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Higher market interest rates can have a negative impact on the stock market. When Fed rate hikes make borrowing money more expensive, the cost of doing business rises for public (and private) companies. Over time, higher costs and less business could mean lower revenues and earnings for public firms, potentially impacting their growth rate and their stock values.

“If the cost of borrowing money from a bank increases, the opportunity to expand investment in capital goods by a corporation stalls,” says Dan Chan, a Silicon Valley investor and a former pre-IPO employee of PayPal. “The interest rate may be so high that many companies will not be able to afford to grow.”

#4: Inflation would rise. A sudden increase in the cost of labor for businesses will lead to inflation throughout the economy because of higher business costs that will need to be passed on to consumers. In addition, when only those at the bottom of the income distribution get a defacto raise to $15, there are upstream consequences. Workers who were making $15 an hour may demand $20 an hour now. Workers making $20 an hour might want $25 an hour and so on. This may seem like a benefit, but “this is a story of serious wage-price spiral, unless we introduce other measures,” warns progressive economist Dean Baker.5 We have been very fortunate that inflation has been well under control for the last few decades. A federal jobs guarantee could change that pretty quickly.

#5: It would be an administrative nightmare. Finally, matching millions of workers to the jobs envisioned under a jobs guarantee would be an administrative nightmare to implement. State and local governments will be tasked with finding the productive work to do, but how do we train millions of people to do these jobs? How does the Department of Labor oversee the millions of new jobs to make sure they’re legitimate? What are the qualifiers for the kind of work that’s eligible? What if a right-leaning state wants jobs done that a left-leaning federal government deems unproductive or socially unacceptable like building an oil pipeline or opening up a coal mine?

Settler-colonialism in North America is the conflict of two social forms, one fighting to negate the other. The capitalist system: private, individualist, focused on expanding an abstract ‘god’ (capital). The Indigenous communal modes of life: premised on relationality, collectivist, focused on viewing the individual as a part of a whole.¶ The bourgeoisie seek exclusive, private ownership of land as property to be bought and sold as a commodity. They do not recognize communal land rights, or anything like having a social relation with a place. Instead, they seek to cut off the nerves connecting every aspect of communal life in order to box things in as commodities, so that they can be abstracted into an exchange-value.¶ The 1887 Dawes Act, which dissolved Indigenous communal landholdings in the United States, was aimed at forcing this system on Indigenous peoples.⁵ In the eyes of the ruling class, this was simply “civilization.” The bourgeoisie had to go to war with these communal ways of life to construct a capitalist system in its place. In the communal systems, unlike capitalism: land itself has rights as a relative instead of being merely a vehicle for value, people live off the land as a community instead of being landless wage-laborers, and exploitation is heavily frowned upon.¶ The first Red Scare in the United States was not during the 1919–1920 assault on organized labor and anti-war activists, but during the struggle of the government and capitalists against Indigenous communal modes of life.⁶¶ This war of generalized commodity production, capitalism, against alternative ways of being extended to ways of knowing. When forcing Indigenous children into boarding schools, the colonizers worked hard to destroy languages, religious practices, and cultural practices.⁷ In their place, they promoted individualism, bourgeois values, and a future as wage-laborers.¶ The liberal view of individuals is quite representative of typical bourgeois thinking. Liberalism posits individuals in an atomistic way, without considering them as concrete beings with concrete relationships in a real world. It sees individuals as simply bundles of rights, obligations, and so on. It premises meaning on extremely abstract, albeit universalizing concepts, such as “justice.” The rights of the liberal citizen are rights they have apart from society. Their freedom is a space separate from society, since they see others as fundamentally competitors.¶ This abstract thinking, individualism, and competitive view makes plenty of sense for a bourgeois. Their well-off conditions and obsession with preserving their private property against others reflect in their lack of concern for positive rights (rights to things, like food or shelter). What they want is to realize their capital, defeat their competitors, and pay as little as they have to for the working class’s living.¶ They only concern themselves with concrete things as far as they relate to their mission to realize abstract, congealed labor: capital. Capital commands them. If they do not expand their capital through exploitation and investment, they fall behind and decay in the rat race. Thus, the bourgeois is shrewd, atomistic, and anti-social.¶ By contrast, the communal view of individuals which is characteristic of Indigenous nations is focused on very concrete things. Individuals are part of specific communities with specific histories, who are relatives with specific land-spaces. To preserve balance in one’s real relations is an important value, contrasting sharply to the obsession with satisfying the god of abstract capital by feeding it concrete sacrifices. The key to this worldview is keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of life: the rhythm of one’s human relatives, non-human relatives, the ecology, the spirits, etc.¶ The latter view has a sibling in the views of Karl Marx. In the sixth thesis from Theses On Feuerbach, Marx said:¶ […]the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.⁸¶ Further, Marx was very concerned with the metabolic rift wrought by capitalism. In his view, while capitalism had for the first time linked up the whole world and all people into one global social system of production, it had also unleashed forces it could not control. While everyone in capitalism depends on everyone else, the system is controlled by self-interested bourgeoisie, who have no concern for humans, animals, or ecology.¶ Therefore, there is a need for a working class revolution, where the people who produce what the world runs on establish social control of this social production. Through that social control, they must restore the balance of humanity and nature, using the planning of production to end the chaos and blindness characteristic of capital. Once they have fully developed this system of social control and planning and brought about a world where all people contribute to the social product instead of anyone exploiting anyone else, they will have established a communist society.¶ The basis for Pan-Indigenism in North America was laid by the proletarianization of Indigenous peoples during and after World War II.⁹ The Federal government explicitly hoped to use this to assimilate Indigenous peoples by removing them from communal life on reservations. Instead, the contact of many distinct peoples in urban workforces and communities led to the development of a new, broad concept of Indigeneity. These proletarians thought of themselves not only as, for example, Standing Rock Lakota or Chiricahua Apache, but also as “Indigenous.”¶ This had precedence with people such as , the Shawnee leaders of a Pan-Indigenous resistance to settler-colonialism in late 18th and early 19th century Ohio, or , the Paiute founder of the Ghost Dance movement in the late 19th century. However, it had never reached this scale before. The same forces which sought to destroy Indigenous identity created means of establishing a new political movement in defense of it.¶ This universalization of identity from particular to general, without necessarily negating the particular, is something which must be done by social revolution as well. Proletarianization unites many distinct peoples into one class, leading to radical contacts between worlds. It lays the basis for a revolution which for the first time establishes a real community of all of humanity.¶ Decolonization ties directly into this project of social revolution. Capital attacks communal relations to establish and reproduce itself, yet by doing this it lays the foundation for a more universal form of communal life: communism. To decolonize is not to merely undo history and return to the past. We cannot undo centuries of change, of destruction.¶ Instead, as advocated by anti-colonial theorists like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, we must assert indigenous aims on the basis of the world colonialism has brought. This must take the form of the social revolution, because capital leaves intact the negating force against communalism and the relations of domination between groups of people.¶ In our theorizing of communism, we must avoid the thought patterns of the bourgeoisie. We must not only avoid individualism, but avoid the denigration of communalist ways of life. . They are staunch protectors of the earth, of their ways of life and of their relation with the earth. They resist capitalist primitive accumulation, defending their sovereignty, daily. Communism cannot be some form of universalized bourgeois society, nor can it carry over the denigrated view the bourgeoisie have of life. Instead, it must be communalism reasserted on a universal scale.¶ Decolonization does not mean one throws out settlers. It does not mean we send Euro-Americans back to Europe. This belief is premised on a bourgeois, colonial thinking about life. It assumes that behavior is ahistoric, inscribed into the DNA of people. Rather, it is social relations that we must expel, transforming people through incorporation into new ones.¶ In the past, the adoption of Euro-Americans served as an alternative to their behavior as settlers. A decolonized society can follow this model on a broader scale, while preserving the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples over their homelands. Indigenous conceptions of land are not based on bourgeois exclusive right, but the right of specific people to have an ongoing relation with specific spaces. Abolishing the negating force, capitalism, and asserting these ways of life while working to establish the universalist form, communism, must be our program.¶ To put it simply, decolonization should be understood as the indigenization of settlers. This necessitates a social revolution in all aspects of life. It does not mean settlers must immediately “play Native.” Within the context of bourgeois settler-colonialism, that is part of a process of dissolving Indigenous communities, destroying their ability to remain sovereign. Rather, it means that we must destroy the capitalist society which drives these antagonisms.¶ This decolonization also necessitates a conscious revolution in ideology as part and parcel of social transformation. As discussed, communalist societies have a strong sense of concrete locality, of specificity according to a space and the relations of that space. Capitalism seeks to negate that in favor of universalist abstractions. Communism must take the universalizing capitalism has engaged in and place it on a concrete, conscious basis.¶ We ought to oppose the negation of local life capitalism engages in, while having the universal goal of revolution. That is, unite the particular with the universal, establish the particular as the basis of the universal. The old, European bourgeois ways of thinking, lacking metabolism or relationality with other humans and with ecology, must be overcome.¶ Communism is the abolition of the present state of things on the basis of existing premises. The emancipatory project of communism should not be hostile to, but a student of Indigenous peoples. When all people are one kin, when they are not divided by class or other social antagonisms, then we will all be free. That is the relation of decolonization to communism.

The same contradiction, between the impotence of “hegemonic” critical theory in civil society and the material power of revolutionary theory in the hands of the oppressed masses, can be appreciated by turning to a person who was arguably at the time the second most advanced Marxist theorist in California and likely the United States as a whole: George Jackson. Jackson became imprisoned in 1960 as a teenaged petty criminal and had no formal education. For holding up a gas station, he was given an “indeterminate” sentence, which became a practical life sentence. By the end of the decade, he was the Black Panther Party’s leading theoretician and wrote cogently on the application of Lenin and other revolutionary theorists to the struggle for liberation in the United States and especially in the prison system. He did this with a shockingly limited access to textual resources and wrote much of his theoretical output on a plastic typewriter. As was and is common in U.S. prisons, he was subjected to extended solitary confinement as punishment, some of that time in open-air cages. In his letters and writings he described the prison’s sadistic tortures, its corruptions and obscenities and plots. At the time of his death he had ninety-nine books in his cell: his access to Lenin’s thought was limited and he mostly had to rely on secondary sources or anthologies. The fact that his theoretical development was so acute and sophisticated under these conditions suggests something of the universal pertinence of revolutionary theory in the Leninist vein. In his theoretical work, especially Blood in My Eye, a major work published posthumously, Jackson attempted a clear-eyed confrontation with the “fascist” character of the U.S. racial state and social system. He also excavated Leninist revolutionary theory’s relevance to the predicament of America’s oppressed masses, insisting over and again on the international character of the struggles raging in U.S. ghettos and prisons. Following Mao Zedong in particular, Jackson advocated a prolonged people’s war against the U.S. government. Echoing Engels, he insisted that “People’s War is not polite or proper. . . . People’s War is improvisation and more improvisa- tion.”25 Following Fanon, he appreciated the importance of state violence in imposing colonial conditions and recognized that the development of revolutionary class consciousness was hindered absent a militarily powerful revolutionary movement that could offer real protection for oppressed peoples. Like Lenin, Jackson always framed his struggle as a planetary struggle of oppressed peoples against imperialism. In Left-Wing Communism and other texts, Lenin characterized the newly formed workers’ state as engaged in unrelenting war with the international bourgeoisie. For Jackson likewise, the latest sadistic technique of brutality introduced by the “pigs”—prison guards—was but a material manifestation of the real global struggle that the Black Panther Party shared with the National Liberation Front, and other military forces opposing the U.S. empire. Jackson is a quintessential Leninist not only because he persistently advocated for proletarian revolution (although that is so), but because he conceived of his own struggle, which was one of life and death within a small enclosed space, as part and parcel of a planetary transition that was open to scientific, materialist analysis. From his cell, Jackson could reevaluate the history of the U.S. state and social system without illusion, and realize that as a racial dictatorship, its history was linked to and coeval with other forms of fascism. Prison lays power relations bare—on that, most would agree. But for Jackson, the effect was not to narrow his vision to the demoralizing and undignified intrusions of the state onto his person, but to evince a stark and penetrating analysis of the prison as a legible manifestation of white supremacist global governance. It is such a perspective, I am arguing in part, that allows for and warrants the designation “Leninist”: an uncompromisingly revolutionary stance toward “local” political questions, such as the fate of one particular nation-state: We must accept the eventuality of bringing the USA to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked down, the commonness of death. . . . We simply stop allowing ourselves to be hunted and do some stalking of our own; their secret police aren’t really too secret at all. (55) As Lenin insisted in State and Revolution, a materialist idea of the state sees it as nothing more than “special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc.”26 From George Jackson’s vantage point of being completely controlled by this apparatus, he concluded optimistically that its overthrow was nigh. The latter, moreover, was a prerequisite for the realization of a true universality, one where Black people were in fact free to live. What does it mean to point, then, to the unrealized universality of (Leninist) revolutionary theory? For one thing, it serves to remind us that whatever one thinks of the heroic scenario of the proletariat’s role in history, its alleged mission to abolish first the capitalist system and then all class distinctions as such (creating a proletarian state and then “withering” it into nonexistence),27 it is a theoretical terrain open to the future—and not one that restricts understanding of class struggle to the point of production.28 Second, perhaps more pointedly, it reminds us that for Lenin and revo- lutionary theorists of the twentieth century broadly, imperialism was the name for the planetary system into which capitalism had developed, not a policy of this or that country. Imperialism was, and is, inseparable from the division of the planet into oppressor and oppressed nationalities: liberation from national oppression thus cannot come without a confrontation with imperialism qua global system. Third, and most pointedly still, it insists that there can be no talk of universality as if it were a settled accomplishment: we cannot talk as if humanity is not still “divided.” Put more simply, “humanity” itself is (has always been) the name for a false, presumptive (white supremacist) operationalization of “universality,” the latter having been foreclosed by the racial dynamics of capitalism’s own development. Finally, we cannot understand Black Leninism without understanding its never-ending confrontation with white supremacist counterrevolutionary forces, without understanding Blackness as premature death, without the dialectical relations of the “unrealized” and universal. White supremacist state violence is not an ancillary condition of capitalism—it cannot be explained away in a footnote as in contradiction to this or that philosopher’s appeal to the universal condition of humanity. On the contrary, the “universal” as we have come to inherit it is not just drenched in blood, but irredeemably constricted by its emergence from within the racial partitioning of humanity. Only a revolutionary break with the white supremacist racial states that continue to govern the imperialist system can allow for the realization of a true universality. If we take together the examples of two mid-century comrades, Angela Davis and George Jackson, it couldn’t be clearer: the Black claim to universal emancipation elicits state violence. Liberation for Black people means liberation from the U.S. empire, which is why the latter designates so many state resources to the global and local maintenance of white supremacy. The violence unleashed against Jackson and whosoever invoked his name to assert the “humanity” of the imprisoned (at Attica and so on); the state’s determined effort to try Davis for her life—such examples must be appreciated in the context of a truly planetary operational field (U.S. support for Rhodesia, its proxy wars to prop up apartheid Southern Africa, etc.). Quite simply, the history of Black Leninism suggests that the putative universals we have come to anticipate, such as “humanity” or emancipation per se or theory for that matter, require a thoroughgoing and radical reconstruction, rather than to be “decentered” amid a pluralism of incommensurate forms of life. After the apparent contraction of Black liberation struggles in the late 1970s, the (temporary) end of the long Black freedom movement, there was much academic hand-wringing about whether and to what degree Marxist theory does or can attend to Black liberation, to a universality constituted by Black people: does it not throw Marxism, or Leninism, as “European” theories, into epistemological crisis, or push them uncomfortably into a different ontological terrain? On the contrary, I have argued in this section that it is only by way of Black critique of putative universals do we arrive at the truly universal implications (realizable in the future) of the Leninist ambition to overthrow imperialism as the world system. Moreover, critiques of the presumptive universality of (white, European) theory are necessary to the revival of revolutionary theory per se—not as an idealist, academic language game, but as a material force that grips and bolsters the multinational working class. The final section will examine one particular example of a policy oriented toward a revolutionary transformation within the heart of imperialism—the Black Belt Thesis.

There are several glaring defects in Kahn’s capitalism inspired logic. Though some of these issues have already been introduced, they will be reiterated and expanded upon here in direct response to the arguments presented in support of capitalism as the solution to climate change. Firstly, Kahn assumes that consumers are rational, well-informed actors who possess a consummate understanding of, or at least a genuine desire to understand, the causes and consequences of climate change, and who will model their behavior accordingly. However, the empirical evidence suggests that an astonishingly significant segment of the American population is ignorant of, and reluctant to become informed on, the reality of climate change. A 2013 survey, titled Climate Change in the American Mind, revealed that 23% of Americans are certain that climate change is not happening, while 14% do not know whether it is happening or not. (Leiserowitz, et al., 2013, p. 5) If Kahn’s presumption that capitalism fosters greater understanding and appreciation of the environment were true, we would expect to see a decline in the percentage of the population who are unaware and unconcerned with climate change. Climate Change in the American Consilience Park: Climate Change and Capitalism Mind indicates a burgeoning trend in the opposite direction. The survey found that the percentage of Americans who do not believe in climate change, 23%, is swelling rapidly, even as the number of people who are uncertain about climate change shrinks. Among those who do believe in climate change and global warming, less than half believe that is caused by human activities, and that number is declining (Leiserowitz, et al., 2013, p. 5). If people do not believe in global warming, or do not believe that their actions are affecting the climate, they will have absolutely no reason to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels and other products that diminish the quality of our environment. This illuminating information is indicative of a growing degree of societywide ignorance towards the science of climate change, which is counterintuitive considering that the international scientific community reached a consensus on this subject nearly two decades ago. If American consumers were the rational actors that Kahn and other avid proponents of capitalism considered them to be, their beliefs and behaviors would reflect the scientific consensus on climate change. They would realize that understanding the facts is in their best economic interest, and would therefore seek out the truth, modeling their consumption habits accordingly. Kahn’s assessment relies almost entirely on the notion that consumers behave this way, but the evidence reveals, most assuredly, that they do not. The primary reason for this stems from the perverted nature of supply and demand, and the resultant dissemination of misinformation. As mentioned previously, many suppliers generate a synthetic demand for their products via marketing and advertising schemes. This fact is inherent to the very essence of advertising. Advertising is the process of convincing people to buy a product that they might not buy otherwise. Major ad campaigns almost universally attempt to connect their product to something that is much more desirable. For example, the new Coke cans and bottles have common names written on them, and Coke commercials explicitly suggest that buying and sharing their products will animate new platonic and romantic relationships. These campaigns attach their product to a fundamental human desire for love and social connection. This aggressive marketing tactic of associating low-quality, resource-intensive products with actual human needs and wants manipulates consumers to purchase a product based on unrealistic promises of satisfying a psychological longing, rather than on the product’s actual utility. Potent examples of this phenomenon can be found nearly everywhere in modern, capitalist societies. By compelling people to buy products through playing on their unrelated, often intangible desires, advertisers distort the actual demand for social goods. When people are buying products that are mere representations of the things that they actually need or want, suppliers are not really responding to the needs and wants of society, and thus economic growth is failing to facilitate improved social prosperity. Additionally, people’s consumption habits come to be based on illusory promises, unattainable expectations, and irrational associations rather than their substantive self-interests. The information- and expectation-distorting nature of advertising helps to explain why consumers are growing increasingly uneducated on the subject of climate change. Although it is in every individual’s best interest to consume fewer resources, specifically fossil fuels, so as not to contribute as much to the escalation of climate change, the vast majority of information that we are bombarded with on a daily basis is disseminated by companies and industries that have a compelling economic interest to convince us to constantly consume more. Consider the way in which the law of supply and demand determines the value of products, and, by extension, natural resources. The number of people who want to buy a product and its availability determine its price and value. When demand is growing and supply shrinking, the price goes up, making the product more valuable. In theory, this characteristic of capitalism is what inspires people to invent or discover an alternative to the scarce product or resource. However, there is no built-in market mechanism to prevent the complete depletion of any given resource. It is simply assumed that, if the absolute expenditure of a given resource would cause adverse social consequences, people would realize this through the process of conducting their cost-benefit analyses and through price signals, and they would cease to consume and demand said resource. However, it has already been established that consumers do not behave as quintessential rational actors, and that the cost-benefit analysis is incapable of assessing the true value of natural resources. What all of this means with regard to climate change is that our economic system is designed to use up more fossil fuels than our environment is designed to handle. The known total of the Earth’s extractable supply of fossil fuels is around 2,750 gigatons, of which 745 gigatons are owned by fossil fuel companies (Quick, 2014). The proliferation of neoliberal capitalism and industrialization, coupled with population growth, is cultivating an ever-growing demand for fossil fuels that shows no signs of abating. Recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, displayed in Figure 1, shows the current and projected trends in global fossil fuel consumption. Figure 1: (Source: The Global Education Project, 2014) As we can see in Figure 1, there is no indication that the market is responding to the undeniably dire social need to consume fewer fossil fuels. What we see is quite the opposite. The market is signaling a need for the increased extraction, production, and consumption of fossil fuels. The global demand for fossil fuels is a function of the global population, and both categories are experiencing consistent annual growth. Thus, as population grows, the subsequent demand for fossil fuels grows, diminishing the total supply and jacking up the market value. Inevitably, the fewer fossil fuels that are available, the more valuable they become. The irony is that, the more economically valuable fossil fuels become as a consequence of increased demand and reduced supply, the more imperative it will become for us not to consume them. Unfortunately, that fact is unbeknownst to the free-market, and to the majority of its participants. This paper is not intended to vilify the fossil fuel industry or any other industry; it is merely a critique of the capitalist system that has cultivated the unproductive incentives for these industries to behave as they do. The systematic incentivization to indefinitely exhaust scarce resources, which are assumed to be replaceable upon depletion, inevitably ensures that unfettered capitalism will push us to the brink of climate chaos and beyond. The final major logical pitfall of the free-market, capitalist approach to resolving and adapting to climate change is the assertion that environmental regulation is unnecessary, and even counterproductive. Proponents of a free-market resolution to climate change insist that the government’s role should be limited to providing the public with informative warnings regarding imminent natural disasters (Kahn, 2012). They maintain that the government should not meddle with the freemarket by imposing limitations on the production or consumption of fossil fuels and all other resources. Proponents also purport that government policies intended to buffer the effects of climate change, such as the provision of recovery funds for the victims of natural disasters, encourage people to subject themselves to inevitable environmental hazards, as they come to expect that the government will protect them from future natural disasters. Government is critically important for providing the public with accurate information on present and future environmental hazards. On this point, there is no disagreement. However, the role of government should be not confined to this singular aim. National governments and international governance entities such as the United Nations are in a unique position to enlighten people on the science of climate change. In fact, it was the United Nations that spurred the establishment of the international scientific consensus on climate change via the IPCC. Government and corporate entities are among the few organizations that possess the resources necessary to effectively compile and disseminate information on a national and global scale. Additionally, these entities enjoy a high level of social influence, necessary for convincing people of the veracity of their claims. As previously mentioned, most corporations who are in a position to enlighten the public on climate change, specifically those in the fossil fuel and energy industries, have a powerful economic incentive to persuade consumers that climate change is not occurring, or that it is not a product of human action. These corporations frequently employ their influence to stir specious uncertainty into the mix of public perception of climate change, and thus protect their assets. While corporate influence no doubt permeates the political sphere, government is relatively less biased in climatic matters, and has an entrenched This content downloaded from interest, and a social responsibility, to provide people with the real facts of climate change, and to set a course for remediation. The greatest strides that have been made towards environmental protection and the abatement of global warming have been initiated by government entities. One of the best examples of this can be found in the national Clean Air Act, passed in 1970. Since 1980, this act has reduced sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, both of which are harmful airborne pollutants, by 71% and 46%, respectively (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2013). The CAA has also forced commercial chlorofluorocarbons, which deteriorate the ozone layer, to be phased out, thus facilitating a recovery of ozone molecules in the upper atmosphere. If we were to allow the free-market to provide us with information that is relevant to environmental protection and climate change without government interference, we would be highly susceptible to adopting viewpoints that are skewed by economic interests. Government involvement and regulation is necessary for preserving the environment, as well as mitigating and adapting to climate change.

Contemporary proponents of a job guarantee—both academic and activist—highlight a federal jobs program’s supposed potential to not only provide unemployed workers with gainful employment at a living wage but also serve as a means of raising the wages of private sector workers outside the JG program. They claim that this could be accomplished by the JG program absorbing the pool of the unemployed workers and thus eliminating the downward wage pressure that structural unemployment generates.24 Minsky previously argued for a “tight full employment labour market” maintained through an “employer of last resort” policy used to flexibly absorb the unemployed over the course of the business cycle.25 In this telling, the jobs program would improve the bargaining power of the working class by setting a higher floor for the bottom of the labour market, thus compelling private sector employers in need of workers to offer wages higher than those of the JG program to attract workers away from it. There are several problems with this narrative. Recall that Minsky’s aim was not only to aid the unemployed but also to achieve full employment without causing the wage-price inflation that partially ended postwar full employment policy in the 1970s.26 Such a situation holds only if the wage floor set by the JG is low enough not to allow workers in the private sector to demand higher wages, or, as Seccareccia has critically characterized it, by maintaining a “loose” full employment policy in which JG wages are purposefully set low enough to not drive private sector wage growth over time.27 Wray in fact has previously argued that the existence of a JG program could be used to discipline the wage demands of private sector workers. He writes: However, just as workers have the alternative of [JG jobs], so do employers have the opportunity of hiring from the [JG] pool. This is the primary ‘price stabilization’ feature of the [JG] program. If the wage demands of workers in the private sector exceed by too great a margin the employer’s calculations of their productivity, the alternative is to obtain [JG] workers at a mark-up over the [minimum wage]. This will help to offset the wage pressures caused by elimination of the fear of unemployment.28 Here, Wray characterizes the JG program not as a bargaining tool in the arsenal of the working class, but as a “price stabilization” mechanism that effectively pools the reserve army of labour and pays them a wage sufficiently low to allow employers to obtain (or threaten to obtain) these workers when private sector wage demands are too high. The change from describing the job guarantee as a wage- and inflation-containing institution to one geared towards improving the bargaining power of workers is quite remarkable. One need only to take stock of the various features and benefits that Wray et al. now include in their jobs program proposals. For example, in keeping with the movement demand for “$15 and Fairness,” the Levy Institute proposes to set the wage in their jobs program at $15 per hour, which would effectively function as the new US federal minimum wage.29 As Dean Baker points out, however, there are approximately 40 million US workers currently earning less than $15 per hour—the federal minimum wage remains $7.25 per hour. This could mean one of two things: either low-wage private sector employers would have to raise wages quickly in order to retain employees, or the JG program would have to absorb a lot of displaced private sector workers.30 It is hard to imagine employers tolerating this without a substantive fight. Additionally, this does not account for whatever “spillover effects” a substantial JG-induced wage increase might generate up the income ladder (or at least proximate to the JG wage). This is not to suggest simply that significant increases at the bottom of the wage distribution are not necessary and justifiable, but rather to point out that this outcome is incompatible with JG theorists’ previous insistence that the program would serve a “price stabilization” function—at least short of some other institutional mechanism, such as coordinated wage bargaining or a broad incomes policy. Current JG proposals also aim to provide workers with benefit packages and, notably, access to public health insurance. Although this is commendable, Wray underestimates how forceful the pull might be from the low-wage private sector to the JG program because of these features.31 In a country where low-wage workers are far more likely to be un- or under-insured, access to health benefits in the JG would likely prevent workers from leaving the program even if marginally higher paying work were to be available in the private sector. This lends credence to the argument that the only way the program might be implemented is if it contains wages and conditions significantly below those found in current JG proposals. Wray seems to assume, or predict, in his statistical models that over certain timespans the low-wage private sector would be forced to harmonize wages and conditions upwards, but Baker points out that Wray underestimates how much wage pull and price inflation private sector employers and wealthier consumers will tolerate.32 Furthermore, Wray makes clear that JG employment would not be “at-will,” as is currently the case with all nonunionized employment in the United States. JG workers would have access to a grievance process and could not be fired at the discretion of their state or local public employer without just cause. Here again, contemporary JG advocates do not appreciate how much of an improvement basic just-cause dismissal procedures in the JG would be over nearly all low-wage private sector work in the United States, and, consequently, how much this aspect of the JG might incentivize workers to enrol in the program and stay put. These features raise an important question: does the job guarantee mean that workers always have a right to employment in the program, or only when sufficient private sector employment is not available? In other words, can a worker refuse sector employment and still access the job guarantee program, and if so, is such a right tenable when generalized? Wray and Tcherneva both emphasize the proposal’s ability to adjust JG employment levels as conditions in the business cycle change,33 but it suggests that private sector work outside the JG program will always be preferable to work within the program. When comparing the most recent iteration of the JG proposal with the contemporary landscape of low-wage private sector employment, it is hard to imagine this to be the case. Moreover, although the JG program is supposed to demand no education or skill prerequisites, many jobs that JG proponents imagine participants doing would in fact require considerable skill and training. For example, the National Jobs for all Coalition, an activist and research organization in the United States, proposes that the JG focus on “green jobs,” including building and retrofitting homes and commercial and public buildings; manufacturing and installing solar panels, wind turbines, and other renewable energy infrastructure; local and sustainable farming; expanding and updating public transportation; repairing roads, bridges, and other infrastructure; and training millions of teachers, health care professionals, and child care workers.34 Similarly, the Center for American Progress’s JG proposal mentions homecare workers for the elderly and the disabled; childcare workers; teacher’s aides and other educational support staff; and people trained to provide low-level emergency medical support.35 All of these jobs require significant training, skill development, and public investment, and very few could conceivably be part of a temporary program for workers displaced by private sector contraction. If the number of JG jobs is really meant to grow and shrink according to the performance of the private sector, government is highly unlikely to make significant capital investments for nonpermanent jobs. As Tymoigne points out with reference to the experiences of the New Deal jobs programs,36 skill underutilization was a persistent problem. The necessarily low wages likely to be paid in any actually-existing JG program would almost certainly repeat this problem. Nonpermanence, low wages, and limited capital investment would likely translate into people doing work that is low-productivity and requires little training or coordination. Growing the public sector workforce and increasing public investment to address the climate and care crises are reasonable,37 but conflating this with the JG and its associated features only confuses matters. There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of contemporary iterations of the JG proposal. The JG cannot accomplish price stabilization and wage restraint functions while also advancing working class power by removing the reserve army of labour and increasing worker bargaining power. As Wray points out, Minsky makes a distinction between moving towards full employment and maintaining full employment.38 Minsky contends that, for the most part, the former has produced inflationary pressures (particularly through incentives for private investment and generalized growth promotion) whereas little evidence suggests that maintaining low or full employment in his model would be inflationary.39 He and Wray both predict that the political shock of the program’s implementation will cause some price inflation, but they maintain that the dynamics of the JG program would be such that full employment could become a feature of the regulated capitalist labour market without driving inflation. This prediction is based on the assumption that a tight full employment labour market will also generate a dynamic wherein wages rise faster in the lagging sectors than in the leading sectors of the economy, which will help balance any inflationary pressures brought on by full employment.40 The problem with this, as Minsky himself recognizes, is that institutional mechanisms would be required to maintain wage restraint in higher wage and more productive sectors while wages were encouraged to outstrip growth in lower wage sectors.41 This lesser-noticed aspect of the proposal is markedly similar to the Swedish “wage solidarity” scheme, which had coordinated sectoral collective bargaining as its prerequisite.42 In the United States, with its decentralized bargaining system and much lower union density, no institutional mechanisms exist to play this wage-coordination role. Were a feasible JG to be implemented, it is likely that its base wage would have to be kept low and be coupled with some form of incomes policy. Even with sectoral bargaining or an incomes policy of some sort, it is questionable whether or not the conditions of a JG with rising wages in the lower rungs of the income distribution would hold, as the unravelling of centralized bargaining in the Swedish case partially indicates.43 Thus, the argument that a JG could be used to augment working class power seems to run aground on the idea’s conceptualization as a wage floor that does not encourage private sector wage demands. In other words, under present political conditions, it seems likely that it would simply be another way in which to pool the reserve army of the unemployed in a way that does not meaningfully change the composition of class forces. It seems that a job guarantee is no technocratic fix to the political problem of strengthening organized working class power.

The most important feature of the modern world order, arguably, has been its imperial structure of racialized, capitalist hierarchy. The contours of this hierarchy of wealth, political power and legal standing have changed significantly since its inauguration in the fifteenth century, but its continuity as a basic fact and its implications for the world since so-called decolonization should remain at the center of our description and analysis. The pervasive nature of these imperial dynamics means that the tasks for postcolonial political theory are vast. The very categories that have structured the discipline of political science since the end of the Second World War contribute to the challenge. Political theory was conceived in the postwar period largely as the study of the state and of politics within states, alongside a discipline of International Relations that took itself to be the study of the relations among states, with an implicit understanding that the states in question were post-imperial and disavowing its own prewar past as a discipline preoccupied with the management of colonial and racial hierarchy. Postcolonial theory, in contrast, refers not to a time after the end of empire, a condition that we are nowhere near achieving, but rather after the inauguration of the modern imperial world order (Seth, 2013, p. 1). Twentieth-century anticolonial thought offered precisely such an ‘expansive account of empire that situated alien rule within international structures of unequal integration and racial hierarchy’ (Getachew, 2019, p. 2). as well as resourceful political responses to that condition, now just beginning to be tapped by disciplinary political theory. As I’ll suggest below, W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings on the global order, beginning during the First World War, remain one potent source of empirical analysis of and theoretical insight into this phenomenon. Indeed, the continuing resonance of his account of the imperial global order underscores how much persists, despite changes as seemingly significant as formal decolonization and the onset and then the end of the Cold War. The tenacity of this imperial formation is due in part to the flexibility, and the attractions, of some of its key legitimating discourses, including liberalism and international law. In Boundaries of the International, I studied the relation between imperial structure and discursive scaffolding by exploring the mutual constitution of international law and the imperial global order. I stressed the politics of international law’s conceptual frames: the ways in which an image of the world as an international community of free and independent states was used to justify European imperial domination, and sometimes to criticize it, but especially to occlude it. The state system itself, that is, as an ideology and as a set of legal institutions and political practices, entrenched imperial hierarchies while simultaneously obscuring them with the appearance of formal equality, as it continues to do. As a conceptual frame, or ‘language of disclosure’, the notion of an international community of states has thus obscured or distorted much of global politics since it was invented, and as it was entrenched over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Tully, 2008, vol. 2, p. 127). It follows that any discussion of the politics of territorial states, or of the world as a system of such states, must take place alongside a recognition of more fundamental imperial structures. Given the extent of the task of taking stock of the persistence of global hierarchy, I hesitate to write prescriptively about what political theorists concerned with empire should be considering. Since we were invited to take Boundaries as a point of departure, though, I can begin by noting some of the ways I had hoped it would be engaged and taken up, as well as some of the questions and dynamics that the book does not address and lines of approach that I hope to follow in future work. I am only too aware of the limitations of the approach I took in Boundaries, particularly that it privileges discursive contexts over material dynamics and that its objects are mainly European thinkers, as Vasko, Ince and Nichols observe below. Among the book’s key preoccupations are the epistemic pitfalls and political limitations of the dominant conceptual framework that we have for talking about global politics, as a community of independent territorial states. Boundaries addresses the historical development of this framework and its occlusions but says less about their implications for contemporary normative theory. To place imperial structures at the heart of our critical descriptions of the global order may be to challenge quite fundamentally both the ideal of an international community of free and equal nations and the cosmopolitan ideal that has constituted its main rival within normative international theory. The notion of such a community of states that respect one another’s autonomy, while offering assistance when needed, is in many ways a compelling normative vision. But it has always also been, as is commonly the case in international law, an aspiration couched as a description, a conflation that has generated two different but related problems. First, to the extent that the aspiration has been used as a working description, it has masked the imperial nature of European states (as in Rawls, 1999). Second, to the extent that the aspiration has been shaped by empirical assumptions – for instance, as to what forms of prosperity or solidarity are possible in the modern nation-state – it has presupposed conditions that came about through imperialism and in many instances remain dependent on global hierarchies. This is one reason among many to relinquish ‘liberal-democratic’ states of the global north as normative models. Du Bois’s critique of what he called ‘democratic despotism’ illuminates these two intertwined but distinct problems. As I only began to suggest in Boundaries, Du Bois’s First World War essays offer a profound contrast with the views of the European international lawyers and political theorists of whom my study is a critique. Du Bois saw the modern world order not as an expanding community of states but as a global economic and political system shaped above all by the dynamics of imperial domination. His early efforts to make sense of the industrial imperialism of his present involved a longue durée global history linking conquest, commerce, and race, and showing that the key political developments on which modern Europeans prided themselves – advancing freedom and equality under democracy, the increasing prosperity of their populations – were parasitic on imperial exploitation. His critique bore on the interaction of ideas and material forces: white supremacy and European ideas of civilization together with the operations of global capital. The ideology and the legal and institutional structure of the international system facilitated the exploitation inevitable under capitalism by placing it in imperial and racialized spaces outside the bounds of ‘international’ concern. And because European democratization itself relied on imperial exploitation, empire had morphed into a distinct and novel phenomenon: ‘democratic despotism’. The sharing of imperial spoils eased social conflict within Europe, simultaneously reconciling the ruling ‘captains of industry’ to increased power-sharing at home as long as they had continued impunity in the colonies, and mitigating the poverty and political agitation of the European masses through colonial profits and consumer goods (Du Bois, 1915, p. 709). Despite the fact that the white working classes themselves suffered under imperial capitalism, white socialists and their labor supporters failed to acknowledge or to combat the dynamics of global domination because they were also its beneficiaries: ‘in this crime white labor is particeps criminis with white capital’ (Du Bois, 1921, p. 7). They had been seduced into demanding a greater share of imperial profits, rather than recognizing that ultimately their own liberation depended on their working to end the even more extreme exploitation of non-whites around the world. On Du Bois’s account, the modern nation – and therefore the international system – was not, as other critics such as J.A. Hobson were arguing, perverted by imperialism, but in fact created by it. The Euro-American nation-state system emerged as an idealization perched atop structures of global empire. A wealth of recent scholarship on empire, settler colonialism, and their contemporary instantiations, develops these Du Boisian insights, drawing the connections between racial and imperial domination ‘within’ societies and between them, tracing the connections between democracy or popular sovereignty and imperial subjugation, elucidating the dynamics of racial capitalism, and attending to the resources in anticolonial thought and action, especially in political solidarities across the global south. As Aziz Rana argued in Two Faces of American Freedom, freedom and equality among whites in the North American colonies, and then the United States, depended materially and symbolically on the exploitation and expropriation of subject communities: ‘settler empire was the servant of a unique and robust view of self-rule, seen by many as crucial to the fulfillment of emancipatory ambitions’ (2010, p. 3). Settlers’ ongoing insistence on interpreting Indigenous claims for land and political autonomy in their own terms, moreover – as claims for property rights and cultural freedoms – renders them impervious to the radical challenge such claims pose to the settler-colonial model of development, capital accumulation by means of dispossession, and the political practices that depend on them (Coulthard, 2014). These pathologies are closely bound to the broader dynamics of democratic despotism identified by Du Bois – to democratization in non-settler imperial states – in ways that bear on both democratic theory and the study of settler-colonial societies. The economic and political life of European metropolitan citizens was similarly premised on imperial domination and expropriation: the industrial productivity enabled by the opening of agricultural land in the western hemisphere to European economies; the fueling of the European working class by sugar calories made cheap by the use of slave labor; the sense of political inclusion of the working class generated by a shared colonial project. Class conflict in Europe was mitigated, democratic communities forged, and welfare states inaugurated on the back of imperial expropriation, white supremacy, and, as Inés Valdez has shown, racialized imperial labor control. Valdez’s account of the immigration policies of contemporary nation-states as ‘imperial remnants rather than legitimate attributes of sovereignty’ (2019, p. 22) sheds light on contemporary right-wing populism and exposes the limits of left positions on migration that seek to protect only domestic labor while leaving capital’s global exploitation of labor unchallenged. Thanks to the global hegemony of the United States, the constellation of distinct but connected forms of imperial domination that has characterized American history – slavery, settler colonialism, and conquest of both adjacent and more distant territory – has ramified around the world. As the sociologist Matthew Desmond (2019) has argued, America’s ‘low-road capitalism’ – characterized by depressed wages, extreme inequality, racism, union-busting, the punitive disciplining of workers, lax regulation of labor standards, and ‘normalized insecurity’ – can be traced to slavery. If that low-road capitalism is not typical of wealthy countries, on Desmond’s account, its centrality to the world’s largest economy intensifies the imprint of empire on the contemporary world economy, while the exploitation by global capital of labor in more vulnerable states amounts to the exportation of low-road practices outside the political boundaries, but not the economies, of other wealthy states. Just as Du Bois had demonstrated the continuities between empires and European nation-states as their chief modern agents, he also showed that postcolonial states suffered new iterations of imperial domination obscured by international law. Anticipating the idea of neo-colonialism developed by Kwame Nkrumah and others in the 1950s, Du Bois argued in 1925 that Liberia, one of the few formally independent African states at the time, was wrongly ‘looked upon as a self-steered craft, master of her own fate instead of being, as she has always been, a canoe tossed on raging economic currents which eddied out of the slave trade of the eighteenth-century into the swirl of the World War in the twentieth century’ (Du Bois, 1925, p. 327). As it was for Liberia in Du Bois’s time, debt remains a major mechanism of neo-colonial control, now enforced by a rigid ‘statist’ norm of repayment that states in the global north did not abide by before the 1930s, when they were the major borrowers and defaults were common. This norm, widely considered to be both apolitical and indispensable to the functioning of international finance, is neither. It imposes extraordinary costs on the populations of postcolonial states, while encouraging speculators and investors to make indiscriminate loans, confident that, however illegitimate, predatory or transitory a given regime or loan package, the population is on the hook for repayment (Lienau, 2014; Roos, 2019). In this way, international law and norms, and a flawed, tendentious understanding of their history, discipline postcolonial states to adhere to unprecedentedly onerous repayment terms and further entrench their subjugated international standing. In Boundaries I followed Martti Koskenniemi in treating law as a set of discursive and institutional resources mobilized by ‘people with projects’, asking what sort of political work these resources did for those who deployed them (Kennedy, 2000; Koskenniemi, 2002; Marks and Lang, 2013). The focus of the book’s analysis and critique is liberal ideology as it appeared in the discourses of the law of nations and international law. I recognized the importance of profit motives and commercial agents to this history, but capitalism was not a central category of analysis. Still, given that modern empires and capitalism developed jointly, and must be understood in relation to one other, it would have been useful to address more explicitly the relationship between liberalism and capitalism, as does recent Marxian work in the history of international law that has sought to capture the ‘systemic logics at work’ in international legal hierarchies (Marks, 2008, p. 302) and the literatures on racial capitalism and colonialism that Ince flags below. Where my emphasis in Boundaries tended to be on the persistent violation of international law’s avowed norms of freedom and equality, and the obfuscations of that violation that the articulation of the norms has performed, this scholarship tracks more explicitly liberal international law’s work in service to imperatives of capitalism: the domination performed by the norms themselves rather than by their violation. International law, as these accounts show, created the conditions necessary for capitalism by ‘reconstructing the world in the image of a particular kind of “free” and “equal” or “sovereign” legal subject’, one with individual rights, especially freedom of religion and conscience, and rights of property and freedom to trade (Parfitt, 2019, p. 57). The democratic nation-state as it emerged in Europe, then, was both a creature and an agent of imperial capitalism, though in its self-conception it was the antithesis of empire and its successor in a historical progression toward a more just and equal world. Just as the capitalist corporation is sometimes described as an ‘externality machine’ – a structure designed to internalize profits while offloading costs onto others – the western democratic nation has never been self-sustaining, but rather took the form that it did only by imposing devastating costs elsewhere. I have alluded to the attractions of some liberal and democratic norms and of the ideal of an international community of nations treating one another with mutual respect as independent and as equals; the same can be said of the concern for the dignity and moral equality of every individual that underlies cosmopolitan projects in political theory. Du Bois himself saw ‘but one adequate method of salvation – the giving of democratic weapons of self-defense to the defenseless’ (at other times he might have said the taking of such weapons by the defenseless) (Du Bois, 1915, p. 712). If these values are to serve as the basis for critique or constructive political projects we must continue to reckon as he did with their imperial entanglements past and present.

Drawing on the intellectual production of twentieth-century Black anticapitalists, I theorize modern U.S. racial capitalism as a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation.14 The racial here specifically refers to Blackness, defined as African descendants’ relationship to the capitalist mode of production—their structural location—and the condition, status, and material realities emanating therefrom.15 It is out of this structural location that the irresolvable contradiction of value minus worth arises. Stated differently, Blackness is a capacious category of surplus value extraction essential to an array of political-economic functions, including accumulation, disaccumulation, debt, planned obsolescence, and absorption of the burdens of economic crises.16 At the same time, Blackness is the quintessential condition of disposability, expendability, and devalorization. [Footnote 14]: Another feature of modern U.S. racial capitalism is property by dispossession. In Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory, Robert Nichols draws on the experience of Indigenous peoples in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand to theorize how the “system of landed property” was fundamentally predicated on violent dispossession. While the Anglo-derived legal-political regimes differed in these localities, the “intertwined and co-constitutive” material effects converged in the legalized theft of indigenous territory amounting in “approximately 6 percent of the total land on the surface of Earth.” Such dispossession, Nichols notes, is recursive: “In a standard formulation one would assume that ‘property’ is logically, chronologically, and normatively prior to ‘theft.’ However, in this (colonial) context, theft is the mechanism and means by which property is generated: hence its recursivity. Recursive dispossession is effectively a form of property-generating theft.” As such, theft and dispossession, through property regimes, are an ongoing feature of the Indigenous reality of modern U.S. racial capitalism. Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 50–51. [End Footnote 14] My operationalization of capitalism follows Oliver Cromwell Cox’s explication in Capitalism and American Leadership.17 Modern U.S. racial capitalism arose in the context of the First World War, when, as Cox explains, the United States took advantage of the conflict to capture the markets of South America, Asia, and Africa for its “over-expanded capacity.”18 Cox further expounds upon this auspicious moment of ascendant modern U.S. racial capitalism thus: By 1914, the United States had brought its superb natural resources within reach of intensive exploitation. Under the stimulus of its foreign-trade outlets, the financial assistance of the older capitalist nations, and a flexible system of protective tariffs, the nation developed a magnificent work of transportation and communication so that its mines, factories, and farms became integrated into an effectively producing organism having easy access to its seaports.… [Likewise,] further internal expansion depended upon far greater emphasis on an ever widening foreign commerce.… Major entrepreneurs of the United States proceeded to step up their campaign for expansion abroad. The war accentuated this movement. It accelerated the growth of [modern] American [racial] capitalism and impressed upon its leaders as nothing had before the need for external markets.19 Relatedly, Peter James Hudson argues that the First World War fundamentally changed the terms of order of international finance, allowing New York to compete with London, Paris, and Berlin for the first time in the realm of global banking. This was not least because the Great War “drastically reordered global credit flows,” with the United States transforming from a debtor into a creditor nation.20 In addition to Latin American and Caribbean nations and businesses turning to the United States for financing and credit, domestic saving and investment patterns were altered to the benefit of imperial financial institutions like the City Bank.21 Although the United States is, to use Cox’s terminology, more a “lusty child of an already highly developed capitalism” than an exceptional capitalist power, the nation perfected its techniques of accumulation through its vast natural wealth, large domestic market, imbalance of Northern and Southern economies, and, importantly, through its lack of concern for the political and economic welfare of the overwhelming masses of its population, least of all the descendants of the enslaved.22 Modern U.S. racial capitalism is thus sustained by military expenditure, the maintenance of an extremely low standard of living in “dependent” countries, and the domestic superexploitation of Black toilers and laborers. Cox notes that Black labor has been the “chief human factor” in wealth production; as such, “the dominant economic class has always been at the motivating center of the spreads of racial antagonism. This is to be expected since the economic content of the antagonism, especially at its proliferating source in the South, has been precisely that of labor-capital relations.”23 In a general sense, racial capitalism in the United States constitutes “a peculiar variant of capitalist production” in which Blackness expresses a structural location at the bottom of the labor hierarchy characterized by depressed wages, working conditions, job opportunities, and widespread exclusion from labor unions.24 Furthermore, modern U.S. racial capitalism is rooted in the imbrication of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism. Anti-Blackness describes the reduction of Blackness to a category of abjection and subjection through narrations of absolute biological or cultural difference; ruling-class monopolization of political power; negative and derogatory mass media propaganda; the ascent of discriminatory legislation that maintains and reinscribes inequality, not least various modes of segregation; and social relations in which distrust and antipathy toward those racialized as Black is normalized and in which “interracial mass behavior involving violence assumes a continuously potential danger.”25 Anti-Blackness thus conceals the inherent contradiction of Blackness—value minus worth—obscuring and distorting its structural location by, as Ralph and Singhal remark, contorting it into only a “debilitated condition.”26 Antiradicalism can be understood as the physical and discursive repression and condemnation of anticapitalist and/or left-leaning ideas, politics, practices, and modes of organizing that are construed as subversive, seditious, and otherwise threatening to capitalist society. These include, but are not limited to, internationalism, anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, peace activism, and antisexism. Anti-Blackness and antiradicalism function as the legitimating architecture of modern U.S. racial capitalism, which includes rationalizing discourses, cultural narratives, technologies of repression, legal structures, and social practices that inform and are informed by racial capitalism’s political economy.27 Throughout the twentieth century, anti-Blackness propelled the “Black Scare,” defined as the specter of racial, social, and economic domination of superior whites by inferior Black populations. Antiradicalism, in turn, was enunciated through the “Red Scare,” understood as the threat of communist takeover, infiltration, and disruption of the American way of life.28 For example, in the 1919 Justice Department Report, Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes, As Reflected in Their Publications, it was asserted that the radical antigovernment stance of a certain class of Negroes [Black people] was manifested in their “ill-governed reaction toward race rioting,” “threat of retaliatory measures in connection with lynching,” open demand for social equality, identification with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and “outspoken advocacy of the Bolshevik or Soviet doctrine.”29 Here, anti-Blackness, articulated through the fear of the “assertion of race consciousness,” was attached to the IWW and Bolshevism—in other words, to anticapitalism—to make it appear even more subversive and dangerous. Likewise, antiradicalism, expressed through the denigration of the IWW and Soviet Doctrine, was made to seem all the more threatening and antithetical to the social order in its linkage with Black insistence on equality and self-defense against racial terrorism. In this way, “defiance and insolently race-centered condemnation of the white race” and “the Negro seeing red” came to be understood as seditious in the context of modern U.S. racial capitalism. The link between my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism and Robinson’s catholic theory of racial capitalism, beyond his “suggest[ion] that it was there,” is vivified through the prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who writes: “Capitalism…[is] never not racial.… Racial capitalism: a mode of production developed in agriculture, improved by enclosure in the Old World, and captive land and labor in the Americas, perfected in slavery’s time-motion, field factory choreography, its imperative forged on the anvils of imperial war-making monarchs.”30 Racial capitalism, she continues, “requires all kinds of scheming, including hard work by elites and their compradors in the overlapping and interlocking space-economies of the planet’s surface. They build and dismantle and reconfigure states, moving capacity into and out of the public realm. And they think very hard about money on the move.”31 Perhaps more than Gilmore, though, my approach aligns with that of Neville Alexander as described by Hudson.32 Like Alexander, who focused on South Africa, I offer a particularistic understanding of racial capitalism, mine being rooted in the political economy of Blackness and the legitimating architectures of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism in the United States. Gilmore qua Robinson offers a more universalist and transhistorical conception. Like Alexander, my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism is primarily rooted in (Black) Marxist-Leninists and fellow travelers. This is an important epistemological distinction: whereas Robinson finds Marxism-Leninism to be, at best, inattentive to race, my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism is rooted in the work of Black freedom fighters who, as Marxist-Leninists, were able to offer potent and enduring analyses and critiques of the conjunctural entanglements of racialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, on the one hand, and capitalist exploitation and class antagonism on the other hand.33 Although Robinson draws on scholars like Fernand Braudel, Henri Pirenne, David Brion Davis, and Eli Heckscher to understand European history, socialist theory, and the European working class, the work of Black Marxists like James Ford, Walter Rodney, Amílcar Cabral, and Paul Robeson offer me those same intellectual, historical, and theoretical resources. Finally, I agree with Alexander that the resolution to racial capitalism is antiracist socialism, not a cultural-metaphysical Black radical tradition. In what remains of this essay, I will draw on the work of Black Marxist-Leninists and anticapitalists to explicate the defining features of modern U.S. racial capitalism—war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, labor superexploitation, and property by dispossession. In this, I demonstrate that their critiques and analyses offer a blueprint for theorizing modern U.S. racial capitalism. War and militarism facilitate the endless drive for profit. Military conflicts between imperial powers result in the reapportioning of boundaries, possessions, and spheres of influence that often exacerbate racial and spatial economic subjection. War and militarism also perpetuate the endless construction of “threats,” primarily in racialized and socialist states, against which to defend progress, prosperity, freedom, and security. The manufacturing of conflict legitimates the mobilization of extraordinary violence to expropriate untold resources that produce relations of underdevelopment, dependency, extraversion, and disarticulation in the Global South. Moreover, the ruling elite and labor aristocracy in imperialist countries, not least the United States, wage perpetual war to defend their way of life and standard of living against the racialized majority who, because they would benefit most from the redistribution of the world’s wealth and resources, represent a perpetual threat. Here, Du Bois’s 1915 essay, “The African Roots of War,” is instructive.34 Though he does not directly analyze the United States, he nonetheless demonstrates how racism, white supremacy, and the plunder of Africa underpinned the capitalist imperialist war that engulfed the world from July 1914 to November 1918—a war that catapulted the United States into the center of the capitalist world system. Using Du Bois’s own words, Hubert Harrison, the father of Harlem radicalism, makes the direct link: But since every industrial nation is seeking the same outlet for its products, clashes are inevitable and in these clashes beaks and claws—armies and navies—must come into play. Hence beaks and claws must be provided beforehand against the day of conflict, and hence the exploitation of white men in Europe and America becomes the reason for the exploitation of black and brown and yellow men in African and Asia. And, therefore, it is hypocritical and absurd to pretend that the capitalist nations can ever intend to abolish wars.… For white folk to insist upon the right to manage their own ancestral lands, free from the domination of tyrants, domestic and foreign, is variously described as “democracy” and “self-determination.” For Negroes, Egyptians and Hindus to seek the same thing is impudence.… Truly has it been said that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the ‘Color Line.'” And wars are not likely to end; in fact, they are likely to be wider and more terrible—so long as this theory of white domination seeks to hold down the majority of the world’s people under the iron heel of racial oppression.35 For Du Bois, the imperialist rivalry for the booty on offer in Africa drove Berlin’s efforts to consolidate its place in the sun by displacing London in particular. While Vladimir Lenin understood that “the war [was] a product of half a century of development of world capitalism and of billions of threads and connections,” Du Bois expanded this analysis by providing a critique of the racial foundations of capitalist expansion.36 He held that the struggle to the death during the Great War for African resources and labor had begun to “pay dividends” centuries earlier through the enslavement of African peoples, the subsequent conflation of color and inferiority, and the reduction of what was routinely referred to as the “Dark Continent” to a space of backwardness ideally suited for dispossession. He further noted that “with the waning possibility of Big Fortune…at home, arose more magnificently the dream of exploitation abroad,” especially in Africa—a dream shared by white labor and the ruling class.37 In other words, this “democratic despotism” allowed for the white working class to “share the spoil of exploiting ‘chinks and niggers,'” and facilitated the creation of “a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor” that perpetuated racial capitalism across class lines.38 Moreover, this national unity was strengthened through the disrespect and dehumanization of the racialized toilers and peasants in the plundered colonies that mitigated the exploitation and impoverishment of the white working class in imperial countries. This superexploitation allowed white workers to get a share, however pitiful, of “wealth, power, and luxury…on a scale the world never saw before” and to benefit from the “new wealth” accumulated from the “darker nations of the world” through cross-class consent “for governance by white folk and economic subjection to them”—a consensus solidified through the doctrine of “the natural inferiority of most men to the few.”39 Given the entanglement of racialization and capitalist exploitation, Du Bois averred, “Racial slander must go. Racial prejudice will follow…the domination of one people by another without the other’s consent, be the subject people black or white, must stop. The doctrine of forcible economic expansion over subject people must go.” Insofar as this admonishment applied as much to the United States as to European imperialists, beyond the international proletariat, it was the darker peoples and nations of the world who would challenge racial capitalism, not least “the twenty-five million grandchildren of the European slave trade…and first of all the ten million black folk in the United States.”40 Imperialist accumulation denotes the rapacious conscription of resources and labor for the purpose of superprofits through violent means that are generally reserved for populations deemed racially inferior. On the precipice of the Great Depression, the prominent Black communist James Ford beautifully explicated imperialist accumulation. In his 1929 report on the Second World Congress of the League Against Imperialism, he explained that the extant political economy constituted the consolidation of Africa’s partition and the “complete enslavement of its people”; the arresting of its industrialization, which hindered the development of the “toiling masses”; and the relegation of the continent to a source of raw material, a market for European goods, and a dumping ground for accumulated surplus capital. In the U.S. South, the Black poor were dehumanized by Wall Street, “white big business,” and the “rising Negro [Black] bourgeoisie” whose condition of possibility was the subjection of the Black working class. This oppression was exacerbated by rigid racial barriers, disenfranchisement, and lynching. Ford further argued that the West Indies, subjected to U.S. militarism and occupation on behalf of Wall Street, were largely transformed into a marketplace for U.S. goods. Moreover, throughout Africa, the U.S. South, and the Caribbean, Black workers were impressed into forced labor, laying railroads, building roads and bridges, and working in mines; were entrapped on plantations through peonage; and were subjected to convict leasing. In addition, they suffered intolerable working conditions and routinized violence.41 Expropriation by domination designates the seizure and confiscation of land, assets, property, bodies, and other sources of material wealth set to work by relations of economic dependence. This relationship exists both between nations and between groups. A quintessential enunciation of expropriation by domination between groups is We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People, edited by the Black Communist William Patterson (with significant help from his wife and comrade Louise Thompson Patterson) and submitted to the United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress in 1951.42 The petition meticulously documented the past and present expropriation of Black people by the ruling class of modern U.S. racial capitalism through consistent and persistent discrimination in employment, unfair wages, forced ghettoization, inequitable and inferior accommodation and services, and the denial of justice in the courts. It further argued that this process was sustained by genocidal terror, white supremacist law, and the drive of monopoly capitalists for superprofits. Importantly, We Charge Genocide noted that, for primarily economic reasons, the historical and geographical locus of anti-Black genocide was the “Black Belt” of the Southern United States, a region expropriated by the Northern industrial capitalists and by Southern landowners alike. This was due in large part to plantation systems of sharecropping and peonage—legacies of slavery—in which Black political and economic rights were virtually nonexistent, Black laborers were inexorably tied to the land through debt, and the threat of violence and death precluded demands for justice. For Patterson, such expropriation by domination was the basis of “racist contamination that has spread throughout the United States.”43 We Charge Genocide further conveyed that expropriation by domination, a central element of modern U.S. racial capitalism, was more than a domestic concern because such practices “at home must inevitably create racist commodities for export abroad—must inevitably tend toward war.”44 Labor superexploitation can be understood as an economic relationship in which the intensity, form, and racial basis of exploitation differs little from slavery. Its effects are so extreme that it pushes racialized, particularly Black, labor effectively below the level of sheer physical subsistence. As Harrison explained, in the context of modern U.S. racial capitalism, Black workers “form a group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group” because enslaved Africans were brought to the “new world” to be ruthlessly exploited. This reality fixed their social status as the most despised group, which in turn intensified their subjection.45 Likewise, organizations like the American Negro Labor Congress and the Anti-Imperialist League analyzed that the racial capitalist superexploitation of Black nations like Haiti in the first quarter of the twentieth century for the purposes of consolidating Wall Street control over land, commercial relations, and production was accompanied by the brutalization of Black labor, the export of Jim Crow practices, military occupation, and political repression.46 In effect, superexploitation results from the conjuncture of white supremacy, racialization, and the “badge of slavery,” which exacerbates the conditions of exploitation to which white working classes are subjected. As the Black Marxist Harry Haywood argued in 1948, “the stifling effects of the race factor are most strikingly illustrated by the drastic differences in the economic and cultural status of Negroes and whites.… Beyond all doubt, the oppression of the Negro, which is the basis of the degradation of the ‘poor whites,’ is of separate character demanding a special approach.”47 Superexploitation, he explained further, constitutes a combination of direct exploitation, outright robbery, physical violence, legal coercion, and perpetual indebtedness. It stifles “the free economic and cultural development” of the Black masses “through racist persecution as a basic condition for maintaining” virtual enslavement.48 The entrapment of Black women in domestic labor throughout the twentieth century—a function of their “triple oppression”—is perhaps the most glaring example of labor superexploitation under modern U.S. racial capitalism. In 1936, the lifelong Black radical Louise Thompson explained that Black women’s superexploitation in the capitalist mode of production was based on their race, sex, and subordination in the labor market.49 That same year, Black militants Marvel Cooke and Ella Baker published an article titled “The Bronx Slave Market” in which they studied triple oppression as it related to Black domestic workers. Cooke and Baker explained that the entanglements of racism, sex-based labor subordination, and structural poverty were deeply intensified by the Great Depression and forced Black domestic workers to pauperize their labor for the abysmal wage of less than thirty cents an hour. This form of labor exploitation was unique to the female sex because domestic work was conventional “women’s work,” and it was racialized insofar as the denigration of Black people fitted this group of women for low-wage, unprotected, and contingent labor.50

This chapter is concerned with detailing what is meant by anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy at the level of the classroom. To accomplish this, I build on existent pedagogical theories of critical pedagogy (Freire, 2000), anti-oppressive education (Kumashiro, 2009), and culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2006a). Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy constitutes a form of Freirean reinvention of these other critical approaches to teaching and learning. I expand on these pedagogical visions and work to detail how such commitments can be made into anticapitalist antiracist practice. These pedagogical theories cannot be neatly teased apart, but rather inform and react to one another. In other words, critical pedagogy overlaps with anti-oppressive education, and of course both speak to and overlap with culturally relevant pedagogy. My aim here is not to discuss the differences between these theories, but rather to bring them together so as to articulate a pedagogi- cal vision of anticapitalist antiracism. I have organized the next sections of this chapter into three segments: learning, curriculum, and consciousness. While of course these concepts are impossible to separate from one another completely, they will allow us to focus in on particular facets of justice work in classrooms and what makes an anticapitalist antiracist stance so powerful. Before proceeding, however, I need to make clear that what follows is not an account of what I do in the classroom. Nor is it a step-by-step guide, or a list of best practices. Instead, I offer a framework: a way of organizing conceptually the tasks of the anticapitalist antiracist teacher and the sociopolitical commitments necessary for such a practice. Thus, my orientation toward peda- gogy, and to writing in advocating a pedagogical position, must be nuanced by the objective conditions of teaching and learning. Joe Kincheloe (2008) reminds us, “There are as many brilliant forms of practice as there are brilliant practitioners” (p. 116). There is no single way of practicing anticapitalist antiracism, in the classroom or outside of it. As pedagogues we must understand ourselves, as both people and as educators, as political actors capable of acting on and transforming our worlds. And the truism that there is no one best way to do this creates openings we may never have even sought out, were we convinced there was something that could always work best if we could only figure out exactly what it was and how to do it. Following this, the caution from Kumashiro (2009) that “[n]o practice is always anti-oppressive” means that even for educators committed to anticapitalist antiracism and the inherently political nature of their work in classrooms, there are no methods one can employ in every possible situation that will always function on the side of justice (p. 3). We must be willing to reject lessons and activities that we have used before if those lessons and activities are no longer grounded in the lived reali- ties of our students and the wealth of experiences they bring with them into our classrooms (Freire, 2000). But this also opens up an endless number of possibilities: for if no practice is always-anti- oppressive the task of teaching in anticapitalist antiracist ways rep- resents an endless array of possible lessons and topics that one can never disengage with, or reduce to an unthinking reaction. This work can seem impossibly daunting at times, yet it is imperative that we see the inevitability of no practice always being anti-oppressive as an opening to newly imagined spaces, rather than disabling our abilities to make meaningful connections between our students and their/our world(s). Gloria Ladson-Bill- ings (2006a) addresses this when asked by her teacher education students why she will not simply explain to them “how to do” culturally relevant pedagogy. She says, Even if we could tell you how to do it, I would not want us to tell you how to do it. . . . The reason I would not tell you what to do is that you would probably do it. . . . Without any deep thought or critical analysis. You would do what I said regardless of the students in the classroom, their ages, their abilities, and their need for whatever it is I proposed. (p. 39) Ladson-Billings is demanding that her teacher education students see culturally relevant pedagogy (and for that matter critical peda- gogy and anti-oppressive education) not as something one does, but rather as something one is. We do not do critical pedagogy; we are critical in our engagement with the word and the world. Ladson-Billings (2006a) is arguing “for why ‘doing’ is less impor- tant than ‘being’. . . . Practicing culturally relevant pedagogy is one of the ways of ‘being’ that will inform ways of ‘doing’” (p. 41). An emphasis on being, then, does not see questions of doing fall by the wayside. I am not arguing here for a directionless pedagogy, nor arguing that we should never consider what we are doing in the classroom. Rather, I am following other critical scholars to argue for a new hierarchy of pedagogical reflection in which the question of “being” comes before the question of “doing.” Teachers are to consider first who they are being with and for their students, and then consider what they are doing in subordinate relation to whom they are being. For an Anticapitalist Antiracist Theory of Learning The famed American psychologist Carl Rogers (1989), while he makes for a rather odd way of beginning this section, offers us sev- eral crucial theories of learning and how particular kinds of learn- ing become valued or practiced more than others. His conclusions 152 A PEDAGOGY OF ANTICAPITALIST ANTIRACISM form the basis of the theory of learning in anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy. First, he writes, “My experience has been that I can- not teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run futile” (p. 301). The irony in a self-identified teacher educator subscribing to this notion may trouble the reader, but if we continue with Rogers’s beliefs on learning, this point becomes more easily understood. Rogers’s next two conclusions address the linkage of learning and behavior, in which he states he is “only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior” (p. 302). From the perspective of anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy, this commitment can be read as an attention to learning in ways that lend themselves to action on lived reality, rather than mere passive participation. This is central to Freire’s notions of the purpose of learning, that literacy for literacy’s sake is empty: the purpose of learning to read words is so that one is better able to read the world in critical and humanizing ways. Thus, while at first we might con- sider Rogers to be too much of a behaviorist, we find much the same commitment in Freire’s and other critical pedagogues’ work. Rogers goes on, writing that he has “come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning” (p. 302). For Rogers, this is the kind of learning that “cannot be directly communicated,” the kind that if it were communicated would become a form of teaching that Rogers finds “absurd” (pp. 302–303)—absurd because the results are “inconsequential,” and Rogers cites Kierkegaard here as some- one else who found that merely communicating information to another is generally of little consequence to that other. This can be read, once again, in a Freirean way: so often, teaching represents the attempted transfer of knowledge the teacher possesses into the minds of learners. This, of course, is what Freire called the “bank- ing method” of education, but Rogers’s work helps us understand the Freirean critique more deeply. What Rogers is so troubled by is that his own knowledge that is of value to him is knowledge that he has self-appropriated, internalized, and personalized in such a way that it constitutes a part of who he is, what he does, his behavior, rather than a mere fact to be memorized. Thus, when Rogers says that teaching is inconsequential, he means that the communication of self-appropriated knowledge can only be impactful if it is seen as a knowledge-gathering process on the part of the learner. That is, if a young child asks an adult how to tie her shoes, and the adult then demonstrates and explains how he ties his own shoes, this is not an instance of banking education. Why? Because the agentic character of the learner is never undermined by the teacher: the learner wants to learn how to tie her shoes, thus making asking the question and watching the demonstration an active process of self-appropriated meaning making. Rogers goes on to say that he feels the results of his teaching too often stifle learning, in the self-appropriated way he believes carries the most meaning for the learner. He goes so far as to say that he no longer wishes to teach, only to learn, and in groups if possible. Once again, the Freirean tones should be apparent. For Freire (2000), one of the primary tasks of the teacher is to trouble the traditional power differential between teachers and learners. This does not mean, as has sometimes been assumed by readers of Freire who have not done enough work to uncover his meaning that the teacher merely pretends as though she is not in a posi- tion of relative power vis-à-vis her students. Rather, the teacher is tasked with moving to being on the side of her students, to posi- tioning herself as a learner in the act of teaching and, in radical solidarity with her students, working together to learn in ways that allow for humanization and transformation. Rogers wants us to go a step farther, to “do away with teaching. People would get together if they wanted to learn” (p. 303). But here, we can nuance Rogers somewhat to argue that what is most needed for teachers is that they stop thinking of themselves as the only teacher in a pedagogical site. Rather, teachers must see themselves as another learner, one who may well have read the particular course texts fifty times more than the other learners present, but still as some- one who is fundamentally seeking to learn in humanizing ways with others. Learning thus is the focus of any and all pedagogical activity, and as such we can concretize the common abstraction of being in solidarity with students into an active praxis: of a solidarity premised on the positionality of the learner. When a teacher has made up her mind that she has learned everything about a par- ticular subject, that teacher can almost never be in solidarity with her students, who by definition carry with them the notion that they are incomplete, unfinished. This is not to say that teachers and students must be learning the same thing at the same time, only that the fundamental attitude of both be as learners, as human beings with questions and curiosities about their world(s). Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy entails a conception of learn- ing that cannot be reduced to the status of a commodity: nothing one learns should derive its primary value based on its exchange- ability. This means that learning cannot be primarily for job train- ing, or preparation for future work. It means, further, that all information be subjected to critical scrutiny on the part of the learner based on their lived experiences. Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy refuses abuses of teacher power, not only based on com- mitments to redistributing power, but because of the centrality of learning to the pedagogical act. In Freire’s (1998) terms, “[T]here is no teaching without learning” (p. 29). Rather than privileging the teaching act, or making teaching into the mere delivery of infor- mation, teaching becomes fundamentally the process and practice of the facilitation of learning. If one stands and lectures and the students learn nothing, one is not teaching. Thus, anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy places learning above all other aims and commitments, but learning defined as the self- appropriation of knowledge through a critical engagement with one’s own lived experience. This means that authentic learning is never for an outside need, for economic participation, for creden- tializing, or for the will of others. We can test this rather humbly, if we just stop and think about something we know really well, and then ask ourselves how we came to know it really well. It is our own work to understand, to figure out, premised on genuine interest that produces knowledge we actually possess, what we have actually learned. Thus, the things we are most expert in are things we have largely learned ourselves or with others in a way that sought others’ support as part of our process of knowledge creation and meaning making. We all have favorite teachers, to be sure, but how often is it the case that someone tells of their favorite teacher by launching into a description of the best lesson they delivered? Virtually never. Rather, we most often describe our favorite teachers by the ways they made us feel. To put the former into more critical terms, we celebrate those teachers who created the conditions under which we were able to live out our curiosities and construct knowledge and meaning for ourselves. Not the teachers who taught us the most; the teachers who helped us learn the most. For an Anticapitalist Antiracist Theory of Curriculum On the first night of class, in the course Contemporary Approaches to Curriculum, I ask my students (practicing teachers) to come up with as many examples of what we mean by curriculum as they possibly can. The first few are usually the same every time: text- books, teacher guides, workbooks, or the more abstract but no less accurate “what we teach.” After a while, and with a short pause, someone usually opens up the floodgates with a concept such as “the hidden curriculum” or what we unintentionally teach—those hidden messages embedded in what we do in the classroom and in the texts we take up. In the end, the board is often filled up, to the point that I ask, “So, what isn’t curriculum?” The ensuing conver- sation usually ends with someone making a definitional statement, something along the lines of, “Curriculum is anything you learn from.” For anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy, this is precisely the case, and this opens up a number of possibilities for classroom praxis. We often make the mistake of thinking that the best made plans and course materials are what matter most for teaching. When we think of the work a teacher does outside of class to get ready, we most often think of grading student work and designing course assignments and activities. Yet, how often have we experienced the teacher who cannot help but share a story or anecdote with her students? What if we took just as seriously the anecdotal, the extra, of classroom curricula and the more formal, state standard- esque form? The insight that curriculum is anything we can learn from truly means anything, and this is precisely what the anti- capitalist antiracist pedagogue explodes in terms of course texts and activities. Students are able to bring in their own artifacts and experiences, to be discussed and examined. Students take up inter- esting and new problems, of their own invention, and work to solve challenges in cooperative solidarity. These tasks are enhanced exponentially when it is students’ own desires and experiences that are privileged in this process. The “funds of knowledge” (Gonzalez & Moll, 2002) that students bring with them to school every day must be understood as just as much a part of the curriculum as the formal textbook, scope and sequence, and standards. Why? Because students, as human beings, are always already learning from any number of curricular artifacts. Pretending that only that which is in the official curriculum is what is learned at school is ludicrous. The test is simple. Think of all the ways we learn how to carry ourselves, how to position our bodies, how to dress to achieve a certain affect, how we should wear our hair, and what kinds of foods we should be eating. There is no end to this list, because there is no limit to what we could possibly learn from the staggering array of curricula that we continually experience. This conception of curricula has a special importance in anti- capitalist antiracist pedagogy because it denies the privileged position of the formal curriculum its reified status as the “official knowledge” of a course (Apple, 2000). Curriculum in the formal sense is an exceptionally expensive commodity, and learning imag- ined as consumption is inevitable if we narrowly imagine all that people should (or will) learn as something that could be packaged, bought, and sold. There are, of course, challenges to such a com- mitment of making curriculum a means to rather than an end in itself, and we need to address these here. The first challenge is the role of standards and the academic disciplines as they have come to be practiced and protected in our current historical moment. While it may be surprising, Freire and other critical educa- tional theorists are most often supportive of standards or the aca- demic disciplines as the basis for work in schools. It is not the curriculum itself that makes or breaks a critical classroom, but rather how curricular materials are taken up, and with what limits in place. For Ladson-Billings (2006a), “[T]eachers engaged in cul- turally relevant pedagogy must be able to deconstruct, construct, and reconstruct the curriculum” (p. 32). By deconstruction, she means examining particular curricula for those elements that may well be oppressive and placing them in context, making the learn- ing of an event a form of critique, as we constantly compare our values and beliefs to practices and histories as they exist in formal curricula. Next, construction here means simply that teachers and students are both seen as able and capable of making curriculum, of naming the objects and subjects of their studies in powerful ways. Reconstruction, for Ladson-Billings, means putting things back together in new ways, taking both the “official knowledge” and the critical knowledge students have brought to bear on the curriculum to place it in context in ways that both enable students to have access to dominant theories and concepts while affirming their own lived experience. Lisa Delpit’s (2006) work around making the culture of power explicit to students from historically marginalized communities makes for a powerful example of Ladson-Billings’s theories of curriculum in practice. Delpit is clear that not engaging dominant modes of discourse, white ways of being and speaking, and capi- talist financial skills with students who do not experience these things at home is doing these students a profound disservice. Anti- capitalist antiracist pedagogy places every person in the context of our present historical reality, which is profoundly oppressive and dehumanizing. No amount of socially just pedagogy in one iso- lated classroom is going to transform white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1994). This means that while we must place an emphasis on those curricular artifacts and funds of knowledge that students bring with them into our classrooms, we also must engage the official curriculum. Failure to do this is a failure to support stu- dents in their self-appropriation of learning. But this does not have to be an either/or dilemma, as Ladson-Billings has demonstrated above. We engage the official curriculum in ways that privilege our own experiences and knowledges. We work within disciplinary boundaries because they offer unique lenses to ask different kinds of questions and different ways to respond. The point is this: cur- riculum cannot be viewed as an end in itself. Rather, curriculum is a means to, through learning. It is a resource, which we can learn from in order to develop anticapitalist antiracist consciousness. For an Anticapitalist Antiracist Theory of Consciousness In the work of Paulo Freire the aim of pedagogy is humaniza- tion, through liberation. We can read Freire as offering a peda- gogy of Marxism, and at the center of this pedagogy, as it was at the center for Marx, is a concern with developing the conscious- ness necessary for revolution, for transforming our oppressive reality. Conscientização, in Freire’s terms, critical consciousness of consciousness must be the aim for our learning. Ladson-Billings (1995) makes a case for a form of critical consciousness, what she calls sociopolitical consciousness, as a part of culturally relevant pedagogy. She writes, “The first thing teachers must do is educate themselves about both the local sociopolitical issues of their school community (e.g., school board policy, community events) and the larger sociopolitical issues (e.g., unemployment, healthcare, hous- ing) that impinge upon their students’ lives” (p. 37). Consciousness thus has the function here of working to connect the local and the universal, both what is immediately at hand and the structures, systems, and frames that inform and act on both individuals and groups. The need is for teachers to come to position themselves as conscious political actors, in an inherently political reality, and to draw connections between what they experience in their local contexts and how those experiences inform the larger context in which those experiences take place. For Marx, revolutionary consciousness is tied to an under- standing of one’s position in relation to the means of production. When workers understand that the owners of the means of pro- duction alienate and dehumanize in the pursuit of profits, that this is fundamentally what capitalism functions to do, they can then articulate their aims for liberation with the understanding that the present economic system denies them their capacity to be fully human. For anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy, this form of revolutionary consciousness is the product of learning and critical engagement with curricula, as outlined above. This consciousness is premised on the ability to see, in both local and global contexts, the present realities of white supremacy and the ways in which the logics of white supremacy function to legitimate capitalist exploita- tion. It is this ability to see that consciousness offers, not merely an abstract principle, but rather a self-appropriated ability to read both the word and the world in critical ways. Seeing the connec- tion between local manifestations of white supremacy and global manifestations of capitalist abuse as a part of the same overarch- ing system of signs and meaning is the principle aim of anticapi- talist antiracist pedagogy. Importantly, however, this cannot be thought of as merely an intellectual skill, and, further, cannot be learned through banking methods. These last two points need to be explained in further detail. Consciousness, and critical consciousness in particular, should be thought of less as an ability, and more of a way of being in the world. We can make rules for finding racism in practice, and we might learn those rules and then always be successful at identifying the racist connotations of a particular phrase or practice. But merely being able to name these processes offers us nothing. Rather, being able to name these processes while understanding their historical, social, and political dimension and the ways in which race and racism intersect in myriad other systems and forms of oppression offers us the ability to not only understand racism, but to orient our lives in opposition to it. This orientation, this way of being, carries with it the profound capacity to act on oppressive realities because it refuses to take any system or reality as an inevitability. That is, no creation by human beings is devoid of context, and if we understand capitalism, positivism, and instrumental reason as unnatural, as made by human beings, we can position ourselves in relation to these systems in ways that enable us to see cracks in the edifice. Consciousness of our oppressive order and the ways in which it has been created for particular aims is the precondition for radical solidarity. There is a tendency, perhaps, to seek to accelerate the conscious- ness of others through banking methods. Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy rejects the idea that one can acquire critical conscious- ness as if it were merely a technology, something to be used toward particular ends, rather than a practice. Freire (2000) warns us, “In the revolutionary process, the leaders cannot utilize the banking method as an interim measure, justified on grounds of expediency, with the intention of later behaving in a genuinely revolutionary fashion” (p. 86). Rather, the revolutionary process itself must be dialogical, in Freire’s terms, from beginning to end. The process of coming to consciousness is one that must be self-appropriated for it to have any actual impact or bearing on individuals in their daily experience. This means that, rather than banking notions of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation, the learner must come to see these systems as they impact on their actual lives. We cannot treat oppression solely in abstract terms, as though the purpose of our work for justice was to elaborate a metaphysics of oppression. The purpose is, rather, to abolish the oppressive systems as such, to use the capacity for critical reflection and action to usher forth a new reality premised on justice rather than the accumulation of wealth and power. Anticapitalist antiracist consciousness is thus a practice of liv- ing, a way of being in relation to others in the world. This con- sciousness is never finished; the end of capitalism will not create the end of the need for critical consciousness. Rather, it is only through the practice of critical consciousness that a more just real- ity is possible. This is the optimism inherent in the work of both Marx and Freire, though we should be clear that neither thinker should be thought of as utopian.1 To claim that a more just reality is possible is not utopian; it represents the conscious desires of bil- lions of men and women to live worthy lives. There will never be a time, even after capitalism is no more, when the need for critical scrutiny, for placing our immediate reality in context, is no longer necessary. It is only through the cultivation of critical consciousness that a more just reality can ever come about, but this does not mean that there will not be disagreements on how we ought to organize our lives. Marx is famously ambiguous about what he thinks the postcapitalist world will look like, because it will be up to the women and men of the world to dictate what their lives are to be and how best to organize society for achieving justice. These are not future people, but rather existing human beings, in the world now. Thus, anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy holds out no vision for the contents of daily life in a world where white supremacy and capitalism have ceased to be the dominant ideological formations of the globe. Rather, what is necessary is the capacity for creating such a society—a way of being that will enable both the revolution and postrevolutionary existence to be premised on the same aims of humanization and critical interrogation of the ways in which power and wealth function in human groups. Consciousness is not a preparation for revolutionary action; it is the lifeblood of revolutionary action. Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy resists any claims for learning premised on future needs because those needs are not those elaborated by learners them- selves, but rather by the oppressive system learners find themselves in. Education as preparation for later employment can only func- tion on the side of capitalism and the existing global order. Dewey (1897/2010) was critical of the idea of education as preparation, and, rather, sought to make democracy a way of being in much the same way as I am describing anticapitalist antiracist consciousness as a way of being. For Dewey, education is always already happen- ing, human beings are always making meaning from their experi- ences, we are always learning. To behave as though learning was something that only happened in school, and then only at certain times, and with only certain predetermined subjects or facts, is to deny what it means fundamentally to be human. Thus, anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy as a practice of being must transcend the space of the classroom in order to fully realize itself in consciousness. Anticapitalist antiracist pedagogy is not a technology, a tool to be used, but rather a way of being and living. And while this may seem overly daunting, we already have prac- tices embedded in our present capitalist order that make this more easily imaginable. In the United States, we commonly define our- selves based on our occupations. “What do you do?”—to return to the example raised in earlier chapters—is perhaps the most com- mon question asked when two adults meet for the first time. When we answer, “I’m a teacher,” we often mean that that is what we do for employment. What is called for here, in an anticapitalist antira- cist consciousness, is that we never stop acting as though “what we do” is not “what we are doing” and thus, “who we are.” The call then, is to live our pedagogies, not merely in the classroom, but in any and all social spaces where human beings are creating meaning for themselves. This process never stops, and thus consciousness never stops, but rather leads to more consciousness, to conscious- ness of consciousness, and thus to revolutionary action.

Knox 21 [Amy Knox, frequent contributor to “Human Rights Pulse,” author of various articles about different political/social issues, 5-16-2021, "Capitalism And The Green Agenda: A Green New Deal Or Green Neo-Colonialism? — Human Rights Pulse," Human Rights Pulse, https://www.humanrightspulse.com/mastercontentblog/capitalism-and-the-green-agenda-a-green-new-deal-or-green-neo-colonialism] laura

ANOTHER EPISODE OF GREEN NEO-COLONIALISM? When compared to Western notions of conscious consumerism, corporate sustainability targets, carbon taxes, and even climate change denialism, the GND undoubtedly presents a progressive turning point in a political conversation that has been dominated by the belief that climate change can be solved by placing limits on an otherwise rational economic system. A GND, however, will not meet any definition of climate justice if it does not place at its centre a postcolonial and Indigenous worldview. Postcolonial critics argue that while versions of the GND differ in detail, they share one important feature: a tendency to ignore both the global nature of the climate crisis and the colonial history from which it has fundamentally emerged. While there are obvious scientific flaws in limiting the solution to climate change to one country in a global capitalist world, the more problematic notion underpinning this policy is that it ultimately prioritises the survival and security of those living within the Western borders of its origin. It bears repeating that the United States and the 28 countries of the European Union are historically the biggest contributors to the climate crisis through colonial and imperial expansion, together contributing 47% of historical carbon emissions. Put differently, the GND makes few efforts to address the colonial roots of the climate crisis by centring the emancipation of once-colonised peoples, despite the fact that the impact of the climate crisis and ecological destruction is experienced most acutely by nations in the Global South, compounding the existing Western dominance produced by the neo-colonial global capitalist order. Furthermore, the GND and its proponents self-appoint the US and European state leaders as spearheading the international anti-capitalist fight against climate change, despite most anti-imperial and post-independence struggles in the Global South existing as struggles against capitalism and the ecological injustices it produces. Thus, through such whitewashing of historical anti-colonial struggles, and through omitting any inclusion of Indigenous voices in its formulation, the GND reinforces the dominance of white and Western-centric thought over the Indigenous worldview. Finally, the solutions proposed by the GND itself are critiqued on account of relying upon the resources and labour of countries in the Global South to meet the heavy burdens of material and energy requirements necessary for such a transition. The GND thus becomes the next chapter in a long and entrenched history of racialised capitalism, resource extraction, and the dispossession and displacement of native communities, wherein the Global South continues to shoulder the cost of Western “progress” and the cost of emancipating the white working class in these nations. THE CASE FOR A GLOBAL AND DECOLONIAL GREEN NEW DEAL To the extent that the GND does not fundamentally challenge the neo-colonial role of the West in the global political order, it is unlikely to produce the transformational and systemic change necessary to reverse the climate crisis. To truly address the climate crisis and the inherent contradiction between capitalism and the green agenda, Western environmentalists must advocate for a global version of the GND—one that disrupts the global capitalist order of Western domination and centres itself on the emancipation of the most marginalised from colonial legacies and the neo-colonialism of the present. The green agenda cannot be bound within the borders of the Global North, nor can it prioritise social and economic justice for Westerners over the most at-risk Indigenous communities in the rest of the world. However, this requires Westerners to enter the climate space not as self-appointed leaders, but as “figures of solidarity”. Privileging the worldview and voices of Indigenous communities is essential in decolonising the green agenda and countering the global capitalist logic of accumulation and commodification. The Indigenous communities who maintain their existence without exploiting their land or resources should thus be the “standard conception” of a green agenda that claims to have the transformative potential to reverse the climate crisis.

The cause of climate breakdown is our economic system. Capitalism∂ relies for its functioning on a logic of infinite growth, fossil fuel∂ combustion, and colonial resource extraction abroad. The drive for∂ infinite economic growth exhausts the world’s finite resources and∂ creates increasing waste and pollutant by-products which necessarily∂ ends up crossing planetary boundaries and undermining the world’s∂ biosphere. The capitalist economy’s growth imperative relies on the∂ high efficiency of polluting fossil fuels to sustain itself,∂ manifested in the stark rise in carbon emissions and global warming∂ since the industrial revolution. The capitalist economy is∂ historically built on colonial resource extraction abroad and has only∂ survived by these same means. Still today, the fuels and resources for∂ the Global North are obtained by means of gross human rights∂ violations, exploitative work conditions, and localised ecological∂ degradation in the Global South. It is this system of infinite growth∂ that is currently driving the planet to climate breakdown and∂ ecological Armageddon.∂ However, without this increasing growth, the economy falters and even∂ collapses in recession, putting shops out of business, pushing∂ communities into unemployment, and creating grim economic hardship and∂ social fallout. This creates an impossible dilemma for those running∂ society’s political institutions – they are unable to keep the∂ economy afloat and tackle climate breakdown at the same time.∂ What is the Green New Deal’s answer to this dilemma? It refuses to∂ acknowledge the problem. Clearly, the Green New Deal is rhetorically∂ very strong on highlighting the injustices and ecological problems of∂ the current economic system, rightly arguing for the climate crisis to∂ be understood as a social justice and a class issue and outlining some∂ of the basic characteristics of an ecological society. It’s∂ educational role here is valuable. But its rhetoric is not matched by∂ a practical plan to transform the economic paradigms producing climate∂ change_._∂ The Green New Deal pivots on a central lie of continued growth,∂ promising this growth and employment whilst pretending it can magic∂ away the environmental and humanitarian consequences. The result of∂ this is that on all three counts – infinite growth, reliance on∂ fossil fuels, and colonial resource extraction – the Green New Deal∂ is unable to challenge the prevailing order. Instead, it _perpetuates∂ the capitalist paradigm and economic relationships_ and maintains the∂ system leading us towards total ecological collapse.∂ THE LIE OF INFINITE GROWTH∂ Continued economic growth is necessary for the Green New Deal to∂ fulfil its promise of jobs for all, which is only possible in a∂ growing economy. Where the Green New Deal plans dare to tackle the∂ question of growth, they promise to decouple economic growth from the∂ extraction of finite resources and environmental consequences. But∂ this is not possible. Economic growth has never been absolutely∂ decoupled on a global scale from growth in material and energy use,∂ and there is no credible empirical model to suggest it will ever be.∂ To make claims to the contrary is to deny the planet’s ecological∂ limits, and this is precisely the realm of ‘green growth’∂ narratives and a business class trying to find excuses for endless∂ profit in an era of climate breakdown.∂ The Green New Deal plans imagine that they can measure growth by more∂ ethical standards, but this ignores the harsh reality that jobs in∂ this economy are tied to the grow-or-die imperative of businesses.∂ Green New Dealers cannot use _qualitative_, ethical measures of value∂ to create the _quantitative_ economic growth that is necessary both to∂ create new jobs for the unemployed and replace the tens of millions of∂ current useless jobs. Indeed, millions of jobs in our existing economy∂ are socially-useless – by providing superfluous products and∂ services they exist merely to keep profits rolling and the economy∂ growing. Simply put, ethical considerations cannot penetrate the∂ capitalist economy.∂ A growing capitalist economy means environmental destruction. There is∂ no such thing as ‘green growth’.∂ THE LIMITS OF RENEWABLE ENERGY∂ Secondly, the Green New Deal ignores the realities of renewable∂ energy. Renewables are not a magic bullet. Like all technologies, they∂ have their limits. A capitalist economy powered by renewables would∂ still be ecologically damaging. Due to their lower energy density,∂ renewables require high land-use, and for current levels of growth∂ this land use would be at a scale which presents devastating∂ ecological consequences. To power Britain’s current level of energy∂ consumption solely on solar energy, around 30% of the UK’s available∂ land would be needed, 50% for the EU overall, and many countries would∂ need more land than they currently have available. This would not only∂ wipe out biodiversity buffers but the need for land would also entail∂ disastrous trade-offs between food and energy production. Beyond this,∂ there are important limitations of efficiency, land competence, and∂ mineral reserves. These technical limitations of renewables means that∂ we should not expect them to replace fossil fuels in a capitalist∂ system.∂ Fossil fuels have always been vital to the functioning of a capitalist∂ system, to the degree that capitalism cannot exist without them.∂ Fossil fuels, with high energy density, can be extracted, stored and∂ burnt for energy around the clock. Historically their storage provided∂ greater mobility than renewables and energy that wasn’t tied to a∂ particular river or windmill, and despite their continual fall in∂ efficiency, they would still have to play a huge part in a capitalist∂ economy. If the Green New Deal is to maintain a growing economy it∂ will inevitably end up relying on the final reserves of fossil fuels,∂ the incessant burning of which is the main driver of climate∂ breakdown.∂ COLONIAL RESOURCE EXTRACTION∂ Finally, the Green New Deal maintains imperialist relations between∂ Global North and Global South, by which countries in the Global South∂ are subjected to economic servitude. To build up its renewable∂ technologies, like solar, wind turbines and batteries, the Green New∂ Deal would require high inputs of earth minerals for its production,∂ such as lithium and cobalt, and would rely on kilotonnes of silver,∂ copper, and steel. These minerals are mined predominantly in the∂ Global South; from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to∂ Chile, Argentina, and China. Vast increases in extraction and∂ appropriation of these resources would be needed to ‘green’ the∂ UK’s economy - the process of which would be deeply violent. These∂ mining industries are associated with some of the world’s most∂ appalling work conditions, human exploitation, and a host of tragic∂ health problems and ecological degradation for local populations - all∂ enmeshed in colonial economic relations to service the Global North.∂ UK journalists rightly warn of ‘green colonialism’. To demand∂ resource extraction at such increased levels would be maintain the∂ colonial relationships between Global North and South and would∂ intensify disaster for local populations. The climate justice rhetoric∂ of the Green New Deal would lie in tatters.

That capitalism is unsustainable has long been empirically observable. Most obviously, manufacturing costs and consumer commodity prices are trending towards zero. For example, whereas the world’s fastest supercomputer in 1975 was worth $5m ($32m in 2013’s money), the price of an iPhone 4 released in 2010 with the equivalent performance was $400. Aerospace companies producing propulsion systems in 2010 for $24m in 24 months are now 3-D printing their engines for $2,000 in two weeks. And rather than having globalised supply chains, such companies foresee the entire rocket being built in ‘at home’ [7]. While ‘offshoring’ manufacturing jobs to the ‘low-income economies’ is said to save up to 65% on labour costs, replacing human workers with robots saves up to 90% [8]. Unlike workers, robots do not need wages, breaks, sick days, holidays or pensions. And they work quicker in the first place, too. While industrialisation, particularly in Asia, saw 83 ‘developing countries’ achieving growth rates by the early 2000s that were more than twice the rate of the ‘developed’ OECD members, the rest of the world has seen the same opportunity end ‘prematurely’. Latin America and Africa are already deindustrialising (shifting to services-based workforces) – from a much lower starting point than Asia [9]. Whereas industrialisation peaked in western European countries at income levels of around $14,000, India and many sub-Saharan African countries appear to have reached their peak manufacturing employment at income levels of $700 (both at 1990 levels) [10]. Not only do robots and 3D-printing increasingly remove the incentive for capitalists based in the US and Europe to exploit workers overseas, the incentive to exploit transit workers – who add production time/value to the commodities they transport around the world – is also removed [11]. The emergence of cellular agriculture (lab-grown food), with falling prices and rising quality estimated to see the beef industry go bust by 2035, is going to have the same effect [12]. For the past 145 years, the imperialist powers – the US, Britain, France, Germany and Japan – have been increasingly compelled to export capital (invest) overseas in order to expand and cheapen their exploitable labour bases, thereby sustaining their own economies by living off profits generated by commodity-producing workers in the ‘developing world’. Britain, for example, exported capital equal to 560% of its GDP in 2014 [13]. Between 1980 and 2012 the net outflows of capital from ‘developing’ countries being funnelled into ‘developed’, ie imperialist nations, totalled $16.3 trillion [14]. But the economic relation that underpins imperialism is now unravelling. If prices are trending historically towards zero, so too must the ‘global’ aggregate rate of profit. According to Estaban Maito’s estimates, it fell in a secular trend from 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s, and is (as of 2014) on course to reach zero around 2054 [15]. Automation and absolute overaccumulation But as the criminally under-appreciated Polish Marxist Henryk Grossman warned in 1929, capitalism is bound to collapse “much earlier than a zero rate of profit” [16], because capital, inherently, does not accumulate harmoniously – the process tends to break down. Overaccumulated capital – surplus capital that has become unprofitable to reinvest – is inevitable. It causes every recession, a partial and temporary breakdown, and is at the same time an underproduction of surplus value; ie, too little profit has been generated to preserve and expand the value of total capital. (Surplus value, or surplus labour time, is the amount of value the capitalist appropriates from the worker, who, on average, keeps only what they need to subsist, their necessary labour time. Profit then is essentially unpaid labour, which tends to increase with innovation. Hence falling prices.) Debt therefore rises to ‘fill the gap’ caused by this underproduction, but can only cover the lag in profit for so long before recession becomes inevitable, since investors are bound to withdraw funds when growth becomes too stagnant, channelling this new surplus instead into tax havens, land and the competitive gambling of speculation that generates financial ‘bubbles’. Each breakdown is overcome through the sufficient destruction, cheapening and centralisation of capital. But the resulting innovation means fewer workers tend to remain employed relative to total capital. Despite the increased rate of exploitation that temporarily lifts profit rates, the next overaccumulation tends to be greater than the one which preceded it. There is no such thing as ‘technological unemployment’ though – alongside surplus capital grows unexploitable surplus labour (unemployment). Clearly, the closer we get to the completion of the historical trend towards fully-automated production, the closer capitalism gets to its final breakdown. Production is already highly automated. As James Manyika, McKinsey Global Institute director, said in June 2017: “Find a factory anywhere in the world built in the past five years  –  not many people work there.” But the services jobs – relatively unproductive since they tend to handle near-finished commodities, if they handle commodities at all – that replaced manufacturing work are now becoming increasingly automated, too. In Britain, where services count for 80% of economic activity, the number of supermarket checkout assistants fell by 25.3% between 2011 and 2017. At the end of March, after most countries had entered lockdown, almost half of company bosses in 45 countries said they were speeding up plans to automate their businesses. [17] Innovation always takes place most rapidly during a recession, when prices are low. With lockdown turning the home into the place of work, Microsoft could boast of having discovered a fresh way of reducing labour costs and extending absolute labour time as it announced “two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months”. As The Guardian reported at the end of April: “Bank branches were already closing in droves before the epidemic, but here is the perfect excuse to shut more. And that’s not all. The authors of an Oxford University study thought that by 2035 it would be possible to automate 86% of restaurant jobs, three-quarters of retail jobs, and 59% of recreation jobs. By unlucky coincidence, those are among the very industries hardest hit by an epidemic now demanding quantum leaps in efficiency if some companies are to avoid going under.” [18] But automation is abolishing the source of profit, ie, commodity-producing human labour. To be more precise, automation is the final expression of capitalism’s self-abolishing tendency. As Marx wrote in 1858: “As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great wellspring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure... Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.” [19] But this dissolution does not happen in a seamless falling rate of profit towards zero, since – as explained, and as indicated by both zig-zagging profit rates and the recessions that tend to strike roughly every 10 years – capital does not accumulate harmoniously. As the Soviet Russian philosopher Genrikh Volkov wrote in 1967, increasing automation eventually leads to “the breakdown, instead of the consolidation, of the existing relations ... of the private ownership of the means of production…. Its consummation is incompatible with capitalism.” [20] In Capital, Marx anticipates an eventual “absolute overaccumulation” of capital. “The limit of capitalist production is the excess time of the labourers,” says Marx. [21] But stretching the rate of exploitation of the working class to anywhere near 100% is obviously impossible – for starters, capital cannot even afford to exploit an ever-increasing part of it, a surplus population that grows alongside surplus capital, while workers in the growing services sector are also relatively unproductive. “As the capitalist mode of production develops, an ever larger quantity of capital is required to employ the same, let alone an increased, amount of labour-power.” But there are other limits too: “As soon as capital would, therefore, have grown in such a ratio to the labouring population that neither the absolute working time supplied by this population, nor the relative surplus working time, could be expanded any further (this last would not be feasible at any rate in the case where the demand for labour were so strong that there were a tendency for wages to rise); at a point, therefore when the increased capital produced just as much, or even less, surplus value than it did before its increase, there would be absolute overproduction of capital.” [22] From zero interest rates to worldwide hyperinflation If the rate of profit is on course to hit zero around 2054, but the final breakdown is bound to happen much earlier than that, it at least becomes impossible to dismiss the theory that we are entering this uncharted territory right now. But empirically, there also seem to be several approaching economic limits or ‘tipping points’ which cannot be converging at the same time merely by coincidence. For starters, average GDP growth rates in what the World Bank defines as ‘high income countries’ are already closing in on zero, having fallen every decade for the past half century: from 5.59% in the 1960s, to 4.15% in the 1970s, 2.93% in the 1980s, 2.35% in the 1990s, and 1.78% in the 2000s. The figure rose slightly to 1.97% in the years 2010-2017, but this minor reprieve has already proven to be unsustainable. GDP in the imperialist nations, though, is inflated by the profits leached from the rest of the world, since much of the profit from each commodity goes towards the GDP of the nation in which it is sold, rather than where it was made. [23] Productivity growth in the high income countries has itself, since 2011, spluttered below 1%. Aggregate global debt (the total debt of governments, corporations and households), already mountainous before the Great Recession, has hit new heights, indicating record-high overaccumulation [24]. According to the IMF, global debt fell by 1.5% of GDP in 2017 compared to a year earlier, but remained more than 11 percentage points of GDP above the previous high in 2009. In June 2019, the IMF said global debt stood officially at $184 trillion, 225% of global GDP. This averages out at $86,000 for every person in the world, 2.5 times average annual per capita income. But according to financial analyst Ron Surz, once ‘off-the-books’ net obligations such as social security and health care are taken into account, official figures are understated by a factor of 2.5, making actual global debt $460 trillion, 560% of GDP and $215,000 per person (as of July 2019) [25]. He put the US figure not at the official 105%, but 390%. Even that is without taking into account the serious accounting problem in the US Department of Defense. In 2016, before Trump was elected, the department’s Inspector General said he could not properly track $6.5 trillion in defence spending. An academic study looking at the years 1998-2015 later put the figure at $21 trillion [26]. The US defence budget has ballooned to $748bn as the long-time imperialist superpower scrambles to hold on to its dying empire. Another financial analyst, Simon Thorpe, calculated in 2015 that global debt was 2.5 times higher than the global money supply (up from two times higher in 2013) [27]. This is despite the fact that the US’s monetary base exploded from $842bn in August 2008 to $2.9 trillion in January 2013 and then $4 trillion in August 2014. The sheer amount of debt is unsustainable since the tax base needed to pay it is obviously shrinking in relative terms. Though it has been socialised, it is now simply too large to work off. Something the capitalist state can do to ease the government’s ability to pay its debt is reduce interest rates, which also makes borrowing cheaper and stimulates lending, maintaining the circulation of money. But lifting the economy out of recession usually takes a 4-5% base interest rate cut. In the US and across Europe base rates are already at zero, having been cut by around only 2%. Central banks have said going negative would make the banks unviable. Therefore, it is highly probable – lockdown or no lockdown – that capitalism, as Pento says, is soon going to spiral for the first time in its history into a crisis of worldwide hyperinflation, since rates will have to start going back up to re-incentivise bond holding and sustain the tax base. But debt-to-GDP – already at record highs and rising – will surge, and so the tax base will continue to shrink; bondholders will realise that what they are owed cannot be repaid and increasingly transfer their funds into hard assets, especially precious metals. The only way to avoid hyperinflation is for states to default on their debt through hyperdeflation – which the record bailouts imply they are understandably trying to avoid – but that would happen after hyperinflation anyway. The US’s national annual deficit is now expected to soar from $984bn in 2019 to $3.8 trillion in 2020. The US has never meaningfully defaulted on its debt but, historically, countries that have failed to get their debt-to-GDP back below 90% have gone on to default, meaning they have had to go to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bail out (usually in the form of high-interest loans and on the condition of privatising state assets). But given that the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency – all oil must be traded in US dollars, for example, making the solvency of all countries dependent on their ability to purchase US dollars – the IMF effectively is the US. The US dollar has lost more than 96% of its value, its purchasing power, since 1913. The figure is more than 99.5% for British pound sterling, compared to 1694, the year it was founded [28]. This is why negative rates would make the banks unviable – they would finish off the depreciation of fiat currency. Many countries, including Russia and China, have started diversifying their foreign currency reserves in the past few years, meaning the main source of financing US debt is disappearing. Even the biggest US bank, JP Morgan, told its clients in August 2019 to sell the dollar. The world economy will likely soon be without a reserve currency. While smaller economies have survived defaults through bailouts in the past, the US and western European countries are the richest and most developed in the world. They represent monopoly capitalism, or imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. As mentioned, with their workforces now largely services-based, the imperialist nations have been largely living off of profit produced by the labour of commodity-producing workers in Africa, Asia and South America. If the imperialist economies collapse, it’s because the whole system has collapsed. Indeed, as of 7 March, investors had already pulled $83bn from developing markets, the largest capital outflow ever recorded, according to the Institute of International Finance. If all these converging factors – near-zero prices, flat productivity growth, unsustainably high debt, zero interest rates, exhausted currencies – do not constitute a final breakdown of the system, then what will?

The US is launching a New Cold War against Russia and China in an attempt to deflect our attention from the escalating crisis of global capitalism. The announcement on April 15 by President Biden that this administration was expelling 10 Kremlin diplomats and imposing new sanctions for alleged Russian interference in the 2020 U.S. elections–to which Russia replied with a tit for tat–came just days after the Pentagon conducted military drills in the South China Sea. These actions were but the latest escalation of aggressive posturing as Washington ramps up its “New Cold War” against Russia and China, pushing the world dangerously towards international political and military conflagration. Most observers attribute this US-instigated war to rivalry and competition over hegemony and international economic control. These factors are important, but there is a bigger picture that has been largely overlooked of what is driving this process: the crisis of global capitalism. This crisis is economic, or structural. One of chronic stagnation in the global economy. But it is also political: a crisis of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. The system is moving towards what we call “a general crisis of capitalist rule” as billions of people around the world face uncertain struggles for survival and question a system they no longer see as legitimate. In the United States, the ruling groups must channel fear over tenuous survival away from the system and towards scapegoated communities, such as immigrants or Asians blamed for the pandemic, and towards external enemies such as China and Russia. At the same time, rising international tensions legitimate expanding military and security budgets and open up new opportunities for profit making through war, political conflict and repression in the face of stagnation in the civilian economy. All around the world a “people’s spring” has taken off. From Chile to Lebanon, Iraq to India, France to the United States, Haiti to Nigeria and South Africa to Colombia, waves of strikes and mass protests have proliferated and, in many instances, appear to be acquiring a radical anti-capitalist character. The ruling groups cannot but be frightened by the rumbling from below. If left unchallenged, the New Cold War will become a cornerstone in the arsenal of U.S. rulers and transnational elites to maintain a grip on power as the crisis deepens. THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM Economically, global capitalism faces what is known in technical language as “overaccumulation”: a situation in which the economy has produced–or has the capacity to produce–great quantities of wealth but the market cannot absorb this wealth because of escalating inequality. Capitalism by its very nature will produce abundant wealth yet polarize that wealth and generate ever greater levels of social inequality unless offset by redistributive policies. The level of global social polarization and inequality now experienced is without precedent. In 2018, the richest one percent of humanity controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just five percent. Such inequalities end up undermining the stability of the system as the gap grows between what is–or could be–produced and what the market can absorb. The extreme concentration of the planet’s wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated impoverishment and dispossession of the majority means that the transnational capitalist class, or TCC, has increasing difficulty in finding productive outlets to unload enormous amounts of surplus it accumulated. The more global inequalities expand, the more constricted the world market becomes and the more the system faces a structural crisis of overaccumulation. If left unchecked, expanding social polarization results in crisis–in stagnation, recessions, depressions, social upheavals and war–just what we are experiencing right now. Contrary to mainstream accounts, the coronavirus pandemic did not cause the crisis of global capitalism, for this was already upon us. On the eve of the pandemic, growth in the EU countries had already shrunk to zero, much of Latin America and sub-Sahara Africa was in recession, growth rates in Asia were steadily declining, and North America faced a slowdown. The writing was on the wall. The contagion was but the spark that ignited the combustible of a global economy that never fully recovered from the 2008 financial collapse and had been teetering on the brink of renewed crisis ever since. Even if there is a momentary recovery as the world slowly emerges from the pandemic, global capitalism will remain mired in this structural crisis of overaccumulation. In the years leading up to the pandemic there was a steady rise in underutilized capacity and a slowdown in industrial production around the world. The surplus of accumulated capital with nowhere to go expanded rapidly. Transnational corporations recorded record profits during the 2010s at the same time that corporate investment declined. The total cash held in reserves of the world’s 2,000 biggest non-financial corporations increased from $6.6 trillion in 2010 to $14.2 trillion in 2020–considerably more than the foreign exchange reserves of the world’s central governments–as the global economy stagnated. Wild financial speculation and mounting government corporate, and consumer debt drove growth in the first two decades of the 21st century, but these are temporary and unsustainable solutions to long-term stagnation. THE GLOBAL WAR ECONOMY As I showed in my 2020 book, The Global Police State, the global economy has become ever more dependent on the development and deployment of systems of warfare, social control and repression simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accumulate capital in the face of chronic stagnation and saturation of global markets. This is known as “militarized accumulation” and refers to a situation in which a global war economy relies on perpetual state organized war making, social control and repression–driven now by new digital technologies–in order to sustain the process of capital accumulation. The events of September 11, 2001 marked the start of an era of a permanent global war in which logistics, warfare, intelligence, repression, surveillance and even military personnel are more and more the privatized domain of transnational capital. The Pentagon budget increased 91 percent in real terms between 1998 and 2011, while worldwide, total state military budgets outlays grew by 50 percent from 2006 to 2015, from $1.4 trillion to more than $2 trillion, although this figure did not take into account the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on intelligence, contingency operations, policing, bogus wars against immigrants, terrorism and drugs, and “homeland security.” During this time, military-industrial complex profits quadrupled. But focusing just on state military budgets only gives us a part of the picture of the global war economy. The various wars, conflicts and campaigns of social control and repression around the world involve the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization. In this relationship, the state facilitates the expansion of opportunities for private capital to accumulate through militarization, such as by facilitating global weapons sales by military-industrial-security firms, the amounts of which have reached unprecedented levels. Global weapons sales by the top 100 weapons manufacturers and military service companies increased by 38 percent between 2002 and 2016. By 2018, private for-profit military companies employed some 15 million people around the world, while another 20 million people worked in private security worldwide. The private security (policing) business is one of the fastest growing economic sectors in many countries and has come to dwarf public security around the world. The amount spent on private security in 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, was 73 percent higher than that spent in the public sphere, and three times as many persons were employed in private forces as in official law enforcement agencies. In half of the world’s countries, private security agents outnumber police officers. These corporate soldiers and police were deployed to guard corporate property, provide personal security for TCC executives and their families, collect data, conduct police, paramilitary, counterinsurgency and surveillance operations, carry out mass crowd control and repression of protesters, run private detention and interrogation facilities, manage prisons and participate in outright warfare. In 2018, President Trump announced with much fanfare the creation of a sixth military service, the “space force.” The corporate media duly towed the official line that this force was needed to face expanding threats to the United States. What went less reported is that a small group of former government officials with deep ties to the aerospace industry had pushed behind the scenes for its creation as a way to hype military spending on satellites and other space systems. In February of this year, the Federation of American Scientists reported that military-industrial complex lobbying is responsible for the decision by the U.S. government to invest at least $100 billion to beef up its nuclear stockpile. The Biden administration announced in early April to much acclaim that it would pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. While U.S. service troops in that country number 2,500, these pale in comparison with the more than 18,000 contractors that U.S. government has hired to do its bidding in the country, including at least 5,000 corporate soldiers that will remain. The so-called wars on drugs and terrorism, the undeclared wars on immigrants, refugees and gangs–and poor, dark-skinned and working-class youth more generally–the construction of border walls, immigrant detention centers, prison-industrial complexes, systems of mass surveillance and the spread of private security guard and mercenary companies, have all become major sources of profit-making and they will become more important to the system as stagnation becomes the new normal. In sum, the global police state is big business at a time when other opportunities for transnational corporate profit-making are limited. But if corporate profit, and not an external threat, is the reason for expanding the U.S. state and corporate war machine and the global police state, this must still be justified to the public. The official state propaganda narrative about the “New Cold War” serves this purpose. CONJURING UP EXTERNAL ENEMIES There is another dynamic at work in explaining the New Cold War: the crisis of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. International tensions derive from the acute political contradiction in global capitalism in which economic globalization takes places within a nation-state-based system of political authority. To put this in technical terms, there is a contradiction between the accumulation function and the legitimacy function of states. That is, states face a contradiction between the need to promote transnational capital accumulation in their individual national territories and their need to achieve political legitimacy and stabilize the domestic social order. Attracting transnational corporate and financial investments to the national territory requires providing capital with all the incentives associated with neoliberalism, such as downward pressure on wages, union busting, deregulation, low or no taxes, privatization, investment subsidies, fiscal austerity and on so. The result is rising inequality, impoverishment and insecurity for working and popular classes; precisely the conditions that throw states into crises of legitimacy, destabilize national political systems and jeopardize elite control. International frictions escalate as states, in their efforts to retain legitimacy, seek to sublimate social and political tensions and to keep the social order from fracturing. In the US, this sublimation has involved channeling social unrest towards scapegoated communities such as immigrants–this is one key function of racism and was a core component of the Trump government’s political strategy–or towards an external enemy such as China or Russia, which is clearly becoming a cornerstone of the Biden government’s strategy. While the Chinese and Russian ruling classes must also face the economic and political fallout of global crisis, their national economies are less dependent on militarized accumulation and their mechanisms of legitimization rest elsewhere–not on conflict with the US. It is Washington that is conjuring up the New Cold War, based not on any political or military threat from China and Russia, much less from economic competition, as US- and Chinese-based transnational corporations are deeply cross-invested, but on the imperative of managing and sublimating the crisis. The drive by the capitalist state to externalize the political fallout of the crisis increases the danger that international tensions will lead to war. Historically wars have pulled the capitalist system out of crisis while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy. The so-called “peace dividend” that was to result in demilitarization when the original Cold War ended with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union evaporated almost overnight with the events of September 2001, which legitimated the sham “War on Terror” as a new pretext for militarization and reactionary nationalism. U.S. presidents historically reach their highest approval ratings when they launch wars. George W. Bush reached an all-time-high of 90 percent in 2001 as his administration geared up to invade Afghanistan, and his father George H. W. Bush achieved an 89 percent approval rating in 1991, right as the U.S. declared the end of its (first) invasion of Iraq and the “liberation of Kuwait.” THE BATTLE FOR THE POST-PANDEMIC WORLD We are currently witnessing a radical restructuring and transformation of global capitalism based on a much more advanced digitalization of the entire global economy and society. This process is driven by so-called fourth industrial revolution technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, Big Data, autonomously driven land, air and sea vehicles, quantum and cloud computing, 5G bandwidth, bio- and nanotechnology and the Internet of Things, or IoT. The crisis is not only economic and political, but also existential because of the threats of ecological collapse and nuclear war, to which we must add the danger of future pandemics that may involve much deadlier microbes than coronaviruses. The pandemic lockdowns served as dry runs for how digitalization may allow the dominant groups to step up restructuring time and space and to exercise greater control over the global working class. The system is now pushing towards expansion through militarization, wars and conflicts, through a new round of violent dispossession and through further plunder of the state. The ruling classes are also using the health emergency to legitimate tighter control over restive populations. The changing social and economic conditions brought about by the pandemic and its aftermath are accelerating the process. These conditions have helped a new bloc of transnational capital, led by the giant tech companies, interwoven as they are with finance, pharmaceuticals and the military-industrial complex, to amass ever greater power and to consolidate its control over the commanding heights of the global economy. As restructuring proceeds, it heightens the concentration of capital worldwide, worsens social inequality and also aggravates international tensions and the dangers of military conflagration. In 2018, just seventeen global financial conglomerates collectively managed $41.1 trillion dollars–more than half the GDP of the entire planet. That same year, to reiterate, the richest one percent of humanity led by 36 million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent–nearly six billion people–had to make do with just five percent of this wealth. The result is devastation for the poor majority of humanity. Worldwide, 50 percent of all people live on less than $2.50 a day and a full 80 percent live on less than $10 per day. One in three people on the planet suffer from some form of malnutrition, nearly a billion go to bed hungry each night and another two billion suffer from food insecurity. Refugees from war, climate change, political repression and economic collapse already number into the hundreds of millions. The New Cold War will further immiserate this mass of humanity. Capitalist crises are times of intense social and class struggles. There has been a rapid political polarization in global society since 2008 between an insurgent far-right and an insurgent left. The ongoing crisis has incited popular revolts. Workers, farmers and poor people have engaged in a wave of strikes and protests around the world. From Sudan to Chile, France to Thailand, South Africa to the United States, a “people’s spring” is breaking out everywhere. But the crisis also animates far-right and neofascist forces that have surged in many countries around the world and that sought to capitalize politically on the health calamity and its aftermath. Neofascist movements and authoritarian and dictatorial regimes have proliferated around the world as democracy breaks down. Such savage inequalities are explosive. They fuel mass protest by the oppressed and lead the ruling groups to deploy an ever more omnipresent global police state to contain the rebellion of the global working and popular classes. Global capitalism is emerging from the pandemic in a dangerous new phase. The contradictions of this crisis-ridden system have reached the breaking point, placing the world into a perilous situation that borders on global civil war. The stakes could not be higher. The battle for the post-pandemic world is now being waged. Part of that battle is to expose the New Cold War as a ruse by the dominant groups to deflect our attention from the escalating crisis of global capitalism.

Based upon these recent cases of food conflicts, and upon the lessons gleaned from the longer history of the interaction between food and war, several regions of the planet face a greatly heightened risk of conflict towards the mid twenty-first century.

Food wars often start out small, as mere quarrels over grazing rights, access to wells or as one faction trying to control food supplies and markets. However, if not resolved quickly these disputes can quickly escalate into violence, then into civil conflagrations which, if not quelled, can in turn explode into crises that reverberate around the planet in the form of soaring prices, floods of refugees and the involvement of major powers – which in turn carries the risk of transnational war. The danger is magnified by swollen populations, the effects of climate change, depletion of key resources such as water, topsoil and nutrients, the collapse of ecosystem services that support agriculture and fisheries, universal pollution, a widening gap between rich and poor, and the rise of vast megacities unable to feed themselves (Figure 5.3).

At least 40% of rural U.S. hospitals are at risk of shutting down in the near future, according to a new  from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR)—a situation that could potentially leave millions in smaller, less affluent communities with no access to nearby emergency and critical care facilities.

So it is completely mystifying that the Senate, according to all reports, is seriously considering capping federal Medicaid payments to states starting in 2020 and each year thereafter in perpetuity. A cap on Medicaid would almost certainly lead to a large federal disinvestment from health care in rural America, leaving rural communities without health care infrastructure and children and families without geographic access to care.

Allow me to connect the dots:

Some progressive economists are now arguing for the idea of a Job Guarantee Program (JGP), and their advocacy has begun to gain political traction. For instance, in the US, Bernie Sanders and some other leading Democrats have recently signaled a willingness to embrace the idea. In recent research paper I have examined the macroeconomics of such a program. Whereas a JGP would deliver real macroeconomic benefits, it also raises some significant troubling economic and political economy concerns. Those concerns should be fully digested before a JGP is politically embraced. The starting point for discussion should be recognition that a JGP delivers multiple benefits. First, it ensures full employment by making available a job to all who want one on the terms specified by the program. Second, it substitutes wages for welfare benefits to workers who accept such jobs and would otherwise be on welfare. Third, it may deliver supply-side benefits to the extent that it helps unemployed workers retain job skills and avoid becoming detached from the labor force during periods of unemployment. Fourth, society benefits from the services produced by workers holding guaranteed employment jobs. Fifth, it has significant desirable counter-cyclical stabilisation properties. That said, a JGP generates some policy conflicts and it also has some drawbacks. Those conflicts and drawbacks concern macroeconomics, microeconomics, and political economy. A first macroeconomic concern is the putative cost of a JGP. This is a complex multifaceted concern. The immediate cost of a JGP will depend on the state of the economy and the state of the aggregate demand (AD) generation process. An economy with a deteriorated AD generation process, marked by a reduced wage share and increased inequality, will be prone to higher unemployment that raises the program’s cost. That speaks to the need to pair a JGP with other conventional structural Keynesian policies that remedy the causes of AD weakness. A second macroeconomic issue concerns financing and policy trade-offs. If government is financially constrained, policy must operate in a realm of trade-offs. Consequently, adopting a JGP may require giving up other desirable policy proposals such as increased public infrastructure investment, expanded subsidized healthcare, covering the shortfall in Social Security via general revenues, free tertiary education at public universities, elimination of student debt, or a universal basic income (UBI). This effect of financial constraints on government explains why discussion of a JGP tends to quickly spill over into a broader discussion about the macroeconomics of public finance. JGP proponents tend to believe government is financially unconstrained and can pay for everything by printing money. After the fact, government can then readily withdraw the money it has printed by raising taxes. All of this can be done without causing financial, economic, or political disruptions or distortions. That view is identified with modern money theory (MMT), which dismisses financial constraints on policy and argues the only constraint is availability of real resources (i.e. unemployed workers or under-utilised capital). In contrast, more conventional public finance macroeconomics argues that history, economic situation, markets, and political process impose financial, economic, and political constraints on governments that are difficult to thread. Though government has the technical ability to pay for everything owing to its power to issue money, doing so in excessive fashion will provoke disruptive and distorting financial, economic, and political reactions. The possibility of such reactions renders government’s technical ability to pay for everything an economic will-o-the-wisp. A government with a short time horizon can use its printing power to finance all its policy desires, but subsequent market reactions to budget excess will impose costs and may make the policies unsustainable. Alternatively, a government with a longer time horizon takes such future reactions into account when setting current policy, making it de facto financially constrained despite the appearance of being unconstrained. A third macroeconomic concern is inflation. The JGP wage is a real wage, which means the JGP nominal wage must be tied to inflation. Private sector nominal wages may then likely be tied to the JGP nominal wage to maintain an appropriate wage differential. Consequently, the JGP nominal wage could start to act as a form of economy-wide nominal wage indexation. Such indexation could potentially generate an unstable wage – price spiral, particularly if the existence of a JGP aggravates distributional conflict by increasing private sector wage demands. Raising the private sector wage share may be a desirable feature, but it points to the need for additional macroeconomic stabilisation policy tools. That requirement is either ignored or denied by JGP proponents. As regards microeconomics, there is concern related to the minimum wage aspect of a JGP. A necessary condition for the program to work is workers be willing to move from guaranteed jobs to private sector jobs when the latter become available. That requires the utility derived from a private sector job to exceed that of a guaranteed employment job. The utility depends on the job package consisting of wage, benefits, and work conditions. In effect, a JGP would set a floor for employment conditions in the private sector, akin to a minimum wage, only broader. If the guaranteed employment job package is more attractive than the private sector job package, that will attract workers out of the private sector, lowering private sector output and employment. In that case, private sector employers may respond by improving their job package, which could have effects akin to a high minimum wage that prices low productivity workers out of employment. Lastly, there are significant political economy concerns. A first such concern is the impact of a JGP on public sector unions. The distinction between government sector employment and guaranteed employment is artefactual, and both contribute to national income at cost. Consequently, there would likely be considerable pressure to lower public sector wages and benefits to the level of the guaranteed job on grounds that the work is similar. In effect, there is a high risk that a JGP could be used to open a new front for undermining public sector unions and public sector remuneration. A second political economy concern is workfare. Not only may the JGP be used to undermine the character of public sector employment, it can also be used to undermine the right to welfare. Thus, the right to welfare can be made conditional on accepting a guaranteed employment job. In this fashion, a JGP can become a double-edged sword, cutting upward against the public sector and downward against the welfare system. That is not an outlandish speculation in the context of US political economy, where the large prison population is already being exploited to work for near-free for the benefit of politically connected labor-intensive private industry. A third political economy concern is the productivity of guaranteed employment jobs. A JGP will be sold politically to the public on grounds that JGP workers are productive. However, delivering productivity requires organisational and managerial capacity that the public sector may not have. In that case, there is a risk that such jobs become perceived as “make work”. That would play into the political economy of animus to government, and it could boomerang back in the form of politics opposed to government provision of public goods and services and opposed to macroeconomic stabilisation policy. Careful what you wish for In sum, the debate over JGPs is fraught. Even those who support the aims of a JGP, and are favourably inclined to activist public policy, may still be wary of a JGP for economic and political economy reasons. Implementing a JGP will require political capital and the right political conditions. It might be better to use that favorable moment to introduce new policies (e.g. a UBI) and upgrade a collection of existing different policy modalities that together deliver the same or more benefits without the political economy risks.

Advances Maternal Health and Health Equity. The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, and rates are disproportionately high for Black and American Indian and Alaska Native women. The Budget includes $471 million to support implementation of the White House Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity rates and address persistent disparities; expand maternal health initiatives in rural communities; implement implicit bias training for healthcare providers; create pregnancy medical home demonstration projects; and address the highest rates of perinatal health disparities, including by supporting the perinatal health workforce. In addition, the Budget requires all States to provide continuous Medicaid coverage for 12 months postpartum, eliminating gaps in health insurance at a critical time.

Expands Access to Quality, Affordable Health Care. The Budget invests $150 billion over 10 years to improve and expand Medicaid home and community-based services, such as personal care services, which would allow older Americans and individuals with disabilities to remain in their homes and stay active in their communities as well as improve the quality of jobs for home care workers. And because community health centers—which provide comprehensive services regardless of ability to pay—serve one in three people living in poverty and one in five rural residents, the Budget puts the Health Center Program on a path to double its size and expand its reach. To bolster the health care workforce, the Budget provides a total of $966 million in 2024 to expand the National Health Service Corps, which provides loan repayment and scholarships to healthcare professionals in exchange for practicing in underserved areas, and a total of $350 million to expand programs that train and support the nursing workforce.

Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., have spent the past two months engaged in a war of words over the Green New Deal resolution. Many argue its ambitious goals aren’t feasible within the short timeframe it lays out. Others say there’s simply no alternative. While they’ve been sparring, however, cities and states across the country have been moving forward with their own ambitious plans, showing how elements of the radical proposal could take shape at a local level. “I think at the state and local level, we’ve got the capacity to do it,” Alan Webber, mayor of Santa Fe, New Mexico, told ThinkProgress. Webber’s city has been moving swiftly on climate action over the past few years. Part of that is necessity: New Mexico already suffers from water shortages, something the 2018 National Climate Assessment (NCA) warns will only grow worse in the Southwest as climate change intensifies droughts. With no time to waste, Santa Fe is jumping in head first. “We are on land that belongs to the Pueblo,” Webber said, noting that indigenous communities in the area have paved the way for the “sustainable life” Santa Fe is now pursuing. Last November, Santa Fe adopted a sustainability plan putting the city on the road to carbon neutrality by 2040. That’s 10 years later than the Green New Deal proposes, but it’s still a rapid timeline. And it’s one that includes a host of factors — moving to renewable energy, upgrading buildings and street lighting, water conservation, and local food production, in addition to more run-of-the-mill actions like recycling. “It’s a comprehensive approach to having a sustainability roadmap,” said Webber. What is unfolding in Santa Fe is an accelerated version of the conversation taking place on the national level. Once a topic pushed to the side by Republicans and Democrats alike, climate change has been catapulted to the top of the political agenda in recent months. After two years of deadly wildfires and hurricanes across the country, polling shows that most Americans accept the science behind climate change and that many feel it is already impacting their lives directly. And they are demanding action. Congressional newcomers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), joined by activist groups like the youth-led Sunrise Movement, have led the charge. In February, Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced the Green New Deal resolution, a blueprint for overhauling the entire U.S. economy and transitioning to emissions-neutral energy sources within a decade. Short on specifics, the resolution is meant to serve as an aspirational blueprint for eventual legislation in Congress that would emphasize rapidly transitioning the United States away from fossil fuels, in line with the latest science, all while investing in job creation, education, and health care. Ambitious climate legislation akin to the Green New Deal faces gridlock in Congress and staunch opposition from the White House, making it essentially a non-starter right now. But that isn’t true of cities and states. As of March, at least 19 states are considering or have already set 100 percent clean or renewable electricity targets, according to EQ Research, a policy group that works on issues like energy efficiency and renewables. Not all of those efforts resemble the full spectrum of changes called for under the Green New Deal, however, as they focus predominately on electricity goals. But several of the plans incorporate language about jobs and social justice, with some directly referencing the Green New Deal as a source of inspiration. That’s significant because, without federal support, ground-up implementation could be how the Green New Deal ultimately becomes a reality. Ambitious energy targets alone are notable in several areas. Hawaii and California have enacted legislation to hit a 100 percent clean or renewable electricity target by 2045, while Washington, D.C., is aiming for 2032. And already this year, 10 more states have followed suit, introducing their own legislation to reach a clean electricity standard by 2050 or earlier. This marks a dramatic change of pace compared to a few years ago, according to Ben Inskeep, a research analyst with EQ Research. “We definitely do see a lot of examples at the state level where we see [decarbonization targets] ratcheting up,” Inskeep told ThinkProgress. According to an alarming U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released last fall, the world only has around a decade left before crossing a dangerous global warming threshold. Reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels would, the report warns, mean devastating climate impacts on a scale the world is not prepared to address. This is why the Green New Deal resolution emphasizes the importance of serious, widespread action by 2030, in keeping with established climate science. Many cities and states, however, are operating within the 2050 deadline, which proponents of the Green New Deal may view as unambitious. But Inskeep says such criticism might be missing the point. The fact that local officials are announcing significant emissions reduction goals by 2050 is remarkable, he said, arguing the chief takeaway is less about the timeframe and more about growing momentum. “Some folks might say 2050 is too far in the future… [or] down the road,” he said. “[But] certainly none of us were having this conversation even three years ago… we’re seeing already that ratcheting up.” There was a time when 2050 seemed like an impractical goal, Inskeep explained. Now, it’s relatively average for most middle-of-the-road ambitions, viewed as achievable in part thanks to the rapidly-dropping costs of wind and solar power, in addition to advancements in technology. If lawmakers now see 2050 as an achievable deadline, that indicates just how much policymakers and officials have adjusted their expectations, and perhaps could ramp up ambitions even more down the road. “A few years ago, it would’ve been very surprising to see any kind of 100 percent proposal introduced… now, we have 10 more states introducing legislation… that’s a tremendous growth,” he said. In Santa Fe, action to implement the city’s sustainability plan is already in full swing. Last month, the city sold the state’s first-ever “green bonds,” which allow investors to finance environmental projects. That sale is translating to a $15 million city wastewater upgrade, which includes the construction of an anaerobic digester. Through the new system, microorganisms will break down biodegradable waste from the city. In the process, they will reduce emissions and generate clean energy. With the help of solar power and the digester, almost 95 percent of the plant’s power will be produced onsite. The energy savings are projected to eliminate some 3,100 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of taking nearly 750 cars off of the road. Such projects are a good example of how cities can be innovative as they seek to lower their emissions. But the city’s mayor is thinking bigger. “We tend to think of policies in silos but people don’t live in silos, they live their lives,” Webber said. In addition to committing Santa Fe to carbon neutrality, he’s also interested in job creation through renewable energy, something the Green New Deal emphasizes. He moreover sees other social efforts as being key components of any long-term plan, like protecting the city’s undocumented members, as well as low-income communities and people of color impacted by pollution. “There’s a renewable energy piece, a transportation piece, a land-use planning piece, a social equity piece, a jobs and inclusivity piece,” he said. Santa Fe is part of a larger story unfolding in New Mexico. On March 22, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) signed the Energy Transition Act, which would require the state’s electricity grid to be completely carbon-free by 2045. It also earmarks funds for communities impacted by the transition away from fossil fuels, including coal workers. “This is a state that is not in climate denial,” the governor declared. “We are clear that we have basically a decade to begin to turn things around and New Mexico needs [to] and will do its part.” The legislation comes as New Mexico struggles with hard choices. The state is a poor one, and it is also a leading fossil fuel producer. The Permian Basin, which straddles West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, is the leading oil and gas reserve in the country. And more than half of New Mexico’s electricity comes from coal. Lujan Grisham has said she wants to work with the fossil fuel industry to reduce emissions, but environmental advocates worry that flies in the face of New Mexico’s lofty climate goals. The Santa Fe-based New Energy Economy (NEE), which advocates for addressing climate change and shifting away from fossil fuels, has been critical of the Energy Transition Act. The environmental group has argued that the law provides too much assistance to Public Service Company of New Mexico, or PNM, the utility operator behind the failing San Juan Generating Station coal plant. According to NEE, the law amounts to a polluter “bailout” and was passed without the support of a number of tribal leaders. Others feel differently. Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez backed the law, as did many other stakeholders and a slew of environmental groups. That split in support indicates the challenges that others might also encounter as they look to pass similar legislation. Efforts in New Mexico are nonetheless notable in the components they bring together. Namely, they go beyond advocating for a shift away from fossil fuels, and also work to grow jobs and protect impacted communities. That’s language that has made the Green New Deal resolution so popular for some and so divisive for others. But such small-scale efforts will also be a test of whether a bigger and bolder endeavor might succeed. Some state proposals are in the early development stage. In Rhode Island, a tiny state threatened by sea level rise and overly vulnerable to financial crisis, the state is looking to begin researching its own version of a Green New Deal. Historically, Rhode Island has been among the first states to fall into recessions and the last to leave them — something a stimulus centering green jobs could help avoid. Others are further along. Last month, Illinois introduced the Clean Energy Jobs Act, which would push hard for job expansion as the state shifts away from fossil fuels. It also emphasizes increased solar distribution in vulnerable communities and the importance of creating energy-related jobs in low-income and pollution-impacted areas. And many local leaders are leaning into the language popularized by Ocasio-Cortez and young activists. Los Angeles city council members have used the language of the Green New Deal to push for an end to natural gas generation in the city. And in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the city’s shift from coal to solar power has been similarly marketed by activists and officials. Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) of New York also wasted no time in labeling the climate components of the state’s 2019 executive budget as a Green New Deal. That budget seeks to put New York on the road to “economy-wide carbon neutrality” by 2040, while ensuring a “just transition to clean energy.” New York has already banned fracking, committed to phasing out coal by 2020, and set a 50 percent renewable power target by 2030. And thanks to the potential of offshore wind, state officials are feeling confident about New York’s energy transition. They’re also hopeful that the state can be a model for others, said Alicia Barton, president and chief executive of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). “New York is very focused on developing a plan for economy-wide decarbonization that we can deliver on as we progress toward achieving the state’s nation-leading goals,” Barton told ThinkProgress. She said she hopes the state’s “leadership” will help national efforts by “driving the clean energy transition faster than anyone thought.” City and state-level efforts remain different from federal action in that they are much smaller scale and thus easier to implement. However, virtually every official who spoke to ThinkProgress indicated that assistance from Congress and the White House would help, either with funding or with general guidance. But the polarized nature of Washington is proving challenging in that regard, as is evident by the Green New Deal’s failure to gain bipartisan support. Webber, of Santa Fe, sees an opening there. “I think particularly with the federal government frozen in so many ways, the level of engagement is shifting to the cities and the states,” he said. And in some ways, they may be better equipped to address some problems. Cities and states, Webber says, are “closer to the problem and also closer to the people affected by the issues, like closing down a coal mine.

The policy changes envisioned in the Green New Deal resolution are not hypothetical. In fact, many are already happening at the state and local level, where broad local coalitions of labor, environmental, and racial justice groups are winning pro-climate, pro-jobs, pro-equity policies that help lay the groundwork for a national Green New Deal. In addition to more than 100 cities nationwide that have already committed to 100 percent clean, renewable energy, here are just a few examples of state and city initiatives that offer models and momentum for a nationwide Green New Deal. NEW YORK CITY The New York City Council recently passed a job-creating bill that takes aim at the city's largest source of climate pollution: inefficient buildings. The new policy, cited as part of the city's own Green New Deal, will require about 50,000 large buildings to meet ambitious targets for reducing climate pollution. The building retrofits required by the policy are expected to create about 8,000 jobs each year. To protect low-income residents, the policy includes terms to prevent rent increases in rent-regulated buildings. MAINE Maine recently enacted a new "Act To Establish a Green New Deal for Maine." The law will create a task force of labor, youth, climate science, and other representatives to craft a strategy for achieving 80% renewable energy in Maine by 2040, creating good jobs in renewable energy and manufacturing, and ensuring low-income households have access to affordable solar power. The Maine AFL-CIO has praised the policy, saying that workers must "have a seat at the table in crafting bold climate protection policies." LOS ANGELES In April 2019, Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti released an update to the Sustainable City pLAn, calling it "L.A.'s Green New Deal." The plan lays out the most ambitious and achievable climate goals for the city to date. It would invest in L.A.'s local workforce and economy by creating good union jobs for thousands of technicians, electricians, engineers, and other clean energy workers. Critically, the plan tackles the ongoing poor air quality that Los Angeles and other Southern California communities continue to breathe as the worst region for smog pollution in the country. ILLINOIS The Future Energy Jobs Act gives low-income families priority access to solar panels, while providing solar-installation job training, particularly for formerly incarcerated people and communities fighting environmental injustice. The law also sets new energy-efficiency standards that are slated to further reduce air and climate pollution, create over 7,000 new jobs each year to retrofit buildings, and cut $4 billion in energy costs for Illinois families. CALIFORNIA In addition to committing to 100 percent clean energy by 2045, California’s Buy Clean policy helps stimulate clean manufacturing by requiring that tax dollars be spent on goods manufactured under conditions that protect our climate. The law will help ensure that when the state government buys steel for bridges or glass for offices, it sends tax dollars to manufacturers that are slashing their climate pollution and creating good jobs. NEW MEXICO New Mexico has enacted a historic law to transition to 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045. The bill sets interim milestones for clean energy adoption and invests heavily in NM communities, accounting for retiring an existing coal-fired generating plant while pursuing a just and equitable transition to a clean energy future for NM workers and families. PORTLAND In 2018, after a grassroots campaign led by communities of color, voters in Portland overwhelmingly approved a ballot referendum that will raise $30-70 million per year, via a fee on big retailer profits, for energy efficiency, renewable energy, job training, affordable housing, regenerative agriculture, and green infrastructure projects. A new task force of city stakeholders will be tasked with deciding annually the beneficiaries of the fund, with at least half of the revenue going toward investments in low income communities and communities of color. SEATTLE In August 2019, the Seattle city council unanimously passed a resolution calling for a city-level Green New Deal, which seeks to eliminate Seattle’s climate pollution by 2030, address historical and current injustices, and create thousands of good, green, well-paying, unionized jobs. The effort is being led by local environmental justice organizations and frontline communities of color, and includes a "Healthy Homes, Healthy Businesses" ordinance that would require new buildings in the city to run on clean electricity rather than gas appliances. PITTSBURGH Pittsburgh United's Clean Rivers Campaign has been pushing for job-creating green infrastructure projects that could drastically reduce flooding in some of the city’s vulnerable neighborhoods. They are one of many local coalitions across the country calling for, and often securing, public investments in green spaces to absorb rainwater, replacement of lead pipes, and other infrastructure upgrades to increase climate resilience and ensure clean water. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA The Clean Energy DC Omnibus Act of 2018 requires DC to transition to 100 percent clean, renewable electricity sources by 2032. It also sets stronger, job-creating building performance standards to reduce energy use and make buildings more energy efficient and requires buses and large private vehicle fleets to transition away from dirty fuel and toward electric vehicles.