This is part five of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s, Spain’s urban bourgeoisie (capitalists), supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States.
But, in defending the Republic, they were defending capitalists. This was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists.
In the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go, and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership are essential. Without their leadership, our class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism. The following continues that story:
Admiral Kilpatrick was born in Denver on February 20, 1898. His father worked first as a cowboy in Oklahoma and then as a miner in Colorado. When Admiral was six years old, his father got a job with a steel company and moved the family to Cleveland, Ohio. Kilpatrick’s father was a Socialist, and his son accompanied him to political meetings when he was as young as 12 years old.
He eventually joined the Socialist party and, when he was 19 years old, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). After high school he worked in mills, foundries, electrical shops, and lumber camps. Kilpatrick joined the Army during World War I and served in France as a mechanic. Kilpatrick worked with the union in the 1919 Cleveland steel strike, in which the companies brought in thousands of Black workers to serve as strikebreakers.
Kilpatrick joins the CP
Kilpatrick joined the Communist Party (CPUSA) in 1928. In 1931 the Party sent him to study at the International Lenin School in the Soviet Union. In 1935, during the Great Depression, he returned to the United States and helped organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO - a communist-led union) and the unemployed movement (also led by communists).
While the CP became a tremendous reform organization during the Great Depression, unfortunately, it gave up the fight for a communist revolution. So all the evils of capitalism are still with us today, from racist killings by the bosses’ cops to homelessness and looming nuclear world war.
Before World War II, Kilpatrick went to fight in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists. He served in a transport unit, as an ambulance driver, and in an intelligence unit. While working as a frontline driver, Kilpatrick was wounded by shrapnel from an aerial bombardment.
Back in the U.S., he resumed his union activities becoming president of Local 735 of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. In the late 1940s the union was expelled from the CIO for being dominated by communists. The liberal capitalists were starting to take back whatever reforms the CP was able to win in the 1930s. Kilpatrick was called before congressional investigators during the Red Scare of the 1950s. He refused either to name other communists or to take the Fifth Amendment.
Kilpatrick: CP "gives up the class struggle”
Kilpatrick remained a committed Marxist. He was expelled from the CP “because I wasn’t going to go along with the fact [that] now all of a sudden you can build a Party with all classes.” His problems with Party leadership had begun during the Popular front , a coalition of working-class and middle-class parties. The very idea that the Party “was carrying on the traditions of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Douglass,” in Kilpatrick’s opinion, was “a lot of bull.” He told an interviewer:
Any Party or grouping that calls itself communist, gives up the class struggle, and won’t follow the road of Marxism-Leninism is completely out of step with what is going on in the world today. The revisionists, the scabs and sectarians have no answers to any questions in today’s class struggle.
In the late 1950’s, Kilpatrick, along with fellow Spanish Civil War veteran Harry Haywood, was involved in the short-lived Provisional Organizing Committee for a Communist Party, aiming to found a new, revolutionary communist party. They were not successful, but in the 1960’s another group of CP members left to form Progressive Labor Movement, which today is the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Join us.
Admiral Kilpatrick in his own words:
In the class struggle you can’t stay in it when it’s good and jump out and leave it when it’s bad. You go all the way …
I don’t have to have no damn praise … about going to Spain ... But I wasn’t doing it just for Spain alone. … I was doing it because I was a member of the movement that believes in that type of struggle ... I was a Communist. A Communist fights oppression, and they fight tyranny everywhere.
As far as I was concerned, this was the only way that the common man was to have anything, was to carry out these types of actions. My understanding of the world and its problems is based on Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.
I’ve been in jail so goddamn many times, I thought I was living in jail. You get in jail for demonstrations, you get in jail for standing up in strikes, violating strike regulations about how many pickets you can have ...
But in the class struggle you can’t stay in it when it’s good and jump out and leave it when it’s bad. You go all the way. They send you to jail,what difference does it make? People have died for causes and things.
Kilpatrick continued his organizing even into retirement, serving as the chairman of the tenants’ committee in his retirement home. He never found the organization that would, as he put it, “go all the way.” Well, in the Progressive Labor Party we do want to “go all the way.” Whatever fightback you are involved in, join us and integrate the fight for communist revolution to your struggle. Let’s “go all the way!”
Source: http://alba-valb.org