The Black American Party advances the producer class of the Black American community — through ownership, enterprise, constitutional principle, and economic solidarity. What is good for Black Americans is good for all Americans.
Socialism steals the products of production. The party supports capitalism, and distinguishes a safety net from an economic program.
Socialism steals the products of production. The Black American Party supports capitalism.
The distinction from the previous chapter is precise and worth keeping. Communism takes the means - the factory, the land, the firm. Socialism, in the founder's formulation, takes the output: what the enterprise produced, reallocated by an authority that did not produce it.
Consider who is on each side of that transaction at the moment the policy arrives. A community that has just begun to accumulate - whose firms are young, whose margins are thin, whose first generation of owners is still alive - is a community whose gains are the newest and the most easily taken.
Established capital is protected. It has lawyers, structures, jurisdictions and lobbyists, and it has had decades to arrange itself. The Black American corner enterprise has a lease and a line of credit. When output is reallocated, it is reallocated from whoever is least able to resist, and this community has been on that end of every previous reallocation in American history.
We are not late to accumulation by accident. Arriving at last and being told the products of production now belong to everyone would be the oldest trick in our national experience wearing a new coat.
It is not saying there should be no floor. The welfare chapter states plainly that this party supports a safety net for all Americans against hunger and homelessness, and the minimum wage chapter states plainly that it supports a living wage for all laborers.
Neither of those is socialism, and the confusion is usually manufactured. A floor beneath a market is not the abolition of the market; public roads and public schools are not the abolition of private enterprise. This party distinguishes between a society that guarantees nobody starves and a system that reallocates the products of enterprise by authority. It supports the first and rejects the second.
A safety net is a floor. Ownership is the objective. A party that offers only the floor has offered managed dependency, and this community has considerable experience of being managed.
Every institution proposed in this platform - the community bank, the directory, the procurement pipeline, the land acquisition, the estate that survives its founder - is a claim on ownership. That is what we are asking for. Not a larger share of somebody else's output. Our own.
Be suspicious of any political offer whose main promise is what you will receive. Ask what it says about what you will own.
The distinction is the whole of this platform's economics, and it is the distinction that both major parties have avoided putting to this community for sixty years.
The party opposes it. Socialism reallocates the products of production by authority, and the Black American Party supports capitalism and Black American ownership.
Communism takes the means of production - the factory, the land, the firm. Socialism takes the output that enterprise produced.
Because a community whose accumulation is newest and thinnest is the least able to resist reallocation, while established capital has lawyers, structures and decades of arrangement.
No. The party supports a safety net against hunger and homelessness and a living minimum wage. A floor beneath a market is not the abolition of the market.
Be suspicious of any political offer whose main promise is what you will receive, and ask what it says about what you will own.
The reputation is undeserved and the record says so. The party supports a safety net for all Americans against hunger and homelessness.
We have served in every American war. The party honors the armed services, rejects foreign command over them, and demands better for veterans.
Neglected by our community for too long, though we are called to fight disproportionately. The party supports military action in defense of American borders.
The party supports a living minimum wage for all laborers - and treats it as a floor beneath the ownership agenda, not a substitute for it.
Communism steals the means of production. The Black American Party supports capitalism - and intends for Black Americans to own capital.
The party supports the free practice of religion for all Americans, and recognizes what the Black church built while the state was not protecting us.
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