The BPP’s heyday was extraordinarily short. In less than 10 years, the party fell apart under repressive pressure from the government and ethical inconsistency from its leadership, which centralized authority and became increasingly punitive and masculinist. Considering what the state put this group of people through, it’s no surprise that some Panthers turned on one another: They were infiltrated by government agents planning to imprison and kill them. The RAM milieu was right about that (and it had a much higher survival rate), but it’s objectively mistaken to see the Black Panther Party as a failure. It synthesized political currents from the Civil War and the Cold War, and the model it produced took the world by fire. In the Panthers’ analysis, they combined the psychological heat of anticolonial struggle with an ice-cold understanding of capitalism as a worldwide impersonal system. That’s what allowed them to uphold the seemingly contradictory truths of Black Power and Marxist universalism at the same time. Strategically, it allowed them to understand that changing hearts and minds could never abolish global capitalism. The Panthers showed that the war was always already here at home. The question was how to fight and win.

— Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris