It’s a Battlefield, Please!

To be committed to dismantling capitalism requires personal and social sacrifice not identification with the Empire. “We need a concerned left politics,” writes bell hooks, “that continues to launch powerful critiques of ruling class groups even as it also addresses and attends to the issue of strategic assault and demoralization of the poor, a politics that can effectively intervene on class warfare.” The Black Left knows there’s an ongoing war against capitalism. We know that in our day-to-day lives, we are under siege, for the pea-poded beings feel their positions within the capitalist hierarchy might slip away as more eyes are opening. They are hissing at us. They will hiss – that’s what snakes do! We know the human condition under the control of capitalism. We aren’t blind to the “absent,” and we’d be crazy to think that war, occupation, hunger, torture, embargoes, climate change, and the incessant drive for more oil – the business of corporate capitalism – will come to a grinding halt if Obama is in the top seat among his corporate capitalist friends. This is a concrete distinction between the Black Left and those who claim to know by virtue of their accumulated things and positions among the rulers: we know corporate capitalists and their politicians along with the media won’t prohibit the advancement of Empire building.