The Power of Pull-Over Prevention Clinics ("POPs")

By Joseph Lobodzinski

Throughout many leftist circles, debates are taking place over the best way to achieve police abolition. Some insist that the most realistic path is through an electoral struggle, wherein police abolitionists run for local, state, and federal positions. Once elected, they can slash police budgets and implement different policies that will bring us closer to a society without military-like “peacekeepers.” Others put their faith in community-based action such as, but not limited to, abolition read-ins and food/clothing donation events. These efforts seek to model a community wherein social ills are eradicated through basic human compassion, rendering a police presence unnecessary.

Abolitionist inquiry has yielded many great proposals addressing the destructiveness of America’s current police apparatus. As we continue this inquiry, we must take stock of all the meaningful ways people have advanced abolition within their communities.

One particular mode of abolitionist praxis has proved especially successful. It has shown an ability to protect marginalized people not just from cops, but immigration officers as well. Pull-over prevention clinics — or “POPs,” as they’re sometimes called — are free, volunteer-run repair shops. Crews of off-duty mechanics and community handymen help fix tires, install lights and booster seats, and refill essential fluids. This work, of course, allows people to safely conduct their required daily travel. But it also does much more than that. By ensuring compliance with legal standards, pull-over prevention clinics preempt “unsafe [and] discriminatory interactions with law enforcement.”

Ypsilanti, Michigan — located in the Huron Valley between Ann Arbor and Detroit — is a hotspot for this sort of mutual aid. In a remarkable display of solidarity, individuals from all walks of life are banding together to help protect the most marginalized members of their community.

The Ypsilanti Mutual Aid Network is one of many organizations in the Huron Valley region conducting POPs. They explain their reasoning as follows: 

“Police and immigration officers use minor automotive issues as reasons to stop, search, fine, and deport people. POP volunteers provide repair and advice for these issues, share repair skills, and promote access to local resources.”

Since 2020, some local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America have also assisted hundreds of motorists in the Huron Valley through POPs. In those two years, POP events have grown significantly in both scope and frequency.

An increasing number of organizations in the Huron Valley go beyond car repair to provide other types of community-care work. Roughly once a month, residents of southeast Michigan can receive free COVID and flu shots, test kits, and masks provided by the Washtenaw County Health Department and Packard Health. Free lunches are given away by FedUp Ministries, free pet food and other supplies are provided by Pet Pals Mutual Aid, and clinics often have volunteer DJs and other entertainment for children to enjoy while their parents’ cars are being fixed. While not directly tied to policing, these services nonetheless help build the abolitionist project by drawing in more people who — whether they realize it or not — become part of an effort to eradicate social ills through community action rather than criminalization.

To increase accessibility, information on POPs is always published in both English and Spanish.  This allows word to travel quickly, increasing turnout and thus broadening the impact of POPs. That should encourage organizers, whose efforts will almost surely create positive ripple effects throughout their locale.

In a society with little sense of community, alienation is a staple of American life. It is therefore hard to organize aid efforts with quick, direct, and long-lasting effects — especially when the intended goal is abolition. While the notion of a society without police has gained traction since the murder of George Floyd, much of America is still tentatively supportive of the current approach to law enforcement. As liberal reforms continue to fail, and cities like New York shovel billions of dollars into their police departments, we must show those on the fence that there are better ways to promote public safety. Pull-over prevention clinics might be an integral part of an overall strategy to do just that.

Privatizing the Common Good: The 21st-Century Enclosures Are Here

[Pictured: Oscar Olivera, executive secretary of the Cochabamba Federation of Factory Workers and spokesperson for the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life, known as La Coordinadora, organizing with fellow Bolivians.]

By Ashley Dawson

Republished from Literary Hub.

Fossil capital has been granted immense power, producing life-giving heat and light but also plunging communities into darkness when they fail to return outsize profits. In 2011, DTE Energy, the investor-owned utility (IOU) that controls southeast Michigan’s energy infrastructure, repossessed one thousand streetlights from Highland Park, a city in the larger metropolis of Detroit. The city was left in the dark. Like many other Black-majority cities across Michigan, Highland Park was struggling at the time with capital flight and spiraling levels of austerity. Once home to Ford and Chrysler auto assembly plants and the well-paying jobs that they generated, Highland Park had seen its fortunes crash in the 1990s and the 2000s as the automakers shipped jobs abroad.

Now, half of the residents of Highland Park had trouble paying their monthly electric bills, and a quarter had experienced a shutoff of gas or electricity—often during Michigan’s cold winter months. When DTE took the lights, Highland Park owed $4 million in electricity bills, a situation likely to be aggravated by the rate hikes the utility wanted to impose to support its existing coal-fired power plants, to build new fossil fuel plants, and to pay the utility’s chief executive his $5.4-million annual salary. The repossession of Highland Park’s streetlights was part of a broader crisis of public assets: across Michigan, communities struggled as control of key public infrastructure like the water department and the school system was stripped from them by undemocratic emergency-management czars.

The taking of the light in Highland Park is part of a new, global round of enclosures in which common assets are stripped from the public. For radical critics of capitalism such as the historians Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh and the geographer David Harvey, enclosures are one of the dominant forms of contemporary capital accumulation. According to these activist scholars, critics of capitalism have mistakenly followed Marx’s analysis of what he famously termed “primitive accumulation,” which sees enclosure as a kind of original violence that kick-started the capitalist system. Enclosure, Marx argued, was foundational to capitalism since it allowed powerful landlords to accumulate wealth by dispossessing the peasantry of the land they farmed collectively, replacing such feudal social relations with more lucrative forms of enterprise such as the production of wool.

As the 16th-century English philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas Moore put it, “sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.” The accumulated capital produced by enclosure of common lands was used to support expansion of industrial production domestically and of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism abroad. Enclosure thus refers to a global process of violent extraction. But the key thing is that enclosure did not cease once common lands in Britain had all been opened up and capitalism had been established as an economic and political system.

Contrary to what Marx argued, the predatory stripping of common assets around the world never stopped. In fact, it has intensified. The neoliberal era that began in the 1980s has seen a massive expansion of attacks on the commons, both in the form of the shifting of formerly public assets such as school systems into the private sphere in rich countries, and through extensive land grabs in areas hitherto relatively autonomous from the capitalist world system such as parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Resistance to the new enclosures has become a central feature of social struggles over the last few decades. For instance, in 2000, the people of the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia rose up after the World Bank insisted that the government hand over control of municipal water supplies to Aguas del Tunari, a conglomerate controlled by the US-based multinational Bechtel Corporation. The new owner of Cochabamba’s water demanded steep and sudden rate increases of double or more for poor consumers in order to finance the double-digit profits demanded by the companies. The conglomerate even proposed to tax water that people caught in barrels as the rain flowed off their roofs.

A just transition to renewable energy will require a shift away from today’s energy-as-commodity regime.

The people of Cochabamba rose up in protest, occupying the center of the city and forming a grassroots participatory organization called the Coordinator for the Defense of Water and Life that shut the city down and demanded a rollback of the water privatization measures. Under pressure from the water conglomerate and international authorities, the Bolivian government declared martial law and tried to suppress the protests with riot troops, measures leading to mass arrests, hundreds of injuries, and the death of a teenage boy as conflicts erupted on the barricades the citizens had set up around the city. Protesters held fast in the face of state repression, however, and on April 10, 2000, the Bolivian government reached an agreement with the Coordinadora that ultimately not only reversed the privatization of the city’s water but also catapulted Evo Morales and his Movement for Socialism (MAS) into power in the country.

This victory for popular mobilization in Bolivia was a key moment in resistance to the new round of capitalist enclosures carried out during the age of neoliberal hyper-capitalism. The defense of the commons through new forms of participatory organizing resonated around the globe in the following years. In 2013, for instance, Turkish activists protesting government plans to pave over Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park described the park itself and various other urban spaces that the government’s neoliberal policies tried to confiscate for private profit as a “commons.” The Turkish activists called the form of self-government developed during their occupation of Gezi a “commune,” one that involved not just a sit-in but also food distribution, a medical center, and an autonomous media collective.

Grounded in a determination to defend common space from enclosure, the Gezi protest shared a commoning ethos not just with the Cochabamba Water Wars but also with similar movements around the world, from the resistance of the Zapatistas to the neoliberal tenets of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in Mexico beginning in 1994, to the Occupy movement that began in New York and spread across the United States, and to the Indignados movement in Madrid in 2011. In addition to resisting enclosure, these movements also experimented with new forms of popular sovereignty, animated by a fierce critique of the blindness to inequality that characterizes liberal democracy and the regime of private property rights on which it is founded. New structures of governance were developed in global movements founded on the idea of the people as an egalitarian collective with a mandate to rule in order to bring about social transformation.

These experiments reached their highest point with the emergence of what might be termed the social movement party in countries such as Bolivia and Brazil, but the effort to develop egalitarian, non-bureaucratic ways of organizing societies has been a key feature of the Left in recent decades. And, as feminist scholars such as Silvia Federici have documented, contemporary commoning movements crucially include the fight for communal, egalitarian control over material needs linked to social reproduction such as housing, food preparation, child rearing, sex and procreation, and even the reproduction of collective memories.

These radical experiments have exciting implications for the struggle for energy democracy. For example, when the power company came to strip them of their light, the residents of Highland Park took power into their own hands in ways that built on the logic of popular sovereignty developed in global commoning movements. DTE Energy had consistently used political donations (based on those elevated rates) and lobbying to stymie efforts to establish local ownership of clean energy in Michigan. Now it was taking away the power supplied by dirty coal plants.

Faced with this threat, citizens of Highland Park established Soulardarity, a community-based organization that fights for collectively owned streetlights, energy production, and equitable development. Soulardarity not only brings light back to Highland Park, it generates the power to run streetlights from the sun. Soulardarity produces what one observer calls “visionary infrastructure.” And it provides local folks with jobs building and maintaining this new solar infrastructure. Through the organization’s PowerUP program, the community is able to purchase solar power in bulk and at reasonable rates, and to deploy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of solar infrastructure in the community. But this is not just about transformation of the community’s physical infrastructure: it is also about broader social transformation in Highland Park.

Soulardarity is a democratic, community-governed membership organization that aims to educate Highland Park residents about what autonomous control of power or energy democracy should look like, and to advocate for community ownership, transparency, and environmental sustainability across the region. Soulardarity advocates for a Community Ownership Power Administration (COPA) as a vital element of a Green New Deal in the United States. Like the Rural Electrification Administration that brought electricity to farms across the country during the New Deal in the 1930s, COPA would provide finance and technical capacity to help local communities across the country make the transition to renewable energy. As Jackson Koeppel of Soulardarity explains, COPA would give municipalities, counties, states, and tribal authorities the legal authority and the funding mechanisms that would allow them to “terminate their contacts with investor-owned utilities, buy back the energy grid to form a public or cooperative utility, and invest in a resilient, renewable system.”

In the introduction to their collection of essays on the US movement for energy democracy, Denise Fairchild and Al Weinrub contrast corporate models of decarbonization with the forms of renewable energy being fought for by organizations like Soulardarity. For Fairchild and Weinrub, the former are oriented around the growth imperative of capitalism and are characterized by “a transition to industrial-scale, carbon-free resources without challenging the growth of energy consumption, material consumption, rates of capital accumulation, and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.”

The centralized nature of power generation and distribution in the era of fossil capitalism has not only led to significant waste, with average losses of 8 to 15 percent of power generated as a result of far-flung transmission lines. It has also helped to make energy invisible and unconscious for many ratepayers, while subjecting others to heightened environmental and health damages, harms that track closely along lines of residential segregation and racialized inequality in the United States. Corporate-owned renewable energy is not likely to challenge this history.

By contrast, Fairchild and Weinrub argue, the decentralized renewable energy model fosters community-based renewable energy development that “allows for the new economic and ecologically sound relationships needed to address the current economic and climate crisis.” Such decentralization of power, they suggest, is facilitated by the distributed nature of renewable resources: “solar energy, wind, geothermal energy, energy conservation, energy efficiency, energy storage, and demand response systems are resources that can be found in all communities,” and consequently provide a foundation for “community-based development of energy resources at the local level through popular initiatives.”

Fairchild and Weinrub’s advocacy of decentralized renewable energy is thus predicated on both the material characteristics of renewable energies and the forms of radical democracy that they hope will facilitate and result from a just transition. For them, transition is about community empowerment rather than simply decarbonization of the grid, as important as the latter may be in the struggle to avoid climate meltdown.

The question of the energy commons is fundamental to the fight for a collective future.

Writing in Fairchild and Weinrub’s collection of essays, Cecilia Martinez, director of the Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy, argues that a just transition to renewable energy will require a shift away from today’s energy-as-commodity regime. Martinez suggests that energy democracy requires the construction of an energy commons. What models exist to support the institution and collective governance of such an energy commons, one that diverges radically from today’s private property–based regimes of energy control and ownership? For Martinez, the first step is to recognize that energy is not so much a physical object, but rather a “vast array of natural interactions and phenomena for societal use.”

While energy might derive from natural phenomena all ultimately grounded in the harnessing of solar power, it is inescapably rooted in the social forms and infrastructures developed by humans to exploit solar energy. It is about forms of collective power that are active: in other words, about commoning rather than about some pre-given and static commons. How might energy be regulated in a more egalitarian manner? Martinez alludes briefly in her essay to the legal structures created over the last few decades to establish a global commons outside the control of any particular nation: founded on centuries-old legal paradigms governing the high seas, today’s global commons also includes the atmosphere, Antarctica, and outer space.

Martinez also draws on the pioneering economist Elinor Ostrom to argue that diverse cultures around the world and across history have established institutions resembling neither the bourgeois nation-state nor capitalist markets to govern resource systems. Martinez points to indigenous governance models of commoning founded on reciprocity, cooperation, and respect not only between humans but also among humans and the more-than-human world.

What are the conditions for the creation of a new world based on the energy commons? The egalitarian governance systems and legal paradigms discussed by Cecilia Martinez are helpful here. The particular material characteristics of modern renewables such as solar and wind power distinguish them from fossil fuels like coal and oil, but to what extent do these specific material forms, which derive directly from solar power and its effect on atmospheric systems, make for a new, commons-based energy regime that might be termed “Solarity”? What forms of collective, egalitarian governance can the movement for energy democracy draw on as it seeks to challenge the centralized paradigms of energy generation and ownership of the fossil capitalist regime? Do legal paradigms already exist to help community-based organizations like Soulardarity escape from the clutches of fossil capital and adopt solar power on a mass basis? What are the limits of these legal paradigms and what juridical innovations might address these limits?

These questions all relate to much broader struggles to establish new, revolutionary forms of popular sovereignty to defend and extend the commons, but they have a particular import for the fight for energy democracy. The struggle for a rapid and just energy transition is at the core of broader struggles for an exit from today’s trajectory toward social degradation and planetary ecocide. The question of the energy commons is therefore fundamental to the fight for a collective future.

Ashley Dawson is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His previous books include Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change and Extinction: A Radical History. A member of the Social Text Collective and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist. His new book, People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons is available at OR Books.

An Ideal Blueprint: The Original Black Panther Party Model and Why It Should Be Duplicated

By Colin Jenkins

The rise of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the late 1960s signified a monumental step toward the development of self-determination in the United States. In a nation that has long suffered a schizophrenic existence, characterized by a grand facade of "freedom, liberty and democracy" hiding what Alexis de Tocqueville once aptly described as "old aristocratic colours breaking through,"[1] the BPP model provided hope to not only Black Americans who had experienced centuries of inhumane treatment, but also to the nation's exploited and oppressed working class majority that had been inherently disregarded by both the founding fathers' framework and the predatory nature of capitalism.

As we grind our way through the tail-end of a neoliberal storm, it has become clear that in an age of extreme inequality, unabated corporate power, and overwhelming government corruption at all levels; we have a war on our hands. Not a war in the traditional international sense, but a domestic class war; one that has decimated our communities, our hopes for a better future, our children's educations, and our collective physical and mental well-being. The aggressors in this war are powerful - so much so that resistance often seems futile, and the opposition insurmountable. Multi-trillion dollar financial institutions and multi-billion dollar corporations pulling the strings of the most powerful politicians - Presidents, Senators, Congress members, and Governors alike - all of whom have at their disposal the abilities to print money at will, control markets through fiscal and monetary policy, deploy powerful militaries anywhere in the world, and unleash militarized police forces to terrorize our neighborhoods.

Despite this juggernaut of an enemy, working-class resistance has not subsided. And although it took a proclaimed "economic crisis" to wake many from their slumber, developments within activist and direct action circles have been positive over the past half-decade. The Occupy movement sparked much-needed discourse on income inequality and corporate/government corruption while setting up the fight for a $15 minimum wage, which has caught on like wildfire throughout the country, and especially among the most vulnerable of the working class - low-wage service sector workers. Anti-war protestors who made their presence felt during the Bush administration - only to disappear after Obama's election - have begun to trickle back with the gradual realization that nothing has changed. And anti-capitalist political parties throughout the Left, though still small and splintered, have gained momentum and membership while successfully plugging into some mainstream working-class consciousness (Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative's rise in Seattle; the Black Autonomy Federation's regrouping of grassroots, anti-authoritarian struggle; the International Socialist Organization's ongoing solidarity with folks like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Ali Abunimah and Amy Goodman; the Socialist Party USA's growing relevance; and the Party for Socialism and Liberation's relentless battle in the trenches of anti-war, anti-police brutality, and anti-racist activism).

These developments, while positive in many respects, have ultimately been limited. Some of these limitations are due to external factors that continue to plague the American public: a general deficit in education and knowledge, a lack of class-conscious analysis, and the inundation of corporate media and propaganda, to name a few - all of which pose elements that are difficult, if not impossible, to control. Other limitations are due to internal factors which are largely controllable, such as organizational structures and approaches. It is regarding these internal shortcomings where the original Black Panther Party model becomes invaluable and should be held as a standard blueprint for all organizations and parties seeking revolutionary change.

The following is a list of attributes, both tangible and conceptual, that made the BPP an effective model for true liberty and self-determination; and, consequently, a substantial threat to the status quo of ever-strangling corporate and governmental power. Organizations and parties of today, whether through piecemeal or wholesale consideration, would do well to take this ideal mix into account.

Theoretical Foundation and Internationalism

Despite constant grumblings regarding the "inundation" and "worthlessness" of theory from within the modern Left, a glance at the operational effectiveness of the original BPP lends credence to its usefulness.

The BPP was firmly rooted in revolutionary political philosophy, most notably that of Marxism - a tool that is needed to understand and properly critique the very system which dominates us - capitalism. "Capitalist exploitation is one of the basic causes of our problem," explained one of the party's founders, Huey P. Newton, and "it is the goal of the BPP to negate capitalism in our communities and in the oppressed communities around the world."[2]

The BPP's ongoing exploration of theory allowed for the development of a crucial class component that perfectly balanced their fight against institutional racism. This helped create the notion that the fight for racial justice could not be won outside the confines of economic justice and class division, something revolutionary counterparts like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X would also eventually realize.

Stemming from Marxism was the method of and adherence to "dialectical materialism," which "precluded a static, mechanical application" of theory and allowed the party to adapt to the constantly developing environment while maintaining a mission based in class and racial oppression. "If we are using the method of dialectical materialism," argued Newton, "we don't expect to find anything the same even one minute later because one minute later is history." [3] Regarding the party's embrace of this method, Eldridge Cleaver noted, "we have studied and understand the classical principles of scientific socialism (and) have adapted these principles to our own situation for ourselves. However, we do not move with a closed mind to new ideas or information (and) know that we must rely upon our own brains in solving ideological problems as they relate to us." [4]

The Party's belief in "international working class unity across the spectrum of color and gender" led them to form bonds with various minority and white revolutionary groups. "From the tenets of Maoism they set the role of their Party as the vanguard of the revolution and worked to establish a united front, while from Marxism they addressed the capitalist economic system, embraced the theory of dialectical materialism, and represented the need for all workers to forcefully take over the means of production." This approach was echoed by Fred Hampton, who urged all to resist fighting racism with racism, but rather with (working class) solidarity; and to resist fighting capitalism with "Black capitalism," but rather with socialism.

Through this theoretical base, "Newton and the BPP leadership organized with the intent of empowering the Black community through collective work," Danny Haiphong tells us. "Each concrete medical clinic, free breakfast program, and Panther school were organized to move community to confront the racist, capitalist power structure and embrace revolutionary socialism and communalism."

The Party's Ten-Point Program and platform, which evolved slightly over the course of several years, rested on demands that focused not only on historical roots to the daily injustices faced by Black Americans and oppressed communities, but also took on an international scope that allowed for understanding macro-systemic causes, and particularly those associated with capitalism. As Cornel West explains, "The revolutionary politics of the Black Panther Party linked the catastrophic conditions of local Black communities (with the disgraceful school systems, unavailable health and child care, high levels of unemployment and underemployment, escalating rates of imprisonment, and pervasive forms of self-hatred and self-destruction) to economic inequality in America and colonial or neocolonial realities in the capitalist world-system."[5]

"It was the politics of international radical solidarity ... Because of the tremendous hostility that the Vietnam War was generating, youth organizations in Germany, France and Sweden created solidarity committees for the BPP. We would travel back and forth; and they raised money for us. There were liberation movements in Africa who read our paper and contacted us," says Kathleen Cleaver. The Party even established its own embassy in Algeria, a nation that had no diplomatic ties with the United States at the time. With a firm understanding of political economy and geopolitics, the party possessed a "big picture approach" that has become a necessity, especially in today's world of globalization, neoliberalism, and multinational corporate power.

Praxis and Direct Action

"They (the people) can do anything they desire to do," Newton professed, "but they will only take those actions which are consistent with their level of consciousness and their understanding of the situation. When we raise their consciousness (through education), they will understand even more fully what they in fact can do, and they will move on the situation in a courageous manner. This is merging your theory with your practices." [6]

The BPP didn't just talk about change, they actively pursued it. Their presence was felt in the neighborhoods for which they lived and worked. They walked the streets, talked with folks, broke bread with neighbors, and cultivated a sense of community. Their numerous outreach efforts were well-planned, beautifully strategic, and always multi-pronged - combining basic and pleasant human interaction with education and revolutionary politics. They were the perfect embodiment of solidarity, often times rejecting notions of leadership and superiority to create a radical landscape where all were on equal footing. The sense of empowerment felt by all who came in contact with them was unmistakable.

In an effort to curb police brutality and the indiscriminate murders of black youth at the hands of racist police tactics, the party regularly deployed armed citizen patrols designed to evaluate the behaviors of police officers. They coordinated neighborhood watch programs, performed military-style marching drills, and studied basic protective manuevers to ensure measures of safety and self-preservation for citizens living in oppressed communities.

In January of 1969, in response to the malnutrition that plagued their communities, the party launched a "Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren" program, which was introduced at St. Augustine's church in Oakland, California. In a matter of a few months, the program had spread to other cities across the country. In April, the Black Panther newspaper reported on its progress and effectiveness:

The Free Breakfast for School Children is about to cover the country and be initiated in every chapter and branch of the Black Panther Party… It is a beautiful sight to see our children eat in the mornings after remembering the times when our stomachs were not full, and even the teachers in the schools say that there is a great improvement in the academic skills of the children that do get the breakfast. At one time there were children that passed out in class from hunger, or had to be sent home for something to eat. But our children shall be fed, and the Black Panther Party will not let the malady of hunger keep our children down any longer.

By year's end, the program had blanketed the country, feeding over 10,000 children every day before they went to school. To compliment this, the Party "launched more than 35 Survival Programs and provided community help such as education, tuberculosis testing, legal aid, transportation assistance, ambulance service, and the manufacture and distribution of free shoes to poor people." This type of tangible solidarity and assistance is needed today. Food drives, safety programs, neighborhood watch, and basic accessibility and assistance should not represent things that are beneath revolutionary politicking.

Intersectionality

Due to their solid theoretical framework, the Party was able to deploy a proto-intersectionality that allowed them to go beyond issues of racial oppression and police brutality in order to address broad roots and common causes. In doing so, they were able to redirect the emotional rage brought on by targeted racism and channel it into a far-reaching indictment of the system. This created the potential for broad coalitions and opened up avenues for unity and solidarity with revolutionary counterparts, especially with regards to Black women.

Despite stifling elements of misogyny and sexism, the emergence of women as key figures in the Black Power movement was ironically made possible through the BPP. One of the party's early leaders, Elaine Brown, pointed to a conscious effort on the part of female members to overcome patriarchy from within party lines. "A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant," explains Brown. "A woman asserting herself was a pariah… It was a violation of some Black Power principle that was left undefined. If a Black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding Black manhood."[7]

Leaders like Brown, despite carrying this heavy burden of being drawn into a fight within THE fight, were incredibly important to the party's mission and became highly influential members, local leaders, fierce orators, and public representatives for the party-at-large. Brown made impressive runs for Oakland City Council in 1973 and 1975, receiving 30% and 44% of the vote respectively. In 1977, she managed Lionel Wilson's Oakland mayoral campaign which resulted in Wilson becoming the city's first Black mayor.

Regarding the dynamics of sexuality and gender in the party, journalist and activist Annie Brown tells us:

The BPP had an open mind towards sexual expression as well as the roles women could play in social change organizations. The embrace of female empowerment and varied sexual identities within the party allowed for women like Angela Davis, to rise to prominent positions of power within the party while other radical organizations of the time such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and The Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) saved leadership roles for men, and forced women to remain in the background.

After addressing these early pockets of misogyny and hyper-masculinity, the party was shaped heavily by women, to the point where it "transformed gender roles in the Black Power movement," and paved the way for similar developments in other grassroots movements in the U.S. In researching for her forthcoming book, "What You've Got is a Revolution: Black Women's Movements for Black Power," Historian Ashley Farmer found the Party's newspaper regularly "defied gender roles by depicting women as strong, gun-toting revolutionaries," while female party members were heavily involved in setting "a community-focused revolutionary agenda that supported programs for daycare, groceries, and housing."

In addition to celebrating women as "tough revolutionaries," the newspaper included an "explicit focus on women's issues" throughout its publication. For years, Women Panthers assumed leadership roles and " turned toward local-level activism, providing food, housing, and health care in local black communities." The inclusion of women as active participants in the struggle was eventually, if not initially, embraced by founding members. As Historian Robyn Spencer writes, "Seale and Newton didn't exclude African-American women in their rhetoric or in their involvement. The message became: Black brothers and sisters unite for real social action."[8] This development within the party's evolution led to a membership that was majority (roughly two-thirds) female by the early-1970s, a desirable goal for a modern Left that still possesses a troublesome androcratic identity.

Discipline

Despite constant meddling from the FBI and its COINTELPRO program, which sought to "disrupt, confuse and create tension within the organization," the BPP's organizational structure was solidly built, baring a slight resemblance to that of the Nation of Islam. Some BPP chapters operated with military-like discipline, a quality that tends to be lacking on a loose and often times hyper-sensitive Left (even amongst Leninist organizations). This was accomplished with a good mix of horizontal leadership and chapter autonomy, which allowed for creativity, initiatives and actions throughout the organization, while also maintaining the discipline necessary for taking broad action and staying focused on the big picture.

The party recognized the severity of the situation for oppressed and working-class communities within a racist and capitalist system. The system's inherently predatory nature regarding social and economic issues provided a glimpse of a society based in class division, and the daily brutalization of communities of color at the hands of the police confirmed the presence of an all-out class war. In this sense, the party organized for this purpose - equipping themselves with ideological ammo, building poor and working-class armies through community outreach and education, arming themselves for self-defense, and operating their mission with a high degree of strategy and discipline.

Mao Zedong's revolutionary military doctrine, "Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention," was highly influential in the party's daily operations. These "rules of engagement" emphasized obedience to the needs of oppressed peoples as well as conducting actions in a respectable and honorable manner (Be polite when speaking; Be honest when buying and selling; Return all borrowed articles; Pay compensation for everything damaged; Do not hit or swear at others; Do not damage crops; Do not harass females; and Do not mistreat prisoners). "There were some aspects of Chairman Mao's thought that had helpful and sensitive application for the life of the Panthers in the ghetto," explained Cleaver.[9]

In addition to Mao's "little red book," the party made Che Guevara's "Guerilla Warfare" required reading in all of its political education classes. Recognizing the similarities between the Black struggle in America and the struggle of the colonized in many parts of the world, party members studied anti-colonial resistance and Regis Debray's foco theory of revolution, which posited the idea that "vanguardism by cadres of small, fast-moving paramilitary groups can provide a focus (in Spanish, foco) for popular discontent against a sitting regime, and thereby lead a general insurrection." While the BPP didn't apply this in the same manner as a revolutionary peasantry would in taking up arms against an imperial force, they were able to use many points as a foundation for unity and self-defense, if not merely for inspiration in battling forces of oppression. Said Newton:

… all the guerilla bands that have been operating in Mozambique and Angola, and the Palestinian guerillas who are fighting for a socialist world. I think they all have been great inspirations for the Black Panther Party… they are examples of guerilla bands. The guerillas who are operating in South Africa (against Apartheid) and numerous other countries all have had great influence on us. We study and follow their example."

This disciplined approach allowed the party to establish clear targets for opposition, while also dissuading reactionary behaviors that were dangerously counterproductive and counter-revolutionary. An example of this came in a message released to members through the organizational newspaper in 1968. The message was in response to news of frequent quarrels with hippies:

"Black brothers stop vamping on the hippies. They are not your enemy. Your enemy, right now, is the white racist pigs who support this corrupt system. Your enemy is the Tom nigger who reports to his white slavemaster every day. Your enemy is the fat capitalist who exploits your people daily. Your enemy is the politician who uses pretty words to deceive you. Your enemy is the racist pigs who use Nazi-type tactics and force to intimidate black expressionism. Your enemy is not the hippies. Your blind reactionary acts endanger THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY members and its revolutionary movements. WE HAVE NO QUARREL WITH THE HIPPIES. LEAVE THEM ALONE. Or - THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY will deal with you."

Such focus is crucial and should be a primary goal for a modern Left that is often intensely and frustratingly sectarian.

An All-Inclusive, Working-Class Orientation

Perhaps the most valuable of the BPP's attributes was its common acceptance and inclusion of the most disenfranchised and oppressed of the working classes - the unemployed, the poor, and those alienated by the criminal justice system through racist and classist laws and law enforcement practices. This approach stood in contrast to the overly-Eurocentric package that housed orthodox Marxism, and openly defied the highly romanticized, lily white version of working-class identity espoused by many Leftist organizations throughout history - often symbolized by the white, chiseled, "blue-collar" man wielding a hammer.

Over the years, Marx's assessment and discarding of the "lumpenproletariat" - a population that he described as "members of the working-class outside of the wage-labor system who gain their livelihoods through crime and other aspects of the underground economy such as prostitutes, thieves, drug dealers, and gamblers" - had been accepted by many on the Left. However, the BPP's familiarity with Zedong and Guevara led them away from this commonly accepted notion, and their philosophy paralleled that of Frantz Fanon, who in his ongoing analysis of neocolonialism, deemed the lumpen to be "one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people."

The BPP recognized similar dynamics within the United States - particularly the relationship between Black, poor, and disenfranchised populations and the power structure - and viewed this as a microcosm of international colonialism. In their eyes, the American "peasantry" wasn't tilling fields and cultivating crops - it was the homeless lying in the streets, the unemployed standing on the corners, the racially disenfranchised left with no options in life, and the unlawfully imprisoned masses behind bars. They saw potential in society's castaways and embraced the idea of a revolutionary class made up of displaced workers who were never given a chance to participate in the labor market.

Newton, particularly, was a firm believer in the revolutionary potential of the 'Black lumpenproletariat' in the United States, and viewed this notion as an important challenge to the "bourgeois nature" of the Southern Civil Rights movement, which he believed had become completely reliant on a reformist-minded, Black middle-class leadership that was too concessionary and did not properly represent a revolutionary working-class orientation.

Today, at a time when over 20 million able-bodied Americans have been forced into the "underground economy," and another 2.5 million are incarcerated, the idea of drawing society's castaways toward class-conscious political movements is ripe. Narratives that focus on the erosion of the "middle class" are not only insufficient, they're irresponsible. Our true struggle lies with the multi-generational poor, the unemployed, and the imprisoned victims of the draconian "Drug War" and prison industrial complex.

A Winning Formula

The BPP model could be summed up with the following formula: (THEORY + INTERSECTIONALITY) + (PRAXIS + EDUCATION) = CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS = REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE. Like no other, the party successfully blended a heavy academic foundation with a non-academic approach, using community outreach programs to serve basic needs while also educating and promoting class consciousness. Their crucial "Survival Programs" sought to satisfy immediate Maslovian needs without losing sight of the ultimate goal of uprooting and transforming society from below.

"All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but they are not solutions to our problems," explained Newton. "That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution. We say that the survival program of the Black Panther Party is like the survival kit of a sailor stranded on a raft. It helps him to sustain himself until he can get completely out of that situation. So the survival programs are not answers or solutions, but they will help us to organize the community around a true analysis and understanding of their situation. When consciousness and understanding is raised to a high level then the community will seize the time and deliver themselves from the boot of their oppressors." [10]

The party also wasn't afraid to display physical prowess and utilize the art of intimidation in their struggle. In fact, they saw this as a crucial component necessary to counter reactionary and senseless violence from racist citizens and police officers. They provided security escorts for Betty Shabazz following Malcolm's death, and sent thirty armed members to the California State capitol to protest the Mulford Act. This approach, coupled with similar tactics of self-defense used by the Nation of Islam, proved to be a vital compliment to the non-violent wing of the Civil Rights movement, ultimately allowing its "more palatable elements" to secure legislative victories. Furthermore, it challenged the notion that reactionary and racist conservatives had a monopoly on intimidation and violence - a notion that has gained an increasingly strong foothold over time, and should be challenged again.

The BPP's model is needed today. A firm foundation of knowledge, history, internationalism, and political economy is needed. A concerted effort to bond with and assist our working-class communities and disenfranchised sisters and brothers is needed. An infusion of authentic, working-class politics which shifts the focus from 'middle-class erosion' to 'multi-generational disenfranchisement' is needed. The blueprint is there. Let's use it.

Notes

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Penguin Books edition, 2004: p. 58

[2] The Huey P. Newton Reader, Seven Stories Press, 2002. p 229

[3] Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas. Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy. Routledge, 2001, p. 30.

[4] The Huey P. Newton Reader, p 230

[5] The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs, the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. Edited and with an afterword by David Hilliard. University of New Mexico Press, 2008

[6] The Huey P. Newton Reader, pp. 228-229.

[7] Johnnetta B. Cole, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women's Equality in African American Communities. Random House, NY: 2003. p 92

[8] Robyn C. Spencer, "Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California," Journal of Women's History, 20 no. 1 (2008), 3.

[9] Cleaver and Katsiaficas, p. 30.

[10] To Die for the People: The writings of Huey P. Newton, City Lights Books, 2009.