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More broadly, in Gramsci’s view, a movement is revolutionary politically to the extent that it poses an effective challenge. He suggests that such a revolutionary movement must first be creative rather than arbitrary. It must seize the political imagination and offer credible proposals to address…

The broader question is why no revolutionary movement of any kind exists in the United States today. To untangle this question, we need to consider what makes a movement revolutionary. Here, the writings of the Italian theorist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci are instructive: “A theory is ‘revolu…

The history of the Black Panther Party holds important implications for two more general theoretical debates. First, this history suggests a way out of dead-end debates about how the severity of repression affects social movement mobilization. One common perspective, supported by a rich scholarly l…

The hard-core right wing was not the main threat to the Party. Rather concessions to blacks and opponents of the war reestablished the credibility of liberalism to key constituencies.4 It was much easier for the parents of young adults to find Tom Wolfe’s parody of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s P…

Perhaps even more important, Nixon sharply reduced the military draft that had motivated many young people to embrace revolutionary anti-imperialism. Vietnam War draft inductions peaked in the late 1960s, with more than 225,000 soldiers inducted every year from 1965 through 1969. The Nixon administ…