Malcolm X: Courageous Fighter Against Black Oppression

Down With Racist, Anti-Communist Provocation at Columbia!

(Young Spartacus Pages)

We reprint below a New York Spartacus Youth Club statement issued as a leaflet on 3 December 2005.

On November 2, Columbia College Conservative Club (CCCC) honcho Chris Kulawik published a column in the Columbia Spectator attacking the name of the Malcolm X student lounge. The column was a calculated provocation against black people and other minorities, leftists and anti-racist students and workers. The CCCC’s 2004 anti-affirmative action “bake sale”—a disgusting insult against black, Latino, female and Jewish students—sparked wide-spread outrage on campus. And now these creeps are at it again. Kulawik himself might as well have been mentored by Republican bigwig William Bennett, who made the genocidal argument: “If you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” It is not an accident that racist views are being retailed at Columbia, a bastion of race and class privilege run by a union-busting slumlord administration in the middle of Harlem.

Kulawik rants that Malcolm was “a radical, hate-spewing, violent, anti-American racist” and that the room should be re-named to honor Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Communist Party member who, during the McCarthyite anti-red witchhunts of the 1950s, was infamous as an informer for the FBI. Trotskyist James P. Cannon had his number in 1952: “Chambers has written a book (Witness, Random House) with a message to the effect that, to his personal knowledge, God has taken a definite position against communism, and all revolutions past, present and future. That is a message which the instigators and beneficiaries of the current hysteria want to hear and have proclaimed far and wide.” Kulawik hates Malcolm X for the same reason that the racist capitalist rulers feared and hated him: he was an uncompromising fighter for black freedom, a truth teller who exposed the hypocrisy and lies of the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties and advocated the right of armed self-defense against Klan and police terror.

The racist atrocity after Hurricane Katrina starkly exposed the raw reality of race and class in capitalist America. But it’s not just Bush and the Republicans who are the enemies of blacks and poor people. Despite their differences with the Republicans over particular policies, the Democrats are just as much a capitalist party of racism and war. Although he did not have the Marxist understanding of the centrality of mobilizing the multiracial working class independent of its capitalist exploiters, Malcolm X inspired a whole generation of blacks and radicals who courageously stood up to the racist ruling class.

It is quite fitting that students protesting against racist U.S. imperialism in 1968, during the U.S.’s counterrevolutionary war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants, would choose to honor Malcolm X after occupying and renaming the former ROTC lounge. These students also struggled against the racist policies of the Columbia administration. Kulawik would like to turn the clock back to the days when reds were witchhunted off campus and black people were mostly excluded from higher education. The SYC fights for free, quality education for all! Nationalize Columbia and open the gates to the black and Latino residents of Harlem! We understand that the fight for black liberation requires building a revolutionary, internationalist workers party with a substantially black leadership.

The Spartacus Youth Club fights for revolutionary integrationism—the understanding that black freedom will not be won short of socialist revolution and that there will be no socialist revolution unless the cause of black freedom is actively championed by a fighting labor movement. When the integrated working class in this country makes that revolution, Malcolm X will be honored as a courageous fighter and martyr for the cause of black freedom. If you are interested in taking up this fight, join us on December 9 at 6 pm for the Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners. Come show your solidarity with those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression!