“Fully aware of the constant place women & children held in the workforce, Marx deemed them so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor & peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist, noncapitalist, & primitive accumulation.

https://twitter.com/decolonialcommi/status/1630521062709493762

And how, can we sup- pose, was Marx's conception of the mode-specific, internal development of European productive forces to accommodate the technological borrowings from China, India, Africa, and the Americas which propelled the West into industrialism and imperialism?'

“This more passive framing of ‘division within the seagoing population’ leaves us to understand racism as merely a form of irrationality. Irrational it may be, but racist societies lend this irrationality an objectivity. If ‘divisions’ in the working class are explained as superimpositions or distortions of elites alone, racism is understandable only as ‘ideology’, a garish expression of fallible human passions.

“All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But the action of European men has not carried out the mission which fell to them … … and which consisted of bringing their whole weight violently to bear upon these elements, of modifying their arrangement and their nature, of changing them and finally of bringing the problem of mankind to an infinitely higher plane.

“For DuBois, the precondition for fascism was a civilisation profoundly traumatized by slavery and racism.

https://twitter.com/decolonialcommi/status/1585232899086745600

At the time, DuBois was in the minority among his radical colleagues, Manning Marable, one of his most sympathetic biographers, has chastised him for not being able “clearly … to discern the broad prerogatives of industrialists & finance capitalists who supported the Nazi state”

The point of Racial Capitalism isn’t to go “it’s capitalism, but just racial.” If class is constructed through & organised along racial lines, then an exclusively unified proletariat is an impossibility. Opposition must therefore converge from multiple sources, not only class. Thinking about this while reading the response of American white workers & trade unions to racialised Chinese immigrant labour in the mid-late nineteenth century:

The term “settler” has become so moralised, by both liberal academics as well as the Left (orthodox anarchists/marxists) its often stripped of meaning in online discourse.

Settler is a class status, but is not reducible to it & both theory & praxis suffer when we obscure that. Mentioned this before

https://twitter.com/decolonialcommi/status/1524775874524061698?s=21&t=ksiMU8ZapXMuJGBvAOtDuw

“White radicals continue to maintain that colour oppression is no more than an aspect of class oppression, that colour discrimination is only another aspect of working-class exploitation, that the capitalist system is the common enemy of the white worker and black* alike. Hence they require that the colour line be subsumed to the class line and are satisfied that the strategies worked out for the white proletariat serve equally the interests of the black* …

“But at the very moment that we need analysis and strategy and commitments, the intellectuals and the academics have either retreated into culturalism and ethnicism, or, worse, fled into discourse and deconstruction and representation – as though to interpret the world is more important than to change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing world. The first is a retreat, the second a betrayal.

“And it is that symbiosis between racism and poverty that, under those other imperatives of multinational capitalism, the free market and the enriching of the rich, has come to define the ‘underclass’ of the United States and, increasingly, of Britain and Western Europe. It is not so much a class that is under as out – out of the reckoning of mainstream society: de-schooled, never- employed, criminalised and locked up or sectioned off.

“The analysis I propose also allows us to transcend the dichotomy between “gender" and “class." If it is true that in capitalist society sexual identity became the carrier of specific work-functions, then gender should not be considered a purely cultural reality ... but should be treated as a specification of class relations. From this view­ point, the debates that have taken place among postmodern feminists concerning the need to dispose of “women" as a category of analysis & define feminism purely in oppositional terms, have been misguided

“Boycotting & confronting Israeli governance plans, ranging from rigged municipal elections to village leagues, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, & Gaza became a permanent feature of that policy for much of the 1970s. So was the building of self-reliance & resilience (Summoud). The resulting infrastructure of popular struggle eventually allowed for carrying out the first intifada (1987–92), and it was amid that intifada that boycott reached its zenith.

There has been a recent proliferation of essays, journal articles & books using Racial Capitalism as a conceptual analytic in which to interpret events, social processes & histories. Yet I don’t think there has actually been a long enough sit down with what we actually mean. Much of the recent work is very good & constructive. But to my mind, Robinsons conception of Racial Capitalism was not merely as an creative conceptual analytic. What Racial Capitalism did for Robinson was to allow for a new paradigm in which to apply theory to interpret history.

“Accounts of colonialism tend to concentrate on the way systems of governance and control are translated into the organization of space, according to underlying principles of rational organization, classification, procedure and rules of administration. … However, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the organization of geographical space cannot simply be understood as the preserve of the Israeli government executive power alone, but rather one diffused among a multiplicity of - often non-state-actors.

Thanks @CSUnderstander for buying me this text. Crucial for understanding the necropolitical & colonial geographies of Israeli settler colonial occupation & invasion.

“Israel’s system of control … has, hardened into an exceptionally efficient form of territorial apartheid” “The domination of more than four million Palestinians has stopped being an economic burden and proven to be profitable. The people under occupation are a captive market (literally) for many surplus Israeli manufactured goods.

Israel is the perfect model for neoliberal states to pursue globally, which is why it continues to act with impunity. It holds a “niche” within global arms & security markets for its “combat proven” brand, dealing in weapons, security technologies & surveillance infrastructure. Its not a choice between neoliberalism & fascism, but a neoliberal fascism, of increasing deportations, segregation, borderization, policing & incarceration of the gendered/racialised poor, modelled off Israeli settler colonialism & racialised/apartheid population control.

“Thus it is misleading to assume, as many have, that the Portuguese wished to grow sugar in the New World and this prompted a requirement for slaves, Indigenous or otherwise, to grow it. As Fernando Novais argued over forty years ago, with the expansion of the Atlantic-island sugar industry reaching its limits, the Portuguese required another destination to which they could export slaves, and sugar provided the requisite outlet for
the labour of those slaves.

“Western socialism had older and different roots. It radiated from the
desperation, anguish and rage of the rural poor of the medieval era, assuming expressions as diverse as the politically secular, the mystical and the heretical. It manifested in mass movements of violent rebelliousness, in hysterical devotion as well as ecclesiastical debates. And its moral and social denunciations stung temporal rulers, the wealthy classes, and the clerical privileged alike.

“Against the linear, developmentalist, and Eurocentric Marxist dialectic—with its politics of stages and Comintern- enforced alliances with the stunted national bourgeoisie—Mariátegui therefore adopted a proto-Fanonian line. For underdeveloped nations, so-called development is essentially impossible, because capitalism doesn’t fundamentally operate on the national level … but instead as a global system of structured inequality that obstructs rather than facilitates development in exploited zones

“Despite the protestations of Engels and Marx, historical materialism and classical materialism shared in common the social origins of their adherents: both were philosophies which originated with intellectuals drawn from the bourgeoisies. Moreover, as theories of history, historical materialism and classical materialism drew on the materialist implications found in an identical stadial architecture of history.

Revolutionary Feminist, Abolitionist politics is what is needed now more than ever in Britain.

Essentially all party’s are signed up to the burgeoning Neo-Liberal security/surveillance state.

Anti-carceral, anti-police, anti-borders, anti-militarist, anti-imperialist politics. The intersectionality of struggles is not additive. It’s not, we need to support anti-imperialist politics as well as anti-police politics. These structures are intimately constitutive of eachother, and so require broad-based coalitions against them.

“The plantation brought these disparate, unevenly generated forces of production together: English capital, American land and African slavery. This combination was historically unprecedented and distinct from prior forms of either slave labour or plantation production – a productive unit geared specifically towards capitalistic production.