How is Capitalism Like a Bad Relationship? (w/ Malaika Jabali)

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Malaika Jabali is Senior News and Politics Editor at Essence magazine. She is also the only previous Current Affairs contributor whose writing for our magazine has won an award! Her exceptional piece "The Color of Economic Anxiety" won the 2019 New York Association for Black Journalists award for magazine feature. She has now published her first book, It's Not You, It's Capitalism: Why It's Time to Break Up and How To Move On. In accessible and entertaining prose (with fun illustrations by artist Kayla E.), Jabali presents an introduction to leftist economic and social analysis for the uninitiated reader.

Uniquely, the book looks at economics through analogies from modern dating life, and shows how some of the things that keep us trapped in toxic relationships have parallels in the way we feel trapped with our dysfunctional economic system. Her book is also valuable for the way it introduce socialism by highlighting leftists of color. Instead of beginning with Marx and Debs, Malaika gives us W.E.B. DuBois, Assata Shakur, and A. Philip Randolph.

Today Malaika joins to discuss not only the basic anti-capitalist argument made in the book, but how she's thought about presenting that argument in a novel and easy-to-read way. (Her book, incidentally, makes a fantastic holiday gift especially for young people.) We also talk about her award-winning Current Affairs essay about neglected Black voters in Milwaukee, who saw no point in supporting the Democratic Party in 2016, and whose "economic anxiety" Hillary Clinton saw little need to address.

"I broke up with capitalism around my junior year of college. Ever since, I've felt like the patient friend waiting for my bestie to see why she needs to break up with her toxic partner, too. While socialism has captured mainstream attention in the U.S. in the past decade or so, probably because of the popularity of Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America, I didn't arrive at my anti-capitalism through electoral politics. It was through studying Black history as an undergrad that I started to see how messed up our whole system really was. Reading about how slaveholders were willing to kidnap, brand, torture, and work their labor force to near-death—oh and create a system of white supremacy to maintain their profits that still thrives today—will do that to you. I also soaked in the words of Black revolutionaries who spoke out against capitalism, including my godfather Charles Barron, a former member of the Black Panther Party. "We keep fighting the symptoms," he is prone to say, "But capitalism is the disease." - Malaika Jabali, It's Not You, It's Capitalism