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To take a scientific attitude about war and peace, we must carry the causal analysis a step further. If peace movements are caused by wars and war threats, then we must ask, what are the causes of these wars, both in the short term and in the long term? Before analyzing the causes of wars, it is necessary to dismiss a false analysis that has been popularized in recent years, the myth that war is caused by a "war instinct." The best biological and anthropological data indicate that there is no such thing as a war instinct despite the attempt of the mass media and educational systems to perpetuate this myth. Instead, "the same species that invented war is capable of inventing peace" (note 15). Since there are several kinds of war, it is likely that there are several different kinds of causes for war. There are two kinds of war in which the United States has not been engaged for over two centuries. The first are wars of national liberation such as the American Revolution or today's revolutions in Nicaragua and South Africa being waged by the Sandinistas and the African National Congress. The second are wars of revolution in which the previous ruling class is thrown out and replaced by another. In the British and French Revolutions of earlier eras the feudal land-owners were overthrown by the newly rising capitalist class. In the revolutions of this century in Russia, China, Cuba, etc. the capitalists, in turn, were overthrown by forces representing the working class and landless farmers. The six wars and threats of war that have caused American peace movements in this century have been wars of imperial conquest, inter-imperialist rivalry, and capitalist-socialist rivalry. What are the root causes of these wars in the short term? For the following analysis, I will rely upon some of America's best economic historians (note 16). The Spanish-American and Philippine Wars of 1898, according to historian Walter LaFeber, were inevitable military results of a new foreign policy devoted to obtaining markets overseas for American products. The new foreign policy was the response to a profound depression that began in 1893 with unemployment soaring to almost 20 percent. Farm and industrial output piled up without a market because American workers, being unemployed, had no money to buy them. Secretary of State Gresham "concluded that foreign markets would provide in large measure the cure for the depression." To obtain such markets, the U.S. went into competition with the other imperialist empires such as Britain and Spain. The U.S. intervened with a naval force to help overthrow the government of Hawaii in 1893, intervened diplomatically in Nicaragua in 1894, threatened war with England over Venezuela in 1895, and eventually went to war with Spain in 1898 and invaded the Philippines in 1898. To quote from the title of LaFeber's book, the U.S. established a "new empire." American intervention in World War I again rescued the economy from a depression. In 1914 and 1915, as war between the European imperialist powers broke out, American unemployment was rising towards ten percent and industrial goods were piling up without a market. One industrial market was expanding, however, the market for weapons in Europe. The historian Charles Tansill concludes that "it was the rapid growth of the munitions trade which rescued America from this serious economic situation." And since the sales went to Britain and France, it committed the U.S. to their side in the war. Finance capital was equally involved: "the large banking interests were deeply interested in the World War because of wide opportunities for large profits." When bank loans to Britain and France of half a billion dollars went through in 1915, "the business depression, that had so worried the Administration in the spring of 1915, suddenly vanished, and 'boom times' prevailed." Of course, German imperialism did not stand idly by while the U.S. profited from arms shipments and loans to their enemies in the war. German submarine warfare against these shipments finally provoked American involvement in the War. The rise of fascism in Europe was the direct result of still another cyclical depression, the Great Depression that gripped the entire capitalist world in the Thirties. In his recent book on the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism, David Abraham has documented how major capitalists turned to Hitler to fill the vacuum of political leadership when the economy collapsed. In part, the absence of political leadership "with the collapse of the export economy at the end of 1931...drove German industry to foster or accept a Bonapartist solution to the political crisis and an imperialist solution to the economic crisis. The "Bonapartist solution", as Abraham calls it, was found in Hitler's Nazi Party. As he says, "By mid-1932, the vast majority of industrialists wanted to see Nazi participation in the government." For these industrialists, "an anti-Marxist, imperialist program was the least common denominator on which they could all agree, and the Nazis seemed capable of providing the mass base for such a program." The appeasement of Hitler's promise to smash the communists and socialists at home and to destroy the Soviet Union abroad expressed a new cause of capitalist war. Up until that time, inter-imperialist wars were simply the response to economic contradictions at home and capitalist competition abroad. In part, World War II was yet another inter-imperialist war. But now a new cause of war was emerging alongside of the old. The rise of socialism was a direct threat to the entire capitalist world. In addition to glutted domestic markets and competition for foreign markets, the capitalists now had to face the additional problem that the overall foreign market itself was shrinking. Thus, they tended to support each other in the face of a common enemy. After World War II, there was a particularly sharp shrinkage in the "free world" for capitalist exploitation as socialism and national liberation triumphed through much of the world. The U.S. and its allies responded by demanding that the socialist countries open their doors to investment by capitalism. According to historian William Appleman Williams, "It was the decision of the United States to employ its new and awesome power in keeping with the traditional Open Door Policy which crystallized the cold war." As Williams explains, "the policy of the open door, like all imperial policies, created and spurred onward a dynamic opposition." Diplomatic and military confrontation between the U.S. and USSR were used to justify the Cold War and establishment of NATO, but the underlying issues were economic. As pointed out by historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, "The question of foreign economic policy was not the containment of Communism, but rather more directly the extension and expansion of American capitalism according to its new economic power and needs." In addition to the new problem of shrinking world markets, there remained the problem of cyclical depressions. Although unemployment was not bad in 1946 because industry was producing to meet the accumulated needs of the war-deprived American people, the specter of another depression was very much a factor in the Cold War. As the Kolkos point out, "The deeply etched memory of the decade-long depression of 1929 hung over all American plans for the postwar era....In extending its power throughout the globe the United States hoped to save itself as well from a return of the misery of prewar experience." The Vietnam War was a continuation of the Cold War, as the United States tried to prevent further shrinkage of the world capitalist economic system. The U.S. had already fought a similar war in Korea. In his chapter, "The U.S. in Vietnam, 1944-66: Origins and Objectives," Gabriel Kolko calls the intervention of the United States in Vietnam, "the most important single embodiment of the power and purposes of American foreign policy since the Second World War." Elsewhere in his book, Kolko goes into detail about the economic basis of American imperialism: access to raw materials, access to markets for American products, and investment opportunities for American capital. The Vietnam War, he explains, was not a conspiracy or simply a military decision. It was the natural result of "American power and interest in the modern world." Finally we come to the question of what has caused the massive escalation of the arms buildup under Presidents Carter and Reagan (and more recently under Bush, father and son). To some extent, it is a response to the old problem of cyclical depressions. Since World War II, each recession has been deeper than the last, until by 1981 unemployment reached double digits for the first time since

the Thirties. Government spending was needed to put people back to work. Would the government spend the money for military weapons or for civilian needs? A long line of Presidential candidates, standing for the military solution, have been supported in their campaigns by the military-industrial complex against other candidates who were unable to wage a serious campaign for civilian spending instead of military spending. The growing power of the military-industrial complex is a new and especially dangerous addition to the economic causes of war. It reflects an economic crisis that goes even deeper than those of the past. In addition to the cyclical depressions and the shrinkage of foreign markets, there is a new imbalance in the entire structure of capitalism. There is an enormous increase in financial speculation and short-term profit schemes. The military-industrial complex has risen to become the dominant sector of the American economy because through the aid of state subsidies it generates the greatest short-term profits. Never mind if the U.S. government goes into debt to banks and other financial institutions in order to pay for military spending. The world of financial speculation does not worry about tomorrow. Not only does this "military spending solution" endanger the security of the planet, but it also increases the risk of a major financial collapse and subsequent depression. To summarize, we may point to the following causes of American wars over the past century: 1) cyclical crises of overproduction and unemployment, 2) exploitation of poor colonial and neo-colonial countries by rich imperialist countries, 3) economic rivalry for foreign markets and investment areas by imperialist powers, 4) the attempt to stop the shrinkage of the "free world" - i.e. the part of the world that is free for capitalist investment and exploitation, and 5) financial speculation and short-term profit making of the military-industrial complex. In the 1985 edition of this book the argument was made that the socialist countries were escaping from the economic causation of war. In comparison to the capitalist countries, they did not have the same dynamic of over-production and cyclical depression, with periods of enhanced structural unemployment. As for exploitation and imperialism, despite the frequent reference in the American media to "Soviet imperialism," the direction of the flow of wealth was the opposite of what holds true under capitalist imperialism. Instead of the rich nations extracting wealth from the poor ones, which is the case, for example between the U.S. and Latin America, the net flow of wealth proceeded from the Soviet Union towards the other socialist countries in order to bring them towards an eventually even level of development. According to an authoritative source associated with the U.S. military-industrial complex, the net outflow from the Soviet Union amounted to over forty billion dollars a year in the mid-1980's. In one crucial respect, however, the 1985 analysis was incorrect. It failed to take account of the military-industrial complex that had grown to be the most powerful force of the Soviet economy, a mirror image of its equivalent in the West. The importance of this was brought home to those of us who attended a briefing on economic conversion from military to civilian production that was held at the United Nations on November 1, 1990, a critical time for Gorbachev's program of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. The speaker, Ednan Ageev, was the head of the Division of International Security Issues at the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was asked by the Gorbachev administration to find out the extent to which the Soviet economy was being used for military production. Naturally, he went to the Minister of Defense, where he was told that this information was secret. Secret even to Gorbachev. In conversation, Ageev estimated that 85-90% of Soviet scientific researchers were in the military sector. That seems high until you realize that the Soviet's were matching U.S. military research, development and production on the basis of a Gross National Product only half as large. Since about 40% of U.S. research and development was tied to the military at that time, it would make sense that the Soviets would have had to double the U.S. percentage in order to keep pace. How could the Gorbachev administration convert their economy from military to civilian production if they could not even get a list of defense industries? Keeping this in mind, along with the enormous militarization of the Soviet economy, it is not so surprising that the Soviet economy collapsed, and with it the entire political superstructure. The origins of the Soviet military-industrial complex can be traced back to the Russian revolution which instituted what Lenin, at one point, called "war communism". He warned that war communism could not succeed in the long run and that instead of a top-down militarized economy, a socialist economy needed to be structured as a "cooperative of cooperatives." But war communism was entrenched during the Stalin years, carried out of necessity to an extreme during the Second World War, and then perpetuated by the Cold War. The economic causation of the war system is not new. It originated long before capitalism and socialism. From its beginnings in ancient Mesopotamia, the state was always associated with war, both to capture slaves abroad and to keep them under control at home. As states grew more powerful, war became the means to build empires and to acquire and rule colonies. In fact, the economic causation of war probably extends back even further into ancient prehistory. From the best analysis I know, that of Mel and Carol Ember, using the methods of cross-cultural anthropology, it would seem that war functioned as a means to survive periodic but unpredictable food shortages caused by natural disasters. Apparently, tribes that could make war most effectively could survive natural disasters better than others by successfully raiding the food supplies of their neighbors. While particular wars can be analyzed, as we have done above, in terms of immediate, short-term causes, there is a need to understand the war system itself, which is as old as human history. Particular wars are the tip of a much deeper iceberg. Beneath war, there has developed a culture of war that is entwined with it in a complex web of causation. On the one hand, the culture of war is produced and reinforced by each war, and, on the other hand, the culture of war provides the basis on which succeeding wars are prepared and carried out. The culture of war is a set of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that consists of enemy images, authoritarian social structure, training and arming for violence, exploitation of man and nature, secrecy and male domination. Without an enemy, without a social structure where people will follow orders, without the preparation of soldiers and weapons, without the control of information, both propaganda and secrecy, no war can be carried out. The culture of war has been so prevalent in history that we take it for granted, as if it were human nature. However, anthropologists point to cultures that are nowhere near as immersed in the culture of war, and it is the opinion of the best scientists that a culture of peace is possible. Peace movements have not given enough attention to the internal use of the culture of war. The culture of war has two faces, one facing outward and the other inward. Foreign wars are accompanied by authoritarian rule inside the warring countries. Even when there is no war threat, armies (or national guards) are kept ready not just for use against foreign enemies, but also against those defined as the enemy within: striking workers, movements of the unemployed, prisoners, indigenous peoples, just as in an earlier time they were used against slave rebellions. As documented in my 1995 article in the Journal of Peace Research (Internal Military Interventions in the United States) the U.S. Army and National Guard have been used an average of 18 times a year, involving an average of 12,000 troops for the past 120 years, mostly against actions and revolts by workers and the unemployed. During periods of external war, the internal wars are usually intensified and accompanied by large scale spying, deportations and witch hunts. It would appear that we have once again entered such a period in the U.S. We are hardly alone in this matter. Needless to say, the culture of war was highly developed to stifle dissent in the Soviet Union by Stalin and his successors of "war communism." The internal culture of war needs to be analyzed and resisted everywhere. For example, readers living in France should question the role of the CRS. The internal use of the culture of war is no less economically motivated than external wars. The socialists at the beginning of the 20th Century recognized it as "class war," carried out in order to maintain the domination of the rich and powerful over the poor and exploited. Not by accident, it has often been socialists and communists who are the first to be targeted by the internal culture of war in capitalist countries. And they, in turn, have often made the most powerful critique of the culture of war and have played a leading role in peace movements for that reason. Their historical role for peace was considerably compromised, however, by the "war communism" of the Soviet Union. With its demise, however, there is now an opportunity for socialists and communists to return to their earlier leadership against war, both internal and external, and to insist that a true socialism can only flourish on the basis of a culture of peace. In considering future prospects for the American Peace Movements, I shall begin with trends from the past and then consider different factors for the future? First, let us look back over the economic factors and movements of the previous century to see if the trends are likely to continue. 1. Wars are likely to continue because, for the most part, their economic causes remain as strong as ever: 1) cyclical crises of overproduction and unemployment, 2) exploitation of poor colonial and neo-colonial countries by rich imperialist countries, 3) economic rivalry for foreign markets and investment areas by imperialist powers, 4) the attempt to stop the shrinkage of the "free world" - i.e. the part of the world that is free for capitalist investment and exploitation, and 5) financial speculation and short-term profit making of the military-industrial complex. The fourth factor is not as prominent since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but there is still evidence of this factor at work: for example, the attempted overthrow of the government of Venezuela in spring, 2002, was apparently linked to its developing ties with socialist Cuba, especially in terms of its oil resources. Although the coup d'etat failed, there was a risk of plunging Venezuela into warfare, especially considering the increasingly internationalized war next door in Colombia. Although the "war against terrorism" in Afghanistan, Philippines, etc. and the associated military buildup is usually justified as revenge for the attacks of September 11, there seems little doubt that there are economic motives involved as well, including the control of oil resources from Central Asia as a supplement to those of the Middle East. At the same time, the massive expansion of the military-industrial complex in the U.S. appears at some level to be intended as an increase in government spending to hedge against declining non-military production, unemployment and financial crises in the stock markets. 2. The American peace movements have been reactive in the past, developing in response to specific wars or threats of war, and then disappearing when the war is over or the threat is perceived to have decreased. In fact, this observation at the macro level is mirrored by an observation that I have made previously at a micro level: participants in peace movements have been motivated to an important degree by anger against the injustice of war. This dynamic seems likely to continue. Governments, worried about the reactive potential of peace movements may attempt to engage in very brief wars, just as the U.S. government cut short the 1991 Gulf War after several weeks to avoid an escalating peace movement. In the future, peace movements need to be broadened by linkages to other issues and by international solidarity and unity; otherwise they risk being only temporary influences on the course of history, growing in response to particular wars and then disappearing again afterwards. The world needs a sustained opposition to the entire culture of war, not just to particular wars. To be fully successful, the future peace movement needs to be positive as well as negative. It needs to be for a culture of peace at the same time as it is against the culture of war. This requires that activists in the future peace movement develop a shared vision of the future towards which the movement can aspire. I have found evidence, presented in the recent revision of my book Psychology for Peace Activists (note 17), that such a shared, positive vision is now becoming possible, and, as a result, human consciousness can take on a new and powerful dimension in this particular moment of history.

The two great threats to human survival that now confront us are military and environmental. They are likely to converge more and more in the future, as struggles over scarce resources escalate into armed conflict. Over the years, communists have been among the most ardent advocates of peace, and the reason for this is ably summarized by Ellen Meiksins Wood. ‘‘It seems to me axiomatic,’’ she writes, ‘‘that the expansionary, competitive and exploitative logic of capitalist accumulation in the context of the nation-state system must, in the longer or shorter term, be destabilizing, and that capitalism . . . is and will for the foreseeable future remain the greatest threat to world peace.’’≤Σ If the peace movement is to grasp the root causes of global aggression, it cannot afford to ignore the nature of the beast that breeds it. And this means that it cannot afford to ignore the insights of Marxism. The same goes for environmentalism. Wood argues that capitalism cannot avoid ecological devastation, given the antisocial nature of its drive to accumulate. The system may come to tolerate racial and gender equality, but it cannot by its nature achieve world peace or respect the material world. Capitalism, Wood comments, ‘‘may be able to accommodate some degree of ecological care, especially when the technology of environmental protection is itself profitably marketable. But the essential irrationality of the drive for capital accumulation, which subordinates everything to the requirements of the self-expansion of capital and so-called growth, is unavoidably hostile to ecological balance.’’ The old communist slogan ‘‘Socialism or barbarism’’ always seemed to some a touch too apocalyptic. As history lurches towards the prospect of nuclear warfare and environmental catastrophe, it is hard to see how it is less than the sober truth. If we do not act now, it seems that capitalism will be the death of us.

(B, “An End to Self-Care,” 16 Oct. 2012, https://www.organizingupgrade.com/archive-an-end-to-self-care-b-loewe/)

Talking about how we sustain ourselves, honor our personal needs, and prioritize our well-being in this brusque and brutal world is a huge advance from movement culture generations before. However, centering that conversation on ‘self-care’ devoid of our place in the collective misses the central point of why we need to care for ourselves. And that is because we must have all of our strength in place to counter the systems which, without our ability to resist and transform, without the self-preservation describes, would see us destroyed. Yashna Maya Padamsee, in her article , writes “Talking only about self-care when talking about healing justice is like only talking about recycling and composting when speaking on Environmental Justice. It is a necessary and important individual daily practice- but to truly seek justice for the Environment, or to truly seek Healing for our communities, we need to interrupt and transform systems on a broader level. Speaking in Phoenix, Arizona in 2009 at a rally for migrant rights, , ‘The racism and hatred we are seeing here inflicts in us a collective wound. The only way to heal from those wounds and address those assaults on our dignity is to resist.’ If injustice results in collective wounds, healing comes from collective struggle. At the core, and when at it’s best, the conversation of self-care is seeking an answer to the question, “What must be done so that each one of us can maximize our participation in efforts that move us toward a world where we are more free?” Too often it sounds different. Below I hope to identify some ways ‘self-care’ strays from its path in order to move us further down the road of healthier lives and more vibrant struggles. There’s No Time for Self-Care Self-care is often referred to as a task to add to a to-do list that is already overflowing. After several years running an immigrant worker organization together, my co-worker and I went on a to decompress and reflect (readers pause to clap.) The retreat granted us space to re-find ourselves in the grueling work and commit to continuing a practice that would keep us centered upon our return. When we returned, we’d ask each other, “So, you meditate today? You stretch?” I, with professional parents in a city far from mine and an apartment mainly to myself, usually would say yes (and the readers clap). But he returned to a bustling home with the noise of TV and the family responsibilities of caring for his brother and completing family chores. He’d usually say no (and the readers frown disapprovingly). As long as self-care is discussed as an individual responsibility and additional task, it will be something that middle-class people with leisure time will most easily relate to and will include barriers to the lives of people without time to spare. It becomes one more unchecked box on a to-do list to feel bad about, an unreal expectation, or a far-off dream. The movement is my self-care not my reason for needing it. Don Andres awoke every morning at 5:00am to arrive at a street corner to look for work by 6:00am. He’d work a full day of heavy construction and still arrive at the 7:00pm meeting. He’d routinely fall asleep but he was there. Why? Because organizing together to improve conditions, to create alternatives, to band together, was the only option for how care could be anything but alien in his life as a day laborer. Being at the meeting was self-care. Lack of care is systemic. Therefore resistance to those systems is the highest affirmation of care for oneself and one’s community. Movement work is healing work. What self-care often misses is the reality that for the majority of people engaged in social justice movements, participation is out of necessity. That a collective effort in the form of social movement is the highest articulation of caring for one’s own self in a world designed to deny your worthiness of care. Too many people discussing self-care overlook the structural barriers that make access to the care they are speaking of impossible without the struggle they often discuss as the cause of their need to ‘take care of themselves.’ Even for someone like myself who has the majority of my materials needs met, I feel most alive, most on fire, most able to go around the clock, when I’m doing political work that feels authentic, feels like it pushes the bounds of authority, and feels like it is directly connected to advancing my individual and our collective liberation. The truth is that we cannot knit our way to revolution. The issue is not that movements are taxing, because truly they are. It’s called ‘struggle’ for a reason. But they go from strain to overtaxing when we seek to fulfill our political aspirations through vehicles never meant to carry them like in non-political formations or some 501c3s. The crisis of care is also a crisis of organization. Non-profits are built to do a lot of good, but they have inherent limitations that mean they are rarely built to fulfill our visions of the transformative organizing that would usher in a world where we could feel whole. Most engaged in social movements today are originally driven out of either a concrete material necessity and/or a deep connection to the wrong that accompanies inequality and a drive to make it right. However the majority of organizations available to us today are designed for gentle reforms but not the fundamental transformation our spirits crave. As a result, we try to transform a model unfit to nourish our hearts and then treat that frustration with tonics and diets and stretches instead of placing our efforts in creating a collective space that unleashes our heart’s creative desires. Maria Poblet of once said, “Burnout is not about the amount of hours you work, it is about the amount of political clarity you have.” What that means is that there is no chance of us consistently burning the midnight oil if we don’t at our core believe what we’re working on will get us to a new day and no amount of yoga or therapy or comfort food we supplement our work with will compensate for that. However, if we can see a better world just over the horizon, like a marathon runner nearing a finish line, we can find endless wells to draw upon as we work to usher it in. I have literally gone from being in debilitating pain and only being able to accomplish three hours of work each day to working 18 hour shifts the same week in a completely different context. The difference was not the conditions of my work. It was my connection to my purpose. The problem with self-care is that there is an underlying assumption that our labor is draining. The deeper question is how do we shape our struggles so that they are life-giving instead of energy-taking processes. When did activities that are aimed to move us closer to freedom stop moving us? Resilience Builds Resistance As we move toward answering that question, we also have to look at the lifestyles, both individually and communally, that we live. We can’t address care without also addressing culture. Capital’s vision for our lives is one where we are alienated from our work and from each other. Where non-profit jobs mirror for-profit jobs and both end in take-out and television. Where we mirror the lives of our opposition; long hours of work, eat out, come home drained, watch television, collapse, repeat. Replacing the television in that cycle with yoga or bodywork does not address the alienation at the core of it. The change comes when we begin to build communities of care. The difference between the strength of a rope and the weakness of a string is that a rope is a hundred strings that have bound together. As points out, the trees that are uprooted in a hurricane are those that stand alone while those whose roots have intertwined support each other against the push of storms. The fact that you’re tired and asking yourself how you’re going to keep going, is not unique to you. The answer to that question isn’t either. Going back to , she writes, “I cannot sit and care for my body without being concerned with what happens to the bodies of my sisters. We are connected… it is our responsibility not as individuals, but as communities to create structures in which self-care changes to community care. In which we are cared-for and able to care for others. So then don’t ask the single mother if she’s taking care of herself unless you’re also offering to do childcare. Don’t ask the striking teacher how they’re fairing unless you’re also picking up a picket sign. Hopefully at this point we know that an injury to one is an injury to all but have we also figured out how to making healing for one healing for all and vice versa? What do communities that share responsibility for each others’ well being look like? Where both our movement work and social time outside of it bring us to deeper connection and clearer purpose? There are examples: The Republic of New Africa did physical training in the park every morning before members went off to work. In Arizona, to take care of each others’ children in case someone in the network is detained or deported. But we need more. It’s not just a question we need to answer to figure out how to stay involved but one that, if we answer, will open a world for much more people to get involved. We’re already taught to go it alone and look out for #1. Putting self-care to bed and waking up community care might be what can take us to 100.

(Aimaloghi, “THERE IS NO SELF-CARE WITHOUT COMMUNITY CARE,” 10 Nov. 2020, https://urge.org/there-is-no-self-care-without-community-care/)

You know that weird that happens when you say a word too many times repeatedly, and it starts to feel funny on your tongue when you pronounce it, and sound funny when you hear it? After a while, you don’t even know if the word you’re saying is real? That’s what the term “self-care” has become for me. Your favorite instagram therapist has a bulleted list of ideas on how to care for self. Cosmetic brands are selling 98% petroleum jelly, 2% lavender essential oil eye creams under the guise of self care. At the end of every hour-long zoom meeting (which let’s be real, could have easily been an email, but I digress,) there’s some kind of self-care lecture and plug. At this point, I don’t know if self-care is really about care or if it has just served as a corporate marketing ploy and a hollow message for non-profit organizations to on the end of week emails to their overworked staff, hoping it absolves themselves from any kind of guilt they may feel (y’all know who you are ). In actuality, the self-care movement has deep, radical roots as well as race, gender, and class dynamics behind the concept, that many are not aware of. The true intention of self-care is unfortunately drowned out by misaligned, co-opts to profit from. Nonetheless, the history of self-care was and continues to be vital to the movement towards freedom and deserves to be honored in its fullness. The emergence of self-care began in the healthcare setting back in the 1950s, originally used to characterize actions, like personal grooming and exercise, that institutionalized patients could take to practice their autonomy and foster a sense of self-worth. However, I think all the credit of our contemporary interpretation of self-care is due to the Black Panther Party. In the 1970s, the BPP began to promote a message to Black folks that prioritized looking after their health and well-being, noting that our own wellness was essential in order to remain resilient in the face of relentless systemic and medical racism. The Black Panthers revolutionary fight for liberation in the United States was not limited to organizing around racial injustice, but it included and uplifted community care. Since the government would not provide aid, out of necessity, the BPP established “” such as health facilities, education programs, and distributed food throughout their communities. This is a Black Panther Party concept known as “”. In the 70s and still today, Black communities and communities of color lack access to basic social services because of systemic barriers. The Black Panthers understood that in order to survive in this world, they had to take care of themselves and, inherently, one another. The late activist Audre Lorde, adopted these philosophies in her own writing and expanded on self-care in her essays. Most notably in her 1988 book, A Burst of Light, Lorde writes “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”. This quote has acted as a famous declaration for self-care, particularly for Black women, who are often pillars of their community and with taking care of everyone around them, leaving little care for themselves Self-care is also especially needed in activist spaces. “(Practicing radical self-care) means we’re able to bring our entire selves into the movement,” , “It means we incorporate into our work as activists ways of acknowledging and hopefully moving beyond trauma. It means a holistic approach.”. The problem with what I’ll call “new age self-care” is that it can become too capitalistically driven and centered on luxurious pampering that has very little to do with sustainable nurturing and all to do with spending money, which for the communities that actually need the most care, they cannot access! The reality is that we cannot escape the exhaustion and violence that is systemic oppression and white supremacy. It is the culture that we live in. Although self-care has never ensured an escape, this does not mean that all acts of self-care should be so short-sighted and diluted to a point of frivolousness. The realities of racism cannot be outrun, out-bought, or pampered away, only lived with, yet simultaneously resisted. This brings us back to recognizing the true intent of self-care, as modeled for us by the Black Panthers, Audre Lorde, and Angela Davis, and in doing so, “” Self-care doesn’t have to cost a thing. It can look like pursuing connection and community, mutual aid, supportive and reciprocal relationships, self-reflection journaling, validating feelings in a vulnerable conversation, setting boundaries, listening to your body, meditation, resting without justification or reason, feeding your friends, reading for pleasure, spending time in nature, quiet moments, crying, cultivating joy, practicing peace etc. Self-care is anything that gives you a way to reconnect with yourself and your community in meaningful, long-term ways that nurture our individual welfare and gives us the power to survive and continue to do the collective work.

Towards this, I maintain that scholarly engagement with utopia deserves an ‘unsettling.’ As such, I intend to argue for utopian studies’ engagement with emergent critical discourses of Indigenous peoples themselves, as well as non-Indigenous work concerned with the phenomenon of settler colonization.2 These discourses represent vital considerations for the potential revaluation of the phenomenon of utopianism as a useful contributor to the destabilization of distinctly settler colonial foundations. The specific and substantial effects that More’s Utopia and, more generally, the modern utopian tradition have had (and, importantly, continue to have) on settler colonial formations offer a clear and compelling basis for scholarly attention to such concerns. ¶ Firstly, there is an etymological dilemma involved in the utilization of More’s neologism “utopia” which may be translated as ‘the no place’ or, more commonly, ‘the good place which is no place’ to describe the social dreaming or expressions of desire for a better way of being by the Indigenous peoples of what is now known as the United States and Canada. While I do not at all wish to subsume the significant differences that have and do exist among Native peoples, the particularity of place is, generally speaking, a fundamental epistemological and ontological referent. It is the specificity of ties to a particular place which, in many ways, defines indigeneity. For example, the late Lakota philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. wrote in God is Red that “American Indians hold their lands—places—as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind” (Deloria, 1992: 62). ¶ Moreover, the power of non-Indigenous persons (settlers and otherwise) to shape discourse and language in ways that contribute to the ongoing displacement and subjugation of Indigenous peoples should not be understated.3 This is perhaps most (in)famously exemplified by the nonsensical application of the term ‘Indian’ to the original peoples of the so-called ‘New World.’ It follows that it is problematic to utilize a term signifying ‘no place’ to categorize the hopeful practices or traditions of Indigenous peoples. ¶ But aside from the etymological difficulties, the significant contributions of More’s famous text to the ongoing settler colonization of what is now known as the United States and Canada, and the settler utopian tradition itself must be critically evaluated in light of the consequences for Indigenous peoples. Indeed, Jeffrey Knapp has argued that Utopia “contains perhaps the first Tudor attempt to elaborate a theory of colonization,” and, referencing the work of D.B. Quinn, has suggested More was “...the first Englishman to use the word colonia in a Roman [i.e. imperialist] meaning” (Knapp, 1992: 21). Furthermore, there are recognized parallels between Utopia and contemporaneous published accounts of Amerigo Vespucci’s explorations (Logan / Adams, 2002: 10). ¶ However, it is the novel’s narrator, Hythloday, who recounts that the island ‘no place’— Utopia—was originally called “Abraxa” and was not an island at all. But after King Utopus’ invasion was successful, he “... brought its rude, uncouth inhabitants to [...] a high level of culture and humanity.” Furthermore, he ordered his own soldiers, alongside the conquered original inhabitants, to separate the territory from the mainland by digging a channel 15 miles wide to allow the sea to encircle the newly formed island (More, 2002: 42). Later, Hythloday details the philosophical rationale for the Utopians’ expansionist colonial adventures, explaining that when the Utopian population grows too large, they enroll citizens out of every city and plant a colony under their own laws [...] wherever the natives have plenty of unoccupied and uncultivated land. Those natives who want to live with the Utopians are adopted by them. When such a merger occurs the two peoples gradually and easily blend together, sharing the same way of life and customs, much to the advantage of both. For by their policies the Utopians make the land yield an abundance for all, though previously it had seemed too poor and barren even to support the natives. But those who refuse to live under their laws they drive out of the land they claim for themselves and against those who resist them, they wage war. They think it is perfectly justifiable to make war on people who leave their land idle and waste yet forbid the use and possession of it to others who by the law of nature, ought to be supported from it (idem, 54). ¶ Thus, as Antonis Balasopoulous has noted, the trajectories of utopian expansionism are clear (Balasopoulous, 2004). For Utopia clearly articulates the settler colonial doctrines of terra nullius [no man’s land], vacuum domicilium [unoccupied home], and inane ac vacuum [idle and waste] which were used by European powers to establish legalistic grounds, via an appeal to the “law of nature” for expropriating the supposedly uninhabited land. According to Knapp, this justification was “repeated time and again in the American propaganda of Renaissance England” (Knapp, 1992: 21). ¶ While the Utopians “acknowledge gratefully the kindnesses of Mother Nature” the soil of the fictional island of Utopia is reported to be less than ideal, requiring “improve[ment] by industry [...] hard work and technical knowledge” (More, 2002: 74-75). Virtue is realized, for the Utopians, in the maximization of human pleasure and welfare through reason so long as it does not hinder “... the welfare of [human] others or the common [human] good” (idem, 74). In other words, the realization of the original modern utopia obliges the instrumentalization of what Daniel Heath Justice describes as the “other-than-human” in the service of humanity alongside the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples. For in order that Utopians act in accord with the “law of nature” the rationale holds that Abraxans (Natives) have left their land “idle and waste” and, therefore, the principle of “maximization of human pleasure” commands that lands be expropriated. The extension of (settler) sovereignty over a territory in the service of the maximization of ‘rational’ human interests is dependent upon an “ecological sovereignty,” which Mick Smith argues is foundational to a purportedly ‘progressive’ political modernity (Smith, 2011: xi). This notion of modernity determines who is “fully human,” in part, based upon a notion of human nature reliant upon a break from a “primitive” “natural state” by “hard work and the employment of that unique human faculty ‘reason’” (idem, 66-67). ¶ Therefore, More’s Utopia—the namesake of utopian studies—was articulated in decidedly modernist terms; the Utopians and their ideas are unambiguously representative of a notion of progressive modernity counter posed with Indigenous inhabitants (Abraxans) who are consigned to a backward ‘primitive’ pre-modernity, partly based on their failure to rationally recognize the “law of nature” and proceed to instrumentalize the land on which they lived. The consequences of this rationale were, of course, devastating for the peoples of Turtle Island—the English translation of the term utilized by the Haudenosaunee for what is now known as the continent of North America,4: ... ‘Haudenosaunee’ being the self-identification for the peoples of what is commonly referred to as the Iroquois Confederacy. More’s Utopia must, therefore, be recognized as having been constituted by and, crucially, as simultaneously contributing to the production and perpetuation of modernist epistemologies and ontologies, which were and, importantly, continue to be acutely dystopian for Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, More’s Utopia must be acknowledged as an archetypical modern settler society marked by what Patrick Wolfe terms “a logic of elimination” (Wolfe, 2001: 387). ¶ This logic is articulated in the abovementioned passage from More’s Utopia: in short, the original inhabitants of Abraxa are to be assimilated as Utopians (“brought [...] to a high level of culture and humanity”), re-located, or simply eradicated (“But those who refuse to live under their laws they drive out of the land they claim for themselves and against those who resist them, they wage war.”). Wolfe writes, “Settler colonies were [are] premised on the elimination of native societies [...] colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (Wolfe, 1999: 2). As expressed by Lorenzo Veracini, this distinction is essential to the project of settlement as differentiated from other forms of colonialism: that remains permanently distinct from it ... as settlers, by definition, stay, in specific contradistinction, colonial sojourners—administrators, missionaries, military personnel, entrepreneurs, and adventurers— return (Veracini, 2010: 10). ¶ The consequences include the ensuing naturalization of the Utopians’ settler colonization and what Veracini calls a process of “settler indigenisation” (Veracini, 2011: 194). Here the foreign colonizers and the indigenous peoples switch places through a variety of one or more means of “transfer”: the modern citizen-subject of the settler society is rendered natural and, in fact, indigenous to the modern nation-state and its territory while the original inhabitant, the ‘Indian’ or ‘Aborigine’ is de-naturalized, made foreign, and per Wolfe, marked for elimination.5 Additionally, Utopia’s discussion of the management of what Veracini refers to as “exogenous Others”—an intentionally broad third category in a tripartite settler colonial order also involving settlers and Indigenous peoples—including foreigners, servants, and slaves (indentured and otherwise) exemplifies a distinctive form of settler sovereignty (Veracini, 2010: 17). In fact, the biopolitical administration detailed in Utopia ought be evaluated in light of contemporary examinations of biopolitics and settler colonial practices.6 ¶ Unfortunately, these processes can be observed as tropes routinely found in the utopian literary traditions of settler societies (Sargent, 2010b: 204). In fact, nearly all of the various expressions or “faces” of utopianism—from intentional communities to radicalized politics— which emerge from such settler societies ought be recognized as being predicated upon and, therefore, implicated in the ongoing naturalization of settler colonization. This resonates with Scott Morgensen’s contention that “[s]ettler colonialism has conditioned not only Indigenous peoples and their lands and the settler societies that occupy them, but all political, economic, and cultural processes that those societies touch” (Morgensen, 2011: 53). ¶ Clearly, recognition of settler colonialism’s contribution to and naturalization within much of the modern utopian tradition is fundamental to utopian studies’ engagement in an ongoing project of ‘unsettling.’ Furthermore, the editors of the journal Settler Colonial Studies opine in their definition of ‘settler colonialism’ that “[t]here is no such thing as neo-settler colonialism or post-settler colonialism because settler colonialism is a resilient formation that rarely ends” (Cavanagh and Veracini, 2010). Thus, it is apparent that use of the term ‘post-colonial’ is problematic for the utopianism of settler societies or the Indigenous peoples who continue to experience settler colonial realities. This is to say that, in such circumstances, there is a need for a differentiated form of utopianism; “[s]ettler colonisation requires an imagination that is alternative from traditional accounts of decolonizing passages (Veracini, 2010: 114).

Towards Indigenous Futurisms: Decolonizing Utopia The Indigenous critical theories discussed above are themselves examples of the distinctly Indigenous concepts of survivance and transmotion, and are indeed reflective of Indigenous intellectual histories and sovereignties. The assertions of continued Indigenous presence and active critical interventions in other discourses act as a means of both demanding and attending to the concerns of Indigenous peoples. But they also compel comparative work on, and collaboration with, non-Indigenous peoples in order to add to, complicate, and extend the work of critical theory, as such, as a means of contributing to the broad and diverse projects of decolonialization. This project attends to the constituent role of utopia in colonial modernity, especially the tradition of utopian narratives, which both prefigured and contribute to the naturalization of settler colonialism. While Indigenous authors of poetry and prose have received increasing critical and popular attention, especially since the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn, there has been relatively little attention paid to Indigenous narratives that fall within “genre” literature. This includes speculative narratives, including, but not limited to, those often categorized as “sf”—science fiction, fantasy, or speculative fiction, under which the somewhat amorphous subcategory of utopian literature falls. However, Anishinaabe scholar Grace L. Dillon’s work is foremost in the ongoing establishment of the field of what she alternately describes as “Indigenous futurisms” and Indigenous sf. Dillon characterizes Indigenous science fiction within the broader science fiction community as …thought experiments that confront issues of “Indianness” in a genre that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century context of evolutionary theory and anthropology profoundly intertwined with colonial ideology, whose major interest was coming to grips with—or negating—the implications of these scientific mixes of “competition, adaptation, race, and destiny.”74 Thus the broader genre of sf is explicitly identified for its contributions to the horrors of the nineteenth century holocausts of the Indigenous peoples while it is simultaneously recognized as potential means of redress and reimagining. As I will discuss in greater detail in the fourth chapter, the tradition of utopian narratives of white settlers itself has evolved considerably with respect to its orientation towards Indigenous peoples and the condition of settler colonialism. I will also engage with contemporary examples of Indigenous sf as well as examples of narratives created by authors of mixed identities as a means of addressing the relationship between postcolonial and Indigenous sf. In her edited anthology Walking the Clouds, billed as the first ever collection of Indigenous sf, Dillon identifies several themes and strategies in contemporary Indigenous writings that involve science-fictional, fantastical or otherwise speculative narratives.75 In her introductory essay to the collection, Dillon centers the Anishinaabe concept of biskaabiiyang, arguing: It might go without saying that all forms of Indigenous futurisms are narratives of biskaabiiyang, an Anishinaabemowin word connoting the process of “returning to ourselves,” which involves discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalyptic world. This process is often called “decolonization,” and as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Maori) explains, it requires changing rather than imitating Eurowestern concepts.76 Indigenous futurisms, as expressed through Indigenous science fiction narratives, therefore serve several functions at once. They are a means of “internal” creative exploration, healing, and entertainment, as a means of biskaabiiyang. But they are also compelling critical interventions in the wider sf, literary, and indeed societal narratives concerned with Indigneity, race, settler colonialism, and decolonization. Ultimately, I maintain there are significant and meaningful implications of attending to both the historical and contemporary effects of utopia on colonial modernity. Concepts developed by Indigenous critical theory, including those of Indigenous nationhood and Indigenous futurisms, may work to end the deferrals of Indigenous concerns and the naturalized dehumanization of Indigenous peoples within the resilient, often interrelated narratives of utopia and colonial modernity. These concepts challenge non-Indigenous scholarship, including that of utopian studies, to center Indigenous peoples and, in doing so, to re-evaluate and re-articulate their respective critical frameworks in light of Indigenous critiques of colonial modernity.

Kafila -- First published May 23, 2013, posted at the Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission. The brutal gang rape of a woman in December 2012 triggered a mass movement against violence against women in India. The perpetrators were sentenced on September 13, 2013 -- Sexual violence cannot be attributed simply to some men behaving in "anti-social" or "inhuman" ways: it has everything to do with the way society is structured: i.e., the way in which our society organises production and accordingly structures social relationships. Once we understand this, we can also recognise that society can be structured differently, in ways that do not require – or benefit from – the subordination of women or of any section of society. What are the material structures that underpin sexual violence? As I address this question I will also engage with some of the arguments made in two recent articles which offer a professedly Marxist analysis of sexual violence and women’s subordination in India; one is "On the empowerment of women" by Prabhat Patnaik, in the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s People’s Democracy, January 27, 2013, and the other is "Class societies and sexual violence: Towards a Marxist understanding of rape", by Maya John, Radical Notes, May 8, 2013. Prabhat Patnaik analyses the differences between gender oppression in advanced capitalist countries and countries like India. He notes, rightly, that the development of capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries was accompanied by a destruction of their pre-capitalist structures, facilitated by colonialism and the resulting large-scale emigration into the so-called "new world". Whereas in India, “the 'old community' associated with our pre-capitalist structure … continues to remain with us”. The persistence of pre-capitalist structures and extremely stubborn feudal survivals in India is undoubtedly significant in producing the specifically Indian variant of patriarchal oppression. A glaring instance of this is the phenomenon of khap panchayats [unelected caste councils] that pass diktats and death sentences on couples who marry by choice, especially those that do so in defiance of caste norms. However, some of Prabhat Patnaik’s arguments and conclusions are questionable. Among them is his assumption that it is only pre-capitalist structures that provide a base for patriarchy; and consequently that in the advanced capitalist countries, gender oppression remained only in the form of “patriarchal attitudes”, “essentially as a part of the superstructure”. This goes against the grain of Marxist analysis, and an entire body of work which has painstakingly mapped out the structural basis of gender oppression in capitalism. Central to this understanding is the role of the gendered division of labour, whereby the burden of reproductive labour has been privatised and assigned to women. Production (involving wage labour that produces surplus value) and reproduction (of life in a literal sense as well as of the necessities of life, involving women’s unpaid household labour) are both equally central to capitalism. The gendering and privatisation of reproductive labour, whereby the socially necessary labour of child care, cooking, cleaning, etc. became "women’s work" to be done inside the household, took place in class societies pre-dating capitalism. Capitalism itself displays contradictory impulses. On the one hand it seeks to draw everyone – men, women, children – into production. On the other, it has an interest in retaining reproductive labour as "women’s work" so as to ensure that the cost of such labour is minimised – both for the wage-paying capitalist as well as for the capitalist state. Patriarchy is therefore one of the axes of the capitalist system; part and parcel of the structural edifice of capitalism. Patriarchal ideology does not hang unsupported in the air; it is not a matter of "mindset" or "attitude" alone: notions of feminine "nature", "duties", "good and bad women" and sexual propriety for women are produced, nourished and deployed to mask, mystify and justify women’s unpaid reproductive labour and the patriarchal family where such labour takes place. The tension between women entering the workforce and continuing to bear the burden of "housework" has been a factor in forcing the state, in some countries, to concede state-funded child care, health care, education and so on. But in neoliberal times, with the state adopting "austerity measures" to bail out capitalism in crisis, we are witnessing a global cut-back in such social spending. Any state that pursues such policies needs to persuade women to accept the burden of housework as "women’s work", and to dissuade women from rejecting traditional roles. It is notable that some of the worst rape culture remarks by US Republican senators (who could compete with India’s patriarchal lawmakers in misogyny) have been made recently to promote arguments against the right to abortion. The enormous resistance to, and organised reaction against, conceding the right to abortion or same-sex marriage in the US is an instance of how much the capitalist class still invests in the family institution and the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction within it. One should also be wary of locating the structural basis for gender oppression in India solely in pre-capitalist structures. Capitalism in India, and the Indian state, also have a stake in the gender division of labour and the patriarchal ideology that supports it. The character of capitalist development in India, too, is such that it promotes caste and gender oppression, including several of the regressive elements associated with the pre-capitalist structures. Moreover, global capital too is implicated in the project of Indian patriarchy. International media coverage of the Indian anti-rape protests tended to discuss the issue as unique to "Indian/Asian culture". They chose to overlook the fact that gender violence, sexism and rape culture are thriving in the West, and moreover that neoliberal policies pursued by global capital are complicit in perpetuating women’s oppression and redeploying patriarchal structures and attitudes in order to exploit women’s labour in, say, Bangladesh or India! The case of Bangladeshi women producing for Wal-Mart in exploitative and unsafe sweatshops that prey on and promote their insecurity and subordination has come to light time and again, especially in the recent tragedies of factory fire and building collapse that killed hundreds of young working women.

To queer freedom is not to disavow the political work of calling out the power differentials buried in these identity categories: it is not to return us to the allegedly neutral space of ‘the human.’ To queer freedom is, on the contrary, to deepen our grasp of the historicity of these categories. The conflation of dominant subjectivities with the posture of neutrality that we find in our contemporary cultures of phallicized whiteness did not occur recently. It reaches back, at a minimum, to the emergence of classical liberalism in the seventeenth century and its valorization of particular kinds of labor, rationality, temporality—and thereby of particular bodies, particular identities. We need to return to those roots of classical liberalism and trace out its subtle valorization of these characteristics, if we are to historicize the categories of identity that have since become some of its best tools.27 This work of historicizing our categories of identity is, among other activities, the work of queering freedom. It will both give us a deeper sense of how these categories emerged and show how the categories themselves intersect and interact to perpetuate the systems of domination in which we now find ourselves living. I develop much of this through the logic of the limit, a kind of logic that binds classical liberalism to phallicized whiteness through the shared value of individualism—a cornerstone, in turn, of advanced capitalism. Individualism simultaneously demands two apparently contradictory moves: 1) that we transcend material differences and understand ourselves as “just human”; and 2) that we conceive of ourselves through the rigid categories of identity that lock us into raced, sexed, classed (and so on) individuals. Individualism demands both identity and difference: the first of these perpetuates the Myth of Sameness, while the second reduces our subjectivities to the delimited categories of difference. But these categories of difference are ultimately that which must be transcended—erased—if we are to ascend into the treasured neutrality of humanity. And, even more perniciously, these categories of difference only lock us into politics of alleged resistance, wherein difference is pitted against difference (e.g., the old story of race or gender), while the one who transcends such differences altogether walks away unscathed. In Hegelian parlance, difference is always only mediated by identity here. The logic of the limit shows how these concepts of identity and difference are ultimately two sides of the same coin—namely, the currency of phallicized whiteness. It also rings a loud cautionary note about the viability of any politics of resistance that grounds itself in identity. The logic of the limit thereby helps to excavate how classical liberalism presents a hollow concept of freedom. In classical liberalism, freedom holds itself out as the transgression of boundaries and liberation from constraint. For example, we might think that we will liberate ourselves from domination if we engage in transgressive behaviors that violate our designated race, sex, gender, class, nationality, or religion. But the logic of the limit shows, as Bataille and Foucault among others also see, that such notions of freedom as the transgression of boundaries or liberation from constraint only enmesh us further in the very systems of domination we seek to resist. To queer freedom we must learn not only to resist the limited notions of difference enacted in categories of identity, but to resist differently altogether.

In order to challenge oppression, it is important to know where it comes from. Historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists tell us that in pre-class societies such as hunter-gatherer societies, racism and sexism were unheard of. Because homosexuality was not an identifiable category of such societies, discrimination on that basis did not occur either. In fact, it is clear that racism, sexism, and homophobia have arisen in particular kinds of societies, namely class societies. Women’s oppression originated in the first class societies, while racism came into prominence in the early periods of capitalism when colonialism and slavery drove the economic system. The prohibition against gays and lesbians is a relatively modern phenomenon. But what all forms of oppression have in common is that they did not always exist and are not endemic to human nature. They were created in the interest of ruling classes in society and continue to benefit the people at the top of society, while dividing and conquering the rest of us so as to weaken the common fight against the oppressors. The work of Marx’s collaborator Friederich Engels onThe Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State in some respects reflects the Victorian times in which in was written. Engels moralizes about women’s sexuality and doesn’t even include gay and lesbian liberation in his discussion of the oppressive family. However, anthropologists like the feminist Rayna Reiter have confirmed his most important and central argument that it was in the first settled agricultural societies that women became an oppressed class. In societies where for the first time people could accumulate a surplus of food and other resources, it was possible for some people to hoard wealth and control its distribution. The first governments or state structures formed to legitimate an emerging ruling class. As settled communities grew in size and became more complex social organizations, and, most importantly, as the surplus grew, the distribution of wealth became unequal—and a small number of men rose above the rest of the population in wealth and power. In the previous hunter-gatherer societies, there had been a sexual division of labor, but one without a hierarchy of value. There was no strict demarcation between the reproductive and productive spheres. All of that changed with the development of private property in more settled communities. The earlier division of labor in which men did the heavier work, hunting, and animal agriculture, became a system of differential control over resource distribution. The new system required more field workers and sought to maximize women’s reproductive potential. Production shifted away from the household over time and women became associated with the reproductive role, losing control over the production and distribution of the necessities of life. It was not a matter of male sexism, but of economic priorities of a developing class system. This is why Engels identifies women’s oppression as the first form of systematic class oppression in the world. Marxists since Engels have not dismissed the oppression of women as secondary to other kinds of oppression and exploitation. To the contrary, women’s oppression has a primary place in Marxist analysis and is a key issue that socialists organize around today. From this history we know that sexism did not always exist, and that men do not have an inherent interest in oppressing women as domestic servants or sexual slaves. Instead, women’s oppression always has served a class hierarchy in society. In our society divided by sexism, ideas about women’s nature as domestic caretakers or irrational sexual beings justify paying women lower wages compared to men, so that employers can pit workers against one another in competition for the same work. Most women have always had to work outside the home to support their families. Today, women around the world are exploited in sweatshops where their status as women allows bosses to pay them very little, driving down the wages of both men and women. At the same time, capitalist society relies on ideas about women to justify not providing very much in the way of social services that would help provide health care, family leave, unemployment insurance, access to primary and higher education, and so forth—all because these things are supposed to happen in the private family, where women are responsible. This lack of social support results in a lower quality of life for many men as well as women. Finally, contemporary ideologies that pit men against women encourage us to fight each other rather than organizing together.

Kafila -- First published May 23, 2013, posted at the Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission. The brutal gang rape of a woman in December 2012 triggered a mass movement against violence against women in India. The perpetrators were sentenced on September 13, 2013 -- Sexual violence cannot be attributed simply to some men behaving in "anti-social" or "inhuman" ways: it has everything to do with the way society is structured: i.e., the way in which our society organises production and accordingly structures social relationships. Once we understand this, we can also recognise that society can be structured differently, in ways that do not require – or benefit from – the subordination of women or of any section of society. What are the material structures that underpin sexual violence? As I address this question I will also engage with some of the arguments made in two recent articles which offer a professedly Marxist analysis of sexual violence and women’s subordination in India; one is "On the empowerment of women" by Prabhat Patnaik, in the Communist Party of India (Marxist)'s People’s Democracy, January 27, 2013, and the other is "Class societies and sexual violence: Towards a Marxist understanding of rape", by Maya John, Radical Notes, May 8, 2013. Prabhat Patnaik analyses the differences between gender oppression in advanced capitalist countries and countries like India. He notes, rightly, that the development of capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries was accompanied by a destruction of their pre-capitalist structures, facilitated by colonialism and the resulting large-scale emigration into the so-called "new world". Whereas in India, “the 'old community' associated with our pre-capitalist structure … continues to remain with us”. The persistence of pre-capitalist structures and extremely stubborn feudal survivals in India is undoubtedly significant in producing the specifically Indian variant of patriarchal oppression. A glaring instance of this is the phenomenon of khap panchayats [unelected caste councils] that pass diktats and death sentences on couples who marry by choice, especially those that do so in defiance of caste norms. However, some of Prabhat Patnaik’s arguments and conclusions are questionable. Among them is his assumption that it is only pre-capitalist structures that provide a base for patriarchy; and consequently that in the advanced capitalist countries, gender oppression remained only in the form of “patriarchal attitudes”, “essentially as a part of the superstructure”. This goes against the grain of Marxist analysis, and an entire body of work which has painstakingly mapped out the structural basis of gender oppression in capitalism. Central to this understanding is the role of the gendered division of labour, whereby the burden of reproductive labour has been privatised and assigned to women. Production (involving wage labour that produces surplus value) and reproduction (of life in a literal sense as well as of the necessities of life, involving women’s unpaid household labour) are both equally central to capitalism. The gendering and privatisation of reproductive labour, whereby the socially necessary labour of child care, cooking, cleaning, etc. became "women’s work" to be done inside the household, took place in class societies pre-dating capitalism. Capitalism itself displays contradictory impulses. On the one hand it seeks to draw everyone – men, women, children – into production. On the other, it has an interest in retaining reproductive labour as "women’s work" so as to ensure that the cost of such labour is minimised – both for the wage-paying capitalist as well as for the capitalist state. Patriarchy is therefore one of the axes of the capitalist system; part and parcel of the structural edifice of capitalism. Patriarchal ideology does not hang unsupported in the air; it is not a matter of "mindset" or "attitude" alone: notions of feminine "nature", "duties", "good and bad women" and sexual propriety for women are produced, nourished and deployed to mask, mystify and justify women’s unpaid reproductive labour and the patriarchal family where such labour takes place. The tension between women entering the workforce and continuing to bear the burden of "housework" has been a factor in forcing the state, in some countries, to concede state-funded child care, health care, education and so on. But in neoliberal times, with the state adopting "austerity measures" to bail out capitalism in crisis, we are witnessing a global cut-back in such social spending. Any state that pursues such policies needs to persuade women to accept the burden of housework as "women’s work", and to dissuade women from rejecting traditional roles. It is notable that some of the worst rape culture remarks by US Republican senators (who could compete with India’s patriarchal lawmakers in misogyny) have been made recently to promote arguments against the right to abortion. The enormous resistance to, and organised reaction against, conceding the right to abortion or same-sex marriage in the US is an instance of how much the capitalist class still invests in the family institution and the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction within it. One should also be wary of locating the structural basis for gender oppression in India solely in pre-capitalist structures. Capitalism in India, and the Indian state, also have a stake in the gender division of labour and the patriarchal ideology that supports it. The character of capitalist development in India, too, is such that it promotes caste and gender oppression, including several of the regressive elements associated with the pre-capitalist structures. Moreover, global capital too is implicated in the project of Indian patriarchy. International media coverage of the Indian anti-rape protests tended to discuss the issue as unique to "Indian/Asian culture". They chose to overlook the fact that gender violence, sexism and rape culture are thriving in the West, and moreover that neoliberal policies pursued by global capital are complicit in perpetuating women’s oppression and redeploying patriarchal structures and attitudes in order to exploit women’s labour in, say, Bangladesh or India! The case of Bangladeshi women producing for Wal-Mart in exploitative and unsafe sweatshops that prey on and promote their insecurity and subordination has come to light time and again, especially in the recent tragedies of factory fire and building collapse that killed hundreds of young working women.

In order to understand “identity” and “intersectionality theory,” we must have an understanding of the movement of capital (meaning the total social relations of production in this current mode of production) that led to their development in the 1960s and 1970s in the US. More specifically, since “intersectionality theory” primarily developed in response to second wave feminism, we must look at how gender relations under capitalism developed. In the movement from feudalism to capitalism, the gendered division of labor, and therefore gender relations within the class began to take a new form that corresponded to the needs of capital. Some of these new relations included the following: (1) The development of the wage. The wage is the capitalist form of coercion. As Maria Mies explains in her book, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, the wage replaced serf and slave ownership as the method to coerce alienated labor (meaning labor that the worker does for someone else). Under capitalism, those who produce (workers) do not own the means of production, so they must go to work for those who own the means of production (capitalists). Workers must therefore sell the only thing they own, their ability to labor, or their labor power, to the capitalist. This is key because workers are not paid for their sensuous living labor, the act of producing, but the ability to labor. The labor-labor power split gives rise to the appearance of an equal exchange of value; it appears as though the worker is paid for the amount of value she produces but in essence she is paid only for her ability to labor for a given period of time. Furthermore, the working day itself is split into two parts: necessary labor time and surplus labor time. Necessary labor time is the time it takes the worker (on average) to produce enough value to buy all the commodities he needs to reproduce himself (everything from his dinner to his iPhone). Surplus labor time is the time the worker works beyond the necessary labor time. Since the going rate for labor power (again, our capacity to labor – not our actual living labor) is the value of all the commodities the worker needs to reproduce herself, surplus labor is value that goes straight into the capitalist’s pocket. For example, let’s say I work in a Furby factory. I get paid $10 a day to work 10 hours, I produce 10 Furbies a day, and a Furby is worth $10 each. The capitalist is only paying me for my ability to work 1 hour each day to produce enough value to reproduce myself (1 Furby = 1 hour’s labor = $10). So my necessary labor time is 1 hour, and the surplus labor time I give to the capitalist is 9 hours (10-1). The wage obscures this fact. Recall that under capitalism, it appears as though we are paid the equivalent value of what we produce. But, in essence, we are paid only for our necessary labor time, or the minimum amount we need to reproduce ourselves. This was different under feudalism when it was very clear how much time humans spent working for themselves, and how much time they spent working for someone else. For example, a serf might spend five hours a week tilling the land to produce food for the feudal lord, and the rest of her time was her own. The development of the wage is key because it enforced a gendered division of labor. (2) A separation of production and reproduction. Along with commodity production came a separation between production and reproduction. To be clear, “reproduction” does not solely refer to baby making. It also includes meeting the many various needs we have under capitalism, from cooking food and cleaning the home, to listening to a partner vent about their shitty day and holding their hand, to caring for the young, sick, elderly and disabled members of society. As capitalism developed, generally speaking, productive (value-producing) labor corresponded to the wage, and reproductive labor was unwaged (or extremely low waged), since in appearance it produced no surplus value for the capitalist. This separation, characterized by the wage, took on a specific gendered form under capitalism. Women were largely excluded from productive sphere and therefore did not receive a wage for the reproductive work they did. This gave men a certain amount of power over women, and created antagonisms within the class based on a gendered division of labor. Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, calls this the “patriarchy of the wage” (97-100). (3) The contradictory development of the nuclear family. With the development of capitalism and large-scale industry, the content of the nuclear family took a contradictory turn. On the one hand, as pointed out by theorists such as Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa in “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community,” the nuclear family was strengthened by the gendered division of labor characterized by the wage. Women and children were excluded from the wage and relegated to reproductive work; men received a wage and were relegated to productive work. This meant that men needed women and children to reproduce them, and women and children needed men to bring in a wage to reproduce the family as a whole (of course this wage was sometimes supplemented by a woman’s low wage earnings as a domestic or other paid reproductive worker). And so on the one hand, the development of capitalism strengthened the nuclear family. On the other hand; however, capitalist relations also undermined the nuclear family. As James and Dalla Costa point out, the gendered division of labor is: “rooted in the framework of capitalist society itself: women at home and men in the factories and office, separated from the other the whole day … Capital, while it elevates heterosexuality to a religion, at the same time in practice makes it impossible for men and women to be in touch with each other, physically or emotionally — it undermines heterosexuality as a sexual, economic, and social discipline” (James, Sex, Race and Class, 56). (4) The development of “identity” and alienation. John D’Emilio runs with this concept of the contradictory development of the nuclear family, arguing that “gay identity” (and we can infer “female identity”) as a category developed through this contradictory movement of the nuclear family. He argues for a distinction between gay behavior and gay identity, stating, “There was, quite simply, no ‘social space’ in the colonial system of production that allowed men and women to be gay. Survival was structured around participation in the nuclear family. There were certain homosexual acts — sodomy among men, ‘lewdness’ among women — in which individuals engaged, but family was so pervasive that colonial society lacked even the category of homosexual or lesbian to describe a person … By the second half of the nineteenth century, this situation was noticeably changing as the capitalist system of free labor took hold. Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity — an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on the attraction to one’s own sex” (“Capitalism and the Gay Identity,” 104-105). D’Emilio’s understanding of “identity” is key for understanding identity politics and intersectionality theory; however, I would slightly change his framework. In distinguishing between “behavior,” and “identity,” D’Emilio is touching on what could be broadened out to the Marxist categories, “labor” and “alienation.” I digress in order to fill out this idea. For Marx, labor is an abstract category that defines human history. In his early texts, Marx refers to labor as self- or life-activity. In “Estranged Labour,” Marx writes, “For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need — the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species — its species character — is contained in the character of its life activity; and free conscious activity is man’s species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life” (76). Life-activity, or labor, is an abstraction that transcends a specific form, or a specific mode of production (capitalism, feudalism, tribalism, etc.). However, labor can only be understood within the context of these forms; it is through these forms, the social organization of our labor, that humans engage in the ever-expanding process of satisfying our needs, introducing new needs, and developing new ways of fulfilling our needs. Labor encompasses everything from our jobs under capitalism to tilling the land under feudalism, to creating art and poetry, to having sex and raising children. Through labor and its many expressions, or forms, we engage with the world around us, changing the world and changing ourselves in the process. Under capitalism, there is a separation between our labor and our conscious will. When Marx says “Life itself appears only as a means to life,” he is pointing toward this contradiction. As noted above, under capitalism, labor is divorced from the means of production so we must work for those who own the means of production. We engage in the same form of labor all day every day, and we receive a wage for this activity in order to exchange to meet our needs. We produce value in order to exchange for the use-values we need to survive. So what appears under capitalism as a mere means to satisfy our needs (work), is in essence the activity of life itself (labor). Because of this schism between our labor and our conscious will, our labor under capitalism is alienated, meaning it is not used for our own enrichment, instead, we give it away to the capitalist. Our multi-sided labor becomes one-sided; our labor is reduced to work. In “The German Ideology,” Marx writes, “as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood” (53). We are not fully enriched human beings, engaging in all forms of labor we wish to engage in, we are relegated into one form of labor in order to exchange to meet our needs. We are call center workers, hair stylists, nurses, teachers, etc. This one-sidedness, as the precondition for meeting our needs, is unique to the capitalist mode of production. In applying Marx’s categories to D’Emilio’s explanation of homosexuality, we could say that homosexual behaviors are an expression of labor, or self-activity, and homosexual identity is a one-sided, alienated form of labor unique to capitalism. It distinguishes the difference between a person who consciously engages in homosexual acts, and one who is defined by one form of labor: a homosexual. Women and people of color experience something similar in the development of capital; a shift from engaging in certain types of labor to engaging in feminized, or racially relegated forms of labor. To put it another way, under capitalism, we are forced into a box: we are a bus driver, or a hair stylist, or a woman. These different forms of labor, or different expressions of our life-activity (the way in which we interact with the world around us) limit our ability to be multi-sided human beings. There were plenty of homosexual acts, many forms of gender expression, and some divisions based on skin color in pre-capitalist societies. But “identity” as an individualistic category is unique to capitalism. If we understand “identity” in this way, we will struggle for a society that does not limit us as “bus drivers,” “women,” or “queers,” but a society that allows everyone to freely use their multi-sided life activity in whatever ways they want. In other words, we will struggle for a society that completely abolishes, or transcends, “identities.” I will explain more on this later. What is Intersectionality Theory and How Did it Develop? The term “intersectionality” did not become commonplace until the early 1980s. According to most feminist historians, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw was the first to coin the term, in a series of articles written between roughly 1989 and 1991 (for example, see “Mapping the Margins“). Intersectionality theory was then popularized by many critical race and gender theorists. Despite where the term was coined, intersectionality theory has its roots in the 1960s and 70s class struggle movements in the US and Europe (roughly speaking). This period was generally characterized by autonomous struggles based on the gendered and racialized division of labor. Black folks were the vanguard of this form of struggle, developing and leading many types of organizations from revolutionary parties like the Black Panther Party, to majority black workplace organizations like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. These forms of struggle influenced other groups, such as white women, latinos, gays and lesbians, to form similar organizations along race, gender and sexuality lines (while there were multi-ethnic projects in this time period, and many contradictions within these organizations themselves, it can be said that in this specific time and place, there was a general tendency to organize along these lines). This was due to the gendered and racialized division of labor; black folks were relegated to certain neighborhoods and certain forms of labor, the value of a black person’s labor was less than a white person’s, and a socially constructed skin color hierarchy and corresponding antagonisms within the class was fully developed and materially enforced. To be black meant to be objectified, relegated into one form of labor: producing and reproducing blackness. Black Power was therefore the struggle against the alienation and one-sidedness of blackness, a struggle to liberate labor, releasing its multi-sidedness, unifying labor with its conscious will. Similarly, women organized in response to the gendered division of labor in effort to break free from the alienation of “womanhood.” For example, women struggled for reproductive and sexual freedom in effort to gain control over the means of production (their bodies). Maria Mies describes how women’s bodies are their means of production under capitalism, stating, “The first means of production with which human beings act upon nature is their own body,” and later, she writes, “women can experience their whole body, not only their hands or their heads. Out of their body they produce new children as well as the first food for these children” (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 52 and 53). Since women’s use of their bodies is a unique form of alienated labor for women under capitalism, it is historically the site of struggle for liberation. However, there was also a tendency within second wave feminism that sought to reproduce capitalist relations, arguing for “equal wages for equal work.” Both of these tendencies were acting in response to the gendered social relations under capital, and both shared a methodology of identity politics, arguing that women could unite on the basis of a shared “woman” experience, or “womanhood.” From this development, intersectionality theory took hold. As the autonomous struggles of the 60s and 70s began to recede, groups like the Combahee River Collective responded to the material divisions within the movement. They argued that the objectively white second wave feminist movement excluded women of color by assuming the white woman’s experience could be extended to women of color, and that white women were adequate spokespeople for women of color. In contrast, they argued that a revolutionary praxis must be informed by the experience of black lesbian women, stating, “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves” (“Combahee River Collective Statement”). What developed in practice through the Combahee River Collective’s specific set of identity politics (a black, lesbian, working class-based politics) was solidified theoretically with the development of intersectionality theory. The intersectionality theorists who emerged in the late 70s and early 80s rightly expressed antagonisms within the class, arguing that one cannot discuss gender without discussing race, class, sexuality, disability, age, etc. Patricia Hill Collins describes intersectionality theory as an “analysis claiming that systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of a social organization, which shape Black women’s experiences and, in turn, are shaped by Black Women” (Black Feminist Thought, 299). Using this definition and the prominent intersectionality theorists’ writings, I have identified four core components of the theory: (1) a politics of difference, (2) a critique of women’s organizations and people of color organizations, (3) the need to develop the most oppressed as leaders and take the leadership from them, and (4) the need for a politics that takes all oppressions into account. (1) A politics of difference. Intersectionality theorists argue that our various identities, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, etc., necessarily differentiate us from people who do not have those identities. So a ruling class, gay, black man will have a different experience, and therefore, a different politics, than a straight, white, working class woman. On the other hand, people with shared identities, such as being black or lesbian, will have a shared experience that organically unites the individuals. Some of these shared identities are more likely to unite some people than others. As Collins explains, “On the one hand, all African-American women face similar challenges that result from living in a society that historically and routinely derogates women of African descent. Despite the fact that U.S. Black women face common challenges, this neither means that individual African-American women have all had the same experiences nor that we agree on the significance of our varying experiences. Thus, on the other hand, despite the common challenges confronting U.S. Black women as a group, diverse responses to these core themes characterize U.S. Black women’s group knowledge or standpoint. Despite differences of age, sexual orientation, social class, region, and religion, U.S. Black women encounter societal practices that restrict us to inferior housing, neighborhoods, schools, jobs, and public treatment and hide this differential consideration behind an array of common beliefs about Black women’s intelligence, work habits, and sexuality. These common challenges in turn result in recurring patterns of experiences for individual group members” (25). This is a cornerstone of intersectionality theory: some individuals or groups are differentiated from other individuals or groups based on their experiences. This can be cut along many different identity lines. (2) Critiques of women’s organizations and people of color organizations. Women of color were marginalized in the 1960s and 70s women’s, Black Power, Chicanismo, and other people of color-led organizations. Most intersectionality theorists attribute this to a unique experience women of color (and particularly Black women) have around race, class, gender, and other forms of oppression. For example, Collins argues that women of color have abstained from joining white feminist organizations on the grounds that they have been “racist and overly concerned with White, middle-class women’s issues” (5). Similarly, Collins argues that black studies is traditionally based on a “male-defined ethos,” and contains a “predominantly masculinist bias” (7), despite historically joining and feeling marginalized in African American organizations. Again, this is an objective and historical situation that intersectionality theorists attribute to difference along identity lines. (3) The need to develop the most oppressed as leaders, and take leadership from them. Following this analysis, intersectionality theorists argue that the experience of being an oppressed person places individuals in a uniquely privileged position for struggle. In other words, if you’ve experienced the multiple, identity-based oppressions, you are the vanguard of the struggle against it. bell hooks writes, “As a group, black women are in an unusual position in this society, for not only are we collectively at the bottom of the occupational ladder, but our overall social status is lower than that of any other group. Occupying such a position, we bear the brunt of sexist, racist, and classist oppression. At the same time, we are the same group that has not been socialized to assume the role of exploiter/oppressor in that we are allowed no institutional “other” that we can exploit or oppress … Black women with no institutionalized “other” that we may discriminate against, exploit, or oppress, often have a lived experience that directly challenges the prevailing classist, sexist, and racist social structure and its concomitant ideology. This lived experience may shape our consciousness in such a way that our world view differs from those who have a degree of privilege (however relative within the existing system). It is essential for continued feminist struggle that black women recognize the special vantage point our marginality gives us and make use of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony as well as to envision and create a counter-hegemony” (Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, 16). This point justifies the need to develop queer, women, and people of color as movement leaders, and allows intersectionality theorists to explain why historically the most oppressed tend to be the most militant. (4) The need for a politics that takes all oppressions into account. Finally, all intersectionality theorists argue the need to analyze every form of oppression, using the terms, “interlocking system of oppressions,” “matrix of domination,” or some variation thereof. The idea is that it is impossible to view one identity or category of oppression without looking at all the others. As Barbara Smith simply puts, “the major ‘isms’ … are intimately intertwined” (The Truth that Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom, 112); they cannot be separated. While intersectionality theory seems to overcome the limitations of identity politics, it falls short. The next section will show how intersectionality theory is, in fact, a bourgeois ideology. A Marxist Critique of Identity Politics and Intersectionality Theory. Identity politics is rooted in a one-sided expression of capitalism, and is therefore not a revolutionary politics. As noted earlier, “identity” can be equated with alienated labor; it is a one-sided expression of our total potential as human beings. Frantz Fanon discusses something similar in the conclusion to Black Skin White Masks. He writes, “The black man, however sincere, is a slave to the past. But I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass” (200 – Philcox Translation, 2008). On the one hand, Fanon points to a particular, one-sided expression: blackness. On the other hand, he points toward the multi-sides of a potentially universal human. Fanon is at once both of these things: a black man, and a man (or, more generally, a human); a particular and a universal. Under capitalism, we are both the alienated worker and labor itself, except the universal has not been actualized concretely. The identity politics of the 60s and 70s conflates a particular moment, or a determinant point, in the relations of capitalism with the potential universal. Furthermore, it reproduces the schism between appearance and essence. Under capitalism there is a contradiction between the particular and the universal; appearance and essence. We appear to be alienated individuals (a bus driver, a hair stylist, a woman, etc.), though in essence we are multi-sided individuals capable of many forms of labor. Identity politics bolsters one side of this contradiction, arguing for collective struggle on the basis of “womanhood,” or “blackness,” or “black lesbianhood,” etc. To borrow from Fanon, identity politics states, “I am a black man,” “I am a woman,” or “I am a black lesbian,” etc. This is a key first step. As he writes in his critical chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man:” “I finally made up my mind to shout my blackness” (101), “On the other side of the white world there lies a magical black culture. Negro sculpture! I began to blush with pride. Was this our salvation?” (102), and “So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, ‘standing at the helm,’ governing the world with his intuition, rediscovered, reappropriated, in demand, accepted; and it’s not a Negro, oh, no, but the Negro, alerting the prolific antennae of the world, standing in the spotlight of the world, spraying the world with his poetical power, ‘porous to the every breath in the world.’ I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself. He discovers he is the predestined master of the world. He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation. But there are values that can be served only with my sauce. As a magician I stole from the white man a ‘certain world,’ lost to him and his kind. When that happened the white man must have felt an aftershock he was unable to identify, being unused to such reactions” (106-107). For several pages, Fanon argues that black people must embrace blackness, and struggle on the basis of being black, in order to negate white supremacists social relations. But to stop there reproduces our one-sided existence and the forms of appearance of capitalism. Identity politics argues, “I am a black man,” or “I am a woman,” without filling out the other side of the contradiction “…and I am a human.” If the starting and ending point is one-sided, there is no possibility for abolishing racialized and gendered social relations. For supporters of identity politics (despite claiming otherwise), womanhood, a form of appearance within society, is reduced to a natural, static “identity.” Social relations such as “womanhood,” or simply gender, become static objects, or “institutions.” Society is therefore organized into individuals, or sociological groups with natural characteristics. Therefore, the only possibility for struggle under identity politics is based on equal distribution or individualism (I will discuss this further below). This is a bourgeois ideology in that it replicates the alienated individual invented and defended by bourgeois theorists and scientists (and materially enforced) since capitalism’s birth. Furthermore, this individualism is characteristic of the current social moment. As left communist theorist Loren Goldner has theorized, capitalism has been in perpetual crisis for the last 40 years, which has been absorbed in appearance through neoliberal strategies (among others). Over time, capital is forced to invest in machines over workers in order to keep up with the competitive production process. As a result, workers are expelled from the production process. We can see this most clearly in a place like Detroit, where automation combined with deindustrialization left hundreds of thousands jobless. The effects of this contradiction of capitalism is that workers are forced into precarious working situations, jumping from gig to gig in order to make enough money to reproduce themselves. Goldner refers to this condition as the “atomized individual worker.” As Goldner has written elsewhere, this increased individualism leads to a politics of difference, where women, queers, people of color, etc., have nothing in common with one another. Intersectionality theorists correctly identified and critiqued this problem with identity politics. For example, bell hooks, in a polemic against liberal feminist Betty Friedan, writes, “Friedan was a principal shaper of contemporary feminist thought. Significantly, the one-dimensional perspective on women’s reality presented in her book became a marked feature of the contemporary feminist movement. Like Friedan before them, white women who dominate feminist discourse today rarely question whether or not their perspective on women’s reality is true to the lived experiences of women as a collective group. Nor are they aware of the extent to which their perspectives reflect race and class biases…” (3). hooks is correct to say that basing an entire politics on one particular experience, or a set of particular differences, under capitalism is problematic. However, intersectionality theory replicates this problem by simply adding particular moments, or determinant points; hooks goes on to argue for race and class inclusion in a feminist analysis. Similarly, theories of an “interlocking matrix of oppressions,” simply create a list of naturalized identities, abstracted from their material and historical context. This methodology is just as ahistorical and antisocial as Betty Friedan’s. Again, patriarchy and white supremacy are not objects or “institutions” that exist throughout history; they are particular expressions of our labor, our life-activity, that are conditioned by (and in turn, condition) our mode of production. In Capital, Marx describes labor as the “metabolism” between humans and the external world; patriarchy and white supremacy, as products of our labor, are also the conditions in which we labor. We are constantly interacting with the world, changing the world and changing ourselves through our “metabolic” labor. So patriarchy and white supremacy, like all social relations of labor, change and transform. Patriarchy under capitalism takes a specific form that is different from gendered relations under feudalism, or tribalism, etc. There will be overlap and similarities in how patriarchy is expressed under different modes of production. After all, the objective conditions of feudalism laid the foundation for early capitalism, which laid the foundation for industrial capitalism, etc. However, this similarity and overlap does not mean that particular, patriarchal relations transcend the mode of production. For example, under both feudalism and capitalism there are gendered relations within a nuclear family, though these relations took very different forms particular to the mode of production. As Silvia Federici describes, within the feudal family there was little differentiation between men and women. She writes, “since work on the servile farm was organized on a subsistence basis, the sexual division of labor in it was less pronounced and less discriminating than the capitalist farm. … Women worked in the fields, in addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping an herb garden; their domestic activities were not devalued and did not involve different social relations from those of men, as they would later, in a money-economy, when housework would cease to be viewed as real work” (25). A historical understanding of patriarchy needs to understand patriarchy from within a set of social relations based on the form of labor. In other words, we cannot understand the form of appearance, “womanhood,” apart from the essence, a universal human. A Marxist Conception of Feminism. At this point, I should make myself very clear and state that the limitations of identity politics and intersectionality theory are a product of their time. There was no revolution in the US in 1968. The advances of Black Power, women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the movements themselves, have been absorbed into capital. Since the 1970s, academia has had a stronghold on theory. A nonexistent class struggle leaves a vacuum of theoretical production and academic intellectuals have had nothing to draw on except for the identity politics of the past. A new politics that corresponds to a new form of struggle is desperately needed; however, the Marxist method can provide some insight into the creation of a politics that overcomes the limitations of identity politics. Marx offers a method that places the particular in conversation with the totality of social relations; the appearance connected to the essence. Consider his use of the concept of “moments.” Marx uses this concept in “The German Ideology” to describe the development of human history. He describes the following three moments as the “primary social relations, or the basic aspects of human activity:” (1) the production of means to satisfy needs, (2) the development of new needs, and (3) reproduction of new people and therefore new needs and new means to satisfy new needs. What is key about this idea is that Marx distinguishes between a “moment” and a “stage.” He writes, “These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three aspects, or, to make it clear to the Germans, three ‘moments,’ which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today” (48). The particulars of this specific argument are not relevant; what is key is Marx’s use of “moments” juxtaposed to “stages.” Marx makes this distinction to distinguish himself from a kind of determinism that sees the development of history in a static, linear fashion, versus a fluid and dialectical historical development. Throughout many of Marx’s writings, he refers back to this term, “moments,” to describe particular social relations in history, or, more precisely, particular expressions of labor. “Moments” also helps fill out Marx’s idea of fluid modes of production. As noted earlier, for Marx, there is no pure feudalism or pure capitalism; all relations of production move and must be understood historically. This concept is useful for understanding our various alienated existences under capitalism. For example, in the Grundrisse, Marx writes, “When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as a product etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement. The direct individuals, but individuals in a mutual relationship, which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The constant process of their own movement, in which they renew themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create” (712). To be a “woman” under capitalism means something very specific; it is even more specific for women in the US in 2013; it is even more specific for black lesbians in the US in 2013; it is even more specific for individual women. But, in a universal sense, to be a “woman” means to produce and reproduce a set of social relations through our labor, or self-activity. Taking a cue from Fanon, our method must argue: I am a woman and a human. We must recognize the particular in conversation with the totality; we must consider a moment, or a single expression of labor, in relationship to labor itself. It is important to note that identity politics and intersectionality theorists are not wrong but they are incomplete. Patriarchal and racialized social relations are material, concrete and real. So are the contradictions between the particular and universal, and the appearance and essence. The solution must build upon these contradictions and push on them. Again, borrowing from Fanon, we can say “I am a woman and a human,” or “I am a black person and a person.” The key is to emphasize both sides of the contradiction. Embracing womanhood, organizing on the basis of blackness, and building a specifically queer politics is an essential aspect of our liberation. It is the material starting point of struggle. As noted earlier, Frantz Fanon describes this movement in “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. However, at the end of the chapter, Fanon leaves the contradiction unresolved and leaves us searching for something more, stating, “Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness. Not yet white, no longer completely black, I was damned” (117), and, “When I opened my eyes yesterday I saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but the eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed wings. Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between Nothingness and infinity, I began to weep” (119). Fanon points to the contradiction between the particular form of appearance (blackness) and the essence, the universal (humanness). In the conclusion, as noted earlier, Fanon resolves this contradiction, arguing for further movement toward the universal, the total abolition of race. He writes, “In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future” (201). For Fanon then, and for Marx, the struggle for liberation must include both the particular and the universal, both the appearance and essence. We must build upon and push on both sides of these contradictions. Some Practical Consequences. Since identity politics, and therefore intersectionality theory, are a bourgeois politics, the possibilities for struggle are also bourgeois. Identity politics reproduces the appearance of an alienated individual under capitalism and so struggle takes the form of equality among groups at best, or individualized forms of struggle at worse. On the one hand, abstract “sociological” groups or individuals struggle for an equal voice, equal “representation,” or equal resources. Many have experienced this in organizing spaces where someone argues that there are not enough women of color, disabled individuals, trans*folks, etc., present for a campaign to move forward. A contemporary example of this is the critique of Slut Walk for being too white and therefore a white supremacist or socially invalid movement. Another example is groups and individuals who argue that all movements should be completely subordinate to queer people of color leadership, regardless of how reactionary their politics are. Again, while intersectionality theorists have rightly identified an objective problem, these divisions and antagonisms within the class must be address materially through struggle. Simply reducing this struggle to mere quantity, equality of distribution, or “representation,” reinforces identity as a static, naturalized category. On the other hand, identity politics can take the form of individualized struggles against heteropatriarchy, racism, etc., within the class. According to Barbara Smith, a majority of Combahee River Collective’s work was around teaching white women to stop being racist by holding anti-racism workshops (95). Today, we might see groups whose only form of struggle is to identify and smash gendered, machismo, male-chauvinist, misogynist, and patriarchal elements within the left. Another example is Tumblr users’ constant reminder to “check your privilege.” Again, it is important to address and correct these elements; however, contradictions and antagonisms within the class cannot be overcome in isolation, and individual expressions of patriarchy are impossible to overcome without a broader struggle for the emancipation of our labor. We will never free ourselves of machismo within the movement without abolishing gender itself, and therefore alienated labor itself. A truly revolutionary feminist struggle will collectively take up issues that put the particular and the form of appearance in conversation with the universal and the essence. Elsewhere, I have offered the following as examples of areas that would do that work: Grassroots clinic defense takeovers and/or nonprofit worker committees that build solidarity across worker-“client” lines. Neighborhood groups engaged in tenant struggles with the capacity to deal directly with violence against women in the community. Parent, teacher, and student alliances that struggle against school closures/privatization and for transforming schools to more accurately reflect the needs of children and parents, for example on-site childcare, directly democratic classrooms and districts, smaller class sizes, etc. Sex worker collectives that protect women from abusive Johns and other community members, and build democratically women- and queer-run brothels with safe working conditions. Workplace organizations in feminized workplaces like nonprofits, the service industry, pink collar manufacturing, etc., or worker centers that specialize in feminized workplaces and take up issues and challenges specific to women. There are many, many others that I cannot theorize. As noted, we cannot project the forms of struggle and their corresponding theories without the collective and mass activity of the class, but it is our job as revolutionaries to provide tools that help overthrow the present state of affairs. To do so, we must return to Marx and the historical materialist method. We can no longer rely on the ahistorical, bourgeois theories of the past to clarify the tasks of today. For feminists, this means struggling as women but also as humans.

The failure of progressive change in contemporary book publishing is so total that there is now a whole string of books about the failure of progressive change in contemporary book publishing, often backed enthusiastically by big corporate publishers, in an elaborate circuit of denial and absolution. In June 2021, Atria Books released The Other Black Girl, by debut novelist Zakiya Dalila Harris. Harris, a former assistant editor at Knopf, had crafted a novel that dissects the book world’s whiteness with an insider’s long pent-up precision: Nella, the only Black employee at a storied New York publishing house (similar to Harris’s own situation), struggles with the toxic atmosphere of an all-white workplace. On top of that, she has to endure the field’s other entry-level burdens, like relentless grunt work and low pay. When Wagner Books finally hires another Black girl, Nella thinks she might have an ally until she starts getting gaslit by the new hire, who seems eerily indulgent of their white bosses’ worst impulses. A year and a half before the novel’s release, Publishers Weekly reported a fourteen-way bidding war between houses that culminated in a seven-figure deal. The note at the front of the advance copy gives a taste of the enthusiasm that thrummed around the book. The winning bidder “chased it alongside every single editor in town,” the note says; “We all wanted this razor-sharp send-up of the starkly white world of book publishing.” Acquiring Harris’s book was the type of victory that powers a near-obsolete fantasy of the industry: a writer spends years laboring over a manuscript until she is plucked from obscurity by a star-making editor. The editor marshals corporate resources behind a story that’s riveting enough to keep readers turning pages (and hopefully send copies flying off the shelves), but that also tells us something essential about the way we live. This is the Jonathan Franzen story, the Jonathan Lethem story, the story of at least one other Jonathan. It is a story that used to involve a lot of handshakes and martinis. It is not a story that usually winds up broadcasting the histories North America prefers not to talk about—but this one did. The old narrative of publishing casts the business as rosy, merit-based, and perfectible. Rather than being driven by the market, it’s driven by individual skill, choice, and editors’ perceptive responses to artistic genius. It’s the one-in-a-million story arc of true love, but also the plotline of bootstrapping capitalist entrepreneurship. The journey of Harris’s novel follows a trajectory that’s become increasingly unlikely in the literary world. Because of the book’s sharp critique of structural whiteness, its publication also lends heft to a different, feel-good fiction: those from the margins will eventually tilt toward the center by dint of ability, both their own and that of the people in charge. Good white people inherently know the value of diversity and are able to correct literature’s historic exclusions one book at a time. Justice à la carte is possible, provided you know how to amplify the right voices. Harris’s novel deserves the hype. It’s a sparkling bit of fun, dishing the dirt of the trade in a manner both savage and playful. Scenes of editorial and marketing gaffes made familiar from headlines, like throwing money behind a white-authored book seamed by racist stereotype (with the pressure to “catch it” offloaded onto a racialized junior staff member who’s hesitant to piss off the higher-ups), are rendered in the vivid but casual dread of someone who knows, too well, whereof she speaks. Publishing has incorporated the story of its flaws back into itself to be repackaged as product. Pitched by Harris’s agent at the intersection of Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out and the catty publishing TV show Younger, the book carries sufficient commercial appeal that a hefty offer feels deserved. But laying all that aside for a moment, doesn’t it scan as odd that the collective book industry reply to “your working conditions are so racist they’re a form of psychological horror” was an ecstatic yes, drag me? How hungry do you have to be for expiation—or how constrained your sense of possibility for improvement—to eagerly claim these problems as endemic? Much of the early press around Harris’s deal notes its closeness in time to the American Dirt backlash, in which Jeanine Cummins had been paid a reportedly comparable sum to tell a story of Latinx refugees along the Mexico-US border. A few weeks before its release, American Dirt attracted a flurry of criticism for its stereotypical depictions of Mexico and of Latinx people. It became the latest flashpoint for issues of representation in publishing—more specifically, it was further evidence that the industry had only partially digested the lesson that representation matters, buying up stories about people of color while still overpaying white people to tell them, and arguably not even that accurately. While Latinx writers had been ignored by mainstream houses, Dirt was positioned as the definitive novel on immigration in America, a subject that industry lore held to be all but unsellable. The manuscript sailed through executive meetings insulated by a powerful editor, and only when the book hit the outside world, which contained a more realistic cross-section of the reading public than senior-level staff meetings had, did the consequences finally come raining down. The time, in other words, seemed ripe for a serious reckoning with institutional literary whiteness. There’s a subplot in The Other Black Girl about a manuscript that basically commits the same sins that Dirt was later accused of, told from the perspective of a low-level employee who sees what the all-white senior staff can’t. In the novel, Nella is assigned to read and offer notes on one of the house’s forthcoming titles, and she agonizes over whether or how to tell her boss that it’s cartoonishly racist. The fictional manuscript, which is about the opioid crisis, has only one Black character—“Shartricia”—whose persona is made up exclusively of stereotypes. While telling her boss may be the morally right thing for Nella to do, she hesitates because the white male author is also one of Wagner Books’ rainmakers. He’s also, no spoilers, incredibly fragile and does not take criticism well. But nobody else clocks the problem. Unless Harris added this subplot in at a later date, its presence indicates these patterns are so baked into the field that she basically predicted American Dirt before American Dirt happened. More than being a sign of her canniness, it’s a sign of an industry that has learned so little that such a situation is more or less mimesis. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Harris’s agent admitted that the Dirt fallout came up in early meetings for The Other Black Girl and “may have made editors even more confident that [Harris’s book] has an audience.” The Dirt snafu, after all, had been dissected exhaustively by the news cycle. The public seemed keen to know how such a mishap, which looked so obvious in retrospect, could have happened in the first place; deep-dives explored parts of the production process up to a year after the novel came out. This fascination, the PW piece implies, may have created an audience hungrier for a book about race, which is a relatively uncommon notion in big publishing. Like the belief that stories about immigration are too unsexy to sell, the warmed-over falsehood that nobody (white) wants to read about race or racism (unless it’s a book about slavery) has been used to bar Black writers from the halls of literature for years. The Dirtcontroversy seemed to prove Harris wasn’t the only one ready to reckon with the industry’s skeletons. That isn’t the only thing the controversy proved. From a business standpoint, the Dirt saga has a much happier ending: a tale of executives who read the manuscript, saw dollar signs, and got exactly what they paid for. The book’s critical cred may have been shredded, but it still topped the New York Times bestseller list and was one of the year’s most commercially fruitful titles. And yet the path from one seven-figure acquisition to another—Cummins to Harris—still managed to poke the dormant narrative of improvement; the idea that a switch had been flipped and justice was now flowing in the right direction. But neither American Dirt nor The Other Black Girl are examples of how to deal with an inequity problem. They’re examples of how to deal with a money problem. The Other Black Girl isn’t airing any dirty laundry that wasn’t already extremely public—Harris’s innovation is how precisely she documents the issue. Other novels tell a similar story, as do the stats on who gets hired and paid and retained, and whose stories and ideas get put in print. The consensus over publishing’s whiteness problem snakes back through the last few years of contemporary fiction, demographic surveys, and digital humanities scholarship. In several recent novels that center millennial life, a character’s low-level publishing job functions as a kind of shorthand for both marginality and precarity. As a pattern, it can feel almost uncannily specific. Edie, the narrator of Raven Leilani’s incandescent Luster, is also one of only two Black people working underpaid staff jobs in a publishing house. Edie’s erstwhile double is, like Nella’s, more careerist than she is, a Tobagonian woman with an eye on Edie’s job and an aptitude for “doing that unthreatening aw-shucks shtick for all the professional whites.” Publishing isn’t as central to the plot of Luster as is it in The Other Black Girl, but it has a heavy hand in shaping the harrowing material conditions of Edie’s life. Leilani is alert to how life under capitalism is represented in fiction. “I personally need to know how characters eat and pay rent,” she said in an interview with Lux magazine. These financials, she added, “often have enormous bearing on life’s trajectory and plot.” In crafting the trajectory and plot of Luster, she gave Edie the same job she herself had—an entry-level publishing gig. In New York City, Edie’s efforts to survive on that salary involve living in a cockroach-infested apartment and licking tuna from cans. (The paucity of the pay, especially for entry-level jobs, is another thing the industry has spent many years agreeing is a problem while the problem has largely stayed the same.) The professional setting, and its regressive racial politics, also offers a window into the kinds of stories about Black people that the industry tends to favor. Scanning a pile of books marked for giveaway in the company lobby, Edie reels off a list that plots the coordinates of Blackness in the literary imagination: three slave narratives, one of them about “a tragic mulatto who raises the dead with her magic chitlin pies”; a “domestic drama about a black maid”; and an “ ‘urban’ romance where everybody dies by gang violence.” The only book description with any information about its author is “a book about a Cantonese restaurant, which may or may not have been written by a white woman from Utah, whose descriptions of her characters rely primarily on rice-based foods.” It’s a dismal list any way you slice it, but what’s notable is the lack of detail about the authors’ backgrounds other than the final example. That only one author gets (potentially) identified leaves open the chance that the other books, built on tired caricatures of Blackness, were either written by white people or were the only stories by Black writers the white-staffed imprint was willing to gamble on. As the books sit there abandoned in the lobby, demoted to the status of “Diversity Giveaway[s],” that gamble doesn’t seem to have paid off. Ling Ma’s 2017 debut, Severance, is a novel about the mindless repetition of office work that presciently rendered a pandemic a few years before COVID-19. In Severance, Ma appoints publishing as the chief representative of empty capitalist labor. Candace Chen, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, has spent five years working dutifully (if disaffectedly) at Spectra, a New York–based publishing house, coordinating the production of specialty Bibles. Candace is good enough at her job—she sits down at her desk, the hours disappear, and the tasks get done—but her heart’s not in it. A photographer outside work hours, Candace aspires to design coffee-table books alongside the company’s “Art Girls”—a group of “colt-legged, flaxen-haired” women in their twenties, who tote “discounted Miu Miu and Prada” as they swan along the office hallways. When a spore-based disease blossoms into a global crisis, Candace accepts a lucrative contract to stay in the office after Spectra’s executives have fled New York, coordinating Bible production with the company’s flagging business partners in Hong Kong. In both the city and the world around her, the numbers of infected people skyrocket, with victims trapped in an endless loop of unthinking repetition—a family droning grace over a rotted meal, an elderly neighbor fumbling with the keys outside her apartment. Candace doesn’t cling to her comparably numbing job amid global catastrophe because she has an unusually passionate desire to be one of those art-world white girls, but because her work routines anchor her to the only stability she has left. Candace’s job, like Edie’s and Nella’s, taps a vein of interrelated contemporary problems. Want to tell a story about the abject horrors of surviving under racial capitalism in a world blanched by homogeneity? Give your character an entry-level publishing job. Whiteness, precarity, tokenized hiring—these literary tropes form their own consensus about how inhospitable the industry can be, especially for junior-level workers who are neither white nor wealthy. There are entire savage meme accounts dedicated to driving this point home on Instagram. These novels concur with The Other Black Girl and the New York editors who bid on it: yes, the situation is really bad. With towering barricades around any port of entry, the book industry has always been complicit in marginalization. Moreover, publishing has incorporated the story of its flaws back into itself to be repackaged as product (this book, I suppose, included). The absorption of dissent isn’t surprising; loosening the valve to release a little built-up tension is a time-honored tactic that lets the status quo carry on unchecked. Publishing is a business like any other, and especially at the big commercial houses, decisions are made in the service of the bottom line. At the same time, what makes the lack of demographic change more disheartening—and the cannibalization of critique seem darker—is the amount of breath the industry has spent on professing how much it wants to do better. Because the numbers tell a different story. In 2019, independent publisher Lee & Low Books released its second Diversity Baseline Survey. The results, widely circulated in news and social media, showed negligible improvement over the inaugural survey four years prior. Measuring the race, gender, orientation, and ability of workers across department and seniority, the survey put figures to a problem that was already long known. The results reported an overall 76 percent of white employees—three percentage points lower than the outcome of the 2015 survey, which wasn’t considered statistically significant, especially since the 2019 survey had had a bigger sample size. (For reference, the population of white people in the United States, the most recent census reports, is 60.1 percent.) The percentage of white employees fluctuated slightly depending on the position: the highest concentration, at 85 percent, was clustered in editorial; the lowest, at 51 percent, was among the interns. The percentage of Black workers hovered at a relatively stable 3–5 percent across all of the categories with exceptions in the intern and editorial pools—8 percent and 1 percent, respectively. Though the decision to acquire a book engages multiple departments and requires buy-in from far more than one person, when it comes to the laps that manuscript submissions land in and who picks the ones that go forward, editors are the frontline. These numbers were released during the long winter of American Dirt but still a few weeks prior to The Other Black Girl’s deal announcement, perhaps stoking the latter’s fire even hotter. The results also came out before the uprisings against police violence sent corporate hand-wringing into an even higher gear. The pattern established across industries—where CEOs issued statements in support of Black lives, calling forth an immediate surfeit of evidence to the contrary—seemed to take place with particular verve in the publishing space. Each of the Big Five publishers made the requisite post, though the message took a different form depending on who issued it: white text on a black square; letters containing fleshed-out accountability plans; or an antiracist booklist-cum-shopping list appended to a statement. But, at the same time as they issued these pledges to justice, some presses doubled down on practices that indicated the opposite. With towering barricades around any port of entry, the book industry has always been complicit in marginalization. More recently, it has increased its stock in injustice by continuing to publish material that threatens or harms the lives of the people the profession already shuts out. Books about the Trump presidency were incredible sellers. As material by or about white supremacists grew more lucrative, the gap between the word (“we stand with you,” “we’re listening”) and the action (“. . . but we’re also giving a million dollars to someone who believes your existence is worthless/deserving of extermination/ up for debate”) pushed the theater of good intentions beyond credulity. Before and even during the wave of statements and action plans, the book industry got away with a lot: using AI to trawl the text of classic novels for nominally raceless characters, then deciding Frankenstein (or whomever) was actually Black and issuing a series of special editions right in time for February—as Barnes & Noble did for their swiftly revoked “Diverse Editions” initiative. Paying bottom dollar for racialized writers’ books (if they bought their books at all) but throwing money at white ones to tell the same story riddled with inaccuracies. Keeping certain acquisitions secret from a company’s staff and then announcing a marquee title by a fascist-adjacent public intellectual, or alleged child molester, or murderous cop, in a surprise blitz. This dissonance persists because publishers are trying to have it two different ways: to claim moral progress by anointing a few more marginalized writers than it has in the past, while disavowing the language of progress or justice altogether when they give a platform to hate speech (at that point, it becomes an issue of free expression). But neither of these frameworks tell a complete story—the most relevant metric is what’s considered sellable.

In 2020, the publishing industry entered a moment of moral urgency about the persistent lack of racial and ethnic diversity among employees and authors. The industry is disproportionately white, and the canon of published books from trade publishers is overwhelmingly so. According to one analysis, 95 percent of American fiction books published between 1950 and 2018 were written by white people.1 While that analysis looks at a broad sweep of time, more recent figures indicate that both the publishing industry, and the books it puts out, remain disproportionately white. The lack of diversity in the ranks of publishing professionals and in the works brought to market are linked: In a cultural industry like publishing, where subjective interpretations of what constitutes good or marketable literature are a major determinant of what gets published, the whiteness of the industry’s staff has accompanied a largely white cadre of published authors. Not only is the United States a demographically diverse nation—as of the last census, an estimated 42 percent of the country are people of color2—it also boasts a demographically diverse readership. The National Endowment for the Arts estimates that approximately a quarter of America’s regular adult readers are people of color.3 For decades, voices within and outside the publishing industry have called on publishing houses and bookstores to more fully reflect this demographic diversity.4 In response to calls for publishers to heed and support employees and authors of color, the publishing industry has gone through waves of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. But over time, many of these gains have turned out to be temporary or insufficient. Industry experts and longtime editors have occasionally aired their frustrations with these cyclical, transient attempts. As fifty-five year publishing veteran Marie Dutton Brown put it in a 2020 interview: “Black life and Black culture are rediscovered every 10 to 15 years. Publishing reflects that.”5 Over the past several years, major publishers have ramped up their efforts to diversify the racial and cultural composition of their workforces and author lists. They do so while facing—and in part spurred by—a groundswell of activism, including from authors and editors of color, calling on the industry to change. At the same time, activists have seen the rise of social media–enabled advocacy, from the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement (a hashtag-turned-organization that advocates for more diverse children’s books) to the #PublishingPaidMe movement (a 2020 campaign that called on authors to disclose their advances to expose discrepancies in payment between white authors and those of color). Beginning in the summer of 2020, the society-wide confrontation of racial justice issues in the United States prompted a renewed reckoning. As the killing of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter instigated a sea change in the way Americans have approached race and racism, book publishers were among the corporate institutions that have pledged to be part of this change. A New York Times article in June 2022 noted that in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, “the number of nonwhite employees in the publishing industry surged,” editors “scrambled to buy manuscripts from nonwhite authors,” and publishing houses “doubled down on their efforts to recruit and support their nonwhite employees and to examine their procedures through diversity, equity, and inclusion councils.”6 Recent activism and reform efforts have pressed for a broad scope of actions to overcome systemic racial inequities in the publishing industry and achieve sustained, holistic, and structural change. PEN America’s research and interviews suggest that measuring and addressing racial representation in employee hiring, author lists, and published content are key metrics for evaluating long-term diversification. But diversity in the books sector isn’t just a question of who is on editorial staffs and which authors receive book contracts. Our research and interviews revealed a host of historically underexplored financial and institutional factors that feed into underrepresentation across the industry, and compound the marginalization of publishing professionals, authors, and booksellers of color. These factors include policies and strategies for entry-level pay, author advances, employee retention, professional mobility, mentorship, book sales, audience development, and marketing—all of which shape a book’s chance of publication and commercial success as well as an author, bookseller, or publishing professional’s capacity to remain and flourish in the industry. Today we find ourselves in the midst of a promised shift, with publishing houses launching signature initiatives, hiring new personnel, and making high-level strategic decisions designed to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Big Five U.S. publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House (PRH), and Simon & Schuster—collectively control over 80 percent of the so-called trade publishing market, encompassing books sold to a general audience.7 Their actions—including through their various imprints—will be determinative in shaping the diversity, equity, and inclusion of the trade book sector at large, but there are also hundreds of midsize and small independent publishers that play a role in determining the industry’s direction. PEN America is convinced that the industry has embarked on current reforms with a genuine desire to make change. But systemic change requires more than goodwill. It necessitates specific, far-reaching, and sustained policy revisions and company-wide commitments that outlast any single political moment and persist despite inevitable hurdles and setbacks. If publishers are the curators of our country’s stories, they have an obligation to ensure that these stories reflect the breadth of our society. Current diversity statistics, alongside the testimony of many publishing and writing professionals of color, point to persistent obstacles and shortcomings in fulfilling this responsibility. PEN America undertook this report to better understand why the debate over the lack of diversity in publishing has seemed to stagnate, or to progress only in fits and starts. Our hope is to shed light on the dynamics that both enable and inhibit the broadest range of voices in American literature. In researching this issue, PEN America focused on racial and ethnic diversity—acute and urgent, if not the sole, areas of under-representation. Our research and analysis incorporate interviews, conversations with major publishers, and open-source data and draw on PEN America’s deep contacts with authors and editors and throughout the field of adult trade publishing. This report is primarily informed by more than 60 interviews with authors and publishing professionals, including agents, editors, salespeople, marketing and publicity specialists, and publishers. The interviewees range from longtime veterans to recent hires and represent independent presses such as Graywolf and Akashic as well as the Big Five. While many agreed to speak on the record, a significant number chose to speak anonymously or off the record to avoid impairing their career prospects or personal relationships. PEN America has made every effort to select sources whose reliability could be established. Systemic change requires more than goodwill. It necessitates specific, far-reaching, and sustained policy revisions and company-wide commitments that outlast any single political moment and persist despite inevitable hurdles and setbacks. Section I offers a snapshot of the transitions afoot in the industry. Section II addresses recruitment and retention, delineating how the lack of staff diversity impedes the autonomy and authority of editors and executives of color, and limits the books that are acquired and how they are marketed and sold. Section III explores long-standing attitudes and platitudes that have shaped the way the publishing industry has dealt with books by authors of color, including the shibboleth that “diverse books don’t sell.” Section IV examines how certain timeworn conventions such as author advances and the use of comparative titles (“comps”) for sales projections may perpetuate existing inequities for authors of color. Section V focuses on the marketing, distribution, and sale of books and how standard practices can disadvantage books by authors of color. Section I: The Color of Publishing How disproportionately white is America’s corpus of stories? Although there is no regularized, industry-wide system that tracks the racial identities of published authors, there are several sets of numbers that help to paint a picture. The most comprehensive evaluation of racial diversity among trade authors came in 2020, when McGill University professor Richard Jean So and New York Times graphics editor Gus Wezerek compiled a data set of approximately 8,000 fiction books by 4,100 authors published by major American publishing houses between 1950 and 2018. The research team identified the race or ethnicity of almost 3,500 of these authors. They concluded: “We guessed that most of the authors would be white, but we were shocked by the extent of the inequality once we analyzed the data. Of the 7,124 books for which we identified the author’s race, 95 percent were written by white people.”8 While the results of this research emphasize trends across decades and may hide recent historical gains, they paint a sobering picture of publishing as an institutionally white field. Richard Jean So analyzed this data both in his 2020 book Redlining Culture and in a piece published in The New York Times in December of that year. Speaking to PEN America about the significance of this research, So said: “I wouldn’t say I was surprised by these results, but it was a learning process. We focus so much on the success of a few individual writers that we don’t realize that’s like all there is, that there’s not a much larger community” of books from writers of color. “But when you really get into the data of it—actually, no, there’s not.”9 Of the Big Five publishing houses, only two—Penguin Random House and Hachette—have publicly disclosed author diversity statistics. Penguin Random House released its first-ever public, multiyear report on the subject in December 2021.10 Their stats revealed that white U.S. contributors (authors, illustrators, and translators) accounted for 74.9 percent of the books released by the publishing giant between 2019 and 2021—a number significantly higher than the percentage of white people in the general population but one that tracks closely with the percentage of white employees in PRH’s U.S. workforce (74.2 percent).11 Contributors of color constituted 23.5 percent, including 6.8 percent Asian, 6 percent Black, 5 percent Hispanic or Latinx, 2.1 percent Middle Eastern or North African, and 3.3 percent two or more races, with less than 1 percent each for American Indian and Pacific Islander.12 Hachette has disclosed its broad statistics for recent acquisitions of authors of color in comparison with white authors since 2020. In March 2022, Hachette released its third annual report on diversity equity and inclusion–including author diversity statistics. The publishing house disclosed that 34 percent of contracts with new contributors in 2021 were with self-identified BIPOC authors and illustrators, compared to 29 percent in 2020, and 22 percent in 2019.13 Elizabeth Méndez Berry is a vice president and executive editor of the PRH imprint One World as well as the founder of Critical Minded, an initiative to support cultural critics of color. She told PEN America that while the publishing industry doesn’t control what the consumer buys, “we do play a big role in defining what they can buy. And when you put that in historical context—the millions of stories in New York and hundreds of millions of stories in the country—[when] we primarily publish books by white authors, the number of stories that we’re avoiding or suppressing is significant. It’s exciting that we’re starting to see a shift in acquisitions, but you have to remember that this shift is happening against a backdrop of decades upon decades that told a narrow story of what this country has been and could be. We have a lot to make up for.”14 A Changing Industry: Publisher Action Meets Literary Activism In recent years, publishers have pledged to renew their commitment to diversity. In 2017, Penguin Random House, which accounts for an estimated 25 percent of U.S. trade book market15 and, as of this writing, was trying to fend off an antitrust challenge to its bid to acquire rival Simon & Schuster, began an employee-led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative. In 2019, PRH contracted with an outside consultant, Paradigm, to conduct an in-depth company culture survey, followed by focus groups with company employees. U.S. CEO Madeline McIntosh found the results eye-opening. “On every measure,” she told PEN, “there was just such a significant gap in empowerment, to put it simply, where everybody—everybody—rated below straight, white men. In the focus groups, it became clear that that was affecting business decisions as simple as how a cover is designed.” Many employees reported that in the course of doing their jobs, they felt they didn’t have the opportunity to voice their opinions, or that if they did speak up, their opinions weren’t taken seriously.16 McIntosh said: “I was already very clear that publishing is a very monocultural industry, and has historically been a very monocultural industry, very much dominated by a single race—and that there is particularly a history of a fairly privileged class element within publishing that was paired with historically low compensation rates in the industry. But … it was really revelatory to see the degree in which, even in a company culture that considered itself to be progressive and forward-thinking and inclusive, that in reality that experience was very different depending on your identity.”17 In the past decade, new forms of literary activism have arisen to push for greater diversity in publishing. In April 2014, young-adult-fiction authors Ellen Oh, Malinda Lo, and Aisha Saeed, reacting online to an all-white and all-male panel of children book authors at that year’s BookCon gathering, began campaigning for greater attention to diversity in the children and young-adult sectors, adopting the Twitter hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks. Soon after, a group of writers and publishing insiders founded We Need Diverse Books as an organization aiming “to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people.”18 The Cooperative Children’s Book Center has found that We Need Diverse Books has had a major impact, prompting a meaningful rise in authors of color.19 In 2016, a group of Hispanic publishing professionals created Latinx in Publishing to connect authors and publishers with readers and to boost the Hispanic presence in the industry.20 These efforts accelerated in mid-2020 as a society-wide reckoning with racial justice reverberating throughout the publishing industry. In June of that year, author L.L. McKinney started the Twitter hashtag #PublishingPaidMe, calling on writers to reveal the advances they received for selling their books to publishers.21 That same month, employees at the Macmillan imprint Farrar, Straus, and Giroux organized a “Day of Solidarity” for publishing professionals to “speak out against racist murder, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.”22 It asked publishing professionals to work on projects featuring Black authors, donate a day’s pay, or otherwise support Black writers. At least 1,300 workers across the industry ended up participating.23 The #PublishingPaidMe revelations were both predictable and alarming. Author Jesmyn Ward, who is Black, disclosed that even after Salvage the Bones, her second novel (for which she received an advance of about $20,000), received a National Book Award, she had to fight furiously, and switch publishers, to receive $100,000—“barely equal to some of my writer friends’ debut novel advances”—for her next novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing. That book also went on to win a National Book Award. Science fiction writer N.K. Jemisin, who is also Black, reported that she received only $25,000 advances for each book of her Broken Earth trilogy—all of which went on to receive the Hugo Award, making Jemisin the first author in the award’s 65-year history to win three times in a row.24 As part of the #PublishingPaidMe discussion, a Google spreadsheet of advances began to circulate with nearly 1,200 self-reported entries. Of these, 122 authors revealed that they received an advance of at least $100,000. Of those 122 authors, 78 identified themselves as white, compared with just seven who identified as Black and two as Latino or Latina.25 While the spreadsheet was not comprehensive, many commentators nonetheless pointed to the results as another indication that publishing favors white authors and audiences. The #PublishingPaidMe discussion brought the long-secretive subject of advances at least partly out in the open. “The #PublishingPaidMe hashtag really showed us the inequality that exists, where a Black writer with even a big following might be getting three, five, ten times less than a white author that isn’t equal at all in terms of audience,” Rebekah Borucki, founder and president of Row House Publishing,26 told a writer for Forbes, noting that the online debate sparked widespread frustration among publishing professionals and writers of color.27 Writer Leah Johnson, author of the acclaimed young-adult novel You Should See Me in a Crown, posted on Twitter that #PublishingPaidMe was “one of the most important things that could have ever happened in publishing,” adding: “We’re still witnessing a shift in culture that was kickstarted by a newfound transparency around wage disparity (and the expectation of overwork for minimal compensation) . . . It’s difficult to understand how underwater you are when you have no concept of where the surface is.”28 As a direct result of #PublishingPaidMe and the discrepancies it revealed, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, a recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for his story collection Friday Black, was able to renegotiate his advance for his next book. But he told PEN America that as he scrolled through his feed at the time of the initiative, he couldn’t help noting the absence of “so, so many of these white male authors that I see all the time on Twitter . . . And I keep that in my head.” While Adjei-Brenyah expresses gratitude toward “the white writers who stepped up and made more clear and transparent that disparity,” he said that for the most part, on the subject of equity in book advances, “it’s really always the people of color talking about this, people of color on the diversity counts, people of color trying to fix things—and where are the white people trying to help us?”29 As a direct result of #PublishingPaidMe and the discrepancies it revealed, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, a recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for his story collection Friday Black, was able to renegotiate his advance for his next book. Publisher Commitments That same month, in response to the broad national call for reckoning and to targeted activism among their authors, employees, and audiences, major publishers made a series of public commitments, in some cases pledging to implement major initiatives to address racial inequities in their institutions.30 PRH vowed to disclose statistics on employee demographics, publish more books by people of color, mandate antiracist training among its staff, and hold a company-wide reading assignment of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. Michael Pietsch, the CEO of Hachette Book Group, announced that it would provide staff demographic information and create diversity targets for its staff and authors.31 Each of the Big Five publicly voiced support for Black Lives Matter and articulated new company principles about racial equity and justice. PRH promised to “stand against racism and violence toward the Black community” and to “commit to listening—to our readers, to our authors, and to our teams—as we work toward becoming part of the change.”32 HarperCollins Publishers pledged to “stand with all of our colleagues, authors, readers, and partners who experience racism and oppression.”33 Hachette declared that it would “support Black writers, readers and people of color by sharing their stories and experiences in many of the books we publish.”34 Macmillan released a statement against racism, canceled internal meetings for a day in June to allow for discussions, added Juneteenth as a company-wide holiday, and offered a double matching program for donations to racial justice causes that led to over $400,000 being donated to groups including the Black Lives Matter Global Network.35 Simon & Schuster announced that it was “committed to working with our employees, authors and the publishing community to make our company and our industry a safe and inclusive environment for all, and a publisher of works that represent the breadth and depth of our diverse population.”36 This public statement followed a June 1 internal letter from CEO Jonathan Karp to employees—a copy of which the publisher provided to PEN America—that said, “We stand with our colleagues, authors, and the many citizens both within the world of publishing and the greater population who have mobilized in the cause of social justice and in proclaiming that yes, Black Lives Matter.”37 PEN America spoke with representatives of each of the major five publishing houses to better understand how they have worked to actualize these pledges. Some publishers stressed that much of the work they view as most influential in promoting diversity occurred prior to 2020; still, each of the Big Five acknowledged the importance of June 2020 as a catalyst for the industry. Based on these conversations as well as research and interviews, PEN America developed the following metrics to assess whether, and to what extent, publisher diversity statements have translated to structural change.38 (As these metrics intend to evaluate structural change, we have omitted instances of individual and ad hoc editorial and commercial decision-making, which, while important, are more difficult to evaluate and may not reflect long-term, company-wide policy. These metrics are not intended as a comprehensive description of all publisher commitments and efforts, but as an illustration of Big Five activity in several important areas.) Since 2020, several diversity initiatives have been adopted by all of the Big Five publishing houses, becoming new baseline standards, particularly in the hiring and recruitment processes. These include the creation of new retention, hiring, and funding initiatives; the appointment of formal DEI officers, many of whom serve on and/or report to senior-level management; and a turn toward data to track and analyze employee diversity. Other areas reflect a lack of uniformity in implementation. These include multicultural marketing officers and strategy; staff-wide diversity and inclusion training (acknowledging that the quality and value of such training can vary widely, making this metric difficult to assess); and the collection and publication of diversity statistics for a publishing house’s authors and other contributors. As of August 2022, none of the Big Five had publicly disclosed information on author advances. PEN America’s research underscores that diversity in the book market is not simply a matter of getting employees and authors of color through the door. Each publishing house is operated and structured somewhat differently, obviating exact comparisons among their strategies to achieve greater diversity, equity, and inclusion. Nonetheless, we hope that by disclosing the information we did obtain on affirmative efforts to address these issues, we can prompt further discussion and progress. Intentional marketing, workplace culture transformation, and large-scale diversification in publishing houses are crucial for ensuring that diverse stories and storytellers can thrive. According to the Publishers Weekly 2020 report on workplace diversity, 75 percent of industry respondents said that their employer had increased their diversity and equity efforts in the past year by broadening recruitment efforts (for instance, by expanding outreach at historically Black colleges and universities), hiring DEI experts and holding training sessions, adding a retail manager to work with bookstore owners of color, auditing author demographics, boosting marketing support for titles by authors of color, and raising entry-level salaries. Roughly half of the respondents whose workplaces added a DEI initiative said they believed the initiative would result in real change at their workplace.50 Overall, it is too early to evaluate how much long-term change this burst of post–George Floyd efforts will bring. Clearly publishing is investing in reform in unprecedented ways, impelled in large part by industry professionals, authors, and others proponents of change. Halting Progress: Diversity in Fits and (False) Starts Dating back to the 1960s, publishing companies have mounted initiatives and started imprints focused on authors of color, and industry publications have covered questions of diversity and inclusion within major houses.51 Experts and longtime insiders have warned that these past efforts have waxed and waned, receiving substantial fanfare, then dying down as public and media attention diminished. Many of PEN America’s interviewees referenced previous unfulfilled promises to transform, evincing leeriness about whether this time things will be any different. Despite this wariness, many interviewees voiced hope that current efforts would prove more serious and permanent. “We are both at a demographic inflection point and an inflection point in terms of the future of our democracy,” said Tanya McKinnon, a literary agent for more than 20 years.52 McKinnon argued that to surmount cyclical patterns of progress and regression, publishers need “to feel a real normalization toward acquiring and publishing books by people of color well. That is a first step, so that publishing voices of color doesn’t feel like an anomaly, that it doesn’t feel like it’s something that’s a response to the moment but that it’s an ongoing commitment—to publish consistently, and well, the work of people who reflect the face of America.”53 Some of those interviewed by PEN America express cautious optimism that a combination of attitudinal, societal, and commercial changes have combined to make progress irreversible. Ibrahim Ahmad, former editorial director of the Akashic Books, said that his decision to move from an indie publisher to Viking Books, a PRH imprint, in 2021,54 was spurred in part by his belief that the industry was changing and that larger publishers increasingly recognized that authors of color can be both highly acclaimed and commercially successful. “What speaks loudest in this business and in any business are dollars,” he said. “When publishers see that writers of color can sell huge quantities of books, they will invest in those books.”55 “I’ve been in the publishing industry for over 10 years,” said Milena Brown, marketing director at PRH imprint Doubleday,56 “and literally, this year has been the most action I’ve seen on this issue. It’s slow-moving, and that’s not great, but . . . talks of diversity don’t matter until there’s people of color at decision-making positions. Why is there a lack of diversity at the top?. . . I think people are starting to see things changing in the industry or in corporate America, period.” Brown adds that the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests helped empower her personally. “I started to be more vocal” about problems in the industry like inequities in pay, budgets, and advances. Ultimately, she predicts, “this is no longer going to be a trend” that lasts for a few months or a year, then reverts to “the same things we’ve been doing. I don’t think we are going to allow it anymore. We can now hold companies accountable.”57 Carrie Bloxson, the Hachette Book Group’s chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, said that new industry standards like collecting and disclosing employee and contributor statistics ensure publisher “accountability” to authors, readership, and industry professionals. Comparing Hachette’s 2020 and 2021 diversity reports, Bloxson notes, “What was interesting about 2021, too, is that the largest percentage gain for staff diversity was at VP and above, which is really heartening to see.”58 Others are more skeptical. Speaking to PEN America in October 2021, Chris Jackson, publisher and editor-in-chief of PRH’s One World, said: “The last shred of naivete I have about publishing is that I think we have passed an inflection point. I don’t think we can go back to the way it was because there’s just too much evidence that books coming from writers of color work in the market.”59 But when PEN America followed up in the summer of 2022, he was less certain: “I may have believed this when the interview first took place,” he said, “but I don’t believe it anymore. I’m pretty convinced at this point that things can definitely go back to the way they used to be.” A Brief Overview of the Industry and the Publication Process The American trade publishing industry consists of a patchwork of presses—from PRH, the largest, which publishes over 15,000 print titles a year,60 to micro-presses that publish only a couple a year. Trade publishers acquire, edit, produce, and distribute works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and journalism. Trade books, the largest publishing category, are intended for a general audience and are usually sold in bookstores and through other retail booksellers. Other publishing categories include academic, professional, and specialty. While children’s and young-adult books may have some different conventions, they are often considered part of the trade publishing industry. The Big Five trade publishers were known as the Big Six until 2013, when Penguin and Random House merged. In 2020, PRH announced plans to buy Simon & Schuster for more than $2 billion; the Justice Department has sued to stop the merger, citing antitrust concerns.61 If the merger goes through, the moniker will become the Big Four. The industry’s center of gravity is in New York City, where all of the Big Five and many other publishers are based. The Big Five account for an estimated 80 percent or more of the domestic trade book market, with PRH books alone comprising roughly 37 percent.62 Within the Big Five, each conglomerate operates numerous “imprints”—literary brands that make relatively independent decisions in acquiring books. PRH, for example, owns about 275 imprints, including Riverhead, Vintage, Viking, One World, Doubleday, and Pantheon, each of which has its own editorial team and sensibility.63 Hachette Book Group owns Basic Books, Grand Central Publishing, BoldType, Little Brown, and more.64 Amistad, an imprint known for focusing on work by Black writers, is an imprint of HarperCollins, as is Ecco.65 Simon & Schuster’s imprints include Atria, Scribner, and Avid Reader Press,66 while Macmillan’s include Flatiron Books, Henry Holt, and Farrar Straus and Giroux.67 In all, the Big Five have an estimated 500-plus imprints,68 many of which were once autonomous companies. Agents can submit a manuscript for consideration to multiple imprints within a publishing house, and imprints can bid against one another as long as a different publisher is also in the running. In contrast to the Big Five, independent publishers are not part of a large conglomerate. They tend to be much smaller and include the likes of Grove Atlantic, Graywolf, Beacon, New Press, Akashic, Feminist Press, and Catapult. With fewer resources, independent and small presses offer lower advances and slimmer marketing and publicity budgets. They are seen within the industry as taking greater creative risks and being less profit-focused, with some of them embracing a nonprofit model. While independent and Big Five publishers often act as competitors, they also have collaborative relationships, as major publishers frequently operate as distributors for one another and for books published by their indie counterparts. Though every publisher has its own processes, most houses have editorial, marketing, publicity, sales, and production departments. Other departments include art and design, contracts and legal, digital production, finance, and subsidiary rights. The Publication Process The first step of the process happens outside the publishing houses: when a writer with a manuscript or a book proposal queries an agent, or an agent queries a writer whom they hope to represent. Once they sign a representation agreement, the agent, who has developed relationships with editors at various houses, pitches the book project to editors. If an editor is interested in acquiring a book, they—often with the sales director—create a profit-and-loss projection that can include information such as production and manufacturing costs, royalty rate, formats, expected price, and, perhaps most important, expected sales. This sales projection is typically based on comparative titles (“comps”), previously published books that are similar to the proposed project and likely to appeal to the same book-buying audience. The final decision on whether to acquire is typically made through a committee that includes editorial, publicity, marketing, sales, and sometimes other departments, depending on the house. The advance is the amount the author is paid to write the book (with the agent taking a cut, usually 15 percent). It is based in part on sales projections, which in turn are based on the comp titles. As the word suggests, an advance is not simply a lump-sum payment. It is a preliminary payment of the author’s predicted future earnings—that is to say, the royalties from sales, share of any licensing agreements, and any other profit the author is are expected to make on the book. Advances are typically paid out in three or four installments: the first payment upon signing the contract, the second payment when the full manuscript is delivered, and subsequent payments when the book is published (including publication in different formats, i.e. hardcover and paperback). A writer starts receiving royalties on copies sold only once they “earn out,” meaning they have sold enough copies that their total royalties (and other earnings) exceed their advance. Marketing and publicity departments work together to ensure that the book finds an audience. Generally, marketing works on positioning a book: What genre is it? What social media campaigns should they run? What kind of advertising will the publisher run and on which platforms? How should the book be described and tagged for search engines? Publicists are responsible for soliciting “earned” media coverage (as opposed to advertising) of a book. They ensure that the book is reviewed and that the author is interviewed or featured in print or on radio, podcasts, or television. Publicists also plan and execute book tours, readings, and other events. With the marketing department, the salespeople are often responsible for managing direct relationships with bookstores and booksellers. Sales reps are a direct link to buyers—bookstores, other businesses, libraries, schools—and are responsible for selling the book to these purchasers. For each publishing “season”—often spring, summer, and fall—a house has an internal “launch” of its new books, during which editors present them to marketing and publicity teams and to national sales reps, aiming to get them excited about promoting the latest titles. Internal launches of a book take place about a year before it is set to be published.69 After the launch, publishing houses host sales conferences, where marketing and publicity present a selection of the biggest upcoming titles—and associated highlights and tactics—to all the sales field reps. The marketing and publicity budgets are set during meetings that take place shortly after the launch presentations. Staff from editorial, marketing, and publicity are likely to be present. Also present for these deliberations might be sales managers who work with booksellers (representing, for example, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Costco, and independent distributors). They consider how many copies were purchased from distributors in the past for similar books and discuss sales projections, leading to decisions on how much to spend to push a particular book to the market. The number of copies the publisher plans to publish—the so-called announced first print run (AFP), or announced market distribution (AMD)—is a key indicator of how big the house expects the book to be, and therefore how much of an investment it makes in marketing. If a book receives good early buzz, the AFP may increase and the associated marketing and publicity budgets may rise. The budget size also ties into the size of the author’s advance—a higher advance generally demands a higher budget to earn back that money. Distribution is broadly divided into print and e-book arms. Typically, big publishers possess in-house distribution services with their own sales representatives and warehouses. Most small and medium-sized publishers contract with a book distributor, which agrees to get their books to market (bookstores, book chains, online booksellers, and book wholesalers) in exchange for a percentage of sales. One of the distributor’s main roles is to handle advanced sales of a book to bookstores and libraries before it’s published. Distributors also commonly provide services including marketing, sales, logistics, shipping, order fulfillment, warehousing, and returns. Traditionally, when a book comes off the printer, it is sent to an established book distributor that provides warehousing for the book before it is sold to various stores in the book trade or to a wholesaler (such as Ingram, Baker & Taylor, or Greenleaf), which can also fulfill book orders from bookstores and libraries. There are several companies that operate purely as book distributors. Three of them—the Independent Publishers Group, Ingram Publishers Service, and National Book Network—collectively represent 900 small publishers.70 But small publishers frequently work with one of the Big Five publishers to distribute and sometimes market their titles to bookstores and other sellers.71 "It’s very, very hard for somebody who is not independently wealthy to come into the industry and accrue the power that’s required to actually be the decision-maker later on.” Elizabeth Méndez Berry, Vice President and Executive Editor, One World Section II: Staff Diversity The disproportionate whiteness of the publishing industry is a product of racial disparities that have dominated every professional field in America. But as other industries have made progress in diversifying, one reason that book publishing has lagged is that it “attracts people who don’t need to make money,” said consultant Richard Nash, who formerly headed Soft Skull Press, an independent publisher known for experimental fiction.72 Publishing is notorious for low pay and long hours and is centered in New York City, all of which pose barriers for those who do not have external sources of financial support from their families or savings. These limitations do not hinder people of color alone, but they do tilt the playing field toward people with wealthy families or powerful connections. Because people of color are more likely to lack these advantages, ostensibly race-neutral conditions like low entry-level salaries enshrine systemic inequities. ​​“It’s very, very hard for somebody who is not independently wealthy to come into the industry and accrue the power that’s required to actually be the decision-maker later on,” said Elizabeth Méndez Berry of One World.73 The Numbers Tell the Story Although there are few publicly available numbers that break down the ethnic and demographic makeup of publishing employees, the numbers we do have affirm what numerous interviewees told PEN America: that the publishing industry remains whiter than American society overall. In 2015, Lee & Low Books, a children’s publisher, and researchers at St. Catherine University took the first publicly available baseline survey measuring diversity in the publishing industry as a whole.74 Among the findings: The publishing industry was 79 percent white Executives in the publishing industry were 86 percent white Editorial departments were 82 percent white Sales departments were 83 percent white, and marketing and publicity departments were 77 percent white Book reviewers were 89 percent white Lee & Low completed a follow-up survey in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available.75 Among the findings: The publishing industry was 76 percent white—but the 3 percent difference from the 2015 results “did not meet the bar for statistically significant change” Executives in the publishing industry were 78 percent white; Editorial departments were 85 percent white, a statistically insignificant increase from 2015 Sales departments were 81 percent white, and marketing and publicity departments were 74 percent white Book reviewers were 80 percent white, and literary agents were also 80 percent white While the 2019 survey appeared to show a slight improvement in diversity at the top levels, editorial departments were, the survey’s authors noted, “even more White than before.” The authors concluded that, overall, “the field is just as White today as it was four years ago.”76 In the past couple of years, three of the Big Five houses—PRH, Macmillan, and Hachette Book Group—have published their own internal diversity statistics. PEN America has analyzed these reports and compared their findings. The percentage of white employees differs somewhat, although not massively, among the three houses: PRH’s employees are 74 percent white,77 Macmillan’s 70.5 percent white,78 and Hachette’s 64.6 percent white.79 PRH, Macmillan, and Hachette also disclosed the makeup of their senior management teams. The data indicates that senior managers are disproportionately white, surpassing the percentage of white employees in lower positions.80 Of the five publishing houses, only PRH and Hachette Book Group have publicly disclosed the race and ethnicity of their new hires from the past two years; Simon & Schuster provided PEN America with internal reports from 2020 and 2021 that give this information. The numbers demonstrate that the efforts to increase diversity within the companies has resulted in more hires from underrepresented groups. All of this data helps to confirm the widespread assumption that the industry remains overwhelmingly white, particularly at the higher echelons. Still, publishers’ decisions to release this information publicly is itself encouraging, as it provides a benchmark against which further progress can be measured. A Rising Cohort of Publishers of Color In the past few years, major publishing houses have begun aggressively courting professionals of color.81 Veteran publisher Erroll McDonald82 noted in 2021 that “more people of color have been appointed to senior positions in publishing in the last year than have been appointed in decades.”83 Notably, many of these professionals have come from outside the publishing industry.84 Several of these hires or appointments have been to roles specifically focusing on organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion, including: In January 2021, Hachette hired Carrie Bloxson, former VP of marketing at HarperCollins but more recently the interim CEO of DoSomething.org, as head of diversity and inclusion85 In September 2020, HarperCollins hired Gisselda Nuñez, former executive director and head of diversity strategy at Morgan Stanley, as its newly created VP of DEI86 In September 2020, Simon & Schuster appointed Amanda Armstrong-Frank as its director of workplace culture and diversity initiatives87 Throughout 2020 and after, major publishing houses and other literary institutions also announced a series high-profile senior Black and Latinx editorial hires, among them: In April 2020, Nadxieli Nieto, a board member of Latinx in Publishing who formerly served as program director of the PEN America Literary Awards, joined Flatiron as executive editor88 In July 2020, Lisa Lucas, formerly executive director of the National Book Foundation, was hired as publisher of Pantheon and Schocken Books, two PRH imprints89 Also in July 2020, Krishan Trotman, formerly an executive editor at Hachette, started a new Hachette imprint focused on underrepresented voices called Legacy Lit90 In September 2020, Jamia Wilson, previously the director and publisher of CUNY’s Feminist Press, was named an executive editor at Random House91 In 2020 and 2021, Dana Canedy, LaSharah Bunting, and Aminda Marqués González—all female journalists of color—joined Simon & Schuster. Canedy, a former administrator of the Pulitzer prizes and New York Times journalist,​​ joined as senior vice president and publisher of the Simon & Schuster imprint92 Bunting, a former New York Times editor and director of journalism at the Knight Foundation, joined as vice president and executive editor93 Marqués González, the first Hispanic person and second woman to serve as editor of the Miami Herald, also joined as a vice president and executive editor94 In July 2022, exactly two years from the date of her hiring, Canedy announced that she was leaving Simon & Schuster, reportedly to focus on writing95 In February 2021, author, editor, and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast Jennifer Baker joined Amistad Books, the HarperCollins imprint, as senior editor. In September 2022, Baker revealed on Twitter that her position had been dissolved96 In March 2021, Yahdon Israel, former editor-in-chief of Brooklyn magazine and founder of the book club Literary Swag, joined Simon & Schuster as a senior editor97 In August 2021, Denne Michele Norris was named editor-in-chief at Electric Literature, reportedly making her the “first Black and openly trans editor-in-chief of a major U.S. literary publication”98 In December 2021, former New York Times reporter Adenike Olanrewaju joined HarperCollins as executive director99 In February 2022, Milena Brown, formerly the associate director of marketing at Simon & Schuster, joined Doubleday, part of PRH, as marketing director100 In February 2022, Retha Powers, former assistant director at the CCNY Publishing Certificate Program at City College, joined Henry Holt & Co. as vice president and executive editor101 In July 2022, Carmen Giménez, a queer Latinx poet and editor, was named director of the independent Graywolf Press102 While laudable, this recent wave and the many appointees from other fields highlight the long-standing lack of a hiring pipeline for professionals of color. Speaking to PEN America, One World Editor-In-Chief Chris Jackson asks: “Why is it that these publishing houses have had to look outside to be able to hire diversely at the highest levels? They have not cultivated anyone within the industry to take on these roles.” Compounding his frustration, Jackson said, is “the self-congratulation that they hire people from outside the industry, when in fact that’s a damning fact about their failure.” Jackson, a leading light of the industry who has edited and published such luminaries as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, Heather McGhee, Eddie Huang, and Bryan Stevenson, described himself as part of a previous wave of entry-level diversity hires in the early 2000s, “a whole generation of people that were hired at the same time that were close-knit, young people in publishing.” Many of those hires have since left the industry, he said, “because it was a hostile environment for them.”103 Their pain ripples far beyond their own dismal on-the-job experiences, to the future authors never published, colleagues never mentored, and stories never read. Today, editors of color may worry that this cycle threatens to repeat itself, with editors of color who are brought in but then not supported. Jennifer Baker, the former senior editor at Amistad, critiqued her former employer on Twitter when sharing the news of her firing in late 2022: “I’m mostly dismayed at how the authors I worked with have been disregarded . . . And I remain upset at this treatment of creators of color when they were assured Amistad was a safe home for them/their work.”104 Chris Jackson of One World described himself as part of a previous wave of entry-level diversity hires in the early 2000s, “a whole generation of people that were hired at the same time that were close-knit, young people in publishing.” Many of those hires have since left the industry, he said, “because it was a hostile environment for them.” Narrow pipelines for people of color When Retha Powers was a Howard University undergraduate, she rode a train from New York City to Washington, D.C., and observed a Black woman reading The New York Times Book Review. She asked the woman if she could borrow it, struck up a conversation, and “by the time I got to D.C., she had offered me an internship.” The woman was Marie Dutton Brown, an editor and book agent with more than 40 years’ experience in publishing.105 Today Powers is a vice president and executive editor at Henry Holt & Company.106 Powers’s story is a testament to the importance of person-to-person connections and mentors in publishing. Yet the lack of such relationships is among the major obstacles cited by interviewees that narrow and obstruct the paths to publishing success. Historically, the field has drawn heavily from elite schools that themselves disproportionately recruit young people from privileged backgrounds, replicating broad inequities of both class and race. “Publishing is a very cliquish, network-y, elitist sort of group,” said literary agent Ayesha Pande, who worked as an editor from 1990 to 2005 and today runs her own literary agency with an explicitly anti-racist mission. “They all know and talk to each other, and when people are hiring, they ask each other: ‘Do you know someone?’ ‘Oh yes, my lovely Dartmouth assistant . . . ’ So that absolutely ensures that they stay within the group, within those elite circles.”107 Like the clubby who-you-know phenomenon, other circumstances that may not code as race-based can hinder the progress of would-be publishers of color. In addition to her position at Holt, Powers was until recently the assistant director of City College of New York’s publishing program, started in 1988 by the biracial novelist Walter Mosley to develop a pipeline of publishing employees of color. Powers said that many of the students of color who graduate from the program are a few years older than typical entry-level publishing hires and sometimes have to contend with comments about “being old”—which, Powers said, “on its own might not sound like a microaggression in the sense that it’s not a direct comment about race, but it ultimately ends up being one.” Rather than sauntering from Ivy to Big Five, such students often have to spend years transitioning to publishing or, given the low salaries, take a second job to make ends meet.108 A master’s degree in publishing and experience in bookselling were initially not enough for Ebony LaDelle to land a full-time job. “I worked at Howard, at the bookstore, and then I worked there even after I graduated,” said LaDelle, who until this spring held the post of marketing director at PRH.109 “So I had those few years of publishing-related experience, no different from anyone who is a part-time bookseller in a New York bookstore and got a job as an editorial assistant, which I saw happen all the time.” She remembers going on several interviews that did not lead to job offers: “They felt like I was great, but there were always these reasons why they went with another candidate.”110 After several such dead ends, LaDelle reluctantly enrolled in a masters program at Pace University, but still struggled with finding a job after she graduated. One conversation there stuck with her and helped her process her earlier struggles. “Someone said to me something I’ll never forget: that at the end of the day, the people are just thinking about who they could see themselves getting drinks with. And it’s a slight to yourself, but I do think that they’re looking for who they unconsciously feel most comfortable with, and it seems like more often than not, that’s a white candidate.”111 Zakiya Dalila Harris is the author of the satirical novel The Other Black Girl, a 2021 New York Times bestseller about a young Black woman who contends with racism in the publishing industry.112 While the book is wider ranging, Harris said that she did draw from her own experience feeling like “the only one” during her nearly three years at Knopf/Doubleday as an editorial assistant and assistant editor.113 She saw that most hires had personal connections to the hiring editor, had gone through Columbia’s publishing program—with its high cost as a barrier to entry—or had passed through circles that Harris saw as closed and essentially white. Always in the back of her mind was the idea that she was the sole Black editorial assistant. “I definitely had the thought that this wasn’t the path for me,” she recalled, but remembered thinking, “If I can’t make this work, and I’ve had all these opportunities afforded to me—an MFA, resources, availability of financial help—how hard must it be for someone else to get hired here?”114 These hiring disparities translate into author disparities. Several insiders reported that employees who feel personally connected to a book help generate excitement for it that builds into greater support within the publishing house and in the marketplace. In this way, the composition of the workforce directly translates into whose stories get told and whose don’t. In PEN America’s conversations with representatives of the Big Five houses, executives emphatically touted their initiatives and policies aimed at disrupting this cliquishness, such as internship, associate, and mentorship programs. But even if these efforts succeed, they will take time, and sustained commitment, to bear fruit. Decades of exclusionary hiring and retention failures mean that there are comparatively few mid-career or late-career professionals of color to mentor this rising generation or wield authority in pushing for greater inclusion. If so many of Chris Jackson’s peers hadn’t felt the need to defect, they could now be filling these voids. Several insiders reported that employees who feel personally connected to a book help generate excitement for it that builds into greater support within the publishing house and in the marketplace. In this way, the composition of the workforce directly translates into whose stories get told and whose don't. Employee Retention and Promotion Beyond hiring, several publishing conventions limit the pathways for upward mobility, making it difficult for younger people to graduate into positions of power. “Some places have faced retention issues on the junior level because advancing is so difficult,” said Yuka Igarashi, executive editor at Graywolf. “There’s this convention that people stay editorial assistants for three years, and I’ve heard people repeat that so many times to me. There are other weird publishing conventions, like that you need to do the job for a year before you’re acknowledged for the title, which leads to back promotion.”115 These conventions do not uniquely affect publishing professionals of color. Yet combined with the scarcity of people of color already at the top, they function to inhibit the advancement of employees of color and keep the decision-makers in the industry disproportionately white. Interviewees stress that low turnover at the higher, whiter levels can mean less room for high-level, non-white executives to make changes, execute new ideas, and help promote longer career trajectories for staff of color. Lisa Huang, a sales strategy associate at Macmillan, said: “I feel like because a lot of people in the industry have retained their jobs for 10-plus years, and back then the publishing industry was like 90 percent white . . . , everyone knows each other, so of course everyone is going to vouch for each other for promotion. And because a lot of the younger positions are more diverse than the older positions, we don’t get as many connections and networking to aim for those promotions.”116 Carrie Bloxson of Hachette believes that the need for greater opportunity is “urgent” and that given the slow rate of turnover, “we may need to consider some additional options if we want to see change faster.” Bloxson asks: “Is there room to consider additional roles within the industry? I realize that’s challenging in terms of budget, but that could be a serious gamechanger in terms of opening the pipeline.”117 The lack of upward mobility for younger employees leads some of them to leave the industry. “At one of the publishing houses that I worked at that was very highly respected and highly regarded, most of the senior members of that house died out of their job,” said Lesleigh Irish-Underwood, who worked in publishing for 25 years before leaving in 2013.118 It’s hard, she said, for a young go-getter to be placed in a situation where they’re expected to work for decades without a clear path to seniority.119 An editor who has worked at both major and independent publishers spoke anonymously to offer a blunt appraisal: “I see too many white people stay in their job way too long, like decades too long. . . You see some people dying at their job, and at a certain point we have to get that out of the way.” Too often, when a senior-level staff member does leave, said Amanda Armstrong-Frank of Simon & Schuster, a person of color will be hired as a replacement—but at a lower level because they lack the seniority and years of experience of the person they replace.120 Decades of exclusionary hiring and retention failures mean that there are comparatively few mid-career or late-career professionals of color to mentor this rising generation or wield authority in pushing for greater inclusion. Workplace Realities for Professionals of Color There are other insidious impediments to advancement. Virtually all of the interviewees reported or affirmed that they found working in the industry isolating and emotionally taxing. While stress and strain are common to all work environments, non-white publishing employees told PEN America that they had experienced incidents and patterns involving exclusion, disrespect, and the expectation that they should do more work than white colleagues. “I’ve seen across my career the struggles of my Black colleagues to stay in a business that always felt hostile, not built for us, in the rare events that we were hired at all,” Chris Jackson said in a 2020 speech at the Center for Fiction.121 Research backs up these observations. One substantial study, the Workplace Racism Survey, conducted in 2018 by the nonprofits People of Color in Publishing and Latinx in Publishing,122 surveyed 200 professionals who had worked in various departments at publishing houses, both independent presses and the Big Five. The majority of respondents were entry-level professionals, with fewer than five years’ experience and more than half having worked at a large publisher. Among the survey’s findings: 92 percent cited occasions on which they were the only person of color in a meeting 72.9 percent said they had experienced microaggressions at work 61 percent said they felt they needed to modify their actions, appearance, or other aspects of themselves to fit in with the culture. Examples of such accommodations included how they wore their natural hair, the food they brought for lunch, the gestures they used, and how they conducted themselves socially 88.6 percent said they felt it was their job to educate coworkers about diversity A third said they felt the need to mask their opinions so as not to be seen as too aggressive and—as the report authors described it—“to avoid being negatively marked as the ‘diversity police’” Though the survey was conducted about three years before its June 2021 release, Nancy Mercado, a board member of Latinx in Publishing, said that “based on the reactions we received online to the survey results and in personal conversations, it’s clear that while some changes may have been made, the overall, underlying problems persist.” She lists among them “low salaries, toxic culture, lack of timely promotions, employees being generally overworked, and an industry steeped in whiteness.”123 Many interviewees recount stories or experiences that underscore these systemic problems. Retha Powers recalled hearing from her City College students and alumni of color that they are told they don’t have the right attitude “if they’re not chipper all the time”—an idea echoed by survey respondents—and that “when they see their white counterparts slacking off, they feel they don’t have that option and will, at every step, need to work harder than white colleagues.”124 Malaika Adero, an author, book developer, and literary agent who is Black, relates a story about a microaggression that she experienced in 2012 from a senior-level colleague at Scribner. Outside the office, a white colleague she’d never had a conversation with grabbed her hair. “She said, ‘Oh, I hope you don’t mind, I’ve been dying to do this,’” Adero remembers. Then, in early 2021, this same, now-former colleague invited Adero to work on a project with her. Adero said that she was open to working with this woman, but “I felt like no matter what I did with her moving forward, I needed to clear the air on this, and so we talked about it, and I told her, . . . ‘The most significant encounter we ever had was when you grabbed my hair in the street.’ And she interrupted me and said, ‘Oh, you didn’t mind did you?’ Well, I absolutely minded.”125 “Ad Hoc Sensitivity Readers” Some interviewees shared their frustration at what they saw as a widespread expectation that they should only or automatically be expected to champion writers of the same racial or ethnic background. Such pigeonholing has come from agents pitching book proposals, colleagues, and higher-ups. “You become a sort of de facto ambassador to a group of people,” the “sole representative of the Black Man Society,” said Todd Hunter, who spent a decade at Atria and is now the founder and CEO of Avenue Literary Services agency. Hunter said that at times he chafed at this role, yet he believed that if he didn’t play it, there was no one else who could. “The publisher doesn’t necessarily have to invest or engage in that audience,” he said. “They just use you to do it.”126 One Black editor who works at an independent press, who requested anonymity to speak more freely, reports similar experiences and similar mixed feelings. “I am a Black publicist who works on many race titles,” the editor said. “And sometimes that’s great, and other times I would be interested in not shouldering so many race-related publicity campaigns. Sometimes it kind of lands as ‘Black hire, Blackness, Black books.’ And sometimes that is a really gratifying and satisfying experience, and other times it becomes a typecasting and pigeonholing experience.”127 Cherise Fisher, a literary agent at Wendy Sherman Associates and former senior editor at Simon & Schuster, believes that typecasting professionals of color reduces broad arrays of experience to simple black and white. “It’s important to have a lot of different types of people of color,” Fisher said. She cites industry leaders like Chris Jackson of One World, Rakia Clark of Mariner, and Dawn Davis, formerly of Simon & Schuster, as more than just representatives of their race: “Those three individuals have their interests. Our experiences as Black people are so multiple. You would never say to a white editor, ‘Here’s a book by a white author. I’m sure you’re going to love it.’ Is she white from New York, white from Wisconsin, white from California? I mean, the fact that [people] recognize the diverse experiences and interests of the white editor but think a Black editor wants it because it’s by a Black person is just problematic.”128 Such typecasting is not only presumptuous but also creatively limiting. What if, say, a Black editor wants to work on books about cats, or cars, or science, or electoral politics? Or a Hispanic publicist wants to promote a book about classical music? “The verve and excitement that I could bring to a race-related title I could also bring to something not related to race,” said one Black editor.129 Aminda Marqués Gonzalez, who in 2020 left a leadership role at Miami Herald Media to join Simon & Schuster as a VP and executive editor, said that she has received many Cuban book proposals due to her heritage. “That’s fine because I have an interest and expertise,” she said, “but I don’t want to just be ‘the Cuba book editor.’”130 Another editor of color, speaking anonymously, said, “Sometimes people feel that because a person is Black, they will always like all of the Black books, as if they didn’t have their own taste, their own expertise.”131 Many interviewees say that, while they are often treated as “authorities” when it comes to diversity initiatives or books written by authors of color, they enjoy less respect and acknowledgment of their expertise when it comes to their core publishing, editorial, and marketing acumen. “No matter what specific point of view or range of interests we articulate,” said Chris Jackson, “both in terms of the work and our careers, we’re often meant to serve a racial function within the company.” Jackson said that this dismissal can extend to entire publishing brands. “One World publishes award-winning books and bestsellers,” he said. “We are a publisher of exceptional literary excellence. But I find in conversations with people in the industry that when they describe our work, they describe it as encompassing ‘writers of color’ in this very meaningless way, that fails to speak to the particular point of view or quality or even range of subjects and genres we publish—i.e., the way any other publisher would be described.”132 As a result, “any success we experience is discounted or even erased.” In recounting these experiences, publishing professionals who spoke to PEN America noted that assumptions of racial expertise and expectations of greater diligence do not come with real organizational power, higher pay, or more opportunities for promotion. Nor do professionals of color receive rewards for educating their white coworkers on race—an unpaid task that is not unique to the publishing sector but is prevalent there. The Workplace Racism Survey found that 86 percent of respondents “cited unfair or extra workloads placed on them in order to educate their colleagues about racism, while 47.4 percent said they had been asked to act as ad hoc sensitivity readers without compensation.”133 PEN’s interviewees also described pressure to “overprove” or “overexplain” to others in the industry why a book by an author of color could be commercially successful—denying them the deference and respect granted to white employees of comparable stature. Several editors say that they commonly find themselves doing extra research for books by authors of color both to validate their own judgment and to rebut presumptions that they are championing those books only out of an assumed racial affinity. “There was a literary agent in particular, a Black female, where my boss made the assumption that I was supporting this project because I was her friend,” said Malaika Adero, formerly of Simon & Schuster. “When, you know, I’m a little embarrassed to say that I didn’t even like the woman and we weren’t friends.” She adds that an editor at Viking once said something about Adero’s boss at Amistad, a Black man, that “suggested that she assumed we were lovers.”134 The need to constantly justify and defend their recommendations and decisions contributes to “burnout” for employees of color, said Rockelle Henderson, who runs Rock Inked, a publishing consulting company. Henderson worked at HarperCollins from 2000-2006 and served as the associate publisher at Amistad—an imprint of HarperCollins focused on publishing Black authors—from 2003 to 2006. Henderson said that she left her job at Amistad and founded her own company in part because this dynamic took a toll on her. “One of the things in the industry that I didn’t have was someone in marketing who came before me who taught the industry what it was to market to Black readers but also to publish books by Black people that white people would want to read,” she said. Besides the onus of “having to explain why these books should be published, why certain authors should be published,” she became exhausted by the “the education of helping other people understand what it is we’re doing with our publishing program. And it wasn’t even just the in-house people. It was the industry as a whole. When somebody at Barnes & Noble can say, ‘If you don’t put a Black person on the cover, how will anybody know this is a Black book?’—why does this have to be a Black book? Those arguments went on, that was every title argument. That gets exhausting. It was distribution, it was sales, it was retail book buyers, it was across the board, an industry-wide problem.”135 Henderson’s observations dovetail with the findings of the Workplace Racism Survey, whose authors conclude that “the burden on BIPOC to educate white colleagues” about race and racism “is an onerous task that contributes to burnout.”

In Rethinking Capitalist Development, Sanyal claims that postcolonial capitalism is distinct from transnational or global capitalism because of the specific role primitive accumulation plays in postcolonial development. Rather than a process that subsumes pre-capital, postcolonial capitalist development produces pre-capital such that pre-capital is not outside of but rather an "internal 'other' of capital" (39). Sanyal thus redesignates pre-capital as "non-capital" to mark its immanence to capital (39). Given the immanence of non-capital, postcolonial capitalism is inherently heterogeneous (composed of capital and non-capital), and its surplus populations are permanently excluded because concurrence forecloses those populations' incorporation.5 In the case of Thailand, Sanyal's theory applies not only to those places that had been formally colonized but also to any capitalist formation characterized by what he calls a reversal of primitive accumulation, by which he means the return of surplus capital to the nominally pre-capitalist labor power (59).

To manage this permanently excluded population, capitalist development—historically mobilized to incorporate surplus populations—activates [End Page 119] a process whereby surplus "is not transformed into new capital but transferred to the surplus population to constitute the conditions of existence of non-capitalist production" ( 59). According to Sanyal, the goal of postcolonial development is to "rehabilitate" and politically manage the dispossessed into informal, non-capitalist modes of production by providing them access to productive resources (127). The power of the postcolonial economic order "lies in its ability, not to annihilate its 'others', but to negotiate the world of difference" (8). It is a complex hegemonic form "in which dominance expresses itself through difference rather than monism" (207). This negotiation of difference involves the production of new subjects and subjectivities that appear to take the same form as those produced under capital but that have different ends. The subjectivities produced within (oriented to accumulation) and outside (oriented to consumption) of capital are thus uncannily proximate but non-identical (127). To maintain this uncanny proximity, multicultural recognition functions as a virtualizing mode of post-colonial governance deployed to hail these subjects as if they were equal partners in cultural exchange, thereby masking the raced, gendered, and sexualized modes of domination needed to produce and maintain the surplus population in perpetuity.

In Rethinking Capitalist Development, Sanyal claims that postcolonial capitalism is distinct from transnational or global capitalism because of the specific role primitive accumulation plays in postcolonial development. Rather than a process that subsumes pre-capital, postcolonial capitalist development produces pre-capital such that pre-capital is not outside of but rather an "internal 'other' of capital" (39). Sanyal thus redesignates pre-capital as "non-capital" to mark its immanence to capital (39). Given the immanence of non-capital, postcolonial capitalism is inherently heterogeneous (composed of capital and non-capital), and its surplus populations are permanently excluded because concurrence forecloses those populations' incorporation. In the case of Thailand, Sanyal's theory applies not only to those places that had been formally colonized but also to any capitalist formation characterized by what he calls a reversal of primitive accumulation, by which he means the return of surplus capital to the nominally pre-capitalist labor power (59).

To manage this permanently excluded population, capitalist development—historically mobilized to incorporate surplus populations—activates [End Page 119] a process whereby surplus "is not transformed into new capital but transferred to the surplus population to constitute the conditions of existence of non-capitalist production" ( 59). According to Sanyal, the goal of postcolonial development is to "rehabilitate" and politically manage the dispossessed into informal, non-capitalist modes of production by providing them access to productive resources (127). The power of the postcolonial economic order "lies in its ability, not to annihilate its 'others', but to negotiate the world of difference" (8). It is a complex hegemonic form "in which dominance expresses itself through difference rather than monism" (207). This negotiation of difference involves the production of new subjects and subjectivities that appear to take the same form as those produced under capital but that have different ends. The subjectivities produced within (oriented to accumulation) and outside (oriented to consumption) of capital are thus uncannily proximate but non-identical (127). To maintain this uncanny proximity, multicultural recognition functions as a virtualizing mode of post-colonial governance deployed to hail these subjects as if they were equal partners in cultural exchange, thereby masking the raced, gendered, and sexualized modes of domination needed to produce and maintain the surplus population in perpetuity.

Published in the midst of the Asian debt crisis, Gold gives an account of Thailand's speculative real estate boom and the attendant cultural and economic logics that led to the 1997 financial collapse. In response to this crisis, Thailand shifted its currency from a fixed exchange rate pegged to the US dollar to a floating exchange rate subject to the vagaries of the global currency market.3 As an effect of virtualization, "there is no longer a fixed scale that measures value" (Hardt and Negri 356), making the value of floating currencies "maximally abstract yet real" ( 58). This virtualized value, typically associated with the financialization of capital, is produced through the persistent circulation of currencies unmoored from commodity production and fixed relations with other currencies. That is, the value of floating currency is produced in a "place where time gains the upper hand over space, where relations start to matter more than mere things, [and where] power's location is less important than its velocity through temporary obstacles" ( 24). While, as Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee note, the "circulation systems" of global capitalism are leading to significant cultural transformations (10), many theorists insist that these transformations do not result in a homogenous culture of global capitalism ( 1). Rather, cultural transformation is marked by locally specific incorporations of globalizing processes differentiated by heterogeneous scales, sites, and histories (Mezzadra 1). Furthermore, such cultural transformation is not merely a byproduct of economic determinants. Economic and cultural values constitute each other such that cultural difference is foundational in the production of capitalist value (Spivak 229) and is thus inseparable from the economy ( 1). Chua's narrator gestures to this relationship [End Page 112] when he states, "Economists explain how production takes place in relations between classes of people. But they never explain how those relationships evolve in the first place" (57). Using cultural forms to show how global capitalism produces economic value through the social production of "restrictive particularity" ( 27)—that is, differences produced to foreclose access to citizenship, higher-wage labor, and so on—queer diasporic critique offers a frame for understanding how labor power is devalued or rendered surplus in and through evolving particularities of sexual, racial, gender, and national difference. In a queer diasporic framework, culture indexes heterogeneity in the putatively homogenous domain of global capitalism. This heterogeneity marks not only the differential racialization of distinct populations (Hong and Ferguson 3) but also the "differential relationships" in nominally homogenous racialized populations (Lowe 67). To put this in the narrator's terms, queer diasporic critique—and, by extension, the queer of color critical project it contributes to—puts into relief non-heteronormative sexualities to explain how differential relationships, those where power is unequally distributed, "evolve in the first place" (Chua 57). I draw on queer diasporic critique not to emphasize how postcolonial capitalism "short circuits the politics of queer diaspora" but rather to emphasize the queer diasporic politics of postcolonial capitalism ( 10). In this account, queerness is politically ambiguous. The partiality, non-identity, and subjectlessness of queer, as a term with "no fixed political referent" (1), can as easily be the means of social regulation as of radical possibility. Thus, rather than excavate the potential of "unauthorized" subjectivities purportedly "beyond" capitalist political and economic formations, as David Eng suggests (Feeling 15), I use queer diasporic critique as a means of identifying ruptures in postcolonial capital's negotiation of heterogeneity. Multicultural recognition is a technique of virtualization that produces cultural value by rendering sexual, racial, gender, and ethno-national differences as substitutable and persistently in motion. It frames one order of difference in terms of another, compressing temporalities and geographies. As Brian Massumi explains, the virtual is a realm of potential where things "happen too quickly to have happened, actually," [End Page 113] where "futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness," and "where outsides are infolded" (30). As such, the virtual is both materially embedded and beyond materiality, historical yet outside of time. With their values produced in dynamic relation, socio-cultural differences are floating currencies that mediate social exchange such that the racialized, sexualized, and gendered subjectivities posited by postcolonial capitalism are virtualized by dint of the way those differences are framed as if they are the same. When read as a queer diasporic critique of postcolonial itineraries of multicultural recognition and the cultural forms that naturalize them, Gold offers a frame for understanding how this virtual equivalence "is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect" (Massumi 30) while nominal similarities of sexuality, race, and labor mark dispersal and disjunction. I. Toward a Queer Diasporic Critique of Postcolonial Capitalism In contradistinction to neocolonial travel narratives, Gold highlights the protocols of multicultural recognition that underwrite postcolonial capitalist governmental regimes while disrupting facile literary tropes involving encounters between cosmopolitan citizens and postcolonial subjects. As Chih-ming Wang notes, Gold also displaces multiculturalism as a sign of Euro-American liberal modernity and instead locates it as "an organic formation" of local Southeast Asian histories and "everyday practice" (20). Throughout the novel, the narrator deploys tropes of identity (e.g., gay hustler, hypereroticized Asian, returning son) in hope that his various performances of sexuality, race, kinship, and class will set in motion forms of recognition to provide him with a sense of wholeness. Yet these performances of organic, geographically delimited identities fail to achieve their desired effects, leaving the narrator with a feeling of fragmentation.

The rise of racial capitalism also brought with it new gendered relations of power through an idealized distinction between so-called men's productive and women's social reproductive labors—a split that was never a reality for poor and racialized families (Glenn, 2012). Indeed, scholars have argued that capital accumulation was only possible through the invisibilized labor of women and enslaved people, in terms of both the biological reproduction of the labor force and in the everyday labor of social reproduction (scholars have called this an ongoing form of primitive accumulation) (Federici, 2014; Mies, 2014; Weinbaum, 2019). The latter half of the 20th century saw a hardening of capitalist logics, globally. During this period, structural adjustment programs, which were rolled out in response to the global debt crisis of the 1980s, destroyed the last vestiges of the commons and further devolved social reproduction to individuals and their families (Federici, 2014). In turn, much of the labor of social reproduction—the “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” (Katz, 2011, p. 711)—shifted more deeply onto 6 of 15 NEELY and LOPEZ under-paid, over-worked, and highly exploited care laborers as more and more women entered the workforce. Yet much of the mainstream scholarship on care and care ethics is Euro- or Western-centric (Green & Lawson, 2011; Raghuram, 2016), lacking an intersectional analysis (Hankivsky, 2014; Raghuram, 2019), and ignoring the long history of Black feminists attention to care. Black feminist care analysis has always been intersectional and accounted for racial capitalism. These scholars and activists recognize racial capitalism as the structure against which an ethic of care must be mobilized in order to exceed the care-less-ness of what Patricia Hill Collins (2002) calls the “matrix of domination.”3 Often grounded in othermothering and revolutionary mothering, Black feminist care ethics is rooted in the practices of women caring for children intergenerationally and across the community—a practice that stretches back to West Africa and to slavery. Othermothering is the revolutionary act of challenging western conceptions of family and care, enfolding it into social and political activism (Butler, 2019; James, 1993; McDonald, 1997). Black feminist care ethics begins from culture work, or “the entire way a community organizes to nurture itself and future generations” (Reagon, 1996, pp. 168, 170; see also; Barry & Grady, 2019). As an expression of culture work, othermothering is “the bridge work that requires confronting the very real barriers that oppression places in our way and also finding love and power by facing the barriers that divide us from each other across geopolitical divides” (Gumbs et al., 2016, pp. 5, 6). As such, it refuses the insistence on the gender binary, offering, instead, potentiality (Spillers, 2003) by defying neoliberal temporalities and individualization that are grounded in hetero-normative, patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism (Crawley, 2020). As Sosa-Provencio (2016) writes, “...caring is necessarily political, transformative, and rooted in the collective uplift of those struggling to overcome these forces of oppression in their daily lives” (p. 306). Care ethics is a politics of relationality and as such it is necessarily multi-scalar, moving beyond neoliberal capitalism's insistence on the atomized individual and family and a vision of care-as-protection. The global protests against anti-Black violence in the summer of 2020 and increasing interest in police abolition were a direct recrimination of the pervasiveness of the masculinist formation of care-as-protection. “Care,” in this frame, is violence. Abolition movements are a call to shift this framing toward building communities of care and support, toward a Black feminist vision of care (Okechukwu, 2021). Black feminists offer an approach to care that always recognizes the influence of racial capitalism. With this framing, care ethics pushes for an attention to “mutual vulnerability,” transformation, and mutual responsibility (Nash, 2018). For a feminist care ethics to fulfill its promise as a transformative ethos, it must center race, racism, and racial capitalism as the ground from which care and relationships emerge. As Christina Sharpe (2016) puts it, this care is bound up in “wake work,” where “care in the wake [is] a problem for thinking of and for Black non/being in the world...[it] is a work that insists and performs that thinking needs care (‘all thought is Black thought’) and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake” (p. 5). This wake work necessarily entails “multispecies assemblages” of care that move beyond the “the racial and colonial logics of the abstract universal anthropos” upon which the current ecological crisis is pinned (Davis et al., 2019, p. 3). This notion of the “Anthropocene,” scholars argue, flattens humanity to a singular monolith and fails to account for the uneven impacts of the climate crisis, and we would add, global pandemics. It also fails to consider whose labor and lives were, and still are, enrolled in these processes under violence, oppression, exploitation, and expropriation (Davis et al., 2019; see also H.; Davis & Todd, 2017; Karera, 2019; Pulido, 2018). Indeed, as Françoise Vergés argues (2017, p. 74), the Anthropocene and the politics of climate change rest on “the politics of nonraciality beneath which…lurk more sinister shadows of the racial everyday and persistent institutional and structural racisms—and racial capitalism.” As with PEH, this attention to non-human entanglements, especially in the context of racial capitalism, helps us understand why certain people (marginalized care givers who disproportionately have preexisting conditions) get sicker from COVID-19. When combined, the literature on PEH and racial capitalism helps to explain the pandemic in the context of anti-Blackness, while, as we turn to next, Black feminist work on care offers us a possible new way forward.

In reading Butler’s fictions as contributing to and nuancing a black feminist philosophy of history keyed to the rise of neoliberalism, I treat it as a meditation on evolving forms of racialized and gendered dispossession as these are recalibrated to changes in the mode of (re)production the rise of contemporary biocapitalism and consolidated by a postracial ideology that disavows the salience of processes of reproductive racialization to the extraction of life itself on which biocapitalism depends. To further develop this reading of Butler’s literary fictions, throughout this chapter I draw on Raymond Williams’s ideas about “dominant,” “residual,” and “emergent” cultural formations.10 Though Williams did not consider racial or gendered power when he developed these analytical concepts in the 1970s, his ideas about how cultural formations mediate historical and thus material processes resonates with Butler’s ideas about mediation as expressed in her novels about enslavement. As Williams’s conceptual trilogy suggests, literature not only allows for apprehension of dominant cultural formations; it also allows us to access “residual” (formed in the past but still “active” in the present) and “emergent” (“alternative” and yet often inchoate) cultural formations that continuously exert pressure on, compete with, and reshape dominant ones. Whereas residual formations are routinely incorporated into dominant ones through processes of reinterpretation, dilution, projection, inclusion, and exclusion, emergent cultural formations reveal “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship” (123). Emergent formations come in two varieties: those that are elements of some new phase of the dominant culture, and those that are “substantially alternative or oppositional to it” and thus connected directly, if unevenly, to the emergence of new social classes (123). When we take up Williams’s conceptual terminology, we see more clearly how Butler’s fictions render visible the incorporation and reinterpretation of racial slavery as a residual formation within the dominant biocapitalist processes that are depicted. Put in the language used elsewhere in this book, Butler’s fictions render visible the sublation (read the negation and the preservation) of slavery in biocapitalism. In giving expression to more than one cultural formation and representing more than one economic formation (or, perhaps more aptly, in representing what Stuart Hall would describe as complexly articulated economic formations, including slavery and biocapitalism), Butler’s fictions reveal the contestation that goes on among the array of reproductive cultural projects that are currently in existence.11 In so doing they make visible the afterlife of reproductive slavery in the form of a cultural residue that is alive and well in contemporary biocapitalism. And they reveal the possibility of opposition to biocapitalism and neoliberalism in the form of emergent cultural processes. These emergent cultural processes might ideally challenge the hegemony, by rejecting the ideologies that secure the smooth functioning of racial capitalism and biocapitalism through elevation of neoliberal market values in all social interactions and celebration of the obsolescence of race. By refusing to represent clean breaks and discrete historical epochs, by insisting on complex economic structuration, Butler’s fictions reveal multiple modes of production vying for hegemony. And they reveal that an active and ongoing contest for reproductive hegemony is always already under way. Recognizing (albeit without citing) the Benjaminian maxim “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins,” Butler uses fiction as a weapon in a war against “the enemy” (read: historicism), refusing, through creation of her various dystopian worlds, to allow the enemy “to be victorious.”12 She does not pander to myths of progressive departure, or to the inevitability of defeat. Instead she offers us an array of representations and a philosophy of history in view of which she invites readers to grasp the material complexity in which we have been and continue to be immersed. In so doing she urges her readers to stop wasting time—to jump into what amounts to an ideological fray. After all, the outcome will determine our collective future.

In reading black feminist production as the elaboration of a philosophy of history, this chapter treats black feminist accounts of women in slavery as mediating the economic conflicts and contradictions that emerged during the three decades in which black feminism was produced. Though I follow other scholars in recognizing black feminism’s relationship to the long civil rights movement, dominant white iterations of the feminist movement, the dismantling of welfare, and the expansion of the carceral state, I also offer a different orientation to it. By keying black feminism not only to those political movements with which black feminists were expressly involved but also to the emergence of the new markets in reproductive labor and products discussed in chapter 1, I demonstrate its responsiveness to the ascent of biocapitalism and the neoliberal rationality that accompanied it. While it is true that only a small number of the black feminists writing in the period that interests me expressly treated the emergence of what were then referred to as the “new” reproductive technologies and surrogacy, I suggest that all black feminist writing produced in the period is both proleptic and analeptic—it reflects and refracts the commodification of human reproduction, its processes and products in slave racial capitalism, and in the present biocapitalist moment of writing. What my approach to black feminism implies for the arguments set forth thus far is twofold. It behooves us to explore black feminist interventions into the debate about surrogacy and the emergence of biocapitalism, as I did in chapter 1. And it behooves us to examine how a robust black feminist philosophy of history emerged and came to constitute a significant contribution to the black radical tradition—a contribution that pushes us toward theorization of women’s sexual and reproductive dispossession and insurgency in the slave past and in the moment in which the slave past is recollected. As I noted in my introduction, in dominant accounts of the black radical tradition it is narrated as male. In histories of the long civil rights movement a familiar cast of male activists and intellectuals is lionized, and their oratorical and scholarly contributions celebrated and parsed. In genealogies that reach back in time, including Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, those positioned as the key contributors to the tradition are men. As important as is critique of the gender politics of the construction of black radicalism (as others have already pointed out),13 in the present context I wish to take up a different aspect of the black radical tradition’s masculinism: the presumptive gender neutrality of two of the central concepts BLACK FEMINISM as a around which it has been oriented, the general category of “labor” and the specific category of “slave labor.” Because Robinson’s contributions have been so influential and, not least, because they underpin the idea of racial capitalism that I engage throughout this book, I begin by limning the problem of masculinist analytical categories in Robinson’s work and in one of the watershed texts upon which his elaboration of black Marxism is based. As Robinson argues, Du Bois’s 1935 tome, Black Reconstruction, is an epic treatise on the history of American slavery, the Civil War, and the failures of Reconstruction.14 It is also the first text in which Marxism is expressly employed to situate slavery as capitalism and to cast the slave as a “worker” whose involvement in the Civil War constitutes a “strike” against the conditions of work and thus against slavery. As Robinson explains in a 1977 essay that appeared in the Black Scholar and presaged his more wellknown reading of Du Bois, published nearly a decade later, Du Bois’s recasting of the slave as “the black worker” caught up in an eruptive moment is an important materialist move and a major innovation on traditional Marxism.15 By casting the slave as a worker Du Bois retooled the idea of the paid laborer as the model proletariat. And he rendered the unpaid, hyperexploited slave the centerpiece of a black revolution against slavery and thus against racial capitalism.

Making the utopian vision come to fruition will require a few things. Lisa Lucas, publisher of the art and politics magazine , and a woman of color, says, “There is this ever-growing, snowballing movement of people who are interested in alternate storytelling forms for writers of color and for readers of color.” But she says the movement requires growth outside the creative spotlight, among what she calls “administrators of color.” These are the expediters who drive the business decisions surrounding entertainment—the producers, editors, and owners. Administrators of color would look to cultivate new audiences instead of relying on sales metrics that tend to exclude marginalized voices. The notion could be extended to the boardrooms of major publishing houses and studios, neglected spaces for advancing progressive causes. Afrofuturism will also thrive when writers immerse themselves in technology in their studies or in their work. Speculative fiction can succeed through narrative discipline and intellectual curiosity alone, while sci-fi subgenres like space opera tend to be written by engineers. It helps to know some physics when you’re writing about a spaceship that is five kilometers long. Only about of engineers at Facebook and Google are black Americans. And this has been my experience working in tech, too—meeting a black employee is like happening upon a crocus peeking through the snowmelt. A truly transformative Afrofuturism would find creators confronting prejudices within black culture. They would question laws that force LGBTQ writers , or fight gender discrimination couched under arguments of tradition. It could become a liberation movement of the imagination for all people. This utopian vision of Afrofuturism is enticing, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Right now there are a number of very real challenges for Afrofuturism to overcome in order to take hold in mainstream culture. In the dystopian vision, no one on the business end of creative industries—the agents, marketers, publishers, producers—takes risks on creators of color. Artists might be forced to revert to addressing explicitly black themes. “We have to write a slave narrative,” Lisa Lucas said, “or a story about civil rights, a retelling of Rosa Parks, some kind of better understanding of what it was like in 1960 or 1830, or what it was like on a slave boat.” It’s a mistake, too, to think that crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Patreon can solve the problem of structural exclusion. The impressive speculative fiction collection was created from a Kickstarter campaign. The volunteer-run Tumblr blog , which is named for the fictional African kingdom in Marvel’s Black Panther series, publishes an incredible volume of content about black comics and science. Founder Lionel Queen recently to support underrepresented creators. It’s a great idea, well worth supporting, but an Afrofuturism that relies upon crowdfunding to survive is dystopian. It means there’s no sustainable investment. Afrofuturism also needs to overcome its geographic myopia. Nnedi Okarafor, one of the most prominent science fiction writers working today, said: “My issue with Afrofuturism is that it has traditionally been based and rooted far too much in American culture.” She champions what she calls “Africa-based sci-fi.” Authors such as , , and are writing engaging fiction set on the continent. But it’s dangerous to oversimplify this trend. To my knowledge, not a single black sci-fi writer has been published by a major publishing house in Africa, and most writers working in Africa-based sci-fi hail from South Africa or Nigeria—not coincidentally, the largest economies on the continent.