Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Markin comment:
Sometimes it is possible to learn a thing or two in politics, especially if you are not hidebound to ossified “truth”. The truth is that we of the left should have been supporting, holding our noses if necessary, the Soviet Union’s efforts back in 1979 to militarily assist the PDPA government. That reflexive anti-Sovietism came back to haunt us in more than one way. The additional lesson to be learned the enemy (mujahedeen) of your enemy (Soviet Union for the American government and those who supported its aid to the rebels) is not always your friend. And to put paid to that point –Obama –Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops and Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
************
Workers Vanguard No. 998
16 March 2012
U.S./NATO Troops Out Now!-Afghanistan: Women Under Imperialist Occupation
We Said: Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!
On March 6, two days before International Women’s Day, Washington’s Afghan puppet president Hamid Karzai announced that he had approved a new “code of conduct” issued by the Ulema Council of senior Muslim clerics. This edict legally confines women to their homes, barring them from going out without a male guardian or mingling with men in schools, offices or markets. It also officially condones wife-beating. “Men are fundamental and women are secondary,” said the statement, which Karzai saluted as “the sharia law of all Muslims and all Afghans.”
Throughout the past ten years of U.S. occupation, Afghanistan has been a living hell for women. To sell their predatory war in retribution for the September 11 attacks, the U.S. and its NATO allies pointed to the crimes against women under the then-ruling Taliban, pledging that an American-led takeover would bring liberation. After U.S. forces seized control of the country in 2002, George W. Bush proclaimed that “today, women are free.” In reality, the U.S. rulers merely handed power to another wing of the anti-woman fundamentalist forces that they had backed against the Soviet Union and the leftist regime of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) from the late 1970s to the early ’90s.
In Afghanistan today, women are forced to wear the suffocating head-to-toe burqa almost everywhere. The sight of women begging for money to feed their starving families is commonplace on the streets of Kabul, the capital city. To survive or pay off debts, families sell their daughters in marriage or to the many brothels servicing U.S. troops and contractors. More than half of all girls are forced into marriage before the age of 16.
There is a saying in Afghanistan that a woman belongs either to her husband’s house or to her grave. Half of the inmates at the Badam Bagh women’s prison in Kabul have been imprisoned for years for refusing to marry or for fleeing abusive husbands. Returned runaways are often shot or stabbed by family members in “honor killings.” Other women are jailed for being victims of rape or assault. For a woman in Afghanistan, any sex outside marriage is considered a crime—including when she is raped. The rapist, meanwhile, almost always goes unpunished.
Barely a quarter of Afghan girls go to school. Religious fanatics attack those who do, including by spraying acid in their faces, as happened at a school in Kandahar in 2008. The following year, the education ministry reported that nearly 500 schools, mostly schools for girls, had been destroyed, damaged or forced to close. Between March and October 2010, at least 126 students and teachers were killed. The literacy rate for women is 12 percent, while their average life expectancy is 44, some 24 years below the world average. To escape their unbearable lives, many women turn to suicide. Even according to official Afghan statistics, some 2,300 women and girls kill themselves every year—more than six each day. The most common method is self-immolation with cooking oil.
The atrocities endured by Afghan women are not in the main the actions of rogue elements breaking the law. In 2004, the U.S. overseers brokered a constitution that enshrined Islamic sharia law. Despite the token presence of women in the constituent assembly and a claim that women have “equal rights,” the constitution states that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” In 2006, Karzai’s cabinet reestablished the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was notorious under the Taliban for its brutal imposition of sharia, including stoning to death women who defied its edicts.
Calling Afghanistan “the good war,” in 2009 the Obama administration reinforced the U.S. occupation with another 30,000 troops. The imperialist troops, full of racist contempt, continue to massacre untold numbers of civilians. American soldiers have murdered Afghans for sport, cut off their fingers as trophies and urinated on their dead bodies. Marine snipers have posed for photos with a flag bearing the Nazi SS insignia. Soldiers regularly stage night raids in which they go after suspected opponents of the Afghan regime at private homes and shoot dead whoever opens the door. The explosion of anger that followed the revelation that the U.S. military had burned copies of the Koran last month shows the depth of resentment that has built up among the Afghan peoples.
In the latest atrocity, a U.S. Army staff sergeant went door-to-door in a village in southern Afghanistan overnight on March 11, gunning down at least 16 civilians, including nine children. This outrage provoked an immediate condemnation from the Karzai government and vows for vengeance from the Taliban, further complicating the U.S. rulers’ efforts to extricate themselves from the Afghanistan quagmire.
After repeated instances of Afghan forces turning their guns on American soldiers, the Obama administration announced last month that it was moving up the timetable for ending U.S. troops’ “combat role” to some time next year and withdrawing them in 2014. The U.S. is looking to open negotiations with the Taliban, which continues to control large parts of the country, in order to somehow cobble together a “political solution” that would create a modicum of stability after U.S. troops are withdrawn. Karzai’s approval of the clerics’ woman-hating “code of conduct” is widely seen to be an overture to the Taliban on the part of his regime.
As Marxists, our starting point in opposing the U.S. occupation is proletarian class opposition to America’s capitalist rulers and their imperialist predations. In the lead-up to the 2001 invasion, we called for the military defense of Afghanistan against the U.S. and allied forces without giving any support to the Taliban reactionaries. In the face of the ongoing occupation, we emphasize that every blow struck against the blood-soaked U.S. ruling class is a blow against the chief enemy of working people and the oppressed around the world. All U.S./NATO troops out of Afghanistan now!
Afghanistan: Front Line of the Anti-Soviet War Drive
In their drive for world domination, the U.S. imperialists have never had any compunction about siding with the most retrograde social forces. It is impossible to comprehend the current plight of Afghan women without examining Washington’s role in backing the forces of Islamic reaction against the Soviet Union and its PDPA allies starting in 1978.
Many of the modernizing left nationalists who led the PDPA were educated and trained in the Soviet Union, which they rightly saw as a source of social progress. The Soviet Union was a workers state that embodied key social gains of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, centrally a planned economy and collectivized property, despite its subsequent degeneration under a nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy. Progressive-minded activists in Afghanistan in the 1970s looked at the example of Soviet Central Asia, just across the border, which was a modern society where women went unveiled, were educated and participated in public life and where everyone had access to free education and health care.
On coming to power in April 1978, the PDPA began to implement serious reforms favoring women and poor peasants, such as redistributing the land, lowering the bride price, educating women and freeing them from the burqa. In the context of this cruelly backward country, which had far more mullahs than industrial workers, such reforms had an explosive impact. They fueled a revolt by reactionary traditionalists who sought to maintain the old society, including its all-encompassing degradation of women. When the Muslim insurgency threatened the PDPA’s hold on power, the government made repeated requests for Soviet assistance, until the Soviets finally dispatched tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan in December 1979.
This was the only war in modern history fought centrally over women’s rights. From the start, the U.S. imperialists, determined to strike a blow against the Soviet Union, took the side of benighted reaction. Democratic president Jimmy Carter and his successor, Republican Ronald Reagan, backed the mujahedin holy warriors to the hilt in the biggest covert CIA operation in history. Billions of dollars in aid went to an array of Islamist groups based in Peshawar, Pakistan, and to that country’s ISI intelligence service. The CIA used the ISI and the Egyptian and Saudi intelligence services to create, train, finance and arm a network of 70,000 Islamists (including Osama bin Laden) from more than 50 countries to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, giving a huge boost to Muslim fundamentalist movements the world over.
We wrote at the time of the Soviet intervention: “For revolutionary socialists there is nothing tricky, nothing ambiguous about the war in Afghanistan. The Soviet Army and its left-nationalist allies are fighting an anti-communist, anti-democratic mélange of landlords, money lenders, tribal chiefs and mullahs committed to mass illiteracy.... The gut-level response of every radical leftist should be fullest solidarity with the Soviet Red Army” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 29, Summer 1980). The threat of a CIA-backed Islamic takeover on the USSR’s southern flank posed directly the need for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the extended Soviet presence opened the possibility of social liberation for the Afghan masses, particularly women. We proclaimed: Hail Red Army! Extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!
In contrast, the bulk of the left internationally, with few exceptions, eagerly joined the imperialist chorus against the Soviet Union and whitewashed the mujahedin. The International Socialist Organization and its then ally in Britain, Tony Cliff’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP), stood foursquare with the imperialists. The 12 January 1980 issue of the SWP’s Socialist Worker blared, “Troops Out of Afghanistan!” In 1981, the then fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat of Ernest Mandel called for “stopping Soviet occupation in Afghanistan.” In howling with the imperialist wolves against the Soviet intervention, these groups made common cause with the worst enemies of the rights of women and all the oppressed.
Huge Gains for Afghan Women Under Soviet Presence
Freeing Afghan women from purdah (seclusion) and giving land to the peasants required ending the domination of the mullahs and tribal khans and overturning the country’s entire social structure. But the popular base of support for such moves within Afghanistan was very narrow. The country utterly lacked a proletariat with any social weight. Its tiny manufacturing workforce of some 35,000 was dwarfed by the quarter million Islamic clerics. Those elements in the cities aspiring to progress were surrounded by a sea of nomadic herdsmen and landless peasants beholden to the khans and the landlords. Thus, the presence of the Red Army, together with substantial Soviet aid, was essential to social progress.
Afghan women made unprecedented gains under the Soviet umbrella. While the 1964 constitution had declared women equal to men, equality largely remained on paper except for a few women in the upper strata of urban society. A thin layer of women had taken off the burqa and obtained education and employment outside the home, but even in Kabul, the main urban center, half of all women still wore the full veil in the late 1970s. Throughout the country, 98 percent of women were totally illiterate. In the 1980s, in contrast, there were vast opportunities for women to escape at least the strictest restraints of purdah. Many thousands became university students, workers, professionals and leftist activists.
Suraya Parlika, a founder of the PDPA-affiliated Democratic Women’s Organization, recounted some of these accomplishments in the 2007 documentary Afghan Women: A History of Struggle: “Women worked very hard to get their rights. They formed childcare centers in their workplaces to make it easier for women to work. Maternity leave was extended to three months from six weeks and they were still getting their salary.” The Afghan government also began mass literacy campaigns and provided free medical care.
By the late 1980s, women made up 40 percent of the country’s doctors (women doctors were in high demand, especially in rural areas, where women were still strictly secluded and barred from consulting male doctors). Sixty percent of the instructors at Kabul University and 65 percent of the student body were women. Family courts, in some cases presided over by female judges, had replaced the mullahs’ sharia courts. The number of working women increased 50-fold. By 1987, there were an estimated 245,000 women working in fields ranging from construction, printing and food processing to radio and TV journalism and especially teaching, where they made up 70 percent of the workforce.
In a 1994 PhD thesis, Educated Afghan Women in Search of Their Identities, the Afghan-born academic Sharifa Sharif reported on her 1987 interviews with 30 women workers in Kabul, undertaken as part of a survey for the United Nations Development Program. The sharp increase in women’s participation in economic life was partly due to the war, which had taken away many men and brought women from the countryside into Kabul. But it was also the result of greater legal rights, supportive government policies and economic development, including the construction of new homes, factories, schools and hospitals.
The transformation of these women from backward traditionalist areas into skilled workers gives a glimpse of what might have been achieved if Afghanistan had been able to continue its Soviet-assisted development. While initially encountering fierce resistance from their families, women workers were exposed to technology, education and literacy. They took pride in acquiring job skills and becoming ustad (expert masters) in their fields. Some were sent for training to the Soviet Union. At a construction site, Sharif interviewed a 23-year-old widow and mother of two children, who was one of three female crane operators, a job never before done by a woman in Afghanistan.
Many women took up arms against the mujahedin threat. Four of seven military commanders appointed in 1986 were women. By 1989, the regime reported having armed some 15,000 women. The same year, all female members of the PDPA received military training and arms. The arming of unveiled women with Kalashnikovs symbolized the social transformation then under way in Afghanistan. As early as 1984, Indian journalist Patricia Sethi reported encountering 15-year-old girls carrying rifles who were members of a civilian brigade in a village near Kabul: “They spoke fervently and passionately about their revolution and what it meant for young women in Afghanistan: it meant ‘an education, freedom from the veil, freedom from feudalists who want to keep us down,’ said Khalida. ‘We do not want to become the fourth wife of a 60-year-old man, existing solely for his whim and pleasure’” (India Today, 31 July 1984).
Soviet Withdrawal Betrayed Afghan Women
The Soviet military presence posed the possibility not only of defeating the U.S.-backed Islamists but also of incorporating Afghanistan into the Soviet system. In the 1920s, Soviet Central Asia looked remarkably like Afghanistan in the 1970s—a miserably backward and desolate place where women were bought and sold. Every step toward emancipation taken by the Soviet regime was met with fierce resistance from the khans, mullahs and their armed gangs of basmachi (the mujahedin of the time), including the wholesale murder of Communist agitators and women who rejected the veil.
The imposition of Soviet power under the umbrella of the Red Army created the conditions for dismantling centuries-old tribal/clerical domination and developing the region’s vast natural resources. Once the Soviet Army got the upper hand against the basmachi in 1922, Bolshevik women activists were sent in to work among the horribly oppressed women, who stood to benefit most from the extension of the gains of the October Revolution. Under Lenin’s guidance, they set out to gradually undermine the power and authority of the khans’ and mullahs’ institutions through legal and administrative measures, demonstrating that the Communists were the foremost fighters for the oppressed.
Beginning with the Stalinist political counterrevolution in 1923-24, the USSR underwent a qualitative bureaucratic degeneration in which the working class was deprived of political power. Even after this, however, the necessities of industrialization and economic planning continued to produce particularly huge benefits for Central Asia. As the USSR was transformed from a largely peasant country into an industrial power starting in the late 1920s and early ’30s, Soviet women were increasingly mobilized to work in industry. In Central Asia, women entered the industrial workforce in large numbers during World War II, when many Soviet factories were relocated to the region away from the front lines of the war.
Had the Soviet leadership been determined to see the war in Afghanistan through to victory, the country could have undergone similarly immense social progress through the construction of a modern infrastructure, the creation of a significant urban proletariat and the institution of economic planning. But the Stalinist bureaucrats in the Kremlin did not pursue this course. Instead, the regime of Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew the Red Army in 1988-89.
This was not because it faced military defeat; to the end, the Soviet Army had the upper hand militarily. The Soviet withdrawal was a political decision by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow carried out with the fatuous aim of appeasing U.S. imperialism. It was a betrayal of the Afghan masses, especially women, that helped pave the way for capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union itself in 1991-92.
The Stalinist bureaucracy was a contradictory caste whose nationalist outlook subordinated the interests of the world proletariat to the defense of its own privileged position as a parasitic layer resting on the collectivized economy. The 1979 Red Army intervention was a decent and progressive act, even if it was carried out by the corrupt and conservative regime of Leonid Brezhnev, that cut against the grain of the Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country.” However, we warned from the outset that the bureaucracy might cut a deal at the expense of the Afghan peoples as part of its quest for “peaceful coexistence” with Washington. We fought for a proletarian political revolution to oust the treacherous Stalinist bureaucracy and return the Soviet Union to the Bolshevik internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky.
After the Soviet withdrawal, the Afghan government fought on valiantly for three years. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—wrote to the PDPA government in 1989 offering to organize an international brigade to help fight the forces of Islamic reaction. When that offer was turned down, the PDC, at the request of the Afghan government, launched an international fund drive to aid civilian victims of the mujahedin siege of the city of Jalalabad, raising over $44,000. The Afghan forces were able to repel this attack.
When the mujahedin finally took Kabul in 1992, re-enslaving Afghan women, the various tribally-based militias carried out a vengeful war of mass murder, torture and rape of rival ethnic populations, which left at least 50,000 people dead in Kabul alone. This led to four years of horror under the rule of various warring fundamentalist factions which brought the city to the point of famine and total devastation.
A recent New York Times article (“In Afghanistan, a Soviet Past Lies in Ruins,” 11 February) captured some of the destruction wrought by these U.S.-backed cutthroats. The article notes that in the Soviet House of Science and Culture during the 1980s, “Soviets and Afghans gathered for lectures, films and the propagation of modernizing ideas that for a while refashioned Kabul, including a time when women could work outside the home in Western clothing.” It continued:
“But during the civil war of 1992-96, the House of Science and Culture was occupied by one faction and wrecked as another lobbed shells down from a nearby hill. Today, the auditoriums are littered with rubble; cold air comes in through rocket holes; and once-bold Soviet murals of men and women, Afghans and Russians, are hidden in the squalid darkness near cartoon images depicting a Taliban fighter instructing children to become suicide bombers.”
Eventually the Taliban, recruiting from the historically dominant Pashtun ethnic population, emerged as the strongest of the mujahedin factions. Backed by Pakistan and supported by the U.S., it came to power in 1996. A year later, an American diplomat declared: “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that” (quoted in Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia [2000]). Only when the U.S. rulers realized that there would be no Aramco (or any other oil company) and no pipelines did they start talking about the Taliban’s barbaric treatment of women.
Many of the CIA-financed fundamentalists who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s turned against their former paymasters over the following decade. This was the case with the September 11, 2001 attacks carried out by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, which led in turn to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. After ousting the Taliban, the Bush administration installed a regime based largely on the same mujahedin warlords who devastated the country from 1992-96.
The Impact of Counterrevolution in the USSR
The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union has fed the bonfires of social reaction on a global scale. In many countries, women’s rights and social progress in general have been thrown back by generations. For working people in the ex-Soviet Union and the former deformed workers states of East and Central Europe, the return of capitalism has been a calamity measured in unemployment, homelessness, collapsing life expectancy and intercommunal violence.
In ex-Soviet Central Asia, while the effects of more than seven decades of socialized economic development did not permit a quick and easy victory for the Islamic fundamentalists, millions of women have found themselves again trapped under veils and classified as second-class citizens. Fewer and fewer girls attend secondary schools. In much of the region, women can no longer initiate a divorce. The resurgence of nationalism has led to interethnic strife, as in Tajikistan in 1992-97 and more recently in Kyrgyzstan. The region remains a powder keg, where ethnic clashes continue to rage.
The horrors produced by U.S. imperialism’s “holy war” against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, as well as its present occupation of the country, underline how the capitalist system is a barrier to social progress and a breeding ground for reaction. As in Afghanistan, U.S. occupation forces devastated Iraq during their occupation of that country, fueling sectarian massacres and throwing back the rights of women and other oppressed.
Through its “war on terror,” U.S. imperialism aims to impose its will on oppressed peoples around the world. The despotic bourgeoisies of the neocolonies subjugate and plunder their “own” people for their own profit and that of the imperialists to whom they are beholden. There is plenty of hatred among the masses for these parasites and their overlords, however the aspirations of the downtrodden have increasingly been channeled into religious reaction. Islamist forces continue to grow in influence throughout North Africa and the Near East, from Egypt to Gaza to Turkey and beyond.
The only way forward is the struggle for an internationalist revolutionary leadership dedicated to the fight for workers revolutions in both the neocolonies and the heartlands of world imperialism. While this may seem a distant prospect in this very reactionary political period, the bitter truth is that no other road can put an end to ethnic and national oppression, the oppression of women and the exploitation of working people.
The domestic complement of the murderous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is an escalating war on the U.S. working class, black people and immigrants. While a handful of wealthy capitalists accrue massive profits, the rest of the population is faced with increasing assaults on its living standards or utter poverty. Moreover, anti-woman religious fundamentalism is also rampant on the home front, as bourgeois politics is saturated with God and the right to abortion and even contraception is under siege.
The purpose of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), of which the Spartacist League is the U.S. section, is to forge revolutionary Marxist parties modeled after Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party that led the October Revolution. Only the working class has the social power and objective interest to sweep away the deeply irrational and inhumane capitalist system through socialist revolution, replacing it with a planned economy in which production is based on the human needs of all, rather than profits for the few.
Particularly in the neocolonial world, where women’s oppression is so acute, women workers will be in the front ranks of such parties. The overthrow of the imperialist-dominated world order will lay a material basis to free women from age-old family servitude and reorganize society in the interest of all. The social functions of the family—housework, child rearing, preparation of food, etc.—will be replaced by collectivized institutions. When the bloody rule of capital is swept away by the workers of the world, the veil, the bride price, purdah, “honor killings” and the social degradation of women in all its forms will become but bitter memories of a barbaric past.
Friday, March 23, 2012
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Workers Vanguard No. 998
16 March 2012
Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!
In our article “Lessons of the Battle of Longview” (WV No. 996, 17 February), we addressed the fight by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 against an all-out union-busting attack by the giant multinational grain conglomerate EGT in Longview, Washington. Backed by forces ranging from the local police to the federal courts and the armed might of the U.S. Coast Guard, EGT’s aim was to drive ILWU Local 21 out of jobs at the port the union has worked for 80 years. The union held the line against this union-busting offensive. But the struggle is far from over. ILWU members and their supporters continue to be subjected to a relentless campaign of persecution by the courts, cops and Cowlitz County District Attorney’s office. The union itself is facing more than $300,000 in fines leveled at the behest of the National Labor Relations Board.
In the course of their battle against EGT, ILWU members and their allies engaged in the kind of militant labor struggle not seen in this country in years. In retaliation, leaders and members of ILWU Local 21 were met by a campaign of police violence, detentions and surveillance. More than 200 arrests were made, including several on felony counts. These workers are being dragged through the courts with many being pressured to plead guilty to misdemeanors or face more serious felony charges.
Even now, after a settlement has been reached between the ILWU and EGT, Cowlitz County prosecutor Susan Baur, working hand in glove with the county sheriff’s department and local police, continues to escalate the anti-union vendetta. New charges, including felonies, are being manufactured over events that occurred many months ago. This vindictive prosecution is a shot at all of labor, aimed at creating a chilling effect on trade unionists who were inspired by the power ILWU members brought to bear during their fight against EGT’s union-busting in Longview.
These longshoremen and their supporters fought with courage and determination. Now we must fight for them! The Partisan Defense Committee, a non-sectarian, class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, has written a protest letter to the Cowlitz County prosecutor demanding that all charges be dropped immediately. We urge unions, both nationally and internationally, as well as all opponents of the bosses’ war against the unions, to do the same.
Letters demanding that all charges be dropped and fines and other penalties rescinded should be sent to:
Susan Baur
Cowlitz County Prosecuting Attorney
Hall of Justice, Room 105
312 SW 1st Avenue
Kelso, WA 98626
Fax: (360) 414-9121
Copies should be sent to:
Governor Christine Gregoire
P.O. Box 40002
Olympia, WA 98504-0002
Fax: (360) 753-4110
Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna
1125 Washington Street SE
P.O. Box 40100
Olympia, WA 98504-0100
Fax: (360) 664-0228
Additional copies should be sent to:
President Dan Coffman, Executive Board and Members of ILWU Local 21
617 14th Avenue
Longview, WA 98632
Fax: (360) 423-0642
E-mail: ilwu21@iinet.com
President Robert McEllrath, IEB and Coast Committeemen
ILWU International
1188 Franklin Street, 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94109-6800
Fax: (415) 775-1302
E-mail: Info@ilwu.org
Partisan Defense Committee
P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station
New York, NY 10013-0099
Fax: (212) 406-2210
E-mail: partisandefense@earthlink.net
Workers Vanguard No. 998
16 March 2012
Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!
In our article “Lessons of the Battle of Longview” (WV No. 996, 17 February), we addressed the fight by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 against an all-out union-busting attack by the giant multinational grain conglomerate EGT in Longview, Washington. Backed by forces ranging from the local police to the federal courts and the armed might of the U.S. Coast Guard, EGT’s aim was to drive ILWU Local 21 out of jobs at the port the union has worked for 80 years. The union held the line against this union-busting offensive. But the struggle is far from over. ILWU members and their supporters continue to be subjected to a relentless campaign of persecution by the courts, cops and Cowlitz County District Attorney’s office. The union itself is facing more than $300,000 in fines leveled at the behest of the National Labor Relations Board.
In the course of their battle against EGT, ILWU members and their allies engaged in the kind of militant labor struggle not seen in this country in years. In retaliation, leaders and members of ILWU Local 21 were met by a campaign of police violence, detentions and surveillance. More than 200 arrests were made, including several on felony counts. These workers are being dragged through the courts with many being pressured to plead guilty to misdemeanors or face more serious felony charges.
Even now, after a settlement has been reached between the ILWU and EGT, Cowlitz County prosecutor Susan Baur, working hand in glove with the county sheriff’s department and local police, continues to escalate the anti-union vendetta. New charges, including felonies, are being manufactured over events that occurred many months ago. This vindictive prosecution is a shot at all of labor, aimed at creating a chilling effect on trade unionists who were inspired by the power ILWU members brought to bear during their fight against EGT’s union-busting in Longview.
These longshoremen and their supporters fought with courage and determination. Now we must fight for them! The Partisan Defense Committee, a non-sectarian, class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, has written a protest letter to the Cowlitz County prosecutor demanding that all charges be dropped immediately. We urge unions, both nationally and internationally, as well as all opponents of the bosses’ war against the unions, to do the same.
Letters demanding that all charges be dropped and fines and other penalties rescinded should be sent to:
Susan Baur
Cowlitz County Prosecuting Attorney
Hall of Justice, Room 105
312 SW 1st Avenue
Kelso, WA 98626
Fax: (360) 414-9121
Copies should be sent to:
Governor Christine Gregoire
P.O. Box 40002
Olympia, WA 98504-0002
Fax: (360) 753-4110
Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna
1125 Washington Street SE
P.O. Box 40100
Olympia, WA 98504-0100
Fax: (360) 664-0228
Additional copies should be sent to:
President Dan Coffman, Executive Board and Members of ILWU Local 21
617 14th Avenue
Longview, WA 98632
Fax: (360) 423-0642
E-mail: ilwu21@iinet.com
President Robert McEllrath, IEB and Coast Committeemen
ILWU International
1188 Franklin Street, 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94109-6800
Fax: (415) 775-1302
E-mail: Info@ilwu.org
Partisan Defense Committee
P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station
New York, NY 10013-0099
Fax: (212) 406-2210
E-mail: partisandefense@earthlink.net
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Liberal’s “Reinvention”-A Review-Honor Malcolm X, Militant Voice of Black Struggle
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.
Markin comment:
This two-part article reviewing the late Manning Marable’s political biography of Malcolm X couldn’t be timelier. There has been a real revisionist historical, but mainly political, trend over the past several years to merge Malcolm’s and Martin Luther King’s political perspectives together. As noted in the review this represents the author’s (and others)“wish” more than any reality. Historical accuracy is once again a casualty of the class wars.
Two quick points on this amalgamation of Malcolm and Martin. First, back in the 1990s when young blacks wanted to show their defiance of the racist system they are forced to live under here in America they, and were very heavily under the sway of hip-hop as it emerged, their natural symbol of rebellion and alienation was Malcolm (just as internationally Che performed that same service). Doctor King was for the old fogies and white liberals.
Secondly, a personal anecdote. When I was coming of political age in the early 1960s I would listen to Malcolm speak on a late night talk show here in Boston. I was very heavily under the sway of Doctor King and his message then and while almost everything that Malcolm said I disagreed with, especially on integration, I grudgingly “knew” that he spoke a truth that I did not want to acknowledge. I had no trouble then seeing that these two men represented two very different concepts of struggle. Nor did I now. I just wish, as wrong as I thought he was then, I had listened a little closer to Malcolm. Honor Malcolm X –Black Liberation Fighter.
****************
Workers Vanguard No. 997
2 March 2012
Honor Malcolm X, Militant Voice of Black Struggle
Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Liberal’s “Reinvention”
A Review by J.L. Gormoff
Part One
Malcolm X was one of the most courageous political voices of the second half of the 20th century. At the time of his assassination in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in 1965, when he was not yet 40 years old, he was the most admired and respected, the most hated and feared, black man of his generation. He spoke truths that other black leaders refused to say. Rejecting the pacifism of the liberal civil rights establishment, he was the voice of self-defense for black people. While Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph and others looked to Democratic politicians like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to grant black rights, Malcolm forthrightly denounced the Democratic Party, North and South, as racist to the core.
On the 20th anniversary of Malcolm’s assassination, Young Spartacus, newspaper of the Spartacist League’s youth organization at the time, wrote:
“At a critical moment in contemporary American history Malcolm X was the voice of black militancy. His importance and appeal lay, in particular, in his intransigent opposition to the ‘white man’s puppet Negro “leaders”,’ as he called them. Martin Luther King told the world that black people loved the white oppressor and would answer the racists’ bombings and beatings with Christian forgiveness.... The idea that blacks had to prove to the ‘good white massa’ that they were peaceable folk and god-fearing Christians enraged Malcolm to the depths of his being. It was degrading. Like the sheep reminding the wolf when it’s time for dinner. Malcolm X cut through the sanctimonious claptrap and foot-shuffling hypocrisy of the ‘respectable’ black leaders like a sharp knife going through a tub of butter.”
— “Malcolm X: Courageous Fighter for Black Liberation,” reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 2 (1985)
In the decades since his assassination, Malcolm X has been claimed by people espousing almost every sort of politics. As early as November 1965, Rustin, a social democrat who for decades embodied the “moderate” black leadership that Malcolm X castigated as doing the bidding of the white rulers, asserted: “Malcolm was moving toward the mainstream of the civil rights movement when his life was cut short,” although he “still had quite a way to go” (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin [1971]). Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable is the latest in this genre.
For more than a decade, Marable, a professor at Columbia University and a leading liberal black intellectual, had been working on this biography; he died just before Viking published it last spring. The book is now out in paperback. Marable promised that his book would shatter everybody’s view of Malcolm X. While his research has yielded some interesting details that fill in Malcolm’s life, the book mainly covers ground dealt with more convincingly in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published shortly after his assassination.
What Marable’s book does offer is truly a “reinvention” of the political views of Malcolm X, a contradictory figure. Marable does his best to recast Malcolm as moving toward conventional liberal protest politics. As he puts it, at the time of his death Malcolm was approaching “the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system.” Marable casts Malcolm X in today’s terms as “a multicultural American icon” and “a man who emphasized grassroots and participatory politics.” As Marable would have it, he cultivated “alliances with Third World nations” so that “black Americans could gain leverage to achieve racial empowerment.” Beneath the trendy terminology, there is politics: Marable’s book packages Malcolm X for the era of Barack Obama.
As is well known, after Malcolm broke with Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI), he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. There he was welcomed by Muslims of all races, leading to his renunciation of all racism. This was an important step. But for Professor Marable and many others before him, it was important because it presaged Malcolm’s supposedly being reborn as a liberal integrationist. In other words, since Malcolm had supposedly broken from the NOI’s black nationalism, then he must have been moving closer to the black liberal establishment. In fact, Malcolm X admitted that he did not yet know what his overall political philosophy was at that point. Marable’s purpose is the same one that liberals and social democrats have always pursued: to counsel against militant struggle by black people and youth and to imbue them with faith in the lie that they can achieve social equality within the confines of the American capitalist system.
In our obituary in Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965 (reprinted on page 7), we termed Malcolm X a “heroic and tragic figure” and summarized:
“Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful and terribly incomplete. It is useless to speculate on how far it would have gone had he lived.... At the time of his death he had not yet developed a clear, explicit, and rational social program. Nor had he led his followers in the kind of transitional struggle necessary to the creation of a successful mass movement.”
Never breaking from black nationalism, Malcolm X was far removed from our revolutionary Marxist worldview. For us, his significance was his ability to cut through the self-serving hypocrisy of bourgeois political discourse and expose the racism and oppression at the heart of this society. At his most effective, he mercilessly attacked the idea that black people seeking freedom should link their cause to the Democratic Party. He identified with the black masses who were being held in check by “preachers and the educated Negroes laden with degrees” (Autobiography) and exposed these leaders’ subordination to the Democrats. This lesson remains no less crucial today and is for us the enduring legacy of Malcolm X.
“Reinvention” and Reconciliation
In the epilogue to his book, Marable criticizes “a tendency of historical revisionism,” namely, attempts “to interpret Malcolm X through the powerful lens of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: that Malcolm was ultimately evolving into an integrationist, liberal reformer.” He calls this “not only wrong, but unfair to both Malcolm and Martin.” Yet in the very next paragraph, Marable claims of Malcolm that “at the end of his life he realized that blacks indeed could achieve representation and even power under America’s constitutional system.”
Marable’s evidence is, first, what he terms “black encouragement.” He draws a line from the “Black Power” movement that began in the mid 1960s to black politicians from Chicago mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s and Jesse Jackson up to Obama himself. (Marable references Obama no less than four times in the epilogue.) Second, Marable approvingly looks upon the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism. This was a ludicrous appeal to the UN—that den of imperialist thieves, their accomplices and their victims—to turn itself into a force against racial oppression. Though Marable doesn’t quite sign on to Obama’s view that American society is “post-racial,” he speculates that if Malcolm X were alive today he would “have to radically redefine self-determination and the meaning of black power.” Whatever Malcolm X might have thought had he lived to see it, it’s clear that for Professor Marable, Obama’s empowerment signified black power.
Manning Marable was a social democrat—in other words, a reformist “socialist”—of some distinction. He had been a founding vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. Later he was an initiator of the Committees of Correspondence, a lash-up of various social democrats and former members of the Communist Party. In the late 1990s, he was a founder of the Black Radical Congress. Whatever their differences, the perspective of all these groups has been to try to pressure the Democratic Party—currently the ruling party of American capitalism—to the left in order to serve the interests of workers, minorities and the poor.
Of course, Marable voted for Obama in 2008, calling this Wall Street Democrat “a progressive liberal” who “has read left literature, including my works, and he understands what socialism is” (Socialist Review, December 2008). Barack Obama is a servant of the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression and thus a committed enemy of socialism, which means the revolutionary working-class overthrow of the class he represents. He campaigned to become the first black Commander-in-Chief by explicitly praising the anti-Soviet Cold War and the presidential record of Ronald Reagan in carrying that out.
The main way that millions of youth, black and white, have learned about Malcolm X is through his Autobiography, a product of collaboration between Malcolm and black writer Alex Haley (who would go on to write the best-selling Roots). The Autobiography was recently named by Time magazine as the 13th most influential nonfiction book written in English since 1923. Marable was particularly disdainful toward Haley and the Autobiography. In a 2009 interview, he denounced Haley as “deeply hostile to Malcolm X’s politics” because he “was a Republican, he was opposed to Black nationalism, and he was an integrationist” (International Socialist Review, January-February 2009).
Marable promised to present the real Malcolm, the one Haley had supposedly hidden. But on the whole, his book rehashes material that is already known. Much of the controversy about Marable’s book among black commentators has centered on its “exposé” that Malcolm, when he was a young hustler and petty criminal, supposedly engaged in “homosexual encounters” for money, or that later on Malcolm and his wife, Betty Shabazz, had marital problems. The furor about these “revelations” (which have been around since at least the early 1990s) only underscores how distant these talking heads are from even the memory of black struggle.
Black Oppression in Capitalist America
What does come through strongly in Marable’s book is a picture of how deeply torn Malcolm X was between the Nation of Islam, with its rejection of political and social struggle, and his passion to join the battles taking place to finally free black people and complete the unfinished promise of the Civil War.
Black oppression has always been central to the American capitalist system. The Civil War (1861-65) destroyed the slave system in the South. But the Northern bourgeoisie, acting on its class interests, went on to make peace with the Southern planters, and blacks were forced into backbreaking labor on the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Following the end of Union Army occupation of the South during Reconstruction, naked white-supremacist rule was restored. By the late 19th century, the white propertied classes had imposed and legally enshrined Jim Crow segregation, enforced by what was virtually a racist police state, and further backed by night-riding Klan terror and lynching. Black people were consolidated anew as a specially oppressed race-color caste, forcibly segregated at the bottom of the social and economic structure of American capitalism.
In the “Great Migration” that started during World War I, millions of black people moved to the North in search of greater freedom and to escape dire poverty. In the Northern cities, they became increasingly integrated into the industrial economy while facing segregation in housing and throughout social life. In World War II black servicemen served in separate units. But many came home vowing to get some of the “democracy” they supposedly had fought for.
By the 1950s, when the civil rights movement arose, the mechanization of agriculture had undermined the viability of Southern subsistence farming by sharecroppers. A significant black proletariat existed in Southern cities like Birmingham, Alabama, in industries like steel. Furthermore, in its pursuit of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the U.S. government was finding the overt, official discrimination against black citizens and the images of brutal sheriffs and racist mobs an acute embarrassment internationally. In 1954, the Supreme Court issued its famous Brown decision that overturned school segregation, without creating any way to actually integrate schools (or anything else in American society). More and more working people and students were becoming involved in protests against segregation in the South, which were ruthlessly suppressed.
From the outset, the civil rights movement was dominated by a black middle-class leadership allied to Democratic Party liberalism. Its aim was to pressure the federal government to grant formal legal equality to the Southern black population. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., with his Christian religious appeals to the conscience of those in power, became the exemplar of this wing of the movement. Riding on their coattails, along with the reformist Communist Party, were the leaders of the very right-wing social democracy in the U.S., such as A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. These were Manning Marable’s ideological forebears. By pledging nonviolence, King and the other “mainstream” civil rights leaders were pledging the movement’s allegiance to the white power structure, promising that it would not go beyond the bounds set for it by the liberal wing of the ruling class. Advocacy of nonviolence dovetailed with the belief that black people could achieve equality and justice by relying on the government and “working within the system.”
Malcolm X denounced these misleaders from the perspective of black nationalism. Strongly influenced by the struggles in colonial and neocolonial countries for emancipation from imperialist subjugation, Malcolm viewed the American black struggle as one of the liberation of an oppressed nation inside an imperialist metropolis. In one of his most influential speeches, “Message to the Grass Roots” (November 1963), he espoused “revolution” and defined it in these terms: “Revolution…is based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation.” For Malcolm, nationalism was the key dividing line between his ideology and that of the liberal leaders marching for integration: “These Negroes aren’t asking for any nation—they’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.”
Black nationalism is premised on the false idea that the doubly oppressed black population in the U.S. constitutes a separate nation. As a doctrine, nationalism can sometimes attract militants who are deeply alienated from this racist society and have no illusions that it can be reformed. Historically, it has meant for many of its proponents that black Americans should be given their own country, with some saying it should be situated in the so-called Southern “black belt,” where black people were the majority. To others, it meant a homeland “back” in Africa.
However, in the 1960s the term “black nationalism” became a synonym for various forms of racial separatism within the existing American capitalist state. (For Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, this had taken the form of a religious sect.) Under the rubric of “community control,” the main body of young self-styled black “nationalists” sought to become government-funded overseers of the ghettos. Such types were denounced as “pork-chop nationalists” and “dashiki Democrats” by the militants of the Black Panther Party, which was founded in 1966 in Oakland, California. Considering themselves “Marxist-Leninists” along the lines of the Stalinist Mao Zedong, the Panthers advocated the right to armed self-defense and raised calls such as “black power.” The Panthers sought to establish a paramilitary organization in the ghettos coexisting with and restraining the racist police. This effort, while heroic, resulted in their murderous repression given the existing balance of political forces.
Overwhelmingly, the thrust of black people’s struggles has been for social equality in this society, not separation. At bottom, black nationalism is an expression of hopelessness stemming from defeat, reflecting despair and the belief that the labor movement will never take up a fight for black rights. Black nationalism rejects the basic truth that the fundamental division in capitalist society is that between the bourgeois ruling class, which owns the means of production, and the working class, whose labor is exploited by the capitalists for profit. Moreover, the idea that the U.S. ruling class can be shamed or coerced into ceding a black homeland inside these borders is fantastical. Just as unrealistic is the notion that the bulk of the U.S. black population should renounce their claims to this country, which along with the working class as a whole they helped to build, and emigrate to Africa.
The Marxist program for black liberation is that of revolutionary integrationism: the struggle against all forms of racist discrimination and violence and for the integration of black people into an egalitarian, socialist society. As a race-color caste whose special oppression is integral to the workings of the American capitalist economy and every social institution, the black population cannot win equality except through socialist revolution. Black oppression and its legitimization through racist ideology are priceless tools for the exploiters in keeping working people divided, blinded and unable to organize to overthrow our common enemy. There can be no revolutionary workers party built in this country that does not grasp the strategic character of the fight for black emancipation. In building such a party, black workers are determined by history to play a vanguard role. This view stands flatly counterposed to both liberal integrationism and black nationalism.
Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam
The contours of Malcolm’s life are well known. As “Detroit Red,” Malcolm was a street hustler and petty criminal during the 1940s in Boston and Harlem. He converted to the Nation of Islam while in prison in Massachusetts, changing his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X.
The Nation was a small sect under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad that combined religious superstition and black nationalism. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Malcolm became its most visible and effective spokesman. He made the group known by his denunciations of the “respectable” civil rights leaders. He organized several mosques, including in Harlem, the primary center of black politics and culture in the U.S. As activists were beaten and murdered, Malcolm was the only prominent black leader who asserted that black people should not beg to be integrated into American society. His denunciations of the liberal sellouts struck a chord among the ghetto poor and working-class blacks. But the Nation accepted the idea that America was a white man’s country and opposed integration.
Marable describes the political roots of the Nation of Islam in the movement founded by Marcus Garvey in Jamaica in 1914. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association grew rapidly in the U.S. during the 1920s, when it seemed to many that no black struggle for social integration and equality could succeed. This was a heyday of the KKK, exemplified by the 40,000 robed and hooded Klansmen who paraded openly in Washington, D.C., in 1925. Jim Crow segregation was the law of the South and was enforced by terror, legal and extralegal, as black men and women were lynched for not “knowing their place.” Anti-Communist red scares were viciously waged in response to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The period was marked by aggressive union-busting, with notorious frame-ups of labor militants and prosecutions of unions under “criminal syndicalism” laws. Labor radicals and other immigrant workers were rounded up and deported.
Garvey’s political philosophy was for complete black separation from whites, including the demand for an independent black state in Africa. He emphasized the development of black-owned businesses—i.e., a black middle class that would profit from its monopoly of the patronage of black consumers. Marable notes Garvey’s continuity with the conservative, business-oriented philosophy of Booker T. Washington, pointing out that both Garvey and Washington were “accommodationists” who accepted segregation and did not challenge black disenfranchisement or separate schools for blacks and whites.
While other factors contributed to the destruction of Marcus Garvey’s organization, its appeal was decisively undercut when working-class struggle exploded in the 1930s. Black workers played a vanguard role in heroic strikes which organized industrial unions in the CIO—inclusive unions that sought to organize all workers in a given industry, breaking down craft categories and organizing skilled and unskilled workers across ethnic and racial divisions. As the working class emerged fighting out of the doldrums of the Great Depression, the illusory solace offered by Garvey’s brand of black nationalism tended to lose its appeal.
The Nation of Islam, which sprang up later, was primarily a religious organization. But its ideology was similar to Garvey’s. Explicitly disavowing organized political activism, the Nation espoused separate “development” of blacks in “white” America. Dedicated cadres of Garvey’s movement, Malcolm’s parents relocated repeatedly, from Philadelphia to Omaha, Nebraska, and elsewhere before settling in Lansing, Michigan, where Malcolm Little was raised.
By the early 1960s the Nation had begun to grow rapidly, attracting converts from diverse backgrounds. Malcolm X was personally responsible for a huge number of recruits, not only to Temple (later Mosque) No. 7 in Harlem, which he headed for years, but in many other cities, traveling the country as the NOI’s National Minister.
Despite its opposition to participating in organized protest, its religiosity and its advocacy of black capitalism, the NOI was viewed as some kind of radical organization. In this racist country, black radicals or those perceived as such will always be a target for the political police (who especially fear the intersection of blacks and communism). The FBI and the New York police red squad were all over the NOI, employing constant surveillance and infiltration as well as provocations seeking to fan the flames of jealousy and distrust among its leaders. The sect was denied legal protections afforded other religions, and salesmen of its newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, were harassed by the cops. One of the strengths of Marable’s book is its use of police records to demonstrate the extent of state surveillance, harassment and provocation of black militants, including Malcolm X.
The Crucible of the Civil Rights Struggles
The civil rights movement helped to undermine the reactionary Cold War consensus of the 1950s. Seen as a struggle against entrenched racial oppression and for equality, it drew many thousands of workers and youth into the streets of cities and towns in the South and inspired solidarity worldwide. As the struggle sharpened and racist atrocities against blacks multiplied, NAACP organizer Robert F. Williams in North Carolina undertook armed self-defense. Williams was suspended from the NAACP, and in 1961 government repression drove him to flee the country to Cuba, where the revolution had just expropriated the capitalists in the face of U.S. imperialist hostility. In Louisiana, the Deacons for Defense, many of whom were Korean War veterans, organized to protect civil rights demonstrators.
In response to an emerging mass movement that showed increasing willingness to openly defy the Jim Crow police state, dominant sections of the Northern bourgeoisie saw that it was time for the South to adopt the same formal democratic norms as the rest of the country. It is to this wing of the bourgeoisie that the leaders of the civil rights movement handcuffed the fight for black freedom. The civil rights struggles won partial gains for black people in the South, such as access to public facilities, voting rights and a degree of school integration. But these gains did not challenge capitalist class rule. And when the movement came North and tried to take on the conditions of the segregated inner cities—widespread poverty and unemployment, racist cop brutality, inferior housing and schools, etc.—it foundered. These conditions of oppression and capitalist immiseration could not be ameliorated by more speeches or new laws. Beginning with Harlem in 1964, the Northern ghettos exploded, registering the depth of anger and disappointed hopes.
It was in the period of the civil rights movement that Malcolm X came of age politically, and this would throw him into an irreconcilable conflict with the NOI. The Nation’s philosophy of black business helped enrich Muhammad (supposedly God’s messenger) and his family, but offered no solution to black oppression. The NOI was a religious movement in a political time; for all its inflammatory rhetoric, it stood aside from the struggle for civil rights, preaching individual religious enlightenment and renunciation of “sinful” conduct.
For Malcolm X, this religious ideology, which he deeply believed, became a wrenching contradiction with his passionate commitment to fight white supremacy, injustice and hypocrisy. He felt the pressure from young people who thought he ought to join them in militant action, stating in the Autobiography: “I felt that, wherever black people committed themselves in the Little Rocks and Birminghams and other places, militantly disciplined Muslims should also be there.” But for the NOI to have participated in struggles for integration would have violated their precepts and their very reason for existence.
Malcolm X gave voice to young activists’ increasing dissatisfaction with the housebroken civil rights leaders. Where liberals swooned as Reverend King intoned “I have a dream” at the 1963 March on Washington, Malcolm X termed the event “a circus, a performance that beat anything Hollywood could ever do.” This was more than irreverence, it was an attack on the pro-Democratic Party politics of the organizers. He named the individual black leaders, closely tied to the Kennedy administration, who worked overtime to keep any militancy out of the march.
For Marable, the March on Washington was a marvelous mass movement that nobody in his right mind could have resisted: “The supposedly ‘Uncle Tom’ leaders like Rustin, Randolph, and King had mobilized a quarter of a million people,” he writes. Marable goes on to say: “Malcolm argued that the Kennedy administration decided to ‘co-opt’ the demonstration…. Malcolm’s thesis was that the civil rights leaders were so craven and bankrupt that they were duped by whites in power. This version of events was a gross distortion of the facts—yet it contained enough truth to capture an audience of unhappy black militants.” The facts are that what could have been an angry outpouring was turned into an appeal for conscience and reconciliation. John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had begun to reject the preachers’ allegiance to nonviolence, was prevented from delivering even a mild criticism of the Democrats. (Lewis later became a Democratic Congressman.)
Malcolm Breaks with Elijah Muhammad
Malcolm had by this time become increasingly alienated from Elijah Muhammad. He was shocked by the stories that could not be suppressed of the NOI leader’s sexual relations with young women who were his secretaries. But fundamentally the sources of friction were political: Malcolm chafed at the Nation’s aloofness from political activity, while Elijah Muhammad increasingly resented and feared Malcolm’s popularity.
The conflict came to a head after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Muhammad, not wanting to attract attention, ordered his supporters to say nothing whatsoever about the assassination. But Malcolm famously declared that Kennedy’s assassination was a case of the “chickens coming home to roost,” adding that “chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.” This disobedience infuriated Elijah Muhammad, but won Malcolm increased authority among the more militant black activists.
At that time, the most militant and politically conscious activists sympathized with the Cuban Revolution and solidarized with other struggles for national and social liberation. Few of them shed any tears for U.S. imperialism’s slain Commander-in-Chief, the man who had ordered the CIA-organized Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and had sent the Green Berets into South Vietnam. So when Malcolm made his “coming home to roost” comment, many black militants applauded, even if they were not themselves ready to go that far.
Marable’s tactic of falsification by omission is especially clear in his treatment of the 1960-61 Cuban Revolution, which had created a workers state, although one that was bureaucratically deformed from its inception. Marable recounts Malcolm’s strong sympathy and support for the revolution and the government of Fidel Castro, who had won plenty of support among American blacks when he decided to stay in Harlem’s Hotel Theresa on a trip to address the United Nations. But nowhere in Marable’s book is there any mention of the Democrat Kennedy’s relentless efforts to overthrow the Cuban government, including engaging the Mafia in an attempt to assassinate Castro.
Elijah Muhammad purged Malcolm from the Nation and NOI leaders relentlessly denounced him, including Malcolm’s former protégé, Louis X (today the reactionary demagogue Louis Farrakhan), who proclaimed him “worthy of death.” Marable’s book describes the NOI’s vendetta against Malcolm, relying heavily on an interview with Farrakhan and presenting the latter’s version of the events leading to the 1965 assassination.
That Malcolm felt liberated by his split from Elijah Muhammad was underlined by his telegram to American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, which Malcolm read out to a rally in Harlem on 24 January 1965. The NOI’s racial separatism had led it to recognize “common ground” with fascists and other segregationists, as Marable documents. Malcolm’s message read:
“This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad’s separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense—by any means necessary.”
Between his split from the Nation and his murder, Malcolm lived barely a year. Much of this was spent abroad, including his pilgrimage to Mecca. Although he founded two organizations in rapid succession—the Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity—they had no real program beyond the eclectic views expressed in his speeches. While eventually millions would become aware of his impact, the organizations he founded probably never included more than a few hundred. Yet his impact on black activists and the nascent New Left radicalism was undeniable.
Malcolm X’s speeches and his Autobiography were hugely influential for thousands of militants who would never have dreamed of attending a meeting of the Nation of Islam. His appeal lay precisely in his debunking of liberal hypocrisy on the part of the Democratic politicians and especially his exposure of the mainstream civil rights leaders as servants of the system.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 998
16 March 2012
Honor Malcolm X, Militant Voice of Black Struggle
Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Liberal’s “Reinvention”
A Review by J.L. Gormoff
Part Two
Part One of this article appeared in WV No. 997 (2 March).
Malcolm X was greatly influenced by the colonial revolutions that followed World War II, particularly in Africa and Asia. He and other militants were also deeply affected by the Cuban Revolution, which expropriated the capitalists in the face of American imperialist hostility in 1960 and opened the road to massive social advances benefiting working people and the poor. It was not lost on people like Malcolm X that the Cuban regime uprooted the island’s own version of Jim Crow segregation.
Malcolm and many other black activists and leftists grasped that the fight against black oppression in the U.S. was linked to the struggle against U.S. violence and warfare abroad. Malcolm denounced the U.S. as “the chief imperialist nation of the world” and “the leader of a pack of white imperialist nations” (quoted in Carlos Moore, Pichón: A Memoir: Race and Revolution in Castro’s Cuba [2008]). He was astute in his denunciation of the assassination of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba in a plot organized by the CIA, which later installed the murdering despot Moise Tshombe as prime minister.
Malcolm believed that the dark-skinned colonial peoples of the world had liberated themselves or were about to liberate themselves from Western imperialism. He felt that the states of Asia and Africa were becoming powerful enemies of Washington and naively expected them to use what power they had on behalf of the American black population. This view was consistent with seeing the U.S. black struggle as a colonial liberation struggle within the imperialist metropolis.
Social revolutions had occurred in China, North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba, expropriating the local bourgeois ruling classes and liberating these countries from imperialist bondage. Based on peasant insurgencies, with the working class removed as a factor, those revolutions resulted in bureaucratically deformed workers states under the rule of nationalist Stalinist regimes. But in a far larger number of former colonial countries, independence struggles resulted in the rule of indigenous bourgeois classes.
As Marxists, we champion struggles for national liberation against direct imperialist rule. But we recognize that under the rule of bourgeois nationalist regimes, those societies remain dependent on the handful of capitalist-imperialist states of North America, Europe and Japan. As clients of the Soviet degenerated workers state, nationalist regimes such as Colonel Nasser’s in Egypt were able to act with a certain independence from the imperialists while remaining subordinated to the capitalist world market. With the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, the main impediment to untrammeled imperialist plunder was removed, reinforcing the intense poverty and dependence of neocolonial Third World societies.
In a speech in Cairo to the Organization of African Unity, Malcolm naively implored this collection of bloodthirsty militarists, venal nationalist demagogues and tribal chiefs to step up, lamenting: “What makes our African brothers hesitate to bring the United States government before the United Nations?” An interesting chapter in Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention makes clear, based on letters by Malcolm to family members during his 1964 trip to Africa, that the cordial relations he experienced with representatives of the ruling elites were wide-ranging. Marable documents Malcolm’s mutually appreciative encounters with Prince Faisal of the reactionary Saudi monarchy, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nigerian cabinet minister, the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, and the parliament of Ghana, among others.
The strength of Malcolm X was that he saw and spoke the truth about American social reality. He saw through liberal politicians (white and black) and indicted U.S. government hypocrisy as no one else did, although he was also not above engaging in occasional anti-Semitism. But when he looked at Africa through the prism of race, not class, he did not see the same hypocrisy of their ruling elites when they professed concern for the welfare of the people.
There are powerful concentrations of the proletariat in many parts of the neocolonial world. It is those working classes that, under the leadership of Leninist vanguard parties, can unite all the impoverished toilers in a fight to sweep away the local bourgeois rulers and liberate their countries from imperialist subordination as part of the struggle for world socialist revolution.
Marable Falsifies Malcolm X: The Democratic Party
At bottom, Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention does indeed reinvent Malcolm X, falsely portraying him as moving toward mainstream liberalism during the tumultuous civil rights struggles of the 1960s. This serves to justify Marable’s conviction that there were no options other than pro-Democratic Party pressure politics on the one side and passivity or sectarian abstentionism on the other. In Marable’s eyes, once Malcolm X broke from the do-nothing policy of the Nation of Islam (NOI), allegiance to “working within the system” was sure to follow. He forecloses any possibility of revolutionary struggle against the racist capitalist order, both during the civil rights movement and now.
Let’s look at two concrete examples of how Marable’s politics distort Malcolm’s record. One is Marable’s presentation of the presidential election of 1964. The other is his comparison of two of Malcolm’s most famous speeches, “Message to the Grass Roots” and “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
According to Marable, Malcolm supported Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater in his race against Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater was an extremely right-wing, anti-Communist libertarian who had voted against the Civil Rights Act. He devised what was known as the Republican’s “Southern Strategy,” appealing to white Democratic voters in the South on the basis of opposition to the civil rights movement. Goldwater lost in a landslide, but Republicans went on to use this strategy with great success starting with Richard Nixon in the next presidential election.
The civil rights leadership pushed blacks to vote for Johnson. Martin Luther King Jr. called Goldwater “the most dangerous man in America” (Playboy, January 1965), and Bayard Rustin wrote that Mississippi Senator James Eastland, a notorious racist, and Goldwater were “the main enemies” (Commentary, February 1965). A record 94 percent of black voters cast their ballots for the Democrat Johnson.
As for Malcolm X, Marable asserts: “Nearly alone among prominent black leaders, he continued to support Barry Goldwater as the better candidate to address blacks’ interests.” Marable’s only evidence is the claim that Alex Haley, who coauthored The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “cited an article by Malcolm, ‘Why I Am for Goldwater’.” While there is no class difference between a Republican and a Democrat, it would still be surprising if Malcolm X had supported an arch-reactionary for president—except that it is not true.
When one goes to the source of the supposed article in support of Goldwater—in Malcolm’s papers at the Schomburg Center in Harlem—one finds no article by Malcolm. In fact, Haley was pitching to his literary agent something he imagined that Malcolm might write (Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, 21 June 1964, Malcolm X Collection, reel 3). What Malcolm did write was an article in the Saturday Evening Post (12 September 1964) in which he made clear his opposition to both candidates:
“I feel that as far as the American black man is concerned, [Johnson and Goldwater] are both just about the same. It’s just a question of Johnson, the fox, or Goldwater, the wolf.... Since these are the choices, the black man in America, I think, only needs to pick which one he chooses to be eaten by, because they both will eat him.”
He added:
“I wouldn’t put myself in the position of voting for either one, or of recommending to any black man to do so. I’m just talking about if America’s white voters do install Goldwater, the black people will at least know what they are dealing with.”
With his slander of Malcolm’s position on the elections, Marable echoes the New York Times (8 September 1964), which ran a piece titled “Malcolm X Article Favors Goldwater.” What upset both the liberals at the Times and Marable was that Malcolm dared to point out the real nature of the Democrats. Malcolm X did not oppose Johnson in class terms, in other words, as a representative of the capitalist ruling class. But he understood that Johnson and the Democrats were enemies of black rights. And for Marable, if you don’t vote Democrat, you support the Republicans.
Marable Falsifies Malcolm X: Electoralism
Central to Marable’s book is the case he tries to make that Malcolm in his last years was moving toward garden-variety liberal politics and electoralism. This he does by, for example, contrasting “Message to the Grass Roots” (10 November 1963), which Malcolm delivered right before breaking from the Nation of Islam, and “The Ballot or the Bullet,” a speech he gave six months later. The way Marable tells it, “Message” was a militant call for revolution, and “Ballot” a call for black people to vote. Marable states that “Ballot” starts off with “an appeal for black unity despite ideological quarrels” and claims that “this sentiment directly contradicted the ‘Message to the Grassroots,’ which had ridiculed King and other civil rights activists.” In fact, rhetorical appeals to black unity combined with attacks on liberal leaders were integral to both speeches.
Marable deplores exactly what made Malcolm X such an important figure. He’s right to focus on “Grass Roots,” which nailed the role of King, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer and others by name in co-opting the August 1963 March on Washington:
“This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it. They didn’t integrate it, they infiltrated it. They joined it, became a part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry…why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all…. They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make; and then told them to get out of town by sundown. And every one of those Toms was out of town by sundown.”
“Grass Roots” is also where Malcolm cogently pointed out that it was when the black population of Birmingham, Alabama, began to fight back against racist terror just three months before the D.C. march that President Kennedy sent in federal troops to restore order.
It is false to see a big political difference between “Grass Roots” and “Ballot.” According to Marable, in the second speech Malcolm made a turn, urging that “Black people must forget their differences and discuss the points on which they can agree.” But why is this so different from the position put forward in “Grass Roots”: “Instead of airing our differences in public, we have to realize we’re all the same family.... We need to stop airing our differences in front of the white man.” Malcolm X was, from our standpoint, a contradictory figure. But in this case the contradiction is Marable’s: Malcolm could urge a black “united front” at the same time as he made clear his opposition to the politics of the liberal black leaders—they were the ones betraying the black masses. After all, it was in “Ballot” that Malcolm declared: “I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”
For Marable, by the time of “Ballot,” supposedly “Malcolm had come to see the vote as a necessary tool if black Americans were to take control of the institutions in their communities.” Marable criticizes Malcolm for “glaring inconsistency in his logic,” because “Malcolm was encouraging African Americans to vote, even to throw their weight behind either major party; yet simultaneously he accused both major parties of racism, incapable of delivering fairness to blacks.”
In “Ballot,” Malcolm does highlight the importance of blacks’ votes in the North, but in terms counterposed to Marable’s liberal interpretation: “Your vote, your dumb vote, your ignorant vote, your wasted vote put in an administration in Washington, D.C., that has seen fit to pass every kind of legislation imaginable, saving you until the last, then filibustering on top of that.” Filibustering was how Dixiecrats like Senator Eastland tried to kill civil rights bills. Malcolm X grasped how the Democrats’ division of labor worked. Addressing the role of liberal Democrats, he said: “They blame the Dixiecrats. What is a Dixiecrat? A Democrat. A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise.... When you keep the Democrats in power, you’re keeping the Dixiecrats in power.”
As Malcolm put it in a subsequent speech: “The Northern Dixiecrat puts all the blame on the Southern Dixiecrat. It’s a con game, a giant political con game” (“The Black Revolution,” 8 April 1964). This con game continues to be played out today, as the craven trade-union officialdom and black liberal politicians promote the “lesser evil” capitalist Democrats against the Republicans. While the Republicans make no pretense of being “friends” of labor, black people and immigrants, the Democrats lie about it and do the same things.
The Struggle for Revolutionary Leadership
There have been few historical conjunctures when a small Marxist propaganda group could, in a few years’ time, transform itself into a party leading a significant section of the proletariat and the oppressed. The South in the early 1960s offered such an opportunity. The mass movement of proletarians and students for black rights was seething and activists were learning painful lessons about the nature of the capitalist state, leading to impassioned debates over strategy and tactics and the politics underlying them. By 1964, the main body of young black militants, concentrated in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had broken with liberalism as they understood it but had not yet latched on to the political dead end of black separatism. At the same time, these young fighters on the front lines of the struggle against white supremacy had acquired enormous moral and political authority among the black masses in the South, including members of the industrial proletariat.
The reformist Communist Party (CP) had no appeal for radicalizing elements in this period. In the time of V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist International had pressed American Communists to pay special attention to the fight against black oppression. The CP won some impressive recruits from among black intellectuals and went on to build a base in the South in the late 1920s and ’30s. Despite its developing Stalinist degeneration, the CP was at that time still capable of some quite heroic struggles. To take one example, it organized Southern sharecroppers’ unions that sought to include poor whites as well as blacks. In Atlanta in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the CP led a large, racially integrated march of unemployed workers that braved fierce repression and Klan terror in order to demand relief.
Such struggles were impossible without opposing the whole Southern power structure, including the Democratic Party. These efforts, and the black working people who had been mobilized by them, were abandoned when in the mid 1930s the CP became open supporters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the name of the “people’s front.” The CP could not even bring itself to support the mild-mannered 1941 March on Washington movement led by A. Philip Randolph because nothing was to be allowed to mute its chauvinist support for U.S. imperialism’s war effort in World War II. For the same reason, the CP actively broke strikes and even suspended its Japanese American members during the wartime internment.
In sharp contrast, the American Trotskyist movement stood for working-class politics independent of the Democratic Party as well as the Republicans. Led by James P. Cannon, a founder of American Communism who was won to Trotskyism at the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, the Trotskyists were expelled from the CP in 1928, forming the Communist League of America and, in 1938, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). As part of its revolutionary program, the SWP stood for racial integration and equal rights for the black population.
However, by the early 1960s, the SWP, weakened by the anti-Communist repression and intense conservatism of the post-WWII period, had begun to move rapidly to the right in response to perceived opportunities. This found grotesque expression when the SWP sent condolences to John F. Kennedy’s widow after his assassination. Our political tendency, now called the International Communist League, arose out of a factional struggle inside the SWP that was triggered partly over the question of black liberation. Our founding cadres, organized in the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), fought equally against the SWP’s opportunism over the Cuban Revolution, as the party uncritically supported the petty-bourgeois Fidel Castro leadership. Our comrades were expelled from the SWP in 1963-64 and went on to found the Spartacist League in 1966. By the fall of 1965, the SWP had crossed the class line into reformism with its overt class collaborationism in the burgeoning protests against the Vietnam War, building platforms for liberal Democrats who were beginning to see the war as a losing proposition for U.S. imperialism.
Instead of fighting to win black militants such as those in SNCC to a revolutionary program, the SWP argued that black people needed their own party. This served as the rationale to tail, successively and sometimes simultaneously, pro-Democratic Party civil rights leaders as well as sundry black nationalists. In opposition to the SWP’s abstentionism, the RT argued in July 1963 that the party should send members to the South to participate in the struggle. In a document submitted as part of internal party discussion, the RT argued in opposition to a draft resolution of the SWP’s Political Committee (PC):
“Negroes who are activists in the movement, such as, for example, the full-time militants around SNCC, are every day formulating concepts of struggle for the movement. The meaning of the line of the PC draft is that we are not interested in recruiting these people to our white party because we have the revolutionary socialist program for the section of the working class of which we are the vanguard, and they (Negro militants) must lead their own struggle, although we would like to have fraternal relations with them. This is the meaning of the PC draft.
“To the concept of the white party must be counterposed the concept of the revolutionary party. For if we are only the former, then black workers are misplaced in the SWP.”
— “For Black Trotskyism” (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [Revised], “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism” [September 1978])
This document laid out our political orientation:
“Our point of departure comes in turn as the conclusion that the Negro question is so deeply built into the American capitalist class-structure—regionally and nationally—that only the destruction of existing class relations and the change in class dominance—the passing of power into the hands of the working class—will suffice to strike at the heart of racism and bring about a solution both real and durable.”
Our strategic perspective was to recruit the left wing of the civil rights movement into a revolutionary party capable of leading vanguard layers of the black working class and petty-bourgeois youth in the South. The RT put forward a series of demands linking the struggles of workers and the black masses and addressing immediate needs such as organized self-defense and union organizing drives throughout the South. As volunteers were risking their lives to register black voters, we called for independent political organization so that voting could mean something other than supporting Democrats.
The RT and the early Spartacist League raised such transitional demands as the call for a Freedom Labor Party. These demands were aimed at uniting the ranks of the trade unions—the workers’ basic organizations of self-defense against the exploiting class—with the militant masses in the civil rights movement behind a perspective of socialist revolution. This fusion could not come about through preachments of unity, but only by the union movement actively taking up the fight for the rights of the specially oppressed black population. The obstacle to uniting the working people in revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system was not only the liberal preachers. It was, principally, the sellout labor bureaucrats, who matched King & Co. in fidelity to the Democratic Party.
When Malcolm X came to political awareness, the main body of the union bureaucracy consisted of the open Cold War crusaders at the head of the AFL-CIO, who had been installed by the anti-red purges in the late 1940s and ’50s. Another section of the labor tops, epitomized by the United Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther, tried to strike a slicker pose with vague social-democratic rhetoric. As Malcolm X noted, Reuther & Co. were closely tied to the pro-Democratic Party civil rights leaders and served as a prop of the Kennedy administration.
Both wings of the labor bureaucracy were explicitly hostile to labor militancy and to the militant wing of civil rights activism. Both wings were outspoken enemies of Communism and acted as agencies of U.S. imperialism abroad, supporting reactionary pro-American regimes and spearheading efforts to smash leftist-led unions. Their despicable political profile contributed hugely to the view of black and other New Left radicals that the unions themselves were a part of “the system” and enemies of liberation. Identifying the working class as a whole with the sellout leaders at the top is a fallacy that to this day contributes to anti-union prejudices, undermining any perspective of fighting inside the unions for a class-struggle leadership.
Unlike many others on the left, who patronizingly enthused over whatever was popular, the Spartacist League was forthright in advancing our Marxist views and criticisms. When the slogan of “black power” was put forward, we wrote that it “represents the repudiation of tokenism, liberal tutelage, reliance on the federal government, and the nonviolent philosophy of moral suasion. In this sense, therefore, black power is class power, and should be supported by all socialist forces” (“Black Power—Class Power,” Spartacist West No. 8, September 1966; reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [Revised]). But we also warned that the slogan “can be used by petty bourgeois black nationalist elements who want to slice the social cake along color rather than class lines and to promote reactionary color mysticism. More seriously, it can be degraded to mean mere support for black politicians operating within the system.”
Indeed, within a few years, the larger wing of the Black Panthers’ leadership had begun to openly look to the Democratic Party. In 1973 Panther leader Bobby Seale ran as a Democrat for mayor of Oakland, California. “Black Power” increasingly came to be defined as “black control of the black community,” which meant more black businesses, the election of black mayors to preside over the misery of the big cities, and more black cops to participate in shooting down blacks.
Marable and “Trotskyism”
Marable takes as good coin the revisionist SWP’s portrayal of “Trotskyism,” promoting the party’s opportunist tailism of whatever leaders black people seemed to want. Marable writes:
“For decades, the SWP had promoted revolutionary black nationalism. Leon Trotsky himself had believed that Negro Americans would be the vanguard for the inevitable socialist revolution in the United States. Malcolm’s separation from the Nation of Islam and his endorsement of voter registration and mass protest by African Americans seemed to Trotskyists a move toward socialism.”
Marable goes on to wrongly state in a footnote that Trotskyism “meant that the vanguard of the socialist revolution would not come from the industrial proletariat, but from the most oppressed sectors of the working class and peasantry,” which in the U.S. meant black people.
Shortly after Malcolm died, longtime SWP cadre George Breitman wrote The Last Year of Malcolm X (1967), which argued: “Malcolm was pro-socialist in the last year of his life, but not yet a Marxist.” Breitman would go on to proclaim Malcolm an increasingly pro-socialist “revolutionary.” For the SWP to call Malcolm X a socialist was in keeping with renouncing its former revolutionary socialist program and adapting to many non-proletarian forces that falsely appropriated the term “socialist,” such as the Algerian Ben Bella government and Egypt under Nasser, both of which were bourgeois-nationalist regimes.
The SWP’s use of Trotsky’s authority in regard to the black struggle was also fraudulent. Trotsky’s rare comments concerning American blacks were consistent with the mistaken understanding that they might constitute a nation and hence with raising a slogan of self-determination. But it is a travesty to suggest that Trotsky would ever have entertained the notion of organizing separate “revolutionary” parties by race. In discussions with the SWP leadership in 1939, Trotsky reminded the comrades that the roots of opportunism in the trade unions in the U.S. lay in their being based on the “aristocracy of labor”—privileged layers who sided with the bourgeois class “to hold the Negroes and the unskilled workers down to a very low scale.” Correctly identifying black workers as “the most dynamic milieu of the working class,” he insisted: “We must say to the conscious elements of the Negroes that they are convoked by the historic development to become a vanguard of the working class…. If it happens that we in the SWP are not able to find the road to this stratum, then we are not worthy at all. The permanent revolution and all the rest would be only a lie.”
The Spartacist League’s political program, representing a revolutionary alternative to both the liberal-integrationist and black nationalist dead ends, powerfully spoke to felt needs, but our very small organization was not able to pose it forcefully before the mass of radicalizing black activists. The early SL made promising beginnings in exemplary mass work, illustrating our program through such actions as organizing defense of Bill Epton, a black Progressive Labor supporter who was prosecuted in the wake of the 1964 Harlem “riot”—in reality, a police riot against the people of Harlem. With the ghetto in police lockdown, we initiated the Harlem Solidarity Committee, which organized a 1,000-strong rally in NYC’s garment district to mobilize working-class support for the besieged black people.
Ultimately, we were frozen out by black nationalist currents that claimed to reject liberal gradualism and tokenism. The opportunism of organizations such as the SWP let pass a promising opportunity to recruit substantial numbers of black radicals to a perspective of socialist revolution and to develop them as cadres and leaders of a Leninist vanguard party.
The black freedom struggle—and in fact the whole working class—paid heavily for black radicals’ inability to find the levers to polarize capitalist society along class lines, as the nationalists rejected any revolutionary potential for white workers. The isolation of the Black Panthers and others from the working class and the trade unions increased their vulnerability to the racist capitalist state as it extracted murderous vengeance. Through cop repression and the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO operation, dozens of leaders and militants were shot down and many others framed up and thrown in jail. These attacks broke the back of the Panthers, whose fragmentation—assisted by agents provocateurs, forged documents and other police “dirty tricks”—led to most of their leading members moving sharply to the right.
Malcolm X and the Left Today
In a suitably scathing review of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, black columnist Glen Ford takes on Marable’s assertion that Malcolm’s later activities “marked an early, tentative concession to the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system” (“Dragging Malcolm X to Obamaland,” Black Agenda Report, 27 April 2011). Ford comments that “Marable and his circle” are “the left Black Obamaites, purported radicals who have a perpetual love affair with Power.” However, behind Ford’s bons mots is a bankrupt black nationalist outlook, which obliterates a class understanding of Obama’s role as chief executive of the racist U.S. capitalist order. In 2008, Ford himself supported the candidacy of Cynthia McKinney, a black former Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia who was running on the ticket of the Green Party, a small-fry capitalist party.
The reactions to Marable’s book by the ostensibly socialist left show how much they accept his basic framework of either liberal integration or black nationalism, in opposition to a revolutionary alternative. In Liberation News (11 June 2011), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) points out Marable’s distortion of Malcolm’s comments about electoralism. But for the PSL, the bottom line is that “there is nothing inconsistent about condemning the two major parties while suggesting that Black people vote strategically. A revolutionary makes use of all tactics that advance the struggle at a particular moment, provided that this does not foster illusions in the current system.”
This is the pretext that the PSL’s forebears in the Workers World Party (WWP) have used to backhandedly support black capitalist politicians in the name of “fighting the right.” In the 1980s, it was the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson; today, the WWP hails New York City Councilman Charles Barron. Marxists fight for the class independence of the working class, for a workers party that fights against all oppression and for black liberation through socialist revolution!
For 20 or 30 years it has been common on the reformist left to reconcile Malcolm X to the politics of Martin Luther King. The reformists all share the perspective of pressuring the Democrats to do good things, either overtly or backhandedly. Virtually all of them cheered Obama’s election and will do their best to find ways to get back on the bandwagon in this election year. In the end, the reformists are reduced to quibbling over this or that in Marable’s book, which distorts Malcolm X’s political trajectory to serve a very contemporary purpose, including by absurdly depicting Malcolm X as becoming “race neutral.” Marable’s book takes for granted that the civil rights movement succeeded. In terms of the limited objectives of its pro-government leaders, it did. But it benefited mainly a thin layer of middle-class blacks, the traditional “talented tenth” in the professions augmented by a layer of government bureaucrats and a few elected officials.
What we see in America today is not the “post-racial” society invoked by Barack Obama but the failure of the liberal civil rights movement to fundamentally better the lives of this oppressed layer of American capitalist society. In the U.S. today, the prison system is one of the few growth industries, accompanying the deindustrialization of recent decades. Starting with Jesse Jackson himself, the black politicos who Marable sees as proof of “empowerment” early on enrolled themselves as champions of the “war on drugs,” which has resulted in mass incarceration of black people as well as a growing number of Latinos and others. The current economic crisis has underlined the vulnerability of the black population, measured by such indices as the enormous gap in household net wealth between white and black families, as the Great Depression of the 1930s did in its day. It must be obvious to all that capitalism is not bringing prosperity to white working people either.
The simple truth is that there will be no end to black oppression, exploitation and imperialist war until the multiracial working class seizes power from the tiny handful that constitutes the capitalist class and reorganizes society on a socialist basis. As in the days when Malcolm X gave voice to the oppressed black masses, what needs to be done is to forge a revolutionary party that can provide the necessary leadership for the working class and the oppressed. In our obituary on Malcolm X in Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965 (reprinted last issue), we noted the “agonizing gap in black leadership today,” a condition that has grown even more acute since that time. Our obituary concluded:
“But such leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike as a heroic and tragic figure in a dark period of our common history.”
Markin comment:
This two-part article reviewing the late Manning Marable’s political biography of Malcolm X couldn’t be timelier. There has been a real revisionist historical, but mainly political, trend over the past several years to merge Malcolm’s and Martin Luther King’s political perspectives together. As noted in the review this represents the author’s (and others)“wish” more than any reality. Historical accuracy is once again a casualty of the class wars.
Two quick points on this amalgamation of Malcolm and Martin. First, back in the 1990s when young blacks wanted to show their defiance of the racist system they are forced to live under here in America they, and were very heavily under the sway of hip-hop as it emerged, their natural symbol of rebellion and alienation was Malcolm (just as internationally Che performed that same service). Doctor King was for the old fogies and white liberals.
Secondly, a personal anecdote. When I was coming of political age in the early 1960s I would listen to Malcolm speak on a late night talk show here in Boston. I was very heavily under the sway of Doctor King and his message then and while almost everything that Malcolm said I disagreed with, especially on integration, I grudgingly “knew” that he spoke a truth that I did not want to acknowledge. I had no trouble then seeing that these two men represented two very different concepts of struggle. Nor did I now. I just wish, as wrong as I thought he was then, I had listened a little closer to Malcolm. Honor Malcolm X –Black Liberation Fighter.
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Workers Vanguard No. 997
2 March 2012
Honor Malcolm X, Militant Voice of Black Struggle
Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Liberal’s “Reinvention”
A Review by J.L. Gormoff
Part One
Malcolm X was one of the most courageous political voices of the second half of the 20th century. At the time of his assassination in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in 1965, when he was not yet 40 years old, he was the most admired and respected, the most hated and feared, black man of his generation. He spoke truths that other black leaders refused to say. Rejecting the pacifism of the liberal civil rights establishment, he was the voice of self-defense for black people. While Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph and others looked to Democratic politicians like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to grant black rights, Malcolm forthrightly denounced the Democratic Party, North and South, as racist to the core.
On the 20th anniversary of Malcolm’s assassination, Young Spartacus, newspaper of the Spartacist League’s youth organization at the time, wrote:
“At a critical moment in contemporary American history Malcolm X was the voice of black militancy. His importance and appeal lay, in particular, in his intransigent opposition to the ‘white man’s puppet Negro “leaders”,’ as he called them. Martin Luther King told the world that black people loved the white oppressor and would answer the racists’ bombings and beatings with Christian forgiveness.... The idea that blacks had to prove to the ‘good white massa’ that they were peaceable folk and god-fearing Christians enraged Malcolm to the depths of his being. It was degrading. Like the sheep reminding the wolf when it’s time for dinner. Malcolm X cut through the sanctimonious claptrap and foot-shuffling hypocrisy of the ‘respectable’ black leaders like a sharp knife going through a tub of butter.”
— “Malcolm X: Courageous Fighter for Black Liberation,” reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 2 (1985)
In the decades since his assassination, Malcolm X has been claimed by people espousing almost every sort of politics. As early as November 1965, Rustin, a social democrat who for decades embodied the “moderate” black leadership that Malcolm X castigated as doing the bidding of the white rulers, asserted: “Malcolm was moving toward the mainstream of the civil rights movement when his life was cut short,” although he “still had quite a way to go” (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin [1971]). Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable is the latest in this genre.
For more than a decade, Marable, a professor at Columbia University and a leading liberal black intellectual, had been working on this biography; he died just before Viking published it last spring. The book is now out in paperback. Marable promised that his book would shatter everybody’s view of Malcolm X. While his research has yielded some interesting details that fill in Malcolm’s life, the book mainly covers ground dealt with more convincingly in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published shortly after his assassination.
What Marable’s book does offer is truly a “reinvention” of the political views of Malcolm X, a contradictory figure. Marable does his best to recast Malcolm as moving toward conventional liberal protest politics. As he puts it, at the time of his death Malcolm was approaching “the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system.” Marable casts Malcolm X in today’s terms as “a multicultural American icon” and “a man who emphasized grassroots and participatory politics.” As Marable would have it, he cultivated “alliances with Third World nations” so that “black Americans could gain leverage to achieve racial empowerment.” Beneath the trendy terminology, there is politics: Marable’s book packages Malcolm X for the era of Barack Obama.
As is well known, after Malcolm broke with Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI), he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. There he was welcomed by Muslims of all races, leading to his renunciation of all racism. This was an important step. But for Professor Marable and many others before him, it was important because it presaged Malcolm’s supposedly being reborn as a liberal integrationist. In other words, since Malcolm had supposedly broken from the NOI’s black nationalism, then he must have been moving closer to the black liberal establishment. In fact, Malcolm X admitted that he did not yet know what his overall political philosophy was at that point. Marable’s purpose is the same one that liberals and social democrats have always pursued: to counsel against militant struggle by black people and youth and to imbue them with faith in the lie that they can achieve social equality within the confines of the American capitalist system.
In our obituary in Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965 (reprinted on page 7), we termed Malcolm X a “heroic and tragic figure” and summarized:
“Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful and terribly incomplete. It is useless to speculate on how far it would have gone had he lived.... At the time of his death he had not yet developed a clear, explicit, and rational social program. Nor had he led his followers in the kind of transitional struggle necessary to the creation of a successful mass movement.”
Never breaking from black nationalism, Malcolm X was far removed from our revolutionary Marxist worldview. For us, his significance was his ability to cut through the self-serving hypocrisy of bourgeois political discourse and expose the racism and oppression at the heart of this society. At his most effective, he mercilessly attacked the idea that black people seeking freedom should link their cause to the Democratic Party. He identified with the black masses who were being held in check by “preachers and the educated Negroes laden with degrees” (Autobiography) and exposed these leaders’ subordination to the Democrats. This lesson remains no less crucial today and is for us the enduring legacy of Malcolm X.
“Reinvention” and Reconciliation
In the epilogue to his book, Marable criticizes “a tendency of historical revisionism,” namely, attempts “to interpret Malcolm X through the powerful lens of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: that Malcolm was ultimately evolving into an integrationist, liberal reformer.” He calls this “not only wrong, but unfair to both Malcolm and Martin.” Yet in the very next paragraph, Marable claims of Malcolm that “at the end of his life he realized that blacks indeed could achieve representation and even power under America’s constitutional system.”
Marable’s evidence is, first, what he terms “black encouragement.” He draws a line from the “Black Power” movement that began in the mid 1960s to black politicians from Chicago mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s and Jesse Jackson up to Obama himself. (Marable references Obama no less than four times in the epilogue.) Second, Marable approvingly looks upon the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism. This was a ludicrous appeal to the UN—that den of imperialist thieves, their accomplices and their victims—to turn itself into a force against racial oppression. Though Marable doesn’t quite sign on to Obama’s view that American society is “post-racial,” he speculates that if Malcolm X were alive today he would “have to radically redefine self-determination and the meaning of black power.” Whatever Malcolm X might have thought had he lived to see it, it’s clear that for Professor Marable, Obama’s empowerment signified black power.
Manning Marable was a social democrat—in other words, a reformist “socialist”—of some distinction. He had been a founding vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. Later he was an initiator of the Committees of Correspondence, a lash-up of various social democrats and former members of the Communist Party. In the late 1990s, he was a founder of the Black Radical Congress. Whatever their differences, the perspective of all these groups has been to try to pressure the Democratic Party—currently the ruling party of American capitalism—to the left in order to serve the interests of workers, minorities and the poor.
Of course, Marable voted for Obama in 2008, calling this Wall Street Democrat “a progressive liberal” who “has read left literature, including my works, and he understands what socialism is” (Socialist Review, December 2008). Barack Obama is a servant of the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression and thus a committed enemy of socialism, which means the revolutionary working-class overthrow of the class he represents. He campaigned to become the first black Commander-in-Chief by explicitly praising the anti-Soviet Cold War and the presidential record of Ronald Reagan in carrying that out.
The main way that millions of youth, black and white, have learned about Malcolm X is through his Autobiography, a product of collaboration between Malcolm and black writer Alex Haley (who would go on to write the best-selling Roots). The Autobiography was recently named by Time magazine as the 13th most influential nonfiction book written in English since 1923. Marable was particularly disdainful toward Haley and the Autobiography. In a 2009 interview, he denounced Haley as “deeply hostile to Malcolm X’s politics” because he “was a Republican, he was opposed to Black nationalism, and he was an integrationist” (International Socialist Review, January-February 2009).
Marable promised to present the real Malcolm, the one Haley had supposedly hidden. But on the whole, his book rehashes material that is already known. Much of the controversy about Marable’s book among black commentators has centered on its “exposé” that Malcolm, when he was a young hustler and petty criminal, supposedly engaged in “homosexual encounters” for money, or that later on Malcolm and his wife, Betty Shabazz, had marital problems. The furor about these “revelations” (which have been around since at least the early 1990s) only underscores how distant these talking heads are from even the memory of black struggle.
Black Oppression in Capitalist America
What does come through strongly in Marable’s book is a picture of how deeply torn Malcolm X was between the Nation of Islam, with its rejection of political and social struggle, and his passion to join the battles taking place to finally free black people and complete the unfinished promise of the Civil War.
Black oppression has always been central to the American capitalist system. The Civil War (1861-65) destroyed the slave system in the South. But the Northern bourgeoisie, acting on its class interests, went on to make peace with the Southern planters, and blacks were forced into backbreaking labor on the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Following the end of Union Army occupation of the South during Reconstruction, naked white-supremacist rule was restored. By the late 19th century, the white propertied classes had imposed and legally enshrined Jim Crow segregation, enforced by what was virtually a racist police state, and further backed by night-riding Klan terror and lynching. Black people were consolidated anew as a specially oppressed race-color caste, forcibly segregated at the bottom of the social and economic structure of American capitalism.
In the “Great Migration” that started during World War I, millions of black people moved to the North in search of greater freedom and to escape dire poverty. In the Northern cities, they became increasingly integrated into the industrial economy while facing segregation in housing and throughout social life. In World War II black servicemen served in separate units. But many came home vowing to get some of the “democracy” they supposedly had fought for.
By the 1950s, when the civil rights movement arose, the mechanization of agriculture had undermined the viability of Southern subsistence farming by sharecroppers. A significant black proletariat existed in Southern cities like Birmingham, Alabama, in industries like steel. Furthermore, in its pursuit of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the U.S. government was finding the overt, official discrimination against black citizens and the images of brutal sheriffs and racist mobs an acute embarrassment internationally. In 1954, the Supreme Court issued its famous Brown decision that overturned school segregation, without creating any way to actually integrate schools (or anything else in American society). More and more working people and students were becoming involved in protests against segregation in the South, which were ruthlessly suppressed.
From the outset, the civil rights movement was dominated by a black middle-class leadership allied to Democratic Party liberalism. Its aim was to pressure the federal government to grant formal legal equality to the Southern black population. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., with his Christian religious appeals to the conscience of those in power, became the exemplar of this wing of the movement. Riding on their coattails, along with the reformist Communist Party, were the leaders of the very right-wing social democracy in the U.S., such as A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. These were Manning Marable’s ideological forebears. By pledging nonviolence, King and the other “mainstream” civil rights leaders were pledging the movement’s allegiance to the white power structure, promising that it would not go beyond the bounds set for it by the liberal wing of the ruling class. Advocacy of nonviolence dovetailed with the belief that black people could achieve equality and justice by relying on the government and “working within the system.”
Malcolm X denounced these misleaders from the perspective of black nationalism. Strongly influenced by the struggles in colonial and neocolonial countries for emancipation from imperialist subjugation, Malcolm viewed the American black struggle as one of the liberation of an oppressed nation inside an imperialist metropolis. In one of his most influential speeches, “Message to the Grass Roots” (November 1963), he espoused “revolution” and defined it in these terms: “Revolution…is based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation.” For Malcolm, nationalism was the key dividing line between his ideology and that of the liberal leaders marching for integration: “These Negroes aren’t asking for any nation—they’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.”
Black nationalism is premised on the false idea that the doubly oppressed black population in the U.S. constitutes a separate nation. As a doctrine, nationalism can sometimes attract militants who are deeply alienated from this racist society and have no illusions that it can be reformed. Historically, it has meant for many of its proponents that black Americans should be given their own country, with some saying it should be situated in the so-called Southern “black belt,” where black people were the majority. To others, it meant a homeland “back” in Africa.
However, in the 1960s the term “black nationalism” became a synonym for various forms of racial separatism within the existing American capitalist state. (For Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, this had taken the form of a religious sect.) Under the rubric of “community control,” the main body of young self-styled black “nationalists” sought to become government-funded overseers of the ghettos. Such types were denounced as “pork-chop nationalists” and “dashiki Democrats” by the militants of the Black Panther Party, which was founded in 1966 in Oakland, California. Considering themselves “Marxist-Leninists” along the lines of the Stalinist Mao Zedong, the Panthers advocated the right to armed self-defense and raised calls such as “black power.” The Panthers sought to establish a paramilitary organization in the ghettos coexisting with and restraining the racist police. This effort, while heroic, resulted in their murderous repression given the existing balance of political forces.
Overwhelmingly, the thrust of black people’s struggles has been for social equality in this society, not separation. At bottom, black nationalism is an expression of hopelessness stemming from defeat, reflecting despair and the belief that the labor movement will never take up a fight for black rights. Black nationalism rejects the basic truth that the fundamental division in capitalist society is that between the bourgeois ruling class, which owns the means of production, and the working class, whose labor is exploited by the capitalists for profit. Moreover, the idea that the U.S. ruling class can be shamed or coerced into ceding a black homeland inside these borders is fantastical. Just as unrealistic is the notion that the bulk of the U.S. black population should renounce their claims to this country, which along with the working class as a whole they helped to build, and emigrate to Africa.
The Marxist program for black liberation is that of revolutionary integrationism: the struggle against all forms of racist discrimination and violence and for the integration of black people into an egalitarian, socialist society. As a race-color caste whose special oppression is integral to the workings of the American capitalist economy and every social institution, the black population cannot win equality except through socialist revolution. Black oppression and its legitimization through racist ideology are priceless tools for the exploiters in keeping working people divided, blinded and unable to organize to overthrow our common enemy. There can be no revolutionary workers party built in this country that does not grasp the strategic character of the fight for black emancipation. In building such a party, black workers are determined by history to play a vanguard role. This view stands flatly counterposed to both liberal integrationism and black nationalism.
Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam
The contours of Malcolm’s life are well known. As “Detroit Red,” Malcolm was a street hustler and petty criminal during the 1940s in Boston and Harlem. He converted to the Nation of Islam while in prison in Massachusetts, changing his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X.
The Nation was a small sect under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad that combined religious superstition and black nationalism. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Malcolm became its most visible and effective spokesman. He made the group known by his denunciations of the “respectable” civil rights leaders. He organized several mosques, including in Harlem, the primary center of black politics and culture in the U.S. As activists were beaten and murdered, Malcolm was the only prominent black leader who asserted that black people should not beg to be integrated into American society. His denunciations of the liberal sellouts struck a chord among the ghetto poor and working-class blacks. But the Nation accepted the idea that America was a white man’s country and opposed integration.
Marable describes the political roots of the Nation of Islam in the movement founded by Marcus Garvey in Jamaica in 1914. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association grew rapidly in the U.S. during the 1920s, when it seemed to many that no black struggle for social integration and equality could succeed. This was a heyday of the KKK, exemplified by the 40,000 robed and hooded Klansmen who paraded openly in Washington, D.C., in 1925. Jim Crow segregation was the law of the South and was enforced by terror, legal and extralegal, as black men and women were lynched for not “knowing their place.” Anti-Communist red scares were viciously waged in response to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The period was marked by aggressive union-busting, with notorious frame-ups of labor militants and prosecutions of unions under “criminal syndicalism” laws. Labor radicals and other immigrant workers were rounded up and deported.
Garvey’s political philosophy was for complete black separation from whites, including the demand for an independent black state in Africa. He emphasized the development of black-owned businesses—i.e., a black middle class that would profit from its monopoly of the patronage of black consumers. Marable notes Garvey’s continuity with the conservative, business-oriented philosophy of Booker T. Washington, pointing out that both Garvey and Washington were “accommodationists” who accepted segregation and did not challenge black disenfranchisement or separate schools for blacks and whites.
While other factors contributed to the destruction of Marcus Garvey’s organization, its appeal was decisively undercut when working-class struggle exploded in the 1930s. Black workers played a vanguard role in heroic strikes which organized industrial unions in the CIO—inclusive unions that sought to organize all workers in a given industry, breaking down craft categories and organizing skilled and unskilled workers across ethnic and racial divisions. As the working class emerged fighting out of the doldrums of the Great Depression, the illusory solace offered by Garvey’s brand of black nationalism tended to lose its appeal.
The Nation of Islam, which sprang up later, was primarily a religious organization. But its ideology was similar to Garvey’s. Explicitly disavowing organized political activism, the Nation espoused separate “development” of blacks in “white” America. Dedicated cadres of Garvey’s movement, Malcolm’s parents relocated repeatedly, from Philadelphia to Omaha, Nebraska, and elsewhere before settling in Lansing, Michigan, where Malcolm Little was raised.
By the early 1960s the Nation had begun to grow rapidly, attracting converts from diverse backgrounds. Malcolm X was personally responsible for a huge number of recruits, not only to Temple (later Mosque) No. 7 in Harlem, which he headed for years, but in many other cities, traveling the country as the NOI’s National Minister.
Despite its opposition to participating in organized protest, its religiosity and its advocacy of black capitalism, the NOI was viewed as some kind of radical organization. In this racist country, black radicals or those perceived as such will always be a target for the political police (who especially fear the intersection of blacks and communism). The FBI and the New York police red squad were all over the NOI, employing constant surveillance and infiltration as well as provocations seeking to fan the flames of jealousy and distrust among its leaders. The sect was denied legal protections afforded other religions, and salesmen of its newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, were harassed by the cops. One of the strengths of Marable’s book is its use of police records to demonstrate the extent of state surveillance, harassment and provocation of black militants, including Malcolm X.
The Crucible of the Civil Rights Struggles
The civil rights movement helped to undermine the reactionary Cold War consensus of the 1950s. Seen as a struggle against entrenched racial oppression and for equality, it drew many thousands of workers and youth into the streets of cities and towns in the South and inspired solidarity worldwide. As the struggle sharpened and racist atrocities against blacks multiplied, NAACP organizer Robert F. Williams in North Carolina undertook armed self-defense. Williams was suspended from the NAACP, and in 1961 government repression drove him to flee the country to Cuba, where the revolution had just expropriated the capitalists in the face of U.S. imperialist hostility. In Louisiana, the Deacons for Defense, many of whom were Korean War veterans, organized to protect civil rights demonstrators.
In response to an emerging mass movement that showed increasing willingness to openly defy the Jim Crow police state, dominant sections of the Northern bourgeoisie saw that it was time for the South to adopt the same formal democratic norms as the rest of the country. It is to this wing of the bourgeoisie that the leaders of the civil rights movement handcuffed the fight for black freedom. The civil rights struggles won partial gains for black people in the South, such as access to public facilities, voting rights and a degree of school integration. But these gains did not challenge capitalist class rule. And when the movement came North and tried to take on the conditions of the segregated inner cities—widespread poverty and unemployment, racist cop brutality, inferior housing and schools, etc.—it foundered. These conditions of oppression and capitalist immiseration could not be ameliorated by more speeches or new laws. Beginning with Harlem in 1964, the Northern ghettos exploded, registering the depth of anger and disappointed hopes.
It was in the period of the civil rights movement that Malcolm X came of age politically, and this would throw him into an irreconcilable conflict with the NOI. The Nation’s philosophy of black business helped enrich Muhammad (supposedly God’s messenger) and his family, but offered no solution to black oppression. The NOI was a religious movement in a political time; for all its inflammatory rhetoric, it stood aside from the struggle for civil rights, preaching individual religious enlightenment and renunciation of “sinful” conduct.
For Malcolm X, this religious ideology, which he deeply believed, became a wrenching contradiction with his passionate commitment to fight white supremacy, injustice and hypocrisy. He felt the pressure from young people who thought he ought to join them in militant action, stating in the Autobiography: “I felt that, wherever black people committed themselves in the Little Rocks and Birminghams and other places, militantly disciplined Muslims should also be there.” But for the NOI to have participated in struggles for integration would have violated their precepts and their very reason for existence.
Malcolm X gave voice to young activists’ increasing dissatisfaction with the housebroken civil rights leaders. Where liberals swooned as Reverend King intoned “I have a dream” at the 1963 March on Washington, Malcolm X termed the event “a circus, a performance that beat anything Hollywood could ever do.” This was more than irreverence, it was an attack on the pro-Democratic Party politics of the organizers. He named the individual black leaders, closely tied to the Kennedy administration, who worked overtime to keep any militancy out of the march.
For Marable, the March on Washington was a marvelous mass movement that nobody in his right mind could have resisted: “The supposedly ‘Uncle Tom’ leaders like Rustin, Randolph, and King had mobilized a quarter of a million people,” he writes. Marable goes on to say: “Malcolm argued that the Kennedy administration decided to ‘co-opt’ the demonstration…. Malcolm’s thesis was that the civil rights leaders were so craven and bankrupt that they were duped by whites in power. This version of events was a gross distortion of the facts—yet it contained enough truth to capture an audience of unhappy black militants.” The facts are that what could have been an angry outpouring was turned into an appeal for conscience and reconciliation. John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had begun to reject the preachers’ allegiance to nonviolence, was prevented from delivering even a mild criticism of the Democrats. (Lewis later became a Democratic Congressman.)
Malcolm Breaks with Elijah Muhammad
Malcolm had by this time become increasingly alienated from Elijah Muhammad. He was shocked by the stories that could not be suppressed of the NOI leader’s sexual relations with young women who were his secretaries. But fundamentally the sources of friction were political: Malcolm chafed at the Nation’s aloofness from political activity, while Elijah Muhammad increasingly resented and feared Malcolm’s popularity.
The conflict came to a head after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Muhammad, not wanting to attract attention, ordered his supporters to say nothing whatsoever about the assassination. But Malcolm famously declared that Kennedy’s assassination was a case of the “chickens coming home to roost,” adding that “chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.” This disobedience infuriated Elijah Muhammad, but won Malcolm increased authority among the more militant black activists.
At that time, the most militant and politically conscious activists sympathized with the Cuban Revolution and solidarized with other struggles for national and social liberation. Few of them shed any tears for U.S. imperialism’s slain Commander-in-Chief, the man who had ordered the CIA-organized Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and had sent the Green Berets into South Vietnam. So when Malcolm made his “coming home to roost” comment, many black militants applauded, even if they were not themselves ready to go that far.
Marable’s tactic of falsification by omission is especially clear in his treatment of the 1960-61 Cuban Revolution, which had created a workers state, although one that was bureaucratically deformed from its inception. Marable recounts Malcolm’s strong sympathy and support for the revolution and the government of Fidel Castro, who had won plenty of support among American blacks when he decided to stay in Harlem’s Hotel Theresa on a trip to address the United Nations. But nowhere in Marable’s book is there any mention of the Democrat Kennedy’s relentless efforts to overthrow the Cuban government, including engaging the Mafia in an attempt to assassinate Castro.
Elijah Muhammad purged Malcolm from the Nation and NOI leaders relentlessly denounced him, including Malcolm’s former protégé, Louis X (today the reactionary demagogue Louis Farrakhan), who proclaimed him “worthy of death.” Marable’s book describes the NOI’s vendetta against Malcolm, relying heavily on an interview with Farrakhan and presenting the latter’s version of the events leading to the 1965 assassination.
That Malcolm felt liberated by his split from Elijah Muhammad was underlined by his telegram to American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, which Malcolm read out to a rally in Harlem on 24 January 1965. The NOI’s racial separatism had led it to recognize “common ground” with fascists and other segregationists, as Marable documents. Malcolm’s message read:
“This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad’s separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense—by any means necessary.”
Between his split from the Nation and his murder, Malcolm lived barely a year. Much of this was spent abroad, including his pilgrimage to Mecca. Although he founded two organizations in rapid succession—the Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity—they had no real program beyond the eclectic views expressed in his speeches. While eventually millions would become aware of his impact, the organizations he founded probably never included more than a few hundred. Yet his impact on black activists and the nascent New Left radicalism was undeniable.
Malcolm X’s speeches and his Autobiography were hugely influential for thousands of militants who would never have dreamed of attending a meeting of the Nation of Islam. His appeal lay precisely in his debunking of liberal hypocrisy on the part of the Democratic politicians and especially his exposure of the mainstream civil rights leaders as servants of the system.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 998
16 March 2012
Honor Malcolm X, Militant Voice of Black Struggle
Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Liberal’s “Reinvention”
A Review by J.L. Gormoff
Part Two
Part One of this article appeared in WV No. 997 (2 March).
Malcolm X was greatly influenced by the colonial revolutions that followed World War II, particularly in Africa and Asia. He and other militants were also deeply affected by the Cuban Revolution, which expropriated the capitalists in the face of American imperialist hostility in 1960 and opened the road to massive social advances benefiting working people and the poor. It was not lost on people like Malcolm X that the Cuban regime uprooted the island’s own version of Jim Crow segregation.
Malcolm and many other black activists and leftists grasped that the fight against black oppression in the U.S. was linked to the struggle against U.S. violence and warfare abroad. Malcolm denounced the U.S. as “the chief imperialist nation of the world” and “the leader of a pack of white imperialist nations” (quoted in Carlos Moore, Pichón: A Memoir: Race and Revolution in Castro’s Cuba [2008]). He was astute in his denunciation of the assassination of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba in a plot organized by the CIA, which later installed the murdering despot Moise Tshombe as prime minister.
Malcolm believed that the dark-skinned colonial peoples of the world had liberated themselves or were about to liberate themselves from Western imperialism. He felt that the states of Asia and Africa were becoming powerful enemies of Washington and naively expected them to use what power they had on behalf of the American black population. This view was consistent with seeing the U.S. black struggle as a colonial liberation struggle within the imperialist metropolis.
Social revolutions had occurred in China, North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba, expropriating the local bourgeois ruling classes and liberating these countries from imperialist bondage. Based on peasant insurgencies, with the working class removed as a factor, those revolutions resulted in bureaucratically deformed workers states under the rule of nationalist Stalinist regimes. But in a far larger number of former colonial countries, independence struggles resulted in the rule of indigenous bourgeois classes.
As Marxists, we champion struggles for national liberation against direct imperialist rule. But we recognize that under the rule of bourgeois nationalist regimes, those societies remain dependent on the handful of capitalist-imperialist states of North America, Europe and Japan. As clients of the Soviet degenerated workers state, nationalist regimes such as Colonel Nasser’s in Egypt were able to act with a certain independence from the imperialists while remaining subordinated to the capitalist world market. With the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, the main impediment to untrammeled imperialist plunder was removed, reinforcing the intense poverty and dependence of neocolonial Third World societies.
In a speech in Cairo to the Organization of African Unity, Malcolm naively implored this collection of bloodthirsty militarists, venal nationalist demagogues and tribal chiefs to step up, lamenting: “What makes our African brothers hesitate to bring the United States government before the United Nations?” An interesting chapter in Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention makes clear, based on letters by Malcolm to family members during his 1964 trip to Africa, that the cordial relations he experienced with representatives of the ruling elites were wide-ranging. Marable documents Malcolm’s mutually appreciative encounters with Prince Faisal of the reactionary Saudi monarchy, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nigerian cabinet minister, the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon, and the parliament of Ghana, among others.
The strength of Malcolm X was that he saw and spoke the truth about American social reality. He saw through liberal politicians (white and black) and indicted U.S. government hypocrisy as no one else did, although he was also not above engaging in occasional anti-Semitism. But when he looked at Africa through the prism of race, not class, he did not see the same hypocrisy of their ruling elites when they professed concern for the welfare of the people.
There are powerful concentrations of the proletariat in many parts of the neocolonial world. It is those working classes that, under the leadership of Leninist vanguard parties, can unite all the impoverished toilers in a fight to sweep away the local bourgeois rulers and liberate their countries from imperialist subordination as part of the struggle for world socialist revolution.
Marable Falsifies Malcolm X: The Democratic Party
At bottom, Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention does indeed reinvent Malcolm X, falsely portraying him as moving toward mainstream liberalism during the tumultuous civil rights struggles of the 1960s. This serves to justify Marable’s conviction that there were no options other than pro-Democratic Party pressure politics on the one side and passivity or sectarian abstentionism on the other. In Marable’s eyes, once Malcolm X broke from the do-nothing policy of the Nation of Islam (NOI), allegiance to “working within the system” was sure to follow. He forecloses any possibility of revolutionary struggle against the racist capitalist order, both during the civil rights movement and now.
Let’s look at two concrete examples of how Marable’s politics distort Malcolm’s record. One is Marable’s presentation of the presidential election of 1964. The other is his comparison of two of Malcolm’s most famous speeches, “Message to the Grass Roots” and “The Ballot or the Bullet.”
According to Marable, Malcolm supported Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater in his race against Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater was an extremely right-wing, anti-Communist libertarian who had voted against the Civil Rights Act. He devised what was known as the Republican’s “Southern Strategy,” appealing to white Democratic voters in the South on the basis of opposition to the civil rights movement. Goldwater lost in a landslide, but Republicans went on to use this strategy with great success starting with Richard Nixon in the next presidential election.
The civil rights leadership pushed blacks to vote for Johnson. Martin Luther King Jr. called Goldwater “the most dangerous man in America” (Playboy, January 1965), and Bayard Rustin wrote that Mississippi Senator James Eastland, a notorious racist, and Goldwater were “the main enemies” (Commentary, February 1965). A record 94 percent of black voters cast their ballots for the Democrat Johnson.
As for Malcolm X, Marable asserts: “Nearly alone among prominent black leaders, he continued to support Barry Goldwater as the better candidate to address blacks’ interests.” Marable’s only evidence is the claim that Alex Haley, who coauthored The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “cited an article by Malcolm, ‘Why I Am for Goldwater’.” While there is no class difference between a Republican and a Democrat, it would still be surprising if Malcolm X had supported an arch-reactionary for president—except that it is not true.
When one goes to the source of the supposed article in support of Goldwater—in Malcolm’s papers at the Schomburg Center in Harlem—one finds no article by Malcolm. In fact, Haley was pitching to his literary agent something he imagined that Malcolm might write (Alex Haley to Paul Reynolds, 21 June 1964, Malcolm X Collection, reel 3). What Malcolm did write was an article in the Saturday Evening Post (12 September 1964) in which he made clear his opposition to both candidates:
“I feel that as far as the American black man is concerned, [Johnson and Goldwater] are both just about the same. It’s just a question of Johnson, the fox, or Goldwater, the wolf.... Since these are the choices, the black man in America, I think, only needs to pick which one he chooses to be eaten by, because they both will eat him.”
He added:
“I wouldn’t put myself in the position of voting for either one, or of recommending to any black man to do so. I’m just talking about if America’s white voters do install Goldwater, the black people will at least know what they are dealing with.”
With his slander of Malcolm’s position on the elections, Marable echoes the New York Times (8 September 1964), which ran a piece titled “Malcolm X Article Favors Goldwater.” What upset both the liberals at the Times and Marable was that Malcolm dared to point out the real nature of the Democrats. Malcolm X did not oppose Johnson in class terms, in other words, as a representative of the capitalist ruling class. But he understood that Johnson and the Democrats were enemies of black rights. And for Marable, if you don’t vote Democrat, you support the Republicans.
Marable Falsifies Malcolm X: Electoralism
Central to Marable’s book is the case he tries to make that Malcolm in his last years was moving toward garden-variety liberal politics and electoralism. This he does by, for example, contrasting “Message to the Grass Roots” (10 November 1963), which Malcolm delivered right before breaking from the Nation of Islam, and “The Ballot or the Bullet,” a speech he gave six months later. The way Marable tells it, “Message” was a militant call for revolution, and “Ballot” a call for black people to vote. Marable states that “Ballot” starts off with “an appeal for black unity despite ideological quarrels” and claims that “this sentiment directly contradicted the ‘Message to the Grassroots,’ which had ridiculed King and other civil rights activists.” In fact, rhetorical appeals to black unity combined with attacks on liberal leaders were integral to both speeches.
Marable deplores exactly what made Malcolm X such an important figure. He’s right to focus on “Grass Roots,” which nailed the role of King, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer and others by name in co-opting the August 1963 March on Washington:
“This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it. They didn’t integrate it, they infiltrated it. They joined it, became a part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry…why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all…. They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make; and then told them to get out of town by sundown. And every one of those Toms was out of town by sundown.”
“Grass Roots” is also where Malcolm cogently pointed out that it was when the black population of Birmingham, Alabama, began to fight back against racist terror just three months before the D.C. march that President Kennedy sent in federal troops to restore order.
It is false to see a big political difference between “Grass Roots” and “Ballot.” According to Marable, in the second speech Malcolm made a turn, urging that “Black people must forget their differences and discuss the points on which they can agree.” But why is this so different from the position put forward in “Grass Roots”: “Instead of airing our differences in public, we have to realize we’re all the same family.... We need to stop airing our differences in front of the white man.” Malcolm X was, from our standpoint, a contradictory figure. But in this case the contradiction is Marable’s: Malcolm could urge a black “united front” at the same time as he made clear his opposition to the politics of the liberal black leaders—they were the ones betraying the black masses. After all, it was in “Ballot” that Malcolm declared: “I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.”
For Marable, by the time of “Ballot,” supposedly “Malcolm had come to see the vote as a necessary tool if black Americans were to take control of the institutions in their communities.” Marable criticizes Malcolm for “glaring inconsistency in his logic,” because “Malcolm was encouraging African Americans to vote, even to throw their weight behind either major party; yet simultaneously he accused both major parties of racism, incapable of delivering fairness to blacks.”
In “Ballot,” Malcolm does highlight the importance of blacks’ votes in the North, but in terms counterposed to Marable’s liberal interpretation: “Your vote, your dumb vote, your ignorant vote, your wasted vote put in an administration in Washington, D.C., that has seen fit to pass every kind of legislation imaginable, saving you until the last, then filibustering on top of that.” Filibustering was how Dixiecrats like Senator Eastland tried to kill civil rights bills. Malcolm X grasped how the Democrats’ division of labor worked. Addressing the role of liberal Democrats, he said: “They blame the Dixiecrats. What is a Dixiecrat? A Democrat. A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise.... When you keep the Democrats in power, you’re keeping the Dixiecrats in power.”
As Malcolm put it in a subsequent speech: “The Northern Dixiecrat puts all the blame on the Southern Dixiecrat. It’s a con game, a giant political con game” (“The Black Revolution,” 8 April 1964). This con game continues to be played out today, as the craven trade-union officialdom and black liberal politicians promote the “lesser evil” capitalist Democrats against the Republicans. While the Republicans make no pretense of being “friends” of labor, black people and immigrants, the Democrats lie about it and do the same things.
The Struggle for Revolutionary Leadership
There have been few historical conjunctures when a small Marxist propaganda group could, in a few years’ time, transform itself into a party leading a significant section of the proletariat and the oppressed. The South in the early 1960s offered such an opportunity. The mass movement of proletarians and students for black rights was seething and activists were learning painful lessons about the nature of the capitalist state, leading to impassioned debates over strategy and tactics and the politics underlying them. By 1964, the main body of young black militants, concentrated in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had broken with liberalism as they understood it but had not yet latched on to the political dead end of black separatism. At the same time, these young fighters on the front lines of the struggle against white supremacy had acquired enormous moral and political authority among the black masses in the South, including members of the industrial proletariat.
The reformist Communist Party (CP) had no appeal for radicalizing elements in this period. In the time of V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist International had pressed American Communists to pay special attention to the fight against black oppression. The CP won some impressive recruits from among black intellectuals and went on to build a base in the South in the late 1920s and ’30s. Despite its developing Stalinist degeneration, the CP was at that time still capable of some quite heroic struggles. To take one example, it organized Southern sharecroppers’ unions that sought to include poor whites as well as blacks. In Atlanta in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the CP led a large, racially integrated march of unemployed workers that braved fierce repression and Klan terror in order to demand relief.
Such struggles were impossible without opposing the whole Southern power structure, including the Democratic Party. These efforts, and the black working people who had been mobilized by them, were abandoned when in the mid 1930s the CP became open supporters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the name of the “people’s front.” The CP could not even bring itself to support the mild-mannered 1941 March on Washington movement led by A. Philip Randolph because nothing was to be allowed to mute its chauvinist support for U.S. imperialism’s war effort in World War II. For the same reason, the CP actively broke strikes and even suspended its Japanese American members during the wartime internment.
In sharp contrast, the American Trotskyist movement stood for working-class politics independent of the Democratic Party as well as the Republicans. Led by James P. Cannon, a founder of American Communism who was won to Trotskyism at the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, the Trotskyists were expelled from the CP in 1928, forming the Communist League of America and, in 1938, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). As part of its revolutionary program, the SWP stood for racial integration and equal rights for the black population.
However, by the early 1960s, the SWP, weakened by the anti-Communist repression and intense conservatism of the post-WWII period, had begun to move rapidly to the right in response to perceived opportunities. This found grotesque expression when the SWP sent condolences to John F. Kennedy’s widow after his assassination. Our political tendency, now called the International Communist League, arose out of a factional struggle inside the SWP that was triggered partly over the question of black liberation. Our founding cadres, organized in the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), fought equally against the SWP’s opportunism over the Cuban Revolution, as the party uncritically supported the petty-bourgeois Fidel Castro leadership. Our comrades were expelled from the SWP in 1963-64 and went on to found the Spartacist League in 1966. By the fall of 1965, the SWP had crossed the class line into reformism with its overt class collaborationism in the burgeoning protests against the Vietnam War, building platforms for liberal Democrats who were beginning to see the war as a losing proposition for U.S. imperialism.
Instead of fighting to win black militants such as those in SNCC to a revolutionary program, the SWP argued that black people needed their own party. This served as the rationale to tail, successively and sometimes simultaneously, pro-Democratic Party civil rights leaders as well as sundry black nationalists. In opposition to the SWP’s abstentionism, the RT argued in July 1963 that the party should send members to the South to participate in the struggle. In a document submitted as part of internal party discussion, the RT argued in opposition to a draft resolution of the SWP’s Political Committee (PC):
“Negroes who are activists in the movement, such as, for example, the full-time militants around SNCC, are every day formulating concepts of struggle for the movement. The meaning of the line of the PC draft is that we are not interested in recruiting these people to our white party because we have the revolutionary socialist program for the section of the working class of which we are the vanguard, and they (Negro militants) must lead their own struggle, although we would like to have fraternal relations with them. This is the meaning of the PC draft.
“To the concept of the white party must be counterposed the concept of the revolutionary party. For if we are only the former, then black workers are misplaced in the SWP.”
— “For Black Trotskyism” (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [Revised], “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism” [September 1978])
This document laid out our political orientation:
“Our point of departure comes in turn as the conclusion that the Negro question is so deeply built into the American capitalist class-structure—regionally and nationally—that only the destruction of existing class relations and the change in class dominance—the passing of power into the hands of the working class—will suffice to strike at the heart of racism and bring about a solution both real and durable.”
Our strategic perspective was to recruit the left wing of the civil rights movement into a revolutionary party capable of leading vanguard layers of the black working class and petty-bourgeois youth in the South. The RT put forward a series of demands linking the struggles of workers and the black masses and addressing immediate needs such as organized self-defense and union organizing drives throughout the South. As volunteers were risking their lives to register black voters, we called for independent political organization so that voting could mean something other than supporting Democrats.
The RT and the early Spartacist League raised such transitional demands as the call for a Freedom Labor Party. These demands were aimed at uniting the ranks of the trade unions—the workers’ basic organizations of self-defense against the exploiting class—with the militant masses in the civil rights movement behind a perspective of socialist revolution. This fusion could not come about through preachments of unity, but only by the union movement actively taking up the fight for the rights of the specially oppressed black population. The obstacle to uniting the working people in revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system was not only the liberal preachers. It was, principally, the sellout labor bureaucrats, who matched King & Co. in fidelity to the Democratic Party.
When Malcolm X came to political awareness, the main body of the union bureaucracy consisted of the open Cold War crusaders at the head of the AFL-CIO, who had been installed by the anti-red purges in the late 1940s and ’50s. Another section of the labor tops, epitomized by the United Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther, tried to strike a slicker pose with vague social-democratic rhetoric. As Malcolm X noted, Reuther & Co. were closely tied to the pro-Democratic Party civil rights leaders and served as a prop of the Kennedy administration.
Both wings of the labor bureaucracy were explicitly hostile to labor militancy and to the militant wing of civil rights activism. Both wings were outspoken enemies of Communism and acted as agencies of U.S. imperialism abroad, supporting reactionary pro-American regimes and spearheading efforts to smash leftist-led unions. Their despicable political profile contributed hugely to the view of black and other New Left radicals that the unions themselves were a part of “the system” and enemies of liberation. Identifying the working class as a whole with the sellout leaders at the top is a fallacy that to this day contributes to anti-union prejudices, undermining any perspective of fighting inside the unions for a class-struggle leadership.
Unlike many others on the left, who patronizingly enthused over whatever was popular, the Spartacist League was forthright in advancing our Marxist views and criticisms. When the slogan of “black power” was put forward, we wrote that it “represents the repudiation of tokenism, liberal tutelage, reliance on the federal government, and the nonviolent philosophy of moral suasion. In this sense, therefore, black power is class power, and should be supported by all socialist forces” (“Black Power—Class Power,” Spartacist West No. 8, September 1966; reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 5 [Revised]). But we also warned that the slogan “can be used by petty bourgeois black nationalist elements who want to slice the social cake along color rather than class lines and to promote reactionary color mysticism. More seriously, it can be degraded to mean mere support for black politicians operating within the system.”
Indeed, within a few years, the larger wing of the Black Panthers’ leadership had begun to openly look to the Democratic Party. In 1973 Panther leader Bobby Seale ran as a Democrat for mayor of Oakland, California. “Black Power” increasingly came to be defined as “black control of the black community,” which meant more black businesses, the election of black mayors to preside over the misery of the big cities, and more black cops to participate in shooting down blacks.
Marable and “Trotskyism”
Marable takes as good coin the revisionist SWP’s portrayal of “Trotskyism,” promoting the party’s opportunist tailism of whatever leaders black people seemed to want. Marable writes:
“For decades, the SWP had promoted revolutionary black nationalism. Leon Trotsky himself had believed that Negro Americans would be the vanguard for the inevitable socialist revolution in the United States. Malcolm’s separation from the Nation of Islam and his endorsement of voter registration and mass protest by African Americans seemed to Trotskyists a move toward socialism.”
Marable goes on to wrongly state in a footnote that Trotskyism “meant that the vanguard of the socialist revolution would not come from the industrial proletariat, but from the most oppressed sectors of the working class and peasantry,” which in the U.S. meant black people.
Shortly after Malcolm died, longtime SWP cadre George Breitman wrote The Last Year of Malcolm X (1967), which argued: “Malcolm was pro-socialist in the last year of his life, but not yet a Marxist.” Breitman would go on to proclaim Malcolm an increasingly pro-socialist “revolutionary.” For the SWP to call Malcolm X a socialist was in keeping with renouncing its former revolutionary socialist program and adapting to many non-proletarian forces that falsely appropriated the term “socialist,” such as the Algerian Ben Bella government and Egypt under Nasser, both of which were bourgeois-nationalist regimes.
The SWP’s use of Trotsky’s authority in regard to the black struggle was also fraudulent. Trotsky’s rare comments concerning American blacks were consistent with the mistaken understanding that they might constitute a nation and hence with raising a slogan of self-determination. But it is a travesty to suggest that Trotsky would ever have entertained the notion of organizing separate “revolutionary” parties by race. In discussions with the SWP leadership in 1939, Trotsky reminded the comrades that the roots of opportunism in the trade unions in the U.S. lay in their being based on the “aristocracy of labor”—privileged layers who sided with the bourgeois class “to hold the Negroes and the unskilled workers down to a very low scale.” Correctly identifying black workers as “the most dynamic milieu of the working class,” he insisted: “We must say to the conscious elements of the Negroes that they are convoked by the historic development to become a vanguard of the working class…. If it happens that we in the SWP are not able to find the road to this stratum, then we are not worthy at all. The permanent revolution and all the rest would be only a lie.”
The Spartacist League’s political program, representing a revolutionary alternative to both the liberal-integrationist and black nationalist dead ends, powerfully spoke to felt needs, but our very small organization was not able to pose it forcefully before the mass of radicalizing black activists. The early SL made promising beginnings in exemplary mass work, illustrating our program through such actions as organizing defense of Bill Epton, a black Progressive Labor supporter who was prosecuted in the wake of the 1964 Harlem “riot”—in reality, a police riot against the people of Harlem. With the ghetto in police lockdown, we initiated the Harlem Solidarity Committee, which organized a 1,000-strong rally in NYC’s garment district to mobilize working-class support for the besieged black people.
Ultimately, we were frozen out by black nationalist currents that claimed to reject liberal gradualism and tokenism. The opportunism of organizations such as the SWP let pass a promising opportunity to recruit substantial numbers of black radicals to a perspective of socialist revolution and to develop them as cadres and leaders of a Leninist vanguard party.
The black freedom struggle—and in fact the whole working class—paid heavily for black radicals’ inability to find the levers to polarize capitalist society along class lines, as the nationalists rejected any revolutionary potential for white workers. The isolation of the Black Panthers and others from the working class and the trade unions increased their vulnerability to the racist capitalist state as it extracted murderous vengeance. Through cop repression and the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO operation, dozens of leaders and militants were shot down and many others framed up and thrown in jail. These attacks broke the back of the Panthers, whose fragmentation—assisted by agents provocateurs, forged documents and other police “dirty tricks”—led to most of their leading members moving sharply to the right.
Malcolm X and the Left Today
In a suitably scathing review of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, black columnist Glen Ford takes on Marable’s assertion that Malcolm’s later activities “marked an early, tentative concession to the idea that perhaps blacks could someday become empowered within the existing system” (“Dragging Malcolm X to Obamaland,” Black Agenda Report, 27 April 2011). Ford comments that “Marable and his circle” are “the left Black Obamaites, purported radicals who have a perpetual love affair with Power.” However, behind Ford’s bons mots is a bankrupt black nationalist outlook, which obliterates a class understanding of Obama’s role as chief executive of the racist U.S. capitalist order. In 2008, Ford himself supported the candidacy of Cynthia McKinney, a black former Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia who was running on the ticket of the Green Party, a small-fry capitalist party.
The reactions to Marable’s book by the ostensibly socialist left show how much they accept his basic framework of either liberal integration or black nationalism, in opposition to a revolutionary alternative. In Liberation News (11 June 2011), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) points out Marable’s distortion of Malcolm’s comments about electoralism. But for the PSL, the bottom line is that “there is nothing inconsistent about condemning the two major parties while suggesting that Black people vote strategically. A revolutionary makes use of all tactics that advance the struggle at a particular moment, provided that this does not foster illusions in the current system.”
This is the pretext that the PSL’s forebears in the Workers World Party (WWP) have used to backhandedly support black capitalist politicians in the name of “fighting the right.” In the 1980s, it was the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson; today, the WWP hails New York City Councilman Charles Barron. Marxists fight for the class independence of the working class, for a workers party that fights against all oppression and for black liberation through socialist revolution!
For 20 or 30 years it has been common on the reformist left to reconcile Malcolm X to the politics of Martin Luther King. The reformists all share the perspective of pressuring the Democrats to do good things, either overtly or backhandedly. Virtually all of them cheered Obama’s election and will do their best to find ways to get back on the bandwagon in this election year. In the end, the reformists are reduced to quibbling over this or that in Marable’s book, which distorts Malcolm X’s political trajectory to serve a very contemporary purpose, including by absurdly depicting Malcolm X as becoming “race neutral.” Marable’s book takes for granted that the civil rights movement succeeded. In terms of the limited objectives of its pro-government leaders, it did. But it benefited mainly a thin layer of middle-class blacks, the traditional “talented tenth” in the professions augmented by a layer of government bureaucrats and a few elected officials.
What we see in America today is not the “post-racial” society invoked by Barack Obama but the failure of the liberal civil rights movement to fundamentally better the lives of this oppressed layer of American capitalist society. In the U.S. today, the prison system is one of the few growth industries, accompanying the deindustrialization of recent decades. Starting with Jesse Jackson himself, the black politicos who Marable sees as proof of “empowerment” early on enrolled themselves as champions of the “war on drugs,” which has resulted in mass incarceration of black people as well as a growing number of Latinos and others. The current economic crisis has underlined the vulnerability of the black population, measured by such indices as the enormous gap in household net wealth between white and black families, as the Great Depression of the 1930s did in its day. It must be obvious to all that capitalism is not bringing prosperity to white working people either.
The simple truth is that there will be no end to black oppression, exploitation and imperialist war until the multiracial working class seizes power from the tiny handful that constitutes the capitalist class and reorganizes society on a socialist basis. As in the days when Malcolm X gave voice to the oppressed black masses, what needs to be done is to forge a revolutionary party that can provide the necessary leadership for the working class and the oppressed. In our obituary on Malcolm X in Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965 (reprinted last issue), we noted the “agonizing gap in black leadership today,” a condition that has grown even more acute since that time. Our obituary concluded:
“But such leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike as a heroic and tragic figure in a dark period of our common history.”
Out In The 1960s Folk Revival Night- Sonny Terry And Brownie McGhee Hold Forth
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee doing, well justi doing what they do.
CD Review
The Best Of Sonny Terry And Brownie McGhee
One of the unanticipated results of the folk and blues revival of the early 1960’s was the re-discovery of many black blues, especially country blues, singers. John and Alan Lomax had recorded a number of them in the late 1930s and early 1940s and then they fell off of the map. The most famous ‘discovery’ of the early 1960’s was, of course, the reemergence of the legendary Mississippi John Hurt. On the fringes of that development came the new prominence of some working musicians who had previously fallen below the radar like the presently reviewed classic blues harmonica player Sonny Terry and driving guitar playing Brownie McGhee, one of the most productive duos of the period. This long time partnership developed and continued in spite of the fact that they had a fairly rocky personal relationship, especially toward the end of their careers. Well, stranger things have happened in the world of music.
In this compilation we get to see the range of musical talents that this pair had from the plaintive Let Me Be Your Big Dog through the pathetically sad Betty And Dupree’s Blues and a jaunty version of Freight Train. Along the way also listen to their version of Louise, Louise that has been recorded by many others including Mississippi Fred McDowell and Son House. There are also a couple of rousing songs like House Lady and The Devil’s Gonna Get You. And a couple that defy classification but will just make you feel good like I Got A Women. The total package is one that you will find yourself listening to much more than you would have thought.
CD Review
The Best Of Sonny Terry And Brownie McGhee
One of the unanticipated results of the folk and blues revival of the early 1960’s was the re-discovery of many black blues, especially country blues, singers. John and Alan Lomax had recorded a number of them in the late 1930s and early 1940s and then they fell off of the map. The most famous ‘discovery’ of the early 1960’s was, of course, the reemergence of the legendary Mississippi John Hurt. On the fringes of that development came the new prominence of some working musicians who had previously fallen below the radar like the presently reviewed classic blues harmonica player Sonny Terry and driving guitar playing Brownie McGhee, one of the most productive duos of the period. This long time partnership developed and continued in spite of the fact that they had a fairly rocky personal relationship, especially toward the end of their careers. Well, stranger things have happened in the world of music.
In this compilation we get to see the range of musical talents that this pair had from the plaintive Let Me Be Your Big Dog through the pathetically sad Betty And Dupree’s Blues and a jaunty version of Freight Train. Along the way also listen to their version of Louise, Louise that has been recorded by many others including Mississippi Fred McDowell and Son House. There are also a couple of rousing songs like House Lady and The Devil’s Gonna Get You. And a couple that defy classification but will just make you feel good like I Got A Women. The total package is one that you will find yourself listening to much more than you would have thought.
All Out Tuesday March 27 At 12 Noon At Harvard’s Science Center In Support Of The Harvard Library Workers -We Are Rallying For Education, For Libraries, For Jobs!
Click on headline to link to Facebook event page for Harvard library workers speak-out.
We Are Rallying )n March 27th For Education, For Libraries, For Jobs
Harvard University announced January 19th that it intends to reduce the size of the library workforce. Harvard already down-sized library staff in 2009 by more than 20% with early retirement buyouts and layoffs. Workers have struggled to continue providing quality services under speed-up conditions and outsourcing and are now faced with the threat of even more layoffs. Library workers who are spared from actual layoff are being told they'll have to re-apply for positions. Harvard also recently laid off workers in the Medical area.
Harvard hasn't cited financial need to make these cuts. Their endowment grows and the library budget was only 6% of their total expenses in June 2010 and is now just 3.3% of total budget (Feb. letter from Provost). Harvard is trying to unilaterally impose a restructuring plan that will further reduce costs, a plan that they refuse to disclose or discuss with HUCTW, concerned staff, students and faculty.
The largest employer in Cambridge, the third largest employer in Massachusetts and the richest University in the world should not lay off workers in a still depressed economy. They should not lay off workers who are vital to the operation of the Library. They should not outsource jobs.
TODAY is an important day of NATIONAL MOBILIZATION on education issues. OCCUPY groups, unions and many other students groups today are conducting actions nationwide in defense of education.
Harvard Library Workers, Other Harvard Workers, Students,
Faculty, Union Members and Community Allies Are Here Today to Support Quality Education and to SAY NO! TO HARVARD LAYOFFS
If you oppose layoffs, please send an email protest.
Email Harvard President Drew Faust (president@harvard.edu) and Provost Garber (alan garber@harvard.edu)
Please Cc the following address or contact for more info: harvardnolayoff@ gmail.com
Sample text: "I oppose layoffs in the Harvard Libraries. A University should be protecting these services, not reducing them in favor of outsourcing. Layoffs damage the local economy and ruin lives. Harvard can only be a better library with adequate staffing. Library workers, a library's lifeblood. are not expendable resources."
For more information see harvardnolayoffs.blogspot.com or email harvardnolayoffs.gmail.com
LABOR DONATED
We Are Rallying )n March 27th For Education, For Libraries, For Jobs
Harvard University announced January 19th that it intends to reduce the size of the library workforce. Harvard already down-sized library staff in 2009 by more than 20% with early retirement buyouts and layoffs. Workers have struggled to continue providing quality services under speed-up conditions and outsourcing and are now faced with the threat of even more layoffs. Library workers who are spared from actual layoff are being told they'll have to re-apply for positions. Harvard also recently laid off workers in the Medical area.
Harvard hasn't cited financial need to make these cuts. Their endowment grows and the library budget was only 6% of their total expenses in June 2010 and is now just 3.3% of total budget (Feb. letter from Provost). Harvard is trying to unilaterally impose a restructuring plan that will further reduce costs, a plan that they refuse to disclose or discuss with HUCTW, concerned staff, students and faculty.
The largest employer in Cambridge, the third largest employer in Massachusetts and the richest University in the world should not lay off workers in a still depressed economy. They should not lay off workers who are vital to the operation of the Library. They should not outsource jobs.
TODAY is an important day of NATIONAL MOBILIZATION on education issues. OCCUPY groups, unions and many other students groups today are conducting actions nationwide in defense of education.
Harvard Library Workers, Other Harvard Workers, Students,
Faculty, Union Members and Community Allies Are Here Today to Support Quality Education and to SAY NO! TO HARVARD LAYOFFS
If you oppose layoffs, please send an email protest.
Email Harvard President Drew Faust (president@harvard.edu) and Provost Garber (alan garber@harvard.edu)
Please Cc the following address or contact for more info: harvardnolayoff@ gmail.com
Sample text: "I oppose layoffs in the Harvard Libraries. A University should be protecting these services, not reducing them in favor of outsourcing. Layoffs damage the local economy and ruin lives. Harvard can only be a better library with adequate staffing. Library workers, a library's lifeblood. are not expendable resources."
For more information see harvardnolayoffs.blogspot.com or email harvardnolayoffs.gmail.com
LABOR DONATED
A Call To Action-United National Antiwar Coalition Conference-March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
Click on the headline to link to the United National Antiwar Coalition website for details on workshops, directions, registration and accommodations.
A Call To Action-United National Antiwar Coalition Conference-March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
SAY NO! TO THE NATO/G8 WARS & POVERTY AGENDA
A CONFERENCE TO CHALLENGE THE WARS OF THE 1% AGAINST THE 99* ABROAD AND AT HOME
March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
The US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the G-8 world economic powers will meet in Chicago, May 15-22,2012 to plan their economic and military strategies for the coming period. These military, financial, and political leaders, who serve the 1 % at home and abroad, impose austerity on the 99% to expand their profits, often by drones, armies, and police.
Just as there is a nationally-coordinated attempt to curb the organized dissent of the Occupy Wall St. movements, the federal and local authorities want to deny us our constitutional rights to peacefully and legally protest within sight and sound range of the NATO/G-8 Summits. We must challenge them and bring thousands to Chicago to stand in solidarity with all those fighting US-backed austerity and war around the globe.
To plan these actions and further actions against the program of endless war of the global elite, we will meet in a large national conference March 23-25 in Stamford CT. This conference will bring to¬gether activists from the occupy movements, and the antiwar, social justice and environmental move¬ments. We will demand that Washington Bring Our War Dollars Home Now! and use these trillions immediately for human needs.
The conference program will feature movement leaders, educators, grassroots activists, 40 workshops, and discussion/voting sessions on an action program. A partial list of presenters include: Ann Wright, Bill McKibben, Glen Ford, Vijay Prashad, Saadia Toor, Cynthia McKinney, Malik Mujahid, Ian Angus, Monami Maulik, Elliot Adams, Bruce Gagnon, David Swanson, Lucy Pagoada, and Clarence Thomas.
A conference highlight will be the relationship between the Wars Abroad and the racist War at Home on the Black Community, addressing unemployment, the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration, police brutality, the prison industry, and the racist death penalty.
Workshop Topics Include:
Occupy Wall St. & the Fight Against War x Global Economic Crisis Climate Crisis and War oo Women and War oo War at Home on Black Community oo War on the U.S.-Mexico Border oc Islamophobia as a Tool of War oo War and Labor's Fight Back oo Defense of Iran oo Afghanistan after Ten Years of Occupation oo Is the U.S. Really Withdrawing from Iraq? oo War on Pakistan oo Updates on Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen oo What Next for the Arab Spring? oo Occupation of Haiti oo U.S. Intervention in Honduras, Colombia, and the rest of Latin America x> Drone Warfare and Weapons in Space oo Fight for Our Right to Protest oo Civil Liberties oo Guantanamo, Torture and Rendition oo U.S. Combat Troops Involved in New Scramble for Africa oo Somalia oc Control of Media oo Imperialism oc Nonviolence & Direct Action oo Palestine: UN Recognized Statehood or Civil Resistance oc Breaking the Siege of Gaza & Ending Occupation oo Veterans Rights oo Immigrant Rights and War °o No War, No Warming oo Bring Our War $$ Home Campaigns.
www.unacpeace.org
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A Call To Action-United National Antiwar Coalition Conference-March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
SAY NO! TO THE NATO/G8 WARS & POVERTY AGENDA
A CONFERENCE TO CHALLENGE THE WARS OF THE 1% AGAINST THE 99* ABROAD AND AT HOME
March 23-25,2012 - Stamford Hilton Hotel, CT
The US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the G-8 world economic powers will meet in Chicago, May 15-22,2012 to plan their economic and military strategies for the coming period. These military, financial, and political leaders, who serve the 1 % at home and abroad, impose austerity on the 99% to expand their profits, often by drones, armies, and police.
Just as there is a nationally-coordinated attempt to curb the organized dissent of the Occupy Wall St. movements, the federal and local authorities want to deny us our constitutional rights to peacefully and legally protest within sight and sound range of the NATO/G-8 Summits. We must challenge them and bring thousands to Chicago to stand in solidarity with all those fighting US-backed austerity and war around the globe.
To plan these actions and further actions against the program of endless war of the global elite, we will meet in a large national conference March 23-25 in Stamford CT. This conference will bring to¬gether activists from the occupy movements, and the antiwar, social justice and environmental move¬ments. We will demand that Washington Bring Our War Dollars Home Now! and use these trillions immediately for human needs.
The conference program will feature movement leaders, educators, grassroots activists, 40 workshops, and discussion/voting sessions on an action program. A partial list of presenters include: Ann Wright, Bill McKibben, Glen Ford, Vijay Prashad, Saadia Toor, Cynthia McKinney, Malik Mujahid, Ian Angus, Monami Maulik, Elliot Adams, Bruce Gagnon, David Swanson, Lucy Pagoada, and Clarence Thomas.
A conference highlight will be the relationship between the Wars Abroad and the racist War at Home on the Black Community, addressing unemployment, the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration, police brutality, the prison industry, and the racist death penalty.
Workshop Topics Include:
Occupy Wall St. & the Fight Against War x Global Economic Crisis
www.unacpeace.org
**************
From the General Strike Occupy Boston (GSOB) Working Group- “Official” Flyer For May Day 2012
From the General Strike Occupy Boston (GSOB) Working Group- “Official” Flyer For May Day 2012
Occupy May 1ST-A day without the 99%
We will strike for a better future!
We will strike for OUR HUMAN RIGHTS to:
Healthcare, Education, and Housing
Economic, Social and Environmental Justice
Labor Rights
Freedom from Police Brutality and Profiling
Immigrant Rights
Women & LGBTQ Rights
Racial & Gender Equality
Clean water and healthy food to feed our families!
We call for a democratic standard of living for
all peoples!
Peace in our communities with JUSTICE!
What will you strike for?
Rally at noon, City Hall Plaza, Boston!
for more info: www.bostonmayday.org, www.occupymayist.oro. www.occupyboston org, or find us on facebook https://www.facebookboston-may-day-committee
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Occupy May 1ST-A day without the 99%
We will strike for a better future!
We will strike for OUR HUMAN RIGHTS to:
Healthcare, Education, and Housing
Economic, Social and Environmental Justice
Labor Rights
Freedom from Police Brutality and Profiling
Immigrant Rights
Women & LGBTQ Rights
Racial & Gender Equality
Clean water and healthy food to feed our families!
We call for a democratic standard of living for
all peoples!
Peace in our communities with JUSTICE!
What will you strike for?
Rally at noon, City Hall Plaza, Boston!
for more info: www.bostonmayday.org, www.occupymayist.oro. www.occupyboston org, or find us on facebook https://www.facebookboston-may-day-committee
&&&&&&&&&&&&&
5th ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND SOCIALIST CONFERENCE APRIL 14TH-15TH SATURDAY AND SUNDAY)-IN CAMBRIDGE
5th ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND SOCIALIST CONFERENCE APRIL 14TH-15TH SATURDAY AND SUNDAY)-IN CAMBRIDGE
The Democracy Center
45 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge MA
Short Walk from Harvard Sq T Stop
* FEATURED EVENTS *
DISCUSSION • SHOULD THE LEFT SUPPORT DEMOCRATS?
FORUM • INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE 1%
FORUM - SOCIALISM FAQS
-Labor Donated-
WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Dismantling Sexist Culture
Racism, Prisons and Police Brutality
Book Launch: Lessons of Wisconsin
For further details, see
Boston.SocialistAlternative.org
as the event approaches.
Call: 774-454-9060
Email: Boston@SocialistAlternative.org Visit: SocialistWorld.net or
SocialistAlternative.org
The Democracy Center
45 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge MA
Short Walk from Harvard Sq T Stop
* FEATURED EVENTS *
DISCUSSION • SHOULD THE LEFT SUPPORT DEMOCRATS?
FORUM • INTERNATIONAL CRISIS AND THE FIGHT AGAINST THE 1%
FORUM - SOCIALISM FAQS
-Labor Donated-
WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Dismantling Sexist Culture
Racism, Prisons and Police Brutality
Book Launch: Lessons of Wisconsin
For further details, see
Boston.SocialistAlternative.org
as the event approaches.
Call: 774-454-9060
Email: Boston@SocialistAlternative.org Visit: SocialistWorld.net or
SocialistAlternative.org
Thursday, March 22, 2012
From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press- Socialist Tactics to Build May 1st Protests
Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.
Markin comment:
All out on May Day 2012
Markin comment:
All out on May Day 2012
From The Archives Of The Socialist Caucus Occupy Boston (SCOB)-International Women’s Day 2012-Remembering the struggles & victories of women workers
Click on the headline to link, via the Socialist Caucus Occupy Boston Facebook page, to the presentation noted in the title.
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
From Archives Of The Socialist Caucus Occupy Boston (SCOB)-Protest MBTA Fare Hikes, Service Cuts & Layoffs on March 14
Click on the headline to link, via the Socialist Caucus Occupy Boston Facebook page, to the presentation noted in the title.
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
From Archives Of The Socialist Caucus Occupy Boston (SCOB)-Occupy Boston Live- Occupy the T
Click on the headline to link, via the Socialist Caucus Occupy Boston Facebook page, to the presentation noted in the title.
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
From Archives Of The Socialist Caucus Occupy Boston (SCOB)-Occupy Boston Live: Veterans for Peace
Click on the headline to link, via the Socialist Caucus Occupy Boston Facebook page, to the presentation noted in the title.
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
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