REVIEW BY ALISON THORNE
Revolutionary Integration: A Marxist Analysis of African American Liberation
By Richard Fraser and Tom Boot
Red Letter Press, Seattle 2004
224 pages, $28.00 (pb)
Available in Australia from Feminist Education Association, PO Box 266 West Brunswick Vic 3055 (add $2.50 postage and handling), email <a.thorne@bigpond.com> or phone Alison on (03) 9388 0062.
It's hard to imagine that the US left was once "colour blind". Race is such a central political question in the US that even President George Bush — who gives campaign speeches in Spanish — dare not ignore the question.
But US radicals in the early part of the 20th century abstained completely on the race question. Organised in the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, activists believed that the struggle of Black workers was just another battle between bosses and workers, refusing to acknowledge any special features.
US capitalism was founded — and continues to depend — on pervasive, vicious racism. This is why, despite making important gains through struggle, African Americans have been unable to achieve racial justice.
Revolutionary Integration: A Marxist Analysis of African American Liberation is based on historical documents and traces the fascinating evolution of how socialists acknowledged and grappled with the special features of African-American oppression, eventually hammering out competing strategies for liberation.
Part one, "Dialectics of Black Liberation", offers a vivid, contemporary view of the Black movement as it took on the full fury of the segregated South. Socialist theoretician Richard Fraser challenges the then-prevailing left view that African Americans were a subjugated nationality. Originally authored as a minority position for the 1963 convention of the US Socialist Workers Party, Revolutionary Integration became one of the founding documents of the Freedom Socialist Party, founded in 1965.
Part two, "Revolutionary Integration: Yesterday and Today", was written in 1982 by African-American radical Tom Boot. Boot begins by reviewing the left's record on the question of Black liberation. He evaluates the state of the Black movement in the 1980s, including discussions on the emergence of African-American feminists and Black lesbians and gays.
The "Black question" has been a difficult issue for US radicals. The notion that race was of little relevance to US working-class politics was challenged early. But how Black liberation can be achieved remains fiercely contested.
Under Lenin's leadership in the early 1920s, the Communist International (Comintern) established that the Black question in the US was a special question that involved double exploitation and required special demands, and resolved to take immediate steps to convene a World Negro Congress. The congress never eventuated. In 1928, the now Stalinist Comintern adopted a new policy. "Self-determination for the US Black Belt" held that "Blacks in the US conformed to the criteria of a nation and should therefore fight for a nation ... in the southern 'Black Belt' states with majority Black populations". The American CP fell into line, declaring that communists "are for a Negro Republic".
The alternative view is that African Americans do not have the features of an oppressed nation — a common language, economy, psychology and territory — but are in fact a super-exploited race battling for equality.
Revolutionary Integration explains the evolution of both theories in order to show that the general direction of the African-American struggle has been to fight for equality through battling against apartheid-like segregation, especially in the South. It examines the small group of Black middle-class professionals who desire individual assimilation and concludes that they are incapable of providing leadership to the broader struggle. Finally it traces decades of discussion among the US left preceeding the consolidation of the theory of revolutionary integration.
The book concludes that neither separation nor assimilation within capitalism can liberate African Americans. Complete equality will be achieved only as part of a broader revolutionary struggle: "Revolutionary Integration [holds] that Blacks are not a nation, that racism based on skin colour is distinct from national oppression, that the prime historic direction of Blacks is towards full equality and integration into the general struggle for social change, and that the Black struggle in America is an essential component of the class struggle, the key question of the American revolution, and the domestic link to the African and world struggles of colonial people."
The book is beautifully produced, featuring a range of historic images such as Claude McKay addressing the Comintern in 1922, a 1963 demonstration of Black youth in Birmingham Alabama, and the Black contingent in the 1979 National Lesbian and Gay March on Washington. The detailed footnotes also provide fascinating background for readers new to the African-American struggle.
Boot quotes powerful Black feminist poets including Pat Parker, June Jordan and Audre Lorde. Demonstrating how, in periods of downturn and despair, separatist ideas supplant the general trend towards integration, he allows Jordan to describe the dominant mood in the late 1960s. Honouring two southern Black students who were killed during campus unrest, she wrote: "I'm tired and you're tired and everybody's goddamn tired tired students tired Blackfolks tired Liberals tired Revolutionaries tired."
With most radical leaders jailed, murdered or demoralised, the 1970s was a time when cultural nationalism and Black machismo took centre stage. Black feminists who opposed Black sexism were isolated by a vicious backlash. Boot argues "the sheer amount of super-macho strutting around attained the level of the absurd ... The capitalists had created malleable male peacocks and aspiring middle-class executives; the divide-and-conquer tactics of male supremacy worked like charms against the Black movement."
Revolutionary Integration argues that the question of Black leadership is absolutely essential. It chronicles the highs and lows of the movement. What happened to the Black Panthers? How was the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) eventually derailed? What role have Black workers played in the US trade union movement? What happened when ex-marine and Black freedom activist Robert Williams in Monroe, North Carolina, organised armed self-defence against the Ku Klux Klan? What did Black Trotskyist, C.L.R. James and Trotsky discuss when they met in Coyoacan in 1939? What role have African-American socialists played? Where can we look for leadership in the 21st century?
In a new introduction Guerry Hoddersen, who began her political life in 1965 as a 20-year-old working in Mississippi for the SNCC, writes: "Revolutionary Integration tells the history, but it is more than a history book. It is a handbook for revolutionaries." She quotes her southern mother: "Those who were not born to live in the world as it is, were born to change it."
"And we will", vows Hoddersen.
From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004.
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