Today, racism, as it always has been, is used by the ruling class in America to justify land theft, austerity and war; to distract people from attacks on their civil rights and living conditions, and, more importantly, to turn working people against each other so that they do not see the larger issue of capitalist inequality and exploitation and thus will not organize against it.
The divide and conquer strategy is an historical strategy of the ruling elite.
Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, described the process of "divide and conquer" in 1866 this way:
"The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendency over both the poor whites and the blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each."
Now, the slave masters have been replaced with the wage-slave masters; modern capitalism has replaced slave systems yet racial divisions and hatreds are still employed to keep people from seeing their common oppression: the capitalist system itself.
BP: You said that capitalism and racism go hand in hand. Could you elaborate?
Danny Weil: The elites in the United States have historically and systematically tried to repress organizations that have tried to combat racism, capitalism and political repression. The use of COINTELPRO against black organizations and leaders has a long sordid history of assassinations, surveillance and political repression. And it is just one example.
Paul Robeson's Civil Rights Congress, labeled as Communist in the 1950's and destroyed by the U.S. government six decades ago is yet another example.
"The CRC took up legal causes of those they considered unjustly accused. In addition to pursuing legal campaigns, often alongside the NAACP, the group sought to raise awareness outside the courtroom with demonstrations, propaganda, and high-profile events. As these campaigns gained popular awareness, the CRC received many letters from prisoners requesting legal assistance. The CRC opposed the 1940 Smith Act and 1950 McCarran Act, both of which expanded government powers to prosecute domestic dissent".
Sound hauntingly familiar?
If we know that racist ideas are produced by a capitalist social and economic system that needs oppression and subjugation to function, then we know that we need to fight this system if we are to challenge racism. Likewise, any genuine struggle against capitalism must be anti-racist and stand in solidarity with those subject to it.
BP: How shall the death of George Floyd be avenged? What is the way forward?
Danny Weil: The most rational and basic answer to this question is: reduce the police budget, stop the phony diversity training for police, fund social programs, get the police out of schools, demilitarize them, get rid of the Vice units, foster community-based violence and interruption programs, provide jobs and affordable housing, stop the war on drugs, stop mass incarceration, prisons for profits, etc. All of these demands calls into question the entire system of capitalism.
With the coronavirus pandemic, capitalist class contradictions and antagonisms are entering a new, frightening stage. The corporate and financial oligarchy, after looting the treasury of trillions and doing nothing to protect the population, has used the pandemic to transfer trillions of dollars to itself, in a move unanimously endorsed by the Democratic and Republican politicians.
The fight against police brutality and racism must be fused with the growing movement of the working class against unsafe working conditions, mass unemployment, social inequality, austerity and mass poverty, the fight for affordable housing, transportation, an end of looting by the financial sector, and on and on.
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