Readers of CHALLENGE are aware of Progressive Labor Party’s(PLP) insistence upon the centrality of the struggle against racism to the fight for working-class liberation. The history of this strategic communist emphasis reveals the importance of proletarian (that is, working-class) internationalism in both theory and practice.
Although the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is widely credited (even by anticommunist historians) with leading the fight against racism during the Depression years, during most of the previous decade the CPUSA—following in the tradition of the prewar U.S. Socialist Party—insisted that Black oppression (then called the “Negro Question”) was exclusively an economic matter. Undue emphasis upon the violence, poverty, and harsh conditions of labor disproportionately endured by the Black working class, it was argued, would alienate white workers. Unsurprisingly, Black membership in the CPUSA remained low through the 1920s: by 1929, there were still fewer than 300 Black members in a total membership of over 15,000 (Zumoff).
The contradictory policy of Black liberation
It was the intervention of the Comintern (the worldwide association of Communist parties formed in 1919 after the Bolshevik Revolution) that enabled the CPUSA to put the fight against racism front and center. At the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, there was intense debate over race, class, and nation. (1) Should Black workers in the U.S. be viewed as a “people,” a “race,” or a “nation”? (2) Did class divisions in the Black population make it impossible to have commonly shared material interests? (3) Did the call for “self-determination” of oppressed peoples and nations—a proposition key to both Lenin’s and Stalin’s writings on the “national question”—pertain to U.S. Black workers, and if so, how? (4) Were Black workers in the United States, by virtue of their greater degree of oppression and exploitation, particularly positioned to lead the global struggle against capitalism?
Notably, Black communists in the U.S. delegation to the Sixth World Congress were—while actively recruited to play a prominent role in these debates—themselves split on these issues (Haywood). It was largely delegates from other countries—especially Japan, Finland, and the USSR—who pressed for the position that would be endorsed as CPUSA policy during the coming period (Solomon). This policy was complex and contradictory.
On the one hand, it asserted that the Black peasantry (agricultural workers), located mostly in the “Black Belt” of the rural South, constituted an oppressed nation in need of self-determination, comparable to the separate peoples that had joined together to form the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) after the Bolshevik Revolution. On the other hand, particularly in the North, the Comintern policy called for an intensified fight against racism in all spheres of life, expressed in the slogan, “Black and White, Unite and Fight!”
Black nationalism is a failing strategy
It was assumed that the Black Belt—upon attaining self-determination through a “bourgeois-democratic” (capitalist) revolution that would help it overcome its capitalist-engendered uneven development—would then join the multiracial working class in the unified revolutionary movement needed to abolish capitalism.
This strategy was then and is now subject to serious critique. The call for a Black Republic, while intended to benefit working-class people of all races and ethnicities, even at the time smacked of Black nationalist separatism.
The post-World War II history of national liberation movements premised upon self-determination, moreover, has shown that the two-stage theory of revolution (first the bourgeois-democratic revolution, then the socialist revolution) has yielded only disappointment and betrayal, particularly in those parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America where it was most fervently embraced.
Progressive Labor Party asserts that the early twentieth-century theorizations of the “national question,” while plausible in their time, have proven to be impediments rather than spurs to working-class liberation. We see its failure playing out to this day. That is why PLP fights for nothing less than multiracial unity and one international fight against capitalism. We have one common enemy and one world to win.
Communists fight racism
Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the sharp struggles undertaken at the Sixth World Congress, the CPUSA greatly intensified its commitment to the fight against racism. Focusing both upon the special oppression of nonwhite workers and upon the destructive and divisive impact of racism upon the entire working class, the CPUSA took the lead in building a class-conscious multiracial movement, one whose legacy lasts to this day, especially in the ranks of PLP.
There would have been no Scottsboro campaign, no sharecropper organizing, no multiracial unionism, no massive eviction protests throughout the USA without the debates that had taken place in Comintern meetings on the other side of the world (Kelley; Naison). Moreover, where racism (“white chauvinism”) within the Party raised its ugly head, it was combated head-on, as in the so-called Yokinen trial of 1931 (Hudson).
One of the favorite canards of anticommunist historiography is the claim that the Comintern—often equated with a demonized construct designated as “Stalin”—never had at heart the interests of the workers of the world: that it sought only to defend the USSR and its ruling circles. The history of the struggle over the “Negro Question” in the United States shows quite the opposite.
In fact, whatever their nationalist limitations, when seen in retrospect, it was communists from around the world whose intervention helped communists in the U.S. reset their priorities. For this gesture of proletarian internationalism revolutionary antiracists remain indebted to this day.
Black workers key
The international communist PLP is fighting for the idea that liberal bosses and politicians are the main danger and that fascism is being expressed most sharply today in fights within ruling classes over how they will align themselves or respond to the reality of U.S. imperialism in decline.
We also fight for the idea that leadership of Black workers is uniquely key to the global victory of communism. Join the fight.

Further readings:
Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist.
Hudson, Hosea. The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Depression.
Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression.
Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936.
Zumoff, Jacob. The Communist International and U.S. Communism, 1919 – 1929.