Reparations Now!
Full compensation for the Black community
Just before he was murdered, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embarked an assault on what he called the “triple evils” plaguing American society: war, poverty and racism. Dr. King also recognized that in order to eliminate these oppressive conditions, you must attack the root of the problem—the system from which they come.
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We in the Party for Socialism and Liberation agree that war, poverty and racism are the enemies we must fight. We fight the system that made them; that system has a name: capitalism. Since its inception, U.S. society has been marked by extreme racism. At least 12 million Africans were kidnapped and forcibly taken to the Americas as slaves. The capitalist economic system in the United States was built largely on the backs of slave labor.
Major banks and corporations that participated in the genocidal slave trade still exist in some form today. They reaped enormous profits from engaging in this inhuman practice. Corporations like CSX, Fleet Boston, Aetna and JP Morgan Chase all were started with profits reaped from exploiting slave labor. Aetna and JP Morgan Chase made millions insuring slaves as the property of their masters. Universities like Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Virginia also profited from slave labor.
Corporate and commercial interests also made super-profits from Black labor in the post-Civil War period. Institutionalized racism channeled Black workers into the most backbreaking labor in key industries. The brutal system of sharecropping extracted super-profits from Black agricultural labor. All workers have the fruit of their collective labor stolen by the capitalist owners. In the case of Black labor, however, it was the super-exploitation based on racism that allowed for super-profits for the capitalist bosses.
The Black population continues to lag behind the majority white population in access to affordable housing, decent paying jobs and health care. A system of virtual medical apartheid has led to vast differences in the life expectancy between Black people and whites in the United States.
Police brutality and mass incarceration are the tools of repression visited on the Black community. The importation of drugs into oppressed communities is a source of human suffering and mega-profits for various networks of capitalists. Major banks have been found guilty of laundering drug money, but it is not the bankers who languish behind bars. The Black community is still the most exploited segment of the working class, facing grinding poverty, unemployment and low wages, compounded by racist violence and police state terror.
We demand that the Black community be compensated fully, with interest, for the historical racism and wrongs forced upon them by capitalism. The wealth stolen from Black people by corporations, institutions and the government must be repaid in full.
The PSL puts the struggle against racism, police brutality and the prison-industrial complex as a top priority. This is the basis for building multinational working-class unity against our common enemy—the racist, capitalist class of bankers and corporate owners.
