Capitalism has no clothes

by Dr. Willie and Mary Ratcliff

For weeks we’ve all been watching millions of Ukrainians fleeing to safety within Ukraine or to the neighboring countries of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova and Romania. News cameras there – and even in Russia – show us street scenes. In all those countries, except the parts of Ukraine that have been bombed to rubble, the streets are clean and the people well dressed, even those fleeing.

Have you seen a single sign of homelessness? Have you seen any signs of the dire poverty on display around us in the streets of the US?

For folks as old as we are – in our 80s – these are the first pictures we’ve seen of daily life in that part of the world since World War II left those countries with millions of war dead, their cities destroyed and their people starving. We assumed they were still poor. What happened?

Ukraine and the countries around it were part of the Soviet bloc – Ukraine and Russia part of the Soviet Union itself and the others part of the Warsaw Pact, a counterweight to NATO. Their economies are all far more socialist than capitalist. Private ownership and profit do not drive people to live on the streets in those countries.

Capitalism was built on slavery. Free labor by enslaved Africans kept plantation expenses so low Southern slaveowners raked in the profit. Under US capitalism and the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, slavery remains legal for prisoners. While “middle class” Americans aspire to be Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, in reality, they’re one missed paycheck from poverty and homelessness. To oversimplify, capitalists compete; socialists share.

War hit Ukraine hard – and suddenly. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans the same way a few years ago.

But in New Orleans, a “chocolate city” (majority Black), Katrina was used as a smokescreen to obscure genocide. Families were stranded on rooftops and freeway overpasses for days without food or water, while people desperate to rescue them in small boats were threatened with arrest. 

At the Coliseum, tens of thousands chanted “Help us! Help us!” to reporters prevented from doing anything themselves to help but intent on telling the world. Temperatures soared. Babies died in their mother’s arms; old folks died in their wheelchairs; young people trying to forge a humanitarian corridor were blocked. After a couple of days, the National Guard’s orders changed from rescue to shooting looters, so they patrolled back and forth in front of the Coliseum in their tanks.

The Sheriff’s Department abandoned the 6,000 people in the New Orleans jail, largest in the country. Many on the lower tiers drowned; others used an old chair and their own bodies to knock a hole in a concrete wall, allowing many to escape. 

Sheriff’s deputies, back on duty, carried them in boats to a freeway overpass where they, like everyone else, waited for days in the sweltering heat without food or water. Most were transferred to a Greyhound bus terminal, quickly converted to an outdoor jail, where chow time meant sandwiches dumped on the muddy ground.

The crowning blow of the genocide gavel in New Orleans was to force the survivors onto planes and dump them thousands of miles away in cities where they knew no one and had no money, no clothes, no help, no way to get back home.

Our old friend Malik Rahim, a Black Panther veteran, whose phone was working while the phones were down in most of New Orleans, described vigilantes using “looting” as their excuse to shoot Black people on sight. His call for volunteers drew 300 calls a day to the Bay View and eventually 25,000 volunteers to the movement Rahim founded called Common Ground. 

Initially, all Black volunteers were turned back at the police checkpoints set up at every entrance to New Orleans. Read “‘This is criminal’” and “‘If it moved, you shot it’: Investigation uncovers vigilante shootings of Blacks in New Orleans.”

The crowning blow of the genocide gavel in New Orleans was to force the survivors onto planes and dump them thousands of miles away in cities where they knew no one and had no money, no clothes, no help, no way to get back home. But if the plan was to drive Blacks out of New Orleans, it didn’t work for long. 

Seventeen years after Katrina, New Orleans is still a chocolate city, the Black population only falling from 67 percent to 59.53 percent. Many fewer are locked up; the jail capacity has dropped from 6,000 to 1,400. 

Those the trauma didn’t kill are tough as nails – after all, most New Orleans Blacks are descended from the Haitians who beat Napoleon’s armies to found the world’s first independent Black republic – studying and deliberating at New Orleans’ fine universities how to prevent a repeat of the genocidal, racist capitalism response to any future catastrophe such as Katrina.

Assuming the major divide between capitalism and socialism is private vs. public ownership of essential services, Katrina signaled the end of public housing in the US – but only after years of heroic resistance. New Orleans had built the finest stock of public housing in the country: Large, handsome brick buildings were laid out like college campuses on acres of grass where children cavorted – buildings so sturdy, the flood barely touched them. 

Yet the residents were prohibited from retrieving their own belongings – not furniture, not clothing, nothing. They camped outside the gates for months, children looking longingly at the homes they loved, screaming in pain as the demolition crane took a bite out of their bedroom.

Racist capitalism permeates our government and our society from top to bottom. Kanye West’s wisest words came four days after Katrina when he declared, off script, during a huge televised fundraiser for storm victims, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” 

Today, President Joe Biden finds more money every day for the Ukrainian cause while deporting more Haitians and giving tacit approval to his border guards whipping Haitian families. Like Bush, Biden apparently doesn’t care about Black people.

“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child was heard to say, and her truth spread through the crowd.”

Remember the Hans Christian Andersen folktale called “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? The emperor, who cared about nothing but fine clothes, was promised by men posing as weavers that “they could weave the most magnificent fabrics imaginable. Not only were their colors and patterns uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid.” Clothes that could tell him who’s unfit for office or a fool “would be just the clothes for me,” he thought. 

Everyone he sent to check the weavers’ progress, afraid to appear unfit or a fool, praised the weavers’ work. When the great day came for the procession to display the emperor’s new clothes, the weavers made an elaborate show of pretending to dress him. The townspeople had heard about the cloth’s unusual powers and, like the emperor’s retinue, didn’t dare admit the clothes were a hoax.

“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child was heard to say, and her truth spread through the crowd. Andersen concludes: “The emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, ‘This procession has got to go on.’ So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.”

Capitalism has no clothes. It’s a fraud. What use is it to anyone but the billionaires, the ones who rob the rest of us? Words like “freedom” are supposed to define a system where, we’re told, anyone who tries hard can make a fortune. Are we brave enough to call out that lie? We don’t need statistics; we only need to believe our eyes. 

Disaster can strike anywhere any time. Would our families be more likely to survive under socialism or capitalism? Would we be loved and lionized by the world like the Ukrainians or loathed like New Orleanians after Katrina or Haitians today?

We think capitalism is on its deathbed. But it’s trying to take us with it. Capitalism is fossil fuels that will make our planet unlivable in just a few years. Capitalism is a war machine that sees us as cannon fodder.

Capitalism is the barrier we shall overcome.

Dr. Willie and Mary Ratcliff. publishers of the Bay View, can be reached at 415-671-0789 or mary@sfbayview.com.