And it saw that struggle for self-representation – or sovereignty, if you will – against, and in the context of empire and imperialism, as part and parcel of a global struggle of people to try to represent themselves. And on the other side, neither were the ideas sufficient to generate or sustain those relationships, the ideas were also important, so the Party, as we can talk about more and as is reflected in the title of the book, very much emphasised an anti-imperialist politics which centred black freedom struggle in the black community and the black community’s effort to represent itself. I mean, there were definitely organisational and interpersonal relations between members and leaders of the group and other organisations and those relationships were important, and those organisational ties were important, but they weren’t sufficient to either generate or sustain those relationships – the organisational and the interpersonal relations alone. So neither were those alliances simply organisational alliances. The alliances formed were very much on the basis of what the party was actually doing. Joshua Bloom So, this really starts to get right away at part of the central and intellectual thrust of the book.
How difficult was it to maintain and balance such alliances, to keep people within the party on board and to avoid being co-opted by less militant groups? What, if any, prospects do you see for any similar alliances being formed for a contemporary revolutionary politics in urban America? The OT One of the central arguments in Black Against Empire is that what lay behind the Black Panther Party’s growth and influence, what made them synonymous with the Black Power Movement rather than the many other contemporary black nationalist organisations, was their ability to form alliances and coalitions – namely with moderate, more establishment black organisations, white student leftists, sympathetic revolutionary governments abroad and Latino, Native American and Asian radical groups in the US.
The OT recently spoke in depth with Joshua Bloom, co-author of the 2013 award-winning book ‘Black Against Empire’, about the history, politics and thought of the Black Panther Party.
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