Up until 1931, the race issue had not been a significant element in the Communist agenda for the Spanish-speaking territories of the Caribbean Basin. The establishment of the Caribbean Bureau of the Comintern in New York in early 1931, however, forced a reassessment of the subject, as the Communist Party of the United States’ Colonial Department’s aims merged with the Caribbean Bureau’s anti-imperialist blueprint. This chapter focuses on the development of this integrated race agenda for the region that brought together elements of regional anti-imperialist campaigns, anti-lynching campaigns in the US, and anti-Garveyism Communist activity in the British West Indies. The result of this joint project was an amalgamated anti-racism initiative, American rather than Caribbean. In practical terms, the inclusion of race in the Communist agenda caused a severing of the traditional ties between Comintern agencies and Communist networks in the Caribbean Basin, since the agenda enforced a black identity as the proletarian norm for the region, artificially designed and imposed from the new revolutionary metropolis. As a result, the project’s foundations for an anti-racism platform and a leadership network would colour the Black Caribbean decolonisation and democratisation process of the post-Second World War era, while helping to preserve a racially segregated radical agenda for the Spanish-speaking Caribbean Basin.

The 1945 Pan-African Congress’ Declaration ended with the words ‘Colonial and Subject People of the World, Unite’. To attempt to achieve at least West African unity, Joe Appiah and Kwame Nkrumah, who had attended the Congress, went to Paris to interest activists there. A conference in London followed at which the West African National Secretariat (WANS) was formed. Their aim was to ‘push forward the struggle for West African National Unity and Absolute Independence’. Kwame Nkrumah was appointed secretary. Naturally, contact was made with as many organisations and activists in West Africa as possible. Nkrumah also travelled around the UK, not only to seek support for WANS, but as a member of the Coloured Workers’ Association, campaigning against the many forms of racial discrimination in the UK. Why do I think this was the beginning of the Cold War in at least Ghana? The Cold War was attempts by the West to curtail support for the USSR and prevent its expansion. The 1948 ‘riots’ in the Gold Coast were attributed by the government to Communist activism. MI5, which was in collaboration with the CIA, set up offices there and in Nigeria. So the Cold War began.

This chapter looks at the black radical claim on Bolshevism through a study of the African-American radical press in the years following the Russian Revolution. In the myriad of articles that engage with Bolshevism, writers and activists of the black left in the US produce political imaginaries which inaugurate a very particular transnational anti-racist class politics. In the pages of the Crusader, the Messenger and Negro World, writers like Cyril Briggs, W.A. Domingo and Claude McKay polemicised against a colour-blind labour movement in the US and against a class-blind black nationalism. They saw in Bolshevism a model which could crack the monolith of white supremacy and colonial oppression. In their celebratory accounts of events in Russia, the African-American radical press insisted on the centrality of black workers as a vanguard of revolutionary struggle.

Lenin’s essays on national self-determination and anti-colonial struggles are well known. Much less so are his earlier remarks on the process of internal colonisation of the Russian Empire’s ‘free’ borderlands. Oppressed nations are conspicuously absent in those writings, which feature a comparative analysis of the shared destiny of Russian serfs and American slaves. This urges us to look afresh at Lenin’s later identification between the experience of Asian and African people subjected to the yoke of European imperialism and that of African Americans considering themselves as colonised from within. Finally, Langston Hughes’s narrative of his journey to Soviet Central Asia in the early 1930s offers a valuable perspective for re-examining the emancipation of the former Russian Empire’s ‘coloured people’ after 1917, and its limits.

British Guiana (Guyana), like elsewhere in the Black Atlantic, felt the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The rise of the left in Guyana in the period was initially marked by the work of trade unionists like Hubert Critchlow and others. On his return to Guyana from a visit to Soviet Russia in 1931, Critchlow is reported to be the first individual to introduce the term ‘comrade’ to the colony and uphold the Red symbols in May Day marches. Individual firebrands, some of whom hailed from the local chapter of the African Blood Brotherhood, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association and other organisations were active as an emergent black nationalism. By the late 1940s, a nascent nationalist, Marxist-influenced movement had developed in Guyana. The chapter explores the largely unrecorded contribution of the early radical movements, their varied ideological outlooks and potential collective influence on the development, by the 1950s, of a popular national party, the People’s Progressive Party, with its Marxist and anti-colonial orientation.

The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) was an attempt by the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU, also known as Profintern) to sensitise black toilers in the African Atlantic during the interwar period. Established in 1928 as the International Trade Union Committee of the RILU, it belonged to a group of new committees and organisations that saw their light during the so-called Third Period when the Third (Communist) International – the Comintern – inaugurated its new policy of ‘class against class’. The foundation of the ITUCNW was the attempt by the Comintern and RILU to build an alternative, radical body in the African Atlantic. In contrast to the Pan-Africanist organisations, to direct its message to black people in general, the ITUCNW presented itself in the African Atlantic as a class organisation for the black toilers only. However, it is questionable whether the class-before-race rhetoric ever convinced but a few activists. By 1935, the ITUCNW was to be transformed and was envisioned to emerge as a Black International. Nevertheless, this plan could never be realised and the Comintern quietly liquidated the organisation in 1937.