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A review by tombomp
The Huey P. Newton Reader by Huey P. Newton
4.0
Fascinating if you're interested in the Black Panthers, probably not so much otherwise. The first quarter is an extract from his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, which I really want to read now and would probably be a better bet if you're not interested in the more detailed parts of his ideology and how it developed - it's a pretty gripping read even with just the short extract. The end chapter is an extract from War Against The Panthers which was his doctoral thesis and talks about the ways the FBI tried to bring them down - they're the sort of things that are completely expected but still incredible to have confirmed and I think the book would make an important case study on the issue of police repression.
The biggest frustration here is that he never really explains deeply some of his positions - I'm thinking primarily here of his ideas about intercommunalism. I don't know if he just never wrote more articles answering questions on the topic or what but I didn't really get a good grip on what he's talking about, which is annoying because it seems to have been an important part of his later ideology. Overall the impression you get is of someone who is serious about working in the Marxist tradition (he rejects the term Marxist because of its connotations with dogmatic people who believe in re-runs of 1917) - he talks constantly about dialectics, he references Mao, Che, Marx, Lenin (both directly and through borrowed metaphors etc), he focuses on the economic dimension. He constantly criticises himself and previous party positions and comes across as highly honest and dedicated. I came away from the book impressed by a revolutionary hero.
The biggest frustration here is that he never really explains deeply some of his positions - I'm thinking primarily here of his ideas about intercommunalism. I don't know if he just never wrote more articles answering questions on the topic or what but I didn't really get a good grip on what he's talking about, which is annoying because it seems to have been an important part of his later ideology. Overall the impression you get is of someone who is serious about working in the Marxist tradition (he rejects the term Marxist because of its connotations with dogmatic people who believe in re-runs of 1917) - he talks constantly about dialectics, he references Mao, Che, Marx, Lenin (both directly and through borrowed metaphors etc), he focuses on the economic dimension. He constantly criticises himself and previous party positions and comes across as highly honest and dedicated. I came away from the book impressed by a revolutionary hero.