Capitalist globalization has produced three interrelated realities:
Global poverty as its greedy extractivist processes transferred surplus value from the global South to the North,
A network of class-conscious elites in both Northern and Southern countries who share an interest in maintaining the neoliberal status quo, and
An integrated, global military-intelligence apparatus to defend neoliberal capitalist relations under the control of the U.S. state.
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only stripped away the veneer of respectability and promise that neoliberal capitalist development was supposedly going to offer workers and countries. It has revealed, in stark terms, the repressive reality and potential of a dying capitalist order. From Detroit in the United States to Durban in South Africa, capitalism has shown it cannot protect and realize human rights. That is why the elites are using the pandemic to police people under the pretext of protecting public health.
In the United States, the Black professional/managerial/administrative mis-leadership class openly collaborates with neoliberal Democrats against the interests of the African/Black working class and poor, who desperately need healthcare as well as protection from predatory capitalists.
Colonialism had either underdeveloped or altogether wiped out healthcare systems in Africa. Then came the neocolonial International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs that required state disinvestment in healthcare as a prerequisite for loans.
The neocolonial elites in Africa, like the neocolonial U.S. Black elites, have conspired in mutual class solidarity with white settler-colonial and imperial power to control, exploit—and when need be—repress the African masses on behalf of colonial power.
PRESS AND MEDIA
Pan-African News Wire Editor Abayomi Azikiwe reminds us that while many corrupt African states are strengthening military ties with the United States and are engaged in repressing their people, Cuba is providing support to those African states to combat the virus and maintain national sovereignty.
Margaret Kimberley, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) Coordinating Committee member and senior editor at Black Agenda Report, argues the people’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic must take the form of a mass struggle against capitalism.
BAP member Erica Caines warns in Hood Communist that the state’s reaction to the pandemic “is not protecting us from the virus.”
BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka writes the May 1 strike action should be placed within the context of the struggle for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, a framework that emanates from the bottom-up, not out of the imagination of human-rights lawyers or the state.
Writer, human rights lawyer and member of BAP’s Africa Team, Mark P. Fancher, discusses the proud history of African militancy in Detroit and the current reality of the desperate fight against COVID-19. Four decades of neoliberal economic policies that caused environmental destruction, job displacement, gentrification and federal-government neglect have made Detroit’s African/Black population especially vulnerable to contracting and dying from COVID-19.
The Obama administration did not cry out when Detroit was forced into bankruptcy by a Republican governor because it was busy intensifying the attack on the people of Venezuela. Ajamu Baraka recently discussed why Venezuela must be defended as it copes with COVID-19 in the midst of a U.S-imposed economic blockade.
Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume conducted a wide-ranging interview with Margaret Kimberley on “The Persistence of White Supremacy” for Counterpunch.
Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford writes the white settler class has always inflicted “excessive mortality” on non-white populations.
“The coronavirus is a death sentence on Black people,” who make up two-thirds of Louisiana’s prisoners, said Belinda Parker Brown, head of Louisiana United International during the Black is Back Coalition’s webinar. Attorney Zena Crenshaw-Logal called for the “evacuation” of prisons in the state, which holds the distinction of incarcerating more of its citizens than any place in the world.
EVENTS
May 10, 1 p.m., EST: “The Struggle Against Mass Incarceration’s Impact on African Women,” a webinar organized by the African National Women’s Organization. Register today.
TAKE ACTION
Sign the U.S. Peace Council’s Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations, demanding all U.S. and U.N. sanctions against the targeted nations be lifted, and all U.S. military threats and actions against them cease immediately.
No Compromise, No Retreat!
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé
P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.
Photo credit: AFP - Getty