Communist International Quotes
Complete right of self-determination must include the right to governmental separation.... The Communist Party must stand ... for the establishment of a Negro republic in the Black Belt.
Comintern was generally supportive of Black enfranchisement; but they were unrealistic, for they viewed Blacks as an oppressed “nation” within the United States. Blacks, however, weren’t looking for a distinct nationhood, but just to be fully accepted into the already existing nation.
Communist International, [Comintern], Sixth Comintern Congress, 1928, Quoted in Howe, The American Communist Party: A Critical History, 1957
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Ironically Fort-Whiteman was arrested in Moscow in one of Stalin’s massive purges and sent to a Soviet Gulag where he died of starvation. He was one of several Americans who were Stalinist victims. Ironically, he was right about Blacks and revolutionary change, but whereas he thought the “revolution” would be a socialist and communist one, the “Civil Rights Revolution” was a legal, cultural and intellectual one. However, statements like this were taken advantage of by white racists who saw in every attempt to right the wrong of racial discrimination, a communist revolution in the making.
Orthodox communist thinking assumed that the Blacks would “fall into the communist camp,” because of the legal support for racism and discrimination of the majority of America. While a few did, as Allen warned most would not as much of the communist doctrine was antithetical to Black cultural values. Religion is probably the best example. Allen was prescient.
When the first Southern States seceded, each appointed a whose job it was to persuade the other Southern States to also secede. In this case Hale was marketing secession to Kentucky which with Maryland were the only two Southern States to reject what they regarded as treason and rebellion. The importance of the quotation however is in his argument which was all based on enmity to racial equality and abolition. Later Southern apologists would argue that the Civil War was fought, not about slavery and racism butt about different philosophies of government. See {623715} .
Ironically, events later supported the truth of his statement. He was wrong about the parties however. It was the South who denied liberty to a very large part of their population, and it was the “unconquerable will” of the enslaved Negroes that eventually prevailed. It is hard for most of us in modern times to understand why Davis and other Southerners saw themselves as having freedom curtailed over an economic factor—chattel slavery—and not see that the institution of slavery was a total denial of freedom to a huge part of their population. See England’s Dr. Johnson XXXXX for a classic contemporary statement of this contradiction.
While this document may seem a little pompous today, this was a monumental event for American Blacks and many others in the world. Garvey was as well known at the time as Martin Luther King Jr. and f were later.
Liberia was founded by freed American slaves.
Johnson had a white mistress who accompanied him visibly at a time when Blacks were lynched for dating white women in many parts of the country. He was criticized heavily by whites for going with a white woman and many Blacks for the same.
Commenting on political parties in Cuba:
Comintern was upset by the American Socialist Party because the party had rejected the 21 Conditions for Affiliation and withdrew their intent to join the Third International. To Comintern, the Socialist Party was a party of “bourgeois socialism.”
Parliamentary representatives of the Communist Party shall not introduce or support reform measures.
The Party line at the time was that any reform of the democratic institutions of America would simply delay the complete revolution. Let things get worse and then act; don’t try and fix them.
The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International (1919–1943), was an international organization that advocated world communism. It was controlled by the Soviet Union. The Comintern resolved at its Second Congress to "struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state". The Comintern was preceded by the 1916 dissolution of the Second International.
