Actually this piece of MB doesn't sit well w/me. I don't know when exactly Horowitz jumped ship with the Panthers, but they didn't evolve all that much. They weren't as bad as MB suggests in their latter days, nor as good at the beginning. Max Sawicky
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I can't remember the year either, maybe 1974? What's wrong with Horowitz then and now is interesting (to me). He is a creep, but an interesting creep. On the other hand, nobody should accept his version of the 60s left. He wasn't here during a key transition between about 1963-4 and 1968. He was in London trying to con his way into the aging Bertrand Russell's peace organization and its publications.
When he got back, he hadn't been on the ground, at the level of understanding necessary to have any valid perception at all. He skipped immediately to the top of the radical publishing ladder without ever once touching ground.
In many ways Horowitz is as wrong about the Right as he was about the Left, which makes for an interesting distortion. By the time he joined the Panthers, they were already in eclipse. They didn't have the depth of political sophistication, internal agreement on principles and theory to pull themselves together. Their political momentum was stalled out in navigating the criminal justice system. The police had tied them up tight in endless prosecutions, shoot outs, assassinations, investigations, surveillance, and every dirty trick they could come up with---and of course the Panthers were not shy about crime and cops. Their constant engagement with the police was a profound mistake, akin to `working within' the system.
Newton and the top cadre living like Oakland pimps in downtown high rise dope havens was an obvious exploitation of the working class street level Pathers who were trying to run an employment support center, school program, and a prisoner rehab center. Interestingly, while some of the organization was already part of, or on the fringes of city government social services, another group were in constant run-ins with the cops. The `normal' separations between political action, criminal activity, social services, access to power, and grass roots identity were all dissolved in bizarre and contradictory ways.
The most interesting thing about Horowitz (then and now) is he is bereft of any moral center at all---while at the same time he claims one as his raison d'etre. It is as if he were a moral parasite living within the Other as a form of moral possession. It is a fascinating pathology. I am tempted to think of it as the kind of mentality that characterizes mass killers.
There is a kind of political-philosophical lesson to be learned from Horowitz---I think. Moral judgment can only be useful as a very rough guide in a political realm. The problem with morality as a political center is related to the problem of ends and means. Horowitz's amorality is what allows him to swing wildly across the political spectrum, centered only on some abstract moral telos that ignores every intermediate step. He is so certain of his own rectitude and its good end that all of his opportunism, all of his completely a-moral actions are excused in advance by this `good' end.
This moral-amoral profile fits a lot of the Rightwing, as it once did some sections of the Left. The profile has a kind of religious quality that ignores the practical difficulties and steps of negotiating the immediate here and now conditions of life for the sake of some higher goal. You could call it the problem of idealism, but in the dark and destructive zealotry of the current moment it has such a religious flavor that mere idealism is too limited a word.
I think this totalized telos of the `good' explains a lot. For example the Right can politically exploit the WTC destruction and deaths without ever once taking into account or providing for the immediate victims, their family's needs or the city's. They move immediately to attack mode as the `good' crusade against the whole Islamic world, where equally there is no serious determination of its diversity and no realistic appraisal of the `enemy' at all. The Enemy is all of `them' and it doesn't matter really which individuals, which country, or what the original reason were given for the WTC attack in the first place.
Obviously al Qaeda has a remarkably similar moral-amoral profile. The two, the US Right and al Qaeda fit each other, hand in glove. And not to bring up Israel always, but the same sort of amplified moral-political profile fits most of its righwing and certainly its occupation ideology.
The whole neocon movement (with Strauss as godfather) follows suit. National `good' or national security trumps all individual determinations and all meaningfully diverse and lesser goods including the need for any rational examinations at all. These are profoundly anti-democratic impulses that when amplified sufficiently begin to characterize the actions of real authoritarian police states---police states by intention, design, and enforcement. Since the US Right is on the right side, the good side of every issue, everything is excused, everything is understood in advance to be for the greater good and there is no need for further examination or reflection.
In fact those who question and reflect are traitors and in league with the enemies of the good---the Empire of Innocents. And so, by further turns we get down to matching Roger Ebert with Mohammed Atta or Ward Churchill with whoever. Obviously these are all on the same side---the universal Other against the Good.
CG