Reviewing Eldridge Cleaver's second book, Post-Prison Speeches and Writings, demands a critical license like that of reviewing the aspects of a man's life which consigned him to purgatory. Moreover, the review itself can offer little promise of comfort and less in the way of advice to the man in question, whose likely response would be: "If I could live life all over again, I'd do the same thing." There is, then, but one legitimate line of investigation, since we already know why the man lived the way he did. This approach would ask two questions, "Why must he do it again in that way, if he could?" and "Is there really no other way?"

But even this tack is not very promising, because it offers no easy answers to these questions which would even begin to satisfy those who adhere to any of today's "revolutionary" trends in America. For if there is anyone among them who has demonstrated the full measure of his devotion to "putting one's head on the line," it is Eldridge Cleaver. What more can one demand after that? What is there more to be said about Eldridge Cleaver, the writer-activist-revolutionary, that is legitimate critically and politically apt?

In the first place, [Post-Prison Speeches and Writings] presents a peculiar problem because of the nature of its content and style…. [We] must deal here not with Cleaver, the literary essayist, but with Cleaver, the activist, the revolutionary, the political ideologist. Also with Cleaver, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Information and associate editor of Ramparts Magazine. One must deal in part with all of these facets of Eldridge Cleaver because the man defies facile classification. He did not emerge from what was considered, during periods like the 1930s, the proper path to conventional revolutionary politics. His political personality is as unprecedented as the situation of racial confrontation in which he and his ideas became famous….

Out of prison, Cleaver faced a very complex world, in a tense and agitated human mosaic in black and white tones. For Cleaver, as he said in prison, real history, black history, "began with Malcolm X." But Malcolm X's organization, the OAAU [Organization of Afro-American Unity], had died with him, and Cleaver hoped and tried to revive it. His search for an organization reminiscent of Malcolm X's movement ended when he encountered the Black Panther Party. As the Panther's Minister of Information, he started a new political career. "Without the Panthers," [as Robert Scheer says in his introduction to Post-Prison Speeches and Writings], "Cleaver would undoubtedly have developed a much more personal career-oriented, literary way of life. With the Panthers, he became a disciplined political revolutionary as well as a literary polemicist, although there was hardly any time for writing."

But Cleaver never sought a "literary way of life"; in fact he deliberately did otherwise: he searched for political involvement because he held a "belief in the necessity of black political revolution …" In this self-assumed role, Cleaver experienced in his unique way what several other black writers discovered before him: revolutionary political activity and literary creation simply do not mix. This is why "there was hardly any time for writing."

Perhaps it is safe to assume that this was the way Cleaver wanted it. For a serious writer in prison, particularly a philosophical one, there is hardly a better place to pursue the writer's lonely commitment to literature than in isolation, free from external infringements such as the need to "earn a living." The outside world is hard on the would-be writer, especially if he is black. After enduring the arduous course of literary commitment and exile, the black writer then runs the hazards of literary success: he is then induced, if not commanded, to become a black spokesman. Then he is asked: what are his political commitments? If he is willing, he succumbs and becomes, like Cleaver, a "literary polemicist," and, ultimately, a political revolutionary. (p. 13)

Cleaver, like many others, was first legitimized by the very mass media whose social role most of us attack as the corrupting propaganda agency of the "power structure." In this fashion are writers, revolutionary or otherwise, trapped by the system in ways many of us do not like to admit. But in viewing Cleaver's essential ideas, one is led to ask, What did the Black Panthers and the Peace and Freedom Party really think about Cleaver's political ideas which the mass media ignored?

This question may not appear legitimate on first sight, but it is. It is ironic that in our society the propagandist of unpopular political ideas cannot depend on his allies to propagate his views. Neither the Old Left nor the New Left could or would publish Eldridge Cleaver widely—they have neither the resources nor the disseminating range to equal the visibility given Cleaver by the mass media. It was one sector of the "power structure" that jailed him, controlled him, negated him, and finally hounded him into exile. But it was another sector of the "power structure" that facilitated and sustained his literary and political celebrity.

We must admit that Frantz Fanon was right, for the United States is structurally unlike those societies in the Third World that spawn revolutionary anti-colonialist movements in Algeria, Kenya, Angola, and heroes like Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara. The wish to emulate these Third World movements in the United States is understandable, but the revolutionary leaders in the Third World would find Cleaver's access to publishing houses and television studios incomprehensible. It is with the social and political reality of the United States in mind, as well as the nature of his alliances, that we must consider Cleaver's views.

We know fairly well the ideas of the Black Panther Party's self-defense program before the arrival of Cleaver: land, bread, housing, education, justice, peace, the end of police brutality, freedom for black prisoners, peer jury trials, exemption of blacks from military service, to name the most important. But the appearance of Cleaver in the Black Panther ranks as a major spokesman and ideologist brought to the fore again that touchy question of the possibility and the necessity of a black nationalist-white leftist political alliance. For one thing, the jailing of one Panther leader, Huey Newton, made such an alliance a necessity if Newton was to be saved. Funds and legal aid were needed. Cleaver, however, recurrently voices the theme of black and white unity as a fundamental political necessity for the Panther movement which, as he explained to Nat Hentoff in the Playboy Interview [see excerpt above],… was intended by him to become "the black national movement" of America…. (pp. 13-14)

This is the way Cleaver more than anyone else personifies the Malcolm X legacy. Malcolm came to disavow "black racism," as it is called. So Cleaver found a way to reconcile "political nationalism" to a black and white coalition. (p. 14)

Cleaver differs not at all from other committed American militants, for, like them, he is basically American, with the same radical hang-ups and contradictions. It is the quality of his rhetoric that is unique but, as Nat Hentoff pointed out in his interview, Cleaver is just as much a prisoner of the reformist bind and the agony of its unfulfilled promises as anyone else who, under inexorable and excruciating pressures, must resort to revolutionary slogans and threats…. (p. 15)

Robert Scheer states that Cleaver "thrives in chaos" and is "very much the impulsive, lusty, bohemian writer." The variety of his perceptions reveal this—they roll out of his mind and on to paper or tapes chaotically, in an avalanche which he is hard put to constrain or keep within a political frame. Inevitably, then, after giving full play to his political imagination, wherein everything, including sex, is given a political configuration, Cleaver falls back on Karl Marx:

Let's pay our respects to Brother Karl Marx's gigantic brain, using the fruits of his wisdom, applying them to this crumbling system, and have some socialism, moving on to the classless society.

So it all comes down to that, which is where many of us came in. Before Cleaver mentions Marx, he points out that "The basic problem in this country is political confusion." True, but does the injection of Marxian ideas into this situation help to clear up this confusion? If Cleaver thinks so, then we are entitled to ask, what does he think the American Marxists have been about all the years before Cleaver appeared? Have they been adding clarity to confusion? The answer is: not much. In addition to attaching himself to the agony of his (and our) legacy of present-day political confusion, Cleaver innocently and in desperation has attached himself to the agony of the American white Left. We know that misery loves company, this was always so; but our experience in the American morass tells us that the will to make a revolution is not the same thing as having the means to make it.

It is a good thing that some black nationalists have arrived at that level of political maturity which allows them to dispense with enough "black racism" to understand that "Whitey," too, is caught in a tight bind in America, right along with his "black colonial subjects." But history has at last handed the black brother a torch to light up the path out of this darkness. Although certain young diehards are using the torch for incendiary purposes, the more sophisticated are called upon to understand their own condition in the interests of a heightened black social awareness. Questions arise: Shall the black nationalist militants accept poverty grants in the ghettos, before or after applying the torch, or shall they opt for the revolutionary millennium, during which time someone else will take advantage of the government's grants anyway! Here is one economic source of political confusion, or vice versa. It is very, very real, and what answer can Marx or Mao give to this black political and economic dilemma? (pp. 15-16)

[Behind] the "political confusion" which Cleaver sees as the American malaise lies a vast, ignoble legacy, a grossly distorted interpretation of the political, economic, cultural, racial, and ethnic ingredients that comprise the national development. In short, the American "political confusion" is a reflection of the confusion over "national purpose." Americans generally have no agreement on who they are, what they are, or how they got to be what they are. They do not respond to their situation out of any real sense of historical determination, because their "history," when they are aware of it, gives them no guidelines to the resolution of present difficulties.

Thus the black search for "identity" (or Fanon's "cultural matrix") only underscores the fact that all Americans are involved in an identity crisis. Since whites and blacks do not identify with each other, it only means that neither blacks nor whites are really identifying with the realities of the American experience which bound them together so fatefully in what is supposed to be the "cultural matrix" of a nation. Thus the implied threat of the division of the nation into "two nations black and white" is another way of saying that the American experiment in nationhood has been a historical failure of the first magnitude.

Simplistically and biologically, the black and white confrontation is called a "racial" conflict, a carry-over from black slavery. But deep down, historically and psychologically, it is a cultural conflict over the seeming incompatibility of "group values" and aspirations which manifest themselves in our political, economic, and cultural institutions. The implied premises of these institutions are, ultimately, the perpetuation of Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacy, which is the white-skinned side of cultural nationalism.

For this important reason Cleaver's attack on what he perceives as black "cultural nationalism," its meaning and social role, is not only superficial, but also reveals a narrow-minded and antihistorical point of view. There are some black nationalists for whom, as Cleaver charges, "posturing, dress, or reviving African cultural roots" is the be-all and end-all of "cultural nationalism." It becomes their form of psychological "liberation" from the values of white culture especially when it culminates in dropping "slave names." Call it romanticism, but every movement has its share of romantics. People have called [Marcus] Garvey's "Back to Africa" nationalism "Political Nationalism," but it was also scoffed at as being "highly romantic" and "utopian."

Cleaver posits the necessity for political revolution in opposition to the search for identity implicit in black "cultural nationalism," as if to say that in America blacks and whites can collaborate in making revolution without a program that will deal with the problem of black cultural identity or cultural nationalism. The Marxists have long maintained this position, but this reviewer, while understanding the logic of this position, will continue to maintain that it is erroneous. (pp. 16-17)

The problem with Eldridge Cleaver and those of his generation who opt for "political revolution" is that a new set of social and philosophical concepts are needed to substantiate political activism toward more and specified goals. To say that America is a racist society is not enough—there is more to it than that. If American racism created the institutions, it is now the institutions themselves which legitimize the racist behavior of those who are the products of the institutions. The problem, then, is how to deal structurally with these institutions—how to alter them, eradicate them, or build new and better ones? What is the method of social change to follow the demonstrations, the oratory and polemics, the jailings, the agony, and the exiles? (p. 18)