Alright, my stomach is acting up but I did say I wanted to do this today, so with 23 minutes left on the clock I present Revolutionary Intercommunalism. To recap really quick, Reactionary Intercommunalism is the modern day neoliberal/cyberpunk dystopia of the Corporation being more powerful than the Nation-State under capitalist conditions. Introducing a decentralized "Reactionary Intercommunalism" that runs the world via oligarchical feelings and corporate think thanks who are all trying to make Line Go Up, to the detriment of everyone, especially those at the bottom. Who to Huey are Black and LGBT people (We will see some of his takes on LGBT struggles as we move forward and finally when we actually get to Intercommunalism (1974)).
3. Revolutionary Intercommunalism
"When the people seize the means of production, when they seize the mass media and so forth, you will still have racism, you will still have ethnocentrism, you will still have contradictions. But the fact that the people will be in control of all the productive and institutional units of society—not only factories, but the media too—will enable them to start solving these contradictions. It will produce new values, new identities; it will mold a new and essentially human culture as the people resolve old conflicts based on cultural and economic conditions. At some point, there will be a qualitative change and the people will have transformed revolutionary intercommunalism into communism. We call it "communism" because at this point in history people will not only control the productive and institutional units of society, but they will also have seized possession of their own subconscious attitudes toward these things; and for the first time in history they will have a more rather than less conscious relationship to the material world—people, plants, books, machines, media, everything—in which they live. They will have power, that is, they will control the phenomena around them and make it act in some desired manner, and they will know their own real desires. The first step in this process is the seizure by the people of their own communities."
53
I think it's important that Huey acknowledges this here. Some fresh faced leftists fresh off reading the Communist Manifesto after an all-nighter of playing HOI4 would probably say "Once the workers seize the means of production all the old isms of capitalism will be swept aside!" while huey, in much more and more elegantly goes "Once the
people seize the means of production, all the old isms will cling on until resolved by the people as they adjust under a life free from economic and political oppression". It'll be a process to truely build that new world from the ashes, and it's good to keep the sobering reality in your mind, especially if you do find yourself after the revolution and you still have a misogynist trying to espouse their views in the economic planning meeting for your Peoples Burger joint. But after Touching Grass:tm: Joe will understand that it's actually quite rude to say those things infront of the other half of the store that is female.
Newton used his conception of dialectical materialism to both respond to and lead the BPP's ideological and strategic turns. According to Newton, the Black Panther Party began as a
black nationalist organization. Having observed that "most people in the past had solved some of their problems by forming into nations,"
54 they invested their efforts in pursuing a politics concerned with defending and empowering Black people as a distinct community. That said, from the start, they also critiqued
cultural nationalist approaches, noting both their ineffectiveness for significantly changing the lives of most Black people and their popularity among more educated and affluent African Americans.
55
Nationalism, it's not good folks. Shocking to some I know, I still give a good ol 'merica everytime i see a 4th of July fireworks show, but making it the center of reality time and time again results in reaction taking hold, and oppressive thinking prevailing as the discussion becomes centered around what benefits the nationality and the nationality alone, dismissing other Nations of people and minorities that exist throughout. I actually did read this part of Huey's essay before this and I can't wait to share that part. The way Huey breaks down how he arrived at the conclusion that nationalism is a dead end for black people is quite insightful in my humble opinion. Also that little bit at the end of "more educated and affluent African Americans" I assume is talking about petite-bourgeoise Black americans of the era. Small business owners to be exact. The Vanguard of Reaction regardless of who you start out as. Wanna start a fascist movement? Get the backing of the oligarchs, but go hard on appealling to small business owners.
Some Afrocentric approaches to cultural nationalism in the 20th century seemed at times to imply that liberation might come simply from dressing differently or changing one's name—by asserting a newly produced identity as an individual or as part of a community.
56
I've also seen this take in the trans community, and it is always quickly dismissed by those that look around and experience the world as it interacts with a transgender person. I don't
want to compare Black and trans struggles, but in the usa under capitalism they overlap in places that I feel can be relevant when talking about leftist theory due to both communities being at the very bottom of the totempole of political acceptability.
At the same time, however, the Panthers deeply valued political education, aware of its profound psychological impact on youth especially, and they made learning about African and African diasporic history a requirement for membership. Among Panthers on the East Coast especially, changing one's name was a common practice, drawn from a religious tradition that was central to Black Islam and was epitomized through the figure and life of Malcolm X, a.k.a. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, who served as a symbol of reinvention and personal transformation for countless radicals in the 1960s and beyond.
57 However, the BPP also always regarded cultural nationalism as only a stepping stone in a dialectical process, insufficient on its own for bringing about revolution. They were deeply critical of African or Black-led states that were nonetheless authoritarian, or capitalist, or within which Black people were still poor. To be for Black liberation meant then necessarily also to be against capitalism.
"It's not a phase, mom" - Malcolm X changing his name and adopting black cultural nationalism. But yes, this is another moment of looking at reality and going well duh. Interestingly I don't think at this time they had too many examples of black people being in charge in america to support this example, only post-colonial independent african states. Though with Ferguson under Obama we can at least look back with hindsight and know they were correct that as long as they are under capitalism, Black people at any level of power will not be able to liberate their own people unless the current system is done away with.
As an aside can I say the wiki page on ferguson is wild, I
do not remember this event. But I have to share
this part of the historical record. I feel like a madman looking at this snippet and laughing like a maniac. "You, oppressed people of Ferguson, rise up all ye want. But ye shall be under our scopes, under our watchful eye, and we will send demons in sheep clothing to talk to you, to quell your justified anger, and to make you know your place. The system will not yield, it can wait you out and drown your voice our with the tide of history as it rises and falls."
Newton recounts how he came to his position, years before the Party was established:
"It was my life plus independent reading that made me a socialist—nothing else. I became convinced of the benefits of collectivism and a collectivist ideology. I also saw the link between racism and the economics of capitalism, although, despite the link, I recognized that it was necessary to separate the concepts in analyzing the general situation. In psychological terms, racism could continue to exist even after the economic problems that had created racism had been resolved. Never convinced that destroying capitalism would automatically destroy racism, I felt, however, that we could not destroy racism without wiping out its economic foundation. It was necessary to think much more creatively and independently about these complex interconnections."
58
Yeah I understand Huey, that tracks with my own political journey. Though replace racism with sexism/homophobia I guess. I think these days this falls under the field of study labelled "Intersectionality". Though that is a feminist framework. Though skimming through the intersectionality wikipedia article I find a section labelled "Marxist feminist critical theory" which starts off with everyones favorite Black American Marxist theorist... Du Bois.
Snippet from the Intersectionality Wikipedia Article said:
W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the intersectional paradigms of race, class, and nation might explain specific aspects of the black political economy. Collins writes: "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped African-American access to status, poverty, and power."
[40]: 44 Du Bois omitted gender from his theory and considered it more of a personal identity category.
These ideas go back a long ways, and are still in flux. The wikipedia article on Intersectionality barely touches on the
economic aspect of societal values but it is a theory under capitalism, most people don't quite have the critical thinking mindset drilled into them due to our shit educational system. I got taught Marketing! In 10th Grade! I never took a home ed or personal finance class but boy at least I got to learn fucking Marketing at a public high school in Tennessee!
For these reasons, and many more, the Black Panther Party quickly shifted towards
revolutionary nationalism, grounded in the need to transform the economic organization of society in order to transform it politically.
59
Within a year of the BPP's founding, however, Party leadership would come to the conclusion that the Black community in the U.S. could not, practically speaking, become a nation-state—secure, with their own territory and with full control over their economic, political, and cultural life—after all. "It is an endless circle, you see: to achieve nationhood, we needed to become a dominant force; but to become a dominant force, we needed to be nation."
60 More to the point, if African Americans were indeed ever able to establish a separate nation-state,
even if it were socialist, Newton argued, there would be little to stop the U.S. from invading and turning it into a colony in the traditional imperialist fashion, or, more likely, from asserting economic control over it in the contemporary "neo-colonial" manner.
61 Given the immense power of the United States, the solution could only be then for the BPP to ally themselves with other oppressed peoples, domestically and abroad.
To become a nation, one must be a nation. What an idea of revolutionary implications to many nationalist movements around the world right now, or maybe not. I'm not too well versed on current international insurrectionary movements as I might want to be. Though I have to argue in this day and age the actual invasion by the USA is growing unlikelier as the American Empire takes misstep after misstep. Cough cough the failed coups in bolivia and venezuela and even at home yada yada, but American Capital would still "invade". American capitalism and corporates still run a majority of the worlds globalized economy.
According to contemporary genetic science, racial categories as people popularly believe in them today are demonstrably invalid. However, racial categories are not mere fantasy either, nor can they be used as an easy means for individual self-expression. Modern racial categories are not chosen but rather are imposed, their most important function is to dehumanize, and they are made real through processes of political domination and exploitation.
Sure "Black people" as a race materially exists insofar as some people have more melanin, but the Race exists as a social and political construct. Anyone trying to sell you some shit about IQ or skull shapes can be handed some calipers and shoved into a locker like the fascist nerd they are.
Huey Newton's thought often reflects an awareness of the social and political constructedness of blackness as a category. In his words: "I knew the difference between white people and black people, of course, but the cue was always the way white people treated us, not the color itself."
62 Of course, situated in a historical context, Newton considered the category of blackness still a necessary one for recognizing certain material dynamics (eg. genocide, the racialized character of colonization, lumpenization, etc.) and also as a ground for political solidarity. It was a category that received extra emphasis in the later years of the Oakland-based BPP, not as a hindrance to international alliances but as a way to strengthen them. That said, Newton ultimately considered it politically necessary to eventually establish a "universal identity," disconnected from "cultural, racial, and religious chauvinism."
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And this is where my earlier statement of "Black and trans people experience similar overlapping oppressions" can come back and say hi. Capitalism and its enforcement mechanisms through social and political control can be universally recognized in all its various ism forms. So thus, under all these charades of seperation that Capitalism performs to divide the people, what unites all these disparate groups?
Aiming to build alliances with oppressed people against capitalism wherever possible, the Black Panther Party officially became
internationalist, forming political bonds across six continents with other revolutionary organizations and oppressed people. Historically, this was unremarkable, as non-Western socialists and communists of all stripes had throughout the 20th century worked to build alliances with each other and against European and American capitalism and imperialism. Indeed, in many ways internationalism was already part of the background for the Black Panther Party, which formed in 1966, the same year that The Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America was founded in Cuba, followed soon after by the publication of the
Tricontinental magazine. The literature and social movements from which BPP members drew inspiration were consistently internationalist, from Kwame Nkrumah's autobiography to Carlos Marighella's
Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. At the same time, the willingness of Newton to reconsider the Black Panther Party's relationship to Black American identity was in many ways a continuation of a gesture that other U.S.-based Black revolutionaries had already made—from Malcolm X to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers—in using the word "Black" to refer not just to people of partial African descent but as a revolutionary catch-all category, so that the "Black revolution" could include revolutions in Asia and Latin America, and "Black people" could include all "people of color who are engaged in revolutionary struggle in the United States and all over the world."
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Yeah to reiterate, nothing so far that we have covered is necessarily new or specific to the BPP or Huey. Though for some of you, the revelation that "Black" means "any people oppressed by the American Empire" might be news, and for that I say, hooray! Today you are one of the lucky 10000! bask in your new assurance that yes, those right wing shouts about how Black Revolutionaries want a state controlled by and for Black Men is complete reactionary fantasy made to scare you into being subconciously racist towards your neighbor. To those that have the theoretical basis to understand all this, you can know that the struggle for your liberation is the struggle for the liberation of everyone. No adjectives needed.
And yet, by 1970, Newton came to reject even internationalism as a flawed revolutionary strategy. The reasons for this rejection are based in at least two problems or "contradictions," one external to the BPP and one internal to it.
The first problem is grounded in Newton's understanding of the world under reactionary intercommunalism and what kind of resistance is even possible within it. As Brown has put it, "Huey concluded that the capitalists of the United States had succeeded in reducing the rest of the world to a collection of communities, no different in terms of territorial sovereignty or control over resources than oppressed communities inside the United States."
65 Since there were no more nations, one could not have true internationalism, much less among oppressed people. Put more strongly, "the people and the economy are so integrated into the imperialist empire that it's impossible to 'decolonize,' to return to the former conditions of existence"; and "if colonies cannot decolonize and return to their original existence as nations, then nations no longer exist. Nor, we believe, will they ever exist again."
66
Boom goes the dynamite. I felt like maybe bolding this part or seperating it with a few spaces or something to clarify its significance within the work of Hueys worldview. And yes you read that right, Huey is arguing that the very nations that we think exist around us, no longer actually meaningfully exist. That they have all been subsumed into the American Empire. Subjugated under American Capital and bending to the will of the American Oligarchs.
You can have communities, the black community, the LGBT community, the hispanic community. But you can no longer have nations. The USA has broken down anything that can be meaningfully described as an international barrier and subsumed it within itself. And you might be thinking "Wait what about North Korea, or Cuba, or China? Aren't those nation-states with international barriers to the USA?
Instead, for Newton, there can only exist liberated territories within the larger expanse of the global American empire. As long as that empire still exists, these liberated territories must constantly struggle to maintain their autonomy from capitalism and imperialism both. Already by 1974, we see Newton question the extent to which the Soviet Union and The People's Republic of China could be considered truly independent, communist nation-states:
"By whom are the Chinese, for instance, forced? They are forced by the actions of the United States. Instead of putting their money into the schools, the hospitals, and into institutions in their community, they are forced to maintain a large military. So their liberated territory is very similar to what happened in the riots and rebellions in Detroit where, for about 4 or 5 days the blacks there held about 8 blocks and they drove the local police and the national guard out and the peace was not restored… They only held their territory for 4 days, they could have had a revolutionary provisional government and we would have recognized it just as we recognized the People's Republic of China… We do not recognize them as a nation but as a liberated territory and a community that is somewhat free, but it can only maintain its freedom through a constant fight."
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I appreciate it when people just plainly describe stuff as "they held the territory for 4 days". In 2020 an autonomous zone was declared in what was it Seattle? For like three days. That's an example of a temporarily liberated zone in the Empire, even though everyone and their mom considers CHAZ a joke and a half. But funnily enough under Hueys Intercommunalism, that's the only form of revolutionary resistance one can do against the American empire anymore, I think. We should probalby read further before i make a declarative statement like that one.
But yeah Cuba, North Korea, and China can all be considered liberated zones in a way. All former second world nations that maintained their power in the face of the usa. Two too small to strike out and do something else on their own, and one that managed to steer its own ship of state until economic necessity made them open up to foreign investments and become entangled in the web of the American Empire and its Overton window.
The second problem Newton encountered had to do with how internationalism was received by the Black community. Immediately upon his release from prison in 1970, Newton announced an offer of troops on behalf of the Black Panther Party to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, a material expression of internationalist solidarity. The backlash from Black elites
68 was less of a concern than the backlash that came from the mass base of the Party:
"…Our offer of troops to the Vietnamese received negative reactions from the people, truly oppressed people. Welfare recipients wrote letters saying, 'I thought the Party was for us; why do you want to give those dirty Vietnamese our life blood?' I would call this a contradiction, one we are trying to solve. We are trying to give some therapy, you might say, to our community and lift their consciousness but first we have to be accepted. […] We try to do whatever is possible to meet the patient on the grounds that he or she can best relate to, because, after all, they are the issue."
69
I worked at a job recently in a supermarket. It wasn't bad. The job was unionized and was simple enough that my coworkers with learning disabilities could do it. Never talked politics with any of my workers outside of once with my manager and one line she told me stuck with me, "Why should we care about anyone 'over there' when there are people here that need caring about?" She sort of said this out of context in a way that confused me and the conversation ended there. But that line sticks with me because it's such a simple thing to understand, but to reconcile that with the need to liberate everyone under capitalism is either a tough nut to crack or a hard pill to swallow depending on what you believe. Should we set up groups that benefit the local community only? Ensuing loyalty so that people will want to support us because it materially benefits themselves? Or will that fall into reaction due to its isolated and hyper specific nature? Should we invite others to help us? Can we use the privilege our community has to help others? While Black Americans on the 70s were at the bottom the hierarchy, they still had the privilege to go overseas and fight with the vietnamese against American troops on the ground and Huey said that and tried to capitalize on that. Or at least, this is all how I see it. My particular worldview is being influenced by 2am brain fog. I started this at 1130 ughhhhh...
Newton's critique of internationalism was influenced by the need to address the ideological relationship of the Black community in particular to American nationalism. As Americans—even for the most marginalized, poor, and recently immigrated among us—we are inclined to uphold the false belief in our exceptionalism and superiority, if not at least our social difference.
Can I just take a moment to say that even when I am actively trying to counter the exceptional thinking, foreign friends and associates still tell me I fall into its pitfalls and traps. Climbing out of the American Exceptional programming is extremely difficult and you should feel zero shame if you too are on a path where you are trying to course correct for it.
The vitality of nationalism is in part maintained by the state's dispensation of certain material privileges and a symbolic status unto a population based off of the mere and arbitrary facts of their birth. The defensive retort that "we" must take care of "our own" serves to obscure the active role that we play in disconnecting ourselves from the suffering of the rest of the world, even when it is in fact deeply connected to our own suffering.
70 I would forward that Newton was able to identify that this reactionary tendency necessarily reasserts itself through the nationalism that is
presumed within internationalism.
Several theorists in recent years have tackled the matter of the historically unique position that diasporic African people have been forced into under modernity—arguably one of incommensurable subjection, and even abjection. For these thinkers, the forced "social death" of diasporic Africans, as a continued effect of slavery, is an indispensable feature of western society, or perhaps of capitalism. In some ways, Newton might be said to agree with the basic intuitions behind some of these views, but, informed by his intercommunalist perspective, he comes to opposite conclusions.
For Newton,
all oppressed people within the bounds of American Empire are in some sense colonized.
71
Alright that was a lot right there but what does it all say exactly? Why didn't I break it up? Well to be frank, it's because I myself am having a spot of trouble parsing it through my feeble mind. For the first part as a finalization of the last part I quoted, it means that what I and Huey have observed is true. That people want themselves and those immediately around them to be taken care of first, and that it's the natural outcome of living under a nationalistic/internationalist capitalistic way of thinking.
For the rest I have to sit here tapping my table deciding if what Huey has just described is the Marxist concept of "Alienation". Where one becomes "alienated" from their work, their workplace, their coworkers, and eventually, everyone around them until they are atomized into easily controllable boxes under capitalism. Alienation is essentially what happened to White people, and is what Huey is noticing is happening to Black people around the 1970s. Can I just say sometimes I feel this literally? Sometimes I straight up say to myself I am just an Alien sent here to observe earth because it's just so hard to comprehend those around me sometimes.
Furthermore, though, because "Black people" in America compose a
uniquely colonized community, comparable to colonized communities in other parts of the world while simultaneously located within the very center of the empire, the community is in a uniquely privileged position
to destroy that empire. Specifically, Newton considered Black people in the U.S. to be in the ideal position to act as the vanguard for a global revolution against reactionary intercommunalism. "We believe that black Americans are the first real internationalists; not just the Black Panther Party, but black people who live in America… We have been internationally dispersed by slavery, and we can easily identify with other people in other cultures. Because of slavery, we never really felt attached to the nation in the same way that the peasant was attached to the soil in Russia."
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I... 100% understand what he means and agree with the conclusion. I don't think he necessarily means the traditional type of leftist Vanguard, but that the African American community as a whole is "the Vanguard" and that's really neat to think about. It could be said that BLM is a Vanguard movement for the American left in this vein. Though that argument falls apart in the face of the lack of any form of ideological rigor across the BLM movement. And actually on further thought, Huey kind of was almost right in 2020. When things were getting heated and it seemed like everything was spiraling out of control, it was Black people and Black suffering that ignited the flame that charred the gilded edges of the Empires lustrous image
and the Third Precinct.
According to official Black Panther Party ideology, African diasporic people in the Americas are not a minority, but rather members of the colonized majority, imported over centuries to build the foundational wealth and heart of the empire.
73 This means that we, like other oppressed groups in the U.S., "reap benefits" from the exploitation of the rest of the world but are also in a strategic position to uproot that empire at its base.
74
"If we believe we are brother with the people of Mozambique, how can we help? They need arms and other material aid. We have no weapons to give. We have no money for materials. Then how do we help? … They cannot fight for us. We cannot fight in their place. We can each narrow the territory that our common oppressor occupies. We can liberate ourselves, learning from and teaching each other along the way. But the struggle is the same; the enemy is the same."
75
The Slaves of the empire, imported into the Masters house, have the best opportunities to slit the Masters throat. And the second part of the Huey quote, that made me go down what I call a "third eye opening" moment where a bunch of thoughts hit me all at once and its hard to put the idea i just had into words. But essentially this is what we need to do, and what some of the more clever leftists need to do today. Networking, communicating, and liasioning with those from all over the world that have the most relevant experience in fighting the American Empire and all its tendrils wherever and however they spread. From Germany to Somalia to the streets of china, there are revolutionary groups throughout the world that are trying, failing, and learning everyday, and it's a duty you can pick up as one of those in a position to, to learn from and help them as well.
Within a reactionary intercommunalist world, intercommunal solidarity and revolutionary struggle is to fight locally for one's own freedom as well as the freedom of those far away. Intercommunalism is therefore Newton's non-statist theoretical frame—a frame that insists that one's political vision must be able to see past the limits of border ideology.
And here is something super interesting to me. I have two immediate thoughts. Firstly something something Mao started as an anarchist, Huey was heavily inspired by Mao, Huey is an evolution of Maoism into a non-statist ideology is a fit of historical irony i can enjoy. Secondly, something me and some other leftists have noticed in the last few years is that the statist left is incredibly irrelevant and has no practical means to climb back up to their once upon a time peak, and Anarchism has taken over as the ideology most capable of functioning within its ideological bounds under capitalism. So basically, yeah
4. The Long Durée of the Black Panther Party: A New Reason to Exist
Alright and that's the end for me tonight. I did a lot more rambling today than I did yesterday but it was all about something that touched a particular thought of mine. I've never read anything of huey's work from before yesterday, but the more I learn the more I realize it's stuff that I either can agree with, or already do just based on observations I have made about the world around me and via the conversations I have had with other left radicals about current events. I hope someone out there gets something out of this, and I hope to be back Soon:tm: with Part 4 of the Introduction to Intercommunalism. Incase you go off to google translate it Durée is duration in French.
