Huey P. Newton
Huey on Anarchists and Individualists as Related to Revolutionary Struggle and the Black Liberation Movement
In Defense of Self Defense, The Black Panther, November 16, 1968
Written: November 16, 1968
Source: The Black Panther Vol. 2 No. 12–14, November 16, 1968; Pamphlet titled Essays From the Minister of Defense published by the Black Panther Party, 1968, Oakland
Transcription/Markup: 2021 by Philip Mooney
Public Domain: Marxist Internet Archive 2021. This work is completely free.
We should understand there is a difference between the rebellion of the anarchists and the black revolution or liberation of the black colony.
This is a class society; it always has been. This reactionary class society places its limitations on individuals, not just in terms of their occupation, but also regarding self expression, being mobile, and being free to really be creative and do anything they want to do.
The class-society prevents this. This is true not only for the mass of the lower or subjugated class. It is also true within the ruling class, the master class. That class also limits the freedom of the individual souls of the people which comprise it.
In the upper class, the individuals always try to free themselves from these limitations — the artificial limitations placed upon him through external sources: namely, some hierarchy that goes by the name of State or Governmental Administration.
In America, we have not only a class society, we also have a caste system, and black people are fitted into the lowest caste. They have no mobility for going up the class ladder. They have no privilege to enter into the ruling structure at all.
Within the ruling class they’re objecting (resisting?), because the people have found that they’re completely subjected to the will of the administration and to the manipulators. This brings about a very strange phenomenon in American. That is, many of the rebelling white students and the anarchists are the offspring of this master class. Surely most of them have a middle class background and some even upper class. They see the limitations imposed upon them and no they’re striving, as all men strive, to get freedom of the soul, Freedom of expression, and freedom of movement, without the artificial limitations from antique values.
Blacks and colored people in America, confined within the caste system, are discriminated against as a whole group of people. It’s not a question of individual freedom, as it is for the children of the upper classes. We haven’t reached the point of trying to free ourselves individually because we’re dominated and oppresses as a group of people.