Revolutionary Suicide

by Huey P. Newton

Besides, genuine social change didn’t come from celebrities, Huey argued, but from the people themselves.

readers should consult his final book, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.

In other words, every revolutionary fighter by definition struggles against the power imbalance of the establishment, and the cost of this struggle is often paid with one’s own life.

Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions.

Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible.

When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.

Not that I am happy with the suffering; I simply refuse to be defeated by it.

If hard work brought success, why did we not see more success in the community? The people were certainly working hard. It seemed we were predestined to endless toil. We poor people never reached the point of having time to pursue the things we wanted.

I also saw the link between racism and the economics of capitalism, although, despite the link, I recognized that it was necessary to separate the concepts in analyzing the general situation.

Therefore, trying to get more laws was only a meaningless diversion from the real issues.

This shows again that when the oppressor cannot get his will through legal devices, he will act illegally.

The Black Panthers have always emphasized action over rhetoric. But language, the power of the word, in the philosophical sense, is not underestimated in our ideology.

Man attempts to define phenomena in such a way that they reflect the interests of his own class or group.