Workers World: “I have been asked to address the Rosa Luxemburg Conference on the subject ‘Is civil war imminent in the United States?’ Well, that question implies that the first U.S. Civil War, fought over enslavement, has ended. The truth is since the conclusion of that civil war there has in its place been a long war over nearly two centuries that has revolved around defending capital and the exploitation of Black and oppressed minorities in the United States and maintaining white supremacy, which is tied intricately to capital.

What we are witnessing today in the United States is the culmination of the ‘long war’ against equal rights, social justice and socialism. After the Civil War, the project of Reconstruction brought a brief period of freedom and equal rights for Black Americans, but that was quickly suppressed, and those freedoms and rights were rolled back through white supremacist violence in the form of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) aligned with state capital in the South and North.

Uprisings for social justice have occurred in the United States in the 1920s, 1960s and 2020. The leading political line of all of these uprisings was that capitalism was incapable of bringing justice to Black Americans and the working class. However, in the wake of these uprisings, some freedoms were gained but not social justice.”

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