It's clear that different parties take what they like from Malcolm for their own purposes. Thus the Farrakhan group exploits M's popularity, notwithstanding their leader's more-or-less tacit admission, on videotape, of complicity in M's assassination. In this vein, talk of authorities 'criminalizing' Farrakhan is silly; Farrakhan has admitted complicity in the ultimate criminal act, from a revolutionary standpoint: murdering the best leader the left had. In D.C. we have a park named after M, and local news anchors refer to him as a 'civil rights leader.' Pathfinder makes him out to be a week short of joining the SWP. Like Jesus, everybody thinks they own him.
But the real Malcolm ought to be of some current as well as historical interest. As LP emphasizes, his development is key. There is no evidence I know of to contradict the Pathfinder portrayal, which bespeaks a positive evolution.
I've been critical of nationalism here, but there have always been different types of nationalism. From my standpoint, LP is somewhat uncritical of nationalism, but this is a difference of degree than of kind; Rakesh just goes overboard, and JH is at least teetering over the railing.
What was called revolutionary nationalism typified first by Malcolm and soon after by the Panthers and the League was THE key development (that word again) among the black working class. Louis reacts rightly to Rakesh's hidebound, academic, ill-documented caricature of Malcolm as a crony of the Klan, utterly ridiculous and not something that can be remedied by 100 references to Grossman or Gezundheit.
As Carrol suggests, what matters is how movements actually evolve, not the static categories we invent to try to understand them. Contra Carrol, however, what we say does matter in the sense that what we say prefigures how people like us may or may not relate the really-existing insurgency and actual -- rather than idealized -- leaders.
One sticking point is that the same flexibility is not extended to white as to black incipient protest. We seem to give a lot more space to black nationalists than to angry white folks. The latter tend to be stigmatized for patriarchy, racism, homophobia, etc. by criteria which are not consistently applied to non-whites. And expressions of any kind of solidarity with whites is quickly slammed as 'left conservative' or reactionary populist or something other than the true path.
I think it's fine that young blacks are drawn to Malcolm. It doesn't matter for what reason. Those that go the trouble of finding out what he really said, those who are serious, can not fail to be touched for the better.
mbs