disturbed by the number of times i've seen the idea that calling gaza an open-air prison is not okay because "that implies that gazans have done something wrong", the subtext being unlike those criminals who deserve to be in prison. i'm sorry but we HAVE to understand criminalization and incarceration as an intrinsic part of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, because settler states make laws that actively are designed to suppress indigenous and racialized resistance, and then enforce those laws in even more racist and discriminatory ways so that who is considered "criminal" is indelibly tied up with who is considered a "threat" to the settler state. that's how law, policing, and incarceration function worlwide, and how they have always functioned in israel as part of the zionist project.

talking about prison abolition in this context is not a distraction from what's happening to palestinians; it's a key tool of israel's apartheid and genocide. why do you think a major hamas demand has been for israel to release the palestinians in israeli prisons? why do you think israel nearly doubled the number of palestinians incarcerated in their prison in just the first two weeks after october 7? why do they systematically racially profile palestinians (particularly afro-palestinians, since anti-blackness is baked into israel's carceral system as well, like it is in much of the world) and arrest and charge 20% of palestinians, an astonishingly high rate that goes up even higher to 40% for palestinian men? why are there two different systems of law for palestinians and israelis, where palestinians are charged and tried under military law, leading to a conviction rate of almost 100%? why do they torture children and incarcerate them for up to 20 years just for throwing rocks? why can palestinians be imprisoned by israel without even being charged or tried? why do they keep the bodies of palestinians who have died in prison (often due to torture, execution, or medical neglect) for the rest of their sentences instead of returning them to their families?

this is not to say that no palestinians imprisoned by israel have ever done harm. but incarceration worldwide has never been about accountability for those who have done harm, nor about real justice for those have experienced harm, nor about deterring future harm. incarceration is about controlling, suppressing, and exterminating oppressed people. sometimes people from privileged classes get caught up in carceral systems as well, but it is a side effect, because the settler colonialist state will happily sacrifice some of its settlers for its larger goal.

so yes, gaza is an open-air prison. that doesn't means gazans deserve to be there. it means that no one deserves to be in prison, because prisons themselves are inherently oppressive.

The tax sharks are back and they’re coming for your home

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TODAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

One of my weirder and more rewarding hobbies is collecting definitions of "conservativism," and one of the jewels of that collection comes from Corey Robin's must-read book The Reactionary Mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reactionary_Mind

Robin's definition of conservativism has enormous explanatory power and I'm always finding fresh ways in which it clarifies my understand of events in the world: a conservative is someone who believes that a minority of people were born to rule, and that everyone else was born to follow their rules, and that the world is in harmony when the born rulers are in charge.

This definition unifies the otherwise very odd grab-bag of ideologies that we identify with conservativism: a Christian Dominionist believes in the rule of Christians over others; a "men's rights advocate" thinks men should rule over women; a US imperialist thinks America should rule over the world; a white nationalist thinks white people should rule over racialized people; a libertarian believes in bosses dominating workers and a Hindu nationalist believes in Hindu domination over Muslims.

These people all disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that some people are ordained to rule, and that any "artificial" attempt to overturn the "natural" order throws society into chaos. This is the entire basis of the panic over DEI, and the brainless reflex to blame the Francis Scott Key bridge disaster on the possibility that someone had been unjustly promoted to ship's captain due to their membership in a disfavored racial group or gender.

This definition is also useful because it cleanly cleaves progressives from conservatives. If conservatives think there's a natural order in which the few dominate the many, progressivism is a belief in pluralism and inclusion, the idea that disparate perspectives and experiences all have something to contribute to society. Progressives see a world in which only a small number of people rise to public life, rarified professions, and cultural prominence and assume that this is terrible waste of the talents and contributions of people whose accidents of birth keep them from participating in the same way.

This is why progressives are committed to class mobility, broad access to education, and active programs to bring traditionally underrepresented groups into arenas that once excluded them. The "some are born to rule, and most to be ruled over" conservative credo rejects this as not just wrong, but dangerous, the kind of thing that leads to bridges being demolished by cargo ships.

The progressive reforms from the New Deal until the Reagan revolution were a series of efforts to broaden participation in every part of society by successively broader groups of people. A movement that started with inclusive housing and education for white men and votes for white women grew to encompass universal suffrage, racial struggles for equality, workplace protections for a widening group of people, rights for people with disabilities, truth and reconciliation with indigenous people and so on.

The conservative project of the past 40 years has been to reverse this: to return the great majority of us to the status of desperate, forelock-tugging plebs who know our places. Hence the return of child labor, the tradwife movement, and of course the attacks on labor unions and voting rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

Arguably the most potent symbol of this struggle is the fight over homes. The New Deal offered (some) working people a twofold path to prosperity: subsidized home-ownership and strong labor protections. This insulated (mostly white) workers from the two most potent threats to working peoples' lives and wellbeing: the cruel boss and the greedy landlord.

But the neoliberal era dispensed with labor rights, leaving the descendants of those lucky workers with just one tool for securing their American dream: home-ownership. As wages stagnated, your home – so essential to your ability to simply live – became your most important asset first, and a home second. So long as property values rose – and property taxes didn't – your home could be the backstop for debt-fueled consumption that filled the gap left by stagnating wages. Liquidating your family home might someday provide for your retirement, your kids' college loans and your emergency medical bills.

For conservatives who want to restore Gilded Age class rule, this was a very canny move. It pitted lucky workers with homes against their unlucky brethren – the more housing supply there was, the less your house was worth. The more protections tenants had, the less your house was worth. The more equitably municipal services (like schools) were distributed, the less your house was worth:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

And now that the long game is over, they're coming for your house. It started with the foreclosure epidemic after the 2008 financial crisis, first under GW Bush, but then in earnest under Obama, who accepted the advice of his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who insisted that homeowners should be liquidated to "foam the runways" for the crashing banks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

Then there are scams like "We Buy Ugly Houses," a nationwide mass-fraud outfit that steals houses out from under elderly, vulnerable and desperate people:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The more we lose our houses, the more single-family homes Wall Street gets to snap up and convert into slum properties, aslosh with a toxic stew of black mold, junk fees and eviction threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Now there's a new way for finance barons the steal our houses out from under us – or rather, a very old way that had lain dormant since the last time child labor was legal – "tax lien investing."

Across the country, counties and cities have programs that allow investment funds to buy up overdue tax-bills from homeowners in financial hardship. These "investors" are entitled to be paid the missing property taxes, and if the homeowner can't afford to make that payment, the "investor" gets to kick them out of their homes and take possession of them, for a tiny fraction of their value.

As Andrew Kahrl writes for The American Prospect, tax lien investing was common in the 19th century, until the fundamental ugliness of the business made it unattractive even to the robber barons of the day:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-04-26-investing-in-distress-tax-liens/

The "tax sharks" of Chicago and New York were deemed "too merciless" by their peers. One exec who got out of the business compared it to "picking pennies off a dead man’s eyes." The very idea of outsourcing municipal tax collection to merciless debt-hounds fell aroused public ire.

Today – as the conservative project to restore the "natural" order of the ruled and the ruled-over builds momentum – tax lien investing is attracting some of America's most rapacious investors – and they're making a killing. In Chicago, Alden Capital just spent a measly $1.75m to acquire the tax liens on 600 family homes in Cook County. They now get to charge escalating fees and penalties and usurious interest to those unlucky homeowners. Any homeowner that can't pay loses their home.

The first targets for tax-lien investing are the people who were the last people to benefit from the New Deal and its successors: Black and Latino families, elderly and disabled people and others who got the smallest share of America's experiment in shared prosperity are the first to lose the small slice of the American dream that they were grudgingly given.

This is the very definition of "structural racism." Redlining meant that families of color were shut out of the federal loan guarantees that benefited white workers. Rather than building intergenerational wealth, these families were forced to rent (building some other family's intergenerational wealth), and had a harder time saving for downpayments. That meant that they went into homeownership with "nontraditional" or "nonconforming" mortgages with higher interest rates and penalties, which made them more vulnerable to economic volatility, and thus more likely to fall behind on their taxes. Now that they're delinquent on their property taxes, they're in hock to a private equity fund that's charging them even more to live in their family home, and the second they fail to pay, they'll be evicted, rendered homeless and dispossessed of all the equity they built in their (former) home.

It's very on-brand for Alden Capital to be destroying the lives of Chicagoans. Alden is most notorious for buying up and destroying America's most beloved newspapers. It was Alden who bought up the Chicago Tribune, gutted its workforce, sold off its iconic downtown tower, and moved its few remaining reporters to an outer suburban, windowless brick building "the size of a Chipotle":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Before the ghastly hotel baroness Leona Helmsley went to prison for tax evasion, she famously said, "We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes." Helmsley wasn't wrong – she was just a little ahead of schedule. As Propublica's IRS Files taught us, America's 400 richest people pay less tax than you do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/13/for-the-little-people/#leona-helmsley-2022

When billionaires don't pay their taxes, they get to buy sports franchises. When poor people don't pay their taxes, billionaires get to steal their houses after paying the local government an insultingly small amount of money.

It's all going according to plan. We weren't meant to have houses, or job security, or retirement funds. We weren't meant to go to university, or even high school, and our kids were always supposed to be in harness at a local meat-packer or fast food kitchen, not wasting time with their high school chess club or sports team. They don't need high school: that's for the people who were born to rule. They – we – were meant to be ruled over.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/26/taxes-are-for-the-little-people/#alden-capital

On a previous ask, someone asked about racial capitalism and like what makes it different from regular capitalism

Yeah, I didn't explain what the term meant, although I wasn't asked that before.

To start with, according to Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism (1983), there is no difference because all forms of capitalism are racial capitalism, that capitalism by its nature produces racial oppression when it produces inequality.

So why coin the term?

The main thing that Robinson was trying to do was to shift the focus of Marxist thought on capitalism towards the way that capitalism extracts value specifically from the racially marginalized.

This has a lot to do with fights within Marxism about how to think about capitalism - for example, Robinson isn't a fan of the idea from Marx that capitalism was a progressive force vis-a-vis feudalism, and argues that capitalism simply displaced caste systems from Europe to Europe's colonies in the Americas, Asia, Africa, etc. through slavery and colonialism and later systems of racial oppression.

In 2023, Let's Remember that Jesus Was a Poor Man

I’ve been thinking alot about this picture lately that I first came across online probably 4 or 5 years ago, you can view it at the start of this blog post. It’s a black and white photo of a mule drawn covered wagon. Painted on the wagon cover is the phrase, “Don’t laugh folks, Jesus was a poor man.” This picture was taken in 1968 as part of The Mule Train. The Mule Train was a train of mule drawn wagons that rode together from Marks, Mississippi, one of the poorest areas in all of the USA at the time, to Washington DC as an act of protest to highlight the need for poor people, especially poor children, to have their basic needs met. The Mule Train was part of the original Poor People’s Campaign which Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader in before he died. Marks was populated predominantly by poor Black sharecroppers who were descendents of enslaved people, which was no accident either. Disproportionate Black poverty was and is a feature of US racial capitalist society, which was built by enslaved Black people, and became prosperous by the total theft of value generated by their labor while living in bondage. Much like Southern Black people in the USA in 1968, Jesus too lived under constant state repression and under oppressive social regimes as a Palestinian Jew living under Roman Imperial occupation.

I love the implication of the claim that this wagon makes. The idea that the God of the universe became human and lived, walked, worked, loved, ate, cried, laughed, and died amongst us is earth-shatteringly profound. Yet, when this Creator of everything that was, is, or will be became a human-being, God chose not to be born into a wealthy, aristocratic family. God chose to become a poor man living under occupation. Therefore, how our societies and economies treat poor people is reflective of how our societies and economies would treat God if God became human in our day. 

At my lovely Episcopal church in Dallas last night, sitting in the pew, participating in our lovely Lessons and Carols liturgy that we always do the first Sunday after Christmas, I heard this passage, John 1:1-14, like I’d heard it for the first time. In this passage, the author of the text refers to God as “the Word” and “The Light” which are common Biblical titles for God. I, however, couldn’t escape this idea of “what if these titles, the Word and the Light, were replaced with the phrase “the Poor Man”? After all, our Mule Train drivers named Jesus as a poor man. How might we hear this passage differently in our time? In this place?” 

Therefore, I invite you to read this New Revised Poor Man edition of John 1:1-14 below, adapted from the Common English Bible. I took the liberty of abandoning this motif a few times for clarity.

John 1:1-14 - Common English Bible

In the beginning was the Poor Man

    and the Poor Man was with God

    and the Poor Man was God.

The Poor Man was with God in the beginning.

Everything came into being through the Poor Man,

    and without the Poor Man

    nothing came into being.

What came into being

    through the Poor Man was life,

    and the life was the light for all people.

The Poor Man shines in the darkness,

    and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the Poor Man.

A man named John was sent from God. He came as a witness to testify concerning the Poor Man, so that through him everyone would believe in the Poor Man. He himself wasn’t the Poor Man, but his mission was to testify concerning the Poor Man.

The true Poor Man that shines on all people

    was coming into the world.

The Poor Man was in the world,

    and the world came into being through the Poor Man,

        but the world didn’t recognize the Poor Man.

The Poor Man came to his own people,

    and his own people didn’t welcome him.

But those who did welcome him,

        those who believed in his name,

    he authorized to become God’s children,

        born not from blood

        nor from human desire or passion,

        but born from God.

The Poor Man became flesh

    and made his home among us.

We have seen his glory,

    glory like that of a father’s only son,

        full of grace and truth.

When I read this adapted passage, the first thing that it reminds me of are two verses from John 12:7-8 CEB:

““Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

This passage comes from an absolute favorite Gospel story of mine, the raising of Lazarus followed by the story of Mary and Martha and the perfume. In the story, following Jesus’ miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, Lazarus, Mary, Martha, Judas Iscariot, and Jesus share a meal together in Mary, Martha, and Lazarus’ home. In the story, while Martha is serving the table, Mary gets up and pours a very expensive bottle of perfume (worth a year’s wages) over Jesus’ head, anointing him, and then wipes his feet with her hair. The others are outraged by this act, but Jesus understands it as a holy sign of devotion from his dedicated follower, Mary, who seems to know that Jesus is quickly approaching his death. 

When Jesus says “You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me” it sounds kind of dismissive of the plight of the poor. However, if you are familiar with the full text of the Gospels and Jesus’ work and ministry then you understand that Jesus cares more for the poor and the outcast than any other group in ancient Palestinian society. 

If we interpret John 12:7-8 through the lens of Jesus being the Poor Man then the verses take on an entirely different meaning. If Jesus is leaving his humanly and earthly life, but the poor are staying, that means that Jesus is staying, embodied in the lives of the poor. It follows that, if we want to know how to best worship God on this side of the eschaton then we need look no further than the homeless person on the side of the street asking for money. We need look no further than the single mother working 70 hours a week to keep her children fed and housed. We need look no further than the Central American refugees at our southern border fleeing persecution and immiseration, seeking a better life in the USA. 

The Poor Man, the Peasant King, is with us everyday. Jesus lives in our hearts but he also lives in the places furthest out of the eyes of mainstream society, where poor and working people struggle to meet their basic needs under the oppressive thumb of a patriarchal, nativist, racial capitalist world system. As we enter into 2023, let us boldly worship God by working towards making a world where all unjust systems and institutions are torn down and the world is remade for the perpetual worship of our Creator, meaning a world where all poor people are fed, cared for, loved, and free.

This idea of home beyond the nation state where we find common ground and bonds of mutual care with other communities where we live was their anti-capitalist alternative.  To fight for justice wherever we are, with and for people who are, and are not, related to us.  Because, as Fenya Fischler, a member of Een Andere Joodse Stem/Another Jewish Voice, Belgium argues: “Our safety is a mere illusion if it relies on walls and weapons to keep those we dehumanise out.” In the famous words of Bundist, Marek Edelman, the Jewish Polish political activist and cardiologist who was the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, “to be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.” This is what will keep us safe.

Koni Benson in African Arguments. Making Home, not taking it: Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Zionism from South Africa today

South African Jews for a Free Palestine stand firmly behind a history of anti-imperial, anti-Zionist Jewish visions of liberation.

*This text is adapted from a speech given at the Global Day of Action for Palestine Rally at the Sea Point Promenade, Cape Town South Africa, 13 Jan 2024.

"I think about capitalism as a political and economic system that categorizes groups of people for the purposes of exploiting, excluding, and extracting their labor toward the profit of another group."

- Derecka Purnell, Becoming Abolitionists

At the same time that these [redlining] maps were being made, the insurance industry, for example, was implementing similar data-driven methods for granting (or denying) policies to customers based on their demographics. Zoning laws that were explicitly based on race had already been declared unconstitutional; but within neighborhoods, so-called covenants were nearly as exclusionary and completely legal. This is a phenomenon that political philosopher Cedric Robinson famously termed racial capitalism, and it continues into the present in the form of algorithmically generated credit scores that are consistently biased and in the consolidation of “the 1 percent” through the tax code, to give only two examples of many. What’s more, the benefits of whiteness accrue: “Whiteness retains its value as a ‘consolation prize,’” civil rights scholar Cheryl Harris explains. “It does not mean that all whites will win, but simply that they will not lose.”

Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism

Final quote is from Cheryl L. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993)

Plantation Legacy

“Black body,” whiteness tricking Mixed race, my sister, I embrace!

But your white supremacy, My blackness, it seeks to displace

If we keep these dimensions in mind – the longue durée of colonial racial capitalism, the differential experience of domination, political violence pre-empting an imagined existential threat, the subject as deputy of sovereign violence – we can begin to comprehend how contemporary fascist potentials converge and crystallize into forms of ‘border fascism.’ Whether that border be a physical demarcation to be walled and patrolled, or a set of fractal fault lines running through the body politic and multiply marked and policed, there is no circumventing the fact that, as ‘the cycles of capitalism driving both mass migration and repression converge with the climate crisis’ and a racial-civilizational crisis is spliced with scenarios of scarcity and collapse, the extreme and authoritarian right will map its politics of time – and especially its obsession with epochal loss of privilege and purity – onto the space of territory. It will also, like its twentieth-century forebears, seek to gain control over the borders of the body, to patrol the demarcations between genders and sexes. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has encapsulated the idea of racial capitalism in the formula ‘capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.’ Fascism, we could add, strives violently to enshrine inequality under conditions of crisis by creating simulacra of equality for some – it is a politics and a culture of national-social entrenchment, nourished by racism, in a situation of real or anticipated social catastrophe. As a politics of crisis, it is a limit case of ‘capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism’ (sometimes even creating the mirage of a capitalism without capitalism). Countering the fascist potentials and processes that traverse the global present therefore cannot mean subordinating the practical critique of capitalism to watered-down (un)popular fronts with liberals or conservatives. A ‘progressive’ neoliberalism – the one that lies in the back of most mainstream denunciations of fascism – is defined by the production and reproduction of inequalities and exclusions inconsistently accompanied by formalistic and formulaic commitments to rights, diversity and difference. Those who make common cause with it will have to do so in the awareness that they are ‘manning the imperial gates,’ allying with the cause to ward off its effects. Whoever is not willing to talk about anti-capitalism should also keep quiet about anti-fascism. The latter, capaciously understood, is not just a matter of resisting the worst, but will always be inseparable from the collective forging of ways of living that can undo the lethal romances of identity, hierarchy and domination that capitalist crisis throws up with such grim regularity. [x]

an excerpt published on literary hub from alberto toscano's late fascism: race, capitalism, and the politics of crisis (2023)

In this episode of Solarpunk Presents, Ariel sits down with John Okhiulu from the Decolonizing Wealth Project to talk about the role of philanthropy in addressing racial capitalism and reparations, and how the DWP is working to change the narrative around charitable giving and wealth-transfer. Also, John tells us about how he personally found himself in the world of philanthropy, as well as his vision of a solarpunk future.

To learn more, visit decolonizingwealth.com, read about its founder Edgar Villanueva on his site, or follow the organization for updates on their Twitter @decolonizwealth.

Connect with Solarpunk Magazine at solarpunkmagazine.com and on Twitter @solarpunklitmag

Connect with Solarpunk Presents Podcast on Twitter @SolarpunkP, Mastodon @[email protected], or at our blog https://solarpunkpresents.com/

Connect with Ariel at her blog, on Twitter at @arielletje, and on Mastodon @[email protected]

Connect with Christina at her blog, on Twitter @xtinadlr, and on Mastodon @[email protected]

Have you ever heard of racial capitalism

Yes, I have.

In fact, Cedric Robinson - who coined the term in 1983 - was a frequent participant and occasional presenter at the Colloquium on Work, Labor, and Political Econony that I regularly attended when I was a graduate student at UCSB.

I can't say that I knew him particularly well, but he was always very insightful and I'm glad I had a chance to learn a little from him before his passing.

"CANADIANS BEAT JUNGLE, SNAKES, TO BUILD WAR-VITAL RAILROAD," Porcupine Advance (Timmins). August 26, 1943. Section 1, page 2. --- Canada's Plane Programme force opening of new Bauxite Mines in British Guiana - Roadbed Kept Disappearing into Swamp, Manager says - 40-mile Road took Year to Complete ---- Montreal, Aug. 24. - Canadian-born engineers have just completed constructing a railroad through forty miles of steaming Jungle in British Guiann, and "they had first to kick the snakes out of the way and then lay the roadbed over and over again he cause the gravel kept disappearing into the swamp," says F. L. Parsons, general manager of the Demarara Bauxite Company, Ltd., who oversaw the job.

Aluminum plants in Canada, turning out the metal which keeps the United Nations flying, forced construction of the new railroad, says Mr. Parsons, now visiting this city. "It taken four tons of bauxite to make one ton of aluminum and your Canadian plants have been eating up the mineral at such a pace that down in South America we have had to open new bauxite mines. We now have to strip from the mine site an overburden of earth up to 100 feet thick.

"It took a year to build those forty miles of road. It runs from Mackenzie, where we crush, wash and dry the bauxite, to a spot in the jungle called Ituni. We had unskilled labor. And we had to deal with the mud, the snakes, and sometimes an ocelot, which is a South American tiger.

"This job has added to the reputation of Canadians, which is already high in South America. They like us down there because we treat the people well. For instance, our colored boys like to travel by train so we give them free rides on the railroad in our Pullmans - old freight cars with the sides out and benches in. And we take good care of our white people, of course. Recently we found it necessary to build a swimming pool for them as they cannot bathe in the river with safety because of a freshwater shark called the piranha, a vicious little brute about eighteen inches long, nearly all mouth and three rows of teeth. It bites off fingers and toes. In gangs this fish even brings down cows drinking in the river. It's a curse.

"Now we're ready to operate our new road, which the people of British Guiana foresee will ultimately lead to opening up back country full of riches. I hope Canada will follow up the good impression her engineers and other technicians have been making down there. Recently, the Daily Chronicle of Georgetown, said: "Taking a retrospective glance, one is bound to say that the history of industrial, economic and social development in this country in the past decade cannot the written without allotting priority of place to the Canadians, our greatest Empire cousins in the Western Hemisphere.

"The job Canadians are doing to the south can, I believe, be built into a lot of good post-war business."

Cedric Robinson challenged us to think about the role of Black radical theorists and activists in shaping social and cultural histories that inspire us to link our ideas and our political practices to deep critiques of racial capitalism. I am glad that he lived long enough to get a sense of how younger generations of scholars and activists have begun to take up his notion of a Black Radical Tradition. In Black Marxism, he developed an important genealogy that pivoted around the work of C. L. R. James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright. If one looks at his work as a whole, including Black Movements in America and e Anthropology of Marxism, as H. L. T. Quan has pointed out, we cannot fail to apprehend how central women have been to the forging of a Black Radical Tradition. Quan writes that when asked about why there is such an enormous focus on the role of women and resistance in his body of work, Robinson replies, “Why not? All resistance, in effect, manifests in gender, manifests as gender. Gender is indeed both a language of oppression [and] a language of resistance.”

Angela Davis in an interview by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin in Verso Books Blog. Angela Davis: An Interview on the Futures of Black Radicalism

"The concept associated with Black Marxism that I find most productive and most potentially transformative is the concept of racial capitalism…. Global capitalism cannot be adequately comprehended if the racial dimension of capitalism is ignored."

Futures of Black Radicalism. Edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin

“Just as for much of the 20th century the post office stood, in the eyes of working-class African-American communities, as the very paradigm of stable, secure, but also respectable and community service oriented employment, so after Reagan it came to be pictured as embodying all the supposed degradation, violence, drug abuse, and inefficiency of a welfare state that was viewed in deeply racist terms.

This identification of African-Americans both with a stuffy bureaucrat, and with scary random violence, appears again and again in US popular culture – the rarely, it’s true, both at the same time. It is a strange, repetitive feature of action movies that the infuriating go-by-the-rules boss of the maverick hero is almost invariably Black.”

David Graeber, Utopia of Rules, 162

Syracusecovenants.com

Showing racist housing covenants in Syracuse, New York and how they connect to capitalism, imperialism, and radical social movements

Epistolary (on carceral islands) Performance A performance addressing the history and development of island prisons across the globe through the colonial project of the British Empire. The work travels from Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, to outposts of ‘empyre’ such as Spike Island, Ireland, and to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. The performance will take the form of a sonically expansive, trans-historical poem-letter addressed to ancestors incarcerated for anti-colonial revolt. Raha considers what the rise and fall of these carceral islands can teach us about contemporary abolitionist struggles, from a transfeminist perspective. 

Nat Raha