Letters of July 15

A Mass Party Will Come from the Mass Movement
We participate in the mass organizations in order to fight for the political leadership of the working class and build a mass PLP. Reading and distributing CHALLENGE is central to our work. As we participate in fightbacks and reform campaigns in mass organizations, CHALLENGE gives us the opportunity to introduce communist politics and analysis to friends in our base at work, in schools, communities, and churches.
Our club is active in an immigrant rights group that is funded by the “liberal” ruling class and involved in various struggles, like a $15-an-hour minimum wage, housing issues and budget cuts. Within this, our club fights racism and for multiracial international unity of the working class. Over the past 10 years, we have grown to a club of 12 recruiting our five newest members after the rebellion in Ferguson against racist police terror.
We read CHALLENGE articles in our club meetings and study groups. We struggle with veteran and new members to distribute CHALLENGE hand to hand and through networks of readers and distributors as the main way to take advantage of the political opportunities to build the Party.
Each member takes between four and up to 50 papers each issue, allowing the club to distribute 150 CHALLENGEs hand to hand and through networks of non-Party workers, who also distribute some papers. We also sell or distribute papers at mass protests. In all, we usually distribute 200 to 250 copies. There is still a lot of room for improvement.
This process often leads to profound political discussion and uncovers many questions or disagreements. We talk about the contradiction between being in reform struggles while exposing capitalism and fighting for communist revolution. Many times workers ask why communism has failed. One new member recently explained how he confronts his friends’ anti-communist ideas. We also expose the dead end of nationalist politics. As we build stronger ties with our friends, our members and  our Party become stronger.
Two new friends came to our last study group. We identify new friends in the mass organization by how workers respond to CHALLENGE and to what our comrades say in meetings and at protests. We continue to struggle with our comrades to take advantage of the opportunities that always arise as the work in the mass organization continues.
★ ★ ★ ★
Movie Review:
The Black Panthers
I went to see the new documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution by veteran Black documentary film maker Stanley Nelson, who also made the film Freedom Summer about the 1964 summer civil rights struggle in Mississippi. His new film is a fascinating look at the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party, celebrating the organization’s accomplishments while discussing some of the flaws that contributed to its demise.
The film will have a commercial release in numerous cities beginning in September, and then will be shown on PBS in February. It’s definitely worth watching.
It contains footage of BPP rallies and interviews with leaders and members, including Fred Hampton, the leader of the Illinois chapter who declared, “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.”
The film shows that while the top leaders of the BPP were men (including Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale), the majority of members were women. The public face of the BPP was mostly men, often in militant face-offs with the police, while it was women who quietly staffed the offices and ran the community breakfast and health clinic programs. Despite the importance of women, and despite capable women leaders like Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins and Kathleen Cleaver, sexism was widespread in the BPP.
Nelson also reveals that a majority of the BPP members were teenagers, radicalized by the violent repression suffered by Black people. The BPP rejected non-violence and advocated armed self-defense of Black communities from racist police brutality. This was welcomed by millions at a time when people were fighting back all over the world, from Vietnam to Latin America.
The BPP advocated revolution — destroying capitalism — while at the same time demanding improvements in the lives of Black workers, including jobs, better housing, schools and health care, exemption from the imperialist military draft, and the end to police harassment and brutality. This was encapsulated in the BPP’s 1966 Ten Point Program. Many thought the BPP had a bright future.
Yet it was not to be. Formed in 1966, the Panthers were essentially defunct by 1971, when they suffered a major split between factions based around Cleaver in Algeria (who advocated adventurist attacks on police that ended up getting members killed) and around Newton and David Hilliard (who favored focusing on the breakfast program and health clinics). There was also a move toward reformist electoral politics, with Bobby Seale running unsuccessfully for Mayor of Oakland in 1972. BPP chapters all around the country were closed down so that people could come to Oakland to help with the campaign.
One of the weaknesses of the BPP was that it seriously underestimated the power of the repressive state apparatus to attack and tear apart the organization. Under J. Edgar Hoover and Cointelpro, the FBI coordinated with local police forces to infiltrate the BPP with dozens of informants, to disrupt the BPP (by encouraging splits and personal attacks) and to murder members with armed attacks on its offices. One such brutal police assault killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago.
Another flaw was the cult worship of leaders like Huey Newton, who was addicted to cocaine, living in a penthouse apartment and often abusive to members. Eldridge Cleaver was a blatant sexist, who advocated risky small-group violence while living safely abroad. He would go on to become a “born-again” Christian and support Ronald Reagan, while being financially supported by right-wing groups.
A major weakness of the BPP was its unwillingness to focus on the Black working class and organize in factories, where a tremendous amount of anti-racist struggle was going on at the time, especially in the auto plants. Huey Newton and other leaders argued that the truly revolutionary class was not workers but rather the “lumpenproletariat,” largely composed of people who made their living from criminal activity, including drugs and prostitution. If the BPP had focused its energies on building a base in the working class, as well as joining mass organizations like unions and churches, it might have endured state repression and not fallen apart.
The Black Panthers is an important film to watch and discuss with our friends, to learn the lessons — both positive and negative — of an organization that attracted thousands of young men and women who dedicated years of their lives to fighting against a destructive racist system and for a better society.
★ ★ ★ ★
What You Do Counts
In letter “Struggle and Learn” in CHALLENGE (6/17), I liked the lines, “We should constantly raise the line and struggle with people. It may seem like we’re not getting anywhere, but we can never tell.” It reminded me of a passage in a book I’m reading, which I would like to share.
 The book is Heinz Rein’s 1948 novel Finale Berlin which tells the story of an underground, communist-led German Resistance group during the last two weeks of World War II. After 12 years of clandestine struggle, the group succeeds in liberating a Berlin neighborhood as the Red Army approaches. One character says:
Up to now, we’ve performed our illegal work without any visible success, we’ve always only been able slightly to touch the people to whom we turned with our secret radio transmitter, our words have always dribbled into the darkness, have been vaporized into a great desert, our leaflets have continually fluttered into nothingness, we’ve never been able to observe their effect because we had to get away from the people who received them before they had unfolded them, our acts of sabotage often seemed ridiculously small to us, as if a mosquito was attacking an elephant, we’ve always remained without an echo, and in the final analysis it was only thanks to a belief in ourselves that we didn’t despair at the wall of silence which all of us ran up against. But finally, yesterday evening, something really happened, there was a visible success, a many-voiced echo boomed back to us, there our activity, with which perhaps we only vindicated ourselves to ourselves, was transformed into a real deed for the first time.
This dramatic example of events 70 years ago can inspire us never to despair. Finale Berlin was republished in Germany this year. As far as I know, it’s never been translated into English or Spanish, but I recommend it to everyone who can read German. (Be forewarned that, as the excerpt shows, they liked to write very long sentences in the 1940s.)
★ ★ ★ ★