CLR James and Malcolm X

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Fri Jan 15 00:21:00 PST 1999


I just read this post of Louis'. It's quite remarkable for its incoherence.

1. CLR James and Malcolm X's positions are polar opposites. the former argues that blacks are a national minority; the latter propounded black nationalism. But after quoting James rejecting the theory of blacks as a nation, Louis then says: "James's resolution on black nationalism was rejected by the Workers Party." It was not a resolution on black nationalism but on black national minority status.

I don't get why it does not even occur to Louis to compare and contrast the views of these two militants unless he thinks all angry black men are saying the same thing.

James makes a persuasive argument that blacks are oppressed as a national minority, not a suppressed internal nation or colony. He also successfully argues that socialist parties should support independent black struggles for democratic rights. I also agree with this. Indeed today we have the criticism of a Herbert Hill or Michael Goldfield of trade union leadership for ignoring racism (and sexism and nationalism, we should add) at the factory gate and within the workplace and refusing to use its latent power to ameliorate political problems of unemployment and welfare deform on behalf of the most vulnerable proletarians. The narrowness of organized labor, coupled with separatism of petit bourgeois minority leadership, undermined then and now the development of revolutionary proletarian politics. This was underlined by Abram Harris and Sterling Spero in The Black Worker in the early 1930s. Council Communism develops a much more radical critique of trade unionism for the stabilisation it provides bourgeois society. But that's another question.

2. But worker radicalism is obviously not the direction Malcolm X wanted to go. Louis provides these quotes himself.


>On March 8, 1964 He elaborated on what kind of movement was necessary: "I am
>prepared," Malcolm said, "to cooperate in local civil rights actions in the
>South and elsewhere and shall do so because every campaign for specific
>objectives can only heighten the political consciousness of the Negroes and
>*intensify their identification against white society.*"


>The question of alliances with American whites was much more problematic.
>At the March 12, 1964 press conference to announce his new organization,
>the Organization for Afro-American Unity, Malcolm X said:
>"Whites can help us, but they can't join us. There can be no black-white
>unity until there is first some black unity. *There can be no workers'
>solidarity until there is first some racial solidarity.* We cannot think of
>uniting with others, until we have first united with ourselves."

my emphases

As I have argued elsewhere, such advocacy of racial separatism that follows from

a theory of black nationalism is utopian and bound to degenerate into reaction. I also don't think accepting white money makes black nationalism any less racially exclusivist than willingness to accept support from regimes that self describe themselves African or Arab socialism made Malcolm X a Marxist.

I find myself in agreement with CLR James's rejection of black nationalism for a hard challenge to trade union leadership for their subordination of the needs of national minorities and their unwillingness to support minority's independent struggle for democratic rights. We can broaden the criticism of trade union leadership on the way to fortifying a revolutionary workers' movement. This seems to have been James' approach. Seems quite reasonable to me. But it does not seem to me to have been Malcolm X's. At least their views should not be so easily conflated.

Rakesh



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