Nautilus Walker
There were several speeches given during the Coalition for Women's Rights' Black Lives Matter march on Feb. 16., 2023. Nautilus Walker, founder and public relations chair of Stockton Socialists, gave a rousing speech that emphasizes capitalism's role in racism. Below are his remarks from that day.
I see a lot of narratives being thrown around online, on CNN and Fox News; and I don't think any mainstream outlet will identify the real reason why we see many of the issues we see today in America.
I’m here to attempt to set the record straight. The history of African-Americans is the history of them being repeatedly controlled through systems of exploitation and racial hierarchies that appear to die, but then are reborn and tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.
Recently, Tyre Nichols was brutally murdered by five Black Memphis officers during a traffic stop. Both conservative and liberal media went into damage control, having the chief of Memphis police agree that this was an outrage and in her 30 years on the force she's never seen anything like it.
Rodney King's beating was 30 years ago, what has changed since then? We've seen countless high profile cases of police abusing their monopoly on violence to disproportionately brutalize and kill Black citizens. They want you to think this is an isolated event and that this is abnormal, but this is anything but abnormal. We saw what they did to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, how they acted at the Uvalde school shooting…
The primary purpose of the police is to uphold and enforce the rule of law. We all know legality does not equal morality, and we've seen historically when it comes time for the people to rise up and fight back against those unjust laws, the cops have stood in their way. Policing in America has its origins in slave catching. Gangs of armed men tasked with rounding up runaway slaves, assets, capital… and returning them to their rightful “owner”. From inception, cops were created to protect and serve the interests of capital.
We are not utopians: we can achieve (a worker's state) in our lifetime, but it's up to the people, the masses of working people, to put in the work and organize. If we want a positive future for ourselves, the next generation and the planet, we’ll have to fight for it! We’ll only get what we’re organized to take. And when the time comes, African-Americans will be at the forefront of that movement.
After the Civil War, slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines and large plantations. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous and often deadly work conditions. The 13th amendment allows this because it states that slavery is legal if it's a punishment for a crime.
In the 60s, when civil rights protestors were fighting back against segregation and for their basic human rights, the cops were in the way: sicking dogs on them and hosing them down, cracking their skulls.
In the 70s, when the Black Panthers were uniting poor Blacks, whites and Latinos for their common economic well being. They were providing free food for school children and building free clinics, and what did the cops do? The Chicago police killed their chairman, Fred Hampton, in his sleep because it goes against the capital's Interests.
In the 80s and 90s, we saw the war on drugs/war on crime, which was really a war on people. Crack and heroin were planted in Black communities and were heavily criminalized, coupled with the 1994 crime bill that was supported by now president Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, and we got increased police presence, disproportionate amount of arrests and harsher prison sentences.
Today, we live in a post Jim Crow era where our new system blends elements of chattel slavery, convict leasing and Jim Crow together. We now have a for-profit prison system which strips mostly poor people of color of their rights that they won during the Civil Rights Movement. America has the highest prison population by size and per capita. In the land of the free, despite only having only 5% of the world's population, we have 25% of the world's prisoners.
What are the Republicans' solutions to these problems? Fascism? What are the Democrats' solutions? Name another street, "Black Lives Matter?'
Everyday there isn't a revolution in this country, people will needlessly suffer. Whether it be from police brutality, lack of healthcare, lack of housing. Capital has negatively impacted every aspect of our lives. Imperialist wars will continue, killing millions of working people abroad.
Martin Luther King, Jr., said that "the greatest purveyor of violence is our own government." And due to racism and white supremacy, the effects of capitalism compound even more onto Black people and people of color. Angela Davis said, "To be radical is to tackle the problem at its root."
The problem is capitalism, it is white supremacy, it is patriarchy, it is heteronormativity. A time will come where all oppressed and exploited people will rise up to overthrow this disgusting system and replace it with a workers state. A state for and by the workers. One based on cooperation instead of competition. A foreign policy of mutual development, not domination. A system where everyone has a right to economic well being, where our labor is not exploited, where we'll have a criminal justice system that prioritizes rehabilitation and not profits, where the number in your bank account doesn't determine whether or not you eat, or have a roof over your head, or get a quality education, or get access to healthcare.
We are not utopians: we can achieve this in our lifetime, but it's up to the people, the masses of working people, to put in the work and organize. If we want a positive future for ourselves, the next generation and the planet, we’ll have to fight for it! We’ll only get what we’re organized to take. And when the time comes, African-Americans will be at the forefront of that movement.
