Day 42 of 100 Days of Blogging: The Optimism of Afropessimism
I have enthusiastically said on social media and among my communities that I am disinterested in playing into the anxiety of the election turnout because I don’t earnestly think that the two party system will currently deliver systemic changes that will impact the masses in any meaningful way beyond what market forces are already doing.
At the same time, I can’t help but be connected to the collective conscience energy, contemplating the future of how the American political system might progress or devolve. While reports are stating that this election has brought on one of the most unprecedented voter turnouts, this election seemed entirely lukewarm in terms of legitimately mobilizing the masses. The pandemic and negative political sentiments are what I predict to have been the driving factors encouraging voter turnout. Additionally, more districts such as D.C., made a major effort to send absentee ballots to constituents to encourage socially distanced voting.
As somewhat of an Afropessimist, I have studied and researched the ways in which, even among the “economically elite” in the African American population, systemic racism places economic barriers that disadvantage Black workers from equal advantage in the market in respect to building wealth, and income and wealth are not the same. Increases that some African Americans have received in income are often conflated for wealth when on the whole, Black wealth has diminished in America. In this way, even along the lines of liberal progressiveness, the African American population will continue to be economically stifled in terms of economic opportunity and fair treatment, history has shown that Black elites can’t buy their way out of racism because racial construction is dependent upon class and wealth insecurities and social alienation.
As we’ve seen in contemporary American culture, folks on the whole are insecure about class and wealth, and the promise of having a leg up on other groups in a system that was ideologically structured to focus on the individual, only makes sense. Consumerism is fueled by class insecurities and for some reason, anti-communist propaganda has made many Americans believe that strong public systems will equate to the elimination of a capitalist marketplace,…..how would that even be feasible?
There are a variety of forms of socialist democracies, none of which are outside of capitalism….the legacy of wartime propaganda encouraging Nationalism mainly worked in America because war efforts put people to work and is the major determining factor that wove Americans together in the past. Today, it is logical that Neoliberal systems that emerged would encourage class insecurities because when social systems and the state are organized by the market, social divisiveness encourages competitiveness among the working masses to survive.
In this way, slicing and dicing the nation along the lines of wedge issues disguised as core values, is a tool used to discourage working class folks from organizing for better labor conditions. If all social systems become organized as businesses, rather than towards an efficiency in delivering common goods and services, there is no incentive for standards that benefit the common good beyond creating efficiencies that benefit the bottom line of “managing” the business. Therefor, if America continues to further erode public systems, the market becomes the sole determinant of who can afford wellness and this encourages social competitiveness rather than togetherness.
I predict that the Neoliberal ways in which American public systems are organized will continue to encourage social division with African Americans continuously utilized as the scapegoat against which economically pressured non-Blacks can be emotionally duped out of organizing for socialized public systems.
The optimism I have in this prediction is that when standards in public infrastructure begin to more horizontally impact the population negatively, people will be forced into organizing for change in some shape or fashion. When state sanctioned systems are ultimately degraded, municipal scale communities (including predominantly Black ones), will be forced into organizing more autonomous community scale systems, and demand state support to sustain what kinds of systems work for that particular community.
In my political imaginary, there is a sweet spot between state standardization in support of common infrastructure, and allowing community autonomy to further the maximum degree of self-determination in order for communities to sustain themselves.
Communists and Democratic Socialists still have the elephant in the room in regards to answering the question of how to manage the threat of State power to the masses, and to this end the echoes of Soviet memories and traumas must be accounted for in figuring out how to create systems that support the common good.
I’m very excited about what I’m seeing at the microscale of democratic decision-making. While organizing people and building trust takes a lot of energy and patience, the rewards of seeing how systems of shared decision-making can function, excite my community organizing sensibilities. There is nothing that makes me feel happier than community forged and bonded by figuring out how to create and manage something together with egalitarianism. We can create a society in which we encourage autonomy while also building and supporting social interdependence, I’ve seen it at the microscale, so I have to believe that this pattern can be scaled up, it just takes trust and time for new systems to emerge.
