Public Enemy / Article + Interview

Public Enemy: Power to the People and the Beats

The famous Civil Rights movement, which began in the fifties with Martin Luther King and reached a climax in the late sixties with the spread of the Black Panther Party, in reality failed to bring a significant improvement in the living standard for the oppressed black minority within the United States. The reformist current inside the movement eventually took over in the early seventies (mostly because of the typical Stalinist mixture of ultra-left and reformist policies of the Black Panther leadership) and directed the movement towards the Democratic Party. The ultimate achievement of this reformist course over the years was the creation of a tiny layer of black petit-bourgeoisie through affirmative action (positive discrimination), which integrated itself into the American white middle class. Most of the Afro-Americans however, remained stuck in the lowest parts of the social ladder to this very day, living in the poorest neighborhoods of the big cities. The economic crisis that hit American capitalism in the seventies and the movement of industry out of the big cities devastated the living conditions for the black minority. From the year 1967 until 1987 Philadelphia lost 64% of it’s industrial jobs, which had been traditionally occupied by blacks. New York lost 58% and, the well-known working class center, Detroit more than 50%. Minority neighborhoods in the heart of the most advanced capitalist country in the world began to resemble third world communities.

See this Link:
http://www.marxist.com/ArtAndLiterature/public_enemy_art.html

The Interview:
"We don’t care what color the oppressor is, it is the oppression that connects us for real"
http://www.marxist.com/ArtAndLiterature/public_enemy_interview.html