"I'm not sure how what Malcolm X did or said, or didn't do or say, in 1963, bears on politics right now."
History bears on today's politics in many respects. Santayana's saw about those who don't learn from it are doomed to repeat it is one point. On that score, the Marxist left's widespread failure to learn the great radicalizing potential of autonomous Black struggle in the previous insurgent era of the 1920s and 1930s left most traditional radicals on the sidelines when Black Power became the determining force.
A more general lesson of the 1960s, which relates not just to Malcolm X but equally to the broad spectrum of insurgents, is that Marxists were dreadfully wrong in believing that capitalist economic collapse was a prerequisite for revolutionary insurgency. The mass movements of that era arose during a period of prosperity in the United States. Marxists who anticipated a Wall Street crash and widespread privation as the call to action missed their calling.
Here is another lesson I personally take to heart: In the early 1960s, Hal Draper preached that the radical student movement of the 1930s (the American Student Union, which he had led) had "seeded the country" with revolutionaries, who would rise to the occasion as radical motion began to stir, tutoring the new generation of radicals in their duty. With scant few notable exceptions (himself among them during the occupation of Sproul Hall), Hal was wrong. The older generations of Marxists were cynical about the potential for new forms of struggle. They regarded the peace and civil rights movements as good, but not the real thing. At all times, they tried to subordinate mass struggles to electoral campaigns, and regarded each automobile workers' contract renewal as a greater opportunity than those posed by the Black movement.
The left's failure to view Malcolm as a radicalizing force was even worse than these previous points illustrate. Comb Marxist left papers of that era for their coverage. The Worker's attitude then was about equal to Rakesh's now. The Militant came around in the mid-sixties, but not earlier, and not consistently. A few Marxist sects either had elaborated ideological grounds for critically supporting Black nationalism (Johnson-Forest among Trotskyists, POC among Stalinists) or by habit cheered the most exemplary militants (Marcyites). The attempts at socialist regroupment after the CP's collapse in 1956-57, of which the American Forum for Socialist Education was the most effective, also missed the boat. Somewhat more flexible were Monthly Review and the National Guardian, but their yardstick still was the previous period.
The New Left, largely discouraged by the Old's failures, looked for new sources of inspiration. The Southern Freedom Movement was the first (along with Ghana, Cuba, Kenya, and Algeria internationally), followed by Black Power in its various manifestations. From these footings, the anti-war movement became largely a movement of anti-imperialist solidarity. Least common denominator and lesser-evil political strategies were swept aside.
Now that cynicism and self-flagellation have once again become vogue, along with the inevitable pitch to accept Democratic Party politics as the road to travel, a review of 1960s heroes, and a debate over their importance, has a great deal of contemporary relevance.
Ken Lawrence