Strom Thurmond asked FBI to investigate MLK.

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Should we abolish President's Day then, because Washington and Jefferson were slave owners?

good point on Wallace.

I think out of the first 15 Presidents only 2 weren't slave owners. John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams.

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As for black rights, that's another issue all together.

I would argue that not only did the black community not get equal rights overnight, as you say, the black community never got them at all. What the black community got was bamboozled, as Malcolm X says.

The few positive changes that did occur were a result of the militancy of the Black Panther Party, Maoist heirs to Malcolm's project, and the Maoist groupuscules that were born out of Students for a Democratic Society and which would form the base of the New Communist Movement. I'm not talking about these groups because they are Maoist. I'm talking about the groups because it was they that won the positive changes for the black community (in the sense of allowing the black community to violently seize self-consciousness in the way Frantz Fanon talks about liberating one's identity from the gaze of the oppressive Other), not Martin Luther King singing "we shall overcome." Though we do have to give Dr. King some credit.

Even he began, before he was murdered, to see himself that nonviolence wasn't enough and that Malcolm's cry - "by any means necessary" - was correct. And yet even these so-called civil rights that were awarded to the black community as a result of the nonviolent activism of the American Civil Rights Movement are bourgeois rights.

That's Marx's term in Critique of the Gotha Program for formal rights devoid of content, such a freedom of speech - you can say whatever you want (unless you are Dr. Ward Churchill and write a book about chickens coming home to roost, that is), just don't do anything. These bourgeois rights include the (formal but not actual) end of segregation in US America and the so-called institution of universal sufferage as well.

That's what poor people deal with all over the third world, my neighborhood included. One is reminded of what Frantz Fanon once said: freedom isn't given, it must be taken. If you let them give it to you, they will give it to you in their terms. Overtly oppress a people until they demand change, then give them a little bit of "negative liberty" (this is what Bush is talking about when he uses the word "freedom") once you've them economically and psychologically where you want them, and what happens? Nothing.

Martin Luther King's got streets named after him all over and the day he was assassinated is remembered as a national holiday. But you don't see any street signs that say "Huey P. Newton Boulevard" and the day of Malcolm X's assassination certainly isn't a national holiday. Why is that?

Because these guys wanted more than desegregation and so-called equal rights. They wanted self-determination for their community and you can't put that on a street sign. Overthrowing the system is the only effective option. Emancipatory nonviolence works only in tandem with emancipatory violence, as has been shown by the violence on the side of the oppressed, sometimes extreme, in both the Indian independence movement and the American Civil Rights Movement.

[phk]

For all of his nonviolence, Gandhi knew that he was playing the "good cop" role to the British, and Lenin fully realized the tactical and strategic force, both political and psychological, of the General Strike as a nonviolent tool to be used along side violence.

Diversity of tactics. But even then these nonviolent "successes" - Gandhi's independence movement and the Civil Rights Movement - are only successes in the movement from colonialism to neocolonialism in India and "dispersed colonialism" to dispersed neocolonialism in US America. The problem: both movements were basically reformist - they believed they could pull on a few heart-strings and the system would prove be able to function in their interests, rather than in the interests of foreign and domestic imperialism (fascism), after all. I've always been very much influenced by Malcolm X.

After his break with the Nation of Islam and the formation of his Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm advocated decolonization of the black community in US America. In his speech entitled "Message to the Grass Roots," Malcolm discusses the Civil Rights Movement, revolutions around the world, and this question of nonviolence, stressing that there is a correct (violent, decolonizing) "black revolution" and an incorrect (nonviolent, reformist) "Negro revolution":

"...you don't have a peaceful revolution. You don't have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. The only kind of revolution that is nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution based on loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. It's the only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit next to white folks - on the toilet. That's no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence."

Also check out another of Malcolm's major speeches, "The Ballot or the Bullet." And if you are put off by all this talk of emancipatory violence, you may want to take a look at Mao's Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. You may also want to consider what Fanon says concerning violence in his Wretched of the Earth. Then, of course, there's the infamous declaration of nihilism, The Revolutionary Catechism.

 There's a ton of theory about emancipatory violence. I could cite it all day. Ask anybody who's ever been brutalized by the police or who knows somebody that's been railroaded or murdered by the police. They'll tell you all about. Its terrible but its fine. When you get right down to it, however, the problem has never been bloodshed - there's always been plenty of that. The people have been bled dry from the beginning. The problem is that its been so damn one-sided.

In his essay, "Some People Push Back," Ward Churchill says, "In fairness, it must be admitted that there was an infinitesimally small segment of the body politic who expressed opposition to what was/is being done to the children of Iraq. It must also be conceded, however, that those involved by-and-large contented themselves with signing petitions and conducting candle-lit prayer vigils, bearing 'moral witness' as vast legions of brown-skinned five-year-olds sat shivering in the dark, wide-eyed in horror, whimpering as they expired in the most agonizing ways imaginable."

This is not acceptable. The principled position of nonviolent opposition is a method of relieving bourgeois guilt. That is all.

We will do what is necessary for liberation, no more and no less. Though Fidel Castro was wrong: history will not absolve us. It is a question of strategy and tactics. We have a lot of history to learn from. We should examine it through the science of historical materialism and see what means lead to what ends, and why.

Nonviolent means when we can, violence when we must. Correct means must be judged strategically and tactically correct rather than correct according to some historical imperative, some telos. There is no final cause. History will never end, and such a view is contrary to Marxism. There is no final Utopia. There is, as Mao has pointed out, no "One" that cannot "divide into Two" (cf. his "Talk on Questions of Philosophy"). I do not take a teleological view of history, and neither should Marxism-Leninism.

As Ward Churchill says in his book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, "Skeptics might wish to explain exactly how and to what extent the nazis - Hitler was, after all, a duly elected anti-smoking ecologist vegetarian official influenced by Eastern mysticism and the occult - might have been swayed in their policy-orientation by receipt of carefully-worded petitions." Unfortunately, I think the prime example of the inability of nonviolence to effectively combat fascism alone is the Jewish holocaust. And something not unlike that has been happening here. I live in a lower-class urban neighborhood surrounded by low-income housing - an apartheid neighborhood (cf. Massey & Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass), a ghetto. People don't live here. People are stored here.

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Malcolm X had late in his life said that, "We are living in an era of revolution, and the revolt of the American Negro is part of the rebellion against oppression and colonialism which has characterized this era....It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter."

The Panther's were placing themselves within this aspect of Malcolm's legacy. That's why Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, heir to Malcolm X, called the black community a "dispersed colony," and there's no way out of the ghetto from the inside. This is the problem the Panthers were dealing with: survival under a fascist occupational force. Maybe its not as overt - a ghetto is still a ghetto, be it Watts or Warsaw, but now its crack instead of gas chambers, unemployment instead of labor camps, and FBI COINTELPRO never wore jackboots, but the effect is the same - the systematic elimination of a people. Fascism has been liberalized.

This is why groups like Jews for Urban Justice rallied behind the Black Panthers. After the Watts riots, it was obvious that not only were the apparatuses of the state (schools, the police, etc.) within the black community not in the service of the black community, they were, on the contrary, an antagonistic occupational force within black community.

The Civil Rights Movement had clearly failed the black community, or at best was an incomplete project, and so for the Black Panthers revolutionary violence meant self-determination as well as self-defence in the face of these realities. Mao's statement that "a single spark can start a prarie fire" couldn't have been made more clear. The rain of universal sufferage had left the thirsty black community high and dry, and a basically routine instance of police brutality and agression was just the spark need to set a blaze that would consume Watts for six days.

The effects would last much longer. "We had seen Martin Luther King come to Watts in an effort to calm the people," writes Newton, "and we had seen his philosophy of nonviolence rejected." After Dr. King left Watts rejected, he said himself, "This was not a race riot. It was a class riot."

The problems that brought about the Watts riots were not about universal sufferage, but about land and bread. The black community had been given the vote - what they realized is that the vote hadn't given them anything else, hadn't given them power or self-determination. For the Black Panther Party and many others, Watts was an event in the same sense that Alain Badiou speaks of May 68 as a "road to damascus experience."

This event revealed what needed to be dialectically negated from the political heritage of the Civil Rights Movement while simultaneously illuminating a new militant universalism.

It ripped a hole in the state of the situation that was structured around the Civil Rights Movement, turning from its race based reformism to a new politics that could acount for both class and race without stressing one over the other.

As the ultra-charismatic Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver said in his Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, "We don't need a War on Poverty. What we need is a war on the rich." The point being that a "war on the rich" is the only effective means by which to combat poverty - Watts planted the seeds in the black community of class consciousness.

So armed self-defence was one method the Panthers employed. We have a constitutional right to arm ourselves in self-defence (I own a Soviet M-44 myself), and Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party saw the importance of exhausting that right, that is taking advantage of it until it is eventually denied by the repressive government. So in the interest of armed self-defence, Panthers with guns would patrol the police, the colonial power and backbone of domestic imperialism in the black community, often entering violent confrontations with them.

And eventually the second amendment was exhausted as is evidenced by the numerous murders of Panthers like Fred Hampton by the police. But in addition to armed self-defence the Panthers set up "survival programs," the socialist community programs like the free breakfast program, the free health clinics and the intercommunal news service, all in the interest of "all power to the people" (cf. Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party and Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story). All of this prompted the fanatical anti-communist and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to declare the Black Panther Party the number one threat to US internal security. And he was probably right.

The Panthers realized that the problems in the black community needed a class based analysis, rather than a strictly race based analysis, and while they found a great deal of inspiration in the spirit of Malcom X, considered themselves the rightful heirs to Malcolm's emancipatory project, it was Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that gave them the theoretical tools they required to cope with what bourgeois economics calls "externalities."

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The Little Red Book of Quotations from Chairman Mao was required reading for all members. "The Red Book and what else? The gun!" Huey P. Newton would say. (cf. the chapter on the Red Book in Bobby Seale's Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton.) T

The Panthers embraced Maoism because they needed the analytical tools of Marxism-Leninism. What's more, they saw the truth in Mao Tse-tung's statement that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," and they saw the struggle of the black community as tied with the struggle of poor and oppressed people all over the world. Mao was certainly as big of an influence on the Panthers as Fanon and Malcolm. Mao made it clear that politics is war without bloodshed, and war is the continuation of politics by other means - that politics deals with non antagonistic contradictions among the people and with antagonistic contradictions between the people and the enemy, the oppressor. Panther member and political prisoner/prisoner of war, George Jackson, said: "Politics and war are inseperable in a fascist state." Of course, like George Jackson, most of the Panther leadership were political prisoners/POWs at one time or another, but Comrade George made a career out of it. His point is that in our situation, an apartheid state engaged in domestic imperialism against the black community, a dispersed colony, and in imperial aggression against other oppressed communities all over the world, these contradictions are antagonistic and nonviolence just isn't enough. The gun then becomes neccessary for emancipation.

At the same time, the Panthers recognized and extended the Leninist periodization of the capitalist mode of production through neocolonialism (what Kwame Nkrumah, echoing Lenin, called the "last stage of imperialism") to our current period of Globalized Empire. The Panthers saw that imperialism had already broken down the nation-states into a global complex of dispersed communites dominated by the interests of the universality of the global market and US American hegemony. So in order to account for this the Panthers stressed what Huey Newton terms "revolutionary intercommunalism" in opposition to the "reactionary intercommunalism" of Empire (cf. Newton, To Die for the People, and The Huey P. Newton Reader).

It was thus that the contradictions of the New Left (based, intellectually, in Existential Marxism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory) emphasis on identity politics and the Old Left (Marxist-Leninist) politics of class were resolved and synthesized in both theory and practice by Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. The theoretical terminology of dialectical materialism, especially as it was refined by Maoism (cf. Mao Tse-tung's essay, "On Contradiction"), is very useful in framing a discussion of this issue. So in Maoist terms, I will say that Huey acknowledges that class contradiction, particularly that between colonized peoples and imperial powers, occupy the position of principal contradiction in the present period of the capitalist mode of produciton, while racial contradictions, understood both as non-antagonistic contradictions amongst the colonized people and as antagonistic contradictions between the colonized and the oppressor, occupy a crucial and distinct secondary position. This functions to the extent that various dispersed communities (the Black ghettos, the poor white communities, etc) must organize themselves in order to socialize their resources and begin the resistance against Empire, maintaining their autonomy from a single monolithic Party while at the same time banding together and coordinating their efforts in their mutual interest.

Of course the ghetto in US America is just one example of that reactionary intercommunal oppression. So the Black Panther Party formed these revolutionary intercommunalist coalitions, united fronts, while holding the place of vanguard in the US. They backed the Chinese Communist Party, the Algerian FLN, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Patriot Party, the Maoist parties of the New Communist Movement, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the Weather Underground, I Wor Kuen, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Red Guard Party in San Francisco's Chinatown - and they were backed in turn by all of these groups in one way or another, either politically, materially, or both.

The Panthers even made an agreement with the Viet Cong for the Vietnamese guerrillas to release US American POWs in exchange for the release of Panther POWs by the US government. This was the famous "Pilots for Panthers" program. Of course the Black Panther Party, in line with basic Marxist-Leninist internationalism, also offered to send Panther troops to aid the NLF in South Vietnam (an offer that was formally accepted but never cashed in by the Viet Cong).

That's the point of revolutionary intercommunalism, and Huey was talking about, and, more importantly, applying, this stuff long before the hip and ineffectual Deleuzean Neomarxism of Hardt and Negri's Empire and Multitudes hit the academic scene, and in a much more digestable and concrete form. All of the domestic organizations that were involved in the Panther led Rainbow Coalition fell apart, most were destroyed by the FBI COINTELPRO.

[phk]

I was hoping to hear from someone who made a little more sense.

You have to analyze and break-down these issues more in-depth.

[phk]

Why the hell are you saying Malcom X was better than MLK? He was a violent black supremecist.

I'm not saying he was better than MLK.  But I am suggesting that maybe a portion of his philosophy was better than some of what MLK ended up with at the end.

Supposedly, Malcolm X abandoned the black supremacy stuff toward the end, and preached more of a doctrine of black self-help.  At the same time, MLK did a lot to remove the legal barriers to black advancement.

So I wonder if some combination of the best parts of their philosophies might have served blacks better than preaching dependency on government.

Dude, you need to learn to debate a little more politely.  You're a f'cking fireball.

Martin Luther King's got streets named after him all over and the day he was assassinated is remembered as a national holiday. But you don't see any street signs that say "Huey P. Newton Boulevard" and the day of Malcolm X's assassination certainly isn't a national holiday. Why is that?

Because these guys wanted more than desegregation and so-called equal rights. They wanted self-determination for their community and you can't put that on a street sign.  They realized thier community needed a class-based analysis as oposed to soley race.

They demonstrated that Emancipatory nonviolence works only in tandem with emancipatory violence, as has been shown by the violence on the side of the oppressed, sometimes extreme, in both the Indian independence movement and the American Civil Rights Movement.

Though we do have to give Dr. King some credit. Even he began, before he was murdered, to see himself that nonviolence wasn't enough and that Malcolm's cry - "by any means necessary" - was correct. And yet even these so-called civil rights that were awarded to the black community as a result of the nonviolent activism of the American Civil Rights Movement are bourgeois rights.