BURLINGTON, Iowa (AP) – Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke is not in favor of traditional reparations for African-Americans for the legacy of slavery but says it is important to confront the truth about how black people have been treated in the U.S.
At a house party in Muscatine, Iowa, on Thursday night, O’Rourke said the United States needs to recognize that systematic racism exists in the country.
Other Democratic presidential candidates, including Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, have also spoken of the need for the U.S. government to reckon with and make up for centuries of stolen labor and legal oppression. Some have talked about using tax credits and other subsidies as reparations.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC.
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
I was asked the same question after I posted a video to my You Tube channel defending Ilhan Omar and I explained that I would not oppose this. Affirmative action clearly hasn't solved the problems centuries of racist exclusion have inflicted on black communities but I would never oppose it especially as a white person as my motives could be suspect and rightly so. To the extent I oppose it, it is because it doesn't work. At very least, not opposing it is an act of solidarity as for many disenfranchised people some form of AA is all they have.
But there are a number of issues here. If there were to be some form of reparations where would the money come from?
If the source of such a payment was another section of the working class, public services, education or something similar, that would be harmful to the struggle against racism as it would be a robbing of Paula to pay Pauline, making one section of the working class pay in order to alleviate pressure another section is placing on those responsible for racism and in the case of slavery, when a human being is owned in total, non payment of wages for three centuries. It would serve to sow division and weaken the working class in the struggle against capitalism and therefore racism. It seems inconceivable that such a payment would come from the combined wealth of Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos who collectively could end world hunger. Why would they do that? It would serve no useful purpose?
The other point is that even if pushed to pay through taxes on the super rich or something like that, racism would not cease to exist. Racism is not natural to human beings, but class society will always contain such divisions as a ruling minority, outnumbered by those whose labor power is the source of their riches, has to find some way of overcoming the inherent desire of the exploited to overcome their oppression, retain more of the wealth they create and the powerful tendency to unity along class lines to achieve that.
No state or colonizing power has ever achieved their goals without consciously dividing its victims along racial, color, religious, tribal and at all times gender lines.
Perhaps the most important point is recognizing that in class society, capitalism, slavery, feudalism, any class society, the ruling class in that social system steals through coercion and violence, the labor power of the exploited and owns the products of that stolen labor power. In the colonization of what we call the Unites States of America, the people already occupying the land were violently removed from it through a genocidal war of occupation. In the capitalist system of production, the capitalists wealth has its source in the surplus value created through the labor process. The capitalist purchases the labor power of the worker and uses it under their direction. But the workers work over and above the time for which they receive remuneration (wages) for this labor power it has sold to the capitalist. The value produced in this time is referred to as surplus value, It is value for which the capitalist has paid no wages and is the source of their profits.
So if there is anything at all that working class folks need to get in to our heads, it is that the capitalist's profits come from the unpaid labor of the working class. As in slavery or feudalism but in a different way, this exploitative set up is kept in place through coercion and extreme violence.
The workers (often children) in the English cotton mills that processed cotton Black slaves picked in the US South had their labor power stolen. The same with the workers in the mines of Bolivia, the gold fields of South Africa, the Coal mines throughout the world and the factories of Bangladesh.
In the great migration north in to the factories of Detroit, Black workers, often forced in to the worst jobs, had their labor power stolen by the Fords and other auto magnates. The world's wealthy got their wealth through the violent repressive theft of labor power.
Under pressure, the bosses would pay reparations, they have the money and are not really threatened by being forced to pay it. By making this the dominant issue we are letting them off the hook. They'll pass the costs on one way or another and continue doing what they do. If we have the power to force them to pay the entire world's working class for the centuries of labor power stolen since the emergence of modern world capitalism------over 500 years, we have the power to take the means of producing that wealth, the technology, the factories, the dominant sectors of production and the wealth itself, out of their hands and produce humanity's needs in a rational, planned collective way based on social needs not profit.
What we do and how we approach the struggle against oppression and exploitation has to always keep this goal at the top of our list.
********************
Afscme Local 444, retired
I was asked the same question after I posted a video to my You Tube channel defending Ilhan Omar and I explained that I would not oppose this. Affirmative action clearly hasn't solved the problems centuries of racist exclusion have inflicted on black communities but I would never oppose it especially as a white person as my motives could be suspect and rightly so. To the extent I oppose it, it is because it doesn't work. At very least, not opposing it is an act of solidarity as for many disenfranchised people some form of AA is all they have.
But there are a number of issues here. If there were to be some form of reparations where would the money come from?
If the source of such a payment was another section of the working class, public services, education or something similar, that would be harmful to the struggle against racism as it would be a robbing of Paula to pay Pauline, making one section of the working class pay in order to alleviate pressure another section is placing on those responsible for racism and in the case of slavery, when a human being is owned in total, non payment of wages for three centuries. It would serve to sow division and weaken the working class in the struggle against capitalism and therefore racism. It seems inconceivable that such a payment would come from the combined wealth of Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos who collectively could end world hunger. Why would they do that? It would serve no useful purpose?
The other point is that even if pushed to pay through taxes on the super rich or something like that, racism would not cease to exist. Racism is not natural to human beings, but class society will always contain such divisions as a ruling minority, outnumbered by those whose labor power is the source of their riches, has to find some way of overcoming the inherent desire of the exploited to overcome their oppression, retain more of the wealth they create and the powerful tendency to unity along class lines to achieve that.
No state or colonizing power has ever achieved their goals without consciously dividing its victims along racial, color, religious, tribal and at all times gender lines.
Perhaps the most important point is recognizing that in class society, capitalism, slavery, feudalism, any class society, the ruling class in that social system steals through coercion and violence, the labor power of the exploited and owns the products of that stolen labor power. In the colonization of what we call the Unites States of America, the people already occupying the land were violently removed from it through a genocidal war of occupation. In the capitalist system of production, the capitalists wealth has its source in the surplus value created through the labor process. The capitalist purchases the labor power of the worker and uses it under their direction. But the workers work over and above the time for which they receive remuneration (wages) for this labor power it has sold to the capitalist. The value produced in this time is referred to as surplus value, It is value for which the capitalist has paid no wages and is the source of their profits.
So if there is anything at all that working class folks need to get in to our heads, it is that the capitalist's profits come from the unpaid labor of the working class. As in slavery or feudalism but in a different way, this exploitative set up is kept in place through coercion and extreme violence.
The workers (often children) in the English cotton mills that processed cotton Black slaves picked in the US South had their labor power stolen. The same with the workers in the mines of Bolivia, the gold fields of South Africa, the Coal mines throughout the world and the factories of Bangladesh.
In the great migration north in to the factories of Detroit, Black workers, often forced in to the worst jobs, had their labor power stolen by the Fords and other auto magnates. The world's wealthy got their wealth through the violent repressive theft of labor power.
Under pressure, the bosses would pay reparations, they have the money and are not really threatened by being forced to pay it. By making this the dominant issue we are letting them off the hook. They'll pass the costs on one way or another and continue doing what they do. If we have the power to force them to pay the entire world's working class for the centuries of labor power stolen since the emergence of modern world capitalism------over 500 years, we have the power to take the means of producing that wealth, the technology, the factories, the dominant sectors of production and the wealth itself, out of their hands and produce humanity's needs in a rational, planned collective way based on social needs not profit.
What we do and how we approach the struggle against oppression and exploitation has to always keep this goal at the top of our list.
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