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BLACK EXPO: DESIGN FOR UNITY                    
O'DELL

employment for millions, an epidemic of drug addiction in the major urban centers, war casualties in the tens of thousands and a social order in which racism is systemic. 

The choices before us are to organize a bold, creative, liberating thrust, which is indeed possible at this hour, or to be caught up in the general ruin which the present political economy is generating, and be numbered among its chief victims. The power to be mobilized is present in the role of ten million Black voters and its potential in crystallizing a new coalition which can carry through a radical reconstruction of the American political party system. One stage of that continuing process is the work to be done on all levels in connection with the 1972 presidential and other elections. 

The power to be mobilized is present in the more than two million Black and Spanish speaking trade unionists whose fraternal cooperation in action is the key to a rank and file upsurge that can break out of the wage freeze and transform organized labor into a movement once again. Not only are those workers strategically located in significant numbers in such basic industries as steel, ore mining, long-shore, garment and urban transit but by nationality, race and class are linked to the poorest strata of the working population in domestic services and migrant farm labor.

There are also to be mobilized some 470 thousand black college and university student, a majority of whom for the first time in history are attending colleges, North and South, in "integrated" situations, i.e. situations in which they are physically in the position to in-fluence the educational policies of the major universities and to form alliances for such purposes with white students of their generation. 

The Afro-American community in the United States has no "common economic life" exercised on a "contiguous stretch of territory" as fits the classical Marxist definition of the conditions for nationhood and independent state sovereignty. Nevertheless, we are a distinctive community living throughout the common territory of the United States nation on this continent, of which we are historically a component part. As an historically evolved, distinctive community we do have a common economic experience with capitalist exploitation, whether as sharecroppers and tenants in plantation agriculture or as the chronically unemployed, ghettoized population in the urban centers of the United States. The "last hired and the first fired" confined in the main to the lowest paying jobs regardless of preparation, a total experience historically anchored in the slavery period of American economic history. The common economic experience has 

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