Vol. 73/No. 40      October 19, 2009

The photos in the feature spread on pages 4, 5, and 8 are taken from the nearly 80 pages of pictures that illustrate the new book, whose table of contents appears on page 3.

Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES  
This is a book about the dictatorship of capital and the road to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

A book about the last century and a half of class struggle in the United States—from the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction to today—and the unimpeachable evidence it offers that workers who are Black will comprise a disproportionately weighty part of the ranks and leadership of the mass social movement that will make a proletarian revolution.

It is a book about why this revolutionary conquest of state power by a politically class-conscious and organized vanguard of the working class—millions strong—is necessary. About why that new state power provides working people the mightiest weapon possible to wage the ongoing battle to end Black oppression and every form of exploitation and human degradation inherited from millennia of class-divided society. And how participation in that struggle itself changes them to the point they are politically capable of carrying that battle through to the end.

This is a book about the last year of Malcolm X’s life. About how he became the face and the authentic voice of the forces of the coming American revolution.
 

“Dictatorship of capital? Dictatorship of the proletariat? What do these terms have to do with our world today?” That's the refrain working people in the United States and most of the rest of the world hear over and over again in schools and daily papers, and from TV and radio “commentators.” Above all, we hear it voiced by every middle-class political current—“socialist,” “green,” or whatever—claiming to speak and act in the interests of the oppressed and exploited.

Above the din, the answer remains: It's not “our” world. And which class will rule is the question that ultimately matters for toilers everywhere—now more than ever.

The depression and social crisis that have deepened and spread worldwide over the last year have torn yet another veil from the face of capitalism, from the consequences of bourgeois rule for working people. The fact that the ruling families of the United States and other capitalist countries dictate, and will continue to dictate, the use of whatever degree of state power is necessary to defend and advance their own class interests is increasingly evident. As is the fact that they do so, and will continue to do so, regardless of the toll on many hundreds of millions the world over, the vast majority of humanity.

Since early 2008, banks and financial institutions such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Citigroup, General Electric, General Motors (yes, GE and GM!), and scores of others have been deemed “too big to fail” by the ruling-class families and their government. Literally trillions of dollars in federal outlays and “guarantees” have been marshaled—conjured from their printing presses outright, in fact—in order to save these bastions of finance capital, or more accurately, to save their major bondholders, which is another way of describing the U.S. ruling class. They are determined to ensure that their enormous accumulation of interest-bearing wealth, produced by working people over centuries, remains secure.

Top partners and executives of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and other Wall Street houses are cycled back and forth to policy-making posts at the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and other government and quasi-government agencies (with a university stint sometimes wedged in between), like cards dealt by a mechanic at a poker table. The faces “managing” the financial crisis under the recent Republican White House resurface in the current Democratic administration, with or without new hats, and often with résumés stretching back to previous presidencies under both capitalist parties.

Those not “too big to fail” under the rule of capital are obvious as well. They include the rapidly expanding millions of workers being thrown out of jobs due to plant shutdowns, “cost-cutting” layoffs, “furloughs,” “no-match” letters, deportations, and farm foreclosures. They include shuttered mom-and-pop stores from the largest cities to the smallest towns. They include employed working people whose wages, which already buy less than they did forty years ago, have fallen even more sharply the last twelve months. They include those, insured and uninsured, forced into bankruptcy by catastrophic medical expenses. They include those evicted from houses as a result of mounting bank foreclosures, as well as millions more forced from apartments on which they are no longer able to pay rent. These “new homeless,” as they’re called in the bourgeois media, are hidden from view, as they more and more often find themselves and their families packed together with others in a single residence.

“We serve and protect”—that promise is displayed on squad cars across the United States from which cops harass and brutalize workers day in and day out, disproportionately singling out African-Americans, Latinos, and immigrants as targets. For working people, those words will always be a contemptible lie. But for the ruling class and privileged middle layers, they are a truthful summary of the function of the U.S. state apparatus—the armed forces; the multitude of local, state, federal, and military cop and spy agencies; the courts, bail-bond sharks, and probation and parole officers; the over-stuffed jails and prisons, with their evermore frequent, dehumanizing lockdowns and gang-controlled life, organized by those who run the “penal system” and overseen by thuggish prison guards (a true microcosm of bourgeois social relations). The U.S. state is the largest repressive apparatus in world history, with the highest—and increasing—incarceration rate of any country on earth.

These institutions of class rule, of bourgeois “law and order,” do brutally serve and protect the property, profits, and assumed prerogatives of the U.S. capitalist class—from the streets, factories, fields, mines, border crossings, and prisons across the United States, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and beyond.

Working people can and will wrest concessions from the ruling class in the course of sharpening struggles against the crisis-fueled assaults on our jobs, living conditions, and elementary human dignity, on our political liberties and right to unionize, and against the march toward increased military spending and bloodier wars abroad. But these concessions cannot alter the laws underlying the operations of the capitalist system itself or forestall its further devastation of our lives and livelihoods. They cannot end the dictatorship of capital.

Only the conquest, and exercise, of state power by the working class and expropriation of finance capital can lay the foundations for a world based not on exploitation, violence, racial discrimination, class-based pecking orders, and dog-eat-dog competition, but on solidarity among working people that encourages the creativity and recognition of the worth of every individual, regardless of sex, national origin, or skin color.

A socialist world.
 

Over the past half century, two developments above all have transformed revolutionary prospects for working people in the United States. They have had a deep impact on the capacity and effectiveness, the proletarian character, of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance.

One is the conquest of power in 1959 by the workers and farmers of Cuba. That triumph not only opened the road to socialist revolution in the Americas. It marked a renewal in action of the proletarian internationalist course first pointed to by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels more than a century earlier and then carried out in life by workers and peasants in Russia in 1917 under the leadership of V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party.

The other is the post-World War II rise of the popular struggle for Black liberation in the United States, from which Malcolm X, its outstanding single leader, emerged. Even in the early 1960s, while Malcolm was still the best-known spokesman for the Nation of Islam, leaders of the Socialist Workers Party recognized in his words and deeds an uncompromising leader of unusual caliber. The Nation itself was a bourgeois-nationalist, religious organization, as it remains today. As Malcolm pointed out after his public break from the Nation in March 1964, it “didn't take part in politics” and its hierarchy, led by Elijah Muhammad, was “motivated mainly by protecting its own self-interests.”

But Malcolm's voice was increasingly that of a revolutionary leader of the working class. And during the last year of his life, the political clarity of his words advanced with blinding speed.

In January 1965, less than a year after his split from the Nation, Malcolm told a television interviewer, “I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation.

“I believe that there will be that kind of clash,” Malcolm said, “but I don't think that it will be based upon the color of the skin, as Elijah Muhammad had taught it.”

Speaking on behalf of the Young Socialist Alliance to a March 1965 New York City memorial meeting a few weeks after Malcolm's assassination, I pointed out how relentlessly Malcolm had pressed beyond his origins in the Nation of Islam to emerge in world politics as the outstanding “leader of the struggle for Black liberation” in the United States. “To his people he first and foremost belongs.” At the same time, to young people of all backgrounds attracted to the working class and proletarian politics, in this country and around the world, Malcolm X had become “the face and the authentic voice of the forces of the coming American socialist revolution. He spoke the truth to our generation of revolutionists… . Malcolm challenged American capitalism from right inside. He was living proof for our generation of revolutionists that it can and will happen here.”

Almost half a century later, I have nothing to change in that assessment, and I can still recognize the young socialist who made it. But I am aware that no one would ever recognize this Malcolm X, the living Malcolm we knew—the Malcolm who kept fighting and growing to the last day of his life—if their knowledge of his political course came solely from The Autobiography of Malcolm X prepared by journalist Alex Haley, or from the 1992 movie Malcolm X directed by Spike Lee. Together those are the main sources of “information” about Malcolm today, having been read or viewed, in multiple languages, by literally tens of millions the world over. Both, however, freeze Malcolm’s political trajectory in April 1964 when he made the hajj to Mecca, only a month after his public break with the Nation of Islam. Everything after that pilgrimage gets short shrift in both autobiography and film. But Malcolm’s experiences and the political conclusions he drew didn’t stop there. In fact, he had barely begun.

This misrepresentation of Malcolm X is also what readers discover in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, the 1995 memoir by Barack Obama, today the president of the United States. Writing in preparation for launching his electoral career with a race the next year for a seat in the Illinois State Senate, he said that as a teenager he had looked for guidance to works by a number of well-known authors who were Black, including James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright. And each of them, in different ways, ended up “in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.” (In all but the first of these cases, the devil was Stalinism. But that has always been finessed by Hyde Park politicians and their progressive supporters or editors.)

Only the Autobiography of Malcolm X initially “seemed to offer something different,” a future U.S. president said. Yet even that turned out to be a pipe dream, he concludes. “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.”

If that indeed summed up Malcolm’s legacy and example, then, yes, it would be a hope for “a distant future, in a far-off land.”

But had this aspiring officeholder even bothered to read any of Malcolm’s words from the last ten months of his life? At least eight books and pamphlets of Malcolm’s speeches and writings were in print in English by that time (as well as one in Spanish), containing some sixty talks, interviews, and letters from those final months. Yet for those of many political persuasions, it’s advantageous to act as if that record of Malcolm’s emerging revolutionary convictions simply doesn’t exist. As if those words were never spoken. As if Malcolm did not die because of them.
 

In June 2009, almost fifteen years after sending his story of race to press, Barack Obama spoke on a related theme in quite a different capacity, as chief executive and commander-in-chief of the world's dominant imperialist power. During a state visit to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, he addressed students and others at Cairo University, giving voice to the self-serving legends of the upper middle-class layers of all skin colors in the United States from which he ascended to the White House. Legends Malcolm spent his political lifetime exposing and inoculating against, as he fought to awaken African-Americans and others for whom he spoke not to their oppression but to their own self-worth.

“For centuries,” the new president said in Cairo, “black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding.”

Was the institutionalized violence of the slave trade and chattel servitude ended, in the words of the U.S. president, by “peaceful and determined insistence”? Didn't the “ideals at the center of America's founding” enshrine chattel slavery in the constitution of the republic itself?

Was the “peculiar institution” ended without slave ship mutinies and fearless acts of individual and collective defiance by Africans during the notorious cross-Atlantic “middle passage”?

Without the rebellions led by Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and hundreds of others, which had to be drowned in blood by the slaveholders and their government in order to be put down?

Without the hundreds of armed Underground Railroad “conductors” like Harriet Tubman?

Without the U.S. Civil War with the greatest loss of life of any war in U.S. history, a revolutionary war that by 1865 had enlisted some 200,000 Black troops in the Union cause?

Without the might of the Union Army as well as local militias standing behind the policies of post-Civil War state governments of Radical Reconstruction across the South—until 1877 when the ascendant U.S. bourgeoisie betrayed the Second American Revolution and withdrew the army, leading to the bloody crushing of those popular regimes?

Was Jim Crow segregation across the U.S. South imposed without violence? Was it brought down by love and forgiveness? Or was the mass, proletarian-led movement for Black rights in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s made possible only by the political and physical discipline and courage of millions (including within the imperialist armed forces), and by the determination of a conscious vanguard to organize to defend their communities against night-riding terror, by any means necessary?

Didn’t the 1960s urban rebellions by workers who are Black in Harlem, Watts, Chicago, Newark, Detroit, and other U.S. cities put the ruling class on notice that millions among this oppressed and superexploited section of the working class would not be satisfied simply by laws once again formally recognizing the “full and equal rights” cited by the U.S. president in Cairo? Weren’t the militants and martyrs of the Attica rebellion and other prison uprisings using the only means left to them to bring to the world’s attention the horrors of America’s penitentiaries? Hasn’t capitalism’s institutionalized racist brutality and class inequality long outlasted the conquests registered by the Black rights struggle of the mid-twentieth century?

Didn’t a broad vanguard of African-Americans see their struggles as an integral part of the victorious post-World War II national liberation movements that swept across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and act accordingly? Didn’t all this push back racism, raise self-confidence among African-Americans, and lay the basis for greater unity in struggle by workers who are Black, white, and of other racial or national backgrounds?

The historical record gives ample evidence that even the most “democratic” bourgeois state is at bottom a massive and all-pervasive apparatus of violence, dedicated to preserving capitalist rule. Since the end of World War II alone, U.S. imperialism’s troops, special forces, “intelligence” operatives, paid mercenaries, and weapons (“hi-tech” and low) have been responsible for the slaughter and maiming of millions of workers and peasants, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, from Iran and Korea to Cuba, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, from Guatemala to Angola and Yugoslavia.

All the self-serving bourgeois homilies about the “ideals at the center of America’s founding” notwithstanding, history demonstrates hundreds of times over that it is not those who struggle against exploitation and oppression who are the source of violence in the world. It is the dictatorship of capital—merchant, industrial, banking, and, today, finance capital.

The determination and capacity of working people to effectively defend ourselves along the line of march toward a revolutionary struggle for power will decide whether there can be a peaceful and productive future for humankind.
 

Once Malcolm X had freed himself in early 1964 from the political fetters of the Nation of Islam, he faced the challenge confronting all small revolutionary organizations in the working class. How to join with others who don't share your program and strategy in order to fight for common goals, for immediate demands, for space to do politics? How, as you engage in political work, as you untiringly propagandize, do you find those with whom your developing positions converge? How to keep advancing along a revolutionary course in less than revolutionary times, while never retreating into the comfortable, self-absorbed existence of a sect?

The Nation of Islam was not a political organization. It had no internal discussion and decision-making structure that enabled a leadership to determine a political course. The Nation functioned on the basis of “revelation” and decree. No fight to clarify political perspectives was possible. As a result, Malcolm—whose standing in the Nation had been second only to Elijah Muhammad, and in the true regard he enjoyed among its members second to none—brought few with him from the organization when the split came. While those who joined Malcolm were disciplined cadres, it was not yet a political discipline. It was a discipline still grounded in individual moral qualities, not in political convictions and habits forged, tempered, and internalized over time in the course of mass work and class-struggle action.

The task confronting Malcolm X during the final months of his life was to build a political cadre. He was starting from scratch. It would take time. And as Malcolm knew from the outset, time was something that forces in and around the Nation, as well as federal and local police agencies, here and abroad, were determined to deny him.
 

Malcolm put great store in meeting and collaborating with other revolutionaries, at home as well as around the world. He held in high esteem fighters who at great sacrifice had done battle to overturn colonial regimes across Africa and Asia. He was particularly drawn to the revolutionary leadership of the secular government of Algeria, many of whom, as Malcolm pointed out, were “white,” and few of whom continued to practice the Islamic faith. Led by Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria's workers and peasants government, unlike other newly independent nations in Africa and the Middle East, was organizing working people to challenge not only the power and prerogatives of their former French colonizers, but of Algeria's homegrown landlords and capitalists as well.

Malcolm was increasingly influenced by the internationalist example of the Cuban Revolution, too. He had expressed solidarity with and admiration of that revolution and its leadership since its opening years, demonstratively welcoming Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara to Harlem. “The Cuban Revolution—that’s a revolution. They overturned the system,” Malcolm told an overwhelmingly Black audience in Detroit in November 1963, in his last major talk as a Nation of Islam leader. But in 1964 and early 1965—as Malcolm saw more clearly the need to advance the “global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter”—his political attraction to the Cuban Revolution grew.

In January 1965, when Malcolm addressed a public meeting hosted by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance in New York City, he opened his remarks by saying, “It's the third time I've had the opportunity to be a guest of the Militant Labor Forum. I always feel that it is an honor and every time that they open the door for me to do so, I will be right here.” Malcolm was a man of his word. He meant “every time.”

Malcolm relished doing things together with fellow revolutionaries. Once there had been enough time and experience for mutual confidence to develop, Malcolm was eager to exchange hard-won lessons about how to do more. He wanted to share information with other revolutionaries about “contacts,” as he called them—individuals, especially young people, whom each of us had gotten to know in the course of political work here in the United States, in Africa, or elsewhere.

At the same time, Malcolm was neither naïve nor unknowledgeable about the sharply conflicting political courses of different organizations in the working-class movement calling themselves Marxists or communists, including, in the early and mid-1960s, the Communist Party USA, the Progressive Labor Party, and the Socialist Workers Party. In New York in particular, it was impossible to function in the Black movement at the time without knowing members and supporters of these parties. The Communist Party USA alone had had thousands of African-American members in Harlem as recently as the thirties and early forties.

Malcolm knew full well that the CPUSA and its sister organizations throughout the international Stalinist movement reviled him for his uncompromising opposition to the political course of leaders of civil rights organizations who sought to reform “the system of exploitation” in the United States and worldwide, rather than—as Malcolm, with increasing clarity, aimed to do—organize a revolutionary movement to overturn it.

Malcolm opposed both imperialist political parties in the United States. His refusal to call for a vote for incumbent Democrat Lyndon Johnson against Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election—a position he held in common with the Socialist Workers Party and virtually no other organization in the workers movement in the United States—was particularly galling to Communist Party leaders. For some three decades, support to the Democratic Party and its candidates had been the lodestar of the CP’s class-collaborationist course in U.S. politics.

A few weeks after the November 1964 elections, Malcolm told participants in a rally in Paris, France, that “the shrewd capitalists, the shrewd imperialists” in the United States “had the whole world—including people who call themselves Marxists—hoping that Johnson would beat Goldwater… . Those who claim to be enemies of the system were on their hands and knees waiting for Johnson to get elected—because he is supposed to be a man of peace,” Malcolm said. “And at that moment he had troops invading the Congo and South Vietnam!”

A few months later, in early February 1965, authorities at the Paris airport barred Malcolm from reentering France to participate in another gathering he had been invited to speak to there. Later that month, at a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity in Harlem, Malcolm explained that even before the French government had denied him entry, the Communist Party there had made sure that the largest trade union federation in France not only refused to rent its meeting hall to organizers of the Paris event for Malcolm, but also “exercised its influence to prevent them from getting” another location they had attempted to secure.
 

“What the Bolshevik Revolution Taught Us,” the third section of this book, includes the transcripts of discussions in 1933 and 1939 on the Black liberation struggle in the United States with Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. Those discussions appear here under the title, “The National Question and the Road to the Proletarian Dictatorship in the United States”—an accurate summary of their content, as opposed to “Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination,” the title of the book in which the transcripts have been available since 1967.

In those discussions, Trotsky urged the Socialist Workers Party leadership to turn the party toward deeper and broader involvement in the struggle for Black freedom along the line of march of the revolutionary fight for power in the United States. The party “cannot postpone this extremely important question any longer,” Trotsky had written to SWP leader James P. Cannon in 1939 during Trotsky's several days of discussions with party members.

Unless the SWP meets this political challenge, Trotsky said during those discussions, “our party cannot develop—it will degenerate… . It is a question of the vitality of the party. It is a question of whether the party is to be transformed into a sect or if it is capable of finding its way to the most oppressed part of the working class.”

This book is a commitment and a weapon in continuing to rise to that challenge today and tomorrow.
 

Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power could never have come into being without the leadership collaboration over nearly half a century of proletarian cadres of the Socialist Workers Party who are Black.

The book is a product of the disciplined efforts of these and other SWP cadres, including the generations who have been leading the work since the mid-1970s to build a party that is working class in composition as well as program and action. Who have been in the front ranks standing off racist thugs assaulting school buses, demonstrations, and picket lines. Who carry out communist political activity in the industrial working class and unions. Who join in strikes, union organizing drives, and shop-floor skirmishes small and large. Who have organized inside the imperialist armed forces against racism and denial of their rights as citizen soldiers. Who take to the streets with others to protest cop brutality, to demand legalization for immigrant workers, to say no to the death penalty, and to champion the right of women to choose abortion. Who have participated in the National Black Independent Political Party and other organizations seeking to advance Black rights along proletarian lines. Who work to educate about and mobilize opposition to the imperialist policies of the U.S. government and its never-ending march toward widening militarization and spreading wars.

What readers will find in these pages is the fruit of decades of political activity by communist workers and youth campaigning with the Militant newsweekly and other publications on street corners, at plant gates, to students, on strike picket lines, and at social protest actions and meetings. By proletarian cadres who have organized and participated in communist leadership schools, helping to educate themselves and others about the lessons of more than 150 years of revolutionary struggle by working people. By those who have run as Socialist Workers Party candidates for posts from local office to president of the United States, and have done so in opposition to nominees—whatever their skin color—of the Democratic, Republican, and other bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties.

By cadres who have never tired of getting in the face of race-baiters, red-baiters, and outright bigots and demagogues of every stripe who have sought to deny that workers, farmers, and young people who are Black—and proud to be Black—can and will become communists along the same road and on the same political basis as anyone else.

Working together with these comrades—through many crises and conjunctures, including the global capitalist panic still in its early stages today—has taught me much of what readers will discover in these pages. Putting these lessons down on paper is one of my obligations, and my name appears as author. But I could not have come to these conclusions in any other way than as part of a tested and disciplined proletarian cadre, including these men and women of African origin, who, in their lives and activity, remain true to their revolutionary convictions to this day.

It is to them that Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power is dedicated.

New York City
October 4, 2009
 
 
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