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302     THE COMMUNIST

by the Comintern, put the question of the content of the Chinese Revolution differently in the various stages of that revolution.  Does this not hold good also for India and other countries?  Ordinary commonsense does not permit the counterposing of form to its content.

Is it not clear that, figuratively speaking, our language is not the same as that of Comrade Shick, that we speak in the language of different epochs?

SHICK THE COMMUNIST UPHOLDS THE PROGRAMME OF DUBOIS THE LIBERAL

Comrade Shick wants to prove that form is of secondary importance for the movement.

Our thesis was:

"One of the allies in the proletarian socialist revolution in America can and should be the national-revolutionary movement of the Negro masses.  It is quite probable that the Negro movement will still put forward some utopian ideas such as the theories of Garvey, but objectively any Negro revolutionary movement will be a part of the struggle of the American workers against capitalist domination."

Now Shick counterposes this thesis by the following:

"The struggle of the Negroes of the Black Belt for self-determination is nothing but a struggle against political and social inequality of the Negroes which interferes with the toiling Negro population, the farmers who constitute the majority, in abolishing the relics of semi-slavery which still press upon them.  The self-determination slogan for the Black Belt is a slogan of the agrarian revolution."

Reducing the national-revolutionary struggle of the Negroes to an agrarian problem, Shick says that "this movement can be only conditionally called a national-revolutionary movement, as is done in the resolution of the Comintern."  First of all, the Comintern resolution does not call the movement "conditionally national revolutionary." It should have been necessary to give some evidence.  Comrade Shick turns topsy-turvy the following Comintern thesis:

"The Negro farm-hands and share-croppers feel strongest the persecutions and exploitations by the whites.  The agrarian problem is thus at the basis of the Negro national movement."

Shick distorted this thesis and discarded the form of the Negro