The Jackson-Kush Plan

Saw an article referencing this article the other day and finally got around to looking at it. Long and rambling in some parts but interesting and enlightening as to the mindset that is undermining the fabric of America in many urban areas.

It reminds me of a conversation I overheard about 20 years ago in my hometown between a young guy and an old guy. The young guy was back in town visiting family and was asked if he considered moving back. He responded with no (referencing the Chicago area) that there were so many more opportunities for "our people" to gain power, referencing government. No mention of private sector jobs, educational opportunities, or what would typically be considered "American Dream" opportunities, but the opportunity for power through government.

I've never forgotten that. Reading this article, it makes me wonder what our country will look like 50 years from now with all of the external forces working at times in concert and at other times independently to reshape America into something it was never intended to be. Groups like this are waging a war of attrition it and seem to be progressing toward their goal, and gaining momentum with each decade. The article covers about 40 years and shows how these groups are targeting specific areas as opportunities to centralize and gain power through the election process.

A new-society vision in Jackson, Mississippi

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By March of 1971, when the mayor’s story began, Lumumba was an officer in the Provisional Government. The organization had made an oral agreement to buy twenty acres of land from a black farmer in Bolton, Mississippi, a small town about twenty miles west of Jackson. They had hired a contractor to build a school and dining hall on the property. The site would be named El Malik after the name Malcolm X had taken for himself: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. March 28, a Sunday, had been chosen as Land Celebration Day, when the group would inaugurate the site at El Malik.

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The starkest difference between the PG-RNA’s and the Jackson-Kush Plan’s new-society visions was in the stance on engaging with the country’s established system of electoral politics. The PG-RNA’s leaders had based their call for a new society on the argument that the federal, state, and local governments were illegitimate, since they had long relied on broad disenfranchisement to amass their power. MXGM revised this stance: A central goal described in the Jackson-Kush Plan was the development of progressive political candidates who, if elected, could support the goals of economic democracy and self-governing People’s Assemblies from that elected office.

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Kali’s mind, Cooperation Jackson is an experiment; his hypothesis is that living and working in fully democratic communities will change the people involved. One of the experiment’s first steps, he believes, is for people to realize how capitalism has shaped them and to recognize how alternatives could refresh their perspectives. He picked up on this week’s slide and began. The class was continuing its guided tour through Marx’s Capital. Under discussion today was Marx’s concept of exchange-value. Kali asked if someone would volunteer to read the first slide. After a silence, a woman wearing a green cloth headband over graying dreadlocks and strings of beads around her neck complied. She read:

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Kali then ticked off Jackson’s problems and listed the municipal operations facing privatization or takeover by the state: the water system, the schools, the whole of downtown. “We’re setting ourselves up to administer the most severe austerity the city’s seen probably since the Civil War. . . . We have to be clear that if we fail, that’s not just MXGM failing, or Chokwe Antar failing. That’s a failure for the left in this country.”

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Free the land!” he called out three times as he concluded his address, raising his right fist high above the rose boutonniere pinned to his lapel. “Free the land!” the city of Jackson called back to him.

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