PyramidHead
Contributor
I hesitated before deciding to make a thread on this, because over the past year it has become increasingly clear to me that this is actually a fairly center-right forum. I used to look at it as a bastion of the left, but that was before I knew what the left was about. The majority of users here are considerably to the right of someone like Noam Chomsky or Michael Parenti, or really anyone who is even slightly critical of capitalism. But even those people don't say much about what I'm about to discuss, at least not as much as other topics. So, I don't expect any buy-in from this crowd, but I hope to at least educate some visitors and perhaps make some of the more left-leaning members see that this is an important topic.
All blacks everywhere are owed reparations from all wealthy first-world capitalist nations. As a start.
Why? Well, first we have to talk about what reparations are and what it means to be "owed" them. Reparations are not a check from the government, and they are not owed as punishment for wrongdoing on the part of whoever is providing them. Reparations are tangible resources, material and otherwise, that would allow the unification and self-determination of a people that was forcibly divided and dispersed throughout the world. They are owed because the prosperity of the entire capitalist world rests on the European colonization of Africa, the extraction of its inhabitants and natural resources, and the subsequent disenfranchisement of people of African descent wherever they are in the world.
How so? Before the imperialist invasion of Africa by Europe, there was neither an Africa nor a Europe proper. Both landmasses were occupied by their respective inhabitants, who engaged in internal conflicts as any nation would. Europe was in the midst of a dark era of widespread poverty and disease. The dawn of imperialism, which predates industrial capitalism but is indispensable for it, lifted Europe out of that feudal cesspool. The European conquest of Africa robbed it of minerals, crops, wildlife, and perhaps most importantly, human beings. The continent was carved up based on European interests, resulting in the national divisions we see today, which were established in Germany by committee. Suddenly, Europe had electricity and sanitation, enabled by the labor and materials they extracted from Africa, and in doing so stifled the African people from having electricity and sanitation of their own. Cobblestone roads were laid down across Europe using stones removed from Africa and laid by African slaves. Pretty much every major city in Belgium, Spain, Italy, and overseas into Brazil, Mexico, and of course the United States, was built by African slaves using African materials. The entire western world is built upon the unpaid labor and stolen resources of a once-independent Africa.
This has left the African people and their progeny fractured and divided across the globe, in places like Haiti and Jamaica. Some, of course, are still in Africa, but under the rule of petty bourgeoisie neo-colonial governments that continue to extract wealth from them. The colonization that had occurred in the open prior to the industrial development of Europe and the Americas continues on a smaller scale to this day. When cities that contain large percentages of black people are gentrified, raising property values and driving out the low-income workers as well as the businesses they work at, it's another version of the same process: enriching white European capitalism by either removing people from or co-opting the spaces where Africans live. Where this does not occur, blacks are segregated from everyone else in metropolitan areas that are underdeveloped, poorly funded, and devoid of meaningful cultural monuments. And for more than a century, black people have been targeted by law enforcement from the highest levels of government on down.
I'm going to stop here with a recommendation: if you vehemently disagree with this account of European history, then you probably won't be sympathetic to reparations. You can post about your disagreement if you want, but I won't respond to you. I'm not interested in arguing about what has already taken place. The facts are clear: Africans, through their forced labor and the resources of their homeland, literally constructed the base structure of Western capitalist society as we know it. None of this would exist without the African people doing unpaid work for centuries, African natural resources forming the infrastructure of our civil and technological development, and the intentional division and dispersal of a previously unified continent of people with their own economies, laws, art, philosophy, politics, science, and literature. As they would continue to do for indigenous populations in Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere, Europe has effectively erased Africa from modern history as an actor and turned it into an object of exploitation. That is the reality that has burdened black people for five hundred years.
If you basically acknowledge the previous few paragraphs as even roughly accurate, I would like to know: why should black people respect white laws and their enforcers? Why should they want to pay white taxes, why should they show up to work to enrich the owners of white companies? And I'm not using the word "white" here to differentiate between the biological races of whoever enacted the laws, invented the taxes, or owns the particular companies (even though most of those people are, in fact, white). It's just a label for the arc of European imperial colonization that has erected social and economic structures to protect its bounty; even when black police officers harass black sex workers, the underlying function of that power dynamic serves the white ruling class. Black politicians and black CEOs who carry out the ongoing accumulation of capitalism are agents of white power in their capacity as politicians and CEOs.
And so, from an ethical standpoint, black people are entitled to reparations. Not because the people who will be paying them are the ones responsible for the situation that needs repairing--although some of them certainly are--but because the material resources they are owed belong to them as endowments of the African continent whose rape and pillage form the basis of virtually our entire society. Will undeserving blacks end up getting reparations? Yup. Lucky them! Too bad. Will violent criminals get some? Yup. Lucky them! Too bad. There is no other way, no means-testing or parsing that will ever do justice to the genocide Africans have endured around the world at the hands of European colonial capitalism. And since we live in a capitalist world, the provision of reparations can only be the beginning. A consolidated, unified, self-determining African working class must be empowered to guide its own destiny fully and without white permission. This has gone on far too long. If white power does not concede reparations, black power should take them.
Reparations are not just cutting a check. For an idea of what they might look like, I will reproduce this from the platform of the African People's Socialist Party, an organization chaired by Omali Yeshitela that has been fighting for reparations for decades.
Each one is expounded upon at this page.
All blacks everywhere are owed reparations from all wealthy first-world capitalist nations. As a start.
Why? Well, first we have to talk about what reparations are and what it means to be "owed" them. Reparations are not a check from the government, and they are not owed as punishment for wrongdoing on the part of whoever is providing them. Reparations are tangible resources, material and otherwise, that would allow the unification and self-determination of a people that was forcibly divided and dispersed throughout the world. They are owed because the prosperity of the entire capitalist world rests on the European colonization of Africa, the extraction of its inhabitants and natural resources, and the subsequent disenfranchisement of people of African descent wherever they are in the world.
How so? Before the imperialist invasion of Africa by Europe, there was neither an Africa nor a Europe proper. Both landmasses were occupied by their respective inhabitants, who engaged in internal conflicts as any nation would. Europe was in the midst of a dark era of widespread poverty and disease. The dawn of imperialism, which predates industrial capitalism but is indispensable for it, lifted Europe out of that feudal cesspool. The European conquest of Africa robbed it of minerals, crops, wildlife, and perhaps most importantly, human beings. The continent was carved up based on European interests, resulting in the national divisions we see today, which were established in Germany by committee. Suddenly, Europe had electricity and sanitation, enabled by the labor and materials they extracted from Africa, and in doing so stifled the African people from having electricity and sanitation of their own. Cobblestone roads were laid down across Europe using stones removed from Africa and laid by African slaves. Pretty much every major city in Belgium, Spain, Italy, and overseas into Brazil, Mexico, and of course the United States, was built by African slaves using African materials. The entire western world is built upon the unpaid labor and stolen resources of a once-independent Africa.
This has left the African people and their progeny fractured and divided across the globe, in places like Haiti and Jamaica. Some, of course, are still in Africa, but under the rule of petty bourgeoisie neo-colonial governments that continue to extract wealth from them. The colonization that had occurred in the open prior to the industrial development of Europe and the Americas continues on a smaller scale to this day. When cities that contain large percentages of black people are gentrified, raising property values and driving out the low-income workers as well as the businesses they work at, it's another version of the same process: enriching white European capitalism by either removing people from or co-opting the spaces where Africans live. Where this does not occur, blacks are segregated from everyone else in metropolitan areas that are underdeveloped, poorly funded, and devoid of meaningful cultural monuments. And for more than a century, black people have been targeted by law enforcement from the highest levels of government on down.
I'm going to stop here with a recommendation: if you vehemently disagree with this account of European history, then you probably won't be sympathetic to reparations. You can post about your disagreement if you want, but I won't respond to you. I'm not interested in arguing about what has already taken place. The facts are clear: Africans, through their forced labor and the resources of their homeland, literally constructed the base structure of Western capitalist society as we know it. None of this would exist without the African people doing unpaid work for centuries, African natural resources forming the infrastructure of our civil and technological development, and the intentional division and dispersal of a previously unified continent of people with their own economies, laws, art, philosophy, politics, science, and literature. As they would continue to do for indigenous populations in Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere, Europe has effectively erased Africa from modern history as an actor and turned it into an object of exploitation. That is the reality that has burdened black people for five hundred years.
If you basically acknowledge the previous few paragraphs as even roughly accurate, I would like to know: why should black people respect white laws and their enforcers? Why should they want to pay white taxes, why should they show up to work to enrich the owners of white companies? And I'm not using the word "white" here to differentiate between the biological races of whoever enacted the laws, invented the taxes, or owns the particular companies (even though most of those people are, in fact, white). It's just a label for the arc of European imperial colonization that has erected social and economic structures to protect its bounty; even when black police officers harass black sex workers, the underlying function of that power dynamic serves the white ruling class. Black politicians and black CEOs who carry out the ongoing accumulation of capitalism are agents of white power in their capacity as politicians and CEOs.
And so, from an ethical standpoint, black people are entitled to reparations. Not because the people who will be paying them are the ones responsible for the situation that needs repairing--although some of them certainly are--but because the material resources they are owed belong to them as endowments of the African continent whose rape and pillage form the basis of virtually our entire society. Will undeserving blacks end up getting reparations? Yup. Lucky them! Too bad. Will violent criminals get some? Yup. Lucky them! Too bad. There is no other way, no means-testing or parsing that will ever do justice to the genocide Africans have endured around the world at the hands of European colonial capitalism. And since we live in a capitalist world, the provision of reparations can only be the beginning. A consolidated, unified, self-determining African working class must be empowered to guide its own destiny fully and without white permission. This has gone on far too long. If white power does not concede reparations, black power should take them.
Reparations are not just cutting a check. For an idea of what they might look like, I will reproduce this from the platform of the African People's Socialist Party, an organization chaired by Omali Yeshitela that has been fighting for reparations for decades.
Each one is expounded upon at this page.
