revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

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precipitious action, to attack the enemy when he is most angry and to fail
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to plan things and act out of improvisation .
Black Bolshevik , Harry Haywood's autobiography, encompasses his growth
and political development as a
black theoretician for the Communist Party
from the later 1920's to the mid-1950's .
Haywood's book is a political
autobiography which traces the development of "the Afro-American National
Question" in the Communist International and the American Communist Party,
and the struggle for a revolutionary mass line or practice within the
CPUSA . Haywood describes the rise of race pride, consciousness and militancy
amoung the black troops during World War I . He also traces the impact
of the World War race riots of 1919 and the effect they had on him
as a veteran . In chapter four of Black Bolshevik , Haywood gives an overview
of a
secret paramilitary revolutionary nationalist organization that
emerged in the 1920's, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) .
Haywood's description of the ABB is important because little is known
of the ABB's development Haywood, in chapter eight, traces how he came to
the conclusion that Afro-Americans constituted an oppressed nation of a
"new kind ." Asserting that "Afro-Americans are not only a 'nation within
a nation,' but a captive nation, suffering a colonial-type oppression while
trapped within the
geographic bounds of one of the world's most powerful
imperialist countries ."
Haywood explains how first Lenin, Stalin and
other members concluded that blacks, having maintained a stable community
and being in majority in many counties of the Black Belt South, are an
oppressed nation with the right to self-determination . Haywood then
i6 Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla (London :
International institute for Strategic Studies, 1971) .