Charles Denby and the idea of Marxist-Humanism

by Lou Turner

Precisely because we had brought out [the] total concept of Absolute Idea which extended the idea of revolution to the party-concept, [we] began with the proletariat as leader whether it was the editorship of the paper, or the [Resident Editorial Board and National Editorial Board].

--Raya Dunayevskaya, 1974

Charles Denby's autobiography INDIGNANT HEART was originally published in 1952 under the pen-name Matthew Ward in order, as Denby stated in the Foreword to the 1978 edition, "to protect individuals from the vicious McCarthyite witch hunt then sweeping the country, which resulted in the persecution and literal destruction of many people. Few who did not go through that experience of national repression of ideas can fully understand the truly totalitarian nature of McCarthyism and the terror it produced."

The McCarthyite witch hunt to which Denby refers took place against the economic backdrop of the U.S.'s first postwar recessions associated with the new production methods called automation. The 1953-54 recession, automation, and competition with Ford for second place among the Big Three automakers, led to a significant drop in employment at Chrysler, from 100,000 to 35,000, in the 1950s. But for his seniority at Chrysler, Denby would have been among the ranks of workers displaced by this first post-war restructuring of the U.S. economy.

West Virginia coalminers of the United Mine Workers of America were the first to battle the new technology with a general strike in 1949-50. Denby recorded the worker solidarity he witnessed when the striking coalminers came to Detroit UAW Local 600 to appeal for relief: "workers not only gave several thousand dollars outright, but pledged $500 a week for as long as the strike lasted, and sent a whole caravan--five truckloads--of food and clothing. The strike didn't last too long after that show of solidarity." Denby would mobilize the same kind of material support and solidarity a decade and a half later, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, when he organized the Michigan-Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights to aid Black sharecroppers evicted from white-owned plantations for registering to vote.

NORTH/SOUTH DIALECTIC

In his articles on his home of Lowndes County, Alabama, and the fierce struggle of Black farmers there, Denby never missed the opportunity to make the connection to the struggle against racism in the North, especially on the shop floor. In only a few years, the industrial working class resistance to racism which had for the most part gone unrecognized during the 1960s as the southern Civil Rights Movement took center stage, would emerge full-blown with the radical caucuses of Black workers in the union. Such is the way in which the unity of civil rights and labor for which Denby had agitated for more than a decade finally manifested itself.

A high point of Denby's political efforts in this period was the role he played in initiating and helping to organize a mass solidarity rally at Detroit's Cobo Hall, June 19, 1966 where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke. Part of the proceeds from the rally went to the Lowndes County tent city to buy land for displaced farmers and their families, and to provide food, clothing, and shelter. Tent cities like the ones in Lowndes County, in Greenville, Mississippi, and on many other civil rights battle fronts spontaneously sprang up, providing the original impetus and inspiration for King's 1968 Poor People's Campaign.

King came again in 1967 to a Detroit Cobo Hall rally from SCLC's Chicago campaign. Chicago was his and SCLC's initial foray into the urban North. Unlike Chicago, however, the focus and strength of Black organized labor in Detroit gave King a new appreciation of the importance of unionization for Black working people. It would influence his decision to participate in his last freedom struggle with the Memphis sanitation workers' strike in the spring of 1968. Taken together, the rural tent cities as the dwelling places of displaced agricultural and domestic workers, the urban battles over segregated schools and housing, the struggles of the Black working poor to organize for better wages and working conditions, and the power of Black organized labor to effect a new kind of solidarity backing and leadership for all these struggles that had been so organic a part of Denby's political consciousness as a Marxist-Humanist for a decade were beginning to emerge in King's social vision at the end of his life.

PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION: FROM NEW CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS TO ALIENATED SPIRIT

As the vitality of the '60s Civil Rights Movement waned, its watershed reached with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ensuing urban rebellions which swept the U.S. in 1968, a new stage of Black labor militancy arose from the point of the production process itself. The years 1967-68 saw continuous mass 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 and debate 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. (See NEWS & LETTERS, February 1969.) Not only was it the first celebration of King's birthday as a working class holiday, the absence of Black workers actually shut down production.

It was a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King that 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 been articulating for more than a decade regarding the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements in the minds of Black workers.

According to William H. Harris, an historian of Black labor and the scholar who wrote the introduction to the 1989 edition of Denby's autobiography, "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." Another scholar of Black labor history, Philip Foner, described the social basis of the new militancy that entered the Detroit auto shops at the end of the 1960s. Foner went on to quote at length from the article Denby wrote on the Black caucuses and their demise when he was the editor of the Chrysler Mack THE STINGER.

The event that began to determine a new manner of writing by Denby, at this time, however, occurred in theory, not practice. The publication of Raya Dunayevskaya's work PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, in 1973, had a marked influence on Denby. This is evident in a 1975 "Worker's Journal" column that also served as a lead article, "Black intellectuals probe role of Marxism and American workers" (NEWS & LETTERS, August-September, 1975), in which Denby took up a debate then underway in the intellectual journal, BLACK SCHOLAR, about nationalism, separatism, and Marxism. The Black workers Denby spoke to about the debate dismissed it as remote from the new onslaught against labor capitalism was just beginning to unleash with its restructuring. Denby tied this to the demise of the Black caucuses in the union whose leaders' Maoist brand of Marxism and nationalism, the Reutherite union leadership exploited in order to discredit them in the eyes of Black workers and sympathetic white workers. His article demonstrated the concreteness of the issues of nationalism and Marxism that the intellectuals in the BLACK SCHOLAR debated as abstractions.

Denby understood, painfully, the consequences of the ideological pitfalls that led to the demise of the Black caucuses movement on the threshold of the most far-reaching economic restructuring of capitalist production relations in this century. He understood that the two--the ideological and the economic-- were linked. The radical challenge by labor to capital spearheaded by young Black workers calling themselves revolutionaries, and the potential it had to call forth rank-and-file white labor, had so threatened industrial capitalism that it could not possibly have regained its equilibrium without the aid of the union bureaucracy. Once the ideological battle waged by the union leadership against this worker militancy succeeded with the discrediting and defeat of the Black caucuses, capitalist restructuring commenced its great industrial purge of Black labor from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

The ensuing mass unemployment of the Black workforce, and the alienation of the succeeding generations of young workers from the labor market, became a major concern of Denby's from the mid-1970s onward. On the one hand, he criticized the abstract discussion about nationalism among Black radical intellectuals, when Black and white workers were preoccupied with the question of forging a new unity to beat back the company purges of Black workers and union concession that paved the way for capitalist restructuring. On the other hand, the growing problem of Black unemployment, which he thought was not really understood by Black intellectuals, was producing a militant spirit among the Black working class, a spirit, however, that was deeply alienated. It bothered him that both this Black militancy and alienation had not developed to the point where it could recognize in Raya Dunayevskaya's, PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION, the philosophical ground for the growth of the movement and his own organization, News and Letters Committees. What grew instead was the desire for more activism and the notion that it alone would bring on the revolution. "It isn't so," Denby explained at an editorial board meeting of NEWS & LETTERS, June 15, 1975. "But we have to know that the unemployed are desperate and they want to upset the whole system, and when they can't have the revolution now, they can become disillusioned unless we make it clear that working out the philosophy is also the way to revolution. We have to find a way to work out philosophy as it relates to our daily lives."

Denby strove tirelessly to have Black working people and intellectuals engage Dunayevskaya's work. As early as 1969, four years before PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION was published, he had convened a "Black-Red Conference" in Detroit of Black workers, activists and intellectuals, along with Marxist-Humanists, to discuss the work-in-progress Dunayevskaya presented on the book at the Conference. For Denby the Conference provided a means to unify thought and action in a way that could even lead to "a committee for the study of philosophy in the revolution." (See "The Black-Red Conference" bulletin, Detroit: News & Letters, January 12, 1969, p. 2.) By 1975, the need for philosophy in the movement had become dire in Denby's estimation. The disintegration of the Black caucuses movement, which was not due to any lack of militancy, was proof enough of this. To Denby's way of thinking, "You can't have a movement in the street that you can have in the plant and [it's] nowhere in the plant now."

Something new had appeared with the capitalist restructuring that began in 1974-75 which threw masses of Black workers into unemployment lines, many permanently. The alienation of the working class had a new face, permanent unemployment, which by the end of the decade would also have a new name: the so-called "underclass." This is what made the political in-fighting among all the intellectual tendencies merely another manifestation of this new condition of Black life and labor. Denby recollected that when such conditions existed back in Depression years of the 1930s, and workers and Black people talked of revolution, it was the non-revolutionary character of the Communist Party that prevented one from actually occurring. The situation in the 1970s was entirely different, in Denby's view, because when the unemployed "can't have the revolution now, they become disillusioned." Inside the factory, unity among Black and white workers was needed to fight the capitalist restructuring and the union bureaucracy's concessions to the companies that paved the way for it. What made the Black intellectual discussion about nationalist separatism abstract was that it came precisely at the moment that unity was needed among Black and white workers in order to fight the onslaught.

Denby is among the very few writers on race relations in the American society who displayed a persistent grasp of their class contradictions and ambiguities. Never one for taking the latest appearances of the white backlash and retrogression on race matters as the leading characteristic of a historic period, Denby didn't let go of what the Civil Rights and labor movements had achieved, especially in regard to the transformation of social relations and consciousness among working people themselves. For Denby, anything won through arduous struggle and often in blood could not be easily rolled back. So, even as he acknowledged the latest expressions of racial and class oppression, or trade union concessions, he also found expressions of continuing militance, insisting on how fundamentally social relations and consciousness had changed. His favorite expression for this condition of historical ambiguity was the movement's arrival at a "crossroads."

ORIGIN OF TODAY'S BLACK LEADERSHIP CRISIS

Denby teaches us how to look dialectically at social and political developments; how, in other words, to face new retrogressive realities while holding on to, or preserving, the high points created by the movement that the power structure seeks to overturn or negate. "No one can take away from the greatness of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in Lowndes County and all across the South.... But what we have to see in 1982 is how much more total a revolution is needed to get to freedom. Whenever the movement is not complete, a way is left for the old oppressors to get back in. That is what the white system is doing behind Black faces today. Instead of ruling by KKK terror, they are strangling Black farmers and workers economically." (NEWS & LETTERS, June 1982)

It was after his last trip to the South in 1982 that Denby, alarmed at the unprecedented internal crisis he saw emerging inside the Black community and the racist resurgence against the Black community coming from the outside, made a point of retelling the story of his encounter with Stokely Carmichael over the direction of the movement in Lowndes County in 1965. He explained to a group of young Black leaders in Lowndes County "how SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] came into Lowndes County, and [that] no one there had ever heard of SNCC. They asked me who they should work with, SNCC or SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], and I supported SNCC as a grass-roots organization. I supported Stokely because he raised the consciousness of the people in so short a time. But I explained why I split from Stokely too.This was the beginning of the division between leaders and ranks in the freedom movement in this country."

For Denby, in other words, the crisis in Black leadership, in 1982, originated in the high point of the social movement of the '60s over the direction of the struggle and in defining the relationship of leadership and organization to the masses, in the face of state repression. It was only when the persistence of that "division between leaders and ranks in the freedom movement" gained an objective basis in the Reagan era of the 1980s that it assumed the dimensions of the crisis that currently exists.

Meeting these crises in the Black and labor movements in what would be the last months of his life meant rising to the stature of a new level of articulating the meaning of his life and struggles. Only after the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism developed by Raya Dunayevskaya had been rounded out in 1982 with the completion of the third of her major works on Marx's philosophy did Denby express in the most unequivocal terms, not only what his life story had meant, but that its inherent philosophy also represented the perspectives and ground needed to confront the race and class crises of the 1980s.

It is as if he now saw his life, the story of the developing social consciousness of an American Black worker, as the very embodiment of Marx's philosophy of human emancipation. The universality of a historically working-class people is what one feels in Denby's story. What he was reaching for at the end of his life was the expression of that universality in the unequivocal terms of Marx's philosophy of revolution as it spoke to the Black dimension.

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