Socialist Action (US)

The monthly paper of Socialist Action, San Francisco, 1983–2018

In 2013 the face of U.S. imperialism is Black

Socialist Action, Vol. 31, No. 5, May 2013 · scan p. 11 · about 661 words

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interests in Africa. And the first person that the U.S. military asked to run AF­ RICOM was William Ward, a Black man.

Obama bombs Yemen and Somalia without ever having declared war. He and the Democratic Party have given their full support to U.S. wars and oc­ cupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. … Obama’s only intention is to do the bidding of the capitalist class. If they decide they want to recolonize and seize the natural resources of Africa and the Middle East, then Obama is there for them to do that.

There is a myth that Obama is merely compromising with evil Republicans. From health care, to the massive bud­ get cuts triggered after the phony debt crisis that the capitalist class created, we have seen Obama willing to propose measures identical to or even further to the right of Republicans.

I am only 21. I’ve never voted in a presidential election because by the time I was old enough, I could already see through the façade of American capitalist “democracy.”

Current research suggests that, at the current rate, Blacks will not close the income inequality gap with whites for another 500 years. This requires radi­ cal action, not weak liberal, reformist demands that the ruling class probably won’t even concede. I don’t have the patience to wait 500 years, and no one else should either.

I am often told that I’m not being real­ istic about the necessity or the plausi­ bility of an international working-class revolution, that I am too radical to ever win. I am told that I need to be more pragmatic and less utopian.

But it is not utopian to think that we don’t have to pick between the lesser of two evils. American democracy is a rotten game, with rules designed to not only see us lose but to see us play the game thinking we might win.

Black people fought hard for the right to vote, but they did so because they understood that voting could be a means to an end.

The end was not the democratic right to vote. The end has always been, and should continue to be, Black liberation, and that cannot really be voted on, be­ cause it cannot be attained under capi­ talism.

We stand in solidarity with the vic­ tims of U.S. imperialism because Black people in this country know what it is liked to bleed under the heel of U.S. imperialism. To think that we can end imperialism without completely over­ throwing capitalism and instituting so­ cialism is what is utopian. n consciousness across the color line.

Then he tells us that the slave-owning class, which was tiny in comparison to the population of the South, was socio­ logically, politically, and economically ruined by the Civil War. So where did the new ruling class come from? And here’s an extraordinary observation; I have not heard anyone else talk about this: It emerged from the poor whites.

He uses a word (if you are Catholic you might have heard it), transubstantiation:

The transubstantiation of a part of the poor white population to become the ruling class of the South, who would then impose upon the entire South a reign of racial terror and counterrevolution pre­ viously unseen in American history.

Today the Obama presidency, contrary to popular perception, is nothing less than the consolidation of counterrevo­ lutionary power in the United States as part of an attempt to globally reposition itself for war and the recolonization of Africa, in the first instance, and parts of Asia. We need not go into long discus­ sion—just note the facts and events such as Libya in 2010 and 2011, and the bru­ tal assassination of Muammar Gadhafi….

We are in a new stage of this counter­ revolution. We have to think about the forms of struggle to defend the people, to prevent all-out world war, and to dis­ mantle the institutions of domestic re­ pression and control. n

← Contents of Vol. 31, No. 5, May 2013

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