By Tom “Big Warrior” Watts 12/18/22
The key question when it comes to racism is: “Are you about ending it or perpetuating it?”
If an organization or party claims to be about ending racism, then it must have a plan for doing agitation, education and organizing in the white community. If it doesn’t, then it is only interested in exploiting racism—which is perpetuating it. Pantherism holds that the best way to fight racism is with solidarity, just like you fight fire with water. In order for the white worker to see he or she has a common class interest with the black and brown workers, he or she must have a degree of class consciousness.
Huey Newton said: “We have two enemies to defeat, capitalism and racism.” To fight one, you must fight the other. If someone says: “I am against racism but I am for capitalism,” they really aren’t about ending it at all. Racism is a byproduct of capitalism that is built-in to the system. Racial discrimination increases the rate of profit as does gender discrimination. Dividing the working class and playing one section against another is essential to maintaining the minority rule of the exploiting class.“
The New Afrikan Black Panther Party (NABPP) is fully committed to ending racism and to ending capitalism. It has a plan for doing work in the white community and for building a worldwide united front against capitalist-imperialism. We have a plan for working in the black community to transform it so it will play a vanguard role in the Panther Revolution, and we see that role as having the ability to define the phenomena of objective reality, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner.
The White Panther Party represents the ideological-political line of the NABPP in the white community, but it also applies it concretely and creatively to class struggles in the white community. As Mao said, “If you want to know the taste of a pear, ‘you must change the pear by eating it yourself.’ If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.” Theory can only be tested in practice, and through summing up practice, we amend our theory to make it more reflective of reality.
The job of the White Panther Party does not end at winning people in the white community to struggle to end racism and capitalism. Like the NABPP its strategy is to transform the prisons into “Schools of Liberation” and the oppressed communities into “base areas of cultural, social and political revolution in the context of building a worldwide revolutionary united front against capitalist-imperialism.” Working class white communities need to become base areas of people’s power too. Poor white people need “Serve The People” survival programs as well.
Increasingly, the working class and sections of the middle class are being forced into a situation of unstable relationship to the means of production, of being permanently “temporary” and jobbing as an “independent contractor.” Liberals no longer talk of an “Industrial Democracy,” just a diversity of faces looking down through the “glass ceiling.” Upward mobility is for the rich and the rest are sinking into debt and depression. Caught between rising rent and prices and declining income, the working class communities are suffering under late capitalism. Food insecurity is a class-wide problem. Affordable housing is a class-wide problem. Healthcare is a class-wide problem.
The Panther Revolution is a global struggle to bring to an end the globalized system of capitalist-imperialism. We cannot overthrow our ruling class in the United States as if it was not the hegemonic imperialist superpower, with military bases almost everywhere, as if the same transnational corporations were not pulling the strings all over. Our revolution is necessarily global and necessarily proletarian and socialist. It is democratic in that it demands the global proletariat must have the power to command the world economy to serve the needs of humanity in accordance with principles of equality and social justice for all.
Communism, as the name implies is based upon community, and the world is a great community of communities, all interconnected by trade and social infrastructure. The whole world is today smaller than the smallest feudal kingdom. We can talk to each other in real time from anywhere to anywhere on the planet and be there in person in a matter of hours. We can shop for the same stuff on line and have it delivered anywhere in no more than a few days. The world is too small for nations and wars, and too advanced for private ownership of the means of production.
We have the means and the know how to provide everyone on the planet with a decent standard of living, comfortable housing, quality healthcare and free education—to eliminate poverty all together—and do it without destroying the natural environment that sustains life on this planet, and we could do it is a few short years at that. The trick is we can only do it by putting aside our differences and uniting around our common class interests. We must unite ourselves in our local communities, and we must unite our communities in revolutionary intercommunal solidarity. We must all take a bite out of the pear and change it by eating it. The new must supersede the old and resolve the old contradictions.
Ending racism is ending the system that spawns it and replacing it with a new system based on more just and democratic principles. Public ownership and a command economy are necessary to achieve true equality and social justice for all. The People must have the power!
DARE TO STRUGGLE, DARE TO WIN…
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
https://hasanshakurcc.wordpress.com/
United Panther Movement: https://www.facebook.com/PantherPower05
New Afrikan Black Panther Party: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100067639352580
White Panther Party: https://www.facebook.com/WhitePantherOfficial
Second Rainbow Coalition: https://www.facebook.com/SecondRainbowCoalition
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