The world of the Black Panther party might have been constructed by Kurt Vonnegut out of bits and pieces of Dostoevsky. It is a world of double and triple agents, radical rhetoric and reactionary consequences, mindless violence and breakfast-for-children programs, cop killers and killer cops, penny-ante stickups and Park Avenue fund-raising soirées, chiliastic impulse and unforgiving discipline. That the Panthers are a world unto themselves is easily confirmed by a reading of their weekly paper, the Black Panther, with its crude cartoons depicting pigs in police uniforms being shot to pieces, its ominous purge lists complete with the name and photograph of each victim and an account of his heresy, and the inevitable pages of thunderously dull quotation from Kim II Sung or some other “Third World leader. Yet the circulation of that unreal journal exceeds a hundred thousand, and if it is true that its readership is composed mainly of white New Leftists, it is also true that among Negro youth, both on the campus and in the streets, the Panther mystique is pervasive and highly influential.
The rapid rise to prominence of a group as exotic as the Black Panther party poses a formidable challenge to analysis—a challenge that is not lessened by the not unlikely possibility that the party will lose its current fight for survival. From an organizational standpoint, the Black Panther party today hardly exists. Its ranks have been depleted by a wave of internal purges and a ban on new recruitment by the national headquarters; the party’s leadership has been decimated by lethal confrontations with the police and rival nationalist groups and by legal prosecutions against the survivors. Nevertheless, the fame and prestige of the Black Panther party have never been greater. Competing groups of militants and nationalists grudgingly acknowledge the “vanguard” role which the Panthers play in the struggle for “black liberation.” New Left leaders see in the Panthers an opportunity to re-program their own faltering movement by concentrating on the issue of race rather than on foreign policy. New Left young people in general idolize the Panthers because they embody every adolescent stereotype of the revolutionary. And, as Tom Wolfe has so wittily discovered, the beautiful people have found them to be perfect partners in the current game of “radical chic.”1
At the other end of the spectrum, the right wing has also discovered the Panthers. For a couple of years now, California’s Ronald Reagan has been able to raise his Gallup ratings five or ten points by publicly attacking the Panthers every few months, and Attorney General Mitchell has done his best to cooperate on a national level. The pattern is depressingly familiar: the right wing’s hysterical attacks have the effect of legitimating the most undemocratic, unrepresentative, and extreme elements of the Left; these elements return the favor by engaging in the kinds of violent rhetoric and actions that are guaranteed to frighten solid majorities of Americans into the conservative camp.2
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What is the Black Panther party? It is a totalitarian organization of black nationalists which identifies with branches of world Communism. Its base is the Negro lumpenproletariat but it is intimately allied with the collegiate New Left. It is anti-Semitic, sometimes openly, sometimes by implication and innuendo.3 It is highly theatrical and publicity-minded, but it means business and is after power. It is a racket, but also much more than a racket.
The Panthers are organized along strict paramilitary lines. Power in the organization is concentrated wholly at the top. The party has never held an election of its officers, never held a convention, and never debated basic policy. Individual members have no rights with respect to the party bosses. They are liable to summary purge, with no right of appeal, for any reason deemed appropriate. No internal factions, or even differing points of view, are tolerated. The only form of criticism permitted is self-criticism; that is to say, the leadership has the right to criticize the rank and file, and the rank and file has the right to criticize itself.4 Panther leaders have been frank to explicate their basic political values. In his book, Seize the Time,5 Bobby Seale invokes the age-old comparison of the righteous party and the state it creates with an organic entity in which the leadership corresponds to the “brain” and the membership to the lesser organs. Justice and democracy then consist of the smooth and efficient carrying out of the orders of the head by the hands, feet, and so forth. It is clearly “unnatural” for hands and feet to usurp the brain’s function; accordingly, the duty of those not in leadership is absolute obedience.
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But if the fundamental structure of the party is unoriginally totalitarian, in other respects the Panthers are a very distinctive group. Although the party itself is only about four years old, neither its character nor its development can be understood without reference to the recent history of the Negro movement as a whole, and more specifically to the failure of the civil-rights movement to make a successful transition from the South to the North.
Throughout the 50’s and early 60’s, the Negro movement consisted mainly of the struggle to extend constitutional principles, which already prevailed in every other section of the nation, to an island of backwardness: the American South. This struggle resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 which, together with the accumulated decisions of the federal courts, placed segregation outside the pale of legality. It was a brilliant victory but it also posed a new and more difficult challenge to the movement. Bayard Rustin summed up the nature of this new challenge in the phrase “From Protest to Politics,” the title he gave to a landmark article in the February 1965 COMMENTARY. After reciting the now familiar litany of statistics documenting Negro poverty in the U.S., Rustin said:
These are the facts of life which generate frustration in the Negro community and challenge the civil-rights movement. At issue, after all, is not civil rights, strictly speaking, but social and economic conditions. Last summer’s riots were not race riots; they were outbursts of class aggression in a society where class and color definitions are converging disastrously. How can the (perhaps misnamed) civil-rights movement deal with this problem?
Rustin noted that the beginnings of an answer to his question were visible in the evolution of “the civil-rights movement . . . from a protest movement into a full-fledged social movement. . . . It is now concerned not merely with removing the barriers to full opportunity but with achieving the fact of equality.” Such a movement had to adopt a new program, stressing full employment, abolition of slums, and massive investments in education. And it had to adopt a new strategy to implement this program—a strategy based not on the protest tactics of the civil-rights phase (which had been effective precisely because the demand for equal opportunity did not challenge existing economic relationships) but on a political thrust aimed at forging alliances with labor, the other ethnic minorities, and liberals within the Democratic party. The approach Rustin advocated—“coalition politics”—envisioned a realignment of the major parties, with the Negro movement playing a catalytic role. The American people were to be given a clear choice between a Democratic party bound to a liberal program emphasizing full employment through public works and job training, national economic planning, federal aid to education, attractive public housing—“all this on a sufficiently massive scale to make a difference”—and a Republican party of “refugee racists and economic conservatives.” Rustin, with the evidence of the 1964 Presidential election behind him, had few doubts about how the American people would respond if given this kind of choice between clear-cut alternatives.
It was not to be. A variety of issues, which Rustin had no way of anticipating, arose whose effect was to divide rather than to consolidate the coalition he expected to take over the Democratic party. Chief among these divisive issues, of course, was the war in Vietnam. But even before the war escalated, there were clear indications that the civil-rights movement itself was going to face grave difficulties in making the transition “from protest to politics.” Beginning in those sections of the civil-rights movement which were at the militant forefront of the Southern struggle—SNCC and CORE—there arose a rebellion against the coalition strategy urged by Rustin, a rebellion most pungently articulated by Stokely Carmichael, whose demand for “black power” seized the imagination of thousands of Negro middle-class youth across the country. Soon the black-power slogan had deepened into a more comprehensive ideology of black nationalism, exclusivity, and separatism. Almost overnight, SNCC and CORE, which had formerly measured “militancy” by the degree of commitment to integrationist ideals, reversed themselves and now equated militancy with fervid denunciations of liberals, honkies, middle-class Jews, and white America.
To a considerable degree, the new nationalist impetus came from exactly where the black-power advocates said it did: the need for an assertion of black independence and pride after centuries of racial oppression. Other influences, like the liberating effect on American Negroes of sovereign, self-determining African nations, played their role as, in a different way, the summer ghetto riots also did. But whatever may have caused it, the turn from civil rights to black nationalism effectively torpedoed efforts by Rustin and others to help move the Negro movement beyond the emphasis on formal legal equality to overt political action for social and economic equality.
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Today, when we are accustomed to finding black nationalism in open or tacit coalition with the most fantastic array of white groups, it is well to bear in mind that “black power” began its career as a “radical”—even “revolutionary”—critique of the very idea that blacks could profitably ally with anyone but themselves. Rustin’s projection of economic equality as the next stage of the Negro struggle was based on his perception that after the passage of the civil-rights acts, the great question for black Americans would be, “If we’re so free, how come we’re so poor?” His answer to that question entailed the formulation of a new strategy for the Negro movement, aimed at energizing a majority coalition of Americans around economic issues—jobs, schools, housing, and the like—to make equality not merely a legal condition but a social fact.
In this context, the “radical” rhetoric of “black power,” with its fierce attacks on integrationists, labor unions, liberals, white ethnic minorities, and democratic socialists, its effort to substitute questions of identity and pride for a unifying economic program, and its divisive obsession with violence, played directly into the hands of those with the most to lose from economic change—to be blunt, the conservative rich. Black nationalism thus provided a “left-wing” ultra-militant cover for a major retreat by what had been leading sections of the Negro movement from the fight for economic equality. Like most counterrevolutions, it was germinated within the ranks of the popular movement itself—indeed, among its militants.
Paul Feldman, in a prophetic article (“The Pathos of ‘Black Power,’” Dissent, January-February 1967), sensed the essentially conservative implications of the black-power movement almost before business itself did:
In a number of its implications, “Black Power” is a conservative position. I say this not merely, or even primarily, because William Buckley expressed agreement with Floyd McKissick’s defense of “Black Power” on TV. Nor merely because the right-wing Free Society Association, headed by Barry Goldwater, announced that “Black Power could become a constructive political force under responsible leadership,” since “it has at least the virtue of calling upon the Negro to think and do for himself.” No; “Black Power” is conservative because it signifies a turning inward of the Negro revolution, a form of economic separatism which, under the best of circumstances, would leave the ghetto intact and still at the mercy of overwhelming social forces.
The affinities between business conservatism and black nationalism are both programmatic and organizational. They reveal themselves most blatantly in the “black capitalism” boondoggle currently being perpetrated by CORE and the Nixon administration; but the thrust of the alliance—for such it became—was plain even before it “went public,” specifically in the general indifference of black nationalists to the economic plight of the Negro masses—or rather, in their redefinition of the problem as “white racism” rather than poverty (which after all affects many more whites than blacks) and economic exploitation (which affects a majority of Americans and degrades them all). “Going it alone” became the proud watchword of the nationalists; slogans like “black power,” “black is beautiful,” and “burn baby burn” were meant to dissolve Negro self-hate and instill the self-confidence which was necessary for blacks to pull themselves up by their “bootstraps.” This of course was but a black version of what the economic elite has always preached to the poor. Once one accepts the logic of this approach, social programs aimed at collective upward mobility through full employment, quality public education, better housing, and so on, take on the appearance of bureaucratic doles, patronizing handouts, and insidious efforts to undermine individual moral character.
The conservative attitudes I have been describing have had their traditional home among those business forces which have opposed the trade-union movement, the New Deal, major spending in the public sector, efforts at a more equalitarian redistribution of national wealth, and democratic planning for social priorities. They originate, obviously, in the business community’s stake in an economic order which perpetuates its wealth and power. How what amounts to a free-enterprise ideology found its way into the “militant” wing of the Negro movement and was thereby miraculously transformed into “radicalism” must surely rank as one of the great hoaxes of 20th-century American politics.
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The first indication of a receptivity to the idea of black power in circles which had not previously been notable for their sympathy with anything radical was the deluge of daily TV coverage suddenly awarded to the incendiary rhetoric of Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and other leaders of organizations which even then had dwindled to no more than a few hundred—in some cases, a few dozen—members. Similarly, businessmen who a few months earlier had been nodding their heads in agreement with a New York Times editorial which criticized the first New York school boycott on the grounds that its demands, though perhaps just, required unrealistically expensive reforms and would therefore only “alienate white people,” did an about-face and began patronizing whole organizations of professional alienators of white people. Thus the first major national conference of black nationalists, held in Newark in the summer of 1967, was funded by a group of “concerned” national corporations headed by American Telephone and Telegraph (this was the conference which produced the 13-point definition of Black Power, one of whose more infamous items referred to the “Imperialist Zionist war” in the Middle East, while disclaiming any implication of anti-Semitism). At the same time, flocks of black “militants” were being signed on to lucrative positions as “consultants” to the billion-dollar foundations.
There is no need to imagine a manipulative conspiracy to derail the civil-rights movement. The point is that a powerful affinity existed from the beginning between the black nationalists and the business Establishment, and each side did its share in translating that affinity into an alliance. Business—reeling from the massive defeat inflicted upon its party in the 1964 elections, increasingly apprehensive about the nearly unanimous support being given by Negroes to the Democrats, and fearful of the possibility that the Negro movement, in making the transition from civil rights to social and economic equality, might spark a full-scale realignment of the party structure, with all the grave consequences for the economic status quo which that development would entail—was definitely in the market for a strategy to defuse the Negro revolution. The “militants”—increasingly frustrated with the failure of their direct-action tactics to affect social and economic realities, and not so enamored of the type of change which might interfere with their own middle-class aspirations anyway—wanted desperately to get themselves acknowledged as the legitimate representatives and spokesmen of the Negro people as a whole. The militants provided business with a radical-sounding cover for its conservative influence; business provided the militants with glamor and money. It was one of those fascinating alliances into which the parties stumble, half unconsciously and half by design, and which are the stuff of major turning points in politics.
This particular alliance between big business and middle-class Negroes found its quintessential expression in the demand for “community control” of various ghetto institutions. Feldman, in talking about Stokely Carmichael’s demand for black control of the ghetto, dismissed the idea as “black utopian socialism.” He of course had no way of anticipating that business would rush in to subsidize the nationalists, together with their program, as a means of setting the ghetto community, the ethnic minorities, and the labor movement at each other’s throats. Yet that is exactly what happened in New York City in the terrible fight over the schools.6
A final aspect of black nationalism that deserves comment is the little psychodrama of threat and capitulation that passes for “confrontation” between “irreconcilable militants” armed with “non-negotiable” demands, and “terrorized” Establishments which always seem to be accommodating the extremists in order to ward off that ever-threatening race war lurking in the wings. Close observation usually reveals that the irreconcilable militants rarely demand anything which might produce tangible gains for the people of the ghetto—things like more jobs, better housing, or more schools and teachers. Usually they demand things which will produce tangible gains for the irreconcilable militants—things like administrative control of the school system, with its extensive patronage opportunities, or autonomous black studies programs, or “reparations” for 400 years of Negro suffering which have a tendency to disappear into the pockets of the recipients. As to the terrorized Establishments, they have a decided inclination to sacrifice other people’s rights and funds rather than their own; thus, to “keep Harlem cool,” New York’s Mayor is willing to concede the jobs of union teachers, while to “save the university” a president will liquidate the faculty’s academic freedom.
The threat-capitulation psychodrama is important to the maintenance of black nationalism for several reasons. It disguises the paternalistic relationship between the conservative business Establishment and the black nationalists by maintaining the fiction that the militants have forced the Establishment to make concessions that it would not otherwise make. It heightens the prestige of the militants and their nationalist ideology within the Negro community: “Say what you will, they get results.” And it legitimizes threat, intimidation, and violence as political tactics—rarely employed, to be sure, against the hand that feeds, but quite useful in disciplining dissenters from the nationalist orthodoxy and as shock weapons against political enemies in the white community.
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Once unleashed, reactionary forces, like their revolutionary counterparts, tend to pyramid on one another, often in ways unintended by their original authors. In providing financial and moral support for the rise of black nationalism, the business Establishment played a vital role in the subversion of the Negro movement and helped set the stage for the next major development:
So Huey suggested to the central group that we bring these brothers off the block, openly armed, on to the campus and bring the press down. We could reach the community (because the press would be hungry for it) and snow them, on Malcolm X’s birthday, May 19, that Malcolm X had advocated armed self-defense against the racist power structure and show the racist white-power structure that we intend to use the guns to defend our people. All these cultural nationalists, these underground RAM bastards, all of them, were scared and rejected it. . . . The only people hanging on to it were Huey P. Newton leading it and me—following Huey P. Newton because I dug my brother Huey, because I felt I knew what the hell he was talking about, because at this time, he was explaining to me that you implement through practice, not just through a bunch of words, what Fanon was talking about. . . .
This is when we really, really, began to pick our bone with these cultural nationalist cats. . . . They accused us of stealing money, and then rejected this idea about the guns and arming the people. They started accusing us, and they were trying to act bad on the campus like they were bad dudes off the block. You get these cultural nationalists that think they’re bad, think they’re badder than anybody else. So Huey says, “If they think they’re bad, we’re going to get our shit” (Seize the Time, Bobby Seale, pp. 30—31).
It was frustration with the endless “jiveass bickering,” the violent posturing, and the pseudo-revolutionary plotting of middle-class black nationalism that finally drove Huey P. Newton, acknowledged “genius” of the Black Panther party, off the campus of Merritt Junior College and onto the streets of Oakland, California. It was a tremendous leap, one that wrenched black nationalism free of its umbilical connection with the white bourgeoisie and the Negro middle class. By recasting black nationalist ideology on flexibly racialist, rather than racist, grounds, the Black Panthers preserved the dynamism of black nationalism while breaking through its parochialism. By freeing black nationalism of the Negro middle class, they transformed it into a mobilizing ideology of the black lumpenproletariat. Huey P. Newton’s accomplishment required the most reckless courage and a superb intelligence, as well as the most appalling amorality and cynicism.
The lumpenproletariat is the concentrated refuse of society. Economists and ideologues may wonder why an affluent country like America should tolerate unemployment on the level necessary for such a class to accumulate, but there can be little serious dispute about its social character. Occupying an underworld in which necessities are scarce and amenities absent, the lumpenproletariat acquires every conceivable corruption and vice. Atomization, the precondition for the rise of a totalitarian movement in society at large, is the permanent condition of life within the lumpenproletariat, where each individual must struggle to survive and to escape at every other individual’s expense. In such a situation, the simplest and most basic social bonds dissolve. Trust and loyalty—even among friends and family—are impossible luxuries, and, in the psychopathic transvaluation wrought by lumpenproletarian realities, come to be looked upon as manipulative devices. The characteristic mentality corresponding to this mode of life is the “hustle”; the characteristic group, the juvenile gang. The glamorized route out of the lumpenproletariat is the kind of anti-social behavior that typically consists of either the most primitive exploitation of other members of the class, or predatory attacks on the society which excludes: the pimp or the thug.
Huey P. Newton knows all this and accepts it. In a poignant essay entitled “Fear And Doubt,” he writes:
The lower socio-economic Black male is a man of confusion. He faces a hostile environment and is not sure that it is not his own sins that have attracted the hostilities of society. . . . As a man, he finds himself void of those things that bring respect and a feeling of worthiness. . . .
It is a two-headed monster that haunts this man. First, his attitude is that he lacks innate ability to cope with the socio-economic problems confronting him, and second, he tells himself that he has the ability but he simply has not felt strongly enough to try to acquire the skills needed to manipulate his environment. In a desperate effort to assume self-respect, he rationalizes that he is lethargic: in this way, he denies a possible lack of innate ability. If he openly attempts to discover his abilities, he and others may see him for what he is—or is not, and this is the real fear. He then withdraws into the world of the invisible, but not without a struggle. He may attempt to make himself visible by processing his hair, acquiring a “boss mop,” or driving a long car, even though he can’t afford it. He may father several illegitimate children by several different women in order to display his masculinity. But in the end he realizes that he is ineffectual in his efforts.
Society responds to him as a thing, a beast, a nonentity, something to be ignored or stepped on. . . . He is confused and in a constant state of rage, of shame and doubt. This psychological set permeates all his interpersonal relationships. . . . His psychological development has been prematurely arrested. This doubt begins at a very early age and continues through his life. The parents pass it on to the child and the social system reinforces the fear, the shame, and the doubt. . . .
With whom, with what, can he, a man, identify? As a child he had no permanent male figure with whom to identify; as a man, he sees nothing in society with which he can identify as an extension of himself. His life is built on mistrust, shame, doubt, guilt, inferiority, role confusion, and despair. . . . He is unskilled and, more often than not, either marginally employed or unemployed. Often his wife . . . is the breadwinner. He is, therefore, viewed as quite worthless by his wife and children. He is ineffectual both in and out of the home. He cannot provide for or protect his family. He is invisible, a nonentity. Society will not acknowledge him as a man. He is a consumer and not a producer. He is dependent upon the white man (“THE MAN”) to feed his family, to give him a job, educate his children, serve as the model that he tries to emulate. He is dependent and he hates “THE MAN” and he hates himself. Who is he? Is he a very old adolescent or is he the slave he used to be?
What did he do to be so black and blue? (The Black Panther, May 15, 1967.)
What Newton does not say, but must know, is that such people are the easiest people in the world for demagogues and adventurers to manipulate. In the foreword to his book, Seize the Time, Bobby Seale admits that “Marx and Lenin would probably turn over in their graves if they could see lumpenproletarian Afro-Americans putting together the ideology of the Black Panther party. Both Marx and Lenin used to say that the lumpenproletariat wouldn’t do anything for the revolution.” In fact, what Marx and Lenin were worried about was what the lumpenproletariat would do to the revolution. In their day, the chief political role of the lumpenproletariat was to be mobilized by reactionary elites as a counterrevolutionary force—the Czar’s Black Hundreds and the anti-Dreyfus mobs of turn-of-the-century Paris being two notable examples. Their most prominent role in contemporary politics has been in totalitarian movements—paramilitary arms of fascist and Communist parties.
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Seale, Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver, the three ideologues of the Panthers, almost compulsively reiterate their belief that (in Cleaver’s words) “in terms of revolutionary theory, the most oppressed people in a given social entity are likely to be the most revolutionary people.” This ludicrous theory, which ignores a century of mass politics, obscures the crucial distinction between blind rebelliousness and authentic revolutionary potential. Sheer nihilism and pathological desperation provide the basic impetus for lumpenproletarian rebellions; they burst forth in elemental frenzy, wreak tremendous violence, and subside just as rapidly. All such rebellions demonstrate the same essential flaw; incapable of self-organization, the lumpenproletariat cannot be brought together in a movement without benefit of an iron-fisted leadership, and invariably that leadership ends by selling out those it claims to represent or, if it should acquire power, by oppressing them even more vigorously than did the old order.
Cleaver, a Stalinist who claims to be a Marxist, a Maoist who claims to be a Leninist, ought to have read enough Marx and Lenin to know that revolutionary theory holds that the most exploited class, not the most oppressed people, is likely to be the most revolutionary force in society. To be exploited, one must work, whereas to be oppressed, one need only vegetate. The lumpenproletariat experiences a much greater degree of oppression than does the proletariat—but for that very reason is infinitely less capable of carrying out a social revolution.
And that is the pathos of the Panthers and the entire lumpenproletariat on which their party (as well as the counterpart “revolutionary” nationalist groups which have sprung up lately in other sections of the lumpenproletariat—Young Lords, Patriot party, etc.) is based. The degradation of this class is utterly unearned and undeserved and its resentment morally justified. Nevertheless, it is precisely that unearned degradation which renders it a barbaric threat—not to “capitalism,” but to all civilized standards, capitalist or socialist. The very desperation of the lumpenproletarians means that any political pirate with the proper backing, a good hustle, and a few slogans can con them into the bloodiest and most irrational escapades—escapades having nothing to do with anyone’s liberation, least of all their own.
When Newton and Seale “hit the streets,” it was by way of the federal poverty program. This brought them into contact with the juvenile gangs who were to comprise one important source of recruitment for the party. The other source is perhaps best described by Seale himself:
Huey wanted brothers off the block—brothers who had been out there robbing banks, brothers who had been pimping, brothers who had been peddling dope, brothers who ain’t gonna take no shit, brothers who had been fighting pigs—because he knew that once they get themselves in the area of political education (and it doesn’t take much because the political education is the ten-point platform and program), Huey P. Newton knew that once you organize the brothers he ran with, he fought with, he fought against, who he fought harder than they fought him, once you organize those brothers, you get niggers, you get black men, you get revolutionaries who are too much (Seize the Time, p. 64).
Newton and Seale, while still students at Merritt College, received money from Robert Scheer, an editor of Ramparts, “to help get things off the ground,” as Seale puts it. A year later, in the late summer of 1966, they founded the Panthers. Their next step was to buy guns, which they financed in part from sales of Mao’s “little red book” on the campus at Berkeley. The first party activity was “patrolling” the Oakland police department. This consisted of following police cars with a carload of heavily-armed Panthers. Needless to say, confrontations were provoked, and some of them resulted in shootouts. Numbers of Panthers and police were killed and wounded.
These confrontations with the police earned the Panthers enormous admiration within the black nationalist movement, as well as within the white New Left. Of all the nationalist groups, only the Panthers had dared to “pick up the gun.” Furthermore, they picked it up in broad daylight and did everything possible to attract the attention of the police, the community, and the mass media—just the opposite of groups like RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement) which stayed behind closed doors incubating dark conspiracies that never seemed to hatch. Confrontations with “pigs” gave the Panthers a reputation for courage that made it extremely difficult for rival middle-class groups to compete. Such confrontations also gave the Panthers the publicity and glamor necessary for organizing in the ghetto. Shootouts with the cordially hated Oakland police department were supplemented with such inspired audacities as invading the state capitol in Sacramento, armed to the teeth, to protest a gun-control law then being debated. It was not long before the combination of lessened competition from rival nationalist groups, and oceans of publicity, enabled the Panthers to grow into a national organization with thousands of members.
Growth brought its own set of problems. The Panthers’ militarized structure created an expensive bureaucracy. In addition, many party members did not hold regular jobs. There are strong indications that some Panther officials ordered members to commit armed robberies and burglaries as a means of raising money for the party. A number of Panthers have been caught and convicted, but in each case the party leadership has disclaimed all responsibility, stating either that the member was victimized by a frameup, or that he was acting on his own. The party expels any member caught red-handed in criminal actions of this sort, a practice which has led to considerable bitterness on the part of those unlucky enough to get caught.
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But it was the tactic of “offing the pig,” even though it built the party, which became—as Huey P. Newton must have known it would—the party’s greatest problem. It is not necessary to believe the Panther contention that a nationwide conspiracy, headquartered in the Justice Department and extending through the FBI to police departments throughout the country, exists to annihilate the Panthers. The predictable spontaneous reactions of typical policemen suffice to account for what has happened. On October 28, 1967, in the early morning hours, a gun battle occurred between Huey P. Newton and two Oakland policemen. Newton was shot in the stomach; patrolman John Frey was killed, his partner, Herbert Heanes, seriously wounded. Less than a week later three policemen were shot in the Hunters Point project in San Francisco. One died. As Earl Anthony, a former member of the Panthers and still an admirer, reflects in his book, Picking Up the Gun7:
The Sun-Reporter, a weekly black newspaper in San Francisco, reported that police authorities felt it was a Panther retaliation. The Party had time and again stressed that the police were the enemy, and that you don’t get your revenge for police brutality and murder by rioting in the streets . . . but you attack the enemy by using guerrilla tactics—sniper attacks, or police station bombings. Although the Party did not execute that attack in Hunters Point, the young black brothers were beginning to accept the leadership of Huey and the Party, and the attack was done Panther style.
The Panther newspaper that week carried a drawing by our revolutionary artist Emory, with pictures of Heanes, Frey, and the three cops shot in Hunter Point. A caption with the drawings said that “three little piggies got away”—referring to the three of the five cops who had survived in the gun battles during that week.
That edition of the Black Panther paper must have started many cops thinking about their personal well-being (pp. 37—38).
In some cases involving shootouts with the police the Panthers have probably been victims and in others victimizers, but the main point is that once the Panthers embarked upon an “off the pig” strategy, an overwhelmingly violent reaction from the police was inevitable. Anyone having the slightest familiarity with the police knows that the one criminal with the least chance of making it alive to the station house is the cop-killer. An organization which declares its belief in cop-killing as a means of social change—no matter how great the short-run benefits in publicity and a “radical” image—is certain to be devastated. And indeed, for all their aggressive and cocky bluster about “picking up the gun” and “self-defense,” it is the Panthers and not the “pigs who have paid by far the bloodier price.
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For the Panthers the certainty of a swift and merciless police reaction made it both possible and imperative that alliances be formed with whites, which at first meant the New Left. In moving toward this alliance, the Panthers found themselves adopting a hodgepodge ideology designed to give offense to none of the New Left’s chaotic tendencies—a mixture of Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Stalin, Castro, Guevara, and Fanon. The New Left, for its part, was so eager to encourage the development of the one black nationalist group that was willing to work with whites that it submerged its multiple differences and united in defense of the Panthers. It turned out, however, that the Panthers, far from wishing to unite the New Left, were preparing to help tear it apart—an objective which was accomplished at the 1969 SDS convention in Chicago.
The preeminence of the “revolutionary” line in the New Left had enabled Progressive Labor, the pro-China Communist party, to acquire great influence in SDS; PLP, after all, was the representative in America of the land of the Cultural Revolution. PLP’s opponents in SDS, finding themselves constantly outflanked from the Left, finally countered by charging PLP members with being “phony” Maoists and representing their own faction as the true Maoists. The Panthers, meanwhile, who had been running full-page quotations from Chairman Mao and encomia to China in their newspaper for several months, showed up at the convention with an “ultimatum”: SDS must “expel counterrevolutionary PLP or face the wrath of the black revolutionary vanguard.” Lacking a majority at the convention, the anti-PLP faction could not really expel the Maoists, but with the help of the Panthers they could and did isolate them. When quotations from Mao were quietly dropped from the Panther newspaper a few months later and replaced by doses of Kim II Sung of North Korea, more of a neutral in the Sino-Soviet dispute, nobody seemed to mind, or even notice.
Some did notice, however, that in announcing a “United Front Against Fascism” conference, to be held in Oakland, in July 1969, the Panthers quoted at length from Georgi Dimitrov, the Stalinist hack identified with the shift by the world Communist movement in the late 20’s and early 30’s from “Third Period” Communism, which witnessed local Communist parties all over the world engaged in suicidal putschist adventures, to the greener pastures of the “Popular Front” period in which alliances with liberals against the common fascist enemy became the order of the day. And indeed, it was at the United Front Against Fascism conference that the “repression” theme—which has by now been very widely sounded throughout the country—was first enunciated, and by no less well-defined a figure than Herbert Aptheker, chief theoretician of the American Communist party. Aptheker’s droning oration, “Historical Aspects of the Rising Tide of Fascism Today,” literally emptied the hall but it still provided, exactly as Dimitrov had thirty-five years ago, a justification for liberals and radicals to close ranks in defense of “The Movement” against the threat of repression.
The fact that the Panthers were the instrument by which the Maoists were isolated within SDS and that they then invited Herbert Aptheker to make the keynote speech at their conference—where such other prominent members of the American Communist party as Archie Brown, Roscoe Proctor, and William Patterson were also very much in evidence—raises the delicate question of the relation between the Panthers and the Communist Party U.S.A. That such a relation exists is perfectly clear; what is not so clear is its precise nature. It seems doubtful that the Panthers are controlled by the Communists, if only because a lumpen organization is inherently difficult for anyone to control. It is also hard to reconcile the American Communist party’s reputation as a “reformist” group with the feverishly revolutionary rhetoric one associates with the Panthers and their supporters. William Kunstler, for example, who headed the defense at the Chicago conspiracy trial and who has also done legal work for the Panthers and other black revolutionists, has lately been dashing from campus to campus making statements like the following to huge student audiences:
If they mean anything, if they are life and death issues, then you must be prepared to offer life or death, and hope it will not be necessary.
You must learn to fight in the streets, learn to revolt, learn to shoot guns. We will learn to do all the things property owners fear.
You may have to take that final step. You may ultimately be bathed in blood. So will others. But you will have to do it.
And a recent article in the Panther newspaper by Connie Matthews, international coordinator of the Black Panther party, resorts to anti-Semitism and the threat of race war in demanding more sacrifices from the “White Left” on behalf of the Panthers:
The White Left in the U.S.A. is comprised of a large percentage of the Jewish population. Before the Black Panther Party took its stand on the Palestinian people’s struggle there were problems but the support of the White Left for the Black Panther Party was concrete. However, since our stand the White Left started floundering and became undecided. This leaves us with no alternative than to believe that a large portion of these people are Zionists and are therefore racists.
It was a Zionist judge, Judge Friedman, who sentenced Huey P. Newton to 2—15 years in jail. It was a Zionist judge, Judge Hoffman, who allowed the other Zionists to go free but has kept Bobby Seale in jail and sentenced him to 4 years for contempt charges. . . .
The other Zionists in the Conspiracy 8 trial were willing and did sacrifice Bobby Seale and his role in the conspiracy trial to gain publicity. Once again we condemn Zionism as a racist doctrine. . . . We do not want a race war. From the beginning of the Black Panther Party we have made that crystal clear but we have lost too many lives in order to keep the stand we truly believe in. However, we will not stop fighting until we gain our objectives. If our White allies allow the racist capitalistic system to once again use and misuse them without really diagnosing the situation Chen we will stand alone. That will ultimately mean Black people fighting alone, which in other words means a race war. We think the decision rests with our White allies (“Will Racism or International Proletarian Solidarity Conquer?,” April 25, 1970).
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The relation between the Communist party and the Panthers, then, more likely resembles the relation between the black-power militants and the business Establishment: it is an alliance entered into half by accident and half by design for the mutual advantage of both parties. The Panthers get ideological help, financial help, and legal help; the Communists acquire a new prestige, particularly among the hundreds of thousands of New Left youth who idolize the Panthers and who know of nothing more critical to say of the Communists than that they are reformist. A successful defense of the Panthers could result in what the Maoists of the Progressive Labor party have asserted is the real objective of the Panther-CP nexus: a kind of Mafia-type control over the ghetto masses by the Panthers, and a reassertion by the Communists of the hegemony within the American Left that they enjoyed during the 30’s. The prospect seems highly unlikely, but then so did a lot of other things that have happened recently in this country. Whatever the strategy is, the risks are clearly grave, for the alliance between the Panthers and the Communists might well help to stimulate the real repression that Eldridge Cleaver says he welcomes as a prelude to “revolutionary war.” And that might indeed be the true purpose for which the alliance was formed.
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1 See Wolfe's article in New York magazine, June 8, 1970.
2 There is an eerie parallel between the views of Eldridge Cleaver, the Panthers' most famous spokesman, and those of Kevin Phillips, until recently special assistant to Attorney General Mitchell, and author of The Emerging Republican Majority. Both are obsessed with the factors of ethnicity and extremism in American political life, and each has developed a strategy for exploiting these factors in a way which almost requires the services of the other. Cleaver, in an article entitled, with characteristic subtlety, “Racist Ethnic Groups Battle for Pig Power” (Black Panther, Nov. 16, 1968), has argued that America is a potential inferno of ethnic animosities in which black extremism can serve as the “disreputable element that supplies the pressure, that supplies the chaos, that supplies the friction”—either to destroy “bourgeois democracy” and produce a right-wing dictatorship (a development to be welcomed since it lays the ground for “the revolution”), or to coerce concessions from “those who want law and order . . . so that they can continue the functioning of their machine.” Phillips, less apocalyptically, predicates Republican electoral dominance until the year 2004 in large part on friction within the traditional Democratic coalition between black extremists, patronized by the Yankee elite (which he believes is moving out of the GOP and preparing to take over the Democratic party), and the ethnic lower-middle and working classes, who will be spurred by backlash sentiment into the Republican party.
3 The Panthers admit to being anti-Zionist but insist that this is not a form of anti-Semitism. The terms of the disclaimer are rarely convincing. Here, for example, is how a recent article in the Black Panther dealt with the charge of anti-Semitism: “This is a bald-face lie. It must be pointed out that the Black Panther Party is not anti-Semitic. In fact, we are in total support of Palestine's righteous struggle against Zionist imperialism, that works hand in glove with U.S. imperialism. We must remember that the Arab people are Semitic people also and the only right that the Zionist clique, headed by Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, have to the land that they call Israel is a robber's right. We are anti-Zionist expansion in the Arab world and Zionist exploitation here in Babylon, manifested in the robber barons that exploit us in the garment industry and the bandit merchants and greedy slumlords that operate in our communities” (May 19, 1970).
4 For a description of the “rights” of the Panther rank and file, see “What Is Ultra-Democracy?,” an article by Don Cox, field marshal of the Black Panther party, in the Black Panther, February 2, 1969.
5 Random House, 429 pp., $6.95.
6 See Maurice J. Goldbloom's article in the January 1969 COMMENTARY.
7 Dial Press, 240 pp., $4.95.
