FR Kankam-Boadu
“If the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by
force, then Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the
effort to achieve freedom.”
WEB Du Bois
“Every Negro who lays claim to leadership should make a
study of Bolshevism and explain its meaning to the coloured masses. It is the
greatest and most scientific idea afloat in the world today that can be easily
put into practice by the proletariat to better its material and spiritual life.
Bolshevism…has made Russia safe for the Jew. It has liberated the Slav peasant
from the priest and bureaucrat who can no longer egg him on to murder Jews to
bolster up their rotten institutions. It might make these United States safe
for the Negro…if the Russian idea should take hold of the white masses of the
Western world, and they should rise in united strength and overthrow their
imperial capitalist government, then the black toilers would automatically be
free!”
Claude McKay (1890-1948)
Trotsky asked me some straight and sharp questions about
American Negroes, their group organisations, their political position, their
schooling, their religion, their grievances and social aspirations and,
finally, what kind of sentiment existed between American and African Negroes. I
replied with the best knowledge and information at my command. Then Trotsky
expressed his own opinion about Negroes, which was more intelligent than that
of any of the other Russian leaders…he was not quick to make deductions about
the causes of white prejudice against black. Indeed, he made no conclusions at
all, and, happily, expressed no mawkish sentimentality about black and white
brotherhood. What he said was very practical…he urged that Negroes should be
educated about the labour movement…he said he would like to set a practical
example in his own department and proposed the training of a group of Negroes
as officers in the Red Army.
Claude McKay (1890-1948)
A Rebel's Guide to Malcolm X is further confirmation, if it
was already needed, of the British Socialist Worker’s Party’s promotion of racialist
identity politics. This small book largely whitewashes, if you pardon the pun, Malcom
X’s pursuit of black nationalist politics and support for racial segregation.
Hamilton’s book and the party he belongs to have historically
adapted to the reformist middle-class leadership of the international civil
rights movement. The SWP presents black nationalism, along with other forms of
petty-bourgeois nationalism such as Castroism in Cuba, as complementary to the
fight for socialism.
This small book begins by granting political amnesty to
Garveyism.[1]
The SWP in all their articles on Garvey contain mild criticisms of him, but on
the whole, they gave him a free pass, saying, “In the end, he is remembered for
giving a sense of pride to black people in the face of the hideous racism of
the 1920s. That is worth recalling, and his faults should be seen in that
context.”[2]
But as the Trotskyist Lawrence Porter points out “Despite
his radical aura, Garvey rejected socialism. Indeed, he steadfastly opposed the
struggle for equality even among blacks. As time progressed, the left rhetoric
receded and the right-wing essence of Garvey’s politics came to the fore. By
the 1920s, he found himself in cooperation with Jim Crow politicians and the Ku
Klux Klan, who agreed with black nationalism’s policy of racial separatism. By
the end of his life, Garvey boasted he was a fascist.”[3]
The other organisation given a free pass by Hamilton and the
SWP is the American Communist Party. Malcolm X was never a member of the
Communist Party or even close to it. So it is a little confusing that while he
was in prison, his correspondence was opened and intercepted by the FBI. In
this letter, Malcom X clearly states he is a Communist.
Under the heading of “Communist Party Activities”, the
heavily redacted FBI transcription of letters from Malcolm X while in prison
noted:
“Several excerpts from letters written by the subject.
[redaction’] these excerpts were not quotes but rather notes jotted down
[redaction] on the contents of these letters. On June 29, 1950, the Subject
mailed a letter from which [redacted] copied the following: ‘Tell [redaction]
to get in shape. It looks like another war. I have always been a Communist. I
have tried to enlist in the Japanese Army during the last war, but now they
will never draft or accept me in the U.S. Army. Everyone has always said
[redaction] Malcolm is crazy, so it isn’t hard to convince people that I am.”[4]
The free pass given to the Stalinists in the American
Communist Party reflects their attitude towards the American Trotskyist movement
and Leon Trotsky. Neither is mentioned in the book. For an organisation that
purports to be Trotskyist, the SWP and Hamilton do not discuss the attitude of
Leon Trotsky and the American Trotskyist Party towards Black Nationalism at any
point. There is not enough room in this short review to include Trotsky’s
discussion with the American comrades on black nationalism, which should be
considered in any discussion of Malcolm X.
Trotsky wrote:
“The point of view of the American comrades appears to me
not fully convincing. ‘Self-determination’ is a democratic demand. Our American
comrades advance as against this democratic demand, the liberal demand. This
liberal demand is, moreover, complicated. I understand what ‘political
equality’ means. But what is the meaning of economic and social equality within
a capitalist society? Does that mean a demand to public opinion that all enjoy
equal protection under the law? But that is political equality. The slogan
‘political, economic and social equality’ sounds equivocal, and while it is not
clear to me, it nevertheless suggests itself easily to misinterpretation.
The Negroes are a race and not a nation:—Nations grow out of
the racial material under definite conditions. The Negroes in Africa are not
yet a nation but they are in the process of building a nation. The American
Negroes are on a higher cultural level. But while they are there under the
pressure of the Americans they become interested in the development of the
Negroes in Africa. The American Negro will develop leaders for Africa, that one
can say with certainty and that in turn will influence the development of
political consciousness in America.
We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a
nation; if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is,
what they desire and what they strive for. We say: If the Negroes want that
then we must fight against imperialism to the last drop of blood, so that they
gain the right, wherever and how they please, to separate a piece of land for
themselves. The fact that they are not a majority in any state today is
irrelevant. It is not a question of the authority of the states but of the
Negroes. That in the overwhelming Negro territory also whites have existed.
They will remain henceforth is not the question and we do not need today to
break our heads over a possibility that sometime the whites will be suppressed
by the Negroes. In any case the suppression of the Negroes pushes them toward a
political and national unity.
That the slogan ‘self-determination’ will rather win the
petty bourgeois instead of the workers—that argument holds good also for the
slogan of equality. It is clear that the special Negro elements who appear more
frequently in the public eye (businessmen, intellectuals, lawyers, etc.) are
more active and react more strongly against inequality. It is possible to say
that the liberal demand, just as well as the democratic one, in the first
instance will attract the petty bourgeois and only later the workers.”[5]
In a lecture delivered at the Socialist Equality Party (US)
summer school, held August 1 through August 6, 2021, Niles Niemuth, a writer
for the World Socialist Web Site, made the following point. “Trotsky was
seeking in brief discussions with American members in Turkey in 1933 and Mexico
in 1939 to correct the American Trotskyists’ neglect of the “Negro question,”
orient the party to a critical section of the American working class and
facilitate the recruitment of worker members under conditions where the twists
and turns of the Communist Party had alienated many black intellectuals and
workers who had been drawn to Marxism over the previous two decades.” I don’t
know if even the Trotskyists in the American section of the Fourth
International would have been able to change Malcolm X’s subsequent political
trajectory. Still, the ensuing political discussion with Malcolm X would have
educated a much larger audience and clarified the question of Black nationalism.[6]
Section four of the book elaborates on Malcolm X’s time in
prison and his life in the Nation of Islam. While in prison, Malcolm X read John
Milton’s Paradise Lost. Orlando Reade[7]
In an interview with the SWP, Reade said :
“Malcolm X read Paradise Lost in the late 1940s when he was
a young man serving a long sentence for burglary. He had this desire to read,
combined with a deep suspicion of white writers. Malcolm X was trying to bend
the literature to make it serve his new radical viewpoint. When he came to
Paradise Lost, Malcolm also perceived something true. Milton compared Satan on
his way to Eden to European ships on their way to satisfy their appetite for
sugar, spice and tobacco. Malcolm saw how Milton associated Satan with European
kings and their armies, as well as the colonisers. Malcolm found something
profoundly radical in Milton’s critique of worldly power. He found in Paradise
Lost a critique of white supremacy.”[8]
In the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine, an article
on the women in Malcom X’s life shows they were instrumental in his turn
towards the politics of the Nation of Islam. [9]The
NOI was not a threat to capitalism in the United States, nor was Malcolm X, as long
as he was in it. But as David Walsh points out, it was only after breaking with
the organisation that his life became endangered. Walsh writes :
“The assassinations of Malcolm X and, some three years
later, of Martin Luther King Jr., could not have been accidental in their
purpose or their timing. When Malcolm represented the Nation of Islam, his life
was not threatened. Still, when he broke from Elijah Muhammad’s anti-white
separatism and suggested, even in a limited way, that race was not the
fundamental dividing line in the fight against injustice, he became a marked
man. His newly formed Organisation of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) was
undoubtedly quickly infiltrated by agents and provocateurs. At the same time,
full advantage was taken of the threats made against him by the Nation of
Islam. All the cops had to do was sabotage Malcolm X’s security and look the
other way.”[10]
As I mentioned at the beginning, the SWP adapted to the
Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. With the advent of the “Black
Lives Matter” movement, it continues to maintain its stance in support of Black
nationalism. How else would you understand the SWP’s Ruby Hirsch’s fawning article
over the recent Super Bowl performance of Beyonce’s “ in which her dancers
dressed in the black berets and raised gloved fists of the Black Panthers and
stood in an “X” formation, was broadcast to more than 100 million Americans. It
was a powerful tribute to Malcolm X and the Black Lives Matter movement.”
The reality of the Black Lives Matter Movement is somewhat
different from the one described by the British SWP. As Lawrence Porter and
Nancy Hanover write, “From the beginning, the 'mothers of the movement' Alicia
Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi—who collectively adopted the famous
hashtag—specifically opposed uniting blacks, whites and immigrants against the
brutal class-war policies of the capitalist state. Instead, the group did its
best to confine anti-police violence protests within the framework of the
capitalist system and push a racialist and pro-capitalist agenda.”[11]
Malcolm X was a complex man. Who knows if he had not been
assassinated, whether he would have moved further to the left and rejected his
brand of black nationalism and taken up a struggle against black and white
capitalism. To be blunt, Hamilton’s book is a whitewash of Malcom X’s history
and politics and does nothing to clarify today's issue of black nationalism or racism.
[1]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey
[2]
Marcus Garvey: a liberating legacy of challenging racism-socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/marcus-garvey-a-liberating-legacy-of-challenging-racism/
[3]
Marcus Garvey and the reactionary logic of racialist politics-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/02/qhdd-m02.html
[4]
www.blackagendareport.com/malcolm-x-black-nationalism-and-cold-war
[5]
On Black Nationalism-Documents on the Negro Struggle www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/negro1.htm
[6]
Race, class and social conflict in the United States. wsws.org
[7]
What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost, 2024, Jonathan
Cape.
[8]
Paradise Lost inspired generations of radicals-socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/paradise-lost-inspired-generations-of-radicals/
[9]
www.historyextra.com/magazine/current-issue-bbc-history-magazine/
[10]
Two men convicted in 1965 Malcolm X assassination exonerated in New York court-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/19/malc-n19.html
[11] Black Lives Matter cashes in on black capitalism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/04/blm-a04.html
