Dear Friend in Struggle:
I am happy to hear that you are actively involved with the Philadelphia Occupier movement. Sounds like it has been an exhilarating eleven days for you. You seem to have found your place in the on-going demonstrations. You obviously feel, like many others who have a long history of participation in movement actions that this new nationally spreading series of actions is "the revolution in place" as you say.
I certainly think the Occupier movement is a happening event and I think it's one that black people should be part of with certain carefully conceived caveats. The caution being that we
should never forget our history of struggle in America and we should pay attention to lessons unfolding before our eyes.
I believe it may have the potential to at least wake up and energize segments of the population to make progressive demands on society's elites and plutocratic rulers. On the other hand a general revolution is a big, huge step that I don't think this movement has as a goal, especially given its multiple issues and contradictory demands most of which have yet to be unified in any specific manner.
Take the events surrounding the Arab Spring for instance. It was good to see thousands of Arab people rise up against the backward regimes that held sway for so long. The spontaneity of the people in taking to the streets was electrifying. To see the Arab people wake up and begin to take back the night was obviously inspiration, but "the Arab Spring has not become a revolution in the sense of its dependence on the backing of Western powers among whom are some of the same nations that not long ago colonized the region or still hold effective power over both the discredited dictators and now the Arab movement for democracy. The Arab Spring overseas has not yet yielded good fruit in Libya, Egypt or Syria. In Egypt the military has allowed some religionists to go on a rampage and kill other religionists. Throughout the region Arab rebels have replaced the American and Western backed dictators with what? I think more economic and military dependence on Western powers to maintain their new set of governmental orders. Will the Occupiers do better in the American Autumn before another winter of discontent sets in?
I think that as black people and other people of color begin to increase our numbers in the movement, the character, demands and leadership initiatives of the movement must reflect issues of black survival. The fight against advanced corporate capitalism and its control over our governments and lives, or the rich primarily white ruling class and their 1% of control over 55% of society's wealth (and over 99% of most of our minds because of the way privately held wealth impacts the public's spiritual, cultural, political, judicial, military, and legal-penal ideas and actions), must deal seriously with the issue of racism, the black economic and jobs crisis, the criminalization and incarceration of the black masses. the theft of millions of square miles of black owned land and the fair payment of $$$ billions in monetary reparations for black enslavement and the subsequent 3rd class, segregated citizenship that still marks us and locks our people into ghetto arrested-development.
It must be remembered that Wall Street and America's financiers, money men, insurance companies, mortgage lenders and bankers are mainly the white plutocrats whose rule over finance capital is nothing but a dictatorship of corporate thugs who double as the financial backers of economic racism, stratification and social segregation. This class of thugs owes black people something other than "a blank check, marked insufficient" funds. History evidences this class' thuggish behavior toward black interests going all the way back to the financing of slavery via their investments in slave related production and services on southern plantations as well as in northern shipping and mercantile industries. Let's not so easily forget that King Cotton produced by free black labor was responsible for vast fortunes made by fat cats in the South as well as the North.
The labor movement in America, for all its history in dealing with black workers' issues, has been under the power and control of the white working class and a normally racist set of narrow minded leaders. The professional classes of lawyers, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs who can secure bank loans for business expansion and growth, engineers, politicians, college educators, academy awards entertainment types, philosophers and theologians (in big white, moneyed religious denominations) have also seen fit to mainly exclude black people for ages, allowing a paltry few in here and there and calling that integration. The military has just a few black generals and admirals out of over 400. There are no black US senators. There is one black state governor. There are 3 or 4 black billionaires out of 500-600 hundred. There are less than 50 black congress persons out of 535. There are no Fortune 500 black banks, stock manipulators or even major corporate operations that can be said to have a profound effect on the American economy. Black youth unemployment is at 50% or more. Black people have had double digit unemployment for years and if we honestly look at our ghetto imprisonment we can see that the Great Depression has never ended for us.
So by itself Wall Street is one (certainly a most powerful one) of a set of white controlled institutions that end up needing revolutionary change as far as black people are concerned.
If the Occupy movement can take on the real concerns of our people that would be fine for we black people have marched and marched and demonstrated and things since our first slave revolt and resistance to white over lordship back in the days. In most of those demonstrations of black resolve to change our condition of subservience, whites in solidarity came few and far between. Their were some whites at the 1995 Million Man March and the 1997 Million Women's March, but where was the big white solidarity marches in support of the Million black People's Marches? Why is it that when black people march for a black agenda, most whites, even well meaning ones, sit it out or claim that its racist. Why can't whites sponsor a million person white march against white racism and for $$$ billions in reparations to blacks and Native Americans and peace in ghetto streets as well as the withdrawal of European and American imperialist military forces from all over the non-white world? Blacks would most certainly show solidarity with it! Peace in our streets is a direct jab at the white dominated peace movement that is forever talking about international peace and nuclear disarmament, but says little about the causes of domestic and neighborhood violence that plagues our communities --- mush of the violence is directly related to the horrible economic and social conditions black people constantly find themselves in.
Old John Brown came in serious way. Some other white abolitionists also came, but they came with their own white agendas that, while advocating black legal freedom, often called for black segregation from society's real privileged whites or even removal from America to colonize Liberia, Haiti, Cuba or Nicaragua ala the Abraham Lincoln types. Later the white socialists, anarchists, feminists and communists came and that was good to a point, but their focus remained on the plight of the white majority interests and only secondarily on black folks needs. During the Civil Rights movement some sincere whites came. Some came with money and resources that influenced the movement's directions. A few gave their lives, John Brown style. But most prayed and marched for a non-violent way to deal with black inclusion. A non-violent white majority and democratically approved way acceptable to white American moral sensibilities. What we got out of the Civil Rights movement was the official end of legal segregation, but Dr. King's call for help for the black poor, uplift of the black laboring classes and his call for jobs. peace and justice with reparations kept being put off the table as unacceptable to most white sensibilities. Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad, and Queen Mother Moore and Marcus Garvey's concerns for black pride, self-determination, self-sufficiency, land, reparations and the building of the black nation took a back seat to white notions of gradualist, judicially crafted (Supreme Court interpreted) integration.
Last week Minister Farrakhan, as he discussed the 16th anniversary of the Million Man March at the Philadelphia Convention Center, asked the question of whether we should march again. He concluded that there are much more urgent strategies we need to be about. As a black nationalist I must agree with him, we do need to get ourselves together in some form of united front where we can create some form of economic strategy based on our own self-sufficiencies I would hope lead to ending white ruled capitalist dictatorship with its socialist replacement. As a black radical and socialist I also think it necessary that we develop our own black terms, slogans and demands and join in solidarity with the Occupiers in order that some whites of goodwill may again have an opportunity to hear and act upon our ancient concerns. Reparations are both a demand of black nationalists and black socialists. Maybe we can get the white Occupying majority to join us to occupy the neighborhood check cashing sites, police stations, jails-prisons, crack houses, white dominated craft labor union halls and county-statehouses that persecute or exclude our people.
So yes the Occupier movement has potential, but it cannot be "revolutionary" for black people unless and until it seriously comes to grips with the age old black demand for an end to white, anti-black racism coupled with the equal demand for $$$ billions in reparations, land and even the possibility for black political autonomy. We shall see if the Occupiers can make these demands their top agenda items that they lay on the plutocrats.
