“If Negro leadership, especially the new young generation, also understood the history of the white Marxist Left, then they would better understand American capitalism and the Marxist Left’s real position within it. They would see how the myth of the Negro revolution is used by both capitalism and the white Left. However, the inner dynamic of American capitalism has nullified any possibility of the Marxist Left leading a revolution according to its theories. Consequently, out of sheer political insolvency and desperation, the white Left swallows the myth of the Black Revolution and reads revolution into every actual or potential Negro uprising. The joke is that the leftwing buys its way into a pr-capitalistic movement on the hope that what the establishment calls a revolution, will in fact become one later on. But the white Left does not possess a single idea, tactic, or strategy in its theoretical arsenal that can make the Negro protest movement a revolutionary one. All it can achieve is to intervene and foster such tactics as will get some persevering Negro activist leader jailed, framed, or exiled for utterly romantic reasons. As of now, the same capitalistic dynamic that absorbed and negated the white Left of the 1930’s, has blunted the forward thrust of broad segments of the civili rights movement (including self-defense uprisings).”
- Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 1967
