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 literature covering various times and places, is that “repression breeds resistance”: When authorities repress insurgency, the repression encourages further resistance.9 But others pose the opposite argument, with equally rich scholarly support, suggesting that repression discourages and diminishes insurgency.10 A classic sociological position that seeks to reconcile this apparent contradiction is that the relationship between repression and insurgency is shaped like an “inverse U”: When repression is light, people tend to cooperate with established political authorities and take less disruptive action; when repression is heavy, the costs of insurgency are too large, causing people to shy away from radical acts. But, according to this view, it is when authorities are moderately repressive—too repressive to steer dissenters toward institutional channels of political participation but not repressive enough to quell dissent—that people widely mobilize disruptive challenges to authority.

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 ‘revolutionary’ precisely to the extent that it is an element of conscious separation and distinction into two camps and is a peak inaccessible to the enemy camp.” In other words, a revolutionary theory splits the world in two. It says that the people in power and the institutions they manage are the cause of oppression and injustice. A revolutionary theory purports to explain how to overcome those iniquities. It claims that oppression is inherent in the dominant social institutions. Further, it asserts that nothing can be done from within the dominant social institutions to rectify the problem—that the dominant social institutions must be overthrown. In this sense, any revolutionary theory consciously separates the world into two camps: those who seek to reproduce the existing social arrangements and those who seek to overthrow them.

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 grievances of large segments of the population, creating a “concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will.” But when a movement succeeds in this task, the dominant political coalition usually defeats the challenge through the twin means of repression and concession. The ruling alliance does not simply crush political challenges directly through the coercive power of the state but makes concessions that reconsolidate its political power without undermining its basic interests. A revolutionary movement becomes significant politically only when it is able to win the loyalty of allies, articulating a broader insurgency.