Infrastructure and the Black Panther Party: Toward an Infrastructural Politics

The Black Panther Party was one of the most important American radical groups of the 1960s, although few scholars have examined them as a model of a revolutionary vanguard party. Following recent political theory, this study performs a discourse analysis of The Black Panther newspaper through the lens of infrastructure. It offers a reading of the Panthers as articulating an infrastructural politics by activating infrastructure as a site of political struggle, providing infrastructure to the people as a mode of political praxis, and drawing attention to the communicational infrastructures that sustain political movements. The study contributes to the growing literatures of infrastructure studies, critical theory, and the Black Panther Party.

another sense, infrastructure is a relation that occurs in practice between people and things. More than technical systems, infrastructures are sociotechnical assemblages. A recent turn toward "infrastructuralism" (Peters, 2015) in media studies urges us, moreover, to focus on the elemental substrates that mediate between the human and non-human, nature and culture. Each of these major currents in critical infrastructure studies informs the three valences of infrastructural politics.
Coined by John Durham Peters (2015, p. 1), infrastructuralism as a media theoretical perspective is a "philosophy of elemental media." It concerns the environments and their elements that "anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible" (Peters, 2015, p. 2). Infrastructuralism defines media broadly as that which mediates: media are metaphors and infrastructures that enable and sustain particular relations of people and things. From this perspective, an infrastructural relation consists of the mediation between and behind the scenes that makes life-worlds possible. The lens of infrastructuralism reveals the mediation performed by a newspaper like The Black Panther to constitute an infrastructural relation between the Party and its members.
In a paper that marks the inauguration of infrastructure studies, infrastructure is defined as "a fundamentally relational concept" (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113). Challenging the common notion that infrastructure is an inert substrate that preexists and is indifferent to what runs atop it, it's argued instead that infrastructure is "something that emerges for people in practice, connected to activities and structures.
[…] It becomes infrastructure in relation to organized practices" (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 112-113). Infrastructure-as-relation is comprised of the social and the technical in equal, inseparable parts. Requiring enormous organizational efforts, the BPP's Service to the People programs appear as the provision of infrastructure in this sociotechnical sense.
Theoretical and methodological innovation on the question of infrastructure has paved the way for a recent explosion of scholarship on particular infrastructures (Anand et al., 2018;Parks & Starosielski, 2015). Authors' definitions vary slightly, but all seem to agree that infrastructures are large, material systems or networks, often centralized, used in-common by a group, community, or public. Because of its pervasiveness, it is suggested that infrastructure is best defined negatively: "those systems without which contemporary societies cannot function" (Edwards, 1998, p. 10).
Virtually all contemporary studies of concrete infrastructures indicate some political dimension of their history, implementation, or function. As a material embodiment of standards, infrastructure necessarily produces the non-standard: "part of the public stability of a standardized network often involves the private suffering of those who are not standard-who must use the standard network, but who are also non-members of the community of practice" (Star, 1991, p. 43). Infrastructure is thus profoundly political-raising questions of inclusion, (dis)ability, access, and equity. Some have argued, further, that the power of modern states resides in and is exercised primarily through infrastructure (Easterling, 2014). This infrastructural "extrastatecraft" is so powerful precisely because it operates through invisible and purportedly non-political technical systems. The BPP's formation in response to police brutality and anti-poverty programs can be read as activating these infrastructures of state power as sites of political struggle.
At the same time, the evocative power of infrastructure also inspires creative resistance (Larkin, 2013;Wakefield, 2018). Many scholars argue that infrastructure offers compelling grounds upon which to articulate new, more inclusive, and emancipatory politics because of its unique relational, institutional, resilient, and (re)productive qualities (Amin, 2014;Barney, 2018;Berlant, 2016;Edwards et al., 2009).Today, infrastructure is a key site of political struggle and the laboratory for alternative modes of living (Barney, 2018). One of the most important features of infrastructure in this regard, as both a conceptual apparatus and material thing, is its power to connect diverse struggles that otherwise seem unrelated (Cowen, 2017). Infrastructure, it appears, is politics by other means.
Political movements as well have infrastructures of their own. In the twenty-first century, social networking sites have often served as the infrastructures of what Zizi Papacharissi (2015, p. 125) calls affective publics: "networked public formations that are mobilized and connected or disconnected through expressions of sentiment." As ambient, always-on conduits for social movements, social networking sites can facilitate the formation of publics around sentiment and feeling that, sometimes, achieve radical political victories. In a Marxist vein, political scientist Jodi Dean (2016) highlights the affective dimension of the vanguard party in particular. Responding to the successes and failures of recent social movements, she argues for a revival of the party form for radical politics. Innovatively emphasizing the psychodynamics of political struggle, she theorizes the vanguard party as an "affective infrastructure" for sustaining revolutionary feeling and political action. As the BPP's most important communication channel, The Black Panther newspaper represented the Party to itself, mediating its affective infrastructure to sustain investment in revolutionary political struggle.
It is ultimately impossible, in fact, to separate the BPP from its mediated representation that was both cultivated from within and imposed from without the Party. There is strong consensus between the BPP and its scholars that The Black Panther newspaper was vitally important to the Party organizationally, ideologically, and representationally in this regard. Producing the newspaper-its writing, layout, and art-was a labor-intensive activity that encouraged group cohesion among members (Calloway, 1977). When the Party began to fracture, The Black Panther served almost exclusively to raise funds and preserve organizational identity (Davenport, 1998, p. 202). Chief among the BPP's publishing ventures, the newspaper was part of an "infrastructure" for the Party's financial survival (Fearnley, 2019, p. 203). As self-styled media icons, the BPP performed its identity across the pages of The Black Panther newspaper while disseminating the Party's ideology as well (Rhodes, 2017).
While its importance cannot be overstated, The Black Panther newspaper was only one of a wide gamut of Service to the People programs instituted by the BPP. JoNina Abron (1998) has emphasized the diversity, extension, and integrity of the Service programs to the BPP's theory and practice. For example, the Party combatted medical discrimination by providing free healthcare to the black community while pioneering sickle cell anemia research and activism (Bassett, 2019;Nelson, 2011). Perhaps even more famous than the newspaper, the Free Breakfast for School Children program enacted a radical anti-hunger politics by feeding children in cities across the USA each morning before school (Heynen, 2009;Potorti, 2017). By theorizing these practices as an infrastructural politics, the present study joins an ongoing evaluation of the BPP's political legacy (Jones & Jeffries, 1998) and its relevance today.

The Black Panther Party and (Its) Infrastructure(s)
Reflecting on the history of black radicalism, Robin D.G. Kelley (2002, p. ix) writes that "too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they 'succeeded' in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves." Recently, scholars have redoubled the effort at recuperating precisely this political vision of the BPP. Arguably, "what is unique and historically important about the Black Panther Party is specifically its politics" (Bloom & Martin Jr., 2013, p. 9). In this spirit, I highlight what, from my perspective as a critical communication scholar, is most interesting, instructive, and relevant about the BPP's political vision. In the interest of exploring new strategies for recovering this vision, I offer a speculative reading of the BPP's discourse as a record of their politics.
Huey Newton insisted that the BPP was a political organization-and, moreover, a model for waging revolution. In an interview from the Alameda County Jail printed in the March 16, 1968, issue of The Black Panther, he explains that the BPP dropped "For Self Defense" from its name because "we ran into the problem of people misinterpreting us as a political party.
[…] to make it clear to every one we changed the name to the Black Panther Party, to make it clear what our political stand was about" (Newton, 1968b, p. 4). Another article in the same issue places the BPP within the tradition of Marxism-Leninism: "like Lenin, Huey created a Party" (Anon, 1968d, p. 8). In a statement at the Peace and Freedom Party Forum, Eldridge Cleaver says "we are involved in trying to create models in the vanguard set so that people around the country will see how we can move" (Cleaver, 1968e, p. 22). Analyzing the BPP as a vanguard party within the tradition of Marxism-Leninism thus, importantly, evaluates them on their own terms.
Across the following sections, the concept of infrastructural politics emerges from out of the BPP's discourse as manifested in The Black Panther newspaper. First, I argue that by identifying the police as an unwanted infrastructure of colonial power and the state's anti-poverty infrastructure as insufficient, the BPP activated infrastructure as a site of political struggle. Second, I focus on the BPP's Service to the People Programs as an attempt to provide and become infrastructure for the people. These first two sections read The Black Panther as a record of the BPP's thought and practice. The third section performs an "infrastructural inversion" (Bowker, 1994) by foregrounding The Black Panther newspaper itself as a constitutive element of the Party as such. The Black Panther elucidates the sophisticated ways in which the Party, as an affective infrastructure, was mediated. The final section distills the concept of infrastructural politics and suggests why the BPP's vision remains instructive today.

Activating Infrastructure
The BPP was founded primarily to combat police brutality against the black community. From the beginning, however, its program addressed a wide range of socioeconomic problems facing black people in the USA, beyond just the police. Though they had gained legal rights, many black Americans, particularly in the North and West, found their situations virtually unchanged as they continued to suffer from inequalities that the Civil Rights movement was unable to ameliorate. These included unemployment, unsuitable and overpriced housing, poor health, and rampant hunger. The BPP responded to these conditions by activating infrastructures of the state as sites of political struggle. In doing so, they identified police as an unwanted infrastructure of colonial violence and anti-poverty programs as insufficient for producing real change in the lives of black Americans.
An instance of police brutality catalyzed the publication of the first issue of The Black Panther. Distributed to publicize the murder of Denzil Dowell by police in nearby Richmond, California on April 1, 1967, this first issue introduces one of the most consistent refrains in all of the BPP's discourse: "the white cop is the instrument sent into our community by the Power Structure to keep Black People quiet and under control" (Anon, 1967, p. 4). In the subsequent May 1967 issue, Newton writes that "because black people desire to determine their own destiny, they are constantly inflicted with brutality from the occupying army, embodied in the police department" (Newton, 1967a, p. 4). The metaphor is repeated again by Bobby Seale in the July 20, 1967, issue. He writes that "the racist power structures power over black people lies in its police force occupying our community" (Seale, 1967, p. 15). Since its inception, the BPP consistently transcended simple condemnation of the police to provide a political analysis of police brutality.
The BPP's colonial analysis is key to recognizing that they viewed the police as an infrastructure. Drawn from Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, a colonial analogy is the starting point of the BPP's analysis, from which their understanding of police brutality follows. In a November 1967 article, Cleaver writes "it is no secret that the Black Panther Party for Self Defense believes that the police function in Black Communities in the same manner and for the same purpose as an occupying army functions in a colony. In fact, we take the position that Afro-America is a domestic colony subjected to a peculiar form of colonialism" (Cleaver, 1967a, p. 6). Cleaver begins a statement presented at the Peace and Freedom Party Forum: I think the first thing we have to realize, really get into our minds, is that it is a reality when you hear people say that there's a 'black colony' and a 'white mother country.' […] If you don't make that distinction, then a lot of the activities going on in this country will be non-sensical.
[…] But if you accept the analysis that the black colony is separate and distinct from the mother country, then other forms of political struggle are indicated. (Cleaver, 1968e, p. 8).
In another paper presented at the Peace and Freedom Party Founding Convention, he is careful to proceed from the same premise: "we start with the basic definition: that black people in America are a colonized people in every sense of the term and that white America is an organized Imperialist force holding black people in colonial bondage" (1968b, p. 12). He reiterates this argument again in an article in the subsequent, May 18, 1968 issue: "Our's is a struggle against Community Imperialism. Our black communities are colonized and controlled from the outside […] we ourselves are controlled by the racist police who come into our communities from outside and occupy them patrolling, terrorizing, and brutalizing people like a foreign army in a conquered land" (Cleaver, 1968c, p. 10). This series of articles from the early editions of The Black Panther hammers into place the BPP's colonial frame for understanding police brutality, out of which springs their identification of the police as an infrastructure of the state.
The BPP articulated an analysis of police brutality that identified the police not as a racist but legitimate institution, but as an infrastructure of illegitimate colonial power. Police were not simply racist on an individual level, nor just at an institutional level; they were, at a political level, "the Enforcer arm of the Power Structure" (Anon, 1968d, p. 8). Newton states in an interview printed in the March 13, 1968, issue that "we realize that when we are assaulted in the community by the gestapo tactics of the police that this is also a political thing" (Newton, 1968b, p. 4). Black people are brutalized by police not just because they are black but "because the power structure finds it to their advantage to keep us imprisoned in our black community as colonized people are kept by a foreign power" (4). An October 5, 1968, article quotes Fanon to describe the infrastructural function of police in the Black community: As the black revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon stated about Algeria, a situation which is basically different only in kind and not in degree from the situation in this country: 'the policeman and the soldier are the official, instituted go-betweens … the agents of government speak the language of pure force.' In the black communities of America, the policeman is also the agent of the government, the visible example of law and order, of justice and fairness. (Anon, 1968c, p. 13).
This discourse was consistent throughout the period 1967-1971, often repeated verbatim. In early 1970, prominent Los Angeles Panther Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt invokes the concept of infrastructure explicitly to describe the USA's exercise of power: "the CIA in Viet Nam has established an Infra Structure similar to their own here in ameriKKKa" (Pratt, 1970, p. 4). He identifies various police unions and organizations as part of the "Infra Structure" of American fascism.
The discourse about police in The Black Panther reveals that the BPP viewed police as a concrete infrastructure of state power. In the BPP's analysis, police make possible the continued colonial domination of black Americans throughout the dispersed internal colony. They understood that the police are one of "those systems without which contemporary societies cannot function" in a doubled sense (Edwards, 1998, p. 10). First, the state requires the police-the domestic police and the international military-to maintain its rule. Second, for black Americans, the police are an unavoidable part of life. As Bob Avakian writes in The Black Panther, "Police repression is a fact of everyday existence" in the black community (Avakian, 1967, p. 11). In response, the BPP activated this unwanted infrastructure as a site of political struggle.
The BPP responded to police brutality in two ways. First, and most famously, they picked up the gun. The BPP founders and early members instigated armed confrontations with the police. Corresponding to point seven of the platform, which demands an end to police brutality, the seventh point of the BPP's program reads: We believe we can end police brutality in our black community organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense. (The Black Panther Party, 1968, p. 7).
Newton reasoned that "the power structure depends upon the use of force without retaliation" (Newton, 1967b, p. 4). His solution was to disrupt the daily exercise of colonial violence through armed resistance that was, until the passage of the Mulford Act in July 1967, completely legal.
This served two purposes: first, it was self-defense. The Panthers refused to stand idly by while their community was brutalized; instead, they confronted police with their own guns. They practiced "self-defense against the occupation forces of an illegitimate and criminal government" (Walsh, 1968, p. 14). This provoked the well-documented violent repression of local and federal forces, but it also served another function: recruitment. Armed self-defense was educational. Members of the community who witnessed Newton stand down police officers were impressed and inspired to support-if not join-the fledgling organization. By openly confronting the police, the BPP performed an infrastructural inversion of their own, drawing attention to the invisible, taken-for-granted operation of colonial violence that the police embody, challenging the legitimacy of this infrastructure, and empowering the black community to resist its unwanted imposition.
While armed resistance mitigated the immediate threat of police brutality, the BPP also promoted a long-term program of community control of the police. This program built on the BPP's colonial analysis and demanded decentralized police forces as a form of self-determination. In May 1968 Seale announced that "we want our own Black police department which lives in our own communitybecause the police are the arm of the power structure" (quoted in Anon, 1968b, p. 25). In the same issue, Cleaver demands that police be removed from the Black community: "withdraw the troops. The occupying army of the police must be replaced with a force of black men who live in the community to maintain order and harmony" (Cleaver, 1968b, p. 25). The BPP began demanding that municipal governments in Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond introduce amendments to replace existing police departments with community controlled ones and encouraged others to do the same (Anon, 1968a). Under the headline "What does the decentralization of police mean?," an article explains that community control of the police threatens the very existence of the US government: "So when the Black Panther Party initiates a Community Control of Police Petition, we are threatening an arm of Babylon which is very fundamental to its existence. Without that arm of organized violence and repression, Babylon would cease to exist" (Anon, 1969d, p. 15). Here, the BPP's understanding of the police as an infrastructure of the state-without which it could not function-is reflected even in the more reformist portions of their program.
The BPP was formed also to combat issues like decrepit housing, unemployment, unequal healthcare, and poor food. Cleaver begins the front page story of the third edition of The Black Panther by listing the many indignities suffered by black Americans: Bad roads, dilapidated housing, rampant unemployment, inferior education, brutal cops […] bad sewers, bad lighting, no drainage system, no say-so over the decisions that control our lives-this is a portrait of the horrible inhuman conditions that the white structure forces black people in the North Richmond area to live under. By holding the community in this abject, colonial status the power structure taxes them while allowing them no representation. They have no one to speak for them on the city council, nobody takes their needs, desires, and dreams into consideration. (Cleaver, 1967b, p. 1).
Lists such as this are common throughout The Black Panther, which dedicated countless pages to documenting the inhumane conditions in which black Americans lived.
Under the auspices of the Great Society and the War on Poverty, the US government had constructed an infrastructure of programs and centers to combat the poverty chronicled by Cleaver. In the summer of 1966, Seale would take a job at one of these anti-poverty centers in North Oakland. There he experienced first-hand the inadequacy of existing anti-poverty programs to rectify the socio-economic destitution of his black community (Seale, 1970). It was in the office of that antipoverty center, in fact, where Newton and Seale wrote the ten-point platform and founded the BPP. An Emory Douglas cartoon in the October 12, 1968, issue of The Black Panther succinctly illustrates the BPP's position on Great Society programs. It depicts a pig in a long-sleeve shirt labelled "L.B.J." The pig's arms flail in the air, its mouth is agape in a tongue-waggling shriek, and the turbulence of its last oinking breath emanates from its snout while it is flushed down a large toilet labelled "The Great Society" (Douglas, 1968b, p. 7).
Determining that the state's existing anti-poverty programs were insufficient, the BPP again activated this infrastructure as a site of political struggle. The above-cited list of grievances from Cleaver is taken from an article about an effort to incorporate the majority black neighborhood of North Richmond into an independent city. One of the perceived benefits of this plan was that the black community would "gain control of the War on Poverty Funds that come into the area, instead of standing by passively watching the manipulators downtown diverting these funds to their own selfish ends" (Cleaver, 1967b, p. 2). Control over poverty programs became a consistent demand of the Party's. Simultaneously, the BPP went forth to meet the needs of the people directly. They instituted community programs that would come to be known as Service to the People programs. In its direct response to the inadequacy of state anti-poverty infrastructure, the BPP enacted an infrastructural politics of a second type: providing and becoming infrastructure to the people.

Providing Infrastructure, Becoming Infrastructural
Beginning in 1969, the BPP instituted a variety of Service to the People programs ranging from Free Breakfast for School Children (the most famous and most widely successful program) to pest control and free bussing to prisons for families of inmates. Given that the state's anti-poverty programs were insufficient, the BPP built their own. A sociotechnical conception of infrastructure allows us to recognize and evaluate this social practice as the provision of infrastructure. What emerges is a second valence of infrastructural politics: providing and becoming infrastructure to the people as a mode of political praxis.
Infrastructure is an entanglement of social practices and technical objects. Infrastructure is not just a thing, as it is in the ordinary sense, but a status that sociotechnical assemblages can attain. A list of characteristics identifies when-not what-an infrastructure occurs: embeddedness, transparency, reach or scope, learned as part of membership, links with conventions of practice, embodiment of standards, built on an installed base, and becomes visible upon breakdown (Star & Ruhleder, 1996). In a simplified formulation: "organizations, socially communicated background knowledge, general acceptance and reliance, and near-ubiquitous accessibility are required for a system to be an infrastructure" (Edwards, 2003, p. 188). Although some of these characteristics derived from technical systems do not perfectly translate to largely non-technical community programs, they nonetheless provide a heuristic for recognizing the BPP's practice as the provision of infrastructure.
The BPP announced the beginning of "Breakfast for Black Children," a "revolutionary program of making sure that our young, going to school, have a full stomach before going to school in the morning" in the September 7, 1968, issue of The Black Panther (Newton et al., 1968, p. 7). They advertised this first program, and requested volunteers, in five issues from September 1968 until it opened in late January 1969.
With Newton imprisoned and Cleaver in exile, Seale and Chief of Staff David Hilliard took initiative and expanded the BPP's community programs. Seale instituted the breakfast program nationally in a directive printed in the March 3, 1969, issue of The Black Panther. Free health clinics, bussing to prisons, liberation schools, and more would soon follow. His sweeping essay on the Party's history to that point and political analysis champions service to the people as a practical lesson in socialism that would meet the immediate needs of the black community. Moreover, it would insulate the BPP from repression by bringing the Party closer to the people, and the people closer to the Party.
The BPP's community programs criticized the state's insufficient efforts through social practice. In the August 16, 1969, issue of The Black Panther, Cleaver writes that "these actions expose the contradiction between the pretenses of the system and the needs of the people. They stand as an assertion that the pigs of the power structure are not fulfilling their duties" (Cleaver, 1969, p. 4). The programs were also extremely important for sustaining the Party itself. The Party's membership, swollen through the Free Huey! campaign, needed direction and things to do. The community programs provided "positive, disciplined activities for the membership" (Alkebulan, 2007, p. 29). Moreover, they improved the BPP's reputation-at that point more closely associated with police shootouts than feeding children-among community members.
The newspaper published many articles celebrating the revolutionary nature of community programs. The April 27, 1969, issue highlights the breakfast programs in particular. Out of 14 total articles, eight feature the breakfast program. In addition to a three-page photo montage, there is a centerfold editorial statement (with more photos) from managing editor Elbert "Big Man" Howard and a statement from the Central Committee that praises the breakfast programs. A photograph of a woman preparing a plate of food is captioned "All party work is political." The paper leverages authoritative voices in the party to emphasize the importance of serving the people. A statement from the Central Committee praises Newton's practical and theoretical innovations and declares "practical socialist programs from the black nation is where it's at" (Central Committee of the Black Panther Party, 1969, p. 14).
By addressing itself to infrastructures of social reproduction (Heynen, 2009) the BPP's politics "tore these spaces out of the nation-state and claimed them as their own" to undercut and expropriate the US government's power (Singh, 1998, p. 79). Like their critique of the police and Great Society programs, the BPP's community service was grounded in achieving self-determination (Abron, 1998, p. 178). An April 1969 article argues, "We cannot depend upon the present government to fulfill our wants and needs. Thus more and more programs shall be set up to suffice the desires of the people and destroy the dictatorship of the b[o]urgeosie (ruling class) and its lackeys" (Marsha, 1969, p. 14). In the August 16, 1969, issue, Cleaver explains the radical nature of the BPP's programs: Breakfast for Children pulls people out of the system and organizes them into an alternative.
[…] If we can understand Breakfast for Children, can we not also understand Lunch for Children, and Dinner for Children, and Clothing for Children, and Education for Children, and Medical Care for Children? And if we can understand that, why can't we understand not only a People's Park, but People's Housing, and People's Transportation, and People's Industry, and People's Banks? And why can't we understand a People's Government? (Cleaver, 1969, p. 4).
Cleaver's infrastructural free association demonstrates the revolutionary aspirations of the BPP's service programs: by providing an increasing number of infrastructures to the black community, the Party itself would become infrastructural to the whole people, supplanting the state.
Cleaver's article reflects a conception of politics centered on building and maintaining institutions outside of the state and under the control of the black community. As Richard "Dharuba" Moore writes, "When we talk of survival as human beings within an oppressive social, economical, and political system and super structure, we must by necessity talk of creating programs that will insure our survival, and to go even further lay down the foundation for a new alternative to the present racist state machinery now in existence" (Moore, 1970, p. 9). Resonating with contemporary infrastructuralisms, "the question of politics becomes identical with the reinvention of infrastructures" for the BPP (Berlant, 2016, p. 394). The BPP knew that political power-in addition to the barrel of a gun-grew out of becoming infrastructural to the people.
Whether the Party's programs successfully became infrastructure, however, is debatable. Of course, the BPP's community programs were infrastructural in a rudimentary sense: they provided services that were essential to the everyday functioning of communities. And they were widely successful in doing so. The BPP's breakfast programs, for example, were the catalyst and model for the federally funded school breakfast programs in operation today (Heynen, 2009, p. 406). Their free medical clinics pioneered new methods of health activism and research into sickle cell anemia as well (Nelson, 2011). It is difficult to ascertain from The Black Panther newspaper, however, whether the BPP's Service to the People programs were infrastructure in a rigorous sense-that is, according to the sociotechnical definitions of Star and Ruhleder (1996) or Edwards (2003).
On the whole, there is little discourse in The Black Panther that reflects the dayto-day of the party's service programs from the perspective from community members. Nonetheless, what is present does suggest that the BPP's service to the people did exhibit many of the traits of infrastructure. They were certainly built on installed bases: Free Breakfast for School Children and Liberation Schools were typically hosted in local churches. As a result, the BPP often struggled with local politics and community resistance in establishing programs. And they had reach and scope: the programs were instituted nationally, and they operated, sometimes continuously, for many years. The first Liberation School in Oakland, which was later renamed the Intercommunal Youth Institute, for example, graduated students until 1982. The programs were embedded: breakfasts were scheduled around and linked to the school calendar. Potorti (2017, p. 91) writes that "breakfasts structured rather than disrupted the morning routines of both the child participants and the young adult volunteers." In the summers when there was no school, liberation schools took their place, used the same transportation organization, and served food as well.
The community programs embodied new standards of the BPP's ideals. At Liberation School, children were taught "about the big family and what it is all about. In the big family we do not hit or swear at the brothers and sisters. We are all brothers and sisters because we all are not free. We are all equal because we are not free" (Anon, 1969b, p. 17). For better and worse, they were linked with conventions of practice. Liberation schools were "a familiar concept in the black community because they had been an organizing tactic used by Southern civil rights groups" (Alkebulan, 2007, p. 33). Reflecting deep-seated distrust of medical doctors within the black community, the opening of the Bobby Hutton Memorial Free Health Clinic in Kansas City "met with some difficulties. The open house was not well attended by the people of the community. Many people do not really believe that the FREE HEALTH CLINIC is really free" (Anon, 1969a, p. 18). Breakfast programs were a site of internal conflict around gendered labor as well.
Transparency was a goal of the BPP's community programs. The party hoped that, eventually, the programs would run themselves. For the breakfast program in particular, they sought donations on a recurring basis and attempted to involve community members to the extent that the program could be passed on to them exclusively, freeing the BPP to do other work. An article in the April 27, 1969, issue reads, "the Breakfast has already been initiated in several chapters, and our love for the masses makes us realize that it must continue permanently and be a national program. But we need your help, and that means money, food, and time. We want to turn the program over to the community but without your effort and support we cannot" (Anon, 1969c, p. 3). And when the programs broke down, it was visible. In the December 20, 1969, issue, the Richmond branch of the BPP "sincerely apologizes" for arriving late to the breakfast program (Dauod, 1969, p. 4). In the October 31, 1970 issue, the Harlem branch apologizes to its community for not serving breakfast one morning: "We did not serve breakfast to the children this morning. It was a failure on all our parts as a whole, not just the individuals involved. It is time for us to stop shucking and jiving and get down to some serious business because our survival is at stake" (Anon, 1970b, p. 11). One missed breakfast was not just a minor disruption to people's schedule; it meant that potentially hundreds of community children would go hungry that day in school.
There are strong indications, as well, that the black community viewed the BPP as an infrastructure for meeting their needs in general. According to Bloom and Martin (2013, p. 180-181) "local Party chapters frequently served as community sounding boards and social service agencies-as black people's stewards […] In doing so, [the BPP] provided community members with a vital source of remediation that was often unavailable from the state." In the July 19, 1969, issue, Fred Hampton writes that "when people got a problem they come to the Black Panther Party for help and that's good. Because, like Mao says we are supposed to be ridden by the people and Huey says we're going to be ridden down the path of social revolution and that's for the people" (Hampton, 1969, p. 7).
The BPP received and reprinted many letters from individuals seeking help, especially from black men in the military and the family or friends of people unjustly incarcerated. One letter from a "Military Pig," for example, says "the reason I'm writing to the Black Panther Party is because I have a problem, and I think the Panthers are the best and the only ones who can help me" (Chatman, 1969, p. 3). A letter from Ali Bey Hassan, imprisoned in the Bronx as one of the New York 21, requests legal assistance for another inmate (Hassan, 1969). Perhaps due to the BPP's many high-profile legal battles, this type of letter was common, in addition to many requesting assistance with deplorable housing and racist landlords. Evidently, members of the black community learned, as part of membership in the community, that the BPP were a dependable resource for meeting their needs.
The BPP's vision for its service programs thus illustrates a second valence of infrastructural politics: providing and becoming infrastructure to the people. Although the BPP's project ultimately failed under the weight of enormous repression, the radical power of providing infrastructure to the people as a mode of political praxis resonates strongly today when our infrastructures are often and increasingly the sites of capitalist accumulation, political domination, and stark inequality.

Communicational Infrastructure
The BPP relied on a vast communicational apparatus to support its work. Members typed up meeting minutes, filled out daily and weekly work reports, and regularly mailed records to headquarters. In its later years, the Party created standardized forms to facilitate this process (Spencer, 2016, p. 133). Of the numerous printed and written documents through which the BPP functioned, its newspaper was the most important. An article in the August 8, 1970, issue of The Black Panther concedes that FBI director "J. Edgar Hoover was correct in his analysis that the effectiveness of the Party is through the newspapers" (Anon, 1970c, p. 11). Virtual Murrell writes, "Our paper is so important that it is an absolute necessity that the information we circulate within our paper, reach the Brothers in the street […] We use it primarily for two reasons: to give political consciousness to the masses and as an organizing tool" (Murrell, 1969, p. 16). Everyone-from the leadership down to the rank-and-file of the BPP, the former director of the FBI, and contemporary scholars-counts The Black Panther as immensely important to the Party. It is telling that after the party split in early 1971, the Cleaver-aligned faction targeted Samuel Napier, the national circulation manager for the newspaper since 1968, for assassination.
This final section performs an infrastructural inversion by reading The Black Panther newspaper not as a simple record or index of a historical reality external to it, but as an active agent in producing the reality of the BPP to examine how the newspaper was infrastructural to the Party's psychodynamic function. The BPP's selfconscious use of its newspaper to mediate the Party's affective infrastructure reflects the final valence of infrastructural politics: attention to the communicational infrastructures that sustain political movements.
Embodying the perspective of contemporary media theoretical infrastructuralism, the BPP leaders-in particular, Newton and Cleaver-thought, like media theorists, "in the ablative case: 'by means of which'" (McLuhan, quoted in Peters, 2015, p. 21). From Newton's discerning predictions about technical automation and labor (Newton, 1971) to Cleaver's "interest in communications" (Cleaver, 1968a, p. 14), the Panthers possessed a sophisticated media-technical sensibility (Kamish forthcoming). Given the BPP's leaders' unique media-technical awareness, the sophistication exhibited by their communicational infrastructure is not surprising. "Communication," writes Rhodes (2017, p. 112), "took up a significant portion of the Black Panthers' labors." Counted among the BPP's service programs, The Black Panther newspaper was another attempt at providing infrastructure to the black community that was widely successful. A letter from reader, contributor, and future Student Editor Iris Wyse reprinted in an early issue says "I am thrilled that you have started that beautiful truthful paper again. I missed not having a paper that would hip me to all the happenings in our black communities" (Wyse, 1968, p. 5). In the July 11, 1970, issue, Brother Bowdiddlee Brown writes that "The Black Panther Community News Service is the greatest and baddest newspaper ever produced by Blacks and for Blacks in specific and the world at large. For it totally relates to Black people's lives and is a vital Black institution that tells us the truth about what this fascist, racist society is doing to us" (Brown, 1970, p. 15). Emory Douglas remarked that The Black Panther "became a paper that people relied on" (quoted in Rhodes, 2017, p. 119). According to Jane Rhodes (2017, p. 120-122) The Black Panther was "the paradigmatic periodical of black revolutionary politics" in its time and was "ubiquitous in black communities across the United States." Evidently, The Black Panther achieved a high degree of ubiquity and reliance, indicating that it was an infrastructure for the black community.
As the primary way that the Party represented itself to itself, moreover, The Black Panther newspaper was infrastructural to the Party itself and instrumental in producing the BPP as such. The newspaper communicated the Party's program to its members and wider readership. In the September 13, 1969, issue, Seale writes that "the Party paper sets the correct, or is definitely suppose to give, the correct political line. Now everyone in the Party naturally receives nationally the Party newspaper. From there, the correct political perspective is transferred, by Party members and the Black Panther Party newspapers" (Seale, 1969, p. 17). Infusing every article with the party's political analysis, each issue of The Black Panther contains a concentrated expression of the party's complete ideology. As a result, members did not just read The Black Panther; they studied it. Thus, The Black Panther newspaper is a compelling document of the generative power of newspapers as infrastructures for producing publics, imagined communities, and, in this case, a vanguard party (Ananny, 2018;Anderson, [1983Anderson, [ ] 2006. Jodi Dean (2016, p. 28) theorizes the vanguard party as an affective infrastructure that "knots together unconscious processes across a differential field to enable a communist political subjectivity" to emerge. It is "an apparatus for mobilizing emotional longing and generating affective attachment in the service of struggle" (247).
The central psychodynamic function of the party, from which all others follow, is transference. In Dean's psychoanalytic theory, the party "is a site of transferential relations" because its collectivity is "irreducible to its members" (Dean, 2016, p. 181-184).The party is a collectivity greater than the sum of its parts that thus "exerts a force counter to personal desire" back upon its members (Dean, 2016, p. 182). "The more powerful the affective infrastructure we create," writes Dean (2016, p. 249), "the more we will feel its force, interiorizing the perspective of the many into the ego-ideal that affirms our practices and activities and pushes us to do more than we think we can." The Black Panther newspaper self-consciously performed the psychodynamic functions of the party; through its pages, the affective infrastructure of the BPP was mediated. BPP leadership clearly understood the party's role as an affective infrastructure. One of the oldest of the BPP's recurring slogans is "The spirit of the people is stronger than the man's technology." It is not often remarked upon in scholarship, but this slogan accompanied the ten point platform and program from the second to the fifth issue of the newspaper. Subsequently, it was a common refrain within and following many articles, often printed in bold. It reflects the understanding that the BPP had of its own affective function. Under the headline "The Black Panther: Mirror of the People," Landon Williams writes: The Black Panther Black Community News Service, is not just a newspaper in the traditional sense of the word, it's more than that. The Black Panther Community News Service is a living contemporary history of our people's struggle for liberation at the grass roots level. It's something to be studied and grasped, and saved for future generations to read, learn and understand. […] No! The Black Panther Black Community News Service, is not an ordinary newspaper. It is the flesh and blood, the sweat and tears of our people.
[…] The Black Panther Black Community News Service, is truly a mirror of the spirit of the people. (Williams, 1970, p. 10-11).
Explaining the role of political cartoons in The Black Panther, Emory Douglas writes, "We try to create an atmosphere for the vast majority of black people-who aren't readers but activists-through their observation of our work, they feel they have the right to destroy the enemy" (Douglas, 1968a, p. 20). Douglas's analysis of revolutionary art exhibits an understanding that the newspaper performed an essential affective role for the Party, its members, and its readers. Evidently, The Black Panther went far beyond simply relaying information. It created an atmosphere; it was the communicational infrastructure of transference, mediating the party to itself, modulating and reflecting back the spirit of its members and the people. As the mirror of the spirit of the people, The Black Panther newspaper mediated the BPP's transferential function, modulating and reflecting the affective intensity of the Party back upon its members.
A series of articles, letters, and poems published in The Black Panther powerfully indexes the process of transference between the Party and its members. In a statement responding to his guilty manslaughter verdict in 1968, Newton "compliment[s] the people on the revolutionary fervor that they have shown thus far." He continues: They have been very beautiful and they have exceeded my expectations. Let us go on outdoing ourselves, a revolutionary man always transcends himself or otherwise he is not a revolutionary man, so we always do what we ask of ourselves or more than what we know we can do. We have the people behind us that we are always successful, the people collectively. (Newton, 1968a, p. 2).
In this statement, Newton deftly amplifies the Party's spirit, which had been deflated by a guilty verdict, and redirects it back upon the people by invoking their collectivity and the capacity to transcend oneself that it produces. A subsequent article by "Matilaba" (Joan Lewis) responds to Newton's statement, testifying to the powerful effect of the BPP's collectivity upon its members. She reflects on the imminent possibility of death at the hands of police or betrayal by "those you put your trust in" (Matilaba, 1968, p. 18). "And when they fail you in one way or another," she writes, "you lose that spark, that thing that helps keep you going and suddenly you are convinced that whatever you do you have to make it by yourself, alone with no help" (18). But, in the depths of despair, her spirits are lifted by the power of collectivity: Of course people may dig you and to some extent depend on you to do your thing.
[…] Right now the leary feeling which keeps throbbing in my soul becomes stronger […] Sometimes I feel like saying fuck it and I don't care if I die, but brothers and sisters remember this; loosing your revolutionary life will only let our people down. (18).
A piece in the October 3, 1970, issue expresses a similar sentiment, "If the revolutionary political education is high enough [a Panther] will know that if he gives into the pig he will not only let himself down, he also will be letting people down, perhaps to the extent of losing the struggle" (Howard, 1970, p. 10). The power of the Party's affective infrastructure working back upon its members is evident in these articles, as Newton's statement inspires other Party members to subordinate their individualism to the collective of the party. They testify to the BPP's transferential function and The Black Panther newspaper's role in mediating this process. The BPP, by representing itself to itself, mediated the affective power of collectivity and inspired its members to transcend their individualism.
Moreover, by printing these types of expressions, The Black Panther re-mediated the process of transference itself, endowing individual experiences with the force of collectivity. Two poems printed in The Black Panther in late 1968 reflect how BPP members found strength in collectivity and the capacity to exceed oneself that it produces. A meditation on weapons and violence determines that "success / will depend mostly on your state of mind:" "what will win is mantras, the sustenance we give each other. the energy we plug into (the fact that we touch share food)" (Di Prima, 1968, p. 17).
The poet-speaker recognizes that in munitions, the BPP is on equal footing with their enemies: "the guns will not win this one, they are an incidental part of the action" (17). What differentiates the BPP is its collectivity; this produces an awesome strength in excess of what individuals, on their own, are capable of. A similar poem about revolutionary hope titled "Time Is Running Out!" begins: "As we move closer to true revolution Our lives become more entangled into each others Our beliefs are tried over and over But neither do we falter Neither do we fail A fire is life up under us and we Burn with a new sense of meaning ……..a new sense of hope." (Bruce, 1968, p. 19).
In these poems, collectivity is more than a source of duty; it is also sustenance, meaning, and hope. Evidently, individual members of the BPP were inspired by the Party's collectivity, strengthened by subordinating oneself to the people. Moreover, these poems perform valuable affective work for the Party itself. By printing these particular works in the newspaper, The Black Panther re-mediates the authors' experiences of transference back to other readers, producing an affective feedback loop infused with the authority of the Party and force of collectivity to work upon its members again.
The sophisticated affective mediation and modulation performed by The Black Panther reflects how the BPP and its leaders often thought like media theorists, carefully considering how information was communicated by and within the Party. Illustrating the final valence of infrastructural politics, The Black Panther newspaper is a testament to the psychodynamic rewards of careful attention to communicational infrastructures. Scholarly analysis can likewise benefit from the same attention to the communicational infrastructures of political movements.

Conclusion: Toward an Infrastructural Politics
The preceding analysis adopted an infrastructuralist lens to mine the discourse of The Black Panther newspaper for the BPP's political vision. What has emerged from this particular reading is the concept of infrastructural politics. I have argued that the BPP demonstrated a unique infrastructural politics throughout their thought and practice. First, grounded in a colonial analysis that understands the police as an infrastructure of state violence, the BPP activated infrastructure as a site of political struggle. They also identified the US government's antipoverty programs as an insufficient infrastructure. After activating these as sites of political struggle as well, the BPP developed its own community programs to meet the needs of the people, demonstrating the second valence of infrastructural politics: providing and becoming infrastructure as a mode of political praxis. Finally, as the primary medium through which the BPP represented itself to itself, The Black Panther newspaper testifies to the careful attention that must be paid to the communicational infrastructures that sustain political struggle. Over and above these particular valences based in specialized definitions of infrastructure, however, perhaps what is most compelling about the BPP's political vision is their commitment to material self-determination through community control over institutions of social reproduction-the way their politics are infrastructural in a comprehensive, foundational sense.
In a speech delivered at Boston College shortly after his release from prison in 1971, Newton defined a community as "a comprehensive collection of institutions which serve the people who live there" (Newton, 1971, p. F). Years earlier, in the fourth issue of The Black Panther, he defined politics: "Politics are merely the desire of individuals and groups to satisfy first their basic needs: food, shelter and clothing, and security for themselves and their loved ones" (Newton, 1967c, p. 9). As Seale explains, "Politics starts with hungry stomachs, dilapidated housing, murder and brutal treatment by racist cops, unfair treatment received in the courts, the way black men are drafted into the military forces and are forced to fight other colored people of the world" (Seale, 1967, p. 4). Newton believed that "the things that we commonly use and commonly need should be commonly owned" (Newton, 1970, p. 2). Therefore, Cleaver describes the revolution as "the struggle of black people to liberate their communities from community imperialism, and to enact the principle of community control over community institutions" (Cleaver, 1968d, p. 1). And thus follows the basic, foundational political vision of the BPP: "A people's government provides the basic necessities of land, bread, housing, education and clothing" (Anon, 1970a, p. 9). In their practice, the BPP attempted to make this infrastructural vision a reality.
Infrastructural politics is not only the negation of existing infrastructures of capitalist domination; it also necessitates building infrastructures as well. An instrumentalist view of infrastructure teaches us that while the technical objects change, the needs they meet remain the same (Edwards, 2003). People will always need land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. Political movements will always need to communicate information, modulate and sustain the affective investment of their participants, and articulate a vision of the future. This is but one reason the political vision of the BPP remains so compelling today. The preceding analysis has attempted to elucidate some tools the Panthers provide us for thinking critically about the assemblages of human practice and technical objects that make all of these diverse processes possible, and the model the BPP offered for building an emancipatory future.