Demands from BLM: the leftist response
It is a (genuinely) exciting development for anti-racist politics that a basic statement about the intrinsic humanity of one minority group has become somewhat uncontroversial. When even Mitt Romney has taught himself to say that “black lives matter”, we know we are experiencing a momentous shift in attitudes. This creates a space in which anti-racists might get a hearing when they advocate for tangible policy changes. Many left-wing groups are using this moment for precisely this purpose. Here, I intend to discuss and prioritise the kind of policy changes leftists are advocating for, with a focus on strategic considerations.
Racism in capitalist societies: a feature, not a glitch
For those seriously interested in dismantling the racist architecture of our modern societies, it is important to understand what the genesis of racism is, and why it appears so persistent despite almost everybody paying lip-service to wanting it gone. There are at least three schools of thought about racism: conservative, liberal, and leftist. The conservative view of humanity as in some sense “fallen” sees racism as an inherent part of humanity. In the same way that Palaeolithic humans would have been suspicious and fearful of other nearby settlements, so modern humans are intrinsically fearful of other humans that do not “look like them”. In this account, racism has always existed, as a natural human attribute. Eliminating it is therefore a long, difficult process which will never reach its full fruition. The liberal view appears to be broadly that racism is a terrible historical accident, which can be overcome when people realise they have to start being nicer to each other. Recent history suggests the limitations of this approach.
The leftist understanding of racism benefits from a materialist approach. Racism is not an accident, nor is it intrinsic to human nature, but rather is rooted in capitalism. Wallerstein draws a distinction between xenophobia, the fear of the other which underpins the pessimism of the “fallen humans” perspective, and racism. Racism in this account is not a natural human response; it is a modern ideology which legitimises the unequal division of wealth. Universalism and “racism-sexism” are in contradiction within capitalism, and it cannot survive without either. Without a de jure commitment to universalism it is not possible to get the kind of flexible labour markets that capitalist economies require; without racism-sexism, it is not possible to legitimise the objective fact that the fruits of labour are not disinterestedly apportioned. Indeed, there is strong historical evidence for this. Vanessa Williams shows here that the genesis of modern racism myths in the US might have come directly from an attempt to stratify the working class and to buy support for the system.
Why does this matter? Precisely because if this account is correct, then racism is not an unfortunate or superficial fact about modern society. It is a necessary and deep feature of life in a capitalist economy. The anti-racist struggle is therefore as much an economic struggle as social struggle. As Marx wrote about other oppressive ideologies, “To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.” To attempt to shake white people out of their illusions of superiority is to desire a move to a post-capitalist society which does not require racism for its legitimacy. This means, firstly, that taking down some statues, performatively begging black citizens for forgiveness, taking a knee, and using the right hashtags will not do it. Neither will viewing this as a narrow issue of police brutality. Those who would genuinely want to live in a world where “black lives matter” will have to commit to supporting radical economic change as well. Secondly, in the short term, policy measures which alleviate the suffering of racial minorities under capitalism need to focus as much on the economy as reforming the justice system. The criminalisation of poverty is a necessary aspect of capitalism. Therefore, alongside reforms which decriminalise having black skin need to come reforms which abolish black poverty. Incidentally, this means that middle-class white people who support anti-racist movements had better realise that this might not be painless for them. In the short run, giving up their unequal share of the pie is going to hurt, possibly even more than learning that they never deserved it in the first place.
Racism is not a glitch in capitalism but a feature, and as such anti-racism requires a complete revolution in society. I do not claim this as an original point. The Black Lives Matter organisation and movement has been making this argument for some time. The realisation does, however, provide an important background to what policy demands anti-racists should be making now. To be clear, any policy that might improve the lives of racial minorities is welcome and leftists should definitely support it. However, we must be clear that any policy proposals along the lines of, “let’s be nicer to black people for a change” is only moving the dial from racism to universalism within a capitalist ideological framework, and as Wallerstein puts it, capitalism is prone to “zigzag” between the two anyway. In other words, do not expect this to lead to a sustainable improvement in black lives.
A typology of policies by stickiness
Policy stickiness occurs to the extent that a policy creates its own political constituency, with the power and resources to defend it. It should be obvious that this is of crucial importance to any leftist policy proposal, since whenever advances in the condition of the working class go beyond those required to reproduce labour and secure consent for the system, there are powerful interests ranged against us which aim to reverse them. Korpi and Palme show that when it comes to poverty alleviation programmes, social insurance models are more effective in providing for redistribution because they earn the buy-in of middle-class voters, thus expanding the social welfare “budget”. This construction of powerful interest groups capable of resisting retrenchment from the right tends to be vital in determining the fate of progressive institutions. Duane Swank shows empirically that larger welfare states were generally more robust during the period of post-1970s retrenchment. Pierson makes this argument in the US context. Anecdotally, large, comprehensive social programmes such as Medicare appear to be difficult to repeal. Applied to the issue of anti-racism, the implications are that we should prefer sticky anti-racist policies, which give real political power and resources to ethnic minorities. Of course, the only truly sticky anti-racist policy is a revolution in the organisation of society such that there is no longer an unequal distribution of resources and no ideological justification for it is any longer required. As Paul Mason describes, this looks like the gradual erosion of capitalist economic institutions by the creation of new non-market ways of organising society, so that the capitalist economy is eaten from the inside out in the same way that capitalism did to feudalism. In the meantime, however there are some policies leftists can push for which will be sticker than others. What follows is an attempt at classifying them. This is in a US context, but much of the analysis largely extends to other countries.
Criminal justice system reform: very unsticky
The US criminal justice system is deeply racist, for (at least) three reasons. Firstly, if the criminal justice system predominantly criminalises the violence associated with poverty, and the economic set-up has an uneven distribution of income with respect to different races, then black Americans will inevitably end up getting arrested more. Secondly, the police is used throughout the US as a form of racist state violence. This fascinating study from Jackson and Carroll shows that even once crime and illegal black activism is controlled for, police resources are predominantly allocated to those cities which had the most engagement with the African American civil rights movement. In other words, the police are there (partially, not exclusively) as a form of legal state terrorism directed against racial minorities. Thirdly, the content of US laws is designed to be racist. Designed. In case you think this is conspiratorial, here is John Ehrlichman, architect of the war on drugs in the Nixon administration, on where it comes from:
“We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news”.
I will leave it to the reader to speculate on what the racial breakdown of arrests and imprisonments for drug-related crime might look like.
Understandably, much of the response from the anti-racist left has been to propose to reform the US criminal justice system. Frankly, in terms of policy proposals that can be enacted locally, this makes an awful lot of sense as a political strategy. De facto decriminalising cannabis and other drugs can be done easily and quickly at a county level if there is political will. More radical reforms have also been enacted, and might include an end to failed broken windows policing in favour of a public health approach to violence and crime. This has been found to be effective in the past. These are policies which can be put into place immediately at a local level.
They are strictly limited, however, in the following respects. Firstly, while it might be possible to reverse some of the criminalisation of African Americans, if you do not deal with poverty, you are making a dent at best. Secondly, this blunts any attempts at a public health approach because it turns out that income inequality is a significant risk factor for crime. Criminal justice reform itself will not cut it.
Crucially, though this strikes me as an “unsticky” policy. It does not in any sense create a powerful interest group and arm them with the resources to defend themselves. While lessening the burden of state terrorism might allow African Americans to mobilise politically, political mobilisation per se does not appear to protect these communities much. The last 400 years should be evidence enough of this. This might be a “moment” in which fleeting white sympathy allows space for these reforms. The sympathy of rich white people is no substitute for genuine political and economic clout, though, and these proposals do little on this score. The upshot is that when the political mood changes, these reforms might end up being reversed with little effective opposition.
Targeted poverty alleviation: moderately unsticky
Any movement serious about improving black lives in the US has to have a plan for poverty. This is not just because African Americans are over-represented amongst the poor in the US, but because economic resources translate into political power. The most sustainable way to improve the wellbeing of the US’ black population is to give black communities resources, and that means financial wealth, which will allow them to build their own durable institutions, to lobby, donate as well as organise, providing a counterweight to the power of the establishment which, as we have discussed, has material interests in oppression of racial minorities.
Given this, it is tempting to think about cheap government programmes which target the poor in order to most effectively reduce poverty rates. In a vacuum, this can work. It is a myth that the war on poverty did not reduce poverty. Desegregation also made black lives better. However, these type of reforms are simply not sticky. At the risk of recapitulating the argument above, many of the reforms from the war on poverty could be repealed by the Nixon and Reagan governments. Because it was relatively concentrated, small groups who benefited, pseudo-intellectuals such as Charles Murray were able to zero in on the poor, who were disproportionately racial minorities, and demonize them as “welfare queens”. The most durable outcome of the social reforms of the 1960s is Medicare. Why? Precisely because it is universal, and popular amongst its recipients.
Once you have such a powerful, large constituency in support of a policy, it is difficult to remove it.
With this in mind, I want to discuss a zeitgeisty proposal on the left: the Federal job guarantee. This is the idea that the Federal government would replace existing support for unemployed Americans with a guaranteed (well-paid) job. On balance, leftists should support a Federal job guarantee. Undoubtedly, it would have some excellent effects, including general equilibrium effects on wages in the private sector. It would also in my view have some potentially reactionary effects, not least devaluing unpaid work, potentially turning disabled people into second class citizens, and undermining social rights by establishing a principle that a minimum income is not an unconditional right. I will focus on my concerns about its stickiness, however. A Federal job guarantee has a larger constituency in its support than unemployment benefit because there are people who might benefit from the option of a well-paid job but not from a small welfare cheque. It still falls significantly short of a universal programme. Single parents of young children who cannot work full time would not get significant benefits; undocumented people would not benefit; disabled people would not benefit; the retired would not benefit. On the other hand, next time there is a squeeze on profits resulting from higher labour costs, there will be strong interest groups pushing for the abolition of any such plan. For this reason, it strikes me that this proposal falls short of the stickiness threshold, and were it enacted, I would not be surprised to see its subsequent repeal.
Political rights: moderately unsticky
It is a stretch to call the US a democracy today, if it ever could be described as such. As Cheeseman and Klaas argue, the way autocrats rig elections these days is not through anything so gauche as ballot-stuffing, but by using the apparatus of the state to tilt the playing field in one’s favour: disqualifying opponents, disrupting voting in areas where you expect the other team to get votes, administrative processes designed to systematically exclude the other side’s voters, and so on. The US is a masterclass in gerrymandering, targeted disruption of voting, and intimidation of voters that would make Vladimir Putin proud. If the steady creep of this consistent undermining of basic principles of democracy does not raise concern, then the behaviour of the current president should.
But the most significant hit to African Americans’ political rights in recent years was the 2013 ruling of the supreme court, Shelby County vs. Holder which pulled the rug out from underneath the crowning achievement of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Specifically, this act banned the literacy tests that had been used to prevent racial minorities from voting in Southern states and New York, and crucially froze in place other arrangements, such that any further revision of electoral rules needed to be cleared by the Federal government. The Supreme Court decision in 2013 suspended this on the grounds that the criteria used to determine which counties and states needed to pre-clear electoral arrangements was based on data from the 1970s, and that congress needed to come up with a new formula. This gave the green light for a series of voter suppression practices across Southern states, including the introduction of voter IDs, and large decreases in the number of polling stations in areas high in racial minorities. As Ang shows, these laws had real effects on voter turnout, racial minority turnout, and support for the Democratic party.
The very least that should be on the cards is a new civil rights act, that rectifies the supreme court’s concern about the formula and also bans the voter ID laws. One might have thought that Nancy Pelosi would have found doubling down on this demand an even more effective method of advancing the cause of anti-racism than kneeling with Kente cloth. Obviously, Republicans in the Senate would veto it, but it might nevertheless be a method of putting pressure on ascendant white supremacists. I would go a step further, and introduce legislation which would permit non-American citizens to vote in local elections, analogous to laws in much of Europe. This would have the advantage of bringing undocumented voters, disproportionately Latinx, into the formal political process, allowing them to mobilise to elect local politicians who would be fierce defenders of their right to access government services, and a bulwark against ICE.
The limits of electoral politics are obvious from this side of the fiasco that was the 2020 Democratic primary. It is increasingly clear that the Democratic party will attempt to throttle at birth any attempt at genuinely revolutionary politics. Political rights for African Americans are also moderately unsticky, because Republicans in government and the law have a consistent incentive to find inventive ways to undercut them. However, the right to vote is a component of citizenship, and the claim that black lives matter might reasonably be thought to extend to the formal citizenship of black Americans. It also has the advantage of being the kind of proposal that liberals will have trouble opposing. When our liberal suburban swing voters realise that the political battles lines are between those who support Martin Luther King’s crowning achievement and those who are trying to undermine it, that might bring home to them quite how racist the United States really is.
Universal rights and services: moderately sticky
As per the political science literature cited above, any universal benefit that all citizens benefit from is difficult to reverse because it creates with it a large constituency which has an interest in defending it. This is why despite the best attempts of the right, universal healthcare has never been abolished in the UK. The purpose of these policies in the context of BLM is to empower racial minorities with the financial resources they need to build strong political institutions.
Obviously Medicare for All (M4A) should be a no-brainer for the left. Healthcare as a human right is not controversial in most developed countries, theoretically private provision of healthcare has never made sense, there is no particular evidence that the US healthcare system as is functions especially well, and there is evidence that expansion of decent health insurance reduces financial hardship. It has an outsized effect on people’s welfare because as well as eliminating catastrophic out-of-pocket medical expenses, it eliminates the risk of these. That allows people to plan better, and make investments in other things that matter to them.
There is a strong case for going beyond this, however. Philosophically, once it is accepted that citizens ought to have the unconditional right to healthcare, it becomes difficult to argue they do not have an unconditional right to the other things they require in order to be fully autonomous. One natural response to this is the Universal Basic Income (UBI). Much like the Federal jobs guarantee, there is something to this and the left should back it if ever given the opportunity. It is likely to be stickier than the Federal job guarantee because it is universal. However, there are significant drawback: firstly, it is likely to be expensive. Andrew Yang's proposal of $1000 per American adult would cost an annual 12 x $1000 x 333 million = $4 trillion, or about 18% of GDP. For that, although an unconditional $1000 per month would be extremely helpful in alleviating the suffering of many poor Americans, we don't get an especially transformative effect. $1000 per month would not allow most Americans to live autonomous lives. For comparison, if, say, only 20% of Americans are taking up the offer of a Federal job, then this can be provided more cheaply. truly transformative UBI would be even more expensive. Secondly, a UBI might have the effect of reinforcing inequality. Middle class Americans used their stimulus cheques to invest in stocks. There is a danger that a similar effect might occur if a more permanent UBI were implemented. This might lead to an explosion in the cost of housing, for example, which would be counterproductive for the groups it is primarily supposed to support. Thirdly, a UBI does nothing to transform the economic environment. A UBI would be used to continue to subsidise rip-off health insurers, fossil-fuelled energy, supermarket chains like Trader Joe’s and Kroger which have used the Pandemic to undermine their employees’ economic and political rights.
On the other hand, the concept of Universal Basic Services (UBS) is less susceptible to many of these criticisms. It has several advantages. Firstly, providing all Americans with free access to shelter, food, healthcare, education, transport, information, and legal and democratic services is the ultimate liberation from economic want. More so than a UBI or Federal job guarantee, it ensures access to these things. It would also furnish the working class and racial minorities with an assurance of the full complement of resources they need to build a rich political ecosystem to agitate for better political change. Secondly, it shrinks, rather than enhances social polarisation. Take the opportunities that having a car gives a person. With a free, comprehensive, and reliable transport network, these advantages more or less disappear. This is not true for either of the other two proposals for empowering the working class which I have discussed. This might have a transformative effect on the nature of human interactions. Creating such a breathing space might allow for the creation of non-market relations between people, the “cracks” that John Holloway talks about as the source of our post-capitalist future. Thus, it takes us a step closer to the kind of economic and social relations where society will no longer require racism for its legitimacy. Thirdly, with the exceptions of food, housing and legal and democratic services, the provision of these goods for free is a standard prescription in most first-year undergraduate economics textbooks. In other words, from the perspective of strategy, these are things which the left should be able to make common cause with liberals on. I am not naïve enough to think that these are achievable political goals in the short term. However, using the crisis to highlight the ways in which poorer African Americans are disadvantaged and demanding policies to rectify them might enable progress to be made in many of these areas.
The importance of inter-racial solidarity
The final point I want to make on political strategy is about the importance of creating a political agenda which welds together a coalition of racial minorities and the progressive wing of the white working class. As Diane Abbott once said, white people love playing divide and rule. The left’s policy programme has to be carefully crafted to snuff out any such opportunity. This is particularly a problem with policies which extend the scope of citizenship, since it brutally leaves out undocumented people. It is hard to see a Federal job guarantee working for those without a social security number, for instance. Consider the brutal de facto apartheid this would produce, with undocumented (again disproportionately Latinx) workers the only ones still willing to do jobs which pay wages below the newly established floor. Many universal services, such as M4A, would create similar problems. If the left pushes a policy agenda which leaves out non-black minority groups, there is a danger that the right will attempt to co-opt these groups in the same way it has co-opted part of the white working class. Anyone who doubts the right’s ideological flexibility in this regard is not paying attention.
This should not be too difficult. It means, as far as I can see, pushing for any extension of social and political rights to go as far as possible, transcending barriers of formal “citizenship”. Many of the universal basic services proposed above will be instantly attractive to the progressive white working class, but it is important that they are also articulated in this way. It also means maintaining the left’s commitment to LGBTQ-rights, and women’s reproductive and economic rights. By the way, this is another reason to dislike the Federal jobs guarantee, as it is likely to undermine the citizenship status of caregivers, predominantly women. The left should be bringing all working class women into their coalition where possible. As Paul Mason puts it, the left needs to become the non-existent “cultural Marxists” the right fears so much, creating an iron coalition of progressive groups which cannot be divided up.
Conclusion
Who knows how long this moment will last? Perhaps it has already passed, but I doubt it. I think there remains a clamouring from large parts of society to know what can be done about systemic racism in the US. Hopefully the two major themes here (recognising racism as an artefact of as well as a cause of the unequal distribution resources, and focusing on reforms which might have meaningful effects in empowering African Americans to defend those gains once middle class white Americans go back to not caring) provide some sort of pointers as to how the left should respond to this moment to have a meaningful lasting impact.