Because of historical exclusion, “Black women’s social and political desires have always had to be shaped outside of the dogmatic and the normative – inside of the liminal, the fugitive and the imaginative.” said Minna Salami, the Nigierian-, Finnish- and Swedish-descended author of “Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone.” Salami said this is especially true of iconic intellects Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Winnie Mandela.
“I think what we are looking at is a severely wounded, crippled US imperialism as the chief hegemon of world capitalism,” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. The coronavirus epidemic “brought the crisis of this economy into bold relief,” said Yeshitela, while China continued its rise “as a major contending force that was rapidly overtaking the US economy – and most of Europe,” as well.
The theory of change that depicts the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC as the leaders of the class struggle has failed to materialize in reality.
In March, Bernie Sanders and “the Squad” were calling for a $2000 monthly check to be included in the first governmental response to the pandemic. That didn’t happen. Instead, the Democratic Party majority in the House silently voted for the CARES Act. The CARES Act pumped more than four trillion dollars to the richest corporations while providing just a one-time $1200 payment to workers and the poor.
The development of diverse faces in high places within the state has temporarily disarmed the Black consensus on peace and social justice.
So-called “progressive Democrats” such as Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voiced opposition to the bill but did not organize against it. Ten months later, the chickens of austerity are roosting on a global pandemic that the U.S. ruling class has used to beef up its profits at the expense of the rest of us.
Austerity is the engine of U.S. capitalism in its late stages. The regime is driven by the unmitigated rule of finance capital over all levers of the state. Everything is looked upon as an opportunity for private profit and “investment” rather than human need. Neoliberalism is a modernized version of the very classical liberal ideology which brought capitalism into being. Only this time, monopolies are the mercantilists and the very existence of workers themselves is seen as an impediment to the maximization of ruling class wealth.
Labor cannot be eliminated under capitalism, so the rich overseers of the system have resorted to squeezing every drop of blood from the working class. COVID-19 brought to the fore the immense crisis facing more than 150 million people who were already in or near poverty before the economic collapse hit in March. On January 1st, more than nineteen million people risk homelessness with the expiration of CDC-enforced moratoriums on mortgage and rent payments . As unemployment increased by the tens of millions beginning in March, so too did the lines at food banks. Sixteen percent of households with children in the U.S. currently experience food insecurity . That number nearly doubles for Black and Latino households.
None of these conditions are by accident. Neoliberal capitalist decay is a boon for the rich even if it sends the system into an overall state of crisis. Jeff Bezos and the richest billionaires on the planet have increased their wealth immensely since the pandemic. U.S. billionaires have seen their net worth skyrocket by almost one trillion dollars and counting. What has been missing from the equation is a U.S.-based movement that can fight back against the resultant immiseration of the masses.
Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the squad diverted their youthful and increasingly socialist base to the corporate jaws of the Democratic Party.
Majorities of people of all political persuasions are hungry for Medicare for All and any kind of relief from the precarity of neoliberal capitalism. Young Democrats displaced from the American Dream hoped that the rise of Bernie Sanders and “the Squad” represented the first signs of life for the resurgence of class struggle politics in the United States. A major problem with this formulation rested in the fact that Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the squad diverted their youthful and increasingly socialist base to the corporate jaws of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is where movements go to die and where austerity is given a friendly, more diverse face from which to shatter the dreams and lives of the working class.
COVID-19 has served as a litmus test for the socialist-ish elements of the Democratic Party. The theory of change that inserts the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC as the leaders of the class struggle has failed to materialize in reality. In recent weeks, AOC and Sanders have blamed Republicans for the latest stimulus package which is half of what was formulated by Donald Trump before Biden became president-elect and excludes the singular $1200 payment to every American. They have been silent about the fact that House leader Nancy Pelosi signed off on the latest stimulus proposal coming out of Congress. When asked about the change of heart toward a bipartisan stimulus, Pelosi answered , “That’s okay now because we have a new president. A president who recognizes that we need to depend on science.”
In other words, the masses will get science but no rental assistance, a vaccine but no universal healthcare, and a new president but not a new politics that will fulfill their basic needs. Sanders and his surrogates have opposed the latest Pelosi-backed bill but have only called for the inclusion of another one-time $1200 dollar payment . It is clear that the chickens of austerity are roosting on the Sanders-wing of the Democratic Party. Austerity is politically defined by the complete absence of any demands on power which disrupt the status quo and the endless downward pressure placed on the lives of the downtrodden. Sanders’ willingness to reduce his demand for a $2000 universal basic income to a $1200 one-time payment after nine months of economic crisis follows the logic of austerity to a T.
Bernie Sanders and “the Squad” have always been unprepared to challenge austerity because their struggle does not fundamentally confront the character of the U.S. state. The U.S. state is the enforcement mechanism of capitalism. Black America has historically been the most organized, vocal, and effective force in exposing the true character of the U.S. state so that the masses of people can get to the business of transforming it.
The development of diverse faces in high places within the state has temporarily disarmed the Black consensus on peace and social justice. This has in turn created a huge weakness in the U.S. left as a whole. There are but a few voices calling for Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the “progressive” Democrats to move beyond demands for a $1200 one-time paycheck and even fewer challenging their silence on the nomination of Black war hawk Llyod Austin to Secretary of Defense or the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) worth $740 billion .
Austerity’s chickens have come home to roost in the form of the most devastating economic crisis since the Great Depression and there is no end in sight. The lesson of this moment is that real demands must be placed on the ENTIRE state, even the most supposedly left elements nesting within it. Movements are defined by their demands.
Without them, AOC and Sanders will continue to support bloated military budgets and capitulate to the class that actually wields power: the capitalist class. The so-called “left-wing” of the Democratic Party is accountable only to the political apparatus enforcing austerity on the masses of people. That AOC and Sanders won’t respond to the demands of the masses is a lesson that has yet to be learned by loyal Sandernistas.
Because so-called progressives are unprepared for the moment, it is ultimately up to workers and oppressed people to make the United States ungovernable unless their demands for a better life, and a new world, are met.
President-elect Joe Biden “is not even giving a nod and a wink” to Medicare for All, despite its huge popularity among both Democrats and Republicans, said Dr Margaret Flowers, director of Popular Resistance and longtime single payer healthcare advocate. “We can’t give Biden any honeymoon period,” said Flowers. “We’re not seeing a lot of difference between Biden and Trump in terms of their priorities.”
Pan-African Community Action organizer Netfa Freeman told a panel organized by Black psychology students at Bowie State University, in Maryland: “Community control of police is a way to create autonomous zones of power, so that people can actually take control of public safety.” Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who spent 19 years as a Black Panther Party political prisoner, urged creation of a national front of organizations demanding community control of police. “Unless we abolish policing as it’s presently constituted, we are not going to get anywhere,” said Bin Wahad.
Breya Johnson, co-chair of Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) in Washington, DC, said her organization enjoys a “working relationship” with the local Black Lives Matter chapter, but views BLM’s national leadership as “more about career interests” and raising money “than it is about Black liberation.” BYP100 sees mutual aid as crucial during the Covid-19-induced economic crisis, “because the government failed us.” “How we keep us safe is critical,” said Johnson, a masters student at George Washington University.
“The struggle has to be more than simply a declaration of our significance as human beings, as in the term ‘Black Lives Matter,’” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. That’s why, for the 12th consecutive year, the Coalition last week marched on the White House under the banners of “Black Power Matters,” “Down With Colonialism,” and “Black Community Control of the Police.” Said Yeshitela: “The masses of people need and want leadership.”
Lydia McCaskill, a masters and doctoral student at North Carolina Central University and activist firebrand in her hometown of Gastonia, proposes a process of “de-white supremification” in the US, similar to “de-Nazification” of Germany after World War Two. “The purpose would be “to remove any, every and all things that represent or signify any type of white supremacy in Amerikka,” said McCaskill, who has launched a “Stop Injustice in North Carolina Initiative.”
The great African revolutionary, Amilcar Cabral, reminded us that without revolutionary theory there can be no revolution.
His reminder was not a call for abstract theorizing, quite the contrary. What he meant was that one cannot advance in practice unless that practice is guided by the most advanced understanding of the material and ideological conditions that revolutionary forces face.
Over the next two days we will ground ourselves in our particular realities as they relate to our strategic and tactical engagement with bourgeois electoral system in the United States.
Let’s begin:
The ongoing and current capitalist crisis has created the most serious crisis of legitimacy since the collapse of the capitalist economy during the years referred to as the Great Depression.
Opponents of transformational change are seeking to “domesticate” the protest movement with bland calls for “justice” for George Floyd, who is dead and beyond justice, said Ajamu Baraka, national organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace. “What we can do is put a critical view on the system that created the conditions that resulted in Floyd’s life being taken.” Activists also have an opportunity to build solidarity with global victims of U.S imperialism. “We have a responsibility as citizens of Empire to put a brake on the U.S. state,” said Baraka.
