The Marxist roots of America’s racial unrest

By Michael Hancock | Commentary, Michael Hancock’s Undercurrent

How the Communist International weaponized race — and why its echoes still divide us today.

In October 1928, the Communist International — the Moscow-based command center for global revolution — issued an extraordinary directive. Buried in the archives of the Political Secretariat of the Communist International, the document was titled “Resolution on the Negro Question in the United States.” It did not read like a humanitarian plea to end racial injustice. It read like a military plan.

It declared:

“The Negro working class has reached a stage of development which enables it, if properly organized and well led, to fulfill successfully its double historical mission: to play a considerable role in the class struggle against American imperialism… and to lead the movement of the oppressed masses of the Negro population.”

That single paragraph exposed the revolutionary calculus. The Communists had no intention of healing America’s racial wound. They meant to weaponize it — to turn suffering into strategy, moral pain into political power, and the pursuit of justice into a tool of division.

The Blueprint for Division

By 1928, Lenin’s heirs understood that a frontal assault on the United States would fail. America was too vast, too resilient, and too prosperous. But its moral contradictions — particularly between its founding ideals and its racial realities — could be exploited. The Communist International saw in America’s Black population both a symbol of oppression and a strategic lever against “imperialist power.”

The resolution continued:

“The various forms of oppression of the Negro masses… provide the necessary conditions for a national revolutionary movement among the Negroes.”

That’s the language of insurgency, not equality. The plan was to transform racial grievance into revolutionary consciousness. Moscow urged the American Communist Party to “mobilize and rally the broad masses of the white workers for active participation in this struggle.” The objective wasn’t reconciliation; it was polarization — to pit class against class and race against race, until the structure of the republic itself cracked.

Two years later, in 1930, the Communist International doubled down with a second resolution that escalated the stakes. It declared that the Black population in the South constituted an “oppressed nation” and demanded “the right of self-determination… in the Black Belt.”

That phrase — self-determination in the Black Belt — meant something radical: the right to secede. The document spelled it out plainly:

“The right of self-determination… means complete and unlimited right of the Negro majority to exercise governmental authority… and to decide upon the relations between their territory and other nations, particularly the United States.”

It went further still:

“No armed forces of American imperialism should remain on the territory of the Black Belt.”

Read that again. In 1930, the Comintern called for the removal of U.S. military forces from parts of the South — effectively carving out a Soviet-aligned enclave within American borders. This was not civil rights advocacy. It was geopolitical subversion dressed in the language of liberation.

The Long Shadow

That strategy — to use moral struggle as revolutionary fuel — has echoed across a century of ideological evolution. The Marxist Left learned long ago that class warfare alone could not fracture America. But class warfare combined with race, grievance, and guilt? That could corrode the moral fabric from within.

And it did.

Today’s cultural polarization — racial essentialism, identity politics, and the endless obsession with group grievance — all trace philosophical lineage to the same dialectical framework laid down in Moscow in 1928. The logic was simple but devastating: divide society into victims and oppressors, redefine justice as retribution, and turn perpetual resentment into political energy.

Under new names — equity, liberation, systemic deconstruction — the same machinery hums quietly behind our modern movements. The slogans have changed; the spirit has not.

The Communist International once urged its agents to sharpen propaganda “primarily against the preachers and churchmen,” knowing that faith and family were the ligaments holding the American conscience together. Today’s secular ideologies do the same — replacing moral conviction with moral accusation, dissolving faith-based unity in favor of ideological orthodoxy.

The result is what we see now: citizens turning on one another, dialogue replaced with denunciation, and shared national identity giving way to fragmented tribes of perpetual grievance. The Comintern may be gone, but the fault lines it cultivated still run through our culture.

Exploitation Disguised as Liberation

The great irony is that the very movement claiming to fight oppression did so by deepening it. The Soviet program didn’t free Black Americans; it used them. Their pain became propaganda, their dignity became leverage, their struggle became theater for global revolution.

What began as a cynical strategy in 1928 metastasized into a permanent cultural posture — a way of seeing the world that rewards outrage and punishes unity. Today’s activists, academics, and ideologues often believe they are advancing justice. In truth, many are reciting lines written in Moscow a century ago, unaware that their intellectual inheritance was designed to destroy the very nation that secured their freedom to dissent.

When the Comintern wrote that “the struggle for equal rights must be linked up with the economic demands of the Negro masses,” it didn’t mean equality under the law. It meant perpetual struggle — a revolution without end, where equality is always promised but never delivered, because its purpose isn’t resolution; it’s power.

Restoring the Republic

America’s racial history is complex, tragic, and real. But the solution has never been revolution. It has always been redemption — through truth, through reconciliation, through a shared moral and civic renewal that transcends ideology.

The Communists understood that moral chaos is the prerequisite for political conquest. And so they set out to create it. That’s why understanding their documents isn’t an exercise in Cold War nostalgia — it’s a warning. Because we are living through their harvest.

If the 1928 resolution was titled “The Negro Question,” then our generation faces its inverse: The American Question. Can a nation so deliberately divided by lies remember what it means to be whole?

We will not rebuild unity by pretending race doesn’t matter, nor by surrendering to those who weaponize it. We rebuild by reclaiming truth — that human dignity is not a tool of revolution but a reflection of divine design; that equality under law is not a Marxist dream but an American promise; and that freedom is sustained not by grievance but by gratitude.

The seeds of division were planted long ago. It’s time we stopped watering them.

Hancock also publishes on Substack. You can check out more of his work here.

Michael A. Hancock is a retired high-tech executive, visionary, musician, and composer, exploring diverse interests—from religion and arts to politics and philosophy—offering thoughtful insights on the intersections of culture, innovation, and society.

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.