By Michael Wunder, News Editor
Steve Clark, editor of the book “Malcolm X, Black Liberation and the Road to Workers Power” by Jack Barnes, lectured at the Milo Bail Student Center Chancellor’s Room on Tuesday as part of UNO’s Black History Month Celebration.
The purpose of Clark’s lecture was to show that Malcolm X was not just an African-American leader, but a leader for members of the a working class worldwide.
Throughout his lecture, Clark, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee, expounded on the potential for working-class revolution.
“As the world capitalist crisis continues, we’ll see more struggles,” Clark said of the recent protests in Africa and the Middle East. “Including right here in the United States.”
The protests were one facet of an ongoing global struggle against a worldwide system of oppression, Clark said. In the U.S., a handful of wealthy families make up a ruling class that potential U.S. working-class protestors would target.
“This is a class-differentiated movement for sure,” Clark said. “It’s a clash, as Malcolm describes, between the oppressors and oppressed, the exploiters and the exploited — one not based on color of skin.”
Clark was also critical of the U.S. government, portraying the nation’s system of leadership as a tool of subtle oppression.
“One of the ways the rulers of this country keep us oppressed is by calling the government ‘our government,'” Clark said. “There is no ‘we’ that includes both the oppressed and the oppressor.”
This was not strictly a lecture strictly on Malcolm X. Barnes’ book goes beyond the subject of the influential leader’s life.
“This is a book about the dictatorship of capital,” Barnes wrote in the introduction to his book, “and the road to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Barnes’ book, a discourse on Malcolm X’s relationship to the working class, has been published in English, Spanish, French and — most recently — Farsi. In the aftermath of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts, the book’s publisher, Pathfinder Press, plans to release an Arabic translation as well.
