Introduction

At the international conference Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and A Legacy of Struggle our sacred radical Black tradition was reborn. Scholars, activists, and militant youth embraced in the rebirth of the great self determination debate. All major voices of the tradition were singing: religion, panafricanism, nationalism, feminism, and socialism.

The major conference theme was Black liberation and social revolution, the double-edged sword of freedom. This volume contains the presentation of two plenary sessions, one from U.S. perspectives, and the other from world perspectives. These presentations prove that radical Black scholars and activists can provide clarity of analysis and the moral courage to struggle.

These 8 presentations deal with the following points:

1. Is social revolution an objective possibility? Do we have a choice to struggle or not? Can we win?

2. What has been wrong with our political organizations? What styles of leadership are required in mass democratic movements?

3. How can the struggle in the U.S. be coordinated with campaigns of struggle in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean?

One major aspect of these analyses, in fact the most basic and fundamental aspect, is that the study of political economy points to an objective and material basis for the struggle. Even more, it points to the "necessity" for the struggle as a struggle for survival. This is especially true in the presentations by Peery and McLeod. Militant Black youth are not simply going through a transitional phase in their life cycle, sort of like now it is Malcolm X but when they get older it will be Booker T. Washington. Militant Black youth are turning to Malcolm X because the objective conditions have negated the possibility for their upward mobility into the middle class and they are being forced to seek a revolutionary road to survival.

Malcolm X had a message for the 'wretched of the earth," the hard inner city ghetto youth. The society has a message to conform or die. Conformity means playing the games of self-destruction without causing the mainstream any problems. Otherwise, it's bloodthirsty cops or some kinda jail. But the Message of Malcolm X is that if you're gonna die anyway you might as well die fighting Black. He sort of makes all of us keep in mind that great poem of resistance by Claude McKay:

Furthermore this is not just a local problem but it is a crisis for the entire world. The whole world is going through a new experience, the death of an old form of industrial production with its demand for an abundance of skilled factory labor. This includes all of capitalism and what has been alleged to be actually existing socialism. The entire world is in an uproar, and as of yet no one can say for sure how things will turn out.

What is clear, however, is that these are at least two main roads, the path of positive social transformation based on new democratic forms of peoples power or the path of new imperialist domination based on wars of domination and social barbarism for the ever impoverished masses of the world, especially in Africa and the rest of the Third World.

Babu, Madunagu, and John clearly define this problem of two roads on an international level and link their discussions of the international struggle with the necessity of active struggle by the masses of Black people in the U.S.A. This was clear when Malcolm X ran it down, and it has been restated here with the urgency of 25 additional years of crisis.

The focus then is on the challenge to rebuild our movement, to regroup mass forces of resistance under a renewed leadership. This task is at the heart of the comments by Lumumba, Fletcher and Burnham. I was especially struck by Burnham's question, "Are we ready yet to acknowledge that ideological struggle is not a winner take-all game and that ideological diversity is a permanent feature of our community?" In this question she captured the essence of the process we were able to initiate at this conference, and which must be repeated everywhere if we are to rebuild the movement into an effective force that can do its part to challenge imperialist domination from within the U.S.A.

The ideological diversity of the Black liberation movement contains five main aspects:

We are trying to keep the spirit of the conference alive by publishing these speeches. We are trying to get you the reader, whether you were at the conference or not, to initiate a discussion of these ideas in your community.

Sisters and Brothers, Comrades and Friends, now is the time to act. Tomorrow will be too late.