Black Panthers and Radical Liberalism.

The present hegemony of society makes us often believe that everyone who isn't standing on a firmly socialist ground is harmful, a phony radicalist. However, perhaps that is both more wrong and more accurate than we realized in the past. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defence is an interesting case to examine. Both for their extreme radicalism, but also for their rhetoric and the rhetoric of their ideological predecessor - Malcolm X.

It's quite obvious when you study Malcolm X that he is in many ways a radical liberal - don't get me wrong, an extremely radical liberal, but a liberal in so many senses of the word. Making claims such as that when the government doesn't protect black people, they must protect themselves, that he has learned everything he knows about the right to rebellion from the Declaration of Independence and that black nationalism means simply that the black community should govern itself, Malcolm X simply states liberal ideas in a very powerful and developed manner. Certainly, liberalism must always breed this ideology out of itself. Capitalism is an unjust, racist and imperialist practice that no thinking being can ultimately approve of - and least of all anyone who subscribes to the hallowed principles of liberalism.

But how far does it last? Wasn't the rebellion of '68, and much of the civil rights movement in the USA that accompanied it simply liberalism that went a step further? Perhaps the failiure of so many of the leftist movements is both that it has not used the conscious ideological factors of injustice and hypocricy in it's popular slogans, but also that they have in themselves simply been a left wing of liberalism as a whole - in that it's deeper ideology (but perhaps not it's science) has relied too much on liberalism that there has never been an actual break with the system. It's pure speculation, of course, but it is certainly something worth investigating further.

Much like the young Marx, radical liberalism runs out of steam after a while and either passivity sets in, or a revolutionary break appears. The Black Panthers, with their interest in land, their own communities and their own nation on one hand and Mao Tsetung and with Che Guevara on the other embody all of this in an exciting manner. How far can we take liberal radicalism without it becoming revolutionary? The Panthers were certainly revolutionaries - are still revolutionaries. And perhaps what we can learn from them is how they organized, and something about the hope of resistance that exists in the United States as well. A society with extreme class and ethnic divisions will continously create revolutionary groups, many of them with the old mottos of the French Revolution - liberté, fraternité, egalité. However, without a socialist basis for the economy, it doesn't ultimately matter what skin colour or what gender the capitalists have.