After his release from California Men's Colony on bail in 1970, Huey Newton opened a letter from the Chinese Communist Party.Footnote 1 Newton, a black Marxist celebrity on the US left, had founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland four years earlier. The group won attention first by deploying armed patrols to monitor police, then in a national campaign to “Free Huey!” after his political arrest.Footnote 2 In light of this, the Chinese Communists spoke to Newton as a comrade: they invited him to their country to learn from his Marxist analysis of the United States, as well as to educate him on China's revolutionary project. Newton, along with fellow Panther leader Elaine Brown and a few other party delegates, took off for the People's Republic in September of 1971. There, these controversial radicals met large groups applauding them and waving signs that read “We Support the Black Panther Party” and “We Support the American People but the Nixon Imperialist Regime Must Be Overthrown.” Newton reported seeing China as a “free and liberated territory” where the police served the people instead of oppressing them. He also saw “a classless society” which met everyone's needs. He attended a reception hosted by China's premier Zhou Enlai, with honored guests from all over the Third World.Footnote 3 Newton understood his host country as the socialist center of the anti-imperialist struggle.
Just one year later, the Panthers’ number one enemy Richard Nixon flew to China to meet Newton's heroes. Within the United States, Nixon escalated repression against the Black Panther Party. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) labeled the organization “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The agency made the party the new target of COINTELPRO, a “counter-intelligence program” originally designed to repress Communists. Nixon oversaw 233 actions against the Panthers, ranging from rumor spreading to assassination.Footnote 4 But in China, he shook hands jovially with Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong. He proposed a gradual reduction of the United States’ military presence in Taiwan as a first step towards normalizing US–China relations. In the decade that followed, the formerly isolated People's Republic slowly opened up to trade and cooperation with the United States.Footnote 5 The Communist Chairman made a friendly face towards the capitalist empire.
Newton and Nixon's trips caused serious disorientation for US Marxists, who had envisioned China as the socialist leader of a united front against American imperialism. The idea of China as an anti-imperialist figurehead dates back at least to the 1955 Bandung conference, which championed Afro-Asian solidarity, and the late 1960s Third World movement, in which radical US activists of color began to associate their antiracist struggles with decolonization.Footnote 6 On top of this, China claimed to pioneer a more communal society in its Cultural Revolution (1966–76), which appeared to US Marxists as a radically collectivist method of building socialism. China combined militant nationalist traditions with communal ideals, reinvigorating Marxism and outshining the supposedly bureaucratized and hegemonic Soviet Union.Footnote 7 Millions of people in the United States wanted a revolution soon, so Marxists reasonably believed China could inspire it through its brilliant combination of socialism and national liberation.Footnote 8 But radicalism's decline soon set in, ushered in by FBI repression, the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, and a rising neoliberal economy that championed market freedom and property rights while weakening labor and impoverishing the decolonized world.Footnote 9 To make matters worse for US Marxists, the 1970s Sino-US rapprochement and the end of the Cultural Revolution muddled exactly how China combined national liberation and socialism. Because of this confusion, US Marxist internationalism suffered a setback. Did Mao invite Nixon in resignation, or as a ruse to fulfill a grander plan? What legitimized China's leadership of the global revolution, or even its claim to socialism at home?
This essay analyzes how US Marxists’ imagined Chinese-led united front gave way to theoretical splintering over these questions. My goal is to supplement existing histories of radicalism's retreat with a study of the fragmentation over how to theorize global revolution. I draw from historians’ idea of “radical imaginaries,” or conceptual communities that bridge activists’ and social groups’ different worlds. “Imaginary” does not necessarily imply “false”; it makes clear that activists carefully theorized these groups to build strength and unity under tough circumstances. Kenyon Zimmer made this case for nineteenth-century anarchist migrants who developed a cosmopolitan identity to counter their persecution as foreign implants.Footnote 10 Cynthia Young traced how US leftists of color forged common cause with the Third World to understand their oppressions and guide their resistance.Footnote 11 However, my research points to political imaginaries’ opposite and divisive effect on ideological umbrellas: race, class, and state-based imaginaries separated US Marxist perspectives on China. As historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin underscored in their analysis of the Black Panthers, revolutionaries depend on their ability to forge common cause with oppressed groups on a global scale. Allies in Africa and Asia came in clutch to boost the Panthers’ legitimacy and morale while under Nixon's repression.Footnote 12 But in the 1970s, US Marxists experienced a disconnection between their shared desire for internationalism and their competing ways of framing global struggles. Historians need to understand this to help explain US Marxism's fragmentation and 1970s anti-imperialism more broadly.
My point is not to reject any of these revolutionaries’ visions, but to help today's activists and academics understand how radicals’ ideological decisions affect internationalism. The Chinese-led united front helped US Marxists make a logical connection between the class struggle and the liberation of oppressed nations, which included racialized peoples domestically. But because these revolutionaries drew from China's inspiration without squaring socialism and national liberation, the country's opening to the West ultimately contributed to fracturing their world outlook. This analysis adds to that of Steve Striffler, a historian who attributed the decline of revolutionary internationalism to the rise of neoliberalism and the “era of human rights.” Striffler argues that neoliberalism's emphasis on individual harm (not systemic injustice) helped popularize the use of human rights to condemn state abuses, while sidelining conversations on neocolonialism and capitalism.Footnote 13 This essay also recognizes micro-level decisions on how to adjust socialist anti-imperialism to the changing world political economy, acknowledging US Marxists’ agency on the ground.
To do so, I will study how three Marxist perspectives diverged on socialist anti-imperialism as the Cultural Revolution came to a close. The Black Panther Party championed China as leading an anti-imperialist struggle, with the Cultural Revolution's communal socialism justifying this leadership. Rooted in their black radical base, the Panthers imagined a revolution of racialized and colonized people, or “oppressed peoples,” rather than the traditional working class. The Trotskyist Workers World Party took an inverse approach, admiring the Cultural Revolution for empowering the proletariat more than any other socialist country had done. For this party, with its core supporters among students and industrial laborers, anti-imperialist politics proved their worth by building towards a worker-controlled society.Footnote 14 The scholars of the Monthly Review magazine engaged with a much more academic audience, but focused on the same issue of how to reconcile socialist and anti-colonial ideas. They debated over defining Chinese socialism as playing a primarily moral, economic, or counterhegemonic role. Despite their vastly different political backgrounds, my choices of study have two core commonalities. First, all of them were staunchly internationalist, winning the praise of foreign leaders from Cuba to North Korea. Second, each group promoted vigorous reading and writing. A comparative analysis of their perspectives underscores the breadth and depth of intellectual disorientation within Marxist internationalism. This focus complements Max Elbaum's similar work on 1970s US Marxism–Leninism by widening the varieties of Marxism under study and concentrating on their theoretical work.Footnote 15
After contextualizing relevant developments in China, this article will explore how each of these groups incorporated the last few years of Mao's leadership into distinct united-front visions. They all linked socialism with national liberation. But ongoing influences like Trotsky's teachings, black Marxism, world-systems theory, and development economics yielded conflicting united-front imaginaries. The primary material from each group comes from their periodicals: Black Panther (1967–80), Workers World (1959–present) and Monthly Review (1949–present). The essay begins in 1973, the year that marked a definitive setback in US internationalism after Nixon's withdrawal of troops from Vietnam satisfied most anti-war activists.Footnote 16 I end the study in 1979 in order to analyze each group's responses to the Cultural Revolution's ending and China's reform-oriented leadership.
CHINA IN CONTEXT
For its part, China had already begun to shift its priorities, as its 1970s westward turn came out of a need for stability and development. The years 1966 to 1976 saw the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. Motivated by a sense of radical egalitarianism and encouraged by top Party leadership, millions of Chinese people criticized, prosecuted, and often executed bureaucrats, Party cadres, academics, and wealthier peasants accused of being “capitalist roaders” or “revisionists.” Alongside this, the Cultural Revolution championed a unique communal economic model, which many ordinary citizens ran with by establishing cooperatives and local self-governance. In 1967, for example, industrial workers attempted to take over Shanghai. To balance this revolutionary sentiment with national sovereignty, the army suppressed total workers’ control and established the “Shanghai People's Commune” as an attempt to incorporate both state and local direction.Footnote 17 Around the same time, Premier Zhou had denounced the Soviet Union, China's former ally, as “social imperialist” for its invasion of Czechoslovakia and military buildup on the Sino-Soviet border.Footnote 18 China was alone and unstable, so it sought warmer relations abroad to help relax people's fears at home.Footnote 19 The Chinese Communist Party thus turned its diplomacy towards the United States. In 1971, Zhou invited US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to plan Nixon's then secret visit the following year.Footnote 20 Later in 1971, while Third World countries deserve credit for spearheading the admission of the People's Republic to the United Nations, the United States’ qualified support further softened Sino-US relations.Footnote 21
In the 1970s, China initially sustained its late 1960s domestic policies while making overtures to the world's capitalist superpower, but soon turned to market-oriented economic reforms. In 1973, the Party initiated the “Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius” to discredit Marshal Lin Biao, an early Cultural Revolution leader and opponent of Sino-US normalization. Yet this campaign followed the Cultural Revolution's tradition of encouraging village-based mass criticism. Economic policy also showed a strong degree of continuity into the 1970s, as the Party pushed for communal agriculture based on the self-reliant and egalitarian Dazhai model brigade.Footnote 22 But after Mao's death in September 1976, the country changed course. Top official Hua Guofeng took over as Party Chairman, supporting what Zhou and the reform-oriented Deng Xiaoping had called “four modernizations”: strengthening agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology.Footnote 23 Hua declared the end of the Cultural Revolution after politically defeating its leaders, the “Gang of Four,” who claimed to be Mao's torchbearers. In December 1978, the Communist Party elected Deng to top leadership.Footnote 24 In 1978, he solidified China's new course with his “reform and opening,” promoting private enterprise and trade with the West.Footnote 25
With its national security and economic future on the line, China prioritized its interests in all state decisions, including in its ideological communications with US revolutionaries. Early in the Cultural Revolution, China briefly encouraged foreign visits to promote its new socialist model, and then switched to strong nationalism and isolation.Footnote 26 But in 1971, the country reopened its diplomacy towards both US left-wing dissidents and right-wing rulers. Zhou hosted a reception for US supporters of China, including the Black Panther Party and other Marxists, in which he explained that the country had to build an alliance with the United States for security reasons. Later turning to the Nixon administration, Zhou dismissed the Panthers as unimportant in order to come across as friendly to the West.Footnote 27 This being said, US revolutionaries were far from Chinese pawns, as Red Scare-style propaganda may claim.Footnote 28 They had distinct moral and pragmatic commitments to international solidarity. The following research will break down these commitments, examining how each Marxist group envisioned China to articulate what revolution looked like.
THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY: SHARING IN LIBERATED TERRITORY
Like China, the Black Panthers spent the early 1970s stepping back from their heyday of mass struggle, but not without a fierce internal and international debate. Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver were two of the group's last leaders pushing for armed confrontation, as opposed to Huey Newton's strategy of prioritizing community organizing. The Cleavers connected their militancy to a vision for global revolution. While exiled in Algeria, they established the Panthers’ International Section with the government's sanction. From this foundation, they organized US antiwar activists into the People's Anti-Imperialist Delegation, which broke bread with socialist leaders in Korea, China, and Vietnam. The Cleavers’ work came as a needed legitimacy boost as the party suffered from US persecution.Footnote 29 The delegation also pushed the antiwar movement towards a pro-national liberation stance, beyond the more limited “Bring the troops home” slogan.Footnote 30 Regarding internal party politics, Eldridge Cleaver took the most interest in promoting socialist Korea's “Juche” ideology of militant self-reliance.Footnote 31 However, in 1971, his bitter tactical disagreement with Newton and ensuing split from the Panthers cut short his influence. The Cleaver–Newton dispute, combined with the antiwar movement's dwindling momentum, caused irreparable damage and large defections from the party as the 1970s began.Footnote 32 The Cleavers later condemned China for hosting Nixon and betraying Third World unity.Footnote 33 Disillusioned with seeking leadership from nation-states, they sought to build a network of “cosmopolitan guerrillas” prepared for a transnational revolution.Footnote 34
Party leader Elaine Brown emerged from this divisive climate as Newton's key ally, a voice for moderation and persistence. Brown came out of Los Angeles’ black student activism and joined the party in 1968.Footnote 35 She ascended to leadership and traveled on the People's Anti-Imperialist Delegation with the Cleavers. Upon returning to the United States, she praised China for its socialist economic system, also noting its strides towards women's liberation.Footnote 36 After Cleaver left, Brown upheld Newton's defense of China's UN membership as a tactical move to consolidate alliances.Footnote 37 At this point, the Panthers understood China as stuck between US imperialism and Soviet “social imperialism” (socialism in words but imperialism in deeds), revising their ten-point program in 1972 to condemn “all wars of aggression” rather than just the US military.Footnote 38 Brown and Newton saw themselves as paralleling China's strategic retreat by concentrating their resources on politically controlling Oakland.Footnote 39 Party chairman Bobby Seale ran for mayor in 1973, and Brown ran for city council twice in 1973 and 1975.Footnote 40 The candidates consistently won tens of thousands of votes, more than the Communist Party had nationally.Footnote 41
When Newton left for Cuba to flee from a murder charge in 1974, Brown took charge of the strategy of “survival pending revolution” that aimed to bring Oakland under black community control. Under her leadership from 1974 to 1977, the Panthers dramatically expanded their medical clinics, free clothing and food distributions, and “liberation schools.” They even took over twenty-one Bay Area properties, and developed plans to run their own factories as well as the Port of Oakland.Footnote 42 Brown could also take credit for promoting more women to leadership positions.Footnote 43 Although this effort represented a complex reaction to patriarchy within the party and racism in the US feminist movement, Brown also took inspiration from Mao and Jiang Qing's affirmations of women's roles in the revolution.Footnote 44 One of her most historic achievements was to help Lionel Wilson become Oakland's first black mayor in 1977, and her efforts won her a position on his transition team.Footnote 45
In analyzing China, the Panthers worked from Huey Newton's “revolutionary intercommunalism” thesis, which argued for a Third World revolution beyond nation-states. In 1974, Newton asserted that the US was a corporate-ruled empire that conquered the globe and destroyed all state sovereignty. He called the resulting integrated economy “reactionary intercommunalism.” No nation could achieve either self-determination or communism until the empire fell. In the meantime, revolutionaries could only establish “liberated territory” that built an egalitarian system while still suffering from imperialist pressure. But unlike Cleaver's idea of “cosmopolitan guerrillas,” Newton's vision continued to take inspiration from nation-states, especially China. He explained:
By whom are the Chinese, for instance, forced? They are forced by the actions of the United States. Instead of putting their money into the schools, the hospitals, and into institutions in their community, they are forced to maintain a large military. So their liberated territory is very similar to what happened in the riots and rebellions in Detroit where, for about 4 or 5 days the blacks there held about 8 blocks and they drove the local police and the national guard out and the peace was not restored …
Newton's theory informed Brown's practice. David DuBois, the Black Panther editor under Brown, greatly expanded the paper's coverage with a particular focus on China.Footnote 46 When Brown supported Lionel Wilson, she understood him as the Panthers’ parallel to Sun Yat-sen, the progressive President of China whose term preceded civil war and liberated territory under the Communists.Footnote 47 As a dialectician, Newton claimed that liberated territory contained the potential for “revolutionary intercommunalism,” or a cooperative and egalitarian world free of empire.Footnote 48 Borrowing from Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon, Newton championed the unemployed and racialized underclass over the revolutionary agency of the working class.Footnote 49 Overall, his thesis anticipated the difficulties of sustaining anti-imperialist ideals as neoliberalism integrated the global economy.
As they attempted to seize Oakland, the Panthers perceived China as the epitome and leader of revolutionary intercommunalism. They identified with the country in the international arena, understanding every Chinese foreign-policy move as an effort to further liberate the Third World. This was especially true regarding its relations with African nations. They thus wove China's geopolitical behavior into an anti-imperialist imaginary that transcended the nation-state. Furthermore, the Panthers saw themselves as a part of that imaginary. Accordingly, they celebrated what they perceived as achievements of China's liberated territory, which included a strong state, economic development, public education, health care accessibility, and communal agriculture. The Cultural Revolution anchored this liberation, since they saw it as empowering the masses to control their destiny. The Panthers’ celebration was as practical as it was ideological: they reported on Chinese policies that reflected their own attempts to build a commune in Oakland. Mao's China thus served as ongoing fuel for the Third World imaginary in which the Panthers claimed a leading role.
The Panthers found validation for the idea of China's selfless solidarity in its foreign policies, especially given the country's attention to African nations. From 1974 to 1976, the Black Panther newspaper published thirteen articles that illustrated examples of Afro-Chinese solidarity.Footnote 50 In a fully reprinted article from Chinese news outlet Renmin Ribao (People's Daily), the Black Panther reported,
We [China] will, as always, stand on the side of the African people and firmly support the African countries and people in their struggle to win and safeguard national independence, develop their national economies and oppose imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, Zionism, and great-power hegemonism.Footnote 51
Another reprinted statement explained the fear of overpopulation to be a racist myth blaming the Third World for its own poverty. Rather than fearing the growth of their populations, the statement argued that China and the rest of the Third World should appreciate this demographic trend because of the numerical advantage it gave them in the fight against imperialism.Footnote 52 The Panthers thus identified with China through the common experience of racism. More broadly, they constantly linked China to the Third World political imaginary, reprinting excerpts from China's UN speech celebrating how “new and important victories have been won by the people of all countries in their struggle against colonialism, imperialism, and hegemonism.”Footnote 53 China did, in fact, have a history of extending competitive loans to developing countries. But, at this point, Premier Zhou actually toned down his state's alliance building in the Third World as the country normalized relations with the United States.Footnote 54
The Panthers showed particular interest in China's economic partnerships in Africa as evidence of its supranational anti-imperialist intentions. In three articles on China's relationship with Tanzania, the Panthers depicted China as a benevolent and almost self-sacrificing promoter of African independent development. Not only did a Tanzania–Zambia railway apparently develop faster than predicted because of Chinese aid, it also did so thanks to an interest-free loan.Footnote 55 Understood as unprecedented and altruistic, the loan served as an example of China putting the well-being of liberated territory above simple national interests. As the Panthers saw it, the country's economic aid uplifted the Third World.Footnote 56 The newspaper furthermore portrayed China's own economic developments as a model for all members of liberated territory. Their reports on African revolutionaries’ visits to the country went beyond analyzing them as simple diplomatic tokens. This is most apparent in the paper's reporting on FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front that led the country's struggle against Portuguese colonialists. The newspaper reported on FRELIMO's visit to China as a way to learn from the Cultural Revolution's Dazhai model, which the Panthers considered an exemplary village for development and equality.Footnote 57
In addition to praising the country's internationalism, the Panthers showed concern for China's strength and integrity as a bulwark against empire. In an article on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, the Panthers rejected the US media's frequent reports of infighting in the Chinese Communist Party leadership. It claimed that “governmental succession … will take place in an orderly manner” despite Mao's and Premier Zhou Enlai's illness. The same article celebrated China's “first nuclear test in 1964,” implying their capacity to rival the two Cold War superpowers.Footnote 58 The Black Panther Party also supported the campaign against Lin Biao, the leader of China's People's Liberation Army who favored rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The piece argued that Lin tried to divide and weaken the Chinese state, which Mao rightly refused to entertain.Footnote 59 On the border dispute between China and the Soviet Union, the Black Panther unequivocally took China's side in total opposition to Soviet “social imperialism.”Footnote 60
Even China's policy reversals fit Newton's narrative of Third World revolution. Revolutionary intercommunalism had a very binary character, the only alternative being reactionary intercommunalism. Left with little room to treat China as a mixed bag, the Panthers continued to see a quiet militancy underlying Mao's talks with Nixon and Kissinger. In the Panthers’ analysis, China strategically avoided isolation. Using its robust economy to attract Western capitalists, China made the minor concession of opening its economy to the United States in order to “frustrate that cooperation” between the United States and the Soviet Union.Footnote 61 The result of China's move was an overall gain for liberated territories. They made a similar report on Kissinger's visits to the Middle East, which the Panthers claimed to be about China preventing superpower dominance in Asia.Footnote 62 While it is true that China wanted to disrupt hegemony, it also backed far-right and neocolonial governments to do so (i.e. Pinochet in Chile).Footnote 63 Nevertheless, the Panthers continued to find hope in a Chinese-led Third World common cause.
Regarding domestic policy, the Panthers praised China's development as exemplary for the global South. On the People's Republic's twenty-fifth anniversary, the Panthers declared that the country had achieved “perhaps the most phenomenal economic and political growth ever accomplished by a Third World nation in a quarter of a century.”Footnote 64 They also marked China's growth as a global victory: “China continues to march forward, defeating imperialism's best efforts to arrest its development, which is really the world's development.”Footnote 65 In the same vein, the newspaper reprinted a speech by Deng Xiaoping arguing for economic self-sufficiency.Footnote 66 Furthermore, Panther publications on China's economy extolled China for nearing energy independence.Footnote 67
Fundamentally, the Panthers credited China's communistic society for this development. The twenty-fifth anniversary article claimed, “unemployment in China is virtually nonexistent, and the prices of essential food items have remained unchanged since 1957.”Footnote 68 A report on a research trip to China by ten leading US agricultural scientists quoted them as saying that “China is doing a marvelous job feeding its people.”Footnote 69 David DuBois made sure to recall China's free health care in his article.Footnote 70 The Panthers also emphasized the country's abolition or near-abolition of malnutrition and illiteracy, health care system comprehensiveness, and prioritization of the youth.Footnote 71 Such constant celebration and appraisal of Chinese policies and growth rates indicated a strong identification with Chinese success. The People's Republic, according to the Panthers, built “a free, cohesive and well-disciplined democratic society” – the Cultural Revolution's unity and militancy built towards communal prosperity.Footnote 72 They relied primarily on Chinese sources, which accurately reflected China's successes in energy independence and capital growth, but left out years of recession like the early Cultural Revolution.Footnote 73
China's self-determined economic development, as narrated by the Panthers, reflected the party's own goals in building the “Oakland Commune” as an ideal for black sovereignty. Brown's leadership took direct inspiration from China's foreign-relations turn, and likely found something similar in its domestic policy.Footnote 74 A reprinted review of a film series on China characterized the army as community-oriented and the country's multiple ethnicities as living in harmony.Footnote 75 The newspaper also characterized misogyny as declining fast in China. The “Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius” took the spotlight in an article about patriarchy based on editor-in-chief David DuBois's visit to China. Through the Cultural Revolution's encouraging general criticism of flawed leaders and customs, women were dismantling men's traditional authority. In that same vein, DuBois reported an increased proportion of women in the labor force and a tripling of women Communist cadres.Footnote 76 The Panthers’ reports on the Dazhai Commune as an economic model that supposedly transformed barren land into a thriving agricultural economy alluded to the Oakland strategy and its ambitions.Footnote 77 Under Brown, the party similarly fought patriarchy, racism, and poverty in Oakland through expanded medical clinics, “liberation schools,” and free food programs.Footnote 78 The Panthers thus saw a prototype for anti-imperialist struggle in China's “socialist transformation.”Footnote 79
Through their reporting, the Panthers looked to China as leading a communal socialist revolution that transcended nationalism without abandoning anti-imperialism. As the globalizing economy squeezed state sovereignty, they looked for a non-nationalist way to breathe life into the anticolonial tradition. They found it in Chinese egalitarian society, which led the way for revolutionary intercommunalism. By the Panthers’ twilight in the late 1970s, they condemned the post-Mao leadership for abandoning the Cultural Revolution, and consequently caving to reactionary intercommunalism by letting in Western capital.Footnote 80 In their critique, they singled out diplomatic normalization as a treacherous concession to the West, despite the fact that they had supported warmer relations with the US earlier. Nevertheless, their reasoning could claim consistency because the Panthers could no longer trust China as a genuine example of revolutionary intercommunalism without a Cultural Revolution. But while the Cultural Revolution lasted, the Chinese-led Third World political imaginary helped the Panthers loosen Marxism's staged conception of history so that all oppressed peoples could share in “liberated territory.”Footnote 81 Setbacks and concessions made sense under this framework, since “reactionary intercommunalism” inevitably weighed on all oppressed peoples.
This analysis helps to elucidate not only the Panthers’ intellectual development, but also their larger imprint on the US far left. The Revolutionary Communist Party, mostly made up of white Marxists, wholly mirrored the Panthers in its embrace of Cultural Revolution-style socialism and its total condemnation of China's leaders after Mao's death.Footnote 82 I Wor Kuen, an Asian American Marxist–Leninist collective inspired by the Black Panthers, continued to support China's leadership of world revolution throughout the 1970s.Footnote 83 My conclusion also supplements historians Robin Kelly and Betty Esch's work on Mao-inspired black radicals. They argue that black radicals of the 1960s and early 1970s primarily admired China for its policies in Africa, with the Panthers paying particular attention to Chinese domestic life.Footnote 84 This section's research confirms that the Panthers balanced both, understanding China's communal society as part and parcel of its anti-imperialist leadership. For them, Mao kept up the socialist and Third World fight to the finish.
THE WORKERS WORLD PARTY: THE PROLETARIAN CAMP
If Newton held the Panthers’ ideological banner, Sam Marcy did the same for the Workers World Party, a much more marginal but still theoretically innovative group. Marcy grew up fleeing the tsarist White army pogroms in eastern Russia. After moving to the United States, he earned a law degree at St. John's College and became a top official for a paper box workers’ union in New York. He and his wife Dorothy Ballan organized strikes with this female-majority workforce before moving to Buffalo, a strategic industrial city for the labor movement. There, they helped lead the 1946 strike wave and met steel plant labor leader Vince Copeland. These organizers’ experiences in Buffalo showed them that the labor movement gained the most radical energy from black workers, whom Marcy saw as having comparable revolutionary potential to the Third World.Footnote 85 He distrusted the Communist Party of the USA for being too concessionary, but he stood in solidarity with it during McCarthyism.Footnote 86 He temporarily found a political home when he established the Buffalo branch of the Socialist Workers’ Party.Footnote 87 This group stood for traditional Trotskyism, which argued that only industrial workers could lead a socialist revolution, and the revolution had to occur all around the world. States claiming the mantle of “socialism” inevitably ended up as corrupt and overbearing without a global transformation.Footnote 88 This idea of “permanent revolution” settled for nothing less than a world socialist movement, so the Socialist Workers became notorious for neutrality during US invasions, claiming neither side was worth supporting since neither represented socialism.Footnote 89
Marcy was uncomfortable with this inflexibility, so he organized an internationalist faction within the party that would later become its own organization. He broadened the orthodox “proletariat” into his “global proletarian class camp” (emphasis added). This camp represented both the working classes of imperialist nations and the peoples of decolonizing ones. The corresponding “bourgeois class camp” included only the capitalist classes of imperialist nations (not former colonies). While only the original “proletariat” could bring about socialism, the proletarian camp could move the planet closer to it by weakening the bourgeoisie.Footnote 90 China, as this section will explore, belonged squarely to the proletarian camp, but vacillated in its loyalty. Similar to the Panthers, Marcy sought to incorporate all exploited and oppressed peoples into a united front. Unlike the Panthers, he established a working-class imaginary, not a racial or underclass one. The grouping that embraced Marcy's view became known as the “global class war tendency” while still a part of the Socialist Workers Party. This tendency sided with Korean Communists during the US invasion of the country, and thought of China as fundamentally progressive despite having “Stalinist” leadership.Footnote 91 This view also left room for defending the Soviet Union's socialist system while criticizing its leadership.
In 1959, Marcy and his allies broke away to form the Workers World Party, which grew steadily throughout following decades as it engaged in antiwar activism, labor organizing, antiracist campaigns, and the budding LGBTQ+ movement. With working-class and student bases in Buffalo, Seattle, Youngstown, and New York, the group led the earliest protests against the invasion of Vietnam. To its great pride, the Workers World Party received official thanks for its solidarity from Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. But as the antiwar movement subsided, the party put more energy into racial and gender struggles.Footnote 92 In line with the view that the United States’ internal oppressed nations (i.e. people of color) and Third World countries had analogous revolutionary roles, Marcy supported black nationalism as a progressive force in the proletarian camp, even if it was not always worker-led.Footnote 93 The party mobilized support for the Attica prison uprising in 1971, helped organize the Boston March against Racism in 1974, and led women's liberation marches.Footnote 94 Transgender activist Leslie Feinberg joined the Workers World Party in the 1970s and wrote extensively for its newspaper.Footnote 95
Like the Panthers, the Workers World Party looked to China for leadership, but scrutinized it closely in accordance with whether or not the country advanced proletarian interests. Marcy wrote almost every Workers World newspaper article on China before Mao's death. He led the party to embrace the Cultural Revolution as a mass rebellion against bureaucratization. Similar to Newton, he thought that China's communal socialism gave it a world leadership role. However, while the Chinese working class fought for socialism, the Chinese bourgeoisie could opportunistically ally with imperialists. This implied the potential of a “bourgeois restoration” that only a vigilant proletariat could guard against. This narrative led to Workers World developing a significantly more critical stance towards late Mao-era China. While the country continued to exemplify socialism, its friendliness towards the United States opened Chinese leadership to condemnation.
The Cultural Revolution, especially in its most radical years, represented a mass-led socialism worthy of Workers World's praise. Marcy called the Cultural Revolution a “genuine groundswell of revolutionary enthusiasm.” It engaged in “securing the foundations of a People's Republic upon which a genuine socialist society can be built” and “it safeguarded the new [socialist] property relations.”Footnote 96 It thus insulated China from a full-scale capitalist restoration or “counter-revolution.” However, it could not prevent a “Thermidorian reaction” – a reference to the French Revolution, which Marcy defined as a “historically signified political reaction but on the basis of the new social system.”Footnote 97 In this narrative, the radically democratic and egalitarian Shanghai Commune marked the high point of the Cultural Revolution. This was because the proletariat apparently took over the city to put China on a firmer course towards a communist future. It should be noted that Chinese history complicated Marcy's analogy to the French Revolution, since China never had a past bourgeois state to restore.Footnote 98 Nevertheless, this lens made sense to Workers World as a framework for situating Chinese national liberation in a global class struggle.
However, the Cultural Revolution's later years disappointed Marcy as the Chinese Communist Party sidelined its more radically egalitarian, anti-US leadership. The proletariat, tired and apathetic, allowed the right-wing “capitalist road” to reemerge.Footnote 99 The political decline, death, and eventual mass criticism of Marshal Lin Biao paralleled the weakening of the proletariat. The Workers World Party saw him as the leader in the struggle against bourgeois restoration. Lin encouraged many of China's late 1960s upheavals and promoted constant struggle against the US, fulfilling Marcy's standards for both socialism and the global proletarian camp.Footnote 100 The 1973 campaign against Lin Biao turned out to ensure China's pro-capitalist ascendency, manifested as a rehabilitation of “rightists” like Deng Xiaoping. Marcy cast no blame on Mao for this.Footnote 101
The final implication of a right-wing ascendancy, in the Workers World Party's analysis, was that China would betray and weaken the proletariat in the global class war. Kissinger and Nixon's trips to China were prime examples. The Workers World newspaper called Kissinger's visit “one-sided,” claiming that China conceded too much and the United States went back on its most significant promise of withdrawing from Taiwan.Footnote 102 In contrast with the Black Panther, Workers World characterized Nixon's visit as the United States taking advantage of the Sino-Soviet split to win China's openness to the market while still refusing to concede Taiwan.Footnote 103 Thus China became engaged in “a virtual alliance with imperialism against the USSR.”Footnote 104 While the Panthers may have understood this move as tactically justifiable, Marcy saw it as a blow to global proletarian unity, since he still characterized the Soviet Union as fundamentally socialist. An earlier article, which criticized China's abstention from voting on a United Nations resolution on Puerto Rican independence, fully summarized the Workers World Party's general point: China was “abdicating its responsibility to give revolutionary leadership to the world's workers and oppressed.”Footnote 105 The decline of the Cultural Revolution and the reemergence of the right led to a betrayal of the global proletariat.
After Marcy had developed this nuanced analysis of Mao's final years, the party could critique the Cultural Revolution's conclusion while maintaining support for China's social system. At this point, more Workers World Party members came to appreciate and articulate the global class war perspective. About a week after Mao's death, party leader Deirdre Griswold published a retrospective article praising the past decades of Workers World analysis. The party's key strength, according to Griswold, was its ability to criticize China's counterrevolutionary failures while “consistently defending the essentially socialist character of the revolution.” These failures included Zhou's accusation of Soviet social imperialism, a mistake that destroyed proletarian unity and ultimately paved the way for concessions to Western capital.Footnote 106 On the other hand, in response to the Revolutionary Communist Party's (and by extension the Panthers’) sharp turn against China during the reform era, Workers World Party leader Sara Flounders rebutted,
The monopoly of foreign trade and the nationalized property in the basic means of production still remain. The old exploiting classes and the repressive state have been smashed … Production for social use as opposed to production for profit is still intact … it is high time to abandon the utterly harmful method of characterizing a social system according to the political character of its leadership.Footnote 107
While just as upset as any US Marxist about the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Workers World Party was able to critique its idea of degenerated socialism while still preferring it to capitalism.
Thus the Workers World Party looked to China for leadership insofar as the country met the standards of a class-based world revolution. While it supported the same communal socialist ideals as the Black Panther Party, it saw them as the mark of an agitated proletariat winning China's internal class struggle. The Panthers, on the other hand, were more inclined to treat it as a core component of China's national fight against empire. Yet, compared to the Panthers, the Workers World Party had a much lower tolerance for China's opening to the United States because this signaled a step back from the global proletarian struggle. While the Panthers could trust an exemplary “liberated territory” to handle itself in negotiations with the United States, Workers World scrutinized how well China's foreign policy strengthened its own class camp. The latter's view was similar to how a socialist revolutionary in the decolonization movement might treat a reform-oriented nationalist party. China still played a progressive role, but without maintaining loyalty to the proletariat.
MONTHLY REVIEW: SAME PRAISE, DIFFERENT JUSTIFICATIONS
Monthly Review magazine spent the mid-1970s continuing its history of Marxist and Third World-oriented analysis. Marxist economists from elite universities founded the paper in 1949 and managed it through the 1970s, among them Leo Huberman, Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran, and Otto Nathan.Footnote 108 The periodical entered the 1960s cheering on Third World revolutions and supporting Cuba very early on compared to the rest of the US far left.Footnote 109 In 1966, the affiliated Monthly Review Press made its big break with the publication of two landmark left texts: Sweezy and Baran's Monopoly Capital, arguing that capital exploited workers even during the postwar boom, and agronomist William Hinton's Fanshen, praising land reform in a Chinese village. In 1967, Trotskyist labor organizer Harry Braverman joined the editorial staff. Under his direction, Monthly Review Press gained worldwide prestige, translating works by revolutionaries like Che Guevara of Cuba and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Monthly Review led the far left in both academic and international circles. The magazine rode the wave of 1960s radicalism for longer than most, maintaining a readership around 10,000 until it began to decline in 1977.Footnote 110
The Monthly Review's most prominent scholars of China – Paul Sweezy, William Hinton, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Charles Bettelheim – each looked for ways in which solidarity with the Cultural Revolution would fit their theoretical frames and research backgrounds. The first, Paul Sweezy, was the Review's editor. He became a Marxist in response to the Great Depression, which he saw as a sign of the fundamental failure of capitalism, and obtained a PhD in economics at Harvard University.Footnote 111 His primary concern was identifying and supporting socialist economies based on ideological incentives (rather than material ones). The second, William Hinton, was a farmer and Quaker who traveled frequently to China and praised its society for apparently having a fundamentally humanitarian mind-set. Hinton epitomized “radical orientalism,” which historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu defined as a way of viewing Eastern revolutionaries through an idealistic lens nurtured by travel experiences.Footnote 112 The third, social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein, founded “world-systems theory.” According to Wallerstein, humanity existed in a “capitalist world-economy” – a social system resting on a global division of labor that operated above the level of nation-states. Finally, French economist Charles Bettelheim would emerge as the magazine's most vocal author after Mao's death. Drawing from both left-wing development theory and France's radical philosophical tradition, Bettelheim cared both about socialist economics and their guiding egalitarian ideology. As prominent Marxists, each of them had to grapple with Mao's China.
Paul Sweezy celebrated what he saw as innovative communal economics. The scholar had acquired a reputation for studying socialist domestic policy. In 1960 Paul Sweezy coauthored Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution with Leo Huberman, claiming that Cuba was a socialist country before Fidel Castro did. In doing so, the authors cited the country's robust state sector that served the general population.Footnote 113 After extensive study of the Soviet Union, Sweezy concluded that a noncapitalist ruling class had come to power to govern the ossified planned economy.Footnote 114 He called the Cultural Revolution “a breath of fresh air on a hot sultry night.”Footnote 115 Disillusioned with Soviet planning based on monetary incentives, Sweezy embraced how China and Cuba relied on a collectivist mind-set as motivation for their workers. Thus, like the Panthers and the Workers World Party, he admired Chinese Cultural Revolution-style socialism. However, this admiration came from his prioritizing rising production and living standards.
Despite his interest in ideology's contribution to economic growth, Sweezy claimed that Chinese socialism depended more on the country's political economy than on its people's values. The scholar rejected Hinton's sociocultural focus, especially the claim that China had achieved a “socialist consciousness.” In “China's Economic Strategy,” coauthored with Harry Magdoff and John Gurley, Sweezy wrote that no special humanitarian mentality helped Chinese people support the commune system. Instead, he credited the peacetime legitimacy of the People's Republic. Sweezy saw the Mao period as stable compared to China's history of civil and anti-imperial war. Thus Chinese people's trust in Mao's policies had a specific historical context.Footnote 116
Beyond China's incentive schema, what mattered to the economist was the country's broader approach to state planning in the interests of the working class.Footnote 117 In an article coauthored with the other Monthly Review editors, Sweezy lauded Mao's “walking on two legs.”Footnote 118 This referred to China's presumably equal regard for agricultural and industrial sectors, developing both at once instead of one at the others’ expense (as Stalin was said to have done by draining the peasants to support urban workers). In a special edition on Chinese economics, Sweezy argued that China pioneered a profitless method of economic organization geared solely towards people's welfare.Footnote 119 As he saw things, the People's Republic appropriated all surplus value produced in agricultural communes and redistributed wealth as welfare funds calculated completely independently of local productivity. At the root of China's success were two revolutionary forms of public property: collective ownership in agriculture and state ownership in heavy industry. As an anticapitalist economist, Sweezy supported Mao-era China on the grounds of what he saw as a radically socialist method of economic management.
On the other hand, William Hinton consistently related China's achievements back to morality above all else. He rejected Sweezy's prioritization of the “productive forces” and invalidation of China's revolution in values.Footnote 120 For Hinton, China was building a more ethical world. His background was in field research on land reform in Long Bow, Shaanxi. In this village, he witnessed peasants overturn feudal relations in agriculture to establish more egalitarian land ownership. Unlike villages that spent the 1930s and 1940s under Communist control, Long Bow spent most of those decades under the Japanese empire, so it required a rapid transformation to catch up to other liberated villages. Hinton took note that mass upheaval made this happen. While conducting his investigation, he found that peasants’ “honesty, thoroughness, and depth” were critical in the process. He also recognized and denounced “excesses,” by which he meant the killing of several better-off villagers. Nevertheless, he considered land reform and mass participation to produce great social advances. China's approach to agriculture, Hinton claimed, offered a resolution to the land inequalities of the developing world.Footnote 121
His attitude towards the Cultural Revolution, even in its final years, applied this same style of humanitarian appraisal. Writing for Monthly Review, he only contributed analyses of Chinese domestic politics from 1973 to 1976. Hinton's description of a revolutionary factory crystallizes his attitude:
There was no time clock. The only record kept is who worked that day. There are no foremen and no bosses wandering around, no one checking on anyone. There are team leaders and they are working side-by-side their mates … This all comes from the consciousness of people and the system they have set up to operate the plant. It puts technique in the hands of the rank-and-file and, really, responsibility in the hands of the rank-and-file.Footnote 122
The Cultural Revolution's primary achievement in the factory was egalitarianism; its commendable method of doing this was by instilling humanitarian values in “the consciousness of the people.”
But Hinton did not limit appraisal of the Cultural Revolution to the workplace. For the agronomist, “the great thing about the Cultural Revolution was that people had to make their own decisions about these things, test themselves politically, and, of course, develop politically to learn what is an effective policy.”Footnote 123 Hinton used the same charged labels as his Marxist contemporaries, i.e. calling Soviet leadership “revisionist, capitalist road management.”Footnote 124 However, his underlying analysis was consistently focused on ethical principles, rather than economic, cultural, racial, or even class-based arguments. The opposition to “revisionist” management in Hinton's narrative is “a stable leading group, dedicated to socialist transformation” and made up of “really down-to-earth people, working every day, meeting every night, and very dedicated.”Footnote 125 He saw the Chinese people as showing the way forward for advancing humankind, with the Cultural Revolution's leadership spearheading their path.
Immanuel Wallerstein looked at a much bigger anti-imperialist struggle, always analyzing what role states played in the global capitalist system. In that regard, he stood closer to Huey Newton and Sam Marcy than didthe rest of the Monthly Review regulars. He argued that capitalism acted as a “world system” – not as an empire under a polity but as a more decentralized domination. A “core” of strong nation-states extracted surplus from a “periphery” governed by weak states.Footnote 126 For Wallerstein, “the mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed.” It should be noted that independent nation-states (i.e. former colonies) could exercise this “counter-assertiveness,” but that was not identical to “socialism,” which Wallerstein saw as only theoretical and necessarily global.Footnote 127 More generally, Wallerstein distrusted the division of academic social sciences, tracing its roots to Western state interests.Footnote 128 Thus, unlike Sweezy and Hinton, he did not privilege economic, political, or social life at the expense of the others.Footnote 129
Building from his world-systems theory, he saw Mao's China and the Cultural Revolution as a way of organizing the state to better struggle against core exploitation. For him, China primarily deserves praise not for being moral or socialist, but for asserting a peripheral nation's interests. Two excerpts from one of his articles summarize the position:
We all exist today within the framework of a single capitalist world-economy, including the USSR and China … the creation of states with centrally planned economies, state ownership of property, and socialist parties in power is a mode of operating within a world system, but does not represent the creation of a second socialist world … They do not present images of what communism (or socialism, if you will) would look like, once achieved. They present, rather, images of states organized in order to industrialize rapidly and, perhaps as well, images of how groups use state power to undermine the foundations of the present capitalist world economy.
Accordingly Wallerstein supported the Cultural Revolution because he saw it as fueling Chinese militancy against the capitalist world system.Footnote 130 However, he set aside the question of building a socialist society as an issue for the distant future.
Wallerstein also advocated for a united global left, but he did not see it as transcending the nation-state and China's independent importance.Footnote 131 While superficially reminiscent of the political imaginaries of the Workers World and Black Panther Parties, Wallerstein's position advanced nation-states (composed of many classes) as the primary actors within a capitalist world system, not a supranational “proletarian class camp” or “revolutionary intercommunalism.” However, he balanced the importance of the nation-state against the power of the world economy. This contrasted with Sweezy's adherence to state-centric development models. For Sweezy, revolutionary upheaval in China was not the result of a core–periphery relationship but a product of Europe exporting its economic system.Footnote 132 According to him, the position of today's Third World proletariat is analogous to the position of the European proletariat of Marx's time – i.e. similarly miserable and revolutionary. Wallerstein did not see China's development as a reproduction of Europe's, but instead as the beginning of a revolutionary world system which the left should rally behind.
After the Cultural Revolution ended, these three voices took a moment of silence while Charles Bettelheim defended Mao's last years against the emerging reforms. The economist's influences included development theorists and French philosophers. After his expulsion from the French Communist Party in 1937 for rejecting Stalin's governance, he built up a reputation as a development adviser for socialist countries. Revolutionary leaders such as Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Zhou Enlai read his works. He also drew directly from Louis Althusser's philosophy on the importance of ideology to maintaining an economic system. In 1968, in his The Transition to Socialist Economy, Bettelheim argued that the construction of a socialist economy depended on “advanced forms of appropriation” – i.e. democratic economic relations among producers. An egalitarian ideology played the primary role in maintaining these relations.Footnote 133 He lauded the Cultural Revolution for advancing a “new proletarian morality,” credited it as the foundation of China's supposedly sustainable socialism, and mobilized support for it through his leadership of the Franco-Chinese Peoples’ Friendship Association. In contrast, he painted a picture of the Soviet Union as an ossified bureaucracy, never moving towards a more egalitarian future.Footnote 134 He and Hinton thus similarly prioritized a moral vision for socialism.
Bettelheim saw a damning sign of “authoritarianism” in every detail of China's reforms. All forms of hierarchy or inequality degraded the once-socialist economy. As he saw it, shop-floor-level workers’ democracy had withered away so that one-man management could replace it.Footnote 135 He compared China's centralization of agricultural production to Stalin's collectivization, which he also saw as eroding the Soviet Union's socialism. Regional and wage inequality were on the rise, which was in direct contradiction of Mao's intentions.Footnote 136 Bettelheim understood these shifting production relations to reveal “a bourgeois conception of technological progress … that inevitably must result in raising, substantially and rapidly, the rate of accumulation, which must tell heavily upon the standard of living and working conditions of the workers and peasants.”Footnote 137 Thus capitalist development replaced socialist development. This change did not confine itself to the economic sphere – it penetrated education as well. “Elitist” recruitment of students “aimed at re-establishing the power of academic authorities.”Footnote 138 The means clearly mattered more than the ends for Bettelheim. Chinese socialism was about the direct power of the rank and file, and it was vanishing.
However, Monthly Review also saw a surge of questioning readers who pushed back against Bettelheim's focus on social relations and wanted more patience with China's reforms. The number of subscribers engaging with Bettelheim's writing was large enough to justify an entire May 1979 special issue filled mainly with criticism. Historian Jerome Ch'en wrote the magazine, stressing that “China needs stability for her modernization, not upheavals.”Footnote 139 Ch'en contradicted Bettelheim, claiming that housing and medical care had actually improved since reforms began. Ch'en also did not mind some level of top-down management, given that it produced positive economic results. Economist Arthur MacEwan agreed. For him there was nothing contradictory between large-scale production and the class struggle; workers would gain from a thriving economy.Footnote 140 Post-Keynesian economist Joan Robinson defended China's new bonus system. For her, it was faithful to Mao's legacy since it put “politics in command” – allowing the state and the Party to direct economic growth.Footnote 141 All three readers sharply criticized the Cultural Revolution. Ch'en associated it with the legacy of feudalism, citing parallels like the association of people's character with their class background, factional disputes, and lack of due process.Footnote 142 MacEwan said that it yielded no significant positive changes, and Robinson called it “an orgy of indiscipline” stalling industrial growth.Footnote 143 Both Robinson and MacEwan lamented what they understood to be a lost generation in Chinese education. They preferred a more traditional examination-based university system to the Cultural Revolution's anti-intellectual climate.Footnote 144 Conventional development made more sense than prioritizing a communal society at all costs, although Monthly Review contributors kept egalitarianism as an end goal.
Thus Monthly Review's studies of China called into question how to define “socialism” during and immediately after the Cultural Revolution. For Sweezy, Mao's China represented an innovative and progressive kind of socialism, based on a robust public sector that served the people's benefit. Hinton also called China socialist, but primarily because of its revolution towards a communal consciousness and less because of its economic organization. For his part, Wallerstein appreciated China's domestic policies primarily because of their role in undermining the capitalist world economy. He refrained from calling the country “socialist” because of his idea of an integrated capitalism, but he still saw it as supporting socialist aims. Mao's death convinced Bettelheim to rally behind the idea that egalitarian consciousness maintained Mao-era socialism. However, most scholars were willing to reexamine the Cultural Revolution as a whole and take China's new line seriously. They cited many benefits of China's new system and focussed on economic measures for success. Common praise during Mao's last few years actually contained a variety of perspectives on what made socialism work, but the previously popular communal ideals gave way to calculated economic analysis as the Cultural Revolution waned.
CONCLUSION
When the perceived leader of the Third World opened up to Nixon, it sparked discussions as to just what national liberation meant for US Marxists. All agreed that monopoly capitalists dominated the world economy. However, significant disagreement existed as to whether to understand resistance along primarily racial or class lines. For the Panthers, China's geopolitical struggle against the United States argued that imperialism subjugated the Third World in a “reactionary intercommunalism.” Newton's theory drew from the idea of a racialized and colonized underclass. For the Workers World Party, Marcy's analysis claimed the existence of a “global proletarian camp” that set the standard for anti-imperialist struggle. Genuine anti-imperialism supported proletarian interests, the only other alternative being capitulation to the bourgeoisie. While both parties used class-based analysis to identify capitalists as the enemy, the former understood liberation as coming from oppressed races and decolonized nations, while the latter characterized it as led by the multinational working class.
Furthermore, despite near-universal socialist admiration for the Cultural Revolution, US Marxists debated about how to define socialism. Many academics, like Sweezy and Hinton, praised the Mao era for its radical egalitarianism straight through 1976. Sweezy took a developmental approach while Hinton took a moral one, but their conclusions both amounted to praise for a model country. On the other hand, the Workers World Party saw socialism in China as more of a mixed bag, carefully tracking what it considered bourgeois interests inside the Communist Party. Still other Marxists intentionally dropped the question. For the Panthers, there was no revolutionary proletariat and China's economic policies were the result of an ongoing struggle for national liberation and securing the people's welfare. Without a precise theoretical standard by which to call the late Cultural Revolution “socialist,” China primarily represented “liberated territory” to them. Wallerstein's interest in the Cultural Revolution stemmed from its apparent value for undermining the capitalist world system, and he refrained from calling it “socialist” on its own.
These competing understandings of mid-1970s China revealed that there was no single socialist anti-imperialism, which became clearest after Mao's death. The Panthers justified solidarity with China by including African Americans in a “revolutionary intercommunalism” opposed to empire, and the Workers World Party did the same by including the US proletariat in a proletarian radical imaginary. Since the Panthers’ praise for China depended on their image of its liberated and communal society, they lost all respect for its leadership when the Cultural Revolution ended. On the other hand, the Trotskyists held consistent critical support, since they only championed the elements of China that fought for socialism. Wallerstein expressed solidarity with the Chinese state primarily because of its geopolitical rivalry to US hegemony. Hinton believed in solidarity towards Mao's China because he saw it as morally advancing humanity, while Sweezy defended its egalitarian development model. After Mao's death, Monthly Review's backlash against Bettelheim proved that many US Marxists saw socioeconomic benefits in China's reforms. Although the Cultural Revolution provided temporary unity and inspiration, competing ideological priorities surfaced quickly.
These opposing priorities exposed critical divisions in US Marxism and played a key part in weakening socialist internationalism. When China appeared to lead both the Third World resistance and a new style of socialism in the late 1960s, it cemented an ideological combination that gave US Marxists strength and appeal despite their theoretical disagreements. The enduring Cultural Revolution helped maintain this fusion of socialism and national liberation into the next decade, but the ideal had fractured more clearly by the late 1970s. Radicalism was already on the defensive against escalating conservative and neoliberal attacks. But US Marxists in particular held double ideological commitments to socialist revolution and class struggle on the one hand, as well as national liberation and its relevance for racialized peoples on the other. These commitments and their contradictions impacted political work in all areas: from theorizing liberation for poor urban black youth to mobilizing strikes in industrial centers. Certainly, Marxism's downswing in the United States had much to do with its domestic organizing challenges, and it is impossible to ignore the broader causes of the decline of revolutionary ideas in general. But, as my analysis explores, Marxist anti-imperialist ideology also has its own history. Its theoreticians’ ability to combine socialism and national liberation helped decide what 1970s international solidarity looked like. Growing divisions over China took a toll on socialist anti-imperialism's place among other left-wing ideas of global politics. Appreciating the dynamic implications of international solidarities will continue to matter, as revolutionaries conceptualize their places in empire and look for allies against it.
