Malcolm X speaks

[Rakesh Bhandari]

The talk is an analysis of representation of blacks at home and abroad. 
. Yet Malcolm X only implicitly likens the domestic to foreign struggles,
i.e.,black people everywhere are struggling against white colonialism. For the
US Malcolm X uses the colonial imagery of black economy in white hands, so
he recommends wresting control in the ghettoes from whites of small
businesses and residential property to be put in the hands of black
owners--there have now been several decades of set aside programs for
black businessman, thanks to Richard Nixon. His internal colonial theory
was given some analytical form by Robert Blauner in the early 70s who has
long since abandoned it. Malcolm X
does not see blacks over-represented or occupying the worst positions in
an exploited working class--in fact, he simply can't see classes. His NOI
years continue to shape his separatist, petit bourgeois outlook; he
analogizes  the confounded class and race oppression of African Americans
with anti colonial struggles abroad. And he is ill prepared to understand
the complexities of the latter, though of course his criticism of the
barbarities of imperialist aerial bombardment is poignant. But he confuses
his own courage to confront the monstrosities of American imperialism with
his madness to want to separate blacks from America and whites.  

Malcolm X  becomes a Castroite here without any tools for the
critical analysis of Cuban Socialism or Nkrumahism, ostensibly the sorts
of regimes he would like to take power everywhere in the third world 
(perhaps Doug can get his friend Robert Fitch to comment on his study of
Ghanian socialism *End of an Illusion*; I know Jacques Depelchin now
fighting with the Congo rebels led by Wamba dia Wamba recommended Fitch's
book to students at Berkeley). Farakhan of course feels more comfortable
with the present Nigerian or Sudanese or Saudi ruling elites. 

Yours, Rakesh