DeRay Mckesson's Misguided Case for Hope
Devyn Springer and Zellie Imani
Black resistance has occurred at every stage in American history. Liberty,
the right to act according to one's own will, was denied to Black people,
and the conditions Black people suffered from the state during the periods
of slavery and its afterlife have developed radical tendencies within our
community. As C.L.R. James said, "What Negro, particularly below the
Mason-Dixon line, believes that the bourgeois state is a state above all
classes, serving the needs of all the people? They may not formulate their
belief in Marxist terms, but their experience drives them to reject this
shibboleth [principle] of bourgeois democracy." Ultimately, the Black
Experience is one which constitutes an ongoing struggle by Black people to
both ideologically and physically challenge and free themselves from
exploitation and domination. The goal of many social struggles is freedom,
but, for McKesson, the "goal of protest" is simply "progress." In his collection of essays, McKesson limits the radical capacity of
protest by merely defining it as an activity that "creates space that would
otherwise not exist, and forces conversations and topics into the public
sphere that have been long ignored." But protest, or more accurately direct
action, is more than that. Direct action can refer to various forms of
activities that people themselves decide upon and through which they
organize themselves against injustice and oppression. They are processes of
self-empowerment and self-liberation. Through direct actions individuals
collectively seek to end, or at the very least, reduce harm inflicted by
oppression and exploitation. For example, what W.E.B Du Bois described as a
"general strike against slavery" was not an attempt to create space for
further national debate on the humanity of enslaved Africans, but an
extraordinary attempt by enslaved Africans..
The Social Economy of Rojava
A Primer on the Co-op Model
Thomas Sullivan
To best examine how the co-operatives of Rojava may thrive, we would need
to look at past examples as a basis for future predictions. One of the most
cited examples of a successful cooperative is the Spanish Mondragon
Co-operative Corporation. The organization, which dates to 1956, was
founded from several co-operative organizations that joined together in
1991 to form the international corporation it is today. The co-ops showed
remarkable staying power, with most of the 100 original co-ops surviving to
form the united corporation. Employing upwards of 3% of the Basque region's
workforce over multiple industries, the co-operatives showed that
alternative corporate models could be successful when they were previously
untested on a large scale (Harding 1998, 61). However, the Mondragon example also points to a critical failing of co-ops.
Mondragon has shed many of its original ideals to remain competitive with
other international businesses as the globalized, capitalist economy has
developed. This includes creating non-co-op subsidiaries abroad and
decreasing the number of co-operative employees to 29.5% as of 2007 (Bretos
2017, 155). This example of the most well-known and well-studied
co-operative falling back into a more capitalistic model would suggest that
the co-op model is not sustainable in the long term. Mondragon's change did not occur in a vacuum of some static economy. The
co-operative began to require modification after the fall of the fascist
Franco government, the liberalization of Spain's economy, and the opening
of European free trade by way of the European Common Market and later the
European Union (Harding 1998, 62). We can see from this mix of
pro-capitalist institutional changes that external stress on co-operatives
would result in failures or the need for structural changes.
In Defense of Tenants
An Interview with Omaha Tenants United
Devon Bowers
We met our first tenant through Feed the People, an organization devoted to
food distribution some of us were members of at the time. Since he had
moved in to his apartment six months earlier, he did not have hot water
despite repeated maintenance requests, with the landlord saying it would
cost thousands of dollars and weeks of work. We met with the tenant, and
after we went over portions of the state tenant statute and discussed the
tenant's options, he made the decision to take a more direct approach to
resolving his dispute with the support of our organization. We drafted a
demand letter citing the various parts of the statute that the landlord was
infringing upon, and demanding that steps be taken to resolve the issues or
face escalation. The tenant then signed the letter, and we went together to
his landlord's office to deliver it. The landlord wasn't home, but after
hearing about the large group who delivered the letter, he contacted the
tenant, angrily demanding to know what was going on. The tenant sent him a
picture of the letter and explained our involvement. Less than 24 hours
later, a maintenance crew repaired what turned out to be only a broken
gasket, and the tenant had hot water. We built our approach on this experience. We try to establish contacts
among the working-class people in our neighborhoods, and learn from them
about the situation of tenants in the city, particularly tenants of
slumlords. Through this process we identify situations we can help resolve
through forming demands of landlords, and stepping in to back the tenant up
in a confrontation or meeting. It's important to our mission that we serve
to empower the tenant themselves rather than be seen as performing a
charitable service. Our first tenant, mentioned above, was shocked when we
proposed delivering the demand letter as a group with him. He had assumed
that we would deliver the letter ourselves, and was delighted to take for
himself the action of delivering his demands..
Colin Kaepernick, the Black Panthers, and Fred Hampton
Simon Wood
Whatever Kaepernick's and his followers' good intentions, they must be
aware that any movement that gains popularity and has potentially
revolutionary appeal will be either subverted and rendered harmless by the
state apparatus, or - if or when that fails - mercilessly crushed. That
second stage has not been reached here, and it will not, as all the signs
are there of a major media operation to re-direct and dilute the mass of
outrage away from the true target, namely class oppression and the system
that enables it - capitalism. By giving support and condemnation, the media
subverts the anger of the people and crafts the debate on its terms. Black
versus white, the people versus Trump, freedom of speech - whatever. What
it absolutely must not ever mention or encourage
understanding of is the reality that this injustice stems directly from
oppression by the ruling classes. Just keep the people arguing among
themselves. Divide and rule. This is a class issue, and to understand that requires class awareness, the
very concept identity politics was deployed to destroy. The one single
thing that petrifies the looting warmongers in control of the world's
'democratic' institutions is a mass awakening of class awareness, from
which follows the ability to discern between truth and fraud, fact and
misdirection, reality and illusion - in other words, the only means to
tackle the disease. If you listen carefully, as the right bang on and on
about respecting the flag and the left argue among themselves, demanding
some kind of vague 'justice' for the victims of police violence, on a quiet
night you can hear the ruling classes laughing over champagne in their
ivory towers. You may also hear the sound of Fred Hampton rolling fitfully
in his grave. Fred Hampton was the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther
Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP..
