Concessions Or!

 

        The "Black lives Matter" movement is not unique to this era, it has been part and parcel by black Afro-Americans for generations, under different names, as they struggled for justice and equality. This time round it is probably the largest of those movements, as it has spread across borders, not just of states, but of countries. Despite the apparent resistance from the establishment, like in the past, there will be concessions granted to take the insurrectionist element out of the movement. On the streets to lots of people white power matters, but to the established corporate body that rules America and else where, what really matters is that power remains with that corporate body and the present economic system survives. Black white halfway in between, makes little difference to the massive corporations, what matters is power, control and the survival of their sacred system of economic exploitation of all humanity.
       The past "Black lives Matter" movements have brought about changes, black Mayors, black officers in the military, and even black millionaires, but the real power still lies with the corporate oligarchs and the economic system that they live by, who see groups of people as a source for exploitation and will gladly play up one against the other.
        This time round, will the "Black lives Matter" settle for more steps towards equality with their exploited whites, or, and it looks more encouraging, will it, linked to all shades of human colour, evolve into a real movement for change by bringing down the corporate monster that lives by this economic system of exploitation.

       The following is an extract from an interesting article from It's Going Down:

       A third reason that Black Awakening is important, and the one I’m most concerned with here, is that it includes an invaluable discussion of ruling-class responses in the face of mass upheaval. In the broadest terms, Allen argued that

“In the United States today a program of domestic neocolonialism is rapidly advancing. It was designed to counter the potentially revolutionary thrust of the recent black rebellions in major cities across the country. This program was formulated by America’s corporate elite—the major owners, managers, and directors of the giant corporations, banks, and foundations which increasingly dominate the economy and society as a whole—because they believe that the urban revolts pose a serious threat to economic and political stability. Led by such organizations as the Ford Foundation, the Urban Coalition, and National Alliance of Businessmen, the corporatists are attempting with considerable success to co-opt the black power movement” (17).

Allen saw this program as emerging in the context of “several interlocked responses” to the rebellions from different sectors of the white power structure:

On the one hand there was the orthodox liberal who prescribed more New Deal welfarism as an antidote to the riots… [Another was] the shrill voices emanating from the embattled metropolises–voices demanding more policemen, more troops, more weapons, heavier armor, and tougher laws…. But between these two camps, there has arisen a third force: the corporate capitalist, the American businessman. He is interested in maintaining law and order, but he knows that there is little or nothing to gain and a great deal to lose in committing genocide against the blacks. His deeper interest is in reorganizing the ghetto ‘infrastructure,’ in creating a ghetto buffer class clearly committed to the dominant American institutions and values on the one hand, and on the other, in rejuvenating the black working class and integrating it into the American economy. Both are necessary if the city is to be salvaged and capitalism preserved” (194).

One of the architects of the neocolonialism program, who receives special attention in Allen’s study, was McGeorge Bundy. Child of an elite Boston family, Bundy spent five years as national security advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, then left in 1966 to become president of the Ford Foundation. With this job change, Bundy shifted from a leading role in designing U.S. political-military operations in Vietnam to a leading role in designing establishment responses to the Black Liberation Movement.

Bundy quickly set a new tone as Ford Foundation president. In August 1966 he told the National Urban League’s annual banquet, “We believe that full equality for all American Negroes is now the most urgent domestic concern of this country. We believe that the Ford Foundation must play its full part in this field because it is dedicated by its charter to human welfare.” With Bundy as its head, the foundation broadened its grant-giving from relatively tame civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League to the more militant Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Allen explains that CORE appealed to the Ford Foundation because it talked about revolution but offered an “ambiguous and reformist definition of black power as simply black control of black communities,” fortified by increases in government and private aid. “From the Foundation’s point of view, old-style moderate leaders no longer exercised any real control [in the ghettos], while genuine black radicals were too dangerous” (146-47). In Cleveland, Ford financed a CORE-led voter registration and voter education campaign, which in November 1967 helped Carl Stokes win election as the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city.

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk