This article was produced as part of the work of the Socialist Alternative US Black Caucus. Follow us on Instagram for more analysis on the fight for racial justice and against capitalism!
Across the country, a massive struggle is building against ICE raids, mass deportations, war, and the Trump administration’s assault on working people. We face a wave of racist, sexist, and transphobic attacks—from voter suppression to the assault on trans peoples’ right to exist. None of these are separate struggles. They are different fronts of the same fight. In that context, a growing layer of activists and organizers are turning to the history of the Black Panther Party, not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity.
Groups are actively discussing armed community patrols. Mutual aid networks are springing up in neighborhoods facing state violence. Young people are reaching for a tradition that actually fought back, one that spoke the language of dignity, community control, and international solidarity.
That impulse is right. But inspiration is not the same thing as strategy. It is important to examine this history honestly, to learn not only what the Panthers got right, but where they hit walls, and what those lessons mean for building real power today.
The Black Panthers’ Armed Police Patrols
The Black Panther Party (BPP) was founded in Oakland in 1966, and their open-carry police patrols captured the imagination of a generation of young Black people. The Panthers would follow police in Black neighborhoods, legally armed and organized, reading out the rights of those stopped by cops. It was a direct, visible challenge to the daily terror of policing, and it spread rapidly.
The state, of course, was not neutral. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, backed by the NRA, moved almost immediately to restrict open-carry in direct response to the Panthers’ patrols. This is a critical lesson: the state is not an impartial referee. It is a tool of the ruling class, and when working people begin to organize power for themselves, the ruling class uses it accordingly.
The armed patrols brought the Panthers enormous attention, and they forced a national conversation about who the police actually serve. But notoriety also made the party a target. The state’s repression, through COINTELPRO and direct police violence, came down hardest on those who posed the sharpest challenge. The Panthers’ visibility was both their greatest strength and one of the conditions that allowed the state to isolate and target them.
BPP co-founder Huey Newton himself acknowledged that the guns and the uniforms, the black berets and leather jackets, while electrifying to some, alienated other sections of Black America who were not yet ready for that kind of confrontation with the state, or who feared the reprisals it would bring down on their communities. The party had to grapple with the gap between those inspired by militancy and those still navigating survival.
“Survival Pending Revolution”
The Panthers’ community survival programs—free breakfast for children, health clinics, liberation schools, and more—remain among the most celebrated parts of their legacy. But it is crucial to understand how the Panthers themselves thought about these programs. They did not call them “mutual aid.” They called them “survival pending revolution.” The distinction matters enormously. This was also reflected in the development of other organizations that evolved from mutual-aid-style groups into explicitly political organizations, like the Young Lords.
The idea was straightforward: these programs would help people survive in the immediate moment, but they were not liberatory in themselves. They were a bridge—a way to build trust with the community, demonstrate what organized people can provide, and win people to the longer fight. The goal was always revolution, and the survival programs were organized in service of that goal. It should also be noted that the late 60’s were a period of massive global upheaval, from anti-colonial revolutions to mass movements across the US. Revolution did not seem like a distant, abstract idea.
But those programs consumed enormous resources. They relied heavily, and disproportionately, on the labor of Black women in the party, whose contributions have often been underacknowledged in popular memory. And they opened a sharp internal debate about priorities.
Eldridge Cleaver, an early BPP leader, argued forcefully against the survival programs. His position was that only a refocusing on armed confrontation with the police, preparing actively for armed violence against state power, could bring about the revolution. In his view, the breakfast programs and clinics were a distraction, even a neutralization of revolutionary energy.
This debate was not just a personality conflict. It reflected a real strategic tension: whether to prioritize immediate revolutionary confrontation or to focus on meeting the immediate needs of ordinary people while building support. And as the saying goes, “if you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing.”
Running large-scale community programs with the limited resources available to the Panthers meant that the organization wasn’t able to lead larger political campaigns. But Cleaver’s alternative, of reducing the strategy to armed confrontation, would have led to deeper isolation. Both sides reflected a real problem that was never really resolved: how to meet needs while building toward systemic change.
That tension still exists today. Mutual aid alone cannot win liberation. Nor can isolated militancy. What is needed is a strategy that connects immediate struggle to mass collective action. That’s why Marxists use what we call a “transitional approach,” building a bridge linking the immediate needs of ordinary people (such as better wages or affordable housing) with the overwhelming necessity for socialist revolution. Crucially, we do this by calling for class struggle tactics to be taken up in a mass movement of working people and the oppressed.
Socialism & Internationalism
What is often missed in popular discussions of the Panthers is how central socialism and internationalism were to their politics. This was not window dressing. It shaped how they understood the world.
The Panthers saw themselves as part of a global anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle. They expressed solidarity with liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and they explicitly identified the enemy as capitalism, not just individual racist cops or politicians. In 1969, they amended their Ten-Point Program, changing their call for “end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community” to “an end to the robbery by the capitalist of our Black and oppressed communities.”
These politics resonated so broadly because of the objective crisis of capitalism at the time, much like today: the escalating Vietnam War, stagnant wages, crumbling urban infrastructure, and the visible failure of liberal reform to address the conditions of Black working-class life after the civil rights victories. The system’s inability to deliver created the conditions for a more radical politics to take root.
But the party’s engagement with what they perceived to be socialist states and organizations, particularly those influenced by Stalinism and Maoism, proved damaging. These forces did not sincerely support the Panthers’ development as an independent revolutionary organization. They often offered rhetorical solidarity, but related to the Panthers more in service of their geopolitical conflict with the US than in support of the struggle to build independent, democratic working-class power. And crucially, the Panthers were not part of an international socialist organization, one rooted in genuine working-class democracy rather than top-down party discipline. That absence left the party more isolated and contributed to the internal crises that the state’s repression was able to exploit.
Centrality Of The Working Class
Today, the Black Panther Party remains one of the most powerful reference points in the history of American radical politics. It is entirely right that a new generation looks to them in a moment of ICE raids, mass deportations, and an administration openly prepared to use violence against working people and immigrants.
But we cannot simply copy and paste the Panthers into 2026. We have to learn the strategic lessons, both from what they achieved and from where they were defeated.
The Panthers organized heavily among the most dispossessed: people pushed out of the formal economy, the unemployed, those with the least to lose. That population can fight hard, and they did.
But those layers of the class alone are not in a position to stop how capitalism actually runs, which is through production and profit. Without organized power at the workplace level, even the most militant resistance can be contained.
The Panthers’ limited roots among Black workers in key industries meant they lacked the economic leverage to seriously threaten the system. When COINTELPRO came down, there was no broad network of organized workers who could push back through strikes or collective action. The party was isolated, and that isolation made the repression effective.
Today’s choke points are logistics hubs, Amazon warehouses, UPS distribution centers, transit systems, airports, and shipping ports. Black and immigrant workers are concentrated in many of these sectors. Organized alongside the broader multiracial working class, they have the power to shake and disrupt the whole capitalist system.
ICE and Trump are looking for confrontation with the working class, and they are prepared to use lethal force in pursuit of it. The response cannot be limited to neighborhood defense alone, though that matters. It has to be rooted in the organized power of working people where capital reproduces itself every day: on the job, in the union, in the workplace.
Legacy Of The Panthers
The Panthers showed us confrontation and pride. They showed us that the working class and oppressed do not have to accept state violence passively. They showed us that Black struggle is inseparable from the struggle against capitalism internationally. Those lessons are permanent and correct.
But they also showed us that a small, self-described vanguard party, disconnected from mass organization, cannot carry a revolution. Real political leadership is a conscious layer of people embedded in everyday struggles—on the job, in unions, in tenant struggles, and more—who can connect those struggles to each other and to a bigger political vision.
The energy of young people getting radicalized by ICE raids and police violence, reaching for Black Panther imagery and courage—that energy is real, and it is welcome. But it needs to be developed and connected: to workplace organizing, to democratic union reform, to independent working-class politics, and to a disciplined socialist organization genuinely accountable to working people.
The goal is not to recreate 1966. It is to take the courage and clarity of that era and combine it with patient, rooted mass work, the kind that builds durable power.
Conditions on the block can spark resistance. Oppression can at times produce political clarity. But the fights that will actually change things happen where capital reproduces itself every single day. That’s where power is built. That’s where the system can be disrupted. Minnesota’s general strike earlier this year shows that. And that is where Black liberation becomes materially possible.
