The Market
The antiracist movement is over and the world is new. The victory of antiracism is significant, but limited to cultural legitimacy and representation, seats at the table, which, of course, is what was fought for. Whether that will lead to significant change as theorized is an open question, but it does seem as if a confluence of factors including the antiracist movement are pushing the US towards European style social democracy, where the workers are bought off to prevent resistance. So, the movement did in many ways work and was quite successful, but capital stayed in place. Replacing capitalism was clearly never the overarching goal.
So, what do we do now?
What is next has to be led by the working class. It is called Redneck Liberation Theology. The antiracist movement was led in large part by up and coming petit bourgeoisie, preachers, attorneys, academics, and politicians. There was little if any connection between the antiracist movement and working class people of all persuasions and even more than a little bit of antipathy. Many of the antipathic feel vindicated as an army of organizers turned antiracist consultants try to break their piece off capitalism. I am not of among the angry because I recognize that the antiracist movement was never a revolution and the tools it employed had little chance to actually challenge capitalism. So, by all means, go get yours; hell, everyone else is. It’s the American way.
To challenge capitalism is simply said, but more difficult in practice. We must build, own, and control a new economy by ourselves. Some have argued that this economy is the so-called solidarity economy, but the interventions were too complex, required too much capital, and started with well-defined structures, which were not really morphed into structures that could engage with capital in the market. They had little leverage.
There are certainly well understood limits of cooperatives in that they are essentially the best version of capitalism, but most cooperatives lack any form of innovative structure that could engage differently with the market, instead trying to compete on a very unequal playing field. Most of these economic interventions were agricultural and speaking from the point-of-view of the market, that is an extremely difficult scenario to compete in when corn is sold at below the cost of production. Agriculture is essentially nationalized.
What we’re talking about is a very old formulation adapted to modern conditions - the proletariat as the historical actor. The proletariat or the industrial working class was thought to be uniquely positioned to challenge capitalism because it was thought that capital couldn’t survive without it. Now, the proletariat is essentially skilled labor or labor that has not been virtually automated. Skilled labor is the historical actor because skilled laborers can easily break away from capitalist enterprises and start socialist enterprises and even demand support from capital and the state. We have leverage.
Certainly culture, language, and narrative are important, but in Redneck Liberation Theology, those serve the structural engagements with the market and not the other way around. If you want representation and cultural legitimacy from a movement, it is unlikely that you will get much structural change, but if you want to fundamentally change the way society is organized, we must devise economic interventions that challenge and leverage capitalism and at least force it to respond, which it really hasn’t.
As an aside, I fought for years on the side of the antiracist movement and had incredible experiences doing so, learned a lot, but me and the people I was fight alongside of were not fighting for the same thing and that’s really ok. We got the job done and now it’s on to what’s next, the next movement - Redneck Liberation Theology.