The Black Lives Matter campaign, given the most enormous boost by the killing of George Floyd, provides a powerful example of the “three currencies” at work.
The roots of the movement illustrate the three currencies: in the cash employing commerce of the Triangular Trade of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the slavery plantations of the Caribbean and the American South, the brute force employed by tribal chiefs and British slavers in West Africa and subsequently by slave masters, and in the cultural norms that facilitated the establishment of companies by royal charter and act of Parliament and, in the United States until the Civil War, tolerated and legitimated continuing enslavement of uprooted black people for two hundred years.
The current movement illustrates the three currencies too.
Policing, principally but not exclusively in the United States, that relies on physical (in the case of George Floyd deadly) force is an application of power where the application of persuasion and influence have failed. Many observers argue that the overuse of force (including, in the United States, widespread resort to guns by police) ultimately frustrates the objective of achieving peaceful civil society, but that is generally not the belief of the shooters at the time. It is impossible to get into the mind of Derek Chauvin, the police office filmed with knee on Floyd’s neck. However, unless he mounts a defence in court of diminished responsibility as a consequence of a mental health disorder, we can only assume that his defence was that he believed that anything short of the force that he and his colleagues applied was insufficient.
Correspondingly, demonstrators who become rioters and throw missiles or charge a police line (albeit a police line is an application force) are deploying physical force reflecting the belief that the political expression of the demonstration is insufficient to achieve their purpose. Of course, it is possible to argue that rioting and throwing missiles may frustrate the purpose of the demonstration in the eyes of other demonstrators and the wider audience, but that is not the belief of the rioters themselves.
The toppling of statues, particularly that of Edward Colston, is an interesting case in terms of where the line is drawn between the application of physical force as a currency and the application of influence. It is indisputably criminal damage and the equally indisputable that the removal of the statue involved physical force. But the removal of the statue was an exercise of political expression designed to further a shift in a political and cultural norm in pursuit of a wider objective.
The expression of the mass demonstrations, particularly in the context of restrictions on public gathering as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, has clearly been a very powerful application of power to influence an outcome through political means. There was already disgust felt widely across the world and within the American establishment without the demonstrations, but they have helped keep the story in the deadlines, have elicited positive responses from people in power (even if not from Donald Trump), and have generated accounts across mass media channels that probably both reflect a shift in public mood and reinforce it.
But what about Black Lives Matter as an expression of the third currency, cash? Just look at the way that corporate America has responded. What little I know of some of the corporate leaders who have spoken up to express their disgust at the conduct that result in the killing of George Floyd and others before him, satisfies me that most if not all of them instinctively oppose racism. However, most have spoken as clearly as they have in the knowledge that this will be good for their businesses. The messages coming out from the board room are not dog whistle statements designed to appeal to a “woke” audience without turning off an audience that is hostile to Black Lives Matter. Opposing racism is good for their businesses. Similarly, as a merchandise director with the UK’s largest retailer of stationery, in the 1980s I justified developing environmentally friendly (or at least environmentally less harmful) not just because I wanted to do my bit to help the save the planet, but because I was confident that it was going to be good for business – helping grow our sales and market share, enhance the standing of our brand, and attract the best and brightest young people to work for us. It hasn’t required a threat by the black community to boycott these US corporations, but the knowledge that wide swathes of the American population, black and white, will be influenced positively by the corporation taking a stand.