Perm do both - only centralizing black radicalism solves, critiques of cultural tactics or identity focus like the alternative pathologize black spiritual deviance and destroys the alt’s praxis.

While the ABB would soon be absorbed by the CPUSA, as of 1919 its program still represented the blend of black nationalism, anticolonialism, and economic radicalism that marks the classic black synthesis of the third path. Note that the African Blood Brotherhood’s program and synthetic ideology predates Du Bois and other mid-twentieth-century black radical leftists. They, along with Hubert Harrison and the Liberty League, were early pioneers in developing the third path. Like the Liberty League, which in its “Declaration of Princi- ples” called for “the securing of absolutely equal rights” (Perry 2009, 291), the ABB emphasized at the beginning of its program the need for both black liberation (“a liberated race”) and full equality (“absolute race equality”). In Briggs’s view black libera- tion was the only feasible alternative, especially at a time when the social democrats of the Socialist Party had abandoned their work on race and had a leadership who swore to maintain, in their own words, “white supremacy.” As Solomon argues, Briggs was also deeply committed to the principle of self-determination for peoples of African descent. Like Garvey, he believed that Africans, both in Africa and throughout the diaspora, had not only the right but the duty to govern themselves (Solomon 1997). Briggs was suspicious of the Socialist Party and more generally of the social democracy of the Second International; as late as 1921 the ABB still was promoting a program that had elements of black national- ism even as the organization’s leadership was moving closer to the representatives of Lenin’s revolution within the United States (Solomon 1997). Eventually Briggs joined the Communist Party for reasons similar to Haywood’s. As Briggs himself put it: “I en- tered simply because the party had a program, even [though] not written, . . . on the Negro field; because of the solution of the na- tional question in the Soviet Union, and because I was confident that the American party in time would take its lead on that ques- tion from its Soviet party, which is what it eventually did” (Dawson 2001, 182). A significant aspect of Briggs’s comment, one borne out by the historical record, is his lack of confidence in the Ameri- can communists. He knew well that American socialism, whether of the Socialist Party type or the Leninist variety, was at best skep- tical of how important the struggle for racial justice, let alone black liberation, would be to radical organizing in the United States. Briggs was counting on the international communist movement to force the American party to treat blacks’ struggle as one with revo- lutionary potential in its own right. As noted earlier, during this period some of the most savage pogroms ever launched were directed against black communities. Many blacks were extraordinarily angry—including black veter- ans of World War I—and were at a point at which militant action seemed preferable to doing nothing. Blacks were also looking for an organizational base and allies. The only two games in town for black radicals (besides the small ABB) were the CPUSA and Gar- vey’s UNIA. As would happen to a later generation, many of these early and critical black Marxists eventually would be pushed out of the organizational mainstream of the left precisely because of their views on black liberation and the national question, and spe- cifically their belief that the black struggle represented a revolu- tionary effort in its own right. Richard Rorty argued, “The Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was of very little importance to the political life of our country” (Rorty 1998, 44). That is certainly a plausible argument for American politics as a whole from 1930 on, but it does not capture the reality of black politics between the 1920s and 1940—until the CPUSA decided to sacrifice much of its good- will among African Americans and its hard-won gains to the Soviet- mandated false unity that emphasized working with racist and liberal whites who were offended by the occasionally racially militant practices of the CPUSA. Even though black leftists were increasingly at odds with the party over its stance toward orga- nizing blacks, the CPUSA remained the main organizational form that black leftists worked within during this period. While not the only Marxist influence on black radicalism, the CPUSA did have hegemonic organizational influence on the black left before World War II. The third path was not followed, and the Socialist Party (and social democrats more generally) provided little real competition for black support even during the early years of the CPUSA. Communist Party work among blacks had stagnated during the 1920s due to the CPUSA’s white-dominated leadership crack-ing down on organizing aimed at blacks. The dominant faction of the white leadership furiously opposed special status for Afri- can Americans or work among African Americans. Many in the leadership did not see the black movement as central to leftist or- ganizing, let alone as a revolutionary movement in its own right. Black cadres argued about the best way to raise the prominence of work among blacks, with Haywood and Briggs embracing a “black nation” thesis, and others, including Haywood’s brother, disagreeing. In 1922 black communists were attacked by the head of the Workers Party (the CPUSA’s precursor) for protesting separate seating for black delegates to a Farmer-Labor Party con- vention in Chicago. Indeed, some Virginia blacks were purged for lacking the “qualifications” to be communists—they were consid- ered too petty bourgeois, since they kept raising the question of racism within working-class organizations and meetings, and there- fore were guilty of dividing the working class. It was even rec- ommended that the entire “colored branch be dismissed” (Harris 1989, 148). As early as 1924, just as the party was taking its mod- ern form, the main leadership faction refused to publicly demand that its members support full equality for blacks within the labor movement (Solomon 1997). Further, the Harlem branch was con- sidered to be a den of nationalists—much the way the Socialist Party’s Harlem branch had been viewed by its leadership. Not surprisingly, given this view of the black struggle and suspicion of at least some of the leading black cadres, black cadres’ advice about how to organize the American Negro Labor Congress—particularly their advice that whites should not play the leading organizing role—was ignored. The result was the disaster that the black cad- res had predicted, because blacks were suspicious toward whites after the great wave of antiblack pogroms that occurred between 1919 and 1923 and were understandably reluctant to join an orga- nization dominated by whites. Finally, the dominant faction, led by Jay Lovestone, rejected organizing in the South—where the great majority of African Americans still resided—labeling the region as backward and not fit for organizing (Solomon 1997). Before 1923 there was a seemingly viable and vibrant nationalist alternative in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, but after the decline of the Garvey movement organizational options for black radicals were limited throughout much of the 1920s. By the late 1920s, however, black cadres in Moscow working with the Communist International, the Comintern, were able to win a mandate for a resolution on a black nation. Ironically, the first version of the resolution, in 1928, was close to the formula- tions of many black-power-era groups such as the Black Panthers, as well as individuals such as Malcolm X. It called for support for self-determination for African Americans—the ability for blacks to be able to collectively determine their political relationship to the United States–without necessarily arguing for the existence of a black nation. The 1932 resolution was much closer to the posi- tion eventually embraced by hard-core black nationalists such as the Nation of Islam and black-power-era groups such as the Republic of New Africa, which specified a black nation based in the South.