In the 1950s, Fraser disputed the notion that blacks in the U.S. were a nation, pointing to the fact that they lacked a separate culture, language, and especially, geographic territory and autonomous market economy: the requirements for nationhood.
The struggle for equality had always been the main goal and task of blacks in the U.S., argued Fraser in speeches he made and internal documents he wrote for the SWP.
Nationalism was the product, not of hope for blacks, but arose during periods of despair and disillusionment when whites—capitalists during Reconstruction, trade union bureaucrats in the 20th century—betrayed them.
In these writings and speeches, Fraser also carefully analyzed the historical, post-Civil War class structure and dynamics of the U.S. South and the U.S. in general, in the process updating W. E. B.
Though he disagreed with them about the nature of the Cuban workers state, Fraser was a theoretical father figure to the SWP's Revolutionary Tendency (RT) led by James Robertson and Tim Wohlforth, later expelled when the RT opposed the reentry of the SWP into the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI).