This Shutdown Isn’t About Budgets, It’s About Bodies
Another government shutdown. As of today, federal agencies are closed, and the political theater is in full swing. We’re being told this is about fiscal responsibility, about those “pesky Democrats” who refuse to negotiate. But as Professor Robert Reich recently pointed out, this shutdown is different because the context is everything.
This isn’t just a budget impasse. This is the predictable fallout from the “Big Ugly Law” passed in July—a piece of legislation that gutted healthcare and social supports for millions to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. The shutdown is simply the next step in a policy agenda that has always prioritized profits over people.
Hiding the Numbers, Ignoring the Pain
The government wants us to believe in a fairytale economy. They rely on the old, tired story: give money to the rich, and jobs will magically trickle down to the rest of us. The American capitalist machine marches on, we’re told.
But the machine is sputtering.
Just weeks after a “mistake” on the summer jobs report that conveniently inflated the numbers by nearly a million, the government has now delayed the release of the September jobs report altogether, using this shutdown as the perfect excuse. It seems no one wants to admit the truth we are all living: the economy is failing the majority of Americans. Instead of taking responsibility, the government is doing everything in its power to protect the capitalist machine, not its citizens.This reminds me of Stephanie Kelton’s argument in The Deficit Myth. We obsess over federal deficits while ignoring our most critical resource: human capital. There is so much willing, intelligent, and talented labor sitting on the sidelines. We have a deficit of good jobs, a deficit of healthcare, a deficit of care—but we’re told the only thing that matters is the financial ledger of the wealthy.
The Foundation of Exploitation
This isn’t a new problem; it’s the core feature of American capitalism. As scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore asserts, capitalism requires an exploited class to function. It needs a bottom rung, a group of people whose labor and lives are deemed expendable for the sake of profit.
From the very beginning, that exploited class was intentionally built on the backs of Black women. In A Black Women’s History of the United States, Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross detail how the Virginia colony spent its first forty years crafting slave codes specifically to institutionalize the exploitation of Black women’s productive and reproductive labor. For two full generations before the Declaration of Independence was even written, the foundation of American wealth was cemented through the brutalization of Black women.
We were never meant to be citizens; we were meant to be capital.
The Carrot Doesn’t Work Anymore
Today, the justifications are fancier, but the logic is the same. Conservatives and Boomers lament that “no one wants to work anymore.” But they miss the point. As author Simon Sinek explains, younger millennials and Gen Z grew up in a different world. They watched their parents, a generation of two-income households, get laid off without cause. They saw loyalty to a company rewarded with a pink slip.
The carrot on a stick no longer works. Younger generations are demanding to be compensated with actual living wages for their time and labor now. The promise of a distant, uncertain future is not enough to justify a miserable present. Our culture is starting to reject the foundational myths of capitalism. We have out-capitalisted ourselves.This is why the Labor Pains project feels more urgent than ever. By collecting the oral histories of Black women’s labor, across generations, we are doing more than just archiving stories. We are building a record of the true cost of this nation’s economy. We are tracing the scars of exploitation and mapping the geography of our resilience. Our narratives are the jobs report that can’t be delayed, revised, or hidden. They are the undeniable truth.
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