Comintern policy on Black self-determination was political opportunism seeking theoretical cover

Evidence

This extraordinary passage is perhaps characteristic of Stalin’s theoretical contributions to Marxist thought and to world knowledge. First, it too is ahistoric, since no contemporary nation has emerged in this way; second, it is abstract and vague, utilizing such phrases as “psychological constitution”; third, it is tautological: community manifests itself as community; and finally, it is not Marxian, tending as it does toward an evolutionary paradigm as opposed to that of historical materialism. Its one apposite feature was that it was in keeping with the ideological and programmatic opportunism that characterized Stalin’s immediate predecessor. The policy implications of this passage fit quite well into the rationalizations found in “Left-Wing” Communism. This is, perhaps, another sort of proof that the policy was a gloss on the history of Black movements and not the independent product of the Soviet Union’s political elite. Like formulations on other national liberation struggles one discovers in Comintern declarations, it was political opportunism searching for theoretical justifications. It thus represented the critical importance to the Soviet Party of forming alliances with movements that were emerging from theoretically “precapitalist” societies. Given historical necessity, Marxist-Leninism compromised itself theoretically with nationalism, and as such institutionalized the force that had brought the Second International to its submission. It might be said in the most simple-minded reading of the dialectic, that the Third International was a synthesis of the thesis (socialism) and anti-thesis (national chauvinism) of the Second. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1066

Categorization

• XREF: Continues the book’s argument about how Soviet Marxism’s Black Belt Thesis distorted Black radical history.