bloodsucker' Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable Reviewed by Liam Mac Uaid Manning Marable was probably the most influential historian of the Black experience in the United States. He died in April this year aged sixty almost immediately before this indispensable and accessible exploration of Malcolm X's life and intellectual journey was published Although the book is almost 600 pages long predictably enough it's the marital indiscretions, the probable gay
37 relationship and CV tampering that have excited most comment in the mainstream reviews. But his life story does throw up many more interesting questions about his political evolution in a time of anti-colonial revolutions, workers' struggles and the fight of African Americans for civil rights. There is also his
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You can comment on many of the issues raised in articles in Socialist Resistance at www.socialistresistance.org or simply drop us a line at PO Box 62732, London, SW2 9GQ 38 Malcolm X intriguing relationship with the far left. Marable is unflinching in his description of just how reactionary and bizarre some of the ideas held by the former Malcolm Little were. Yet his account of Malcolm X's move towards a more orthodox understanding of Islam and his dealings with Marxists is engaging and put in the context of the big events that were happening around him. Socialists leave theological disputes to others. We do, though, try to understand what organisations represent and how they evolve when the real world imposes itself on them. From this point of view we have much to learn how revolutionary socialists in the United States developed their relationship with Malcolm X in the months before his murder in 1965 Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) while serving a sentence for burglary. He was a drug dealer and career criminal. It was a sect, isolated from mainstream Black politics and not recognised by the American Islamic community. It enforced a rigid discipline and sexual abstinence on its followers. It preached Black unity and Black separatism. Its attraction for Malcolm X in his cell was the message that he had sunk so low because of racist oppression. The Nation of Islam promised to restore his personal dignity and allow him to fight against racist American society. Its members were taught that white people are the result of a genetic experiment conducted 6000 years ago by an evil scientist. As one of its most prominent figures he made public statements that inter-racial marriage is "evil". He rose quickly to become number two to the cult's leader Elijah Muhammad, a man who declared himself to be appointed by his god, a heresy in Islam. From 1952 until his expulsion in 1964, Malcolm X worked as a full time organiser and speaker for the group. Malcolm was suspended and then expelled from the NOI on the pretext of remarks that he had made about the assassination of President Kennedy. The real reason was that Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm were relating very differently to the civil rights demonstrations, marches and pickets that were starting all over the United States as Black Americans started fighting for their rights. Muhammad's version of Black unity was that the other Black organisations would follow his instructions. Malcolm was prepared to work with other organisations in united fronts. So when Los Angeles police shot seven Black Muslims in April 1962, Malcolm went there and organised mass protest meetings, got TV coverage and was creating a mass defence campaign. Muhammad put a stop to this and Malcolm acquiesced. But by March 1964 Malcolm was saying "I am prepared to co-operate in local civil rights actions in the South and elsewhere because every campaign can only heighten the political consciousness of the Negroes." He was in touch with the communities that were organising and the youth who were fighting. He was following developments in the colonial revolutions and was quickly transcending the political and philosophical limitations of his Nation of Islam background. The majority of the American left at the time was hostile. The Communist Party, for example, denounced Black Nationalism, siding with the more conservative civil rights figures against the more radical. Its paper wrote "The Muslim organization in general and Malcolm X in particular, are ultra-reactionary forces operating in the orbit of the Negro people's movement with the strategic assignment to sow ideological confusion." Writing about these events Barry Sheppard who was a leading member of the US SWP (then the organisation of supporters of the Fourth International) says: "One of the things we came to understand was that the prejudice of some Blacks toward whites and the racism of most whites towards Blacks were not the same. The Nation of Islam, whom the media dubbed the Black Muslims, for example, had a theory about the origin of the white race, which they considered the spawn of Satan. Was this the same thing as white racist theories about the nature of Blacks? No, we said. Prejudice is wrong, whoever espouses it. But the prejudice of some Blacks toward whites is a distorted form of opposition to the oppression of Blacks by white society. White racism towards Blacks, however, is a false justification for the oppression of Blacks." This was a different way of approaching movements and politics. These socialists appreciated that Malcolm was evolving in response to the radicalisation that was taking place. They reported his speeches in their paper because they understood that the rise of Black Nationalism was an expression of opposition to racist oppression. They also understood that the religious language that people vocabulary they had borrowed to explain the real world. Most importantly they knew that people's ideas and language can change very quickly when rebellions are taking place. After splitting with the NOI Malcolm went to Africa where he met several participants By the time he returned he had reached the view that a secular political organisation was needed. He was also passionately opposed to the Vietnam War and the assaults on Congo by the United States It was evident that he was moving dramatically to the left. In a speech in December 1964 he said: "You can't operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else's blood to suck to be a capitalist. You show me a capitalist, I'll show you a bloodsucker". Malcolm was murdered by a hit team from the NOI in 1965, aged 39. Marable's fine writing builds up an atmosphere of almost Shakespearian tragedy as he recounts his protagonist's last months of insecurity and isolation. This is only compounded by the reader's knowledge that, had he lived, Malcolm would have been a major figure in the revolutionary surge that was opening up only three years later.
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Mexico's Zapatista rebels and the Seattle demonstrators were the tip of an iceberg of social and political revolt against the injustices of corporateled globalisation. In 2002 John Holloway, working in Puebla, Mexico, published Change the World without Taking Power. This book debates the implications of that slogan. £6 €7 $10
Documents of the differences which developed last year in how Respect should be organised and built, and which led to the split promoted by the SWP following criticism of its leadership role by almost everyone else, including Socialist Resistance. £3.50 €4 $6
Since World War Il the Middle East has suffered a seemingly unending period of war, foreign domination, environmental devastation and mass resistance to the region's ruling classes. In this book, that resistance speaks in its own words, in a collection of some of the most powerful articles written in the last sixty years by socialist, ecologist and anti-Zionist activists across the region. £10 €11 $17
A collection of important contributions to the debate on ecology and global warming, and the limits of capitalism's ability to control the resulting destruction of the environment. This reprinted second edition is essential reading for anyone getting to grips with ecosocialism. £6 €7 $10
elia Hart Celia Hart came from
La tamily of veteran Cuban revolutionaries who fought with Fidel against the Batista dictatorship. Celia was an outspoken defender of the political and revolutionary heritage of Leon Trotsky. Her recent articles on this subject provoked an intense debate on the question of Trotsky internationally. £6 €7 $10
Ron Ridenour's follow-up to his Cuba
BEYOND THE
Trotsky's writings on the permanent revolution are the theoretical mainspring The of proletarian Perm nem Revolution revolutionary strategy
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The credit crunch Capitalist of 2008 produced an international recession in 2009. In Socialists and the Capitalist Recession, Claudio Katz and Michel Husson, fellows of the International Institute for Research and Education, and SSP activist Raphie de Santos, describe the present crisis, construct a socialist analysis of its causes, and propose socialist solutions. £6 €7 $10
The account of his life and struggle by a black activist in South Africa. It records the founding and growth of the revolutionary left, and includes a stern, reasoned critique of the ANC and SACP. Nikani describes his exile, a clandestine mission back into South Africa, his escape to and imprisonment in Swaziland, and his final exile to Sweden, where he died in 1999. £10 €11 $17
Kautsky's 1908 Marxist classic is an account of how what began as a minor sect in Palestine became the state religion of the Roman Empire. There was a time when Kautsky was in the true sense of the word the teacher who instructed the proletarian vanguard: - Leon Trotsky £12 €13 $20
Brazilian socialists André Passos Cordeiro, Ubiratan de Souza, Pepe Vargas, Raul Pont and João Machado describe in The Porto Alegre Alternative how Porto Alegre's participatory budget was born and developed with popular movements and local Workers' Party (PT) victories, and how it promises a radically democratic alternative in the interests of the poor to top-down political and economic decision-making. £12 €13 $20
39 Venezuela has THE REAL become a huge VENEZUELA source of hope and
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The international movement of women fighting their IN *FEMMES oppression has JALISME reached a new level ATION FEMN Since the 1960s.
The resolutions collected here are a product of that movement. Women's oppression and exploitation of women must be understood in the context of class society will end only when we get of class society. Socialist organisations need to take positive actions used by socialist organizations to develop their feminist work and profile. £7.00 €8.00 $11.00
In 2007, French fascist Le Pen won British National Germany's fascist NPD won over organisations like the English Defence League and Italy's Future and Freedom party emerged. To help activists understand these developments, this book gathers together some of the most important analysis of fascism in the 20th century. Read Zetkin, Trotsky, Guerin and Gramsci and £5.00 €6.00 $8.00
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