Divide and Conquer at the New York Times Today [View all]

[McCamy Taylor]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/sunday/women-voting-19th-amendment-white-supremacy.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

I encourage DUers to read and comment on this piece. Did you know that Black folks in this country suffer under oppression because their disenfranchised white sisters did not liberate them? Did you know that women suffer under oppression, because their disenfranchised Black brothers did not liberate them? This is the subtle message of this piece, which serves the purpose of Capital by pitting workers against each other---in this case women versus racial minorities, but it could have been written one hundred years ago about Italians versus Irish. Many, many years ago, Engels commented that the American capitalist keeps worker's wages low and prevents unionization by workers by pitting one groups of immigrants against another. We still do--this is the real motive of Trump's War on Immigrants. But as the number of immigrants coming to this country has slowed, we have increasingly pitted young versus old, gay versus not-gay, Black versus white, men versus women, disabled versus not-disabled.

Wake up and smell the Divide and Conquer, working class America. How do you think the 1% manage to keep the rest of us under their thumb in a so called democracy? They do it by encouraging us to fight among ourselves. And they tell us that any attempt to talk about "capital" and "wages" and "unions" is somehow un-American. Marxist economic theory is only un-American if you think that the real American are the billionaires who get rich stealing the labor of others.

And remember, Dr. King became a real threat to the establishment when he began to focus on worker's rights. He was in Memphis to support a union when he was murdered. And Brother Malcolm became a threat (and was murdered) when he came back from mecca convinced that whites were not the enemy and that we should all work together.

Solidarity!