<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div id="container" class="container font-size5">
<div dir="ltr" style="display: block;" id="reader-header"
class="header"> <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/until-we-win-black-labor-and-liberation-in-the-disposable-era/"
id="reader-domain" class="domain">counterpunch.org</a>
<h1 id="reader-title">Until We Win: Black Labor and Liberation
in the Disposable Era</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">by <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/author/kalaku1039/"
rel="nofollow">Kali Akuno </a></span><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/author/kalaku1039/"
rel="nofollow"><br>
</a><span class="post_date" title="2015-09-04">September 4,
2015<br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/until-we-win-black-labor-and-liberation-in-the-disposable-era/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/until-we-win-black-labor-and-liberation-in-the-disposable-era/</a></small></small></small></b><br>
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="content">
<div style="display: block;" dir="ltr" id="moz-reader-content">
<div
xml:base="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/until-we-win-black-labor-and-liberation-in-the-disposable-era/"
id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div itemprop="articleBody" class="post_content">
<p>Since the rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri in August
2014, Black people throughout the United States have
been grappling with a number of critical questions such
as why are Black people being hunted and killed every 28
hours or more by various operatives of the law? Why
don’t Black people seem to matter to this society? And
what can and must we do to end these attacks and
liberate ourselves? There are concrete answers to these
questions. Answers that are firmly grounded in the
capitalist dynamics that structure the brutal European
settler-colonial project we live in and how Afrikan
people have historically been positioned within it.</p>
<p><strong>The Value of Black Life </strong></p>
<p>There was a time in the United States Empire, when
Afrikan people, aka, Black people, were deemed to be
extremely valuable to the “American project”, when our
lives as it is said, “mattered”. This “time” was the era
of chattel slavery, when the labor provided by Afrikan
people was indispensable to the settler-colonial
enterprise, accounting for nearly half of the
commodified value produced within its holdings and
exchanged in “domestic” and international markets. Our
ancestors were held and regarded as prize horses or
bulls, something to be treated with a degree of “care”
(i.e. enough to ensure that they were able to work and
reproduce their labor, and produce value for their
enslavers) because of their centrality to the processes
of material production.</p>
<p>What mattered was Black labor power and how it could be
harnessed and controlled, not Afrikan humanity. Afrikan
humanity did not matter – it had to be denied in order
create and sustain the social rationale and systemic
dynamics that allowed for the commodification of human
beings. These “dynamics” included armed militias and
slave patrols, iron-clad non-exception social clauses
like the “one-drop” rule, the slave codes, vagrancy
laws, and a complex mix of laws and social customs all
aimed at oppressing, controlling and scientifically
exploiting Black life and labor to the maximum degree.
This systemic need served the variants of white
supremacy, colonial subjugation, and imperialism that
capitalism built to govern social relations in the
United States. All of the fundamental systems created to
control Afrikan life and labor between the 17<sup>th</sup>
and 19<sup>th</sup> centuries are still in operation
today, despite a few surface moderations, and serve the
same basic functions.</p>
<p>The correlation between capital accumulation (earning a
profit) and the value of Black life to the overall
system has remained consistent throughout the history of
the US settler-colonial project, despite of shifts in
production regimes (from agricultural, to industrial, to
service and finance oriented) and how Black labor was
deployed. The more value (profits) Black labor produces,
the more Black lives are valued. The less value
(profits) Black people produce, the less Black lives are
valued. When Black lives are valued they are secured
enough to allow for their reproduction (at the very
least), when they are not they can be and have been
readily discarded and disposed of. This is the basic
equation and the basic social dynamic regarding the
value of Black life to US society.</p>
<p><strong>The Age of Disposability</strong></p>
<p>We are living and struggling through a transformative
era of the global capitalist system. Over the past 40
years, the expansionary dynamics of the system have
produced a truly coordinated system of resource
acquisition and controls, easily exploitable and cheap
labor, production, marketing and consumption on a global
scale. The increasingly automated and computerized
dynamics of this expansion has resulted in millions, if
not billions, of people being displaced through two
broad processes: one, from “traditional” methods of life
sustaining production (mainly farming), and the other
from their “traditional” or ancestral homelands and
regions (with people being forced to move to large
cities and “foreign” territories in order to survive).
As the International Labor Organization (ILO) recently
reported in its World Employment and Social Outlook 2015
paper, this displacement renders millions to
structurally regulated surplus or expendable statuses.</p>
<p>Capitalist logic does not allow for surplus populations
to be sustained for long. They either have to be
reabsorbed into the value producing mechanisms of the
system, or disposed of. Events over the past 20 (or
more) years, such as the forced separation of
Yugoslavia, the genocide in Burundi and Rwanda, the
never ending civil and international wars in Zaire/Congo
and central Afrikan region, the mass displacement of
farmers in Mexico clearly indicate that the system does
not posses the current capacity to absorb the surplus
populations and maintain its equilibrium.</p>
<p>The dominant actors in the global economy –
multinational corporations, the trans-nationalist
capitalist class, and state managers – are in crisis
mode trying to figure out how to best manage this
massive surplus in a politically justifiable (but
expedient) manner.</p>
<p>This incapacity to manage crisis caused by capitalism
itself is witnessed by numerous examples of haphazard
intervention at managing the rapidly expanding number of
displaced peoples such as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>* The ongoing global food crisis (which started in
the mid-2000’s) where millions are unable to afford
basic food stuffs because of rising prices and climate
induced production shortages;</p>
<p>* The corporate driven displacement of hundreds of
millions of farmers and workers in the global south
(particularly in Africa and parts of Southeast Asia);</p>
<p>* Military responses (including the building of
fortified walls and blockades) to the massive migrant
crisis confronting the governments of the United
States, Western Europe, Australia, Malaysia,
Indonesia, Singapore, etc.;</p>
<p>*The corporate driven attempt to confront climate
change almost exclusively by market (commodity)
mechanisms;</p>
<p>*The scramble for domination of resources and labor,
and the escalating number of imperialist facilitated
armed conflicts and attempts at regime change in
Africa, Asia (including Central Asia) and Eastern
Europe.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>More starkly, direct disposal experiments are also
deepening and expanding:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>* Against Afrikans in Colombia,</p>
<p>* Haitians in the Dominican Republic,</p>
<p>* Sub-Saharan Afrikans in Libya,</p>
<p>* Indigenous peoples in the Andean region,</p>
<p>* The Palestinians in Gaza, Adivasis in India,</p>
<p>* The Rohingya’s in Myanmar and Bangladesh,</p>
<p>* And the list goes on.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Accompanying all of this is the ever expanding level of
xenophobia and violence targeted at migrants on a world
scale, pitting the unevenly pacified and rewarded
victims of imperialism against one other as has been
witnessed in places like South Africa over the last
decade, where attacks on migrant workers and communities
has become a mainstay of political activity.</p>
<p>The capitalist system is demonstrating, day by day,
that it no longer possesses the managerial capacity to
absorb newly dislocated and displaced populations into
the international working class (proletariat), and it is
becoming harder and harder for the international ruling
class to sustain the provision of material benefits that
have traditionally been awarded to the most loyal
subjects of capitalisms global empire, namely the
“native” working classes in Western Europe and settlers
in projects like the United States, Canada, and
Australia.</p>
<p>When the capitalist system can’t expand and absorb it
must preserve itself by shifting towards “correction and
contraction” – excluding and if necessary disposing of
all the surpluses that cannot be absorbed or consumed at
a profit). We are now clearly in an era of correction
and contraction that will have genocidal consequences
for the surplus populations of the world if left
unaddressed.</p>
<p>This dynamic brings us back to the US and the crisis of
jobs, mass incarceration and the escalating number of
extrajudicial police killings confronting Black people.</p>
<p><strong>The Black Surplus Challenge/Problem </strong></p>
<p>Afrikan, or Black, people in the United States are one
of these surplus populations. Black people are no longer
a central force in the productive process of the United
States, in large part because those manufacturing
industries that have not completely offshored their
production no longer need large quantities of relatively
cheap labor due to automation advances. At the same time
agricultural industries have been largely mechanized or
require even cheaper sources of super-exploited labor
from migrant workers in order to ensure profits.</p>
<p>Various campaigns to reduce the cost of Black labor in
the US have fundamentally failed, due to the militant
resistance of Black labor and the ability of Black
working class communities to “make ends meet” by
engaging in and receiving survival level resources from
the underground economy, which has grown exponentially
in the Black community since the 1970’s. (The
underground economy has exploded worldwide since the
1970’s due to the growth of unregulated “grey market”
service economies and the explosion of the illicit drug
trade. Its expansion has created considerable “market
distortions” throughout the world, as it has created new
value chains, circuits of accumulation, and financing
streams that helped “cook the books” of banking
institutions worldwide and helped finance capital become
the dominant faction of capital in the 1980’s and 90’s).</p>
<p>The social dimensions of white supremacy regarding
consumer “comfort”, “trust” and “security” seriously
constrain the opportunities of Black workers in service
industries and retail work, as significant numbers of
non-Black consumers are uncomfortable receiving direct
services from Black people (save for things like
custodial and security services). These are the root
causes of what many are calling the “Black jobs crisis”.
The lack of jobs for Black people translates into a lack
of need for Black people, which equates into the
wholesale devaluation of Black life. And anything
without value in the capitalist system is disposable.</p>
<p>The declining “value” of Black life is not a new
problem – Black people have constituted an escalating
problem in search of a solution for the US ruling class
since the 1960’s. Although the US labor market started
to have trouble absorbing Afrikan workers in the 1950’s,
the surplus problem didn’t reach crisis proportions
until the late 1960’s, when the Black Liberation
Movement started to critically impact industrial
production with demands for more jobs, training and open
access to skilled and supervisorial work (which were
“occupied” by white seniority-protected workers), higher
wages, direct representation (through instruments like
the League of Revolutionary Black Workers), constant
strikes, work stoppages, other forms of industrial
action, militant resistance to state and non-state
forces of repression and hundreds of urban rebellions.</p>
<p>This resistance occurred at the same time that the
international regime of integrated production, trade
management, and financial integration, and currency
convergence instituted by the United States after WWII,
commonly called the Bretton Woods regime, fully
maturated and ushered in the present phase of
globalization. This regime obliterated most exclusivist
(or protectionist) production regimes and allowed
international capital to scour the world for cheaper
sources of labor and raw materials without fear of
inter-imperialist rivalry and interference (as
predominated during earlier periods). Thus, Black labor
was hitting its stride just as capital was finding
secure ways to eliminate its dependence upon it (and
Western unionized labor more generally) by starting to
reap the rewards of its post-WWII mega-global
investments (largely centered in Western Europe,
Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan).</p>
<p>One reward of these mega-global investments for US
capital was that it reduced the scale and need for
domestic industrial production, which limited the
ability of Black labor to disrupt the system with work
stoppages, strikes, and other forms of industrial
action. As US capital rapidly reduced the scale of its
domestic production in the 1970’s and 80’s, it
intentionally elevated competition between white workers
and Afrikan and other non-settler sources of labor for
the crumbs it was still doling out. The settler-world
view, position, and systems of entitlement possessed by
the vast majority of white workers compelled them to
support the overall initiatives of capital and to block
the infusion of Afrikan, Xicano, Puerto Rican and other
non-white labor when there were opportunities to do so
during this period.</p>
<p>This development provided the social base for the
“silent majority,” “law and order,” “tuff on crime,”
“war on drugs,” “war on gangs and thugs” campaigns that
dominated the national political landscape from the late
1960’s through the early 2000’s, that lead to mass
incarceration, racist drug laws, and militarized
policing that have terrorized Afrikan (and Indigenous,
Xicano, Puerto Rican, etc.) communities since the
1970’s.</p>
<p>To deal with the crisis of Black labor redundancy and
mass resistance the ruling class responded by creating a
multipronged strategy of limited incorporation,
counterinsurgency, and mass containment. The stratagem
of limited incorporation sought to and has partially
succeeded in dividing the Black community by class, as
corporations and the state have been able to take in and
utilize the skills of sectors of the Black petit
bourgeoisie and working class for their own benefit. The
stratagem of counterinsurgency crushed, divided and
severely weakened Black organizations. And the stratagem
of containment resulted in millions of Black people
effectively being re-enslaved and warehoused in prisons
throughout the US empire.</p>
<p>This three-pronged strategy exhausted itself by the
mid-2000 as core dynamics of it (particularly the costs
associated with mass incarceration and warehousing)
became increasingly unprofitable and therefore
unsustainable. Experiments with alternative forms of
incarceration (like digitally monitored home detainment)
and the spatial isolation and externalization of the
Afrikan surplus population to the suburbs and exurbs
currently abound, but no new comprehensive strategy has
yet been devised by the ruling class to solve the
problem of what to do and what politically can be done
to address the Black surplus population problem. All
that is clear from events like the catastrophe following
Hurricane Katrina and the hundreds of Afrikans being
daily, monthly, and yearly extra-judicially killed by
various law enforcement agencies is that Black life is
becoming increasingly more disposable. And it is
becoming more disposable because in the context of the
American capitalist socio-economic system, Black life is
a commodity rapidly depreciating in value, but still
must be corralled and controlled.</p>
<p><strong>A Potential Path of Resistance </strong></p>
<p>Although Afrikan people are essentially “talking
instruments” to the overlords of the capitalist system,
Black people have always possessed our own agency. Since
the dawn of the Afrikan slave trade and the development
of the mercantile plantations and chattel slavery, Black
people resisted their enslavement and the systemic logic
and dynamics of the capitalist system itself.</p>
<p>The fundamental question confronting Afrikan people
since their enslavement and colonization in territories
held by the US government is to what extent can Black
people be the agents and instruments of their own
liberation and history? It is clear that merely being
the object or appendage of someone else’s project and
history only leads to a disposable future. Black people
have to forge their own future and chart a clear
self-determining course of action in order to be more
than just a mere footnote in world history.</p>
<p>Self-determination and social liberation, how do we get
there? How will we take care of our own material needs
(food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, defense,
jobs, etc.)? How will we address the social
contradictions that shape and define us, both internally
and externally generated? How should we and will we
express our political independence?</p>
<p>There are no easy or cookie cutter answers. However,
there are some general principles and dynamics that I
believe are perfectly clear. Given how we have been
structurally positioned as a disposable, surplus
population by the US empire we need to build a mass
movement that focuses as much on organizing and building
<em>autonomous, self-organized and executed social
projects</em> as it focuses on campaigns and
initiatives that apply <em>transformative pressure on
the government and the forces of economic exploitation
and domination</em>. This is imperative, especially
when we clearly understand the imperatives of the system
we are fighting against.</p>
<p>The capitalism system has always required certain
levels of worker “reserves” (the army of the unemployed)
in order to control labor costs and maintain social
control. But, the system must now do two things
simultaneously to maintain profits: drastically reduce
the cost of all labor and ruthlessly discard millions of
jobs and laborers. “You are on your own,” is the only
social rationale the system has the capacity to process
and its overlords insist that “there is no alternative”
to the program of pain that they have to implement and
administer. To the system therefore, Black people can
either accept their fate as a disposable population, or
go to hell. We have to therefore create our own options
and do everything we can to eliminate the systemic
threat that confronts us.</p>
<p>Autonomous projects are initiatives not supported or
organized by the government (state) or some variant of
monopoly capital (finance or corporate industrial or
mercantile capital). These are initiatives that directly
seek to create a democratic “economy of need” around
organizing sustainable institutions that satisfy
people’s basic needs around principles of social
solidarity and participatory or direct democracy that
intentionally put the needs of people before the needs
of profit. These initiatives are built and sustained by
people organizing themselves and collectivizing their
resources through dues paying membership structures,
income sharing, resource sharing, time banking, etc., to
amass the initial resources needed to start and sustain
our initiatives. These types of projects range from
organizing community farms (focused on developing the
capacity to feed thousands of people) to forming
people’s self-defense networks to organizing non-market
housing projects to building cooperatives to fulfill our
material needs. To ensure that these are not mere Black
capitalist enterprises, these initiatives must be built
democratically from the ground up and must be owned,
operated, and controlled by their workers and consumers.
These are essentially “serve the people” or “survival
programs” that help the people to sustain and attain a
degree of autonomy and self-rule. Our challenge is
marshaling enough resources and organizing these
projects on a large enough scale to eventually meet the
material needs of nearly 40 million people. And
overcoming the various pressures that will be brought to
bear on these institutions by the forces of capital to
either criminalize and crush them during their
development (via restrictions on access to finance,
market access, legal security, etc.) or co-opt them and
reincorporate them fully into the capitalist market if
they survive and thrive.</p>
<p>Our pressure exerting initiatives must be focused on
creating enough democratic and social space for us to
organize ourselves in a self-determined manner. We
should be under no illusion that the system can be
reformed, it cannot. Capitalism and its bourgeois
national-states, the US government being the most
dominant amongst them, have demonstrated a tremendous
ability to adapt to and absorb disruptive social forces
and their demands – when it has ample surpluses. The
capitalist system has essentially run out of surpluses,
and therefore does not possess the flexibility that it
once did.</p>
<p>Because real profits have declined since the late
1960’s, capitalism has resorted to operating largely on
a parasitic basis, commonly referred to as
neo-liberalism, which calls for the dismantling of the
social welfare state, privatizing the social resources
of the state, eliminating institutions of social
solidarity (like trade unions), eliminating safety
standards and protections, promoting the monopoly of
trade by corporations, and running financial markets
like casinos.</p>
<p>Our objectives therefore, must be structural and
necessitate nothing less than complete social
transformation. To press for our goals we must seek to
exert maximum pressure by organizing mass campaigns that
are strategic and tactically flexible, including mass
action (protest) methods, direct action methods,
boycotts, non-compliance methods, occupations, and
various types of people’s or popular assemblies. The
challenges here are not becoming sidelined and
subordinated to someone else’s agenda – in particular
that of the Democratic party (which as been the grave of
social movements for generations) – and not getting
distracted by symbolic reforms or losing sight of the
strategic in the pursuit of the expedient.</p>
<p>What the combination of theses efforts will amount to
is the creation of Black Autonomous Zones. These
Autonomous Zones must serve as centers for collective
survival, collective defense, collective
self-sufficiency and social solidarity. However, we have
to be clear that while building Black Autonomous Zones
is necessary, they are not sufficient in and of
themselves. In addition to advancing our own autonomous
development and political independence, we have to build
a revolutionary international movement. We are not going
to transform the world on our own. As noted throughout
this short work, Black people in the US are not the only
people confronting massive displacement, dislocation,
disposability, and genocide, various people’s and
sectors of the working class throughout the US and the
world are confronting these existential challenges and
seeking concrete solutions and real allies as much as we
do.</p>
<p>Our Autonomous Zones must link with, build with, and
politically unite with oppressed, exploited and
marginalized peoples, social sectors and social
movements throughout the US and the world. The
Autonomous Zones must link with Indigenous communities,
Xicano’s and other communities stemming from the
Caribbean, and Central and South America. We must also
build alliances with poor and working class whites. It
is essential that we help to serve as an alternative (or
at least a counterweight) to the reactionary and
outright fascist socialization and influences the white
working class is constantly bombarded with.</p>
<p>Our Autonomous Zones should seek to serve as new fronts
of class struggle that unite forces that are presently
separated by white supremacy, xenophobia and other
instruments of hierarchy, oppression and hatred. The
knowledge drawn from countless generations of Black
oppression must become known and shared by all exploited
and oppressed people. We have to unite on the basis of a
global anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and
anti-colonial program that centers the liberation of
Indigenous, colonized, and oppressed peoples and the
total social and material emancipation of all those who
labor and create the value that drives human
civilization. We must do so by creating a regenerative
economic system that harmonizes human production and
consumption with the limits of the Earth’s biosphere and
the needs of all our extended relatives – the non-human
species who occupy 99.9 percent of our ecosystem. This
is no small task, but our survival as a people and as a
species depends upon it.</p>
<p>The tremendous imbalance of forces in favor of capital
and the instruments of imperialism largely dictates that
the strategy needed to implement this program calls for
the transformation of the oppressive social
relationships that define our life from the “bottom up”
through radical social movements. These social movements
must challenge capital and the commodification of life
and society at every turn, while at the same time
building up its own social and material reserves for the
inevitable frontal assaults that will be launched
against our social movements and the people themselves
by the forces of reaction. Ultimately, the forces of
liberation are going to have to prepare themselves and
all the progressive forces in society for a prolonged
battle to destroy the repressive arms of the state as
the final enforcer of bourgeois social control in the
world capitalist system. As recent events Greece
painfully illustrate, our international movement will
have to simultaneously win, transform, and dismantle the
capitalist state at the same time in order to secure the
democratic space necessary for a revolutionary movement
to accomplish the most minimal of its objectives.</p>
<p><strong>Return to the Source</strong></p>
<p>The intersecting, oppressive systems of capitalism,
colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy have
consistently tried to reduce African people to objects,
tools, chattel, and cheap labor. Despite the systemic
impositions and constraints these systems have tried to
impose, Afrikan people never lost sight of their
humanity, never lost sight of their own value, and never
conceded defeat.</p>
<p>In the age of mounting human surplus and the
devaluation and disposal of life, Afrikan people are
going to have to call on the strengths of our ancestors
and the lessons learned in over 500 years of struggle
against the systems of oppression and exploitation that
beset them. Building a self-determining future based on
self-respect, self-reliance, social solidarity,
cooperative development and internationalism is a way
forward that offers us the chance to survive and thrive
in the 21<sup>st</sup> century and beyond</p>
</div>
<p class="author_description"> <em><strong>Kali Akuno</strong>
is the Producer of “An American Nightmare: Black Labor
and Liberation”, a joint documentary project of Deep
Dish TV and Cooperation Jackson. He is the co-founder
and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, and a co-writer
of “Operation Ghetto Storm” better known as the “Every
28 Hours” report.. Kali can be reached at <a
href="mailto:kaliakuno@gmail.com"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:kaliakuno@gmail.com">kaliakuno@gmail.com</a></a>
or on Twitter @KaliAkuno.</em> </p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>