Fugitive sociality. A model of debate that eschews a role for the negative “does not care about care.” Mutual burdens of rejoinder can generate new relations and worlds in the undercommons; refusing them facilitates elite capture, which turns solvency.

One review of Táíwò’s book has accused it of suggesting that “bad decisions and choices on the part of individuals are to blame” for elite capture. This is odd, when Táíwò writes, over and over again, that “to blame the problems of elite capture entirely on [elites’] moral success and failures is to confuse effect for cause.” This misreading is demonstrative of the way systematicity has become a leftist bogeyman, summoned to scare straight naïve radicals itching to do something about the world (and inadvertently convincing them that there’s nothing they can do). In such a misreading, the necessary cohesion of systematic analysis and individual action is erased by a rewired, now fatalistic, causal story. The work of world-building becomes a theoretical null space. Táíwò’s book, if attended to, is an opportunity for modern leftists to unlearn this entrenched pessimism, with what the philosopher William Paris might call a hope beyond optimism: a hope built not on scientific predictions or heaven-sent faith, but on a dogged persistence in the relentless, everyday work of getting shit done.

To be sure, this kind of hope lacks the sweeping grandiosity of leftist dogma. Very well. Grandiosity, Táíwò would remind us, is not the litmus test of a political strategy. Its usefulness is what matters.

Does the undercommons satisfy this test? How can studying, thinking, reading and writing change the world?

This is no mere academic question. After all, Elite Capture itself is undercommons work. It is the project of a fugitive intellectual, one unwilling to accept the mode of study called “knowledge production” and one invested in a radical politics ostensibly unacceptable to the systems within which he resides. But, like Moten and Harney themselves, Táíwò’s fugitive work remains dangerously close to the very systems that worry him. A university professor and professional philosopher, Táíwò’s previous book, Reconsidering Reparations, was written firmly in the specialist language of academic philosophy and has been lauded by the elites who populate that space. Elite Capture has done quite well for itself too. It’s been reviewed and profiled, with almost universal acclaim, by the writers at the bastions of the chattering classes, from the Nation to the New York Times and, now, The Point. It will doubtless be read in many university classrooms; indeed, one can morbidly imagine corporate antiracist trainings passing out excerpts alongside Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Given the book’s descriptions of, well, elite capture, the irony is unmistakable.

The question of the undercommons’ radicalism, then, applies to Elite Capture too. And this, if we heed Táíwò’s own warnings, cannot be treated as a matter of moral purity. The question worth asking is: How can the undercommons, in which Elite Capture endeavors to participate, change the world?

Moten and Harney locate the radicalism of the undercommons in its approach to social life. They believe:

Study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.

Summoned out of themselves, the undercommons theorists are driven to speak when a human being sends something their way; they are pulled into social orbit by the unnamable gravity that every human being exudes and by which every human being is drawn to one another. The fugitive intellectual is a fugitive from the way of relating to other people that objectifies them, alienates them, treats their utterances as hypotheses to test or attacks to defend against. This thinker, this speaker and hearer, performs the ultimate act of love: attending carefully to what others have to say, because they care that the other cares enough to say it. They receive an invitation: not an invitation to retreat to a monastic refuge and think the universe in order, but to turn toward the one who has made an unsalvageable, blissful debtor out of them and speak back, with feeling, and an ear open for an altered echo.

Táíwò has reminded us of the stakes of radical work. A constructive politics must deliver more than tenure for elites, pay raises for elites, state apologies for elites. The university is not abolished when Moten gets a MacArthur. It is abolished when universities no longer exist to fund fossil-fuel extraction and private prisons, or funnel elites into state-surveillance branches and global banks. How does study—even study steeped in sociality—get us closer to that world, or the world of any genuinely radical, genuinely transformative politics? Can the politics of the undercommons be genuinely constructive? Can the undercommons escape elite capture? Can Elite Capture?

Can this review? What does it matter if I manage to convince the graduate students and journal editors who read The Point that Táíwò is an accomplished writer or a gifted rhetorician? What does it matter if I successfully litigate Táíwò’s correct or incorrect applications of Marxist or decolonial analysis? Are such concerns not further proof of the absorption of Táíwò’s project, of my commitments, into the circulatory system of racial capitalism laying waste to the world beyond your laptop screen?

If all criticism is capable of performing are such adjudications—attributions of symbolic totems of praise or disapproval—then the answer is simple. Criticism is elite capture; criticism is the death of abolition; criticism is the death of politics.

But what if we did an undercommons kind of criticism? How might criticism—the act of speaking about another’s speech, the act of thinking aloud, in the public, about what another has thought—become a social gesture? Or, I misspeak. This is an invitation to see criticism as the act not of speaking about, but speaking with.

When critics fail to embrace this undercommons possibility, both disagreement and agreement—with the artist, with the reader—fail to be opportunities for connection. They become nothing but opportunities for a declaration, a decision, an assertion. The other, in their difference, is not someone to hear and be changed by but someone to talk to, or even toward. Call this adjudicatory criticism: a criticism that cares about nothing but evaluation, a criticism that does not care about care.