The aggression against Nigeria is one of the signs that we must reorient the antiwar movement, and our broader popular struggles, around pan-African liberation in particular. That if you are a participant in the class struggle, and especially if you call yourself a Marxist, any path forward will have to involve reconnecting our struggles with the politics of the Black Panther Party. This is the practical way that we can respond to Washington’s latest maneuvers towards a Nigeria intervention, where it got Nikki Minaj to speak at the UN about there being a supposed targeted violence campaign against Nigeria’s Christians. It’s this narrative, based on selective reports of the country’s violence, which indicates a broader U.S. imperialist pivot towards “rightist” and “trad” politics. The best answer to this is to revive America’s most effective tradition of revolutionary politics; the trend that the U.S. government has historically put the greatest effort into crushing.
When I talk about responding to the ruling-class rightist push by fully embracing left-wing politics, I am advocating for the opposite of ultra-leftism. At this moment, ultra-leftism of the adventurist kind is undergoing a major revival, and we must combat this trend alongside the “trad” imperialist current. The way that we can do this is by putting forth a synthesis between the politics of racial liberation which pan-Africanism represents, and the class-centered politics that’s been brought back into the mainstream by the MAGA communist movement.
This was actually something that the Panthers themselves did, prior to when MAGA communism had gotten the label it has now; when this class-centric practice wasn’t being called MAGA communism, Fred Hampton was describing it as a kind of Black politics that deals with the white masses:
You know a lot of people have hang-ups with the Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. And the people that have those hang-ups are opportunists, and cowards, and individualists and everything that’s anything but revolutionary. And they use these things as an excuse to justify and to alibi and to bonify their lack of participation in the real revolutionary struggle. So they say, “Well, I can’t dig the Panther Party because the Panthers they are engrossed with dealing with oppressor country radicals, or white people, or hunkies, or what have you. They said these are some of the excuses that I use to negate really why I am not in the struggle.”
We got a lot of answers for those people. First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx, and Lenin, and Che Guevara end Mao Tse-Tung and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that revolution is a class struggle. It was one class—the oppressed—those other class—the oppressor. And it’s got to be a universal fact. Those that don’t admit to that are those that don’t want to get involved in a revolution, because they know that as long as they’re dealing with a race thing, they’ll never be involved in a revolution. They can talk about numbers; they can hang you up in many, many ways, but as soon as you start talking about class, then you got to start talking about some guns. And that’s what the Party had to do.
This is how we defeat the Nigeria war campaign, and all other schemes of our ruling class: by restoring the status of the African liberation movement as the center of American working-class politics. Which, according to Hampton, entails reaching the same parts of the American masses that today make up the MAGA base. It’s this part of what the Panthers did that’s been lost on the American communist movement since the Panthers were destroyed; when the Panthers were gone, the ones who came to dominate communism were the same unserious leftists who had been attacking the Panthers for reaching out to the white workers.
In response to this problem, communists have introduced a means for breaking our movement out of the insular leftist niche, that means being MAGA communism. Since MAGA communism’s beginning in 2022, though, its original advocates have largely shifted away from that particular label, because at this stage it’s redundant; MAGA’s style has become something ubiquitous within American politics, and we need a new way to differentiate ourselves. This has to do with the right-wing cultural pivot among our ruling class, and the conservative virtue signaling that the empire is doing by claiming to care about persecuted Christians; because the elites have pivoted away from wokeness, and back towards the Reaganist style of politics, anti-systemic politics can now only succeed by bringing back the old left. Or rather a version of the old left that’s been fused with the model of the Panthers, and that’s incorporated the lessons we’ve learned since the end of the Panthers.
The goal is not to re-create the old workers movement, or to re-create the Black Panther Party; this can’t be done anyhow, like no one will ever be able to simply replicate the Soviet Union. What we must do is apply the practices from the past that have been shown to work—like seriously building ties with organized labor, taking the lead in organizing the workers, and putting central emphasis on Black Power—in the ways that best fit the conditions we’re navigating now.
All of the past movements fell short in their own ways; the Communist Party of the United States failed to avoid being crippled by those who sought to liquidate it from within, and the BPP emphasized lumpen-style displays of armed strength while not sufficiently accounting for Black labor. The movement that succeeds will be one which synthesizes the effective aspects of the past efforts, and treats their mistakes as guides to figuring out the best path forward. This is the complete picture that we need to gain in order to properly utilize the insight which has already become well-understood among our ranks—namely the fact that identitarian leftism has kept the communist movement trapped in a bubble. We know that this is true, and more Marxists are realizing that this means we need to reach the MAGA base. To take our efforts to the next phase, though, and prevent our enemies from winning as they launch their new offensives, we have to bring about a new iteration of the politics the Panthers represented.
As Hampton’s statements show us, these Black Power politics are actually compatible with the politics that we would now call MAGA communist, and that the unserious leftists would call class reductionist. It’s a synthesis between the Black Power aspect and the class aspect, which of course are one and the same. The better we understand this synthesis, and the more we study the history of how it came into being, the greater a resistance we’ll be able to mount against the unmasked chauvinistic aggression that’s coming from our rulers.
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