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AGAINST LIBERALISM IN U.S. NEGRO QUESTION 
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share-croppers' and farm hands' agrarian movement, its cover, the national character of the movement.

It is also wrong to counterpose the right to self-determination the struggle for equal rights. Recognizing the right to self-determination of the Negroes, we thereby recognize their equality. We are rebuked for having put full equality in inverted commas. I believe it would be a disgrace to argue in a theoretical Communist magazine, trying to prove that Negroes are human beings just like whites. I would consider it particularly disgraceful to do that by showing the blood compounds, the bones, and in general the structure of the body of a Negro, are the same as of a white man. This has already been done by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and her laurels need not have tempted you so Comrade Shick. For us Communists it is not a problem of proving this when speaking of the equality of all nations and races, but of finding the ways and means of its realization. Our problem is, how, under what slogans, and under what conditions, will a given oppressed people fight a revolutionary battle for its equality, and not merely by means of liberal constitutional benevolence.

We proved that the struggle of the Negroes for equality will assume the form of a national-revolutionary character as a part of the proletarian revolution. 

"To think that the social-revolution is possible without revolts of the small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts of the petty-bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the unconscious proletarians and semi-proletarian masses against the landlords, the church and against national oppression, etc., to think thus means to renounce social-revolution... Anyone who looks forward to a 'pure' social revolution will never see it." (Lenin, Vol. XIX. p. 194 Russian Ed.). 

Such are the words used by Lenin against the upholders of the "purity" of the revolution, such as Comrade Shick is now, at least in so far as America is concerned.

The Communist Party, the vanguard of the working class, must forsee where and in what forms will there be outbursts so that it may lend greater force to the blow against imperialism. Comrade Shick's view is diametrically opposed to that.

Here is what Comrade Shick wrote in the summer of 1928:

"The idea of an independent State under capitalism is a most reactionary utopia. The separatist movement does not in the least menace the American bourgeoisie. Of course, the bourgeoisie cannot permit such a movement to go too far. It will have to interfere and break-up such a separatist movement if the broad masses of the