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Communist Theory and the American Negro Question

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

Political Science has long been interested in opinion. It is supposed that expressed views are indicators of behavior or potential behavior and are therefore worthy of attention as aids in understanding the present and predicting the future. While there can be little doubt that people's feelings guide their actions, we can sometimes be deceived because manifest opinion may be merely an epiphenomenon derivative from other factors, rather than vice versa. This is a problem most evident when trying to relate the true designs of an ideological movement's leadership to its pronouncements.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1967

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References

1 This article is largely derived from research done for an unpublished doctoral dissertation at Yale University, 1966.Google Scholar

2 For general studies of communism and the Negro problem see, e.g., Record, Wilson, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill N. C.., 1951);Google ScholarRecord, Race and Redicalism (Ithaca N.Y., 1964);Google ScholarDraper, Theodore, The Roots of American Communism (NewYork, 1957);Google ScholarDraper, , American Communism and Soviet Russsia (NewYork, 1960);Google ScholarNolan, William, Communism Versus the Negro (Chicago, 1951);Google ScholarShannon, David A., The Decline of American Communism (NewYork, 1959);Google Scholar and Mouledous, Joseph C., “From Browderism to Peaceful Co-Existence: An Analysis of Developments in the Communist Position on the American Negro”, Phylon, XXV, no.1, (Spring 1964), 7990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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21 Marx wrote in his introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), “No form of society can perish before all forces of production which it is large enough to contain are developed, and at no time will outworn conditions be replaced by new higher conditions as long as the material necessities of their existence have not been hatched in the womb of the old society itself”.Google Scholar

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36 Ibid., p. 12. Moreover, the CPUSA called the Chinese expectations of revolution in the USA fanciful: “This is a totally fanciful picture. Neither now nor at any other time since World War II could it be said with the remotest justification that within the United States there existed a volcano ready to erupt into outright revolution against U.S. imperialism at any moment”. Ibid., p. 14.

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