The following concluding section of the introduction to Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, was written Oct. 4, 2009. It was read by Mary-Alice Waters as part of her remarks at the March 22 meeting celebrating Omari Musa’s life building the SWP. Copyright © 2009 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
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 and campaigned to build 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.