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History shows that most of the parties that have led people out of their difficulties have had administrators with what we sometimes call the traits of the bourgeoisie or declassed intellectuals. They are the people who have gone through the established institutions, rejected them, and then applied their skills to the community. In applying them to the community, their skills are no longer bourgeoisie skills but people's skills, which are transformed through the contradiction of applying what is usually bourgeoisie to the oppressed. That itself is a kind of transformation.
We will inform this government, this social order, that it must administer to its people because it is supposed to be a representative government which serves the needs of the people. Then serve them. If it does not do this then it should be criticized. What we will not do in the future is jump too far ahead and say that the system absolutely cannot give us anything. That is not true; the system can correct itself to a certain extent. What we are interested in is its correcting itself as much as it can. After that, if it doesn't do everything that the people think necessary, then we'll think about reorganizing things.
To be very honest I think there is great doubt whether the present system can do this. But until the people feel the same way I feel then I would be rather arrogant to say dump the whole thing, just as we were arrogant to say dump the church. Let's give it a chance, let's work with it in order to squeeze as many contributions and compromises out of all the institutions as possible, and then criticize them after the fact. We'll know when that time comes, when the people tell us so.
[...] When we coined the expression "All Power to the People," we had in mind emphasizing the word "Power," for we recognize that the will to power is the basic drive of man. But it is incorrect to seek power over people. We have been subjected to the dehumanizing power of exploitation and racism for hundreds of years; and the Black community has its own will to power also. What we seek, however, is not power over people, but the power to control our own destiny. For us the true definition of power is not in terms of how many people you can control. To us power is the ability to first of all define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner.
We see then that power has a dual character and that we cannot simply identify and define phenomena without acting, for to do so is to become an armchair philosopher. And when Bobby and I left Merritt College to organize brothers on the block we did so because the college students were too content to sit around and analyze without acting. On the other hand, power includes action, for it is making phenomena perform in the desired manner. But action without thinking and theory is also incorrect, for if the social forces at work in the community have not been correctly analyzed and defined how can you control them in such a way that they act in a desired manner? So the Black Panther Party has always merged theory and practice in such a way as to serve the true interests of the community.
[...] We should never say a whole movement is dishonest when in fact they are trying to be honest. They are just making honest mistakes. Friends are allowed to make mistakes. The enemy is not allowed to make mistakes because his whole existence is a mistake, and we suffer from it. But the women's liberation front and gay liberation front are our friends, they are potential allies, and we need as many allies as possible.
At this point we can't really talk about any revolutionary institutions. We can talk about a process that is in the making. We have a provisional revolutionary judicial system which we realize can't function to its greatest capacity. Because you can't have isolated pockets of human treatment when reaction is pressing in all around you. So we don't claim to have developed any utopia in our commune system in which we live or in the Party itself. We have problems because we exist in a backward society. So we know our chief task at this point is to transform the society. It's not simply to erect just institutions because it's impossible to do that either in this country or in the world as a whole, today, until reaction, and that consists of the seventy-six companies that control the world, is killed once and for all.
in response to a q about whether the BPP has a revolutionary court system
[...] Capitalism has generated massive increases in productivity and extravagant wealth for some, yet many people still struggle to make ends meet. Capitalism is an inequality-enhancing machine as well as a growth machine. What’s more, it is becoming ever clearer that capitalism, driven by the relentless search for profits, is destroying the environment. And in any case, the pivotal issue is not whether material conditions on average have improved in the long run within capitalist economies, but rather whether, looking forward from this point in history, things would be better for most people in an alternative kind of economy. It is true that the centralized, authoritarian state-run economies of twentieth-century Russia and China were in many ways economic failures, but these are not the only possibilities.
Both of these stories are anchored in the realities of capitalism. It is not an illusion that capitalism has transformed the material conditions of life in the world and enormously increased human productivity; many people have benefited from this. But equally, it is not an illusion that capitalism generates great harms and perpetuates eliminable forms of human suffering. Where the real disagreement lies—a disagreement that is fundamental—is over whether it is possible to have the productivity, innovation and dynamism that we see in capitalism without the harms. Margaret Thatcher famously announced in the early 1980s, “There is no alternative”; two decades later, the World Social Forum declared, “Another world is possible.” That is the fundamental debate.
Two general kinds of motivations are in play in these diverse forms of struggle within and over capitalism: class interests and moral values. You can oppose capitalism because it harms your own material interests, but also because it offends certain moral values that are important to you.
There is a poster from the late 1970s that shows a working-class woman leaning on a fence. The caption reads: “class consciousness is knowing what side of the fence you’re on; class analysis is figuring out who is there with you.” The metaphor of the fence sees conflict over capitalism as anchored in conflicts of class interests. Being on opposite sides of the fence defines friends and enemies in terms of opposing interests. Some people may be sitting on the fence, but ultimately they may have to make a choice: “you’re either with us or against us.” In some historical situations, the interests that define the fence are pretty easy to figure out. It is obvious to nearly everyone that in the United States before the Civil War, slaves were harmed by slavery and they therefore had a class interest in its abolition, while slave owners had an interest in its perpetuation. There may have been slave owners who felt some ambivalence about owning slaves—this is certainly the case for Thomas Jefferson, for example—but this ambivalence was not because of their class interests; it was because of a tension between those interests and certain moral values they held.
Two general kinds of motivations are in play in these diverse forms of struggle within and over capitalism: class interests and moral values. You can oppose capitalism because it harms your own material interests, but also because it offends certain moral values that are important to you.
There is a poster from the late 1970s that shows a working-class woman leaning on a fence. The caption reads: “class consciousness is knowing what side of the fence you’re on; class analysis is figuring out who is there with you.” The metaphor of the fence sees conflict over capitalism as anchored in conflicts of class interests. Being on opposite sides of the fence defines friends and enemies in terms of opposing interests. Some people may be sitting on the fence, but ultimately they may have to make a choice: “you’re either with us or against us.” In some historical situations, the interests that define the fence are pretty easy to figure out. It is obvious to nearly everyone that in the United States before the Civil War, slaves were harmed by slavery and they therefore had a class interest in its abolition, while slave owners had an interest in its perpetuation. There may have been slave owners who felt some ambivalence about owning slaves—this is certainly the case for Thomas Jefferson, for example—but this ambivalence was not because of their class interests; it was because of a tension between those interests and certain moral values they held.
The unjust inequalities generated by capitalism extend beyond income and wealth. Capitalism also generates severe inequalities in the social conditions to live a flourishing life. Of particular salience here is access to meaningful, fulfilling forms of work. Most jobs that are generated by capitalist firms are tedious, even when they provide an adequate income. Of course, in any process of producing goods and services, there will always be unpleasant, uninteresting tasks to be done. The issue is the grossly unequal distribution of work activity that is interesting and fulfilling compared with work that is experienced as a burden. Capitalism generates severe inequalities in the distribution of such burdens.