BLM- The Social Contract Has Been Broken; What Now?
According to John Locke, this makes the US overdue for a revolution, but in what form?
What is Social Contract Theory?
Social contract theory is based on a real or hypothetical agreement between the people and their rulers, whereby people agree to surrender some of the freedom they enjoyed in a ‘state of nature’ (life without government), in return for the protection and security of government.
This theory has been developed by a number of philosophers, however, for the purposes of this article, I focus on the writings of John Locke. I do so because the Lockean concept of the social contract was invoked in the United States Declaration of Independence, making it the most contextually significant.
The context in question is months of demonstrations around the US, protesting the state’s failure to protect its Black citizens, and culminating in an international ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.
It is important to note this movement did not begin recently, but in 2013, in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer -yet another example of the state’s failure to protect its Black citizens. 7 years later, and Black people across the world are still protesting, this time in an attempt to force the state to provide justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, and too many others.
As Dr. Kajsa Hallberg Adu, professor of social contract theory outlines below, the very existence of the Black Lives Matter movement proves that the US has broken the social contract.
“The social contract, even in its cruelest, most authoritarian form…has one caveat -when your life is threatened…when your life does not matter to the leadership, the social contract no longer exists. You are back in the state of nature.”
Let me repeat. When your life does not matter to the leadership, the social contract no longer exists. The American state has proven, time and time again, that Black lives do not matter to them. Not only with regards to policing, but every facet of society: education, healthcare, housing, and so on.
So What Happens When The Contract is Broken?
Locke stated that, as the legitimacy of the state is based on a contract, either party can fail to meet the terms of the agreement.
The thought: if the state fails to meet its side of the bargain -as it has- it becomes illegitimate, and revolution is justified.
It must be clarified what is meant by revolution here. The word evokes images of citizens marching, arming themselves, physically overthrowing an oppressive state.
However, revolution, at its heart, is simply displacing rulers and changing political rules. In modern democratic societies, our political systems have been designed so that ‘revolution’ is an organised and regular part of the political process, with voting being a form of controlled revolutionary activity. It allows governments to peacefully and effectively be deprived of power, giving the people continual control over the process of creating and maintaining the regime.
Nevertheless, the effectiveness of voting in this specific situation has been challenged.
Even if we ignore the very real concerns of voter suppression in the US, the idea that we can vote ourselves into a more just state is laughable. Under the US’s two-party system, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can convincingly be said to have upheld the social contract with specific regards to their Black voters.
In fact, the Black Lives Matter movement began under the Obama presidency, under a president who was not only a Democrat, but Black himself, proving that this is not a partisan issue, nor one that can be resolved through political means, but one deeply rooted into the state itself.
“It is significant that under a black president the Black Lives Matter movement, demanding nothing but the right to live and be counted, originated.” — Danielle Fuentes Morgan
Furthermore, if we consider that the social contract itself has only ever been extended towards a certain type of person – historically, a white upper-class male– as well as the American states’ roots in genocide and white supremacy, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that the United States made a mockery of the social contract from the moment of its existence.
From the moment that article one, section two of the Constitution of the United States declared that any person who was not free would be counted as three-fifths of a free individual, it broke the social contract. From the moment the first slave ship docked, it broke the social contract. Indeed, the very conception of the US as a nation-state, based on colonisation and genocide -notably, something Locke supported- would logically be said to have made a mockery of any social contract that followed.
What Can We Do?
Having concluded two important points: the first being that the American state has never upheld the social contract towards all of its citizens, and the second that our current political systems do not have the ability to remedy that, the question is where do we go from here? How do we oppose a system that has inequality so rooted into its very existence? Voting doesn’t work, peaceful resistance is extremely limited in its impact, so what exactly are we to do?
Having read this far, you are probably expecting an answer. Honestly, I don’t have one. I don’t know if anyone does. But if we continue to read, to discuss, to critically examine, maybe one day we can find an answer. And in the meantime, as a collective, we must utilise the forms of resistance -meagre though they may be- that we have. Continue talking, tweeting, signing, marching, but be ready for more.
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