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A Functional Understanding Of Historical And Social Context

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When it comes to the evaluation of history, there are a variety of components essential to developing a functional understanding of historical and social context: to look to the future, we must look to the past, and to explore the present, we must think about the potential of the future. This juxtaposition of past, present and future, or the combination of empiricism and logic thought, constitutes dialectical materialism, requiring an examination of the end-goal to determine the means of societal change. This theorization of revolutionary action established the backdrop for the creation of the Black Panther Party in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who drew from dialectical materialism and general Marxist-Leninist philosophy to …show more content…

In his writings on the subject of politics in 1969, Huey Newton makes the similar argument that Black people must develop shared political power in order to make it “unprofitable for racists to continue oppressing” their communities (148). Through this emphasis on the need to change profit incentives by banding together, which he argues must be through military power, Newton seems to concur with Marx’s thesis that the “ever-expanding union of the workers” is needed to centralise power (Marx 166). This reclaiming of the political sphere through political and ideological union, as both theorists seem to attest to, thus has the potential to resolve class antagonisms. But Newton’s understanding of this principle seems to diverge from Marx in its contextualization to the African-American situation: Huey professed to follow the ideological path of Marxist-Leninism and Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung, but made it relevant to the situation of the United States. The reorientation of Marxist-Leninist theory to address the oppression of Black people in America through the Black Panther Party, as Newton himself points out in his speech at Boston College in 1970, “follow[s] the dialectical method” while also integrating theory and practice (Newton 164). Instead of looking to historical facts as the sole arbiter of potential futures, as historical materialists – who,

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