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Title: Intercommunalism
Author: Huey P. Newton
Date: 1974
Language: en
Topics: libertarian marxism, Black Panther Party, intercommunalism, communism, marxism, Leninism,
Source: Retrived on 8 August 2021 from https://viewpointmag.com/2018/06/11/intercommunalism-1974/#f+9955+1+3

Huey P. Newton

Intercommunalism

The logic of the thesis of intercommunalism is: imperialism leads to

“reactionary intercommunalism” to “revolutionary intercommunalism” to

pure communism and anarchy. Each of the concepts is in need of

definition and redefinition.

“The imperialist war is ushering in the era of social revolution,” said

Lenin in 1915. The scholar David Horowitz, finds, as we do, imperialism

and revolution to be functions of each other:

[Editor’s Note: In the original text, Newton here features a 16-page

quotation from David Horowitz’s Empire and Revolution (1969/1970), pp.

29-45. We have left out this portion of the text for copyright reasons.]

Following World War II and the exponential technological increase in

weapons systems and communications, the concept of “one world” and the

“Global Village” began to be offered as bourgeois metaphors to compete

with the socialist image of “The New Man” and international

proletarianism. The technological network emanating from America was the

spine of the “Free World” image that was to roll back socialism.

Who makes U.S. foreign policy? The question is by no means academic, for

the historical record shows that over the last fifty years and more,

U.S. policy has consistently run in channels which are antagonistic to

the most publicized ideals of the American Republic, issuing finally in

the conflicts which we associate with the Cold War. Those

ideals—enshrined in the Declaration of Independence—recognize the right

of nations to self-determination, and of any oppressed people to

overthrow by force the institutions of their oppressors in order to

secure for themselves the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness.”

Yet the record shows that as the United States has assumed the role of a

great and then dominant world power, it has more and more consistently

opposed the major social revolutions of our time, and in violation of

the principle of self-determination, it has intervened militarily,

diplomatically, and economically to crush or to cause grave setbacks to

these revolutions, whether in Russia, Mexico, China, Cuba, Greece, or

Vietnam.

Nowhere has this pattern of policy been more evident, certainly, than

with the American intervention in Vietnam. In 1945, the Democratic

Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed in a document modeled on the American

Declaration of Independence and at first recognized by the former

colonial power, France. Yet when that power sought to reassert control

of its former colonial territory, establishing a puppet regime in Saigon

for this purpose, it found support in U.S. policy. Not only did

Washington back France’s illegitimate war of conquest with economic and

military aid, but when the French failed, Washington itself took over

the struggle to defeat the Vietnamese Republic through the quisling

government in Saigon. Indeed, more than twenty years after the

proclamation of Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence, the Vietnamese

peasants are still being assaulted by the U.S. armed forces in what will

undoubtedly become the most ruthless and destructive intervention on

historical record.

Nor is this counterrevolutionary expedition exceptional as U.S. Cold War

policy, despite the unprecedented ferocity and unparalleled savagery of

this execution. As already noted, it forms rather a consistent pattern

with other U.S. interventions in Santo Domingo, Cuba, Guatemala, the

Congo, the Middle East, China, Greece, and elsewhere during the Cold War

years, and in Russia, Mexico, Cuba, China, and other countries earlier

in the century. Indeed, counterrevolutionary intervention, which is at

the heart of the Cold War and its conflicts, has been a characteristic

of U.S. foreign policy ever since the United States embarked on a course

of overseas economic expansion following the closing of the geographical

frontier more than seventy years ago.

How is this counterrevolutionary policy, which runs directly counter to

the high ideals of the American republic, to be explained? How is it to

be explained that the largest “defense” program of any nation in history

(and of the United States in particular, which, prior to the postwar

decades, never maintained a peacetime conscription army) is organized

around the unprecedented concept of counterinsurgency?

These paradoxes can only be answered if it can be shown that there is a

group wielding predominant power in the American polity whose interests

run counter to America’s high ideals and which can impose its own

interpretation of the American tradition onto the framework of

policy-making in the state. If it can be shown that there is a class

among the plurality of competing interest groups which enjoys a

predominance of power and can establish its own outlook as a prevailing

ideology and if it can be shown that these interests are expansionist,

anti-revolutionary, and tending to be militarist by nature, then an

explanation of the paradoxical character of American policy will have

been found and, beyond that, the sources of the Cold War conflicts and

their permanence.

Such a “ruling class” can, in fact, be readily shown to exist. Its locus

of power and interest is in the giant corporations and financial

institutions which dominate the American economy, and moreover, the

economy of the entire Western world. “In terms of power,” writes one

authority on the corporations (himself a corporate executive and former

U.S. policy-maker) “without regard to asset positions, not only do five

hundred corporations control, not only do five hundred corporations

control two-thirds of the non-farm economy, but within each of that five

hundred a still smaller group has the ultimate decision-making power.

This is, I think, the highest concentration of economic power in

recorded history.”6 Moreover, “since the United States carries on not

quite half of the manufacturing production of the entire world today,

these five hundred groupings—each with its own little dominating pyramid

within it—represent a concentration of power over economies which makes

the medieval feudal system look like a Sunday school party.”

As this observer points out, many of these corporations have budgets,

and some of them have payrolls which, with their customers, affect a

greater number of people than most of the hundred-odd sovereign

countries of the world. Indeed, the fifty largest corporations employ

almost three times as many people as the five largest U.S. states, while

their combined sales are over five times greater than the taxes the

states collect.

In the last analysis, it is the dependence of men individually and

collectively on the corporately organized and controlled economy that

provides the basis for the corporate domination of U.S. policy,

especially U.S. foreign policy. The basic fulcrum of this corporate

power is the investment decision, which is effectively made by a small

group of men relative to the economy as a whole. This decision includes

how much the corporations spend, what they produce, where the products

are to be manufactured, and who is to participate in the process of

production.

But this is not the whole extent of the power of the corporate

investment decision. In the national economy, the small oligarchy of

corporate and financial rulers, who are responsible to no one, determine

through their investment outlays the level of output and employment for

the economy as a whole. As Keynes observed, the national prosperity is

excessively dependent on the confidence of the business community. This

confidence can be irreparably injured by a government which pursues a

course of policy inimical to business interests. In other words, basic

to the political success at the polls for any government, as to the

success of its specific programs, will be the way the government’s

policies affect the system of incentives on which the economy runs—a

system of incentives that is also the basis of the privileges of the

social upper classes.

This does not mean, of course, that the business community as such must

prefer a particular candidate or party for that candidate or party to be

victorious. It means, much more fundamentally, that short of committing

political suicide, no party or government can step outside the framework

of the corporate system and its politics, and embark on a course which

consistently threatens the power and privileges of the giant

corporations. Either a government must seize the commanding heights of

the economy at once, i.e., initiate a course of social revolution, or

run things more or less in the normal way, that is, according to the

priorities and channels determined by the system of incentive payments

to the corporate controllers of the means of production. This is an

unspoken but well understood fact conditioning politics in capitalist

countries, which explains why the pattern of resource allocation—the

priority of guns over butter, of highway construction over schools and

hospitals—is so similar in all of them. It also explains why, despite

the congressional and parliamentary enactment of progressive tax laws in

all these countries, the spirit of the law has been thwarted, and

nowhere has the significant redistribution of income promised by these

democratically ratified statutes taken place.

The sheer economic pressure that the corporations can exert over the

policies of democratically elected governments is lucidly manifest in

the experience of the Wilson Labour government in England. For while

owing its office to labor votes and labor money, this government was

forced by “the economic situation,” i.e., by domestic and international

capital, to pursue precisely the policies that it had condemned as

anti-labor while in opposition.

Of course, under normal conditions, and particularly in the United

States, where no labor party exists, the corporations have less subtle

means at their disposal for ensuring policies conducive to their

continued vigor and growth.

The means by which the upper classes maintain their privileged position

and vested interests in countries where universal suffrage prevails vary

with the differing traditions, social institutions, and class structures

of the countries involved. They vary also with their historical roles.

Thus, in the twentieth century, as the United States has replaced

Britain as the guardian power and policeman of the international system

of property and privilege, the corporate ruling class, with its equally

expanding overseas interests, has less and less been able to entrust

policy to indirectly controlled representatives and has more and more

had to enter directly the seats of government itself.

In the postwar period, the strategic agencies of foreign policy—the

State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Treasury, as well as

the key ambassadorial posts—have all been dominated by representatives

and rulers of America’s principal corporate financial empires. In

addition, all the special committees and task forces on foreign policy

guidelines have been presided over by the men of this business elite, so

that on all important levels of foreign policymaking, “business serves

as the fount of critical assumptions or goals and strategically placed

personnel.”

While the corporate-based upper class in general occupies a prodigious

number of positions in the highest reaches of the “democratic” state, it

need not strive to occupy all the top places to impose its own

interpretation of the national interest on American policy. Precisely

because the prevailing ideology of U.S. politics in general, and of the

federal government in particular, is corporate ideology, reflecting the

corporate outlook and interests, and because, therefore, the framework

of articulated policy choices lies well within the horizon of this

outlook, political outsiders may be tolerated and even highly effective

in serving the corporate system and its programs.

There are two principal ways (in addition to those already discussed) by

which corporate ideology comes to prevail in the larger political realm.

In the first place, it does so through the corporate (and upper-class)

control of the means of communication and the means of production of

ideas and ideology (the mass media, the foundations, universities,

etc.). However, even this control, which is vast but not ubiquitous in

ensuring the general predominance of the ideas of the dominant class, is

not left to work at random. Thus, in Professor Domhoff’s investigation

of the American ruling class, he found that “in most instances”

non-upper-class political leaders “were selected trained and employed in

[special] institutions which function to the benefit of members of the

upper class.” Such leaders, Professor Domhoff concluded, “are selected

for advancement in terms of the interest of the members of the upper

class.”

The second basic way in which corporate ideology comes to prevail,

particularly at the foreign policy level, is by the very fact that the

dominant reality of society is corporate, and therefore political

“realism” dictates for any statesman or politician that he work within

its framework and accept its assumptions. If the horizon of political

choice is limited to an area in which the corporate interests is not

directly challenged, because it would be both imprudent and impractical

(utopian) to do so, if the framework of private property in the means of

production is accepted as not realistically subject to change, then the

“national” interest, which is the concept under which politicians and

statesmen tend to operate (particularly in foreign policy), necessarily

coincides with the interests of the corporations, the repositories of

the nation’s wealth, the organizers of its productive power, and hence

the guardians of the material basis of its strength. In a class-divided

society under normal (i.e., non-revolutionary) conditions, the national

interest vis-à-vis external interests inevitably is interpreted as the

interest of the dominant or ruling class. Thus, in a corporate

capitalist society, the corporate outlook as a matter of course becomes

the dominant outlook of the state in foreign affairs.

This is not to say that there is never a conflict over foreign policy

that expresses a conflict between corporations and the state. Just as

there are differences among the corporate interests themselves, within a

general framework of interests, so there are differences between the

corporate community outside the state and the corporate representatives

and their agents in the state, resulting from the difference in vantage

and the wider and narrower interests that each group must take into

account. But here, too, the horizon of choice, the framework of decisive

interests, is defined by the necessity of preserving and strengthening

the status quo order of corporate capitalism and consequently the

interests of the social classes most benefited by it.

What, then, is the nature of corporate ideology as it dominates U.S.

foreign policy and what is its role in the development of the Cold War?

As a result of the pioneering work of Professor William Appleman

Williams and his students, these questions can be answered precisely and

succinctly. The chief function of corporate ideology is, of course, to

make an explicit identification of the national tradition and

interest—the American Way of Life—with its own particular interest. This

identification is accomplished by means of an economic determinism,

which takes as its cardinal principle the proposition that political

freedom is inseparably bound up with corporate property: that a “free

enterprise” economy is the indispensable foundation of a free polity

(where free enterprise is defined to coincide with the status quo order

of corporate capitalism, not with an outdated system of independent

farmers and traders).

Starting from this root premise, the ideology, as articulated by

American policymakers since the nineteenth century, maintains that an

expanding frontier of ever new and accessible markets is absolutely

essential for capitalist America’s domestic prosperity and hence, that

the extension of the American system and its institutions abroad is a

necessity for the preservation of the American, democratic,

free-enterprise order at home. Originally formulated as an “Open Door”

policy, to prevent the closing of the external frontier by European

colonialism, and to ensure American access to, and eventual domination

of, global markets, this policy has become in the postwar period a

policy of preserving and extending American hegemony and the free

enterprise system throughout the external frontier, or, as it is now

called, the “free world.” From Woodrow Wilson’s First World War cry that

the world must be made safe for democracy, it was but a logical

historical step to Secretary of State Byrnes’s remark at the close of

the Second World War that the world must be made safe for the United

States. This is the core of America’s messianic crusade: that the world

must be made over in the American image (read: subjected to the American

corporate system) if the American Way of Life (read: the corporate

economy) is to survive at home.

If expansion (and militarism) had held the key not only to American

prosperity, but to American security as well, the postwar period would

undoubtedly have realized Secretary of State Byrnes’ ambitious goal. In

the last stages of the war and the first of the peace, the United States

successfully penetrated the old European empires (mainly those of

France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands), assumed control of Japan

and its former dependencies, and extended its own power globally to an

unprecedented degree. By 1949, the United States had liens on some four

hundred military bases, while the expansion of direct overseas

investments was taking place at a phenomenal rate. Thus, while between

between 1929 and 1946 U.S. foreign investments had actually declined

from $7.9 to $7.2 billion, between 1946 and 1967 they increased an

incredible eightfold to more than $60 billion. It is this global stake

in the wealth and resources of the external frontier that forms the

basis of the U.S. commitment to the worldwide status quo (though it may

not always provide the whole explanation for particular commitments or

engagements). It is this commitment to the internal status quo in other

countries (the State Department actually runs a course for foreign

service officers and ambassadors called “Overseas Internal Defense”)

that renders Washington’s expansionist program not the key to security

but the very source of Cold War conflict, with its permanent menace to

mankind’s survival.

For the expansion of corporate overseas investment has to an

overwhelming degree not produced beneficial results on the whole, and

the status, of which the corporations inevitably constitute a dominating

part, is almost everywhere a status quo of human misery and suffering:

No one acquainted with the behavior of western corporations on their

pilgrimages for profit during the last fifty years can really be

surprised that the … explosions now taking place (in the underdeveloped

world) are doing so in an anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-western

context. For many years these continents have been happy hunting grounds

for corporate adventurers, who have taken out great resources and great

profits and left behind great poverty, great expectations and great

resentments. Gunnar Myrdal points out that capitalist intervention in

underdeveloped countries thus far has almost uniformly had the result of

making the rich richer and the poor poorer….7

This has indeed been the undeniable historical consequence of capitalist

corporate expansion, although this is not what one is led to believe by

the orthodox theorists and academic model builders who function so

frequently as the sophisticated apologists of the American Empire and

the policy of counterrevolutionary intervention necessary to maintain

it.

In the writings of such theorists, the expansion of America’s

monopolistic giants and their control of the markets and resources of

the poverty-stricken regions is presented as entailing the net export of

capital to these capital-starved areas, the transfer of industrial

technologies and skills, and the flow of wealth generally from the rich

world to the poor. From this point of view, revolutions which challenge

the presence and domination of foreign corporations and their states are

either misguided or sinister in intent, and contrary to the real needs

and interests of the countries involved. Indeed, for those who maintain

this view, revolutions are regarded as alien-inspired efforts aimed at

subverting and seizing control of the countries in question during

periods of great difficulty and instability prior to the so-called

takeoff into self-sustaining growth. This is the argument advanced by W.

W. Rostow, former director of the State Department’s Policy Planning

Staff and the chief rationalizer of America’s expansionist

counterrevolutionary crusade.

In fact, this view rests neither on historical experience, which shows

the presence of foreign capital and power to have had a profoundly

adverse effect on the development potential of the penetrated regions,

nor on a sound empirical basis. Far from resulting in a transfer of

wealth from richer to poorer regions, the penetration of the

underdeveloped world by the imperialist and neo-imperialist systems of

the developed states has had the opposite effect. As a result of direct

U.S. overseas investments between 1950 and 1965, for example, there was

a net capital flow of $16 billion to the United States, and this was

just a part of the negative transfer. Similarly, when looked at in their

political and economic settings, the much-heralded benefits of the

advanced technologies transplanted into these areas, but under the

control of international corporations, also tend to be circumscribed and

even adverse in their effects. Indeed, regarded in terms of its impact

on total societies rather than on particular economic sectors, the

operation of opening the backward and weak areas to the competitive

penetration of the advanced and powerful capitalist states has been

nothing short of a catastrophe. For as Paul Baran showed in his

pioneering work The Political Economy of Growth, it is precisely the

penetration of the underdeveloped world by advanced capitalism that has

in the past obstructed its development and continues in the present to

prevent it. Conversely, it has been primarily their ability to escape

from the net of foreign investment and domination that has made a chosen

few among these countries, like Japan, exceptions to the rule. Professor

Gunder Frank and others have continued the work that Baran initiated,

showing how foreign capitalist investment produces the pattern of

underdevelopment (or “growth without development,’ as it is sometimes

called) that is the permanent nightmare of these regions.

The crisis of reactionary intercommunalism has now, inevitably, given

rise to the concept of “revolutionary intercommunalism.”

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 at which we arrive

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 yet be proved.

This is true of both general schools of thought—the idealistic 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 really know

whether we are in 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 discussion, I merely

ask that we agree on the stipulation that a material world exists and

develops externally and independently 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.

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 analyzed 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 class of owners, and because there exists a basic

contradiction in the interests of these 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 equilibrium. I say “leap” because

we know from our experience of the physical world than 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 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, “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 say that we have to analyze 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 and Engels began to develop. People say, “You claim

to be Marxists, but did you know that Marx was a racist?” We say, “He

probably was a racist: he made a statement once about the marriage of a

white 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 to 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 favorite pastime was

hunting and hanging niggers, yet he made great forward strides in the

analysis and investigations 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 we have changed our

understanding of the world.

When we started in October 1966, we were what one would call black

nationalists. We realized 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 realized 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. We

developed from just plain nationalists or separatist nationalists into

revolutionary nationalists. We said that we joined with all the other

people in the world struggling for decolonization 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—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 great number, a

greater chance, a greater force; and that is what we needed of course,

because only force kept us a colonized 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 did 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 social institutions they established. It gave them a

certain amount of 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 know as 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 “neocolonies.” 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 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 explorations, 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 of the world’s lands and people.

We believe that there are no more colonies or neocolonies. If a people

is colonized, it must be possible for them to decolonize and become what

they formerly were. But what happens when the raw materials are

extracted and labor 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 is impossible to “decolonize,” to return to the former

conditions of existence.

If colonies cannot “decolonize” and return to their original existence

as nations, then nations no longer exist. 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 serve to exist a small

group of people. And we say further that the struggle in the world today

is between the 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 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 have liberated their

territories and have established provisional governments. We recognize

them, and say that these governments represent the people of China,

North Korea, and the people in the liberated zones of South Vietnam, and

the people of 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.

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 is happening to the

blacks here and what is 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 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 structure of society. At this time, the world will be ready for a

still higher level, of which we can now know nothing.

We can be 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. It is 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”: the revolution

is going on every day, every minute, because the new is always

struggling against the 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 will move to an even higher state.

So of course there will be contradictions in the future. But some

contradictions are antagonistic and some contradictions 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.

The expropriators will be expropriated. All things carry a negative sign

as well as a positive sign. That is why we say every determination has a

limitation and every limitation has a determination. For example, one’s

organism carries internal contradictions from the moment of birth and

the beginning of deterioration. First you 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

has moved into a phrase 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, the people become stronger and stronger.

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 the

unconscious and make it conscious: that is 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.

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. 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 realize that we are all Homo sapiens and

have more in common than not. We will be closer together than we are

now.

The mass media have, in a sense, psychologized many of the people in our

country, so that they come to desire the controls that are imposed upon

them by the capitalist system, so that they are psychologically, at

least, part of the ruling class. 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 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 realize 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.

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.

The revolutionary 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. As every society, like every age, contains its

opposite: feudalism produced capitalism, which wiped out feudalism, and

capitalism produced socialism, which will wipe out capitalism; the same

is true of 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 for workers

decreases. It has been estimated that ten years from now only a small

percentage of the present workforce 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 the black unemployable and the white racist hard hat who is not

regularly employed and 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.

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 inherit

this legacy primarily because we are the last, 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 have 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.

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 people first because they were carrying the banner first,

and we try to do everything possible to get them to relate to us.

Our big burden is trying to simplify our ideology for the masses. 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 but I am

sometimes afraid to do that because people will take each example and

think, “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.

The concept of the black bourgeoisie is something of an illusion. It is

a fantasy bourgeoisie, and this is true of most of the white bourgeoisie

as well. There are very few controllers even in the 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. So they are not really controlling anything;

they are controlled. In the same way, I do not 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.

We saw a need to formalize education in the black community because we

did not 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. What we are trying to do is structure an educational

institution of our own.

Our first attempt along these lines is that we call our Ideological

Institute. So far we have about one hundred students and these hundred

students are very 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 kickouts and dropouts; most of them left school in the

eighth, ninth or tenth grade and those few who stayed all the way did

not learn how to read or write, just as I did not learn until I was

about sixteen. They are now dealing with dialectics and 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 is very practical and relates to the needs of the people in a way

that makes them receptive to our teaching 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. We, the Black Panther Party control our Ideological

Institute. If the people—the oppressed people—do not control their

schools, without reservation, and without having to answer for what is

done there or who speaks there, then it is not a progressive

institution.

The qualitative leap from reactionary intercommunalism 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.

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 this 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 it 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.

I would like to see the kind of communism I just described come into

being, and I think it will come into being. But the concept is so far

from my comprehension that I could not possibly name the contradictions

that will exist, although I am sure that the dialectics will go on. Only

the basis for the contradictions exists 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, truly oppressed people. Welfare

recipients wrote letters saying, “I thought the Party was for us; why do

you want to give those dirty Vietnamese our life blood?” I would call

this a contradiction, one we are trying to solve. 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 cannot 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. 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.

In a paper of this length the balance between philosophy or ideology and

material data is difficult. And to look forward to world communism, the

withering away of the State, and, then, anarchy can only be done by

speaking, here, only in the most general terms.

Ernest Mandel calls the next stage the “end of political economy and

commodity production.” In his book, Marxist Economic Theory, Vol II,

Mandel says:

“It is not only the logic of the new mode of production that will bring

about this withering away of commodity production. Automation entails

the same logical necessity in the sphere of production. The production

of an abundance of goods and services is in fact accompanied by the more

and more rapid eliminations of all living, direct, human labour from the

production process, and even from the distribution process (automatic

power stations; goods train driven by remote control; self-service

distribution centers; automatic vending machines; mechanized and

automised offices, etc.). But the elimination of living human labour

from the cost of production means the elimination of wages from the cost

of production! The latter is increasingly reduced to the “costs” of

operations between enterprises (purchase of raw materials and

depreciation of fixed plant). Once these enterprises have been

socialized, this involves much less transfers of real money than simply

accounting in monetary units.

As services will continue non-automised for a longer period than goods,

money economy will retreat more and more into the spheres of exchange of

services for services, purchase of services by consumers, and purchase

of services by the public sector. But in proportion as the principal

services become automised in their turn (eg. public services, automatic

machines for providing drinks and standardized articles of current use,

laundries, etc.), money economy will become restricted more and more to

“personal services” only, the most important of which (medicine and

education) will, however, be the first to undergo a radical abolition of

money relations for reasons of social priority). In the end, automation

will leave to money economy only the periphery of social life: domestic

servants and valets, gambling, prostitution, etc. But in a socialist

society which ensures a very high standard of living and security to all

its citizens, and an all around revaluation of “labour,” which will

increasingly become intellectual labour, creative labour, who will want

to undertake such forms of work? Socialist automation thus brings

commodity economy to the brink of absurdity and will cause it to wither

away.

This withering away, begun in the sphere of distribution, will spread

gradually into the sphere of production. Already in the era of

transition from capitalism to socialism, socialization of the major

means of production and planning imply a more and more general

substitution of money of account for fiduciary money in the circulation

of means of production.

Only the purchase of labour power and the purchase of raw materials from

the non-state sector will involve the use of fiduciary money. But when

the increase in the standard of living is accompanied by a reduction and

no longer by an increase in individual wages, the circulation funds of

enterprises also start to wither away. With the ‘industrialisation of

agriculture’, with the withering away first of private enterprise and

then of co-operative enterprises in agriculture and distribution, this

withering away spreads to relations between producing enterprises and

owners of labour-power, relations between enterprises and suppliers of

raw materials. The withering away of money becomes general. Only ‘units

of account’ survive, so that an economy based on accounting in terms of

hours of labour may govern the management of enterprises and of the

economy taken as a whole.

Economic Revolution and Psychological Revolution

So far we have considered only the economic consequences of the new mode

of production, the withering-away of commodity economy and of money to

which it will lead. We must now consider the social and psychological

results, that is, the complete upheaval in relations between men,

between individuals and society, as these have developed out of

thousands of years of social experience derived from antagonism between

classes of exploitation of man by man.

Free distribution of bread, milk and all other basic foodstuffs will

bring about a psychological revolution without precedent in the history

of mankind. Every human being will henceforth be ensured his subsistence

and that of his children, merely by virtue of being a member of human

society. For the first time since man’s appearance on earth, the

insecurity and instability of material existence will vanish, and along

with it the fear and frustration that this insecurity causes in all

individuals, including, indirectly, those who belong to the ruling

classes.

It is this uncertainty about the morrow, this need to ‘assert oneself’

in order to ensure one’s survival in a frenzied struggle of all against

all, that is at the basis of egoism and the desire for individual

enrichment, ever since the beginning of capitalist society and even, to

a certain extent, since the development of commodity economy. All the

material and moral conditions for the withering away of egoism as a

driving force in economic conduct will have vanished. True, individual

ownership of consumer goods will doubtless expand to an unheard-of

degree. But in face of the abundance of these goods, and the freedom of

access to them, the attachment of men to ownership will likewise wither

away. It is the adaptation of man to these new conditions of life that

will create the basis for the ‘new man’, socialist man, for whom human

solidarity and co-operation will be as ‘natural’ as is today the effort

to succeed individually, at the expense of others. The brotherhood of

man will cease to be a pious hope or a hypocritical slogan, to become a

natural and everyday reality, upon which all social relations will

increasingly be based.

Will an evolution along these lines be ‘contrary to human nature’? This

is the argument invoked as a last resort against Marxism, against the

prospect of classless society. It is regularly put forward by those who

do not know this human nature, who base themselves on crude prejudices

or suspicions in order to identify morals and customs derived from a

certain socio-economic context with biological or anthropological

characteristics alleged to be ‘unchangeable’ in man. It is also invoked

by those who endeavor to preserve at all costs a conception of man which

is based on the idea of original sin and the impossibility of

‘redemption’ on this earth.

But anthropology starts from the idea that that which is distinctive of

man is precisely his capacity for adaption, his capacity to create a

second nature in the culture which forms the only framework in which we

can live, as Professor A. Gehlen puts it.

These practically unlimited possibilities of adaptation and

apprenticeship are the essential anthropological feature. Human ‘nature’

is what precisely enables man continually to rise above what is merely

biological, to continually surpass himself.

The tendency to competition, to the struggle of all against all, to the

assertion of the individual by crushing other individuals, is not at all

something innate in man; it is itself the product of an

‘acculturisation’, of an inheritance which is not biological but social,

the product of particular social conditions. Competition is a tendency

which is not ‘innate’ but socially acquired. Similarly, co-operation and

solidarity can be systematically acquired and transmitted as a social

heritage, as soon as the social milieu has been radically changed in

this direction.

More than that—a disposition to co-operation, to solidarity, to love of

one’s neighbor corresponds far better to specific biological needs and

basic anthropological features than a tendency to competition, conflict

or oppression of others. Man is a social being not only in the

socio-economic sense but also in the biological sense. Of all the higher

mammals he is the one who is born in the weakest state, least protected

and least capable of self-defence. Anthropo-biology regards man as an

embryo prematurely born, who thereby possesses a physiological

organization making him capable of a much longer period of

apprenticeship and practically unlimited adaptability—thanks to activity

and socialization during a year of existence as an extra-uterine embryo.

Phylogeny here confirms ontogeny, since today it is generally agreed

that these very processes of activation (the beginning of deliberate

praxis) and socialization are at the origin of the human species.”

Marx shows that “alienation appears not only in the result, but also in

the process of production…”8 He contrasts the type of production before

extensive division and fragmentation of labor with modern production:

In handicraft…the workman makes use of a tool; in the factory the

machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instruments of

labor proceed from him; here it is the movement of the machines that he

must follow.9

What did Marx see in his later works as possibilities for the future? He

believed that a necessary precondition for the eventual cure of

alienation is reorganization of society, in such a way that the means of

production are owned by the public at large, the product being created

and distributed solely according to human need. In such a society, man

consciously would take himself as the subject of history. He would

experience himself as the source and control of his powers, and use them

to release himself from dependence upon things and external

circumstances. He saw the objective as the full development of the

individual person’s potentialities, stifled now by the techniques

employed to make production more efficient.

Modern industry… compels society,… to replace the detail-worker of

today, crippled by lifelong repetition of one and the same trivial

operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully

developed individual… to whom the different social functions he performs

are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and

acquired powers.10

He expected a flowering of freedom in such changed conditions not only

for the individual but for the entire human community.

In fact, the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is

passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external

utility is required.11

There is an old African saying, “I am we.” If you met an African in

ancient times and asked him who he was, he would reply, “I am we.” This

is revolutionary suicide: I, we, all of us are the one and the

multitude.

The difference lies in hope and desire. By hoping and desiring, the

revolutionary suicide chooses life; he is, in the words of Nietzsche,

“an arrow of longing for another shore.” Both suicides despise tyranny,

but the revolutionary is both a great despiser and a great adorer who

longs for another shore. The reactionary suicide must learn, as his

brother the revolutionary has learned, that the desert is not a circle.

It is a spiral. When we have passed through the desert, nothing will be

the same.

The preacher said that the wise man and the fool have the same end; they

go to the grave as a dog. Who sends us to the grave? The unknowable, the

force that dictates to all classes, all territories, all ideologies; he

is death, the Big Boss. An ambitious man seeks to dethrone the Big Boss,

to free himself, to control when and how he will go to the grave.

There is another illuminating story of the wise man and the fool, found

in Mao’s Little Red Book: A foolish old man went to North Mountain and

began to dig; a wise old man passed by and said, “Why do you dig,

foolish old man? Do you not know that you cannot move the mountain with

a little shovel?” But the foolish old man answered resolutely, “While

the mountain cannot get any higher, it will get lower with each

shovelful. When I pass on, my sons and his sons and his son’s sons will

go on making the mountain lower. Why can’t we move the mountain?” And

the foolish old man kept digging, and the generations that followed

after him, and the wise old man looked on in disgust. But the

resoluteness and the spirit of the generations that followed the foolish

old man touched God’s heart, and God sent two angels who put the

mountain on their backs and moved the mountain.

This is the story Mao told. When he spoke of God he meant the six

hundred million who had helped him to move imperialism and bourgeois

thinking, the two great mountains.

The reactionary suicide is “wise,” and the revolutionary suicide is a

“fool,” a fool for the revolution in the way that Paul meant when he

spoke of being “a fool for Christ.” What foolishness can move the

mountain of oppression; it is our great leap and our commitment to the

dead and the unborn.

We will touch God’s heart; we will touch the people’s heart, and

together we will move the mountain.