The current ongoing capitalist crisis has created the most serious
crisis of legitimacy since the collapse of the capitalist economy during
the years referred to as the Great Depression. The economic collapse
comes on the heels of a deep crisis of the economy that occurred in
2007, 2008. With economic instability and the increasing competition
between capitalist states, divisions have emerged among the nations that
those of us in the Black Alliance for Peace refer to as the US/EU/NATO
axis of domination.
The US has responded by moving toward a more confrontational posture,
not only with its allies in Europe, but it has also elevated China and
Russia as national security risks. Domestically, the black working class
has never recovered from the collapse of 2007, 2008. The continual
restructuring of the US economy to a low wage economy has resulted in
the black working class being relegated to the lower rungs of the labor
force, joining undocumented migrants, immigrants and other colonized
workers.
We are now seeing, within the economy, the genocidal implications of
economic conditions in which young black workers have more value as
human generators of profit locked up in prisons than as participants in
the economy as low wage workers.
This reality is one of the factors driving the obscene phenomenon of
black and brown incarceration in the largest prison system on the
planet. Astronomical youth employment. Millions of African-Americans and
white people without health care. Poisoned environments and crumbling
schools make for conditions that, with Covid-19, are ravaging the black
communities. This is the reality of the colonial, capitalist system in
its neoliberal stage. The Corona pandemic has pulled the ideological
curtain away from the system and has exposed the brutal realities of a
rapacious system of greed, human exploitation and degradation, social
insecurity, corruption, and the normalization of coercive state
violence.
-- Ajamu Baraka, "Ajamju Baraka on Race, Class and Protest in the United States" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).