The Comintern and the Negro Question: The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 1930-1934

The work is intended to cover the Comintern activity in Africa in 1930-1934. In that time, in July 1930, the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) was established. The organization was a part of the transnational apparatus of the Communist International or Comintern and aimed to fight for the rights of the black workers of the world (particularly the US and Africa). The purpose of the work is an analysis of the basic principles of the ITUCNW's work and determining the specificity of experience the Comintern activities in African countries. Source analysis shows that ITUCNW was an international organization that brings together young politicians and activists around the world. These people saw the revolutionary potential of the black workers and actively wrote about “Negro Question”. The Comintern (at least in the case of ITUCNW) was able to adapt itself to the African specifics and was the one political actor in the word that tried to unite this new popular political wave of “Negro Question”. The studying of the Comintern activity, especially in the case of African question, demands to take into account the fact that the international organizations and internationalism were extremely popular in the interwar years. The Comintern should be considered not in isolation, but in a view of the fact that it was a transnational socialist political organization. In that case it competed with the same Western liberal and social-democrat organizations. Studying the Comintern from that side, it becomes clear that it offered an alternative way of organizing transnational cooperation.