revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

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party that would function within the existing U .S . system . RAM saw these
trends' emphasis on racial pride as very positive, but branded as reactionary,
the policy of "inversion,"
the substitution of white capitalist for
black capitalist, because it failed to go to the heart of the problem .
Bourgeois nationalism could not bring about the necessary psychological
revolution . Also, it had a tendency to become increasingly conservative
in its analysis and program . RAM felt that bourgeois nationalism suffered
from the following problems :
first, the naive assumption that white America,
the Western arm of world imperialism, would just 'give' black people
land in the South ; and second, the failure to identify capitalism as the
enemy of black people and its impossibility lead to their liberation .
These two articles asserted that revolutionary black nationalism was
the only revolutionary alternative for black people . Its adherents were
the vanguard of the black underclass .
The dictatorship of the black under
class was the central ideological difference between revolutionary black
10
nationalists and reformists, RAM stated in Black; Revolution (1966) . The
goal of revolutionary black nationalism was given as communalism or socialism
which requires the collectivization of the economy .
Western civilization
would be de-emphasized . "Dialectical humanism, the method of analyzing,
planning and developing the sociological and cultural motivations as
related to the material factors which affect man's psyche for the raising
of his revolutionary humanness towards man,"" would be emphasized .
By 1967, in a position paper developed for cadre organizers, RAM felt
that revolutionary black nationalists were in a peculiar position,
in that
10 Ibid ., pp . 1-28 .
11 !bid ., pp . 30-31 .