The centennial of the birth of Malcolm X, also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, is May 19. Black organizations and other revolutionaries will take this historic opportunity to analyze and pay homage to his contributions to the struggle against racist oppression, for the right to self-defense and for self-determination for the Black diaspora.
It remains to be seen if the mouthpieces of the ruling class, the mainstream media, will acknowledge this significant anniversary or will repeat the hostility shown to him when he was alive.
Malcolm X was a political inspiration for the launching of liberation organizations like the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Black Liberation Army, the Young Lords, Republic of New Afrika and more. Although he was assassinated 60 years ago, Malcolm X’s words, “By any means necessary,” still resonate today in relation to winning liberation. This is despite bourgeois pundits’ attempts to dilute their political context.
What sometimes gets lost in assessing Malcolm X’s legacy is his call for internationalism and class unity. Following his trip to West Asia (aka the Middle East) and Africa just months before his assassination, he made the following statement: “The same man that was colonizing our people in Kenya was colonizing our people in Congo. The same one in the Congo was colonizing our people in South Africa and in Southern Rhodesia and in Burma and in India and in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.”
Malcolm was explaining in his own unique, winning way that colonialism was a worldwide system of oppression that called for worldwide solidarity.
Once he visited occupied Gaza in early September 1964, including the Khan Younis refugee camp, Malcolm wrote a little-known commentary entitled “Zionist Logic.” In it he likens Zionism to a “new kind of colonialism” that not only threatens the existence of Palestine but also the newly independent African countries. This was his way of showing solidarity with the Palestinian masses against the U.S.-backed Israeli regime as far back as the 1960s.
Malcolm X also stated, “You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker,” to show the connection between the struggle against racism to the struggle against capitalism, an economic system that puts profits before meeting human needs.
Based on his experiences abroad, along with growing up under white supremacist U.S. society, Malcolm X’s political outlook evolved from Black nationalism to anti-imperialist internationalism. In theory and practice, he reached out to Civil Rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., despite any political differences, to launch the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
Malcolm viewed the United Nations as a platform to bring world attention to the plight of the oppressed Black nation inside the U.S. This was part of an effort to build a united front to fight a common enemy of oppressed peoples around the globe, not just in one country.
Just one month before his assassination, plotted by the U.S. government, he remarked: “It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.” Prophetic words for what is happening today.
Workers World Party salutes the enduring legacy of Malcolm X on the centennial of his birth. The lessons he leaves behind are still relevant today as we welcome the decline and eventual collapse of predatory imperialism and the billionaire capitalists, to lay the basis for the inevitable emancipation of the global working class and the oppressed.
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