The Strategy for a Black Agenda, written by Henry Winston, former National Chair of the CPUSA, carries the work of Lenin’s “Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.” Lenin states in his work that the opportunistic ideology of such leaders of the Second International like Kautsky, “very clearly reveals their entire thinking and their entire range of ideas, or, rather, the full extent of their stupidity, pedantry, baseness and betrayal of working-class interests—and that, moreover, under the guise of “defending” the idea of “world revolution”.[1] “In this tradition, Winston pulls from Lenin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Du Bois, and Frederik Douglas to show successful struggles for black liberation have been about fighting against monopolists that have exploited blacks in Africa and America. He points out the ideologies that go against this anti-monopolist strategy, especially those that espouse a “Pan-African” or “neo-Pan African” ideologies that only objectively strengthen the position of the monopolists’ strategies. The “super-revolutionaries” that Winston mentions that support such a pernicious ideology that overall misconstrue the concepts that were brought up by Marx, Lenin, and Du Bois do not adhere to the tradition of Lenin’s construction of self-determination and remove the class struggle and replaces it with a pseudo-Marxist, Maoist ideology that focuses on white chauvinists against third world countries. 

Winston critiques a few of the writers in support of “Pan-Africanism.” Roy Innis, Winston mentions, speaks of “Black Capitalism” that looks at Africa for the blacks as Israel is for Jewish people under a chauvinistic Zionist ideology.[2] What is evident from these “Pan-African” ideologies is that they point to Maoism and the Chinese opportunistic formation that pushed away from Soviet solidarity and the Leninist strategy of “national self-determination.”[3] While it is out of scope to look at the Sino-Soviet Split, the aftermath of it isn’t. Winston quotes Gus Hall, “The Maoist policy of driving wedges into the ranks of the socialist countries and the movements for national liberation, the efforts at disrupting the unity within the world Communist movement is a historic service to world imperialism.”[4] Winston astutely points with Hall’s quote what the consequences for the years to come after the Sino-Soviet split.

The Neo-Pan-Africans like Huey Newton and the Black panthers, align with the Maoist anti-Soviet ideology that pigeonholes the Soviets into the “white chauvinists” of the Western Imperialist powers.[5] The alignment only served to objectively help monopoly capital and imperial power as blacks in both America and Africa continued to be immiserated under it. Winston will exemplify how the tactics of Newton’s “Neo-Pan-Africanism,” and its Maoist ideology that is given in the chapter from A Strategy for A Black Agenda below but furthering into Strategy for a Black Agenda we see that Newton’s strategy did nothing more than allow a front for the imperial apparatus and the FBI to dismantle the Black Panther movement all together. Winston critically compares two strategies, one based in mass organization built on “anti-monopolists” lines to Newton’s strategy of armed insurrections forming on “guerilla tactics,” which was also espoused by another Black Panther, Eldridge Cleaver. In his analysis, Winston brings the non-violent, mass organizational movement that forced the acquittal of Angela Davis lead by the CPUSA and its apparatus of non-violent, mass organizational movements that forced monopolists to concede something that the American racist judicial system rarely does.[6]  This chapter was carefully selected to codify why it is imperative that we do not “lean” towards sectarian “super-revolutionary” tendencies like Newton’s ideology that removed the historical materialist analysis of self-determination that Lenin rightfully identified. The end result of the unfortunate consequences of pushing a strategy that “leans” towards imperialist and monopolist formations show that the communist movement must look at left wing radical ideology as objectively antagonist to their success. Winston expresses that what the strategy for black liberation should organize on is not “super-revolutionary” Maoists formations that lead to the objective strengthening of imperialist structures like the police state but only on “anti-monopolist” and class lines regardless of skin color. This is under the heritage that points to such revolutionary thinkers and activists like King, Douglas, Du Bois, and Lenin and not to “ignore the context” of these revolutionary thinkers like others that with a “most extraordinary” privilege which “lack of understanding of how the socialist [Soviet – ed.] countries have altered the prospect for class and national liberation within the prison of imperialism.”[7] This is exemplified in the contemporary New Left formations that only wreck any movement that will lead to a worker lead state.

[1] Lenin, V.I., “Left-Wing” Commun-ism: An Infantile Disorder; New Outlook Publishers: New York, 2022, p. 3.

[2] Winston, Henry, Strategy for a Black Agenda: A Critique of New Theories of Liberation in the United States and Africa; International Publishers: New York, 1973, P. 25.

[3] Ibid., pp. 116-117.

[4] Ibid., p. 150.

[5] Ibid., p. 160.

[6] Ibid., p. 263.

[7] Ibid., p. 231.