[lbo-talk] Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-Tung, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!

[Carrol Cox]

shag carpet bomb wrote: I mean to say that groups like the Weathermen
and the Panthers saw America quite clearly. But they were so unprepared
for what they saw, and were so clearly lacking in any sense of viable
strategies for dealing with what they saw, that they slid quickly and
tragically into modes of reaction which were almost always hysterical,
self-destructive, and self-defeating-to say nothing of their
ineffectuality.

----------

It isn't quite accurate to bracket Panthers and Weatheman. Fred Hampton
spent the last months of his life speaking to black high-school students
around Chicago - and the core of his speech, his point of departure, was
a denunciation of Weatherman. I say this because it seems to me the most
retrograde feature of so much commentary on the sixties concerns the
Panthers, and they just simply cannot be identified with a strategy of
violence. Quite frankly, I think the Panthers represent the very best of
that great movement from Bus Strike to final defeat with the failure of
ERA (the two events that I use to identifie beginning and end of "The
Sixtiesd"). Criticism of the Panthers is usually either ignorant _or_
(like so much criticism of the revolutionary past) fails to see them in
the context of what could be expected under the given historical
conditions. Every movement reaches a point beyond which, at the time, it
cannot go. That high point for the 'sixties was the Panthers.

Carrol