We are at a turning point
Across decades-old racial divides, our class — the working class — is beginning to unite
We are at a turning point. Something very serious, very significant, very beneficial for our class — the working class — is under way.
For a good many years, the Tribuno del Pueblo has argued that if the working class in the United States wants to survive it must unite across the racial divides that the oligarchy has carefully cultivated over the decades.
Now just such unity appears to be developing, and it is developing in places where joining hands across racial lines has been most difficult to achieve and where it is most threatening to the powers that be — in the South and the prisons.
In the Moral Monday demonstrations in the North Carolina state capital (see p. 6), thousands of Anglos have joined thousands of African-Americans under the banner of the black civil-rights organization, the NAACP.
For whites to march behind black leadership is historic in the South, where the oligarchy has for centuries bought the loyalty of whites with just enough privilege to keep them a step above blacks.
In the Dream Defenders’ long sit-in at the Florida governor’s office (see p. 8), the united struggle of black and Latino youth is equally historic.
In the California state prisons, the hunger strike of 30,000 inmates (see p. 12) — united by a peace agreement among warring black, Latino, and Anglo gangs — threatens the very foundation of the state’s prison system.
Courageous leaders for years have attempted to create this unity and failed. Why now?
Our class is uniting across old divides because conditions have changed — and changed fundamentally.
For many people, it is becoming clear that the economic system — capitalism — is collapsing, that it can no longer provide the things people need, and that there is no shortage of those things, just of the money to buy them.
And it is becoming clear that the oligarchy’s response is to come down on us hard, take what remains of our money, deprive us of our democratic rights, and leave us bleeding in the gutter.
In this critical moment, class unity is the new idea that germinates, takes root, and flourishes to feed an increasingly conscious need to rise up — as a class — and take charge of our future.
Let us all now grasp that new idea.
