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This essay advances a materialist theory of race. In my view, race oppression dialectically intersects with the exploitative logic of advanced capitalism, a regime which deploys race in the interest of surplus accumulation. Thus, race operates at the (economic) base and therefore produces cultural and ideological effects at the superstructure; in turn, these effects—in very historically specific way—interact with and ideologically justify the operations at the economic base . In a sense then, race encodes the totality of contemporary capitalist social relations, which is why race cuts across a range of seemingly disparate social sites in contemporary US society. For instance, one can mark race difference and its discriminatory effects in such diverse sites as health care, housing/real estate, education, law, job market, and many other social sites. However, unlike many commentators who engage race matters, I do not isolate these social sites and view race as a local problem, which would lead to reformist measures along the lines of either legal reform or a cultural-ideological battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep the existing socio-economic arrangements intact; instead, I foreground the relationality of these sites within the exchange mechanism of multinational capitalism.

Consequently, I believe, the eradication of race oppression also requires a totalizing political project: the transformation of existing capitalism—a system which produces difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying ideological narratives that justify the resulting social inequality. Hence, my project articulates a transformative theory of race—a theory that reclaims revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing toward a post-racist society. In other words, the transformation from actually existing capitalism into socialism constitutes the condition of possibility for a post-racist society—a society free from racial and all other forms of oppression. By freedom, I do not simply mean a legal or cultural articulation of individual rights as proposed by bourgeois race theorists. Instead, I theorize freedom as a material effect of emancipated economic forms. 

Because black radicals never had the political capacity to challenge for state power or a broad and deep popular base, the movement’s class tensions seldom surfaced in political debate. By the mid-1960s the racial-democratic tendency’s cultural force and institutional clout – including its incorporation within postwar liberalism – had made its commitment to racial redistribution practically hegemonic as the standard of justice and equality for black Americans. In retrospect, that moment marked the birth of antiracism as a claim to a discrete politics. The ambiguity and murkiness in black popular front radicalism regarding intra-racial class dynamics undercut the ability of social-democratic advocates to mount appropriate critical responses. For the most part, such advocates also fell back on a discourse of racial authenticity and objections that the strategies and objectives of the emerging political class did not properly represent the interests of the ‘community’ or the ‘people’. The conceptual limitations imposed by that fetishized racial populism testified to and reinforced professional-managerial class hegemony in black politics. Partly from ideological purblindness, partly from material imperatives, the expressions of political radicalism that purported to dissent from the consolidating new black class politics – openly idealist cultural nationalism, a new, anti-imperialist Pan-Africanism, and a potted Marxism-Leninism – defined their radicalism through withdrawal from mundane political dynamics and embrace of one or another flavour of millenarian revolutionary catechism.41 Some black radicals, particularly in the 1970s moment of the largely Maoist New Communist movement in the US, strove to meld their fundamentally nationalist discourse of national liberation with a Marxist anti-imperialism. The Black Panther Party had been an early expression of this inclination.42 However, that turn retained the crucial assumptions of national liberation discourse, especially the most significant one – the nationalist premise that posits the group as an authentically communitarian and singular ‘people’ united against external oppression, and represents the character of class struggle within the population (e.g., black Americans) as that ‘people’ arrayed against inauthentic ‘misleaders’ or a co-opted, comprador element. That view originated in the ‘domestic colonialism’ analogy that emerged from some radicals’ early 1960s identification with Third World insurgencies. The great irony of this apparently radical tendency is that the communitarian populism on which it rested worked mainly to obscure class dynamics within black politics. It is a marker of retreat from programmatic commitment to social transformation that many who consider themselves on the left accept the stance that racial politics is more radical or inclusive than class politics and that pursuit of socialism is suspect on identitarian grounds. Ascriptive identity becomes the primary basis for political commitment, and solidarity on the basis of who we are trumps solidarity on the basis of what we believe only when the left no longer has a transformative vision around which to cohere as a basis for political judgment. Antiracism does not have an affirmative agenda, a fact that complements a left that by and large has little clarity of social vision itself. Antiracist politics mimes radicalism with posture and performative evocation of earlier insurgent politics like Black Power radicalism in the US and the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but with complete erasure of the class and political-economic tensions in which those movements were immersed. CONCLUSION Positing a singular black community or racial political aspiration has had longreaching effects on black politics, and leftist scholarship on black Americans, that have facilitated accommodation to neoliberal imperatives often while intending quite the opposite. Proliferation of a literature that presumes a singular ‘black freedom movement’, ‘black liberation movement’ or even a ‘long civil rights movement’ divests black Americans’ political activity of its tensions and structural contradictions. The effect is to de-historicize examination of black politics. Politically, this tendency has obscured thirty years or more of steadily lowered expectations for what can be gained from political action. This was exemplified clearly during the 2016 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination when in South Carolina, longtime Georgia Congressman and former civil rights movement icon John Lewis and his fellow black Congressman James Clyburn from South Carolina denounced the Sanders campaign’s proposal for free public higher education as irresponsible because it sent the bad message that people should expect free things – that is, decommodified public goods and services – from government. ‘Nothing is free in America’, Lewis snarled.43 Left-neoliberal exuberance surrounding the Democratic National Convention’s official nomination of Hillary Clinton as its presidential candidate made undeniably clear that antiracism and other identitarian expressions are more than simply compatible with neoliberalism but are most meaningfully active components of its ideological reproduction. Dara Lind, writing in vox.com, exulted that ‘a commitment to diversity has become the [Democratic] party’s unifying principle’, and Jeet Heer gushed in The New Republic that ‘the Democratic Party opened their arms to Republicans – without compromising their liberal values’.44 Identity and social liberalism in this happy vision will completely override the Democrats’ enduring class loyalties, and contradictions. There are two final ironies to note regarding the left embrace of antiracist politics. First, all politics in a class society is class politics. Antiracism is not exempt from that reality. What its proponents will not admit is that it is a class politics but not a working-class politics. Second, representing race as a primordial identity also elevates it as a social force above the dynamics of the reproduction of capitalist social relations; in that sense, antiracist politics of the contemporary sort proceeds from the same primordialist view of race as did fin-de-siècle race theorists. And that is also a case of argument by historical analogy coming home to roost.

This is not simply a matter of stipulating different criteria for assigning the label “political movement.” BLM’s amorphousness reflects and enables another tiresome political pathology that has become increasingly common in an era when an actually insurgent left is so remote from living memory and cargo-cult politics is so prominent. Activists, typically without visible institutional connections, stage more or less flamboyant events that often evoke nostalgic associations with earlier insurgencies – civil rights/Black Power demonstrations, sit-ins, militant “street action,” even purely rhetorical appropriation of the phrase “general strike” as a reference that sounds appealingly militant, totally disconnected from any concrete practice. Prior to BLM, Occupy and, more cynically, the Tea Party were the most highly publicized illustrations of this phenomenon, which is similar to an ad agency approach to movement-building. The point of these performances is to project simulacra of popular insurgency, which then become justification for issuing press statements and manifestos and, depending on the mood of the moment and skills of the operators, being recognized as spokespersons for the fictive movement. In the public interest world such groups are described as “astro-turf,” as contrasted to grassroots. Proliferation of this Kabuki theater politics among leftists stems in part from the dialectic of desperation and wishful thinking that underlies the cargo-cult tendency; it is commonly driven by an understandable sense of urgency that the dangers facing us are so grave as to require some immediate action in response. That dialectic encourages immediatist fantasies as well as tendencies to define the direct goal of political action as exposing, or bearing witness against, injustice. Occupy, for instance, proceeded from premises at least overlapping a tendency I have described as the Myth of the Spark, the notion that single events or dramatic acts can in themselves galvanize mass mobilization. That was also the dream that too many enthusiasts crafted for themselves about the Sanders campaign. Fetishization of the power of social media feeds the fantasy that movement-building can be automatic and instantaneous. That disposition is exacerbated in a context in which organizing as a project of deepening and broadening an actual base through building solidaristic relationships around shared interests is not part of an activistist culture in which radicalism is more posture and performance than strategic pursuit of a program. The strains of Trotskyism and anarchism popular in some activist quarters are drawn to spontaneist and voluntarist approaches to politics, which fit comfortably as well with the logic of insta-celebrity generated through Potemkin internet and social media campaigns. From that perspective, one of the most revealing and chilling features of the BLM phenomenon has been the unself-conscious clarity with which Alicia Garza and other of its prominent personalities represent, and no doubt genuinely understand, crafting and projecting their individual personae as identical with advancing political objectives.22 The potential for opportunism is great because the inertial material imperatives impel in that direction and unrestrained because the “movement” has no concrete constituency to which its spokespeople are accountable. What we get instead are shopworn calls to distinguish the really authentic BLM voices – i.e., what DeRay McKesson was until he wasn’t – from the fakers and hustlers and those who are genuinely grassroots from those who aren’t. So Birch and Heideman finger McKesson as epitomizing a “black professional class selling a desiccated form of opposition to racism as radical politics.” What distinguishes this “desiccated form of opposition to racism” from the good, radical anti-racism they insist is out there? The only clue we have is that McKesson embodies the former. Yet a year ago he embodied the latter! This kind of political differentiation grounded on claims to racial authenticity rehearses the product cycle in the hip-hop industry in the 1990s, in which an act started out packaged as authentic or hardcore, attained success and became crossover and thence became a target against which those that follow proclaim their own real authenticity. This sort of politics is also, as we’ve seen at least since Black Power, a hustler’s paradise. And all the millennial versions of New Age-y bullshit about leaderlessness and structurelessness obscure the fact that absence of organizational mechanisms of accountability enable anyone to say anything, or deny anything said, in the name of the “movement.” Overestimation of the political significance of protest and a related, all too familiar problem of confusing militancy and radicalism contribute to exaggerating the significance of eruptions like those associated with BLM. Militancy is a posture; radicalism is linked to program for social transformation, and protests do not necessarily challenge power relations at all. In some ways, as political scientists have pointed out for generations, they can validate existing power relations insofar as they appeal to established authority to accommodate their demands and pursue more effective incorporation into extant governing coalitions. Although they are so commonplace now that most people no doubt rehearse them unreflectively, presumptions that protest actions and militant postures are intrinsically radical or follow a natural trajectory leading them toward radicalism depend on the nostalgic wishful thinking and forms of fallacious reasoning I’ve already discussed. But Birch and Heideman’s narrative is also plagued by their utter innocence of the history of the last half-century of black politics, which is truly astonishing, especially in light of their profound self-assuredness, though I suspect the former may be a key enabling condition for the latter. They show no knowledge or understanding of the relation of black political development to the growth of the large national, state, and local public-private anti-discrimination and diversity apparatus, or of the broader incorporation of black people into the various distributive regimes, market-based and not, that constitute and reproduce hegemonic neoliberalism. At this moment, in one tiny illustration of this phenomenon, my mother is engaged in dealings with a black-owned or black-fronted firm – not clear whether it’s for-profit or a non-profit NGO — that is enmeshed in a web of boondoggles outsourced from the Road Home program that the state of Louisiana created and administers in concert with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide assistance to people who suffered property damage in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Granted, the Road Home is an extraordinary policy intervention, and this is a trivial illustration. But this instance’s trivial and quotidian character is in a way the point. This sort of public-private, outsourced, marketized or semi-marketized activity is a node in an ever-expanding and reorganizing array of opportunity structures generated through neoliberalism and that contribute to its legitimation as everyday reality. More accurately, this activity and the individuals and organizations that participate in it constitute neoliberalization as an evolving political-economic, cultural and ideological order. People reproduce their material existence, not to mention pursue the entrepreneurial dreams that attest to the extent of Thatcherite ideological victory, through such nooks and crevices in the social administrative apparatus, whose public and private extrusions become ever more difficult to disentangle. At the same time, those structures and processes of neoliberalization are enmeshed with evolving black politics. The fact is that black people not only have access to these opportunity structures; they also participate in the processes that generate, shape, and legitimize them. The ambiguous relations of many prominent BLM figures and other black antiracist voices to the corporate and nonprofit interests that drive the assault on public goods and working people’s living standards underscore the class contradictions that antiracist politics papers over. The black political regime that emerged out of contestation and negotiation over the terms on which the victories of the 1960s would be consolidated institutionally was rooted from its inception in the dynamics simultaneously articulating market-driven pro-growth politics from the municipal level through national Democratic politics.25 It is not simply that the center of gravity of black politics accommodated to the regime of regressive redistribution and punitive social policy as it took shape and became hegemonic. Race-conscious black political discourse and practice, grounded on underclass ideology and a sharply class-skewed communitarian rhetoric of uplift and self-help and racial redistribution – anti-disparitarianism — as the crucial metric of social justice helped to define the left wing of Democratic neoliberalism over the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, black people participate as active and committed agents in the processes of neoliberalization, public and private – charterization of public education, devolution and outsourcing of the social service sector, direct and indirect attacks on public goods and labor standards in the name of individual enterprise (e.g., Uber, which openly promotes itself as providing opportunities for black Americans) or “community development,” private contracting at all levels, including the rent-intensifying real estate development that is unhelpfully called gentrification. Any serious left critique of black politics has to take those dynamics into account and must proceed from examining the actual complexities and contradictions, including class contradictions, in contemporary black political life. That is why my colleagues and I who authored “On the End(s) of Black Politics” singled out as problematic “the conceptual and political confusion that underwrites the very idea of a Black Freedom Movement.” Formulations like Black Freedom Movement and Black Liberation Struggle suffer from the circularity problem: they posit what needs to be demonstrated through historical and political analysis. This is not simply a formal flaw. Those formulations impose an idealist coherence, what is in effect a racial supra-consciousness or the teleological equivalent of a vanguard party, that obscures the history of political differentiation among black Americans and its significance for understanding both past and present. They posit a transcendent goal – empty signifiers like “freedom,” “liberation,” or “self-determination” — that most crucially unites and defines black Americans’ political aspirations. This presumption that a deeper racial truth, constant across historical and social contexts, guides black politics requires diminishing the significance, and often enough necessitates the procrustean erasure, of the historical specificity of political dynamics involving black Americans at any moment in order to sustain the teleological narrative of fundamental continuity. This problem and its counterproductive implications are apparent in the many versions of tortured analogy – e.g., “new Jim Crow” – purported, ever more convolutedly, to fit contemporary racial disparities into reductionist narratives that reify the white supremacist ideology and practice hegemonic at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth as the essential normative center of gravity of American politics and thus the source of racial disparities in the present. This interpretive commitment hinges on a fundamentally static view of race/racism and the primacy of its social power. Which is to say, this view of race’s primordial force – uniting top-shelf racists like Madison Grant and Charles Murray with earnest anti-racists like Birch and Heideman – may be the one thing in the last century that really hasn’t changed. In response to these increasingly tortured attempts to preserve monocausal narratives stressing the centrality of racism in explaining apparent inequalities, Chowkwanyun and I observe that “they bring to mind Kuhn’s account of attempts to accommodate mounting anomalies to salvage an interpretive paradigm in danger of crumbling under a crisis of authority.”28 The further away we move from conditions under which black Americans confronted officially enforced and tolerated subordination and discrimination on openly and directly racial grounds, the more Rube Goldberg-ish arguments that “racism” nonetheless remains the fundamentally causal force determining black Americans’ and other nonwhite groups’ life chances must become. As I have argued, a key effect of that commitment to race-first political interpretation is to shift the fulcrum of debate from examination of the discrete, contextually specific dynamics that reproduce inequalities to the label we must attach to them.

Some might object to my use of the second-person plural "we" and "us"-what do you mean "we"? This objection is symptomatic of the fragmentation that has pervaded the Left in Europe, the U K, and North America. Reducing invocations of "we" and "us" to sociological statements requiting a concrete, delineable, empirical referent, it erases the division necessary for politics as if interest and will were only and automatically attributes of a fixed social position. We-skepticism displaces the performative component of the second-person plural as it treats collectivity with suspicion and privileges a fantasy of individual singularity and autonomy. I write "we" hoping to enhance a partisan sense of collectivity. My break with conventions of w1iting that reinforce individualism by admonishing attempts to think and speak as part of a larger collective subject is deliberate. The boundaries to what can be thought as politics in certain segments of the post-structuralist and anarchist Left only benefit capital. Some activists and theorists think that micropolitical activities, whether practices of self-cultivation or individual consumer choices, are more important loci of action than large-scale organized movement-an assumption which adds to the difficulty of building new types of organizations because it makes thinking in terms of collectivity rarer, harder, and seemingly less "fresh." Similarly, some activists and theorists treat aesthetic objects and creative works as displaying a political potentiality missing from classes, parties, and unions. This aesthetic focus disconnects politics from the organized struggle of working people, making politics into what spectators see. Artistic products, whether actual commodities or commodified experiences, thereby buttress capital as they circulate political affects while displacing political struggles from the streets to the galleries. Spectators can pay (or donate) to feel radical without having to get their hands dirty. The dominant class retains its position and the contradiction between this class and the rest of us doesn't make itself felt as such. The celebration of momentary actions and singular happenings-the playful disruption, the temporarily controversial film or novel-works the same way. Some on the anarchist and post-structuralist Left treat these flickers as the only proper instances of a contemporary left politics. A pointless action involving the momentary expenditure of enormous effort-the artistic equivalent of the 5k and 10k runs to fight cancer, that is to say, to increase awareness of cancer without actually doing much else-the singular happening disconnects task from goal. Any "sense" it makes, any meaning or relevance it has, is up to the spectator (perhaps with a bit of guidance from curators and theorists). Occupation contrasts sharply with the singular happening. Even as specific occupations emerge from below rather than through a coordinated strategy, their common form-including its images, slogans, terms, and practices-links them together in a mass struggle. The power of the return of communism stands or falls on its capacity to inspire large-scale organized collective struggle toward a goal. For over thirty years, the Left has eschewed such a goal, accepting instead liberal notions that goals are strictly individual lifestyle choices or social-democratic claims that history already solved basic problems of distribution with the compromise of regulated markets and welfare states – a solution the Right rejected and capitalism destroyed. The Left failed to defend a vision of a better world, an egalitarian world of common production by and for the collective people. Instead, it accommodated capital, succumbing to the lures of individualism, consumerism, competition, and privilege, and proceeding as if there really were no alternative to states that rule in the interests of markets. Marx expressed the basic principle of the alternative over a hundred years ago: from each according to ability, to each according to need. This principle contains the urgency of the struggle for its own realization. We don't have to continue to live in the wake of left failure, stuck in the repetitions of crises and spectacle. In light of the planetary climate disaster and the ever-intensifying global class war as states redistribute wealth to the rich in the name of austerity, the absence of a common goal is the absence of a future (other than the ones imagined in post-apocalyptic scenarios like Mad Max). The premise of communism is that collective determination of collective conditions is possible, if we want it. To help incite this desire, to add to its reawakening force and presence, I treat "communism" as a tag for six features of our current setting: 1. A specific image of the Soviet Union and its collapse; 2 . A present, increasingly powerful force; 3 . The sovereignty of the people; 4. The common and the commons; 5. The egalitarian and universalist desire that cuts through the circuits and practices in which we are trapped; 6. The party. The first two features can be loosely associated with the politics that configures itself via a history linked to the end of the Soviet Union as a state, as refracted through the dominance of the US as a state. What matters here is less the historical narrative than the expression of communism as the force of an absence. My discussion of these first two features highlights how the absence of communism shapes our contemporary setting. In the sequence narrative as the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy, the communist horizon makes itself felt as a "signifying stress." This is Eric L. Santner's term for a way that reality expresses its nonidentity with itself. As Santner explains, the "social formation in which we find ourselves immersed" is "fissured by lack" and "permeated by inconsistency and incompleteness." The lack calls out to us. Inconsistency and incompleteness make themselves felt. "What is registered," Santner explains, "are not so much forgotten deeds but forgotten failures to act. "7 The frenetic activity of contemporary communicative capitalism deflects us away from these gaps. New entertainments, unshakeable burdens, and growing debt displace our attention toward the immediate and the coming-up-next as they attempt to drown out the forceful effects of the unrealized-the unrealized potentials of unions and collective struggle, the unrealized claims for equality distorted by a culture that celebrates the excesses of the very rich, the unrealized achievements of collective solidarity in redressing poverty and redistributing risks and rewards. The first two chapters thus treat the gaps, fissures, and lack Santner theorizes as signifying stresses in terms of a missing communism that makes itself felt in the setting configured by its alleged failure and defeat.

The end of history, being itself a catastrophe, can only be fuelled by catastrophe. Managing the end therefore becomes synonymous with the management of catastrophe. And, quite specifically, of that catastrophe which is the slow extermination of the rest of the world. We have long denounced the capitalistic, economic exploitation of the poverty of the 'other half of the world' [l'autre monde]. We must today denounce the moral and sentimental exploitation of that poverty - charity cannibalism being worse than oppressive violence. The extraction and humanitarian reprocessing of a destitution which has become the equivalent of oil deposits and gold mines. The extortion of the spectacle of poverty and, at the same time, of our charitable condescension: a worldwide appreciated surplus of fine sentiments and bad conscience. We should, in fact, see this not as the extraction of raw materials, but as a waste-reprocessing enterprise. Their destitution and our bad conscience are, in effect, all part of the waste-products of history - the main thing is to recycle them to produce a new energy source. We have here an escalation in the psychological balance of terror. World capitalist oppression is now merely the vehicle and alibi for this other, much more ferocious, form of moral predation. One might almost say, contrary to the Marxist analysis, that material exploitation is only there to extract that spiritual raw material that is the misery of peoples, which serves as psychological nourishment for the rich countries and media nourishment for our daily lives. The 'Fourth World' (we are no longer dealing with a 'developing' Third World) is once again beleaguered, this time as a catastrophe-bearing stratum. The West is whitewashed in the reprocessing of the rest of the world as waste and residue. And the white world repents and seeks absolution - it, too, the wasteproduct of its own history. The South is a natural producer of raw materials, the latest of which is catastrophe. The North, for its part, specializes in the reprocessing of raw materials and hence also in the reprocessing of catastrophe. Bloodsucking protection, humanitarian interference, Medecins sans frontieres, international solidarity, etc. The last phase of colonialism: the New Sentimental Order is merely the latest form of the New World Order. Other people's destitution becomes our adventure playground. Thus, the humanitarian offensive aimed at the Kurds - a show of repentance on the part of the Western powers after allowing Saddam Hussein to crush them - is in reality merely the second phase of the war, a phase in which charitable intervention finishes off the work of extermination. We are the consumers of the ever delightful spectacle of poverty and catastrophe, and of the moving spectacle of our own efforts to alleviate it (which, in fact, merely function to secure the conditions of reproduction of the catastrophe market); there, at least, in the order of moral profits, the Marxist analysis is wholly applicable: we see to it that extreme poverty is reproduced as a symbolic deposit, as a fuel essential to the moral and sentimental equilibrium of the West. In our defence, it might be said that this extreme poverty was largely of our own making and it is therefore normal that we should profit by it. There can be no finer proof that the distress of the rest of the world is at the root of Western power and that the spectacle of that distress is its crowning glory than the inauguration, on the roof of the Arche de la Defense, with a sumptuous buffet laid on by the Fondation des Droits de l'homme, of an exhibition of the finest photos of world poverty. Should we be surprised that spaces are set aside in the Arche d'Alliance* for universal suffering hallowed by caviar and champagne? Just as the economic crisis of the West will not be complete so long as it can still exploit the resources of the rest of the world, so the symbolic crisis will be complete only when it is no longer able to feed on the other half's human and natural catastrophes (Eastern Europe, the Gulf, the Kurds, Bangladesh, etc.). We need this drug, which serves us as an aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. And the poor countries are the best suppliers - as, indeed, they are of other drugs. We provide them, through our media, with the means to exploit this paradoxical resource, just as we give them the means to exhaust their natural resources with our technologies. Our whole culture lives off this catastrophic cannibalism, relayed in cynical mode by the news media, and carried forward in moral mode by our humanitarian aid, which is a way of encouraging it and ensuring its continuity, just as economic aid is a strategy for perpetuating under-development. Up to now, the financial sacrifice has been compensated a hundredfold by the moral gain; But when the catastrophe market itself reaches crisis point, in accordance with the implacable logic of the market, when distress becomes scarce or the marginal returns on it fall from overexploitation, when we run out of disasters from elsewhere or when they can no longer be traded like coffee or other commodities, the West will be forced to produce its own catastrophe for itself, in order to meet its need for spectacle and that voracious appetite for symbols which characterizes it even more than its voracious appetite for food. It will reach the point where it devours itself. When we have finished sucking out the destiny of others, we shall have to invent one for ourselves. The Great Crash, the symbolic crash, will come in the end from us Westerners, but only when we are no longer able to feed on the hallucinogenic misery which comes to us from the other half of the world. Yet they do not seem keen to give up their monopoly. The Middle East, Bangladesh, black Africa and Latin America are really going flat out in the distress and catastrophe stakes, and thus in providing symbolic nourishment for the rich world. They might be said to be overdoing it: heaping earthquakes, floods, famines and ecological disasters one upon another, and finding the means to massacre each other most of the time. The 'disaster show' goes on without any let-up and our sacrificial debt to them far exceeds their economic debt. The misery with which they generously overwhelm us is something we shall never be able to repay. The sacrifices we offer in return are laughable (a tornado or two, a few tiny holocausts on the roads, the odd financial sacrifice) and, moreover, by some infernal logic, these work out as much greater gains for us, whereas our kindnesses have merely added to the natural catastrophes another one immeasurably worse: the demographic catastrophe, a veritable epidemic which we deplore each day in pictures. In short, there is such distortion between North and South, to the symbolic advantage of the South (a hundred thousand Iraqi dead against casualties numbered in tens on our side: in every case we are the losers), that one day everything will break down. One day, the West will break down if we are not soon washed clean of this shame, if an international congress of the poor countries does not very quickly decide to share out this symbolic privilege of misery and catastrophe. It is of course normal, since we refuse to allow the spread of nuclear weapons, that they should refuse to allow the spread of the catastrophe weapon. But it is not right that they should exert that monopoly indefinitely. In any case, the under-developed are only so by comparison with the Western system and its presumed success. In the light of its assumed failure, they are not under-developed at all. They are only so in terms of a dominant evolutionism which has always been the worst of colonial ideologies. The argument here is that there is a line of objective progress and everyone is supposed to pass through its various stages (we find the same eyewash with regard to the evolution of species and in that evolutionism which unilaterally sanctions the superiority of the human race). In the light of current upheavals, which put an end to any idea of history as a linear process, there are no longer either developed or under-developed peoples. Thus, to encourage hope of evolution - albeit by revolution - among the poor and to doom them, in keeping with the objective illusion of progress, to technological salvation is a criminal absurdity. In actual fact, it is their good fortune to be able to escape from evolution just at the point when we no longer know where it is leading. In any case, a majority of these peoples, including those of Eastern Europe, do not seem keen to enter this evolutionist modernity, and their weight in the balance is certainly no small factor in the West's repudiation of its own history, of its own utopias and its own modernity. It might be said that the routes of violence, historical or otherwise, are being turned around and that the viruses now pass from South to North, there being every chance that, five hundred years after America was conquered, 1992 and the end of the century will mark the comeback of the defeated and the sudden reversal of that modernity. The sense of pride is no longer on the side of wealth but of poverty, of those who - fortunately for them - have nothing to repent, and may indeed glory in being privileged in terms of catastrophes. Admittedly, this is a privilege they could hardly renounce, even if they wished to, but natural disasters merely reinforce the sense of guilt felt towards them by the wealthy - by those whom God visibly scorns since he no longer even strikes them down. One day it will be the Whites themselves who will give up their whiteness. It is a good bet that repentance will reach its highest pitch with the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas. We are going to have to lift the curse of the defeated - but symbolically victorious - peoples, which is insinuating itself five hundred years later, by way of repentance, into the heart of the white race. No solution has been found to the dramatic situation of the under-developed, and none will be found since their drama has now been overtaken by that of the overdeveloped, of the rich nations. The psychodrama of congestion, saturation, superabundance, neurosis and the breaking of blood vessels which haunts us - the drama of the excess of means over ends - calls more urgently for attention than that of penury, lack and poverty. That is where the most imminent danger of catastrophe resides, in the societies which have run out of emptiness. Artificial catastrophes, like the beneficial aspects of civilization, progress much more quickly than natural ones. The underdeveloped are still at the primary stage of the natural, unforeseeable catastrophe. We are already at the second stage, that of the manufactured catastrophe - imminent and foreseeable - and we shall soon be at that of the pre-programmed catastrophe, the catastrophe of the third kind, deliberate and experimental. And, paradoxically, it is our pursuit of the means for averting natural catastrophe - the unpredictable form of destiny - which will take us there. Because it is unable to escape it, humanity will pretend to be the author of its destiny. Because it cannot accept being confronted with an end which is uncertain or governed by fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species.

According to Watts, Williams, & Jagers (2003, p. 187) liberation “requires vision—a transition from critique to creativity.” Creativity is necessary to envision a better professional and cultural environment as well as a moral order. For these authors liberation “involves challenging gross social inequities between social groups and creating new relationships that dispel oppressive social myths, values, and practices” (p. 187). To this end, space must be made for multiple voices to participate in non-consensus driven dialogue and to express multiple knowledges and epistemologies. This can be created within, through, and in spite of the formal, established academic system. Individual actors are crucial in efforts to create formal institutional space for trans- formation (e.g., diversity committees, round tables, conferences, policy reviews), as well as informal spaces of resistance and liberation (e.g., strategizing behind closed doors, bearing witness to counter-stories). These spaces can mitigate microaggressions (i.e., acts of individual racism in the form of cultural insensitivity, dismissal of relevant racial/cultural issues, and/or stereo- typical assumptions) and counter the coercive control of “power over” boundary transgressions. Effective participation in these spaces requires acknowledging and being held accountable for our interconnected privileges based on gender, race, ethnicity, nation of origin, sexual orientation, abilities, institutional networks and promotion, and professional roles. Figure 2 illustrates our understanding of how a post-colonial academia might value cultural democracy by transforming exclusive Andro-, Euro-, and middle-class centered institutions to include and value the voices and life experience of all involved. Cannella and Manuelito (2008) argued at length for an anti-colonialist research stance which would end the separation between how data is collected from communities and the intellectuals who write about them. They have advocated for research interaction guidelines that make transparent public conversations, as well as new methodologies that lend themselves to the development of public conversations. Finally, Cannella and Manuelito have pressed for practices that would “avoid the reinscription of economic power that results when the dominant also becomes the method for the elimination of oppression/colonialism” (p. 50). This framework can inform practices beyond the realm of research, including academia. This includes the promo- tion of open, democratic, transformative processes that support inclusion and equity. Our vision of a post-colonial academy involves the following elements: (a) using the lens of intersectionality to transcend conceptualizations of oppression organized around single axes of identity, (b) identifying and providing alternatives that transform White and other systems of privilege into fair participatory structures and processes for all, and (c) prioritizing considerations of accountability and justness across a wide range of social differences.

Decolonization is not a metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012). At its core, the practice of decolonial research and activism involves a commitment to the principles of Indigenous self-determination and to the repatriation of Indigenous land. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write that “decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (2012, p. 21). Beginning with our understanding of land as sovereignty, it is clear that all acts of decolonization as well as attempts at creating alternative development pathways, centred on Indigenous self-determination, must begin with returning land to Indigenous control. Across Oceania, the overwhelming majority of land, over 80% in most countries, is held under customary tenure arrangements. Like other parts of the region, in Vanuatu, the overwhelming majority of land (currently around 88%) is held under customary tenure managed by customary institutions governed by chiefs, or councils of chiefs, that determine use and access rights over an area of land in accordance with customary principles. In Vanuatu’s traditional economy, people live in large extended family groups and satisfy their food and other basic requirements largely through customary access to land and sea resources, and they generally speak a local Indigenous vernacular language, participate in customary ceremonies and have disputes resolved by local leaders (R. Regenvanu, 2010). Leasing customary land, particularly where it results in the eviction of the Indigenous population—as is increasingly happening in Vanuatu, has profound implications for the operation of customary systems, and for the social and kinship relationships bound within these systems. Removal of land from the customary system has been markedly increasing since 2001, when Vanuatu began to experience a dramatic rush to lease customary land, with the result that over 10% of all customary land is now leased (Scott et al., 2012). On Efate Island where the national capital Port Vila is situated, 43.6% of land previously held under customary tenure is now leased. Many of these leases hug the coastline, with over 56.55% of the coastline of Efate Island now leased. The coastline of Efate represents much of the most arable land that is best suited for cultivation. It is concerning that issues of large-scale land leasing and Indigenous dispossession have occurred in post-colonial Indigenous-governed states, including Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. In self-governing Indigenous states, key state actors have often been involved in undermining Indigenous land rights. Lease data for Vanuatu indicate that successive Ministers for Land have repeatedly leased customary land without the consent of customary owner groups. At its highest point, in 2004, the Minister for Land signed just under 250 leases in 1 year over customary land, generally without the consent or knowledge of the customary landowning groups (McDonnell, 2017). Numerous court cases and Ombudsman decisions indicate that successive Ministers for Land have abused their powers by leasing customary and urban state land so as to grant land to themselves, close family members, kin, wantoks (one talk people with a shared language and cultural bond), political associates and close business associates (McDonnell, 2018). Acts of dispossession are often sites of Indigenous resistance. As knowledge about the dramatic and widespread scale of the land rush in Vanuatu became available, a political movement grew that critiqued the actions of powerful political figures and called for land reform to change the land laws so as to better protect Indigenous rights. As part of this broader political movement Ralph Regenvanu entered politics first as an independent, and later formed a political party, the Graon mo Jastis Pati (Land and Justice Party). A major platform of the Graon mo Jastis Pati was changing the land laws so as to stop the rapacious leasing of customary land, consistent with the recommendations of the 2006 National Land Summit and other meetings of civil society. In 2013, Ralph Regenvanu became the Minister of Land and we began our efforts to realize this agenda and create substantial reforms of the land laws of Vanuatu and the Constitution. These efforts were supported by a Ministry of Land taskforce, the President and other members of the Malvatumauri (National Council of Chiefs) as well as various working groups from civil society, business and the banking sector. While the description we have just offered details the formal roles that we held in creating new land laws in Vanuatu, it does not describe our collaborative process or practice of working together. Here, we present a transcript of one of our virtual discussions over Zoom on how we began collaborating on land issues: Ralph Regenvanu: I came from the background of having worked with the [Vanuatu Cultural Centre] fieldworkers on the Traditional Money Banks project which involved workshops across Vanuatu. These workshops came up with the idea of needing to have an urgent national meeting to talk about land issues because the leasing of customary land was out of control . . . . The National Land Summit happened the following year, and made twenty resolutions around changes needed to land law and administrative arrangements. I researched land and kastom [custom] with the fieldworkers network. We really wanted to understand what people in Vanuatu valued and what they wanted to see maintained, revitalized and protected. And it became clear that maintaining and protecting those systems would not be possible with the scale of land dealings that were occurring. So, then, we worked to build coalitions between people and organisations to make sure policies and laws were changed, and then moving in the direction and trying to do that. In the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, we were trying to work alongside people and do what was needed but we were constrained by limited resources, and by being a statutory organization in ways I have written about in another paper (R. Regenvanu, 2015). Another complication was that there were sometimes difficulties between fieldworkers and chiefs. Sometimes, they could work together but sometimes they would have different views. Siobhan McDonnell: For me, such a big part of the story around my coming to Vanuatu and working on these issues comes from my previous experience working in Indigenous Australia. So much of my experience before I came to Vanuatu was listening to the impact of dispossession on Indigenous people in Australia, the history of colonization, the stolen generations and the long history of trauma that comes from that. And, so, then, to be in places where that was happening, where land leasing was occurring and people were literally losing access to customary land was like watching the processes of dispossession occurring. When I first went out into North Efate in 2007 there was no real leasing then. It was really just villages and one or two other developments. But when I later began work in North Efate, in 2010, it was a landscape where land issues were tense, it was so fraught. When I first arrived, I was asked to run legal clinics, so, that is what I did. Men would come to me with leases and ask me how they could break them, and often they were signed and legal and there was not much I could do. [However, t]here were some leases that I did manage to break. And I also got to see, in detail, the arrangements that people had entered into which were incredibly unfair on the side of the landowners. In those early legal clinics, people would come to see me with leases that they had signed but had no idea what was in them. And then, over time, I could watch the other developments that took place in the region, and the land deals. Ralph Regenvanu: Yes you came from all the legal and ethnographic research that you had done for years with Lelepa people. That experience of people losing their land. Your experience of working with Aboriginal people on land rights, on understanding the issues of Lelepa people, of being an anthropologist and lawyer was unique. We needed a way to actualize the concerns that people had and turn these into drafting. And, so, then, we met in the policy space, trying to address some of these issues. Our backgrounds were important because you were not just a consultant being flown in. You came out of that specific context of being with communities who were actually losing land and the urgency of having to deal with those issues. And, I was coming from the same situation, it wasn’t my land that was lost but I could feel it through the people that I was working with, through the consultations that had been run with the fieldworkers and in the Land Summit. It was an urgent issue that needed to be resolved. You and I were working with our broader team to make sure that we captured what people wanted from the broad consultations that we held, working alongside people. But also informed by what we both knew about the situation already, and our practical knowledge of the leases and the legal arrangements that were being made with landowners. All the work we did to create safeguards around the leasing process, and make sure that leases would be fairer in the future. (R. Regenvanu & S. McDonnell, personal communication, April 29, 2021) Here, we discussed how our collaboration working towards the land reforms was built from our various experiences of providing legal advice on, hearing and understanding the concerns of the people that we worked alongside and eventually meeting in the policy space on land issues in an attempt to address these concerns. Collaborating in this policy space on land issues is something that was already familiar to both of us because of our previous experiences, and is something that we both continue to do together, and in our own work. For scholars, these spaces are sometimes described in terms of the practice of engaged anthropology (Kirsch, 2018; Low & Merry, 2010), or activist scholarship, but in this article we describe this more simply as the practice of work or scholarship in accordance with kastom and the practice of reciprocity, a discussion to which we return to at the end of this article.

Facing assertive indigenous presences within settler colonial spaces, settlers must answer the legitimate charge that their daily life – in all its banality – is predicated upon the privileges produced by ongoing genocide. The jarring nature of such charges offers an irreconcilable challenge to settlers qua settlers.64 Should these charges become impossible to ignore, they threaten to explode the imago of settler colonialism, which had hitherto operated within the settler psyche in a relatively smooth and benign manner. This explosion is potentiated by the revelation of even a portion of the violence that is required to make settler life possible. If, for example, settlers are forced to see ‘their’ beach as a site of murder and ongoing colonization, it becomes more difficult to sustain it within the imaginary as a site of frivolity.65 As Brown writes, in the ‘loss of horizons, order, and identity’ the subject experiences a sense of enormous vulnerability.66 Threatened with this ‘loss of containment', the settler subject embarks down the road to psychosis.67 Thus, to parlay Brown's thesis to the settler colonial context, the uncontrollable rage that indigenous presences induce within the settler is not evidence of the strength of settlers, but rather of a subject lashing out on the brink of its own dissolution. This panic – this rabid and insatiable anger – is always already at the core of the settler as a subject. As Lorenzo Veracini observes, the settler necessarily remains in a disposition of aggression ‘even after indigenous alterities have ceased to be threatening'.68 This disposition results from the precarity inherent in the maintenance of settler colonialism's imago, wherein any and all indigenous presences threaten subjective dissolution of the settler as such. Trapped in a Gordian Knot, the very thing that provides a balm to the settler subject – further development and entrenchment of the settler colonial imago – is also what panics the subject when it is inevitably contravened.69 We might think of this as a process of hardening that leaves the imago brittle and more susceptible to breakage. Their desire to produce a firm imago means that settlers are also always already in a psychically defensive position – that is, the settler's offensive position on occupied land is sustained through a defensive posture. For while settlers desire the total erasure of indigenous populations, the attendant desire to disappear their own identity as settlers necessitates the suppression of both desires, if the subject's reliance on settler colonial power structure is to be psychically naturalized. Settlers’ reactions to indigenous peoples fit, almost universally, with the two ego defense responses that Sigmund Freud observed. The first of these defenses is to attempt a complete conversion of the suppressed desire into a new idea. In settler colonial contexts, this requires averting attention from the violence of dispossession; as such, settlers often suggest that they aim to create a ‘city on the hill’.70 Freud noted that the conversion defense mechanism does suppress the anxiety-inducing desire, but it also leads to ‘periodic hysterical outbursts'. Such is the case when settlers’ utopic visions are forced to confront the reality that the gentile community they imagine is founded in and perpetuates irredeemable suffering. A second type of defense is to channel the original desire's energy into an obsession or a phobia. The effects of this defense are seen in the preoccupation that settler colonialism has with purity of blood or of community.71 As we have already seen, this obsession at once solidifies the power of the settler state, thereby naturalizing the settler and simultaneously perpetuating the processes of erasing indigenous peoples. Psychic defenses are intended to secure the subject from pain, and whether that pain originates inside or outside the psyche is inconsequential. Because of the threat that indigeneity presents to the phantasmatic wholeness of settler colonialism, settlers must always remain suspended in a state of arrested development between these defensive positions. Despite any pretensions to the contrary, the settler is necessarily a parochial subject who continuously coils, reacts, disavows, and lashes out, when confronted with his dependency on indigenous peoples and their territory. This psychic precarity exists at the core of the settler subject because of the unending fear of its own dissolution, should indigenous sovereignty be recognized.72 Goeman writes as an explicit challenge to other indigenous peoples, but this holds true to settler-allies as well, that decolonization must include an analysis of the dominant ‘self-disciplining colonial subject’.73 However, as this discussion of subjective precarity demonstrates, the degree of to which these disciplinary or phenomenological processes are complete should not be overstated. For settler-allies must also examine and cultivate the ways in which settler subjects fail to be totally disciplined. Evidence of this incompletion is apparent in the subject's arrested state of development. Discovering the instability at the core of the settler subject, indeed of all subjects, is the central conceit of psychoanalysis. This exception of at least partial failure to fully subjectivize the settler is also what sets my account apart from Rifkin's. His phenomenology falls into the trap that Jacqueline Rose observes within many sociological accounts of the subject: that of assuming a successful internalization of norms. From the psychoanalytical perspective, the ‘unconscious constantly reveals the “failure”’ of internalization.74 As we have seen, within settler subjects this can be expressed as an irrational anxiety that expresses itself whenever a settler is confronted with the facts regarding their colonizing status. Under conditions of total subjectification, such charges ought to be unintelligible to the settler. Thus, the process of subject formation is always in slippage and never totalized as others might suggest.75 Because of this precarity, the settler subject is prone to violence and lashing out; but the subject in slippage also provides an avenue by which the process of settler colonialism can be subverted – creating cracks in a phantasmatic wholeness which can be opened wider. Breakages of this sort offer an opportunity topursue what Paulette Regan calls a ‘restorying’ of settler colonial history and culture, to decenter settler mythologies built upon and within the dispossession of indigenous peoples.76 The cultivation of these cracks is a necessary part of decolonizing work, as it continues to panic and thus to destabilize settler subjects. Resistance to settler colonialism does not occur only in highly visible moments like the famous conflict at Kanesatake and Kahnawake,77 it also occurs in reiterative and disruptive practices, presences, and speech acts. Goeman correctly observes that the ‘repetitive practices of everyday life’ are what give settler spaces their meaning, as they provide a degree of naturalness to the settler imago and its psychic investments.78 As such, to disrupt the ease of these repetitions is at once to striate radically the otherwise smooth spaces of settler colonialism and also to disrupt the easy (re)production of the settler subject. Goeman calls these subversive acts the ‘micro-politics of resistance', which historically took the form of ‘moving fences, not cooperating with census enumerators, sometimes disrupting survey parties’ amongst other process.79 These acts panic the subject that is disciplined as a product of settler colonial power, by forcing encounters with the sovereign indigenous peoples that were imagined to be gone. This reveals to the settler, if only fleetingly, the violence that founds and sustains the settler colonial relationship. While such practices may not overthrow the settler colonial system, they do subvert its logics by insistently drawing attention to the ongoing presence of indigenous peoples who refuse erasure.

The historical presence of the ‘Inka Empire’ (spelled with ‘k’ and not ‘c’)1 goes back to the year 1200 AD in the area known as the Cuzco Valley, and over the next 300 years it became one of the greatest native kingdoms in South America, controlling a region that comprised much of what today is Peru ́, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and portions of Argentina and Colombia. In his Comentarios Reales de los Incas, 1609 (Royal Commentaries of the Incas), Peruvian writer Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, defined the empire, ‘THE INCA KINGS divided their empire into four parts, which they called Tahuantinsuyo, meaning “the four quarters of the world,” corresponding to the four cardinal points of heaven: east, west, north and south’ (Garcilaso de la Vega 1994: 93). The Inca Empire and its enduring cultural legacy have fired the social, political and artistic imagination of these countries for centuries. In Peru, in particular, indigenismo or ‘Indianism,’ a Latin American political, literary, artistic and social movement in favor of the South American Indians, gave new life to different symbols and cultural elements of the Inca culture, and became especially visible during the first half of the twentieth century. New indigenista groups and associations were created by urban intellectuals who criticized indigenous exploitation, while at the same time rebellions of the aboriginal population challenged the power of large land-owners in rural areas .In the Siete ensayos de interpretacio ́n de la realidad peruana (Lima 1927) (Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality) Peruvian Marxist thinker Jose ́ Carlos Maria ́tegui reinterpreted the indigenismo movement and transformed it into a revolutionary praxis that would lead to socialism. Maria ́tegui’s socialist utopia was founded on the existence of a rural communal Inca tradition that survives into the present, justifying the participation of indigenous populations in social revolution, and providing a historical foundation for the imagining of a new Peruvian nation.2 In a critical effort to avoid European imitation, Maria ́tegui’s Peruvian socialist utopia attempts to integrate ancient Inca tradition and modern revolution, myth and Western history, and more specifically, European Marxism and indigenismo into a single national revolutionary project: the creation of what he calls ‘Indo-American socialism.’ However, I argue that Maria ́tegui’s imagining of revolutionary utopia is ambiguously trapped in an idealized view of indigenous people, with racist prejudices against populations not descended from the Inca, and an abstract and exclusionary concept of agrarian community, among other problems. Despite Maria ́tegui’s rejection of nineteenth-century racial thought, which was based on biological determinism and the fixed nature of human races, he reinstates it as a fundamental element of his utopian political project.

This dissertation offers black statecraft as a theoretical lens to capture a range of ideas and engagements/entanglements black people have had with the state. It rejects the idea that black actors engaged with state-making and theorizing are merely privileging Western categories and values. Black statecraft instead attunes us to the radical features of this revolutionary event of state-making in their connections to the contexts of decolonial revolutions in the social heterogeneity of the antislavery movement, a transnational/transcultural network and media sphere, and diverse practices of slave resistance. The Haitian Revolution and the founding of the first black independent nation in the Atlantic world, I argue begins a long tradition of black statecraft that extends across the United States and the Caribbean. ¶ By keeping our visions of the state (political community) and freedom in view alongside our critiques of the state, black statecraft brings attention away from a shared or unified vision of the state and freedom, and instead to a shared set of questions and problems that real world political actors face, what David Scott terms “the problem space.” As Scott (2005) defines it, the problem space is, ¶ First of all a conjunctural space, a historically constituted discursive space. This discursive conjuncture is defined by a complex of questions and answers – or better, a complex of statements, propositions, resolutions, and arguments offered in answer to largely implicit questions or problems. Or to put this another way, these statements and so on are moves in a field or space of argument, and to understand them requires reconstructing that space of problems that elicited them. ¶ To uncover the dynamics of black statecraft, I use Scott’s notion as a way of understanding and analyzing the conceptual and ideological work objects, like the state and statecraft, are meant to perform. ¶ Throughout this dissertation, I aim to make visible black political engagements with statecraft in terms of a “theory-problem.” Thinking of the state as a theory problem and statecraft as a problem-space provides an opportunity to theorize black engagements with statecraft in terms of what is viewed as a problem itself. In other words, it makes visible what the black actors under study were doing with the state, what foundations they wanted to build. At the same time, rather than explain the failures of state or ideology, I reflect on the ways in which this approach to the issue of enacting black freedom results in an antipolitical response. My main contention is that theories of the state are implicitly theories of politics. Therefore, the disavowal of the state is also a disavowal of black politics. ¶ Black statecraft, as this dissertation will illuminate is an important part of black political practice of politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through an engagement with Toussaint Louverture, Frederick Douglass, and C.L.R. James, I will illustrate how responses to the state speaks to a larger problem of the possibilities of black politics in a racialized world. Engaging with these thinkers through the lens of black statecraft and attuned to their problem-space also gets to the specificity of black freedom struggles in the 19th and 20th centuries. ¶ By undervaluing the state and statecraft as a topic worthy of investigation, scholarship in political theory ignores the ways in which these black statecraft thinkers provide alternatives and innovations in state-making, bending the arc of history closer to justice. Both approaches to black freedom and the state along with the binary thinking it encourages blunts our understanding of the contours of decolonization and limits the way we view our resources in the events and thinkers of the past. ¶ This dissertation engages with the persistent and ongoing question of enacting black freedom in the context of a racialized world in the Caribbean and the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. I aim to show the variety of ways black thinkers and actors reflected upon their experience through critical engagement to put forward political ideas and projects that continue to shape the ways in which we engage or choose to disengage the state, politics, and the political. ¶ I insist that we must return to these questions of founding, freedom, and the state because the state is also a site of contestation. Through an investigation of how these theorists of black statecraft engage with and theorize the state, we are better able to reflect on the areas of political contestation reshaping the way certain concepts like the state and freedom, to name a few key concepts explored in this study, are understood, and mediated. These black political thinkers provide great reflections for what we are fighting for, to give content to the kind of political-social community we seek to build upon principles of freedom, equality, and justice. My work responds to the need for reconceptualizing and expanding anticolonial politics and principles, decolonizing principles of freedom, self-determination, and autonomy. ¶ As a framework of analysis, black statecraft thus subverts statist-anti-statist binaries by holding together a critique of the state with political projects aimed toward founding a new one. Through its deconstructive critique, the black thinkers in this inquiry bring into view the relationship the state has with freedom in its vision of the new state to be built. It captures both what black people were and continue to fight against along with keeping in view what we are fighting for. ¶ Statecraft, here, is a political and ideological project of world-making in concert with others (Arendt 1958; Krause 2015; Markell 2003). There is no black allegiance to state, but perhaps allegiance to an idea of a principled, ethical state, one they shaped not one they mistakenly placed their belief – the sole creation of white Europeans. I aim to show the variety of ways blacks reflected upon their experience and put forward political ideas and projects that continue to shape the ways in which we engage or choose to disengage the state, politics, and the political. Black visions of the state and freedom provides a space to reflect on the possibilities of freedom and the modes in which we attempt to achieve it. This history offers stories and writings that become our resources for present and future political practice. ¶ In this dissertation I develop this argument through an analysis of three thinkers: Toussaint Louverture, Frederick Douglass, and C.L.R. James. These thinkers, I argue, represent black statecraft thinkers that are especially positioned to hold both the critique of the destructive power of the state with liberatory visions of the state as thinkers that subvert binary-thinking on the state and state-making. They illustrate how black statecraft navigates this binary. I argue that it is valuable to reflect upon the relationship of the state suggested by these thinkers to the actualization of racial emancipation and black freedom. ¶ I demonstrate that binaries are not productive and offer black statecraft and state- making as an alternative to the statism/anti-statism dichotomy. A reinterpretation of black state-making is necessary to disclose the complicated nature of black politics in a world organized by racism. I want to both ‘deconstruct certain modalities’ of black political thought, critical race theory, and decolonial thought as well as construct a theory of black statecraft that holds together the critique and the (possibilities of) formation or foundation of the new. I tease out our understanding of the state as both a set of political, social, economic institutions of governance and an idea influencing how we envision our society, the principal foundations of government and the state, and the role of government/the state in the peoples lives. In this way, it’s important to keep in mind the state as object – as a site of contestation – and as an idea – another site of contestation.

Recent surveys show that managers tend to consider compliance restrictions and a lack of resources as the main obstacles to innovation. This common wisdom suggests eradicating all constraints: by getting rid of rules and boundaries, creativity, and innovative thinking will thrive. Our research, however, challenges this wisdom and suggests that managers can innovate better by embracing constraints. We reviewed 145 empirical studies on the effects of constraints on creativity and innovation, and found that individuals, teams, and organizations alike benefit from a healthy dose of constraints. It is only when the constraints become too high that they stifle creativity and innovation.¶ As a simple illustration of the principle, consider GE Healthcare’s MAC 400 Electrocardiograph (ECG), which revolutionized rural access to medical care. The product was the outcome of a formidable set of constraints imposed on GE engineers: develop an ECG device that boasts the latest technology, costs no more than $1 per scan, is ultra portable to reach rural communities (i.e, should be lightweight and fit into a backpack), and is battery operated. The engineers were given just 18 months and a budget of $500,000 – a very modest budget by GE’s standards, given that development of its predecessor cost $5.4 million. Our research suggests that GE engineers were not successful despite these constraints, but because of them. Constraints can foster innovation when they represent a motivating challenge and focus efforts on a more narrowly defined way forward.¶ According to the studies we reviewed, when there are no constraints on the creative process, complacency sets in, and people follow what psychologists call the path-of-least-resistance – they go for the most intuitive idea that comes to mind rather than investing in the development of better ideas. Constraints, in contrast, provide focus and a creative challenge that motivates people to search for and connect information from different sources to generate novel ideas for new products, services, or business processes.¶ Therefore, managers can embrace and use a variety of constraints in their arsenal. These constraints take three main forms. First, they can limit inputs (e.g., time, human capital, funds, excess cash, and available materials). For example, managers may intentionally cap resources in corporate entrepreneurship initiatives to motivate employees to be more resourceful. Second, they can enforce specific processes. Examples include procedures on seeking early market and technological feedback (e.g., lean start-up model), guidelines on how small cross-functional work teams should interact (e.g., agile management approaches), or rules for brainstorming. Third, they can set specific output requirements such as product or service specifications. For example, Apple’s former Design Chief Jonathan Ive is known to have imposed use of scratch-resistant aluminosilicate glass during the design of iPhone 4.

Imagine being tasked with creating something new and having the world at your disposal. You can invent whatever you want, made from any material you choose, in any color, size or shape you’d like. Pretty amazing, right?¶ As it turns out, that kind of creative freedom can be paralyzing.¶ Though most people think that unlimited resources are what fuel innovation, the best ideas are born from creative constraints.¶ In his TedEd animation short, Brandon Rodriguez explains that “any project is restricted by many factors, such as the cost, what materials you have at your disposal, and the unbreakable laws of physics. These factors are called creative constraints, and they’re the requirements and limitations we have to address in order to accomplish a goal.” ¶ He also notes that they apply across professions and play a unique role as drivers of discovery and invention. Even supposed failures can lead to breakthroughs. When scientist Alexander Fleming mistakenly contaminated a Petri dish in the lab, it led to the discovery of the first antibiotic, penicillin. Synthetic dye, plastic, and gunpowder have similar origin stories.¶ “Constraints,” Rodriguez says, “aren’t the boundaries of creativity, but the foundation of it.”¶ Research backs up Rodriguez’s assertion. A study on creativity and constraint demonstrates that surprisingly when options are limited, people generate more, rather than less, varied solutions.¶ When faced with scarcity, research shows that people must give themselves the freedom to use resources in less conventional ways. Without restrictions, the research suggests, we’d remain stuck in our old ways of thinking. Constraints create an environment that demands that we unleash that which would otherwise remain untapped, which fuels innovation. ¶ Here’s how to embrace creative constraints:¶ View them as the creative challenges they are¶ Instead of resisting constraints and seeing them as inhibitors to your success, reframe them as creative challenges essential for innovation. ¶ Constraints shake us from the shackles of the status quo and force us to use our creativity to find new solutions. We engage our curiosity to ask questions like “what if?” and “why not?” And by shifting our perspective, we allow constraints to help us maintain focus and direction.

I engage my profession as a humanities professor to draw the link between questioning and life, for that link is already at stake when scholars lose their jobs, universities lose their programs, and instructors are laid off because of the questions they pose, the presuppositions they call into question in order to advance a more livable and just form of life. Fanon has already drawn this link in a way that we must keep in mind. The attack on scholars is aimed at their scholarship and implies a judgment about what a university should include or exclude. To understand this form of power, we need the forms of thought supplied by universities, including the humanities, but we also need a way to relate the existential risk that thinking can imply to the institutions that bear responsibility for keeping critical thought alive. I am struck by the fact that when we draw attention to the plight of endangered scholars, we generally start with a sequence of events, or we ask them to tell their stories, or we explain how it came about that they signed petitions, received warnings, and then the police were at the door; the legal document served; the sudden discovery that they are locked out of the university, or that it is too dangerous to come to the university. In other words, being fired, censored, threatened, or expelled takes place through a sequence of events where interpretations and judgments have been made and executed, and the injustice of these acts is established through narrative means. Understanding how censorship and expulsion works requires an ability to construct a narrative and conduct an interpretation. An interpretation based on evidence is crucial not just in a court of law for the purpose of illuminating an injustice but also in a humanities classroom, where the point is to learn how to work with a text, to understand how it communicates what it does, the kind of evidence it supplies for its claims, and what relationship to the world it seeks to open or close.

Fanon sugests that questioning is, or can be, a matter of life and death, a decision to build a human world or let the world dissolve into inhumanity. But he also points to a kind of freedom that is helpful for us to remember as we broach the question of academic freedom—a freedom that requires moving beyond established parameters of knowledge. Although some invoke academic freedom to justify their circulation of falsehoods and hatreds, it is important to remember that academic freedom is a faculty right that comes to exist within institutions that establish norms for academic inquiry. We can quarrel about whether some of those norms are justified, as we do within institutions in which we are obligated to demonstrate the claims we make. That obligation to demonstrate our claims, what we seek to know, and why, exists across the disciplines both in our research and as a practice of our teaching. In the humanities and the arts, demonstration takes many forms: we are bound to the organization of words on a page or images on a screen or a canvas when we give an interpretation, or we present the archives that establish and elide the histories yet to be told. When a student treats a character in fiction as a person, we try to explain how the character belongs to the fiction even as it resonates with our lives. We ask students to find the part of the text that can ground that interpretation, and we ask for a reading of that passage, a way of getting bound up with the text that yields an interpretation that shows that the text has been understood. There is no one right interpretation, but ungrounded speculation that bypasses the material at hand fails, in my view, to qualify as a good reading. We seek to demonstrate that difference when we teach students how to think critically and judge well. At the same time, in the course of reading, we come up against the limits of disciplines and the constraining, if not destructive, character of certain categories and modes of thought. Critique, as an operation of thought, does not always stay within the bounds, since one of its aims is to question what and how thought is bounded, and whether those limits should be dismantled in the name of another university, or another world.

It is important to note that when we talk about indigenous peoples' relationship with their lands, it is not a question of whether an individual may or may not have a relationship with her or his environment. Obviously, it is important to distinguish between a philosophy or a worldview and individual thinking and behaviour which may not always reflect or comply with the former. Moreover, my intention here is not to evoke the stereotype of 'ecological Indian' or any other variety of the Noble Savage, but to consider how certain aspects of indigenous life philosophies can inform our rethinking the notion of responsibility and how that could be applied in endeavours aimed at decolonizing and transforming the hegemonic academy characterized by sanctioned epistemic ignorance. In the context of rapid corporatization of the academy, there is a pressing need to envision alternatives that oppose the destructive agendas affecting all of us. The pervasive nature of neoliberal corporate mentality is also reflected in the (willy-nilly) adoption of its values such as the externalization of social responsibility by many academics. It seems that the ethos and values of corporations and consumer culture are increasingly influencing the academy. In the former, social responsibility is considered a distortion of business principles (Bakan, 2004, p. 35), whereas in the latter, "we are actively prevented from exercising care and living in ecologically-embedded and responsible ways" (Plumwood, 2002, p. 16). As a result, we have academics, including many 'revolutionary scholars,' who prefer to point fingers rather than start examining their own roles in espousing new forms of social responsibility. As Grande (2004) contends:

In this context, the voices of indigenous and other non-Western peoples become increasingly vital, not because such peoples categorically possess any kind of magical, mystical power to fix countless generations of abuse and neglect, but because non-Western peoples and nations exist as living critiques of the dominant culture, providing critique-al knowledge and potentially transformative paradigms. (p. 65)

(Michael – President and CEO @ Center for Christianity & Public Life, “A Politics Worse than Death,” 10 July 2020, https://breakingground.us/a-politics-worse-than-death/)

This year, our politics has been riveted by death. The COVID-19 virus has been a blunt reminder of a truth we try so desperately to avoid: that death is coming for us all. Yet the solidarity that might be inspired by this knowledge has been challenged by the renewed realization that death is not colorblind in America, whether it comes to the racial disparities of the pandemic or the deadly violence against black people at the hands of the state. What do we do when death comes to our politics? Whose death matters in our politics? Of course, death has always been tied to politics. In fact, some would argue that politics itself is a response to death, and our desire to ward it off. Violence unto death has been an engine of economic development. Violence is so pervasive in political affairs that the development of tools of violence so extraordinary so as to ensure the annihilation of entire communities of people have been hailed as victories for peace. It is conventional wisdom among much of the foreign-policy establishment that the threat of violent death as a result of nuclear warfare is an acceptable and wise tool for peace and protection. Many are reckoning with the fact that, as a society, we have made a similar bargain domestically: the ever-present specter of death for some at the hands of law enforcement is an acceptable cost for the security we believe violence provides for us. This violence is necessary, some think, because they never anticipate that it will fall on them. This violence is acceptable because it happens only with the legitimacy we grant it, not by our own hands. Framed in such striking terms, I am tempted to judge this bargain quite harshly. Indeed, I am tempted to judge us harshly for making it. But perhaps such a judgment is too easy. It is difficult to count deaths averted, especially in such a violent world. What violence has been avoided because of the deterrence of the nuclear bomb, or of the death penalty? If physical death is not just inevitable but an imperative, perhaps our politics needs to plan for it, to consider it, to redirect it as long as possible. One feels vulnerable even expressing such doubts, but what hubris to refuse to even consider the utility of the nuclear bomb or the electric chair, even if you seek to abolish both, as I do. Perhaps the nuclear bomb has saved my life. Perhaps lethal injection has saved yours. Might ending either only lead to misery of a different sort, death by other hands? How do we weigh these possibilities? Whose death matters? In a discourse centered on privilege, it’s tempting to draw a clear dividing line between the powerful and the downtrodden on questions of death and violence. We might assume that only the powerful are content with such “necessary” violence, and that the downtrodden would do away with it if they could. But the powerful often fly above death, unaware it lies just beneath the cover of the clouds. The downtrodden can view death as a matter of practicality, a potential source of order and safety, however unreliable, amid chaos. But here is the real distinction: For death to come to the powerful, it almost always has to come for the powerless first. To reach the palace, an opposing army must first make its way through the slums. For the powerful, their death is often everyone’s death. For the unnoticed and unnoteworthy, death comes like a thief in the night. A fundamental privilege, certainly, is the privilege to stave off death, to die knowing every appropriate measure was taken to protect your life. A pandemic like the one we are enduring now cuts through these typical divides. While the burden of the COVID-19 virus has not fallen equally on all, it is striking how it has forced a kind of solidarity. It is easy to mock celebrities complaining about stay-at-home orders while they sip cocktails in their exotic swimming pools, but I can’t really think of anything other than COVID-19 that has forced me to adjust in my life, that has also forced bank CEOs and movie stars to adjust as well, particularly over such a sustained period of time and over such a geographic spread. The powerful sometimes have unique reasons to fear death because of their power, but COVID-19 has caused powerful people to fear death simply because they are human. There is a certain unity in this. For a moment, at least, it seemed as though we were ready as a country to meet the moment. A Pew study in March found that 89 percent of Americans were following news about COVID-19 very (51 percent) or fairly (38 percent) closely. In April, an overwhelming majority (80 percent) of the American people supported stay-at-home orders, knowing and bearing their cost. This pandemic has brought governance, especially state and local governance, back into the center of a politics dominated by personality, identity, and movements. I was struck on a recent walk as I passed by a series of local government signs urging me to protect myself and others. Local government, which mostly fades into the background in my life, now brought to the fore. A March NBC/Wall Street Journal survey showed about three-quarters of registered voters had confidence in state and local government to deal with the outbreak of the virus. Congress, which has evaded responsibility for much in recent years, actually acted to pass a significant, if flawed, relief bill on a bipartisan basis. Perhaps the pandemic would prove that some seemingly intractable political problems were not so intractable after all. This is the story I would love to see and tell. Instead, while we should not ignore the bright spots, I do not believe death has jolted us out of anything. Yes, we have had a politics riveted by death this year, but death has exerted little discernible discipline on our political dysfunction. Rather, our politics has proved capable of forcing even death into its mold. In March, Rusty Reno, the editor-in-chief of First Things, decried the “sentimentalism” and “false god” of saving lives. His article was widely panned on social media, and easy accusations of pro-life hypocrisy were called forth. In May, on Twitter, Reno would share that his view that the “mask culture” was “fear-driven” and that wearing a mask is a “mark of cowardice.” This, too, was not received well on social media. There is a kind of pseudo-Christian narcissism that places on others its own embrace of a calculated risk in determining death’s value. We’ve all seen the folks at protests who claim they’re okay to be out in public because God will protect them. Or the Ohio legislator who the “image of God” as depicted in the human face specifically as the reason he would not wear a mask, and asked, “Is the role of government to protect us from death, which is inevitable? Or is the role of government to radically protect our freedom and our liberty?” Many of us recognize these kinds of sentiments as irresponsible. But perhaps we simply lack theological insight? Perhaps we lack the faith of Christian bravado? Are we not supposed to “reject death’s dominion” as Reno called for us to do? In the , we’re told that while Jesus was teaching, a crowd began to surround him, and so Jesus told his disciples that they would take a boat across the nearby lake. Before they could leave, a teacher approached Jesus and said he would follow Jesus wherever he went. Jesus indicated to the man what he was volunteering for, a life on the run. One of Jesus’s disciples asked to bury his father before traveling on with Jesus. Jesus replied, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” “Then,” Scripture tells us, Jesus got into a boat and his disciples followed him. “We better do what he says,” they might have said. “He’s been worth following so far,” they might have reasoned, the implicit question hanging in the air. The passage continues, Suddenly a furious storm came up on the lake, so that the waves swept over the boat. But Jesus was sleeping. The disciples went and woke him, saying, “Lord, save us! We’re going to drown!” He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm. The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!” As Dallas Willard suggested in a , Jesus is not just reproaching his disciples for fearing that the boat would sink, but for “their thought that if their boat were to sink it would be the end of the world.” In other words, he reproaches them for their overriding fear—of danger, of physical harm, of death—fear to the point of the diminishment of their faith. At another point in Jesus’s ministry, he had been sent word that someone he loved in Judea was sick. Jesus told the disciples who were with him that the sickness would not end in death, but would be an occasion for God’s glory. After two days, Scripture tells us, Jesus said that they were to return to Judea. Jesus’s companions reminded him that he had almost been killed the last time he was in Judea, but he told them Lazarus had died and he was going to see him. Martha and Mary, whom he also loved, were there as well. Andrew told the other disciples that they were to follow Jesus to die as well. When Jesus arrived in Bethany, he was greeted by Martha, who expressed utter confidence that Jesus had the power to prevent Lazarus’s death, and that “even now God will give you whatever you ask.” Jesus tells Martha her brother will rise again, but Martha gives Jesus an out: “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” This understanding of physical death seems like precisely the kind of faith Jesus wanted from the disciples on the boat. When Mary saw Jesus, she fell at his feet, and told him, “Lord, if you had been there, my brother would not have died.” Scripture says that when Jesus “saw Mary weeping . . . he was deeply moved and troubled.” Jesus asked to be taken to Lazarus, and it is when those who had gathered told him “Come and see, Lord,” that Jesus wept. He would, of course, raise Lazarus from the dead. And Jesus and his disciples would not die that day, as the disciples had worried. In the passage of Scripture describing Jesus’s greatest miracle, and his supreme confidence in his Father, Jesus is described as “moved” multiple times, troubled, weeping. What was it that led Jesus to rebuke his disciples on the boat but to weep with those mourning the death of Lazarus? When confronted with death, when is the proper Christian response to proclaim, like Paul, “O death, where is thy sting!,” and when is it to weep, to mourn, to try to avoid death or turn it back? There is a passage in Scripture where Jesus is talking with Simon Peter about death. The way a person interprets this passage can be an indicator of what they think about God and how God views death. Jesus, who had risen from the dead, had joined several of his disciples on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and made them breakfast. After they were fed, he addressed Simon Peter, who had denied that he knew Jesus three times prior to his crucifixion. When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” “Yes, Lord,” he said, “you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.” Again Jesus said, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.” The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, “Follow me!” I am afraid many of us read this as a story of Jesus shaming Simon Peter, reminding Simon Peter of his betrayal and then giving Simon Peter his punishment. Instead, I believe this is a story of reconciliation, of Jesus assuring Simon Peter of his love. By telling Simon Peter how he will die, he tells Simon Peter that he will be with him, that even in death Simon Peter will never be abandoned by Jesus. It’s a tender moment, not an alpha moment, just as when Jesus tells Thomas he can put hand into his side where he was pierced. This was not to shame Thomas, but to help him believe. We so often put ourselves in the center of the drama, when Jesus was always thinking about others. Jesus’s life testifies to a concern for the lives and physical deaths of others, even as he was on his way to his own death. He told his disciple to put away his sword, and healed the ear of a man who would take him to his death. Bearing his cross, he looked at his mother and the “disciple he loved” and thought of how his death would leave them, and entrusted them to each other’s care. On the cross, he asked that his Father forgive those who put him there. On the cross, as a thief feared his own death, Jesus spoke through anguish to offer consolation and salvation. Our political culture is sick with self-expression and a self-interested pursuit of power that masquerades as civic contribution. This sickness is not as developed for most Americans as it is for its greatest purveyors, but that is part of the problem. We have, indeed, an in this country, for whom the heights of their greatest imagination for their contribution to our politics, when they think of it at all, is their self-satisfied rejection of it. Those who are, understandably, exhausted by this culture that is intended to either convert them or grind them down become limp in their convictions. There was no widespread outcry for stay-at-home orders and restrictions to be lifted. As of late May, of Americans were concerned loosening restrictions would lead to a second wave of infections. They were betrayed by elected officials, yes, but that explanation is both insufficient and a practical dead-end. Those elected officials were simply more certain they would be held accountable by special interests and a vocal, active, and organized fringe than they would be by an exhausted, disengaged majority. Our political problem is not simply a function of those who haven’t thought about their own death, but of those who aren’t motivated by the death of others. Our political problem is that we have a system that requires tremendous energy to be heard, and a citizenry that cannot find the energy, resources, and will to be heard. At some point, we must question the conventional wisdom that the stratification and sophistication of media, including social media, has been a neutral democratizing force, and instead ask whether it has empowered and incentivized unrepresentative voices at the cost of a representative politics. We should ask the question now, while we still can, before we become so limited by the extremes in our politics that we can’t imagine there are any other options. the Republican governor of North Dakota plead through tears, marshaling great rhetorical tools of persuasion, that citizens not assume a person wearing a mask in public is sending a political message of antagonism but consider that they might have a five-year-old at home who is at risk of death if they are infected with the COVID-19 virus. How can our politicians gain trust and respect as experts when our politics is so stupid? When a governor of a state has to explain to grown adults, citizens, that they should prioritize the safety of vulnerable children over their discomfort at the sight of a mask, I’m not sure a mere change in political leadership is sufficient to the challenge. No, our political narcissism is now institutional and systemic, and deeper reform is needed. Why is the primary response our political system can muster to a man dying at the hands of police in Minneapolis the rejection of an image in Mississippi that apparently required nine people dying in a church basement in Charleston five years earlier for politicians to finally act to take it down from South Carolina’s state capitol building? Here is where federal reform that would actually be responsive to the millions who have protested following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd sits today: Senator Mitch McConnell charged Senator Tim Scott with drafting legislation without Democratic input in the Senate. Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a vote on legislation drafted only by Democrats that they knew had no chance of becoming law. Democrats in the Senate refused to negotiate with Senator Scott, contending his bill was not robust enough. That assessment is valid; I agree with it. But I would also note that Senator Scott’s bill includes provisions Democrats believed were important enough to include in their own bill. It is now doubtful Congress will pass any legislation in response to the clear injustice that has grabbed the attention of the people. Correction: Juneteenth is still on the table. What a predictably American way to commemorate a history of racism in this nation, to respond to black death with kente cloth and a holiday. How is inaction preferable to insufficient action? With political will so fleeting, the attention span of politicians and the people so short, can we really afford to wait until another election, in the hope that we’ll be more empowered, not less, come January? Is this political gamesmanship commensurate with the moral gravity of the moment? Our politics can muddle any clear intention. You see, the political insiders tell us, it is really for the best that we don’t pass any federal reforms now, when there is political will to do so. In order to pass federal legislation addressing police brutality, the best course of action is to raise money for political campaigns that will promise to pass reform, and also raise money for the advocacy groups that will ensure those politicians we elect will pass reforms. What’s the cost of waiting? We won’t know for sure, because the national database of police use of force that is in Senator Scott’s bill that Democrats won’t negotiate on, which is also in the Democrats’ bill, won’t see the light of day until the right tragedy meets the right expression meets the right constellation of politicians who are in power to take the right amount of credit for the reform. The expressive drives American politics right now, at least when it comes to the terms of debate. When the American people actually get to vote, like in the Democratic primary, it’s more of an even contest. One reason our politics is now so driven by executive action and legal balancing tests is that this mode of “governing” is sustained by personalities. Once a bill becomes law, that’s it. That work is done, and there is no more symbolism to extract from it. The expression is expressed. Once it is law, the debate over it is dead. A new debate might emerge, but that debate now must consider a new feature. A new word has been spoken, and it stands on its own. How frustrating that is for those who prefer to talk without ceasing, without ever really saying anything at all. It is exhausting—this political culture that responds most readily to those who find in politics an ultimate arbiter of meaning, who view politics as a forum for their inexhaustible expressions—but if anything is to change, the exhausted must choose to act. As citizens, we hold an office we cannot leave vacant. As Christians, for those who are Christian, we must identify the harm our politics is causing and the harm our politics is unwilling to rectify, and recognize that our capacity as citizens paired with our obligations to our neighbors requires us to act. Our actions might prove insufficient, but in a pluralistic democracy like ours, we are not held accountable for outcomes but inputs. Ideally, every citizen can come to the public square fully as themselves. This is not in contradiction to the idea that citizens, and especially Christians, ought not come to politics only for themselves as individuals. Our political participation should be grounded in our perspective and our convictions, yes, but our political convictions are a different thing than merely our personal preferences, affections, interests, loves, and hatreds made public. This is not relativism; it is discernment. And the Christian faith offers for our actions in a pluralistic society, and for the society we live in itself. We must act for the good of our neighbors, the good of our politics, and hope that, by the grace of God, our actions accomplish some good. For this to happen, we, the exhausted, must institutionalize. We must coordinate. We must invest. We are exhausted because we shout into the wind with no plan, alone, and are disappointed when the wind does not return to us with a reply. Politicians cannot respond to incentives that are never presented to them. Institutions respond to those who are active participants in them, not silent bystanders who express their displeasure through cold shoulders and disappointed scowls. The exhausted must know what they believe, and actually believe they have something to offer the public. They must affirm truths, not just sigh when they hear falsehoods. The exhausted must recognize they are exhausted because politics is demanding from them what it does not deserve, and distracting them from providing what it needs. When we refuse to grant politics’ claim as a source of affirmation and forum for unmediated self-expression, we’ll have space and energy to view politics as a forum for the mediated pursuit of the common good. This pursuit will be healthier once we acknowledge that our political convictions, our convictions about how to advance justice and affirm human dignity in our politics, are imperfect and prudential. We pursue right as we see it, but we assume we could be wrong, and therefore our political participation will always be tinged with enough ambivalence that we can act in politics with integrity, and treat those with whom we disagree with dignity. The exhausted must stop looking to politics for motivation, and find their motivation elsewhere. Politics cannot be the source of our action, only the object. We must refuse politics’ claim as ultimate, while also refusing to cede politics to those who make an idol of it. We must die to our ourselves, to our nonsensical desire for a politics that is just our own, so that we can see and act in politics as it is, in a way that is free to reflect concern for others as well. On the night before his death, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. called for something like this, what he called “dangerous unselfishness.” He those gathered about the good Samaritan. Here, he sought to empathize with the priest and the Levite who passed the man on the other side of the road. He imagines not just cold indifference, ignorant, but that the priest and the Levite were conflicted. And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” What King describes here is the moral paralysis of refusing to address the injustice in front of us because of uncertainty about what would follow. I am not advising here a reckless politics; I have already cautioned about a dogmatic politics that fails to consider the potential costs of pursuing a particular agenda. But you will notice that dogma is rarely accompanied by a concern for others’ interest and perspective. The issue here is not whether citizens and policymakers should react recklessly to whatever injustice seems most pressing without concern for the consequences. The issue is whether we allow the possibility of unintended consequences that would more directly affect ourselves to override whatever motivation we might have to alleviate an injustice that more directly affects someone else. Does the mere imagining of harm falling to us prevent us from intervening in a real injustice we know is happening today? In April, a circulated about the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. Priests had stepped forward to volunteer to offer final rites to dying coronavirus patients. Some hailed their actions with similar language as was used to praise those who defied convention to wear a mask. Here, too, were people who weren’t going to let fear over a virus get in the way of doing something they wanted to do. But, of course, the nature and context of what these priests did is far different. Their confidence in Christ was not used as justification to act in a way that put their neighbors at risk. Quite the opposite, it was because of their security in Jesus that they had the freedom to sacrifice in the service of others who faced death. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. For you are with me.” Christians never welcome death on its own, for this is a very rejection of life. But to walk where death might be in order to follow Jesus—like David, like the disciples following Jesus to Judea even as they did not understand what would happen or what Jesus intended—this is to embrace life to its fullest. I have been thinking about one death in particular over these past few months. Reverend Joseph Echols Lowery helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), served as its vice president under Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and served as the SCLC’s third president. The SCLC is arguably the most powerful, explicitly Christian organization for human rights and justice in the history of this nation. Lowery was there in Montgomery for the bus boycott. He was the person who presented the demands to Governor Wallace from the “Bloody Sunday” march. He was one of the principal American voices against apartheid in South Africa. He delivered the benediction at President Obama’s first inaugural, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. In his book Bearing the Cross, David Garrow wrote of Lowery that he was “the most prominent survivor” of the civil rights movement, “the human and symbolic link going all the way back.” Reverend Lowery died on March 27, 2020. Had he passed during any other time, the city of Atlanta would have been consumed with honoring this man even more than it already has. (A street is named in his honor, and Atlanta’s mayor ordered flags at half-staff in the wake of his death.) Had he not passed during a pandemic, he would have been honored as Billy Graham was, laid in honor at the capitol. Had he passed during the presidency of any person with the slightest sense of history, of honor, Reverend Lowery would have been honored from the Rose Garden, perhaps—with some expression of gratitude and recognition from the president of the United States. I knew Reverend Lowery, and had the tremendous blessing of spending significant time with him over the last twelve years. My personal sadness over his sadness has mingled with a public sadness. I have been quite sad that Reverend Lowery’s name has not been on everyone’s lips. I have wondered where the inexpressible mourning will go, as I believe it must go somewhere. The dead always leave a trace. There’s a story about Reverend Lowery that has helped me. The run-up to Bloody Sunday was a difficult season for King. He was physically tired. He was tired of fundraising. He was off the highs of the Civil Rights Act, but he was now back in Alabama, where his first major action took place a decade earlier. The FBI had notified him of the most serious death threat on his life up until that point, and had urged him to take much greater precaution in his travels. Malcolm X had been assassinated. Jimmie Lee Jackson had been murdered. It was Jackson’s funeral that brought King to Alabama on March 3. (Bloody Sunday was March 7.) Jackson was murdered by an Alabama state trooper during a peaceful, nonviolent protest for voting rights. He was a civil rights activist and deacon in his Baptist church. Garrow describes the scene: King returned to Alabama on Wednesday to attend Jimmie Lee Jackson’s funeral. He preached at the memorial service and led a procession of some one thousand mourners through the rain to Jackson’s grave site. The constant death threats and the reminders of Malcolm’s and Jackson’s violent ends, had put King in a morbid state of mind. As the march started out for the cemetery, King beckoned SCLC board member Joseph Lowery to come with him. “Come on, walk with me, Joe. This may be my last walk,” King remarked in a bantering tone that did not conceal the concern underlying it. “Come on, walk with me, Joe. This may be my last walk.” Might we consider our political participation less as an opportunity to express and advance our personal interest, and more as an opportunity to come alongside those who face death, those whose backs are against the wall? Will we walk in our politics without thinking of only ourselves, but the death and injustice around us?

In a violent and contemporary period of history (let's say between the two world wars and the cold war), it is myth that invades cinema as imaginary content. It is the golden age of despotic and legendary resurrections. Myth, chased from the real by the violence of history, finds refuge in cinema. Today, it is history itself that invades the cinema according to the same scenario-the historical stake chased from our lives by this sort of immense neutralization, which is dubbed peaceful coexistence on a global level, and pacified monotony on the quotidian level-this history exorcised by a slowly or brutally congealing society celebrates its resurrection in force on the screen, according to the same process that used to make lost myths live again. History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth. It is by virtue of this fact that it takes the place of myths on the screen. The illusion would be to congratulate oneself on this "awareness of history on the part of cinema," as one congratulated oneself on the "entrance of politics into the university." Same misunderstanding, same mystification. The politics that enter the university are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise, with the air of a game and a field of adventure, this kind of politics is like sexuality or permanent education (or like social security in its time), that is, posthumous liberalization. The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations , and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution-today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions-no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake. Anything serves to escape this void, this leukemia of history and of politics, this hemorrhage of values-it is in proportion to this distress that all content can be evoked pell-mell, that all previous history is resurrected in bulk-a controlling idea no longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates: war, fascism, the pageantry of the belle epoque, or the revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and is mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and funereal exaltation, in the same retro fascination. There is however a privileging of the immediately preceding era (fascism, war, the period immediately following the war-the innumerable films that play on these themes for us have a closer, more perverse, denser, more confused essence). One can explain it by evoking the Freudian theory of fetishism (perhaps also a retro hypothesis). This trauma (loss of referentials) is similar to the discovery of the difference between the sexes in children, as serious, as profound, as irreversible: the fetishization of an object intervenes to obscure this unbearable discovery, but precisely, says Freud, this object is not just any object, it is often the last object perceived before the traumatic discovery. Thus the fetishized history will preferably be the one immediately preceding our "irreferential" era. Whence the omnipresence of fascism and of war in retro-a coincidence, an affinity that is not at all political; it is naive to conclude that the evocation of fascism signals a current renewal of fascism (it is precisely because one is no longer there, because one is in something else, which is still less amusing, it is for this reason that fascism can again become fascinating in its filtered cruelty, aestheticized by retro). History thus made its triumphal entry into cinema, posthumously (the term historical has undergone the same fate: a "historical'' moment, monument, congress, figure are in this way designated as fossils). Its reinjection has no value as conscious awareness but only as nostalgia for a lost referential. This does not signify that history has never appeared in cinema as a powerful moment, as a contemporary process, as insurrection and not as resurrection. In the "real" as in cinema, there was history but there isn't any anymore. Today, the history that is "given back" to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a "historical real'' than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real. Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal. Therein objects shine in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that fundamentally they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance, the empty form of representation. It is a question of life or death: these objects are no longer either living or deadly. That is why they are so exact, so minute, frozen in the state in which a brutal loss of the real would have seized them. All, but not only, those historical films whose very perfection is disquieting: Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor, Barry Lyndon, 1900, All the President's Men, etc. One has the impression of it being a question of perfect remakes, of extraordinary montages that emerge more from a combinatory culture (or Mcluhanesque mosaic), oflarge photo-, kino-, historicosynthesis machines, etc., rather than one of veritable films. Let's understand each other: their quality is not in question. The problem is rather that in some sense we are left completely indifferent. Take The Last Picture Show: like me, you would have had to be sufficiently distracted to have thought it to be an original production from the 1950s: a very good film about the customs in and the atmosphere of the American small town. Just a slight suspicion: it was a little too good, more in tune, better than the others, without the psychological, moral, and sentimental blotches of the films of that era. Stupefaction when one discovers that it is a 1970s film, perfect retro, purged, pure, the hyperrealist restitution of 1950s cinema. One talks of remaking silent films, those will also doubtlessly be better than those of the period. A whole generation of films is emerging that will be to those one knew what the android is to man: marvelous artifacts, without weakness, pleasing simulacra that lack only the imaginary, and the hallucination inherent to cinema. Most of what we see today (the best) is already of this order. Barry Lyndon is the best example: one never did better, one will never do better in ... in what? Not in evoking, not even in evoking, in simulating. All the toxic radiation has been filtered, all the ingredients are there, in precise doses, not a single error

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s plans for wealth taxation represent a welcome and, frankly, overdue shift in the attention the economics profession pays to issues of wealth inequality. Central to this shift, of course, has been their sometime co-author, Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century tracked the relentless redistribution of economic rewards over the last four decades from workers—those whose income derives mainly from wage labor—to capitalists, those whose income stems instead from the rents and profits that their wealth delivers to them. Zucman and Saez provide a powerful proposal for how we might begin to address this problem—what R. H. Tawney called “the problem of riches”—through ambitious political action. But in some instances we need to be more radical than they propose, and there is also much to be done outside the tax system itself. (Some of this Piketty himself outlines in his new book, Capital and Ideology.)

Start with our reasons for caring about wealth inequality. Zucman and Saez are right that wealth inequality matters not just to the degree that it determines income inequality. As they put it, “wealth is power.” Great wealth can be both cause and effect: a source of unacceptable forms of economic power as well as a consequence of such power. Wealth is not just a way of storing up opportunities for future private consumption, as in some rather innocent economists’ models. More often it is a means to shift political agendas in the direction of the wealthy by converting economic power into political power, or a way of buying educational and social advantages for family members at the expense of their fellow citizens.

While it could hardly be called revolutionary, the plan is actually pretty smart politics for Warren and the Democrats. It will dedicate a new program to demographic groups that have been moving away from Republicans and consolidating behind Democrats in recent elections: college graduates, upwardly mobile suburbanites. It will also address the genuine scandal of ever-growing student debt, without addressing the problem of ever-growing tuition and the luxurification of the American college experience. That is, it will relieve the costs to students, without really hitting the bottom line for the professoriate and administrations of colleges — another constituency that punches above its weight in the Democratic coalition.

This is because the wealthy’s wealth is not in cash but largely in stocks, real estate and art. To pay a wealth tax they would have to sell large blocks of stock that would force market prices down for everyone invested in the markets.

Warren is not ignorant of the market disruption her proposed Wealth Tax could take. Indeed, it is the opening salvo toward government control of industry. The next step is for a “responsible” Congress to intervene and “prevent the disruption in the markets that could cause the middle class to incur losses in their retirement accounts” when significant stock liquidations occur as the wealthy prepare to pay their taxes.

We face crises on every front. The ongoing health crisis has tragically already cost over 2.5 million lives worldwide. Economic crisis has also come in Covid’s wake. In Britain it threatens 1980s levels of youth unemployment. Over the next few years it’s estimated that one in 20 of us will be destitute. The environmental crisis threatens lives and livelihoods on a major global scale. Inequality is rampant and detrimental. The charity Oxfam has warned that the world’s poorest “could need over a decade to recover from the economic impact” of Covid-19, while the world’s ten biggest fortunes alone grew by $500 billion. The Office for Budget Responsibility, which tracks government spending, said on 3 March that borrowing would be £355 billion in the financial year to April 2021 – the highest figure ever seen outside wartime. Who will pay for the pandemic spending? Will it be the working class that pays again through austerity, or the billionaires? Which class will determine what measures are taken and what society’s priorities are? A Wealth Tax Commission (WTC) was “established in Spring 2020 to provide in-depth analysis of proposals for a UK wealth tax, for the first time in almost half a century” as part of this debate. For the working class and poor of the world it’s clear that change to the way society is organised is needed. Increasingly discussion and debate will take place about how to most effectively fight to defend our lives and our livelihoods – and whether a wealth tax should be supported and fought for. Billionaires increase wealth While the very richest seem to inhabit another planet in many ways – billionaires across the world saw their wealth rise by 32% to $14.7 trillion last year – they cannot escape completely the crises that confront their system. A former Tory advisor writing in the Financial Times said: “If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that economic insecurity can breed political instability. In recent decades, globalisation and deindustrialisation combined with rising inequality have contributed to the appeal of populist politicians across many advanced economies. The resulting instability – and the negative impact on social mobility – should worry all conservatives”. The unavoidable question confronting the working class is how can we solve the huge problems that confront us – of securing the basics of food, shelter, a job and a future for our children? Nearly 27 million American adults report that their household sometimes doesn’t have enough to eat. In Britain four million children live in poverty. The fact that six million people in Britain will breathe a sigh of relief that the Tories are maintaining the £20 a week ‘uplift’ to Universal Credit gives a glimpse of the depths and breadth of poverty here. In order to protect the future of capitalism in extreme situations like today, the capitalist class has shown itself prepared to take all kinds of steps that appeared unthinkable before. Over the last year, in order to save their system, capitalist governments have been forced to take actions they previously thought they would never consider. However, the measures they implement are ultimately in the interests of saving the capitalist system. “No, I do not believe that now is the time, or ever would be the time, for a wealth tax.” So said Rishi Sunak, Tory Chancellor in July 2020. Eight months on he announced the first rise in corporation tax since 1974 and speculation is rife that he could go further. ‘Millionaires tax’ Argentina voted for a one-off ‘millionaires’ tax’ on 4 December. It’s expected to raise £2.2 billion, intended for Covid relief and to address inequality. Argentina ranked second-last of 53 countries as the best places to be during the pandemic, and the poverty rate rose to 40.9% in the first half of 2020. Nonetheless, the tax has been attacked as ‘confiscatory’ by the representatives of big business and big farmers. The billionaires will fight tooth and nail against any incursion into their wealth. One legal company that advises some of Britain’s richest, including hedge fund managers, claims to have doubled the planning work it does to help their clients prepare for a potential wealth tax. The billionaires will also fight it through their representatives in politics – the Tories and Keir Starmer are defenders of the capitalist system. However, part of the churning generated by the crisis of capitalism means that there are elements even within the capitalist class who can see that a continuation of the rising inequality and impoverishment of the 99% puts the future of their system in jeopardy from the revolt being brewed. While polls in Britain and the US find support for a wealth tax at around the three-quarter mark – including a majority of Tory and Republican voters – it’s not only those at the sharper end of inequality who are debating these ideas. A majority of readers of the Financial Times, the mouthpiece of the capitalist class, are in favour. In an open letter to the 2020 presidential candidates printed in the New York Times, 18 billionaires made the case for a moderate tax on wealth. These mavericks are actually among the more far-sighted members of their class – they can see that the impoverishment of the 99% cuts across their ability to sell their products and make profits. One signatory is Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist. He has “come to the conclusion that a wealth tax would actually increase investment, boost productivity, grow the economy, and create more and better jobs”. There are also voices who seek to represent the 99% who are calling for wealth taxes. New York Congress Woman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ‘left’ Democrat, has put forward a top rate of 70% on income over $10 million. Her fellow Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for a wealth tax of 2% on wealth over $50 million – which is estimated to affect 750,000 families in the US. Here in Britain, Richard Burgon, secretary of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, has proposed a windfall tax on big business. Predictably, Boris Johnson has rejected this. But so has Labour leader Keir Starmer, saying ‘now is not the time’. He’s keen to make it crystal clear he has the bosses’ backs. Fighting inequality cannot be done without having to confront these defenders of capitalism. The moral case will not be enough. The headline finding by the WTC academics is that, after accounting for non-compliance and administration costs, a one-off wealth tax payable on all individual wealth above £500,000 and charged at 1% a year for five years would raise £260 billion. They base their figures on net wealth (all assets minus all debt). With a threshold of £2 million it would raise £80 billion. This is not the first time a wealth tax has been discussed in Britain. But they have always been confronted with resistance from the bosses. In 1974, for example, the then Labour chancellor Denis Healey retreated from his ‘pip-squeezing’ wealth tax plans when faced with a big-business investment strike, hyperinflation and rising unemployment. Rather than challenge the bosses, Labour chose to take the axe to vital public services. But it cannot be ruled out that, under pressure, even the Tories could be forced to implement a limited wealth tax. In order to save the system they represent – capitalism – they have already shown themselves prepared to take all kinds of seemingly unthinkable steps. Historically, much higher taxes have existed – under Thatcher corporation tax stood at 52% – now it’s 19%. But as the response to the proposed increase to 25% in the latest budget shows, the fat cats are not about to give up their gains easily. The vast majority of the super-rich will fight any measures that reduce the share of wealth they get, no matter how moderate. The Socialist Party is in favour of taxing the rich – ‘until the pips squeak’! In the 2015 general election, standing as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, we called for a one-off tax on wealthy individuals or businesses to raise cash for the NHS. We explained that a one-off levy of 20% on the £519 billion then held by the richest 1,000 individuals would raise over £100 billion, enough to plug the then funding gap many times over. The Sunday Times 2020 Rich List calculated the combined wealth of Britain’s super-rich to be £743 billion. That 20% levy would now produce £148 billion. Following the 2007-08 world economic crisis, the Socialist Party offered a programme to resist the working class paying for a crisis that we didn’t cause. It included a 50% levy on the uninvested capital of the major corporations. By the end of June 2020, UK private non-financial corporations (ie mainly the corporate sector) had accumulated – including global deposits – gross cash worth almost £900 billion. It certainly is gross. As a share of GDP, corporate cash has risen from about 20% in 1987 to about 40% today. That’s not to mention the estimated $800 billion lost in tax every year on the vast wealth of corporations and individuals stashed in tax havens. Because the bosses don’t see an easy way to make a profit, the capitalist class are failing to fulfil their historic role of investment in the productive forces. Our programme is therefore not limited to a wealth tax. The problem with poverty and inequality isn’t only that the 1% hoard so much of society’s wealth. It’s that the private ownership of the means of production by the capitalist class condemns society to crisis. It is a short-sighted system.