James Ron - Are Police Critics Also Anti-Capitalists?

(This article was written with Doug Guthrie)

Do the supporters of Black Lives Matter (BLM) want to replace the capitalist system with something akin to socialism?

When the movement burst onto the US and global scene in 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, BLM became a political Rorschach test.

For some, it was a legitimate protest movement aimed at ensuring civil and human rights, while for others, it was an aggressive effort to destroy the principles upon which the United States was founded: freedom, democracy, and capitalism. Claims that BLM was a leftist plot were memorably voiced by Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, who described the protests as a Marxist plot.

Many of the fires set during anti-police brutality demonstrations in the US targeted businesses and commercial buildings. In response, some corporations, including Apple, Target, and Walmart, temporarily shut their stores down.

Photo of the aftermath of rioting in Minneapolis, spring 2020.

Was the call to “defund the police” shorthand for “end capitalism?”

To answer this question, we reviewed survey evidence I collected from roughly 13,000 respondents in the United States and elsewhere. The data suggest that, on average, police critics in this country and elsewhere are NOT opposed to business. Here and in other countries, the respondents who told us they mistrusted the police the most were also more likely to trust international and local businesses. Across the world, support for business appears to have gone hand in hand with skepticism towards the police.

This finding undermines claims by conservatives in the U.S. and abroad that BLM supporters are also anti-capitalists who are supportive of the broader post-2008 movement for socioeconomic reform, which was promoted by Occupy, Bernie Sanders, and others.

BLM is not easy to pigeonhole on the right-left economic spectrum, however. While right-wing critics bemoaned BLM’s anti-capitalist tendencies, critics on the far left seemed anxious that BLM was not turning decisively enough in their direction. The Socialist Appeal, for example, published an “appeal to Black Lives Matter activists” asking them to realize that, “[T]he reason racism is systemic is precisely because it is woven into the fabric of our socioeconomic system: capitalism.” Dissent Magazine, another left-wing venue, wrote that Bernie Sanders and his supporters “must develop a deeper analysis of the racialized nature of U.S. capitalism.”

The BLM leadership has, in fact, tread carefully on economic issues. Although BLM co-founder Patrisse Collors readily acknowledged that she and her colleagues were “trained Marxists,” the group’s official website speaks only of “imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness,” dismantling “patriarchal practice,” and disrupting “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.” Dismantling capitalism, nationalizing private enterprise, or freeing consumers from the grip of advertiser-promoted false consciousness, where they cannot recognize the injustice of the situation, are nowhere on the agenda.

In 2020, surveys showed that some 50 percent of registered U.S. voters supported the movement, a dramatic increase from before George Floyd’s killing. Were these BLM supporters also aligned with America’s anti-capitalist left, as conservatives feared? And what about their supporters elsewhere?

To learn how potential BLM supporters feel about the institutions of capitalism, we re-examined our existing cross-national survey data from a series of polls James Ron led from 2012 to 2018. His nationally representative surveys in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and the U.S., and sub-national surveys in Lagos, Mumbai, Rabat, and Casablanca, included almost 13,000 adults.

To determine respondents’ underlying attitudes toward the police, Ron's surveys asked, “Please tell us how much trust you have in the following institutions, groups or persons,” including “the police.” To determine attitudes toward business, the surveys asked about trust in “multinational” and “local” corporations. Ron then ran statistical models that controlled for age, gender, income, education, place of residence (urban/rural), and individual propensity to trust.

The data clearly showed that in all areas surveyed, the more respondents were skeptical of the police, the more they trusted international and domestic business. Indeed, maximum mistrust in the police yielded anywhere from 10 percent to 90 percent more trust in business than minimum police mistrust, controlling for a wide range of other factors. Respondents who mistrust the police most, of course, are also those most likely to support BLM.

Among respondents from multiple countries and world regions, less trust in the police was reliably and significantly correlated with more trust in business.

These findings suggest the existence of at least two major “leftist” social movements worldwide. One, nourished by the ideas of democratic socialism and socioeconomic justice, attacks economic inequality in the U.S. and abroad, and seeks to reform the basic structures of our economic system. Some adherents of this movement may also be opposed to capitalist business.

The other is deeply critical of the police and of racism in its ranks. It wants police to stop using excessive violence, and wants racial justice to be hardwired into the way in which governments enforce the rule of law.

Some police skeptics may also be critical of capitalism, but our data show that the two movements are distinct phenomena. Regardless of what the founders of BLM believe, their supporters here and abroad show little sign of intense anti-capitalist sentiment.

Instead, our data suggest BLM in the U.S. and elsewhere has attracted the support of people who see business as part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Violent policing and socioeconomic injustice are real problems to be addressed. For now, however, we find no evidence that the movements protesting these two social ills are coalescing into a single overarching movement.

(An earlier version of this post appeared on the On Global Leadership blog).

About James Ron

James Ron is an author and social scientist whose career has spanned military service, human rights investigations, journalism, and university teaching. He is working on a memoir, Azimuth, which reflects on a life lived at the intersection of political violence, moral responsibility, exile, and personal transformation.

Learn more at www.jamesron.com | www.jamesron.org | www.jamesron.net

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