• Revolutionary integration: A Marxist analysis of African American liberation, Richard Fraser and Tom Boot, with introduction by Guerry Hoddersen, Red Letter Press 2004, $17.95
The first half of this book, ‘Dialectics of Black Liberation’, written by Richard Fraser for the 1963 USA National convention of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at a time of increasing black struggle, calls for ‘revolutionary integration’. The SWP refused a proper debate so in 1966 Fraser and others set up the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP).
The second half, ‘Revolutionary Integration: yesterday and today’ by Tom Boot, was adopted by the 1982 National Convention of the FSP. It reviews the black struggle and the left in the previous 17 years and confirms the correctness of the revolutionary integration principle.
Fraser claims ‘revolutionary integration’ as a socialist principle, in opposition to black separatism. Historically, US left organisations had supported black separatism, seeing African Americans as an ‘oppressed nation’ with the ‘right to self-determination’. The FSP makes the claim that in 1963 and again in 1982 the SWP failed to develop a political stand on the question of black liberation and the silence led to opportunist practice.
The opposite position to black separatism is ‘integrationism’. This is the view that the black people of the US are an integral part of the population and indeed may claim to have contributed more to the wealth of the nation through slavery and cheap labour. As such they have the right to just treatment before the law and equal opportunities in health, education, housing and all social areas.
In the 1960s the US left tended to view ‘integration’ as the platform of the opportunist and middle class elements in the civil rights struggle. The older established National Association for the Advancement of Coloured peoples (NAACP) was described as ‘assimilationist’ and Dr Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Church movement as ‘reformist’. In 1963 the FSP argued for a perspective of ‘revolutionary integration’ in which the struggle against the oppression of African Americans should challenge US capitalism head on. The challenge from the black masses for equality and justice was a revolutionary demand and one that the white working class must make common cause with.
So far, so true. And yet the FSP remains tied to the Trotskyist view that the socialist revolution is the task of the organised working class to which other concerns, such as sexism, racism, student rights, and peasant struggles, must be subsumed. That US organised labour is now and has been for most of the past, reactionary, racist, sexist, and corrupt is explained by the ‘aristocracy’ of union leadership rather than the material interests of the union membership. One of the tasks of the black movement is to ‘profoundly stimulate’ the labour movement into struggle.
‘Only northern labour has the power to paralyse the ability of the government to intervene against the southern revolution. And since the southern Black movement cannot wait until northern labour sheds its passivity and bureaucratic leadership, it must proceed to shake up and spur northern labour into life’. (p18)
By 1982 it was evident that US organised labour was unable to defend even the most basic workers’ rights in the period of Reaganite reaction. Why and how this happened is not addressed here. Instead there is a short survey of black movements of the previous 17 years including Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, Stokely Carmichael and the slogan of Black Power. There are also brief summaries of left groups including the Communist Workers Party (CWP) who had five members murdered by Klan/FBI agents in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979. Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! organised a national speaking tour of Britain for the CWP at that time. It is significant and probably sectarian that there is no mention of black CPUSA communist Harry Haywood whose brilliant autobiography, Black Bolshevik, was published in 1978, or of George Jackson’s great contribution to questions of the state and black liberation.
In 1982 the FSP and its sister party Radical Women held the view that revolutionary integration depends upon ‘the dialectics of sexual revolution: the vitality of the Black lesbian/gay sector is the catalyst for restoring the entire Black movement to the revolutionary path!’ (p171) It may well be that in 1982 black socialist feminists were leading the struggle – but he fails to make a convincing argument that this experience is a general principle.
These are two interesting and contemporary accounts of an extraordinary phase of US history, the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath, by comrades involved in that struggle. However, this is no Marxist analysis and programmatic demands and sweeping generalisations are compounded in an altogether sloppy way.
Why is it being reissued now? The conditions of the black African American population are relatively worse today than 24 years ago. In 1980 there were 600,000 prisoners in the USA, today there are 2.1 million. Young African Americans are more than six times more likely to be imprisoned than young white offenders. The most prominent gain of the Civil Rights movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed millions of African Americans electoral franchise, is being gradually repealed by state restrictions barring ex-felons from voting. In Alabama and Florida 31% of all black men are permanently disenfranchised.
Guerry Hoddersen writes in the introduction of ‘the need to keep faith with those that went before, learn from their mistakes and press on’. Never was that task so urgent as today.
Susan Davidson
FRFI 182 December 2004 / January 2005
