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Beneath the Surface, KPFK, July 19, with Michael Slate
Michael: You know that there's a lot of people, especially when you're going out among a lot of Black people, and a lot of Black people one way or another, they're going to be saying things like, 'You know what? "We’ve got to take care of Black people first."' There's Black nationalism. There’s a basis for it, and people arguing that. How do you answer this? It's a leap to go from fighting against the oppression of Black people to fighting for the emancipation of all humanity. It's much easier to get people when police brutality comes down and people will stand up and fight against that. Then when you start talking to them about, 'Look, we're talking about going up against the whole thing,' then that’s a whole other leap that's required.
Carl: We say two things to that. The first thing we say and the basis for getting into that, is, 'Look, what's the fundamental problem in this society? Where does everything else flow from?' That fundamental problem is the fact that millions of people all around the world gotta work together, labor in common to produce everything that society needs. In fact, they can produce enough so that everybody in the whole could have enough food, clothing, shelter, medicine, everything they need for a decent way of life. But what stands in the way of that is that there's a handful of capitalists who own and control the means to produce wealth when the overwhelming majority of people around the world work together to produce this stuff, it belongs to these capitalists.
They use that power to determine the way the whole world runs. And that's where everything flows from. Even the oppression of Black people fits into that in terms of, it's a way in which the imperialists, the capitalists get extra profits from the super-exploitation of Black people and they brutally suppress them to maintain those profits coming in. So we're going to situate that oppression of Black people in the context of the fundamental problem of capitalism and say that what needs to happen is, we need a movement that can aim to get rid of that fundamental problem, that can take care of the source of this problem, and that that's what we need to do. On that basis, we're challenging people to become emancipators of humanity.
Then what we say to people who want to come at it like, 'Well, look, I can see the need to fight to get my people out of this,' we say, well, look, what's the way to do that? How can that happen? We think that we need to unite everybody and bring forward and emancipation movement that is aiming to emancipate all of humanity. If all you're looking at doing is liberating your people, you've still got to say how's that going to come about? Is it going to come about by in some way trying to patch up this system, and get your piece of it, or trying to set up another system which would fundamentally work like this? Or does that exploitation and oppression that's characteristic of capitalism need to be done away with?
So that's how we would come at that, and we would engage in a lot of debate and discussion around it and we've been doing that through the course of this tour because. While it's going to take a big leap when we actually have the event this Saturday, we've already begun that conversation and that discussion. We've been meeting with people. We met with a couple of dozen people just a day or two ago and we had a lot of this debate. We've been meeting with people in different cities across the country, and there are even people who are coming at it from the thing of, 'I want to liberate my people,' but are seeing that the kind of struggle and debate, the kind of questions that are going to be gone into and struggled around, and the challenge that’s going to go out to the masses to get up out of stuff like being all about bling-bling and 'gettin' rich or die trying,' or representing 'your hood,' in struggle against another hood that's made up of oppressed people just like you who've got everything in common, whether that's a rival gang set or whether that's conflict between Blacks and Latinos, getting out of the stranglehold that religion has on too many oppressed people. That kind of struggle and challenge to break out of that would be a positive thing that they want to see even though they don't embrace the entire revolutionary communist message we bring down.
Note: For more information about the RC4 Tour, please write to rc_speaks@yahoo.com.
