Capitalism by Matthew Desmond, Abridged

If you've been following along with the Long-Form blog posts, you know that I've been thinking about economics. Perhaps you also know that the Long-Form program is not about definitive opinions or asserting specific answers to complex problems; it's about learning and increasing our comfort with nuance. Maximizing learning starts with reading.

My goal with the effort is to have conversations with my neighbors about economics and community. Perhaps, in due time, we'll take what we are learning and apply it or adapt it to our lives, our places. 

In the process of living out the first season, I realized that I was remiss to propose a conversation about economics in America without acknowledging the role of slavery in forming our economic infrastructure. Being that it is June -- the month in which we celebrate Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the effective end of slavery in the United States -- we have a unique opportunity to consider just that: the history of our national economic system and its relationship to slavery.

The following essay is a collage of excerpts and paraphrased passages from the chapter titled Capitalism, written by Matthew Desmond, in the book The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah Jones, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter. 

Matthew Desmond is known for his research on the causes and consequences of poverty, especially in urban settings. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, as well as Poverty, by America.

I hope these passages inspire you to read the full text (it is truly an excellent book). Consider renting it from the Ely Public Library, or ordering a copy via the Piragis Northwoods Company bookstore. 

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There are many types of capitalist societies, and our nation’s is particularly brutal. America has evolved into one of the world’s most inequitable societies. [In 2021], the richest 10 percent of Americans owned over 75 percent of the country’s wealth, with the top 1 percent owning well over a third. Our capitalism opts for a relatively low level of labor power and normalizes insecurity; it tends toward a philosophy of growing at all costs, and demonstrates a distinct tolerance for certain people enriching themselves by breaking rules with little consequence.

This can be traced back to vehement defense of the right to own and sell Black people. “Slavery shaped our political institutions and founding documents, our laws governing private property and financial regulation, our management techniques and accounting systems, and our economic systems and labor unions.” 

The cotton trade had a profound impact on America’s burgeoning economy.

 Cotton was to the nineteenth century what oil was to the twentieth –

and what our personal data is to the twenty-first. 

“A key factor that made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor.” 

“[Cotton] gave rise to factories, vast manufacturing enterprises, and large industrial proletariat workforces, forming whole industries around itself. Unlike other staple crops grown by enslaved Black workers – rice in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, sugar in Louisiana – cotton could be cultivated throughout the South, relied heavily on industrial production, and was sought by consumers across the developed world. Together, cotton planters, enslaved workers in the South, wage laborers in the North, and millers and consumers from across the ocean helped fashion a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor, and products across long distances.”

Meanwhile, “slave owners worked their slaves financially, as well as physically. [...] Southerners decided to use the people they owned as collateral for mortgages and took on immense amounts of debt to finance their operations.” This produced a 3x return on investment. But “when the price of cotton tumbled, it pulled down the value of enslaved workers and land along with it. [...] Planters and their banks took the risk, but others paid the price." 

Cotton crops require land. “The United States solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida. It then sold that land on the cheap – just $1.25 an acre in the early 1830s ($38 in today’s dollars) – to white settlers.”  

In many cases we are simply more

devoted to individual property rights 

then we are to human rights. 

“Slavery demanded a legal defense of ownership rights much more far-reaching and severe than would have been necessary to secure, say, a house or a herd of cattle. Houses do not attempt to become non-property by running away. Cattle do not stage armed revolts. But humans treated as property were constantly doing both. After the Civil War, legal provisions originally developed to protect slavery were extended to strengthen corporate interests and promote laissez-faire capitalism.”

The Supreme Court continues to defend corporate personhood. 

“Slavery, and the racism it nourished, also played a decisive role in weakening the American labor movement. Capitalists leveraged slavery and its racial legacy to divide workers – free from unfree, white from Black – diluting their collective power. [...] At inception, the American labor movement defined itself as a movement of and for white workers, a bulwark against their downward slide into “wage slavery,” Blackness, and un-freedom.”

Thus “American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage, [...] a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter or a means to get ahead.” 

—

I wonder, what am I to do with this information? That is, beyond my standard 

responsibility to fact check it and absorb it, what am I to do with it? 

What are we, collectively, to do with this information? 

I wonder, which people working in which industries in the US today are

strategically disempowered? For whom have we “normalized insecurity,”

and what can we do about it? How do we prevent ourselves from

repeating past mistakes?

And I wonder how the wealth gap is faring

since this chapter was published in 2021….

What comes to your mind when The 1619 Project is brought up? I understand it is considered controversial to some. Do you consider it controversial? What do you make of Desmond’s chapter on Capitalism, or at least the ideas abridged here? Do they ring true, or do they challenge your notions of our nation? How do you tend to react when confronted with uncomfortable ideas? 

Is there a different account of influences on American economics that you’d have me share to add further nuance to this ongoing conversation? 

I wish I were able to present more fully fleshed out thoughts of my own, but I don’t yet have a robust thesis about what it means for how to live, or specific proposals on how to proceed in terms of economic policy, especially on a local level. (That being said, I do have a sense that desirable policy routes involve increasing empowerment and resources for under-resourced people. It seems the normalization of insecurity is a poor policy choice.)

Rather than presenting you with a plan wrapped in a bow, I share these passages with you and invite you to join me in reading this text as a way to BEGIN. My aim is to create conversations and to deepen our understanding and outlook on the world around us. It is not my aim to make or force readers to feel irrevocably “bad” about our past, though I do think that it is OK -- and maybe even necessary -- to process (and move through) feelings of anger, fear, guilt, and sadness along the way to an informed conviction in doing better by our neighbors.

History cannot be erased. I worry that it does not serve us well to dismiss the truths presented in The 1619 Project. And so let us grapple with them. May this missive spark a conversation. Please reach out to me with your thoughts, and/or share your thoughts (and this blog post) with a friend.

Finally, join me in celebrating Juneteenth, a day of freedom, reflection, and joy, on Thursday, June 19. I'll be attending VEMA's 5th Annual Iron Range Juneteenth Community Celebration from 11:00am to 3:00pm at the Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm. Perhaps I'll see you there.