Revolutionary integrationism
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Revolutionary Integrationism is an analysis, philosophy, and program for resolving the "black question"—the problem of the oppression of blacks, and their liberation—in the United States.


Origins

Revolutionary Integrationism has its origins in the fight against slavery by Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists before the Civil War, and in the "New Negro" movement in the 1900s–1910s around the ''Crisis'' journal's 1919 articles by NAACP field marshal Walter White and other of his writings,
Carrie Clifford Carrie Williams Clifford (September 1862 in Chillicothe, Ohio – November 10, 1934) was an author, clubwoman, and activist in the women's rights and civil rights movements in the United States. Biography Personal life Born in Chillicothe, ...
, Alfred Kreymborg, and especially, the black Communist poet
Claude McKay Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay OJ (September 15, 1890See Wayne F. Cooper, ''Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner In The Harlem Renaissance (New York, Schocken, 1987) p. 377 n. 19. As Cooper's authoritative biography explains, McKay's family predated ...
, Max Eastman's and
Crystal Eastman Crystal Catherine Eastman (June 25, 1881 – July 28, 1928) was an American lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist. She is best remembered as a leader in the fight for women's suffrage, as a co-founder and co-editor with ...
's ''Liberator'', as well as
A. Philip Randolph Asa Philip Randolph (April 15, 1889 â€“ May 16, 1979) was an American labor unionist and civil rights activist. In 1925, he organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American led labor union. In ...
's and
Chandler Owen Chandler Owen (April 5, 1889 – November 2, 1967) was an African-American writer, editor and early member of the Socialist Party of America. Born in North Carolina, he studied and worked in New York City, then moved to Chicago for much of his c ...
's ''Messenger.'' In the 1930s through 1960s, the ''RI'' doctrine was developed in the main by Trotskyists–
Max Shachtman Max Shachtman (; September 10, 1904 – November 4, 1972) was an American Marxist theorist. He went from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL–CIO President George Meany. Beginnings S ...
,
Oliver Cox Oliver Cromwell Cox (24 August 1901 – 4 September 1974) was a Trinidadian- American sociologist noted for his early Marxian viewpoint on fascism. Cox was born into a middle-class family in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago and emigrate ...
,
Daniel Guérin Daniel Guérin (; 19 May 1904, in Paris – 14 April 1988, in Suresnes) was a French libertarian-communist author, best known for his work '' Anarchism: From Theory to Practice'', as well as his collection ''No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of ...
, Richard S. Fraser, James Robertson, as well as by non-Trotskyists such as
James Baldwin James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American writer. He garnered acclaim across various media, including essays, novels, plays, and poems. His first novel, '' Go Tell It on the Mountain'', was published in 1953; de ...
. These activists argued that the struggle for equality by blacks in the United States was the main current in black history, and that equality could only be accomplished via a socialist revolution by the entire working class. They disagreed with the opinion of socialist thinkers like Leon Trotsky and C. L. R. James in the 1930s, and with
George Breitman George Breitman (February 28, 1916 – April 19, 1986) was an American communist political activist and newspaper editor. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and as a long-time editor of that organiza ...
and the majority of the
Socialist Workers Party (US) The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a communist party in the United States. Originally a group in the Communist Party USA that supported Leon Trotsky against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strik ...
in the late 1950s. Such thinkers argued that Black nationalism was a
transitional demand In Marxist theory, a transitional demand either is a partial realisation of a maximum demand after revolution or an agitational demand made by a socialist organisation with the aim of linking the current situation to progress towards their goal ...
toward socialism. They also disagreed with Joseph Stalin and his followers in the
Communist Party USA The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), is a communist party in the United States which was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revo ...
(CPUSA), who initiated this adaptation to black nationalism within the U.S. Marxist movement. Revolutionary integrationism disputes the assertion of these thinkers, and other leftists and liberals, that blacks in America potentially constitute a "nation", that blacks require separate organizations from whites, and that such organizations might constitute a separate or autonomous second "vanguard", which would cooperate, but not be integrated into, a "white" Marxist American vanguard party. Revolutionary Integrationists argue that equality rather than national liberation should be advocated by revolutionary socialists, that this equality can be accomplished through a class struggle of black and white workers and that such a revolution can be led by members of both races. It was most strongly opposed during the 1960s to the ideas of Malcolm X, the
Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxist-Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, Califo ...
and other Black Nationalist organizations.


Negating the notion of a "Black Nation"

A central part of this idea is the rejection of the possibility of African Americans forming a distinct nation in the United States. *The Southern "black belt" alleged basis for a black nation is a statistical-geographical fiction cobbled together by the Stalinists. *By the criteria of nationhood put forward by Stalin, U.S. blacks do not constitute a nation, because they do not possess either a separate language or culture. Especially, despite the assertions of black nationalists that "white America" constitutes an oppressor nation, the alleged black "nation" lacks a separate or autonomous geographic territory on which there is or potentially might be created a separate capitalist market economy, which is "oppressed" by some foreign imperialist power. *Black nationalism is not the essential thrust of U.S. black history: it is instead, like the Zionist movement in Europe among Jews, the product of the desires of a petit bourgeois stratum of blacks to elevating themselves politically and economically, to become capitalist politicians and capitalists, at the expense of their working class followers, by gaining their votes for political careers within the Democratic Party, and/or by exploiting them as a superoppressed labor force (much like, as in Chinatown, Chinese sweatshop owners exploit their own). *Besides these cynical self-aggrandizing motives of the black petit bourgeoisie, the appeal and attraction of black nationalism only gains ground among black working class and poor people during times of desperation about the basic struggle for equality. For example, Martin Delany's black nationalist novel ''Blake: or the Huts of America'' was written before the Civil War, when, ironically, Delany felt things were hopeless in the U.S. In the 1960s, black nationalism arose with the McCarthyite repression of trade union militants in the CIO, the CIO's fusion with the AFL and their turning firmly toward the Democratic Party, the growth in the power of anti-communist trade union bureaucrats, and their resort to racism to maintain a loyal following. The early industrial organizing days of the CIO, and the organizing efforts in Harlem and other places by the Communist Party, were radical, integrationist, inspiring hope among black workers that racial barriers would be overcome: thus the black nationalism of the Marcus Garvey movement and the Black Muslims was on the wane in the mid-1930s.


Capitalism and racism

The Revolutionary Integrationists argue that: *White racism against blacks is not the product of some inner "imperialism", "urge for domination", "male sexual competition", "innate inability to accept the Other", etc. Such explanations are all products of liberal idealism, not historical materialism. *Racism arises with the rise of capitalism: it is not expressed in the ancient world, nor in much of the feudal era. It gains ground as the feudal mode of production begins to deteriorate. The Jews, losing their status as a feudal caste (See
Abraham Leon Abraham (Abram) Leon (1918–1944) (born Abraham Wejnstok), was a Belgian Jewish Trotskyist party leader and theorist, who was murdered in 1944 by the Nazis at the Auschwitz death camp. Biography Leon was born in Warsaw in 1918. His parents, adher ...
, ''The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation'') become the scapegoats of choice for the developing capitalist class. Against the Irish, as Cox pointed out, British racism becomes a justification for the exploitation of the British working class. Against Africans, it becomes a rationale for their capture and enslavement in the U.S., and a means by which they are isolated from white farmers and workers, by the capitalist class. Today it is used by the capitalist class to divide the working class against itself, to privilege one sector of the working class, the whites (or to make them think they are privileged when day by day their own oppression actually grows), against the others (blacks, Latinos, Arabs, etc.), to prevent the working class from uniting. It also rationalizes the superexploitation of workers of color, and the forcing of them into the category of a permanent
reserve army of labor Reserve army of labour is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. It refers to the unemployed and underemployed in capitalist society. It is synonymous with "industrial reserve army" or "relative surplus population", except that t ...
of the chronically unemployed. *The history of the southern United States is not a history of a "southern ruling class" maintaining
Jim Crow The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Other areas of the United States were affected by formal and informal policies of segregation as well, but many states outside the Sout ...
out of motives purely or mainly of racism. Since the Civil War broke the old Southern planter class, the South and its politicians, such as
Strom Thurmond James Strom Thurmond Sr. (December 5, 1902June 26, 2003) was an American politician who represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 to 2003. Prior to his 48 years as a senator, he served as the 103rd governor of South Caro ...
, etc. have been controlled by Northern corporations.
U.S. Steel United States Steel Corporation, more commonly known as U.S. Steel, is an American integrated steel producer headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with production operations primarily in the United States of America and in severa ...
, for example, with offices in the North, provided funding for demagogues like Thurmond, who, in 1948, ran on a platform of segregation and fierce resistance to anti-lynch laws in Congress. *In the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 60s, it is not the case that the Northern-based ruling capitalist class of the South as well as North switched sides and became firm liberal champions of racial integration. Instead, the U.S. capitalist class, particularly its multinational corporate wing which at the time supported the Democratic Party, realized that they could stave off a social revolution in the South by presenting themselves as the non-violent liberal movement's benefactors. "Sending federal troops to Mississippi", however, was not benevolent—the FBI and the federal troops were as much or more concerned with crushing revolutionary militancy among blacks as they were with stopping the Klan. The FBI, for example, gave details in advance of the Freedom Riders' plans to local police officials, whom the FBI knew would reveal such details to the Klan.


Integration and the transitional program

Radical integrationism argues that it is impossible, contra the assertions of liberal assimilationists such as Gunnar Myrdal and the early Martin Luther King Jr., for blacks to be integrated into a ''capitalist'' U.S. society. Integration, it is argued, can only be achieved in a socialist society. Revolutionary integrationism must not be confused with ''cultural'' assimilation, either. Culturally, as Randolph Bourne and James Baldwin argued, the culture of America itself must change, for genuine ''integration'' to take place. Thus leading black workers must be educated to see the fight for socialism as integral to their own struggle for emancipation, and fully integrated into the rank and file and leadership of a future U.S. Bolshevik-Leninist party. In turn, this process of racial integration must be fully integrated into the transitional demands made by socialists. Such demands as worker control of hiring, organize the South, organize unions of the unemployed, organize the unorganized, full employment through public works, armed self-defense of black neighborhoods ("block patrols") must be fully taken up by Leninists.


Referring works


1980s-90s

* Sharon Smith,
Race, class, and 'whiteness theory'
''International Socialist Review'' Issue 46, March–April 2006, adapted from her recent work, ''Subterranean Fire: A * History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States'' (Haymarket Books, April 2006). See also her
Mistaken identity: Or can identity politics liberate the oppressed?
''International Socialism'' 62, March 1994. * Mike Davis, ''Prisoners of the American Dream'' Verso, 1986, pp. 309–10 * Tom Boot, "Revolutionary Integrationism: Yesterday and Today" (1982), in ''Revolutionary Integration: A Marxist Analysis of African American Liberation'' Red Letter Press 2004''.''


1960s

* James Baldwin, ''Nobody Knows My Name'' Vintage Books, 1960 * James Robertson, Shirley Stoute, 1963 SWP document,

* Spartacist,

1967 *

by the Spartacist League, February 17, 2006 *

, by the International Bolshevik Tendency


Late 1950s-early 1960s: writings and speeches of Richard S. Fraser







* ttp://www.bolshevik.org/history/Fraser/Fraser04.html Resolution on the Negro Question* Dialectics of Black Liberation (1963), in 'Revolutionary Integration: A Marxist Analysis of African American Liberation' Red Letter Press 2004.
On "Color Caste": Letter to James Robertson


1940s-early 50s

* Daniel Guérin, ''Negroes on the March'' Grange or Weissman, 1956 * Oliver C. Cox, ''Caste, Class and Race'' Doubleday, 1948 * Abraham Leon
The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation
originally published 1946.


Early 1930s

* Max Shachtman, ''Race and Revolution'', Verso 2003 originally published as an internal SWP document entitled "Communism and the Negro Question" 1932–33. * Bryan D. Palmer, "Race and Revolution"

€”a review of Shachtman's ''Race and Revolution'' and of
Barbara Foley Barbara Foley (born March 29, 1948) is an American writer and the Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She focuses her research and teaching on U.S. literary radicalism, African American literature, and Marxist critic ...
, ''Spectres of 1919: Class & Nation in the Making of the New Negro'' (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003)--many historical details here.


Other

* Randolph Bourne,
Transnational America
*
Sidney Finkelstein Sidney Finkelstein (1909–1974) was a writer of music who specialized in jazz and was best known for his books ''Jazz, A People's Music'' (1948) and ''How Music Expresses Ideas'' (1952). Along with Charles Seeger (father of Pete Seeger), Finke ...
, ''Art and Society'' (1947) * O'Reilly, Kenneth, ''Racial Matters": The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 1960 - 1972'' (1989)


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Revolutionary Integrationism African-American leftism Politics and race in the United States Marxism