Introduction
- Location
- A Hell Of Our Own Creation
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hi i'm a white american with vaguely left politics here to read over an Essay I found that is really interesting and in my opinion, spot on about the world. So I tried to figure out the best way to spread it and ended up choosing the idea of doing a Let's Read of it on an obscure internet forum because praxis happens one step at a time or not at all i guess.
I'll update as I read, at one point im going to make a chart and we will all recoil in horror at my passion for graphics design. I will be copy + pasting from the original article here in case you want to skip my ramblings. Now, I present to yinz:
I hope including the references benefits someone. Also, at the moment you probably have no idea what this introductionary quote means, and I am getting ahead of myself, but for the 70s this was a beautiful prediction of the future. I must acknowledge that the material conditions have changed and it might be time for someone to form a new theory for the future, but out of all past dialectics theorized, this is the most recent I am aware of. If someone knows any more recent theorists let me know.
Everytime I learn more about the Black Panthers the more I understand why people did genuinely fear them, and despair at what could have been in Huey and the Panthers had ended up the victors in the historic struggle. Alas, the American Empire is nothing if not good at oppressing its population.
I talked to an old man once at my job. He remembered the 70s... and is now a paranoid wreck. After one of the deaths in the headlines recently he was talking with another woman about how the Black community needs something to protect themselves, and I asked jokingly if he wanted to refound the Black Panthers (I'm as white as a sheet) and he started to go off about how there are eyes everywhere and clamed up about it. After feeling bad I realized that's how thoroughly they dismantled the panthers, that their legacy to an old man is everyone betraying the cause and the feds being all powerful.
The article does not say explicitly why he felt this way so i clicked through to the source and its an entire pdf of Huey P. Newtons Revolutionary Suicide for those interested. I'm not covering it in this thread.
Something like 10% of Americans right now are functionally illiterate? 10% of Americans can't read this mans works. I am in awe that he managed to correct that through reading Republic several times.
Imagine being tested for IQ several times as a child in a school system that produces you as funtionally illiterate, and then being dumped into the Free Market. 'Merica. Man I walked away to get a drink of water but this really stirred something in me. I'm a white american with a high school diploma and not much else. I can't find any work that doesn't drain my soul and make me want to drink. the absolute piss jobs that are left for people who can't read, write, or just never completed high school... And then there's the recent bullshit in the news with what's it, Iowa saying they want to bring back child labor? Yeah sure might as well, not like they'll have many opprotunities anyways, might as well start 'em young. Ostrasize them to a lower caste and say that it's what the market desires.
If the Black Panthers ever did manage to send volunteers to the Vietcong I can't find proof of it with a single google search so oh well. I also love this because that, laying out an account of how he understood the world to be structured, is something i've wanted to try and take a crack at. Just so maybe in 50 years time if im still alive i can see how off i was. And I also understand his inability to quite make it understandable enough for others to understand. I've been grappling with this very concept lately, that nobody quite 'gets' how I think the world works whenever I try to explain it. It takes a lifetime to come to the current day you, and not everybody is going to understand all the experiences and lessons learned and know all the things and have the assumptions you do. Which when I explain it like that it's like, well duh, but that results in politics being this weird mess of individualized opinions that we try to fit in neat little boxes. Do people understand the words "seize the means of production" the same way you do? What about the phrase "game conditioning"? Do you even get that reference i just made?
That sounds absolutely fascinating and it is frustrating that the reference is a dead link. Fortunately for you Trivers is still alive and has his own website with a backup of the article in pdf form. Also can I just quote this mans website real quick, "Unlike other renowned scientists, Robert Trivers has spent time behind bars, drove a getaway car for Huey P. Newton, and founded an armed group in Jamaica to protect gay men from mob violence." Hell yeah Dr. Trivers. Go hard in that research. For the future of course when Dr. Triver dies and his site dies here is another backup from the wayback machine.
A few suggestions for yinz reading lists.
Ah, modern day progressivism and it's ability to ahem Whitewash anything it touches. The same thing is happening to MLK and other figures of the time. Insert Malcolm X by any votes necessary meme image.
What could have been, what the world needs right now, and what the right fears BLM will turn into another version of I guess? If the BLM started to build infrastructure and do armed patrols of neighborhoods.
Huey probably heard of Cybersyn and geeked out like the rest of us. I wonder what he will have to say later.
Today being June 11th, 2018. Heck, I didn't even even understand what the means of production were back then. I feel like so much has radicalized in the last five short years.
I decided to go look and see if its actually inaccessible online and yeah, I can't find anything with a quick search for letting me see what's in this box online. I'd have to travel somewhere and look myself. But I did find out that you can buy some black panthers merch from the Huey P Newton Foundation Online Store... Capitalism!
Sorry to cut right when stuff gets good, but it's getting a bit long and I want to chop this up so my next post will be actually going through what Intercommunalism even means. I hope this introduction into both Huey and me was entertaining and insightful, and I hope yinz stick around for whenever i update this.
I'll update as I read, at one point im going to make a chart and we will all recoil in horror at my passion for graphics design. I will be copy + pasting from the original article here in case you want to skip my ramblings. Now, I present to yinz:
Intercommunalism (1974)
By Huey P. Newton
Communism with American Characteristics has been found, and pal are we gonna talk about America. Delio Vásquez is a professor who has written three articles in two magazines, all about radical left politics in America it looks like. His introduction is long and provides a lot of context for the Intercommunalism essay, so I will be covering it first. So now that I did the bait and switch I present to yinz:By Huey P. Newton
On September 5, 1970, Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party (BPP), introduced his theory of intercommunalism at the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.1 He later expanded on this theory before an audience at Boston College in November of that year, and then again In February 1971 during a joint talk he gave with psychologist Erik Erikson across several days at Yale University and later in Oakland.2 Newton's opening remarks at Yale lasted over an hour but were reduced to about ten pages in the subsequently published In Search of Common Ground.3 As a philosophical foundation for his remarks on intercommunalism, that introductory speech included an engagement with the work of Hegel, Marx, Freud, Jung, Kant, Pierce, and James, among others.4 Portions of the material of this main speech, the subsequent Q&A, and other writings of Newton's were later combined, recomposed, and expanded upon under the title of "Intercommunalism" in 1974, the same year that he completed his bachelor's degree and fled temporarily to Cuba. This text had until now been available only through access to the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection (1968-1994), held in archive in Stanford University's Special Collections.5 It is now reproduced here, available to the public at large for the first time, accompanied by this introduction.
– Delio Vásquez
Intercommunalism: The Late Theorizations of Huey P. Newton, 'Chief Theoretician' of the Black Panther Party
By Delio Vásquez
Black Panther leader Huey Newton holds a press conference in San Francisco after returning from a meeting with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai in China. Newton is facing his third trial on charges of killing a police officer. October 8 1971.
Intercommunalism (1974) the article by Viewpoint Magazine is from 2018, so yeah, until very recently this magnum opus of Huey was tucked away in an archive. But now it's freely available for us to read over and discuss five years later. Honestly this should be added right alongside "Revolutionary Suicide" for his notable works on his wikipedia page, but well, it needs people to notice it first I guess.By Delio Vásquez
Black Panther leader Huey Newton holds a press conference in San Francisco after returning from a meeting with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai in China. Newton is facing his third trial on charges of killing a police officer. October 8 1971.
On September 5, 1970, Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party (BPP), introduced his theory of intercommunalism at the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.1 He later expanded on this theory before an audience at Boston College in November of that year, and then again In February 1971 during a joint talk he gave with psychologist Erik Erikson across several days at Yale University and later in Oakland.2 Newton's opening remarks at Yale lasted over an hour but were reduced to about ten pages in the subsequently published In Search of Common Ground.3 As a philosophical foundation for his remarks on intercommunalism, that introductory speech included an engagement with the work of Hegel, Marx, Freud, Jung, Kant, Pierce, and James, among others.4 Portions of the material of this main speech, the subsequent Q&A, and other writings of Newton's were later combined, recomposed, and expanded upon under the title of "Intercommunalism" in 1974, the same year that he completed his bachelor's degree and fled temporarily to Cuba. This text had until now been available only through access to the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection (1968-1994), held in archive in Stanford University's Special Collections.5 It is now reproduced here, available to the public at large for the first time, accompanied by this introduction.
"The logic of the thesis of intercommunalism is: imperialism leads to 'reactionary intercommunalism' to 'revolutionary intercommunalism' to pure communism and anarchy. Each of the concepts is in need of definition and redefinition."6
The Black Panther Party was the last and perhaps most significant, domestically-based left revolutionary political organization to challenge American imperialism. At its height, the BPP encompassed 68 chapters in the United States, it established an international branch in Algeria and trained with operatives in the Congo, and it formed coalitions with political organizations in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, North and South Vietnam, North Korea, Japan, the People's Republic of China, India, Uruguay, Peru, Nicaragua, Cuba, Palestine, Iraq, Israel, Australia, and throughout Europe.7
Ultimately, the Black Panther Party's influence and power provoked a frenzied effort by the U.S. federal government and local law enforcement to destroy its structure and either assassinate or immobilize its members—an effort that continues to the present day, with dozens of former Panthers still incarcerated.8
Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the BPP with Bobby Seale, was raised in poverty in Oakland and attended Oakland public schools. He later described his schooling as a humiliating experience that eliminated any confidence he had in his own ability to learn, leaving him with feelings of "despair and futility." "We not only accepted ourselves as inferior; we accepted the inferiority as inevitable and inescapable."9
After graduating high school, he finally gained functional literacy at age 17 through the memorization of poetry and by reading Plato's Republic several times consecutively.10 He then threw himself into the study of ancient, early modern and modern philosophy; Enlightenment Era, Marxist, Third World and Black Radical political theory; foundational sociology, psychology, and positivist philosophy; and modern European, American, and Black literature.11
During the existence of the BPP, Newton was the party's primary political strategist and tactician, responsible for both the early armed patrols of Oakland police which he conducted with shotgun and lawbook in hand and for the diplomatic envoy made to Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China in 1971. Despite his erudition and aptitude, Newton rarely tested to an IQ much above 74—which would have classified him as "borderline mentally deficient"—neither when he was tested in high school or college, nor when he was tested again in 1968 while in prison. In the latter instance, he consciously refused a genuine engagement with the tests, rejecting them on principle for their role in perpetuating structural racism.12
Newton developed his theory of intercommunalism in the fall of 1970, two months after his release from solitary confinement, penned in response to his deep disappointment with the backlash from the Black community following the BPP's pledge to offer troops in support of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.13 Many simply could not grasp what the liberation of Black people could possibly have to do with the Vietnamese Communists against whom the U.S. was waging war. The theory of intercommunalism was Newton's attempt to lay out a political and economic account of how he understood the world to be structured at the time—under a new type of imperialism—but it was also his attempt at forming a political strategy for how the BPP could expect to move forward in the decades to come as the revolution advanced. According to Newton's own admission, the theory of intercommunalism nonetheless proved perplexing and difficult for most, though it is now clear that this was more an effect of the counterintuitive character of what he was arguing rather than how he argued it, as Newton's writing style reads as refreshingly clear compared to much other leftist writing of the period.14
He was able to expand on his theorizations later while completing his PhD in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, an interdisciplinary department for philosophy, cultural theory, and political theory. Indeed, from 1972 through about 1980, Newton worked on a wide range of theoretical problems, including a series of studies into the global "decentralization of production" and the feasibility of revolutionary expropriations in "The Technology Question" and "Technology vs. Land." He accumulated writings and annotations on anthropology, evolutionary biology, and human psychology for a "Proposed Book on Deceit and Self Deception" that never came to fruition, though he would later publish a related article in collaboration with evolutionary biologist Dr. Robert Trivers for Science Digest in 1982.15
Among his most philosophical writings are included: a metaphysical inquiry into the possibility of a utopian politics drawing from dialectics, psychoanalysis, and intercommunalism in "Utopia: Universal Life Energy"; a sprawling engagement with mind-body dualism in "The Mind is Flesh"; and a speculative psychoanalytic essay on gendered domination in "Eve, the Mother of all Living."16 In the late 1970s, he also produced a critique of theological approaches to history grounded in a reading of the epic of Gilgamesh entitled "The First Hero of Literature," a materialist historicization of early Christian history presumably for use in relation to the BPP's late '70s Black community-oriented "Son of Man" Temple, and other writings on political theology, as with the aptly titled "Politics and Myth."17
Regrettably, Newton's intellectual productivity both during and after the height of the BPP has too often been dismissed out of hand. Even mainstream narratives that purport to celebrate and legitimize the Panthers simultaneously depict Newton as a "thug," maligning through obviously racialized terms not only the Black Panther Party's "chief theoretician" but also the Black, inner-city poor that Newton sought to organize and died trying to liberate.18 There have been great historiographic and theoretical strides made in the last decade and a half to better account for the wide political-strategic range of the BPP as a social movement, from a renewed focus on their social programs to their partial origins in university-based study groups.19 At the same time, however, the apparently increasing unwillingness of historians and theorists to honestly square the illegality, violence, and lumpenproletarian character of Panther members, politics, and strategy with the Panthers' perceptive intellectual insights has served to further divorce academics and leftists alike from realistic conceptions of what significant political contestation actually looks like and who it includes. That is, the move to "save" the history of the Panthers from the simplistic demonization to which it was almost unilaterally subjected between the 1960s and the 1990s seems to have come hand in hand with a watering down of their militancy and a dismissal of the poor, street-based culture that produced the Party in the first place.20
Other accounts fail to engage with the uniqueness of the political theory produced by Newton and the Panthers, often conflating the Party with other movements from the era. It is also the case that much of the political "left" today simply refuses to read theory produced by the BPP, to say nothing of other Black radical thought.
Stares Into Camera and whispers "don't worry me too".Still others even urge that we move on beyond the Black Panther Party precisely as they are finally being treated with nuance by scholars and the public alike.21 And yet, what are we to make of an organization that has long been considered the paragon of the Black Power movement, but was not only often at odds with the very person who coined the phrase "black power" but actively developed alliances with both white Hollywood celebrities and poor Appalachian migrants, with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Mizrahi Israelis alike?22 More to the point, what are we to make of Newton's own insistence that—when they have done the job that has to be done—"the Black Panther Party will no longer be the Black Panther Party"?23
***
This essay is meant to serve as an introduction to "Intercommunalism" (1974) and as a contextualization of Newton's theory of intercommunalism as a whole. Those in search of theory to inform their political practice will find value in Newton's treatment of the problems of race, nationalism, and internationalism, his speculations on the future of surplus populations and questions of class composition, and the role of information technology in future possibilities for struggle.
Through the rest of this essay, I (1) outline Huey Newton's political-economic account of global empire, (2) contextualize Newton's philosophical method—dialectical materialism—within his personal intellectual history, and (3) trace the progression of the Black Panther Party's "official ideology" from Black Nationalism to Revolutionary Intercommunalism, informed by historical debates within the Black Liberation movement. In the second half, applying Newton's theory, I (4) offer a new interpretation of the BPP's shift in strategy from "self defense" to "survival pending revolution," (5) give an account of the political import of the BPP's Oakland commune, and (6) reflect on some connections to political struggles today.
1. Reactionary Intercommunalism
"We see then that the United States controls other countries thousands of miles away and uses their resources to benefit the ruling circle in America. The same situation holds for the many communities of the oppressed within the United States. Therefore the evidence shows very clearly that the United States is not a nation for its boundaries are extended into every territory of the world. The United States is an empire."24
This is a direct quote from the reference "Newton, "Intercommunalism: A Higher Level of Consciousness," Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc. Collection, Box 48, Folder 4, pp. 6-7." This was in a box until a few years ago. The stuff we have buried from the recent past. Also yeah this is your first glimpse into Huey's worldview.I decided to go look and see if its actually inaccessible online and yeah, I can't find anything with a quick search for letting me see what's in this box online. I'd have to travel somewhere and look myself. But I did find out that you can buy some black panthers merch from the Huey P Newton Foundation Online Store... Capitalism!
Sorry to cut right when stuff gets good, but it's getting a bit long and I want to chop this up so my next post will be actually going through what Intercommunalism even means. I hope this introduction into both Huey and me was entertaining and insightful, and I hope yinz stick around for whenever i update this.
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