Viewing page 11 of 94

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

AGAINST LIBERALISM IN U.S. NEGRO QUESTION 297

3. To answer to a number of questions concerning the position of the Negroes in the United States raised by Comrade Shick.

THE NATIONAL PROBLEM IN THE IMPERIALIST EPOCH.

Comrade Shick's strongest theoretical argument is his statement that "according to Lenin these movements (the national movements of oppressed nations) are bound up with the epoch of the final victory of capitalism over "feudalism" and also that "it is clear that the principal economic basis of any bourgeois national movement of an oppressed nation is the struggle of the industrial bourgeoisie for its untrammelled economic development, for the home market, for a removal of such obstacles as the language. This is not a movement of petty-bourgeois producers (our emphasis-N.N.) who are themselves a market for themselves."
In other words (we shall discuss here Shick's terminology "bourgeois movement of an oppressed nation"-by this terminology Comrade Shick renders a discussion difficult because he has the right to interpret his terms as he likes), any movement of an oppressed nation has only then a right to exist when its economic foundation is a struggle of a national industrial bourgeoisie for the home market of the given nation.
If that is so the Negroes "have no right" to a revolutionary movement, and any such Negro movement is reactionary, as Comrade Shick maintains. But this connection has nothing in common with the contemporary positions of Communism on the national problem. Comrade Shick is wrong in his reference to Lenin. He merely proves that there one must not go by the letter but by its substance. The substance of the matter is that we are now in a different epoch.
Stalin for example splendidly formulates various stages in the development of the national problem as follows:

"It may be safely stated that the formulation of the national problem passed through 2 stages in the history of Russian Marxism, the first stage being prior to the October revolution, and the second, after the revolution. In the first stage the national problem was regarded as a part of the general problem of the bourgeois democratic revolution, i.e., as a part of the problem of the dictatorship of the working class and the peasantry. In the second stage, when the national problem became wider and a problem of the colonies, when the national problem became from an internal domestic problem a world problem, it is no longer regarded as a part of the general problem of the world revolution, as a part of the problem of the proletarian dictatorship." (Bolshevik No. 7, 1925).

Shick did not notice that the epoch has changed, while Lenin repeated tens and hundreds of times that one must always con-