Up From The South!
Written by John Henry
You ever walk into a city and the whole city is gone? I mean washed away. I mean completely soaked in the reality that what once was can never be again. Hundred-year floods, made reality more and more by the year, by the month. If the last one was once every 100 years, what does that make tomorrow’s watery grave? Accelerating. Shouldn’t have built in a flood zone. You get what you voted for. That’s what they’d say if Katrina happened today. No pity parties from the liberal, “progressive” faction, just a spit in the face of the victim. “Should have voted harder, should have voted blue, no matter who!” Get screeched into the flood waters, the family trapped under the weight of the attic roof, the water rising. If we just rallied around you, the people who wield our suffering as a political tool, we’d suffer less. No master would surrender his tools, no democrat would ever alleviate the suffering they wield as a weapon. Roll on through the lands of North and South Carolina to see what the most progressive president in modern history (the party’s words, not mine) could do for his countrymen. The skeletons of buildings wiped away by Helene still linger like an elephant graveyard of an empire that will never again know prosperity. For a region that never really knew prosperity.
They will tell us to vote, but the government that rules over our region does not serve us, it does not represent us, it does not work for us. It never has, it has only ever worked for the capitalist, for the extraction companies, for the oil barons, for the petro-chemical lords. What is a vote worth in a neocolony? What is representation to a comprador? What is democracy to an imperialist? What is democracy to the capitalist who only sees your region as a means to an end?
The victories of the coastal elite in New York, in Los Angeles, in the richest parts of the imperial core, have such little bearing on those in the extraction colonies that power them. Wealth and resources flow upwards, the materials extracted driving coastal, imperial profits. When it rains in Brooklyn, the power doesn’t go out. What is routine in the delta is unheard of in the imperial core. Indeed the family born into a Louisiana sacrifice zone, doomed to an early death, doomed to poverty, written off as dead-living by the empire, has more in common with the family in Venezuela than they do with the party powers in NYC. In what way could a Manhattanite relate to someone from a town like Ville Platte? A town with a median income three-fifths lower than the US average per year. Where over 30% of the population lives below the poverty line. A sacrificed town. A Southern tradition. A normalized existence of suffering for capitalist extraction. Blue or red, the party in charge still serves the same capitalist, still assures the people in the region will never know the wealth of their resources. Prison labor or poverty. Slavery or death. Is it any shock that the left from these regions is more radical? More revolutionary? Less willing to accept reforms that, ultimately, make life easier for the people whose lifestyles are powered by the extraction that comes from the delta? They’ll write op-eds about how New Orleans should be abandoned to the sea, while ignoring that their cities face the same issues. Is it because New Orleans, like much of the sacrifice zones they profit from, is mostly Black? This isn’t to downplay the diversity of New York City, but the white banking class doesn’t find a home in the streets of New Orleans.
Reformism won’t rebuild the South, reformism won’t free the people still held on reservations, it won’t give us land back, reformism won’t break the prison-slavery-industrial complex that finds its deepest roots in the South. The South is still a plantation society, the plantations shifted to prison, but Angola never changed. Reformism won’t stop the mass human sacrifice happening both from within and without the ugly, bastard beast we call America. A DSA that ignores the South is a DSA that rebuilds the same settler-colonial system that it seeks to rebuke. A metropolitan vanguard that neglects the internal colonies is no vanguard at all. DSA chapters, and any other organization or group, operating in the deep South, are facing material conditions that would break many a would-be “progressive.” The South will be the place where the sword of revolution is forged from the fires of struggle.
To write off the South as a lost project, an inherently backward, bigoted place only worthy of an outside savior is to ignore the voices of the most disenfranchised within this nation. If you want to build an anti-imperialist coalition, but fail to build with those being extracted closest to your own home, then you are no anti-imperialist at all. America is a prisonhouse of nations, and the South, not the planter South but the radical, racialized, sacrificed South, is a nation that demands a seat at the table of revolution. We will not be written off as a place the sea has already taken. We will not comply in advance with eco-genocide in the name of respectability, in the name of having our voices heard by the reformists who would watch us drown. If you cannot see the plight of our people, what could you offer to those for whom the imperialism runs even deeper? What can you offer to Hawai‘i? To Puerto Rico? To the indigenous nations that exist, right now, separate from our national project? We don’t want to be offered a seat at the table; we demand to be in the kitchen with you, cooking the meal together.
"We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand."
—Thomas Paine, Common Sense
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