March 25, 2017
I work with Cooperation Jackson, based in Jackson,
Mississippi, which comes out of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and
the New Afrikan People’s Organization. I bring up
both the local and national groups to give you a sense of the broad movement
I’m coming from, and also the more specific work going on in Jackson. That’s
important because I believe we have to be rooted somewhere firmly on the ground
in order to have a base on which to stand, and from which to organize.
After Trump was elected, it took two or three weeks for many
people to get out of the fog. There are some losses that we’re going to take in
this next period under Donald Trump. We have to get ourselves mentally prepared
for that, and do the organizing that is necessary to withstand the assault
against what little democracy has ever existed in this country, as they try to
take us back to the sixteenth century.
Don’t be confused about what the Republicans are really trying to
do. Part of it is about profit. But they also want to make sure that those who
were supposed to stay in their respective places get back in those places. And
that’s virtually everybody, once you really think about it. Being white is not
necessarily going to protect you.
If you can engage in actions, engage. If you can’t, that’s OK,
there will be other times. The question really is, at some point we can’t just
mobilize, we’ve got to start organizing. After the first 100 days, people need
to sit down and come up with a plan or we are all wasting our time and we are
going to be summarily defeated.
We have to develop a serious program and that starts with
dialogue—amongst us. On a national level, we have to develop what I call a
framework of ungovernability. Fundamentally, that means not giving any
legitimacy to Trump, and more importantly, to the neo-confederates, who I would
argue are actually far more dangerous than Trump himself.
We’ve got to get ourselves profoundly more organized than we are
now. And we are not an organized force. Let’s not kid ourselves. With the
unions, with our political parties, we’re not even as organized as we were
twenty or thirty years ago. And by organized, I do not mean creating a great
Internet platform.
We need to be so organized that you can call me, give me two days,
and I can move fifty people, and put them in action on the ground in my
community. That’s the level of organizing that I’m talking about. We’ve done it
before. And we can do it again. It’s not magic; it’s just a bunch of hard work.
I hear people say, “I can’t believe what’s happening.” But what’s
happening now has been happening to indigenous people and black people all
along. The older I get, the more appreciation for my people’s history and
culture I have, and what my ancestors did to survive this bullshit. I am seeing
that more and more as a vital piece we can’t overlook.
I’m glad people have woken up. But understand that it can get
worse, and we have to get prepared for that. We don’t yet have a serious
conversation between what is left of organized labor and what is emerging as
the cooperative movement in this country. We aren’t in deep enough conversation
with each other about how as workers we’re going to shape our own future.
A big part of Cooperation Jackson is based on black reality.
Ain’t nobody creating no jobs for us. Those days are long since past. In
Jackson, Mississippi, I think the real unemployment rate is easily over 50
percent. I can knock on almost any door in a black, working-class community,
any day of the week, and there’s an able-bodied adult, typically, who will
answer the door. Any time of day. That gives you a real sense of what I mean by
a deep level of unemployment.
That is a challenge, but it’s also a
great organizing opportunity.
You have some time and energy. Can we
use that to do something collective in our community? Can we bring your skills,
time, energy, resources, and talents together with other folks under similar
circumstances and transform our reality?
It takes a lot of convincing of
people. But we are starting to see some results, getting people to just start
doing small things.
Let’s pull together some time and
energy to fix the cars and bikes in the neighborhood, to deal with our city’s
transportation crisis. Jackson has a few public buses. But we don’t have much
of a public transportation system. If you don’t have a car, you can’t get a job
or go to the grocery store, and there are a lot of people in that situation.
But that’s an opportunity also for us
from an organizing perspective, because it helps us to put people in
relationship. I have a car, I have some time. You know how to fix cars, you
have some time. Let’s work together and we can create a mutually beneficial
system.
How do we create our own kind of
cooperative cab company? We are looking into that on a deeper level—how that
would fulfill not just a transportation need but a social need in our
community.
Rather than see the limitations, we
are seeing there’s more space from the decay of late capitalism to actually do
some things to push back and start seizing the means of production. That is a
big part of our project in Jackson. We call it organizing for “community
production.”
The city is in profound debt. We are
faced with the threat of losing control of our water system. Our public
education system is going to be seized this summer by the state—primarily
through the orchestration of state-mandated testing that has changed the
goalposts every year to produce the outcome the Republicans wanted.
Our governor is very close to Trump.
The Tea Party basically runs our state. Our governor is a member of the Tea
Party. There’s a Tea Party supermajority in the legislature in both houses, and
also within the state court system. So we’ve been living under the kind of
one-party rule that the whole country is now experiencing for six years. We’ve
learned a few lessons that perhaps we can impart.
Our governor says President Trump has
promised he can do some things for Mississippi that the Army Corps of Engineers
has spent twenty-five years saying are impossible. He’s been bragging and
boasting since the Inauguration that they’re going to create a whole new water
system for Rankin County, which is a predominantly white, working-class county
and one of the bases of white reaction in Mississippi.
It’s right next door to Jackson. The
county only has 140,000
people. But they’re going to build a whole new water system for them. They
don’t even have the density to pay for the system that will be created.
It’s pure politics: Jackson receives
much of its annual revenue from the sale of water to the greater metro area. So
if you take water away from us, basically you destroy the ability of the
municipality to function.
The state is also planning to annex a
critical part of the downtown area, where 60 percent of the jobs in the city of
Jackson are located in this new district that they’re creating. They will turn
that over to the state. And then they want to flood a good portion of downtown
Jackson to create a lake, and a casino district.
The long-term objective is to break
the political back of Jackson, which is 80 percent black.
State Republicans and the Greater Jackson Chamber of Commerce believe they can
take Jackson back politically if they’re able to reduce its current black
population to between 60 and 65 percent.
If they are able to reduce the city’s
black population to that degree, they will have the power to both split and
dilute the black vote. So this is all part of a long-term, coordinated plan and
strategy. It gives you an example of what organization looks like. We need to
get to that level of coordination, strategy, and organization. Their side can
do it, and our side can do it.
The Democratic Party is not going to
save us. We’ve got to organize something different. It may use some remnants of
that old structure, but we’ve got to organize something new to reach the vast
majority of those who are oppressed, exploited, and excluded in this society.
It’s going to take a lot of hard
work. But we have to remember that all of the Tea Party folks and Trump only
represent a minority from this point forward. That is all they can ever
represent. That doesn’t mean they can’t rule effectively as a minority. Look at
South Africa to understand how a minority can effectively rule an overwhelming
majority.
But if we organize in a different
way, there’s a profound new majority which is largely black and brown that we
can tap into. That majority is more than willing to be politically engaged, but
it doesn’t see electoral politics as the only viable way, or even the most
expedient way, to address their real life circumstances.
And so we must think outside the box,
those of us on the left, instead of just trying to channel most of our energy
into electoral fights.
What are the other things we have to
build? How can we actually build power in our communities and organize people
to exercise that power? People’s assemblies are one way, cooperatives are another.
But that’s not all.
I would argue that we should give as
much time to the building as we give to the fighting. And we must give equal
time to actually sitting down in our communities, having meetings with our
neighbors, whether they agree or disagree with us. And constructing a real
political and viable program going forward. If we don’t, Trump is going to be
the least of our concerns.
This is a hell of a time. I think we
should embrace the fluidity of the time, and not be afraid of it. If, like me,
you consider yourself a socialist, it would have been hard to believe a few
years ago that we could publicly identify ourselves as socialists in so many
places. But that space is now open, and it’s one we need to seize. We can’t let
this moment pass or fade. Because there are millions of people out there
looking for alternatives.
This is a very fluid moment. It may
look bleak. But in the end, the other side has a few economic things, levers
they can pull which shouldn’t be underestimated. But we know they must resort
to force to keep this thing together. And that’s a losing strategy. So let’s
seize the time and opportunity. Don’t be weary. Get to work.
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