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As stated by the principle of instrumental primacy, institutional change depends first and foremost on the technical capability to change. In the present context, this means identifying which proposals for completely “greening the grid” rely on technology that has yet to be developed. The most obvious technical limitations are the storage requirements for clean renewable energy. As discussed above, one key issue with solar, wind, and wave energy is the uncertainty behind its generation due to their reliance on natural ecological systems. Powering the grid, however, requires energy to be generated and distributed on demand and in a more certain manner than is presently available, given the load required. As a result, attempting to switch out the thermal grid for a renewable grid all at once would likely lead to shortages and blackouts. Dealing with this problem requires both a short-term and a long-term solution. Short-term, it may be necessary to maintain a targeted fleet of flexible ramping thermal generators so that disruptions to the power grid are avoided during periods of intermittent generation. While this may not satisfy the environmental criteria discussed here, it does fit within the principle of minimal dislocation – the ability to provide enough energy to satisfy consumer needs is presently a non-problematic aspect of the present institutional structure and must be maintained. Long term, however, the federal government must invest directly in the creation of storage capacity and technology to increase the speed of generation from renewable energy. This investment, further, should be direct on the part of the federal government, rather than in the form of research subsidies or subcontracting to private energy producers. The reason for this is two-fold: first, the federal government does not face the same financial criteria new private investments must meet to warrant creation and implementation. The government is not in the business of making a profit and, as such, it is able to bear the high fixed costs without a guarantee of return that private enterprises are unable to incur. Precedence for this activity, as shown by Mazzucato, may be found throughout history, such as in the development of DARPA and numerous base-line pharmaceutical research projects that would not have existed without direct action from the federal government (2011). Once the new technologies are advanced to a point where they are financially feasible for the private sector to utilize, they may be turned over to private enterprises for further development and management. The key here is that the fixed costs of developing this emerging technology are too high to be feasible for private enterprise. However, for a sovereign currency-issuing government like the United States, these financial costs are immaterial.

In light of the current limits at the local and federal level, there is an opportunity for state governments to explore ambitious, publicly-funded cash transfer policies that: promote dignity and greatly improve the lives of their low-income residents; add to a growing body of research with assessments of larger scale positive impacts across geographically and racially diverse areas; utilize the revenue raising powers of state government; and could be a model for a permanent federal program. We need a permanent federal guaranteed income, but political gridlock and polarization threaten to frustrate attempts at a federal program in the immediate term. States have an opportunity to push closer to that ideal with large scale, publicly funded, permanent programs of their own that will provide essential data and experience toward the realization of a federal program. This guide seeks to arm state-level advocates and policymakers with information regarding the choice points in program design, the positive impacts shown by existing research, and special considerations for states including options for guaranteed income implementation, interactions with existing public benefits programs, opportunities for public funding, and promoting racial equity.

While we recognize some advantages to designs that feature a federally administered program like the WPA, we prefer a highly decentralized program. Today, the federal government directly employs only 2.8 million workers (less than 2 percent of US employment). Advocates of a universal job guarantee recognize that the program might employ five times that number of workers. We worry about the political feasibility of expanding federal employment on such a scale. We also see the advantages of decentralizing administration to the community level. Since the goal is to create jobs in every community, and to projects that are beneficial to every community, it makes sense to involve the local communities in these projects, from the proposal stage through to implementation, administration, and evaluation. Hence, while we would have the federal government provide the funding for the program, we would allow state and local governments as well as registered nongovernmental not-for-profits to put forth proposals. (To retain a level playing field within the private sector, we would not allow for-profit firms to participate—as they might try to replace part of their workforce with federally paid or subsidized workers.) Since federal monies would be spent, we envision that project assessment and evaluation would take place at multiple levels: community, state, regional, and federal. We expect that most of the jobs created will provide public services in nonprofit community organizations, public schools, and state and local governments. We recommend that the federal government’s role be largely confined to providing administrative service (through local employment offices), project evaluation, and funding of wages, benefits, and some materials costs. However, if state and local efforts prove to be insufficient, the federal government will need to create supplemental projects to ensure a sufficient number of jobs are made available to all seeking work. These should be targeted to underserved groups. While some advocates of job guarantee programs would follow the New Deal in undertaking large-scale public works projects, we would limit the use of PSE workers on infrastructure projects to small-scale projects or for approved apprenticeship or other trainee positions. We do this to avoid conflicts with the Davis-Bacon Act and prevailing wage laws that require wages higher than $15 per hour. As discussed above we do not favor a tiered wage structure within the PSE Levy Economics Institute of Bard College 5 program. Further, we do not want the program to compete with private sector employment. Virtually all public works projects today involve government contracts that are awarded to private construction firms. We would not use the PSE program to compete with private contractors or subvert prevailing wage laws. However, PSE workers could be used for very small projects (installing playground equipment), simple maintenance of infrastructure (planting vegetation as screening), and environmental retrofitting (adding insulation to housing in lowincome neighborhoods or to community buildings), where such projects do not conflict with applicable prevailing wage laws or the Davis-Bacon Act. The types of projects undertaken will vary across the country, consistent with variations in state and local labor laws and needs. We also envision experimentation with alternative approaches to employment and the provision of community services. For example, a number of proposals for the creation of workers’ co-ops could be solicited. These might be supported by the PSE program for a limited time, with the federal government paying wages until the co-ops become self-supporting. Additionally, proposals can be solicited for apprenticeship programs that would train PSE workers for skilled employment outside the program after a specified term of PSE. While we want to avoid funding of programs that train workers for jobs that do not exist, training should be a part of every PSE job and some room should be made in the program for approved apprenticeship programs. Again, state and local rules will determine what kinds projects will be allowed.

While the WPA’s top-down design theoretically could have guarded against local discrimination, the program’s centralized decision making often meant its projects were not democratically designed. Entire regions like the South were neglected in favor of western swing states. Women, Black Americans, and workers with disabilities were often excluded from the program. Additionally, the country’s state capacity has deteriorated significantly since the middle of the 20th century. The dominance of anti-statist factions within the Republican Party (Kabaserice, 2012; Fried & Harris, 2021), a bipartisan favor for tax preferences over spending programs (Teles, 2013), and liberal attempts to preserve government capabilities by surreptitiously fitting new programs and initiatives into existing agencies unequipped to implement them (Mettler, 2011) have all contributed to the decline. The portion of public employees out of the total workforce, a crude but effective metric for state capacity, has declined from 14.6% in 2000 to 13.8% in 2022 (Bureau of Labor Force Statistics, 2022; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; author’s calculations). A modern American job guarantee should combine the democratic nature of Jefes with the centralized administrative support of the WPA. Local NGOs, municipal government agencies, and social entrepreneurs would design most projects and request program funds. City councils would be tasked with approving projects and would receive technical support from local program administrators and financial compensation from the program for increased workloads. If local governments lack the capacity to approve projects, even with additional support, state and local program administrators would be empowered to create local councils staffed by elected community representatives in a manner similar to Jefes’ Municipal Consultative Councils. The job guarantee would operate identically in Puerto Rico and in all U.S. territories. Every county would have at least one program administrator tasked with adding approved projects to a publicly available job bank. The job bank would contain contact information about the project’s objectives and requirements, as well as its approval process. The job bank would be available online, allowing workers to digitally enroll in projects. Physically, the jobs bank would be accessible at local Unemployment Offices and would complement the existing network of American Job Centers established under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014 (U.S. Department of Labor). Unlike unemployment benefits, workers would be allowed to search for other employment without losing access to the guarantee. These workers would not be counted in official unemployment statistics. State-level administrators would coordinate with local officials to identify gaps in the program’s supply of jobs and the needs of local communities. They would help state and local agencies design new projects and scale up existing ones when necessary. As demonstrated by NREGS, regional administrative capacity is critical for mediating behind federal standards and local participation. The guarantee would give state administrators the authority and mandate to combat discrimination and disparities at the local level when necessary. Program officials could direct funds to state or municipal agencies that create projects in communities without existing civic infrastructure and coordinate with local officials and program administrators to identify successful projects to scale or replicate.

Historically speaking, the economists who followed John Maynard Keynes can be grouped into two camps: fiscal Keynesians, who created a synthesis between Keynes and standard neoclassical microeconomics, and emphasized the power of aggregate spending and monetary policy, and social Keynesians, who emphasized the more heterodox elements of Keynes’ thinking, and argued that the government had to be a more dynamic actor in the economy. One of the chief arguments of the social Keynesians was that fiscal Keynesians, in their attempt to fit Keynes’ theories into the free market orthodoxy, had neglected the great man’s denunciation of the market as a tool for investment. Less well known than his arguments about aggregate demand, John Maynard Keynes had argued in the General Theory that the stock, bond, and money markets were terrible ways to distribute capital for investment, likening them to a giant casino, in which people made bets on what they thought other people would think the average man would think. Keynes argued that this process inevitably led to excesses of fear and exaltation that led at various times to over-investment, under-investment, maldistribution of capital, and general inefficiency – the government, he argued, would have to take over the investment function. And so the social Keynesians argued that it was insufficient merely to boost the level of Federal spending in recessions; the government had to use its spending power to invest counter-cyclically in those needed areas (infrastructure, for example) over the long run. So, what do we need in order to make sure that 50-State Keynesianism can handle both the short-term consumption function (boosting aggregate demand in recessions, dampening things down in bubbles) and the longer-term investment function? To begin with, as mentioned in part 2, the establishment of state reserve banks are a critical structure for developing a stable and counter-cyclical source of financing during recessions, both to fund the consumption function programs , and to provide the capital to keep necessary public investments running in times when the private credit markets have frozen up. However, it is only once “fractional reserve lending is combined with an agile use of the power to tax (as opposed to the 2/3rds rule in California) and a temporary suspension of balanced budget rules that individual states can muster enough financial muscle to be able to run counter-cyclically.

Now that we’ve come through the debt ceiling drama, most of us who want to see more fiscal responsibility at the federal level can agree that we got to a reasonable result, but the process was – to put it mildly – a problem. We cannot use the full faith and credit of the nation and the economic health of the global economy as a bargaining chip to restore fiscal responsibility. There has to be a better way. In fact, many of us who study state budgeting annually observe budget processes that lead to (largely) fiscally responsible decision-making and do not require high stakes hostage taking to get there. As someone who has worked at both the state and federal level, the differences are striking and suggest that some serious thought should be given to translating some valuable lessons of state budget processes and policies to the federal level. The most obvious place to begin is that almost all states have some sort of statutory or constitutional balanced budget requirement. The objection to this at the national level is that the federal government may need to run deficits to reboot the economy or respond to emergencies – but we are now running nearly $2 trillion-dollar annual deficits when times are good. And without any procedural restraint to invoke, it is very hard for policymakers to temper expectations and build a culture of fiscal discipline consistently over time. While balanced budget requirements at the state level are often perceived as strictly binding, state budgeters can deploy any number of tricks to circumvent these requirements. States can short their pension obligations, issue debt to cover operating expenses, create off-the-books entities to issue debt, pass the buck to local governments, and game the revenue estimate – just to name a few gimmicks. Yet, by and large, year after year, most states pass fiscally constrained budgets. Balanced budget requirements are as much about perception than about a hard and fast rule.

BBRs are not uniform across states. They vary in stringency and design, and not all spending is subject to BBR limitations. Capital and pension funds, for example, are usually exempt from BBR limitations (Snell 2011) (box 5). In 44 states, the governor must propose a balanced budget, while in 41 states the legislature must pass a balanced budget, and in 40 and DC the governor must ultimately sign a balanced budget (figure 11). States combine rules differently. For example, although Texas and West Virginia require the legislature to pass and the governor to sign a balanced budget, they do not require the governor’s initial proposal to be balanced. Hawaii, meanwhile, requires the governor to propose and eventually sign a balanced budget, but the state does not require the legislature to pass a balanced budget as an intermediary step. Circumventing Balanced Budget Requirements Balanced budget rules are often designed imperfectly, and state policymakers can circumvent BBR requirements. Limitations on the spending covered under BBRs, paired with government fund accounting practices, can provide opportunities for circumvention. BBRs are generally applied on a cash basis rather than on an accrual basis, which means that states can engage in accounting gimmicks to satisfy requirements. For example, states can push a payroll or state aid payment from the last month of the current fiscal year into the first month of the next. This allows states to meet their legal requirement to balance their budgets while leaving resources and obligations out of balance. In 1998, Hawaii delayed payroll for state employees from June to July to balance its budget, although the effort resulted in several lawsuits from public university employees. In 1985, Texas made a similar choice to move its payroll in order to balance the budget (Oregon Office of the State Controller 2009). California moved its payroll obligation by one day in the 2009–2010 budget cycle to balance its budget (California Legislative Analyst’s Office 2010). This gimmick only produces one-time savings, however, as the state is simply transferring its obligation to the following fiscal year. If a shortfall is caused by sudden changes in economic conditions, this flexibility can allow a state time to recover economically and meet its fiscal obligations. However, it can also lead to ongoing reallocation of expenses to the next budget year. State BBRs do not apply to all revenue streams or spending obligations. For example, states typically do not apply their BBRs to pension obligations or employee health care costs. In these scenarios, a flexible BBR can make suspending pension payments especially attractive, even if fiscally unwise in the long term, since suspending payments frees up resources to cover general fund expenses. This example illustrates how state fund accounting can obscure a state’s true fiscal position.

Importance of state and local government spending for countercyclical policy The fifty state governments and ninety thousand local governments in the United States are responsible for administering and managing essential services such as education, healthcare, and transportation. To this end, they hire public workers, invest in infrastructure, and purchase materials and equipment. State and local government consumption and investment spending rose from 5.5% of GDP in 1947 to 12.5% of GDP in 1975 and has averaged 11% of GDP between 1970 and 2020. The sheer size of the state and local government sector implies that fluctuations in its spending will have significant impacts on the macroeconomy. Figure 1 shows that stagnate state and local spending after the 2001 recession contributed to the weakness of the 2001 recovery and the fall in state and local spending after the 2008–2009 downturn contributed even more greatly to the weakness of the 2009 recovery. In the 2009 recovery, real state-local expenditures declined until 2014 and did not return to the pre-recession level until 2019, a full 10 years after the official end of the Great Recession. This dragged real GDP growth, rather than supporting it. Policymakers are deeply concerned that the current contraction in state-local government spending will once again prolong the recession and delay the recovery. For example, Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell stated in June, “It will hold back the economic recovery, if [state and local governments] continue to lay people off, if they continue to cut essential services. And in fact, that's kind of what happened, post the global financial crisis.” (Smialek, Rappeport, and Cochrane Citation2020). Figure 1. Real state-local expenditures and real GDP during the 2001 and 2009 recoveries. The solid lines in the figure show aggregate state-local government spending growth during the 2001 and 2009 recoveries. The dashed lines in the figure show real GDP growth during the 2001 and 2009 recoveries. The index equals 100 at business cycle trough. Source: FRED and author’s calculations. Table 1 shows the change in real state-local spending from the prior year for total direct expenditures and for the major categories of spending by function. It shows that education spending fell four consecutive years, accounting for about half of the fall in overall spending in 2011 and about 30% of the overall fall in 2013. This means education spending was a large drag on state-local government spending during the recovery from the Great Recession. Transportation, public safety, and environment and housing spending also declined, dragging overall spending. Public welfare spending, on the other hand, increased every year except 2012, providing a countercyclical stabilizing force. Capital spending is a promising potential vehicle for countercyclical fiscal policy for two major reasons. First, capital spending, unlike current spending, is easier to shift forward and backward in time. Keynes supported the idea the government should pace capital spending such that no business cycle fluctuations could occur. He argued the government should ready blueprints “as ambitious and glorious as the minds of our engineers and architects and social planners can conceive” and then pace capital spending “neither so slow as to cause unemployment nor so rapid as to cause inflation” (Keynes Citation1978, 266). The potential for countercyclical stimulus is only limited to the imaginations of the architects and engineers who create capital project designs. Second, capital spending is one aspect of state and local government budgets that has the potential to operate on a countercyclical basis even in the absence of federal aid. Balanced budget rules legally prohibit state and local governments from deficit financing operating expenditures to varying degrees. This effectively forces aggregate current spending to decrease when revenues decrease, imparting a significant procyclical bias to state and local government budgets. However, the majority of governments can legally borrow to pay for capital investment (National Conference of State Legislatures Citation1999). This means state and local governments could issue bonds during a recession to finance capital spending, providing local stimulus.

Because of the vital role of state and local governments in providing public workers and services, it is essential that federal agencies and the NIEC are empowered to work closely with these governments. Local and state governments will be encouraged to develop employment proposals in conjunction with community leaders, local government officials, labor organizations, and local residents to ensure the proposals will serve the needs of the constituents and available pool of labor. The employment proposals may not be used to employ individuals who will replace or speed the displacement of existing employees or individuals who would otherwise perform similar work.[35] The program will cover wage, benefits, and material expenses.[36] This structure will largely parallel the direct employment programs under the New Deal, whose projects were developed and proposed by local and state governments. Fostering partnerships and buy-in from local and state partners is critical to the success of the program, as localities may be most aware of the skills of their available workers as well as projects that will provide the greatest benefit to their communities.

What we suggest is missing in the preceding discussions of accumulation/ dispossession and debt is the consideration of how these “new territories” of consumption and investment have been mapped onto previous racial and colonial (imperial) discourses and practices. If we go back to C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, to name only three classic anticolonial, racial, and global interrogations of historical materialism, we are reminded of how historical materialism alone cannot account for the ways in which capitalism has lived off—always backed by the colonial and national state’s means of death—of colonial/racial expropriation.24 As Manu Goswami writes in her critique of both historical materialism and the “excision” of “socioeconomic coordinates from colonialism” in postmodern theory, we must look at the “tangled causal relationships” of the lived experiences of the colonial space and the “expansive logic of capital.”25 Contesting the “evolutionary assumptions” that guide Harvey’s theories (“Flexible accumulation follows Fordist production as barbarism follows savagery”), Anna Tsing proposes instead the notion of “spectacular accumulation,” which “occurs when investors speculate on a product that may or not exist.”26 This could mean biotechnology or real estate, but her point is that it could also take us back to the “South Sea bubble and every gold rush in history.”27 Returning to how the subprime crisis allows us to highlight links otherwise missed by prevailing accounts of racial subjugation, we draw on Roy’s argument that microfinance (subprime) loans targeting poor women in the global South are part of a “frontier of empire.” Roy traces the travel of microfinance mediated by a “kinder and gentler World Bank” from Bangladesh to Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East: “As microfinance is a preferred weapon of mass salvation, so the Middle East is the site at which the war on terror and the war on poverty are conjoined.”28 This evokes a kind of space of death Achille Mbembe describes as distinctive of the postcolony.29 In short, the essays in this issue add to the library of postcolonial and critical racial theories of the statethat establish how neoliberal architectures and discourses of dispossession act on earlier forms of racial and colonial subjugation. Building on this challenge, we come back to the question of how to theorize racial/ postcolonial subjugation and economic exploitation in the context of the current financial crisis.30 The concept of differential inclusion seeks to attend to the degrees in which the various racial subaltern collectives enter into the U.S. racial configuration,31 but cannot help explain why Blacks and Latino/as figure as highly profitable as aberrant economic subjects in the very articulation of postracial claims of achieved equality. Race in the naturalized ways U.S. Americans deploy the term cannot be the privileged and sole critical descriptor of the variety of ways in which the racial/colonial logic of displacement, dispossession, debt, and death have visited the “others of Europe,” as conquered/ colonized natives, enslaved Africans, Asian indentured laborers, and so on. The common usage of the term assumes that race as a social operator enables and protects white privilege against every other nonwhite collective. In the case of the subprime crisis, this might mean that because Asian home owners were more protected than their Black and Latino/a counterparts, one could make the case that class inequalities as opposed to race offer more explanatory insight. In fact, scholarly and popular writing about inequality in the United States today and its social consequences by both liberal scholars like Theda Skocpol and neoconservative provocateurs like Charles Murray of Bell Curve infamy make exactly this argument.32 As with other improper economic subjects, the excess value the Black and Latino/a subprime mortgage holder refers to their ontological deficiency, or as G. W. F. Hegel describes Africa, for being a thing.33

Initial criticisms of the thinking that I have presented in this article include the fact that surveillance capitalism tracks and controls all individuals who are essentially required to make use of surveillance capitalist technologies in the modern world. The operations of surveillance capitalism that declare humans as free raw material for the purposes of data extraction, prediction and sales essentially turn all bodies into property. My contention is not that surveillance capitalism only targets specific groupings of people or only presents potential damage for some. Indeed, Zuboff (2019: 8) essentially argues that if we thought that our "voices, personalities, emotions" could not be possessed in capitalist terms, the era of surveillance capitalism has made it so for all individuals subjected to the digital communication technologies that we have become dependent on. Rather, my contention is that surveillance capitalism draws on a history of colonial exploitation and its concomitant racialised ways of seeing the world. As mentioned above, today, the legacy of colonialism continues and is maintained through various institutions, ideologies, and everyday social practices. The question that arises and that precedes the argument that surveillance capitalism is connected to a racialised way of seeing the world can be formulated as follows: where or how can we detect in surveillance capitalist operations the residue and traces of the colonial project? This question can be answered in a number of ways and the arguments above in no way provides a thorough theoretical account. Rather, my focus above was on drawing some connections and tracing some of the logics at play in surveillance capitalism vis-ä-vis colonial expressions. Firstly, Birhane's (2020) reasoning around the algorithmic colonisation of Africa highlights the colonial logic present in the expansion of surveillance capitalism into new territories. The continent is seen as inevitably in line to receive technological "solutions", and, as such, Birhane locates this rhetoric within the colonial matrices of power. The author invokes conquest patterns that depend on imposing new facts and claims to legitimate knowledge. With regards to Google's vast economic power and expansion, Zuboff (2019: 338) notes that "Google imposed the logic of conquest, defining human experience as free for the taking, available to be rendered as data and claimed as surveillance assets". Secondly, although surveillance capitalism penetrates deeply throughout society, its penetration is differential. Some groups of people are negatively racialised by its operations, reifying boundaries along racial lines and as such reifying practices of white world-making. We, therefore, have to ask about the implications regarding surveillance capitalism's enabling of new forms of racist habituation and subjugation. Browne (2015) draws attention not only to differential penetration, but also to the fact that the historical formation of surveillance is not outside the historical formation of racial oppression. According to Browne (2015: 8), racialised surveillance is "of course... not the entire story of surveillance", however, her analysis leads us to ask about the historical and central role of surveillance practices in the creation of racial hierarchy. Third, Mirzoeff's understanding of racial surveillance capitalism insists on the racialised nature of capitalism. Robinson's insight regarding the fact that capitalism is inextricably linked with the histories of racist expropriation, alone, necessitates an understanding of the constitutive genealogies of surveillance capitalism. Further, surveillance capitalism employs the logic of turning bodies into raw material free for the taking, turning bodies into objects, transubstantiating life into value, into data. The logic of rendering life as property, to turn bodies into objects that value can be extracted from, is not new. Rather, this strategy accompanied European colonial expression that sought to expand the project of white world-making. Fanon's (1967: 109) description of the experience of epidermalisation is worth noting here. This reasoning points to the white hegemonic gaze as constructing the black body into "an object in the midst of other objects". Under the matrices of surveillance capitalism, Zuboff (2019: 12) notes: The body is simply a set of coordinates in time and space where sensation and action are translated as data. All things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable "it". These methods reduce individuals to the lowest common denominator of sameness - an organism among organisms -despite all the vital ways in which we are not the same . In this new regime, objectification is the moral milieu in which our lives unfold . [Surveillance capitalism] poaches our behaviour for surplus and leaves behind all the meaning lodged in our bodies, our brains, and our beating hearts [...] (2019: 337). Although there are important contextual differences here in the sense that Fanon points to the imposition of race in black life, while Zuboff's analysis interrogates the extent of data extraction throughout modern society, I read Zuboff's paragraphs in relation to Fanon's formulation of epidermalisation as both pointing to a process of objectification in which bodies become legible as property. As mentioned above, I understand the notion of white world-making to mean ways of feeling, thinking, and seeing that reproduce whiteness and as intimately tied to the project of global coloniality. My interests, therefore, lie in the logics that make possible strategies of conquest declarations rooted in colonial matrices of power, the turning of bodies into objects, and racialised surveillance. These logics point to interweaved histories that set the structural conditions within which surveillance capitalism could and can continue to occur. To say that surveillance capitalism is part of the project of white world-making is to say that it draws on an episteme constructed through interlocking forces of oppression, including racial capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and conquest. Locating surveillance capitalism within the project of white world-making in no way attempts to ascribe new or different qualities to it. Rather, tracing some of the longer histories and oppressive knowledge structures in the workings of surveillance capitalism might help us to disentangle the logics and conditions that allow it to thrive.

The same contradiction, between the impotence of “hegemonic” critical theory in civil society and the material power of revolutionary theory in the hands of the oppressed masses, can be appreciated by turning to a person who was arguably at the time the second most advanced Marxist theorist in California and likely the United States as a whole: George Jackson. Jackson became imprisoned in 1960 as a teenaged petty criminal and had no formal education. For holding up a gas station, he was given an “indeterminate” sentence, which became a practical life sentence. By the end of the decade, he was the Black Panther Party’s leading theoretician and wrote cogently on the application of Lenin and other revolutionary theorists to the struggle for liberation in the United States and especially in the prison system. He did this with a shockingly limited access to textual resources and wrote much of his theoretical output on a plastic typewriter. As was and is common in U.S. prisons, he was subjected to extended solitary confinement as punishment, some of that time in open-air cages. In his letters and writings he described the prison’s sadistic tortures, its corruptions and obscenities and plots. At the time of his death he had ninety-nine books in his cell: his access to Lenin’s thought was limited and he mostly had to rely on secondary sources or anthologies. The fact that his theoretical development was so acute and sophisticated under these conditions suggests something of the universal pertinence of revolutionary theory in the Leninist vein. In his theoretical work, especially Blood in My Eye, a major work published posthumously, Jackson attempted a clear-eyed confrontation with the “fascist” character of the U.S. racial state and social system. He also excavated Leninist revolutionary theory’s relevance to the predicament of America’s oppressed masses, insisting over and again on the international character of the struggles raging in U.S. ghettos and prisons. Following Mao Zedong in particular, Jackson advocated a prolonged people’s war against the U.S. government. Echoing Engels, he insisted that “People’s War is not polite or proper. . . . People’s War is improvisation and more improvisa- tion.”25 Following Fanon, he appreciated the importance of state violence in imposing colonial conditions and recognized that the development of revolutionary class consciousness was hindered absent a militarily powerful revolutionary movement that could offer real protection for oppressed peoples. Like Lenin, Jackson always framed his struggle as a planetary struggle of oppressed peoples against imperialism. In Left-Wing Communism and other texts, Lenin characterized the newly formed workers’ state as engaged in unrelenting war with the international bourgeoisie. For Jackson likewise, the latest sadistic technique of brutality introduced by the “pigs”—prison guards—was but a material manifestation of the real global struggle that the Black Panther Party shared with the National Liberation Front, and other military forces opposing the U.S. empire. Jackson is a quintessential Leninist not only because he persistently advocated for proletarian revolution (although that is so), but because he conceived of his own struggle, which was one of life and death within a small enclosed space, as part and parcel of a planetary transition that was open to scientific, materialist analysis. From his cell, Jackson could reevaluate the history of the U.S. state and social system without illusion, and realize that as a racial dictatorship, its history was linked to and coeval with other forms of fascism. Prison lays power relations bare—on that, most would agree. But for Jackson, the effect was not to narrow his vision to the demoralizing and undignified intrusions of the state onto his person, but to evince a stark and penetrating analysis of the prison as a legible manifestation of white supremacist global governance. It is such a perspective, I am arguing in part, that allows for and warrants the designation “Leninist”: an uncompromisingly revolutionary stance toward “local” political questions, such as the fate of one particular nation-state: We must accept the eventuality of bringing the USA to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked down, the commonness of death. . . . We simply stop allowing ourselves to be hunted and do some stalking of our own; their secret police aren’t really too secret at all. (55) As Lenin insisted in State and Revolution, a materialist idea of the state sees it as nothing more than “special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc.”26 From George Jackson’s vantage point of being completely controlled by this apparatus, he concluded optimistically that its overthrow was nigh. The latter, moreover, was a prerequisite for the realization of a true universality, one where Black people were in fact free to live. What does it mean to point, then, to the unrealized universality of (Leninist) revolutionary theory? For one thing, it serves to remind us that whatever one thinks of the heroic scenario of the proletariat’s role in history, its alleged mission to abolish first the capitalist system and then all class distinctions as such (creating a proletarian state and then “withering” it into nonexistence),27 it is a theoretical terrain open to the future—and not one that restricts understanding of class struggle to the point of production.28 Second, perhaps more pointedly, it reminds us that for Lenin and revo- lutionary theorists of the twentieth century broadly, imperialism was the name for the planetary system into which capitalism had developed, not a policy of this or that country. Imperialism was, and is, inseparable from the division of the planet into oppressor and oppressed nationalities: liberation from national oppression thus cannot come without a confrontation with imperialism qua global system. Third, and most pointedly still, it insists that there can be no talk of universality as if it were a settled accomplishment: we cannot talk as if humanity is not still “divided.” Put more simply, “humanity” itself is (has always been) the name for a false, presumptive (white supremacist) operationalization of “universality,” the latter having been foreclosed by the racial dynamics of capitalism’s own development. Finally, we cannot understand Black Leninism without understanding its never-ending confrontation with white supremacist counterrevolutionary forces, without understanding Blackness as premature death, without the dialectical relations of the “unrealized” and universal. White supremacist state violence is not an ancillary condition of capitalism—it cannot be explained away in a footnote as in contradiction to this or that philosopher’s appeal to the universal condition of humanity. On the contrary, the “universal” as we have come to inherit it is not just drenched in blood, but irredeemably constricted by its emergence from within the racial partitioning of humanity. Only a revolutionary break with the white supremacist racial states that continue to govern the imperialist system can allow for the realization of a true universality. If we take together the examples of two mid-century comrades, Angela Davis and George Jackson, it couldn’t be clearer: the Black claim to universal emancipation elicits state violence. Liberation for Black people means liberation from the U.S. empire, which is why the latter designates so many state resources to the global and local maintenance of white supremacy. The violence unleashed against Jackson and whosoever invoked his name to assert the “humanity” of the imprisoned (at Attica and so on); the state’s determined effort to try Davis for her life—such examples must be appreciated in the context of a truly planetary operational field (U.S. support for Rhodesia, its proxy wars to prop up apartheid Southern Africa, etc.). Quite simply, the history of Black Leninism suggests that the putative universals we have come to anticipate, such as “humanity” or emancipation per se or theory for that matter, require a thoroughgoing and radical reconstruction, rather than to be “decentered” amid a pluralism of incommensurate forms of life. After the apparent contraction of Black liberation struggles in the late 1970s, the (temporary) end of the long Black freedom movement, there was much academic hand-wringing about whether and to what degree Marxist theory does or can attend to Black liberation, to a universality constituted by Black people: does it not throw Marxism, or Leninism, as “European” theories, into epistemological crisis, or push them uncomfortably into a different ontological terrain? On the contrary, I have argued in this section that it is only by way of Black critique of putative universals do we arrive at the truly universal implications (realizable in the future) of the Leninist ambition to overthrow imperialism as the world system. Moreover, critiques of the presumptive universality of (white, European) theory are necessary to the revival of revolutionary theory per se—not as an idealist, academic language game, but as a material force that grips and bolsters the multinational working class. The final section will examine one particular example of a policy oriented toward a revolutionary transformation within the heart of imperialism—the Black Belt Thesis.

Furthermore, poor black women cannot depend on the state for protection from any kind of violence. In fact, violence against black women is intimately connected to state power. There is a clear correlation between institutionalized violence against black women in the United States. In 2015, a police officer named Daniel Holtzclaw raped thirteen black women between the ages of seventeen and fifty-eight over a seven-month period. This sort of crimes violating black women’s bodily integrity and ruining their psychic stability shows how poor black women lives do not matter and are not considered as grievable, lives conceived and exposed to deliberate police violence. It is worth pointing out that the women who were raped by Holtzclaw live in a poor black community in Oklahoma and are already reduced to absolute vulnerability and exposed to all kinds of state violence—physical, social, economic, and environmental. It is not surprising, then, that such atrocious acts perpetrated against black women that are utterly vulnerable took so long to be revealed. Is it because they are constructed as the “other,” the welfare queens? As a general rule, the “others,” the “them,” are always viewed as different from the “us” and not in need of protection. And since “we” presumably can never be “them,” it is likely that the “we” continue to ill-treat the “them” on ground that such an atrocity would go unnoticed. What such an account depicts, in no uncertain terms, is that gendered racism is a real problem for black women in the welfare state and society as a whole, which cannot be ignored.

Black women who want to be stay at home mothers and take care of their children, their elderly parents, and other needy family members are usually looked at as welfare queens and seen as profaning the sacrosanct principles of “good mothering” and the ethics of care as normalizing gender norms.71 And while, women in general were indeed excluded from the white male demos of free and equal subjects capable of practical reason, “self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation,”72 white women, in no uncertain terms, benefited from the cult of true womanhood. In other words, the rights of women to be protected from the drudgery of work outside the home, even if it denied them self-autonomy and freedom and strengthened paternalistic power, it was a right given only to white woman. This was shamelessly recognized and articulated in the Mothers’ Pensions Program, which denied social assistance to black women. In a word, white womanhood was safeguarded and defended against black womanhood.

Reconciliation is profoundly uncritical in its inability to see that the constant in white supremacy is Christianity and Christian religious formation as unity in Christ that transcends earthly identities and thus holds the logic of the world together. This universal and totalizing logic of reconciliation is precisely the problem. For it is not able to imagine a world that would actually value blackness as blackness, only a world that is able to transform blackness into a lesser whiteness, to transform unreason into reason. Similarly, it is not able to hold a concept of whiteness as a violent and violating unity. It can only think whiteness as a repetition of forgetfulness, or the unthinking itself, that whiteness always performs (present currently in the “post-racial”). It can only think whiteness as a present failure that is not really a failure. A failure that will be made right in the future. For example, John Piper’s recent chat with Douglas Wilson [with brilliant twitter commentary by Sarah, here] had Piper applauding Thabiti Anyabwile because he bent over backwards to try and “understand” Doug Wilson’s racist treatise defending slavery. In the framework of unity and reconciliation, this is the mode in which blackness can be valued—in how much it defers to and submits to whiteness as the organizing logic around which we must confront race. A secular example of this could also be noted around Mandela’s death and the utility Mandela’s writings about peace and reconciliation quickly found themselves divorced from his radicalism and one-time support for armed resistance in order to shore up neoliberal ideals regarding democracy, global capitalism’s expansion, and hope in capitalism as the harbinger of democracy. In each instance, It is the same position blackness must hold—a thing to be reformed and transformed until it can speak in the language that recognizes whiteness as the savior and the structure of the world’s reason. Because it is not able to recognize itself as a reproduction of the violence of white supremacy and anti-blackness, reconciliation discourse and frameworks encourages the emotional abuse of people of color for the benefit of white supremacy and for the benefit of white people as the primary people who must be borne with in order for the world to really change. It encourages the redemption of a white supremacist world through a reconciliation that extends the white supremacist world in a nicer more inclusive form. Reconciliation sets itself up as the only solution to the problem it creates, as the only remedy to the violence it produces.

The idea of poverty as a security issue has been fairly commonplace since the end of the Cold War. In 1993, the United Nations sought to redefine security with individuals as the referent object; a framework in which poverty is one of the principal security threats as it significantly reduces quality and quantity of life. At the same time, poverty was gaining importance in the security agendas of states. This is based on the idea that poverty is a threat to the rich as well as the poor and that an unequal world is an unstable one; a view that has become very powerful in the years since September, 2001. This essay will address the implications of this second type of securitisation – world poverty as a threat to the west.

I will use the Copenhagen School approach to show how poverty is being securitised by western leaders in the context of the “War on Terror.” I will then go on to demonstrate that, although the issue of poverty is likely to receive more attention as a result, the securitisation of poverty may also cause many problems. Firstly, aid may be redirected from the non-threatening poor (often those most in need) to those perceived to be dangerous. Secondly, the involvement of the securitising states in the creation of poverty can be hidden as the rich are presented as potential victims. Finally, securitisation necessarily presents the interests of the securitiser as more important than those who will be affected by its actions and therefore encourages an imperialistic approach.

At this moment, standing at the crossroads, American reparations theory charts a murky path. In light of the stakes and in hopes of generating practical theory that links scholars and frontline advocates with policymakers and the American public, we have suggested next steps down an American reparations path that elevates the role of "social healing" and links group and societal healing to "doing justice." To help chart this path we have suggested that reparations-asrepair392 scholars and advocates generate a strategic framework that draws more deeply from multidisciplinary understandings of social healing as well as from multifaceted global reparations attempts at symbolic and practical justice.393 The suggested framework of social healing through justice bears three distinct markers. First, it builds upon the scholarship embracing reconciliation (instead of compensation) as the conceptual foundation for reparations. 394 It diverges, however, by expressly highlighting the role of justice in social healing and by deploying language that is less controversial than "reconciliation." 395 Second, it casts reparations not as an end in itself but instead as an integral aspect of the larger project of social healing-as the culmination of a series of strategic efforts targeting recognition, responsibility, and reconstruction. 396 In doing so, it identifies repairing damage to group members and building new relationships as focal points for fostering an interest-convergence among the subjects of injustice, citizens' groups, and society itself. And third, the path is marked by an emphasis on reparations practice; or more specifically, on the insights drawn from recent ground-level human rights struggles worldwide to redress the harms of injustice as a pivotal element of a country's democratic legitimacy. 397

In the most basic terms, NAARC advances a simple expansive and inclusive definition of eligibility for reparations for African Americans/Black people: All Black people who were harmed by America in America, should be repaired by America in America!

We take this position because the focus on who can prove a direct lineage to the enslavement era contains two major false assumptions:

We thus contend that a reparations way of thinking is needed within calls for universal distributory justice. This way of thinking also allows us to look beyond race to other ways in which certain groups of people have been exploited and expropriated by others — namely, via gender. We do not have the scope to address the question of reparations and gender in this article, but given the historical and ongoing harms of patriarchy, in particular the ongoing free-riding and expropriation of women’s unpaid care work and social reproduction (Fraser, 2016, 2018), and indeed the central role of patriarchy within capitalist production and accumulation (Bhattacharyya, 2018), a reparative way of thinking is also useful when considering what is rightful through a gendered lens (Rubio-Marin, 2009; Wells, 2014). Recognition and redress through reparations are important for acknowledging not just past wrongs, but also the ways these wrongs underpin contemporary inequalities. Such historical wrongs engender race and class (and gender) relations that still have material and affective impacts today. In the post-independence case, we examined how unequal global systems set up under colonialism continue to underpin divisions between the majority world and its former colonizers. In the settler colonial case, we showed how dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples continues through racialized punitive welfare programmes, the continued dispossession of lands and the denial of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty. Racialized systems in the US set up under slavery still impact Black communities today, for example through mass incarceration, employment and educational outcomes and broader inequalities of both income and wealth. There are intersections between redistributory universalism and reparative redress. In many cases, the links between class and race can be reflected in statistics of poverty. However, this can also hide the way in which race has been the grammar of unequal relations and has justified expropriation and exploitation in places like the US since colonization. This is also the case in Australia, where ignoring the ways in which race and coloniality have impacted and continue to impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples ignores aspects of settler colonialism that are not only about economic dispossession, but also about racism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Yet (re)distribution must be as much a key part of reparatory justice as is recognition. As Nancy Fraser (2003, 2005) has pointed out, recognition without redistribution holds the danger of displacing struggles for economic justice — an issue that Fraser argues has plagued feminism in recent decades (Fraser, 2005: 298). The negotiations between Namibia and Germany around the Herero-Nama genocide are another example: while Germany is willing to recognize the genocide, and give some additional development aid as part of this recognition, it has declined to term the accompanying payment ‘reparations’, fearing to set a precedent for other or larger redistributive claims to reparative payments. Fraser has argued that both recognition and substantive redistribution are equally essential parts of social justice; one cannot be forsaken in favour of the other. Here we have built on that argument to make the case that the two are in fact intertwined in justice-based claims for shares of collective wealth. All three cases illustrate common themes. While the US is a post-slavery society, it is also a settler colonial state, and insights from the Australian case have resonance for Native Americans in the US who also have substantive claims for reparative justice. The US case gave us one possibility on how mechanisms of distributive justice can also do some measure of reparative work via universal, redistributive and individual payments framed as a rightful share. A U+BI contends with some of the issues of recognition and redress raised in this article. While it is universal in scope and rightful in framing, the addition of the plus includes recognition of specific historical ills in need of reparative justice. The Australian case also suggested avenues that could accompany reparations, showing how not just recognition but also sovereignty could include specific national truth-telling processes, returning of land rights and self-determination, along with a U+BI or other forms of reparative redistribution. These reparative packages would need to be directed by Indigenous peoples themselves. Decentralized and decolonial cosmopolitanism — such as a global UBI framed as reparations for colonialism and its after-effects — may help fulfil reparations for postindependence injustice. However, these payments need to also transcend nation state boundaries and connect with people that are stateless, or diaspora dispersed because of colonialism and slavery.

Reparations demand clear-eyed accountability for acts in the past and our role in them so we may be able to envision other futures. Academic reparations call for community accountability from all of us. Collaboratively conceptualizing a pedagogy of reparations fosters the possibility of a genuinely intersectional, decolonial, global imagination for film and media studies. Reparations are not about benevolence or charity. Reparations are our duty and obligation. I don’t like the word fix, it makes me uncomfortable. ...there is no once and for all fix for anything. The word I like is “ repair”: more tentative, more humble. ... The marines go in there to fix things, they don’t go in there to repair things. Repair can always be undone. —Teju Cole20 Institutions like to forget. A reparative pedagogy is committed to remembering, to witnessing, to repairing. A reparative pedagogy commits to curricula that critique hegemonic colonial, settler, cisheteropatriarchal, ethnocentrist, casteist epistemologies. A reparative pedagogy demands that we recognize and situate our own positionality. A reparative pedagogy asks, what will our classrooms look like when we move from stories of innocence to admissions of complicity? Rather than be defensive, when we start with complicity, we recognize our “proximity to the problems we are addressing.”21 A reparative pedagogy covers a wide range of histories, genres, and media traditions. A reparative pedagogy resists minor curricular reform, the hush money, the reluctant bribe of the one Black or one queer or one non-Western text in the syllabus (e.g., “the infamous “race week” in any Intro to Film/Media course”).22 A reparative pedagogy thinks through the relationship between epistemic violence and state violence. Iyer | A Pedagogy of Reparations 185 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/article-pdf/8/1/181/495522/fmh.2022.8.1.181.pdf by Dartmouth College user on 15 July 2023 A reparative pedagogy divests from binaries of form and content, theory and history, aesthetics and political economy, art and geopolitics. A reparative pedagogy recognizes “film’s rootedness in politics, imperialism, and capital” and interrogates purely formal, aesthetic appraisals of media forms.23 A reparative pedagogy divests from the dichotomous, hierarchical logics central to modern, colonial, capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality.24 A reparative pedagogy invests in multidirectional visions, granular and textured histories, global media circulations, labor practices, underrepresented epistemologies.

The time for this kind of broad based, collaborative security is now. As the climate crisis accelerates, we risk our social system warping around its old and longstanding inequalities. By century’s end we may face persistent forms of climate apartheid and climate colonialism, in which inequalities within and across countries are increasingly tied to the extent to which families, communities, and whole nations can pay to deal with the consequences of a warming planet. Our current trajectory risks genocidal realities – perhaps most dramatically if our governments continue to respond to movement across borders with border militarization and warehousing, and to social upheaval within them by means of increasingly violent and exploitative policing and caging.

The pandemic should serve as a grave wake up call. The virus, after all, was just one part of the deeper political problem: how our society distributes risk, vulnerability, and security. Since our global society is built on racial capitalism, distributes these in a deeply stratified way, where different tiers of society experience markedly different levels of risk of exposure to environmental, financial, and interpersonal harm and violence. Responding to such a system must involve more than challenging this or that political leader or installing a few solar panels. It calls for us to find a way of protecting ourselves beyond the cannibalistic, violent model provided by the history of racial capitalism that built so much of today’s world – to find a way to protect ourselves by protecting each other. Basic income is one way forward.