"The program of the Communist Party demanded an end to the national inequalities suffered by the French Canadian people, but did not spell out the full program of national self-determination. It required the mass upsurge of the French Canadian people to produce the realization that in French Canada there existed not only grievances against national inequalities but potentially, and now actively, a mass demand for complete self-determination. This demand is now at the center of the Communist Party's position" 1
As we have seen, the Communists really put themselves out to plan the future of every individual on the face of the earth. And so the question arises: What did they plan for us?
For more than a decade after the Russian revolution, the comrades floundered on the subject of the "Negro problem" in the United States. They discussed it, they studied it, but they were absolutely unable to form a revolutionary theory to guide the activities of their American members. And comrades were complaining that these ungrateful American Negroes simply didn't go for communism.
At the Communist sixth world congress, in 1928, the problem was solved. For the American Negroes, the comrades had developed an amazing new theory. They called it "self-determination."(2)
It is important to record how and why the Communists decided to apply this theory to Negro Americans.
After the second Congress, the mystery deepens [writes Theodore Draper]. For the next eight years, there is no record in the Comintern or in the American party of any reference to the American Negroes as a "nation" or any implications of Negro "self-determination." On the contrary, all the documents and discussions we have seen, the Fourth Congress in 1922, during Lenin's lifetime, stressed the American Negroes' role in the liberation of Africa, not their own independent political existence. The Fifth Congress in 1924, soon after Lenin's death, arrived at a consensus that the right of self-determination did not apply to the United States. The American party's conventions in 1923, 1925, and 1927, all of them minutely scrutinized by Comintern commissions and representatives, did not give the slightest hint of an American Negro "national question." . . .(3)
But there was no mystery at all about the American comrades' opinion of this theory. Benjamin Gitlow, who was in the South campaigning as a Communist for the vice presidency of the United States in 1928 when the word came through about self-determination, reports his own hostility and shock.(4) William A. Nolan writes that
. . . About twenty per cent of the articles which appeared in the official magazine of theory [Communist] during the first quarter of 1930 were devoted to the Negro question. But even in July, this high communist source had to concede that there existed only "great confusion" as to what self-determination could mean for the United States, and this was about two years after the Sixth World Congress had "clarified" the slogan. A former Negro communist told the author that the Negro comrades simply couuld not believe it, even those who for opportunist reasons gave it lip service. . .(5)
The reason all this is so important is to show that the Communist notion that American Negroes might need, and want, "self-determination"--secession--just because they happened to be black, was so ludicrous, so alien to the facts, that even American comrades themselves, not noted for an excess of individualism, found it difficult to accept. It is important to show that the idea of "self-determination" was not an idea that would readily spring to mind after even a mildly rational examination of the facts.
Indeed, Earl Browder later explained as head of the American Communist Party:
The Bolshevik program on the Negro question was not simply a generalization of our own experiences in America. It was an application of Lenin's program on the national question which summarized the world experience of generations of revolutionary struggle and especially the experience of the revolutionary solution of the national question in the Soviet Union. We could not have arrived at our program only upon the basis of our own American experience. It was the existence of the World Party of Communism which made possible for us the elaboration of a correct Leninist program on the Negro question.(6) (Italics added)
So, according to Earl Browder, it would not only been difficult for a reasonable Negro looking at the facts to develop the idea of self-determination; it would have been impossible--without the use of Communist theory--simply because the idea of self-determination was one of the discoveries of the "science" of Leninism. In fact, according to Earl Browder, only a Communist could develop the idea.
"'Nearly all' non-Communist Negro leaders rejected the Communist theory. . ." Draper reports a Communist leader to have written.(7)
The question naturally arises: If the idea of self-determination made so much trouble when applied to American Negroes, then why apply it at all?
There were probably two reasons: In the first place, it was Stalin's idea, his and Lenin's plan for the minorities in Russia, and in 1928 Stalin had recently come to power; and in 1915 Lenin had written as follows: ". . . There is a striking similarity between the economic position of the American Negro and that of the former serf of the central agricultural provinces of Russia."(8)
So the comrades applied it.
. . . The similarity between the program laid down for the Communist party of the United States and the earlier doctrines of Lenin and Stalin on the national and colonial questions is readily apparent; and the connection is a direct one, through the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International. Not only were the general ideas taken over; they were advocated in precisely the same terms, down to the slogans, and even to the sentences and phrases, employed by the Communist International.(9)
Now what did "self-determination for the Negroes in the Black Belt" actually mean? One of the earliest, if not the earliest, explanations, and certainly the most official, was offered by "John Pepper," who as Joseph Pogany had been a general in the Communist regime in post-World War I Hungary, and was at the time he wrote an official representative of the comintern in the United States. "The 'black belt' of the south . . . constitutes virtually a colony within the body of the United States of America," Pepper tells us soon after the sixth world congress.(10) And therefore:
The Negro Communists should emphasize in their propaganda the establishment of a Negro Soviet Republic.The Workers [Communist] Party of America puts forward correctly as its central slogan: Abolition of the whole system of race discrimination. Full racial, social and political equality for the Negro people. But it is necessary to supplement the struggle for the full racial, social and political equality of the Negroes with a struggle for their right of national self-determination. Self-determination means the right to establish their own state, to erect their own government, if they choose to do so. . . .(11)
As we have seen, however, this caused more problems than it solved, and so two years later, in October 1930, Moscow again sent word:
The struggle of the communists for the equal rights of the Negroes applies to all Negroes, in the North as well as in the South. the struggle for this slogan embraces all or almost all of the important special interests of the Negroes in the North, but not in the South, where the main Communist slogan must be: The Right of Self-Determination of the Negroes in the Black Belt. . .(12)
Remember this: The Communist policy towards the Negroes would consist of two slogans or strategies: first, a drive for equal rights for Negroes everywhere in America, and second, at the same time a drive for self-determination in the South.
Let us pursue this incredible idea.
In 1932, at the national nominating convention of the Communist party, comrade C. A. Hathaway made a speech called "Who are the Friends of the Negro People?"
In the first place, our demand is that the land of the Southern white landlords, for years tilled by the Negro tenant farmers, be confiscated and turned over to the Negroes. This is the only way to insure economic and social equality for the tenant farmers.Secondly, we propose to break up the present artificial state boundaries established for the convenience of the white master class, and to establish the state unity of the territory known as the "Black Belt," where the Negroes constitute the overwhelming majority of the population.
Thirdly, in this territory, we demand that the Negroes be given the complete right of self-determination; the right to set up their own government in this territory and the right to separate, if theywish, from the United States.(13)
The black belt in which the Negroes are to be self-determined was defined in 1935:
The actual extent of this new Negro Republic would in all probabilty be approximately the present area in which the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. In other words it would be approximately the present plantation area. It would be certain to include such cities as Richmond and Norfolk, Va., Columbia and Charleston, S.C., Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah and Macon, Georgia, Montgomery Alabama, New Orleans and Shreveport, La., Little Rock, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee. . . .(14)
In 1947, William Z. Foster, who then headed the party again solved the problem:
It is a fact we must reckon with that, for the most part, the Negro people have not responded favorably to the slogan of self-determination for the Negro people in the Black Belt, a slogan first put forward by our party in 1928. Because of this lack of response, which amounts in many cases to vigorous opposition, there are some comrades in our ranks who conclude incorrectly that the slogan of self-determination for the Negro people in the Black Belt is wrong.(15)
In other words, just because the "Negro people" vigorously oppose "self-determination" doesn't mean they aren't going to get it.
The point is, said Foster:
. . . the Negro people in the Black Belt are a nation . . . they possess the essential qualities of nationhood, as elaborated in the works of that great expert on the national question, Stalin. This lays a firm basis for the self-determination slogan. So I will not deal further with this basic matter of whether or not the Negroes in the Black Belt are a nation.Secondly, we have an important contribution in answering a question that has puzzled our comrades for the past twenty years, namely, why, if the Negro people are a nation, don't they put forth the slogan of self-determination. Fundamentally, the reason is that they are essentially a young nation, a developing nation. A nation has to be at a certain stage of political growth before it advances the demand for self-determination. . . .(16) (italics added)
The end of the war also saw a metamorphosis in language. The term "self-determination" was replaced by "national people's liberation." According to William Nolan:
There are several reasons for the new emphasis. In the first place, it escapes some of the embarrassment which had become associated with the slogan of self-determination. Secondly, it helps to bring the American communist movement into line with the "national people's liberation movements' behind the Iron Curtain, as well as in the Far East. And it also marks a more specific return to the leading terminology of the national and colonial theses of the Second and Sixth World Congresses of the Communist International.(17)
Indeed, it was necessary to hide what Communist policy was really about:
In the excess of his desire to make amends for his wartime deviations, Ben Davis printed his reapproval of the slogan of self-determination in the Black Belt in the Sunday edition of the Daily Worker for July 22, 1945. The effect on non communist Negroes was so instantaneous and so explosive that the slogan was thereafter withdrawn from the eyes of the rank and file. From that time on, the Negro masses would have to be content with circumlocutions, such as "free determination of their own destiny." and "fight against the semifuedal system of the South."(18)
Let us remember this. Such circumlocutions are nothing but circumlocutions. What they really mean is self-determination.
Nevertheless, as late as 1951, we find Gus Hall, the present head of the party, writing openly as follows:
. . . what is the Negro nation we speak about? There are some who say that all the 15 million Negro people in the U.S.A. comprise the oppressed nation. This, of course, is not so. We are speaking about the subjugated Negro nation . . . in the Black Belt area of the South. . . .When one states this, the question immediately arises, what about the millions of Negro people who live in the North and other parts of the country? The Negro people outside of the area of the Negro nation constitute a national minority.
In this connection there are a number of questions that need further elucidation. First, what are the possible dangers and wrong conclusions that can be drawn from the formulation that the 15 million Negroes comprise a nation?
. . .
It leaves room for confusion as to the tasks, outlook, program of the Negro nation in the South and its struggle for self-determination, and the struggle for full equality of the Negro people in the rest of the country. As a rule, this confusion results in a watering down of the program and tasks of the national liberation struggle, an ignoring of the particular and distinctive features, of the unequal levels and forms of struggle, demanded by the requirements of the "equal rights" goals of the national minority and the "liberation" goals of the Black Belt nation.(19)
And in 1953, Hugh Bradley was saying the following in a report delivered at the national conference of the Communist Party:
In addition, the entire Negro people are confronted with the problem of national oppression, arising from the heart of the Deep South where the Negro people constitute a distinct nation, held in subjugation, and denied all major rights as a nation.. . . While helping to unite the Negro people in support of a minimum national program for complete equal rights the Communist Party must advance a class program in behalf of the Negro workers in industry, a program designed to relieve the burden of the Negro farming masses, as well as to raise and popularize the demand of self-determination for the Negro nation in the South.(20)
In fact, writes former Royal Canadian Mounted Police undercover agent Pat Walsh, "the executive of the USA Communist Party discreetly distributed in June 1964 thousands of copies of a 1935 pamphlet entitled, The Negroes In A Soviet America." (italics added)(21)
Let us proceed carefully and ask ourselves what we have proved. Well, we have proved that the Communists have decided to apply here in America the same strategy we have proved they are applying elsewhere in the world. We have proved that they openly decided to apply it here more than thirty-five years ago. And we have demonstrated that since this strategy was the work of Lenin and Stalin, they could do nothing else but apply it, being Communists.
But a question arises. As we have seen, the Communists prescribed two strategies for American Negroes: equal rights and self-determination. Equal rights would seem to refer to "integration." whatever that is, but self-determination would seem to refer to "segregation." whatever that is.
Isn't this some sort of contradiction? Doesn't one strategy tend to negate the other?
It is of supreme importance that we understand this answer to this question.
At the plenary meeting of the national committee of the Communist party in 1946, William Z. Foster complained:
One of the major difficulties we have had to contend with has been a tendency of our opponents to pose one of these currents to the other, thus making it appear that the demand for self-determination slogans is in contradiction to the proposition that Negroes fight for the fullest rights as Americans. Comrade Strong knocked this nonsense on the head when he pointed out so forcefully that it is impossible for the Negro people to achieve their full economic, political, and social equality as Americans unless they organize as a nation, unless they forward the slogan of self-determination for the Black Belt of the South.(22) (italics)
In other words, equal rights and self-determination not only aren't antagonistic, they aren't even complementary; they are one and the same thing. If it is impossible for the Negro people to get equal rights without self-determination, then it follows, does it not, that the struggle for equal rights is the struggle for self-determination.
At the same meeting, General Secretary Eugene Dennis spoke of:
. . . the main slogan of action which our Party champions nationally in behalf of the Negro people, namely, the right of full political, economic, and social equality for the Negro people. . . if this basic democratic slogan and Marxist principle is to mean what it says, then its application in the Black Belt. . . requires the excercise of the right to self-determination. (italics added)(23)
"Before a people can have equal rights with other peoples of the world, it must have the right itself to determine its relations with other nations," James S. Allen tells us in 1932. "We can in no sense speak of the Negro people having achieved full equal rights until it has won the right of self-determination."(24)
". . . is there a close connection, an interrelation between the subjugated nation in the South and the Negro people generally?" asks Gus Hall in 1951.
How could anyone deny this? Of course there is. There is in fact a very close kinship. Each influences the other. . . Thus, the struggles for full equality of the Negro national minority and the struggle for national liberation of the oppressed nation are very closely interlinked.(25)
Self-determination, in short, is in no way opposed to equal rights. It is simply the name of the last victory in the struggle for those rights. Self-determination means full equal rights and all the equal rights won before it are only partial.
The slogan for the right of self-determination and the other fundamental slogans of the Negro question in the Black Belt do not exclude but rather pre-suppose an energetic development of the struggle for concrete partial demands linked up with the daily needs and afflictions of wide masses of working Negroes. . .(26)
And the point of it all, of course, is to bring socialism-communism to the United States:
The point I wish to make is that the development of the American Negroes in the Black Belt into a full-fledged nation in the classical sense is a basic requirement for the progressive [that is, socialist-communist] development of the United States. . .It means as a result of this struggle the unfolding of the most fundamental and the most profound struggles for democracy in the United States, anti-imperialist struggles leading to socialism.(27)
Here is a large part of the Communist plan for the destruction and communization of the United States. But again the question arises: Like a bunch of psychotics in a hospital, the Communists can say whatever they like.
Where's the proof that they're doing it?
Notes
1. Leslie Morris, "National and Democratic Revolution in French Canada," World Marxist Review, vol. 7, no. 9 (September 1964), p. 20.
2. "Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies, Sixth World Congress," International Press Correspondence, vol. 8, pp. 1659-1676.
3. Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York, The Viking Press, 1960), pp. 339-340.
4. Benjamin Gitlow, I Confess (New York, E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1940), pp. 480-481.
5. William A. Nolan, Communism Versus the Negro (Chicago, Henry Regnery Company, 1951), p. 48.
6. This position of Browder is contained on page 5 of a pamphlet by the Communist Party of the U.S.A., "The Communist Position on the Negro Question" (New York, Workers Library Publishers, 1934). Because there is another pamphlet with the same title, we will refer to this first pamphlet as "The Communist Position (1934)." See footnote 16 of this chapter.
7. Draper, p. 354.
8. V. I. Lenin, Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States of America (translation in manuscript, New York Public Library), p. 8.
9. Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1951), p. 60.
10. John Pepper, "American Negro Problems," Communist, vol. 7. no. 10 (October 1928). This and other Pepper quotes on p. 628 ff.
11. Ibid. Also quoted by Nolan, p. 47.
12. "The Communist Position 1934)," p. 42. Also quoted by Nolan, pp. 39-40.
13. "The Communist Position 1934)," p. 28.
14. James S. Allen and James W. Ford, The Negroes in a Soviet America (New York, Workers Library Publishers, June 1935), p. 39. Also quoted by Nolan, p. 45.
15. William Z. Foster, "On Self-Determination for the Negro People," Political Affairs, vol. 25, no. 26 (June 1946), pp. 549-554. Also quoted by Nolan, p. 58.
16. This position of Foster is contained on Page 14 of a pamphlet by the Communist party of the U.S.A., National Committee, "The Communist Position on the Negro Question" (New York, New Century Publishers, 1947). We will refer to this pamphlet as "The Communist Position (1947)." See footnote 6 of this chapter. Contained also in William Z. Foster, "On the Question of Negro Self-Determination," Political Affairs, vol. 26 (January 1947) p. 54. Also quoted by Nolan, p. 59.
17. Nolan, p. 60.
18. Ibid., p. 61.
19. Gus Hall, Marxism and Negro Liberation (New York, New Century Publishers, 1951), pp. 17-19.
20. Hugh Bradley, Next Steps in the Struggle for Negro Freedom (New York, New Century Publishers, 1953), pp. 24-25.
21. TAB, vol. 9, no. 15 (Toronto, August 29, 1964).
22. As quoted in "The Communist Position (1947)," pp. 14-16.
23. Ibid., pp. 24-25.
24. James S. Allen, "Negro Liberation," International Pamphlets no. 29 (New York, International Publishers, 1932), p. 21.
25. Hall, pp. 17-19.
26. Resolutions of the Communist International on the Negro Question in the United States, in "The Communist Position (1934)." p. 53.
27. Alexander Bittleman, as quoted in "The Communist Position (1947)," p. 43. Bittleman was a member of the national committee of the Communist party.
Comments: Steven Montgomery