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LA Progressive
Ruling Class Counteroffensive in the Works
*Ruling Class It’s Capitalism, Stupid*
*https://www.laprogressive.com/capitalism-2-2/?fbclid=IwAR3_J8qdVqdcaVDExAWM0gI8KngQxN1zMvi4GXCjVNzVNIYPJrvmQhEqevE
*
*A*s anti-racist protests continue unabated across the United States,
the ruling groups have been forced momentarily onto the defense by the
sheer scale of the uprising, the first full-scale pushback against
global police state
<https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/the-global-police-state/> in the
richest and most powerful country in the world. Yet absent a more
frontal attack on the root causes of racism, the uprising may be hard
pressed to resist a counteroffensive from above involving a combination
of repression, mild reform, and cooptation.
The powers that be are already embracing the language of struggle
against “systemic racism.” Racial justice is now being espoused by
political and economic elites. CEOs of major global banks and
corporations whose policies have perpetuated racial inequality have
taken the knee, declared their “solidarity”
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/14/donald-trump-racism-american-oligarchy>
with aggrieved communities, as have Democratic and Republican Party
stalwarts, as they attempt to commodify and convert “black lives matter”
into a corporate logo. Lest the anti-racist struggle end up emptied of
its transformative potential it must identify and target capitalism as
the system that gave rise to and continuously reproduces racism.
Ethnic, racial, gender and sexual oppression are not tangential but
constitutive of capitalism. There can be no general emancipation
without liberation from these forms of oppression. Yet the opposite is
equally true: there can be no liberation from these forms of oppression
without liberating ourselves from capitalism.
“We never negated the fact that there was racism in America, but we said
that the by-product, what comes off capitalism, that happens to be
racism,” noted half a century ago Fred Hampton
<https://mronline.org/2020/06/11/fred-hampton-black-panther-and-red-revolutionary/>,
the charismatic Chicago leader of the Black Panther Party shortly before
his extra-judicial execution by the FBI and Chicago police in 1969.
Hampton went on: “That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That
when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the
idea came that we want to make money, then the slaves came in order to
make that money. That means, through historical fact, that racism had to
come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a
byproduct of that.”
*To the extent that the struggle against police brutality is
limited to targeting disproportionate police violence against
racially oppressed communities the less we will be able to
confront the underlying structural causes of this violence.*
Yet Hampton’s anti-capitalist perspective appears, at least at this
time, to be largely absent. To the extent that the struggle against
police brutality is limited to targeting disproportionate police
violence against racially oppressed communities the less we will be able
to confront the underlying structural causes of this violence. Racist
police are but an extension of the capitalist state. They exist to
defend property from the propertyless, to enforce the power of capital
and the rich over the poor and dispossessed majority who in the United
States come disproportionately from racially oppressed communities. In
the big picture, the solution is not to reform law enforcement since law
enforcement means enforcing a legal system that under capitalism is
intended to protect the rich and the powerful from the poor and the
dispossessed through criminalization of the latter or simply through
enforcement of property rights.
As is now well known, the top one percent of humanity owns over half of
the world’s wealth
<http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more-338125>
and the top 20 percent own 94.5 percent of that wealth, while the
remaining 80 percent have to make do with just 5.5 percent. Such savage
social inequalities are politically explosive and to the extent that the
system is unable to reverse them it turns to ever more violent forms of
containment to manage immiserated populations. The police are a
coercive instrument of the capitalist state to control surplus labor,
the poor, and the working class. In the United States, workers from
racially oppressed groups disproportionately swell the ranks of surplus
labor, as do worldwide those from the Global South.
The police are the visible frontline of the capitalist state. It is
they who come into direct contact with those dispossessed and
marginalized and who are responsible for controlling them. Capitalists
and elite whose wealth and power are protected by the police do not go
into the streets to confront poor black people and workers; they command
quietly from corporate boardrooms, banking and financial houses,
foundations and government offices. We cannot do away with police
violence and mass incarceration without doing away with surplus labor,
that is, doing away with the system that relegates tens of millions in
the United States (and several billion worldwide) to the margins as
surplus humanity.
From 2015 to 2019, a total of 4,885 people were shot and killed by the
police
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/>
in the United States, 1,295 of those black, compared to 2,471 white.
While the rate that blacks are killed by police is more than twice the
rate for whites, the greatest danger to black lives comes from the
economic violence of capitalism, which takes hundreds of thousands of
black (and other) victims of unemployment, occupational hazards,
malnutrition, substandard housing, homelessness, lack of access to
health care, exposure to toxic wastes, and so on. More than 5,000
workers die on the job every year
<https://aflcio.org/reports/death-job-toll-neglect-2018> as a result of
work injuries, the majority of them preventable, and another
50,000-60,000 die each year due to occupational diseases (worldwide more
than two million workers
<https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/03/workplace-death-health-safety-ilo-fluor/>
die at the job every year). Predictably, Blacks are overrepresented in
this group
<https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.88.1.40>, not
because of racial discrimination per se but because they are
overrepresented in the most hazardous (and least remunerated) occupations.
In the United States workers and poor people have escalated their
struggles since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. In Amazon
warehouses, meatpacking and auto plants, supermarkets, hospitals and
nursing homes, they undertook a wave of strikes and protests as the
coronavirus spread to demand safe working conditions and hazard pay
(note that these frontline and essential workers come disproportionally
from racially oppressed communities), while tenants called for rent
strikes, immigrant justice activists surrounded detention centers and
demanded the release of prisoners, and homeless people took over homes.
Yet there appears to be a disconnect between these worker-led struggles
in the capitalist economy and the black youth-led anti-racist uprising.
This has to change if the anti-racist movement is not to peter out and
become reincorporated into the hegemonic order as repression,
cooptation, and fatigue take their toll. The secret to moving forward
the mass anti-racist struggle is to link it with mass working class
struggles, and this involves targeting the roots of racism in capitalist
exploitation.
*Global Capitalism has been mired in an intractable crisis that is
as much structural as it is political and that has intensified
many times over by the pandemic.*
Global Capitalism has been mired in an intractable crisis that is as
much structural as it is political and that has intensified many times
over by the pandemic. Structurally, the system faces a crisis of what
is known as overaccumulation, which refers to a situation in which
enormous amounts of capital (profits) are accumulated, yet this capital
cannot be reinvested profitably and becomes stagnant. Politically,
capitalist states face spiraling crises of legitimacy after decades of
hardship and social decay wrought by neoliberalism, aggravated now by
these state’s inability to manage the health emergency and the economic
collapse.
Capitalist crises are times of intensified class and social struggle.
We are on the eve of a massive new round of class and social struggle
worldwide. From Chile to Lebanon, Iraq to Hong Kong, and France to the
United States, these struggles reached a crescendo in fall of 2019 and
were acquiring a radical anti-capitalist character before the pandemic
lockdown pushed protesters off the streets. The working-class actions
and the anti-racist uprising in the United States are part of this
broader worldwide upsurge in mass struggle.
*Where is the Socialist Left?*
There is another disconnect in the current moment, between the social
movement in the streets and an organized left that could give it a more
coherent anti-capitalist direction. The millions of young people
risking life and limb in the streets can hardly be blamed for failure to
link the anti-racist to anti-capitalist and socialist struggle. That
responsibility lies in my view with the failings of the socialist left
and the betrayal of the intellectuals
<https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/planetize-movement-robinson>, for
no struggle of the oppressed can be without its organic intellectuals.
The mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s opened up space for
representatives from the oppressed groups and others who had earlier
identified with the radical agenda of those mass struggles to join the
ranks of the professional strata and of the elite. In academia, it
opened up space for a new intellectual petty-bourgeoisie whose class
aspirations became expressed in post-modern narratives and identitarian
politics, and most notably in a visceral rejection of the radical
critique of capitalism and of a socialist vision. These narratives
shaped the consciousness and understanding of a whole generation of
young people, alienating them from embracing a desperately needed
critique of capitalism at the moment of its globalization.
With the apparent triumph of global capitalism in the 1990s following
the collapse of the old Soviet bloc, the defeat of Third World
nationalist and revolutionary projects, and the repression of radical
working-class struggles, many intellectuals who previously identified
with anti-capitalist movements and emancipatory projects put forth an
identitarian politics of reform and inclusion. The most such a politics
can aspire to is symbolic vindication, diversity (often meaning
diversity in the ruling bloc), non-discrimination in the dominant social
institutions and equitable inclusion and representation /within/ global
capitalism. It is no wonder that the corporate and political elite came
to embrace as its own the politics of “diversity” and “multiculturalism”
as a strategy to channel the struggle for social justice and
anti-capitalist transformation into non-threatening demands for
inclusion if not outright cooptation. The strategy served to eclipse
the language of the working and popular classes and of anti-capitalism.
Upturning monuments that symbolize racism is an act of symbolic or
discursive justice than by itself is not a fundamental threat to the
system, so long as these acts can be isolated from demands for more
fundamental social and economic transformation, which is why they are
now being embraced by many political and corporate elites. Changing the
names of military bases may be satisfying as a demand for symbolic
justice, yet it does not change the fact that these bases house military
forces that exist to intervene around the world on behalf of capital and
empire, and that blacks are overrepresented in the military because they
are overrepresented in the ranks of surplus labor and enjoy the least
opportunity for satisfying employment in the civilian economy.
The ruling groups are momentarily on the defensive and deeply divided on
how to respond to the crisis of legitimacy and the erosion of capitalist
hegemony. They are pursuing a strategy of accommodation to symbolic
demands and mild reform. But if history is anything to go by, they will
launch a counteroffensive that will attempt to reimpose and consolidate
the global police state just as soon as a correlation of social and
political forces becomes more favorable for them to do so.
*A*s fissures and splits in the ruling bloc become more acute they open
up opportunities for counter-hegemony from below whose development will
require a radical critique of capitalist exploitation that links race to
class. The significance of millions of people rising up against racism
around the world cannot be overstated. Popular forces cannot squander
this moment of acute capitalist crisis. We are at a crucible.
*William Robinson*
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