Review of "The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History" by David F Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson

Well, first of all, I loved this book. I don't always like graphic novels, but it seems to work well for this subject. It's a good way to convey all the different people (with little comic-style portraits) and threads and factions.

And I also have a big soft spot for the Black Panthers, not least because I have the impression that they were more socialist than Black Nationalist. This comes across really strongly in the films "Judas and The Black Messiah" and "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution", both of which I also liked.

But this is more of a warts-and-all portrait than either of those, and there's quite a lot to not like so much about the Panthers, honestly depicted here. The factionalism, which sometimes turned murderous. The gun thing - now I know that Black people with guns has a liberatory dimension, but it's hard to feel comfortable with how comfortable the Panthers seem to have been around guns. 

And this rather does raise questions about the meaning of "armed struggle" for revolutionary organisations. Proper armed struggle requires a military wing, and military wings attract people who like military stuff. If you are fortunate they are actually good at it, but either way it's really hard to subordinate them to an overall political strategy...I think that comes over in the story of the Panthers' ultimate failure. The same things seem to have consumed the white radical left too, as the history of the Weather Underground illustrates.

There were also factional disputes about the role of "the working class" and "lumpenproletariat" and criminal elements in bringing about the revolution. Some Panthers favoured the latter, and that clearly didn't work out well. Other Marxists have generally tended to view the lumpenproletariat as usually reactionary. In the context of American Black communities where workers have been generally excluded from the better working-class jobs, appealing to a simplistic idea of working-classness is not going to work. Micro-entrepreneurship is one of the routes to a livelihood for some, both legal and otherwise...the same thing happens in the cities of the Global South, where the formal "working class" is something of a privileged stratum. So I think the Panthers who wanted to recruit from criminals were ultimately wrong, but not obviously so.

It doesn't pull its punches or hide the details of where some of the Panthers ended up - Elridge Cleaver becoming a conservative Republican, for example, and Huey P Newton consumed by drug addiction. It's also really good on Cointelpro, J Edgar Hoover's anti-radical counterintelligence and infiltration program.

The book starts with a quick survey of pre-Panther Black political figures, and it's a shame to see Marcus Garvey and Wallace Fard (both reactionaries to the core) listed alongside W E B Du Bois (not a reactionary at all) with not even a hint of a critical distinction. Still, that is just one page - much of the rest, about SNCC and SCLC and so on is great, and very informative.