For Antifascist Futures by Alyosha Goldstein & Simón Ventura Trujillo

Author:Alyosha Goldstein & Simón Ventura Trujillo [Goldstein, Alyosha & Trujillo, Simón Ventura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942173564
Publisher: Common Notions
Published: 2022-04-25T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Claudia Jones, the Longue Durée of McCarthyism, and the Threat of US Fascism

Charisse Burden-Stelly

Fascism from Hitlerism to McCarthyism

On December 5, 1955, the United States government ordered the deportation of Claudia Jones, a prolific leader and theorist in the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), who, though Trinidadian by birth, had spent most of her life stateside.1 Her expulsion was the culmination of years of harassment, surveillance, and state repression, primarily under the auspices of the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (Smith Act) and the Internal Security Act of 1950 (McCarran Act). This anticommunist violence experienced by Jones and her fellow party members was one aspect of what she feared was the rise of fascism in the United States. After World War II, Jones theorized, the threat of US fascism was manifested in the rise in white supremacist terrorism, especially against Black people; the entrenchment of “Wall Street imperialism,” which included the subjugation of labor domestically and economic domination internationally; warmongering and militarism; and, of course, the government’s utilization of anticommunism to crush the CPUSA and to cripple all progressive thought and activism. As the National Committee to Defend Negro Leadership argued in 1955, Jones was being persecuted because she fought against the “fascist-like abuses of the Negro people in the South,” because she fought for world peace, and for her political views in general. Jones’ “forcible ejection,” the Committee reprimanded, exemplified “the continuing abuse of the rights of colored people by the use of anti-Communist hysteria”—a practice that had been a cornerstone of Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the nottoo-distant past.2

Jones’ postwar antifascism is not surprising given that it was the spread of fascism in the 1930s that drew her to the CPUSA. In particular, she was impressed by how the Party spoke about the linked fates of Africans who were menaced by fascist Italy and African Americans who were terrorized by white supremacy. “I was impressed by the Communist speakers,” she wrote to her comrade William Z. Foster in 1955, “who explained the reasons for this brutal crime against young Negro boys [the Scottsboro Nine]; and who related the Scottsboro case to the struggle of the Ethiopian people against fascism and Mussolini’s invasion.”3

When the Italian fascist Benito Mussolini ordered the invasion of Abyssinia on October 3, 1935, anticapitalist activists, organizers, and intellectuals throughout the African diaspora immediately connected this aggression against one of the only African countries that had evaded colonial rule to European colonialism, white supremacy in the United States, Euro-American imperialism, and world war.4 As long as Africans continued to be treated as inferior “others” to be ruled by Europeans, the Pan-African Marxist George Padmore contended, the threat of fascist tyranny would always be present.5

As early as 1934, the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), founded in July 1928 during the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, appealed to the global proletariat to rally against Italy’s war provocations. Every subsequent issue of the ITUCNW’s newspaper, The Negro Worker, defended Abyssinian sovereignty, condemned

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