Vol. 74/No. 21      May 31, 2010

Malcolm’s political ideas and example were not simply valuable for their time, but offer a guide for revolutionists today and tomorrow. That’s ultimately the only test by which anyone can judge revolutionary leadership—a political test. It is the measure of Malcolm’s true stature as an international proletarian leader.

Malcolm’s revolutionary convictions have been validated in many ways, but let’s start with one in our own hemisphere. Let’s start with the Grenada Revolution of March 13, 1979. That’s when the workers and farmers of that small Caribbean island, under the leadership of the Maurice Bishop-led New Jewel Movement, overturned the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Eric Gairy. They brought to power a workers and farmers government that organized and led them in throwing off the boot of U.S. and British imperialist domination and beginning to transform the social relations that for so long had perpetuated capitalist exploitation and oppression. In short, Grenada’s toilers were led to begin discovering their own worth, and were organized to act on that knowledge.

Maurice Bishop was part of the generation of revolutionists, both biologically and politically, that came right after Malcolm. As I noted earlier, Malcolm has many heirs and will have millions more, including right here in the United States and other imperialist countries. But it’s useful to point to one who helped lead workers and farmers to power—because the revolutionary class struggle for political power was the direction in which Malcolm was heading during the last year of his life, and the single most important goal around which Malcolm and other committed revolutionaries converged.

Maurice Bishop came to politics under the impact of the “Black Power” movement in the Caribbean, which was itself deeply influenced by Malcolm and the Black struggle in the United States. Bishop, as a young man in college in the United Kingdom, had read and studied Malcolm. (A prime example of Malcolm’s notion that if you print the truth, it gets around.)

Two years before the Grenada Revolution, in a 1977 interview with the Cuban weekly Bohemia, Bishop said that the political impetus in founding the New Jewel Movement had come from “the ideas of ‘Black Power’ that developed in the United States and the freedom struggle of the African people in such places as Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.” And he added that it was the Cuban Revolution that led the NJM “to develop along Marxist lines,” and to recognize, “on the practical level of day-to-day political struggle, the relevance of socialism as the only solution to our problems.”

It was through emulating the revolutionary march to state power in Cuba that Maurice Bishop became the working-class leader, the communist leader that he was. And in the process, he too—as Malcolm had, years earlier—came to grips with the limitations of nationalism as a guide to revolutionary political action. Bishop indicated his views in an interview he gave a little more than a year after the New Jewel Movement took power in Grenada—a July 1980 interview conducted by leaders of our movement and run in full in the Militant in September 1980. Bishop reminded our readers that due to a common history of slavery, “There is a very close sense of cultural identity, which the people of Grenada automatically feel for American Blacks and which we have no doubt is reciprocated by the American Black community.” Revolutionists in Grenada, Bishop said, “feel a particularly close affinity to American Blacks and other oppressed minorities, to the working-class movement in America.” And he concluded the interview—“without intending to be disrespectful,” he said—by calling on working people in the United States, whatever their skin color, to “get together and wage a consistent fight against the real enemy. Don’t spend time fighting each other… .”

Does the fact that the Grenada revolution was betrayed by a petty-bourgeois Stalinist clique around Bernard Coard—serving up the island nation to U.S. imperialism “on a silver platter,” in Fidel Castro’s words—diminish in any way the significance of Bishop’s example? The answer is no. We helped working people in this country, in Grenada, across the Caribbean, and around the world to draw the lessons from that counterrevolutionary coup.  
 
 
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