The life of a Black radical who fled state violence in the US only to find it under a different name in the Soviet Union shows the state is never the solution.
Taken from here: /http://autonomies.org/2022/01/no-escaping-the-state-the-story-of-lovett-fort-whiteman/
The excitement of Bolshevism expressed by famous Black radicals like Paul Robeson, prominent thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and those with proximity to the party elite like Lovett did not necessarily reflect the whole picture of the Black experience of living in Moscow during this time. Frustrations about the direction of the Party and race eventually hit home with Lovett. His outspokeness regarding “the Negro question” and tensions with other communists eventually drew the attention of the Soviet authorities. This issue eventually brought him into conflict with some fellow Black communists and party officials in the US as well. Sectarian disputes and failed attempts to organize the Black masses back home drew the ire and suspicion of Soviet officials and the comrades around him. He eventually caught the attention of Stalin’s secret police, who put him under surveillance — just as he had been with the FBI.
State terror purges, abuses and expulsions created plenty of discord among communists the world over. Black people had to confront the possibility of being labeled as “counterrevolutionary” for daring to emphasize the centrality of race in relation to revolutionary struggle. Some Black communists left the party or were expelled for being so vocal on the issue. Even Lovett’s devotion as a fervent party-line state-communist was not considered good enough.
The Black American journalist Homer Smith recalled in his memoir that Lovett was “so steeped in party dogma that he had completely lost touch with America.” Nonetheless, in 1933 Lovett eventually decided he wanted to come back to the US and sent a letter to the Party Secretary in New York. To his misfortune, the note was intercepted by Soviet state authorities who added it to his file, which was growing along with his own disillusionment. His loyalties and his potentially negative influence on other Black people came into question. He was denied permission to leave and in 1936 he was exiled from Moscow to Alma-Ata in what is now Kazakhstan. He would be rearrested and sentenced to hard labor from there.
Some people around him, like Homer, did not know what to make of his disappearance at first, suspecting he might have fallen victim to Stalin’s Great Purge, as many of Lovett’s former contacts had been. Smith recalled that “many disappeared without a trace.” He dedicated a chapter to Lovett’s disappearance in his memoir and said it was a case that “dramatized… as no other, the absoluteness of the purges.” Eventually, word reached Smith that Lovett “had died in a concentration camp.”
Additional testament to Lovett’s tragic death was provided by another disillusioned Black man in the Soviet Union, the Jamaican-born Detroit engineer Robert Robinson who found out about Lovett’s fate through a friend. In his autobiography he noted that news of Whiteman’s tragic end came from “another Russian who had been banished to the same town as Whiteman.” That man told a friend of Robinson that Lovett “died of starvation, or malnutrition, a broken man whose teeth had been knocked out.” He was not able to keep up with his forced labor requirements in the harsh Siberian prison camp and he paid the ultimate price.
Lovett was an early member of an overlooked chorus of Black radicals and others who fled the West for state-socialist projects the world over, just to discover they still had not escaped oppression and violence. Before numerous revolutionaries of the Black Power era would make “skyjacking” planes to Cuba and African countries a trend, there were Black people like Lovett, Robert and Homer, who left the US seeking new freedom and belonging. For Joy Gleason Carew, author of Blacks, Reds, and Russians, the Black sojourners to Soviet Russia “represented an enormous investment in a faith that the society they were joining could accomplish at least some of its noble goals.”
Recounting their stories is not an indictment of socialism, but it is certainly an indication of how the state apparatus perverts the potential for what it can be. Leftists who have affinities with, and romanticize state-socialist projects like that of the Soviet Union could disturbingly dismiss Lovett’s death as justified. Stories like his often get lost in patriotic state loyalties as well as leftist historical nostalgia. That sort of rationale carries an ongoing predilection towards state authority that can lead into fantasy, where reformed “socialist” governance always means and always has meant liberation.
When we note that the Russian Revolution was followed by a notorious totalitarian despot like Joseph Stalin, the tragedy of Fort-Whiteman is not an aberration. Of course, to see the issues at hand, this requires us to observe the Russian Revolution as a historical event rather than to mythologize it. We can then see injustice, betrayals, mass killings, imprisonment and systemic inadequacy. History is not clean, it is full of disarray, and unless we want to carry its failures with us into the future, we have to tell the truth of what actually happened. Not what we wanted to happen.
As C.L.R. James and Grace Lee Boggs once wrote, when Stalin’s “fantastic stupidities” were shielded from criticism, they became “common property.” A history of mythmaking turned this into the inheritance of many Stalinist or Stalin-friendly factions of the US and Western left. With regard to the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg already argued: “It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy.” But perfunctory praise devoid of honest observation can make superhumans of another sort. Mythology creates the kind of people whose superpowers are to make stories like that of Fort-Whiteman vanish. To avoid giving evil history an invisibility cloak, we have to look for these stories beyond the fame of glorified leaders and convenient state narratives.
Maybe what is most deeply disturbing is that Fort-Whiteman left the US where he could have been imprisoned and forced to labor in bondage as his father had, only to die that way at the hands of the Soviet state. He did not escape state violence — he met it under a new name.
In his new “home,” to make him more easily disposable, Fort-Whiteman had to be depicted as an alien, a counterrevolutionary or potentially seditious — just as he had been in the US. Robert Robinson said that despite becoming a Soviet citizen, he was always reminded that: “you may have Soviet citizenship, but you are still a foreigner.” This confirms that the state is not our redeemer, it is our problem. The lengths it will go to in order to maintain its monopoly on violence and power are inherent.
This elitism of the ruling classes of the world and their administrations — whether in capitalist or nominally-socialist states — is why we have to excavate the stories of people like Lovett Fort-Whiteman. The overshadowing dominance of the ruling elites is wed to the state and its machinations. The state form will never grant Black people a safe escape from state violence because the state’s destructive potential can always turn on us. Those rendered stateless in some form or another — whether they be refugees, non-citizens or migrants — do not have to do anything to be subjected to the violence of the state; they are always considered especially deserving of it.
Lovett’s story is just one among many, and it represents a plethora of contradictions. The greater question is, do we want to uncover the others? The lessons we can learn from these inconvenient histories are often hidden behind a cloud of popular myths and fantasies. If we refuse to face these unsettling truths, we will never be able to achieve liberation.
The Slow Burning Fuse 