Tag: capitalism

What Comes Next: The Change Within

On By The Social CriticIn Crime & Consequence, Culture Critique, Politics & Public PolicyLeave a comment

If you do not quite grasp how the occupied zone in downtown Seattle, known as CHOP — formerly known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) — relates to George Floyd’s death, social media calls to “defund the police“, HBO’s decision to pull “Gone with the Wind” and recent flashpoints around historic statues and monuments, you are not alone.

The denizens of CHOP not only wish to dispense with law enforcement but prisons and even courts. Objectives include drug decriminalization, disbandment of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), dismantling of immigration courts, and the legalization of undocumented migration (“open borders“). Media has grappled with how to cover this latest chapter. Some reporters have described CHOP as a “commune“, others as a “street festival” — both of which have drawn the ire of participants, many of whom identify as activists.

Mainstream media has been slow — reluctant, even — to connect the dots between academia, social justice advocacy, legal system reformers and street activism. The backstory is long — decades long — and controversial. Broadly put, the scenes unfolding on our streets reflect less the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent approach to Civil Rights — although his actions have since been interpreted through an “anti-Capitalist” lens — and more the revolutionary roots of Black Liberation.*

Liberationists’ embrace a Marxist view of Abolition, a key goal of which is to tie America’s “original sin” of slavery to capitalism.

“The new history of slavery seeks to obliterate the economic and moral distinction between slavery and capitalism, and between the South and the North, by showing them to have been all part of a single system”, Nicholas Lemann for The New Yorker writes, in “Is Capitalism Racist?“.

Criminal justice reform is, perhaps, the most widely recognized facet of contemporary Abolitionism. Proponents of “defund the police” do not merely wish to redirect law enforcement funds into community programs. To them, law enforcement is a manifestation of white supremacy — irrevocably illegitimate.

Prof. Willem De Haan, a University of Amsterdam criminologist, writes “Abolitionism emerged as an anti-prison movement when, at the end of the 1960s, a destructuring impulse took hold of thinking about the social control of deviance and crime…. Crime’ is a social construction, to be analysed as a myth…. As a myth, crime serves to maintain political power relations … Abolitionists do not share the current belief in the criminal law’s capacity for crime control. They radically deny the utility of punishment and claim that there can be no valid justification for it…. They discard criminal justice as an absurd idea.”

While it may be tempting to dismiss modern Abolitionism as a product of a radical fringe, it is anything but.  Its analytical framework rests upon Critical Race Theory, which explicitly promotes activism as a goal. CRT has made inroads into numerous fields of study within academia over the past two decades: criminal justice, feminism, African American studies, critical whiteness studies, political science, economics and American studies, among others. CRT, in a nutshell, evaluates the world through a hierarchal lens comprised of white oppressors and non-white victims. On the heels of Black Lives Matter, which was founded in 2013 to counter police brutality, activists within various movements have found common cause. To cite one of the better known examples, philanthropists and presidents, alike, have called for an end to mass incarceration in recent years.

“The broadening bipartisan consensus on the need for criminal justice reform offers promise to build on this trend, and we intend to exploit it” [p. 31],  documents a U.S. Programs board meeting of the Open Society Foundation, a George Soros-backed nonprofit that supports many similarly-aligned interests. “The path to ending mass incarceration requires fundamentally changing laws that inappropriately criminalize certain conduct …. We believe continued support of a group of key partners working nationally is essential to maintain the broad call for substantial reform, but recognize that most reform activity must take place at the state level. … Our strategy includes efforts to […] correct the public perception of crime survivors … and shift the culture of prosecution” [p.32]. Crime victims, the board wrote in 2015, have a “disproportionate influence” on criminal justice [p.33].

“This is what we have been waiting for”, says Angela Davis, author, activist, self-described Communist, onetime prisoner and longtime University of California Santa Cruz college professor, of Black Lives Matter. “All of this is connected and I think that is a moment when there is so much promise, so much potential. Of course we never know what the outcome is going to be, we can never predict the consequences of the work that we do. But as I always like to say, we have to act as if it is possible to build a revolution and to radically transform the world.”

If we can right the wrongs of oppressors past by radically transforming our present legal, political and economic systems, some would argue not only that the benefit outweighs the risk — but that it is a moral imperative.

What is less clear to the Abolitionist occupiers of CHOP, and their ideological luminaries in academia and activism, is this: What comes next?

Cultural revolutions, historically, come not just with ideals but bloodshed. Even if reform prevails over revolution, social upheaval is all but assured. The evidence is mounting: Take, as an example, the rising momentum in favor of pretrial release, cashless bail and sentencing reform. If the rate at which our legal system changes is faster than the rate at which alternatives are in place — mental health services, diversionary programs, drug treatment and similar — it is all but inevitable that intractable social problems, once largely papered over by our overcrowded prisons, will accumulate, instead, on American streets. Already, this trend is evident. Early release from prison, to untreated, decriminalized drug addiction and/or few job prospects, can serve to increase homelessness, which in turn lends itself to public health crisis. The ensuing blight precipitates a vicious cycle of declining property values, “white flight” (re-segregation), falling tax revenues, waning economic development and, ultimately, shortchanged public schools. A hasty attempt to empty the prison system, in this manner, is all but certain to set in motion a death spiral that will make it that much more difficult to advance the cause of social justice and racial equality in the years to come.

Good intentions are not enough. We cannot afford to underestimate the downstream impacts of top-down change.

Perhaps the most tragic of these unintended downstream consequences is the loss of morale suffered by communities into which repeat offenders are released. A recent New York City incident provides a foreshadowing: while passing on the street, a man cold-cocks a 92-year-old women, causing her to tumble to the ground where she strikes her head on a fire hydrant. The assailant is alleged to have committed 103 prior offenses, some of which were sexual offenses, with only a “desk ticket” (citation) to show for his latest run-ins with police.

While the notion that prisons are ill suited to deal with institutional racism, class disadvantage, drug addiction and mental health issues is true, replacing one broken system with another — to the extent our best solutions hinge upon a patchwork of unproven or underfunded alternatives — may backfire. A rough transition is bound to temper enthusiasm for reform, which may give rise to public calls in the years to come for a return to “tough on crime” policing.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Altering the criminal justice side of the “coin” faster than we implement broad and effective community services for at-risk populations, on the flip side of the coin, is the gotcha of Abolitionism. Redistribution of wealth, another goal of Abolition, is presumably the means by which these thorny problems are solved, but — beyond the fact that a shift from capitalism to revolutionary socialism faces steep resistance — activists’ “no pain, no gain” approach may very well define an entire generation of youth, who are condemned to grow up in communities thrust into turmoil for the sake of an unassailable ideal — a pretext to a messy, if not narcissistic, social experiment.

Abolitionists have no answer to a cruel paradox: Because we have failed to come far enough in pursuit of a more perfect union, things must get worse before they get better — if they get better.

The desire for social change must be weighed against its real-world consequences. No matter how many felony offenses are reclassified as misdemeanors for the sake of reducing incarceration rates or improving on-the-books crime statistics, violence is still violence and crime victims are still crime victims. The philanthropist-backed ACLU goal to reduce prison populations by 50 percent threatens to reverse over 25 years of reductions in violent crime, induce employers, large and small, to vacate blighted, less profitable communities, erode job prospects — which is itself a risk factor for rising crime — and, perhaps most ironically, undermine efforts to redistribute dwindling tax-revenues to social services, jobs programs and healthcare. This is why the “What comes next?” question must be answered — not after every conceivable historic American figure is scrubbed from our public spaces but before — in a manner that non-authoritarian political adherents of any stripe should embrace: openly, honestly and collectively.

Rather than place our hopes in an army of nonprofits — or hold out for a ne’re-to-be-realized Marxist-socialist nirvana! — activists would be better served to petition their billionaire benefactors, who collectively own more wealth than 4.6 billion of earth’s ~7 billion citizens, for direct investment into under-served communities by which to achieve the greatest amount of good with the least amount of harm in the shortest period of time!

Righting the wrongs of structural inequality and institutionalized racism is a righteous goal. And yet its success will be limited by the fallout: people who should be in jail, instead return to the streets, speeding up the rate not only with which they are free to re-offend but to encounter police — in sometimes deadly ways. Abolitionism in recent years has begun to see more success than anything by which to replace the function of the criminal justice system as we know it, however broken that system may indeed be.

Simply breaking off the other end of the “pipe” — the criminal justice system — in what sociologists call the school-to-prison pipeline, is to treat symptoms rather than causes.

Do we need prison population reductions? Yes. And yet mass incarceration is but a symptom. The “disease” is what goes on every day in our communities: schools that fail to produce students who are prepared for living-wage jobs and the administrators, politicians and disempowered parents who fail to hold them accountable. The nexus between racism, poverty, addiction and crime within urban America is an insidious one in which a parent, rather than science fairs and soccer practices, is instead resigned to gang violence and truancy. Above all, however, this illness is linked to fatherless homes, a leading risk factor for early encounters with the criminal justice system, particularly among males. Criminal justice system encounters make it difficult for individuals who have been incarcerated to turn their lives around, making it that much more difficult to find and keep jobs. As such, one might logically expect to see broad-based investments in better education, mental healthcare services and drug treatment programs, alongside job training and placement programs, for those who have been incarcerated. Instead, even as nonprofits turn out study after study on the barriers facing the incarcerated, the broader success of this effort thus far lies in legal system reform — success that outpaces effective community services and interventions.

The order in which social justice goals are pursued and achieved is paramount. Cart-before-the-horse transformation, which in practice lowers public safety, are certain to set the stage for public backlash. Success on the legal front, minus robust efforts to improve quality of life measures within disadvantaged communities, succeed, chiefly, in “burden-shifting” from prisons to communities.

There is no practical way around it: When “prison problems” are externalized, support for prison reform, let alone the more ambitious goals of Abolition, will wane. Burden-shifting threatens to accelerate social, psychological and economic harms — a knockout punch to public morale. An uncontrolled descent into lost community investment, poor economic development, declining property tax revenues, program cuts and underfunded schools threatens to conspire, if not by design by default, to oppress the next generation — in which case minority youth, and urban America more broadly, will disproportionately bear the brunt.

Noble intentions on the part of social justice advocates, Abolitionist or otherwise, are not enough. We cannot erase, burn, bargain, buy or lobby our way out of human suffering — be it physical, psychological or spiritual — any more than we can rewrite an unjust past. By now, the fallacy of a Big Philanthropy-meets-Big Activism “formula” for change should be clear: Top-down change is slow. It favors an endless parade of “middlemen” who staff think tanks and nonprofits in effort to parlay academic theory into “re-imagined” public policy. Such broadly-coordinated efforts are bound to engender public skepticism, if not opposition, on political grounds.

As conversations about race are conflated in the public mind with radical political agendas promoted by CRT proponents, Black Liberation adherents, Abolitionists and others, it places communities of color in a tough spot — one in which their struggles are appropriated for purposes they may not fully appreciate or endorse, yet are forced by the unseen hand of Big Philanthropy to “own” as a race-based political identity. This is why a simpler and more transparent version of change is called for: If we sincerely care about those who have the smallest voices, who are neither privileged nor criminal, the tangled web of political activist “causes” will be de-cluttered in favor direct-investment into disadvantaged communities — to change lives, not merely laws; to invest in opportunity today, not merely the public policies of tomorrow.

We cannot change our racial identities. We cannot change our history. We cannot change the reality that no matter what structural solution we may imagine, the results will only be as just as the people who pull the levers of power — no matter what we may call that system of policing or government. Governments, by their very definition, operate by imposing rules — and yet they have little influence upon whether hearts and minds will change to favor a more just and equitable world. When we sweep back the curtain on the Abolition debate, the reconciling we must do as a people is more spiritual than it is political. And so, in the midst of these emotionally-charged times, we must reclaim a simple truth: A good deed is apolitical. Do the right thing for yourself, your family, your neighbor, your community, your country. It may seem too small of an effort to count but it does: Change begins with us.

It is indeed time to demand a better world — this time from the inside out and the ground up.

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Resources

* “We are trained Marxists” | The Real News

Antifa violence is ethical? This author explains why | NBC News

From Liberated to Disillusioned: How far did we come, baby?

On By The Social CriticIn Culture CritiqueLeave a comment

Something of a debate is afoot: Are nuclear families a good idea? Do they work in 21st Century America?

David Brooks, in a provocatively-titled Atlantic magazine piece, argues that “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake“. He recognizes the utility of the extended family, which predates the nuclear variety, but points out that “while extended families have strengths, they can also be exhausting and stifling.” Conversely, he observes, “family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmented into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.”

Brooks goes on to argue in favor of “forged families” — meaning people who voluntarily adopt the roles of extended family even though they are not biologically related. Brooks’ piece, while a worthy read, raises more questions than answers. For one, is it not more typical for conservatives to raise concerns over the state of American families? What would prompt a liberal journalist, however obliquely, to critique the impact of individualism on society?

And why now?

While mulling this question over, I decided to revisit aspects of history I recall studying in college. I watched the Amazon Prime documentary “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry“, which depicts the way in which women of the 1960s began to redefine roles within the family and the workplace.

While there is great value in the first-person recollections of the women who helped raise the nation’s consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, I am struck by a question only a post-baby boomer would likely ask: In an era dominated by Greatest Generation Americans, how did a movement of this kind achieve critical mass — devoid not only of social media but beholden to a national media bound to an FCC-mandated fairness doctrine? This, of course, begs another question: Are we correct to attribute second-wave feminism to entirely organic (spontaneous) causes? The documentary acknowledges, for example, that J. Edgar Hoover planted informants in women’s consciousness-raising groups. What is less clear is at what stage government involvement occurred. That matters because the “when” and the “why” may very well be informed by a history we have yet to fully explore. (To that end, the documentary scarcely touches upon Gloria Steinem’s pivotal role in the feminist movement and her self-admitted associations with a CIA front group.)

It is said that history is written by the victors. In this case, the victors consist of self-described student radicals, most of whom are well into their Golden Years. But there is another history this documentary doesn’t touch upon — that of the post-World War II period: the Cold War, Korean and Vietnam war era. It’s a glaring omission that that circumscribes this documentary to the anecdotal recollections of long-ago activists.

It cannot be stressed enough that the Cold War was not merely an arms race or a tale of two competing ideologies. The stakes were far higher: freedom vs. tyranny; mutually-assured destruction vs. prosperity; patriotism vs. sedition. However it is remembered, it was a time of, by and for the politics of patriarchy. When President Nixon vetoed a bill in 1971 that would have granted the pro-family policies the women’s liberation movement championed, his explanation reflects Cold War chauvinism as much as it reflects upon stereotypical gender-role expectations of the time. Similarly, the contrasting roles of Soviet and American women appear to have been propagandist ploys as much as anything.

If this kind of bravado occurred in the open, what kind of behind-the-scenes social engineering efforts went into winning the Cold War on the home front?

In the documentary, a leader of the 1960s women’s movement relates — still with an apparent sense of awe — that women’s consciousness groups arose “spontaneously” around the country. For a country that was still decades removed from social media, is this not curious? Is there any research to suggest that the timeline of government efforts to monitor, if not influence, activist groups occurred well after such movements caught on? Has anyone within the journalism sphere, for that matter, pursued Freedom Of Information Act requests to explore whether the government played a direct, if not lesser-appreciated, role?

Having come of age during the 1980s at the height of the crack epidemic, yuppie culture, latchkey kid debates, urban gang proliferation and the tail end of the nuclear arms race, my sense is that early second-wave activists who credit themselves with continuing where Suffrage left off seem to miss the fact that, far from being non-beneficiaries of women’s liberation, men — and more specifically the federal government— were working to advance one overarching goal: Proving that the United States, and by extension Capitalism, was superior to that of the U.S.S.R. (Communism).

While political leaders of the era may have continued to pay lip service to the traditional roles of women, there was only so far the image of American nuclear family bliss could go in the hands of “happy homemakers“. The effort to defeat Communism, after all, was also cultural and economic. The Soviets, for their part, actively worked to project cosmopolitan values, in which female labor was a man’s equal (or so the propaganda maintained). Soviet women’s children were supported by collectivist programs even as American women and children were not. Machismo undoubtedly shaped American foreign policy and that, in turn, dovetailed with key aspects of second-wave feminism. Conversely, less masculine aspects of the movement, such as access to universal childcare, floundered then and continue largely unchanged today.

Why might that be?

Could the thinking have been — if not explicitly, tacitly — that while less robust Soviet citizens might require Marxist concessions to secure their cooperation, Capitalists are a tougher, more independent, patriotic and industrious lot? Might this explain why aspects of the women’s liberation movement, such as labor force participation, succeeded in changing expectations and norms, whereas efforts to confront domestic inequality and to alleviate racial inequality, among other burdens that continue to fall disproportionately upon women, have been less successful?

The support garnered in 2016 and 2020 by a self-professed democratic socialist, presidential candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, reveals not just a desperation to unseat the current president but a declining belief in the merits of Capitalism. College-age women today still envision for themselves what women of an earlier generation sough: liberation. To a Millennial generation disproportionately raised by single and/or overworked dual-income parents, equality does not look like the gender-defined domestic roles one’s grandmother or great grandmother shouldered, a lifetime of student loan debt servitude or the seductive, if not disingenuous, women-can-have-it-all messaging of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s (loving marriage, fulfilling career and quality, if not quantity, time with the kids).

While second-wave feminism paved the way for women to pursue fulfilling careers, the law of unintended consequences was not far behind. Within two decades the conversation was less about choice and more about economic necessity. As household incomes began to rise as a result of women’s entry into the workforce, the buying power of a dollar began to slip. Despite surging numbers of dual-income households, financial security continues to elude many middle class households. What began as women’s choice translated, for too many families, into a man’s license to abandon his children. The result is that women have been left to juggle responsibilities they have been tasked with for hundreds, if not thousands of years — even as women are now socially and culturally obligated to demonstrate their worth to kin and country, alike, in a monetized manner.

Is this the “choice” our liberation-minded trailblazers promised?

Disillusionment with the nuclear family reflects a loss of faith in something else entirely. With the exception of the affluent, who can readily hire the help they need to strike a better work-life balance, middle class and working class women have been sold a bill of goods about “having it all”. In reality, something was bound give: the career; the marriage; non-work friendships; waning influence over the values of one’s own over-scheduled children; and, in the end, support for the nuclear family if not Capitalism itself.

Conservatives have long decried the unraveling of the nuclear family and, in some ways, their worst fears have been realized over the past 60-some years: By the 1980s, self-medicating yuppies and their latchkey adolescents had begun to fuel a demand for recreational drugs; gangs overtook the inner cities to deal to users — while disproportionately maiming and killing each other in the ensuing turf wars; addicts dropped out of the workforce and/or began to commit crimes in support of their addictions, contributing to mass incarceration and a still-proliferating homelessness crisis; violent crime rates hit new highs in the 1980s and 1990s, divorce rates climbed and, in a mea culpa that is just now beginning to make the rounds, Brooks’ assertion that the nuclear family was a mistake.

Is this chain of events purely a fluke?

Second-wave feminism did not occur in a vacuum. The U.S. was left with a sky-high bill for the cost of rebuilding Europe after WWII and for our subsequent commitment to NATO. Against a Cold War backdrop we pursued a costly nuclear arms buildup, sparking fears not only of a “hot war” but of ballooning deficits. In the span of only a few decades, the United States went from an isolationist foreign policy to one of unprecedented global responsibility, which demanded two things as a means to assure our national security interests: rapid economic growth and an increase in the tax base — meaning more working-age adults, male and female alike, in the labor market. Fast forward to the 21st Century, and women and children are still lacking in access to affordable childcare, healthcare and other quality (or equality) of life and family indicators one might expect in a First World country.

Against this backdrop, is it any surprise that the Millennial generation is inclined to believe that the only way to achieve a work-life balance is to challenge the Capitalist system their mothers and grandmothers worked so hard to participate in? Similarly, might falling marriage and birthrates among Millennials, first noted among Generation-X, who were themselves less financially secure than their parents, explain why politicians and pundits increasingly condemn efforts to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration? Do our leaders genuinely believe unsecured borders pose no terrorism risk or that limits to immigration carry xenophobic overtones — or is it the case, rather, that our deficit-riddled federal government would rather open the door to “pyramid scheme migration” than implement family-supportive policies that may serve, much as they have in socialist countries, to curb precipitous demographic declines?

If these observations are in any way prescient, they illustrate one of the most ironic, if not tragic, developments in the entirety of this Great Experiment: whereas the Soviet Union disbanded into a quasi-Capitalist Russian state, Americans are increasingly inclined to romanticize the greener grass on the other side of the socialist fence. To bring this full circle, we must ask a fundamental question: How historically certain are we that the second-wave women’s liberation movement was entirely grassroots in nature? For all that it ultimately came to represent in the 1970s and beyond, is it possible the U.S. government’s early efforts to gain the upper hand in the Cold War were so all-encompassing that it motivated policymakers — who were largely answerable to traditional values-driven voters — to disavow social engineering efforts that were too radical to endorse outright? Could this explain, in turn, why Steinem — who at the face of it might have been expected to be at odds with a male-dominated, hierarchical government — said of her relationship to the CIA, “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”?

To reflect upon Steinem’s words, perhaps the radicalism-driven image we hold today obscures the Cold War-combating cooperation that existed in those days, in defiance to its apparent contradictions.

While it may be a bridge too far to assert, as some do, that second-wave feminism weakened the family unit and made more Americans dependent upon government for their welfare, there is no getting around the fact that Cold War posturing backed the United States and the former Soviet Union into ideological corners from which we have only recently begun to emerge. The question is, what does that emergence look like? Will it take the form of a more family-friendly version of Capitalism — or a wholesale exodus to a Socialist future in which economic growth, even more so than our European counterparts, is stifled by the impossible burden of over-ambitious entitlements we can ill afford to keep?

We now have seen two, if not three, generations of Americans faced with untenable choices: one in which they attain the education, career and financial stability necessary to support a family but are severely delayed if not denied the opportunity by virtue of a prolonged pursuit; the other in which life stages such as marriage and family are realized within traditional time frames, but all too often without the requisite skills and economic mobility to adequately sustain those choices. A generation of political leaders has done so little to address real-world domestic concerns — to include a wholesale failure to shore up the entitlements retiring baby boomers will soon deplete!  — that Americans have been conditioned to expect inaction. Nonetheless, failed leadership has begun to extract a price: Faith in the Great Experiment itself.

A government in which top elected representatives spend their time appearing on Right vs. Left-wing media to shift blame is a government that is actively deflecting from its collective public policy failures.

How do we derive change from division, reform from partisan gridlock and pragmatic progress from ideological purity?

As American citizens, do we still believe, as our idealistic counterparts of the 1960s did, in the power of activism? Are reform efforts best served in an ideology-driven sociopolitical climate — with or without our current president to blame! — in which an ever-expanding federal government continues to serve every cause but our own?

Much like the 1960s, we are at a crossroads. We can plunge down the rabbit-hole to a post-nuclear family oblivion, polarized and unappreciative that our passions have been exploited, our energies redirected and our problems unchanged. We can bog down in the weeds of identity politics — conservative/liberal, male/female, black/white, they/them, majority/minority, secular/religious, Capitalism/Socialism. Alternately, we can identify the challenges we share in common as a means to evolve what is really at stake: a better work-life-opportunity balance.

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