In a message dated 11/8/2009 11:50:43 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) writes: >> The Black Panther Party failed, just like the SWP, the CP, and just like every other would-be wannabe revolutionary party in the history of the USA. But, the BPP was an authentic working class revolutionary organization which rose from the proletarian cauldron of Oakland, California. Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver looked around for whatever revolutionary theory they could find, and what they found was the Communist Party USA, and third worldist Maoism.<<
Reply Dear Comrade, your comment were deeply moving, insightful and fascinating. I have forwarded them to a writer’s project I am involved in. The CP did in fact abandon the struggle of the black masses and by doing such created a political vacuum in the social movement of blacks. The SWP and general Trotskyite movement never had any roots in the movement of blacks other than tailing various national leaders. This is due to a function of their ideology and political outlook. The Panther’s - as did we, emerged out of the political vacuum. Below are some notes earnestly written before reading your comments. These notes were personal and never meant for the list. Will stay in touch, preferably off line. WL. Huey’s P. Newton’s “Black Panther Party” formed, consolidated and existed within a political continuum. The immediate political landscape on which the BPP was formed was the Watts Rebellion of 1965. Watts expressed a development in the social struggle against Jim Crow segregation and police violence. Watts in turn expressed a new boundary in the social struggle earlier expressed as the 1963 Birmingham riot, where black steel workers were forced into struggle against their local fascist thugs. The link between Birmingham 1963 and Watts 1965, as a spontaneous social impulse and social consequence was mass rejection of the reality of “non-violence” as a strategy. In American history, the Watts rebellion completed the encirclement of American imperialism by the fighting colonial masses. No one sat up in meeting and argued over how to “get the masses” to reject non-violence as a strategy. Rather, these social explosions are organic and expressed the momentary collapse of the political middle or “overrunning” of all the organizations mediating relations within and between classes. Spontaneous rebellions over run all society structures of mediation as a section of the masses directly confront the state as state. The founders of the BPP - in Oakland, felt an urgency to “do something” and respond to the spontaneous impulses of the blacks to remedy and address their grievances. One of the historic grievances was and is a militant fight against police violence and fascist methods of control in the old South. The BPP and other scattered grouping throughout the country adopted armed self-defense as an intimate component of their political strategy, along with demands for community control of the police. The scope of the rebellions of the late 1950’s, 1960s and 1970s remain to be examined in totality. Somewhere I recall reading states that over 2,000 (two thousand) occurred. The Cleveland story is important and being written. In Cleveland Ohio the intensity of the armed self-defense movement, which compelled the local authority and policing powers to negotiate and stay out of areas of the city dominated by the revolutionaries, need to be presented in a similar back drop you provide. In Cleveland the revolutionaries never adopted an attitude of “bombing the workers out of the factory,” as articulated by Katherine Cleaver during this period of her youthfulness. The struggle of the industrial core of the unionized workers had peaked and was in a period of ebbing simultaneous with the rise of the Negro Peoples Movement of the fifties and early 1960s. Between 1948 and 1965, unemployment remained low and real take home pay for factory workers rose 2.1 percent a year. Although blacks were entering the lowest rung on the ladder of the industrial social order, most did not benefit as much as their Anglo counterparts and the whites at large. Reuther had consolidated his control of the UAW on the basis of war production; the promise of the GI Bill and general capital expansion as the rebuilding of Europe, rather than exploitation of the colonies of American imperialism. Thus, the working class remained split expressing conflicting spontaneous motion. This historical split is rooted in the workers completion for wages as the condition for the existence of capital. One of its forms in America has always been the color factor. The motion of the white majority was for advancement up the social ladder based on capital expansion. This produced the ideology of “go slow.” The blacks pushed hard for inclusion. The demand for an ending of Jim Crow and its destruction as pushing for entry into the system and better paying jobs exceeded the ability for advancement of the white workers seeking to enjoy the fruits of America’s post war status. Every section of the working class wanted in and reform of the system. The BPP ideology was in fact anti-working class to a degree. So was our’s in Detroit. However, none of either groups ideology was anti-proletariat, if one means the property form of bourgeois servitude. A section of the industrial workers - in the large industrial unions, were able to accumulate capital reserves. Another section of the industrial workers could never accumulate reserves and literally were dominated by the moments they could sell their labor power or "exist by the hand out of the government." No one can agree with the most reactionary and chauvinistic sector of the working class and their leaders, dominating the union movement. One section of the working class always fights another section as part of the revolutionary process. Capital rest exclusively on wage labor and the condition for wage labor - as the form of bourgeois property, is competition for wages. Competition means fighting. End (Again, this was a personal note part of an extensive collection of “bits of writings.”) ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
