Comintern adopted Black self-determination only in 1928 amid immigrant-worker politics

Evidence

To the degree that the early movement became aware of Black nationalism, that, too, would be unacceptable. Black nationalism was intolerable to a movement so constantly close to foundering on national and ethnic divisions. This concern was made manifest by the frequency with which “Back to Africa” ideologies were described as “Zionist” and compared to “Back to Palestine” movements among the Jews—a substantial and influential minority in the early socialist movement. The party consistently opposed Black nationalism until its own variant: self-determination, emerged in the Soviet Union in 1928. The UNIA, as the strongest organization among Blacks with a nationalist ideology, was characterized as a bourgeois reactionary group and made a focus of the attack on Black nationalism. American racism did not justify the program of Black nationalism. European immigrants with other than Anglo-Saxon origins were also targets of racist abuses and discriminations. Racism, then, was merely an element of ruling-class ideology and white “chauvinism” its political position. Thus the social context of Blacks was adapted by ideologues in the socialist movement to the social experience of European immigrant workers. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1028