Cornel West: Without opposing the status quo, people won’t have dignity.

After almost one week of protests all over the US, the cracks of the capitalist system, more clearly revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic’s mass deaths and unemployment, could be more accurately described as canyons.

“We have overwhelming evidence of the madness, failure of the American capitalist system, hand in hand with the feeble democratic experiment called the USA." - Cornel West, Economic Update: Cornel West on Pandemic Capitalism

"Those accumulated injustices, outrages, tragedies have now finally produced the uprising that was always coming but took a long time. We are in the midst of a prolonged war, a class war, in which the employer class, a small minority, wages war on the mass of people... Will this be the time when white and black people understand that the system is the problem, not each other? It'll be hard, that's why it's worked so well to keep capitalism in place. But it's the key issue. Don't be divided and learn the power of organizing yourselves” - Richard Wolff, Wolff Responds: Protests and Class War

A system that unreservedly and fundamentally minimizes one human’s rights and freedoms in the name of profit cannot be allowed to return to “normal”.

"How are we going to make sure that the plight and predicament of the weak and vulnerable would begin with class analysis and embraces anybody catching hell [so that] we’re able to come together in mass opposition without this one narrow “ism” or narrow ideology, but rather a movement, motion, momentum, against the greed, against the hatred, the contempt, the indifference to the suffering of others?... Without massive opposition to the economic, political, and cultural status quo in place—the critique of capitalism and white supremacy and the empire—people are not going to be able to live their lives in dignity.” - Cornel West, Economic Update: Cornel West on Pandemic Capitalism

How do we not divide ourselves? How do we embrace anyone catching hell? How do we organize ourselves as an intersectional movement that protects and empowers the weak and vulnerable while uniting for a common goal?

We listen. We self-educate. We leverage our privileges. We center those impacted and elevate their voices.

Here is a small compilation of resource and reading lists that we are sharing in the hopes they can help guide compassionate and effective advocacy.

In solidarity,

The d@w Team

Democracy at Work