The National Executive Committee of FRSO/OSCL is pleased to announce that Camino Press has published a new book: The Cost of Privilege: Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism. This book is a comprehensive account of the key role that white supremacy plays in our society and of how white privilege functions as the basic building blocks of that system. The book also looks at the history of how this system developed, how it is deeply tied into other forms of oppression, and what we need to do to organize and overturn white supremacy.

The Cost of Privilege is an important contribution to revolutionary strategy in the United States. Understanding white supremacist national oppression as a method of social control and domination is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms that have obstructed virtually every progressive social movement over the last several hundred years. Racial oppression is central to the construction of US capitalism.

Throughout progressive social movements there has been a long history of both failing to understand and attempting to avoid addressing racist oppression in the USA. First, racism is regularly separated off from US capitalism as if it were some sort of add-on, that can just as easily be added-off. The view that US capitalism can be understood as some sort of pure economic formation onto which have been added racism, sexism, etc., leads to unsuccessful strategy. Second, for too many progressives, even when there is an understanding of the importance of racist oppression, there is a tendency to believe that the force of it as a system is so overwhelming that it cannot be addressed directly, but must be addressed through indirect appeals to unity based on alleged common interests in non-racial objectives.

This book challenges the analysis of racist oppression that abstracts it from the realities of US capitalism, and takes on the strategic (and tactical) implications of confronting it. Fundamental to this book is the notion that racist oppression is both central to US capitalism, but also that it can be taken on. Perhaps more importantly, it must be taken on if there is any hope for a progressive movement in the USA, let alone, any hope for socialism and internationalism.

We encourage you, the readers, to delve into this book and the issues that it raises. We further encourage you to study this with friends and comrades alike, using this to move badly needed discussions about how to unify our movements on the basis of the recognition that white supremacist national oppression cannot be avoided; that our movements are already divided; and that unity only happens when one recognizes the divisions.

Socialism will not be won by ignoring white supremacist national oppression.

We urge all readers of this website to visit the book's website. You can order the book online there, buy it from your local FRSO/OSCL member, or order it from the independent bookstores listed on the book's site.