They can’t explain Flint – lower class non-white communities are reduced to “The Surplus”, constantly threatened by extermination to re-entrench state power. Makes inequality inevitable

But, again, it is which lives are subordinated to fiscal solvency that is key. Michigan cities placed under EFMs are disproportionately African American (Table 1). Abbey-Lambertz () has pointed out that African Americans constitute only 14% of Michigan’s population, yet they are approximately 49% of those living under EFM. This is a shocking statistic: Half of Michigan’s African Americans are not living under any pretense of local democracy. As one Flint resident sarcastically wrote, “State Take Over Coming to a Black City Near You” (Williams ). Nor has the over-representation of Black places under EFM escaped the notice of the mainstream media. “Coming in the wake of deindustrialization, recession, and persistent poverty, state intervention has disproportionately impacted the people who – because of race and class – have been given the least opportunity to succeed in America” (Lewis ). Having established the vulnerability of Black places, let us return to surplus populations and devaluation. As explained earlier, key to the devaluation of Black Flint is its status as a surplus population. But calling Black residents “surplus” does not adequately convey their relationship to capital. We need to more fully theorize the role of surplus in contemporary capitalism. Generally, surplus populations embody varying degrees of integration into the workforce, ranging from precarious employment to the permanently unemployed. Many have argued that the most peripheral surplus populations have zero value to capital. “Once relegated as permanent surplus … these populations are little more than human waste, excreted from the capitalist system” (Yates , 1680). While this is often true, Gilmore () has demonstrated capital’s ability to transform surplus populations into profit through the prison industrial complex. Though Flint inhabitants are potential prisoners, they are still city residents, and thus we need to more fully understand their relationship to capital. Collard and Dempsey () have developed a typology that describes how various forms of nature are valued by capital. Though their schema centers on nonhuman nature, it is helpful in understanding Flint. Utilizing their framework, Flint’s Black residents can be seen as embodying at least three distinct forms of surplus: “Outcast Surplus,” “The Underground,” and “Threat.” Outcast Surplus refers to the widely held idea that surplus is of no value to capital. This position has been implicit throughout this essay and will not be elaborated on. However, I believe that Flint’s relationship to capital is more complex than Outcast Surplus suggests. “The Underground” refers to both human and nonhuman nature that perform services for capital but which are not recognized or valued. Examples include unpaid domestic work or ecosystem services (Collard and Dempsey, ). I argue that Flint is performing unpaid labor for capital by preparing the larger society for increased struggles over basic reproduction, including such necessities as water. It is inconceivable that a wealthy or even a middle-class neighborhood in the US (of any color) would deliberately be given poisoned water. Yet, it is entirely conceivable that such a thing could happen in a poor, nonwhite place. Places like Flint are where crisis is being “worked out” and the newest tools and practices of neoliberalism are being fashioned. Flint is a training ground for “disciplining” places by finance capital. What is happening in Flint today, the rest of us can expect in the coming years: the continued devaluation of life and the sacredness of bonds. Of course, this is not new. This is what happened in the Global South in the 1980s through austerity, debt, and structural readjustment (George ). One Flint resident actually said that the community felt like a “Third World Country” (ACLU of Michigan ). Did she know how accurate this was? Flint’s water disaster signals the inability to provide a hallmark of the “first world” to its surplus residents: clean, tap water. As President Obama stated, I will not rest … until every drop of water that flows to your homes is safe to drink, and safe to cook with, and safe to bathe in, because that’s part of the basic responsibility of a government in the United States of America. (Pearce , A8, emphasis added) It is difficult to overemphasize the significance of potable water to the US’s sense of self. While I was growing up, the jokes about Mexico’s drinking water were legendary, “Don’t drink the water!” Water was both a symbolic and material manifestation of Mexican economic, political, and social inferiority. Mexico, as a “third world” country, was incapable of providing safe tap water, while in the US, this was taken for granted (Salzman ). Though there have been moments when potable water was temporarily unavailable in the US, increasingly poor Black, Brown, and indigenous communities are unable to consistently access sufficient, clean water (Jennings ; Marcum ). This is a singular moment in US history as we confront our downward mobility. The final relationship that Flint has to capital is as “Threat.” Marx largely dismissed the revolutionary potential of surplus populations, arguing that they lacked the proper consciousness and discipline. While it is true that surplus populations may have different forms of consciousness than workers, many theorists have overlooked the revolutionary potential of nonwhite populations, in particular, how materialist demands have been incorporated into antiracist struggle. Too often these are seen as “racial” issues, devoid of economic content. This is a misreading, particularly of Black history, which is filled with poor Black people fighting for both economic and racial justice (Georgakas and Surkin ; Kelley ; Quizar ; Woods ). Robinson has dubbed this powerful revolutionary consciousness and history the Black Radical Tradition (BRT). It is “an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle … in its most militant manifestation … the purpose of the struggles informed by the tradition became the overthrow of the whole race-based structure” (, xxx–xxxi). This does not mean that all Black people are poised for revolution. But it does acknowledge that a powerful tradition exists among the Black diaspora that can be drawn upon. The class struggles of white workers have only rarely included the fight against racial capitalism. Not only have most whites been partially pacified by their privileged status, but the “wages of whiteness” (Roediger ) have enabled capital to extract greater levels of surplus than would otherwise be possible. In contrast, Black people have been forced to struggle against racism, class exploitation, and gendered oppression for centuries – often directly against the white working class. Evidence of the BRT can be seen in its role in ending slavery as well as current efforts to dismantle the prison industrial complex.