Capitalism Is Not “The One”
An exclusive excerpt from Malaika Jabali’s new book, It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism, a guide to socialism for budding anti-capitalists.
Malaika Jabali
From Miles Kampf-Lassin:
Speculative fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin famously said, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.”
How can we imagine cutting through the latticework of markets and profit that undergirds our day-to-day lives of shopping, streaming and swiping? That’s the question Malaika Jabali tackles in her new book, It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time To Break Up and How To Move On, a primer on socialist politics for the 2020s.
Jabali tells In These Times she wants to speak to readers who are “social-ish” but “may not really have a word or a system or a theory to pinpoint exactly why they’re feeling what they’re feeling, and why they’ve been feeling it for so long.”
To that end, she uses a sly trope — the toxic relationship — as a model to explain how capitalism foments insecurity and a sense of being trapped. People work multiple jobs only to live in poverty while “we keep thinking the onus is on us to make it work, when this is the way the system is built.”
“I’m intentionally being conversational and fun and telling jokes, but it’s kind of hint hint, wink wink: We’re doing this for a reason — there’s a broader purpose,” she says.
Jabali, an attorney who has worked in New York housing policy, also wants the book to work for socialists “still trying to wrap their heads around how we can direct some energy into a real political project.”
“If capitalism is all we’ve been taught, then what alternatives can people think of?” Jabali asks. “And even if you do think there could be alternatives, you might think they’re too far-fetched.”
Jabali spotlights Martin Luther King Jr. and longtime Black Panther Party organizer Kathleen Cleaver, who envisioned an economic and political system based on a dignified life and democratic freedom. She also suggests off-ramps toward a broader political transformation, such as worker cooperatives, labor organizing, debt forgiveness, community land trusts and universal healthcare.
Making socialism a reality will require building a multiracial working-class movement to serve as the vehicle of social change. But in Jabali’s estimation, it’s the only route to prevent a further slide into reactionary politics.
“We’re at a crossroads,” she says. “This kind of radical thinking — and brainstorming around ways to implement socialism — is really crucial right now.”
As Le Guin hinted, if the monarchists can be overthrown, then so can the billionaires.
Read an excerpt from Jabali’s It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism below.
It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism
While socialism has captured mainstream attention in the United States in the past decade or so, probably because of the popularity of Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America, I didn’t arrive at my anti-capitalism through electoral politics. It was through studying Black history as an undergrad that I started to see how messed up our whole system really was. Reading about how slaveholders were willing to kidnap, brand, torture and work their labor force to near-death — oh, and create a system of white supremacy to maintain their profits that still thrives today — will do that to you.
I also soaked in the words of Black revolutionaries who spoke out against capitalism, including my godfather Charles Barron, a former member of the Black Panther Party. “We keep fighting the symptoms,” he is prone to say. “But capitalism is the disease.”
But it wasn’t until I was in grad school for social work, in the heart of the world’s financial capital, that I began to think seriously about other options I’d want to settle down with. It was 2008. Absolutely nothing major happened that year, besides, y’know, the fall of Wall Street. A core memory of Gen-Xers may be the fall of the Berlin Wall and the West celebrating the end of communism. But for a lot of millennials like me, the collapse of big banks — and its repercussions for the economy and for everyday working people — was our core memory, and it made many of us a bit more critical of the country’s capitalist relationship.
Those repercussions included me finishing my masters in a recession and with a crapload of student loans. I couldn’t find full-time work and had a series of odd jobs. One of those was a stint as an administrative assistant for an investment manager back home in Atlanta. My job largely consisted of fielding calls from investors who were demanding a return on their investments. Some even showed up at my job to find my boss. He was never around, they never got those returns, and he was eventually charged with fraud for running a Ponzi scheme. Definitely have some loving, long-lasting impressions of capitalists from that whole situation.
That same year, I had to haggle with a mortgage servicer that was using deceptive practices to squeeze my family of money. A few years before that, a different lender targeted us with a subprime loan, and they sold our mortgage to the servicer. Like, we didn’t even ask to be in this relationship! We were forced into it. The property values in our part of metro Atlanta took a nosedive, like lots of Black neighborhoods during the Great Recession. We were underwater and getting foreclosure notices even though we were making on-time payments. It took over a decade to recover — and that was mostly because a random pandemic that devastated the rest of the economy had people moving to warmer climates and rushing to buy homes in our neighborhood.
I didn’t spend most of my life witnessing any sort of “compassionate” capitalism. I saw a clusterf*ck.
The world was a hot mess, and I needed to make sense of what was going on. But the stuff I read frequently seemed to miss something. I disliked how some progressive books about economic injustice and corporate malfeasance were really, really good at identifying the problems, but then concluded with something lame like, “we just need better reforms.” Other books had Marxist theory down to a science, but you would never know from their narratives that there were tons of women and people of color who practiced and preached anti-capitalism, or just how much capitalism was built on slave labor and anti-Blackness. Or even how much socialism was central to the liberation movements of African, Asian, and Latin American countries fighting colonialism and imperialism. The foundational ideas of people like W.E.B. DuBois, Kathleen Cleaver, Ella Baker, and Evo Morales are practically erased from so many visions of American socialism today.
Meanwhile, most of us outside academic and activist circles continue to think we’re the ones failing at life, and not that capitalism is fundamentally flawed. Like the toxic partner we can’t seem to leave, capitalism is still going strong and reeling us in with occasional gifts (here’s $15 an hour and casual Fridays, happy now??).
After you read this book, I hope that you’ll be ready to break up and move the hell on from this monster, and that you can convince your friends and your boomer parents and your day-trading uncles to do the same.
From It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time To Break Up and How To Move On © 2023 by Malaika Jabali. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books. Illustrations by Kayla E.
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