{"id":2238,"date":"2016-10-22T14:08:54","date_gmt":"2016-10-22T14:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=2238"},"modified":"2016-11-17T14:41:37","modified_gmt":"2016-11-17T14:41:37","slug":"once-a-panther-always-a-panther-reflections-on-the-50th-anniversary-of-the-bpp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=2238","title":{"rendered":"Once a Panther always a Panther: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the BPP"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month marks the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. As an original White Panther, my involvement with the Panthers began in 1968, when I hooked up with WPP members in Chicago during the protests outside the Democratic National Convention. The MC5, the house band of the Ann Arbor-based White Panther Party, was performing at the Yippie!-organized \u201cFestival of Life\u201d in Lincoln Park, which was repeatedly attacked by Mayor Daley\u2019s pigs. They, and Yippie! troubadour Phil Ochs, were the only performers who dared to show up and perform to entertain the protestors. Twice the Chicago pigs came on stage and smashed Phil Ochs\u2019 guitar, but each time someone from the audience ran up and donated their guitars so he could continue.<\/p>\n

After Chicago, I returned home to Eastern Pennsylvania armed with my first copy of Chairman Mao\u2019s \u201cLittle Red Book\u201d and instructions to organize chapters of the White Panther Party. The WPP, were a revolutionary anti-racist, white American political collective founded in 1968 by Pun Plamondon, Leni Sinclair, and John Sinclair. It was started in response to an interview where Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was asked what white people could do to support the Black Panthers. Newton replied that they could form a White Panther Party. The White Panthers took him at his word, and chapters were formed in various cities, and different countries, which worked in conjunction with local chapters of the Black Panther Party and allied formations in various ethnic communities, like the Young Lords, Young Patriots, Brown Berets, Chinese-American Red Guards, and others.<\/p>\n

In Eastern Pennsylvania, we formed collectives in various factory and coalmining towns, as well as Philadelphia, and worked closely with collectives of Black Panthers and Puerto Rican Young Lords. Philadelphia had authorized chapters of Black Panthers and Young Lords and were our connections to the national BPP and YLP headquartered in Oakland, California and New York City respectively. We also interacted with the NYC-based Youth International Party, popularly known as the Yippies! We considered ourselves to be an extension of the BPP-initiated \u201cRainbow Coalition\u201d founded by Chairman Fred Hampton in Chicago. We weren\u2019t long on formalities or protocols, but in a general way, we saw Huey P. Newton as our leader in the U.S. and Mao Tse-tung as our leader internationally.<\/p>\n

We saw the revolution as a material thing and ourselves as allied with the Viet Cong, the freedom fighters in Africa and Latin America, and revolutionaries everywhere. We saw ourselves as \u201cdown for the whole thing,\u201d and we sought to become \u201call the way revolutionary\u201d and to overthrow capitalism, racism and all oppression \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d We took Huey Newton\u2019s statement that, \u201cThe first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man\u201d <\/em>to heart and expected we would likely die in battle or in prison. The pigs\u2019 assassination of Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969, and John Sinclair being sentenced to 10 years for two joints that year made this expectation very real. I had myself survived an assassination attempt in 1968, and all around the country Panther offices were being shot up by the pigs, and comrades were being killed, railroaded into prison or forced into exile or underground. We looked at this in the context of the sacrifices being made by the Vietnamese, by Ch\u00e9 in Bolivia, by Lumumba, Steve Biko and Amilcar Cabral in Africa, and the heroism of reds from the Paris Commune to the Long March and the students massacred in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas <\/em>in Mexico in October of 1968.<\/p>\n

The Panther Movement was proletarian in character, and we didn\u2019t see ourselves as having a lot in common with the student radicals. We used to have a saying that: \u201cWhite radicals are 9 parts bullshit and 1 part hesitation.\u201d It is hard to explain to young comrades today, but we didn\u2019t fetishize \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d or engage in \u201ccall out culture.\u201d We weren\u2019t all that well read politically and took unevenness in development for granted. Whether we were organizing among other young workers, hippies or gang members, we sought to be \u201cfish in water.\u201d We didn\u2019t look down on the masses like student radicals often do but valued their experience and opinions, particularly those who had experience in fighting back.<\/p>\n

\u201cIdentity politics\u201d had yet to become a \u201cthing,\u201d and though we organized among our peers, we had a strong sense of a united movement to overthrow imperialism. We rejected \u201cPork Chop Nationalism\u201d and \u201cBlack Capitalism\u201d and their equivalents as counter-revolutionary. We sought to \u201cServe the People\u201d and create alternative institutions based on cooperation and \u201cparticipatory democracy.\u201d We saw these as seeds of the socialist future we were ready to fight to create, and we were waging a \u201ctotal assault on the culture\u201d of capitalist-imperialism.<\/p>\n

The late-60\u2019s and early-70\u2019s was a time of rapid change and transformation. \u201cActually existing socialism\u201d was being eliminated, and with it \u201cCold War\u201d liberalism, and neoliberalism was on the rise. We didn\u2019t understand it very well. We didn\u2019t even have a word for it, but Huey Newton coined one: He called it \u201creactionary intercommunalism,\u201d and he proposed a counter to it he called \u201crevolutionary intercommunalism,\u201d but to us it was simply \u201cPantherism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPantherism\u201d is illuminated by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the theoretical and practical contributions of the original Black Panther Party and its allied formations. Central to Huey\u2019s \u201cTheory of Revolutionary Intercommunalism\u201d is the understanding that the U.S. is no longer a nation but the headquarters of a globe-reaching, capitalist empire, Hell-bent on consolidating its global hegemony, and because of this, no nations can exist anywhere. The world, as it now exists, consists of a network of interconnected communities, each of which is composed of sub-communities down to the level of neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, this world is rapidly urbanizing and \u201cghettoizing\u201d as the percentage of people the monopoly capitalist ruling class can profitably exploit as workers is rapidly shrinking and the fastest-growing section of the masses are the \u201clumpenized\u201d urban poor, forced to survive by \u201cany means necessary,\u201d including hustling, dealing and stealing. Comrade Huey summed up that because of automation, the capitalist-imperialists would increasingly be unable to profitably exploit a growing percentage of the proletariat as wage workers, and this growing mass of \u201cunemployables\u201d would eventually become the majority of the population. He further theorized that the lumpen (broken) proletariat would provide the basis for a new revolutionary vanguard that would act as a catalyst upon the whole proletariat and masses of people to inspire them to rise up against and overturn the capitalist-imperialist system.<\/p>\n

When we apply this analysis on a world scale, we see that large-scale capitalist agriculture has rendered the small-scale production of the peasant class obsolete, and that it is pushing the peasantry off the land and into the proletariat, as they have nothing left but to sell their labor power to survive, while at the same time the employed section of the proletariat is shrinking. Thus, throughout the \u201cThird World\u201d there is a growing mass of \u201cunemployable\u201d and marginalized poor concentrated in and around the urban centers living under dire conditions, or being compelled to emigrate to the \u201cFirst World\u201d imperialist countries in search of employment, even as industrial jobs are being outsourced to the \u201cThird World\u201d to take advantage of the cheap labor available there. Thus, we have a situation of rapidly changing demographics in the \u201cFirst World\u201d countries. In this declining phase of capitalist-imperialism, where nations are submerged into Empire, the \u201cmother countries\u201d of imperialism are being transformed into \u201cThird World\u201d countries while capitalist-imperialism is \u201cghettoizing\u201d the dependent countries of the actual \u201cThird World.\u201d<\/p>\n

The essence of communism is community, and capitalist-imperialism is the antithesis of community, particularly under neo-liberalism, which is the final stage of imperialism. Kwame Nkrumah theorized that neo-colonialism was the final stage of imperialism, but neo-colonialism is but an aspect of neoliberalism. It is how it plays in the \u201cThird World.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it relies on financial mechanisms and banks instead of brute force of subduing people the practice of neoliberalism outside of the G7 is also called neocolonialism. Neoliberal practice within G7 is called casino capitalism, an apt term that underscore<\/em>[s] the role of finance and stock exchange in this new social order.[1]<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Neoliberalism can best be understood as a protracted \u201cWar on the Poor\u201d or Marxism in reverse. It is all about concentrating wealth and power into the hands of a monopoly capitalist elite. From their perspective, better than half the population of the world are unnecessary mouths to feed. When Huey talked about \u201csurvival pending revolution,\u201d he wasn\u2019t just being rhetorical, and it isn\u2019t coincidental that the U.S. has killed between 20 and 30 million people, mostly people of color, since the end of World War II.[2]<\/a> The top .001% couldn\u2019t care less about the people at the bottom. It is not just a question of Black lives not mattering, nobody\u2019s life matters if the exploiters can\u2019t profit from them.<\/p>\n

Neoliberalism extols greed as a virtue. It sees social services as a source of profit through privatization, not as a responsibility of society. It is essentially fascistic when it comes to caring for the elderly, the disabled and the poor.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/h3>\n

[1]<\/a> \u201cNeoliberalism as a New, More Dangerous, Form of Corporatism,\u201d Softpanorama; www.softpanorama.net\/Skeptics\/Political_skeptic\/Neoliberalism\/index.shtml<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Lucas, James A., \u201cUS Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 \u201cVictim Nations\u201d Since World War II,\u201d Global Research<\/em>, November 27, 2015<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. As an original White Panther, my involvement with the Panthers began in 1968, when I hooked up with WPP members in Chicago during the protests outside the Democratic National Convention. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-2238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-united-panther-movement","tag-united-panther-movement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2238"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2239,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2238\/revisions\/2239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}