Description:
Drawing on years of archival research, Professor Hakim Adi uncovers an often-overlooked revolutionary alliance: between African and Caribbean leaders and organizations, and the Communist International, a pioneer of a global, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist politics. Pan-Africanism and Communism digs deep into the development of the Comintern's approach to the question of African liberation, and its eventual establishment of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW). Looking at the ITUCNW's activities in Africa, the US, the Caribbean, and Europe, it shows what it looked like to build solidarity between those forwarding the international communist movement and those fighting against capitalism in all of its faces.
This book remains an essential text for anyone who wants to truly understand the history of solidarity that shaped revolutions past, and the unfinished fights they left behind.
Review Quotes:
Few studies have linked Pan-Africanism and the global class struggle, so this book fills that gap. Anti-communist attacks have silenced many historians, but Hakim Adi forces recognition of the important role of the Communist International. This study helps us to understand that the social force behind Pan-Africanism has been based in the working class. We need this understanding to help us understand that the fight against colonialism was a class struggle, and the current fight against neocolonialism will also be a class struggle. Hakim Adi helps us understand that the slogan "Africa Must Unite," is a demand of the working class.
-Abdul Alkalimat, author of The History of Black StudiesPan-Africanism and Communism is imperative reading for new generations of progressive, socialist, and communist African and African diaspora movements, political parties, governments, and allies. Presented by Hakim Adi, a first-class historian and master teacher, this book is a crucial tool as we continue to defend hard-won life, liberties, and democracy under threat by White supremacist movements and authoritarian, fascist governments.
-James Early, activist and former director of Cultural Studies and Communication at the Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies at the Smithsonian Institution[A] stunningly conceived and researched book . . .
-Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century[A] foundational text for scholars, organizers, and activists committed to Black liberation and socialism. Hakim Adi's meticulous research and accessible writing illuminates how superexploited comrades across the world used every collective vessel at their disposal, from parties and radical organizations to congresses and campaigns, to not only cast off their own capitalist chains and racialized fetters, but to convey to their compatriots that the liberation of their darker siblings must not be subordinated or delayed. Though focused on the interwar years, this enheartening excavation of African peoples' refusal to separate the struggle against white supremacy and white chauvinism from the fight to overthrow colonialism and capitalist imperialism is important to our current moment. It helps render irrelevant ongoing debates about the primacy of race or class, the utility of Marxism to African people, and the potential of a Black vanguard in a multiracial movement. In short, Pan-Africanism and Communism is a blueprint for organizing and movement building in a time of profound alienation and human degradation.
-Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States