The Editors of Capitalism Nature Socialism

The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer has stirred an uprising against racism and police violence across the US and across the world such as we have not seen before. The slaying of George Floyd was, as of 25 May 2020, the latest in a long history of state-sanctioned violence against people of colour that began with the foundation of the US: the enslavement and genocide of Native Americans, Africans, and their descendants. Since the protests began against the murder of Floyd, police across US cities have reacted violently against protesters, including by murdering two more people, Sean Monterrosa and Rayshard Brooks. The racist attitude towards people of colour is not confined to US territory but is global. It is an expression of a global racist regime we call capitalism. This is why the murder of George Floyd has inspired a global outcry and worldwide protests against all forms of oppression. The world is crying out: the life of George Floyd matters! Black Lives Matter! No to racism! No to colonialism! Police violence is only one aspect of the structural violence that permeates capitalism: mass incarceration, environmental racism, imperialism, war, and neoliberal austerity. The struggle against racism is a struggle against capitalism and its inherent tendencies for colonialism and constant war. For every police murder there are thousands of slow, invisible murders on the “treadmill of production” and on the altar of austerity. “Unity in diversity” (see Capitalism Nature Socialism 31(1)) is our call for social equality in an ecologically sustainable system that will replace capitalism.

Reformist reforms are again being demanded. We are told “this time” there will be a significant, lasting effect, real improvement of life within capitalism. For us, true and lasting effects must include radical changes that pave the way out of capitalism, permanent transformation of the relations of production and social reproduction and of the structures of power. Since its foundation, our journal has called for envisioning such radical transformation. The current moment emphasises the urgency of our mandate.

The current Covid-19 pandemic has affected us all, but, in the US, it has disproportionately affected Black and Indigenous People because of centuries of racial discrimination and violence that have rendered their lives especially vulnerable. The choking and tear gassing of people across the country in the midst of a pandemic of respiratory disease put in stark relief the common origins of police violence and the public health crisis, exacerbated by an epidemic of mass incarceration, social and economic inequality, and the dangerous working conditions of people historically forced into circumstances of greater vulnerability. The pandemic made it clear who the “essential workers” are. They are the workers who make life possible – orderlies, janitors, cleaners, medical assistants, nurses, non-medical staff at hospitals, supermarket workers, farmworkers, slaughterhouse workers, garbage collectors and other sanitation workers, warehouse and fulfillment centres workers, lorry drivers and food and other delivery drivers, and scores of others, including immigrants working in inherently dangerous industries under the continuous threat of deportation. They are also those who provide essential but unpaid care. Essential workers are often the lowest paid, have no health insurance and live in the least desirable housing, if they have housing at all. Essential workers are at the greatest risk of exposure to the disease especially because those who exploit them, with the support of governments, have willfully failed to provide them with the necessary protective gear and with the necessary healthcare to help them survive.

Praise of essential workers must not stop at nightly rounds of applause and prepared TV ads telling us we are all in this together. Neither the applause nor the ads call for or represent real change. Real, non-reformist change must include, first, a dramatic shift in the predominant wage structure with serious diminution of the financial takings of the highest paid executives and a shift to significant increases in the earnings and benefits of essential workers. It must involve radical redistribution of wealth from policing and corporate bonuses to the support of essential workers – all workers essential to the satisfaction of needs – and the provision of adequate housing, health care, education, food security. Radical change, however, involves more than income redistribution. It involves a radical transformation of the conditions of life, the eradication of the power structures that have led to daily police murders and the death of 130,000 people in the US alone and more than half a million worldwide from Covid-19, as of July 2020. It must include reparations and land restitutions for communities still suffering from the legacies of slavery and from past and current colonialism. Real, radical change must involve an end to all forms of colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.

Capitalism Nature Socialism has a long history of dissecting the wrongs of capitalism and arguing for fundamental change. Along with so many who have lost and suffered so much, this is more than a moment in which we express our grief for the inhumanities of capitalism. Against all odds, it is a moment to reaffirm our commitment to advancing radical change and to reinvigorate our pledge to publish the best scholarship promoting a red-green political culture, an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, anti-heteronormative, and environmentally-just politics towards a world free of capitalist exploitation and domination. Let this moment not be recorded in history as just one more crisis that the capitalist system managed to overcome.

From: Capitalism Nature Socialism 2020 31 (3)

Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10455752.2020.1790804