The Black Panther Movement
As part of our reports on class movements in the US – to which we intend giving a continuing nature – we will refer in short to the Black Panthers first, the movement that best represents the aspiration for emancipation of the black community. The latter is involved in a daily fight against the violence of the police, which retaliates back by persecuting a social stratum with no economic weight and completely left to itself such as the lumpenproletariat.
The “Black Panther Newspaper” is the consistent echo of those clashes and the issues that they imply in terms of defending and organizing the community.
Its photos are the ones of murdered or imprisoned militants, demonstrations, clashes against the police and the destruction the cops themselves carry out, battlefields and also the enemies, meaning the pigs – policemen, that is – murdered during the skirmishes.
This fight against an enemy that always and only has the face of the “pigs”, beyond which Black Panthers are unable to see class and political determination, represents the true soul of the movement and also the cause of its progressive exsanguination in a struggle that cannot be tackled at the roots.
Black Panthers’ leaders have been deliberately and repeatedly hit by police. In fact the latter is looking for any pretext to engage in battle in order to liquidate dangerous members of the movement – something police has succeeded at many times already.
Such an episode was the attack in which Bunchy Carter (member of the “Ministry of Defense”) and John Huggins (member of the “Ministry of Information”) were killed and Elridge Cleaver (that later found refuge in Algeria) was injured.
Arrest and trial, of course with a class verdict, represent the other method. “Minister of Defense” Huey P. Newton, who is the theorist of the group, Bobby Seale and Angela Davis are among the most well‑known names that ran into raids.
Currently, it appears that US prisons are “hosting” at least 400 members of the Black Panthers. Police does also attack the party’s headquarters, as occurred during the preparations for the plenary session in Philadelphia for the “Constitutional Convention of the Revolutionary People”. Moreover, it engages in those clashes that are triggered by individual incidents, such as the mistreatment of a child or a drunkard, which soon all members of the neighborhood participate in.
All‑out war is the normal state of living of a community that sees itself as a unit in contrast with the rest of society.
Above any distinction, members of the community are unified by actual solidarity and Black Panthers have the unity of their racial group in the foreground.
They take the lead even in the most insignificant fights, without quitting for moral and legal qualms – and that is a point of honor of theirs.
They do not hesitate to defend “the criminal element” as they see it as the result of a situation of desperate oppression. In effect, the Black Panthers pose as the representatives of blacks opposed to whites.
There is definitely a theoretical limit here, but what “Marxist” party today has the courage to defend an ordinary “delinquent”, a “thug”? Or the courage to show the social connections and the aberrant class relations that produce these “asocial” elements and the individual rebellions that can only find salvation by merging into the push of an organized social revolt?
The defense of action – even the individual one – of their community’s members represents both the strength and the theoretical weakness of a movement that transcends class boundaries to reach those of racial community.
The Black Panther party does not fight for blacks as the oppressed, beaten up, thrown into a corner or impoverished proletarians – therefore more responsive to the propaganda of social revolution – they are in every way, shape or form. The Black Panther party fights for blacks in general, for the purpose of liberating black people from white oppression in general. Thus, it attributes a greater role to ethnic differences rather than class ones.
Class struggle is deemed as existing only in individual communities, almost as an internal affair of them. Black Panthers openly refer to the black lumpenproletariat, as its spirit for tenacious struggle they claim.
That is because Black Panthers see the condition of the black lumpenproletariat as the condition of black people in general, turning the former into the means of the emancipation of the black community beyond the emancipation of the working class from capital – which is the only condition for the emancipation of all oppressed strata as well as the overcoming of any “racial question”.
Without a doubt, the black community, along with several other racial minorities, is the element of the American society whose members are the most exploited and worst treated.
Among those are laborers with no attribute other than their raw labour power, the unemployed that the “technological progress” produces and reproduces continuously, those that are only occasionally employed, the “godless and amorals”, the “unsociable” and the “thugs”, those with the “wrong genes” “crime-prone”, et cetera.
But this community cannot be looked at as a community of its own, an independent group, by any means. It cannot be separated from society as a whole, otherwise we fall into utopia on one hand and into a reactionary picture on the other.
Black proletarians and lumpen are left alone in a struggle that only now and then receives support from other workers in a country where having white skin equals receiving favorable treatment in workplaces and in society.
During a certain phase (the one of the disintegration of class, political and economic organizations) that privilege is also defending itself from the competition represented by those “brothers” of the same skin, in the application of the inhuman law that dominates the capitalist world of man on man struggle.
It is thoroughly understandable then that black proletarians and lumpen do not see their white class comrades as their brothers. That is all the more so because the bourgeois State has long figured out that by fomenting racial hatred it wards off any class solidarity capable of shaking that said State to its foundations.
In such a situation, it is only fair that should collect the greatest contempt those who under the guise of the political absence of white wage workers come to the conclusion that black workers must sit and “wait”.
Combative proletarians, even in a small vanguard and regardless of the color of their skin, must act in order to drag behind the undecided strata. They must show the latter the necessity of organizing in order to obstruct the very development of capitalism, its crushing pressure upon the class that is selling its labor power and to ultimately break down capitalism’s domination itself.
The fact that the majority of such an organization, due to a number of circumstances, is temporarily made of black wage workers must not change the non‑racial character of the organization itself.
However, the American working class has stayed for too long without its political leadership to be able to overcome the enormous difficulties opposing the development of such a process. It has stayed for too long without having to face the very hard struggle that is not only against capital itself but the one of also deciphering its own class interests while enduring painful sacrifices and attempts destined to failure.
The price that the American working class will inevitably have to pay will be that of momentarily walking in the footsteps of improper ideologies, not appropriate for the proletarian class struggle. The Black Panther movement suffers in a decisive way from this tragic isolation and its mistake is to consider that isolation definitive.
Unable to come to an analysis of the current situation on its own – a result of that counter-revolution’s victory that involves a period of several decades and an area of worldwide extension – the Black Panther party sought an agreement with the official Communist Party of the United States, totally anchored on the positions of Stalinism and worse. Inevitably, the agreement then came to a breaking point because of the very different attitude towards the use of violence between the two.
The search for a contact with more combative forces has therefore led the Black Panthers to meet the so‑called “Marxist-Leninists” led by China on one side and the “Third World’’ in general on the other. Finding themselves in the same condition of oppression by the same imperialism apparently, all of them are waging a national war against the United States.
It is with this hybrid contribution – which mistakes the struggle for independence (more or less real) from the bond of imperialism with that of class emancipation – that Black Panthers have “enriched” their previous positions.
Here, the theory that puts on the same level the struggle of the black lumpenproletariat and the one of the colonial peoples is born. That said theory establishes a link between the home country and the colony on one hand and between the white metropolis and the black colony within the same state on the other, concluding that there is «a “Mother Country’ Working Class” and a “Working Class from the Black Colony”», with its own and divergent interests.
Therefore, it is stated the need for distinct and even opposing organizations, to the point of postulating actual solidarity between white workers and their ruling, bourgeois class on one hand, and between the different black strata on the other.
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In short, against the class struggle the Black Panthers propose struggles of “communities of color.”
To tell the truth, the cause for such attitudes is placed upon white proletarians, «a parasite upon the heritage of mankind». In part, such a responsibility exists, however it is seen from a wrong perspective and analysis.
On the other hand, it appears that Black Panthers have never considered class solidarity if not for their own community’s interests, not considering to merge the latter with the general interests of the working class.
As we have seen, the Black Panthers’ appeal is also not to the working class but to the lumpenproletariat in general and the black one in particular.
Cleaver proudly states in ”On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party”: “We are Lumpen. Right on. The Lumpenproletariat are all those who have no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of capitalist society.
That part of the ‘Industrial Reserve Army’ held perpetually in reserve; who have never worked and never will” et cetera.
The attempt is to adapt a theory and a tactic fitting this social category, seeking in the very historical and social reasons of the political impotence of the lumpenproletariat a way and an energy that are both new and pristine. The lumpenproletariat does not have the possibility of boycotting production with strikes and being forced to struggle in the streets it should therefore be more revolutionary and it should have «no immediate oppressor except perhaps the Pig Police with which it is confronted daily». It is not understood that also implicates its fatal defeat.
The colony-metropolis relation is quite different. The colony is also in certain relation of dependence from the imperialist country, but at the same time it is a producer and a supplier of specific products, usually raw materials, and in some cases is able to conduct real blackmail. Often, it is well disposed to reach agreements with imperialism for the exploitation of its own proletariat.
Therefore, the colony does not have the characteristic, described by Cleaver for the lumpenproletariat, of being «locked out of the economy».
Far from it! Colonies complain of being cut off from global trade, which is quite another matter.
Furthemore, it can also be noted that equally erroneous is the application of guerrilla struggle as a form of armed struggle.
For the colony, guerrilla struggle finds its origin in the fact that the struggle cannot be pushed to the point of destroying bourgeois relations but is only a way of exerting certain pressure and changing those relations’ direction.
On the contrary, we know very well that the class movement has nothing to lose but its chains and therefore organizes itself in a real war that must lead to the total control of political power (therefore it does not admit any local autonomy within it).
Black Panthers’ weakness is definitely theory and that jumps out when their programmatic points are taken in consideration.
Their program is not even a political one, it is just an array of points that should serve for the mobilization of the masses.
Their “platform and program” – that is from the October of 1966 but whose demands have stayed the same up to this day – deserves the definition, in the most benign of cases, of traditional reformism that is backed by a form of guerrilla struggle.
The ten points of the “platform and program” demand, for the black community, freedom, full employment, decent housing, education appropriate to its history and race (a particularly retrograde point), exemption from military service, cessation of police persecution, freedom for black prisoners, courts with black juries, a plebiscite under the supervision of the United Nations (sic!) to establish the will of the black community.
Finally, the end of the capitalist plunder is demanded and the fulfillment of the promise of a hundred years ago that is the payment of “40 acres and 2 mules” as compensation for slave labor and mass suppression (a payment also accepted in currency!).
What Black Panthers are missing is the minimum political and economic analysis of the way to achieve emancipation (and what is a program if not the formulation of theses conveying such analyses?).
Theirs are just a series of demands to the ruling state, conceived as the latter’s duties. Those demands might mobilitize and push groups of exploited towards the use of violence, but cannot change the essence of class relations except on paper.
Indicative, in this regard, is that Black Panthers went as far as writing petitions to the United Nations that should, “on the basis of simple justice” conduct “universal action, including political and economic sanctions, against the U.S.”, guilty of the crime of genocide as defined by the United Nations in the General Assembly of December 9, 1948.
One could think of those petitions as a pure, simple but very naive maneuver to make the black question “public”, but the conclusion of the platform-program above summarized adds the appropriate “theoretical” background to it: «all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness».
Rights that call for the usual, corrective interventions from the more or less sovereign “people” when, as in classic bourgeois-democratic thinking, a tyrant arises or said rights are in any case trampled.
The intention of the movement that opposes open violence to the mystified violence of the democratic and racist state of the United States is indeed to act within the very framework of this society, limiting its demands to just a certain autonomy for its own people.
Admirable for its open‑faced battle, nevertheless the movement proceeds on ambiguous and essentially ahistorical foundations.
That very last aspect, one that sees a tie to the experiences of the “heroic” North Korean and Vietnamese peoples, is the retrograde part of the movement.
A part that breaks down, entering into inherent contradiction, as class struggle develops and regains its real content by placing the proletariat (no matter what skin!) as the true protagonist of class struggle. The proletariat is the class suppressing any pretense of autonomy in all areas, from school, “justice”, “military service”, family to political and economic state organization because everything is merged in a single unstoppable movement. That is the movement of the exploited class as a whole and led by a single party.
Black proletarians and lumpenproletarians are hindered by a racial struggle whose way to a real enfranchisement in given economic and social conditions is shut before its very eyes. However, there is no doubt that their painful experience will be able to contribute with its continuous and generous sacrifices, the murders committed by the defenders of “order” and the resulting outrageously repressive trials.
And the growth of reverse racism itself (all of these things may well lead to a slow bleeding of proletarian energies) will contribute to open the eyes of white and non‑white proletariat and generate a political vanguard capable of unifying in its ranks all proletarians without discrimination of race. That is the wish and also the tribute that we express for the sake of blacks in their courageous struggle and for the sake of the whites in torpid slumber as well!