Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, ¡presente! ( www.workers.org )

Ho Chi Minh stated: “It is well-known that the Black race is the most oppressed and the most exploited of the human family. It is well-known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the ‘New World’ had, as an immediate result, the rebirth of slavery. … What everyone does not perhaps know is that after 65 years of so-called emancipation, [Black people in the U.S.] still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings.” (workers.org/2015/05/19953/)

Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, put the Black liberation struggle in a worldwide context 40 years later, in 1964. He said: “It is incorrect to classify the revolt of [Black people] as simply a racial conflict of Black against white or as a purely American [U.S.] problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.” (Malcolm X Speaks)

Malcolm X acknowledged the centrality of the national liberation war led by Ho Chi Minh to that global rebellion, when he noted, “Viet Nam is the struggle of all Third World nations — the struggle against imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism.” (1972 interview with Yuri Kochiyama, tinyurl.com/k93cq2n)

The voices of both these revolutionaries ring out with the clarion call of solidarity as the path to a future of justice and liberation. They remind us that we of the multinational, multigendered, global working class have a common oppressor in imperialist capitalism.

We can resist its racism, its anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ2S+ bigotry, its anti-immigrant hatred.

We can — we must — rise up in resistance.