The Incompatibility of Capitalism with Black Lives Matter(ing):Toward Deep Structural Change

by Shumaisa Khan

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change. – Audre Lorde

A few weeks ago, I was talking to my mom, who lives in what was formerly Lenape tribal land, by what is commonly known as New York. The conversation had shifted to politics, as it often does, and I mused that a mass uprising in the US would happen in the not-too-distant future - the kind seen in global south countries. I did not realize it would start within a week, nor that it would spread throughout the world.

Much has already been written and will continue to be written about the global Black Lives Matter protests. I encourage you to read and listen to diverse black voices with lived experience of anti-blackness, as I’m sure many of you are doing. [There is a list of a few selected resources at the end of this post, including on addressing racism within Muslim communities]

Bear in mind that while in the US (known as Turtle Island among its indigenous peoples), the collective Black experience is one of far greater levels of injustice than British Black experience, the latter is also abysmal. After all, racism and slavery in the US can be traced back to Britain, and many of the means of oppression used in the US were first practiced during England’s subjugation of Irish people. Both nations’ systemic racism has resulted in disproportionately higher morbidity and mortality from Covid-19 among Black people, and both have a long list of chapters in their sorry tales of structural injustice - Grenfell, Windrush, Katrina, and Flint, just to name a few.

Immediate changes in the education system, criminal justice system, healthcare system and so forth are both necessary and long overdue, and the recent protests have already triggered some changes in US police departments. This is a testament to the power of collective action, both what’s become visible via these mass protests, and the more unseen organizing people have been doing for years. The reality that there needs to be a redistribution of wealth and other resources to level the centuries of inequality is belatedly getting more air time.

Beyond police brutality & protests

Taking just one example of the scale of inequality beyond the policing and criminal justice domain, here is a 2019 article on employment discrimination, highlighting the barriers Black and minority ethnic people face in even getting shortlisted for any kind of work:

“While applicants originating from western Europe and the US were treated almost as well as the majority group, people of Pakistani origin had to make 70% more applications. The figures were even higher for those of Nigerian, Middle Eastern and north African (MENA) origin, at 80% and 90% respectively.”

Employment insecurity, which has implications on housing and food security, is one of the many manifestations of systemic racism contributing to greater vulnerability to Covid-19 among Black and ethnic minority people.

What I would like to draw attention to, and I think this bit is integral from an Islamic perspective, is that capitalism is inextricably intertwined with racism. In simple terms, capitalism is an economic system based on the employer/employee dichotomy, where a relatively tiny group of people control the mass of humanity producing goods and services. The successor to feudalism, capitalism rests on the past enslavement of Black people and ongoing globalized exploitation of Black people and people of color as the cogs of production. The police began as an enforcement arm of capitalism, with the purpose of protecting the rights of merchants and slave owners. Yet because policing was purported to provide community safety, it has been funded from the public purse.

This insidious origin story has underpinned the history and current expression of policing everywhere, and is why the brutality seen in the US, can also be seen to varying degrees in Hong Kong and the UK. Yet the idea that police can reform their way toward an institution that protects all people is just as much of a fantasy as the notion that corporations can greenwash, Black Lives Matters-wash, or any other ‘wash’ their way toward a role in a just and whole economy, and thus, world.

The path to racial justice

Immediate changes to blunt the knife of racism must happen, and the changes that have been sparked by the recent events rest on years of tireless work by campaigners and organizers who have long advocated for alternatives to policing and incarceration. The astronomical amount of funds invested into policing needs to shift to meeting basic human needs - decent homes, food, water, healthcare, learning and development opportunities, and basic income.

Ensuring that these needs are met for everyone would take care of much of community safekeeping, and the rest would be supported by people from those communities, trained and equipped in de-escalation and restorative justice. More broadly, though, we need to invest time, finances, and energy into long term structural change to creating a restorative, generative economy and direct democracy. This transformation, in our localities and around the world, would also address the pillaging of the earth under capitalism. Without this level of change, reparations and redistribution of wealth, while needed to begin to rectify historical wrongs, will not preclude the perpetuation of injustice. Disposability of life, especially the lives of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, is encoded into the DNA of capitalism.

Seedlings of deeper change

Some inspiring of examples of moves in this direction by Black and other people of color can be found in Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi and Rojava, Syria. Black Socialists in America have developed a thorough articulation of the path toward racial justice, one that demands international solidarity. Importantly, liberation for Black people, and other historically oppressed peoples - by entailing transformation of the extractive economy - liberates all people.

As economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard summarizes the thinking of Fannie Lou Hamer,

“we tried getting voting rights and other basic civil rights, but when we did, they retaliated against us economically. So now we need to figure out how to become economically self-sufficient so that they can’t retaliate against us when we try to do our political and social action. So she also saw this notion that we really need an economic system that supports us with dignity, prosperity, and survival—cooperatives. We need to own our own land, grow our own food, control our own economy; and then from there, we can fight all the other battles and struggles.”

For the deeper, transformative work, consider learning from and supporting these kinds of efforts - whether through in-kind support or financial support. The tendency is to open up wallets around crises while they are elevated in news coverage - and indeed, this is incredibly important. Unfortunately, the slower work of radical structural transformation, not surprisingly, gets less support from foundations and other major donors, and less from individual donors.

My yearning is that at this unprecedented time of the unimaginable becoming reality - a virus-induced economic slowdown AND a global anti-racism uprising - more people do the groundwork for making another unimaginable change become reality. We can achieve racial justice and meet humanity’s real needs through a moral economy, but first we have to imagine it, and then put our hearts, minds, and hands into making it inevitable.