Huey P. Newton's declaration that he had no doubt the revolution would triumph, that the people of the world would prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, and win a new world, is an expression of revolutionary optimism. It is not wishful thinking but a conviction grounded in history and in the creative power of the people. Born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1942 and raised in Oakland, Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense with Bobby Seale in October 1966. The Party began by monitoring the police with law books and legally carried guns, and it grew into a national movement whose survival programs, from free breakfasts for children to free health clinics, showed that the people could meet their own needs.

Newton's words come from Revolutionary Suicide, his autobiography, which takes its title from an idea at the center of his thought. He argued that oppressed people face a choice between reactionary suicide, slow death through despair, poverty, and submission, and revolutionary suicide. Revolutionary suicide meant the willingness to risk everything in the fight against the forces that destroy them, with the confidence that the struggle would continue and ultimately win. He developed the theory of revolutionary intercommunalism, arguing that US empire had linked the world's oppressed communities in a common struggle against a single system.

Revolutionary optimism has sustained movements through prison, repression, assassination, and defeat. It runs from Gramsci's call for optimism of the will to the certainty of the Vietnamese, the Cubans, and the Palestinians that their struggles would prevail against overwhelming force. In a world that teaches despair and tells us nothing can change, optimism is a political act. This print is a reminder that the people have made history before and will make it again, and that the new world we are fighting for is not a dream but a future to be won.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*