In America, socialism is a dirty word, demonized and weaponized by politicians and media alike. Concurrently, capitalism is presented to us almost as if it is a divinely ordained system, and to speak against it is to literally speak against God, democracy, and all that’s righteous.
So, what would possess a highly successful Black millennial lawyer (Columbia Law School graduate); award-winning journalist with articles published in The Root, Teen Vogue, The New Republic, etc; and documentary filmmaker who has been interviewed by countless major news services and who has graced countless stages, including at Essence Fest… why would someone so positioned to live the American dream and “stack paper,” proudly profess to be an avowed socialist?
Malaika Jabali, former Essence Magazine senior news and politics editor, shares her answer in her new book, “It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On.” Jabali also explained her reasons with the Defender.
Capitalism is Built on Exploitation
Jabali shows the connection between exploited European child labor and the labor stolen from enslaved Blacks in America via capitalism, saying:
“Children were essentially being shackled in England, white kids. So, they don’t even care about them either. They were being shackled and burned and branded in order to create the machinery that produced cotton in order for them to produce the clothing that came from our burdens. Slavery [gave] value to the colonies. The colonies created world trade. World trade [was/is] the necessary condition of large-scale machine industry. Slavery, therefore, is an economic category of the highest importance. So, we were the ones who toiled this land.”
Capitalism Failed Us Then and Fails Us Now
“In 2021, there was $136 trillion in wealth in America. [About 25%], that’s how much the bottom 50% owned of that wealth (about 25%). About 75%, that’s how much the top 10% owns in wealth. So, if capitalism was supposed to serve us and work for us, why does it still look like this a hundred years later?”
“A lot of times we say, ‘That was capitalism back in the day. I’m sure it could still work for us.’ But today, if you wanted to own a corporation, the average net worth of somebody who’s self-employed, they own a business, is $380,000… So, you need to have $380,000 as a median in order to be able to be an entrepreneur, a successful one… But in 2019, the median Black household net worth was $24,000. So, we gotta keep it real. We need a reality check. This isn’t to say that we should not be able to be enterprising and have businesses and support each other. But we also have to be realistic about how far that can get us.”
Capitalism Projects Its Evils Onto Socialism
“When we are told about socialism, we’re taught about authoritarianism. It’s about nobody being able to make decisions. Somebody else is running your life. [It’s about] big government. But the reality is that’s how it works under capitalism… [It’s like] when you have relationships, people trying to project on you when they know they’re doing wrong… This is how capitalism has worked through propaganda. Even though [capitalism] has a few big wigs who make decisions about what kind of clothes we have access to, what kind of food we have access to… but suddenly it’s socialism where we won’t have that kind of decision-making power.”
MLK Called Capitalism a Failed System of Exploitation
“Our modern-day heroes tend to get whitewashed… [still] Martin Luther King of all people said, ‘I am convinced that capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world. It is a well-known fact that no social institution can survive when it has outlived its usefulness. This, capitalism has done. It has failed to meet the needs of the masses.’”
Black/African Fights Against Capitalism Viewed as Threats to the Powerful
“As Assata Shakur says, ‘There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism.’ The Black Panthers [and others were] drawing inspiration from Black countries who were trying to free themselves from European colonialism. So many of them, Tanzania, Kenya, Grenada, Jamaica, they were fighting for a socialist economy… This was a threat to white people. This was a threat to the powers that be because we weren’t just talking about integration anymore, we were talking about revolution. We were talking about changing the economy fundamentally.”
Capitalism Disconnects Us from Our Ancestral Values
“When you have somebody, a figure like Reagan and we buy into that, ‘Well, I’m just gonna ball out, I’m just gonna hustle, I’m just gonna do me,’ that affects our consciousness as a whole. So, we’re not thinking collectively. We’re not thinking communally. We’re not thinking like how we did in our West African traditions, where it was about ‘Ubuntu’ (I am because we are), it was about Ujima (collective work and responsibility), because we have adopted a Western framework. And not only do we adopt it, but we teach it and we practice it. And then we pretend as if capitalism is the only system that could ever work.
Capitalism Incentivizes Profit By Any Means Necessary
“Up until about the 1960s, 1970s, you probably know family who were in unions. They could get a high school diploma and make $80,000 to $90,000… Back in the day, you had a union to negotiate with a corporation. You were able to get enough salary to be able to afford a home, retire, send your kids off to college if you wanted. It’s not like that anymore. And even though that was a more fair capitalist system, fundamentally, they’re focused on maximizing shareholder value. That means they’re gonna make as much money as possible. So, they started moving to China, they started moving to Mexico, they started moving to my state, Georgia, with right-to-work laws where they don’t have to think about actually being fair to you because capitalism doesn’t incentivize that.”
Capitalism Destroys Whole Communities and Cities
“How many of y’all have been to anywhere in the Midwest: Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland? So many Black people worked in those factories, and a couple of people decided, ‘We don’t need to be there anymore. We’re paying ’em too much money.’ That’s how capitalism works. With socialism, you could have a pool of workers who say, ‘You know what, let’s figure out another strategy.’”
Socialism Promotes Political & Workplace Democracy
“Assata Shakur, in her own autobiography, the famed Black Panther party leader, creates this contrast between capitalism and socialism. She said, ‘Anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.’ One way of putting this is socialism is like creating a democracy, but not just in our government, but at our workplace.”
History of Blacks Critique of Capitalism Purposefully Erased
“The Black Panther Party was a socialist organization. You had dozens of countries in Africa who built their liberation movements off of socialism, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, all these people, Assata Shakur, I quote in this book for us to remember why it is that people have tried to critique capitalism. Why it is that those critiques have gotten minimized and erased from our classrooms, and there’s a reason for that.
Capitalism Convinced us Access & Inclusion Better than Revolution
“About a decade or so after [the Civil Rights & Black Power Movements], we started talking about just inclusion and access. We went from revolution to inclusion; revolution to ‘You just need your education and mind your business; revolution to ‘Just worry about yourself and pick your own self up from your bootstraps.’”
