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Blood in
My Eye

George L. Jackson

My dea anly surviving son

of my heart your keepers murdered in <o

i3 grave was supposed 10 be beind your g
srandmotier's. But | could't
mawed grass. The story of our
for 3 headstone

1 the grave e
e for e

dfather's au

Dast. | sent the keeper o &
a0 w0 extra sies. o wn wy eyt
Ta their fathers—

we

ow eriticize the unjust with the weapon

Blood in
My Eye

Preface

In his introduction to George Jackson's Soledad Brother,
Jean Genet wrote, “Nothing has been willed, written or com-
posed for the sake of a book - . . it is both & weapon of
liberation and a poem of love. This book, 100, Is a weapon,
but one entirely willed and purposeful. It was completed
barely a week before the author's murder in San Quentin on
August 21, 1971. 1t was sent out of the Adjustment Center
with specific instructions for its publication, almost as if the
author knew that he would never five 1o see its appenrance
in print. Describing it a few days before the end, George said,
“I'm not a writer, but all of it's me, the way | want it the
way Usce it.” What he saw and what he wanted, the central
passion of his life, was war, the revolutionary war of the
people against their oppressors, a war which grew out of
“perfect love and perfect hate.”

“F've been in cebellion all my life,” he wroie 1 one of
his letters. For a young black growiug up in the ghietto, the
fiest rebellion is always crime. George's

more arrests. Al age cighteen he was c,
$70.00 from a gas station. His lawyer Promised him that he
would make a deal with the D.A. i George confessed 10
second degree robbery. He told George it way his only
chance because he had s record. “Don't Put the court 10 the

Lopense of & Leial, and they will give you county fime.
Instead he was given an ind
life

onvicted of stealing

The turning point in his lifc came when

"
"Seledad Brothe: The Prison Lettrs of George Juckson.

Eagels, and Mao . .. and
first four years, | studied
1y ideas. | met the
Big Jake™ Lewis, and James
Care, W.C. Nolen, Bl Christmas, Tony Gibson ang
many others. We altempted (o transform the black

criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mental.
iy.e

He wesn't alone in his discovery. At the same time,
to discover Marx, Fanon

all my life. 1 just didn'y
RV

of the human community, members of a revolutionary broth-
erhood.

In_prison, commitment to revelution has a special
meaning and a special price. To be identifled as a revolution-
ary by the prison authorities means an almost permanent
denial of parole, separation from the other prisoners, solitary
confinement (usually in maximum security wings of the
prison), transfers from one prisan to another, beatings, had
food. It brings down on you the entire punitive and repres-
sive force of a completely totalitarian system.

Inside prison George practiced a very special kind of

I,

devotion and love. When convicts Inlk about him, they often
use the term “for real.” Many inmates “murder mouth™ and
“sell wolf tickets™; they do a lot of heavy talking, but when
it comes down to the point of action, they disappear. George,
however, was as good as his word. Whenever he made a
statement of some kind, it would be followed by action. If
you were the victim of a raci tack inside prison, there was

a good chance that he would turn up fighting for you st your
side.

Most of his “offenses” inside prison—the reasons why
he was forced to spend over seven years in various forms of
solitary confinement, including the infamous strip cells® in
Soledad's “O" wing, the reasons why he was never paroled
—involve his defense of other inmates. What made him par-
ticularly dangerous to the prison authorities was this enor-
mous talent as an organizer.

We have got 10 be together. We have got 10 be in &
position 1o tell the pig that if he doesn't serve the food
when it's warm and pass out the scouring powder on
time, everybody on the tier is going to throw something
a1 him, then things will change and life will be casier.
You don't get that kind of unity when you're fighting
with each other. I'm always telling the brothers that
some of those whites are willing to work with us against

R Yy p——b_
e el which he might clesn himscf, forced (0 cat i the stemuis et
s own Body wastcs, alowed (0 wash hs hands only onee

vy v dus und reqired 10 slcp an a st caavas mat placed dicectly
a0 the cold canvas flor.

s Pigs: All ey g0t 0 do i sop talking hanky. Wi
the races start fighteng, uil you have is one ma. ine group.
against another. That's Just what the pigs want.+

s not coincidental that the need for unity among revolu.
Uionary groups is one of the major themes of (s book.

Tey to remember how you fel at the most depressing
Troment of your life, the moment of your decpest dejec.

tion. That is how I feel all the time. No maties what
level my consciousness may be, aalccp, a in be-

tween. The thing is there and it keeps me moving, pins
™Y €3¢ Lo the bal, uptight, twenty-four hours a day.{

“Locked down" iuside his cell, George devoted himself
10 study. His painfully acquired scholarship in the ficlds of
Marxian economics and history rivaled that of mogt college

professors. But sometimes, for days on end, reality itself
wauld vanish from his cell,

¥ would be sitting in a special locked isolation cll,
sometimes even with the lock welded shut, and there
would be no one to talk to—just the sound of screaming
voices. And because there is no human contact, you
depend on books. No contact with people. Special fnck
welded on the docr. Nobody around. I'm siculy by
myself. The only friend I had wat & book. Sometimes Iy
find myself talking out loud 10 the author. I'd sort of
wake myself up and I'd hear myself talking (o this other
“Unpublished nterview,
HUnpublished ntervien:

person. | gues it was ke some kiud of wish fultliinen
When I aslecp at ight, 1 sl find myself tatking 1

lished position papers which dealt with prison life and revo-
lutionary politics from a Marxian point of view.

He paid a heavy price for his activities. When the prison
couldn't brenk him through solitary confinement, they at-
tempted to have him killed by other inmates: “They were
forced to frame me and set me up for the final kill.” The word
was out among white convicts: “Get Jackson. Tt will do you
some good.” Once he remarked that there had been twenty

setups on ide prison. Tt got 50 that when he left his
cell he was always ready to parry an attack.

But nothing could mitigate the pain of confine.
ment.

And
passed.
In the context of his life what happened next hnd
a grim inevitability.
On January 13, 1970, a new exercise yard was
opened in the maximum security wing of Soledad
Prison. Eight whites and seven blacks were skin-

searched and sent out into the yard. Predictably a fight
broke out between the whites and the blacks. Without

any warning, a tower guard who had a reputation as a

*Unpublished interview.

years siretched out and a whole decade

crack shot began to fire. He fired four times and three
black inmates were killed. One white prisoner was
wounded in the groin by shot (hat ricocheted.

Black survivors claim that one of the wounded men
bled t0 death an the concrete floor. Three days later the
Monterey County Grand Jury found that the Killings
were justifiable homicide. Less than half an hour afler
this verdict was announced on the prison radio, a white
guard, (not the guard who had fired the shots) was
found beaten 10 denth. All the convicts in the wing
where the killing took place were put into isolation. On
February 28, Fleeta Drumgo, John Cluichette, and
George Jackson were formally charged with the mur-
der.

The prison authoriies accused George because, 9
their words, “he was the only one who could have dene

iL" With their total powes over the inmate population
the power of parole, soltary confinement, the power

oF life and death—they were certain they could et the

kind of lestimony (hey needed when the trial came.

When George's parents cane to visit
1o bring his younger brother Jonathun,
Jonathan would get off 10 one side of the visis
and whisper together. What went on between them can
be scen in this book in the excerpts from Janathag'y
correspondence. AL the age of sixteen Jonathan had an
extraordinary insight into the nature of guerrilla war-
fare. In some of his leters, George was later ta refer tq
Jonathan as his alier ego. Afler George was accused of
the murder of the guard on the 16th of Janu-

a1y, Jonathan began 1o get his first taste of Amerikan jus-
tice,

Jonathan himself wrote:

People huve said that I am ubsessed with my brother's
case, and the movement in general. A person that was
close to me once said that my life was too wrapped up
in my brother's case, and that | wasn't cheerful enough
foe her. It's true 1 don't laugh very much any more. |
have but one question to ask wl you people and peopie

that think like you, what would you do if it was your
brother?

On August 7, 1971, Jonathan Juckson entered a court-
room in San Rafael, Californi nd attempted (0 frec three
black convicts, onc of whom was on trial for ussauliing &
guard. He armed the cons and took five hostages, in-
cluding the assistant district attorney and the judge, st
dressed in his robes. He died a few minutes later in 3 hail
Of bullets inside a rentcd van that was being used for the -
getaway,

“We're tnking over," he suid. Aq Aeventeen, Jonathun
b alecudy come 10 the conclusion that the only way he
could affiem his sense of i -

only way he could be heard was by an act of suicidal daring.
“You can take our pictures, We are the revolutionaries.”
With these words he announced to the world that he was not

& criminal, because he no longer recognized the legitimacy
of white law.

When his sister heard the news of his death, she cried
out, “But he was only a boy." Her mother corrected her:
“Don't say that. He was a man. They killed his father a long
time ago. Jonathan wasn't going to let that happen to him.
He was going to live like a man.”

After his death, George wrote in a letter:

T haven't shed one tear, I'm 100 proud for that, a beauti-
ful, besutiful man-child with a sub-machine gun. He

knew how 1o be with people. 1 loved Jonathan, but his
death only sharpens my fighting spirit.

V'm proud just to have knawn that he was flesh of
my flesh, blood of my blaod.

In a news conference three days after, he ssid, "1 loved
that boy. 1 was the first to stand him up in his crib. Not a

crib, really. All we had was a box. I taught him how 1o walk;

1 wanted 1o tench him how to fly. UMl think of him now as
1 think of Che Guevs

George Jackson's Inst book, Blood in My Eye, speaks
with the voice of the dead, not only the dead George Jackson
and his brother, Jonathan, but the fiving dead in all of the
Juils and ghettos of this country. It speaks with the voices
of the men who have slready given themselves up for dead

and who have nothing leR 1o give—except a death for the
people.

1tis very much a baok by a man who considered himself
doomed. In his last letters, George wrote about the judicial
process a3 “the endgame.” He had foreseen and foretold his
ansassination at San Quentin o thousand times (“ten years
of blocking knife thrusts and the pick handles of sndistic
pigs").
e fact that the author of this book lived with hus death
for 30 many years gives his book a kind of special impor-
fance. But it would be 2 mistake 1o consider it simply as the
work of an individual—George slways refused 1o consides
himsclf an individual. Untold thousands b
outside prison join
war.

This bouk was weitten litcrally in bedlam, with the au.
thor locked in solitary for u minimum of twenty-three and
& half hours a day, in the midst of raucous screaming that
flever stopped-—the screams of prisoners being beaten, the

screund of men cetreating from intolerable pain into mad.
ness.

b insude and
proclamation of total revolutionary

1t is a book ubout taking the revolution that Geurge
worked and died for inside prison out inta socicty at large.
lis message 10 his revolutionary brothers is crystal-cicar.
Setule your quarrels, come together, undersiand the reality of
our situation, undersiund that fascism is already here, tha
people are already dying who could be saved, that generations
more will die o liv poor butchered half-lives if you fail 1 act,
Do what must be done. discover your humanity and your love

in revolution. Pass on the lorch. Join us, give up your life for
the people.

sacre.* This would only have be

cen in keeping with the char-
acter of his entire life.

—Gregory Armatrong
October 15, 1971

AN UBdan e by the s of he Son G
shortly afer the author's death.

"
BlooQ N 1z

My Eye

We must aceept the eventuality of bringing the
US.A. 10 its knees; accept the closing off of critical
scetians of the city with barbed wire, armored pig
carviers crisscrossing the strects, soldiers everywhere,
tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling,
Vinck ngainl the daylight sky, he smel of cordie
hause-tn-house searches, doort being kicked in, the
commanness of death.

March 28, 1971

Tetter to a Comrade®

education class you have formed."From her words and your
messages, T sense that we are il together. We've gone
through approximately the same changes since they sepa-
rated us—the confused flight to mational revolutionary
Africa, through the riot stage of revolutionary Black
Amerika. We have finally arrived at scientifi revolutionary
sacialism with the rest of the colonial world. | was hoping

that you wouldn't get trapped in the riot stage like s great
many other very sincere brothers. | have to browbent them
every dny down here. They think they don't need ideoloy,
strategy or tactics. They think being a warrior is quite
enough. And yet, without discipline or direction, they'll end
up washing cars, or unclaimed bodies in the city-state’s
morgue. But 1 was almost certain that woulda't be your
destination, brother.

“Though 1 no longer adhere o all of Nechayev's revolu-
tionary eatechismt (100 cold, very much like the fascist psy-
chology; revolution should be love-inspired), his first fine
contains the incontrovertible truth, the black revolutionary
s twice donmed.

Al times I wonder ahout the present state of revolution-

;A prison comeade, of the wuthor's wha must remuin nonymous.

Nechaye Russinn st Vs cate

Zera The Slory of Terrurism, by Robert Payne—Ed.

max, Youny, Bunche

+ thanks 10 the forces of gaod. |
think Lady Lamax is will around, though, representing

Africa with her Anglo-Saxon vernaculur. Her husbund, L.
Lomax was C.LA. Did you read The Reluctane African,
Which was sheer propaganda for the “owner,
bluckface. These arc the really dungeraus people. When we
leap 10 destroy the “owner" we'll have these kinds of niggers
{0 fight. They wil use the tactic “white lefi-wing causes™ 1o
protect their bosses' “while right-wing cause.”

You must teach that socialism-communalisan is as ol
a8 man; that its principles formed the basis of masily il the

are still neo-colonies. Any
ican military dictatorship is
a6 much a fscist s Hoover. Are you aware of how the
people are living under these so-called Africanized fuscis,
cultures? The Congo wnd the entire West Coust of Africs
excepting Guinca and Mauri

right-wing puppets. I'm
horoughly sick of the ol Jess B. Simples* (young oncs too),

They'll be your main source of opposition in commuaizing

“Fictional hero of the Langston Hughes storics— gy,

the black colonies here, The “goud white people™ who own
hings will slways give them a few inches in heie Pupers or

other media. That's how fascisim works, 'nflunlr.'mg the
nasscs and institutions hrough cltes,

0110 Severat (MaCK 1awYErS wiien | Bo1 U last case
of pig killing hung on me. We started off agreing, but they

abandoned me the moment 1 attacked Anglo-Saxon law,
capitali

m and the Mlues, and then went on to recognize
Rinck Panthers, Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Nyerere
and Odinga instead of Kenyaita, Lumumba instead of that
little punk in Ethiopia, and Peking instead of Atlanta or
Freetown. That will be your main source of opposition—the
black running dog. But i's unfair to sutomatically condemn
2 black person for not understanding economic and political
subtleties; some are simply confused in an honest way.

Some of the arguments they pose il center around the
despondent cliché that " Africa will invent something unique,
it won't be socinlism, communism, or capitalism.” Often
theyll leave out the denunciation of capitalism altogether.
You must explain the economic motive of human social

ory and bring out that there are only two ways by which
societies can ever be governed and organized for production
of their needs: the various types of totalitarian methods
represented by assorted capitafist and fascist arrangements,
and the cgalitarian method. Egalitarianism is people’s gov-
ernment, and people's government and economics is social-
ism, dinlectical and materialist. How else can socleties be
governed? There must be hierarchies or the elimination of
hicrarchies. Then show that the greatest conteibutions to
egalitarisnism came from Africa, the greatest and the first
examples.

Then, comrade, you will encounter the faint-hearted
and illogical types like All/Clay, entertainer and tool of the
capitalist cliques. Their i is: *Ain't nobody but black folks
gonna die in a revolution." This argument completely over-
Tooks the fact that we slways have done most of the dying,
and still do: dying st the stake, through socisl neglect or in
US. forcign wars. The point is now to construct a situation
where someone else will join in the dying. IF it fails and we
have to do most of the dying anyway, we're certainly no
worse off than before.

We find ourselves today forced into a reexamination of
Whe whole nature of black revoltionary consciousness and

s relative standing within a cl
of racism so sensitized that it ex
st variation in skin tone.

The breat majority of blucks reject racism. They have

never found it expedient, wise or honorable (o tuke gn (he
charactesistics of the enemy. I thiuk it s vitall

sures that for blacks @ concern for the “survival™ of the race
is not, pateatly not, definable as racisin.

Any explanation for so
or future, must present valid
truvel back into history, hone

ass society stecped in a forn / ¢
tends itsell cven (0 the sligh-

! phenomenon, pust, preseat
arguments and proof. As we
st descriptions and deinitions
willinevitably overlap. They will difer depending on thelr
gcopalitical standpoiat. Ideally, they should be colored wigh
s litle subjective interpretation a5 possible from today's
world. The present, duc 1o its staggering complexitics, is
almost as conjectural as the Ppast. We must prove our predic.
tions about the future with action,

So all my comments must be considered the merest
sUpposition—they must be considered in

we must consider all other camments in
attention only iy

Just the same way
this arca. They merit
that a3 300 a3 1 make them it won't be
“much longer before I go about proving tiem,

As 8 slave, the sacial phenomenon that cngages my
whole cansciousness is, of course, revolution,

The slave—and revolution.

Born (0 a premature death,
worker, 0dd:job man, the cleancr, the caugh, the avan wner
hatches, without bail—that's me, the colonial victis, Any-
0ne who can pass the civil scrvice cxaminution today can kil
me lomarrow. Anyone who passed the civil service examina.
tion yesterday can kill me today with complete immunity.
Fvelived with repression every moment of my lie, a repres:
slon 50 formidable that any movement on my part can only
bring rclif, the respite of a small victory or the release of
death. In every sense of the term, in every sease tha's real,
I'm a slave 10, and of, property.

menial, subsistence-wage

can anly mean the overthrow of all existing property rela-
tions and the destruction of all institations that directly or
indirectly support existing property relations. It must in-
clude the total suppression of all classes and individuals who
endorse the present state of property relations or who stend
to gain from it. Anything less than this s reform.
Government and the infrastructure of the enemy capi-
talist state must be destroyed 10 get at the heart of the prob-
lem: property relations. Otherwise there is no revolution.
Reshuffle the governmental personnel and forms, without
changing property relations and economic institutions, and
you have produced simply another reform stage in the old
bourgeois revolution. The power to alter the present imbal-
ances, to remedy the critical defects of an advanced indus-
trial state ordered on an antiquated set of greed-confused
motives, rests with control over production and distribution
of wealth. If the 1 percent who presently control the wealth
of the society maintain their control after any reordering of
the state, the changes cannot be said to be revolutionary.

“The prerequisite for a successful popular revolution is
that the victors totally junk the old machinery of state.
Lenin stressed in the State and Revolution: “One thing
especially was proven by the commune, viz. that the
‘working class cannot simply Iay hold of the ready-made
state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” And

again: “the working class must break up, smash the
ready-made state machinery, and not confine itself
merely 10 layi

hold of it.” The reason is simple
enough: A popular revolution means a revolution by
and for the popular classes. Its ultimate aim is to bring
all classes into one, that is, destroy the class statel*

*John Gerassi, The Coming of the New International (New Vork:
World Publishing, 1970), . 40.

Revalutionary change means the seizure of all that is
held by the 1 percent, and the transference of these holdings
into the hands of the remaining 99 percent. 1f the | percent
are siuply displaced by another | prc

change has not taken place. A social revolutic
oF the modern corporate capitalist state can
breakup of that state and a completely new f
ics and culture. As slaves, we understay

the mechanics of distribution must be r
lem of the Black Colouy and the Brown Colomy, those of e
entire 99 perceat who are being munipulaicd, cun never be
redressed as long as the necessary resources o their sofution
arc lic personal property of wn eatrancous minority mots.
vated salely by the need for its own survival. And that e,
\raneous minority will never consider the proper solutions,
We have this o record from voice speaking from inside (he
Fourth Reich—a Licuteuaut Gavernor of California orating,
in public 0n poverty: “One-third of the population will |
waysbe ll-housed, il-clothed, and il-fed. Many urban prob.
lems are really conditions tha

cevolutionary ; 5
on after the fuct
only mean the,

rm of cconom-
that ownership und
eversed. The prob.

“o00l" or cautious. It's bold, audacious, violeat,
slon oficy, disdainful hatred! It can hardly be any.
without raising & fundamental contradiction, I

an expres-
other way

revolution,
and especially revolution in Ame anything less than

an elfective delense/attack weapon and
Ppeople to mount now, i

a charger for the
is meaningless (o the great awjority
of the slaves. If revolution is tied (0 dependence on. 1hy
inserutabilities of “long-range politics,” it cannot be made
relevant Lo the person who expects 10 die tomorrow. There
can be 00 rigid time controls attached 10 “the process
Offers tself as relief, no if those for wh

hat
om it is principally

intended are under attack now. If the proponcnts of revolu.
i

4 cannol learn to distinguish and translate the theoretical
o the pracical, if they continue to debate just how 10 call
up and haruess the conscious motive forces of revoluli
fevolutionary ideal will be the loser—it will be rejecied,

The principal reservoir of revolutionary poential v

Amerika lies in wait inside the Black Colony. lts sheer nu-
desperate historical relation to the vio-
tive system, and the foct of its present
status in the creation of wealth force the black stratum at the
base of the whole class structure into the forefront of any
revolutionary scheme. Thirty percent of all industrial wark-
ers are black. Close to 40 percent of all industrial support
roles are filled by blacks. Blacks are still doing the work of
the greatest slave state in history. The terms of our servitude
are all that have been altered.

The Black Colony can and will influence the fate of
things to come in the U.S.A. The impact of black revolution-
ary rage nctunlly could carry at lenst the opening stages of
a socialist revolution under certain circumstances—not dis-
counting some of the complexities created by the specter of
racism. However, if we are ever going to be successful in
tying black energy and rage to the international socialist

revolution, we must understand that racial complexities do
exist,

When the Minister of Defense and Servant of the Peo-
ple* attacks the strategy of the Amerikan Communist Party
and the liberal-eN revisionists for their failure 1o devise a
policy which takes into account the spacial circumstances of
‘Yankee-style racism, he is not attacking communism and the
collective ideal, He is questioning the Communist Party and
other less committed sections of the left revolutionary mave.
ment shout their awareness of the unique problems presented

by a particularly vicious and immediately threatening ra-
cism.

Huey P Newion.

My brother Jonathan, a communist revolutionary ta the
core, writing me in June of 1969, theorized as follows:

We are quite ohviously faced with a need to organize

same small defenses 1o the more fiagrant abuses of the
system now. | mean this in a military sense. The period
of disorganized activity, of riots and ralles, and purcly
political agitation/education has come 1 a clase. The
violence of the opposition has brought it to un end We

cannat raise consciousness another mullimeter without

8 uew sel of actics. Long-range political plays alone are

not practical for us. Ta me, the concept seems 1o assume

that someday in the distant future we'll produce a 700,

pound flea to Aght the Paper Tiger. That's nat too likely

10 happen. While we await the precise moment when all

of capitalism's victims will indignantly rise 10 destroy
the system, we are being devoured in family lots at the
whim of this thing. There will be no super-slave. Some
of us are going Lo have to take our courage in hand and
build a bard revolutionary cadre for selcctive retaliatory
violence. We have numbers an our sideif the whites who
support revolutionary change can preveat this thing
from degenerating into race war. The picture of the U.S.
a5 a Paper Tiger is quite accurate, but there is a great
deal of work to be done on its destruction and I'm of the
opiaion that if there is a big job of growing o do, the
sooner begun he saoner done.

Both Huey and Jonathan are understandubly calling for
the programmed revolution (0 take into account the fact of
racial genocide. Jonathan is calling from his grave, adding
another vaice 10 the many thunderous graveyard aficma-
tions which, for us blacks, speeds the revolution 1o its ulti-
mate issue.

In order to develop revolutionary consciousness, we
must learn how revolutionary cansciousness can be raised to
the highest point by stimuli from the vanguard elements. We
recogaize and appreciate the decades of hard, sometimes
dangerous work done in the nume of revolution by the older
socialist parties. Perhaps we wouldn’t exist ut all were it not.
for their efforts. 1t is our sincere wish to operate in complete
harmony with these older groups. But we must create new
impetus and greater intellectual and physical encrgy if the
forces of reaction are not to win another extended repricve.
A joint effort will make the task of averwhelming our com-
mon enemy all the simpler. But if our present differences
cannot be reconciled by an hanest and fearless search fo

7
positive and more practical superstructure applicable to the
circumstances surrounding our lives. In his Guerrilla War-
Jare Lenin wrote: “New forms of struggle, unknown to the
participants of the given period, inevitably arise as the given
socinl situation changes, the coming erisis willintroduce new
forms of struggle that we are now unable (o foresee."

Tn other wards, the old guard must not fail to under-
stand that circumstances change in time and space, that
there can be nothing dogmatic about revolutionary theory.

s 10 be born out of each papular struggle. Each popular
struggle must be analyzed historically to discover new ideas.
In the words of John Gerassi: “Building from one to the
other, eventually the revolutionary cadre would become
equipped with a theory rooted in experience, broadencd by

historical knowledge, tested by combt, and fortified by re-
fection.”t

After ten or fifteen generations of laboring on a subsist-
ence level, after a hundred and forty years of political agita-
tion and education, we grow impatient—not that we fail 10
understand the risks and complenitics of antl-establishment
warfare. We simply want 1o five.

We question a strategy that seems to have stopped short
of providing a tactic for growth and for survival. Terror
tactics like lynching will never be allowed to work on us. If
terror is going to be the choice of w=apons, there must be

funerals on both sides. And let the whole enemy power com-
plex be conscious of thatl

The superstructure of any edifice that is as extensive and
85 lofty as revolution must be reexamined with each succes-
sive layer, for faults, for possible improvement of method.

We have the foundation of our sirategy. We have stud-
ied Marx and Lenin for a description and history of the
modern industrial state. We've organized our thoughts and
trained our bodies for the ordeal of “gravedigging.” Our

vanguard elements understand the simple importance of
‘winning consciousness. OF course eduzation and familiariza-

Guerrlla Warfare,
op. cit, p. 42,

tion with the core issues an a br
revolutionary violence. If peaple are
1o revolutionary violeuce they must first be educated intg an
seceptance of the fuct that there s no altcmuave, o oy Ihe
alternative s less inviting than a fighy,

Our whale questian is; jus
will suppart the violent revolu

0ad Lasts. precede hary
1o understand and refaje

't Whiat level of cq,

A vanguard which fears that conscio,
spontancity, which fears to put for(h,

UAESS will autseyy
4 bold “plan* thyy

¥ am not implying that the van
people's role. 1 am not imply;
clely.” We mustnever forget that it i the peaple whe, change
clreumstances and that the educator himsef nees o
ing. “Going among the people, learning from the. People, ang
serving the people” i relly stating that we oy g out
exaclly whal the people nced and organize fepy arouny
these s, I the statement impies a “caning g, some.
where ehe, it substantiates nosupeciority bt rathey biolog.

8UACd party set oy (he
"society superior 10 5.

2

feamty. VIS concept meeds very e
" imetantinting beyand the obvious fact of 8 nation of slaves
“+ho control no more wealth than some clothes, perhaps a
- ehless automobile, and & roof of sorts aver their heads,

V.1, Lenin, Sclected Works.

st who have been successfully conditioned to fee! rich or at
lest contented.

The task of a revolutionnry—is to make revolution.”
The word “manufacture” can be substituted for the word
wmake,” and the meaning, comes through a litle better for
us.

The fascists have deliberately manufactured a false
sense of security by various stratagems. They will never per-
“wit conditions to go out of their control as long as “bread

"d circuses" appease. We clearly cannot dodge our respon-
biltes by giving credence to slogans built around *condi-
Yions." Conditions will never be altogether rightfor a broadly
pased revolutionary war \unless the fascists are stricken by an
ncharacteristic R of total madness. Should we wait for
Something that s not ikely to occur at least for decades? The
conditions that are not present must be manufactured.
‘Recall; we had people who [elt conditions weren't right
in the 19305 lso. The government’s bread lines were backed
o around every corer, and bascball was at s peak. Private
ownesship of public property should have been destroyed in
That decade, but the “conditions weren't right” The van-
gunrd clements betrayed the. propie of this nation and the
Svorid as a result of their ailure o seize the time. The conse-
quencen were catastrophic war and s new round of imperi-
alist_expansion, this time carcied out by the greatest
{mperiatist of all time—the Yankee brigand. There would
now be no Indochina "situation” (10 mention one of dozens
of like situations) if we had taken oursclves seriously then,
“when all conditions were avorable. 1t was a slightly below-
conscious desire to avoid doing the US. further violence, and
echaps peneral distaste for arganized violence, in paricu-
Tar, that robhed us of our chance to win on that aceasion

2Z
when, ironically, u win would have cost very liule. There
wasn't then even the illusion of well-being. 23

In a report written by Comrade Jonathan Jackson 1n
November of 1969 just before Fred Hampion's and Mark
Clark's murders in Chicago and the shoot-out at the Central
Avenue Panther headquarters in Los Angeles,® he says,

195 come down on us hard now. There are twenty differ-
ent breeds of pigs patrolling every streel in the colony
here. I mean every section of the city that can be said
10 be predominately Black is saturated with the estab-
lishment's demented gunslingers, of every sort. They're
all nervous and dangerous as king cobras. Spics, double
agents, entrapment, a war of electronics, house-to-house
scarches, doors being kicked in. I feel just as you do on
these issues. I'm just ot going for it, cven if it means
fighting them by mysclf. If they kick down the door of
a house I've stopped at they'll ful in dead. The 9 mm
Browaing weighs something like 2 pounds. I'm not car-
rying this extra weight around my beli for nothing. It
has a 13-vound clip, I keep one in the barcel, 14 shots.
Save me a cell on murder ««'s row there, | could have 14
murder charges any day now.

Tey to get the picture—down every through streer
they cruise just a few moments apart at most. Some-
times the stupid bastards arc bumper 10 bumper. Each
one of the cruisers has a different residential sireet here
in the Black communitics that seems 1o belong 1o them.
10s patterned. Let's suy two pig ears, “P," and “P,," are
both traveling south on Central. They'll pairol ix 1o
seven blocks on that main street. “F,” will then make
a left oa SOtk Street, “P," a right on Slst Sirect, etc. It

*Taea Blck Panther Party leaders kiled during.
police, Hurmpton was the chaieman of the lling

Special report prepared by the commission.
Clark caucluded that the purpose of the
desteoy. I aha caneluded that Hampiay
shols fired a close range while he wis.
0n Central was the result of 3 police
headquarters. The Paothers baltlcd the

WA O N LA ECI LOUIE U8 AUATE VICKS & 1
effect always surrounded, cut of, divided, sub-divided.
Repression is herel I've followed them, studied them,
holed a few of their cars—you should see how they'll
run. when they can't lell from exactly what quarter
they're drawing fire. We overestimate them, or perhaps
have litle sense of our own power. In theshort run, and
here 1 mean in an isolated tactical operation sitting
within & particular political design, with military weap-
ons we could ensily out-gun the establishment’s firs fine
of defense. What, for example, would the city pigs do if
they are confronted by a .38 snubbed revolver in the
hand of 8 brother who's fired that .38 perhaps 10 times
in his life? Then take the same situation but give the
brother a Aamethrower (stolen from the military), give
the brother an armored van from inside which he could
use said fiamethrower, give him also two comrades in
arms, one cquipped with an M60 machine gun, the
other an anti-tank racket launcher. Pigs are punks. Give
me 10 cells armed as I've just mentioned and we could
start 10 enforce some of the demands of the people.
Their present show of strength is actually their weak-
ness—show—they're too visible. Comrades ssk me
sometimes what can we do against “all these pigs.” |
state it simply—we put them to death. They look at me
251 10 say, “You're nuts, man.” When I go sbout my
explanation their eyes go blank, or they are distracted
by something five blocks down the street. They're not

us, smile) seem 100 fantastic for them to even listen. Yet
it doesn't seem fantastic for them to 3o against the
LAP.D. with a snubbed-nosed revolver. There's a
great deal of work 10 be done—with ourselves—yet. But

the day of the real dragon is coming. Long live the
guerrillall

Jonathan was sixteen years old then and he had just that
vear heen allowed to drive a car. He liked 1o drive, and
nbserve. T1e had long since learned 10 like the fight. Guns and
weapons in general were his forte. 1 carefully reminded him
that =ven vanguard violence was organized violence. He re-

turned one of Funon's lines:
und the acting 10 begin."

1 anather of his repart, afer the Chicaga murders f
Hamplon and Clark and the five-hour shoot a Black Pan-
ther headquarters in Los Angeles, he writes;:

s time for the talking (o cnd,

The fact of Amerikan terror, slave cistence in genera),
seems Lo have almost destroyed the nervous system of
the Black maa here. They are frightened, and fect they
are amart for being so. Those that were unaffected, thovs
that escaped, those that refused ta be intimidaged, v,
mayed, prudent ta the paint of cowardice, have either
Joined or supported the Black Panther Partyl They got
down prelty cold. One point nceds (o be cleared up,
However. I recall you remarking that in an urban guer.
illasituation the military proper must be hidden, sepa-
rate from the political front, since unlike a classica]

iap counlryside struggle where the encmy's prin.
cipal forces are 30 miles down the raad, with vy the
cnemy s all around, within & few moments of strike.
Ther should, I fecl, be one branch that i purcly pol
cal, operating the rent strikes, the breakfast programs,
the People's Bazaars where all sorts of food and loth
ing, utensils aad tooly are sold, hospitals or clinics (free,
of course), and what 1 willterm cottage shops to employ
those wha will work for the new medium of exchange
—love and loyalty—at such things as the making of (he
clothing and cannig of the food for the People’s By,
2aar. Then there should be the super-secret branch—tg
caforce. The military, the comrades with the nervous
cauipment to make the best use of the M6, the M 16,
the flamethrower, the hand grenade, the mortar, our
armored vans and equipmeat in front and plenty of gun
ports, bulll-proof ices, etc. You dig, onc of the large
trucks properly prepared (plastic may be the best armor,
114 inches will 310p & 220 grain slug ficcd from 3 4
sub-machine gun; 2 inches (0 3 inches wil protget you
from high-power riflc bulcts)—and with heavy ar-
mor-plercing, ammo-cquipped M60 part in the fron;
cab pointing in the direction that the (ruck is moving

2

—
&
and one pomting oul 1o the rear ) er, nas
whatever strcet they are moving down in a guerrilla
amhush tactic we'll call angulation. Esch one of these
guns pointing front and back, up the street and back
down it, has the advantage of being able to rck that
entire street with only a slight back and forth lateral
movement. One armor-piercing bullet may render sev-
eral of the unrighteous dead.

And comrade, the pigs are so proud of their new
itdle "copters—they're suckers—it's almost comical to
hear them bonst and watch them look to the sky with
the pride of power. The pig who will get up in ane of
those things is as stupidly suicidal as a duck trying to
outfty a charge of 12-gauge shot. The fierce and beauti-
ful Cong shaot down a couple dozen of the very biggest
and best ‘copters Yankee invention can produce every
week. These things that the pigs use are toys, sitting
ducks. One, | mean one, sofid or armor-piercing .30
caliber bullet aimed at sny one of several points—the
tail rotor, the hub of the main rotor, or even the opera-
tor—uwill reduce $200,000 worth of Yankee invention to
serap.

1 was pursuing this joke of a secondary education
when the whole thing occurred, but acting with my
small thing would have hardly helped much, though it
may have helped raise consciousness some—the be-
siegers altacked from the rear, the idea of it—strong!
Militarily it would have demonstrated to the pigs that
the Panther Party is not out there on the limb alone, and
of course it would have promoted among the penple that
confidence of ability we always speak on when togetherl
How would they have felt (the pigs and the people) if
the nameless, faceless, lightning-swift soldier of the pea-
ple could have reached up, twisted the tail of their
$200,000 death bird, and hurled it into the streets,
‘broken, ablazell 1 think that sort of thing has more to
do with consciousness than anything else I can think of.
Long live the Pantherl Power 1o the Peaple Who Don't
Fear Freedom.

Janathan was sisteen years old then, | repeat.

Consciansness i the opposite of indifference, of blind-

26
ness, blankness. Promoting consciousncss invelves the gen- 27
eral dissemination of the concept that cach of us is part of
a universal action and interaction; that poles are somewhere
counected; that there are material causes for traum, veetig,
degenerative disease. Connections, connections, causc and
effect, clarity on their cclation and interrelations, the connec.
tion with the past, continuity, flow, movement, the aware.
ness that nothing, nothing remains the same for loug, Aund
it follows that i a thing is not building, it is certainly decay-
ing—that life s revolution—and thut the world will die if we
don't read and act out its imperatives. Not an its awn will
it die, but rather because the forces of reaction have created
imbalances that will kill it: *The sceds of its uwn destruc.
tion."” Our destruction (00—in the cpoch of the Bomb, the
nerve gases, the massive precipitation of industrial wastes

Consclousness is knowledge, recognition, foresight;
common experience and perception; sensibility, alertness,
mindfulness. It stirs the senses, the blood; it expases and
suggests; it will objecufy, enrage, dircct. There are no pas
tive formulas for a thing so complex. We have guidelines
only Lo help us with its growth. This means that iter we are
done with our books, they must be Put aside; and the search
for method will depend on observations, correct analyses,
crealivity and scizing the time,

Sometime after the December 4, 1969, shaot-out around
the Panther Party Los Angeles headquarters, Jomathan com.
meited on the “connections,” the aftermaths

Have you grasped the significance of the backlash? 1t
has stung the fascist. The people are in foment, all of
them, of all persuasion. They don't dig midught or
dawn raiding parties, bullets with steel jackets, cow
ardly pigs perched upon their roofs, the same gases
manulaclured for use against the Vietnamese Liberators
blawing back inta their faces: Repression. Do you sce
the efect it has on the uncommitted? Comrade, Repres-
sion expases. By drawing violence fram the beayt, (he
vanguard party is demonsirating for the world ta exann.
ine just exactly what terms their rule 18 predicated

But check—Dlacks are conditioned to scquiesce. 48
They have, in general, been led to befieve that this sys-

tem is the product and property of the
that the white man will protect it with his
white man is a killer, a refiex killer, that all we can ever
hope for is & reforming or expanding of the system to
include the few of us who can make ourselves accepts-
ble; “it's 100 big for us," “you can't Aight city hall," i

can't happen in Amerikkka,” and all of that shit, pig-
shit.

Double check—all of the objective conditions are
present here in the Black Colony for revolution, the
physical thing, I mean, "want” and “want to” (the real
fecling, not the various pretenses). East Los Angeles
hasn't changed a bit since you were out, Watts is sill a
depressed area. Many of the west-side districts are start-
ing to resemble the older black districts. The issue of
employment is still the same; we do 30 to 40 percent
of the nation’s work for | percent of the returns, and
2 huge pool of us is always kept unemployed to reduce
the value of the labor of those who are, just ike 10 years
ago, just like 1864-65 when we were thrown on the
Iabor market—hungry, ragged, crowded into clap-
boards, and unhappy. Nothing has changed since you
left the street, comrade, not in this respect at least.

Perhaps our condition stands out a little more glarinly,
that's all.

But you know what's be
has viciously attacked the “system™—the omnipotent
system attacked by the slave. Sort of like the worker bee
growing so disgusted with the quality of his i that he
turns and attacks the bear. The other bees will under-
stand, they do understand, and all sorts of bees, even
those who thought the bear their rightful ruler see him

differcntly when he foams at the mouth, and bites at his
own tai

1 think you were on the right track with the idea
concerning repression. 1L is, it has 1o be, a part of the
revolutionary process, a necessary stoge in the develop-
ment of revolutionary conseiousness. The situation be-

building. The vanguard

ing as it was and is, the Black expericnce is what I'm
referring 1o here. The milder lynch-example type repres-
sion i accepted by us as a necessary part of life, bul the
new harsher thing brought an by the political thrust of
the vanguard party serves (o show even the most tracta-
ble of the reformers among us that firstly, the sysiem
will not, or actually cannol, meet our demands; se.
ondly, it clearly illustrates the real terms of our
existence under capitalism, the nature of it, and how
foul a piece of the pic would be even if we could have
some.

One fundumental problem remuins: the survival of
the vanguard political party and I mean in good form.

‘We must think (o the righteous elding of a clandestine
armyll

Jon

Lenin, Guevara and Fanon, all in their particular fash-
ion, postulate that before revolution can take place, all other
forms of redress must be exhausted, clearly exhausted. Elec-
toral processes must have broken down, the confidence of the
electorate in any of the old forms completely shattcred, confi-
dence in the ability of the old system o honestly organize any
aspect of public life must be shaken to the core. Years and
years ago it may have been an acceplable tuctic L0 organize
2 people's ticket of solid worker and revolutionary creden-
tials and arm it with an ideal platform—only Lo be defeated
by & mud-slinging opportunist-warlord, demonstrably in-
ferior, scum-swilling pig. Then pass out a pamphlet (o ex.
plain 10 the people how the system has failed them, or speak
it in Pershing Square—or, years ugo, in the Campus Hall
Today it is not a taci counterrevolution. After forty

pretty clear that it will not suffice. Years ago,
“working with" and attempling to influeace union leader.
ship may have been judicious, but the government has long
sines infirated and bought off this eadership and legislated
sy the stcike. Union-hall specchies and pusnphlet passing
are playing at revolution,

To disconnect revolutionary consciousness from revolution-
izing nctivity, 1o build consciousness with political agitation
and cducational issue-making alone is idealistic rather than
materialist. The effect has been reformism rather than revo-
lution. When any election is held it will fortfy rather than
destroy the credibility of the power brokers. When we partic-

tead of disrupt, we're lending
iy, and destroying our own. With all the factors
of control aver the electoral pracess in the hands of the
minority ruling cless, the people’s party can always be made.
10 seem isolated, unimportant, even extraneous. If these tac-
tics still give the appearance of revolution to some after
decades of miscarriage, we are justified in replacing them as
vanguard.

When people begin to express their disgust at the dema-
gogic and reformist maneuvers of the vanguard parties, thev
will discover in real action a new form of political activity
which in no way resembles the old:

These politics are the politics of leaders and organizers
living inside history who take the lend with thelr brains
and their muscles in the fight for freedom. These politics
are revolutionary and social, and these new facts which
the native will now come to know exist only in action.
‘They are the essence of the fight which explodes the old
colonial truths and reveals unexpected facets, which
brings out new meanings and pinpoints the contra-
dictions camoufiaged by these facts. The people engaged
in the struggle who because of it command and know
these facts, po forward, freed from colonialism and fore-
warned of all attempts at mystification, inoculated
against all national anthems. Violence alone, violence
committed by the people, violence organized and edu-
eated by its lenders, makes it possible for the masses to
understand social truths and gives the key to them.
Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the
practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-dress
parade and the blare of the trampets. There's nothing

30
save minimum of readaptation, a few reforms at the
10p, a flag wavi nd down there at the bottom an

undivided mass stil living in the middle ages, endlessly
‘marking time.*

In the gencral retreat (o avoid full commitiment, (o weite
the discomfort out of revolution, some have raiscd a deba
among us that has degenerated into name-calling, quoting
the same authorities (o validate diametrically apposed ideas,
and ultimately creating a process that is dividing us w0 two

mutually exclusive or contradietory groups. The overall
effec is (0 reduce us 1o carieature.

‘Where more than one individual is involved in any hie
situation, the fact of subjectivism will always make differ-
caces based on opinion and interpretution—a problem in
exchanges, in reaching the necessary means fur the initiation
of callective activity. Some debate will always be carried on.
Hawever, on the basics we must somehow agree or nothing
will get dane. ANl opinians are not of equal valuc, and there
is such a thing as counlerproductive revisianism

Stupidity is nat unknown 10 our lang-range political
policy makers. Participation in electoral politics organized
by the cnemy statc—after recogaizing that the whole process
must be discredited 8 conditional step into revolution, and
particularly participation that tends 10 authenticate tins
process—is the oppasite of revolution. 1t's a taciic for the
ultra-cightists. With history as a guide we could never mahe
such monumeatal errors.

The history of the U.S.—the blood-soaked, urime-
being; the wreckage and demise of its
human character under the wheels of a two-bundred-year-
old headlong flight with hecdless, frighicned animals at the
controls of a machine that has mastercd them—allows for no
appeal on a stricily ideological level. George Wallace or
Adolf Hitler would fare better at the polls of an honest
election than Huey Newlon and Tom Hayden. But again,
what i an hanest election after the fuct of manopoly capital?

Repression is indeed a part of revolution, a natural as.
pect of antithesis, the always-to-be-expeeted defense-atisch,

hess RS AN gy
apainst this fundamental hcl are false and labored to the
point of being completely illogical. Can power be seriously
challenged without a response? Will the robber baton, the
tycoon, the Fuehrer allow us to seize his privilege without
resistance? Can we steal it away from the greatest bandit of
all time with sleight of hand alone? Incrediblel The fascists
understand the value of mass psychology, are familiar with
its use, and hold all the important implements of its effective
control. Put they are ot aware of our existence and our
general strategy regarding the reaching of people.

‘The whole situntion can be reduced to & minority ruling
clique engaging the people’s vanguard elements for control
of the masses. The ruling clique approaches its task with a
“what 1o think" program; the vanguard elements have the
much more dificult job of promoting “how to think."

No tactic can be ignored or discounted in such a batule.
Power responds 1o all threats. The response is repression. I
the threat is a small one, the fascist tactic is to laugh it off,
ignore it isolate it with its defense mechanism—media. The
greater the threat the greater the corresponding violence
from power.

The only effective challenge to pawer is one that is broad
enough to make isolation impossible, and intensive enough
{0 cause repression to affect the normal life style of as many
members of the society as possible. By compromising and
playing st class war, we lose. If some effective means of
threatening to wicld power is not used in the opening stages
of revolutionary activity, repression will concentrate itself on
the vanguard elements only, whea the ideal situation is for
the peaple to feel the raw essence of power. Nothing can bend
consciousness more effectively than a false arrest, a no-knock
invasion, careless, panic-stricken gunfire. These will righten
s0me, anger others. Common sense alone tells me whom the
‘people will turn their anger against. Perhaps for a short time
they will be angry at us, but since the pig is a pig, it won't
be fong before this anger is channeled in the right direction.

Revolution builds in stages; it isn't cool or romantic; it's
bold and vicious; it's stalking and being stalked—the opposi-

uon rising above our level of vilence 1o repress us, and vur
forces learing how o counter this repression aind agam >
pulling ougselves above their level of violence. That process
repeats itsell again and ugain until finally the level is reached
where the real power of the people 1s felt and the ruling class
is suppressed. The power of the people fies in its greatcr
potential violence. And this power of the people—therr
greater potential violence—can be brought 1o fruition only 1f
the conditions in an urban society are created by the upplica-
tion of the foco theory. The foco theory can be elfctive only
when it does not allow itself 10 be isvlated from the people,

thus expasing itself 10 the vasily superior fire power af the
corporale state:

‘There is no doubt that Fidel's fuco was the motor to the
revolution in Cubi. But nor can there be any doub that
Fidel's organizational genius made sure that the foco
remained in the center of the much bigger revolutionary
mavement, which it cantrallcd or guided for its military
and political advantage. The foco may well be the best
taclic 10 mount the motor, but it needs a long period of
preparation, intensive arganizational work 10 sct up an
efficient, reliable machinery which will not only g
ate the atmosphere for armed struggle by focos but
also guarantee their logistic, communication, survival
programs and propaganda network. The teaditional
communist parties of the world claim that they arc
doing just that—and have been, mostly peaccfully, for
forty years. That s not what Bejar had in mind when
he said there have been “real stages of hard under-
ground life." Dajar, and New Lefl revolutionaries ail
over the world, know very well that a revolutionary ife
style is u warrior's life style. Dy stages he meant stages
of combat, and that is preciscly the way in which revolu-

“The fuco theory grew out of the Cuban Revolution and refecs (0

“more or less slow building up through gucriilla warlare of 4 moorle
struigc force which would be the aucleus of peaple’s army and of &

futuce sociaiststaic.” (Regis Debeny, Revolution in the Revolutivn? Armo.s

Strugele and Political Siruggle w Latin Amenica (New York: bontt),
Review Pres. (G611 241
capable of leading a people’s war.*

We are at an impasse now, because the neat level of
rexolutionary conscinusness and activity cannot be reached
without calling down on the nation a corresponding and
perhaps overreactionary repression. And it's not the people
who dread this next level of commitment. They don’t under-
stand the significance of it as yet. The dread, the fear, rests
with some of the old-guard clements. | refer you again to
v "When revolution fails . .. it's the fault of the vanguard

Some of the fear is an honest fear that revolution will
be repressed entirely. These thinkers have historical refer-
ences that roll them back to Europe to the time of Hitler's
Germany and Htaly in the twenties and thirties. But I say that
can never happen here. That was 100 long ago, 100 far away,
and none of those European countries had thirty million irate
niggers on their hands. None of that ever had 1o happen, for
the same reason that we don’t have (o allow it to happen. All
reactionary movements depend principally on a handful of
individuals—sometimes one individual.

‘There are many thousands of ways lo correct individu-
als. The best way is o send one armed expert. 1 don't mean
10 outshout him with logic, | mean correct him. Stay him,
assassinate him with thuggee, by silenced pistol, shotgun,
with a high-powered rifle shooting from four hundred yards
away and behind a rock. Suffocation, strangulation, crucifix-
ion, burning with Namethrower, dispatch by bomb. Auto
accidents happen all day. People drown, get poleaxed,
breathe noxious gases, get stabbed, get poisoned with bad
water, ratsbane, germicides, hemlock, arsenic, strychnine,
L.S.D. 25 concentrate, cyanide, hydrocynic acid, vitriol. A
snake could hite him, nicotine oil is deadly, nn averdose of
dape; there's deadly nightshade, belladonna, datura, wolfs-
bane, foxglove, aconite, plomaine, botulism, and the death of
a thousand cuts. But a curse won't work.

R
We're going 10 have 1o ight 1o win. The logic of procr

3
tination has been destroyed. A people can never be 5o re.

pressed that they can't strike back in some. way. We will
purge the poltraons and fight. Or just ignore them.

The reality of power's automatic defense refleacs makes
it possible for us to meusure our own eflectiveness, Theyy
clforts Lo seriously repress us indicate that we have reachey
people—that we are finally in the fight. And we cannot ever
be truly repressed. There is Quite simply no way for un estab-
lished government 10 defeat an internal, determined, aggres-
sive enemy. Especially in an urban socicty. The mechanics,
logic, and logistics of urban people's gucrrilla warfare
be defeated.

In the opening stages of such a confict, before a uninea
left can be estublished, before most people have uccepted the
inevitabilty of war, before we are uble militarily to organize
massive violence, we must depead on limited, sclective vio.
lence lied o an exact political purpose. In the early service
of the people there must be totally committed, professional
revolutionaries who understand that all human life is mean-
ingless ifit is not accompanicd by the controls that determine
its quality. I am one of these. My life has absolutely no valuc.
I'm the man under hatches, the desperate one. We will make
the revolution. Nothing can stop us, we are not intimidated
by the specter of repression—we're already repressed. The
Bluck Legion® and their terror leaves us cold, unafraid. We
will meet it with a counter-terror. We'll never, never allow
ourselves to be immobilized by u tactic that actually works
better for us. The lynch-murder of a fricnd—it mukes me
angry, not afraid. I'm the next man that must be lynched! My
forefather trembled when his brother was lynched, but my
brother's immolation means war 10 the death, war 1o the
utmost, war Lo the knifell

Violence is not supposed 1o work in Amerika. For no
onc, that is, except the “omnipotent adn ninistrator.” But this
has yet Lo be proved to my satisfuction sin

e cannot

1 know that

e R —,

hamb is a hamb is a bomb; it twists steel, shatters concrete
and dismembers men everywhere else in the world. Why not
those made in Amerika? A bullet fired from an assault rifle
in the hands of a Vietnamese liberation fighter will kill a pig
in Vietnam. Why won't it kill a p
are made?

Counter-terrorism is a facet of urban people’s guerrilla
warfare. 1ts our logical response o the repressive measures
1aken by the enemy state to contain us in the early stages of
the rebellion. Our military cadre involved in this activity has
the tactical advantage over the establishment's terrorists
only if we remain clandestine. While working at the direction
of political front we must remain separate from it. The
ranks of these early soldiers must be absalutely impervious
{o inflltration; precautions must be made o keep this cadre
impenetrahle to police spies and less committed comrades. In
The Coming of the New International, John Gerassi observed
that

in the plnce where pigs

As a leading pragmatist, Lenin believed that the only
way 8 revolution could come sbout in Europe n his time
was by the creation of a revolutionary organization.
That arganization had to be tight, well trained, loyal to
its central committee, dedicated—and narrow, not only
for idealogical reasons (hence purges and sectarian
splits were to be encouraged during its formative years)
but also for security.*

And Lenin states that

The more we confine the membership of such an organi-
zation to peaple who are professionally engaged in revo-
lutionary activity and who have been professionally
trained in the art of combating the police, the mare.
difficult it will be 10 unearth the organization.”}

Qne of Jonathan's reports contai

he following:

1 find it almost impossible 1o trust comrades, not afler
all of this, They say Gloves Davis—n black pig—killed

1V Ve, el Warke
Fred Mampton, while e was askeep. | certamly don't
have to mention ull the so-called defectors who ace nav
appearing before government committees testifying
for the state. They were infiteators (0 begin with,
The house-niggers who ran 1o the high sheriff as sonn
25 someone whispercd revolt. 1 think 1 hate them
worse than I hale the sheriff or the “owner,

V'm just a young slave (you say) trymg (v wnder-
stand and cope with my environment. | know personal.
ties have no place in revolution but every time | thin,
of Davis, Jess B. Simple, Karenga® and the rest of these
Murderous urncoat iiots, my trigger finger farely n.
chest Non-persons like Karenga, LeRoi Jones and iy
other right-wing blacks are intelligent cnough 10 know
what they are doing. We cannot excuse them with 1he.
case that we cun excuse the average brother who has ha
o oppartunity ar inclination 10 search. The mantle of
ignorance doesa't cover their behavior. They have 1o
know that when they auack sacialism, the communst
ideal, and revalution that they are not logically (or illog.
iaally depending) attacking all that is whitc, <ic. They
know that Ho Chi Miah isu't white or Chaicman Mao,
or Nkrumah, Lumurmba, and Touré. They know tha;
there isn't but ane ight going on across this planet, the
one between the imperialist forces of capitalism and ity
victims. They know that it was for work that we were
kidnapped—what else o you feed u slave for? These
Black, Black, Black, Black men (if you can swallow
their shallow shit) have had time 10 study, some have
traveled, they “know" that it was capitalist agricultural
cconamics that first caused our pain, and that the only
change since thea is the decline of the ugricultural clite
and the risc of the modern bourgeoisi. A sweat-shop
displaced the plantation. Could it have escaped theiy
notice that all the African states that really liberated
themselves booted out the foreign businessmen and are
maw socialist states?

No, I think the strongest suggestion is tiat they
working for the gavernment, the new hause-nigg

are
ers

And what better way is there 107 INem (0 Sen uiciizu e
10 us than o scream Black, Black, Black, Black ... Like
Tom Mboya, whose whole service for the C.LA. was to
redirect the revolutionary rage of the people into a thing
more compatible with the interests on Western Busi-
nessmen. They are spies—death to spics.

1 don't think it is a personality clash at all for us
10 teach these biack pigs that ‘we will not be altered from
our course, that the reward for counterrevolution s
Qeatht We can't continue to expect o wish for loyalty
1o the people—we'll have to ‘demand it. And that's both
from these cowardly fat-mouths ‘who come to us in their
disguise, “cultural nationalism,” and from the class de-
fectors who tommy-gun us in our sleep.

Tl make an example of Gloves Davis even if have
{0 hobo 1o Chicago. They'l find him strung-up 1o &
street light by his heels with our sign burned in his
forehead!!

Tests must be devised to guard ourselves ageinst
the possibility of those fools getting into our separate
millitary groups. There is n0 way to stop the infitration
of an above-ground political group, but we can guard
the clandestine army by: 1. letting no one choose us
(even i they did know about us and could find u
o the chaosing. 2. Once we choose someone (o do the
people’s military work they should be isolated and
lested thoroughly, and their background checked.
There are patterns to peaple’s lives, especially Blacks,
that if studied one can easily spot pig tendencies and
connections. Checks could be run through some of our
political peaple who have friends or sympathizers who
wn, say, used car lots or any business that generally
deals in credit. A great deal can be learned through the
various credit check institutions these days. We'll be
using one of their own instruments for the “real” pur-
pose that they invented it, against them. (Generally
that's the way it will be throughout the war.)

Testing can be develnped into a science—writien
41010 help reestablish for ourselves the patierns of this
soldicr's background. You knaw, full commitment gen-
erally enmes as result of awareness, and awareness is

37
the product of study and abscrvation, The things a per-
s0n has gone 10 the effory of reading and analyzing say
grcal deal about his character. In other words, very
o black intelligence agents will have studica Mary.
Mao, Lenia, Funon, cats like that
generully (ell what Pprocesses & man's mind has gone

{hrough by what he's siudicd, observed S examine,
even the Post Office will do thut,

~—drugs are not to be discountey
\ruth drugs. Then you have the ultimate ests, she things
Uhat no agent ofthe establishment could do, Lie assas.
sinate the local head of the Gestapo. Bring i a1
Isolation blindfolded, arm him, tell him whe v o, and
Where 0 g0 ufterward, and wait, etc. hing you could
be firly sure of him after a serics of (ests e e
We're only thinking in terms of a small, highty
fsined, super-sccre, counter-K lusist vanguary 8roup
However, dealing with peaple you've kneawn orb the
Yo and bave scen tested i fir already i beat, like e
Jou and your comrades, and mine. The Mg
lnined the armed expeditionary forces just for profi (the
£ls who steal them blind and hustle the other suckers),
They are starting to sir, to become g
This Vietnam adveaturc on the part
Yas vasily changed the whole relationship betu u

ly ugly side of imperiulisn is being
not just the peaple who suffer i
s 10 the lile sleepy guy here
‘re starting now 1o make the link
wars and foreign businesses. And
to make the comparisans and conclu.
slons. Ho Chi Minh v. Ky, for cxample. Penple see o)

ing 0 say such things as “Some form of socialism
is the answer. Ime 10 move, we must show them that
resistance is Ppossible, and that there is 2 hard left cadre
villing 1o lead it. Conditions arc right now, for the

fanings, st lcat, o a revolutionary culture; Js
conditions have always been preseat fere ingige the
Black Colany but ... no leadership uati] g

16 e

party workers with a show of underground strength,
watching the watcher, assassinating the assassins, |
think the people will start o listen to them. Blacks have.
grown very cynical (o all groups who make claims n the
area of problem-solving—since there have been one mil-
lion groups and no problems sotved. The physical condi-
ions arc right for the start of a protracted war. We have
yet to hit on the tactic for control of alttudes, hawever;
how to make people organize and resist the ruin of theic
ives. And it's for certain we'll never figure out the right
tactic i the pigs keep killing off and busting all the
vanguard elements. The time has come—Bobby's Seize
the Time makes sense. We can’t by d = mass movement
without finding some way 1o stay alive long enough to
Jet them know we're here. And that we're not just out
10 play on them. That we are finally prepared to totally
commit ourselves 10 the fight, that we will never sban-
don them when the pig moves in with his pistols and
paddy-wagons, that we're willing to take it to the grave-
yard.

‘A show of organizational skill and valid anti-est
lishmentism will aways bring on violence from the fas-
cist. The people know this, 5o they must also know that
this violence can be countered before they'll believe and
respond. “Let the ruling class tremble et & communist
revolution.” That's my favorite line in ail of Marx and
Engels. From Fanon it's “The time for talking has
ended, the time for acting has begun."—Long live the
guerrilla.

Jon
The counter-terrorist, faceless, nameless specialistin all
martisl arts ia the first soldier of the people! ‘His violence will

be swilt, surprising, explosive, and tied into a clearly political
matrix. In some cases of assas ion, it may be wise to
make them appear a3 accidents, but that sill doesn't reduce
the political content.

These warkers, properly distributed and going sbout
their tasks with secret, flawless precision and in perfect uni-
<o with the political front, will shake the fascists to their
very foundations. “Their limited, highly selective violence is

the absolute minimum [0F enloreing e ey wr sy,
peaple. Anything less willfail. We are not dealing with nice
people who will throw down their guns and submit to our
will becavse we outnumber them; from the vantage point of
established power and history, they know that one armed
man can control a thousand.

People’s War is not polite or proper. It is not possible
10 timit the scope and range of violence o what the enemy
will bear without reacting. Any ideal, any activity that may
do violence 1o their control, will never be permitted. People's
War is improvisation and more improvisation. It is organiz-
ing the masses around their reallstic needs and moving them
against whatever forces retrict thelr passage to power. |
repeat: realistic, dny-to-dny needs should be the basis of or-
ganizing people and making them conscious of revolution—
that the world, the universe, must revolve—that it will stop,
stagnate, and die for no man's privilege.

IF we accept revolution, we must accept al that it im-
plis: repression, counter-terrorism, days filled with work,
nervous strain, prison, funerals.

Our present problem as soldiers i (o protect our politi-
cal penple at their work and enforce the increasing demands
that the people, a5 a political result, will make upon power.
The soldier is the counter-terrorist, the bodyguard, the first
of a military vanguard. The distance between him and the
class enemy is 8 free fire zone. He has to be the baddest and
strongest of our kind: calm, sure, sclf-possessed, completcly
familiar with the fact that the only things that stand between
binck men and violent death are the fast break, quick draw,
and snap shot. Terrible Jonathans teethed on the barrel of the
political tool, hardened against the conerete of the most
uncivilized jungles of the planci—Chicago, St. Louis, Los
Angeles, San Francisco—tested in a dozen fires. “Tall, slim

youth™. . . the new nigger, with a gun and the cyes of the
hunter, the hunter of men.

These comrades must make the first contribution. They
will be the first to fall, We gather up their bodics, clean them,
Kiss them and smile. Their funerals should be gala affairs, of
Home-brewed wine and revolutionary mu
of deuth by. We should be sad only that i's {
Benerations 1o produce them,

Building consciousness and revolutionary culture
3gainst the repressive, natural defcnse reflexes of the system
means laking realistic day-to-day issues like hunger, the nced
for clothing and housing, oblessness. It invalves prove
repression—lecding on it. The fact of political and political.
coonomie prisonces n legions and the processcs used by the
pbressors (o judge and condemn them must be used as the
rulying crcs of tevoluion. Economic crime and even cimeg
of passion against the o

{0 do the dance
aken us 50 many.

n the Black Colany and other depressed ureas of the
countey there wil be less difficuly in organizing, mobilizing
and altering the attitudes of the people toward their class
enemics. However, in the areas of the class structure that can.
be said to be “making il " affecting attitudes toward a revolu-
Vionary change i the system of production and distribution
will, of course, call for the destruction of their comfort, the
‘manufacturing” of a “con where they wil be cither
neutral or complementary (o the revolutianary cflort.
The Ppsychological effect of our secret army, the real
destructive effect it can have; an increasingly pervasive un
derground press with new emphass on a “mass style™ the
Popularization of the revolutionary culture and then the ele.
vating of it; both under the direction of an ultra-aggressive
political party—these theee, with no clemeat missing, con.
eted (0 the ealistic issues form the basis of our aly hope.
There will be no educa g, no consciousness, no revolution-
a0y culture, mo forward movement, without these fhree cle.
ments working with the harmony of a healthy organism.
T sum up, the existence of a politcal vaaguard pre-
cetes the existence of any of the other elements of a trly
revoluionary culture. I the theust of this poitical vanguard

y2
the overthraw of established power), it will be attacked by
the built-in automatic survival instincts of the established
power complex, creating and supporting the necd to counter-
poise the violence of power. Without the ability 10 organize
a counterforce to neutralize the violence of established
power, antithesis dies. We are not contending with fools who
will allow us to simply walk in and organize people (o war
against them. All serious challenges will be met with panic
and repression. That is axiomatic. We must not allow our-
selves to be hunted, imprisoned and murdered. We will never
yield 1o terror tactics. We will organize a violence of our
‘own, hidden and more aggressive. We fight from a position
of weakness, but there arc tactical devices that if employed
without restraint will afford us a very real advantage.

‘The fuscists believe that one guard with a machine gun
can control & thousand men, but 1 know that this guard
cannot watch all one thousand at once. While his attention
and gun are trained on a gathering of ten who whisper free-
dom—closing on his blind side, my knife will claim his
A political thrust is immediately followed by a hidden mil
tary thrust in the opening phases of revolutionnry culture.
Leadership must be protected. And it helps people bit by bit
10 understand and relate 10 the necessity of violence in any
plan to overthrow anything—"overthrow" means violence.
In our case it means putting to death. This is the last time
1l repeat this for those of us who for one dread or another
seem not 100 receplive: fighting originates from a well-
developed kick in the ass.

The proletariat—the working class—is still the most
revolutionary class, and still the real gravedigger of capitalist
saciety. However, the notion that they alonc can or must
s 100 ridiculous and simplistic for any
serious consideration at all. The industrial working force of
today's modern industrial state may be pivotal in carrying
‘out a successful revolution against that state, but their pawer
and numbers have been vastly reduced by such developments
vs automation, military-corporate elitism, (the connection
e of government, military and corporate

heads), the new class of National Guard Pigs (they broke the
postal strike), government-controlled unions, right-to-work
fiws, ctc. The argument that centers on the ideal tha i)
workers must be politically educated before the revoluiion
can support a violent thrust verges on the absurd, Today
nearly six and a half million of them caa't find work. And
those who are working seem 10 be canvinced that foreign
wars and armaments speading are more desirable than
unemployment. Of course. they should be. made conscious of
their exploitation and they must be moved 10 act in their
behalf: Those who fecl that they are doing well, and thoge
Who actually are doing weil should be introduced to the fact
of “surplus valye."*

Waiting pasively for the final verdit of history i not
making revolution. It fs in the face of evolution. It ignores
the existence of bread and circuses, terror from the ight, and
the racism and animalism of the ruing-class pigs. It docamt
take into account the fact that they know we are coming.

They know hiow (o hold on totheir privilege, could they
Have eld it this long otherwisc? We are being repressed non,
‘Courts that dispense no jusice and concentration camps are

wsueptus aborin Marxian cconomics i he narmber ofbours s warker
otionork I excess of what Is required 1o provide hsm with miseecy
e antes. The product of surplus abor s known ss surplus alue s by
e ek Source of prol fo the capitalsnd I 1o xpicetenrat

worker,—Ed.
already in existence. There are more secret polics in this
counicy than in all others combincd—sa many that they
constitute a whole new class that has attached itself (o the
power complex. Repression is here. I's time to move with
determination. After our victory, no one will escape our
ustice with the now historically clasic fine “Well, we didn't
know." Repression is here naw and we won't reach she neat
level of revolutionary cansciousness and activity untl we
incet it with a counter-terror and demonstrate ta the people
that we are here and resistance is possible,

From a letier mailed by Jonathan shartly before his
deatl

7Y
Why do we go for this old shit, most of the fascist

functionaries live a5 unguarded as 1 do. 1 could slip 3
Knife between Max Rafferty's ribs. The Agnews and Du
Ponts, the Rockefellers and Morgans, all of the Getty,
Tiunt, and Hughes types who sneak around in armored
cars and jets are just as reachable. Anyone who will
‘come out of his bomb shelter can be had. Imagine what
Nixon's armored ear would look like if I stepped out of
the alley and hit it with the anti-tank rocket fauncher
under my coat—a ball of fire. Hell will be their re-
ward.

Put the guerrilln needs our help. When Jonathan steps
forward with his anti-Nixon rocket launcher, there should be
nine more like himself, with nssault rifls to close an exit path
for him. And there should be a politieal infrastructure,
cadre, not far awav tn exolain his actions, and glean from
them the greatest possible overal political cffect.

Prestige stands between the masses and a revolt against
their class enemy. The aurn of magic, glamour, luster and
splendid permanence covers the fascists like a protective
ayer of fat. The slimy scales of majesty shicld and conceal

idation of the old bourgeois reign of terror. Al-
though in reality nothing remains but the illusion. They can
till organize violence, but the Tndo-Chinese have proved
that 10 be not too formidnble.
sk is to flusteate this point forcefully to
industrial state con organize n ponder-
ous, mechanized violence, but this systematic indusirially
based holding action is helpless hefore the fuid, mobile,
sell-impelled nttrition of people's urban guerrilla warfarc,
With his techniques fully developed and estabished, the ur-
ban guerrilla lawnches his atiacks on the corporate-military-

police complex with some of these military objectives in
mind:

—10 weaken the local guards or the security system of
the dictatorship, given the fact that we are altacking and
the “gorillas” defending, which means catching the gov-
enment in a defensive position with its traops immahil.

ized

defense of the cutire complex of ational
mai

enance, with its ever-present fears of an altack on
s srategic nerve centers, and without ever knowing
where, how, and when that attuck will come;
—10 altack on every side with many different armed
groups, few in number, each self-contained and operat~
Separately, to disperse the government forces in
their pursuit roughly fragmented organization
instead of offesing the dictatorship the opportunity to
cancentrale its forces of repression on the destruction of
one lightly organized system operating throughout the
country;
1o give proof of its combaiveness, decision, frmness,
determination, and persistence in the attack on the mili-
tary dictatorship in order to permit all malconteats to
follow our example und fight with urban guersilla tac-
ics. Meanwhile, the government, with all its problems,
incapable of halting guerrilla operations in the city, will
losc time and suffer endless attition and will inally be
forced 1o pull back its repressive 17a0ps in order to
mount guard over the bunks, industrics, armorics, mili-
tary barracks, prisons, public offices, radio and televi-
sion stations, North American firms, gas storage tanks,
il refincrics; ships, airplanes, ports, residences of out.
standing members of the regime such as ministers and

gencruls, police stutions, and official organizations,
ete.

—10 increase urban guerrilla disturbances gradually in
an eadless ascendancy of unforeseen actions such that
the government troops cannot leave the urban arcas to
pursue the guerrillas in the interior without runniag the
risk of abaadoning the citics,and permitting rebellion to
increase oh the cosst as well as in the interior of the
country;

40 oblige the army and the police, with the commund-
€rs and their assistants, 1o change the relative comforts
and tranquillty of their barracks and their usual rest for
2 state of alarm and growing tension in the expectation

of attack o in search for tracks that vasish without «
trace;

e

—t0 0void apen btile and decisive combat with th
government, limiting the struggle to brief and ra
attacks with lightning results;

—to assure for the urban gucrrilla a maximum freedom
of mancuver and of action without ever relinquishing
the use of armed violence, remaining firmly oriented
toward helping the beginning of rural gucrrilla warfare

and supporting the construction of the revolutionary
army for national liberation. (*)

Prestige is an abstract, an intangible. It has no material
basis, no substantial objective reality to be perceived through
the senses. One can't touch it or taste it see it or smell
can't be heard. So how does it exist? Subjectively, in the
mind's eye, after the fact of some connected circumstances
that may also have been subjective,

‘We're looking for connections; the materialist approach
s to examine things in their fotal sequence, see them in
process, not to merely establish their being in fixed sequential
imges, but 1o take in the state of being in process: infancy,
maturity, decline, things in motion, processed into other
things in motion. We're constantly Taboring to determine
that which governs, regulates, motivates all the separate but
related and interrelated processes—from the viewpoint that

consciousness s determined by dialectical, objective develop-
ments.

()eress, op. it p. 71.

The prestige of power as the subjective effect of a past
deed or reputation, real or fancied, then has a very definite
Tife process. The prestige of the capitalist chss inside the U.S,
reached its maturity with the clase of the 1860-64 civil war.
Since that time there have been no serious threats 10 their
power; thelr excensen have taken on a certain legitimacy
through long usage.

Prestige bars any serious attack an pawer. Do people
attack a thing they consider
legitimacy?

th awe, with & sense of it
I e process of (hings, the prestige of power emcrges
roughly in that period when power does nut have to exercise
its underlying basis—violence. Having proved and cstab.

lished itself, it drifts, secure from any serious challenge. lis
automatic defense-attack instinets remuin ulert; sinall threats

are cither ignored away, laughed away, or in the cases that
may build into something dangerous, slapped away. To the
masters of capital, the most dreadful omen of all is revolu-
ionary scieatific socialism. The gravedigger evokes fear re.
sponse. Prestige wanes if the first attacks on its power base

find it wanling, Prestige dies when it cannot prevent further
altucks upon itself,

Al intellectual arguments ugainst the necessity of
counter-violeace, cven in the opening stages of a People's
War against an lndustrial establishment such as the one in
the US.A., are falsc. We can stop the debate; prestige must
be destroyed. People must see the vencrated institutions and
the “omaipotent administrator” actually under physical at-
tack. They must be assured that the heavens will not hurl
lightaing bolts at the people's heads for challenging the
Fights of property. Thes, ulthough international capitalism
has shot its last bolts, it s not exactly harmiess. If the threat
o power is truly revolutionary and the first step into revolu-
tionary cansciousness taken with a forceful attack upon pres-
tige, we must anticipate reaction, accept repression’s tesror,
and meet it with a counter-terror of our own, The gravedi
er needs a bodyguard 10 proteet him at this work, clsc the
grave may be his own,

The debate between the vanguard elements should cnd.
The argument that the prestige of power will let tself to be
educated away is 100 idiotic to be allowed to stand. Waiting
for power 10 move to it inevitable collapse is suicidal for all
concerned. Blacks and other Third World peoples have the.
very imminent prospect of genocidul lactics to contend with,
and we can now all sce that the modern industciul state,
maotivated by the interests of exclusive groups of capitalist

masters, cannot regulate tself 1o make possible an inclusive

1%

2 massive waste of resources and destruction of all that * *

stends about. The debate ends, the action begins. It is not a
question of the necessity of violence, but how to organize it
to fit our unique situation, to tie it with flawless exactitude
to our political activity, and to organize it immediately.

Comrade George: I read recently from a textbook edited
by my favorite writer W. Pomeroy* that a clty street
could actually be considered as a defile. A convoy of any
kind trapped in a defile on the countryside is easy prey

for the forces positioned sbove and about it . . .
—Jonathan
1t absolutely certain that every fascist military thinker
and official in the world has devoted time and study to the
works of the great guerrilla tacticians, Mao, Ho, Giap,
Guevara, Pomeroy, Fanon and Nkrumah. The fundamentals
of People’s War are no secret. It would scem that Giap's
People’s Army, People’s War or Guevara's Guerrila Warfare
and the other masterworks on poor people’s war, once pub-
fished for the world to study, would blunt their effectiveness
at least a fittle—that is, until one has studied in depth and
understood. Guerrilla warfare by its very nature is invulnera-
ble. Advanced scientific guerrilla strategy, worked out over
the first three-quarters of this century, is not, contrary to
Popular image, merely a “hit-and-run™ haphazard afai
spite of the need for improvisation and mobility and in spite
of its poverty and daring, it is scientific. The man who la-
bored over its construction had s a task the forging of an
instrument which would enable an indigent and weaponless
people to esist and overcome a ponderous mechanized army
dependent upon an industrial base and operating on systema-
tized thought. It is a perfect taol, pesfect. No establishment

army can countervail it. The best example of this new
fighting style—the urban guerrilla—is

cess of the Tupamaros, the

the spectacular suc-
ary arm of Uruguny's Na-

*W.J. Forest Pomeroy, suthor of Guerrilla Warfare ond Marinm,
tonal Liberation Movement. Brillianty organized, they
have carsied out well-planned operations, such as

burning dawn plants (General Motors) without harni-
ing a single worker, robbing impregnable fortresses
(such as the Casino of Punta del Este), kidnapping hated
officials, ambassadors, and bankers, sizing whole towns
long enough to explain their purpose and revolulionary
commitment, assassinating key repressive agents, such
as the chicf of the police's special squad, sabotaging
impesialism's industrial-military complexes and raiding

police military outposts to capture arms and ammuni-
tion.*

Gerassi outlines their fighting strategy as follows:

The objective is manifold: (1) to threaten the Establish-
ment, cause it Lo panic and make serious tactical mis-
takes, such as resorting o mass repression which
radicalizes the population against them; (2) to cstablish
the underground revolutionary apparatus, including
both active participants and trusted but passive col-
laborators (who will later carry out the lisison com-
munication, logistic, and propaganda needs of the
revolutionary armies in the cities); (3) to test new re-
cruits in relative security, for, though police infiltrators
are bound 10 crecp in and stay in the organization for
future need even if they have to kill their own ta do so,
the fact tha for a long time urban groups will operate
independently of cach other keeps sweeping arvests of
urban gucrrillas down to & minimum; (4) to demoralize
the rank and fllc and even the officers of the repressive
forces, as they sec themselves constantly but unexpect-
edly under attack (it is said that to kill policemen indis-
criminately is to forget the working-class background of
the cop on the beat; this is as absurd as Irying lo save
the ordinary soldiers whom the Vietnamese must kill to
survive; (5) to panic local capitalists Lo withdraw their
funds from specific arcas, thus hurting the local war-
fords and politicians who profit from these investmicats;

So
10) 10 (F1gNICN AWaY 10TEIEN INVESIOTS, WhICN Wil aflect
the whole bureaucratie oligarchy; (7) to force the U.S.
10 constantly extend its intervention, which will tax its
fesoutces, hence discontent at home, and spread its im-
perialistic arms, rendering it more vulnerable abroad.*

st

At this point, | must make clear that [ am certainly not
warning the military establishment or their capitalist mas-
ters, nor am 1 advocating the averthrow of the established
Amerikan government; when 1 use the initinls US.A. in
these observations, it must be understood that 1 could quite
2 ensily be referring 10 the Union of South Africa (U.S.A.T)

‘The government of the US.A. and ll that it stands for,
all thet it represents, must be destroyed. This is the starting
point, and the end. We have the means 1o this end; the
problem is to develop acceptance of their use.

‘The first struggle is one waged within our own minds.
We must in all haste transcend the intellectunl inhibitions
that preclude support of at Jeast the minimum level of vio-
lence that must develop concomitantly with each political
thrust; our attitudes must change before we can expect any
response from the people, workers, students, lumpen-
proletariat. We must accept the eventuality of bringing the
U.S.A. 1o ts knees; accept thé closing off of critical sections
of the city with barbed wire, armored pig carriers criss.
cronsing the city streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns
pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the
daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches,
doors being kicked down, the commonness of death. Then
we must learn the forms of resistance: the booby trap, the
silenced pistol and rifl, the pitting of strects to slow them
down, the wrecking of heavy equipment to block their effi-
cient movement, false walls, hidden sub-basements, tunnels
(Vietnamese style), destruction of the critical elements of the
facilties that support establishment order; we must learn the
value of infiltration—it works better for us than it does for
the apposition. We simply stop allowing ourselves to be

*1hid, p. 60,
unted wid do some stalking of aur ow; thie sccre police § 3
aren't really 100 secret at all. Right now we can go numbe--
ing, naming, compiling information on them all—they're too
visible (0 be safe. Revolution is aggressive. Just where are wel
Where is this country skidding 107 In the morning the fight
have begunl
In considering all of the establishment's protective agen-
cics, cven those that are quasi-secret, none can hide them-
selves. Any establishment, institution or organization that
enioys prestige, that exists openly aboveground, is by this
definition “weak," or at least vulnerable 1o & determined
attack. When the purpose of your military tactics is to build
and guard some abject or point of supposed advantage, the
defender cun actually be thought of as being under sicge, the
8uard himself a standing target, The fortress and all its re-
sources, mechanized and human, for all its imposing
strength, cannot exist for long under persistent attack de-
prived of the opportunity o replenish, repair, rencw itsel. 1f
the opposing military forces that have laid the siege are
fameless, faceless, numberless, indistinguishable from all the
millions that exist all about the establishment, when the
establishmeat's military forces sally forth from their belea-
gucred fortress 10 o batele, what must be the result? They
must cause suffering 1o the innocent, since it is impossible for
them 1o know us, thus making new cnemies. They will ré.
srict the (recdom of our knowa or suspected political parties
and projects that are welded 10 the peaple, thus resticting
the (recdom of others who may have been ncatral or sympa-
hetic to them. They will make themselves targets for our
hidden machine gun, sniper's rife silenced pistol, mortar,
ti-tank rocket, flamethrower.
Our counter-terrorism will briny
repression. ... < is no question in our minds—blacks, men
under hatches—about the nature of the ruling class; the
excecdingly violent disposition of the U.S.A. ruling class is
well documented with just a glance into our lives and the
order of our deaths. The paint is to reveal this “seascless
violence” (0 the entire revolutionary elass or clusses.

8 0n a stage-two fuscist
our disposal in the opening stages of People’s War. In some
cases in other revolutionary societies this level of violence
alone was sufficient to win all the demands of the people.
However, I'm sure that here it will not be sufficient because
of the complexities of the US.A. class structure and its
stockpile of potential further violence (many of the small
demands of a sizable portion of the population are slowly
being met at the expense of all the rest of us and the world's
people). A new pig-oriented class has been crented at the
bottom of our society from which the ruling class will be
always able to draw some support. Consequently our task
‘will be to move from counter-terrorist tactics into the second
stoge of larger guerrilla unit operation.

Over 90 percent of the U. .. population live in cities
and towns, and although some of the principles of clossic
Mno-Che-style guerrilla operations must be used to stop the
orderly flow of intercity and interstate commerce, most of
the real fighting must.take place inside the nerve centers of
the nation—the cities. This is an entirely new situation in the
development of People's War. Whereas the classic types of
the Third World movements generally relied upon the stran-
gling of provincial capitals where the enemy colonial power
tended to concentrate itself, in urban guerrifin warfare where
the eolonies can be said to be situated within the city, the
prozess or tnctics will be unique.

Though the basic strategy is the same, urban guerrilla
warfare differs from all that has ever taken place in the arena

of guerrilla agninst the god state. There are simi
tween our si

larilies be-
tion and that of the growing movement of the
Urugunysn people, and perhaps we can draw from their
experience. But to be renlistic, the disparity in size and popu-
ation, the relative strength of the enemy st
and their global sweep, must seriously be taken into account.
Uruguay is a colony of Anglo-Amerika; defeat of the
Uruguayan government and a change in the present property
relntions would of necessity mean the defent of a section of
the Amerikan imperial infrastructure, The comparison he-
tween oursclves and the Algerian liberation experience is

institutions

lmost untenable, though there may be some small tactical
lessons to be gleaned from their urban effort. Tt must be kept
in mind that the principal battles that led Lo the people's
victory were fought on the countryside between massive
French mechanized divisions and a classical guerilla army
of the people. The battlc for Algicrs was anly sided by the
forces within. The peaple’s fifth column within the city of
Algiers was not a model of perfection simply because the
principul effort, energy and motive forces were lacaied in the
classical guerrilla units that engaged the Freach expedition-

ary forces for control of the countryside. At issue there in
Algeria were such things as erude petroleum (62 percent of
the nation's exports), agricultural products (18 percent), and
some iran ore. All these basic raw materials were, of course,

located in the countryside und had (o be protected by the
French.

The war for control of the US.A. is unique in that its
heartbeat can be stopped only by placing our primary forces
in the valleys and defiles of its cily strects. US.A. is the
colonial master, the center of the imperial process where the
raw malerials are worked into finished manufactured prod-
ucts 10 be recirculated back into the exterior and interior
colonies.

In a comparison of the classical forms of wars of libera-
tion fought in the outlying colonies and the ane we must
yet formulate, u vital question is immediately brought to
our attention: Docs it work in such a totally different set-
ting?

A theoretical examination indicates that it does. In fact,
urban people’s guerrilla warfare may prove to b an even
more effective (ool than the classical type. The same advan-
tages are present, the same possibilities, plus some that cxist
simply because the fight is taking place within the cities, the
nerve centers of the mation.

The encmy culture, the established government, exists
firstof all because of its ability to govern, Lo maintain enough
order 0 ensure that a cycle of sorts exists between the vi
ous levels and elements of the socicly. “Law and Order” is
their abjective. Ours is “Perfect Disorder.” Ouraim isto stop

Exl
the e cyele of we enemy o —
own revolutionary culture. This can be done only by creating
perfect disorder within the cycle of the enemy culture's life
process and lenving a power vacuum 10 be filled by our
bullding revolutionary culture.

When the ight takes plnce within the cities, the disorder
will clearly be hastencd—this will have an immediate effect
on the consciousness of the bulk of the population and will

strain the relationship between gavernment and gaverned to
the utmost.

1f the life of the manufacturing city is 10 be stopped, it
is clear that the normal processes, at least, will be slowed by
a ronvoy of establishment trucks, tanks or troops simply
meving in the city's arteries where commercial convoys
should be moving. The necessary checkpaints will further
slow it. Esch one of the oppositian's own tank shells that is
fired inside the manufacturing city at the elusive guerrilla
will destroy some aspect of that factory-city and undercut
the sbility of the establishment to produce anather tank shell.
1t will not help the faseist cause very much at all when the
armored personnel carrier or jeep patrol equipped with 30-
caliber machine guns fires into a downtown shopping crowd
at the elusive guerrilla who has taken refuge among them.
The people just will not understand.

The cities of fascist U.S.A.—built straight up and with
very litte real planning or pattern, the twisting side streets.
gangways connecting roofs, manholes, storm drains, con-
erete and steel trees—will hide a guerrilla army just
tively as any forest, There is the added advantage that jus-
being in an area doesn’t automatically make one suspect anc
fair game, a3 is the case when an establishment army
spots 8 gathering, no matter how innocent, in an area when
guerrilla movements have been reported in the countryside
just being out there defines them. The fact that the guerrill
can hide himself fairly easily inside large population center
does not mean that hard work necdn't be done toward th
‘winning of popular support. 1t simply means that failure t
gain “full support” for violent confrontation doesn’t pre

°

effec.

clude violcut confrontation. Ifal the elements exist that have.
made guerilla warfare in its classical style sn invincible
Weapon against mechunized, industrially-based armics in un-
developed areas, they will be cven more successfulin buill-up
urban Amerikan conditions,

The facts thut make it impossible for the establishment
army 1o overcome the atlacking guerilla army—in spite of
the availability of the knowledge contained in the master-
works on gucrrilla strategy—become clear when we realize
thatafter the strategy is understood by the guerrilla chif, the
tactics applicable to his particular military problems “are a
product of his imagination alone,” a constant crestive im-
provising. Also working against the establishment's general
Stall s its own mentality. They've convinced themselves o
have been convinced by their experience at war with other
mechanized armies that “having the most at the right time™
Wins war. In other words, they fecl that winning wars de-
pends mainly on gadgets dnd they presume that they can
dictate the terms and grounds upon which each battle takes
place. They're locked in on a fixed set of systematized ideas
that confict completely with the realities of People’s Wi
Their egos simply will never allow them to sdmit that all the
ingenuity that has gone into the development of the biitz-
krieg has been wasted. A $100,000 tank can be destroyed
with (wo dollars’ worth of materials; a jct is useless against
the rificman, and it also can be destroyed with one well-
placed burst from sn assault rifle or destroyed o the ground
by mortar {com miles away. Then, too, the pilot, years in the
making, can b killed with » kaife. The ‘copter us & fighting
machine is the most stupid of all the cosly gadgets; it can
be heard from miles away; it can't be armored, ten-cent
bullet can render it wseless. All of these contraptions require
liquid fucls that will stop lowing when the production of ull
the other commaditics stops. Fighting really depends upon
the people and small casily machined portable weapons.

Another factor that works to the advantage of the guer-
fila army is time. The establishment forces cannot survive
the prolonged unrest that is steadily building. Profits full the

St
there, the establishment's force and energy goes into its last
stages oflfe, while our new revolutionary culture s building
—musical chairs where each go-round excludes some ele-
ment of their control factors.

‘The objective, 1 repeat, of the destruction of a city-based
industria establishment and its proteetive forces is (o create
pefect disorder, to disrupt all of their intercting proccsses
that allow them to produce and distribute goods, and this
can be done from within the process much more casily
than from without. Really, there is no possibility of an estab.
lished government ever overcoming a determined internal
enemy.

By their very nature, the “holder™ or “owner™ and his
guard are exposed and vulnersble. A comparison between
their mode of existence and that of the people's
elements employing all the subtle scientific pri
ban guerrilla warfare will demonstrate clearly where the real
power fies.

Top-heavy establishment organizations that exist
openly are always a reflection of the men who staff them. O
primary interest (o the guerrila are the bureaueratic insitu-
tions that serve 10 protect the right of the wrongdoers to do
their wrong—the local and federal pig establishments. The
complesiies of the class structure have shifled somewhat
since the time of Marx and Lenin. Presently within the work-
ing class, there exists an ultra-right section at the bottom of
this structure which feels that l of its demands on life can
be met by the existing order. In fact, the working class of
U.S.A. 1971 ean be realistically divided into two mutually
exclusive and conflicting sections, one right-oriented and
conservative, the other lefl 10 neutral. One explanation for
this phenomenon is the loss over the years (to fascist nation-
alistic propaganda and state-controlled unions) of a clear-cut

clnss consciousness. In effect, it can be said that this right.
oricnted sector of the working class is a new class, a new pig
class. I their ranks we find a fctory or construction worker,
the ubiquitous civil service employee, the retired military

P o i

career

1. the man who scls uscd autos or insurance,the ¢
stack clerk or longshoreman about 10 be replaced by 8 ma-

chine. All of thesc individuals are not clearly
class—some only have just ane foot in the grave. As yet they
only have pig tendencies and can still be redeemed, Outright
Pigs must be cither neutralized or destroyed (killed). From
the new pig class (a section of the working class whose
demands are smait and are being slowly met by the capitalist
masters), the government draws its greatest support. The
forces of counterrevolution make themseives felt on the
street level through this new class, while above this class, in
the loosely defined petit-bourgeois level and upper-middie-
class professionals and students, we can find some very real
revolutionary consciousness| There are explanatious for this
complex inverted stratification of revolutionary potential;
the bistory of (he U.S.A. and its immigrants, the cmphasis
placed on subversion of the workers" movement (the unions)
b the ruling class, and the apparent (not real) stabilizing of
the economy with fascist Keynesian controls and redoubled
imperialist expansion, all can be carefully treated to ex-
plain the preseat confusion and contradictions in the class
struggle—but most of this 1 leave to Comrade Newlon
Wwho has handled it well 5o fur. This is a comment on what

todo with what we have and what we are realistically fuced
with,

The top-heavy bureaucratic ugencics that cuist with
Quasi-social sunction—and in particulur the oncs that are
8iven over (o the maintenance of law and order—draw their
principal pe:anacl from the pig class and consequently are
an expressiun of that class's mentality: a stagnant, even ata.
vistic mentality that s completely dependent upon regimen
and rote 1o perform the simplest of funclions,

First of all, the oppositioa is stupid. However, let me
Qualify this statement with the observation that they make
up for what they lack in braias with sheer brutality. As a
result of their original drawback (stupidity), they have cx-

panded to massive proportions, and lied themselves irrevocs-
Bly to a technolagy based on massive and equally faulty

machines 1o the point naw that it is impossible for them ever 5
1o hide any of their movements, 1o move with any real specd,
or to change themselves in response o any change in our
attack. The very nature of their apparatus, its supposed legal.
ity and its size, tends to weaken it. Their growing demand
for personnel leaves them helpless to stop us from infilteating
them.

Their cybernetics cannot overcome the fact that men,
especially of the pig class, are cyclic. They think, function,
and live in cycles. This is more to their detriment than ours.
Their science of control turns upon them to weaken and
wreck their own institutions. How can a massive department
or burcau or regiment with hundreds of personnel ever coor.

e any activity without the strictest regimentation, with.
out a massive meeting place to familiarize themelves with
procedures, without badges or uniforms to identify each
other, without systematized patterns of thought and behay-
for, without dependence or: -Jear-cut orders. Simple pig types
can anly learn 10 function by rote and in cycles. Procedure
must be drilled into them and only seldom if ever changed.
Itis quite casy for a pig 10 perform a particular function the
same way, time after time, once he has learned the function;
s not 50 ensy to vary, espechlly when there are great
numbers of the same types of individuals involved. What
would be the resultif each pig were given a different job each
day in a different area or if he had to vary his code every week
or think for himself just one eight-hour shift? Chaos. If it
weren't for the sergeant or lieutenant and o routine, when the
average pig ran out of gas, his car would have o be pushed
out of the street by the citizenry; when his bullets ran out
he would have only a club until he could check with the cap-
tain,

Cyelic men equipped with only a few learned responses
can be watched, clocked, photographed and snticipated.
Their code isn't really a code at all, They are finished! A pig
s a fooll They have numbers over the small vanguard
clement and the sociol license to kill—but once we decide

on the proper action, we will find that aur encmies are vul.
nerable.

For the soldiers of the people, the guerrillu, though
ey also must operatc with the tightest structure and in
completc harmony with their political branch, cycles are not
a factor in their operations.

“The sublleties and fundamentals of urbun guerrilla war-
fare can be broken down 10 their simplest terms this way:

Mubility

Only the light, portable, casily machincd or cusily stolen
weapons are cmployed by the guerrilla under normal circum-
stances. On rare occasions, he may hire or commandeer a
picce of heavy equipment for an isolated or special purpose
(which fits in with the improviscd, extemporancous nature of
s form of combat). The bomb in all its various forms,
‘banglor, mortar, satchel charge, hand grenade; the anti-tank
racket launcher, the sniper's rifle, the light machine gun, the
silenced pistol, the Aamethrower, the poison dart, poison
bullet, the crossbow, the knife, the fist—all form the guerrilla.
arsensl. Provision must be made to move men and equip-
ment in spite of the condition of today's streets and rosds in
the cities. Thal means making use of the new four-whecl
drive civilian-type jeps, station wagons and motorcycles.
The bicycle will egain popularity. Heavy vehicles, the jeeps,
trucks, vans (all ordinary-looking family o commercial-
looking vehicles but armored with either plastic or steel) can
be cither rented ar commandesred. All dwellings should be
rented and expendable. They should be equipped 0 that
when forced 10 leave by tunncl or other hidden exits, the
place can be burned to create further confusion for the at-
tacker and destroy cvidence. Food and clothing should be
purposely simple. Clothing must always be available for dis-
guises. Although part of the guerrilla’s function is 10 hijack
and commandeer food in nonperishable form from the
enemy cultures and stackpiles, he should also learn 10 iden-
tify the food plants that grow wild all over the country—even
iin buckysrds and vacant lots. He should also learn 1o want

s

b0
Infiltration ¢

Right now we can be placing our soldiers inside the variaus
police and military nd prison staffs. Our more gifted and
better-cducated comrades could end up in the intelligence
units of the army and police; our major souree of weapons
should come from our men placed in the military under
scemingly ordinary circumstances, This is our enemy’s great-
est weakness; any establishment's greatest weakness is the
need for personnel to resist the people. This Iays them oper
10 infitration. The guerrilla army that operates within thi
city is necessarily small, so we stop infiltration by being ver:
selective and conducting thorough and murderous tests anc

making foll use of the principles underlying departmentaliza
tion.

The Ambush

‘The only form of attack employed by the guerrilla forces i
the ambush, the surprise attack. There must never be an
front lines, or defending of territory. The only engagement
that are carried to completion are the ones that we are win
ning; after an initial attack if the enemy regains himsell an:
counteratiacks, we disengage and simply go home t0 awai
the next opportunity when we can catch him asleep, with hi
‘women, moving in convoys, on the toilet.

Camouflage

Nothing ever appears outwardly as it is. The armor (shee
of plastic or steel) is fixed inside the vans and trucks in suc
2 way s to make them appear normal when viewed fro
without. The mifitary safchouse—with tunnels leading in a
directions and connecting with other houses, & storm drair
a manhole with bulletproof and airtight plexiglnss windov
encasements inside the house camoulaged with heavy cur.
ains, rooms with doars that are really baoby traps that work
from the inside—must be made to look like any other house
slong the block. We must dress and quip ourselves with
weaponry that will allow us to move even in units of a dozen
©r mare without appearing 10 be anything other than private
cilizens pursuing their private interests. We will make use of
ise: mailman, policeman, telephone repair.
National Guardsman. This principle will
S00n have them shooting at each other or turaing the
cents against them. The result—perfect disorder]

Autonomous Infrastructure

Wit is our eventual goal o wear away the estublishmeat's
ability to produce and distribute goods, 10 feed its war ma-
chine, o organize any sort of social ctivity; then, of course,
e must, at the same (ime, provide ourselves with the means
of performing these functions on st least subsistence level.
Both the mil Y and the political arms of the liberation
movement must hink of the provisioning of their vanguard
clements and the people during the dark days when we siop
the machine. Military supplics are stockpiled in advance
with food staples. Depression-days' foraging and war-years'
liberation gardens must be reintroduced and refined. The
military must depend on the people for food. Tt must also
Prepare (0 feed the people from the enemy’s supplics.

Then you have the very lialthy, spontancous mass loot-

6. Perfect disorder! At some point in the development of
the overall siruggle revolutionary culture it will have to be-
come totally independent of the old enemy culture in kecping
With Che's theory of molding the new society aound the
struggle against the old. We will start from the beginning to
build our own infrastructure in every possible area: people’s
stores, hospitals, banks, buses, acmy. This dual power, this
building of poliical infrastructure and the military is suc-
cintly stated by the Minisier of

tz
ther Party, Huey P. Newton:

b

We recognized that in order to bring the peaple to the
Tevel of consciousness where they would seize the time,
it would be necessary 1o serve their inlerests in survi.
val by developing programs which would help them to
meet their daily needs. For a long time we have had
such programa not only for survival, but for organ-
izational purposes. Now we not only have a break-
fast program for schoolchildren, we have clothing pro-
groms, we have health clinics which provide free
medical snd dental services, we have programs for pris-
oners and their familics, and we are opening cloth.
ing and shoe factories to provide for more of the
needs of the community. Most recently we have be.
89n & testing and rescarch program on sickle-cell anc-
mia, and we know that 98 percent of the victims of
this disease are Black. To fail to combat this disease
is to submit to genocide; to battle it s survival,

Al these programs satisfy the deep needs of the
‘community but they are not solutions to our problems.
That is why we call them survival programs, meaning
survival pending revolution. We say that the survival
program of the Black Panther Party Is like the survival
kit of n sailor stranded on a raf. It helps him to sustain
himself until he can get completely out of that sitwation.
S0 the survival programs are not answers or solutions,
but they wil ielp us 10 organize the commaunity arounc
a true analysis and understanding of their situation
When consciousness and understanding is raised 1o 1
high level, then the community will scize the time anc
deliver themselves from the boot of their oppressors.*

In following this strategy we at once “fil a very rea
vacuum" that already exists in the Biack Colony (brown ane

poor white (o), where the peaple are not being fed, clothed
provided with adcquate medical treatment or transportatio

facilities. This will crente the consciousness that comes fror
the introduction of people's government. 1t will help th

“Htvey P. Newton, Block Capitaiom Re-Analyeed p. (suppleme

from) ek Pan teccommunal News Service, Suturday
1om

People (0 understand the force and cuergy of revolution, “We

are organizing hem arownd their needs.” We will no dis.
as who will be elected

tract them with such cmpty quesii

of the established politics

—or an “individual." What would help us, in fact, is to allow
8 many right-wing clements as possible (o assume “pali.
eal” power. The warnings that “our thrusts toward self.
detcrmination will bring on (ascism” are rresponsible.—or
betler, unrealistic. The fuscists already have power. The
Point is that some way must be found to expase them sad
combat them. An clectoral choice of ten different fascist f5
like choosing which way onc wisles (o dic. The halder of
so-called high public offce s always mercly an extcasion of
the hated ruling corporate clas. I i 10 our bencfit that s
peeson be opealy hastile, despotic, unrcasaning, We are not
fiving in & wation wheze let-wing patics hod sighty ou of
o hundred seatsin a congressional body, or even cigh out
Of two hundred. This is a huge nation dominaied by the most
reactionary and violent ruli i

world, where the mujority of

understand that they are existi
fort of the world. They have beea hyprotized fnto believing

that citicism of the expansionist policies o imperialye

really isolationist or injurious (0 both the U.§ g and the
worldil

We are faced with 1
done for forty years fanni
cane, or starti

wo choices: (o continue as we have
ing our pamphlets against the hurri-

We are not going 10 wait ntil the U.S.A. attacks the

Peaple of the U ‘gola, Mozambique or any of
e other African natians in foment. We can't wait, We

shouldn’ even allaw this thing to happen in Indo-

I3
China. Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, First Na-
tional City Bank of N. Y., frving Trust C., the Morgan
monopoly, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Continental
1. National Bank, First National Bank of Chicago,
Bankers Trust Co., and a dozen lesser firms all have
great financial interests in the U.S.A. now. In 1966 the
US.A. investment in one small African nation was $667
million. 1t's atmost doubled since then. In 1968, 70 to
75% of all goods from the US.A. entered the USA.
duty free. Soon we'll be asked to fight the. people of the
U.S.A. because they're getting their people’s army to-
gether ... No—I'm not waiting for them 10 attack a new
part of Africa or Asla, I'm entering the war now—on
the side of the Vietnamesel

The Black Colony, U.S.A., has fittle choice, We must
enter the war on the side of the majority of the world's
people, even if it means fighting the U.S.A. majority. We
fight 0 live. And we're lea 1 be a war, (o the
knife if necessary.

We can't wait until the generation that thinks of blacks
a5 niggers and the rest of the world as gooks, chinks, spics
etc., has been educated away. 1t may be the reverse tha
happens: we niggers and gooks may be blown away first. O
i we survive, what will we inherit? A desert?

We'll mass what people we can: pechaps that won't be
the whole lower class. We'll mass ourselves and any ally we
may be able to draw from the whole class structure, and we'll
attemp to wage a war on property and property rights
Essentially that is the ight, but, even then, some men will dic
as i allforms of war. Putif we cannot draw the support tha
is necessary for such a war, then we see a positive benefit fo
the majority of the world's peaple in the reduction of thi
whole country to a vast wasteland, and a graveyard for tw
hundred millian of history's most damnable fools!

Tn Peaple’s War, urban style, cach pofitical move
ward organizing people around their realistic needs will
Port a corresponding military move. This wnity of poli

g war willincreas the overai revolutionary consciousaes

bY degrees to u point where wass consciouspen <an be said
10 exist.

The Black Panther

'urty is the lurgest and most power-
ful palitical force exi

' outside cstublishment politics. 1¢

ople. It is the people’s nutural,
us assume the existence of 3
maitied and separate military

small, tightly ki, otally cor
vangusrd such us Jonathun Jackson attempied (0 build,

Jonathan was my brother and closest comrade. 1 knew
. He was the real super-nigger. He worked at i, pard, He
00K compcte control of himsel, he learned every weapon
in the human arscnl, from the yiug sde-theue fogy attack
e the quick-deaw suap shot 1 the manulacture and yse of
the mortar. He knew six thousand ways to kil » man, o ity

the simple stroke of an empty hand o foot. fe wes
seventeen years old when he died in the service of the Ppeople,
on the side of the black colonies and ‘with the courage of the
whole colonized world, Let's assume where. Jonathan is con-

our battle cry reaches some recepive car,

other hand reaches down o take up our weapn
e have two perfectly harmonios fsts: the Iet “fopnq
e, of the Dlack Panthers® poltical thrust, wnd the 1ot
“back ram* of the August 7th movement.

Le’s further assume that this nation i
that we can call by i

This clarifies the understanding of urban People’s.

anguard party and revolu.
{ponary consciousiess within the inner Black Colony. Al

Anglo-Western cities are generally the same when they are

U
ceduced 10 the critical features that support them. I could be
talking about Landon, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Paris, Berlin or Rome in-
stend of Johannesburg.

Mao pictured the US.A. as the city of the world sur-
Tounded, besicged and slowly strangled to death by a third
force under arms. Using Mao's theoretical springboard, 1
wish 10 make further comments on the hypothetical super-
technological city-state and its vulnerability.

Any honest expert in the overall strategy and logistic:
of classic Western mechanized warfare—the war of the in
dustrially-based, established state—will admit that the scien
tific guerrilla force must be outnumbered ten to one i
manpower by the mechanized force if it is to be contained a
. The establishment army, the defenders of property, of th
industrial complex armed with the tools and weapons ¢
heavy industry, must field ten men for just one guesrilla: thi
point s a strong indication of the relative effctiveness of th
two fighting styles. Recent reports (March of 1971) comin
in from the Indo-Chinese theater describe such debacles a
cighty U.S.A. 40-ton tanks racing in wild retreat before th
guerrillas. Puppet soldiers and US.A. mercenaries in the
haste to disengage from the people's forces are lashing then
selves 10 the runners of rescue helicopters. Disaster for t1
man with the most and best equipment is threatening an
imminent. Now is the time for us to Al the streets with o1
protest, clog the tunnels and back stairs of covert totalitarie
government with every weapon at our disposal.

‘The effectiveness of rallies and mass demonstrations h
not come to an end. Their purpose has diacritically altere

but the general tactic remains sound. Today the rally affor
us the opportunity 1o effect intensive organization of 1
Projects and programs that will form the infrastructure
our communes. If the mass ralfies close, as they have in 1
past, with a few specches and a pamphlet, we can expect
more results than in the past: two hours later the peaple v
be Amerikans again (instend of people). fut going am¢
“the paple” i each pathering with cliphonrds and pens, ¢

painfully uscer,

15 wihat cach can contibute 10 clear-cu,
carclully defined political projects, is the distinction betwees,

ten W the sterile, stilied attempls to
and file, etc) or elect a socialist

build new wnions (rank
legislature.

However, us we start the projects that will eventully
move the workers and the whole cor munity into open con-
flict with the ruling clique, my own personal obscrvations
ead me 10 the independent conclusion that the palitcal
vanguard and cven its early project need to be defended.
Clearly the political cadre necs protection from the encmy

colture’s. military, its secret police and vigilunte “death
squads.”

Armed struggle s at the very heart of revalution, If the
problems of the people cannot be redressed because

fecessary resources are in the hands of a relatively few fami-
lies and individuals, it mcans we arc going to have to seize
this property. Seizing property has always meant some form
of war, some form of rmed strugle. I history is our guide,
it clearly records that nothing of any great value hus ever
changed hands without a struggle, or at least a show of, or

hreat o, viokeice. Men simply don't sursender what they
think of s their privicge and property excepl by force.
Hi

story ilsell is cconomically motivated class strugge.
There is simply no way to compare this sacicty o its
historical experience with that of a iy colonial country like
Chile: Allende is not seizing property; bis government is
“buying property.” Until the Chilean ruling capitalist class
s suppressed, the Chilean revolution is as meaningless as the
Swedish cxperiment. Socialst governments which, atiempt 1o
coexist with capitalist economics compleicly forget the seo.
nomic mlive o human sociul istary, Revisionise hag given
birth to countless “sacialistic” hermaphroditcs, alwaysta the
detrimeal of people's power. Strained, tortured defnitions of
social exstence and organization have rapped the peaple in
10 tmany contradictions that most have given up il hope of
harnessing the modern industrial state or even understand-

123
ing it. England before the Torics or between the Torics i

liberal socialist.” nry dictatorships, clearly total
itarian, are ruled by cliques traveling under the designatio
“revolutionary council,” etc. [3

No argument has any substance if it conflicts with th
objective conditions, the clear, incontrovertible facts. In o1
case, these facts can be read from the nation's dailies—in 11
obituary section. Blacks who seriously advocate revolutic
arekilled. Blacks who attack property relations are siated f

the graveyard or the prison camp. It's a national cultur
tradition. Since these are the facts, it follows that

An oppressed class which does not strive to learn to u
arms, 10 acquire arms, only deserves (o be treated
slaves. We cannot forget, unless we become bourger
pecifiss or opportunists, that we arc living in a clt
society, that there is no way out of this: society, and the
can be none, except by means of the class struggle.

every class society, whether it is hased on slavery, se

dom, or as at present, on wage Ibour, the appressi
clas s armed.®

‘The vanguard cannot stay alive long enough to effec
brond consciousness unless it possesses the latent threat
force. They're going 1o claim that our clothing projects, |
People’s bazaars, the people’s stores and decentralized ¢
toge industries are fronts for stolen property. The establk
ment will claim that the vangusrd party is feeding a
clothing people with goods stolen from the old enemy c
ture. They'll claim that we're buying it from the city-stai
fumpen who steal everything they ean sell, or that we
ripping it off ourselves. OF course, this wil be used to jusi
an attack upon our political projects, our infrastructure. 1
assaults will be justified by them in a dozen different wa
whether we establish ourselves in storefronts or in
homes. They will attack us—behind the fire ordinance,
sanitation department, the anonymous tip. The establi
ment's mercenaries will break in shooting, and all of us v

*Y.1. Lenln, Selected Works,
are not killed will g 10 juil, for vilating the lire ordinance,
fesising arrest, attempling murder and receiving stolen
property, etc. predictable as nightfall.

I'm convinced that any serious organizing of people
must carry with it (rom the stast a potcntial threat of revolu-
tionary violence. Without it, the establishment forces
succeed in isolating the political organizer and closing down
his project before the people can feel its benefis. Self.
determination requires a small, hidden, highly trained
army equipped with the very best and most destructive of
military weapons, and a bodyguard of counter-terrorists.

The vanguard party distinguishes itself in the service of
the people and superimposes itsclf aver the old culture
throughout the city-state. Tactics designed to further the
development of revolu lionary consciousness must be bused
upon the prevai stute of class and race nlagonisms
created oul of the new relutionship. We can be certain thut
the nuclens of a clundestine acmy will already exist by then,
The government's repressive agencies will also be wel infl.
trated by blacks and other revolutionary people. Infiltration
s the work of the professional revolutionary. Infirating the
cstablishment's protective agencies will also tend o neutral
ize the rullng class's attempt t0 isolate the black vanguard
commune (rom the larger body of the class structure. All
clforts to isolate the vanguard community must be resisied,
The Black Colony mus actively invic other revalutionary
People to follow thcie example. We must give refuge to the
refugees, and eventually work out some means (0 coordinate
our operations with theirs at every level. However, we cannot
delay our own preparations toward a united black evolu.
tionary culture. No one wil undertake t0 aid us uniss they
sense the power of our maveiment. It s blacks who must play
not only the role of liberating the Black Colony but also the
\eading role in the liberation of the whole city-siate. To
expect that someone else will tuke the full responsibility for
our own lberation is suicide. We'll be asked to be "patient™
for anotlier one hundred 1o one hundred and ity years!
We'll get stuck with long theorctical explanations on con-

d
seiousness or objective conditions when it's clear that cor
sciousness will not grow unless there is someane among 1
willing to feed it.

Consciousness grows in spirals. Growth implies feedit
and belng fed. We feed consciousness by feeding peop
addressing ourscives 10 their needs, the basic and soc:
needs, working, organizing toward a united national le
ARer the peaple have created something that they are willi
1o defend, a wealth of new ideals and an sutonomous subsi
ence infrastructure, then they are ready o be brought ir
“open” conflict with the ruling class and its supporters, T
‘conflict must extend to every level of capitalist producti
and distribution, Consciousness of our power will grow,
a result of this mass contact with the ruling forces, Thers
70 question that people must be organized and edueated

the benefits of people's government before they can succe
fully move against their class enemy. However, there see
to be some question as 1o how seriously we should 1
ourselves and our work of organizing.

When we meet resistance, should we acquiesce, wi
draw, wait it out or intensify? Should we meet violent re
tion with & more determined violence? The type that
eighty tanks to flight in Laos? In other words, if the fasc
don't like what we're doing and attack us through a ly:
‘mob (the police forces and judicial branch of their gove
ment), should we relent? Or should we accept their viol
reaction as a natural respanse 10 our challenge and ory
against it?

Every step, every stage toward a unified black comm
will meet great resistance. This resistance will come in s¢
form of violence. It is clear that if we don’t learn to avere:
all resistance, no forward movement will be made. Disco
ing ways of meeting and overcoming resistance, demonst
ing to ourselves that “we can,” is a fundamental antecec
1othe growth of revolutionary consciousness because we'
under attack every step of the way. One hundred years
it would have been the same. One hundred years from tc

it willbe the same. We'll take our mule and forty ucres now,
collectivize them, defend them, invite other revolutianary
peaple to follow our example, make allics—then leap to de.
stroy the fascists' pscudo-mass-culture from within.

As the people move into more significant areas of unti-
establishment projects they will be hurled violently into can.
et with the defenders of the preseat state of property
relations at the level of production, distribution and property
rights in general. Thea we will discover that their power and
their new gy style actually depend on their greater po-
tenthal for viokence. The size and complexity of a thing are
"ot an index of its strength. This struck me forcefully one
cvening a3 fipped through onc of the nation's news weeklies
2nd spoted a photograph of s huge self-propelled 155-mm
cannon lying on its side, it barrel spiked forever. A man on

fool, armed with a racke! that weighed less than four pounds,
hud destroyed it.

The larger and more complex the city-state, the more it
is dependent upon all related parts. The cannon was hi at
its base, in the moving parts of its treads, which were de.
stroyed and the death machine fell of its own weight, How

can the super-technological sate operate without lectricity
Or power, without water, transport, communications, sewage

systems, utilities? None of these can be protected; their sheer
size alone makes it impossible. How can the establishment
protect an electrical supply line and the thousands of trans.-
formers, cic? Effective Ppositioning of the guards is militarily
ry twenty-five fect up and down the
million miles of line can't protec wauld also break he
class that paid for the protection), since a break at any one
Ppoint renders powerless. huge sections of the area. served. The
cost of supporting the guards would bankrupt any nation.
The gucrrillas would simply overwhelm the guardiaos poiot
0 point. I think this s the essence of the poor man's war.
the essence of the gucrrilla stratcgy, the protracicd war of he
worker bees.
“The only valid form of union activty is seizure of union
leadership by any ineans nccessary. We must cal strikes 1o

7z
entorce our demands va capital. 1o enforce the strike +
must stop the plant's power source. Standing in the gatew:
with 3 placard and a pamphlet alone will not dull a worke:
short-term interest in woge slavery. The very fist impulse
10 eatl With right-wing union leadership gone and the bla
warker revolutionized through his contact with the bla
commune, even the fascists who exist without any sense
commaunity or class consciousness can possibly be won o
or at least rendered neutral. Either way, they won't be a
10 break strikes with the power lines down.

‘The power of our military strategy sitting beside
political infrastructure depends on constant attack, att
attack. Improvisation, aggression. An attack on prope
the utilities that feed the super-state, indirect and di
attacks at the productive point and distribution system

As Ustated, the Western military experts admit that
mechanized establishment guard must outnumber the
tacking worker by ten to one. What they cannot affor
admit is that even this numerical superiority they
not win. They're learning this in every theater of comba
» class war, they could never even raise a ten-to-one nun
cal superiorityl Even if they succeed in employing the de
erte elements of the lower class (created by a long his
of counterpositive mobilization of reactionary mass soc
18 mercenaries or vigilantes in the enrly stages, the advar
s still ours. At ten to one, we still enjoy a strategic, mil
lority if we are attacking, because they must defer
many different points vital (o the order and continui
their ffe-support system, all at the same time. The poin
be protected will always outnumber the units who are s
able to protect them.

‘The super-technological city-state has grown so «
plex that it is completely dependent npon its thousan:
related parts. It has grown so large that no force ca
fielded 10 protect all its vital parts. The essence of
villa technique i to cripple and fnally stop the
system of the enemy class or state. The advantage ¢

anti-establishment force can he best understood by pict
the nced for the estublishment forces 1o spread themselves
thin in the vain atiempt 1o protect the mechan cal base of
their source of power, which, of course, works. out 0 be the
yarlous forms of productive and nonproductive property,

The mabile “have-not,” the attacker, can conceatrate i
forces (even though initaly hey are numerically inferior) tg
actually outnumber and overwhelm the thianed-out forces of
the establishment by attacking at onc or two points a s ime.
I Mao's Selected Works, Vol I, he speaks of ingenuity and
mobiliy as necessary qualites of any guerrilla operation,

clics depends
i which is what we

is the contribution of the inteligeat
‘commander. Flexibility does not mean recklessness;
recklessness must be rejected. Flexibility consists in the
intelligent commander's bifity 1o take timely and ap.
proprlate measures on the busis of objective conditions
after *judging the hour and sizing up the situation” (the
tustion” includes the enemy's situation, owr situation
and the terrain), and this Rexibility is “ingenuity in
varying tactics.” On the basis of this ingenuity, we can
Win mare victories in quick-decision offensive warfare
on exterior lines, <change the balance of forces in our.
favor, gaia the initiative over the encmy, and overwhelm
and crush him 30 that the fiual victory will be ours.s

“Mao Tae-tung, Selecied Works.

7
. 5 v 5 v
tected, and ten units of protection, clearly an attacking force
of one could destroy ten of the twenty points without opposi-
tion. The ten points that remain and are guarded by the ter
of protection must now meet the attacker on a one
to-one basis. The term “attack” explicitly means “firs
strike,” and “first sirike” translates into “sdvantage.” Tots
repression and genocide are not possible if we organize our
selves for survival first—if we first construct the communc
2 sense of commy ‘common interest of class. The objec
tive conditions are present. To postpone our liberation wit
the excuse that the “people aren't ready™ is to ungerestimat
them; in effect it's fike saying they don't have the ments
to act in their defense. The repeating shotgun s the deadlie
weapon in the world for close-range urban fighting. They ar
simple to make, maintain and use. Anyone can be effectis
with the scatter gun; one simply points and squeezes tt
trigger, if the thing o be shot is moving, follow through wil
Your swing. Tanks arc obsolete. They can be rendered harn
less with a dollar's worth of grenade, propelled from 11
muzzle of the shotgun by a blank cartridge. Then, s a tar
moves down any city street it has placed itsclf i a defile. C
8 cost-effectiveness basis, the most destructive weapon is t/

gasoline bomb. Enough gasoline, soap shavings and pots
sim chlorate could flip a tank over on its side, or throw

from the windows of our defile, the gasoline bomb cou
incinerate the largest army.

We can only be repressed if we stop thinking and st
fighting. People who refuse Lo stop fighting can never
repressed—they cither win or they die—which is more |
tractive than losing and dying. The primacy of poli
mains but we must now prepare for armed confrontation, |
o stretch of the imagination can we hope (0 overthrow
determined an enemy without force.

We Will Winl

George
Anile
m
Mo

for & servant was an expression
created a demented, gl
My strong and huge,

Dear Greg,*

‘The breakdown of «llhlithmbemn‘niminu usually
occurs first at the university level. Students refuse to accept
el that our exploitation of the workd's people s actually
bencficial 10 them. They begin to refuse their share of thy
spoils. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale left the campus to
forn the Bluck Panther Party. The Students for a Demo,
cratic Society gave birth 10 the Weatherman,

The rise of socio-political insttutions to their present
form and complexity was not the result of chance. The sor.
poration, the uni iversity, the unions, the mass media, the
foundations, the assaciations, the courts, the prisons. the
army (police—national and international—uniformed and
disguised) from their beginmings were formulutcd as snforc.
€3 of state Gentralism. An examination focused on the
tory of all the major socio-political institutions of the U
States (a study in the genetics of hicrarchy) would certainly
uncover the totally economic motive underlying the founda-
tions of these institutions. For my purpose, | would broadly

76
ide the major socio-political institutions into two classes,
one designed by the state to move people into certain actions,
and the other to discourage, curtail or completely deny cer-
tain other actions. The unintelligible vastness of these institu-
tions makes it seem impossible that they could be owned and
operated by a relatively small number of men; but the truth
of thia can be demonstrated by documented evidence and
irrefutable case studies. The modern industrial, corporative,
city-based state could never function at all without hierarchi-
el control and an acceptance by the peaple of the controlling
hierarchy.

“Prior conditioning," of coursel The “effects of ubiqui-
tous self-negation inbred since childhood," of course, againl
Certainly “the pervasive nihilism of capitalist man . . . But
these are simply “effects.”

Western civilization is dying because it's tied into an
economic system that was decadent & hundred years ago.
This system was certainty the calculated creation of a specific
minority class. The rise of the manufacturing class was not
spontancous. It is perpetuated beyond the stage of decadence
in spite of fits of outrageous disorder. Its seemingly remarka-
ble ability to return from crisis is not proof of natural dura-

bility. Rather it is proof of a destructive will to power at any
cost.

Frankenstein's need for a servant was an expression of
his diseased ego, 50 he created a huge, pathologically strong,
demented, ugly creature. He censored the beast’s activity by
‘making him underintelligent. He erected institutions fexible
‘enough to keep the giant working, but rigid enough to fore-
stall any growth of his mental facultics. A brain was grudg:
ingly attached to the benst to provide a way for it to act. The
benst worked and fought the enemies of his creator. The
beast was content 10 watch the creator flourish. He livec

through his creator. And when he finally saw himself as b
was, he went mad.

The corporation, the foundation, the association, th
mass media, the state-cantrolled unions, the universities an
primary schoolk are all desipned 10 move people intn ver

specitically pre-ordercd and monitored actions. The actual
moniloring is done by a broader segment of the stratified
stave state bul the pre-ordering is done by the one.tenth of
one percent, the ruling cluss and governing elite of the cor-
porative arrangement. The careful observer can see immedi.
ately how the guiding instructions are held together by red
tape and rubber bands so th: they can be very flexible when
necessary. The corparation’s lea market and the mass media
are relatively new techniques of control, as are the jnstity.
tional foundations and most of the associations.

The foundations, whether family or corporate, are tax-
exempl financial mecha ms, ostensibly established for al-
{ruisic influences in the fields of art and culture generally.
They subsidize scien ic rescurch, higher education, educa-
tional TV, etc. The Rockefellers alone control thirteen such
foundations, through which they also control the oi) holdings
of ninety to a hundred nations in the Third World countries
mainly—holdings variously estimated in value from ten o
fourteen billion dollars. Similac foundations are controlled
by the Fords, Kelloggs, and Carnegies, ctc., etc. When (he
international business interests of these family financial insti.
futions are threatencd, the *tax-supported internatianal po-
lice ace activated. After the C.LA. fails, the special forces are

called upon. When necessary, the Marine Corps and infantry
intervene,

Cumrade Gearge

Soutn Chicago
ABC Zine Distro
Pulishrer & Distilbueor
PO, Box 721
Hoineaood, IL 60450

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