The achievement of African-American former Communist Harold Cruse has become a reference point for a large measure of scholarship addressing Black Marxism and the communion between African-American and Jewish American leftists from the 1920s through the 1960s. Yet Cruse's work is marred by a lack of accountable documentation, allegations of offensive group behavior by Jews and Afro-Caribbeans, and the claim that Black Communist cultural workers produced art that was "integrationist" and middle class. The authority of Cruse's work stems from its (...) anger about the failure of an adequate response to the cultural consequences of racism in the United States, which arises out of his personal experiences with African-American Communist writers of the post-World War II years. Therefore, an alternative means of appraising Cruse's claims is by placing them in the context of the imaginative work of other Black radicals — Chester Himes, Alice Childress, John O. Killens—who address similar issues, and whose creative writings dispute Cruse's characterizations. (shrink)

The relevance of Marx’s theory of value and his ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ to the analysis of the financial crisis of 2007–8 and the ensuing global slump is affirmed. The hypertrophic growth of unproductive constant capital, including the wages of ‘socially necessary’ unproductive labour and tax revenues, is identified as an important manifestation of an historical-structural crisis of capitalism, alongside the increasing weight of fictitious capital and the proliferation of fictitious profits in the (...) lead-up to the financial crisis. These phenomena have obscured the deepest roots of the global slump in the long-term profitability problems of productive capital – that is, in a crisis of surplus-value production. With these considerations taken into account, a better empirical assessment of trends in the composition of capital becomes possible, and with it a more accurate understanding of the impact of the ongoing displacement of living labour from production on the average rate of profit and the future of US and global capitalism. (shrink)

Combining knowledge of social policy and practice with insights from poststructural and feminist theory, the text demonstrates how democratic citizens and the political are continually recreated.

For nearly a decade American Communists generally ignored the problems of African Americans, much as Socialists had done. The Comintern's involvement with national liberation movements and the activism of some "new Negro" militants put some pressure on the American Party to move into this area. But this did not challenge the Party's basic focus on the working class, against which all else was seen as a diversion. In 1928 the 6th Congress of the Comintern resolved that the Negro population of (...) the "black belt" was a subject nation, thus capable of engendering a "national revolutionary movement," and ordered the American Party to give work on the Negro question high priority. The Party eventually found in the "Scottsboro Case" an issue that made the situation of African Americans a matter of international concern for the first time since the Civil War, and locked it into the American radical/liberal political agenda. The first part of this article deals with the situation before the 6th Congress; the second part with the Resolution and its consequences. (shrink)

For nearly a decade American Communists generally ignored the problems of African Americans, much as Socialists had done. The Comintern's involvement with national liberation movements and the activism of some "new Negro" militants put some pressure on the American Party to move into this area. But this did not challenge the Party's basic focus on the working class, against which all else was seen as a diversion. In 1928 the 6th Congress of the Comintern resolved that the Negro population of (...) the "black belt" was a subject nation, thus capable of engendering a "national revolutionary movement," and ordered the American Party to give work on the Negro question high priority. The Party eventually found in the "Scottsboro Case" an issue that made the situation of African Americans a matter of international concern for the first time since the Civil War, and locked it into the American radical/liberal political agenda. The first part of this article dealt with the situation before the 6th Congress; the present part examines the Resolution and its consequences. (shrink)