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<font size=4><b>A Work of Negation: A Critical Review of Manning
Marable's, "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention"<br><br>
</font><font size=3>by Kali Akuno<br><br>
Written for Left Turn Magazine<br>
Thursday, May 19, 2011 <br><br>
</b>Manning Marable's, "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention", must
be seen for what it is, an ideological polemic. The general focus of this
polemic is Black Nationalism, and Black revolutionary nationalism in
particular. Manning's critical focus and fixation on Malcolm X as the
quintessential point of reference for Black Nationalists since his cold
blooded assassination in 1965, is a means to socially advance a line of
reasoning against this broad political philosophy and social movement by
turning its iconic figurehead on his head. The objective of this
inversion is to prove, in 594 pages no less, that those who adhere to and
seek to advance some variant of a Black nationalist program not only have
it all wrong, but in fact are distorting what Malcolm himself stood for
at the end of his days. <br><br>
As Manning would have it, at the time of his assassination, Malcolm X had
all but abandoned Black nationalism, and had instead become a pragmatic,
liberal humanist, with social democratic political leanings. As several
critics have already pointed out, this character bears a striking
resemblance to Manning himself. Paraphrasing Patrick Moyniham, although
Manning is unquestionably entitled to his own opinion, he is not entitled
to his own facts. And the fact stands that the document that most clearly
reflects Malcolm's political philosophy and programmatic orientation at
the time of his death was the <i>Program of the Organization of
Afro-American Unity</i>. This program is without question a revolutionary
nationalist program. The OAAU's program is modeled on the
anti-imperialist program of the Organization of African Unity (OAU)
advanced by the Casablanca block of the Union in the early 1960's. The
Casablanca Group included several progressive states offering political,
financial and military aid to the revolutionary anti-colonial struggles
then raging on the continent, particularly in the Portuguese held
colonies and Southern Africa. Chief amongst the Casablanca states were
Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, Sekou Toure's Guinea, and Gamal Abdel-Nassar's
Egypt, all of which Malcolm X had long standing knowledge and admiration
of. This is evidenced by his constant references to the 1955 Afro-Asian
or Bandung Conference, even prior to his departure from the Nation of
Islam (NOI), and the Non-Aligned Movement which he was concretely
relating to at the time of his death. Manning consistently tries to tip
toe around these and other clearly known facts, and where he can't he
insists on trying to twist their meaning into something more temperate
and palatable to the liberal, non-racial or multi-cultural, social
democratic movement and program he was seeking to advance. <br><br>
No where was this more painfully evident than on pages 484 - 486 of the
book. The portion that perhaps best illustrates Manning's disdain for
Black nationalism and his narrow interpretation of it is found on page
485. He states:
<dl>
<dd>"<i>The unrealized dimension of Malcolm's racial vision was that
of black nationalism. A political ideology that originated before the
Civil War, black nationalism was based on the assumption that racial
pluralism leading to assimilation was impossible in the United States. So
cynical were many nationalists about the incapacity of whites to overcome
their own racism that they occasionally negotiated with white terrorist
groups like the Ku Klux Klan, in the mistaken belief that they were more
honest about their racial attitudes than liberals. Yet as Malcolm's
international experiences became more varied and extensive, his social
vision expanded. He became less intolerant and more open to multiethnic
and interfaith coalitions. By the final months of his life he resisted
identification as a 'black nationalist', seeking ideological shelter
under the race-neutral concepts of Pan-Africanism and Third World
revolution</i>."
</dl>First, he rehashes an old, liberal line against Black nationalism
that it is the largely <i>rejected strain </i>of Black politics that
periodically reemerges like a phoenix during times of heighten oppression
against Black people. Manning, like many of his predecessors who held and
advanced this line, has a hard time grasping that since the inception of
the genocidal white-settler project that is the United States, that there
have been African people not in the least mystified by the material and
ideological trappings of their would be masters, and have sought to
establish their own independent states or safe havens on American soil or
sought repatriation back to Africa. Uncompromising self-determination and
sovereignty has always been the fundamental objective of this tendency of
the Black Liberation Movement. Further, Manning's statement assumes that
structurally the US is qualitatively less white supremacist now than it
was in the 19th century. While some of the formal trappings of white
supremacy have changed, and changed considerably as in the case of the
elimination of de jure apartheid, the fundamental essentials of the
racist political economy remain the same. And we have to keep in mind,
that although history never repeats itself exactly, there are plenty of
signs that the "second reconstruction" has exhausted itself
with the election of President Obama, and is in the process of being
reversed, much as the first reconstruction was between the late 1870's
and 1890's. <br><br>
Second, neither Pan-Africanism, Third Worldism, or Tri-Continentalism
were ever "race-neutral". All of these social movements were
and are crystal clear that one of their primary enemies was and is white
supremacy in the guise of European and American colonial occupation and
imperialist exploitation. Malcolm X's deepening embrace of Pan-Africanism
and Third World internationalism was never a rejection or retreat from
Black nationalism. If anything, as it pertains to his adoption of these
ideologies and movements, the base of his contemporary US influences
alone (the myth that it was international travel alone that advanced
Malcolm's politics in this vein needs to be totally debunked) - which run
the gamut from Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Queen Mother Moore, Robert F.
Williams, CLR James, Vickie Garvin, Carlos Cooks, Elombe Brath, Harold
Cruse, John Henrik Clarke and Gaidi and Imari Obadele, to name but few -
indicate more than anything, that Malcolm was in fact embracing the more
revolutionary and internationalist currents of the Black Liberation
Movement. These revolutionary currents were brutally repressed in the
1940's and 50's by the US government and largely sidelined by the
liberal, petit bourgeois leadership of the social movement now labeled
the "Civil Rights Movement", which made a conscious choice to
abandon the economic demands and human rights framework advanced by the
BLM in the 1930's and 40's, so as not to be castigated or associated with
communism and the revolutionary nationalist movements opposed by US
imperialism during the high tide of the Cold War. <br><br>
In light of these facts, I think it becomes clear that Manning's
distortions are more than just mere twists of fact. "Malcolm X: A
Life of Reinvention", has to be read as a product of the political
and ideological struggles of its own time and historical context, just as
much as it should be read and interpreted as a product of a singular (or
team, as I believe there was more than one hand responsible for some of
the sections of this work) consciousness. It is the contemporary
weaknesses of the Black Liberation Movement on a whole, and its Black
Nationalist wings more specifically, buttressed by imperialism's
hegemonic co-optation of Afrocentrism and other liberal variants of
multi-culturalism into a "post-racial" politics of American
nationalism that define the so-called "age of Obama", that
enabled the production of this work. Nowhere is this most evident than on
page 486, where Manning raises the question:
<dl>
<dd>"<i>If legal racial segregation was permanently in America's
past, Malcolm's vision today would have to radically redefine
self-determination and the meaning of black power in a political
environment that appeared to many to be 'post-racial'</i>."
</dl>Here again, Manning displays his narrow understanding of Black
Nationalism. In this leap frog of a statement, Manning fails to address
the more than 40 years of the Black nations internal struggle over the
question of self-determination. What is negated here is an explanation of
the political and military defeat of the Black Liberation Movement in the
1970's and 80's, and the Black petit bourgeoisie's broad betrayal of the
liberation movement by making conscious, deliberate and consistent
choices since the 1970's to incorporate itself within the American
imperialist project. Thus by virtue of a vacuum, the Black petit
bourgeoisie, in alliance with the Democratic Party, has assumed an
unrelenting hegemonic stranglehold over Black politics, removing it from
the streets, the schools and the shop floors to ensure that the peoples'
political engagement would be safely confined to narrow electoral
channels. The liberal Black petit bourgeois program and cultural
orientation willfully subjects and subordinates the interests of Black
people to the interests of the American imperial project, essentially to
ensure that its own position within the projected is secured and
consolidated. The "post-racial" political climate that Manning
speaks of is not some neutral phenomenon that somehow spontaneously
emerged. It is the outcome of this struggle, an outcome with clear
winners and losers. The primary loser being the Black working class.
<br><br>
Since its qualitative fragmentation (particularly after the collapse of
the National Black Political Convention and the dissolution of the
African Liberation Support Committee in the mid-1970's) and repression
induced retreat in the 1970's, the Black Liberation Movement has been
largely unable to address the deteriorating conditions of the Black
working class produced by capital's globalizing counter-offensive to the
gains of Black workers and the working class as whole won between the
1930's and 60's, and fundamentally blocked from enacting on a
comprehensive scale an independent political program that advances the
goal of self-determination. One of the primary results of this defeat has
been a steady right orientated ideological drift in the Black community
that has tailed the growing class fragmentation of the Black nation into
the Haves (and have access) and the Have-Not's. The Have's occupy the
hegemonic center, and through the hegemonic block that they have
constructed within the Black nation have advanced a program that creates
space for the general acceptance of Black cultural and physical inclusion
within the imperial project, just so long as it doesn't threaten the
settler-order at home and the never ending expanse of capital globally.
The Have-Not's meanwhile, due to the present lack of a strong and viable
alternative, are increasingly excluded from labor markets, warehoused in
prisons, and contained in isolated urban ghetto's or ex-urbanian
cantonments seeking economic justice and self-determination. <br><br>
Manning spent a considerable portion of his political and academic life
contemplating what could and should be a viable political alternative for
the Have-Not's. As one of his defining political projects, he was
unwavering in his resistance to the advance of conservative and
reactionary Black nationalist politics, as well he and all of us should
be in my own opinion, posing as that alternative. But, he often displayed
a somewhat narrow understanding of the complexity of Black nationalism,
which often led him to short change revolutionary nationalism and its
promise and potential as an alternative in his works and political
engagements. However, its clear from reading "Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention", that Manning was not just casting Black nationalism
narrowly unintentionally, but that he was committed to seeing that no
version or tendency of this phenomenon be projected as an alternative.
However, as hard as "A Life of Reinvention" tries to negate the
propagation of this ideological and political alternative by its
attempted inversion of the political life and legacy of Malcolm X, it
largely fails. And it fails because as much a Malcolm X was constantly
pushing himself and being pushed by his peers to grow politically, his
commitment to the self-determination of African people in the US and
throughout the world was unwavering, and no assemblage of minutia can
twist this historical fact. <br><br>
<br>
For reference to many of the historical points raised herein, please
consider the following sources as a sample of the rich history of the
Black Liberation Movement:<br><br>
1. "Race Against Empire: Black Americans and anti-imperialism, 1937
- 1957", by Penny M. Von Eschen. <br><br>
2. "Eye's Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American
Struggle for Human Rights, 1944 - 1955", by Carol Anderson.
<br><br>
3. "Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 - 1880", by W.E.B. Du
Bois. <br><br>
4. "From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the
Organization of Afro-American Unity", by William Sales, Jr.
<br><br>
5. "Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom
Struggle", edited by Dayo Gore, Komozi Woodard, and Jeanne
Theoharis. <br><br>
6. "Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of
African American Politics", by Cedric Johnson. <br><br>
8. "The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850 - 1925", by
William Jeremiah Moses. <br><br>
9. "Black Power in the Belly of the Beast", edited by Judson L.
Jefferies. <br><br>
10. "Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition",
by Cedric J. Robinson. <br><br>
11. "We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations,
1960 - 1975", by Muhammad Ahmad. <br><br>
12. "New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American
Culture, 1965 - 1975", by William L. Van Deburg. <br><br>
13. "A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black
Power Politics", by Komozi Woodard. <br><br>
14. "Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black
Power", by Timothy B. Tyson. <br><br>
15. "Negroes with Guns", by Robert F. Williams. <br><br>
16, "Free the Land", by Imari A. Obadele. <br><br>
-----<br><br>
Kali Akuno is the National Coordinator for the Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement (MXMG) and the Director of Education, Training, and Field Work
for the US Human Rights Nework (USHRN). Kali is currently working on a
book tentatively entitled "<i>Confronting a Cleansing: Hurricane
Katrina, the Battle for New Orleans, and the Future of the Black Working
Class</i>". The views expressed in this article do not reflect those
of MXGM or USHRN. Email feedback to:
<a href="mailto:kaliakuno@gmail.com">kaliakuno@gmail.com</a>. <br><br>
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