Race and Revolution

Two texts comprise this slender volume: Phelps's introduction occupies the first third, while the remainder consists of an""advance draft"" of Shachtman's previously unpublished text of revolutionary socialism, Communism and the Negro, written in 1933. Phelps (Young Sidney Hook) leads the reader through Shachtman's""political gymnastics"" amid the byzantine divisions of the Communist and Socialist movements in the '30s and '40s. He traces the progress of this pamphlet, from an attempt to clarify matters for Trotsky (who""wondered aloud whether 'the Negroes do not also...speak their own language'"" and""speculated that perhaps they kept their language a secret to avoid being lynched"") to its limited circulation via""painstakingly retyped onion-skinned copies among the socialist far left during the Great Depression."" Without ignoring the""many fault lines and elisions"" of the most famous American Trotskyist, Phelps alerts the reader to Shachtman's foresight in addressing issues of race, class, identity and nationality. The first half of Shachtman's pamphlet offers a Marxist historical account of blacks in the U. S.; the second half addresses what was called""The Negro Question""--whether African-Americans constituted an""oppressed national minority, with a common language, culture and territory"" and thus warranted the right of self-determination. Shachtman argues that they did not form a separation, and that the Stalinist position was""radically wrong and guaranteed to produce the most harmful results in the fight to liberate not only the American Negro but the whole American working class."" Although an annotated edition might have made Shachtman's historical section more useful to the general reader, the book has documentary value for historians of the American left; scholars of other disciplines will appreciate the index.