The Black Panther Party's War of Position, Neoliberal Passive Revolution, and the Origin of the Prison Industrial Complex in the U.S. and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper contributes to the debates on Neoliberal Passive Revolution in the U.S. by examining the legacy of the Black Panther Party's war of position against internal colonialism, which culminated in the rise of neoliberalism to contain the racial crisis in America. Gramsci's (1971) theory of working class organic intellectuals, passive revolution, and the war of position in civil society to win proletarian hegemony in fascist Italy, is utilized as a framework to analyze the historical significance of the U.S. Black Panther Party. The party's war of position, under the ideological leadership of Panther leader Huey Newton, transformed race relations in America, by challenging White ruling class hegemony in working class African-American communities throughout the country. The Panther war of position was defeated, but it was ultimately responsible for the ascendancy of the neo-liberal passive revolution that was carried out by the ruling class to contain the African-American working class; while incorporating the African-American middle class into U.S. civil society and political society on an unprecedented level. This paper hopes to contribute to the development of Toronto's prison abolition movement to end mass incarceration in Canada. For this to occur, I will discuss the historical context of the prison industrial complex in the U.S., which inspired its formation in Canada over the last two decades. In Canada, neoliberalism took the form of a counter-reformation: a restoration with no progressive element. The Canadian imperialist bourgeoisie organized the prison industrial complex differently than the U.S. But mass incarceration was introduced by the Canadian state with the same intention to occupy and contain African-Canadian communities, to reduce their ability to transform Canadian capitalist imperialism into a socialist workers state organized on the principal of self-determination for the Indigenous and African nations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".