This is a joke, right? Malcolm X wrote an autobiography to describe his political evolution from the NOI to revolutionary nationalism. This political evolution cost him his life. So Jim wants to place equal weight to the phase of Malcolm X's career that he had repudiated? Why don't we then treat Mussolini as a socialist and Lenin as a narodnik since they went through these phases before finally arriving at fascism and Marxism respectively.
>But it is a mistake to think that the contemporary relevance of Malcolm
>X is reducible to what the Trotskyist left saw in him. To many young
>blacks it is precisely his militant anti-white message that appeals. And
>presumably it is quite another Malcolm X that appeals to the teachers
>and educationalists who have made him part of the school curriculum.
I am not sure what you mean by a "militant anti-white" message. If anybody can read his autobiography and derive this message from it, then then are not paying any attention to the words. However, that detracts from the point being made here. Rakesh purports to be a serious Marxist scholar and he is not arguing that some people misinterpret Malcolm X. He says that the message of Malcolm'x speeches is inherently "hate whitey", so that the most harmful counterproductive intepretation of Malcolm's speeches are the correct ones after all. The speeches support no such interpretation whatsoever.
> The assassination was manipulated by the US secret services
>to criminalise Farrakhan. Presumably it is that idea of the recantation
>of black nationalism that recommends Malcolm X to the US postal
>services.
Once again we hear about a "recantation" of black nationalism. I am not sure that Jim thinks that this idea has any basis in fact, as Rakesh does. If so, he is dead wrong. Malcolm X never renounced black nationalism. He renounced sitting on the sidelines.
>Now, if young blacks have strong feelings against white people, one can
>hardly complain. But Rakesh is right that any politics built on such
>reactions are ultimately conservative.
What I find conservative are empty calls for black-white unity of the Todd Gitlin variety, which Rakesh packages in flamboyant ultraleft Marxist rhetoric. This is from Gitlin's "Twilight of Common Dreams":
"A Left that was serious about winning political power and reducing the inequality of wealth and income would stop lambasting all white men, and would take it as elementary to reduce frictions among white men, blacks, white women, and Hispanics. Could it be more obvious that the Left and the Democrats alike are helpless unless they offer all these constituencies something they benefit from in common? At the same time, a Left is not a Left unless it defends the scapegoated poor, tries to deliver them (along with the not-so-poor) training, decent jobs, and provision for children, acknowledging that the present welfare state is not kind to the poor. But multiculturalism by itself does not contribute to that political revival. The most insistent multiculturalists do not seem to recognize that there is no Left, there is only more panic, unless a plausible hope emerges for a greater equality of means. The right to a job, education, medical care, housing, retraining over the course of a lifetime—these are the bare elements of an economic citizenship that ought to be universal."
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)