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Abstract
In November 1970, Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton gave a lecture at Boston College where he introduced his theory of intercommunalism. Newton re-articulated Marxist theories of imperialism through the lens of the Black liberation struggle and argued that imperialism had entered a new phase called ‘reactionary intercommunalism’. Newton’s theory of intercommunalism offers nothing less than a proto-theorisation of what we have come to call neo-liberal globalisation and its effects on what W. E. B. Du Bois had seen as the racialisation of modern imperialism. Due to the initial historical dismissal of the Black Panther Party’s political legacy, Newton’s thought has largely been neglected for the past 40 years. This paper revisits Newton’s theory of intercommunalism, with the aim of achieving some form of epistemic justice for his thought, but also to highlight how Newton’s recasting of imperialism as reactionary intercommunalism provides critical insight into the rise of Trumpism in the US.
Notes
1. Newton, “Huey’s Message,” 16.
2. Brown, A Taste of Power; Hilliard, This Side of Glory.
3. See Heynen, “Bending the Bars” for how Intercommunalism was itself challenged within the Black Panther Party.
4. See Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire; Joseph, Waiting Til’ the Midnight Hour; Singh, Black is a Country; Slate, Black Power Beyond Borders.
5. See Heynen, “Bending the Bars” and Jeffries, Huey P. Newton for an exception to this rule.
6. See Hobson, Imperialism; Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital; Lenin, Imperialism.
7. For a view that challenges the idea that Marx neglected imperialism see Pradella, Globalisation and the Critique.
8. Racial capitalism highlights how racialisation and racism were integral blocks in the emergence of capitalism. The capitalist system is thus fused with and often dependent on forms of racialisation and forms of domination based on such racialisation. See Robinson, Black Marxism.
9. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 3.
10. Du Bois, The African Roots of the War.
11. My argument here is not that these Marxists erased the relationship between race and class. Marx himself seems to have been aware of how racism could split class unity. See Marx, “Marx to Siegfried” for his appreciation of how English and Irish working-class conflict resembled ‘that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the USA’. Lenin was also aware of how the uneven nature of capitalist development had derailed Marx and Engels’ conception of world revolution. Indeed, his work on imperialism further developed Engels’ idea of a labour aristocracy splitting the global working class. Lenin was also aware of what he would call the ‘Negro Question’ and related the struggles of Black Americans to the struggle for national self-determination. However, as CitationVirdee, Second Sight of Racialised Outsiders” highlights, Lenin, along with Luxemburg, ‘consistently failed to come to terms with the corrosive effects of the racisms of imperialism on the European working class’. More specifically, Du Bois advances Marxist narrations of imperialism through highlighting how the aristocracy of labour that marked European imperialism was underpinned by a geo-political idea of white supremacy. For more on Du Bois’ relationship to the work of Marx and Lenin and wider Marxist thought see Robinson, Black Marxism.
12. Du Bois, Darkwater, 17.
13. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. The idea of the wage of whiteness derives from Du Bois’ reflections on the invention of white supremacy in the US. In his monumental revision of the history of Reconstruction, Du Bois brings to the fore how white supremacy was invented in the South to curb the revolutionary potential of united Black and white labour after the abolition of slavery. This saw the ruling planter classes supplement the low wages of white labour with the ‘public and psychological wage’ of white supremacy after the end of the civil war. Shaping the economic, political and cultural institutions through the lens of white supremacy the ruling planter class were able to prevent workers with ‘practically identical interests’ from uniting after Reconstruction This in turn saw the rolling back of Reconstruction’s gains for Black Americans with the onset of Jim Crow and the re-emergence of inter-racial conflict that masked the ruling class’ economic exploitation of labour in its entirety. See Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 573–574.
14. Du Bois, Darkwater 24.
15. Ibid., 27. See CitationVirdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider for a history of how the wages of whiteness were facilitated by the socialist leaders of the European working class and how this lent such ideas a degree of authenticity and authority that would otherwise not have existed if they had come solely from above.
16. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth.
17. Myrdal, Challenge of World Poverty, 299.
18. Newton, Huey P. Newton Reader, 186–187.
19. Ibid., 188.
20. Ibid., 256–258, 260, 265.
21. Ibid., 260.
22. Prashad, The Poorer Nations, 5.
23. Newton, Huey P. Newton Reader, 303.
24. Ibid., 264–265.
25. Ibid., 302–303.
26. Ibid., 170–172.
27. Ibid., 259.
28. Ibid., 193, 263–264.
29. Ibid., 312.
30. Ibid., 192–193.
31. Newton, “Huey’s Message,” 19.
32. Newton, Huey P. Newton Reader, 195.
33. Newton, “Interview with Huey,” 2.
34. For confirmation of Newton’s prescience about neo-liberal globalisation see Harvey, Short History of Neo-liberalism; Prashad, The Poorer Nations; Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century.
35. Trump, “Remarks on Foreign Policy.”
36. Roberts, “Donald Trump and Capitalism’s Next Crisis”; Roberts, The Long Depression, 137.
37. Roberts, “Donald Trump and Capitalism’s Next Crisis.”
38. Gilens, Affluence and Influence.
39. Milanovic, Global Inequality, 196.
40. Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, 103.
41. The Economist, “On the Turn.”
42. Milanovic, Global Inequality, 103–104.
43. Desilver, “Black Unemployment Rate.”
44. Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter, 183.
45. Alexander, The New Jim Crow.
46. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor.
47. Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter, 49.
48. Ibid., 211–212.
49. Burd-Sharps and Rasch, Impact of the US Housing Crisis, 3.
50. Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter, 211.
51. Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land.
52. Ibid., 137.
53. Silver, “Education, Not Income.”
54. Kelly, “Trump Says Go Back.”
55. Kelly, “Birth of a Nation.” There were of course parts of communities of colour who voted for Trump. The key point here is that whiteness is not necessarily embodied in white people but can be ideologically accepted by Black, Latino, Asian and other communities of colour. What these actors are doing is voting for a class project that necessarily only accepts them as an alibi for not being racist.
56. Trump, “The Inaugural Address.”
57. Prashad, “Voters Just Delivered a Mandate.”
58. Trump, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination.”
59. Trump, “Remarks to New York.”
60. Newton, Huey P. Newton Reader, 193.
61. Newton, “Interview with Huey,” Side III, 1.
62. Trump, “Remarks to New York.”
63. Roberts, “Donald Trump and Capitalism’s Next Crisis”; Roberts, The Long Depression, 261–262.
64. The Trump administration’s 2017–2018 preliminary budget proposal confirms this, scaling down the size of discretionary domestic spending and increasing discretionary defence spending. These cuts to domestic programmes directly target the very blue-collar workers Trump proclaimed to represent but are counterbalanced with increased spending on the projection of American power.
65. Prashad, The Poorer Nations, 10–12, 286–289.
66. Newton, “Interview with Huey,” Side II, 2.
67. Newton, Huey P. Newton Reader, 171.
68. Ibid., 171–172.
69. Brown in Newton, To Die for the People, xviii-xix.
70. Singh, Black is a Country, 205–206.
71. This focus on new forms of life would not simply revolve around race and class issues but all facets of human existence such as sexuality and gender relations. Newton’s ideas about this can be found in his essay ‘The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movement’ see Newton, Huey P. Newton Reader, 157–160. This essay not only outlines how the struggles of women and the gay liberation movement were key to ideas of revolutionary intercommunalism but also can be seen as an antecedent to intersectional analysis across race, class, gender and sexuality. Although Newton’s ideas would fail to be taken on board in BPP practice, with the BPP suffering from institutionalised sexism and misogyny, it should also be noted that Newton was driven to take such an intervention and modify his own theory by the women who made up the rank and file of the Party. Indeed, revolutionary intercommunalism’s focus on new forms of life therefore owes debts to the inherent Feminism of the BPP’s women even if many of the BPP’s men, including Newton at times, failed to uphold these ideals. For more on this issue see Spencer, The Revolution Has Come.
72. For examples of social democratic forms of populism see Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of The Labour Party in the UK.
73. My analysis here has centred on the US but as Milanovic’s work highlights, see Global Inequality, rising inequality combined with respective factors such a migration, Islamophobia and austerity has also seen an upsurge in right wing populist parties in countries such as the UK, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary and Austria. Although, it is beyond the scope of this paper to interrogate all of these cases individually the resurgence and popularity of racist nativism hints at a need to examine a wider displacement of the wages of whiteness across the Western world. For example, see Emejulu, “On the Hideous Whiteness” for an excellent take on BREXIT and whiteness. Moreover, it may also be useful to examine how the upsurge in right wing populist parties across the West is related to the rise of similar nationalisms across the Global South.
74. Newton, “Interview with Huey,” Side III, 1–2.