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through the most intense campaign of disruption, both within and without the movement, even influencing certain sections of our Negro comrades-in fact, wining one of the outstanding Negro leaders to their side.

Comrades, was it not clear that in that particular situation at that particular moment, petty bourgeois nationalism was the main danger? Therefore, while recognizing white chauvinism as the main danger, it is not excluded that with the sharpening of the struggle, with the intensification of the activities of the petty bourgeois nationalists, that the petty bourgeois nationalist danger can under certain conditions, at a given moment, in a particular situation, become the main danger.

Another idea brought forth in defense of petty bourgeois nationalist deviation, is the idea that "petty bourgeois nationalism arises as the result of the weakening of our struggle against white chauvinism and for Negro rights." The logic of this idea is that we must completely eliminate white chauvinism from our ranks before we can even speak about the fight against petty bourgeois nationalism. Comrades, just the reverse is true. As Comrade Earl Browder correctly emphasized in his report, the spread of petty bourgeois nationalism at the present time is taking place precisely as a result of the growing radicalization of the Negro masses and the growing influence of the Communist Party and the revolutionary movement among them.

Again, in defense of petty bourgeois nationalism, we hear the cry "white chauvinism strengthens petty bourgeois nationalism." Comrades, this is true. Every concession to white chauvinism plays into hands of petty bourgeois nationalism. But it is not the whole truth. We must also see the other side of the question-namely, that petty bourgeois nationalism also strengthens white chauvinism. Why? Because petty bourgeois nationalism is also an instrument of

imperialism. Hence the necessity of simultaneously conducting the fight on two fronts.

In this one-sided formulation, we see another effort to blur over the fight against petty bourgeois nationalism and distort our general line of fight on two fronts.

This underestimation of the petty bourgeois nationalist danger, this distortion of our line of fight on two fronts, arises, in the main, from a lack of understanding of the class essence of Negro reformism and petty bourgeois nationalism, the failure to understand it as the class ideology of the Negro bourgeoisie, i.e., as an agency of imperialism within the ranks of the Negro toilers. In this there is a failure to understand the common class character of both white chauvinism and petty bourgeois nationalism as agencies of imperialism among the white and Negro workers, that all deviations in the direction of nationalism, be it white chauvinism or Negro petty bourgeois nationalism, represent a departure from our line of proletarian internationalism. Therefore, as Stalin correctly stated: "If you want to keep both dangers under fire, then aim primarily against this source, against those who depart from internationalism...."

Concealed Petty Bourgeois Nationalism

But the most dangerous form of petty bourgeois nationalist influences in the Party is not its open expression. Wherever petty bourgeois nationalist ideas express themselves in an open form, they can easily be met and defeated. It is the concealed, hidden forms that are the most dangerous, the kind that does not dare come out into the open, but works under cover. How? Through subtle insinuations, fostering distrust and suspicion among less developed comrades as to the integrity of the Party and its leaders regarding the Negro question; veiled inferences that the leading Negro Comrades, those who are seriously carrying out the work

Transcription Notes:
"carried" completed on previous page wining = winning