(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 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:
I’m gonna go with 2. You sticking with 1?
What is Maoism to you, because I don’t think that the BPP would describe themselves as that.
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: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.”
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.
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.