Malcolm X and Michael Gove: separated at birth
Posted on Friday 27 August, 2010
Filed Under Conservative Party
I SAW the Spike Lee biopic when it came out, of course. But other than that, I have to admit to not knowing a lot about revolutionary icon Malcolm X.
That’s pretty remiss for a leftie, so to put matters right, I am reading ‘By any means necessary’, a compilation of the 1960s black nationalist leader’s speeches in the last year of his life, following his break from Nation of Islam.
The book was published by the US Socialist Workers’ Party, at that time a Trotskyist grouping, and is designed to show that Malcolm X’s thinking was evolving in the direction of Marxist socialism. That doesn’t come across as very likely.
No class-based analysis whatsoever is in evidence. Indeed, the focus is on community self-organisation, and it does strike me that some of the ideas expressed would not sound out of place in a flagship speech from a Big Society Cameron Conservative.
I am being perfectly serious. For instance, Malcolm X argues: ‘[T]he black man in Harlem can gain control over his own economy and develop business expansion for our people in this community so we can create some employment opportunities for our people in this community.’ Ex-service personnel should go into business together on the back of government loans, he suggests. Sounds straight out of Phillip Blond if you ask me.
Perhaps the most surprising passage comes on p.44, and is worth citing at length:
‘The Board of Education in this city [New York] has said … there are 10 percent of schools in Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant community in Brooklyn that they canot improve. So what are we to do?
‘This means that the Organization of Afro-American Unity must make the Afro-American community a more potent force for educational self-improvement.
‘A first step in the program to end the existing system of racist education is to demand that the 10 percent of the schools that the Board of Education will not include in its plan be turned over to and run by the Afro-American community itself.
‘Since they say that they can’t improve these schools, why should you and I who live in the community let these fools continue to run and produce this low standard of education? No, let them turn those schools over to us.
‘Since they say they can’t handle them, nor can they correct them, let us take a whack at it.’
Bloody hell. Is that an endorsement of the Tory policy for free schools, or what?
I presume Michael Gove will not be reading this. But if he ever finds himself short of ideas for a speech he needs to deliver in Brixton, he could do a lot worse than to borrow the quotes above. It would prove counter-intuitive, to say the least.
<<Go back
Comments
22 Responses to “Malcolm X and Michael Gove: separated at birth”
Leave a Reply
This article reminds me that who delivers the message is critical. Do we really believe that the Tory ‘Big Society’ idea is anything other than capitalism providing cheaper and poorer public services and reconfiguring the economy to the low tax interests of the rich, and supplying the private sector with more *available* labour.
Forgive me if I don’t think that was Macolm X’s motive!
I agree with Dean, the validity of an argument changes depending on who is using it.
I can’t imagine Malcolm X having much truck with Michael Gove’s idea of the Big Society and ‘free schools’.
Hi Dave
By coincidence (?) former Blair adviser Matthew Taylor, now of the RSA, quoted Malcolm X on “The Today” prog this morning about protests – “its the hinge that creaks that gets the grease”.
at least have the good grace to finish the fucking book!
then come back and tell us from your decades of self sacrifice and struggle just how you can even begin to discuss malcolms life and legacy from such an ignorant position. Only a white british leftie could take such an arrogant stance
non-partisan. His legacy is he knelt down on a carpet and prayed to something that does not exist. The fact he was black makes it even worse considering the slave trade and racism. That should have enlightened the man. History will forget about him.
“the validity of an argument changes depending on who is using it.”
That’s a logical fallacy. While the agenda may differ, that doesn’t change the validity of the argument.
I was around in Malcolm X’s time, on the left.
The SWP at that time, was relatively large. That’s another story.
The problem was instead of moving Malcolm X to Lenin and Trotsky, they became more nationalist. At one time they even supported The Nation of Islam.
Malcolm X’s legacy is more positive than not. He opposed the Vietnam War, and was developing into an internationalist. His image is more important than his actuality, like Che.
Well I didn’t exactly say the validity of an argument changes depending on who is using it. So Duncan slightly misses the point. Frankly, I just don’t believe the Tories, in the same way I don’t believe Bush when he says he is fighting in Iraq to help the Iraqis. And all we are talking about here are words, the devil is always in the detail. This is the element Simon misses, he assumes, like the author of this article it seems, that the Tories and Malcolm X are talking about the same thing just because the language is similar. That is worse than a logical fallacy, it is downright stupid.
Simon,
On second thoughts, I was confusing justification with validity. I meant that the issue of whether an argument is justifiable or not depends on who is using it.
Apparently a week before he was shot dead, Malcolm X had arranged to meet communist singer Paul Robeson. The implication being that X’s politics were shifting leftward, away from the nationalist / separatist thing (and probably the pro-business) towards a socialist-ish thing as the means of liberation.
Those in London wanting to learn more about Malcolm’s political and intellectual evolution in the last year of his life should pop along on September 14 to hear Marika Sherwood talk about her fascinating new book on Malcolm X’s visits abroad (see below). One apt quote in the book is from the Trinidadian Marxist CLR James, who (and I have to paraphrase here) noted in 1967 that Malcolm was a great fighter whose potentialities were expanding at such speed that his enemies had to simply murder him. (For more on Malcolm X and CLR James, see here:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/139.html)
For Marika’s meeting, see the London Socialist Historians Blog: http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.com/2010/08/legacies-of-british-slave-ownership.html
Obviously Malcolm X could not be:
a) a black nationalist/separatist,
b) an orthodox sunni muslim, and
c) a radical/revolutionary opponent of the US and its racist power structure
without something snapping somewhere.
The notion that somehow he would have found the arguments of the US SWP – or for that matter die-hard Stalinist Paul Robeson – so convincing that he would have abandoned Islam is as absurd as our own SWP’s imagining that it could somehow turn our own communalist leaders into part of the proletarian vanguard.
From his autobiography Malcolm X’s conversion to first the NoI and then to ‘real’ Islam was clearly far, far more than a tactical maneuver and would have been a far bigger block to his making true common cause with the 1960s left than we can imagine in these desperate days when we clutch at even the most unlikely alliances.
The worldview it gave him was clearly not some shallow false consciousness ready to dissipate at first contact with the superior dialectical skills of Paul Robeson or James P Cannon.
Even his ‘apparent’ (there is a fine weaselly word for you) shift away from nationalism and separatism was clearly driven far more by his Islamic faith and its vision of a single and non-racial Umma of all believers than by the dubious advantages to be gained from an an alliance with such pathetic entities as the SWP and CPUSA.
Personally I’d imagine that if the assassin’s bullet had sent him into a 45-year coma and he’d just been miraculously revived, our hero would be putting the Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders rather higher on his list of things to do than negotiating for academy schools with Michael Gove – but hey what do I know….
Roger. You do know a wee bit.
“Even his ‘apparent’ (there is a fine weaselly word for you)”
Yeah, this would be me saying “apparent” because I wasn’t endorsing the view as I am happy to acknowledge that I know even less about Robeson than I do about Malcolm X. Less of the “weaselly” please, you pompous windbag.
But, then, milgram, shouldn’t the grammar be ‘A week before he was shot dead, Malcolm X arranged a meeting with the apparent communist Paul Robeson.’, or maybe, ‘A week before he was shot dead, Malcolm X apparently arranged a meeting with the communist singer, Paul Robeson.’.
“our hero would be putting the Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders rather higher on his list of things to do than negotiating for academy schools with Michael Gove – but hey what do I know….”
The answer to that question Roger is very very very very very little.
He might well have been negotiating with Michael Gove about setting up a faith school as part of the whole jihadi thing.
Exactly what would be the left-libertarian objection to community-run schools if it wasn’t a surreptitious attempt to a) remove them from local authority control and place them directly answerable to the Department of Education (i.e. the precise opposite of the stated aim of decentralisation) b) reintroduce selection by the back door c) turn over their day-to-day running to private, democratically-unaccountable profit-making companies and d) enable any fucking nutter with a ton of cash to spare to control the curriculum? Is there an “in principle” objection? This is surely a classic example of the capitalist recuperation of a progressive demand in the service of a new mode of primitive accumulation, as any good autonomist will tell you.
I think sections of the left are making a huge mistake in confusing the rhetoric of the “Big Society” with its actual aims. An idea, as presented on the surface, is not necessarily reactionary just because a Tory proposes it: its subtext and manner of implementation almost certainly will be.
Malcolm liked SWP member Geo. Brightman. It does seem the US SWP moved more towards black nationalism, than Malcolm studying dialectical and historical materialism.
The whole subject of Malcolm, is what he could of been. I think in comparison Martin Luther King was more radical. The 60s radicals didn’t realize that.
It’s not academic, the loss of X and King to the black liberation movement. The Democrats as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson filled the void.
Why Brixton? Is there a large Afro-American [sic] population there?
Malcolm X may have ‘liked’ George Breitman but he never met him in person. When offered the opportunity to meet Malcolm X Geoerge Breitman actually declined for reasons beyond my comprehension.
That said it does seem clear that the SWP (US) did move towards a position of supporting black nationalism s a result of the influence of Malcolm X while he was still in the NOI.
I was just going to recommend an article critiquing Islamism but then having read this I realise you’re just another angry, parochial Englishman who wouldn’t know socialism if it hit him between the eyes.
By the way pass my regards onto your blow up Queen Victoria rubber doll.