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attitude to Negroes N.B.: Socialists and Negroes |
The Socialist Party and the Ne- groes in America: pp. 382-83: The Industrial Workers of the World[2] is for the Negroes. The attitude of the Socialist Party is “not quite unanimous”. A single manifesto on behalf of the Negroes in 1901. Only one!!! |
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Ibidem, p. 592: in the state of Missis- sippi, the Socialists organise the Negroes “in separate local groups”!! |
Negroes and Socialists!! |
[1] Lenin quotes from a notice of an article by M. W. Ovington, “The Status of the Negroe in the United States”, which appeared in Die Neue Zeit, 1914, Vol. 1, pp. 382-83, and from a notice in the same magazine on p. 592 of an article by I. M. Raymond, “A. Southern Socialist on the Negro Question”.
[2] Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.)—a trade union organisation of workers in the United States founded in 1905. It embraced mainly unskilled or semi-skilled workers in various industries. Daniel De Leon, Eugene Debs and Bill Haywood, prominent figures in the American labour movement, had an active part in its formation. The I.W.W. organised a number of successful mass strikes and anti-war demonstrations during the First World War. Some of its leaders, notably Bill Haywood, welcomed the Great October Socialist Revolution and joined the U.S. Communist Party. At the same time, I.W.W. activities had a strong anarcho-syndicalist tinge: it rejected proletarian political struggle, denied the leading role of the revolutionary workers’ party and the need for proletarian dictatorship. Owing to the opportunist policy of its leadership, the I.W.W. degenerated into a sectarian organisation and rapidly lost influence in the labour movement.
The Socialist Party of America was formed in July 1901 at a congress in Indianapolis by a merger of break-away groups of the Socialist Labour Party and the Social-Democratic Party, one of whose founders, Eugene Debs, had an active part in organising the Socialist Party. In the First World War three trends developed in the Socialist Party: the social-chauvinists, who supported the government’s imperialist policy; the Centrists, who opposed the imperialist war only in words; and the revolutionary minority, who took an internationalist stand and waged a struggle against the war.
The Socialist Party Left wing headed by Charles E. Ruthenberg, William Z. Foster, Bill Haywood and others, and supported by the Party’s proletarian elements, fought the opportunist leadership and campaigned for independent working-class political action and for industrial trade unions based on the principles of the class struggle. The Socialist Party split in 1919; the Left wing withdrew from the party and became the initiator and main nucleus of the Communist Party of the U.S.A.
The Socialist Party is now a small sectarian organisation.
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