Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [256]
If ordinary people possess the intelligence and potential for changing their conditions, around what economic principles should that take place? Here again Malcolm returned to socialism, but explained it in a new, geopolitical context. In his judgment, the basic geopolitical division of the world was not between the United States and the Soviet Union, but America versus communist China. “Among Asian countries, whether they are communist, socialist . . . almost every one . . . that has gotten independence has devised some kind of socialistic system, and this is no accident.” Although Malcolm had visited neither China nor Cuba, it was clear that the socialist societies he admired most drew from the models of Mao and Castro.
That he should have looked to Asia, and specifically China, for examples made sense given the direction of his recent investigations into the history of global politics, and could also be placed in a much older context of black interest in China as a model for the struggle of oppressed peoples. As early as the turn of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois had made reference to the “color line” in The Souls of Black Folk, with the implication that “colored” people included Africans, Asians, Jews, and other minorities around the world engaged in a struggle against Western imperialism. Based on this argument, some blacks had entertained great sympathy for the Japanese empire in the 1930s. A generation later, many black leftists saw Mao Zedong as a triumphant leader of nonwhite people. The idea of black identification with Asia had even been reflected in the ideology of the Nation of Islam, which had viewed African Americans as genealogically “Asiatic,” a classification that Malcolm had abandoned before eventually coming to see the connection differently, in global-political terms. He was encouraged in this direction by his relationship with Shirley Graham Du Bois and her son, David, who enthusiastically picked up the torch their patriarch had long carried. Indeed, by the end of his life, W. E. B. Du Bois had come to be a revered figure in Asia, celebrated both by the Chinese and by Nehru in India. He had perceived revolutionary China as a triumph for all colored people.
In the Williams church speech, Malcolm drew on the triumph of Asian socialism to return to the notion that capitalism as an economic system was inherently exploitative: “You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else’s blood to suck to be a capitalist.” The tide of history for people of African descent was moving inextricably toward the East: “When we look at the African continent, when we look at the trouble that’s going on between East and West, we find that the nations in Africa are developing socialistic systems to solve their problems.”
At the event, Malcolm invited Fannie Lou Hamer and the SNCC Freedom Singers, traveling with her, to attend the OAAUʹs rally at the Audubon that evening. The successful rally with Hamer opened for Malcolm and the OAAU a long-desired conduit for political work with a progressive organization in the South. Attention in the civil rights movement was directed at this moment at Selma, Alabama, where various groups hoped to launch a major voting rights initiative in the new year. Malcolm found Selma intriguing, and continued his efforts to redefine his image within the civil rights