More than half a century ago, Malcolm understood the duopoly electoral system as “foxes” (Democrats) and “wolves” (Republicans), and that “both will eat you.” And indeed, the Democratic foxes have since Malcolm’s time devoured the vast bulk of the community’s civic organizations, turning Black churches, sororities and fraternities, and so-called “civil rights” groups into partisan annexes of the corporate duopoly. The Democratic Party, a mechanism of mass manipulation and social control, dominates every aspect of political life in Black America, blunting and negating the radical impulses of the nation’s most lean-leaning, socialist-friendly polity. Thus, Black Lives Matter activists say they oppose racial capitalism but collaborate with, and base their strategies on, intimate interactions with Black operatives of the corporate political machinery: the thoroughly Democratic “Black Misleadership Class.”
Not that the movement has altered the political behavior of most Black elected officials in any substantive way. Although Black Lives Matter is a world model in confronting the police – the perennial flashpoint of Black interaction with the corporate state -- Black Democratic elected officials at the national level continue to vote in lockstep with corporate Democratic leadership on militarization of local police (2014) and elevation of cops to the status of “protected class” -- assault on which can now be prosecuted as a federal hate crime (2018).
The avowedly socialist, anti-imperialist, and Black self-determinationist elements within the Black Lives Matter umbrella are the best hope to lead a genuinely transformative movement in the United States – primarily because most Black Americans are peace-minded, socialism-friendly, and supportive of Black autonomy. But this can only happen if these organizations “put politics in command” and confront the enemy within: the Democratic Party, which is hegemonic in Black America.
-- Glen Ford, "Nightmare Years Will Repeat Themselves – Until the People Kick Out the Cabal" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).
