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More than ever, we must face the question: can the peoples of Earth, doomed to share a ravaged planet, learn to live together in ways that encourage our species to flourish in an emergent future? The concept of a Great Transition invites us to reimagine such a future by exploring what might be possible, which requires an initial willingness of the imagination to let go of the trappings of the present without engaging in wishful thinking. Such a balancing act is not as straightforward as it sounds. What was science fiction a generation ago is increasingly entering the realm of the possible, and even the feasible in the near future. It is an opportune time to explore the seedlings of possibility sprouting around us, inscribing a more hopeful mapping of the human future in the prevailing collective consciousness.

On What is Possible

The external standpoint and the foundation in identity that give such epistemological critiques their power can also, as many of the practitioners are keenly aware, prove to be a limitation. Donna Haraway, for example, warns that any search for a standpoint outside, based in identity, is tinged with the dream of returning to a Garden of Eden, a site of absolute purity.79 Another way of posing this danger, to use the slogan we derived from Fanon earlier, is that such projects risk getting stuck in antimodernity. In epistemology as in politics, we need to focus on the forces of critique and resistance that are inside modernity and from this internal position discover the means to create an alternative. The passage from anti- to altermodernity, in the epistemological context, must lead to a biopolitical conception of rationality.

Two intuitions serve us as initial guides for exploring the terrain of biopolitical reason. First, the experience of the common provides a framework for breaking the epistemological impasse created by the opposition of the universal and the particular. Once we have critiqued the false universals that characterize dominant modern rationality, any new attempt to promote universal truths is rightly viewed with suspicion, because the critique has unmasked not only those specific claims to universality but also the transcendent or transcendental basis on which universal truths are proclaimed. It is not sufficient, though, in reaction to this, simply to limit ourselves to particular knowledges with no claim to truth. The common cuts diagonally across the opposition between the universal and the particular. Normal usage of the terms “common sense” and “common knowledge” captures some of what we have in mind insofar as they extend beyond the limitations of the particular and grasp a certain social generality, but these terms generally view the common as something passive, already given in society. We concentrate instead, following Spinoza’s conception of “common notions,” on the production and productivity of the common through collective social practices. Like the universal, the common lays claim to truth, but rather than descending from above, this truth is constructed from below.80

All the objective conditions are in place: biopolitical labor constantly exceeds the limits of capitalist command; there is a breach in the social relation of capital opening the possibility for biopolitical labor to claim its autonomy; the foundations of its exodus are given in the existence and constant creation of the common; and capital’s mechanisms of exploitation and control increasingly contradict and fetter biopolitical productivity. But there are also countervailing objective conditions: new capitalist mechanisms find novel ways to expropriate and privatize the common, and the old social institutions ceaselessly corrupt it. Where does all this leave us? Analysis of objective conditions take us this far but no further. Capitalist crisis does not proceed automatically to collapse. The multiplicity of singularities that produce and are produced in the biopolitical field of the common do not spontaneously accomplish exodus and construct their autonomy. Political organization is needed to cross the threshold and generate political events. The kairos—the opportune moment that ruptures the monotony and repetitiveness of chronological time— has to be grasped by a political subject.

We propose the multitude as an adequate concept for organizing politically the project of exodus and liberation because we are convinced that, in the current biopolitical context even more than before, traditional organizational forms based on unity, central leadership, and hierarchy are neither desirable nor effective.39 The multitude proposition has now been debated in intellectual and political circles for several years, and we can take advantage of these discussions to evaluate and refine the concept. The critiques and challenges we have found most productive center generally on two fundamental questions: one regarding the multitude’s capability to take coherent political action and a second about the progressive or liberatory character of its actions.

One of the axioms inscribed in Foucault’s work is that where powers are continually made and remade, bodies resist. Hardt and Negri (2009) underline the dual nature of power as one of the distinguishing markers of Foucault’s theory of power at large, which was developed in Discipline and Punish (1991) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1990). In this duality of power, firstly, one is given the complex ways in which the disciplinary regimes exercise social command through a diffuse network of dispositifs, which might be thought of as the material, affective, and cognitive apparatuses that work on the production of subjectivity. Secondly, one is immediately provided with “other to power” or even “another power” which remains categorically unnamed. The latter could be best defined, according to Hardt and Negri, ‘an alternative production of subjectivity, which not only resists power but also seeks autonomy from it’ (2009: 56).

Recognising that power in Foucault is always double, Negri and Hardt invite readers to reconsider the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. The authors argue that ‘history cannot be understood merely as the horizon on which biopower configures reality through domination’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 31). There always flourish spaces of confrontation against the power that is imposed on subjects, that is, ‘the power over life’ (Revel, 2002). In other words, the power that administers and produces life is continually confronted by a resistance which derives from the desire to feel, think, and exist differently. This resistance activating desire is defined as ‘power of life’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 57). Hardt and Negri thus expose the difference between two powers; biopower is separate in its form from the power of life with which we move towards emancipation. In order to stress this fundamental difference, Hardt and Negri adopt a terminological distinction between biopower and biopolitics which remained somewhat veiled in Foucault [1]: ‘the former could be defined as the power over life and the latter as the power of life to resist and determine an alternative production of subjectivity’ (2009: 57).

It would be a serious error to reduce the entire planetary ecological emergency signaled by the rise of the Anthropocene simply to climate change, as the other critical planetary boundaries, each of which represent an Earth System emergency, are being crossed as well, with immense dangers for humanity. For example, the biodiversity crisis stemming mainly from the destruction of the world’s ecosystems is arguably as serious as climate change. 45 Nevertheless, climate change currently threatens irreversible change on a scale and with a speed that has no counterpart. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are now “higher than at any time in at least two million years,” heating up the entire earth via the greenhouse effect. 46

Part 1 of Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, published in August 2021 by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), indicated that even in the case of SSP1-1.9, the most optimistic scenario in its Shared Socioeconomic Pathways—in which carbon emissions would peak globally by 2025, a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature over preindustrial levels would be avoided until 2040, and the goal of net-zero carbon emissions would be reached by 2050—the consequences for global humanity would nevertheless be catastrophic by the measure of all historical precedents. 47 This would include various “compound” events of extreme weather, sometimes known as “global weirding” (including record heatwaves, persistent droughts, out-of-control wildfires, megastorms, torrential rainfall, unprecedented floods, glacial melts, and sea level rise), affecting every region and ecosystem of the world. The second-best scenario (also optimistic), in which global average temperature would be stabilized at less than 2°C (at around 1.7°C)—is a sort of last hope scenario and carries with it dangers disproportionately greater. 48 The other three scenarios are almost unthinkable, although more consistent with current trends, threatening the very existence of civilization and humanity itself.

What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that “the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt”; in Italy, “the collapse of the establishment” in the March elections has even brought talk of a “barbarian arrival”, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.

But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian “solutions” are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious “purification” (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).

Despite the raised awareness around the issue of reparations, the political will to enact a federal plan is currently lacking. H.R. 40, a bill to establish the Commission to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans, is an important first step toward passing such a federal plan, but has yet to be brought to the House floor for a vote in its 32-year history. In the absence of a federal plan, various states and localities have convened their own commissions and, in some cases, enacted their own reparations-style plans at the sub-federal level (i.e, below the federal level). California’s Reparations Task Force represents the largest state effort to investigate reparations thus far, but cities like Evanston, Illinois, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Providence, Rhode Island have all investigated and worked toward creating and implementing programs under the auspices of reparations. As more states and localities attempt to design reparations plans, it is important that they keep certain principles in mind to ensure that the plans are effective as reparations. There is an important difference between policy that is simply “good” for Black people or people of color more broadly, and policy that is reparative. Darity and Mullen identify three criteria for an effective federal reparations plan. The plan must include acknowledgement and apology for the harm committed; it must provide material redress for that harm; and it must bring closure through a mutual understanding between the beneficiaries (white Americans) and victims (Black Americans) of the oppressive systems that were implemented. In this post, I expand these criteria slightly to provide guidelines for states and localities that are attempting to create their own reparations-style plans in the absence of a federal effort. In addition to acknowledgement and redress, I suggest that any sub-federal reparations plan that aims to be effective should: Specify what harms are being addressed and who will benefit. Stay within its capacity to provide redress for its harm—and avoid absolving the federal government from its responsibility. Commit to structural change designed to prevent future racial injustice. Sub-federal reparations plans should acknowledge and apologize for the harm done

— Louis Weathers had a stable job and was married when he decided to buy a home in the Chicago suburb of Evanston in 1959 – but high interest rates and White real estate agents who seemed adamant about keeping him and other Black residents out of certain neighborhoods nearly discouraged him. More than six decades later, the 87-year-old received a payout to make up for the discriminatory housing practices that he and other Black residents experienced between 1919 and 1969. After three years in the making, Evanston gave Weathers and 15 other Black residents $25,000 each in May to put toward a down payment on a home, mortgages or home repairs. Like Weathers, generations of Black Americans have faced disparities in housing, transportation, business and other areas. And as descendants of enslaved people many say they have not been compensated for their labor and the lingering effects of systemic racism. Recent federal reparations efforts have stalled in Congress, but cities like Evanston are working to atone for the harms caused by slavery and institutional racism – and address the racial wealth gap. Last week, Detroit’s city council unanimously approved how it would structure the city’s first reparations task force. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the Amherst Town Council approved the creation of a fund to allocate a total of $2 million in reparations over the course of about a decade. The push for reparations has gained momentum on the heels of the national uprising in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, which rekindled the Black Lives Matter movement. Kamilah Moore, of the California Reparations Task Force, said she sees reparations “as fulfilling the promises made to her ancestors” in the mid-19th century following the abolition of slavery. The federal government now has the chance to live up to those commitments, she said. “You can’t talk about a racial reckoning in this country without mentioning reparations,” she said. “Reparations are comprehensive enough to address all of the ills that still impact the African American community.” From cash payouts to issuing extensive reports and building a bureaucratic system to examine what reparations could look like, here is what some local and state governments have done so far: Evanston, Illinois Robin Rue Simmons, a former Evanston alderman who introduced the idea to the city in 2019, said the Restorative Housing Reparations Program was created to remedy some of the harm caused by the city’s historical anti-Black housing policies. When it was approved last year, it was considered the country’s first reparations program. Since it was founded in 1860s, the city “created systems to segregate, limit, deny, and control Black citizens,” who were denied equal access to many areas, including schooling and housing. In the early 20th century, real estate agents developed a practice of informal racial zoning, almost exclusively offering Black residents housing on the city’s west side, according to a 2020 report commissioned by the city that details how the city perpetuated discriminatory practices toward Black residents. The report also highlights that Evanston banks typically refused mortgage loans to Black residents seeking to buy homes in predominantly White neighborhoods. When the city’s Restorative Housing Reparations program opened online applications in September, officials received more than 600 applications. In January, Weathers and 15 others were chosen at random from the first 122 applications submitted by eligible Black residents. The program’s payments were funded by donations and money collected by the city from cannabis sales taxes. Weathers says he was “elated” when he learned that he would receive a payout and decided it could help current and future generations of his family. Instead of using the money for himself, he transferred his payout to his 60-year-old son, Michael Weathers, to put toward his mortgage. “It was a no brainer,” he said. Rose Cannon, a long-time Evanston resident, said she was initially excited when she heard about reparations efforts coming to Evanston, but grew to be against them once the conversation shifted from direct cash payments to a housing program. For her, conflating housing equity efforts with reparations minimizes the larger reparations movement. “When you use the term reparations, we would like for it to be associated with the full repair of human beings, to close the racial income gap,” Cannon said. “Housing can only be a portion of it, maybe a silo of it.” The current program, Simmons said, is the city’s initial reparations effort and was informed by a mass of research that led them to identify the legacy of discriminatory housing practices. Following more work to address housing disparities, Simmons said the city is expected to focus its reparations efforts on economic development and education initiatives. A committee has recommended grants for Black businesses and the establishment of a Black history museum in the city, she added. “It’s not so much that the initial 16 recipients are going to completely transform the life circumstances for all of Black Evanston, but the fact that it has happened means that we can expand it and we can build on it and do more,” Simmons said. “Not just in housing, but in other areas as well.” St. Paul, Minnesota Cities like St. Paul have taken steps to build a bureaucratic system to examine what a reparations package for Black Americans could look like. After the city apologized last year for its role in the institutional and structural racism experienced by its Black residents, officials established an advisory committee to create a framework for a reparations commission. A year later, the advisory committee has released a report recommending direct cash payments to eligible Black residents and the establishment of a permanent reparations committee focused on implementing reparations to address racial disparities in housing, healthcare, education, employment and more. As far as funding, the report identified various sources, including the city’s funding under the American Rescue Plan, sales taxes and philanthropic donations. Trahern Crews, a member of the St. Paul city council’s reparations legislative advisory committee, partially influenced reparations efforts in Minnesota’s capital city. “The fact that [Evanston] led on [reparations] and they were so bold to actually do it, let our city council know that this is something that can happen, and it can happen in our lifetime,” Crews said. Although Minnesota was a free state, Black Americans were enslaved at St. Paul’s Fort Snelling and used for free labor by the US Army. Following the abolition of slavery, they faced forced segregation, redlining, housing discrimination, and the destruction of Saint Paul’s Rondo neighborhood – the city’s center of Black business and cultural life. It was destroyed to give way for the construction of an interstate highway, the advisory committee’s report says. Yohuru Williams, another member of the committee, said the task force decided to take a more “holistic approach” to reparations because the damage of institutional racism is uneven and impacts different descendants of slavery in varying ways. “It may be inflicted in one way for one set of descendants,” said Williams, a history professor and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas. “It could have been unfair labor practices that resulted in unequal acquisition of wealth. For others, it was outright slavery.” California One of the largest reparations efforts in the nation is taking place in California, where a statewide task force is expected to become “a model for partners across the nation.” In 2020, California became the first state in the country to establish a state reparations task force and nearly two years later, the panel released its first report last month outlining the state’s involvement in slavery and how it continues to harm Black Americans. In the 500-page interim report, the task force detailed how California perpetuated institutional racism in connection to slavery and state-sanctioned discrimination, as well as how the federal government perpetuated these harms. Chairperson Kamilah Moore said the report is the most extensive issued by the government on the African American community in more than 50 years. One of the report’s main goals, Moore said, was educating California residents about the state’s role in maintaining the institution of slavery. The task force’s report outlines how Black Americans have been harmed, including by slavery and political disenfranchisement, and in labor, housing, education, the criminal justice system, and arts and culture. The panel included preliminary recommendations for each category but said a final report will be issued next year. Some of those recommendations include updating language in the state’s Constitution; removing racial bias and discriminatory practices in standardized testing; compensating people deprived of profits for their work; investing in and creating free healthcare programs; and apologizing for acts of political disenfranchisement. Brandon Greene, the director of the racial and economic justice program at the ACLU of Northern California, said the report is extremely comprehensive and hopes officials consider direct cash payments as the center of their reparations efforts. “Reparations to me explicitly is giving money for harm,” Greene said. “If reparations is giving me a million dollars, I can do whatever I want with it. If I want to buy a million dollars’ worth of Jordan’s, I can do that.” With several state and local governments leading the push for reparations, Moore and others said they hope the federal government is empowered to advance H.R. 40, which was first introduced in Congress in 1989 and proposes the creation federal commission to study reparations and recommend remedies for the harm caused by slavery and the discriminatory policies that followed abolition. “The federal government is not off the hook,” Moore said. “I hope that people use this report as leverage to fight for reparations on a federal level.”

If significant tax hikes aren’t viable, then the question remains: what gets cut in order to fund UBI? Under this scenario, UBI becomes stingy and punitive, as a vast amount of important government programs would be on the chopping block.

Murray, the conservative UBI proponent, recommends that a $13,000 annual basic income replace all social assistance programs. Consider the value of the benefits people would lose: Medicaid, Medicare, Disability Insurance, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Unemployment Insurance, SNAP, Section 8 housing vouchers, Pell Grants, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. As Dylan Matthews writes, “$13,000 a year doesn’t mean much if you lose insurance that was paying $60,000 a year on chemotherapy.”15

A second macroeconomic issue concerns financing and policy trade-offs. If government is financially constrained, policy must operate in a realm of trade-offs. Consequently, adopting a JGP may require giving up other desirable policy proposals such as increased public infrastructure investment, expanded subsidized healthcare, covering the shortfall in Social Security via general revenues, free tertiary education at public universities, elimination of student debt, or a universal basic income (UBI).

This effect of financial constraints on government explains why discussion of a JGP tends to quickly spill over into a broader discussion about the macroeconomics of public finance. JGP proponents tend to believe government is financially unconstrained and can pay for everything by printing money. After the fact, government can then readily withdraw the money it has printed by raising taxes. All of this can be done without causing financial, economic, or political disruptions or distortions. That view is identified with modern money theory (MMT), which dismisses financial constraints on policy and argues the only constraint is availability of real resources (i.e. unemployed workers or under-utilised capital).

We would benefit from more clarity on the assumed theory of change when advocating for UBI (or arguing against it). In “A Capitalist Road to Communism,” Van der Veen & Van Parijs (1986) attempted to indicate how we might progress to a just society through UBI. There are many potential routes from here to there, so this is an area where more work would be helpful. In an interesting recent contribution to this discussion, Gourevitch & Stanczyk (2018) worry that UBI proponents may be getting things backward—that the kind of UBI we would be able to get without organized labor would be too low. To think that the ruling and business class will simply acquiesce to an ambitious version of the proposal is naïve; it comes down to believing that they will consent to their own expropriation. The left, the authors argue, should refocus its priorities on rebuilding the labor movement.

Basic income is a regular cash payment to all members of a community, without a work requirement of other conditions.

If every person received the same basic income “floor” regardless of income, class, race, location of residence, or other status, the stigma of receiving support could be eliminated.

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME

“Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement condemning the new standards. “It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history.” “We are proud of the rigorous process that the Department took to develop these standards,” Alex Lanfranconi, director of communications for the Florida Department of Education, said in a statement, noting the standards were created by a group of 13 educators and academics. “It’s sad to see critics attempt to discredit what any unbiased observer would conclude to be in-depth and comprehensive African American History standards. They incorporate all components of African American History: the good, the bad and the ugly. These standards will further cement Florida as a national leader in education, as we continue to provide true and accurate instruction in African American History,” Lanfranconi said.

Florida’s public schools will now teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills, part of new African American history standards approved Wednesday that were blasted by a state teachers' union as a “step backward.” The Florida State Board of Education’s new standards includes controversial language about how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to a 216-page document about the state’s 2023 standards in social studies, posted by the Florida Department of Education. Other language that has drawn the ire of some educators and education advocates includes teaching about how Black people were also perpetrators of violence during race massacres. That language says, “Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre.” The Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers’ union representing about 150,000 teachers, called the new standards “a disservice to Florida’s students and are a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994. “How can our students ever be equipped for the future if they don’t have a full, honest picture of where we’ve come from? Florida’s students deserve a world-class education that equips them to be successful adults who can help heal our nation’s divisions rather than deepen them,” Andrew Spar, president of the union, said in the statement. “Gov. DeSantis is pursuing a political agenda guaranteed to set good people against one another, and in the process he’s cheating our kids," Spar said. "They deserve the full truth of American history, the good and the bad.” The union said it is troubling that at the high school level, the standards conflate the 1920 Ocoee Massacre, when at least 30 African Americans were killed for attempting to vote, with “acts of violence perpetrated by African Americans.” And in middle school, the standards require students be taught slavery was beneficial to African Americans because it helped them develop skills, the union said.

The Economist, 2/3/17, the Lessons of violence and inequality through the ages,

https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2017/03/02/the-lessons-of-violence-and-inequality-through-the-ages?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/apocalypsethenthelessonsofviolenceandinequalitythroughtheages --- HH

Infiltration: a word that may evoke a host of thoughts and fantasies from soldiers operating behind enemy lines, police informants gaining access to criminal organizations, or to scenarios of radicals inserting themselves into corporations or research labs. Whatever the scenario, infiltration can be tactic that anarchists pursue when thinking about operating within current institutional realities, especially if interested in teaching in public schools. Although this claim is entangled within complex relationships of power and privilege, struggle arises wherever domination coalesces, especially within institutional structures and settings (Sharp, Routledge, Philo & Paddison, 2000). Power conjures, “the threadings, knottings and weavings” of social relationships through a intertwining of the social, political, moral, educational, and historical realities of a given society. In this way, power is “crucially and unavoidably spun out across and through the material spaces of the world” (Sharp, et al., 2000, p. 22). This chapter thus looks to situate itself and build radical pedagogy within the threads and knots of contemporary relationships of power; inbetween what Holloway (2010) has called the “cracks” of capitalism, trying to “desperately find . . . faults beneath the surface, or to create cracks by banging the walls” (p. 8). Cracks have emerged through environmental disaster, economic collapse, psychological alienation, a crisis of identity, and decades of war and imperial aggression conducted by the West. It is under these historical conditions that resistance needs to be conceptualized. Creating, finding and exploiting “cracks” within a diffused and networked capitalism demonstrates that dated narratives of revolutionary struggle are no longer viable and there is “no guarantee of a happy ending” (Holloway, 2010, p. 9). Unfortunately, although these narratives may provide comfort amid an onslaught of capitalism, war, death, terror, and alienation, they do not open up, nor allow, alternative possibilities of resistance to form outside the boundaries they construct. In some ways, these may only help to reproduce the current order we find ourselves in. This does not mean that we should resign ourselves to the throngs of nihilistic defeat, as there is indeed potential for radical hope within the cracks of Empire. The multitude, with its potential for infinite possibilities, can build a complex and dispersed resistance through the breaks, tears, and folds of our social order (Deleuze, 1992), and the tactics and pedagogies that we envision as radicals can attempt to capture this spirit. Although the manifestations of these cracks and folds is yet to be seen, I leave the reader to their own radical imaginations in devising ways to subvert a networked and diffused machine (Shukaitis, 2009). Evoking the metaphor of a “machine,” as I describe the multifaceted nature of contemporary capitalism, harkens to Trotter’s (1990) claim that colonialism operated in a very similar way, divorced from individual interactions and operating abstractly through “official” and “unofficial” discourses, forms of knowledge, ways of knowing, the morality of a given era, and the reproduction of knowledge to name a few. The analogy of a machine also challenges that human agency is solely at the center of how social system operate, because machines, “create, distribute, and organize populations and impose regimes of conduct, agency and effectivity” outside of individual actors and agency (Grossberg, 2010, p. 36). Radicals (within and outside the labor movement) had ingenious ways in which to deal with the machines of capitalism, occurring through tactics that spanned strikes, sit-ins, walking out, and subversion to even more direct forms like sabotaging machinery, bringing production to a halt. Sabotage is a tactic that anarchists need to rethink in light of how labor is now dispersed among a wide variety of institutional realities (factories, banks, corporations, and public institutions, for example), as well as the contemporary knowledge and abstract economies. The machines of capitalism that produced goods during the height of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century provide us a way in which to think of societal machines and tactics that can be adapted for current conditions. How do we as anarchists, who want to teach and work with students, deal with the contradictions of being located within the same institutions that seek to discipline bodies and coerce us? How do we sabotage these machines and build a radical pedagogy from this perspective? Sabotage provides a provocative conceptual framework in which to think about building alternative forms of resistance and aligns with ways in which anarchists have historically conceptualized direct political action. This is even more interesting when we think of how this will emerge through educational practice, as teaching allows us to directly engage ideology, challenging students’ conceptions about the world around them. With this type of important, dare I say political work, why do some anarchists shun the world of public teaching and service? Education is at the “front lines” of the contemporary ideological war conducted by corporate media, official organs of the State, and influential economic institutions. Whether that emerges through corporate textbooks that omit subaltern experiences and worldviews, standardized testing that stress rote memorization, or a curriculum that reproduces Eurocentrism and Western ways of knowing, education is invested in reproducing dominant conceptions of the world. However, sabotage can take myriad forms, and this chapter will build on the conceptual idea of building politics of infiltration. It has been well established that police and other State agents have infiltrated radical political movements, especially with the rise of anarchist praxis over the past two decades (Borrum & Tilby, 2004). Anarchists should think about assuming this same tactic, using the idea of infiltration as a guiding way to think about our praxis within institutional realities and as a way to think about diffused forms of sabotage. Although anarchism is rife with identity and lifestyle politics that detests any signs of “selling out,” this has only proven to further marginalize us in the eyes of the larger society that we must work at convincing how terribly oppressive the current social arrangement is. In the end, our movement is going to have to be broadbased and span multiple identities, social locations, political affiliations, and a renewed sense of politics that seeks to look at how, “the contemporary world has been made to be what it is [and] make visible ways in which it can become something else” (Grossberg, 2010, p. 1). Stoler (2010) discusses the idea of reading and analyzing “against the grain” of archival documents to unearth new interpretations and voices. This chapter urges radicals to think of our social actions along these same lines of thought: against the grain of dominant ideologies that serve to support historically oppressive realities. In this chapter, I will attempt to propose a politics of infiltration through a peculiar anarchist lens that seeks to subvert capitalism and its accompanying institutional realities through a diffused resistance stemming from bodies; bodies immersed in oppressive institutional realities. I dance through theoretical traditions to demonstrate how infiltration can be conceptualized as not only a physical practice (such as our work in classrooms), but also can be a theoretical framework in which to situate our practice, always looking for cracks, weaknesses, and opportunities to sabotage dominant conceptions of the world that demonstrates another world is possible. Although radicals may think of this action as “selling out,” I want to reframe teaching and working within institutions as a potential form of infiltration, inserting other ways of knowing and being into the academy to challenge systemically oppressive realities. Shannon (2009) reminds us that cooptation lurks around every corner and Shukaitis (2009) warns us of the recuperative nature of capitalism. Both of these realities are firmly acknowledged as risks, however, it should not immobilize us into inaction. Nor should this resign us to “ghettoizing” ourselves into intellectual enclaves where conversations are more about nodding our collective heads in agreement rather than challenging our own practices with alternative voices and tactics. Indeed, tensions can be the basis for a critical reflection about what we are actually doing in our practice and engaging a wide variety of techniques and approaches to explore these, such as writing and political organization. Communities of practice, whether in activism or through qualitative research, are an essential feature of building bridges with other like-minded activists and scholars (Rossman & Rallis, 2003). Cooptation and recuperation are indeed challenges we will face but should not stop us from doing something, keeping in mind the question that Lorde (2003) had when she struggled with the tools of the master (p. 25). This chapter will hopefully allow the conversation to continue about the role of anarchist theory in building alternative forms of praxis, pedagogy, and direct action, especially within the context of public education and the contradictions that anarchists face within hierarchical and coercive institutions.

This line of thought involves conceptualizing citizens as embodied, as fleshly, in a more encompassing way than existing vocabularies like trust and care. As mentioned earlier, the subject of trust theory is decidedly disembodied, marking a serious limitation in its scope and usefulness. Notably, second generation care ethicists put embodiment on the political agenda, but they dealt only with quite specific aspects of embodiment – typically those to do with bodily maintenance and nurturance, such as elder care and child care (Beasley and Bacchi, 2005; Bacchi and Beasley, 2005). Yet, caring practices are only one part of the complex and interweaving layers of interconnection that characterize contemporary social relations. Visions of ethical community require, in our view, a more expansive conception of embodied intersubjectivity. We are precisely looking for a better way of gripping together the corporeal and the sociopolitical – of grasping simultaneously the sociality of flesh and the physicality of social life. Insisting upon our common and collective intersubjective embodiment marks a different ethical moment. It shifts the focus from those constituted as dependent to human embodied interconnection. The challenge theoretically is to maintain this insight and not to lapse into versions of sociality that construct some groups as needy and dependent while ‘independent’ others attend to their ‘needs’. Rosalyn Diprose’s concept of ‘corporeal generosity’ in our view fleshes out both embodiment and sociality and their simultaneity more than most. Diprose intends to avoid the typical meaning of vocabularies of altruism as a moral quality held by individuals (2002: 4). Moreover, Diprose’s account of beneficence rests on a reworking of Levinas’ concern with a foundational ethical relation. The self/citizen is produced precisely by the other’s alterity. For Diprose this ‘primordial’ relation of generosity – of connection between self and other – is not volitional, abstract or moral (as it often is in the trust and care literatures) but involves ‘an ontology of corporeal intersubjectivity’. Importantly, unlike Levinas, she claims to reconfigure generosity as a political intervention (Diprose, 2002: 14). All the same, we suggest that Diprose’s notion of ‘corporeal generosity’ is inclined, along with feminist care ethics and indeed other feminist theorizing of the body, to revert to embodiment as vulnerability and to reinstate the asymmetrical vision of sociality which lies at the heart of the Levinasinflected ontological requirement towards altruism. Not surprisingly perhaps, the chosen exemplar for Diprose’s corporeal generosity is the requirement for the Australian white community to show generosity towards those who are marginalized, towards Indigenous Australians (2002: 164–6). We stress that this concern with corporeal justice is a considerable advance on the neo-liberal ethos of atomistic individualism. Yet, as Borgerson has noted (2001), Levinas-inflected ‘proximity ethics’ resolves into an uncompromising, non-negotiable relation of responsibility between Self and Other that cannot deal with possible dangers of self-sacrifice or of being the object of sacrifice. Diprose goes along with Levinas in heralding the inescapable responsibility for others as a pre-existing condition of being human. She too places this self/other relationship beyond the realm of social practice and creativity, outside of history. This limits the capacity of such an ethics to take account of social hierarchy, and presents corporeal interconnection primarily in relation to vulnerability, undercutting recognition that interconnection understood in this way may be suffocating and subordinating and may reiterate self-abnegation for both those conceived as vulnerable and their helplessly responsible, generous ‘helpers’.

Where Fugitive Slave Law regulated emancipated Black life as perpetually outside of the law and subject to recapture, Jim Crow and later mass incarceration repackaged the same legal precedent while revising its application. Of course, the most relevant of these developments in the U.S. is the constitutionality of slavery under the 13th amendment’s “punishment for a crime” clause. For if the legality of slavery rest on being punishment for a crime, Blackness itself is a crime, has already been constituted as a crime, and is the symbolic indication of future crime, making it perpetually eligible for enslavement under the law. Emancipation could not change the precedent at its core, which understands the emancipated Black person as runaway merchandise, assumes Black deviancy, and requires Black discipline and containment. Today the law underwrites all instances of police brutality, mass incarceration, and the extrajudicial killing of Black people. “Law and order” is a synonym for waging state violence against Black people. Likewise, the positionality of Blackness makes it almost impossible to appeal to the law as a form of justice or legal restitution. Countless examples of failed attempts at justice through legal channels confirm that Black injury cannot be seen by the justice system, and does not register as injury in the eyes of the law. In fact, to deliver justice to Black people is actually counterintuitive to the project of the law, which is always, the containment of Blackness. As Calvin Warren explains: “The Law recognizes the black only in its destruction, and this destruction is required for legal intelligibility. Thus, something like black redress is outside of the law’s jurisdiction to the extent that the aim of redress is restorative, and restoring black being is not only impossible but antithetical to the law’s aim” (Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror) Two Black revolutionary formations become important to analyze here for their markedly different approaches to the law and its relevance to Black struggle. The early years of the Black Panther Party saw the law as a tool that could be used to push Black revolution forward. The first armed demonstrations organized by the Party constantly reference the Second Amendment right to bear arms. New members of the Party were encouraged to read Mao’s Red Book and the United States Constitution. Huey P Newton personally studied the law fervently and for all of the loud and bombastic declarations made at the armed demonstrations, a great effort was made to keep them squarely within the bounds of the law. What the Party did not foresee is that when the law could not perform its function to contain and regulate Blackness, the law could be changed. Months after the 1967 Panther demonstration at the California Capitol, the Mulford Act was passed effectively banning the open carry of loaded weapons. As police repression increased, amounting later to shootouts, raids, and assassinations of key BPP leaders, it became clear that legality did not matter when Black revolutionaries pose a threat to the white power structure. The systematic attack on the Black Panther Party forced Newton and many others to dial back on armed demonstrations. The law remained unavailable for use as a form of redress in the pursuit of Black liberation, for Black liberation is against the law and antithetical to the laws aim. Huey himself briefly turned towards criminal activities later in his life in an attempt to organize gangs but was killed in the process. The Black Liberation Army emerged largely out of the fallout of the Black Panther Party and took an extralegal approach to Black liberation. It engaged in armed attacks, robberies, prison breaks, and other activities while rejecting the legitimacy of the law itself. Taking the lessons learned from the Black Panther Party seriously, the BLA understood that breaking the law would be required for Black liberation but refused to see what they were doing as truly criminal. They made distinctions between illegal activities that were explicitly political and those that were criminal. They argued that because their actions were political they should be tried not as criminals but as prisoners of war. When Black Liberation Army members were tried in court for crimes such as ‘domestic terrorism’ they famously rejected the legitimacy of U.S. courts maintaining that the court lacked the moral authority to do so. Kuwasi Balagoon in his trial statement said boldly: “I am a prisoner of war and I reject the crap about me being a defendant, and I do not recognize the legitimacy of this court. The term defendant applies to someone involved in a criminal matter, in an internal search for guilt or innocence.” The BLA’s refusal both recognized the court as an illegitimate colonizing institution and rejected the terms in which Black radical activity is marked as criminal. Instead, BLA members reframed their activity as existing outside of the jurisdiction of the law and requiring different legal machinery. The BLA members appealed not to U.S. law but international law pertaining to the treatment of prisoners of war. In his essay The Vengeance of Vertigo, Frank Wilderson had this to say about Balagoon’s statement: “Its deepest insight is the conclusion that it reaches that the law is White, coupled with the inference that Balagoon was guilty prior to the Brinks expropriation. His innocence cannot be vouchsafed until all semblance of the law has been eradicated.” The way in which the BLA positioned themselves in relation to the law, both as the wholehearted embrace of Black illegal forms coupled with the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the law, has been an inspiration for this paper. I disagree with Wilderson’s complaint that the fault of the approach was the inability to empathetically account for Black suffering within the courtroom. Rather, the only fault was the assumption that an appeal toward ‘prisoner of war’ as a viable legal standing for BLA members could or would be heard at all by the court. Their non-cooperation with the law still relied on the law to see BLA members as subjects eligible to be tried as prisoners of war (when as Calvin Warren reminds us, the law ‘recognizes the black only in its destruction’). It represents an inability for the law to extend legal status to Black people that would absolve them of criminality. Further, it reveals the inability of the law to recognize Black people as Humans or anything other than runaway merchandise. The BLA was correct in claiming their activities were outside of the law’s jurisdiction, for Blackness itself is outside of the law and in perpetual contempt of the court. It ruptures the very coherence of the law since laws apply to those considered humans, yet the legal precedent is invested in recognizing the black only in its destruction. Given this context, where the law codifies Black containment, engenders Black criminalization, underwrites antiblack state violence, and denies Black appeal to the law as a form of redress, we can finally begin to make the case for a Black illegalism (Blaqillegalism). Blaqillegalism takes the fugitivity of Blackness, that is, the perpetual refusal of and flight from enclosure inherent in Blackness, as its basic starting place. It argues that Blackness breaks the law by its very nature; it is a fissure within the law. This fissure is read by the state as perpetual criminality and is the source of the systematic criminalization of Blackness under the state. Furthermore, Blackness is made into the perpetual criminal element that enables the law and its enforcement. Blaqillegalism maintains that the law remains necessarily unavailable to Blackness for making appeals of redress, that the law ‘recognizes the black only in its destruction’. Finally, Blaqillegalism understands Black life, Black survival, Black restitution, and above all Black freedom to be outlawed and in so many words illegal. The Blaqillegalist postulates that breaking the law is not only good praxis but becomes necessary for Black survival and even further, for the pursuit of Black liberation. If the law’s main function is to discipline and codify the state containment of Blackness, then breaking the law becomes an act of flight from the enclosure that the law engenders, and is thus a fugitive act. Due to the everyday conditions of Black oppression, which emerge as a consequence of white supremacist capitalism and state repression, Black people again cannot help but break the law be it by accident, circumstance, resistance, or necessity. Fugitive acts occur always in response to these conditions and are compounded by the criminalization that already marks Blackness. For these reasons, the Blaqillegalist says that under white supremacy the Black person already breaks the law as a consequence of their very being, and as a refusal to die under white capitalist oppression. This renders all efforts to remain lawful pointless and undoes any moral obligation Black people might have had in abiding by the law. Since we are ‘damned if we do, damned if we don’t’, the Black person might as well engage in illegal activity if it is responsible and for the survival of themselves and their communities. Of course, on the ground, Black people have already arrived at this conclusion. There are a great variety of illegal activities that are already employed by Black people every day. Of these, only some constitute a Blaqillegalist praxis, while others don’t. A Blaqillegalist position generally embraces both small and large-scale illegal activity pointed in the direction of Black collective survival and Black liberation and is critical of illegal forms that are ultimately detrimental to that project. Here we will examine and reclaim the Black illegal forms that would fall under a Blaqillegalist praxis. Disorderly Conduct Definitions for what actually constitutes disorderly conduct remain arbitrary, and on the ground, disorderly conduct could refer to any normal activity Black people do that break some arbitrary law imposed by the state. This could be anything from “being too loud” in a public place, playing loud music, selling goods without a permit, soliciting, loitering, trespassing, squatting, protesting without a permit, to even resisting arrest. These laws are almost always meant to target Black people specifically and are a residue of the slave codes that regulated Black movement and assembly in public spaces. Black people always break these laws, usually unbeknownst to them, because what is being regulated here is Black everyday life. Blaqillegalist praxis asserts that we should break as many of these arbitrary laws as possible while evading the police. Theft Under white supremacist capitalism, all theft by Black people that targets white individuals, institutions, and businesses are reparations. This includes shoplifting, petty theft, burglary, looting, expropriation, grand larceny, scamming, embezzlement, piracy, and fraud. Colloquially called swiping in the Black community, these acts have always been practiced and for some have been a viable means of survival. Black theft emerges as a direct refusal of capitalist oppression and resistance against a system that has stolen from Black people for centuries. A Blaqillegalist praxis would encourage continued decentralized theft of white institutions as the best means to obtain reparations for slavery and colonialism. Furthermore, the stealing and redistribution of food, medication, toiletries, clothing and other necessities serve the collective survival of Black communities. As long as the targets of such activities are white, this is Blaqillegalist praxis.

By design, the wealth tax will further increase this tax burden. Should the affluent abandon California because of the greater drain on their assets – and history shows this will happen – they will take with them the dollars needed to fund schools, public safety, health care, and other public services utilized by Californians. Investment in the state economy, which creates jobs and wealth across all classes, should also decline.

This won’t hurt the moneyed residents who leave. They will be fine. The damage will be felt in the lower and middle classes.