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Fiscal redistribution is defined as the reduction in income inequality, brought about by government via taxes and transfers. Their findings indicate that only in countries characterized as young democracies do elections exert a positive impact on fiscal redistribution. Moreover, their work suggests that the effect of elections is strongest in young democracies characterized by relatively higher political instability. Further details can be found at: Kammas P. and V. Sarantides (2015). Fiscal redistribution around elections when democracy is not “the only game in town” SERPS 2015019.

1 The Theory of Fiscal Redistribution: Key Analytical Insights

In this Handbook, “fiscal redistribution” refers to the process by which the state collects revenues from individuals and households (primarily through taxes) and spends these revenues on benefits (for example, cash transfers, price subsidies, and in-kind benefits such as education and health) intended for specific individuals and households. In so doing, the state changes the postfiscal income distribution and poverty rates that would have prevailed in the absence of fiscal policy. Because of behavioral responses and general equilibrium effects, fiscal policy can also change the prefiscal income distribution and poverty rates. While at this point the CEQ Assessments do not estimate the counterfactual prefiscal income with these second-round effects in place, it is important to note that the analytical insights presented here and in chapters 2 (Enami, Lustig, and Aranda), 3 (Enami), 4 (Higgins and Lustig), and 5 (Enami) apply to fiscally included income redistribution regardless of the method used to estimate its extent. That is, regardless of whether fiscal redistribution is calculated using run-of-the-mill fiscal incidence analysis, microsimulation methods, or partial or general equilibrium modeling, the theoretical results discussed below and in the next four chapters apply.

The third central concept is (income) redistribution. As Tullock argues, ‘‘redistribution is probably the most important function of most modern governments’’ (Tullock, 2013, p. 1). However, the level of redistribution and its cross-sectional variation cannot be modeled using only purely economic explanations, such as the level of inequality in a given society (see McCarty & Pontusson, 2009). Therefore, I focus on the question of how political processes and institutions, such as autocratic ruling strategies and the degree of incumbent party institutionalization, determine the level of redistribution and inequality. In this dissertation, redistribution is broadly defined as the transfer of resources from one person or group to another person or group (see also Albertus, 2015; Boadway & Keen, 2000; Solt, 2020; Tullock, 2013). More precisely, income or fiscal redistribution is defined as the transfer of resources via taxes and fiscal transfer policies from one person or group to another. By contrast, land redistribution —a second influential type of redistribution (Albertus, 2015) —is defined as land reform measures that lead to a reallocation of land properties from landed elites to the landed poor.10 In addition, income redistribution is also often conceptualized as the transfer of resources to the poor.

The present redistributive policy focus is on a particular type of government redistribution that may be called direct fiscal redistribution to the poor (hereafter DFRP). Fiscal redistribution refers here to redistribution of money and in-kind income among strata of households by means of both government spending and taxing (i.e., fiscal) activities. For example, increased generosity in public assistance payment levels and reliance upon progressive income as opposed to regressive sales taxes can provide positive fiscal redistribution. Direct fiscal redistribution refers to that part of such redistribution that can be accounted for in terms of government's relatively direct and immediate give-and-take of expenditures and taxes to and from income strata of households. Current evidence suggests that such redistribution is considerable in advanced capitalist political democracies, especially vis-à-vis the poor (e.g., Reynolds and Smolensky, 1977; Hicks and Swank, 1984b). During the 1970s DFRP apparently augmented the "pre-fisc" income share of poor households in the U.S. by over 100 percent (see Reynolds and Smolensky, 1977: 74 on the U.S.; and Hicks and Swank, 1984b on advanced capitalism).

Fiscal progressivity is affected by both the progressivity of taxes (lower λT) and transfers (higher λM). Fiscal redistribution requires that transfers are more progressive than taxes, i.e. the social cost of transfers needs to be less than the social benefit of transfers. Figure 4 shows the variation in tax and transfer progressivity across countries. While, on average, taxes reduce fiscal redistribution by around 56 percent (the ratio of the social cost of taxes, λT, to the social cost of transfers, λM), there is very little systematic relationship between the two. In some countries, such as Ireland and Belgium, high transfer progressivity is reinforced by high tax progressivity. In others, such as Hungary and Poland, low transfer progressivity is reinforced by low tax progressivity. In the Netherlands and Belgium, high transfer progressivity is offset by low tax progressivity, whereas in Portugal and Cyprus low transfer progressivity is offset by high tax progressivity.

While a tax expenditure can have the same effect on the allocation of resources and the distribution of income as a corresponding tax increase, there are always some differences between tax and spending programs. The most obvious is the one discussed in the previous section—the difference in how tax and direct expenditures are displayed in budgetary accounts and communicated to the public. But there are some other differences as well. A second (and also obvious) difference is that tax expenditures always require some level of involvement by the IRS, while direct expenditures do not. Tax expenditures affect the total amount of tax paid or refund due on April 15 and can affect withholding schedules and estimated payments. Individuals claim benefits, subject to audit by the IRS, but may in some circumstances also be required to submit documentation supplied by other agencies. A third difference is that the costs of administering direct expenditures are more transparent than the costs of administering tax expenditures because they are typically revealed in the budgets of program agencies. In contrast, there is no specific accounting for the administrative costs of tax expenditures. Tax expenditures do raise the cost of providing a given level of enforcement and taxpayer service, but the IRS budget does not display incremental costs attributable to specific provisions.7 A fourth difference is the time period used for determining and paying benefits. The income tax uses an annual accounting period as the basis for calculating and assessing tax liability, although tax payments are made more frequently through withholding and estimated taxes. In contrast, spending programs do not necessarily use a one year time period to determine the amount of benefit payments a person or family receive and may pay benefits on a monthly or quarterly basis instead of annually. Eligibility for benefit programs may be based on the stock of assets, on income flows within a year, or on income or earnings over multiple years. For example, Social Security retirement benefits are determined by a formula based on average indexed monthly earnings over 35 years. The use of an annual accounting period places some limitations on how tax incentives can be designed.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rolled out her "Green New Deal," calling for clean energy, universal health care and guaranteed jobs, one of the first questions she got was: How do you plan to pay for it?

The New York Democrat argued that ambitious programs can easily be financed through deficit spending.

In the beginning, man said, Let there be money: and there was money. Centuries later, on March 27, 2020, the United States passed into law the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act and with the stroke of a pen, over $2 trillion was spent without first taxing or borrowing from anyone. It included $1,200 stimulus checks for adults and $500 for kids. Another $900 billion was spent without first taxing or borrowing from anyone nine months later as the Consolidated Appropriations Act. It included $600 stimulus checks per adult and kid. Another $1.9 trillion was spent without first taxing or borrowing from anyone another three months later when a third stimulus check went out thanks to the American Rescue Plan Act, this one for $1,400 per adult and kid. It was followed in July by the first of six monthly payments of $250 to $300 more per kid. All told, within one year, $1 trillion in cash was sent directly to the bank accounts and mailboxes of about 85% of Americans, no strings attached.

We didn’t "pay for" any of this. We just did it. None of it was made possible by taxing or borrowing from anyone first, and that’s the big lesson I believe everyone needs to take away from the COVID-19 pandemic besides the effectiveness of direct cash payments and dangers of politicizing science and public health. Americans needed money, so it was created out of nothing. The thing is, that’s not new. It’s how money works in any country that issues its own currency.

Black Radical Tradition; racial capitalism; Black Geographies; South Asia Studies

The Black Radical Tradition posits an unbroken line of community, history, and struggle. It claims to be resistant to the maneuverings and mutations of capitalist development. The Black Radical Tradition is outside of the dialectics of capitalism and the theory of Marxism. The tradition accuses Marxists of selectively choosing the 20th century as its temporal concern. For Robinson, this is a sleight of hand because it foregrounds European struggles and conveniently disconnects the Black Radical Tradition from earlier forms of struggle. I argue there is an incomplete theorization of racial capitalism in the Black Radical Tradition that does not allow Robinson to see the Black Radical Tradition's defeat. This might seem stunning considering Robinson popularized the term "Racial Capitalism," however I argue the full force of racial capitalism never influences Black struggle in Robinson's works. This is in contrast to capitalism's decisive influence amongst European and white workers. The only place capitalism does come into play is in the form of imperialism and even that is profoundly limited. As I will show in this section, Robinson fails to apply the most rigorous critique of political economy to the Blacks Radical Tradition. This has resulted in a dichotomous system, separate from one another, unlike the integrated world of capital all proletarians find themselves in. I propose a different approach to racial capitalism rooted in value-form theory, systemic dialectics, and communization. In this section, I will lay out my own perspectives and critiques of the Black Radical Tradition, Black Marxism, and Cedric Robinson. I will bring to bear the dynamic force of capitalist social relations which have penetrated all forms of life on the globe. This will show that the defeat of the Black Radical Tradition was epochal, requiring a fundamentally new approach to the question of Black liberation. Robinson is certainly correct in challenging classical Marxist conceptions of capitalism. One-hundred and fifty years after Marx wrote his great works, we can see capitalism in a different light. Capitalism is not revolutionary. In fact, it goes through many periods of stagnation. Capitalism does not sweep away the old order. In fact, it reorders many of them into its very logic. Capitalism does not create a universalistic class, but constantly reproduces new divisions of difference and domination. Capitalism does not only produce the free waged laborer. It in fact produces the unfree proletariat, the slave, the indentured servant, the tenant farmer, and the incarcerated. Capitalism also creates a unique form of organizing the globe, called nation- states, culminating in the larger order of colonialism and imperialism. We can credit all of this to Robinson's intervention in Black Marxism. However Robinson's refusal to see racial capitalism as a total system that leaves no social relationship, politics, or tradition untouched has made it difficult to see and theorize the defeat of the Black Radical Tradition. Racial capitalism is a total category and system. The value-form, a concept virtually left untouched in the Black Radical Tradition, is the defining concept of our period. This does not mean the exclusion of gender, nationalism, and race is inevitable or even possible. On the contrary, I argue the value-form produces these very differences and dominations from its own internal logic. So that differentiation and domination is not a subset of value-form, but its substance. This is in sharp contrast to Marxists who treat the value-form as only (abstract) socially necessary labor time. For such Marxists, differentiation and domination are the products of a devious bourgeoisie, class struggle, or some other contingent process. I argue against the contingency thesis, and instead posit that differentiation and domination on the order of race, nation, and gender are necessary to the categorical logic of the value-form. The value-form could not exist without these forms of difference and domination. We cannot separate the critique of political economy from race because it is always racial in every dimension. I show that the concept of historical being used by Robinson is a metaphysical devise that blocks the analysis of the value-form's impact on the Black Radical Tradition. Following this, I will demonstrate the consequences of introducing value-form analysis to Robinson's argument and specifically the concepts of formal and real domination of labor. Considering that Black people were slaves, workers, or unemployed--or more broadly speaking proletarians--this concept holds primacy in analyzing the development of Black liberation. I will also introduce the concept of systemic dialectics in analyzing the Black Radical Tradition. Cedric Robinson has correctly pointed out the racialist and stage-ist assumptions of historical dialectics. Systemic dialectics does not read Hegel or Marx in a historical manner, but treats Hegel's work as an exposition of a totality, and not of history. The concept of totality will do an immense amount of labor in this final section. This will tentatively set up the development of the race-form which is an internal development of the value-form. Robinson calls it racialism. This is one of his singular contributions to Marxist theory. I see much overlap between the concept of race-form and racialism. The other definitive thinkers who have headed in this direction are Paul Gilroy (2000) and Evgeny Pashukanis (1989). The hope is to finally end the class versus race debates, to finally end whether race is contingent or necessary in capital, and place the struggle against race on the terms of anti-capitalism.74 74 This dissertation has not addressed the question of the state as rigorously as it could have. But the origins of this can begin with the state derivation debates in Germany in developing a more rigorous concept of the state (Holloway, 1979). From there the relationship of the state and race can be unraveled to also develop an anti-state politics and theory when it comes to Black liberation. 106 Historical Being Why hasn't the Black Radical Tradition waged a total war against its oppressors? Robinson argues that "Blacks have seldom employed the level of violence that they (the Westerners) have understood the situation required" (2000, p. 168). Robinson asks why did National Turner not kill poor whites or Toussaint not kill his master's family. He reminds the reader that these are not mere anecdotes, but a pattern that has been repeating throughout the centuries. When there was violence, he argues that it was pointed inward. He explains the meaning of this profoundly historical act of mercy, This violence was not inspired by an external object, it was not understood as a part of an attack on a system, or an engagement with an abstraction of oppressive structures and relations. Rather it was their "Jonestowns," our Nongqause: The renunciation of actual being for historical being; the preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never been allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or physical sense. For them defeat or victory was an internal affair (2000, p. 168). The meaning of contrasting Jonestown to Nongqause is opaque. Both are failed millennialist movements. Jonestown led to the death of over 900 people; the other the slaughter of 400,00 cattle and the death of 40,000 people through starvation. What is Robinson trying to invoke by these two references? Why is Jonestowns in quotes and why is it 'theirs'? Why is Nongquase 'ours'? Robinson demarcates the boundaries by pointing out it was not Fanon’s fratricide. It was not self-inflicted wounds because the oppressor was beyond reach as described by Fanon in Wretched of the Earth. Nor was it the historic terror found in revolutions. It was certainly not savagery. It was simply not motivated by any external reality. It was the self-constitution of a new politics. I call it class struggle anti-colonialism--the reason for this will be clear shortly. Timothy J. Stapleton argues that it was class conflict which drove the cattle killing and crop destruction. In 1856, a teenage girl, Nongqawuse had a vision. She met "strange figures" who told her the cure to cattle sickness and how to rid the Xhosa of the British (Stapleton, p. 389). The only thing they had to do was kill their cattle, burn their crops, renounce witchcraft among other things. At the time many observers saw this as a backwards superstitious belief. It was beyond comprehension to the British. It looked like mass suicide. It was not a backward superstition of the Xhosa that caused this, but an attack on the privileges of a cattle holding aristocracy. As Stapleton argues, the cattle became the material of wealth in Xhosa society. The chiefs owned upwards of 87 percent of the Xhosa cattle (Stapleton, p. 384). Wealth was determined by ownership in cattle. This was the key that unlocks the cattle killing. Other factors also played a role: the power of the chiefs declined due to the British, allowing for new forms of authority or rise, the drought of 1850 exacerbated class differences and conflict amongst the Xhosa, and other prophecies similar to Nongquwsue were circulating around the time. As Stapleton writes, "...they were striking against a failed political class. Religious leadership from the masses sought to size [sic] the initiative from the impotent royals and aristocrats" (Stapleton, p. 387). Furthermore, whose cattle were slaughtered was determined by which chiefs had collaborated with the British. So not only was this class struggle, it was an anti-colonial struggle. As Stapleton points out "Originating with the commoners, the movement seems to have been the strongest in areas where the chiefs had lost legitimacy because of neutrality or collaboration" (p. 390). This was anti-colonial class struggle. Far too under-appreciated dynamic in the history of liberation. Not only was struggle waged against the colonizer, but also the indigenous ruling elites. The colonizer nor the indigenous elite could understand this deadly dialectic. Robinson develops the lack of violence towards outsiders in the Black Radical Tradition to preserving historical being and the ontological totality. Robinson connects this to the structures of the mind: creating epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology of the Black Radical Tradition.75 The passage revolves around the change from 'actual being' to 'historical being'. What exactly is historical being Robinson does not elaborate, leaving the reader to speculate. It seems historical being is the 'preservation of the ontological totality" (2000, p. 168). Robinson sheds some light on the meaning of this when he writes "This was a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the historical experience of Black people and not merely from the social formations of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism" (2000, p. 169). This was a consciousness rooted before capitalism took hold. Because of its earlier origins, it knew of a world outside of the value-form. It was entirely different way of seeing, being, and becoming. In the penultimate sentences of the book, Robinson writes "But always, its focus was on the structures of the mind. Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material" (2000, p. 169). To understand the importance of metaphysics for Robinson, I will need to return his first work, Terms of Order. He writes, "...the social sciences as taught and applied in Western experience, prepare the intelligence for formal, structural ontology, eschewing metaphysics and transformation as well as their implications for social and/or historical understanding" (2016, p. 206). He focuses on the concept of transformation through the movement of the negation of the negation. This latter movement is in contrast to stable systems of knowledge which are "convenient illusions" (2016, p. 208). Robinson describes language as a mask of reality, 75 One of the more dangerous and explicit readings of Robinson's argument directly leads to privilege and identity politics. 109 demanding something that can break out of this limitation. He cites Levi-Strauss's emphasis on music, "...a grammar which he is convinced transcends, that is, fails to be restricted by the 'topological constraints' of mind-structure" (2016, p. 209). I read Robinson's usage of music as an approximation for culture which is so central in Black Marxism. It is culture that is the material and historical container of the Black Radical Tradition.76 Robinson writes, "The Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture" (2000, p. 170). Robinson's move is to separate culture from capitalism. The Black Radical Tradition seen as culture avoids the damaging consequences of capitalism: alienation, reification, and atomization. Does it also avoid de-industrialization, automation, suburbanization, and commodification? Ultimately, we must make come to terms with whether capitalism is a total system or not? I argue that it is. While its domination is never complete, not because of any specific theory of autonomy, rather capitalism is a self-generating system of contradictions with the proletariat at one pole of that contradiction. My argument is not that Africans had no culture (Stuckey, 1987).77 That would be ridiculous and profoundly racist. Nor is my argument that Africans did not have a tradition which was a powerful resource against colonialism (James, 2012). The history of the Xhosa demonstrates precisely the opposite. Nor does the middle passage completely eradicate such 76 In contrast, Lukacs maintains it is the Leninist organization. 77 The critical intellectual intervention was W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folks where he writes about the Black church, "First, we must realize that no such institutions as the Negro church could rear itself without definite historical foundations. These foundations we can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not start in America. He was brought from a definite social environment..." (Du Bois, 1986, p. 495). 110 culture (Sexton, 2011). The works of Sterling Stuckey (1987), George Rawik (1972), Lawrence Levine (1978) among others have demonstrated that African culture persisted in the ante-bellum South. Nor is my argument that culture has no role to play in revolution (Cabral, 1980). Undoubtedly a new culture will have to be developed approximating the movements of the future. Nor am I saying that culture played no role in the Classical Black Liberation Movement or the Classical Workers Movement: it did and at times it was profoundly important (Woods, 1998; Thompson, 1964).78 I am arguing that regardless of culture, my fundamental argument would remain the same.79 My point is that to explain the movements solely in terms of culture is to give the concept of culture explanatory powers which it simply does not have. Both movements were defined by different dynamics, not completely reducible to such dynamics, but should be considered the central dynamics of those movements, and the most powerful explanations which all other dynamics must develop a relationship to. Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, what I am saying is that arguments which center culture as central to liberation as does the Black Radical Tradition cannot explain the absence of the tradition for fifty years. To the extent that real domination of labor by capital and a crisis of profitability has become the defining dynamic of capitalist accumulation, it has had a fundamentally negative impact on the strategic, organizational, and political possibilities of revolution as they were defined by the 20th century. This is not to say that the possibilities of revolution are now over, but that they will not be 78 E.P. Thompson wrote "Class consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms" (1963, p. 1). 79 Vincent Brown writes, "The anthropologist David Scott is probably correct to suggest that for most scholars, the power of slaveholders and the damage wrought by slavery have been “pictured principally as a negative or limiting force” that “restricted, blocked, paralyzed, or deformed the transformative agency of the slave.” In this sense, scholars who have emphasized slavery’s corrosive power and those who stress resistance and resilience share the same assumption" (p. 1244). 111 recognizable to those expected the forms and content of the 20th century to be repeated. Just as importantly, the terrain upon which revolution will take place, is profoundly different than what it was in the previous century. We experienced a certain cultural form and content, which I will not explicate in this dissertation, but that form and content cannot be separated from the material coordinates which it was embedded in: workplaces, homes, and schools (Jameson, 1991). As those have been fundamentally restructured in the last fifty years, it should seem obvious that it will have consequences for culture. The entire premise of Limits is that we must periodize the relationship of the two movements to the movement of racial capitalism to even begin having sensible conversation about "Black culture" or the "Black Radical Tradition". If we return to where we began on Robinson's historical being, we will have to work through it as a concept, and historicize it. Theorie Communiste has the definitive response to the concept of historical being that applicable to Robinson's usage of the term, a is If there is a 'being' of the proletariat, and moreover a being on which the 'realization of communism' depends, the revolution is inevitable. No amount of theoretical tinkering around the 'historical moment' as the conjunctural condition of the becoming actual of this 'being' will change anything. The 'being' will always find its way through contingency and circumstance. Communism 'in its deep content' will remain invariant in 1796 and 2002. All that remains is to name that 'deep content', and, in passing, indicate a little contingent dross due to the 'historical moment' of 1796 or 2002. But how do we separate the dross from the 'invariant' (End Notes, 2008, p. 189-190). While they are responding to the condition of the proletariat and the theory of communism, it is very much applicable to the Black subject and the Black Radical Tradition Theorie 112 Communiste's point is, "...if this 'being' is not just a metaphysics' then it is not 'independent of the forms taken by capitalist domination' "(End Notes, 2008, p. 190). If people of African descent have a specific being which expresses itself in the Black Radical Tradition, then as Theorie Communiste points out there is very little for activists, revolutionaries, or anyone else to do. The Black Radical Tradition seeks to escape the dialectics and contradictions of capitalism. No matter its defeats, there is always a metaphysical concept of Black liberation, outside the material world which acts as a reservoir of praxis. In contrast, the conception I am outlining is historical, social, material and part of the contradictory-dialectics of racial capitalism. Ultimately, Theorie Communiste's point is that there is no inherent metaphysics to the human condition, history, or experience. Most importantly, the Black proletariat is not independent of racial capitalist domination. It is understandable that Robinson is trying to find something outside of capitalism. Everything that has become internal to the totality of capital has not been able to pose a revolutionary alternative (Postone, 1993). For Robinson the internal movement of the dialectics of proletarian consciousness and politics based on European conditions does not result in communism or anti-racialism. Robinson stands at the end of one century of communist revolutions and correctly sees their limitations. In doing so Robinson creates a new metaphysics. If Lukacs created one around the proletariat, then Robinson does so around the Black Radical Tradition. I argue there is no historical being hanging above history, ready to attack capitalism. Like the workers movement, revolution and fundamental challenges are actually very rare in its history. The Black Radical Tradition has long quiet periods. It has required the same internal battles for clarity of strategy, intellectual positions, political program that the workers movement has. Neither is sacred, but profaned movements, for it is the logic of racial capital to profane 113 everything it touches. As I will show later in this section, both the workers movement and the Black movement attempted to escape racial capitalism, but both ultimately built racial capitalism and became trapped within it.

There is little doubt the Panthers were targeted in ways that were often viciously excessive, including what amounted to extrajudicial killings. But there is even less doubt that among their own senior ranks were pathological killers, ideological madmen and depraved opportunists. But that side of the story is either only referred to in passing or ignored altogether. For example, the film features interviews with a charming and now grey-haired former Black Panther called Ericka Huggins. Although the image of the Panthers was potently male, more than half the members by the late 1960s were female. Their story has been sidelined and it is to the documentary’s credit that it seeks to redress the marginalising of female voices. We hear Huggins speak about what initially galvanised her to join the Panthers, how she committed herself to the cause and how, with a heavy heart, she finally left, having been assaulted by an increasingly deranged Newton. What she doesn’t mention – and nor does the film – is the case of a 19-year-old Panther foot soldier called Alex Rackley. In May 1969, after her Panther husband, John Huggins, was killed in a shoot-out with black nationalists, Huggins moved with her baby daughter to New Haven, Connecticut, where she led the local chapter of the Black Panthers. For no good reason, Rackley, an illiterate young man, was suspected of being an informant. At that time, the FBI had infiltrated the organisation and fear of informants was widespread. And so Rackley was interrogated under torture. He was tied to a chair and had boiling water poured over him and was then left tied to a bed for three days in great pain, in his own mess. Not only did Huggins witness these scenes, , after which he was taken to a nearby swamp and shot dead. Huggins and Seale were charged with murder, kidnap and conspiracy, the allegation being that they commissioned the crime. After a celebrated trial, both walked free. Huggins’s defence was that she was coerced into playing along with the killers – Warren Kimbro and Lonnie McLucas – by the national “field marshal” of the Panthers, George Sams. Of this whole tragic episode, not a word is mentioned. Why? “Ericka Huggins was acquitted,” Stanley Nelson tells me on the phone from the States. “You can’t keep trying people in the media.” Huggins was indeed acquitted – the jury found her not guilty by 10-2. But no one can say she wasn’t there during the torture. Nor that she didn’t remain in the Panthers for almost another decade. Why did she stay with an organisation that harboured such sadistic killers? “Because I was committed to the party, not to orchestrations of the FBI,” she tells me from her home in Oakland. “I was committed to serving people. That’s why I stayed.” As far as she is concerned, the FBI were ruthless puppet masters, able to turn good men into cold-blooded killers through the power of suggestion. It’s a handy theory that absolves the Panthers of responsibility for their own actions and it’s one the film implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, supports. As Nelson says: “We did ask people about that [Alex Rackley] story. But to retry someone who’s been acquitted, I don’t see the relevance of it. What exactly does it prove? It’s a very complicated story. You have a psychopathic infiltrator from the FBI, spurring the Panthers on to commit these acts.” The accusation that Sams was working for the FBI has been repeated many times but with no definitive proof and there is nothing to suggest the torture was conducted under FBI direction. All the same, when I ask Nelson whether there was a critical point at which things started to go wrong, he says: “If you wanted to single out one thing, I think it would be J Edgar Hoover and the FBI. I think the Panthers might have been able to sort out their internal problems themselves.” This is, to say at the least, a large assumption, But it’s one that fits the film’s perspective. As Nelson rightly says: “The way the Black Panthers are remembered is not the way that they were thought of at the time.” And one judgment of the film is that it sets out to recover that earlier understanding of the Panthers, when they were seen by many as an inspiration rather than an embarrassment. “We wanted to give this film the spirit of this revolutionary fervour going on,” says Nelson. In an immediate sense, it’s a question of image and style. The Panthers were striking in the first instance because of how they looked. This was the era of afros and black consciousness and no one did it with more panache than the Panthers. Seldom has a sense of danger, radicalism and street cool been combined to such mesmerising effect. One former henchman in the film recalls a gathering of sympathetic Hollywood A-listers which Black Panthers attended in full black leather-and-guns garb. “Those stars,” he says laughing at the memory, “they just loved that shit. They just ate that shit up.” There was a willingness in progressive circles to give the Panthers the benefit of any doubt, owing to their unimpeachable revolutionary credentials. For they didn’t just shout “kill the pigs”, like a lot of angry students, they really did go out and shoot the police dead. Newton killed Oakland police officer John Frey in a shoot-out after Frey stopped him in his car early on the morning of 28 October 1967. Newton suffered a stomach wound in the exchange and was arrested in hospital. There followed a nationwide campaign to release him.

IV. A WAY FORWARD Racial capitalism is rampant in American society. As I have shown, the commodification of non-whiteness harms both non-white individuals and society as a whole. But how do we decommodify race? In this relatively brief Part, I sketch the contours of a solution to the problem of racial capitalism. My account is intentionally impressionistic, and this Article will serve as a foundation for future work offering both broader discussion of identity capitalism and a more detailed account of how we should go about decommodifying race.314 The first obstacle is that decommodification poses what Radin describes as a “transition problem”: there are difficulties inherent in moving from our current, nonideal world to an ideal one.315 With respect to race, the view of race as a commodity is so deeply wrought in our collective imagination that it will take time to work the fundamental change in individual minds and collective social norms necessary for decommodification. Yet even if instant decommodification were possible, the prospect raises what Radin describes as a “double bind”: commodification powerfully symbolizes and legitimates racial hierarchy, yet an immediate, wholesale decommodification of race would freeze existing racial hierarchies as they currently stand.316 Radin’s approach to these difficulties is a pragmatic one.317 In the nonideal world in which we live, “it may sometimes be better to commodify incompletely than not to commodify at all,” and “in choosing the best alternative now available to us . . . we may have to tolerate some things that would count as harms in our ideal world.”318 Put another way, “[w]e cannot make progress toward the noncommodification that might exist under ideal conditions of equality and freedom by trying to maintain noncommodification now under historically determined conditions of inequality and bondage.”319 The challenge, then, is to “structure an incomplete commodification that takes account of our nonideal world, yet does not foreclose progress to a better world.”320 Radin analyzes the transition problem in the contexts of sexuality and family life. Taking the transition problem into account leads her to conclude that the commodification of sex, infants and surrogacy impedes human flourishing, and that in an ideal world such things would ideally remain market-inalienable.321 In our nonideal world, however, she believes that the sale of sexual services should be governed by a regime of incomplete commodification.322 We should decriminalize the sale of sexual services, but we should work to prevent a domino effect of sexual commodification by banning pimping, recruitment, and advertising.323 The commodification of race raises a particularly difficult transition problem. As I discussed in Part III, many harms ensue from commodification, and collectively, these harms instantiate inequality. In an ideal world race would not be commodified. Yet the harms that ensue from commodification in the present also highlight the difficulty of disallowing commodification. Racism and discrimination are deeply entrenched both in the very structure of society and in the hearts and minds of even the best intentioned of us. Although the diversity rationale has reinforced a way of thinking of race as a commodity, it has also had material positive effects on the life trajectories of many individuals.324 To wholly decommodify race now would remove a potential tool—flawed, but not entirely useless—for addressing lingering social inequality. I therefore propose a solution of reactive commodification.325 We should discourage commodification of racial identity. But when commodification does occur, we should respond to it by identifying it as commodification, calling attention to its harms, and ensuring that non-white people receive compensation for the commodification of their racial identity. Where possible, some of the compensatory measures should be directed to the project of furthering equality and reducing future commodification, and the transaction should be structured so as to express those goals.326 Consider the following three examples arising in the social, educational, and employment contexts. Albeit satirically, How to Rent a Negro illustrate the possible implementation of reactive commodification in social settings. ayo envisions a fantasy world where white people have to pay when they use (or, as she puts it, “rent”) black people in social settings. That is, “renting” a black person as a way of demonstrating one’s own non-racism, or as a way of diversifying one’s social circle, requires compensating the black person for that use. ayo suggests that many white people may be “behind in their rental payments,” and imagines presenting white people with bills for services rendered. Of course, explicit rentals are both improbable and undesirable, but they do suggest how reactive commodification might be implemented. A nonwhite person who finds herself used in a social setting might call attention to the behavior of the person using her—“It’s offensive when you keep referring to me as your black friend.”

Nongovernmental organizations are central to contemporary global governance, and their numbers and influence have grown dramatically since the middle of the twentieth century. However, in the last three decades more than 130 states have repressed these groups, suggesting that a broad range of states perceive them as costly. When they choose to repress NGOs, under what conditions do states use violent strategies versus administrative means? The choice depends on two main factors: the nature of the threat posed by these groups, and the consequences of cracking down on them. Violent crackdown is useful in the face of immediate domestic threats, such as protests. However, violence may increase the state's criminal liability, reduce its legitimacy, violate human rights treaties, and further intensify mobilization against the regime. Therefore, states are more likely to use administrative crackdown, especially in dealing with long-term threats, such as when NGOs influence electoral politics. I test this theory using an original data set of administrative crackdowns on NGOs, as well as violent crackdown on NGO activists, across all countries from 1990 to 2013. To shed light on the strategic decision between violent or administrative crackdown, and how states may perceive threats from domestic and international NGOs differently, I provide a case study from India. I conclude by discussing the implications of this crackdown for the use of civil society actors by the international community, as well as donors and citizens in the global South. What are these US research organizations and foundations: the George Soros Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and others that have opened up shop in Russia? Why are they here? —Report by the Russian Federal Counterintelligence Service, January 1995 The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the third wave of democratization in the early 1990s gave a massive boost to the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Central and Eastern Europe. These NGOs sought to tackle a range of issues: institutional development, establishing and supporting electoral processes, and working to reduce ethnic conflict, to name a few. As such, NGOs began to be seen in the West as a precondition for democratic transition and consolidation, protecting against authoritarian overreach and holding governments accountable. However, while Western states were enthusiastic about NGOs because NGOs espoused the same liberal values these states ostensibly promoted, many host countries began viewing them with skepticism. In Russia, for example, Putin believed the West had orchestrated the color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan—which led to widespread protests and regime change—through their support of local NGOs and activists. Following years of increasingly vocal suspicion, in 2006 Russian authorities passed a law restricting NGO activity. This was followed in 2012 by the infamous “foreign agent” law, which forced organizations receiving foreign funding and engaging in political activities to register as foreign agents, a term intended to stigmatize NGOs. Moscow argued that this crackdown was prompted by the excessively political role of US and Western European aid to NGOs. Under the Bush administration's Freedom Agenda, the spread of democratic ideals worldwide became even more clearly linked with US national security objectives. US Secretary of State Colin Powell commented in 2001, “American NGOs are out there serving and sacrificing on the frontlines of freedom. NGOs are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team.” Such statements did little to allay the concerns of foreign leaders. Research has shown that NGOs can wield real influence in ways that can be threatening to states. These organizations can influence electoral politics, aid mobilization, and threaten a state's economic interests. In response, states have increasingly chosen to repress NGOs they perceive as threatening. In this article, I argue that when states decide to repress NGOs, they have two main strategies at their disposal: violent or administrative. Administrative crackdown is a nonviolent strategy which entails enacting legal restrictions to create barriers to entry, funding, and advocacy by NGOs. Hampering foreign funding is the most insidious of these tactics because without adequate funds NGOs cannot continue their operations in target countries. Both democracies and autocracies have used this tactic to repress NGOs. More broadly, since the end of the Cold War, more than 130 countries have engaged in NGO repression. When they choose to repress NGOs, under what conditions do states use violent strategies versus administrative means? I argue that, once states decide to repress NGOs, the choice of strategy (violent or administrative) depends on two factors: the nature of the threat posed by these groups, and the international consequences of cracking down on them. Violent crackdowns address a state's short-term strategic goals. When states are dealing with immediate threats, such as ongoing protests, they are more likely to violently repress NGOs they see as aiding these activities. However, violence has consequences: it can increase the state's criminal liability, reduce its legitimacy domestically and internationally, violate human rights treaties, and intensify mobilization against the regime. State agents may even refuse to implement violent orders. To avoid these consequences, states often look for strategies to prevent various forms of collective action from coalescing in the first place. I argue that states are more likely to undertake administrative crackdown as a long-term strategy, especially in dealing with threats preventively. This is the case particularly when NGOs have the potential to influence electoral participation or challenge key economic interests of the state. Administrative crackdown has smaller domestic consequences than violence. Citizens are likely to see administrative crackdown as a form of regulation rather than repression, making a backlash less likely. The international consequences are also fewer, since administrative actions are less likely than violence to invite condemnation, shaming, or threats of aid withdrawal. Using panel data on all countries from 1990 to 2013 and an original data set on state repression of NGOs using administrative crackdown, I demonstrate that as elections become increasingly competitive, states are, on average, more likely to repress NGOs via administrative means. However, administrative crackdown is not the state's main choice of strategy when NGOs pose immediate threats. Instead, a higher number of protests is positively and significantly associated with the use of violence against NGOs and activists. I provide qualitative evidence for the proposed mechanisms through a case from India. Through interviews with state elites and NGOs, this case sheds light on how states choose between different crackdown strategies. The case study also explores how states perceive varying levels of threats from domestic and international NGOs, even when they work on similar issues. This article makes two main contributions. First, it develops a new theory of the conditions under which states, when they decide to repress NGOs, choose violent or administrative means. Although violent responses to dissent have been studied extensively, the use of alternative mechanisms of control in a state's repertoire, such as the administrative crackdown introduced in this paper, has not. Research on such alternative mechanisms has looked primarily at co-optation or surveillance, and with a focus on autocracies. By examining the frequency and tactics of administrative crackdown, I show how democracies and autocracies alike design coercive institutions to facilitate nonviolent repression. This article is also unique in that instead of focusing on armed targets, it shows how states crack down even on nonviolent nonstate actors, such as domestic and international NGOs. Second, in contrast to the influential work on transnational advocacy networks, I show that human rights victories and reforms resulting from local and international pressure may be short-lived. Implicit in both the boomerang and spiral models of NGO power is the core assumption that local NGOs are able to reach out to international actors for assistance. While this assumption had a stronger empirical basis in the past, this article sheds light on the contemporary barriers to NGO mobilization. Instead of initiating long-term improvements in human rights when facing international pressure, states may be learning to counter these dynamics by ramping up repression. The article proceeds as follows. First, I examine the rise of NGOs as important actors in contemporary global governance, and look at the main strategies of repression states can employ against these groups. I then lay out my theory and introduce an original data set on state repression of NGOs to test its hypotheses. A case from India sheds light on how and why the state adopted different crackdown strategies in response to immediate or long-term threats, and how these strategies differed between domestic and international NGOs. I conclude by discussing the implications of this crackdown for the use of civil society actors by the international community, as well as donors and citizens in the Global South. Both the absolute number and the influence of domestic and international NGOs have grown dramatically since the middle of the twentieth century. This was due to both geopolitical changes and the emergence of a pro-NGO norm across the international system. Since NGOs provided a number of political and economic benefits, many states have given these organizations wide access and participatory roles in recent decades. Globally, a large amount of resources was channeled to NGOs because many donors—public and private alike—perceived them as more efficient than states in achieving certain goals. For instance, in countries with weak institutions and poor governance, direct aid transfers to states raised issues of misuse and bureaucratic inefficiency. Donors then specifically sought out NGOs for projects instead. Being less bureaucratic and more nimble than state institutions, NGOs were seen as key agents of both development and democratization. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Western governments also began spending more resources to promote democracy abroad, including, but not limited to, conditionality, diplomacy, and military intervention. Democracy assistance, or “aid programs specifically designed either to help non-democratic countries become democratic or to help countries that have initiated democratic transitions consolidate their democratic systems,” was among the most visible facets of democracy promotion. As part of this assistance, US administrations have allocated billions of dollars in foreign assistance each year. Much of this was spent on programs supporting democratic institutions, rule of law, and human rights, implemented via domestic and international NGOs. These groups became the face of civil society for donors seeking to promote democracy. As a result, NGOs in the global South were often targeted by foreign donors as visible, easy-to-reach organizations within civil society. Authorities frequently engage in repression to counter ongoing challenges to the status quo. That is, dissent increases repressive behavior. However, dissent and repression have an endogenous relationship: state authorities may engage in preventive repression to undermine or restrict dissent before it occurs. In addition to undermining groups’ willingness to organize against the state, such preventive repression damages their capacity to impose costs. In addition to undermining groups’ willingness to organize against the state, such preventive repression damages their capacity to impose costs. As I show however, preventive repression is not synonymous with violent repression. Repression can also be carried out through administrative or nonviolent means. The causes and effects of what I call administrative crackdown have not been analyzed in great depth. Existing studies on the determinants of state repression and control primarily look at the causes and consequences of state violence that is used to repress conventional challengers such as social movements, opposition parties, and dissidents, with much less attention to state repression of NGOs. I focus on NGOs because of their centrality to contemporary global governance. Although their functions may sometimes overlap with broader civil society groups and social movements, NGOs are more institutionalized than other kinds of amorphous civil society organizations and thus may be easier to target. A focus on NGOs is valuable because states may repress nonviolent nonstate actors in ways that differ from those used against armed nonstate actors. However, NGO organizational structures and strategies are tied to national environments. Beyond their internal organization, NGOs are shaped by the political structures and institutions with which they interact. Ultimately, both domestic and international NGOs are governed by national laws, develop advocacy strategies in response to domestic political opportunities, and are shaped by powerful sets of social norms in their host countries. Although there is a growing number of studies on state–NGO dynamics, this is the first paper to systematically analyze how states, once they decide to repress NGOs, choose between different crackdown strategies. Repression is the use of coercive action against an individual or organization within the territorial jurisdiction of the state. Its purpose is to impose a cost on the target as well as to deter specific activities perceived to be challenging to state personnel, practices, or institutions. I differentiate between violent or overt crackdown and nonviolent or administrative crackdown. Overt crackdown involves violence against NGO officials, including arrests, detention, extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and assassinations of organizational staff, volunteers, and activists. It also includes attacks on NGO offices and destruction of their property, and thus captures physical integrity rights violations. In contrast, administrative crackdown is the use of legal restrictions to create barriers to entry, funding, and advocacy by NGOs. This includes (but is not limited to) violations of civil liberties, such as the rights to free speech, assembly, association, and movement. To be clear, not all NGO-related legislation is aimed at cracking down on these groups. Regulations may establish standards for appropriate organizational behavior and set penalties for legitimate violations. States frequently use regulations to routinize the behavior of NGOs. These regulations produce convergent practices and prevent malfeasance that threatens to undermine confidence in the entire NGO community. However, I focus on the conditions under which states, when they decide to repress NGOs, use administrative crackdown (anti-NGO laws) as a strategy. Unlike regulation, administrative crackdown is intended to impede the larger NGO community, through barriers to entry, funding, and advocacy. Barriers to entry means the use of law to discourage, burden, or prevent the formation of NGOs. Such laws increase the complexity and difficulty of the registration process, expand state discretion in denying permits, and prevent appeals. Barriers to funding impose restrictions on how NGOs secure financial resources. States impose restrictions based on the origin of the funds, how those funds are channeled, and what purposes they can be used for. Restrictions on foreign funding are worrisome because many NGOs in the Global South depend on funds from abroad. Local groups tackling contentious issues may not be able to raise funds domestically. Barriers to funding impose restrictions on how NGOs secure financial resources. States impose restrictions based on the origin of the funds, how those funds are channeled, and what purposes they can be used for. Restrictions on foreign funding are worrisome because many NGOs in the Global South depend on funds from abroad. Local groups tackling contentious issues may not be able to raise funds domestically. Even local philanthropists may be deterred by poor tax incentives or a fear of retribution. Finally, barriers to advocacy restrict NGOs from engaging in the full range of free expression and public policy advocacy. They prevent legitimate activities by making certain forms of speech, publication, and activity illegal. Many countries also implement laws that ban NGOs from working on “political” issues. The word political in these laws is intentionally left vague, providing cover for states to crack down on NGOs they perceive as politically threatening. When confronted with threatening NGOs, states decide whether to accommodate them or repress them. Some states may decide to accommodate or tolerate their presence in the country, owing to the multitude of economic, technocratic, and service-provision benefits they provide. However, it is clear that some states are not willing to tolerate at least some of the NGOs operating within their borders. Whether a state chooses violent or administrative crackdown depends, I argue, on its short-and long-term strategic goals. To understand the causes and strategies behind state repression of NGOs, scholars have recently begun documenting trends, making important theoretical and empirical contributions in a burgeoning area of study. For example, some studies have found that states perceive foreign aid to NGOs as supporting the regime's political opponents. In these circumstances, states may choose to forego the benefits accrued from foreign-funded NGOs and adopt restrictive financing laws. Regimes that have recently experienced competitive elections are particularly likely to crack down on foreign aid to local NGOs as political opponents may seek to discredit the incumbent's victory and states perceive a window of opportunity to crack down on these opponents. Most recently, scholars have argued that when states continue to commit severe abuses and have also ratified human rights treaties, they impose restrictions on human rights organizations to avoid monitoring and hide their noncompliance.A large focus of this work lies in explaining the onset of legal restrictions, rather than variation in the type of laws, or repressive strategies, states employ to target NGOs. Moreover, the analysis is confined to democratizing low-and middle-income countries, or to NGOs working in specific issue areas. Instead of the narrower focus on the onset of restrictive foreign financing laws (one form of what I term administrative crackdown), I examine the variation in the type of crackdown (that is, violent or administrative). Empirically, I also expand the focus to include all countries. I argue that violence is more useful in the context of ongoing domestic threats such as protests, since it addresses the short-term strategic goal of ending such threatening mobilization. But in addition to its punitive and deterrent effects, violence can have adverse consequences. Regimes may refrain from using violence against nonviolent mobilizations for fear of defection. And even if the state orders violent crackdown, state agents might refuse. Violence may also intensify mobilization against the regime. Research has shown that publics are more likely to approve of abuses targeted at violent opposition movements.However, given that NGOs are nonviolent in nature, violently cracking down on them can alienate the population. If violence is easily linked to the state or its agents, it also increases the state's risk of criminal liability. Since the 1980s, there has been a dramatic increase in criminal accountability of state officials for the past use of violence, in both international and domestic judicial processes. These prosecutions of military, civilian, and political leaders can increase the perceived costs of repression. Thus, state agents may be deterred from using violence due to a mix of normative pressures and material punishments. However, not all states have the same attitudes to the use of violence. Besides institutional features that protect organizations against repression, there are normative reasons why states may differ. The strong presence of the rule of law, combined with preferences for less coercive means, may lead some states to be more likely to use administrative means rather than violence to deal with opponents. Violence against NGOs can also have adverse international consequences. It may violate human rights treaties and preferential trading agreements that contain human rights clauses. Compared to local NGOs, targeting INGOs is especially risky since they often have the legal and political backing of their home states. It can also be risky for states that are dependent on INGOs for service provision and transfer of aid. Finally, the use of violence requires knowledge of specific actors and organizations to target, information which is sometimes costly and difficult to acquire. Therefore, states may prefer strategies that prevent NGOs from posing challenges in the first place. Administrative crackdown is one such strategy. In the short term, it may not be attractive because it requires time, effort, and resources. In democracies or states with democratic trappings, legislators have to go through the process of drafting bills, debating provisions, and collecting sufficient votes on a bill before it can be adopted as law. However, in the long term, it has advantages over the use of violence. Because laws seem ordinary, routine, and apolitical to many, they are more likely to be perceived as regulation rather than crackdown. Indeed, coercion can be “costly, crude, and potentially dangerous for authorities.” Compared to violence, administrative crackdown is also less likely to invite international condemnation. When states repress groups administratively, they rarely face tangible consequences beyond minor public expressions of disapproval.It can also deter collective action from coalescing in the first place. Aleksandr Tarnavsky, sponsor of Russia's 2015 “undesirable organizations” law, argued that it would be a “weapon hanging on the wall … that never fires” but stands as a warning to potentially uncooperative NGOs. Thus administrative crackdown has some advantages over violent crackdown in the long term. While the foregoing argument applies to both domestic and international NGOs, they are not entirely interchangeable. They represent different threats to states because they have different primary audiences. NGOs can direct their programming to locals, domestic elites, or international elites. While both domestic and international NGOs may target all three of these constituencies, INGOs are inherently better at targeting other states, intergovernmental organizations, and transnational networks. INGOs disseminate information more effectively, and transnational advocacy networks can pressure governments to reform. Access to Western forums is also critical to the success of local challengers, and INGOs can lend legitimacy to local grievances. Negative reports by INGOs can also impair the shamed country's access to aid, trade, and foreign direct investment. Since INGOs are better able to target international audiences and impose costs on states from above, states may feel more threatened by their activities. These differences in audiences might lead states to crack down on domestic and international NGOs differently. Violence against domestic NGOs may go unnoticed internationally, but violence against INGOs is likely to be reported. Since such reports can have negative repercussions internationally, states may prefer to use administrative crackdown with INGOs.

In June 2015, a white supremacist opened fire inside the historic African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine black congregants, including the minister. The massacre sparked a crescendo of anti-racist protest, including often successful demands for the removal of statues of Confederate Generals from public spaces throughout the South. Two years later, a coalition of white nationalists arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a “Unite the Right” rally aimed at protesting and reversing the local City Council’s decision to remove from the city’s center of a hundred year-old statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Also gathered in Charlottesville were civil rights activists who sought to support the city’s resolve in removing the statue, and to press for further reforms aimed at dismantling institutional white supremacy. The event turned violent after the white nationalists attacked the racial justice advocates with tiki torches, pepper spray and lighter fluid. Fights erupted, injuring at least 30 people. The weekend of protest ended when one of the white nationalists deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of antiracist counter-protesters, injuring 19 and killing one. Refusing to condemn either the goals or the actions of the white nationalists, President Trump  that there were “very bad people … and very fine people on both sides.” In June 2015, a white supremacist opened fire inside the historic African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine black congregants, including the minister. The massacre sparked a crescendo of anti-racist protest, including often successful demands for the removal of statues of Confederate Generals from public spaces throughout the South. Two years later, a coalition of white nationalists arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a “Unite the Right” rally aimed at protesting and reversing the local City Council’s decision to remove from the city’s center of a hundred year-old statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Also gathered in Charlottesville were civil rights activists who sought to support the city’s resolve in removing the statue, and to press for further reforms aimed at dismantling institutional white supremacy. The event turned violent after the white nationalists attacked the racial justice advocates with tiki torches, pepper spray and lighter fluid. Fights erupted, injuring at least 30 people. The weekend of protest ended when one of the white nationalists deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of antiracist counter-protesters, injuring 19 and killing one. Refusing to condemn either the goals or the actions of the white nationalists, President Trump  that there were “very bad people … and very fine people on both sides.” Successful movements should act in a political environment in which they have leverage to demand systemic change. Authorities who control institutional policy grant concessions only when organized disruptions are more damaging to their continued power than giving in to the demands of the movement. Successful movements must include the rank and file of the constituencies they are representing in decisions concerning goals and tactics. Often this involves working in tandem with organizations that link the movement to the communities that will benefit from the movement’s success. Successful movements should act in a political environment in which they have leverage to demand systemic change. Authorities who control institutional policy grant concessions only when organized disruptions are more damaging to their continued power than giving in to the demands of the movement. Successful movements must include the rank and file of the constituencies they are representing in decisions concerning goals and tactics. Often this involves working in tandem with organizations that link the movement to the communities that will benefit from the movement’s success. And still, there are no guarantees of success. Because social movements form organically, outside of mainstream institutions, they are by nature . Rarely does meaningful change happen by relying exclusively on peaceful and lawful means. Petitions, marches, litigation, and chanting are only part of the protest repertoire. Achieving systemic change invariably requires : social movements gain leverage when they disrupt business-as-usual for the institution they are targeting—by stopping traffic, blocking commerce, surrounding buildings or interfering with administrative activities. Generations of activists, as well as the scholars who study social movements, have been challenged by the need to deploy effective strategies when nonviolent disruption reaches an impasse without generating concessionary responses; or when it provokes violent responses by the police or by counterdemonstrators aimed at defeating the demands for institutional change. Faced with severe repression, good movements typically retreat. But dispersing a disruptive action can often guarantee failure, because the movement may not have the capacity to rebuild its strength and recapture the leverage. The alternative is to hold their ground, facing off with police or counterdemonstrators, thus prolonging and intensifying the disruption. The police and counterdemonstrators, who aim to dismantle the protest, must therefore target the bodies of activists. The human casualties that can occur on both sides can, in an instant, transform a site of protest into a sensationalized event, drawing attention away from the political aims of the movement.Sites of protest are thus both vibrant and vulnerable. But social movements that are attempting to ameliorate “big” social problems and gaping contradictions in the democratic order—economic inequities, racism, patriarchy—are . As such, the clash between white supremacists and racial justice activists that took place in Charlottesville in 2017 should be viewed as a recent “moment” in the long civil rights movement that began at the end of the Civil War. Persistence—sustaining commitment, perhaps over the course of a lifetime; expanding networks while forming and reforming coalitions; assessing failures and devising new strategies; exploiting new political opportunities with fresh tactical repertoires; and integrating new generations into the life of the movement—is key to assuring further moments of success. As the pioneers of social history have shown, this is how “bad” movements are defeated and “good” changes are won.

Opportunities and incentives Fiscal policies can create opportunities for those who would otherwise be disadvantaged. In many economies, advanced and emerging alike, large disparities exist between higher- and lower-income households in terms of access to quality education, health care, and digital technologies. These disparities put children in unequal starting positions. Public spending can, in part, compensate for the gap between rich and poor in private spending on children and help reduce the importance of parental background and other circumstances that are beyond an individual’s control. This is achieved through efforts to ensure access to basic public infrastructure, such as clean water and sanitation; basic health services; and social investments—for instance, in education. These policies can increase intergenerational mobility and also, by facilitating human capital formation, can enhance long-term growth, particularly by increasing education levels among children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Public spending on basic services can be a priority where access gaps are large. However, the type of spending needs to be carefully assessed given country-specific circumstances. For instance, spending on higher education might benefit mostly richer households. Fiscal policies can also influence inequality by providing incentives for labor market participation or children’s education. For example, labor supply and employment can be affected by labor tax wedges, the difference between a worker’s take-home pay and the corresponding total labor cost for the employer, and by participation tax rates, the difference between replacement income received by an unemployed person and his or her expected earnings. This is especially true for second earners. Refundable tax credits for low-income families, individualization of personal income tax filing, and more widely available and affordable childcare could reduce gender bias and encourage labor force participation. Conditional cash transfers, in addition to reducing poverty, can provide incentives for school attendance or regular health checkups. Active labor market policies can support efficient functioning of labor markets, for instance through public employment services that assist the unemployed in finding suitable jobs or government-sponsored vocational training for those most excluded from the labor market. On the demand side, worker retention programs, which have been developed massively in advanced economies throughout the recent crisis, have helped governments invest in maintaining employment linkages. This has contributed to smoother recoveries and helped avoid massive job losses and business failures that would have fed inequality. Redistribution Redistributive policies can curb labor income inequalities. Direct taxes and transfers jointly reduce income inequality by more than one-third in advanced economies. However, in emerging market economies the extent of redistribution is much smaller. Overall redistribution accounts for 85 percent of the disposable income inequality between advanced and emerging market and developing economies. Social transfers help reduce inequality mostly at the bottom, and taxation at the top. Importantly, most of the redistribution is achieved through social transfers—social assistance, unemployment insurance, or pensions. The coverage of the most vulnerable groups and adequacy of the benefits rather than the aggregate level of spending determine the effectiveness of social transfers in terms of reducing poverty and inequality. As is often the case in policymaking, the design is crucial. Well-targeted transfers can help support vulnerable groups while keeping costs manageable. In this respect, the leap in digitalization is a new opportunity for governments. For example, it makes the identification of households and verification of eligibility easier and quicker. As a result, governments can improve coverage and targeting and reduce leakages through fraud, corruption, or errors. More progressive taxation, along with mobilizing revenues to finance social spending, has a large potential to reduce inequality, especially in countries where taxation is relatively low in terms of its overall burden and in its progressivity. Countries can achieve more redistributive tax systems through higher top marginal income tax rates, (in-work) tax credits for low-income households, and limiting loopholes in the taxation of capital income (dividends, interest, and capital gains). Tax policy and administration reforms are also crucial for raising additional revenues, especially in countries with weak tax capacity, to provide financing for social spending. Indirect taxes, such as value-added tax and excises, are major revenue sources for most governments, and they are relatively easy to enforce and collect. While consumption taxes could be regressive, they can support equity objectives if they are used to finance basic public services, such as health care, education, and infrastructure. This is because poor households benefit more from these services than rich households, in proportion to their incomes. Significantly raising revenues from direct taxes requires strong governance reforms and making use of opportunities from digitalization. Among these are real-time data on household expenditures, which can facilitate progressive taxation of consumption. International registers for asset ownership and greater transparency create additional revenue opportunities. Tax administration reforms can generate resources for higher spending on health, education, and social protection.

But Robinson never provides evidence of this “shared epistemology among diverse African people.” This notion of Africans as some mega ethno-nation seems to simply be true by fiat, that is, by his assertion that it is true. It is this “truth” that forms the basis for the claim to a pan- “Black Radical Tradition” that compresses hundreds of millions of Africans in and outside of the continent into an undifferentiated category, and conversely collapses hundreds of millions of Europeans. As we will discuss below, this conception of an undifferentiated category of oppressed humanity defined by ahistoric essentialized identities is a hallmark of the identitarian paradigm. This paradigm, which posits some shared interests of a group of people made organic by an essential ascribed identity, generally racial or ethnic, often premised as well on some singular cultural tradition, has come in recent decades to eclipse the language of class – nay, to contrapose class to ethnic, cultural, or national identity. Yet, this view of the African past and present as made up of such an undifferentiated mass that shares a single epistemology and “Black Radical Tradition” misreads the African past as much as it does the present. While it is easy to become seduced by the literary brilliance of the text, the sheer power of its prose, and the vast sweep of history and literature that it covers, we maintain here that more is at work in explaining the left’s embrace of Black Marxism, namely the conservative retrenchment of the late twentieth century. As world capitalism entered a deep structural crisis in the 1970s, capitalists and bureaucratic elites from around the world strove to beat back the power that organized labor, radical social movements, and Third World liberation struggles had accumulated in the preceding period of mass struggle. Capitalist globalization and the neoliberal counterrevolution brought about a change in the worldwide correlation of class and social forces in favor of emergent transnational capital.[8] As proletarian power eroded and the left and socialist movements lost influence around the world in the fin de siècle, the chronic gap between theory and practice, thought and action, showed up as a degeneration of intellectual criticism as well. Rather than seek renewal, much of the left withdrew into post-modern identity politics and other forms of accommodation with the emerging neoliberal social order. The left intelligentsia retreated into the academy, abandoning the commitment to a universal emancipatory project as it turned to celebrating the fragmented particularisms postulated by post-narratives – post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, and so on. The target of condemnation became Marxism, which it claimed was unable to explain racial inequality.[9] The causal explanation of racism now shifted from the political-economy critique of capitalism to psychology and culture. It was in this context that Black Marxism, an Afrocentric and proto-Afro-pessimistic text par excellence, found such resonance in U.S. academia, and increasingly, beyond. A Transhistoric Racialism In his quest to explain racism and subjugation of peoples of African descent, Robinson takes us back to what he sees as its origins in “European” antiquity. For Robinson, capitalism is not the progenitor of racism but its offshoot in a construct that, as Jason W. Moore has noted in a different context, takes flight from world history, from the real movement of capitalism. “The pretext for this flight typically rests on two major claims. One is an empiricist assertion that world history is diverse and therefore cannot be grasped in its combined and uneven patterns. The second is an ideological claim that any attempt to narrate capitalism’s differentiated unity is irremediably Eurocentric.” While both these claims hold for Black Marxism, what concerns us most here is the second. The result, observes Moore, “is a descent into amalgamation of regional particularisms with assertions that the problem of modern world history is Europe – rather than capitalism.”[10] By “racial capitalism,” Robinson tells us, he means a commitment to racialism among Europeans that first sprung from the slave societies of antiquity – a transhistoric original sin that marks millennia of Western history. Let us put aside that “Europe” didn’t exist before 1492: the same historical forces at work that produced capitalism and propelled it to outward expansion also produced “Europe” that became the core of an expanding world capitalist system understood as a differentiated unity, or totality. This theme of a Greek and allegedly therefore European origin to modern racism is not new; it has become a trope among Afro-pessimists and other “race” scholars.[11] Robinson claims that Greek slavery was an “uncompromising racial construct” that was reiterated and embellished throughout European history: “Race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce, and power…. from the twelfth century on, one European ruling order after another, one cohort of clerical or secular protagonists following another, reiterated and embellished this racial calculus.”[12] Ironically, one of the very authors whom Robinson includes as a case study in Black Marxism, C.L.R. James, insisted that “historically it is pretty well proven now that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. They had another standard – civilized and barbarian – and you could have white skin and be a barbarian and you could be black and civilized.”[13] At the same time, Robinson asserts that “racialism” is “hardly unique to European peoples” but does not explain what, then, would have separated the European case from civilizations the world over. For Robinson, Greek slavery is the prototype of modern-day racism, some mysterious particularity of “Europe” that wound its way through millennia to the contemporary era. We know that all the ancient empires as class systems also differentiated groups according to cultural or territorial criteria and involved differentiated relationships to the state or political statuses. So, there must have been something else that arose in Europe to explain why this region became the generator of systems of modern-day racial inequality and the colonizer of the world. That something, of course, is capitalism. We have a vast literature showing how systems of race-based slavery, exclusion, and oppression arose as part and parcel of the rise of capitalism as a world system (we cannot explain the antinomy whereby Robinson discusses much of this literature approvingly even though it refutes his thesis). Racialism, he goes on, “was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of Europeans to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples.”[14] These internal relations involved ideological conceptions of inferiority and superiority based on cultural (he singles out linguistic) and class distinctions, often adduced to be biological, which organized ancient and feudal domains that later became Europe. Beyond these “ordering ideas” of inferiority and superiority, we can find in Black Marxism no precise explanation of what Robinson understands racism to be, that is, no further conceptual specificity. It is not, in his construct, that these ordering ideas became specified along racialist lines as capitalism evolved, but that they sui generis constituted “racialism.” By conflating these ordering ideas of class rule with “racialism,” Robinson is able to claim that racism originates in “European” antiquity. Remarkably, Robinson gives no explanation as to why we should conflate slavery with “race.” We have no historical evidence of “race” and racialization prior to the modern era, if by this we mean something other than the “ordering ideas” of inferiority and superiority, or anything resembling the scientific racism that reached its apogee from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Yet, at the same time, to reiterate, he asserts that “racialism” is “hardly unique to European peoples.”[15] If so, it begs the question – unanswered by Robinson – what makes the European case different from civilizations the world over?

The hearth of the US racial empire, maintained by Black women’s racialized, classed, and gendered labor, is embroiled in a history of struggle. In the efforts of enslaved women who “judged the plantation a viable site from which to wage war and engage in the process of emancipation” (Glymph, 2013: 492), and in the organizing campaigns of waged household workers (Nadasen, 2015), we trace a lineage of racialized oppression and resistance that calls for repoliticizing the domestic. For Black women, exploited to reproduce empire, the domestic signifies a parallel space of struggle, that of nurturing their own homes, families, and communities amidst the violence of internal colonialism (Davis, 1972). In the early 20th century, following mass migration to the North, Black women’s clubs organized neighborhood campaigns to address unsafe living conditions in overcrowded cities (Mann, 2011). This eco-feminist lineage persists in contemporary environmental justice, concerned with “the survivability of individual bodies, particular communities, national cultures, and the earth itself” (Di Chiro, 2008: 280). In sustaining sociality and personhood in excess of the demands of imperial reproduction, Black women have ensured the persistence of “remaindered life,” that is, “subaltern pathways of social and self-formation that remain beneath the threshold of visibility of raced subjects” (Tadiar, 2015: 156). Roberta’s history of fighting racial capitalism are a starting point to consider how feminist political geography and environmental justice scholarship might be strengthened by engaging with Black feminist theorizations of the domestic. We argue that Black social reproductive practices constitute an embodied form of geopolitical praxis, an unacknowledged engagement with the imperial state’s necropolitical governance of Black life (Smith, 2016). We identify three categories of labor as strategies of domestic geopolitics. The labor of keeping wake refers to practices of caring for, attending to, and registering deaths in the community, a secular ritual of valuing lives in death that are sacrificed in life (Sharpe, 2016). The labor of tactical expertise addresses how racialized people, living with double consciousness (Du Bois, 2008; Fanon, 2008/1967), must translate the lived experience of racial violence into scientific and legal discourses legible to the state. The labor of revolutionary mothering (Gumbs et al., 2016; James, 1997) describes the responsibility of nurturing communal life in the face of persistent death as a creative force of worldmaking. In the next sections, we describe the context of everyday life in Badin and Flint, abandoned as surplus populations by a state intent on facilitating racial capitalism, followed with a discussion of the labors that constitute domestic geopolitics’ challenge to the racial state.

We can now turn to the three tensions in the racial capitalism literature, beginning with the issue of race. This is critical. If the term racial capitalism is to have implications for social theory, it must offer rigorously defined concepts constituting a transposable conceptual apparatus. Surely one of those concepts would have to do with “race.” But what exactly is “race”? The problem is that “race” is not typically defined in the existing literature, so it is unclear whether other categories marking difference, such as ethnicity, are more appropriate than race. Should we be thinking about “ethnic capitalism” rather than racial capitalism? Robinson’s (2000) work is a prime example. Nearly all scholars claim that one of Robinson’s key contributions is to show that capitalism was forged from precapitalist racial divisions in Europe. Capitalism is “racial,” according to Robinson, “because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society,” and capitalism was built upon that racialism (Kelley 2017; Táíwò and Bright 1996). The problem is that Robinson himself was not entirely clear that precapitalist social differences were actually “racial.” On one hand, he did use the term race in his analysis. “Racism,” Robinson (2000:2; see also pp. 26–27, 66–67) wrote, served to structure “the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples” prior to capitalism, and capitalism seized on racism as it developed. On other hand, when discussing some of the presumably “racial” groups in feudal Europe, Robinson (2000:10–11) referred to linguistic rather than phenotypical differences, thus equating racial groups with linguistic groups. In fact, when discussing how migratory and immigrant labor formed the basis for the armies of the Absolutist states and for the production of value in early agrarian capitalism, he oscillated between calling them “races” and “ethnic” groups. For instance, Robinson (2000:23) used the phrase “ethnic divisions of sixteenth century immigrant labor,” and he referred to “national” differences when presumably speaking about premodern “racial” differences. Given these ambiguities, Robinson’s argument could be read differently from how it is conventionally taken. It is not that capitalism was built on prior racial differences; rather, capitalism served to racialize the preexisting ethnic division of labor, thereby turning religious, cultural, or linguistic differences into “racial” ones to legitimate its new exploitative tructure. In this view, racialization—the process of turning groups into biological entities called “races”—was a part of modern capitalism, not its precursor (cf. Omi and Winant 1986). In some passages, Robinson (2000) said this exactly: “the tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones” (p. 26). Of course, whether “race” preexisted capitalism does not alter the larger argument of the racial capitalism approach, which is that racial differentiation and capitalism are mutually supportive. Still, the tension in Robinson’s work manifests the deeper issue of whether “racial” capitalism refers to race or other identities. This issue permeates Walzer’s (2020) recent criticism of the racial capitalism concept. Walzer points to examples such as Russia and China, where capitalism does not rely on racial differences but rather on ethnic and religious differentiation. “It may be that Muslims are among the most exploited workers in Russia,” he wrote, “but they are mostly Caucasian (some of them the original Caucasians), so we would have to talk about religious capitalism—where Orthodox Christians, not white people, are the privileged group.” On this basis, Walzer rejected the racial capitalism concept as limited at best and analytically debilitating at worse. Skeptics of Walzer have offered a rebuke: his argument misses the global dimensions of capitalism. At issue is not whether racial stratification articulates with capitalism within any single country but whether it permeates the world-capitalist system. Proponents of this argument could readily assemble evidence to show that, on a global scale, the vast majority of the world’s proletariat, subproletariat, and dispossessed—whether cultivating grapes or coffee on the farms of the Americas, cleaning up office floors in London, or making clothes in the sweatshops of New Delhi—are, to borrow DuBois’s (1935) phrase, “yellow, brown and black.” Against Walzer, this would retain the main claim of the racial capitalism approach that race and capitalism are intertwined. Yet this scaling upward of capitalism to a global level brings its own complications. It carries the danger of what Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) called “the cunning of imperialist [racialist] reason”: an analytic operation by which U.S.-centered scholars impose presumably U.S.-centric classifications (in this case, “race”) onto the rest of the world, thereby imposing racial classifications into contexts where they might not be operative. We would be obliged, for instance, to impose racial classifications onto Latin American contexts such as Brazil, where the salience of racial classifications is debatable (Loveman 1999; Wimmer 2015). In short, if we are to insist on the global character of racial capitalism, we must assume that analysts’ racial classifications are global as well. They may very well be, but racial capitalism’s founding texts, and more recent discussions, have not sufficiently problematized this tension.2 Can this tension be resolved? One way to do so is to raise the possibility that the racial capitalism concept works best for groups that have been undoubtedly racialized, such as members of the African diaspora in North America.3 Racial capitalism would thus refer mainly to the black ex-slave population, which has suffered some of the clearest and most virulent forms of racism. This might explain why the literature on racial capitalism has focused on African Americans and transatlantic slavery rather than other groups elsewhere in the world. Yet this seeming resolution would significantly reduce the scope of the racial capitalism concept. Racial capitalism would no longer depict a global system. Perhaps the best resolution is one that arrives through more reflexive research. We can explore how “race” is connected to capitalism in diverse sites and across historical periods, but we must be more conscious about whether we are referring to analysts’ definition of race or a category of practice. Put simply, we can arrive at a resolution only through careful research that more clearly defines “race. A second tension in the racial capitalism literature has to do with the relationship between this literature and existing social theories of capitalism, in particular, Marxian theories of capitalism. Animating the racial capitalism approach is the claim that Marxian theories of capitalism are inadequate because they obfuscate the racial foundations of capitalism. For Robinson (2000), “Western Marxism . . . has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications” (p. 317). Historians’ use of the racial capitalism approach is premised on the idea that Marxism does not adequately acknowledge slavery’s role in capitalism or the ongoing importance of colonialism and “primitive accumulation,” which Marx presumably relegated to the margins of his theory (Smallwood 2018). This is exactly why scholars in this tradition insist on the term racial capitalism: because Marxian theory fails to theorize race, we must add the qualifier race to the signifier capitalism. But what if Marxian theory does in fact take into account race, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism, and proponents of the racial capitalism approach merely misread Marx? If so, the warrant, if not the entire premise, for Robinson’s and others’ work on racial capitalism would crater by an unfortunate misreading of Marxian theory. A number of scholars, in fact, already push against the notion that Marxist thought does not account for race, slavery, or colonialism. Drawing largely on Marx’s journalistic writings, they show that Marx not only discussed race, slavery, and colonialism but saw them as central for capitalism. According to this argument, Marx saw race as so crucial for capitalism that his theory saw the true proletariat as black, brown, and yellow—directly contrary to Robinson’s claim that Marxist theory only saw the white European proletariat as the true subject of history (Anderson 2010; Foster, Holleman, and Clark 2020; Ralph and Singhal 2019). If true, the racial capitalism literature is based on a “misguided reading of Marx” (Ralph and Singhal 2019:864). How might this apparent aporia in Marxian theory be resolved, if at all? It is imperative here to register a distinction between Marx’s theory of capital and his theory of capitalism. 4 The former is sketched in Marx’s mature social theory in Capital and related writings such as The Grundrisse (Postone 1996). These writings offer a formalized and abstract representation of the inner workings of capital, its accumulation, its contradictions, and its necessary demise through a series of central categories that capture the key elements of the capitalist system. At this level of abstraction, the main categories of the theory (e.g., “value,” “surplus value,” “concrete labor,” “abstract labor,” “capital,” “socially necessary labor time”) are devoid of any historical specificity or social content and as such can be applied to distinct historical phases or social formations (e.g., capitalism in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world or Russia in 1998, or the twenty-first-century global system). Categories of race, gender, or ethnicity are therefore not central, because they are too concrete. Alternatively, a theory of capitalism refers to capitalist development and dynamics in their empirical specificity. It is meant to explain and describe specific capitalist formations and developments as they really exist in the world, not their abstract conceptual form. This theory can be extracted from Marx’s journalistic writings and other essays, and it is here where issues such as slavery and ethnicity arise: the essays refer to real events and pressing issues in actually existing capitalism, such as the Civil War or the Irish question (Anderson 2010). But these observations or statements on concrete processes and relations such as slavery in actually existing capitalism—that is, Marx’s theory of capitalism—do not disturb or reconfigure his theory of capital, which remains focused on the relations of wage labor induced to a highly abstract level from his analysis of textile production. If and when he did discuss things such as slavery, such as in “The Working Day” section in Capital, he treated slavery as a passing phase or outside capital’s inner logic, a sort of heuristic to better apprehend and illuminate the latter (Marx [1867] 1906:328–30; on slavery as a heuristic, see Smallwood 2018). This distinction between Marx’s theory of capitalism and his theory of capital helps us better approach the debate generated by the racial capitalism literature. When Robinson or other proponents of the racial capitalism idea critique Marx’s theory for eliding or deliberately occluding race, slavery, and colonialism, they are critiquing his theory of capital, not his theory of capitalism. Here proponents of the racial capitalism approach are on solid ground. Marx’s theory of capitalism does take into account race, slavery, and colonialism, but his theory of capital renders these things marginal at best.5 Hence the warrant for the racial capitalism approach: because Marx’s theory of capital does not center race, the racial capitalism concept and the research and theorizing that go under its banner can fill the void. The concept may provide the basis for an alternative theory not only of racial capitalism but also of racialized capital. The final tension within racial capitalism is whether the interconnectedness of racial difference and capitalism is a logical or contingent necessity.6 If, as the racial capitalism literature suggests, slavery and its associated logics of racism have been crucial for the development of capitalism, and if global capitalism today remains intertwined with racial stratification, to what extent are these relations intrinsic to capitalism or accidental? Put differently, is capitalism necessarily racist (Fraser 2019; Lemann 2020)?7 For some, the relationship is only contingent. Walzer (2020) argued that in some countries, capitalism proceeds along just fine without racial difference, and if there is racial difference on a global scale, it is historically contingent. Although the vast majority of workers are nonwhite, Walzer suggested that this is not due to any intrinsic logic of capitalism but rather the accident of demographics (because most of the world is nonwhite, the majority of the world’s workers will be nonwhite). For this reason, Walzer suggested we disavow the racial capitalism concept. Alternatively, others claim that racism is indeed intrinsic to capitalism.8 There are two versions of this claim. One is that racism is necessary to divide the working class and legitimate the rule of the bourgeoisie. Racism is an ideological necessity of capitalism, justifying its unequal relations (Camp, Heatherton, and Karuka 2019; McCarthy 2016; Taylor 2016). “Capitalism requires inequality,” suggested Gilmore (2015), “and racism enshrines it.” A very different version, coming most predominantly from Fraser (2019), is that capitalism necessarily entails relations of exploitation and expropriation that feed off each other. Exploitation is the extraction of value from “free subjects” through wage labor. But expropriation, which includes slavery and colonialism, extracts value from racialized “dependent subjects” and is what enables exploitation to happen in the first place. Expropriation is “a necessary background condition for the exploitation of ‘workers’” (Fraser 2019) and therefore for capitalism itself. Capitalism is thus logically dependent upon racism.9 So what is the answer? Again, it helps differentiate between a theory of capital and a theory of capitalism. A theory of capitalism might demonstrate that race has been historically necessary for capitalist accumulation by reference to empirical reality: historically, capitalism and race have always been intertwined. But the claim that race is a logical necessity to capitalism would have to derive from a theory of capital, not from empirics alone. One would have to deduce, from the categories of Marx’s theory, the necessity of racism or racial differentiation in society. On this score, the arguments for the logical necessity of capitalism’s entanglements with race fall short. Consider the argument that racism is necessary for capitalism because capitalism requires racist ideology to divide the working class. This is a functionalist argument that is not functionalist enough, for it effaces the logical possibility of functional substitution. We may find that racism has historically always functioned to divide the working class, but in theory other “isms” could serve the same function. There is nothing inherent to the logic of capital that requires race to be the ideology of division (Lebowitz 2006:39).10 Why not ethnicity? Why not sexuality? Consider Fraser’s argument that expropriation is intrinsic to capitalism and that racial differentiation must be too. It is plausible and indeed persuasive to claim that expropriation is necessary for capitalism, but it is less persuasive to claim that racial difference is logically necessary for expropriation. Gender could easily serve as the main axis of dependent classification (and, to feminist-Marxist thought, it has served that function), as could ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or citizenship. Fraser would have to show that expropriation, and hence capitalism, requires a racial classification as opposed to other social categories. This is a task left unfulfilled.11 A different and possibly more productive route would be to reframe the issue as one of social difference rather than race. Is racism necessary for capitalism? There are good reasons, as just mentioned, to think not. But is social difference of various types (from race to gender to ethnicity) necessary for capitalism?12 This is more demonstrable, both empirically (by reference to actually existing capitalism) and theoretically (by reference to the logic of capital accumulation). For example, Fraser’s argument about expropriation could be reformulated in the following manner: expropriation is logically necessary for exploitation, which is in turn necessary for capital accumulation, and expropriation requires differentiation among workers. This differentiation could be along racial lines, or it could be along other lines such as gender, but differentiation there must be. Note that this argument logically insinuates a racial component but remains abstract enough to account for other possible identities across different capitalist formations. It can account for racialized slave labor in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world (where “race” was a key axis of differentiation), twentieth-century Russia (where ethnicity or religion might be the important axis), or gender across all these formations. This is just one possibility. There are others. Chakrabarty (1993), for instance, seized on Marx’s categories of “abstract” and “real” labor to write difference into Marx’s theoretical architecture. “Abstract labor” generated by capitalism refers to a homogeneity among different and otherwise incommensurable labors. It is the register of the juridical free subject. But “real” labor marks have heterogeneity that registers the incommensurability of different labors. It therefore refers to a difference that stands “only as a Derridean trace of something that cannot be enclosed” (Chakrabarty 1993:1096). Exactly how persuasive is Chakrabarty’s rereading remains to be seen. The point is that this effort, and others like it, speak to theoretical possibilities that the racial capitalism literature opens up but has yet to pursue thoroughly. More could be done.13

Capitalism is the real, authentic 'anti-racist' force. Minority entrepreneurship can transcend America's racial and economic divides. As many Americans enjoy a short workweek due to Martin Luther King Day, it's worth reflecting on how Democrats and progressives ignore MLK's message to judge people not "by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Their solution to overcome racial economic disparities is a racial spoils system that divides income, jobs, promotions, and college admissions based on skin color, the opposite of MLK's vision. Consider Democrats' broad support for race reparations, affirmative action, DEI benchmarks, and government programs and contracts that redistribute income based on race. A California government-sanctioned task force is currently devising the size and scope of reparations to be funneled to Black residents. President Biden even attacked car insurers for being racist on Monday, perhaps a prelude to more federal regulations. These racial redistribution schemes are downstream from "critical race theory," which teaches that U.S. societal institutions like the economy are structurally racist. "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination," argues leading proponent Ibram X. Kendi in his book "How to be an Antiracist." "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." Rather than MLK's uniting message of racial progress that makes everyone better off, this neo-Marxist doctrine views society as a zero-sum competition among races. To the extent this worldview has been implemented by Democrats, it's led to pressure-group warfare and a deterioration of race relations. Ironically, this approach actually entrenches racial economic divides by impeding the greatest force for economic advancement that's ever existed: the free market. Capitalism is the true "antiracist" force because it rewards people based on hard work, ingenuity, and customer service rather than immutable characteristics like skin color. Doubling down on the free market is the best way to bridge racial economic gaps and achieve MLK's dream. As I argue in my new book, "The Real Race Revolutionaries: How Minority Entrepreneurship Can Overcome America's Racial and Economic Divides," increased minority entrepreneurship can achieve the racial economic equality we all seek. Data shows that minorities are disproportionately entrepreneurial and that minority entrepreneurs have already eliminated economic disparities, earning more than average White Americans. I was inspired to write this book after I came across a title in a local bookstore marketed to grade-schoolers called "Sylvia and Marsha Start a Revolution." The book's cover depicts two women of color, and its Amazon page describes it as "a playful introduction to trans identities," telling the story of "the transgender women of color who fought for LGBTQ+ equality." The moral of this story and so many others like it: Kids, especially minority kids, should pursue social activism and "revolution" to make the world a better place. I thought, "Why can't this book be Sylvia and Marsha Start a BUSINESS and feature a tale of entrepreneurship?" Starting a business is the real revolutionary act that minorities can take to empower themselves and their communities. Entrepreneurship can bring financial independence and hard-earned confidence. This is the empowering message that we should promote to kids and all minorities, not the soft bigotry that they are victims of structural racist forces. Democrats and progressives claim to be the intellectual descendants of MLK even while they pervert his message of racial blindness. They have staked out the moral high ground on racial issues, yet their activist message hasn't delivered. Meanwhile, the free-market small business economy is actually helping minorities reduce racial income equality through their own volition. Small businesses and their defenders are the ones who genuinely deserve moral authority on race issues. It's time we claim it.

Policy, power, and the dialectics of domination The inequitable effects of mainstream education policy and practice are wellknown: inadequate provision of resources and opportunities to low-income students and students of color, disparate access to higher education by race and SES, disproportional effects on students of color of zero-tolerance disciplinary policies, accelerating resegregation of public schools (including new forms of within-school segregation), and impoverishment of curriculum and assessment in schools serving working-class communities as a result of managerialist accountability initiatives and instrumentalist literacy regimes. In addition, research increasingly shows the collaboration of dominant educational policy with regressive public policy more generally, including in housing and urban planning (where the state-aided process of gentrification has been helped along by school reorganization) (Lipman 2004), regressive tax structures (Anyon 2005), and the neoliberal dismantling or privatization of public services generally, evident in the movements toward choice and corporatization of schools (Saltman 2005). Starting from an historical context in which white students and students of color already have access to very different networks of economic and social capital, these initiatives exacerbate existing inequalities and press the educational system into persistent crisis. The social-reproductive effect of these disparities, with regard to SES, is welldocumented and widely recognized. In addition, the argument that hegemonic policy frameworks and reforms have been systematically racist in their effects on students should now hardly be controversial. Progressive sociology of education (e.g. Noguera 2003), liberal policy research (e.g. Orfield 2000), and critical analyses of schooling (e.g. Apple 1999) have shown that no coherent account of education can be offered that does not centrally consider the importance of race and racism (within an understanding of the constructedness of racial categories); not to mention that by now extensive scholarship in education starting from critical race theory recognizes racism as a preeminent, persistent, and formative reality in school and society (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995; Solórzano and Delgado Bernal 2001; Yosso 2005). Furthermore, quite sensitive analyses have emerged of the systematic interactions between race and class experiences as they are influenced by school organization and administration – both in the construction of student identity (Bettie 2003; Valenzuela 1999) as well as in the larger framing of the meaning of school and popular culture (McCarthy 1998). Nevertheless, even such progressive and critical analyses have failed to adequately theorize the force and sense of power as it works through education policy and practice. On the one hand, educational research has often been captured by the reifications themselves of race and class as transparent and distinct social categories, and has then organized its analyses on the basis of an allegiance to one or the other (as can be seen for instance in the argument between CRT and Marxist perspectives). On the other hand, critical analysis from all of these perspectives has been held hostage to a conceptual model that understands education policy as the transparent effect of a process of accumulation (of wealth or privilege) by elites. Two important aspects of power are overlooked as a result. First, this model misses the way that race and class oppression do not so much overlap or intersect, but are rather identified within a more basic logic that produces each of them, as we have argued above. Second, power in this context cannot be understood merely as a monopoly on resources or control, but has to be recognized as a more fundamental process of domination – a drive that precedes and organizes familiar identities and social categories. In this way, in contrast to the arguments of familiar critical analyses, the active violence and ‘unspeakable terror’ (Harris 1999) that runs through the history of racism is not merely an instrument for shoring up hegemony, but represents as well the actual purpose and goal of power. This more fundamental logic and drive remain elusive for analyses that take given social classes and categories for granted, and which understand education policy solely as a sphere of contention between them. In this connection, Zeus Leonardo’s work makes an important contribution in undertaking a reexamination of race and racism in education that draws from Marxist and other class theories (Leonardo 2007, 2009). Leonardo’s work has helped to advance important insights about the complex dialectics of race and class within educational discourse. His work has specifically called for an examination of race questions that explores how ‘race is a structural formation [that] maintains an interdependent, codetermined and heterogeneous relationship to the economy and other social relations’ (Leonardo 2004, 404). His work on the theorizing of race, while drawing from a number of thinkers and ideas, suggests at its core that the theorization of race and educational policy must account for ideological, material and personal experiences related to race (Leonardo 2004, 2007, 2009). So in advancing a social theory of race, schooling and educational policy, Leonardo posits that race questions be understood through their structural and material meanings and in this project makes use of Marxist and capital theories. Leonardo’s work has been instrumental in helping to set in motion a needed critical discussion about the manner in which race and class analysis can help make sense of long standing educational problems. There are however, some key distinctions between Leonardo’s work and our own project. The first has to do with how we approach the dialectical relationship between race and class. Leonardo’s work tends to focus more on specific theories and theorists, and consistently refers to the ‘marriage’ or ‘synthesis’ of race critique with non-reductionist Marxist work. Our project, by contrast, is less concerned with the marriage or synthesis of race and class theories and more with how theoretically we are to understand the complex dialectic of race and class within the logic of capital as a whole. In other words, what does it mean theoretically to engage the dialectical unity of race and class, and what does this look like when offering critical analysis of educational policy? Another key distinction from Leonardo’s work is that we situate the intellectual history of theorizing the dialectic of race and class within the tradition of Black radical thinkers who understood the dialectical unity of race and class within the logic of capital. While critical theory, critical social thought, and critical pedagogy all help to provide useful nuances to the analysis of the relationship between race and class, we have found that the foundational theoretical insights, thoughts, questions and ideas from the Black radical tradition have provided particularly relevant and cogent theoretical arguments concerning the link between race and class. It is from this history that we have been able to theorize the notion of ‘economies of racism’, which we have developed in this paper.

I Education as enclosure and dispossession If education holds the promise of renewal and justice, it is also a practice that has been based on enclosure and dispossession. Education’s capacity for violence has received significant attention in critical scholarship, particularly in relation to the role of mass schooling in cultural assimilation, linguistic erasure and ‘epistemicide’ – the systematic destruction of knowledge (Santos 2014). In the settler colonial context of New Zealand, for instance, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) has argued that schooling systems are part of state projects of enclosing Indigenous people, key vehicles for epistemological violence in which culture, life and being are dispossessed. There is a growing body of work that examines how modern schooling, even in its ‘progressive’ forms, contains or encloses people through its enduring ‘civilising’ missions (Fallace 2015; Simpson 2007) and its colonial and racialised hierarchies of knowledge (Coloma 2017; AUTHORS; Bain 2018). However, the material conditions of enclosure and dispossession that underpin these epistemic relations have not received as much attention. These are the foundational conditions of racial capitalism which we focus on here. Enclosure is the process of extracting value from land and in doing so dispossessing the people whose livelihoods and lifeworlds are connected to it. As Marx (1952) documents in the case of England, capitalism was characterised by the mass enclosure of ‘the commons’ and subsequent dispossession of land through the displacement of peasants. This act of enclosure and dispossession fundamentally altered the social relations of work and livelihood, but also the social relations of land (Melamed, 2015). In Marx’s (1952, 355) terms, this is a part of primitive accumulation: the act of enclosure was a moment when ‘great masses’ were ‘forcibly torn from their subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labour market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, [their] separation from the soil, is the basis of the whole process’. In other words, enclosure necessarily requires dispossessing, and this dispossessing involves radically denying the existence and worth of those who live there. For Marx and Engels? (2010, 21) this dual process of enclosure and dispossession was central to the colonial relations that underpinned the development of capitalism, as it ‘opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie’. We bring enclosure and dispossession together analytically to denote the constitutive mutuality of these two forces in the practices of racial capitalism. Working with Aileen MoretonRobinson’s (2015) examination of the ‘white possessive’, enclosing/dispossessing can be understood as a fundamental act of colonial violence. Writing about settler colonialism, Moreton-Robinson (2015) suggests that ‘possessive logics’ create the taken-for-granted conditions of settler colonisation in which land becomes propertied, a ‘thing’ to be laboured on and have value extracted from it. This foundational act of possession is at the same time an act of enclosure. In this act Indigenous people are rendered ‘propertyless’ and subjects of the colonial state to be controlled, contained, and – ultimately – possessed. Possession is centrally concerned with valorisation and the capacity to own and to make value from land, things, and people and is carried out by the state. As settler colonial theorist Patrick Wolfe (2001, 868) notes, ‘settler colonialism introduced a zero-sum contest over land on which conflicting modes of production could not ultimately coexist’. Here then, the colonial state becomes the ‘possessor’, and the project of enclosing/dispossessing continues to be carried out in the name of nationhood. The logics of the ‘white possessive’ under British settler colonialism as set out by MoretonRobinson, relates to Byrd, Goldstein, Melamed and Reddy’s (2018) discussion of ‘economies of dispossession’. Writing from the US context, they contend that economies of dispossession are used to articulate how ‘modes and relations of production, distribution, consumption, and reproduction’ are materially enacted and create ‘a specific systemic organization or logic of circuits of interaction and exchange’ (Byrd et al, 2018, 2). In this way, enclosing/dispossessing is centrally concerned with creating particular relations to land, value, labour, and things that are underpinned by capital and property. Private property holds that land can be worked on to extract wealth, making land something to be owned, laboured upon, and commodified. In the Australian context, the logics of the ‘white possessive’ became rationalised through the assertion of ‘terra nullius’, an idea made possible by understanding land as a property requiring particular forms of ‘settlement’, ownership and labour, and by the wilful dismissal of Indigenous knowledge, care and labour (Pascoe, 2014). The colonial capitalist nation state is founded upon, and continues to be steeped in, this declaration of terra nullius: the denial and dispossession of Indigenous people continues to legitimise settler ‘ownership’ of land - a clear example of how capitalism is racial capitalism. The racial regime of ownership under settler colonialism requires, as Brenna Bhandar (2018, 9) outlines, ‘continual renewal and reinstantiation to prevail over other ways of being and living’. Education, we suggest, has been a potent force for this renewal. Indeed, enclosure/dispossession is at the very foundation of education institutions. Consider, for example, the material buildings of schools and education institutions. As Sharon Stein (2020) documents in the US context, the Morrill Act of 1862 established oft-celebrated public (state) land grants that aided the formation of higher education institutions.1 This expropriation of Indigenous land re-embeds practices of enclosure/dispossession which denied – and continue to deny – Indigenous claims to the land upon which these institutions sit (Stein, 2020). Stein’s analysis points to the ongoing processes of enclosing/dispossessing in which social institutions of the nation state – such as public education – cannot escape its past-present-future relation to racial capitalism (see also Bhambra & Holmwood, 2018). Indeed, in her discussion Stein argues that critiques of, and resistances to, neoliberal privatisation of education need to take better account of the violence of such ‘public’ claims, and how these ‘public institutions’ reinforce racial divisions even as they claim to broaden access to education. As Clayton Pierce (2017, 42) discusses, the ‘public’ school system in the U.S., often held up as a site for democratic potentiality, is built upon racialised divisions in humanity, and ultimately the ‘fungibility of Black bodies’ (original emphasis). There are many more examples of enclosure/dispossession in education we can point to: the building of international branch campuses as part of the expansion of education institutions,2 1 For details, maps and narratives, see the database at Land Grab Universities https://www.landgrabu.org/ 2 There is a growing literature on ‘off-shore’ university campuses, much of it focusing on pedagogic models and experiences (Siltaoja et al. 2019; Dobos 2011). However we were unable to identify studies that focused explicitly on matters of land acquisition, material infrastructures, and displacement/gentrification in relation to the expansion of Higher Education through international branch campuses. the infrastructures of platform capitalism in education,3 and the securing of ‘public’ land, which is unceded Indigenous land, by private schools.4 Take for example Eliot Tretter’s (2015) analysis of how US universities’ increasing role as ‘land developers’, particularly through industry partnerships, is rationalised through anti-Black racism. Under projects of ‘urban renewal’, universities are actively involved in land seizures and clearance, and therefore the displacement and impoverishment of existing communities (Tretter, 2015; see also Baldwin 2021). Tretter (2015, 54) examines two urban renewal schemes by the University of Texas where, ‘approximately one thousand people were displaced, mostly African Americans, and countless businesses, many African American-owned, were forced to close’. University-led expansion occurs, Tretter argues, through a racist theory of value, an idea we return to later. He suggests University of Texas administrators and city officials worked with the assumption that African American neighbourhoods, households, and bodies were simply less valuable and desirable than those of whites. Since the university was going to change the ‘colour’ and character of the neighbourhood by removing its inhabitants, it was also going to improve its value. (Tretter, 2015, 49). As these examples attest, the expansionist and extractivist projects of education systems under capitalism – the capitalisation of land, buildings, infrastructures – require racialised enclosing/dispossessing.