Richard Seymour: At any rate, the Bernie Sanders campaign is shortly going to become the Hillary Clinton campaign. So ultimately, what happens to Bernie’s speeches doesn’t matter hugely. It may be annoying, but it’s a triviality. But Black Lives Matter, or rather the movement with which it has become synonymous, isn’t going to go away. And it is far more important to America’s long-term future. It might be too much to expect a Third Reconstruction, but even the discussions among the political leadership now about cutting imprisonment rates suggest that it has already leveraged an existing division in the power bloc about the existing modes of racist oppression. BLM has embarked on the process of breaking down the carceral state, putting manners on the cops, ending the death penalty, chastening the racist media, and weakening the racist ideological bonds which consolidate right-wing political coalitions. Summoned into existence by the furious, exasperated, spontaneous grassroots responses to the repeated, legalised murders of African Americans, it has had to confront not just a racist police force, and racist courts, and racist prosecutors, and racist politicians, and racist media, and racist juries, but also the difficulty of trying to build some sort of activist infrastructure anew and form new alliances – and to somehow circumvent the threat of cooptation by the NGO-Democratic Party nexus. Where do the Sandernistas want to be in all this? Do they really want to say that they spent this time complaining about the movement because a couple of activists disrupted the campaign of an old not-very-radical, ‘colour-blind’ social democrat? More here.