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Vol. 73/No. 11      March 23, 2009

 
Malcolm X: A course of conduct to emulate
Revolutionary struggle, not conspiracy schemes,
offers road forward for oppressed and exploited
(feature article)
 
Reprinted below are the remarks by Steve Clark at a February 21 forum on the 44th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. Clark is the editor of several collections of speeches by Malcolm X published by Pathfinder Press and a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee.

The forum was held at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, at the site of the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem where Malcolm X was fatally shot at the podium on Feb. 21, 1965. A report on the meeting appeared in the March 16 issue of the Militant.

I’m glad to be here with all of you this evening to help keep alive the legacy of one of the 20th century world’s most outstanding revolutionary leaders of working people, and of the struggle for Black freedom—Malcolm X. And not just a legacy, but above all a course of conduct to emulate.

There is much we may never know about Malcolm’s assassination in this very hall 44 years ago, since there are so many forces—the FBI and other federal police agencies, the New York cops, and those in and around what was then the leadership of the Nation of Islam—who have a stake in covering up the truth.

What I want to focus on, however, is the political course Malcolm was on during the final year of his life that made him so dangerous to—and so hated by—all those who unsuccessfully sought to prevent his example from becoming better known.  
 
Evolution didn’t end in Mecca
In his book Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Barack Obama—the newly inaugurated president and commander-in-chief of the world’s final empire—has this to say: “If Malcolm’s discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation, that hope appeared in a distant future, in a far-off land.”

But Barack Obama gives us only the Malcolm of the Autobiography. Like many who seek to deny Malcolm’s revolutionary political course during the final months of his life, Obama freezes Malcolm’s political evolution in April 1964, with the pilgrimage to Mecca. It’s as if Malcolm had been assassinated 10 months before he actually was. Spike Lee’s movie does the same thing.

This is standard for those who would turn Malcolm into a moral or religious reformer, instead of a political leader who acted on the reality that the concessions working people win under capitalism are always a by-product of revolutionary struggle.

It’s standard for those who hold onto Malcolm X as a nationalist, rather than an internationalist champion of struggles by the oppressed and exploited the world over.

And we even hear it these days from some who try to twist and disfigure Malcolm X into a beacon of the growing minority among African Americans in the professional and middle classes who distance themselves more and more—socially and politically—from the great mass of working people, whose living and job conditions continue to get worse, and in whose interests Malcolm fought and died.

Yes, of course, if all Malcolm’s legacy amounted to was the hope that “some whites might eventually live beside him as brothers in Islam”—then, certainly, that’s quite a reach for the transformation of the United States and most of the rest of the world! It is a hope for “a distant future”—at the very best.  
 
Malcolm’s political legacy
But Mecca was not the culmination of Malcolm’s evolution. He lived, learned, spoke, and fought for another 10 months!

And dozens of Malcolm’s speeches, interviews, and letters from those months are available in books kept in print primarily by Pathfinder Press. All of us can study—and work to emulate—what Malcolm actually said and set out to achieve.

In them we discover the Malcolm who—when asked by a Village Voice interviewer, just a few weeks before he was killed, whether his aim was to awaken Blacks to their exploitation—immediately shot back: “No, to their humanity, to their own worth.”

There we find the Malcolm who spoke out against those who don’t give women “incentive by allowing her maximum participation in whatever area of the society where she’s qualified.” Whatever country you visit, Malcolm said, “the degree of progress can never be separated from the woman.”

We find the Malcolm who rejected the Nation of Islam’s opposition to intermarriage, saying: “I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being—neither white, black, brown, or red… . It’s just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being.”

It’s during those 10 months that we find the Malcolm who sought to unify the broadest layers—irrespective of religious beliefs, or absence of religious beliefs—in militant political action against every manifestation of racist bigotry, of capitalism’s economic and social exploitation, and of murderous imperialist wars—from the Congo, to Vietnam, to Cuba at the time, and today we can add Iraq, Gaza, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (where missile strikes by the Obama administration in recent weeks have killed at least 30 people).

In order to join in these struggles effectively, Malcolm said, you have to keep “your religion at home, in the closet”—because whether you are “a Methodist or a Baptist or an atheist or an agnostic,” or a Muslim, the oppressed catch the same hell.  
 
Internationalist revolutionary
It’s during those 10 months that we find the Malcolm who told the Young Socialist magazine that his recent visits to Africa and the Middle East—meeting fellow fighters of all hues of complexion—had convinced him to stop referring to the course he advocated as “Black nationalism,” because, as Malcolm put it: “I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary.”

And that system has a name: capitalism. “You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic,” Malcolm told a Harlem rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity—in this very ballroom—in December 1964. And three days prior to his assassination he told a meeting at Columbia University, just a few blocks from here, “We are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.”

Malcolm X recognized it was necessary for African Americans and other oppressed and exploited working people and youth to together make a revolution in the United States, to take power out of the hands of the racist and war-making capitalist rulers. He was an internationalist revolutionary, part of a political convergence of revolutionary leaderships of the toilers from North America, to Cuba, Algeria, and elsewhere in Africa and the Americas.

Malcolm argued that this is a worldwide struggle, against a worldwide social system that not only expropriates the wealth that working people create with our labor. But above all, a system that denies us the human solidarity and civilization that social labor makes possible—that denies us, in Malcolm’s words, “our humanity, our own worth.”

Let me close with a few words about what we can and must learn from Malcolm’s assassination itself. We know that the U.S. rulers—and their massive political police apparatus at federal, state, and local levels—carry out systematic spying, harassment. And, when they need to, murderous violence against opponents of their policies.

Pathfinder publishes many titles detailing these cop operations against unions, fighters for Black liberation, communists and socialists, the movement against the Vietnam War, women’s rights activists, and others: Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom and FBI on Trial: The Victory in the Socialist Workers Party Suit against Government Spying, among the many.

In the course of a 15-year-long campaign against the FBI and other federal cop agencies conducted by the political party I am a member of, the Socialist Workers Party—which ended in 1986 in a victorious federal court ruling against the U.S. government—the judge’s decision documented 204 burglaries of party offices between 1945 and 1966—that’s 204!; the use of 1,300 paid informers against the SWP between 1960 and 1976, including 300 planted as members; as well as firings, evictions, and so on.

We know the Chicago cops brutally assassinated Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton while he was sleeping in his bed in 1969. And since the 1959 revolution in Cuba, Washington has organized more than 600 failed assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. And there are many, many other examples.

We have the right and the duty to demand that the government release all the files on their disruption operations against those involved in popular struggles here and around the world.

But those of us engaged on various fronts of the fight against exploitation and oppression need to look at and draw lessons from an even more fundamental political question. Because as Malcolm and other revolutionary leaders have taught us, it is how we act, what we say and do, how we organize to resist—in face of inevitable spying, provocations, and violence by the exploiters, which will continue so long as they hold state power—that ultimately settles defeat or victory. How we do it—not how someone does it for us.

The U.S. rulers wanted to get rid of Malcolm X. However much is still hidden from us, it’s clear nonetheless that Malcolm was assassinated by individuals in or around the organization he had been a leader of as recently as 18 months earlier: the Nation of Islam.

The U.S. rulers hated and feared the Grenada Revolution. But Maurice Bishop, its outstanding leader, was assassinated by a Stalinist gang within the governing New Jewel Movement, which in the process—as Fidel Castro so accurately explained—not only destroyed the revolution but handed the island over to U.S. imperialism on a silver platter.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Washington sent U.S. Special Forces to help the government in El Salvador defeat worker and peasant struggles led by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the FMLN. But world-class FMLN leaders such as Roque Dalton and Commander Ana María were brutally assassinated not by these U.S. or Salvadoran rightist squads, but by others within their own organization.

The U.S. government salted the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and early 1970s with scores of paid snitches. But why were these cop provocateurs able to get away with murderous internal violence and thuggery on such a scale in the Panthers that the organization was literally torn apart?  
 
Intolerable methods
These are intolerable methods that the Stalinist movement in the 1930s picked up from the dog-eat-dog social relations of capitalism and injected into the unions and organizations of the oppressed.

Malcolm X hated these methods. He came to detest demagogy and thuggery. He knew what the cops and racist bigots were capable of. He knew the brutality he had been trained in as a leader of the Nation of Islam and its paramilitary Fruit of Islam. As he said of the Nation the day before his death, “I know what they can do, and what they can’t, and they can’t do some of the stuff recently going on.”

Beatings of Malcolm’s supporters and attempts on his own life escalated in early 1965, including the fire-bombing of his house that could have killed his daughters and his wife Betty.

Malcolm’s greatest concern was the blows being struck to the fight for liberation by the systematic violence being carried out by an organization claiming to speak on behalf of the oppressed—the Nation of Islam. “As we fight one another, they continue to rule,” Malcolm said.

There’s another, related lesson we must internalize, as a habit. The U.S. ruling families don’t operate primarily on the basis of plots and conspiracies. They don’t need to. They hold state power—the armed forces, the cops, courts, and prisons. They control the schools, the major newspapers, TV and radio stations.

Above all, their economic system exploits workers and farmers here and around the world, wrings unimaginable wealth from our labor, and reproduces those oppressive social relations every day, every week, every month, every year.

However great our justified distrust of the rulers and their government, focusing our attention on alleged conspiracies takes our eyes off these fundamental realities—that the source of society’s ills is the capitalist system, and we must organize a mass revolutionary movement of working people to take political power from the hands of the exploiting class.

What’s more, by diverting attention from our class enemy—for us in the United States, the capitalist rulers in this country, first and foremost—the endless pursuit of conspiracies too often ends up in scapegoating and baiting: Cui bono? Who benefits? Like the widely circulated anti-Semitic libel that Jews employed at the World Trade Center were warned beforehand not to come work on September 11.

Or the scapegoats can be the communists. Or anarchists. Or immigrants who are supposedly taking “our” jobs. Or the Blacks who are taking “our” spots in college and in graduate schools. Or feminists. Or greedy unions.

It’s all grist for the mill of the ultraright.  
 
Capitalist crisis, civil debate
Capitalism is being shaken worldwide by the deepest contraction of production and trade since the Great Depression of the 1930s. And it has just begun.

Millions are being thrown onto the streets, with the hammer blows falling heaviest on workers who are African American or foreign-born. The capitalists are fanning reactionary trade protectionism, America Firstism, and assaults on immigrant workers. Jew-baiting is again on the march, as during the crisis of the 1920s and 1930s.

As the crisis of the capitalist system accelerates, there will be mounting resistance by working people in the United States and around the world.

As we organize to combat the wealthy families who own and control industry, the banks, land, and trade—as well as the Democratic and Republican parties that represent their class interests on the political level—it is essential that within the organizations of the working class and oppressed, we stand guard in defense of our ability to exchange experiences and opinions above all in a civil manner, to put opposing views to the test and draw a balance sheet—as we fight shoulder to shoulder for goals we share in common.

If we are able to do that, then we will truly be drawing on the enduring political contribution of the man who we are here to remember this evening—to remember accurately, and completely.

There is no better moment than in tumultuous times we’ve entered to recall the words Malcolm X spoke at Oxford University in the UK a little more than 44 years ago, when he said that “the young generation of whites, Blacks, browns, whatever else there is,” you’re living in “a time of revolution.” And “I for one will join in with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”  
 
 
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