Revolutionizing The Masses In Three Stages: The Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party and its Intermediate and Mass Organizations (2021)

WHAT ARE WE DOING?

We face the most daunting of tasks; that of building a viable, effective, AND ULTIMATELY SUCCESSFUL, revolutionary movement within and aimed at piercing the heart of the most powerful and murderous empire the world has yet known: Amerikkka.

Many attempts have been made, and just as many have failed or suffered repeated setbacks, often for lack of learning from past mistakes or becoming disheartened or distracted by secondary contradictions.

We must double down on our efforts, but commit ourselves to applying the dialectical materialist method of analysis and practice every step of the way, so that we are scientific in our mode of work. This begins with understanding who and what we are struggling against and why; who we aim to organize and how; and what forms of organization are required to meet the needs of our work.

THE PSO AND UNRESOLVED CONTRADICTIONS

This work is not new to the founding members of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party (RIBPP) who split from the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (NABPP) on Dec 29, 2020. Until that time the United Panther Movement (UPM) was the principal mass organization of the NABPP, however most of the UPM united with the RIBPP in the split and later reconstituted itself as the Panther Solidarity Organization (PSO). The PSO is now the RIBPP’s principal mass organization.

At the time of the split, the UPM was struggling to grasp what a mass organization operating under the NABPP’s leadership should look like, and how that leadership should operate. A major cause of this struggle, which was never resolved, was the NABPP’s failure to explain its relationship to the UPM, and give them any informed guidance in developing its organizational structure and processes of accountability between the organizations. Yet the NABPP’s Central Committee was critical of the structure the UPM Comrades were forced to develop on their own and ultimately denounced them as the NABPP’s mass organization.

The RIBPP has inherited these unresolved contradictions which were created by the NABPP’s lack of leadership—leadership failures that RIBPP Comrades were struggling against leading to their split, and which we aim to rectify here and in the accompanying position paper, “Organizing the People: On the PSO and Intermediate Organizations.”

IT’S A CLASS STRUGGLE!

Social wealth is produced by workers who, through their collective labor, extract and work up natural resources into consumable products and provide the services that make the organization of societies possible.

The existing system of capitalist imperialism is rigged up to allow a tiny group of people who don’t perform any meaningful labor to control the institutions of political power and the global system of production and distribution, so that they are able to hoard a vast amount of social wealth for themselves and prevent any meaningful challenge to their power from everyone else.

Consequently, access to needed resources falls unevenly on everyone else, causing immense poverty and suffering to over half the world’s people, and insecurity and uncertainty for everyone, especially workers.

The masses therefore live every moment in conflict and contradiction with this system and those who benefit from and control it. The beneficiaries and their armed protectors and enforcers must for this reason constantly maneuver to keep the masses misinformed, distracted, divided, and contained in order to maintain their power and control, which produces all manner of chaos, social conflict, and instability.

Most people by design of the ruling class, don’t understand that they live under a system that is deliberately set up to operate this way or that they have the ability, once awakened, united, and organized to fundamentally change it. This is where the revolutionary party comes in.

THE NEED AND ROLE OF THE RIBPP

Just as the ruling class organizes and enforces its power and interests through the medium of political parties, the working class and masses of oppressed people, who are far larger in number and divided as a class, require their own party (a revolutionary party) to raise their consciousness, and unite and organize them to seize, exercise and defend their own political power and interests AS A CLASS, and replace capitalist imperialism with a socialist economy that uses social wealth to benefit and meet the needs of all the people on a global scale. A system we call Revolutionary Intercommunalism.

In the post-1960s era of neoliberalism (which we call reactionary intercommunalism), enhanced automation has replaced and pushed vast numbers of workers into perpetual unemployment and peasants off their land. These chronically unemployed and displaced masses have experienced an ongoing Great Migration and concentration into marginalized urban settings (ghettos, favelas, shantytowns, refugee camps, prisons, and so on), where they are forced to eke out a living by desperate—often “criminal” and predatory—means.

These people desperately need cultural, social, and political education and power, and access to and control of basic survival resources.

With few exceptions, traditional revolutionary parties have looked askance at these desperate layers of the people as destructive, politically unstable, and unreliable, and because they do not exist at the point of production, they have been dismissed as having little revolutionary purpose. These parties have therefore focused their work almost exclusively on active workers and peasants as the main social forces of revolutionary struggle.

The original BPP changed this trend. Huey P. Newton, the BPP’s co-founder and leading theoretician, recognized that changing global conditions under the U.S. dominated, imperialist system was fueling the unprecedented rise of permanently unemployed people. He predicted that they would soon outnumber the regularly employed people. He also recognized that if these marginalized masses were not reached and organized by revolutionaries, they would be used as forces of violent reaction against the traditional revolutionary movement by the establishment.

What Huey also saw was the masses of predominantly urban Black people in Amerika also largely fell into this growing category of desperate, chronically unemployed, lumpen people. He, in turn, met the challenge of creating a party and strategy that could serve the needs of, give leadership to, unite, educate, and organize these marginalized people into a mass force. This was the BPP.

Huey’s predictions about the unprecedented growth of permanently unemployed people and the lumpen, and the need to create revolutionary leadership to serve them, have come to pass on a global scale. An intercommunal Panther vanguard is needed today more than ever. This is the need, purpose, and role of the RIBPP.

THE 3 LEVELS OF MASS CONSCIOUSNESS

In revolutionary work the masses generally exist at three stages of consciousness: the advanced, the intermediate, and the undeveloped. These stages of development generally determine the levels at which we meet and organize the people.

The advanced are those who grasp and wholly unite with the ideological and political line of the revolutionary party, and have demonstrated a total commitment to its work and willingness to make the necessary sacrifices of placing the people and revolutionary struggle foremost. These people qualify for membership in the advanced organization which is the Party.

The intermediate are those who have leftist political leanings, experience, and/or education, but have not fully learned or embraced the ideological and political line of the Party. These people are organized in the intermediate organizations which are led by leading Party cadre who work to develop them into advanced forces that may be recruited into the Party. The intermediate organizations are also the structures that cadres of other revolutionary parties (namely traditional RCPs) may join and formally collaborate with the RIBPP cadre in performing mass work consistent with our Dual Party Strategy. The intermediate organizations also engage in mass work of serving the people and working alongside them to help them meet their needs and solve their problems.

The undeveloped are the everyday people from the oppressed communities, who have a wide range of political, spiritual, and cultural views and leanings. They lack revolutionary experience and education, and have different levels of political commitment and discipline, but generally recognize that change needs to be made in the interests of the oppressed communities and masses. The undeveloped are essentially the general masses of people who form the social base of the struggle and of the mass organizations, which they may freely join. The basis of unity of the mass organizations sponsored by the RIBPP as its own mass organizations is the Party’s 10 Point Program. Otherwise members of the mass organizations are free to embrace a wide range of beliefs and ideas.

Members of the Party and intermediate organizations must work alongside the masses within the mass organizations to help develop them and win them over politically, but on a wholly voluntary basis. We cannot compel the mass organizations or their members to embrace our views nor to commit to any practice, but we may struggle to win them over through principled debate, discussion, and political education.

We may not use our stature as Party or intermediate organization members to pressure the mass organizations or their members to engage in any practices or work that they are as yet unwilling or unprepared to engage in.

In the developmental stages of all revolutionary movements, the advanced (or vanguard) are always in the minority, the intermediary are larger in number but certainly not the majority, while the undeveloped form the vast majority of the people. In the dialectical process of development of revolutionary forces, the advanced work to develop the intermediate into advanced forces, while the intermediate work to develop the undeveloped into intermediate forces. This is why we have the vanguard party, the intermediate organizations, and the mass organizations—so that in a dialectical process the vanguard develop advanced cadre out of the intermediate organizations, and the intermediate comrades develop the undeveloped masses into intermediate forces, like moving the masses up floor by floor so that they ultimately become the advanced themselves.

In this way we systematically develop and grow the revolutionary movement out of the masses, transforming the minority into the majority (quantitative change), until we’ve created the conditions for the masses to seize power (qualitative leap), and transform reactionary intercommunalism into revolutionary intercommunalism.

In this work we must ALWAYS remember the decisive role of the masses as the makers of history. It is the collective people, not individuals, that are the force of society-wide and world change, so we must win them over to the struggle to make those changes themselves. This can only be done through applying the Maoist mass line, so let’s give special attention to what it is and how we must apply it.

THE MASS LINE AND METHOD OF LEADERSHIP

The RIBPP adheres to the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist mass style of leadership, which recognizes that everything relies on and is determined by the consciousness and voluntary action of the people. Without this, our efforts are in vain and will accomplish nothing. Our work, therefore, entails as a first step, raising the people’s consciousness.

But we do not compel the people to accept our ideas, instead, we begin with, and move from their own existing levels of understanding and mindstates. A dialectical process that Mao summed up as, “from the masses to the masses.” A back and forth process between the revolutionary vanguard and the people which he described as:

“…summing up (i.e., coordinating and systematizing after careful study) the views of the masses (i.e., views scattered and unsystematic), then taking the resulting ideas back to the masses, explaining and popularizing them until the masses embrace them as their own, stand up for them, and translate them into action by way of testing their correctness. Then it is necessary once more to sum up the views of the masses once again, take the resulting ideas back to the masses so that the masses give them their wholehearted support…and so on, over and over again, so that each time these ideas emerge with greater correctness and become more vital and more meaningful.”

So, we learn from the masses what their needs are, elevate and concentrate their understanding of their needs, the cause of those unmet needs and how to go about solving them, and then work alongside them in implementing the solutions. We do not command or dictate to the people. Instead, as Mao explained:

“Every comrade…should help the masses to organize themselves step by step and on a voluntary basis to unfold gradually struggles that are necessary and permissible under the external and internal conditions obtained at a particular time and place. Whatever we do, authoritarianism is always erroneous because as a result of our impetuosity, it makes us go beyond the degree of the masses’ awakening and violates the principle of voluntary action on the part of the masses.”

What qualifies a revolutionary party and its members to lead the masses, is our mastery and application of the revolutionary proletarian line, or to give what may be called revolutionary proletarian leadership (RPL). The key to RPL is our use of dialectical and historical materialism, which compels us to engage in continuous study of all pertinent social phenomena, constant analyses and review of our work and its results, and grasping history as a process and our role in it. We must be aware of and able to adjust quickly to major changes in the conditions of the masses and events we are involved in, and adjust our plans and policies whenever conditions develop differently than we anticipate.

But these factors alone do not enable us to give correct leadership to the people. What’s decisive is that we win the masses over to seeing and carrying forward the struggle as their own, which it must be. This calls for our own perseverance and patience, because we cannot engage in advanced actions, no matter how needful they are at a given point and time, until the people become willing and able through our education and persuasion to make those changes themselves.

Applying the mass line in this respect determines victory or defeat, because on the historic stage the movement of the masses is irrepressible whereas moves by small groups of radicals are doomed to isolation and being rendered helpless.

In the work of winning the masses in their millions, leading by example is decisive. The masses must trust us, give us their unconditional support, take up our ideas as their own, and support our Party throughout the long process of struggling to overturn this oppressive system.

The people must see our credibility in our superior moral characters, our dedication to their interests, our integrity, receptivity to criticism, honesty in facing and correcting errors, and willingness to engage in self criticism; these are the qualities that move and win the masses. In this cynical society where social views and values have been molded by the ruling class, the people will only vest their trust and confidence in us if we are genuine Communists in our public and personal lives, and as such we place the interests of the masses above private interests, the general good before any partial good, long-range concerns before short-range concerns.

The people in the oppressed communities, the lumpen especially, cannot be dictated to, they can’t be compelled into any actions. They must see with their own eyes the benefits of any course of action, shown the likelihood of success of any plan, learn from observation and experience that their predicament can be changed for the better, before they will consciously and willingly take it up. And these plans and ideas must correspond to their actual needs which they recognize themselves, not needs we tell them they have.

This is why we are structuring our organizations to meet the masses in three stages—advanced, intermediate, and undeveloped—and why the mass line must be our approach to organizing and leading the people in struggling to end this oppressive system of capitalist imperialism, racism, and police state repression.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All Power to the People!