$100 Trillion- 15T dispersed as cash and the remaining $85T pushed into resources for free education and tutoring for all Black children, comprehensive healthcare, corrections/credits in banking and home lians, income tax abatements, free trade programs and job training in Black communities, etc., etc…WE CAN DO BOTH THINGS.
You are correct, imo, Brother Ball that , rather than just reparations for the Holocaust of Enslavement and its aftermath (Jim Crow, mass incarceration, etc.) we need, more than anything, a whole new world. For many of us on the left that ultimately means a world freed from the rule of capital. Besides, under the present, mostly selected-by-the-ruling-class black (mis)leadership – capitalistic to the bone! – more than likely MOST reparations will, not only deflect us from the revolutionary action necessary to free us. MOST of it will go to further consolidate that treacherous class of collaboraters and sellouts. Even a UBI-type monthly check might make us think that we, in solidarity with the rest of the U.S. proletariat, don’t need, in the final analysis, to seize the means of production AFTER seizing the state.
Nevertheless, at the same time, the struggle for reparations remains critically important, within a radical analysis, in the sense that it : 1) helps to keep the history alive and real 2) makes it impossible – based on the sheer economics of our oppression – to deny the CENTRAL role we’ve played in American history and the WORLD.
I also agree with you, and others, who recognize that, reparations must not be primarily about receiving a ‘check’. In a pamphlet Amiri Baraka wrote on the subject , he proposed that we demand things like:
free education, from kindergarden to PHD
free COMPREHENSIVE healthcare
free housing
Iows, real goods and resources and services that help the masses.
$100 Trillion- 15T dispersed as cash and the remaining $85T pushed into resources for free education and tutoring for all Black children, comprehensive healthcare, corrections/credits in banking and home lians, income tax abatements, free trade programs and job training in Black communities, etc., etc…WE CAN DO BOTH THINGS.
You are correct, imo, Brother Ball that , rather than just reparations for the Holocaust of Enslavement and its aftermath (Jim Crow, mass incarceration, etc.) we need, more than anything, a whole new world. For many of us on the left that ultimately means a world freed from the rule of capital. Besides, under the present, mostly selected-by-the-ruling-class black (mis)leadership – capitalistic to the bone! – more than likely MOST reparations will, not only deflect us from the revolutionary action necessary to free us. MOST of it will go to further consolidate that treacherous class of collaboraters and sellouts. Even a UBI-type monthly check might make us think that we, in solidarity with the rest of the U.S. proletariat, don’t need, in the final analysis, to seize the means of production AFTER seizing the state.
Nevertheless, at the same time, the struggle for reparations remains critically important, within a radical analysis, in the sense that it : 1) helps to keep the history alive and real 2) makes it impossible – based on the sheer economics of our oppression – to deny the CENTRAL role we’ve played in American history and the WORLD.
I also agree with you, and others, who recognize that, reparations must not be primarily about receiving a ‘check’. In a pamphlet Amiri Baraka wrote on the subject , he proposed that we demand things like:
free education, from kindergarden to PHD
free COMPREHENSIVE healthcare
free housing
Iows, real goods and resources and services that help the masses.