What Is Left to Be Done? The Marxist-Humanism of Charles Denby (1907–1983) – Black Worker-Editor

From Marx's critique of the white working-class during the Civil War (1972, 237) to Lenin's concrete working out of the connection of “the Negro to the labor movement as a whole” (RDC, 9306), an undisclosed Marxian race-class dialectic unfolds. It is one, Raya Dunayevskaya observed in the 1940s, “that up to today has not received the serious study by American Marxists that it deserves” (RDC, 9307). The present study of the working-class autobiography and Marxist-Humanist journalism of Black worker-editor Charles Denby recovers this lost Marxian race-class dialectic. As articulated by Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxist-Humanism was strategically situated at the historical material intersection of this dialectic, when it appeared full-blown in the social movements of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s through the early 1970s.

Because the Black working-class Reason of Charles Denby's voice is representative of the working class as a revolutionary class, as much as an individual, one aim of this essay is to unpack the revolutionary theory contained in Denby's autobiography and radical working-class journalism Lenin contends is indispensable to revolutionary movements. What we seek to recover, in other words, is the lost dialectical intersection of labor and civil rights struggles in the thought of a rank-and-file labor militant and co-founder of an independent socialist tendency of the American Left – Marxist-Humanism. Toward that end, the essay opens into a wide-angle lens to engage, as indicated in Marx's 1860 frontisquote above, the “dialectics of history” (Lenin 1916) at the intersection of the combined and uneven development of capitalist societies as different as the United States and pre-revolutionary Russia and the revolutionary democratic imperatives of their respective social movements.

Tracing the intersection of Charles Denby's Black proletarian thought and action with Lenin's turn of the twentieth century articulation of the political and organizational imperatives of the dialectics of history of a crumbling Russian autocracy discloses several dimensions of Marxist-Humanism. As an American expression of Marxism, particularly an African-American expression of Marxism, from its inception in the 1950s, Marxist-Humanism spelled out the politics and theory of Black masses in motion as the vanguard of the American Revolution. Although this does not exhaust the historic-philosophic ground of Marxist-Humanism, it does make the following claim, articulated by its philosophic founder in the United States (Dunayevskaya 1963):

All of philosophy consists in making explicit what is only implicit in the objective movement of history. An objective view of historical development of necessity reveals the subjective, the human force which will be the one to realize the forward movement of humanity. In the case of the United States, it [is] the Negro….

As Dunayevskaya also put it in 1963, marking the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, in a pamphlet written for political education in the Black social movement at the time, American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard:

…the contradictory foundation of American Civilization; its Achilles heel is enclosed not in the “general” class struggle, but in the specifics of the “additive” of color in these class struggles. Precisely because of this, the theory of liberation must be as comprehensive as when Marx first unfurled the banner of Humanism. (Dunayevskaya 1963, 26).

Charles Denby – Autoworker, Newspaper Editor, Marxist-Humanist

Born in Lowndes County, Alabama, August 25, 1907, the son of independent farmers and the grandson of slaves, Charles Denby, whose real name was Simon Peter Owens, was a Detroit autoworker and labor militant who helped found a revolutionary socialist movement in the U.S. called Marxist-Humanism. Associated for nearly four decades with Raya Dunayevskaya, the founder of the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, Denby was the worker-editor of the movement's newspaper News & Letters from its beginning in Detroit in 1955 until his death, October 10, 1983.

Not long after meeting Dunayevskaya and CLR James, Denby became a member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Upon breaking with the SWP, in 1951, the Tendency became the Committees of Correspondence, existing for four years until James and Dunayevskaya split in 1955. Among the majority of workers who followed Dunayevskaya after James broke up the organization and appropriated the name of its newspaper, Correspondence, Denby and his wife Ethel Dunbar (Effie Owens) became founding members of the new Marxist-Humanist organization, News and Letters Committees. Denby, along with another worker, Johnny Zupan, became co-editors of the organization's newspaper, News & Letters. Zupan soon dropped out of the organization, making Denby the sole editor of News & Letters.

The year 1955 saw the lynching of Emmet Till near Money, Mississippi, the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the merger of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Denby began the second part of his autobiography, published in 1978, with his return to Lowndes County at the time of the Boycott. In the chapter on Montgomery, Denby tells the story of the Bus Boycott as he heard it from Mrs. Rosa Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., along with other Montgomerians. Subsequent chapters in part two of his autobiography carry Denby's narrative of the southern Civil Rights Movement and of his encounters with some of its central figures, such as Stokely Carmichael, the militant organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and John Hulett, the first Black elected sheriff of Lowndes County.

Because the first part of his autobiography was written during the McCarthyite anticommunist scare, many of the people and places he identified had to be altered. The original manuscript with the real names is held in the archives of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection. The second part of Indignant Heart climaxes in the same way as the first part recounts his beginnings as a rank-and-file militant, namely, with unauthorized wildcat strikes of young Black autoworkers in 1973. In the first part of Indignant Heart, Denby tells the story of leading his first wildcat strike in the middle of World War II to get Black women workers upgraded in the war industries plant he worked in making airplane parts. The significance of this episode highlights the fact that it took place in an environment of fierce racial bigotry in Detroit's industrial workplaces. The Department of Labor calculated that in 1943, the year that Denby led his first wildcat strike to get Black women workers upgraded, nearly three million work-hours were lost in “hate strikes” by white workers opposed to the upgrading of Black workers, or integrating them into lily-white production departments, dressing and toilet facilities. The Department of Labor report on white hate strikes came a month after the June 1943 Detroit race riot, an upheaval that cost the war industries one million lost work-hours (Sugrue 1995).

Denby's narrative also records his experiences and eyewitness observations of the 1943 riot. Indeed, Indignant Heart's description of Detroit's race riot of 1943 is the most poignant participant account of the feelings, self-organization and social consciousness of people caught up in urban rebellion documented in social movement literature. Because his vantage point was that of a Black production worker, the rage and determination to extract social justice assumes the stature of high drama, revealing the moral crisis in American race relations. Denby makes us aware that social upheavals do not arise outside of the specific production relations of the capitalist economy.

Black Marxist-Humanism

Four years before the founding of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S. and one year before the publication of Denby's Indignant Heart, Raya Dunayevskaya wrote to Denby, April 5, 1951, on the American roots of Marxism. She pointed out Marx's sharp criticism of mid-nineteenth century Marxists, who abstractly thought that since the Civil War would not abolish wage slavery, they (American Marxists) would remain bystanders. It marks one of the occasions when Marx declared that if that was “Marxism,” then he was not a “Marxist.” Later, in a letter Marx wrote to Abraham Lincoln, in the name of the First International Workingmen's Association (Marx 1972, 236–38), he criticized the white workingmen of the North for allowing chattel slavery to defile their republic. In her 1951 letter to Denby, Dunayevskaya also made the following methodological point:

[Marx] influenced the Marxists in America to see that each problem must be solved concretely and that sometimes a fight for a concrete thing may appear slight, but if it involves great masses of people and a revolutionary method, a proletarian way of attaining it, then that is decisive and that in itself will either bring on the socialist force directly or indirectly. (RDC, 9306-07 –emphasis in the original)

Finally, she informed Denby, “The one person who worked out more concretely the question of the Negro to the labor movement as a whole was Lenin” (RDC, 9307). In a document from the archives of the Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, “How to Study Lenin,” from the time Dunayevskaya taught classes on Marx's Capital and Lenin's works in the Workers Party's School, 1945–47, she points to the parallels between Lenin's study of Black sharecropping and tenant farming in the American South and the agrarian relations among Russian serfs. Furthermore, Lenin theorized the serf/sharecropping affinity in the context of the meaning that the combined agrarian and national questions assumed in his thinking before and after the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. In fact, the relationship between the agrarian and national questions determined the development of his position on the “Negro National Question,” discussed at the 2nd and the 4th Comintern (Communist International) Congresses, 1920 and 1922.

The agrarian and national questions assume a new and profound meaning in this period [1914–1916] and will form the basis of Lenin's position at the 2nd Congress of the Communist International [1920]…. Moreover, even in the articles written in 1914–15, “Development of Capitalism in the U.S.” [Lenin 1964], dealing with the situation in the South based on the 1910 census, he raises and analyzes the Negro problem in a manner illuminating the problems of the Russian Serf. The parallel is drawn between the serfdom of Russia and slavery in the South, a comparison that up to today has not received the serious study by American Marxists that it deserves. This is of prime importance for the study of the Negro problem in the U.S. and should be studied along with the resolution of Johnson-Forest on the Negro Question and the Forest articles in the dispute with Coolidge in the W.P. [Workers’ Party]. (RDC, 715). ¹

Denby would make a similar connection during the Civil Rights Movement with the emergence of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Lenin “found in his study of…Russian serfdom and pseudo-emancipation in 1861 and the condition of the American Negro sharecropper after the Civil War to be of such parallel nature as to incorporate it in his many theses on the National Question” (RDC 9307 – emphases in the original). ² Lenin's articulation of the National Question was ground for Marxist-Humanism's theoretical formulation of Black national self-determination.

The “philosophic moment” of Marxist-Humanism was born in 1953 ³ and assumed organizational form with the founding of News and Letters Committees in 1955, on the threshold of the Civil Rights Movement. Although popularly thought to be an expression of Marx, “historical materialism” was an invention of Frederick Engels (1878) and Marxist philosopher Georgi Plekhanov popularized “dialectical materialism” in the 1890s. For his part, Marx first referred to his philosophic standpoint in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as a “thoroughgoing Naturalism, or Humanism.” ⁴ Both the philosophy and organizational expression of Marxist-Humanism developed through the 1960s to the social movement's turning point of the late 1960s, when it turned from civil rights to what Malcolm X called human rights, as articulated in the new but contradictory Black Nationalist ideologies of the Black Power Movement. ⁵ The singular dialectic of race-class struggles by which this most consequential social movement of the twentieth century (Holt 2021) unfolded was documented in the journalism of the Black worker-editor of a radical socialist newspaper that had professed the aim of recreating the dialectics of the American roots of Marxism. Indeed, it identified itself as a “labor and civil rights newspaper.” Concomitantly, the vicissitudes of the dual rhythm (dialectic) of these social movements found their explanation, i.e., their Reason, reflected in the journalistic-theoretical practice of workers and intellectuals writing for a workers’ newspaper edited by a Black production worker.

To situate this study within a self-reflexive framework that reflects the organizational imperatives of the theoretical articulation of a Marxist-Humanist dialectic as it developed out of dual civil rights and labor social movements in the thought of Charles Denby, it assumes the vantage point of Lenin's 1902 What Is To Be Done? Consistent with the dialectics of labor and civil rights struggles that formed Denby's revolutionary thought and practice, What Is To Be Done? theoretically captures Lenin's practice of positing the inseparability of workers’ shop-floor struggles from the struggle for social democracy, as socialism was called then. Charles Denby's political journalism and Black working-class narrative share important co-determinations with Lenin's elaboration of a theory of organization in What Is To Be Done? These co-determinants center on the relationship of 1) the historical periodicity of revolution; 2) class leadership of social movements; 3) Marxian analysis of capitalist political economy; and 4) the relationship of radical parties to forms of organization that spontaneously arise within social movements. Furthermore, the contradictory development of the social movements that Denby captured in his narrative and journalism foreshadows the organizational contradictions in contemporary uncertainties over what constitutes salient forms of organization in the era of Black Lives Matter. The inseparability of Charles Denby's working-class shop-floor experiences and his practice in the Civil Rights Movement then unfolding in his home of Lowndes County, Alabama, from his organizational life as Marxist-Humanist worker-editor and “Worker's Journal” columnist, in Detroit, Michigan, is a function of the undisclosed dialectic of organization I seek to uncover. It is a dialectic of non-elitist, cooperative leadership that sociologist John Brown Childs glimpsed in his work on leadership, conflict and cooperation in Black social thought:

Denby was especially alert to the dangers of Vanguard pretensions in leadership…. For Denby, there could be no “Black Moses” to lead people. The actions of resistance were too complex and too fluid to be guided by any one person or group…. Because the self-generated activities of people did not fit [their] plans, said Denby, groups ranging from the NAACP to the Communist Party and the unions were unprepared for the movement in the South and had to rush to catch up when they finally comprehended the significance of what was happening. The Montgomery bus boycott is a concrete example, for Denby, of the people surging ahead of the supposed leadership. (Childs 1989, 137-38)

This dialectic originated in Raya Dunayevskaya's unique interpretation of Lenin's What Is To Be Done? and his later response to the 1905 Russian revolution. She initially developed her interpretation of Lenin in the late 1940s to early 1950s in her political-philosophic correspondence with CLR James and Grace Lee (Boggs), who, with Dunayevskaya, were the theoretical and political leaders of the Johnson-Forest Tendency within the Trotskyist Workers Party and Socialist Workers Party, prior to their break with Trotskyism, in 1951. Dunayevskaya's Lenin studies were one of the focal points of her 1958 work Marxism and Freedom, which revolved around the difference between the class content and form/method of historic stages of revolutions and social movements.

What Is To Be Done? – Form Versus Content of Social Movements

The reader of Lenin's 1902 polemic, What Is To Be Done?, confronts a conceptual split-screen. On the one hand, a sharp polemical work that clarifies social democratic theory and principles (negative critique), on the other, Lenin's positive exposition of his evolving position on the nature of the Russian revolution deduced from his 1899 political economic analysis, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. What Is To Be Done? drew organizational conclusions from Lenin's Marxian analysis of Russia's developing capitalist economy. In opposition to the Russian Populists (Narodniki) who contended that Russia could bypass the capitalist stage of development based on its rural commune, the Mir, in Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin demonstrated through amassing over 500 sources that a capitalist home market had replaced local markets. New class divisions had opened amongst peasants, expanding the kulaks (i.e., wealthier, propertied peasants), poorer peasants, and peasant laborers. Small landholding peasants or tenant farmers buffered a new rural landed bourgeoisie against a growing landless rural proletariat. The political-organizational trajectory of Development of Capitalism in Russia programmatically turned toward the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants that would make its appearance with Russia's 1905 revolution. (This had particular salience for Charles Denby's Black proletarian engagements in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, especially with the mid-1960s political emergence of the “Black Panther” freedom organization in Lowndes County (Jeffries 2010).) Finally, Lenin demonstrated how capital accumulation had grown in Russia as production for local subsistence changed direction, destined for the national home market.

Lenin polemicized against a new adversary in What Is To Be Done? – economism. This ideological tendency assumed various forms in and outside of the social democratic movement, particularly among the liberal intelligentsia. As an ideology, economism contended that the historical lateness of Russia's bourgeois revolution to emancipate it from its semifeudal ancien régime, due to the country's economic backwardness, meant that leadership of its impending revolution fell politically and programmatically to the Russian bourgeoisie. Another opponent, which like economism found a foothold in the Russian social democracy in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, was liquidationism. This ideological tendency argued that the logic of economism made it politically expedient for social democratic organizations to liquidate themselves in deference to the liberal bourgeoisie's leadership of what ostensibly would be a bourgeois revolution. A left anarchist version of liquidationism deviated from the typical liberal tendency among the Russian social democratic parties based on anarchists’ opposition to radicals assuming state power.

In numerous writings, Lenin targeted both of these tendencies, economism and liquidationism, which found acceptance within Russian social democratic circles, from his 1899 Development of Capitalism in Russia, which demonstrated that Russia had unmistakably entered onto the capitalist road, to the 1905 Revolution, followed by the ensuing 12 years of tsarist repression, culminating in the 1917 Revolution. Only in part was he successful in putting such ideological tendencies in check.

Economism continued to resurface in different forms up to and after the 1917 Russian Revolution within the Bolshevik Party. Nonetheless, the dialectic of Russia's contradictory sociohistorical and political economic development compelled Lenin to practice certain compartmentalization in his thinking regarding proletarian consciousness. On the one hand, he followed Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of the German Social Democracy, in his contention that the proletariat could only reach trade union consciousness and that socialism had to be introduced into the consciousness of the proletariat from without by a radical sector of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia (Lenin 1973, 375). On the other hand, the later leap in consciousness Lenin experienced in the 1905 Russian revolution radically changed his mind and led him to the conclusion that “The working class is instinctively, spontaneously, Social Democratic” (Dunayevskaya 1958, 182). In Dunayevskaya's succinct assessment, “The contradiction in Lenin between the practicing revolutionary dialectician and the thinking Kautskyan is the contradiction of Russian society whose singular development from feudal monarchy even to bourgeois monarchy was through proletarian methods of struggle” (Dunayevskaya 1987).

Lenin's 1902 position reflects certain economism of its own at this stage, one that theorized that the formation of trade union consciousness among the working class was concomitant to the development of capitalism in Russia; consequently, the proletariat could only reach trade union, not socialist, consciousness. In Lenin's 1902 view, this imposed dual, even triple, tasks upon the organizational imperatives of the Russian social democratic movement. First, the combined and uneven development of capitalism in Russia meant that, while its impending revolution would be bourgeois in content, its form and method would be proletarian due to the inability, reticence and cowardice of the bourgeoisie to carry out its own revolution. ⁶ Second, the democratic impulses for sustaining such a bourgeois-democratic revolution among the urban and rural proletariat, stemming from the socialization of labor in capitalist agricultural and industrial production, were not the case for their bourgeois counterparts.

Programmatically, Lenin concluded, the politics practiced by the Russian social democracy had of necessity to be the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” (Dunayevskaya 1958, 184). Third, a new theory of the party was necessary to concretize these politics organizationally.

Organizational membership in the Russian social democracy by the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia must be contingent upon active membership in a local party organization with working-class membership. The definition of what constitutes membership in the Russian social democratic party did not, in Lenin's view, rest solely on verbal adherence to party principles. Coming “under the discipline of the local organization,” i.e., discipline through active membership in a local organization predominated “over verbal adherence to Marxist theory, propagandizing Marxist views, and holding a membership card” (Dunayevskaya 1958, 180).

Because economic context determines the theory and practice in a given era, the combined and uneven development of capitalism in Russia disciplined the working class, while laying the material foundations for a bourgeois revolution. It did not discipline the rootless petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, who needed disciplining. Capitalist production disciplined, organized and united the working class, ⁷ but the unevenness of capitalist development in Russia allowed the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia to evade the discipline of the dual economic content of the bourgeois revolution that history had elevated them to lead. As a mediating class formation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the petty-bourgeoisie was the embodiment of the duality of Russia's combined and uneven capitalist development. The methodological problem of dealing with the dualism of Russia's political-economic development dates back to Marx's 1881 analysis of the dual tendencies he found within the Russian commune, the Mir.

The archaic or primary formation of our globe contains a number of strata of different ages, one superimposed on the other…. [Isolation] permits the emergence of a central despotism above the communities…. I now come to the crux of the question. We cannot overlook the fact that the archaic type, to which the Russian commune belongs, conceals an internal dualism. (Quoted in Dunayevskaya 1991, 186)

What connected Marx's response to the Russian Narodniki to Lenin, writing in a different era, was Marx's method of approach. Where the Narodniki were more interested in eliciting an answer from Marx to their question of whether the Mir could be the basis for Russia avoiding capitalist development (and apparently without a revolution), Lenin was more concerned with the theoretical method of approach to questions of economic development, revolution and organization. In the four drafts of Marx's letter to the young Narodnik Vera Zasulich, what stands out, as the through-line from Marx to Lenin, is what Dunayevskaya singles out. Marx stressed “first, the historic determinant; second, the theoretic concept which would result if that historic determinant were related to a capitalist world in crisis,” since it is this which creates favorable conditions for transforming primitive communism into modern collective society (Dunayevskaya 1991, 183 – emphasis in the original). ⁸ In the end, as Marx reminds Zasulich, “In order to save the Russian commune there must be a Russian Revolution” (Dunayevskaya 1991, 183). In other words, “revolution is the indispensable, whether one has to go through capitalism, or can go to the new society ‘directly’ from the commune” (Ibid.).

Combined and Uneven Development: Economic History of Labor in Revolution

Combined and uneven development of the political economy of late nineteenth century Russia, as it entered the twentieth century, formed the contradictory context in which Lenin worked out his original theory of Marxism, i.e., the theory of the vanguard party. To be sure, revolutionary theory was the principal aspect of Lenin's Marxism. As he observed, “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement” (Lenin 1973, 369). Theory was of the utmost importance in Lenin's practice of making social revolution. The question is – What made the theoretical imperative so compelling to Lenin? My argument is that it is also what impelled Charles Denby to insist throughout his life as a Marxist-Humanist, but particularly after the high point of the 1960s not only failed to end in revolution but instead with Nixon, on the need for a philosophy of revolution. That retrogression set the stage for the most far-reaching restructuring of American capitalism in the modern era (Turner 2010). Although Russia was a backward semifeudal land steeped in serfdom and autocracy, extensive foreign investment concentrated capitalist accumulation in pockets of industrialization and commercial trade, forming a capitalist home market, which, in turn, incentivized the development of a wealthy, landholding bourgeoisie. However, it had yet to reach the historical stage of European capitalist nations that had undergone the modernizing influences of bourgeois political revolutions. ⁹

Foreign capital investment produced an embryonic but quickly gestating industrial working class catalyzing a Marxist social-democratic movement then in the process of shedding its rural Populist identity from the period of the 1870s and early 1880s, when the Narodniki (Populists) corresponded with Marx, following publication of the second edition of Capital, in 1873. With bourgeois modernity came upgrading the historicity of Russia's political-economic development. There also came sharp contestations among its emerging Marxist, social-democratic, intelligentsia over the prognosis of the natal birth of a revolution from the quickening collapse of an ancient, corrupt and insipid autocracy. The very social relations formed by Russia's contradictory combined and uneven political economic development not only sped up the collapse of its autocracy, it set the parameters of the theoretical discourse on what would replace it and the form and methods to do so. Russia found itself in the historical terrain of multiple crossroads, a situation that privileged the theoretical capacity of Marxists or Social Democrats, who alleged their advanced, progressive, scientific advantage over Russia's autocratic bureaucracy and intelligentsia, to map a theoretical course through such a precarious terrain to socialism. Instead, ideological contradictions emerged in the nascent social democratic movement as intractable as the objective and subjective ones embedded in Russia's combined and uneven capitalist development. The organization of trade unions in the emerging workers’ movement was inseparable from the intellectual movement and organization of petty-bourgeois progressives and radicals with their prognostications on the nature and possibility of the impending Russian revolution.

Given Russia's combined and uneven development, Lenin theorized that Marxist social democrats had to articulate an ideology and politics that expressed immediate working-class strivings, on the one hand, and social democratic political ends toward socialism, on the other. Although these political terms reflected the historicity of Russia's combined and uneven development, Lenin's articulation of these twin imperatives assumed different theoretical expressions, over time in response to continuous and deepening crises. From the outset, Lenin held that regardless of whether or until the historical content of the impending revolution assumed a bourgeois form, its method would necessarily be proletarian. The lateness of Russia's bourgeois revolution, due to the tenacity of its feudal heritage, meant that the historical initiative to make its revolution passed from the bourgeoisie to the energetic emergence of the industrial proletariat. The dualism in Lenin's politics meant that the maturity of the working-class movement, reflected in its organizational capacity to create trade unions, and later, in 1905, its creation of the world-historic soviets (workers’ councils), signified social democrats had to uncompromisingly pursue proletarian politics. It did not mean, as the economistic tendency in the Russian Social Democracy contended, self-limiting social democratic politics to the economic demands of the trade union consciousness of the working class.

As Lenin argued in What Is To Be Done?, the proletarian consciousness of Russia's emergent industrial working class was not allowed to stop at trade union demands. The shop floor “economic exposures” written up by social democrats about the exploitative working conditions in Russia's factories ¹⁰ elicited proletarian militancy and educated workers about the larger system of capitalist exploitation beyond a single shop floor. Lenin argued, against liberal and social democratic Economism, that social democratic “political exposures,” documenting the tsarist autocratic system, police brutality, various levers of state oppression, and bureaucratic corruption, evinced a widening and deepening social democratic consciousness among the working class. He singled out the reciprocal and reinforcing relationship between the two exposures. ¹¹ It meant that the ends that those politics sought to realize did not take the form of democratic rights in a bourgeois state, nor were they brought about by the political methods of the bourgeoisie, despite the bourgeois historical stage of the impending revolution. The proletarian form and method by which Russia's bourgeois revolution had of necessity to unfold could as well bring about a workers and peasants’ social democratic state. That, in other words, is what is inherent in proletarian forms and methods of struggle. Although this signified a new relationship of economics to politics in Marxist thought, or because it did, it also spelled out a new concept of organization within social democratic politics.

The relationship of proletarian methods of struggle to social democratic objectives and ends in Lenin's turn-of-the-century revolutionary theory foreshadowed Denby's dialectical combining of workers’ shop floor and trade union actions with Civil Rights Movement struggles. They would later combine in a new form in the Black Power era with the Black caucuses in the union movement and a direct challenge to capital (Turner 2010). Civil rights moved Denby beyond trade union consciousness, although fighting shop-floor racism and discrimination in the union did that, as well. At the same time, labor struggles moved his civil rights practice beyond the petty-bourgeois reformist politics of the movement's leadership. The historical course of America's capitalist political economy, too, featured combined and uneven development along its North-South regional divide. As with the lateness of emancipation of the serfs in Russia, the lateness of America's abolition of plantation slavery signified that its bourgeoisie was constitutionally incapable of completing its bourgeois democratic revolution. How else to explain the hundred-year delay in African Americans extracting the formal democratic franchise from the state with the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights acts by way of the proletarian methods of the Civil Rights Movement. This was precisely the meaning of Marx's assessment in his August 7, 1862, letter to Engels wherein he pushed back against Engels’ pessimism over the inefficacy of the Yankees’ prosecution of the war effort:

I do not entirely share your views on the American Civil War. I do not think that all is up. The North itself has turned slavery into a military force of the South, instead of turning it against the South. The South leaves productive labor to the slaves and could thus without difficulty put its whole fighting strength in the field. In my opinion all this will take another turn. The North will finally make war seriously, adopt revolutionary methods and throw over the domination of the border slave statesmen. A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves…. The long and the short of the story seems to me to be that a war of this kind must be conducted on revolutionary lines, while the Yankees have so far been trying to conduct it on constitutional lines. (Marx 2010)

Socialization of Labor and Revolt – The Maturity of the Age

The trajectory of the unresolved duality that derived from Russia's combined and uneven capitalist development motivated the famous split in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) into Bolshevik (Majority) and Menshevik (Minority) factions over the question of what constitutes membership to the party (Dunayevskaya 1958, 179–81). Whether concerning the nature of Russia's political economy and the state of its political development, or concerning the more nuanced but sharper division within Russian Social Democracy into Bolshevik and Menshevik, the Russian dilemma was fundamentally a crisis over the historical material nature of Russian society. It was a dispute over how to respond to the economic laws governing the development of the social forces contending for predominance over the reconstruction of Russian society. Marx himself had struggled with this problem in the last years of his life as he attempted to respond to Russian revolutionaries’ queries on whether semifeudal Russia had to experience the horrific birth pangs of a capitalistic gestation and birth; or could Russia somehow skip the capitalist stage of development and transition to socialism. ¹²

From an African American historical perspective, it should come as no surprise that the matter of the sociohistorical nature of Black social movements approximates the themes and dilemmas Lenin confronted in the Russian social democratic movement. As a people, importantly, a predominantly working-class people, the combined and uneven regional development of the U.S. influenced Black lived experience in capitalist America. Generationally rooted in a backward, semifeudal South, Black working people migrated to northern, Midwestern and western regions of the country, where they underwent the twin socializations of urbanization and proletarianization. Their experience and the social movements they forged from that experience bear an uncanny resemblance to the sociohistorical dilemma with which Russian revolutionaries contended and that Lenin provided the clearest resolution. Not only is it the contention of this essay that Charles Denby's working-class autobiography and journalism capture the form and content that dilemma assumed in Black America, but that there is a shared perspective between Lenin's resolution of the dilemma in What Is To Be Done? and the Black working-class thought of Charles Denby that found journalistic and organizational expression in the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism.

The capitalist home market of Charles Denby's rural South was noted for historically lagging behind the rest of the U.S. capitalist economy. Serial natural and economic crises, from boll weevil infestations, to historic flooding, to the precarity of global agricultural market forces challenged and, because of the South's social culture of white supremacy, recklessly endangered Black lives. An important contribution of Denby's working-class autobiography is the list of jobs he worked in the South, not to mention his admission to the author that he had attended nearby Tuskegee Institute for courses in mechanics. As against the idylls promoting Tuskegee as the institutional savior of Black agrarian life, Denby confided that his decision to study mechanics arose from his sincere desire to get as far away as possible from rural tenant farming! The jobs that Denby held in the South before migrating to urban industrial Detroit reflect Lenin's contention that the expansion of the underdeveloped capitalist home market did not develop through “realization of surplus-value in a foreign market,” but through expanded reproduction of the home market.

Denby's work–life as a welder in Anniston, Alabama and machine-shop worker at the Alabama Machine Supply Company, in Montgomery, Alabama, reflects the expanded reproduction of capital in the South. In Lenin's view, this was due to the fact that

The progressive, historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief postulates: increases in the productive forces of social labor and the socialization of labor. (1972, 596)

He enumerated other characteristics of capitalist accumulation in Russia shared by capitalist development in Denby's American South. First, socialization of labor signified the collective character of production versus the individual character of appropriation. Second, it meant the concentration of production in agriculture and industry. Third, it represented the elimination of personal dependency. In other words, “Compared with the labor of a dependent or bonded peasant. The labor of a free laborer is a progressive phenomenon in all branches of national economy” (Lenin 1972, 599). Fourth, and importantly, socialization of labor meant the mobility of the population (migration). Fifth, development and growing predominance of industrial centers were magnets for dependent rural populations. Sixth, the totality of the preceding characteristics increased the need for solidarity among all sectors of the working population against capitalism. Finally, these characteristics “cannot but bring about a profound change in the very character of the producers” (Lenin 1972, 599).

On his 1967 annual trip to Lowndes County at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Denby's report in his News & Letter “Worker's Journal” column captured the duality in capitalist social relations described by Lenin. In spring 1967, he reported on his trip to the “tent city” of displaced farm families in Lowndes County. He wrote movingly of driving down Jefferson Davis Highway 80 and seeing “five or six ragged tents propped up against sticks.” “I felt sick to my stomach,” he confessed. “Here we are, in the richest country of this whole world, with a government that spends millions of dollars in Vietnam in a single day – and there they are, Negro Americans, cast out of society and living like animals in a jungle for committing the crime of crimes, registering to vote!” (Denby 1967a). He also reported on the rash of church burnings in Lowndes County several days after his return to Detroit. In another column, Denby reported that the Lowndes County movement was involved in all social activities in the county such as antipoverty and Head Start prekindergarten programs. “One would be amazed to see how those Negroes have raised their consciousness along political lines in the past two years through their self-activities and holding regular meetings every Sunday night for the past two years.” He went on to recount that he spoke at one of these meetings to a capacity crowd on “The Historical Revolutionary Development of the Negro: Past, Present and Future” (Denby 1967b).

As in the case of Denby's rural south, by the end of the nineteenth century, Lenin could conclude in Development of Capitalism in Russia, the socioeconomic backwardness of the country worsened the conditions of labor, which “suffer[s] from capitalism as well as from the insufficient development of capitalism” (Lenin 1972, 600). ¹³ The similarity of the two periods, though articulated geographically along quite distinct ethnoracial lines, is striking. In Lenin's turn-of-the-century capitalist world, the development of productive forces was, by 1905, divided between trustification, monopoly, and imperialist colonialism, on the one hand, and the organization of the proletariat and the emergence of national self-determination among colonized non-European peoples, on the other. The 1905 Russian Revolution and the formation of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), in the U.S., represented the militant organization of industrial labor, even as the 1906 Bambatha Zulu Rebellion, in South Africa, signaled a direct challenge to white supremacist colonialism. The 1899–1901 Boxer Rebellion in China and the 1904–07 Nama-Herero war against German imperialism in South-West Africa (Namibia) were but a few of the anti-imperialist, anticolonial struggles that coincided with the 1905 Russian Revolution and the organization of industrial workers in the West. The revolutionary moment of 1905 extended in a most unique way to Persia, where it achieved the historic first of creating a women's soviet (anjumen) in the 1906–1911 constitutional revolution (Dunayevskaya 1991, 102; 110, n9). ¹⁴

If these did not exactly have the ear of the Marxist movement at the time, since none were discussed at the 1907 congress of the social democratic Second International, it did have the ear of revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg, who, despite her opposition to what was considered the “National Question,” had been writing about imperialism for a nearly decade. She articulated both the politics of the mass strike and a theory of capital accumulation to explain the new stage of capitalist development. Luxemburg would utilize the politics of the mass strike against the opportunism of the leadership of the social democratic party and the bureaucratization of its trade union counterparts (Dunayevskaya 1991). Similarly, Denby used the politics of Black-led wildcat strikes, the Civil Rights Movement, and Black mass urban revolt as critical wedges against the trade union bureaucracy and political leadership of the Civil Rights Movement.

As the vitality of the “60s” Civil Right Movement waned, its watershed reached with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ensuing urban rebellions that swept the U.S. in 1968, a new stage of Black labor militancy arose at the point of production. The years 1967–68 saw continuous urban revolts from Newark to Detroit to Chicago. Altogether new forms of organization appeared in 1969 with the spontaneous creation of Black caucuses within industrial trade unions, especially within the UAW. Denby participated in these Black worker organizations, wrote about their developments in the pages of News & Letters, and provided space in the newspaper for workers to discuss the issues the caucuses were fighting in the plants and in the union. He also edited one of the many shop newsletters generated by the Black caucuses’ movement, the Chrysler Mack Stinger.

One of the significant actions News & Letters reported in 1969 was a Black workers’ walkout to commemorate Martin Luther King's birthday, one year after his assassination. Not only was it the first celebration of King's birthday as a workers’ holiday, the absence of Black workers actually shut down production. At Denby's own Chrysler Mack plant, Black workers staged a walkout on the fourth anniversary of the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. Eight months earlier Black and white workers had walked out at Denby's plant over the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, which came two months after a similar walkout in response to the assassination of King.

A month after the assassination of Martin Luther King, DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) was formed, May 1968, over the summary firing of seven workers (five Black and two white) at the Chrysler Dodge Main plant in the Detroit enclave, Hamtramck. That DRUM was formed a month after King's assassination demonstrated in yet another way what Denby had articulated for more than a decade on the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements in the minds of Black workers. Militancy among Black workers fighting discrimination in production and in the union intensified after King's assassination. DRUM led a five-day wildcat strike in July 1968 to get the seven workers reinstated.

After DRUM's success, several other groups of revolutionary Black workers sprung up in automobile plants, among them FRUM at Ford and GRUM at General Motors. Later, in 1968, these groups, whose leaders shared a pseudo- Marxist-Leninist [i.e., Maoist] view of the world, came together to form the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (Harris 1982, 171).

While the revolutionary maturity of the 1960s left no doubt about the historical significance of the various forms of Black revolt and organization, in Lenin's case, he did not initially grasp the significance of the working-class form of organization created by the Russian working classes in the 1905 Russian Revolution, the soviet. Nonetheless, he did comprehend that in backward absolutist Russia only the proletariat could democratize capitalist society regardless of the stage of its historical development. Still, Lenin nearly overlooked the dialectic of the Russian working class’ recreation of the soviets twelves later, in the 1917 Revolution. Once having shaken off his old categories of thought in responding to the initial news of the Russian masses’ toppling tsarist autocracy, Lenin's second response was to call for “all power to the soviets!” Dunayevskaya writes that on the eve of the 1917 revolution, in a speech to Swiss youth on the commemoration of the 1905 revolution, January 22, 1917, Lenin “singled out, not the Soviet, but the mass strike as [its] outstanding feature” (Dunayevskaya 1958, 189). She observed further that when Tsarist autocracy fell the following month (February),

[Lenin] sent his co-leaders a telegram, which showed that his mind was still operating within old categories. Combine legal with illegal work, read his first telegram. The very next day, the newness, the truth dawned upon him, finally. The Russian workers had, on their own, recreated that “peculiar organization,” the Soviet, and now it had spread through the length and breadth of the whole land…. The Russian workers alone had remembered. Not a single theoretician –including Lenin – had thought of Soviets or told the workers to build them. The workers’ own creative energies had built this alternative form of government…. It was not that the workers must support the Government. It was that the Provisional Government must support the workers. “All Power to the Soviets!” (Dunayevskaya 1958, 188-90)

As in the case of Lenin and Luxemburg, the sociohistorical period that forged Charles Denby's revolutionary thought also represented a new stage of capitalist development. Post-World War II mechanization of agriculture that mobilized a second great Black migration out of the South was the ground whence the southern Civil Rights Movement arose, even as the imposition of automation in mass production industries evoked northern urban workers’ revolt at the point of production in anti-automation work actions (Denby 1960; Phillips 1984). ¹⁵ Inseparable from these dual working-class movements, North and South, the era saw the rise of a wholly new stage of anticolonial struggles for national independence. Although the historical continuities are unmistakable, the discontinuities figure more critically. Despite the Second International entertaining the tragic illusion that the mass organizational character of its political parties and trade unions constituted a bulwark against war, making peace “automatic” or “inevitable,” the susceptibility of the various social democratic parties and trade unions to the narrow nationalism of the epoch stripped the Left of its internationalist facade, green-lighting world war.

No such illusory assumptions were in evidence in the 1960s Vietnam War era. On the contrary, the historic political turn Martin Luther King, Jr. took toward anti-war, anti-imperialist, internationalism from within the Civil Rights Movement deepened the social movement of the 1960s, especially among Black student activists in and outside of SNCC, including in the military itself. Here too, Denby's journalism discloses an untold story of Black proletarian internationalism that preceded King's and that infused internationalism and Pan-Africanism into the Civil Rights and Black Power social movements.

Black Proletarian Internationalism (Pan-Africanism)

In a column, “Race and Class,” Denby wrote for the June–July 1962 issue of News & Letters, he connected his African American genealogy to African liberation, a decade ahead of Alex Haley's Roots.

In the early years of my life [in rural Lowndes County, Alabama], it was a common thing among Negroes to discuss their relation to those in Africa. Many of the older ones would remember to which tribe in Africa they belonged while the younger ones would not understand their dialect. But it was practically impossible for any Negro not to have a feeling of close kinship as we sat and listened to the stories of slave ships that the old ones told. I can remember my grandmother telling me about how people were put on the block for sale. She told me how she was sold in Virginia while her mother stood screaming. She never saw her mother again. (Denby 1962)

From his Black Marxist-Humanist proletarian perspective, Denby understood the relationship between Africans and Africans in America as a two-way road to liberation. The concreteness of his recollection becomes more apparent further on in his column on “race and class” when we read that its focus was the 1960-61 crisis in the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo. National independence had culminated in what Frantz Fanon called “neo-colonialism” and the tragic assassination of its first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Denby pointed to the different class attitudes toward the Congo tragedy among Black workers and the Black middle-class. He wrote:

Where the middle-class Negro was quiet as a tomb, the working-class Negro first began to speak his mind during the assassination of Lumumba, lining up solidly behind Lumumba and his nationalist movement. The workers in my shop eagerly followed all developments both in the Congo and in the UN, warmly supporting the demonstrations before that body, holding it responsible for the murder. (Denby 1962)

At the core of Denby's recounting of Black working-class support for Lumumba and Congo independence was that the Black working class was prepared to sacrifice its immediate struggle for the sake of overthrowing international capitalist imperialism in Africa. This was the essence of Black working-class internationalism and Pan-Africanism, which Denby's journalism captured, from reports on opposition to the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam to working-class anti-apartheid boycotts against South Africa, and later his public solidarity with the South African Black Consciousness Movement.

Concerning the latter, Denby connected deindustrialization in the U.S. Midwest heartland to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and to international working-class boycotts. The dialectical movement in Denby's Black working-class perspectives, from Civil Rights to Black Power to Black proletarian internationalism (Pan-Africanism), differentiates itself from the point of view of the Black petty-bourgeoisie, from bourgeois democracy, and from bourgeois internationalism (i.e., neo-colonialism, calling itself “Pan-Africanism”). The onset of the retrogression of the post-Civil Rights, postindustrial period, however, did not signal a retreat from proletarian internationalism in the face of U.S. transnational capitalist competitiveness with Japanese and German capital and rising Chinese state-capitalism. On the contrary, the international anti-apartheid movement had the proletarian backing of the Black working class with boycotts and strike actions against apartheid corporate interests. Denby's journalism captured the counter-revolutionary retrogression in politics, culture, and social relations for which the deindustrialization of capitalist production relations laid the material ground. The political result was as incontrovertible as it was draconian, viz., the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States and the imposition of neoliberal Reaganomics.

Socialization of Black Labor and Revolt

Where the transformation of commercial into monopoly capitalism had privileged the upper strata of the working class as an “aristocracy of labor,” according to Lenin, automation, in postwar mass production industries in the 1950s and 1960s, triggered new rank-and-file workforce actions. Denby's News & Letters captured the latter, and his 1960 pamphlet Workers Battle Automation compiled workers’ accounts of their alienated labor within and revolt against automation. Black urban rebellions of the period occupied the same historic space, driving corporate managers and trade union leaders to the bargaining table with Black Nationalists to hammer out pledges to train and hire Black urban youth in government-funded job training programs. Labor historian Foner (1982, 411) describes the social basis of the Black militancy that entered Detroit's auto shops at the end of the 1960s. In doing so, he quotes at length from the article that Charles Denby wrote on the Black Caucuses in the union and their demise, when he was the editor of the Chrysler Mack Avenue Black Caucus newsletter, The Stinger (Foner 1982, 423). ¹⁶ Denby's article also appeared in the third expanded edition of the News & Letter pamphlet American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard, in 1970, as “Black Caucuses in the Union”.

Where theorists and political leaders of the Second International theorized the “inevitable” or “automatic” collapse of capitalism as a prelude to their bringing organized socialist planning to the economy, ¹⁷ there were no such illusory assumptions at play in the 1960s. On the contrary, from the title of Denby's 1967 talk to local Lowndes County residents and voting rights activists on “The Historical Revolutionary Development of the Negro,” we sense the militancy evoked by the 1967 Detroit rebellion that had erupted a month earlier. However, the militancy of 1967 and 1968, by the end of 1968, met with a new ruling class challenge with the election of Richard Nixon, and the racist climate of the election campaign that year fomented by the candidacy of white supremacist Alabama governor George Wallace. Because of the long history of do-nothingness on the part of the UAW leadership when it came to fighting racism and upgrading Black workers both in the plant and on union staff, Wallace gained a foothold among some sectors of the white working class. This alarmed Denby, especially after witnessing Wallace's racist impact on white workers at a Detroit, Cobo Hall convention center rally for him in 1968. Denby recounts the episode in Indignant Heart:

As soon as I entered the building, I could feel and sense the tension. You felt like you were sitting among a jungle of wild beasts and that if you did not quickly transform yourself into a ferocious beast or escape from this meeting, that you would be caught and destroyed as soon as this man got in the position to do it. You could see these beasts putting fear or trying to put fear into anyone who opposed Wallace…. Then I felt, “This is fascism.” (Denby 1989, 222) ¹⁸

Theoretical Conclusion: Proletarian Democracy

There are telling similarities between the historical tendencies of capitalist accumulation of the two periods that Lenin and Denby occupied. The abstract assumptions of the social democratic Second International about the “inevitability” of capitalism's collapse, ended in its incorporation into capitalism, ¹⁹ and hence the first collapse of Socialism. In the case of the Black Power stage of the Civil Rights Movement, abstractions regarding the nature of capitalism fed idylls about “Black capitalism,” illusions, which, along with the U.S. government's COINTELPRO repression of Civil Rights and Black Power organizations, contributed to the collapse of the Black Power Movement and to the post-Civil Right nadir. From the vantage point of economically backward Russia, Lenin comprehended the manner in which technological revolutions (e.g., Taylorism) and the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation (trustification), transforming commercial into monopoly capitalism, broke up Russia's social and political relations. ²⁰ The maturity of the post-World War II world of unchecked automation, Black rural to urban migrations, and working-class struggles at the point of production and in the streets, led Denby to comprehend how a new stage of capitalist production and U.S. imperialist wars, resulting from the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation, inaugurated transformation of American race relations. In a word, the Left's political economic analysis remained hopelessly abstract so long as its theorization of the objective stage of the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation evaded theorization of racialized super-exploitation and the subjective forces of labor resistance to capital, as well as the national liberation struggles against imperialist–colonialist formations of capitalist accumulation. ²¹ Although rather sophisticated theorization developed in the case of the latter (Fanon 1966; Cabral 1972), whether in the form of theories of decolonization or economic development theories, the Left all but abandoned the critique of industrial political economy, its socialization of labor and point-of-production resistance. Consequently, when workers’ revolt organized itself at the point of production, and in urban revolts outside of production, the need for theory was answered by importing it not only from the outside but from abroad in the form of Maoist ideology, which bore no resemblance to the historical material conditions of the Black working-class. ²²

The cumulative effect of Left abstractions, which have yet to be reckoned with, is the reason for staging this critical engagement with the Marxist-Humanist thought of Black worker-editor, Charles Denby. It represents a return to the missed historical moment of Black revolutionary thought that could potentially reset our understanding of the objective-subjective dialectic of the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation that led to the current moment that goes by such framings as “advanced capitalism”, “neoliberal capitalism” and “capitalist globalization”. That similar abstractions accompany these frameworks is sufficient reason to recover what the thought of Charles Denby has to teach us about the dialectics of Black and labor struggles, which though subterranean at times and at other times powerfully resurface into the full light of day, have been ongoing. The difficulty lies in grasping that within the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation to transform into its opposite, monopoly or state capitalism, the competitive essence of commercial capitalism persists, i.e., develops coextensively with it. The opposition of commercial competition to monopoly appears at the point of transition to a higher stage, the point where capitalism is exposed as “rotting alive,” wherein the difference between democracy and authoritarianism reaches its indifference point. In fact, at the point where the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation transitions from free trade and competition to monopoly and state capitalism, democracy becomes superfluous to the bourgeois governance of capitalist society. When economic monopoly cannot be separated from political monopoly, whether it be the one-party state or the competition of political monopolies of two-party states, democracy becomes the exclusive possession of the proletariat (not unlike the present historic moment of Black self-determination that compelled America's reckoning with race). ²³ The significance of the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation, however, is not found in Marx's prognosis that the law of the concentration and centralization of capital leads to our age of state-capitalism. It lies instead “in the fact that nothing fundamental is changed in the relations between classes by such an extreme development. On the contrary, all contradictions are pushed to the extreme” (Dunayevskaya 1958, 102).

The extremity to which the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation was pushed by 1975 marked the end of Black Power urban insurgency and the demise of the revolutionary Black caucuses in the trade unions. To Denby, it meant, “You can't have a movement in the streets that you can have in the plant and [it's] nowhere in the plant now”. Something new had appeared with a capitalist restructuring that began in 1974–75, throwing masses of Black workers into unemployment lines, many permanently. The alienation of the Black working-class had a new face, permanent unemployment; by the end of the decade, it would also have a new name – the so-called underclass. ²⁴

The effects of the extremity to which the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation was driven are reflected nowhere more powerfully than in the Marxist-Humanist thought of Charles Denby, which disclosed the relation between labor and Black civil rights struggles, whose content and methods were democratic and working-class. The democratic modalities of both struggles, in which he participated and wrote about with profound simplicity, signified Denby's comprehension of the inseparability of workers’ opposition to capitalists’ monopoly over production from Black working-class opposition to the bourgeois monopoly over politics. The latter was, in fact, being broken up by the mass grassroots movement for civil rights, voting rights, poverty and educational legislation, Black political-economic power over community development, even as the former was being broken up through shop floor struggles for Black workers’ rights in the plant, in the union, and in battles against automation.

Moreover, the perennial backlash in U.S. white supremacist history made the dialectic of these Black intertwined working-class struggles a revolution in permanence.

What Lenin drew from his dialectical analysis of monopoly capitalism is not only its tendency toward stagnation and decay, but what Marx comprehended about the degradation of the working-class in the tendency of the declining rate of profit. The economic decay and degradation of monopoly capital accumulation abolishes the apparent differences between political forms like democracy and autocracy to such a degree that democracy remains alive only if it assumes a new life among the working class. The monopoly and state capitalist decay and stagnation of political rights appear to make democracy and the fight for democracy, which also constitute the historic propulsion of the self-determination of nations against monopoly imperialism, illusory. Lenin took issue with this conclusion drawn by such revolutionary Marxists as Rosa Luxemburg and Nikolai Bukharin who opposed the principle of national self-determination. Luxemburg based her opposition to the principle of national self-determination on its illusory assumptions about democracy within national independence struggles. The principle, in her view, was in any event more favorable to the nationalist bourgeoisie than to the working class. Lenin argued, to the contrary, democracy becomes the proletarian form and method of struggle in the period of imperialism, making it more than a “principle,” and instead, “the dialectics of history.” The dialectics of history meant that while “Capitalism in general and imperialism in particular transforms democracy into an illusion, [it] at the same time generates democratic tendencies among the masses” (Dunayevskaya 1958, 173). Imperialism did not make democracy illusory; it made it indispensable to national liberation struggles. In fact, Lenin went so far as to state that the theoretical errors made in the analysis of imperialism by those tendencies within the international social democracy and Bolshevik Party itself, such as Bukharin, who opposed self-determination of nations because they thought it diverted from the proletarian class struggle, represented nothing less than imperialist economism. For Lenin, it was the return of an old ideological, social democratic enemy. Indeed, proletarian democratic methods of struggle were so indispensable to national self-determination that bourgeois nationalist leaders were compelled to resort to such methods as mass strikes and armed struggles of the rural proletariat. In the “Theses on the National Question,” Lenin wrote:

[A]lready under capitalism, all economic, political and spiritual life is becoming more and more international. Socialism will make it completely international. International culture, which is now already being systematically created by the proletariat of all countries, does not absorb “national culture” (no matter of what national group) as a whole, but accepts from each national culture exclusively those of its elements that are consistently democratic and socialist. (Lenin 1913)

This meant enlisting the broad masses of all oppressed classes in a democratic struggle against capitalism. Democratic proletarian struggles were not only the form but also the content of those struggles. Civil Rights and Black Power struggles were in form and content proletarian democratic movements because their historical tendency (their “dialectics of history”) incorporated new cooperative, communal and collective forms of social organization. With little in the way of critical analysis of capitalist production relations, movement politics of the period degenerated into abstract banalities about “the system.” As a result, national self-determination was abstractly posited as feasible under capitalism in the form of neocolonialism; workers’ democratic rights were socially engineered to fit within the policy framework of individualist meritocracy; Black civil rights were coopted into Black bourgeois representation in the state; and Black Power became in some instances synonymous with Black capitalism. As four years of the Trump administration demonstrated, climaxing with the Black-led democratic removal of a white supremacist “unitary executive” of the U.S. government, the African American democratic imperative that grew out of the Civil Rights and Black Power era retains its power to challenge the decaying democracy of bourgeois republicanism. Although in form and content, it contains the beginnings of a new social order, it remains subject to the limitations imposed by the institutional norms of the bourgeois socioeconomic order.

In the epoch of advanced capitalism, or what Marxist-Humanists like Charles Denby call state-capitalism, the concrete analysis of every historical situation requires disclosing economic relations as political relations in the struggle for socialism. As Marx reiterated throughout the Communist Manifesto, “Every class struggle is a political struggle” (Marx 1848). The objective situation of advanced, neoliberal, globalized capitalism requires that we not only comprehend the unity of opposites but the dialectical transformation into opposite. Instead of counterposing democracy to the repressive enormity of imperialism, i.e., viewing imperialism as the repudiation of democracy and thus impractical of ever being realized, on Lenin's view, imperialism, in actuality, “generates democratic tendencies among the masses, creates democratic institutions, accentuates the antagonism between imperialism…and the masses” (Gankin and Fisher 1940, 226). Whether it was the 1950s’ and 1960s’ anticolonial struggles against imperialism, or the Civil Rights Movement and labor struggles of the same period, Denby's Marxist-Humanism made the connection between state-capitalism and imperialism to the struggle for social justice and democracy. Socialism, or the fight for socialism, was not an abstraction counterposed to struggles for democracy.

Lenin's conception of democracy, like Denby's, arose from the fact that absolutism, like white supremacy, imposed on the working class the task of discovering new proletarian methods of struggle. In Russia that meant the creation of the soviet. In the white supremacist U.S. South and de facto apartheid North, it assumed myriad “freedom” organizational forms, e.g., freedom schools, freedom unions (Flug 1990), freedom farms (White 2019), Black caucuses in the unions, bus boycotts, sit-ins, coalition and CBO (community-based organization) formations of the Chicago Freedom Movement and urban housing and rural agricultural cooperative movements. These proletarian methods of struggle and the organizational forms they assumed gave working-class resistance the political and strategic grounds to resist compromising either with liberalism or autocracy and the white supremacist state, despite the fact that in both cases the content of the revolution meant the establishment of bourgeois democratic social relations and bourgeois production relations. The dialectics of history are such that while democracy is constitutive of a state, it also mobilizes the masses of people to fight the state. It is not only the mobilization of the industrial proletariat but also mobilization of the broad masses of the population. The interrelationship between all the facts that Denby weaves together throughout his autobiography and journalism with his exceptional story-telling abilities gives one a feeling for the totality of the combined objective and subjective situation of Black working-class struggles.

Like Lenin, Denby's notion of democracy changed over time because the working-class methods of struggle for democratic rights evolved. Lenin's conception of democracy under tsarist absolutism changed in light of the workers’ development of their own soviet form of democracy. Denby's conception of democracy, under the twin modalities of southern white supremacy and northern liberal de facto segregation, evolved in real time with the development of the manifold democratic forms of civil rights and shop-floor labor struggles. Denby was involved in the organizing efforts of organized labor to provide material support to striking mineworkers in West Virginia during the 1949–50 miners general strike against the imposition of continuous miner automation in the mines. In 1966, he was at the center of organizing Black autoworkers’ and Teamsters’ support for Black sharecroppers displaced from cotton plantations into tent cities. The March 17, 1966 issue of Jet magazine carried an article about Denby's efforts to organize support for the Lowndes County tent city, “Factory Worker Helps Lowndes County Poor.” Detroit newspapers carried articles in spring 1966 about Denby and the Lowndes County Association, particularly the Black weekly Michigan Chronicle (April 2 and 6, June 11, 1966), and the Detroit News (April 6, 1966). Tent cities like the one in Lowndes County and Greenville, Mississippi, along with many other battlefronts of the Civil Rights Movement throughout the South spontaneously sprang up, providing the original impetus and inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign, in 1967–68.

Because the capital-labor contradiction, e.g., workers battling automation, coincided with the mobilization of masses of people in struggles for democratic rights, or national self-determination in periods of monopoly imperialism, democratic struggles assumed a particular urgency. The combined and uneven historical development of a particular country imposed this urgency on the politics of proletarian internationalism. This took various forms in the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power era, from Denby's account of Black workers closely following the vicissitudes of Africa's national independence struggles, to Dr. King's civil rights politics taking a sharp anti-imperialist turn against the U.S. war in Vietnam.

From Lenin's World War I perspective, imperialist rivalries between monopoly state powers descended into military rivalries of world war. In Denby's case, it meant U.S. imperialist support of West European powers’ colonial-imperialist wars against national independence struggles in their colonial territories. The politics arising from the internationalization of democratic struggles, especially for national independence in Africa, became more concrete in this era. Unfortunately, the necessity to work out revolutionary theory, i.e., the dialectics of liberation, had not. Despite the need for a revolutionary theory, comprehension of the dialectics of liberation in the epoch of Civil Rights, Black Power, and Third World, anti-colonial, national independence struggles, with few exceptions like Frantz Fanon, remained a missed moment. For his part, Denby made a category out of the need to work out the dialectics of liberation with his continuous admonition to Black nationalist and Left activists to study Raya Dunayevskaya's 1973 work, Philosophy and Revolution, as the philosophic ground on which to engage the dialectics of liberation. ²⁵

For his part, Lenin's dialectical comprehension of proletarian democracy – soviet democracy meant the working-class majority of the population, “to a man, woman, and child” (Quoted in Dunayevskaya 1958, 202) running society. The revolutionary deconstruction of the bureaucratic state was the first objective challenge to socialist praxis against bureaucratization of the socialist state. By January 1917, on the eve of the February Revolution, Lenin had grasped the dialectics of history of the previous 15 years, from What Is To Be Done? (1902) to the 1905 Revolution, through the long 12 years of Tsarist repression and ideological struggles over the nature of the coming Russian Revolution.

The class content of the form and method of the revolution would not be bourgeois democracy but proletarian democracy, not a parliamentary talking body, but a proletarian working body. Lenin drew from Marx's assessment of the historic accomplishments of the 1871 Paris Commune his conclusion that the “Commune was to be a working, not parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time”.

Charles Denby's autobiography and journalism captures similar distinctions between the petty-bourgeois leaders and elites versus the grassroots organizational forms of community-based democracy, on the one hand, and rank-and-file democratic caucuses at the point of production and in the local unions, on the other. These rank-and-file working-class forms of organization were the method and content of the Civil Rights, Black Power and Black labor struggles, over the course of the 1950s through the 1960s and early 1970s. The narrative of the forms and methods of these struggles found in the writing of Charles Denby delineates the proletarian democratic tendency of subsequent progressive social movements and liberal bourgeois electoral campaigns alike, regardless of the retrogression that came with the assumption of state power by the liberal bourgeoisie. It should come as no surprise or mystery when the form and methods of these social movements resurface repeatedly throughout the post-Civil Rights era, as they have today. The theoretical discernment of their form and content remains the task of Marxist-Humanism today.