By Jeff Mackler and Glen Ford, April 2020
[Editor’s note by Jeff Mackler, National Secretary Socialist Action: Four years ago, in 2020, not long after Minneapolis racist police choke-hold murdered George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, five million people in 2,000 US cities, led by enraged Black activist youth, joined by their white supporters across the country, mobilized in unprecedented numbers to denounce US SYSTEMIC RACISM in all its manifestations. An unprecedented 84 percent of the US population, according to CNN polls at that time, agreed with the anti-racist demonstrators.
Indeed, with countless thousands in the streets of Washington, D.C. a fearful President Trump felt compelled to seek refuge in the bowels of the White House. The cowardly President soon realized his political mistake. He emerged soon after, accompanied by an entourage of his police and military tops, and marched in public view to a nearby site, instructing his top general to be prepared to attack the demonstrators, if not declare Marshal Law.
The general, Joint Chiefs of Staff head, Mark Milley, who later called Trump a “hard core fascist,” publicly refused, embarrassed that he had accompanied Trump in the first place. In 2020 the American people were far from ceding any significant authority to the likes of Trump or any other would-be dictator. But they were undoubtedly susceptible to the Democrat’s demagogy.
At the height of the Black Lives Matter mobilizations, when Joe Biden’s presidential primary campaign was faltering and liberal Bernie Sanders appeared to be headed to victory, the Democrats’ billionaire elite shifted gears, withdrew their super rich candidates and backed Biden for the presidency. The largely corporate funded Black Lives Matter leadership was near instantly converted into Biden’s campaign apparatus via what Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford termed the “Black Mis-leadership Class. Biden handily won the presidency. This fifty-year Democratic Party veteran racist politician had previously served as the Democrats’ liaison between its racist, segregationist Southern wing and its Northern liberal capitalist super-rich components. With the assistance, if not blessings of the corporate media, Biden’s half century of service to the racist cause was instantly disappeared.
The 2020 text below, “A Manifesto For Our Times: ABOLITION OF SYSTEMIC RACISM IS ON THE AGENDA TODAY” was co-authored by this writer and Glen Ford as an effort to counter the pending collapse of much of the existing social movements, led by Democratic Party funded Black and Latinx faith-based communities, civil rights organizations and the broad “left,” once again, into capitalist-imperialist politics, that is, into the Biden campaign. We ask our readers here whether another ruling class and corporate media slight of hand is in the works, whether today’s racist, genocidal, anti-immigrant, environmentally catastrophic and largely discredited Democrats, can be reconfigured yet again in the disguise of a “working people’s party.”
The November 2024 election saw some seven million fewer votes for the Democrat’s Kamala Harris, as compared to Biden in 2020. Harris took the Black, Latino and labor vote for granted and sought the presidency via a reactionary route parallel to Trump’s. Today’s capitalist pundits argue in effect that we have witnessed a massive shift in the politics of the nation’s poor and working people, from 2020 when historically unprecedented numbers, Black, white and Latinx, denounced in no uncertain terms US capitalism’s “systemic racism,” to today when they support it!
That is, say capitalism’s defenders, yesterday’s [2020] hundreds of millions, who had come to understand that racism is inherent in the system itself, a product of the conscious extermination of the nation’s indigenous people and the capture, enslavement and murder of countless millions of Africans who were used as the driving force of the country’s then agrarian-based economy, have changed their minds!
An independent class struggle alternative to capitalist politics
Black Agenda Report editor, Glen Ford, had coined the term, “Black Mis-leadership Class.” Ford was a leading advocate of a definitive break of the Black community from the Democratic Party, beginning with the independent organization of Black and Latinx communities aimed at controlling their own lives in the economic and political arenas – “community control,” or, more precisely, “Black and Latino control of Black and Latino communities.”
Today, it is clearer than ever to increasing millions that the Democratic Party is no reliable friend of the poor and nationally oppressed, not to mention the broad working class.
Indeed, had there been a definitive break from the Democrats with a clear orientation to the construction of an independent mass party of the national oppressed, the Democratic Party would have been doomed to irrelevance long ago. The same with the today’s largely corrupt, anti-democratic and privileged class collaborationist trade union bureaucracy, that largely casts its fate with the Democrats based on the myth that a few concessions might be forthcoming from the minority ruling class, whose very existence is inseparable from its inherent need to exploit and oppress the working masses.
In short, the independent organization of the Black, Latinx and Native American communities in the political arena would instantly set into motion a qualitatively new dynamic in US politics. It would simultaneously pose the same critical questions to working people. Why tie labor’s fate to a doomed Democratic Party? Why not establish fighting alliances in all social arenas with capitalism’s most oppressed and, perhaps, independent electoral alliances to challenge capitalist rule of the government itself?
In 2020, the Democrats proved capable of a near instant shift necessary to preserve their rule. Their near total control and dominations of the organizations and leadership of the oppressed was key to their success. The 2024 election has shaken that domination. It has opened the door wider than in a generation to the emergence of a new fighting leadership, a leadership akin to Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other freedom fighters who began to question the validity of the twin parties of capitalism. Because their ideas deeply resonated with millions they were assassinated, with government complicity.
The manifesto below describes in great detail how human political consciousness is molded by the material conditions of life itself. Whether this consciousness can be manipulated by capitalist minority forces for their own reactionary ends or whether it can be channeled toward the abolition of the system itself depends on the leadership qualities of the mass organizations, from the mass organizations of the nationally oppressed to the trade unions, qualitatively expanded, and, especially the deeply rooted and respected forces of revolutionary socialism. This is the future that Socialist Action looks to. Join us! socialistaction.org socialistaction@lmi.net
A Manifesto for our times…
ABOLITION OF SYSTEMIC RACISM IS ON THE AGENDA TODAY
Massive opposition to SYSTEMIC RACISM… a racism and the inseparable generalized social inequality that permeate every institution in U.S. society are the only serious explanations for the magnificent, unprecedented, defiant daily multi-racial mass mobilizations in 2000+ U.S. cities and towns. In the face of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic and police repression courageous millions have taken to the streets. The resounding declarations of Black Lives Matter! and No Justice, No Peace! have reverberated across the world. An unprecedented 84 percent of the US population, according to CNN polls, agrees with the anti-racist demonstrators.
It is this SYSTEMIC RACISM, not just the police murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks, that has infuriated the vast majority. That daily racist police murders of unarmed Blacks has been the norm for decades is no longer denied with impunity. Minneapolis is but one example: Twenty percent of the population of 430,000 is Black. But when the police employ violence — with kicks, neck holds, punches, shoves, takedowns, Mace and Tasers — nearly 60 percent of their victims are Black – seven times the rate of whites. 63 percent of those recently killed by Minneapolis police – 19 people – were Black; 17 percent – or 5 people – were white.
INGRAINED RACISM: And a century and a half before these murders, during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, 1865 to 1876, 2,000 racist lynchings of Black men, women and children were recorded, that is, after the Emancipation Proclamation. And another 4,400 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. And countless more since. And two more in Los Angeles last week. And four looped lynch ropes ominously tied to trees in an Oakland, CA park just yesterday!
SYSTEMIC RACISM: That is, the school-to-prison scenario, where ever-segregated, underfunded schools in the communities of the poor “graduate” near majorities of functionally illiterate students channeled into the ever-privatized-for profit prison-industrial-complex to work at Fortune 500 corporations at slave wages rates averaging 50 cents per hour. Half of the incarcerated are people of color. The nation that ranks first in the number of billionaires ranks first in the number and percentage of its population in jail.
SYSTEMIC RACISM: When COVID-19 deaths of Blacks, Latinx and Native Americans are nearly triple the rate of whites and quality health care, if any health care, is absent for the great majority.
SYSTEMIC RACISM in the poverty wage, part time, “gig” economy, “flexible” workforce largely of the poorest “essential workers” forced back to work in deadly unsafe/unprotected conditions to boost the profits of corporate America.
SYSTEMIC RACISM and generalized social inequality when $trillions in the recent CARE corporate bailout legislation were gifted to behemoth corporations – with a handful of billionaires getting $457 billion – while a one-time pittance is allocated, if at all, to exploited and oppressed working people.
SYSTEMIC RACISM when 43 percent of the military’s soldiers are Black, Brown and Native American people – victims of the economic draft – and trained to police the world at a cost one $trillion annually while our cities decay, our environment destroyed, our waters polluted, our schools fail, our health care disappears, our jobs deemed obsolete, our wages cut, our children go hungry and our hopes for a better future increasingly distant.
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass said it well, “Power cedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.”
Today, with undaunted millions in the streets, frightened figures in power have conceded more in days than in multiple decades, indeed centuries. Statues honoring the secessionist slaveocracy have been removed at the hands of the people and even by decree of local and state governments and in the nation’s capital. Their portraits have been ordered disappeared from the halls of Congress. Promises of “police reform” have been instantly announced in cities across the country. National “police reform” legislation has been introduced, awaiting quick bi-partisan debate and passage. Generations of racist brutality and discrimination are pledged to be remedied with the passage of a piece of paper. Buildings honoring racist Klan member Senators and their ilk have been instantly renamed. A handful of police chiefs have resigned. A few racist cops have been charged with murder and may be convicted in contrast to yesterday where such charges, not to mention convictions were the rarest of exceptions.
Even the nation’s leading generals, who oversee U.S. imperial wars of intervention around the world, counseled caution with regard to sending active duty troops, 43 percent of whom are people color, to quell the massive anti-racist protests. “The right of the people peaceably to assemble,” they asserted, rather than implied proposals of martial law, at least for now, had to be respected. At least for now! No doubt the rebellious spectacle of U.S. troops taking the knee or otherwise fraternizing with rather than repressing their sisters and brothers was a risk to be avoided. And Juneteenth, June 19, when federal troops arrived in Texas in 1865 to announce the end of slavery, is to be declared a national holiday. That is supposed to fix everything.
Where do we go from here?
We begin with the proposition that the term police reform is an oxymoron. Derek Chauvin’s knee has been on our necks for four centuries. His historic police predecessors were the slave patrols of yesteryear formed to track down escaped slaves. They were the post Civil War police who arrested en masse Black Code designated “vagrants” turned into instant prisoners then transferred to plantation chain gangs to work free for former slave owners; they were the racist Bull Connor heads of Birmingham’s Public Safety Commission hired to enforce the state’s “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws; they were and remain the scab-herding cops employed to break union strikes and club civil rights demonstrators. They are all part of the system’s inherent function to maintain the social order of the few against the vast majority.
Their instant concessions today aside, few believe that the Systemic Racism in U.S. society can be fundamentally altered without profound changes in relations of power between the oppressors and the oppressed, between the one per cent who own nearly half the wealth of the nation and the vast majority who live pay check to paycheck, and the Black, Latinx and Native Americans who are compelled to live on much less.
Democratic Community Control
The right of Black, Brown and Native American people to control and govern their own lives and communities must begin with a fundamental change in relations of power. This can only emerge today with the formation of new, united and independent organizations dedicated to the freedom struggle in all its manifestations.
The struggle to disarm, defund, and disband the racist institutions of police power begins with democratic community control of the communities of the oppressed. Only in this context can the $billions spent on the institutions of racist police repression be used to defend and safeguard our interests not theirs.
The $trillions spent on bailing out the corporate elite, and the $trillions more transferred to them in “tax reform” bills can be spent on re-building the nation’s poor neighborhoods, inner cities, and tribal lands.
The movement we aspire to build in alliance with all exploited working people will fight for:
* Community-based job programs to provide work at a living wage for all.
* A massive public works program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. Build schools, hospitals and quality housing not prisons and military bases around the world!
* An end to racist deportations. Tear down the walls! No human being is illegal!
* An end to the violence and discrimination against women and LGBTQI/transgender people
* Free quality health care and education for all from the cradle to the grave, including virus testing and PPE now!
* Limitations on rental costs to no more than 25 percent of household income!
* An end to evictions and foreclosures!
* An immediate national programs to build quality housing for all!
* A program to tax the rich, not working people.
* $Billions for human needs not endless wars of imperial intervention and murder. No to sanction wars, drone wars, Secret Operation wars, death squad assassination wars and privatized army wars!
* Stop the fossil fuel-induced climate catastrophe. Nationalize the entire fossil fuel corporate monopolies for a rapid transition to a safe, ecologically sustainable energy system. Jobs for all at a living wage for all replaced workers during the transition! No to environmental racism and to toxic waste dumping!
UNITY! UNITY! UNITY!
The example of the most poor and oppressed uniting to advance their freedom struggle has already inspired working people of all races and creeds to join in wholeheartedly. The courageous spectacle of unprecedented numbers of inspired white youth standing firm and side by side with their Black, Latinx and Native American sisters and brothers, in defiance of curfews, police clubs and exploding noxious gas grenades, portends wondrous victories to be won now and in the immediate future. The construction of ever-broadening united coalitions and movements to advance humanity’s best aspirations for a new world where SYSTEMIC RACISM and SYSTEMIC INEQUALITY are truly relegated to history’s distant and dark past is within our reach.
Join us! A new world is emerging. What was impossible, unimaginable, unexpected and unthinkable yesterday is on the order of the day today. [The statement concluded with a call to sign the Manifesto.]
