Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 8:22 PM
The Black Panther Party. Race, Class and Revolution
Lil Joe <liljoe.radical@gmail.com>
A social revolution requires a passive element, a material basis: it is the transfer of the productive forces from one class to another. The rising class emerges from changes in the economic mode of production [means of production determined] changes in the mode of appropriation of labor. These changes in the economic base both creates and empowers the rising class and enables it to expropriate the productive forces and do away with the existing mode of production and thereupon to attack existing relations of production and corresponding property formation: the rising class is objectively positioned to take the production forces and destroy the existing mode of appropriation of labor and relations of production.
This is accomplished by the corresponding political revolution, whereby the old ruling classes are overthrown and the rising class becomes the new ruling class. Whether this revolution is accomplished by violence or not depends on the political situation, that is the degree of resistance of the old class power, and in particular whether their desire to hold power resorts to violence. If peaceful evolution is impossible, then the ruling classes make violent political revolution inevitable means of transfer of the economy from one class to the other.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. ... The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises for the latter sufficient has already been said above. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm#b3
Toward the end of his life by assassination by cultural nationalists of the Nation Of Islam Malcolm X came to realize revolutions are a transition from an economy based on class exploitation to another economy, the exploited and oppressed class being historically positioned objectively and subjectively determined to overthrow the exploitative and oppressive economy and establish a new one by their self-emancipation from the old. Thus Malcolm X became a conscious critic of the capitalist mode of production and appropriation, capitalism.
As Marx wrote in Capital:The capitalist has bought the labour-power at its day-rate. To him its use-value belongs during one working-day. He has thus acquired the right to make the labourer work for him during one day. But, what is a working-day?
At all events, less than a natural day. By how much? The capitalist has his own views of this ultima Thule [the outermost limit], the necessary limit of the working-day. As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. [3]
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. [4]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm#4a
So Malcolm X said, “Show me a capitalist and I’ll show you a bloodsucker” and “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” Malcolm X came therefore to recognize social revolution as not a racial struggle against "white supremacy" in the abstract, but as concrete global class warfare against capitalism. Malcolm said of revolution against the capitalist mode of production:
“We are living in an era of revolution, and the revolt of the American negro is part of the rebellion. ... It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of black against white or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter." http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/issue.php?issue_id=207
The Reverend Martin Luther King, quoting Matthew 4:16: "the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned" http://bible.cc/matthew/4-16.htm but in the spirit of liberation theology, the secular social revolutionary said 4 April 1967:
"These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions" See: http://www.nathanielturner.com/commemorationmarchwashington.htm
Huey Newton in a 1968 and the Panther's distinguish this their revolutionary nationalism based in the Black proletariat as a Black liberation movement with socialist objectives, that leads to socialism, i.e. social revolution through multiracial solidarity in class struggle and proletarian internationalism on one hand, from reactionary nationalism i.e. cultural nationalism on the other.
Says Huey P. Newton in the 1968 interview:
There are two kinds of nationalism, revolutionary nationalism and reactionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism is first dependent upon a people's revolution with the end goal being the people in power. Therefore to be a revolutionary nationalist you would by necessity have to be a socialist. It you are a reactionary nationalist you are not a socialist and your end goal to the oppression of the people.
From an Interview of George Jackson:
Karen Wald: George, could you comment on your conception of revolution?
George Jackson: The principle contradiction between the oppressor and oppressed can be reduced to the fact that the only way the oppressor can maintain his position is by fostering, nurturing, building contempt for the oppressed. That thing gets out of hand after a while. It leads to excesses that we see and the excesses are growing within the totalitarian state here. The excesses breed resistance; resistance is growing. The thing grows in a spiral. It can only end one way. The excesses lead to resistance, resistance leads to brutality, the brutality leads to more resistance, and finally the question will be resolved with either the uneconomic destruction of the oppressed, or the end of oppression. These are the workings of revolution. It grows in spirals, confrontations, and I mean on all levels. The institutions of society have buttressed the establishment, so I mean all levels have to be assaulted....
Wald: Is the form of struggle you're talking about here different from those with which we may be more familiar with, those which are occurring in the third world, for example?
Jackson: Not Really. Of course, all struggles are different, depending upon the whole range of particular factors involved. But many of them have fundamental commonalities which are more important than the differences. We are talking about a guerrilla war in this country. The guerrilla, the new type of warrior who's developed out of conflicts in the third world countries, doesn't fight for glory necessarily. The guerrilla fights to win. The guerrilla fights the same kind of fight we do, what's sometimes called a "poor man's war." It's not a form of war fought with high tech weaponry, or state-of-the-art gadgets. It's fought with whatever can be had-captured weapons when they can be had, but often antiquated firearms, homemade ordnance, knives, bows and arrows, even slingshots-but mostly through the sheer will of the guerrilla to fight and win, no matter what. Huey [P. Newton] says "the power of the people will overcome the power of the man's technology," and we've seen this proven true time after time in recent history.
You know, guerrilla war is not simply a matter of tactics and technique. It's not just questions of hit-and-run or terrorism. It's a matter of proving to the established order that it simply can't sustain itself, that there is no possible way for them to win by utilizing the means of force available to them. We have to prove that wars are won by human beings, and not by mechanical devices. We've got to show that in the end they can't resist us. And we will! We're going to do it. There's never going to ever be a moment's peace for anyone associated with the establishment any place where I'm at, or where any of my comrades are at. But we're going to need coordination, we're going to need help. And right now, that help should come in the form of education. It's critical to teach the people out there how important it is to destroy the function of the prison within the society. That, and to show them in concrete terms that the war is on - right now! - and that in that sense we really aren't any different than the Vietnamese, or the Cubans, or the Algerians, or any of the other revolutionary peoples of the world.
Huey came to the joint about a year ago because he'd heard stories about the little thing we had going on already. He talked with us, and checked it out, and he decided to absorb us. Afterwards, he sent me a message and told me that. He just told me that I was part of the Party now, and that our little group was part of the Party as well. And he told me that my present job is to build, or help build, the prison movement. Just like that. Like I said, the objective of our movement is to prove the state can't seal us off in a concentration camp so I accepted. What else could I do? It was the correct thing. Now, as to your second point, the people inside the joint, the convict class, have related to the ideology of the party 100%. And we've moved from... well, not we, I've always been an internationalist.
Wald: Despite a few peaceful victories in Latin America, such as that of Salvador Allende in Chile, many people still believe that armed struggle is the only way most Latin American countries are going to be free. Also, there've been some recent victories in the courts for members of the Black Panther Party, Los Siete de la Raza [seven Chicano activists from San Franciscocharged with murder in 1969; they were acquitted], and so on. Do you believe the victories in Chile and in the courts...
Jackson: They were appeasement. Allende... the thing that happened with Allende... look, it was not a "peaceful revolution." That's deception. Allende is a good man, but what's going on in Chile is just a reflection of the national aspirations of the ruling class. You will never find a peaceful revolution. Nobody surrenders their power without resistance. And until the upper class in Chile is crushed, Allende could at any time be defeated. No revolution can be consolidated under the conditions that prevail in Chile. Blood will flow down there. Either Allende will shed it in liquidating the ruling class, or the ruling class will shed his whenever it decides the time is right. Either way, there's no peaceful revolution.1
Wald: The news today said that Tom Hayden declared in front of the National Student Association Congress that there will be more actions like the one Jonathon attempted. Do you agree?
Jackson: I've been thinking a lot about the situation. I'm not saying that these particular tactics-even when successfully executed-constitute the only valid revolutionary form at this time. Obviously, they don't. There must also be mass organizing activities, including large-scale nonviolent demonstrations, education of the least developed social sectors, and so on. These things are essential. The revolution must proceed at all levels. But this is precisely what makes the tactics necessary, and far too many self-proclaimed revolutionaries have missed the point on this score. Such tactics as Jonathon employed represent a whole level - an entire dimension -- of struggle which has almost always been missing from the so-called American scene. And while it is true that armed struggle in-and-of-itself can never achieve revolution, neither can the various other forms of activity. The covert, armed, guerrilla dimension of the movement fits hand-in-glove with the overt dimension; the two dimensions can and must be seen as inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon; neither dimension can succeed without the other.
Wald: In an interview with some imprisoned tupamaros, urban guerrillas in Uruguay, the question was raised about the decimation of the ranks of tupamaros; comrades killed or imprisoned by the state. Those interviewed assured me that there were far more people joining the ranks than were being lost to state repression, and that the movement was continuing to grow. Do you feel the same confidence about the black panther party, about the revolutionary movement as a whole in this country?
Jackson: We're structured in such a way as to allow us to exist and continue to resist despite the losses we've absorbed. It was set up that way. We know the enemy operates under the concept of "kill the head and the body will die." They target those they see as key leaders. We know this, and we've set up safeguards to prevent the strategy from working against us. I know I could be killed tomorrow, but the struggle would continue, there would be two hundred or three hundred to take my place. As Fred Hampton put it, "You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution." Hampton, as you know, was head of the party in Chicago, and was murdered in his sleep by the police in Chicago, along with Mark Clark, the party leader from Peoria, Illinois. Their loss is tremendous, but the struggle goes on. Right? It's not just a military thing. It's also an educational thing. The two go hand-in-hand. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/jacksoninterview.html
Fred Hampton on Youtube: I am revolutionary proletarian http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHzSdniqi4g
Fred Hampton Tribute From Proletarian
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Fred Hampton, 1948-1969
On 30 August 2008, Fred Hampton would have turned 60 years old. Instead, thanks to his political beliefs and activism, he was shot and killed by the Chicago Police Department in conjunction with the FBI, aged just 21.
Hampton joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) in late 1967 following a history of political involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
What made Hampton move away from the established and comparatively respectable NAACP, to the highly controversial and demonised BPP? For Hampton, it was a recognition of the need not simply to campaign against racism, but actually to fight for something: socialism.
The BPP understood that racism was merely a symptom of a far greater illness in the USA, namely, capitalism.
As Hampton said in 1969, “When I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.”
This political awareness, and rejection of non-violence, made the BPP ‘public enemy number one’ for the FBI. The infamous Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Programme) pumped millions of dollars into undermining and decimating the BPP leadership.
Arrests and intimidation played their part in removing the more experienced cadres from BPP activity, but they also brought Hampton to prominence in Chicago. The FBI’s Racial Matters Squad opened a file on Hampton in 1967, which, during the last two years of his life, expanded into 12 volumes, some 4,000 pages! Clearly, his leadership qualities and political abilities were not only acknowledged by his peers.
Hampton was a gifted organiser, and was almost successful in reforming Chicago’s biggest street gangs and recruiting them into the BPP. That he did not ultimately succeed in this endeavour was due entirely to the machinations of the FBI, who used paid informants to spread dissension between the gangs and the party.
He did, however, provide crucial leadership to Puerto Rican revolutionaries, enabling them to turn the Young Lords from a street gang into a revolutionary organisation sympathetic to Marxism Leninism.
Hampton’s goal of politicising the street gangs and engaging them in community work ran contrary to the interests of the US authorities, and the FBI’s Chicago BPP infiltrator William O’Neal personally instigated an armed clash between the party and the Blackstone Rangers gang.
Reducing the influence of the Panthers was high on the agenda of the FBI, and its boss, J Edgar Hoover, himself took a personal interest in ensuring that Cointelpro destroyed “what the [BPP] stands for”.
This meant taking action against the Panthers’ Serve the People programmes, such as free breakfasts for school children. Additionally, BPP literature and newspapers were targeted, in an attempt to stop the party’s political message being transmitted. Racist cartoons were printed and ascribed to the BPP in an attempt to alienate their white supporters.
Indeed, the message of the BPP, along with Hampton’s charisma and ability to spread the idea of socialism and communism within the black community, was what singled the party out for special repression from the US government.
Tacit support was given to cultural nationalist groups who preached black chauvinism and separatism, as this only served further to divide America’s workers, and black activists in particular. “Racism is a by-product of capitalism,” he said.
To Hampton, education was key, and programmes were only effective to the extent that they were understood by the people. He cited examples such as Papa Doc’s Haiti, and African states where colonialism was replaced by neo-colonialism, stressing that for the proletariat it matters not what colour the exploiter’s skin is.
As Hampton explained, people joining the BPP from a background of poverty might not understand the ultimate goal of “a communistic state”. Without political education, those who joined the party because they “wanted something”, would find themselves wanting more. This would lead the revolutionary movement to capitalism, and “before you know it, you’ve got Negro imperialists”.
Hampton was not scared to use the terms socialism and communism, as he explained to those who were benefiting from the BPP free health clinics and food for kids programmes: “they’re endorsing it, they’re participating in it, and they’re supporting socialism”. “They [the police] can call it communism, and think that that’s gonna scare somebody, but it ain’t gonna scare nobody.”
To those who believed the McCarthy era propaganda against socialism, Hampton said, “socialism is the people! If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself!”
Just a few days before his murder, the BPP published an article by Hampton about a speaking tour he and other comrades had made to Canada, in which he expressed his particular support for the Korean revolutionary leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung:
“Every campus that we spoke on we were heckled by the same pigs. They tried to start fights at two of the campuses but they were unsuccessful. The pigs even got up and took a very strong position against Kim Il Sung. We knew very well, when they took that anti-position, that Eldridge [Cleaver] and the leadership of our party were definitely on the right line in following the teachings of the great leader of north Korea, Kim Il Sung.” (‘Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton on Canada’, Black Panther: Black Community News, 29 November 1969)
Hampton was a dedicated revolutionary who studied theory, and carried this through into everyday action. Throughout 1969 he maintained a demanding speaking schedule; he organised weekly rallies in support of BPP members in jail or on trial.
He worked with volunteers and party members in organising a free ‘People’s Clinic’ in Chicago’s West Side, whilst organising and teaching political education classes at the BPP ‘Liberation School’. And all this was on top of helping out at the Breakfast for Children Programme each morning from 6.00am.
Following the established party model, Hampton also instigated a Community Control of the Police project, in order to remind the police that they were public servants, and not above the law.
In November 1969, Hampton was appointed to the BPP Central Committee as ‘Chief of Staff’ and also gave a lecture to UCLA law students in California. This was all reported by FBI infiltrator O’Neal whose bosses were clearly unhappy.
The Chicago chapter of the BPP was becoming one of the strongest in the country, and, despite all attempts to derail it, its Serve the People programme was by far one of the most successful.
O’Neal’s FBI handler, Special Agent Mitchell, decided drastic action was necessary to eliminate the threat that Hampton posed. A detailed floor plan of Hampton’s apartment was drawn up, and an illegal weapons raid was planned.
Initially, the Chicago Police ‘Gang Intelligence Unit’ were to handle the raid under the misinformation that the BPP were responsible for the deaths of two of its officers. However, the GIU head Thomas Lyons correctly intervened, since there was no evidence at all to link either Hampton or the BPP to the aforementioned killings.
This did not stop Mitchell finding those who would cooperate, however. This time, it was the Special Prosecutions Unit, who assembled a 14-man team for the raid equipped with pistols, carbines and even a Thompson sub-machine gun.
At 4.30am on 4 December 1969, the raid took place. The apartment was used that night, not only by Hampton and his pregnant partner, but also by several BPP members who were ‘crashing’ there for the night, O’Neal having left at 1.30am.
The raid began with the front door to the apartment being kicked open, and the man nearest the door, Mark Clark, being shot point-blank in the chest with a .30 calibre M1 Carbine (a battlefield weapon used by US paratroops during the second world war).
Clark had been sleeping with a shotgun across his lap, and upon being shot his weapon discharged. The Panthers fired no other shots during the raid.
The same policeman who had shot Clark then proceeded to shoot the unarmed 18-year-old Brenda Davis, who was then shot by a second officer. The policemen unleashed automatic fire from the Thompson sub-machine gun through the walls into the bedrooms beyond, with 42 rounds converging on the spot where O’Neal had informed them would be the head of Hampton’s bed.
Amazingly, Hampton was hit just once in the left shoulder by this barrage, although it was a serious wound.
A second team of policemen entered through the rear of the apartment, again shooting as they entered. There then followed a lull in the firing, during which the following exchange took place between two officers, as testified to by surviving witnesses:
“That’s Fred Hampton ...”
“Is he dead?… Bring him out.”
“He’s barely alive; he’ll make it.”
Two shots were then fired, followed by one of the officers announcing, “He’s good and dead now.”
Fred Hampton, aged 21, had been asleep when first hit, and, as he lay prone on the floor, was shot twice at point-blank range in the head. His body was then dragged into the doorway in a pool of blood.
The police opened fire on the remaining bedroom, hitting several Panthers repeatedly. The survivors were beaten, dragged into the street, and arrested on a charge of the attempted murder of the police officers who carried out the raid, and aggravated assault.
The survivors were assigned bail of $100,000 each, and yet five months later all charges against them were dropped.
The official investigation into the shootings was a farce, and it was left up to the survivors and the BPP to pursue a civil case against the SPU and FBI. Finally, in 1983, it was acknowledged that there “had in fact been an active governmental conspiracy to deny Hampton, Clark and the BPP plaintiffs their civil rights”.
Damages of $1.85m were awarded to the survivors and the families of the deceased. The organisers and perpetrators of the assassination of Fred Hampton served not one day for the offence, and, by the time it was acknowledged by the US justice system, the Cointelpro programme had served its purpose in destroying the BPP from the inside.
What set Fred Hampton apart from so many other revolutionaries of the late 1960s was his dedication to both theory and practice. It was this that made him such a dangerous adversary of the US bourgeoisie.
Comrade Hampton was not manipulated by the racism he suffered and witnessed. He was not blinded by hate or prejudice, but rather he was motivated by the true spirit of proletarian internationalism: a love of the people.
In 1968, Hampton clarified the distinction between reaction and revolution with the following statement:
“You know, a lot of people have hang-ups with the party because the party talks about a class struggle. We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx and Lenin and Che Guevara and Mao Zedong and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practised anything about revolution always said that a revolution is a class struggle.
“It was one class – the oppressed, and that other class – the oppressor. And it’s got to be a universal fact. Those that don’t admit to that are those that don’t want to get involved in a revolution, because they know as long as they’re dealing with a race thing, they’ll never be involved in a revolution.”
The saying most often associated with Fred Hampton is: “You can kill a revolutionary, but you cannot kill a revolution. You can jail a liberation fighter, but you cannot jail liberation.”
Fred Hampton Jnr was born a few months after his father’s murder. He, too, is active in the African-American revolutionary movement and has spent almost nine years in jail on politically-related charges.
He is currently the Chairman of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee.
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Nov 2, 2008 "Assata Shakur Liberation Day" marks 29 yrs of freedom for our Comrade Assata Shakur, Our Warrior was liberated from a NJ prison by Comrades In The Black Liberation Army click here to read more or here
"www.assatashakur.com
"I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces and all the mindless, heartless robots who protect them and their property. I am a Black revolutionary, and, as such, I am a victim of all the wrath, hatred and slander that Amerika is capable of" ...
"Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It's really working to create something beautiful."
"I am an ex political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984. I have been a political activist most of my life, and although the U.S. government has done everything in its power to criminalize me, I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one."
http://www.assatashakur.org/axioms.htm
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Barack Obama vs. Huey P. Newton
B21646 / Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:04:40 / Human Rights
Barack Obama:
“I understood (Reagan’s) appeal. It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper salutes. . . . Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order, our need to believe that we are not subject to blind, impersonal forces, but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies. So long as we rediscover the traditional values of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.” ....
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.
It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.
Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.
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Huey P. Newton:
(Excerpted from an October 29, 1970 letter from Black Panther Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton to the National Front for Liberation and Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam)
“In the spirit of international revolutionary solidarity, the Black Panther Party hereby offers … an undetermined number of troops to assist you in your fight against American imperialism. It is appropriate for the Black Panther Party to take this action at this time in recognition of the fact that your struggle is also our struggle, for we recognize that our common enemy is U.S. imperialism which is the leader of international bourgeois domination. There is no fascist or reactionary government in the world today that could stand without the support of United States imperialism. Therefore our problem is international, and we offer these troops in recognition of the necessity for international alliance to deal with the problem… Such alliance will advance the struggle toward the final act of dealing with American imperialism. To end this oppression we must liberate the developing nations… As one nation is liberated elsewhere, it gives us a better chance to be free.”
SOUTH VIETNAM PEOPLE'S COMMITTEE FOR SOLIDARITY WITH THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
Under the international news section of The Black Panther, April 11, 1970 : 15, the text of a letter "To Black Americans from Mr. Rochom Briu, General Secretary of the Movement for the Autonomy of Nationalities in the High Plateaus—South Central Vietnam—and Vice Chairman of the South Vietnam People's Committee for Solidarity with the American People."
It states in part: "We are very glad to know that large numbers of Black America took an active part in the recent Fall Offensive to end the war in Vietnam. We sincerely thank the Black Panther Party and other anti-war organizations in the US, that have called for a Campaign of Solidarity with Vietnam and intensified struggle to bring home now all US troops from Vietnam... We strongly protest repression of Black Movement as shown in the arrest of Huey Newton, Bobby Seale... or the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark... We energetically condemn the US authorities' attempt to bring Bobby Seale to trial next month..."
In bold type the Panthers state: "End the war now, bring the troops home, or we will open up a new front right here in Babylon."
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Panther coverage of the Vietnam war consistently has presented a pro-Viet Cong, North Vietnam solidarity position. The following examples are typical of the material concerning Vietnam which has appeared in The Black Panther:
An article entitled "Hanoi Hannah," datelined Hanoi, is a short complimentary biography of the Vietnamese woman who broadcasts from North Vietnam to American troops, trying to convince them to leave Vietnam. (The Black Panther, Feb. 17, 1969 : 11)
"Power To The People of Viet Nam," by Larry Jones, presents the view that the war in Vietnam is "a struggle for liberation; revolutionary war opposite the largest and most repressive monopoly system in the world—the United States." Jones declared that the "U.S. cannot contain the Vietnamese revolution," which, he said, "shall be exported throughout non-communist Asia without a single Viet Cong going beyond the boundaries of his own soils." The war in Vietnam "and all contemporary socialist revolutions are marked with internationalism," according to the article. (The Black Panther, July 26, 1969 : 16)
June, 2007
The Black Panther Party and the Communist Party, In Response to the Attack by Charlene Mitchell
An Analysis by Lil Joe
THE BLACK PANTHER
April 27, 1969. Page 14.
"STATEMENT BY THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY"
We will not try to fight fire with fire because all of the people know that fire is best put out with water. Therefore, the Black Panther Party will not fight racism with racism. But we will fight racism with solidarity. We will not fight capitalism with capitalism (Black capitalism), but with the implementation of socialism and socialist programs for the people. We will not fight U.S. government imperialism with more imperialism because the peoples of the world and other races, especially in America, must fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism. All peoples and revolutionaries must defend themselves with organized guns and force when attacked by the pig power structure.
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp/bpp270469_14.htm
The Black Panther Party (BPP) was a working class cadre of revolutionary socialists that flourished in the working class, inner-city rebellion from the mid 1960s into the mid 1970s. As it is not the consciousness of men that determine their existence, but their social being that determines their consciousness, I will defend the Black Panther Party in its historical context in response to Charlene Mitchell's pseudo-socialist attacks on the working class and socialist legitimacy of the BBP/Panther Party, against the claim, for instance, that when the Panthers criticized the Communist Party (CP) because its broad united front with the Democratic Party, that that Panther criticism is classified by Charlene Mitchell as anti-communism.
Other than the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which is the caretaker of the Trotskyist tradition in the United States, the majority of the socialist and communist organizations critiquing the CP as reformists, revisionist and Stalinists came out of either the SWP, or the CP itself, in the 1950s and 60s to mid 70s in response to the CPs association with the Democratic Party and its policies. Other than to the Republican Party and FBI, the CP in no way represented communism, but opposition to communist revolution, and it was so criticized as a reformist Democratic Party tool by the Panthers, and by the dozen or so communist and socialist organizations throughout the United States, and the world!
The BPP/Panthers was an organization of inner-city working class youth. They were a disciplined organizational formation of working class youth in armed self-defense in context of global workers and peasants armed revolutions they were armed workers in America's inner-city slums advocating Socialist Revolution in context of American inner-city armed rebellion against the State. The leadership in the BPP, which in the early days included Kwame Toure, as well as Huey Newton, Ray Masai Hewitt, John Huggins, George Jackson, the New York 21, and others were openly proletarian revolutionaries and as such were class-conscious socialists.
It was therefore not just because the Panthers had guns that they were constantly subjected to armed attacks by police and other armed representatives of the capitalist ruling classes in America. The cultural nationalist, reactionaries, such as, US Organization also had guns and paramilitary units, and killed Panthers. The Nation of Islam had a paramilitary organization, the Fruit of Islam, and killed Malcolm X. But neither the US Organization, nor the Nation of Islam was subjected to attacks by the American armed State the way the Panthers were.
Racial nationalists have always presented themselves as a paramilitary, revolutionary movement from Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to the Nation of Islam (NOI) Fruit of Islam (FOI) to the US Organization. Their confrontations with the police were isolated incidents rather than the systemic repression of Panthers. These cultural nationalists, who today call themselves Afro-centric, were not a threat to the American capitalist ruling classes, but its ideological ally.
These cultural nationalists advocated Black capitalism, opposed Black-White working class union solidarity, and they denounced communism as a godless, atheistic ideology of European White men that is alien to Africans. Their ideologies were identical to those of the Ku Klux Klan, J. Edgar Hoover, the American Nazi Party and Richard Nixon as they all advocated capitalism, opposed unions, and denounced communism as a godless, atheistic ideology that is alien to American Blacks! Thus, along with the American capitalist classes and politicians the cultural nationalists were not only not enemies of capitalism, but its ideological and political allies.
The F.B.I., the U.S. State Department, and the House Un-American Activities Committee of Joseph McCarthy, the Democrats and Republicans didn't go after the UNIA, the KKK, the NOI, the American Nazi Party, or US Organization. They went after the Communist Party, the trade unions, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. The Democrats and Republicans legislated in Congress the Smith Act, the Taft-Hartley Act, and the Rap Brown Act. Rap was a Panther leader in 1968. Elijah Muhammad wasn't brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Paul Robeson was.
See:
The Sedition Act of 1798:
http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/sedition/s-text.htm
The Espionage Act:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWespionage.htm
The Smith Act:
http://www.answers.com/topic/smith-act
The Taft-Hartley Act:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAhartley.htm
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC):
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/McCarthyism/HUAC_Rise_AntiCommun.html
The Rap Brown Act:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1467-8330.2003.00347.x
The history of workers in America "here by way of the Middle Passage" (Osiris) has been a history of class struggles. One has to understand the culture of America in the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 60s in context of the so-called "Cold War", that is what made the Communist Party what it was in the 60s relative to the Panthers and what made the Panthers what they were. This defense of the Black Panther Party against the Communist Party criticism and Charlene Mitchell's Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism's attack can be understood only in this historical context.
In consequence of racial slavery, once Civil War abolished it, the majority of the former slaves remained in the Slave States, as sharecroppers - serfs on the lands owned by the previous owners.
These sharecropping families were poor, isolated and terrorized by the State and Ku Klux Klan. It was only sharecroppers whose children were able to immigrate into the proletariat jobs in the cities, and many of those jobs were in the North. As wage laborers, these new proletarians had money and organizational networks that enabled them to self-organize into labor unions, and form civil rights organizations.
The Socialist Party of the United States and the trade unions they influenced recognized these American working class Blacks as their class brothers, and welcomed them into the Party. See Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Deb's article "The Negro and His Nemesis":
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/debs/works/1904/negronemesis.htm
Philip Randolph, who the Garvyites dismissed as an "integrationist", because he fought to tear down walls of racial segregation and discrimination, was a Socialist Party activist leader and organizer of Black trade unions, whom the American capitalists and the U.S. government called "the most dangerous Negro in America". See the AFL-CIO biography of Randolph at:http://www.apri.org/ht/d/sp/i/225/pid/225
Black proletarians forced their way into the American working-class, and unions. The White workers thought of Blacks as competitors for jobs and were hostile to them. Check out the racist history of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. They thought of themselves more as "White men," and "Americans," than as proletarians. The lily White, snobbish craft trade unionists like [Samuel] Gompers excluded not just Blacks in general but also the unskilled White workers from the trades unions.
By this racial pragmatism, the White workers, although thinking they were maintaining a racial monopoly on certain jobs were actually setting themselves up for class struggle defeats. Black sharecroppers and capitalists brought others up North to break strikes. It was only then that racist White worker, and trade unionists realized that it was in their own best interest to bring Blacks into the proletariat and into the unions.
It was the Marxists in the Socialist Party, such as Eugene Debs, and Daniel DeLeon in the Socialist Labor Party that fought racism in those socialist organizations. See my Interview by Sharif on the Dilemma of Class and Race in Political Struggles at:
http://www.nathanielturner.com/sharifinterviewsliljoe.htm
The Communist Party was also involved in the struggle to protect Black sharecroppers and proletarians against racists, and the State, for instance the Scottsboro legal lynching, that led the fight for Black civil rights. See B.D. Amis - Black Communist & labor leader:
http://www.pww.org/article/articleprint/6137/
Civil rights movements originated in the cities of the North, challenging segregation and racially discriminating laws. In the 1950s and early sixties Black civil rights movements emerged in Southern cities. Socialist labor organizers such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and the Sleeping Car Porters Union, with substantial Black working class bases, became the organizational networking of the civil rights protests.
The State's vicious response and violent repression of non-violent protesters was teaching Black Americans both in the North, Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton, as well as in the South, Robert F. Williams, the naked brutality of not just the Ku Klux Klan, but of State Power.
The State's FBI attacked the Civil Rights organizations on an anti-communist platform. They knew that Randolph and Rustin were socialists in the Socialist Party, as well as trade unionists. But, the split between the Socialists concerning the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, in which the more radical socialists supported the Revolution and formed themselves into a Communist Party affiliated with the Soviet centered Communist International, were seen by the American capitalists and State as the real threat. The FBI asserted that the Communists were Soviet agents, who were "outside agitators" and "rabble rousers" that "infiltrated" the Civil Rights movement and its organizations. J. Edgar Hoover accused Martin Luther King Jr. of having a "Communist" adviser. King determined it to be a necessity to expel this "communist" from SCLC.
On the other hand, in contrast to the non-violent principles of the majority of civil rights organizations and leaders, in the civil rights movement in Monroe, North Carolina, there emerged the militant armed resistance, against both the State and its Ku Klux Klan lackeys. These were veterans of World War II and the Korean War organized by and under the leadership of Robert F. Williams. These civil rights activists opted for armed self-defense, self-organizing themselves into a community militia. They named themselves "Deacons of Defense". The Deacon, led by Robert F. Williams, defended not just themselves at protests, but the Black community itself.
Robert Williams was forced to flee the United States to "Communist Cuba". It was in Cuba that Williams organized a literary campaign in the United States called "Radio Free Dixie", and then to China where he published the magazine "The Crusader". Robert Williams wrote the book "Negroes, with Guns." (See: http://www.afrocubaweb.com/rwill.htm#negroes%20with%20Guns)
An RW biography of Williams states:
In Memory of Robert F. Williams:
A Voice for Armed Self-Defense and Black Liberation
RW #882, November 17, 1996
Born in Monroe, North Carolina, in 1925, Robert Williams grew up hearing stories of his grandparents, who were born into slavery. During World War 2, he was a machinist and led a strike of workers when he was 16 years old. He moved to Michigan where he became an autoworker and fought in the Detroit riot of 1943, when white mobs stormed through the streets and killed dozens of Black people. In 1947, Williams married Mabel Ola Robinson, who shared his commitment to social justice and African-American liberation, and they built a partnership of love and respect that lasted the rest of Robert's life.
Robert Williams made his mark on history after he returned to Monroe in 1955, after being discharged from the Marines. He became the president of the Union County branch of the NAACP and went out to recruit members among laborers, farmers, domestic workers, and the unemployed. In his book, "Negroes, With Guns" Williams recalls, "˜We ended up with a chapter that was unique in the whole NAACP because of working class composition and a leadership that was not middle class. Most important, we had a strong representation of returned veterans who were very militant and didn't scare easy. We started a struggle in Monroe and Union County to integrate public facilities and we had the support of a Unitarian group of white people." Monroe was the southeastern regional headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. But this didn't stop Williams from organizing struggle against segregation.
In 1961, Freedom Riders were coming from all over the country to the South to join the Civil Rights struggle. When they came to Monroe, Williams refused to take their oath of non-violence, but called on people to support them. In August, Freedom Riders started picketing the Monroe courthouse and within days, a number of them were viciously attacked and white racist mobs were mobilized to try and run the Freedom Riders out of town. According to Williams:
At first the victims were all Freedom Riders and the local non-violent students, but soon Negroes were attacked indiscriminately as the mob fanned out all over town. They were massing for an attack against our community.... White people started driving through our community, and they were shouting and screaming and some would fire out of their cars and throw objects at people on the streets. Many of the colored people started arming, exchanging guns and borrowing ammunition and forming guards for the night to defend the community from the mob massing in town. All kinds of people started calling Williams on the phone--reporting on beatings, asking what should be done, volunteering to join armed groups to defend the community.
At one point, when a white couple drove into this whole scene and were threatened by the crowd, Williams let them escape into his house.
That night Robert and Mabel left Monroe. After they left, Williams and one of his supporters, Mae Mallory, were indicted on charges of kidnapping the white couple who Robert had let into his house. The FBI launched a nationwide hunt for the Williamsons and Mae Mallory and back in Monroe they went on a rampage: 'The police used my disappearance as an excuse to raid through the rest of the community; tearing up homes, terrorizing a lot of the people who weren't even in the defense guard, grilling in all-night sessions persons known to be my associates, and confiscating the weapons they found--weapons we possessed legally.'
After leaving the U.S., Robert and Mabel lived in Cuba for five years. From here, they organized "Radio Free Dixie," which reached African-Americans, advocating armed self-defense and Black liberation. Williams also continued to publish The Crusader newsletter which he had started in 1959. Williams' stand on armed self-defense continued to have a big influence on the Black liberation struggle in the U.S. His example inspired groups in the South like the Deacons for Defense in 1965. And other groups were also influenced by Williams, like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party.
Williams said:
"˜When the racists forced me into exile they unwittingly led me onto a greater field of battle...All this time we will further identify our struggle for liberation with the struggle of our brothers in Africa, and the struggle of the oppressed of Asia and Latin America. They, in turn will further identify their struggle with ours."
In 1963, Williams asked Mao Tse-Tung, leader of the Chinese revolution, to speak out on the oppression of Black people in the United States. And in response, Mao issued a Declaration of support for the cause of African-American liberation. In 1966, Williams moved with his family to China and lived there during the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. http://rwor.org/a/firstvol/882/willms.htm">http://rwor.org/a/firstvol/882/willms.htm
These were the historical circumstances, and international-national context in which Malcolm X broke with the racial mysticism of the Nation of Islam, whose ministers talked the talk about Black self-defense in militant sounding demagogy, but by opposing civil rights street fights with racists and the State as "integrationist", themselves did nothing to actually defend fellow Muslims, let alone the oppressed Black working classes communities. Like the UNIA outfits, the Nation of Islam, wearing military uniforms and rank designations notwithstanding, these outfits never defended Blacks against the KKK attacks, let alone engaged the State in armed combat.
Rather the opposite. The UNIA and KKK leadership cadres admired one another, and endorsed each others program and premises: racial segregation, and ultimately the removal of Africans in America by way of the Middle Passage back to Africa. The difference in ideological realities is that militant Klansmen, who were killing Africans in America by way of the Middle Passage, advocated military expulsion of Blacks from the United States. The Black back to Africa advocates, however, pretended that Blacks return to Africa was their own idea to go to Africa to separate from Whites, rather than integrate with Whites.
The American Colonization Society was established in Washington at the Davis Hotel on December 21, 1816. Among the delegates attending were Henry Clay, John Randolph of Roanoke, Richard Bland Lee, and the Rev. Robert Finley; colonization mastermind Charles Fenton Mercer remained a member of the Virginia legislature and was unable to be in Washington. Although the eccentric Randolph believed that the removal of free blacks would "materially tend to secure" slave property ...Very few members were slave owners who feared free people of color and wanted to expel them from America, and in fact the Society never enjoyed much support among planters in the Lower South. Despite being antislavery, Society members were openly racist and frequently argued that free blacks would be unable to assimilate into the white society of this country. John Randolph, one famous slave owner, called free blacks "promoters of mischief." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society
Black Nationalism in America accepted the American Colonization Society (ACS) viewpoint that "integration" was both impossible and undesirable. The "free" Blacks were similar to the "Coloreds" in Apartheid South Africa. These free Blacks consisted of those who were legally freed by their owners, such as David Walker, those who issued from those freed Blacks who were born free, those who illegally freed themselves such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglas, and of those such as Edward Blyden who immigrated to the United State from the Caribbean.
Wherever from which they hailed, free Blacks did in fact assimilate into the American capitalist system - riverboat laborers, farmers, artisans, or physicians such as Thomas White and John V DeGrasse, religious leaders such as George Liele, scientists and engineers such as Benjamin Banneker, publishers and journalists such as Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm, proletarian abolitionists as Frederick Douglas, petty bourgeois merchants such as David Walker, international shipping capitalists such as Paul Cuffe, and even American capitalist slave owners, such as Thomas Day.
Just as free Blacks were a mix in their assimilation into the American capitalist economy based in layers of capitalist commodity production by wage labor, in the North-Eastern United States there were corresponding and therefore different social strata. To the class interests of the different strata there were different political tendencies and ideologies. The individuals who emancipated themselves from slavery, such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas became abolitionists and fought capitalist commodity production by chattel slave labor, to displace it with capitalist commodity production by wage labor.
On the other hand, the Black capitalists slave owners, wealthy merchants and professionals resented racial limits to their ambition personally, and having no tie to Black chattel they sought a State of their own. Since they knew the U.S. government/State would not permit a Haitian like Black Republic in North America, or even a predominantly Black State in the American Union, the wealthy, and educated Blacks associated with them allied together with the American Colonization Society lobbied the American government to establish a Zionist Black American colony in West Africa.
The Black Zionist "Back to Africa" movement restricted itself to free Blacks, and lobbied for their interests. Whereas, the Black liberationist confronted both chattel slavery and fought for its abolition in the South, and also racial segregation and discrimination in the North from a perspective integrating an emancipated Black people into every occupation and level of American society, the Black Zionists accommodated both socially and politically the existence of slavery in the South and racial segregation in the North and West.
There were therefore two political and ideological trends in the free Black community! The liberationists, who fought for the abolition of both slavery and racial segregation, were denounced as "assimilationists". The implicit charge of assimilation is self-inflicted cultural and even racial social genocide.
The Black back to Africa Zionist's capitulation to the existence of racial slavery in the South, and racial segregation in the North made its militant sounding principle by denouncing "the White man" to justify themselves for not being in the trenches of class warfare - not being involved in the struggles to abolish slavery. Demagogy produced this masquerade of Black militancy and demagoguery denouncing "the White man's country" as irreconcilable with Black interests and the White man as irredeemable racists, on the one hand, and on the other denouncing the abolitionists as "assimilationists" and "lovers of the White man".
Zionism is always a reactionary cultural nationalism of racial naturalism, "a bird of a feather flock together", as though the races of man are different species of primates, and the preaching of outright racial supremacy to justify conquering others:
The Hebrew tribes supposed genocidal conquests in Canaan that established a Hebrew caste system in the creating of the kingdom of Israel in Palestine;
The stories of Shadrach, Meshack, Abednego and Daniel in the Book of Daniel in the historical Jewish Diaspora in Babylonia and Ezra and Nehemiah dispatched by the Babylonian political class to retake Canaan from the Samaritan population, establishing a Jewish caste system;
Paul Cuffe and Edward Blyden of the "African Diaspora" who were used by British and U.S. imperialism to help establish settler colonies of Sierra Leone and Liberia...
Marcus Garvey, an anti-communist against the Russian worker's Revolution, with delusions of grandeur was elected by UNIA Provisional President of Africa, and following German imperialism's defeat in World War I sent a delegation to the League of Nations, to urge the imperialist representatives set him up in a predominately Negro American settler colony Republic in Namibia, as though Sierra Leone weren't big enough for his ambition!
Yes, a bird of a feather do flock together: Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the Provisional President of Africa, as a Black supremacist was later exposed for having a secret meeting with the White supremacis back to Africa preaching Edward Young Clarke, the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/peopleevents/e_factoriescorp.html
Elijah Muhammad, an anti-communist who was honored by the Chicago city government whose racial supremacy doctrine culminated in fantasy and science fiction.
On the hard ground back on earth, away from "mother ship" theology, the leaders of the Nation of Islam, including Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were holding meetings with the Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragons and with George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party, who spoke at a NOI national convention where he praised Muhammad as the Black Adolph Hitler, a compliment! It must, at this reading be pointed out, that when Malcolm left the NOI and moved toward socialist revolutionary objectives, that he ended his relations with Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. See: http://www.malcolm-x.org/docs/tel_rock.htm
The cultural nationalists in the US Organization in the 60s continued the orientation of capitalism, and anti-communism. It was correct that the Communist Party was in the tradition of Dubois, Paul Robeson and Civil Rights, whereas the Socialist Workers Party bent to Black nationalism, or rather Malcolm X's brand of it. So, why then is Charlene Mitchell here attacking the Panthers?
The facade of Black militancy in military uniform wasn't perceived as a threat to American capitalists, the State, nor even to the racists in the Ku Klux Klan. These powerful Whites recognized Black militancy in military uniform to be the capitulation and therefore window dressing facade that it was.
The Black nationalist base is the Black petty bourgeoisie shoe shine stands, mom/pop stores, restaurants, tailor shops, craftsmen, gas station managers, dressmaking shops, barber shops, ghetto news papers, Black professionals, Black colleges and so on. There is nothing wrong with that! The issue is that their ideology corresponds to their interests: it is in their interests to castigate working class Blacks for having so much money collectively, and fail to patronize Black businesses. It is also in their interests to ideologically denounce Jew, Koreans and of course the White man for being the majority in our neighborhoods.
The Black petty-bourgeoisie demand to buy Black, and the Black politicians demand that Blacks vote Black, by which is usually meant vote for the Democrats! Yet, the Black petty-bourgeois businessmen do not restrict their customers to Blacks, nor Black politicians restrict campaign contributions and their voters to Black Democrats! Black Nationalism, just like any other nationalist ideology, including fascism and Nazism is a bourgeois ideology of race hustlers.
This is not to say that that is the case of every Black Nationalist; there are those who call themselves "revolutionary nationalists", and even socialists. They therefore struggle for what they regard as a socialist perspective in the general nationalist movements, as do the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, and individuals such as Baraka. More often than not, they are Maoists, who after all, they say, never forgot he was Chinese.
It was because of the Panther's Marxist-Leninist ideology and advocacy of revolutionary class war against capitalist, rather than denouncing the "White man", and most importantly that the Panthers had a base of popularity and support in the inner-city ghetto slums, that the FBI, COINTELPRO, and local police waged an unceasing armed struggle against the Black Panther Party.
The Hollywood movie "Panthers" misrepresented the truth when it presented Mao tse-Tung's Red Book as no more than an opportunist ploy to sell to radical students to raise money on college campuses. In fact that is a lie. Most Panthers, women as well as men, carried Mao's Quotations in upper coat pockets. These Red Books were read. But so were other books by Mao, and Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Che, Bakunin, Fanon and others by Panther Party members, and other organizations in the Black communist working class districts.
Charlene Mitchell's recounting of the early years of the Panthers in L.A., didn't discuss the Panthers practical role in community political organizing as such, which had to do with Mao's advocacy of building a base in the community struggles against oppression and repression. For instance, the positive role the Panthers played in response to an L.A.P.D. raid on Carver Jr. High School in South Central Los Angeles in 1969.
There existed at the time Black Student Unions (BSUs) in Community Colleges, State Colleges and Universities throughout L.A. County, formed an alliance organization the Black Students Alliance of BSUs that responded to this attack on Black school children by the Pigs by calling for student strikes. The BPP cadres participated in these strikes as the Southern California BPP were in a practical alliance with the Black Students Alliance (BSA). The Black Students Alliance was a federation of college Black Students Unions, its leaders including Ayuku Babu and Harry Truly.
These strikes were organized modeled on the anti-war student's strikes against U.S. aggression, e.g. SDS. The solidarity between SDS, anti-war groups on campuses, with and in support of the BSU's call to shut the colleges and schools down in protest were a success. In protest of the police raids high schools and colleges were struck all over L.A. County.
Reverend Peters, who was an active member in the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) associated with Martin Luther King Jr., was pastor of Victory Baptist Church, around the corner from Carver Junior High School. He graciously allowed the BSA, together with their Panther Party allies to use his Church as headquarters for the student's activities, and to co-ordinate the student's general strike.
Franklin Alexander and Kendra Alexander of the CPUSA participated in these strikes. As the CP's Che-Lumumba Club, they in particular had influence at the South West Community College in South Central Los Angeles. After about a week the strike was at its height and Franklin at a meeting argued that the strike must be culminated at its success, rather than peter out. I don't recall whether it was Franklin, representing the Communist Party USA's Che-Lumumba Club, Dedan Kamathi and Sabu from Compton Community College, Melvin X from East Los Angeles Community College, Jabali from California State College at Los Angeles, Damu and Josef from South-West College, Harry Carey from U.C.L.A., China, Majid and John Imani from Los Angeles City College, all of whom contributed to the practical political leadership of the strike also had the responsibility of making the strikes at their own college home bases successful.
Los Angeles Community College (LACC) itself became a battlefield, as right wing white students, who called themselves Victory in Vietnam Association, or VIVA, were an anti-anti-war outfit, who also attacked the Black students strike. They had the open support of racist right wing news caster George Putnam on the LA local station KTLA. Thus, the struggles at LACC were as an important center of the storm of Black student protests as was Carver Junior High itself.
At Jefferson High, Bill Graham led the struggle there, and got together with Charles Dubois from Hamilton High, and organized in the model of the BSA Black High School Students into a similar federation of high school rebels into the Black Youth Alliance, or BYA. It was due in large part to the dedication of the kids at Jefferson that the high school student's strikes were successful.
The Black Panther Party's L.A. Chapter was not directly involved in the student's strike, or its leadership. But, they were there as consistent supporters, and had political and friendship relations with many of the student protestors. There was a brief confrontation between Bunchy Carter and several of his Panther associates with Josef, and his BSU associated at South West, that involved the Che-Lumumba cadres, but the issues were resolved in context of the class struggle itself, and didn't affect the Panther/Che-Lumumba/BSA solidarity in pursuing the student's strike to its logical conclusion.
The Communist Party, including the Che-Lumumba Club Negro organizers were well experienced, disciplined and smart strategists. As the student's strike approached its climax, in the battles at Jefferson High and LACC, after a couple of weeks or so Franklin recognized that the strikes were nearing a transitional stage, where they would either peter out in a whimper or be set-up for a bang by the police forces, that in either case would be defined as failure by the media. At a community-student meeting, Franklin made a memorable contribution to the struggle by arguing the protestors must take the moment into their own hands, by culminating the strike of their own accord.
The BSA student leadership was convinced by Franklin's experienced, thus powerful arguments, which had the support of dedicated and respected Panthers who were in attendance. The discussion, with strongly advanced creative suggestions, from Jabali, Dedan, Melvin X , Josef and others evolved dialectically to the perspective of the revolutionaries themselves deciding to go out with a bang, not being beaten by the cops on television as Franklin warned, but by the BSA culminating the strike in an act that would be at once bold and educative: taking over Carver Junior High School by the BSA, bringing the students back to class room but in those class rooms BSA college students would be the teachers!
What would they teach? Black history, liberation and class struggle! What else? After all, the Black students who organized those BSUs and demanded Black Studies Departments had an agenda of getting this education and returning to the hood as high school teachers and Ph.Ds at high schools in the inner-city slums, denouncing economic exploitation and racial oppression!
That was the stated purpose of BSU's fight for Black Studies Departments that would provide education that would provide a perspective to enable them to return to the inner-city slum schools, or low priced lawyers defending individual victims of racist laws and cops, and so on. As it turned out it was mainly the White socialist students in the anti-war movement that became inner city school teachers and public defenders.
Those Black students who exploited the civil rights movements and ghetto rebellions to get affirmative action slots and money grants in the interests of Black folk, who did become MAs, PhDs and lawyers from the Black cultural nationalist milieu ended up selling themselves for the money and prestige of being Afro-centric, professors teaching rich white kids Black history at noted colleges and Ivy League universities, experts on cable network news and C-Span, universities, corporate lawyers, judges, and radio commentators, and their Black consciousness revolutionary activities are celebrations of Kwanza, and so on.
But, in the 60s most of the Black students, such as, those at Cornell University, San Francisco State College, and the BSA, who were associated and worked with the Panthers, were socialists and serious about both learning at the universities, and teaching Black history to downtrodden Black kids, to impart to them the knowledge and dignity they needed to continue the struggle for Black liberation, and socialism. Socialism is Black liberation and socialism is Black liberation.
The Black student's rebellions engendered revolutionaries in the frame of the Black liberation movement, just as SDS and others became revolutionaries in the anti-war movements. The Black students however had never lost their connectivity with the rebellions taking place in the Black communities, fighting racism and police violence. In this context the members of the BSA voted to take over Carver, taking the children to their respective class rooms and to dismiss the teachers, to themselves teach the children African history, slave revolts, and socialism. Not all the students in the BSA were socialists, but they all considered themselves revolutionaries.
Ronald Freeman, and other members of the Black Panther Party were there with the students, and helped provide security both at the school take over and teaching action, and also back at the Victory Baptist Church, where the BSA student rebels was to regroup and analyze the significance of what they did.
It was decided before the school culmination take over and education action was taken that no one would carry guns because there were children involved, and both the school and the Victory Baptist Church were surrounded by not only the L.A.P.D., bit also by the FBI, and the media. Yet, the police and the FBI stood by and allowed some members of Ron Karanga's Dashiki wearing US Organization to cross their lines with guns including a rifle. In the Church, notwithstanding the presence of Black school children, whether by assignment from the State or US Organization, one of the members of that organization shot Ronald Freeman. The police and FBI agents stepped aside and instead arresting the shooters, raided the Church with guns out, and made everyone get down. It just so happened, however, that Ronald had his Red Book in pocket, which caught the bullet and prevented him from being touched by it! The popularity of Mao's Little Red Book assumed mythical dimensions, so to speak.
The point here is that the Panthers were not opportunists selling Red Books to White revolutionaries as a means of getting guns to fight the cops! The above statement, quoted from a communique of the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party, the rejection of politics of skin (racism) imperialism and capitalism was dialectically placed as the negation of these negatives contrasted to the affirmation of the positives of class politics, proletarian internationalism and the fight for Socialism.
The Panthers never wrote that the lumpinproletariat was a revolutionary class as opposed to the proletariat, but that these class elements are in poverty, Black victims of racism and of the contradictions of capitalism engendered critical thinking among them. This critical thinking inevitably resulted in the break from American racism and anti-communist culture. People, in the 60s, both Black liberation activists and student anti-war protestors, may have started by reading the Little Red Book of Quotations from Chairman Mao tse-Tung as a Third World revolutionary, but this led to the reading of Mao's Four Essays on Philosophy particularly "On Practice", "On Contradiction" and "Where Do Correct Ideas Come From," and to reading "Combat Liberalism". By reading and discussing these essays in study groups, Black liberation activists, including Panthers such as Masai from L.A., who was to become the BPP Minister of Education, these introduced sophisticated serious studies and discussions on dialectics, materialist epistemology, class struggle and workers revolution as seen from the standpoint of historical materialism and class struggle. Black liberation activists and students organized study groups, where in addition to Mao the reading lists universally included Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth", Stalin's "Marxism and the National Question", Lenin's "Lecture on The State", "The State and Revolution", and of course Marx and Engel's "The Communist Manifesto". Later, in the 70s those Maoists, who came into ideological conflict with the Communist Party interventions eventually, became familiar with the writings of Leon Trotsky. Study circles came to include Trotsky's "The Transitional Program" and individuals even read on their own Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed" and "In Defense of Marxism"! The year of 1968 was decisive in that the revolutionary praxis of peasants and workers in national liberation movements in Africa as well as Asia and Latin America, but also and even more importantly in Europe particularly in France. In the year of 1968 several dialectically interconnected events convinced many Black liberation activists and anti-war students and protestors that Marxism is scientific, and that the working class can function as a non-racial independent political force that alone produce the revolutionary socialist vanguard.
The Tet Offensive in Vietnam in which the Vietnamese Workers Party co-coordinated armed insurrections: See:
http://www.marxist.com/1968/vietnam.html
The Workers and student's French General Strike. See:
http://www.marxists.org/history/france/may-1968/timeline.htm
Upsurge and State's sudents Massacre in Mexico, 1968 See:
http://rwor.org/a/v20/970-79/975/mex1.htm
The solidarity both with the Mexican student and workers class war against the bourgeois government, and with Black Americans fighting the American bourgeois state, including with the Black Power Movement, expressed by Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who as Black American athletes refused to identify their wins with U.S. imperialism, but raised the Black Power fist of defiance! See:
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/Mexico_1968.htm
The armed rebellion of working class and unemployed Blacks following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in which they combated the State in some 120 cities across the United States fighting the police and national guards, the Pentagon deployed Vietnam hardened Airborne divisions to Boston, Washington D.C., Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco.
The Chicano high school students blow-outs in East Los Angeles, in which students confronted the racist school board and demanded changes in curricula, by city wide student strikes, in which the Brown Beret Party participated similar to Black Panther Party participation in the South Central Los Angeles.
On March 1, 1968, the Brown Berets planned and participated in the East L.A. walk outs or blow outs, the largest and lengthiest in the history of California, in which thousands of students left their classrooms to join the protest for quality education. The Brown Berets were able to unite college and high school students and begin a new stage in the Chicano/a movement. Shortly after this event, other Chicano students led walk outs all over the Southwest. http://brownberets.info/history/
Thus, it was the praxis in the class struggle itself that, as Masai used to say forces Black revolutionaries in America not only to pick up the guns ( in order to get rid of the gun [the State] it is necessary to pick up the gun) but also, to recognize the necessity to study revolutionary literatures accumulated in Marxism to form and participate in study groups as an obligation. Panthers, and others such as the BSA, formed study circles, and discussed literature from revolutionaries, liberation movements, and Marxist literature from all over the world, which accompanied the practical community organizing and political confrontations with the State.
The Communist Party in Los Angeles ran a book store on 7th street that carried and sold books from the Soviet Union and even China. But, other than discussions with Mike Davis there was no immediate interaction between Black revolutionaries and the Communist Party as such. Rose Chernin of the Communist Party operated an outfit called the Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, which worked with the Celes King Bail Bondsman, who was also the local leader of the NAACP, to bail revolutionary Blacks and student anti-war activists from jail. Panthers, and others in the Black liberation movement who in appreciation for Rose bailing them out of jail, attended annual Committee appreciation meetings that honored her, and raised money for the Committee, at the Ambassador Hotel grand ball room, on Wilshire Blvd. This didn't mean however capitulation to the politics and ideology of the Communist Party, but was an issue of respect, and self-disciplined duty. She, Dorothy Healy, who played a central political role debating Black revolutionaries, at least until she left them in 1968, and also Franklin and Kendra were respected as individuals.
The only member of the Communist Party as such with whom the movement had official relations with was Dorothy Healy. She lived in South Central L.A., a Jewish woman and her son Richard, in the midst of the hood as comfortable and secure as all who knew she had deep respect for Black people and they for her. She invited revolutionary Blacks into her home where we debated for hours. A principled woman, and communist leader, Dorothy resigned from the Communist Party in protest of the Soviet military invasion of Czechoslovakia in that wonderful rebellious year of protests, 1968. Dorothy and her son Richard became among the founders of the New Leftist New American Movement party, called NLNAM.
As Charlene Mitchell pointed out in her analysis of the relationship of the Communist Party USA to the Black Panther Party, her brothers Franklin and Deacon Alexander, who were like she was a "red diaper baby" i.e. her parents were in the Communist Party, played a significant role in the Black liberation movement in L.A., sometimes positive, as when dealing with practical issues related to protests, often negative when dealing with theoretical political significance of events. They were pragmatists. Also Franklin's wife, Kendra Alexander played a positive role, and had a great influence on the Black revolutionaries that attended South-West L.A. Community College, a group of bungalow class rooms put in place in response to the "Watts Riot" the Black ghetto rebellion in South Central L.A. in 1965.
Deacon Alexander and Angela Davis were partners, and it was in this context that she was introduced to the Black liberation movement in L.A. in the late 1960s, but this was prior to her becoming "famous" as a member of the Communist Party fired from U.C.L.A. by Governor Reagan's direct intervention against allowing Communists to teach in California State Colleges and Universities. It was in this context that the Communist Party, as an alternative to the Panther Party organized its Black comrades into an all Black collective of the CPUSA, called the Che-Lumumba Club. The Che-Lumumba Club of the Communist Party had the resources, and the discipline, and Angela Davis's relative celebrity being exploited enabled them to become the dominate group in the movement campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, George Jackson, John Cluchette, and Fleeta Drumgo. George Jackson had a younger brother, Jonathan Jackson who was committed to getting John Jackson, who was a Panther in prison, free from the prison system that was hell bent on killing George Jackson, John Cluchette, and Fleeta Drumgo.
In prison and in solitary confinement, George Jackson used this time to study the political, social and economic writings of Marx and Engels, Nkrumah, Fanon and others. He wrote letters of great insight and critiquing capitalism and the State. The book "Soledad Brother"had a photograph of himself pictured on a prisoner transfer bus, self-confident. There was also an enlarged photo of George in chains, confidently smiling although surrounded by armed prison transport guards. This photo was both in the homes of American Blacks, plastered on walls at Panther offices around the country, and in socialist and communist bookstores and lecture halls. But, this is not all. Also, this photo of this Black revolutionary Panther was in the homes of Irish nationalists in occupied Ireland, where George was respected, if not loved by Irish revolutionaries, who identified with the American Black revolutionaries, the cover in chains, surrounded by armed prison guards.
Jackson, author of the widely read prison memoir "Soledad Brother", had been thrown in jail for a petty robbery, and became a revolutionary behind bars. He was murdered in August 1971 by guards at San Quentin prison in an alleged escape attempt:
"Stephen Bingham, one of several lawyers working with Jackson, was accused of being part of the escape plot. Bingham fled the country and lived in exile until 1984. When he returned, he was acquitted of all charges related to the escape. Today, he is a welfare rights attorney in San Francisco. He spoke to Socialist Worker's Joe Allen about George Jackson's legacy--and his own fight for justice. Read the link:
http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-1/578/578_04_GeorgeJackson.shtml
George Jackson's writings "Soledad Brother" were a best seller not just among Black revolutionaries and socialists, and on the so-called White left, but internationally. It was a shrewd move on the part of the Communist Party to get involved with the Jackson case. However, George Jackson's younger brother, 17 year old Jonathan, thought the Communist Party, or rather that the "Che-Lumumba Club" were opportunists exploiting the Soledad Brothers to advance their own presence and significance in the Black liberation movement.
Jonathan concluded that the Committee to free the Soledad Brother was useless, decided on his own initiative to free his brother himself. It was stupid of the State, and the capitalist owned print and media propaganda machine, masquerading as news, to suggest that Angela Davis, or any other member of the Communist Party, whose line was and is peaceful transition to socialism, would give a shotgun to a 17 year old kid, who loves his brother, to invade a courtroom and kidnap a judge to free his brother.
Politically motivated kidnapping is based on the illusion that the State would capitulate, rather than kill both the kidnappers and the hostage, even a judge! George knew better, having experienced the State's repression and understood from reading Lenin's "The State and Revolution", that the State's fundamental existence is as an apparatus of violence. See:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/
The State and media associated Angela Davis with Jonathan Jackson, and thereby with Ruchell McGee, William Christmas and James McClain. Jonathan Jackson, William Christmas and James McClain were killed. Ruchell McGee survived, and was charged with the escape plot, as was Angela Davis. The highest levels in the Communist Party bureaucracy organized the Angela Davis Defense Committee. The slogan initially was, to push credibility among Black liberation activists, to call for the State to "Free Angela", Free Ruchell, and Free All Political Prisoners. Huey's name wasn't mentioned, and Eldridge Cleaver denounced the Free Angela campaign as it omitted Huey, Bobby Seale and others as a sham to divert from the State repression against Panthers.
Ruchell McGee was convicted for Haley's kidnapping and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he is serving in Corcoran State Prison. Now 56 years old, he has lost numerous bids for parole. The Communist Party separated the politics of Angela's case from that of McGee. Yet, they continued to associate Angela with the Soledad Brothers and George Jackson.
There was made a Hollywood movie, "The Brothers", based on Angela and George, staring Bernie Casey that depicts Angela and George falling in love. Perhaps, in any case, the campaign to Free Angela presented the image of Angels in the minds of Black working class and impoverished masses in rebellion against racial oppression, and that Angela Davis personified what Nina Simone proposed to be 'young, gifted and black'. She was a very pretty, long bush haired natural style, and very educated young Black woman, whose photograph posters pictured her as a Black revolutionary. Angela was popular, the same as the Panther's Erica Huggins and Assata Shakur. But, there were many other Black women and Panther revolutionaries arrested and jailed by the State, such as Peaches Moore, who fought the police raid on Panther Party Headquarters in 1969.
George Jackson was the personification of defiant intellectual freedom and critical thinking, and representative of revolutionary courage. As a Black Panther Party Field Marshall, George Jackson was shot down by the pigs in prison on August 21, 1971. Aesthics is politics. In recognition of George Jackson, Archie Shepp, who is the heart of asthetics of Black resistance, in 1972 did an album "Attica Blues", which represented the Attica prisoners revolt and the Governor Rockefeller ordered slaughter of both inmates and guard hostages, also has a track in the album entitled "Blues For George Jackson".
Also, Bob Dylan wrote:
I woke up this mornin',
There were tears in my bed.
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head.
Lord, Lord,
They cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.
Sent him off to prison
For a seventy-dollar robbery.
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key.
Lord, Lord, They cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.
He wouldn't take shit from no one
He wouldn't bow down or kneel.
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real.
Lord, Lord,
They cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.
Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love.
Lord, Lord,
So they cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.
Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard.
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards.
Lord, Lord,
They cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.
http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/jackson.html
Already associated with George Jackson, the State's association of Angela Davis with the bold action of Jonathan Jackson was to isolate her from the American political culture as a Communist conspirator, 1950s style anti-communism. But, the State's plot backfired. The State Courts and FBI put out a warrant to arrest Angela Davis, and made her the most wanted in FBI repressive lists, and consequently jailed her. But this was not the patriotic culturally reactionary 1950s! By persecuting and prosecuting Angela Davis, the State inadvertently gave the Communist Party of the U.S.A. a boon!
The civil rights and the anti-war movements had broken down the propaganda and anti-communism of the 1950s. By the persecution and arrest of Angela Davis the government gave the CP.U.S.A. its first popular celebrity, used both as a defense committee and a recruitment drive since the government framed and murdered Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in the 50s the Cold War politics that isolated and defeated the Communist Party.
In the 1950s capitalist movies and television networks demonized Khrushchev and the Soviet Union respectively as an EVIL "dictator" and an "EVIL" empire: godless atheists, a "1984" police state, and about brainwashing in "Red China". The Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial, Sputnik, the Korean War and beginning of the Vietnam War and such was daily on the network news and movies, manipulating Americans and especially of children growing up in the 1950s.
News and television propaganda in the homes were reinforced in school books, and fear of nuclear war the children's fears were reinforced by bomb drills, telling innocent children to duck under their wooden desks with butts facing the window as if that would protect them from incineration or fallout from nuclear bomb explosions. American politicians and news and media propagandists associated America with "democracy" and "freedom", which of course is nothing but words, was embellished by right-wing preachers, pulpit propagandists who asserted that the Soviet Union was dominated by "godless communists".
The U.S. Democratic as well as Republican politicians and pulpit propagandists thereby contrasted America as a "Christian nation", free and democratic to the Soviet Union as "totalitarian police State". The General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party was presented as an evil "dictator". George Orwell's "1984", a work of science fiction was presented to gullible American workers as the realities of the Soviet Union, and other anti-Soviet literature emerged. American members of the Communist Party U.S.A. were depicted as Soviet agents, and spies, rather than what they were, loyal American workers and trade unionists fighting for worker's democracy and socialism and against capitalist exploitation and its bourgeois totalitarian State.
In the 1940s and 50s, the critical thinking and communist novelists, writers, script writers, movie directors and even actors in Hollywood, were viciously attacked by the FBI, and the House Un-American activities Committee (HU-AC). The HU-AC anti-communist cadres raided Hollywood in response to powerful movies critical of capitalism and/or the Press as propaganda, such as "Modern Times", "Imitation of Life", "The Great Dictator", "Citizen Kane", "Meet John Doe", "High Noon", "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", "Jesse James", "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town", "All About Eve", "Dead End", "Grapes of Wrath", "Tales of Manhattan", "A Face in the Crowd", "Viva Zapata", and "The Salt of the Earth". Get the DVDs and watch these movies, and also watch Woody Allen's "The Front", and read "The Hollywood Ten" biographies article at: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/blacklist.html
Aesthetics, as said previously, is politics. The classes that own the productive forces and the press and media, owns the movie making studios and movie theatres as well. The movie studio owners and producers collaborated with the HUAC and the FBI. These capitalists, although not in industrial or agricultural commodity production by wage slaves, had the same class interests in stomping critical thinking in capitalist America.
In the name of "freedom", "democracy" and "national defense", the American ruling classes, represented by the State, and in these cases specifically by the HUAC and FBI, attacked free speech of artists. Aesthetics is politics and politics are part and parcel of the culture. The attacks on American writers, directors and actors in the movies of the 40s and 50s, in politics was accompanied by the presentation of explicitly a-political but actually pro-capitalist presentations on television sit-coms of American workers as a happy-go-lucky middle class, with working class women who had held jobs during World War II to go back into the kitchen, such as "The Life of Reilly", "Ozzie and Harriet", "Donna Reed Show", and "Leave It To Beaver".
World War II brought women into industries in response to the capitalists need for labor power. The capitalist government needed war to emerge from the Great Depression, as we discussed already. But, this war snatched American workers from industry, to kill and get killed in this imperialist war. As the wars in Europe and Asia, against German and Japanese imperialisms advanced, women and Blacks replaced White men in industry. This change in economic conditions of women and Blacks enabled women workers to have money income independent of men (husbands), which provided the economic independence of women that enabled the feminist movement of the 1970s as well as the Black civil rights and liberation movements in the 60s and 70s. The first feminists in America at this time were civil rights activists, and anti-war activists.
The unintended consequence of bringing women into the economy was an economic liberation of women as workers while their husbands were in Europe and Asia. They were fighting to advance the predatory interests of U.S. imperialism. Now with relative economic independence, American working class women achieved sexual freedom from fear of pregnancy by the invention of birth control pills. These economic and sexual independence of women overthrew the myth of female inferiority, and the place of working-class women as either in bed with their legs spread, or consequently barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.
The capitalist cultural response was to produce the so-called "film noir" genre. These films presented independent women as evil vicious bitches, as in e.g. "The Postman Rings Twice" and "Double Indemnity", but many others. The "Red Scare" was in the 1950s subliminally suggested in Science Fiction Movies, such as "Invaders from Mars". State leaders were "recruited", or rather abducted by Martians, into agents in service of alien invaders by inserting alien items into the back of their necks.
In context of the HUAC attacks on State Department officials, this made government , in particular movie at this time politicians and police chiefs, and army generals and so on suspect. Similarly in the movie "The Body Snatchers" one's own parents, friends, and lovers were displaced by "aliens".
Yet, it slipped past an antidote science fiction movie, "The Day Earth Stood Still", where the alien represented a savior Interstellar Leviathan State, which disciplined humanities tendency toward self-destruction by global thermonuclear war. In this sense, the stories of an individual alien, referred to in the language of Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra", and Hitler's "Aryanism", the "superman" - appropriation of American children into nationalist patriotic superiority the 1950s in and by "The Adventures of Superman: Fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way", standing in front of an American flag, waiving in the background.
For a sense of the explicit anti-communist propaganda in American culture in the 1950s, even into the early 60s, See:
"I Married a Communist", (1949)
http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=96058
"I Was a Communist for the FBI", (1951)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043665/
"Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight",(1958)
http://www.zpub.com/notes/masters.html
"The FBI Story", (1959)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_FBI_Story
"Manchurian Candidate", (1962)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200001/ai_n8896111
"None Dare Call It Treason"
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/526
Yet, in the 60s the American culture was changing.
In the context of the US imperialist war in Korea, the "Manchurian Candidate" brainwashed Americans into believing that there was such a thing as "brainwashing". It doesn't exist. Yet, even if it did exist, it would have been cultural “the assimilation of American workers by press, media and movies into a culture of anti-communist, into an irrational fear of Russia and China.
In context of the rebellious youth's "counter-culture", rather than isolating the Communist Party, as the government intended, the FBI, and nightly news propaganda campaigns to persecute and smear Angela Davis, as a "Communist", and associate her with George Jackson as a "murder accomplice", they failed. George Jackson was a Field Marshal and member of the Black Panther Party, so by associating Angela Davis with George Jackson, and thereby wrongly associating the Communist Party with the Black Panther Party, the government and media's campaign made Angela a heroine and tended to legitimize the Communist Party as a revolutionary cadre.
Not only workers in the Black communities, but in the Chicano, Indian liberation, feminists and anti-war movements, who also had organizations attacked by the State, themselves identified with Angela Davis as a fellow revolutionary, and thereby with the Communist Party as such as well. The governments attack on the Communist Party by persecuting and abducting Angela Davis did not isolate and repress the Party, but to the contrary it provided to it a celebrity!
There were other women in the Black liberation movement, such as "Peaches" Moore, who as I mentioned elsewhere, was one among many Panthers at the Central Avenue office who fought back the police raid, and Erika Huggins, who was framed along with Bobby Seale in New Haven, Connecticut. I was on trial in Compton for electioneering, i.e. passing out leaflets denouncing American elections as a sham. Word got to us that Erika's husband, John Huggins, who was Deputy Minister of Information of the BBP, along with Bunchy Carter, were killed by members of Karanga's US Organization. The Police, rather than protecting Erika, raided her home, where she and John's new born baby were resting. A similar thing happened to my wife, Sharon Johnson who was not a Panther, and neither was I, but while I was away at a meeting in West L.A. she was home asleep with our new born baby, when the Compton police sent some twenty police to raid our apartment, she in bed with hands in the air, and our baby in the crib crying. We all know how the FBI and Chicago police raided the home of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, shooting them in their respective beds as they slept. Fred and Mark were Panthers.
Black revolutionaries considered themselves communists and socialists but were not in the tradition of the Communist Party. Most were "Maoists", as were for that matter most youth groups on campuses who were in the anti-war movements. The SDS, was the major such organization at the national level. The Progressive Labor Party made progress in the SDS, and brought forth a campus cadre organization of campus recruits. The Revolutionary Union, the October League, and the Revolutionary Communist Party also emerged from the anti-war activists, from studying "Marxist-Leninist" literature of the Maoist milieu. The ethnic liberation organizations, feminists, and anti-war activists in the majority of cased were in solidarity with the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, and the Chinese government's opposition to "Soviet Revisionism" and "capitalist restoration" in the Soviet Union, which politics placed them not only outside the Soviet Oriented Communist Parties, including the Communist Party U.S.A., but in opposition to it.
Thus, the praxis of cosmopolitan class warfare changed the consciousness of Black liberation activists into working class class-conscious socialist revolutionaries! This a theoretical what Masai and the Panthers called a "class analysis" understanding of the so-called "cultural nationalists", of the kind of "Black nationalists" who assassinated Malcolm X, John Huggins, Bunchy Carter and other Panthers. It was understood theoretically that those individuals and organizations, which "collaborated with U.S. imperialism" (i.e. the State) are its agents.
In international politics, Mao tse-tung described these bourgeois nationalists who collaborate with U.S. imperialism as "running dogs" and "lackeys". Kwame Toure called them neo-colonial stooges.
In the 1970s, the gain of the civil rights victories, most importantly for the leaders of it was Voting Rights and racial districting. Many became Democrats and ran for office, at city, county, state, and federal levels. The bourgeois Black cultural nationalists advocated that the exploited Black working poor have a "nationalist duty" to "buy Black", also demands that these workers have a racial nationalist obligation to "vote Black". Invariably, this means working class Blacks must vote for Democrats, and at every level.
The Democratic Party is a Party of Capital, the political representatives of the domestic industrial capitalists, although it masquerades as the representatives of the so-called "common man". This masquerade arose in the 1930s on the basis of Roosevelt's Keynesian economic policies, calling those policies of government public works spending "the New Deal", which included getting America into World War II. These Keynesian policies enabled American agricultural capitalists and industrial capitalists to restart from the Great Depression.
The public works and welfare spending, ostensibly to "help the poor", actually helped the rich, by enabling agricultural capitalists to sell food to government work program employees and welfare recipients on one hand, and selling food rations to feed American soldiers on the other; and at the same time enable domestic industrial capitalists to produce and sell consumer industrial commodities to American customers and war related industries to sell their guns and killing machines for use in the War. In both agriculture and industry these Keynesian policies together with America's entry into the War engendered booms that led to hiring workers who also became consumers and the decreasing of the surplus populations by getting them killed in the War.
Only a fool among the workers would believe that the Keynesian domestic and militarist policies were a "New Deal", on behalf of American workers and the poor, rather than agricultural and industrial capitalists.
The tragedy is that the American Communist Party cadres believed it. It was accepted by the leaders of the Communist Party U.S.A. in the wider ideological context of the alliance of the Soviet Union with the British and American imperialists in a so-called "United Front Against Fascism".
The Bulgarian Communist Party ideologist Georgi Dimitrov wrote the apologetic to justify both the alliance of self-styled "Marxist-Leninist", i.e. Stalinist Communist Party dominated Soviet government with the French, British and U.S. imperialist war against German, Italian and Japanese imperialist on one hand, and more relevant to this article the Moscow ordered subordination of Communist workers to capitalist domination the economy by forcing its influenced trade unions to submit to capitalist exploitation and tyranny, and its political representatives in governments in Britain, France, China and the United States.
The Chinese Communist Party refused to subordinate the workers to capitalists or peasants to landlords. This is why Charlene Mitchell wrote, in her attack on the Panther Party below:
"The Black Panthers" Maoist influence, especially the ultra-leftism that is common among Maoists, led to a distorted notion of the concept of the "united front." The united front, first enunciated by the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov in the 1930s struggle against Nazi Germany, holds that the immediate tasks of Marxist-Leninists is to work to unite broad sections of the population around concrete programmatic demands that advance democratic rights. It holds that agreement on long-term goals and philosophy are not the basis for broad unity. Thus, Communists can disagree with non-communist about the necessity to destroy capitalism, but that disagreement should not hinder the ability of both forces to work for decent housing, full employment, peace, and other general democratic demands. In the words of Henry Winston, "instead of linking theory with practice", the Black Panther Party turned the concept of the united front into a sectarian caricature of Marxist-Leninist principles.“
What Charlene Mitchell is calling a disagreement with "non-communists" parties was in actuality, agreements with capitalists parties. Moscow directed "communist" parties to unite with capitalist parties in countries in which the Soviet Union had a united front against "fascism". Moscow was united with Washington's Democratic Party governed state in opposition to the German state.
The case in point is that the Communist Party became lackeys of the Democratic Party. Their assignment in the American working class was to subordinate working class interests to national interests. See: No strike pledge http://www.marxists.org/archive/glaberman/1999/wages/conclusion.htm
The Socialist Workers Party opposed the capitulation to the Democratic Party. The Black Panther Party criticizing the Communist party in the 1960s was consistent with these the Socialist Workers Party critcizing the Communist Party in the 30s and 40s. The quintessential critique of Stalinist popular front politics and ideology is the Trotskyist political and ideological tradition of opposition to Stalinism. In America, the care taker of Trotsky's body of critical literature and inheritance of revolutionary theory is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
In the mid 60s-mid 70s, the Socialist Workers Party in Los Angeles had a book store and "Militant Labor Forum". In New York, Malcolm X spoke at the SWP Forums, and it was they who published Malcolm's speeches. Ideologically, the SWP sided with the racial Black nationalists. When Black liberation activists visited SWP book stores, what they needed to be communist revolutionaries was Trotsky's alternative of Marxist literature of class struggle principles and politics.
Inherent in Trotskyism is explication of the antinomy of racial nationalism and proletarian internationalism. Instead of discussing and debating this antinomy, and selling to them Trotsky's "Transitional Programm" and "In Defense of Marxism", or any other Marxist Trotskyist literature, what the SWP members at the store discussed was racism, and sold to these Black revolutionaries was reactionary nationalist Black literature. This literature was in libraries, and could be found in most book stores, such as the writings of, or about, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Harold Cruse, John Hope Franklin, and other writers of Essays and novels.
True, as well as Trotsky's "The Russian Revolution", and C.L.R. James "Black Jacobins" were also available at SWP book stores. But, as writings on history, these books, along with e.g. Dubois' "The Souls of Black Folks" and "Philadelphia Negro", E. Franklin Frazer's "Black Bourgeoisie" are classics that are available in Public Libraries. They are not political writings calling for the overthrow of bourgeois governments and destruction of capitalism.
Rather that presenting Trotskyist anti-Stalinist writings, by Trotsky and others, denouncing nationalism as bourgeois, and "united fronts against fascism" as Communist Party betrayals of class-conscious trade unionists, socialists, anarchists and communists, the SWP capitulated to reactionary racial politics of Black Nationalism, rather than as revolutionaries of principles respectfully challenging these Black authored books, and racial organizations working in and with the Democratic Party.
Though sectarian and often hysterical, it wasn't until the Workers League, briefly, and more long term the Sparticist League, presented Trotskyist literature by direct intervention in the Black liberation and anti-war movements. The Sparticist League was a disciplined, principled, intellectual cadre of true revolutionary Leninists in the ideological sense, but in ideology only.
Though they regarded themselves as incipient "Bolshevik-Leninists", unlike the real Lenin and Russian Bolsheviks the Sparticist was without a presence in the working class, and had no strategy to overthrow the government and expropriate the productive forces in America. Also, unlike the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party, which respectively had a presence in the American working class since playing significant roles in CIO and Teamsters, the Sparticist League and Workers League emerged initially as a faction in the SWP, the "Revolutionary Tendency", in opposition to the SWP capitulation to Cuba's "Stalinists", and its capitulation to race politics of "Black nationalism", but the workers in the SWP stayed in the SWP.
The Revolutionary Tendency (RT) faction formed in the SWP, in the late 1950s and early 60s. It was led by Tim Wolforth, on the philosophical grounds of Trotskyist Orthodoxy, and by Jim Robertson, on the basis of revolutionary principle. The Trotskyist movement, as Marxists and Leninists generally, operated in the international context: proletarian internationalism. The RT leaders were associated with the British Socialist Labour League (SLL), led by Jerry Healy. The SLL was itself associated with the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) led by Pierre Lambert, the International Committee for the Fourth International.
The Socialist Workers Party, in the U.S., was led by James P. Cannon, whose personal organizational experiences included the founding of the Communist Party U.S.A. With the expulsion of the "Left Opposition", led by Trotsky, Cannon split with the CP as well, following Trotsky to found the Forth International. The Trotskyists regarded the bureaucratic government and Party leaders in the Soviet Union corrupted by power and privileges, and that consequently the once "healthy workers" state in the Lenin period, 1917 -1924 degenerated. The Stalinist ascendancy in the Soviet Union resulted in the Betrayal of the Revolution, manifested internationally by capitulation to capitalistic imperialist nations in the betrayal of revolutionary workers and socialists in those countries under the doctrine of "Socialism in one country", the Soviet Union alone. These betrayals were expressed in the doctrines of "united front against fascism".
To Trotsky and the Trotskyists, the Stalinist betrayals indicated the necessity to restore the revolutionary legacy of Marx's "First International", Engels and the "Second International", and Lenin's revolutionary Communist Third International. Trotsky with his small cadre of revolutionary Leninists created the Fourth International. Trotsky developed its Marxian theoretical basis by making a thorough analysis and revolutionary critique of Soviet Communism in "The Revolution Betrayed", and "The Third International after Lenin".
Trotsky also made a series of analysis and critiques of Stalin's international betrayals of the working classes and toiling masses in China, which led to the slaughter of Communists by the Chinese bourgeois Nationalist Kuomintang, as well as of the CP betrayals in the Spanish Civil War, the French CP's popular front policies, and of betrayals of workers and socialists by herding Communist Parties into "United Front's Against Fascism", throughout Asia and Europe, and in America.
Georgi Dimitrov's pamphlet, "The United National Front Against Fascism", was studied by Panthers and their allies in preparation for the 1969 Oakland Conference. Panthers and others in the Black liberation movement, who understood Malcolm X's critique of the Democratic Party as "fox" compared to the Republican Party as "wolf", still lacked the historical and theoretical concept of the Democratic Party as a capitalist class party. Yet, they, as Patrick Henry said of the American Constitutional Convention said of it, "smelt a rat", or rats!
The united front, first enunciated by the Bulgarian Stalinist Georgi Dimitrov in the 1930's struggle against Nazi Germany, was nothing but the presentation in Marxian language of abandoning Marxism and Leninism. Dimitrov's nationalist theory of "national united fronts against fascism", in the United States meant the subordination of the workers to capitalists.
In American electoral politics, since the Roosevelt "New Deal", and the Roosevelt regimes alliance of the U.S. imperialism with the Soviet Union against German imperialism, the CPUSA has to this day been lackey foot soldiers of the Democratic Party. So is its offshoot the Committee of Correspondence of Democracy and Socialism. Thus, rather than being in opposition to the Panther's call for a "united front against fascism", everyone who was at the Conference knows that Communist Party members and representatives where mingling all over the place.
Based on its history in the class struggle, and participation in the Fourth International, the SWP understood the class betrayals and theoretical fallacies inherent in popular front alliance of worker organizations with their national bourgeoisie. Yet, the SWP leadership's paternalistic capitulation to "Black nationalism", and lack of presence in the Black liberation movement, excluded them from playing a role at the United Front Conference in Oakland, 1969.
The Sparticist League did intervene with their news papers and book tables, but were regarded and isolated "Trotskyite sectarians", and regarded as such from the Stalinist point of view, of Panthers and others. Progressive Labor Party, as Maoists intervened, actively and was attacked at Bobby Hutten Park, physically.
Charlene Mitchell's attack on the Panthers considered as being "Maoists", and as such, supposedly, "ultra-leftists". Such labels intimate that the Panthers, because they were real deal worker-communists and therefore to the left of the C.P.U.S.A., the implication is that the B.P.P. were adventurists, similar to the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), the Students For a Democratic Society (SDS), Weathermen, and "Weather Underground", the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and even the Symbioses Liberation Army (SLA) and Black Liberation Army, led by Cleaver.
In actuality, whether the shoot-out between Huey Newton and Oakland police which left one cop dead and Huey wounded and was used by the State's courts to send Huey to prison; the police attack on Eldridge Cleaver and Li'l Bobby Hutton which killed Li'l Bobby, the police ambush and murder of Li'l Tommy Lewis, Steve Bartholomew, and Robert Lawrence at Adams Boulevard and Montclair by police ostensibly because they "looked suspicious", the murder by cops of Franco Diggs in Long Beach, the murders of John Huggins and Bunchy Carter at U.C.L.A., and John Savage, a Panther in San Diego murdered in each instance by US Organization members, the raid of Panther headquarters and leaders homes in New York, the frame-up of the "New York 21", as well as the pre-dawn police and FBI raid on Panther Party office on Central Avenue in South Central L.A., and so on. (See: http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Chapter_History/BPP_Pieces_of_History.html)
These were in each case unprovoked murder of Panthers by the State. Yet, in her statement, disassociating the CP from the BPP, Charlene Mitchell not only doesn't denounce the State for killing and framing Panthers, but by calling the Panthers "Maoists" and "Ultra leftists" she intimates that the BPP brought these repressive State attacks on themselves by provocation! And then Charlene Mitchell, Franklin and Kendra Alexander, and Angela Davis as CP cadre had the gall to form a Che-Lumumba CP led "National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression"!
Charlene Mitchell wrote:
- In December 1969, shortly after the policee assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, The Los Angeles police raided the Black Panthers headquarters in South Central LA. The Panthers held off the police during a gun battle that lasted for more than four hours. During the battle, the Panthers requested members of the African American community to come and witness their surrender, hoping to forestall a police murder of their members. The Che-Lumumba Club, with other community activists, took the initiative in organizing the community to witness the arrests of the Panthers. Afterwards, members of the Communist party with the leadership of CP activist Rose Chernin, played a significant role in raising bail money and funds for the legal representation of the jailed Panther members.-
This is true, but does not tell the entire story of the politics of this event.
During the Panther armed resistance to the FBI and L.A.P.D. terrorist assault on the Panther office, it went out over the news, particularly the Black radio station KGFJ. The masses of South Central L.A. heard of it and went to the location. The press and media were present, and this prevented the massacre.
At the same time, members of the U.C.L.A. BSU "Chrysti Farlice" understood the politics of State repression as political, not just racial. The U.C.L.A. BSU, which was part of the Southern California BSA, wrote a political leaflet explaining the politics of class war and the function of the State in it, which also called for a mass community meeting that, was to take place that evening at a rather large Church in South Central L.A. The purpose of this meeting was to organize a massive working class political protest against the State. The Black community was presented as what it in substance was and is: working class. Thus, the slogan around which the political protest was to be organized was that the attack upon the Panthers was an attack on that organization and on the Black community as an attack on the working class. I wrote the leaflet, but that is not important. It was the issue, not leaflets or personalities, but anger at the police attack that brought a couple thousand members of the community to the protest organizing meeting.
At the same time, Democrats in the California Legislative Assembly, in particular Mervin Dymaly, saw an opportunity to advance themselves/himself at the expense of the Panthers, so went to the shoot-out location and got hit by a cop. He was of course put on television and radio news as the news.
The united front ideology, which calls for the "unity" of Communists and Democrats against a "common enemy", even as Malcolm X called for such "Black unity", was exploited by the C.P. Panthers nationalistic tendencies and ignorance of the Trotskyist critique of the Stalinist betrays in guise of "united front against fascism" enabled Franklin Alexander, at the community meeting, as a CP member and lickspittle of the Democratic Party, to give an emotional demagogic speech turning over the leadership of the protest against the State to a representative of the State! In the form of a "challenge" to Democrat Dymaly to lead the protest, the politics of the protest became the politics of the Democratic Party!
The Communist Party acted as the trained cadre that they were. In that way, faking as "Black militants", rather than as Communist Party cadres, Franklin Alexander and Angela Davis presented themselves as the "Che-Lumumba Club", and by name recognition and celebrity status Angela as a tool of the Communist Party was inadvertently the tool of the Democratic Party, therefore the State. Rose Chernin, by her Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, working with King Bail Bondsman, used their access to money to manipulate the dependency of Panthers in jail to get out of jail.
Still, the Panthers continued to think of themselves as revolutionaries:
"The Black Panther Party is informing and calling on all the peoples of the communities across the country to scorn and denounce the actions of this capitalist-racist government's attempts to try and destroy the Black Panther Party which has chapters and branches across the nation. Scorn, denounce and destroy the lies by capitalists and racists, from the Nixons, the Rockefellers, and all their pig lackeys, to the bootlicking cultural nationalists and black capitalists. They are the real conspirators where we see their obvious attempts to destroy the Black Panther Party's revolutionary leadership. They, of course, try to do this by murders, jailing, unfair court trials, the forcing of Eldridge Cleaver into exile, and the temporary imprisonment of the Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton in California." ttp://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp/bpp270469_14.htm
The problem is that Americans don't know what a revolution is.
Malcolm X in opposition to the non-violent Negro civil rights movement, advocated in his "Message to the Grassroots" armed self-defense, and association with the Black working poor, as "Black revolution", and reactionary Black racialism as "revolutionary nationalism" the objective of which is to get land - a territory outside the US to set up a Black nation, he doesn't speak here of its economic mode of production and appropriation's relations of production, class and politics.
In the Message to the Grassroots, Malcolm X at the time, still a member of the race thinking of the Nation of Islam, confused national liberation wars with revolutions. His examples, comparing for instance the American War of Independence with the French Revolution, and these with the Russian Revolution, calling them all "white nationalism".
The white man knows what a revolution is. He knows that the black revolution is world—wide in scope and in nature. The black revolution is sweeping Asia, sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America. The Cuban Revolution —— that’s a revolution. They overturned the system. Revolution is in Asia. Revolution is in Africa. And the white man is screaming because he sees revolution in Latin America. How do you think he’ll react to you when you learn what a real revolution is? You don’t know what a revolution is. If you did, you wouldn’t use that word.
A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, "I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me." No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Reverend Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing "We Shall Overcome"? Just tell me. You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. These Negroes aren’t asking for no nation. They’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.
When you want a nation, that’s called nationalism. When the white man became involved in a revolution in this country against England, what was it for? He wanted this land so he could set up another white nation. That’s white nationalism. The American Revolution was white nationalism. The French Revolution was white nationalism. The Russian Revolution too —— yes, it was —— white nationalism. You don’t think so? Why [do] you think Khrushchev and Mao can’t get their heads together? White nationalism. All the revolutions that’s going on in Asia and Africa today are based on what? Black nationalism. A revolutionary is a black nationalist. He wants a nation. I was reading some beautiful words by Reverend Cleage, pointing out why he couldn’t get together with someone else here in the city because all of them were afraid of being identified with black nationalism. If you’re afraid of black nationalism, you’re afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism.
The white man knows what a revolution is. He knows that the black revolution is world—wide in scope and in nature. The black revolution is sweeping Asia, sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America. The Cuban Revolution —— that’s a revolution. They overturned the system. Revolution is in Asia. Revolution is in Africa. And the white man is screaming because he sees revolution in Latin America. How do you think he’ll react to you when you learn what a real revolution is? You don’t know what a revolution is. If you did, you wouldn’t use that word.
A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, "I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me." No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Reverend Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing "We Shall Overcome"? Just tell me. You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. These Negroes aren’t asking for no nation. They’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.
When you want a nation, that’s called nationalism. When the white man became involved in a revolution in this country against England, what was it for? He wanted this land so he could set up another white nation. That’s white nationalism. The American Revolution was white nationalism. The French Revolution was white nationalism. The Russian Revolution too —— yes, it was —— white nationalism. You don’t think so? Why [do] you think Khrushchev and Mao can’t get their heads together? White nationalism. All the revolutions that’s going on in Asia and Africa today are based on what? Black nationalism. A revolutionary is a black nationalist. He wants a nation. I was reading some beautiful words by Reverend Cleage, pointing out why he couldn’t get together with someone else here in the city because all of them were afraid of being identified with black nationalism. If you’re afraid of black nationalism, you’re afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love black nationalism. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1145
In fact, the American War of Independence was not a revolution, because the mode of production and appropriation of labor power in the 13 independent states were the same as they were as British colonies: agricultural capitalist commodity production by chattel slave labor dominated the Southern colonies, then states, and manufacture capitalist commodity production by wage labor, together with merchant capital dominated the Northern colonies then states, remained unchanged.
Following the success of the American War of Independence the masses of yoemen farmers, sharecroppers, slaves, mechanics, artisans were economically subordinate and excluded from political power. Whereas in the French Revolution the bourgeoisie overthrew the landed aristocracy politically, and the peasants expropriated the lands economically. The bourgeois power was based on the economic power of capital and monetary wealth, not land or 'whiteness'. The Russian Revolution, on the other hand was led by the urban proletariat, supported by the peasant masses, and expropriated both the bourgeois industrial property by the proletariat in the cities and of the landed aristocrats by peasants in the country.
Moreover, the Russian proletarian revolution was transnational i.e. throughout the Russian Empire, which included Asian as well as European nations. The proletarian revolution was based on the expropriation of industries and finance, and had nothing to do with nationalism. The Communist Party of the emergent Union of Soviet Socialist Republics established the Communist International to overthrow the capitalists in all industrial capitalist nations, and to aid the wars of national liberation in the European imperialist's third world colonies. When Malcolm X spoke of "The black revolution is sweeping Asia, sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America. The Cuban Revolution —— that’s a revolution", US imperialism was aiding European imperialists (Portugal, France, Soth Africa, Rhodesia, Israel) to keep their colonial possessions in Africa and Asia, or displacing those imperialist, whereas the Soviet Union was aiding African and Asia liberation movements -Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau. ...
Martin Luther King Jr. had a better understanding of the mechanics of violent revolution and armed liberation struggles, which he dealt with in defense of his strategy of non-violent civil disobedience to force the State to dismantle sagregation and end discrimination and violence against Blacks. He dealt with these issues in his book "Where do we go from Here"?
"Occasionally Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional antipoverty money allotted by frightened government officials, and a few water-sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettoes. It is something like improving the food in prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars. Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations. When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces.
"Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the National Guard and, finally, the army to call on—all of which are predominantly white. Furthermore, few if any violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the nonresistant majority. Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually fighting with him up in the hills, but he could never have overthrown the Batista regime unless he had the sympathy of the vast majority of Cuban people." http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/628.html
King was right: "power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, "Power is the ability of a labor union like the UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say, ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That's power.""
Of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X said: "He got the peace prize, we got the problem.... If I'm following a general, and he's leading me into a battle, and the enemy tends to give him rewards, or awards, I get suspicious of him. Especially if he gets a peace award before the war is over."
Armed self-defense and denouncing "the white man", however, is not revolutionary. Even if we were to make the strategy the main thing, i.e. violence as opposed to non-violent civil disobedience, still the objective is determinate: revolution is class power.
Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society, and without them it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes and therefore impossible for the people to win political power. "On Contradiction" (August1937), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 344.* http://art-bin.com/art/omao5.html
First, the local tyrants, evil gentry and lawless landlords have themselves driven the peasants to this. For ages they have used their power to tyrannize over the peasants and trample them underfoot; that is why the peasants have reacted so strongly. The most violent revolts and the most serious disorders have invariably occurred in places where the local tyrants, evil gentry and lawless landlords perpetrated the worst outrages. The peasants are clear-sighted. Who is bad and who is not, who is the worst and who is not quite so vicious, who deserves severe punishment and who deserves to be let off lightly-the peasants keep clear accounts, and very seldom has the punishment exceeded the crime. Secondly, a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. A rural revolution is a revolution by which the peasantry overthrows the power of the feudal landlord class. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1927mao.html
A revolution requires a passive element, a material basis: it is the transfer of the productive forces from one class to another. The rising class emerges from changes in the economic mode of production [means of production determined] changes in the mode of appropriation of labor. These changes in the economic base both creates and empowers the rising class and enables it to expropriate the productive forces and do away with the existing mode of production and thereupon to attack existing relations of production and corresponding property formation: the rising class is objectively positioned to take the production forces and destroy the existing mode of appropriation of labor and relations of production.
This is accomplished by the corresponding political revolution, whereby the old ruling classes are overthrown and the rising class becomes the new ruling class. Whether this revolution is accomplished by violence or not depends on the political situation, that is the degree of resistance of the old class power, and in particular whether their desire to hold power resorts to violence. If peaceful evolution is impossible, then the ruling classes make violent political revolution inevitable means of transfer of the economy from one class to the other.
Toward the end of his life by assassination by cultural nationalists of the NOI, Malcolm X came to realize:
Malcolm X: I used to define Black nationalism as the idea that the Black man should control the economy of his community, the politics of his community, and so forth.
But when I was in Africa in May, in Ghana, I was speaking with the Algerian ambassador who is extremely militant and is a revolutionary in the true sense of the word (and has his credentials as such for having carried on a successful revolution against oppression in his country). When I told him that my political, social, and economic philosophy was Black nationalism, he asked me very frankly: Well, where did that leave him? Because he was white. He was an African, but he was Algerian, and to all appearances, he was a white man. And he said if I define my objective as the victory of Black nationalism, where does that leave him? Where does that leave revolutionaries in Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Mauritania? So he showed me where I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary.
So I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of Black nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as Black nationalism? And if you notice, I haven’t been using the expression for several months. But I still would be hard pressed to give a specific definition of the overall philosophy which I think is necessary for the liberation of the Black people in this country....
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/070.html
Malcolm X became a conscious critic of capitalism. He said, “Show me a capitalist and I’ll show you a bloodsucker” and “You can’t have capitalism without racism.”
Malcolm X observed:
“You have whites who are fed up, you have blacks who are fed up. When the day comes when the whites who are really fed up learn how to establish the proper type of communication with those [blacks] who are fed up and they get some co-ordinated action going, you’ll get some changes. And it will take both, it will take everything that you’ve got.”
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=591
“We are living in an era of revolution, and the revolt of the American negro is part of the rebellion. ... It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of black against white or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter."
http://www.malcolm-x.org/quotes.htm
The Reverend Martin Luther King actually echoed Malcolm X, quoting Matthew 4:16: "the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned" http://bible.cc/matthew/4-16.htm but in the spirit of liberation theology, the secular social revolutionary said 4 April 1967:
"These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions" See: http://www.nathanielturner.com/commemorationmarchwashington.htm
Huey Newton in a 1968 Interview agreed with Martin Luther King about the goal of Revolution is aquisition of power, requiring a mower to overthrow the dominate power. But, at this time the Black Panther Party was still self-defined as Self-Defense, i.e. armed defense of the Black community, and Black nationalist, one tendency in Malcolm earlier Black Muslim era of speeches such as Message to the Grassroots, quoted above. At the same time, Huey and the Panthers rejected the passivity of the Nation of Islam and instead appropriated the Civil Rights Movement's tendency to direct confrontation with the bureaucratic military State, and also participated in the anti-War Movenment.
Huey Newton and the Panther's distinguish this their revolutionary nationalism that leads to socialism, multiracial solidarity in class struggle and proletarian internationalism on one hand, distinguished from reactional nationalism i.e. cultural nationalism on the other.
Says Huey P. Newton in the 1968 interview:
There are two kinds of nationalism, revolutionary nationalism and reactionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism is first dependent upon a people's revolution with the end goal being the people in power. Therefore to be a revolutionary nationalist you would by necessity have to be a socialist. It you are a reactionary nationalist you are not a socialist and your end goal to the oppression of the people.
Cultural nationalism, or pork chop nationalism, as I sometimes call it, is basically a problem of having the wrong political perspective. It seems to be a reaction instead of responding to political oppression. The cultural nationalists are concerned with returning to the old African culture and thereby regaining their identity and freedom. In other words, they feel that the African culture will automatically bring political freedom. Many times cultural nationalists fall into line as reactionary nationalists. http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/pan-afrikanism-afrocentricity/25983-huey-p-newton-interview.html
Huey Newton in a 1968 Interview agreed with Martin Luther King about the goal of Revolution is aquisition of power, requiring a mower to overthrow the dominate power. But, at this time the Black Panther Party was still self-defined as Self-Defense, i.e. armed defense of the Black community, and Black nationalist, one tendency in Malcolm earlier Black Muslim era of speeches such as Message to the Grassroots, quoted above. At the same time, Huey and the Panthers rejected the passivity of the Nation of Islam and instead appropriated the Civil Rights Movement's tendency to direct confrontation with the bureaucratic military State, and also participated in the anti-War Movenment. Huey and the Panther's distinguish this their active proclivity revolutionary nationalism that leads to socialism, multiracial solidarity in class struggle and proletarian internationalism on one hand, distinguished from reactional nationalism i.e. cultural nationalism on the other.
The Black Panther Party was a cadre of socialist revolutionaries in the Black liberation movement. Masai, as the Minister of Education of the Black Panther Party and leading Marxist-Leninist theoretician played a vital role in orienting Black socialists from militant rhetoric of Black Nationalism to class struggle, revolutionary socialist politics and internationalism. Masai, Elaine Brown, and (if I recall correctly) Erica Huggins visited North Vietnam on a mission of solidarity, and also to the People's Republic of China.
The cultural nationalists in America were being self-discredited by killing Panther leaders -such as John Huggins and Bunchy Carter - and association with "Black" capitalists" and Democratic Party "Black" politicians. These "Black Democrats" were part of the same State Power that sick police, FBI and troops to kill Black revolutionaries, targeting the socialist Black Panther cadres in particular. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark for instance.
Panthers regarded themselves as the cadres of the revolutionary vanguard party. They, together with the Black Student Unions aligned with the Panthers, as did the Black Students Alliance in L.A., and the San Francisco State College BSU in the Bay Area. Together they organized a founding convention for the formation of a multi-racial multi-ethnic National United Front Against Fascism, which Bobby Seale called a "Rainbow Coalition". Charlene Mitchell writes about this, as we shall see below.
On the other side of the class divide, the US Organization and their cultural nationalist allies on campus never engaged in class warfare - or rather they opposed those Blacks who did by denouncing the Panthers as "integrationists". These cultural nationalists had nothing in common with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, though they initially intimated that they were a "Black American" version of it. On the contrary, the cultural nationalists, who now call themselves "Afro-Centrists", consist of demagogic speeches at public meetings, where the speakers denounce "the white man" and today also Jews and Korean merchants in "the Black community", advocating Black capitalism "buy Black" campaigns. The Panthers and their allies in the Black working class communities dismissed this "Black capitalism" as "cockroach capitalism".
Masai described the cultural nationalists as "bourgeois nationalists", who had politically more in common with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang Nationalist regime than they had with Mao tse-Tung and the Chinese People's Liberation Army, or even the Chinese youth in the Red Guard. The Chinese were Marxist-Leninists, and the Panthers, and also Baraka's "Unity Press" was Marxist-Leninist-Maoist and as such were the proletarian revolutionaries in the Black liberation movement.
Though not as politically and intellectually advanced and sophisticated as the Black Trotskyists, such as in the Sparticist League, and even those in the Socialist Workers Party, yet it was the Black Maoists and Castroists who were the ones who introduced and legitimized Communism in the Black liberation movement.
The Socialist Workers Party lacked the ability, following the repressive 1950s, any more than did the Communist Party, to come out strongly and openly as Communists. Rather, it was the factions in these two "official" Communist Marxist Parties that came forth in the 1960s, that declared the legitimacy of Communism and Marxism to the American working classes and toiling poor masses.
There were three factions in the Communist Party that revolted against the "revisionist" accommodation and submission of the CPUSA to the US State, and in opposition to "Soviet revisionist" accommodation to U.S. imperialism at the international level. The Chinese Communist Party, and in fact Mao tse-Tung in particular was politically opposed to "Khrushchev"s revisionism" and doctrine of international "peaceful co-existence" with U.S. imperialism.
One faction of revolutionary communists in the CPUSA organized around Bill Epton, a Black Communist revolutionary who became a founder and leader of the China oriented Progressive Labor Party, a man admired by Malcolm X.
"William Leo Epton Jr. (January 17, 1932, New York City". February 3, 2002), more popularly known simply as Bill Epton, was a Maoist African-American communist activist. He was Vice Chairman of Progressive Labor until approximately 1970, and chairman of its Harlem branch until that position went null upon Epton's incarceration for incitement to violence in 1964. Epton was "the first person convicted of criminal anarchy since the Red Scare of 1919", reportedly for a crime of three words: "Burn, baby, burn". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Epton
Read for yourself the Court room speech by Bill Upton, "We Accuse". Also, read the messages of international solidarity with Upton, including such principled activists and writers. See: http://www.mltranslations.org/US/epton.htm
Upton was in Harlem in the streets with the oppressed people fighting oppression and violence. The other revolutionary faction in the CPUSA, which rejected Khrushchev's Revisionism, and oriented to Mao's version of Stalinism, was Nelson Peery, who is still around and as revolutionary as ever!.
"Nelson Peery (born 1925) is an American political activist and author. Peery spent over 60 years in the revolutionary movement, and has been active in the Communist Party USA (CP-USA), the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Party (POC), the Communist League (CL), the Communist Labor Party (CLP), and the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Peery
Yet, it was a relatively insignificant fellow called Michael Laski, whose parents were relatively well off who left him the money to open a book store in the heart of Watts, within which were giant posters of Mao, Stalin, Lenin and Marx- selling books from these authors who influenced most the intervention of communist literature into the Black liberation movement. This is because, among his Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist) [CPUSA (M-L]) there was of this Party of four a brilliant Black revolutionary who called himself Robere.
In the heart of the Slauson gang's territory, across the street from Edison High School, he rented a building and with an initial few folk started a live-in commune/organization which they called the "United Front". In their imaginations, more than in actuality, the four members of the CPUSA (M-L) were the class party cadre, and the United Front their "mass organization" base area.
Ndugubidi, Nubi, Naffiti, and Masai were introduced to "Marxism-Leninism" as members of this organization collective. There were about 30 members of this organization when I met them in 1966 or 67. The members had completely memorized Mao Tse-Tung's "On Contradiction", "On Practice", "Where Do Correct Ideas Come From", and "Combat Liberalism".
In 1967 or 68, the Democratic Party Black elected officials, along with the anti-communist US Organization, together with "the Sons of Watts", and other poverty pimps who worked for federal anti-poverty programs, paid of course, and other opportunists put together a "Black power conference" held at Jefferson High in South Central L.A. The United Front went to participate in the Conference, dressed in Maoist military clothing. These communist-Maoists denounced the gathering, quoting Mao that "you cannot defeat U.S. imperialism by collaborating with its agents". Masai was there among these communist protestors. Members of the cultural nationalist anti-communist, US Organization, viciously, physically attacked the United Front comrades. When they returned to the United Front building, there was a confrontation with Robere, who was forced to leave L.A. Soon the United Front dissolved.
Masai now on his own joined the BBP, and as a proficient Marxist-Leninist he rose in its ranks to become the Panther Party's Minister of Education. Functioning as a leader in the working class opposition to capitalism at the national level changed Masai, and in reciprocity with and from those changes changed the thinking in the Panther Party, which now became class-conscious Marxist-Leninists.
Huey P. Newton and the Panthers were clear in understanding the world revolution is not a race struggle, but a class struggle.
See:http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp/bpp270469_14.htm
The cadres of the Black Panther Party regarded themselves the vanguard party of Black liberation and working class revolution combined. These activists were socialist comrades who were serious about achieving the socialist objectives. They saw themselves as the Leninist Vanguard Party leading yhe Revolution, and would no more subordinate itself to the Communist Party than the Bolsheviks would to the Mensheviks.
This political seriousness about revolution engendered critical thinking and study among Panther comrades in arms, based on the praxis of their understanding of Lenin's dictum: "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement". On this practical political basis many of the Panther's cadres seriously approached social and political theory: they read, and argued passionately critical analysis of the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Antonio Gramsci, Che Guevara, Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxemburg, C.L.R. James, Eric Fromm, and Leon Kamenev; Josef Dietzgen, W.E.B. Dubois, Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James, Georgi Dimitrov, Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Nathan Hare, E.Franklin Fraiser, Oliver Cox, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Muhammad Babu, Michael Bakunin, Paulo Freire, Nicolai Bukharin, Walter Rodney, Henry Winston, and others.
The objective of the Panthers was to develope and disseminate their own revolutionary theory in praxis as they participate in the Black liberation and socialist revolutionary movements: to achieve Black liberation through working class socialist revolution. It is in this connection that the Panther's antagonism with the Communist Party must be regarded as no different than the antagonisms between the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, as equals.
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Communist Party and the Black Panther Party
by Charlene Mitchell
October 28, 2006
A NYU Symposium On the occasion of the James & Esther Jackson Papers Given to Tamiment Library
In discussing the relationship between the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party it is important to note that the Black Panther Party had a relatively short life on the national scene. The BPP was founded in Oakland, California in 1966, but didn't actually become a national organization until 1968-69, the result of a confluence of events, including the murder trial of Huey Newton, the armed Panther protest at the California State Assembly, and the publication of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. By early 1972, the Black Panther Party had shut down most of its branches and moved active members to Northern California, where they attempted to build a political base. (1) So, after 1972, the Black Panthers were essentially a local organization with little presence outside California.
These years, 1968-1972, were also years of tremendous political unrest within the United States. It was the beginning of the post-Civil Rights Movement, when African Americans were searching for directions and political vehicles to take them beyond formal legal equality. This search led to the formation of many political organizations within the African American community, socialism, Pan-Africanism, cultural nationalism, and political nationalism were ideologies that were debated within the community. At the same time the anti-Viet Nam War movement moved to the center stage of political debate within the U.S. and sparked a broad level of activism, especially among youth. The political upheaval of those years forms the backdrop for the Communist party's relationship with the Black Panther Party.
Throughout the relationship the Communist Party consistently advocated for right of the Black Panthers to exist as a legitimate expression within the African American community and within the broader political debate taking place in the U.S. A scan of the Communist Party's two newspapers, the Daily World, published in New York, and the People's World, published in San Francisco, reflect consistent, supportive coverage of the activities of the Black Panthers, beginning with their demonstration at the California State Assembly, the Huey Newton's trials and the trials of other Panther members.
At the same time the Communist Party clearly expressed its criticism of many aspects of the Black Panthers politics, ideology, and tactics. The general thrust of that critique is contained in the book Strategy 2 for a Black Agenda, written by the Communist party's chair, Henry Winston. The center of Winston's critique included four main points.
1. (1) The Panthers' designated the lumpenproletariat, or society's declassed elements, as being the leading revolutionary force in capitalist society. The Communist Party consistently held that the working class was the leading revolutionary force in capitalist society, while holding that the African American people, who are overwhelmingly working class, constitute a critical part of the U.S. working class and that the struggle against racism was central to any advance in society.
2. (2) The influence of Maoist theories on the Black Panthers' politics led them to denigrate the role of the Soviet Union and the Socialist countries in the struggle for National Liberation and the fight against imperialism and further led them to equate the international role of the Soviet Union and U.S. imperialism.
3. (3) The Black Panthers' Maoist influence, especially the ultra-leftism that is common among Maoists, led to a distorted notion of the concept of the "united front." The united front, first enunciated by the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov in the 1930s struggle against Nazi Germany, holds that the immediate tasks of Marxist-Leninists is to work to unite broad sections of the population around concrete programmatic demands that advance democratic rights. It holds that agreement on long-term goals and philosophy are not the basis for broad unity. Thus, Communists can disagree with non-communist about the necessity to destroy capitalism, but that disagreement should not hinder the ability of both forces to work for decent housing, full employment, peace, and other general democratic demands. In the words of Henry Winston, "instead of linking theory with practice, the Black Panther Party turned the concept of the united front into a sectarian caricature of Marxist-Leninist principles. (2)
4. (4) The Communist Party's initial relationship with the Black Panther Party developed in Oakland and Los Angeles before the Panthers had achieved national notoriety. A community organization called "Youth for Jobs," an offshoot of the Dubois Clubs, was formed in the Bay Area and worked with the Panthers from the beginning. Around the same time the BPP was being formed in Oakland, the Communist Party formed the Che-Lumumba Club. This was an all African American collective within the South Side section of the Communist Party in LA. It was formed to provide a political and ideological base within the Communist Party for young African Americans who were becoming politically active in the new militant movements of the mid-1960. Some of the early members of the Che-Lumumba Club who went on to play prominent roles in the Party and the Left included myself, Franklin and Kendra Alexander, and Angela Davis.
At the time there was a militant movement within the African American community that was strongly influenced by Black Nationalism. It was mainly young and they were often not accepting of people who came from multiracial organizations. People who came from multiracial or interracial organizations were often looked upon with suspicion, consequently only organizations comprised solely of black people were completely accepted. The Che Lumumba club did not exist in a political vacuum. The Che-Lumumba members made it clear that they were going to remain members of the Communist Party, but within the Communist Party they going to set up a Black collective. They were open members of the Communist Party and were tied to the Party in every way. They had representatives on the Communist Party's section committee, the district committee and national committee.
Several years later, Franklin Alexander, a founding member of the Che-Lumumba Club, remarked that, "It was the view of the Party when we created the Che-Lumumba Club, that in [that] moment of history there was need for an all-black collective in the Party to concentrate its activities in the Black community including work with its organized militants. It was a period when nationalist sentiment among our people couldn't be ignored and required a Black response to our problems." (3)
During the post-Watts Rebellion era in Southern California a significant number of African American protest organizations were active in the community. They included Che-Lumumba, the Black Panthers, Los Angeles SNCC, the Black Panther Political Party (a separate organization from the Bay Area Panthers) the US organization, the Black Congress, and others. Given the brutal nature of the Los Angeles Police Department, it was only natural that defending the African American community against police brutality was a major focus of many of these organizations. The Che-Lumumba Club also became very active in the fight against police brutality and were among the initiators of an organization called TALO, which was the Temporary Alliance of Local Organizations. TALO began following the police on night patrols and always included someone who had prestige within the African American community - judges, doctors, or ministers.
In Southern California several members of the Communist Party joined and assisted in the organization of the Los Angeles branch of the Black Panther Party. They helped them secure offices, (4) organize political education classes, and organize the community in response to actions of police brutality. However 1968 witnessed a purge within the Black Panther Party, which had succumbed to near-paranoia over police and government infiltration. In their efforts to "cleanse" their ranks they mandated that no Black Panther member could belong to any other political organization. Consequently, the two Communist Party members who had joined the Panthers eventually resigned from the BPP. (4) In December 1969, shortly after the police assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, The Los Angeles police raided the Black Panthers headquarters in South Central LA. The Panthers held off the police during a gun battle that lasted for more than four hours. During the battle, the Panthers requested members of the African American community to come and witness their surrender, hoping to forestall a police murder of their members. The Che-Lumumba Club, with other community activists, took the initiative in organizing the community to witness the arrests of the Panthers. Afterwards, members of the Communist party with the leadership of CP activist Rose Chernin, played a significant role in raising bail money and funds for the legal representation of the jailed Panther members.
The connections between the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles and the Bay area were atypical of the national relations between the two organizations. Part of this had to do with the particularity of California. Also, by 1969 the Black Panther Party was, with the exception of their survival programs, was devoted most of its time to defending its members from attacks against government forces. However, depending on local cadre in each organization, there were close contacts in other cities as the Panthers spread across the United States. For example in Chicago, Communist party leaders such as Claude Lightfoot and Ishmael Flory helped organize protests and rallies in response to the Fred Hampton, Mark Clark murders. CP lawyers who had been the legal defense for the Smith Act defendants were among the attorneys in the NY Panther 21 cases.
The Communist Party's position had always been that the Panthers were a legitimate force within the African American community and within the progressive movement as a whole, and consistently acted on that belief. In the late 1960's there was an anti-war meeting in Montreal between peace activists in the U.S. and Canada at which representatives of the Vietnamese peace movement were present. In the broader North American movement there was a debate about the role of anti-imperialist forces. There were those who wanted to display the NLF flag and others who felt that we had to demonstrate loyalty to the U.S. The Maoists took the position that to negotiate was tantamount to selling out. A few on the left including some from the Communist Party argued that all Vietnam could reasonably do at that point was to negotiate with the United States otherwise the alternative would up the ante by escalating the war. It was a long and serious debate which found its way into the Montreal conference. The conference organizer from Montreal, didn’t want to have speakers from the US or Canada who might have been accused of being terrorists. so it was a question of whether Bobby Seale, accused or not, should speak because it was feared that he might offend the broader peace forces in Canada. It became a question of what position the U.S. communist would take. We defended the right of Bobby to speak. One of our delegates proposed that we take it to the Vietnamese and ask them to help us decide this question. The Vietnamese delegation wanted Bobby Seale to speak. Bobby gave a very good speech as he discussed the relationship between racism in the US and the war being waged against the Vietnamese. Bobby whose working class background helped him to be one of the more logical thinkers in the Panthers so it was good that it was Bobby who spoke. Of course the Royal Canadian Mounted Police interrupted the Conference to challenge the legality of some of the Americans to visit Canada. We were told to either leave Canada or be arrested and then deported. Of course, we left.
As the Black Panther Party continued to come under attack the Communist Party helped to organize in their defense. In January 1970, the Communist Party initiated the organization of the Emergency Conference to Defend the Right of the Black Panther Party to Exist. This initiative had its origins in a meeting in Chicago in February 1970 attended by Angie Dickerson, Dick Gregory, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Father James Groppi, Ossie Davis, Bobby Rush (Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party; comedian and activist Dick Gregory; and representatives of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, and William Patterson and myself of the Communist Party's Black Liberation Commission. The intent of this initiative was to build a broad coalition of individuals and organizations that could unite in defense of the democratic rights of the Black Panther Party. The building of the Emergency Committee was a reflection of the Communist Party's "united front", based on organizing a large political force around political demands with which all could agree. As a representative of the Communist party, I was the main organizer of the Conference and we utilized space in the offices of the American federation of Journeymen, Crafts and Allied Industrial Unions in Chicago. The Emergency Conference was held in March 1970 with more than 500 people and included representatives from the Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Committee to defend the Bill of Rights, the Latin American Defense Organization, the United Auto Workers District 65 in New York, the Urban League, the American Friends Service Committee, the New York Hospital Workers Union, and many other labor union locals and religious organizations.
Some of the recommendations that arose from the conference were the planning of mass demonstrations, a national speaker's bureau, and a national fundraising mechanism to raise bail funds and pay for legal assistance.
Ultimately the work of the Emergency Committee was hampered by the non-cooperation of the Black Panther Party. In direct opposition to the united front concept, the Panthers demanded that they control the finances of the Emergency Committee and that the Committee endorse the Panthers political program. This was simply unacceptable in a united front organization. In Ohio, the Panthers attempted to block an Emergency Committee attempt to hold a local rally on the basis that the local Panther chapter had not "Ok'd" the meeting. The Panther leadership even withdrew from the first initiative of the Emergency Committee, which was to launch a national petition campaign. The petition protested "The savage police activities, based upon official policies of Federal, State, and City governments, [that has] resulted in innumerable beatings, frame-ups, arrests and murders of black Americans, the classical example of which is the Black Panther Party."
The petition had started with the signatures of Ruby Dee, Dick Gregory, William Patterson, Shirley Chisholm, and Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The Panthers withdrew largely based on the fact that they weren't in control of the finances. In an August 1970 personal letter to David Hilliard, then Panther National Chief of Staff, I wrote explaining, "The Continuations Committee has sought in every way to cooperate with and seek the cooperation of the Black Panther Party" and has "continually tried to help in mobilizing people for events programmed by the Black Panther Party." I further attempted to assure him that "any rumor…that the Continuations Committee or any people connected with it are using or attempting to use the repression against the Panthers for some devious, opportunistic reason" was erroneous.
It became clear that without the Panther’s cooperation there was no way the Emergency Committee could continue its work. Later that year Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party, had been accused of involvement in an attack on a courthouse in California and the Communist Party immediately went into gear toward building a broad-based united front campaign to win her acquittal. Although the Black Panther Party supported the demands for Angela’s freedom, their demand was often couched in the same narrow, sectarian tenor that marked their participation in the Emergency Committee. Thus, in a speech in Chicago in February of 1971, Huey Newton called for Angela’s freedom, but cautioned people not to financially contribute to her defense in any way that could end up in the hands of the Communist Party.(5) In a more brazen sectarian fashion, Eldridge Cleaver, writing in the Black Panther newspaper, claimed the Angela Davis Defense Committee was formed by the Communist Party "in collusion with the U.S. fascist" to divert attention, resources, and support from the trial of Bobby Seale, who was then being tried in New Haven, Connecticut for conspiracy to commit murder.
I responded to Cleaver with an open letter criticizing his anti-communism and noting that "to play that particular game of the enemy does a distinct disservice not only to Angela, but also to Bobby, Ericka [Huggins] and all political prisoners. This is not to say that there can be no differences between the CPUSA and the BPP." I outlined some of those differences, adding that California Communist Party leader Franklin Alexander had recently called for the mobilization of half a million people to protest the opening of Seale’s trial in New Haven and the Panthers had "negated that motion by insisting on absolute adherence to the program of the BPP." I added that, "we both know that this insistence bears no resemblance to the concept of [a] united front, which necessarily starts from maximum unity around…minimum issues. I concluded the letter by noting that, "The line of the Communist Party is and will continue to be that while we are determined to free Angela - Bobby, Ericka, the [NY] Panther 21, the Soledad Brothers and all political prisoners must also be free. You will find this theme in virtually all statements issued by our Party, by our comrades working in the Angela Davis defense committees, and of course by Angela herself."
The Black Panther Party made significant contributions to the struggle for African American equality in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, including their work that helped popularize the idea of socialism in the African American community. They brought needed, though often incorrectly, attention to that sector of the African American community whom capitalism had cast aside. However their efforts were often hamstrung by their ideological weaknesses – especially their narrow sectarianism, which precluded them from politically operating within a broad democratic front.
The Black Panther Party was an important part of the history of the struggles of African Americans for freedom, equality and human dignity. Theirs is a history that the youth who want to work for radical change would do well to critically study.
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(1) Forbes, Flores. Will You Die with Me. Atria Books: NY, 2006, p. 65.
(2) Winston, Henry. Strategy for a Black Agenda. P. 211.
(3) Stern, Sol. "The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee." The New York Times on the Web.
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/08/home/davis-campaign.html)
(4) Davis, Angela. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. Random House: NY, 1974, pp. 191-195.
(5) Chicago Defender. 2/22/7, p. 4.
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