Library:Blood in My Eye

Blood in My Eye
Author	George Jackson
Written in	1971

Preface

In his introduction to George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, Jean Genet wrote, “Nothing has been willed, written or composed for the sake of a book ... it is both a weapon of liberation and a poem of love.” This book, too, is a weapon, but one entirely willed and purposeful. It was completed barely a week before the author’s murder in San Quentin on August 21, 1971. It was sent out of the Adjustment Center with specific instructions for its publication, almost as if the author knew that he would never live to see its appearance in print. Describing it a few days before the end, George said, “I’m not a writer, but all of it’s me, the way I want it, the way I see it.” What he saw and what he wanted, the central passion of his life, was war, the revolutionary war of the people against their oppressors, a war which grew out of “perfect love and perfect hate.”

“I’ve been in rebellion all my life,” he wrote in one of his letters. For a young black growing up in the ghetto, the first rebellion is always crime. George’s first experience with Amerikan law came at fourteen when he was arrested in Chicago for stealing a purse. From then on, his life was a constant succession of arrests, juvenile homes, paroles and more arrests. At age eighteen he was convicted of stealing $70.00 from a gas station. His lawyer promised him that he would make a deal with the D.A. if George confessed to second degree robbery. He told George it was his only chance because he had a record. “Don’t put the court to the expense of a trial, and they will give you county time.” Instead he was given an indeterminate sentence—one year to life.

The first time I was put in prison, it was just like dying. Just to exist at all calls for some very heavy psychic adjustment. Being captured was the first of my fears. It may have been an acquired characteristic built up over centuries of black bondage.¹

The turning point in his life came when

I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao . . . and they redeemed me. For the first four years, I studied nothing but economics and military ideas. I met the black guerrillas, George “Big Jake” Lewis, and James Carr, W.C. Nolen, Bill Christmas, Tony Gibson and many others. We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.²

He wasn’t alone in his discovery. At the same time, other prisoners were just beginning to discover Marx, Fanon and Mao, who provided them with a new way of regarding themselves and their struggle—a new standard of moral judgment. “I have been in rebellion all my life. I just didn’t know it.” The social insights of Marx and others made it possible for them to have a sense of themselves as members of the human community, members of a revolutionary brotherhood.

In prison, commitment to revolution has a special meaning and a special price. To be identified as a revolutionary by the prison authorities means an almost permanent denial of parole, separation from the other prisoners, solitary confinement (usually in maximum security wings of the prison), transfers from one prison to another, beatings, bad food. It brings down on you the entire punitive and repressive force of a completely totalitarian system.

Inside prison George practiced a very special kind of devotion and love. When convicts talk about him, they often use the term “for real.” Many inmates “murder mouth” and “sell wolf tickets”; they do a lot of heavy talking, but when it comes down to the point of action, they disappear. George, however, was as good as his word. Whenever he made a statement of some kind, it would be followed by action. If you were the victim of a racial attack inside prison, there was a good chance that he would turn up fighting for you at your side.

Most of his “offenses” inside prison—the reasons why he was forced to spend over seven years in various forms of solitary confinement, including the infamous strip cells³ in Soledad’s “O” wing, the reasons why he was never paroled —involve his defense of other inmates. What made him particularly dangerous to the prison authorities was this enormous talent as an organizer.

We have got to be together. We have got to be in a position to tell the pig that if he doesn’t serve the food when it’s warm and pass out the scouring powder on time, everybody on the tier is going to throw something at him, then things will change and life will be easier. You don’t get that kind of unity when you’re fighting with each other. I’m always telling the brothers that some of those whites are willing to work with us against the pigs. All they got to do is stop talking honky. When the races start fighting, all you have is one maniac group against another. That’s just what the pigs want.⁴

It is not coincidental that the need for unity among revolutionary groups is one of the major themes of this book.

Try to remember how you felt at the most depressing moment of your life, the moment of your deepest dejection. That is how I feel all the time. No matter what level my consciousness may be, asleep, awake, in between. The thing is there and it keeps me moving, pins my eye to the ball, uptight, twenty-four hours a day.†

“Locked down” inside his cell, George devoted himself to study. His painfully acquired scholarship in the fields of Marxian economics and history rivaled that of most college professors. But sometimes, for days on end, reality itself would vanish from his cell.

I would be sitting in a special locked isolation cell, sometimes even with the lock welded shut, and there would be no one to talk to—just the sound of screaming voices. And because there is no human contact, you depend on books. No contact with people. Special lock welded on the door. Nobody around. I’m strictly by myself. The only friend I had was a book. Sometimes I’d find myself talking out loud to the author. I’d sort of wake myself up and I’d hear myself talking to this other person. I guess it was like some kind of wish fulfillment. When I’m asleep at night, I still find myself talking to those guys.⁵

Typing laboriously on a plastic typewriter, George published position papers which dealt with prison life and revolutionary politics from a Marxian point of view.

He paid a heavy price for his activities. When the prison couldn’t break him through solitary confinement, they attempted to have him killed by other inmates: “They were forced to frame me and set me up for the final kill.” The word was out among white convicts: “Get Jackson. It will do you some good.” Once he remarked that there had been twenty setups on his life inside prison. It got so that when he left his cell he was always ready to parry an attack.

But nothing could mitigate the pain of confinement.

And the years stretched out and a whole decade passed.

In the context of his life what happened next had a grim inevitability.

On January 13, 1970, a new exercise yard was opened in the maximum security wing of Soledad Prison. Eight whites and seven blacks were skin-searched and sent out into the yard. Predictably a fight broke out between the whites and the blacks. Without any warning, a tower guard who had a reputation as a crack shot began to fire. He fired four times and three black inmates were killed. One white prisoner was wounded in the groin by a shot that ricocheted.

Black survivors claim that one of the wounded men bled to death on the concrete floor. Three days later the Monterey County Grand Jury found that the killings were justifiable homicide. Less than half an hour after this verdict was announced on the prison radio, a white guard, (not the guard who had fired the shots) was found beaten to death. All the convicts in the wing where the killing took place were put into isolation. On February 28, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and George Jackson were formally charged with the murder.

The prison authorities accused George because, in their words, “he was the only one who could have done it.” With their total power over the inmate population —the power of parole, solitary confinement, the power of life and death—they were certain they could get the kind of testimony they needed when the trial came.

When George’s parents came to visit him they used to bring his younger brother Jonathan. George and Jonathan would get off to one side of the visiting room and whisper together. What went on between them can be seen in this book in the excerpts from Jonathan’s correspondence. At the age of sixteen Jonathan had an extraordinary insight into the nature of guerrilla warfare. In some of his letters, George was later to refer to Jonathan as his alter ego. After George was accused of the murder of the guard on the 16th of January, Jonathan began to get his first taste of Amerikan justice.

Jonathan himself wrote:

People have said that I am obsessed with my brother’s case, and the movement in general. A person that was close to me once said that my life was too wrapped up in my brother’s case, and that I wasn’t cheerful enough for her. It’s true I don’t laugh very much any more. I have but one question to ask all you people and people that think like you, what would you do if it was your brother?

On August 7, 1971, Jonathan Jackson entered a courtroom in San Rafael, California, and attempted to free three black convicts, one of whom was on trial for assaulting a guard. He armed the convicts and took five hostages, including the assistant district attorney and the judge, still dressed in his robes. He died a few minutes later in a hail of bullets inside a rented van that was being used for the -getaway.

“We’re taking over,” he said. At seventeen, Jonathan had already come to the conclusion that the only way he could affirm his sense of justice was at the point of a gun. His experience of life in Amerika had convinced him that the only way he could be heard was by an act of suicidal daring. “You can take our pictures. We are the revolutionaries.” With these words he announced to the world that he was not a criminal, because he no longer recognized the legitimacy of white law.

When his sister heard the news of his death, she cried out, “But he was only a boy.” Her mother corrected her: “Don’t say that. He was a man. They killed his father a long time ago. Jonathan wasn’t going to let that happen to him. He was going to live like a man.”

After his death, George wrote in a letter:

I haven’t shed one tear, I’m too proud for that, a beautiful, beautiful man-child with a sub-machine gun. He knew how to be with people. I loved Jonathan, but his death only sharpens my fighting spirit.

I’m proud just to have known that he was flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.

In a news conference three days after, he said, “I loved that boy. I was the first to stand him up in his crib. Not a crib, really. All we had was a box. I taught him how to walk; I wanted to teach him how to fly. I’ll think of him now as I think of Che Guevara.”

George Jackson’s last book, Blood in My Eye, speaks with the voice of the dead, not only the dead George Jackson and his brother, Jonathan, but the living dead in all of the jails and ghettos of this country. It speaks with the voices of the men who have already given themselves up for dead and who have nothing left to give—except a death for the people.

It is very much a book by a man who considered himself doomed. In his last letters, George wrote about the judicial process as “the endgame.” He had foreseen and foretold his assassination at San Quentin a thousand times (“ten years of blocking knife thrusts and the pick handles of sadistic pigs”).

The fact that the author of this book lived with his death for so many years gives his book a kind of special importance. But it would be a mistake to consider it simply as the work of an individual—George always refused to consider himself an individual. Untold thousands both inside and outside prison join in its proclamation of total revolutionary war.

This book was written literally in bedlam, with the author locked in solitary for a minimum of twenty-three and a half hours a day, in the midst of raucous screaming that never stopped—the screams of prisoners being beaten, the screams of men retreating from intolerable pain into madness.

It is a book about taking the revolution that George worked and died for inside prison out into society at large. His message to his revolutionary brothers is crystal-clear. Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.

George Jackson was shot and killed inside San Quentin on August 21, 1971. The convicts who were with him inside the cell block where he was being confined have asserted that he sacrificed his own life to save them from an official massacre.⁶ This would only have been in keeping with the character of his entire life.

—Gregory Armstrong October 15, 1971

Blood in My Eye

We must accept the eventuality of bringing the U.S.A. to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city with barbed wire, armored pig carriers crisscrossing the streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked in, the commonness of death.

March 28, 1971 Letter to a Comrade⁷

My sister has informed me of your release and the political education class you have formed. From her words and your messages, I sense that we are still together. We’ve gone through approximately the same changes since they separated us—the confused flight to national revolutionary Africa, through the riot stage of revolutionary Black Amerika. We have finally arrived at scientific revolutionary socialism with the rest of the colonial world. I was hoping that you wouldn’t get trapped in the riot stage like a great many other very sincere brothers. I have to browbeat them every day down here. They think they don’t need ideology, strategy or tactics. They think being a warrior is quite enough. And yet, without discipline or direction, they’ll end up washing cars, or unclaimed bodies in the city-state’s morgue. But I was almost certain that wouldn’t be your destination, brother.

Though I no longer adhere to all of Nechayev’s revolutionary catechism†

(too cold, very much like the fascist psychology; revolution should be love-inspired), his first line contains the incontrovertible truth, the black revolutionary is twice doomed.

At times I wonder about the present state of revolutionary black consciousness. It’s really annoying to hear blacks express right-wing traditionalist political ideals. I mean the same spiel that you get from Wallace, Maddox, Hearst, or Hunt coming from black people like Lomax, Young, Bunche —some recently dead now, thanks to the forces of good. I think Lady Lomax is still around, though, representing Africa with her Anglo-Saxon vernacular. Her husband, L. Lomax was C.I.A. Did you read The Reluctant African, which was sheer propaganda for the “owner,” disguised in blackface. These are the really dangerous people. When we leap to destroy the “owner” we’ll have these kinds of niggers to fight. They will use the tactic “white left-wing causes” to protect their bosses’ “white right-wing cause.”

You must teach that socialism-communalism is as old as man; that its principles formed the basis of mostly all the East African cultures (there was no word to denote possession in the original East African tongues). The only independent African societies today are socialistic. Those which allowed capitalism to remain are still neo-colonies. Any black who would defend an African military dictatorship is as much a fascist as Hoover. Are you aware of how the people are living under these so-called Africanized fascist cultures? The Congo and the entire West Coast of Africa excepting Guinea and Mauritania are still slave states, dominated by Westernized black right-wing puppets. I’m thoroughly sick of the old Jess B. Simples⁸ (young ones too). They’ll be your main source of opposition in communizing the black colonies here. The “good white people” who own things will always give them a few inches in their papers or other media. That’s how fascism works, influencing the masses and institutions through elites.

I talked to several black lawyers when I got this last case of pig killing hung on me. We started off agreeing, but they abandoned me the moment I attacked Anglo-Saxon law, capitalism and the Blues, and then went on to recognize Black Panthers, Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Nyerere and Odinga instead of Kenyatta, Lumumba instead of that little punk in Ethiopia, and Peking instead of Atlanta or Freetown. That will be your main source of opposition—the black running dog. But it’s unfair to automatically condemn a black person for not understanding economic and political subtleties; some are simply confused in an honest way.

Some of the arguments they pose will center around the despondent cliche that “Africa will invent something unique, it won’t be socialism, communism, or capitalism.” Often they’ll leave out the denunciation of capitalism altogether. You must explain the economic motive of human social history and bring out that there are only two ways by which societies can ever be governed and organized for production of their needs: the various types of totalitarian methods represented by assorted capitalist and fascist arrangements, and the egalitarian method. Egalitarianism is people’s government, and people’s government and economics is socialism, dialectical and materialist. How else can societies be governed? There must be hierarchies or the elimination of hierarchies. Then show that the greatest contributions to egalitarianism came from Africa, the greatest and the first examples.

Then, comrade, you will encounter the faint-hearted and illogical types like Ali/Clay, entertainer and tool of the capitalist cliques. Their line is: “Ain’t nobody but black folks gonna die in a revolution.” This argument completely overlooks the fact that we always have done most of the dying, and still do: dying at the stake, through social neglect or in U.S. foreign wars. The point is now to construct a situation where someone else will join in the dying. If it fails and we have to do most of the dying anyway, we’re certainly no worse off than before.

We find ourselves today forced into a reexamination of the whole nature of black revolutionary consciousness and its relative standing within a class society steeped in a form of racism so sensitized that it extends itself even to the slightest variation in skin tone.

The great majority of blacks reject racism. They have never found it expedient, wise or honorable to take on the characteristics of the enemy. I think it is vitally important to stress that for blacks a concern for the “survival” of the race is not, patently not, definable as racism.

Any explanation for social phenomenon, past, present or future, must present valid arguments and proof. As we travel back into history, honest descriptions and definitions will inevitably overlap. They will differ depending on their geopolitical standpoint. Ideally, they should be colored with as little subjective interpretation as possible from today’s world. The present, due to its staggering complexities, is almost as conjectural as the past. We must prove our predictions about the future with action.

So all my comments must be considered the merest supposition—they must be considered in just the same way we must consider all other comments in this area. They merit attention only in that as soon as I make them it won’t be much longer before I go about proving them.

As a slave, the social phenomenon that engages my whole consciousness is, of course, revolution.

The slave—and revolution.

Born to a premature death, a menial, subsistence-wage worker, odd-job man, the cleaner, the caught, the man under hatches, without bail—that’s me, the colonial victim. Anyone who can pass the civil service examination today can kill me tomorrow. Anyone who passed the civil service examination yesterday can kill me today with complete immunity. I’ve lived with repression every moment of my life, a repression so formidable that any movement on my part can only bring relief, the respite of a small victory or the release of death. In every sense of the term, in every sense that’s real, I’m a slave to, and of, property.

Revolution within a modern industrial capitalist society can only mean the overthrow of all existing property relations and the destruction of all institutions that directly or indirectly support existing property relations. It must include the total suppression of all classes and individuals who endorse the present state of property relations or who stand to gain from it. Anything less than this is reform.

Government and the infrastructure of the enemy capitalist state must be destroyed to get at the heart of the problem: property relations. Otherwise there is no revolution. Reshuffle the governmental personnel and forms, without changing property relations and economic institutions, and you have produced simply another reform stage in the old bourgeois revolution. The power to alter the present imbalances, to remedy the critical defects of an advanced industrial state ordered on an antiquated set of greed-confused motives, rests with control over production and distribution of wealth. If the 1 percent who presently control the wealth of the society maintain their control after any reordering of the state, the changes cannot be said to be revolutionary.

The prerequisite for a successful popular revolution is that the victors totally junk the old machinery of state. Lenin stressed in the State and Revolution: “One thing especially was proven by the commune, viz. that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” And again: “the working class must break up, smash the ready-made state machinery, and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.” The reason is simple enough: A popular revolution means a revolution by and for the popular classes. Its ultimate aim is to bring all classes into one, that is, destroy the class state!⁹

Revolutionary change means the seizure of all that is held by the 1 percent, and the transference of these holdings into the hands of the remaining 99 percent. If the 1 percent are simply displaced by another 1 percent, revolutionary change has not taken place. A social revolution after the fact of the modern corporate capitalist state can only mean the breakup of that state and a completely new form of economics and culture. As slaves, we understand that ownership and the mechanics of distribution must be reversed. The problems of the Black Colony and the Brown Colony, those of the entire 99 percent who are being manipulated, can never be redressed as long as the necessary resources for their solution are the personal property of an extraneous minority motivated solely by the need for its own survival. And that extraneous minority will never consider the proper solutions. We have this on record from a voice speaking from inside the Fourth Reich—a Lieutenant Governor of California orating in public on poverty: “One-third of the population will always be ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. Many urban problems are really conditions that we cannot change or do not want to incur the disadvantages of changing.” His “one-third” statement was a calculated understatement.

To the slave, revolution is an imperative, a love-inspired, conscious act of desperation. It’s aggressive. It isn’t “cool” or cautious. It’s bold, audacious, violent, an expression of icy, disdainful hatred! It can hardly be any other way without raising a fundamental contradiction. If revolution, and especially revolution in Amerika, is anything less than an effective defense/attack weapon and a charger for the people to mount now, it is meaningless to the great majority of the slaves. If revolution is tied to dependence on the inscrutabilities of “long-range politics,” it cannot be made relevant to the person who expects to die tomorrow. There can be no rigid time controls attached to “the process” that offers itself as relief, not if those for whom it is principally intended are under attack now. If the proponents of revolution cannot learn to distinguish and translate the theoretical into the practical, if they continue to debate just how to call up and harness the conscious motive forces of revolution, the revolutionary ideal will be the loser—it will be rejected.

The principal reservoir of revolutionary potential in Amerika lies in wait inside the Black Colony. Its sheer numerical strength, its desperate historical relation to the violence of the productive system, and the fact of its present status in the creation of wealth force the black stratum at the base of the whole class structure into the forefront of any revolutionary scheme. Thirty percent of all industrial workers are black. Close to 40 percent of all industrial support roles are filled by blacks. Blacks are still doing the work of the greatest slave state in history. The terms of our servitude are all that have been altered.

The Black Colony can and will influence the fate of things to come in the U.S.A. The impact of black revolutionary rage actually could carry at least the opening stages of a socialist revolution under certain circumstances—not discounting some of the complexities created by the specter of racism. However, if we are ever going to be successful in tying black energy and rage to the international socialist revolution, we must understand that racial complexities do exist.

When the Minister of Defense and Servant of the People¹⁰ attacks the strategy of the Amerikan Communist Party and the liberal-left revisionists for their failure to devise a policy which takes into account the special circumstances of Yankee-style racism, he is not attacking communism and the collective ideal. He is questioning the Communist Party and other less committed sections of the left revolutionary movement about their awareness of the unique problems presented by a particularly vicious and immediately threatening racism.

My brother Jonathan, a communist revolutionary to the core, writing me in June of 1969, theorized as follows:

We are quite obviously faced with a need to organize some small defenses to the more flagrant abuses of the system now. I mean this in a military sense. The period of disorganized activity, of riots and rallies, and purely political agitation/education has come to a close. The violence of the opposition has brought it to an end. We cannot raise consciousness another millimeter without a new set of tactics. Long-range political ploys alone are not practical for us. To me, the concept seems to assume that someday in the distant future we’ll produce a 700-pound flea to fight the Paper Tiger. That’s not too likely to happen. While we await the precise moment when all of capitalism’s victims will indignantly rise to destroy the system, we are being devoured in family lots at the whim of this thing. There will be no super-slave. Some of us are going to have to take our courage in hand and build a hard revolutionary cadre for selective retaliatory violence. We have numbers on our side if the whites who support revolutionary change can prevent this thing from degenerating into race war. The picture of the U.S. as a Paper Tiger is quite accurate, but there is a great deal of work to be done on its destruction and I’m of the opinion that if there is a big job of growing to do, the sooner begun the sooner done.

Both Huey and Jonathan are understandably calling for the programmed revolution to take into account the fact of racial genocide. Jonathan is calling from his grave, adding another voice to the many thunderous graveyard affirmations which, for us blacks, speeds the revolution to its ultimate issue.

In order to develop revolutionary consciousness, we must learn how revolutionary consciousness can be raised to the highest point by stimuli from the vanguard elements. We recognize and appreciate the decades of hard, sometimes dangerous work done in the name of revolution by the older socialist parties. Perhaps we wouldn’t exist at all were it not for their efforts. It is our sincere wish to operate in complete harmony with these older groups. But we must create new impetus and greater intellectual and physical energy if the forces of reaction are not to win another extended reprieve. A joint effort will make the task of overwhelming our com-

mon enemy all the simpler. But if our present differences cannot be reconciled by an honest and fearless search for the correct way, then we will be forced to take the foundation of correct ideals and theory into our own hands and build a positive and more practical superstructure applicable to the circumstances surrounding our lives. In his Guerrilla Warfare Lenin wrote: “New forms of struggle, unknown to the participants of the given period, inevitably arise as the given social situation changes, the coming crisis will introduce new forms of struggle that we are now unable to foresee.”*

In other words, the old guard must not fail to understand that circumstances change in time and space, that there can be nothing dogmatic about revolutionary theory. It is to be born out of each popular struggle. Each popular struggle must be analyzed historically to discover new ideas. In the words of John Gerassi: “Building from one to the other, eventually the revolutionary cadre would become equipped with a theory rooted in experience, broadened by historical knowledge, tested by combat, and fortified by reflection.”†

After ten or fifteen generations of laboring on a subsistence level, after a hundred and forty years of political agitation and education, we grow impatient—not that we fail to understand the risks and complexities of anti-establishment warfare. We simply want to live.

We question a strategy that seems to have stopped short

*V. I. Lenin, Guerrilla Warfare.

†Gerassi, op. cit., p. 42.

of providing a tactic for growth and for survival. Terror tactics like lynching will never be allowed to work on us. If terror is going to be the choice of weapons, there must be funerals on both sides. And let the whole enemy power complex be conscious of that!

The superstructure of any edifice that is as extensive and as lofty as revolution must be reexamined with each successive layer, for faults, for possible improvement of method.

We have the foundation of our strategy. We have studied Marx and Lenin for a description and history of the modern industrial state. We’ve organized our thoughts and trained our bodies for the ordeal of “gravedigging.” Our vanguard elements understand the simple importance of winning consciousness. Of course education and familiarization with the core issues on a broad basis precede hard revolutionary violence. If people are to understand and relate to revolutionary violence they must first be educated into an acceptance of the fact that there is no alternative, or that the alternative is less inviting than a fight.

Our whole question is: just what level of consciousness will support the violent revolutionary activity necessary to achieve our ends? And how will we know when this level is reached? Recall: our Mao teaches that when revolution fails it isn’t the fault of the people, it’s the fault of the vanguard party. The people will never come to us and say, “Let’s fight.” There have never been any spontaneous revolutions. They were all staged, manufactured, by people who went to the head of the masses and directed them.

The liberalist slogan “You can’t get ahead of the peo-ple” is meaningless. From what other position can one lead? From the rear? Rearguard leadership?!! A typical Yankee innovation. I think most of these irresponsible excuse-slogans are based on dread—a secret wish to avoid the discomfiture of people’s war. In all the successful class struggles and colonial wars of liberation, the vanguard elements did get ahead of the people and pull. There is no other way in forward mass movement:

A vanguard which fears that consciousness will outstrip spontaneity, which fears to put forth a bold “plan” that would compel general recognition even among those who differ from us. Are they not confusing vanguard with rearguard?*

I am not implying that the vanguard party act out the people’s role. I am not implying a “society superior to society.” We must never forget that it is the people who change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. “Going among the people, learning from the people, and serving the people” is really stating that we must find out exactly what the people need and organize them around these needs. If the statement implies a “coming from” somewhere else, it substantiates no superiority but rather a biological-existential reality. This concept needs very little substantiating beyond the obvious fact of a nation of slaves who control no more wealth than some clothes, perhaps a worthless automobile, and a roof of sorts over their heads,

♦V.I. Lenin, Selected Works.

but who have been successfully conditioned to feel rich or at least contented.

“The task of a revolutionary—is to make revolution.” The word “manufacture” can be substituted for the word “make,” and the meaning comes through a little better for us.

The fascists have deliberately manufactured a false sense of security by various stratagems. They will never permit conditions to go out of their control as long as “bread and circuses” appease. We clearly cannot dodge our responsibilities by giving credence to slogans built around “conditions.” Conditions will never be altogether right for a broadly based revolutionary war unless the fascists are stricken by an uncharacteristic fit of total madness. Should we wait for something that is not likely to occur at least for decades? The conditions that are not present must be manufactured.

Recall: we had people who felt conditions weren’t right in the 1930s also. The government’s bread lines were backed up around every corner, and baseball was at its peak. Private ownership of public property should have been destroyed in that decade, but the “conditions weren’t right.” The vanguard elements betrayed the people of this nation and the world as a result of their failure to seize the time. The consequences were a catastrophic war and a new round of imperialist expansion, this time carried out by the greatest imperialist of all time—the Yankee brigand. There would now be no Indochina “situation” (to mention one of dozens of like situations) if we had taken ourselves seriously then, when all conditions were favorable. It was a slightly below-conscious desire to avoid doing the U.S. further violence, and perhaps a general distaste for organized violence, in particular, that robbed us of our chance to win on that occasion when, ironically, a win would have cost very little. There wasn’t then even the illusion of well-being.

In a report written by Comrade Jonathan Jackson in November of 1969 just before Fred Hampton’s and Mark Clark’s murders in Chicago and the shoot-out at the Central Avenue Panther headquarters in Los Angeles,¹¹ he says,

It’s come down on us hard now. There are twenty different breeds of pigs patrolling every street in the colony here. I mean every section of the city that can be said to be predominately Black is saturated with the establishment’s demented gunslingers, of every sort. They’re all nervous and dangerous as king cobras. Spies, double agents, entrapment, a war of electronics, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked in. I feel just as you do on these issues. I’m just not going for it, even if it means fighting them by myself. If they kick down the door of a house I’ve stopped at they’ll fall in dead. The 9 mm Browning weighs something like 2 pounds. I’m not carrying this extra weight around my belt for nothing. It has a 13-round clip, I keep one in the barrel, 14 shots. Save me a cell on murderer’s row there, I could have 14 murder charges any day now.

Try to get the picture—down every through street they cruise just a few moments apart at most. Sometimes the stupid bastards are bumper to bumper. Each one of the cruisers has a different residential street here in the Black communities that seems to belong to them. It’s patterned. Let’s say two pig cars, “P₁” and “P₂,” are both traveling south on Central. They’ll patrol six to seven blocks on that main street. “P₁” will then make a left on 50th Street, “P₂” a right on 51st Street, etc. It works out so that each couple of square blocks is in effect always surrounded, cut off, divided, sub-divided. Repression is here! I’ve followed them, studied them, holed a few of their cars—you should see how they’ll run when they can’t tell from exactly what quarter they’re drawing fire. We overestimate them, or perhaps have little sense of our own power. In the short run, and here I mean in an isolated tactical operation sitting within a particular political design, with military weapons we could easily out-gun the establishment’s first line of defense. What, for example, would the city pigs do if they are confronted by a .38 snubbed revolver in the hand of a brother who’s fired that .38 perhaps 10 times in his life? Then take the same situation but give the brother a flamethrower (stolen from the military), give the brother an armored van from inside which he could use said flamethrower, give him also two comrades in arms, one equipped with an M60 machine gun, the other an anti-tank rocket launcher. Pigs are punks. Give me 10 cells armed as I’ve just mentioned and we could start to enforce some of the demands of the people. Their present show of strength is actually their weakness—show—they’re too visible. Comrades ask me sometimes what can we do against “all these pigs.” I state it simply—we put them to death. They look at me as if to say, “You’re nuts, man.” When I go about my explanation their eyes go blank, or they are distracted by something five blocks down the street. They’re not hearing then. So what’s happening? The things I say (for us, smile) seem too fantastic for them to even listen. Yet it doesn’t seem fantastic for them to go against the L.A.P.D. with a snubbed-nosed revolver. There’s a great deal of work to be done—with ourselves—yet. But the day of the real dragon is coming. Long live the guerrilla!!

Jonathan was sixteen years old then and he had just that year been allowed to drive a car. He liked to drive, and observe. He had long since learned to like the fight. Guns and weapons in general were his forte. I carefully reminded him that even vanguard violence was organized violence. He returned one of Fanon’s lines: “It’s time for the talking to end, and the acting to begin.”

In another of his reports, after the Chicago murders of Hampton and Clark and the five-hour shoot at Black Panther headquarters in Los Angeles, he writes:

The fact of Amerikan terror, slave existence in general, seems to have almost destroyed the nervous system of the Black man here. They are frightened, and feel they are smart for being so. Those that were unaffected, those that escaped, those that refused to be intimidated, dismayed, prudent to the point of cowardice, have either joined or supported the Black Panther Party! They got down pretty cold. One point needs to be cleared up, however. I recall you remarking that in an urban guerrilla situation the military proper must be hidden, separate from the political front, since unlike a classical Mao-Giap countryside struggle where the enemy’s principal forces are 30 miles down the road, with us the enemy is all around, within a few moments of strike. There should, I feel, be one branch that is purely political, operating the rent strikes, the breakfast programs, the People’s Bazaars where all sorts of food and clothing, utensils and tools are sold, hospitals or clinics (free, of course), and what I will term cottage shops to employ those who will work for the new medium of exchange —love and loyalty—at such things as the making of the clothing and canning of the food for the People’s Bazaar. Then there should be the super-secret branch—to enforce. The military, the comrades with the nervous equipment to make the best use of the M60, the Ml6, the flamethrower, the hand grenade, the mortar, our armored vans and equipment in front and plenty of gun ports, bullet-proof tires, etc. You dig, one of the large trucks properly prepared (plastic may be the best armor, 1½ inches will stop a 220 grain slug fired from a .45 sub-machine gun; 2 inches to 3 inches will protect you from high-power rifle bullets)—and with a heavy armor-piercing, ammo-equipped M60 port in the front cab pointing in the direction that the truck is moving forward along the street—is more effective than a tank of the Yankee style. The machine gun in the front cab, and one pointing out to the rear from the trailer, has whatever street they are moving down in a guerrilla ambush tactic we’ll call angulation. Each one of these guns pointing front and back, up the street and back down it, has the advantage of being able to rack that entire street with only a slight back and forth lateral movement. One armor-piercing bullet may render several of the unrighteous dead.

And comrade, the pigs are so proud of their new little ’copters—they’re suckers—it’s almost comical to hear them boast and watch them look to the sky with the pride of power. The pig who will get up in one of those things is as stupidly suicidal as a duck trying to outfly a charge of 12-gauge shot. The fierce and beautiful Cong shoot down a couple dozen of the very biggest and best ’copters Yankee invention can produce every week. These things that the pigs use are toys, sitting ducks. One, I mean one, solid or armor-piercing .30 caliber bullet aimed at any one of several points—the tail rotor, the hub of the main rotor, or even the operator—will reduce $200,000 worth of Yankee invention to scrap.

I was pursuing this joke of a secondary education when the whole thing occurred, but acting with my small thing would have hardly helped much, though it may have helped raise consciousness some—the besiegers attacked from the rear, the idea of it—strong! Militarily it would have demonstrated to the pigs that the Panther Party is not out there on the limb alone, and of course it would have promoted among the people that confidence of ability we always speak on when together! How would they have felt (the pigs and the people) if the nameless, faceless, lightning-swift soldier of the people could have reached up, twisted the tail of their $200,000 death bird, and hurled it into the streets, broken, ablaze!! I think that sort of thing has more to do with consciousness than anything else I can think of. Long live the Panther! Power to the People Who Don’t Fear Freedom.

Jonathan was sixteen years old then, I repeat.

Consciousness is the opposite of indifference, of blindness, blankness. Promoting consciousness involves the general dissemination of the concept that each of us is part of a universal action and interaction; that poles are somewhere connected; that there are material causes for trauma, vertigo, degenerative disease. Connections, connections, cause and effect, clarity on their relation and interrelations, the connection with the past, continuity, flow, movement, the awareness that nothing, nothing remains the same for long. And it follows that if a thing is not building, it is certainly decaying—that life is revolution—and that the world will die if we don’t read and act out its imperatives. Not on its own will it die, but rather because the forces of reaction have created imbalances that will kill it: “The seeds of its own destruction.” Our destruction too—in the epoch of the Bomb, the nerve gases, the massive precipitation of industrial wastes.

Consciousness is knowledge, recognition, foresight; common experience and perception; sensibility, alertness, mindfulness. It stirs the senses, the blood; it exposes and suggests; it will objectify, enrage, direct. There are no positive formulas for a thing so complex. We have guidelines only to help us with its growth. This means that after we are done with our books, they must be put aside; and the search for method will depend on observations, correct analyses, creativity and seizing the time.

Sometime after the December 4, 1969, shoot-out around the Panther Party Los Angeles headquarters, Jonathan commented on the “connections,” the aftermath:

Have you grasped the significance of the backlash? It has stung the fascist. The people are in foment, all of them, of all persuasion. They don’t dig midnight or dawn raiding parties, bullets with steel jackets, cowardly pigs perched upon their roofs, the same gases manufactured for use against the Vietnamese Liberators blowing back into their faces: Repression. Do you see the effect it has on the uncommitted? Comrade, Repression exposes. By drawing violence from the beast, the vanguard party is demonstrating for the world to examine just exactly what terms their rule is predicated on— their power to organize violence, our acquiescence.

But check—Blacks are conditioned to acquiesce. They have, in general, been led to believe that this system is the product and property of the “white man,” that the white man will protect it with his all, that the white man is a killer, a reflex killer, that all we can ever hope for is a reforming or expanding of the system to include the few of us who can make ourselves acceptable; “it’s too big for us,” “you can’t fight city hall,” “it can’t happen in Amerikkka,” and all of that shit, pigshit.

Double check—all of the objective conditions are present here in the Black Colony for revolution, the physical thing, I mean, and “want to” (the real feeling, not the various pretenses). East Los Angeles hasn’t changed a bit since you were out. Watts is still a depressed area. Many of the west-side districts are starting to resemble the older black districts. The issue of employment is still the same; we do 30 to 40 percent of the nation’s work for 1 percent of the returns, and a huge pool of us is always kept unemployed to reduce the value of the labor of those who are, just like 10 years ago, just like 1864-65 when we were thrown on the labor market—hungry, ragged, crowded into clapboards, and unhappy. Nothing has changed since you left the street, comrade, not in this respect at least. Perhaps our condition stands out a little more glaringly, that’s all.

But you know what’s been building. The vanguard has viciously attacked the “system”—the omnipotent system attacked by the slave. Sort of like the worker bee growing so disgusted with the quality of his life that he turns and attacks the bear. The other bees will understand, they do understand, and all sorts of bees, even those who thought the bear their rightful ruler see him differently when he foams at the mouth, and bites at his own tail.

I think you were on the right track with the idea concerning repression. It is, it has to be, a part of the revolutionary process, a necessary stage in the development of revolutionary consciousness. The situation being as it was and is, the Black experience is what I’m referring to here. The milder lynch-example type repression is accepted by us as a necessary part of life, but the new harsher thing brought on by the political thrust of the vanguard party serves to show even the most tractable of the reformers among us that firstly, the system will not, or actually cannot, meet our demands; secondly, it clearly illustrates the real terms of our existence under capitalism, the nature of it, and how foul a piece of the pie would be even if we could have some.

One fundamental problem remains: the survival of the vanguard political party and I mean in good form. We must think to the righteous fielding of a clandestine army!!

Jon

Lenin, Guevara and Fanon, all in their particular fashion, postulate that before revolution can take place, all other forms of redress must be exhausted, clearly exhausted. Electoral processes must have broken down, the confidence of the electorate in any of the old forms completely shattered, confidence in the ability of the old system to honestly organize any aspect of public life must be shaken to the core. Years and years ago it may have been an acceptable tactic to organize a people’s ticket of solid worker and revolutionary credentials and arm it with an ideal platform—only to be defeated by a mud-slinging opportunist-warlord, demonstrably inferior, scum-swilling pig. Then pass out a pamphlet to explain to the people how the system has failed them, or speak it in Pershing Square—or, years ago, in the Campus Hall. Today it is not a tactic—it’s counterrevolution. After forty years it’s pretty clear that it will not suffice. Years ago, “working with” and attempting to influence union leadership may have been judicious, but the government has long since infiltrated and bought off this leadership and legislated away the strike. Union-hall speeches and pamphlet passing are playing at revolution.

It isn’t revolutionary or materialist to disconnect things. To disconnect revolutionary consciousness from revolutionizing activity, to build consciousness with political agitation and educational issue-making alone is idealistic rather than materialist. The effect has been reformism rather than revolution. When any election is held it will fortify rather than destroy the credibility of the power brokers. When we participate in this election to win, instead of disrupt, we’re lending to its credibility, and destroying our own. With all the factors of control over the electoral process in the hands of the minority ruling class, the people’s party can always be made to seem isolated, unimportant, even extraneous. If these tactics still give the appearance of revolution to some after decades of miscarriage, we are justified in replacing them as vanguard.

When people begin to express their disgust at the demagogic and reformist maneuvers of the vanguard parties, they will discover in real action a new form of political activity which in no way resembles the old:

These politics are the politics of leaders and organizers living inside history who take the lead with their brains and their muscles in the fight for freedom. These politics are revolutionary and social, and these new facts which the native will now come to know exist only in action. They are the essence of the fight which explodes the old colonial truths and reveals unexpected facets, which brings out new meanings and pinpoints the contradictions camouflaged by these facts. The people engaged in the struggle who because of it command and know these facts, go forward, freed from colonialism and forewarned of all attempts at mystification, inoculated against all national anthems. Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of the trumpets. There’s nothing save a minimum of readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag waving: and down there at the bottom an undivided mass still living in the middle ages, endlessly marking time.¹²

In the general retreat to avoid full commitment, to write the discomfort out of revolution, some have raised a debate among us that has degenerated into name-calling, quoting the same authorities to validate diametrically opposed ideas, and ultimately creating a process that is dividing us into two mutually exclusive or contradictory groups. The overall effect is to reduce us to caricature.

Where more than one individual is involved in any life situation, the fact of subjectivism will always make differences based on opinion and interpretation—a problem in exchanges, in reaching the necessary means for the initiation of collective activity. Some debate will always be carried on. However, on the basics we must somehow agree or nothing will get done. All opinions are not of equal value, and there is such a thing as counterproductive revisionism.

Stupidity is not unknown to our long-range political policy makers. Participation in electoral politics organized by the enemy state—after recognizing that the whole process must be discredited as a conditional step into revolution, and particularly participation that tends to authenticate this process—is the opposite of revolution. It’s a tactic for the ultra-rightists. With history as a guide we could never make such monumental errors.

The history of the U.S.—the blood-soaked, urine-steeped essence of its being; the wreckage and demise of its human character under the wheels of a two-hundred-year-old headlong flight with heedless, frightened animals at the controls of a machine that has mastered them—allows for no appeal on a strictly ideological level. George Wallace or Adolf Hitler would fare better at the polls of an honest election than Huey Newton and Tom Hayden. But again, what is an honest election after the fact of monopoly capital?

Repression is indeed a part of revolution, a natural aspect of antithesis, the always-to-be-expected defense-attack reflex of the beleaguered, toothless tiger. All arguments against this fundamental fact are false and labored to the point of being completely illogical. Can power be seriously challenged without a response? Will the robber baron, the tycoon, the Fuehrer allow us to seize his privilege without resistance? Can we steal it away from the greatest bandit of all time with sleight of hand alone? Incredible! The fascists understand the value of mass psychology, are familiar with its use, and hold all the important implements of its effective control. But they are not aware of our existence and our general strategy regarding the reaching of people.

The whole situation can be reduced to a minority ruling clique engaging the people’s vanguard elements for control of the masses. The ruling clique approaches its task with a “what to think’’ program; the vanguard elements have the much more difficult job of promoting “how to think.”

No tactic can be ignored or discounted in such a battle. Power responds to all threats. The response is repression. If the threat is a small one, the fascist tactic is to laugh it off, ignore it, isolate it with its defense mechanism—media. The greater the threat the greater the corresponding violence from power.

The only effective challenge to power is one that is broad enough to make isolation impossible, and intensive enough to cause repression to affect the normal life style of as many members of the society as possible. By compromising and playing at class war, we lose. If some effective means of threatening to wield power is not used in the opening stages of revolutionary activity, repression will concentrate itself on the vanguard elements only, when the ideal situation is for the people to feel the raw essence of power. Nothing can bend consciousness more effectively than a false arrest, a no-knock invasion, careless, panic-stricken gunfire. These will frighten some, anger others. Common sense alone tells me whom the people will turn their anger against. Perhaps for a short time they will be angry at us, but since the pig is a pig, it won’t be long before this anger is channeled in the right direction.

Revolution builds in stages; it isn’t cool or romantic; it’s bold and vicious; it’s stalking and being stalked—the opposition rising above our level of violence to repress us, and our forces learning how to counter this repression and again pulling ourselves above their level of violence. That process repeats itself again and again until finally the level is reached where the real power of the people is felt and the ruling class is suppressed. The power of the people lies in its greater potential violence. And this power of the people—their greater potential violence—can be brought to fruition only if the conditions in an urban society are created by the application of the foco theory.¹³ The foco theory can be effective only when it does not allow itself to be isolated from the people, thus exposing itself to the vastly superior fire power of the corporate state:

There is no doubt that Fidel’s foco was the motor to the revolution in Cuba. But nor can there be any doubt that Fidel’s organizational genius made sure that the foco remained in the center of the much bigger revolutionary movement, which it controlled or guided for its military and political advantage. The foco may well be the best tactic to mount the motor, but it needs a long period of preparation, intensive organizational work to set up an efficient, reliable machinery which will not only generate the atmosphere for armed struggle by focos but will also guarantee their logistic, communication, survival programs and propaganda network. The traditional communist parties of the world claim that they are doing just that—and have been, mostly peacefully, for forty years. That is not what Bejar had in mind when he said there have been “real stages of hard underground life.” Bejar, and New Left revolutionaries all over the world, know very well that a revolutionary life style is a warrior’s life style. By stages he meant stages of combat, and that is precisely the way in which revolutionaries can be honed into the kind of organization capable of leading a people’s war.¹⁴

We are at an impasse now, because the next level of revolutionary consciousness and activity cannot be reached without calling down on the nation a corresponding and perhaps overreactionary repression. And it’s not the people who dread this next level of commitment. They don’t understand the significance of it as yet. The dread, the fear, rests with some of the old-guard elements. I refer you again to Mao: “When revolution fails ... it’s the fault of the vanguard party.”

Some of the fear is an honest fear that revolution will be repressed entirely. These thinkers have historical references that roll them back to Europe to the time of Hitler’s Germany and Italy in the twenties and thirties. But I say that can never happen here. That was too long ago, too far away, and none of those European countries had thirty million irate niggers on their hands. None of that ever had to happen, for the same reason that we don’t have to allow it to happen. All reactionary movements depend principally on a handful of individuals—sometimes one individual.

There are many thousands of ways to correct individuals. The best way is to send one armed expert. I don’t mean to outshout him with logic, I mean correct him. Slay him, assassinate him with thuggee, by silenced pistol, shotgun, with a high-powered rifle shooting from four hundred yards away and behind a rock. Suffocation, strangulation, crucifixion, burning with flamethrower, dispatch by bomb. Auto accidents happen all day. People drown, get poleaxed, breathe noxious gases, get stabbed, get poisoned with bad water, ratsbane, germicides, hemlock, arsenic, strychnine, L.S.D. 25 concentrate, cyanide, hydrocyanic acid, vitriol. A snake could bite him, nicotine oil is deadly, an overdose of dope; there’s deadly nightshade, belladonna, datura, wolfsbane, foxglove, aconite, ptomaine, botulism, and the death of a thousand cuts. But a curse won’t work.

We’re going to have to fight to win. The logic of procrastination has been destroyed. A people can never be so repressed that they can’t strike back in some way. We will purge the poltroons and fight. Or just ignore them.

The reality of power’s automatic defense reflexes makes it possible for us to measure our own effectiveness. Their efforts to seriously repress us indicate that we have reached people—that we are finally in the fight. And we cannot ever be truly repressed. There is quite simply no way for an established government to defeat an internal, determined, aggressive enemy. Especially in an urban society. The mechanics, logic, and logistics of urban people’s guerrilla warfare cannot be defeated.

In the opening stages of such a conflict, before a unified left can be established, before most people have accepted the inevitability of war, before we are able militarily to organize massive violence, we must depend on limited, selective violence tied to an exact political purpose. In the early service of the people there must be totally committed, professional revolutionaries who understand that all human life is meaningless if it is not accompanied by the controls that determine its quality. I am one of these. My life has absolutely no value. I’m the man under hatches, the desperate one. We will make the revolution. Nothing can stop us, we are not intimidated by the specter of repression—we’re already repressed. The Black Legion* and their terror leaves us cold, unafraid. We will meet it with a counter-terror. We’ll never, never allow ourselves to be immobilized by a tactic that actually works better for us. The lynch-murder of a friend—it makes me angry, not afraid. I’m the next man that must be lynched! My forefather trembled when his brother was lynched, but my brother’s immolation means war to the death, war to the utmost, war to the knife!!

Violence is not supposed to work in Amerika. For no one, that is, except the “omnipotent administrator.” But this has yet to be proved to my satisfaction since I know that a bomb is a bomb is a bomb; it twists steel, shatters concrete and dismembers men everywhere else in the world. Why not those made in Amerika? A bullet fired from an assault rifle in the hands of a Vietnamese liberation fighter will kill a pig in Vietnam. Why won’t it kill a pig in the place where pigs are made?

Counter-terrorism is a facet of urban people’s guerrilla warfare. It’s our logical response to the repressive measures taken by the enemy state to contain us in the early stages of the rebellion. Our military cadre involved in this activity has the tactical advantage over the establishment’s terrorists only if we remain clandestine. While working at the direction of a political front we must remain separate from it. The ranks of these early soldiers must be absolutely impervious to infiltration; precautions must be made to keep this cadre impenetrable to police spies and less committed comrades. In

*An armed anti-labor terrorist group active in the thirties, reputedly financed by sections of the automotive industry.—Ed.

The Coming of the New International, John Gerassi observed that

As a leading pragmatist, Lenin believed that the only way a revolution could come about in Europe in his time was by the creation of a revolutionary organization. That organization had to be tight, well trained, loyal to its central committee, dedicated—and narrow, not only for ideological reasons (hence purges and sectarian splits were to be encouraged during its formative years) but also for security.¹⁵

And Lenin states that

The more we confine the membership of such an organization to people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity and who have been professionally trained in the art of combating the police, the more difficult it will be to unearth the organization.Ӡ

One of Jonathan’s reports contains the following:

I find it almost impossible to trust comrades, not after all of this. They say Gloves Davis—a black pig—killed Fred Hampton, while he was asleep. I certainly don’t have to mention all the so-called defectors who are now appearing before government committees testifying for the state. They were infiltrators to begin with. The house-niggers who ran to the high sheriff as soon as someone whispered revolt. I think I hate them

worse than I hate the sheriff, or the “owner.”

I’m just a young slave (you say) trying to understand and cope with my environment. I know personalities have no place in revolution but every time I think of Davis, Jess B. Simple, Karenga¹⁶ and the rest of these murderous turncoat idiots, my trigger finger fairly itches! Non-persons like Karenga, LeRoi Jones and the other right-wing blacks are intelligent enough to know what they are doing. We cannot excuse them with the ease that we can excuse the average brother who has had no opportunity or inclination to search. The mantle of ignorance doesn’t cover their behavior. They have to know that when they attack socialism, the communist ideal, and revolution that they are not logically (or illog-ically depending) attacking all that is white, etc. They know that Ho Chi Minh isn’t white or Chairman Mao, or Nkrumah, Lumumba, and Touré. They know that there isn’t but one fight going on across this planet, the one between the imperialist forces of capitalism and its victims. They know that it was for work that we were kidnapped—what else do you feed a slave for? These Black, Black, Black, Black men (if you can swallow their shallow shit) have had time to study, some have traveled, they “know” that it was capitalist agricultural economics that first caused our pain, and that the only change since then is the decline of the agricultural elite and the rise of the modern bourgeoisie. A sweat-shop displaced the plantation. Could it have escaped their notice that all the African states that really liberated themselves booted out the foreign businessmen and are now socialist states?

No, I think the strongest suggestion is that they are working for the government, the new house-niggers. And what better way is there for them to sell themselves to us than to scream Black, Black, Black, Black ... Like Tom Mboya, whose whole service for the C.LA. was to redirect the revolutionary rage of the people into a thing more compatible with the interests on Western Businessmen. They are spies—death to spies.

I don’t think it is a personality clash at all for us to teach these black pigs that we will not be altered from our course, that the reward for counterrevolution is death! We can’t continue to expect or wish for loyalty to the people—we’ll have to demand it. And that’s both from these cowardly fat-mouths who come to us in their disguise, “cultural nationalism,” and from the class defectors who tommy-gun us in our sleep.

I’ll make an example of Gloves Davis even if I have to hobo to Chicago. They’ll find him strung-up to a street light by his heels with our sign burned in his forehead!!

Tests must be devised to guard ourselves against the possibility of those fools getting into our separate military groups. There is no way to stop the infiltration of an above-ground political group, but we can guard the clandestine army by: 1. letting no one choose us (even if they did know about us and could find us); we do the choosing. 2. Once we choose someone to do the people’s military work they should be isolated and tested thoroughly, and their background checked. There are patterns to people’s lives, especially Blacks, that if studied one can easily spot pig tendencies and connections. Checks could be run through some of our political people who have friends or sympathizers who own, say, used car lots or any business that generally deals in credit. A great deal can be learned through the various credit check institutions these days. We’ll be using one of their own instruments for the “real” purpose that they invented it, against them. (Generally that’s the way it will be throughout the war.)

Testing can be developed into a science—written stuff to help reestablish for ourselves the patterns of this soldier’s background. You know, full commitment generally comes as a result of awareness, and awareness is the product of study and observation. The things a person has gone to the effort of reading and analyzing say a great deal about his character. In other words, very few black intelligence agents will have studied Marx, Mao, Lenin, Fanon, cats like that “in depth.” You can generally tell what processes a man’s mind has gone through by what he’s studied, observed. So examine, even the Post Office will do that. Written and oral tests —drugs are not to be discounted either, oral tests under truth drugs. Then you have the ultimate tests, the things that no agent of the establishment could do. Like assassinate the local head of the Gestapo. Bring him out of isolation blindfolded, arm him, tell him what to do, and where to go afterward, and wait, etc. I think you could be fairly sure of him after a series of tests like these.

We’re only thinking in terms of a small, highly trained, super-secret, counter-Kluxist vanguard group. However, dealing with people you’ve known over the years and have seen tested in fire already is best, like me, you and your comrades, and mine. The Blacks who joined the armed expeditionary forces just for profit (the cats who steal them blind and hustle the other suckers). They are starting to stir, to become aware also.

This Vietnam adventure on the part of the fascist has vastly changed the whole relationship between the masses and the ruling class. Can you detect the subtle changes? The really ugly side of imperialism is being demonstrated for not just the people who suffer its effects abroad, but also to the little sleepy guy here inside the U.S. They’re starting now to make the link between foreign wars and foreign businesses. And they’re better able to make the comparisons and conclusions. Ho Chi Minh vs. Ky, for example. People are all starting to say such things as “Some form of socialism is the answer.’’ Time to move, we must show them that resistance is possible, and that there is a hard left cadre willing to lead it. Conditions are right now, for the beginnings, at least, of a revolutionary culture; these conditions have always been present here inside the Black Colony but ... no leadership until now.

If we can keep the Panther alive by protecting the party workers with a show of underground strength, watching the watcher, assassinating the assassins, I think the people will start to listen to them. Blacks have grown very cynical to all groups who make claims in the area of problem-solving—since there have been one million groups and no problems solved. The physical conditions are right for the start of a protracted war. We have yet to hit on the tactic for control of attitudes, however; how to make people organize and resist the ruin of their lives. And it’s for certain we’ll never figure out the right tactic if the pigs keep killing off and busting all the vanguard elements. The time has come—Bobby’s Seize the Time makes sense. We can’t build a mass movement without finding some way to stay alive long enough to let them know we’re here. And that we’re not just out to play on them. That we are finally prepared to totally commit ourselves to the fight, that we will never abandon them when the pig moves in with his pistols and paddy-wagons, that we’re willing to take it to the graveyard.

A show of organizational skill and valid anti-estab-lishmentism will always bring on violence from the fascist. The people know this, so they must also know that this violence can be countered before they’ll believe and respond. “Let the ruling class tremble at a communist revolution.” That’s my favorite line in all of Marx and Engels. From Fanon it’s “The time for talking has ended, the time for acting has begun.”—Long live the guerrilla.

Jon

The counter-terrorist, faceless, nameless specialist in all martial arts is the first soldier of the people! His violence will be swift, surprising, explosive, and tied into a clearly political matrix. In some cases of assassination, it may be wise to make them appear as accidents, but that still doesn’t reduce the political content.

These workers, properly distributed and going about their tasks with secret, flawless precision and in perfect unison with the political front, will shake the fascists to their very foundations. Their limited, highly selective violence is the absolute minimum for enforcing the demands of the people. Anything less will fail. We are not dealing with nice people who will throw down their guns and submit to our will because we outnumber them; from the vantage point of established power and history, they know that one armed man can control a thousand.

People’s War is not polite or proper. It is not possible to limit the scope and range of violence to what the enemy will bear without reacting. Any ideal, any activity that may do violence to their control, will never be permitted. People’s War is improvisation and more improvisation. It is organizing the masses around their realistic needs and moving them against whatever forces restrict their passage to power. I repeat: realistic, day-to-day needs should be the basis of organizing people and making them conscious of revolution— that the world, the universe, must revolve—that it will stop, stagnate, and die for no man’s privilege.

If we accept revolution, we must accept all that it implies: repression, counter-terrorism, days filled with work, nervous strain, prison, funerals.

Our present problem as soldiers is to protect our political people at their work and enforce the increasing demands that the people, as a political result, will make upon power. The soldier is the counter-terrorist, the bodyguard, the first of a military vanguard. The distance between him and the class enemy is a free fire zone. He has to be the baddest and strongest of our kind: calm, sure, self-possessed, completely familiar with the fact that the only things that stand between black men and violent death are the fast break, quick draw, and snap shot. Terrible Jonathans teethed on the barrel of the political tool, hardened against the concrete of the most uncivilized jungles of the planet—Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco—tested in a dozen fires. “Tall, slim youth”. . . the new nigger, with a gun and the eyes of the hunter, the hunter of men.

These comrades must make the first contribution. They will be the first to fall. We gather up their bodies, clean them, kiss them and smile. Their funerals should be gala affairs, of home-brewed wine and revolutionary music to do the dance of death by. We should be sad only that it’s taken us so many generations to produce them.

Building consciousness and revolutionary culture against the repressive, natural defense reflexes of the system means taking realistic day-to-day issues like hunger, the need for clothing and housing, joblessness. It involves provoking repression—feeding on it. The fact of political and political-economic prisoners in legions and the processes used by the oppressors to judge and condemn them must be used as the rallying cries of revolution. Economic crime and even crimes of passion against the oppressors must be understood as rebellion. Even funerals can be used as an issue, since there will be so many of them. Improvising on reality is the key principle underlying the building of a united left and raising the consciousness of the people. It will give us our tactics.

In the Black Colony and other depressed areas of the country there will be less difficulty in organizing, mobilizing and altering the attitudes of the people toward their class enemies. However, in the areas of the class structure that can be said to be “making it,” affecting attitudes toward a revolutionary change in the system of production and distribution will, of course, call for the destruction of their comfort, the “manufacturing” of a “condition” where they will be either neutral or complementary to the revolutionary effort.

The psychological effect of our secret army, the real destructive effect it can have; an increasingly pervasive underground press with new emphasis on a “mass style”; the popularization of the revolutionary culture and then the elevating of it; both under the direction of an ultra-aggressive political party—these three, with no element missing, connected to the realistic issues form the basis of our only hope. There will be no educating, no consciousness, no revolutionary culture, no forward movement, without these three elements working with the harmony of a healthy organism.

To sum up, the existence of a political vanguard precedes the existence of any of the other elements of a truly revolutionary culture. If the thrust of this political vanguard is effective (demonstrating realistic, sincere designs aimed at the overthrow of established power), it will be attacked by the built-in automatic survival instincts of the established power complex, creating and supporting the need to counterpoise the violence of power. Without the ability to organize a counterforce to neutralize the violence of established power, antithesis dies. We are not contending with fools who will allow us to simply walk in and organize people to war against them. All serious challenges will be met with panic and repression. That is axiomatic. We must not allow ourselves to be hunted, imprisoned and murdered. We will never yield to terror tactics. We will organize a violence of our own, hidden and more aggressive. We fight from a position of weakness, but there are tactical devices that if employed without restraint will afford us a very real advantage.

The fascists believe that one guard with a machine gun can control a thousand men, but I know that this guard cannot watch all one thousand at once. While his attention and gun are trained on a gathering of ten who whisper freedom—closing on his blind side, my knife will claim his life. A political thrust is immediately followed by a hidden military thrust in the opening phases of revolutionary culture. Leadership must be protected. And it helps people bit by bit to understand and relate to the necessity of violence in any plan to overthrow anything—“overthrow” means violence. In our case it means putting to death. This is the last time I’ll repeat this for those of us who for one dread or another seem not too receptive: fighting originates from a well-developed kick in the ass.

The proletariat—the working class—is still the most revolutionary class, and still the real gravedigger of capitalist society. However, the notion that they alone can or must carry the revolution is too ridiculous and simplistic for any serious consideration at all. The industrial working force of today’s modern industrial state may be pivotal in carrying out a successful revolution against that state, but their power

and numbers have been vastly reduced by such developments as automation, military-corporate elitism, (the connection through marriage of government, military and corporate heads), the new class of National Guard pigs (they broke the postal strike), government-controlled unions, right-to-work laws, etc. The argument that centers on the ideal that all workers must be politically educated before the revolution can support a violent thrust verges on the absurd. Today nearly six and a half million of them can’t find work. And those who are working seem to be convinced that foreign wars and armaments spending are more desirable than unemployment. Of course they should be made conscious of their exploitation and they must be moved to act in their behalf. Those who feel that they are doing well, and those who actually are doing well should be introduced to the fact of “surplus value.”¹⁷

Waiting passively for the final verdict of history is not making revolution. It flies in the face of revolution. It ignores the existence of bread and circuses, terror from the right, and the racism and animalism of the ruling-class pigs. It doesn’t take into account the fact that they know we are coming.

They know how to hold on to their privilege, could they have held it this long otherwise? We are being repressed now. Courts that dispense no justice and concentration camps are already in existence. There are more secret police in this country than in all others combined—so many that they constitute a whole new class that has attached itself to the power complex. Repression is here. It’s time to move with determination. After our victory, no one will escape our justice with the now historically classic line “Well, we didn’t know.” Repression is here now, and we won’t reach the next level of revolutionary consciousness and activity until we meet it with a counter-terror and demonstrate to the people that we are here and resistance is possible.

From a letter mailed by Jonathan shortly before his death:

Why do we go for this old shit, most of the fascist functionaries live as unguarded as I do. I could slip a knife between Max Rafferty’s ribs. The Agnews and Du Ponts, the Rockefellers and Morgans, all of the Getty, Hunt, and Hughes types who sneak around in armored cars and jets are just as reachable. Anyone who will come out of his bomb shelter can be had. Imagine what Nixon’s armored car would look like if I stepped out of the alley and hit it with the anti-tank rocket launcher under my coat—a ball of fire. Hell will be their reward.

But the guerrilla needs our help. When Jonathan steps forward with his anti-Nixon rocket launcher, there should be nine more like himself, with assault rifles to close an exit path for him. And there should be a political infrastructure, a cadre, not far away to explain his actions, and glean from them the greatest possible overall political effect.

Prestige stands between the masses and a revolt against their class enemy. The aura of magic, glamour, luster and splendid permanence covers the fascists like a protective layer of fat. The slimy scales of majesty shield and conceal the dilapidation of the old bourgeois reign of terror. Although in reality nothing remains but the illusion. They can still organize violence, but the Indo-Chinese have proved that to be not too formidable.

Our present task is to illustrate this point forcefully to the people. The fascist industrial state can organize a ponderous, mechanized violence, but this systematic industrially based holding action is helpless before the fluid, mobile, self-impelled attrition of people’s urban guerrilla warfare. With his techniques fully developed and established, the urban guerrilla launches his attacks on the corporate-militarypolice complex with some of these military objectives in mind:

• —to weaken the local guards or the security system of the dictatorship, given the fact that we are attacking and the “gorillas” defending, which means catching the government in a defensive position with its troops immobilized in defense of the entire complex of national maintenance, with its ever-present fears of an attack on its strategic nerve centers, and without ever knowing where, how, and when that attack will come;
• —to attack on every side with many different armed groups, few in number, each self-contained and operating separately, to disperse the government forces in their pursuit of a thoroughly fragmented organization instead of offering the dictatorship the opportunity to concentrate its forces of repression on the destruction of one tightly organized system operating throughout the country;

—to give proof of its combativeness, decision, firmness, determination, and persistence in the attack on the military dictatorship in order to permit all malcontents to follow our example and fight with urban guerrilla tactics. Meanwhile, the government, with all its problems, incapable of halting guerrilla operations in the city, will lose time and suffer endless attrition and will finally be forced to pull back its repressive troops in order to mount guard over the banks, industries, armories, military barracks, prisons, public offices, radio and television stations, North American firms, gas storage tanks, oil refineries; ships, airplanes, ports, residences of outstanding members of the regime such as ministers and generals, police stations, and official organizations, etc.

—to increase urban guerrilla disturbances gradually in an endless ascendancy of unforeseen actions such that the government troops cannot leave the urban areas to pursue the guerrillas in the interior without running the risk of abandoning the cities and permitting rebellion to increase on the coast as well as in the interior of the country;

—to oblige the army and the police, with the commanders and their assistants, to change the relative comforts and tranquillity of their barracks and their usual rest for a state of alarm and growing tension in the expectation of attack or in search for tracks that vanish without a trace;

—to avoid open battle and decisive combat with the government, limiting the struggle to brief and rapid attacks with lightning results;

—to assure for the urban guerrilla a maximum freedom of maneuver and of action without ever relinquishing the use of armed violence, remaining firmly oriented toward helping the beginning of rural guerrilla warfare and supporting the construction of the revolutionary army for national liberation. (¹⁸)

Prestige is an abstract, an intangible. It has no material basis, no substantial objective reality to be perceived through the senses. One can’t touch it or taste it, see it or smell it, it can’t be heard. So how does it exist? Subjectively, in the mind’s eye, after the fact of some connected circumstances that may also have been subjective.

We’re looking for connections; the materialist approach is to examine things in their total sequence, see them in process, not to merely establish their being in fixed sequential images, but to take in the state of being in process: infancy, maturity, decline, things in motion, processed into other things in motion. We’re constantly laboring to determine that which governs, regulates, motivates all the separate but related and interrelated processes—from the viewpoint that consciousness is determined by dialectical, objective developments.

The prestige of power as the subjective effect of a past deed or reputation, real or fancied, then has a very definite life process. The prestige of the capitalist class inside the U.S. reached its maturity with the close of the 1860-64 civil war. Since that time there have been no serious threats to their power; their excesses have taken on a certain legitimacy through long usage.

Prestige bars any serious attack on power. Do people attack a thing they consider with awe, with a sense of its legitimacy?

In the process of things, the prestige of power emerges roughly in that period when power does not have to exercise its underlying basis—violence. Having proved and established itself, it drifts, secure from any serious challenge. Its automatic defense-attack instincts remain alert; small threats are either ignored away, laughed away, or in the cases that may build into something dangerous, slapped away. To the masters of capital, the most dreadful omen of all is revolutionary scientific socialism. The gravedigger evokes fear response. Prestige wanes if the first attacks on its power base find it wanting. Prestige dies when it cannot prevent further attacks upon itself.

All intellectual arguments against the necessity of counter-violence, even in the opening stages of a People’s War against an industrial establishment such as the one in the U.S.A., are false. We can stop the debate; prestige must be destroyed. People must see the venerated institutions and the “omnipotent administrator” actually under physical attack. They must be assured that the heavens will not hurl lightning bolts at the people’s heads for challenging the rights of property. Then, although international capitalism has shot its last bolts, it is not exactly harmless. If the threat to power is truly revolutionary and the first step into revolutionary consciousness taken with a forceful attack upon prestige, we must anticipate reaction, accept repression’s terror, and meet it with a counter-terror of our own. The gravedigger needs a bodyguard to protect him at this work, else the grave may be his own.

The debate between the vanguard elements should end. The argument that the prestige of power will let itself to be educated away is too idiotic to be allowed to stand. Waiting for power to move to its inevitable collapse is suicidal for all concerned. Blacks and other Third World peoples have the very imminent prospect of genocidal tactics to contend with, and we can now all see that the modern industrial state, motivated by the interests of exclusive groups of capitalist masters, cannot regulate itself to make possible an inclusive production and distribution of goods, or production without a massive waste of resources and destruction of all that stands about. The debate ends, the action begins. It is not a question of the necessity of violence, but how to organize it to fit our unique situation, to tie it with flawless exactitude to our political activity, and to organize it immediately.

Comrade George: I read recently from a textbook edited by my favorite writer W. Pomeroy¹⁹ that a city street could actually be considered as a defile. A convoy of any kind trapped in a defile on the countryside is easy prey for the forces positioned above and about it. . . .

—Jonathan

It is absolutely certain that every fascist military thinker and official in the world has devoted time and study to the works of the great guerrilla tacticians, Mao, Ho, Giap, Guevara, Pomeroy, Fanon and Nkrumah. The fundamentals of People’s War are no secret. It would seem that Giap’s People's Army, People's War or Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare and the other masterworks on poor people’s war, once published for the world to study, would blunt their effectiveness at least a little—that is, until one has studied in depth and understood. Guerrilla warfare by its very nature is invulnerable. Advanced scientific guerrilla strategy, worked out over the first three-quarters of this century, is not, contrary to popular image, merely a “hit-and-run” haphazard affair. In spite of the need for improvisation and mobility and in spite of its poverty and daring, it is scientific. The man who labored over its construction had as a task the forging of an instrument which would enable an indigent and weaponless people to resist and overcome a ponderous mechanized army dependent upon an industrial base and operating on systematized thought. It is a perfect tool, perfect. No establishment army can countervail it. The best example of this new fighting style—the urban guerrilla—is the spectacular success of the Tupamaros, the military arm of Uruguay’s National Liberation Movement. Brilliantly organized, they have carried out well-planned operations, such as

burning down plants (General Motors) without harming a single worker, robbing impregnable fortresses (such as the Casino of Punta del Este), kidnapping hated officials, ambassadors, and bankers, seizing whole towns long enough to explain their purpose and revolutionary commitment, assassinating key repressive agents, such as the chief of the police’s special squad, sabotaging imperialism’s industrial-military complexes and raiding police military outposts to capture arms and ammunition.*

Gerassi outlines their fighting strategy as follows:

The objective is manifold: (1) to threaten the Establishment, cause it to panic and make serious tactical mistakes, such as resorting to mass repression which radicalizes the population against them; (2) to establish the underground revolutionary apparatus, including both active participants and trusted but passive collaborators (who will later carry out the liaison communication, logistic, and propaganda needs of the revolutionary armies in the cities); (3) to test new recruits in relative security, for, though police infiltrators are bound to creep in and stay in the organization for future need even if they have to kill their own to do so, the fact that for a long time urban groups will operate

*Gerassi, op. cit., p. 72.

independently of each other keeps sweeping arrests of urban guerrillas down to a minimum; (4) to demoralize the rank and file and even the officers of the repressive forces, as they see themselves constantly but unexpectedly under attack (it is said that to kill policemen indiscriminately is to forget the working-class background of the cop on the beat; this is as absurd as trying to save the ordinary soldiers whom the Vietnamese must kill to survive); (5) to panic local capitalists to withdraw their funds from specific areas, thus hurting the local warlords and politicians who profit from these investments; (6) to frighten away foreign investors, which will affect the whole bureaucratic oligarchy; (7) to force the U.S. to constantly extend its intervention, which will tax its resources, hence discontent at home, and spread its imperialistic arms, rendering it more vulnerable abroad.²⁰

At this point, I must make clear that I am certainly not warning the military establishment or their capitalist masters, nor am I advocating the overthrow of the established Amerikan government; when I use the initials U.S.A. in these observations, it must be understood that I could quite as easily be referring to the Union of South Africa (U.S.A.!!)

The government of the U.S.A. and all that it stands for, all that it represents, must be destroyed. This is the starting point, and the end. We have the means to this end; the problem is to develop acceptance of their use.

The first struggle is one waged within our own minds.

We must in all haste transcend the intellectual inhibitions that preclude support of at least the minimum level of violence that must develop concomitantly with each political thrust; our attitudes must change before we can expect any response from the people, workers, students, lumpenproletariat. We must accept the eventuality of bringing the U.S.A. to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city with barbed wire, armored pig carriers crisscrossing the city streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked down, the commonness of death. Then we must learn the forms of resistance: the booby trap, the silenced pistol and rifle, the pitting of streets to slow them down, the wrecking of heavy equipment to block their efficient movement, false walls, hidden sub-basements, tunnels (Vietnamese style), destruction of the critical elements of the facilities that support establishment order; we must learn the value of infiltration—it works better for us than it does for the opposition. We simply stop allowing ourselves to be hunted and do some stalking of our own; their secret police aren’t really too secret at all. Right now we can go numbering, naming, compiling information on them all—they’re too visible to be safe. Revolution is aggressive. Just where are we? Where is this country skidding to? In the morning the fight will have begun!

In considering all of the establishment’s protective agencies, even those that are quasi-secret, none can hide themselves. Any establishment, institution or organization that enjoys prestige, that exists openly aboveground, is by this definition “weak,” or at least vulnerable to a determined attack. When the purpose of your military tactics is to build and guard some object or point of supposed advantage, the defender can actually be thought of as being under siege, the guard himself a standing target. The fortress and all its resources, mechanized and human, for all its imposing strength, cannot exist for long under persistent attack deprived of the opportunity to replenish, repair, renew itself. If the opposing military forces that have laid the siege are nameless, faceless, numberless, indistinguishable from all the millions that exist all about the establishment, when the establishment’s military forces sally forth from their beleaguered fortress to do battle, what must be the result? They must cause suffering to the innocent, since it is impossible for them to know us, thus making new enemies. They will restrict the freedom of our known or suspected political parties and projects that are welded to the people, thus restricting the freedom of others who may have been neutral or sympathetic to them. They will make themselves targets for our hidden machine gun, sniper’s rifle, silenced pistol, mortar, anti-tank rocket, flamethrower.

Our counter-terrorism will bring on a stage-two fascist repression. There is no question in our minds—blacks, men under hatches—about the nature of the ruling class; the exceedingly violent disposition of the U.S.A. ruling class is well documented with just a glance into our lives and the order of our deaths. The point is to reveal this “senseless violence” to the entire revolutionary class or classes.

Counter-terrorism is a mighty tool, and the only one at our disposal in the opening stages of People’s War. In some cases in other revolutionary societies this level of violence alone was sufficient to win all the demands of the people. However, I’m sure that here it will not be sufficient because of the complexities of the U.S.A. class structure and its stockpile of potential further violence (many of the small demands of a sizable portion of the population are slowly being met at the expense of all the rest of us and the world’s people). A new pig-oriented class has been created at the bottom of our society from which the ruling class will be always able to draw some support. Consequently our task will be to move from counter-terrorist tactics into the second stage of larger guerrilla unit operation.

Over 90 percent of the U.S.A. population live in cities and towns, and although some of the principles of classic Mao-Che-style guerrilla operations must be used to stop the orderly flow of intercity and interstate commerce, most of the real fighting must take place inside the nerve centers of the nation—the cities. This is an entirely new situation in the development of People’s War. Whereas the classic types of the Third World movements generally relied upon the strangling of provincial capitals where the enemy colonial power tended to concentrate itself, in urban guerrilla warfare where the colonies can be said to be situated within the city, the process or tactics will be unique.

Though the basic strategy is the same, urban guerrilla warfare differs from all that has ever taken place in the arena of guerrilla against the god state. There are similarities between our situation and that of the growing movement of the Uruguayan people, and perhaps we can draw from their experience. But to be realistic, the disparity in size and population, the relative strength of the enemy state institutions and their global sweep, must seriously be taken into account. Uruguay is a colony of Anglo-Amerika; defeat of the Uruguayan government and a change in the present property relations would of necessity mean the defeat of a section of the Amerikan imperial infrastructure. The comparison between ourselves and the Algerian liberation experience is almost untenable, though there may be some small tactical lessons to be gleaned from their urban effort. It must be kept in mind that the principal battles that led to the people’s victory were fought on the countryside between massive French mechanized divisions and a classical guerrilla army of the people. The battle for Algiers was only aided by the forces within. The people’s fifth column within the city of Algiers was not a model of perfection simply because the principal effort, energy and motive forces were located in the classical guerrilla units that engaged the French expeditionary forces for control of the countryside. At issue there in Algeria were such things as crude petroleum (62 percent of the nation’s exports), agricultural products (18 percent), and some iron ore. All these basic raw materials were, of course, located in the countryside and had to be protected by the French.

The war for control of the U.S.A, is unique in that its heartbeat can be stopped only by placing our primary forces in the valleys and defiles of its city streets. U.S.A. is the colonial master, the center of the imperial process where the raw materials are worked into finished manufactured products to be recirculated back into the exterior and interior colonies.

In a comparison of the classical forms of wars of liberation fought in the outlying colonies and the one we must yet formulate, a vital question is immediately brought to our attention: Does it work in such a totally different setting?

A theoretical examination indicates that it does. In fact, urban people’s guerrilla warfare may prove to be an even more effective tool than the classical type. The same advantages are present, the same possibilities, plus some that exist simply because the fight is taking place within the cities, the nerve centers of the nation.

The enemy culture, the established government, exists first of all because of its ability to govern, to maintain enough order to ensure that a cycle of sorts exists between the various levels and elements of the society. “Law and Order” is their objective. Ours is “Perfect Disorder.” Our aim is to stop the life cycle of the enemy culture and replace it with our own revolutionary culture. This can be done only by creating perfect disorder within the cycle of the enemy culture’s life process and leaving a power vacuum to be filled by our building revolutionary culture.

When the fight takes place within the cities, the disorder will clearly be hastened—this will have an immediate effect on the consciousness of the bulk of the population and will strain the relationship between government and governed to the utmost.

If the life of the manufacturing city is to be stopped, it is clear that the normal processes, at least, will be slowed by a convoy of establishment trucks, tanks or troops simply moving in the city’s arteries where commercial convoys should be moving. The necessary checkpoints will further slow it. Each one of the opposition’s own tank shells that is fired inside the manufacturing city at the elusive guerrilla will destroy some aspect of that factory-city and undercut the ability of the establishment to produce another tank shell. It will not help the fascist cause very much at all when the armored personnel carrier or jeep patrol equipped with 30-caliber machine guns fires into a downtown shopping crowd at the elusive guerrilla who has taken refuge among them. The people just will not understand.

The cities of fascist U.S.A.—built straight up and with very little real planning or pattern, the twisting side streets, gangways connecting roofs, manholes, storm drains, concrete and steel trees—will hide a guerrilla army just as effectively as any forest. There is the added advantage that just being in an area doesn’t automatically make one suspect and fair game, as is the case when an establishment army unit spots a gathering, no matter how innocent, in an area where guerrilla movements have been reported in the countryside; just being out there defines them. The fact that the guerrilla can hide himself fairly easily inside large population centers does not mean that hard work needn’t be done toward the winning of popular support. It simply means that failure to gain “full support” for violent confrontation doesn’t preclude violent confrontation. If all the elements exist that have made guerrilla warfare in its classical style an invincible weapon against mechanized, industrially-based armies in undeveloped areas, they will be even more successful in built-up urban Amerikan conditions.

The facts that make it impossible for the establishment army to overcome the attacking guerrilla army—in spite of the availability of the knowledge contained in the masterworks on guerrilla strategy—become clear when we realize that after the strategy is understood by the guerrilla chief, the tactics applicable to his particular military problems “are a product of his imagination alone, ” a constant creative improvising. Also working against the establishment’s general staff is its own mentality. They’ve convinced themselves or have been convinced by their experience at war with other mechanized armies that “having the most at the right time” wins war. In other words, they feel that winning wars depends mainly on gadgets and they presume that they can dictate the terms and grounds upon which each battle takes place. They’re locked in on a fixed set of systematized ideas that conflict completely with the realities of People’s War. Their egos simply will never allow them to admit that all the ingenuity that has gone into the development of the blitzkrieg has been wasted. A $100,000 tank can be destroyed with two dollars’ worth of materials; a jet is useless against the rifleman, and it also can be destroyed with one well-placed burst from an assault rifle or destroyed on the ground by mortar from miles away. Then, too, the pilot, years in the making, can be killed with a knife. The ’copter as a fighting machine is the most stupid of all the costly gadgets; it can be heard from miles away; it can’t be armored, a ten-cent bullet can render it useless. All of these contraptions require liquid fuels that will stop flowing when the production of all the other commodities stops. Fighting really depends upon the people and small easily machined portable weapons.

Another factor that works to the advantage of the guerrilla army is time. The establishment forces cannot survive the prolonged unrest that is steadily building. Profits fall, the point of diminishing returns is eventually reached; and from there, the establishment’s force and energy goes into its last stages of life, while our new revolutionary culture is building —musical chairs where each go-round excludes some element of their control factors.

The objective, I repeat, of the destruction of a city-based industrial establishment and its protective forces is to create perfect disorder, to disrupt all of their interacting processes that allow them to produce and distribute goods, and this can be done from within the process much more easily than from without. Really, there is no possibility of an established government ever overcoming a determined internal enemy.

By their very nature, the “holder” or “owner” and his guard are exposed and vulnerable. A comparison between their mode of existence and that of the people’s vanguard elements employing all the subtle scientific principles of urban guerrilla warfare will demonstrate clearly where the real power lies.

Top-heavy establishment organizations that exist openly are always a reflection of the men who staff them. Of primary interest to the guerrilla are the bureaucratic institutions that serve to protect the right of the wrongdoers to do their wrong—the local and federal pig establishments. The complexities of the class structure have shifted somewhat since the time of Marx and Lenin. Presently within the working class, there exists an ultra-right section at the bottom of this structure which feels that all of its demands on life can be met by the existing order. In fact, the working class of U.S.A. 1971 can be realistically divided into two mutually exclusive and conflicting sections, one right-oriented and conservative, the other left to neutral. One explanation for this phenomenon is the loss over the years (to fascist nationalistic propaganda and state-controlled unions) of a clear-cut class consciousness. In effect, it can be said that this right-oriented sector of the working class is a new class, a new pig class. In their ranks we find a factory or construction worker, the ubiquitous civil service employee, the retired military career man, the man who sells used autos or insurance, the stock clerk or longshoreman about to be replaced by a machine. All of these individuals are not clearly in the new pig class—some only have just one foot in the grave. As yet they only have pig tendencies and can still be redeemed. Outright pigs must be either neutralized or destroyed (killed). From the new pig class (a section of the working class whose demands are small and are being slowly met by the capitalist masters), the government draws its greatest support. The forces of counterrevolution make themselves felt on the street level through this new class, while above this class, in the loosely defined petit-bourgeois level and upper-middle-class professionals and students, we can find some very real revolutionary consciousness! There are explanations for this complex inverted stratification of revolutionary potential; the history of the U.S.A. and its immigrants, the emphasis placed on subversion of the workers’ movement (the unions) by the ruling class, and the apparent (not real) stabilizing of the economy with fascist Keynesian controls and redoubled imperialist expansion, all can be carefully treated to explain the present confusion and contradictions in the class struggle—but most of this I leave to Comrade Newton who has handled it well so far. This is a comment on what to do with what we have and what we are realistically faced with.

The top-heavy bureaucratic agencies that exist with quasi-social sanction—and in particular the ones that are given over to the maintenance of law and order—draw their principal personnel from the pig class and consequently are an expression of that class’s mentality: a stagnant, even atavistic mentality that is completely dependent upon regimen and rote to perform the simplest of functions.

First of all, the opposition is stupid. However, let me qualify this statement with the observation that they make up for what they lack in brains with sheer brutality. As a result of their original drawback (stupidity), they have expanded to massive proportions, and tied themselves irrevocably to a technology based on massive and equally faulty machines to the point now that it is impossible for them ever to hide any of their movements, to move with any real speed, or to change themselves in response to any change in our attack. The very nature of their apparatus, its supposed legality and its size, tends to weaken it. Their growing demand for personnel leaves them helpless to stop us from infiltrating them.

Their cybernetics cannot overcome the fact that men, especially of the pig class, are cyclic. They think, function and live in cycles. This is more to their detriment than ours. Their science of control turns upon them to weaken and wreck their own institutions. How can a massive department or bureau or regiment with hundreds of personnel ever coordinate any activity without the strictest regimentation, without a massive meeting place to familiarize themselves with procedures, without badges or uniforms to identify each other, without systematized patterns of thought and behavior, without dependence on clear-cut orders. Simple pig types can only learn to function by rote and in cycles. Procedure must be drilled into them and only seldom if ever changed. It is quite easy for a pig to perform a particular function the same way, time after time, once he has learned the function; it is not so easy to vary, especially when there are great numbers of the same types of individuals involved. What would be the result if each pig were given a different job each day in a different area or if he had to vary his code every week or think for himself just one eight-hour shift? Chaos. If it weren’t for the sergeant or lieutenant and a routine, when the average pig ran out of gas, his car would have to be pushed out of the street by the citizenry; when his bullets ran out he would have only a club until he could check with the captain.

Cyclic men equipped with only a few learned responses can be watched, clocked, photographed and anticipated. Their code isn’t really a code at all. They are finished! A pig is a fool! They have numbers over the small vanguard element and the social license to kill—but once we decide on the proper action, we will find that our enemies are vulnerable.

For the soldiers of the people, the guerrillas, though they also must operate with the tightest structure and in complete harmony with their political branch, cycles are not a factor in their operations.

The subtleties and fundamentals of urban guerrilla warfare can be broken down to their simplest terms this way:

Mobility

Only the light, portable, easily machined or easily stolen weapons are employed by the guerrilla under normal circumstances. On rare occasions, he may hire or commandeer a piece of heavy equipment for an isolated or special purpose (which fits in with the improvised, extemporaneous nature of this form of combat). The bomb in all its various forms, banglor, mortar, satchel charge, hand grenade; the anti-tank rocket launcher, the sniper’s rifle, the light machine gun, the silenced pistol, the flamethrower, the poison dart, poison bullet, the crossbow, the knife, the fist—all form the guerrilla arsenal. Provision must be made to move men and equipment in spite of the condition of today’s streets and roads in the cities. That means making use of the new four-wheel drive civilian-type jeeps, station wagons and motorcycles. The bicycle will regain popularity. Heavy vehicles, the jeeps, trucks, vans (all ordinary-looking family or commerciallooking vehicles but armored with either plastic or steel) can be either rented or commandeered. All dwellings should be rented and expendable. They should be equipped so that when forced to leave by tunnel or other hidden exits, the place can be burned to create further confusion for the attacker and destroy evidence. Food and clothing should be purposely simple. Clothing must always be available for disguises. Although part of the guerrilla’s function is to hijack and commandeer food in nonperishable form from the enemy cultures and stockpiles, he should also learn to identify the food plants that grow wild all over the country—even in backyards and vacant lots. He should also learn to want less.

Infiltration

Right now we can be placing our soldiers inside the various police and military and prison staffs. Our more gifted and better-educated comrades could end up in the intelligence units of the army and police; our major source of weapons should come from our men placed in the military under seemingly ordinary circumstances. This is our enemy’s greatest weakness; any establishment’s greatest weakness is the need for personnel to resist the people. This lays them open to infiltration. The guerrilla army that operates within the city is necessarily small, so we stop infiltration by being very selective and conducting thorough and murderous tests and making full use of the principles underlying departmentalization.

The Ambush

The only form of attack employed by the guerrilla forces is the ambush, the surprise attack. There must never be any front lines, or defending of territory. The only engagements that are carried to completion are the ones that we are winning; after an initial attack if the enemy regains himself and counterattacks, we disengage and simply go home to await the next opportunity when we can catch him asleep, with his women, moving in convoys, on the toilet.

Camouflage

Nothing ever appears outwardly as it is. The armor (sheets of plastic or steel) is fixed inside the vans and trucks in such a way as to make them appear normal when viewed from without. The military safehouse—with tunnels leading in all directions and connecting with other houses, a storm drain, a manhole with bulletproof and airtight plexiglass window, encasements inside the house camouflaged with heavy curtains, rooms with doors that are really booby traps that work from the inside—must be made to look like any other house along the block. We must dress and equip ourselves with weaponry that will allow us to move even in units of a dozen or more without appearing to be anything other than private citizens pursuing their private interests. We will make use of all forms of disguise: mailman, policeman, telephone repairman, priest, nun, National Guardsman. This principle will soon have them shooting at each other or turning the innocents against them. The result—perfect disorder!

Autonomous Infrastructure

If it is our eventual goal to wear away the establishment’s ability to produce and distribute goods, to feed its war machine, or organize any sort of social activity; then, of course, we must, at the same time, provide ourselves with the means of performing these functions on at least a subsistence level. Both the military and the political arms of the liberation movement must think of the provisioning of their vanguard elements and the people during the dark days when we stop the machine. Military supplies are stockpiled in advance with food staples. Depression-days’ foraging and war-years’ liberation gardens must be reintroduced and refined. The military must depend on the people for food. It must also prepare to feed the people from the enemy’s supplies.

Then you have the very healthy, spontaneous mass looting. Perfect disorder! At some point in the development of the overall struggle revolutionary culture it will have to become totally independent of the old enemy culture in keeping with Che’s theory of molding the new society around the struggle against the old. We will start from the beginning to build our own infrastructure in every possible area: people’s stores, hospitals, banks, buses, army. This dual power, this building of political infrastructure and the military is succinctly stated by the Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton:

We recognized that in order to bring the people to the level of consciousness where they would seize the time, it would be necessary to serve their interests in survival by developing programs which would help them to meet their daily needs. For a long time we have had such programs not only for survival, but for organizational purposes. Now we not only have a breakfast program for schoolchildren, we have clothing programs, we have health clinics which provide free medical and dental services, we have programs for prisoners and their families, and we are opening clothing and shoe factories to provide for more of the needs of the community. Most recently we have begun a testing and research program on sickle-cell anemia, and we know that 98 percent of the victims of this disease are Black. To fail to combat this disease

is to submit to genocide; to battle it is survival.

All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but they are not solutions to our problems. 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.²¹

In following this strategy we at once “fill a very real vacuum” that already exists in the Black Colony (brown and poor white too), where the people are not being fed, clothed, provided with adequate medical treatment or transportation facilities. This will create the consciousness that comes from the introduction of people’s government. It will help the people to understand the force and energy of revolution. “We are organizing them around their needs.” We will not distract them with such empty questions as who will be elected from which political party. All political parties, as things stand, will support the power complex. Any individual elected will either be a supporter of the established politics —or an “individual.” What would help us, in fact, is to allow as many right-wing elements as possible to assume “political” power. The warnings that “our thrusts toward self-determination will bring on fascism” are irresponsible—or better, unrealistic. The fascists already have power. The point is that some way must be found to expose them and combat them. An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die. The holder of so-called high public office is always merely an extension of the hated ruling corporate class. It is to our benefit that this person be openly hostile, despotic, unreasoning. We are not living in a nation where left-wing parties hold eighty out of two hundred seats in a congressional body, or even eight out of two hundred. This is a huge nation dominated by the most reactionary and violent ruling class in the history of the world, where the majority of the people just simply cannot understand that they are existing on the misery and discomfort of the world. They have been hypnotized into believing that criticism of the expansionist policies of imperialism is really isolationist or injurious to both the U.S.A. and the world!!

We are faced with two choices: to continue as we have done for forty years fanning our pamphlets against the hurricane, or starting to build a new revolutionary culture that we will be able to turn on the old culture. Collectively we have that choice; the Black Colony as it sits out here alone has no such choice. In a report from Jonathan Jackson in early 1970, he said,

We are not going to wait until the U.S.A. attacks the people of the U.S.A, or Angola, Mozambique or any of the other African nations in foment. We can’t wait. We shouldn’t even allow this thing to happen in IndoChina. Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, First National City Bank of N. Y., Irving Trust Co., the Morgan monopoly, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Continental Ill. National Bank, First National Bank of Chicago, Bankers Trust Co., and a dozen lesser firms all have great financial interests in the U.S.A. now. In 1966 the U.S.A, investment in one small African nation was $667 million. It’s almost doubled since then. In 1968, 70 to 75% of all goods from the U.S.A, entered the U.S.A. duty free. Soon we’ll be asked to fight the people of the U.S.A, because they’re getting their people’s army together ... No—I’m not waiting for them to attack a new part of Africa or Asia, I’m entering the war now—on the side of the Vietnamese!

The Black Colony, U.S.A., has little choice. We must enter the war on the side of the majority of the world’s people, even if it means fighting the U.S.A. majority. We fight to live. And we’re learning to fight; it’ll be a war, to the knife if necessary.

We can’t wait until the generation that thinks of blacks as niggers and the rest of the world as gooks, chinks, spics, etc., has been educated away. It may be the reverse that happens; we niggers and gooks may be blown away first. Or if we survive, what will we inherit? A desert?

We'll mass what people we can; perhaps that won’t be the whole lower class. We’ll mass ourselves and any ally we may be able to draw from the whole class structure, and we’ll attempt to wage a war on property and property rights. Essentially that is the fight, but, even then, some men will die as in all forms of war. But if we cannot draw the support that is necessary for such a war, then we see a positive benefit for the majority of the world’s people in the reduction of this whole country to a vast wasteland, and a graveyard for two hundred million of history’s most damnable fools!

In People’s War, urban style, each political move toward organizing people around their realistic needs will support a corresponding military move. This unity of politics and war will increase the overall revolutionary consciousness by degrees to a point where mass consciousness can be said to exist.

The Black Panther Party is the largest and most powerful political force existing outside establishment politics. It draws this power from the people. It is the people’s natural, political vanguard. Now let us assume the existence of a small, tightly knit, totally committed and separate military vanguard such as Jonathan Jackson attempted to build.

Jonathan was my brother and closest comrade. I knew him. He was the real super-nigger. He worked at it, hard. He took complete control of himself, he learned every weapon in the human arsenal, from the flying side-thrust foot attack and the quick-draw snap shot to the manufacture and use of the mortar. He knew six thousand ways to kill a man, thirty with the simple stroke of an empty hand or foot. He was seventeen years old when he died in the service of the people, on the side of the black colonies and with the courage of the whole colonized world. Let’s assume where Jonathan is concerned that “. . . our battle cry reaches some receptive ear, and another hand reaches down to take up our weapon . . .” We have two perfectly harmonious fists: the left “front ram’’ of the Black Panthers’ political thrust, and the left “back ram’’ of the August 7th movement.

Let’s further assume that this nation is one huge city that we can call by its rightful updated name Johannesburg. This clarifies the understanding of urban People’s War, the concept of “the true internationalism,” and the connections, interactions, processes and effects of a people at war under the leadership of a vanguard which wields a double-edged sword against an isolated enemy element. All the cities of this country can be treated as one interconnecting entity, due to the necessity of exchange and interactions caused by specialization. We can now deal with them as a single entity because of the national character of the vanguard party and revolutionary consciousness within the inner Black Colony. All Anglo-Western cities are generally the same when they are reduced to the critical features that support them. I could be talking about London, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Paris, Berlin or Rome instead of Johannesburg.

Mao pictured the U.S.A, as the city of the world surrounded, besieged and slowly strangled to death by a third force under arms. Using Mao’s theoretical springboard, I wish to make further comments on the hypothetical super-technological city-state and its vulnerability.

Any honest expert in the overall strategy and logistics of classic Western mechanized warfare—the war of the industrially-based, established state—will admit that the scientific guerrilla force must be outnumbered ten to one in manpower by the mechanized force if it is to be contained at all. The establishment army, the defenders of property, of the industrial complex armed with the tools and weapons of heavy industry, must field ten men for just one guerrilla: this point is a strong indication of the relative effectiveness of the two fighting styles. Recent reports (March of 1971) coming in from the Indo-Chinese theater describe such debacles as eighty U.S.A. 40-ton tanks racing in wild retreat before the guerrillas. Puppet soldiers and U.S.A. mercenaries in their haste to disengage from the people’s forces are lashing themselves to the runners of rescue helicopters. Disaster for the man with the most and best equipment is threatening and imminent. Now is the time for us to fill the streets with our protest, clog the tunnels and back stairs of covert totalitarian government with every weapon at our disposal.

The effectiveness of rallies and mass demonstrations has not come to an end. Their purpose has diacritically altered, but the general tactic remains sound. Today the rally affords us the opportunity to effect intensive organization of the projects and programs that will form the infrastructure of our communes. If the mass rallies close, as they have in the past, with a few speeches and a pamphlet, we can expect no more results than in the past: two hours later the people will

be Amerikans again (instead of people). But going among “the people” at each gathering with clipboards and pens, and painfully ascertaining what each can contribute to clear-cut, carefully defined political projects, is the distinction between intensive organization and the sterile, stilted attempts to build new unions (rank and file, etc.) or elect a socialist legislature.

However, as we start the projects that will eventually move the workers and the whole community into open conflict with the ruling clique, my own personal observations lead me to the independent conclusion that the political vanguard and even its early project need to be defended. Clearly the political cadre needs protection from the enemy culture’s military, its secret police and vigilante “death squads.”

Armed struggle is at the very heart of revolution. If the problems of the people cannot be redressed because the necessary resources are in the hands of a relatively few families and individuals, it means we are going to have to seize this property. Seizing property has always meant some form of war, some form of armed struggle. If history is our guide, it clearly records that nothing of any great value has ever changed hands without a struggle, or at least a show of, or threat of, violence. Men simply don’t surrender what they think of as their privilege and property except by force. History itself is economically motivated class struggle.

There is simply no way to compare this society or its historical experience with that of a tiny colonial country like Chile: Allende is not seizing property; his government is “buying property.” Until the Chilean ruling capitalist class is suppressed, the Chilean revolution is as meaningless as the Swedish experiment. Socialist governments which attempt to coexist with capitalist economics completely forget the economic motive of human social history. Revisionism has given birth to countless “socialistic” hermaphrodites, always to the detriment of people’s power. Strained, tortured definitions of social existence and organization have trapped the people in so many contradictions that most have given up all hope of harnessing the modern industrial state or even understanding it. England before the Tories or between the Tories is “liberal socialist.” Military dictatorships, clearly totalitarian, are ruled by cliques traveling under the designation “revolutionary council,” etc.

No argument has any substance if it conflicts with the objective conditions, the clear, incontrovertible facts. In our case, these facts can be read from the nation’s dailies—in the obituary section. Blacks who seriously advocate revolution are killed. Blacks who attack property relations are slated for the graveyard or the prison camp. It’s a national cultural tradition. Since these are the facts, it follows that

An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves. We cannot forget, unless we become bourgeois pacifists or opportunists, that we are living in a class society, that there is no way out of this society, and there can be none, except by means of the class struggle. In every class society, whether it is based on slavery, serfdom, or as at present, on wage labour, the oppressing class is armed.*

The vanguard cannot stay alive long enough to effect a broad consciousness unless it possesses the latent threat of force. They’re going to claim that our clothing projects, the people’s bazaars, the people’s stores and decentralized cottage industries are fronts for stolen property. The establishment will claim that the vanguard party is feeding and clothing people with goods stolen from the old enemy culture. They’ll claim that we’re buying it from the city-state’s lumpen who steal everything they can sell, or that we’re ripping it off ourselves. Of course, this will be used to justify an attack upon our political projects, our infrastructure. The assaults will be justified by them in a dozen different ways, whether we establish ourselves in storefronts or in our homes. They will attack us—behind the fire ordinance, the sanitation department, the anonymous tip. The establishment’s mercenaries will break in shooting, and all of us who are not killed will go to jail, for violating the fire ordinance, resisting arrest, attempting murder and receiving stolen property, etc. It’s as predictable as nightfall.

I’m convinced that any serious organizing of people must carry with it from the start a potential threat of revolutionary violence. Without it, the establishment forces will succeed in isolating the political organizer and closing down

*V.I. Lenin, Selected Works.

his project before the people can feel its benefits. Self-determination requires a small, hidden, highly trained army equipped with the very best and most destructive of military weapons, and a bodyguard of counter-terrorists.

The vanguard party distinguishes itself in the service of the people and superimposes itself over the old culture throughout the city-state. Tactics designed to further the development of revolutionary consciousness must be based upon the prevailing state of class and race antagonisms created out of the new relationship. We can be certain that the nucleus of a clandestine army will already exist by then. The government’s repressive agencies will also be well infiltrated by blacks and other revolutionary people. Infiltration is the work of the professional revolutionary. Infiltrating the establishment’s protective agencies will also tend to neutralize the ruling class’s attempt to isolate the black vanguard commune from the larger body of the class structure. All efforts to isolate the vanguard community must be resisted. The Black Colony must actively invite other revolutionary people to follow their example. We must give refuge to the refugees, and eventually work out some means to coordinate our operations with theirs at every level. However, we cannot delay our own preparations toward a united black revolutionary culture. No one will undertake to aid us unless they sense the power of our movement. It is blacks who must play not only the role of liberating the Black Colony but also the leading role in the liberation of the whole city-state. To expect that someone else will take the full responsibility for our own liberation is suicide. We’ll be asked to be “patient” for another one hundred to one hundred and fifty years! We’ll get stuck with long theoretical explanations on consciousness or objective conditions when it’s clear that consciousness will not grow unless there is someone among us willing to feed it.

Consciousness grows in spirals. Growth implies feeding and being fed. We feed consciousness by feeding people, addressing ourselves to their needs, the basic and social needs, working, organizing toward a united national left. After the people have created something that they are willing to defend, a wealth of new ideals and an autonomous subsistence infrastructure, then they are ready to be brought into “open” conflict with the ruling class and its supporters. This conflict must extend to every level of capitalist production and distribution. Consciousness of our power will grow, as a result of this mass contact with the ruling forces. There is no question that people must be organized and educated to the benefits of people’s government before they can successfully move against their class enemy. However, there seems to be some question as to how seriously we should take ourselves and our work of organizing.

When we meet resistance, should we acquiesce, withdraw, wait it out or intensify? Should we meet violent reaction with a more determined violence? The type that put eighty tanks to flight in Laos? In other words, if the fascists don’t like what we’re doing and attack us through a lynch mob (the police forces and judicial branch of their government), should we relent? Or should we accept their violent reaction as a natural response to our challenge and organize against it?

Every step, every stage toward a unified black commune will meet great resistance. This resistance will come in some form of violence. It is clear that if we don’t learn to overcome all resistance, no forward movement will be made. Discovering ways of meeting and overcoming resistance, demonstrating to ourselves that “we can, ” is a fundamental antecedent to the growth of revolutionary consciousness because we’ll be under attack every step of the way. One hundred years ago it would have been the same. One hundred years from today it will be the same. We’ll take our mule and forty acres now, collectivize them, defend them, invite other revolutionary people to follow our example, make allies—then leap to destroy the fascists’ pseudo-mass-culture from within.

As the people move into more significant areas of antiestablishment projects they will be hurled violently into contact with the defenders of the present state of property relations at the level of production, distribution and property rights in general. Then we will discover that their power and their new fighting style actually depend on their greater potential for violence. The size and complexity of a thing are not an index of its strength. This struck me forcefully one evening as I flipped through one of the nation’s news weeklies and spotted a photograph of a huge self-propelled 155-mm cannon lying on its side, its barrel spiked forever. A man on foot, armed with a rocket that weighed less than four pounds, had destroyed it.

The larger and more complex the city-state, the more it is dependent upon all related parts. The cannon was hit at its base, in the moving parts of its treads, which were destroyed and the death machine fell of its own weight. How can the super-technological state operate without electricity or power, without water, transport, communications, sewage systems, utilities? None of these can be protected; their sheer size alone makes it impossible. How can the establishment protect an electrical supply line and the thousands of transformers, etc? Effective positioning of the guards is militarily impossible. A man every twenty-five feet up and down the million miles of line can’t protect it (it would also break the class that paid for the protection), since a break at any one point renders powerless huge sections of the area served. The cost of supporting the guards would bankrupt any nation. The guerrillas would simply overwhelm the guardians point by point. I think this is the essence of the poor man’s war, the essence of the guerrilla strategy, the protracted war of the worker bees.

The only valid form of union activity is seizure of union leadership by any means necessary. We must call strikes to enforce our demands on capital. To enforce the strike we must stop the plant’s power source. Standing in the gateway with a placard and a pamphlet alone will not dull a worker’s short-term interest in wage slavery. The very first impulse is to eat! With right-wing union leadership gone and the black worker revolutionized through his contact with the black commune, even the fascists who exist without any sense of community or class consciousness can possibly be won over or at least rendered neutral. Either way, they won’t be able to break strikes with the power lines down.

The power of our military strategy sitting beside our political infrastructure depends on constant attack, attack, attack. Improvisation, aggression. An attack on property, the utilities that feed the super-state, indirect and direct attacks at the productive point and distribution system.

As I stated, the Western military experts admit that the mechanized establishment guard must outnumber the attacking worker by ten to one. What they cannot afford to admit is that even with this numerical superiority they cannot win. They’re learning this in every theater of combat. In a class war, they could never even raise a ten-to-one numerical superiority! Even if they succeed in employing the degenerate elements of the lower class (created by a long history of counterpositive mobilization of reactionary mass society) as mercenaries or vigilantes in the early stages, the advantage is still ours. At ten to one, we still enjoy a strategic, military superiority if we are attacking, because they must defend so many different points vital to the order and continuity of their life-support system, all at the same time. The points to be protected will always outnumber the units who are available to protect them.

The super-technological city-state has grown so complex that it is completely dependent upon its thousands of related parts. It has grown so large that no force can be fielded to protect all its vital parts. The essence of the guerrilla technique is to cripple and finally stop the life-support system of the enemy class or state. The advantage of the anti-establishment force can be best understood by picturing the need for the establishment forces to spread themselves thin in the vain attempt to protect the mechanical base of their source of power, which, of course, works out to be the various forms of productive and nonproductive property. The mobile “have-not,” the attacker, can concentrate his forces (even though initially they are numerically inferior) to actually outnumber and overwhelm the thinned-out forces of the establishment by attacking at one or two points at a time. In Mao’s Selected Works, Vol. II, he speaks of ingenuity and mobility as necessary qualities of any guerrilla operation.

The ancients said: “Ingenuity in varying tactics depends on mother wit”; this “ingenuity,” which is what we mean by flexibility, is the contribution of the intelligent commander. Flexibility does not mean recklessness; recklessness must be rejected. Flexibility consists in the intelligent commander’s ability to take timely and appropriate measures on the basis of objective conditions after “judging the hour and sizing up the situation” (the “situation” includes the enemy’s situation, our situation and the terrain), and this flexibility is “ingenuity in varying tactics.” On the basis of this ingenuity, we can win more victories in quick-decision offensive warfare on exterior lines, change the balance of forces in our favor, gain the initiative over the enemy, and overwhelm and crush him so that the final victory will be ours.²²

If there are twenty points in the city-state to be protected, and ten units of protection, clearly an attacking force of one could destroy ten of the twenty points without opposition. The ten points that remain and are guarded by the ten units of protection must now meet the attacker on a one-to-one basis. The term “attack” explicitly means “first strike,” and “first strike” translates into “advantage.” Total repression and genocide are not possible if we organize ourselves for survival first—if we first construct the commune, a sense of community, a common interest of class. The objective conditions are present. To postpone our liberation with the excuse that the “people aren’t ready” is to underestimate them; in effect it’s like saying they don’t have the mentality to act in their defense. The repeating shotgun is the deadliest weapon in the world for close-range urban fighting. They are simple to make, maintain and use. Anyone can be effective with the scatter gun; one simply points and squeezes the trigger; if the thing to be shot is moving, follow through with your swing. Tanks are obsolete. They can be rendered harmless with a dollar’s worth of grenade, propelled from the muzzle of the shotgun by a blank cartridge. Then, as a tank moves down any city street it has placed itself in a defile. On a cost-effectiveness basis, the most destructive weapon is the gasoline bomb. Enough gasoline, soap shavings and potassium chlorate could flip a tank over on its side, or thrown from the windows of our defiles, the gasoline bomb could incinerate the largest army.

We can only be repressed if we stop thinking and stop fighting. People who refuse to stop fighting can never be repressed—they either win or they die—which is more attractive than losing and dying. The primacy of politics remains but we must now prepare for armed confrontation. By no stretch of the imagination can we hope to overthrow so determined an enemy without force.

We Will Win!

George

The Amerikan Mind

Frankenstein’s need for a servant was an expression of his diseased ego, so he created a demented, ugly creature, pathologically strong and huge.

Dear Greg,¹

The breakdown of establishment-conditioning usually occurs first at the university level. Students refuse to accept the lie that our exploitation of the world’s peoples is actually beneficial to them. They begin to refuse their share of the spoils. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale left the campus to form the Black Panther Party. The Students for a Democratic Society gave birth to the Weatherman.

The rise of socio-political institutions to their present form and complexity was not the result of chance. The corporation, the university, the unions, the mass media, the foundations, the associations, the courts, the prisons, the army (police—national and international—uniformed and disguised) from their beginnings were formulated as enforcers of state centralism. An examination focused on the history of all the major socio-political institutions of the United States (a study in the genetics of hierarchy) would certainly uncover the totally economic motive underlying the foundations of these institutions. For my purpose, I would broadly divide the major socio-political institutions into two classes, one designed by the state to move people into certain actions, and the other to discourage, curtail or completely deny certain other actions. The unintelligible vastness of these institutions makes it seem impossible that they could be owned and operated by a relatively small number of men; but the truth of this can be demonstrated by documented evidence and irrefutable case studies. The modern industrial, corporative, city-based state could never function at all without hierarchical control and an acceptance by the people of the controlling hierarchy.

“Prior conditioning,” of course! The “effects of ubiquitous self-negation inbred since childhood,” of course, again! Certainly “the pervasive nihilism of capitalist man . . .” But these are simply “effects.”

Western civilization is dying because it’s tied into an economic system that was decadent a hundred years ago. This system was certainly the calculated creation of a specific minority class. The rise of the manufacturing class was not spontaneous. It is perpetuated beyond the stage of decadence in spite of fits of outrageous disorder. Its seemingly remarkable ability to return from crisis is not proof of natural durability. Rather it is proof of a destructive will to power at any cost.

Frankenstein’s need for a servant was an expression of his diseased ego, so he created a huge, pathologically strong, demented, ugly creature. He censored the beast’s activity by making him underintelligent. He erected institutions flexible enough to keep the giant working, but rigid enough to forestall any growth of his mental faculties. A brain was grudgingly attached to the beast to provide a way for it to act. The beast worked and fought the enemies of his creator. The beast was content to watch the creator flourish. He lived through his creator. And when he finally saw himself as he was, he went mad.

The corporation, the foundation, the association, the mass media, the state-controlled unions, the universities and primary schools are all designed to move people into very specifically pre-ordered and monitored actions. The actual monitoring is done by a broader segment of the stratified slave state but the pre-ordering is done by the one-tenth of one percent, the ruling class and governing elite of the corporative arrangement. The careful observer can see immediately how the guiding instructions are held together by red tape and rubber bands so that they can be very flexible when necessary. The corporation’s flea market and the mass media are relatively new techniques of control, as are the institutional foundations and most of the associations.

The foundations, whether family or corporate, are tax-exempt financial mechanisms, ostensibly established for altruistic influences in the fields of art and culture generally. They subsidize scientific research, higher education, educational TV, etc. The Rockefellers alone control thirteen such foundations, through which they also control the oil holdings of ninety to a hundred nations in the Third World countries mainly—holdings variously estimated in value from ten to fourteen billion dollars. Similar foundations are controlled by the Fords, Kelloggs, and Carnegies, etc., etc. When the international business interests of these family financial institutions are threatened, the “tax-supported” international police are activated. After the C.I.A. fails, the special forces are called upon. When necessary, the Marine Corps and infantry intervene.

Comrade George

¹

A friend of the author.

Amerikan Justice

For their freedom to prey on the world’s people . . . whatever the cost in blood.

Dear Greg,

In order for capitalism to continue to rule, any action that threatens the right of a few individuals to own and control public property must be prohibited and curtailed whatever the cost in resources (the international wing of the repressive institutions has spent one and one-half trillion dollars since World War II), whatever the cost in blood (My Lai, Augusta, Georgia, Kent State, the Panther trials, the frame-up of Angela Davis)! The national repressive institutions (police, National Guard, army, etc.) are no less determined. The mayors that curse the rioters and the looters (Mayor Daley of Chicago has ordered them summarily executed in the streets) ignore the fact that their bosses have looted the world!!!

I refuse to make any argument with statistics compiled by the institutions and associations that I indict. Yet it is true that even official figures prove the case against capitalism. The Federal Bureau of Investigation compiles and indexes almost all information on crime in the United States—I have the figures as it states them right here: Vital Statistics—FBI Crime Report—property crimes, 87 percent of the total in 1969, 28 percent of these crimes occurring in the ghetto. Since 1960, the number of men and women prisoners in state and federal penitentiaries has fluctuated slightly around the quarter-million mark. These statistics conceal the living reality.

This is my eleventh year of being shoveled into every major prison in the most populous state in the nation—and the largest prison system in the world. What I have seen in these eleven years is the living situation. The experience is quite different from the columns of figures neatly arranged to give the impression of well-studied, detached, scientific and calculated analysis. Hidden are the facts that, at each institution I’ve been in, 30 to sometimes 40 percent of those held are black, and every one of the many thousands I’ve encountered was from the working or lumpenproletariat class. There may be a few exceptions, but I simply have not met any of them in my eleven years. Where I am confined now in San Quentin Prison, California, awaiting trial for two alleged crimes¹ conviction on either of which would subject my lungs to the poison-gas treatment, there are seventeen cells in what is euphemistically called “the adjustment center” but is far more accurately known as the hole. The A./C. is San Quentin’s triple maximum security, and all of these cells are filled—eleven of them with black men—every one of them without exception from the working class.

I’ve been arrested, interrogated or investigated more times than I care to count. I’ve learned ten times more about the process than the most expert single groups of inquisitors. From the first moment I’m brought into this scenario, I attempt to establish control over the exchanges that will take place between myself and my captors. Depending on the situation, one learns to feign either indignation, surprise, idiocy or fear. At times the peasant-philosopher face will work. I don’t think I am an exception at all, as most blacks learn by age fifteen how to handle the cretins who hire out as guns for the privileged. There is only one type of inquisitional situation that I personally cannot control—the sessions that begin with violence. In those cases, guile fails and blacks learn to fight multiple opponents while handcuffed, or at least learn how to protect the groin area. I simply have never managed to develop a technique against nine armed men who are fascinated with damaging my private parts!! But, I’m still learning!

“All black people, wherever they are, whatever their crimes, even crimes against other Blacks, are political prisoners because the system has dealt with them differently than with whites. Whitey gets the benefit of every law, every loophole, and the benefit of being judged by his peers—other white people. Blacks don’t get the benefit of any such jury trial by peers. Such a trial is almost a cinch to result in the conviction of a black person, and it’s a conscious political decision that blacks don’t have those benefits” (Howard Moore Jr., attorney, official “of” the court, but not “for” the court—he’s in a position to know—he’s honest, black, and dedicated enough to tell).

The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class- and race-sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order— it’s prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, and thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics. One can even pick that out of those Vital Statistics. Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships. The cultural traits of capitalist society that also tend to check activity—(individualism, artificial politeness juxtaposed to an aloof rudeness, the rush to learn “how to” instead of “what is”)—are secondary really, and intended for those mild cases (and groups) that require preventive measures only. The law and everything that interlocks with it was constructed for poor, desperate people like me.

Jonathan, my younger brother, understood this point perfectly. The purport of the raid on the Marin County Courthouse was more significant by far than its calculable effects. I knew him well, since he was and still is my alter ego. He went to liberate and to educate with aggressive and free action. He knew that as he proceeded in liberating there would be more action. He wasn’t a speechmaker, and neither am I. Escape from the myth, the hoax, by moving people into action against the terror of the state—counter-terrorism—is the real significance of the August 7th affair. To Jonathan, the striking exposure was “audacity, audacity, and more audacity.” Theory and practice, strategy and tactics were based in his mind on actual confrontation within “this” particular historical development. He must have calculated that foco army activity that was hidden and nameless, operating where the objective conditions for revolution already existed and had existed for a dozen decades, would survive and grow if, at the same time, the Black Panther political apparatus continued to develop its autonomous infrastructure. Proof of his theory was built right into the action: five desperate men were offered arms as a means to freedom—three took them.

Proof of the role of law within the totalitarianauthoritarian relationship was also built into the action. In a fit of reckless, mindless gunfire, one hundred automated goons shot through the bodies of a judge, district attorney, and three female noncombatants to reestablish control over all activity. To prevent certain actions, no cost in blood is too high.

It would seem that so much free fire would be difficult to explain, but it is not. Freedoms are invariably being protected with this gunfire. Freedom must then be interpreted a thousand separate ways, but it actually comes down to freedom for a few families and their friends—freedom to prey upon the world.

Acceptance of enslavement is deeply buried in the pathogenic character types of capitalism. It is a result of the sense of dread and anxiety which is the lot of all men under capitalist rule. Compulsive behavior and disordered obsessional longings are actually made synonymous with “character” in our disordered society. But to emphasize these conditions before examining the institutions from which they spring is to confuse effect with cause and further cloud the point of attack. So far, cultural analysis has established that the psychosis is so ingrained, the institutions so centralized, that what is needed is total revolution, the armed struggle between the have-nots with their vanguard and the haves with their hirelings or macabre freaks that live through them, civil war between at least these two sections of the population is the only purgative. Total revolution must be aimed at the purposeful and absolute destruction of the state and all present institutions, the destruction carried out by the so-called psychopath, the outsider, whose only remedy is destruction of the system. This organized massive violence directed at the source of thought control is the only realistic therapy.

Analysis of the oppressed mentality and the psychopathic personality that accrue from contact with the prevarications of Amerikan culture must be carefully integrated with the analysis of the source. Simple interpretation of effects tends to calcify—it certainly promotes defeatism. “Action makes the front.” One can quietly refuse to accept the constrictions of bourgeois culture, can reject himself, hate the self and turn inward. By so doing he accomplishes a form of individual revolt, but here again we find another unconscious manifestation of the thing we hate—individualism—a now attitudinal instrumentality of bourgeois culture. We cannot escape—one simply cannot reject constrictions without rejecting and putting to death the constrictor. An armed attacker cannot be ignored. Gandhi and the gurus were all abject fools. I would certainly be dead if, when critical flash points matured, I hadn’t backed my rejection with blows. I would hate to have been a Vietnamese in My

Lai without arms. I hate encounters like the one at my last court appearance on April 6, 1971,² when the enemies who attacked me had all the weapons. I would hate to run into freaks who have Mike Hammer/J. Edgar Hoover complexes without being armed. My pledge is to arms, my enemies are institutions and any men with vested interests in them, even if that interest is only a wage. If revolution means civil war —I accept, and the sooner begun the sooner done.

I don’t think the enemy can be identified any more carefully than this. Further identification must be made in the process. I feel elated that my brother died with two guns in hand. I’m going to miss him and all the others, though death in our situation is only a release. I miss people intensely. I miss him intensely, but he and the others who sought freedom died at the throat of the principal repressive institution of the empire—they died making real attempts at freedom.

I paraphrase Castro on trial after Moncada:

“I warn you, gentlemen, I have only begun!”

Toward the United Front

A new Unitarian and progressive current has sprung up in the movement centering on political prisoners. How can this unitarian conduct be developed further in the face of determined resistance from the establishment? How can it be used to isolate reactionary elements?

Unitary conduct implies a “search” for those elements in our present situation which can become the basis for joint action. It involves a conscious reaching for the relevant, the entente, and especially, in our case, the reconcilable. Throughout the centralizing authoritarian process of Amerikan history, the ruling classes have found it necessary to discourage and punish any genuine opposition to hierarchy. But there have always been individuals and groups who rejected the ideal of two unequal societies, existing one on top of the other.

The men who placed themselves above the rest of society through guile, fortuitous outcome of circumstance and sheer brutality have developed two principal institutions to deal with any and all serious disobedience—the prison and institutionalized racism. There are more prisons of all categories in the United States than in all other countries of the world combined. At all times there are two-thirds of a million people or more confined to these prisons. Hundreds are destined to be legally executed, thousands more quasi-legally. Other thousands will never again have any freedom of movement barring a revolutionary change in all the institutions that combine to make up the order of things. One third of a million people may not seem like a great number compared with the total population of two hundred million. However, compared with the one million who are responsible for all the affairs of men within the extended state, it constitutes a striking contrast. What I want to explore now are a few of the subtle elements that I have observed to be standing in the path of a much needed united front (nonsectarian) to effectively reverse this legitimatized rip-off.

Prisons were not institutionalized on such a massive scale by the people. Most people realize that crime is simply the result of a grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth and privilege, a reflection of the present state of property relations. There are no wealthy men on death row, and so few in the general prison population that we can discount them altogether. Imprisonment is an aspect of class struggle from the outset. It is the creation of a closed society which attempts to isolate those individuals who disregard the structures of a hypocritical establishment as well as those who attempt to challenge it on a mass basis. Throughout its history, the United States has used its prisons to suppress any organized efforts to challenge its legitimacy—from its attempts to break up the early Working Men’s Benevolent Association to the banning of the Communist Party during what I regard as the fascist takeover of this country, to the attempts to destroy the Black Panther Party.

The hypocrisy of Amerikan fascism forces it to conceal its attack on political offenders by the legal fiction of conspiracy laws and highly sophisticated frame-ups. The masses must be taught to understand the true function of prisons. Why do they exist in such numbers? What is the real underlying economic motive of crime and the official definition of types of offenders or victims? The people must learn that when one “offends” the totalitarian state it is patently not an offense against the people of that state, but an assault upon the privilege of the privileged few.

Could anything be more ridiculous than the language of blatantly political indictments: “The People of the State . . . vs. Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee” or “The People of the State ... vs. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins.” What people? Clearly the hierarchy, the armed minority.

We must educate the people in the real causes of economic crimes. They must be made to realize that even crimes of passion are the psycho-social effects of an economic order that was decadent a hundred years ago. All crime can be traced to objective socio-economic conditions—socially productive or counterproductive activity. In all cases, it is determined by the economic system, the method of economic organization. “The People of the State ... vs. John Doe” is as tenuous as the clearly political frame-ups. It’s like stating “The People vs. The People.” Man against himself. Official definitions of crime are simply attempts by the establishment to suppress the forces of progress.

Prisoners must be reached and made to understand that they are victims of social injustice. This is my task working from within (while I’m here, my persuasion is that the war goes on no matter where one may find himself on bourgeois-dominated soil). The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary potential. Working alone and from within a steel-enclosed society, there is very little that people like myself can do to awake the restrained potential revolutionary outside the walls. That is part of the task of the “Prison Movement.”

The “Prison Movement,” the August 7th movement and all similar efforts educate the people in the illegitimacy of establishment power and hint at the ultimate goal of revolutionary consciousness at every level of struggle. The goal is always the same: the creation of an infrastructure capable of fielding a people’s army.

Each of us should understand that revolution is aggressive. The manipulators of the system cannot or will not meet our legitimate demands. Eventually this will move us all into a violent encounter with the system. These are the terminal

years of capitalism, and as we move into more and more basic challenges to its rule, history clearly forewarns us that when the prestige of power fails a violent episode precedes its transformation.

We can attempt to limit the scope and range of violence in revolution by mobilizing as many partisans as possible at every level of socio-economic life. But given the hold that the ruling class has on this country, and its history of violence, nothing could be more certain than civil disorders, perhaps even civil war. I don’t dread either. There are no good aspects of monopoly capital, so no reservations need be recognized in its destruction. Monopoly capital is the enemy. It crushes the life force of all of the people. It must be completely destroyed, as quickly as possible, utterly, totally, ruthlessly, relentlessly destroyed.

With this as a common major goal, it would seem that anti-establishment forces would find little difficulty in developing common initiatives and methods consistent with the goals of mass society. Regretfully, this has not been the case. Only the prison movement has shown any promise of cutting across the ideological, racial and cultural barricades that have blocked the natural coalition of left-wing forces at all times in the past. So this movement must be used to provide an example for the partisans engaged at other levels of struggle. The issues involved and the dialectic which flows from an understanding of the clear objective existence of overt oppression could be the springboard for our entry into the tide of increasing world-wide socialist consciousness.

In order to create a united left, whose aim is the defense of political prisoners and prisoners in general, we must renounce the idea that all participants must be of one mind, and should work at the problem from a single party line or with a single party line or with a single method. The reverse of this is actually desirable. “From all according to ability.” Each partisan, outside the vanguard elements, should work at radicalizing in the area of their natural environment, the places where they pursue their normal lives when not attending the rallies and demonstrations. The vanguard elements (organized party workers of all ideological persuasions) should go among the people concentrated at the rallying point with consciousness-raising strategy, promoting commitment and providing concrete, clearly defined activity. The vanguard elements must search out people who can and will contribute to the building of the commune, the infrastructure, with pen and clipboard in hand. For those who aren’t ready to take that step, a “packet” of pamphlets should be provided for their education.

All of this, of course, means that we are moving, and on a mass level: Not all in our separate directions—but firmly under the disciplined and principled leadership of the Vanguard Black Panther Communist Party. “One simply cannot act without a head.” Democratic centralism is the only way to deal effectively with the Amerikan ordeal. The central committee of the people’s vanguard party must make its presence felt throughout the various levels of the overall movement.

With the example of unity in the prison movement, we can begin to break the old behavioral patterns that have repeatedly allowed bourgeois capitalism, its imperialism and fascism, to triumph over the last several decades. We tap a massive potential reservoir of partisans for cadre work. We make it possible to begin to address one of the most complex psycho-social by-products that economic man with his private enterprise has manufactured—Racism.

I’ve saved this most critical barrier to our needs of unity for last. Racism is a matter of ingrained traditional attitudes conditioned through institutions. For some, it is as natural a reflex as breathing. The psycho-social effects of segregated environments compounded by bitter class repression have served in the past to render the progressive movement almost totally impotent.

The major obstacle to a united left in this country is white racism. There are three categories of white racists: the overt, self-satisfied racist who doesn’t attempt to hide his antipathy; the self-interdicting racist who harbors and nurtures racism in spite of his best efforts; and the unconscious racist, who has no awareness of his racist preconceptions.

I deny the existence of black racism outright, by fiat I deny it. Too much black blood has flowed between the chasm that separates the races. It’s fundamentally unfair to expect the black man to differentiate at a glance between the various kinds of white racists. What the apologists term black racism is either a healthy defense reflex on the part of the sincere black partisan who is attempting to deal with the realistic problems of survival and elevation, or the racism of the government stooge organs.

As black partisans, we must recognize and allow for the existence of all three types of racists. We must understand their presence as an effect of the system. It is the system that must be crushed, for it continues to manufacture new and deeper contradictions of both class and race. Once it is destroyed, we may be able to address the problems of racism at an even more basic level. But we must also combat racism while we are in the process of destroying the system.

The self-interdicting racist, no matter what his acquired conviction or ideology, will seldom be able to contribute with his actions in any really concrete way. His role in revolution, barring a change of basic character, will be minimal throughout. Whether the basic character of a man can be changed at all is still a question. But ... we have in the immediacy of the “Issues in Question” the perfect opportunity to test the validity of materialist philosophy again, because we don’t have to guess, we have the means of proof.

The need for Unitarian conduct goes much deeper than the liberation of Angela, Bobby, Ericka, Magee, Los Siete, Tijerina, white draft-resisters, and now the indomitable and faithful James Carr.³ We have fundamental strategy to be proved—tested and proved. The activity surrounding the protection and liberation of people who fight for us is an important aspect of the struggle. But it is important only if it provides new initiatives that redirect and advance the revolution under new progressive methods. There must be a collective redirection of the old guard—the factory and union agitator—with the campus activist who can counter the ill-effects of fascism at its training site, and with the lumpenproletariat intellectuals who possess revolutionary scientific-socialist attitudes to deal with the masses of street people already living outside the system. They must work toward developing the unity of the pamphlet and the silenced pistol. Black, brown and white are all victims together. At the end of this massive collective struggle, we will uncover our new man, the unpredictable culmination of the revolutionary process. He will be better equipped to wage the real struggle, the permanent struggle after the revolution—the one for new relationships between men.

¹

The author was under indictment for two counts: first-degree murder, and assault on a non-inmate causing death which, under Section 4500 of the California Penal Code, automatically involves a sentence of death upon conviction.—Ed.

²

On April 6, 1971, at a preliminary hearing of the Soledad Brothers’ murder trial, a bailiff persisted in jabbing George Jackson in the ribs despite repeated warnings. Finally Jackson wheeled around and decked the bailiff with a karate blow to the head.—Ed.

³

Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, Ruchell Magee. Los Siete de la Raza are the seven Chicanos who were acquitted in San Francisco of the charge of killing a police officer, and who continue to be harassed by the police. Reis Tijerina is a Chicano leader imprisoned for his attempt to reassert Mexican-American ownership by right of treaty grant to large tracts of land in the Southwest. James Carr was with George Jackson during most of his years in prison. While on parole, he reportedly attempted to come to George’s assistance during the violent aftermath of the Soledad Brothers’ hearing on April 6. He was arrested and now faces the possibility of return to prison to complete his life sentence.—Ed.

After the Revolution Has Failed

After the killing is done, the ruling class goes on about the business of making profits as usual.

On Withdrawal

syllogism, n. argument with two premises and a conclusion; a logical scheme of a formal argument consisting of a major and minor premise and a conclusion which must logically be true if the premises are true.

—Merriam- Webster

After revolution has failed, all questions must center on how a new revolutionary consciousness can be mobilized around the new set of class antagonisms that have been created by the authoritarian reign of terror. At which level of social, political and economic life should we begin our new attack?

First, we, the black partisans and their vanguard party, the old and new left alike, must concede that the worker’s revolution and its vanguard parties have failed to deliver the promised changes in property relations or any of the institutions that support them. This must be conceded without bitterness, name-calling, or the intense rancor that is presently building. There have been two depressions, two great wars, a dozen serious recessions, a dozen brush wars, crisis

after economic crisis. The mass psycho-social national cohesiveness has trembled on the brink of disruption and disintegration repeatedly over the last fifty years, threatening to fly apart from its own concentric inner dynamics. But at each crisis it was allowed to reform itself; with each reform, revolution became more remote. This is because the old left has failed to understand the true nature of fascism.

We will never have a complete definition of fascism, because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class. But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define it in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be “reform.” We can make our definition more precise by adding the word “economic.” “Economic reform” comes very close to a working definition of fascist motive forces.

Such a definition may serve to clarify things even though it leaves a great deal unexplained. Each economic reform that perpetuates ruling-class hegemony has to be disguised as a positive gain for the upthrusting masses. Disguise enters as a third stage of the emergence and development of the fascist state. The modern industrial fascist state has found it essential to disguise the opulence of its ruling-class leisure existence by providing the lower classes with a mass consumer’s flea market of its own. To allow a sizable portion of the “new state” to participate in this flea market, the ruling class has established currency controls and minimum wage laws that mask the true nature of modern fascism.

Reform (the closed economy) is only a new way for capitalism to protect and develop fascism!

After the German SS agents or Italian Black Shirts kick in the doors and herd Jews and Communist partisans to death camps, after Peg-Leg White’s Black Legion terror and the Guardians of the Republic¹ and their offspring legitimize the F.B.I., in other words, after the fascists have succeeded in crushing the vanguard elements and the threat they pose is removed, the ruling class goes on about the business of making profits as usual. The significance of the “new fascist arrangement” lies in the fact that this business-as-usual is accompanied by concessions to the degenerate segment of the working class, with the aim of creating a buffer zone between the ruling class and the still potentially revolutionary segments of the lower classes.

Corporative ideals have reached their logical conclusion in the U.S. The new corporate state has fought its way through crisis after crisis, established its ruling elites in every important institution, formed its partnership with labor through its elites, erected the most massive network of protective agencies replete with spies, technical and animal, to be found in any police state in the world. The violence of the ruling class of this country in the long process of its trend toward authoritarianism and its last and highest state, fascism, cannot be rivaled in its excesses by any other nation on earth today or in history.

With each advancement in the authoritarian process and strengthening of the ruling class’s control over the system, there was a corresponding weakening of the people’s and workers’ movement.

And intellectuals still argue whether Amerika is a fascist country. This concern is typical of the Amerikan left’s flight from reality, from any truly extreme position. This is actually a manifestation of the authoritarian process seeping into its own psyche. At this stage, how can anyone question the existence of a fascist arrangement? Just consider the awesome centralization of power, and the proven fact that the largest part of the Gross National Product is in the hands of a minute portion of the population.

Of course, the revolution has failed. Fascism has temporarily succeeded under the guise of reform. The only way we can destroy it is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class. Compromises were made in the thirties, the forties, the fifties. The old vanguard parties made gross strategic and tactical errors. At the existential moment, the last revelation about oneself, not many members of the old vanguard choose to risk their whole futures, their lives, in order to alter the conditions that Huey P. Newton describes as “destructive of life.”

Reformism was allowed. The more degenerate elements of the working class were the first to succumb. The vanguard parties supported the capitalistic war adventure in World War II. Then they helped to promote the mass consumers’ market that followed the close of the war, the flea market that muted the workers’ more genuine demands. Today we are faced with a clearly different set of class antagonisms, the complexities of a particularly refined fascist economic arrangement, where the controlling elites have co-opted large portions of the lowly working class.

When we ask ourselves, Where will we attack the enemy state? we are answered, At the productive point. The next logical question is, With whom and what will we attack the fortified entrance of the productive and distributive system in a nation of short-sighted, contented, conservative workers? Obviously, the fascist movement is counterrevolution at its very center. Fascist reformism is a calculated response to the classic, scientific-socialist approach to revolution through positive mobilization of the working classes. From its inception, the fascist arrangement has attempted to create the illusion of a mass society in which the traditional capitalist ruling class would continue to play its leading role. A mass society that is not a mass society; a mass society of authoritarians whose short-term material interests are perfectly suited to the development of the perfect totalitarian state and centralized economy. The most precise definitions of fascism involve the concept of “scientific capitalism,” or “controlled capitalism,” a sophisticated, totalitarian, “learned” response to the challenge of egalitarian, scientific socialism. After its successful establishment in Spain, Portugal, Greece, South Africa and the United States of America, we are faced with the obvious question of “how to raise a new consciousness.”

We are faced with the task of raising a positive mobilization of revolutionary consciousness in a mass that has “gone through” a contra-positive, authoritarian process.

The new vanguard elements seem to agree that withdrawal from the enemy state and its social, political and economic life is the first step toward its destruction. The new vanguard elements seem to agree that the new revolutionary consciousness will develop in the struggles of withdrawal. However, after this point, agreement grows vague and is all but lost in a sea of contradiction. The contention turns on one primary question—the scope and range of violence within the revolutionary process.

After the lengthy and clearly unnecessary ideological battle that laid to rest a direct approach to revolution by the white or black worker, we are now faced with an equally unnecessary ideological battle over which of the various communal (revolutionary cultural) approaches has the stronger revolutionary validity.

The problem is compounded by the almost apolitical withdrawal of the growing Weatherman faction, and their estranged allies on campus to organic food gardens and a life of sex, music and drugs. Their Nietzschean-Hegelian withdrawal mimics the European historical experience of the last five generations. In our equation, this must be considered the minor side of the syllogism. Though revolution is in fashion, the realistic, cohesive synergism seems as yet impossibly remote.

On the other side of the equation, we have Huey Newton’s concept of black communes set well within the huge population centers of the enemy state. This concept accepts any level of violence that will be necessary to enforce the demands of the people and workers. These communes will be tied to one another by a national and international vanguard party and joined with the world’s other revolutionary societies. They are the obvious answer to all the theoretical and practical questions and problems about an Amerikan revolution—a revolution that will be carried out principally by blacks.

The question I’ve asked myself over the years runs this way: Who has done most of the dying? Most of the work? Most of the time in prison (on Max Row)? Who is the hindmost in every aspect of social, political and economic life? Who has the least short-term interest—or no interest at all—in the survival of the present state? In this condition, how could we believe in the possibility of a new generation of enlightened fascists who would dismantle the basis of their hierarchy?

Just how many Amerikans are willing to accept the physical destruction of some parts of their fatherland so that the rest of the land and the world might survive in good health? How can the black industrial worker be induced to carry out a valid worker’s revolutionary policy? What and who will guide him? The commune. The central city-wide revolutionary culture. But who will build the commune that will guide the people into a significant challenge to property rights? Carving out a commune in the central city will involve claiming certain rights as our own—out front. Rights that have not been respected to now. Property rights. It will involve building a political, social and economic infrastructure, capable of filling the vacuum that has been left by the establishment ruling class and pushing the occupying forces of the enemy culture from our midst. The implementation of this new social, political and economic program will feed and comfort all the people on at least a subsistence level, and force the “owners” of the enemy bourgeois culture either to tie their whole fortunes to the communes and the people, or to leave the land, the tools and the market behind. If he will not leave voluntarily, we will expel him—we will use the shotgun and the anti-tank rocket launcher!!

Who will build on an ideal that begins with force? The vanguard party is now nation-wide. But vanguard parties cannot build revolutions alone. Nor can a vanguard party expect full party-line agreement before it moves in the direction of the people. Revolution is illegal. It’s against the law. It’s prohibited. It will not be allowed. It is clear that the revolutionary is a lawless man. The outlaw and the lumpen will make the revolution. The people, the workers, will adopt it. This must be the new order of things, after the fact of the modern industrial fascist state.

In blacks, the authoritarian traits are mainly the effects of terrorism and lack of intellectual stimulation. The communal experience will redeem them. At present, the black worker is simply choosing the less dangerous and complicated strategy of survival. All classes and all people are subject to the authoritarian syndrome. It is an atavistic throwback to the herd instincts. But it requires only the proper trauma, the proper eco-sociological set of circumstan-

tial pressures to bring forth a revolutionary consciousness.

Racism enters, on the psycho-social level, in the form of a morbid, traditional fear of both blacks and revolutions. The resentment of blacks, and conscious or unconscious tendencies to mete out pain to blacks, throughout the history of Amerika’s slave systems, all came into focus when blacks began the move from South to North and from countryside to city to compete with whites in industrial sectors, and, in general, engage in status competition. Resentment, fear, insecurity, and the usual isolation that is patterned into every modern, capitalist industrial society (the more complex the products, the greater the division of labor; the higher the pyramid, the broader its base and the smaller the individual brick tends to feel) are multiplied by ten when racism, race antagonism, is also a factor. There is certainly no lack of evidence to prove the existence of an old and built-in character assassination of programmed racism (what class controls the nation’s educational facilities, prints the newspapers and magazines that carry the little cartoons, and omits or misrepresents us to death?) has always served to distract and defuse feelings of status deprivation suffered by the huge sectors just above the black one. Then also to account for the seemingly dual nature recognizable in the authoritarian personality (conformity, but also a strange latent destructiveness), racism has always been employed as a pressure release for the psychopathic destructiveness evinced by a people historically processed to fear, to feel the need for a decisionmaker, to hate freedom.

The revolutionary is outlawed. The black revolutionary “is a doomed man.” All of the forces of counterrevolution stack up over his head. He’s standing in the tank-trap he has dug. He lives in the cross hairs. No one can understand the feeling but himself. “From the beginning” of his revolutionary consciousness he must use every device to stay alive. Violence is a forced issue. It’s incumbent on him. The very first political programs have had to be defended with duels to the death. The children’s breakfast programs haven’t been spared. The next round of commune building could cause the third great war of the century.

We must build with the fingers of one hand wrapped around a gun (an anti-personnel weapon). We cannot leave the central city. This must be understood by the other revolutionary people if we are to move together to conclusive action.

The war will be fought in the nerve centers of the nation, the cities where Angela was finally captured as she was at work for the revolution, where Huey was found hiding and working by the government’s propaganda apparatus.

We cannot withdraw from the cities. In order to complete the revolutionary syllogism, the fascists must be forced to withdraw. And under cover of the guns which force their withdrawal, we will build the new black communes. A BLADE IN THE THROAT OF FASCISM.

¹

Probably the author is referring to the Guardians of Liberty, an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant group formed by ex-military officers and civil servants in New York in 1911. Among its founders was Nelson A. Miles, former chief of staff of the United States Army.

Fascism

Its most advanced form is here in Amerika.

Comrade John¹

I’ve just finished rereading Angela’s analysis of fascism (she’s a brilliant, “big,” beautiful revolutionary woman— ain’t she!!). I’ve studied your letters on the subject carefully. It could be productive for the three of us to get together at once and subject the whole question to a detailed historical analysis. There is some difference of opinion and interpretation of history between us, but basically I think we are brought together on the principal points by the fact that the three of us could not meet without probably causing World War III.

Give her my deepest and warmest love and ask her to review these comments. This is not all that I will have to say on the subject. I’ll constantly return to myself and reexamine. I expect I will have to carry this on for another couple of hundred pages. We’ll deal with the questions as they come up, but for now this should provoke both of you to push me on to a greater effort.

The basis of Angela’s analysis is tied into several old left notions that are at least open to some question now. It is my view that out of the economic crisis of the last great depression fascism-corporativism did indeed emerge, develop and consolidate itself into its most advanced form here in Amerika. In the process, socialist consciousness suffered some very severe setbacks. Unlike Angela, I do not believe that this realization leads to a defeatist view of history. An understanding of the reality of our situation is essential to the success of future revolutionizing activity. To contend that corporativism has emerged and advanced is not to say that it has triumphed. We are not defeated. Pure fascism, absolute totalitarianism, is not possible.

Hierarchy has had six thousand years of trial. It will never succeed for long in any form. Fascism and its historical significance is the point of my whole philosophy on politics and its extension, war. My opinion is that we are at the historical climax (the flash point) of the totalitarian period. The analysis in depth that the subject deserves has yet to be done. Important as they are, both Wilhelm Reich’s and Franz Neumann’s works² on the subject are limited. Reich tends to be overanalytical to the point of idealism. I don’t think Neumann truly sensed the importance of the antisocialist movement. Behemoth is too narrowly based on the experience of German National Socialism. So there is so much to be done on the subject and time is running out. If I am correct, we will soon be forced into the same fight that the old left avoided.

6/20/71

It is not defeatist to acknowledge that we have lost a battle. How else can we “regroup” and even think of carrying on the fight. At the center of revolution is realism. To call one or two or a dozen setbacks defeat is to overlook the ebbing and flowing process of revolution, coming closer to our calculations and then receding, but never standing still. If a thing isn’t building, it must be decaying. As one force emerges, the opposite force must yield; as one advances, the other must retreat. There is a very significant difference between retreat and defeat. I am not saying that our parents were defeated when I contend that fascist-corporativism emerged and advanced in the U.S. At the same time it was making its advance, it caused, by its very nature, an advance in world-wide socialist consciousness: “When U.S. capitalism reached the stage of imperialism, the Western great powers had already divided among themselves almost all the important markets in the world. At the end of World War II when the other imperialist powers had been weakened, the U.S. became the most powerful and richest imperialist power. Meanwhile, the world situation was no longer the same: the balance of forces between imperialism and the socialist camps had fundamentally changed; imperialism no longer ruled over the world, nor did it play a decisive role in the development of the world situation” (Vo Nguyen Giap).

In my analysis, I’m simply taking into account the fact that the forces of reaction and counterrevolution were allowed to localize themselves and radiate their energy here in the U.S. The process has created the economic, political and cultural vortex of capitalism’s last re-form. My views correspond with those of all the Third World revolutionaries. And if taken in the international sense, they are aggressive and realistic.

The second notion that stands in the way of our understanding of fascist-corporativism is a semantic problem. When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape-recorder that cost him a week’s labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geo-political affair where only one political party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed. But examine that definition of totalitarianism, comrade. No opposition parties are allowed in China, Cuba, North Korea or North Vietnam. Such a narrow definition condemns the model revolutionary societies to totalitarianism. Despite the presence of political parties, there is only one legal politics in the U.S.—the politics of corporativism. The hierarchy commands all state power. There are thousands of ways, however, to attack it and place that power in the hands of the people.

6/20/71

All levels of struggle must be conceived as inclined planes leading inexorably to a point where armed conflict will engulf two or more sections of the people.

Armed struggle or organized violence is the natural outcome of a sequence of historical events that have matured to the point of impasse. This is not to say that war is for us the only immediate recourse or the spontaneous result of a breakdown in lesser forms of political activity. I have always tried to emphasize that through every stage of political mobilization there must be a corresponding and equal military mobilization of the people’s forces. One is inextricably tied into the other, and not simply for the reason unwittingly put forward by the old guard that fascism allows for no valid opposition political activity, though there is some truth in that position. My position is based on historical precedents that indicate the probable scope and range of violence in an Amerikan revolution.

In the present class structure we represent the group with the greatest revolutionary potential. We are black—the significance of which needs very little analysis here, though I will go into the mechanics of race at length later in dealing with the contextual structure of fascist hierarchy. But mainly my position is rooted in the long history of the Amerikan business oligarchy’s penchant for violent repression of any forces that have threatened its centralist movement, and in the very natural defense reflexes of any form of state power. Although, as victims of one of history’s most brutal contradictions, as the poorest of the poor, as blacks, it is quite justifiable and completely possible for us to destroy this country as a modern nation-state, to attack it with a totally destructive counter-sweep of frustrated retaliatory rage; that is not our purpose. As revolutionaries, it is our objective to move ourselves and the people into actions that will culminate in the seizure of state power. Our real purpose is to redeem not merely ourselves but the whole nation and the whole community of nations from colonial-community economic repression.

The U.S. has established itself as the mortal enemy of all people’s government, all scientific-socialist mobilization of consciousness everywhere on the globe, all anti-imperialist activity on earth. The history of this country in the last fifty years and more, the very nature of all its fundamental elements, and its economic, social, political and military mobilization distinguish it as the prototype of the international fascist counterrevolution. The U.S. is the Korean problem, the Vietnamese problem, the problem in the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, the Middle East. It’s the grease in the British and Latin Amerikan guns that operate against the masses of common people.

6/21/71

The nature of fascism, its characteristics and properties have been in dispute ever since it was first identified as a distinct phenomenon growing out of Italy’s state-supported and developed industries in 1922. Whole libraries have been written around the subject. There have been a hundred “party lines” on just exactly what fascism is. But both Marxists and non-Marxists agree on at least two of its general factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class nature. These two factors almost by themselves identify the U.S. as a fascist-corporative state.

An exact definition of fascism concerns me because it will help us identify our enemy and isolate the targets of revolution. Further, it should help us to understand the workings of the enemy’s methodology. Settling this question of whether or not a mature fascism has developed will finally clear away some of the fog in our liberation efforts. This will help us to broaden the effort. We will not succeed until we fully accept the fact that the enemy is aware, determined, disguised, totalitarian, and mercilessly counterrevolutionary. To fight effectively, we must be aware of the fact that the enemy has consolidated through reformist machination the greatest community of self-interest that has ever existed.

Our insistence on military action, defensive and retaliatory, has nothing to do with romanticism or precipitous idealistic fervor. We want to be effective. We want to live. Our history teaches us that the successful liberation struggles require an armed people, a whole people, actively participating in the struggle for their liberty!

The final definition of fascism is still open, simply because it is still a developing movement. We have already discussed the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.

No one will fully comprehend the historical implications and strategy of fascist corporativism except the true fascist manipulator or the researcher who is able to slash through the smoke screens and disguises the fascists set up. Fascism was the product of class struggle. It is an obvious extension of capitalism, a higher form of the old struggle— capitalism versus socialism. I think our failure to clearly isolate and define it may have something to do with our insistence on a full definition—in other words, looking for exactly identical symptoms from nation to nation. We have been consistently misled by fascism’s nationalistic trappings. We have failed to understand its basically international character. In fact, it has followed international socialism all around the globe. One of the most definite characteristics of fascism is its international quality.

6/22/71

The trends toward monopoly capital began effectively just after the close of the Civil War in Amerika. Prior to its emergence, bourgeois democratic rule could be said to have been the predominant political force inside Amerikan society. As monopoly capital matured, the role of the old bourgeois democracy faded in process. As monopoly capital forced out the small dispersed factory setup, the new corporativism assumed political supremacy. Monopoly capital can in no way be interpreted as an extension of old bourgeois democracy. The forces of monopoly capital swept across the Western world in the first half of this century. But they did not exist alone. Their opposite force was also at work, i.e., “international socialism”—Lenin’s and Fanon’s—national wars of liberation guided not by the national bourgeois but by the people, the ordinary working-class people.

At its core, fascism is an economic rearrangement. It is international capitalism’s response to the challenge of international scientific socialism. It developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism’s dilapidation. The common feature of all instances of fascism is the opposition of a weak socialist revolution. When the fascist arrangement begins to emerge in any of the independent nation-states, it does so by default! It is simply an arrangement of an established capitalist economy, an attempt to renew, perpetuate and legitimize that economy’s rulers by circumflexing and weighing down, diffusing a revolutionary consciousness pushing from below. Fascism must be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis. It is the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried—a consciousness that was compromised. “When revolution fails . . . it’s the fault of the vanguard parties.”

It is clear that class struggle is an ingredient of fascism. It follows that where fascism emerges and develops, the anticapitalist forces were weaker than the traditionalist forces. This weakness will become even more pronounced as fascism develops! The ultimate aim of fascism is the complete destruction of all revolutionary consciousness.

6/23/71

Our purpose here is to understand the essence of this living, moving thing so that we will understand how to move against it.

This observer is convinced that fascism not only exists in the U.S.A, but has risen out of the ruins of a once eroded and dying capitalism, phoenixlike, to its most advanced and logical arrangement.

One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of a U.S.A, totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will triumph.

On May 14, 1787, the Constitutional Convention with George Washington presiding officer, the work of framing the new nation’s constitution proceeded with fifty-five persons and only two were not employers!!!

There have been many booms and busts in the history of capitalism in this nation and across the Western Hemisphere since its formation. The accepted method of pulling the stricken economy out of its stupor has always been to expand. It was pretty clear from the outset that the surplus value factor eventually leads to a point in the business cycle when the existing implementation of the productive factors makes it impossible for the larger factor of production (labor) to buy back the “fruits of its labor.’’ This leads to what has been erroneously termed “overproduction.” It is, in fact, underconsumption. The remedy has always been to expand, to search out new markets and new sources of cheaper raw materials to recharge the economy (the imperialist syndrome).

Conflicts of interests develop, of course, between the various Western nations and eventually lead to competition for these markets. The result is always an ever-increasing international centralization of the various capitalists’ elites, world-wide cartels: International Telegraphic Unions (now International Tele-communications Union), universal postal union, transportation, agricultural, and scientific syndicates. Before World War I there were forty-five or fifty such international syndicates, not counting the purely business cartels. The international quality of capitalism is not happenstance. It is clearly in the interests of the ruling class to expand and unite. I am one Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Fanonist who does not completely accept the idea that the old capitalist competitive wars for colonial markets were actually willed by the various rulers of each nation, even though such wars stimulated their local economies and made it possible to promote nationalism among the lower classes. War taken to the point of diminishing returns weakens rather than strengthens the participants, and if the rulers of these nations were anything at all they were good businessmen. Expansion, then, which often led unavoidably to war, was the traditional recourse in the solving of problems created by a vacuous, uncontrollable system, which never considered any changes in its arrangement, its essential dynamics, until it came under a very real, directly threatening challenge from below to its very existence. Fascism in its early stages is a rearrangement of capitalist implementation in response to a sharpening, threatening, but weaker egalitarian socialist consciousness.

In regional or national economic crisis the traditional remedies also include measures which stop just short of massive expansion on the international level. Traditional controls short of expansion and war have always existed in the form of government intervention, tariffs, public expenditure, government export subsidy and limited control of the capital market and import licenses, and monopolies have always used government to help direct investment.

Classes at War

Mobilization and Contramobilization

Enough time has passed now since the emergence of fascism, the extreme crisis that precipitated it, and the hostilities that caused its early development to view it with less of the coloring that sensationalism and war propaganda necessarily create. We should now be able, after time has somewhat dulled the traumatic exchanges of debate and struggle, to analyze fascism objectively-its antecedents, its prime characteristics, and its goals. In denying its ideological importance I am not suggesting that all of its advocates (of the especially early period) were opportunist or deranged individuals reacting to a personal threat to their own situation within the society. A great many of the early fascist intellectuals were responding

to a very real social situation. As intelligentsia, keepers of the particular nation’s system of values, art forms and political thought, they felt it was their responsibility to attempt to resolve a growing social problem. My insistence upon the nonimportance of ideology indeed rests squarely upon this point: that most of the fascist intellectuals were reacting to the uprootedness and social disintegration of the particular moment, and with each change in the face of this state of affairs they were in large part forced to repudiate most of their former ideology. Weight is given to this observation by the fact that early fascism included an amalgam of expressionists, anarcho-syndicalists, futurists, Hegelian idealists, theoretical syndicalists, nationalists and, in the case of the Spanish Falange, intellectual anarchists.

The whole theme of this early face of fascism was not merely anti-communist but fundamentally a general indictment of decadence, bourgeois decadance. Fascism also absorbed some socialists. In 1914 the Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria formed itself out of a group of super-nationalist patriots favoring Italian intervention in the war against the Central Powers. Benito Mussolini, a leader of the extreme syndicalist faction of the Socialist Party, supported them vehemently in his newspaper II Popolo d'Italia, and of course this resulted in his expulsion from the party. In March 1919, after the deep disillusionment and unrest caused by the Italian participation in the war, Mussolini formed the first real fascio. The intellectuals that supported him did not do so out of a sense of the usual role of the intellectual in society (i.e., to educate, to set the values of that society) in a time of extreme social disintegration and economic crisis. Men like Benedetto Croce and Arturo Toscanini, and others like Giovanni Gentile and Gabriele D’Annunzio (one of Italy’s greatest poets), supported Mussolini almost out of desperation at what they felt to be a destructive national breakdown. All four were elitist and may have also felt that their status as intellectuals was also threatened. Recall, the Russian revolution had shocked the world to its foundations about this time. The general disregard of the Socialist Party for any art form or scientific activity that did not serve the state, and its tendency to factionalize and procrastinate alienated many of the nation’s top intellectuals.

But the final reason why the importance of ideology in fascism must be denied is the fact that it exists in more than one form. In fact, historically it has proved to have three different faces. One “out of power” that tends almost to be revolutionary and subversive, anticapitalist and antisocialist. One “in power but not secure”—this is the sensational aspect of fascism that we see on screen and read of in pulp novels, when the ruling class, through its instrumental regime, is able to suppress the vanguard party of the people’s and workers’ movement. The third face of fascism exists when it is “in power and securely so. ” During this phase some dissent may even be allowed. In Italy, Trilussa the poet wrote and published more bitter and biting satires attacking the political regime than can be found in any of the so-called liberal-democratic states. In April 1925, three years after the fascist

March on Rome, Benedetto Croce was able to publish a clearly anti-fascist manifesto.

The finished product, the actual fascist arrangement, is diametrically opposed to its original ideology. The regime turns openly traditionalist and idiots like Mussolini receive the favor and compliments of other idiots like President Roosevelt, Bernard Shaw, Du Pont, Kennedy, and H.G. Wells. This stems from an inevitable conflict between the notion of a new spiritualistic man and the theory of the ethical state. The ideals of obedience and creativity, authority and freedom, are so contradictory of each other, so mutually exclusive, that the ideology of fascism could never be taken seriously.

The pseudo-intellectual origins of fascism can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece. The German National Socialist apologist Alfred Baumler and expressionist Gottfried Benn both recognized Hegel, as did some of the Italian intellectuals and Eastern European fascists. The Western Europeans, however, favored the primitive, withdrawn ideals of Nietzsche or a confused combination of Nietzsche and Hegel with a bit of Plato’s philosopher king added for window dressing. Actually, there have been as many different fascist ideals and arrangements as there have been fascist societies. Which brings us to the relevant point of inquiry. The importance or form of a particular political regime can never be understood simply as it stands alone. Its social and economic past must be investigated and clearly defined before the distinctive being of the political realm takes shape.

It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that Germany and Italy reached nation-state status. Their heavy industrial sectors were rapidly expanding and coming into conflict with the traditionalist economic sectors. Though there were some clashes of interest within the extended family of the ruling classes at the point of their emergence into Western bourgeois culture, the section controlling the largest share of the GNP in all cases finally succeeded in gaining an even greater hold over the direction of the economy, with class interest generally working a compromise. The final result always involved a higher degree of centralization of power and control. I term this contra-positive mobilization. It occurs when the capitalist industrial sector of a particular society succeeds in altering the preexisting equilibrium in its favor. The period in question was characterized by the movement of masses from the traditional agricultural sector into the sweat shops (large and medium) of the cities. A policy was designed by this capitalist class to limit the range of choices of the newly mobilized masses. But “the specter of communism” was “haunting Europe.” The working masses began to organize and exert increasing influence in the realm of politics. This we will term positive mobilization.

So a three-sided political struggle opened the twentieth century. Actually it was a two-sided struggle: the proletariat against the ruling class. A multitude of conflicts existed within the ruling class, particularly between the older traditionalist sectors and the manufacturing class. Within these two factions there were a number of separate interest groups. The corporative ideal had its roots in this conflict. Elitist, conservative economists like Pareto theorized around such concepts as “governing elites,” and “general equilibrium.’’ The object of course was to diffuse the positive mobilization of the working class. The system itself was ostensibly designed to balance the interests of all economic classes and substructural groups. However in fact, its principal purpose was to check the growth of the vanguard party’s influence on the working class. In its beginning, especially in Italy, it was too vague and difficult to control. General equilibrium was never reached and class struggle went on unabated. Class consciousness sharpened and the old bourgeois democratic states, torn from within and in conflict with each other, rushed toward their own ruin.

There is another form of mass mobilization that has strong socio-economic significance. It lies between positive and contra-positive mobilization. It involves the men who were uprooted to serve in nation-state wars. Those who were recruited from the agricultural sector generally gravitated to the cities after their release, further dislocating the economy in favor of the modern sector. The traditional agricultural sector was forced to mechanize (modernize) and pull marginal land out of production. In some areas agriculture collapsed altogether. The result was the need to import foodstuffs and other agricultural products. This may or may not have damaged the overall economy, but in any case it represented another function turned over to the modern sector.

After World War I, international capitalism went through an expansion phase of the business cycle. At its base were the regenerative effects of war on capitalist production and speculation. But the boom was brief. The great war had taken the whole business of destruction of surplus to the point of diminishing returns. The years 1920 to 1925 were spent in recession and depression across the Western world. The few years that followed—from 1925 to 1929—business “roared” back to recovery and expansion. Industrial manufacturing around the Western world and parts of the Third World (Japan, Argentina, Brazil) increased by 25 percent. The volume of world trade increased accordingly. However, an increase in the arts of agricultural production, under the strain to modernize without a corresponding increase in the ability of the great laboring masses to buy back what was being produced, precipitated a sharp fall in the price structure of foodstuffs in one of the world’s largest agricultural centers, the United States. It was underconsumption (not overproduction), and it led to the fatal stock market crash of 1929. The whole Western world went into recession and deep depression.

Two countries were little affected by the general breakdown: Russia, which had taken itself off the wheel with a successful socialist revolution, and Italy, which had established a strong economic centralization that tended to close her economy off from the other bourgeois states. Italy had already established fascism shortly after World War I during the 1920-25 economic crisis. That war had mobilized millions of Italians, most of whom were uprooted from overtraditionalist sectors of the proletariat. They had gone through the changes that most other Western countries were about to adopt. The key element that made the economic policy of fascist arrangements unique was the emphasis on “reform through government intervention. ” The opposite of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” working to coordinate economic activity. The opposite of the French revolutionary battle cry “laissez faire.”

Big business was in a crisis, of course, after the short boom following World War I. The giant cartels and the national industrial and financial monopolies were starved to the bone in both periods of fascist rearrangements (the early twenties and all of the thirties). This gave the movement its seemingly middle-class antecedents. Where large-scale manufacturing was not in complete control, its straining to emerge as the dominant force within the economy was resisted by the petit bourgeois, the landed classes and the medium proprietor. Here we see fascism in its out-of-power “stage one. ” We hear its language sounding deceptively anticapitalist: “parasitic capitalism,” “illegitimate capital,” “rapacious capital,” etc., etc. This was true in Italy and with early fascism, in Falangist Spain and in Germany.

Mussolini, who set up the first successful fascist regime, was a man trained all of his life in the revolutionary tactics and strategy of scientific socialism!! His departure from the international socialist movement dated from the moment he gave his unreasonable support to a nation-state war in which the working class of one or more nations was manipulated into the murder of the working class of other nations by the ruling classes of the respective states.

His opposition to the Socialist Party and his participation in reformist capitalism were no doubt due to the factionalism and basically reformist attitude of the Socialist Party. In spite of the fact that the Socialists won 156 seats in the Chamber in the elections of 1919 (over 50 percent more than the next largest political party, the Catholic Popular Party) and won majorities in the councils of 2,202 communes and 26 provinces (there were 8,507 communes and 69 provinces) in the general administration elections of the following year, and in spite of the fact that the Socialist General Confederation of Labor had grown from 300,000 members before World War I to almost 2.5 million members in 1920, the Socialists still seemed powerless to solve the nation’s economic problems with the promised revolution. In 1920 the Socialist Party seized control of all the nation’s steelmanufacturing plants but, incredibly, returned them to the private interests. Several accounts claim that the workers couldn’t run the plants—but if the makers of steel can’t make steel . . . ? Obviously it was a problem of direction and management in the vanguard party. There were strikes, slowdowns, lockouts and the kinds of disorders that precede revolution (or counterrevolution). In the years following the war and during the early depression of 1920-25 Italy could have gone either socialist or fascist. There were partisans enough in both parties to lead the uprooted, disintegrating society into a new direction. The difference was in the nature of the leadership, along with the question of who would be willing to commit their whole fortunes and futures to the battle.

Mussolini took his Black Shirt army and moved to the fight killing and suppressing his opposition for the interests of an alarmed industrial-traditionalist elite. He was well educated in the science of positive mobilization, which made him the natural architect of a contra-positive mobilization intended to diffuse the working-class movement. He “seized power” in 1922 with the full support of the northern industrialists, the petit bourgeois, and the older traditionalist agrarian interests. The 1921 elections left his party with only 35 seats out of a possible 535 in the parliamentary body. But by applying violence judiciously and scientifically as he had learned from Lenin, he was able to force the abdication of the king and the constitutional monarchy and form the first political regime representing the new direction of capitalist development. “Eyes right”—he pumped bullets into the old left and new life into capitalism. The people were to exist solely for the state (the ruling class). This was the very antithesis of socialism. This period marked the “second face” of fascism, “the dark night” when it was still insecure.

But it went on to develop a “closed economy” with directed investment in public works projects. It proceeded to fill the economic vacuum with surplus capital and supernationalism.

“Believe, fight, obey.” State-protected industries, mainly in munitions and shipbuilding. Italy extended her power facilities and opened new marginal agricultural land for its new slaves. New educational facilities and new “educators” (out of 1,250 university professors only twelve refused to take the academics’ oath of loyalty to the regime in 1931) were also part of the reforms. Taken all together the reforms turned out to be extreme reaction. The government of 1870 had seized the papal states. The regime brought back the old religion. In 1929, in spite of the unrewarding experiences of World War I, the regime was allowed to make war again in Africa, in Europe. This marked the “third face” of fascism—in power and secure.

The point here is that fascism emerged out of weakness in the preexisting economic arrangement and in the old left. And the weakness must be assigned to the vanguard party, not the people. The People’s Party failed to direct the masses properly with positive suppression of their class enemies and their goons. Mussolini was able to proclaim that fascism held the only solution to the people’s problem—by default. Fascism, the new arrangement, the rearrangement, the strengthening and reforming of laissez-faire competitive capitalism, was antisocialist from its inception. It attempted to conceal the reality of class struggle by disguising itself as a new solution to “national problems,” by deifying the interests of the “whole state”—which turned out to be the interests only of the state’s ruling classes.

Fascism is always a response to a threat to the establishment. Any anti-establishment actions taken by the strictly political arm of a forming fascist arrangement are simply attempts to centralize or upstage the capitalist industrial sector—either to establish it, as in Spain, or modernize it, as in those cases where marginal productive interests are absorbed or destroyed by the arrangement. It is significant to note that no fascist regime “in power” has advocated the abolition of any form of private ownership. The fascist regime and private ownership work hand in hand. No modern political regime can exist for long without the cooperation of those who control the means of production.

The shock troops of fascism on the mass political level are drawn from members of the lower-middle class who feel the upward thrust of the lower classes more acutely. These classes feel that any dislocation of the present economy resulting from the upward thrust of the masses would affect their status first. They are joined by that sector of the working class which is backward enough to be affected by nationalistic trappings and the loyalty syndrome that sociologists have termed the “authoritarian personality.” One primary aim of the fascist arrangement is to extend and develop this new pig class, to degenerate and diffuse working-class consciousness with a psycho-social appeal to man’s herd instincts. Development and exploitation of the authoritarian syndrome is at the center of totalitarian capitalism (fascism). It feeds on a small but still false sense of class consciousness and the need for community. The collective spirit in fascism is a morbid phenomenon that grows out of the psychopathology of mob behavior.

With each development in the fascist arrangement, the marriage between the political elite and economic elite becomes more apparent. The integration of the various sectors of the total economic elite becomes more pronounced. The Rumanian Iron Guard was no exception. It would have eventually bedded down with the “owners” and “financiers” and integrated the archaic sectors of the traditionist capitalist elites with the modern sectors had it not encountered the Red Army.

The generals and colonels of the various Latin Amerikan fascist regimes are attempting contra-positive mobilization and functioning as an instrument to balance the interests of the traditionalist with the more modern sectors of the neo-colonial nations. It is very misleading to regard them as the “ruling class” of such nations, or to consider them as part of a populistic movement. As in Rumania and Spain, state intervention simply serves the best interests of a diminishing capitalist ruling class by restructuring it and destroying the people’s labor movement. Capitalist political regimes cannot exist of their own. Without the support of government, capitalism simply could not prevail. Peron was a fascist. The peace he worked out between labor and “owner” was subtle and disguised but nonetheless fascist in that it appeased and diffused the worker’s resentment of the nonworker and effected a quite efficient counter-positive mobilization. Peron maintained an apparent popular appeal throughout his years as head of state because of the vanguard party’s willingness to settle for reformism and tokens in a less than junior partner relationship with capital. His arrangement of the fascist state was indeed singular. Like the U.S.A., the original structure of the society in which he had to work his scientific manipulations had only one available sector large enough and uprooted enough (without strong left direction) to carry his movement—labor. Peron the fascist found his strongest support in labor. He was finally deposed when he lost the favor of the economic elite. At heart all fascist manipulators are elitist and revere private ownership. They are backward and reactionary to the ultimate extreme of self-destruction. Peron might have held on to his position had he chosen to serve the laboring class honestly and make it a genuine power base for the society—one which truly embraced their interests—by nationalizing the productive facilities and turning them over to labor’s management. But fascists would rather die or flee than support the total revolution. So they must be slain!

The very first step in establishing the “whole interest of the state,’’ the combine, the corporate state, is to dismantle the working-class movement and replace it either with a state-controlled organ or no organization at all. The corporate laws passed in Italy in 1934 served only to sanction the complete destruction of the proletarian movement. At the same time they set up an automatic defense mechanism against future labor activity. In disputes, labor was represented by men sworn either to the state or without the skill and intelligence to effect labor’s demands. The manufacturing class had long since literally married into the regime. In Italy the fascist party cadre spread throughout the nation organizing people left aimless by the failure of the positive mobilization of the socialist vanguard parties: people who had dropped out, defected; people who became uprooted and unemployed either by the war or the deflated economy. This organizing must be considered contra-positive mobilization in that its intent was to inflate the capitalist economy and deflate the worker’s and people’s influence and control over the economy. With easy credit, inflationary financing, and increased government sponsorship of public works projects, fascism in Italy, Germany and Japan succeeded in reconstructing capitalist productive institutions and traditional property relations. After the takeover, Italy recovered rapidly from the 1920-25 postwar depression. The ordinary complexities created by inflationary budgeting did not immediately manifest themselves because of the preexisting state of the economy. The untapped productive factors— capital and labor—were grinding to a standstill. Cost of living and cost of production under those circumstances did not immediately rise to the point of crisis (diminishing returns for capital, decrease in real wages of labor). Later in both Italy (1925-26) and Germany (1937-38) this inflationary budgeting showed damaging trends and set off a chain reaction in Germany that may have eventually led to its downfall. However, the heart of the fascist economy is an attempt at control through centralization: monopoly capital control, price fixing, wage freezes, and carefully balanced foreign trade.

The first currency crisis stimulated by Italy’s inflationary policies (initiated in 1925) resulted in the stabilizing of the lira by decree in 1927. A controlled deflationary period followed, effected through the banking systems which the regime influenced by decree or advice. Private interests protected themselves from totally destructive competition by using the regime as referee. After the Great Depression and the international rise of fascist states by default, refinements in its simple currency control methods were introduced. The replacement of competition with cooperation among the private interests became more standardized. The Germans realized that inflationary currency control would have little real effect on the expansion of heavy industry without also controlling the capital market. Direction of investment was also a key factor in the arrangement. Again, the regime functioned as a centralizing, mitigating influence. Real wages began to fall and industrial production rose. Considered against the Gross National Product, investment rose 25 percent by 1937 in Germany. The same 25 percent figure held true for Japan in the middle and late thirties. From 15 percent of GNP at the lowest point of the Great Depression in fascist Italy, annual average investment in industry rose to 19 or 20 percent in the years 1936-40. Because Italian fascism was already established when the entire Western capital market’s banking system failed, there was a sizable amount of quasi-government ownership. The “Industrial Reconstruction Institute” established by the regime was quite simply a financial institution, a huge bank. It also indirectly owned or influenced large sectors of the nation’s heavy industry—a further hint at an upward thrust of the middle classes to fill in sections of the traditional ruling class destroyed by the forces of the business cycle. In general, the developments and experiments in controlled capitalism resulted in a concentration of economic power in the large monopolies. The crisis in German foreign exchange murdered the small businessman. Small agricultural units tended to disappear because of low wages, low consumption and large increases in the arts of agricultural production. The necessity for government intervention increased as the interests of the private elites generated new tensions. The breakdown of the big industrial pattern into sections, the regulation or elimination of real competition except, of course, for labor when it was short, and the control of labor organizations basically comprised the whole of the new fascist “economic arrangement” which attempted to reduce the vast strata of classes and class interests of the preexisting state of the economy to just the two principal classes—the haves and the have-nots.

The psycho-social dimensions of fascism become quite complex, but they can be simplified by thinking of them as part of a collective bargaining process carried on between all the elites of the particular state with the regime acting as arbitrator. The regime’s interests are subject to those of the ruling class. Labor is a partner in this arrangement. At the head of any labor organization in the fascist state, there is an elite which is tied to the interests of the regime—and consequently tied also to the economic status quo.

The trappings of this pseudo mass society are empty, cheap, spectacular leisure sports; parades where strangers meet, shout each other down and often trample each other to death on the way home; mass consumption of worthless super-suds or aspirin; ritualistic, ultra-nationalistic events on days to glorify the idiots who died at war or other days to deify those who sent them out to die. A mass society that is actually a mass jungle.

At its core, fascism is capitalistic and capitalism is international. Beneath its nationalist ideological trappings, fascism is always ultimately an international movement.

Many of the fascist regimes that failed or lacked thrust —the Belgian Rexists, the Dutch N.S.B. (National Socialist Movement) Japan’s arrangement, Rumania’s Iron Guard— were all essentially too imitative and inflexible. Even the totalitarians must be supple and responsive if they are to survive. Peronism was imitative as was the Brazilian inte-gratistas. They were emulating their colonial masters in the U.S.A. So one fascist regime falls to another more efficient fascist regime.

Two factors must be seriously considered when analyzing the two largest fascist states in Latin Amerika—Brazil and Argentina. Their dependence on foreign trade and their neo-colonial status, which involves dependence on “foreign investment.” When exports fall as they did during the depression of the thirties, the value of the national currency must also fall, and it follows that imports automatically decrease. The battle to balance payments begins, necessitating massive governmental intervention which leads inexorably to inflationary domestic economic policy and sometimes to a conflict of interest with the ruling class of the parent nation. Concern for balance of payments determines internal economic motives. The deficit financing, the attempt to control incomes (by controlling labor), price fixing, government stockpiling of agricultural surpluses, positive direction of investment and the balancing of the interests of the dualistic economy’s elites can all be pointed to as evidence of an attempt to employ the centralist controls that characterize the classic fascist arrangement.

The first fascist regime of Brazil was headed by Vargas.

It lasted from 1930 to 1945. Coffee exports formed 70 percent of the nation’s GNP prior to Vargas’ takeover and the Depression. When international trade (especially in agricultural goods) collapsed, Vargas was forced to attempt experiments with the so-called closed economy. New internal markets had to be created, investment and motives relocated, industrialization attempted. But all of this planning, though successful to an extent, was still basically imitative and did not accurately reflect the realities of the nation’s inability to accumulate capital.

It is extremely important not to confuse the three faces of fascism when studying Latin Amerika. The second phase (in power but not secure) is the really significant part of the whole fascist episode. Regime after regime has failed to increase internal demand or unseat the traditionalist landed elite in favor of the small industrial interests; this means a permanent dependence on foreign trade and investment for machine tools, for weapons to control the people’s movements, and for raw materials to feed their light industries and flea markets. Consequently we see these areas as the most glaring dichotomy of socio-economic injustice. In the shadow of their plush beach resorts which attract degenerates from all over the Western world, literally within rifle shot, live the people who service these vacation-resort complexes in disease-infested corrugated tin shanties on hillsides constantly ravaged by mudslides. A strange combination of the first two phases of fascism. Without the massive military aid of the United States, Gestapo “death squads,’’ and the most intensive rightist terror, the guns of liberation would by now have certainly filled the streets and forests with blood “to the horse’s brow.” It is important never to lose sight of Latin Amerika’s neo-colonial status. A victory for the people’s liberation armies entails a victory over international capitalism and especially a victory over their colonial masters. The puppet regimes of these areas cannot move firmly into phase three of the fascist arrangement for two reasons. The people are willing to use arms and are learning to use them more effectively, and because the regimes are imitative, not indigenous, they do not reflect the real interests of the nations’ elites, but rather the interests of the ruling elites of the parent imperial nation, the U.S.A.

Germany attempted to rearm, deflate its currency, and at the same time continue to meet the war-swollen demands of heavy industry. It finally fell of its own weight. The fascist economic arrangement failed under the pressure of war in Germany, in Austria, in Italy and Japan, as later it failed the first regimes in Brazil and Argentina. The principal failing was very much the same that brought down laissez faire. The capitalist business cycle cannot be controlled. Inflationary spasmodic attacks, regional recession and depression pursue capitalism in all its forms like a nemesis, break its spirit, reduce its top-heavy bureaucratic backbone to jelly. Inflation, at first the key to regeneration after an extended collapse, ultimately leads to complex problems that seem to be beyond regulatory remedy. To control it by compressing wage demands always turns out to be politically unsound.

Class consciousness in Germany was better developed than in any other European nation before and after the fascist takeover, so consciousness “alone” is obviously not the factor that determines which way a disintegrating society will develop—fascist or socialist. The task of defusing the people’s labor movement and balancing it in favor of the few special individual heavy industrial firms (Reichswerke-Her-mann Göring-Krupp) and the vital interests of the increasingly important chemical industry (I. G. Farben, etc.), fell to the regime-sponsored Labor Front. Its first attempt to appease labor came in the form of slightly improved working conditions, meaningless slogans like “Strength through Joy” which echoed the Anglo-Amerikan work ethic. Even after the forcible suppression of the vanguard party by the Gestapo in the first years of the regime, the potential political power of labor (due to the workers’ importance in the production of heavy armaments) was such that really effective measures for controlling it were not devised throughout the tenure of the Third Reich. Wage increases couldn’t be avoided. Rigorous state controls replaced mild repression and propaganda only after the Sudentenland affair of 1938 and the accentuated armaments drive of 1939. Because wages could not be successfully held down (the individual firms were after profits, bear in mind; consequently they devised many indirect incentives designed to attract a shrinking labor market), measures were taken to limit the movement of laborers from place to place, and the other factors of production were openly channeled into the armament sectors by stringent government intervention. All idealistic, ideological pretenses were dropped. Racism and the interests of the military-industrial complex formed the economic and psycho-social motives of the society and shook it apart.

The German economy was already in ruins by the time the Reich expanded into Russia. This expansion itself was a symptom of the economy’s death-directed lack of discipline. Its own internal contradictions and deceits destroyed it. An industrial-military-based economy must expand to live, must forcibly balance trade in its favor to survive. No amount of logic or dissent can influence the men who have vested interests in the life of such an arrangement! Only organized violence and armed struggle could have stopped them before they lost their minds and destroyed so many lives. The counter-terrorism of the socialist parties’ vanguard and the proper direction of the people’s consciousness could have changed the whole course of history over the last fifty years. Once fascism moves into its third phase and contra-positive mobilization (the psycho-social antithesis of lower-class mobilization) insinuates itself technologically with weapons and control of the means of the people’s subsistence, limiting their vision to their own personal short-term interests with propaganda and empty promises, “only he who does not fear death of one thousand cuts” can then unseat the Fuehrer.

The United States was not existing in a vacuum when fascism first swept the Western world on the heels of two great depressions. My reading of history indicates that the U.S. was in greater economic, social, and political crisis after the 1929 stock market crash than any other Western country excepting possibly Germany. The same trends, the same experiments, the same internal battles were fought by the same forces for the direction of the nation’s economy. The extreme economic crisis of the early thirties brought working-class revolutionary consciousness to its very peak. All serious commentary on this period reflects a profound lack of confidence in the workability of capitalism. This avalanche of criticism came from sectors of the middle- and right-oriented thinkers as well as the left—just as it did in Italy, Germany, Rumania and the other fascist storm centers. But of course the middle and rightist intellectuals were thinking in terms of a new direction for capitalist growth, not in its abolishment—a “New Deal,” much like those of Nazi, Fascist, and Falangist Europe. No serious or honest student could miss the likeness. F.D.R. was a fascist. His stated, documented congratulatory messages to Mussolini were not simply diplomatic gestures. Joseph Kennedy’s advice to England to surrender to German expansion did not necessarily originate in Kennedy’s mind. He was official ambassador of the U.S. to England.

There was positive mobilization of workers and the lower class, and a highly developed class consciousness. There was indeed a very deep economic crisis with attendant strikes, unionizing, lockouts, break-ins, call-outs of the National Guard. The lower class was threatening to unite under the pressure of economic disintegration. Revolution was in the air. Socialist vanguard parties were leading it. There was terrorism from the right from groups such as Guardians of the Republic, the Black Legion, Peg-leg White-type storm troopers and hired assassins who carried out the beginnings of a contra-positive suppressive mobilization. Under the threat of revolution, the ruling class, true to Marxian theory, became all the more co-optive and dangerous. F.D.R. was born and bred in this ruling class of families. His role was to form the first fascist regime, to merge the economic, political and labor elites. Governing elites/corporative state/fascism —his role was to limit competition, replace it with the dream of cooperation; to put laissez faire to rest, and initiate the acceptance of government intervention into economic affairs.

A great many of the early trends of Amerikan history prepared the way for the ultimate success of fascism in its highest form. From the very beginning of Amerika’s existence as an independent nation-state there were localized labor organizations that attempted to further the interests of their class by influencing the social, political and economic life of the new nation. It wasn’t until the second half of the nineteenth century that labor took on a national character and began to make its presence felt in the economic life of the nation. Even then, it was resisted by the violence of employers and government working together. Marx’s definition of history as a broken, twisted, sordid spectrum of class struggles is substantiated by Amerikan labor history. The earliest significant struggles between labor and capital began in the 1790s on the East Coast in cities like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore where mutual-aid craft societies attempted to gain higher wages and shorter working hours. Resistance from employers and their backers in government to these mild organizational efforts forced the establishment of the first trade unions, the Philadelphia Printers Union, the New York Typographical Union of 1794, Journeymen Cabinet and Chair Makers of 1796. The first wage strike was organized by the Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers) of Philadelphia. It lasted ten or eleven weeks in 1799 and was broken by right-wing terrorist activity.

The laying to rest of laissez faire, the shackling of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” really began during the Civil War in the U.S. The petit-bourgeois dream of countless contending private proprietorships somehow managing a mellifluous blending of private and state interests—when long-range plans could still be made by wage workers to be proprietors one day—became a nightmare with the advent of the mass manufacturing process. At the opening of the Civil War, the U.S. was ranked fourth among the world’s industrial states behind the English empire, the German states and France. By 1870 the U.S. industrial manufacturing plant had doubled the value of its products. The number of factory workers drawn out of other sectors of the economy caused the industrial work force to nearly double during this same period. Improvements in the arts of agricultural production drew some workers from the countryside and sent others westward toward the closing frontier. The craftsman lost his privileged economic position with the appearance of newly invented mass production machinery. This new machinery and the factory setup in general made individual workers more expendable and made it possible to reduce their share of the profits. By the mid-1890s the U.S. was producing one-third of the world’s manufactured goods, and was on its way to becoming first among the world’s industrial states.

The expansion of U.S. industry out of the demands of the Civil War involved a complex concentration of several violent and predictable capital mandates. The old traditional sector of the landed aristocracy was broken; machine tools, transport, and communications boomed (the basis of the industrial state and, of course, an industrial elite, when raw materials—coal, iron and other ores—are not lacking); the price or value of labor shrank; and the “drive” toward monopoly accumulation was firmly established.

This period of capital accumulation, invention of new machinery, its use in expanding factory setups, the “closed economy” created by Republican government legislation, and the direction of certain amounts of capital through government contract were in part the beginnings of a new chapter in the authoritarian process of Western history. Industrial centralization, I mean the refined tactics of monopolized capitalism, may have been developed right here in the U.S.!!

This is the logical place to question some of the old left’s historical assumptions about the last hundred years of life. Analysts of the old left are completely confused by the differences between bourgeois democracy and monopoly capital and their manifestations on the Amerikan scene. They seem to feel that both can coexist in the same society. Actually one simply grows out of the other. Monopoly capital is the central objective of corporative fascism. Prior to the Civil War and the emergence of the trends toward monopoly capital, Amerika was dominated by bourgeois democratic economics and political rule. The economy was based upon the diverse ownership of many thousands of factory units and a political arrangement to reflect that fact.

However, with the emergence and expansion of monopoly capital after the economic impetus of the Civil War, bourgeois democracy naturally began to fade. Bourgeois democracy, the political rule of the bourgeoisie, simply cannot exist after the emergence of monopoly capital. Monopoly capital has its own political expression. It develops as bourgeois democratic political rule declines.

The roots of corporativism-fascism were laid with the expansion of monopoly capital into the giant cartels, corporations and interlocking trusts. The owners of the largest share of a nation’s GNP will always control the political life and government of the state. Monopoly capital is corporativism (fascism!).

I don’t think anything that ever happened in Italy, Spain, Germany or any of the other capitalist states can match the centralizing process that the U.S. went through in the last hundred years. Even the so-called public utilities (A.T. & T., the Santa Fe, the Pennsylvania RR, Western Electric, Western Union) are owned by financial institutions that, on examination, always turn out to be controlled by a few families who are descendants of the industrial expansionists of 1865-95.

The traditional Anglo-Saxon concept of law (founded on the latent principle that the haves must always be protected from the have-nots), though it did not attack labor as openly as in England, effectively prohibited the emergence of any really strong labor movement until the close of the nineteenth century. It did not prevent the war-profiteering Rockefeller petroleum combination from forming. It didn’t stop Western Union from taking over the telegraph industry. It didn’t stop Samuel Slater and the “Boston Associates” from tying up all the New England textile interests. The transcontinental railroad hookup (May 19, 1969—Union Pacific and Central Pacific) could have never been accomplished without government and commercial cooperation. Corruption and lawlessness were the basis of their commercial success, but no one was charged or punished by law. Any individual, on the other hand, who joined with someone else to effect an increase in his wage was guilty of conspiracy. That same law is still used to protect the same interests today. Anglo-Saxon law supported F.B. Gowen of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and its coal subsidy in cutting wages and breaking unions, just as it supported the KKK in reconstructing Southeastern U.S., King of the Baltimore and Ohio, Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania, William Vanderbilt of the New York Central. Every time I hear the word “law” I visualize gangs of militiamen or Pinkertons busting strikes, pigs wearing sheets and caps that fit over their pointed heads. I see a white oak and a barefooted black hanging, or snake eyes peeping down the lenses of telescopic rifles, or conspiracy trials.

• 1. Mankind is biologically sick.
• 2. Politics is the irrational expression of this sickness.
• 3. Whatever takes place in social life is actively or passively, voluntarily or involuntarily, determined by the structure of masses of people.
• 4. This character structure is formed by socio-economic processes, and it anchors and perpetuates these processes. Man’s biopathic character structure is, as it were, the fossilization of the authoritarian process of history. It is the biophysical reproduction of mass suppression.
• 5. The human structure is animated by the contradiction between an intense longing for and fear of freedom.
• 6. The fear of freedom of masses of people is expressed in the biophysical rigidity of the organism and the inflexibility of the character.
• 7. Every form of social leadership is merely the social expression of the one or the other side of this structure of masses of people . . .

—W. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

Revolutionary change always involves the complete alteration of the structure of property relations and the institutional substructures that support them. It leads from hierarchy to mass society.

The ruling class in the U.S. is composed of one million men and their families—the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Morgans, Mellons, Du Ponts, Hunts and Gettys, Fords and their minions and dependents. They use the ivy League universities and elite law schools as private schools for their offspring and as training grounds for their corporate hirelings. They rule with iron precision through the military, the C.I.A., the F.B.I., private foundations and financial institutions. Their control of all the media of education and communication comprises an extremely effective system of thought control. At the time when this ruling class was forming a hundred years ago, the International Working Men’s Party supported strikes that asked only for reformist measures, although it was aware, even at that time, that reform was not the solution and it quietly advocated the seizure of the materials of production. The dichotomy between the longing for true freedom and the fear of its responsibility was apparent even then. Early radicals excused themselves by claiming that they were “exploiting the inherent contradictions of monopoly capital.” They hoped that the masses would spontaneously awaken to the fact that capitalism had grown decadent. But capitalism reformed itself, apologized to no one, and went on to build a network of national and international centralization that stands unrivaled by any hierarchy past or present.

Reformism is an old story in Amerika. There have been depressions and socio-economic political crises throughout the period that marked the formation of the present upper-class ruling circle and their controlling elites. But the parties of the left were too committed to reformism to exploit their revolutionary potential.

The latest round of capitalism reform, the latest redirection of its energy, was its highest and last form. The struggles of the thirties, forties and fifties completed the totalitariani-zation of the country and perfected the system of total mass social deception. I’ve had learned men tell me that controlled capitalism, monopoly capital, fascism, corporativism, or whatever your vernacular, is a form of “welfare-state-ism.” This is precisely what we were intended to believe: that the political takeover by monopoly capital was actually an advance in the welfare of the common people. Even the old left promotes the lie that valid concessions have been made by the ruling class, as if deceptively better working conditions and illusory wage increases were Marxism. A true Marxist revolution abolishes the wage system. The true welfare state would be the final and highest stage of social development, where the world and the state are one, where the material and psychological needs of the masses have been met and political regimes have ceased to exist. The New Deal and the resulting military industrial complex as welfare-state-ism— I swear I’ll strangle the next idiot who repeats that line.

All the ingredients for a fascist state were already present: racism, the morbid traditional fear of blacks, Indians, Mexicans; the desire to inflict pain on them when they began to compete in industrial sectors. The resentment and the seedbed of fear is patterned into every modern capitalist society. It grows out of a sense of insecurity and insignificance that is inculcated into the workers by the conditions of life and work under capitalism. This sense of vulnerability is the breeding ground of racism. At the same time, the ruling class actively promotes racism against the blacks of the lower classes. This programmed racism has always served to distract the huge numbers of people who subsist at just a slightly higher level than those in a more debased condition (in the 1870s the strikes frequently ended in anti-Chinese or antiblack lynchings). It conforms to dual requirements of the authoritarian personality (conformity accompanied by compulsive sadism). Racism has served always in the U.S. as a pressure release for the psychopathic destructiveness evinced by a people made fearful and insecure by a way of life they never understood and resented from the day of their birth.

In the U.S., World War II was the principal cause of the total breakdown of the working-class movement and its revolutionary consciousness, which had been built up by the crisis years of the thirties and all that went before them. Lesser attempts at suppression had been made prior to the war through the typical reformist policies of modern fascist regimes. The economy had been closed, banks regulated, deficit spending had been practiced on projects like TVA and CCC. The arms race that eventually culminated in the fascist military-industrial-complex-based economy broke the closed economic ideal. Two conditions distinguished the successful establishment of fascism in this country. The old vanguard parties copped out and supported a nation-state ruling-class war which wasted the blood and energy of their proletariats. At the time, resistance to the war would have seemed like simple common sense. If Stalin gave the order to support the U.S. war effort, he was a fool. In any case, the old vanguards’ support should have been for the people’s struggle inside the U.S.

With a little more patience and sacrifice, Stalin could have eventually marched to the Atlantic. With all of Europe

in ruins and the German economy already in its final stages of disintegration with the U.S. presence in Europe, capitalism could be dead today. Instead, U.S. imperialism rose to behemoth proportions. After the war, international markets opened in Europe, Africa and Asia with the flea market of radios, TVs and novelties here at its center. For the sake of these trinkets and baubles, the labor elites diffused the righteous demands of the people. Consensus politics formed as a result of their defection simply solidified the totalitarian regime with all the opinion-molding facilities under the ruling classes. Elections and political parties have no significance when all serious contenders for public office are fascist and the electorate is thoroughly misled about the true nature of the candidates. One cannot say all the people who vote are unaware, just as one cannot say the twelve hundred professors who backed Mussolini were all frightened. Those who are aware and still do nothing constructive are among the most pathetic victims of the totalitarian process.

The necessary shock troops and tools for creating the false contra-positive psycho-social basis of a fascist-type pseudo-society were in short supply in this country prior to and during the process of the fascist takeover. There was little of this consciousness among the middle classes, so the first terror came from the specially formed and hired goons of the Du Ponts and Rockefellers, the Black Legion, the Guardians of the Republic, the F.B.I. They destroyed the already disintegrating vanguard, leaving the degenerate elements of the working class as the only available mass. Class relations were slowly altered as a result of this action by the co-opted labor sectors. Government agents were sent to infiltrate scattered labor movements. The disguise was complete. The satisfaction of labor’s short-term economic interests was made possible by the giant consumers’ market and the military complex. Ties were formed between rulers and labor leaders. The elites of the proletarian movement were compromised. A ruling class and its governing elites were centralized and were carefully co-optive. A fascist arrangement! Death and prison for all who object—fascism in its final and secure state. It has happened here. And the only recourse is an appeal to arms. The corporative state allows for no genuinely free political opposition. They only allow meaningless gatherings where they can plant more spies than participants. They feel secure in their ability to mold the opinion of a people interested only in wages. However, real revolutionary activity will draw panic-stricken gunfire. Or heart attacks.

So what is to be done after a revolution has failed? After our enemies have created a conservative mass society based on meaningless electoral politics, spectator sports, and a 3 percent annual rise in purchasing power strictly regulated to negate itself with a corresponding rise in the cost of living. What is to be done about an expertly, scientifically calculated contra-positive mobilization of the entire society? What can we do with a people who have gone through the authoritarian process and come out sick to the core!!!

There will be a fight. The fight will take place in the central cities. It will be spearheaded by the blacks of the lower class and their vanguard party, the Black Panther Party. Real union activity will eliminate the corporative ties between the regime-ruling class and labor. People at the top will be removed and the guy with the programmed mind will have no union boss to think for him. He will remain neutral or join us in our fight to liberate him. We will work this attack at the productive level indirectly by first building our central-city communes, which will revolutionize the all too conservative black laborer. We will build these communes against all resistance, the pamphlet in one hand, the gun in the other. In blacks authoritarian traits are mainly the effects of terrorism and a lack of intellectual stimulation. They have been choosing the less dangerous and complicated mode of existence, survival. All classes, all people are subject to the authoritarian syndrome. It requires only the proper set of eco-sociological circumstantial pressures to turn blacks around and reawaken their revolutionary consciousness. We’re hungry.

Our overall task is to separate the people from the hated state. They must be made to realize that the interests of the state and the ruling class are one and the same. They must be taught to realize that the present political regime exists only to balance the productive forces within the society in favor of the ruling class. It is at the ruling class and the governing elites, including those of labor, that we must aim our bolts. The average workingman will simply withdraw or watch with secret satisfaction or actively join in when we bring his union boss under attack. We blacks have lived with terrorism for generations. It no longer affects us. It will intensify. We must prepare a counter-terrorism. A man can never be so repressed that he cannot strike back in some way. But it must begin now. The Rand Corporation does 80 percent of its work for the military-industrial-intelligence complex; 750 or more colleges offer police science courses; 247 additional colleges offer associate degrees in law enforcement; 44 offer bachelor degrees. The National Guard numbers 390,000. The C.I.A.D. (Counter Intelligence Analysis Detachment)—the 113th military intelligence group—is designed for the surveillance of private citizens. The police state isn’t coming—it’s here, glaring and threatening.

How do we raise a new revolutionary consciousness against a system programmed against our old methods? Revolution is against the law. It will not be allowed, not in significant form. That makes the true revolutionary an outlaw, and the black revolutionary a “doomed man.” As blacks, we must function as the vanguard in any hostilities. We must use a new approach, unite and revolutionize the black central-city commune, and slowly provide the people with the incentive to fight by allowing them to create programs that will meet all of their social, political and economic needs. We must fill the vacuums left by the established order. We must push the settlers off our land when they won’t cooperate with the new communal life of our system. We must learn from the people, we must learn from the workers, the discipline they are so highly skilled in. In return, we must teach them the benefits of our revolutionary ideals. We must move blacks to the forefront of a really productive assault on the outside enemy reactionary culture, not only on the production level, but in all significant areas of property relations. We must promote and support enforced rent strikes. Merchants must come over to our side, or face the appropriation of their property for the commune. We must build a subsistence economy and a socio-political infrastructure so that we can become an example for all revolutionary people.

Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange.

I am an extremist, a communist (not communistic, a communist), and I must be destroyed or I will join my comrades in the only communist party in this country, the Black Panther Party. I will give them my all, every dirty fighting trick in the annals of war. Nothing will defeat our revenge and nothing will countervail our march to victory. We come to our conclusion: the only historical recourse that is left to us. Freedom means warmth and protection against harsh exposure to the elements. It means food, not garbage. It means truth, harmony, and the social relations that spring from these. It means the best medical attention whenever it’s needed. It means employment that is reasonable, that coincides with the individual necessities and feelings. We will have this freedom even at the cost of total war.

The Oppressive Contract

First women and children in a ditch in Vietnam, ultimately executions in the civic centers of every look-alike county in this country

Dear John Gerassi:

As you know, I’m in a unique political position. I have a very nearly closed future, and since I have always been inclined to get disturbed over organized injustice or terrorist practice against the innocents—wherever—I can now say just about what I want (I’ve always done just about that), without fear of self-exposure. I can only be executed once. No matter what I do, they will always explain me away with the fact of my eleven years in prison and my supposed loss of contact with objective reality. So I rage on aggressive and free (the action on April 6). When I am denied or corrected —I always understand—but rage on. All on the principle that the ideal must be demonstrated that the oppressed mentality must be taught by example to escape the myth, the hoax that repression can work against the collective consciousness of the commune, and to prove that ideals cannot be killed with violence. So—I’m duty bound to take the occasion of your letter to respond with what an Irishman once termed “the sweet taste of sedition.”

I’ll go straight back to our visit and the hour they allowed us to deal with all the years. I took your casual remark concerning “the outlaw” back to the cell with me, tooled with it a bit, and clarified it in my own hand. I have a hundred related questions (I am alive and learning!). Outlaws, of course, I thought. Revolution will not be tolerated, it is against the law in the totalitarian corporative state. The revolutionary must certainly reconcile himself with one day becoming an outlaw.

Then my thoughts turned to the oppressive contract in general. It’s the nature of cancer to expand. You’ve seen a great deal of it firsthand—U.S. expansionism since World War II—I’ve only studied it vicariously. But we see the same conclusions: millions of outlaws in the Union of South Africa, Jordan, Indochina and here. Summary executions not of uniformed soldiers but ordinary people. First women and children in a ditch in Vietnam, ultimately executions in the civic centers of every look-alike county in this country.

And that’s the principal contradiction of monopoly capital’s oppressive contract. The system produces outlaws. It also breeds contempt for the oppressed. Accrual of contempt is its fundamental survival technique. This leads to the excesses and destroys any hope of peace eventually being worked out between the two antagonistic classes, the haves and the have-nots. Coexistence is impossible, contempt breeds resistance, and resistance breeds brutality, the whole growing in spirals that must either end in the uneconomic destruction of the oppressed or the termination of oppression.

History is clearly a long continuum of synthesizing elements. The imbalances of the oppressive contract, ideals so fundamentally contradictory, and forces so mutually exclusive can only result in the dissolution of the agents of that contradiction.

The corollary of the contract is quite simply malignancy. It strikes first of all in the region of the brain. A search for a nondiseased mind throws one hard against one of the greatest historical/biological calamities imaginable. Excuses can be made for some workers—blind defense for the system that is victimizing them, brainwashed by the National Advertising Council’s portrait of the silent majority as well-off in comparison to the barbarian world. Their mindless behavior can also be explained by their ignorance of labor history. But even the nationalistic conditioning received in massive doses from birth cannot completely explain why man would turn against himself. Even the workers’ short-term economic advantage is only a partial explanation. We must look for the root causes in the psycho-social effect of competitiveness and racism. The huge mass of blue-collar workers seem to be working totally against themselves in their support of a system owned and controlled by a tiny minority. Actually, their contradictory behavior is explained by feelings of loyalty to race, by their identification with the white hierarchy and by their economic advantage over the oppressed races. They may be oppressed themselves, but in return they are allowed to oppress millions of others.

The economic nature of racism is not simply an aside. Built-in physical features exclude blacks from participation, exclude them forever. These features cannot be changed. It is the relationship that must change. Racism is a fundamental characteristic of monopoly capital. When the white self-congratulatory racist complains that the blacks are uncouth, unlettered; that our areas are run-down, not maintained; that we dress with loud tastelessness (a thing they now also say about their own children), he forgets that he governs. He forgets that he built the schools that are inadequate, that he has abused his responsibility to use taxes paid by blacks to improve their living conditions, that he manufactured the loud pants and pointed shoes that destroy and deform the feet. If we are not enough like him to suit his tastes, it’s because he planned it that way. We were never intended to be part of his world. It’s a silly contradiction for him or us to dwell on the subject of comparisons between the enemy culture and its creation, the subculture. The only way the exploiter can maintain his position is to create differences and maintain deformities.

It is the sense of the finality of their exclusion from solid social-economic participation that forces our youth away from the crippled family unit into the streets. It causes the excessive importance of meaningless relationships and the prevalence of anticommunal behavior which is a psychosocial response to the loss of—and longing for—community.

The diseased mind . . . it’s slowly spreading throughout the oppressed organism. Even the “magnificent savage,” the mindless overman is dying from the almost total anemia. Where is the Black Man? I see him inseparable from the Black Female, but where is he now? How he has survived at all is almost beyond any rational explanation.

Early I understood the alternatives of the black situation: assimilation, meaning acceptance of the oppressive contract; ossification or life below, beyond, outside of society or revolution. But John, I admit to some confusion over the issue of white racism growing out of my experience in prison. My mind has vacillated between the historical references: African feudalism and African communalism—I know that we Africans were the first communists (J. Edgar Hoover calls it “primitive communism” in one of the glossaries of his anti-people books). Dr. Du Bois dealt with it in The Philadelphia Negro I think (I can’t quite remember now) in a positive manner, so I never had any of the really serious hang-ups in accepting revolution. But—I think for a while I sincerely felt that Europeans were not capable of communistic Unitarian behavior. I felt this, however, only briefly, since unitarian, progressive conduct seems to be a problem for all of us after hundreds of years of steadily centralizing capitalism and, in some areas, after thousands of years of hierarchy. I’ve always understood that the new cultural-nationalist attempts to return to the pre-slavery past of African feudalism can only leave the average black man more uncertain and insecure than ever. It is difficult to understand why such negative, academic and obscure exoticism exists when there are definite examples of historical contributions which could be used to analyze and give meaning to our present and our future.

The commitment to total revolution must involve an analysis of both the economic motives and the psycho-social motives which perpetuate the oppressive contract. For the black partisan, national structures are quite simply nonexistent. A people without a collective consciousness that transcends national boundaries—freaks, Afro-Amerikkkans, Negroes, even Amerikkkans, without the sense of a larger community than their own group—can have no effect on history. Ultimately they will simply be eliminated from the scene. Without the collective sense of community, without its movement (Bobby Hutton, the shoot-out on Central, August 7¹) and institutions (our survival projects† that will now grow into infrastructure), we simply never will be an effective force.

During the nationalist period of the collective oppressed mentality promoted by the establishment, the movement is frozen, static. This is the level of development favored by the oppressor, the artless empty ideals of the pseudo-nation, love and respect for a flag, a nationalistic song or beat, the fervent belief in a bond or organization which arises out of a thwarted longing for real community. The establishment does everything in its power to ensure that revolutionary rage is redirected into empty outlets which provide pressure releases for desires that could become dangerous if allowed to progress. At this stage in the development of monopoly capitalism, there are two alternatives: aggressive revolutionary activity or calcification. Conservative society, black or white, is decadent society; due to the absence of creativity and movement, conservative society always burns itself out.

Your letter got right at the heart of that principle. The whole ideal of cultural nationalism has been all but smothered now. It was basically contrived out of the loss of community and the terms of the oppressive contract—coercive conformity and indulgent flexibility to the demands of hierarchy. But we must all realize that the oppressive contract cannot be broken as long as any sort of hierarchy exists to perpetuate the sensitized relationships of Amerikan tribalism, classism and racism. Society is rendered impossible by such relationships. The establishment of society through in-tercommunalism² will require that the social contract be completely altered. Clearly alteration cannot take place unless hierarchy is destroyed. Can we expect the hierarchy to do away with itself???

Then the real undertaking at present is the unconditional freeing of the people. We plunge beyond ideological debate before this immediate task. The black man and the black female must be, as I have mentally ordered things, completely joined together in the act of liberation! I accept my black mama with all her fears for my life that border on hysteria at times. But I also realize that it is the “role of the living,” of all the innocent, to discover unitary practice and conduct and move against the institutions that close on the oppressed.

Those who have more regard for their own egos or self-interest than they have for building a united progressive left, and those who abandon community altogether in favor of petty interests, are in direct opposition to our real interests. They are attempting another form of escapism. They’re fleeing the objective conditions of their real life and will eventually reach the ultimate contradiction of facing their father or brother, or old classmate, comrade, or wife, over the barrel of a gun. Or they will find themselves in no man’s land, cast out by the people, suspected by their crime partners.³ But, regarding the crisis (just past) in the party,† as Huey Newton reminds us, there is always a positive side to each negative. The confused resentment and reverse racism of the black partisan will eventually lead to a new, more productive and creative contribution. Already we realize that there was no split in the party, only a defection. The party has come out of it stronger. We can now bring our strategy and tactics into a realistic conformity with our total objective situation. Recall we discussed Jonathan and guerrilla strategy in the urban situation at length over that piece of paper with circles and lines, arrows and question marks.

I guess now that he is dead, and the guilty are safe from the muscle of his mind and arm, it is safe to reveal some of his thoughts and functions within the matrix of the party and movement. He felt as I did that the military and political branches, though married in purpose and direction, in these opening stages should function separately from each other for very obvious reasons. In undeveloped countries, the establishment’s military-strike forces are not more than thirty miles down a dirt road in the provincial capital. They’re always within a few moments of strike. The urban guerrilla, however, can mingle with the enemy and remain invisible and invulnerable. In our present situation there is no contradiction between the military thinking and action and the primacy of politics. The situation allows for such activity as the August 7th movement, because it can be accomplished without giving the enemy-state forces the pretext they need to move in and destroy the political apparatus—under the very convenient and much used Anglo-Saxon conspiracy laws. The primacy of politics will continue as long as the military reads, picks up and works well within the prevailing political matrix. So Jonathan’s raid on the military and judiciary that Friday was at once an expression of his own aggressive consciousness and that of the party. It is easy to infer all of this in retrospect that Jonathan was head of a clandestine army which saw the Black Panther Party as its political leader. Operating on his own, he was able to at least attempt to support some of the minimum demands of the people without placing Huey Newton and David Hilliard in jeopardy of loss of movement or death, i.e., persecution in courts.

That this is our only recourse at the present level of development is too obvious to even dwell on. It will not be possible, however, in the advanced stages of revolution. Just a glance at the present level of consciousness and the status of the survival infrastructure will reveal the error of Cleaver’s analysis that no separation should exist even now between military and political cadre, between military and political action. You know I sent him a message suggesting that Unitarian conduct depends on a principled discipline and submission to democratic centralism instead of the egoism that sent him first against his Muslims (through the Sacramento Bee Pig press that time), then against the Peace and Freedom Party, even against the progressive elements of the C.P. through his unreasoned attack on the magnificent Angela Davis. Recently he has even attacked the dedicated, overworked and brilliant Charles Garry. It seems to be a pattern with the man. You recall the attack he launched against Fidel and Cuba, and those accounts that seemed disparaging of his hosts which have reached the pig press here from time to time.

My personal message to him was mild, considering that he was in fact leaving his old comrades open to attack again. I sent a letter reminding him that his behavior while in prison was far from exemplary and had that section of it signed by Ulysses McDaniel and Clifford Jefferson, two of the oldest (time in) and most respected black partisans in the California concentration camp system. I then listed some of his behavioral patterns since his release—a more complete list than the one just given—that did not indicate that he had changed much. I finally asked him simply to show proof now that he was not a compulsive disrupter or agent provocateur. A very mild request, I feel. He returned with a very scurrilous and profane set of invectives—in short, a piece of vendetta. Tell him that seven thousand miles, the walls of prison, steel and barbed wire do not make him safe from my special brand of discipline, tell him that the dragon is coming . . .

The substructured prison movements are gaining momentum. My trial is set for early August, 1971, there’ll be hearings in between of course. If they are at all like the last,⁴ you’ll get to see my special bastardized style of martial arts. I’m working hard to stay in form. I wasn’t at my best at the last showing. I’ll clean them all next time they attack. Attend—let me see your style.

Your comrade in arms—“He who does not fear the death of 1,000 cuts will dare unseat the emperor.”

George Jackson

Afterword: Statement by Huey P. Newton, Servant of the People, Black Panther Party at the Revolutionary Memorial Service for George Jackson

Power to the People. Power to our fallen comrade Brother George Jackson, member of the Black Panther Party. First, because many people are wondering, I would like to explain the connection between Brother George Jackson and the Black Panther Party.

When I went to prison in 1967 I met George. Not physically, but through his ideas, his thoughts and words. He was at Soledad Prison at the time; I was at California Penal Colony. George was a legendary figure throughout the prison system, where he spent most of his life. I met George through his spirit. Shortly after learning about him I got word through the prison grapevine that he wanted to join the Black Panther Party. At his request he was made a member of the People’s Revolutionary Army with the rank of general and field marshal. He was put in charge of the prison recruiting, and was asked to go on with his life as a revolutionary example, which was the most important thing that one can ever do, because that cannot be killed.

I say that the legendary figure is also a hero. George Jackson was my hero. He set a standard for prisoners, political prisoners, for people. He showed the love, the strength, the revolutionary fervor that’s characteristic of any soldier for the people. He inspired prisoners, whom I later encountered, to put his ideas into practice and so his spirit became a living thing. Today I say that although George’s body has fallen, his spirit goes on, because his ideas live. And we will see that these ideas stay alive, because they’ll be manifested in our bodies and in these young Panthers’ bodies, who are our children. So it’s a true saying that there will be revolution from one generation to the next. This was George’s legacy, and he will go on, he will go on into immortality, because we believe that the people will win, we know the people will win, as they advance, generation upon generation.

What kind of standard did George Jackson set? First, he was a strong man, without fear, determined, full of love, strength, and dedication to the people’s cause. He lived a life that we must praise. No matter how he was oppressed, no matter how wrongly he was done, he still kept the love for the people. And this is why he felt no pain in giving up his life for the people’s cause.

The state itself sets the stage for the kind of contradiction or violence that occurs in our world, particularly in the prisons. The ruling circle of the United States has terrorized the world. The state has the audacity to say they have the right to kill. They say they have a death penalty and it’s legal. But I say by the laws of nature that no death penalty can be legal—it’s only cold-blooded murder. It spurs all sorts of violence, because every man has a contract with himself, to keep himself alive at all costs. Legally the state can only confine someone, subject to correction at a later date. Even if the state does wrong it could give itself the semblance of legality by leaving open the possibility of rectification. But of course with the death penalty, with the kind of violence that we see in our community where the police are also the executioners, we don’t have this chance of negotiation. They have the audacity to say that people should deliver a life to them without a struggle. None of us can accept that. George Jackson had every right to do everything possible to preserve his life and the life of his comrades, the life of the People.

Even after his death, George Jackson is a legendary figure and a hero. Even the oppressor realizes this. To cover their murder they say that George Jackson killed five people, five oppressors, and wounded three in the space of thirty seconds. You know, sometimes I like to overlook the fact that this would be physically impossible. But after all George Jackson is my hero. And I would like to think that it was possible; I would be very happy thinking that George Jackson had the strength because that would have made him superman. (Of course, my hero would have to be a superman.) And we will raise our children to be like George Jack-son, to live like George Jackson and to fight for freedom as George Jackson fought for freedom.

George’s last statement, the example of his conduct at San Quentin on that terrible day, left a standard for political prisoners and for the prisoner society of racist, reactionary America. He left a standard for the liberation armies of the world. He showed us how to act. He demonstrated how the unjust would be criticized by the weapon. And this will certainly be true, because the people will take care of that. George also said once that the oppressor is very strong and he might beat him down, he might beat us down to our very knees, he might crush us to the ground, but it will be physically impossible for the oppressor to go on. At some point his legs will get tired, and when his legs get tired, then George Jackson and the people will tear his kneecaps off.

But first the state sets the scene for such violence, you see. And some people say that we can’t get rid of this kind of physical conflict with more of the same. Well, I would take issue with this (we can use that example of the oppressor stomping George Jack-son down to his knees; he can’t go on). We will retaliate with violence against his violence. It’s true that we’ll be hurt by his violence but we’re determined not to let him wipe out the people. We know that he cannot wipe out the people, because we will fight on. We will tear his legs off, we’ll tear his head off and we’ll take the example from George Jackson. In the name of love and in the name of freedom, with love as our guide, we’ll slit every throat of anyone who threatens the people and our children. We’ll do it in the name of peace, if this is what we are forced to do; because as soon as it’s over, then we can have the kind of world where violence will no longer exist.

So we will be very practical. We won’t make statements and believe the things the prison officials say—their incredible stories about one man killing five people in thirty seconds. We will go on and live very realistically. There will be pain and much suffering in order for us to develop. But even in our suffering, I see a strength growing. I see the example that George set living on. We know that all of us will die someday. But we know that there are two kinds of death, the reactionary death and the revolutionary death. One death is significant and the other is not. George certainly died in a significant way, and his death will be very heavy, while the deaths of the ones that fell that day in San Quentin will be lighter than a feather. Even those who support them now will not support them in the future, because we’re determined to change their minds. We’ll change their minds or else in the people’s name we’ll have to wipe them out thoroughly, wholly, absolutely and completely. ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE.

Blood in My Eye was completed only days before the author died from bullet wounds during an alleged escape attempt from San Quentin Prison, California. Arrested at the age of eighteen for allegedly taking part in the robbery of a gas station netting $70, George L. Jackson was sentenced to one year to life in prison. At the time of his death he had served eleven years behind prison walls, seven of those years in solitary confinement. This book testifies to how those years were spent, and why.

Written with the memory of his slain brother, Jonathan, constantly before him, it is an apocalyptic vision of America. It speaks to the poor, the jailed, and the disenfranchised throughout the world. Jackson’s message to his revolutionary brothers is clear: “People are already dying who could be saved, generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Discover your humanity and your love in revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give up your life for the people.”

As expressed in the preface to this volume: “What he saw and what he wanted, the central passion of his life, was war; the revolutionary war of the people against their oppressors, a war which grew out of perfect love and perfect hate.”

Long before the world heard of him, George Jackson had already become a legendary figure inside the California prison system. When Soledad Brother: The Prison Writings of George Jackson was published, he was hailed at home and abroad. The New York Times called his book “... one of the most significant and important documents since the first black was pushed off the ship at Jamestown colony ... In one of the finest pieces of black writing ever to be published, he summarizes 300 years of rage for untold millions of blacks, alive and dead ... this is the most important single volume from a black since The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Blood in My Eye takes up where Soledad Brother left off, and introduces the reader to the life force that was George L. Jackson.