210
ABBIE HOFFMAN
Day, longhair Daniel Brown, age nineteen, attacked a police car naked
while brandishing a sword. He was shot dead. It was not so long after
Huey Newton, head of the Black Panther Party in nearby Oakland, shot
a policeman. The styles are different but the goals the same. Both
Daniel Brown and Huey Newton wanted freedom. What is this thing
called Freedom? What meaning does it have for young whites in Amer–
ica as it is screamed from the steps of Sproul Hall or murmured at tribal
council meetings in an incense-filled room on the Lower East Side.
Freedom is the right to stand on the streetcorner and do nothing. Free–
dom is no censorship. Freedom is an end
to
poverty. Freedom is love.
Freedom is having fun. Freedom is an end to the draft. Freedom
is
the '
abolition of property. Freedom is burning money. Freedom is the end
of work. Our goal is full unemployment. Our vision is the free society.
Step one: a guaranteed annual income. Demands for more jobs,
traditionally seen as the answer to ghetto poverty, are outdated. Our
technology has unrealized potential for expansion. The little training
now going on in the ghetto is for jobs that are already obsolete, hence
meaningless. A guaranteed annual income is a transitional step toward
a free society. Next: rent, food and medical care. Services such as tele–
phones, transportation, utilities, will follow. And finally free art, free
entertainment, free news. Goods to satisfy the needs of men. Society
as a whole will move from issue orientation to problem-solving. The
question then becomes: How do we construct our vision? Finally we will
do away with money. Allen Ginsberg, in the poem
America,
writes,
"When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I want with my
good looks?" while in Cuba, Castro announces "the goal of our society
is the abolition of money." We need to work towards that vision if we
as people both black and white are to survive the collapse of the
Empire. Cries of black power, student power, flower power, will peck at
the guts of a cancerous system while guerrilla power chops at its
tentacles abroad. There will be riots, drop-outs, disruption and foreign
wars the government cannot win. We will have our own war of libera–
tion , and the young, if
we
survive, will build the Free America.
Tom Kahn
Is it not remarkable that so much effort is devoted to the
exegesis of a slogan? One would think the phrase "Black Power" had
an independent existence, a substance and dynamic of its own. Yet
words are presumably invented to indicate preexisting things; and at
least in politics, slogans have typically arisen as popular condensations
