Why Marxist Revolutions Fail: Lessons from the Black Panther Party and Radical Chic
A Lesson from Radical Chic
There's something poetic about watching Marxist rhetoric unravel in real time—especially when it's happening inside a Park Avenue duplex, surrounded by Roquefort morsels, crushed nuts, and white-gloved servants. That's what went down on January 14, 1970, at Leonard Bernstein's infamous cocktail party for the Black Panther Party's legal defense fund. Tom Wolfe captured it perfectly in Radical Chic—a surreal scene where Manhattan's wealthiest liberals played at being revolutionaries for an evening. You HAVE to read this piece.
It was a perfect storm of contradictions. You had Don Cox, the Black Panther Party's Field Marshal, standing in front of a room full of people whose entire existence was built on the system he wanted to dismantle. Cox was trying to explainMarxist ideals to folks sipping champagne in a multi-million-dollar apartment. And the whole thing just exposed why Marxism never works—it sounds good in theory, but the second it meets reality, it falls apart.
At the party, Cox said, "We believe that the government is obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income … see … but if the white businessman will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessman and placed in the community, with the people."
Bernstein, eager to show he was down with the cause, asked the most obvious follow-up: "How? I dig it! But how?"
Julie Belafonte, also wanting to play along, added, "A very difficult question!"
And then Cox, like every Marxist ideologue before and after him, delivered the ultimate non-answer: "You can't blueprint the future."
And there it is. That's why Marxism is a dead-end—it's all theory, no plan. Just big ideas about justice and fairness, vague notions of redistribution, and blind faith that somehow, this time, the details will magically work themselves out. Every Marxist revolution has promised prosperity, but when it comes time to actually execute the vision, things always fall apart. And when they don't? You get gulags, purges, economic collapse, and mass starvation.
One of the best moments of the night came when Otto Preminger, in his thick Austrian accent, called out Cox: "You said zis is de most repressive country in de vorld. I dun't beleef zat."
Cox, caught off guard, tried to shift the conversation. Preminger pressed him: "Is de United States more repressive than Nigeria?"
Cox dodged. "I don't know anything about the government of Nigeria."
And that right there is another reason why these movements collapse—so much of their messaging is built on emotion, not facts. It's always about feeling like capitalism is the worst system in the world, rather than actually studying history. Because if you look at history, there's no debate—socialist and communist regimes have been exponentially more repressive than capitalist democracies. Every. Single. Time.
And then comes the funniest moment: Bernstein caught up in his guilt, decides to make it about himself.
"When you walk into this house, into this building… you must feel infuriated!"
Cox, probably realizing how absurd this had all become, tried to brush it off. "No, man … I manage to overcome that."
But Lenny wasn't done. He needed to feel the revolution, to believe he was part of the struggle.
"Well, it makes me mad!"
No, it doesn't. Bernstein wasn't about to give up his Park Avenue lifestyle. He didn't want to actually dismantle capitalism—he just wanted the thrill of revolution without the consequences. That's what Wolfe nailed in Radical Chic—this wholescene wasn't about real change. It was about rich liberals playing dress-up, indulging in Marxism for an evening before heading back to their art galleries and charity galas. Just like liberals to today.
And that's really the core issue with Marxism: it thrives on the idea that history is a battle between oppressors and the oppressed and that only a revolution can fix it. But as Cox himself admitted, the Black Panthers didn't actually have a functional alternative economic system—they had a fight. A fight that had to keep going, no matter what.
"If we can't find a meaningful life … you know … maybe we can have a meaningful death."
That's the problem. Marxism, in practice, isn't about solutions—it's about struggle. It's about tearing things down with no real plan to build anything sustainable. That's why every Marxist regime turns authoritarian. The revolution always has to continue, because utopia never arrives. And once you run out of external enemies, you start turning on your own. The French Revolution had the guillotine. The Soviets had the purges. Mao had the Cultural Revolution.
And here's where things get really interesting—because history has a funny way of catching up with revolutionaries.
I've seen video interviews with Eldridge Cleaver from years later, and you know what? He tuned into a Republican. Not just a former Marxist, but an actual Reagan guy. You can hear the regret in his voice when he talks about his past beliefs. Huey Newton, later in life, wasn't as revolutionary either. By the time you see him in later interviews, he's in a suit, speaking in a way that makes it clear—even he saw the mistakes of the movement he co-founded.
And that's what makes me want to read Don Cox's book. I want to know how people evolve in their thinking. Because if you look at almost any revolutionary movement, you start to notice the same pattern: in the beginning, it's all about the mission, the cause, the fight. But over time you get mission creep. Thing morphs into something else. It becomes a cult of personality. It becomes about power. And eventually, the disillusionment sets in.
By January 1969, the Black Panther Party had chapters all over the country. They had momentum. But here's the thing—outside of the Free Huey campaign, they didn't actually have a plan. They hit the books, trying to learn Marxism-Leninism so they could figure out what to do next. And that's where it all started to unravel.
The first book they studied? Joseph Stalin's The Foundations of Leninism. Yeah. They used Stalin to structure their movement. And the lesson they took from it? The Party had to come first. Loyalty to the Party was everything. Not about the community. Not even the revolution. Just the Party. It's almost like that today with the party in power in Washington today.
And that's how you get cults of personality. Huey Newton became the voice of the movement. His word became law. The Party turned insular. Power was consolidated at the top. And anyone who questioned it? They were purged.
Cox later admitted that they didn't question it at the time because they didn't know what else to do. They weren't political strategists. They were young, angry, and desperate for change. And in that desperation, they built something that eventually destroyed itself.
That's what happens in every revolution. The leaders become gods. The movement turns inward. The revolution starts eating itself. And when it all collapses, the people who survive are left wondering how they ever believed in it in the first place.
Blaming COINTELPRO for the Panthers' collapse is convenient, but as Cox said, the biggest damage was self-inflicted. The actual Huey Newton couldn't survive the idealized version of himself that they had created.
And that's why I want to read Cox's book—to see that evolution. I want to know what it feels like to go from believing in the revolution to watching it fall apart.
Because it always falls apart.
Clayton Craddock is a devoted father of two, an accomplished musician, and a thought-provoker dedicated to Socratic questioning, challenging the status quo, and encouraging a deeper contemplation on various issues. Subscribe to Think Things Through HERE, and for inquiries and to connect, email him here: Clayton@claytoncraddock.com.
"...that's why I want to read Cox's book—to see that evolution. I want to know what it feels like to go from believing in the revolution to watching it fall apart.
Because it always falls apart."
While you're at it, you might also read Ron Chernow's 'Alexander Hamilton', which (by my reading) portrays the American Revolution as a struggle for its own sake, with the attendant emergence of a new elite running everything (without a plan) to replace the old one, the utilitarian shift from rejecting all things British to noticing that British banks had financed the Continental Army and now wanted their lavish loans paid back (!), the transformation of an ad-hoc office of the President (the first holder of which barely knew what it was he was to preside over and mostly wanted to go home to Mount Vernon and count his remaining cherry trees) into a quasi-religious cult of personality including plans to convert some worthless Virginia swampland into a shiny new national capitol named after him, and the new struggle to the death between rival up-and-comers (Hamilton & Burr, America's 18th century version of a post-revolutionary Trotsky vs Stalin) whose primary credentials each included having served in the war of independence and each having read some law books in the meantime, with each managing to lose a shit-ton of their private investors' money as career side-hustles, which is why they each remained in politics, instead of ever earning an honest living once the Bloody British had been (more or less) thrown out....
It has also bothered me, ever since I began to do my own courses of study on revolutions and why they always fail to become anything but newer and even worse regimes than the ones they had fought to dismantle, that the popular ignorance of the realities of how thirteen colonies eventually became fifty United States tends to give the revolution itself a historic pass. What passes for historic analysis of the American revolution reads as though, for once, these larger-than-life 'founding fathers' had somehow managed to have themselves the one revolution in all history which kept to its ideals (did it ever have any?) and, as if by magic, managed to create, as if a matter of epochal destiny, the most powerful nation on earth with the most perfect form of governance ever devised, with liberty & justice for all, etc, etc.
If you read Chernow's book it might also give you some clue why I find reducing the story of America's first Treasury Secretary and original architect of this indestructible 'national debt' as a new nation-building form of the ancient practice of living well beyond one's true means, to a Broadway musical wherein everyone on stage is cast mostly on a whimsical basis of their having the wrong skin colors (!), and wherein the creation of that nation is somehow rendered as cause to burst into song every few minutes, is about as grotesque a distortion of history as ever occurred, in a nation known the world over for distorting its own and everyone else's history beyond recognition just for the self-admiring (and highly lucrative, I'm told) fun of it...
The revolution which began this country was in reality as much a failure, in its resulting future practices, as any other. American prosperity as we have known it since the end of a second world war (a global conflagration devised by Josef Stalin to begin with, and with that cult of personality emerging as its primary beneficiary) has little to do with some superior template for governing, and much to do with plain old imperialism in conquering the world's most advantageous continent in terms of access to global trade routes. And now a new revolution and personality cult are seeking to dismantle all that, for the fun of it and for the struggle's own self-justifying sake, to achieve better social media results on their smart phones, or something.
As someone once said, 'You say you want a revolution? Well, when you're talking about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out?'
Where was John Lennon in 1776, when we needed him? When I look around at what that revolution has done to this continent ever since, and at whose cost, I'm pretty convinced that had I been of age to serve in that pointless exercise, I would have headed to the Rockies to go trap beavers and hang out with the locals, while one still could.
The rabid destruction being called 'prosperity' would have caught up eventually, no matter who won that needless war. Just look at a map: moderate climates, central north latitudes, boundless natural resources, few prior inhabitants standing in the way, and thousands of miles of uncontested shorelines with hundreds of suitable natural harbors giving unrestrained access to all the world's oceans with the nearest rival powers thousands of miles away across them. Those 'founding fathers' had little to do with granting today's Americans any of that, and mostly were unaware that any of it even existed.
They were too busy trying to destroy each other politically, once the revolution was over, leaving as a legacy mostly a permanent state of war between equally useless rival factions (and a real one in the 1860s: the 'war between the states' was for all practical purposes a war between central-rule Republicans and States'-rights Democrats, over whether to take a southern or northern route building a railroad to those California gold fields, their having been seized by force from Mexico a half-generation earlier...), an enduring curse against the cause of human liberty which to this day the ordinary American people (whom none of this conquest and destruction was ever meant to serve) have as yet been unable to cure.
We're just another country, folks, vicious self-serving politicians and politically indifferent career bureaucrats and all, and NONE of what these do all day is about you. It never was.
We just got lucky, with location-location-location, as the rest of American political history has gone on being just as insincere and fueled by cynical elitist fortune-hunting as any other country's.