In 1969, Eldridge Cleaver then a leading theoretician of the Black Panther Party, an organization forged in the crucible of Oakland’s ghettos and dedicated to the armed self‑defense of the African‑American nation traveled to Pyongyang to attend an anti‑imperialist journalists conference. The journey was not a mere diplomatic gesture; This gesture acted as a genuine encounter between two fronts of the same global war, the war of the dispossessed against the empire of capital. In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Cleaver directly experienced the truth of North Korea, that is, it is a socialist state that had expelled Japanese colonialism, repelled US invasion, and was constructing a self‑reliant society under conditions of total blockade. He became entranced. For the Panthers, North Korea was not a curiosity; it was a material proof that a non‑white, non‑Western nation could not only survive imperial punishment but thrive on its own terms.
The theoretical bridge was Juche of course, the principle of self‑reliance. Juche is a strategic doctrine born from Korea’s particular material conditions, a peninsula divided by imperial confrontation, a nation forced to choose between Soviet patronage, Chinese hegemony, or its own path. Pyongyang’s genius was to turn this squeeze into a weapon. Juche allowed North Korea to navigate the Soviet split by declaring its ideological independence, and in doing so, it offered a template to other colonized and semi‑colonized peoples, you need not bow to Moscow or Washington; you can build with your own hands, your own soil, your own class struggle.
The Black Panther Party, from its inception, had practiced a form of Juche. The programs of armed community patrols, the free breakfast for children, the survival kits these were expressions of “using what you have to get what you need.” The Panthers did not wait for the settler state to provide; they expropriated from the bourgeoisie and redistributed within their nation of poor dispossessed peoples, separate from the amerikkkan nation. When the Black Panther newspaper declared in February 1970 that “broken wine bottles and hypodermic needles are very effective… this is Juche,” it was not appropriating a foreign slogan. It was recognizing a theoretical kinship of self‑defense as a materialist necessity under conditions of occupation.
Eldridge Cleaver’s embrace of North Korea was documented. He saw in Pyongyang’s streets, its literacy campaigns, its
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