Page 227 - Contribution To Phenomenology

220 STANFORD M LYMAN & LESTER EMBREE

(1828-1906), Marx's correspondent in America, organized an all-German
group. He succeeded in gaining Marx's support for expelling from the
Internationale the cell headed by Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927), who had
run for the President of the United States on the Equal Rights Party
ticket with Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the ex-slave, as her vice
presidential running mate. Ironically, the Communist Party ended up
having its own Black cell, which, on the one hand, seemed to reinforce
racial segregation, and, on the other, responded to the linguistic and
national divisions of 1920s America. As far as I can tell, the Communists
were never fully able to resolve the contradictions contained in this issue.
The thrust of their argument was that Blacks were to conceive of
themselves as members of a multi-ethnic proletarian class and that they
ought to deemphasize race issues as they drew together with Whites to
engage in a common class struggle.
Then there was an ambivalence about assimilation? Yes. Ironically,
Robert E. Park, who was not a Marxist and was opposed to Marxism,
asserted in 1939 that the onset of complete assimilation, which would
occur as the culmination of the irreversible and progressive cycle of race
relations that he had postulated, would herald the beginning of the class
struggle. That is, he thought of assimilation as solving a problem that had
originally been recognized by Engels in his famous letter to Sorge in
1893.' Sorge had written Engels, asking "Why is there no socialist
movement in America?" Engels replied by caUing attention to the fact
that work, in America, is organized on the basis of ethnicity and race,
into work groups composed of Irish, Germans, Czechs, Poles, Italians,
Scandinavians, etc. Then he adds, "And the Negroes." He continues,
arguing that so long as work is organized in this way there will never be
a class-based proletariat. Park's race relations cycle, with its promissory
note that assimilation would be its final stage, solves Engels's problem by
saying, in effect, that separate ethnic, social, and economic organization
is temporary. Ultimately, assimilation would result in a society composed
of ethnoracially integrated classes "and the class struggle will begin"!
My thought, in the light of recent events, is that Engels was not very
insightful about European societies and failed to recognte that in England,
for example, some businesses were Welsh, some were Scottish, and so on,
so that he had a somewhat over-idealized notion of a homogeneous

' Reprinted in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy,
edited by Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 458.