Much has been written about Malcolm X in recent months, marking 100 years since his birth on May 19, 1925, and 60 years since his assassination. A lot of it falsely describes Malcolm as an anti-white Black supremacist, or conversely as converging politically with Martin Luther King and his commitment to reform capitalism.
The simple fact is Malcolm X was a revolutionary leader of the working class in the U.S. His political legacy is marked by his political evolution in the last year of his life after breaking from the Nation of Islam in March 1964. This includes his international trips abroad and conclusions he was drawing on the need to build a revolutionary movement of all those who wanted to fight to end capitalist oppression and exploitation worldwide. This underlies his growing attraction to the Socialist Workers Party.
This course was summed up in a conversation Jan Carew — a black Guyanese who joined Malcolm on his trips to Africa, England and the Caribbean — had with Malcolm a few weeks before his assassination. (See related article.)
In January 1965, Jack Barnes conducted an interview with Malcolm for the Young Socialist magazine. Barnes asked him, “How do you define Black nationalism, with which you have been identified?”
Malcolm said that during his trip to Africa in the spring of 1964 he met a leader of the revolution against French colonial rule in Algeria, that country’s ambassador to Ghana, who “was a white man.” The Algerian revolutionary asked Malcolm, where does “Black nationalism” leave me? That experience, Malcolm said, “showed me where I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the systems of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary.” He added, “And if you notice, I haven’t been using the expression for several months.”
Barnes asked Malcolm what his “opinion of the worldwide struggle now going on between capitalism and socialism” was. Malcolm responded, “It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before [capitalism] will collapse completely.”
Malcolm’s experiences had led him to see capitalism as the central enemy to oppressed people everywhere.
Malcolm responded with enthusiasm to Barnes’ proposal that the Young Socialist Alliance organize a national campus tour for him. He offered to provide Barnes with a list of young revolutionaries, people he called “contacts,” he had met in Africa and Europe during his recent trips there.
Malcolm’s break from the Nation of Islam was not just a political break, but a class break, from nationalism toward a convergence with communism. “While he would not have called it that at the time,” Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote in Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, Malcolm “deepened his political orientation to the working class, toward the revolutionary proletarian movement on a world scale. He did not fear to go where the political logic of uncompromising struggle against oppression and exploitation took him, regardless of earlier notions and beliefs.”
Inspired by Cuban Revolution
Malcolm was also inspired by the internationalist example of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro. When Castro came to New York in September 1960 to speak for the first time before the United Nations General Assembly, numerous mid-Manhattan hotels refused to give accommodations to the Cuban delegation. Malcolm arranged for them to stay at Hotel Theresa in Harlem, and he welcomed Castro there as thousands of Harlem residents eager to learn more about Cuba’s revolution gathered outside the hotel.
“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. In 1964 and 1965 — as Malcolm became more and more convinced of the need for a course to advance the “global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter” — his political attraction to the Cuban Revolution grew.
Malcolm spoke at the Militant Labor Forum hosted by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance three times between April 1964 and January 1965. Major excerpts from these talks are reprinted in Malcolm X Speaks, published by Pathfinder Press.
At the second forum, James Shabazz, one of Malcolm’s closest associates, was listed as the speaker. But upon learning about the meeting, Malcolm, who had just returned from Africa, requested to be the speaker. “I couldn’t resist the opportunity to come,” he said.
Malcolm spoke at a forum again in January. He said, “It’s the third time that 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.” He added, “The Militant newspaper is one of the best in New York City. In fact, it is one of the best anywhere you go today.”
Malcolm was looking forward to joining with the SWP in the fight for a thoroughgoing revolution in the U.S. when he was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965.