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Vol. 79/No. 7      March 2, 2015

 
(Books of the Month column)
Malcolm X became the voice
of coming revolution in US

As part of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, we are reprinting excerpts from the introduction to Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. The Spanish version is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for February. Malcolm X was one of the outstanding revolutionary leaders of the 20th century. His political legacy and example, especially in the last year of his life, has been misrepresented, Barnes points out. Malcolm X’s emerging revolutionary convictions are available to all who are interested in eight books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder Press, containing some 60 talks, interviews and letters from his final months. 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. …

❖

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 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.  
 
 
 
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