Without latent social power, either the organization devolves into self destructive internal warfare/patriarchal authoritarianism or enters the game of electoral politics and pragmatic compromise. Dr. Newton thought the BPP could overcome the isolation of blacks through "intercommunal" solidarity with national liberation movements abroad; this proved a dead end as after the ascent to power, the national liberation movements got on with the "realistic" business of international power politics and bureaucratic socialism--not freeing the internal colonies in the heart of the imperialist Amerikkan beast.
As a practical science, Marxism on the other hand tries to prove clarity to the long term goal of the presently defensive struggles by mine, dock and field workers, truck drivers, and factory operatives to bring an end wage labor--the last historic form by which surplus labor is pumped out of the direct producers for the benefit of a ruling class. And such historic and revolutionary class consciousness can only find its source in Marx's *Capital* and of course requires for its achievement the overcoming of the internal divisions within the proletariat that have haunted it as much its conflict with capital--whether we talk about Irish and English workers, Algerian and French workers, Asian American and white workers, Black workers and trabajodores sin papeles, women and men. In this sense, the politics of "race" and "gender" are of paramount importance.
Omali Yeshiteli's Uhuru House outfit to whom I lost a good white high school friend made its key issue not unemployment, discrimination in hiring on in the workplace, not the schools but the "genocidal" adoption of black babies by white foster parents. It was this twisting of the Geneva Convention and grotesque commitment to the purity of race that had me turn my back on them--I used to talk to them at Ashby Flea Market and their bakery before it burned down (they claimed by the FBI of course). Their party line is defended in a book by Penny Hess, The Culture of Violence. Where Walter Rodney and Manning Marable wrote about how Europe and Capitalism "underdeveloped" Africa and Black America respectively, Hess writes about how that process "over-developed" Europe and white America respectively. At the same, the organization characterized black America and Africa as excluded from the production process and the internatonal division of labor. But such violation of the principle of non contradiction rankled no one in the search of new vindicationist black propaganda. Of course the search is justified to some extent by the assault on the common humanity of blacks and the response by blacks and non racists alike to this leads quite understandably in often irrational directions.
There is however the undernoticed side of racist projection here, i.e., the projection on to *whites* of all of the reification, practico inertness of modernity and the celebration of black in Bergsonian terms, as Senghor did--those who intuit deeper truths by their participation in the flow of life. We have here the path from Marcuse to the Weathermen, as a Neil McInnes would perhaps put it.
Perhaps it would be interesting to discuss the Martin Bernal controversy in this regard and Stephen Howe's book on Afrocentrism from Verso Press. I am not convinced by Howe's complete rejection of Bernal's theory of the rise of an Aryan or racial theory of history, though I must say that I never understood the fascination with Cheikh Ante Diop.
Rakesh Bhandari