The Baltimore Uprising is more than just another battle against police lynching in a new city with new faces. It marks an important escalation of the slow burning fight to end the War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial complex, aka the New Jim Crow. The New Jim Crow, a term coined by Michelle Alexander, is the racialized system of social control that is the inheritance of slavery and the original Jim Crow. In my opinion the New Jim Crow was not just racism finding a new way to live on in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. The features of the New Jim Crow are no accident; they are premised on the economic features of capitalism following the collapse of Fordism and the advent of the new economics of "Toyotism".
Deindustrialization and static wages necessitated a way to house, feed, and tightly control an expanding portion of the population that no longer had a productive place in the economy. Overproduction (when the economy produces more "stuff" to be sold then there is demand for) created a systemic need that was filled by two specific phenomenon: 1) the proliferation of public and private debt, and 2) the delivery of “wages” to people for producing nothing (and not just middle management). Together, these things allowed folks to remain consumers without adding more unsellable products to the market. The best way to create this situation is mass incarceration. Prisoners constitute an outrageous drain on resources (which is why it costs more to house a max security inmate for a year in NJ then it does to send her to Princeton for the year), their lives are completely controlled, and the costs of resistance are so high for inmates that they pose little risk to the system.
It’s important that this system was racialized; just like slavery, the white majority is largely safe from being victimized the Prison-Industrial complex. Because we white folks know that we, and our kids, will likely never spend a significant amount of our lives behind bars, even if we do use or sell drugs, then we don't have a personal investment in ending the system. Consider for a moment how different the world would be if college campuses were subject to the same aggressive Drug War policies as like Black neighborhoods: constant searches and pat downs, aggressive prosecution, the recruitment of informants through intimidation and the threat of lengthy jail time, often brutal harassment of suspected dealers. And then of course there is mass incarceration: Who would send their children to college if they knew that 1 in 3 living on college campuses would spend time in jail? As long as the victims of the system were a vulnerable racial minority instead of the middle class stoner kid in the next dorm over, most of the population remain silent if not give their tacit support. If not, the War on Drugs would have met its demise a long time ago. This is the power that racism gives capitalism; being able to super-exploit a portion of the population makes it easier to exploit the whole of society.
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"All night, all day, we will fight for Freddie Gray!"
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But now the world has changed forever due to the Great Recession, and we can never go back to business as usual (even if the stock market is currently in denial). The collapse of debt as a means of artificially creating demand is no longer sufficient. The American Dream is in shambles, even for those who expected easy access to it. The wealth gap continues to grow, pushing the poor further into destitution and culling the ranks of the already thinned “middle class.” These changing material conditions have given rise to a hunger for change (not the Obama kind) and a revival in the expression of "people power," from Occupy to Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter, in particular, targets the primary point-of-contact between the people and the Prison-Industrial Complex; that is, the confrontation between Black folks and Police. In a climate where state budgets are bowing under the weight of overcrowded private prisons, and the job market has replaced few, and lower wage, jobs since the Great Recession, we are now witnessing a cascading working class uprising. Black communities across the country are simultaneously refusing to accept that Black folks can be lynched with impunity by people who are supposedly paid to protect them.
With these massive, systemic factors still in flux, the only certainty is that the makeup of society will be fundamentally different over the course of the next two decades, and the seeds of the new order are being planted now. I can't predict the future, but the following three alternatives are my best attempt.
Worst Case Scenario
Between ISIS, Iran, Russia, and even China, there are a lot big scary bad guys out there that many reactionaries in the US would just love to go to war with. And there is a precedent: WWII got us out of a similar economic crisis. How? Besides the Keynesian argument that war spending led to almost complete employment and spiked demand (for bombs and tanks), there is the undeniable fact that there was a chilling loss of life among the working class. If you happen to care more about rate of return on investment than human life, however, several million fewer extraneous workers is a great method to solving your overproduction woes. If you think a massive loss of life to war is far fetched, it's only because it hasn't happened in your lifetime--just ask your grandparents. Even if this doesn't become fully realized, expect to hear reactionaries, or even liberals, warmongering for conflicts that could easily turn into global conflicts, such as those that entangle NATO.
Also Really Bad
Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco released a book a couple of years ago entitled "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt" about what happens when Capitalism has all but taken everything of value from a community and has no need for the inhabitants’ labor. They immerse themselves in “sacrifice zones” across the United States, places where the underclass are left to try and make a life on decaying leftovers of the Market, places like Newark, Appalachia, and Native American concentration camps. This is a model for the nation that could be replicated in many major cities across the country. Superfluous workers could find themselves walled off in crumbling cities like Detroit and Baltimore or pushed out of the cities altogether through gentrification, maybe to deserted suburbs or decrepit edges of the cities they used to inhabit, like is increasingly happening in New York and Boston.
This sort of social order would be complemented by the advances in paramilitary and Mass Surveillance technology and spending, because a large population under such increased deprivation will be even more volatile. Under the guise of anti-terrorism, and fueled by profits from the “War on Drugs,” police departments have been transformed into domestic paramilitary occupying forces. What’s truly terrifying is that despite how brutal police actions have been for decades, we still haven’t gotten a taste of how efficiently these departments can dole out murder or martial law with their new military-style weapons, vehicles, and other equipment. We’ve seen hints of this, like when Oakland and New York’s Occupy protests were attacked, during the hunt for the Marathon Bombers in Boston, or with a rising rate of overzealous drug raids, but it won’t be until a sycophantic mayor decides to put down a “riot” that we realize what we have allowed to be built under our noses.
NSA Mass Surveillance could act in coordination with police, making it possible to head off any digital organizing by targeting leaders and sabotaging communication. It will also be able to discredit anyone by pulling their entire digital history after the fact, and seeking out incriminating or embarrassing material. It’s hard to believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have become the icon he did if all of his dirty laundry was aired the night after his “I Have a Dream” speech. The capability to manage this unrest is being built with our tax dollars as we speak.
Best case scenario
Aside from a social movement that destroys Capitalism once and for all, the best case scenario we can hope for over the next couple of decades is a serious reduction in social laboring time and large spike in wages. A movement that brings about (something like) a 20-30 hour work week accompanied by a wage per day that is significantly greater than it is now would be a transformative step for society that, while in some ways is just a reform, would be a huge step in strengthening the working class and stabilizing society. Civilization only requires a certain total amount of necessary labor time. In eras like ours, when that necessary labor time has extensively shrunk due to advances in productivity, it is only rational to cut back on each individual’s labor time in order to "share" the labor time equitably. In this way we could achieve full employment, and eliminate the need to invent fake jobs that don't produce for society like many bureaucratic desk jobs (you know the ones) or prisoners. It would also cut out a great deal of the time spent making useless products that end up being thrown out (overproduction). The increase in pay would help redistribute the benefits of increased productivity across all of society, spiking consumer demand and ending the socially worthless hoarding among the 1% that has occurred in the wake of the Great Recession. And perhaps most importantly, less time spent working is more time spent with family, in the community, resting, taking care of oneself and each other, and organizing. It is incredibly difficult to engage even ideologically committed individuals in grassroots movements when they are chained to their jobs 60+ hours a week. No organizer is a stranger to the words "I’d love to, but I'm just too busy." When people's time is not as shackled to the enrichment of their bosses, doing what their bosses want, dressing the way their bosses want, and saying what their bosses want, they will be able to spend more of their time the way they see fit, which is far more democratic.
The only mistake would be to believe that society will look anything like it did over the past thirty years. The old way of organizing labor and value, and the social ramifications of it, like debt, mass incarceration, deindustrialization, stagnant wages, and a jaw dropping wealth gap, are collapsing, and maybe as soon as this summer. The society we Millennials raise our children in will be decided in the streets--see you there!
