Comrade Hash, Black Hammer Times Staff
Target, in response to allegations of theft, agrees to pay reparations.
Image by Lorie Shaull
Minneapolis, M.N., Target Inc, a multi billion dollar enterprise has recently come under fire by Black Liberation fighters in occupied Dakota and Ojibwa land.
Under allegations of wage theft, the company responded by allowing community members to seize supplies as repayment.
Financial Scheming
Protesters criticized Target for using a widely practiced exploitation scheme known as white power capitalism. Colonizers have long practiced this con, but like all schemes, it can only last so long.
The scheme works like this: First, the colonizer coerces and steals you, your land, and your resources. Then they buy some expensive machinery to increase their exploitation and force you out of a job.
Our choice becomes whether to work for pennies or starve, while the owner ends up making millions.
Past & Present Theft
Reuben Simeon (R.S.) Goodfellow, the founder of Target, was born into a wealthy Colonizer family in 1840. His father was one of the first in amerikkka to own a power loom, a machine that weaves textiles from cotton.
From the beginning, Target rested all of it’s profits on theft, from using unfair access to private machinery, to exploiting cheap cotton from enslaved Africans, to selling it’s products to other colonizers on land stolen from Indigenous Dakota and Ojibwa people!
The Colonialism of today is not so transparent. Target is no longer allowed to openly steal our land, labor, or resources. Instead, they have to hide their scheme under the guise of white power capitalism by coercing us, the descendants of their previous workers, to be dependent on their exploitative ways.
Disappearing Money
In 2019, Target made $78.11 billion in revenue and oversaw 360,000 workers. Meaning, Target exploited $216,972 from each of it’s workers in one year alone. This comes to $108/hr for a full time worker!
As a sick joke, Target tried to get some good press and provide a false sense of change, by bumping their minimum wage to $13/hr.
If Target makes $108/hr per worker and only pay them $13/hr, there is a surplus of $95/hr which goes to pay the CEO and Shareholder Brian Cornell a $17,204,069 yearly salary.
Let’s not forget the many other parasites swooping in for a share of this surplus , like the banks, which invest in these exploitative schemes, or executive stooges like Laysha Ward (Target’s Chief Corporate Social Responsibility Officer).
The People’s Response
Eventually, capitalist schemes get too big, and they start to crumble.
Working class colonized people start to wake up to the violence baked into the scheme. We notice the inherent police violence to keep it propped up, we notice the denial of jobs and good housing to keep us desperate, we notice when the climate deteriorates and when global pandemics arise because of the scheme.
When this happens, either the capitalist scheme is torn down, like it was in Cuba and so many other colonized nations, or colonialism props it right back up.
Thankfully, Target has opened its doors to the redistribution of wealth and is expected to offer up their headquarters, Target Plaza (47-71 S 10th St, Minneapolis, MN) to the colonized communities who’ve suffered under their scheme. A massive corporation has shown that it is willing to bow to the organized force of the colonized working class.
Colonized leaders are expected to praise the move. Corporate amerikkka, on the other hand, keeps asking “When does it all stop?”
Our answer must always be the same: it stops when the whole colonial system comes down, when colonized working class people have full dictatorship over our lands, lives, and resources!
BLACK POWER!
