Rev Left Radio - The Black Panther Party

Episode Date: January 22, 2018

Authors of "When Theory Meets Practice: The Black Panther Party's Brief but Unignorable Four Years in Boston", Prasanna Rajaskearan and Joe Tache join Brett to discuss the history and philosophy of The Black Panther Party.  Topics include: Malcolm X, black nationalism, Marxism, the Rainbow Coalition, the Boston chapter of the BPP, the FBI, Maoism, Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, feminism in the party, and much, much more. Our guests can be found on twitter: @pvrajasekaran and @thejoetache  Outro Music: "Police State" by Dead Prez off the album "Lets Get Free" Please support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  and follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio  Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org  

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Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and comrade Brett O'Shea, and today we have Prasanna and Joe on to talk about the Black Panther Party and even touch on the Boston chapter of the Black Panther Party, which is a part of the history that doesn't often get talked about. So I'm super excited for this episode. Prasana and Joe, would you guys like to introduce yourselves and say a little bit about your background before we get into the conversation?

Yeah, I guess I'll start. So my name's Joe. I'm a student at Northeastern along with Prasana. That's where we met. And it's hard. I guess I've been undergoing a really rapid political transformation pretty much since, I think, the death of, or the murder of Trayvon Martin. So we were, it was the end of our freshman year in college when my ground was killed and that kind of catalyzed even more of my racial radicalization. And then within the past, honestly, six months or so, it's done well for me to having more of class capitalist critique and layering onto that.

So I'm still a budding leftist, but I think a leftist nonetheless. Yeah, I'm in the same boat as that. My name is Prasana, by the way. I'm also a student at Northeastern. Yeah, like two years ago, or maybe like three years ago, I was like a solidly, like, progressive who, like, believed in the Democratic Party. And I guess with everything that happened with Black Lives Matter, and then also, obviously, with Trump's election and the sort of rise of more leftist movements during that time, really catalyze my political development. a ton. Like I feel like every day I'm like changing my opinion about something and developing like politically. So I would also categorize myself as a leftist at this point. But, you know, I'm just now learning about like how broad and deep the left actually is. Thanks to this

podcast actually a lot. So yeah, maybe in two weeks like I'll have like a specific tendency that I associate with. But for now, yeah, I'm just a leftist. Hey, I mean, it's an honor to know that our podcast is doing that. And I've heard from other listeners that have said similar things. And I think that also reflects, you know, that sort of being politicized and radicalized over the last few years. I think that represents a broad pattern throughout our entire society, especially in the millennial generation, as we're seeing what capitalism in crisis looks like, as we're seeing the rise of fascism and Nazis, as we're seeing the corruption in both parties and the putting up of this absurd candidate, Donald Trump, cartoonish system. More and more people are becoming disillusioned with it. And so I'm, I mean, I love that that process is happening. I hope this show contributes to people's radicalization.

And so I think that a lot of our listeners can relate to both of you on that front. So let's just go ahead and get into the conversation. There's so much to talk about. Of course, we're not going to be able to cover every single aspect of the Black Panther Party. It's such a complex and nuanced history. But I think we have a lot here that we can talk about and a lot that we can learn from. So let's just start with the little historical context of what happened. So what was happening at home and abroad in the mid to late 60s that helped create the conditions for the rise of the Black Panther Party? Yeah, so this is a huge question. I think that it's really hard to describe just how much further left kind of like the global political atmosphere was in the 60s than it is today. But one,

you of course, you have the success of black organizing in the United States kind of pushing people further left. You also have mentioned on the show before kind of the constant threat of the Soviet Union as kind of like keeping capitalism at bay and showing an alternative to a capitalist state. And then something I think that doesn't get mentioned a ton is this wave in, particularly in the 60s of these anti-colonial socialist movements throughout Africa and Asia. So if you were a leftist in the United States, all you had to do was kind of look around at what was happening and draw inspiration read, you know, thoughts of the intellectual of the time, study the movements, and there was a lot to work with there.

But I think at the same time, particularly in by 66, which is when the party was officially started, there was a clear demonstration of the limitations of the civil rights movement because, you know, by then you'd have, of course, Brown versus Board, with school desegregation in the 50s, you had the civil rights law of 63, you had the initiation of the war on poverty, you had the voting rights act they'd all been passed and yet the majority of black people living in the states and really see a material

change in their condition on top of that you had you know the assassination of Malcolm X who meant a lot to a lot of black people in the U.S. and across the world a lot of people generally and on top of that you had police brutality and

this increase in the police state which was kicked off by the war on crime in 65 so there's a lot boiling up in terms of what is like what the shortcomings of the contemporary movement were at the time and in the years before the party was created there were a number of major urban rebellions in places like philadelphia where i'm from in harlem in cleveland and of course in wats in los angeles and those were really rooted in either police brutality cases of free police brutality or cases of substandard living conditions or both.

So in Oakland, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton were looking at these conditions, seeing a need for a greater amount of radicalism and not seeing any already established pathways for them to act upon that. So they actually tried to work with some local organizations in Oakland and essentially decided to start the party after they decided that those organizations. weren't going to do what they thought need to be done. And one other interesting tip bit that's related is in 1965, SNCC, the student nonviolent violent coordinate committee, which was really spearheaded by Sokley Carmichael at the time, started the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, which is really focused on trying to establish political power among a predominantly black population in Lowndes.

and they used the Black Panther as their logo or their mascot. So I think Newton and C.O. kind of saw one of those voter registration pamphlets or something like that and thought it would be a good representation for the party. Yeah, and I think that history is sort of indicative of the leftist view of how social progress gets made on a couple fronts. First and foremost, you know, the liberal worldview is that through policy change, through politicians, through electing good politicians who make good choices and good

policies, that some of these issues can be ironed out and progress can be maintained over time. But the truth is, from the civil rights movement onward and even way before, of course, it's really grassroots movements of regular people taking to the streets, putting pressure on the system, enforcing them and then change the laws. And then even when we see those laws get changed, as we did after the civil rights movement, you still have the sort of material foundation of the racism still in society and that will manifest itself in extrajudicial ways in the forms of police brutality most notably with the Black Panthers.

So there's this, in my opinion, dialectical relationship where you have the civil rights movement, then you have this reactionary backlash and then you have a more militant, more arrogant, more confrontational black power movement come up in response to the reactionary movement that was a response to the civil rights movement. So it's a very dialectical process,

and I think that's interesting, and it kind of justifies the leftist view of history and how history unfolds. But moving on a little bit, because I think there's a key character here, which is Malcolm X. Malcolm X was actually born here in Omaha, Nebraska. He was chased out by the clan, unfortunately,

when he was about two years old, but he was born here, and it's kind of a source of pride for us here in Omaha. But what influence did Malcolm X specifically have on the formation of the Black Panther Party. Yeah, I think Malcolm was the spirit of the Black Panther Party, even though the party was formed a year after his death. So I think you can look at it in two ways. You can look at it in terms of the ideology that Malcolm promoted throughout his life, especially near the end of his

life. And then you can also look at it in terms of like the significance of Malcolm's personal history and the effect that that had on people and the effect that that had on the Black Panther Party leaders. So with that first aspect, Malcolm was the most notable proponent of this idea of armed defense against state violence, right? And obviously, you know, that's kind of the popular idea of what the Black Panther Party is, you know,

based on their police patrols and taking over the California State House. House early in their history. So obviously that comes directly from Malcolm. The United States government could intervene by law in the state of Mississippi by sending troops. And since the Attorney General and others in the federal government have pointed out that they don't intend to send federal troops in themselves to protect the lives and the property

of the Negroes who are being brutalized down there, it's our intention to try and organize the black people or the American Negroes in this country into self-defense units in that area in areas where the government is unwilling or unable to defend our people, we will defend our people ourselves. And then on top of this, Malcolm had a pretty unique perspective. He considered the black community in the United States to be analogous to a nation under colonial subjugation. And that was a perspective that the Black Panthers took verbatim from Malcolm. You know, on top of this, Malcolm had this very sort of universalist orientation, this internationalist perspective, especially near the end of his life, where he was trying to connect

the struggle of black Americans to struggles of anti-colonialist movements in Africa and throughout the world. And that internationalism is so present in the Panthers organizing throughout their history. I think the other part about Malcolm that's so important to understand is like the significance of his personal life and what that meant to the Panthers as organizers. So there's a reason that the autobiography of Malcolm X is one of the most important books in American history. It's because there's something about Malcolm's life that really speaks to us personally. And for the Panthers and for the Panthers organizing, I think what that was was this idea of the political power of the Lumpin proletariat. So Malcolm was someone who

dealt with a ton of state oppression throughout his life, was, you know, a solidly working class, went to jail several times and had to struggle for everything he had and his struggle sort of led directly to his political realization and his political transformation and I think the Panthers saw that and in the development of Malcolm's life

and his like own personal political transformation they saw like the revolutionary power of like the lump in proletariat and marginalized working class black people. Whereas, you know, a lot of Marxist theory and theorists sort of like discard the lump and proletariat as like a class that, you know, can never truly attain class consciousness. The Black Panthers saw that class as sort of the core to their organizing.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. For those, I know you kind of defined it yourself, but just to make it extra clear for those that might not know what that term lump proletariat means, it simply means the criminal underclass, the poor and working people that go to crime to make their material ends meet. And the notion that the Black Panthers were reaching out to those people is widespread. Instead of Martin Luther King's movement, which was amazing and wonderful, it was really church-based. It was about, you know, there's a lot of faith in it, and they reached out to regular people, of course. But the Black Panthers made an extra

attempt to reach out to, you know, the people that were even left, that, that were kind of left aside from even that movement, you know, the people that were criminals or that did have to rely on crime or that were pulled out of their cars and beaten by cops, but didn't have any larger organization that they could turn to. And so that kind of pops up again and again in their, and they're organizing. And you mentioned their sort of internationalism. I think there was a time, and I think you might, you two might have written about it in your paper, where the Black Panther Party actually made appeals to the United Nations to kind of view black people in America as a sort of nation within a nation. And they had a right to national liberation,

just like other movements all around the world at that time. Is that correct? Yep. Yeah. So the idea of a plebiscite, which is basically giving black people a vote on whether they want to remain as part of members of the United States or create their entirely new nation. Yeah, that was like one of their demands that I'm pretty sure that they had throughout their existence. And it was something that Malcolm X himself during his lifetime was calling for directly. So again, you can see this continuity that's very clear. Interesting. Yeah, so let's get into some of the activities and the programs of the Black Panther. Some people know about some of these programs, but it actually goes really deep. So what were some of the main

activities in the programs of the Black Panther Party, how did they serve their communities? So I think the first thing that they really started out with was this police patrol, and that was really concentrated in Oakland before the party expanded. And it was really, you know, arming ourselves, getting into a car, and driving around, either following a police car, or if we see somebody stopping the police, pulling over, getting out with our guns, and sometimes, you know, reading out loud, California legal code and passing out kind of like know your rights pamphlets to people who came around. So there's kind of what we'll talk about political education later, but there's always this constant thread of trying to find ways to galvanize people

politically in terms of expanding people's knowledge of their oppression and understanding the implications of the rule of the state in their lives. And it was something that they also used to actually just get the community's attention and try to draw people in with. I mentioned earlier that at this time, there were urban rebellions around the country, specifically regarding police brutality. So right off the bat, they identified something that was important to the majority of black people living in the country and tried to figure out something to do about it. Of course, this is not something that the state of California was too happy about. So if you look at gun control laws, pass through Governor Reagan at the

time you can see that they're directly traced to to the panthers and trying to control their ability to to maintain that program because when they're doing the police patrols they're very clear about trying to stay within the law they were carrying you know registered weapons they wouldn't shoot first anything like that so it was a very disciplined program but a very clear show of strength and something that resonated with what people wanted to see at the time, to an extent, and I think we can get into that later, too. Yeah, no, I was just going to add on to that a little bit in terms of, like, I think one of the core things, like, to think about when you think about the Panthers organizing outside of

their programs is, like, they were kind of just there to do, in many ways, whatever the community came to them and asked them to do. So we had a ton of stories of people, oh, are, volunteers for the Panthers and Panther members just talking about how, you know, someone might come up and say, you know, I can't afford this medication. Is there any way you can get it for me? Or, you know, white gangs are coming into my neighborhood and harassing me. Like, is there any way you could, like, provide security? And the Panthers would always respond to the, to these requests in like really affirmative ways and do anything that they could to help out people who came to them. So I think outside of the, formal programming, which is, of course, super important. I can important understand that, like, the Panthers were really, really attuned to the needs of the community and just trying to do whatever people needed to get by in their daily lives. Absolutely. And I think that that serves as an important lesson for leftists today.

Don't go into communities wherever you live and just think that you know what's best for people. What the Black Panthers did that was so amazing and that worked so well was precisely that they were of the community and they were constantly in dialogue, with the community and responding to the community's needs. And that's what made them so successful. And that's what gave them credibility inside their community and outside of it. All over the country. And in fact, all over the world, this was a movement that people supported because it was so rooted in the people themselves.

But let's talk about their 10-point program because that was another aspect of their organizing. And it was sort of the explicit version of their intentions and their motivations. So can you talk about what the 10-point program was and what role it played in the party? yeah essentially it was the vision for what the party wanted society it looked like so it's really accessible online i recommend that people check it out and also kind of see how necessary all of those 10 points are still today but includes things like self-determination literally an end to the capitalist exploitation of black communities adequate housing food education an end to the police state all things that are still crucially important today.

And I think it's important for three primary reasons. One is that it connected these broader ideas of socialism to something that felt more tangible and really important to people living on the ground. So kind of what persona was getting at earlier. And one of my personal favorite of people from a leftist movement in the past is Emil Carr Cabral from Guinea-Bissau

And one of the quotes that he is well known for is talking about that people don't fight for ideas or the things in anyone's head that they fight to win material benefits to see their lives go forward and to guarantee the future of their children. So it's not enough to just talk about how bad capitalism is and why they need to be an alternative. It's important to spell out what that alternative can actually do and a movement that fails to connect. those ideals to like material benefits is going to fail to galvanize the base that it really wants to. Secondly, I think it set a clear baseline for what it meant to be a member of the party and that made it easier to hold people to account for not operating within those interests. And that's conflict within the party is something that manifested in a number of different ways and we'll talk about that later. But in addition to the 10 point platform, they also had party

rules, which are less well-known but included things like not doing drugs or alcohol, when doing party work, you know, engaging in a violent act in self-defense only, and other logistical day stuff that is a lot less exciting, but stuff like local branches giving weekly reports to the national headquarters. So in tandem, these really established a way for the party to deal with ideological and practical conflicts, because if you can establish those things at the beginning in as great deal as possible, then you can set a protocol for how the organization can deal with conflicts when they arise because it's inevitable in any movement in any organization.

And then thirdly, it added, the 10-point platform added a revolutionary implication to things that are not inherently revolutionary. So programs that they ran like free breakfast program, the health clinic, having a newspaper, those things were important, but I think in a previous episode, you or guests actually mentioned that providing a food is an important thing, but if you don't provide it with the right frame of mind, it is not a revolutionary act and actually kind of reinforces the problems in society that led to people not being able to eat food in the first place. So by having this revolutionary mantra that they could put in.

in all of their newspapers that they could hand out the people whenever they wanted to. It set up a way to connect these day-to-day acts that were kind of about survival and serving the people to a larger struggle for liberation. Yeah, and it's so fascinating because a lot of the original Black Panther Party members were pretty young. I mean, we're talking late teens, early 20s for the bulk of a lot of these original members. and the fact that their politics were so developed and so advanced and that they understood this tension between theory and praxis and this relationship to the community that it must be rooted in.

It's just really fascinating. And the more I learn about this stuff, the more I'm just kind of shocked and amazed and inspired by what, you know, largely really, I mean, at this time, young people were doing and how mature and sophisticated they were. Me and persona are both about to turn 23 and working on this project every time we're like, damn he he's only 1915 he's only 20 it's like you really got to put put your life in perspective

and think about what we all be doing exactly yeah that's that's true for a wide range of figures on the left throughout history sometimes you're like wow they're doing that already I got to get my shit together yeah all right let's go on to the next one let's talk about the ideology of the party because there were some tensions that don't get talked about a lot and and some of these tensions exist you know still to this day and it existed throughout history But there's this tension between, you know, revolutionary nationalism, black nationalism, the cultural nationalism, and then the Marxism that defined the Black Panther ideology. So to begin, what are the differences between revolutionary nationalism and cultural nationalism, and how did the Black Panther Party orient themselves to these forms of black nationalism? Yeah, absolutely.

So I guess start with cultural nationalism. So culture nationalism is basically the idea that the sort of central tool for building political solidarity and nationhood is culture or race. And so Huey Newton sort of says at one point, you know, we were once a cultural nationalist organization and now we've become a revolutionary nationalist organization. I don't know if that's entirely the case. I would probably argue that the Panthers were always revolutionary nationalists, but it was definitely something that was really, really on their mind, distinguishing them from being cultural nationalists. So I actually have a few quotes from Huey, which kind of illuminate his perspective on cultural nationalism and why he was against it. So Huey says, quote, cultural nationalism seems to be a reaction instead of responding to political oppression. The cultural nationalists are concerned with returning to the old African culture and thereby reggae,

their identity and freedom. In other words, they feel that the African culture will automatically bring political freedom. Many times cultural nationalists fall into line as reactionary nationalists. And then he goes on to cite Papa Doc, who is the brutal Haitian dictator in the mid-20th century as like a prime example of what a cultural nationalist was. So Huey says, quote, Papa Doc oppresses the people, but he does promote the African culture. He's against anything other than black, which on the surface seems very good, but for him, it is only to mislead the people. He merely kicked out the racists

and replaced them with himself as the oppressor. Many of the nationalists in this country seem to desire the same ends. So obviously, Huey and Bobby and the entire Panther leadership was very much focused on dissociating themselves with cultural nationalism. And their way to do that was by creating

this new ideology called revolutionary nationalism. He defined revolutionary nationalism, like super succinctly as like nationalism plus socialism, which I guess is what it is. But basically it was the panther's attempt to infuse black nationalism and Marxism into a single coherent ideology. Kind of implicit in that was this idea that, you know, being anti-racist wasn't going to dismantle capitalism. and being anti-capitalist wasn't going to end racism. And that in order to successfully organize against both of these institutions, we need a theory that is simultaneously anti-racist and anti-capitalist.

And that's what revolutionary nationalism was trying to be. And I think it's, this is like one of the, there's a lot of things about the Panthers that are super relevant to today, but I think this is one of the most relevant things to today. Basically, like, this question that always comes up and leftist circles and probably doesn't need to come up, but it still comes up about what's more important, racism or capitalism? Revolutionary nationalism was an answer to that question,

or an answer to perhaps, like, a more accurate question, which is, how do you apply a Marxist analysis to America to a white supremacist society? Um, so that's what revolutionary nationalism was really all about. And you can argue, I guess, you can have these like very like academic theoretical arguments about, you know, does it really make sense to combine nationalism and Marxism? But I don't think what you can argue is that whether, you know, this ideology was an effective tool for the panthers organizing. It definitely was. And I mean, we'll talk more about it later. But, um, I, I think, Yeah, this idea is, like, really important to the Panthers and, like, really important to explore in order to understand them.

Yeah, and I think it was really succinctly sort of, like, concentrated in that famous Fred Hampton quote, where he's like, we're not going to fight racism with racism, we're going to fight it with solidarity, we're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, we're going to fight it with socialism. Black people and white, poor people, and red poor people, and Puerto Rican poor people, Latin American people of all. They had them caught up in their movements based on racism when the black fabric party stood up and said that we don't care what anybody said, we don't think to fight fire with five best, we think you fight fire with water best, we're going to fight racism, not with racism, but we're going to fight with solidarity. We said we're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism.

We stood up and said we're not going to just fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state attorneys like this and reactionary states attorneys like Hand with any other reactions on our part. We're going to fight their reactions with all of those people are getting together. and have an international poetry revolution. Right on. Right on. And that's saying, all power to the people.

That's saying that no matter what color you are, there's only two classes. And that's saying there's a class over here, and there's a class over there. And the reason that this class over here has never did anything to get this class off his back because this is lower, this is upper, this is the oppressed, this is the oppressor,

this is the exploiter, this is the exploiter. And these people in this class have divided themselves. They say, I'm black, and I hate white people. I'm white and I hate black people. black people. I'm Latin America and I eat healed billy. I'm healed a bit. I hate Indians. So we fight amongst each other. And that's kind of the class consciousness and the infusing of the socialist perspective into the racial war. It's like we're going to infuse

our racial outlook as as black Americans or as black people with a class analysis that comes with socialism. And that allows us sort of a way forward and a more productive, progressive way forward. so I think that's super interesting that that sort of tension that doesn't get talked about a lot but speaking of those tensions maybe we could talk a little bit about the tensions more explicitly between you know black nationalism or black separatism and Marxism and how that played out inside the Black Panther Party during their formative years and which side of the dispute they ultimately came down on yeah I think it's really important to realize that like from the

jump the Panthers were influenced by Marxists and had an explicitly socialist platform in a lot of ways. Like when in revolutionary suicide, Huey writes about reading Chey and reading Mao before they started the party and using their success as examples to build a platform here in the U.S. So there was definitely always that component to the party. I think one of the big issues was that one, the party expanded very rapidly, particularly because of the show of force of the armed police patrols, and a lot of times the media's presentation of the Panthers kind of fashion-wise and culturally, it expanded quicker than

the Panthers' political presentation. So people got an image of the Panthers that was incomplete, and that is true of today as well. And also, both Huey and Bobby spent significant portions of late 1960s in jail. So while the party is expanding, the two founders of the party didn't have access to, you know, doing things on the day to day. So while chapters were opening up, there are people who had an idea of what the party represented that was skewed from what the party actually wanted to represent. So I think that the party always centered black liberation in their work from their

inception to their dismantling, but they understood their liberation to be inextricably tied to dismantling capitalism, and also to the liberation of other oppressed groups of people across the United States and across the world. Our attack was not only against white supremacy, but it was also about capitalism. We actually thought that the way in which capitalism created a working class that was kept absolutely destitute, that was wrong. So we took the position that in order for us to be free, that system had to be dismantled. We cannot be free in a system that it oppressed us in the first place.

So you have to get rid of that system. So this call for, you know, just specifically black unity, it starts to fall short when you realize that there are black people who will sell out the interests of the majority of black people for their own personal gain. And that is something I think that we've seen specifically. become even more of a problem within the past 50 years where the white supremacist capitalist state of the United States has made some concessions to a certain group of black Americans, you know, educated upper middle class black Americans who are willing to assimilate into, you know, the two-party system into ideas of capitalism or at least, you know, black capitalism and an uplift of black people by, you know, engaging in the practices that oppress them in the, or oppressed us in

the first place. So I think it's just, it's, it was a realization that it is very important to center the liberation of oppressed peoples, but also realizing that not everybody is down for the cause, that all skinfolk and kinfolk and try and downs that tension. And that's why they landed toward and within the ideology that Prasana mentioned earlier of the revolutionary nationalism. Right. Yeah, super interesting. It's sort of like a synthesis of the best parts of both and a way to move forward. I like that.

In what ways did Mao and what would later come to be called Maoism, which Maoism as an ideology wasn't really synthesized until the late 80s or 90s, but what influence did Mao and Maoist China have on the Black Panther Party and why do you think Mao did have such? a big impact on the Panthers. So we will be the first to admit that we are not experts on Maoism, nor are we expert on experts on Mao or the Chinese Revolution.

You all did a really good episode on Maoism that we would encourage people to check out. And I think there are a few takeaways. One, like I mentioned earlier, when Newton and Seale were trying to create the party, they were reading Mao in 66 and they were doing so because they saw now as a veteran of what they call people's war and and as someone who was part of movement that worked out successful strategies for liberation so this is a quote from revolutionary suicide where he says we read these men's work because we saw them as kinsmen the oppressor who had controlled them was controlling us both directly and indirectly so really basically they wanted to their knowledge and experience in how to gain freedom and I think in terms of nationalism specifically in terms of the ideology there are they seem to be two components that are most applicable to the Panthers one is and I got I got this from from listening to to grab left actually but there's the idea of the NASS line right

and that there's will I'll just reiterate I guess what you said it or what one of guest said in an early episode, but that it's an evolution of this London's idea of vanguardism, right? It's that there's this more educated, more advanced segment of the working class that is going to not just manage the revolution by itself, but bring these Marxist principles to the masses and interact with them, educate them, ask them for input, and ultimately get consent in order to implement these revolutionary programs. And I think when we're talking early, about the panthers being in touch with the people and knowing, you know, what do people need? They need health care.

They need food. They need protection from police brutality and figuring out ways to provide that kind of stuff is very indicative of the fact that they were definitely influenced by Maoism. I think there's kind of this interesting tension, though, between the idea of the Panthers as a vanguard party and this idea of them following the mass line. And I think that's reflected kind of in the undemocratic approach of the Panthers decision. So while they are in touch with the needs of the black communities across the U.S., they don't necessarily ask for, you know, ultimate consent in order to implement programs. They didn't ask for consent on how to manage the party and make decisions for the party. So there's kind of, I think they have both the Leninist tendency of the vanguard.

party and implement some of the mass line strategy as well and then the other thing that you all brought up in your episode on nowism is the idea of protected people's war and i think this is something that's definitely also very applicable to the party particularly the idea of making the state irrelevant in as many ways as possible so doing things that the state should be doing or doing things that the state is doing but doing them better. And so the Panthers had programs even that are well known like an escort program for elderly people. And one thing that the police do in the United States is make it so that if you have an emergency, you have to call them no matter what pretty much. You know, there's not, there aren't extensive emergency resources

for mental health crises or for issues of domestic violence. You know, the other There aren't specially trained forces that can handle these things or for assorting old people so they don't get, you know, mugged or assaulted, which was an issue in Oakland and why that program started. So by doing things, it basically creating alternative so that people did not have to call the police and trying to create a general alternative to the current state. So definitely part of that was the Panthers emphasis on self-defense and knowing how to, to, to, arm yourself and defend yourself when necessary, and then also politically trying to make the state as irrelevant and unnecessary as possible. So definitely I'm an amateur nowist, but I think that those two principles are definitely present within the party. And then one of the thing is that they actually sold Mao's little red book quotations from Chairman Mao. And

specifically in Boston, every member of the chapter was required to carry a copy on them at all times and they use it as a tool of political education and also when they're doing kind of general field work they would read specific chapters of the book before going out so one person that we interviewed one former party member that we interviewed indicated that when they're trying to handle dispute they would read a chapter called the correct handling on the correct handling of contradictions among the people so really trying to take these ideas and put them of practice. Yeah, you say that you're an amateur with regards to Maoism, but that was amazingly put, extremely well done. I could not agree more. All those points that you made were

points that if you missed, I was going to make, but you hit them all. So that was great. And I'm glad that our show helped kind of inform you on that front. You mentioned the notion of calling cops to deal with health crises. And it reminded me of an incident here in Omaha that happened last year with a Native American man named Zachary Bearheels, he was having a mental crisis and he traveled to Omaha from, I think it was South or North Dakota. And his mother had been in contact with the Omaha Police Department saying, my son is going through a mental health crisis. He needs to be taken to a crisis center and be given medical treatment. But when the cops got to him, they brutally beat him to death. They tased him multiple times. They beat him over the head multiple times

and he eventually died from his injuries. So this notion of having to rely on these cowardice criminal cops to take care of our health crisis in this country, you know, that still resonates today. And your notion, your argument about the structure of the Black Panther Party being less than 100% Democratic, you know, there's pros and cons to all forms, to all types of organizing structures. The Occupy movement was very much more on the anarchist side of consensus decision-making, and we saw the flaws that came with that. So I think there is some justification and some really good argumentative points in favor of a, you know, vanguard party in the Maoist sense that is constantly in communion with their community, but that ultimately

makes decisions on how to go forward and then the whole party follows step. I think there's a lot of benefits to that. You can disagree with some of the cons of that, but as far as how it operated in the Black Panther Party, it never seemed to sever ties with the community at large. They always had credibility in the community, and that was in large part, in my opinion, to their sort of Maoist-inflected mass line sort of orientation? The one thing I did, I wanted to mention that you also brought up in that episode is that the benefit of the mass line is to prevent a left and right deviations, right, so that you don't do things that the community is not, doesn't want that they aren't ready

to do yet, but at the same time, you don't underestimate, you know, the political aptness of the community that you as a revolutionary organization are doing exactly what the community wants. And I think, again, in Hewey's writings, he kind of talks about how the armed police patrols might have actually banned a left deviation in the sense that they created a clear distinction between the party and the people,

and that this was, it was like a separate army, separate like militaristic force from the general community and and the the masses of black people at that time he would argue we're not ready to pick up guns and patrol police or to stage a revolution and so I think there's benefits to I think that the you can definitely argue that the armed patrol police was a very effective program particularly in gaining notoriety for the party. And at the same time, I think even Hughie recognized that it did distinguish the party from the community in a certain way.

Yeah, fascinating. I'd never heard that, but I can completely see that point. It's super interesting. And it's food for thought for organizers today. Think about these things, you know, reflect on them, see what succeeded and what failed in the past and try to learn from that because, you know, there's so much history to, you know, there's so much history to draw from sitting as we are in the 21st century, so it's worth exploring in depth. But before we move on to the Boston chapter, which I know you have a special

focus on, I wanted to ask one more question because I think this is kind of synthesizes a lot of what we've been talking about. We've been talking about Marxism. We've been talking about revolutionary nationalism. We've been talking about internationalism and Maoism, et cetera. But what was the Rainbow Coalition? And how did that reflect some of the core values of the Black Panther Party's Marxist internationalist approach? Yeah, so the Rainbow Coalition is like the super interesting short-lived coalition of three groups, the Black Panther Party, specifically the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, the young lords and the young patriots. So these three organizations were all revolutionary Marxist organizations organizing in Chicago in the late 60s, early 70s. Obviously, we all should know who the Black Panthers are at this point, but the young lords were Latin X organization, and the young patriots were a white working class organization.

And the Rainbow Coalition was just sort of like these three organizations coming together and mutually supporting each other and mutually organizing together and fighting against the police brutality of the Chicago. police department and the general poor living standards that you know all three of these organizations communities face during this time um i think on one so okay yeah on one hand the rainbow coalition is like really really cool and really inspiring in that it sort of really brought together the framework of like late 60s radical organizing which like this idea of like organizing your own but at the same time like supporting other communities and their radical organizing and like coming together as a coalition so like even though we're not like totally like integrated like into one organization which is not what a lot of 60s

organizers wanted we're still mutually supporting each other mutually organizing together at the same time it is it does bring up a lot of questions I think because The Young Patriots were a class that, were an organization that really, really highlighted white identity in their organizing. And that was most clearly shown through the fact that they had a Confederate flag in their logo or their symbol. So obviously, like, that's like a huge point of contention. And I think just the idea of organizing under white identity. can potentially be really problematic, but, you know, the effects of the Rainbow Coalition and, you know, our historical understanding of it makes it seem like it was like a really, really effective coalition during the time of its existence. It's just interesting to think about how that might work at today or how that would have worked out, you know, had they existed for a little bit longer. It makes me think of there's some contemporary iterations of the attempt not to highlight white

identity because I think that time is long gone and we see what that leads to. But there are like redneck revolt comes to mind as an organization that specifically attempts not to amplify their white identity but to reach out to largely white communities and try to radicalize them leftward and try to give them the sort of paradigm shift that is needed to bring in more of them to the leftist cause, especially in, you know, poor areas like Appalachia where you have, you know, extremely long histories of poor and working white people being absolutely devastated by capitalism. There's something to be said for trying to go into those communities and stop them from going fascist because, you know, the fascist white identity

politics, it's a way to, it's a simple, it's very simple and it appeals to people on that simplistic level. But I think you're absolutely right that the highlighting and the amplifying of whiteness as an identity is extremely problematic and that that is no longer a viable option and perhaps and probably it never was but it is an example for all its successes and failures of like an early intersectionalism it was an attempt to bring together different communities under a class banner that acknowledge different identities and acknowledge the different oppressions that different identities go under but gave a way for a bunch of people across identities to unite and move forward so i think it was it was worth

worthwhile and I think it's an interesting historical thing, yeah. Yeah, I also, I think I would also add that it really sparks an interesting conversation not just about organizing, not about organizing a leftist movement among white working class communities, but it sparks an interesting conversation about the question of class unity and cross racial class unity in the United States. And I think one of the fundamental bases for class unity is this idea that the experience of the median black person is

closer to the experience of the median white person than it is to the experience of the capitalist, right? Right. Which is absolutely true and I think it is a very compelling point, but I think it also somewhat obscures the very real

implications of race and although racial distinction is largely rooted in class control, it can't just be reduced to class control in 2017. So I think in the episode that you did with Kristen Gatsy, she made a really interesting point about how heterosexual relationships under capitalism are often reduced to being transactional and removing the human element of their relationship. And I think that a goal of leftists is to restore that humanity, right? But I feel like sometimes

discussions about class unity can deal really transactionalists, both in how they're to white people and people of color or black people more specifically. So for example, it's clear that white people, white working class folks have an economic incentive for class unity, but I think we'd be fooling ourselves if we if we argued that economic incentives are all that people care about. So we have to try to gauge the social capital that a working class person perceives themselves, perceives their whiteness to hold. And if they perceive the economic incentive for anti-racist, anti-capitalist work to supersede the interests of that whiteness. And that's not a question I have the answer to. But on the other hand, and I think

maybe even more pointedly, you have to think about the race-based trauma that is inflicted upon black people by whiteness and white working class people specifically. And that's definitely, again, rooted in the scarcity and the competition that capitalism manufactures. But if you're thinking about building a more humane world, I think you do have to think about the human implications of asking people to prioritize building a coalition with, you know, of people who are violent towards them, which is something that I feel like a lot of leftists and specifically white leftists tend to do. And then, of course, when you throw in other societal variables like gender, sexuality, religion, et cetera, it becomes even more complicated.

So I would just, I'd say that working class unity is a very good goal and is something that we should consider when we're building a leftist movement. We should also consider the implications and consider how complex our society is and the implications of asking, you know, a group of people to prioritize, you know, you know, building and co-listing with someone that they view as their oppressor, even if not the ultimate oppressor, if that makes sense. Right, no, it makes extreme sense, and it's an extremely important point. I could not agree more.

It's a core issue that the left right now has been dealing with and will continue to deal with, but I think it's extremely important for white leftists to internalize that reality. Think about that, and weave it into how they interact with other communities and how they think of their own politics, because, as a white leftist myself that we have so many blind spots you know in my blind spots that I've had throughout my political development I've I've hit walls with them I've I've said something that I thought was progressive and it turned out to be no no no you're blinded by your whiteness

on that front and I had to sit back I had to listen and I had to learn and so I think it's especially important for white leftist to understand that and to sort of to sort of prioritize that listening and that learning from what you know people of color are saying because if the left is ever going to succeed. It's going to succeed on the basis of true unity rooted in an acknowledgement and respect across identities. And for white left, as that means, we're uprooting a lot of our fucking blind spots, a lot of our blind spots. And it's a long learning curve and it's going to take a long time. But if you care about liberation for all people, put in the work. But let's go ahead and transition to the Boston chapter of the Black Panther Party. Because before I read your

paper. I didn't even know anything. You asked me, you know, something about the Boston chapter. I would have said nothing. I didn't know anything. So I think it's extremely interesting and extremely new. It'll be new to a lot of our listeners. So before we get into like the details, why did you two decide to focus on the Boston chapter of the Black Panther Party? And what about it specifically is worth examining and what drew you to it in the first place? I think one is I guess the more superficial reason is that we are Boston students or students attending a university in Boston and in a lot of ways students have very extractive relationship with the city, particularly students who come from outside the city like we do in Northeastern is a school that is a gentrifying force in the city and is bad for the city in a lot of other ways.

So finding ways to conduct our experience as students to the roots of the city and is really important to us. So doing that through research and through organizing. But also in the way that we think about historical lessons, we often uphold movements or people who are very distant from us. And the fact is that in our low areas, wherever we are, there is likely a really strong tradition of radicalism. And I think uplifting that local radicalism and teaching people or making people, making the history of that available people is really valuable because it's not something that is distant or is done by some mystical people far away, but right in my backyard by people who lived and walked and breathed where I am living and walking and breathing right now. Yeah, and I guess for me, I was just always like super enamored with the Panthers. you learn about the Panthers in your history class and like even though they try to do everything they can to make the Panthers seem like the most evil organization in the world like it's still

you can still sense that there's like a cool this to it or like something very unique about the organization about the movement and I was always drawn to that and obviously they have like the Panthers have this like cultural power this mystique that they're sort of imbued with that, you know, whether you love the Panthers, you hate the Panthers, you can't deny is present. And learning that there was, like, yeah, like, I was just like you, but I didn't know that there was a Panther chapter in Boston, even after living here for four years.

And so learning about that, I was like, okay, yeah, like we definitely have to have to study this organization and, like, see how they interacted with the city that we now live in. Yeah, so what were some of the, you know, like we talked about the background, events in the country and the in the world in the 60s that led to the national party. But what were some of the background events happening in Boston specifically at that time right before the blossoming of the Boston chapter of the BPP?

Yeah, in a lot of ways, it mirrors the birth of the Panthers nationally. So we know that the chapter emerged sometime, that the Boston chapter emerged sometime in early 1968. We don't know the exact date, but we can kind of estimate around there. And in June of 1967, so, you know, six or so months before, there was an action planned by a radical group called Mothers for Adequate Welfare. And they say to sit in at the Boston Welfare office, and they were demanding that the welfare commissioner agreed to elicit the demands, including, you know, not stripping anyone of their welfare support without adhering, you know, basic, basic things. so they did a sit-in and after 24 hours of the action they actually escalated the protests by locking themselves into building and there was supposedly a health emergency that someone inside the building was was undergoing so the police broke into the office started clearing and beating up demonstrators and they drew a crowd eventually started beating on and clearing the crowd so it's broken to a larger rebellion and known as the MAW riot.

So at least 75 people were injured, 37 arrested, over 1,500 Boston police officers were on the street, like a small army in Roxbury, which is probably Boston's most well-known black neighborhood. Malcolm X actually lived there when he was younger. And then 10 months after that, uprising Martin Luther King was assassinated. So again, like there's this constant reinforcement of, um, the subjugation of black people in the U.S. and in Boston specifically. And then there's also a culture of resistance in Boston that was happening. So one, Kwame Torei, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael at the time, he went to Boston.

He urged black people to organize amidst like government repression. And then there's also this state movement of trying to build urban highways. So the federal government was subsidizing highways to be built in cities at 90 cents on the dollar. So cities are trying to build highways that would essentially go through residential neighborhoods across the country. And there are two that were going to be built in Boston, and there's a lot of resistance to that. So there's a culture resistance. There is a clear need for a stronger organization for the issues that are facing Boston's black community, and the Panthers were a natural fit.

There was one thing I learned in your paper about the Franklin D. Lynch People's Free Health Center, It was something I had never heard about. Can you talk about who it was named after? What needs was its creation of response to? And what services did it provide in Boston? Yeah. So Franklin DeWinch was killed by a Boston police officer while he was a patient at the Boston City Hospital.

So again, kind of talking about the ability of police to handle people in need of health care. And it was actually the health center. was paid for by another organization called the Black United Front and was placed on a spot of land really close to northeastern that was actually designated to be in the path of the highway so they didn't have a permit to to open the center they just got this trailer plopped it down there and opened it up and they basically they claimed that it was necessary because of understaffed hospitals under train staffs overcrowded wards and under equipped medical teams and we were also told by someone when we interviewed that Medicaid administration was discriminatory at that time.

The health care system, of course, has always been racist. So people didn't have access to quality. Black people in the city of Boston did not have access to quality affordable health care. So it was essentially a general practice institution that really utilize the volunteer work of doctors and medical students. and we were actually told by a really cool story by some we interviewed that Northeastern has this thing called the co-op program where you work for four to six months

and take that time off of school and they're supposed to get like working experience it's really careerist capitalist, corporatize all that stuff that's great and so one person who was a Northeastern student at the time was working in a pharmacy and a Black Panther Party member

actually asked him to quote liberate some drugs from the pharmacy and use them to stock the health center. So you wouldn't tell us if he didn't or not, but we're pretty sure that he did it. Yeah, you gave us a little way. So just like really just like using creative methods to find ways to again meet the needs of people. And I think the thing that they're most well known for, and this is this happened with the party across the country was sickle cell screenings. So the party identified sickle cell anemia as, uh,

a disease neglected by the American health health care system because it predominantly affected people of African descent. And they, again, noticing the needs of the people put this program into action. And at its height, according to an old Boston Globe article, they could perform at least a thousand screenings per month. So like a really well oiled machine. Yeah, that's beautiful. And it's interesting because it seems so hard to do today. It seems like it would be impossible to, I mean, I know the free health clinics exist, but for revolutionary leftists to open up and stock and staff their own free health centers, it seems just a monumental task and somehow they were able to do it.

But now let's shift into an essential part of this historical movement to understand, which is its ultimate infiltration and destruction, because all through history, whenever leftist movements have gained any sort of power or credibility inside the communities, either at home or abroad, the U.S. government has dedicated an unlimited amount of resources and violence to squash it. And that's unfortunately what happened to the Black Panther Party. So how did the Black Panther Party ultimately end? And what role did the FBI play in that ending? Yeah, so everyone or a lot of people are familiar with Colentel Pro, the FBI's program, to undermine the Panthers and black radicalism generally in the United States. And there are a couple ways.

in which this was most notable. First, SNCC and the Black Panther Party were actually supposed to merge and try to basically try to gain greater organizational skills for the Black Panther Party still under this revolutionary banner. Get so quick Carmichael in there and really try to merge these two powerhouses. And that was something that was sabotaged by the FBI using, you know, fake letter misinformation. And that relationship fell apart. And I say that there weren't differences, but it was definitely something that was sabotaged by the FBI. And similarly, there was this split between Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, and this group of Panthers called the New York 21, who were arrested for trumped up conspiracy charges in New York. And again, the FBI was sending fake letters to Huey Newton saying that New York 21 was trying to assassinate or overtake the party and just like increase the paranoia.

within the party, which was coupled with the fact that there was on the ground police repression of the party as well. So, you know, the murder of Fred Hampton, just the general harassment of party members. And it was definitely an atmosphere that was very difficult to deal with, both from state violence, like physical assassinations and harassment, as well as this more covert subterfuge. Right. Yeah. And then the other part of that is that, you know obviously like the panther party wouldn't have fallen apart when it did without coinel pro but there were actual problems within the organization that led to its downfall so the first

most notable perhaps most notable one was the 1971 split with eldridge cleaver was one of the main leaders of the party was one of the faces of the party and he really believed that the panther should always stick to their goal of like an armed resistance to stay violence and eventually like turn that into armed revolution through like urban guerrilla warfare etc and by 1971 1972 Hughie and Bobby were both sort of moving away from that direction they felt like armed revolution at this point was unrealistic and that they needed to focus more on their survival programs, which are their social programs. So that was, so that sort of precipitated Elders leaving the party, and a lot of people left

with him. The other big thing was in 1972, the party, in attempt to consolidate power, closed down all of its local branches, and said everyone should move to Oakland and start organizing in Oakland to support Bobby Beazio's mayoral campaign and O'ane Brown City Council campaign. And that was, you know, in the moment, it makes sense as a decision. But it was honestly probably a really big mistake on the part of the Panther leadership because a lot of these local chapters were starting to form roots in the community. And I think there was a bit of an oversight on Huey and Bobby's part

and not really seeing that there was a lot of really, really effective local organizations. organizing going on at the time in various cities and that ending all of that would be a huge detriment for the Panthers. And then finally, I think one thing that we're going to talk about a little bit more later, but I just want to bring it up now, was that the sort of blatant sexism and massaging of the party was obviously in itself, like horribly bad, but it really, really heard that they're organizing and led to their demise. Like Elaine Brown, one of the leaders of the party, one of the key hogs of the panther leadership, she left the party because of sexism. And she talked often about how hard it was for her to stay in the party because of how blatant

the metadony was every day. And this is one of the leaders of the party. So you can imagine how difficult it must have been for other women in the party who weren't as high up as Brown was. So I guess those are the factors. Yeah. And we'll touch on that in a couple questions. But, you know, the fact that women in the Black Panther Party not only had to deal with state repression and state violence and fighting police and doing all these social programs, but they also had a fight internally in their own party to get to fight the sexism and the misogyny and the patriarchy that was, you know, inculcated in the organization itself. So, you know, the black women of the Black Panther Party especially had a dual fight on their hands. And it's, it's

kind of heartbreaking that they had so much on their plate and so much to have to deal with. You know, whether I approve of violence, I mean, that just doesn't make any sense at all. whether I approve of guns. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Some very, very good friends of mine were killed by bombs, bombs that were planted by races. I remember from the time I was very small. I remember the sounds of bombs exploding across the street,

our house shaking. I remember my father having to have guns at his disposal at all times because of the fact that at any moment, someone, we might expect to be attacked. The man who was at that time in complete control of the city government, his name was Bull Connor, would often get on the radio and make statements like niggers that moved into a white neighborhood. We better expect some bloodshed tonight.

And sure enough, there would be bloodshed. After the four young girls who lived very, who lived, one of them lived next door to me, I was very good friends with the sister of another one. My sister was very good friends with all three of them. My mother taught one of them in her class. My mother, in fact, when the bombing occurred, one of the mothers of one of the young girls called my mother and said, can you take me down to the church to pick up Carol?

You know, we heard about the bombing, and I don't have my car. And they went down, and what did they find? They found limbs and heads strewn all over the place. And then after that, in my neighborhood, all of the men organized themselves into an armed patrol. They had to take their guns and patrol our community every night because they did not want that to happen again. I mean, that's why when someone asked me about violence, I just find it incredible. Because what it means is that the person who's asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black

person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa. Before we move on to the next question, I do just want to kind of emphasize Fred Hampton's death. You know, Fred Hampton was a really charismatic, really intelligent, capable organizer in Chicago. The FBI and the Chicago PD ultimately teamed up to murder him, to assassinate him. He was sleeping in his bed next to his pregnant girl or fiancé and the police bar. in and they murdered him in cold blood while he was asleep with no ability to defend himself or anything. And so what the FBI and what the U.S. government did to Fred Hampton especially,

we should never forget and we should absolutely never forgive because that was absolutely brutal. They stripped his child of a father and they took out one of the most charismatic and promising leaders of the party because that's how this government operates and that's how this government has always operated. But what does the systemic destruction of the Black Panther party say about organizational structures that are so centralized and that have such a clear hierarchy. Are these, in your opinion, more vulnerable to this sort of infiltration and destruction? Yeah, this is a really hard question to answer because I think, Brett, like you mentioned, there are good arguments you can make for such a structure and it did in a lot

of ways it served the party well. I think I would say that centralized organizations are less vulnerable to like external destruction, even though that was a function of how the party was dismantled. But, you know, leaving less gaps for people to infiltrate, I think probably is more suitable for protection from external destruction. But I think you also see that it's more likely to have fatal internal flaws, especially if there is one person who, who seizes that, you know, centralized decision-making power, like Hugh Newton did in the early 70s. I think I would argue that it's absolutely ridiculous for tab one person to have sweeping decision-making power for an organization, particularly an organization as large as the Panthers. But I think there probably is a balance to be struck between those two things because I think either way you lean their flaws in the organizational structure.

Yeah, and I think you said it right. There is a balance to be struck. We've seen the failures of a more totally decentralized consensus decision-making failures of Occupy, and we've seen the open vulnerabilities of more hierarchical, structured organizations like the Black Panther Party. Another thing the Black Panther Party did basically had a necessity was they really had an open policy.

They let anybody off the street come in because they were so committed to bettering the everyday person's, you know, position in life that that openness that sort of non-vetting process had its downfalls it wasn't ultimately what brought them down but it opened up an opportunity for them to be brought down one of the anarchist sort of alternative models to a hierarchical organization is cell structure organizations we've seen this work in the f a i and other sort of anarchist inflected movements where there are cells that operate autonomously and maybe a report back system so that they can be in communication with other cells but that you know cutting off the head of one cell does nothing to the overall

you know organization globally or nationally because they're not intertwined at such a degree so those are things just to think about we can learn from the successes and failures of a bunch of different organizational structures and take what works and and discard what doesn't but i do want to get i do want to spend a little bit of time talking about what Prasana mentioned earlier about about women and how you know the LGBT community inside the black community was treated by the by the black panther party so in this regard what were black panther party's biggest failures and can you kind of flesh out sort of these these issues and why they ultimately weaken the party yeah so i don't think there's any denying that the sort of aesthetic that the panthers portrayed and that the

the panthers you to organize was one steeped in masculinity and toxic masculinity. And even though certain leaders, you know, tried to implement, you know, a less patriarchal, like, form of organizing and tried to get rid of the toxic masculinity within the organization, it was just so pervasive. and you could just see it was really a top-down thing. I have actually a quote from Malin Brown that I think really highlights like how pervasive the misogyny and the sexism was. She says, quote, A woman in the black power movement was considered at best irrelevant.

A woman asserting herself was a pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of the black people. I knew I had to muster something mighty to manage the Black Panther Party. So, you know, again, like you have a leader saying that and talking about how much of a struggle it was for her to not only lead the party, but just exist in the party.

So, again, we can imagine how difficult it must have been for women trying to organize within the party. Yeah, and that's also important note that the party was created for cisgender, straight men, And when they launched the armed police patrols, they were only recruiting black men. And I think that that's a legacy that they could never shake. And it's a shame because that paradigm never shifted because by, you know, a year, maybe less, women were carrying the load of the party. And certainly by its end, and it's an interesting oversight because on the one hand, it's an organization that is very a two. to the needs of people on the ground and being receptive to those needs and then being

completely overlooking within the party the needs of the people really carrying the burden of the work and black women and it's a really devastating and disappointing oversight that we can't really overstate the importance of yeah and I think I would I would argue that black lives matter today which is you know the modern iteration of the black liberation movement that stretches from abolitionism, all the way through the Underground Railroad, through civil rights movements, all the way up to the black power movements. Black Lives Matter has really internalized those lessons. I think I'm correct in saying that Black Lives Matter was ultimately started by black women.

I think even some were black queer women. And I think that the sort of manifestation that we see today of Black Lives Matter is really, really beautiful and has really, really learned from this specific failure and has grown, and done a lot of new things and been extremely progressive on these fronts. So, you know, all the love in the world to Black Lives Matter because, I mean, they are really carrying

this torch forward in a beautiful way. But to wrap it up, I know we've touched on this question all throughout, but to kind of summarize it, what can revolutionary leftists today who are active today, who are organizing today, who are learning today? What can we learn from the successes

and the failures of the Black Panther Party in your opinion? Yeah. So I think one of the coolest and most interesting parts of the Black Panther Party was the fact that they were constantly changing their theory. They were constantly defining themselves as something different. And this wasn't like a long period of time. This was within like four to six years, you know. They changed their ideological orientation for times in that period. So I think what that hints at is the Panthers desire for theories. to sort of follow Praxis in a way. Like I think a lot of leftists get really caught up in the idea of like having this like perfectly spelled out theory that, you know, sort of considers every situation that could possibly occur and has an answer to it. And then going out and then implementing that theory verbatim in Praxis.

The Panthers didn't do that at all. I think the Panthers were trying to do were, was create a theory. that responded to sort of like the status quo conditions of black people at like any given moment. And if their understanding of those conditions changed, then their theory would change with it. So theory for them was like an organizing tool, like a way for them to create the most effective practice, if you will. And I think that's like really unique and something honestly to aspire to. I think two, I completely agree with that. I think two things I would add is one, build alternatives.

You know, it's not just about talking a good game, but really like thinking about how we can go out and start to build the world that we want to see and not wait for somebody else to do it. And on a similar note, I guess, but something that I think a lot of leftists might disregard for a valid reason is I wouldn't personally throw out the potential of electoral politics as a tool. I think rooting a movement in electoral politics will get you nowhere or close to nowhere.

But I think there are really interesting possibilities and the Panthers started to unlock those possibilities of taking over local institutions through means that whatever like little slivers of means that you know certain areas of the state provide like bobby seal was very close to becoming the mayor of oakland and i think that that should never have become priority on top of the other programming that the party was doing but thinking about ways to infiltrate and dismantle some of these oppressive institutions in ways that there might be pathways to do is a really interesting possibility to me particularly thinking in boston where the mayor has you know power to control the institution that is driving gentrification in the city for example

And what happens if you can slow that down and build your alternative from the outside, if you can defund police, which is something that, you know, local governments have control over. So I think it's something that we shouldn't throw out as leftists in. We should definitely, you know, consider the limitations and the possibilities of electoral politics. Yeah, I could not agree more. When we say diversity of tactics, we mean precisely that. Having power centers at every level of society is extremely important. You know, the Black Panther Party, the Black Panther Party in the form of Bobby.

BCL, as you mentioned, running for local office, you know, the mayor of a city, as you said, has great control over the gentrification process or the policing process and can make huge impacts there. Having somebody that is receptive to leftist ideas inside the halls of power can be nothing but a good thing. I mean, they have to be actually receptive and not just, you know, dismissive and flipping and sort of take you for granted like the Democrats do today. But having radicals run for local office especially, you know, why would anybody say don't do that? Secondly, the notion of dual power building up alternatives

inside the belly of the beast that sort of confront and offer another way of doing things that the system offers is a wonderful way and the Black Panther Party did that on every level from health clinics to food programs,

etc. And then Prasana said I think it was Prasana that was talked about this hyper focus on theory leading to bad ends. Of course, you have to stay open, you have to stay fluid because history is dynamic. Material conditions are always in flux

and if you're trying to take a static, dogmatic version of what you think things should be and apply it to a fluid dynamic system, well, you're just saying, I just want to fail really quickly because that's exactly what's going to happen. And another thing I wanted to point out, last thing, as far as what the Black Panther Party did, that was so wonderful, is that it boosted the self-esteem of black people, especially young black people in a period when Martin Luther King and MLK were assassinated, the Vietnam War was going on. Racism was rampant as it always has been as it continues to be to this day.

But there was an arrogance to the Black Panther Party. There was a confidence. There was an aesthetic. There was a love of being black that they brought into the culture that has never left. And that that that lives on as a part of the Panther legacy in my opinion. So I just want to say thank you both for coming on. This has been a fascinating discussion. Both of you came extremely prepared and educated me on a lot of these topics. Reading your paper was not only only informative, but an actual joy and an honor. So thank you for the work that you guys are doing. Before we leave, can you guys let the listeners know where they can maybe find your paper? And then beyond that, what other works you would recommend for anyone interested in learning more

about the Black Panther Party? Yeah. So unfortunately, we are not successful enough to have our paper published, but you can find our paper in PDF form on both of our Twitter accounts. Should I give my hands? or is that too much? Oh yeah, go ahead and give your handle. Okay, it's at P-V-R-A-G-E-R-A-S-E-K-A-N. And then I think we're also going to put it in the description of this episode.

So if you want to take a look there, it will be there. And I think we'd also suggest doing, like looking to see if there was a local chapter where you live or somewhere near where you live, and try to do just some thinking up on what they did during their time. There were, you know, four-ish archives and libraries that had primary documents, you know, like old Black Panther newspapers, old writings, just available.

And you just have to go in and kind of see what they have. So we definitely recommend doing some local learning. I really recommend reading Asada by Asada, the autobiography. it's a really good account of her radicalization, her time in the party, just how repressive the state was and is. So I'd recommend that. Yeah, you can also hit my Twitter handle up, I guess, at the Joe Tashay. Tashay is my last name, T-A-C-H-E. So, yeah. And I will, I also would recommend, I just watch this on Netflix. A lot of people have access to Netflix. It's the Black Panther Party, Vanguard of the Revolution. They actually do interviews with members of the

Black Panther Party, lots of them. So you get to hear firsthand their experiences. And then I will tag both the Twitter handles of Prasana and Joe in the sort of post that I make for this episode so you can find them there. And then I will add the PDF of their paper in the episode show notes. I encourage anybody to go read that. You will learn a lot. It's really, it's really fascinating. So thank you, comrades again for coming on. It's been an honor and I really enjoy talking to you. Let's keep in touch. Of course, thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for I really appreciate it.

You have the emergence in human society of this thing that's called the state. What is the state? The state is this organized bureaucracy. It is the police department. It is the army, the Navy. It is the prison system, the courts, and what have you. This is the state.

It is a repressive organization. But the state, in three rule, you know, you've got to have the police, because if there were no, police look at what you'd be doing to yourselves you'd be killing each other if there were no police but the reality is the police become necessary in human society only at that junction in the society where it is spread between those who have the door to ain't got i throw a molotocat cocktail at the precinct you know how we think organized the hood under i ching banners red black and green instead of gang bandanas fbi i spy on us through the radio antennas and them hitting cameras in the street Like watching society with no respect for the people's right to privacy I take a slug for the cause like Huey P while all you fake niggins try to copy master P I want to be free to live

Able to have what I need to live bring the power back to the street where the people live We sick of working for crumbs and filling up the prisons dying over money and relying on religion for help We do for self-like ants in a colony organized the wealth into a socialist economy A way of life based off the common needs and all my comrades is ready we just spreading this See, to have a black male live a third of his life in a jail cell Cause the world is controlled by the white male And the people don't never get justice And the women don't never get respected

And the problems don't never get solved And the jobs don't never pay it up So the rent always be late, can you relate? No more bondage, no more political monsters No more secret space launches Government department started it in the project Material objects thousands up in the closets Could have been invested in the future for my comrades battle contacts primitive weapons out in combat many never come back

Pretty niggas be running with gas rather get shot in their back than fire back We're tired of that corporations hiring blacks denying the facts That's why I write the shit I write in my rap It's documented I meant it every day of the week I live in it breathing it It's more than just fucking believe in it I'm holling in ones rolling up my sleeves and shit It's Elover push-ups now. Many headed for one conclusion. Ligas ain't ready for revolution.

The average black now, live a third of his life in a jail cell, because the world is controlled by the white male, and the people don't never get justice, and the women don't never get respected, and the problems don't never get solved, and the jobs don't never pay enough, so the rent always be late. Can you relate?

We live in a police state. I am a revolutionary, and you're going to have to keep on saying that. You're going to have to say that I am a politarian. I am the people. I'm not the big. Juliani, you are full of shit. And anybody that's down with you, you could man make things better. You're cutting the well-fail.

Going damn well, when you cut the welfare, a person gonna do crime.