Malcolm X voiced the rage of millions against poverty, racism, and police brutality. Evolving from Black Nationalism to anti-capitalism and towards socialism, he remains an inspiration to all who challenge racist capitalism.

"Why am I as I am?"

Malcolm X experienced racism from birth. Forced by racists to move home, Malcolm was still young when white supremacists murdered his father. Insurance companies refused to pay out, "claiming my father had committed suicide... how could my father bash himself in the head, and then get down across the streetcar tracks to be run over?"

Malcolm X was often top of his class. But the racist system failed him, drove his mother to a breakdown and hospital, and broke up his family. Malcolm wanted to be a lawyer. His school-teacher replied, "A lawyer - that's no realistic goal for a nigger... Why don't you plan on carpentry?"

Poverty-stricken, alienated, and angry without answers, Malcolm drifted from shoe-shining to train porter, to petty crime, drug addiction and jail. While imprisoned, he converted to the Nation of Islam.

"The true knowledge of the black man"

The Nation of Islam was founded in 1931, preaching Black pride and separatism - and quickly finding fertile soil among Black convicts. Malcolm X described: "Here is a black man caged behind bars, probably for years, put there by the white man.

"Usually the convict comes from among those bottom-of-the-pile Negroes, the Negroes who through their entire lives have been kicked about, treated like children - Negroes who have never met one white man who didn't either take something from them or do something to them... 'The white man is the devil' is a perfect echo of that black convict's lifelong experience."

"I felt Allah would be more inclined to help those who helped themselves"

Leaving prison, Malcolm X threw himself into building the Nation of Islam. He quickly became a leading minister: founding temples and the Nation's newspaper; addressing meetings; raging against America's racist history; articulating anger instinctively felt by oppressed Blacks. The Nation swelled to 100,000 followers by the early 1960s.

Civil rights movement

The mass civil rights movement involved millions of angry Blacks demanding change. To disrupt segregation, young people occupied bars and organised Freedom Rides to enforce an end to segregated public transport. In the neo-colonial world, revolutions swept away colonial rule. Revolutionary events combined with police brutality to spur on a mass movement.

"Those Muslims talk tough, but they never do anything"

Civil rights leaders attempted to tie the movement to lobbying Democrat politicians. Malcolm X correctly attacked this: "Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lilypad park pools, with gospels and guitars and 'I Have a Dream' speeches? And the black masses in America were - and still are - having a nightmare."

Martin Luther King later moved to the left, arguing for working-class unity and supporting strikers just before he was murdered.

The LAPD (Los Angeles police) attacked a Nation temple in 1962, killing a leading activist. Malcolm X began a defence campaign, holding mass meetings. He supported a New York trade union boycott of a firm refusing to hire black workers.

"The chickens coming home to roost"

But this contradicted the conservative Nation leaders, who offered no practical alternative to the civil rights movement. Moves were underway to undermine Malcolm X, sanctioned by Nation leader Elijah Muhammad.

President Kennedy's assassination in 1963 meant Nation ministers were immediately ordered to say nothing. Malcolm was not to be silenced. "... it was, as I saw it, a case of 'the chickens coming home to roost'. I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the killing of defenceless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, finally had struck down this country's Chief of State."

The Nation moved swiftly on this pretext. Meeting with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X was told "I'll have to silence you for the next ninety days - so that the Muslims everywhere can be disassociated from the blunder."

Within days, suspension became "'if he submits'... I had completely submitted. ... I was being set up", followed by talk from senior Nation members about killing Malcolm X.

"A working unity among all peoples"

Fifty weeks separate Malcolm X's split with the Nation, and his murder by the US state. At Mecca on pilgrimage, in Africa discussing with independence movement leaders, Malcolm's ideas underwent a profound transformation. He met many non-Black "true revolutionaries, dedicated to overthrowing the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary.

"So I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of black nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as black nationalism? And if you noticed I haven't been using the expression for several months."

Malcolm X launched a new organisation, 'Muslim Mosque Inc', to "...embrace all faiths of black men, and it would carry into practice what the Nation of Islam had only preached".

"This was a move that people had waited for. Numerous people said... they wanted to join me... Muslims wrote from other cities that they would join me, their remarks being generally along the lines that 'Islam is too inactive'... 'The Nation is moving too slow'".

After his international travels, Malcolm X wanted to develop links between the 'Muslim Mosque Inc' and Muslims across the world. His ideas continued to move towards those of working-class unity and socialism.

From challenging racism with religion, to challenging capitalism with unity of the oppressed, Malcolm X stated: "I will join in with anyone, I don't care what colour you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth."

This represented a real threat. Within weeks Malcolm was dead, assassinated by the state with Nation support.

"The system cannot produce freedom for the Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period"

Malcolm X's ideas have long been distorted. He has been falsely accused of being a "black racist". The Nation of Islam claim him as their own. Yet shortly before Malcolm was killed, current Nation leader Farrakhan said "a man such as this is worthy only of death".

Some see Malcolm as a Muslim preacher. He filled his faith with the social struggle for liberation - beginning to reach out to all Blacks, and then working-class whites, for unity against racism and poverty.

Four decades later a whole race-relations industry exists. The most glaring racism has been shoved under the carpet. But the police are institutionally racist. Harassment and poverty remain. New Labour and the US Democrats have nothing to offer. As Malcolm said, "With these choices, I felt the American black man only had to choose which one to be eaten by, the 'liberal' fox or the 'conservative' wolf - because both of them would eat him."

Malcolm's murder enraged a generation to rise up and fight. One million Blacks considered themselves revolutionary. The Black Panther Party, organising community defence against racists and police, drew some socialist conclusions.

Panther leader Bobby Seale summed it up: "We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative capitalism with black capitalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism. We fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism."

The Socialist Party stands in the best traditions of mass struggle and self-defence, for working-class unity of all races, religions, and countries.

See also

The Undiscovered Malcolm X: Stunning new info on his assassination, his plans to unite the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements & the 3 'missing' chapters from his autobiography - A Democracy Now! special on the 40th anniversary of Malcolm X's assassination. (CWI is not affiliated to DN!)

The life & legacy of Malcolm X - A Socialist Alternative pamphlet by Andrea Enisuoh (1993).

Panther: The Black Rebellion - A collection of material written by members of Panther. The first in a series of publications combining historical and present-day issues which are of crucial importance to the Black movement in Britain and America (1994).

"Just give me my equality": An obituary for Nina Simone - Gary Mulcahy, Socialist View (Summer 2003)

"You can't have capitalism without racism" - Cillian Gillespie, Socialist Youth Voice (July 2002).

Arthur Miller, the American playwright, died on 9 February, aged 89, having battled with cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition.

Tributes were carried in the international media. Newspapers as far apart as the New York Times, the Boston Herald, the Daily News, in addition to the Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Observer, were compelled to recognise Miller's eminence in his field. It was a life that had seen the Wall Street crash, World War Two, the Holocaust, and the McCarthy era.

Miller was a literary colossus who penned some of the most revealing insights into the corruption of corporate practices and the concept of the 'American Dream'. Death of a Salesman, View from the Bridge, The Crucible and All My Sons, are just some of his works which are now classics.

Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915, the son of a prosperous garment manufacturer whose business was a casualty of the Great Depression of 1929-31. This experience fuelled his instinctive radicalism and began his politicisation.

Miller worked in a warehouse after graduating from high school until he saved enough money to move to the University of Michigan where he studied journalism and playwriting.

Success

After the outbreak of World War Two, Miller moved to New York to pursue his writing. His first successful play, staged on Broadway in 1947, was All My Sons which dealt with a corrupt arms manufacturer, whose selling of faulty aircraft parts to the US air force during the war led to the death of servicemen.

This was followed by Death of a Salesman, which was acclaimed as a masterpiece, won the Pulitzer Prize and is now synonymous as Miller's critique of the American Dream (or, if you're Willy Loman, the American nightmare). It starred Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman and the then icon of the left, Elia Kazan, directed both plays. The two men subsequently played a baleful and crucial role in Miller's later life.

Anti-communism

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), originally set up by Congress to investigate Nazi activity in the US, turned to anti-communism under Richard Nixon's leadership.

In the 1950s it became a tool of Senator Joe McCarthy's rabid anti-communism, supported by right-wing republicans thirsting for revenge for Roosevelt's New Deal. It tapped into a mood of anxiety, which was fuelled by the existence of Stalinist-dominated Eastern Europe and the emergence of communist China in 1949.

McCarthy's witch-hunt targeted the motion picture industry as a so-called hot bed of sedition and communist sympathy. An atmosphere of fear and uncertainty swept post-war America. Hundreds of activists and radical liberals who had supported various peace campaigns which sprang up during and after the war were hauled in front of HUAC and asked the question: "Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?"

If they took the Fifth Amendment, they were damned for contempt. If they answered yes, they had to apologise and give the names of friends and colleagues who had been at CP meetings. If no, they had to prove it. If they refused to name names they were in contempt of Congress, faced with jail and prevented from working in their own industry.

Appalled by this blatant violation of basic human rights, Arthur Miller began to write The Crucible, a play that would reflect the activities of HUAC. To research material he paid a visit to Salem, Massachusetts, the scene in 1692 of the most grotesque witch-hunt in American history. Ironically, it was while on his journey to Salem that he heard of Elia Kazan's decision to collaborate with HUAC.

Kazan's betrayal

In his biography, Time Bends, Miller describes Kazan's attempt to justify his decision: 'Listening to him I grew frightened. There was a certain gloomy logic in what he was saying: unless he came clean he could never hope, in the height of his creative powers, to make another film in America, and he would probably not be given a passport to work abroad either.

'If the theatre remained open to him, it was not his primary interest anymore; he wanted to deepen his film life, that was where his heart lay, and he had been told in so many words by his old boss and friend Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century Fox, that the company would not employ him unless he satisfied the Committee.... I was growing cooler with the thought that as unbelievable as it seemed, I could still be up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I attended meetings of the Communist Party writers years ago and had made a speech at one of them."

Self-justifying

In the early 1950s, Kazan made On the Waterfront, a film about the Mafia controlling the stevedores' union on the New York docks. Budd Schulberg, who wrote the book and the screenplay, and most of the principal actors, including the aforementioned Lee J Cobb, were 'friendly witnesses', collaborators with HUAC. In his own biography Kazan conceded that he made the picture to show that if the circumstances demanded it, it was OK to betray your friends.

In response, Miller wrote The View from the Bridge, also set in New York's dockland. In contrast to the lionisation of Brando's character in Waterfront, it attacked the role of the stool pigeon Eddie Carbone for his act of betrayal.

Witch-hunted

In 1956, Arthur Miller's name was projected onto the pages of the world's popular press when he married Marilyn Monroe and was found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to name names to HUAC.

He describes his revulsion at the morals of HUAC when its then chair, right-wing senator Francis Walter, offered to drop the charge if he could persuade Monroe to be photographed shaking his hand. Miller and Monroe both refused.

According to Nicholas Hytner, director of the film adaptation of The Crucible, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Miller used to joke that, as a measure of the play's timeless relevance, you could get an indicator of the level of international political persecution by counting the number of productions taking place around the world.

To demonstrate the truth of that observation, it was staged on Broadway just after the Patriot Act had been brought in.

Disenchantment

During the 1990s, Miller expressed his disenchantment with the New York theatre by spending more time in Britain. In one of his last articles, he declares that the Broadway theatre has succumbed to glorious, glamorous show business.

He was right. Everything is about the bottom line. The theatre now parallels capitalism's obsession with downsizing, delayering, streamlining, privatising, and other euphemisms for sacking workers or attacking wages and conditions.

Miller argued that his great plays would not now be staged on Broadway because they required 'too many people.'

Arthur Miller, while pronouncing and writing boldly about the political issues of the century, was explicitly political in his analysis of society but never joined a political party. David Mamet, director of Glengarry Glenross a film that parallels Salesman, in his New York Times tribute, suggests that there is an acceptance in Miller's work that it is the 'human lot to try and fail'.

However, this is a profoundly pessimistic analysis. Whilst writing about the dark side of society, Arthur Miller constantly brought out and underlined humankind's potential for nobility. To the end, he never lapsed into cynicism, or abandoned his vision of a more humane and just society.

Socialism

Socialists can refer to his work as a means of popularly explaining the evils of capitalism, but also explaining how such evils can be eliminated by the socialist transformation of society. On that score, Arthur Miller's contribution to this debate remains priceless.