• What is happening with the Cerrejón mine and the communities in La Guajira is an example of what Eduardo Gudynas calls ‘extrahections’², a term that refers to the violent ‘appropriation of natural resources’ which involves the violation of human rights and the rights of nature. ‘There are many examples where extraction has led to such violations, such as harm to human health caused by pollution, the forced displacement of communities and others, including the assassination of social leaders’, Gudynas says.
• At the turn of the century, high prices for raw materials on international markets stimulated growth in export-oriented extractive activities. This so-called ‘super cycle’ put even more pressure on the affected territories and communities. Resistance grew, led mainly by indigenous and peasant movements, as well as social organisations from the cities. The level of conflict intensified throughout Latin America, as did state-sponsored repression, the criminalisation of protest and the assassination of environmental and social leaders. Maristella Svampa calls this the era of ‘neoextractivism’.³
• Changes in international prices and the growth of the Chinese economy  reshaped many Latin American government budgets. Around 2010, governments began to promote more projects of mega-mining, extraction of conventional and unconventional fossil fuels, agribusiness expansion and the construction of mega-dams. They also began to build infrastructure related to extractive operations, such as highways for transporting exports. The fall in commodity prices in 2013 and 2014 exacerbated the intensification and expansion of resource extraction to order to compensate for loss of export earnings. Consequently, there were more socioenvironmental conflicts and violent repression of communities in extractive zones.

• The assassination of environmental leaders during this period were also cause for alarm. Global Witness reports that between 2002 and 2013, 908 such murders were reported worldwide, of which 760 – 83% – were in Latin America. In 2016, over half of the 200 activists killed were in this region.

   

  “Extractivism is a structural feature of capitalism as a system of world accumulation. For this accumulation to take place, it is necessary that there be sacrificial, colonial zones”, explains Argentinean sociologist Horacio Machado.
• The ‘re-primarisation of the region’s economy’ exacerbated the ‘dynamics of dispossession and pillaging of land, resources and territories for progress. This process reproduces a pattern that dates back to colonial times in which the region was a source of the world’s raw materials. Today, each country extracts and exports what cumulatively represent a huge range of natural resources. And just as in colonial times, this extraction involves violence and destroys territories. The operators of this capitalist extractivism are mostly transnational corporations (TNCs) working in partnership with the state, whose role is to provide security and generate favourable economic conditions for foreign investment in this kind of activity.

• For Oscar Campanini⁶, from the the Bolivian Centre for Documentation and Information (CEDIB), “the state is essential to carry out extractivism.” First, because it needs to make operations viable through the normative and laws. It is also a protagonist through state-owned companies. But mainly, it is the state that resolves the contradiction in conflicts through violence exercised by state apparatuses, such as the police and the armed forces.

   

  In recent decades, several Latin American governments have created tough police units designed to control protests and intervene in socio-environmental conflicts. One such unit is the Mobile Anti-Riot Squadron (ESMAD for its acronym in Spanish) in Colombia. Created in 1999, this unit is in charge of ‘riot and crowd control, blockades, accompanying evictions from public or private spaces that occur in urban or rural areas on national territory’.

   

  ESMAD has become notorious for its brutality, especially when repressing indigenous and peasant communities who resist eviction from their land to clear the way for mining, oil exploitation and the construction of mega-dams. They are consistently deployed in the midst of socio-environmental conflicts. In Colombia, 25% of the conflicts reported between 2001 and 2011 were related to oil, gold and coal.
• In Peru, for example, Earth Rights International (ERI) has brought to light how the law ‘empowers the Peruvian National Police… to create agreements with extractive companies that allow the Police to provide private security services within the facilities and other areas … of extractive projects in return for profit’. According to ERI, at least 138 agreements were signed between 1995 and 2018, of which 109 had been signed before 2017 and 29 were still in effect in 2019. In effect, the state is turning into a private police force for transnational capital.
• Gigantic TNCs, such as Anglo American, BHP, Glencore, Southern,  Newmont, China Minmetals Corporation, have shares in operating companies that have signed agreements with the police in recent years. The companies provide the police logistical support, basic services, communications equipment, food, vehicles, internet, office supplies and more. According to ERI, between 2010 and 2018, the police were paid 45.5 million soles (more than US$ 12.2 million) for their security services.
• These battalions function by order of the government, but companies can also hire their services. In 2014, the existence of several security contracts between extractive companies and the mining and energy battalions came to light. The Colombian government justified them by referring to the internal armed conflict. Investigations by the Colombian organisation Tierra Digna found that as of 2015, there were at least 21 special energy and road battalions in Colombia. It also revealed that between 2001 and 2013, 103 contracts were signed for which companies handed over the sum of 45 billion Colombian pesos to the state for the battalions’ services (around US$ 12 million). Companies, such as Glencore, Anglo American, BHP, AngloGold Ashanti, Drummond and others, have paid for these services.
• It is clear that the establishment of this entire legal and economic architecture has been made possible through the corporate capture of the state – a mechanism that TNCs use to exert influence to implement laws for their own benefit in various domains, which range from the relaxation of environmental standards to security laws. ‘Legislation by dispossession’, as Miller Dussán of the Association of People Affected by the Quimbo Megadam (ASOQUIMBO) in Colombia calls it. However, it is important to note that this legal framework that prioritises extractivism is not just limited to serving private corporate interest, it also serves state-owned companies.

• This political, economic and judicial framework can  be situated in what William Robinson calls the ‘transnational stage of global capitalism’, which is characterised by the rise of ‘truly transnational capital’ and the integration of countries into the ‘globalized production and financial system’ and ‘global circuits of accumulation’. In this stage, the new ‘transnational state’ generates the conditions for globalised accumulation, promoting regulatory frameworks that facilitate it, financing the infrastructure that transnational capital needs and becoming an instrument of coercion and control.

   

  In the era of transnational capital, a supranational power exerts ‘de facto’ power over state sovereignty in the form of  a global regulatory structure based on a vast network of free trade and investment protection agreements. In practice, this governs and regulates trade and the global economy via the ‘Lex Mercatoria’, which shapes the global economic and legal order in favour of transnational capital. This economic order also “overprotects” companies when popular resistance or public policies for the benefit of the population affect their interests. It is not by chance that most of the Investor-state dispute settlement cases (ISDS) lawsuits of transnationals against states, are in extractive sectors, mainly mining.
• This new ‘wave of dispossession’ has intensified extractive activities, triggering resistance from people living in the affected territories and an increase in conflict, repression and violence on the part of the transnational state. This is what Robinson calls ‘militarized accumulation’ or ‘accumulation by repression’.

• ‘Defending human rights is hard… especially in La Guajira because of the coal mining’, says Jakeline Romero, an indigenous member of Force of Wayúu Women, an organisation that also resists the expansion of coal mining. ‘In our organisation, we have had to endure many situations of violence including threats, stigmatisation and false accusations’..

   

  Front Line Defenders say that ‘44% of the attacks between 2015 and 2019 [in Colombia] were against defenders who expressed concern with the operations of five companies… Cerrejón is one of them’. Moreover, this company has a security agreement with a ‘mining and energy battalion’.

• In the case of Peru, repression has also increased in areas of resistance to mining activities. The situation is particularly critical in the southern Andes, which includes the most mining concessions in the country and the so-called ‘mining corridor’. Minerals pass through the corridor to the point of export. Most of the extractive companies that have security agreements with the police have projects in this ‘mining corridor’.

   

  This area, Espinar province, is home to the Antapaccay copper, gold and silver mine, owned by the Swiss-based transnational mining corporation, Glencore, and is now constantly militarised as a result of successive ‘states of emergency’, a legal provision that suspends the communities’ rights and protests despite the mines environmental impact on water, air and land. High amounts of heavy metals have been found in the blood samples of dozens of adults and children in the communities.
• After the 2012 protests in Espinar, the state prosecuted three social leaders charged with instigation and other crimes. The trial lasted more than eight years and during that time, the affected people were forced to bear the costs in terms of economic resources and their time, not to mention the psychological and social impacts on them and their families. Rodrigo Lauracio from Red Muqui says that in some cases these processes are driven by companies and in others directly by the state. “It seeks to prevent future social protests and intimidate organizations that question extractive projects,” he says.

• ‘We are seeing neoliberal traditional extractivism and a new kind of progressive neoextractivism, where the state plays a more active role in the capture of the surplus and the distribution, which is legitimised, but that produces the same impacts on the environment and rights’, Gudynas explains.

   

  One of the cases in Bolivia that drew the most attention was the TIPNIS conflict. In August 2011, 1,000 indigenous people began a 400-kilometre march from the eastern department of Beni to the seat of government in La Paz. The goal was to demand a halt to the ‘unconsulted’ construction of the highway that was to go through the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS), which is home to many Amazonian indigenous peoples. The communities were seeking to prevent the incursion of extractive activities into the nature reserve.

   

  The government discredited the march in several ways by linking it to particular NGOs and other political groups. In the end, the government violently repressed the march when it was 80 kilometres from La Paz, initially ignoring national and international criticism but eventually forced to abandon the project temporarily. 

• The growing violence associated with extractivism exposes the systemic crisis engulfing the transnational capitalist model as well as the planet’s ecological limits. Thus, it is a good opportunity to think about building a new civilisational system. 

   

  These proposals range from advocating for just energy transitions, changing the productive matrix, to rescuing and articulating the experiences of communities that live based on their ancestral knowledge about the land. Other proposals to curb extractive activities promoted by the communities have emerged from the popular consultations and assemblies that have been developed successfully in Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina and other countries.

15 more annotations...

• What it might mean to take seriously the unremarkable, the boring, and the non-oppositional as resistance? What if we were to move beyond form as ‘the’ marker of resistance? Such a conceptual shift would not flatten forms of resistance; rather, as the following contributions demonstrate, expanding resistance beyond oppositional forms would enrich and enliven our geographical accounts. We are not trying to foster a momentary illusion of conceptual closure, resolve the troubles of writing resistance geographies, still the so-called ‘chaos’ of the sub-discipline, or fix our dissenting taxonomies. Rather, this Intervention sits with the conceptual—that is, also the political—antagonisms within and between our terms.
• Katz suggested that people responded to challenges through ‘three fluid and overlapping categories … call[ed] the three Rs: resilience, reworking and resistance, each carried out at a range of scales and by a number of differently situated actors’ (240–241). For Katz, resistance draws upon ‘oppositional consciousness’ and aims to bring about ‘emancipatory change’ (251). Reworking alters ‘the organization but not the polarization of power relations’ (247). Resilience refers to people's endurance, persistence, and the agency to take action (albeit non-transformative) to better withstand their situation.
• Her method of ‘countertopography’ identified the global impacts of neoliberal capitalist processes and offered a polymorphous framework for understanding people's actions in both communities. Katz's triadic framework—resilience, reworking, and resistance—elucidated how communities and individuals manoeuvre differently in place against oppressive or exploitative forces, entities, and people.
• In this Intervention, we play within the chaos at the conceptual margins of resistance within political geography. We revisit Cindi Katz’s (2004) influential articulations of resistance, reworking, resilience, and revanchism 15 years after the publication of Growing Up Global.
• Katz's thinking emerged from a moment of analytical diversification within human geography; feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories were stirring energetic debates about power, hegemony, and agency. Watershed scholarship on the prosaic forms of resistance, the micro-politics of everyday resistance, and the ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott, 1985) increasingly framed resistance practice and praxis as diverse, ephemeral, subtle, sporadic, quiet, and banal.
• In this Intervention, we play within the chaos at the conceptual margins of resistance within political geography. We revisit Cindi Katz’s (2004) influential articulations of resistance, reworking, resilience, and revanchism 15 years after the publication of Growing Up Global.
• Katz's thinking emerged from a moment of analytical diversification within human geography; feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories were stirring energetic debates about power, hegemony, and agency. Watershed scholarship on the prosaic forms of resistance, the micro-politics of everyday resistance, and the ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott, 1985) increasingly framed resistance practice and praxis as diverse, ephemeral, subtle, sporadic, quiet, and banal.
• Her method of ‘countertopography’ identified the global impacts of neoliberal capitalist processes and offered a polymorphous framework for understanding people's actions in both communities. Katz's triadic framework—resilience, reworking, and resistance—elucidated how communities and individuals manoeuvre differently in place against oppressive or exploitative forces, entities, and people.
• Katz suggested that people responded to challenges through ‘three fluid and overlapping categories … call[ed] the three Rs: resilience, reworking and resistance, each carried out at a range of scales and by a number of differently situated actors’ (240–241). For Katz, resistance draws upon ‘oppositional consciousness’ and aims to bring about ‘emancipatory change’ (251). Reworking alters ‘the organization but not the polarization of power relations’ (247). Resilience refers to people's endurance, persistence, and the agency to take action (albeit non-transformative) to better withstand their situation.
• What it might mean to take seriously the unremarkable, the boring, and the non-oppositional as resistance? What if we were to move beyond form as ‘the’ marker of resistance? Such a conceptual shift would not flatten forms of resistance; rather, as the following contributions demonstrate, expanding resistance beyond oppositional forms would enrich and enliven our geographical accounts. We are not trying to foster a momentary illusion of conceptual closure, resolve the troubles of writing resistance geographies, still the so-called ‘chaos’ of the sub-discipline, or fix our dissenting taxonomies. Rather, this Intervention sits with the conceptual—that is, also the political—antagonisms within and between our terms.
• We take inspiration from Katz's work on minor theory (1996, 2017). Minor theory is not a coherent or unified theory, but rather describes an approach to knowledge production that is never comfortable, never at home. A minor theory of resistance, therefore, does not delineate what is ‘minor’ or ‘major’, but understands that all well-trodden paths preclude others (see Krishnan herein). Attention to the minor (which may include resistance as unsettling, contradictory, persisting, enduring, reworking) does not diminish these paths-less-taken, or hold them to a different scale – but reworks such epistemologies of resistance from within.
• Reading resistance through minor theory foregrounds those seemingly mundane moments that may be boring, ‘everywhere’ or unremarkable, but also ‘compel [s] political gestures for the current moment when so much feels foreclosed’ (Katz, 2017, p. 597).
• Katz arrives at these distinctions, in part, out of frustration with the ‘voyeurism’ in academic accounts seeking resistance (2004). A minor theory of resistance also continues this critique by refusing to determine in advance who or what ‘counts’ as resistance. Here, a multiplicity of resistance is an expansion rather than a reduction of its ‘political’ potential (Nowicki herein).
• Feminist geographers have critiqued masculine tropes of resistance, including the activist-subjects who stand in clear opposition to manifestations of power (c.f. Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010).
• The resulting set of critical, and sometimes contradictory, contributions alternately advocate for Katz's resistance concepts within feminist political geographies (Nowicki; van Teijlingen) and calls for re-elaborated political concepts, including slow dissent (Murrey), refusal (Krishnan; Fannin and MacLeavy) and linguistic defiance (Daley).
• The productive friction between Murrey's and van Teijlingen's reconsiderations of the geographies of extraction and resistance, for example, reveals some of the complexities and emotional textures of working in communities struggling to get by in the context of global coloniality. The discord between their theorisations also opens space to consider how a scholar's distinctive ethical and theoretical orientations are made explicit as we knowingly theorise resistance differently, without attempt at consensus.
• I argue that decolonial geographies of resistance raise questions about the conceptualisation of resistance as contingent upon oppositional consciousness, offering instead an understanding of resistance as re-existence within environments confined by intergenerational coloniality. In rethinking oppositional consciousness, I address the potentials of decolonial resistance geographies that are knowingly, wilfully, and imperfectly romantic.
• To these ends, I drew sustenance from Katz's sensitive self-(re)positioning beyond disaffected anonymity and her reflections on the political limitations of working and writing at a distance from the communities to which she was accountable.
• Focusing on the longue durée reframes resistance as enduring and supple, rather than episodic. This extended timeline of dissent foregrounds intergenerational patterning and sharing. Through slow dissent, people often experience the past as embodied: people's memories and knowledges of previous violence, exclusion, and repression are central for fostering expansive, diffuse, and pluriversal resistances in the present (and in anticipation of liveable futures).
• However, the decolonial point of departure for understanding resistance is not oppositional consciousness, but creative presence-making beyond the parameters of coloniality. Padini Nirmal (2016, p. 197) explains that resistance is a ‘conjoined component of decoloniality where that which is decolonial is already in resistance’. Resistance draws from possibilities generated by and through vulnerability, withdrawal, active being and ‘continuing presence’ (Nirmal, 2016, p. 197). The Indigenous defence of life, as well as Indigenous active presence in the face of colonial and extractive violence, are forms of decolonial dissent. The decolonial refrain ‘existence is resistance’ clarifies this shared refusal of coloniality:
• Decolonial healing requires building to re-exist rather than energy to only resist. Resistance implies that you accept the rules of the game imposed upon you, and you resist. Re-existence means that you delink from the rules imposed upon you, you create your own rules communally and, therefore you re-exist affirming yourself as a human being. (Mignolo, 2016, p. viii)
• Moving beyond oppositional consciousness encourages us to turn away from the agency/passivity dichotomy as well as the opposition/vulnerability dyad that have troubled resistance studies. It shifts us away from debates about people's intentions or internal objectives, which have long been central to considerations of oppositional consciousness. The study of consciousness centres on how people see themselves; yet, how scholars attempt to know consciousness (concretely, logistically, and methodologically) remains a matter of debate within the social sciences (e.g. the work of Asef Bayat, 2013). There are significant political and epistemic implications of claiming that scholars can determine and name a person's self-understanding or consciousness. For decolonial scholars, the academic evaluation of the intentionality, truthfulness, or falseness of a person or community's consciousness (or, of course, ‘false consciousness’) perpetuates forms of epistemic and symbolic violence that echo colonial logics and disciplinary tendencies.
• Yet we now see that what began as a powerful internal critique amongst scholars of resistance has been adopted as a wholesale criticism of resistance studies writ large. Anecdotally, I see this tendency in an assortment of banal encounters that make up the academy. My undergraduate students routinely begin reading an article on resistance by first criticizing the author's political affiliations with the social movement being researched as signalling forms of ‘romance’. In conference debates, colleagues hastily renounce emergent and critical work in resistance studies as naïve, subjective, or partial. Through such conventional academic encounters, the term ‘romantic’ blusterously forecloses richer dialogue. Academics working on resistance are positioned in the impossible predicament of continually evincing that their work is not ‘mere romance’. What is more, the critique of resistance-as-romance is not evenly distributed: work carried out by junior, queer, and women of colour scholars is at particular risk of being trivialised by these bad faith judgements.
• In corporate universities, decolonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist work is regularly scorned as naïve and posturing, or political and polemic. Scholars of resistance have become caught in this unworkable position of perpetually needing to defend their work as unromanticised views of resistance. Given these dynamics, I encourage political geographers of resistance—while remaining sensitive to questions of power, the historically patterned and shifting practices of dissent, and structures of domination (Abu-Lughod, 1990)—to rethink the proclivity to dismiss resistance scholarship as ‘romantic’
• A close reading of Katz's work, including her affection and care for the young people in Howa and New York, reveals the possibilities of embracing forms of romance in resistance geographies. Indeed, Katz's work on agency and resistance invites us to pursue forms of wilful romance in our analyses of people's power and collective change.
• The shortcoming I focus on here is that many authors in this field envision power dynamics at the mining frontier as ‘being swung between globally connected resistance movements […] and mining companies (and the state on most occasions)’ (Conde, 2017, p. 87). In this binary view, community responses other than resistance—e.g. inaction, negotiation or support for mining—remain largely unaddressed or explained in terms of ideological obfuscation and co-optation. Some authors depict community members who do not resist mining as docile subordinates or uncritical devotees whose ‘hearts beat at the rhythm of the stock exchange of Toronto’ as they have been ‘colonized’ or even ‘mineralized’ by mining corporations (Machado Aráoz, 2014, pp. 65–66). As a result, the agency of community members is reduced to a particular rendering of resistance.
• Katz's (2004, p.241) attempt to ‘diffuse, if not burst the romance with “resistance”’ by drawing attention to the broad range of messy and contradictory responses of those disenfranchised by global capitalism, thus continues to be a much-needed perspective.
• Oscar, a member of the Shuar – an Indigenous group that has experienced decades, if not ages, of violent settler colonialism, territorial loss, racism and marginalization. He publicly supports the mining project as long as the company grants his community development projects. His negotiations with the company are motivated by his sense of entitlement to the subsoil wealth as an ancestral inhabitant of the region, as well as the strong wish to overthrow the local unequal ethnic hierarchies that derive from settler colonialism, as Oscar explained in an interview: ‘We do not want to be marginalised as we were in the past. We want to be free, to be authoritative’.
• Although they do not resist mining, Oscar and Julia recognize the socio-environmental risks of the mine and their marginal position vis-à-vis corporate and state interests. Based on this awareness, they sometimes embrace mining and at other times seek to ‘recalibrate power relations and/or redistribute resources’ (Katz, 2004, p. 247). Through such assemblages, their actions shape the way in which mining materializes in their community as much as those of the individuals who oppose mining.
• Her conceptual approach opens the analysis of mining conflicts to a range of subjectivities and forms of agency and helps to recognize community actors who do not resist mining as conscious agents who exert power. The stories from the Ecuadorian Amazon, however, also reveal ways in which the analytical merit of Katz's framework can be further enhanced. Among other things, they show that it is vital to not only distinguish between different forms of agency but to also look into how and why these different responses come about. For Oscar and Julia, for example, it was a mix of local histories of colonialism and conflict, notions of belonging and identity politics, social inequalities, corporate discourses, and personal as well as collective aspirations and experiences that brought them to their actions.
• Such an approach is attentive to people's intimate and embodied experiences, engagements and strategies, while acknowledging that these are necessarily open-ended, paradoxical, historically and geographically contingent and changing over time (Asiyanbi et al., 2019; Bagelman & Wiebe, 2017). By tracing these multi-scalar, historical and dynamic webs of power relations and personal motivations, we might be able to better grasp how and why grassroots actors move back and forth between resilience, reworking and resistance in the messiness of everyday life at the mining frontier.
• Katz's work on dissent has been seminal to theorising young people's agency, particularly in the Global South, for she accounts for forms of political subjectivity beyond heroic and spectacular moments of transformation. My own work on hostels in the South Indian city of Chennai has also sought to draw attention to practices such as gallows humour, and ghost-story telling, as sites where young women's political subjectivities are formed and negotiated (Krishnan, 2019).
• The subjects at the heart of the disciplinary regimes of hostels – educated and typically middle-class and upper-caste young women – are the figures that undergird heteronormative and caste-patriarchal visions of national futurity (Krishnan, 2019).
• Hadiya's case highlights the insidious role that hostels have long played in aiding the Indian courts in providing an extra-judicial form of incarceration for non-criminal women. It is hard not to see continuities with the colonial governance of racialised populations as ‘childlike’ subjects.
• As Katz cautions, we should take care not to romanticise the notion of resistance, as ‘we cannot understand oppositional practice or its possible effects if we consider every autonomous act to be an act of resistance’ (2004: 242; see also Murrey herein). And yet, as this intervention argues, we should not dismiss actions that may not directly challenge the destruction of home, but nonetheless establish conditions for wider resistances to grow. Katz's distinctions between resilience, reworking, and resistance are invaluable in understanding how discreet actions connect to wider fights for a universal right to home, without conflating or diminishing individual impacts.

33 more annotations...

• As Michael Ralph and Maya Singhal argue in their critical article “Racial Capitalism,” the influence of this framework is attributable to the 1983 publication of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.³ However, the republication of this text in 2000, with a new preface by the author and a foreword written by Robin D. G. Kelley, is perhaps more significant in dating this conceptual turn, given that the overwhelming majority of the scholarship on racial capitalism has been published in the past twenty years.
• Capitalism, Robinson contends, did not represent a radical rupture from or a negation of feudalism, but rather an extension of its racialism into “the larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and economic relations.”⁵
• Robinson argues that the primary distinction between feudalism and capitalism was in “the increasingly uneven character of development among European peoples themselves and the world beyond” and in its consolidation of race in the nineteenth century as the preeminent “rationalization for the domination, exploitation, and/or extermination of non-‘Europeans.'”⁸
• They rightfully note that, in his sweeping rejection of Marxism, Robinson overlooks the ways that numerous racialized radicals, from Frantz Fanon to Sylvia Wynter, “have fashioned Marxism into a critical method concerned with historicizing capital and theorizing dialectics.”¹⁰
• Racial capitalism, they assert, merely analyzes the racial foundations of capitalism while overlooking the “strict forms of discipline based on gender, sexuality, race, national origin, ability, character, and intelligence”—considerations better addressed by “forensics of capital.”¹¹ Their assumption is that, in emphasizing race, other ascriptive categories necessarily fall by the wayside.
• However, one need only look to the work of the Black Communist leader and theorist Claudia Jones to see how a focus on the racial foundations of capitalism can open up, as opposed to foreclose, more complex analyses.
• in placing the history, conditions, and experiences of African descendants at the center of their analysis and critique of capitalist accumulation, Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Ford, the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, Esther V. Cooper Jackson, Walter Rodney, and James Boggs, among many others, approximated theories of racial capitalism that were sufficiently sophisticated “to explain the broad range of dynamics we seek to study.”¹³
• Stated differently, Blackness is a capacious category of surplus value extraction essential to an array of political-economic functions, including accumulation, disaccumulation, debt, planned obsolescence, and absorption of the burdens of economic crises.¹⁶ At the same time, Blackness is the quintessential condition of disposability, expendability, and devalorization.
• Drawing on the intellectual production of twentieth-century Black anticapitalists, I theorize modern U.S. racial capitalism as a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation.
• Although the United States is, to use Cox’s terminology, more a “lusty child of an already highly developed capitalism” than an exceptional capitalist power, the nation perfected its techniques of accumulation through its vast natural wealth, large domestic market, imbalance of Northern and Southern economies, and, importantly, through its lack of concern for the political and economic welfare of the overwhelming masses of its population, least of all the descendants of the enslaved.²²
• modern U.S. racial capitalism is rooted in the imbrication of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism. Anti-Blackness describes the reduction of Blackness to a category of abjection and subjection through narrations of absolute biological or cultural difference; ruling-class monopolization of political power; negative and derogatory mass media propaganda; the ascent of discriminatory legislation that maintains and reinscribes inequality, not least various modes of segregation; and social relations in which distrust and antipathy toward those racialized as Black is normalized and in which “interracial mass behavior involving violence assumes a continuously potential danger.”²⁵
• it was asserted that the radical antigovernment stance of a certain class of Negroes was manifested in their “ill-governed reaction toward race rioting,” “threat of retaliatory measures in connection with lynching,” open demand for social equality, identification with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and “outspoken advocacy of the Bolshevik or Soviet doctrine.”²⁹
• “Capitalism…[is] never not racial.… Racial capitalism: a mode of production developed in agriculture, improved by enclosure in the Old World, and captive land and labor in the Americas, perfected in slavery’s time-motion, field factory choreography, its imperative forged on the anvils of imperial war-making monarchs.”³⁰
• Racial capitalism, she continues, “requires all kinds of scheming, including hard work by elites and their compradors in the overlapping and interlocking space-economies of the planet’s surface. They build and dismantle and reconfigure states, moving capacity into and out of the public realm. And they think very hard about money on the move.
• mine being rooted in the political economy of Blackness and the legitimating architectures of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism in the United States.
• Like Alexander, my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism is primarily rooted in (Black) Marxist-Leninists and fellow travelers.
• my theory of modern U.S. racial capitalism is rooted in the work of Black freedom fighters who, as Marxist-Leninists, were able to offer potent and enduring analyses and critiques of the conjunctural entanglements of racialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, on the one hand, and capitalist exploitation and class antagonism on the other hand.³³
• Anti-Blackness thus conceals the inherent contradiction of Blackness—value minus worth—obscuring and distorting its structural location by, as Ralph and Singhal remark, contorting it into only a “debilitated condition.”²⁶ Antiradicalism can be understood as the physical and discursive repression and condemnation of anticapitalist and/or left-leaning ideas, politics, practices, and modes of organizing that are construed as subversive, seditious, and otherwise threatening to capitalist society. These include, but are not limited to, internationalism, anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, peace activism, and antisexism.
• the work of Black Marxists like James Ford, Walter Rodney, Amílcar Cabral, and Paul Robeson offer me those same intellectual, historical, and theoretical resources. Finally, I agree with Alexander that the resolution to racial capitalism is antiracist socialism, not a cultural-metaphysical Black radical tradition.
• defining features of modern U.S. racial capitalism—war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, labor superexploitation, and property by dispossession.
• Anti-Blackness and antiradicalism function as the legitimating architecture of modern U.S. racial capitalism, which includes rationalizing discourses, cultural narratives, technologies of repression, legal structures, and social practices that inform and are informed by racial capitalism’s political economy.
• War and militarism also perpetuate the endless construction of “threats,” primarily in racialized and socialist states, against which to defend progress, prosperity, freedom, and security. The manufacturing of conflict legitimates the mobilization of extraordinary violence to expropriate untold resources that produce relations of underdevelopment, dependency, extraversion, and disarticulation in the Global South.
• For white folk to insist upon the right to manage their own ancestral lands, free from the domination of tyrants, domestic and foreign, is variously described as “democracy” and “self-determination.” For Negroes, Egyptians and Hindus to seek the same thing is impudence.… Truly has it been said that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the ‘Color Line.'” And wars are not likely to end; in fact, they are likely to be wider and more terrible—so long as this theory of white domination seeks to hold down the majority of the world’s people under the iron heel of racial oppression.³⁵
• Moreover, this national unity was strengthened through the disrespect and dehumanization of the racialized toilers and peasants in the plundered colonies that mitigated the exploitation and impoverishment of the white working class in imperial countries.
• Insofar as this admonishment applied as much to the United States as to European imperialists, beyond the international proletariat, it was the darker peoples and nations of the world who would challenge racial capitalism, not least “the twenty-five million grandchildren of the European slave trade…and first of all the ten million black folk in the United States.”⁴⁰
• For Patterson, such expropriation by domination was the basis of “racist contamination that has spread throughout the United States.”⁴³ We Charge Genocide further conveyed that expropriation by domination, a central element of modern U.S. racial capitalism, was more than a domestic concern because such practices “at home must inevitably create racist commodities for export abroad—must inevitably tend toward war.”⁴⁴
• The entrapment of Black women in domestic labor throughout the twentieth century—a function of their “triple oppression”—is perhaps the most glaring example of labor superexploitation under modern U.S. racial capitalism. In 1936, the lifelong Black radical Louise Thompson explained that Black women’s superexploitation in the capitalist mode of production was based on their race, sex, and subordination in the labor market.⁴⁹ That same year, Black militants Marvel Cooke and Ella Baker published an article titled “The Bronx Slave Market” in which they studied triple oppression as it related to Black domestic workers. Cooke and Baker explained that the entanglements of racism, sex-based labor subordination, and structural poverty were deeply intensified by the Great Depression and forced Black domestic workers to pauperize their labor for the abysmal wage of less than thirty cents an hour.
• her master’s thesis, “The Negro Woman Domestic Worker,” that the exclusion of Black women from trade unions and the organized labor movement reified their superexploitation by excluding them from labor protections afforded to other classes of workers.
• Black women’s triple oppression resulted in their responsibility as partial or sole breadwinner, their maltreatment in the labor market, and, consequently, their active participation in the social, political, and economic life of the Black community. As such, they were “the real active forces—the organizers and the workers” whose structural realities primed them to vehemently challenge modern U.S. racial capitalism.⁵²
• In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson powerfully illustrates that the United States did not innovate capitalist pursuits shot through with racial subjection and oppression. Nonetheless, “the fact that western hemisphere capitalism was racist from the moment of inception is a distinguishing feature of U.S. historical development.”⁵³
• Furthermore, theorizing modern U.S. racial capitalism offers an epistemological intervention by drawing on the knowledge, worldview, and critical interpretation of Black anticapitalists who understand the integral relationship between capitalist accumulation, racial hierarchy, perpetual war, imperialism, expropriation, and superexploitation. In doing so, it fundamentally challenges intellectual McCarthyism, which erases, silences, distorts, and/or discredits the intellectual production of African descendants deemed subversive, un-American, and threatening to national security for dedicating their lives to challenging these conjunctures.

29 more annotations...