Manning Marable and the March Towards a Socialist America

The Great Wells Of Democracy (2003)

His most recent book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011), was issued on Monday April 4, three days after he joined the ancestors. From the press reports of the book, this work of over 600 pages will ignite new debates and discussions on one of the principal figures of the black liberation movement in the United States. I have not yet read this work but the New York Times has already declared that the book is a “re-evaluation of Malcolm X’s life.” In due time, I will be reading and commenting but I vividly remember the challenge that came from Manning Marable when he gave an interview on Democracy Now on the Book. He called on scholars and intellectuals within the Black Studies movement to engage the scholarship on Malcolm X, drawing attention to the thousands of pages of documents that still had to be processed to have a better appreciation of the life of Malcolm X. Scholars in general, but especially younger scholars were being challenged to do serious scholarly work that can advance the understanding of the social conditions, ideas and forms of community that created leaders such as Malcolm X.

Manning Marable wrote hundreds of scholarly articles. He was an internationalist who exposed the conservatism of those sections of the black community who sought to domesticate black political activity in the United States in the service of capitalism and the two established political parties ” the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. In his castigation of black capitalism and black conservatism however, there was one article in Race and Class where Marable took Marcus Garvey out of the context of Jim Crow and chided Garvey for the attempts to build corporations such as the Black Star Line. Shades of the 1920’s divisions between nationalists and communists could be discerned in that essay. Marable critiqued the idea that capitalism can be the basis for liberation and he was clear in his opposition when Louis Farrakhan embraced Sani Abacha in Nigeria. Manning Marable understood that one could not be anti-racist at home and embrace dictators overseas. Hence, he was consistent in his support for African liberation and the attempts of the Cuban people to build an alternative way of life away from Yankee imperialism.

Like his former colleague Robin D.G. Kelly, Manning Marable understood the centrality of cultural struggles within the Left movement and he worked within the Board of Directors of the Hip Hop Summit Action Network. His clarity on the need to work from the inside of the power of the hip hop movement in the United States showed a level of political maturity because Marable was against the crude capitalist orientation of other members of the Board of Directors of the Hip Hop Summit Action Network.

In the traditions of W.E.B. Dubois and Walter Rodney, he ensured that his skills and training did not serve those who oppressed the majority of the working peoples, both black and white. He was also the general editor of Freedom on My Mind: The Columbia Documentary of the African American Experience (2003)

For years, when I taught an introductory course on African American Studies at Syracuse University, I used the text Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices on Resistance, Reform, and Renewal An African American Anthology. This was a text that he edited with Leith Mullings and it brought to life for younger students the history of struggles and the revolutionary leadership provided in the society by thinkers and activists such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Manning Marable worked closely with the feminist movement and the gay and lesbian movement to expose and challenge homophobia in black political spaces.

While teaching, running a research center and speaking on the circuits of the international freedom struggle, Manning Marable was on the editorial board of BlackCommentator.com ensuring that his ideas did not remain within academia. He wrote political columns that were syndicated widely in numerous platforms and newspapers in the United States. In the last twenty years, Manning had been researching and writing the book on Malcolm X, and in the last few years, though ill and diagnosed with sarcoidosis, he soldiered on with his determination to contribute to building a solid basis for the ideas and organization that will be the foundation for an alternative society.

Manning did not shy away from the hard questions of police brutality, the hollowing out of the urban spaces, and the conservatism of a section of the black church that wanted to turn religion into a business venture. Working inside the black freedom traditions, he was forthright in his opposition to the prison-industrial complex, and was involved in numerous conferences and meetings to oppose the mass incarceration of black youths. He used his position in academia to build the Africana Studies Against Criminal Injustice network. In bringing together formidable scholars and activists such as Julia Sudbury, Angela Davis, Van Jones and others to tap into the vast reservoir of knowledge that is locked away inside the prison system, Manning was using his position to advance research, education and political action. There were so many facets of his massive contribution that this short tribute cannot do justice to his legacies. He left a valuable corpus of work for those who want to interrogate the injustices of capitalism and racism.

In his efforts to build Africana Studies in the service of the people, Manning embarked on projects that brought together some of the best activists and he did not confine himself to the work in the black community. As a committed socialist working in the traditions of Paul Robeson, Manning Marable served as Chair of Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS). This remains one of the broad fronts for the radical and socialist Left forces in the United States. It was this work that brought Manning to the forefront of the broader struggles for socialism, and he understood that this struggle must be anchored in the history of the black liberation struggles. In this work, he was very close to the formation of former members of the Communist Party of the United States who were organized under the umbrella of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, this group of committed socialists sought to maintain the organizational basis for thinking through the challenges of building socialism in the United States.

Marable, Socialism, and the Reparations Movement

Throughout his life and in his political practice, Manning Marable was an educator who sought to educate the society that there needed to be repair from the destructive traditions and contemporary forms of capitalist exploitation. As a historian, he understood the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on human history and he actively participated in the activities of the international and US-based reparations movement. This work was not the kind of political activism that endeared him to the sections of the Left that refuse to deal with the issues and consequences of slavery. I remember when Manning traveled to Durban, South Africa for the NGO conference of the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in August-September, 2001. He worked inside the NGO conference and outside the meeting. He spoke before a big rally at the City Hall of Durban in South Africa, where he linked the struggles for repair and renewal in Africa and the United States. Reparations were not simply about monetary compensation, but a way of opposing militarism and reactionary conservative politics. Writing In defense of Black Reparations, Marable observed that:

Manning Marable was fully aware that capitalism could not pay this debt, so he understood that the fight for reparations was part of a fight to lift the political consciousness of the society of the “crimes against humanity” that had been committed by the United States and Western Europe. Like the different forms of black struggles, there were differing formations within the Black Reparations Movement, and Marable stood out while others within the dream team from Harvard studiously avoided serious discussions about reparations in fear of alienating their benefactors in the capitalist classes. Manning Marable’s Institute of Research held sessions on reparations at Columbia. In the State of New York, Marable was also a member of the New York Legislature’s Amistad Commission, created to review state curriculum regarding the slave trade.

I interacted with Manning inside the Black Radical Congress in the short life of the BRC. Inside this organization there was the concrete question of the organizational form necessary to build an alternative to the traditional forms of politics. Within the Black Radical Congress there were differences of opinions on whether the Congress would be a formation with individual members or based on networks that were grounded in local organizing committees (LOCs). One other difference was the overlap between the local organizing committees and caucuses of the organization such as the youth caucus, the worker/labor caucus, LGBT caucus, environment and prison caucus.

The differences over the organizational form could not detract from the forceful and clear positions that had come forth from collective discussions on the Principles of Unity and the Freedom Agenda. The translation of the ideas of Unity from theory to practice proved to be a major challenge, especially inside a black radical formation that sought to bring together all the black radical tendencies within the United States. How could all of these black radicals work together in a society where radicalism was frowned upon?

In New York City where the traditions of black Left politics were strongest, there were two local organizing Committees: the New York LOC and the New York Metro. Manning Marable was a dominant force within the New York branch of the Black Radical Congress. There were, however, differences over tactics and strategies with sections of the BRC that had formed the New York Metro.

This organization was dedicated to a radical vision and hence could not really survive in capitalist America. Divisions between differing parts simmered until the Black Radical Congress melted away at precisely the moment when the neo-conservative onslaught of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld rule required a vigorous fight back campaign.

Regardless of the differences within the black Left, there was one question where all came together, and that was the opposition to mass incarceration. In 1999, while the organizational challenges of the paths forward for black radicalism were being debated, all the sections of the Black Left came together to build the fight to free Mumia Abu Jamal. Manning Marable spoke at a rally in Philadelphia where there was the ongoing fight to save the life of Mumia.

Future history will reveal whether the ruptures within the Black Radical Congress were simply divisions over ideological and organizational lines or whether there was the nefarious hand of the state involved as in the past COINTELPRO, which instigated divisions within the black liberation and peace movements. The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities stated that, COINTELPRO is the FBI acronym for a series of covert action programs directed against domestic groups.

In these programs, the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action defined to “disrupt” and “neutralize” target groups and individuals. The techniques were adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence, and ranged from the trivial (mailing reprints of Reader’s Digest articles to college administrators) to the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous (encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers). The devastating work ranged from supporting assassinations to instigating divisions within the civil rights and peace movements.

There are enough of the activists of the BRC still alive for research to be done to examine the activities of the US government within the ranks of the BRC. Was the BRC neutralized?

Despite its short life, the Black Radical Congress worked to oppose war and militarism at home and abroad and fertilized the black liberation struggles and the wider socialist movement inside the United States. Marable worked very hard to place the important stamp of linking anti-racism to anti sexism work within the liberation movement. Working with his partner, Leith Mullings, and fighters such as Barbara Ransby and Cathy Cohen, among hundreds of others, the BRC successfully placed the fight against homophobia within the liberation history. The documents and statements of the Black Radical Congress remain a force in the struggles for an alternative social system.

Manning Marable was one of the authors of the Freedom Agenda that declared,