As the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party approaches, the following article by Dr. Ajamu Nangwaya should be considered by those attempting to establish the Black Arts Movement Business District in Oakland. We should study the pitfalls of the BPP in ideology, organizational structure, relationship to social classes, especially the grass roots or the people on the street in particular; programs and program funding, economic independence and the united front. One thing should be clear: conditions in Oakland are critical and thus require radical solutions. Conservative approaches will not move the Movement but only hinder progress that will be slow enough as we see with BAMBD caught in the bureaucratic quagmire of Oakland City Hall politricks.--Marvin X, BAMBD
Why You Shouldn’t Romanticize the Black Panther Party
Global Research, June 04, 2016
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
(BPP). It is arguably the most revolutionary and impactful organization
created by the African-American liberation struggle. There is much that
may be learned from the legacy of the BPP in advancing today’s struggle
for freedom, justice and a world that is free of capitalism,
patriarchy, imperialism and racism.
The
BPP’s explicit commitment to revolutionary socialism was a notable
development, which serves as a contrast to the failure of many current
activists and social justice organizations to openly embrace socialism.
Well, we are not referencing Bernie Sanders’ “socialism” that is really capitalism with a human face. In Eldridge Cleaver’s On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party (Part I),
he states that the BPP was committed to Marxism-Leninism or state
socialism, while altering it to the Afrikan-American social reality. It
should be expected that the ideas of socialism will be adapted to the
concrete conditions in specific societies.
It
is not enough for the radical forces to assert that they are
anti-capitalist. That is a politically negative and vague position.
Radicals must name the political ideology to which they are committed.
If progressive individuals and organizations appreciate the BPP’s
radicalism, they need to seriously explore socialism as the antidote to
capitalism.
However,
given humanity’s experience with authoritarian or state socialism in
the former Soviet Union, the radicals of today would need to move away
from the socialism of the BPP that promotes an all-power state and
top-down leadership. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin is on-point here:
“Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without
liberty is slavery and brutality.” Revolutionary socialism must commit
itself to ending all hierarchical relations in society. The creation of
the classless, stateless and self-organized (communist) society is
impossible through the path of state socialism.
The BPP’s survival programmes
served as an excellent way for the group to implant itself among the
people as well as to organize with them. The BPP provided and/or
initiated a comprehensive and impressive range of programmes. Huey P.
Newton explains the context for these programmes:
We
recognized that in order to bring the people to the level of
consciousness where they would seize the time, it would be necessary to
serve their interests in survival by developing programs which would
help them to meet their daily needs. For a long time we have had such
programs not only for survival but for organizational purposes.
There are two things that might become obvious to the reader after going through the book The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Program.
Firstly, the programmes were not sustainable. They depended on
donations from individuals, businesses and religious organizations or
foundation funding to survive and they generated no revenue. If a
radical group gets locked into this operational mode, it might
degenerate into a social service, reformist political entity. Since
revolutionary organizations will not be funded by the state and
foundations, they must find other ways to self-finance the struggle for
liberation.
Secondly,
the BPP’s survival programmes provide a compelling case for
self-organizing the people to autonomously operate their projects,
programmes or institutions. The people should not just serve as
volunteers, advisors or clients. A central role of the organizers is to
equip the people with the knowledge, skills and attitude to collectively
address their needs. This approach would affirm in practice the slogan
“All Power to the People” as well as operationalize participatory
democracy within the ranks of the labouring classes.
Furthermore,
in the event that the revolutionary organizers and organizations are
rendered ineffective by the secret police, regular cops, the court and
prison system, as happened to the BPP, the people would be able to
continue running their programmes and institutions. The state would have
to repress the people, as a whole, in order to stop them from living
the resistance through their projects, programmes and institutions.
In
this “Age of Vulgar Identity Politics” wherein each oppressed group
retreats into the protective cocoon of its particular identity, the
BPP’s practice of solidarity could instruct us on the strategic value of
principled alliances among different people in society. Uniting the
oppressed against the forces of oppression should be seen as a positive
and essential action. In the paper Black Panther Party: 1966-1982,
Michael Carpini states that “the Black Panther [P]arty connected the
self-determinacy of blacks to the self-determinacy of other marginalized
groups such as the poor, women, and homosexuals.” The preceding
approach of the BPP offers a way forward in uniting the people who
experience exploitation.
Some
Black nationalists viewed the BPP’s alliance with largely White
organizations such as the Patriot Party, White Panther Party and Peace
and Freedom Party with suspicion. Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely
Carmichael) claimed that the BPP would play the role of cannon fodder
for the White left. Ture’s position reflects a lack of confidence in the
capacity of Afrikan revolutionaries to enter into alliances with White
organizations on an equitable and non-exploitative basis. One would not
argue that there will not be difficulties in the coalitions or alliances
between revolutionary Afrikan and White organizations. But they must
create principles of unity that will guide their actions and processes
to deal with the unavoidable problems that will emerge when people work
together.
A
problematic element of the BPP’s programme was the central role that it
gave to the lumpenproletariat as agents of revolutionary
transformation. Eldridge Cleaver channelled the BPP’s position on the
lumpen when he asserted that
“the Lumpenproletariat is the Left Wing” of the working-class in the
Afrikan-American nation and the “Mother Country” (the United States). It
argued that the working-class had embraced the values and aspirations
of capitalism and had carved “out a comfortable niche for itself.” As a
result of this development, the unionized working-class is now a part of
a “most un-revolutionary, reformist minded movement that is only
interested in higher wages and more job security.” The lumpen cannot be
the left-wing of the working-class because it has no direct relationship
with the world of work.
According
to the BPP, the isolation of the lumpen from the means of production
and the dominant institutions leaves it with “no choice but to manifest
its rebellion in the University of the Streets.” Cleaver and the BPP
viewed the urban rebellion as the defining feature of the struggle for
emancipation in the United States. This line of thought led Cleaver to
declare that “One outstanding characteristic of the liberation struggle
of Black people in the United States has been that most of the activity
has taken place in the streets.” Since the urban uprisings are episodic
and short-lived, the bulk of the organizing work among the
Afrikan-American working-class takes place in the spaces in which it
lives, works and plays. It is not the members of the lumpenproletariat
who carry out the consistent, systematic and ongoing organizing that is
the basis of effecting Afrikan liberation. It is the working-class and
its radical or revolutionary petite bourgeois allies who shoulder the
task of organizing and mobilizing the people.
Cleaver
rebuked some Marxist-Leninists when he wrote that “It can be said that
the true revolutionaries [the lumpen] in the urban centers of the world
have been analyzed out of the revolution.” There is no question about
the fact that the ruling-class sees urban insurrections as frightening
affairs and that the street becomes the theatre of the oppressed during
those infrequent moments of resistance. But Cleaver’s claim that “by and
large, the rebellions have been spearheaded by Black Lumpen,” ignored
the fact that many of the young people who actively participated in
these uprisings were members of the working-class.
According to the March 1968 issued document the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disordersthat reported on the causes behind the 1967 rebellions:
The
typical rioter was a teenager or young adult, a lifelong resident of
the city in which he rioted, a high school dropout; he was,
nevertheless, somewhat better educated than his non-rioting Negro
neighbor, and was usually underemployed or employed in a menial job. He
was proud of his race, extremely hostile to both whites and middle-class
Negroes and, although informed about politics, highly distrustful of
the political system.
The
typical participant in the rebellions were members of the
Afrikan-American working-class and that may be deduced from the fact
that he was “underemployed or employed.” It is reasonable to assume that
the lumpen-proletariat do participate in urban uprisings but given its
social characteristics, this class might simply use this festival of
resistance in the streets for its own immediate material gains.
The composition of Marx’s lumpen-proletariat, as outlined in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, was definitely not a positive or endearing description:
Alongside
decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin,
alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie,
vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley
slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni,1 pickpockets, tricksters,
gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ
grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the
whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which
the French call la bohème.
The Marxist Internet Archive lists the 21st century members of the lumpenproletariat
as “beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty
criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables… and all sorts of
declassed, degraded or degenerated elements.”
In the autobiography A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story,
Elaine Brown, former BPP Chairperson, incorrectly includes members of
the working-class (“black domestics and porters, nurses’ aides and
maintenance men, laundresses and cooks, sharecroppers, unpropertied
ghetto dwellers”) in the lumpen category. Brown demonstrates a lack of
ideological clarity on the question of the people who constitute the
working-class. But she did capture key members of the Afrikan-American
lumpen: “gang members and the gangsters, the pimps and the prostitutes,
the drug users and dealers, [and] the common thieves and murderers.”
How
realistic is the expectation that the criminalized lumpen elements,
Huey P. Newton’s “illegitimate capitalists,” will serve as agents of
liberation? If members of the lumpen are transformed into agents of the
revolution by way of methodical political education and disciplined
organizing within the working-class, they have essentially committed
“class suicide” and, as such, would no longer be lumpen.
The
BPP was ill-advised in believing that the lumpen, especially the
criminal elements, could serve as a revolutionary force. The lumpen
panders to predatory behavior, self-destructive lifestyle of the street
and “militarism.” The lumpen can become a useful part of the
revolutionary force, but only after extensive political and ideological
education. There is not even a single case, since the emergence of
capitalism, of the lumpen serving as the revolutionary force in
struggles for liberation. Samuel Farber’s essay The Black Panthers Reconsidered is a good source on the challenges of the lumpen as political actors or activists.
Radical
organizations and organizers should be wary of the BPP’s top-down
leadership approach. Kwame Ture highlights this problem in his
autobiography Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture):
From
a SNCC perspective, the organization seemed to me entirely too
hierarchical. With a quasi-military chain of command even. Not enough
serious political education instead of slogans. Also, there apparently
was no time, and absolutely no provision, for full internal discussion
within the organization. Instead, “mandates,” “orders,” and “directives”
were handed down whether or not folks agreed with or even understood
them.
In
this climate, to raise questions, even legitimate and sincere ones, was
too often seen as disloyalty or as challenging authority, an error to
be corrected with physical or ideological intimidation, expulsion, or
both… C’mon, “beat downs” may be a common gang tactic, but they are no
way to build loyalty, unity, or even discipline in a radical black
political movement.
The
BPP’s revolutionary legacy offers us many useful lessons in our
organizing work to create the just and emancipated world. We should
fully explore and draw insights from the BPP’s legacy in other areas
such as gender relations in movement organizations, practising
principled anti-imperialism, role of armed resistance in the global
North and the centrality of systematic political education in preparing
organizers. Romanticizing the contribution of the Black Panther Party
would make adoring fans of us, and not clear-eyed, unsentimental
revolutionaries.
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