Viewing page 24 of 35

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Hertzel approached Pleve, Czarist minister, leader of the "Black Hundred" and organizer of pogroms against the Jews, with the proposal that he would help Czarism in its fight against the revolutionary movement the Jews, i.e., against the struggle for Jewish rights in Russia, in return for support by Czarism of his reactionary project for migration of the Jews to Palestine. This counter-revolutionary alliance between Zionism and Czarist reaction was continued in the active alliance between the Zionist leader Zhabotinsky (at present leader of the Zionist Revisionist group) and the White Guard pogromist, Petlura, during the Civil War in the Ukraine.

At the present time Zionism, which was originally a movement of the Jewish petty-bourgeoisie, has now become an active agency of British imperialism and international Jewish bankers for the subjugation and robbery of the Arabian masses as well as for the bitter exploitation and degradation of the Jewish toilers in Palestine. Such is the historical course not only of Zionism, but also of its prototypes among the Negroes--Garveyism and neo-Garveyism. Under phrases of Negro liberation, freedom of Africa, the inevitable trend of these movements is to an active alliance with the most reactionary imperialist groups against the national liberation movement of the Negro peoples both in Africa and in the Americas, against the revolutionary movement in general.

[[centered]] Only the Communists Really Fight for Negro Freedom [[/centered]]

Against these counter-revolutionary schemes for the solution of the Negro question, we must put forth our full program on the Negro question in the U. S. A. as well as in Africa. We must advance and popularize the revolutionary way out of the crisis for the Negro people, through an alliance with the revolutionary working class of the imperialist nations, for equal rights and the right of self-determination 

44

for the Negroes in the U. S. A., for complete independence of the Negro colonies in Africa and the West Indies, through the establishment of independent native republics. This alone is the only path to real freedom for the oppressed Negro peoples throughout the world.

Any attempt to draw the Negro masses away from struggle, from coming to grips with the imperialist masters, can lead only to defeat and to the tightening of the shackles of oppression upon theme. In exposing these petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders, it is absolutely necessary to make clear that we Communists not only recognize the aspirations of the Negro toilers in this movement as authentic, but that the Communists alone are the only true champions of Negro freedom, that we alone have the correct program by which oppression can be abolished and these aspirations fulfilled.

In our exposure of these Negro traitors, the chief emphasis must be placed on the fact that their treachery consists precisely in the fact that they are betraying the national liberation aspirations of the Negro people. Our slogan must be: No reactionary utopian dream of "back to Africa" or a Jim-Crow State in the U. S. A.! These are only reactionary caricatures of real self-determination. But revolutionary struggle in alliance with the white toilers and under the leadership of the Communist Party for the overthrow of American imperialism, for the establishment of equal rights for Negroes all over the country and self-determination for the Negro nation in the Southern Black Belt.

In our agitation an important weapon must be the widest popularization of the solution of the national question in the Soviet Union. We must show how the establishment of the proletarian State through the overthrow of Czarist imperialism permitted for the first time the real establishment of complete equality and self-determination for the formerly oppressed national minorities within the Soviet Union. We

45

Transcription Notes:
"Czarism" is completed on previous page.