Check out this new interview that the Situations collective did with the totally amazing Dan Georgakas, poet, co-author of Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, and founding member of Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. We talked about Detroit, Greece, austerity politics, capital abandonment, and working-class leverage in the face of it.
Dan invites us to imagine a counter-history in which the UAW hadn’t been so racist or class collaborationist, and had instead embraced the black liberation politics of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Think about what the labor movement could be today if the UAW, instead of stealing elections from DRUM, had invited DRUM activists to run the union paper, help fight legal battles, and organize the South.
The story of the League is a perfect example of the fact that the fight for black liberation is central to American class struggle; without the first, the second is ultimately a loser. And this fight is not about feelings. It’s about wages, state policies, patterns of capital investment and disinvestment, discrimination both inside and outside working-class organizations. And Dan’s work helps us to see how central cultural interventions are to interrupting business as usual about class and race. Read it and be inspired.
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