— Malcolm Harrisit’s objectively mistaken to see the Black Panther Party as a failure. It synthesized political currents from the Civil War and the Cold War, and the model it produced took the world by fire. In the Panthers’ analysis, they combined the psychological heat of anticolonial struggle with an ice-cold understanding of capitalism as a worldwide impersonal system. That’s what allowed them to uphold the seemingly contradictory truths of Black Power and Marxist universalism at the same time.
Replicated under Fair Use from Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris.