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>Assuming these people are going to remain in the clutches of FEMA, you
better make that a carton of cigarettes and a half gallon of Old Grand Dad. Carl < Reply
FEMA has the infrastructure to lock down roughly 2 - 3 million Americans. This does not include the roughly two million already on lock down. New Orleans been on lock down since the Louisiana Purchase and its value as a port entry was not lost on the old Slave Oligarchy. I personally remember the series of Police Riots throughout the 1980s in New Orleans, but forget the guys name who was coordinating much of the resistance. Police murder, violence and corruption in and around New Orleans is lengendary.
South of the Mason Dixon line America has a powerful fascistic current as history, beneath the guilt and congeniality of the Southern way of life. Here you have a stratum of folks that would hate to disturb your sleep on the night of your execution.
"I hate waking you up this late at night, but you know you have an appointment to keep at 12:01 am."
The FEMA authority could hardly be more unpleasant than Angola Penitentiary or Parchment in Mississippi, which was also hit hard. Consider that there are millions of Americans at the bottom of the social ladder, to whom FEMA rule and prison constitutes upward mobility. Then you are still going to have to house and feed millions in jail and further expand the role of government and the "unproductive infrastructure" as the revolution in technology pushes value lower and lower.
The political issue from my standpoint as a communist is the art of winning the working class to the cause of communism and communism's cause is being redefined on the basis of the striving of the most poverty stricken sector of the working class, rather than this "big fat concept" of "labor," or "labor movement" or even "working class.
The American peoples have a profound instinct and sense that the press is outright lying across the board about the victims of the hurricane, . . . the looting . . . which perhaps the majority of Americans support under these specific conditions, and the Bush administration is through as having any moral legitimacy as effectiveness. There is of course a broad cross section of America that supports fascist measures but it is not as large as it was under the Reagan administration.
"Law and Order . . . but."
There is a profound anger in America at calling these hurricane victims "refugees" and believe me this is one of the really radical ideological breaks - breaches, I have witnessed with official bourgeois ideology in a long time.
This "black and white" thing - race matters, ( "What happens to a race deferred?") is understood very different in our society. To begin with Louisiana have never been just "black and white," in the bourgeois meaning of race. Louisiana and specifically New Orleans was one of the most unique cities on earth that defies ideological categories.
The color factor in our history is exactly that . . . a factor. My wife looks Arab in Detroit and Mexican in Texas, and Arabs in Detroit look Mexican in Texas and her granddad looks "Indian" as does her grandmother, who is in fact Indian. She's a Louisiana girl with that yellow hue all about herself, and a body shape that excludes her from the "big booty" tribes of Africa.
The issue is not one of race or whites and blacks standing together, but the actual circumstances of the most poverty stricken sector of the working class and such was my response to article "What happens to a race deferred?" The people hardest hit by the hurricane need to be viewed as a poverty stricken sector of the working class - a communist sector, in need of socially necessary living circumstances, but because many are black they are not. If they were all white matter would be immediately understandable for the various ideologists of race.
The title "What happens to a race deferred?" is a play on the title of a poem, "A Dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes. This poem was written during another period of American history, when the African American people had not completed their entire evolution as a people or begun their dispersal, as a people, and lived under more than less agricultural conditions in areas housing all classes. The North was somewhat different but maintained Jim Crow since 1790.
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Maybe it just sags Or does it explode? There is no possibility of a return to Jim Crow. Jim Crow, which originated, grew up and took shape in the North, is a legal and extralegal, system of segregation that held all classes of blacks . . . who would evolve into the African American people, together in a segregated community. Jim Crow did not originate or flow from the social relations of Southern plantation slavery. This is not possible today, nor is this the strategy of the bourgeoisie to recreate a society of Jim Crow.
The Bush administration strategy is to attack the communist sector of the world proletariat with overwhelming military force and all he is accomplishing is the slow consolidation of this sector of the class into a militant strike force against bourgeois property.
The Bush administration is hit and has run into the wall of a hurricane of people. How this breach with the ideology of our ruling class accelerates, I have not a clue. The form of the resistance has to be on the basis of the equality because the workers are not equal amongst themselves and the color factor is part of our heritage. To what degree this remains the cutting edge I cannot say.
We are in uncharted water.
FEMA
An uprising in America capable of creating a political breach, allowing for the overthrowing of the legal structure of the bourgeois property relations - not the government as such, will involve between 60 - 70 million people in motion. This kind of social movement cannot be contained.
Where some see black people I see what is clearly the most poverty stricken sector of the working class - in motion, demanding socially necessary living circumstances, even if they have no money to pay for them.
Nothing in America is just black and white, but increasing brown. Louisiana and New Orleans, unlike the Delta of Mississippi, which was hit pretty hard, defies categories. They Jumbo - with all kinds of interesting and scary things in the pot.
That a Marxist and socialist would write about race and race relations in the 21st century is mind boggling. Who does not know that races amongst humanity do not exists? The color factor is an inescapable part of our history and who we are and are becoming.
Baby need new shoes and folks are "busted" - without money or entry into the market as selllers of their labor power. The government needs to get off its fat capitalist ass and to hell with trying to make a dollar from people with no money.
Waistline.
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