A Black Construction of Colonialism: The Black Marxist Response to Fascism in the 1930s

In his 1938 publication, A History of Negro Revolt, Black Marxist C.L.R. James notes that the contemporary central and southern African Watch Tower Movement “does not seek to distinguish between the Fascist and the democratic imperialisms.” “To the vast body of Africans in Africa,” James writes, “such a distinction is meaningless.” James states elsewhere in the text that “an African in Eritrea is no worse off under Italian Fascism than an African in the Congo under democratic Belgium, or a Rhodesian copper miner” under British rule Here, James makes an equivalence between the racial-colonial conditions of liberal-democratic European powers and the racial-colonial conditions of fascist European powers. In part, James was likely responding to those white communists who had abandoned the colonial world. With the transition to the Popular Front in 1935, the Communist International (Comintern) had formally made the rise of fascism in Europe its primary target of opposition. In doing so, the Soviet Union and many white communists sought to strategically gain the support of the liberal-democratic empires of France, Britain, and the United States of America (US). This muted any Comintern commitment to the Colonial, Negro and National Questions which had formed a plank of its Third Period from 1928–35. Alongside this came the gradual closing of the Comintern’s International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), an organization institutionalized by the Black Left to confront questions of race and colonialism across the globe What has heretofore been less recognized is what this fracture revealed about the differences in outlook between contemporary white and Black Marxists. While white Marxists tended to view fascism as the latest stage of capitalist imperialism and a reaction to the rise of communism in Europe, Black Marxists viewed fascism as an inversion onto Europe of the kind of white dominance and empire building long practiced in the colonized world. For Black Marxists, then, it was global colonialism that revealed the interlocking historical practices of race and class, and anticolonialism that was to remain their focus.

In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have become interested in what Cedric J. Robinson called “a Black construction of fascism. At the African Studies Annual Association meeting in 1990, Robinson critiqued the “historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of Western Geist. From the Black perspectives of James, George Padmore, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Oliver Cromwell Cox, Robinson noted that fascism in the 1930s was “no more a historical aberration than colonialism, the slave trade, and slavery … [and] which much like its genetic predecessors, Christianity, imperialism, nationalism, sexism, and racism, provided the means for the ascent to and preservation of power for elitists. Robinson himself was drawing upon an argument made famously by Aim,e C,esaire, who suggested shortly after the ending of World War Two that Europeans had tolerated Nazism “before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples. Leslie James and Minkah Makalani have since historicized how Black newspapers in 1930s London, Accra and Lagos placed fascism in relation to forced labor in Kenya; segregation and death in South Africa; and the use of militarized police forces in Northern Rhodesia Finally, Alberto Toscano has probed “the analytical nexus of fascism and racial capitalism forged in the [US] liberation struggles of the 1970s,” most especially by George Jackson and Angela Davis

What has so far been absent from these studies is an understanding of why so often it is Black Marxists who are making such connections and why white Marxists fail to see them? Indeed, if the Comintern—albeit on account of pressure from Black and Asian Marxists—had incorporated the Colonial, Negro, and National Questions into its analysis in the 1920s, then why had its white leadership not understood the fascist practices that Black Marxists viewed as a central component of the colonial project? Here I make the argument that the differing responses of white and Black Marxists to fascism in the 1930s reveal not so much different constructions of fascism, as Robinson articulated it, but different conceptions of colonialism. White Marxists saw colonialism, often referred to as imperialism, as an extension of capitalist conditions emanating from western Europe to the rest of the world. Thus, the Comintern opposed colonialism primarily because they viewed the colonial world as a site of economic exploitation In contrast, Black Marxists viewed the colonial world as the site of capitalism and race; where white dominance and capital accumulation were practiced and produced via territorial dispossession, transatlantic slavery, (sexual) violence, surveillance, cultural assault, and slave/menial wage labor. For those cognizant of the latter, it is little wonder that “the word ‘fascism’ does not always conjure up a distant and alien social order.

The two major thinkers in the white Marxist tradition until at least the 1930s—Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin—did not share such an understanding of white dominance While both Marx and Lenin wrote about colonialism, they did so only in relation to its role in the historical development of capitalism. As the scholar Robert J. C. Young writes, Marx and Lenin “share the assumption that imperialism was a product of finance capitalism and the circulation of commodities, driven by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the consequent need to incorporate more and more markets. In other words, the rationale for colonialism was economic according to Marx and Lenin. Interwar Black thinkers found utility in Marxism’s study of capitalism and particularly Soviet Russia’s opposition to imperialism However, these Black Marxists advanced their own conceptualization of colonialism. Influenced by their racial experience and knowledge of the colonized Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands, they developed a theory of colonialism which sought to incorporate what they viewed as one of its defining features: race. In other words, Black Marxists advanced the idea that European empires did not merely embark on colonial projects because of its economic opportunities, but because it allowed for the practice and reproduction of white dominance.

Given these different conceptions of colonialism, contemporary white and Black Marxists viewed the emergence of fascism differently. For many white Marxists, fascism was a counter-revolutionary response to communism which attempted to use mass politics to gain support for the expansion of economic markets by the have-not global powers of the 1930s: Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan For Soviet Russia, anti-fascism therefore took precedence over anti-colonialism because fascism threatened the European spread of communism. In the interwar period, the influential white Marxist Franz Neumann encapsulates these ideas most substantively, but we also witness it in the response of Russia to the Italian colonization of Abyssinia. For Black Marxists, fascism had economic aspects but was principally the application of racial practices, historically used in the colonies, into Europe and onto debased Jews. In what follows I will account for these different conceptions of colonialism and alternative responses to fascism through first, an analysis of Marx, Lenin, and Neumann’s thought on colonialism and fascism; second, an account of the 1930s Comintern response to fascism in Europe and the incursion of Fascist Italy into Ethiopia; and third, an analysis of Black Marxist thought on colonialism in response to fascism in Abyssinia and Spain. The thinkers I analyze came from all corners of the Black Anglophone world and participated in one of two Black Left organizations that emerged in response to Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia: the Council on African Affairs and the International African Service Bureau. It is hoped that the combination of theoretical analysis and historicization will reveal how conflicting concepts led to the different practices of white and Black Marxists in the 1930s. While recognizing that some white Marxists did not conform to the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Neumann, this article maintains the articulation of a white Marxism in order that we better understand the ideological and political fracture within the interwar Marxist Left that Minkah Makalani has exposed us to Furthermore, while the Black thinkers I analyze did not always self-identify as Marxists or Leftists, let alone Black Marxists, I place them in this category because they combined an economic and racial theorizing of colonialism and fascism. Black Marxism is therefore Black not merely because it is practiced or written by Black people but because such thinkers developed an understanding of the relation between capitalism and white dominance

A White Marxist Conception of Colonialism

As historians have started to recognize only in this century, Nazi Germany shared the European desire to expand and control territory but did something “unprecedented and shocking to the European mind of the early twentieth century: they tried to build their empire in Europe itself. Until the Nazi’s invasion of Austria in 1938, much of this was unclear or at least unbelieved. Indeed, it was the belief that the Nazis were only interested in a racial empire outside Europe which explains why liberal-democratic empires held favorable attitudes toward, and appeased, Nazi Germany for so long In the case of both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, fascism represented a response to mass politics (the expansion of the vote to white workers and women) that sought to reconstruct and reaffirm the nation on the basis of a culturally united populace. Fascism inverted the contemporary language of Marxist class warfare into a cultural and national warfare that could showcase the superiority of the Italian and German peoples In the Nazi’s desire for territorial expansion, constructing a German race came before economic aspirations. As Adolf Hitler wrote on the significance of the German motherland, “even if such a union were unimportant from an economic point of view; yes, even if it were harmful, it must nevertheless take place … Never will the German nation possess the moral right to engage in colonial politics until, at least, it embraces its own sons within a single state. Given that the Nazis aimed to build this brand of Germanic whiteness not in the traditional sites of the Americas, Africa, the Pacific, or Asia, but on European soil instead, they began to employ increasingly colonial tactics on both their nonwhite and non-Aryan populations after coming to power in January 1933 Indeed, what ended with the extermination camps of World War Two began with legislation to construct an Ayran/nonAryan divide. In 1933, the Nazis decreed a boycott of Jewish businesses and the removal of all Jews from the professions of law, medicine, education, and government. This was followed by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935–36, in which sexual and marital relations between Aryans and non-Aryans was outlawed and non-Aryans lost citizenship and voting rights While it is now clear that Nazi Germany wished to build an empire in Europe on the basis of a white Germanic dominance, this was not readily apparent to contemporary white Marxists who had long understood imperial ambitions to be a result of capitalism.

In the nineteenth century writings of Karl Marx, colonialism is presented in a deracialized manner. Marx’s “only sustained analysis of colonization” comes in his reading of Edward Wakefield’s 1849 text, A View of the Art of Colonization Marx admitted to being interested in this text because Wakefield “discovered not something new about the colonies, but, in the colonies, the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country. In his reading of Wakefield, Marx argues that capitalism assumed “respectable forms” in Europe whereas in the colonies “it goes naked,” revealing “the inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization. While Marx acknowledges that practices were uniquely abhorrent in the colonies, he does not attribute this to the establishment of any hierarchy by Europeans over non-Europeans. In this sense, the study of colonialism did not produce new theoretical insights for Marx nor force him to question whether capital surplus was the only rationale for colonialism. Instead, Marx’s studies tended to confirm this. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Friedrich Engels discuss colonial expansion only insofar as it was key for the development of a new commercial system. As the coauthors argue, “The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie … Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. For Marx and Engels, then, it was “The market [that] has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. While none of this is wholly inaccurate, it is striking that Marx does not at least question whether colonialism had a material and ideological impact on the colonizers and the colonized in the same way that capitalism produces a social relation between the bourgeoisie and the working class. Seventy years later, the Russian Marxist Vladimir Lenin produced another economically-driven analysis of imperialism.

In 1917, Lenin published one of his most significant texts, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Broadly, the text was an attempt to make sense of the ongoing World War and its relation to capitalism and colonialism. In seeking to understand such connections, Lenin argued that “the more capitalism is developed, the more strongly the shortage of raw materials is felt, the more intense the competition and hunt for sources or raw materials throughout the world, the more desperate the struggle for the acquisition of colonies. While valuable in accounting for the economic desires of western colonial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Lenin failed to attend to the colonial production of white dominance that had arisen in tandem with European expansion into the Western Hemisphere since the 1400s For Lenin it could only be the economic benefits of colonial expansion that “bribe[d] the upper strata of the proletariat” to support it, not the creation of whiteness and the power and prestige that came with this Whereas Marx was neutral on imperialism because he believed it would progressively lead to worldwide socialism, Lenin denounced imperialism in no uncertain terms as a means of capitalist exploitation. This made Lenin’s theory of imperialism and Soviet Russia popular with Black and Asian people at a time when no other hegemonic power criticized European empire. Still, Lenin’s theory of imperialism was no less economistic than the one Marx had produced. As Robert J. C. Young suggests, “from a [white] Marxist perspective, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism have always formed part of the more general struggle against the system of global capitalism. For these white Marxists, then, colonialism does not have its own history with unique structures, social relations, and struggles, but rather plays into the economic development of capitalism and the struggle between socialism and capitalism.

When fascism emerged onto the European scene in the subsequent two decades, white Marxists similarly viewed its rise through the lens of economics. In the words of Peter Hayes, white Marxists viewed fascism as “an expression of large-scale capitalism’s need for markets and resources. Even in the midst of the Holocaust in 1942, when the German Marxist Franz Neumann published the first thoroughly researched book on the structure and practice of Nazism, his analysis led him to conclude that Aryanization had more to do with pleasing non-Jewish capitalists than a politics and culture of antisemitism While Neumann recognized that Nazism inverted the language of class warfare into a proletarian war of the German people against a more powerful and wealthier England, he suggested that white Germans bought into it because of significant state terror, a hatred of England as the nation of the bourgeoise, and a potential belief in material gain from German expansion While Neumann did acknowledge a Nazi “doctrine of proletarian racism,” he limited this to a “device of the ruling classes” that had “failed to gain a complete hold over the masses,” not a central political structure that had induced desires through the construction of racial identities Moreover, fascism was to be opposed and prioritized by the white Left because it was the culmination of a counter-revolutionary response to communism, answering the problem of economic depression in a time of mass politics through imperial warfare and a terrorizing state apparatus to achieve it

As many historians of the Black Left have shown, it was difficult for interwar Black thinkers inside organized socialist and communist parties to advance discussions of race As Minkah Makalani notes of the Comintern in the 1920s, there was great hesitancy in expanding its economic analysis of colonialism. Lenin suggested to the Comintern’s Second World Congress in 1920 that national communist parties should “render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among dependent and underprivileged nations (for example, Ireland, the American Negroes, etc.) and in the colonies” and “assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement” in “backward states and nations. However, Lenin principally believed that imperialism would bring non-Europe into capitalism’s orbit “and thereby within the ambit of Marxism. In other words, imperialism would evidence the exploitation of capitalism and therefore encourage non-Europeans to identify with a worldwide proletariat to overthrow it. The burden was thus placed on colonized people to adapt to a Marxism often unconcerned with race, not for Marxism to adapt to the experiences and knowledge of colonized people. This was in distinction to Asian Marxists, such as M. N. Roy, who attended the preliminary hearing of the Second Congress and argued that Europe’s colonies were “the foundation of the entire system of capitalism. While Lenin did include language in his theses regarding the need to combat race hatred, race was not viewed as a systemic problem tied to the formation of capitalism

In the 1920s, Black thinkers sought to move race to the fore of Comintern discussions rather than subsume it under the rubric of the national question. For Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud, who attended the Fourth World Congress in 1922, the method for doing this was the Negro Question, which meant understanding the global significance of race and not merely those of African descent. This allowed McKay and Huiswoud to exchange ideas and interact at the Congress with delegates from Egypt, India, Japan, China, Algeria, and elsewhere. Their notion of the Negro was designed to counteract the common white communist view that Negro referred exclusively to Black people in the US. While the Congress concluded that liberation movements amongst Black people were “essential to the Proletarian Revolution and the destruction of capitalist power,” there was still no reckoning with the historical entanglement between race and capitalism and thus little understanding of anti-colonialism independent from anti-capitalism

Many scholars recognize the Black Belt Nation (BBN) Thesis as a turning point in Comintern discussions on race At the Sixth World Congress in 1928, the BBN thesis described Black Americans in the US South as an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination. The US, Cuban, and South African national communist parties all subsequently positioned their Black populations as oppressed BBN’s that were segregated within parts of their respective geographies The Comintern thereafter put funds into Black organizing through the ITUCNW and the creation of a globally circulating newspaper, Negro Worker. This was edited first by James W. Ford and for much of the early 1930s by Padmore. Despite the ability to engage in direct Black organizing through the Comintern, its Third Phase from 1928–35 continued to limit such activity because of a class-against-class approach. This mandated that struggles be approached from a strictly class analysis and encouraged communists to attack those deemed social democratic reformists or collaborators with capital. In the pages of the Negro Worker, we therefore see a consistent framing of colonialism and Black liberation around class struggle and a leveling of criticism at those who prioritized race: the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Pan-African Congresses of W.E.B. Du Bois. When it became clear that the Comintern was turning away from even a class-based critique of colonialism to center fascism in Europe, Padmore and his close ally Tiemoko Garan Kouyat,e lost hope and left the party. As Makalani argues, 1928–1935 therefore marked a period in which the Comintern “facilitated the organization of a radical black international—the ITUCNW—that ultimately provided a rationale for its most important members to leave. Given all this, it appears that the bulk of 1930s white communists had not moved past Lenin’s economic conceptualization of imperialism to accept either the primacy of race to colonialism nor the historical relation between white dominance and capitalism. This meant anti-colonialism never became a unique antagonism and preoccupation for much of the white Left in the way that we shall see it was for the Black Left.

Nazism as Aberration, Abyssinia as Foreclosure

The consolidation of Nazi Germany and the sight of street fascists in France in 1934 convinced Moscow and the European communist parties to retreat on their anti-colonialism. After fascist riots in Paris on February 6, 1934, the leader of the Communist Party in France (PCF), Maurice Thorez, approved a proposal for a pact of struggle against fascism. This was published in L’Humanit,e on July 2, and a formal agreement was signed between the PCF and the French Section of the Workers’ International, the country’s major socialist party, on July 27 Both here and in Britain from 1934 onwards, the Communist Party (CP) showed greater readiness in working with socialist parties who were supportive of European colonialism. In September 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, partnering with the same western empires who had used the institution as a “thieves’ kitchen” to obtain, govern and administer colonies An emerging Popular Front was ratified at the Comintern’s Seventh World Congress in 1935. The effects of this were immediately apparent in South Africa, where a “native republic” under the previous BBN thesis was now considered “sectarian. This was a clear sign of the Comintern’s desire to appeal to whiteness more than oppose racial-colonialism. In Britain that November the Communist Party decided not to contest the general election—instead encouraging a vote for the pro-empire Labour Party— while the PCF dropped independence (except for Syria and Lebanon) from its manifesto for the April 1936 elections in France While many on the Black Left—particularly those in the Americas—would remain and even enter communist parties throughout this period, it was clear that the Soviet’s desire to oppose colonialism on a global scale was now moot. Barnor Hesse argues that Nazism “was the cardinal political and conceptual problem for western intellectuals and political elites in Europe and the US” in the 1930s, “not western colonialism or white domination. This was as true in the Soviet Union and the Comintern as it was among western thinkers and elites

For the Black Left, the Soviet Union’s turn away from anti-colonialism was made clear when Fascist Italy invaded the East African country of Abyssinia in late 1934. While the CP had responded to the emergence of Nazi Germany and fascism within Europe as if it were an aberration that demanded concessions to the liberal-democratic empires, it did not afford the same concern to African people being colonized by a fascist state. In late 1934 Mussolini’s government began to fortify garrisons in colonial Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. This accompanied extensive publicity in Italy concerning the aggressiveness of Abyssinian Emperor Haile Selassie’s army. After fighting began in November at the border oasis of Walwal, the Italians issued an ultimatum demanding reparations and apologies from the Abyssinians for their victory over the Italians during the first ItaloEthiopian War in 1895–96. While Abyssinia had been a member of the League of Nations since 1923, this brought its people no adequate defense against Fascist Italy. The League issued ineffective economic sanctions because Britain and France were more worried about pushing Italy into an alliance with Nazi Germany. The US played its own role in the failure to support Abyssinia given it did not consent to a full trade embargo nor cooperate with diplomatic ostracization of Italy

The actions and inactions of the Soviet Union were notable for Black thinker-activists. Given the Soviet’s previous opposition to colonialism, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People questioned CP inaction in a cablegram sent to Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov on May 22, 1935. This read quite simply: “Does your anti imperialism stop at black nations. Await your reply. Responding to mounting pressure, the Soviet Union banned arms sales to Italy on September 14, 1935. However, this small act was contradicted by their increased selling of shares to Italy in oil, coal, grain, and lumber, aiding the Italian war effort. The second Italo-Ethiopian War was formally declared in October 1935, and the Italians’ victory in 1937 resulted in a six-years colonization of Abyssinia.

That these events were immediately critical for the Black Left is evidenced through the failure of the ITUCNW and The Negro Worker to respond to them. In April 1934 when Huiswoud took over the institution from Padmore, capacities had been restricted by the Comintern: ambitions to establish sub-committees in Paris, London, New York and Cape Town were scrapped, while sibling institutions were now considered independent and cut adrift. The Negro Worker continued to be distributed across the Black world for some time and produced notable articles on the Scottsboro case in Alabama, but the failure to respond to the Italian invasion convinced Huiswoud of its futility In December 1934, Huiswoud issued an appeal in the name of the ITUCNW for an active global campaign in response to the invasion, but by June 1935 he declared that the Comintern “offer all sorts of reasons why mass action cannot be developed. The Negro Worker slowed publication in 1936 and was formally liquidated along with the ITUCNW in late 1937 While Black thinkers and activists would continue to join communist and socialist parties in various parts of the world, operations within the Comintern ended. This heavily curtailed the Black Left’s ability to study and theorize alongside leading Soviets, to expand white Leftist theories of colonialism, or to put pressure on Russia to materially support anti-colonialism.

Hakim Adi suggests that the Soviet Union’s “concern with the Negro Question did not end with the dissolution of the ITUCNW … but the growing danger of fascism and world war impelled the Comintern to make this its main focus. As is clear though, any concern for the Negro Question meant little to the people of Abyssinia nor the Black world more broadly. Rather than strike out in support of a people being colonized by Italy, the Soviet Union chose to seek alliances with liberal-colonial powers. For the Black Left it was now clear that the white Left had elevated and distinguished anti-fascism from anti-colonialism.

A Black Marxist Construction of Colonialism

Historians have long documented the global Black solidarity that followed Abyssinia’s invasion by Italy in 1934, as well as the importance of Ethiopia in the Black imaginary more broadly Less emphasized is its importance in the orientation and response to fascism made by many of the Black Left in the second half of the 1930s. In 1937, the same year that Black operations within the Comintern came to a formal end, two new organizations were founded that continued but refocused much of the ITUCNW’s work. The first of these was the International Committee on African Affairs (ICAA) which operated out of Harlem from January. The ICAA was funded by Eslanda and Paul Robeson and founded in partnership with Max Yergan, all of whom met in London and spent time in Moscow during the 1930s. Prior to Yergan’s settling in the US in 1936, he had spent fourteen years based in South Africa where he became increasingly involved with the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party. While the ICAA was primarily made up of Black Americans, it was able to maintain links with South Africa through Yergan’s relationship with future president of the ANC, Alfred Xuma, as well as the Black Francophone world via author and poet, Ren,e Maran. The ICAA was initially designed to carry out policy research and build solidarity and collaboration with Africans, though it increasingly began disseminating political news on the African diaspora, centering white dominance and capitalism as constituent features of colonialism, and making demands for self-determination Much of this work took place after the ICAA was reorganized as the Council on African Affairs (CAA) in 1941, at which point it began publishing New Africa, later renamed Spotlight on Africa, through the editorship of W. Alphaeus Hunton. Major Black thinker-activists like Louise Thompson, Audley Moore and W.E.B. Du Bois all joined and became pivotal in the CAA during the 1940s

Working very much in conversation with this institution was the International African Service Bureau (IASB), formed three months later in April 1937 but operating out of London. Compared with the ICAA/CAA, the IASB could more readily trace roots to Soviet Russia given it was founded by Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, and I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson The IASB membership was made up of Black thinker-activists who had come to London from Britain’s colonies. This includes Amy Ashwood Garvey, Nnamdi Azikiwe, C.L.R. James, Akiki Nyabongo, and Louis Nwachukwu. Its executive committee also included Kouyat,e and many members of the West African Youth League (WAYL), a Black Left organization founded by Wallace-Johnson in Sierra Leone. Much of the initial coordination between the IASB and ICAA was dependent on the relationship of Padmore to the ICAA’s Ralph Bunche. Bunche had taught Padmore in the late 1920s while a Professor of Political Science at Howard University. In February 1937, Bunche arranged for both himself and Yergan to meet the progenitors of the IASB on a visit of theirs to London. At the meeting Yergan issued funding for the establishment of the IASB while Wallace-Johnson and Kenyatta joined the ICAA In addition to this connection, Paul Robeson had conversed with Kenyatta on the set of the 1935 film, Sanders of the River, while Robeson had also played the part of Toussaint L’Ouverture in C.L.R. James’ 1936 play of the same name There was thus a cultural politics embedded within the ties of the ICAA and IASB. Both institutions marked a more explicit turn toward Pan-Africanism following events in Abyssinia. The institutions offered space to theorize and discuss Africa as it related to colonialism, capitalism, and race, the building of populist organization, and the promotion of internationalism. This has been shown through scholarship on the IASB’s periodicals, which were issued sporadically throughout the Black world It was in both the CAA and IASB that Black Leftists used a racial conception of colonialism to account for the emergence of fascism in Europe.

Perhaps the earliest member of these organizations to discuss fascism in relation to colonialism was Amy Ashwood Garvey, a central thinker-activist in the early UNIA. While Ashwood Garvey is more readily seen as a Black nationalist, it is clear that she shared a fluid relation to the political and was influenced in the 1930s by the more explicit Black Marxism of James and Padmore It was at her International Afro-Restaurant in London that both her and James would form the progenitor to the IASB in 1935, the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE) At a rally of the IAFE to protest Fascist Italy’s colonial entry into Abyssinia in London’s Trafalgar Square in August that year, Ashwood Garvey declared that “we will not tolerate the invasion of Abyssinia,” which to her symbolized the continuity of “three hundred and more years of enslavement. In suggesting to the crowd in London that Italian fascism was nothing new to Black people, Ashwood Garvey submitted that “You have talked of ‘the White Man’s Burden.’ Now we are carrying yours and standing between you and fascism. Such did the rally and speech travel that when Ashwood Garvey returned to Jamaica in 1939, the Daily Gleaner named it “that memorable mass meeting” which confirmed her status as an “Internationally known lecturer and traveler. While it is difficult to track or discover whether Ashwood Garvey ever more explicitly discussed fascism, it is clear from these comments that she believed Black people understood fascism because of their experience and knowledge of enslavement. For Ashwood Garvey, the plantation was a site where the racial practices of fascism had been earlier developed.

In 1935, Du Bois gave his own analysis on fascism through his response to the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Later serving as vice-chair of the CAA in the 1940s, Du Bois had been fond of the Soviet Union since his first visit in 1926 but remained critical of communist parties and white workers more broadly In an October 1935 article, Du Bois firmly asserted that the actions of both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were attempts to compete with Britain, France, and the US in a colonial method of domination. “When Germany, Belgium and Italy saw what chances for profit were furnished the other Powers through the possession of colonies,” Du Bois writes, “they determined to construct their own colonial empires. In this sense, Du Bois draws upon the white Left’s understanding of the profit motives for colonialism and fascism. Du Bois then compliments this with an analysis of race. Drawing a link between events in Abyssinia and the entirety of modern European colonialism, Du Bois suggests that Italy’s depriving an “African people of its land” is synonymous with “the first measures taken by England, France, Portugal and Belgium” in modernity As “the black world knows,” Du Bois writes, Italian fascism represents “the last great effort of white Europe to secure the subjection of black men. For Du Bois, colonialism is an attempt to practice and reproduce capital accumulation and white dominance. France, Britain, and the US were not alarmed by Germany’s racial practices, Du Bois suggests, but only because of “the attempt of the Nazis to take possession of Austria,” a country in Europe and not the traditional site of racial-colonial practices Furthermore, Du Bois argues that white laborers “have always been just as prejudiced as white employers” and such an “attitude the action of Italy tends to confirm. Here, Du Bois is referring to the lack of anti-colonial support given by white workers in response to colonial events in Abyssinia, accounting for it through an ideology of white dominance. Du Bois therefore advanced a racial and economic history of colonialism that made fascism not an aberration but merely an extension of this preexisting colonialism. While Du Bois therefore opposed fascism, he did so on account of his wider anti-colonial knowledge and politics.

In January 1936, Ralph Bunche published an article in the Journal of Negro History that similarly located fascism within colonialism. In describing the history of colonialism, Bunch ties it to the “world’s capitalistic structure, whose heart is profit,” and which thus “seek[s] the profit markets and raw materials of these so-called backward areas. Aware of this history in relation to the events he is living through, Bunche argues that it is “of deep significance that the Fascist or semi-Fascist states, as Italy, Germany and Japan, are all eagerly seeking colonial conquests. This is because, Bunche argues, the “activities of these nations would seem to be nothing less than the logical outcome” of a colonial system “driven by internal distress to secure fields of expansion or confront utter disaster. It should be no surprise that “under such conditions,” Bunche writes, fascist powers “have but slight opportunity and even less reason to regard the welfare and rights of weaker peoples who stand in their way. Here, Bunche conforms largely with Marx and Lenin’s economic conception of colonialism. However, Bunche clearly theorizes a racial element when asserting that colonialism “had conquered and subjected to systematic and ruthless exploitation virtually all of the darker populations of the earth. In creating such a racial-colonial hierarchy, Bunche argues the French now “believe in the superiority of their culture,” while the British believe so much in their cultural superiority that “they have never presumed that primitive people could ever develop the capacity to absorb it. Much like Du Bois, then, Bunche argues that fascism extended preexisting colonial-racial ideas and practices. “The doctrine of Fascism,” Bunche says, “with its extreme jingoism, its exaggerated exaltation of the state and its comic-opera glorification of race, has given a new and greater impetus to the policy of world imperialism. Moreover, Bunche sees the roots of fascism in a much longer colonial history that had produced and reproduced capital accumulation and white dominance. This ensured Bunche maintained an anti-colonial politics in the face of emerging fascism.

In February 1936, Max Yergan vocalized similar views on colonialism and fascism through a linking of South Africa to Abyssinia. While Yergan’s politics would later be transformed, he was committed in this moment to a Black Marxist analysis of colonialism Yergan made this clear at the highly attended first gathering of the National Negro Congress (NNC) in February 1936. The NNC was an important Popular Front organization that sought to focus upon Black employment, workers’ rights, and racial discrimination in the US while maintaining an anti-fascist outlook. However, the first meeting of the NNC was noteworthy “for balancing national and international issues” given the spotlight was still very much on Abyssinia Yergan strove to contextualize this moment through the consciousness and knowledge he had gained in South Africa. Standing at the podium, Yergan argued that “through the attack on” Abyssinia, “we are becoming aware of the aggressive nature of Fascism, and of the necessity for an intelligent, organized resistance. Despite this, Yergan argued, “Fascism is the outgrowth of a larger force—imperialism. Yergan then offered a definition:

Imperialism, then, means annexation of land and confiscation of labor. In the third place, it destroys the culture—the basic social fabric of the people’s life. In South Africa, through the color laws, Africans are kept out of many phases of skilled labor and on the lowest level, industrially. Laws limiting freedom of assembly make it difficult for them to organize to defend themselves

Yergan suggests here that fascism grew out of the colonization of land, labor, and culture in the non-European world, thus constituting practices in the economic, social, and cultural realms which governments such as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy deployed in Europe. While Yergan notes explicitly that the attack on Abyssinia enabled his audience to become “aware of the aggressive nature of Fascism,” he suggests that otherwise fascism is not novel Yergan therefore pressured his audience to remain committed to an expansive anti-colonialism that should encompass but not focus exclusively on anti-fascism.

In the IASB’s periodical International African Opinion, the British Independent Labor Party’s (ILP) New Leader, and articles in the US Black press, IASB members expanded upon and repeatedly made similar arguments over the course of the late 1930s and early 40s. Padmore came up with perhaps the most incisive term, “Colonial Fascism,” to articulate his argument that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had “borrowed lock, stock, and barrel” from the liberal-democratic empires Writing directly to those living in the British, French, Belgian and Portuguese colonies, Padmore reminded them that such ostensibly liberal powers “segregate you in your own country, pen you in reserves and locations like cattle, make you carry passes like common criminals, and then pay you starvation wages. In commenting specifically upon the colonial situation in Trinidad in 1938, Padmore argued that Britain used the same methods as the Nazis: “public open-air meetings are being prohibited; newspaper editors are threatened with prosecution; British troops have been landed to garrison the industrial centers of the island; [and] the sum of $51,000 has been voted for the purpose of arming a special middle-class volunteer force in order to protect vested interests. Padmore made these arguments to explicitly counteract the whiteness of “the Communist, the Socialist, [and] the Liberal,” who all “smugly declared” that such things “could only happen in a Fascist country. Much like the earlier Black thinkers we have analyzed, it was Padmore’s understanding of the racial elements of colonialism that made his anti-colonialism more theoretically expansive and more practically staunch than that of the Soviet Union. This is evidenced best in his 1936 text, How Britain Rules Africa, where Padmore writes,

Apart from the economic aspect of the East African problem which we admit is fundamental, there is also the racial aspect of the question which no serious student of African affairs can disregard. There is a definite fascist mentality among European settlers in Kenya. This mentality clearly expresses itself in their Weltanschauung—or outlook on the Native question. Here is how Captain W. Hickins, sums it up:

Settlers are conscious and proud of being quite distinct from the Natives. They are members of the dominant white race, and they regard themselves not only racially, but individually as superior, socially, economically and mentally to all Blacks

More than anyone else, Padmore continually linked his understanding of racial-fascism to racial-colonialism, allowing his anti-fascism to stem from a much broader politics of anti-colonialism.

Far from limiting this argument to their own publications, the IASB’s members would frequently make such statements at meetings of the ILP and British Communist Party, as well as at rallies in London’s Trafalgar Square. At one such demonstration on May 8, 1938, the Metropolitan Police reported that Padmore’s speech “alleged that concentrations camps were first erected by British Imperialists. Kenyatta apparently followed up by suggesting “it was from the methods employed by the British government in her colonies that Hitler and Mussolini had learnt their tyrannical form of dictatorship. Explicitly connecting fascism to the contemporary rebellions in the Caribbean and the suppression of the WAYL, placards from a later demonstration on June 26 read “Jamaica strikers versus fascism” and “Abolish Fascist methods in the Colonies. Whenever and wherever they could, IASB members counteracted the Comintern’s division of the world into the “good, peace-loving powers (Britain, France and America)” and the “bad, warlike” ones (Germany, Italy and Japan) By suggesting that colonial history was necessary to theorize in world historical terms, the Black Left returned to the argument first presented by Ashwood Garvey: that Europeans and the Left in particular “cannot beat back fascism at home and at the same time continue to be indifferent” to its colonial deployment outside Europe While such an argument did change the thought and action of some white Leftists, these were exceptions to the norm Moreover, a number of Black Marxists in the 1930s used their knowledge of race and capitalism in the colonies to demand that anti-fascism be wrapped into a more expansive anti-colonialism. The difficulty of convincing white Leftists of this argument was proven during the Spanish Civil War.

This Ain’t Ethiopia, But It’ll Do

The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 symbolized the battle between fascists and Leftists that framed much of the Left’s worldview in the late 1930s. Activists came from across the world to fight with the Leftist Republican government against Francisco Franco’s Nationalists, who were militarily backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Britain and the US remained formally neutral because of their fears of Nazi retaliation. While the Soviet Union had proved incapable of supporting Abyssinia in their anti-colonial war with Fascist Italy, the Comintern sponsored thirty-five thousand volunteers to fight alongside the Spanish Republicans. This was in addition to Soviet propaganda in support of the Republicans

The Black Left were quick to point out this contradiction of the white Left. The IASB began “querying the ways in which anti-Nazi and anti-fascist rhetoric was turned into an alibi, a talisman to obscure colonialism’s own depredations. The IASB’s influence on a few white anti-colonial agitators was shown when Dinah Stock, who at this time shared an apartment with Kenyatta in London, questioned in New Leader: “How is it that people who will demonstrate in tens of thousands to “save Austria,” who will send the Chinese all the money they can spare and more, who will even fight and die for the Spanish workers, remain so deaf and inattentive when Indians claim liberty or Africans demand democratic equality with whites? For the Black Left, there could be no such separation of anti-fascism from anti-colonialism. As well as outwardly supporting the Republicans in their media outlets, the Black Left sent between eighty and two-hundred volunteers to fight on behalf of the Republicans. In doing so, Black volunteers made it clear that they supported the Spanish Republicans as an extension of their anticolonial support for Abyssinia. As the Black volunteer Oscar Hunter notably said, “I wanted to go to Ethiopia and fight Mussolini … This ain’t Ethiopia, but it’ll do.

The Spanish Civil War was particularly formative for Black American women who were emergent in the Black Left. This includes Louise Thompson, Salaria Kee and Thyra Edwards. Kee was supposedly the only Black woman on the battlefield in Spain, volunteering as a nurse after graduating from Harlem Hospital Having previously raised funds in Harlem for medical supplies to be sent to Abyssinia, Kee ventured to Spain in March 1937 and was interviewed on numerous occasions by Thompson and Edwards. The latter pair made the trip to Spain as part of their work for the CP-backed International Workers Order and the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, respectively. While in Europe, Thompson and Edwards attended the Anti-Imperialist International Congress in Paris in 1937, connecting with fellow Black Leftists Hermina Dumont and Otto Huiswoud, Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, and Nicol,as Guill,en

Edwards, Thompson, and Hughes wrote numerous articles on their travels for the US Black press. In one of Edwards’ reports for the Pittsburgh Courier, Kee was interviewed and quoted as saying “We Negroes fighting in Spain are luckier than you who are left in America. Here we can strike back at the forces of reaction. Linking fascism not only to the contemporary US but also to racial slavery, it was submitted in another article that “Miss Kee … is one of those who understand that Fascism and slavery and jim-crow are one and the same thing. Consistently naming Abyssinia in relation to such fascism, Edwards wrote in a letter to congressman Arthur Mitchell in May 1938 that “Those of us who witnessed with horror Italy’s aggression in Ethiopia cannot but be deeply moved at the extension of this brutal policy in relation to Spain. Thompson had made a similar connection via shortwave radio back to the US in August 1937, explaining that she shared Spanish “feeling against the Italian fascism … because we in America felt keenly the devastation by the same forces of Ethiopia. Thompson and Kee therefore understood the racial dimensions of colonialism and fascism, and remained committed anti-fascists on account of their wider conception and politics of anti-colonialism. As Edwards noted in a 1937 press release sent to the Associated Negro Press, “the Spanish people [just] happen to be symbolic of all the rest of us.

The fracture on the Left between anti-colonialism and anti-fascism was deeply evidenced on the question of Republican Spain’s colony in Morocco. The Moroccans, racialized as Moors, were colonially carved up and governed by Spain and France at this time. Thousands of Moroccans chose to fight for the Nationalists because of Franco’s promise to consider self-government and local teaching in Arabic While self-government was a ruse, it was pointed out by the IASB that “the Spanish [Republican] Government does not even make these lying promises. It has nothing to offer the Moors. Not by promising, but by definitively proclaiming the independence of Spanish Morocco, it could have turned the Blacks [sic] against Franco. When Thrya Edwards raised this same point in an interview conducted with a Republican adviser in Spain, the “Moorish question” was dismissed as “in no respect a race question. The adviser further claimed that while the Spanish Republicans were willing in theory to grant Moroccans selfgovernment, the Republicans had to remain loyal to a colonial France that would not countenance this. Given that Morocco’s anti-colonial activists viewed both French and Spanish Morocco as one single territory, no self-rule could be offered As one of the leading Moroccan colonial activists, Abd el Khaleq Torres, said in August 1936, “The real problem concerns France, which is seeking to establish itself permanently in the country, even with the Popular Front in power. There is no hope of seeing it change its colonial policy. With the Spanish Republicans keen to maintain support of a French government who secretly supplied aircraft during the early parts of the war and with the Soviet Union wanting to avoid antagonizing French colonialism, the white Left muted its anti-colonialism in favor of confronting fascism in Europe The Black Left’s racial conception of colonialism therefore went unheard by the Soviet Union, and with it the opportunity for a global anti-colonial Leftist politics that understood the historical ties between the white dominance of colonialism and the white dominance of fascism.

Conclusion

This article has attempted to better evidence and understand the colonial fracture on the 1930s Left historicized previously by Minkah Makalani In curtailing the Comintern’s commitments to the Negro, Colonial, and National Questions, the rise of fascism marked not only the end of a Black Left within the Comintern, but more critically, a white neglect of the Black Left’s more expansive political and intellectual worldview that emanated from their economic and racial conception of colonialism. Black Marxism’s centering of colonialism and the historical practices and beliefs it had wrought meant that its actors were able to formulate a critique of fascism while maintaining opposition to colonial oppression in Abyssinia, Morocco, the US, Trinidad, and elsewhere. Far from denying the impact of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, the Black Left opposed fascism within their wider anti-colonialism, arguing that fascist practices had emerged out of a centuries-old racial-colonialism. The interwar Black Left therefore expanded a white Left economic conception of colonialism through a racial historicization and theory of colonialism, widening the spatial and temporal horizons upon which to understand the emergence of fascism and remain committed to anti-colonialism.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Sherwin K. Bryant and Barnor Hesse for their persistent and critical feedback in the making of this article. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of Souls for their detailed comments, particularly in helping me clarify and organize the argument.