Racism And Imperialism: Looted Land, Looted Lives
Looting? A black man, George Floyd, has the life crushed out of him by the knee of a cop and you want to talk about some broken windows and some stolen Nikes?
That’s what the capitalist media wants you to be talking about.
So let’s talk about looting—a word that entered the English language from Hindi. It means violent theft—like British imperialism did systematically in India.
In the US, unless you are an indigenous person on Tribal land, the ground beneath your feet is looted land.
At least ten million human beings were violently stolen from Africa and enslaved in the Americas, bought and sold like human property.
Their descendants today, and I’m being brief because this deserves a book if not a whole library, suffer crushingly disproportionate rates of poverty, unemployment, police murder and death due to COVID-19.
The museums are full of looted items.
And the looting of the US Treasury during this pandemic—corporations collected over $500 billion in stimulus money. Everyone else was left with a $1200 check, having to decide between paying for food or rent.
Every day that you go to work—if you’re lucky enough to have a job—your boss steals the product of your labor and pays you just enough to keep you coming back tomorrow. And if you try to take home what you produced; you’ll see who they point their guns at.
In Capital (Vol. I Ch. 31), Marx says it better than I can.
“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. Capital comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
You still want to talk about looting?
Not me. I want to talk about revolution. I want to talk about building a movement that can get rid of the capitalist system that is based on violence and theft. A movement that unites all of us in armed struggle against the tiny group of racist bloodsuckers and their thugs in blue and takes back the land and all that we have produced. A movement that will build a new communist society from the ground up, where we fight the racist, sexist ideas that the bosses have used to divide us, and work together for the good of all.
That’s why I’m a communist. That’s why I invite you to read Red Flag and join the International Communist Workers’ Party to organize that fight. That’s what I want to talk about.
—Veteran comrade
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