Brad’s Reviews > Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist > Status Update

"Those of us who did try to do mass work...were rather castigated and beaten down as 'left sectarian.' We were told to have respect for the bourgeois reformists [and] for the bureaucrats of the trade union aristocracy, to 'lay off' and 'wait for favourable conditions to arise.' Through such policies, the [CPUSA] increasingly lost its once important roots in the shops, mills and black working class communities."

"A kind of moral crusade was launched which was completely divorced from any mass work. Refusing to examine the full implications of black oppression as national oppression, it was assumed that chauvinist practices could be eliminated by wiping out wrong ideas and attitudes...White chauvinism came to be considered as a sort of phenomenon...separate from the fight for black rights and proletarian revolution."

"[In the American socialist movement] from the Socialist Party to Lovestone to Browder, the main deviation had always been right opportunism."

"Throughout my lifetime, I found that interracial solidarity--even in the Communist Party--required a continuous ideological struggle."

"It came to me then that I had been fighting the wrong war. The. Germans weren't the enemy-the enemy was right here at home."