Revolutionary integrationism


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.

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, 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, 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 in the late 1950s. Such thinkers argued that Black nationalism was a transitional demand toward socialism. They also disagreed with Joseph Stalin and his followers in the Communist Party USA, 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.

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 Revolutionary Integrationists argue that:
Radical integrationism argues that it is impossible, contra the assertions of liberal assimilationists such as Gunnar Myrdal 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 must be fully taken up by Leninists.