#black left

5 Demands For Emergency COVID-19 Survival

Free Healthcare 

No Work

No Paying / No Debt

Free The Prisoners

Asad Haider Speaking at the East Bay DSA meeting | Identity Politics & How Socialism Can Beat White Supremacy

An example of:

... parts of “the Left” that you’d expect me to have some stake in (like BLM or the Black Left as a black person) have become pits of anti-feminist slandering/smear campaigns and prioritizing politics (like being pro-genderism and pro-sex trades) that harm and/or further oppress biological women and girls.

AJOWA: Finally! This very important and much needed work is finished. I see it as a very important work because it is the only book to chronicle the Black cooperative experience in the U.S. since W.E.B. Du Bois1’ study in 1907. Without being modest, Jessica, what do you see as the value of your work and the book specifically?

JESSICA: I was smiling when you said “finally” because I have been working on this a long time. I started out thinking it would be a two- or three-year project and now it’s actually like 14 or 15 years. I have been able to both compile and chronicle the major activities of African Americans in the United States who have been involved in some form of cooperative business development or collective economics. And, why is that important? Because when I first got interested in using cooperative models for community economic development, particularly in Black communities, everywhere I went people kept telling me that black people don’t do co-ops.

JESSICA: Luckily, at that point I was in position to have a graduate research assistant (TJ Lerman), and I said to him, “go look at every issue of The Crisis magazine, and every time there’s any mention of the word ‘co-op’, make me a copy.” And he did, faithfully. And I suddenly found out that over a period of about 25 years, starting around 1918, there were at least seven different articles about Black cooperatives or cooperative economics.

AJOWA: Would you briefly summarize what Du Bois’ position was on cooperatives?

JESSICA: Du Bois’ position was that African Americans were discriminated against economically, that we were trying to become capitalists and gain individual wealth just like other Americans, however it wasn’t working because of racism and discrimination. He said that we should voluntarily form a group economy based on a sense of solidarity and use producer and consumer cooperatives to position ourselves to serve our economic needs separately from the white economy. This way we could control our own goods and services and gain income and wealth - stabilize ourselves and our communities. Then if we wanted to join the mainstream economy, we could join from a position of strength.