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connection with relief work and in the issuance of unemployment relief, etc.

Against this correct line of the Section Committee, certain comrades brought forward the petty bourgeois nationalist line of replacement of white workers by Negroes. They argued: "Why all this talk about antagonizing the white workers? Are not these white workers in Negro neighborhoods living on the backs of the Negro masses? Are they not occupying jobs that rightfully belong to Negroes?" These comrades forgot about the fight against Jim-Crowism in other parts of the city and tended to regard Harlem as "our territory," playing directly into the segregation policies of the Negro nationalists and the white ruling class. The only logical conclusion flowing from this false conception that "the whites were on the backs of the Negroes" is that the struggle of the Negro toilers for the betterment of their conditions must be directed, not against the capitalists and the government, but against the white workers! Here comrades, we see a complete surrender to petty bourgeois nationalism. Such a line would play directly into the hands of the fascist lynchers of the Negro people. It is clear that the work could only move forward on the basis of a determined struggle and the defeat of this dangerous tendency.

The Question of the "Main Danger"

In defense of this petty bourgeois nationalist idea, and in resistance to the struggle carried forward by the Section against it, a number of false ideas were put forward, ideas which tended to distort our position on the question of the struggle on two fronts, and to weaken the fight against both petty bourgeois nationalism and white chauvinism. Certain comrades began to cry: "Is not white chauvinism the main danger? By all of this noise about petty bourgeois nationalism, are you not furnishing a clock for the white

chauvinists?" Of course, comrades, such counter-posing of the fight against white chauvinism and the struggle against petty bourgeois nationalism is incorrect and serves only the purpose of hampering the struggle against both. The question of white chauvinism is used by these comrades to cover up and conceal the question of the fight against petty bourgeois nationalism. Of course, white chauvinism is the main danger. But we cannot be contented with a mere formula. Comrade Stalin in his report to the Seventeenth Congress of the C.P.S.U. in dealing with the controversy regarding which was the main danger, Great Russian nationalism or local nationalism, correctly stated:

"It would be absurd to attempt to give ready-made recipes for the major and minor dangers that would be suitable for all times and for all conditions. Such recipes do not exist. The major danger is the deviation against which we have ceased to fight and thereby enabled it to grow . . . ."

The fact that white chauvinism is the main danger, by no means implies that petty bourgeois nationalism, under certain conditions, in a particular situation, at a given moment, cannot become the main danger in the development of our work among Negroes. St. Louis is a good example of this. We had there a situation where the Party and the revolutionary trade unions were carrying on a real fight for the daily needs of the Negroes, mobilizing thousands of Negro and white workers in the struggle for the immediate demands of the Negro toilers (nut pickers' strike). This movement withstood the sharpest terror and most cunning demagogy on the part of the local ruling class; but they could not defeat it. Therefore, at a certain time they brought in their Negro reformist agents in the form of a Pacific Movement of the Eastern World in an attempt to break the strike, in an attempt to split the unity of the workers. The petty bourgeois nationalist leaders of this organization carried

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