Revolutionary integrationism
Encyclopedia
Revolutionary Integrationism is an analysis, philosophy, and program for resolving the "black question"--the problem of the superoppression of blacks, and their liberation—in the United States.
and other abolitionists before the Civil War, and in the "New Negro" movement in the 1900-10s around the Crisis journal's 1919 articles by NAACP field marshal Walter White
and other of his writings, Carrie Clifford, Alfred Kreymborg
, and especially, the black Communist poet Claude McKay
, Max Eastman
's and Crystal Eastman
's Liberator, as well as A. Philip Randolph
's and Chandler Owen
's Messenger. In the 1930s through 1960s, the RI doctrine was developed in the main by Trotskyists--Max Shachtman
, Oliver Cox
, Daniel Guérin
, Richard S. Fraser
, James Robertson
, Mike Davis
as well as by non-Trotskyists such as James Baldwin
. 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
and the majority of the Socialist Workers Party (US) in the late 1950s. Such thinkers argued that Black nationalism
was a transitional demand
toward socialism. They also disagreed with Stalin and his followers in the 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
and other Black Nationalist organizations.
and the early Martin Luther King, 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.
Origins
Revolutionary Integrationism has its origins in the fight against slavery by Frederick DouglassFrederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing...
and other abolitionists before the Civil War, and in the "New Negro" movement in the 1900-10s around the Crisis journal's 1919 articles by NAACP field marshal Walter White
Walter Francis White
Walter Francis White was a civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist...
and other of his writings, Carrie Clifford, Alfred Kreymborg
Alfred Kreymborg
Alfred Francis Kreymborg was an American poet, novelist, playwright, literary editor and anthologist.-Early life and associations:...
, and especially, the black Communist poet Claude McKay
Claude McKay
Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem , a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo , and Banana Bottom...
, Max Eastman
Max Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...
's and Crystal Eastman
Crystal Eastman
Crystal Catherine Eastman was a lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist. She is best remembered as a leader in the fight for women's right to vote, as a co-editor of the radical arts and politics magazine The Liberator, and as a co-founder of the Women's International League...
's Liberator, as well as A. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph
Asa Philip Randolph was a leader in the African American civil-rights movement and the American labor movement. He organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Negro labor union. In the early civil-rights movement, Randolph led the March on Washington...
's and Chandler Owen
Chandler Owen
Chandler Owen 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, then moved to Chicago for much of his career. He established his own public relations company in Chicago and wrote speeches for...
's Messenger. In the 1930s through 1960s, the RI doctrine was developed in the main by Trotskyists--Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He evolved from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL-CIO President George Meany.-Beginnings:...
, Oliver Cox
Oliver Cox
Oliver Cromwell Cox was a Trinidadian-American sociologist noted for his early Marxist viewpoint on Fascism. He is a member of the Chicago school of sociology-Education:...
, Daniel Guérin
Daniel Guérin
Daniel Guérin was a French libertarian and author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the...
, Richard S. Fraser
Richard S. Fraser
Richard S. Fraser was an American Trotskyist and the principal theoretician of the doctrine of revolutionary integrationism in the 1950s within the Socialist Workers Party , against George Breitman's advocacy of support for black nationalism. He joined the Trotskyist movement in 1934, and was a...
, James Robertson
James Robertson (Trotskyist)
James Robertson is National Chairman of the Spartacist League of the United States, which is a section of the International Communist League , an international organization of small Trotskyist groups...
, Mike Davis
Mike Davis (scholar)
Mike Davis is an American Marxist social commentator, urban theorist, historian, and political activist. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California.-Life:...
as well as by non-Trotskyists such as James Baldwin
James Baldwin (writer)
James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.Baldwin's essays, for instance "Notes of a Native Son" , explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th century America,...
. 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
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
and C.L.R. James in the 1930s, and with George Breitman
George Breitman
George Breitman was an American communist political activist and newspaper editor. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and as a long-time editor of that organization's weekly paper, The Militant. Breitman also supervised and edited several important...
and the majority of the Socialist Workers Party (US) in the late 1950s. Such thinkers argued that Black nationalism
Black nationalism
Black nationalism advocates a racial definition of indigenous national identity, as opposed to multiculturalism. There are different indigenous nationalist philosophies but the principles of all African nationalist ideologies are unity, and self-determination or independence from European society...
was a transitional demand
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 of a socialist society.-Development of transitional...
toward socialism. They also disagreed with Stalin and his followers in the 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
Malcolm X
Malcolm X , born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz , was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its...
, the Black Panther Party
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....
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 himself, in an article approved by no less than Lenin himself, 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 DelanyMartin DelanyMartin Robinson Delany was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician, and writer, arguably the first proponent of American black nationalism. He was one of the first three blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School. He became the first African-American field officer in the United...
'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 GarveyMarcus GarveyMarcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League...
movement and the Black MuslimsNation of IslamThe Nation of Islam is a mainly African-American new religious movement founded in Detroit, Michigan by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in July 1930 to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of African-Americans in the United States of America. The movement teaches black pride and...
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 materialismHistorical materialismHistorical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans...
. - 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 LeonAbraham LeonAbraham Leon , was a Jewish Trotskyist activist and theorist. He was born in Warsaw but his family moved to Belgium where he grew up. Leon became a member and then leader of the Belgian branch of Hashomer Hatzair, a left wing Zionist youth movement...
, 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 of the chronically unemployed. - The history of the southern United States is not a history of a "southern ruling class" maintaining Jim Crow 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 ThurmondStrom ThurmondJames Strom Thurmond was an American politician who served as a United States Senator. He also ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1948 as the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party candidate, receiving 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes...
, etc. have been controlled by Northern corporations. U.S. SteelU.S. SteelThe United States Steel Corporation , more commonly known as U.S. Steel, is an integrated steel producer with major production operations in the United States, Canada, and Central Europe. The company is the world's tenth largest steel producer ranked by sales...
, 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—often they would work with the Ku Klux KlanKu Klux KlanKu Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
against black militants. A similar strategy is evident in the U.S. occupation(s) of HaitiHaitiHaiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...
more recently.
Integration and the Transitional Program
Radical integrationism argues that it is impossible, contra the assertions of liberal assimilationists such as Gunnar MyrdalGunnar Myrdal
Karl Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish Nobel Laureate economist, sociologist, and politician. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Friedrich Hayek for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the...
and the early Martin Luther King, 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
Randolph Bourne
Randolph Silliman Bourne was a progressive writer and "leftist intellectual" born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and a graduate of Columbia University...
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.