Art McGee:
> If that means that an actual POWER and MONEY SHIFT is about
> to take place, where Wynton Marsalis can tell Pavarotti to
> kiss his ass or get off the stage, then that will mean
> something. This bullshit appreciation crap is NOT what I'm
> concerned about. I want a shift in POWER and MONETARY
> COMPENSATION. I don't want civil rights, I want HUMAN
> RIGHTS. I don't want affirmative action, I want REPARATIONS.
> I don't want integration, I want REPARATIONS. I want MONEY,
> LAND, and POWER. UNDERSTAND? I don't give a fuck about
> bullshit liberalism. Black people need revolution and a
> shift in the power paradigm. GOT IT? ...
Reparations* as they're usually described don't lead to a shift in the power paradigm. In order for reparations to be meaningful, it would be necessary to retain liberal capitalism and its intrinsic class war, in other words, to move around some of the money and personnel while maintaining the established order of things intact. The class war would continue to drive and expand social fault lines like race. The poor would continue to be murdered, robbed and defrauded. Within a liberal context, of course, these considerations are no reason not to demand reparations, since all these things will happen anyway, and liberal worship of property should require that just debts be paid. But if a _shift_in_the_power_paradigm_ is desired, rather than the sham or mummery of one, then anarchy and communism are required, and these would render reparations irrelevant because the framework which would give them meaning would have been abolished.
* Just to make myself perfectly clear: I'm speaking here about real, cash-on-the-barrelhead, per-stirpes payments of substantial money owed to people in general, not modest movements of funny money between politicians, bureaucrats, and institutions. The latter is simply a case of the bourgeoisie taking money out of the left pocket and putting it in the right and will have no effect on anything beyond some specialists' careers.