Panther

Posted December 22nd, 2007 by Anonymous

Foundations

In 1965, Huey Newton was released from jail, and, with his friend from Oakland City College, Bobby Seale, had joined a black power group called the Revolutionary Action Movement, which had a chapter in Oakland and followed the writings of Robert F. Williams. Originally from North Carolina, Williams published a newsletter called The Crusader from China, where he fled to escape kidnapping charges. RAM was often seen as extremely violent; in 1965, three east coast RAM members were charged with conspiring to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument. The Oakland chapter consisted mainly of students, and were not interested in this more extreme form of activism. Newton and Seale's attitude was more militant, and the pair left RAM searching for something more meaningful to them .

Around this time, the pair were working at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center and they also served on the advisory board. In an effort to deal with police brutality, the advisory board obtained five thousand signatures in support of the city council setting up a police review board to review complaints of police brutality. Newton was also taking classes at the City College and at San Francisco Law School, and both were active in the North Oakland Center. Thus the pair had a large number of connections and friends with whom they talked up the new organization they had in mind. Inspired by the success of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and Stokely Carmichael's calls for separate black political organizations, they wrote their initial platform statement, the ten-point program, with the help of Huey's brother, Melvin, and decided on a uniform of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, Black Berets, and openly displayed loaded shotguns .

Theory

With the death of Malcolm X in 1965, the Black Panther Party saw as its purpose to further the African American civil rights movement and to fill what it perceived to be the void in leadership among the African American community. Although it eventually saw the involvement of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader, Stokely Carmichael, the party initially rejected the integrationist stance of Martin Luther King, and rejected compromise with the power structure. The Black Panthers focused their rhetoric on revolutionary class struggle, taking many ideas from Maoism. The party turned to the works of Karl Marx, Lenin, and Mao to inform the manner in which it should organize, as a revolutionary cadre organization. In consciously working toward such a revolution, they considered themselves the vanguard party, “committed to organizing support for a socialist revolution.”

However, the party did not fully agree with Karl Marx's analysis of the so-called lumpenproletariat. Marx felt that this class lacked the political consciousness required to lead a revolution. Newton, on the other hand, was inspired by his reading of post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon and his belief that the lumpen was of utmost importance, saying about these "brothers off the block" that, “If you didn't relate to these cats, the power structure would organize these cats against you.” Marx’s conception of the lumpenproletariat was a group that stands on the very margins of the class system because they are not wholly integrated into the division of labor. They do not accept the idea of making their living by regular work. Thus, their position within society is not marked by the fact that they are unemployed but rather by the fact that they do not seek employment:

Though they may be swept up by a proletarian revolution and are entirely capable of “the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices”, they are equally capable of “the barest banditry and the foulest corruption”, and are much more likely to play the part of “a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” Essentially, they are a malleable populace that is generally tempted into service of sight, as opportunistic and exploitative as the finance aristocracy. “The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society”, Just like the aristocracy, the lumpen live off society, rather than producing for it, existing as an entirely parasitic force.

The Black Panthers' basic interpretation of the lumpenproletariat generally conforms to that of Marx. For Eldridge Cleaver, the lumpenproletariat were those who had “no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of a capitalist society.” His wife Kathleen Cleaver echoed a similar sentiment, stating that the black lumpenproletariat had absolutely no stake in industrial America: “They existed at the bottom level of society…outside the capitalist system that was the basis for the oppression of black people.”

Yet, the Panthers did not propose that the entire black American population constituted a post-modern, race-based lumpenproletariate in and of itself. Instead, the Party's analysis suggested that there existed a significant "underclass" -- both urban and rural in locus -- within the masses of the oppressed whose removal from the primary means of production left that class particularly apt to engage subversive activities, both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary in potential impact. The Panthers included two distinct groups within the lumpen. Firstly the “industrial reserve army”, who could not find employment, being unskilled and unfit, displaced by mechanization and never invested with new skills, forced to rely on Welfare or receiving State Aid. They consisted of ‘the millions of black domestics and porters, nurses’ aides and maintenance men, laundresses and cooks, sharecroppers, unpropertied ghetto dwellers, welfare mothers’. The second group were the so-called “Criminal Element”, who had similarly been locked out of the economy, and consisted of the ‘gang members and the gangsters, the pimps and the prostitutes, the drug users and dealers, the common thieves and murderers’.

The “Criminal Element” quite evidently displayed the key characteristics of the Lumpen, the parasite, “existing off that which they rip off”. However, the “Industrial Reserve Army” poses something of a problem, since a large proportion of this group consists of the working poor (although their jobs are “irregular and usually low paid’ they are the working poor all the same). But Marx explicitly stated that the lumpenproletariat formed “a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat.” However, the Panthers viewed the line that separated the proletariat and the lumpen as tenuous and fragile, and this resulted in a blending of the two classes. Indeed, some historians have argued that the Panthers “envisioned a lumpen more akin to a subproletariat class” that lacked the parasitical aspects of the traditional lumpen sector.

Nationalism, internationalism and "intercommunalism"

The leadership of the Black Panthers were characterized by internal contradictions on the type and kind of black nationalism it wished to embrace. While Bobby Seale, in his book Seize the Time, described the foundation of the organization as being based on "black nationalism", he also described the evolution of the organization into an instrument adapting to counter what it perceived to be social oppression on an international scale. Whereas the Panthers had been founded as an institution interested in social justice for African Americans, Seale attempted to reform it to an institution for worldwide social justice, regardless of the nationality or ethnicity of the oppressed people. Internationalist mentality had strategic advantages in the alliances it could form in pursuing social change with similar like-minded organizations. Newton, Seale, and their supporters within the party eventually came to reject cultural nationalists as "black racists", and dubbed those nationalists' brand of cultural nationalism as narrow and bourgeois "pork-chop nationalism". Alluding to the black nationalist US Organization and Maulana Karenga, Black Panther Fred Hampton said, "olitical power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun." ("Political power flows from the barrel of a gun" is an early quote by Mao Zedong.)

Newton and Seale attempted to work in coalition with organizations representing oppressed communities in the United States (many of which took inspiration from the Black Panthers), as well as with other radical groups with whom they felt they had common interests. These included the Puerto Rican Young Lords,under the leadership of Jose (Cha-Cha) Jimenez, who spent time in training sessions at Panther headquarters in Oakland, CA, and who with Preacherman of the white Appalachian Young Patriots joined with Fred Hampton in Chicago, and together formed the first Rainbow Coalition in 1969. Other groups with whom the Panthers also worked included the predominantly white youth movements Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Youth International Party (Yippies); the Chicano Brown Berets; the California Peace and Freedom Party; and the post-Stonewall riot formed group, the Gay Liberation Front.

In Huey P. Newton's speech at Boston College 1970, speaking as the head of the Black Panther Party, he declared that the party would "disclaim internationalism and become intercommunalists". What Newton envisioned was the end of all "states", all nations, and rather a worldwide social framework of "interdependent socialist communities"; communalism rather than nation alism. The Party recognized that all over the world there were "op

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