Our enemy is monopoly capitalism, the capitalist and imperialist system that exploits the working class here in the United States and oppresses whole nations of people, here and around the world. The monopoly capitalist class, the imperialists, are well organized, and control both the legal and political institutions of the government as well as the military and police. It will take the masses of the people in their millions to overthrow them. We can’t do it alone. The working class must be organized, and it must organize together broadly with its allies. This “united front” against monopoly capitalism is the revolutionary strategy that will carry us forward toward being able to overthrow the imperialists.

When some forces talk about a united front, they mean something like a coalition of communist groups and organizations. That is not what we mean. We need to be organized much more broadly than that, bringing whole classes and strata together under leadership of the working class and its party. When we talk about a united front, we are talking about building just such a broad movement, with the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the oppressed nationalities at its core. The purpose of this is to establish and maintain a broad unity of action in opposition to the monopoly capitalist class.

The communist party – the Marxist-Leninist vanguard, organized, and advanced detachment and general staff of the working class that must eventually lead the united front – doesn't exist yet. It is through the mass organizing work in the people's struggles that we will build it, together with the united front itself.

We looked at the Marxist-Leninist conception of the “party of a new type” in a previous article. As we said, that party has a very high standard of unity, based on the working class and its ideology, Marxism-Leninism. It is organized according to democratic centralism and demands a great deal of long-term commitment and discipline from its cadre. Because of this, it will never be an organization that contains all of the forces necessary to bring down monopoly capitalism on its own. By standing at the center of the much larger united front, this broader unity and broader organization of the masses becomes possible.

If we understand the united front against monopoly capitalism as a united front of classes, led by the working class and directed against our common enemy, then an analysis of those classes to determine who our friends and enemies are is essential.

The best analysis of the current class structure of the United States is in the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) Program. That document looks at the various classes – the monopoly capitalists, the non-monopoly capitalists, the petty bourgeoisie, the working class, and the lumpen proletariat – and analyzes their class interests and trajectory. Based on that analysis, it concludes that the united front must unite everyone who can be united against the monopoly capitalists, including the petty bourgeoisie, whose existence as a class is precarious because of the monopoly capitalists, and the non-monopoly capitalists of the oppressed nationalities – the national bourgeoisie – who suffer national oppression under imperialism. The objective conditions of monopoly capitalism will push some elements within those classes in a revolutionary direction.

One particularity of U.S. imperialism is that it oppresses entire nations within its borders, such as the Chicano nation of Aztlan in the Southwest and the African American nation in the Black Belt South. Because of this, the Black and Chicano liberation movements within the U.S. have an anti-imperialist character. Practically, this means the struggle against racist national oppression must confront the monopoly capitalist class directly. The strategic alliance of the workers’ movement and the national liberation struggles forms the core of the united front for this reason.

Even so, as Mao Zedong said, within the united front, we must maintain our independence and initiative. The united front contains within it a unity and struggle of class forces. The forces we unite with have their own class interests and their own organizations. Some sections of the petty bourgeoisie and the Black and Chicano national bourgeoisie are still exploiting classes, even if not on the scale of the monopoly capitalists. As a class, they want to shake off the monopoly capitalists in order to stabilize and secure their own place in the capitalist system.

We can only lead the united front by persuasion and by example, and we must do our best to do so. To give up leadership would be disastrous. The working class, while seeking broad unity, cannot follow the lead of these other class forces or submit its own class interests to theirs. We can struggle for leadership in a way that prioritizes unity, without giving up our independence and initiative within the united front. Ultimately, only the class-conscious proletariat can lead the revolution towards the construction of socialism and the elimination of exploitation and oppression.

Let’s look more closely at what this looks like in practice. As we’ve discussed previously, the masses are the makers of history, and the correct method of leadership is “from the masses to the masses.” We need to unite broadly with the masses, using Marxism-Leninism to concentrate the felt needs and immediate demands of the masses and focus them towards the long term goal of revolution. We need to rely on the advanced activists in the mass movements to mobilize the broad intermediate, and to win over or isolate the backwards. This is the mass line, and it is how we must conduct our work in the united front. This is true in the current period when our work is legal and above ground, and it would likewise be true if conditions changed, and our work was outlawed and forced underground.

Practically, it plays out something like this: Different classes and strata within the masses come together based on their own class interests, and the advanced within them put forward demands, such as, for example, money for people's needs at home rather than for war abroad. Some mass organizations will be formed spontaneously, while others must be initiated based on the needs of the moment. In either case, the mass organizations formed around these fights will draw in activists from different classes affected by this issue. Our job as communists is to unite everyone who can be united and direct them towards confronting the monopoly capitalists that are the cause of the problem.

We will do everything we can to win all that can be won for the people while striking blows against the enemy. And in the course of that struggle we will make every effort to build consciousness and organization. By drawing in the broad intermediate we can build the mass organizations of the united front. Simultaneously, we can make gains towards building the communist party by winning the advanced to Marxism-Leninism.

The struggle for socialism in the United States will be a protracted struggle, and we must unite broadly with all of the allies we can find. Monopoly capitalism is a system that exploits and oppresses millions of people here and around the world. Therefore, it creates the conditions for us to build the broad unity we need to defeat it.

#UnitedStates #PeoplesStruggles #monopolyCapitalism #MLTheory #redTheory #unitedFront

So far in our series on theory, we’ve looked at the historical emergence of Marxism. But by the time Marx finished writing Capital, capitalism was still developing and changing. The fundamental characteristics of the capitalist mode of production haven’t changed. Commodity production and exploitation of workers’ surplus value by the capitalists remain the driving force of the capitalist system. And it remains a system plagued by regular cycles of crises of overproduction, pushing poor and working-class people further down while the rich get richer and richer. But by the beginning of the 20th century the internal motion of capitalism’s contradictions led to its advancement to a higher stage: monopoly capitalism, also known as imperialism.

As capitalism developed to this higher stage, Marxism needed to advance to come to grips with the demands that imperialism placed upon the international working class, theoretically and practically. By and large, the mainstream Marxists of the time had begun to treat Marxism as a dogma rather than a living science. They failed to understand this shift and proved inadequate to the demands that imperialism placed on the working class. The leader of the Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin, took up this task of understanding this new stage and on the basis of that understanding developed the strategy and tactics of proletarian revolution.

Huge strides were made in the Great October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, where the Bolsheviks established the first socialist state, the Soviet Union. Through the course of the October Revolution and socialist construction, the leaders of the Bolsheviks, especially Lenin and Stalin, further developed Leninism as the Marxism of the era imperialism and proletarian revolution.

Let’s break down the contributions of Leninism to Marxism here before we go into greater detail in forthcoming articles in our series.

First, Lenin clarified the terrain of struggle in developing his analysis of the current stage of capitalism, especially in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He said that imperialism had five basic characteristics:

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.

Based on this, Lenin understood that imperialism is capitalism in decay, that the imperialist powers could extract super-profits through the exportation of capital to the oppressed nations and the super-exploitation of the people there to hold off the system’s own inevitable demise. Lenin thus understood that capitalism developed unevenly. The monopoly capitalist states were able to grow very advanced at the expense of the rest of the world, which was held in a lower stage of development due to imperialist exploitation. Based on this analysis, Lenin recognized the tremendous revolutionary importance of the anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation in the oppressed nations, and gave central importance to the right of nations to self-determination as a cornerstone of proletarian internationalism.

Stalin, himself from one of the oppressed nations of the Russian empire, played a pivotal role in developing the Leninist understanding of the National Question. His essay Marxism and the National Question is the cornerstone to the Leninist understanding of the role of the oppressed nationalities and the demand for national self-determination.

This analysis of imperialism was epoch-defining. According to Stalin, the rise of imperialism brings forward three fundamental contradictions, or defining struggles of the current era: the contradiction between labor and capital, the contradiction between the imperialist countries amongst themselves, and between the imperialist countries and the oppressed nations. The socialist revolutions would create a fourth contradiction, between the socialist and the imperialist countries. Stalin explained in The Foundations of Leninism that because imperialism represents a new stage of capitalism the contributions of Lenin are universally applicable, and that Marxism-Leninism is the Marxism of the current era.

In organizing the revolution in Russia, this theory of uneven development also played an important role. Many Marxists once thought revolution would first happen in the most advanced capitalist countries. Lenin argued that the imperialist stage of capitalism meant that revolution should first develop in the “weak links” of the capitalist chain, and he believed that Russia was just such a weak link. History proved Lenin correct.

In his pamphlet, What is to be Done? Lenin also put forward the theory of the Party of the New Type, a Communist Party of professional revolutionaries in the vanguard of the working class – cadres organized according to the principles of democratic centralism, who would work shoulder to shoulder in the mass movements of working and oppressed people. In practice this meant fusing Marxism with the movements of workers and peasants in Russia through the class struggle, and building the Communist Party through that struggle.

Importantly, Lenin also developed the theory that the revolution in semi-feudal countries like Russia should develop in stages. The working class and their party could and should lead the revolutionary movement directly from the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the proletarian-socialist revolution.

First, the overthrow of semi-feudal society requires a broad people’s democracy, led by the working-class in alliance with the peasantry. In Russia, this stage lasted from 1903 to February, 1917, and had as its objective the overthrow of Tsarism and the remnants of medievalism. The book Foundations of Leninism sums up this stage well. Stalin points out that the main force at this first stage was the proletariat relying on the entire peasantry as the reserve force, and that the revolution was directed at isolating the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie who sought compromise with Tsarism. The firm alliance between the proletariat and peasantry was crucial to prevent the peasantry (as a basically petty-bourgeois, or small-time capitalist, class) from being won over to this idea of compromise.

Then, after the overthrow of the Tsar, the revolution entered its second stage. This stage spanned from March to October, 1917, with the objective of overthrowing imperialism and withdrawing from the imperialist war. The core of this stage was the alliance of the proletariat with the poor peasants, to defeat the bourgeoisie and prevent the peasantry and other petty-bourgeois strata from going over to the side of the imperialists. The establishment of socialism depended on the success of this second stage, and during both stages the leadership of the working class was essential. After this it became possible to establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, consolidate socialism in one country and use that country as a base area from which the international communist movement could battle against imperialism more broadly.

Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, along with the 1938 History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) – Short Course, by summing up the process of the revolution in Russia and breaking down clearly the stages of its advance, serves as a master-class for the application of Leninism’s universal lessons for revolutionaries all over the world. This theoretical understanding of revolutionary stages has proved tremendously important for revolutionaries in countries as diverse as Cuba, Vietnam and China.

Lenin further understood that the old, bourgeois state machinery couldn’t be used to build socialism. Socialism couldn’t be achieved by reforming the bourgeois state, but rather it must be smashed and replaced by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. As the African American poet Audre Lorde later put it, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” On this basis Lenin led the struggle against opportunists and revisionists in Russia and in the international communist movement as a whole and led the Soviet people in the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the establishment of working-class state power, in the largest country in the world.

Led by the only class with no material interest in the exploitation of others, the elimination of all exploitation becomes possible. On this basis, the Soviet Union gave the international working class a base for the first time in world history and was a beacon and an inspiration to people all over the world for more than 70 years. In his pamphlet The State and Revolution, Lenin argued that after the consolidation of socialism and the progressive elimination of the reasons for its existence, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would eventually wither away as it deliberately and methodically developed the forces of production, eliminated capitalist relations of production, and transitioned step-by-step to a classless, stateless society – Communism. Then the material conditions would be in place for Marx’s slogan of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” to be truly realized.

Up to this point our series has covered the historical emergence of Marxism and its development into its current stage, Marxism-Leninism. Next we will look more deeply at the philosophy at the center of Marxism-Leninism. In our next several articles we will look at the Marxist-Leninist theory of knowledge, which stands at the very core of the science of revolution.

See our full series on Marxist-Leninist theory here.

#UnitedStates #Imperialism #PeoplesStruggles #monopolyCapitalism #Socialism #Leninism #MLTheory

For the last two years the mainstream media has been painting a picture of the economic crisis in the euro-zone as one of governments spending too much on social welfare programs, leading to large budget deficits and debt. This reflects a right-wing, free market view that crises of overproduction under capitalism are because of ‘too much government intervention’ in the economy. The poster-child for this story has been Greece, whose large government budget deficit of about 15% of Greek GDP (total production of goods and services) and large government debt (which went as high as 160% of Greek GDP), triggered the crisis in 2010. In response, the big capitalists and their politicians called for more and more austerity in the form of tax increases, spending cuts and reduction in workers’ pensions and employment protection.

But Spain, whose economy is much larger than Greece’s, and which actually has a higher unemployment rate than Greece, is now the new center of the crisis. Spain has just had to take a 100 billion euro ($125 billion) bailout of its banks by the euro-zone. But Spain actually had government budget surpluses during the last economic expansion (2001-2007) so that its tax revenues were greater than government spending. In contrast, Germany, which is often portrayed as being ‘thrifty,’ also had government budget deficits (albeit about half the size of Greece’s). Spain also had one of the lowest levels of total government debt before the last recession and still had a government debt level lower than Germany, until it took out the bank bailout loan.

What Greece and Spain (along with Portugal and Ireland which have also had to impose austerity in exchange for more loans), had in common is that they all had large inflows of capital from Germany and other northern European countries. When the recession (or in a growing number of countries, depression) and financial crisis that began in the U.S. hit, these capital flows dried up. Thus the current euro-zone crisis is very similar to the 1997 Asian economic crisis, which also resulted from a boom and then bust in capital flows and led to a severe crisis of overproduction that spread to Russia and Latin America.

These booms and bust caused by international flows of capital are not accidents; rather they are a fact of life under modern monopoly capitalism. About 100 years ago, the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin pointed out that the concentration and centralization of capital led to a handful of huge corporations dominating industry after industry. Lenin called this monopoly capitalism to differentiate it from the more competitive capitalism of Marx’s time, where most capitalist firms were relatively small.

One of the features of monopoly capitalism pointed out by Lenin was that the export of capital, which is movement of money across borders, became more important than international trade, or the movement of goods and services between countries. Today capital flows, for both investment and speculative reasons, far exceed the value of trade. In 2010, world trade averaged about $75 billion per day. In contrast, the foreign exchange market, which trades money for trade, investment and speculation, averaged a whopping $4 trillion per day, or 50 times larger than the trade of goods and services.

While free market apologists for monopoly capitalism claim that these huge flows of speculative capital actually make capitalism more stable, the fact is that these flows can be the trigger for worldwide economic crises of overproduction. These huge international flows of capital go hand-in-hand with the growth of the financial sector, another characteristic of monopoly capitalism described by Lenin in his work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Some countries with capitalist economies, such as Malaysia during the 1997 economic crisis, turned away from free-market fantasies and introduced controls on capital flows. While free-market economists predicted disaster, these controls actually helped Malaysia’s economy to weather the storm.

But while controls on capital, like other Keynesian government policies such as government deficit spending, can help reduce the damage of an economic crisis, they do not prevent such crises. The more that such controls help limit the damage of crises, the more the capitalists want to reduce the government’s role in the economy to free big corporations and big banks to make the most profits. This is the policy of deregulation, imposed by politicians bought and paid for by the 1% for the last 30 years.

Only with a socialist economy can a country distance itself from the global monopoly capitalist financial whirlpool that is leading to one economic disaster to another. A socialist economy is one where the production is for people’s needs and not for profit and ownership is not concentrated in the hands of the wealthy 1% but instead collectively owned by the people.

#Europe #CapitalismAndEconomy #Ireland #capitalistCrisis #Greece #monopolyCapitalism #Spain #Portugal

Across the country, the movement sparked by Occupy Wall Street has caught fire. This movement, identified by the slogan, “We are the 99%” targets the 1% of rich and powerful who are running the country for their interests and profit, at the expense of the rest of us who face high unemployment, lower wages, soaring tuition costs, home foreclosures and lack of affordable health insurance. In addition, servants of Wall Street are pushing to dismantle Social Security and Medicare and to raise taxes on the poor while cutting taxes even more on the rich. They say that they have no money, but are sending bombers and troops to more and more countries, so that military spending is now the single largest expense of the federal government, costing more than $800 billion a year.

So who are the 1%? The movement has targeted Wall Street, and indeed, before the recession and financial crisis, the financial industry was making 40% of profits of big corporations. But while the pain inflicted by Wall Street on the housing market (while getting bailed out itself) is historic, corporations across the board have shifted jobs to other countries (cutting some 4 million jobs in the United States while creating 3 million in other countries) and amassed some $2 *trillion* dollars in profits that they are not spending.

While there are millions of small businesses that are owned and operated by a single person, these small businesses only do about 5% of all sales in the economy. On the other hand, corporations make up only 10% of all businesses but do more than three-quarters of all sales. An even smaller group of less than 1000 big corporations with sales of more than $2.5 billion each make up half of all sales in the economy. The domination of the economy by a small number of giant for-profit corporations is what is called *“monopoly capitalism.“*

The most common yardstick of one’s position in the economy is income. The U.S. Census Bureau, the government agency in charge of collecting statistics, does not report much on people with very high incomes. They do say that households making more than $250,000 in income make up 2.1% of all households, but this is a much broader group than the top 1%.The Internal Revenue Service did report that the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers had an Adjusted Gross Income of $380,000 in 2010. So one way to define the top 1% would be those making more than $400,000.

But there are problems with using income to define the top 1%. For example, many professional football players make more than $400,000 a year. But on average, they only play three and a half seasons, so their high incomes are temporary. In addition, studies show that the average pro football player only lives 52 years, some 25 years less than the average American male. So they are making a sacrifice that the real rich and powerful don’t make. In contrast, oil billionaire John Rockefeller lived to be 98 and billionaire investor Warren Buffett is still going strong at 81. Last, and perhaps most importantly, last year the football owners locked out the players in a dispute over pay and working conditions, showing the power of the wealthy individuals who own the teams over their highly paid employees.

A better measure of economic power is wealth. Wealth can be more long-lasting than income, and can be passed from parents to children, unlike income. Finally, wealth gives economic power and control, as opposed to income, which allows one to buy more, but doesn’t give one economic power. Those whose wealth controls the big corporations who dominate the economy are the *“monopoly capitalists.”*

According to the IRS estimates based on estate taxes, there were about 2.2 million people, or about 1% of the adult population, whose net worth was $1.5 million or more in 2004. Net worth is a measure of wealth that takes a person’s total assets (home, real estate, stock, bonds, businesses, retirement savings, etc.) and subtracts all debts (mortgages, credit card, etc.). This top 1% owned almost $3.3 *trillion* in stocks, or more than half of the $6 trillion in stock owned by households that year. This means that the top 1% controlled the big corporations that dominate the economy.

An earlier study by economist Edward Wolff, based on statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank’s “Survey of Consumer Finances,” showed that the top 1% owned 47% of the net financial wealth (stocks, bonds, and businesses but not cars and home equity) in 1998. Wolff found that the concentration of wealth was increasing during the 1980s and 1990s, hand in hand with the increasing concentration of income as the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

The rich not only control the corporations, but also the government. Over 40% of congress people, a majority of senators (54 out of 100), and three of the last four presidents were millionaires (and the only one who wasn’t, Bill Clinton, is a millionaire now), far more than the 4 to 5% of households with net worth of more than a million dollars estimated by Wolff. In addition, campaign contributions from the rich and corporate elite, combined with the influence of lobbyists who work for them, make sure that only those who serve the elite can be elected to high political office.

The electoral system as a whole is stacked against working people. Both major parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are parties of the rich. The Occupy Wall Street movement, by breaking away from the confines of our two-party political system and appealing directly to the people, offers real hope for a mass movement that can beat back the right-wing and corporate attacks on our jobs, homes, schools and social programs.

*Read [Part II: Who are the 99? The Working Class](http://www.fightbacknews.org/2011/11/29/who-are-99-part-ii-working-class)* *Read more [Fight Back! coverage of Occupy Wall street](http://www.fightbacknews.org/news/special-coverage/occupy-wall-street) and follow [@fightbacknews](https://twitter.com/#!/fightbacknews) for live updates from #OccupyWallStreet protests around the country.*

#UnitedStates #monopolyCapitalism #OccupyWallStreet #TheOnePercent #politicalEconomy #99

According to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup/Red Cross poll, 39% of New Orleans families are still split up. People recently interviewed by Fight Back! casually mentioned children and grandchildren living in five different states. Parents with children in school are staying in whatever town they landed in after Katrina, at least through the end of the school year. Then a decision has to be made about uprooting again. According the poll, 15% of New Orleans respondents still don’t know where some of their relatives are.

Over 600,000 people were moved from shelters to hotels by mid-October. As of Oct. 14 over 15,000 people were still in shelters. The U.S. government then closed the shelters, sending people mostly to hotels. FEMA trailers are being set up in Louisiana and around the Gulf. Families have priority for trailers, but the waiting list is already months long – shutting out many families and virtually all singles. Being forced to live in a hotel room is not a vacation. Every aspect of living becomes a logistical hurdle: eating, laundry and basic privacy.

Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs. People who have worked all their lives are stalled. Many of us have experienced the agony of weeks of job search, knowing the jobs aren’t really there. Add to that having to struggle daily for the basics of hygiene, food, housing and transportation and your chances are grimmer. Over 363,000 people filed for hurricane related unemployment – but many are discouraged about even doing that, since its just another snarl of red tape to be navigated.

The federal Opportunity Zones for ‘rebuilding’ the Gulf offer pathetic wages and overturn affirmative action hiring – ironic when one considers 75% of New Orleans residents are non-white. This opens the specter of white-owned companies hiring oppressed nationality people at less than prevailing wage (less than $7 per hour, in New Orleans) to demolish homes of poor Blacks and Latinos to replace those homes with mansions for the rich.

For homeowners, the struggle with insurance companies has begun. For those who are uninsured, ‘underinsured’ – a term that will come as a surprise to many – or who get swindled by greedy insurance companies, rebuilding will be difficult or impossible. Many are being forced, out of sheer financial desperation, to put their family property up for quick sale. Real estate speculators are already circling like vultures to cash in on people’s tragedy.

The most devastated part of New Orleans is the Ninth Ward, which was submerged under floodwaters from Bush’s broken levies. Many residents are trying to come back, after dealing with the continued nightmare of a FEMA and government failure. But it seems like the government is determined to shut out Ninth Ward residents. Bush’s Housing and Urban and Development secretary, Alphonso Jackson, was quoted in the the Houston Chronicle, Sept. 29, “New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.” The Chronicle said that HUD Secretary Jackson wasn’t sure if the Ninth Ward should be rebuilt at all. 20,000 people are from the Ninth Ward, almost all of them Black and low-income.

On Sept. 27, Bush gave a fancy speech and moved on. The speech and smirking ‘apology’ were designed to lull us into thinking things were OK, but the Katrina evacuees outside the Reliant Center/Astrodome said, “Too little, too late.” The lives of thousands of displaced New Orleans residents were destroyed because of Bush’s deliberate decision to not fund basic maintenance on the levies, followed by his callous disregard for human life.

Over half of homes in New Orleans (which is 67% Black) were rented. Low wages, even for skilled workers, combined with national oppression have made renting a fact of life. A poll conducted in early October said 60% of folks plan to return to New Orleans. It stands to reason many are people who rented. On Oct. 25, many renters were officially evicted. It is essential that repatriation efforts include not just the construction of affordable rental housing and more subsidized housing – but homes to all former renters who want them. Bush’s call relies on private charities – and we know from bitter experience that charities pick, choose and discriminate. Poor people and Black people in New Orleans deserve reparations from the U.S. – a government that killed hundreds of New Orleans people. Housing should be given to all former residents who want it, no questions asked.

These disasters spawned by Katrina and Bush will continue every day. When the government keeps your life turned upside down, it is a hurdle to demanding the justice you deserve. That is why it is crucial for everyone all over the country to keep up the struggle for justice for Katrina survivors – read between the lines of what the mainstream media puts out and think about the people’s lives behind the government sound bites. It is up to us to keep the truth front and center.

The events following Hurricane Katrina show some basic truths about this country: The government and the economic system – monopoly capitalism – serves the very rich and no one else. African Americans face a system of racism and national oppression that robs Black people of equality, land, democratic rights and political power. The shadow of the plantations still hangs over the Gulf region. Black people in the South need political power, liberation and the right to self-determination. A system that lets people die on freeway overpasses has forfeited its right to exist.

#UnitedStates #PoorPeoplesMovements #Analysis #AsianNationalities #AfricanAmerican #ChicanoLatino #HurricaneKatrina #FEMA #OpportunityZones #monopolyCapitalism