In Part One, we discussed how forsaking systems for individuals impedes progress, and how many systemic theories are deceptively simple. Part Two aims to show how the policy debate over prison abolition was easily defanged, but how it can indict the entire system if read correctly.

If we as working people aim to take the reins of society, we must embrace some fundamental understanding, just as you should probably understand the basics of auto mechanics if you want to stop being conned by your dishonest mechanic. For all its talk of intersectionality, brutal debates over various individualized struggles dominate much of the dialogue on the US Left. Many US leftist organization’s messaging ends up resembling a series of ‘counter-demands’ or a list of ‘antis.’ Organizations proudly center their opposition to racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia - as if these leftists’ basic credentials as decent human beings need to be defended first thing. In many cases, that’s also where the messaging ends. This limitation leads to left sympathizers endlessly debating the relative importance of these antis, throwing the debate into an endless and self-perpetuating divisiveness. Any attempt to synthesize these social issues under a framework invariably ends with all parties being upset at their perceived underrepresentation.

That melanin-biased racism was central to European culture since long before colonialism, that black criminality was central to the racist theories of 19th-century Western pseudo-science, that slave patrols were central to the rise of American policing - none of these very stark and true facts change the reality that the rise of America’s huge, majority-black prison population is strongly rooted in the logic of profits and political economy. None of it should belittle the role of the black experience, in fact, the simultaneous centrality of and disregard for black life in the history of capitalism should further indict the profit motive. To deny this premise would be like saying that centering Nazism when describing the horrors faced by 20th century European Jews by default makes you a Nazi, no matter how anti-fascist your content.

America’s shattering of all world records for prison population is a relatively recent phenomenon. The explosion of a relatively large and already racialized prison population into a truly record-breaking one began in the 1970s - the decade of stagflation in the US. The unprecedented rise in wages and the collective bargaining power of (some) workers during the post-war Keynesian consensus had steadily pushed labor costs-per-unit upward, gradually pushing down capitalist profits. By 1970, this profit squeeze had reached a critical point - it became less and less profitable to produce, and increasingly high wages began demanding products that were no longer being produced for lack of a potential profit. Inflation exploded (as demands outpaced availability), and unemployment exploded at the same time, as workers were now too expensive to hire profitably. The crisis discredited decades of social democratic policymaking, and right-wing economists - now the mainstream - correctly realized that the high cost of labor was the culprit. They sought to suppress the growth of wages by any means necessary, including breaking unions, lobbying governments to allow capital (and hence factories and workers) to countries with lower labor costs and, importantly, abandoning public spending policies that generated employment. Such policies had a deeply international scope - large-scale outsourcing would have been impossible unless the same profit motive had not driven Deng Xiaoping to open up China’s labor market in 1978. Outsourcing only works if you have cheap labor markets that you can outsource to. The US did, and profitability was saved - if not restored.

Although associated primarily with Ronald Reagan, the chain of events was already firmly in place under both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. All these bipartisan anti-worker policies had the effect of suppressing channels for wage growth (unions) and increasing unemployment (outsourcing and public spending cuts) domestically. Naturally, the most economically marginal communities - African-Americans - were hit first, and the collapse in employment and wages caused crime rates in already struggling communities to explode, as desperation became a dominant motive. In Chapter 23 of Capital, Karl Marx tells us that prison populations rise consistently with unemployment rates, given that the criminalization of poverty is used as a means to suppress unemployment figures. This pattern emerged before the end of Reagan’s first term, along with the establishment of private prisons, and a further racialization of prisoner populations. The capitalist system itself thus necessitated the vast numbers of mostly black Californians locked up in Kamala Harris’s prosecutor days - technically, Kamala could have been anyone - although she did happily participate. Nonetheless, the system is still bigger than all of us.

The systemic story told above adequately explains a surprisingly large chunk of recent US history. It does so from quite simple fundamentals, and with a unity of purpose that would take the current leftist discourse literally forever to replicate. Nor does it need to senselessly pit individual struggles against each other. You can have it both ways. Is theory really that scary after all? I don’t think so. We should start using it, and then maybe we can start political victories that are actually worth celebrating.