Some thoughts on coalition, race, and class

One thing I think often gets lost in these discussions is how dramatically the political terrain has changed and what lessons we should actually draw from history.

A white organization calling itself the Young Patriots today would almost immediately be read as far-right or militia-adjacent. A Puerto Rican group like the Young Lords would almost certainly be framed as a gang. An armed Black organization would be treated, as history already shows, as an internal enemy to be destroyed. It reflects a state that learned from COINTELPRO and now preemptively criminalizes racialized armed formations before they can scale into mass power.

From a Marxist perspective, the deeper question is not who is allowed to “join” whom, but whether organizing primarily along racial lines, especially in armed or semi-militant forms, is strategically viable or desirable today.

Fred Hampton’s brilliance wasn’t identity balancing; it was subordinating identity to class struggle without denying racial oppression. The Rainbow Coalition was not an end in itself. It was a tactical formation meant to break racial antagonisms among the poor, build shared class consciousness, and direct struggle against capital and its state. Racial autonomy was a means, not a destination.

Do we really want numerous fragmented, race-based armed groups, each isolated, easily demonized, and unevenly repressed? Or does it make more sense to collectivize around the material reality we all share: exploitation by capital and repression by its state apparatus?

The Panthers’ survival programs: feeding kids, clinics, political education weren’t symbolic or racial litmus tests. They were universalist because material need is universal, and because building mass legitimacy is how power is constructed.

Discipline matters. Strategy matters. Security matters. But if race becomes the primary organizing principle rather than class, we reproduce the very fragmentation the ruling class relies on. The Panthers at their best understood this. Hampton understood it. The state understood it too.

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