Capitalism built on racism
Reparations now!
Growing movement demands compensation for centuries of
slavery
WORKERS WORLD PARTY STATEMENT
Right now the Pentagon war machine, already grinding the
Afghani population under its treads, is swinging its gun
barrels toward the people of Iraq--who have endured a decade of
impoverishment, illness and more than a million deaths as a
result of U.S.-led economic sanctions. The brass in the
Washington war rooms have also locked into their crosshairs the
liberation struggle in Colombia.
Child malnutrition is soaring to emergency levels in
Palestine as the Israeli settler state uses F-16 attack planes,
tanks and missiles--all stamped "Made in the USA"--to wreak
death and destruction on the Palestinians in their own
land.
The United States has its eye on the prize in the Middle
East: oil profits. But this imperialist goliath owes the
peoples of the region a massive debt.
Bush and company boast that the United States is the richest
country on the planet as they wage their imperial "endless" war
to re-colonize whole parts of the globe. But it is class
warfare, carried out against the workers and oppressed peoples
on this continent and around the world, that has amassed that
great fortune and concentrated it in the manicured hands of a
tiny portion of the population.
Reparations are long, long overdue.
Workers World Party lauds the work of African American
activists in this country who have used the capitalists' own
court system to lay bare the depth and breadth of corporation
profits--then and now--garnered from the trans-Atlantic slave
trade and from the economic system of slavery itself.
And Workers World salutes those who rally in Washington,
D.C., on Aug. 17 to demand long-deferred reparations for the
slave labor of generations of Black people in this country. Our
members, of all nationalities, will swell the ranks on the
National Mall.
This demonstration proves that the demand for reparations is
growing louder and stronger. It takes place in the political
capital of Capital, surrounded by the marble colonial mansions
of power--including the White House and U.S. Capitol which were
built with the sweat and toil of unpaid, enslaved Black
laborers.
The landed aristocracy of the South got rich off the labor
and blood of African peoples. And so did the merchant
capitalists, bankers, traders and others who made obscene
profits off the holocaust of the Middle Passage.
Reparations for slavery--yes! Though it is only a small
measure of recognition of the crimes of slavery, justice
delayed is justice denied.
The same wealthy capitalist scions owe reparations to Native
nations for the robbery of land and enslavement of their
peoples. The piecemeal theft of whole chunks of Mexico is still
a huge unpaid debt. So is the virtual enslavement of Chinese
railroad laborers and other immigrants who were worked for
pennies from dawn to dusk until they dropped or died from
exhaustion and hunger.
Once U.S. capital grew too expansive to be held within its
own borders, it became an insatiable imperialist behemoth that
ravaged the land, labor and resources of peoples around the
world.
Today, the movers and shakers from Wall Street to teak-lined
corporate boardrooms are outraged by another move for
reparations: that by the government of Robert Mugabe in
Zimbabwe to expropriate and redistribute the vast tracts of
land concentrated in the hands of wealthy white farmers.
But the centuries of colonial and imperialist pillage are
still draining the lifeblood from the economies of African
countries. U.S. capitalist globalization represents armed
robbery on a worldwide scale.
Yankee imperialism owes the peoples of Latin America, Asia
and Africa reparations.
The ledgers of U.S. banks are filled with columns of
"national debt" that the barons of finance capital claim
oppressed countries owe them. But U.S. big business has kept
these countries technologically under-developed, manipulated
their agriculture for export, held down prices for their goods
on the world market, and stolen their land, labor and
resources.
For almost half a century the Cuban people have been
economically strangled by the illegal U.S. blockade of their
island.
Cancel the debt of the downtrodden, of course. But then let
the imperialist reparations begin.
Here in the belly of the beast, forced labor in the
prison-industrial-complex --disproportionately people of
color--puts the fortune back into the Fortune 500. As the adage
says, "What is the crime of robbing a bank compared to the
crime of owning one?"
Arresting the crimes of capitalism
All the wealth funneled to the ruling classes--from the
slavocracy to the robber barons of capitalism--represents more
than money. It is capital. Capital is a social relationship
between exploiter and exploited.
The profits wrung from kidnapped and enslaved African
peoples, for example, created an economic accumulation of
capital that provided the foundation for today's ruthless
exploitation of workers and oppressed peoples across this
country and around the world by U.S. capitalist industry and
finance.
Under capitalism, workers are not paid the full value of the
fruits of their labor. The unpaid portion--the surplus
value--is stolen from pay envelopes and appears instead as
profits in the accounting books of corporations and banks.
Of course, any white worker in this country, told by his or
her boss that he or she would not receive a paycheck at all,
would ask co-workers, union, family and friends to close ranks
to help get justice.
Now the struggle for a modicum of payment to Black workers
in this country--as recognition of a crime against the humanity
of the peoples kidnapped from Africa to toil as unpaid slave
laborers--is a fight that every working person in the United
States has a stake in.
The unity shown by white workers in pressing this demand
will help strengthen and revitalize the labor movement at a
time when Wall Street wants the working class to shoulder the
deepening capitalist economic crisis. Solidarity in the battle
against racism is key.
A victory in the battle for reparations from the bosses will
contribute to awakening the consciousness of millions of
working people in this country about the underlying crime of
capitalism. Every worker can understand that unpaid labor is
theft--whether slave or wage-slave labor.
And it will help spur on the movement to overturn capitalism
and replace it with planned production to meet human needs and
wants.
That's what socialism is.
Socialism means overturning the private ownership of
industries, banks and commerce that were built with collective
labor.
Socialism means wresting the wealth produced by the class
that works shoulder to shoulder out of the hands of the 1
percent who claim to own it all. Socialism returns that
wealth--that vast pool of unpaid labor--to society for free
education and health care, child care, affordable housing and
to raise the standard of living of all.
Socialism is the ultimate reparation.
Reprinted from the Aug. 22, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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