Against fascism, for racial equality: communists, anti-racism and the road to the Second World War in Australia, South Africa and the United States

Abstract

The Second World War (after June 1941) was a high point for the international communist movement with the Popular Front against fascism bringing many new people into Communist Parties in the global West. In the United States, South Africa and Australia, the Communist Party supported the war effort believing that the war against fascism would eventually become a war against imperialism and capitalism. Part of this support for the war effort was the support of black and indigenous soldiers in the armed forces. This activism fit into a wider tradition of these communist parties’ anti-racist campaigning that had existed since the 1920s. This article looks at how support for the national war effort and anti-racist activism intertwined for these CPs during the war and the problems over ‘loyalty’ and commitment to the anti-imperial struggle that this entanglement of aims produced.

Keywords:

• Anti-racism
• communism
• Second World War
• indigenous peoples
• anti-fascism
• anti-colonialism
• communist international

Notes

1. This paper is informed by the theoretical work on ‘settler colonialism’ conducted by Lorenzo Veracini, but has reservations about using the term to describe these countries in the post-imperial era. See: Veracini, 2010.

2. For example, between 1929 and 1931, the LAI’s Executive Committee involved D.R. Thengdi (India), Hunag Ping (China), Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Shapurji Saklatavla (India), Mohammed Hatta (Indonesia), Fuad Chemali (Syria), J.W. Ford (US), Diego Rivera (Mexico), Augusto Sandino (Nicaragua), Melnichansky (Soviet Union), Dimitroff (Balkans), A. Hercier (France), Willi Münzenberg M.P. (Germany), R. Bridgeman (Great Britain), James Maxton, M.P. (Great Britain), Harry Pollitt (Great Britain) and Edo Fimmen (Holland). LAI statement (Berlin), 3 March, 1931, 542/1/51, RGASPI.

3. Allison Drew explains that ‘Bolshevisation’ was the organisation of the national communist party along Russian lines, with parties to be ‘centralised and subjected to proletarian discipline’, alongside the dissolution of factions and the aim for parties ‘to be demographically representative of the entire population’. In South Africa, this meant the mass recruitment of black people into the Communist Party (Drew, 2003, p. 168).

4. Susan Campbell has argued that the CPUSA overlooked the issue of Native American rights and claims to sovereignty during this period (Campbell, 1994–1995, pp. 461, 462).

5. See: Jagara, 1946; Munt, 2010.

6. For an alternative view, see: Branson, 1985, pp. 121–124.

7. Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson show that there was an anti-British imperialist sentiment that ran through the Afrikaner population in South Africa, and this was initially supportive of the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. However, by the 1920s, especially when the fledgling CPSA join the Rand Revolt, many Afrikaners came out as fervent anti-communists, particularly as the CPSA encouraged reaching out to black workers. Jack and Ray Simons suggest in their classic Class and Colour in South Africa that the CP had flirted with Afrikaner nationalism in its early years, but eventually rejected this reproach with the Afrikaner nationalists, instead favouring ‘working-class unity … by becoming the link between white and black workers’. Filatova & Davidson, 2013, pp. 41, 42; Simons & Simons, 1983, pp. 310, 311.

8. In April 1940, the newly formed conservative United Australia–Country Party coalition used the National Security Act to ban eight communist (and Trotskyist) newspapers and journals, including the monthly Communist Review and the weeklies The Guardian and The Tribune. As France fell to the Nazis in June of the same year, the government under Prime Minister Robert Menzies banned membership of the Communist Party under the same National Security Act and raids were conducted at CPA offices and bookshops across the Eastern states. After the Menzies government was replaced by the ALP under John Curtin, the Attorney-General H.V. Evatt finally lifted the war-time ban on the CPA in December 1942 and membership reached 20,000 by September 1943. Macintyre (1998, pp. 395, 396), Brown (1986, p. 120).

9. ‘Jim Crowism’ was the segregation (enforced through legislation in the southern U.S.) between African–American and white people in the public sphere, adopted by the armed forces until the end of the Second World War. See: Moorhouse, 2000.