5. The class structure of the Black nationality is different in the 1990s than it was in the 1960s, to say nothing of the 1930s.
a) Today, as a result of the victories won by the Black rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, there is a substantially larger petty-bourgeois layer in the Black population. This layer has been able to integrate itself into the broader middle class to a degree that would have been unthinkable to people of all classes and races in the United States even twenty-five years ago.
b) At the same time, the large proletarian majority of the Black nationality has borne the brunt of the sharply worsening economic and social conditions of working people over the past decade. Broad layers of workers who are Black have been driven onto the knife's edge of poverty and into social conditions that are even more segregated - by race and by class - than the late 1960s or early 1970s.(1)
c) As a result of this greater social differentiation, the next upsurge in the struggle for Black rights will rapidly confront a polarization along class lines that will be sharp and deep.
(1) Petty-bourgeois layers will seek to impose their class perspectives and their organizational and political dominance in order to defend their gains against a racism that continues to be systemic and to advance their own integration into capitalist economic, social, and political institutions.
(2) Above all, they will seek to channel any broader movement for Black rights in a class-collaborationist direction - away from class combat and independent working- class political action, away from political initiatives by workers and youth that threaten to break the mold, and away from the development of a broader communist leadership of the working class.
(3) From the outset, spokespeople from the newly arrived middle-class layers in the Black population will appeal to nationalist sentiments as part of an effort to win a social base for themselves among Black workers and youth entering the struggle against racist assaults and intensifying capitalist exploitation and oppression.
d) At the same time, any upsurge in the battle against national oppression and racist discrimination will much more quickly deepen interconnections between those struggles and any developing rank-and-file leadership in the union movement, of which workers who are Black will come to comprise disproportionate numbers as compared to Blacks as a percentage of the population.
(1) An advance in the fight for Black rights will add new power to labor struggles.
(2) A more combative union movement, moreover, will bring decisive social power into the fight for Black liberation.
(3) In the union struggles that are already breaking out today, the percentage of workers who are Black in the rank- and-file leadership is qualitatively greater than anything that was possible in the 1960s or the 1930s.
e) Several new generations of workers and youth who are Black are being attracted to the revolutionary political example and legacy of Malcolm X.
(1) Malcolm's intransigent opposition to racist discrimination and degradation, to "Americanism" in any guise, to any subordination to Washington or any of its political parties, and to imperialism's oppression of the toilers of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific put him on a revolutionary internationalist and anti-imperialist political course while he was a prominent figure in the Nation of Islam; it was Malcolm's refusal to retreat from this course that prepared him to end all denial as to the state of the central leadership of the Nation. This dynamic culminated in Malcolm being silenced by Elijah Muhammad in late 1963 and prepared his public break with the Nation in early 1964.
(2) As imperialism's deadly intention to silence him forever became more and more clear, Malcolm's political integrity and consistency led him to rapidly break through barrier after barrier at the end of 1964 and the beginning of 1965, and to explain the process publicly as it occurred.
(a) Malcolm rejected his previous opposition to "mixed
marriages," a reactionary legacy of the demagogic,
antimaterialist foundation of politics inherited from Elijah
Mohammad.
(b) He dropped all vestiges of subtle anti-Semitic slurs
that were endemic in the Nation and the broader milieus it
influenced and that influenced it.
(c) He detailed the political consequences of "personal"
corruption by explaining how Elijah Muhammad's conduct (with
the knowledge and connivance of much of the Nation's
leadership) made a mockery of respect for women, let alone
the kinds of advances for women's rights that Malcolm had
seen were inseparable from social progress and revolutionary
struggle everywhere in the world.(2)
(d) Malcolm exposed and analyzed the inevitable search
by the leadership of the Nation for alliances with, and
material support from, reactionary organizations; this
course flowed from the social character and political
limitations of that leadership. Malcolm revealed that in
1960 and 1961 he himself had been personally instructed to
pursue or facilitate such alliances with the Ku Klux Klan
and American Nazi Party.(3)
(e) By taking these positions and acting along these
lines, Malcolm shed light on the reactionary political
consequences and antiproletarian thrust of the corruption
born of middle-class aspirations in a leadership pretending
to speak for the oppressed - whether integrationist or
separatist in its trappings.
(f) At the same time that Malcolm spoke out
unflinchingly on all these matters, he deepened a united-
front appeal to his followers and to other fighters, as well
as to the ranks of the Nation of Islam. He pointed to the
unambiguous evidence that forces bigger than the
Nation - the assassination machine of U.S.
imperialism - were responsible for preparing the deadly
assaults to come on himself and his family.
(3) Malcolm's accelerating evolution during the last year of his life toward secular political organization, anticapitalism, and then socialism placed him on a trajectory that converged with that of other revolutionaries and communists worldwide.
(a) He reached out to establish common ground with the
communist leadership of Cuba, both in Africa and on
occasions when its most prominent representatives, Fidel
Castro and Che Guevara, traveled to the United States.
(b) He sought collaboration with communists in the
United States organized in the Socialist Workers Party and
Young Socialist Alliance.
(4) As class battles intensify in the 1990s, working- class fighters of all nationalities, skin colors, and languages will be drawn to Malcolm's political legacy as they move toward proletarian internationalist and anticapitalist perspectives.
(a) These young revolutionists will become cadres and
leaders not only of renewed struggles against all
manifestations of racist and national oppression, but also
of the working-class movement and communist parties.
(b) This fact underlines the importance of the efforts
by communists to keep Malcolm's writings and speeches in
print and to expand their circulation to the broadest
possible layers of fighters and revolutionists among workers
and farmers in the United States and worldwide.
(5) Middle-class misleaders of the Black nationality more and more drape themselves in the mantle of Malcolm X in an effort to build a base for themselves among young people attracted to his example. At the same time, these petty- bourgeois layers fear working-class youth - whether Black, white, or other - and hold them in contempt, echoing bourgeois propaganda about the "dangers of the underclass." (Some also romanticize the "underclass," at a safe distance, projecting onto Black youth their own bourgeois misogyny and brutality.)
(a) Some of these middle-class forces attempt to distort
Malcolm's political evolution by portraying his last year as
a retreat from revolutionary positions as he supposedly
converged toward the perspectives of Martin Luther King, or
even toward liberalism. Ignoring Malcolm's outspoken
opposition to both the Democratic and Republican parties,
these liberals project their own political course and
rhetoric onto Malcolm and seek to present him as a
forerunner of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition.
(b) Many of these and other petty-bourgeois political
currents practice the politics of demagogy in the name of
nationalism (and sometimes "Marxism," as well). In marked
contrast to their own conduct and example, Malcolm emerged
as a revolutionary of integrity who knew from the bottom up
the conservatizing and ultimately bourgeois character of the
corruption of depending on income derived from hustles or
organized crime; who became impervious to middle-class
aspirations and resentments; to red-baiting, race-baiting,
and Stalinist blandishments, let alone racism (anti-Haitian,
anti-Asian, etc.), anti-Semitism, antiwoman bigotry, or
similar self-serving demagogy of any kind.
(6) Malcolm X provides living proof of the capacity of revolutionary-minded fighters from the ranks of the working class to broaden their scope and move toward communism and revolutionary leadership of the highest historic caliber. His example reinforces the judgment that the experienced leading cadres of the SWP who are Black are forerunners of a much broader communist leadership development that will come out of deepening struggles and political clarification.
(a) Given the greater class differentiation in the Black nationality today, nationalist-minded fighters emerging from a new burst forward in the fight for Black liberation will rapidly reach out toward a broader world view, toward Marxism. They will have a better chance than the Black Panther Party generation of avoiding the trap of confusing Stalinism with Marxism.(4)
(b) The wider the struggles against racism, the more
self-sacrificing the commitment to fight for Black
liberation, and the broader the reach of the labor movement
and its vanguard to embrace these struggles, the greater
will be the opportunities for influence, recruitment, and
renewal of the cadres of the Socialist Workers Party and
Young Socialist Alliance.
(c) In the United States, as in other imperialist countries, "nation time" and the socialist revolution will triumph together.
NOTES
1. To cite a few examples of this continuing trend, in July
1998 the official U.S. government unemployment figure for
Blacks was 10.4 percent, more than two and half times the
overall rate. The jobless rate for Blacks aged 16-19 was 29.9
percent, also two and a half times that for the population as a
whole. The median family income of Blacks is less than 60
percent of that of whites, and the gap was substantially wider
in 1996 than in 1967. Thirty percent of African-Americans live
below the miserly official U.S. government poverty line.
Meanwhile, one-third of Black males between the ages of 20 and
29 are either on probation, on parole, or in prison in the
United States; more Black males than white males are in U.S.
prisons, although Blacks make up less than 12 percent of the
U.S, population. (Altogether, 5.4 million people in the United
States were either on probation, on parole, or in prison in
1995 - a 300 percent increase since 1980, while the U.S.
population grew less than 17 percent over that same period.
With nearly 600 out of every 100,000 residents in prison, the
United States has by far the highest incarceration rate in the
world.)
2. The events that culminated in Malcolm being silenced and his subsequent break from the Nation of Islam were precipitated by his discovery that Elijah Muhammad had engaged in sexual relations with a number of teenage women and then, when they became pregnant, organized to suspend them from membership in the Nation on charges of "fornication." Malcolm explains in his autobiography that he learned of this from Elijah Muhammad himself in April 1963. When Malcolm refused to join with others in the Nation's chain of command to cover up this abuse - both abuse of women, and abuse of power - Elijah Muhammad decided to silence him. "When I found out that the hierarchy itself wasn't practicing what it preached," Malcolm said in a 1965 interview with the Young Socialist magazine, "it was clear that part of its program was bankrupt." That interview is published in full in Malcolm X Talks to Young People (Pathfinder, 1991), as well as the Pathfinder pamphlet of the same name.
3. See in particular Malcolm's February 15, 1965, talk at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, "There's a Worldwide Revolution Going On," in Malcolm X, February 1965: The Final Speeches (Pathfinder, 1992).
4. Founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, in response to a cop killing of a sixteen-year old Black youth, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense over the next several years attracted thousands of young Blacks and others repelled by the evils of racism and looking for strategies that addressed the source of the oppression they were fighting. In their search for anticapitalist solutions, however, the leadership of the Black Panthers instead found Stalinism, which at the time still had substantial reserves worldwide. By the end of the 1960s, the combination of thug methods, class-collaborationist illusions, and ultraleft adventures the Panthers absorbed from Stalinism left them wide open to deadly disruption operations by the FBI and other police agencies. Some twenty Panthers were killed, either directly by cops - as in the case of Fred Hampton, murdered in his bed in 1969 by the Chicago police - or in shoot-outs with cops or each other urged on by government provocateurs. Numerous other Panthers were framed up and railroaded to prison.