Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr. (review)

Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr. provide an interesting and well-documented political history of the ideological origins and organizational evolution of the Black Panther Party in Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. The book is developed in five parts and traces the ideological development of the party, its rise to national prominence, the intensification of state repression and the party’s response, and, finally, the demise and disintegration of the party. Bloom and Martin utilize a method they call “strategic genealogy” to trace the history of the strategies, demands, and tactics used by the party in the struggle for political power; therefore, they are able to uncover the political dynamics of how social movements evolve and become revolutionary. However, one of the more interesting themes developed by Bloom and Martin is their demonstration of the Black Panther Party as a hybrid black nationalist-Marxist-revolutionary-vanguard political organization. They clearly reveal that as a vanguard party, the Black Panthers attempted to transcend the strictly racial context of oppression as demonstrated by the civil rights movement and position the party as an advanced segment of the American proletariat in solidarity not only with white American radicals but also with the global revolutionary movement against imperialism and capitalism.

The authors explain that Huey Newton first articulated the Black Panther Party as a vanguard party in the struggle for black liberation in 1967 in the second issue of the party’s newspaper, in which he emphasized the party’s commitment to advancing a revolution in the interest of the black community. Hence, Newton emphasized the black nationalist character of the party while also asserting the stewardship of the party over the interests of black people. Although Newton initially saw the Panthers as a vanguard party in the context of black political organizations, he quickly began to see the broader political resonance. And once Newton identified the black community as a colony and the police as an occupying force, this allowed him to link the black liberation struggle to anticolonial struggles with the Black Panther Party as the legitimate representative of the black community in a global liberation struggle.

However, as the authors point out, it was through Eldridge Cleaver that the Black Panther Party began to define their policies toward the white New Left and to seek them out as allies. During the “Free Huey” campaign, the party, through Cleaver, articulated the role and responsibility of white revolutionaries in support of the black struggle against oppression. By the summer of 1969 the party called for a “Revolutionary Conference for a United Front Against Fascism” to be held in Oakland, California, that included Latino and Asian, but mainly white, delegations and resulted in the Black Panther Party exercising leadership in the organization of a revolutionary movement across race. It was here that the party began emphasizing anti-imperialist politics, nonblack liberation movements, and class struggle and positioning itself as the vanguard of the New Left.

By linking the black struggle for liberation to the international liberation struggle, the Black Panther Party began to assert the commonality of liberation struggles in communities in the United States with those throughout Latin America and the Third World. It was through Marxist theory that the Panthers articulated a class politics that helped build alliances internationally in a global struggle against imperialism. However, as the authors clearly prove, the Panthers were not dogmatic Marxists and did not allow ideology to get in the way of alliance-building. Although their Marxism deepened over time, the Panthers remained committed to the idea of themselves as a revolutionary vanguard party representing the interests of the black community within a global struggle against imperialism.

Hence, Bloom and Martin reveal the Black Panther Party as a unique American revolutionary...