Collectivization of the means of production is key to dismantling racial capitalism at every level

We begin with the following processes and historical structures expressed as noun phrases: Colonization, dispossession, forced migration, militarization, global hunger, heteropatriarchy, homo/transphobia, racism, climate injustice, the possibilities of classless societies and of emancipation from oppression, the legacies of social differentiation, problems of individuality, alienation and psychopathology, extrajudicial killings, failed and future revolutions, fascist states. Unsurprising that the text before you (like the world around you), in wishing to transform the current calamities, seeks significant aspects for the addressing of local and also world-historical problems in the yet-living and new knowledges of the politically marginalized, and in the socialities and world-making capacities of the oppressed. It should also be unsurprising that counter-power is to be found in the aesthetic, the affective, the organizational, the resonant, the performative, the cybernetic – the living tissues that mediate our objects, be they nouns or machines. However, the key question posed on this occasion regards especially this last notion, the cybernetic interdependence of all planetary denizens: the emerging media of the social, psychological and ecological interconnection and disaster. We refer to the objectified and objectifying processes whose functionality overdetermines the conditions of living: textualization, photography, datification, computation, monetization. Therefore the question of cyber-mediation must also include the question of the media of reparative expression and decolonial resurgence. In a world with so much pain and so many cries, lamentations and organized actions against oppression, we ask aloud: How can we keep the calls and struggles for solidarity, for justice, for liberation from oppression from being absorbed and reincorporated into what are now the default racial capitalist production regimens? How to keep practices of radical care, food assistance, mutual aid and collective concern from collapsing back into feeding racial capitalism and its mediation of life on Earth? A perennial question, one urgently posed by capital’s power to turn revolt into profit. What may be surprising here is the strategy by which we propose to navigate the political economy of mediation and the social relations that its global operating system would organize. We propose it in order to move towards an answer that is not supportive of neo-liberal sharing in the dividends of global extraction. There is no neo-liberal solution just as there is no end to world-historical violence under racial capitalism. In what follows, this navigation takes the form of an hypothesis offered in the imperative: We must attack money and we must decolonize it. With this theme of an an attack on money for the purposes of its (and our) decolonization in mind and in the imagination, explored through teachings from the critique of political economy, we aim for something unorthodox: to reimagine the protocols of monetary media in order to transcend racial capitalism and its colonial order. It’s ordering. Critical race theory, feminism, abolition feminism, media theory, decolonial writings and radical finance would indicate that such transformation is only possible if we constantly access our aesthetic and affective capacities as a poetics of relation: their/our powers of persistence, survival, and facility for relation, forms of knowledge and care that can be mounted against, in spite of, and in excess of oppression. And radical transformation that would include liberation from various forms of oppression as well as decolonial resurgence is possible only as a collective and, ultimately, a global project—as practice and as politics. We could even say “as program,” a program, or rather a programming, for the overcoming of racial capitalism and a revaluation of value(s). Existing monetary media (for the moment, think “money as capital”) have through and as computation grafted themselves to all other media forms—monetization underpins social mediation (as language, practice, information, etc.) at 0 to n levels of remove— today all utterance and all expression is tied to computation and financialization, just as plastic and pollutants permeates the global ecosystem. The tractor beams of finance leave no utterance uninflected. The current program for global expression, which is at base a financial one, entails a continuous reprogramming, a semiotic and financial re-encoding of the futures scripted and thus articulated by capital. Through a kind of cybernetic detournement, these futures must be redirected, as co-authored futures (this term is intended in both the temporal and financial sense, and authorship here expresses both the author-function and authority). The co-authorship and indeed collective authorship of futures is to be understood here as a practical poetics of both expression and production. It involves not only new modes of expression, but new forms of writing and of platforming writing. A poetics of relation may yet inform our futures, our post-capitalist economies to be. Many recently published and forthcoming books, among them Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid, Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse, Safiya Umoja Nobel’s Algorithms of Oppression, Mark Alizart’s Cryptocommunism, Robert Meister’s Justice is an Option, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s The End of the Cognitive Empire, Bauwens, Kostakis and Pazaitis’s Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, and also their All Incomplete, Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures, Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done are reaching for this beyond capital. From within it. From a within that is also a without—an “immanent outside.” In different ways, yes, but there is widespread agreement regarding the pernicious bankruptcy, accumulated injustice, and global failures of the current system. These books and their discourses are among the conversations that we would engage here. Ambient in the ether we find sustained attention to problems with logistics, informatics and computation, attention to postcapitalism, attention to abolition feminism, to afro-futurism and Black futures, and to decolonization. We find anti-imperialist, workerist and queer positions. Those seriously seeking post-capitalist alternatives are aware of the violence of settler colonialism, of land-grabbing, radical dispossession, genocide, policing militarization, fascism, imperialism, economic extraction and outright war. We are aware of this thing called racial capitalism and that, as Jodi Melamed says, “racial capitalism is capitalism.” And then there is the protest and forced migration rising up on our screens and in the streets all around the world. But writing cannot simply remain what we know as writing if our criticisms and laments are to be much more than poetic gestures and beautiful hauntologies. From (and as) the living remains of communism (our anarchive) we must seek, and seek practically, collectivization. The poetic function of our texts of liberation contains within itself the world-making crystals of radical social change. In preserving the legacies of struggle and the calls for justice by revitalizing them in the present, they already program changes in sensibility and sociality that could change the world. However, much of the disruption created by these programs is enclosed by the media-environment, which is to say the semiotic and financial limits imposed by capitalist hegemony. The collectivization of the means and media of production, and for now let’s also say a redistributing of risk (and reward) by collectivizing, democratizing and communizing the authorship of the terms of value (yes, the terms), which means, precisely, its expressions, its abstractions, its codes becomes the fundamental political challenge of the 21st century. We seek to intervene in systems of accounting and of account and the forms of numeracy that inform, encode, and functionalize expression. We must explore the integrated circuits between expressivity and the registration, archivization and functionalization of all forms of writing in the social. For some of us, it may be difficult to understand dollars, RMB, Euros, Pesos and Rubles as forms of writing, units of account inscribed on media, capable of producing state changes in ledgers, just as it is sometimes difficult to remember that computation is also writing—algorithmic writing—1s and 0s registered and erased according to rulesets.