“You cannot have untold, obscene wealth unless you have untold, obscene poverty. That is the law of capitalism.”
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
“Today, we witness renewed projects of ‘democratization’ carried out through a civilizing globalizing war against terrorism as well as projects of political emancipation through the broadening of the ‘rule of law’ of liberal democracies, which naturalize the violence of dominant everyday protocols of being human embedded in increasingly neoliberal, capitalist ways of life.”
—Neferti X. M. Tadiar1
“The claim of innocence . . . is a double-edged sword: it contains not-knowing, but also not wanting to know.”
—Gloria Wekker2
For the last several decades, American economists and politicians have declared that a “rising tide lifts all boats.” The slogan assumes that if the American capitalist economy is prosperous, then so, too, is the American worker. It has been most commonly used alongside other popular neoliberal dogmas such as “trickle down economics.” This is no coincidence. The “rising tide” ideology cannot be separated from the deteriorating conditions of the working class and poor in America. Both are a byproduct of American capitalism’s economic decline. Economic decline has left American capitalism vulnerable by exposing the growing fissure between American exceptionalism and the economic reality of the masses.
Most Americans find the economic reality of the United States difficult to confront. The ruling classes of the American nation-state, which also happen to be the captains of enterprise, have spread a narrative of American economic supremacy. American exceptionalism rears its head in nearly every mainstream discussion of the American capitalist economy. We are told American capitalism is a “global force for good” rather than a system driven by profit maximization. Rather than serving as capitalism’s economic engines, conditions such as slavery, poverty, and war are considered “unintended consequences” of what it takes to develop a prosperous society. Yet despite the pride Americans hold for their capitalist economy, “capitalism” remains a taboo word, often spoken of instead as “the economy.” This amorphous “economy” is the largest, most prosperous on the planet. Why should anyone want to change it?
Because many Americans are kept in the dark about how the American capitalist economy actually works, it is commonplace to hear platitudes such as “America is the best place to become successful” or “there is nowhere else I’d rather live.” A central tenet of American capitalism is the veracious worship of private enterprise and individualism. Individualism renders the collective punishment distributed by capitalist economics invisible. It also ignores how such punishment is itself built into the infrastructure of capitalism. Americans are too busy figuring out how to “get ahead” in a society that stifles social solidarity. Indeed, every worker and family is pit against each other for the promise of individual enrichment so much so that the language of capitalism has become normalized in day to day life in America. As Scott Sandage describes in his book, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America:
Ours is an ideology of achieved identity; obligatory striving is its method, and failure and success are its outcomes. We reckon our incomes once a year but audit ourselves daily, by standards of long-forgotten origin. Who thinks of the old counting house when we “take stock” of how we “spend” our lives, take “credit” for our gains, or try not to end up “third rate” or “good for nothing”? Someday, we hope, “the bottom line” will show that we “amount to something.” By this kind of talk we “balance” our whole lives, not just our accounts.3
For many Americans it is difficult to see the violence of American capitalism because it is cloaked in the ideologies of American exceptionalism and individualism. American capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of labor to advance the accumulation of profit. Competition among capitalist enterprises for the prize of surplus value, or unpaid labor, is the lifeline of capitalism. Only by usurping a greater share of the “market” (monopoly), intensifying the exploitation of labor, and investing in technologies that accomplish both can capitalist enterprises achieve their main objective of profit maximization.
A combination of ideological and material factors have facilitated the hegemony of American capitalism worldwide. The U.S. became home to the most dominant capitalist system in the world, first through the mass enslavement of African people in the 17th and 18th centuries. While other colonial powers abolished the slave trade by the beginning of the 19th century, American capitalists gained a significant competitive advantage from the super profits of slavery well into the late 19th century. Enslaved Black labor and captured Indigenous land insulated the impact of the boom and bust cycles inherent to capitalism and gave the U.S. relief in periods when the capitalist economies of Europe began to falter. White supremacy also proved to be a useful buffer against labor solidarity as investments in whiteness made it difficult for impoverished white workers to find common ground with enslaved Africans or free Black Americans in the decades that followed formal emancipation. Social scientist Toby Miller muses on the unique character of American capitalist domination and why it has been more difficult for its colonized subjects to overturn the system:
It’s much harder to gain independence from the United States than it ever was from European colonists, because US imperialism is often indirect and mediated. It produces few dramatic moments of resistive nation building, unlike the painful but well-defined struggles towards sovereignty that threw off conventional colonial yokes across the twentieth century. This is because Yanqui imperialism began at a well-developed stage of industrial capitalism and developed—in fact led into—the post-industrial age, seeking to break down colonialism in order to gain access to labor and consumption on a global scale. Its mature form coincided with the Cold War, which favored imperial proxies over possessions, owing to both prevailing ideology and the desire to avoid direct nuclear conflict with an equal.4
However, when it comes to the American capitalist system, American exceptionalism is designed to disconnect many of the topics already covered in prior essays. The ideology neither openly celebrates the centrality of slavery to the development of American capitalism nor the settler colonial warfare against Indigenous peoples which formed the economic base for rapid industrialization and monopoly. American exceptionalism would never dare cast a light on the United States’ true intentions during the Second World War, nor its criminal behavior in Korea and dozens of countries thereafter. To do so would expose the historical thread that binds these developments together and lay bare the pernicious economic and political motivations behind them.
Narratives of American exceptionalism have therefore diverted popular attention toward the so-called “Golden Age” of American capitalism. The “Golden Age” occurred after the end of the Second World War, which also happened to be the same period that the world’s most cataclysmic economic crisis came to a close. During the “Great Depression,” (1929–1941) American capitalism experienced its longest bout of stagnation and crisis. Unemployment was rampant, wages dropped significantly, and popular confidence in capitalism around the world waned significantly. A great war had emerged between capitalism and socialism around the world. Conventional American wisdom holds that the U.S. recovered from the “Great Depression” by its own merit. Superior military strategy and progressive New Deal policy birthed the exceptionally prosperous American capitalist economy. After all, many more workers entered the so-called “middle class” of relative economic comfort after World War II, and the American capitalist economy became a superpower that now possessed nearly half of the world’s resources and the largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) relative to other countries.
The overall picture of the “Golden Age” was more complicated than what American exceptionalists have us believe. Jim Crow white supremacy largely excluded Black Americans from New Deal reforms such as the G.I. bill. Residential segregation and outright discrimination ensured that the emerging “middle class” would be mostly white.5 Then there was the fact that American capitalism did not grant concessions based on “goodwill” or because it possessed an inherently prosperous model of development. The U.S. was in fierce competition with the Soviet Union’s rapid economic growth and sought to “save capitalism” by gaining control of Europe’s colonial possessions to gain advantage. Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration made its objectives clear in this regard. In his book, A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn quotes two government officials. The first, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department said “a review of the diplomatic history of the past 35 years will show that petroleum has historically played a larger part in the external relations of the United States than any other commodity.”6 In 1944, a second official from the State Department was quoted as saying: “As you know, we’ve got to plan on enormously increased production in this country after the war, and the American domestic market can’t absorb all that production indefinitely. There won’t be any question about our needing greatly increased foreign markets.”7
The “Golden Age” was thus marked by the expansion of American capitalism around the world, laying the basis for American wars across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. These wars allowed the system to spread the spoils of plunder to an increased number of workers. Yet workers themselves often had to force American monopolies to spread their share of the wealth. According to Zinn, fourteen thousand labor strikes occurred during the Second World War in the automotive, steel, and transport industries while a record three million workers went on strike in 1946, just one year after the war ended.8 Strikes and labor actions were necessary to ensure that corporations abided by collective bargaining agreements codified into law by the National Labor Relations Act (1935). They also demanded that corporations raise wages, provide health care, and ensure decent working conditions during negotiations for union contracts.
The broader “social contract” struck between the American working class and American capital is the economic bedrock of American exceptionalism. In the three decades after the Second World War, labor unions became increasingly conservative in their dealings with employers. A “middle class” sentimentality guided by the “American Dream” became dominant in a domestic environment where anticommunism and war polluted the political air of the “Golden Age.” Labor leaders outside of the Communist Party often failed to oppose wars such as the invasion of Korea and often opposed any sort of unity with Black workers affected by racist state terror. During the 1960s, the divide between labor union leadership and social movement politics only grew. Few unions supported the anti-war efforts to end the American invasion of Vietnam or were willing to endorse Black Power and Black liberation. So while American capitalism celebrates the “Golden Age” for the super profits it brought to American enterprise, the conditions of the period left American workers politically unprepared for the assault that was to come.
The reversal of American capitalism’s “social contract” is often called the age of “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism is defined as the reemergence of “free-market” ideology and the privileging of private enterprise over state regulation in all spheres of economic life. Many view President Ronald Reagan’s decision to break the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike in 1981 as the genesis of neoliberalism, though Black feminists and other radical thinkers trace its origins back even earlier.9 “Although it produces the neutral discourses of equality, diversity, freedom, and opportunity,” writes Stephen Dillon, “neoliberalism necessitates force, punishment, warfare, immobilization through incarceration, and the uneven distribution of social and biological death.” And despite what narratives of American innocence might suggest, state violence has never been “the exception to neoliberalism, but rather, is its condition of possibility. Simply, the neoliberal state requires the management, regulation, and immobilization of surplus or expendable populations.”10 By the Reagan years, the shift toward an all-out assault on organized labor and the social welfare system by American capitalism led to a steep decline in living conditions for all workers. The “Golden Age” had officially ended.
The reasons for the abrupt end to American capitalism’s “ Golden Age” are particularly important since they lead directly to the unexceptional condition that characterizes economic life for the majority of Americans today. Beginning in the 1970s, Germany and Japan had begun to recover from post-war wreckage to compete on the capitalist stage with the United States. The tendency of capitalist enterprises to monopolize began to take a toll on the purchasing power of workers and poor people all around the world. It did not help that a strong socialist bloc existed to limit the complete division of the world by the imperialist powers. American capitalism saw its share of the world economy begin to steadily decrease alongside a decline in the rate of American capitalist profit. Steady decline led to a new wave of American investment in automation, privatization, and credit that helped maintain American capitalist hegemony. This only intensified after the disintegration of the socialist bloc and the advancement of “globalization,” but at great cost. A weakened socialist movement abroad left millions of workers in America even more vulnerable to capital’s incessant drive to weaken organized labor and the welfare state.
Americans have become much poorer and economic crises have lasted a lot longer as a result of the hegemony of American capitalism. These developments are not unrelated. The poorer that workers become, the more difficult it is for investments in technology and production to yield profit from labor’s surplus. That is, most Americans and indeed much of the world are unable to purchase what is being sold in the global market. This inevitable outcome of capitalist production produces periodic economic crises. What was once periodic, however, has become a permanent condition carrying dire consequences for the majority of Americans. The numbers do not lie. More than half of Americans make under $30,000 per year.11 A similar percentage can’t pay for a five-hundred dollar emergency should it arise.12 Wages in the American nation have been stagnant for nearly four decades.13 Wealth disparities have widened significantly over the same period to the point where the bottom 90 percent of income earners in America hold just 23 percent of the nation’s wealth.14
Such immense poverty has left American workers out to dry, sometimes literally. Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, spent two weeks touring the United States to get a sense of the economic conditions that make up the “greatest nation on earth.” The results were damning.15 Around 18.5 million Americans live in “deep poverty,” or one-half of the federal poverty line, which itself has historically been seen as an underestimation of poverty.16 Over 3,000 counties have water systems with lead counts higher than Flint, Michigan, the majority-Black city where dangerous levels of lead in the water system led to international attention and scrutiny in 2014. Many impoverished communities that Alston visited possessed yards filled with sewage because residents could not afford septic systems. Nearly 45,000 Americans die each year from a lack of health care. The number of homeless Americans is estimated to be over 500,000 in 2017, which, as Philip Alston reported, is a number “widely considered to be an undercount, as illustrated by estimates of 21,000 in San Francisco [alone] provided by various experts with whom I met.”17
To buttress the empty pockets of American workers, debt has become an extremely important mechanism for economic survival. Students in the U.S. are mired in a $1.3 trillion student loan debt bubble that will never be paid. One in five Americans cannot afford their medical bills, with hundreds of thousands declaring bankruptcy as a result. The biggest debts that Wall Street banks lend, however, are mortgage debts. These debts caused the American capitalist economy to crash in 2008 when the inability of Americans to pay off their fraudulent loans caused a tidal wave of layoffs and foreclosures across the country. As journalist Jon Jeter notes, the 43.8 trillion additional dollars that households, businesses, and governments have taken out in credit since 2008 is proof that the American capitalist economy has yet to recover from the crash.18 If that doesn’t convince readers, then a 2018 ACLU report about thousands of Americans currently serving time in “debtors prisons” should.19
American exceptionalism and innocence have played critical roles in erasing the unexceptional economic situation that the 2007–2008 crash created. During both terms of the Obama Administration, a narrative of “recovery” was promoted non-stop by the U.S. corporate media. The narrative reinforced the myth that the crash was less about the structural character of the economic system and more about poor individual choices. This was especially true in the mainstream narrative that framed the crisis as a “subprime” lending crisis. As Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva argue:
References to law and morality, expectedly, prevail in condemnations of those served with “subprime” loans, who are construed as intellectually (illiterate) and morally (greedy) unfit if measured against any existing descriptors of the modern economic subject: the (liberal) rational self-interested, the (historical-materialist) productive-creative laborer, and the (neoliberal) obligation-bound debtor/creditor. The “immanent risk of foreclosure” and ultimately loss of home for millions in the United States overwhelmingly affected Black and Latino/a borrowers and communities. Lacking property and stocks passed down through generations and burdened by greater reliance on consumer credit, Black and Latino/a borrowers were less able to weather the sudden decline in home values. Foregrounding their predicament, the incomprehensible task of affording the consequences of not-paying what the lenders knew were unpayable debts allows questions that challenge the assumption that the failure to meet an obligation should necessarily lead to punishment when the lender’s profits are secured by betting and spreading the risk globally, against the “high-risk” borrower.20
Laying the problems of American capitalism on the poor is a staple of neoliberalism that protects American exceptionalist mythology. Blaming the increasingly impoverished working class shielded the Obama Administration from accountability for bailing out the banks responsible for the crisis with trillions of dollars worth of “stimulus” funds. Problems such as homelessness that were exacerbated because of the economic crash have received little attention, especially since many Americans are told that it was the fault of fleeced American workers trying to maintain “Golden Age” living standards. No matter that nearly 18 million vacant homes are scattered across the country waiting to be occupied by the nation’s homeless, or that the Reagan Administration’s reduction of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) budget by 77 percent marked the genesis of modern homelessness.21 American exceptionalism tells us that it is the “high-risk borrower,” the individual who failed to “make it,” who is responsible for whatever economic ailments plague the United States. Rarely is blame placed on the inherently exploitative and oppressive conditions that form the very structure of “America” itself.
Neoliberal ideology has not only placed blame for poverty on individuals but has also sought to medicalize and essentialize conditions that cannot be explained by individual failure alone. Craig Willse uses the example of “chronic homelessness” and how the term has shaped housing policy in the U.S. for the last several decades. The term “chronic” served to medicalize homelessness by centering policy on problematic individuals such as the addicted or mentally ill, rather than the structural causes of housing disparities. Federal funds and organizational programming have since focused on getting these populations out of sight and out of mind, mainly through programs that enforce discipline and promote “efficient” use of resources. As Willse explains,
. . . chronic homelessness programmes are part of neo-liberal economies, and thus they enable rather than challenge the very conditions and systems that produce housing insecurity and deprivation. As proponents of the programmes note, 10-year plans come into being through the support of police and local business organizations, both of which eagerly endorse the effort to remove unsheltered individuals from public view. In this way, 10-year plans function as the second phase of the neo-liberal reorganization of the city begun in the 1950s with the destruction of Skid Rows. These 10-year plans attempt to clean up the mess made by the evaporation of SROs and other forms of low-cost housing by removing the individuals left behind. They do nothing to alter the structural conditions that reproduce and distribute housing insecurity and deprivation. In this sense, the plans preserve an earlier medicalized conception of housing insecurity, as if removing ‘problem individuals’ from ‘the streets’ is an adequate solution. The fact remains that ‘the streets’—here we can substitute labour markets, privatized housing, police/prison systems and inadequate public assistance programmes—will continue to produce unsheltered populations.22
Homelessness is but one symptom of the decline of American capitalism. The decline shows no signs of letting up. It is the working class and poor in America who are paying the price. American exceptionalism has laid the foundations of anti-worker, anti-poor, and anti-Black neoliberal policies attempting to restore the capitalist system to stability. The ideology is what made Hillary Clinton call poor Black youth in America “super predators” that needed to be “brought to heel” through racist policing and incarceration. A politics of disposability has emerged where trillions can be spent abroad eliminating people of other nations while it is the homeless, the Black, and the poor who are most feared and criminalized in America. Meanwhile, American politicians and media analysts speak of the U.S. economy as completely capable of reviving the post-war “Golden Age” of nearly seventy years ago.
The hold that American exceptionalism has over the American people, however, appears to be waning. The political party that takes the most credit for the “Golden Age” of American capitalism, the Democratic Party, also happens to be the chief organ of subversion of progressive and radical politics. That is, the Democratic Party has often credited itself as the party of American exceptionalism because of its supposed ability to preach multiracial political pluralism and neoliberal economic dogma. But the Democratic Party’s popularity waned in the 2016 elections. Wall Street’s favored candidate, Democrat Hillary Clinton, campaigned on the platform that America was “already great” and in the midst of an economic recovery. The Clinton campaign was forced to use its influence to sabotage the campaign of the more popular and economically critical Bernie Sanders to secure the nomination, only to lose to a billionaire business mogul whose slogan was “Make America Great Again” in a general election where a larger percentage of voting-age Americans preferred not to vote than to choose between the nominees.
Bernie Sanders remains the most popular politician in America because of his economic program for single-payer health care, living-wage employment, and student loan forgiveness. However, he too beckons the call of American exceptionalism by supporting American imperialist war policies. Sanders voted for the largest military budget in recorded history in 2017. Sanders shows that the proliferation of the unexceptional majority is a problem inherent to the American capitalist system. No politician can reform it. This system is an imperialist system dominated by the war dictates of monopoly corporations and financiers. These entities want to make “America Great Again” and accumulate more profit at the expense of the poor everywhere, including America. They adhere to the three “P’s” of war: policing, prison, and profit. To make America “great,” we must figure out how to put an end to the disastrous capitalist system that has made much of America, and indeed the world, unbearable to live in. There will be no rising tide or lifting of boats under American capitalism. Its anchor of exploitation has sunk the working class in a sea of misery, making it more than time to begin thinking about building a new boat all together.