Dear Socialist Viewpoint,
The reality is, neighborhoods like South Side Chicago and Hunters Point, San Francisco, are underserved, intentionally impoverished, and over policed, due to systemic racism and discrimination, and also face a much higher rate of prosecution and incarceration.
The history of this country was founded on the idea that all men are created equal but only included white land-owning males, and if you weren’t you were considered less than human. Ignoring that, and just looking at statistics and your experience as a white person in America isn’t giving you a full scope of what it feels like to be under the crosshairs of the entire American society your whole life because of the color of your skin.
I grew up on Third Street in San Francisco in the ’80-’90s and only learned the concept of white privilege a few years ago. I could go into white neighborhoods and fit in, not be targeted by cops or adults except from other white kids who teased the way I spoke or dressed once in a while. I could walk into stores with a Black friend and be the one stealing candy or toys because the clerk followed him around like he was the criminal. I just thought “that’s just the way it is” like the whole country did for over 400 years during the era of slavery, and the current state of affairs is a reflection of that.
White men have never known what it’s like to be the target of systemic racism and discrimination built in by design in this country with the intention of concentrating the wealth and resources into the hands of the capitalist class by way of exploitation and oppression. What we know now as police, was originally organized to round up escaped enslaved people. The silent and hidden culture, which includes ignoring the voices of Black peoples’ experience in Western society, that goes along with it is finally coming into the light of day due to technology and it needs to end!
White people especially, can’t ignore or dismiss that history and claim to be in solidarity with Black people just because we enjoy and benefit from Black culture—that’s even more reason to acknowledge and take personal responsibility every day to help create a bridge out of the violent past and present by listening to the voices of marginalized communities and making change, accordingly, working towards a peaceful future together in unity.
The bottom line is that the profit motive of production is the fundamental problem with the capitalist system. That margin, the profit margin, is the space that allows room for ills like racism, oppression, and exploitation, to become profitable by pitting people against each other and makes an asset out of what is actually destroying life on Earth. Capitalism promotes and perpetuates the destructive side of humanity, so that a tiny percentage of the world’s population can accumulate more wealth then could ever be spent.
The world has enough wealth and resources to be able to afford to restructure the economic and production systems to be in favor of life and the future of humanity, rather than profit. All we really need to know is what’s needed, where it needs to go and the logistics to make that happen. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.
The profit motive goes against the social nature of humanity. We came millions of years through the evolutionary process cooperating and living with the earth not off the earth because a cooperative effort always produces abundance.
The amount of destruction that has happened in the last 400 years is exponentially greater than all of the prior 40,000 years combined, for their precious profit which gets hoarded by people who have more money than could ever be spent.
Capitalism is not sustainable, everyone knows that. Socialism would more evenly distribute goods and resources while at the same time cutting out built-in obsolescence, cutting down on waste, and prolonging the future of life on this planet. The destruction caused by the capitalist system to humanity and the planet outweighs its benefits, so, by the nature of its very own laws, it’s become obsolete.
Capitalism takes exponentially more than it gives back. It’s time we take back what’s rightfully ours, the workers need to take back the means of current production. And if we don’t get it, shut it down. The work force of the world is what keeps society maintained and moving forward not capital, not profit, not corporations, and definitely not the boss. All they do is take as much as they can and give as little as possible to the workers. It’s the workers—the working class, who controls and operates the means of production.
Without the production for profit motive, we wouldn’t even need the police at all. We wouldn’t have armed police enforcing capitalist violence and systemic racism. The police could become construction workers and do something constructive instead—or doctors, you can never have too many doctors, or teachers or firefighters.
Capitalism holds the value of not only material wealth but the pursuit of material wealth over the value of life itself. So, the pursuit for more is worth more than life itself under this system, which is why there’s so many needless killings overwhelmingly rooted in economic inequality and of course, the enforcement of systematic racism. And that’s what the cops are here to enforce, and the truth is most of them are just working people that want to feed their family who bought the wolf ticket called the American dream.
I’m not saying it’s totally impossible for someone with nothing to make $1 million but the odds are less than one-in-a-million. We can do better. Being the leader of the world, the United States could lead the world in the direction of sustainability, equality, and justice through socialist revolution—taking economic power out of the hands of the capitalist class and putting it into the hands of the working class and general public. Working people of the world have what it takes, and it’s only a matter of time before the evidence is finally clear enough for the world to see.
—Johnny Gould, @tandino415, April 26, 2021
Dear Editors,
Regarding: Naomi Klein’s February 21, 2021 New York Times op-ed, “Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal”1
Naomi Klein has been a leftwing favorite. I have read her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, a book that lays out how the capitalist classes of many countries have used disasters to impose more privatizations and austerity over those people thrown off kilter and reduced to survival-by-the-minute in the wake of disaster. Sound theory.
Naomi Klein wrote a scathing article against the Republicans of Texas about how they fear the “Green New Deal.” There were only two slight barbs to the Democrats, one barb very telling. She did say that some Democrats have been willing partners in the Republican privatizations. The second barb is if the Democrats have courage, they can start implementing the Green New Deal.
It is so difficult to convince people that the Democratic Party is what you folks have known all your political lives—the graveyard of social movements. Bernie Sanders dashed the hopes of young people by luring them into the camps of Hillary and Biden. It never occurs to Klein that we can take the road to power where we don’t have to beg and plead rulers to do the right thing. That is the essence of Bolshevism—a party of workers and farmers who would rule in their own name and set policies as Bonnie Weinstein tirelessly writes, that benefit the majority and moves towards saving our planet.
Comradely,
Brian Schwartz, February 22, 2021
1 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/opinion/green-new-deal-texas-blackout.html?searchResultPosition=1