It’s Time To Talk About Capitalism
People pay their respects outside the scene of a shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., Sunday, May 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
The shooting in Buffalo spotlights the taboo topic we must discuss: the link between hypercapitalism and racism.
I was going to sit down and finish up some longer writing projects this weekend. But then the shooting in Buffalo happened, where it appears that a white supremacist 18-year-old drove 200 miles to kill Black people in one of the most African-American neighborhoods in New York state.
It’s a horrifying tragedy, immediately harkening back to the 2015 mass murder at Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s church in Charleston, South Carolina. Law enforcement officials say that the murderer had researched the mass murder of 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2018.
As a Black person, I have the biggest news-generated pit in my stomach since George Floyd’s murder. It feels as if American society is becoming unmoored from its foundations and we don’t have any coordinated approach — as people on the left, as workers, and as Black people and people of color — for how to respond.
The central problem with the social media age is its neverending cacophony. Silence and contemplation are never allowed. As a result, responses to mass murder almost immediately begin to conform to folks’ prior views — on gun regulation or on white supremacy, typically, but also a broader set of assumptions about how society is and should be organized. When tensions are so high, honest conversations are difficult.
And yet, those conversations must happen — and we cannot honestly talk about racist mass murder without talking about capital and the profit system.
We are not being honest about violence if we ignore the profit motive in weapons manufacturing.
We are not being honest about racism if we ignore the profit motive in the racism that makes non-rich white people identify their problems as Black people instead of the white people who control the global economy.
We are not being honest about the context of violence if we ignore economic inequality.
We are not being honest about media-fueled hate if we ignore the profit motive in news and social media companies that make money off outrage.
In short, we are not being honest about what’s happening if we ignore how hypercapitalism brought us to this moment.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. said to his staff in 1966: “Something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
By making explicit the connection between racism and capitalism, we honor the legacy of Black thinkers who have explored this question — Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Assata Shakur, June Jordan, Lorraine Hansberry, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, bell hooks, and Claudia Jones, to Robin D.G. Kelley and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor today.
Papering over these links between racial and economic inequality, then, is also papering over Black American intellectual history.
By skirting around the solution to the problems that all of us in the global 99 percent face, we’re not honestly diagnosing the disease and taking steps to address it in the body politic.
Particularly in the U.S. — where the socialist branch of the labor movement that brought us the eight-hour workday, the weekend, and Social Security was crushed in the McCarthy era and never recovered — we must start explaining the virtues of worker control over production and worker power in politics, and how it addresses the problem we face: The rich make every economic decision in society, while treating workers as subhuman.
"Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children,” King said.
The one percent — like Rupert Murdoch, the misanthropic owner of Fox News, and TV host Tucker Carlson — uses racism to get a portion of the white 99 percent to act against their own economic interests.
We need to reduce that one percent’s power if we are going to successfully fight racism.
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To do that, we must also acknowledge painful truths beyond merely the Republican Party’s open embrace of fascism. We must also acknowledge the Democratic Party’s complementary role creating fertile ground for that fascism.