(Offshoot of this discussion on MLK vs Malcom X on violence)
What the Black Panther Party had done breakfast programs, free health clinics, and other mutual aid, but didn’t do the community safety patrols?
We know that the patrols were effective, morally good, and a big part of the BPP’s public perception. We also know that the United States is still racist as fuck, and that black liberation has not been achieved yet.
I see the Black Panthers as one of the most promising leftist experiments in the US. In the spirit of scientific socialism, how do you think the movement would have gone, had the party been less militant?
Would it have just been easier to dismantle? Would it have been seen as less of a threat, so not worth extreme actions? Would the general public have been more or less supportive? Would the black community have been more or less supportive? How would its legacy be different?
My analysis
Partly informed by this interview with the BPP minister of defense
Benefits:
- Community safety: obviously. The patrols were started to address a critical need in the community.
- Recruitment: the militant aspect of the party had massive appeal to folks that had been oppressed for generations. It gave agency and a way to direct the rage into something useful
- Publicity: great way to get into the news, which helps get the message out
Drawbacks:
- Attracted more attention from the feds
- Spooked white people
- Increased risk for party members
Since we have the benefit of hindsight, we know that the feds were a major part of the dissolution of the movement. I assume that if the feds had NOT intervened, the movement would have continued to grow in power and made massive improvements to the lives of black people and Americans in general.
I trust that the BPP members made reasonable decisions to counter CoIntelPro, but I also trust that the focused power of the federal government is able to succeed in whatever fucked up stuff it wants to do. That’s to say: the BPP may have simply been in an unwinnable fight.
Avoiding the eye of sauron for as long as possible is a prudent strategy, and I think a less militant BPP could have drawn less focus from the feds. Mostly, I think they received disproportionate focus because white people saw organized, armed black folks and it tickled the “enemy combatant” part of their brains.
If the party had instead focused on nonviolent mutual aid, I think it could have lessened the suppression efforts, possibly to a point where the fight was winnable. At very least, it could have given more time to grow the organization, so that once more militant actions were needed they would be more powerful.
On the other hand, I think there wouldn’t have been as much excitement about the party. I do not know if having more time to grow without suppression would have been cancelled out by slower growth.
If we were able to run it back, I think a less militant BPP may have ended up making more progress towards black liberation.
It’s a weird hypothetical because the BPP was originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Their original praxis was telling people being pulled over by the police of their constitutional rights while constitutionally wielding firearms in front of the police. They didn’t start out as cop killers, but they weren’t exactly passive either. They also tried doing less militant stuff like running people for office, which didn’t amount to much. And there’s the BLA, which technically didn’t require you to be part of the BPP before joining the BLA, but most people lump the BPP and BLA together with the BPP as the aboveground org and the BLA as the underground org.
It’s only weird if you reduce the BPP to a fraction of what it actually was.
Self defense was a major part of their praxis, yes, and is the part that drew most attention. However, the popular narrative reduces the Panthers to a single-dimensional organization that only confronted the police. That is propaganda, and we should not buy it.
The free breakfast program was a major effort they also ran, as were free health clinics. They educated their members in Marxist theory. Gender equality was a core part of their work. I’m not an expert in all the mutual aid efforts they were involved in, but I’m confident there were more.
So the question is, what would the Panthers have been if they hadn’t done the things that they were reduced to? The narrative can’t be “cop killer” if they didn’t confront cops, so… what would it be instead?
What would be the narrative about DPRK if they didn’t have nuclear weapons? In both cases, the empire would say “a bunch of dead slurs”. Political power doesn’t grow out of a bowl of oatmeal no matter how hungry you are.
And it is foolish to lose a war because you’ve decided to fight an unwinnable battle, no matter how righteous.
The leaders of the BPP were killed. The party was essentially destroyed. They ARE “a bunch of dead slurs”. Being armed did not save them.
The federal government has the power to stamp out any small movement it chooses, period. The black panthers had 50k members, and they were unable to resist government suppression.
I refuse to let their work and sacrifice not influence our strategy. They were brilliant people that were fighting the same fight we are. We must learn from their experience, or we will fail in the same ways.
The Panthers were largely Maoist. They lost.
Our options are:
- They didn’t do Maoism right
- The material conditions of the United States in the late 60s were different from those in pre-Communist China, and a different strategy may have been more appropriate
I’m gonna go with 2. You sticking with 1?
The Panthers were largely Maoist. They lost.
What is Maoism to you, because I don’t think that the BPP would describe themselves as that.
:it-is-known:
I’d seen that Mao’s little red book was pretty common among the Panthers, but don’t recall where I saw it.
From a search, this article has a picture captioned: Members of the Black Panther Party hold up Mao’s “little red book.”
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I’m gonna go with 3: ideological commitment does not make you immortal, nor does owning a weapon. For every revolutionary organization that “won”, there were 50 who died in their beds (literally and organizationally). You cannot kill cops with kindness because they will kill you with bullets. How many people in LA are going to die this week because they were handing out soup in the wrong part of town?
Stop being a debate pervert. If the battle is “unwinnable” then what is the struggle? The state monopoly on violence is only empowered when your organization eschews the capacity for violence. You don’t have to start violence, but you damn well need to be able to repel it hard enough that they’ll think twice about a second bite.
So if you want their work to influence your strategy, do some analysis. What do you think they should have done, and what facts tell you that you are on the right track? What do the people in your org think?
The entire point of this post is to share analysis?
Where does a productive discussion of strategy end and debate perversion begin? I’m trying to have the former.
Self defense was a major part of their praxis, yes, and is the part that drew most attention. However, the popular narrative reduces the Panthers to a single-dimensional organization that only confronted the police. That is propaganda, and we should not buy it.
My point is that community defense was their origin story. That was their initial praxis as an org. And it technically wasn’t even community defense. It was more like a police watchdog org. That’s hardly militant. And the cop killer stuff was more the BLA’s forte. You didn’t address my point about the BLA. In a hypothetical situation where the BPP was less militant, feds would just lump the BPP and BLA together, which they already did to the point where most people consider the BLA to be an extension of the BPP instead of a separate org. So now your hypothetical is if the BPP was less militant and the BLA didn’t exist.
And there’s plenty of militant Black nationalist orgs that the feds could lump the BPP together with even if the BLA didn’t exist. Recently, a Black-led org called the African People’s Socialist Party almost got busted on RICO charges because they were falsely accused of being Russian agents. Their chairman was a member of SNCC and the party itself was a merger of multiple orgs during the early 70s, including one called the Junta of Militant Organizations. And this is just one non-BPP militant org.
The BPP competed with multiple militant Black-led orgs, most of which still had Black nationalism as their guiding ideology. In your hypothetical, the BPP would’ve just been replaced by another militant org, probably some Black nationalist org. Maybe it would’ve been the NOI again, which was the go-to Black-led militant org until Malcolm X left the org. Remember what Dr. Huey Newton wrote in Revolutionary Suicide. He only formed the BPP because the OAAU fell apart after Malcolm X’s assassination, so the BPP itself only existed because the OAAU no longer existed as the go-to Black-led militant org. The BPP became popular because they were rightfully seen as the successor org to the OAAU. If they were less militant, another org would’ve been the successor org and the BPP would’ve been a relatively obscure party that no one knows about like the APSP.
That’s fair, I’m unfamiliar with the programs of all of the different orgs and tbh I thought it was all under the BPP umbrella.
Based on the fact that there was such a widespread crackdown, I think it’s safe to say that the entire movement was targeted (rather than a specific organization).
I think my original question was too narrow vs what I intended, which was basically: what if the entire movement didn’t have militant elements? What if they had done nonviolent mutual aid only?
It’s alt history at this point. Would you consider the NOI, which had a paramilitary called the Fruit of Islam, to be militant? And a lot of Black nationalist militancy can trace its roots to Marcus Garvey and Garveyism, so how would that work out? Malcolm X’s father was a Garveyist who got murdered by white supremacists for his political beliefs. To make it an even bigger mess, Ho Chi Minh himself was partially radicalized by Marcus Garvey while he was at the US.
This hypothetical basically has to assume that Garvey and Garveyism was still around (so Ho Chi Minh would be partially radicalized by them) but that Garveyism didn’t spread past a certain point. But the problem is that his org the UNIA was one of the largest radical Black-led orgs in existence, meaning there will always be people who see it as inspiration.
And as a final point, one of Hoover’s first assignments back when the FBI didn’t exist yet was to bust the UNIA and nab Garvey on trumped-up charges. Hoover led the BOI to bust Garvey and he led the FBI to harass Black radicals of the 60s. We’re talking about multiple generations of Black radicals being harassed by the same asshole cracker.
I don’t think it’s important to delve into the origin story of the hypothetical, since I’m mostly curious about how the state and capitalist superstructures would have been likely to react.
But if it’s important to you: MLK was promoting nonviolence during the liberation movement. In the hypothetical, let’s say he was able to convince the entire movement commit to nonviolence.
Why is this a hypothetical? Didn’t all that non-violent stuff exist anyway independently under different names?
once more militant actions were needed
Like, when would that be? Weren’t things bad enough already?
Didn’t all that non-violent stuff exist anyway independently under different names?
I know it existed under the Panthers, are you saying that there were other leftist organizations doing all the same things as the Panthers, just without the community safety patrols? If so, do you have more details?
when would that be? Weren’t things bad enough already?
Fair, agree that things were bad enough to do something. I’m imagining something like the Zapatistas did, where they took over all law enforcement duties for an area and removed the existing cops completely.
are you saying that there were other leftist organizations doing all the same things as the Panthers, just without the community safety patrols?
Yes. And I think that’s a very relevant question. When doing historical analysis, we have to keep in mind, that not everything that happened is transmitted equally well. The Panthers were talked about because of their militancy and principled stance. Other organizations, we might not here about, because they got co-opoted or didn’t provide enough of a challenge against systematic racism.
do you have more details?
I’m really really not an expert in this, but here is a list from a quick search:
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US Organization (United slaves) was anti militantancy, centered on culture and education, invented Kwanzaa, did festivals and was played by the FBI against the Panthers using forged letters.
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Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee did voter registration, community education and health initiatives and were strongly targeted by the FBI despite their nonviolent stance.
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The Young Lords, while inspired by the black Panthers and pro armed struggle, did less armed safety patrolling and instead tried to organize free breakfast programs, free clinics and educational outreach. They were met with violent reaction by the FBI.
These are all just really famous big organizations, that were active at the time. I’m sure there were dozens if not hundreds more.
I’m imagining something like the Zapatistas did, where they took over all law enforcement duties for an area and removed the existing cops completely.
The Zapatistas, fought wars, did multiple uprisings and many smaller armed confrontations. They are way better armed and much more militant then the Panthers ever were.
When doing historical analysis, we have to keep in mind, that not everything that happened is transmitted equally well.
Hard agree. Even within the BPP, the militant elements are transmitted better than the nonviolent ones.
It’s especially tricky when we know that the state is manipulating the narrative.
… But now that I think of it, maybe we can use that to our advantage?
I think it’s safe to assume that the mainstream narrative largely IS the state’s narrative. We have other sources to try to pin down “reality,” and by comparing the two we can approximate how the state shaped the narrative.
Through that lens, we can assume the state wanted militant elements highlighted. They may have wanted nonviolent elements diminished too, but it’s hard to say.
So: Why does the popular narrative of the Black Panther Party reduce them to cop killers?
I can think of two possible explanations for wanting to do that:
- To justify the suppression to liberals. “These were bad dudes, so we needed to take them out”
- To mislead future revolutionaries. “This was a legitimate threat to the system, and we need to prevent something similar from happening in the future”
(Disclaimer: I absolutely have confirmation bias for it to be 2)
My first reaction was that 1 is a simpler explanation and fully justifies the suppression… but I’m not so sure anymore.
Cointelpro proves that the state saw the black liberation movement as a legitimate threat.
In the interview with a current Panther in the OP, he said that the feds stamped out not just the Panthers, but other related organizations as well. That’s likely why the Young Lords were subject to violence from the FBI - they joined with the Black Panthers and Young Patriots in the rainbow coalition. Someone else mentioned that the BLA was also infiltrated.
They came down hard and wiped out everything.
Why? What caused them to react SO, SO extremely?
Racism? Possibly. Organized black people with guns may have provoked an overly extreme response. But you could describe gangs the same way, and feds have not tried to wipe them from the face of the earth.
I don’t think that’s it though - it must have been a reaction from capital. The throughline for all of these orgs is not how militant they were, it was their position against capital. Hell, MLK was killed after he started to point the finger at capitalism.
And with that lens, we notice that the popular narrative omits that the Panthers were communists. The poplar narrative omits that MLK ever pointed the finger at capitalism. “The black liberation movement was about racism, not class.”
And so we ask again, with capital as the author instead of the state: Why does the popular narrative of the Black Panther Party reduce them to cop killers?
Rhetorically: when has capital ever felt the need to justify killing someone?
I agree with a lot of the general vibe. Remember what a state is. Lenin says, that a state is the tool of organized class warfare. A capitalist state is the weapon, the capitalist class weilds to crush any hope of liberation of the subjugated masses. Any kind of organization or movement that has any hope of effecting meaningful change will always be violently attacked. For this, it doesn’t matter at all whether they choose to defend themselves like the Panthers or choose to try to move the hearts of their opressors through their own suffering and blood by non-violence. If they are in any way a threat, they will be attached mercilessly. Laws will be changed, liberties revoked or ignored. And most relevant for this topic: ideology will be created to attempt to manufacture consent. For the Panthers they chose to paint them as “cop killers” not because they were militant, but because they were a threat. Whenever an organization committed to non-violence becomes a threat, other ideology is used. Any number of other reasons can always be given. And that’s exactly what happens with all these other organizations. Ideology is cheap. Our stance on when it is and when it isn’t strategically smart to use more or less militant means should never depend entirely on an unlikely bet on liberals (in)ability to find other reasons to crack down on us. They always will. Even if they have to make them up, lie, fabricate, whatever. And ultimately, they totally do act without any justification too.
In a similar vein:
- Why is the popular narrative around MLK reduced to protests, speeches, and an unwavering commitment to nonviolence?
- Why do we only learn about Rosa Parks, and not the years-long bus boycott that was accomplished by people working together?
- Why we told about Henry Ford giving Saturdays off, but not how unions won the 40 hour work week?
We know that capital will not tell us how to overthrow it, but I’m only now starting to see how it limits our imagination.
The oppressed cannot fight an oppressor they do not understand, so capitalism must never be the oppressor.
You cannot effectively fight capitalism if you never conceive of the right weapons, so effective weapons must not be talked about.
Understanding that, our job as revolutionaries gets way easier, because we CAN coax capital to tell us how to overthrow it - we just do the stuff that it suppresses and don’t do stuff that it promotes.
The capitalist narrative around the black panthers is that they were overtly militant, so we should take that as a strong signal that our movement should NOT be overtly militant. The nonviolent mutual aid was suppressed, which is a strong signal we SHOULD do nonviolent mutual aid.
Understanding that, our job as revolutionaries gets way easier, because we CAN coax capital to tell us how to overthrow it - we just do the stuff that it suppresses and don’t do stuff that it promotes. The capitalist narrative around the black panthers is that they were overtly militant, so we should take that as a strong signal that our movement should NOT be overtly militant. The nonviolent mutual aid was suppressed, which is a strong signal we SHOULD do nonviolent mutual aid.
I don’t quite follow the logic here. The militant stuff was materially suppressed too, so by your logic we should do it. Unless you only mean ideological suppression. But then the state promoted and funded some of the nonviolent aid so by your logic we shouldn’t do it?
Anyway it seems like in this discussion, we speak a lot in terms of a triple “we”-“the state”-“the people”. Remember that we are the people and that we learn through active involvement in movements.
Right, I mostly mean ideological suppression.
What nonviolent mutual aid that was promoted by the state are you thinking of? I can’t think of anything that’s part of the capitalist narrative, but I could be missing something.
I am actively involved, and I’m afraid. We should all be afraid. I do not want what happened to the black liberation movement to happen to us, and I’m trying to think of ways to avoid that.
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The movement would have been incorporated into mainstream liberal electoralism
Which kind of happened anyway, but alas
I definitely think they would have had pressure to liberalize!
I think there’s some institutional safety that comes from coming off as a mainstream liberal organization. Knowing how the party ended, having that institutional safety seems like it could have been worth the risk.
- Are there ways they could have resisted becoming a liberal organization?
- Do you think resisting that liberalization would have been harder than resisting the violent suppression that they faced?
I have no idea what the ideal strategy would have been.
One can always speculate, but seeing as the universe isn’t deterministic, it’s impossible to correlate failure with an incorrect strategy. Especially when the sample size is essentially 1 in this case.
Reality is, the Black Panthers were always the underdogs relative to the US Government. This is true generally for radical movements. It can fail many times because of this, maybe even just because of bad luck.
But that’s how it always is, isn’t it? A revolution doesn’t happen unless some group, usually starting from the smallest possible minority, decides to roll the dice because it only takes one success (out of many failures) to change history.
Of course we can’t know, but dialectic materialism being an accurate predictor is kinda our whole deal. Individuals are unpredictable, but superstructures can be counted on.
The Panthers predicted that their course of action would succeed, based on their analysis of the material conditions they were in.
It did not succeed.
We are aiming for the same goal, and if we build the same superstructure they did, we will lose in the same way they did.
In “Critique of nonviolent politics” Howard Ryan writes on the common argument that “Non-violence wins more public support”:
Proponents have maintained that a nonviolent response to government repression not only appeals to the opposition but also wins greater sympathy and support from the public at large than does a violent response. Yet history provides abundant examples of violent uprisings winning mass sympathy, support, and participation. None of the armed revolutions and anti-colonial struggles of this century could have succeeded without the massive popular support they received. Observe the international support given in recent years to liberation struggles in Central America and Southern Africa. Some of the finest victories of the American labor movement have involved rallying public sympathy and support behind strikers who fought violently against police attacks. Examples were the three great city-wide strikes in 1934 in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toledo. Each won broad public support and each involved workers violently defending their picket lines–combined, of course, with nonviolent actions as well.86 If one’s cause is clearly just, it isn’t necessary to suffer peacefully the brutalities of the government in order to win popular support. To fight violently in defense of one’s life, one’s home, or one’s freedom is a widely respected human right. In fact, where a movement faces heavy government repression, people may more likely join the struggle if resisters are fighting to defend their lives rather than allowing themselves to be beaten and punished. A campaign which emphasizes voluntary suffering may alienate rather than attract public support and participation. The question of which method will draw greater public support is an historical one: it cannot be answered in the abstract. Often, violent action would be a disaster; at other times, refusal to use violence may be disastrous. It depends on the situation. Just as with converting government troops, the best way to win the hearts of the people, besides convincing them our cause is right, is by choosing an historically appropriate strategy and showing people we can succeed.
Fair, Luigi is a shining example of violence winning public support
The biggest issue with BPP’s militancy is community policing took on the state in the streets and protest actions took on the state in the newspapers. Had they not taken on the state the movement could have had community policing and maintained course while staying under the radar.
The difficulty of a simplistic “do it later” argument, is that it’s harder to build a competent militia “later” both politically, ideologically and militarily.
The issue was that David picked a fight with Goliath before securing the blessings of God.
Are you saying that they should have done community policing without the protests? I.e. the protests drew additional attention from the state that community policing on it’s own wouldn’t have?
That’s a great point. A protest calls attention to the organization (by design), and when that’s done by an organization that also takes militant anti-state action, it’s a recipe for crackdown.
My analysis after this discussion is that militant action is a necessary component of a resistance movement, but that mutual aid networks build real power outside capitalism. Our strategy needs to consider how to react when crackdowns inevitably occur, with an understanding that direct opposition is impossible because of the institutional power in the imperial core.
I’ll probably make a separate post about that, but if you have thoughts or know of any existing theory in that realm I’d be interested in learning!
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
