When we're in trouble: What Chinese society can learn from America's resistance movement #BlackLivesMatter (Part 1)

Any system, even a corrupt one, can create a rapidly developing economy; but only democracy can establish social justice and give people dignity.

If there's an antidote to cynicism, it's the people in the streets.

Where there is wisdom, compassion, decency, justice, equality, caring, and honesty, there is a rush of people.

Note: This report is relatively long, totaling about 25,000 words, and will be published in three parts . But I very much hope you will read it in full. Because it is important to Chinese society . We don’t want to analyze China too much (we did this many years ago) and now we want to focus on clearing the cognitive barriers and improving skills, that is, “how” + “what to do”, and Not "why not".

Perhaps most Chinese readers already know what happened recently. After an unarmed black man in Minneapolis and an unarmed black woman in Louisville, Kentucky, were violently killed by police, protests broke out across the country and in many countries around the world.

This protest has been analyzed from the perspective of "smart suppression" before. Here you can see " What surveillance methods do the police use to target protesters?" 》;

This article will try to explain this movement from the perspective of knowledge, understanding and learning - hopefully to the benefit of actors in Chinese society.

What is the background of this movement?

Economic, health and justice inequalities have persisted like chasms for years, with George Floyd’s death just the final straw

As protests entered their eighth day, Trump began touting his record on reducing poverty and unemployment among black people and passing criminal justice reform. "I have done more for the black community than any other president since Abraham Lincoln," he tweeted.

is this real? Will African Americans be better off under Trump? What does this have to do with the protests?

According to the Census Bureau, African Americans earn just three-fifths of what non-Hispanic whites earn. In 2018, the average black household income was $41,400, compared with $70,600 for white households.

This is a huge gap. Compared to Britain, where race relations are also tense, black people's income is 90% of white people's.

The income gap has indeed narrowed compared to 1970, when African Americans earned half as much as whites. However, all improvements occurred between 1970 and 2000, after which the situation worsened again.

The impact of the coronavirus epidemic in 2020 has made the inequality gap even more obvious. Because African Americans are generally placed in low-skilled or unskilled hard labor jobs, these jobs are more vulnerable to the threat of the coronavirus.

That's not all. Income figures themselves grossly underestimate real economic differences because they describe only those who are employed.

A study by Duke University's Patrick Bayer and the University of Chicago's Kerwin Charles shows that a staggering 35 percent of black young people are partially or completely unemployed, a figure twice that of whites.

This large number appears to be related to the high incarceration rate of African Americans: in addition to those in prison, many have given up looking for jobs because employers do not hire ex-prisoners.

Disparities in judicial rights also exacerbate income and work inequality.

The wealth gap between blacks and whites is even greater than the income gap. According to a 2017 Federal Reserve Board survey, the median net worth of African Americans was just $17,600, compared with $171,000 for non-Hispanic whites during the same period. This gap is the same as in 1990.

This has seeped into the daily financial experience of African American families.

Twice as many blacks as whites have zero or negative equity (meaning they have more debt than assets). More than twice as many blacks as whites have been denied credit or had late payments in the past 60 days; more than twice as many blacks as whites have been unable to pay all their bills in a month; only 43% of blacks say they can in an emergency Borrowing $3,000 from family or friends compared with 71% of white people.

Economically, more African Americans than whites live on the brink of crisis, one paycheck away from disaster.

Covid-19 is a huge scourge, and African Americans have been hit hardest.

Black and Hispanic citizens of New York are twice as likely to die from covid-19 than white people. In Chicago, there are more than five times as many blacks.

Part of the reason is that the jobs they do are jobs that require ongoing work throughout the epidemic, such as nursing work, delivery assistance, etc., which account for a high proportion; and part of the reason is that they are more likely than whites to have no health insurance (now 12.2 % of black people are uninsured (up from 7.8% in 2018); the most important reason is because they have more chronic disease problems and poor health makes people susceptible to the virus.

According to the CDC, African Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 are twice as likely to die from heart disease, 50 percent as likely to die from high blood pressure, and 50 percent as likely to die from diabetes. Twice as many as white people.

There is ample evidence that there is a close link between judicial inequality and economic status . Chinese people are certainly familiar with this.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice, black people were incarcerated at a per capita rate six times that of white people in 2016 (and surprisingly, that's even an improvement: In 2006, the rate was seven times higher).

A study by researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of British Columbia found that if a white person and a black or Hispanic person committed the same crime, the black or Hispanic person was sentenced to a longer sentence.

Another study suggests this is because judges don't believe black people can pay fines and avoid jail, and they worry that if black people are released, they won't be able to find jobs and will become criminals. In other words, poverty and unemployment exacerbated black sentencing practices that made it difficult for black people to find work .

If you want to understand the issue of miscarriage of justice, here’s a report that gives a clear glimpse into it: Wearing the “wrong” clothes can get you arrested ; intercept also has a good rundown of why black people keep being policed In the "Terrorist" database, see " Everything They Don't Like Is Defined as Terrorism ".

Please note: the above are all superficial phenomena! ! So what exactly is causing the huge inequality gap?

See national data on police killings of civilians here - the mapping police violence organization has long compiled this data, here is just a screenshot of the 2019 data:

What should be the goal of this protest?

Why capitalism and democracy are incompatible has been analyzed a lot from the perspective of political science; we will make some brief summaries later.

Regarding the real background and goals of this movement , the famous American rapper Boots Riley made an excellent analysis. See his previous articles here. Let’s summarize and expand a bit.

Racist violence and police murder are inherent to capitalism . Unless there is a real escape from capitalism, it will always be here.

Understanding this is key to protesters finding shortcuts—to collectively finding more direct ways of resisting these injustices. Here’s a brief explanation of why.

Under capitalism you cannot get full employment.

Capitalism must have a certain percentage of unemployed people.

When the unemployment rate drops to a certain level, you'll see the WSJ, FTimes, and other corporate media express concern because, that means wages are going to go up in real time and stock values ​​are going to go down in real time.

There must be a large enough army of unemployed workers so that capitalist bosses can threaten workers at any time to "leave if they don't want to work. There are plenty of people rushing to work" to lower wages. The larger the size of this unemployed army, the more intense the situation of workers’ passive “competition” and the lower the wage level .

The key is to keep wages as low as possible.

If there were full employment opportunities, workers could tell their bosses, "I want $75 an hour. If you don't agree, I will quit my job and find another job." The bosses would be afraid because they would not be able to easily find other applicants to replace the resigning workers. . They would have to give in to the demands of workers.

In China, the reason why the 996 protest movement failed to achieve fundamental changes is directly related to this.

Capitalist Liu Qiangdong can say without shame: "People who are messing around are not my brothers!"; while Jack Ma said at an internal meeting of Ali that 996 is your "blessing."

At the same time, we have also seen a lot of strange comments from Chinese people. People said, "If you quit your job to do freelance work, it will be much more tiring than 996." If you can’t work anymore, you won’t starve to death.” Some people said, “Why are you so pretentious when you occupy a job in a big-name company? Be pragmatic. You will be 35 years old soon. Go to the job market and try to compete with young people. Except for the job of delivering express, no one will care about you!"...

You now understand why capitalists like Jack Ma and Liu Qiangdong are so arrogant. The strange public opinions among the people reflect the actual injustice and exploitation faced by people in capitalist society - age discrimination in employment, pension pressure, abnormal competition, unemployment threats, etc.

People face real existential difficulties, the source of which is the capitalist system. The protesters in the United States know this very well, but in China, to a large extent, people have not yet realized that Chinese society is also capitalist in nature . (There will be detailed analysis on this later)

As a result, Chinese society is likely to view the U.S. resistance movement as “other people’s business,” making it even more difficult for them to be motivated to unite. Of course there are other reasons, including the malicious and stupid tactics of the Chinese authorities that continue to affect the way people think.

This article hopes that by analyzing this movement, it can help Chinese society understand the movement itself; not just the superficial phenomena of police state violence and racial discrimination .

Businesses must make more money each year than the previous year, so capitalism requires an army of unemployed workers to survive.

So what do you make of the army of unemployed workers? They are a hungry people and they need to eat.

And they don't have jobs because capitalism *needs* them to be unemployed and desperate .

That army of unemployed workers will not let themselves or their families go hungry and homeless. They will be forced to choose illegal businesses.

Even many people who are engaged in legal jobs but whose income is not high enough to support their families need to do some illegal businesses to earn extra income - Bring home the bacon. Every adult understands how big a meaning this phrase contains. Hard work, responsibility and stress.

All things, legal and illegal, use violence to regulate themselves. They call it "the rules." Police officers with guns drawn will enforce these "rules" themselves.

So what exactly is illegal? Different periods have completely different definitions.

During Prohibition, alcohol was illegal and "unruly"; if you had alcohol, gangsters would chase you. Now, the police are chasing you. 20 years ago, marijuana was illegal. You have weed and your friends are going to chase you. Likewise, now the police are chasing you.

Illegal businesses have no police or courts regulating them, like there are for legal businesses, none. You can't go to court and say, "Honorable judge, I bought a whole kilogram of cocaine, and apparently half of it was baking soda. I want damages!"

There is also no zoning board for you to complain about. No one would rule like this: "The neighborhood is only for one cocaine seller, and if a person wants to sell cocaine in the same area, he will have to get a special permit."

Therefore, illegal business practitioners must regulate the business themselves. Every kind of regulation requires the application of force and violence, as in policing and legitimate business. You can't do business without violence .

You don't lose your job from an illegal business; but you can't have capitalism without unemployment.

Simply put, there can be no capitalism without poverty, unemployment, so-called “crime” and violence.

But, you know, is there any ruling class (in America that would be those white people) who would tell the entire working class that their poverty and low wages are something inherent in the economic system? Will they admit that the wealth of the world's richest guys like Bezos and Bloomberg depends on the poor at the bottom ?

They won't tell you. Never.

Instead, these rich people promote distorted values ​​to the working class through the media conglomerates they own (corporate media): low wages, poverty, and the growth of violence are due to the poor decisions themselves. Brainwash people on a values ​​level .

The corporate media are unwilling and unable to be honest.

• " Gatekeepers as Cognitive Killers "
• " Media Giants and Silicon Valley's Weaponized Algorithms Silence Dissent "

The Bezos and Bloombergs of the world don’t have to edit or produce the brainwashing material themselves; they just need to hire editors and writers who are willing to obediently repeat the views of these capitalists. It's not difficult, many of these people come from similar backgrounds and/or training/education, that is, they have been fully indoctrinated with the political views of these capitalists before they enter the industry and become loudspeakers.

But how do these capitalists tell the entire working class that their low wages and poverty are the foundation of capitalism, while preventing the working class from deciding to stand up and throw off the oppression of the ruling class?

they do not. Nor would I want to do it.

Instead, they point to blacks and other people of color and say to the white working class: “Look at those savages. They are violent, their culture lacks what it takes to thrive in this system, they don’t work hard, they are They are inferior to white people in every aspect...etc."

These capitalists are telling people: "The reason why those black people are so miserable is because they are poor, these black people and other people of color are in poverty because of what they have done, and capitalism works so well that if you do If you get it right, you can gain wealth from it”…

They continually support the lie that “black communities have more crime and violence than white communities.”

There have been so many studies showing that if you compare black neighborhoods to white neighborhoods at the same income level, the levels of crime and violence are essentially the same. Here are some research reports .

False claims of black crime as a fig leaf for racist violence are nothing new. In 1906, Atlanta newspapers created a false " black crime wave " lie that ultimately led to state militia and county police raiding every black home door-to-door to confiscate guns.

People were beaten and murdered in these raids . In the decades that followed, falsehoods about a “black crime wave” were fed into the media in Washington, New York, and other cities, leading to a crackdown on black communities.

White capitalists must maintain their belief in this lie and spread it more widely because then they can allow the white working class to say, "I don't like those black people at all - I'm morally upright '... If I do have some financial issues personally, that's why I need to improve myself. It's not the economic system. At least I'm not them (those black people)."

This is why you see white people in households making $22,000 a year calling themselves "middle class" and aligning themselves with the ruling class .

These people are not just Trump’s supporters; if you look at Elon Musk’s tweets, they’re also kneeling under his posts — those shy people, kneeling and licking there .

But now that poverty and the resulting "crime" and violence have been broadly defined as personal problems and, further, racially defined as problems stemming from fixed community cultures, these myths have become deeply embedded in the popular psyche. heart. Not just the American public, but the public in all societies that believe in elite capitalists— including China .

You can see a lot of discrimination against black people and Muslims in China. Even people who call themselves democrats have this strange discriminatory attitude . This is not without reason. At least you can find that these people are accustomed to using the American corporate media as their only channel to obtain knowledge-that is, the mouthpieces controlled by the capitalists Bezos and Bloomberg.

One of the main reasons for this situation is still the malicious stupidity of the Chinese authorities (malicious stupidity from the perspective of nationalism). Basically, the Chinese authorities block American corporate media, leading people to mistakenly believe that "the blocked are the good things." . This is due to a typical human psychological weakness, known as the " Law of Availability " by psychological manipulation. We will have a new set of analytical articles on psychological manipulation (brainwashing) techniques in the future, which will mention this again.

Lawyer Dave McKenna points out that the biggest theft in the world is wage theft: this involves employers failing to pay, paying amounts below the minimum wage, and withholding overtime pay and paid sick leave entitlements.

The worst theft in the world is wage theft. That is, the amount of stolen wages combined is far greater than the annual value of all other forms of theft such as robberies, shoplifting, car thefts, etc. combined .

But, you know, wage theft is not considered a crime.

If you steal $100 from your employer, you will be arrested. But if your employer deducts 100 yuan from your salary, the police will only tell you to complain to the labor department. If the labor department fails, you also have a private right of action and can file a civil lawsuit against your employer to recover the money you are owed as well as damages. But getting a trial can take six to 18 months.

Even if you win the case, the employer who stole your wages will not have a criminal record.

Simply put, the law literally defines wage theft as “not a crime.”

If you steal, it's a crime. Employer theft is not a crime.

This is why it is meant to say that crime is "socially constructed." Not all social harm is criminalized. Not all actors who cause harm to society are criminalized .

McKenna said he settled cases worth $27,000 for three clients last year. It took a month to negotiate the NDA because the employer said he would go bankrupt if all the employees sued him and settled like this. His business model depends on wage theft .

Some people sued and he had to pay them. And most others don’t have the resources and energy to litigate for years. Nothing came of it.

This is enough to show how ridiculous the police label of a "high-crime community" is, especially the arbitrary nature of police surveillance and the racist response.

If you poison one person, you will be sentenced; and the people who cause water and air pollution to poison thousands of people are the ones who have the greatest wealth, the 1%.

The people who cause the most harm are not behind bars or living in so-called high-crime neighborhoods. Now you know how ridiculous the argument that black people commit more crimes is.

So, what is the role of the police?

If the police really want to "fight crime," then they should look for the root causes of "crime." The root cause is the ruling class . As mentioned above, billionaire capitalists contribute to low wages, poverty, and “crime,” which is what capitalism requires.

If the police intervene to stop "crime" and the violence that results, they are no longer police officers - but revolutionary organizers .

Because the roots of crime are not found in black communities and other communities of color, or even in white working-class communities, but in upscale neighborhoods: Bel Air, Fifth Avenue, and Silicon Valley.

But, as noted above, precisely because racist ideas about black people and other people of color are necessary for capitalism, the job of police in black communities is functionally one of resisting that community's combatants.

The only way those police officers can avoid cognitive dissonance in the line of duty—the only way they can think they are doing the right thing and being effective in their job—is that they *accept* racist ideas of violence, crime, and poverty. Even if the police officers themselves are black or people of color .

The only fundamental solution to stopping police violence is to stop capitalism.

The success of a resistance movement depends on whether the actors realize where their true power lies.

If protesters want short-term justice for George Floyd's murder and other murders that occur almost every day, they need to demand at least some realistic reforms, hold strikes, and have clear demands.

Hold a massive strike until they not only arrest other police officers, but also appoint prosecutors that people trust so that people can seek justice through prosecution.

Again – this doesn’t solve the underlying problem! But if we want to show what we can do, show that these murders come at a cost. This is the most basic thing to do .

As long as you have a job, everyone can participate. But the action has to be organized, and there are ways to identify the industries where strike action can be most effective.

Each problem is huge and cannot be expected to be completely solved at once. Real change only happens if people resist and organize for change over and over again .

We should know what kind of world we want to build.

Capitalism and democracy are incompatible

In a recent global survey, Pew found that 51% of respondents in 27 countries were very dissatisfied with the way democracy works; and, Millennials and Gen Z are dissatisfied with capitalism Increasingly disinterested, only half of the population in the United States still has a positive view of capitalism.

Professor Isabelle Ferreras of the University of Leuven pointed out that democracy is a system based on the recognition that people are equal in "dignity and rights" and therefore should enjoy equal political rights. This ideal can be applied to entities of any size.

Capitalism is also a system, but it is based on inequality. It confers political rights based on capital ownership. Its core institution is the corporation , which consists of two types of investors: capital and labor.

In capitalist corporations, political rights to governance are held solely by capital investors through the legal means of the corporation.

In the logic of capitalist corporations, the most important people are simply those who own the capital, in other words, the shareholders.

They wield power and reap most of the financial rewards, while labor (i.e. workers) is disenfranchised and the planet's resources are depleted.

Capitalism is not inherently free-market. The market is an exchange mechanism for the legal and cultural production and guarantee of the state. Its superiority in coordinating supply and demand has been demonstrated, but few acknowledge that a market economy is compatible with both democratic and capitalist governments at the corporate level. Capitalism and democracy both need markets, not each other .

Indian development economist Reetika Khera points out that although neither capitalism nor democracy exists in ideal form, the promises of democracy are more attractive to us than the promises of capitalism. For example, unlike democracy, capitalism does not even strive for equality.

The realities of capitalism are disturbing. Whether it's car manufacturers fabricating emissions, banks transferring money without guilt, or business tycoons running away, you can't see the concept of "obeying the rule of law and equality before the law."

Even when powerful capitalists do not break the law, they buy influence, shape the law-making process in their favor (for example, by removing basic worker protections), and engage in "legal" theft.

You know how, over the past few decades, the sugar and tobacco industries paid off intellectuals to run false papers to cover up the ill effects of their products; today, you see the tech industry doing similar things, including Voter manipulation - Undermining the free and fair elections that are the foundation of a functioning democracy.

• How tech oligarchs rigged elections " A Dinner for Kings — It's an Invisible Coup "
• " The Secret of Psychological Manipulation: "Behavioral Economics" + PR=? 》

Do democracy and capitalism need each other? It does not need. Capitalism needs the pretense of democracy more than democracy itself.

Manuel Agosin, professor (former dean) of the Department of Economics at the School of Economics and Business of the University of Chile, pointed out that capitalism can survive for a long time without democracy, as the experience of China, Russia, Turkey and other authoritarian countries proves this. These capitalisms often favor corruption and control of resources through merit such as partisan loyalty.

By emphasizing individualism and individual gain, capitalism tends to breed market concentration and a range of chronic abuses, as the Great Depression clearly demonstrated. Individuals and companies are constantly tempted to evade the law or exploit legal loopholes.

The financial sector is particularly prone to this kind of behavior because it allows market participants to earn profits not only by providing services that people need, but also through clever manipulation of "financial engineering."

This kind of creativity has no value to society. Instead, it usually brings about a variety of conditions that accumulate into a financial crisis.

Steven Klein, assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida, points out that democracy and capitalism have different organizing principles .

Democracy is founded on the belief that everyone should have an equal say in decisions that affect them. Capitalism does not. Rather, it is based on profit motives and barriers to entry.

This is at the heart of their tug of war with each other: achieving the ideal of equal voice means limiting the ability of individuals and businesses to abandon their economic and political ties, even if democratic decisions go against them. We know the consequences of this tension: capitalists turned to authoritarianism before adding new democratic censorship.

Regarding the situation in the United States, here is an article for reference " America's Version of Capitalism Is Incompatible With Democracy ".

Below we summarize the issues that emerged during this protest.

——To be continued——