From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From "Young Spartacus," November 1975- "Eldridge Cleaver: A Political Obituary"-The Demise Of A Black Panther Party Leader

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1960s Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Clever.

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Markin comment on this entry:

Make no mistake the demise of the Black Panther Party through state repression and internal party wrangling rather than political defeat by communist revolutionaries was not an unimportant part of the demise of the entire radical movement in the early 1970s and has left us a huge gap to fill. So read this entry with care-those sisters and brothers like Cleaver represented, for a time, a very, very decent instinct to right the racial wrongs that are the bedrock of American society-and have been embedded there since its beginning.
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Editorial Note-Eldridge Cleaver: A Political Obituary-Young Spartacus, November, 1975

From exile Eldridge Cleaver, renowned former leader of the Black Panther Party, recently has repudiated revolutionary politics in an ultra-patriotic bid for a pardon enabling him to return to the U.S. by the Fourth of July.

Seldom has the ruling class spurned a disil­lusioned radical leader who renounces his cause and courts the bourgeois "establishment." Especially now, when the government's dirty laundry is being laundered publicly, defenders of the status quo can certainly make use of ex-radicals willing to support a discredited social system by "testifying" that there are no alternatives. Thus, the media has assisted former New Left ideologue Tom Hayden—who in 1972 followed the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" onto the campaign trail of "dove" Democrat George McGovern —to achieve new celebrity now as a pseudo-populist Democratic Party senatorial hopeful in California (see "It's Mr. Hayden Now, If You Please," Young Spartacus, September 1975).

Fashionable, socially well-connected renegades like Hayden can easily traipse back to the bourgeois fold. But in this deeply racist society, charismatic black leaders who rose to political stature through flamboyant defiance of the racist order cannot ex­pect to find the bourgeois state so accommodating. This recognition may well be the motivation for Cleaver's grotesque gestures of capitulation and desperate anti-communist tirades.

Eldridge Cleaver recently made his startling debut in Paris as "Eldridge de Paris," the revolutionary-turned-"radical chic" men's fashion designer. Probably only to attract publicity, Cleaver designed and modeled some "revolutionary hot pants" with a crotch shaped into an attenuated pouch, like a medieval codpiece. As his Soul On Ice several years ago revealed, Cleaver is far from naive; he is cer­tainly well aware of the sexual stereotypes of the black male and their role in the pathological psychol­ogy of white racism. His obscene "hot pants" can only be regarded as a costume tailored according to the debased image of the black man projected by the Ku Klux Klan. The spectacle of Cleaver, the once self-sacrificing revolutionary leader, presenting blacks as an object for ridicule by sniggering racists is truly sickening. In the attempt to crawl back into the bourgeoisie's good graces, Cleaver is willing to fan the murderous flames of white racism.

Cleaver has groomed himself politically by an equally grotesque grovelling before the imperialist appetites of the ruling class of this country. In an interview with Rolling Stone (11 September), that soft-pulp rag which slickly trafficks "counter­culture," Cleaver performs a sickening "step-'n'-f etchit" routine for the Pentagon:

"I now think that the U.S. should be second to none militarily, that we have to strengthen, not demise, our military.... I, for one, intend to develop a new relationship with the U.S. military. I'm on a honey­moon with them myself. I love 'em. (much laughter) "However, experience has shown socialists/communists strap onto people the most oppressive regimes in the history of the world.... I want to see the American military establishment's power sup­porting people who are being fucked over in the world. ... If we are truly the force for democracy in the world, then we have an obligation to help in the disintegration of the totalitarian Soviet regime."

Cleaver's defection is political and must be placed in the context of the development and demise of the Black Panther Party and, more generally, the brutal oppression of black people in this racist society. Like Malcolm X, George Jackson and so many other black radical leaders, Eldridge Cleaver came to political consciousness through generalizing his in­dividual victimization at the hands of racist "law and order" into an elemental resistance to brutal oppression of the black masses by this capitalist system. In this racist society the leap from prison-hardened, street-wise lumpen life to socialist con­sciousness and disciplined functioning for a black person is enormous. Cleaver partially overcame a lumpen, criminal, "hustler" existence by seeking to become part of a struggle on behalf of the op­pressed black masses.

But the black militants who built the Black Panther Party embodied profound contradictions, encompass­ing both true heroism and lumpen hustlerism. The Black Panther Party combined militant self-defense of the ghetto against racist cop terrorization with politically reformist, pragmatic social work (such as "serving the people" through the breakfast for children program).

The massive, unrelenting and murderous state repression unleashed against the Panthers exa­cerbated the contradiction between the impulse toward lumpen-based urban guerrilla confrontations with the state and the pressure to accommodate the liberal establishment for protection. This contra­diction in the Panthers' politics led to the devastat­ing split in 1971 between • the pro-capitalist and openly reformist wing led by Huey Newton and the proto-terrorist/"armed struggle" wing, with which Cleaver was associated (see "Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era," Workers Vanguard, January 1972).

Isolated in exile, Cleaver soon became dis­illusioned with "third-world" nationalism. While certainly no political ingenug and always exploiting his various "third-world" patrons for creature com­forts and political elevation, Cleaver's reconcilia­tion with imperialism was facilitated by the hollow-ness of the "revolutionary" rhetoric of radical-nationalist bourgeois regimes such as Algeria and by the willingness of the parasitic bureaucracies ruling in China, Cuba and the other deformed workers states to betray the oppressed for "detente" with world imperialism.

As Cleaver related to Rolling Stone,

"When I left the U.S. I went first to Cuba, then to Algeria, China, North Vietnam and North Korea. Face it, people are nationalists more than they are internationalists and they use internationalism in a very cynical way in order to further their own nationalist aspirations.... The final shock came the day I saw Richard Nixon shaking hands with Chair­man Mao, When you see Nixon and all that he stands for shaking hands with Mao and all that he sup­posedly stood for—well, it marks a turning point in history and a personal turning point for me."

Cleaver did not flee the U.S. in an act of cowardice. He was instructed to escape by the Panther leader­ship, but only after he had prepared himself for "revolutionary suicide": a final, heroic shoot-out with the cops who were hunting him down like an animal. Eldridge Cleaver is at bottom a victim of this racist capitalist state. His final political dis­integration was assisted by bitter disillusionment with the cynical betrayals of Stalinism.

Cleaver rose from a socially marginal existence as a ghetto "hustler" to a leader of the organization which represented the most subjectively revolution­ary expression of the non-Marxist ideology of black nationalism. That organization was destroyed by political contradictions and state repression. Now Cleaver has returned again to "hustling" as ''El­dridge de Paris." In this sense, his repudiation of revolutionary politics is a hollow victory for the ruling class.

Cleaver's defection is tragic. Yet it should be regarded as only the final curtain to a far greater tragedy: the loss of so many subjectively revolutionary and self-sacrificing black mili­tants through political demoralization and cop repression.

A large burden of the responsibility for the demise of the Panthers as a revolutionary organization must be placed squarely on the shoulders of all those self-proclaimed radical organizations which for years opportunistically refused to struggle political­ly with the Panthers. The white-guilt-ridden Maoist/ New Left wing of SDS (whose leaders went on to form the October League, the Revolutionary Union/ Revolutionary Communist Party and the Weather Underground) wallowed in vicarious nationalism and mindlessly enthused over the Panthers, denouncing any criticism of Panther politics as "counterrevolu­tionary." The International Socialists always kept its criticism hushed, while attempting to broker a Panther/left-liberal alliance through building the reformist Peace and Freedom Party. The Socialist Workers Party/Young Socialist Alliance urged the Panthers to become more "nationalist," meaning a retreat into more respectable "community control" politics. And the Communist Party sought to seduce the Panthers into embracing the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Although our forces were numerically small and our authority on the left weak during the crucial period prior to the devastating split, the Spartacist League struggled to the best of our abilities to engage the Panthers in political discussion and to win the most subjectively revolutionary cadres to a Leninist perspective. We did not capitulate to the popularity of multi-vanguardist/"third-worldist" il­lusions, seeking instead to pose a proletarian per­spective for the subjectively revolutionary elements of the militant black movement. Instead of glamoriz­ing the lumpen adventurism of the Panthers, we fought for a truly revolutionary program. Only such a perspective could have combatted the decimation of the Panther cadres by organized cop terror and could have preserved a revolutionary wing of the black movement when the besieged Panther organiza­tion veered sharply toward "respectability" in the form of a turn to the Democratic Party under the auspices of the Communist Party in the period of the United Front Against Facism.

Eldridge Cleaver has passed over to the class enemy. To acknowledge his political demise is bitter indeed. But the struggle for black liberation through socialist revolution can advance only if the costly lessons of the political destruction of the Panthers as a revolutionary organization are assimilated.