revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

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struggle for clarity (direction) in the black liberation movement in
the
60's and 70's, for the same political trends were debated again .
The Communist International
(Comintern) leaders, impressed by Marcus
Garvey's ability to organize millions of Africans and the important role
oppressed nationalities played in
making the Russian Revolution success
ful, felt that a socialist revolution in America had to deal with black
nationalism and that the organization of blacks had to be given top
priority .
The suggestion was strongly reinforced since Lenin's analysis of the
situation concluded that imperialism was the major reason for the persistence
of capitalism . He developed a perspective which elevated the colonial
struggle for national self-determination to a level of almost equal importance
to that of the class struggle of the European proletariat .
19
Lenin observed in 1916, in his "New Data on the Laws Governing the
Development of Capitalism in Agriculture" and his analysis in 1917 in
"Statistics
and Sociology" that
In the United States, the Negro (and also the Mulattoes and
Indians) account for only 11 .1 percent . They should be classed
as an oppressed nation, for the equality won in the Civil War
of 1861-1865 and guaranteed by the Constitution of republic
was in many respects increasingly curtailed in the chief Negro
areas (the South) in connection with the transition from the
progressive, pre-monopoly capitalism (imperialism) of the new
era, which in America was especially sharply etched out by the
Spanish-American imperialist war of 1898 (i .e . . . . . a war
between two robbers over the division of the booty) . . . .
A Commission of the Communist International was organized to draft a
report on the Negro Question at
the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in
19Mark Naison, Marxism and Black Radicalism in America : The Communist
Party Experience, pamphlet Somerville, Mass . : New England Free Press,
reprint from Radical America, May-June, 1971) .
20V . I . Lenin, "Statistics and Sociology," Collected Works, Vol . 23,
August, 1916-March, 1917 (Moscow : Progress PublisFeers,I9'T4),pp . 275-276 .