06 July 2019

Bruce Dixon: a Relentless Warrior for Socioeconomic Justice

BRUCE DIXON, managing editor and co-founder of Black Agenda Report, the only Leftist publication on this planet I regularly applaud and salute in near-total agreement, was slain by cancer 28 June 2019 -- another devastating loss of the sort that (as always) makes me wonder at this disease's apparent penchant for targeting effectively radical activists throughout the United States. 

The italicized passages below are from Ann Garrison's eulogy for him in CounterPunch, an informative piece I urge you to read in full. Likewise the two selections from Black Agenda Report itself:  
 
(...)

A year ago, after the Left Forum, he wrote “What Would an Authentic 21st Century US Left Look Like?

(...)

An authentic left, he concluded, must be independent of the Republican and Democratic Parties, independent of corporate and church philanthropy, unconditionally opposed to empire and white supremacy, and class conscious in its opposition to capitalism. He also wrote that it must give birth to a revolutionary working class party and create “economic and social organizations which prefigure the world we want to build.”

(...)

Every time he and fellow organizers made electoral advances, he said, the Democratic Party changed the rules to undermine them.
 
(...)
 
I once asked him whether the Greens might be better off putting their energy and resources into, for one, creating community gardens in major cities all over the country, and he responded that most of the community gardens he knew of had been shut down by those with wealth and power. There is indeed no sign left of Los Angeles’s famous South Central Farm, the largest urban farm and perhaps the greatest community organizing success in the US from 1994 till 2006, when it was bulldozed by a real estate developer.
 
(To read the remainder of Ms. Garrison's informative piece, go here. Please also read  "Bruce Dixon, in His Own Words," here, and "For Brother Bruce," here.) 
 
If what CounterPunch now acknowledges is the USian Empire's methodical, Final-Solution-type scheme of weaponized ecocide and genocidal tyranny -- the likelihood of which you read about first on Dispatches -- is ever replaced by genuine liberty, Bruce Dixon will most assuredly be recognized as one of the truly heroic figures in U.S. alternative journalism. 
 
Meanwhile, thanks entirely to the great generosity of friends and comrades, I am gradually getting back on-line, about which more later.
 
LB/5 July 2019
 
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