Labeling us as “folk politics” and expecting us to forward positive demands for anti-capitalist organizing is methodological whiteness. Reject them for epistemological racism.

Although this argument is not without merit, its ultimate dismissal of a rather essentialized and reified conception of folk politics in favor of less anti-systemic politics and more state-based methods is in the end a form of methodological whiteness that fails to acknowledge lasting contribution that these politics—which are indeed often steeped in decolonial, feminist, and indigenous types of knowledge—have made.16 Following Gurminder K. Bhambra, methodological whiteness “fails to recognize the dominance of “‘whiteness’ as anything other than the standard state of affairs and treats a limited perspective—that deriving from white experience—as a universal perspective.” 17 This is not to say that Srnicek and Williams do not criticize the subversive universalism of Eurocentrism and its relation to the so-called dark side of European modernity (i.e., the history of colonial dominion, indigenous genocide, slave trade, and colonial extraction) or that they do not recognize some the positive effects of folk politics.18 Yet the fundamental problem with their discussion of folk politics—which they argue has produced critiques that are “largely accurate”—is that it tends to enshrine these contributions as historical tactics that have either accommodated existing power structures that have corrupted the new left, or have remained marginal and therefore unable to trans- form society more broadly. 19 Although this is not the same as directly whitewashing the colonial and racial violence that continues to struc- ture the majority of working and living conditions in the non-western world—dismissing decolonial, feminist, and indigenous politics simply because they “aren’t winning” 20 is deeply problematic, for it contributes to the normalization of a discussion of Eurocentrism that fails or omits to account for its epistemological racism or indeed meth- odological whiteness. Without being firmly rooted in an engagement with coloniality, the discussion of folk politics—which as a term is itself deeply colonial 21 —leaves the argument as a whole fatally impeded from discussing the extent to which conditions of coloniality continue to structure global flows of labor as well as the waves of resistance against them. Indeed, the entire project seems to be premised on the goal of reinvigorating white western leftism. It is for these reasons that Srnicek and Williams regard folk politics as a welcome yet never sufficient step in overcoming the capitalist order. Their frequent refer- ence to anti- and decolonial movements thereby fits within a typical Eurocentric narrative of referencing decolonial, feminist, and indig- enous interventions into the operations of coloniality yet ultimately dismissing them for not heralding the monumental rupture of the capitalist order. Of specific importance for the present argument is the fact that their account of a future-oriented politics is one that does not shy away of making tactical use of state power, as theirs is indeed a project on the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism as opposed to dismantling the state as a fundamentally colonial institution that enables and maintains distributions of racial violence.22 On a theoretical level, their argu- ment is all but explicitly aimed at John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. Yet Holloway’s argument is by no means a naive, folk-political celebration of horizon- talism and localism. Changing the world without taking power entails starting from a more profound analysis of global capitalism and its effects on both the construction of the subject and the composition of class power. More than mere hyper-individuality, capitalism—through its emergence from colonial slavery and exploitation—has reconsti- tuted the subject in a fundamentally dehumanized form. Indeed, colo- nial capitalism was fundamentally a project of turning people into things. The subject is not just atomized and violently separated from its entanglement in the social world but also stripped of its dignity and capacity to flourish and live with dignity as a human being. Holloway therefore argues that a struggle that only frames itself as a positive one in terms of explicit demands negates the dehumanized conditions that determine the lives of a global surplus population:

To treat the subject as positive is attractive but it is inevitably a fic- tion. In the world that dehumanizes us, the only way in which we can exist as humans is negatively, by struggling against our dehumanization. To understand the subject as positively autonomous (rather than potentially autonomous) is rather like a prisoner in a cell imagining that she is already free: an attractive and stimulat- ing idea, but a fiction, a fiction which leads on to other fictions, to the construction of a whole fictional world.23

Although Holloway falls short in explicitly framing this negative struggle as one against the distribution of colonial and racial violence that has shaped and maintained the western world, his engage- ment and experiences with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas have profoundly affected and readjusted his Marxist focus on capitalism and class struggle. I will return to this in the last section of this paper. It will suffice to emphasize at this point that Holloway’s emphasis on autonomy—quickly sidelined by Srnicek and Williams—is not only necessary in fighting for a post-capitalist order, but also essential to facilitating the very waging of such a struggle in the first place. In other words, the difference between a refusal of work steeped in state-based methods and politics, and a negative struggle for autonomy waged from a vantage point that acknowledges and engages colonial and racial violence, is that the latter does not fail to capture the way human subjects are inhibited from raising demands by their own entanglement in a system of dehumanization. In other words, what seems to undermine the demand for a future without work is the fact that there is no political subject capable of raising this demand in the first place. Indeed, the distribution of colonial violence, which has relegated racialized others to the realm of negated humanity, is what characterizes the living and working conditions that have gradually enmeshed global surplus populations into stratifications of precarity. What is lacking in these recent calls for a future without work is there- fore not merely an acknowledgement that precarity omits any sense of future orientation (or indeed the notion of futurity itself) but also the awareness of decolonial, feminist, and indigenous scholarship that has highlighted and exposed the distribution of colonial and racialized violence within and through contemporary relations of labor exploita- tion. Untangling this nexus will be the focus of the next section.