“You represent the potential and the power of the labor movement,” said Angela Davis, the activist and former member of the Black Panther Party, to the assembled crowd. “Whenever the ILWU takes a stand, the world feels the reverberations,” she said, listing the dockworker union’s history of activism—against, for example, the internment of Japanese Americans and apartheid in South Africa, in support of civil rights, and in solidarity with past victims of violence police.

Rapper Lil Baby’s new single begins to address “The Bigger Picture”

June 23, 2020June 23, 2020 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

“The Bigger Picture” is significant and stands out because it strongly rejects the idea employed by identity politics that there is an unbridgeable gap between blacks and whites, it begins to form a critique of capitalism and it shows the development of a popular artist beginning to take the times and his art seriously.
However, the song’s suggestion that voting is the answer to all the great problems is extremely weak. First of all, it comes in the midst of enormous, multi-racial protests whose objective logic clearly indicates that popular struggle against all the existing institutions is where the way forward lies. Second, the call to “Vote” is most often in entertainment industry circles at the moment virtual short-hand for “Vote Democratic” or “Vote for Anyone but Trump.” It is no accident that Lil Baby recently announced he is working with Democratic Atlanta Mayor Keisha Bottoms—who has openly defended the police after the recent Atlanta police killing of Rayshard Brooks—to put together a police reform plan “for Atlanta to the whole world.”

Protest, Riot, Loot, and Burn for Black Freedom in America?

June 22, 2020June 22, 2020 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

In Russia Today, Helen Buyniski reflects on corporate responses to the depiction of Black people in brand labeling. Buyniski highlights the comments …
Protest, Riot, Loot, and Burn for Black Freedom in America?

Who Is Karl Marx: Meet the Anti-Capitalist Scholar

June 19, 2020 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Who Is Karl Marx: Meet the Anti-Capitalist Scholar

The famed German co-authored The Communist Manifesto with fellow scholar Friedrich Engels in 1848, a piece of writing that makes the case for the political theory of socialism — where the community (rather than rich people) have ownership and control over their labor — which later inspired millions of people to resist oppressive political leaders and spark political revolutions all over the world. Although Marx was raised in a middle-class family, he later became a scholar who struggled to make ends meet — a working-class man, he thought, who could take part in a political revolution.

We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War

May 31, 2020 Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

With the defeat of the Bernie Sanders campaign, numerous postmortems have attempted to diagnose what went wrong and what could’ve, should’ve, and would’ve been.
We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War