On Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, and an Integrated Perspective of Multiple Crises

“It’s not a border crisis,” Ocasio-Cortez told viewers in an Instagram Live session. “It’s an imperialism crisis. It’s a climate crisis. It’s a trade crisis.”

Understanding the border requires an understanding of why they exist, and how they are enforced. Kamala Harris’s comment, “do not come” reflects the concept of implicit ethnic credit. Within her statement she cites that there are legal ways to immigrate, and both implicitly and explicitly denies the commonly acknowledged right that survivors of violence have the right to leave violence and apply for asylum for a later date. This corpus of laws consists of a series of qualifications that must be met that maintain capital and in many ways act as credit checks, ways to assure that a given individual can be nested in capitalism steadfastly. In many cases, those who are most desperate to maintain asylum can be extorted on their willingness to maintain trust and avoid further trouble. These are all tenets of imperialism, which require a dense legal network that enforce a series of ethnic propositions. These propositions are based on the predominant culture, which is often simply a revolving door around religious assertions and appeals to tradition. We call this revolving door culture, and one culture’s self-evaluation in terms of another’s an exchange. If the exchange is positive, it results in positive ethnic/cultural regard and if it is negative it results in negative ethnic/cultural regard.

Some examples of this type of credit are the exceptions incoming passengers from Japan saw to Hawaii, as well as the shift in the American perception of Russians in the Trump era (both frightened and interested) to skeptical and dissuaded (Joe Biden’s continued cold war-based conception of the country.)

To say that these credits were not a result of overall perceived gains and losses would be a mistake. Carceral borders are often a result of poor ethnic credit, stemming again from appeals to culture much more than appeals to nation. When this ethnic credit is not fairly earned, it is racism. When it is “fairly” earned as a result of whatever legal consensus can be sussed out and capital exchange, it is hegemonizable and may even congeal into an average stable credit score for an ethnic group. In truth, the abolitionist lens sees these assignments of low credit and impossibility always as errors of disinterest.

When we view this under an analytical lens, we see that those who are held in poor credit are far more often to be subject to poverty and extortion in the positive or negative. The positive instantiation being large legal fees for the “criminal” poor and the negative instantiation being wage theft, mobility limitations, high interest loans and overcharge fees. Overall we call this oppression.

We see that the same unit of labor for an oppressed individual is not evaluated the same as someone who is not oppressed for these reasons — it is subject to high interest, a lower score of value due to ethnic credit and bias — and therefore creates a state of unfair trade. Since my analysis requires the standard of maintaining postconventional reasoning in the favor of advancing humanity and abolitionism, we say that the trade is unfair because it is not legitimated because it must hold the value of an equivalent unit of labor of equivalent quality (consistency, delivery, dexterity, efficiency) at the weight of its own assignment consistently regardless of the identity of the laborer over time.

In critical cases like China which hit economic markers that claim they are still undergoing some forms of economic development but are doing well in terms of global capital generation, we see that the fight for fair exchange when there is still an unfair element internally or externally to a nation (protectionist extortion, limitations on innovation, unexplainable gender disparities) can result in massive industrial upheavals like an abundance of bitcoin mining plants, industrial projects, and low-stability external campaigns that results in proven climate damage.

Putting each of these elements together, we see that these crises are not so different — in fact they are a continued clunky machine of mutually informing dysfunction bordering on a hemorrhaging wound that we must address in the immediate term.