Race Radicalism in America

Integrationist Past, Non-Integrationist Future

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

This UnWoke Essay was written by guest contributor Scott Miller.

The following will aim to address in considerable detail some challenges I have received about my own views on history, society and politics in connection with Marxism in America. The specific points of contention addressed in this document are the following:

• Is it really defensible to say that Marxism (whether Neo-Marxism or Classical Marxism) has meaningful sway in America today? Is America really gradually sliding into communism?

• Isn’t McCarthyism and the ‘McCarthy era’ better understood as a period of high paranoia, at which time the fear of subversion (really, the fear not the reality) almost convinced people? 

In response, I have composed several discussion points below: 1. Why Reject Socialism? 2. McCarthy was wrong – HUAC wasn’t. 3. Franz Boas and the Subversion of American Academia.

Point 1. Why Reject Socialism?

There are myriad answers to the question posed above: why reject socialism? A full treatment of the topic would engage with two hundred years of the most consequential social experiment in human history, one which has had direct consequences for the lives of billions (currently, 1.4 billion in contemporary China alone). The ultimate origin of this great experiment, the socialist principle of social engineering, is inside the mind of one particularly radical French philosopher: the mind of Jean-Jacque Rousseau (the man sometimes referred to as ‘the father of the French revolution’). What I present here as the reason to reject socialism is the reason that most convinces me. I argue that the basis of Rousseau’s social philosophy is utterly untenable, even repugnant, on an intellectual level.

It first must be explained that Rousseau is not positioned here as the founder of socialism, rather, he was the thinker who helped to instigate the French Revolution, and whose social philosophy would be adopted by revolutionaries, and, just after the revolution, by the founders of socialism (Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier).

Rousseau’s philosophical positions grew out of his opposition to the enlightenment values of Englishman John Locke, whose ethical arguments for individualism and for private property were becoming influential at that time (even in Rousseau’s native France). Against Locke’s position that in a state of nature man is an innately rational creature (justifying liberty as a social imperative), Rousseau argued that in a state of nature man is innately irrational (justifying authoritarianism as a social imperative). The means by which Rousseau came to these deductions was a sort of proto-anthropological speculation, basing itself on intuitive leaps and philosophical musing and little to no empirical evidence (of course, the beginnings of the scientific field of anthropological studies wouldn’t come about until half a century after Rousseau, who died in 1778). 

Rousseau conceived of an entirely new, artificially constructed order of society — this order was predicated on his theory which we now refer to as ‘the myth of the noble savage.’ According to this theory, the following postulations can be made about man in a state of nature (presented here in summarized and simplified language): i) in a state of nature, man is a solitary animal, his only joy is eating and sleeping (this is the pure or innocent ideal!); ii) children in this pristine condition left the mother as soon as possible between the ages 4–7. Language did not exist at this stage, only grunts. Hence in this state of nature, man was not rational; iii) as the second point entails, there were no families in such a condition; iv) at a certain historical juncture, man began to group into families, which was the beginning of social complexity, consequently, language and food surpluses started to appear (and these were foreboding developments); v) following surpluses, human society became more and more sophisticated, and it was this sophistication —civilization— that led to the great evil: inequality, and private property. Rousseau’s solution to the problems of the final point is his most impactful proposition: that to resolve inequality, society should be restructured according to the ‘general will’. This means the dissolution of individual and property rights and the subjugation of each citizen to the collective interests of the whole (collectivism, as it would become known, is the basis for later socialism and communism).

Thus, Rousseau achieves his magnum opus, his argument against Lockean values such as individual rights and private property. To call Rousseauism “retrograde” would be an understatement, as endearing as the call for a return to more simple, gentle life would be to the Romantics. It is better framed as the ideological remaking of the world in the image of false anthropology. Rousseau deliberately stuck a thumb in the eye of reason, scientific progress, enlightenment values and civilization itself and so “retrograde” isn’t quite sufficient. There is a reason why today it is called ‘the myth of the noble savage,’ that being, nothing so inanely stupid and so entirely asinine has ever served to alter world history in the way Rousseau’s postulations have. Yes, Darwin’s theory of evolution didn’t come along until some 75 years after Rousseau’s death. Yet, even without the benefit of the Darwinian science, of biology or modern anthropology (which completely repudiate Rousseau), it should have been perfectly obvious that solitary man running around with no language and no family and no rationality was an intellectually vacuous proposition. Since no society ever bore even a vague resemblance to Rousseau’s notion, his deductions could only be the result of speculative inference or “theory” (like the intellectual traditions he inspired) rather than empirical observation (although he could have taken note that none of the tribal societies of his day conformed in any way to his theories of pre-civilization). Nor does the idea of such a miserable state (Rousseau’s lost ideal state) serve, in any genuine manner, as foil to civilization, family and rational society.

There is no denying that Rousseauism proved infectious or that his legacy began to unfold shortly after his death — with the Jacobin uprising during the French Revolution, the Great Terror and the murderous sanctimony of Robespierre (whose ‘republic of virtue’ modelled itself on Rousseau’s principle of the ‘general will’). But the antagonism which socialism has for two hundred years directed at the family and at private property also finds its deepest roots in Rousseau’s little anthropological whimsy.  

Point 2. McCarthy was wrong – HUAC wasn’t.

My objections to the far left are not limited to my ability to reference events of the early to mid-20th century. However, the specter of McCarthy and McCarthyism is so commonly presented as a rebuke to any and all anti-communist objections that it cannot go without comment here. McCarthy was, in final estimation, a fraud who fabricated charges and accused by-standers in addition to actual communist actors. He was rightly discredited. Despite that situation, HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, was absolutely legitimate in its investigations and documentation of communist activity, infiltration and subversion of American institutions. Why do I maintain that, well, because post-cold war scholarship has obtained access to Comintern (Communist International – the branch of the Soviet government tasked with spreading communism across the globe) archives in Russia which contain the hard evidence. Yes, that evidence confirms that Moscow was directing the activities of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA) and dozens of communist front organizations the entire time, it confirms the essential validity of HUAC’s work. Klehr, Haynes and Firsov have published these documents and their books make them available for anyone to read and consider. This evidence demonstrates that CPUSA (which was never illegal in the US, but which rose and fell in public support depending on major geo-political events) was doing what they were accused of doing by HUAC and many anti-communists in the US.  Russian backed communist subversion in the mid-20th century was —in a nutshell— everything that McCarthyism entails (short of anything McCarthy himself ever said).  As a second point, Comintern activity was certainly not restricted to America. The purpose of Comintern was to spread global communism (not just America). Collaborating information about its subversive tactics from dozens of countries substantiate the claims of this line of scholarship.

The two scholars who I rely on for the topic of communism in America are:

Harvey Klehr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Klehr

John Earl Haynes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Earl_Haynes

In 1993, Haynes became the first American scholar to examine the records of the Communist Party USA, housed in the former archive of the Communist International in Moscow, and he is the man responsible for making an agreement with the Russians that lead to the production of copies of the Comintern archives. These copies were then sold to US academic institutions. Haynes’ personal website offers the reading public a topical reference bibliography containing more than 9,000 items. There is probably no better research tool on earth with which to investigate the topic of American communism:

http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page94.html 

See further: Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Fridrikh Firsov. 1995.  The Secret World of American Communism.

HUAC’s annual reports have been digitized and are available at:

https://archive.org/details/ReportsOfTheCommitteeOfUn-AmericanActivities

Many documents and newspapers produced by CPUSA have been digitized and are available at:

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/

Point 3. Franz Boas and the Subversion of American Academia

To start with I quote Thomas Sowell, author of Intellectuals and Society, who makes what should be an obvious point: “for most of history you had autocratic governments you had kings, emperors and so on and what the people thought didn't matter an awful lot. In a democracy, what the people think matters a lot.” In other words, the idea, the intellectual, and the capacity to propagate public policy initiatives in the minds of the masses have replaced what was once accomplished by autocratic dictate.

Racial issues have been part of the Marxist strategy in the United States since the forming of the Socialist Party of America, and subsequently the Communist Party of America, in the early 20th century.  Why poke at race if you are a master Marxist theorist?  The answer is simple: divide and conquer (strike at the cohesion of the capitalist nation by fomenting radical pluralism, and identitarianism). The classic Marxist theme of class struggle had already been reformulated as an identity struggle between races by 1917, when Vladimir Lenin issued a statement in his Statistics and Sociology communication that US blacks should be "classed as an oppressed nation."

In fact, HUAC had long noted Lenin’s doctrine of turning “friend against friend.” The chances of subversion, of insurrection, are much greater if the target nation is first weakened by as many internal divisions as possible; if, indeed, the nation is divided “politically, economically, racially, religiously, and so on.” HUAC point here to one of Lenin’s works “Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder — 1920” (a book which attacks communists to the left of Bolshevism) wherein Lenin enunciates this doctrine: “the more powerful enemy can be conquered only by exerting the utmost effort, and by necessarily, thoroughly, carefully, attentively, and skillfully taking advantage of every, even the smallest, “rift” among the enemies….” (HUAC 1956 — Soviet Total War, ‘Historic Mission’ of Violence and Deceit, p. 156).

In the 1960s, HUAC would report that communist splinter groups in the US and agitators for Puerto Rican sovereignty maintain the same divide and conquer strategy: “it has retained the former CPUSA line initiated by Stalin, which holds that Negroes in a southern “Black Belt” in the United States constitute an ‘oppressed nation’” (HUAC report 1963, p. 7–8). 

The following discussion draws mainly from:

-Bullert 2009.  "Franz Boas as Citizen-Scientist: Gramscian-Marxist Influence on American Anthropology." Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies 34/2: 208–242.

-van den Berghe, Pierre L. 2007.  "Race" in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. 

-Chin, Rita. 2017. The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe. p. 144

-Boas, Franz. 1942. “Franz Boas.” In I Believe; the Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time, edited by Clifton Fadiman. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Kuznick, Peter. 2019. Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

-Cole, Douglas. 1992. “One Does Not Get as Much from the Girls: Franz Boas and Women Students.” History of Anthropology Newsletter 19/2.

-Krook, Susan. 1989. “Franz Boas (a.k.a. Boaz) and the F.B.I.” History of Anthropology Newsletter 16/2.

-Klehr, Harvey. 1984. The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. New York: Basic Books Inc.

-Matusevich, Maxim. 2008. “Journeys of Hope: African Diaspora and the Soviet Society.” African Diaspora 1: 53–85.

-Stocking, George. 1968. Race, Culture, Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

The above may give some sense of a connection between race agitation and anti-Americanism. So how does Soviet and socialist race agitation coalesce into actual American academic and activist movements?

A great example to start with is Franz Boas. Who is Franz Boas and what is his background? According to Boas’ autobiographic statement he comes from: “a German home in which the ideals of the Revolution of 1848 were a living force. My father, liberal, but not active in public affairs; my mother, idealistic, with a lively interest in public matters..” (Boas 1939, 19). Without a strong grasp of the politics of the (now forgotten) 1848 revolution in Germany, it would be easy to conclude that Boas springs from a family of ‘liberal’ ‘idealists’ based on this description. A Boas apologist writing in 2019 gives a similar description: “Progressive political and social views had already been inherited from ‘a German home in which the ideals of the Revolution of 1848 were a living force’” (Kuznick 2019, 184).  A third assessment is the following: “Franz Boas was born in Minden, Germany, in 1852, into a family with radical socialist politics. Abraham Jacobi, his uncle by marriage, had been imprisoned for armed violence during the revolution of 1848; in addition, as Boas admitted, both his parents were sympathetic proponents of the [1848] revolutionary movement” (Bullert 2009, 208).  

A liberal family, a progressive family, a socialist family. Which assessment is really more astute? Well, to start with, that his mother was an early feminist (Cole 1992) is an indicator that she was likely also a socialist (the two doctrines were, and are, heavily connected). Then there is Boas’ uncle, Abraham Jacobi, whose Marxist credentials seem irrefutable should one go by his Wikipedia entry. According to the wiki, after his imprisonment following the 1848 revolution in Germany, Jacobi: i) left Germany and stayed in England several months with none other than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (who apparently got him back on his feet); ii) moved to New York and helped establish the New York Communist Club in 1857; iii) pursued an extremely successful career as a practicing physician in America, he is now known as ‘the father of American pediatrics.’ The political leaning and success in America of Jacobi in America is clear — why is the case of his nephew, Franz Boas, comparable?

Franz Boas was trained as a physicist in Heidelberg and Bonn and received a Ph.D in physics at Kiel 1881. While at Kiel, he was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Kant and the Neo-Kantians (hence, his later adherence to the doctrine of subjective truth) (Kuznick 2019, 184). Arriving in America, Boas redirected his career to anthropology after dedicating himself to a detailed a study of the Inuit. Anthropology was not a well-established field in 1890s America, it is really Boas himself who established the field in American universities; he became known as "the father of American anthropology." Boas’ contributions to this new field lead to his developing a network of students who would pass on his ideas so that, by the time of his death, his students represented "the greater part of the significant professional core of American anthropologists” and, by the mid-1920s, he so dominated the field of anthropology that his students “headed every major anthropology department in America” (Kuznick 2019, 183). His doctrines are now so pervasive in the academy that they have been characterized as ‘the Standard Social Science Model.’

So, what was the social philosophy of the man that established the standard social science model of American universities? Not so different than that of his influential uncle Abraham Jacobi. That Boas was engaged in Marxist politics throughout the entirety of his 40 year tenure at Columbia University (1896-1936) is indisputable: although not a member of the Communist Party of America (then in its heyday), he was fanatically active as organizer or member in dozens (literally dozens) of communist front organizations known to the FBI at that time. Below is a screenshot of J. Edgar Hoover’s personal letter listing 27 of these affiliations (a copy of the letter was reproduced upon fulfillment of a freedom of information act request — Krook 1989):

As Communist Front organizations, these groups are careful to phrase their activism in a clandestine manner by using terms that seem friendly to Western liberal principles (this is the difference between a front organization and an organization which is overtly communist). In the information age that we now live in, it is sometimes relatively easy to tease out indicators that the information and informants who tipped off the FBI about these various organizations were not wrong. The German-American League for Culture, for example, is listed as providing non-English press for the Communist Party USA.  The John Reed Club, named for pro-Bolshevik American journalist John Reed, is so transparently Marxist that even a volunteer encyclopedia like wiki can come up with no other way to describe it. Reed was engaged in the clandestine funding of the Communist Party USA itself, as evidenced by post-cold war access to the Comintern archives in Russia. A record from this archive records a Jan. 22, 1920, payment of 1,008,000 rubles paid by the Soviets, paid to John Reed, to be used for the financing of the newly form Communist party USA (Klehr et al. 1995, 22). The clubs named after him were formed with the purpose of linking together intellectuals and artists, communists and communist sympathizers, who would contribute to the creation of a revolutionary culture (Klehr 1984, 72).

Throughout his long career, Boas never declared his politics in simple terms, never a simple declaration ‘I am a socialist’ or ‘I am a communist.’ But over and beyond his membership in many communist front organizations, his doctrinaire socialism meant that he was often sympathetic to socialist or communist causes on a geopolitical level. For example, his scrupulous adherence to Popular Front etiquette meant that he avoided “any direct public criticism of Stalin” (Bullert 2009, 220).  But more directly relevant here, his adherence to socialist social philosophy shaped his approach to anthropology, his definitions of culture etc. which, because of Boas’ pre-eminence as the founder of American anthropology, have largely become (whether or not we know it) our definitions of culture etc.  

To sketch some of these doctrines and their implications:

i) Boas entirely rejects Darwinian evolution: In a letter to the Alexander Troyanovsky written in 1929, Boas describes himself as a “Lysenkoist” (Bullert 2009, 212). Lysenko was a Soviet scientist whose alternative to genetics and alternative to evolutionary theory was enforced by law under Stalin. All Soviets had to pay lip service to these ideas by law. Lysenko developed “agrobiology” according to which, organisms modify their own genetic makeup, not by natural selection, but by force of habit (i.e. an individual Giraffe grew a long neck by stretching for leaves repeatedly, then passed that trait on to its offspring). Lysenkoism offered Stalin “a pseudo-scientific rationale for molding of the new socialist man within a single generation” (Bullert 2009, 212). Of course, it offered the same pseudo-rational to Boas, leaving him a free hand to toss evolution out of the picture. Whether the anthropological community knew that Boas self-identified as a Lysenkoist is unclear; from his body of work they did know that he was, at minimal, an anti-evolutionist (at a symposium held in honor of Boas, 50 years after his death, W. Kummer gave a paper entitled “Boas as anti-evolutionist.” I don’t have access to that paper currently). In fact, Boasian methodology did “much to stamp the next half century of American anthropology with a strong antievolutionary bias” (Stocking 1968, 210–211).

ii) Race as Subjective Construct: Boas’ predilection for Kantian philosophy, with its emphasis on subjective truth (opposing the objective truth of mainstream science), together with his socialist methodology (see point i above), color his analysis of race which he defines as a subjective construct: “Groups, as they exist among us, are all too often subjective constructions, because those who are assigned to that group do not feel themselves as members of the group and the injustice done them is one of the blots of our civilization” (Boas 1942, 24). According to this subjective reasoning — the precursor to ‘social construct’ theory and ‘discursive violence’ theory of today’s social sciences — if I as a white man don’t feel myself to be a white man, it would be racist for you to say that I am. (In practice, such a claim is only deemed credible should the member of a minority be saying it of course.)

iii) The originators of the term "racism":  the use of the word racism originates in the 1930s from Boas and his students (particularly Ruth Benedict). Before this, what we now term racism was referred to as “chauvinism” or, if directed against blacks, “anti-negroism.”  Boas and his students theorized that racism was specifically the result of European expansion, imperialism, colonialism, and chattel slavery — a nakedly political (if one understands socialist theory), intellectually vacuous statement: according to the anthropologists, when white people discriminate, this is the because of racism and the artificial social constructions which delude them; when other races discriminate, that’s ethnocentrism, which is just human nature (van den Berghe 2007). Such understandings fail entirely to account for the racism inherent and obvious in black nationalism (which was burgeoning in Boas’ day — see below); such understandings, at the same time, establish the basis for the current social justice claim that only white people can be racist.

iv) UNESCO propagates Boasian anthropology: In 1950, UNESCO drafted a statement about race which is often framed as a rejection of Nazi race theory. It is, while at the same time, it is also a rejection of any apolitical treatment of social matters as Boasian anthropology is heavily laced with political presuppositions. Written by Alfred Kroeber, a Boas student, the key line of the 1950 UNESCO statement on race reads: "for all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth." 

v) The theory of cultural relativism: states that all cultures are equal and none better than the other. While seemingly innocuous in itself, it would become the basis for assertations that all evidence of inequality of wealth is proof of discrimination and injustice: that is, if all cultures are equal and are equally productive (and otherwise meritorious), it can’t be that some cultural attitudes and practices are responsible for their inequality. Instead, it must be racism. This subversion of the reality and real-world implications of different cultural practices and attitudes means that the standard socialist (and sociological) analysis comes to the fore; critics of this analysis refer to it as the disparity fallacy (the notion that different outcomes are can only be attributable to racism or sexism). Boas’ cultural relativism is also a semantic manipulation, for the word ‘culture’ prior to Boasian anthropology had (and properly still has) deep associations with civilization (not with i.e. the Inuit).  The word culture, with obvious agrarian connotations, took on the figurative meaning ‘cultivation through education’ by 1500 AD and refers specifically to the refinement of the mind (Stocking 1968, 199). The original meaning of the word is retained in the adjective ‘cultured’ as in ‘he is cultured’ (few English speakers imagine a buffalo hunt in connection with such a description). But the word ‘acculturation’ lost its meaning and became relativistic: before Boas, “acculturation” referred to the stages by which societies develop from savagery, barbarism, civilization and enlightenment; after Boas “acculturation” means something like ‘the process by which one culture is influenced by another’ (Stocking 1968, 212). Never mind that the entire theory, cultural relativism, is entirely untenable outside of utopian whimsy. Should a tribe of head-hunters move into your neighborhood, sever and tie the heads of your neighbors to their belts, you may have trouble maintaining the utopian notion of cultural relativism.

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For more from this author read the Woke Watch Canada series The Great Illiberal Subversion, co-written with James Pew.