Down the Rabbit Hole Again
CALIFORNIA (USA), December 6— A nine-member UC Berkeley task force is proposing a reparations plan “on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” according to task force member Prof. Jovan Scott Lewis. The task force is throwing around the idea of $200,000 or more for each Black California resident who can prove direct descent from a person enslaved in the US.
Don’t spend it yet. Lewis says the report will have “plenty of options” because it knows the State Legislature won’t ever come up with that money. Remember that formerly enslaved people never got the “40 acres and a mule” promised during Reconstruction.
Meanwhile, these promises are tremendously divisive. It’s not just that they are calculated to stir resentment among non-Black Californians. Black people whose ancestors were enslaved in the Caribbean or Latin America, or who migrated from Africa, won’t get a dime.
They, too, have suffered from the “housing discrimination, mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses, and health care” that the panel recognizes as legacies of racist capitalism.
Oops. The panel doesn’t mention capitalism.
Capitalists created the US system of racist slavery. US capitalism arose on the theft of Indigenous lands and the enslavement of African bodies. That’s how the original rulers accumulated the capital for trade and manufacture that enabled them to exploit their poorer cousins and other immigrants from around the globe.
The theft of land, bodies, and workers’ surplus labor accounts for 100% of the wealth of the United States. If we go down the rabbit-hole (dead-end) of reparations, how would it even be possible to calculate what’s owed to whom? It wouldn’t.
The only way forward is communist revolution to abolish private property and take collective control of the products of our labor and that of our ancestors.
Communism will abolish capitalist “exchange” and replace it with “sharing.” Production for use (not for sale) means that goods and services we produce and perform will not have price tags. There will be no money (or credit cards or bitcoins). There will be no wealth, and no poverty either.
To win and build a society that collectively meets everyone’s needs, we urgently need to overcome all the divisions that capitalism creates among us. That means sharp communist class struggle to defeat racism and its cousins: xenophobia, nationalism, Islamophobia, casteism, colorism, and more.
Yes, there’s a huge gap between the resources available to Black, Hispanic, and white households. Ruling-class policies created this racist “wealth gap”” intentionally. For example, the post-World War II “GI Bill” provided for no-down-payment home loans for white veterans but not for Black veterans. Freeway construction in California targeted Black neighborhoods for “urban renewal.”
The racial “wealth gap” is real. But to see the whole picture, we need to look at the intersection of race and class.
The Brookings Institute, a capitalist think-tank, reported that the net worth of a “typical” white family in 2016 ($171,000) was nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150). But the report doesn’t mention that the net worth of the top 0.1% of the population was 100 times greater than that “typical white family”! And the top 0.001% is almost 100 times greater than that.
Racist terror and lies have kept the working class divided and have allowed the capitalist class to maintain power.
No cash payment can compensate for the life of a loved one, or for slavery’s kidnappings and family separation. The pain and anger of slavery and racism demand revolutionary communist transformation, not a cash payout.
Black workers and youth in the US, and other industrial workers, soldiers, and sailors, are key to making this happen.
All Red Flag readers, especially Party members, must build and strengthen communist relationships that enable us to struggle successfully against all of capitalism’s diversions and divisions.
Read Our Pamphlet:
To End Racism: Mobilize the Masses for Communism
Front page of this issue
