Chris Hedges on Class Solidarity (we have to build alliances with people with views that we find distasteful)
Economic justice is the key. King was always adamant about that. There would never be racial justice until there was economic justice. And he was killed of course in Memphis supporting the sanitation workers strike.
And and that means if you're going to go down in an amazon plant you're going to have to deal with people who support Trump.
[...]
We're gonna have to build alliances with people around economic justice who may not think like us, may not talk like us, indeed may embrace and espouse some views that we find distasteful.Any society that rules especially one as anti-democratic as ours understands that you have to keep class divided, you have to create divisions within the society, and if you create those divisions you can maintain power. But if there's a class consciousness, if classes come together against a ruling oligarchic elite then they're in big trouble.
There's a fascinating book, it's written in the 50s it's called the peculiar institution by the historian Kenneth Stamp on slavery. and he gets the manuals that slaveholders had in order to create divisions among the enslaved peoples. So you create people who work in the house, you create drivers where you are foreman in essence, who are you elevating, give them a little better shack, and those divisions become quite effective in maintaining control. And that's what's happened i mean that's what always happens.
[...]
We have to recover that class solidarity, we have to speak in the language of class warfare, that's it, and that means making alliances with people who are suffering economically but who hold political positions that that we find repugnant.
[...]
Once you start working in a united front like that that is a far more effective way to begin to break down the barriers of racism and the stereotypes of racism and everything else.
--- Chris Hedges on act.tv, April 8, 2021 --- https://youtu.be/3zdyWmiagm4?t=1082
