The Communist International and the Struggle for Black Liberation

(Quote of the Week)

Under the influence and tutelage of the Communist International led by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the early American Communist Party came to understand the strategic importance of the struggle against the oppression of black people in the United States. Writing at the time of the mass Southern civil rights movement, James P. Cannon, a founding leader of both the Communist Party and the Trotskyist movement in the U.S., explained the organic link between the Bolshevik Revolution and a proletarian revolutionary perspective against the racist American capitalist state.

The earlier socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was formed, never recognized any need for a special program on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequality this side of socialism....

The difference—and it was a profound difference—between the Communist Party of the Twenties and its socialist and radical ancestors, was signified by its break with this tradition. The American communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Russians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their attitude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the over-all program—and to start doing something about it....

After November, 1917 this new doctrine—with special emphasis on the Negroes—began to be transmitted to the American communist movement with the authority of the Russian Revolution behind it. The Russians in the Comintern started on the American communists with the harsh, insistent demand that they shake off their own unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community....

An honest workers’ party of the new generation will recognize this revolutionary potential of the Negro struggle, and call for a fighting alliance of the Negro people and the labor movement in a common revolutionary struggle against the present social system.

—James P. Cannon, “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement” (1959), reprinted in The First Ten Years of American Communism (Pathfinder Press, 1973)