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 (reviewed here by Matt McManus). 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.

Nathan J. Robinson

You have produced, along with illustrator Kayla E.— who deserves credit here because the illustrations in this book are fantastic—not only one of the most fun introductions to socialist thought that I’ve ever read, but one of the most beautiful and most conceptually interesting. You compare capitalism to a toxic relationship, and so I wanted to begin with a question for you that might sound like the setup to a joke, which is: how is capitalism like a bad relationship?

Malaika Jabali

Oh, in so many ways. The book is set up in 10 chapters, and I would say nine of them really dissect how it’s like a bad relationship, and six of those nine are about how capitalism directly affects us in these different areas of our life, like, for example, the workplace. There are all kinds of pop culture references in the book, and in chapter four, which was about labor, I reference the Dolly Parton movie 9 to 5. In that movie there was a boss that a band of scrappy women tried to overthrow because in that relationship, the women got little trinkets and gifts—but that’s really not enough to actually sustain them. Or they got a pizza party. But our rights and ability to unionize have been undermined by capitalists for the last 60 or so years. So, each chapter deals with various comparisons to toxic relationships in different parts of our lives. 

Robinson

Something that runs through the book is the way that when people are in bad relationships, they find ways to deny the obvious reality in front of them. They can rationalize and justify it; they can look for the small, good things and try to pretend that those are the main things. And in the economic system that we have as well, there is often an effort to say, maybe this is the only way it possibly can be, and maybe this is all I deserve. When you start thinking about it with this kind of analogy, you start to notice all sorts of interesting parallels.

Jabali

Yes, absolutely. I think one of the defining things I read in my journey to socialism was actually an essay that you wrote about how we always get told that capitalism is an ideal system because capitalists are comparing our lives to how things might have been 50 or 100 years ago. But the reality is that we need to compare it to what the possibilities are and what could be. So, when we’re trapped in these bad relationships, we sometimes have a toxic partner that tries to convince us that they’re the best that we can do. They insult us and isolate us from our friends. In similar ways, capitalism isolates us from each other and from our communities, and it has convinced us that it is the best system possible. I get asked the question regularly: what’s better than the economic system we have now? Instead, my response is, can we at least try something different? I’m sure something has to be better than the pronounced wealth inequality that we have. Something has to be better than the fact that we have wages that have not kept up with production in 50 years. This is not at all the best that we can do. 

Robinson

I was very honored to be quoted on page 11. “You don’t measure against what is or what has been, you measure against what could be.” I have always heard the idea that in 1910, they didn’t have fridges. That’s true, but we don’t measure how well we’re doing in 2023 against “there’s no plague anymore”—you have to ask, how well could we do? You don’t say, a lot more people could have died. That’s not how you measure it. You ask, what is it that we are capable of, and are we living up to that? Your title is, It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism, and you write about how people, both in bad relationships and under capitalism, are told that the things that are wrong and make them unhappy are their own fault. 

Jabali

Right. Under capitalism, we’re still getting the plague. One sinister part about living in a capitalist society is that it is rooted in certain principles and values, one of them being individualism. So we believe that if we have not accomplished certain things, if we have not succeeded in this capitalist society, it’s on us. We cannot get assurances from our government, we’re not supposed to ask for help, and we’re not supposed to be supported. So, on top of being exploited, having very few worker protections, and not being able to afford rent, we get told that it’s our responsibility for these structural issues. During the pandemic, I was looking on Twitter, and somebody was complaining about having to work a third or fourth job just to pay his rent. Almost like a hive mind or a mind virus, everybody was just foaming at the mouth to tell him how much he wasn’t stepping up instead of saying, it is a pandemic, maybe we need to think about how to treat our workers better. 

Robinson

There was a similar instance that I saw recently where this young woman recorded a video where she was crying because her long commute meant that she was always in her waking hours either working or commuting to and from work, and when she got home, she was just too tired to do anything else. There were all these right-wing people who picked it up and said, “that’s the reality of having a job, girl,” and, “snowflake finds out what the real world is like”—all that horrible stuff, where you’re just told that if you’re unhappy and miserable, clearly, you’re just weak and are not worthy of the society and the economic system that you are insufficiently grateful for.

Jabali

Yes, exactly. And I saw her video and the responses to it, which are very similar to the example I gave. The lack of empathy that we are showing to each other is really jarring. And so, as much as this book is about a system, it’s also like a relationship guide, giving us the tools to recognize that it’s the system so that we’re not constantly berating ourselves and other people for not finding a successful path through it. I think we have to work on our own value system and question why we have certain values and why we project that onto other people. 

Robinson

With both a terrible partner and a terrible economic system, there are so many ways in which the image and the reality diverge. I think you have a number of illustrations here that are simulations of a dating profile. On the surface, someone or some system can be spun to look like something magical and wonderful, then underneath it the reality is truly miserable.

Jabali

Yes. I have a section called, “Capitalism, the ultimate catfisher.” I was thinking about this when that story about a scammer on Tinder was being featured everywhere. I was reading news about that as I was working on this chapter. We get one image of capitalism. This rhetoric has been very successful at telling us it’s about prosperity, mom-and-pop shops, democracy and freedom, and all of these really patriotic ideals. When you just scratch very shallowly under the surface, that’s really not what a lot of it is about. Even some of the things that entrepreneurs say about empowering people—such as economic mobility—don’t even happen for small business owners. I would say, on average, a household has to have $380,000 to have a business. So, the average self-employed household has an average of $380,000 in household wealth. The average lawn mower service owner, or somebody who just wants to be an entrepreneur and work independently, isn’t really able to advance in society. It takes capital to make capital. That’s not something that we learned from capitalists. For instance, we learned that capitalism gives people of color and Black people a chance to progress through homeownership, but our homeownership rates have not improved since 1968. If after 60 years we have not even gotten to own homes, we’re clearly being sold certain lies through this capitalist enterprise. 

Robinson

There are other ways in which being trapped in bad relationships is similar to the economic situation, such as the fear of leaving, that anything else you could have would be worse and so you don’t want to destroy what you do have. And this, obviously, is like with free market economists constantly saying that any attempts to tinker with or repair these deficiencies you see with capitalism will just destroy the things you do have. It’s the Road to Serfdom: you’re going to end up in a socialist, totalitarian, authoritarian nightmare state, and they say that to create the fear of leaving.

Jabali 

I think what’s important to remember is that so many of the things that have allowed us to be comfortable in capitalism were actually brought to us by socialists. There weren’t capitalists who said that we needed to regulate child labor; capitalist didn’t say that we needed to have unions to give us better bargaining power; capitalists weren’t the ones fighting for health insurance to make sure that people were actually covered. Capitalists fought tooth and nail against the things that have given us comfort in the United States. But if you look at the history of socialism in this country, we’ve just gotten a little taste. We know we’ve just dipped our toe in some elements of socialist ideas and policy. For instance, Milwaukee doubled its park space because of socialist mayors. We were able to get Social Security in the United States because of a school of thought that came out of economists who were socialists and said that we needed to put more value on labor and on workers instead of giving so many rights to corporations. It was socialists within these various radical movements that gave us the 9-to-5 workday and weekends. So, if we’re just getting that little taste, why don’t we just try and commit?

Robinson 

One of the cool things that you do throughout this book is to elevate the stories of historical figures who we are often not taught about but who brought us these things. In previous generations, they saw many of the same things that we do today and decided to do something about it and accomplished a great deal. You highlight many of these people so that we can be inspired by their work and pick it up where they left off. 

Jabali 

I was intentional about focusing on leftists of color. Some of them identified as socialists, some as communists, and some didn’t identify as anything per se, but they were vocally critical of capitalism. So, I’ve got quotes from Dolores Huerta in there. I feature Frida Kahlo, who was a part of the Communist Party. I feature Assata Shakur, who was very vocally socialist, and the Black Panther Party in general was a socialist organization. They believed in Black liberation through the lens of a worker-led movement, and they recognized that many Black people, if we were to use some Marxist terms here, were part of the lumpenproletariat. They would be discarded in Marxist analysis, but so many Black people weren’t employed and had been maligned in society and thought of as outcasts. Those were the kinds of people that needed to be organized because they comprise such a big part of the Black population. People like Malcolm X are centered, and people like Martin Luther King Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin. Folks wouldn’t know, for instance, that the March on Washington where we heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Two of its main two organizers, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, were socialists. So, much of the concept of the march was about economic exploitation and fighting back against it.

Robinson 

Socialists, I think, bear some of the blame here for the racial image of socialism that is often handed down. It is often quite white, and that is not necessarily helped by seeing Karl Marx and Eugene Debs as the greatest figures in socialism. As you point out and emphasize throughout the book, so much of the revolutionary socialist tradition, some of the greatest socialist intellectuals from Du Bois to the Black Panthers, are people of color, and so much of modern socialism was forged in the Global South. This tends to get lost a lot of the time in American discourse around socialism.

Jabali 

Yes, it does. And I think there are plenty of reasons for it. I think some of it is deliberate and is a part of some of the whitewashing that we see in modern politics. I talked about it in that award-winning essay for Current Affairs, where the support that Bernie Sanders had from people of color was deliberately underreported. Obviously, there were valid criticisms—I have criticized him in various outlets—but there were still people of color who supported him, and there were reasons for that support. Many people recognize that a number of his policy platforms hit directly at their material interests, yet the Democratic Party was using their reputation and tradition that they had and the relationships that they were able to build with Black communities to say “we’re actually the party for Black people,” even though they weren’t actually confronting the material disadvantages and harms that some of their policies caused for Black people. And so that, to me, is very convenient. It’s very convenient to whitewash a leftist movement to advance your own political aims.

Robinson 

One of the most cynical quotes of all time in politics was Hillary Clinton’s infamous, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would it end racism?” I remember this rhetoric in 2016, which was basically that it’s a choice between addressing racism and addressing economic inequality and exploitation—we, the centrists, believe in the former, and Bernie Sanders believes in the latter but doesn’t care about racism. It’s just an extremely frustrating narrative.

Jabali 

It was extremely cynical. And they were putting that in their back pocket for a reason: it was advantageous to them to simplify it that way. But as I’ve discussed before, it was a perfect opportunity to talk about the big banks and their role in undermining the wealth of Black people with the financial crisis of 2008. That was a very clear example of the intersection of race and class. So, it was less about not knowing that, but instead about Clinton trying to muddy her own relationship with the big banks.

Robinson 

In your introduction, you write about your own formative experiences that colored your perception of capitalism, and one of them was dealing with mortgage services. 

Jabali 

My family was targeted with a subprime loan. This hit me very hard. We weren’t aware of what that meant at the time, I would say, but we had a lender who just sold us on this thing even though we had all the qualifications to get a conventional mortgage. They were pushing these on homeowners, and I saw it because I was on the receiving end of it. So, they pushed this on us and many Black families in Georgia, where I was raised and where I currently live, and that reverberated throughout the country. We were sold this thing, and then it was repackaged and sold to another servicer. And then we were getting calls and emails and letters regularly, basically saying that we owed when we didn’t. They were using all these deceptive tactics, and they eventually got sued. There was a class action lawsuit against the mortgage servicer because this was a common practice. They were deliberately targeting a lot of Black and brown homeowners, and I was one of them.

Robinson 

They would do crazy things—people don’t even remember this. People would make their payments, and then they’d reject the checks, send it back, and then foreclose on you. Or if you paid too much, they wouldn’t accept the check, so you couldn’t pay things off ahead of time. The practices that were in place caused so much avoidable suffering during that period, 2007-2009.

Jabali 

Just to add to that, I had to go through our archives with the company and look at every single check and show them that their machine clearly didn’t notice that we paid the full amount, that it was not under. And so they blamed it on their photography service that documents the checks, and by then we’re 60 or 90 days behind. For years, this was an ongoing thing. I’m lucky that my mom and I made time to do it because the average person probably wouldn’t be able to. 

Robinson 

Right. And you are someone who ultimately became a lawyer. You’re someone who has the capacity to go through piles and piles of documentation to ferret out the truth. 

Jabali 

That’s right. I’m going to pull the receipts even if it takes up my time.

Robinson 

But for plenty of people, it’s just impossible to do this stuff, or they don’t have the time because they’re working all the time. We should mention your article for Current Affairs, “The Color of Economic Anxiety,” because it touches on this. At the time of the 2016 election—again, to dredge up some ancient history—there had been this whole thing about mocking the idea that Trump voters were motivated by economic anxiety, with a bunch of Democrats saying that it’s just racism. What your article did was say that economic anxiety is a perfectly real thing, and it’s not just Trump voters. You went to Milwaukee and talked to disillusioned Black voters and said, first, it’s a swing state that Hillary Clinton lost, and here are all these people who don’t vote because frankly, the economy sucks. It doesn’t work for them, and they don’t see anything to vote for.

Jabali 

Exactly. Part of what I write about in the book is the whitewashing of the working class. The reason why this is so important is that it’s what dictates the policy priorities of our federal politicians. And so, when we have members of Congress who are saying that they need to appeal to conservative white voters, what they’re saying is that we need to just be doing earned income tax credits and have zoning laws that make sure that we have enough single family housing, but they’re not doing enough to make sure that we have affordable housing. They’re investing more in these kinds of affordable housing programs that will benefit landlords but not tenants. They’re not investing in public housing because that doesn’t appeal to conservative white voters. So, when we do that, when we are so narrowly focused on the conservative end of the working class, we are denying the preferences of millions of people who want things like Medicare for All and free college tuition. We’re denying the entire country the benefits that most other industrial countries have because we are so narrowly focused on a very mythical version of the working class in America.

Robinson 

I want to ask you a meta question about the creation of the book. So, you go through various areas of economic life and show how capitalism functions. You show the ways in which we could have a healthcare system that actually takes care of people instead of extorting them and bankrupting them, how we could have jobs where we work reasonable hours and get paid what we’re worth. This is a really interesting, creative, and novel book because you work with an illustrator. How did you think about taking these ideas and packaging and presenting them to people in the 21st century who don’t want to pick up Karl Marx’s Capital: Volume One? How did you take socialist ideas that are oftentimes, again, associated with the 19th century and make them relevant for 2023 in a way that people can understand, especially for young people, who are the target audience? 

Jabali 

I think everything really opened up when I came up with the relationship conceit. As someone who has dated in New York City, I’ve dealt with all kinds of personalities, and I was just able to run with it. Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for the readers, there’s so much material to draw from. So, I’ve been on dating sites, and I thought, what does it look like when you see a nice profile or when you see red flags? What kind of imagery can we come up with that will display something in a simple way? Also, having a bit of a magazine background helps a bit because I have to think about layouts and how to make some of our ideas visually appealing. I worked in communications for the New York City Council, and so as a lawyer, I frequently had to think about how to translate very wonky policy language into something that could fit on a billboard. So, I think all those skills came together and led to this book, and it took some time to sit with some of the concepts. I was brainstorming with my editor about what would make sense. I wanted to do a video game profile to feature some of the standout leftists: does that make sense? I would just go back and forth with her on some of those things. 

Robinson 

You ultimately make a structured argument in the book, but throughout the book, you have things like timelines, memes, little fake text messages, parodies of video game character selection screens, infographics, maps, charts, quotations—just all kinds of things that take these ideas, and you figure out a hundred different ways to present the ideas to people so they’ll understand.

Jabali 

Yes. I conceived a lot of it. I also have to give props to Kayla, the illustrator and designer, for incorporating her creativity and imagination into the imagery. She just really got what we were trying to do.

Robinson 

I just happened upon a page about vampires: student loan vampire, credit card vampire, jail vampire, payday loan vampire. Kayla did some adorable little vampires. “Why are we swiping right on these lending bloodsuckers and their vampire dating profiles?” Again, this is not like picking up Capital: Volume One.

Jabali 

No, not at all. I had a lot of fun. I think for most of the ideas that I threw at my editor and the illustrator, they said, let’s just do it. It was almost like a smorgasbord of random ideas that I would think about. And so, for the lending vampires, that came out of a Malcolm X quote where he talks about capitalists being bloodsuckers. I thought, why don’t we just make this a whole Twilight theme? So again, there’s just theme on top of theme here. Yes, it’s about our romantic lives and people sucking the energy out of us, but I also wondered about what a movie reference for this could be. So, the movie we chose was Twilight, where you have these lenders, including our federal government, who tell us that we need to be making enough money to buy the basic necessities of life, but we’re not getting enough money to do it. The next thing you know, they come around with student loans, payday loans—all these loans because we are not given the wages we need to afford our basic necessities. We’re getting the life energy sucked out of us just trying to meet interest rates and all of these requirements. So, that led to a whole vampire thing.

Robinson 

I would describe this as really accessible, and this is what we always try to do at Current Affairs. We have all sorts of satirical advertisements and such because of what you identify in the book, which is that because ordinary people spend a lot of their lives working, they’re too tired to pick up a book of economic theory and ideas. It can be a lot of work, and it’s something that a lot of us don’t want to have to do. I don’t even want to pick up big works of socialist ideas very much. And so, you’ve clearly thought about how to simultaneously convey a lot of information—there are a ton of endnotes and statistics in it—and also give the reader some joy.

Jabali 

Yes. I wanted to incorporate my own personality. I am a very studious person, but I also like to have fun. I like to tell my little jokey jokes. We’re going to have some fun while we’re reading and experiencing this. When I was writing it, if I didn’t have fun reading it back, if I didn’t laugh, I thought, maybe other people won’t laugh, either. So, it was really key for me that I was able to enjoy it. Even if you don’t have time for a book, I recommend listening to the audiobook. I narrated the audiobook to capture the tone that some of the jokes required so people could get it, and I think that’s so key. We talk about the working class—people are working. They’re exhausted. Most of the things that I read that led to socialism happened when I was a student or when I just had more free time to do the reading, but we can’t have a movement just with people who are in libraries, people who are researchers and policy wonks. We need a movement of workers and people who are trying to work. I thought this would be a good introduction for those kinds of readers or listeners.

Robinson 

In terms of making the reader feel another world is possible, or that a breakup with the economic system is possible, you look at people in our country and world who are doing the kind of activism that is necessary to create that alternate world. Tell us a little bit about who you chose to profile in the book.

Jabali 

The whole book provides different alternatives. My editor Madeline Jones approached me with a concept of doing an approachable book about socialism. I felt that most readers would be most familiar with the idea of capitalism because we’re living through it, but we still wanted to ensure that a significant amount of the book got into ideas from socialists. So, in each chapter where I’m critiquing an element of capitalism, I also inject it with ideas that socialists have introduced. In the chapter on socialism, which is the third chapter, I wrote about the work of Cooperation Jackson and the Jackson Plan, which is a Mississippi-based movement based on socialist ideas from Black Southerners and Black people who migrated from the Midwest and back down to the South. So, they’re working on a project to make sure that we have participatory democracies in Mississippi. I wrote about the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, which is a conglomeration of cooperatives with thousands of workers. The Marxian economist Richard Wolff has talked about it in his work, and I interviewed him to give us a vision of what a socialist workplace could look like through, for instance, workplace self-directed enterprises. So, it’s all throughout the book. But then at the end, I really hone in on a certain movement. For instance, there’s a city council member who’s a Black socialist and a former Black Panther, Charles Barron. He has been incorporating his socialism as a city council member and making sure that people have affordable housing in his district. I interviewed Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union president who has been vocally critical and outspoken against capitalism. I talked to Smalls’s colleague Cassio Mendoza, who helped found the ALU and is a socialist. They all gave me their tools for what they’re doing today to bring more people into the fold.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.