To let freedom ring, hammer on economic injustice

Since it emerged seven years ago in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matter movement has produced a sea change in attitudes, politics and policy.

In 2016, 43% of Americans supported Black Lives Matter and its claims about the criminal justice system; now, it’s up to 67%, with 60% support among white Americans, compared with 40% four years ago. Whereas Democratic politicians once stumbled over the issue, now even Republicans are falling over themselves to say that “Black lives matter.” And where the policy conversation was formerly focused on body cameras and chokehold bans, now mainstream outlets are debating and taking seriously calls to demilitarize and defund police departments or to abolish them outright.

But the Black Lives Matter platform isn’t just about criminal justice. From the start, activists have articulated a broad, inclusive vision for the entire country. This, in fact, has been true of each of the nation’s major movements for racial equality. Among Black Americans and their radical Republican allies, Reconstruction was as much a fight to fundamentally reorder Southern economic life as it was a struggle for political inclusion.

Our society was built on the racial segmentation of personhood. Some people were full humans and some people — Blacks, Natives and other nonwhites — were not. That unequal distribution of personhood was an economic reality as well. It shaped your access to employment and capital; marked who might share in the bounty of capitalist production and who would most likely be cast out as disposable.

In our society, in other words, the fight for equal personhood can’t help but also be a struggle for economic justice.

As soon as the Civil War came to a close, it was clear there could be no actual freedom for the formerly enslaved without a fundamental transformation of economic relations.

Presidential Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, would immediately undermine any means to this end, as he restored defeated Confederates to citizenship and gave them free rein to impose laws, like the Black Codes, which sought to reestablish the economic and social conditions of slavery. But Republicans

in Congress were eventually able to wrest control of Reconstruction from the administration, and just as importantly, Black Americans were actively taking steps to secure their political freedom against white reactionary opposition.

For Blacks and radical Republicans, Reconstruction was an attempt to secure political rights for the sake transforming the entire society. And its end had as much to do with the reaction of property and capital owners as it did with racist violence.

“The bargain of 1876…left capital as represented by the old planter class, the new Northern capitalist, and the capitalist that began to rise out of the poor whites, with a control of labor greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized lands,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in “Black Reconstruction in America.”

Du Bois was writing in the 1930s. A quarter-century later, as the movement to unravel Jim Crow repression and economic exploitation progressed, the next step was to build a coalition against the privileges of class, since the two were inextricably tied together.

All of this relates back to the relationship between race and capitalism. To end segregation — of housing, of schools, of workplaces — is to undo one of the major ways in which labor is exploited, caste established and the ideologies of racial hierarchy sustained. And that, in turn, opens possibilities for new avenues of advancement.

Which brings us back to the present.

The activists behind the Black Lives Matter movement have always connected its aims to working-class, egalitarian politics. The platform of the Movement for Black Lives, as it is formally known, includes demands for universal health care, affordable housing, living wage employment and access to education and public transportation. Given the extent to which class shapes Black exposure to police violence calls to defund and dismantle existing police departments are a class demand like any other.

To put a final point of emphasis on the potential of the moment, I’ll leave you with this. In a 1963 pamphlet called “The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook,” the activist and laborer James Boggs argued for the revolutionary potential of the Black struggle for civil rights, a struggle for equality “in production, in consumption, in the community, in the courts, in the schools, in the universities, in transportation, in social activity, in government, and indeed in every sphere of American life.”