What if all of Atlanta’s Talk about Income Inequality Actually Perpetuates the Issue?
Income inequality is a hot topic in Atlanta, with the issue receiving a fair amount of local and national media attention in recent years due to the city ranking consistently at the top as one of the most unequal of all major US cities. According to aBloomberg report, Atlanta moved into first place in 2017, after occupying the second place position for the three consecutive years before that. The city’s poverty rate is 24 percent, with 9.3 percent of families making less than $10,000 annually, while 18 percent of households earn $150,000 a year or more.
After the Bloomberg report came out in 2018, local media outlets, includingWABE, theAJC,11alive, andCurbed Atlanta covered the issue. In March of 2019, Goodwill Industries picked up the conversation hosting its “Prosperity for All: Closing Atlanta’s Wealth Gap” conference at the Commerce Club in downtown Atlanta.
It seems important that Atlanta’s #1 ranking on income inequality receives attention in the media. And it is. But the conversations and voices the mainstream media is capturing obscure and ignore the root causes, focusing instead on the “problem” of poor people, of “concentrated poverty,” and how to “help” “them” climb the ladder of social mobility. Even though the naming of the issue as inequality seems to imply a problem of distribution, the popular discourse constantly reverts to a focus on mobility. The issue becomes the poor themselves and how to get them to be middle class, rather than the need for a redistribution of resources or shifting of economic and political power.
This assimilationist agenda looks at poverty as an issue to be solved by shifting individuals’ actions within a system that, in reality, works against them and for the wealthy. The approach tries to change people rather than economic structures that strip some communities of resources and accumulate wealth for others. The discourse surrounding the issue helps to keep the power structure intact by pretending it doesn’t exist, and tries to erase the direct relationship between poverty and ever-expanding levels of highly-concentrated wealth.
To understand how Atlanta’s discussion on income inequality helps maintain the social system of class domination that produces it, we have to understand two critical features of our capitalist economy – exploitation and expropriation. Despite expropriation and exploitation serving as the foundational processes of the global economic system and our day-to-day lived experiences, they often go unrecognized or trivialized in the mainstream. After all, exploitation viewed as the exception rather than the norm placates those who might otherwise resist it. These two intertwined processes reveal the antagonism between the property-owning elite class and the propertyless working and unemployed class.
What is Exploitation?
Left-wing thinkers consider exploitation to be the foundational process within capitalism through which profit is created and capital accumulated. For this understanding, Karl Marx’s theoretical insights on capitalism are the most influential. From Marx, we recognize an economy in which capitalists monopolize society’s resources while workers, being divorced from the “means of production,” are forced to labor for capitalists for a wage to pay for their material needs and survive.
Drawing on Marx, sociologist Erik Olin Wright describes exploitation as a relationship in which an “exploiting group is able to control the laboring effort of another for its own advantage.” Exploitation puts the activities of the working class in direct relation to those of the capitalist class. The capitalist, property-owning class accumulates the “surplus value” produced by workers, concentrating resources and power in a global social system of class domination. This means that the property-owning class profits from the labor of the working class, instead of workers earning the total value of the products they produce.
For a clear illustration of this setup, consider the average CEO’s pay in comparison with the average worker’s pay. According to theAFL-CIO, in 2018 the average S&P 500 company CEO-to-worker ratio was 287 to 1. One particularly egregious case is Tesla where in 2018 Elon Musk made40,668 times more money than the median Tesla employee. Does Elon Musk work 40,668 times harder than his average employee? Or is it that he takes the value produced by his employees for himself? Elon Musk and CEO-to-worker pay ratios are clear illustrations of exploitation.
What is Expropriation?
Equally foundational to capitalism, though often less recognized and understood among left-leaning intellectuals, is the process of expropriation. PhilosopherNancy Fraser defines expropriation as the “[Confiscation] of capacities and resources” for “conscription” into capitalist enterprise to expand capital. Expropriation enables the input of assets into production below-cost or for free. It is the violent underside of capitalism and includes, but is by no means limited to, slavery (unpaid, forced labor), the dispossession/theft of indigenous lands, predatory lending, and the theft of other valuable raw materials like fossil fuels or minerals. (It also includes women’s unwaged domestic labor, which isn’t seen as work deserving of pay, but is nevertheless what makes possible the reproduction of labor under capitalism).
While Marx sees expropriation as a precursor to capitalism, Nancy Fraser – and other critical theorists like Cedric Robinson and feminist scholars like Rosa Luxemberg and Sylvia Federicci, – argue that expropriation has continued as an integral part of capital’s expansion, and is an equally foundational feature of capitalism as exploitation. Marx writes of the origins of capitalism requiring mass processes of expropriation (or what he terms “primitive accumulation”), needed to strip workers of their access to resources and independence. The monopolization of resources created a class of exploitable, dependent workers, after which point, according to Marx, exploitation of the “free” worker overtook expropriation as the defining process of class domination.
Fraser (among others), however, argues that expropriation continued as a necessary process in the global capitalist system, but was largely displaced from the European capitalist “core” of “free” workers to the colonial “periphery” on the African continent and in the Americas. Despite historical-geographical separation between exploitation and expropriation, Fraser also shows how these processes are intertwined throughout global history and, at times, geographically indistinct.
For example, during the period of American industrialization, Black people, fleeing racial terrorism in the South, migrated to southern and northern urban centers. They entered the most dangerous, physically demanding jobs and worked longer hours than white workers, while receiving only a fraction of white workers’ pay rate. We see how expropriation occurs along the lines of a racialized (and gendered) political hierarchy within the working class itself, affecting workers differently.
In this sort of segmented labor market, expropriated and exploited status positions are deeply interrelated. Some workers receive the higher status of “free citizen worker,” while others are marked “alien,” “convict,” “criminal,” or “debtor,” and as racialized subjects for expropriation.Fraser describes the intertwined relationship between these class positions stating, the “racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits.” The racialized wage gap can be thought of as the result of the value expropriated from Black labor subsidizing the higher pay of “free” citizen workers and making possible their comfortable material conditions.
An important form of expropriation in our current “financialized” economy is the creditor-debtor relationship. Here, one party makes money off another due to the historical conditions of expropriation that have produced the latter’s lack of capital. Black communities have been forced into debt to satisfy basic material needs. They are required to pay interest on predatory loans and mortgages justified by their precarious economic position and the “risk” they pose to lenders. To many readers, the most familiar example of this dynamic may be the subprime mortgage crisis in which Black homebuyers were deliberately targeted by banks like Wells Fargo with skyrocketing interest rates, leading to mass foreclosures and loss of wealth. Over the five years of the Great Recessionthe racial wealth gap doubled.
Like exploitation, expropriation generates inequality because it takes value from the dominated class for the enrichment of the dominant class, further entrenching the latter’s hold on society’s resources. These processes occur along racialized and gendered lines that divide subjects of expropriation from more privileged, though still dominated, subjects of exploitation. To understand the true causes of inequality and how it relates to race in our capitalist system, we have to look to these two foundational processes.
Atlanta Talks Income Inequality
Returning to the discussion on income inequality in Atlanta, let’s look more closely at the example of Goodwill Industries’ “Prosperity for All: Closing Atlanta’s Wealth Gap” conference. This conference occurred in March 2019 at the Commerce Club in downtown Atlanta. The Atlanta NPR radio station, WABE, recorded apanel discussion at the conference featuring Keisha Lance Bottoms, Mayor of Atlanta; Keith Parker, President and CEO of Goodwill of North Georgia; Hala Moddelmog, President and CEO of theMetro Atlanta Chamber; and Raphael Bostic, President and CEO of theFederal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
The discussion is a prime example of the power discourse, especially discourse of social mobility, holds in maintaining class domination. Among CEOs and political elites, processes like extraction or expropriation are made to seem irrelevant (or nonexistent) to the shaping of inequality. Poverty keeps happening because people just don’t have the right information or realize the opportunities all around them.
Not one panelist in the recorded discussion makes any suggestion that poor peoples’ disadvantaged position in society may be an advantage to others, or that perhaps the panelists’ class position may be in an oppositional, antagonistic relationship to the people facing the poverty problem they’re setting out to fix. The panelists occupy the dominant position in a class relation that coerces wage labor, enabling wealth accumulation and the continuation of their dominant class position.
Pretending that social mobility can be a reality for the many is a way to obscur and thus maintain the setup. For the panelists, the solution is all about social mobility or, as Mayor Bottoms says, “[giving] people a chance to make it.” In Keith Parker’s introduction, he explains that the issue isn’t unique to Atlanta and that “there’s no city in the country that’s actually good at this… all these cities are struggling with moving people from the lower wealth positions into middle class and affluent positions.” Moddelmog drives this point home in her introduction, saying the issue that really “tugs at the heart,” even more than income inequality, is the lack of income mobility in Atlanta, where only four percent of people have a chance to get into the “top rung.”
The panelists’ solution for creating social mobility has a strong focus on “awareness.” That is, awareness among the poor that, as Mayor Bottoms says, “this is for you too,” as well as an awareness among the rich that poverty exists. In Parker’s introduction, he tells an interesting story where he is the mentor to a 16-year-old boy who has never set foot in an affluent part of town. To Parker, this is a serious problem of social and economic isolation, with a seemingly simple solution. Parker says how the solutions are actually “right in front of them” (the poor), but they don’t know so, “they might as well be a planet away.” This clearly means that “a big part of what we have to do is provide the information that people need.” Towards the end of the discussion when the moderator turns the conversation towards “solutions,” Bostic brings the audience back to the important idea of “awareness.” She tells the CEOs that “each of us can be a change agent” by contributing to “access and information” and that “sometimes it’s the small act that makes the big difference.”
We can see a strong example of the material benefits of obfuscating class antagonism in the example of Goodwill. Keith Parker tells us we should look at poor people as “opportunities” rather than as people to shun and talks about Goodwill’s job training programs that “meet people where they are.” Parker has refused to disclose his salary publicly, but Goodwill International CEO Jim Gibbons earns a base salary of$434,252. Change.org, which has hosted several campaigns to increase Goodwill employees’ pay, says that the salaries for top managers at 150 Goodwill locations across the country total more than$30 million.
Meanwhile, many of Goodwill’s disabled employees makesignificantly below minimum wage. Is it possible that some of the profits going into Gibbons’ and Parker’s pockets are coming from the value produced by their super-exploited workers? It’s difficult to be critical when we live in a society where super-exploited workers with disabilities are likely better off with a job than unemployed, but that doesn’t make it okay. It is completely within the power of Goodwill to decide to pay their employees a living wage.
An interesting moment comes towards the discussion’s end when Moddelmog talks about a book she read recently, Hoarding the Dream. It’s the only moment in the 45-minute conversation in which the question of unequal distribution of society’s resources comes up (even though the discussion is supposedly about inequality). Moddelmog tells the audience that the book is about “making sure you’re not taking it all for yourself and for your family” which can be “a hard message to hear.” She then makes the boldest statement of the evening that “doubtless to say many of us have contributed in that way.”
What? Class Struggle?
When the dominant class makes the solution to inequality about upskilling workers and social mobility, as exemplified in Goodwill’s panel discussion, they obfuscate the power relations at play and perpetuate the everyday violence of precarity and poverty. They make the required response to inequality – political and class struggle – seem ludicrous.
When we look at the economic trends in the past 50 years though, it’s the idea of social mobility that starts seeming ludicrous. Real wages havebeen stagnant since the 1970s and are even going down for low-wage workers today. Meanwhile, CEOs salaries have multiplied, growing by about5 million in the past ten years. The economy keeps growing, but the wealth gap keeps widening. People across the US are sleeping in their cars and on the streets and struggling to put food on the table, even while they work multiple jobs.
This grim reality of millions of workers who are trapped in low-wage work or unemployed reveals the dynamics of a class relation that allows for continued exploitation, expropriation, and capital accumulation. Low wages make other people rich.
Eric Olin Wright argues that the level of inequality in society depends on the “effectiveness of political struggle” for redistribution and transformation of the “underlying mechanisms of exclusion, domination, and exploitation.” With an understanding of exploitation and expropriation as the root cause of inequality, we come to see those perpetuating the narrative of social mobility in an antagonistic relationship to those they seek to “help.” When we look at it this way, it seems nuts that the CEOs and political elites who control this system are also the experts interviewed on NPR about “fixing” inequality.