The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-05-29
SLOGAN of Self-DeterminatlOn
by Grobber

movement" One cannot speak seriously OF
Negro national movement until such time as
we have seriously tackled the job of organizing
the Negro rural proletarat and poor farmers.
Furthermore this should be particularly easy
in the South In no other section of the country
or the connections between the farmers and the
industrial proletariat so strong. At the same
time in seine industries, such as tobacco, the
farmers and the workers in the shops feel the
oppression of the same boss. The same tobacco
trust that sets the price of the tobacco raised
on the farms, employs the workers in the big
tobacco plants. These industries must be our
central points of attack in work among the
Negro farmers of the South The whole sys-
tenn of peonage and semi-slavery on the farms,
of ruinous prices for the farmers products,
must be linked up with the demand for the
right of self-determination for the Negro ma
ton in the Black Belt. The T.U.U.L. and the
AN.L.C. should consider as one of their most
pressing tasks in their work in the South the
sending of competent organizers into the rural
districts.
Winning Southern White Workers.
The third problem is that of winning the
white workers of the South to the support of
the slogan of self-determination. In one of his
articles on the national question, Lenin spoke
of the p-fold duty of Communists in this
"a
of self-determination for an oppressed national
minority among the workers of the oppressOr
nation and the propaganda of the duty of inter-
nationalism, among the workers of the OPP
pressed nation. The first part of this quota
ton from Lenin (the Quotation" is far from
exact as ! do not have the article referred to
at hand and quote from memory applies
exactly to our third problem. am of the
opinion that in our work in the South we have
somewhat underestimated and in consequence
neglected this aspect of our work.
There can be no question that the slogan of
self-determination will meet with the active
resistance of large sections of the white work
ers in the South. Despite all assertions to the
contrary it is fact that the slogan of full
social, economic and political equality for the
Negroes is resented by considerable sections
of the white working class in the South. A
tendency to retreat before the chauvinism of
the southern workers, not in the sense of modi-
fcation our program, but in the sense of
capitula0Dn before the greater difficulties
often encountered in the organization of white
workers, was noted by the resolution of the
Central Committee Plenum on the Economic
and Political Situation in the South. The reso-
luton correctly characterized this tendency as
an expression of the right danger. We must,
therefore, put at once more emphasis on the
systematic carrying on of propaganda for the
right of the Negroes to self-determination,
among the white workers.
At the same time must carry out in prac-
tice the second half of the quotation from
Lenin-we must guard against any tendency
to convert the slogan of self-determination into
it's opposite: counter-revolutonar slogan
for the further segregation Of the Negroes in
some kind of a Jim Crow state.
These constitute our principal problems in
the practical application of the slogan of self
determination for the Negroe nation in the
South.