The Problem of Decentralization as Scarcity
Every few weeks, when I study The New York Times, I read about another police shooting of some innocent citizen–killed for no reason. It gives me a feeling of nausea. That is the emotional side of the problem. There is also a cognitive side and that is my suspicion that large parts of the so-called “Left” don’t have a clue about what to do regarding these things. I don’t mean Black Lives Matter (BLM) which has in theory a pretty comprehensive program of activities or set of organizing ideas. Rather, I mean a more comprehensive problem which I will get to shortly.
Adolph Reed, however, has offered some criticisms of BLM which are certainly worth considering. First, there is an “immensely fortified and self-reproducing institutional and industrial structure” behind the repressive state. Challenging that state “will require a deep political strategy, one that must eventually rise to a challenge of the foundational premises of the regime of market-driven public policy and increasing direction of the state’s functions at every level toward supporting accelerating regressive transfer and managing its social consequences through policing.” Second, “the focus on racial disparity accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice that the problem of inequality is not its magnitude or intensity in general but whether or not it is distributed in a racially equitable way. To the extent that that is the…