Take the following facts:
"BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors stated in 2017 that it would be partnering with the Fortune 500 New York ad agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT) to create "the biggest and most easily accessible black business database in the country".
"In 2016 the Ford Foundation, one of the most powerful private foundations in the world, announced that it was organizing to channel $100 million to the Black Lives Movement over the next six years.
By partnering with Borealis Philanthropy, Movement Strategy Center and Benedict Consulting to found the Black-Led Movement Fund, Ford has made six-year investments in the organizations and networks that compose the Movement for Black Lives," according to the Ford Foundation website. In a statement of support, Ford called for the group to grow and prosper.
Partnering with corporate America and their coin-operated politicians will not stem the systematic police murder of black people nor help build a solid, working class organization to stop racism.
The source of police violence is not racial antagonism; it is class oppression. The unifying characteristic among victims of police violence - be they black, white, Hispanic or Native American - is that they are poor, disenfranchised, dispossessed, exploited, and among the most vulnerable segments of capitalist society.
Operating like a non-profit organization, seeking corporate partners and grants from powerful corporate funded foundations will not build a movement to challenge corporate capitalism and imperialism - it will weaken it through misdirection.
The development of the struggle against racism must be the development of a struggle against capitalism and this requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans and for the abolition of capitalism in favor of socialism.
The good news is that people are beginning to understand this. The eruption of mass demonstrations of workers and youth of all races and colors, triggered by the brutal murder of George Floyd, has given expression to a tremendous social solidarity; a solidarity which belies the mere racial narrative and seats the struggle against racism within the context of capitalist exploitation.
People can see that it is not a question of black against white, but the working class, the disenfranchised class, the dispossessed class against the rich and powerful. This understanding represents a tremendous leap forward in consciousness that must be, and can only be, sustained and extended through mass organizing opposed to capitalism, racism and imperialism.
The corporate Democratic Party is incapable of waging this fight. Underlying their cowardice are their basic class interests. Whatever their tactical differences with Trump, the Democrats represent the same ruling class interests - the banks, Wall St., big tech, big pharma, the military, imperialism and capitalist exploitation. What they fear more than anything else is that opposition to Trump may assume revolutionary dimensions that threaten the interests of the capitalist financial-corporate oligarchy as a whole, and thus their own political interests and privileges.
Over the last 50 years, the conditions of black workers have deteriorated, social inequality has reached record levels and military police violence has intensified. All this while capitalist wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
BP: How would you analyze the connection between inequality and racism, especially in the current era in America?
Danny Weil: To answer this question we can start here:
Black Americans are dying of Covid-19 at three times the rate of their white counterparts. Why?
That black people are at the mercy of everything that is flawed and dysfunctional about America's health-care system, which has long been shaped by racism, is only keeping in line with the disproportionate suffering in at the hands of police, in work, housing, prisons, and community life.
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