in the 1930s, Haywood turned his attention elsewhere. “Blacks have always felt the most brutal, racist oppression in the United States,” he recalled in his autobiography, “but fascism would mean a great heightening of the terror and oppression.” After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Haywood served with other Black soldiers in the conflict, and in 1943 he joined the Merchant Marines, where he would serve for the rest of World War II. After returning to the United States in 1945, he discovered that the Communist Party USA was, in his view, turning away from revolution and toward reform. “The Party’s work in the Black liberation movement,” Haywood wrote in Black Bolshevik, “felt the first effects of this retreat.” Though he had fought to stymie fascism’s intensification of Black oppression through service overseas, he found far less effort being made to alleviate Black people’s sufferings at home.
Under the party’s rightward retrenchment, Haywood returned to his Black Belt thesis, focusing especially on the need for sharecroppers in the South to organize interracially to alleviate their oppression and to end capitalism more generally. And he began writing his detailed account of this theory: Negro Liberation.
To Haywood’s earlier arguments, Negro Liberation added an account of Black people’s postwar conditions. Just as he had served overseas only to return to racism and racial violence back home, many Black people in and beyond the armed forces had fought “against fascist reaction,” only to then have to struggle against their “traditional enemy at home”: the “Nazi-like system of Jim Crow.” If anything, the war’s end only marked a resurgence of this American form of fascism, now goaded on by “the handful of Wall Street monopolists who stand in mortal fear before the advancing tide of democracy in the world.”
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Black people’s oppression in the South, Haywood noted, had long depended on “a depressed peasantry living under a system of sharecropping, riding-boss supervision, debt slavery, chronic land hunger, and dependency—in short, the plantation system, a relic of chattel slavery.” That plantation system had not disappeared, and its persistence transformed even the lives of white workers. In comparison with the rest of the nation, white workers in the South earned less, were sometimes forced into sharecropping, and included a larger number of children in their ranks.
The methods for repressing Black Southerners impacted Northern workers as well. The racist myths legitimating the position of people in the Black Belt circulated nationwide, suppressing Black wages in the North, segregating Black Northerners in neighborhoods with worse housing and worse health outcomes, and hindering interracial trade unionism. In Haywood’s view, capitalists “artificially” fostered “racial prejudice” to turn Black people into the “cheap and underprivileged labor” that these capitalists then used to lower wages and break strikes, while preventing Black and white workers from joining together to oppose their exploiters.
According to Haywood, Wall Street also profited from and reproduced the plantation system by controlling its financing. Planters with more tenant liens had more credit, encouraging planters to acquire even more tenants. Northern industrialists and financiers also owned a great deal of the industries on which the plantations depended, like steel and coal. And Northerners owned much of the South’s means of production—for example, they owned more than 35 percent of Alabama’s spindles and looms in the 1930s. Because of its investment in cotton and related industries, Wall Street maintained “the southern lag and poverty as an essential condition for the extraction of super-profits from the starvation wages of the Negro and white masses.” In Haywood’s view, the Black Belt was a colony in part because Northern capital extracted extreme profits from it in the way that colonizers do from their colonies.
Abolishing this plantation system, Haywood argued, would therefore offer the first step toward abolishing the wage system across the country. Doing so would require an interracial movement of Black and white workers disavowing the white-supremacist ideologies that divided them and “the development and organization of the economic and political struggle of the landless masses, Negro and white.” “Supported by the working class and other progressive forces of the country as a whole,” this interracial workers movement could then establish “a truly people’s government.” That government, in Haywood’s eyes, required self-determination. This is where his argument becomes difficult to follow for those not familiar with his earlier writings on the national question. Since Black people constituted the majority in the Black Belt, the democratic “people’s government” that would emerge there would necessarily be one determined by Black people. “The corrupt rule of monopoly capitalism and its allies in the Black Belt,” he wrote, “must be supplanted by the democratic rule of the majority, that is, of the Negro people, with the full participation of their allies among the disenfranchised white minority…. Only government institutions that represent and express the special interests of the preponderant Negro population, and enjoy its confidence, can effect a radical change in the structure of southern landownership, so urgently needed by the bulk of the Black Belt’s people and southern whites generally.” In short, self-government would aid disadvantaged people in the region more generally in addition to solving Black people’s specific problems.
Haywood lived another four decades after the publication of Negro Liberation. Although he left the CP in the 1950s, he remained dedicated to communism as a cause. In 1958, he formed a new communist organization with, as he put it, “mostly Black and Puerto Rican working class cadres.” As the civil-rights movement swept the nation and turned some toward integration under a capitalist system, Haywood continued to advocate for revolution and African American self-determination in the Black Belt. By the late 1970s, he’d turned to writing the story of his life—Black Bolshevik, published in 1978—before his death in 1985.
Even though Haywood wrote about and organized for Black self-determination for some 40 years, Negro Liberation still ranks among his most thorough theorizations of Black oppression, the exploitation of workers in general, and the means of ending both. By arguing that the Black Belt was an internal colony in which Black agrarian workers were subject to brutal exploitation, it offered an analysis of 20th-century capitalism that also situated it in the past and present of colonization. Although Haywood’s book was, as the historian Rebecca Hall noted, replete with “Indigenous erasure,” it offered its analysis at a moment when the United States was becoming an international hegemon and included not just a searing indictment of Jim Crow in the South but of American empire abroad. No matter what quality-of-life improvements might be gleaned from increased production, capitalist exploitation and colonial domination would continue, Haywood argued, until socialist and self-determined governments were put in power—and this was true within the United States as well as around the globe.
For Haywood, this wasn’t merely an abstract notion. He arrived at these beliefs through grassroots organizing. Those experiences led him to conclude that ending anti-Blackness required radical change and that Black people, like all other subaltern groups, would remain perpetual foreigners under the domestic and international American empire without this form of liberation. While the internal-colony and self-determination theses may no longer be in vogue for many as analyses of racism’s contemporary ills or their resolution, Haywood’s insistence on grassroots change remains as convincing as ever, whether in the 1928 Communist International resolution, Negro Liberation, or elsewhere, and his account of serfdom remains more inspiring than many of those in the Dobb-Sweezy debate. To adopt Marx’s language, where others only interpreted feudalism in various ways, Harry Haywood sought to change it.
Elias RodriquesElias Rodriques is the author of All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.