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For some types of AI systems, the potential to impact the physical, mental, and financial wellbeing of individuals, communities, and society is obvious. For example, a credit scoring system could discriminate against certain ethnic groups. For other systems – in particular general-purpose AI systems6 – the applications and potential risks are often not immediately evident. General-purpose AI systems trained on massive datasets also have unexpected (and often unknown) emergent capabilities.7

In Europe, the draft AI Act already requires that, prior to deployment and upon any substantial modification, ‘high-risk’ AI systems undergo ‘conformity assessments’ in order to certify compliance with specified harmonized standards or other common specifications.8 In some cases, the Act requires such assessments to be carried out by independent third-parties to avoid conflicts of interest.

The future of the 5G economy in the US will depend to a large extent on decisions made by government. Policymakers can help this essential technology expand by focusing on spectrum availability and the innovation ecosystem. We propose five key initiatives:

Increase the availability of licensed full-power mid-band spectrum for mobile use. Doing so will enable the US 5G economy to better support innovative use cases and further scale existing successes. As noted earlier, mid-band spectrum is in short supply, and more of it is sorely needed. Adding capacity in this range will provide the greatest benefit for users in urban, suburban, and rural locales. With additional exclusive-use licensed spectrum, telecom companies can provide a consistent, reliable, and robust experience for consumers and businesses through 5G connectivity.

Scholars’ geographical locations matter for a number of reasons to do with the politics of knowledge (some of which are discussed above), and they also matter because they can shape the types of research that is possible. While in some locations (e.g. in Hungary) it may be impossible to conduct feminist research in an academic institution at all, practical issues in other locations—such as the priorities and methodological biases of funding bodies, the relative permissiveness of risk assessment regimes, and the possibility of getting research access into military institutions—all shape what types of feminist research are possible. This likely plays out in different ways across Europe, but I offer a couple of examples from the UK here because, given that most scholars are located in the UK, this likely has the most significant impact on the field as a whole. The most immediate point here is that the concentration of scholars in the UK leads to an disproportionate focus in the literature on the UK military, but there are also more subtle factors at play. Many UK institutions have cautious travel risk assessment policies that somewhat simplistically (and influenced by a colonial mindset) divide the world into ‘low risk’ and ‘high risk,’ or even ‘hostile’ locations. Anecdotally, this may result in researchers being denied permission to carry out fieldwork in certain locations in a way that would not happen, for example, in Sweden, where universities do not seem to follow restrictive travel risk assessment regimes. Similarly, the quantity of scholarship that does exist on the British military perhaps masks the often difficult processes required to gain approval to conduct research with members of the institution itself, which particularly constrain research that is interpretive, critical, and/or feminist. The power and biases of military gatekeepers in the British context have doubtless prevented and/or reshaped feminist research that would otherwise have been conducted (Basham and Catignani 2021). It is not possible, of course, to conduct a review of literature not published and research 2 DISPARITIES AND DIVERSIFICATION … 25 not carried out. However, the point I want to make here is that it is not only intellectual interest that drives how feminist scholars in Europe select the focus of their research, it is also political economic realities and the constraints of requiring various forms of institutional permission. These realities shape the body of feminist literature on war and militarism that is produced across Europe in powerful, if usually unseen, ways.

Hodaie ‘22 [Sara Hodaie, undergraduate student at The University of Western Ontario making some very good arguments; “Naught is Fair in Love and War: Reframing the Partnership Between Marxism and Feminism”; 04-01-2022; Tulips: The Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Undergraduate Journal,; accessed 07-19-2024] dliang

Nevertheless, these battles oppose distinct and individual forms of oppression. Though they converge, there is a danger in essentializing them as one. This has been the historical mode of Marxism, wherein classical theorists discounted the existence of patriarchy by assimilating it into explanations of class struggle.18 This approach, known as reductionism, reduces systems of oppression to one concern, discounting and minimising the multitude of other structural forces which lead to the increased marginalisation of certain groups.19 These two battles must rather develop an intersectional relationship, recognizing that the institutions which they aim to abolish converge to amplify the oppression of women, especially those of lower socioeconomic status and various marginalised groups. This equal appreciation which Marxism and feminism must develop is possible but impaired in an analysis of their relationship as a marriage. Hartmann’s analogy obscures the fundamental obligation of a strong relationship between Marxism and feminism for the fulfillment of their aims. It embarks on analysis from a framework of innate duality, which renders the parallels and junctions between the Marxist and feminist struggles ambiguous. This poses a risk of cyclical antagonism, wherein Marxism and feminism habitually contend upon which party holds sovereignty. Ironically, positing Marxism and feminism as a set of allied battles in a corresponding war transfers analysis from a schema of disunity and digresses focus towards the necessitation of a symbiotic relationship. It clearly demonstrates the prerequisite of a reciprocal relationship in achieving the aim of both Marxism and feminism and thereby makes compulsory the cooperation of the two. Further, it guides both parties to a common cause, which delineates the essence of their relationship.

Patterson developed a theory of Marxist feminist praxis that held that in the context of US capitalism, black women faced multiple oppressive relations that resulted in their greater exploitation under capitalism: of class, race and gender (Gore 2011; McDuffie 2011). In her essay, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” she wrote, “(o)ver the whole land, Negro women meet this triple exploitation – as workers, as women, as Negroes” (Patterson 1936). Claudia Jones, a communist party member who worked on the Scottsboro campaign, further elaborated Patterson’s invocation of historically specific relationships to exploitation (Davies 2007). Jones saw these complex relations as locations for greater strength among workers, rather than solely sites of division to be overcome by class solidarity. “The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressive seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is enhanced” (Guy-Shefthall 1995, 108). Jones argued that Marxist feminist struggles shaped by what Patterson called the “triple exploitation” faced by black women in the US could best lead the communist movement for liberation as a whole. As an early theory of intersectional praxis, Patterson and Jones proposed a Marxist feminist politics guided by the differential sites of oppression and exploitation faced by women of color, rather than simply by women workers. In 1977, the Combahee River Collective members theorized the liberatory possibilities for this praxis: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Guy Shefthall 1995).

The praxis of intersectional organizing on the left informed movements for reproductive justice and the movement for welfare rights, led by poor women of color in the United States in the 1960s (Ransby 2003). Both movements attacked ethics of women’s place in dominant regimes of heterosexuality, marriage and the family (Tillman 1970). The reproductive justice movement sought bodily autonomy for women’s reproductive decisions, and material state support to fully realize those choices (Ross and Solinger 2017). In addition, it linked reproductive justice to dismantling the carceral state that strictly policed (as it constituted) the class politics of gendered, raced and ethnicized embodiment within capitalism (Davis 1981). The welfare rights movement demanded a basic income from the US state that historically had excluded them from the postwar social wages for single mothers. These sites of praxis further pushed Marxist feminism to analyze different histories of oppression as co-constitutive in sites of reproduction and production.

Hodaie ‘22 [Sara Hodaie, undergraduate student at The University of Western Ontario making some very good arguments; “Naught is Fair in Love and War: Reframing the Partnership Between Marxism and Feminism”; 04-01-2022; Tulips: The Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Undergraduate Journal,; accessed 07-19-2024] dliang

Women's exclusion from the public sphere extended to their omission from politics. Thus, they were rendered unable to participate in the crafting of the legislature which directly impacted them. All forms of domination may be abridged as a lack of rights for one segment of society. Under capitalist domination, this is characterised by the position of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, while within patriarchal domination it is personified as that of man over woman. Thus, when these forms intersect, the rights of these oppressed groups are miniaturised. Throughout the industrial revolution, proponents of the enlightenment disseminated notions of equal opportunity and political rights. These declarations, however, did not apply to women, as they were understood as relegated to an entirely different sphere of existence, that of the private.12 The continued perseverance of the separation of spheres throughout history is evidence of a collective false consciousness with regard to patriarchal inequalities. False consciousness is a central concept of Marxism, which identifies the process as one wherein society recognizes the inequality present in a system of oppression as intrinsic to social relations.13 By this mechanism, domination is able to continue. False consciousness presents itself in patriarchy through the naturalisation of gender and its affiliated echelon. In this regard, gender differences guide the behaviour of both the oppressed and the oppressor, encouraging them to perform in accordance with patriarchal power relations. The false consciousness of patriarchy has been historically circulated and advantaged by capitalism through the commodification of gender norms. Following World War Two, gendered advertisements targeted directly at women encouraged an increase in consumption and bolstered patriarchal norms.14 These trends persist today through the sale of gendered goods and services, further disseminating both the gender binary and its illusion of worldly differences. Thus, patriarchy formulates the division which capitalism sells, and capitalists discover a market in the promulgation of patriarchal norms which it reinforces. This historical analysis of the intersection between capitalism and patriarchy indicates that the battles within which Marxism and feminism are engaged do not simply intersect, but are fundamentally reliant upon one another. Throughout history, capitalism has benefited from the existence of patriarchy, utilising the disparaged category of “woman” and preexisting patriarchal norms as both a labour and goods market. Patriarchy tolerates the system's exploitation of women's labour and provides it with a market of predetermined norms. In considering the structure of capital accumulation, wherein profit is gained by the capitalist through minimal reimbursement of labour power and the sale of commodities, the dependent exchange of capitalism and patriarchy becomes increasingly clear.15 This signifies the obligation which Marxism and feminism hold to one another in their respective battles. If capitalism and patriarchy are reliant upon each other, no feminist explanation of patriarchal oppression can be construed without consideration of capitalism, the distinct purpose of Marxism, and its adverse effects upon the situation of women. Likewise, no valid conception of capitalism can be conducted without recognition of the economic structures that maintain women's oppression. This is the fundamental contribution of Marxism to feminism and feminism to Marxism. Just as in warfare, without the equal allyship and communication of one another, neither of their battles may be succeeded. It may be rationalized here by Marxist opponents that feminism does not necessitate a particular Marxist contribution, but merely an ally which commits an awareness of the economic nature of patriarchy. Such contenders may claim that the Marxist domain is insufficient in its contribution to feminism due chiefly to its historic subjugation of feminist questions. Yet regardless of one's personal sentiment, it cannot be forsaken that Marxism comprises what is perhaps the most encyclopaedic analysis of capitalism and its consequences. Its exhaustive evaluations alone warrant it a valid contributor to feminist thought.16 Further, the historically antagonistic relationship between the two domains may otherwise be accepted from a positive frame of reference. Classical Marxism’s dismissal of independent patriarchal evaluation has resulted in subsequent history of extensive feminist enlargements and revisions of its original doctrines.17 While these amended forms of feminist Marxism may be incomplete, the breadth of research substantiates the relationship between the two, providing for a powerful foundation from which contemporary feminists may draw contributions and progress the symbiotic exchange.

Labor, Capitalism, and Slavery Du Bois was arguing that once slavery was addressed in comprehensive terms, in world-historical terms, its true nature was revealed. Beneath its appearance as a “feudal agrarianism” lay the real relation of slavery to the emergence of modern capitalism. As America was a critical subsector of this developing system, the conflicts between American creed and reality, the contradictions of American society, the distortions of its social structures and political institutions ensued from its dependence on slavery and would resound throughout the system into the twentieth century.69 Slavery, then, was not a historical aberration, it was not a “mistake” in an otherwise bourgeois democratic age. It was, and its imprints continued to be, systemic. Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the problem of Religion and Democracy, of Humanity. Words and futile gestures avail nothing. Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human breasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black. (p. 16)70 In America, “free labor”—the vast majority of it supplied by immigrant Europeans from Ireland, England, Italy, and Germany—was also profoundly affected: The new labor that came to the United States, while it was poor, used to oppression and accustomed to a low standard of living, was not willing, after it reached America, to regard itself as a permanent laboring class and it is in the light of this fact that the labor movement among white Americans must be studied. The successful, wellpaid American laboring class formed, because of its property and ideals, a petty bourgeoisie ready always to join capital in exploiting common labour, white and black, foreign and native. (p. 17) Eschewing the traditions forming in the European labor movements that would mature into the nineteenth century’s socialisms of the First and Second Internationals, syndicalism and anarchism, the transplanted European workers became preoccupied with the possibility of accumulating wealth and power, of becoming capitalists. Thus it was that American liberalism in the nineteenth century, with its ideals of individualism and its antagonisms to socialism, became manifest in a particular way. Its character was molded by an economic order that severely delimited material wellbeing and a racial consciousness that at one and the same time removed an entire section of the working classes, the Blacks, from the possibility of access to that well-being while also supplying a fictive measure of status to non-Black workers. The wisest of the leaders could not clearly envisage just how slave labor in conjunction and competition with free labor tended to reduce all labor toward slavery. (p. 19) It was only a minority of these non-Black workers that would join with liberal intellectuals and freedmen to form the abolitionist movement.71 Du Bois had stated as early as 1915 that the “labor aristocracy” that was the result of the trade unionism of a materialistic labor movement—in Germany, England, and France as well as in the United States—was a crucial support to the imperialism and colonialism of the late nineteenth century.72 In the United States, Black and non-Black labor became politically opposed “instead of becoming one great party.” The northern non-Black working-class movement effectively excluded the freedmen, the slaves, and the five million poor whites of the South. (It was even more specifically exclusionist after 1850 as it concentrated on a base of skilled industrial workers and craftsmen.) But it was a more generalized antagonism that would envelop Black and non-Black workers. During the Civil War itself, this conflict would erupt into race wars against Blacks. With the enactment of the Draft Laws in 1863, and with the encouragement of “pro slavery and pro-Southern” Copperheads from the North, the frustration of the nonBlack workers, with their living and working conditions and the war, were turned against Blacks. In the summer of 1863, hundreds of Blacks were killed by mobs of workers in New York City. The report of the Merchants’ Committee on the Draft Riot says of the Negroes: “Driven by fear of death at the hands of the mob, who the week previous had, as you remember, brutally murdered by hanging on trees and lamp posts, several of their number, and cruelly beaten and robbed many others, burning and sacking their houses, and driving nearly all from the streets, alleys and docks upon which they had previously obtained an honest though humble living—these people had been forced to take refuge on Blackwell’s Island, at police stations, on the outskirts of the city, in the swamps and woods back of Bergen, New Jersey, at Weeks-ville, and in the barns and out-houses of the farmers of Long Island and Morrisania.” (p. 103) More than once, in Black Reconstruction, in his editorials in The Crisis, and other works, Du Bois would return to this period in order to identify the roots of racial violence in the labor movement of the twentieth century. It also provided, he believed, an explanation for the tradition of skepticism found among Blacks for organized labor. What was true for the mainstream of the American labor movement was also a factor in the radical traditions in the country. Though mid-nineteenth-century socialism had been largely transferred from areas of Europe where antipathies toward Blacks were inconsequential, its adherents, too, had not been capable, generally, of resisting the corrosive influences of slavery. This had been the case for both Marxist and non-Marxist socialists. The precedents established during this period would be of no substantial help to twentieth-century socialists whether their programs directly or indirectly addressed themselves to “the Negro Problem.” Even when the Marxian ideas arrived, there was a split; the earlier representatives of the Marxian philosophy in America agreed with the older Union movement in deprecating any entanglement with the abolition controversy. After all, abolition represented capital. The whole movement was based on mawkish sentimentality, and not on the demands of the workers, at least of the white workers. And so the early American Marxists simply gave up the idea of intruding the black worker into the socialist commonwealth at that time. (pp. 24–25) Though there had been exceptions,73 the lack of an identity between the interests of Black and non-Black workers was fairly consistent in the labor movement. Wherever one looked—among those who saw the movement in political-electoral terms, or those who advocated revolutionary violence, or those who were committed to economic trade unionism—the labor movement was most often at best ambivalent toward Black liberation and progress. The ideology of racism in combination with self-interest functioned to pit immigrant and poor white workers against the Black worker and the slave. And after the Civil War, the same social consciousness divided the working classes—immigrant and white—from the ex-slave. More than twenty years before the appearance of Black Reconstruction, and while his experience with the Socialist Party was still fresh in his mind, Du Bois had recognized this as a contradiction in the labor movement.74 And during the intervening years, his anger had not dissipated. When it reappeared in Black Reconstruction, it was no longer simply a warning to a negligent labor movement, but an indictment. By then, the labor movement and capitalism were older and in deep crisis. By then, Du Bois spoke as a Black radical: Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over. Thus the majority of the world’s laborers, by the insistence of white labor, became the basis of a system of industry which ruined democracy and showed its perfect fruit in World War and Depression. And this book seeks to tell that story. (p. 30) Slavery and Democracy We have already noted how the idea of slavery, to Du Bois’s mind, was opposed to the ideals of democracy. The ideology necessary to rationalize slavery disallowed the further development of liberal democracy except as a myth. But Du Bois understood that the relationship between slavery and democracy was not a question of the clash of ideas. His approach to history was similar in this respect to that which Marx and Engels had presented in The German Ideology: This conception of history . . . comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “selfconsciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,” “spectres,” “fancies,” etc., but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which give rise to this idealistic humbug.75 For Du Bois, the creation of those political institutions and structures identified with American democracy involved congruence with the country’s economic character, that is, with the slave system and capitalism. And so, though the American Constitution reflected the power of the plantocracy only in its devices for electoral representation, that had been sufficient advantage for the domination of the federal government by that class during the Republic’s first several decades. This had meant a domination by a class that consisted of 7 percent of the South’s population: It had in American history chosen eleven out of sixteen Presidents, seventeen out of twenty-eight Judges of the Supreme Court, fourteen out of nineteen AttorneysGeneral, twenty-one out of thirty-three Speakers of the House, eighty out of one hundred thirty-four Foreign Ministers. (p. 47) Consequent to this power, the plantocracy had established a legal structure that effectively eliminated the civil rights of the nine million Black and poor white workers to be found in the South in the mid-nineteenth century. This perversion of the apparatus of representative democracy had survived the Civil War and Reconstruction and had persisted into the next century despite the challenges of Populism, organized labor, political radicalism, the Depression, and the mass Black movement of the unia.76 Federalism had evolved into states’ rights, the ideological dressing for first, slavery, and then the Black Codes, Jim Crow, and more contemporary forms of repression. Each shift in the apparatus of repression had been associated with the changing forms of exploitation as Blacks moved from being slaves to being sharecroppers and peons, and finally, to being proletariats or a labor reserve. In the North, “the dictatorship of property” had been manifest in capital and investment. Not as rich or as powerful as the plantocrats in the beginning, the northern merchants, manufacturers, and industrialists had developed on the backs of southern agriculture and European labor. The North exploited its labor more efficiently, not having to absorb the costs of developing it during its nonproductive years. Those costs were incurred by the socioeconomic sectors of Ireland, Germany, Italy, and England. The North supplied the middlemen between the South and its European and domestic markets; it supplied the shipping and transportation for the South’s produce. It was also in the process of developing a national economy of total integration before the Civil War, while the South was becoming increasingly dependent. In the world market, the merchants and manufacturers had all the advantages of unity, knowledge, and purpose, and could hammer down the price of raw material. The slaveholder, therefore, saw Northern merchants and manufacturers enrich themselves from the results of Southern agriculture (p. 41). His capitalistic rivals of the North were hard-working, simple-living zealots devoting their whole energy and intelligence to building up an industrial system. They quickly monopolized transport and mines and factories and they were more than willing to include the big plantations. . . . The result was that Northern and European industry set prices for Southern cotton, tobacco and sugar which left a narrow margin of profit for the planter. (p. 37) Capital, both industrial and financial, continued to grow until the northern industrialists could challenge the political power of the plantocrats. And while it grew, it too undermined the structures of democracy: The North had yielded to democracy, but only because democracy was curbed by a dictatorship of property and investment which left in the hands of the leaders of industry such economic power as insured their mastery and their profits. Less than this they knew perfectly well they could not yield, and more than this they would not. (p. 46) Once the industrial class emerged as dominant in the nation, it possessed not only its own basis of power and the social relations historically related to that power, but it also had available to it the instruments of repression created by the now subordinate southern ruling class. In its struggle with labor, it could activate racism to divide the labor movement into antagonistic forces. Moreover, the permutations of the instrument appeared endless: Black against white; Anglo-Saxon against southern and eastern European; domestic against immigrant; proletariat against share-cropper; white American against Asian, Black, Latin American, and so on.

Right now Black political organizing is in a crisis situation. The reason for that is because between 1970 and the early 1980s there is such a police crackdown on revolutionary forces that we’re now in a situation in which the election of Barack Obama has lit a fuse in the collective unconscious of the entire country. The people eight years ago or so thought: “Oh we’re going to elect a Black president and that’s going to show how we’re evolving in terms of our race relations.” Yeah, it showed that [laughter]. And what the election of Barack Obama has done is, it has liberated the unconscious anti-Blackness throughout the country that we are, thankfully, in a more fascistic mode than we have ever been in the past, and I thank him for that [laughter]. The question is, can Black political organizing in Ferguson and Baltimore and these places catch up with that, because unfortunately, we have a problem in that the country is so much more of a police state than it has ever been and you know that just by watching television. When I was in school, if you liked the American flag, if you liked the police, you didn’t have any friends. Now, I find young college students are very slow to say that they hate America, very slow to say that they hate the police. What we’re trying to do now is to infuse an antagonistic orientation in Black people who are white-collar people in college so that their intellectual skills can be enhanced by the orientation that is felt by Black people in the ghetto. If this doesn’t happen they run risk of being anointed and appointed (by the power structure) to manage the anger of Black people in the street, rather than relate to that anger. So that’s a hurdle that we have to overcome. You know, I’ve been doing political education workshops for Black Lives Matter in New York and Los Angeles, and probably will do more in Chicago. And what I hope to have people do workshop exercises around is this concept that I have called “Two Trains Running (Side by Side).” By that I mean, you can do your political organizing that will help us get relief from police brutality right now. We need that. We need that. But that work that we do should be seen as puny in terms of its philosophical and theoretical orientation so that we can educate ourselves politically to be against the police as an institution and against the United States as a country, even while we are working to reform police practices, because we do not have the strength right now that we had in the 1960s and 1970s to act in the way the Black Liberation Army did, or BaaderMeinhof, we do not have the strength to act in the revolutionary mode, but that lack of strength, that lack of capacity, should not contaminate our orientation. We should not feel that we have to accept the existence of police even if we’re working in reformist measures politically. Hopefully this idea of two trains running will pick up. Black Lives Matter has done a great job in opening up a new Black political organizing space. That’s great. Now let’s use that space for an educational project that is soundly anti-American, and soundly anti-police even if tactically, we have to work for police reforms.

Okay, hi. My name is Ramon Amaro. Thank you to the organizers for having me here today. I’m actually going to diverge a second and take the conversation to an ontological and theoretical point that can hopefully emerge to different conversations as we go on later. Namely, what I want to begin with is the idea of bare life of the black female body, an idea that Alessandra Raengo argues must be understood if we are even to critique modern forms of capital, as what we know as the black form is already subsumed in the monetary form of capital and the fictive substance of race. What I mean, and what I would like to propose here in following Raengo, is what she calls “the ontological scandal” perpetuated by slavery. This scandal, according to Raengo, is repeated “with each instance of alienated black labor, each time blackness functions as the commodity form, and with each repetition they continue to be reified.” But what’s important is Raengo’s gesture presupposes that the production and subsequent domination of colonial nations today are predicated on the abstract reification of the black female body as a mode of currency. To even begin to address this ontological scandal, we must first think through how the black body is individuated as a currency of exchange within modern financial systems. For instance, extensive work has been done by Spillers, Hartman, and others to illuminate the important role of the cargo ship on the Middle Passage as a scene of capital exchange and racial subjection. However, I want to build on this work to think through the genesis of the black self as already informed by the logics of innumeration and speculative risk, where the pre-individuated state of black being is always already contaminated by the conditions of labor-based capital accumulation. But this accumulation also informs a dissonance between the real black sense of self and any social agreement that may abstract the black self into, as Denise DeSilva argues, a formative system of monetary value. In other words, as Ian BacComb describes, the growth of Anglo-European financial domination was not merely a cycle of labor and exchange, but a scaled transaction of quantifiable insurance risk associated with the contingency of death and illness aboard slave cargo ships. BacComb points to the British economy in particular to discuss the granting of a real existence of enslaved bodies inasmuch as the survival and the successful delivery of these bodies can be bought virtually as the hidden substance of insurance contracts and bills of credit. Or in the case of the British slave ship Zong, the enslaved body is underwritten as the speculative risk of capital, and public outrage. In this way, the importance of the enslaved body to modes of capital is not predicated to actual material flesh, or even the potential for that body to labor, but was instead articulated as an abstract flow of enumeration and probability. If, under this premise, we are to take W.B. DuBois at face value and consider the double consciousness of the racialized individual, then we are immediately confronted with the fragmentation of black genesis as a tension between what is made visible as blackness or black non-being, which Sylvia Wynters argues is already owned by ontology as a problem of bio-epistemic compliance and the regime of prototypical capital existence, which I argue is symptomatic of a larger logic of social quantification. So I just wanna diverge for a second and return to the issue of the Zong for those who aren’t familiar, the issue of the slave body on the British slaver was the start and emergence of the British insurance industry. If anyone knows, there was an illness that broke out on the slave ship, in the middle of the Atlantic, seven crew members died, and I think it was in term of like twenty slaves, and the captain of that ship decided that, actually, it was cheaper to throw all the slaves overboard and claim the insurance than it was to continue the passage. And when he returned back to England, he sued the insurance company, and that was the start of litigation -- of the body itself as being a virtual point of risk. And what I’m arguing is that, since that development, obviously we know how pervasive the insurance industry is, how pervasive capital mechanisms are at identifying risk and probability, and what I’m arguing here is, following Raengo, is that what we know today as modern capitalism in the UK is already predicated on the violence of the black female body. So, to continue, as the terms of contemporary capital depart from the derivation of value as the direct engagement with the body to the technics of labor practice, so in other words, it no longer became about the actual slave being delivered to do manual labor – the financial gain was greater from actually deriving insurance risk on the body itself. So the body only became a black body once it was subsumed into capital types of risk. These engagements emerged as adaptive forms of information exchange that, unlike popular believe, are indifferent to the specificity of the body. However, it is specific only as much as the racialized body can be extracted into quantifiable forms of data and pre-emption, which continues today to be defined as social value in contemporary techno-capital institutions. What I’m attempting to highlight is that while the technology of shipping and insurance risk, predicated on violence and the abstraction of the black body, were once the lens through which blackness was made visible, the emergence of new generative types of technology, like machine learning, enact an accelerated form of targeting and visibility that no longer require physicality, but depend on the meta-abstraction of all social phenomenon to locate the body as a measure of correlation and probability. So, in other words, after the Zong, following Raengo here, after the Zong, the idea of abstracting the body into actual risk, of course, further objectified the black body, but it also set a precedent of actual citizenship being viewed as potential financial gain or potential investment.

Several theorists and activists have attempted to address the uneven history of the Left and Native American sovereignty in recent years. The widespread left support of the NoDAPL movement — including from America’s most famous socialist, Bernie Sanders — represents only the most obvious example. Historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has recovered the long legacy of the Latin American left’s engagement with indigenous issues through the work of Communist intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui. And David Harvey, as well as the Midnight Notes Collective, point to the ways in which “primary accumulation” — capitalism’s method for jump-starting growth by stealing and privatizing land and resources — is an ongoing and permanent feature of economic development. Still, most assume that Marxism and indigenous struggles have little to say to each other. The former theorizes capitalist modernity and historical transformation, taking the industrialized worker as its subject. Treaty claims and land rights are, at best, secondary concerns in this tradition. As a result, Churchill’s claim that indigenous people have historically been hostile to Marxian ideas generally goes unchallenged, especially in North America. Yet Churchill seems to ignore the writings of Native American Marxists themselves and their own engagement with the long history of dialectical materialist thought. This gap is not merely an ancillary concern: it furthers cultural assumptions that, in Philip Deloria’s words, Native Americans have “missed out on modernity.” Such assumptions also suggest that indigenous people and socialists have little common ground, furthering the notion that there is a dangerous and intractable rift between the labor-left and the sovereign rights of indigenous people. This is far from the truth. Anticapitalist and Anticolonial Archie Phinney, Nez Perce anthropologist and cofounder of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) — the longest-lived pan-Indian organization in the United States — remains one of most important, if least known, Native American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century. Despite, or perhaps because of, his wide-ranging writings — which moved from analyses of the Soviet Union’s policies on indigenous Siberian tribes and articles on mode-of-production theory to books on Nez Perce oral traditions — his work has been eclipsed by other 1930s Native intellectuals, such as D’Arcy McNickle and John Joseph Mathews, who authored the first “modernist” Native American novels in the United States. Phinney’s work has not been fully collected or studied, at least in part due to the long shadow of McCarthyism in the academy: the most complete account of his life and work — a 2004 special issue of the Journal of Northwest Anthropology — spends a great deal of time trying to distance Phinney from his own socialist commitments. And while Phinney’s precise political allegiances remain unknown — for instance, whether he was a member of the Communist Party — it’s clear that, had he not died suddenly in the late 1940s, he would have been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and likely fired from his position with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pan-Indian, cosmopolitan, and self-reflexively modern, Phinney represents another strand of indigenous intellectual thought that avoids the stark binary Means and Churchill articulate. Phinney linked the fight for Native American sovereignty with other struggles for racial justice in the United States. He theorized that Native peoples exist both in- and outside American democratic structures, addressing what is unique to Native American politics while also acknowledging that indigenous populations are modern and must develop a political voice and political allies. Phinney emerged as an intellectual at a time when much of the colonial world saw the Soviet Union and global socialism as a means of liberation. As historians such as Mark Naison, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Penny von Eschen have suggested, the pluralist cultural and political movements of the 1930s intersected with anticolonial and black nationalist movements. They shared space in the same publications and often within the same organizations. As Naison and Kelley explain, after the decline of the Garvey movement in the late 1920s, the Communist Party (CPUSA) not only recruited former Garveyites, but in many ways took up the torch of black nationalism within the United States and much of the colonized world. Beginning with the Sixth Communist International (Comintern) Congress in 1928, the Communist Party put forth a set of policies that would dramatically shape intellectual and political currents in the United States for the next decade. Abandoning “pure” class critique, the Sixth Congress built on Lenin’s and Stalin’s writings and declared anticolonial struggle a legitimate part of global revolution. It announced that the Comintern would support the liberation struggles of both “national minorities” within states and of subjects of colonial powers. On the one hand, this policy followed — perhaps simplistically — the Soviet Union’s policy of self-determination within the former Russian empire. On the other hand, it opened the door for American party leaders to develop a self-determination thesis for the US Black Belt, declaring African Americans “internally colonized” subjects in need of their own state. Perhaps because of the Left’s greater attention to antiracism, there seem to have been a small number of Native American party members who had, at least in regional chapters, a relatively high profile. The West Coast CPUSA newspaper the Western Worker (later the Peoples’ Daily World) printed several headline stories about Native American activist Joe Manzanares in the 1930s; he also placed an advertisement asking for those “interested in Indian issues” to call a number at the San Francisco CPUSA office. In addition, several letters to the editor from Native Americans articulated why they joined the party, combining the demand for self-determination with communist class rhetoric and anticolonial interrogations of the savage-civilized binary. One letter, for instance, argued that “white bosses stole all the land from us Indians” and “they call us ‘natives,’ or ‘Indians,’ or ‘wild,’ . . . the Indians are not wild. . . . Indians are always friendly to workers who must slave for a living.” This writer suggests that entering modernity — being “not wild” — does not amount to assimilation. Socialism, described as “solidarity with the proletariat,” is reimagined as coincident with the writer’s claims to the land and his history of dispossession. A 1934 letter by Vincent Spotted Eagle theorizes Native American life through mode-of-production theory: Before the white man came, our mode of production and distribution were on a cooperative basis, without any exploitation. This is Communism, which is true Americanism. And this is why I joined the Communist Party. Spotted Eagle declares capitalism an “original product of Europe,” writing that “we have been exploited” ever since “Columbus discovered this Great Nation.” Playing on the trope of “Americanism,” Spotted Eagle claims nation status for his own “Great Nation” as well as citizenship rights within the United States. His answer to European capitalism is not to go back to pre-Colombian life, but rather to find a new synthesis with “lovers of all humanity, especially the Negroes” through a transnational socialist project he refers to as communism. At the same time, the Western Worker printed five stories about CPUSA members organizing relief drives and unemployment councils on reservations in California. In Montana, the party ran a Native American senatorial candidate by the name of Raymond Gray. This suggests that, at least in the West, party activists and Native Americans organized together. While the extent and shape of these drives remain unclear, that the Communist Party had an organizing presence on reservations paints a very different picture of both the party and Native groups’ political engagement. Further, the Western Worker ran numerous articles on illegal land claims, broken treaties, deportations of Native Americans to Mexico, and the “genocidal” policy of Indian Removal in California, suggesting that the party did not see Native Americans merely through the lens of class but understood the specificity of Native claims to injustice. This archival evidence belies Churchill’s and Means’s critiques of the relationship between Marxist praxis and indigenous struggle, in much the same way Phinney’s writings on the Soviet “national minorities” policy helped him develop his own materialist theories of indigenous sovereignty. While lacking in the formal party infrastructure that helped vocalize issues of importance to African Americans, such archival evidence suggest far greater participation and involvement between Native communities and the Marxist left than is usually granted. Assimilation as Proletarianization Phinney referred to the Soviet Union in a 1943 speech as “the first attempt of men to intelligently direct their own history.” This is not to suggest that he subscribed to Stalinist policy or was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party — indeed, as Michael Denning reminds us, focusing principally on party membership is not necessarily the best tool for analyzing radical movements of the 1930s. Yet Phinney, who studied under Franz Boas at Columbia and traveled to Leningrad with a letter of introduction from Marxist-feminist Agnes Smedley, clearly saw the Soviet Union and Marxism like many other intellectuals of color in his day: as an alternative mode of economic development that didn’t rely on the European West’s racial hierarchies. While earning his doctorate in Leningrad between 1932 and 1937, Phinney conducted a comparative study of US Indian policy and Soviet treatment of its national minorities, especially its Siberian hunting-and-gathering peoples. He hoped to find a model that the United States could emulate. While Phinney never published a book on this topic, a close reading of his published and unpublished manuscripts suggests that his exposure to Marxism and Soviet policy would powerfully influence his subsequent involvement with the implementation of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) and his career as a founding theoretician of postwar Indian activism. Phinney’s most widely circulated essay after his death, “Numipu Among the White Settlers,” was written as he corresponded with Boas during his stay in Leningrad. In laying out the contradictions faced by the Nimi’ipuu (or Numipu or Nez Perce), Phinney argued that the false binary between assimilation and a return to the past doesn’t help us understand the Nimi’ipuu after their surrender in 1877. Rather, he relied on mode-of-production theory to assess the tribe’s current status. As Phinney saw it, the Nimi’ipuu’s potential extinction could not be attributed to a single cause — and he made a point to highlight that they had survived their defeat at the hands of the military. Rather, the tribe’s “moribund” status resulted from a forty-year process by which “the Indians, having been lifted out of, or divested of, one culture,” were then “thrust into another one” — a foreign mode of life for which they had neither understanding nor the material resources with which to flourish. As a materialist — someone who believed that culture is embedded in and produced by the necessities of social and economic life — Phinney was skeptical of cultural revivalists who did not also provide a political program of economic liberation. He recounts the Nimi’ipuu’s collective mode of production as inseparable from their cultural identity: In the former communal economy, all activity was one continuous communal experience in which work (food quest and manufacture), ritual, and recreation were a single process. In subsistence production Indians had no conception of work as distinct from other cultural activity — there was not even a word for “labor” in their language. But with the abrupt transition from general collective participation to advanced capitalistic economy and individualism, they were confronted with a distinction between labor on an individualistic basis and their communal activity and recreation. This contradiction, fundamentally between collectivism and individualism, now disrupted the tribal order, because material benefits were offered to Numipu people individually, without the requirement of work. The individuality of the Indians was developed, but not in consequence of individual enterprise and effort; on the other hand, the communal spirit survived and is expressed today in the form of the aforementioned recreational activities. Phinney, believing that the Nimi’ipuu had lost control of their economic base, did not think “communal spirit” alone could overcome the tribe’s inability to produce its own livelihood. “The flashy regalia and vivid performance of Indians today satisfy both the white man’s taste for spectacular pageantry and the performer’s love for the spotlight,” Phinney wrote of Nimi’ipuu cultural celebrations, and yet “it must not be assumed that elements of Indian culture are being revived. On the contrary, this represents the last stage in the degradation of Numipu culture.” Phinney was no cultural purist, but he felt that cultural celebration without a political or economic program did not signal a revival. Rather, it indexed the tribe’s assimilation into the racial politics of consumer spectacle. There could be no cultural solution without an economic one. Phinney never argued that the Nimi’ipuu should assimilate their lives and work patterns to the settler-colonial economy. He never suggested — as so many others did — that they rely on job training, farming techniques, or educational opportunities provided by the white social order. Instead, he examined what kind of social order the Nimi’ipuu were being asked to join, arguing that participating in the capitalist economy as workers would merely mean “assimilation on the lowest level of white proletarian existence.” Leaving the reservation and joining the working class would achieve “a condition wherein [the Nimi’ipuu] must face the adversities of exploitation and class antagonism,” trading the communal struggle against settler-colonialism for the individual struggle for bare survival. Phinney believed this would, more likely than not, make them worse off than they had been on their allotments and food rations. Framing assimilation as “proletarianization,” Phinney underscores that sovereignty includes not only control over land, but one’s own labor as well. As he explained, for most workers, their conscription into capitalism begins with destitution: There are today in the United States more Negro and more white citizens than Indians who are existing under inhuman conditions of misery and poverty; these non-Indians receive no special attention because they are unemployed proletarians and impoverished tenants and farmers — i.e., active components of capitalist society who are supposed to work out their own salvations individually — to live or die by their own efforts . . . Phinney added, with characteristic acerbity, that “the US government feels compelled to rehabilitate [the Nimi’ipuu]” and bring them “up to the level equal to that of the average rural white family.” But that “average rural white family” itself needed a strong dose of “rehabilitation.” In this passage, Phinney undermines the binary between “primitive” and “modern,” asking why a Native American would want to be assimilated into a social order that itself was fissured along race and class lines. The Nimi’ipuu have already had modernity thrust upon them — the real question is, what kind? Rather than join the working class, Phinney called for Native peoples to fuse their tradition of communal ownership and tribal identity with the first principles of Marxist economics — “ownership of the means of production.” Native Americans, he suggested, should “make Indian groups economically self-supporting on the basis of cooperative (tribal) organization and corporate (common) ownership of the means of production.” In this way, Phinney adapted Marx to an indigenous framework, suggesting that only a collective economic base could support tribal culture. Rather than calling for self-supporting indigenous communities separate from industrialized society, Phinney envisioned collective economic self-sufficiency “break[ing] down the barriers of isolation” and allowing the Nimi’ipuu to align themselves with the mass of “average rural white families” in working toward “new and better conditions of life” as “alert, modern communities.” Phinney’s modernism emerged from his sense that life must be oriented toward social transformation. To try to revive the past, Phinney remarked, would be to live a “‘reservation’ existence of befeathered museum specimens” — to become the “vanishing Indian” whose outmoded ways retroactively justify the theft of Nez Perce land. Yet he also realized that progress and modernity came at an existential price. For Native Americans, confronting the future also meant confronting the profound experience of loss, even of destitution, that resulted from centuries of disease and dispossession followed by colonial rule. Modernity, as he saw it, was therefore an unfinished project, the outcome of which would depend on social struggle. A New Indian Intelligentsia Phinney sought work with the BIA when the agency was undergoing a profound transition. The 1934 IRA or “Indian New Deal” not only decriminalized indigenous culture and ended the government’s disastrous assimilation policies, it also created the first affirmative action program in federal hiring, recruiting large numbers of educated Native Americans into its administrative ranks. Yet Phinney had his own vision of Indian self-empowerment, which expressed a greater skepticism of the American state than his subsequent decision to work for the government would suggest. Sending a long and critical letter to BIA leader John Collier, Phinney correctly reflected that the IRA “failed to break out of the rigid guardianship of the government” and fell dangerously short of the forms of sovereignty he outlined in his “Numipu” essay. Objecting to the dominance of white anthropologists and missionaries at the American Indian Conference in 1939, Phinney formed a new caucus “limited to bona fide Indian leaders,” independent of Collier’s BIA. This group became the National Congress of American Indians. A reading of Phinney’s published and unpublished writings reveals that he felt this pan-Indian organization could empower Native Americans to express a modern sense of self and have a political impact on the United States. In an essay entitled “A New Indian Intelligentsia,” Phinney sketched out his vision of the NCAI. He began by calling on American Indians to radically transform their concept of their own identity: Apart from any considerations of racism or nationalism, there must be ascribed to American Indians not only a tribal status but a racial status. The concept of an Indian “race” derives largely from our modern propensity for classifying groups of people rather than individualizing them. Anciently, Indians identified themselves by local groups or bands, later by tribes and ethnolinguistic stocks, until now they have gained a distinct consciousness of that all-embracing classification — “Indians.” . . . This trend is already apparent among Indian tribes as it is among other minorities throughout the world. Ever the dialectician, Phinney theorized that the imposed identity of race, like the imposed identity of the worker under capitalism, could serve as the basis for collective strength. Concerned that tribal identity could prevent Native peoples from developing wider alliances, Phinney stressed that “Indian racial heritage is not a thing that depends for its survival upon a reservation atmosphere. [S]uch nonreservation Indians are probably the most capable and aggressive element of the Indian population in the United States.” Phinney’s last point seems telling. Rather than imagine, as Means does, that Native Americans who live in cities would be less politically conscious than those on reservations, Phinney argues that diasporic Native peoples are in fact the most politically active. The NCAI, he believed, would function as the vanguard of this new, pan-Indian community. It would be far more “aggressive and militant” than earlier Indian organizations precisely because it acknowledged the modernity of the Native American condition. Phinney’s turn toward racial affiliation did not mark a turn toward assimilation. The NCAI limited its involvement with white-led organizations, and its own membership was restricted solely to Native Americans. Indeed, the NCAI was so suspicious of white authority that any Indian working for the BIA could not assume a leadership position. At its foundation, the NCAI ranked self-determination and sovereignty as its primary political concerns. The group would advance Indian interests at the national level, articulating a broadly Native point of view separate from tribal and land-based identities yet inextricably interwoven with local concerns. The NCAI’s founders understood that their interests coincided with those of other people of color, yet they also saw Indian identity as a distinct form of belonging, emerging from history, treaty claims, and legal relationships with the federal government. In other words, the NCAI, thanks to Phinney’s visionary construction, used modern racial formations to function politically, yet it retained a sovereign Indian identity and purpose. As the NCAI’s heroic struggle to end the disastrous “termination policy” a decade later would suggest, Phinney’s vision for a pan-Indian Congress came not a moment too late. “All The Real Indians Died Off” Phinney’s life and work open up a set of questions about identity and praxis that still have purchase on the national imaginary about Native Americans. As Dunbar-Ortiz recently articulated, the most persistent myth about indigenous Americans is that they have vanished, part of a premodern past that has inevitably, if tragically, come and gone. The notion that “Indians have missed out on modernity” has justified their erasure from history and the logic for their conquest. The little attention paid to Phinney only reinforces this. Historians have tended to present him as either an Indian activist, uninterested in socialism, or as a “white man’s Indian” who adopted European ideas unsuited for Native life. But he was much more like other intellectuals of color of his day — concerned with colonialism, racial identity, and self-determination for his people in a global context. His belief that Native issues should matter to the Left and that Marxism has a role to play in indigenous liberation does not make Phinney a lone iconoclast — rather, it places his work in a global context that understands indigeneity, land, imperialism, and modernity as part of a coherent historical conjuncture. Phinney’s work suggests that modernity and Native American life need to be theorized together, and his ideas about what modern life may represent for all subaltern groups bears greater scrutiny. The questions he posed to the Nimi’ipuu apply to many groups that find themselves alienated, dispossessed, and exploited by capitalism: how to move forward as “alert, modern communities” that are “able to govern their affairs”? Equally, how do we transform the categories capitalism imposes upon us into modes of collective self-consciousness? Phinney understood that capitalism has a global, totalizing logic. But he also realized that this does not mean all subjects’ oppression — or liberation — is configured in the same way. He anticipated the largest, hemispheric pan-tribal gathering in many decades at the NoDAPL camp, and also saw that the fight to save the Standing Rock Sioux’s land, water, and treaty claims participate in a larger struggle over intensified resource extraction, primary accumulation, toxic racism, and the police state. Framing themselves as “water defenders,” the Standing Rock Sioux tribe both dramatizes the violation of their sovereign rights as a nation over their own resources, and connects them to a global struggle to wrest the foundational requirements of life, water, soil, and air from the grips of capital. In much the same way Phinney writes about race, such a construction highlights what is specific to indigenous struggle, while at the same time connecting that struggle to a transnational call for ecological justice. Fighting for indigenous sovereignty does not distract from transforming capitalist modernity — it is central to it.

The first problem is the equation of the Blockadia movements with a struggle for democracy. Klein writes: this emergent network of resistance is “driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival–the health of the water, air, and soil” (295) and “the fight against violent resource extraction and the fight for greater community control, democracy, and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin” (309). Klein displaces particular struggles (pipeline, fracking, climate) into the political field rather than seeing how the struggles themselves change the field by contesting its terms. Most of the time, activist groups aren’t majorities. They are small groups trying to force a position and bring more people over to their side — as well they should! Additionally, Klein implies that communities are somehow unified and that they encounter an external force (state or corporation) that is violently extracting resources from them. But division goes all the way through communities. The communities themselves are divided. The deadlocked political system that we have is both a cause and an effect of this division. Marxists refer to this division as class conflict (which works well enough if we have a loose understanding of ‘class’). By omitting the constitutive place of division, Klein can suggest that community sovereignty is a goal, again, as if the community were united against fossil fuels — but the fact that we are not united is precisely the problem the book, and the movement, encounters. To use a local example, in the battle against the expansion of methane gas storage and LPG storage in the fragile salt caverns adjacent to Seneca Lake, the Town of Reading — where the facility is located — endorses the gas storage plan. Schuyler County — where the facility is located — also supports the plan, although the vote came down to 1 person in their local board and the community is clearly divided. All the other counties surrounding the lake oppose the plan, but most of this opposition came from votes by city or county boards after petitions from activists. The state is considering the issues, and will make a decision. The federal government has already agreed to let the methane storage proceed, but might reconsider. Which level counts as the community? Why? And what sense does this make in a global setting? No one involved has said that the process has not been democratic. This is what democracy looks like. We just don’t think it has yielded the right outcome. The second problem is Klein’s association of communities with indigeneity and land. Klein writes, “communities with strong ties to the land have always, and will always, defend themselves against businesses that threaten their ways of life” (309). Here again she denies division, as if everyone in a community agreed on what constituted a threat, as if they were all similarly situated against a threat, as if they were never too deluded, tired, or exploited to defend themselves, as if they could never themselves constitute a threat to themselves. Cities, towns, states, and regions make bad decisions all the time; they stimulate industries that destroy them. Klein, though, has something else in mind, “a ferocious love” that “no amount of money can extinguish.” She associates this love “with an identity, a culture, a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their grandchildren, and that their ancestors may have paid for with great sacrifice.” She continues, “And though this kind of connection to place is surely strongest in Indigenous communities where the ties to the land go back thousands of years, it is in fact Blockadia’s defining feature” (342). Participants in my seminar found this description racist or fascist. Even though this is not Klein’s intent, her rhetoric deploys a set of myths regarding nature, and some people’s relation to nature, that make some people closer to nature (and further from civilization) than others. It also justifies an intense defense of blood and soil on the part of one group’s attachment to a place such that others become foreign, invaders, rightly excluded as threats to our way of life, our cultural identity. Given that climate change is already leading to increased migration and immigration and that the US and Europe are already responding by militarizing borders, a language of cultural defense and ties to the land is exactly what we don’t need in a global movement for climate justice. Klein’s argument, though, gets worse as it juxtaposes indigenous people’s love of place with the “extreme rootlessness” of the fossil fuel workforce. These “highly mobile” pipefitters, miners, engineers, and big rig drivers produce a culture of transience, even when they “may stay for decades and raise their kids” in a place. The language of rootless echoes with descriptions of cosmopolitan Jews, intellectuals, and communists. Some are always foreign elements threatening our way of life. In contrast, I imagine climate politics as breaking the link between place and identity. To address climate change, we have to treat the world itself as a commons and build institutions adequate to the task of managing it. I don’t have a clear idea as to what these institutions would look like. But the idea that no one is entitled to any place seems better to me as an ethos for a red-green coalition. It requires us to be accountable to every place. I should wrap this up. The final tension I want to address comes in Klein’s conclusion, as she emphasizes mass social movements. Invoking the abolition movement, Klein is inspiring, properly crediting Chris Hayes for his influential Nation article linking climate change and the emancipation of the slaves in the US. Nonetheless, her argument is strange. She calls for societal transformation but refuses the term “revolution.” Throughout the book, she has said that we are running out of time to stop a warming trend so severe as to destroy civilization as we know it if not eliminate the human species altogether. She invokes Brad Werner’s famous paper announcing that earth is basically fucked. But she writes: And let’s take it for granted that we want to do these radical things democratically and without a bloodbath, so violent, vanguardist revolutions don’t have much to offer in the way of roadmaps (450). This lets her completely discount the revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, as if there is nothing to learn from any of the large scale organizing undertaken by communists, socialists, wobblies, and unionists. Her model for the left thus relies on extracting from the left a central component of our history. Frankly, at the level of tactics alone, this is a bad call: why sign on to a political project premised on the rejection of working class achievements (a move which repeats a ubiquitous gesture of erasure since 1989). Wouldn’t incorporating these achievements be fundamental to any effort to reinvent “the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect” (460)? Klein is trying to open up a collective desire for collectivity, but without communism. It is also without revolution, which Klein dismisses as vanguardist, as if her Blockadians weren’t themselves at the vanguard of climate struggle. But what does it mean to reject revolution? If the movements are mobilized as she suggests, what will stop them? What would block or hinder the people after they are moving? Perhaps the state, since Klein hasn’t said anything about seizing it. Perhaps each other, since she thinks of us as divided into local communities. Perhaps the capitalist system, since she hasn’t called for its abolition. Or perhaps this isn’t the worry, since we are unlikely to be mobilized enough in time at all — and for enough of us in the north, that will be okay, at least for a while.

London, Author of several Books at the Intersection of Political Philosophy and Current Events. “Beginning again at the End: A Dialectics of Extinction,” New Formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, Volume 107-108, accessed via ProQuest / spp)

One of the main problems with liberal anti-anthropocentrism is not so much that the human (unwittingly) re-emerges centre stage, but that it does so in exactly the wrong kind of way. Rather than the fiction of a chastened humanity treading lightly on the earth and achieving some kind of harmonious ‘balance’ with nature, we need to begin instead by acknowledging that human beings are in fact freaks of nature: constitutively divided speaking beings; subjects of the unconscious and the death drive; and beings who are dialectical contradictions – on the one hand, part of nature (emerging immanently out of it) and, on the other hand, standing apart from this very nature (acquiring a degree of independence and autonomy from it). This latter point is crucial and can be further developed along lines suggested by Hegel and a number of his contemporary interlocutors.

A not insignificant part of the relations within the digital realm could be referred to as gift economies. The Digital will be dealt with in greater length below, but for now, it should suffice to point out that they also become a target of primitive accumulation (Fuchs, 2012, p. 707). “Unpaid labour extends to different realms, such as Google, Twitter, YouTube, Baidu, LinkedIn, knowledge creation and reproduction”; of course, this also affects labour activities involving domestic, educational, care, etc., “so that the human being in contemporary capitalism spends a lot of working hours every day in creating value for capital by abstract labour that is unpaid” (Fuchs, 2012, p. 716). Some of them are directly involved in the process of value creation, while others are merely indirectly involved by providing elements of social infrastructure. Everything that might have appeared to represent a barrier, an impossibility for private appropriation, is now being reconfigured within a new landscape of apparently endless possibilities. “The pressing search for new fields of expansion and acquisition finds an indispensable ally in technoscience” (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, p. 54). With historical reduction of the value of knowledge, access to it and consequently a form of general appropriation become ubiquitous. However, information and knowledge can always have a direct impact on real economic and political-economic power relations. The free exchange of knowledge through these gift economies and general appropriation must be blocked if contemporary capitalist power is to maintain its status quo. “Rivalry, as a consequence, has to be constructed”, a qualitative change which the authors call “ontological commodification” (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, p. 55f). Even the United Nations promotes this logic of commodification, as everything becomes subject to the logic of profit. Knowledge and cultures emerging in specific places become excluded from intellectual property(common) (Pellizzoni & Ylönen, 2012, p. 59). On the other hand, capital makes no real distinction of use-values. It appropriates for free all cultural practices and developed knowledge which may assist in fostering, producing, and appropriating surplus-value. An example is the so-called sharing economy, which despite its propagandistic excitement focusing on the term “sharing”, analogous to the Creative Commons, is simply another mechanism to penetrate the dimensions of social life not yet subordinated by the logic of economic imposition with an economic dependency prompted by the logic of primitive accumulation (Mazzucato, 2018). Gift economies are, therefore, subsumed under capitalism; now, only the appearance of gift economies is maintained, while in practice, it attains the essence of capitalist economic/market imperatives.

Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum denounce that there is more than meets the eyes when the phenomenon of knowledge-based economy (KBE) is considered. “A shadowy side of the KBE is the primitive accumulation of capital (in the form of intellectual property) through private expropriation (or enclosure) of the collectively produced knowledge of past generations” (Sum & Jessop, 2013, p. 287). Knowledge is transmuted from a collective into a private resource, namely, intellectual property(private). As briefly summarised in Chap. 4 (especially when analysing biopiracy), first, there is the appropriation of indigenous, aboriginal, and foreign knowledge and culture; this process occurs outside of the so-called free market and represents the immediate expropriation and conversion into “commodified knowledge”. Second, the appropriation of nature represents a new domain of colonisation. Third, the effect of the so-called second enclosure is similar to the first in that it separates labour from the means of labour, “thereby appropriating the knowledge of the collective labourer”. Fourth, knowledge is further subsumed to a new form of management imposed top-down by elements such as the Bayh-Dole Act or TRIPS. Finally, intellectual property(private) is so drastically extended that it provokes the “erosion of any residual public interest” (Sum & Jessop, 2013, p. 287). Rebecca Eisenberg refers to the cul-de-sac: “Even if exclusive rights enhance private incentives to develop further research tools, they could do considerable damage to the research enterprise by inhibiting the effective utilisation of existing ones” (Eisenberg, 1994, p. 647). This process of primitive accumulation through “the major expansion of patents into what used to be the realm of science is”, according to Richard Nelson, “well documented” (Nelson, 2003, p. 1702). This progression of major control and “regulation” is contrasted with previous phases of humanity in which “law” was concerned with particular cultural events that might have “disturbed the peace” but not with cultural “creation or spread” (Lessig, 2004, p. 8).

However, as capital is a social relation, one cannot simply accept the examples given by Marx or Smith as rigid, eternal truths if the intention is to contemplate productive and unproductive labour in the contemporary capitalist mode of production. In another sense, Smith also places great emphasis on accumulation. “Parsimony, and not industry, is the immediate cause of the increase of capital”; thus, industry without accumulation has no potential for producing capital (Smith, 2012, p. 332). However, Smith conflates the meaning of capital with profit and is consequently unable to differentiate between capital, surplus-value, and profit. “It thus directly grasps surplus-value in the form of profit. Hence, the difficulties that are about to arise” (Marx, 1965, p. 61). Despite this not irrelevant mistake, Smith underlines that a person must employ his capital, which “puts into motion an additional quantity of industry” (Smith, 2012, p. 332), in this sense correctly representing an essential feature of capital, namely, its need to be in constant motion. However, as capital represents a particular form of surplus labour accumulation, one must differentiate between its idiosyncrasies and other modes of production. While surplus labour characterises the social-labour that exceeds the immediate need for social production and reproduction—denoting surplus-use-value—, labour subsumption under capitalism subordinates all forms of value to surplus-value (surplus-exchange-value). From the labourer’s perspective, surplus labour loses both its social and individual dimensions; appropriated by the capitalist, it appears as surplus-value. The neoclassic economics (the so-called marginal revolution) disregarded the notion of value, in which social relations are considered in totality, and instead presented models based on subjective apprehension of reality, namely, so-called marginal utility (Jevons, 2013; Menger, 2004; Walras, 1954). Its house of cards is based on endless assumptions, which presuppose leaving the most essential things, such as time, out of the model. Other unreal abstractions, such as perfect information, perfect competition, Pareto optimum, (stable) equilibrium of supply and demand, etc., are central in this made-up-economy. Its basis was contested by thinkers such as Ernest Mandel and Maurice Dobb. Piero Sraffa also reintroduced the issue of value in neo-Ricardian terms, deriving it from production instead of neoclassical (marginalist) theoretical assumptions. Building on Sraffa’s critique, Samir Amin leaves no room for disputes: “The subjective theory of value has been shown to rest on a tautology—it does not even meet the criteria of formal logic” (Amin, 1977, p. 117; Sraffa, 1960).Following Sraffa, Dobb demonstrates that prices are the result of “widely different proportions of labour and other inputs at different ‘layers’ in the vertical production-process” and not “independent” of social production relations, thus neoclassic expedient, abstractly regarding them as and in singular units emergent from timeless subjective perception of utility, must be considered “fallacious” (Dobb, 1973, pp. 254, 257, 243f). Mandel attacks it even further. It was political economy’s failure to tackle the question of value posed by critics of capitalism, such as Marx, exposing political economy’s intelligentsia to join the rows of socialist struggles, which made it necessary “to neutralise the ‘socialist danger’”, that is, “the entire structure based on the labour theory of value had to be demolished” (Mandel, 1968, p. 713). To achieve this, arguments concerning historical-ontological social relations exposing capitalists could not be confronted on their own merits. A whole new methodological set had to be founded ex nihilo. “The system is coherent, but it is divorced from reality, which it fails either to grasp statistically or a fortiori, to explain in its laws of development” (Mandel, 1968, p. 713). Therefore, marginalism abandoned not only the critique of political economy but political economy itself.

As the accumulation process swells and consequently metamorphoses—since the composition of capital and ownership changes—banking capital plays an indispensable role in securing the flow of this process. This particular form of capital has the existential advantage of being virtually rootless, as its reproduction of capital renders superfluous the immediate first metamorphosis of capital in commodities through production, skipping directly to the second in which the appropriation of surplus-value enables the expansion of capital. However, to avoid a zero-sum game, it presupposes an ongoing real economy to expropriate and appropriate from. Lenin sagaciously perceived this movement in which banking capital merges with industrial capital, thus becoming financial capital (Lenin, 1971, p. 230). Furthermore, this financial capital—which presupposes the state to secure and legitimate itself as private property—becomes ubiquitous and further metamorphoses with the capitalist state. Lenin calls this process imperialism.

It is, however, vital to distinguish between imperialist capitalism and pre-capitalist imperialism. While “classic” imperialism has a centre, a particular locality from which it unfolds, capitalist imperialism is a much broader and more complex social relation in which different centres (nation-states) are intertwined and operated in a subordinated fashion to capital, which knows no bounds and constantly expands outwards as well as inwards (Hobson, 1902; Lenin, 1971; Rodney, 2018). It goes without saying that this process is not free from contradictions because while capital accumulation and appropriation know no national borders, its legitimation requires many national and international institutions which, as sine qua non, are located within national borders. John Atkinson Hobson’s study—which inspired Lenin’s own analysis—claimed that imperialism “is a constant menace to peace, by furnishing continual temptations to further aggression upon lands occupied by lower races”; furthermore, it consumes “physical and moral resources of the nations” within a mortifying logic of militarism (Hobson, 1902, p. 160).

In an introductory note to the Results of the Immediate Process of Production, Ernst Mandel highlights Marx’s insight that “under capitalism, labour should not be seen as manual labour only, but as the combined or collective labour potential […] of all those whose labour is indispensable to produce the final product” (Mandel, 1976, p. 945); this reinforces both the social character of production and the metabolic dimension of its parts, which also implies that intellectual labour is embedded in this process. Understanding this basis seems crucial to an adequate treatment of intellectual property—because knowledge and information are always embedded in social relations of production as both an input and output (as also Kenneth Arrow noticed, see infra). When its formal subsumption gives way to real subsumption, then its character changes because its universal character within social property relations entails a drastically more significant pressure of universal capitalist legality of commodification. Economic laws are not set in stone because they merely represent the tendency (legality), δύναμις, and logic of a given existing mode of production; thus, “economic categories belonging to earlier epochs of production acquire a specifically different, historical character on the basis of the capitalist mode of production” (Marx, 1988, p. 27). Knowledge is not simply an economic category, but its genesis, development, and constant transformation are the product of ontological relations of production and, as such, attain particular concrete characters. Concrete knowledge dialectically becomes an imperative means for shaping, forming, and transforming social material relations. It is in this sense that one must understand Marx’s assertion: “The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual process of life in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but quite the opposite, it is their social being that determines their consciousness” (Marx, 1961, p. 8f).

When knowledge becomes commodified, then its particular relations coincide with the universal capitalist commodification. It goes without saying that knowledge is neither intrinsically a commodity nor that all knowledge relations are subjected to real subsumption by capital. It is those social relations of knowledge that, when subjected to capitalist imperatives, underwent (and conversely are still undergoing) a transformation from formal to real subsumption. Real subsumption imposes the necessity of privatisation of intellectual appropriation (property). It is not the division of labour in-itself that affords knowledge its private character; on the contrary, this process of socialisation presupposes and results in an accentuation of the social development and exchange of knowledge. The dependency and interdependency of knowledge corresponding to the unfolding of social relations appear as its general ontological condition. It is thus the process of privatisation itself, the imposition of privatisation as a social-ontological necessity, that metamorphoses intellectual property into a private existence, providing a particular and contradictory existence to the production and appropriation of knowledge.

Rainer Kuhlen seems to understand the problem: although capitalism needs privatisation to exist, the exhaustion of its source of privatisation through primitive accumulation occurs by privatisation itself, making it an unsustainable form of exploitation; he nevertheless states that when the “information industry understands […] that they can hardly make any profit with the information itself, but rather through accompanying value-added offers, then the legislator will” have to act according to “the normative behavior and ethical expectations of creators and users in an electronic environment” and unrepresentative laws will be superfluous (Kuhlen, 2007, p. 230). More than fifteen years after the publication of his paper, reality has imposed itself and has instead shown that control of information is driving the new rounds of the so-called primitive accumulation. In a more contemporary publication, Keith E. Maskus and Jerome H. Reichman suggest that today “the regulation of knowledge goods in national markets impinges on the provision of other public goods—health, education, scientific research, agriculture and the environment—in ways that were virtually unknown to previous generations” (Maskus & Reichman, 2016, p. 349). Although TRIPS had the pivotal impulse to catapult intellectual property(private) to attain a higher level of real subsumption—given that intellectual property(private) or intellectual technology plays a crucial role “in the real subsumption of both intellectual and manual labour” (Jessop, 2000, p. 71)—in securing the primitive accumulation of the mind and the body—for instance, with gene appropriation—Dianne Nicol stresses that “the most important legislative intervention in the US was the Bayh–Dole Act 1980” (Nicol, 2021, p. 108).

While George has listed elements that hitherto have not been subjected to capitalist appropriation, Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite named others that, despite their general non-private characteristics, have been reduced to privatisation. By means of computational technology and science, “corporations have made things like DNA, algorithms and musical sounds targets of private ownership. What was once part of the intellectual commons has fallen into private hands” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 19). To enable a vast array of knowledge appropriation, intellectual property(private) appears to be the right tool, and limitations on patentability, for instance, were (mostly) eradicated. “The essence of the knowledge game was to propertize as much knowledge as possible” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 51). The totalising character is not merely a theoretical possibility. Restrictions on the patentability of discoveries were changed in order to accommodate the private appropriation of natural genes. “At an interview with the EPO in 1993, we were told that ‘everything would be patentable; it’s just a question of time’” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 144). Genetics appeared as a new Wild West of intellectual property(private). Patenting genetic sequences without knowing what they did or what they could be used for became paramount. “In 1991, the US PTO had applications covering 4000 such sequences. By September 1998, the number of sequences being applied for had climbed to over 500,000” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 156). Despite private capital having no guarantees, it could secure yields from the so-called primitive accumulation, and it was crucial for the private sector to block the public sector and the development that would prevent complete private control and gain through the privatisation process. This practice, however, became a paradoxical situation because it prompted US-American universities and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to apply for many patents. As public and governmental institutions were the main agents of scientific development and discoveries, then “the Industrial Biotechnology Association, a trade association that represented most of biotech in the US, also urged the NIH not to pursue the patents and to put the sequences into the public domain” (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 156f).

The right (by the practical means of laws) is a normaliser of social behaviour—in the sense of standardising. As social relations, especially those involving domination, become more complex, there is a need to create equalising mechanisms for more fluid social intercourse while hindering the growth and flow of antithetical social actions. At the social level, there is ideology, which “is above all that form of mental processing of reality which serves to make people’s social practice conscious and capable of action” (Lukács, 1986, p. 398). At the level of language, there is grammar, creating a whole body of normative categories, e.g., phonology, morphology, accidence, orthoepy, orthography, composition, semantics, syntax, etymology, the ones italicised, “as the bare essentials for writing & reading, represent for most of us the whole of grammar” (Fowler, 2009, p. 220). On the economic plane, means of exchange, currency exchange rates, contracts, interest rates, etc. On the political plane, sovereigns and hegemonic arrangements. On the plane of social control and regulation, the right—and, more recently, the media, communication, advertisement, and propaganda apparatuses. Cohen’s hypostatisation regarding the abstract right is not his monopoly because most authors dealing with either property or intellectual property have the illusion that the abstract right creates property by virtue of law. We turn our attention to some of Hans Kelsen’s insights to counterbalance this. Nevertheless, his extensive analysis and knowledge of norms and legal affairs can neither be fully discussed here, nor is there the pretension that they could be exhausted in some brief lines. However, it can give the current discussion an essential layer in deciphering the common hypostasis presented. Two points considered pivotal for this discussion are arbitrariness and behaviour shaping.

Usually, the concepts of right and law (or the rule of law) are used to convey the notions of neutrality, predictability, trustworthiness, justice, etc. (Thus, the intellectual property debates over the last decades have tried to figure out how to balance it, assuming it as part of a given framework of impartiality and fairness. Except for the critique of the political economy of the media (see infra), hitherto, most theories have neglected to analyse intellectual property within the scope of capitalism critique.) As with the political economy and mainstream intellectual property theories, also this understanding of norms is laden with mystic and religious content. This has, of course, different historical roots, but central to it was the need for a higher form of deity to legitimate social power and, accordingly, its imposed rule. “The assumption that there must be norms which do not originate in arbitrary choice leads to the concept of a norm which is not the meaning of a human act of will”, whereas in reality, “norms posited by human acts of will are arbitrary, in the genuine signification of the word: that is, they can decree any behaviour whatsoever to be obligatory” (Kelsen, 1991, p. 4). It is thus just a hypostasis to consider that an aggregate will in societies with dominating ruling classes, such as the capitalist mode of production, represents the will of all, as idealism’s conception of non-arbitrary (impartial) justice anchored in the true being, which “is that of the Idea, of moral value hypostatised as a transcendent essence” (Kelsen, 1991, p. 64).

Being one of the most crucial tools for contemporary social control, as it should become clear throughout the analysis of this book, intellectual property(private) is commonly regarded as something abstract. Sharing this perception, Peter Drahos sees it as “a fragile form of power, for it relies on the acceptance of legal norms and on the efficacy of the enforcement mechanisms that support those norms” (Drahos, 2016, p. 195). He conceives this power as a form of threat power because it relies on the law. “Threat power which is so inextricably linked to law is perhaps the most dangerous kind of power for a society to contemplate creating and facilitating because it derives legitimacy from the law itself” (Drahos, 2016, p. 195). Moreover, this danger often goes unnoticed because the cult of private property in liberal ideologies primarily conceives it as a form of liberty and a prerequisite for freedom. However, describing this does not suffice; it is crucial to explain its existence from the point of its determinations; that is, why has intellectual property(private) been needed in reality?

Intellectual property theorists have thus far broadly failed to relate intellectual property(private) to capitalism. Mistaking cause and effect across the board, these thinkers assume the legal system as if it were the originator of intellectual property(private). This analytical failure is the product of not only limitations imposed by ideological constraints but also theoretical shortcomings that play a major role in limiting the apprehension of social property relations. For example, the lack of differentiation between personal and production property; property and private property; social from privatised appropriation; and the list goes on, as briefly presented below still in this introductory section, before it can be thoroughly discussed along the broader discussion of this book. All this hinders a critical assessment of intellectual appropriation which is merely assumed as a feature established by legal relations, that is, when the legal system is not itself hypostasised and presented as a thing-in-itself, also deprived of ontological dimensions. In most cases, not only intellectual property but also any legal dimension are presented as something merely abstract.

Hacktivism merges the idea of hacking with political activism. The Cult of the Dead Cow, founded in 1984 as one of the first hacktivist organizations, coined the term. The organization’s founder Oxblood Ruffin defined hacktivism as the use of “technology to improve human rights across electronic media.” In the group’s statement “The Hacktivismo Declaration,” he wrote that hacktivism should be used to protect rights including but not limited to those listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. One specific freedom that Ruffin notes is “the liberty of fair and reasonable access to information,” particularly important to internet communities. He directly tied hacktivism to existing ideas of social justice and human rights advocacy, but at the time hacking was still perceived in a primarily negative light. The group’s quest to distinguish hacktivism from criminal definitions of hacking was not immediately successful.12 The Critical Art Ensemble, a performance art and activist collective, invented the term Electronic Civil Disobedience to refer to a specific type of hacktivist tactic. Founded in 1987, the group focuses on the interaction between art, technology, and activism.13 The group hoped to combat increasing authoritarianism throughout the world. Because finance and government were shifting online, CAE realized that the best venue for their protest would also be the internet and that it was a particularly important venue for them to resist the spread of authoritarianism. They used all the technology available to them, including fax machines, phones, and, increasingly, computers. CAE’s proposal of ECD did not merely combine technology and activism but also focused on a particular, wellestablished, and widely accepted strategy of protest.