Angela Davis

Since the rise of global capitalism and related ideologies associated with neoliberalism, it has become especially important to identify the dangers of individualism. Progressive struggles—whether they are focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues—are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism. Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective, always also achieved by the men and women who were his comrades, the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual.

You see, we think individualistically, and we assume that only heroic individuals can make history.

1912 when the textile workers went out on strike.

The Wobblies publicly proclaimed that

(t)here is only one labor organization in the United States that admits the colored worker on a footing of absolute equality with the white—the Industrial Workers of the World.…

Every inequality and disability inflicted on American white women is aggravated a thousandfold among Negro women, who are triply exploited—as Negroes, as workers, and as women.53

The continued relegation of Negro women to domestic work has helped to perpetuate and intensify chauvinism directed against all Negro Women

“(t)oo many progressives, and even some Communists, are still guilty of exploiting Negro domestic workers.”

In the United States and other capitalist countries, rape laws as a rule were framed originally for the protection of men of the upper classes, whose daughters and wives might be assaulted.

They have also understood that they could not adequately resist the sexual abuses they suffered without simultaneously attacking the fraudulent rape charge as a pretext for lynching.

The reliance on rape as an instrument of white-supremacist terror predates by several centuries the institution of lynching.