Early this morning I received news that I would be published in the Red Vine: Issue #12. Specifically for a past piece I wrote on how Martin Luther King Jr's radical turn on economic issues had pretty much made him a dead man (I recommend you read it in the Red Vine seeing as I've made some improvements from the version that exists on this blog. Your first digital download is completely free!). For those of you who don't know the Red Vine is the official publication of the Red Party, which "is a U.S. political organization that fights for working class unity in a single socialist party-movement."
I've been knowing for a couple weeks that I was going to be published in a socialist/Marxist/communist publication, and have for almost the entirety of that time, been deciding on how to let the world know the extent of my radicalness (I think I made that word up). Some of my heroes were/are actually socialists;, Martin Luther King wrote to his wife and to other close colleagues that he considered himself to be a Democratic Socialist (as do I - more on that later), the Black Panther Party founded by brothers Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale (GOMAB) was a self-proclaimed socialist organization, and one of my idols Dr. Cornell West was once the Honorary Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. There never was a point where a light bulb went off and I realized at that moment I was a socialist. For those of you who are familiar with my work, I pride myself on criticizing systems of power especially those which plunder, rape, and exploit on the bases of race and national identity. It became strikingly clear, at least to myself, that there is no conceivable way that the economic system that was built and still thrives on the outright oppression and pillage of black people and communities can ever truly deliver us sovereignty over the basic decisions that govern our everyday lives. In a more concrete sense; in my opinion there is no way that the same system of American capitalism that was built and depends on the degradation and pillage of black (among other) people and communities can ever be the same system that delivers us to the (hopefully) inevitable mountaintop. To be clear, I am a Democratic Socialist. NO I'M NOT ADVOCATING FOR REVOLUTION, A PLANNED ECONOMY, OR AUTHORITARIAN SOVIET-STYLE COMMUNISM. However, Like Dr. King and West, I believe that if we are to value the long term democratic goals of freedom, equality, and solidarity, then we must eventually reject the system of capitalism through the use of the democratic political system. Again, this is not to say that the economy must be planned. Free-trade and socialism can occur together, and they do in countries such as (not limited to) Norway, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, France, Australia, Canada.... The difference between socialist free-trade and capitalist free-trade is that in a capitalist free-trade economy firms are operated by and for a single private interest with the goal of maximizing profit, while in a socialist free-trade economy firms are operated by and for the interest othe community at large in an attempt to reach the aforementioned democratic goals of freedom, equality, and solidarity. Goals which of course will not be attainable without a "radical redistribution of economic and social resources," (Martin Luther King Jr.) The point is, Martin Luther King, Cornell West, Huey P Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and Cornell West dedicated their lives to telling the truth about the injustices American Capitalism brought not only to African-Americans, but people of color all around the world. They spoke what was then Jim Crow, police brutality, the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and abject poverty. It was that courage which allows me to speak about today's American neo-colonialism, mass incarceration, STILL EXISTING police brutality, institutional racism, and STILL EXISTING abject poverty. There's something solemn in finally confessing how radical you truly are, something liberating in relinquishing the fear of the status quo. I hope that there's another one of us out there who reads this article and finds the inspiration to let the world know how they truly feel: "I'm crazy and I know it" -515
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