Barbara Ransby: Without challenging the right to autonomous leadership of local struggles or leadership by those most affected by racial capitalism and state violence, the larger left has to support, recognize, and embrace Black Lives Matter, not as secondary, but as central and potentially catalytic for a broad and far-reaching transformative agenda. This understanding must be linked to action. For example, Bernie Sanders’s campaign, the most progressive among the Democrats, must develop a deeper analysis of the racialized nature of U.S. capitalism. He must listen to the young activists who interrupted the Netroots conference and the August rally in Seattle to demand a stronger position against structural racism. The environmental justice movement simply cannot have speaker lineups with no black voices. Organizations that work on issues affecting people of color must also interrogate anti-blackness within their ranks. And the left media must ask how this movement can inform its coverage and analysis of all issues, not just supposedly “black” ones. The brilliant veteran organizer Ruth Gilmore explains that the prison abolition movement is not just about abolishing unjust institutions, but about building just alternatives. Similarly the insistence of Black Lives Matter on the value of all black lives, especially the most marginalized and oppressed, is nothing less than a challenge to all of us to rethink, reimagine, and reconstruct the entire society we live in. And what a daunting and beautiful challenge that is. More here.