GARVEY
From:	e.
To:	trevoroche
Date:	Sat, May 4, 2019 4:52 pm

Leo Smith Good. And you might also lighten up with the labels. You may be right about the calculation by the west that repatriation would diminish them either in the west itself or in their ability to reap African resources in the continent. But this is a complicated issue.

Garvey taught--and I read this within the last year or two--that we were needed for labor, and when we weren't needed any longer we were expendable. (Brother James Baldwin said the very same thing, but MMG said ity 100 years ago.) We are no longer needed for paid labor, but concentration camp labor in the prison-industrial-system works. So you're right about neo-slavery.

The Civil Rights movement was a rouse (good intentions and brilliant work notwithstanding) It came about at the high point of American civilization, when energy resources and consumption were at their highest. This enabled the plenty to somewhat generously spread around. Now, as energy resources dwindle, the available economic pie has shrunken, meaning there isn't that much to spread around, leading to us-against-them strategies to get what is left. Since the Civil Rights game was to integrate into into a disintegrating building, it has no answer for these times of intensified racism. (We can go into why Civ. Rts policy was so misguided some other time.) But I will repeat that MMG could see the systemic nature behind this 100 years ago.

I do not take everything MMG said as gospel. I look for the underlying idea. I doubt that he could have seen the rapid, near term collapse of  European empire, or the environmental catastrophes and overuse the system was wreaking. He was all to guilty in his promotion of industrialism for the African. But those are details. He understood the underlying need for African nationalism...at home or abroad. I submit that, even now, in 2019, there is scarce comprehension of that need, here or anywhere else on Facebook.

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