Dr. Kim. E. Koo, Rocky Mount Racial Justice Group
On September 1st, a strategic meeting was held by a coalition of organizations (El Futuro es Nuestro, NCEJN, USSW and FAN) to discuss the deaths of farmworkers due to labor injustices and exacerbated by the climate crisis.
I am particularly glad that there was a genuine attempt to link all these 3, sometimes seen as isolated issues, how they impact each other and how we need to continue to expose these intersections. In many instances, it is not a matter of “organizing” but more a need to overcome contradictions that arise from “siloing” these struggles and knowing that people working in different industries and facing different injustices share the same enemy.
The corollary is a need to build on this united front on a regular basis. The embers of resistance must not be allowed to die down.
It has been my observation that people are mostly focused on “action”. For me, the need for continued political education and awareness is crucial to the struggle; and not just awareness of internal US politics (most of the time, very skewed because of media control and distortion), but also and especially of the global changes, which are happening on a daily basis.
If you start asking the question “what has that got to do with our struggles here?” then I suggest you think very hard, because you know the answer.
Political discussion, analysis, reading, has not been our tradition, thus we limit our struggles to the lowest denominator of labor struggles: wages, conditions in the workplaces, benefits- mostly economic struggles. Of course they are important, but limiting oneself to just these condemn us to a never ending unwinnable war with the ruling class, the capitalists and the imperialists.
Not only that, we are not taking advantage of the current geopolitical situation when the Global Majority (what used to be called Third World or Global South) is rising up and pivoting away from Western, especially US imperialism. The global south is supporting us by weakening US imperialism. Every struggle they win, weakens our capitalist class, and in turn demands our support. We know that it is necessary for the US ruling class to use and abuse us before they can use and abuse the rest of the world.
Worst of all, limiting our struggles to just economic issues makes us and the people we organize, blind, deaf and dumb- catering to the lowest denominator, dragging down the working class, rather than uplifting them. Why? because we are scared? Understand that this fear is the result of years of insidious and overt anti-communist propaganda, racist and white supremacist indoctrination should make us more defiant and prudent.
How do we overcome this fear? Definitely not by avoiding political discussion! (By politics I mean as a question of distribution of power and resources, not elections for this or that party!). We can perhaps have discussion groups, book clubs or regular one-on-one conversations.
Let’s start, for example, by learning about what the US is doing in Mexico. It would be great to discuss with the farmers, most of whom come from Mexico. Why the USA is interfering with their current proposed judicial reforms when it is an internal question and completely within Mexican sovereignty.
