“The notion was expressed that the British government would not, out of its free will, ‘donate’ self-rule to a colony and that the application of some element of force might be necessary.”

FR Kankam-Boadu

“If the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force, then Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve freedom.”

WEB Du Bois

“Every Negro who lays claim to leadership should make a study of Bolshevism and explain its meaning to the coloured masses. It is the greatest and most scientific idea afloat in the world today that can be easily put into practice by the proletariat to better its material and spiritual life. Bolshevism…has made Russia safe for the Jew. It has liberated the Slav peasant from the priest and bureaucrat who can no longer egg him on to murder Jews to bolster up their rotten institutions. It might make these United States safe for the Negro…if the Russian idea should take hold of the white masses of the Western world, and they should rise in united strength and overthrow their imperial capitalist government, then the black toilers would automatically be free!”

Claude McKay (1890-1948)

Trotsky asked me some straight and sharp questions about American Negroes, their group organisations, their political position, their schooling, their religion, their grievances and social aspirations and, finally, what kind of sentiment existed between American and African Negroes. I replied with the best knowledge and information at my command. Then Trotsky expressed his own opinion about Negroes, which was more intelligent than that of any of the other Russian leaders…he was not quick to make deductions about the causes of white prejudice against black. Indeed, he made no conclusions at all, and, happily, expressed no mawkish sentimentality about black and white brotherhood. What he said was very practical…he urged that Negroes should be educated about the labour movement…he said he would like to set a practical example in his own department and proposed the training of a group of Negroes as officers in the Red Army.

Claude McKay (1890-1948)

A Rebel’s Guide to Malcolm X is further confirmation, if it was already needed, of the British Socialist Worker’s Party’s promotion of racialist identity politics. This small book largely whitewashes, if you pardon the pun, Malcom X’s pursuit of black nationalist politics and support for racial segregation.

Hamilton’s book and the party he belongs to have historically adapted to the reformist middle-class leadership of the international civil rights movement. The SWP presents black nationalism, along with other forms of petty-bourgeois nationalism such as Castroism in Cuba, as complementary to the fight for socialism.

This small book begins by granting political amnesty to Garveyism.[1] The SWP in all their articles on Garvey contain mild criticisms of him, but on the whole, they gave him a free pass, saying, “In the end, he is remembered for giving a sense of pride to black people in the face of the hideous racism of the 1920s. That is worth recalling, and his faults should be seen in that context.”[2]

But as the Trotskyist Lawrence Porter points out “Despite his radical aura, Garvey rejected socialism. Indeed, he steadfastly opposed the struggle for equality even among blacks. As time progressed, the left rhetoric receded and the right-wing essence of Garvey’s politics came to the fore. By the 1920s, he found himself in cooperation with Jim Crow politicians and the Ku Klux Klan, who agreed with black nationalism’s policy of racial separatism. By the end of his life, Garvey boasted he was a fascist.”[3]

The other organisation given a free pass by Hamilton and the SWP is the American Communist Party. Malcolm X was never a member of the Communist Party or even close to it. So it is a little confusing that while he was in prison, his correspondence was opened and intercepted by the FBI. In this letter, Malcom X clearly states he is a Communist.

Under the heading of “Communist Party Activities”, the heavily redacted FBI transcription of letters from Malcolm X while in prison noted:

“Several excerpts from letters written by the subject. [redaction’] these excerpts were not quotes but rather notes jotted down [redaction] on the contents of these letters. On June 29, 1950, the Subject mailed a letter from which [redacted] copied the following: ‘Tell [redaction] to get in shape. It looks like another war. I have always been a Communist. I have tried to enlist in the Japanese Army during the last war, but now they will never draft or accept me in the U.S. Army. Everyone has always said [redaction] Malcolm is crazy, so it isn’t hard to convince people that I am.”[4]

The free pass given to the Stalinists in the American Communist Party reflects their attitude towards the American Trotskyist movement and Leon Trotsky. Neither is mentioned in the book. For an organisation that purports to be Trotskyist, the SWP and Hamilton do not discuss the attitude of Leon Trotsky and the American Trotskyist Party towards Black Nationalism at any point. There is not enough room in this short review to include Trotsky’s discussion with the American comrades on black nationalism, which should be considered in any discussion of Malcolm X.

Trotsky wrote:

“The point of view of the American comrades appears to me not fully convincing. ‘Self-determination’ is a democratic demand. Our American comrades advance as against this democratic demand, the liberal demand. This liberal demand is, moreover, complicated. I understand what ‘political equality’ means. But what is the meaning of economic and social equality within a capitalist society? Does that mean a demand to public opinion that all enjoy equal protection under the law? But that is political equality. The slogan ‘political, economic and social equality’ sounds equivocal, and while it is not clear to me, it nevertheless suggests itself easily to misinterpretation.

The Negroes are a race and not a nation:—Nations grow out of the racial material under definite conditions. The Negroes in Africa are not yet a nation but they are in the process of building a nation. The American Negroes are on a higher cultural level. But while they are there under the pressure of the Americans they become interested in the development of the Negroes in Africa. The American Negro will develop leaders for Africa, that one can say with certainty and that in turn will influence the development of political consciousness in America.

We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a nation; if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for. We say: If the Negroes want that then we must fight against imperialism to the last drop of blood, so that they gain the right, wherever and how they please, to separate a piece of land for themselves. The fact that they are not a majority in any state today is irrelevant. It is not a question of the authority of the states but of the Negroes. That in the overwhelming Negro territory also whites have existed. They will remain henceforth is not the question and we do not need today to break our heads over a possibility that sometime the whites will be suppressed by the Negroes. In any case the suppression of the Negroes pushes them toward a political and national unity.

That the slogan ‘self-determination’ will rather win the petty bourgeois instead of the workers—that argument holds good also for the slogan of equality. It is clear that the special Negro elements who appear more frequently in the public eye (businessmen, intellectuals, lawyers, etc.) are more active and react more strongly against inequality. It is possible to say that the liberal demand, just as well as the democratic one, in the first instance will attract the petty bourgeois and only later the workers.”[5]

In a lecture delivered at the Socialist Equality Party (US) summer school, held August 1 through August 6, 2021, Niles Niemuth, a writer for the World Socialist Web Site, made the following point. “Trotsky was seeking in brief discussions with American members in Turkey in 1933 and Mexico in 1939 to correct the American Trotskyists’ neglect of the “Negro question,” orient the party to a critical section of the American working class and facilitate the recruitment of worker members under conditions where the twists and turns of the Communist Party had alienated many black intellectuals and workers who had been drawn to Marxism over the previous two decades.” I don’t know if even the Trotskyists in the American section of the Fourth International would have been able to change Malcolm X’s subsequent political trajectory. Still, the ensuing political discussion with Malcolm X would have educated a much larger audience and clarified the question of Black nationalism.[6]

Section four of the book elaborates on Malcolm X’s time in prison and his life in the Nation of Islam. While in prison, Malcolm X read John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Orlando Reade[7] In an interview with the SWP, Reade said :

“Malcolm X read Paradise Lost in the late 1940s when he was a young man serving a long sentence for burglary. He had this desire to read, combined with a deep suspicion of white writers. Malcolm X was trying to bend the literature to make it serve his new radical viewpoint. When he came to Paradise Lost, Malcolm also perceived something true. Milton compared Satan on his way to Eden to European ships on their way to satisfy their appetite for sugar, spice and tobacco. Malcolm saw how Milton associated Satan with European kings and their armies, as well as the colonisers. Malcolm found something profoundly radical in Milton’s critique of worldly power. He found in Paradise Lost a critique of white supremacy.”[8]

In the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine, an article on the women in Malcom X’s life shows they were instrumental in his turn towards the politics of the Nation of Islam. [9]The NOI was not a threat to capitalism in the United States, nor was Malcolm X, as long as he was in it. But as David Walsh points out, it was only after breaking with the organisation that his life became endangered. Walsh writes :

“The assassinations of Malcolm X and, some three years later, of Martin Luther King Jr., could not have been accidental in their purpose or their timing. When Malcolm represented the Nation of Islam, his life was not threatened. Still, when he broke from Elijah Muhammad’s anti-white separatism and suggested, even in a limited way, that race was not the fundamental dividing line in the fight against injustice, he became a marked man. His newly formed Organisation of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) was undoubtedly quickly infiltrated by agents and provocateurs. At the same time, full advantage was taken of the threats made against him by the Nation of Islam. All the cops had to do was sabotage Malcolm X’s security and look the other way.”[10]

As I mentioned at the beginning, the SWP adapted to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. With the advent of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, it continues to maintain its stance in support of Black nationalism. How else would you understand the SWP’s Ruby Hirsch’s fawning article over the recent Super Bowl performance of Beyonce’s “ in which her dancers dressed in the black berets and raised gloved fists of the Black Panthers and stood in an “X” formation, was broadcast to more than 100 million Americans. It was a powerful tribute to Malcolm X and the Black Lives Matter movement.”

The reality of the Black Lives Matter Movement is somewhat different from the one described by the British SWP. As Lawrence Porter and Nancy Hanover write, “From the beginning, the ‘mothers of the movement’ Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi—who collectively adopted the famous hashtag—specifically opposed uniting blacks, whites and immigrants against the brutal class-war policies of the capitalist state. Instead, the group did its best to confine anti-police violence protests within the framework of the capitalist system and push a racialist and pro-capitalist agenda.”[11]

Malcolm X was a complex man. Who knows if he had not been assassinated, whether he would have moved further to the left and rejected his brand of black nationalism and taken up a struggle against black and white capitalism. To be blunt, Hamilton’s book is a whitewash of Malcom X’s history and politics and does nothing to clarify today’s issue of black nationalism or racism.

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[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey

[2] Marcus Garvey: a liberating legacy of challenging racism-socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/marcus-garvey-a-liberating-legacy-of-challenging-racism/

[3] Marcus Garvey and the reactionary logic of racialist politics-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/02/qhdd-m02.html

[4] www.blackagendareport.com/malcolm-x-black-nationalism-and-cold-war

[5] On Black Nationalism-Documents on the Negro Struggle http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/negro1.htm

[6] Race, class and social conflict in the United States. wsws.org

[7] What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost, 2024, Jonathan Cape.

[8] Paradise Lost inspired generations of radicals-socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/paradise-lost-inspired-generations-of-radicals/

[9] www.historyextra.com/magazine/current-issue-bbc-history-magazine/

[10] Two men convicted in 1965 Malcolm X assassination exonerated in New York court-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/19/malc-n19.html

[11]  Black Lives Matter cashes in on black capitalism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/04/blm-a04.html