Viewing page 22 of 94

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

308     THE COMMUNIST

A comparison of the Negroes with the Jews can stand no criticism and shows that Shick's methodological position is entirely wrong. 

Shick uses a "stunning argument." On the one hand the Negroes have their national language and religion, only incidentally these are the same as the language and the religion of their oppressors. But based on this argument any part of a nation can be arbitrarily proclaimed a separate nation. 

In my article I did not speak of a "national" language of the Negroes but merely stated the fact that "the Negroes speak one and the same language as their oppressors." Allow me again to refer to Stalin (the same work)—"thus the community of language is one oft he characteristic features of a nation." 

This of course does not mean that different nations speaking different languages or that all who speak one and the same language necessarily comprise nations. I referred to the community of languages because the Negroes of Central Africa for example speak different dialects, just as the Arabians, for example in Arabia, without being different nations.

Shick denies the national features of the Negroes, but how does he explain then the fact that the Comintern has many times, beginning with the II Congress,defined the Negro movement as a national revolutionary movement? Lenin referred many times to the Negroes as an oppressed nation, and, what is more interesting, Lenin refers to the Negroes often when speaking about Ireland.* 

Comrade Haywood, Hathaway, Bill Dunne, myself and others have shown that Lenin and the decisions of the II Congress spoke of the possible Negro movement as a national revolutionary movement not accidentally, and that their arguments were quite correctly based "on generally known facts and figures," and Comrade Shick has not shown and cannot show the contrary.


*Lenin, Vol. XIX, pages 161, 217, 219. Russian edition.