Whats the leftcom perspective on Black Panthers Party?

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He wasn't even a threat, but an aid!

It does smell a little bit like treachery.

A necessary repose to oppression but inherently limited. The movement's politics were always questionable. Sure they did good things like armed self-defense, provide free school lunches and healthcare, etc. but it's questionable how radical these things really are even if they had to be done. This is something of a result of the Panthers being 'community activists' which tends to attract disparate, materially separated individuals whilst also emphasising identitarian programmes such as autonomism etc. The Panthers thus gained mass support within their communities, but it was never a mass movement. Its members and their uniforms were very much distinct from 'the community', or 'the workers' (even if they made marginal in-roads into some workers struggle, the backwards nature of such struggle in the period + the systemic racism of US labour unions meant open collaboration with the likes of the radical black autoworkers was pretty hard….and given the Panthers incoherent political stance, what relation each would have to each-other is questionable).

Of course this is all within the context of massive and unprecedented violent repression, at all levels, from the US state…which limited the success (however defined) of any such movement (even if the Panthers had a developed strategy). This wasn't helped by petty factionalism of some members (the utter incoherence of much of the culturalism of black nationalism).

The fetish for the lumpenproles (I actually don't take Marx's anti-lumpen views here at all, I simply stand against fetishization, see Endnotes' text on lumpenproles to show Marx was historically proven wrong on this btw) and a championing of "black power" at the tail-end of the civil right movement both regressed into a petty-reformism. Black power became not the calling card of a movement that challenged and destroyed white supremacy but merely the call for the autonomy of black communities from white power. This is of course impossible. And the move away from that challenge also institutes the nascent class collaborationism of "black power" which imagines class division relegated to marginal compared to "race consciousness". In a certain sense this is true. For Southern blacks class divisions were peripheral and marginal insofar as the uber-oppression of Jim Crow had, in real terms, relegated most blacks to the proletariat (and thus for a time black power could be synonmous with proletariat). The Civil Rights movement broke that, and engineered a space for a stable black bourgeoisie to emerge made up of the legions of Civil Rights leaders, activists and supporters. These bourgeois leaders became "black leaders" directing and incorporating all struggles of the totalising constituent they apparently represented "blacks" or "the black community". The Panthers were made by this movement, but their Northern origins gave them a radical imagery and rhetoric, since they saw through the promises of whites for voting and equality given they ostensibly had such "rights" in the North. Nevertheless any look at the BPP platform will spot the problems. When the goal becomes autonomy for and self-management of black communities rather than destroying (white) supremacy you aren't far away from electoralism as the bourgeois provides structures of democratic "community control" that can provide healthcare, employment etc. Indeed that's what the Panthers did. And thus despite their potential radicalism, and their brave armed opposition to the State (and the State's uber-repression no doubt gives to the Panthers a certain mythology in activist circles) they weren't after that split revolutionary anymore, and long before violently getting the nail in their coffin by the alphabet soups the movement was already collapsing in incoherence.

Goals that aims for self-control, self-defence, the provision of employed, healthcare etc. are radical only in the context of the historic conditions for blacks in America, yet alone they tend towards both a rejection of class analysis to be replaced by one rooted in space (black community); though of course the black Northern bourgeois and managerial classes didn't reject class: they actively crushed the Panthers with the collaboration of "white power" (literally just allying with white workers). This point was largely missed, outside of moralistic appeals (shame, traitor, etc.), by the Panthers' "leaders") and more importantly ends in electoralism.

what a gem, user

It seems like leftcoms are always either super high-quality posters or the worst shitposters imaginable. I haven't seen much of a middle ground.

bordigists will never recover from this holy shit

eww

Quality fucking post. Seriously, you're one of the best posters on this board even though I disagree with you on a lot of things. Usually I absolutely hate internet leftcoms because they never contribute anything to the discussion except for being smug assholes ("read marx lol") but your posts are good as hell my dude (at least if you're the same leftcom-flag poster I'm thinking of, which I suspect you are).

Okay but how does this fit into a specifically leftcom framework?

thanks for this post. so would better theory have helped, or is community activism inherently limited

Not much I can do about that, friend.

BTW I rarely post with the leftcom flag. I strongly identify with the ultra-left on many points but unless the need to recognize me as one is warranted I go flagless. It seems the ones who consistently adopt it either do it without really understanding much of the communist left or ultra-left at all, or simply think it looks cool.

Also I guess following the train of ethnic nationalism in the oppressed, there's this text which is quite good: libcom.org/blog/hawaii-class-militancy-or-cultural-patriotism-28062015. The author, Kenan Malik, describes the shift from class to cultural politics he saw in the Black and Asian communities of London, explains that "Political struggles unite across ethnic or cultural divisions; cultural struggles inevitably fragment." Rather than uniting activists across cultural lines to fight our common oppression "the shift from the political to the cultural arena helped entrench old divisions and to create new ones." I think that what he saw in London is basically what we saw in the US. You can only really meaningfully tear down cultural misfortunes through class as the focalizer, anything else just introduces new subjectivities and lets capital recuperate.

Thanks I guess. Taking what I said above in mind, e-meme left communism isn't representative of left communism, and as of late with the surge in leftcom/ultra theory's popularity it's become particularly bad. In particular a lot of the armchair memes have led to people unironically thinking left communists are impossibilists and teleological determinists, things that were actually the very first ever things the first left communists rejected as Orthodox/Second International nonsense. This (meme version vs. serious version dichotomy) actually goes for any position versus its memetic incarnation.

not sure that crit fits the panthers until after they were kill already

What, should he have martyr'd himself as soon as the battle ended? The PCdI was extremely active prior to the fascist takeover, fighting in the streets and organizing strikes. They were only criticized by Lenin for refusing parliamentary participation in that instance. I don't even like Bordiga, but this is dumb.

Excellent post. Your first paragraph patricularly reminded me of some lines from "To Our Friends":

What do you mean by that? A big part of their modern writings is the explicit rejection of style (focusing praxis around parties versus around councils) over substance (what actions in what contexts will concretely lead to communism?).

What differences would you say there are between the memetic incarnation of Marxism-Leninism and the serious version of Marxism-Leninism?

I don't think it does, actually. Left communism doesn't have a unique position on every single thing. Perhaps in my slightly bigger focus on the activistic nature of things I may add something, but this is a very barebones Marxist critique of non-class politics, with some of my personal knowledge on the history and facts of things thrown in.

I think community activism is inherently limited to simple reform, but not that it isn't worth doing. Save for perhaps trying to pair their politics back to that of class, what else should the Panthers have done, just lie down and die? The fact that we can refrain from having revolutionary delusions about things does not inherently make them not worthwhile. Smply to ameliorate living conditions is, and it's the basic condition for a vital working class (another thing left communists are painted as is as believers of the notion that proletarian immiseration is their key to revolution). I have nothing to gain in telling you not to vote SocDem at the next election if for example you could really use that higher min. wage.

The shit that makes me have to respect a lot of modern anarchism.

I mean compare any given Twitter tankie like commietantric or Phil Graves (the faces of ML on the internet) and their intellectual musics to something like this: readpolitzer.org/contents.html and fucking wew. I mean outside of the fact that I think ML heavily distorted and misinterpreted Marx and in a sense even Lenin, it is still a fully coherent doctrine unto itself. I also categorically refuse, as most left communists do, to characterize Stalinism as an evil phenomenon borne from the demonic figure of Stalin and his bloodlust rather than a historically-established one that genuinely did have good prerogatives and intentions.

not true at all

marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/1966/10/15.htm

You are reaching pretty far on the black nationalism, obviously it was prominent but they became more and more a leninist/maoist outfit until they collapsed . It is definitely not true that they did not represent a class movement

What are your main problems with ML then, excluding all the twitter tankie bullshit and meme incarnations of it? Socialism in one country? That limited forms of commodity production can and will exist during the primitive, lower stages of communism (what ML's call socialism blah blah blah)?

Forgot to say
nice. leftcoms > anarkiddies > trots.

Racial nationalists of all sorts should be shot.
It is the sort of rubbish that belongs on Holla Forums.

I agree with pretty much everything you said but this.

reactionary black nationalists were kicked out of the movement, that's part of why they collapsed, internal divisions among the leadership.

Well those were some (straw-clutching and dubious) critiques of the BPP, which seem to have been samefaggingly rimmed with no actual comment like every self cock sucking leftcom does in every thread and the ancom flag who is a leftcom disguised as an ancom so obviously (yourself). The question is, how does this fit into the framework of say, Dauve, or Bordiga, and why isn't this just a bunch of observations. The OP asked for a leftcom crit, not just some comments.
no but if it is in any way shape or form coherent its framework should be applicable outside of what its theorists originally applied it to, in the way that we can still apply Marxist economics to the current day.
i see a bunch of opinions. Panthers were Maoist, the reforms they wanted were arguably more radical than ones Marx asked for in his day

I specifically talked about how the movement started with what can safely be characterized as a working class movement (specifically as characterized by the fact that, really, it was near-impossible to be black and bourgeois at the time, as well as the fact that it was largely one of solidarity with all workers played against one another), but that the turn was caused by the implications of the successes of Civil Rights legislature combined with the otherwise non-class focused elements and members of the movement. For every Newton (who despite his faults was proletarian revolutionary) there were ten O'Neals and Rackleys and their anti-radical demands (and this wasn't a sudden turn either; they never stood even close to the revolutionary character of the BPP's humble origins, let alone any at all). Look at the Ten-Point Program; a revolutionary document no doubt, but how much of the communistic rhetoric actually ended up defining its relevance to the BPP in practice? It was all watered down by the historical turn and the explicitly reformist and class traitorous factionalists.

On very many things. I touched upon the distortions and misinterpretations of Marx and Lenin, in the case of Marx something not even unique to ML, because basically Marx's death left the true meaning and significance of "Marxism" in the hands of those hailed experts. If you read Lenin historically you'll find many evolutions in how he understands Marxism, sometimes violently breaking with Second International points, feuding with comrades over what the actual meaning of "dialectics" and "materialism" really is, and so on. It's long, but Marx at the Millenium by Cyril Smith is a good read for this:
marxistsfr.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/index.htm (take a quick look at chapters 2, 2a, 3 and 4 from that, especially 2 and 2a). The author despite noticing Lenin's struggle to make heads or tails of Marxism over the years nonetheless characerizes Lenin as perhaps the most important revolutionary of the 20th century, which brings me to why I make a big deal out of distortions: not for its own sake, to fellate the one and only pure reading of Marx, but because distortions indeed exist, and they can either be good or bad.

To go into your other points:
You could hypothetically imagine communism in one country. But practically it is impossible, because such a state would not exist in isolation. Capital itself demands infinite expansion, and this expansive drive would manifest itself in various ways: imperialism, the need to consolidate as a state like with Russia in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Furthermore, the proletariat has shown that in its movement to communism, it tends to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus, rather than take it over. Additionally, autarky is not realistic from both an economic as well as human perspective, so trade would have to take place, abolishing communism. As Marx puts it:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

Or if you want a leftcom hot take:
libcom.org/library/aircraft-carrier-imperialism-amadeo-bordiga

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What an insightful and nuanced view of the black panthers. A true gem.

I think there's a double misunderstanding here from MLs. Lower phase of communism it seems in ML is not actually made synonymous to the "socialism" stage, but is seemingly associated to the DotP itself, under which indeed there is commodity production because we are still in the period of society's revolutonary transformation. There is no "instantaneous" international revolution, but it certainly needs to spread fast, bringing me to the point about socialism in one country, only hypothetically sustainable. The proletariat cannot hold out in power indefinitely. We have seen that very clearly in the Russian revolution, where the situation was even more dire due to the class composition. Lenin was adamantly clear about the need to expand revolution:
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/7thcong/01.htm
Much of what the Bolsheviks did was with that in mind - even though they made mistakes with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and even though the proletariat lost political power even earlier.

So I got a little off track there, but as I see it in ML we get the lower phase associated not to socialism (the lower phase as in Marx, even in shorthand) but to the DotP (whereas for Marx the DotP is its own category; the revolution itself), and the point of "limited forms of commodity production" it would seem to me at least is contradicted in Marx in Gothakritik ("Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products [commodities]". The lower phase however is marked still by the socialized form of production generated by capitalism, which is the forced conjoining of labor to a specific workplace, under capitalism a form of private property in a firm or State property. Communism fully matures towards the higher phase as this form of socialization is broken, and we effectively have communized all means of production, and no free individual is now tied to a unit of production (thus the need for rationing methods like labour vouchers disappears).

And when I mention how in a sense ML distorts Lenin, it's because actually in Lenin himself we see the redefinition of socialism as something entirely different from communism, as he writes:
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm
So Lenin doesn't try to hide his obvious revision of Marx: he wholly entertains his newly implied transitional society as a capitalistic one except managed by the State under an organ which the represents the proletariat, wherein lies Lenin's coherence and conscious redefining of "socialism" indeed as I said as shorthand for proletarian dictatorship. It seems odd that from this springs the notion that the stage named socialism is here anything but that in ML theory.

You have some problems dude.

I made it explicit that my comments don't necessarily have much to do with the ultra left perspective, save for the activism question, and as it follows Bordiga and Dauve (the former never really hit on these matters and the latter's commentary can at best be paralleled to his comments on Rojava, but barely because the context is so wildly different) so I don't know what you're saying. The OP wanted a leftcom take, so he got a leftcom's take.

This is a very vanilla Marxist take, actually. When I say that left communists don't necessarily have a unique position on everything I simultaneously implied that such basic Marxist understandings will be found on basically every Marxist communist.

I don't think the BPP was as much Maoist (neither as in derivative of Mao or the formalized Shining Path ideology of Maoism) as it was ML. Perhaps I'm not too familiar but only Wikipedia associates it to Maoism, and only vaguely. I do agree that the Ten-Point Program is wildly more radical compared to the ten measures outline in the Manifesto (which I assume you are referring to). However looking at the BPP's trajectory over time the heart of its truly radical points it seems remained in the radical minority faction of the party, coinciding with the turns forced by the events and factors I mentioned before.

Gotta run for now, catch you guys later.

Others were politically active at great risk as well, and as the article points out the police gave him considerably more leniency then was granted to other leftists, so he could have used that to his advantage.

I don't believe there was nothing that could be done at the very least he could've gone into exile and wrote against the regime like others did instead of serving Mussolini's interests by ostensibly showing a credulous audience that Italy wasn't really so bad.

It's particularly galling that after the war's over after submitting to the fascists, Bordiga comes out and says that really all the Allied countries were fascist as well, isn't that convenient? It's almost as if he was carrying water for the fascists even then but even if you think that's a stretch you have to admit its pretty self-serving and self-justifying.

Meanwhile millions of people, including Italians, had given their lives against fascism during WWII, then the sage Bordiga, who had bent his knee to the fascists, declares that it was all much ado about nothing. Fascinating.

You should read what Hoxha had to say about the PCd'I coming from a country colonized by fascist Italy its not surprising he was pretty scathing about its leadership. But it wasn't just him, one of the first orders of business for the Cominform set up by Stalin was to expose the revisionist trends within the PCd'I and the PCF and then later to expose the Yugoslavian revisionists.
ml-review.ca/aml/Comintern/Cominform_WBB_StalinSoc.htm

Because it was a pretty good analysis. Some measures are revolutionary at certain times, not so much at other times.
Leftcoms disagree with the anarchist methodology of Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee. Kill yourself.
The leftcom did criticize them. Criticism doesn't mean outright contradicting someone and ceaselessly insulting them because they're "wrong".
Time to try to feed you some more theory.