Vol. 74/No. 36      September 27, 2010

BY JACK BARNES  
The reason we need to learn about Malcolm, the reason we need to read and discuss what he said, is not simply in order to do justice to a great revolutionist. We need to understand and absorb Malcolm’s political legacy because it’s a powerful political tool we must have to help make a socialist revolution in the United States. It aids us in gathering and unifying the forces among working people and youth who will forge a working-class party able to lead such a revolution. It is needed by anyone, here or anywhere else on earth, who wants to be part of an international revolutionary movement of the kind Malcolm was so determined to help build—a movement to rid humanity of all forms of oppression and exploitation.

You’re living in “a time of revolution,” Malcolm told a young audience at the Oxford Union, the student debating society at that British university, in December 1964. That was Malcolm’s message. Revolution, he said, was the question of questions confronting “the young generation of whites, Blacks, browns, whatever else there is… . I for one will join in with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”

If we don’t read what Malcolm said—the conclusions he drew from experiences he worked through at an accelerating pace in the closing year of his life—then, as we engage in battles today and tomorrow, all of us will be weaker as thinking, political people. Not less energetic, not less inspired (we will suffer that, also)—but less political.

U.S. imperialism’s victory in World War II laid the basis for a quarter-century-long capitalist expansion that reached its apex in the late 1960s. Together with the effects of the U.S. rulers’ postwar witch-hunt, this stabilization of world capitalism reinforced the bureaucratization of the labor officialdom that had been consolidated during the war and its aftermath. It accelerated the political retreat and weakening of the union movement in the United States.

As part of their overall class-collaborationist and pro-imperialist course, top officials of the AFL-CIO and its affiliates refused to mobilize the weight and power of the unions as part of the massive proletarian movement for Black rights. This movement exploded into nationwide consciousness with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955-56 and picked up momentum over the following decade. Not only did the officialdom’s default undermine efforts to organize the “right-to-work” South and reverse the steady weakening of the union movement nationwide. Above all, it made it more difficult for workers and youth to recognize social and political questions such as the fight for Black rights, for women’s equality, and against imperialist war as class questions in which the labor movement has a life-or-death stake and must join in unconditionally.

“Fighters in these battles were forced to detour around the union movement because of the roadblock thrown up by the labor bureaucracy,” the Socialist Workers Party explained in 1979….

Since the mid-1970s, however, the stability of the global capitalist order has begun to be shaken by the accumulating social and political consequences of declining profit rates and intensifying competition for markets among the employers in the United States, other imperialist countries, and the most industrially advanced nations in the colonial world. To gain an edge on their rivals, the bosses in one industry after another, and in one country after another, have launched an offensive against the take-home pay, social wage, and job conditions of working people. In face of these blows, the working class and unions have been pushed toward the center stage of politics, where they will remain until decisive battles not only have been joined but are resolved in favor of one or the other of the contending classes.  
 
 
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