Regardless of its outcome, the January 5 runoff election for two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia represents a historic convergence. It joins together the 150-year-old Southern freedom movement, led by African Americans, with the national battle for justice being waged by people all across the United States, especially by the most marginalized who are struggling to secure the basic necessities of life. The elections of 2020 defeated Donald Trump, arguably the most racist, divisive, and fascistic president since the days of Jim Crow, but it has left the American people deeply uncertain about their future in the midst of an unchecked pandemic.
Up to 30 million people are currently unemployed, and things are about to get a whole lot worse. Pandemic unemployment assistance ran out on December 16, and the Cares Act extended unemployment insurance is expiring on December 31, as well as eviction prevention, mortgage forbearance, the freeze on student loan replacement, and the federal emergency loan program for small business. This impacts not only impoverished communities but also airline workers, health workers, teachers, government workers, and millions more whose jobs will be permanently replaced by bankruptcy or labor-replacing technology.
As early as November 5, CNN reported that the stock market was rallying because it anticipated a divided government, where Democrats would control the presidency and Congress while Republicans would hold onto control of the Senate. “Such a combination will lead to more moderate policies including a quick stimulus deal but limited tax increases,” it reported – because it would block the government from taking action to meet the needs of the people.
Southern Movement
Together with the New Georgia Project and dozens of other groups, the South’s historic social movements built a powerful voter registration and turnout movement that not only led to Trump’s defeat in Georgia but forced the two US Senate races into a runoff election that could be decided in favor of Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
The South has always been the key to ruling class political control of American workers. Over a century and a half, Wall Street has deliberately cultivated a long line of reactionary and fascistic Southern politicians who have relied for their power on segregation, white supremacy, terror, and voter suppression. The Georgia runoff election system itself was created to prevent African Americans from ever winning statewide office. Southern politicians have, in turn, led virtually every national campaign to weaken labor laws, block Medicaid expansion, and criminalize poverty with mass incarceration and immigrant detentions. The full weight of the knee of American capitalism has always been pressed on the neck of working and poor Southerners.
Southern oppression has not gone unchallenged, but for many decades people toiled in relative isolation. The Southern movement for land, equality, economic democracy, and voting rights arose out of necessity through bottom-up social and political infrastructures. This work accelerated after Katrina and then erupted this summer, with the onset of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. People refused to allow the murders of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery to go unanswered. Millions took to the streets and emerged as a social force. Fifty-seven percent of voters in the nationwide November election identified themselves as Black Lives Matter supporters. This was the motion that energized the sophisticated and resourced organizing that defeated Trump in Georgia and created the opportunity to flip the Senate.
On the Ground
After the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Georgia, along with dozens of other states, began passing restrictive voting laws: exact match, voter roll purges, polling place closures, especially in majority Black rural counties, and restrictions on early voting. Fair Count, Fair Fight, and the New Georgia Project responded by building an electoral and legal infrastructure to register and organize voters, launch legal challenges to voter suppression, and help make Biden’s Georgia victory possible. But their work rested on Georgia’s long legacy of fighting voter suppression. Some of the key work was done by people that still live on the land where their enslaved ancestors picked cotton in Southwest Georgia.
Grassroots organizations built Mutual Aid Centers, registered new voters when they turned 18, performed “no contact canvassing,” collected testimonies for court cases, and mobilized the youth to be poll watchers and provide water, masks, and sanitizer to voters. They warned voters when their registration was purged, or their polling place changed. They prepared people to demand that every vote be counted, knowing that millions were using absentee ballots to avoid COVID-19. The Democratic Party was their only available vehicle, and Biden was their only choice. As Project South wrote, “We won in Georgia. But let’s be clear, Southern freedom movements did not do it for the Democratic Party; we did it to save ourselves.”
Fighting for Our Future
The lessons of the Southern movement are that it is never about one election. It is about taking one more step forward in a lifelong battle for justice. Perdue and Loeffler are not only multimillionaires, but they openly represent the powerful alliance of big finance and big pharma/healthcare and their death grip on the working class. Like the movement to defeat Trump, the battle to defeat Loeffler and Perdue has to draw on every single sector of society concerned with democracy and racial and economic justice.
If the Democratic Party wins control of the U.S. Senate, it could have control of the executive and both legislative branches of the national government. There will be no excuse for inaction. Workers and voters across the country will be able to press their demands for pandemic relief and basic needs and expose any elected officials or political leaders who stand in their way.
The Georgia election confirms once again that the American working class will win when it understands the strategic role of the South: that it is currently an obstacle to a national movement for basic needs, but that it has the potential to unleash revolutionary transformation. This represents a turning point in the struggle for class unity and the path to power, but it is also more. The unity of these movements, in the South, and across the country, is also a question of ideals and of a common vision for the future of America. Communities throughout America share the same aspirations for control over housing, food, education, healthcare, and our very destiny. The role of revolutionaries is to unite with this vision, never let it go, and participate, learn, create, fight, study, and teach.
The pandemic is hastening the discarding millions of workers from steady employment or even any employment at all. Revolutionaries engage these workers with the vision of the society that can be created when they wrestle government away from the corporate rulers who are abandoning our people to die. Human beings have it in their power to create a government that provides for human needs and creates a flourishing society and planet.
Published: December 16, 2020
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