Only the People Make Revolutions

Huey P. Newton has always been something of an intellectual enigma. Famous for co-founding the Black Panther Party in 1966 in Oakland, California, as a revolutionary leader he undertook armed resistance against the racist state. His role as a political theorist, however, remains underexplored.Decades ahead of his time, Newton diagnosed the current, emerging US-enforced world order, linking the plight of Black Americans directly to global capitalist exploitation and anti-colonial struggles across the Global South. Newton exposed how local police violence and racial oppression were directly tied to the machinery of global empire. Drawing on Newton's unpublished archives, John Narayan argues that Newton's theory of intercommunalism constitutes the first serious attempt to build a political and organisational response to neoliberal globalisation.Bold, rigorous, and explosive, Only the People Make Revolutions establishes Newton as a premier theorist of anti-racism and anti-imperialism, offering a vital theoretical arsenal for a new generation fighting capitalist crisis today.