October 15th marks the 40th birthday of the Black Panther Party, the most formidable revolutionary party in history inside u.$. borders. The Maoist Black Panther Party started in 1966 and eventually attracted the plurality of Black support according to bourgeois television polls. Had it been up to Blacks and students in the 1960s led by the Black Panther Party, there would have been a civil war for revolution, but the white so-called workers held the line for imperialism.
Shifting grounds of criticism
Over the years, the primary criticisms of the Black Panthers have varied. From the days that Black Panthers appeared in television interviews and film clips, guns in hand, white hysterical fear has been the main problem. Many could not process what the Black Panthers were saying, because they stayed at the level of fear and related ad hominem thinking. There was no solution for that problem, because disarming a legally and correctly constituted armed struggle would have been wrong, but the white exploiter population had no material force to correct its thinking either.
Substance-level questions concerning the issue of race versus nationality versus intercommunalism do not appear often in discussion of the Black Panthers. Even in Maoist circles, some did not know that the Black Panthers were the pro-lumpen party before MIM ever started its prison kick. MIM's recent web republication of an article from Eldridge Cleaver on its website was not at all old hat, thanks to the haze covering up the legacy of the Black Panthers.
The main discussions of the serious topics seem to have happened among Blacks and Euro-Amerikans visiting Mao in China. Afterwards, the resulting dumbed down discussion in the united $tates left a poor aftertaste, so that MIM came on the scene when various activists of the left-wing of white nationalism simply reported that the Black Panthers were "nationalist" as if that were a swear word against an oppressed nation.
After the state murdered and imprisoned Black Panthers, attention turned in new directions of attack. Documents since declassified show that police spread rumors that Huey Newton was gay. At that time, it was a potent accusation compared with what it is today. Huey Newton correctly deflected that attack.
Meanwhile, some of Huey Newton's comrades had psychiatric help forced on them and wrote psychiatry-adjusted history about the Black Panthers. These criticisms turned in other directions, somewhat the opposite of the criticisms that Huey Newton was gay. Instead, we often heard pseudo-feminism and charity pitted against the Black Panther legacy.
Even while Huey Newton was alive, some of the worst revision of Black Panther history came from former Black Panthers themselves. Bobby Seale made it be known that he was a comedian who sells cookbooks and ice cream. Then Eldridge Cleaver claimed to be reborn Christian and toured with the Moonies against communism in the 1980s. All we can say is that at least they did not pretend to be something they weren't anymore.
If those experiences do not teach people to oppose identity politics, then nothing will. If we follow Bobby Seale the identity, we end up perhaps as progressives, a little more light-hearted than before. If we follow Cleaver for his identity, we end up as right-wing Christians. In other words, if we follow people because we like their identity, we could end up anywhere. Revolutionaries should not blame themselves for all the various ways that people bump into and off of them. The imperialist system is always waiting to force people into capitulation, re-adjustment and reconciliation with the power structure--sometimes to the point of caricature as in the case of Cleaver's sell-out. If Cleaver could make a caricature of himself, then we all stand warned what can happen.
The real floodgates of revision opened after Huey Newton died of course. Through all the controversy swirling around a dead man, probably David Hilliard does the least damage to the real truth of the Black Panthers. His explanations of the Black Panthers' problems centered on drugs and getting the subjective will to continue the struggle.
One state agent who shall go nameless is by himself typical of the shifting grounds of criticism of the Black Panthers. At first when the main leaders left the Black Panthers and even went Moonie, it was clear that a different labor aristocracy party rank-and-file presented itself as ready to kill the ex-Black Panthers. Considering their line in service of Archie Bunker, MIM was not surprised.
The original criticisms of the Black Panthers had the merit of being at least closer to historical reality of the split in politics in the 1960s. The anti- Black Panther line ran that the Black Panthers did not have faith in the white workers. As a result the Panthers supposedly played down class and fell into revisionism.
As time wore on, this explanation wore thin, especially as MIM's counter-attack took hold in the public's imagination. After MIM's re-distributing millions of Black Panther documents and explanations of those documents, the watered down version of the dumbed down account of politics was no longer going to fly. Not only that, other organizations started reading and distributing Black Panther documents in the original without all the sell-out and revisionist commentary since.
Today the same exact people who used to say the Black Panthers lacked faith in the white so-called workers are now running around saying that the Black Panther Party was a multinational party all along. Then as facts, they point to facts about the united front the Black Panthers had, not the party itself. So now there are actually those running around saying that the Black Panther Party had thousands of white supporters. It's a factually true statement but misleading in terms of the party and class analysis. Supporters are not party members. The pro-BPP section of SDS did indeed exist and make contributions to struggle, but it was not one party with the Black Panthers.
The will to criticize the Black Panthers, even after Huey Newton died continued. The state agent with the most changes in line on the question is on record saying that Huey Newton said power is the ability to define a phenomenon. As criticism, the charlatan said a persyn trying to evade bullets fired at him by defining them as pillows was not going to get anywhere. The point that this charlatan was trying to make is to criticize people, even Huey Newton. Unfortunately, even this little criticism of Huey Newton was wrong. If someone died because bullets could not be defined as pillows, it would prove exactly what Huey Newton said, which was that the persyn lacked the ability to define the situation. Typically, in contrast, the white oppressor nation has had the power to define the situation inside U.$. borders, especially the borders between First Nations and Amerikan exploiter territory or between Amerikkkans and Aztlan. What whitey said has gone as truth for the borders.
We are sure the enemy is not done criticizing the Black Panthers. There will be more variations to come in the future. It should be possible to criticize Huey Newton, but it is not easy. It's good to attempt criticizing Huey Newton in his correct years, for the benefit of one's own thinking, but we warn that 95% of the criticisms of Huey Newton are going to end up wrong. Now we are starting to have the opposite phenomenon too where some of the supposed support of the Black Panthers is wrong too. That is the record so far. MIM hopes to have made a contribution to clarifying that truth in the last quarter century. We should not uphold the Black Panther Party (1966-1970) because it was Black or to have an identity or a cool uniform. Rather we should uphold it in its righteous phase as the unsurpassed revolutionaries inside u.$. borders.
Note:
The facts for this article can all be found at http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bpp/index.html