Socialism
In 1911, after his postal firing, Harrison began full-time work with the Socialist Party of America and became America’s leading Black Socialist. He lectured widely against capitalism, campaigned for the party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1912, and founded the Colored Socialist Club (the Socialist’s first effort at reaching African Americans). He developed two important and pioneering theoretical series on “The Negro and Socialism” for the socialist newspaper the New York Call and for the socialist monthly International Socialist Review. He maintained that it was the principal “duty” of the Socialists to “champion the cause of the African American and that the Socialists should undertake special efforts to reach African Americans as they had done with foreigners and women.” Perhaps most importantly, he emphasized that “Politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea” and that true democracy and equality implies “a revolution... startling even to think of.”
Harrison moved to the left in the Socialist Party. He supported the socialistic, egalitarian, and militantly radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was a prominent speaker along with IWW leaders Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, and Patrick Quinlan at the historic 1913 Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. He also supported IWW advocacy of direct action and sabotage. He commended the interracial, IWW-influenced, Brotherhood of Timber Workers efforts in the Deep South.
Despite his efforts, Socialist Party practice and positions included segregated locals in the South and racist positions on Asian immigration. Harrison concluded that Socialist Party leaders, like organized labor, put the white “Race first and class after.”
Read more about this topic: Hubert Harrison
Famous quotes containing the word socialism:
“Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspection and interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Successful socialism depends on the perfectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded and clear-sighted, it is bound to be a rotten failure in any but a physical sense. Even through it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied to any one who chooses to seek them.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)