Mattering lives

Black lives matter.  It needs to be said.  It shouldn’t, but it needs to be said.  Brown lives matter, too.  Of course.  Indigenous lives matter.  LGBTQ lives matter.  Of course.  It’s not a competition.   When someone says “Black lives matter,” and someone else responds with “All lives matter,” in theory, the counter-response should be, “Exactly!  That’s the point.”  But, really, they are missing the point, aren’t they?  And if someone responds with “White lives matter,” or “Police lives matter,” then they’re REALLY missing the point.  Not because the melanin-deficient or officers of the law DON’T have lives that matter, but because nobody is SAYING we don’t.  At least outside of the paranoid fantasies of white racists afraid of losing privilege.  Certainly, there are not massive governmental, economic and cultural institutions acting consistently and forcefully as if they don’t. The same is not true of the other categories I listed.  Police are not acting collectively as if they could casually shoot any random white person (let alone each other), and expect no serious consequences to follow.

If, when you hear someone say “Black Lives Matter,” a person from some other oppressed group responds “so do ours,” that is at least understandable.  When this reaction comes from a member of a privileged group, this is a classic “What about me?” response.  “What about me”-ism happens when an oppressed person speaks about their oppression, and a relatively privileged person feels compelled to respond with some version of, "Well, we have problems too..."  What has effectively happened is that the oppressed person has been silenced. Again. It's a way we privileged people have of telling less privileged people that only OUR voices count.

On the specific issue of murder rates, it does seem that “Black lives matter” needs special elaboration, above and beyond all the others.  I haven’t seen data on Native Americans as homicide victims, but one study I read showed that black Americans are killed at about 12 times the rate of whites.  Latinos are killed slightly more frequently (as a percentage of their numbers) than whites, but the difference is relatively small.  Still, it all depends on time and place, doesn’t it?  We’ve seen mass graves in Texas.  Massacres of immigrants in border states, by vigilantes – maybe  by Border Patrol? – are hidden in the dark of the night, and not tracked by statistics.  Even one murder inspired by racism and mindless hatred is too many.

But the mattering of lives is not just about life and death.  It is about our hopes and aspirations, the things we strive for in our short span between birth and dying, and our dreams for our posterity.  Those of us with white-skin privilege, especially if we also have some share of class, male, straight, cis-gendered privilege, easily form and sustain many expectations in these areas.  We may not achieve our dreams, but those governmental, economic, cultural institutions have not been organized to dampen our hopes.  I’m not saying nothing ever stands in our way.  That would be stupid.  But what privilege is all about is that things stand in our way less often*.  We get more encouragement, less discouragement.  We get a lot more helps along the way.  What “Black lives matter” is about is black people saying, “We want that, too.  Our dreams matter as much as yours.  We want as much chance to form them, and see them to fruition as you do.”  Until EVERYBODY, black, brown, women, LGBTQ, WHATEVER has exactly the same chance at these things as white, cis-gendered, straight men**, then BLACK LIVES MATTER.  It needs to be said.

Footnotes and afterthoughts

*Some people will object to this, because they’ve bought into the “reverse racism” bullshit, and they think the Great Society social programs actually succeeded in eliminating discrimination, have maybe even gone too far.  I won’t go into detail on that, except to say, if that is you, study the actual data, not the sound bites.  Listen to the actual life experiences of black people.  If you believe racism and discrimination have effectively ended, you’re wrong.

**I don’t explicitly include class issues in this list, because wealth disparities simply need to be eliminated.  There is no way to equalize the power distribution between rich and poor other than by eliminating poverty and wealth.

Another aside:  Not a single thought in the above is unique to me.  And I hope I don’t come off as “white-splaining”.  I’m certainly not trying to teach people of color any of the above.  But I encounter, continually, enough confusion and uncertainty about these ideas from other white people, that I thought it would be worth throwing my 2-cents-worth into the mix.

The Root of All Evil

The root of capitalism is the principle that the possession of property entitles you to a claim on the fruits of someone else's labor.  There is no moral justification for this.  It is on a par with "might makes right" or "the Devil take the hindmost."  Capitalism is thus corrupt at its very core, whatever social benefits it might be deemed to have in any specific time and place.

The logic of capitalism only makes sense if there is an unequal distribution of wealth.  If everybody had equal wealth, there would be no sense in property employing labor; rather, we would tend to evolve a system where men and women collectively used their property and their labor in order to socially produce things (since social production is more efficient than individual production).  Equal distribution of wealth would tend toward a cooperative society, rather than a capitalistic one.

So capitalism arises only in an unequal society; its essential logic guarantees that.  The logic of the working-out of capitalism increases the initial inequality.  If you have only a small amount of property, it is very difficult to make it grow.  Generally, only your constant labor can keep it from shrinking.  If you have a large amount of property, however, it is very difficult to PREVENT it from growing.  The process of being paid for the use of your property returns the borrowed property plus a dividend, over and over again.  The more property you possess, the larger the dividend.  If the amount of property you possess is very large, it becomes virtually impossible to spend the dividend.  Even if your wealth is a bit smaller, only a modest amount of self-restraint is necessary for savings.  So the wealth of rich people grows and grows.  Yes, it is possible for a wealthy person to "go bust" because of bad investments.  But it doesn't happen very often.  And even a wealthy person who, with great fanfare, has  "gone bust",  generally has more residual wealth than a person who wasn't rich to begin with.  Squalor turns out to be relative.

Capitalism is inherently incompatible with democracy, because capitalism concentrates concentrations wealth, and wealth is inevitably power. There is no way to decouple the relationship of wealth and power.  Regulatory tinkering, such as campaign finance rules, can only act as an impediment, an inconvenience to the wealthy when they act to assert their money-power.  Capitalist countries, then, even with republican governmental forms, tend to devolve into de facto oligarchies.  This process can be resisted only by constant vigilance, to limit accumulation of wealth, to restrain the free political exercise of wealth, to balance people power against money power (unions and voter empowerment campaigns).  This vigilance is a lot of work.  When we have won some improvements, "we the people" tend to slack off.  The capitalists never do.  The differential rewards for them - the incentives - are just too immediate and great.  Thus, when times got somewhat better in the postwar period - at least in Europe, the U.S. and Canada - the people became complacent, and in the mid-1970s the capitalists, with their neoliberal/Reaganite/Thatcherite agenda, counter attacked.  And so, here we are today, with economic inequality and poverty at record levels, with a stagnant economy, but with many capitalists declaring "recovery" despite the fact that so many remain unemployed, many, many more underemployed, and almost all of us economically insecure.

So it turns out that not money, but private capital is the root of all evil, arising only in conditions of inequality, sustaining and promoting inequality, and undermining democracy.  Ultimately, if we want secure and just economies, we need to decouple property and income, by recognizing that all capital is socially constructed, and must be socially owned.