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Communist Theory and the American Negro Question

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

John W. Van Zanten
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Extract

Political Science has long been interested in opinion. It is supposed that expressed views are indicators of behavior or potential behavior and are therefore worthy of attention as aids in understanding the present and predicting the future. While there can be little doubt that people's feelings guide their actions, we can sometimes be deceived because manifest opinion may be merely an epiphenomenon derivative from other factors, rather than vice versa. This is a problem most evident when trying to relate the true designs of an ideological movement's leadership to its pronouncements.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , October 1967 , pp. 435 - 456
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1967

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References

1 This article is largely derived from research done for an unpublished doctoral dissertation at Yale University, 1966.Google Scholar

2 For general studies of communism and the Negro problem see, e.g., Record, Wilson, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill N. C.., 1951);Google ScholarRecord, Race and Redicalism (Ithaca N.Y., 1964);Google ScholarDraper, Theodore, The Roots of American Communism (NewYork, 1957);Google ScholarDraper, , American Communism and Soviet Russsia (NewYork, 1960);Google ScholarNolan, William, Communism Versus the Negro (Chicago, 1951);Google ScholarShannon, David A., The Decline of American Communism (NewYork, 1959);Google Scholar and Mouledous, Joseph C., “From Browderism to Peaceful Co-Existence: An Analysis of Developments in the Communist Position on the American Negro”, Phylon, XXV, no.1, (Spring 1964), 79–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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4 Ibid., p. 343.

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10 In an article on “Statistics and Sociology” (1917), Lenin labelled the Negroes an “oppressed nation” meriting the right to self-determination. See Lenin, V. I., Collected Works, 4th ed., vol. 23 (Moscow, 1963), p. 275.Google ScholarSee also Lenin's 1920 “These on the National and Colonial Question.” Sen Katayama once noted that Lenin had held in verbal contacts that the Negroes were a subject nation like Ireland: see Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, pp. 336–40.Google Scholar

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20 Ibid., pp. 20–21.

21 Marx wrote in his introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), “No form of society can perish before all forces of production which it is large enough to contain are developed, and at no time will outworn conditions be replaced by new higher conditions as long as the material necessities of their existence have not been hatched in the womb of the old society itself”.Google Scholar

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30 The Soviets in their treatment of the Negro since 1962 have been assiduous in calling it a class or social problem and minimizing the racial aspects.

31 Nitoberg, E. L., “Concerning the Negro Question in the USA”, no. 5, 1963, pp. 41–55.Google Scholar

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34 Ibid., p. 21.

35 Editorial: “On the ideological Position of the Communist Party of China,” Political Affairs, XLII, no. 10 (10., 1963), pp. 1–20.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., p. 12. Moreover, the CPUSA called the Chinese expectations of revolution in the USA fanciful: “This is a totally fanciful picture. Neither now nor at any other time since World War II could it be said with the remotest justification that within the United States there existed a volcano ready to erupt into outright revolution against U.S. imperialism at any moment”. Ibid., p. 14.

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40 See, e.g., Lapitsky, I., “U.S. Communists in Congress”, New Times, no. 28 (07 13, 1966), pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

41 See, e.g., “Who Pays for the Riot?”, Izvestia, 09. 2, 1964, p. 2.Google Scholar

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