The nation that considers itself to be the apex of capitalist achievement on planet Earth turns out to have no health care system worthy of the name–a testament to the sucking moral vacuum at America’s imperial, white settler colony core. A lowly virus–a form of being that exists at the very border between “life” and “not-life”–has revealed the world’s superpower as butt-naked and very much afraid.

Why go back to the 1920s when the militant white supremacists of current generation are either products of, or influenced by, the “third Klan” of the 1970s and 1980s?

It has always been clear to Black Agenda Report that the post-Sixties betrayals of the Black Misleadership Class necessitated that a future Black liberation movement must be largely an internal Black struggle to uproot the corrupted elements in our polity. False unity has become Black folks’ Achilles Heel, allowing Black charlatans free rein in our communities and reserving most elected positions for servants of Capital. The Democratic Party is a predatory edifice of Black disempowerment, from which our people must either free themselves, or become agents of their own perpetual oppression and accomplices in the degradation of humanity, worldwide.

After the outbreak of the most intense and massive social protests ever recorded in the history of Chile, on November 16 the government and most political parties signed an agreement to restore peace and public order and initiate a process to draft a new constitution.

The protests, triggered by the rise in subway fares on Oct. 18, called into question the supposed Chilean success story of the neoliberal economic model implemented in the country during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989). Developed by the so-called Chicago Boys, successive administrations since the 1990 return to democracy in 1990 sustained the model as state policy.

If a Chilean was told a year ago that in a few months he would find popular assemblies in his neighborhood to give his opinion and decide on the future of his country, he surely would not have believed it. But it’s happening. October 18, 2019, marked a before and after in Chile. The social uprising that began with high school students jumping the turnstiles of the subway is now requiring new forms of organization.

One of the most extraordinary phenomena is the thousands of these assemblies that were created in every corner of the country. Just as during Argentina’s crisis in 2001, neighbors are meeting to comment about their reality and take concrete measures against the repressive model headed by President Sebastian Piñera.