February Is Black History Month
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:
The black question as it is called in the Marxist movement, the question of class and race intertwined in the class struggle in America, is central to the strategy for revolutionary. Period. The struggle to find a way to the black masses through the black workers, who have historically been among the most militant sections of the working class, has been long, hard, vexing, and in certain periods fruitless (due to apathy or the predominance of various black nationalist or liberal assimilationist ideolgies. Fraser's work was invaluable as a first step toward sorting things out. Forward!
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Richard S. Fraser, 1913-1988
Written: 1994 (1990)
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
Richard S. Fraser, a veteran Trotskyist and tenacious fighter for black freedom, died in his sleep on November 27 [1988] at the age of 75. For the last several years Dick fought to overcome many painful and debilitating illnesses, mustering the courage to face endless operations, so that he could continue his research and literary work on the question of the revolutionary struggle for black liberation in America. Comrade Fraser was not only a cherished friend but a theoretical mentor of the Spartacist League. SL National Chairman Jim Robertson has acknowledged his considerable personal political debt to comrade Fraser.
Dick Fraser was a co-reporter on the black question at our founding conference in 1966. His work was published as part of our Marxist Bulletin No. 5, “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism,” and he was a close collaborator in our work to establish organizations of labor/black defense. As the Labor Black League for Social Defense in the Bay Area wrote in memoriam: “Richard Fraser was our teacher, the author of ‘For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question’ that lights the road to black freedom through the program of revolutionary integration, the assimilation of black people into an egalitarian socialist society.”
Fraser joined the Trotskyist movement in 1934, recruited on a cross-country Greyhound bus trip by a member of the newly formed Workers Party—the product of a fusion between the Trotskyist Communist League of America and A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party. For close to 30 years he was an organizer of the Socialist Workers Party on the West Coast in Los Angeles and Seattle; for at least 20 years he was a member of the SWP’s National Committee. In the Pacific Northwest Fraser won several members of the Communist Party in Seattle to Trotskyism following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Khrushchev revelations. That Seattle was the place where the SWP had its most significant success in cracking the Stalinists is a testament to the persistence and political capabilities of Richard Fraser.
Through his involvement in black freedom struggles and experience in the recruitment and subsequent loss of hundreds of black workers from the SWP following World War II, Dick came to believe that the American communist movement had failed to come to grips with the question of black liberation in this country. Although lacking much formal education, he dedicated himself to the study of the black question. Criticizing the SWP for underestimating the revolutionary challenge to American capitalism posed by the integrationist struggles for black equality, in 1955 he submitted his document “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question.” Here Fraser counterposed revolutionary integration to the SWP’s turn toward a separatist “self-determination” ideology (associated particularly with George Breitman), which would become a theoretical cover for its abstention from the mass civil rights movement in the early 1960s and subsequent full-blown capitulation to black nationalism.
Dick came into disfavor with the SWP leadership when he opposed the party’s adoption of the call for federal troops to protect Southern blacks. In his “Resolution on the Little Rock Crisis” Fraser tore apart the SWP’s support to Eisenhower’s introduction of federal troops in Little Rock in 1957, powerfully pointing out that the end result had been the crushing of local black self-defense efforts. In the 1960s Fraser along with other SWP spokesmen was propelled out of the party as it plunged from centrism to reformism. As he wrote in a letter to his son: “It was I who initiated the split from the SWP by publicly attacking its Personal Representative, my old friend Asher Harer, whom I had recruited in 1935, for the SWP stand on the Vietnam War, and proclaiming that the way to ‘BRING THE TROOPS HOME’ was for the Viet Cong to drive them into the South China Sea.”
Fraser went on to found the Seattle-based Freedom Socialist Party. Cut off by a split in the FSP, Dick went into the New American Movement hoping that he could influence and educate some of these young New Leftists in the old Leninist school. With the fusion of NAM and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee Fraser was subsequently carried into the Democratic Socialists of America.
Over the years we had our disagreements with Dick. Neither of us tried to hide these, but we were always happy to bend the stick in favor of the areas of profound political agreement between us. In his later years Fraser was handicapped by the loss of his Marxist library, which the SL sought to replenish, and of his personal working papers. In turn Dick’s collaboration was invaluable in elaborating a perspective for rooting the SL among militant black workers and youth. Fraser’s formal membership in other organizations obviously stood in contradiction to his fervent political beliefs, a contradiction which was resolved in his last years. Sharing our outrage over the U.S. bombing of Libya, he distanced himself from the DSA.
Addressing the SL/U.S. Seventh National Conference (1983) on the question of the organization of labor/black leagues, Dick spoke movingly:
“I’ve had some discussions with many comrades, which have been very gratifying, and I am humbled by the knowledge that things that I wrote 30 years ago, which were so scorned by the old party, have had some important impact, finally.”
Dick’s last political act before his death was his endorsement of the November 5 Mobilization that stopped the Klan in Philadelphia. That satisfying mobilization of the power of integrated labor was a testament to our comrade Richard Fraser who in endorsing identified himself as a “historic American Trotskyist.” That he was, and his loss will be keenly felt.
Adapted from Workers Vanguard
No. 466, 2 December 1988
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Introductory Note by the Prometheus Research Library
Revolutionary Integration:Program for Black Liberation
Written: 1990
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
When, as a young Trotskyist activist, Dick Fraser became convinced that American Marxism had not come to terms with the question of black liberation, he made a life-long commitment to study of the question. Although he was hampered by little formal scholarly training, his Marxist understanding and his broad experience in militant struggles with black workers sharpened his insight into the lessons of history. His dedicated study sprang from his conviction that in order to forge a program for black liberation, it is necessary to study the social forces that created the American institution of racial oppression. Fraser turned to the writings of the militant fighters for black equality during the Civil War and Reconstruction and to the pioneering studies by black academics such as E. Franklin Frazier and Oliver Cromwell Cox. To Fraser, understanding the roots of black oppression in the United States was no armchair activity; he carried his theory of Revolutionary Integration into struggle.
With the publication of this bulletin we are honoring Fraser’s fighting scholarship. In the past few years Trotskyism has lost three scholar-militants from the generation brought to revolutionary consciousness by the combative class struggles of the 1930s. George Breitman, who died in April 1986, was as a proponent of black “self-determination” Fraser’s main political opponent within the SWP on the black question. He was also the Pathfinder Press editor responsible for the publication of the works of Leon Trotsky and James P. Cannon. And in July 1990 the Trotsky scholar Louis Sinclair died. As the author of Leon Trotsky: A Bibliography (Hoover Institution Press, 1972), Sinclair performed an invaluable service to the revolutionary movement in documenting and collecting Trotsky’s writings in many languages. Now the tradition of revolutionary scholarship so honorably exemplified by Richard Fraser, George Breitman and Louis Sinclair must be carried on by a new generation of Marxists.
The U.S. capitalist class and its minions would like to forget this country’s modern origins in the Second American Revolution that was the Civil War. To understand the Civil War is to understand the character of U.S. society and its fatal flaw of racism. As Dave Dreiser, Fraser’s long-time collaborator and friend, writes in his 16 April 1990 letter to Jim Robertson (see below), for decades the academic racists of the William Dunning school of U.S. history legitimized the racist status quo. Their “interpretation” was popularized in the movies Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.
The outbreak of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the struggle for black equality inspired a new generation of historians, who began to reexamine central issues of American history, in particular the Civil War and Reconstruction. The distinguished James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era and The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, is only one of the many scholars who have documented the heroic struggles of this revolutionary period. Eminent scholars who have studied southern slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction also include Eugene Genovese, Kenneth Stampp, C. Vann Woodward and Eric Foner.
Today the empiricist/racist brand of “scholarship” represented by Harvard historian Robert Fogel, author of Time on the Cross, is the academic reflection of the American ruling class’s renewed war on the black population. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor, wrote The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in which he outrageously argued that the “fundamental problem...of family structure” was responsible for the intensification of poverty, joblessness, segregation in housing and lack of education suffered by the masses in the big city ghettoes. Bourgeois-empirical sociology (accompanied by pages of charts and graphs) served to provide a pseudo-scientific cover for the old “blame the victim” lies. In 1970 Moynihan coined the term “benign neglect” to describe the federal policy signalling the rollback of the token gains of the civil rights movement. Federal funding for poverty programs dried up; the government under Nixon, Carter and Reagan dismantled civil rights legislation and destroyed even the minimal plans for busing to achieve school integration.
Dick Fraser’s Marxist scholarship utterly rejected the manipulation of history to justify the racist status quo. At the time of his death in 1988 Fraser, with Dave Dreiser, was actively working on notes and abstracts for a book, The Rise of the Slave Power, the result of over 40 years of study. The book was to be a Marxist analysis of the rise of the southern slavocracy, the class antagonisms which exploded in the 1861-1865 Civil War between the capitalist North and the slave South and the leading role of the militant abolitionists in the destruction of black chattel slavery.
While his primary area of study was the black question, Dick Fraser was active in many arenas of struggle. In selecting the documents for this bulletin we have sought to show the breadth of his work. Of documents omitted from this collection there are two worthy of special note: “For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Question” is not published here only because it is readily available in the Spartacist League’s Marxist Bulletin No. 5R, “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism.”
The 1958 “Resolution on the Little Rock Crisis,” in which Fraser sharply exposes the SWP policy of calling for federal troops to intervene in the Little Rock, Arkansas school integration crisis, is also omitted. Fraser’s position is well represented in two other, shorter documents which we have included, “Contribution to the Discussion on the Slogan ‘Send Federal Troops to Mississippi’ ” and a letter, “On Federal Troops in Little Rock.”
Those who would like to read further are directed to the bibliography of Fraser’s writings included here as an appendix. All of these materials are available at the Prometheus Research Library.
Editorial Note: As a member of the Socialist Workers Party and the Freedom Socialist Party Dick Fraser often used the name Richard Kirk. The bibliography distinguishes all documents written under the name Kirk with an asterisk. Our introductions give the source and some background for the documents, which have been edited to correct minor errors and inconsistencies. Some purely personal material in the letters has been cut out. The PRL has added brief explanations to clarify references when necessary; these appear in brackets. All footnotes and parenthetical material are by Dick Fraser.
Prometheus Research Library
July 1990
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Fraser and American Scholarship
on the Black Question
by David Dreiser
Written: 1990
Source: Prometheus Research Library, New York.
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman, Prometheus Research Library.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2006/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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Academic scholarship regarding U.S. history has gone through several phases. After the failure of Reconstruction, scholarship went through a very reactionary period. Beginning in the 1890’s, William Dunning of Columbia and a host of his students spread the view that Reconstruction was the shame of U.S. history and represented military despotism, the evil of “Africanization,” and unrestrained corruption against which a noble but defeated South tried to defend itself. Claude Bowers’ The Tragic Era (1929) was the most influential work of this ilk.
Ulrich Phillips presented a view of slavery as relatively benign. Slaves were well treated and well fed, and the system was productive. Justin Smith presented a view of the Mexican War in which the arrogant Mexicans were totally to blame. These reactionary and pro-Southern views of U.S. history dominated the academies and formed the basis for the teaching of U.S. history in high schools and universities for decades following.
The Civil War was regarded as some terrible mistake in which the issue of slavery was minor. Abolitionists had been self-seeking rabble-rousers whose comments on slavery and the politics of their day can be ignored. The defamation of the radical Republicans, Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, etc., as power mad psychotics became a cottage industry.
Even in those days there were other voices. In 1913 John R. Lynch, former slave and later congressman from Mississippi, wrote The Facts of Reconstruction in which he tried to tell some truth, but his excellent work was lost in a sea of racist “scholarship.” A few words from the introduction to a reprint of his book are instructive:
“These scholars contended that the Reconstruction governments in the South were controlled by base, power-hungry carpetbaggers and scalawags who cynically used the newly enfranchised blacks to gain power and to sustain their debauchery in office. Without the votes of naive and illiterate Negroes, who were easily led to the polls to vote the Radical ticket, these scoundrels would never have had an opportunity in any of the states to plunder the public treasuries and incite blacks against whites, according to the Dunning-school historians.
“Therefore the fundamental mistake in the Radical or congressional plan of Reconstruction was the enfranchisement of the freedmen. Happily, however, according to the established version of the story, during the mid-1870’s decent whites in both sections of the nation rose in indignation over the spoliation of the Southern states, and through the heroic efforts of local Democrats the Radical Republican regimes were overthrown and good government restored.”
After 1960 a new wind blew in the colleges and a number of honest scholars began to chip away at the mountain of pro-Southern reactionary propaganda that still dominated. C. Vann Woodward, Eugene D. Genovese and James M. McPherson are prominent. Other outstanding names are Kenneth Stampp, George Fredrickson and Herbert Gutman, not to mention John Hope Franklin, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Henrietta Buckmaster, and other black scholars.
So what is missing? Hasn’t everything been straightened out? I don’t believe so. Let’s take the issue of the nature of slavery. In 1974 a Harvard scholar, Robert Fogel, wrote Time On the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, a study of slavery based on “cliometrics” which is a computerized technique of examining statistical data. Fogel concluded that slave labor was more efficient than free labor and hence more productive. The slaves were well off and better fed than free workers in the North. Fogel has written a new work in 1989 expanding on this theme. C. Vann Woodward has reviewed Fogel’s new book and seems at a loss to know how to criticize it even if he seems uncomfortable with Fogel’s conclusions.
In the meantime, Fogel and his new toy, cliometrics, are the rage in academic circles and a new generation of scholars using the technique are collecting their PhDs at Harvard and are fanning out around the country. I asked a Harvard history student if the slaves’ own view of slavery might not paint a different picture of how well off they were. Patiently he explained to me that the slaves’ stories were largely taken down by abolitionists, and of course nothing they wrote can be believed! How, one might ask, could the words of slaves hold up to data manipulated by a computer? One might also ask in studying the Holocaust if it would be permissible to consider the recollections of the survivors, whose views would obviously be biased, or only the views of the guards and administrators who ran the camps?
Thirty years of new scholarship haven’t had much effect on the views of history taught in our schools, although there has been some correction. For instance, students of Mexican history at Stanford U. are now taught that the Mexican War was started with an unprovoked attack by U.S. forces ordered by President Polk. Well, that’s true, but it is not enough. What were the class forces that caused the Mexican War? The new scholars not only fail to answer such questions, but consider such a question improper.
The best academic scholars are committed to a view of history that regards any kind of economic determinism as quaint. History is regarded basically as narrative. There was no bourgeois revolution in England. The French Revolution had many causes, but it was not a clash between class forces. The view that struggles between classes is a determining factor in history is Marxist fantasy. In fact in the sense that Marx meant, there are no classes.
This crass empiricism did not always dominate U.S. scholarship. There used to be at least a counter-current of materialism that had legitimacy as in Charles Beard’s day. But, if anything, methodology has deteriorated since then. For instance, Kenneth Stampp has written The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1965) as a total revision of the Dunning school. His work is excellent in many ways, but he says, “DuBois’s attempt at a full-scale revisionist study, Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935), is disappointing. Though rich in empirical detail, the book presents a Marxian interpretation of southern reconstruction as a proletarian movement that is at best naive. The Marxist historian James S. Allen in Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy, 1865-1876 (New York, 1937) offers an interpretation that is more credible but equally schematic.”
It is no longer necessary to refute Marxism which is simply dismissed as naive, quaint and schematic. In spite of this I believe a thorough class analysis has been written regarding Reconstruction by Eric Foner. His Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (1988) is Marxist in content if not in name and meets the most strict demands of scholarship.
Who has spoken in like voice for the antebellum period? Dick felt no one has, that is no one lately. Charles Beard was accused of being a Marxist in his economic interpretation of the Constitution, but he replied that if so, then so was James Madison from whom he drew much of his “economic” view. In like manner Dick’s and my view of the period between say 1776 and 1860 is drawn very largely from Horace Greeley, Charles Sumner, John A. Logan (The Great Conspiracy: Its Origin and History [1885]), Henry Wilson, Benjamin Lundy (The War in Texas [1836]) and other radical Republicans and abolitionists. I submit that their penetrating analyses of the events of their day have never been refuted, but have been dismissed and forgotten.
Even today the abolitionists are regarded in scholarly circles with great suspicion. People committed to a cause cannot be objective observers or commentators, it is said. Black scholars have largely tackled the issue of restoring the role of slaves and black leaders to proper perspective. A class analysis has largely been absent. In a sense Dick wanted to restore the views and scholarship of the radicals of those days. That is not an unworthy purpose.
A brief word about “revisionism” may be needed. Kenneth Stampp regards himself and other post-1960 liberal scholars as revisionists, that is compared with the Dunning school. But, Dunning a generation before had considered himself a revisionist of the views of the mid-19th century. Robert Fogel might be called a new revisionist of the revisionists of the revisionists. I think it is better not to use the term.
I know that a lot of “Marxists” in our movement have tended to take scholarship lightly. Substituting theory for research, they generalize at the drop of a hat. However, it is not always necessary for research to be original to be used in a valid general analysis. For instance Edward Diener is a U. of Illinois scholar who wrote a commentary on U.S. history (Reinterpreting U.S. History [1975]). The book is not annotated and makes no pretense of original scholarship. His book just expresses a point of view which is an altogether legitimate practice. His view happens to be fairly conservative. Dick wanted to make reasonable use of available scholarship to express a point of view about U.S. history.
Briefly, Dick’s view was that after the invention of the cotton gin the slave system took on new life and the compromise between the planters and the merchant capitalists in the North and expressed in the U.S. Constitution fell apart. The planters wanted state power for themselves, and effectively won it with the election of Andrew Jackson. In the main, they controlled the presidency and Congress from then until 1860. Their power was based on a class alliance between themselves and the free farmers of the North who had similar interests on some questions such as soft money and low tariffs.
This alliance operated to stunt the growth of capitalism. The power of the planters was expressed through their control of the Democratic Party. The Whig “opposition” was about as effective as the Democratic opposition to the Republicans today. The subservience of the Whigs gave the planters effective state power.
When the abolitionists spoke of the Slave Power they were not being inflammatory but analytical.
The Republican Party was a revolutionary party which led the nation through the Civil War to an overthrow of planter power and the ascendency of the capitalist state. The failure of that social revolution to proceed through Reconstruction to a resolution of the land question in the South by giving land and the franchise to the freedmen set the stage for the racist nation we have inherited.
Dick would have wanted to cover a broad sweep going on to the aftermath of Reconstruction, but that is all over with his passing. But, certainly it is appropriate to finish his beginning treatment covering the ascendency of the Slave Power.
I further believe that the best of current academic scholars have not told Dick’s story. They have made a major effort to reduce the blatant racism that dominated the academies for 80 years, but in method, empiricism is today more dominant in the study of history than ever before.
David Dreiser
16 April 1990
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