Under Capitalism Black Lives Are Adrift and Vulnerable

By W. T. Whitney, Jr.

Originally published at Monthly Review.

It’s true. Too often, in too many circumstances, for too long, the lives of Black people in the United States don’t matter. Black people fill prisons; their children fill terrible schools; many are poverty-stricken. But at issue here are the killings and people being left to die.

Post-Civil War arrangements by which the victorious North settled with the defeated slavocracy ensured that many Black people would not matter much and that some would die. A thousand or so were murdered in the South in 1866, reports W.E. B Du Bois. Over 2000 more would be lynched during the Reconstruction years, as documented recently by the Equal Justice Initiative. [1] That organization had already documented and memorialized thousands of lynching deaths occurring between 1877 and 1950.

The police killings of Black people prompted the formation of Black Lives Matter. But they die unnecessarily in others ways. Life expectancy is far shorter and infant mortality far greater for U.S. Blacks, for example, than for white people.

According to journalist Adam Serwer, writing in the Atlantic,

The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy.” Specifically, “workers at the front lines of the [COVID-19] pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability.

Significantly, even white people viewed as worthless may be in trouble. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, commenting on the Covid 19 pandemic, told a reporter that “there are more important things than living. And that’s saving this country.” Representative Hollingsworth of Indiana identified Coronavirus deaths as “the lesser of these two evils,” the other being economic collapse.

That white people die because they don’t matter is revealing.  They too may be disposable—if they are unnecessary, in the way, or far off. The victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden are remembered, as are indigenous peoples decimated by settlers and invaders, and civilians and combatants dying in U.S. wars. The political powers seem to be at ease presently with the probability that millions will be dying soon due to climate change.

Dan Glazebrook, writing for Counterpunch, is a witness. He asserts that, “one product has defined capitalism above all else: human waste.” Criticizing Britain’s management of the COVID-19 crisis, he notes that,

Superfluous people, not necessary for production, not able to participate in the market, and an ever-present threat to the stability of the system [are] the main output of the bourgeois epoch.…. [S]urplus Europeans were exiled…to the colonies…to continue the process of exterminating surplus non-Europeans.

Glazebrook cites urban theoretician and historian Mike Davis’s observation that up to 3 billion informal workers constitute “the fastest-growing and most novel social class on the planet.” But this “is not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense: a backlog of strikebreakers. [It’s] a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and the corporate matrix.”

Marxist scholar Andy Merrifield identifies some people as “residues.”

They’re minorities who are far and away a global majority. They’re people who feel the periphery inside them, who identify with the periphery, even if sometimes they’re located in the core. Residues are workers without regularity, workers without any real stake in the future of work…. A lot of these residues know that now work is contingent [and] life itself is contingent.

George Floyd’s life was contingent. The lives of U.S. Black people who don’t matter are residues.

Under capitalism, human beings are valued for their use. Enslaved, Black workers were useful, even essential. Then their agrarian society merged with the larger one embarked upon industrial production and territorial expansion. They acquired a distant master that, like the old one, measured the worth of workers with an economic yardstick.

Black agricultural workers, bereft of education, their ancestors stolen from Africa, didn’t fit the capitalist mold. European immigrants ready to work in factories or to occupy land being opened up by the railroads amply fulfilled capitalist objectives.  From Reconstruction on, Black people were marginalized in a country where social needs are neglected and public attention distracted. Violent thugs threatening them have had free rein.

Du Bois in his Black Reconstruction in America (1935) offers an explanation for how the failure of Reconstruction led to limited political rights for Black people and exclusion from real participation in the larger society. Initially,

the reconstructed states were in the power of the rebels and…they were using their power to put the Negro back into slavery.” But the North “united its force with that of the workers to uproot the still vast economic power of the planters. It hoped…to induce the planter to surrender his economic power peacefully, in return for complete political amnesty.

The northern business class was insecure: “the Republican party which represented it was a minority party.” But “united with abolition-democracy [with its] tremendous moral power and popularity,” the party hoped to “buttress the threatened fortress of the new industry.” Giving Blacks the vote “would save the day.” The Republicans sought to nullify apportionment based on non-voting slaves, as provided for in the Constitution. Southerners had relied on that device to inflate their representation in Washington.

But poor whites in the South regarded Blacks as wage competitors. Landowners proceeded to “draw the color line and convince the native-born white voter that his interests were with the planter class.” Poor whites “thought of emancipation as giving them a better chance to become rich planters, landowners, and employers of Negro labor.” They wanted “to check the demands of the Negroes by any means” and were willing “to do the dirty work of the revolution that was coming, with its blood and crass cruelties.”

In the North, “Abolitionists failed to see that…the nation did not want Negroes to have civil rights and that national industry could get its way easier by alliance with Southern landholders than by sustaining Southern workers.” And so, “labor control passed into the hands of white southerners, who combined with white labor to oust northern capitalists” and themselves manage a southern-style capitalist economy.

What resulted remained for decades. Wages for Black people, initially non-existent or very low, stayed depressed. Aspiring Black landowners met resistance, eventually at the hands even of New Deal officials. Because the methods of exploitation available to southern overlords, sharecropping and the convict-leasing system, were less profitable than those available to northern capitalists, the material value of southern Blacks stayed low.

Most Black people were barred from occupying a sustainable niche in the productive apparatus of the U.S. economy. They’ve verged on the irrelevant, remaining as a “residue,” at risk of being disposed of.

Nevertheless, the U.S. political system has been open enough to allow many Black people to find remunerative work, elevate their social-class status, and be safe. Even Black workers defied expectations: in 1950, 43% of Black men in Michigan were working in the auto industry. [2]

The argument here has centered on social-class difference. But racism, which operates as a means for imposing differentiation among humans, also had a part. The notion of racism elaborated by political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. is relevant. Reed explains that racism showed up historically as a tool devised by oppressors for dealing with social conflict. He claims that white settlers and other exploiters configured differences among humans—physical, cultural, and religious plus others fashioned out of upper-class snobbery—into an all-embracing concept of race. They thus gained the ability to weaponize inequalities within human society, the better to enforce oppression.

One example: southern elites, from Reconstruction on, arranged for Blacks and the white underclass to be at each other’s throats. Their northern counterparts did likewise, leaving it so that Blacks and whites don’t easily unite in common struggle.

Racism serves as an adjunct to classed-based oppression. Causing pain, it works for maintaining social-class boundaries. The combination of the two has resulted in Black people being left with a generally precarious role within U.S. society and with vulnerability to lethal violence.

Some basic ideas, no less true for being platitudinous, may suffice to conclude this effort. One, an injury to one is an injury to all. Two, ruling class prerogatives and oppression travel in the same lane. Three, dedication to equality, radical or otherwise, does matter.

Anti-colonialist intellectual and activist Franz Fanon has the last word: “For my part, the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology.” You need to replace “Africa” with “USA.”

W. T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician.

Notes

[1] “Reconstruction in America–Racial Violence After the Civil War, 1865–1876,” Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, Alabama, pp. 118.

[2] Victor Perlo, People vs. Profits, (International Publishers, NY, 2003), p. 181.

Time, Money, and Lives: The Simple Math of Viral Mass Murder

By J.E. Karla

The masses make history, and the mass pushback against a premature end for social distancing efforts has compelled Donald Trump and his allies to relent. Yet for a brief, shining moment markets soared at the mere suggestion of an early end to anti-virus hygiene measures. For the most reactionary leaders -- those like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- the tradeoff of lives for money is ongoing.

How does this calculation work? To understand, just look at the famous chart going around to demonstrate the need to “flatten the curve” of virus cases.

There are three significant numbers represented by this image: the area under each curve, the threshold extending from the y-axis (number of cases), and the x-axis (time). They are each most significant to a different audience.

The public at large cares most about the areas under the curves: how many people are going to get this disease? Am I going to get it, or will someone I care about get it? The bigger the area, the more likely you are to be touched by the virus. Related to this, of course, is a number not represented in the graph: how many will die from it. 

The second number -- the threshold -- is relevant to that question, and most significant to public officials and health professionals. This is the number of cases that the health care system can safely handle at any one time. The area bounded by it and the top of the curve has a dramatically higher mortality rate than the area below it.

The third number is most relevant to the capitalist class -- how long the plague lasts. Capital is bound up with time, as it represents surplus production, the amount of time the capitalists can make workers produce beyond the point at which our labor power has been paid for. The longer the shutdowns last, the less capital is generated. Furthermore, capital not invested in the persistent circulation of goods and labor is not capital at all -- a pause in production poses an existential threat to the system as a whole.

So there is a contradiction at hand between earnest policymakers and the capitalist class. Public health experts and the officials listening to them are desperate to keep the curve as low as possible. This means saving lives (the priority of the public at large) at the expense of a longer duration for the crisis; social distancing reduces the reproduction rate of the virus until it runs out of steam. Capitalists are just as desperate to shorten the duration by simply exhausting the supply of uninfected people as quickly as possible, even if it means many more deaths -- perhaps into the millions.

For them there is really no downside. A disproportionate number of those who die will be old or poor, meaning that a mass die off would likely entail an increase in productivity and a reduction in social support costs. Any bottom line impacts will get covered by a bailout of one sort or another.

The capitalists also own the media so they can control the narrative -- “this is not a time for politics, it’s a time for charity” -- and they have very conveniently placed a hated buffoon as the figurehead of the enterprise so they can blame him and pretend they never liked the idea all along if they need to. They’ll swap him out for another stooge that will kill for them when the time comes, granting symbolic catharsis to outraged liberals happy to see their 401(k)s back in the black.

Worst-case scenario, they can push towards a new world war with China and hide their culpability under a blanket of jingoism. They’ve already begun that play, and it’s worked many times before.

Only a mass revolt would upend their calculations, and history has shown that at crucial moments they have underestimated that risk. This has a strong possibility of being one of those times, but they prepared for this long ago, using a combination of state violence and philanthropic assimilation to suppress and NGO-ify popular movements. The best-case scenario: near-spontaneous and ad hoc mass formations like the Occupy movement. Look for bourgeois openness to social distancing to reawaken at that time.

Until then let’s be as calculating as the enemy. Let’s maximize our creativity and flexibility. Let’s match their disregard with compassion, and their chauvinism with a global perspective. Let’s trust the masses as much as they fear them. Most of all let’s realize that we actually share one thing with them, namely the thing we lack the most: time.

Black Lives Under Surveillance: A Review of Simone Brown's "Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness"

By Brandi Thompson Summers

Modern capitalism has always placed an undue burden on black bodies. Slavery, forced labor, and dispossession have moved hand in hand with forces of surveillance and the power of the state. In cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Oakland-and countless others that have never reached national awareness-abysmal economic conditions have found an intimate partner in police patrols, drones, security cameras, and citizen-on-citizen reporting.

Today, poor communities of color are under constant surveillance and on the receiving end of brutal market forces. Where high unemployment, inadequate public transportation, and segregation are the rule, surveillance performs the work of control. Rebellions against state-sanctioned violence are inspired by feelings of both oppression and neglect, a contradiction at the core of capitalism's relationship to black people and black bodies. The supposed freedom and equality of the marketplace depend upon the contempt of the overseer.

Our American capitalism, founded in slavery, bore the antagonist twins of blackness and surveillance. Examining this birth and its afterlife, Simone Browne argues in her recent book Dark Matters, will help us come to grips with contemporary practices of surveillance that are often coded as technical and race-neutral advances in safety and security-and are usually anything but. Through her analyses of maps, newspaper articles, fugitive slave advertisements, slave narratives, personal correspondence, government documents, memoirs, and treaties, Brown exposes how blackness was shaped and produced through surveillance practices during slavery.

Slaves were a particularly unpredictable form of capital-they could congregate, organize, plot, and even escape-making their traceability essential. Browne examines the finely honed architecture of slave ships to show how important surveillance was to making black bodies into property, extracting wealth from their humanity. The capitalist discipline of black bodies starts with the design of this "maritime prison," the site of horrifying violence that thousands of men, women, and children did not survive. The strict compartmentalization of slave bodies, stacked one on top of the other, functioned to limit slave insurrection and other kinds of resistance. Furthermore, the documentation and examination practices that took place from slave trafficking ports on the African coast, through the Middle Passage voyage across the Atlantic, to slave auction blocks and plantations, prefigured modern carceral institutions meant to regulate and discipline black bodies.

Even in freedom, black bodies required surveillance. Government records such as the Book of Negroes instituted the tracking of black bodies through written text. This 18th-century document listed three thousand Black British Loyalists (self-emancipated former slaves) who boarded British ships to Canada during the American Revolution. The Book of Negroes, Browne argues, was the "first large-scale public record of black presence in North America," used by slave owners to distinguish fugitive slaves from freed black subjects.

Both before and after formal emancipation, capitalism marked blackness as a visible commodity. Defining the spaces where black bodies could or could not reside or move, what activities in which they could or could not engage, "racializing surveillance," as Browne names it, lay in what John Fiske calls the "power to define what is in or out of place." [1] Such social control, Browne notes, bound surveillance to the violent practices of making and deploying racial hierarchies that plantation owners and others could exploit for profit.

Accurately measuring, counting, and sorting black bodies also required constant visibility. So, slavers employed violent technologies like branding and "lantern laws" to account for slaves and deter escape. Lantern laws were instituted in cities like New York and Boston in the 18th century and required black, indigenous, and mixed-race slaves to carry candle lanterns after dark. Legislation like New York's "A Law for Regulating Negro and Indian Slaves in the Night Time," approved in March 1713, demonstrates how state-enacted technologies were used to surveil and control black populations. "Black luminosity" via lantern laws, as Browne suggests, operated as a "form of boundary maintenance occurring at the site of the black body, whether by candlelight, flaming torch, or the camera flashbulb that documents the ritualized terror of a lynch mob."

The surveillance of unfree black bodies remained central to capitalism's dominance post-emancipation. After the Civil War, oppressive systems like "Black Codes," convict leasing, and sharecropping tied black bodies to the land, despite the fact that they were no longer legal property. These repressive measures generated significant revenue for several Southern states and were fundamental to the economy after slavery. States like Alabama relied heavily on convict leasing in coal mines, with nearly 73 percent of the state's total revenue coming from the system in the late 19th century.

The state-enacted Black Codes, in particular, both established the architecture of modern policing and ensured black people's limited access to capital. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explains in 'From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Black Codes' were "imposed only on African Americans, criminalized poverty, movement, and even leisure." In some cases, laws prohibited the congregation of black people after dark and required black workers to be monitored by and in the service of their former owners. This legal subjugation of blacks in the postbellum South was justified under the logic of the tragically familiar language of "law and order." As Taylor argues, police were used to enforce various measures that limited black movement, black work, and even the right to accrue property.

Because capitalism has relied on the subjugation of black people as workers and largely excluded them from its material benefits, the specter of black uprising and criminality provokes police departments and other authorities to develop and adopt novel technologies of surveillance, like biometric measurements that verify, identify, and automate the production of bodily evidence. Deployed under a rhetoric of racial disinterest, these innovations draw on the long history of tracking blackness. They are far from identity-neutral. Recently, Georgetown University's Center for Privacy and Technology has found that police departments around the country use facial recognition software that track and racially profile African Americans disproportionately. [2] Biometric surveillance technologies form the background of urban life and continue to manage black freedom and mobility.

The protection of property underlies such quotidian acts of surveillance. In an effort to "curb shoplifting," Georgetown-area businesses worked with police through a mobile app, "Operation GroupMe," to secretly message each other about "potential suspects," who were almost always black. [3] Empowered by the ubiquity of surveillance and the ease of digital media, the race vigilante takes on the guise of the citizen shopkeeper.

In the post-civil-rights era, a black elite has emerged who have benefitted from the spoils of capitalism. They do not share the interests of the black poor or working class. As these elites have risen to political leadership they have intensified surveillance of those excluded from capitalism's prosperity. They have blamed "bad people" for making "bad choices," rhetorically cleaving black communities into deceitful criminals who must be monitored and virtuous citizens who deserve protection. The political elite then roll out more surveillance to protect precarious black wealth.

Taylor argues that surveillance also allows some political leaders to profit from the same population of poor black citizens they profess to protect. For example, Randy Primas, the first black mayor of Camden, NJ, supported the New Jersey Department of Corrections' construction of a $55 million prison in the largely black neighborhood of North Camden. Taylor quotes the mayor's bald declaration: "I view the prison as an economic development project. In addition, I think the surveillance from the two prison towers might stop some of the overt drug dealing in North Camden." Primas linked the building of prisons to increased employment, increased city revenue, and reduced crime. Yet this project also turned the landscape of North Camden into a prison itself. Watchtowers now surveil both those inside and outside the prison's gates. This kind of surveillance does more than impose the eye of the state on formally free neighborhoods; it marks North Camden as black, rendering the city subject to ever more monitoring.

It is because of this tacit connection between race, surveillance, and capitalism that, Taylor shows, we have seen the proliferation of the police state, expansion of the prison industrial complex, and laws putting more poor and working-class black people in debt and prison. No wonder, then, Black Lives Matter has emerged, even under the nation's first black president. Taylor argues that the movement constitutes a point along the decades-long arc of black community resistance to widespread police brutality and racial violence under capitalism. Over the past 40 years, we have encountered a War on Poverty, War on Drugs, and War on Terror, all of which increased surveillance and consolidated power in the hands of law enforcement. The proliferation of the police state, expansion of the prison-industrial complex, and laws putting more poor and working-class black people in debt and prison tie together race, surveillance, and capitalism in ways that both demand resistance and help to explain the rise of BLM.

State surveillance of BLM and similar organizations should be expected. Everyday practices of surveillance join the exceptional targeting of artists, writers, and musicians (especially hip-hop artists) under the guise of national security. [4] Extralegal programs like J. Edgar Hoover's infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which ran between 1956 and 1971, explicitly targeted and attempted to disrupt black civil rights organizations, activists, and leaders. Most recently, as detailed in a 2016 ACLU report, law enforcement agencies employed a powerful surveillance program using data from social media sites to track protest activity in Oakland and Baltimore. [5] Black Lives Matter has deftly employed social media to expose the killing of black men, women, and children at the hands of law enforcement, yet the medium is an especially ambivalent space, as government agencies track social media and employ surveillance tactics to monitor organizers and activists. [6]

How then can we transcend capitalism and challenge the strictures of surveillance? Browne employs the term "dark sousveillance" to introduce the "tactics employed to render one's self out of sight." Dark sousveillance, she argues, is a productive space "from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance." At the same time, exposure and visibility can be tactics of freedom, as for example in the use of camera phones to film police. Dark sousveillance can be a means of achieving parity with the state, Browne contends. "What does it mean," though, "when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?," as Audre Lorde famously asked. Lorde also provided an answer: "It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable." [7] Dark sousveillance offers critique, but not resistance. Acts of witnessing racializing surveillance have severe penalties. The civilians who filmed the state-inflicted deaths of Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, and Philando Castile were all subsequently arrested. None of the police officers has been convicted. We must use different tools.

Taylor raises a question parallel to Lorde's: whether the current economic and political conditions, structured by institutional racism, can be altered under capitalism. In other words, can we radically improve and humanize capitalism? The short answer is no. Capitalism continues to be exploited by elites to justify inequality. Rather than searching for new forms of capitalism, we ought to focus on alternatives.

Black enslavement was fundamental to the establishment and growth of capitalism and black oppression continues to feed it. Even black capitalists, Taylor argues, cannot hope to exist outside the constraints of white supremacy. Fighting capitalism requires coming together across the divisions and hierarchies that fuel it. With the recent election of Donald Trump as President, the imperative has only grown more urgent. Capitalism cannot be used to achieve black liberation. Only solidarity will free us all.

This review appeared at Public Books.

Notes

[1] John Fiske, "Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism," in Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 15, no. 2 (1998), p. 81.

[2] See Craig Timberg, "Racial Profiling, by a Computer? Police Facial-ID Tech Raises Civil Rights Concerns," Washington Post, October 18, 2016.

[3] See "Hip Hop and the FBI: A Little-Known History," Esquire, June 4, 2014.

[4] Matt Cagle, "Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Provided Data Access for a Surveillance Product Marketed to Target Activists of Color," American Civil Liberties Union, October 11, 2016.

[5] See Terrence McCoy, "The Secret Surveillance of 'Suspicious' Blacks in One of the Nation's Poshest Neighborhoods," Washington Post, October 13, 2015.

[6] The Baltimore Police Department, for instance, has implemented various surveillance tools to listen in on calls and track mobile phones and developed secret aerial surveillance programs to trace vehicles and the movement of criminal suspects in the city. See George Joseph, "Exclusive: Feds Regularly Monitored Black Lives Matter since Ferguson," The Intercept, July 24, 2015 ; Monte Reel, "Secret Cameras Record Baltimore's Every Move from Above," Bloomberg Businessweek, August 23, 2016.

[7] Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (1979), in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed., edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Kitchen Table Press, 2015), p. 94.