By Tom Watts 5/2/2020
“Cultural nationalists and Black Panthers are in conflict in many areas. Basically, cultural nationalism sees the white man as the oppressor and makes no distinction between racist whites and non-racist whites, as the Panthers do. The cultural nationalists say that a black man cannot be an enemy of the black people, while the Panthers believe that black capitalists are exploiters and oppressors. Although the Black Panther Party believes in black nationalism and black culture, it does not believe that either can lead to black liberation or the overthrow of the capitalist system (footnote, p. 23).”
- Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (1968)
The above quote from Bobby Seale comes from two years before the original BPP made the transition to Revolutionary Intercommunalism (a transition that was not fully consolidated) and reflects the “two line struggle” waged within the Party and in society against various manifestations of black cultural national nationalism, which was then often referred to as “pork chop nationalism.” This is a struggle that had be going on in the Black Community for many decades—but most particularly since World War I and the Bolshevik-led October Revolution in Russia.
In the 1920s, the struggle took shape primarily between two rival formations, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) led by Cyril Briggs and founded in 1919 in Harlem, NYC and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) founded in Jamaica by Marcus Garvey in 1914. Garvey moved his headquarters to Harlem In 1916, and the ABB began as a faction within UNIA. A rift developed between the two organizations as the ABB evolved into a revolutionary nationalist/pan-Africanist formation while Garvey went in the other direction, becoming a capitalist and right-wing cultural nationalist/pan-Africanist.
It became an open split at the 1921 “2nd International Convention of Negroes” called by the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem, when the ABB was expelled by Garvey for criticizing his leadership and lack of any substantive program to actually improve the condition of the black masses. Briggs and the ABB would eventually merge with the newly-formed Communist Party and the movement it led while Garvey wound up being convicted for racketeering and being deported after a short prison term. This and his alliance with the KKK and self-identification with the fascist movement led by Mussolini and Hitler made him an isolated figure who died just prior to the outbreak of WWII in England.
In the post-war period cultural nationalism took on more religious tones, in particular with the formation of the Nation Of Islam (NOI) in 1930, which was an outgrowth of Moorish Science Temple of America founded in 1913. The tendency known as “pork chop nationalism” arose later with the rise of a black middle class. Angela Davis explained:
“I think it arises out of a tendency often to conflate cultural blackness with anti-racism. I think this is another case where there are lessons to be learned during the period of the 60s when organizations like the Black Panther Party were coming into being, there were other cultural nationalist organizations such as US Organization, such as the organization that Amiri Baraka developed and of course Amiri OK, there was the black arts movement which was extremely important, but there was also Baraka's political organization in Newark that took a cultural nationalist position that assumed that if we were able to connect with the culture of our African ancestors that somehow or another these vast problems surrounding us, racism in education, in the school, racism in the economy, in health care, etc would disappear. They were very interesting conflicts and debates between groups like the Black Panther party and the cultural nationalist groups in the 60s.
“The debate often focused on what young black people wanting to associate themselves with a movement for liberation should do, whether they should become active in campaigns against police violence, for example, or whether they should focus their energy on wearing African clothes and changing their name and developing rituals…
“It doesn't surprise me that aspect of the black nationalist movement, the cultural side, has triumphed because that is the aspect of the movement that was most commodifiable and when we look at the commodification of blackness we're looking at a phenomenon that's very profitable and it's connection with the rise of a black middle class I think is very obvious. As far as the tradition of struggle and tradition of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist struggle I think that is one that has to be fought for and recrafted continuously. It's not going to happen on its own, it's not going to be taken up by the capitalist corporations and presented as something that is both profitable and something that is pleasurable to masses of people.”
- Angela Davis, PBS Frontline Interview (1997)
Cultural nationalism didn’t just take the form of wearing dashikis or adopting an Afrikan name. It didn’t just take the form of promoting capitalism in the black community, it also took the form of promoting black separatism and sabotaging building class-based alliances with white and other ethnic groups of people. And this is exactly why the FBI and other government agencies allocated millions in resources to promote black cultural nationalism. George Jackson explains:
“The blanket indictment of the white [so-called] race has done nothing but perplex us, inhibit us. The theory that all whites are the immediate enemy and all blacks our brothers (making them loyal) is silly and indicative of a lazy mind (to be generous, since it could be a fascist plot). It doesn’t explain the black pig; there were six on the Hampton-Clark kill. It doesn’t explain the black paratroopers (just more pigs) who put down the great Detroit riot, and it doesn’t explain the pseudo-bourgeois who can be found almost everywhere in the halls of government working for white supremacy, fascism and capitalism.”
- George Jackson, (Soledad Brother pp. 221-222) (From Blood in My Eye, pp. 4-5)
Black and Brown police officers comprise almost a quarter of the total nationwide, and the representation in the military is about equal to the ethnic composition of the working class. The state bureaucracies are largely made up of ethnic minorities and there is no shortage of black politicians. Those who deny the existence of a multi-ethnic working class are simply not living in the real world. They are drunk on their own subjective idealism—which the CIA and other agents of repression have spent millions to promote.
“We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism….and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That's what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.”
- Fred Hampton, “Power Anywhere Where There’s People!” (1969)
Pantherism is not about idealism but grounding ourselves in objective reality. We begin by making a concrete analysis of concrete conditions. Then we test our analysis in practice and using the Science of Revolution, we sum up that experience and make corrections to our theory, discarding what was based upon idealism and then go back to practice in an endless spiral of critical thinking and investigation to as fully as possible connect ourselves to objective reality. As Huey explained:
“We’ve had long arguments with people about our convictions. Before we became conscious we used to call ourselves a dispersed collection of colonies here in North America. And people argued with me all day and all night, asking, “How can you possibly be a colony? In order to be a colony you have to have a nation, and you’re not a nation, you’re a community. You’re a dispersed collection of communities.” Because the Black Panther Party is not embarrassed to change or admit error, tonight I would like to accept the criticism and say that those critics were absolutely right. We are a collection of communities just as the Korean people, the Vietnamese people, and the Chinese people are a collection of communities, a dispersed collection of communities because we have no superstructure of our own. The superstructure we have is the superstructure of Wall Street, which all of our labor produced.”
- Huey Newton, Speech at Boston College (1970)
One thing we recognize is that fascism is already here and both major political parties are fascist parties. As George Jackson explained: "All political parties, as things stand, will support the power complex. ...The fascists already have power. The point is that some way must be found to expose them and combat them.” The front lines of our struggle are against those who seek to divert our struggle and divide our class. Most insidious are the revisionists who falsify revolutionary science and inject it with subjective idealism. We have to distinguish between honest comrades with wrong ideas and real class enemies. They are as deadly to the people’s movement as the Corona Virus is to people’s bodies.
Some of the enemies are pretty slick and sneaky. Others are more blatant. They “blow their cover” and expose the reactionary essence of their ideological political line. We must look into people’s hearts to see who they really are.
“I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human…. I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone, and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think that it will be based upon the color of the skin, as Elijah Muhammad has taught it.”
- Malcolm X, Interview with Pierre Berton (January 19, 1965)
Cultural nationalism, whether white or black, Christian, Islamic, Hindu or Jewish is all bourgeois ideology and the very opposite of revolutionary intercommunalism. Those intent on dividing the working class along nationalist or racial lines are objectively agents of the bourgeoisie. They are not comrades! The proletariat has no nation, no gender, no race. It is all of us who are exploited by the capitalist class, whatever continent we live on, whatever language we speak. The interests of our class correspond to the highest interests of humanity—all of humanity!
DARE TO STRUGGLE DARE TO WIN…
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
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