REVOLUTIONARY INTERCOMMUNALISM

AND THE RIGHT OF NATIONS

TO SELF-DETERMINATION

1
2
Revolutionary
Intercommunalism

a
The Right of Nations
to
Self-Determination

Huey P Newton
Vladimir lllych Lenin
Edited and introduced by Amy Gdala

3
 First published as a Superscript paperback in 2004
by
Cyhocddwyr y Superscript Ltd.,
404 Robin Square,
Newtown. Powys. Wales. UK

The audio-tapes of the Yale and Oakland meetings are the

copyright property of Stronghold Consolidated Productions
Inc., 1971. No further rights will be asserted under the
Copyright, Designs, and Patent Act of 1988. This book may be
lent, resold, hired out, reproduced or otherwise circulated in
any manner, in whole or in part, and in any form of binding or
cover, without prior permission, provided only that authorship
of any part is correctly identified.

Cover design by Emma Jane Connolly from a photograph of

the children of the Samuel Napier Intcrcommunal Youth
Institute.

ISBN 0954291344
Printed and bound in the United States of America

4
 Contents

Introduction A Gdala 7
Intercommunalism H P Newton 21
Dialectics H P Newton et al 34
Identity E H Erikson, H P Newton et al 48
Revolution H P Newton, J H Blake et al 75
Universal Identity H P Newton et al 107
Self-determination V I Lenin 134
Internationalism V I Lenin 158
Historical Specifics A Gdala 173
Notes 183
Bibliography 190

5
 "....for as we are never in a proper condition of doing justice to others, while
we continue under the influence of some leading partiality, so neither are we
capable of doing it to ourselves while we remain fettered by any obstinate
prejudice."

Thomas Paine, Common Sense

6
 Introduction

"Intercommunalism" has got itself a bad name. This is

mainly because of the way the word (and its diminutive
"communalism") is used in the Indian subcontinent where the
shared language of the old and new imperial powers has
provided a shorthand term for the violence between religious
or ethnic groups which those powers themselves kindled, and
may even continue to inflame.

This shorthand use is particularly unfortunate because

it can be argued - as I intend to do - that Huey P Newton's
exposition of the concept of "Revolutionary Intercommun­
alism" is the most progressive, most logical and most hopeful
political idea since Ghandi developed the principle of non­
violent direct action.

The history of all hitherto existing culture is, of course,

the history of the struggle between opposing sets of ideas, that
is between theses and their antitheses. Karl Marx took the first
step towards a postmodern way of understanding the world
when he characterised this as a war between classes, between
haves and have-nots, between those who owned the land, and
or capital, and those who had nothing to sell but themselves.
Marx showed how the alienation from the essence of the

7
human spirit that comes from the commodification, or
dehumanisation, of labour demeans all the people - bourgeois
and proletarian alike.

Marx was a brilliant sociologist but he was not a

prophet. He could not foresee the trajectory of the rise of the
joint stock company. Nor did he dream of a future time when
stocks and shares would be so widely distributed that the Iron
Lady (a.k.a the Robber Baroness) would "tell Sid" to "sell little
pieces of himself by day" [CW Mills, 2000] to buy back tiny
fractions of his own lost common treasury. He did not consider
the complications of a time when the mass of the alienated and
exploited people would find themselves straddling the
property divide, one foot on each side, hopping on hot ashes,
still wage-slaves but debt-slaves as well, people who, quite
frankly, are of more value to "the economy" as consumers than
they ever could be as producers.

It took the turn of a century and the mind of a thinker

from a later age to realise the importance of the international
dimension in consumer demand. It was V I Lenin who saw
that, even though slavery had been theoretically abolished a
generation back, capital would be increasingly invested across
national boundaries, and labour exploited remotely. Where
once Zola's miner or Tressell's urban artisan would salvage
wood wherever he could, and knock together shelf, dresser or
pot-cupboard in his few workfree hours, the cheap furniture

8
that today’s working man and his working wife can afford to
buy new for themselves in IKEA was tooled the other side of
the world.

But Lenin was no prophet either: he studied the Real

Politik of International capital, but failed to anticipate the
degree to which technological advance would accelerate the
flow of labour, of capital, and of ideas.

Marx’s theories were based on the gentile notions of

bureaucracy that ruled the British Library, where the volumes
he studied were reliably delivered to his green-leather-topped
desk. Lenin's ideology was - despite its overtly international
dimension - no less parochial, harking back, as it did, to the
self-sacrificing certainties of Mother Russia (or Russian
Mothers).

Again it would take another generation to produce the

political theorist who could conceptualise the longer term
impact of imperialism on the consciousness of humankind: the
geographical dimension of relative deprivation, the rise of the
supranational corporations and the globalisation of alienated
desire. That theorist was Huey P Newton. His contribution
was not so much in his elucidation of the new depths of
injustice and exploitation existing in the so-called "post­
colonial" period, as in his understanding that these conditions
constituted the possibility of a higher level of ideological

9
struggle that could lead to a means of greater enlightenment
and fulfillment for all the peoples of the planet.

Huey himself was the youngest of seven children in a

hardworking family, frequently moving around the San
Francisco Bay area from one poor, segregated street to another.
But he never felt deprived: he always had enough to eat,
enjoyed the California climate, "which is kind to the poor", and
thrived in the security of " a close family with a proud strong
protective father and a loving, joyful mother." [HP
Newton,1973, pp. 16,17]. School did its best one way and
another to undermine his spirit but it did not succeed in this
any more than it did in imparting basic literacy. At the age of
sixteen Huey taught himself to read.

I do not know how long it took me to go through Plato the

first time, probably several months. When I finally finished, I
started over again. I was not trying to deal with the ideas or
concepts, just learning to recognize the words. I went
through the book eight or nine times before I felt I had
mastered the material. Later on, I studied The Republic in
college. By then I was prepared for it. [Ibid, p.55].

But the discipline of Political Science was not prepared

for Huey. The universities were not ready for his fresh and
inspiring articulation of the principle of UNIVERSALISM, the
principle which is at the heart of all the great philosophy from

10
Plato through Plotinus and Aquinas to Kant.

Perhaps the easiest, though probably not the most

elegant, way of explaining UNIVERSALISM is to consider
what it is not, what it is opposed to: to think about what it
denies, and by denying, transcends.

According to Confucius, people's duty to each other is

a function of closeness, whether genetic or preferential. So my
greatest duty is to my closest relative or friend, and my
obligation towards others decreases in direct proportion to my
indifference to them. What Confucius is describing here is a
principle of PARTICULARISM, the principle by which what
we think and feel and do towards a person is seen as properly
depending on precisely who that particular person is. Clearly
the extreme conclusion of the advocacy of PARTICULARISM
as a life strategy is the simple imperative to "Look after number
one": yourself first and then the people closest to you. In this
vein it is possible to read Spinoza's philosophy and Darwin's
biological theory as though they generate an ethic of self­
interest much like the one expounded in the glossy magazines:
go on spoil yourself because you are worth it - you have a duty
to pursue your own happiness.

On this reading the very best way to live is to look after

yourself well, and you can show increased virtue by being nice
to your family and friends. Your interaction with people is

11
determined by their singularity, by who they are, not by what
they are saying or playing, or building or destroying.

Self, family, tribe, and nation are to be honoured in that

order. This is the philosophy of autistic extemalisation,
conservatism, nationalism, nepotism, atavism. It is easy to see
how little it would take in terms of cynical political
manipulation to nudge the indifference that the
PARTICULARIST culture feels towards outsiders into
antipathy, antagonism, racism, violence - genocide.

The "strange fruit hanging on the Poplar tree" in the

American deep South was a product of the seed of the
principle of PARTICULARISM sowed generations earlier by
the first truly global commercial operation since the Romans,
where human beings were traded for cotton and sugar, traded
as beasts of burden, as labour. They were not me or my close
friends and family, you must understand, they were nothing to
do with me. If I had been alive at the time, and I had known, I
ought to have been indifferent to their plight because they were
nothing to do with me.

In an admirable effort to remind us all of the logical

consequences of that supreme indifference that is racism,
modem Germany preserves, as museums, the sites of the gas
chambers where the Nazis attempted to exterminate the entire
'races' of Slavs, gypsies and Jews. Yet nothing seems to have

12
been learned. Indeed this holocaust has been invoked over and
over again in attempts to plead other PARTICULARISTIC
causes and justify other atrocities from the atomic bombs, that
the victorious Allies dropped on Japan, to helicopter gun-ships
that are mowing down civilians, even today, even as I write.
And this same day in Rwanda a slowly healing people
attempts to give a final dignity to the victims of a genocide on
just as unimaginable a scale.

'Race' against 'race', tribe against tribe, family against

family, person against person, that is what PARTICULARISM
means. And "all is fair in Love and War", there can be no rules
because everybody is different, there is one rule for me and
another for you, one for us and another for them. That is what
PARTICULARISM is. It is the law of the jungle, where "might
is right" (or at least justifiable in terms of something called
"evolutionary psychology") and one's first duty is personal
survival.

Within the PARTICULARIST culture the only way to

keep order is by the imposition of a Leviathan, a nepotistic,
hierarchical apparatus of state, with armies, police, Witchfinder
Generals, Secret Services, Social Services and Mental Health
legislation.[Hobbes, 1998; Kai T Erikson, 1968; Todd and
Fitzgerald, 2003; Box, 1971; Foucault, 2001] Such covertly
authoritarian regimes are sometimes theocratic, and (though
some of their commanders may be female like Eva Peron,

13
Golda Meyer, Margaret Thatcher and Eugenia Charles) they
are usually patriarchal.

The teenage political theorist Newton understood the

connection between patriarchy and PARTICULARISM even
before he started on Plato.

I had such respect and admiration for my father that I could

not openly question his life. He would not have understood
what I was going through. I was grateful, I was appreciative,
and I loved and admired him, but I had questions not easily
answered.

It was the beatnik era in the Bay area , and I grew a beard.
To my parents, a beard meant a bohemian, and my father
insisted that I shave it off. I refused. Because he was
accustomed to wielding total authority in our family, my
refusal was a serious family violation. My father pressed me
again to shave; I continued to resist. The climax came
abruptly one night when he confronted me with an
ultimatum to shave right then and there. I told him I would
not do it. He struck me, and I ran to him , grabbing him with
a bear hug to restrain his arms and then pushing him away.
He chased me out of the house, but I could run much faster. I
also knew that I was strong enough to overpower him, but I
would never have done that. I just fled.[Ibid p. 59]

The sweet irony is that it was the very loving nature of

14
his close and caring family that gave the young Huey the
personal and spiritual strength to conceive of a kind of love
that transcends the particular and renders it irrelevant. He
called it Revolutionary Love.

Revolutionary Love is not the kind of romantic fiction

that aspires to "living happily ever after behind a white picket
fence" [Ibid, p.96]. Rather it is the practice of the philosophy of
Immanuel Kant.

Kant had two basic points to make, neither of them

actually new, both of them vital to the development of the
perspective of UNIVERSALISM.

First Kant stressed the importance of distinguishing

between phenomena ( happenings and things) and noumena
(ideas or modes of understanding). Huey Newton was
impressed with the application of this distinction in the work
of the twentieth century Logical Positivists.

These ideas have helped me to develop my own thinking

and ideology. Ayer once stated, "Nothing can be real if it
cannot be conceptualized, articulated and shared." That
notion stuck with me and became very important when I
began to use the ideological method of dialectical
materialism as a world view. The ideology of the Black
Panthers stands on that premise and proceeds on that

15
 basis...[Ibid p 68]

Kant's second contribution to the systematic

conceptualisation of UNIVERSALISM lies in his explication of
the categorical imperative;,

My own grandmother (Amelia Noble) was an exact

contemporary of Huey's (Estella O'Neal). A portrait of his
reminds me of mine - the physique, the hair style, the body
language and the cut of the cloth. I wonder if the similarity
extended to the simple "What-if-everybody-did-it?" morality
that mine drummed into me. If I dropped a sweet paper she
would demand that I pick it up.

"But it's only a small sweet paper what harm is it

doing?"

"What if everybody did it? The whole world would be

knee-deep in litter."

Kant’s famous imperative requires each of us to act as

though we were 'Universal Legislators'. He asks us to consider
the consequences of turning our actions into a rule that
everyone else would have to follow. Would the world be a
better place if everybody acted like us? Or would it be knee­
deep in crap?

16
 Newton's notion of revolution is entirely Kantian,
entirely LJNIVERSALISTIC. There is no idea of revenge or
retribution in the revolutionary struggle, no descent to the
barbarism or tribalism of vendetta. The Categorical Imperative
- known for generations before Kant as the 'Golden Rule' -
forbids one to do anything to anyone else that one would not
wish done to oneself. This is an idea of staggering profundity
championed by educators as venerated as the Prophet Jesus
and Archbishop Tutu.

True revolutionary justice has nothing to do with

vengeance. If I have acted badly towards another person I
would want them to admonish me, not with bitterness and self-
righteous anger, but with loving regard for my own
understanding and development. This way there is hope that 1
will learn from the experience. This is to turn the other cheek
but not a blind eye. It is to educate and improve the
transgressors rather than to "teach them a lesson" in the sense
that the Palestinians are supposed to be "taught a lesson" by
having their homes bulldozed into the ground and their
crippled clerics "taken out" with "surgically" precise missiles.

In South Africa this ideal of restitutive rather than

retributive justice has been the foundation not only for the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but for the constitution
itself.

17
 And in Rwanda (where the perpetrators of the
genocide were Christian Hutus, and those who had the
courage to extend love across the 'tribal/racial' divide were
mainly Muslims and atheists) the healing process is begun by a
national policy of transtribal adoption for the countless
orphans, and an NGO-inspired symbolic exchange of cattle
where every calf bom to a Tutsi-owned cow is given to a Hutu
family and vice versa.

Christianity, like every other ideology or religion, is

open to misinterpretation and exploitation by ruthless
patriarchs and power mongers. But it is no mere coincidence
that when Newton struggles to account for the origins of his
own noumenal landscape - in addition to writers as varied as
"Watson ... Skinner and Pavlov...Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard...
Mao Tse Tung ...(and) Malcolm X" [Ibid pp.68-71] - he is
always falling back on The Bible. For Christianity itself
provides a close parallel to Newton's concept of Revolutionary
Intercommunalism. It is a set of universalistic principles
universally ( if hypocritically) proclaimed by imperial powers
to all the diverse communities of the imperialised.

In what Newton described as the 'existentialism' of the

Book of Ecclesiastes, and in the Sermon on the Mount, the
imperial victims found the intellectual weapons (as well as the
spiritual strength) to face their oppressors. No coincidence

18
either, then, that the rhythm and harmonies of Gospel music
provided the template for the revolutionary battle hymns.

Yet Christianity is neither necessary nor sufficient for

the development of the kind of ideas actualised in the South
African constitution. A secular formulation of UNIVERSAL­
ISM could have done the job just as well. But, of course the
imperial boot did not imprint the sparse logic of Immanuel
Kant, simply because there was nothing in it for Empire -
Christianity is more easily mystified and magicalised. And, like
most religions, it is readily permissive of the institutions of
theocracy, hierarchy and patriarchy which negate the essence
of its UNIVERSALISM with the kind of atavistic PARTICUL­
ARISM that is of such value to the builders of empires and the
bringers of global exploitation and destruction.

Add to this the idea of waiting until we get to Heaven

to know what happiness is, and the value of Christianity to
Empire is clear.
Huey says,

Sometimes I got into teaching on the block, reciting poetry

or starting dialogues about philosophical ideas. I talked to
the brothers about things that Hume, Pierce, Locke or
William James had said, and in that way I retained ideas and
sometimes resolved problems in my own mind.
...we talked about such questions as the existence of God,

19
 self-determination, and free-will. I would ask them, "Do you
have free will?"
"Yes."
"Do you believe in God?"
"Yes."
"Is your God all-powerful?"
"Yes."
"Is he omniscient?"
"Yes."
Therefore, I told them, their all-powerful God knew
everything before it happened. If so, I would ask, "How can
you say you have free will when He knows what you are
going to do before you do it? You are predestined to do what
you do. If not, then your God has lied or He has made a
mistake, and you have already said that your God cannot lie
or make a mistake." These dilemmas led to arguments that
lasted all day, over a fifth of wine, though I sometimes went
to school drunk.[Newton, 1973, p.75]

Dialectical materialism is never about final solutions.

Ideological dilemmas do not bring understanding through lazy
quests for quick resolution or 'closure'. Newton's dialogues on
intercommunalism are the quintessence of permanent
revolution on the noumenal plane. They beckon us to a
struggle without end, a struggle without which our little lives
would be wasted in the harsh tum-up-for-the-book that
innocent fools will end up calling 'History', and cynical
operators will label "The End of History" [Fukuyama,1993].

20
 In this book the transcripts of Newton's statements and
discussions in the Spring of 1971 are set beside VI Lenin’s
argument with Rosa Luxemburg on the same subject half a
century earlier. It is for the reader to assess the value of these
perspectives now that

"the declining autonomy of nation states and the rise of

shifting non-state coalitions have provided a new terrain of
opportunity not only for the disaffected but also for
opportunist use and sponsorship of terrorism by states
themselves" [Todd and Bloch, 2003].

21
 Intercommunalism

In early February 1971 a group of social theorists met at

Yale. They sat around a huge mahogany table in the library of
Trumbull College: fourteen students (Alan Beller, Samuel Cooper,
John Cole, William Horowitz, Sandra Hughes, Caroline Jackson, Vera
Jones, Ann Linden, Jennifer Lyman, Donald Mendelsohn, Wayne
Neveu, Dwight Raiford, Kurt Schmoke and Bradley Wong), two
academic sociologists in the role of moderators, an elderly
psychoanalytic theorist (Erik H Erikson) and Huey P Newton,
Supreme Commander of the Black Panther Party.

As Kai T Erikson, one of the moderators, recorded,

...an equal number of onlookers formed another circle

outside them - behind Newton, a half-ring of comrades and
travel companions, and behind Erikson, in awkward
symmetry, a half-ring of Yale people. Without any conscious
intent , the stage had been set for a confrontation. [K T
Erikson, in E H Erikson and H P Newton,1973, p7].

Confrontation was the keynote of the time, this was the

season of the shootings at Jackson State and Kent State universities,
and of the Panther Trials.

The dialogue began with a statement from Newton.

22
 I'll start the discussion by explaining the Black Panther
Party's ideology.
We believe that everything is in a constant state of
change, so we employ a framework of thinking that can put us
in touch with the process of change. That is, we believe that the
conclusions will always change, but the fundamentals of the
method by which we arrive at our conclusions will remain
constant. Our ideology therefore, is the most important part of
our thinking.
There are many different ideologies or schools of
thought, and all of them start with an a priori set of
assumptions. This is because mankind is still limited in its
knowledge and finds it hard, at this historical stage, to talk
about the very beginning of things and the very end of things
without starting from premises that cannot be proved..
This is true of both general schools of thought— the
idealist and the materialist. The idealists base their thinking on
certain presumptions about things of which they have very
little knowledge; the materialists like to believe that they are
very much in contact with reality, or the real material world,
disregarding the fact that they only assume there is a material
world.
The Black Panther Party has chosen materialist
assumptions on which to ground its ideology. This is a purely
arbitrary choice. Idealism might be the real happening; we
might not be here at all. We don’t know whether we are in

23
Connecticut or in San Francisco, whether we are dreaming and
in a dream state, or whether we are awake and in a dream
state. Perhaps we are just somewhere in a void; we simply can't
be sure. But because the members of the Black Panther Party
are materialists, we believe that some day scientists will be able
to deliver the information that will give us not only the
evidence but the proof that there is a material world and that
its genesis was material—motion and matter—not spiritual.
Until that time, however, and for the purposes of this
discussion, I merely ask that we agree on the stipulation that a
material world exists and develops externally and indepen­
dently of us all. With this stipulation, we have the foundation
for an intelligent dialogue. We assume that there is a material
world and that it exists and develops independently of us; and
we assume that the human organism, through its sensory
system, has the ability to observe and analyze that material
world.
Now the dialectical materialist believes that everything
in existence has fundamental internal contradictions. For
example, the African gods south of the Sahara always had at
least two heads, one for evil and one for good. Now people
create God in their own image, what they think He—for God is
always a "He" in patriarchal societies—what He is like or
should be. So the African said, in effect: I am both good and
evil; good and evil are the two parts of the thing that is me.
This is an example of an internal contradiction.
Western societies, though, split up good and evil,
placing God up in heaven and the Devil down in hell. Good
and evil fight for control over people in Western religions, but
they are two entirely different entities. This is an example of an
external contradiction.

24
 This struggle of mutually exclusive opposing
tendencies within everything that exists explains the
observable fact that all things have motion and are in a
constant state of transformation. Things transform themselves
because while one tendency or force is more dominating than
another, change is nonetheless a constant, and at some point
the balance will alter and there will be a new qualitative
development. New properties will come into existence,
qualities that did not altogether exist before. Such qualities
cannot be analysed without understanding the forces
struggling within the object in the first place, yet the limitations
and determinations of these new qualities are not defined by
the forces that created them.
Class conflict develops by the same principles that
govern all other phenomena in the material world. In
contemporary society, a class that owns property dominates a
class that does not own property. There is a class of workers
and a class of owners, and because there exists a basic
contradiction in the interests of those two classes, they are
constantly struggling with one another. Now, because things
do not stay the same we can be sure of one thing: the owner
will not stay the owner, and the people who are dominated
will not stay dominated. We don't know exactly how this will
happen, but after we analyze all the other elements of the
situation, we can make a few predictions. We can be sure that if
we increase the intensity of the struggle, we will reach a point
where the equilibrium of forces will change and there will be a
qualitative leap into a new situation with a new social

25
equilibrium. I say "leap" because we know from our experience
of the physical world that when transformations of this kind
occur they do so with great force.
These principles of dialectical development do not
represent an iron law that can be applied mechanically to the
social process. There are exceptions to those laws of
development and transformation, which is why, as dialectical
materialists, we emphasize that we must analyze each set of
conditions separately and make concrete analyses of concrete
conditions in each instance. One cannot always predict the
outcome, but one can for the most part gain enough insight to
manage the process.
The dialectical method is essentially an ideology, yet
we believe that it is superior to other ideologies because it puts
us more in contact with what we believe to be the real world; it
increases our ability to deal with that world and shape its
development and change.
You could easily say, "Well, this method may be
successfully applied in one particular instance, but how do you
know that it is an infallible guide in all cases?" The answer is
that we don't know. We don't say "all cases" or "infallible
guide" because we try not to speak in such absolute and
inclusive terms. We only we have to say that we have to
analyse each instance, that we have found this method the best
available in the course of our analyses, and that we think the
method will continue to prove itself in the future.
We sometimes have a problem because people do not
understand the ideology that Marx an Engels began to
develop. People say, "You claim to be Marxists, but did you
know that Marx was a racist?" We say, "Well, he probably was a
racist: he made a statement once about the marriage of a white

26
woman and a black man, and he called the black man a gorilla
or something like that." The Marxists claim he was only
kidding and that the statement shows Marx's closeness to the
man, but of course that is nonsense. So it does seem that Marx
was a racist.
Now if you are a Marxist, then Marx's racism affects
your own judgment because a Marxist is someone who
worships Marx and the thought of Marx. Remember, though,
that Marx himself said, "I am not a Marxist." Such Marxists
cherish the conclusions which Marx arrived at through his
method, but they throw away the method itself—leaving
themselves in a totally static posture. That is why most
Marxists really are historical materialists: they look to the past
to get answers for the future, and that does not work.
If you are a dialectical materialist, however, Marx's
racism does not matter. You do not believe in the conclusions of
one person but in the validity of a mode of thought; and we in
the Party, as dialectical materialists, recognize Karl Marx as
one of the great contributors to that mode of thought. Whether
or not Marx was a racist is irrelevant and immaterial to
whether or not the system of thinking he helped develop
delivers truths about processes in the material world. And this
is true in all disciplines. In every discipline you find people
who have distorted visions and are at a low state of
consciousness who nonetheless have flashes of insight and
produce ideas worth considering. For instance, John B Watson
once stated that his favourite pastime was hunting and
hanging niggers, yet he made great forward strides in the
analysis and investigation of conditioned responses.
Now that I have said a word about the ideology of the
Party, I am going to describe the history of the Party and how

27
we have changed our understanding of the world.
When we started in October 1966, we were what one
would call Black Nationalists. We realised the contradictions in
society, the pressure on Black people in particular, and we saw
that most people in the past had solved some of their problems
by forming into nations. We therefore argued that it was
rational and logical for us to believe that our sufferings as a
people would end when we established a nation of our own,
composed of our own people.

But after a while we saw that something was wrong

with this resolution of the problem. In the past, nationhood
was a fairly easy thing to accomplish. If we look around now,
though, we see that the world —the land space, the livable parts
as we know them —is pretty well settled. So we realised that to
create a new nation we would have to become a dominant
faction in this one, and yet the fact that we did not have power
was the contradiction that drove us to seek nationhood in the
first place. It is an endless circle you see: to achieve nationhood,
we needed to become a dominant force; but to become a
dominant force we needed to be a nation.

So we made a further analysis and found that in order

for us to be a dominant force we would at least have to be great
in number. So we developed from just plain nationalists or
separatist nationalists into revolutionary nationalists. We said
that we joined with all of the other people in the world
struggling for decolonialisation and nationhood, and called
ourselves a "dispersed colony" because we did not have the
geographical concentration that other so-called colonies had.
But we did have Black communities throughout the country—

28
San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Haven—and there are many
similarities between these communities and the traditional
kind of colony. We also thought that if we allied with those
other colonies we would have a greater number, a greater
chance, a greater force; and that is what we needed, of course,
because only force kept us a colonised people.
We saw that it was not only beneficial for us to be
revolutionary nationalists but to express our solidarity with
those friends who suffered many of the same kind of pressures
we suffered. Therefore we changed our self-definitions. We
said that we are not only revolutionary nationalists—that is,
nationalists who want revolutionary changes in everything,
including the economic system the oppressor inflicts upon us
—but we are also individuals deeply concerned with the other
people of the world and their desires for revolution. In order to
show this solidarity, we decided to call ourselves
internationalists.
Originally, as I said, we assumed that people could
solve a number of their problems by becoming nations, but this
conclusion showed our lack of understanding of the world's
dialectical development. Our mistake was to assume that the
conditions under which people had become nations in the past
still existed. To be a nation, one must satisfy certain essential
conditions, and if these things do not exist or cannot be
created, then it is not possible to be a nation.
In the past, nation-states were usually inhabited by
people of a certain ethnic and religious background. They were
divided from other people either by a partition of water or a
great unoccupied land space. This natural partition gave the
nation’s dominant class, and the people generally, a certain
amount of control over the kinds of political, economic, and

29
social institutions they established. It gave them a certain
control over their destiny and their territory. They were secure
at least to the extent that they would not be attacked or
violated by another nation ten thousand miles away, simply
because the means to transport troops that far did not exist.
This situation, however, could not last. Technology developed
until there was a definite qualitative transformation in the
relationships within and between nations.
We know that you cannot change a part of the whole
without changing the whole, and vice versa. As technology
developed and there was an increase in military capabilities
and means of travel and communication, nations began to
control other territories, distant from their own. Usually they
controlled these other lands by sending administrators and
settlers, who would extract labor from the people or resources
from the earth - or both. This is the phenomenon we call
colonialism.
The settlers' control over the seized land and people
grew to such an extent that it wasn't even necessary for the
settler to be present to maintain the system. He went back
home. The people were so integrated with the aggressor that
their land didn’t look like a colony any longer. But because
their land didn't look like a free state either, some theorists
started to call these lands neo-colonies. Arguments about the
precise definition of these entities developed. Are they colonies
or not? If they aren't, what are they? The theorists knew that
something had happened, but they did not know what it was.
Using the dialectical materialist method, we in the
Black Panther Party saw that the United States was no longer a
nation. It was something else; it was more than a nation. It had
not only expanded its territorial boundaries, but it had

30
expanded all of its controls as well. We called it an empire.
Now at one time the world had an empire in which the
conditions of rule were different—the Roman Empire. The
difference between the Roman and the American empires is
that other nations were able to exist external to and
independent of the Roman Empire because their means of
exploration, conquest, and control were all relatively limited.
But when we say "empire" today, we mean precisely
what we say. An empire is a nation-state that has transformed
itself into a power controlling all the lands and people.
We believe that there are no more colonies or neo­
colonies. If a people is colonised, it must be possible for them
to decolonise and become what they formerly were. But what
happens when the raw materials are extracted and labour is
exploited within a territory dispersed over the entire globe?
When the riches of the whole earth are depleted and used to
feed a gigantic industrial machine in the imperialist's home?
Then the people and the economy are so integrated into the
imperialist empire that it’s impossible to "decolonise", to
return to the former conditions of existence.
If colonies cannot decolonise and return to their
original existence as nations, then nations no longer exist. Nor,
we believe, will they ever exist again. And since there must be
nations for revolutionary nationalism or internationalism to
make sense, we decided that we would have to call ourselves
something new.
We say that the world today is a dispersed collection of
communities. A community is different from a nation.. A
community is a small unit with a comprehensive collection of
institutions that exist to serve a small group of people. And we
say further that the struggle in the world today is between the

31
small circle that administers and profits from the empire of the
United States and the peoples of the world who want to
determine their own destinies.
We call this situation intercommunalism. We are now
in the age of reactionary intercommunalism, in which a ruling
circle, a small group of people, control all other people by
using their technology.
At the same time, we say that this technology can solve
most of the material contradictions people face, that the
material conditions exist that would allow the people of the
world to develop a culture that is essentially human and would
nurture those things that would allow the people to resolve
contradictions in a way that would not cause the mutual
slaughter of all of us. The development of such a culture would
be revolutionary intercommunalism.
Some communities have begun doing this. They
liberated their territories and have established provisional
governments. We recognize them, and say that these
governments represent the people of China, North Korea, the
people in the liberated zones of South Vietnam, and the people
in North Vietnam. We believe their examples should be
followed so that the order of the day would not be reactionary
intercommunalism (empire) but revolutionary
intercommunalism. The people of the world, that is, must seize
power from the small ruling circle and expropriate the
expropriators, pull them down from their pinnacle and make
them equals, and distribute the fruits of our labor, that have
been denied us, in some equitable way. We know that the
machinery to accomplish these tasks exists and we want access
to it.

32
 Imperialism has laid the foundation for world
communism, and imperialism itself has grown to the point of
reactionary intercommunalism because the world is now
integrated into one community. The communications
revolution, combined with the expansive domination of the
American empire, has created the "global village." The peoples
of all cultures are under siege by the same forces and they all
have access to the same technologies.
There are only differences in degree between what's
happening to the Blacks here and what’s happening to all of
the people in the world, including Africans. Their needs are
the same and their energy is the same. And the contradictions
they suffer will only be resolved when the people establish a
revolutionary intercommunalism where they share all the
wealth that they produce and live in one world.
The stage of history is set for such a transformation:
the technological and administrative base of socialism exists.
When the people seize the means of production and all social
institutions, then there will be a qualitative leap and a change
in the organization of society. It will take time to resolve the
contradictions of racism and all kinds of chauvinism; but
because the people will control their own social institutions,
they will be free to re-create themselves and to establish
communism, a stage of human development in which human
values will shape the structures of society. At this time the
world will be ready for a still higher level, of which we can
now know nothing.

33
 Dialectics

When Newton finished his statement there followed a

question and answer session which was recorded on audio tape and
subsequently transcribed. Unfortunately the list of names to
accompany the tape was mislaid, so the questioners cannot be
identified individually.

QUESTION: I’m wondering: now that you have

established an ideology with which to view the kinds of
imperialism going on in the United States, what do you do
once the revolution has taken place? What happens once you
have taken over the structures made by capitalism and have
assumed responsibility for them? Aren’t you going to
encounter the same struggles between the dominant forms of
government and the inferior?

NEWTON: It’s not going to be the same because

nothing remains the same. All things are in a constant state of
transformation, and therefore you will have other
contradictions inherent in that new phenomenon. We can be
very sure that there will be contradictions after revolutionary
intercommunalism is the order of the day, and we can even be
sure that there will be contradictions after communism, which
is an even higher stage than revolutionary intercommunalism.
There will always be contradictions or else everything would
stop. So it’s not a question of "when the revolution comes": the
revolution is always going on. It is not a question of "when the
revolution is going to be": revolution is going on every day,
every minute, because the new is always struggling against the

34
old for dominance.
We also say that every determination is a limitation,
and every limitation is a determination. This is the struggle of
the old and new again, where a thing seems to negate itself. For
instance, imperialism negates itself after laying the foundation
for communism, and communism will eventually negate itself
because of its internal contradictions, and then we'll move to
an even higher state. I like to think that we will finally move to
a stage called "godliness," where man will know the secrets of
the beginning and the end and will have full control of the
universe - and when I say the universe, I mean all motion and
matter.. This is only speculation, of course, because science has
not delivered us the answer yet; but we believe that it will in
the future.
So of course there will be contradictions in the future.
But some contradictions are antagonistic and some contra­
dictions are not antagonistic. Usually when we speak of
antagonistic contradictions, we are talking about contradictions
that develop from conflicts of economic interest, and we
assume that in the future, when the people have power, these
antagonistic contradictions will occur less and less.

QUESTION: Could you speak to the question of how

you are going to expropriate the expropriators when they are
the ones with the army and the ones with the police force?

NEWTON: Well, all things carry a negative sign as well

as a positive sign. That’s why we say every determination has a
limitation and every limitation has a determination. For
example, your organism carries internal contradictions from
the moment you are bom and begin to deteriorate. First you

35
are an infant, then a small child, then an adolescent, and so on
until you are old. We keep developing and burning ourselves
out at the same time; we are negating ourselves. And this is just
how imperialism is negating itself now. It's moved into a phase
we call reactionary intercommunalism and has thus laid the
foundation for revolutionary intercommunalism, because as
the enemy disperses its troops and controls more and more
space, it becomes weaker and weaker, you see. And as they
become weaker and weaker, the people become stronger and
stronger.

QUESTION: You spoke of technological differences

between the various countries of the world. How are you going
to integrate all these countries into intercommunalism if these
differences exist?

NEWTON: They are already integrated by the mere

fact that the ruling circle has control of all of them. Inside the
geographical region of North America, for example, you have
Wall Street, you have the big plants in Detroit turning out
automobiles, and you have Mississippi, where there are no
automobile factories. Does that mean that Mississippi is not a
part of the complete whole? No, it only means that the
expropriators have chosen to put automobile plants in Detroit
rather than in Mississippi. Instead of producing automobiles,
they grow food in Mississippi that makes stronger the hands of
people in Detroit or Wall Street. So the answer to your question
is that systems are inclusive: just because you don't have a
factory in every single community does not mean that the
community is distinct and independent and autonomous, you
see.

36
 QUESTION: Well, then, do you see each of the
dispersed communities having certain kinds of things to work
out among themselves before they can take part in
intercommunalism?

NEWTON: They are part of intercommunalism,

reactionary intercommunalism. What the people have to do is
become conscious of this condition. The primary concern of the
Black Panther Party is to lift the level of consciousness of the
people through theory and practice to the point where they
will see exactly what is controlling them and what is
oppressing them, and therefore see exactly what has to be
done - or at least what the first step is. One of the greatest
contributions of Freud was to make people aware that they are
controlled much of their lives by their unconscious. He
attempted to strip away the veil from from the unconscious
and make it conscious: that's the first step in feeling free, the
first step in exerting control. It seems to be natural for people
not to like being controlled. Marx made a similar contribution
to human freedom, only he pointed out the external things that
control people. In order for people to liberate themselves from
external controls, they have to know about these controls.
Consciousness of the expropriator is necessary for
expropriating the expropriator, for throwing off external
controls.

QUESTION: So, in the ultimate intercommune, do you

see separate, geographically defined communities that have
had a specific history and a unique set of experiences? I mean,
would each community retain some kind of separate identity?

37
 NEWTON: No, I think that whether we like it or not,
dialectics would make it necessary to have a universal identity.
If we do not have universal identity, then we will have cultural,
racial, and religious chauvinism, the kind of ethnocentrism we
have now. So we say that even if in the future there will be
some small differences in behavior patterns, different
environments would all be a secondary thing. And we struggle
for a future in which we will realise that we are all Homo
sapiens and have more in common than not. We will be closer
together than we are now.

QUESTION: I would like to return to something we

were talking about a minute or two ago. It seems to me that the
mass media have, in a sense, psychologised many of the people
in our country, our own geographical area, so that they come to
desire the controls that are imposed upon them by the
capitalist system. So how are we going to fight this revolution
if a great number of people, in this country at least, are in fact
psychologically part of the ruling class?

NEWTON: Part of or controlled by?

QUESTION: Well, part of in the psychological sense,

because they are not really in power. It’s a psychological way of
talking about the middle class. Do you have any feelings on
that?

NEWTON: First, we have to understand that

everything has a material basis, and that our personalities
would not exist, what others call our spirit or our mind would

38
not exist, if we were not material organisms. So to understand
why some of the victims of the ruling class might identify with
the ruling circle, we must look at their material lives; and if we
do, we will realise that the same people who identify with the
ruling circle are also very unhappy. Their feelings can be
compared to those of a child: a child desires to mature so that
he can control himself, but he believes he needs the protection
of his father to do so. He has conflicting drives. Psychologists
would call this conflict neurotic if the child were unable to
resolve it.
In a sense, then, that is what we are all about. First,
people have to be conscious of the ways they are controlled,
then we have to understand the scientific laws involved, and
once that is accomplished, we can begin to do what we want—
to manipulate phenomena.

QUESTION: But if the opposing forces at this point

include a very large number of people, including most of the
middle classes, then where will the revolutionary thrust come
from?

NEWTON: O.K., I see what you are getting at. That

thrust will come from the growing number of what we call
’'unemployables" in this society. We call Blacks and third world
people in particular, and poor people in general,
"unemployables" because they do not have the skills needed to
work in a highly developed technological society. You
remember my saying that every society, like every age,
contains its opposites: feudalism produced capitalism, which
wiped out feudalism, and capitalism produced socialism,
which will wipe out capitalism. Now the same is true of

39
reactionary intercommunalism. Technological development
creates a large middle class, and the number of workers
increases also. The workers are paid a good deal and get many
comforts. But the ruling class is still only interested in itself.
They might make certain compromises and give a little—as a
matter of fact,the ruling circle has even developed something
of a social structure or welfare state to keep the opposition
down—but as technology develops, the need decreases. It has
been estimated that ten years from now only a small
percentage of the present work force will be necessary to run
the industries. Then what will happen to your worker who is
now making four dollars an hour? The working class will be
narrowed down, the class of unemployables will grow because
it will take more and more skills to operate those machines and
fewer people. And as these people become unemployables,
they will become more and more alienated; even socialist
compromises will not be enough. You will then find an
integration between, say, the Black unemployable and the
white racist hard-hat who is not regularly employed and is
mad at the Blacks who he thinks threaten his job. We hope that
he will join forces with those people who are already
unemployable, but whether he does or not, his material
existence will have changed. The proletarian will become the
lumpen proletarian. It is this future change—the increase of the
lumpen proletariat and the decrease of the proletariat—which
makes us say that the lumpen proletariat is the majority and
carries the revolutionary banner.

QUESTION: I'd like to ask you a question about the

Party. You said that you see the Black Panther Party as
primarily a force to educate people, raise their consciousness,

40
end their oppression, and so on. Do you see the Party as
educating Black people specifically or as educating everybody?

NEWTON: We say that Black people are the vanguard

of the revolution in this country, and, since no one will be free
until the people of America are free, that Black people are the
vanguard of world revolution. We don't say this in a boasting
way. We inherit this legacy primarily because we are the last,
you see, and as the saying goes, "The last will be the first".
We believe that Black Americans are the first real
internationalists; not just the Black Panther Party, but Black
people who live in America. We are internationalists because
we have been internationally dispersed by slavery, and we can
easily identify with other people in other cultures. Because of
slavery, we never really felt attached to the nation in the same
way that the peasant was attached to the soil in Russia. We are
always a long way from home.
And, finally the historical condition of Black
Americans has led us to be progressive. We’ve always talked
equality, you see, instead of believing that other people must
equal us. What we want is not dominance, but for the yoke to
be released. We want to live with other people, we don't want
to say that we are better: in fact, if we suffer a fault, it is that we
tend to feel we are worse than other people because we have
been brainwashed to think that way. So these subjective factors,
based on the material existence of Black people in America,
contribute to our vanguard position.
Now as far as the Party is concerned, it has been
exclusively Black so far. We are thinking about how to deal
with the racist situation in America and the reaction Black
people in America have to racism. We have to get to the Black

41
people first because they were carrying the banner first, and we
try to do everything possible to get them to relate to us.

QUESTION: You were saying something a while ago

about the problem of simplifying your ideology for the masses.
Could you say a little more about it?

NEWTON: Yes, that’s our big burden. So far I haven't

been able to do it well enough to keep from being booed off the
stage, but we are learning. I think one way to show how
dialectics works is to use practical example after practical
example. The reason 1 am sometimes afraid to do that is that
people will take each example and think, "Well, if this is true in
one case then it must be true in all other cases." If they do that,
then they become historical materialists like most Marxist
scholars and most Marxist parties. These scholars and parties
don’t really deal in dialectics at all, or else they would know
that at this time the revolutionary banner will not be carried by
the proletarian class but by the lumpen proletariat.

QUESTION: Talking about contradictions, one of the

most obvious contradictions within the Black community is the
difference in outlook between the Black bourgeoisie and the
Black lower class. How do you raise the level of consciousness
in the community to the point where the Black bourgeoisie sees
its own interests as being the same as those of the lower class?

NEWTON: Well, we are again dealing with attitudes

and values that have to be changed. The whole concept of the
bourgeoisie—Black bourgeoisie—is something of an illusion.
It’s a fantasy bourgeoisie, and this is true of most of the white
bourgeoisie too. There are very few controllers even in the

42
white middle class. They can barely keep their heads above
water, they are paying all the bills, living hand-to-mouth, and
they have the extra expense of refusing to live like Black
people, you see. So they are not really controlling anything:
they are controlled. In the same way, I don’t recognize the
Black bourgeoisie as different from any other exploited people.
They are living in a fantasy world, and the main thing is to
instill consciousness, to point out their real interests, their
objective and true interests, just as our white progressive and
radical friends have to do in the white community.

QUESTION: How do you go about raising the level of

consciousness in the Black community? Educationally, I mean.
Do you have formal programs of instruction?

NEWTON: Well, we saw a need to formalize education

because we didn't believe that a haphazard kind of learning
would necessarily bring about the best results. We also saw
that the so-called halls of learning did nothing but miseducate
us; they either drove us out or kicked us out. They did me both
ways. So what we are trying to do is structure an educational
institution of our own.
Our first attempt along these lines is what we call our
Ideological Institute. So far we have about fifty students, and
these fifty students are — well, may I say unique students,
because all of them are brothers and sisters off the block. What
I mean is that they are lumpen proletarians. Most of them are
kick-outs and dropouts; most of them left school in the eighth,
ninth, or tenth grade. And those few who stayed all the way
didn't learn how to read or write, just as I didn't learn until I
was about sixteen. But now they are dealing with dialectics and

43
they are dealing with science—they study physics and
mathematics so that they can understand the universe—and
they are learning because they think it is relevant to them now.
They will relate this learning back to the community and the
community will in turn see the need for our program. It's very
practical and relates to the needs of the people in a way that
makes them receptive to our teachings and helps open their
eyes to the fact that the people are the real power. They are the
ones who will bring about change, not us alone. A vanguard is
like the head of a spear, the thing that goes first. But what
really hurts is the butt of the spear, because even though the
head makes the necessary entrance, the back part is what
penetrates. Without the butt, a spear is nothing but a toothpick.
QUESTION:What about Malcolm X University? Would
you say that it has value?
NEWTON: The whole issue is: who controls? We, the
Black Panther Party, control our Ideological Institute. If the
people (and when I say "the people" I mean the oppressed
people) control Malcolm X University, if they control it without
reservation or without having to answer for what is done there
or who speaks there, then Malcolm X University is progressive.
If that is not the case, then Malcolm X University, or any
university by any other name, is not progressive. 1 like its
name, though, [laughter]
QUESTION: The thing I don't understand is: if unity of
identity is going to exist in revolutionary intercommunalism,
then what will be the contradictions that produce further
change? Like, it seems to me that it would be virtually
impossible to avoid some contradictions.
NEWTON: 1 agree with you. You cannot avoid
contradictions, you cannot avoid the struggle of opposite
tendencies within the same wholes. But I can't tell you what the

44
new opposites will be because they are not in existence yet. See
what 1 mean?
QUESTION: I guess so. But how does all that fit in
with your idea of a unified identity?
NEWTON: Well, in the first place, we do not deal in
panaceas. The qualitative leap from reactionary intercommun-
alism to revolutionary intercommunalism will not be the
millennium. It will not immediately bring into being either a
universal identity or a culture that is essentially human. It will
only provide the material base for the development of those
tendencies.
When the people seize the means of production,when
they seize the mass media and so forth, you will still have
racism, you will still have ethnocentrism, you will still have
contradictions. But the fact that the people will be in control of
all the productive and institutional units of society—not only
factories, but the media too—will enable them to start solving
these contradictions. It will produce new values, new
identities; it will mold a new and essentially human culture as
the people resolve old conflicts based on cultural and
economic conditions. And at some point, there will be a
qualitative change and the people will have transformed
revolutionary intercommunalism into communism.
We call it "communism" because at that point in history
people will not only control the productive and institutional
units of society, but they will also have seized possession of
their own subconscious attitudes toward these things; and, for
the first time in history they will have a more rather than less
conscious relationship to the material world—people, plants,
books, machines, media, everything—in which they live. They
will have power, that is, they will control the phenomena
around them and make them act in some desired manner, and
they will know their own real desires. The first step in this
process is the seizure by the people of their own communities.
Let me say one more thing, though, to get back to your
question. I would like to see the kind of communism I just

45
described come into being, and I think it will come into being.
But that concept is so far from my comprehension that 1
couldn’t possibly name the contradictions that will exist there,
although I am sure that the dialectics will go on. I'll be honest
with you. No matter how 1 read it, I don’t understand it.

QUESTION: But I still don't see where the

contradictions are going to come in.

NEWTON: I can't see them either because they are not

in existence yet. Only the basis for them is in existence, and we
can't talk about things in the blue, things we don’t know
anything about. Philosophers have done that too much already.

QUESTION: You are talking about this ideology of

intercommunalism as part of the program of the Black Panther
Party and telling us that the idea is to strive for unity of
identity. Yet a few minutes ago you mentioned that the Party
only accepts Blacks as members. That sounds like a
contradiction to me.

NEWTON: Well, I guess it is. But to explain it I would

have to go back to what I said earlier. We are the spearhead
most of the time, and we try not to be too far ahead of the
masses of the people, too far ahead of their thinking. We have
to understand that most of the people are not ready for many
of the things we talk about. Now many of our relationships
with other groups, such as the white radicals with whom we
have formed coalitions have been criticized by the very people
we are trying to help. For example, our offer of troops to the
Vietnamese received negative reaction from the people. And I
mean from truly oppressed people. Welfare recipients wrote
letters saying, "1 thought the Party was for us; why do you
want to give those dirty Vietnamese our life blood?" I would

46
agree with you and call it a contradiction. But it is a
contradiction we are trying to resolve. You see, we are trying to
give some therapy, you might say, to our community and lift
their consciousness. But first we have to be accepted. If the
therapist is not accepted, then he can’t deliver the message. We
try to do whatever is possible to meet the patient on the
grounds that he or she can best relate to, because, after all,
they are the issue. So I would say that we are being pragmatic
in order to do the job that has to be done, and then, when that
job is done, the Black Panther Party will no longer be the Black
Panther Party.
QUESTION: That brings up a related question in my
mind. How do you view the struggles of women and gay
people right now? I mean do you see them as an important
part of the revolution?
NEWTON: We think it is very important to relate to
and understand the causes of the oppression of women and
gay people. We can see that there are contradictions between
the sexes and between homosexuals and heterosexuals, but we
believe that these contradictions should be resolved within the
community. Too often so-called revolutionary vanguards have
tried to resolve these contradictions by isolating women and
gay people, and, of course, this only means that the
revolutionary groups have cut themselves off from one of the
most powerful and important forces among the people. We do
not believe that the oppression of women or gays will end by
the creation of separate communities for either group. We see
that as an incorrect idea, just like the idea of a separate nation.
If people want to do it, all right; but it won't solve their
problems. So we try to show people the way to resolve these
problems: the vanguard has to include all the people. O.K.?

47
 Identity

On the second day of the conference at Yale Erik H Erikson

opened with a lengthy statement of his own position on the question
of identity. This is abbreviated here.

ERIKSON: ... In my terms , I would say that the

biggest problem facing a universal "people" today is the
question of how wide an identity one can afford without
becoming formless, ineffective, and lost, and how small must
and can be genuine communalities, concrete living situations
in which a wider identity finds its home in the here and now....
So we will be interested in knowing what kind of world
organization you foresee for your intercommunalism. What
will be the smallest units and what the largest? And if I may
end with a question which interests me right now to the point
that I go around like Diogenes with a flashlight, what kind of
adult, what kind of mature citizen, do you visualize as the
intercommunalist? I know that we have been so preoccupied
with the sons who want to kill their fathers that we have failed
to take a really good look at the fathers who, always again,
sacrifice their sons, who cast gods into the images of
superfathers so that they will sanction the sacrifices of the
sons. Maybe the adult partaking in a world-wide identity will
need neither a father-image nor a god figure in that
compensatory sense, but only an ideal of maturity as the
symbolic guarantor of a universal adulthood. This, too, we
must discuss in historical perspective.

48
 NEWTON: Let me clarify something. The Black
Panther Party was formed in 1966, and at that time, as I
mentioned yesterday, we thought of ourselves as nationalists.
Now prior to 1966 I had been involved in many organizations
and parties— the Black Muslims, for example, even though I
did not join because I could never quite accept the mystical or
religious aspect of it. But there were other organizations too.
And even from the beginning I found it difficult to accept some
of the Black nationalist ways: I tried to develop an attitude of
great hatred for people, in this instance white people, and
every time I thought I had that attitude all developed and
internalized, my comrades would call me on the carpet about
something. For example, sometimes I would do courteous
things such as opening a door for a woman who happened to
be white, and they would ask me why I had done that. When I
did these things I would be criticized; but when I didn't do
these things, I would feel a certain guilt about it. And I really
felt that I should have hatred for all of these people generally
because all of them had received some privileges from the fact
that their foreparents had been robbers and rapists and so on.
I mention these personal things to give you some
background. The Black Panther Party, from its very conception,
was meant as an antiracist party. Even with our rhetoric, we
made it very clear that we were against racism, that the
purpose of our organization was to transform things so that
racism would no longer exist and no longer affect us. I say this
because Erik seems to think that the Party found it necessary to
even hate some people at this stage in its development. There is

49
something to that, of course, but I would like to point out one
thing about hate. Love and hate are not opposites; they are on
the same pole, and the opposite of both love and hate is
indifference. It's difficult for a Black person in America to be
indifferent, so you can imagine the kind of agony one goes
through. It is difficult to be indifferent, but it is also difficult to
love, you see. To be involved often means to hate, but because
love and hate both grow from the same pole, there's love there
too.
Now, of course, the Black Panther Party is not based
upon hate. We feel that our revolutionary program must be
guided by a feeling of love—armed love we sometimes call it. I
don't like to use the word "love" again but the language is
poor: maybe there should be a new word to express what I
mean about involvement and acceptance.

QUESTION: I would like to raise something which has

always been a source of deep personal conflict for me. I look at
the United States and the ruling structure, and I do not like it. I
do not like the violence and oppression I see here and in
Vietnam and in practically every other country. Now I can see
in an intellectual way that the only way to react against this
violence is with more violence. But when I read the Panther
paper and see words like "shoot to kill," well, I just can't relate
to that either. So would you speak to the question of wanting to
create a new world and a new universal humanity, and at the
same time having to pick up a gun and shoot?

50
 NEWTON: Well, as I said yesterday, the Black Panther
Party is against violence and works for the day when it will no
longer be necessary. We want to abolish all guns and all wars
because we believe it better for people to resolve their
differences without violence. But we are not idealists, and
because we are not idealists we try to understand things in
their material context. And until the actual conditions exist
where defence with a gun is not necessary, we have to act
appropriately. It is insane to ask the Vietnamese to lay down
their guns when the American ruling circle is napaiming them.
It is insane to ask the underground operating in South Africa to
put down their guns when Blacks there are treated like slaves.
It is insane because you are asking people to suffer materially
for an ideal that will not benefit them.
So we condemn violence, but we make a distinction
between the violence of the aggressor and the self-defence of
the people. During the years of slavery, for example, the slave
master kidnapped people, split up their families, forced them
to labor, shipped, tortured, and killed them, stole all the profit
from their work. This was the actual material condition of their
lives. So if the slaves revolted - and they did, many times - they
were defending themselves against murder. This is what
Frederick Douglass meant when he said {let me read this} :
’’The slave is fully justified in helping himself to the gold and silver,
and the best apparel of his master .. . Such taking is not stealing in

51
 any sense of the word. . . . Slave holders had made it almost
impossible for the slave to commit any crime known to the laws of
God or to the laws of man. If he steals he takes his own; if he kills,
he imitates only the heroes of the Revolution" [Douglass, 1995].
We translate that to mean that oppressors have no
rights which the oppressed are bound to respect.
So we believe that people have to defend themselves:
that is why we armed ourselves openly when we started the
Party. We took this risk because we felt that the people had to
be educated about the potential power of the armed Black
community; and now that the example has been made, we are
concentrating on helping the people develop things they will
want to protect - the survival programs.
You see, Chairman Mao's quote that "political power
grows out of the barrel of a gun" is misunderstood time and
time again. Most people interpret this to mean that political
power is a gun, but that's not the point. The verb in the
sentence is "grows": political power grows from the barrel of a
gun; it culminates in the people's ownership and control of the
land and the institutions thereon. Mao's own practice shows
this: he was not interested in spreading the Communists'
influence through mobile guerrilla units, but he believed
deeply in establishing political power.
So we believe that in order to get rid of the gun, it is
necessary to pick it up. We believe that material conditions
produce the violence of the aggressor and the self-defence of
produce the violence of the aggressor and the self-defence of

52
the victim, and that the people have a right and an obligation
to resist attack upon their attempts to change the material
conditions of their lives.

QUESTION: Maybe I feel that way in part because 1

have never had a gun picked up against mezbut...

NEWTON: No, you haven't, because you are protected

by the police and by the imperial army.

QUESTION: All right, part of my hang-up about

picking up a gun is that I have never had it picked up against
me. But what bothers me the most is this: I can see that the
North Vietnamese people need their guns, but when I read the
Panther paper I get the impression that it is indifferent to those
people who have been killed. I mean the paper sometimes
strikes me as a sort of scorecard.

NEWTON: Well, you know, the Vietnamese also shoot

down airplanes. I have a ring at home made from an American
airplane that was cut down over North Vietnam while
attempting to bomb the Vietnamese with napalm and TNT. The
Vietnamese use all the little scraps of the planes they cut down
to make rings, and then they give these rings to their friends.
Imprinted on the ring is the number of planes they have
destroyed: I think the one I have has the number 1300 on it. We
are very proud of the ring because we are proud that they are

53
able to defend themselves with primitive weapons. They have
even shot down helicopters with rifles. But after the plane falls,
the Vietnamese take the dead pilot and bury him, making sure
to put flowers on his grave. According to one account 1 read, a
reporter saw this happen and asked the people why they put
flowers on the pilot’s grave, considering that he was destroying
their children and villages. And they answered that the pilot
was a victim, an unconscious lackey of the ruling circle. The
reporter said that when the Vietnamese down a plane, they
weep for the victim and preserve his grave so that when the
war is over his people can come and take him home.
We feel the same way. We have great compassion for
people, and we really believe that the death of any person
diminishes us because we are all involved in mankind. But we
will not hesitate to use whatever force is necessary so that
sanity might prevail and people keep their dignity.
You mentioned "universal identity" a little while ago.
You know, it is interesting that when we were talking last
night, the professor stated it was difficult for him, even though
he is an immigrant like myself, to understand what I have been
through. But I think that I, or most Black people, can
understand the suffering the professor went through. Black
people can understand it because they have always been
rejected in this country. We have never felt that this country
was our home, and our internalization of Western values had
made it impossible for us to feel at ease in Africa. Even
knowing this, we are still nostalgic much of the time and feel

54
that we would rather deal with the many cultural differences
one finds in Africa than with the racism and exploitation here.
But then we realise that the Africans are catching as much hell
as any people in the world, and from the same controller too.
Like the saying goes, "I went to the mountain to hide my face,
but the mountain cried out, 'No hiding place!"' We cannot
hide. So out of this experience of suffering and oppression, the
Party tries to develop something of a universal identity.
You know, I stayed in solitary confinement for three
years, and just before I got out they took me from the state
penitentiary and put me back in the county jail on what they
call "little death row." I had stayed on little death row for a
month and a half before I was shipped to the isolation cell.
There had been five people there then, all of them people the
authorities expected to go to the gas chamber. And when I was
returned there, prior to my release, two of the guys were still
there, one of them Black and one of them white. They had
gotten reversals too, but they had already gone through their
second trials and had been sentenced to death again.

I felt alienated for the first time since being in prison,

very alone and very sad. The first time, they were all going to
death and I was going to jail, but now they were going to death
and I was being released. I wanted to apologize to them for
being released, even though I had to go through a second trial
too, because why should 1 have been released while they were
going to the death chamber? Why should the people have

55
demanded my release and not theirs? Because of my
identification with those men, I wasn't really released from
prison -1 will not be free until every one of them is out of the
death cells, I'll still be there. And it is the same with the world.
Unless we cultivate an identity with everyone, we will not have
peace in the world.

ERIKSON: We certainly could stop with what you said

right now, but I have to make it clear that when I referred to
my status as an immigrant, I really meant to emphasize the
opposite from what you inferred—especially when one
considers how many immigrants have suffered profoundly. I
did not suffer at all, except to the extent that one can get
mighty anxious when one arrives here with a young family. I
will never forget the moment when our ship first sighted that
coldly competitive skyline of New York. The sight more or less
puts you in a mental state of survivorship, both in the sense of
having to accept, without looking back too much, the fact of
your own survival abroad, and in the sense of being
determined to survive as a family here, too. All this at first
narrows your perceptiveness and, I'm afraid, your capacity to
empathize with the struggling masses, until you have gained a
foothold and a self-definition as American. And, as I said, I
happened to be one of the select immigrants who comes with
the right kind of professional equipment and, therefore, is
given a special chance, and, in addition, is made to feel that he
is bringing an alleviative technique needed for medical

56
progress and progress in general. It was only when, in my
clinical work, I found social interpretations inescapable, that I
slowly became aware of the depth and cruelty of the social
conflicts in this country.

QUESTION: I hate to bring up the idea, but it is totally

possible and maybe even best that a revolution will happen in
my lifetime so that my children will benefit from it. But it
deeply concerns me at the same time, because whether I choose
to be a part of it or not I am Black and my children will be
involved —I will be the target of some retaliation. And the
retaliation that may come will probably be similar to that
which happened in Austria or Germany when the Gestapo
routed out the Jews. It’s all a matter of position. All Black
people in the United States will be part of whatever happens.
But how in your view do we raise our children or prepare
them to be ready for this type of reaction? It’s a bad question,
but you see my confusion. We know that something is going to
happen whether it is started by the Black Panther Party or
someone else, and whatever happens we will be a part of it.

NEWTON: Yes,' you will be part of it because

everything is interconnected; and no matter how much they
would like to, white people cannot run away from it either
because they are definitely involved as a part of the species.

QUESTION: But in this country right now we are in

57
the minority.

NEWTON: Yes, but there is only one world

community. In the context of this country, we are a minority;
but in the context of the empire, we are definitely a majority.
We do not say this to give people hope but to show them the
true nature of the world today.
We can set the best example for our children by
showing them how to love and how to fight against things that
jeopardize the freedom of the people. In spite of the racism in
this country, in spite of the history of oppression against us, we
have to show our children how to love and how to defend
ourselves. The only way the people of the world can resolve
the contradiction between love and defence is to reverse the
dominance, at which point we can keep the love and get rid of
the gun. This is why we talk in our paper about people
exerting their power. We have been conditioned to believe that
we should not defend ourselves, even though fifty million of us
have been killed in this country; we have been taught that we
should be very humble and act like little Jesuses.
Well, we do not accept that idealism. We accept things
the way they are. The oppressed peoples of the world are only
children now; they are children because they do not have
power and do not control phenomena. For many thousands of
years they were hardly recognized at all, except as the toiling
masses; and it is only now, as Fidel says, that they are
beginning to write their own history. As children, they would

58
be wiped out like the Jews in the ghettos of Nazi Germany; but
as mature adults, they would take the way of the Jews in the
Warsaw ghetto and keep their human dignity.
This is the conviction of the Party. We know that the
people have to have control or else the people will always be
children. The people must express their will to power, and we
believe that their desire to do so is beyond good and evil.

QUESTION: Much of the impact of the Black Panther

Party, and the focus of much of the criticism of the Party, has
been your willingness to come out and say that you are
prepared to defend yourselves. Some people say: Look, if you
are truly revolutionary, then you shouldn't play your trump
card by telling people what you are going to do, because then
they are going to pick you off one by one.

NEWTON: You are now talking about strategy. Uncle

Ho said that it is incorrect to publicize military strategy for
military reasons, but that it is perfectly correct to publicize
military strategy for political reasons. To judge the correctness
of our actions, then, you must understand what we were trying
to do.
We believe that only the people can expropriate power
from the ruling circle here and bring about the necessary
transition in the world. So our primary task has been to change
the attitude of the people toward that power. Helplessness in
the face of oppression is the first attitude that has to be

59
changed, because the slave never expropriates power from the
master until he realises that the master is not God and is not
bullet proof. And then it is necessary to teach the people that
they do not have to accept life at the cost of the loss of their
dignity, and the only way to do this is to offer them examples
of people who say if they cannot be free, then they will die
trying. We no longer go around with bandoleers and guns
because we believe we have helped change that attitude. If we
had never offered them an example like that, though, they
would not know us now; we would never have become their
true representatives and leaders. Now we are opening up a
new front, speaking out and saying that we might do
something to the slave master. We are put into jail for that. We
are murdered in our sleep, as Fred Hampton was. We are
framed, as Bobby and Ericka were. This goes on. But at the
same time these acts have gained us the attention of the people,
and the vanguard that does not have the attention of the people
has no way of challenging their unconscious state.

MODERATOR: We have been at it three hours now.

Let's break and see where we are tomorrow.

Hie first day of the Yale meetings had begun with Huey
Newton's defining statement on intercommunalism; the second day
had started with one from Erik Erikson on identity. On the third day
all the participants around the table and the (swelling) groups of
observers and supporters arranged in rough arcs around the long

60
sides of the huge rectangular table in the library of Trumbull College
were eager to get straight on with the question-and-answer session.

MODERATOR: All right, here we go. I sense a burning

question over there.

QUESTION: Yes, I have a burning question for Mr

Newton. I have been reading over some of the notes I have
taken and, frankly, I really cannot find anything that's startling
or new about revolutionary intercommunalism. It seems to me
that the ideology is old. It substitutes new terms for old.

NEWTON: The phenomenon is new. It did not exist

before.

QUESTION: But it really seems like a visionary

ideology for such a materialist as you, and almost impractical.

NEWTON: You mean materialism is visionary?

QUESTION: No, no, that's not what I’m saying. I’m

saying that this whole thing about a unified identity is
visionary. You are saying that the whole world is linked and is
reacting in a certain way to the American empire, and this
seems to me a repeat of something that has been said before. So
I am wondering why you think the notion is really new.

61
 NEWTON: First of all, the Party does not steal ideas. It
often synthesizes ideas and tries to put them to practice, which
gives us a deeper understanding of the original idea. So maybe
you should direct your question to Mr. Erikson, because he ...

ERIKSON: He steals ideas? [laughter]

NEWTON: No, no. But his subject is identity. He is

talking about a universal identity; I am talking about a culture
that is essentially human; and I am merely trying to show the
relationship and the similarity between those two approaches.

QUESTION: I understand that Mr. Erikson should

address himself to that point from a psychological perspective.
But since the Party is supposed to have a program that will
bring about this concept of intercommunalism, it should also
take into consideration that...

NEWTON: Excuse me, but you are missing the point.

We are not bringing about the concept of intercommunalism or
even the fact of intercommunalism, Reactionary inter­
communalism, which is the order of the day, was brought
about by the ruling circles of American imperialism. I am just
describing an actual system of relationships in the world today.

QUESTION: Then what approach does the Party take

to intercommunalism. How do you relate to that fact?

62
 NEWTON: We see ourselves as among the victims of
reactionary intercommunalism. As victims, we resist; as
materialists, we try to understand what our situation is in
respect to it. We try to relate to it, therefore by educating the
people to their real condition and engaging them in actions
that will change that condition. We try to find out what
reactionary intercommunalism is and then try to manipulate it
in the people's favor.

QUESTION: How are you going to manipulate it? In

what direction?

NEWTON: Well, the people of the world are

manipulating it already by struggling against reactionary inter­
communalism. There are battlefronts throughout Asia, Africa,
Latin America, and there is turmoil in Europe now too. People
are dissatisfied with the state of the world today and they are
resisting.
And all of these struggles are against the American
ruling circle in one way or another. Mozambique and Angola,
for example, belong to Portugal, and liberation fronts are
fighting in both places. But the Portuguese belong to NATO
and Americans supply them with the weapons they use to
enslave the Africans.

QUESTION: I think you may be a materialist, but it

63
seems to me that you are not dealing with material conditions.
You are dealing with a grand scheme which does not relate to
me at all in a practical sense. I don’t think anyone denies that
there are dissatisfied people in the world trying to do
something about their lot, but what we are interested in is
getting more specific feedback about what is going on here
with the Panthers in this country.

NEWTON: You say you are concerned about the

people in this country, but I would speculate that you are
concerned about a particular group of people in this country.
You keep saying, "Let's not talk about the Vietnamese", "let's
not talk about the people in Angola and Mozambique", "let’s
not talk about Ericka and Bobby or any of the sufferings of the
people": Let's talk about things that concern students at Yale?
Is that it?

QUESTION: I don’t want to avoid talking about Ericka

and Bobby. I want to talk about Ericka and Bobby. That’s the
point.

NEWTON: Well, you can't talk about Ericka and Bobby

without talking about the Vietnamese.

QUESTION: But we have talked about the Vietnamese.

We have talked about intercommunalism and the world and
other countries and the future and just about everything else.

64
But we have had practically no confrontation with things that
are going on here now.

NEWTON: All right, then. There’s no court today, so I

invite you to come to the trial on Monday. I invite you there
because I refuse to talk about Bobby and Ericka here. I'll talk
about them in the courtroom and outside on the Green, where
our talk might mean something. But I won't indulge in your
desire to merely talk in a classroom about the possibility of
Bobby and Ericka going to the chair. If I feel guilty about
anything, it is speaking here when they are in the docks, you
see. I always feel very uncomfortable outside of the bars—
when I was released from death row, I left people there—and
every time I have a happy day, every time I laugh, I feel
somewhat guilty.

QUESTION: Well, in a sense you have said more about

this whole thing in the last five seconds than you have in the
whole two days before.

QUESTION: The question in a lot of our minds is not

that there are in existence oppressed peoples. We can see that.
What is bothering us has to do with Mr. Erikson's notion of
pseudospecies. Take cultural groupings like youth or blacks or
Vietnamese or Chinese or North Koreans: each of them is a
pseudospecies in Mr. Erikson's terms. Now one bond they all
have in common is the fact that they are oppressed; they have a

65
kind of communality for that very reason. But what happens
when you attain a level where that common bond no longer
exists? Will people be happy? Will no one want to become the
new ruling class? I guess we have a hard time imagining some
future when people no longer want to control one another.

NEWTON: We believe that the primary motivating

drive of people is a will to power, a drive to free themselves
from both external and internal controls. But we do not believe
that this drive necessarily ends in the domination of one group
of people by by another: it is only because people lack
knowledge and technology that their natural drive for control
has been distorted into a desire for power over people rather
than a desire for power over things.
So we can conceive of a time when people will not find
it necessary to steal power from other people. Given a high
level of technological knowledge, people will control the
universe instead... and then they can resolve their differences
peacefully.

QUESTION: In that connection, do you think we can

gain control of our own environment? Do you think it is too
late for any of this to ever come about?

NEWTON: Too late for what to come about?

QUESTION: Well, some people speak in very

66
pessimistic terms about the whole environment of Earth. They
say it will give out in a certain number of years because our
resources have been so misused.

NEWTON: They may be correct. But when we talk

about the capitalists’ exploitation of nature— the kind of thing
discussed in what is now called the Ecology movement—we
often forget that people themselves are a part of the natural
world. The mass murder of Blacks in Africa during the slave
trade, all the depredations the Europeans committed in South
America and the Caribbean, the genocide committed by Nazi
Europe against the Jews, the Slavs, the gypsies, and, of course,
against all people of colour, are probably the greatest examples
of the exploitation of nature by the capitalists. You know the
greatest ecological crime being committed right now? The
bombing of Vietnam. And we think that until the ecology
movement starts recognizing these facts, it will remain largely
irrelevant to the majority of people in the world.
People have always struggled against nature, and it is
impossible for us who are struggling for the necessities of life,
who have to set up our own survival programs, to talk about
the struggle ending. The difference between us and the
capitalists, though, is that we want a rational relationship with
nature. We know that the capitalists have put us in a situation
where nature cannot support us; and ... we cannot support
nature either. So our struggle is twofold. We struggle to survive
and gain power over our environment, and we struggle to have

67
a rational relationship with that environment. Like I've said,
we are a part of nature ourselves, so we think the difficulties
we have with the environment are all in the family, you might
say, and can be solved without hostility. The capitalists are not
part of that family. They are mad men and will destroy nature
as well as us, so our struggle to survive and gain a rational
relationship with the natural world is first directed toward
getting rid of these mad men.

QUESTION: Do you think that the expropriator can be

expropriated soon enough for all this to happen?

NEWTON: We will do everything in our power

to see that it can.

ERIKSON: ... I have indicated, and I will repeat this

here, that the identities of future men will always combine a
sense of uniqueness inherited from a number of past
liberations—whether religious, cultural or political and yet also
a sense of universal communality which must always again
find ways of guarding itself against monopolisers and
usurpers.

Well, that was quite a mouthful. But, Huey, could you

accept such a psychological statement as a counterpart to your
political one?

68
 NEWTON: Yes. We say that we would like to express
our own individuality in a collective consciousness. One of our
chief drives is to free the man as we bring him into the human
community.

ERIKSON: Then I should add that my immigration to

America is now part of me—and while I would not want to
overlook the possibility that we may see things differently as a
result, I also feel strongly that without that development called
the United States of America and, yes, even the technological
imperialism that we deplore so much when it oversteps the
limits of human comprehension and compassion —that without
it we would not sit here talking as we do. That means that we
have a common faith (maybe only because one must have a
faith in survival) that each pseudospecies and each empire in
some dialectical way added new elements to a more universal
sense of humanity.

NEWTON: Yes, and I would take that further and say

that without imperialism there would be no reactionary inter-
communalism, and without reactionary intercommunalism
there would be no revolutionary intercommunalism; and so it
follows that imperialism lays a foundation for world
communism. It is necessary for imperialism to exist, even
though we don't like it. That's the internal contradiction, you
see. I would agree with that. I'm not happy about it, but that is
the dialectics of the situation.

69
 QUESTION: You know, most students seem to have
this thing about following someone or something and not
really becoming concerned themselves. And it seems to me that
just your mere presence here, Mr. Newton, forces me to some
kind of subjective analysis: there are certain things that I am
going to have to do sooner or later, certain conclusions that I
am going to have to reach for myself about this society and
whether I want to fit into it or try to effect some type of change.
It seems to me that everyone is sort of running away from
themselves right now. I mean, it is easier to take what you were
saying and to attack it than it is to look inward and try to reach
something inside; and that's what seems to have been
happening for the past two days. People are saying, "Well,
Huey, what do you think about this?" and "Well, Huey, you are
wrong about that"; and, you know, 1 can challenge you from
ten different stances at once without ever having to face the
basic question you are raising within myself. As far as I am
concerned, though, this whole discussion is about alternatives
—and I think your mere presence here is an alternative. I don't
know.

QUESTION: I would like to comment on that too

because it seems to me that Mr. Newton is very committed to
what he has been talking about and most of us just don't know
how to be. He says that he's not an idealist, but at the same
time he is willing to sacrifice his life for what he believes in.

70
And let's face it, a lot of people do not want to commit
themselves that far because they ...

NEWTON: They’ll commit themselves. Uncle Sam calls

and they will be over on the soil of the Vietnamese people
risking their lives and even giving up their lives. It’s not a
question of giving up your life. The real question is: For what
cause will you give up your life?

We in the Black Panther Party will not give up our lives

when the ruling circles call for us to do so. We would rather
give up our lives trying to expropriate the ruling circles. Now I
don't like having to make that choice, because I would rather
see all of humanity resolving its contradictions by discussions
like this. But it is idealistic to think we can do so now: the
simple fact that people must fight to end division shows a low
development at this time for all of mankind.

QUESTION: You have said several times that the Black

Panther Party is mainly involved in an educational program.
But I guess I don't really understand exactly what you do to
relate to people on the human level, how you set yourselves up
as examples of the kind of thing you are talking about. I mean,
what do you actually do?

NEWTON: Well, we have what we call a ten-point

program. It's called a survival program — survival until the

71
people become more self-conscious and mature, because until
then we are all in danger of genocide. Members of the Party
spend most of their time setting up these programs and
helping run them.
These programs are open to everyone in the
community. We have health clinics; we have a busing program
for parents and relatives and friends of prisoners who would
not be able to visit the prison otherwise because they do not
have the money; and we have clothing programs, especially on
the East Coast because of the winter cold. Now these are
reformist kinds of programs, but they have been integrated
into the rest of our revolutionary program. We do them all over
the country and we are expanding them. We know they won't
solve the problem. But because we are interested in the people,
we serve the people.

QUESTION: The question was raised several times

yesterday and again today about whether the Panthers have
been operating over the past few years more by political
intuition or more by the ideology which has been described
here. I suppose the answer to that has to be that you need both
in order to get off the ground: you need political intuition,
obviously, to get some sense of how to proceed, and, once
started, you need an ideology to enable people to understand
what you are doing.

NEWTON: Political science, not intuition. We have

72
always had an ideology and have always attempted to practise
our theory. We studied the situation from the very start; we
had a program from the very start.

QUESTION: All right. But the ideology as you have

spelled it out seems to me less relevant once you leave the
stage where victims are actively resisting oppression and enter
the stage of universal consciousness. Do you see what I mean? I
am not sure that your ideology is nearly as useful in offering a
blueprint for arriving at that future stage as it has been for
getting out of the stage we are in. It seems to me this is what
people mean when they keep asking you: Where do we go
from here? The usefulness of your ideology is that it mobilises
an enormous amount of human energy against a rather rigid
structure and a rather fixed set of situations. But we are not
going to need that so much anymore, because ...

NEWTON: The Vietnamese don't need it?

QUESTION: Now wait a minute. I’m talking about the

future, the way the future is going to emerge. We have set up
a system, a technological system which rests on science and
which determines the kinds of interconnectedness that we
will have to deal with. In the long run, we are going to have
to manage an enormously complicated plant. And this
creates a different situation from the one in which we lived
as men for five thousand years. We are all involved with a

73
 large, complex technical system which we have got to
manage somehow or it will get control. And I guess what I
miss in your ideology is some way of defining the new
institutions, the new ideas, that will enable us to control that
evolution. So my question is: How are we going to manage
the plant? Have you been thinking about that?

NEWTON: Oh, yes. We are definitely thinking about it.

74
 Revolution

At the end of March the same year, 1971, the two sociology
lecturers who edited the transcripts of the New Haven tapes -
/ Herman Blake ( from the University of California) and Kai T
Erikson (from Yale) - met together again with Erikson and Newton
in Newton's Oakland apartment.

Huey's apartment - twenty five stories above the homely

reality of the streets where he grew up - commanded panoramic
views: through the stark glass walls a vista of the bay; through cctv
on the huge screen in the living room, an eye on the front door; and,
through the telescope in the bedroom, the faint shapes of comrades
moving around on the "little death row" in the county jail.

Four people sat around Huey's breakfast table, drinking

coffee and whiskey into the small hours, a very different scene from
the New Haven meetings. Yet in some ways these later meetings
lacked the intimacy of the more overtly confrontational set-up at Yale
where the great expanse of mahogany had provided a physical barrier
over which the participants strained towards each other with a visible
effort of will.

At the first of the Oakland meetings it was Kai who started

the ball rolling.

KTE: We were talking about the meetings in New

Haven ...
HPN: My preconception about the meeting was that I
would be at odds with you, Erik, as ai psychoanalyst. I didn't
know that you had developed a new
i approach to the

75
understanding of man's behavior. After I read a number of the
essays and books you had written, I was impressed; your
approach took the edge off of what I thought would be my
attack, you see, because I was ready to view it as an adversary
kind of thing. Then after starting the seminar at Yale, I was
somewhat on the defensive because of the general
environment. There were a number of people there who were
more likely than not to misunderstand. And I was more likely
than not to misunderstand, too, because in a setting like that
you tend to want to answer as quickly as possible, to come out
looking and feeling all right about it. In that kind of
environment, one might miss the purpose of the whole thing.

EHE: I suggested to Kai that whatever title we agreed

on [for the book: Erikson and Newton, 1974] the word "search” or
"exploration" should be in it. We were really in an exploratory
mood in New Haven, and that was the meaning of the whole
thing. But, of course, I was on the defensive too—wondering
from which direction your offensive was going to come, and
feeling that we were an odd pair of contestants. We are
obviously an old man and a young man, an immigrant to
America and a Black man coming out of that American reality
which I did not know and, no doubt, preferred not to know at
first. And then, too, I am a psychoanalyst at the end of his
career, a certified professor, already emeritus; and you are a
young man who has put his life and liberty on the line in the
service of a future as yet unclear to me. So on every score we

76
were apt to talk by each other at first—which is actually what
happened at the scheduled meetings, even though we were
relating privately in ways I was not yet willing to share in
public. When you come right down to it, I am the kind of
person who has to respond to what is going on in the world
with psychoanalytic insight, which I realise now you can
accept up to a point. But I could not be sure when we first met
that you would not feel like calling me some kind of names—
because, you see, I thrived on that system that exploited your
people, thrived in spite of being an immigrant, a former
dropout, and (then no general recommendation) a Freudian.
And then, just before we met, I had received a certain amount
of publicity—my picture on the cover of magazines and all that
—because a book about me had just come out. I felt
particularly vulnerable then. My book on Gandhi is the closest
I have come in understanding revolutionary action.

JHB: What was the role of the students in the

conference? What were they looking for? What were they
expecting?

KTE: I don't know. As I look back on the whole affair, I

sometimes worry that I handled it poorly. It all began with a
phone call from Don Freed, as I guess you know, and our
thinking at the time was that it would be nice for you, Huey,
and later for you, Pop, to compare ideas with one another in a
room full of thoughtful students. I suppose I actually had two

77
things in mind. For one, I am a teacher and I just wanted
students to hear and share in the discussions. And then,
frankly, I also wanted to avoid bringing a lot of other
professionals into the conference who have their own
particular lines of thought to offer—Yale is full of them, of
course—because I thought our agenda would get so crowded.
It seemed to me that "intercommunalism" and "the wider
identity" were about as much as we could handle in a three-
day workshop, and I did not want other people hawking their
own wares. I didn't even hawk my own (to the great irritation
of my esteemed colleague here) and maybe I was just too
sensitive on that score. It might have been interesting to hear
what people like Bob Lifton or Bill Coffin or Ken Keniston
would have made of the proceedings.
EHE: In retrospect, would you have liked to have some
of those people there?
HPN: I think it would have been interesting. I didn't
think the students made the contribution they could have.
KTE: Well, one problem was that the conference got
out of hand in terms of scale. If I had to do it over, I wouldn't
locate the whole thing in that enormous library: it's Ivy League
to the core. And there were simply too many people in the
room. Several of the students I talked to felt they were in some
kind of theater, acting out a script they hadn't seen yet.
JHB: Perhaps. But it seemed to me that the students
were reflecting a general public attitude—an image of Huey
Newton and the Black Panther Party which is uninformed and

78
unenlightened —and I really doubt that they saw the con­
ference as an opportunity to become exposed to new ideas. I
thought some of the students were surprised to see Huey
without his shotgun. I would be interested in, knowing from
you Erik, what your first reaction was to Huey’s articulation of
revolutionary intercommunalism. Is this the direction you
expected him to come from? The reason I ask is that I have a
concern which is shared by many persons who have become
revolutionary. People who sit in positions of power and
influence keep saying, "We’re doing all right, what’s the
matter with you that you can’t fit in?" They cannot seem to
accept as legitimate the fact that someone has done an objective
and serious analysis of the system they live in and has
consciously made the decision not to be a part of it. For people
like that, to even give serious thought to the ideas of the Party
is to question their lives, their selves, their beings, their
positions; and so they spend all their time trying to rationalize
the matter, to push the Party back into the system or even to
psychoanalyze it out of existence. I'm wondering to what
extent those kinds of sentiments were coming through.

EHE: Well, as to that last point, I probably should have

stressed earlier that the very fact of my being a psychoanalyst
makes me hold back with criticism or critique. I've seen
psychoanalytical explanations used as weapons - either of
offense or of defence - only too often, and I have tried to learn
not to do that. I want to first to understand the whole situation

79
and then see where any psychoanalytic explanations might fit
in. So I guess I held back exactly in that area where, from your
previous experience, you thought I might let go.
JHB Yes.
EHE: No wonder the students felt that neither of us
really let go. They felt, I would imagine—and, Kai, you correct
me if I am wrong—they felt that you, Huey, were so theoretical
that they could barely recognize the man with the gun and
wondered if you were holding back for reasons of academic
environment. At the same time, they half-expected that I would
light into you, asking about your background, your personality,
in an effort to figure out the unconscious determinants of your
revolutionary leanings —which, come to think of it, is what I
did do in the case of Luther and Gandhi, but only after long
study of their voluminous confessional utterances. So maybe
the students felt a little betrayed: they came to a spectacle in
which Huey was going to be aggressive and I was going to be
psychoanalytic and the sparks would fly.

KTE: And that is certainly how we arranged the room:

like a Roman spectacle.

EHE: They felt each of us betrayed our mandate, in a

way, and that we overadjusted to those rows of books all
around us.
KTE: I think that is partly so, but something else may
have been going on at the same time. Most of the students I

80
know want to relate more closely to people they admire or are
interested in. They wanted to hear a little more from each of
you about who you are, what you are thinking, and how all of
that is connected to the realities of their lives. But what they got
was theory—and a pretty abstract brand of theory at that. They
wanted to be responded to, accepted as deserving people, and 1
am not sure that they were.
EHE: I could make that clear to myself in terms of my
own theory and say that first of all they wanted identify and
then they wanted to understand. So they were mostly
interested in challenging Huey—in finding out how they might
identify with or against him and what he could mean to their
identity choices.

KTE: That's it. They were more interested in coming to

terms with Huey as a person than with intercommunalism as
an idea, which certainly isn’t hard to understand.

EHE: And that’s their birthright, of course. We should

remember, too, that one of their dominant conflicts right now is
between being students in order to study for an occupation and
a profession and a career, or being students so as to be
informed activists in the meantime. I don’t know what is going
on at Yale right now, but when I came out here a month ago a
number of professors at the University of California told me
how depressed the students are because they don’t see at this
moment any genuine access to activism; and I’m not sure that

81
we didn't get some of that conflict at Yale. You know what I
mean?
HPN: Sort of...

EHE: And when you, of all people, talked like a

damned professor!

HPN: Well, they're not the only ones I have had that
problem with.

JHB: But I wonder if that didn't paralyze them a bit.

KTE: It's funny. You know, a lot of people were upset

because they thought we had chosen nothing but conservative
students for the conference—and maybe they were in some
abstract class sense—but in the Yale scheme of things a number
of them were reckoned to be rather radical.

JHB: Well, we won’t go into that.

KTE: How about radical with a small r?

JHB: No, I know what you mean. I think one of the

things people don't understand or refuse to see is that the
Black Panther Party is not just some willy-nilly, helter-skelter
bunch of people who run around trying to upset everybody. It
is a program, a distinct pattern of thinking and ideology,

82
delivering certain conclusions from which strategies and
actions derive. The ideology is critical here; revolutionary
intercommunalism is a way of visualizing reality so that people
can understand the critique the Panthers have been developing
all along. It's not simply that Huey talks like a professor, which
I wouldn’t deny for a moment, but that people cannot accept
the logic of what he says because they are not ready to go that
far.

KTE: I suppose that’s true too. But students have not

really heard very much ideology before. Radical politics on
campus has largely been a thing of action, movement, feeling,
protest; students are just not accustomed to hearing anyone
present a calm and reasoned ideological statement, no matter
how revolutionary its thrust. That’s one reason why the young
white radicals these days and the older socialist radicals who
learned their politics in the thirties and forties have such a hard
time getting together. Have you heard very many serious
ideological conversations on campus?

JHB: No, I haven't. I agree with you. A lot of students

just do this and do that without thought, although it's
understandable when you consider that they spend so much
time in classrooms (I just though I'd toss that in) . But in my
opinion, and in the opinion of some of the colleagues with
whom I work very closely, revolutionary activity without
serious planning and thought is in fact counterrevolutionary.

83
 HPN: As a matter of fact, that's a very good statement
about unplanned action—about revolutionary action and
counterrevolutionary action. Young people generally feel that
the role of the revolutionary is to define a set of actions and a
set of principles that are easy to identify and are absolute. But
what I was trying to explain to them was the process:
revolution, basically, is a contradiction between the old and the
new in the process of development. Anything can be
revolutionary at a particular point in time, but most of the
students don't understand that. And most other people don’t
understand it either.

JHB: What was your reaction, Erik, to Huey's original

statement? I've always wondered about that.

EHE: I've wondered too. Much of it I simply didn't

understand, to tell you the truth—or maybe I was just waiting
for a combined personal and intellectual impression without
which I do not "understand" Maybe what we just said should
have been the very introduction to the whole thing, the relation
of revolutionary action to revolutionary ideology and theory. ...
there are a number of different passions in a revolutionary. Hot
action is one of them, cold theory is another; and we been
exploring the affinities of the two in political and
psychological theory... Maybe I should have said then exactly
what I said just now about the several passions that a

84
revolutionary has; that all revolutionaries, even when armed,
love to argue thing's in theoretical and ideological terms.
Didn't you come to the meetings with the expectation that that
was understood?
HPN: Not really. That's why I said in the beginning
that we were dropouts and that the students would need more
of an explanation because they wouldn’t understand. Dropouts
understand things students don't.
JHB: Erik, would you be a little more specific about
what you expected?
EHE: Oh no, we have talked enough about that I just
did not expect to hear a sermon on materialism as a theory. But
why not? I was glad to listen. I should repeat, however, that I
did expect others to participate more ...I definitely felt that
there should have been a number of other approaches
represented there to help fill in the spaces between the
ideological and the psychological. I listened for where my
concepts might fit in, and that's what I responded to on the
second day. In the background, of course, there were always
two great spirits, Marx and Freud. If we have any theoretical
grandfathers in common, they are Marx and Freud— and
maybe Darwin as well, but that's something else again. In
historical perspective, the young Marx and the young Freud
were much less far apart from each other than was the case
when they became Marx and Freud. So if we could not resolve
the relationship of materialism and psychology, we went on
living that historical split. You must remember that where

85
materialism entered psychology, it became behaviorism, which
is not my field, and I think that one of the names I expected to
be called was "idealist.” So where does that leave us? Can one
be a materialist psychologist without reducing everything to
conditioned reflexes.

HPN: I would only consider a psychologist or a

psychoanalyst an idealist if he attempted to explain the
phenomenon of personality strictly in nonmaterial terms—in
other words, if he did not acknowledge that the "spiritual" side
of a person finds its genesis in a material source, you see. You
would agree with that, wouldn't you?

EHE: Sure, I would agree with that...In the lives and

struggles of revolutionaries, all kinds of unconscious
motivations are obvious which, they must sooner or later
recognize, have little to do with their professed rationales. In
understanding such unconscious motivations, maybe one
could avoid such destructive developments as where old
comrades fight each other as mortal enemies. But maybe this is
just a necessary part of the history of all revolutions—all past
ones at any rate.

HPN: I remember we talked in New Haven about the

necessity for contradictions, the reality of contradictions, in
everything. It is the same with the social as it is with the
physical and biological world. Old things clash and new things

86
emerge, showing characteristics of both the old and the new.

EHE Now I wonder if I could turn to another topic

entirely and ask you, Huey, to talk a little about the principle of
inner contradiction. That is something that most people,
including the students at Yale, do not get and are apparently
not prepared to get. Where and how do we both use it? For
example, I would say that a positive and a negative identity are
a dialectical given in each person. But let’s come to that later
see what contradiction means in your sense and it could be
clarified for people like the students. What has your kind of
contradiction to do not only the dialectical but also with
relativity and com-complementarity? All this is hard for
students. It’s hard for everyone, really, but we have let the
students stand for so many things in our conversations that
they might as well represent "everyone" for the moment.

HPN: 1 don’t think the students are taught dialectically,

and one of the reasons they are not is that it would be
detrimental to the bourgeois educational system to do so. I
think it is a fair statement that the schools are agencies of the
status quo: the bourgeoisie needs to train technicians and to
give students a conglomeration of facts, but it would be
detrimental for them to give students the tools to show that the
status quo cannot stand and so to analyze them out of existence
So I think it is more than just a question of students "having a
hard time."

87
 EHE: I even have a feeling that some of them did not
understand what you meant by "idealism." They weren't sure
whether you were talking about ideas or ideals. So when you
spoke of contradictions, my feeling was that some thought it
was something one must avoid, not something that is
intrinsically necessary. It is very difficult for students to be
asked to believe that we all are living contradictions—and
cannot help it.

KTE: One difficulty here, it seems to me, is that Huey

uses dialectics to deal with the emerging present, to discuss
things that are in the process of becoming. Students and
professors, on the other hand more often use dialectical
reasoning to explain what happened in the past—why
Hannibal acted as he did and so on. A lot of academics assume,
without really saying so, that one is free from a dialectical
process she moment one understands it, you see what I mean?
So Huey comes and tells everyone that they are a part of the
very process they are talking about whether they want to be or
not. That's pretty scary at twenty you know. It's scary at forty.
Now you may be comfortable seeing your own views as
transitory or the truth as you see it now as temporary, but most
people are not. Not in the universities, anyway.

HPN: I don't know how comfortable I am, either.

EHE: We can't afford to forget how young these

88
students are—which is why I reminded us all of the fantastic
things you did, Huey, when you were in your early twenties.
The students are looking—you know I even have a term for it, I
call it "totalism"—they are looking for totalistic explanations
and not for relativistic analysis. A total explanation is
something you can totally identify with or against, a stable
point of reference against which you can know where you are.

JHB: Yeah, but why do you think they are doing that,
Erik?
EHE: I think they are doing it because that is part of
being young—and I agree entirely with you that this is also
what opens them up for a kind of complete indoctrination by
some system. Some of them are quite willing to remain open,
of course, but that is a scary state to be in.

HPN: The main thing I am saying is that they don't

know how to go about it. And the reason they don't know how
is because it is convenient for the schools not to teach them
that. It's better to give them a conglomeration of facts to
remember so that they can be used by whatever employer or
profession they go into, and never step outside of it.

EHE: Maybe all of this has something to do with what

you are trying to do in your course, Herman, when you speak
of the complementarity (that's the word I would use, at any
rate) of emotion and thought. You want the students to feel,

89
right? But then you complain because you get so many papers
in return that are emotional but not thoughtful. While what
you really want to teach them is to feel and then to be able to
stand back and think about what they felt.
JHB: Right.

EHE: And then to step back and see what kinds ::

feeling were in that thought. Isn't that what you in mind?

JHB: That's the way I'm approaching that class, yes.

EHE: That is the way you are approaching that class

but you must notice how hard it is for that age to do what you
ask.
JHB: Yes. But I still think there is a more fundamental
problem here. There are all these self-serving theories which
seem to suggest that you reach a point where process stops,
where transformation ends.

HPN: That's what happens when you get into power.

JHB: That's right, that's right. And what I am trying to

say is that students see themselves as in process, in transition
from childhood to adulthood; but they always want to know
where the process stops. You see what I mean?

EHE: It is exactly at this point where my ideas about

90
identity are easily misunderstood as meaning that once you
become identical with a role, then the process stops and you
know where you are. That is why the most common way
identity is represented is as an answer to the question "Who am
I?"—a definition of identity I have never used and never would
use. because the answer to the question "Who am I?" (if there
really were one) would end the process of becoming itself. Real
identity formation, of course, is continuous process with a
special crisis in youth— and I would think, it is a dialectical
process, which is what we may yet want to talk about.

KTE: Well, how about it, Huey? Does the dialectical

process ever end?

HPN: I think that after the dialectical process has run

its course, man will reach a state of godliness —and that's
because I think God is mostly what man has said "I am not"
Now that's just long-range speculation of course. We'll have to
live with dialectics for a while yet.

EHE: Now about positive and negative identities? If

you assume everybody has a set of self-images which he has
learned he should strive for and a set of images he has learned
he should avoid —and yet he is always both, because real
identity cannot be anything but an interplay of these things.
Now, would you call that dialectics?

91
 HPN: Yesz I think that is a beautiful example.

EHE: You see, some students seem to hope that by

studying my stuff they will leam what a positive identity is
and how to get rid of the negative one. Another group of
students is afraid of my stuff because they think what I mean
by identity is to be so adjusted to the system that you don't
want to be anything else but what the system permits you to
be. And neither of these explanations represent what I meant.
The trouble starts when you project your own negative identity
on other people.

JHB: We have talked a lot about the meetings at Yale. I

would like to change directions for a moment and go back to a
matter that Erik has always been interested in: maybe it's time
to talk about the gun.

EHE: Well, actually, that fits right in here. You see,

when I started to talk in New Haven I reminded the students
of the traditional image which Huey used to, represent and
which still appears on the cover of the Panther paper—the
young Black man with the gun. All of this became more
dialectical in our conversations when you, Huey, began to
speak about arms and love. I thought I understood what you
meant to some extent because of something that became clear
to Gandhi as he developed his nonviolent method—namely,
that most people seem to feel that to be nonviolent means not

92
to have any gun and not to want any gun because one would
not want to use it or would not know how to use it anyway.
But there is an intermediary step between violence and
nonviolence where you have a gun but use it only in the most
disciplined way—in part, at least, to show up the absurdity of
particular kinds of armed violence. This, I think, you did on
several important occasions which really created your original
public image. I hope you see now what I mean. You were not
afraid to carry that gun. Now I would understand armed love
to mean that one can really love only if one knows that one
could and would defend one's dignity, for only two people of
equal dignity can love each other. There is no use trying to love
somebody who denies you dignity or to whom you deny it. In
this sense, then, there is a dialectical relation between violence
and nonviolence, and the last thing I would want to imply here
is that your earlier image is inconsistent with the things you are
saying and doing . Both together make up a historical step and
(I would assume) a very personal step, and you needed the one
for the other. I don't know whether you would agree to that.
You would now accept the gun-carrying image wouldn't you,
as historically necessary and valid.

HPN: I think it served a strategic purpose—although I

imagine historians are going to make a lot out of it.

EHE: You mean like I just did?

93
 HPN: No, no. It's just that so much has been written
about the whole business of the armed self-defence of the
community, and I haven't seen one thing that's accurate. I'm
not talking about you, Erik; I think your interpretation is fair.
But I just sort of shiver whenever I see books written on the
matter.
EHE: For example, Bobby Seale describes some of the
things you two did in the early days of the Party that, to me,
seemed to amount to a parallel with the Gandhi technique—
although I assume you didn’t know about it then or, at any
rate, it was not uppermost in your mind. When you faced
down those policemen, for example—not threatening them
with your guns or indicating with gestures that you would
shoot first, but daring them to shoot first. That was a very
important psychological condition you created there. You gave
them the initiative and said, "O.K., you shoot first!" All of
this is probably related somehow to the old western frontier
scenario, where the cowboys used to make this kind of
confrontation a supreme test as to who would be quicker on
the trigger. But you made something very different and, in a
way, very revolutionary out of it when you made it clear that
you didn't come to shoot them, but if they had come to shoot
you, then they should come out with it. You paralysed them
morally, don't you think?

HPN: Well, I would agree that they were paralysed at

least.

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 KTE: But why were they paralysed?

HPN: They had never been required to cope with a

situation like that one. Because of their own racism, their own
misconception of the black community and the black psyche,
they did not know how to deal with the fact that we were not
afraid of them, you see? And they were very provocative.

EHE: This kind of transvaluation can be a historical act,

and Bobby Seale has a very good sense of how to describe such
things— with humor, too. For example, how you would stand
there with a few of our men and would confront those
policemen and all the armed power they had behind them.
Now, of course, you shouldn't be surprised if they afterward
should feel endangered in their essence. It has often been said
about Gandhi that he could only have done what he did with
the British and not anyone else. All of that fits rather well into
what you refer to as the dialectical development of empires.
You see, Gandhi met the British head-on with their own ideas
of fairness, ideas they had widely established as an ideal, and
when he faced them down with that they simply had to accept
it as a lesson. It could well be that a policeman whose
background does not include any kind of experience with this
kind of thing would simply say to himself—"Okay, to hell with
it, I'll get him some other time." What I learned in studying
Gandhi was how he could give to a concrete object— and this

95
is what I meant to apply to the gun in your case—some endless
symbolic meaning. For example, when Gandhi announced that
he was going to the Indian Ocean and take salt out of it, salt
that the British were taxing, no matter what they say or do, it is
perfectly obvious that he picked salt for many reasons. It is
absolutely necessary in the tropics, for one thing, but it has
great symbolic value too. Now my feeling is that, in principle,
what you tried to do with the gun might have had something
of the same concrete and symbolic meaning, and that you did it
at the right historical moment. Does that make sense or not?

JHB: It makes perfect sense to me. I wish you would

just be more specific, though. You used as a subtitle for the
Gandhi book an expression like "the origins of militant
nonviolence," and I think the concept of nonviolence as utilized
by Americans with respect to Blacks is quite different from
what I hear you saying?. It seems to me that nonviolence here
has always meant acquiescence to whatever power is used
against one in one's attempt- to gain justice. Some moral force
would come from somewhere and overcome the violent
application of force. I’m not sure that is what you are saying.

EHE: Not exactly. In fact, there is a similarity here

which I brought out in the Gandhi book. It would be very easy
to say that Black people have to remain nonviolent because
they'll never learn to fight anyway, and some people would say,
''Well, nonviolence fits their inborn meekness and their

96
religious orientation" Now the case is very similar with India
because there you have one military caste that had done
virtually all the fighting, so that the great masses of people in
India never learned to use weapons at all until the British came
along and drafted them into the army. Those crack Indian
troops in the British Army that we heard so much about all
came from warrior castes whose job on earth, decreed by
heaven, was to fight. The rest of the Indians didn't know how
to fight, had never had any experience with weapons, and
made it a point of religious observance to do no harm to
anyone. Now Gandhi (and his friends did not like him for it)
would sometimes support the British demand that Indians be
drafted, because he felt that Indians would have to learn to
fight before they could choose to be nonviolent. That's what
you meant in part, isn't it? That it makes no sense for a meek
person to call himself nonviolent, because, sure, what else can
he be?

HPN: I think it would be wrong to compare other

situations to Gandhi's action. You have to leave it in context
and regard it in terms of the particular contradictions involved.
Now I would have agreed with the notion that Indians join the
British Army in order to get the training necessary to oppose
the army: I can understand that at some point it is worthwhile
to play upon the weakness of the oppressor. Gandhi did this
knowing the character of the British quite well, but I think he
would have acted differently here. People here who tried to act

97
the same way he did, I think, missed the mark and were not
realistic.
JHB: Most people would say that the apostle of
nonviolence in this country with respect to Blacks was Martin
Luther King. He had a clearly stated philosophy and openly
expressed a debt to Gandhi. Now I would suspect that most
people, not understanding the context in which you are
speaking, would expect to see a very strong clash between your
views and Huey's views on this particular subject. And I would
like to see that cleared up, because I've always argued that
there have to be certain social bases for nonviolence ...

EHE: Look, the last thing I would wish to do is

advocate nonviolence outside of a concrete situation,
particularly since it makes exploited people all the more
vulnerable. Unless one is very careful, the whole nonviolent
point of view could be used against people rather than for
them. I gave a seminar at MIT once, and somebody brought
Tom Mboya to one of the meetings. The students and 1 had just
been discussing Gandhi, so we asked Mboya what he thought
about nonviolence. Well, he said, you can use it with British but
you can’t use it with the Belgians. No historical situations are
ever identical in this sense. What Mboya may have also meant
was that Gandhi had become something of a Britisher himself:
he had been educated in England, of course, and so he knew
where he could count on the British to react to nonviolence in a
certain way. I guess that is really all I have to say. I just have a

98
feeling that you are not an advocate of violence as such, you
know.
HPN: No, I don’t advocate violence. I advocate
nonviolence. If I really had a choice, I would prefer the
nonantagonistic kind of contradictions because they usually
can be resolved in a peaceful way. But of course we have to
deal with concrete conditions and the reality of the situation at
this time is that there are many contradictions that probably
can only be resolved in antagonistic ways and will probably
result in violence—and this will probably be the case until man
and society develop to the point where contradictions will no
longer be antagonistic. So I am working for the day when
antagonisms will no longer exist. And this will probably be
only after people commonly own and share things.

JHB: Erik, you were saying the other day that the
Panthers may understand nonviolence better than anyone else
because they understand violence so well. And I was thinking
about that in connection with Huey’s statement that we
advocate the abolition of war. We say that power grows out of
the barrel of a gun. Chairman Mao’s words; but we also say
that the purpose of picking up the gun is to get rid of it. Now
most people in this society pick up the gun for the purpose of
maintaining control, and they do not understand that someone
else might pick it up in order to abolish control.

HPN: Use violence in order to eliminate it.

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 JHB: Right. Right.

EHE: The point is that you cannot step from un­

disciplined violence to nonviolence. In India, Gandhi failed
mostly where he could not restrain people from rioting, and
you remember (I remember, at least) how he called off some of
his nonviolent campaigns because rioting broke out. Now the
Panthers have actually opposed violence for its own sake, isn't
that right?
HPN: Nondisciplined violence, yes.

EHE: Only a very self-disciplined use of force can lead

to disciplined nonviolence and the abolition of violence. And,
of course, it also takes a pretty high set of moral aspirations for
leaders to make people understand all of that....

The four men continued their discussion for sometime

before, Kai T Erikson, the radical white academic from Yale, author of
the defining text on the sociology of exclusion [ Erikson,K T 1968]
realised that the tape had run out. He replaced the tape while the
older white man went for a leak. Huey replenished the drinks.

KTE: O.K., the machine is on again. It's time for

Oedipus and the controller.

HPN: Well, the Oedipus myth, as I understand it, is

100
used in psychoanalysis as a symbol. The son competes for the
mother's love and feels hostility toward the father because he
keeps him from the mother. Now I concluded that it is not
always the father per se but the controller in the house. The
Oedipus complex is not so much a sexual drive as a drive to
eliminate the controller or take control away from the
controller. As a matter of fact, that is something we have to
make quite clear: eliminating the controller and assuming the
place of the controller are two different things, taking on the
positive and casting off the negative.

EHE: Which would then be a dialectical kind of thing,

right?
HPN: Right.

EHE: You love your father and you want to become

like him, but at the same time you want to get rid of him so you
can replace him. So it is built into a society that you end up
being more or less like your father, and represent the same to
your children. Now I gather you are saying that something
happens in a revolution to change that repetitive pattern, but I
can't quite see ...
HPN: That is exactly what I wanted to take note of.
There's a difference between eliminating the controller and
assuming control: it is possible to get rid of the controller
without assuming all of his negative characteristics. One way is
to not only eliminate the controller but all of his creations at the

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same time, although it shouldn’t be done the way some people
in the youth movement are doing it. It is a very immature thing
to run away to communes and to plow the soil all over again-
renouncing all of the technological equipment the father
happened to produce because they oppose him. They are
rejecting one manifestation of freedom if they do that, the
freedom to choose whether to plow or not, you see.

EHE: O.K., would you also include in this a certain

violent faction that seems to want to destroy the whole system
so that it can be reborn? And these people are willing to
sacrifice all technological achievements in order ...

HPN: To negate the whole thing. I didn't understand at

the time, but Trotsky always talked about there being no such
things as particular kinds of culture, there was only continuity.
So at some times a gun is quite necessary and at other times it
would be proper to use other strategies, whatever will promote
the victims' move toward freedom. But the Oedipus complex is
as much as anything else a symbolic fight of the victim against
the controller.

EHE: I wrote a paper on dissent recently for the

International Journal of Psychoanalysis and I took that occasion to
point out that we always talk about the Oedipus complex as if
only the boy's hostility was involved. But we never talk about
Laius, the father of Oedipus, and ask what "complex" made

102
him so ready to believe the oracle that his little boy was going
to kill him someday. He believed it so strongly that he put the
baby Oedipus out, exiled him. We won't understand the
repetitiveness of this pattern unless we realise the importance
of the fact that the king believed in the son's potential threat
instead of trusting his own ability to bring up the little boy in
such a way that the oracle would have been disproven. That
would not make a myth, I know, but it might make history.
Why do we not point to the ways in which every establishment
and every established organisation, out of a fear that the young
will overcome them, limit the identities of the young and
permit them access to adulthood only by way of confirmations,
communions, inductions, and so on—every one of which limits
the young to a particular identity and threatens transgressors?
And, of course, war comes in here in the sense that every
pseudospecies would put their young into particular uniforms
and try to impress them by way of historical mythology that
the highest affirmation of life would be a heroic death for the
system. If you die well, you're going to be immortal— and all
the more so if you first kill many representatives of the other
pseudospecies ad niajorani gloria of your own pseudospecies.

KTE: Who are also young

EHE: Who are also young. They kill each other off,
then, and at the end the two systems make peace with each
other, having killed enough of the best fighters in each other's

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younger generation to have avoided a certain potential for
rebellion in their own country.

KTE: Boy. That’s quite a thought.

HPN: Yes, it is.

EHE: There is something to that, don't you think? But

nowadays the young of countries that a very short time ago
were ready to do this to each other periodically, like the
Germans and the French, are suddenly beginning to recognize
that they are in many ways closer to each other than they are to
their respective parents.

HPN: That is because they are becoming one

community. That is what intercommunalism is all about.

KTE: The people to whom this is becoming most

obvious—in this country, at least—are the young who realise
that it is always other young people they go to war with, and
Blacks who realise that is it usually exploited people they go to
war with.

HPN: That’s right.

EHE: ...You mentioned Trotsky: remember how - in

spite of Lenin, who was probably the most balanced of all

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those men - in the end Stalin made of himself (again) the little
father, the traditional "little father," heir to the Russian tradition
with all its capacity for tyranny? ...The question always is:
When you gain a new measure of freedom, who can claim the
right to sanction it? The fact that man has such a long
childhood may be the evolutionary origin of his tendency to
always search for an older figure who will sanction whatever
license he takes. Even if rebels first kill the father and then kill
each other, there always comes the question—who is going to
be that charismatic older brother who sanctions the license you
took and confirms your right to have taken it? And then some
of the brothers will fight each other for the role of the oldest.
The result, as we can see even in some of the abortive
revolutionary developments of today, can be paralysis, and
then depression, lethargy and a re-emergence of the old
moralisms in revolutionary disguise; for man cannot destroy
the old without some kind of sanction. 1 have a feeling that
revolutions have been very costly for this reason—costly in a
way that man today, with the means of mechanical destruction
available to him, simply cannot afford. Let's just take Stalin as a
historical example ... My God, what if he had had an atomic
arsenal at his disposal? What might have happened then?

HPN: Well, what did happen? This country had the

weapons, and look: Nagasaki, Hiroshima.

EHE: O.K. You've got me there. That's what we should

105
talk about tomorrow—Hiroshima, the moon, and America. I
would like to try out some notes on you.

HPN: You mentioned that revolutions are costly, and I

just wanted to say that they are not themselves costly and
negative: it's the kind of friction, the kind of obstacles that are
in the way of revolution that keep the change at the
antagonistic level, you see. But the process of revolution, the
process of change, the new struggling against the old to
produce some synthesis, does not necessarily have to be a
destructive process.

EHE: Well, I hope you are right.

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 Universal Identity

On the following evening it was, again, Kai who

clicked on the tape recorder and opened the discussion.

KTE: Could I start off by asking a question? One of the

common grounds between Newton’s ideology, Erikson's
psychology, and the various notions that Herman and I bring
in from the sociological outfield - he can play left field and I
will play center - is the realisation that a person’s perception of
reality is more or less shaped by the experiences he has had
and by the position he occupies in the world. That’s good
dialectical materialism, good psychoanalysis, and good
sociology all at once, right? Now we have made a lot of the fact
that one of our principals is a seventy-year-old white man, an
immigrant to this country, while the other is a thirty-year-old
Black man who comes out of a very different set of
circumstances. To be true to the logic of our various methods,
then, we would have to say that these circumstances are the
lens—if that is the word —through which we look at reality. I
would like to hear each of you talk about those circumstances
for a while.

HPN: I think it is easy for any person who accepts the

ideology of dialectical materialism to share the methods and
subject matters of all other disciplines, because all scientists are

107
concerned one way or another with dialectics if they practise a
true science. That’s why I think that, despite age differences,
the discipline of psychology and the approach of dialectical
materialism would necessarily share many things in common
—beginning with the developmental process and the
recognition of the internal contradictions in all things. That is
why it is not surprising to me, though it may be surprising to
other people, that we could come to agreement on some things
and at least discuss a number of things that are of interest to
both of us.

KTE: Right. That's what my question is all about. There

is a destination out there in the middle distance, let’s say. Huey
reasons his way to that destination by dialectics and Pop {Erik}
reasons his way there by a more psychoanalytic kind of logic.
We have talked a lot about how similar the destinations seem
to be, but we have not said much about the different paths you
took to get there—or about the different travelers, for that
matter. See what I mean? Maybe the Harvard professor will say
a word about the Yale professor's question.

EHE: Well, you are right. There are a number of things

I didn't spell out when I talked about myself as an immigrant.
During a lifetime like mine, one can actually witness the kinds
of transformation which you, Huey, describe—contradictions
meeting each other and change taking place. Now my
experience is that even some of the most trite and

108
commonplace characterizations of the American Dream hold
psychologically and have to be taken care of in any American’s
self-appraisal. When one comes from Europe, America
impresses one as the first self-made nation, creating itself out of
immigrants who came from all the different pseudospecies of
the world and converged here. They had to create a new nation
and to become nationals of a new kind. And that nation
became a new kind of industrial empire, certainly different
from the British one. The British Empire created a
superidentity too—we don't have to go into that—but at least
there always was an England—an ancient geographical core, a
self-contained island .

HPN: One empire is based upon tradition, the other

empire is based upon technocracy—and that’s a new kind of
nation in itself.

EHE: But technocracy was not the original idea. The

coming together of technocracy with a self-made nation was—
in some ways, at least—almost a historical coincidence, even
though a new nation with a whole wide continent to expand in
had what it needed as the base of a new technocratic empire.
Historically, then, the "self-made" idea and the technocratic
vision fused into an idealized image of a man who almost
literally made himself, created himself, manufactured himself,
invented himself. This is important to point out because what
we call the American empire is really a universal technocracy

109
with America in the role not only of central power but also of
central value-giver. And the main value we export is that of the
self-made man. In Germany and Japan, for instance, people
who belong to the establishment have to some extent accepted
that basic value, and even in India you can see it reflected very
sharply in the new managerial class. Compared to others, they
look American, talk American, live like Americans in
apartment houses, and are beginning to develop a new family
structure and a new set of values to go along with it. Now I
would argue that the self-made man is a new kind of
pseudospecies—a type of person who by temperament and
opportunity can make of himself pretty much what he wants to
and who considers other pseudospecies to be people who
cannot do all of that for reasons of race or class or type or
weakness or something else. Of course, the Indians (American,
this time) who happened to be situated here and the Blacks
whose immigration was not exactly self-chosen were very
useful to the image of a pseudospecies that likes to think they
came here of their own free will. Or by God's choice.

HPN: 1 would like to question the whole concept of the

self-made man. The people who settled America were not self-
made, but were the product of specific social and historical
circumstances. The people who came to America were outcasts,
they were victims; and the state they established was quite
different from the traditional kind of empire. Now as we were
saying a while ago, we can see that people sometimes—

110
probably most of the time—-arrive at a certain level of power
without this power being shared in a universal sense. They
become the new status quo and they attempt to hold back the
process again. And once they try to stop the process of change
the take on form of the father, of the controller. Only now, with
a new kind of technocracy at their disposal— transportation,
mass media, and so on—their influence is so great that they
reach everyone in the whole world. Now this is dialectical in
itself, because as their control becomes more severe and more
encompassing, the more enemies they make. And this is why I
say that the whole world has become one community in the
hands of the old victim, who is now the new lord you see. This
is reactionary intercommunalism. The downfall of this new
self-made man, then, is going to be that people will rebel
against him because of his insistence that he has all of the
answers. This is why reactionary intercommunalism, while it
causes its own destruction, also lays the foundation for its own
transformation; because without modem communication and
all the rest of it, how would the youth of the world develop a
common identity? A sense of themselves as oppressed?

JHB: The point I have been trying to make is that the

changes we are talking about require a new character
definition, new definitions of self—but that is only going to
come about as a result of hard, hard struggle. And those youth
who are seeking a new identity must divest themselves of the
old identity based on quantity and more quantity. I just don’t

Ill
see that as a very likely prospect.

EHE: I know. But to me, identity has to do with terrific

power struggles as well as with terrific delusions. It is a matter
of life and death, and not just a conscious choice of what kind
of nice identity one would like to have. To me, identity means
what the best in you lives by, the loss of which would make
you less human. .. when you teach at Harvard today and you
see the children of all those successful people, it is striking how
little it means to them—or so they pretend—what their parents
are. Now this is not just a fad, a passing mood: the fact is, I
think, that they do not get from their parents' way of life the
necessary identity strengths. So something is happening across
the nation—the world, for that matter—and maybe the
Panthers have been in a key spot here in developing a strong
and fraternal image.

KTE: I sense a pause. Could I steer you back to the

question of how and where one’s ideas originate?

EHE: Oh, that. Well, I gave a paper the other day for a
meeting of scientists in Europe, each of whom were being
asked why they, of all people, were the first to think of a
particular word or concept or theory which afterward seemed
so self-evident to everybody. And I was asked: Why were you
the first to write about "identity crisis" in a systematic way? ... I
came to this country at the time when it entered into

112
something of an identity crisis, just because it had tried to
make out of the descendants of so many different
pseudospecies one new one. So the American identity was in
some ways a manufactured one, a self-invented one, and ...

HPN: And I would say that it is a necessarily

oppressive one.

EHE: Well, all right, but so is every other identity that

comes from the same source. Let me try to say it in one
sentence, and then I will be through. As long as the core of any
collective identity is a pseudospecies idea, it is going to be
oppressive. As long as the Britishers felt chosen by God to
colonise all those African and Asian countries, they were
bound to be oppressive —although they did create a new
conscience at the same time. America, too, for a long time could
ignore the fact that it was bound to be oppressive in order to
spread new ideas along with new methods of production.

HPN: But when we create a spirit of oneness, it won’t

be oppressive.

EHE: That is, I think, what Marx meant way back when
he spoke of an overcoming of history itself, an idea probably
related to that of the withering away of the state.

HPN: I think that you understand reactionary and

113
revolutionary intercommunalism very well. You put it in
somewhat different words, but I can agree with almost
everything you say. Just before I went to Yale, I told the class at
our Intercommunal Institute that I did not know how I was
going to fare there because your writings had taken the wind
out of my argument. I had thought at first that I would just be
dealing with another psychoanalyst but after I read some of
your things I found it difficult to treat you as an adversary. But
at the same time, I felt that I could not just go there and agree
with you because of my own situation in the Party. So you see
the dilemma 1 was in. And I felt a little robbed, too, because I
had worked very hard to put my ideas together, and here
someone else had already laid a number of them out. That is
somewhat frustrating, you know.

KTE: This may be the time for me to pursue my

favorite question again, the one with which we began this
morning. The way Huey hacked through the forest to arrive at
the idea of communalism is very different from the way Pop
hacked through the forest to arrive at the idea of identity, even
if the two products look a lot alike. Now Pop said a word or
two about the circumstances that could help explain why he
was the person to write about identity and the identity crisis.
So, Huey, why do you suppose you were the person to come
up with the idea of intercommunalism? Would it be fair to ask
you how you made your way through that forest?

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 HPN: Personally, I am not sure I know.

EHE: Why do you think you invented

intercommunalism?

HPN: Well, I didn't invent it. I discovered it,

focused upon it.

EHE: O.K. I didn't invent identity crisis either...

HPN: A scientist, if he is also an activist, will

necessarily go about changing things in a different way than a
laborer, let's say, or someone else who does not have any
particular discipline, you see. So I went into activism with a
scientific method, and ...

EHE: But why? That’s the point. There must have been
something in your background, in your choice of parents, in
the place where you grew up, which made you that
independent. If you consider only how many of your brothers
just accepted what they were taught, or accepted being
excluded from what was being taught, while you always
insisted on your right to study and your right to teach. There's
always a personal quality to a man which cannot be reduced to
explanations. That's obvious. But you must have some idea
what...

115
 HPN: Well, I don't know how important it is. I seldom
discuss my own personal life except as it relates to the
movement.
EHE: I seldom do either. In fact, I only talk about
myself in relation to the identity concept... I think one has the
right—maybe even the duty—to restrict oneself to that:
otherwise everything becomes a kind of self-indulgence.
HPN: I think one of the things that would naturally
make me somewhat freer to take an objective approach to
situations rather than just follow what has been traditional is
the fact that I am the seventh sibling in my family. I am the
youngest and my family is very tightly knit; my father and
mother have been married almost fifty years now, I guess. I
was protected, you know, taken care of; and in a situation like
that one is usually a little rebellious. In order to assert myself, I
would act somewhat aggressive.
EHE: How many brothers and how many sisters?
HPN: Three brothers and three sisters. And, as I say, I
was the youngest. It is almost a book in itself to tell you how I
was tom between my brothers and my sisters. I took on the
characteristics of all of them, in a way, and by doing that I was
bound to be transformed, you see, because how could I
identify with all of them and at the same time maintain the
thing that was characteristic of the family? I could see, let's say,
identifying with my father or my mother and coming out with
the kind of personality that is either just the opposite or very
much the same as either of them. But I developed a

116
relationship with all of them and appreciated all of their
personalities—and that made me different from them. It made
me a stranger in a way.

EHE: But don't you think that as the youngest you

were also very important to all of them and that they made you
feel important? I would assume that this was so, in spite of the
fact that the youngest always feels oppressed because the
others are so big.

HPN: Well, I felt loved by everyone in the family. Not

necessarily important, but loved.

EHE: Was it clear from the outset—obviously it became

clear later—that you were going to be the last child also? How
old was your mother when you were born?

HPN: Well, she was fourteen when she was married.

She must have been around twenty-nine when I was bom.
Maybe thirty or thirty-two.

EHE: And how about that move west to Oakland?

Oakland seems important to me somehow, but I can't figure
out why.

HPN: You know, I didn't leave Oakland until after I got

out of prison except for two trips to Los Angeles. I didn't leave

117
for the whole twenty-five years. I came here when I was one or
two years old.

EHE: Do you think Oakland has something to do with

all of this? Oakland and the West?

HPN: As a social scientist, I would say that wherever

we are has a definite influence on us, and what we have to do
is find out the difference between one area and another.

EHE: Well, you probably know what 1 am driving at. I

have been impressed, as I said more than once, that there
seems to be a strong Western influence in the Black Panther
image.

JHB: I was just thinking about the time the idea of

intercommunalism came into the picture. I remember coming
over to your place, Huey, the day that you started talking about
intercommunalism, and I can say very honestly that I have
rarely seen you as excited as you were then. You told us that it
was a vision. But if you look at it in terms of its materialistic
basis, it was a vision which came as the result of trying to put
together a lot of different concepts in some comprehensive
way. You were handling and juggling a lot of them then.

HPN: That's right. I was not satisfied with a statement

that I was writing to the Vietnamese because there was a

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contradiction in it. Let me share this with you. I was telling the
Vietnamese that the Party supported their nationalism, their
revolutionary nationalism, even though we were not
nationalists. We were internationalists and could not be
nationalists: no Americans could afford to be nationalists
because we are all guilty on one level or another of being the
exploiter or accepting the bribe of the exploiter if we are not at
war with him. So I said that I disclaim nationalism because it is
a thing of the past but that I would support their nationalism
nonetheless. I disclaimed all of the black nationalists in that
statement —and, of course, that brought about a bad
relationship between our Party and other black organizations
because all of them, even the bourgeois ones, are somewhat
nationalistic in tone and in goal. Now if we disclaim
nationalism for ourselves and vet support nationalism for those
other people, then it seems as though we are belittling them,
being traitors to them. So I sent the statement to them, but I
was very dissatisfied and unhappy for about a month. I kept
tossing this around in my mind and suppressing it in a way.
Then I woke up one morning with this concept of
intercommunalism, and it was like a vision: it didn't seem as
coldly calculated as when you work out a mathematical
problem, which is how I usually handle things intellectually. I
just woke up that morning and I had solved the contradiction
in my sleep. And I was excited to get it out. I have had the
experience in the past of having a dream or vision and then
forgetting the damn thing because I didn’t get it down. I was

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anxious to get all of this down in writing so that I could refer to
it. And that is the history of that concept.

EHE: Now you are a revolutionary and 1 obviously am

not...
HPN: Some people say I'm not either.

EHE: But, as you say, several of our ideas are

complementary in the sense that even though one can only go
so far in bringing them together, they still relate closely to one
another. Let me illustrate what I mean by relating what you
have been saying to some concerns of mine about children and
education. It is terribly important for communalism that
children should live in a true community in order to develop a
sense of identity that is communally based as it were. Identity
is both an individual and a communal concept because you
cannot have a sense of identity—or better, you cannot grow a
sense of identity step for step through the life stages—without
anchoring it somewhere in a group setting. Children,
obviously, have only a fragmentary capacity to understand the
world. At first, the child’s mother is the world, and then he
learns to interact with a limited number of people at given
times.

HPN: At first, only with himself.

EHE: But even there, way back at the beginning,

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everything depends upon the way he is handled, the way he is
nursed, all of which already expressed a community's style—so
in that sense, he is never alone. Even the way the mother gives
him the breast already expresses a communal style, because in
different communities people do such things differently what
they say when they do it, how long they do it, the way they do
it, and so on. There the child has already begun to be a member
of the community. So much depends upon the parents'
relationship to the rest of the community, too. For example
whether the community gives them a peaceful and purposeful
sense of administering to small children. I would say, then, that
in intercommunalism groups would have to be interrelated
sufficiently to assure children a sense of identity in a wider
world, which could only happen if the rest of the world
developed a common style of bringing up the children.

HPN: Yes, this is what would be necessary to stop the

antagonistic kind of contradiction on the group or tribal or
national level. But the only point I want to emphasize now­
and I know you understand it—is that the process is usually
very bloody because the identity that is forced on people is
often based on hostility. . . . When I was young and working in
the Black Muslims and other organizations, we were required
to hate all white people. I would find myself being courteous to
whites, and they would call me to check on it. Now I could
understand intellectually and academically that I had the right
to treat whites as roughly as I wanted, because they had the

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upper hand; but I would just find myself reacting differently.
One time I saw a girl at one of our functions who was
extremely light skinned with Caucasian features, and she kept
trying to convince them that she was Black. They wouldn't hear
her. They abused her and said she was really disturbed, you
know, and she kept telling them that she was from Louisiana
and wasn't white. It really hurt me. The tone was one of
hostility the moment she walked in the door. Maybe I can
relate that back to my family, I don't know; but within my
family the cue was never colour because there is a big
difference of colour in it. I remember that when I was a baby—I
was just on the sideline then—my brother and sister would call
one of my sisters "Red" when they got angry with her, and she
would break down in tears. At the same time, some of the
others would call the darkest one in the family a black bitch,
you see, and then she would be broken up. My father had very
straight hair and others had very curly hair, like my own. So I
never thought that colour was the way to tell people apart. I
knew the difference between white people and black people, of
course, but the cue was always the way white people treated
us, not the colour itself. Do you see what I mean? Maybe that
was one of my problems in the early stages of the movement.
Even now I would say that intercommunalism has something
to do with this.

JHB: What you are saying is that you did not sense
hostility from some whites and therefore you did not respond

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to them with hostility.

HPN: No, I’m saying that even if I expected and

received a hostile kind of response from whites in most
situations, my feeling would be related to something other
than the fact that they happened to be very light skinned, you
see. So when a girl came in who looked white to me, I was
willing to accept her as a Black the minute she said she wasn't
white. 1 didn't care how light skinned she was. Herman, do you
remember the hang-ups people like Malcolm X and Garvey
had about skin colour? Well, I can appreciate their concern
about it, but this never affected me, you see what I mean?
Because of the nature of oppression and the way the world is
today, people identify each other by colour. The {Black}
Muslims personify the whole thing by saying that "white is
evil," you see, and this is the kind of thing that is hard for me to
accept. . . . What I’m saying is that I need something else than
colour to judge people. For example, I often open doors for
people without even noticing that they are white or giving it a
thought; but I can be very, very hostile toward someone if he
gives any indication whatever of feeling superior. Now most
white people had a kind of opposition to me just because I am
Black, you see, so they have their cue but I do not have mine.

EHE: May I ask one question? You spoke of your

particular place in the family. Did your family have a particular
place in the community?

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 HPN: Yes, we were victims. My father is an
uneducated man, no formal education, although he is a very
wise man. We were from a farming community and before I
was bom my father was a sharecropper. He married very early:
my mother was fourteen and he was eighteen. Then he moved
here to Oakland with seven children right after I was born and
worked in the shipyards. My father always had at least three
jobs to support the family, and that's another part of my own
rebellion: I don't have a family and I probably never will.

EHE: Was your father somewhat different from the rest

of the community? Did you perceive him as typical or unique?

HPN: Well, one of the problems my father had with

people was that he was very light skinned with straight hair,
and they could say that he was different from other Blacks. He
would take exception to that, though, and say that he was no
different and would rather be treated like every other member
of his group. He would not accept any favors. He told us later
that foremen on jobs would say, "You don’t want to do this
work, the other guys can do it; you can be truck driver." But he
would say, "No. I'd rather not be a truck driver; I'll sweep the
streets." So people attempted to treat him differently, but he
would not accept it.

EHE: Well, then, he was different in not letting

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 them make him different.

HPN: Of course.

EHE: So in many ways you came from a more stable

family than most Blacks do.

HPN: My father went up to about eighth grade or so.

He's not professional, although he has many skills. He lays
brick, he's a cement mason, and he's a carpenter; but he does
not have any credentials, so he would have to do all of this for
a handyman's price. As I said, he would work three jobs to take
care of seven children. He was a stable figure and we always
depended upon him. My mother has never worked— she was
always in the house having children or taking care of them—so
he would have to do everything; pay all the bills, do three jobs,
everything. Now I may be searching again for explanations,
but one of the reasons I do not have a family or ever hope to
have one other than the Party is that I have always identified
with the sufferings of my father. I felt that he was captured. All
he would do is work, and then he would send me around
Oakland to pay all of the bills until the money was gone. This
would happen every two weeks, and I decided that I would
never be a slave like that. He was a slave, you see. He did it
because he loved us, and we in turn loved him; but at the same
time I rebelled against it....

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 KTE: So the Party will be your family?

HPN: The Party requires a good deal of sacrifice, but in

order to sacrifice you need love. You know, Herbert Hendin
has pointed out in a recent book that Black suicide is different
from white suicide: 80 percent of all Black suicides occur, he
says, because of the lack or loss of a lover—although I would
just want to say lack or loss of love in general. Whites commit
suicide because they suffer the loss of prestige or position or
economic security, but Blacks commit suicide for lack of love
because this is all we have. If love is gone, there is no reason to
go on—and this is how I feel about the Party. I am willing to
make any sacrifice, not because of a suicidal tendency on my
part, as some psychologists and sociologists have concluded,
but because the sacrifice is compensated through the fraternity.
But then the question arises at this stage of the game: what
happens after the fraternity is broken, you see? Where's the
reinforcement going to come from?

EHE: Well, that brings us back to the whole question of

the fraternal and fratricidal relations of revolutionaries.

HPN: Is that a necessary part of development though?

EHE: The matter of brothers and sisters forming a

community is a theme in all development, I suppose, but it
seems to become an acute problem of leadership in revolutions.

126
I watched you on television the other day when your old friend
[Eldridge Cleaver] broke with you, and I couldn't help thinking
(you may not want to discuss this here at all): what do brothers
do to each other once it becomes a matter of struggling for
power among equals?

HPN: The struggle for power among the brothers may

be a natural outgrowth of eliminating the father, but it will
probably hurt more than the struggle between the son and the
father because divorce is sharper. It is more devastating. But I
don't know if I agree with you that this is a natural kind of
outgrowth. I just don’t know.

EHE: I didn't mean that. What I mean is that different

historical situations bring out different aspects of man's
learned patterns. And if this is so, then maybe it would be
better to understand those patterns in order to control them
better. There can be such a waste of human resources when the
simplest emotions are misunderstood.

HPN: I think it would be fair to state that there is no

real difference between familyhood and tribalism and no real
difference between tribalism and nationhood. They all depend
upon a sense of identity that is exclusive, you see—and this is
even true of what they call internationalism.

JHB: When you say there is no difference, do you mean

127
there is no difference in principle or in kind between, say,
tribalism and nationhood?

HPN: There is only a quantitative difference between

familyhood and tribalism and between tribalism and
nationhood, not a qualitative difference.

JHB: But relationships between people in a family

setting and a tribal setting are much more primary, whereas in
a national setting they are more likely to be secondary.

HPN: I agree. It's impossible to have a face-to-face

relationship between one hundred or two hundred million
people. But it's still a matter of degree. At first, people say: "I
will defend my family and serve my family because we share a
common history, a common value system, a common ethnic
background, and a common religion." Then as society grows a
number of families come together in a close relationship, and
say: "We have the same past, the same values— we are a tribe"
Then the tribes compete with one another for territory until
they merge into nations and it's the same thing all over again
on a different scale: I will defend my nation because we share a
common background, common principles and values," and so
on. I would say that the concept of the nation is strictly related
to the concept of the family, and that there is only a
quantitative difference between the two.

128
 JHB: So what is the next step?

HPN: Well, in order for man to survive there has to be

some universal identity that extends beyond family tribe, or
nation—an identity that is essentially human and does not
depend upon people thinking that others are something less
than they are.

EHE: The trouble with that comparison is that the

family is essentially meant for bringing up children, while
nations...

HPN: You are saying that the family is the traditional

method for bringing up children. I would say that the family
has always been a traditional way of keeping people children.

KTE: Huey, when we were talking about the Oedipus

complex a little while back, you said something about science
and religion that intrigued me.

HPN: Science constantly challenges the whole idea of

the supernatural and God is, you know, the symbol of the
father. Now once you reach a maturity in consciousness, then
you assume the role of God yourself. Whenever science
discovers something new, all of a sudden the church starts to
say that it is now an earthly thing: it is not related to God
anymore, but God still exists. So when does God stop existing?

129
He stops existing as soon as you bite the fruit of knowledge
and can assume control yourself. But you haven't really
destroyed God; you have become God. You have become the
controller yourself. The point is that a will to power is the
primary drive of man, not the sexual drive. It is an attempt to
reverse the dominance in nature—to become the controller, to
become the father, to become God. As long as other people
control us. we remain children. As Erik pointed out, that is
why Marx said that there can be no real adults in a capitalist
society.

EHE: On the subject of controllers and fathers: what is

happening right now to the leaders of the revolution in a wider
sense? What form do you expect leadership to take in the
future?

HPN: I think in the future people will realise more and

more that they are responsible for creating leadership just as
they are responsible for creating God. Groups create leaders
just as they create other things, but they usually lose their
awareness that this is so and begin to feel that the leaders are
external to them, somebody to whom they must submit. So I
would think that in the immediate future leadership will take
more the form of the "chairmanship"—and in the distant
future, although I can't really visualize it yet, leadership will
become a coordinated effort among people and maybe even
titles or statuses will no longer be necessary.

130
 EHE: You know, we seem to be talking around things
again. I don’t quite understand your concept of God, for one
thing. Obviously, to say that somebody or something is the
father of all people is to say that all people are brothers: the
common father guarantees the brotherhood. So one question
we should keep in mind is whether brotherhood can survive
the loss of fatherhood. In your Party, you use terms like
"brother" and "sister," but you really don’t have much in the
way of father images, do you? The leaders of the Party look
and sound more like older brothers in your publications. Of
course Ho Chi Minh comes in every once in a while ...

HPN: But they call him Uncle Ho.

EHE: See? They call him Uncle, the father’s brother.

Now how about Mao, is he a father image? He seems so much
more like a grandfather—who, in fact, is trying to weaken any
new consolidation of father images in the hierarchy. Is that
right?

HPN: Yes.

KTE: The next question has to be: Huey, how does a

leader like you manage to avoid becoming a "father" when you
get older? How do you avoid that kind of imagery in a
movement that sooner or later is going to embrace two or

131
maybe even three generations?

HPN: Who knows? Everything is in a state of

transformation, nothing is stable, and the Party, too, will be
transformed.

KTE: But the kind of imagery the Party uses is going to

have to change to take your old age into account.

EHE: There is something very simple to be said here

which is that both a father and a god are irreversible. You
cannot say that somebody is an ex-father—either he was a
father or he wasn't—and nobody can be an ex-god. But then
there are other forms of leadership, aren't there, and being a
teacher is one of them. 1 am impressed how much Mao played
the role later on of the teacher, the leader who would formulate
things like the sages of old.

JHB: Well, Huey, I would say that you are more of a

teacher than a leader or a father figure—a teacher in the sense
that your approach is to provide people with processes by
which they can arrive at answers rather than give them the
answers themselves. That is what you are doing when you talk
about states of change, internal contradictions, processes of
development, transformations, and so on.

EHE: Can I ask one last question? Huey, what do you

132
think of the two-party system?

HPN: Well, if there were a two-party system, maybe I

would think well of it.

EHE: O.K. I was just thinking about constitutional

rights, existing constitutional rights. Would you expect
intercommunalism to change the political structures of the
various countries?

HPN: Yes, I would. I believe that contradictions will be

around for quite some time yet. I won’t say "forever,'’ because
that’s an absolute, but I cannot stretch my imagination far
enough to see a time when contradictions will no longer exist.
What I do look forward to is the time when contradictions will
be nonantagonistic, and I don't think that will occur until we
resolve the question of property—of the property class and the
class that owns no property, of the haves and the have-nots, of
the contradictions based on economic interests. I feel that to
resolve those contradictions it will be necessary to have a
redistribution of wealth. Revolutionary intercommunalism will
exist when power is distributed on an intercommunal level and
each community of the world has control of its own
institutions.

Self-Determination

133
 The following translation is taken from Volume 20 of the
English Edition ofV.I. Lenin's Collected Works (Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1947). Written between February and May, 1914, Lenin's
analysis, like Newton's, takes the form of a dialogue across a
particularlistic divide, not this time skin colour with its ideological
connotations, but an equally biological irrelevance - gender.

Whereas Huey faced Erik in person lllych took on Rosa

Luxemburg from the virtual safety of his writing desk. It is as well to
note that, despite the patronising, pedantic tone of his criticisms,
Lenin held "our Rosa" in great esteem and respect - perhaps even
affection.

Clause 9 of the Russian Marxists' Programme, which

deals with the right of nations to self-determination, has given
rise lately to a crusade on the part of the opportunists1. There is
no doubt that this campaign of a motley array of opportunists
against our Marxist Programme is closely connected with
present-day nationalist vacillations in general. Hence we
consider a detailed examination of this question timely. We
would mention, in passing, that none of the opportunists has
offered a single argument of his own; they all merely repeat
what Rosa Luxemburg said in her lengthy Polish article of
1908-09, "The National Question and Autonomy".

134
What Is Meant by the Self-Determination of Nations?

Naturally, this is the first question that arises when any

attempt is made at a Marxist examination of what is known as
self-determination. What should be understood by that term?
Should the answer be sought in legal definitions deduced from
all sorts of "general concepts" of law? Or is it rather to be
sought in a historico-economic study of the national
movements?

It is not surprising that the {afore-mentioned

opportunists} did not even think of raising this question, and
shrugged it off by scoffing at the "obscurity" of the Marxist
Programme, apparently unaware, in their simplicity, that the
self-determination of nations is dealt with, not only in the
Russian Programme of 1903, but in the resolution of the
London International Congress of 1896. Far more surprising is
the fact that Rosa Luxemburg, who declaims a great deal about
the supposedly abstract and metaphysical nature of the clause
in question, should herself succumb to the sin of abstraction
and metaphysics. It is Rosa Luxemburg herself who is
continually lapsing into generalities about self-determination
(to the extent even of philosophising amusingly on the
question of how the will of the nation is to be ascertained),
without anywhere clearly and precisely asking herself whether
the gist of the matter lies in legal definitions or in the

135
experience of the national movements throughout the world.

A precise formulation of this question, which no

Marxist can avoid, would at once destroy nine-tenths of Rosa
Luxemburg's arguments. This is not the first time that national
movements have arisen in Russia, nor are they peculiar to that
country alone. Throughout the world, the period of the final
victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with
national movements. For the complete victory of commodity
production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market,
and there must be politically united territories whose
population speak a single language, with all obstacles to the
development of that language and to its consolidation in
literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of
national movements. Language is the most important means of
human intercourse. Unity and unimpeded development of
language are the most important conditions for genuinely free
and extensive commerce on a scale commensurate with
modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the
population in all its various classes and, lastly, for the
establishment of a close connection between the market and
each and every proprietor, big or little, and between seller and
buyer.

Therefore, the tendency of every national movement is

towards the formation of national states, under which these
requirements of modem capitalism are best satisfied. The most

136
profound economic factors drive towards this goal, and,
therefore, for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire
civilised world, the national state is typical and normal for the
capitalist period.

Consequently, if we want to grasp the meaning of self-

determination of nations, not by juggling with legal definitions,
or "inventing" abstract definitions, but by examining the
historico-economic conditions of the national movements, we
must inevitably reach the conclusion that the self-
determination of nations means the political separation of these
nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an
independent national state.

Later on we shall see still other reasons why it would

be wrong to interpret the right to self-determination as
meaning anything but the right to existence as a separate state.
At present, we must deal with Rosa Luxemburg's efforts to
"dismiss” the inescapable conclusion that profound economic
factors underlie the urge towards a national state.

Rosa Luxemburg is quite familiar with Kautsky's

pamphlet Nationality and Inter nationality. (Supplement to Die
Nene Zeit No. 1, 1907-08; Russian translation in the journal
Nauchnaya Mysi, Riga, 1908.) She is aware that, after carefully
analysing the question of the national state in §4 of that
pamphlet, Kautsky arrived at the conclusion that Otto Bauer

137
"underestimates the strength of the urge towards a national
state" (p. 23 of the pamphlet). Rosa Luxemburg herself quotes
the following words of Kautsky's2:

"The national state is the form most suited to present-day

conditions, (i.e., capitalist, civilised, economically
progressive, as distinguished from medieval, precapitalist,
etc.); it is the form in which the state can best fulfill its tasks"
(i.e., the tasks of securing the freest, widest and speediest
development of capitalism)".

To this we must add Kautsky's still more precise

concluding remark that states of mixed national composition
(known as multinational states, as distinct from national states)
are "always those whose internal constitution has for some
reason or other remained abnormal or underdeveloped"
(backward).

Needless to say, Kautsky speaks of abnormality

exclusively in the sense of lack of conformity with what is best
adapted to the requirements of a developing capitalism.

The question now is: How did Rosa Luxemburg treat

these historico-economic conclusions of Kautsky's? Are they
right or wrong? Is Kautsky right in his historico-economic
theory, or is Bauer3, whose theory is basically psychological?
What is the connection between Bauer's undoubted "national

138
opportunism", his defence of cultural-national autonomy, his
nationalistic infatuation ("an occasional emphasis on the
national aspect", as Kautsky put it), his "enormous
exaggeration of the national aspect and complete neglect of the
international aspect" (Kautsky)— and his underestimation of
the strength of the urge to create a national state?

Rosa Luxemburg has not even raised this question. She

has not noticed the connection. She has not considered the sum
total of Bauer's theoretical views. She has not even drawn a
line between the historico-economic and the psychological
theories of the national question. She confines herself to the
following remarks in criticism of Kautsky:

"This national state is only an abstraction, which can

easily be developed and defended theoretically, but which does
not correspond to reality. [Przeglad Socjaldemokratycny, 1908,
No. 6, p. 499.]

And in corroboration of this emphatic statement there

follow arguments to the effect that the "right to self-
determination" of small nations is made illusory by the
development of the great capitalist powers and by imperialism.
"Can one seriously speak," Rosa Luxemburg exclaims, "about
the 'self-determination' of the formally independent
Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Rumanians, Serbs, Greeks, partly
even the Swiss, whose independence is itself a result of the

139
political struggle and the diplomatic game of the concert of
Europe?!" (P. 500.) The state that best suits these conditions is
"not a national state, as Kautsky believes, but a predatory one".
Some dozens of figures are quoted relating to the size of
British, French and other colonial possessions.

After reading such arguments, one cannot help

marvelling at the author's ability to misunderstand the how
and the why of things. To teach Kautsky, with a serious mien,
that small states are economically dependent on big ones, that
a struggle is raging among the bourgeois states for the
predatory suppression of other nations, and that imperialism
and colonies exist—all this is a ridiculous and puerile attempt
to be clever, for none of this has the slightest bearing on the
subject. Not only small states, but even Russia, for example, is
entirely dependent, economically, on the power of the
imperialist finance capital of the "rich" bourgeois countries.
Not only the miniature Balkan states, but even nineteenth­
century America was, economically, a colony of Europe, as
Marx pointed out in Capital. Kautsky, like any Marxist, is, of
course, well aware of this, but that has nothing whatever to do
with the question of national movements and the national
state.

For the question of the political self-determination of

nations and their independence as states in bourgeois society,
Rosa Luxemburg has substituted the question of their

140
economic independence. This is just as intelligent as if
someone, in discussing the programmatic demand for the
supremacy of parliament, i.e., the assembly of people's
representatives, in a bourgeois state, were to expound the
perfectly correct conviction that big capital dominates in a
bourgeois country, whatever the regime in it.

There is no doubt that the greater part of Asia, the

most densely populated continent, consists either of colonies of
the "Great Powers", or of states that are extremely dependent
and oppressed as nations. But does this commonly-known
circumstance in any way shake the undoubted fact that in Asia
itself the conditions for the most complete development of
commodity production and the freest, widest and speediest
growth of capitalism have been created only in Japan, i.e., only
in an independent national state? The latter is a bourgeois
state, and for that reason has itself begun to oppress other
nations and to enslave colonies. We cannot say whether Asia
will have had time to develop into a system of independent
national states, like Europe, before the collapse of capitalism,
but it remains an undisputed fact that capitalism, having
awakened Asia, has called forth national movements
everywhere in that continent, too; that the tendency of these
movements is towards the creation of national states in Asia;
that it is such states that ensure the best conditions for the
development of capitalism. The example of Asia speaks in
favour of Kautsky and against Rosa Luxemburg.

141
 The example of the Balkan states likewise contradicts
her, for anyone can now see that the best conditions for the
development of capitalism in the Balkans are created precisely
in proportion to the creation of independent national states in
that peninsula.

Therefore, Rosa Luxemburg notwithstanding, the

example of the whole of progressive and civilised mankind, the
example of the Balkans and that of Asia prove that Kautsky’s
proposition is absolutely correct: the national state is the rule
and the "norm" of capitalism; the multinational state represents
backwardness, or is an exception. From the standpoint of
national relations, the best conditions for the development of
capitalism are undoubtedly provided by the national state.
This does not mean, of course, that such a state, which is based
on bourgeois relations, can eliminate the exploitation and
oppression of nations. It only means that Marxists cannot lose
sight of the powerful economic factors that give rise to the urge
to create national states. It means that "self-determination of
nations" in the Marxists’ Programme cannot, from a historico-
economic point of view, have any other meaning than political
self-determination, state independence, and the formation of a
national state.

The conditions under which the bourgeois-democratic

demand for a "national state" should be supported from a

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Marxist, i.e., class-proletarian, point of view will be dealt with
in detail below. For the present, we shall confine ourselves to
the definition of the concept of "self-determination", and only
note that Rosa Luxemburg knows what this concept means
("national state"), whereas her opportunist partisans do not
even know that.

The Historically Concrete Presentation of the Question

The categorical requirement of Marxist theory in

investigating any social question is that it be examined within
definite historical limits, and, if it refers to a particular country
(e.g., the national programme for a given country), that account
be taken of the specific features distinguishing that country
from others in the same historical epoch.
What does this categorical requirement of Marxism
imply in its application to the question under discussion?
First of all, it implies that a clear distinction must be
drawn between the two periods of capitalism, which differ
radically from each other as far as the national movement is
concerned. On the one hand, there is the period of the collapse
of feudalism and absolutism, the period of the formation of the
bourgeois-democratic society and state, when the national
movements for the first time become mass movements and in
one way or another draw all classes of the population into
politics through the press, participation in representative
institutions, etc. On the other hand, there is the period of fully

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formed capitalist states with a long-established constitutional
regime and a highly developed antagonism between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie—a period that may be called
the eve of capitalism's downfall.
The typical features of the first period are: the
awakening of national movements and the drawing of the
peasants, the most numerous and the most sluggish section of
the population, into these movements, in connection with the
struggle for political liberty in general, and for the rights of the
nation in particular. Typical features of the second period are:
the absence of mass bourgeois-democratic movements and the
fact that developed capitalism, in bringing closer together
nations that have already been fully drawn into commercial
intercourse, and causing them to intermingle to an increasing
degree, brings the antagonism between internationally united
capital and the international working-class movement into the
forefront.
Of course, the two periods are not walled off from each
other; they are connected by numerous transitional links, the
various countries differing from each other in the rapidity of
their national development, in the national makeup and
distribution of their population, and so on. There can be no
question of the Marxists of any country drawing up their
national programme without taking into account all these
general historical and concrete state conditions.
It is here that we come up against the weakest point in
Rosa Luxemburg's arguments. With extraordinary zeal, she

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embellishes her article with a collection of hard words directed
against § 9 of our Programme, which she declares to be
"sweeping", "a platitude", "a metaphysical phrase", and so on
without end. It would be natural to expect an author who so
admirably condemns metaphysics (in the Marxist sense, i.e.z
anti-dialectics) and empty abstractions to set us an example of
how to make a concrete historical analysis of the question. The
question at issue is the national programme of the Marxists of a
definite country—Russia, in a definite period —the beginning
of the twentieth century. But does Rosa Luxemburg raise the
question as to what historical period Russia is passing through,
or what are the concrete features of the national question and
the national movements of that particular country in that
particular period?
No, she does not! She says absolutely nothing about it!
In her work you will not find even the shadow of an analysis of
how the national question stands in Russia in the present
historical period, or of the specific features of Russia in this
particular respect!
We are told that the national question in the Balkans is
presented differently from that in Ireland; that Marx appraised
the Polish and Czech national movements in the concrete
conditions of 1848 in such and such a way (a page of excerpts
from Marx); that Engels appraised the struggle of the forest
cantons, of Switzerland against Austria and the Battle of
Morgarten which took place in 1315 in such and such a way (a
page of quotations from Engels with the appropriate comments

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from Kautsky); that Lassalle4 regarded the peasant war in
Germany of the sixteenth century as reactionary, etc.
It cannot be said that these remarks and quotations
have any novelty about them, but at all events it is interesting
for the reader to be occasionally reminded just how Marx,
Engels and Lassalle approached the analysis of concrete
historical problems in individual countries. And a perusal of
these instructive quotations from Marx and Engels reveals
most strikingly the ridiculous position Rosa Luxemburg has
placed herself in. She preaches eloquently and angrily the need
for a concrete historical analysis of the national question in
different countries at different times, but she does not make the
least attempt to determine what historical stage in the
development of capitalism Russia is passing through at the
beginning of the twentieth century, or what the specific
features of the national question in this country are. Rosa
Luxemburg gives examples of how others have treated the
question in a Marxist fashion, as if deliberately stressing how
often the road to hell is paved with good intentions and how
often good counsel covers up unwillingness or inability to
follow such advice in practice.
Here is one of her edifying comparisons. In protesting
against the demand for the independence of Poland, Rosa
Luxemburg refers to a pamphlet she wrote in 1898, proving the
rapid "industrial development of Poland", with the latter's
manufactured goods being marketed in Russia. Needless to
say, no conclusion whatever can be drawn from this on the

146
question of the right to self-determination; it only proves the
disappearance of the old Poland of the landed gentry, etc. But
Rosa Luxemburg always passes on imperceptibly to the
conclusion that among the factors that unite Russia and
Poland, the purely economic factors of modem capitalist
relations now predominate.
Then our Rosa proceeds to the question of autonomy,
and though her article is entitled "The National Question and
Autonomy" in general, she begins to argue that the Kingdom of
Poland has an exclusive right to autonomy (see Prosve-
shcheniye, 1913, No. la). To support Poland's right to autonomy,
Rosa Luxemburg evidently judges the state system of Russia
by her economic, political and sociological characteristics and
everyday life—a totality of features which, taken together,
produce the concept of "Asiatic despotism". (Przeglad No. 12, p.
137.)
It is generally known that this kind of state system
possesses great stability whenever completely patriarchal and
pre-capitalist features predominate in the economic system and
where commodity production and class differentiation are
scarcely developed. However, if in a country whose state
system is distinctly pre-capitalist in character there exists a
nationally demarcated region where capitalism is rapidly
developing, then the more rapidly that capitalism develops, the
greater will be the antagonism between it and the precapitalist
state system, and the more likely will be the separation of the
progressive region from the whole — with which it is

147
connected, not by "modem capitalistic”, but by "Asiatically
despotic” ties.
Thus, Rosa Luxemburg does not get her arguments to
hang together even on the question of the social structure of
the government in Russia with regard to bourgeois Poland; as
for the concrete, historical, specific features of the national
movements in Russia—she does not even raise that question.

There are many pages in this vein, where Lenin discusses

the concrete historical specifics in Great Russia, Poland and the
Scandinavian countries. He enjoins us to fight our own (national)
bourgeoisie and landlords, to
"fight their 'culture' in the name of internationalism, and,
in so fighting, 'adapt' to the special conditions... that is your
task, not preaching or tolerating the slogan of national
culture".

On Jewish Nationalism

In the process of outlining this prescription Lenin addresses

the specifics of both Jewish and Irish nationalism. On the question of
Jewish nationalism he states:

The same applies to the most oppressed and

persecuted nation—the Jews. Jewish national culture is the
slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our
enemies. But there are other elements in Jewish culture and in

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Jewish history as a whole. Of the ten and a half million Jews in
the world, somewhat over a half live in Galicia and Russia,
backward and semi-barbarous countries, where the Jews are
forcibly kept in the status of a caste. The other half lives in the
civilised world, and there the Jews do not live as a segregated
caste. There the great world-progressive features of Jewish
culture stand clearly revealed: its internationalism, its
identification with the advanced movements of the epoch (the
percentage of Jews in the democratic and proletarian
movements is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews
among the population).
Whoever, directly or indirectly, puts forward the
slogan of Jewish "national culture" is (whatever his good
intentions may be) an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of
all that is outmoded and connected with caste among the
Jewish people; he is an accomplice of the rabbis and the
bourgeoisie. On the other hand, those Jewish Marxists who
mingle with the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other
workers in international Marxist organisations, and make their
contribution (both in Russian and in Yiddish) towards creating
the international culture of the working-class movement—
those Jews, despite the separatism of the Bund5, uphold the
best traditions of Jewry by fighting the slogan of "national
culture". Bourgeois nationalism and proletarian internation­
alism — these are the two irreconcilably hostile slogans that
correspond to the two great class camps throughout the
capitalist world, and express the two policies (nay, the two

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world outlooks) in the national question.

On Irish Nationalism

Lenin makes the same point in respect of the Irish question.

... let us return to the question of Ireland.

Marx's position on this question is most clearly
expressed in the following extracts from his letters:
"I have done my best to bring about this demonstration of
the English workers in favour of Fenianism. ... I used to think the
separation of Ireland from England impossible. I now think it
inevitable, although after the separation there may come
federation." (This is what Marx wrote to Engels on November 2,
1867.)

In his letter of November 30 of the same year he added:

"... what shall we advise the English workers? In my opinion they
must make the Repeal of the Union [Ireland with England, i.e., the
separation of Ireland from England] (in short, the affair of 1783,
only democratised and adapted to the conditions of the time) an
article of their pronunziamento. This is the only legal and therefore
only possible form of Irish emancipation which can be admitted in
the programme of an English party. Experience must show later
whether a mere personal union can continue to subsist between the
two countries....
"... What the Irish need is:
"1) Self-government and independence from England;
"2) An agrarian revolution...."

Marx attached great importance to the Irish question and

delivered hour-and-a-half lectures on this subject at the

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German Workers’ Union (letter of December 17,1867).
In a letter dated November 20, 1868, Engels spoke of
"the hatred towards the Irish found among the English
workers", and almost a year later (October 24, 1869), returning
to this subject, he wrote:
"Il n'y a qu'itn pas [it is only one step] from Ireland to Russia. . . .
Irish history shows what a misfortune it is for one nation to have
subjugated another. All the abominations of the English have their
origin in the Irish Pale. I have still to plough my way through the
Cromwellian period, but this much seems certain to me, that things
would have taken another turn in England, too, but for the
necessity of military rule in Ireland and the creation of a new
aristocracy there."
Let us note, in passing, Marx's letter to Engels of
August 18,1869:
"The Polish workers in Posen have brought a strike to a victorious
end with the help of their colleagues in Berlin. This struggle against
Monsieur Le Capital—even in the lower form of the strike—is a
more serious way of getting rid of national prejudices than peace
declamations from the lips of bourgeois gentlemen."

The policy on the Irish question pursued by Marx in

the International may be seen from the following:
On November 18, 1869, Marx wrote to Engels that he
had spoken for an hour and a quarter at the Council of the
International on the question of the attitude of the British
Ministry to the Irish Amnesty, and had proposed the following
resolution:
"Resolved, that in his reply to the Irish demands for the
release of the imprisoned Irish patriots Mr. Gladstone
deliberately insults the Irish nation;

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 "that he clogs political amnesty with conditions alike
degrading to the victims of misgovernment and the people
they belong to;
"that having, in the teeth of his responsible position, publicly
and enthusiastically cheered on the American slaveholders'
rebellion, he now steps in to preach to the Irish people the
doctrine of passive obedience;
"that his whole proceedings with reference to the Irish
Amnesty question are the true and genuine offspring of that
'policy of conquest9, by the fiery denunciation of which Mr.
Gladstone ousted his Tory rivals from office;
"that the General Council of the International Working-men's
Association express their admiration of the spirited, firm and
high-souled manner in which the Irish people carry on their
Amnesty movement;
"that this resolution be communicated to all branches of, and
workingmen's bodies connected with, the International
Workingmen's Association in Europe and America."
On December 10, 1869, Marx wrote that his paper on
the Irish question to be read at the Council of the International
would be couched as follows:
"Quite apart from all phrases about ’international' and
’humane' justice for Ireland—which are taken for granted in
the International Council—it is in the direct and absolute
interest of the English working class to get rid of their present
connexion with Ireland. And this is my fullest conviction, and
for reasons which in part I can not tell the English workers

152
 themselves. For a long time I believed that it would be
possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working­
class ascendancy. I always expressed this point of view in the
Nezo York Tribune (an American paper to which Marx
contributed for a long time]. Deeper study has now
convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will
never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland.... The
English reaction in England had its roots in the subjugation
of Ireland." (Marx’s italics.)

Marx's policy on the Irish question should now be

quite clear to our readers. Marx, the "Utopian", was so
"unpractical" that he stood for the separation of Ireland, which
half a century later has not yet been achieved.
What gave rise to Marx's policy, and was it not
mistaken?
At first Marx thought that Ireland would not be
liberated by the national movement of the oppressed nation,
but by the working-class movement of the oppressor nation.
Marx did not make an Absolute of the national movement,
knowing, as he did, that only the victory of the working class
can bring about the complete liberation of all nationalities. It is
impossible to estimate beforehand all the possible relations
between the bourgeois liberation movements of the oppressed
nations and the proletarian emancipation movement of the
oppressor nation (the very problem which today makes the
national question in Russia so difficult).

153
 However, it so happened that the English working
class fell under the influence of the Liberals for a fairly long
time, became an appendage to the Liberals, and by adopting a
liberal-labour policy left itself leaderless. The bourgeois
liberation movement in Ireland grew stronger and assumed
revolutionary forms. Marx reconsidered his view and corrected
it. "What a misfortune it is for a nation to have subjugated
another." The English working class will never be free until
Ireland is freed from the English yoke. Reaction in England is
strengthened and fostered by the enslavement of Ireland (just
as reaction in Russia is fostered by her enslavement of a
number of nations!).
And, in proposing in the International a resolution of
sympathy with "the Irish nation", the Irish people, Marx
advocated the separation of Ireland from England, "although
after the separation there may come federation".
What were the theoretical grounds for Marx's
conclusion? In England the bourgeois revolution had been
consummated long ago. But it had not yet been consummated
in Ireland; it is being consummated only now, after the lapse of
half a century, by the reforms of the English Liberals. If
capitalism had been overthrown in England as quickly as Marx
had at first expected, there would have been no room for a
bourgeois-democratic and general national movement in
Ireland. But since it had arisen, Marx advised the English
workers to support it, give it a revolutionary impetus and see it
through in the interests of their own liberty.

154
 The economic ties between Ireland and England in the
1860s were, of course, even closer than Russia's present ties
with Poland, the Ukraine, etc. The "unpracticality" and
"impracticability" of the separation of Ireland (if only owing to
geographical conditions and England's immense colonial
power) were quite obvious. Though, in principle, an enemy of
federalism, Marx in this instance granted the possibility of
federation, as well, if only the emancipation of Ireland was
achieved in a revolutionary, not reformist way, through a
movement of the mass of the people of Ireland supported by
the working class of England. There can be no doubt that only
such a solution of the historical problem would have been in
the best interests of the proletariat and most conducive to rapid
social progress.
Things turned out differently. Both the Irish people
and the English proletariat proved weak. Only now, through
the sordid deals between the English Liberals and the Irish
bourgeoisie, is the Irish problem being "solved"(the example of
Ulster shows with what difficulty) through the land reform
(with compensation) and Home Rule (not yet introduced). Well
then? Does it follow that Marx and Engels were "Utopians",
that they put forward "impracticable" national demands, or
that they allowed themselves to be influenced by the Irish
petty-bourgeois nationalists (for there is no doubt about the
petty-bourgeois nature of the Fenian movement), etc.?
No. In the Irish question, too, Marx and Engels
pursued a consistently proletarian policy, which really

155
educated the masses in a spirit of democracy and socialism.
Only such a policy could have saved both Ireland and England
half a century of delay in introducing the necessary reforms,
and prevented these reforms from being mutilated by the
Liberals to please the reactionaries.
The policy of Marx and Engels on the Irish question
serves as a splendid example of the attitude the proletariat of
the oppressor nations should adopt towards national
movements, an example which has lost none of its immense
practical importance. It serves as a warning against that
"servile haste" with which the philistines of all countries,
colours and languages hurry to label as "Utopian" the idea of
altering the frontiers of states that were established by the
violence and privileges of the landlords and bourgeoisie of one
nation.

Unity against Imperialism

Lenin reminds us over and over again to attend to the

historical specifics, to support all struggles against capital in our
own nations and in those of oppressor nations, concluding that,
The conclusion ... is clear: the working class should be
the last to make a fetish of the national question, since the
development of capitalism does not necessarily awaken all
nations to independent life. But to brush aside the mass
national movements once they have started, and to refuse to
support what is progressive in them means, in effect,
pandering to nationalistic prejudices, that is, recognising

156
"one's own nation" as a model nation (or, we would add, one
possessing the exclusive privilege of forming a state).

Again and again Lenin returns to the basic resolution as

passed by the London International Congress in 1896

This resolution reads:

"This Congress declares that it stands for the full right of all
nations to self-determination (Selbstbestimmungsrecht) and
expresses its sympathy for the workers of every country now
suffering under the yoke of military, national or other
absolutism. This Congress calls upon the workers of all these
countries to join the ranks of the class-conscious
(Klassenbewusste—those who understand their class
interests) workers of the whole world in order jointly to fight
for the defeat of international capitalism and for the
achievement of the aims of international Social-Democracy."

157
 Internationalism

Imperialism is the highest stage in the development of

capitalism. In the foremost countries capital has outgrown the
bounds of national states, has replaced competition by
monopoly and has created all the objective conditions for the
achievement of socialism. In Western Europe and in the United
States, therefore, the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat
for the overthrow of capitalist governments, and the
expropriation of the bourgeoisie is on the order of the day.
Imperialism forces the masses into this struggle by sharpening
class contradictions on a tremendous scale, by worsening the
conditions of the masses both economically—trusts, high cost
of living—and politically—the growth of militarism, more
frequent wars, more powerful reaction, the intensification and
expansion of national oppression and colonial plunder.
Victorious socialism must necessarily establish a full
democracy and, consequently, not only introduce full equality
of nations but also realise the right of the oppressed nations to
self-determination, i.e., the right to free political separation.
Socialist parties which did not show by all their activity, both
now, during the revolution, and after its victory, that they
would liberate the enslaved nations and build up relations
with them on the basis of a free union—and free union is a
false phrase without the right to secede—these parties would
be betraying socialism.

158
 Democracy, of course, is also a form of state which
must disappear when the state disappears, but that will only
take place in the transition from conclusively victorious and
consolidated socialism to full communism.

The Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Democracy

The socialist revolution is not a single act, it is not one

battle on one front, but a whole epoch of acute class conflicts, a
long series of battles on all fronts, i.e., on all questions of
economics and politics, battles that can only end in the
expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It would be a radical mistake
to think that the struggle for democracy was capable of
diverting the proletariat from the socialist revolution or of
hiding, overshadowing it, etc. On the contrary, in the same way
as there can be no victorious socialism that does not practise
full democracy, so the proletariat cannot prepare for its victory
over the bourgeoisie without an all-round, consistent and
revolutionary struggle for democracy.

It would be no less a mistake to remove one of the

points of the democratic programme, for example, the point on
the self-determination of nations, on the grounds of it being
"impracticable" or "illusory" under imperialism. The contention
that the right of nations to self-determination is impracticable

159
within the bounds of capitalism can be understood either in the
absolute, economic sense, or in the conditional, political sense.

In the first case it is radically incorrect from the

standpoint of theory. First, in that sense, such things as, for
example, labour money, or the abolition of crises, etc., are
impracticable under capitalism. It is absolutely untrue that the
self-determination of nations is equally impracticable.
Secondly, even the one example of the secession of Norway
from Sweden in 1905 is sufficient to refute "impracticability” in
that sense. Thirdly, it would be absurd to deny that some slight
change in the political and strategic relations of, say, Germany
and Britain, might today or tomorrow make the formation of a
new Polish, Indian and other similar state fully "practicable".
Fourthly, finance capital, in its drive to expand, can "freely" buy
or bribe the freest democratic or republican government and
the elective officials of any, even an "independent", country.
The domination of finance capital and of capital in general is
not to be abolished by any reforms in the sphere of political
democracy; and self-determination belongs wholly and
exclusively to this sphere. This domination of finance capital,
however, does not in the least nullify the significance of
political democracy as a freer, wider and clearer form of class
oppression and class struggle. Therefore all arguments about
the "impracticability", in the economic sense, of one of the
demands of political democracy under capitalism are reduced
to a theoretically incorrect definition of the general and basic

160
relationships of capitalism and of political democracy as a
whole.

In the second case the assertion is incomplete and

inaccurate. This is because not only the right of nations to self-
determination, but all the fundamental demands of political
democracy are only partially "practicable" under imperialism,
and then in a distorted form and by way of exception (for
example, the secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905). The
demand for the immediate liberation of the colonies that is put
forward by all revolutionary Social-Democrats is also
"impracticable" under capitalism without a series of
revolutions. But from this it does not by any means follow that
Social-Democracy should reject the immediate and most
determined struggle for all these demands—such a rejection
would only play into the hands of the bourgeoisie and reaction
—but, on the contrary, it follows that these demands must be
formulated and put through in a revolutionary and not a
reformist manner, going beyond the bounds of bourgeois
legality, breaking them down, going beyond speeches in
parliament and verbal protests, and drawing the masses into
decisive action, extending and intensifying the struggle for
every fundamental democratic demand up to a direct
proletarian onslaught on the bourgeoisie, i.e., up to the socialist
revolution that expropriates the bourgeoisie. The socialist
revolution may flare up not only through some big strike,
street demonstration or hunger riot or a military insurrection

161
or colonial revolt, but also as a result of a political crisis such as
the Dreyfus6 case or the Zabem7 incident, or in connection with
a referendum on the secession of an oppressed nation, etc.

Increased national oppression under imperialism does

not mean that Social-Democracy should reject what the
bourgeoisie call the ’’Utopian" struggle for the freedom of
nations to secede but, on the contrary, it should make greater
use of the conflicts that arise in this sphere, too, as grounds for
mass action and for revolutionary attacks on the bourgeoisie.

Self-Determination and Its Relation to Federation

The right of nations to self-determination implies

exclusively the right to independence in the political sense, the
right to free political separation from the oppressor nation.
Specifically, this demand for political democracy implies
complete freedom to agitate for secession and for a referendum
on secession by the seceding nation. This demand, therefore, is
not the equivalent of a demand for separation, fragmentation
and the formation of small states. It implies only a consistent
expression of struggle against all national oppression. The
closer a democratic state system is to complete freedom to
secede the less frequent and less ardent will the desire for
separation be in practice, because big states afford indisputable
advantages, both from the standpoint of economic progress
and from that of the interests of the masses and, furthermore,

162
these advantages increase with the growth of capitalism.
Recognition of self-determination is not synonymous with
recognition of federation as a principle. One may be a
determined opponent of that principle and a champion of
democratic centralism but still prefer federation to national
inequality as the only way to full democratic centralism. It was
from this standpoint that Marx, who was a centralist, preferred
even the federation of Ireland and England to the forcible
subordination of Ireland to the English.

The aim of socialism is not only to end the division of

mankind into tiny states and the isolation of nations in any
form, it is not only to bring the nations closer together but to
integrate them. And it is precisely in order to achieve this aim
that we must, on the one hand, explain to the masses the
reactionary nature of Renner's8 and Otto Bauer's idea of so-
called "cultural and national autonomy" and, on the other,
demand the liberation of oppressed nations in a clearly and
precisely formulated political programme that takes special
account of the hypocrisy and cowardice of socialists in the
oppressor nations, and not in general nebulous phrases, not in
empty declamations and not by way of "relegating" the
question until socialism has been achieved. In the same way as
mankind can arrive at the abolition of classes only through a
transition period of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, it
can arrive at the inevitable integration of nations only through
a transition period of the complete emancipation of all

163
oppressed nations, i.e., their freedom to secede.

Proletarian-Revolutionary Presentation of the Question

of the Self-Determination of Nations

The petty bourgeoisie had put forward not only the

demand for the self-determination of nations but all the points
of our democratic minimum programme long before, as far
back as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are still
putting them all forward in a Utopian manner because they fail
to see the class struggle and its increased intensity under
democracy, and because they believe in "peaceful" capitalism.
That is the exact nature of the utopia of a peaceful union of
equal nations under imperialism which deceives the people
and which is defended by Kautsky's followers. The programme
of Social-Democracy, as a counter-balance to this petty-
bourgeois, opportunist utopia, must postulate the division of
nations into oppressor and oppressed as basic, significant and
inevitable under imperialism.

The proletariat of the oppressor nations must not confine

themselves to general, stereotyped phrases against annexation
and in favour of the equality of nations in general, such as any
pacifist bourgeois will repeat. The proletariat cannot remain
silent on the question of the frontiers of a state founded on
national oppression, a question so "unpleasant" for the
imperialist bourgeoisie. The proletariat must struggle against

164
the enforced retention of oppressed nations within the bounds
of the given state, which means that they must fight for the
right to self-determination. The proletariat must demand
freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations
oppressed by "their own" nation. Otherwise, the
internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty
words; neither confidence nor class solidarity would be
possible between the workers of the oppressed and the
oppressor nations; the hypocrisy of the reformists and
Kautskyites, who defend self-determination but remain silent
about the nations oppressed by "their own" nation and kept in
"their own" state by force, would remain unexposed.

On the other hand, the socialists of the oppressed

nations must, in particular, defend and implement the full and
unconditional unity, including organisational unity, of the
workers of the oppressed nation and those of the oppressor
nation. Without this it is impossible to defend the independent
policy of the proletariat and their class solidarity with the
proletariat of other countries in face of all manner of intrigues,
treachery and trickery on the part of the bourgeoisie. The
bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations persistently utilise the
slogans of national liberation to deceive the workers; in their
internal policy they use these slogans for reactionary
agreements with the bourgeoisie of the dominant nation (for
example, the Poles in Austria and Russia who come to terms
with reactionaries for the oppression of the Jews and

165
Ukrainians); in their foreign policy they strive to come to terms
with one of the rival imperialist powers for the sake of
implementing their predatory plans (the policy of the small
Balkan states, etc.).

The fact that the struggle for national liberation against

one imperialist power may, under certain conditions, be
utilised by another "great" power for its own, equally
imperialist, aims, is just as unlikely to make the Social-
Democrats refuse to recognise the right of nations to self-
determination as the numerous cases of bourgeois utilisation of
republican slogans for the purpose of political deception and
financial plunder (as in the Romance countries, for example)
are unlikely to make the Social-Democrats reject their
republicanism.

Marxism and Proudhonism on the National Question

In contrast to the petty-bourgeois democrats, Marx

regarded every democratic demand without exception not as
an absolute, but as an historical expression of the struggle of
the masses of the people, led by the bourgeoisie, against
feudalism. There is not one of these demands which could not
serve and has not served, under certain circumstances, as an
instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie for deceiving the
workers. To single out, in this respect, one of the demands of
political democracy, specifically, the self-determination of

166
nations, and to oppose it to the rest, is fundamentally wrong in
theory. In practice, the proletariat can retain its independence
only by subordinating its struggle for all democratic demands,
not excluding the demand for a republic, to its revolutionary
struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

On the other hand, in contrast to the Proudhonists9

who "denied" the national problem "in the name of social revol­
ution" Marx, mindful in the first place of the interests of the
proletarian class struggle in the advanced countries, put the
fundamental principle of internationalism and socialism in the
foreground—namely, that no nation can be free if it oppresses
other nations. It was from the standpoint of the interests of the
German workers' revolutionary movement that Marx in 1848
demanded that victorious democracy in Germany should
proclaim and grant freedom to the nations oppressed by the
Germans. It was from the standpoint of the revolutionary
struggle of the English workers that Marx, in 1869, demanded
the separation of Ireland from England, and added: . .even if
federation should follow upon separation." Only by putting
forward this demand was Marx really educating the English
workers in the spirit of internationalism. Only in this way
could he counterpose the opportunists and bourgeois
reformism —which even to this day, half a century later, has
not carried out the Irish "reform"—with a revolutionary
solution of the given historical task. Only in this way could
Marx maintain—unlike the apologists of capital who shout that

167
the freedom of small nations to secede is Utopian and
impracticable and that not only economic but also political
concentration is progressive—that this concentration is
progressive when it is non-imperialist, and that nations should
not be brought together by force, but by a free union of the
proletarians of all countries. Only in this way could Marx, in
opposition to the merely verbal, and often hypocritical,
recognition of the equality and self-determination of nations,
advocate the revolutionary action of the masses in the
settlement of national questions as well. The imperialist war of
1914-16, and the Augean stables of hypocrisy on the part of the
opportunists and Kautskyites that it has exposed, have
strikingly confirmed the correctness of Marx’s policy, which
should serve as a model for all advanced countries, for all of
them are now oppressing other nations.

Three Types of Countries with Respect to the Self-

Determination of Nations

In this respect, countries must be divided into three

main types. First, the advanced capitalist countries of Western
Europe and the United States. In these countries progressive
bourgeois national movements came to an end long ago. Every
one of these "great" nations oppresses other nations both in the
colonies and at home. The tasks of the proletariat of these
ruling nations are the same as those of the proletariat in
England in the nineteenth century in relation to Ireland.

168
 Secondly, Eastern Europe: Austria, the Balkans and
particularly Russia. Here it was the twentieth century that
particularly developed the bourgeois-democratic national
movements and intensified the national struggle. The tasks of
the proletariat in these countries both in completing their
bourgeois-democratic reforms, and rendering assistance to the
socialist revolution in other countries, cannot be carried out
without championing the right of nations to self-determination.
The most difficult and most important task in this is to unite
the class struggle of the workers of the oppressor nations with
that of the workers of the oppressed nations.

Thirdly, the semi-colonial countries, such as China,

Persia and Turkey, and all the colonies, which have a combined
population of 1,000 million. In these countries the bourgeois-
democratic movements either have hardly begun, or have still
a long way to go. Socialists must not only demand the
unconditional and immediate liberation of the colonies without
compensation—and this demand in its political expression
signifies nothing else than the recognition of the right to self-
determination; they must also render determined support to
the more revolutionary elements in the bourgeois-democratic
movements for national liberation in these countries and assist
their uprising—or revolutionary war, in the event of one—
against the imperialist powers that oppress them.

169
Social-Chauvinism and the Self-Determination of Nations

The imperialist epoch and the war of 1914-16 has laid

special emphasis on the struggle against chauvinism and
nationalism in the leading countries. There are two main trends
on the self-determination of nations among the social­
chauvinists, that is, among the opportunists and Kautskyites,
who hide the imperialist, reactionary nature of the war by
applying to it the "defence of the fatherland" concept.
On the one hand, we see quite undisguised servants of
the bourgeoisie who defend annexation on the plea that
imperialism and political concentration are progressive, and
who deny what they call the Utopian, illusory, petty-bourgeois,
etc., right to self-determination. This includes the extreme
opportunists in Germany, some of the Fabians find trade union
leaders in England, and the opportunists in Russia.
On the other hand, we see the Kautskyites, among
whom are many pacifists in Britain and France, and others.
They favour unity with the former and in practice are
completely identified with them; they defend the right to self-
determination hypocritically and by words alone: they
consider "excessive" ("zu viel verlangt"; Kautsky in Die Neue
Zeit, May 21, 1915) the demand for free political separation,
they do not defend the necessity for revolutionary tactics on
the part of the socialists of the oppressor nations in particular
but, on the contrary, obscure their revolutionary obligations,
justify their opportunism, make easy for them their deception

170
of the people, and avoid the very question of the frontiers of a
state forcefully retaining underprivileged nations within its
bounds, etc.
Both are equally opportunist, they prostitute Marxism,
having lost all ability to understand the theoretical significance
and practical urgency of the tactics which Marx explained with
Ireland as an example.
As for annexations, the question has become
particularly urgent in connection with the war. But what is
annexation? It is quite easy to see that a protest against
annexations either boils down to recognition of the self-
determination of nations or is based on the pacifist phrase that
defends the status quo and is hostile to any, even
revolutionary, violence. Such a phrase is fundamentally false
and incompatible with Marxism.

The Concrete Tasks of the Proletariat in the Immediate

Future

The socialist revolution may begin in the very near

future. In this case the proletariat will be faced with the
immediate task of winning power, expropriating the banks and
effecting other measures. The bourgeoisie—and especially the
intellectuals of the Fabian and Kautskyite type— will, at such a
moment, strive to split and check the revolution by foisting
limited, democratic aims on it. Whereas any purely democratic
demands are in a certain sense liable to act as a hindrance to

171
the revolution, provided the proletarian attack on the pillars of
bourgeois power has begun, the necessity to proclaim and
grant liberty to all oppressed peoples (i.e., their right to self-
determination) will be as urgent in the socialist revolution as it
was for the victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in,
say, Germany in 1848, or Russia in 1905.
It is possible, however, that years will elapse before the
socialist revolution begins. This will be the time for the
revolutionary education of the masses in a spirit that will make
it impossible for socialist-chauvinists and opportunists to
belong to the working-class party and gain a victory, as was the
case in 1914-16. The socialists must explain to the masses that
British socialists who do not demand freedom to separate for
the colonies and Ireland, German socialists who do not
demand freedom to separate for the colonies, the Alsatians,
Danes and Poles, and who do not extend their revolutionary
propaganda and revolutionary mass activity directly to the
sphere of struggle against national oppression, or who do not
make use of such incidents as that at Zabem for the broadest
illegal propaganda among the proletariat of the oppressor
nation, for street demonstrations and revolutionary mass
action, Russian socialists who do not demand freedom to
separate for Finland, Poland, the Ukraine, etc., etc. —that such
socialists act as chauvinists and lackeys of bloodstained and
filthy imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie.

172
 Historical Specifics

If we look back on the dynamics of the dialectics

between "our Rosa" and Comrade Illych - with the hindsight
knowledge of the equivalent discourse as conducted between
Dr. Newton and Prof. Erikson half a century later - it is clear
that the argument has, in a sense, turned through a mirror.
While Lenin’s insight focused on a quest for the logical
definition of a valid human collective, Newton reflected the
tensions and contradictions on a more ’progressive’ level, a
more spiritual level: the level of collective identity. Newton’s
approach makes it impossible to avoid considering the
implications of Revolutionary Intercommunalism for the
individual consciousness10. In this sense Newton’s position is
the antithesis of Lenin's, reflecting as it does the existential
morality, that is, personal responsibility, shouldered by the
New Left11.

More than thirty years after the Yale and Oakland

meetings we can turn the dialectic through another mirror in
search of a synthesis. But the image will not revert to anything
comprehensible to a Bolshevik. Of course this is partly because
of the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and the coming to
fruition of the economic and military hegemony of
supranational corporations owned and controlled by
hereditary dynasties. These dynasties have become feudal

173
powers of global reach. They have no feudal sense of obligation
to the people, whose labour and natural resources they exploit,
but they enjoy overwhelming technological might (courtesy of
the military and domestic control apparatuses of certain
national states).

There is a second dimension of difference between the

start of this century and the start of the last. It is the
transformation in consciousness that has taken place across
almost the entire planet because of the global media. To be
historically specific this translates into mid-Wales in the
midsummer of 2004 as a situation in which Big Brother vies
with the football for space on the front page of the newspapers,
but the TV schedules are able to accommodate both. This is
not the Big Brother12 smiling with approval at Home Secretary
Blunkett's "prison without bars"; it is not the one raising his
eyebrows as the Head of the CIA sees fit to resign after letting
the cat out of the bag about proactive "Public Diplomacy"13; nor
is it the one immortalised in the subtle, informal British
equivalent of the US Patriot Act. No. This Big Brother is even
more debilitating to the development of a responsible collective
identity - it is only a TV show!

All this spooky surrealism in itself reflects a third level

of paradigm shift: from Lenin's formulation of the collective
entity and its appropriate methodology, through Newton’s
elucidation of the collective identity and its responsibilities, to

174
the historical specifics of today's almost hopelessly
individualised self-seeking identities and their relationships to
any possibility of a resurgence of internationalism, or
revolutionary love.

My own individual historical identity is therefore a

reference point for my attempt to bring this dialectic into a
Here and Now. I am (to use a category conceived by the
market research industry in answer to a question that
governments did not trust sociologists to handle) "mixed race".
But aren't we all? In my case it means I have North African
features and what is, to my taste, far too light a touch of what
the Brits used to call "the tar brush".

I am female. Again this puts me in the majority,

nothing singular about that.

I am a displaced victim/beneficiary of the British

empire. No prizes for originality here either. At different times
in my family history I could have been bom in Africa, India,
Cornwall, Rome, The Lebanon, Romania, Yugoslavia, Egypt.
In fact I was conceived on board ship in the Suez canal and
bom in England.

I am a Welsh citizen now. Warmly adopted by this

well-favoured comer of the old Empire it is easy to get into
feeling nationalistic. My lazy summer afternoon fantasy is of a

175
deep, wide ditch dug across the border from sea to sea. Then
we all dress up in the national costume with the tall hat, like
for the tourists (only now the kids are confusing the gear with
what you get from amazon.co.uk for Halloween), and we line
up along the ditch with long pikes and just push off. So we can
float Wales a little way out into the Irish Sea. Thus in NIMBY-
ish imagination I can physically dissociate our majestic
mountains and green valleys, our history of Chartism,
socialism, Trades Unions, Cooperatives and resurgent Credit
Unions, our principled self-sacrificing energy policy, our
minstrels and bards; I can separate our lovely land from the
encroaching motorways, from the MATRIX, the GPS and
GALILEO technology, the mobile phone masts, MacDonald's,
IKEA, genetically modified crops, precocious commercialised
exploitative sexuality, Seroxat, Special Brew and "reality TV".

But this is infantile?

No it is senile - just as senile and degenerate as the

petrol and Viagra felled, prosthetic-dependent, global mass
culture to which it is a petty bourgeois reaction.

Jamaica is a land of similar size to Wales, equally a

land of fantastic beauty, of mountains and music and poetry.
The sea actually does go right around it. But it is obvious to
anyone with the most cursory knowledge of the historical
specifics that the sea has been no protection from exploitation,

176
 particularly by the British and American imperial dynasties.
Slaves and sugar, coffee and guns can travel across the sea;
cocaine and more guns can fly through the air; dollars and
propaganda can be propelled by wire, radio or satellite
transmission. No island is an island.

Before a simplified, Bowdlerized form of Jamaican

patois became the basis of commercialised adolescent street
cool (via the ghettos of American and British inner cities and
the video-game and popular music industries) the
impenetrability of the patois was a better defence than any
physical barrier. In its arcane and yet highly dynamic localised
dialects it still is. It is a code that simply cannot be cracked by
an artificial intelligence. Foreign intelligence and crime control
agencies need a lot of time and patience ( a high degree of
effective HUMINT14 penetration) to master it, just as has been
the case throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East. They
will not succeed without some covert dealings with the local
power structures15.

Suffice it to say that the Welsh have a language too! It

is this and not the sea which affords them their best hope
against exploitation.

Though nationalism must never become the end of our

struggle against those who want to bum up the whole earth, it
is undeniably the beginning. It is simply Common Sense16 that

177
nationalism may often be the historically appropriate first stage
of political awakening for the dispossessed. Parties such as the
Black Panthers, Plaid Cymru and the New Jewel Movement set
a precedent for the Internationalist maxim, "Think Global: Act
Local", a maxim which is the quintessence of the Kantian
categorical imperative. Their nationalism (unlike that of, say,
the British National Party or the UK Independence Party) is
premised on the ultimate goal of internationalism.

I vote for the Plaid, support the Welsh Assembly, and

campaign for a proper independent tax-levying and law-
making body. I vote for a Plaid Cymru MEP in the European
parliament as well as for a representative in the Assembly. But
as a British citizen I also treasure the right to vote for an MP in
Westminster and I honour the memory of the Chartists and
Suffragettes whose struggle secured that vote for me. I will
brandish my British rights in the face of the oppressors of our
people, just as Huey Newton brandished his American right to
carry a firearm.

As a British citizen I treasure all the rights that the

people of these lands have had to fight for, the trades unions,
the independent system of justice, the "Nanny State" (with its
free schools and hospitals and welfare cushions against
poverty, unemployment, sickness, disability and old age; most
of all I treasure the possibility of "Speaking Truth to Power".
But I am very well aware of the degree to which, in the last few

178
decades, these specific historical compensations have been
undermined and eroded as opportunistic ( and sometimes
heinous) governance has aided and abetted the rise of the
shadowy supranational pirates.

The most disastrous mistake in the history of the

United Kingdom was made in the 1960s - just at the very time
when a new generation of the common people was growing up
less scarred by war , ignorance, poverty and disease than any
before it. The mistake was to sacrifice the most precious asset
"Britain" ever had - the fruits of its ill-gotten empire - in
pursuit of two mutually antagonistic and highly damaging
objectives:

1. Atlanticism
2. The European Common Market

The painstaking and life-costly business of

transforming the pink-coloured parts of the world map from
"British Empire" to "Commonwealth of Nations" was almost
complete as the government in Westminster achieved a
measure of success in curtailing the power of the robber barons
and (not before time) conceding independence, nation by
nation.

The Commonwealth was set to become just that, a

common-wealth. Left to its own logic it would have matured

179
as a massive international political and economic entity,
enjoying access to every conceivable natural resource and
untold potential material wealth which would have been
expropriated by the heirs of the exploited from the heirs of the
exploiters without further bloodshed. This commonwealth
would have had recourse to talents and skills of staggering
diversity. There would have been a dynamic interaction
between ancient and venerable cultures and fast-changing
peripatetic groupings sparkling with cosmopolitan and
bohemian originality. It would have been blessed with the
moral authority of political and ethical giants from Gandichi to
Mandiba.

All that was needed was one simple Common Sense

transformation of definition: Britain simply had to become one
equal member of the Commonwealth. This would have
required a fairly small adjustment to the constitutional
definition of an international body which at that time was still
based on the essential universalistic principles of Separation of
Powers, Habeas Corpus, universal literacy and participative
democracy. If it had gone on to create a new international
Commonwealth court of justice to replace the House of Lords
as arbiter of final resort, such a Commonwealth could even
have afforded to allow the British monarch to hang on to the
figure-head role for another generation.

My own view is that this not only could have been

180
achieved, but that the economic and political trajectories of the
world as a whole were such that it would actually have
happened if "a small group of politically motivated men" had
not set out to prevent it.

Let me make this quite unambiguous. I am saying that

the internal logic of the mid-twentieth century post-imperial
enlightenment expressed the will of the people of the British
Commonwealth towards a non-violent revolutionary
intercommunal grouping - a genuinely political amalgamation
of bottom-up democratic mechanisms of governance.

The material advantages for all parties would have

been obvious. And the cultural prerequisites were already in
place in the early 1960s when students of imperial history like
myself could share a desk with the Grenadian High
Commissioner in the British Library and then leg it over to the
Commonwealth Institute for a quick curry with Julius Nyrere.
Given all the education and good will and respectful non­
violent revolutionary consciousness of those times it is clear
that reactionary atavism would have needed actual conspiracy
to abort the coming internationalism. Actually of course there
were two (diametrically opposed) conspiracy groupings which
succeeded very effectively in emasculating the progressive
potential of the Commonwealth and advancing the cause of the
very dynasties who are today Hell-bent on destroying our
planet for their own short-term gain: they can be nailed with

181
the tags of Atlanticism on the one hand and Europeanism on
the other.

The concepts of Revolutionary Intercommunalism

and Self-Determination explained by Newton and Lenin in
this volume make it clear that a dialectical understanding is
one that recognises that what may be the best move in one
place at one time could be the wrong move in a different place
or time. I believe that Britain should never have "gone into"
Europe. But this does not mean that Welsh peasants like
myself should be supporting the right-wing political parties
who want to get out of the European Union now. For one thing,
we may sometimes need to brandish our European rights in
the face of our home-grown authoritarian government!17
Understanding the contradictions in capitalism is vital to
navigating a route across the minefield that the expropriators
have made of our world. Whether we like it or not we are all
affected by international groupings such as the UN, CIS, EEC,
OPEC, ASEAN, G8 and NATO etc., some of which include us
and some of which exclude us. At every point in time and
space we need to recalculate our position with regard to these
acronymous entities, to the nation states which comprise or
oppose them, and to the local communities in whose
particularistic conditions we have to work out our
universalism.

182
 Notes

1. The opportunists to whom Lenin refers are Semkovsky/The

Russian Liquidator" (who called upon the workers to cease
their revolutionary struggle against tsarism and sought to
create a legal opportunist organisation engaged only in activity
permitted by the tsarist government), Liebman the Bundist (see
note 5 below) and the Ukrainian National Socialist, Yurkevich,
who was an active contributor to the Menshevik-inclined
nationalist journal Dzvin (The Bell). Lenin regarded him as a
philistine and representative of the basest most reactionary
nationalism.
2. The Editor of the 1947 Progress Edition of Lenin's The Right
of Nations to Self-Determination indexed Kautsky thus:
KAUTSKY, KARL (1854-1938) - leader of German Social
Democracy and the Second International; first a Marxist and
later a renegade and ideologist of the most dangerous and
pernicious variety of opportunism, Centrism, i.e. social
chauvinism cloaked in internationalist phraseology; editor of
the theoretical journal of German Social Democracy , Die Nene
Zeit.
3. BAUER, OTTO (1882-1938)- one of the leaders of the
Austrian Social-Democratic Party and the Second International,
ideologist of so-called "Austro-Marxism", a variety of
reformism. He was one of the authors of the bourgeois-

183
nationalist theory of "cultural-national autonomy", the
opportunistic nature of which was repeatedly exposed by
Lenin. Bauer adopted a negative attitude towards the October
Socialist Revolution; from 1918 to 1919 he was Minister for
Foreign Affairs of the Austrian Republic and actively
participated in crushing the revolutionary actions of the
Austrian working class.
4. LASSALLE, FERDINAND (1825-1864) - a founder of the
General Association of German Workers, which though
initially a benefit for the working class movement was led
during Lassalle's presidency along a petty bourgeois
opportunist path which was sharply criticized by both Marx
and Engels.
5. The Bund was the General Jewish Workers' Union of
Lithuania, Poland and Russia, which was organised in 1897
and was mainly an association of Jewish artisans living in the
western regions of Russia. The Bund was affiliated to the
Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (R.S.D.L.P) at the
latter's First Congress in March 1898. At the Second Congress
of the R.S.D.L.P. held between July 17 and August 10,1903 the
Bundists demanded that the Bund be recognised as the sole
representative of the Jewish proletariat; the Congress rejected
this organisational nationalism of the Bund, and the latter left
the Party.
After the Fourth (Unity) Congress in 1906 the Bund
again entered the R.S.D.L.P. Its members gave constant support

184
to the Mensheviks and fought against the Bolsheviks. Although
it belonged, formally, to the R.S.D.L.P., the Bund was a
bourgeois nationalist organisation. It put forward the demand
for cultural-national autonomy in opposition to the Bolsheviks'
programme demand for the right of nations to self-
determination. The Bund played an active part in the formation
of the August anti-Party bloc. At the Prague Conference of the
R.S.D.L.P., in January 1912, its members were expelled from the
Party together with other opportunists. During the First World
War the Bund members adopted the position of social­
chauvinism; in 1917 the Bund supported the bourgeois
Provisional Government and fought on the side of the enemies
of the October Socialist Revolution. During the Civil War
leading Bundists joined ranks with the counter-revolutionary
forces. At the same time there was a change taking place
among rank-and-file members of the Bund who began to
favour collaboration with Soviet power. When the victory of
the proletarian dictatorship over the internal counter­
revolution and foreign intervention became obvious the Bund
declared that it would renounce its struggle against Soviet
power. In March 1921 the Bund announced its dissolution and
part of its membership entered the Russian Communist Party
(Bolsheviks).
6. The Dreyfus Case was a provocative trial instituted in 1894
by reactionary royalist circles among the French militarists
against the Jewish General Staff officer Dreyfus who was
falsely accused of espionage and high treason. A court martial

185
condemned Dreyfus to life imprisonment. The public
movement for a re-examination of the Dreyfus case that
developed in France took the form of a fierce struggle between
the republicans and the royalists and led to the eventual release
of Dreyfus in 1906. Lenin called the Dreyfus case "one of the
many thousands of fraudulent tricks of the reactionary military
clique",
7. The incident took place in the town of Zabem (Alsace) in
November 1913. It was caused by the brutality of a Prussian
officer towards the Alsatians. It gave rise to an outburst of
indignation among the local, mainly French, population,
directed against the Prussian militarists. (See Lenin's article
"Zabem" in Collected Works, Vol. 19, pp. 513-15.)
8. Lenin criticised the reactionary idea of "cultural-national
autonomy", advanced by Renner and Bauer, in an article
entitled "Cultural-National Autonomy" (Collected Works, Vol.
19, pp. 503-07) and in his "Critical Remarks on the National
Question" (Collected Works, Vol. 20, pp. 17-51.
9. PROUDHON, PIERRE-JOSEPH (1809-1865) - French
publicist, economist and sociologist, petty-bourgeois ideologist
and one of the founders of anarchism; he advocated small-scale
private property and criticised large-scale capitalist property
from petty-bourgeois positions. He considered the state to be
the principal source of class contradictions and put forward
Utopian projects for "eliminating the state" peacefully,
opposing all forms of political struggle. Proudhon and his

186
followers held idiosyncratic views on - the national question,
asserting that the concepts of nationality and nation were
"outdated prejudices", and opposed the national liberation
movements of the oppressed nations. In his Poverty of
Philosophy and other works Marx sharply criticised the theory
and political positions of Proudhonism and exposed their anti-
scientific and reactionary nature.
10. See H P Newton To Die for the People (Writers and
Readers,1995) and Frederika Newton and David Hilliard War
Against the Panthers (Writers and Readersz2001).
11. George Lukacs was prominent among these thinkers who
were also influenced by the publication of Marx's 1844
"manuscripts" in English translation. Consult bibliography
below.
12. Until the term was associated in the public consciousness
with a TV programme it was understood, since George
Orwell's novel 1984, to mean something akin to Bentham's
panopticon. See Semple Bentham's Prison (Clarendon,1993).
13. This was on BBC Radio 4 in May 2004. The previous year
Lieutenant-Colonel Steven Collins (head of PSYOPS at NATO
Supreme HQ in Mons, Belgium) bragged on the NATO website
(www.nato.int/docu/review/2003/english/art4.htmlxt) that
"Perception management includes all actions used to influence
the attitudes and objective reasoning of foreign audiences and
consists of Public Diplomacy, Psychological Operations
(PSYOPS), Public Information, Deception and Covert Action".

187
Cited in Lobster, Vol 46, 2003, p.14. See also Frances Stonor
Saunders, Who Paid the Piper (Granta,1999).
14. HUMINT is long established security jargon for human
intelligence, as opposed to electronic surveillance, or SIGINT.
15. For a dangerously precise exposition of the relationship
between the dons and organised crime in the United States see
Laurie Gunst, Born Fi Dead: A Journey through the yardie
underworld (Payback,2003).
16. See Tom Paine's essay on Common Sense where the same
dialectic is examined in the context of American Independence.
17. A horrible frisson of this was experienced in Wales during
the outbreak of the "Foot and Mouth" virus in 2001 when
commercial interests colluded with an authoritarian
government in a mass slaughter of healthy livestock burned in
stinking pyres throughout our land. While commercial meat
farmers, and a variety of other opportunists made a packet by
manipulating the subsidies (and other dodges) the ordinary
peasants were unable to save their flocks from the slaughter
squads. Activists and protestors soon found themselves targets
of unusual measures, many of us suspecting, as later
uncovered by David Miller, that we were guinea pigs in a
newly ratcheted-up internal propaganda system for dealing
with national "emergencies". See Miller (Pluto,2004) p.85.

188
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