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AGAINST LIBERALISM IN U.S. NEGRO QUESTION  301

driving forces or even among the organizing or "stimulating" forces in the national movements.

There is still the "petty-bourgeois movement for democracy" to be dealt with. Shick does not recognize it, but we do and so does the Comintern. According to Shick, there is now a fight going on between feudalism and capitalism, i.e. free competition is fighting under the battle-cries of all possible liberties and "citizens' rights" against feudal restrictions and despotism. But we are now living in different times!

Lenin characterized our epoch somewhat differently:

"Free competition is replaced by monopoly...The political super-structure of modern economy, of monopoly capitalism (imperialism being monopoly capitalism) is a return from democracy back to political reaction. Free competition corresponds to democracy. Monopoly corresponds to political reaction... In this sense it is incontestible that imperialism is a 'negation' of democracy in general, of all democracy, and by no means merely one of the demands of democracy, namely, self-determination of nations." (Vol. III, p. 353, Russian edition).

Does the proletariat discard as lightly the "petty-bourgeois movement of democracy" as Shick? Lenin says no. More than that, the proletariat fights for democracy:

"Socialism is for two reasons impossible without democracy:
"1. The proletariat cannot accomplish the social-revolution if it does not prepare for it through a struggle for democracy.
"2. Triumphant socialism cannot maintain its victory and bring humanity to the negation of the State without realizing full democracy." (Lenin, Vol. XIII, p. 384. Russian edition).

This, by the way, was said in regard to those who denied the necessity of recognizing the right to self-determination on the pretext that the "social revolution will accomplish all...that self-determination is impossible under capitalism and unnecessary under Socialism."

This is not the place to explain why we fight for democracy, we merely want to show where Shick gets the diea [[idea]] of the rejection of the struggle for democracy. Recognition of the right of the Negroes to self-determination, i.e., recognition of the struggle of the Negro workers and farmers in the South as a special form, is merely a higher expression of the struggle of the proletariat for democracy.

The form may remain but the content changes. All Communists have for instance recognized China's right to free itself completely from the imperialist yoke, but the Communists as represented