Clark Atlanta University

Racial Dialectics: The Aptheker-Myrdal School Controversy Author(s): Ernest Kaiser Source: Phylon (1940-1956), Vol. 9, No. 4 (4th Qtr., 1948), pp. 295-302 Published by: Clark Atlanta University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/271955 . Accessed: 22/06/2013 14:52
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PHYLON
FOURTH QUARTER
By ERNEST KAISER

VOL. IX, NO. 4

RACIAL DIALECTICS The Aptheker-MyrdalSchool Controversy

HE Aptheker-Myrdal school controversy is an inevitable development from what has gone on before in liberal and leftist politics and literature. This polemicizing is gratifying to one who has written letters to the Daily Worker and the now defunct New Masses on the same issues which are now being discussed. These letters were written both before and after the Communist war line changed as a result of the Duclos article and the subsequent discussion. In these letters I attempted to discuss the left's reviews and criticisms of Wright's Black Boy, the chauvinistic and stereotyped series of articles that Richard O. Boyer, a Communist journalist, wrote on Duke Ellington for the New Yorker magazine in 1945, and the failure up to that time of New Masses and the Daily Worker to review or deal in any way with Myrdal's An American Dilemma, or Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis. None of these letters was ever published. The Myrdal School consists of J. C. St. Clair Drake, Horace R. Cayton, Richard Wright, Gunnar Myrdal and other scholars and writers both Negro and white. They constitute the liberal school of thought on the Negro question. The current Aptheker-Myrdal school controversy is important for two reasons: first, it gives us an opportunity to clear up the ideological confusion that exists on the Negro question in America; and second, it enables us to see the Negro question in perspective, to understand more thoroughly the egregious mistakes of the past and to correct and avoid these mistakes in the present and future. Let us take up some of the issues that have been broached. One need not accept the idealistic ideology of Myrdal, Cayton and others of the school, but we must admit that they are correct when they say that Aptheker over-simplifies the Negro question, that it is much more complex than he admits. There is a dilemma for American whites insofar as the Negro question is concerned. The racial attitudes of American whites are a part of their psychology now. Their prejudices are deeply 295

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ingrained, stemming from a long anti-Negro tradition and culture. In the Chicago Defender of July 12, 1946, there appeared an interview with the Soviet writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, by Thyra Edwards and Murray Gitlin after Ehrenburg's tour of the South. In this interview Ehrenburg is quoted as saying that here in America racism is in the hearts of the people. And he says that racism in the hearts of the people is much worse than having racism in the law. Here Ehrenburg is discussing the fascists unconscious in America. A little later in one of his Izvestia articles reprinted in Harper's (December, 1946), Ehrenburg summed up the race question in America in these words: I am convinced that in the end racialism will be overthrown in America; but it must be understood that this disease has penetrated deeply into the mind of the average American. I did not meet a single white in the South who was not contaminated with racialism. One of the most fervent opponents of the slave owners admitted to me in a frank and intimate conversation: "Yes, I defend the Negroes, but just the same, for me these are not people. I was playing yesterday with our Negro maid's child and found myself thinking that I was playing, not with a child, but with a nice puppy." Racialism has infected even the persecuted; I met Negro anti-Semites and Jews convinced of the superiority of whites over blacks. In another newspaper article written while in America, Ehrenburg pointed out that Russian intellectuals before the Revolution of 1917 never swallowed anti-Semitism even though the Russian masses fell for it. But he said that here in America the intellectuals have swallowed racism along with the American masses. Communist Party pronunciamentos and speeches have stated again and again in no uncertain terms that white chauvinism is something that must be resolutely fought without and especially within the Party. But Aptheker says with finality that a psychological dilemma or white chauvinism is no problem at all for white Americans who believe in democracy and full rights for all people, and who presumably understand the Marxist view of the Negro question. However, William Z. Foster had this to say in Political Affairs (June, 1946): We must not brush aside the question of race, as we have done too often in the past. On the contrary, we must fully evaluate the role racial prejudice plays in the oppression of the Negro people and show its relation to the larger, more basic political question of the national oppression of the Negro people. In this connection, Oliver C. Cox's chapter on Myrdal in Caste, Class, and Race represents a distinct improvement over Aptheker's critique of Myrdal. Cox shows that Myrdal has no clear definitions for the sociological concepts he employs such as caste, class and race prejudice, and that Myrdal's whole approach to the Negro problem in America is idealistic, abstract and psychological. Cox not only gives the economic, political-class interpretation of race relations as fundamental but admits

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that social ideologies are significant although subsidiary factors. However, even Cox writes off the psychological or race prejudice factor emphasized by Myrdal as nothing but a trick or divisive tactic that can be stepped up or minimized among poor whites and Negroes at will by the ruling class - psychology having no appreciable autonomy of its own even after people have been thoroughly conditioned. White chauvinism will be mitigated and finally dealt a death blow by the long and intensive class struggle in America. But some anti-Negro feeling will be carried over into socialism just as some anti-Semitism was carried over into socialism in the Soviet Union. This was pointed up and explained very clearly by Robert Thompson in a speech which was published in Political Affairs (February, 1947). Thompson's statements on white chauvinism within and without the Communist Party should be studied carefully by everyone interested in the Negro question. For it is incorrect to say, as Aptheker does, that the rich in America are prejudiced-drenched while the poor are virtually free of prejudice. The poor whites, stripped of everything and reduced to poverty, cling to their white skins, straight hair and the anti-Negro prejudice that goes with these as a drowning man clings to a proffered life-line. But if Marxism has any validity, Negro and white workers are driven together by an oppressive capitalist system. Their common misery and oppression force them to stop fighting each other in a race war fomented by the rich American rulers and band themselves together against their common enemy - the overlords and bosses of America. And so we find in Detroit both gruesome, bitter race riots and Negroes and whites organized in the powerful U. A. W. Union. So much for the psychology of whites. In considering the psychology of Negroes in his critique of MyrdalThe Negro People in America, Aptheker, while seeming to admit that the social environment conditions people and determines their psychology, denies that the Negroes' bad, ghetto social environment has had any appreciable deleterious effect upon their psychology. Aptheker points to intelligence tests in which when environmental conditions were approximately the same, the scores of Negroes equalled and sometimes surpassed those of whites. But that is exactly the rub. The environmental conditions of Negroes and whites are not the same. Hence the deficiencies. Aptheker also points to limited studies which show that Negro secondary and college students have more emotional stability than comparable white students! Thus, in addition to flying in the face of all of modern scientific psychology, Aptheker falls over backward into social Darwinism. For if Negroes, in their admittedly bad environment, show more emotional stability generally than whites; if there isn't an iota of truth in the Negro stereotypes; if the Negroes' basic integrity remains untouched; and if there isn't proportionally an even larger lumpen-proletariat among the Negro people than among the whites, then

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the Negroes' terrible living conditions really make them stronger and better than the whites as the social Darwinists say, and there is no point in changing the social conditions under which Negroes live and die. And Negro stereotypes are non-experiential abstractions that can be easily eradicated. However, the Negro people are not destroyed completely by industrial capitalism and southern share-cropping as Wright (introduction to Black Metropolis), Cayton ("The Psychological Approach to Race Relations," Reed College Bulletin, Nov., 1946) and others think. On the contrary, the Negro proletariat and peasantry learn how to struggle with whites against agrarian-industrial capitalist oppression. But agrarianism-industrialism under capitalism takes a frightful toll of the Negro people, and the psychological casualties are high. Aptheker describes the Negro people generally as the beautiful people - as little angels even under terrific oppression. His characterization is similar in some respects to that in Wright's 12 Million Black Voicesa book quite different from Wright's other books. But Negroes are human, all too human. They are maimed by oppression both materially and psychologically. All of them do not run amuck, for they fall into various patterns of partial adjustment to segregation and suppression. They become religious, belligerent, servile or just militant. But if all whites are psychologically sick on the race question, having been driven into this racial sickness as the psychiatrists Erich Fromm and Karen Horney have shown, by the competitiveness, contradictions, isolation and insecurity of American capitalist society, all Negroes are surely neurotic and frustrated no end under their double oppression as exploited workers and farmers under capitalism and as Negroes jim-crowed and segregated. If this is not true, then Negroes are not really human beings. They are real slaves. Of course, the other alternative is that the oppression of Negroes isn't as bad as it has been described. But running like a thread through all of Aptheker's writings is the idea that the common people, both Negro and white are psychologically simple. Only the upper class and the highly educated are psychologically complex. Here are both an idealization of the common people and a condescension to them - attitudes typical of middle-class liberals. Historically, Aptheker is also superficial and liberalistic when he states that Negro slaves revolted merely because they were human beings with "developed reasoning faculties" and "the glorious urge to improve themselves and their environment." This is un-Marxian and liberal in tone. It doesn't explain the system of slavery as a Marxist should. The Negro slaves' fight for life was a class struggle waged by them against their masters. The slaves were forced to struggle against the intolerable, inhuman conditions in which slavery kept them. Aptheker is not unique in failing to deal adequately with psychology.

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Some Negro leftist and Communist writers ignore and refuse to deal with Negro psychology thus revealing their middle-class hangovers. W. E. B. DuBois, in his New York Herald Tribune review of Wright's Black Boy and in his newspaper columns and magazine articles reprimanding ill-mannered, drunken Negroes, Doxey Wilkerson in his introduction to Aptheker's The Negro People in America and Lloyd Brown, a Negro editor of Masses and Mainstream, in his lecture on the Negro character in American Literature to Contemporary Writers are all examples of this failure to deal with Negro psychology. Aptheker and these Negro writers think that they can eschew psychology and close the psychological gap between Negroes and whites by saying that there is no difference and letting it go at that. But we must recognize the psychological differences between Negroes and whites and deal with them before we can hope to close the gap. Furthermore, the Negro people are supposed to constitute a developing nation having, among other characteristics, a common psychology which stems from their common history and culture. How can Communist writers embrace the notion of the developing nationhood of the Negro people and yet at the same time refuse to admit that Negro psychology is unique and different from that of the whites? A Marxist cannot limit himself merely to completing and deepening the economic explanation of problems and issues begun by present-day and erstwhile liberal writers such as Charles A. Beard, Leo P. Crespi, Louis Hacker, Lewis Corey and others. While this broadening of economic materialism or vulgar economic determinism is an important and necessary task, it is not enough for a real Marxist or dialectical materialist. In addition, the Marxian writer must come to grips with what Engels called "the various elements of the superstructure" (letter to J. Block, September 21, 1890) and "proceed," as Plekhanov said, "from economics to social psychology." (The Materialist Conception of History). Only in this way can a problem be dealt with adequately in its complete configuration. This should be elementary to Marxists. Erich Fromm's Escape From Freedom attempts to deal with "the role which psychological factors play as active forces in the social process" as well as with "the problem of the interaction of psychological, economic, and ideological factors in the social process." None of these factors can be overlooked or ignored any longer by serious Marxists. The omission by would-be Marxists of social psychology is even more reprehensible when we consider the great strides that have been made in this field by sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists who have synthesized and integrated the findings and data of their three fields. Over-simplification and sanguineness on the Negro question led Communists during the war to blame all anti-Negro riots and the like on fifth column agents in this country. The Harlem riot, a different kind of

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riot, became, in the words of Michael Gold, a hoodlum-led Negro program against the Jewish shopkeepers of Harlem! Even liberals had better understanding of the different types of riots. But Communists led by Browder refused to face the complex and contradictory truth of the war situation. Samuel Sillen's "Richard Wright in Retreat" piece in New Masses (Aug. 29, 1944) was erroneous and left much to be desired. Here Sillen attempted to deal with the first of two Atlantic magazine articles (Aug.Sept., 1944) by Wright entitled --"I tried to be a Communist," an interview with Wright published in the New York Herald Tribune and Wright's novelette - "The Man Who Lived Underground" in the anthology Cross-Section for 1944. Wright in his tortured and confused way had a strong point against Communists during the war when he stated that Communists had suffered a lamentable regression on the Negro question. Sillen retaliated by quoting Browder's "Teheran" and accusing Wright of retreating. But who was in retreat? Both were partially correct. But both were also wide of the mark. Sillen should admit his error (which I have not seen in print) since he is still a Communist just as Aptheker has admitted that American Communist policy on the Negro question during the war left much to be desired and was pushed frequently far to excess (New Masses, July 23, 1946). Similarly, Harry Politt, the British Communist, has admitted that his party erred during the imperialist phase of World War II. American Communists have yet to do this clearly although all of these questions came up during the summer of 1945 when Browderism was being analyzed and discarded. However, I think that these mistakes were inadequately dealt with at that time and too quickly forgotten. The far-reaching, disastrous errors of revisionism are important if the Party is to prevent errors both during the present period and in the future. It must deal seriously with these errors and not go over them superficially and quickly push on to other things. Aptheker says that during the war, Communists decided that it was preferable to diminish the pressure for immediate full equality for Negroes lest this might interfere with the war effort. He then admits the errors and excesses (New Masses, July 23, 1946). But this is not the way the Negro problem was formulated during the war. The war writings of Communists will document my thesis here to the hilt. On the contrary, as Browder formulated it, Communists were going along with Roosevelt and the Negro-oppressing bourgeoisie because they knew that the American bourgeoisie, in order to win the war, would be forced to abolish jim-crow in the armed services and really liberate the Negro people in the process of winning the war. Browder said that the Negro people had exercised their right of self-determination and had decided to integrate with the rest of the American people. Communist policy on

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the Negro question was not stated in the light of expedient choice, as Aptheker says, but rather as the dialectics of this special anti-fascist war! Furthermore, capitalists were becoming enlightened and would see the democratic light with Roosevelt - see the necessity of liberating Negroes in order to preserve capitalism and their hegemony in American society. No preference was stated at all. No one thought of Communist war policy as pragmatic and expedient, and Communist leaders urged party members to read Lenin if only for flexibility of thought. No one discussed the relationship between capitalism and the exploitation and subjugation of Negroes. All of this was conveniently forgotten by Communist thinkers and scholars who should have known better. Incidentally, Aptheker's naive and schoolboyish (or is it sophistical?) insistence (both in the now defunct New Masses and in his critical book) upon Webster's bourgeois dictionary as the final authority for word definitions and meanings is in poor contrast to Drake and Cayton's approach to and caution against common sense and dictionary definitions of words as completely definitive and accurate in the social sciences. Of course, social scientists who break with Webster don't necessarily arrive at the full truth and meaning of things. However, Soviet linguists and psychologists as well as American Marxists Margaret Schlauch and V. J. McGill have pointed out that while the problem of meaning involves a psychological factor, meaning is basically determined by the socialhistorical context or milieu at any given time. And since this socialhistorical milieu is dynamic and constantly shifting and changing to a greater or lesser degree thus making also for psychological change, it is clear that semantic and linguistic changes are occurring all the time. On the Myrdal school side, Cayton and Drake attempt an almost complete separation of psychology from sociology (New Masses, July 23, 1946) instead of considering psychology as a part of the sociological field, which it most certainly is. The psychoanalytical articles in New Masses (Oct. 2, 9, 30- Nov. 6, 1945- Jan. 8, 22, 1946) by Drs. Joseph Wortis and J. B. Furst plus the psychological books by Fromm and Horney are sufficient proof of this. How do people get the way they are? Is the psychological pattern instinctual or a result of social conditioning? The personality pattern is not immutable human nature at all. It is almost completely the complex end-product of all of the shaping social influences - economic and superstructural (i.e., cultural). That is why philosophic materialists and sociologists are correct when they insist upon thorough social change in the long run knowing that psychological change will follow inevitably in its wake. That is why Aptheker is basically correct in emphasizing socialism as the eventual way out of the capitalist morass and jungle of jim-crow, cruelty, cynicism and exploitation of workers, Negro and white. This solution to the Negro problem should be of great interest to sociologist Cayton and anthropologist

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Drake unless they are suffering from professional myopia and can't see the forest for the trees. Myrdal and his disciples may offer idealistic, moral, psychological theses on the Negro question in America; and Aptheker, Wilkerson and other near-Marxists may offer socio-economic antitheses in rebuttal. But a real Marxist or dialectical materialist who attempts to deal with the American Negro question must try to see the problem in all of its ramifications and complexities. He must see the whole configuration of the Negro problem in the United States- the socio-economic basis and the and ideological. In a superstructural rationalizations -psychological word, the real Marxist must strive to achieve a synthesis of all of the facets and factors of the American Negro problem giving each its proper importance. This exploratory article may be considered as notes toward such an integration.

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