In Memory of Trayvon Martin, Rakia Boyd, Ramarley Graham, Darius Simmons

They take out the garbage, make up their beds, vacuum the living room, wash dishes, and baby sit siblings or neighbor’s children, but they are not workers, and yet, they, too, are targets of the U.S. Empire’s militarism.

Ever since these children were handed over to the “care” of institutions in exchange for “freedom” and “equality,” they have been treated as commodities on the market. Ritalin, separate classrooms, infractions real and unreal normalizes these children. Career-minded teachers, indifferent school administrators, sociologists, and psychologists, in declarative sentences, point to difference and irreconcilable traits. Toxicity and contamination and more separation!

From within the endless mothers of slaughtered children, the idea for a mass strike will come

Straight Fs or straight As, most no longer ask questions, no longer seem curious. They come to see, in this culture, violence as child’s play. Punch classmates in the face. Anger dwarfs into indifference. The desire to read and to write, stomp on the ants, yank the flowers, and some, embolden by an atmosphere equating ends at 4th grade, and is replaced with the desire to make more money than Bill Gates.

Between vacations to the Grand Canyon and other wondrous our land, your land sites, with their children in blissful wonder, the creators of urban blight, speak disingenuously on the mystery of Black and Brown children in our glorious and fair-minded country. And they are paid well for their expertise on the matter. Some of the best minds work on the problem, day and night!

More Ritalin, more separate classrooms, infractions, studies, mandates, tests, and tests scores while more metal detectors are erected and police called in to make classroom arrests, followed by truancy notifications and finally expulsions.

Preparation in the form of education of the masses is necessary

These are children of working parents, Black and Brown, under-waged parents, mothers, diabetic-to-be or diabetic, high blood pressure and heart patients, their narratives long ago tainted with the indignity of exaggerations and outright lies. Historically the “mothers” of white children and the cleaners of white homes now characterized as “bad” mothers and lazy workers, who continue to send their children to these institutions even when the outcome has proven to be disastrously detrimental to the well being of their children. These mothers show up to work behind cash registers at Wal-Mart, walk behind cleaning carts, sit behind computers, dreaming of sons and daughters lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, president of the United States - the American Dream, one paycheck at a time, one big-item purchase at a time, one pair of sneakers, designer jeans, gotta’-have-it smart phone, and a house and a front yard is coming one day soon, and the hearts of white Americans will change for the better, then.

Everything will work itself out if they work and work hard at non-union jobs where they work hard and receive less, dream big and pray, of course, pray fervently as the narrative of the experts, also hard at work, day and night, get-tough-on-crime and win votes at the polls for declaring war on the “unredeemable,” the worthless.

Black or Brown children are no more workers than their mothers who, in our cities, our fields, our finest, homes and estates, hotels and hospitals, malls, work in invisibility among the liberals, socialists, and activists, real workers alike, and when these children and their mothers are referred to at all, they are still commodities - tragic “minority” victims captured in radical narratives as victims, attending yet another funeral for yet another child murdered by a self-appointed vigilante or trigger-smart cop. These narratives, too, establish a market for their authors who, in turn, are paid well too, for their sympathetic observations.

These mothers stand beside, indeed, in front of their children, trying to negotiate a space for their children to live, while they work, and the bullets come spinning, shattering the lives of these children, who lie in graves too soon, while the mothers go on working and working.

In the policeman-like materialist world, we can expect speak of “disorder,” when, in fact, the masses are effecting “a thoroughgoing internal reversal of social class relations”

If ever there is a group around which the Left should rally, it should be these workers and the most endangered children in the U.S. But the Left has its own agenda. It has “celebrity” liberals who, at speaking engagements throughout the country, grace the airwaves and print media with woeful narratives about Palestinian and Iraq and Afghani children. Blessed, sweet, innocent children in Latin America, in China, all rightly in need of American voices to speak on their behalf to the Empire, but who, in turn, have not one word to say about the stop and frisk and deportation policies of selected officials and law enforcement enacted upon Black and Brown children. These “great” liberals, in fear of seeming to empathize with B-L-A-C-K people, have not one word to say about the senseless murdering of B-L-A-C-K children in their own neighborhoods and cities. These “great” liberals, forever in receipt of awards and accolades for their commendable work on behalf of children (who look oh, so almost like their children and grandchildren back home), have not one word to say about the incarceration of Black and Brown youth. These “great” do-gooders refuse to make the connection between the made-in-America bullets of self-appointed vigilantes, fellow whites, fathers, brothers, and sons, and police officers cutting down Black and Brown children here and those drones and bombs dropping on children elsewhere.

No law suit will do it! Acquitting white men with guns, with or without badges, who murder innocent Black or Brown children is not even a “bad” American narrative but a blasphemous outrage in which the collective population of liberals and conservatives alike will point to an image of Blacks murdering whites as endemic - if not outright fictive. No matter! It is believed!

“Sensitivity” training for teachers, administrators, and law enforcement make liberals comfortable and content and serves the Empire with a reason to establish more Charter schools and profit as usual from the commodities they produce, day and night. And violence is what this Empire produces, day and night! Increasing the minimum wage of these mothers-workers while substantially funding the building of more private prisons and producing advanced technology in weapons that maim or kill, stealthy and smartly, will not alter this narrative of death one iota. More Sundays at church or Fridays at the Mosque at prayer will not change the hearts of believers in the American Dream - the most indomitable myth ever advanced to enslave and to slaughter with impunity!

There is a danger of “practical politicians” co-opting the struggle of the workers

It has been and continues to be politically and economically feasible for this nation to sacrifice Black lives. It did so to appease the anger of white Southerners and to advance a white middle class on burning flesh and now to save the life of capitalism, one Black and Brown child’s imprisonment or death at a time, it will rely on this very familiar and profitable form of violence.

Activist and Marxist thinker Rosa Luxemburg surmised, in her day, that the inability of the Left, specifically the trade unions, to step up and truly defend the rights of workers, originated in their fear of “organized bayonets” rather than their professed love of the people.

If “organized bayonets” determined the political polices of Germany’s trade unions toward the workers it classified as an “unorganized” lot of weak proletariats, if in 1905, the “strength of Prussian-German militarism” forced the trade union leaders to privilege their “cash box” and rather than challenge the state’s depiction of revolutionaries as “romantics,” “a handful of conscienceless ‘demagogues and agitators’” peddling “inflammatory ‘propaganda,’” then the trade unions betrayed the workers because they conceded the power of the people to the almighty authority of a “policeman-like materialist” state (“Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Union,” The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 2004).

The Empire’s agenda is to destroy in order to survive, to cover up its imperfections in reams of discourse on the need to defend the State from the dangerous nature of the enemy. For the Empire knows full well the potential strength of its citizens, the workers. It has experienced, Luxemburg writes, the “occasional real power of the organized proletariat as well as the material might” of its own bayonet.” In the “policeman-like theory of the capitalist,” she continues, organized workers are powerful. This is all the more reason to wage war first in campaigns to weaken the potential of workers to organize and effect mass strikes, as the Bolsheviks once did to topple the regime of a Tsar.

The creators of urban blight, speak disingenuously on the mystery of Black and Brown children in our glorious and fair-minded country

Where do the trade unions stand if not along side the militarism of the Empire? The Empire knows the power of the people and the trade unions underestimate that power. Even recognized workers are only significant as they represent membership dues. For the trade unions, (as well as the so-called leaders, and liberal humanitarians) the object, the weapons of mass destruction - the bayonets, then, the guns, tasers, tear gas, the drones, the bombs now - have power. The trade unions remind the people of how it cannot defeat the powerful. Give way to the almighty authority of militarism. Pay dues! Let us plan acceptable protest to assure the safety of all that glitters in the Empire - along with the trade union “cash box”!

Of course, when the war began, what was left for the trade unions but to support the Empire’s “foreign” war as it had supported its “domestic” war.

Something must be done, but what? The trade unions do not recognize these mothers as workers. And if not the trade unions, who will “lead” the way?

The Empire’s fear of mass instigation from Germany’s Left, superficially from the trade unions, was unfounded. You cannot “‘propagate’” a mass strike any more than you can “propagate the “‘revolution.’” You cannot impose the “idea” of mass strike from above through trade unions “organizing” choreographed protests, which are no more than a series of tactics without substance. Mass strikes, Luxemburg explains, require the workers to “be enlightened” of the history of revolutions, strategies, and tactics, of the “international significance” of revolutions, of “wider political perspectives of class struggle,” of the “role and the tasks of the masses in the coming struggles.”

Otherwise, Luxemburg continues, there is a danger of “practical politicians” co-opting the struggle of the workers in order to “subordinate” it to “parliamentarianism” - (the Democratic Party). Above all, these staged mass strikes are artificial, external to the struggle’s “definite political situation.”

The revolution cannot be provoked by revolutionaries, trade unionists, or “practical politicians.” Luxemburg writes -

From that revolution we also learn, Luxemburg continues that with every “great political mass, action,” action breaks up into a “mass of economic strikes.” As the political struggle spreads, clarifies, and involves, the economic struggle does not recede, Luxemburg argues, but “extends, organizes and becomes involved in equal measure” so that between the political and economic struggles, “there is the most complete reciprocal action.”

Thus, the revolution is “something other than bloodshed,” but in the policeman-like materialist world, we can expect the “police interpretations” to speak of “street disturbances and rioting,” that is, “disorder,” when, in fact, the masses are effecting “a thoroughgoing internal reversal of social class relations.” In a police materialist world, violence is order! Trade unions and so-called leaders accept this notion of order!

“Great” liberals have not one word to say about the senseless murdering of B-L-A-C-K children

It is therefore futile, Luxemburg observes, to scrabble over “the technical side” or the “mechanism” of the mass strike. It will come, but preparation in the form of education of the masses is necessary.

Skirmishes with the representatives of capitalism, the educational, judicial and law enforcement institutions, occur daily in which the trade union representatives, “leaders,” and humanitarians encircle the “victims” and demand, ask for “justice.” You cannot ask for “justice” on such and such a day, for one individual at a time, when the idea of “justice” originates from policeman-like materialist theory, and expect anything but “just-us.” You will receive “just-us” just as you receive “education” and “peace” - that is, death and more death!

Only education in action can bring about change and trade unions and so-called leaders cannot end the cycle of violence and death. They assist in perpetrating the bloodshed! The task of grassroots organizers the most important, writes Luxemburg, is patience. From within “themselves,” the masses, in this case, the endless mothers of slaughtered children, the idea for a mass strike will come as surely as there will be Black and Brown children murdered in this policeman-like materialist world.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.