3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

Newton, Seale, and Cleaver had all studied Frantz Fanon~ as well as Mikhail
Aleksandrovich Bakunin, a contemporary of Karl Marx who advocated "the science of
destruction" in his Catechism of the Revolutionist ; a textbook for would-be anarchists,
and one of a number of pieces which various student groups plagiarized, published, and
circulated in pamphlet form in the 1960's and 1970'x . Revolutionists, Bakunin instructed,
must forego conventionality and devote themselves to "mechanics, physics, chemistry,
and possibly medicine," in so far as they contribute to their sole interest : "the rovolution ."
The revolutionist, "merciless toward the state," should delight solely in "inexorable
destruction." He may befriend only those who "prove themselves by their actions" to be
revolutionists like himself. "He is to consider himself as capital," Bakunin wrote, "fated
to be spent for the triumph of the revolutionary cause" ; however, "he has no right to
personally and alone to dispose of that capital, without the consent of the aggrogate of the
fully initiated." Bakunin encouraged those involved in the struggle to "join hands" with
outlaws and bandits, "the only genuine revolutionists ." In a preface to the pamphlet,
Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information of the Black Panther Party, called the
~ltecirism "one of the most important formulations of principles in the entire history of
revolution" ; however, Bakunin, whose notions of violence were direct and immoderate,
~Fanon, a black psychiatrist from Martinique who worked in Algeria for the National
Liberation Front in its fight against the French, considered violence a necessary function
of the liberation of the oppressed. Newton and Seale digested Fanon's theories of
violence and, in the BPP's latter stages, argued that spontaneous violence educates those
"who are in a position with skills to lead the people to what needs to be done." See
Frantz Fanon, Les damnEs de la terra (The Wretched of the Earthl (Paris: Fran~ois
Maspero, 1961 ; reprint, New York: Grove Press, Inc ., 1968); see also Seale,
Timsti, 25-26, 34 .
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