The Negro question is a problem that has a political history. Marxism has to deal with it in a Marxist manner. This connotes an extension, development or precise revision of the principles previously established by Marxists on this question. I propose here to state what the approach of Lenin and Trotsky was and to show that that approach was correct. It is necessary to do so in order to understand both the past impending developments in the future.
"Properly speaking", proclaimed Debs, "there is no Negro question outside the labor question".1 This ultra-left phraseology was a Social-Democratic form of escapism from the actualities of the Negro problem both with respect to capitalist society as a whole and within the labor and revolutionary movement in particular.
The Bolsheviks, too, were not without some theoreticians who failed to comprehend the complexities of the national question. Thus Stalin tried to show that national oppression stemmed only from feudal, not bourgeois relations, and hence that "in America national oppression, generally speaking, finds no place". To this Trotsky retorted: "The author completely forgets the Negro, Indian, Immigrant and colonial problems in the United States".2
Note that the "Negro, Indian, immigrant and colonial problems" are grouped together as manifestations of national oppression. Trotsky thought that American Marxists were too easily satisfied with abstract deductions regarding the Negro problem. The Negro, they said, had no national customs, culture or even religion outside of the American culture and religion and hence the Negroes are not a national but a racial minority. If even the Negro is called a racial minority, what difference does it make to the principles on which a Marxist analysis of the Negro question should be based? "Nations" wrote Trotsky, "grow out of the racial material under definite conditions ... We do not obligate the Negroes to become a nation; if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and they strive for ... In any case, suppression of the Negroes pushes them toward a political and national unity".
Trotsky's approach to the Negro question, his insistence that "an abstract criterion is not decisive in this question" were merely a continuation of Lenin's approach to this question.
Lenin's Theses on the National and Colonial Question, which was adopted by the Second Congress of the Communist International was essentially a statement of principles. It embraces the Marxist policy on the question of nations and national minorities as well as colonial and "financially dependent and weak nationalities". The Theses single out two nations as illustrative of the type of national oppression that evokes mass movements of resistance. These nations are Ireland and the Negroes in America. This reference to the Negroes as a "nation" generally calls forth superior smirks among American Marxists who have studied the National question in general and the Negro question in particular a good deal less seriously than had Lenin.
Those who oppose the principles by which Lenin clearly demarcated the National question from the general question of the proletarian revolution and base their opposition on the fact that Lenin, and after him Trotsky, thought the Negroes were a nation not only fly in the face of the material which exists but seem to be ignorant of the fact that, apart from the Revolutionary War, no section of American history is as familiar to Europeans as the importation of Negroes, their enslavement, and the Civil War. To think that Lenin and Trotsky believed that the American Negroes were a nation in the sense that the Irish were a nation is to accuse them of gross and vulgar ignorance. Does anyone assert that Lenin and Trotsky thought that the Jews in Poland were a nation? Yet, in his foreword to the Preliminary Theses on the National Question, Lenin included the Polish Jews as an example of the problems to be dealt with under the National Question.3
Lenin used the world, "nation", in its broad sense of oppressed and oppressing groups and applied it both to national minorities and colonial majorities.4 In his very numerous polemics on the National Question, and again in his Theses, Lenin emphasized that concrete historic situations, not abstract considerations, formed the focal point of theory and action on the National Question. The decisive thing was that "All national oppression calls forth resistance of the broad masses of people".5 It is insufficient to state that revolutionists would support these movements. It is not only a question of support. It is a question of support and the development of national struggles, not for abstract reasons, but because these struggles must inevitably develop along lines of independent mass activity. As Marxists, we would, naturally, prefer - if we could indulge in such abstractions - that the movements which are grouped under the national question would take a turn towards a shedding of what Trotsky calls the national shell and reveal clearly to the participants the social and class content therein contained. But history, as well as the analysis of the economic basis of what Marxists call the national question, has shown that these questions can be resolved and clarified only in the course of the struggle itself.
Moreover, where the national question is involved, it endangers a differentiation within the proletariat. The proletariat of the oppressed country occupies a subordinate position to the proletariat of the oppressing country. This aspect is not peculiar to the United States. In this connection Marx said that so long as the bourgeoisie of one country holds domination over the other, the emancipation of the proletariat in the oppressing country is impossible. In his letter to Siegfried Meyer and Karl Vogt, Marx amplified on this idea thus:
"The ordinary English worker hates the Irish workers as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that of the 'poor whites' to the 'niggers' in the former slave states of the U.S.A. ... It (the antagonism) is the secret of the impotence of the English working class despite their organization".6
On the basis of a study of this situation, Lenin concluded that revolutionists must apply what has become known as a dualism of propaganda addressed to the proletariat of the oppressor nation and that of the oppressed nation. In his polemic with Pyatakov on the national question, Lenin defended this co-called dualism of propaganda on the [grounds] that the proletariat in the oppressor nation differs from the proletariat in the oppressed nation "all along the line": economically, the worker of the oppressor nation more easily becomes part of the labor aristocracy; politically, he participates more fully in the life of the country; and intellectually, he feels superior because he is taught disdain for the laborer of the oppressed nation.7 The "nations" Lenin referred to in his polemics were the immigrant and native laborers in the United States! Does this or does this not apply to the white and Negro workers in the United States? The smirk on the faces of American Marxists should really change to a furrow of worry for what their attitudes really betrays is what Lenin called "petty bourgeois national egoism" for anonymous oppressed. Here, again, Trotsky merely followed in the footsteps of Lenin when he stated that the arguments of the American Marxists revealed a "certain concession to the point of view of American chauvinism".
The problem of national egoism does not, of course, resolve itself merely into the fact that the proletariat of the oppressing nation is taught disdain for the worker of the oppressed nation. National egoism has a firmer basis: an economic foundation. The point of specific political implication in Lenin's Imperialism, is that, owing to the super-profits of imperialism, the bourgeoisie is able to bribe a section of the proletariat of the advanced country and thereby lay the basis of political opportunism. The Negro masses do not constitute as great a mass as the colonial masses but, as we shall see when we analyze the economic roots of the Negro question, in the South, in particular the whole caste system is fortified by the differentiation not only in labor but also in petty bourgeois jobs. This makes the subordination of the Negro not only a matter of big capital. It gives a definite economic motivation in the participation in that subordination to other classes and sub-classes of the population.
It is the general success of the assimilation in the historic development of a country like the United States that lends credence to the type of ultra-left phraseology behind which lurks national egoism. In Europe the national minorities fought for independence from the larger society (for the Tzarist or Austro-Hungarian Empires). But in the United States the national minorities that come to this country fought for integration within the larger society. They more or less succeeded. It is this which has caused such disorientation in the ranks of the American Marxists on the National Question in American as opposed to their more ready comprehension of it in Europe and Asia.
The exception to the integration is the Negro. Why? Surely, it isn't the Negro's doing: he only wants his assimilation accepted. We see that here is a complex pattern that cannot be solved by abstract criteria as to what constitutes a nation.
Much has been written of the sameness of the Negro and American culture in order to prove that the Negroes are not a nation. But what these writers have failed to show is: why, then, does there nevertheless exist a Negro problem. That is the nub of the matter. The sameness of the Negro and American culture does not explain this. The explanation rather lies in the isolation and attempted exclusion of the Negro from the American culture. The persistence of the divergence and its sharpness is what Lenin and Trotsky saw in their approach to the Negro problem. It is the Negro's special oppression, the deprivation of his political rights, the discrimination against him on the job, Jim Crowism and racial segregation that makes of him a problem. The attempt to gloss over this fact or subordinate it to the general labor problem Trotsky considered a manifestation of, or concession to, American chauvinism.
Some of the American Marxists are obsessed with the idea that if the Negro problem be classed as part of the National Question that thereby we will lose sight of the class struggle and thus let the Negro Bourgeoisie dominate the mass movement of Negroes.8 There is, of course, a theoretical danger that the Negro bourgeoisie would dominate the mass movement. That danger exists in every national movement. But in this special case we must not forget that the Negro bourgeoisie is infinitesimal and to call it a compradore bourgeoisie* is merely to prepare the way for serious political errors. A genuine compradore bourgeoisie is the bourgeoisie of India or China. They have a certain influence and power in the process of production. They are the ones who actually use finance capital. They have a social base which would enable it to overthrow the dominant imperialist power were it not for the fear of the masses. The Negro bourgeoisie has not roots in the process of production itself. It can offer nothing to the Negro masses except hot air on the race question. It is not a compradore bourgeoisie. It is a section of the American petty bourgeoisie. Furthermore, it is the feeblest and most contemptible section of the American petty bourgeoisie. Not only is it restricted to serving Negroes, but even among those who serve Negroes, it is much the smaller and insignificant section, being, for example, far outnumbered and outdistanced by the Jews who live off the same section of the population.
There is a danger also that the Negro movement would be dominated by its petty bourgeois leaders. There is always that kind of danger. But what is the way in which, from the beginning of Marxism to the present day, Marxists have always met this problem? By constantly preaching about the class struggle? Yes, certainly. Marxists always have and always will preach about the class struggle until the complete overthrow of capitalist society. But the whole point of placing the Negro question in the category of the National Question is the following. In order to prevent the domination of the movement against national oppression by the petty bourgeoisie, the Marxists place themselves at the head of this movement. They do so neither with equivocation nor with the air of "how unfortunate it is that we have to waste time on this unfortunate weakness of the masses". No. The only way to defeat the petty bourgeoisie is boldly to proclaim not only the legitimacy but the revolutionary significance of the struggle against national oppression and in our own way to drive the petty bourgeoisie from the leadership. Nowhere is this better expressed than in an article written by Lenin in which he explains how Marx used this method in connection with the agrarian question in the United States. Lenin then applies the same method to the peasant question in Russia. He writes:
"there is no doubt about the revolutionary and democratic nature of this movement and we must support it with all our might, develop it, make it politically conscious and definitely class movement, push it forward, march hand in hand with it to the end - for we are marching far beyond the end of any peasant movement; we are marching to the very end of the division of society into classes".9
These words can be applied to the concrete situation of the masses of the Negroes in the United States. That is what is meant, and that is what Lenin and Trotsky meant when they said the Negro question is part of the National Question.
To say that labor is to fix it all is to say nothing. Labor has to "fix" all problems. The proletariat is the only cohesive revolutionary class in present-day society and no fundamental transformation of the social order can occur except under its leadership. But meanwhile the Negroes are in constant activity and organization (NAACP, Urban League, the Garvey movement) on the basis of the fact that they are a nationally oppressed minority. They work with labor sometimes, and against labor at other times. They cannot be told to wait for the day of the revolution. The fact that the Negro masses could embrace so utopian a scheme as "Back to Africa" - a utopianism all the more suicidal since their customs, language, and cultures are American - reveals both how frustrated the Negro feels at ever achieving full democratic rights in America and how desperately repressed he feels as a national minority. And, what is more important, they mean to do something about this with or without the help of revolutionists. They flock to him who recognizes that fundamental fast. If the movement develops into reactionary channels, as the Garvey movement most certainly did, and if the revolutionists were unable to make a dent in his ranks, it only proves that the only way to influence masses in motion is by understanding the underlying, deep economic and social causes, by guiding the movement, not by throwing epithets at it. This is precisely what Lenin meant by transferring the Negro question from the general proletarian struggle to the scope of the National Question.
It was Trotsky's contention that if we understood the reason for Garvey's mass following, we could have the answer to the Negro problem in America. To this day revolutionists fail to estimate the significance of the movement. They only look at Garvey the faker and not at the mass movement of revolt. A study of the Garvey movement is outside the scope of this article, but it is important to focus attention on what Trotsky meant to apply one of the main lessons he drew from it. Recognizing that the Negro's specific oppression would evoke a broad mass movement, Trotsky stated that, should such a broad mass Negro organization desire to elect its own candidates whom they put up on a capitalist party ticket, the revolutionists could, under certain circumstances, withdraw their own candidate in favor of such a candidate. Such a radical departure from the revolutionary advice for the proletariat in general to vote only for independent working class candidates could have been suggested on only one ground, Trotsky considered the Negro question as part of the National Question, as indeed he repeatedly stated. The national and colonial movement is the only instance where revolutionists conditionally support bourgeois party tickets because there, seemingly chauvinism is really the expression of revolt. And revolts of minority groups, Lenin taught us, are not hopeless:
"The dialectic of history is such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli which help the real power against imperialism to come to the scene, namely, the socialist proletariat".10
Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution, which analyses the relation of combined development and the social forces at hand to solve the problems raised by combined development, gives us the broad Marxist theory which must be applied at home as well as abroad. Lenin's Theses on the National-Colonial Question provides us with the concrete link to the solution. It states that it is necessary "to put as the corner-stone in the national question not abstract and not formal principles, but, firstly, an exact estimation of the historically concrete situation, and, primarily the economic situation".11 We shall proceed to do just that.
1 Eugene V. Debs, 'The Negro in the Class Struggle', International Socialist Review, Vol. IV, No. 5, November 1903.
2 Leon Trotsky, 'A Further Note on the Problem of Nationalities', in Chapter 39 of The History of the Russian Revolution: Volume Three, (1930).
3 V. I. Lenin, Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions, (1920).
4 And so did all other delegates to the C. I. Congress, including the American representatives, John Reed and L. Fraina. Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International, Petrograd, July 19 - August 7 1920. See especially, 'America and Negro Question'.
5 V. I. Lenin, Collected Works: Vol. XIX, p. 248.
6 Karl Marx, Letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9th April 1870.
7 V. I. Lenin, Collected Works: Vol. XIX, p. 242.
8 Lenin knew these accusation of forgetting the class struggle in the national question very well. Writing on the Irish question, he states that because Marx in the International proposed "a resolution of sympathy with the 'Irish nation' and the 'Irish people' (the clever L Vl [L. Vladimirov (pseudonym of M. K. Sheinfinkel) - a Social-Democrat] would probably have berated poor Marx for forgetting about the class struggle!)". V. I. Lenin Chapter 8, 'The Utopian Karl Marx and the Practical Rosa Luxemburg', of The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, (1914).
* To call the Negro bourgeoisie a compradore bourgeoisie is to make the Negro Question indeed a national question and not merely by the application of the principles of the national question to a minority group. Lenin and Trotsky never went that far.
9 V. I. Lenin, 'Marx on the American "General Redistribution"', (1905). [In the version on the Marxist Internet Archive this section is translated as:
"there is no doubt as to the revolutionary and democratic nature of this movement, and we must with all our might support it, develop it, make it a politically conscious and definitely class movement, advance it, and go hand in hand with it to the end - for we go much further than the end of any peasant movement; we go to the very end of the division of society into classes".]
10 V. I. Lenin, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up, (1916).
11 V. I. Lenin, Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions, (1920). [The quote is from paragraph 2. The English language translation on the Marxist Internet Archive translates this passage as:
"must base its policy, in the national question too, not on abstract and formal principles but, first, on a precise appraisal of the specific historical situation and, primarily, of economic conditions".]