ABSTRACT
Comrade Ivon Jones, Comrade Katayama says that the Negro question has been repeatedly
brought forward and discussed in Comintern circles,2 and nothing came of it. Now we have the proposal for a Negro Congress in Moscow. We should ask ourselves ‘Why has nothing come of it?’. I think it is because we approach the question from the wrong side, we approach it as a race question. We propose a Negro race Congress in Moscow. You say, ‘No, a Congress of negro communists’. Nevertheless, it is a race congress. Negro militants drawn from various parts of the earth, Communists drawn from various parts of the earth because they are Negroes. Now, why has nothing come of this proposal? Because the Negro race question is not a revolutionary factor. No race questions can be a revolutionary factor. After the revolution, no doubt, when the world has settled down to an International Soviet Republic, we shall have our hands full of such work, sending ‘missionaries’ out to the backward peoples and cleaning up the mess made by capitalism, or continuing on the plane of humanity the revolutionary role of capitalism. But now, before the revolution, what vitality has this question of the negro race as such for the attack on capital. Very little. It is true that the Negroes are mentioned in the thesis on Colonial and National questions. But we have many opportunities of intervening and demonstrating for the Comintern as a universal human champion such as we tried to do in our draft appeal on the South African revolt. In this way we can intervene in the Negro question. But that appeal was never sent out.
