Vol. 74/No. 25      June 28, 2010

BY JACK BARNES  
Malcolm was committed politically to reaching out to young people. Without doing so, he understood, it was impossible to build a revolutionary movement. That was a lesson of every modern revolution.

“Our accent will be upon youth,” Malcolm said in one of the first interviews he gave after breaking with the Nation of Islam. The youth, he said, “have less of a stake in this corrupt system and therefore can look at it more objectively, whereas the adults usually have a stake in this corrupt system and they lose their ability to look at it objectively because of their stake in it.”

Malcolm was pointing to something the communist movement has long recognized, even if he used different language: that there is a material basis for the place of young people in revolutionary struggles. Youth are in a state of flux, with an entire lifetime ahead of them. For a relatively brief time, they are less tied down with families, financial pressures, mortgages, illnesses, disappointments, and other conservatizing encumbrances. They tend to respond more quickly and more easily to social and political ills all around them. As Lenin pointed out, even the class position of young people is not completely settled. Plus, on average, young people are stronger, more limber, more energetic, more fit for combat.

That’s why, even while Malcolm was still in the Nation, he always sought out young audiences to speak to: on campuses, or to gatherings of young political militants. It’s one of the reasons he responded so readily to our request that he do an interview for the Young Socialist magazine in early 1965. I went back to Malcolm’s office a few days later with the transcribed interview ready for him to edit and approve for publication. I told him I would be going to Algeria in a few months as part of a Young Socialist Alliance delegation to an international youth festival there. He responded immediately and enthusiastically. Malcolm was eager to put us in touch with young revolutionists he had met—he also called them “contacts”—during his trips to Africa and the Middle East and to make sure, among other things, that they got copies of the Young Socialist featuring the interview with him.

We had asked Malcolm during the interview, “What part in the world revolution are youth playing, and what lessons may this have for American youth?” I hadn’t anticipated the first point he made. He started off by talking about the captives being taken by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War. The majority of them are young people, he pointed out—“most are teenagers,” but “some haven’t yet reached their teens.” Something similar was true in the Congo, he added. That’s why, when the imperialist troops “shoot captive revolutionaries,” they often “shoot all the way down to seven years old.”

In Vietnam, the Congo, and other countries on the frontlines of struggle, Malcolm said, “the young people are the ones who most quickly identify with the struggle and the necessity to eliminate the evil conditions that exist. And here in this country, it has been my own observation that when you get into a conversation on racism and discrimination and segregation, you will find young people are more incensed over it—they feel more filled with an urge to eliminate it.”…

“Old people don’t bring about a change,” Malcolm had said at the OAAU’s [Organization of Afro-American Unity] homecoming rally for him in late November 1964, after returning from the second Africa trip. That’s a lesson he had confirmed everywhere he traveled. But Malcolm was quick to make his point more precise: “I’m not saying this against anybody that’s old—because if you’re ready for some action you’re not old. I don’t care how old you are. But if you’re not ready for some action, I don’t care how young you are, you’re old… . [A]ny time you begin to sit on the fence, and your toes start shaking because you’re afraid too much action is going down, then you’re too old; you need to get on out of the way. Some of us get too old while we’re still in our teens.”

Malcolm’s words remind me of nothing so much as Jim Cannon’s call on the leadership and ranks of the Socialist Workers Party in October 1941 to begin carrying out a bolder policy in our trade union work. This was right on the eve of Washington’s entry into World War II and only weeks before he and seventeen other leaders of the SWP and of the Teamsters organizing drive in the Midwest were sentenced, railroaded to prison for their opposition to U.S. imperialist aims in that war. “I don’t know of anything more disgraceful for a young revolutionist than to get settled down and get so encumbered in a place that he cannot move,” Jim said. “It would be a damn good thing for him if he had a fire to blow away some property encumbrance and make him footloose and revolutionary again.”

That’s true for revolutionists of any age.  
 
 
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