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Jack
Barnes, “Malcolm X, Black Liberation, & the Road to Workers Power,”
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 2009), 413 pp., $20.
The
deadly shotgun pellets that silenced Malcolm X did nothing to silence
the controversy about the meaning of his life and his political legacy.
Since his assassination in 1965, conflicting and incompatible interpretations
have emerged as a wide layer of supporters—or ostensible
supporters—have laid claim to his heritage.
The
man whose likeness has now appeared on a U.S. postage stamp has been
embraced by some conservatives who turn him into an African-American
Horatio Alger figure. Liberals praise what they see as his evolution
into a moderate integrationist. Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation
of Islam (NOI), has tried to reconcile with the family of his former
mentor. Orthodox Muslims celebrate the Malcolm X who became El-Hajj
Malik El-Shabazz.
Left-wing
organizations in the United States have had to reckon with the
legacy of Malcolm X and work out a position on the relationship between
Black nationalism and socialism. Most organizations essentially proclaim
some version of the old slogan, “Black and white, unite and fight!”
The
Socialist Workers Party (SWP), at least in its best years, developed a
position on Black nationalism and socialist revolution that transcended
the inadequacies of the “unite and fight” strategy. The old SWP’s
programmatic tradition is defended today by Socialist Action (SA).
Essential to this position is the conviction that Black nationalism is
a progressive and potentially revolutionary force that, in its own
right, deserves the support of socialists and the entire working class.
While
no one can deny the need for white and Black working people to
collaborate in the class struggle, the wide chasm that racism has
opened between them must first be overcome. In the meantime, Black
people need to organize themselves and wage their own fight for
freedom.
It
was in this spirit that the SWP supported Malcolm X—printing his
speeches in its newspaper and giving him favorable press coverage before
he even split with the NOI. While the majority of the left in America either ignored or attacked
Malcolm X (sometimes using the same shallow epithets common in the
mainstream media), the SWP was able to grasp his potential and
importance. Moreover, it set up a working relationship with Malcolm X after
the split with the NOI in an attempt to advance the struggle.
The
SWP’s insight was based on analysis and discussions by many
revolutionaries—notably Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and CLR
James—concerning the struggles for self-determination by oppressed
nationalities.
The
SWP showed that although capitalists extract profit from the
exploitation of the entire working class (of which most Blacks are a
part) they are able to extract even higher profits through the special
oppression of minorities such as Blacks. In short, capitalists profit
greatly from racism.
From
this, the SWP concluded that any future American revolution would be a combined
revolution; it would be a struggle by oppressed minorities for basic
democratic rights that have been routinely denied to them, and not just
a working-class struggle against capitalism.
The
SWP in the 1960s likened the struggle for Black liberation in America to the anti-colonial
struggles erupting around the world at the time. They argued that
consistent Black nationalists would clash with the capitalists, opening
up opportunities for working-class alliances that could one day pose a
threat to capitalism itself.
It
was the job of revolutionaries, they maintained, to give unconditional
support to the rights of self-determination, self-organization, and
self-leadership by Blacks in the United States. This could mean working
with Black nationalists in common campaigns, supporting candidates of
an all-Black political party, or defending the right of Blacks to
separate from the ruling nation and form an independent nation.
This
advanced and unique position on the struggle for Black liberation was
once proudly defended by the SWP—and still is by Socialist Action
today. But it seems that with the publication of this book, Jack Barnes
(longtime main leader of the SWP) is signaling a retreat.
While
the book is mostly a collection of Barnes’s writings and speeches
related to Black liberation, it also includes the text of discussions
held between Leon Trotsky and SWP leaders in the 1930s on the same
topic. In addition, there is an interview conducted with Malcolm X by
the Young Socialist (the newspaper of the SWP’s former youth group).
Since
the interview with Malcolm X and the discussions with Leon Trotsky
found in this book (both of which are highly recommended) were already
available, the only new thing this book has to offer is Barnes’s
contribution. Barnes spends the bulk of his space detailing the
struggles by Blacks from Reconstruction all the way up to the times of
Malcolm X. He gives major focus to Malcolm ’s period of radicalization
after he broke with the NOI.
To
the extent that this information is new to some readers, Barnes is
providing an educational service. Along the way, however, Barnes
revises not only the SWP’s historical assessment of Malcolm X but also
its assessment of the nature of Black nationalism.
At
the same time, Barnes finds time to justify the path the SWP took in
expelling a large part of its membership (or as Barnes would put it,
“preserving the proletarian character of the party”) and to also throw
some last parting shots toward at least one of his former comrades.
Barnes
states that he felt it was among his highest editorial priorities since
at least 2006 to reprint the discussions Leon Trotsky had with SWP
leaders in the 1930s on the struggle for Black liberation (which had
previously been published under the title “Leon Trotsky On Black
Nationalism And Self-Determination”) in a new book that “does justice
to their content” (p. 304).
Barnes
writes that “much about how that [earlier] book was prepared and edited
… hinders rather than helps the reader listen to and understand what
Trotsky was saying … it is not a book about Black nationalism” (p. 303,
emphasis in original).
“Black
nationalism,” Barnes declares, “has no political trajectory that
advances the interests of working people whatever their skin color… To
the degree Black nationalism has a class character… it can only be
bourgeois” (p. 318).
But
how can Barnes attack Black nationalism—retreating from the historic
SWP position—when so much of the book is spent praising the most famous
Black nationalist that ever lived, Malcolm X? Barnes solves this
problem by reevaluating the SWP’s position on how far Malcolm X had
evolved politically after his split with the NOI. In that effort, he
tries to put as much distance between Malcolm X and Black nationalism
as possible.
The
position long held by the SWP—laid out in the excellent book, “Last
Year Of Malcolm X: Evolution of a Revolutionary,” by George
Breitman—was that Malcolm was quickly evolving away from a basic or
“pure-and-simple” Black nationalism to an anti-capitalist and
revolutionary point of view, but that he was still a Black nationalist
in many significant ways. That is not meant to discredit or devalue
Malcolm X’s tremendous legacy in any way, only to reiterate that
Malcolm X’s primary concern up until his assassination was the
condition of Black people—not necessarily the working class as a whole.
Without
knowing that Barnes had been instrumental in having George Breitman
expelled from the SWP in 1984, the reader might be surprised at the
confrontational and dishonest way in which Barnes treats Breitman in
this book. According to Barnes, Breitman concluded that “right up until
his assassination, Malcolm considered the revolutionary transformation
of society in the United States (and the world) to be the
‘white man’s problem’” (p. 333). But any reader who checks Breitman’s
book will clearly see that Breitman was referring to the “pure-and-simple”
variety of Black nationalists who Malcolm had moved beyond in the last
year of his life.
Barnes
later writes mockingly, “Did Breitman think proletarian revolutionaries
who were Black made an error in joining the SWP?” None of Breitman’s
work over his entire life suggests that he held such a belief, but
Barnes is apparently very comfortable bashing Breitman to his heart’s
content.
On
a more substantial level, Barnes lays heavy criticism on Breitman’s
contention that Malcolm X was “on the way to a synthesis of Black
nationalism and socialism that would be fitting for the American scene
and acceptable to the masses in the Black ghetto,” and that Malcolm X
was “Black nationalist plus revolutionary.” Barnes claims instead that
Malcolm was on the way to “something more dialectical, inclusive,
internationalist, and socialist” (p. 336). For Barnes, the new
classification for Malcolm X is “revolutionary leader of the working
class” (p. 59).
Readers
should not, however, get caught up in the debate over semantics that
Barnes launches into. It is better to focus on the contending
ideas put forward here. The old SWP position—and the position
held by Socialist Action today—on Black nationalism is an affirmation
of revolutionary socialists’ support for the rights to
self-determination of oppressed minorities.
This
position is still very relevant as the dual oppression of Black people
in this country has not ended (and will not end until capitalism is
overthrown). For the working class to take power, though, it will have
to be united across the lines of race and nationality. The solidarity
necessary to achieve that unity can only come about by supporting
oppressed minorities in their struggle for democratic rights, and
recognizing and respecting the nationalism of the oppressed as a
progressive and potentially revolutionary force.
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