Gospel According to St. Eldridge. (1971)

Book Review from the June 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver (Algiers) by Lee Lockwood. (Jonathan Cape. Paperback. 60p.)

The blurb of this book describes Eldridge Cleaver as ". . . an outstandingly fine writer, a brilliant theoretician and polemicist . . .  a dynamic, eloquent and fascinating talker.” And if that does not put you off you deserve all you get.

In fact the contents — a brief account of how Cleaver came to leave America and end up in Algiers, followed by a record of Lockwood interviewing him — is not so overpoweringly obsequious. Yet it is still, in the familiar Playboy style, a vehicle for telling us by phony probing, aggressive questions, just how brilliant a man Cleaver is.

And what does the brilliant man have to say? His conception of Socialism is something which can happen in one country, any country but which he wants in America — “a Yankee Doodle Dandy version of Socialism" he calls it. He defends what has happened in Russia with the wearisome excuse that ". . . the whole process of developing a socialist system has been distorted by security considerations.”

Little wonder that he is also a hopelessly confused admirer of the set-up in Cuba and China and that he thinks Socialism can be reality only through a violent upheaval. In fact, like Old Mother Shipton, he even has a date for this — by 1972 there will be full scale war going on in the United States and the Presidential election will be out of the question. After that the revolution . . .

In the meantime, this eloquent, fascinating talker expresses himself in such ways as ". . . the shit gets all fucked up and twisted up and you end up in the John Birch Society.” Of course Cleaver is capable of better than that; presumably it is in the book just to prove how human and earthly he is and that after all this is 1971. Perhaps we ought to be warned off by that blurb, after all.

Ivan.

Cold comfort (1969)

Book Review from the April 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver Jonathan Cape, 35s.

There are more ways than one of exploiting the Negroes’ downgraded social standing. A Negro, for example, can cash in on it himself by writing the sort of book that will be assured of big sales by a raptuous reception from Left-wing reviewers. Such a book need not say very much and what it does say can be confused. Provided it has a leavening of swear words, sex, and anger, the self-appointed 'intellectuals of the Left will rush to give it their uncritical, patronising approval.

Eldridge Cleaver is the Black Panthers' Minister of Information (their Prime Minister is Stokely Carmichael). He has been imprisoned for possession of drugs and for rape. He was a candidate in the last presidential election. With such credentials, almost any book from his was foredoomed to be hailed as a masterpiece. Thus Richard Boston, in his review in The Times, wrote of “complex arguments . . . put‘ forward with extraordinary clarity and intelligence.”

In fact, Soul on Ice is the same weary old stew of violence, sex. and four-letter words. On racism it has nothing more perceptive than a rant. Politically it is pathetic. Cleaver writes about “the rebellion of the oppressed peoples of the world” and although everyone knows who he is getting at, socialists perceive his lack of understanding that there is only one oppressed people, suffering in varying degrees. They are more simply known as the working class; they exist all over the world and their skins are of all colours. They have one interest — to get their masters, who are also of all colours, off their backs.

Now think about these two sentences:

If the capitalists are in power, they enforce laws designed to protect their system, their way of life . . .  If Communists are in power, they enforce laws designed to protect their system, their way of life.

It is almost impossible to know where to begin unravelling the confusion and naïveté of these examples of extraordinary clarity and intelligence. Does Cleaver think the ’Communist’ states are basically any different from those like America and Britain? Does he think that Communism will be a social system where one class has power and imposes laws to protect its interests? What is meant by “If the capitalists are in power”? Are they, or aren’t they?

Racism is one of the fouler fruits of workers' ignorance and frustration. The Negroes in America have suffered terribly under it and a man like Cleaver — he was born in Little Rock — must have made a tremendous effort even to become literate. That is the achievement, if we are looking for one, of Soul on Ice. But now, as the American Negroes begin to kick back, is no time to lose our balance.

Unquestioning admiration for a black man is as bad as unreasoning hatred for him. Soul on Ice must stand or fall on its merits and not on the colour of the hand that wrote it. And it falls.

Ivan

Second Civil War (1969)

Book Review from the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, by Eldridge Cleaver. (Cape 35s.)

There may be those who, since the appearance of Soul On Ice, have been eagerly awaiting the next blast on the trumpet from Eldridge Cleaver. There may. Well here it is, with an introduction in the customarily ecstatic terms by Robert Scheer.—a collection of essays, speeches, articles and an interview with Playboy magazine.

The long suppression of so large a minority as the American Negro just had to call for a terrible response, one day, and the philosophies of what is called Black Power are part of that response. In the Playboy interview Cleaver muses on a " . . . guerrilla resistance movement that will amount to a second Civil War . . ." and the book is crammed with violence, some of it defiant, some of it couched in fashionable four letter words.

Cleaver thinks that we are witnessing only the beginning of the big fight and that when the American government is finished with Vietnam it will apply itself to a war against the black people at home.

This simple, Goody-and-Baddy, concept is carried into his rages against the white politicians who want a policy of overkill in the fight against Black Power—the Reagans, the Daleys, the Alioitos. And Cleaver blasts also at those whose concern for the modern fortunes of American capitalism has led them to embrace Civil Rights—like poor old LBJ, who ended up usurping the battle cry We Shall Overcome. Cleaver thinks Johnson would never have said We Want Black Power, which shows how even a Black Panther does not plumb the depths of a politician's cynicism.

Cleaver does not display the more obvious symptoms of racism which are evident among some black nationalists but even so this is not a constructive, nor even an analytical, book. Raking among its rubble—the fury, the romantic poetry of Che Guevera, the threatening excerpt from Mao's little red book—it is possible to come up with some useful chunks.

There is, for example, a passage from a speech by Abraham Lincoln which highlights the racial bigotry of the man who is popularly supposed to have been the Negroes' great friend and which shows why Lincoln is such a hero to the Ku Klux Klan. And who can argue against this:

Compare the thieves in our prisons with the big-businessmen of this country, who are in control of a system that is depriving millions of people of a decent life. These people — the men who run the government and the corporations — are much more dangerous than the guy who walks into a store with a pistol and robs somebody of a few dollars.

But if course it is possible, and easier, and cheaper, to get all of this—and more—elsewhere.

Ivan