I was wondering when comrade Melyn/Waistline woud enter into the discussion, and I'm glad he did.
Nobody is NOT defending the Panthers, but defense does not imply, include, require uncritical allegiance. The Panthers after all have a history, a history of their rise and fall, and that history is material, based on the interaction of their organization with the larger determinants of capitalist exploitation. So arguing that Fred Hampton, had he survived, would have built a cross-color, class-conscious organization is just not supported by that history; not by the history of the Panthers' own internal organization and its ideological expressions, and not by what followed after Fred Hampton-- if Fred Hampton was in fact capable of executing that tremendous shift in, of, and with the Panthers, then somebody else also in the Panthers, a whole bunch of somebody elses would have been able to articulate, organized, express just that same shift after Hampton's death. We are talking about, first, foremost and last, SOCIAL forces, not individual personalities. I don't think the problem was with the Panthers' reliance on guns-- I think the expression of the problem was the Panthers' attempting to monopolize the notion of armed self-defense, claim it as their property, the hallmark of a "vanguard," and then utilize the ideology of armed self-defense separated and apart from class-conscious struggles. Armed self-defense has a long, and noble, tradition among African-Americans in the US particularly as an adjunct to political, economic, social struggle after the Civil War when the demolition of Reconstruction was undertaken in the South. Mao said political power grows out of the barrel of a gun? Chalk that up to one more thing where Maoism tails after the bourgeoisie, and pre-bourgeoisie; chalk that up to one more example of commodity fetishism existing right in the core of the Chinese Revolution. I mean somebody said way before Mao "War is the continuation of politics by other means" or something like that, right? So what? Any political power can get guns. What counts is the class and the class consciousness the utilizes guns for their use value, and does not fetishize them as an independent social power. Is it realistic to argue that the Panthers' turn towards black capitalism, lumpen, and progressive Democrats was solely the result of government repression, infiltration, etc.? If that's the case, and the Panthers' own organization, ideology, had nothing to do with it... how is any revolutionary organization going to defeat government repression, infiltration? Somewhere along the line, real history has to be apprehended, criticized, captured so we can maybe avoid repeating the same old same old one more same old time. ----- Original Message ----- From: <[email protected]> ________________________________________________ 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
