Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 29

Majority Forces Need To Combat Market Dictatorship

   An economy on the brink of more serious failure than the usual cyclic form entered an even more critical state when the covid virus hit. We now find the mind-boggling debt before the capitalist pandemic growing to be very near breaking the capitalist bank. Along with the awakening public opposition to racism experienced by some who are encountering it for the first time, this is producing the greatest surge for substantial change since the near transformation that took place back in the 1930s, when capitalism defensively improved the lives of much of its working class to avoid social revolution. So, naturally, our intellectually and morally crippled rulers are making every effort to incorporate into the market any and all efforts at creating change, while blocking when not totally smothering public consciousness in the thickest fog of dis-and mis-information to make all previous treatment of mind management seem almost thoughtful by comparison.

 

As the nation sinks more deeply into financial, mental and spiritual blight, we find major outlets of thought control blaring idiocy about Russian threats to our invader forces in foreign countries by allegedly offering payment to the native population to kill them. Such thoughts would never occur to people who have suffered tens of thousands of deaths at their hands and whose governments have been destroyed by them, at least not to the brilliant American foreign policy makers who need to have their heads examined by a proctologist. These Russian monsters are also conducting assaults on our fictional democracy, thus endangering the multi-billion dollar electoral marketing orgy which started right after the last carnival chose a barker and will continue until the next circus selects a clown.

 

 Worse, according to the same purveyors of propaganda, the Chinese are stealing our medical research and computer brilliance and using both to improve the lives of all their people instead of simply enhancing the bottom lines of some of their investors. As an example of their vicious disdain for all that truly matters, during a time in which my own American county closed a hospital for lack of funding, and this in a place with a median income of just under 80,000 a year, the savage Chinese built two – 2! – brand new hospitals in barely a month when confronted by the covid 19 virus. Guess which nation leads the world in number of deaths due to the virus and tries to blame the atrocity of its health care system on an allegedly Chinese menace? This while we ring China with military bases and sail an armada into the South China Sea, which brain dead imperialists tell us is right off the coast of Florida. Or New York?

 

And while college educated fiction writers posing as news reporters screech about Chinese abuse of minorities Americans in greater numbers than ever are reacting to the generations of such real abuse in the USA. And that crippled health care business at a more crippled capitalist mall has increased suffering for millions more unemployed while a handful of billionaires get even disgracefully richer in a marketplace more contaminated by moral sewage than ever before, or, at least since last week.

 

While forced to consider the supposed horrid menace of Russia and China, more Americans are piercing the plastic curtain of corporate mis-information by experiencing material life rather than simply swallowing immaterial stories amounting to modern mythology to make folklore tales of magical wonder sound far more logical.

 

American material reality sees total personal debt at the 14 trillion dollar mark. In truth, like our government in the hallowed “free” market where nothing is free, much of America could not pay rent, mortgages or afford food or clothing without running up tremendous debt, nor could our pseudo-democracy run up trillions of dollars worth of death rays and invading armies without burdening us with a multi-trillion dollar national debt. This, while millions more lose their jobs and health care to the capitalist economy, thousands lose their lives to the capitalist pandemic, and the entire nation is in danger of losing its collective consciousness to the capitalist media.

 

 As public reaction grows in anger at the injustice of a murderous dis-organization of life through the marketing religion of private profit, the ruling powers transmit brain-numbing messages of division, consumption, more division, more consumption and then even more division and consumption.

 

The growing consciousness of racism in America threatens to be reduced to a brand name as banks, malls, fashion, art, films and every other aspect of life-as-commodity sign on to the BLM logo, inviting all to buy their products, rent their cars, eat their fast foods and indulge every form of life reduced to purchase at the market assured that they are buying from supporters of the brand BLM, a most recently discovered and lucrative market share.

 

 Desperately fighting against a rise in consciousness among the people that sees the reality of humanity as a majority with common interests and not the vicious reduction of humans into competing groups, we are reduced to seeing fictional minorities as people of color when all of us with the exception of albinos are such, and that small number of us without melanin are no less humans for having that birth defect.  Anything to prevent the public from clearly seeing, as our primitive communist ancestors did, that hungry people need food, no matter their skin tone, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference or favorite sport. Whether geographic realities and cultural teachings create desire for lasagna, matzos, tacos, chitlins, croissants or fried rice, food is absolutely necessary for survival, not for marketing. When the hunt was successful our ancestors all had meat. When it was not, they all had vegies. When neither meat nor vegies were available our nomadic ancestors moved to another locale, in the human tradition of migrating to a new place when life was no longer possible at the old one. This was long before capital and profits, in fact, long before slave and feudal societies. But the fact is that humans survived from the beginning by cooperation not just because or unless they liked each other but because it was absolutely essential for their survival. If those early practitioners had not followed that mentally advanced if physically primitive form we would not be here in the modern world participating in an either or choice that does not involve a lesser evil but ultimate humanity threatening evil itself.

 

That evil is the private profit first and at all cost system of capitalism which, after that profit procurement, creates investment that brings public good to one and all. Of course. Isn’t it evident in the fact that we spend more than 700 billion on wars while more than half a million of our people are homeless? That’s the beauty and poetry of a free market system of investment for profit first. If dog food, kitty litter and pet health care for our 180 million comfortably housed dogs and cats make more profits than housing for half a million humans and health care for more than thirty million humans, doesn’t it make sense to invest in our pets rather than those humans? If more than seven hundred billion a year brings profit to the Military Industrial Complex we were first warned of by a Republican president, doesn’t that kind of job creation to kill people in foreign countries – while calling it defense of our mostly undefended from pollution, poverty and crime population - isn’t that wonderful? And if all of us simultaneously learn that is the case, rather than the idiotic excuse for reality we are having forced into our heads, might we react in anger and join together in a social uprising to make all social uprisings of the past seem mere preludes? That’s why we are hearing about China, Russia and a failing state because of Russia and China, and why we are being sold a product called Black Lives Matter lest it become a social revolution that says under capitalism, only some lives matter and that group is getting smaller and smaller while the majority of humanity faces ruin as long as it is divided into false races and phony identity groups that allow the most menacing minority on the planet, billionaires and their rich professional flunkies, to lead us all to ruin.

 

All humans need food, clothing and shelter, which our primitive ancestors seemed to understand. They did not differentiate on any stupid grounds of alleged racial difference until something called civilization introduced minority rules, class structure and associated horror. And it got worse for most people when capitalism took over, bringing a better life to some by creating a worse life for many many more. We need to begin acting like what we truly are, a tribe of closely related humans being falsely driven apart by minority rulers who teach us to grow up isolated and suffering adults blaming ourselves or other powerless people for our problems. As more of us reach that point the program of our rulers will become even more desperate than at the present moment at which our major problems are hardly the Russians or Chinese or Iranians but rather the billionaire class and its employees and the Democratic and Republican parties which they own.

 

We need far more than votes to create social transformation. Votes have helped create the mess we’re programmed to fear as budding American fascism, which is what German voters did to create the German brand. Real democracy creates society, not a rubber stamp for its minority owners and is not for purchase at a mall; like food clothing and shelter, it must be created by an aroused public demanding a better life for all of us and not just some of us. Elections can help, but democracy must be created before the vote, not after.

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Bulletin: Biden Chooses Marge Simpson as Running Mate

Biden Chooses Marge Simpson for Vice President

 

The Biden campaign has decided to support Marge Simpson for vice president to give the ticket more balance. “She’s more representative of American women than the professional class feminists who are most influential in our great democracy” said Biden’s marketing and sales advisor from the polling firm running the  campaign from a mobile satellite rotating far above the American people, in keeping with class divisions called for in our  constitution.

 

 

The campaign's mental health crisis center staff advised Biden to make the choice after white working class men had organized protests over dumb TV images of cartoon characters like Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin, calling them hate crimes of disrespect. “These portrayals of white, fat, dumb, beer drinking oafs are hate crimes committed to all white working class people and we will no longer tolerate this hateful denial of our humanity” shouted spokes shouter Joe Six-Pack as his mob of several hundred over-weight pot-bellied white workers chanted “we demand respect.”

 

"Until and unless we hear different from the Over-Weight Black Working Class Women’s coalition, we think Marge Simpson will be accepted by all voters. If she doesn’t do well in the polls, we are thinking of Oprah Winfrey or Beyonce, who, we are told, are actual people and not cartoon characters" said major party advisor, strategist , technician, and person who goes for coffee, Guadalupe Tecumsah Liebowitz, who chairs the party's Disabled Transexual Latino Jewish Caucus.

 

 

Harlem's Pearl - James Baldwin

“The American idea of progress is how fast I become white. And it’s a trick bag. Because they know perfectly well I can never become white. I have drunk my share of dry martinis; I have proven myself civilized in every way I can. But there is an irreducible difficulty: something doesn’t work. Well, I decided: I might as well act like a nigger.”

 

         -----James Baldwin, UC Berkeley, 1979

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, (Harper, 1980) p. 445; Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, pps. 117-18

Tom Hayden, Reunion – A Memoir, (Random House, 1988) p. 59

The account of the Bobby Kennedy meeting is from: James Campbell, Talking At The Gates – A Life of James Baldwin, (Viking, 1991) pps. 163-5; David Leeming, James Baldwin – A Biography, (Henry Holt, 1994) pps. 222-6; W. J. Weatherby, James Baldwin – Artist on Fire, (Donald I. Fine, 1989) pps. 221-4

Leeming, p. 296

A Rap on Race, p. 88

Leeming, p. 185

Baldwin 1965 Cambridge Union debate with William F. Buckley Jr.

I Am Not Your Negro (film)

A Rap on Race, pps. 215-16

Leeming, p. 322

Maya Angelou, “When Great Trees Fall,” bookpatrol.net, May 29, 2014

Toni Morrison, “James Baldwin: His Voice Remembered – Life In His Language” New York Times, December 20, 1987

Amiri Baraka, “James Baldwin, “His Voice Remembered – We Carry Him With Us” New York Times, December 20, 1987

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Economic Fascism Creates Political Fascism

Neo-liberal capitalism has transformed the social democratic capitalism that followed the Second World War into a more oppressive and destructive form with greater accumulation of minority wealth and majority poverty than the world has ever seen. The present stage in the usual boom-bust cycle of market forces under private profit rule now multiplied by a still unperceived factor, seems nearer total failure and more frightening than ever. This is leading to incredibly reactionary programs to assure minority rule while at the same time unleashing revolutionary possibilities for the global majority which threaten minority power as never before.
In America, fading from dominance as the center of the global system but still frighteningly powerful militarily and thus a menace to all humanity, voices are raised in opposition to that power, but so far successfully divided into minorities of relatively less social impact which only rewards segments of the population to keep in power the smallest minority with the greatest state control: the wealthiest 1% who own and operate what passes for a democracy but is no more so than the one which elected Hitler and the Nazis in Germany in the last century.
 And that doctored historic memory of political fascism is constantly used to keep current populations in line, warning them against suffering the horrors of pre-second world war capitalism, rather than becoming aware of that system’s present horrors kept nearly secret by consciousness control and mind management techniques to maintain the prevailing disorder of our social life in maintenance of the dominating order of their private profits.
Capitalism ruled Germany before and after Hitler and still rules up to the present moment, as it does in the USA and most of the global community. Food, clothing, shelter, war, peace, health, illness, pets, tattoos and everything else are for sale at the market and available to any who can afford the price, and to none who cannot. If there is a private profit to be made, the product will be available. If only the public good will be served, forget about it. That is why we spend more than 700 billion a year on war and more than seventy billion on pets while hundreds of thousands live in the street and medical workers and the entire health care community are criminally over-worked and suffering breakdowns leading to death by disease and suicide during the present capitalist pandemic.
Germany in the 1930s, like the United States, was in the grips of an economy near collapse and moved to total ruling class domination without pretense of democratic values by putting the commanding heights of that economy under control of the state. That state, always an arm of ruling power, was a force to keep the peace among the rich and poor by having elections to maintain wealth and poverty in as polite terms as possible, even creating the world’s first national health care system long before the collapse.
The USA was also in economic chaos with as much as 25% unemployment and communist and socialist parties demanding real democracy, which would have meant radical transformation of the economic system.
While more overtly oppressive fascist capitalism took power in Germany, the social democratic form prevailed in the USA, as cooler ruling class heads saw that the market left alone, under religious belief that freedom would flower under the idiotic doctrine that buying cheap and selling dear was the word of god, was a bit more dangerous than minority wealth could rely on. It could lead to social revolution.
The capitalist war saw the USA triumph and after millions of deaths and incredible destruction the social democratic model took hold in the western world and market interference was allowed to the extent that dreadful poverty would not be visible to most of the population and confined to relatively invisible-by-design communities in national and foreign ghettos.
For some fifty years now that phase has been under assault by a return to free market fanaticism as an answer to the only slightly higher taxes and lower profits of the social democratic form, with practitioners of both schools preventing the people from seeing that it is the system itself and not the way it is arranged that guarantees failure for most at tremendous benefit to only some.
The 21stcentury has seen the enormous inequality of previous periods expand to proportions that only those confined to a mental concentration camp could see as a system of democracy and equality, though idealized as such by majorities reduced to accepting the purchase of elections by a wealthy minority under the guise of choice for the working majority. In the past, thousands of multi-millionaires were somehow rationalized as healthy aspects of capitalism since they would invest in businesses and thereby create jobs and prosperity for the toiling masses and their professionally trained upper classes.
At present, there are some 700 earthly creatures called billionaires, having amassed such incredible wealth and power over perverse democracies that past tyrants seen as deities by their subjects might in present terms amount to no more than what were once called rich peasants. These incredibly wealthy individuals shame the very notion of democracy and are treated as more royal than past deities in hopes that they will invest in “my” identity group’s security and that will somehow represent success for the millions left out of “my” group. Viva capitalist democracy.
At a time when the most incredibly massive state and personal debt ever accumulated have the system tilting precariously on a mountain of symbolic finance with roots in a foundation of substantial fiction, a capitalist pandemic has both aggravated the situation further while also making radical change necessary not just to overcome the pandemic but ultimately capitalism itself. So, the people are bombarded anew into fear of political fascism bringing on further deprivation leading many to be swept up in fake-left and phony-right political excuses for the preservation of the moral toilet of an economic system which must be changed for humanity, which is composed of far more earthly beings than our relatively tiny American numbers.
There are more than 7.5 billion humans on earth and the shockingly anti-democratic inequality in America is far more horrifying on a global scale, but the American numbers are bad enough to provoke social revolution once the public finds out, which will never be the case as long as bi-partisan capital owns and operates both major political parties.
The class differences which have existed since organized states began have taken on far more malevolence and created greater threats to the future of humanity under the rules of market capitalism which have rewarded many while destroying far more. The seemingly good life enjoyed by some under alleged democracy are really no different than they were under slavery, when many lived in a degree of comfort even though not owning slaves, just as a shrinking middle class now survives without owning any capital, let alone exercising any control over it. And rest assured that being privileged enough to own some stock in a major corporation will not mean the 1% will be phoning you asking your advice before hiring cheaper immigrant labor or laying off more expensive American workers in pursuit of still greater private profits.
The next American election will offer the usual lesser evil choice to be accepted by a minority of the electorate in a supposed exercise of democracy that would make sense only in a world where pimping meant true love and starvation meant being on a diet, the organizing and action that must take place to end the virus of con-19 and its parent capitalism will need to take on greater efforts than ever to avoid potential disaster not only for America but humanity itself.
Democracy, in material reality and not continued rape of language, is more necessary than ever, to bring about another world and not just a different America. We will all need to think globally while acting locally, and then not just politically but economically before that, lest our politics continually reinforce rather than transform social reality. And the lives of the American and global majority matter more than ever but will amount to less than nothing if we only think of ourselves as nationals or different-than-human members of subjugated groups, and not our class of humanity which is now, as always, the overwhelming majority of working people on the planet. <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Geneva; panose-1:2 11 5 3 3 4 4 4 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}</style>

USA!

"Can't build a decent car anymore. Can't make a TV set, cell phone, or VCR. Got no steel industry left. No textiles. Can't educate our young people. Can't get health care to our old people. But we can bomb the shit outta your country, all right.  We can bomb the shit outta your country!"

----George Carlin, Napalm and Silly Putty

Towering Defiance: W. E. B. DuBois

1903: AtlantaDr. W. E. B. DuBois

Babies are named after him, organizations founded in his honor, grave risks run complying with his constant calls for action.

Brilliant, eloquent, and hungry for knowledge, by age twenty-seven he had completed a Ph.D. in Sociology at Harvard and all coursework for another in Economics at Humboldt University in Berlin, the leading economics department in the world. After that, he wrote the first work on American urban sociology, the first social scientific treatise on the slave trade, and a powerful collection of essays worthy of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
A trail of Yankee and European admirers regularly seeks him out, staying in hotels segregation forbids DuBois himself to enter. Such cruel ironies have etched a half-sneer on the good Doctor’s face, and the scorn only deepens when his requests for research funds are routinely dismissed or ignored.
Condescended to by his inferiors, DuBois responds with volleys of lucid indignation that may subside but never entirely disappear. Seeing the wrath that greets what they take to be their good intentions, Southern “gentlemen” shake their heads and conclude smugly that cities breed a deracialized “uppityness” in general and racial Frankensteins like DuBois in particular.
Teacher, scholar, activist, sociologist, historian, writer, and world traveler, DuBois uses his lyrical voice, analytical rigor, and passionate advocacy with the supreme dignity of an avatar entrusted with the guidance of his entire race.
Boundless ambition marked him early. While still a teenager he decided to “prove to the world that Negroes [are] just like other people.”


Sources: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois – Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, (Henry Holt and Co., 1998) pps. 3, 32, 98, 272, 350, 469, 500, 505; Playthell Benjamin and Stanley Crouch, C-SPAN Book TV, April 2, 2003 
1959: BeijingPortrait of a Harvard Ph.D.
Seeing a lynching victim’s blackened knuckles in a display case jolted him out of brilliant scholarly detachment and converted him to activism.

Decades of distinguished accomplishment later, universities shun him, well-to-do blacks disdain him, and intellectuals refuse to write about him. Only the Communists and the National Guardian risk publishing him, while his sole financial support comes from the pennies of the poor.
Heretical groups, their coffers empty and their leaders always on the brink of jail, compete to have him grace their gatherings with unpaid speeches, which he delivers with aplomb. Always he says exactly what needs saying in an eloquently prophetic voice worthy of Robeson. In private conversation he prefers listening to monopolizing the floor, but whenever he opens his mouth a hush falls over the room.
Prolific author, spellbinding orator, tireless organizer, proud socialist, champion of a hundred causes Dr. DuBois speaks from Beijing University on his 91st birthday: “I speak with no authority, no assumption of age nor rank; I hold no position, I have no wealth. One thing alone I own and that is my soul. Ownership of that I have even while in my own country for near a century I have been nothing but a ‘nigger.’ On this basis and this alone I dare speak.”


Sources: Cedric Belfrage and James Aaronson, Something To Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian 1948-1967, (Columbia, 1978) pps. 137-40, 252; Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Harvey J. Kaye, The American Radical, (Routledge, 1994) pps. 113-20


                       
1903: The Alabama Black Belt   The Tuskegee Machine The gatekeeper of rewards, the key to black advancement, Tuskegee Institute champions hard work and savings, the purchase of respect, and a gradual alleviation of racism’s miseries.
Perpetually under construction, the school is built by students whose lessons consist of laying cement, transporting hods on scaffolds, and planing wood in the carpentry shop. Commencement valedictories witness seniors quickly assembling demonstration houses while buildings bearing the names of Northern philanthropists rise up all over campus the whole year round.
Masters of cabinet-making, plastering, masonry, and steam-fitting, Tuskegee graduates never lack for jobs. According to the Tuskegee creed, practical education is worth temporary political subservience, for a man without a vocation is no man at all.
Liberal arts mean nothing to menials locked in caste subordination, and higher degrees merely glorify idleness. Music, literature, and foreign language can wait until blacks become rich, while the vote is a useless thing. Carpentry pays better, and invites no trouble.


Sources: David Levering Lewis, Kent, W. E. B. DuBois – Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, (Henry Holt and Co., 1998) pps. 233, 262, 309, 341, 353; Noel J. Kent, America In 1900, (M. E. Sharpe, 2000) p. 123
1903: The Urban North
The Talented Tenth
Collusion with oppression and meek acceptance of inferiority is turning black society on its head, warn these learned blacks, a self-surrender that awards starring roles to sharecroppers, skilled mechanics, and domestics, while black teachers, preachers, doctors, and undertakers are forced off the stage. In the past accomplished black people traveled and pondered, read more than just the Bible, and at least aspired to express themselves nobly, but today all march to segregated prosperity behind Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Machine. “In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached has been that manly self-respect is worth more than land and houses,” W. E. B. DuBois reminds his tormented race. Dignity comes before utility, he adds, and knowledge of values will forever trump obsession with prices.       Educated blacks insist that work and money can do their race no ultimate good until it has the vote, higher education, and the power to defeat discrimination. A refinement of character, not material success, is the true measure of humanity. Years ago, Dr. DuBois warned that education should not be confused with a Meal Ticket: “Never make the mistake of thinking that the object of being a man is to make a carpenter; the object of being a carpenter is to be a man.”


Sources: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois – Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, (Henry Holt and Co., 1998) pps. 108, 288; W. E. B. DuBois – The Fight For Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, (Henry Holt and Co., 2000) p. 2; Thomas R. Frazier, ed., Afro-American History – Primary Sources (Harcourt, 1971) pps. 119-28)


W. E. B. DuBois Calls For Economic Sanity

“What has gone wrong? It is clear the workers don’t understand the meaning of work. Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private property. We should measure the prosperity of the nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty; the prevalence of health; the efficiency of the public schools; and the number of people who can, do read worthwhile books. 

Toward all this we do strive, but instead of marching breast forward, we stagger and wander thinking that food is raised not to eat, but to sell at good profit; houses are not to shelter the masses, but to make real estate agents rich; and solemnly declaring that without private profit there can be no food or homes. All of this is ridiculous. It has been disproven centuries ago.

The greatest thinkers of every age have inveighed against concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and against poverty, and disease and ignorance in the masses of men.

We have tried every method of reform. A favorite effort has been force by war. But the loot stolen by murder went to the generals and not to the soldiers. We tried through religion to lead men to sacrifice and right treatment of their fellow men, but the priests too often stole the fruits of sacrifice and concealed the truth.

In the 17thcentury of our modern European era we sought leadership in science and dreamed that justice might rule through natural law, but we misinterpreted that law to mean that most men were slaves and white Europeans were the right masters of the world.

In the 18thcentury, we turned toward the ballot in the hands of the worker to force a just division of the fruits of labor among the toilers. But the capitalists, happening on black slavery and land monopoly and on private monopoly of capital, forced the modern worker into a new slavery which built a new civilization of the world with colored slaves at the bottom, with white serfs between, and the power still in the hands of the rich.

But one consideration halted this plan. The serfs and even the slaves had begun to learn to think. Some bits of education had stimulated them and some of the real scientists of the world began to use their knowledge for the masses and not solely for the ruling classes. It became more and more a matter of straight thinking.

What is work? It was what all must contribute to the common good. No man has a right to be idle. It is the bounden duty of each to contribute his best to the well being of all, of what men gain by the efforts of all have a right to share, not to the extent of all that they may want, but certainly to the extent of what they really need.

You must let the world know that this is your simple and unwavering program: the abolition of poverty, disease and ignorance the world over among women and men of all races, religions and color; to accomplish this by just control of concentrated wealth, and overthrow of monopoly to ensure that income depends on work and not on privilege or change; that freedom is the heritage of man, and that by freedom we do not mean freedom from the laws of nature, but freedom to think and believe and express our thoughts and dream our dreams and to maintain our rights against secret police, witchhunters or any other sort of a modern fool or tyrant.”
--W. E. B. DuBois at the 1953 California Peace Crusade


Source: Heather Gray, Another Look at W. E. B. DuBois, Counterpunch, November 19, 2007<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;}</style>

Making Black Lives Matter: W. E. B. DuBois

1903: AtlantaDr. W. E. B. DuBois

Babies are named after him, organizations founded in his honor, grave risks run complying with his constant calls for action.

Brilliant, eloquent, and hungry for knowledge, by age twenty-seven he had completed a Ph.D. in Sociology at Harvard and all coursework for another in Economics at Humboldt University in Berlin, the leading economics department in the world. After that, he wrote the first work on American urban sociology, the first social scientific treatise on the slave trade, and a powerful collection of essays worthy of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
A trail of Yankee and European admirers regularly seeks him out, staying in hotels segregation forbids DuBois himself to enter. Such cruel ironies have etched a half-sneer on the good Doctor’s face, and the scorn only deepens when his requests for research funds are routinely dismissed or ignored.
Condescended to by his inferiors, DuBois responds with volleys of lucid indignation that may subside but never entirely disappear. Seeing the wrath that greets what they take to be their good intentions, Southern “gentlemen” shake their heads and conclude smugly that cities breed a deracialized “uppityness” in general and racial Frankensteins like DuBois in particular.
Teacher, scholar, activist, sociologist, historian, writer, and world traveler, DuBois uses his lyrical voice, analytical rigor, and passionate advocacy with the supreme dignity of an avatar entrusted with the guidance of his entire race.
Boundless ambition marked him early. While still a teenager he decided to “prove to the world that Negroes [are] just like other people.”


Sources: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois – Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, (Henry Holt and Co., 1998) pps. 3, 32, 98, 272, 350, 469, 500, 505; Playthell Benjamin and Stanley Crouch, C-SPAN Book TV, April 2, 2003 
1959: BeijingPortrait of a Harvard Ph.D.
Seeing a lynching victim’s blackened knuckles in a display case jolted him out of brilliant scholarly detachment and converted him to activism.

Decades of distinguished accomplishment later, universities shun him, well-to-do blacks disdain him, and intellectuals refuse to write about him. Only the Communists and the National Guardian risk publishing him, while his sole financial support comes from the pennies of the poor.
Heretical groups, their coffers empty and their leaders always on the brink of jail, compete to have him grace their gatherings with unpaid speeches, which he delivers with aplomb. Always he says exactly what needs saying in an eloquently prophetic voice worthy of Robeson. In private conversation he prefers listening to monopolizing the floor, but whenever he opens his mouth a hush falls over the room.
Prolific author, spellbinding orator, tireless organizer, proud socialist, champion of a hundred causes Dr. DuBois speaks from Beijing University on his 91st birthday: “I speak with no authority, no assumption of age nor rank; I hold no position, I have no wealth. One thing alone I own and that is my soul. Ownership of that I have even while in my own country for near a century I have been nothing but a ‘nigger.’ On this basis and this alone I dare speak.”


Sources: Cedric Belfrage and James Aaronson, Something To Guard: The Stormy Life of the National Guardian 1948-1967, (Columbia, 1978) pps. 137-40, 252; Mary Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Harvey J. Kaye, The American Radical, (Routledge, 1994) pps. 113-20


                       
1903: The Alabama Black Belt   The Tuskegee Machine The gatekeeper of rewards, the key to black advancement, Tuskegee Institute champions hard work and savings, the purchase of respect, and a gradual alleviation of racism’s miseries.
Perpetually under construction, the school is built by students whose lessons consist of laying cement, transporting hods on scaffolds, and planing wood in the carpentry shop. Commencement valedictories witness seniors quickly assembling demonstration houses while buildings bearing the names of Northern philanthropists rise up all over campus the whole year round.
Masters of cabinet-making, plastering, masonry, and steam-fitting, Tuskegee graduates never lack for jobs. According to the Tuskegee creed, practical education is worth temporary political subservience, for a man without a vocation is no man at all.
Liberal arts mean nothing to menials locked in caste subordination, and higher degrees merely glorify idleness. Music, literature, and foreign language can wait until blacks become rich, while the vote is a useless thing. Carpentry pays better, and invites no trouble.


Sources: David Levering Lewis, Kent, W. E. B. DuBois – Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, (Henry Holt and Co., 1998) pps. 233, 262, 309, 341, 353; Noel J. Kent, America In 1900, (M. E. Sharpe, 2000) p. 123
1903: The Urban North
The Talented Tenth
Collusion with oppression and meek acceptance of inferiority is turning black society on its head, warn these learned blacks, a self-surrender that awards starring roles to sharecroppers, skilled mechanics, and domestics, while black teachers, preachers, doctors, and undertakers are forced off the stage. In the past accomplished black people traveled and pondered, read more than just the Bible, and at least aspired to express themselves nobly, but today all march to segregated prosperity behind Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Machine. “In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached has been that manly self-respect is worth more than land and houses,” W. E. B. DuBois reminds his tormented race. Dignity comes before utility, he adds, and knowledge of values will forever trump obsession with prices.       Educated blacks insist that work and money can do their race no ultimate good until it has the vote, higher education, and the power to defeat discrimination. A refinement of character, not material success, is the true measure of humanity. Years ago, Dr. DuBois warned that education should not be confused with a Meal Ticket: “Never make the mistake of thinking that the object of being a man is to make a carpenter; the object of being a carpenter is to be a man.”


Sources: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois – Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, (Henry Holt and Co., 1998) pps. 108, 288; W. E. B. DuBois – The Fight For Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, (Henry Holt and Co., 2000) p. 2; Thomas R. Frazier, ed., Afro-American History – Primary Sources (Harcourt, 1971) pps. 119-28)


W. E. B. DuBois Calls For Economic Sanity

“What has gone wrong? It is clear the workers don’t understand the meaning of work. Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private property. We should measure the prosperity of the nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty; the prevalence of health; the efficiency of the public schools; and the number of people who can, do read worthwhile books. 

Toward all this we do strive, but instead of marching breast forward, we stagger and wander thinking that food is raised not to eat, but to sell at good profit; houses are not to shelter the masses, but to make real estate agents rich; and solemnly declaring that without private profit there can be no food or homes. All of this is ridiculous. It has been disproven centuries ago.

The greatest thinkers of every age have inveighed against concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and against poverty, and disease and ignorance in the masses of men.

We have tried every method of reform. A favorite effort has been force by war. But the loot stolen by murder went to the generals and not to the soldiers. We tried through religion to lead men to sacrifice and right treatment of their fellow men, but the priests too often stole the fruits of sacrifice and concealed the truth.

In the 17thcentury of our modern European era we sought leadership in science and dreamed that justice might rule through natural law, but we misinterpreted that law to mean that most men were slaves and white Europeans were the right masters of the world.

In the 18thcentury, we turned toward the ballot in the hands of the worker to force a just division of the fruits of labor among the toilers. But the capitalists, happening on black slavery and land monopoly and on private monopoly of capital, forced the modern worker into a new slavery which built a new civilization of the world with colored slaves at the bottom, with white serfs between, and the power still in the hands of the rich.

But one consideration halted this plan. The serfs and even the slaves had begun to learn to think. Some bits of education had stimulated them and some of the real scientists of the world began to use their knowledge for the masses and not solely for the ruling classes. It became more and more a matter of straight thinking.

What is work? It was what all must contribute to the common good. No man has a right to be idle. It is the bounden duty of each to contribute his best to the well being of all, of what men gain by the efforts of all have a right to share, not to the extent of all that they may want, but certainly to the extent of what they really need.

You must let the world know that this is your simple and unwavering program: the abolition of poverty, disease and ignorance the world over among women and men of all races, religions and color; to accomplish this by just control of concentrated wealth, and overthrow of monopoly to ensure that income depends on work and not on privilege or change; that freedom is the heritage of man, and that by freedom we do not mean freedom from the laws of nature, but freedom to think and believe and express our thoughts and dream our dreams and to maintain our rights against secret police, witchhunters or any other sort of a modern fool or tyrant.”
--W. E. B. DuBois at the 1953 California Peace Crusade


Source: Heather Gray, Another Look at W. E. B. DuBois, Counterpunch, November 19, 2007<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;}</style>

Substance Matters More Than Symbols

Substance Matters More Than Symbols  


The current wakeup call being experienced by more Americans about historic racism is leading to hopeful actions but if all that results is removal of symbolic remnants of a wretched past these may lead to very little substantial change of the present and future. The rush to remove statues, change street names, remove written distortions of history and denounce past individuals wont mean much if we don’t confront the debased political economic system that is the substance on which those symbols rest and which creates present reality that still only profits a small minority at increasingly dangerous cost to the great majority.
Building a monument to Martin Luther King or Malcolm X to replace those previously honoring slave owners among the original 1% might be wonderful but will only mean new places for birds to leave their droppings unless we make far more substantial changes in the system that makes good use of symbols, even profiting from their creation and service, while maintaining the social and environmental destruction of private profit capitalism.
Changing the name of Wall Street to Open Border Boulevard wont mean much if we maintain it as a citadel of billions for minority capital that comes from the backs, minds and pocketbooks of majority workers.
Renaming the Pentagon the Emma Goldman building won’t make a dime’s bit of difference if we continue using it as headquarters for spending more than 700 billion dollars a year on war and mass murder while raping language in calling that defense. 
Tearing down a statue of Columbus might make a minority among us feel good but the majority of us need to understand that his voyage was not financed by mythological royalty but by early capital in its desire for spreading commerce to new markets. Those 15th century economic powers were on their way to becoming global and have grown tremendously since then, now ruling the planet with massive power and control in the 21st century. They will not be contested by tumbling a monument or burning a flag or taking a knee before it in more polite protest.
We need to learn real history in order to change the present and future, not simply destroy or rename symbols like statues and buildings and streets. The system that must be confronted and radically changed for the good of all people is the one that profited from slavery in the past, and massive bloody violence before and since slavery which continues up to the minute with more threatened as idiot servants of wealth claim villainy all around us with distractions that make their lies inaudible and our dangerous reality all but invisible. We may be helped inspirationally by destroying some symbols and even creating new ones, but the major work must be done on the substance of reality and not its representations and cosmetically false history lessons.
Symbols can play a vital role in many of our lives, whether national, religious or even more personal, but no one can pay the rent or mortgage by giving the landlord a flag or the bank a Koran, Menorah or four-leaf clover, nor feed a family by leaving a statue of Jesus at the CVS, Costco or Trader Joe’s checkout line. Until we change the political economic foundation of the society from a private profit first focus which approaches moral fanaticism to a humane placing of the public good as primary before any private gain, updating the books at a library or the art at a museum will only benefit those able to attend libraries and museums now, but we need to make a difference in the housing and feeding and health care of a population so that all can attend and benefit from libraries and museums in the future.
The anti-democratic political economics of war and injustice that are the foundation of capitalism must be radically changed from its roots, and confronting its history is not only important but critical to really changing the future in substance and not simply in its symbols. At the present moment of more glaring breakdowns in the economy reflected in a health care system that makes primitive societies look at least morally superior, and with national leadership idiotically lashing out at Russia, China and a growing global population finding the USA the most dangerous power in the world, a desire to confront historical lies is important. But of far greater consequence is the creation of a material truth that is a complete, and not only in specific but all circumstances, break with the inhuman aspects of reality that are leading to serious crises not only in health and markets but in planetary survival itself.
And attacks on speech and the labeling of too many things as “hate crimes” are hardly a healthy reaction to past disgraceful language and especially brutal treatment of humanity. In fact, such actions are in perfect keeping with the worst aspects of a society and culture the anti-speech crowds are supposedly against. Treating some nose-picking intellectuals as brilliant creators of self-lobotomies and some market hustlers as revolutionaries for gaining lucrative incomes by indulging in establishment acceptable speech and teaching are not just symbolic but substantial efforts to smother the demand for real change under a blanket of reactionary practice using language of the present to strengthen systems of the past.
What’s most important for sincere advocates of change to understand is the fact that during the current capitalist pandemic-economic crisis, more than 45 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance and at the same time 29 Americans have become members of the billionaire brigade which now numbers nearly 700 people. That’s in a nation of nearly 350 million people. If that describes a democratic republic, then everyone having cancer describes a healthy public.
Those who find such incredible economic disparities tolerable will probably find the new markets for symbols to replace old ones lucrative forms of advancing their own class privileges. The rest of us need to join together in transforming every aspect of our political economy to one that works for peace, justice and humanity, and choose our symbols later, after we’ve seen to everyone’s right to food, clothing, shelter, and an environment assuring a healthy future for all and not just some. Chains, whether enclosing our bodies or our minds, need to be broken, in substance.
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Racial Pathology In The USA

 
1901: Atlanta  The “Machiavelli of the Black Belt”A former West Virginia slave and the founder of Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington has risen to become the most powerful black man in the United States. In his widely acclaimed autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” he says he did it by hard work and faith in God, the only antidotes to adversity.Conservative, wealthy, and pro-laissez faire, Washington puts social equality on the back burner in favor of economic uplift. Accommodation, compromise, and propitiation are the price of survival, he says, so blacks must apply themselves to blacksmithing, bricklaying, and carpentry. Then they can buy their citizenship rights. “The black man who spends ten thousand a year in freight charges can select his own seat in a railroad train.” Washington’s steady stream of bromides and “darky” tales lets him smoothly navigate his way through white society, dissolving tension in condescending chuckles. One of his cheerful maxims holds that lynching “really indicates progress,”since “there can be no progress without friction.” Another praises slavery for having converted pagans to Christianity, thus teaching blacks to work and speak English. Adrift in a stormy sea of white-sheeted fury, Washington engineers plodding advance by never showing his dislikes. But no matter how much he moderates his moderation and waters down his water, he still evokes white wrath. “I am just as opposed to Booker Washington as a voter,” rails Mississippi Governor Vardaman, “with all his Anglo-Saxon reinforcements, as I am to the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical little coon, Andy Dotson, who blacks my shoes every evening.”<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:50331651 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;}</style><br /><br />Sources:<br /><br />David Levering Lewis, <i>W. E. B. DuBois, Biography of a Race, 1868-1919</i>, (Henry Holt and Co., 1998) pps. 169, 215, 240, 256-7, 261-3, 274<br /><br />Noel J. Kent, <i>America In 1900</i>, (M. E. Sharpe, 2000) p. 123<br /><br /><br /><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 120%; margin-top: .2in; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: lines-together; page-break-after: avoid; text-align: center; text-autospace: none; vertical-align: middle;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT;">1901: Washington</span></i></b></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 120%; margin-bottom: .1in; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: lines-together; page-break-after: avoid; text-align: center; text-autospace: none; vertical-align: middle;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%;">Tasteless Dining</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 120%; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 23.75pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";">President Roosevelt invites Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House and a mortified South recoils in shocked outrage. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 120%; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 23.75pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";">The New Orleans </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Times-Democrat</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";"> complains that, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">“When Mr. Roosevelt sits down to dinner with a Negro, he declares that the Negro is the social equal of the white man.”</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";"> The </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Memphis</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Scimitar</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";"> angrily accuses the president of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">“the most damnable outrage ever.”</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";">The editor of the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Richmond</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Times</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";"> says he has implicitly endorsed Negro-White courtship and interracial marriage. An outraged Memphis editorialist swears that, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">“No Southern woman with proper self-respect would now accept an invitation to the White House.”</span></i>^{<span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";"></span>}<span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";"></span></div><style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:50331651 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;}</style> <br /><br />Sources:<br /><br />Henry F. Pringle, <i>Theodore Roosevelt - A Biography</i>, (Harcourt, 1931) pps. 174-6<br /><br />Clifton Daniel, ed. <i>Chronicle of America</i>, (DK Publishing, 1997) p. 535<br /><br /><br /><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 120%; margin-top: .2in; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: lines-together; page-break-after: avoid; text-align: center; text-autospace: none; vertical-align: middle;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT;">1901: Chicago</span></i></b></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 120%; margin-bottom: .1in; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: lines-together; page-break-after: avoid; text-align: center; text-autospace: none; vertical-align: middle;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%;">Clarence Darrow Laments The<br />Moral Deficiencies of the White Race</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 120%; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 23.75pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">“Probably I do not look at the race problem in as hopeful a way as many of our people do, for I am somewhat pessimistic about the white race. When I see how anxious the white race is to go to war over nothing and to shoot down men in cold blood for the benefit of trade, when I see the injustice everywhere present, the rich people uniting and crowding the poor into inferior positions, I fear the dreams we have indulged in of perfect equality and unlimited opportunity are a long way from realization. The colored race should learn this: if the white race insults you on account of your inferior position they also degrade themselves when they do it. Every time a superior person invades the rights and liberties and dignity of an inferior person he retards and debases his own manhood.”</span></i>^{<span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";"></span>}<span style="color: black; font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt";"></span></div><style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPSMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:50331651 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman"; mso-font-charset:77; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:auto; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;}</style> <br /><br />Source: Irving Stone, <i>Clarence Darrow For The Defense</i>, (Signet, 1941) pps. 197-8

Bigotry, Racism and Capitalist Class Privilege

Bigotry, Racism and Capitalist Class Privilege

" The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being." -- Emma Goldman

Class divisions are prime factors in all systems, governing where, how and if people live, work, eat, dress, school and survive. All members of a class share its privileges, not just some few, as in the case of what is called “white” privilege, as though it was experienced by all humans characterized in racist society as “white”. No matter the skin tone, sexual preference or ethnicity of the persons, class status governs whether they live in some degree of physical comfort, are educated, make investments and are able to plan for the future, or live in relative and often severe discomfort, in debt, in low cost housing, ghettos, jails or on the street, with their only future plan being able to survive another day, let alone another week.

Class privileges come before and count for more than sexual privileges, which are very real but are at least based on the organic nature of humanity, while race differences are a filthy lie under which we live in the promotion of capitalist class society, along with all other separations used to divide humans from our commonality.

The lawyer reduced to ambulance chasing still enjoys a more comfortable material standard of living than the driver of the ambulance, no matter the lawyer’s sex or skin tone or the driver’s religion or sexual preference. Those able to  graduate from college enjoy privilege by comparison to the majority who have no such luck and those with enough money or program access to get them into the “better” schools enjoy more privilege than those who go to ordinary colleges, but both groups enjoy a class status beyond that of the majority, of all shapes, sizes, beliefs and skin tones, who haven’t a prayer of attending college unless making deliveries, cleaning its toilets or building a wing on the chem lab or art studio. And a less formally educated class of majority  Americans owe what education they have to their teachers, all of whom are and were college graduates who enabled them to become, according to some political bigots, unsophisticated, ignorant, and even “deplorable” members of a working class.

Being born into an educated and materially comfortable family does not guarantee a person wont wind up a miserable and suffering human, but that suffering is much less likely to be physical and may at least have the assistance of therapists and legal drugs, rather than reduce them to seeing a parole or probation officer for therapy after consuming the only drugs they can get, illegally.

These aspects of material class reality should be understood by all but are still buried by consciousness controllers who sell us the prevailing mythology that sees all social ills as the result of individual problems or blamed on those most visible as members of lower economic classes, frequently and most malevolently but not exclusively called “people of color”, as though they were blue or purple, but in fact covering for a racist history that reduced some of us to even lower economic status by virtue of skin pigmentation.

The horrid story of chattel slavery, in which hundreds of thousands of Africans were transplanted to the western world in chains as the cheapest form of labor, serving as the back bone of capitalist profits for a long period of history, is still almost a secret to many Americans. But while that treatment was uniquely cruel it was a continuation of the inhumanity and abuse of first, the indigenous people who lived here centuries before European colonization, and later, immigrant labor from Europe and Asia which sometimes suffered miserable conditions even beyond some slaves who happened to be owned by benign masters. While the squalor and bigotry encountered by millions of immigrants may not have been as disgraceful as the suffering of slaves, the lesser evilism implicit in such comparisons serves as an example of what passes for our democracy, when voters are frequently reduced to selecting someone who sickens them less than the opposition candidate after an alleged political debate that often amounts to pimps arguing about which one represents true love.

 In a system dependent on individual consumption at the market as the be all end all of human relations that finds a majority of humans the world over relating to life in poverty and misery, class divisions are used by rulers to keep democracy from ever happening. The result can be as ridiculous as people with cancer  seeing people with polio as being privileged, with lesser evilism carried to a point very close to current conditions of working people so divided by ethnicity, sex and skin tones that they keep minorities in power by allowing themselves to be so humanly reduced.

Our ruling billionaire class, smaller in number and richer than any in history, hires and rents a professional class to maintain its rule while those professionals hire, rent, administer and educate the working class to maintain everyone’s status as members of separate classes but all somehow democratically equal. During slavery, the upper class House Negroes sometimes organized and led rebellions when they saw how their people suffered while the masters lived on what they slaved to produce.  But most went along to get along, often hoping to bring change about by slowly working to bring understanding to all concerned, or maybe just making life better for themselves, as most of us do. Their behavior was the same as any other group trying to survive as best it can under circumstances seemingly beyond its personal control. Welcome to 21st century capitalism, the time when the system has never been as unjust but has more people thinking and acting beyond imposed and taught differences but as united humans whose experience is far beyond past expressions of change, though with the same opponents, problems and with even more serious calamities for the future if humanity is not successful.

When there are social breakdowns, as are currently being experienced in possibly the most severe and communicated way in capitalist history, class differences become bolder and clearer than ever. The latest political economic crisis in America is due to a possibly overdone but still deadly virus compounded by another in a long series of killings of Black Americans by white police, highlighted as never before in the age of instant communication, as well as instant mis-communication. Long dominance by major media over citizen consciousness is often countered now by what is called social media –though it is still at times very anti-social – but the views of a dreadful and at its roots social crime is, as too often, treated as the act of a bigoted individual, or group of individuals who perform state services in maintenance of American class society.

The horrid scene of a victim  with a police officer’s knee on his neck causing his death even though he offered no resistance  has ignited outbursts of understandable pain and rage but also sometimes cynical manipulation mostly directed at the police as though they are individually acting out racist behavior in some social vacuum in which the formidable economic barriers between communities originate because of servants of the state, rather than the owners and operators of that state: the ruling class.

A relatively comfortable sector of the population has suddenly been confronted by a nearly shut down society under assault by a seemingly new virus and simultaneously seen the most vile aspects of racism for the first time, which the collapsing system has spread in its lust for private profit at public expense, but still clouded by mind management into placing blame for increasing horrors on evil individuals or “identity groups” deemed guilty of perpetuating injustice all by themselves.

Blaming police for the wretched social reality of communities segregated by economics and alleged racial difference is like blaming the military for the wars that destroy nations and kill hundreds of thousands of foreigners while most of us go to work, school, shop, watch TV, feed pets, eat taco-pizza-burgers or health food, buy guns and demonstrate against wars. The political economic realities that treat some humans as lesser commodities in a diseased culture that reduces everything to a market item to be bought and sold are rarely dealt with let alone confronted. The forces of the market exclusively under minority control can no longer be tolerated by any of us wishing or claiming to be working on behalf of humanity and not just a sector of it.

The present moment of a virus which may get worse with demonstrating crowds breathing on one another may end with more deaths and social division but as long as it pits people against the police it will be just what our rulers want. Sincere comments offered by politicians and celebrities are nice but in substance they amount to the usual speeches about hearts going out to the sufferers of whatever tragedy of the moment is being discussed. They are very much like the hordes of us who demonstrate against a war or another injustice, and then go home for diner while the war and the injustice continue after we vote for another candidate who supports the system of war and injustice.
Our rulers have made even more billions during this pandemic phase of a crumbling system which may yet fall on all our heads if we don’t stop lashing out simply at those employed by them and paid for by us and aim our rebelliousness at the top where it resides.

Capitalism will continue pouring billions into the accounts of the fraction of 1% at the top  while millions lose their jobs, hundreds of thousands lose their homes and  businesses, and well meaning if often misled manipulated “rebels” lash out at working class state servants or a handful of shaved headed bikers or other selected by their manipulators enemies, while the real problems ride around in chauffeured limousines, private jets and soon, even space ships. As we continue pouring wealth into the coffers of Wall Street, the Pentagon and Israel, reducing more Americans to crippling debt and poverty while killing more people in foreign countries, the current resident of subsidized presidential housing and some “white” cops are still seen by too many of us as the source of all our woes.


Someof us are reduced to thinking the poor, the homeless and those on the dole are great problems because we not only hear that from our mind managers but frequently see them on the street and under the freeways, while our rulers are never seen unless on major media and might as well be gods. Their upper class servants live in gated communities while they are in walled estates less accessible to common people than the royalty of feudal days were in their castles with moats and drawbridges to keep the common people out and under control. The police certainly serve in the same capacity in some communities but attacking them as the source of our problems would be like feudal rebels attacking the moat or drawbridge while remaining ignorant of the people and wealth they protected.

 We  share a material social reality no matter what our personal comfort level may be for the moment and it grows more dangerous to our future the longer we allow ourselves to be ruled by an unelected tiny minority running a system that works against all our interests. We do not need to simply end poverty and injustice in one or another community: we need to end poverty and injustice for all  by insisting on jobs, healthcare and housing for all people. We do not need to simply stop killing people in the Middle East or in American ghettos: we need to cut military budgets, work for global peace and disarmament, and stop killing people everywhere. That calls for a radically different system than the one under which we live, one that puts the public good before - way before - private profit, and that needed transformation can only come about when we of the majority class unite to bring it about.

 

email: fpscott@gmail.com

Frank Scott’s political commentary and satire is online at the blog legalienate: http//legalienate.blogspot.com

 

 

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