Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal [1 ed.] 9781009123358, 9781009127707, 9781009125024

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Resisting Racial Capitalism

What does freedom mean without, and despite, the state? Ida Danewid argues that state power is central to racial capitalism’s violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. Tracing the global histories of four technologies of state violence – policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control – she excavates an antipolitical archive of anarchism that stretches from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the borderlands of Europe, the poisoned landscape of Ogoniland, and the queer lifeworlds of Delhi. Thinking with a rich set of scholars, organisers, and otherworldly dreamers, Danewid theorises these modes of refusal as a utopian worldmaking project that seeks not just better ways of being governed but an end to governance in its entirety. In a time where the state remains hegemonic across the Left–Right political spectrum, Resisting Racial Capitalism calls on us to dream bolder and better in order to (un)build the world anew. Ida Danewid is Lecturer in Gender and Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex.

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LSE International Studies Series Editors Stephen Humphreys (Lead Editor) Department of Law, London School of Economics Kirsten Ainley Department of International Relations, Australian National University Ayça Çubukçu Department of Sociology, London School of Economics George Lawson Department of International Relations, Australian National University Imaobong Umoren Department of International History, London School of Economics This series, published in association with the Centre for International Studies at the London School of Economics, is centred on three main themes. First, the series is oriented around work that is transdisciplinary, which challenges disciplinary conventions and develops arguments that cannot be grasped within existing disciplines. It will include work combining a wide range of fields, including international relations, international law, political theory, history, sociology and ethics. Second, it comprises books that contain an overtly international or transnational dimension, but not necessarily focused simply within the discipline of International Relations. Finally, the series will publish books that use scholarly inquiry as a means of addressing pressing political concerns. Books in the series may be predominantly theoretical, or predominantly empirical, but all will say something of significance about political issues that exceed national boundaries. Previous books in the series: Culture and Order in World Politics Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit (eds.) On Cultural Diversity: International Theory in a World of Difference Christian Reus-Smit Socioeconomic Justice: International Intervention and Transition in Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina Daniela Lai The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order in the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies Hendrik Spruyt How the East Was Won: Barbarian Conquerors, Universal Conquest and the Making of Modern Asia Andrew Phillips Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders Ays¸e Zarakol The Counterinsurgent Imagination: A New Intellectual History Joseph MacKay Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe Osman Balkan

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Resisting Racial Capitalism An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal

Ida Danewid University of Sussex

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009123358 DOI: 10.1017/9781009127707 © Ida Danewid 2024 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-1-009-12335-8 Hardback ISBN 978-1-009-12502-4 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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To my grandmothers: Bomme, Samme, and Gunnipunni.

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Every cook can govern. That has never left me for half a second…. That is all, that is all. – Darcus Howe

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Contents

List of Figures page viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Antipolitical Dreamworlds

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1 A Most Bourgeois Ambition

21

2 Ode to Utopia

43

3 War on Dirt

59

4 Maps of Apartheid

81

5 Of Plunder and Property

102

6 It Runs in the Family

125

Conclusion: The New Society

147

Notes

152

Bibliography

218

Index

261

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Figures

I.1 Street cricket in C. L. R. James’s native Trinidad, 1956 page 16 2.1 Sun Ra, utopian space traveller 44 3.1 Marielle presente! 61 4.1 Alessandra Ferrini, Radio Ghetto Relay, 2016 99 5.1 Josh MacPhee, Ken Saro-Wiwa 104 5.2 Marwa Arsanios, Chart for the Usership of the Land, 2022 120 C.1 Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975 150

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Acknowledgements

This is a book about the dreams of utopia that grow and blossom even in the coldest of winters. I could not have written it without the support, generosity, and kindness of the many colleagues, comrades, friends, students, and mentors who’ve kept me dreaming as I followed the antipolitical in and out of the margins. My deepest thanks to: The team at Cambridge University Press, the editors of the LSE International Studies series, and the reviewers, for their encouragement, professionalism, and support. The painters, galleries, photographers, poets, authors, and collectors who kindly let me use their art: Marwa Arsanios, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis, Natalie Diaz, Alessandra Ferrini, Josh MacPhee, the Mosaic Rooms, Aka Niviâna, and Arundhati Roy. A special thank you to Keith Morrison, whose beautiful painting Scenes from Childhood decorates the cover of the book. Kirsten Ainley and Mark Hoffman, my PhD supervisors with whom I started this journey many moons ago. Thank you for giving me the freedom to explore, experiment, start over, and grow with the text. Sabrina Axster, my intellectual sister who’s read every word of this book a million times and more. I could not have asked for a better or more brilliant friend. Andrew Delatolla, Liane Hartnett, Evelyn Pauls, and Joanne Yao: my PhD buddies and dearest of friends who’ve been there from the start of this project. My colleagues, students, and University and College Union (UCU) comrades at Sussex. A special shout-out to my third-year students (you know who you are!), Kit Eves, and the doctoral tutors with whom I’ve worked in the last few years, especially Kate Cherry and Tom Cowin. Friends and mentors who’ve read and generously commented on various versions of the book: Columba Achilleos-Sarll, Tarak Barkawi, Duncan Bell, Ian Bruff, Lara Montesinos Coleman, Kimberly ix

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Acknowledgements

Hutchings, George Lawson, Louiza Odysseos, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Ben Selwyn, Faiz Sheikh, Anna Stavrianakis, David Wearing, and Lauren Wilcox. Everyone who’s listened to me talk about the project in the last couple of years, at the Australian National University, Cardiff University, Durham University, the European International Studies Association conference in Athens, the Free University of Berlin, Manchester University, Nottingham University, and Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis. The London School of Economics crew, Sheffield House collective, and Millennium network: Maggie Ainley, Kelly-Jo Bluen, David Brenner, Ilaria Carrozza, Nicola Degli Esposti, Andrew Delatolla, Pilar Elizalde, Myriam Fotou, Elitsa Garnizova, Anissa Haddadi, Scott Hamilton, Liane Hartnett, Sophie Haspeslagh, Martin Hearson, Helena Moac, Evelyn Pauls, Kiran Phull, and Joanne Yao. Thank you for the support and discussions, but mostly for the many hours at the George and the White Horse. Other friends who’ve kept me going: Ayah Al Zayat, for being my apricot. Jai Shah, for the philosophy and the masala chai. Hanna Hagos, for the red wine and Mexico City. And Nerma Kunovac, min tuffs. Mamms, Papps, Nanns, and Tjubbz, for being my biggest supporters as I built this himpajimpa till en ubåt. Finally, I couldn’t have done any of this without the silliness, sunshine, and couscous that Adam Almakroudi brings to my life. You’re my liver! As I finish writing this book, UK academia finds itself in another round of strikes over pay, precarity, workloads, and pensions. I dedicate this book to everyone who, in Harney and Moten’s apt phrase, is in but not of the university. May our struggles for a radically different university bring us closer to the dreamworlds of antipolitics.

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Introduction Antipolitical Dreamworlds

We cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls…. Listening to cacophony and noise tells us that there is a wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us. – Jack Halberstam A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’ It is a lie! – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

In the Belly of the Beast In 1952, C. L. R. James – the Trinidadian Marxist, pan-Africanist, and cricket enthusiast – was detained for six months. It was the height of McCarthyism and James had, like so many others, been arrested on suspicion of communist subversive activities. At the time of his detention, James had been in the United States for nearly fifteen years, where he was lecturing and writing on black radicalism, decolonisation, and Marxist theory. He was brought to Ellis Island, the largest and most famous point of entry for migrants and refugees but which also was a prison for those that the US government wanted to deport.1 While awaiting his deportation hearing, James worked tirelessly on a manuscript that he would later publish as Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. It is a strange text that combines literary criticism with political commentary, a history of stateless migrant workers, 1

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and James’s own memories of incarceration. In Melville, James finds a poignant allegory of what he thought was an ‘industrial civilization on fire and plunging blindly into darkness’.2 Ahab, Melville’s one-legged captain determined to pursue the great white whale at any cost, in James’s analysis comes to stand in for the violence of the capitalist state. Moby Dick’s brilliance, he writes, derives in part from the fact that ‘Melville built his gigantic structure, a picture of world civilization, using one small vessel … for the most part isolated from the rest of the world.’3 That vessel, of course, is the whaling ship Pequod. In Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, James similarly constructs a theory of the capitalist state from the enclosed space of the detention centre on Ellis Island, where the US government ‘controlled the destinies of perhaps a thousand men, sailors, “isolatos,” renegades and castaways from all parts of the world’.4 The state, he argues, is an enforcer and (re)producer of white supremacy: ‘every single national state, had and still has a racial doctrine. This doctrine is that the national race, the national stock, the national blood, is superior to all other national races, national stocks and national bloods.’5 Through a Marxist and anticolonial lens, he goes on to centre the motley crew of ‘mariners, renegades, and castaways’ that labour on Ahab’s ship and which he likens to the racialised migrant workers, refugees, and ‘undesirable aliens’ that were incarcerated on Ellis Island. In these ordinary people, he insists, the source of a ‘new society’ lies in wait. While James was eventually deported in the summer of 1953, he would often return to the argument that he had first developed here, in his small cell. In books such as State Capitalism and World Revolution, Facing Reality, and in the pamphlet ‘Every Cook Can Govern’, he argues that ‘The whole world today lives in the shadow of the state power.’ Indeed, This state power, whatever name it is called, One-Party State or Welfare State, destroys all pretense of government by the people, of the people…. Against this monster, people all over the world, and particularly ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices, are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention…. They are imbued with one fundamental certainty, that they have to destroy the continuously mounting bureaucratic mass or be themselves destroyed by it.6

In the seventy years that have passed since James was deported, such radical critiques of the state have come to be regarded as idealistic

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In the Belly of the Beast

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and naïve, perhaps even as dangerous. As several commentators have noted, today we are living through a statist revival: ‘Leviathan is back.’7 Themes of sovereignty, security, authority, and law and order are widespread on the political Right – epitomised by the Brexit slogan to ‘Take Back Control’ – but also shape much of the contemporary Left. According to a widespread narrative, since the 1970s an unfettered economic sphere has dominated the political: the result has been a roll-back of social welfare and the disenfranchisement of the native (white) working class.8 The solution, we are told, is a ‘progressive nationalism’ and a strengthened nation-state capable of acting as a counterweight to the power of neoliberal globalism. Despite the long history of state-sponsored terror and dispossession, displacement and abandonment – which James, writing from his cell, was so critical of – the expanding state is today welcomed by both the Right and the Left. As James Trafford puts it, ‘Here, the political left and right ­collapse – not in a post-political centre, but labouring under the horizon of an increasingly strengthened nation-state.’9 The result is an impoverished political imagination which regards the state as the horizon of possibility and writes off other visions as naïve and deluded forms of utopianism. The roots of this statist revival were sown more than four decades ago. Already in 1995, Wendy Brown lamented that ‘liberals and leftists [have] jettisoned two decades of “Marxist critiques of the state” for a defence of the state as that which affords individuals “protection against the worst abuses of the market” and other structures of social inequality’.10 Social movements, Brown noted, had increasingly come to regard the state as an ally in the struggle against social injustice. In this period, many feminist organisers replaced a structural critique of family, capital, and the state with a carceral agenda which enlists the state to prosecute and punish ‘bad’ men (typically racialised as non-white).11 Over the same period, environmental activists increasingly came to rely on the state in the fight against climate change and ecological destruction.12 After the Civil Rights movement, migrant and minority populations similarly began to place a greater hope in electoral politics. In 1965, there were fewer than 500 black elected officials in the United States; by 1985, that number had grown to more than 6,000. As David Fergus concludes, by the 1980s ‘black radicals and their successors were more likely to petition Congress than blow it up’.13

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Introduction: Antipolitical Dreamworlds

In the humanities and social sciences, this embrace of the state was, in part, precipitated by the widespread abandonment of grand theory and metanarratives. From the 1980s onwards, the state was pushed into the background as ‘part of the general post-Marxist, poststructuralist, postmodernist trend’.14 Michel Foucault famously argued that political theorists for too long had limited themselves to studying the coercive power wielded by the sovereign, obfuscating that power, in fact, pervades all social relations. What was needed, Foucault maintained, was ‘a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problem of law and prohibition’. In short, ‘we need to cut off the king’s head’.15 With that, Foucault led the way towards a greater focus on normalisation, self-discipline, and the ‘microphysics of power’, signalling a turn away from the problem of sovereignty and the violence of the state.16 Anarchists soon followed suit. Developing the concept of postanarchism, Saul Newman argued for ‘an anarchism understood not as [a] certain set of social arrangements, or even as a particular revolutionary project, but rather as a sensibility, a certain ethos or way of living and seeing the world which is impelled by the realization of the freedom that one already has’.17 Anarchism thus understood is not a revolutionary vision of overthrowing capital and the state, but is an insurrectional ethics premised on prefiguration, the creation of alternative structures, and the experience of living anarchistically. Instead of ‘a program of action, an idea of social revolution and a conception of the stateless society’ this style of anarchism ‘is associated with autonomous modes of thinking and acting … and the renunciation of revolution’.18 With that, the possibilities for radical change – beyond and against the state – fade into the background. This turn away from the state as an object of critique was further accelerated by the rise of human rights as the dominant vocabulary of justice.19 Starting in the 1970s, human rights played a central role in legitimising the neoliberal attack on socialism, state planning, and the postcolonial struggle for economic reform.20 Yet, in equating revolutionary politics and radical change with totalitarianism, human rights also invested the state with new legitimacy. ‘The nation-state, which had been the agent responsible for perpetrating crimes against humanity in the colonies and in Europe’ was now resurrected from its own ruins and elevated as the ‘protector of human rights’.21 The classic debate between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism – or between

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In the Belly of the Beast

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human rights and state sovereignty – was thus from the beginning a false choice: if human rights carve out freedoms, then they do so within the state. The great irony of the last four decades’ embrace of the state is, of course, that the state itself has never been more powerful. Contrary to the idea that capitalism is a self-reliant economic system – a political economy without the political – capital has always depended on the state. As Brown notes, political theory, in fact, ‘turned its gaze away from the state at the moment when a distinctively late modern form of state power was being consolidated’:22 one based on heightened forms of control, surveillance, bordering, policing, and punitive forms of welfare. Neoliberalism has ultimately been an era – not of state decline or withdrawal – but of state-sponsored ‘white reconstruction’ against the gains made by working class, black radical, and Third World liberation movements; a time where, as Erica Edwards puts it, the state has sought to ‘incorporate and incarcerate; co-opt and incapacitate; represent and destroy’.23 Today, we find ourselves in a time where the state has not only enhanced its coercive powers but where it has also usurped the collective imagination: where resistance – even when its immediate target is the state – typically articulates itself as a project of redeeming, reforming, and perfecting it. Individual states can, of course, still be criticised – and, in the case of the post-colonial state, they often are24 – yet the state form itself has ceased to be an object of critique. We are, so to speak, caught in the belly of the beast, inside the biblical sea monster that haunts the oceans in C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways and which Thomas Hobbes named Leviathan: the state. In this book, I argue that organisers, scholars, poets, dreamers, and those, who in Thomas Sankara’s formulation, ‘dare to invent the future’,25 need to look beyond the hegemony of the state and its grammar of justice. As the incarcerated James recognised more than half a century ago, the state is not a neutral arbiter of justice that can or should be appealed to for rights, recognition, or restitution. Rather, the state is a relation of violence that is central to upholding and entrenching racial capitalism across the world. This is a type of violence that cannot be reformed away through a politics that merely strives to make oppressive institutions more diverse, inclusive, or tolerant. As a permanent war waged on those deemed delinquent, wayward, and undeserving, the state must itself be abolished.

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Bringing the State Back Out The inability to conceive of justice, freedom, and sociality beyond the state form is a recurrent theme in the wider tradition of Western political thought. While living without state structures has been common throughout history, Western political theorists have overwhelmingly focused on the state and the relation between the ruler and the ruled. ‘Political theory’, Martin Wight once remarked, ‘is a phrase that in general requires no explanation’: it consists of ‘speculation about the state, which is its traditional meaning from Plato onwards’.26 Within this tradition, to think politically has predominantly revolved around the problem of how to govern ‘from above’. To break out of the state, therefore, requires a break with this political paradigm and its focus on questions of rulership, governance, and mastery. To stage such a break, this book draws on a rich set of thinkers, organisers, and otherworldy dreamers, including C. L. R. James, Kuwasi Balagoon, Saidiya Hartman, José Esteban Muñoz, and – most centrally – Cedric Robinson. Like James, Robinson was an active commentator on decolonisation and black liberation struggles across the Atlantic world, as well as a visionary historian who brought together insights from political economy, sociology, anthropology, and film studies. Today he is most well-known for his book from 1983, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Black Marxism re-reads the history of capitalism as a story not only – or ­centrally – about the exploitation of European (male) workers, but of the enslavement, dispossession, expropriation, and coercion of the ‘dark proletariat’ on a global-colonial scale.27 Plantation slavery, indigenous dispossession, militarised trading, and indentured servitude are here revealed as central building blocks of the global capitalist economy, rather than as mere ‘extra’-economic activities of marginal importance. Almost half a decade after its publication, Black Marxism remains one of the most incisive commentaries on the relationship between racial violence and capital accumulation.28 With its focus on capitalism as a racialised and global-colonial system predicated on distinct yet interconnected forms of extraction, exploitation, and expropriation, it steps into what Walter Mignolo has described as Marxism’s ‘colonial fracture’. Where Marx had missed ‘the colonial mechanism of power underlying the system he critiques’, Black Marxism challenges the hegemonic ‘macro-narratives’ that privilege the white European

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proletariat as the revolutionary class of history.29 Instead, it turns to the black radical tradition and the ongoing struggles of those that Frantz Fanon referred to as ‘the wretched of the earth’.30 In the last few years, Black Marxism has inspired a wealth of new scholarship that self-consciously seeks to ‘stretch’ Marxism to questions of race, empire, and (post)coloniality.31 In spite of this, it has been less widely appreciated that Robinson also wrote extensively about state power and the proto-fascist foundations of Western political thought. There is, of course, no such thing as a general Theory of the state in Robinson’s work; if anything, he was deeply critical of ‘the tendency of social theorists to begin and end most theorizing energies with the state’,32 as H. L. T. Quan has noted. And yet, his work is infused with an anarchist impulse that rejects the state as a ‘bourgeois ambition’33 and breathes life into histories where the racial and colonial poor rebelled and rendered themselves ungovernable. His project, as Robinson himself maintained, was ‘to re-open a door to a special universe where justice reigned as historical practice; as a constant inspiration for present conduct; and as a realizable project’.34 In this book, I build on Robinson’s anarchist sensibility to explore what freedom might mean without – and despite – the state. By reading Robinson alongside a variety of movements from below and from the South, I excavate a subterranean archive of anarchism which refuses to see capital and the state as the horizon of possibility. This is a utopian – and, as we shall see, antipolitical – worldmaking project which seeks not just better ways of being governed but an end to governance in its entirety. In the words of Toni Cade Bambara, ‘The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.’35 To develop these arguments, I examine the role of state power in the making of racial capitalism. By revisiting the question of state formation through a Robinsonian lens, I explore how racial capitalism emerged alongside a particular conception of the political, centred around the antidemocratic and hierarchical question of how to be governed. In contrast to the fiction popularised by liberalism – namely, that the state is a product of individuals freely consenting to be ruled – I show that the state first emerged as part of a ruling-class response to the revolutionary struggles that swept through Europe in the late medieval period calling for an end to serfdom, private property, economic exploitation, and hierarchical authority. As a counterrevolution, state formation was from the start a racial-colonial

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project entailing both internal centralisation and domination as well as external conquest and enslavement. This went hand in hand with the making of racialised others who could be enslaved, exploited, and expropriated, as well as with the emergence of whiteness as the integral element of European ruling-class identity. The state has therefore always been a racial state: racism and racialisation have never just been corrupted or exceptional features – imported from the colonies or the fringes of the far-right – but have been central to the capitalist state since its inception.36 Robinson began to explore these ideas in his PhD dissertation, published in 1980 as The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership. The book charts how the identification of politics with governance gained widespread currency in the fourteenth century with the advent of the racial capitalist world system. Why, asks Robinson, did Western political theory come to associate politics with rulership, sovereignty, hierarchy and, ultimately, with the state? As the book makes clear, it is not a coincidence that Plato’s Republic would emerge as one of the urtexts of this tradition. The Republic offered ‘a sustained attack on democracy’37 on the ground that common ­people – the mob, rabble, or pöbel – are politically incompetent and idle, incapable of governing themselves. Ellen Meiksins Wood summarises Plato’s argument: Just as the best shoes are made by the trained and expert shoemaker, so the art of politics should be practiced only by those who specialize in it. No more shoemakers and smiths in the Assembly. The essence of justice in the state is the principle that the cobbler should stick to his last. Much of what follows in the whole tradition of Western philosophy proceeds from this starting point.38

In The Terms of Order, Robinson charts how this political ­ aradigm  – based as it is, not on the interaction among equals, but p on the mastery of the majority – became hegemonic under racial capitalism. With the rise of the capitalist state arrived a ‘new science of politics’39 centred around the problem of governance; it ‘found convenience with the exigencies of certain sectors of the population of the new, class-conscious society’.40 As European states amassed more power and began to colonise the world around them, Plato’s political philosophy was rediscovered, first in fifteenth-century Florence where it helped legitimise the rule of the Medici family and ‘the

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growing elitism and centralization of government’.41 It later influenced Hobbes’s Leviathan and its analysis of the sovereign as ‘a figure performing the same function as a Platonic philosopher-kings’ in supplying what is defective in the rationality of ordinary men, controlling and civilizing through his knowledge’.42 Since then, politics as we know it has revolved around the question of governance: as Robinson notes, ‘Governing justly, unjustly, singly or by elite, “democratically” or dictatorially, momentarily or for imperial durations, consensually or by force, wisely or wrongly, but nevertheless, governing.’43 Within this framework, what is taken for granted is nothing less than ‘the presumption of state authority itself, the presumption that political subjects must and should and indeed will be governed’.44 In the pages that follow, I examine how the hegemony of this political paradigm has served to uphold and entrench racial capitalism’s violent regimes of extraction and accumulation across both metropole and (post)colony. Contrary to the idea that capitalism is a self-reliant system, I argue that capitalist political economy is based on a particular conception of politics as governance. In Robin D. G. Kelley’s apt formulation, ‘Racial capitalism’s driving force was not the invisible hand of the market but the visible fist of state-sanctioned violence.’45 By moving from the local to the global, the intimate to the geopolitical, I explore how the state and its systems of administrative, legal, and coercive violence are premised on mastering, domesticating, and, ultimately, governing people and places deemed wayward, surplus, and undeserving. More than just a night watchman that represses social unrest, protects private property, and pacifies the unruly,46 the state is here revealed as a racial-colonial project that constructs and maintains the difference between those associated with wages, property, and citizenship, and those subject to super-exploitation, dispossession, and premature death.47 In short, the problem with state violence is not only that it disproportionately targets racialised and gendered groups and minorities. More fundamentally, the state is itself racialising, gendering, and hierarchy-producing; it creates, maintains, and polices the hierarchies and stratifications that capital needs to successfully exploit, extract, and expropriate. To understand how the state functions in this way, I examine the global histories and contemporary articulations of four distinct yet interconnected modalities of state violence, namely: policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control. These are obviously not

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the only forms of state violence that exist and that are worth studying; as Baron et al. argue, ‘The state diffuses violence … throughout the entire society – often in ways that go unrecognized by its subjects.’48 My aim is not to provide a complete catalogue of the state and its various repertoires of violence. Rather, I argue that a global and historical analysis of policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control together reveals the state as an ongoing war on people and places deemed unworthy, unruly, and waste: in short, as an accumulation strategy without which capital cannot function. This, in turn, exposes the limits of state-based models of justice. Put simply, if state violence is central to racial capitalism, then the state cannot be the horizon of freedom. To take this insight seriously is thus to consider what justice and freedom might look like beyond the state. As Taiaiake Alfred puts it, ‘What might one achieve by standing against the further entrenchment of institutions modeled by the state?’49 If ‘[a]ppeals to the state cannot save us from the state’,50 then what could? If not Leviathan, then what?

Every Cook Can Become Ungovernable In May 1980, the residents of Gwangju in South Korea successfully pushed the police and military to the outskirts of the city. The uprising began after a military coup installed General Chun Doo-Hwan as dictator and protesting students were fired upon. In Gwangju, nearly a quarter of a million people took to the streets. What started as a spontaneous protest soon turned into an organised uprising as residents raided police stations and managed to take control of large parts of the city. For the next few days, Gwangju was transformed into a people’s city with communal kitchens and popular assemblies. The radical experiment lasted for five whole days before the Korean state violently reclaimed the city.51 History is replete with episodes such as this – from the maroon society of Palmares to the Paris Commune and the autonomous region of Rojava – where ordinary people have come together and refused to be governed. In the academy, these modes of refusal have typically been associated with anarchist theory and practice. Stemming from the Greek word anarchia, anarchism roughly means ‘the government of no one’.52 While some scholars argue that anarchist ideas were present already in classical Greece, ancient China, and medieval Europe, most agree that the modern anarchist movement emerged in nineteenth-century

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Europe with the writings of Mikhail Bakunin, William Godwin, Pyotr Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Max Stirner. Calling for the destruction of the ‘foul divide between rich and poor, great and small, masters and lackeys, rulers and subjects’,53 anarchists sought to dismantle the state. In Proudhon’s famous words, To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue…. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.54

While Proudhon is widely regarded as the first thinker to have used the term anarchism to describe an antistatist politics, it was Bakunin’s critique of Marx at the First International that set the modern anarchist movement in motion. Bakunin argued that Marx was mistaken in thinking that participation in parliamentary systems and law-making institutions could lead to revolutionary change. For Bakunin, the political arena of elections and parties was not only corrupt but also risked damping revolutionary fervour. Marx, of course, agreed with Bakunin that the state is central to capitalist exploitation; yet he believed that a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is necessary for the creation of socialism. The proletariat would need to seize the state apparatus and use it as an instrument of change ‘to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie’.55 Crucially, ‘[t]he state is not “abolished.” It withers away.’56 In response, Bakunin argued that the idea of a ‘revolutionary government’ or ‘people’s state’ is a contradiction in terms which had been proven wrong, once and for all, with the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Instead of capturing the state and using it to advance the revolution, the state is something to be struggled against: ‘If there is a State there must be domination by one class over another.’57 Since Bakunin’s critique of Marx, anarchist movements and scholars have been at the forefront of exploring the violence of the state. In spite of this, they have often come under critique for disconnecting

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questions of state power from empire, (settler) colonialism, and racial oppression. For many, ‘anarchism itself is often code for Occidental and Western European forms of social organization’.58 As the Black Rose Anarchist Federation puts it, ‘the Eurocentric canon of classical anarchism … overlooks and actively mutes the contributions by colonized peoples’.59 In the anarchist literature, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Haymarket Affair of 1886 are frequently cited as watershed moments, while the struggles to abolish plantation slavery and colonial rule are glaringly absent. Occupy Wall Street and the Seattle protests are similarly discussed and celebrated as contemporary examples of anarchist praxis, while movements fighting against police violence and settler colonialism are largely overlooked.60 This ‘methodological whiteness’ sanctions the idea that anarchism is a largely white-led project: in short, ‘There ain’t no black in the anarchist flag.’61 Despite these critiques, the anarchist opposition to capitalism and the state has never been an exclusively white or European concern. Indeed, ‘the truth is that anarchism has primarily been a movement of the most exploited regions and peoples of the world’.62 In recent years, a growing literature has begun to excavate these non-Western histories and traditions. Scholars have shown that anarchist ideas spread all across the world with empire, industrialisation, labour migration, and the globalisation of revolutionary trade unionism.63 From Marseille to Tunis, Hong Kong to Tokyo, and Buenos Aires to Manila, anarchist ideas thrived among diasporic communities and imperial cities. As Maia Ramnath explains, ‘The story of “Western” anarchism’ here turns out to be ‘intrinsically global, woven of the passages of labour migrants and exiles; transnational shipping as vector for syndicalism; diasporas linking host countries and home countries in intellectual networks; and cosmopolitan cities as nodes of multi-ethnic interchange of tactics and ideas’.64 By the turn of the century, there existed not just an ‘anarchist Atlantic’ but also an ‘anarchist Levant’ and an ‘anarchist Pacific’: The largest ‘anarchist’ city in the world in 1910 was not Barcelona but Buenos Aires; a tier of cities in the Global South possessed noticeable anarchist and syndicalist political subcultures (Canton, Havana, Lima, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Tokyo); in the first three decades of the twentieth century, anarchist-dominated trade unions in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico were proportionally more dominant in their respective countries’ overall labor movements than their famous cousin, the Spanish CNT.65

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Resisting Racial Capitalism contributes to this attempt to conceive of anarchism beyond the confines of coloniality and methodological whiteness. Yet, where recent attempts to ‘decolonise’ and ‘globalise’ anarchism predominantly have focused on retrieving the history of revolutionary labour movements in the (urban and industrial) global South, I crack open an altogether different genre. This is a subterranean archive of refusal and ungovernability that derives not from the dissemination of the European Enlightenment and its ideas of rationalism and science but from ‘the heresy, the dreamworlds, the ancestral visions, the folk tales, the church life … a sacred universe of disorder that confounds politics’.66 This is an anarchism which is otherwise to capitalist modernity and which brings into view the magical, mystical, spiritual, fantastical, and poetic dimensions of ­revolutionary struggles. To theorise this subterranean mode of anarchism, I draw on Robinson’s concept of antipolitics. In The Terms of Order, Robinson argues that the political is a historically constructed paradigm which is closely tied to racial capitalism. In contrast, the antipolitical names the possibility of organising society otherwise, ‘without the authority of rulers or the presence of political leaders’.67 This is an alternative antistatist tradition – a ‘whole other way of being’ – which can be found among the people ‘blinded from view’ by Western epistemology, including in the stateless society of the Ila-Tonga (in today’s Zambia), in ‘the palenques, mocambos, quilombos, and maroon settlements’68 that were scattered across the Americas, as well as in the ‘beliefs, myths, and messianic visions’ that catalysed the Haitian Revolution and numerous other slave revolts across the ‘New World’.69 These communities not only challenged the violence of the racial capitalist world system but also signalled the existence of alternative ways of being, outside of the dominant terms of order. Rather than a decolonised or alternative modernity, the antipolitical here emerges as a ‘collective intelligence gathered from struggle’70 which exposes the myth that capitalist modernity is the only way. As Joshua Myers puts it, ‘There had to be other forms of living … another way…. Life on wholly different terms was possible.’71 What is at stake here is not just the reorganisation of society, but a different genre of life altogether. In short, if the political reduces society to a technical problem of governance, then the antipolitical bursts open the question of what it could be to not be governed at all.

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The riotous rhythms of this antipolitical universe have recently been brought to life by Saidiya Hartman. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she tells the story of Esther Brown, a young black woman living in Harlem at the turn of the century: ‘Walking through the streets of New York City, she and Emma Goldman crossed paths but failed to recognize each other.’72 Following Esther in and out of prison – through her daily struggle to survive, dreaming of freedom – Hartman does more than simply uncover the muted but rebellious uncurrents of everyday life. This is ‘resistance in a minor key’, but it is also a different genre of resistance altogether: one that exists beyond the official terrains of anarchist struggle. Esther Brown, writes Hartman, may not have written ‘a political tract on the refusal to be governed’. And yet, She knew first hand that the offense that was punished by the state was trying to live free: to wander through the streets of Harlem, to want better than what she had, and to be propelled by her whims and desires was to be ungovernable – Her way of living was nothing short of anarchy.73

Read together, Hartman’s and Robinson’s journeys into the dreamworlds of antipolitics open a rich avenue for thinking of refusal and ungovernability anew. While much of this work so far has focused on the history of black radicalism in North America, in his later writings Robinson began to explore how the antipolitical has also informed other traditions of struggle, most notably the radical poverty movements that swept through Europe in the late medieval era. In this book, I build on these insights to examine the antipolitical as a global praxis of rendering racial capitalism and the state ungovernable. By assembling a wide set of movements – including Reaja ou Será Mortx!, the gilets noirs, Mujeres Creando, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) – I theorise antipolitics as a global worldmaking project which refuses to recuperate, reform, and perfect the state. This is not a form of nihilism or a type of resignation: indeed, the keyword here is anti, not apolitical.74 The antipolitical is an experiment in living otherwise which, as Harney and Moten insist,

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is ‘launched from any kitchen, back porch, basement hall, park bench, improvised party, every night’.75 The next chapters explore this by studying various forms of refusal and ungovernability that are enacted across the world today: in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the borderlands of Europe, the poisoned landscape of Ogoniland, and the queer lifeworlds of Delhi. Rejecting the violence of policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control, these state evaders not only unravel how the state, in the words of Micol Seigel, is ‘the source of violence rather than its solution’.76 In breaking with the statist political imagination that has come to dominate our era, they also invite us to wildcat the state and, through that, to imagine the world anew. As we shall see, every cook can become ungovernable.77

Beyond the Boundary: A Map of the Book What do they know of the state who only the state knows?

In an essay from 1992, Sylvia Wynter reflects on the ‘pluri-conceptual’ framework that informs C. L. R. James’s scholarship. James, she writes, was ‘a Negro yet British, a colonial native yet culturally a part of the public school code, attached to the cause of the proletariat yet a member of the middle class, a Marxian yet a Puritan, an intellectual who plays cricket, of African descent yet Western, a Trotskyist and PanAfricanist, a Marxist yet a supporter of black studies, a West Indian majority black yet an American minority black…. James embodies an entire world historical process’.78 As Wynter suggests, the quest for a unified frame – one that could contain the many contradictions and antagonisms inherent in his own identity – is a recurrent theme throughout James’s work. Perhaps this is why he was so committed to thinking beyond and against disciplinary divides. In his autobiography slash cricket reminiscence from 1963, James brings together analyses of sports and politics, race and class, and domestic and imperial rule. ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket knows?’ he famously asks in the book’s opening chapter.79 The answer, it turns out, is not a lot. Those ‘who only cricket know’ cannot possibly know that cricket is more than a game of sports: it is also an instrument of colonial power, a political ideology, and a site of resistance. In the chapters that follow, I draw on James’s method of thinking ‘beyond

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Figure I.1  Street cricket in C. L. R. James’s native Trinidad, 1956. Photo by Joseph Champagne/NFB/Getty Images

a boundary’. Bringing together insights from anticolonial thought, black studies, political economy, gender studies, political ecology, and carceral geography, I theorise the role of state power in the (re)making of racial capitalism. By stepping beyond the boundary of political theory and its focus on rulership, governance, and domestication, I ultimately point towards an antipolitical imagination: an anarchism otherwise and a praxis of ungoverning the world. As we shall see, this will sometimes mean thinking beyond James himself. More concretely, the book makes two contributions. First, it develops a novel theory of state power rooted in an analysis of racial capitalism. Through an in-depth analysis of policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control, it pushes against theoretical

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perspectives that maintain a rigid separation between the political and the economic. Instead, it argues that state power is central to fabricating and maintaining racial capitalism’s violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. Building on this, the book also – second – excavates a global antipolitical tradition that refuses to reduce freedom to a question of how we shall be governed. This is an alternative genre of anarchism which finds inspiration – not in European Enlightenment ideas of rationalism, science, and universal history – but in the dreamworlds, jazz grooves, mystical folktales, and otherworldly poetics of the utopian margins.80 The book develops these arguments over six substantive chapters. Chapter 1, ‘A most bourgeois ambition’, begins the journey by theorising the state as a set of carceral, administrative, legal, and extractive systems that are central to racial capitalism. Drawing on Cedric Robinson, the chapter charts how the state arose as a revanchist response to the popular struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy that swept through Europe in the late medieval period. This revolution from above saw the ‘ascension of whiteness to supremacy’81 as politics came to be associated with domestication, mastery, and rulership. State-building was thus from the beginning a racial-colonial project, entailing both internal centralisation and domination as well as external conquest and enslavement. Since then, politics as we know it has revolved around governance, domestication, and mastery. Chapter 2, ‘Ode to utopia’, extends the discussion by showing how an analysis of the racial capitalist state cracks open a subterranean archive of anarchism. Drawing on the queer utopianism of José Esteban Muñoz and the otherworldly space-jazz of Sun Ra, I theorise the antipolitical as a utopian worldmaking project which exists beyond bourgeois modernity and its ideas of science, rationality, and linear progress. I contrast this with recent attempts to ‘decolonise’ and ‘globalise’ anarchism, which largely have focused on radical labour and trade union movements in the global periphery. Unlike these traditions, the antipolitical is a dream of liberation whose source exceeds the profane and material, and which finds inspiration in poetry and fantasy, the magical and the divine. The second half of the book mobilises these arguments to construct and work through an ‘an/archive’82 of refusal and ungovernability. These chapters do not serve as complete case studies in the conventional sense, but instead interweave historical, theoretical, and empirical

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analyses with the aim of rethinking the relation between politics and economics, freedom and state power, and reality and utopia. Starting from different geographies – the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the dark waters of the Mediterranean, the poisoned landscape of Ogoniland, and the queer lifeworlds of Delhi – the chapters centre the motley crew of abolitionists and anarchists, runaways and castaways, and radicals and otherworldly dreamers who refuse to settle for reform and recognition. Pointing to the horizon of antipolitics, they demonstrate why appeals to the state will never be enough: attempts to ‘humanise’ the border, make citizenship more ‘inclusive’, ‘defund’ the police, ‘green’ capitalism, and ‘queer’ the state ultimately reproduce the violence they purport to confront. In place of such state-centred visions of justice, these communities practice an anarchism otherwise that seeks, not just better ways of being governed but, rather, what James Scott has called the art of not being governed at all.83 Chapter 3, ‘War on dirt’, opens this ‘an/archive’ by examining policing as a street-level form of governance that is central to racial capitalism. Focusing on the murder of Marielle Franco and police violence in Rio de Janeiro, it argues that policing functions as an ongoing war on groups and communities deemed wayward, delinquent, and undeserving: what I describe as a ‘war on dirt’. From Rio to London, Ireland to India, policing has been a key mechanism through which the state orders bourgeois society. Policing thus understood is a dirt-producing system which orders as it rejects, sanitises as it represses. Drawing on afro-feminist quilombismo and recent work on black anarchism, the chapter argues that the struggle for police abolition must be anarchised and extended to target the racial capitalist state as a whole. Viewed antipolitically, abolition requires a break, not just with carcerality, but with state logics and governance in its entirety. Chapter 4, ‘Maps of apartheid’, shifts the discussion from the police to the border. While criminal justice and migration control are often regarded as two separate systems – relating, respectively, to the domestic maintenance of order (criminal justice) and the international control of movement (migration control) – the chapter demonstrates that they are closely linked. By reading the history of mobility control through the lens of racial capitalism, I show that the contemporary policing of migrant lives is part of a longer trajectory in which the state has always sought to control the movement of the displaced and the dispossessed. To take this seriously is ultimately to reject the idea

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that migrant justice is attainable through humanitarianism, citizenship, and/or more open borders. While such measures might go some way towards dampening the violence that is unleashed on migrants on a daily basis, they are incapable of uprooting the violent structures that render migrants disposable, precarious, and super-exploitable. In place of state-centric reforms, the chapter theorises borders as a crucial site in the antipolitical struggle against racial capitalism and the state. The next two chapters turn to two modes of violence that are oftentimes not regarded as stemming from the state: namely, ecological destruction and sexual and gender-based violence. Chapter 5, ‘Of pipelines and property’, explores the relationship between plunder, property-making, and state power. Focusing on the struggle against the destruction of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, it argues that capital from its inception has operated by turning land into objects that can be owned, appropriated, and sold for profit: a process that, following Traci Brynne Voyles, I call wastelanding.84 By examining the role of state violence in extractivist projects, the chapter develops a critique of environmentalist initiatives premised on reforming, seizing, and ‘greening’ the state. Instead, it theorises land-based struggles against mega-dams, mines, plantations, oil fields, pipelines, and other extractive projects as part of a wider antipolitical project of refusal. Like ecological violence, gender and sexuality often escape detection as state violence. Indeed, political theory has traditionally started from the assumption that the public and the private belong to separate spheres, with the implication that the domestic household is beyond the reach of the state. Chapter 6, ‘It runs in the family’, takes issue with these assumptions. Building on indigenous, black, and decolonial (queer and trans) feminisms, it explores the history of cisheteropatriarchy as a racial and colonial history of reproductive extraction and control. I argue that racial capitalism operates as a bourgeois sexual order, which shores up the white propertied family by extracting reproductive labour from those it deems racially perverse, degenerate, and bereft. Racialised ideas around what counts as family ‘proper’ have thus functioned as a central tool of capital accumulation. By re-visiting The Communist Manifesto’s famous demand – ‘Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family!’ – through a racial capitalist lens, the chapter ultimately reconfigures ‘family abolition’ as the antipolitical undoing of state-sponsored white bourgeois domesticity.

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In the conclusion, ‘The new society’, I return to explore the wider meaning and significance of the antipolitics of refusal. Drawing on recent scholarship by Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Bonnie Honig, I move towards an understanding of the antipolitical – not as escape from, or return to, the polis – but as a project of building autonomy, care, and horizontalism beyond racial capitalism, the state, and their violent terms of order. As Jack Halberstam writes, ‘there is a wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us’.85 And now, without further ado, we step into that wild.

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A Most Bourgeois Ambition

Europe drew the map of the world as we know it—a ranked array of nation-states—using the tools of white supremacy and capitalism. We don’t have to use nationhood or nationalism to try to find ourselves on their map. The map, the nation, and the state must go. We did not draw them, and they do not serve us. They never did. – William C. Anderson (2021)

‘Look for Me in the Whirlwind’ On 13 December 1986, Kuwasi Balagoon died of AIDS-related pneumonia in Auburn Prison, New York. A poet, a queer man, an organiser of tenant struggles in Harlem, and a member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army, Balagoon was a founding figure of the black anarchist movement in the United States. During his short life, he escaped from prison twice, expropriated banks to fund the resistance, and – rumour has it – helped free Assata Shakur1 from jail. His way was one of autonomy, self-determination, and direct action: as he puts it in ‘Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone’, a short essay written behind bars, ‘The landlords must be contested through rent strikes and rather than develop strategies to pay the rent, we should develop strategies to take the buildings.’2 In 1969, he was part of the landmark Panther 21 case, which marked the start of the state’s sustained attack on the black liberation movement. Look for Me in the Whirlwind, the collective autobiography of the Panther 21, recounts these events through a collection of essays, photographs, pamphlets, and some of Kuwasi’s poetry.3 In 1981, Kuwasi was arrested yet again, this time for taking part in an attempt to expropriate a money transport armoured car. During the subsequent trial, he refused to recognise the authority of the court and argued that he was fighting a war of liberation against the US state. In response, the court sentenced him to seventy-five years in prison. ‘I am not really worried’, he afterwards 21

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A Most Bourgeois Ambition

explained, ‘not only because I am in the habit of not completing sentences or waiting on parole or any of that nonsense but also because the State simply isn’t going to last seventy-five or even fifty years’.4 Yet this time Kuwasi was wrong: he would live for only five more years. The state, meanwhile, would continue to grow, assuming proportions more hegemonic than ever before.5 Kuwasi Balagoon is one of several black, indigenous, and anticolonial (feminist) anarchists who in recent years have garnered a growing scholarly interest. Alongside thinkers and organisers such as Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, the Ghadar Movement, Lucy Parsons, and Luisa Capetillo, Balagoon is increasingly remembered and celebrated for his revolutionary opposition to the state.6 In this chapter, I place Balagoon’s anarchism in conversation with Cedric Robinson’s work on the history of racial capitalism. I argue that this approach sheds new light on the deeply political dimension of capitalist political economy. The state is not a neutral entity – formed by individuals freely consenting to be ruled – but ‘a most bourgeois ambition’7 which is central to upholding and entrenching racial capitalism’s violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. To develop these arguments, I revisit the question of state formation through Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, medieval socialism, and the making of the political paradigm. Where the existing literature has theorised the origins of the modern state in terms of warfare, class rule, and/or overseas colonialism, I argue that the state arose as a revanchist response to the popular struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy that engulfed Europe in the late medieval period. As a revolution from above, state formation went hand in hand with the making of whiteness as a distinctive European ruling-class identity. State-building was thus from the beginning a racial-colonial project, entailing both internal centralisation and domination as well as external conquest and enslavement. Since then, the state and its systems of administrative, legal, and coercive violence have been central to mastering, domesticating and, ultimately, governing people and places deemed wayward, surplus, and undeserving. What C. L. R. James called state capitalism – referring, as he did, to the Soviet Union – here turns out to be all of capitalism.8 The chapter proceeds in three steps. It first turns to the leading critiques of liberal theories of the state. I show that while these

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Modern/Colonial State Formation

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approaches have troubled the view of the state as a peaceful and pacified entity, they have often neglected its racial and colonial history. Post- and decolonial scholars have done much to recover these dynamics but have often done so by relying on the ‘boomerang thesis’, which reverses rather than transcends the ‘diffusionist’ narrative of more orthodox accounts. To think beyond this unidirectional logic, I next offer an alternative genealogy of the state. Building on Robinson, I theorise state formation as a counterrevolutionary response to the medieval socialist movements that challenged the European feudal order. Racism and colonialism are here revealed as structural features of the state already within Europe, before they were later extended to the rest of the world after 1492. In the final section, I show how this analysis sheds new light on the political dimension of capitalist political economy, including the ways in which state-sponsored violence operates to produce a bourgeois global order premised on racialcolonial hierarchy, stratification, and domination. As black anarchists have long maintained, ‘The government will not free us and is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.’9 If we look for Kuwasi in the whirlwind, then we too will see that ‘[t]he state’s task is to make us appear to be everybody’s enemy—however, truth and history make it clear who is the real enemy of the people’.10

Modern/Colonial State Formation Unlike Kuwasi Balagoon, the Western tradition of political thought has overwhelmingly regarded the state as a guarantor of order, progress, and non-violence. Liberals in particular have insisted on seeing the state as a bulwark against chaos, violence, and disorder: the state is ‘an essentially benign institution: a sovereign entrusted with a monopoly over violence, legitimately exercised by its criminal justice system, in the name of protecting its citizenry from the threat of criminal disorder’.11 Within this framework, the state is a solution to ‘private’ violence and a precondition for the attainment of rights and justice. Two origin stories are central to this view of the state. The first is the story of the social contract, which presents the state as a rational response to the state of nature with its war of all against all. This story specifically frames state power as an outcome of people freely consenting to be ruled, as symbolised by the contract. The second story yields

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similar conclusions but revolves around the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. As David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah summarise, Westphalia is here considered as marking the inauguration of state sovereignty: it entailed ‘a movement from the religious to the secular, from the idea of Europe as unified by Christianity to a European system of independent states, and from a web of overlapping and competing authorities to a modern state system based on the demarcation of exclusive territorial jurisdictions’.12 While state sovereignty might have begun as the exclusive property of European states, it was later extended to the rest of the world in the aftermath of decolonisation and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century.13 There is, of course, a substantial body of literature that challenges this view of the state as peaceful and progressive. Political realists from Machiavelli to Clausewitz and Weber, for example, have regarded violence as the defining quality of state power.14 As Weber argued in his ‘Politics as Vocation’ lecture, delivered in January 1919, just two weeks after the socialist-led Spartacist uprising had been violently crushed by the German state: ‘In the last analysis the modern state can only be defined sociologically in terms of a specific means which is peculiar to the state … namely, the use of physical violence.’ In short, the state ‘is a relation of men dominating men’, a relation ‘founded on force’.15 Weber, of course, was no socialist: speaking of the two Spartacist leaders who were murdered and dumped into the Landwehr canal in Berlin, he remarked that ‘[Karl] Liebknecht belongs in the madhouse and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoological gardens.’16 In spite of this, his analysis of the state as a relation of violence has influenced generations of critical scholars interested in understanding the origins and operations of state power. Today, this literature consists of at least three broad streams, which respectively centre geopolitics, capitalism, and overseas colonialism as the main drivers of state-building. Let us take a closer look at these. Geopolitical approaches understand European state formation as a product of war and conflict. Spearheaded by historical sociologists such as Anthony Giddens, Michael Mann, Theda Skocpol, and, in particular, Charles Tilly, this literature emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as part of a wider attempt to ‘bring the state back in’ as an explanatory variable in social analysis.17 The state is here regarded as an autonomous entity that emerged in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Geopolitical rivalry and military competition, it

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is argued, fuelled the process of state formation by encouraging political centralisation, the rise of a modern taxation system, and the development of other institutional innovations associated with the modern state. As Tilly famously puts it, ‘war made the state, and the state made war’.18 Unlike geopolitical explanations, Marxist thinkers typically regard the sovereign state as an organ of class rule. The literature is nonetheless divided on the question of whether the state emerged before, with, or after the transition to capitalism. On one end of the spectrum, Political Marxists argue that capitalism was born into a world that already consisted of absolutist and dynastic states. These regimes were organised according to a logic of (geo)political accumulation, including ‘empire-building, political marriages, wars of succession, dynastic “international” law … and bandwagoning’.19 The first modern state, which signalled a break with these logics, would only emerge in England in the seventeenth century, after the transition to capitalism. As Benno Teschke concludes, ‘It follows that capitalism did not cause the territorially based state-system, nor that it required a state-system, but that it is nevertheless eminently compatible with it.’20 In contrast, world-systems theorists regard the state as a distinctively capitalist entity. Fernand Braudel, for example, argues that ‘Capitalism only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state.’21 The development of a European world economy was from its inception dependent upon the development of strong states. As such, there exists a ‘close historical tie between capitalism and the modern interstate system’.22 These approaches offer a variety of correctives to liberalism’s view of the state as peaceful and progressive: the state is here revealed as a violent entity that is premised, not on consent, but on war-making (geopolitical theories) and capital accumulation (Marxism). Even so, the analysis that they provide has often overlooked some of the state’s most violent aspects, including the history of empire, plantation slavery, indigenous dispossession, and indentured servitude. This is in part a result of the methodological nationalism that haunts these literatures: namely, the idea that the state has a clearly defined inside and outside and that the outside (including colonialism) has no relation to the inside (domestic politics). Weber himself, for example, shuts out any consideration of imperial violence by conceptualising the modern state as a national entity that has a monopoly of coercive power within

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a given territory. This is despite the fact that the German state, just thirteen years after its unification in 1871, began a process of colonial expansion and domination. As Gurminder Bhambra explains, ‘At the same time as establishing itself in Europe, the incipient German state was consolidating its hold over external territories through a variety of violent colonial expeditions, including in South-West Africa (where the Herero and Nama people were dispossessed and effectively exterminated in the desert regions), Samoa and Qingdao in China.’23 That the German nation-state from the beginning was an imperial state is, however, given no attention in Weber’s analysis. This methodological nationalism also frames geopolitical and Marxist approaches. Take, for example, Charles Tilly’s bellicist theory of state formation, which emphasises the role of war-making, military competition, and geopolitical rivalry within Europe – but leaves out indigenous dispossession, enslavement, and so called ‘small’ wars in the (settler) colonies.24 While later scholars have extended Tilly’s insights by showing how colonialism shaped the foundation of states in the non-European world,25 the idea that European states themselves might have been products of empire is typically left out of the analysis. Marxists, too, have reproduced this assumption, most often through an insistence that capitalism is a system that is uniquely premised on the exploitation of ‘free’ wage-labour. Political Marxists, in particular, insist that so-called ‘extra’-economic coercion is a feudal and pre-modern dynamic that is separate from the ‘actual’ process of capital accumulation. This narrow definition is what leads them to see post-1688 Britain as the first distinctively modern state – even though the rise of capitalism in Britain was fuelled by ‘the slave plantations in the West Indies and peasant agriculture in India’,26 and notwithstanding that the British state itself would grow to become the world’s largest empire. While world-systems theorists such as Braudel and Wallerstein go further in considering how state violence helped fuel capitalist development, they too have little to say about how the history of enslavement and colonisation shaped state formation. With that, the ‘violence, terror, subjugation and coercive exploitation’ that were ‘meted out by ruling classes to populations across the globe’ are written out of the history of both capital and the state.27 In the last decade, an emerging body of scholarship – located at the intersection of postcolonial theory and global historical sociology – has sought to move beyond the pitfalls of these approaches by

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examining how empire and (settler) colonialism were integral to the development of the modern state. This literature builds on the concept of the ‘imperial boomerang’, associated with the works of Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault, which postulates that techniques and technologies experimented with in the colonial periphery eventually found their way back home to the metropole. Taking such an approach, Jordan Branch argues that some of the foundational features of modern statehood were formed through a practice of ‘colonial reflection’ whereby ‘European colonial powers implemented some of the key practices of modern territoriality in the New World first, and only later applied them within Europe’.28 Radhika Mongia, similarly, shows that ‘colonial sites were often central to the making of principles, the shaping of doctrine, and the emergence of state institutions and practice’.29 For both of these scholars, state formation cannot be understood in isolation from its colonial history. While this literature has done much to retrieve the state’s history of colonial dispossession, enslavement, and racial violence, it has sometimes ended up inverting – rather than transcending – the diffusionist narrative of ‘first the West and then the Rest’. The state and its repertoires of power are here seen as flowing from the colony to the metropole (via the boomerang), rather than from the metropole to the colony, as in more orthodox accounts. This reverses rather than transcends the dominant narrative and ultimately leaves little room for considering the complex relationship between the use of state power abroad and at home. As Jeanne Morefield notes, by focusing on the corrupting influence of overseas colonialism, scholars risk obfuscating the fact that the European domestic realm was ‘already racialized, already violent, already corrupted’ and that what followed was not a linear dispersion from a ‘debased imperial periphery to an otherwise untarnished domestic arena’,30 but a back and forth between different, interconnected geographies of racial and colonial capitalism. In the next section, I build on this analysis to provide an alternative genealogy of European state formation. By reading Robinson through a Balagoon-inspired lens, I argue that racism and colonialism were structural features of the state already within Europe. Europe was never an ‘uncontaminated’, ‘enlightened’, or ‘civilized’ space that – much like the figure Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – was tragically corrupted by its own violence in the colonial periphery; rather, European state formation was from the beginning a violent

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process of conquering and colonising racialised groups within Europe itself. As we shall see, the state emerged as a counterrevolutionary project that also saw the birth of the political paradigm: an antidemocratic and hierarchical vision of society centred around the question of how to be governed.

Race, Counterrevolution, and the Birth of the State Born Donald Weems in 1946, Kuwasi Balagoon was a self-described ‘wild-child’ who declared war on the US state. Like many other black anarchists of his generation, he first encountered anarchist philosophy behind bars. He had previously been a member of the BPP, the Oakland-based black power movement that stood for a ‘Marxism for the despised, a class-politics for the sub-classed and de-classed’.31 Over time, he would grow critical of what he saw as the BPP’s hierarchical leadership structure and its commitment to Marxist–Leninism, but he continued to build on the Panther’s internationalist critique of imperialism and the carceral state.32 The result was a black or pan-African anarchism which rejected both capital and state power, and which sought ‘to make anarchism a living, breathing practice, applied in [his] own context’.33 As he explains in one of his letters sent from prison: We are left with ourselves. Left in homes that police drop bombs on from helicopters, and without any shared sense of outrage…. Left in the ghettos, barrios, and other reservations. I feel that we must build revolutionary institutions that buttress on survival through collectives, which in turn should form federations. Grassroots collective building can begin immediately.34

These ideas also resonate through Cedric Robinson’s scholarship. Born six years before Balagoon, Robinson grew up in the same era of racial segregation, police violence, and truncated hope. He was no anarchist, but like Balagoon he took a keen interest in the history of state violence and its relationship to global capitalism. Today he is of course most well known as a scholar of racial capitalism. In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, he famously theorises racial and colonial violence as a permanent feature of capital accumulation. ‘Extra’-economic measures such as land expropriation, enclosure, dispossession, and enslavement, Robinson argues, have never been confined to a pre-capitalist era of feudalism or primitive accumulation: rather, they pervade the history of racial

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capitalism in its entirety. He develops these arguments by drawing on an eclectic archive of radical thought, including the longue durée approaches of world-systems theory and the ground-breaking work of Oliver Cromwell Cox,35 the Dar es Salaam School and the broad constellation of pan-Africanists that converged in Tanzania in the years after independence,36 theories of race and class produced by intellectuals clustered around the Institute of Race Relations in London,37 and Norman Cohn’s work on millenarianism and medieval socialism, which he encountered while he was a visiting researcher at the University of Sussex in Brighton. In recent years, a growing interdisciplinary body of literature has built on Robinson to re-examine the relationship between capitalism and state violence.38 In spite of this, the state form itself has often been left out of the analysis. While most scholars agree that ‘There has never been a minute in the history of capitalism lacking the organized, centralized, and reproducible capacities of the state’,39 there have been few attempts to think more concretely about the history of the state and its relation to racial capitalism. In what follows I address this lacuna. By drawing on Robinson’s less well-known writings – in particular, The Terms of Order and An Anthropology of Marxism – I argue that the state is a set of carceral, administrative, legal, and extractive systems without which capital cannot function. To develop this argument, I re-examine the birth of the state through a Robinsonian lens. State formation is here revealed – not as a product of geopolitical conflict or overseas colonialism, as discussed earlier – but as a revanchist response to the popular struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy that swept through Europe in the late medieval era. As we shall see, the state not only emerged as a counterinsurgency but – as Kuwasi knew all too well – it also continues to function as one. At the heart of Robinson’s scholarly corpus is an attempt to rework Marxism’s parasitism on ‘bourgeois hagiography’40 and its linear conceptions of history. As he explains in An Anthropology of Marxism, his book from 2001, Marxism is based on the assumption that bourgeois society constitutes a progressive development from feudalism and that it, moreover, is a precondition for socialist transformation.41 He marshals two interconnected arguments to challenge this. First, the socialist critique of property, domination, and inequality actually precede the emergence of bourgeois society and ‘a specific laboring class, the proletariat’. Well before the rise of capitalism, earlier forms

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of socialism had existed: in fact, ‘the rudiments of Western socialism appeared as early as the thirteenth century—without industrial production’.42 As Robinson elaborates: 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.43

Second and relatedly, Robinson argues that capitalism was never a revolutionary negation of feudalism, as Marx insisted, but rather signalled the intensification and global extension of its ‘social, cultural, political, and ideological complexes’.44 That is, capitalism ‘did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide’.45 Through these two arguments – which both challenge linear and teleological accounts of history – Robinson sheds new light on the state and its origins. Let us explore this in further depth. In An Anthropology of Marxism, Robinson outlines an alternative history of socialism. Here it is no longer the industrial proletariat, but a medieval motley crew of ‘poor rural and urban rebels, female mystics and “pious women,” Latin medieval philosophers, radical communitarians and communists, as well as “thieves, exiles, and excommunicates” [that] take center stage’.46 In the late medieval period, these groups challenged the authority of the feudal lords, the Catholic Church, and the secular ruling classes. Opposing rich town-dwellers, merchants, landowners, and the Church alike, they called for the abolition of rent and private property, as well as an end to enclosures and economic exploitation. In contrast to the secular orientation of Marxism, these movements were driven by ideas of millenarianism, mystical anarchism, and a long-lost Garden of Eden in which ‘all things on earth’ had belonged ‘to all human beings communally’. In this egalitarian state of nature, there had been no inequality, serfdom, private property, or coercive rule: indeed, these ‘had no part in the original intention of God and had come into being only as a result of the Fall’.47 The idea of a lost Golden Age thus functioned much like a revolutionary myth, fuelling visions of a new society based on equality, communal ownership, and a refusal of

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authoritarian rule.48 It was well-captured by John Ball, the radical priest who led the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and who anarchist painter William Morris would later depict in his novel A Dream of John Ball. Ball preached that: If we are all descended from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve, how can the lords say or prove that they are more lords than we are—save that they make us dig and till the ground so that they can squander what we produce? They are clad in velvet and satin, set of with squirrel fur, while we are dressed in poor cloth. They have wines and spices and fine bread, and we have only rye and spoilt flour and straw, and only water to drink. They have beautiful residences and manors, while we have the trouble and the work, always in the fields under rain and snow. But it is from us and our labour that everything comes with which they maintain their pomp…. Good folk, things cannot go well in England nor ever shall until all things are in common and there is neither villein nor noble, but all of us are of one condition.49

Radical anti-property movements such as these existed all across medieval Europe. In England, the Peasants’ Revolt saw thousands of peasants march from Kent to London demanding an end to serfdom and private property; when they arrived in the capital, ‘the populace of the city also arose, prevented the gates being shut against the oncoming hordes and then joined forces with the rebels’.50 In Bohemia, the Hussite revolution brought together workers, peasants, prostitutes, beggars, indentured servants, slum-dwellers, and radical priests in rebellion against the established authorities. In Germany, a series of revolts eventually escalated into the Peasant’s War of 1524–25. They were led by Thomas Müntzer, who preached that ‘All the world must suffer a big jolt. There will be such a game that that the ungodly will be thrown of their seats, and the downtrodden will rise.’51 In France, the Jacquerie of 1358 inspired a rapid proliferation of country-wide struggles against the nobility. A series of uprisings also swept through Catalonia, culminating in the War of the Remences. In Florence, the Ciompi Revolt of 1378 led to a three-year-long rule of wool workers. By the fourteenth century, the European feudal order was in a state of crisis. The revolts, combined with the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the intensification of famines, had ‘a devastating impact on western Europe and the Mediterranean—decimating the populations of cities and countryside alike, disrupting trade, collapsing industry and agricultural production—leveling, as it were, the bulk of the most developed regions of western European bourgeois activity’.52

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This  was heightened by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, which made the Ottomans the leading naval power in the Eastern Mediterranean and blocked Europe access to Asian markets. It is within this context of permanent crisis that the state rose to power. Silvia Federici has elsewhere described this as a counterrevolution, whereby capitalism emerged as a conservative ‘response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centurieslong social conflict that in the end shook their power’.53 Robinson’s analysis not only lends support to this argument but also goes further in demonstrating how this revolution from above unfolded on two separate but interconnected fronts: as internal centralisation and domination, on the one hand, and external conquest and enslavement, on the other. The ascension of the capitalist state was central across both spheres. On a domestic plane, the conservative backlash against the medieval socialist movements reorganised ruling-class power into the centralised state, which increasingly came to be regarded as the sole agent capable of confronting the spiralling crisis. In short, ‘by revealing the evil effects of a breakdown in authority, the troubled times established the case for centralization’.54 Where Marxist historians such as Perry Anderson and Ellen Meiksins Wood have attributed the rise of the absolutist state to ‘the needs of landed aristocracies for a stronger central power to maintain order against the threat of rebellion’,55 the state in fact brought together a coalition of elites, including the bourgeoisie. Federici elaborates: the mounting class conflict brought about a new alliance between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, without which proletarian revolts may not have been defeated … the forces of feudal power—the nobility, the Church, and the bourgeoisie—moved against them united, despite their traditional divisions, by their fear of proletarian rebellion. Indeed, the image, that has been handed down to us, of a bourgeoisie perennially at war with the nobility, and carrying on its banners the call for equality and democracy, is a distortion. By the late Middle Ages, wherever we turn, from Tuscany to England and the Low Countries, we find the bourgeoisie already allied with the nobility in the suppression of the lower classes. For in the peasants and the democratic weavers and cobblers in the cities, bourgeoisie recognised an enemy far more powerful than the nobility…. Thus it was the urban bourgeoisie … who reinstituted the power of the nobility, by voluntarily submitting to the rule of the Prince, the first step on the road to the absolute state.56

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Capitalism, then, was never an evolutionary progression from feudalism that resulted in a more ‘advanced’ stage of history. Rather, it was a ‘counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle’.57 Across Europe, the emerging centralised states instituted a range of terror campaigns to curb the uprisings and restore internal order: The heretic and millenarian movements were persecuted through the Holy Inquisition and punished with excommunication, torture, and death at the stakes. In Germany, the peasant uprisings ‘ended catastrophically, in a series of battles, or massacres, in which perhaps 100,000 peasants perished’.58 In England, Parliament introduced the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349, which fixed wages and compelled all able-bodied people below the age of sixty to work; those who refused were imprisoned. Across Europe, attempts were made to reinstitute serfdom and other forms of coerced labour. In Eastern Europe there was a ‘second serfdom’, whereas Western Europe saw a wave of land enclosures, witch-hunts, executions, and incarceration of vagrants in workhouses. These measures were frequently articulated through a racial logic. As Robinson is at pains to explain in Black Marxism, the European feudal order was saturated with ‘racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional particularities’.59 While racism and racialisation are often seen as hierarchies that emerged through overseas colonialism, racial thinking already suffused the consciousness and identity of the medieval European ruling elites: ‘The bourgeoisie that led the development of capitalism were drawn from particular ethnic and cultural groups; the European proletariats and the mercenaries of the leading states from others; its peasants from still other cultures; and its slaves from entirely different worlds.’60 The lower orders of European society – including Jews, Muslims, the Irish, Romani and traveller communities, Slavs, and Catholics in Ireland – were frequently imagined in racial terms. With the rise of the capitalist state, these existing ethnic, religious, and cultural hierarchies were gradually transformed into racial differences. Crucially, then, state formation was from the start a racial project. As states harnessed more power, the radical anti-property movements increasingly came to be regarded as a separate race, ‘set apart by absolute and fundamental differences within Christianity’.61 Jews and Muslims were similarly subjected to heightened repression, state surveillance, land expropriation, and expulsion. In England, a range of statutes and laws – monitored by institutions such as the Exchequer

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of the Jews – eroded the economic and social status of the Jewish population, limiting where they could live and who they could meet; Jews over the age of seven were also required to wear a badge on their chest to distinguish them from the rest of the English population. In 1290, Jews were finally expelled en masse from England; elsewhere in Europe, Jewish populations were frequently scapegoated for the Black Death, resulting in massacres and pogroms. Muslims fared no better. The Ottomans had long been regarded as Christendom’s main international foe, but this escalated after the year 1100 when the Latin Church unleashed a series of wars to retake the Holy Land. The First Crusade succeeded in establishing four crusader colonies (known as the Outremer) in the Near East: the County of Edessa, Principality of Antioch, County of Tripoli, and Kingdom of Jerusalem. Increasingly, Christians came to regard themselves as ‘a blood race, linked by the shedding of Christ’s blood, and by the blood suffering of Christian bodies at the hands of the Islamic foe’. Muslims, in contrast, were seen as ‘an infernal race, a race incarnating evil, whose extirpation would be a form of malicide’.62 These racial formations would grow increasingly dominant as the Ottomans pressed westward and Christian Europe found itself gripped by panic and revenge-seeking. In 1250 – three years before the fall of Constantinople – Muslims were finally expelled from Portugal, whereas in Spain a series of edicts outlawed Islam in the aftermath of the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. While the rise of the capitalist state went hand-in-hand with the making of racialised others who could be exploited, enslaved, persecuted, and dominated, it also saw the emergence of whiteness as the integral element of European ruling-class identity: a process that Geraldine Heng calls the birth of homo europaeus and which Sylvia Wynter has theorised as the rise of the European ethnoclass of Man.63 As Heng notes, ‘race makes an appearance in the Middle Ages not only through fantasmatic blackness, Jews, Saracens, Mongols, Africans, Indians, Chinese, tribal islanders, Gypsies, indigenes in the Americas, and the collections of freakish and deformed humans pressing upon the edges of the civilized world’. Crucially, race ‘is also to be found at the center of things, in the creation of that strange creature who is nowhere yet everywhere in cultural discourse: the white Christian European in medieval time’.64 The thirteenth-century Hereford world map offers a vivid depiction of this process whereby the European

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ruling classes came to regard themselves as white. The map portrays Europe as a space of cathedrals and civilised cities, whereas the rest of the world is inhabited by ‘human monster of many kind … pygmies, giants, hermaphrodites, troglodytes, cynocephali, sciapods, and other part-human, misshapen, deformed, and disabled peoples’.65 It is from within this whitened landscape – surrounded, as it is, by the ‘threat’ of racialised internal and external Others – that the state rose to power. Now, if one part of the counterrevolution entailed internal centralisation and pacification then it also sparked a new wave of external conquest and enslavement. While 1492 is often regarded as the starting point of the colonial project, European expansion began much earlier. The twelfth-century Crusades were in many ways a prelude to the colonisation of the ‘New World’, as was the English annexation of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and ‘the recuperation by Christian Europe of the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and Corsica, the Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily’.66 In Eastern Europe, Scandinavian and German crusaders had similarly conquered, colonised, and converted Baltic, Finnic, and Slavic people around the Baltic Sea well before 1492. Like colonialism, slavery was also a time-honoured European practice. Portugal had been bringing enslaved Africans to Europe since 1444, whereas the enslaved population of Spain included ‘Circassians, Bosnians, Poles, Russians, and Muslims of various ethnicities’.67 In Genoa and Venice, enslaved persons constituted as much as 5 per cent of the total population. The post-1492 world, then, marked not so much a rupture with the past as an acceleration and intensification of its logics. In the context of the feudal crisis – brought about by a concatenation of forces, including the Black Death, escalating rebellions from below, and pressure from the Ottomans – Westward colonial expansion offered a way out, promising lucrative overseas markets and new pools of enslaveable labour. All along, the hardening of religious, cultural, linguistic, and regional differences into racial ones – culminating in what Robinson calls the invention of ‘the universal Negro’68 – was to be the grease that made the capitalist wheels turn. The Spanish reconquista stands as a watershed moment in the unravelling of this two-pronged strategy of internal centralisation and repression, on the one hand, and external conquest and enslavement, on the other. When al-Andalus fell in 1492, it was the climax of a long intra-European imperial struggle, marking the end of 800

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years of Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula. The Spanish state – formed just twenty-three years earlier through the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon – now found itself ruling over a multireligious and multiethnic population. To consolidate its power, the Spanish state proceeded to expel, expropriate, and forcibly convert its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants.69 As Robinson makes clear, it is not a coincidence that Europe’s colonisation of the Americas began at this very ‘moment when the Spanish Crown was intent upon its self-appointed mission to unify Spain, centralise state authority, vanquish its rivals among its own aristocracy, and acquire an independent source of capital for itself’.70 Just eight months after the fall of alAndalus, Christopher Columbus would set sail for the ‘New World’, backed by the same Spanish monarchy. This was the product of years of state-bourgeoisie geopolitical and financial cooperation: When Columbus came to terms with Ferdinand and Isabella, the road had been paved for him by Genoese admirals who had served Portuguese and Spanish kings for centuries; by Genoese, Piacentine, and Florentine merchants who had assumed the primacy financial risks in colonizing the Portuguese Azores and Madeiran islands, and Spain’s Canary Island group; by Italian factors and money lenders who had strung their capital from Algiers and Ceuta in north Africa, to Elmina and Luanda on the west coast of that continent, and east to the Moluccas and Nagasaki; and by an Italian bourgeoisie whose financial and technical character and business affairs had become totally assimilated to the interests of the Spanish and Portuguese states and their most adventurous aristocracies.71

Consequently, 1492 marks the global inauguration of racial capitalism and state formation as two sides of the same counterrevolutionary project, symbolised by the simultaneous start of ethnic cleansing in Iberia and the colonisation of the Americas.72 Over the next five centuries, state and capital would operate together to extract, expropriate, and exploit: from the dispossession and forced labour of indigenous peoples in the Americas, to the enslavement and coerced migration of Africans, the export of the Chinese and Indians as indentured labourers, the imposition of plantation regimes, militarised trading, and various forms of resource extraction, racial capitalism would depend upon the exercise of state power. As Robinson puts it, ‘“expanded bureaucratic state structures” became the major conduits of capitalist expansion: determining the direction of investment, establishing political security for such investments, encouraging certain commercial networks and

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relations while discouraging others’.73 From the start, state and capital existed in symbiosis, with race as their lifeblood. * To summarise, at least three conclusions follow from this analysis. First, there is nothing inherently, or even potentially, progressive about the state. In contrast to the fiction popularised by liberalism – namely, that the state is a product of individuals freely consenting to be governed – the European state emerged as part of a conservative backlash against the medieval popular struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy. While the critical literature has done much to recover the violent origins of state formation, it has often overlooked the centrality of racial and colonial violence to this process. Racism and colonialism, I have secondly shown, were from the start structural features of the capitalist state. These were never just ‘corrupted’ elements that were imported from the colonial periphery but were central aspects of the state’s genealogy within Europe itself. The colonial conquest, enslavement, exploitation of migrant labour, and religious persecution that had been developed by elites within Europe would later form the basis for the techniques and technologies that after 1492 were projected on a global scale. Consequently, and as David Theo Goldberg notes, ‘Race is integral to the emergence, development, and transformations (conceptually, philosophically, and materially) of the modern nation-state. Race marks and orders the modern nation-state, and so state projects, more or less from its point of conceptual and institutional emergence’.74 Finally, and as I elaborate in the next section, this re-worked history of state formation has serious consequences for our understanding of the political in capitalist political economy. As a system built on violent, coercive, and hierarchical relations, racial capitalism has always been premised on the use of state power. We now turn to this.

Racial Capitalism and the Political Paradigm In the Western tradition of political thought, the political and the economic have often been imagined as belonging to two distinct spheres of power. Since Adam Smith’s critique of mercantilism, liberals, in particular, have insisted that ‘commercial society’ is a self-correcting system

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that is governed, not by the state, but by the invisible hand and the laws of supply and demand. While Marxist scholars have challenged liberalism’s association of capitalism with freedom, they have often reproduced its distinction between politics and economics – implicitly accepting the liberal assumption that capitalism is a system of ‘free’ wage-labour and peaceful market exchange.75 Marx, of course, recognised the centrality of state violence to the making of capitalist social relation (through the history of ‘what she calls primitive accumulation’), but he importantly regarded the actual process of capital accumulation as uniquely premised on the exploitation of wage-labour. Many later Marxists have built on this to argue that ‘extra’-economic coercion in fact is external to capitalism as a mode of production. Ellen Meiksins Wood, for example, contends that pre-capitalist (what she calls ‘Asiatic’ and ‘African’) modes of production are characterised by a fusion of economic and political powers: in these systems, ‘economic and extra-economic, class power and state power, property relations and political relations’ have not yet been separated.76 In contrast, with the rise of capitalism the economic sphere broke free from the political. From now on, Wood argues, the market would be governed, not by the state, but by the invisible hand.77 There are, of course, a variety of Marxist thinkers that have challenged this perceived separation between the political and the economic, of Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas.78 Nonetheless, in defining capitalism through an exclusive focus on the capital-labour relation, they have often overlooked the state’s history of colonial conquest, plantation slavery, indigenous dispossession, and racialised indentured servitude. In contrast, once we dethrone the abstract, deracinated, and asexual worker – recognising that wage-labour is just one of many forms of exploitation under capitalism – a rich avenue for thinking anew about the interplay of the political and the economic is opened up. The analysis developed in the last few pages pushes us in precisely this direction: state power has from its inception been central to upholding and entrenching capitalism’s violent regimes of extraction and accumulation across both metropole and colony. The carceral, legal, administrative, and extractive systems of the state do not just maintain capitalism – by protecting private property, enforcing contract law, preserving order, and so on – but they actively fashion it.79 Crucially, a Robinson-inspired analysis not only compels us to consider the distinctively political dimensions of capitalist political

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economy but also exposes the state as an ongoing war on people and places deemed wayward, waste, and wild: in short, as an accumulation strategy without which capital cannot function. In The Terms of Order, Robinson demonstrates how, with the advent of capital and the state, a hierarchical conception of the ­political – c­ entred around the problem of governance – came to dominate Western social and political thought. ‘The political came to fruition’, he writes, ‘with the theory of the State as the primary vehicle for the organization and ordering of the mass society produced by capitalism’.80 As states harnessed more power, a ‘new science of politics’81 emerged, offering a justification for sovereign rule by discrediting other cosmologies and modes of life. Political theory thus came to revolve around questions of rulership, mastery, hierarchy and, ultimately, the state. In developing these arguments, many political theorists found themselves returning to the antidemocratic ideas that had animated Greek philosophy and its disdain for common people ‘as simple, traditional and ponderous … ridiculous, vulgar, and obscene’.82 Plato’s Republic was to be particularly influential. With its depiction of the poor as idle, incompetent, ignorant, and unfit for political life, it is not a coincidence that the Republic gained currency yet again in the fourteenth century. As Robinson notes, Plato became the central thinker of Western political thought because he offered a philosophical justification for keeping the masses out of politics: ‘Plato survives because if he had not existed, he would have had to be invented.’83 The Platonic disdain for common people – the ‘mob’ – is particularly evident in social contract theory. Take, for example, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Published in 1651, the book famously justifies the state by contrasting it with the horrid state of nature. Where the medieval antiproperty movements had imagined the state of nature as ‘a state of affairs in which all men were equal in status and wealth and in which nobody was oppressed or exploited by anyone else; a state of affairs characterized by universal good faith and brotherly love and also, sometimes, by total community of property and even of spouses’,84 Hobbes subverts this image into a war of all against all. No longer a Garden of Eden, life in this original state is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.85 The conclusion is obvious: the state of nature is to be feared, not desired. Hobbes arrived at this argument – not because of the English Civil War, as is often suggested – but because of the ongoing colonisation of the Americas, where indigenous societies served as inspiration for the idea

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of the state of nature. ‘There are many places where they live so now’, he wrote: ‘the savage people in many places of America … have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner’.86 Hobbes was not alone in making such arguments: if anything, ‘the emergence of possessive individualists from their wanderings in the wilderness of the state of nature into the promised land of civil society is the great theme of moral and political thinkers in the developmental era of our capitalist society’.87 In Locke, the state of nature is imagined in terms of ‘Indians’ in the ‘woods of America’ and the ‘Hottentots’ of Africa; in Pufendorf, it is the space of the ‘New World peoples’; and in Rousseau, it is through the trope of the ‘noble savage’.88 Bourgeois political theorists, then, framed the absence of politicality as chaotic, disorderly, primitive, and, ultimately, as distinctively non-white. ‘The meaning of the political’ for those racialised as black and brown, writes Joshua Myers, ‘has been captivity and exclusion. Modernity has rendered the political as the space beyond accessibility for racialized others’.89 This was premised on a racist philosophy of history in which indigenous societies were made to represent an earlier phase of history, which Europeans had long left behind. As Hegel famously put it, Africa is outside of history; ‘The Negro … exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state’ and hence Africa ‘is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit’.90 While Hegel believed that world history had culminated with the creation of the European state, the threat of racial regression – that is, of falling back into a racialised state of barbarism and savagery – would continue to haunt Western political thought. Keeping race at bay (through discipline, sanitation, apartheid, and/or eugenics) would accordingly emerge as a core logic of capitalist governance. In Black Marxism, Robinson places the birth of this political paradigm in the context of racial capitalism. Where scholars such as Wood regard modernity as the historical era where the economic realm ‘emancipated’ itself from the political, Robinson helps us understand how they evolved together as part of the political economy of capitalism. Contra Marx’s linear history, there was never a clear progression from one mode of production to another; rather, feudal social formations remained engrained in capitalism. By de-centring Marx’s focus on the capital-labour relation, Robinson shows how state-sponsored violence  – including colonial conquest, enclosure, dispossession, extraction, and enslavement – has been central to the history and development

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of racial capitalism. The state is here revealed as an assemblage of carceral, administrative, legal, and extractive systems which are aimed at (re)producing a bourgeois order grounded in racial-colonial hierarchy, stratification, and domination. Capitalism has never been confined to an ‘economic’ sphere of labour exploitation but has always relied on a wider realm of state-sponsored violence and coercion. Marx’s claim that capital ceases ‘to be capital without wage labor’ is here revised to account for the ways in which capital, in fact, cannot function without the political: that is, without governance, domestication, and hierarchy. In theorising capitalism as a system of political economy, Robinson ultimately pushes us to understand state power as a force that is simultaneously repressive and productive. The state is more than just a night watchman that represses social unrest, protects property, and pacifies the unruly; indeed, it is also a worldmaking force that creates, maintains, and polices the hierarchies and stratifications that capital needs to profit and thrive.91 This organised violence splits humanity into those associated with property, citizenship, and wages, on the one hand, and those subjected to super-exploitation and dispossession, on the other. While Robinson’s work predominantly focuses on racism, ethnicity, and nationalism, later thinkers have suggested that gender, sexuality, religion, indigeneity, and disability function in much the same way: that is, as regimes of domination, stratification, and hierarchisation that enable capital to extract, exploit, and expropriate.92 One way in which the state has created and maintained these conditions of extractability and disposability is through the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor: that is, between those seen as ‘hardworking’ and ‘morally pure’, and those who are disregarded as a burden on society. As I explore in further detail in Chapters 3–6, an array of state technologies has been directed against populations deemed unworthy, idle, surplus, parasitic, and bereft, in both the (post)colony and the metropole. While marking these populations for super-exploitation, dispossession, and ‘slow death’,93 these technologies have also sought to eliminate cosmologies and genres of life that provide alternatives to the dominant terms of order. As we shall see, the state not only began as a counterinsurgency, but it also lives on as one: that is, as an ongoing project of domestication, hierarchisation, and ‘organized abandonment’.94 As Plato maintained already in 375 BC, and as bourgeois political theorists have insisted again and again, the masses must be governed.

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Into the Whirlwind Almost forty years have passed since Kuwasi Balagoon’s died on a cold December day in 1986. ‘A warrior born on a Sunday who died in the bowels of the state’, writes poet Jasmine Gibson, ‘Balagoon reminds us that if we must die, it must be in light to guide others out of fascist recuperation. That living under the current conditions given to us is not enough, and is not even a fraction of the sensuousness that can be afforded only in a world that has undergone liberatory revolution.’95 In this chapter, I have followed Balagoon in arguing that the history of racial capitalism is a history of state violence. From its inception, the state has been a key vector through which capitalist modes of accumulation, exploitation, and dispossession are organised, executed, and rendered possible. As Cedric Robinson was well aware, the state has never been a pacified or progressive entity ensuring non-violence, freedom, or justice: rather, the state is a counterrevolutionary project premised on hierarchisation, domination, and antidemocracy. The state first arose from a crisis-ridden European feudal order that was already infused with racial and colonial violence: since then, politics as we know it has revolved around governance, domestication, and mastery. These insights have radical implications for how we think about justice today. If state violence is a constituent element of racial capitalism, then justice cannot be limited to making claims on the state, whether through appeals to rights, law, or recognition. Rather, the state is itself something to be resisted and struggled against. This might, of course, sound naïve and utopian. After all, the hegemony of the political paradigm has made it virtually impossible to conceive of freedom and sociality outside the state. As Robinson explains, with the rise of the capitalist state ‘the antipolitical was translated and transformed into ethical theory, theology, and philosophy, that is into forms of idealism’.96 Nonetheless, and as we shall see in the next chapter, outside the dominant terms of order exist people and communities that have continued to explore alternatives to politics. By stepping into this whirlwind – what C. L. R. James calls ‘beyond the boundary’ – the next chapter traces the antipolitical visions that have continued to persist in the margins. We now turn to these dreamworlds.

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Ode to Utopia

What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. – Ruth Wilson Gilmore Perhaps, then, what we are striving for is another genre of life. – Marquis Bey

We Travel the Spaceways Sun Ra spent his life travelling the spaceways. Born as Herman Poole Blount in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, Ra was a jazz composer, pianist, poet, and bandleader who notoriously claimed to have come from the stars. Blending ideas of an African mythic past with black vernacular culture, cabaret, vaudeville, and dreams of outer space, he created music that was of the future. An unashamedly utopian and imaginary thinker, Ra had little interest in ordinary politics: in its place, he embraced the impossible and ‘the heart of tomorrow’,1 arguing that ‘everything possible has been done and the world didn’t change’.2 Across his songs and poetry, he sought to open a gateway to utopia: ‘A new world for every self / Seeking a better self and a better world.’3 He frequently used outer space as a metaphor for this realm of dreams, visions, imagination, and futurity. As he declares on ‘Space is the Place’: Outer space is a pleasant space A place that’s really free There’s no limit to the things you can do There’s no limit to the things you can be Your thought is free And your life is worthwhile.4

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Figure 2.1  Sun Ra, utopian space traveller Collection of John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis. Source: Oakland, 1972.

Though he has frequently been ridiculed and dismissed as a ‘charlatan’, ‘con man’, ‘clown’, and ‘maniac’, Ra’s utopian poetics build on a rich tradition of black radical aesthetics. As Robin D. G. Kelley explains, the idea of space travel draws from the history of ‘maroonage and the desire to leave the place of oppression for wither a new land or some kind of peaceful coexistence’.5 By taking the ‘celestial road’, Ra ultimately searched for a different way of being and a new genre of life: what I, in this chapter, theorise as antipolitics. The concept of antipolitics was originally developed by Robinson in his first book, The Terms of Order, to describe modes of being that exist outside of Western epistemological frameworks. Offering what Fred Moten has described as an ‘amazing and beautiful ode to disorder’,6 the book refuses to reduce liberation to the confines of the political paradigm. By putting Robinson in conversation with José Esteban Muñoz’s work on concrete utopianism, in this chapter I theorise the antipolitical

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as a utopian worldmaking project which exceeds the racial capitalist state and its terms of order. If the political reduces society to a technical problem of rulership and mastery, then the antipolitical bursts open the question of how not to be governed. This is an alternative genre of anarchism which finds inspiration – not in the European Enlightenment and its ideas of rationalism, science, and universal history – but in the dreamworlds, jazz grooves, mystical folktales, and otherworldly poetics of the antipolitical margins. What Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano half-jokingly once referred to as ‘magical Marxism’ – consisting of ‘one half reason, one half passion, and a third half mystery’7 – here emerges as a living and breathing tradition of struggle. The chapter begins by considering Left attempts to reimagine the state in gentler and more caring ways. Against these appeals to a ‘left art of government’, I argue that the state form cannot be a vehicle for revolutionary transformation. I then turn to Robinson’s notion of the antipolitical to reclaim antistatism from the realm of idealism and impracticality. Drawing on Muñoz, I theorise the antipolitical as a utopian worldmaking project which brings into view the magical, mystical, spiritual, fantastical, and poetic dimensions of revolutionary struggles. In the final part, I show that this points towards a subterranean archive of anarchist thought and praxis, which is otherwise to capitalist modernity.8 Sun Ra, traveling the spaceways, knew this all along: what if there are other ways of being and different genres of life?

The State and Revolution Since Vladimir Lenin’s The State and Revolution, thinkers on the Left have often associated emancipation with the seizure and gradual transformation of state power. Published in 1917, just months before the October revolution, the book offers a critique of anarchist theory and action. Unlike these ‘utopians’, writes Lenin, ‘we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination’.9 As he elaborates: The state apparatus … must not, and should not, be smashed. It must be wrested from the control of the capitalists; the capitalists and the wires they pull must be cut off, lopped off, chopped away from this apparatus; it must be subordinated to the proletarian Soviets; it must be expanded, made more comprehensive, and nation-wide. And this can be done by utilising the achievements already made by large-scale capitalism (in the same way as the

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proletarian revolution can, in general, reach its goal only by utilising these achievements).10

For Lenin, it would be a naïve mistake to abandon the state; rather, the goal should be to transform ‘a state of bureaucrats’ into ‘a state of armed workers’. This will eventually allow the state to wither away. Many theorists and organisers have followed Lenin in arguing that the state both can and should be used for transformative purposes. As Stuart Hall explains in a Marxism Today essay from 1984, the underlying assumption has often been that there are ‘two, great, opposed “continents”’: namely, ‘the domain of capital and the market versus the domain of the logic of social needs, imposed through the state’. According to this logic, the road to socialist transformation leads through the state: capitalism has a thrust, a logic of its own—the logic of private property, capital accumulation, possessive individualism and the free market…. The Left, it seemed, had only one alternative: to break the ‘logic of the market’ and construct society around an alternative logic—a socialist one. But to do this, it needed an alternative centre of power, an opposing rallying-point, to that of capital and the market. This opposing force was the state.11

In political theory, the question of the state and its relation to progressive politics has recently been taken up by Davina Cooper. In Feeling Like a State, Cooper argues that the state should be transformed into ‘a productive concept for left politics’:12 in fact, the state can be reimagined ‘as responsible, activist, and caring; governing in ways that are horizontal, engaged, playful and sensory’.13 Through radical experiments in local government and democratic participatory venues, new governance formations can emerge that challenge ‘the assumption that states must be oppressive, territorial, ­self-interested, and national’.14 Echoing these concerns, Janet Newman and John Clark similarly argue that the state has the potential to become ‘a bulwark against the market’s destructive powers’, a ‘guarantor of rights’, and an ‘equalizer’.15 The state may have been complicit in the neoliberal project, but it still has the capacity to provide social welfare, redistribute resources, and ‘protect populations, including more vulnerable and precarious populations, from civil society’s violence and discriminations’.16 For all of these authors, the state’s more progressive capacities should be built upon to create a proper ‘left art of government’,17 capable of countering the power of global capital.

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In contrast to these approaches, the argument set out in the previous chapter casts doubt on the state’s potential to be a vehicle for progressive and transformative change. As we have seen, the state began as a counterrevolutionary project premised on hierarchisation, domination, and antidemocracy; since then, the state has been central to upholding and entrenching racial capitalism’s violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. While this does not mean that the state can never be reformed, it does suggest that reform-based projects are at risk of aiding, rather than hampering, the state’s counterinsurgent impulse. Take, for example, the rise social welfare in nineteenth century Europe. While this is often heralded as a victory for social democracy, the welfare arm of the state was first ‘developed to counter insurgencies’.18 Driven by the fear of working-class militancy and socialist revolt, social insurance was first introduced to stave off these forces. As Patricia Owens explains, ‘In exchange for revolution “from below,” there would be “social” reform’19 and policy interventions on a range of issues, including unemployment benefits, housing, child labour, and health and hygiene. Otto von Bismarck, who launched the German social health insurance system, was explicit about this link between reform and repression: ‘The cure of social ills must be sought’, he argued, ‘not exclusively in the repression of SocialDemocratic excesses, but simultaneously in the positive advancement of the working classes’.20 Unsurprisingly, and as we will see in the next few chapters, the welfare system has often operated alongside – and not as a counter to – the carceral arm of the state. The struggle for decolonisation is another prominent example in which state-building has been associated with revolutionary and transformative purposes. National liberation, home rule, and the universalisation of state sovereignty are often seen as central tenets of decolonisation, with the nation-state symbolising the antithesis of empire.21 In spite of this, there exists a long tradition of anticolonial thinkers and radicals who rejected the association of decolonisation with the state. Pan-Africanists such as Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, for example, did not envisage the end of empire as a process of state formation but instead argued for ‘non-national orientations to decolonization’.22 Other anticolonial theorists, including C. L. R. James, Rosa Luxemburg, and Frantz Fanon, explicitly warned against the danger of equating decolonisation with flag independence

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and state-building.23 James, who was a long-time friend and supporter of Kwame Nkrumah, had initially believed that Ghana would lead the way to African freedom. By establishing true democratic socialism from below, James argued, Nkrumah would avoid the mistakes of Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. Yet as the years wore on, James grew increasingly disillusioned. Most African leaders, he sarcastically remarked, were Western-educated bourgeois intellectuals and products of the colonial state. This meant that ‘the newly independent African state was little more than the old imperialist state only now administered and controlled by black nationalists’.24 History lends weight to many of these arguments: while most colonial administrations were dismantled in the post-war era, patterns and practices of colonial extraction, expropriation, and superexploitation not only continued but also frequently expanded. In many cases, this has been directly facilitated by the postcolonial state and the national bourgeoisie who, in Fanon’s phrase, ‘discovers its historical mission as an intermediary’.25 Ultimately, the postcolonial era of nation-states has been not so much the negation of colonialism as its continuation by other means; ‘a reworking of, rather than an end to, imperial relations’.26 While this does not mean that the postcolonial state is exactly the same as the European imperial state, it does suggest that ‘the achievement of a national state was not the end point of liberation, and its inherited institutions not the proper vehicle’.27 In the end, the problem with these calls for a ‘left art of government’, whether in the metropole or (post)colony, is that they remain trapped within what Robinson calls the political paradigm and its terms of order. The result is a crude form of realism that accepts the state as the horizon of possibility and writes off more ambitious and visionary projects as naïve and dangerous forms of utopianism. This not only overlooks that there is nothing inevitable or inherently progressive about the state form but it also forgets that appeals to ‘realism’ and ‘what is practical’ often are premised on a statist archive which renders invisible the long history of groups and communities that have lived without the logic of capital and hierarchical rule. After all, and as Pierre Clastres puts it: ‘It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is a history of their struggle against the state.’28

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In the next section, I turn to Robinson’s notion of the antipolitical to reclaim antistatism from the realm of idealism and abstract utopia. I argue that Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, black radicalism, and the antipolitical brings into view a subterranean archive of freedom struggles. I theorise this as a form of ‘concrete utopia’ that refuses to recuperate, reform, and perfect the state, and which instead looks towards other ways of living in and relating to the world. I first provide an overview of Robinson’s concept of antipolitics, before turning to discuss this as an alternative tradition of anarchism. Rather than ‘a left art of governing’, what follows from this is a complete break with politics understood as governance: what Derek Walcott, through his poetry, invites us to think of as ‘no nation but imagination’.29

Antipolitics and Utopian Worldmaking Since Thomas More’s classic novel from 1551, utopia has been associated with a fantasy world: with a lost Atlantis or Xanadu, and a distant future with oceans full of pink lemonade.30 To be utopian, it is frequently maintained, is to be naïve, unrealistic, and utterly impractical. Robinson’s collected works can be read as a rejection of this attempt to trivialise and reduce utopian thinking to mere fantasy. Throughout his five books and many other pieces of writing, he offers an archive of what queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, following Ernst Bloch, calls ‘concrete utopia’.31 Bloch – a Marxist philosopher on the fringes of the Frankfurt school – was interested in the myriad ways in which hope and the desire for liberation are manifest in everyday life. Utopianism for him was not an abstract pipedream but a concrete constellation of tendencies that already exist in the world. As Muñoz explains, concrete utopias are ‘relational to historically situated struggles, a collectivity that is actualized or potential … they are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even of the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many’.32 In the first volume of his collected writings, appropriately titled The Future in the Present, C. L. R. James develops a similar idea: while utopia is about the future, it is already enacted in the present. The socialist future, James suggests, can be glimpsed in the present – particularly in the solidarities and creative practices of industrial workers. For James, these are the ‘outposts of the new society’.33 His musings on utopia are helpful insofar as they help us ‘imagine the future without abandoning the present’.34

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Nonetheless, and as Muñoz points out, James remains caught within a Marxist workerist paradigm: tellingly, it is the shopfloor that offers a glimpse of utopia. Yet, to limit ‘the future in the present’ to the factory is to overlook that concrete utopias are also enacted elsewhere, including in the streets and in the home, on the run and on the stage. The concept of antipolitics pushes James’s insights further by retrieving the magical, mystical, spiritual, and poetic dimensions of concrete utopianism. As we saw in Chapter 1, Robinson challenges Marxism’s parasitism on bourgeois historiography and scientific discourse: failing to break free from these logics, Marxism was a continuation of – rather than break with – bourgeois society and its terms of order. For Robinson, capitalism had never been a revolutionary negation of feudalism, and socialism had, in fact, existed before the transition to capitalism: indeed, ‘socialist thought did not begin with or depend on the existence of capitalism’.35 Marx and Engels – who sought to construct a science of socialism – argued that capitalism and bourgeois society by necessity had to exist prior to the development of socialism. As Robinson explains, Marxism thus ‘crafted a historical pedestal for itself by transmuting all previous and alternative socialisms into poorly detailed blueprints or dead-end proto-forms of itself’.36 In particular, the science of socialism required that older and alternative genres of socialism be erased and trivialised and, consequently, that socialism itself be purged of its utopian, mystical, and magical impulse. Robinson’s scholarly oeuvre can be read as an attempt to recover these lost utopian fragments: Refusing to be held hostage by the capitalist state and its bourgeois terms of order, he breathes life into histories where the racial and colonial poor rebelled and rendered themselves ungovernable. In so doing, he points towards a utopian genre of revolutionary worldmaking: antipolitics. The antipolitical is a term that Robinson introduces in The Terms of Order to describe modes of being that exist outside of Western epistemological frameworks: ‘The political’, he writes, ‘is an historical, one temporarily convenient, illusion’37 which became hegemonic with the rise of the capitalist state and its emphasis on governance, mastery, sovereignty, and hierarchy. Yet, ‘as a myth, as the dominating myth of our consciousness of being together, it is contingent and therefore replaceable’.38 Antipolitics is the name that Robinson gives to this possibility of organising human society otherwise, ‘without the authority of rulers or the presence of political leaders’.39

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In Black Marxism, he develops this argument through a focus on the black radical tradition. Often misinterpreted as Marxists that are black (such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, and Walter Rodney), the black radical tradition is for Robinson an ‘accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle’.40 For more than 400 years, captive Africans continued to rebel, escape from the plantations, and build maroon communities in Brazil, Jamaica, Mexico, Venezuela, the French Guianas, Dutch Suriname, throughout North America, and most famously, in Haiti. ‘At every opportunity … the logic of marronage was manifest.’41 Black intellectuals such as James, Du Bois, and Wright would eventually come to discover this ‘older tradition’ of freedom struggle, finding it ‘first in their history, and finally all around them’.42 At stake here is not merely the question of who is, or who can be, a revolutionary subject. While Robinson’s retrieval of the history of black radicalism seeks to displace the privileged role that Marx had ascribed to the European industrial proletariat, his overall project is more ambitious. At base, he challenges the Enlightenment conception of linear history and the negative dialectics that are at the heart of the Marxist understanding of revolutionary change. As he explains, Marxism is a theory premised on ‘the negation of extremes: a paradigm based on the presumption that historical movement is the consequence of processes which mature by producing contradictory fruits’.43 In this framework, The ultimate measure of social resistance is presumed to be the character and the historical development of the offending structure itself. The logic of resistance suggests that dictatorships produce liberalism; colonialism generated national liberation; imperialism would inevitably be confronted with anti-imperialism; capitalism could only be defeated by an aroused proletariat.44

It is this assumption – namely, that capitalism necessarily contains the seeds of its own destruction – that the concept of antipolitics seeks to move beyond. It is ‘difficult for Black people’, writes Robinson, to attribute the horrors of colonialism and enslavement to ‘the consequences of natural processes, or to delude ourselves that we have no special historical part in the ending of these horrors’.45 What Marxist theory cannot see, because of ‘its Victorian positivistic, scientistic, messianic, and Eurocentric baggage’,46 is that black radicalism emerged

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from cosmologies, traditions, modes of thought, dreamworlds, and ways of being that exist outside of Western epistemology and its terms of order: ‘This was a revolutionary consciousness which proceeded from the whole historical experience of black people and not merely from the social formations of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism.’47 The point here is not that the violence of racial capitalism did not serve as the condition for the emergence of black radicalism – it did, but it was ‘not the foundation for its nature or character’.48 As Robinson elaborates: The social cauldron of black radicalism is western society. Western society, however, has been its location and its objective condition but not—except in a most perverse fashion—its specific inspiration. Black radicalism is a negation of western civilization, but not in the direct sense of a dialectical negation.49

Consider, by way of example, C. L. R. James’s famous analysis of the Haitian revolution in The Black Jacobins. Written as an application of ‘the theories of revolution developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky’50 to African revolutionary struggles, the book theorises the Haitian revolution as a proletarian revolt. Where Marx and Engels had confined the modern proletariat to the core of industrial capitalist states, James broadens it: the enslaved labourers of Saint Domingue, he argues, were ‘closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time’.51 Because of this they were also ‘subject to the same historical laws as the advanced workers of revolutionary Paris’.52 It is this idea – namely, that there was a closed dialectic – that Robinson takes issue with. What James could not fathom, he argues, was that ‘bourgeois culture and thought and ideology were irrelevant to the development of revolutionary consciousness among Black and other Third World peoples. It broke with the evolutionist chain in, the closed dialectic of, historical materialism’.53 James may of course have been right that Saint Domingue’s enslaved Africans were closer to a modern proletariat than any other workforce at the time – but, crucially, they were more than just proletarians, having brought their ‘rich spiritual, cultural and political lives with them as they were forced to cross the Atlantic’.54 African spirituality was central to inspiring and catalysing the revolution – something which James does recognise (‘Voodoo’, he notes, ‘was the medium of the conspiracy’55) but quickly writes off as superstition. In contrast, Robinson encourages

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us to consider how this rich and complex landscape of alternative – antipolitical – cosmologies, in fact, had real revolutionary agency and, consequently, how the enslaved sought liberation on their own terms. It was these dreamworlds, cosmic belief-systems, spirits, and otherworldly poetics that provided the revolutionary impetus – not the scientific laws of negative dialectics. At times, Marx seems to have been aware of these holes and fissures in the dialectic; that is, of the existence of something beyond. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a short essay reflecting on the failure of the 1848 revolution in France, he argues that ‘The social revolution … cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.’56 Meaningful revolutionary change cannot take place within the confines of existing concepts and consciousness; this is why the revolution ‘must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content’.57 Still, just four years earlier Marx and Engels had attacked utopian socialists for their ‘fantastic pictures of society’ which fail to consider how ‘the economic situation … does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat’.58 Rejecting these ‘castles in the air’, The Communist Manifesto self-consciously outlines a ‘science of socialism’.59 Engels would later elaborate on this in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, arguing that for ‘utopian’ socialists such as Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier ‘socialism is … a mere accident’. Consequently, ‘[t]o make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis’.60 In contrast to Marx and Engels’s scientific approach, the concept of antipolitics retrieves the magical, mystical, spiritual, fantastical, and poetic dimensions of revolutionary struggles. As Robinson explains, ‘The Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture.’61 Black radicalism emerged from a ‘dialectical matrix’ of ‘capitalist slavery and imperialism’62 but this matrix was never its source; the ‘objective’ laws of capitalism may have been ‘world historical’, but they ‘were not the world’.63 Consciousness understood in this way is not reducible to material practice and conditions, no matter how crushing the force of capital and state power may be: ‘We are not the subjects or subject formations of the capitalist world-system. It is merely one condition of

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our being.’64 The result is a type of Marxism – but one in which there are no guarantees, no preordained liberation, and no universal laws of history.65 As Robinson explains, this is ‘a kind of resistance that does not promise triumph or victory at the end, only liberation. No nice package at the end, only that you would be free…. Only the promise of liberation, only the promise of liberation!’66 To summarise, where Marxism’s science of socialism have often discarded utopian thinking Robinson retrieves the dreamworlds of antipolitics as an existing practice and a ‘collective intelligence gathered from struggle’.67 In a Blochian fashion, the antipolitical here emerges as a distinctively concrete utopia. In the next section, I build on this to argue that the concept of antipolitics cracks open a subterranean archive of anarchism. Exceeding James’s insistence that ‘every cook can govern’, this is a utopian worldmaking project that uproots the very association of politics with governance. Rather than a ‘globalised’ or ‘decolonised’ anarchism, the antipolitical throws open the question of who we are and what we might become if we dare to imagine otherwise.

Anarchist Archives Otherwise In the last two decades, there have been a variety of attempts to globalise and decolonise the study of anarchism. Responding to critiques that anarchism is white and Eurocentric – perhaps even a ‘code for Occidental and Western European forms of social organization’68 – scholars have shown how anarchist ideas fuelled anticolonial movements in the global South. The inauguration of this ‘postcolonial turn’ is typically associated with the publication of Benedict Anderson’s Under Three Flags in 2005, which charts how anarchist ideas inspired militant anticolonial movements in Asia and Latin America. Since then, scholars have examined a variety of anarchist movements in Cuba, Argentina, Algeria, China, and India, among other places.69 Overall, and as this literature demonstrates, ‘“Western” anarchism may never actually have been so purely Western after all.’70 While acknowledging the importance of these interventions, below I argue that the concept of antipolitics points towards a different tradition of anarchist thought and praxis. Where scholars committed to ‘globalising’ and ‘decolonising’ anarchism often have remained committed to Enlightenment ideas of rationality, modernity, and science, the antipolitical emerges from an awareness that ‘human beings are magical’,

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as Sylvia Wynter once put it. The goal here is not to recover (or even to decolonise) the Enlightenment but rather to burst open the question of freedom. ‘What if life was rhythm’, asks Joshua Myers, ‘rather than the stasis of order? What if being was improvisation, rather than simply the repetition of order?’71 If we open the door to this magical universe, what could we become? Like many other black radicals, Robinson was suspicious of anarchism. ‘Western anarchism’, he writes in The Terms of Order, is ‘a form of anarchism generated from bourgeois political society’.72 It is not a true opposition to racial capitalism and state violence, because it ‘reacted by rearranging the ideas of … bourgeois society: reason, scientism, interests, the self, the group as an economic unity, etc., not by subverting them’.73 Overall, Western anarchism offers ‘an alternative of the social order’ but ‘not to it’.74 In spite of this, it is undeniable that Robinson’s vision of antipolitics harbours an anarchist sensibility.75 Already as a graduate student at Stanford, he argued that the modern nation-state is ‘a regression or step backward from the stateless societies of some earlier African history’.76 ‘Perhaps what is needed’, he suggested, ‘are new political organisations without single or even multiple leaders, but with leaders no leaders at all’.77 Across his body of work, he takes up this challenge. Seeking out concrete histories of lived anarchism, he asks: what happens when those who are meant to be ruled refuse, when they revolt and render themselves ungovernable? While he was critical of the European anarchist canon, he thus maintained that an alternative antistatist tradition – a ‘whole other way of being’ – could be found among the peoples ‘blinded from view’ by Western bourgeois epistemology. Crucially, if the antipolitical for Robinson is a worldmaking project that refuses to reduce politics to the question of how to be governed, then it is also more than simply a ‘globalised’ or ‘decolonised’ form of anarchism. Revisionist historians seeking to stretch anarchism beyond the parameters of Europe and North America have often continued to associate anarchism with anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary trade unionism and, ultimately, with Enlightenment ideas of science, modernity, and rationality. Anarchism is here seen as a Western export which arrived in the global South together with European exiles and migrant workers. In short, this is a style of anarchism which continues to locate ‘its particular organisational lineages and intellectual genealogies … specifically in the context of the European Enlightenment’.78

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Ode to Utopia

This is also true for those scholars who self-consciously seek to move away from Eurocentrism and the focus on industrial labour radicalism. Take, for example, David Graeber’s recent work on pirate societies, which sets out to ‘decolonize the Enlightenment’.79 In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber argues that the roots of Enlightenment philosophy, in fact, lie outside of Europe, including in the anarchistic pirate societies established on what is today Madagascar. Anarchism in the colonial periphery is not so much a product of the Enlightenment, Graeber suggests, as it is its intellectual precursor. This means that, although Enlightenment thought has been ‘used to justify extraordinary cruelty, exploitation, and destruction’,80 it still contains a core ideal of human liberation which can be meaningfully retrieved: indeed, ‘The toothless or peg-legged buccaneer hoisting a flag of defiance against the world … is, perhaps, just as much a figure of the Enlightenment as Voltaire or Adam Smith.’81 Tellingly, the existence of non-Western anarchisms in Graeber’s analysis become a vehicle through which the Enlightenment is once more re-centred and restored as a liberatory project. That there are other kinds of reasoning and different ways of being – that are otherwise to European capitalist modernity – is thus lost. In contrast to these types of anarchism, the antipolitical names a subterranean ode to disorder and utopia that exists beyond bourgeois modernity and its ideas of science, rationality, and linear progress. Rather than a decolonised or alternative modernity, this is a radical imagination whose source exceeds the profane and material, and which finds inspiration in dreams and fantasy, the magical and the divine. This is an anarchism otherwise.82 Otherwise, as in a radical possibility of relationality, communality, and care; and otherwise, as in the promise of a different genre of life, beyond property and hierarchy. What is at stake here is not just the reorganisation of bourgeois society, but a whole other way of life. As Myers puts it, ‘Can we be more than what this order would have us be?’83 Are there other ways – otherwise – of ‘realizing ourselves’?84 In recent years, an eclectic mix of indigenous, queer, and black scholars have explored new and alternative modes of anarchist thought. Saidiya Hartman has offered the concept of ‘waywardness’ to describe the rebellious life of black women in Philadelphia and New York at the turn of the century.85 In queer theory, Jack Halberstam has theorised ‘wildness as a space/name/critical term for

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Moving towards Home

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what lies beyond current logics of rule’.86 In critical indigenous studies, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, J. Ke¯haulani Kehaulani Kauanui, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Macarena Gómez-Barris have similarly pushed against notions of indigenous statehood, calling instead for an ­ ‘anarcho-indigenism’ based on the submerged perspectives and horizontal lifeworlds of indigenous peoples of the Americas.87 These interventions constitute more than just an antiquarian task of recovering authentic, idealised, or pre-colonial pasts: indeed, this is a practice of thinking with the living traditions and ‘collective intelligence gathered from struggle’ that have continued to persist in the margins. As I explore in the next four chapters, ordinary people and communities are already experimenting, creating, and building alternative worlds here and now, in the present. In refusing to see the state, capital, and their terms of order as the horizon of the possible – insisting that there is something more, otherwise, beyond the current order of politics – they resonate with Robinson’s ‘ode to disorder’. Like Sun Ra, they invite us to travel the spaceways.

Moving towards Home I and my musicians are musical astronauts. We sail the galaxies through the medium of sound, our audience is with us wherever we go, whether they want to be or not. The audience might want to be earthbound, but we being space bound we bind them to us and thus they cannot resist because the space way is the better way to travel. It keeps going out, and out, and further out than that.88

Sun Ra often claimed that his proper home was the planet of Saturn. While he has been mocked for this, his reasoning might have been more profound than critics have given him credit for. As Graham Lock argues in Blutopia, in the spirituals and the blues – traditions that Ra continued to draw inspiration from – ‘home’ has typically been used to refer to the heaven to come, a return to Africa, and freedom in the North.89 In short, home is the place of utopia. By travelling the spaceways, Ra was perhaps first and foremost searching for other ways of being: in June Jordan’s poetic formulation, he was ‘moving towards home’.90 In this chapter, I have argued that the concept of antipolitics opens a portal to utopia: what Jordan and Ra both describe as ‘home’. Poetic and otherworldly imaginations such as these may have been violently

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dismissed, domesticated, and driven underground by capital and the state, but dreams of utopia are still dreamt in the margins. As Muñoz puts it, these are dreams that harbour ‘alternative universes that eschew the dominance of the here and now for the force and potentiality of a conjured world of fantasy and magic that is not simply a mode of fantastical escapism but, instead, a blueprint for alternative modes of being in the world’.91 In Marx’s re-mixed language, we can think of this as poetry from the future in the present. * In the next four chapters, I study some of the antipolitical ‘outposts of the new society’92 that exist within the racial capitalist present. Focusing on four distinct yet deeply interconnected terrains of struggle – against policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control – I examine the multiple ways in which state violence works to fabricate, maintain, and renew violent regimes of extraction and accumulation across the world. From Ogoni to Rio de Janeiro, Delhi to the shores of the Mediterranean, there exists a motley crew of state evaders – anarchists and abolitionists, castaways and runaways, and ordinary people and communities – who refuse to reduce the struggle for freedom to a question of state capture or reform. Rejecting carcerality, deportations, settler occupation, cisheteropatriarchy, and the ongoing destruction of the planet, these utopian revolts open up new terrains for antipolitical imagination and action in the present, reminding us of the enduring possibility of life outside – and despite – the violence of capital and the state. We now turn to these anarchist archives otherwise: get ready to travel the spaceways.

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War on Dirt

The war never ended and somehow begins again. – Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem There’s nothing wrong with us (precisely insofar as there is something wrong, something off, something ungovernably, fugitively living in us that is constantly taken for the pathogen it instantiates). – Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

The Coming of Spring On 14 March 2018, Marielle Franco was assassinated by two former police officers in Rio de Janeiro. A black, queer, and socialist city councillor, Franco was on her way home when a car pulled up and opened fire. She died right away, as did her driver, Anderson Gomes. Four shots: three in the head, one in the neck. She was only thirty-eight. Death at the hands of police is far from uncommon in Brazil. In 2019, police killed 1,814 people in Rio alone; a rate that is six times higher than in the United States.1 The majority of victims are poor and black youth from the favelas. A Senate committee report from 2018 puts it in stark terms: ‘the Brazilian state, directly or indirectly, perpetrates the genocide of the young black population’.2 Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, has said he hopes criminals ‘will die in the streets like cockroaches’.3 Marielle was no stranger to this violence. Having grown up in Maré, a favela at the outskirts of Rio, she openly challenged the police and its pacification programs. These operations – aimed at ‘reclaiming’ the city from drug gangs and making it more ‘appealing’ to f­oreign ­investors – have in the last few decades transformed the favelas into a war zone. In the lead-up to the World Cup in 2014, Maré was occupied by the police and military for fourteen months. For the 1.5 million people who live in these areas, late-night raids, extrajudicial killings, and mass arrests have become part of daily life; most people have lost 59

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a family member or friend. As Marielle tweeted the day before her murder: ‘How many more must die for this war to end?’ Taking the murder of Marielle as a starting point, in this chapter I extend the theoretical analysis laid out in the last two chapters. I make two sets of arguments. First, I theorise policing as a street-level form of governance which is central to racial capitalism. Offering a transnational history of police power, I show that policing is a key mechanism through which the state orders bourgeois society. By criminalising, disqualifying, and sorting ‘people for capitalist care or capitalist destruction’,4 policing creates and manages the conditions that capital needs to profit and thrive. Second, and relatedly, I join a growing black anarchist literature in arguing that prison and police abolition must be extended to target the state as a whole.5 Abolition seen antipolitically is an ‘art of not being governed’ that demands an end, not just to carcerality, but to governance in its entirety. I develop these arguments by focusing on Brazil, where police brutality is often regarded as an ‘afterlife’ of the country’s ‘dirty wars’ and military dictatorship. While it is undeniable that this past continues to cast a dark shadow over the present, my analysis demonstrates that policing – in Brazil and elsewhere – must be seen as an ongoing war on those deemed wayward, delinquent, and undeserving: what I describe as a ‘war on dirt’. The concept of dirt is here used as a metaphor for that which must be simultaneously produced, sanitised, ordered, and removed. In Mary Douglas’s famous definition, ‘dirt is matter out of place’.6 Dirt, Douglas argues in her 1966 classic Purity and Danger, is a verb and not a noun, because nothing is inherently dirty: rather, dirt constitutes a ‘residual category [of things] rejected from our normal scheme of classifications’. This means that ‘where there is dirt there is a system’; a system which orders as it rejects, sanitises as it represses.7 In what follows, I argue that policing is one such dirt-producing system. By casting certain people and places as always-already dirty, delinquent, and diseased – as dysselected, in Sylvia Wynter’s terminology8 – policing constitutes one of the main vectors through which the state (re)produces disposability and extractability. Policing thus understood is an accumulation strategy that operates as a public health and sanitary concern. Today’s violent policing of the favela is not so much an afterlife of the ‘dirty wars’ as it is part of an ongoing racial capitalist war on dirt. The chapter proceeds in four steps. It begins by considering police violence in contemporary Brazil, before offering a re-examination of

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Figure 3.1  Marielle presente! Street art in Paris, 2022. Photo by Ida Danewid

the role of policing in the making of global racial capitalism. The next section extends this analysis through a discussion of the ways in which policing works to produce racialised urban geographies in today’s global cities. Focusing on Rio de Janeiro, I show that police terror is at the heart of contemporary state-sponsored urban renewal projects. In the final section, I read the Afro-Brazilian concept of quilombismo as an antipolitical alternative to liberal calls for defunding the police. As the grassroots collective Reaja ou Será Mortx! (React or Be Killed!) explain, ‘to think about the possibilities of a world without police first we need to flee the naive notion that injustice is only about the police, in and of themselves’.9 In radicalising and extending the abolitionist project to encompass the state in its entirety, quilombismo points towards an antipolitical worldmaking project which continues to resonate throughout Rio’s favelas. Four days after her murder, Marielle’s friends wrote that in killing her the police had ‘buried a seed’.10 As another casualty in the long racial capitalist war on dirt – Chilean poet Pablo Neruda – reminds us: ‘You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming’.

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Dirty Wars In Latin America, police violence is often regarded as a legacy of the military dictatorships and ‘dirty wars’ that gripped the continent during the second half of the twentieth century.11 During this era, arbitrary arrests, imprisonment without trials, kidnapping, rape, and torture were common. Brazil is no exception to this. In 1964, the Brazilian military overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of João Goulart. Over the next twenty-one years, the police were placed under the direct control of the military. During this period, hundreds of people deemed a threat to the regime were disappeared or killed. Death squads like Scuderie Detective Le Cocq, consisting of off-duty police officers, acted as vanguards of statesponsored repression. Operating without impunity, they assassinated an estimated 900 people in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo between 1963 and 1975. After the return to democracy in the 1980s, many expected that the police would be reformed. Yet, while ‘control over the police shifted to civilian provincial governors … divestiture did not accomplish much in the way of restoring professionalism to a force heavily tainted from involvement in death squads and brutal treatment of the poor’.12 Not only was the military police maintained, but many of the officers responsible for inflicting atrocities stayed in power and continue to ‘occupy leadership roles, fostering a climate wherein torture and violence are accepted, and even encouraged, by higher-ups’.13 Today, more than four decades after the fall of the dictatorship, the Brazilian police kill an average of five people per day.14 While officials claim that these deaths involve police acting in self-dense, many victims are shot multiple times, some at the back of the head. Most of this terror is allegedly carried out by BOPE, the elite arm of the military police, which kills one person for every twenty-three arrested. With roots in the death squads that emerged under the dictatorship, BOPE is made up of former or off-duty police, prison guards, and security staff.15 Following the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president in 2018, the ties between police and military grew stronger yet again. Bolsonaro, who himself is a former military officer, included more military personnel in government than during the dictatorship era; he also gave police greater immunity and granted clemency to soldiers and officers incarcerated for crimes on duty.

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It is of course undeniable that Brazilian policing continues to be influenced by these historical legacies; and yet, contemporary police violence is not reducible to them. As Bordin and Moraes point out, the dictatorship did not invent torture and extrajudicial executions or the idea that we are fighting a war against internal enemies…. The military and the civilian dictatorship of 1964 simply reorganized the police apparatus, intensified its traditional violence, authorized and trained it, and expanded the spectrum of its scope.16

In spite of this, arguments that frame police violence as a consequence of the incomplete transition to democracy is common, not just in Brazil, but throughout the wider literature on policing in postconflict societies. This is anchored in the idea that liberal democratic institutions should lead to a decrease in state violence and, hence, that police violence is ‘a deviation, or exception, from how things actually “should be”’.17 Such assumptions also underwrite much of the literature on policing in the global North. Consider, for example, the scholarship on ‘police militarisation’, which portrays domestic police brutality in countries such as the United States as the result of military technologies, weaponry, and strategies returning home from overseas battlefields, where they subsequently transform domestic police officers into ‘warrior cops’.18 While this literature has been right to point to the ways in which policing is linked to global circuits of war and militarism, it is rooted in the assumption that foreign wars (just like Latin America’s dirty wars) have soiled ‘democratic’ policing. This is based on a sanitised ‘narrative about the nostalgic image of the “bobby on the beat” or “Officer Friendly” being replaced by camouflage wearing brutes’.19 As critics have shown, the idea that the US police has undergone a process of militarisation rests on the myth of a ‘golden age’ in which the divisions between police and military, war and peace, and domestic and international were clearly distinguishable.20 This not only obscures that the distinction between policing and war was always blurred in the colonial context.21 It also obfuscates that police has never been civilian or purely local: as Tamara Nopper and Mariame Kaba put it, for minorities ‘the “war on terror” hasn’t come home. It’s always been here’.22 Ultimately, the idea that police and military belong to distinct geographies (domestic vs. international) and have their own separate logics (establishing order vs. defeating the enemy) is a myth.

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An emerging abolitionist literature has in the last decade begun to problematise many of these assumptions.23 By tracing the roots of the modern police to the plantation economies and slave patrols, abolitionist scholars have shown how police emerged as a part of a colonial order built on the enslavement of Africans and dispossession of indigenous people. To date, this scholarship has predominantly focused on North America, in general, and the United States, in particular. The result has sometimes been a form of exceptionalism, in which the United States is seen as an outlier or ‘bad apple’. This belies that police violence in the United States is not uniquely different from other states: in Kenya, police terror, extrajudicial killings, and arbitrary arrests are daily occurrences; in India, five people (predominantly poor, Muslim, and/or Dalit) die in police custody every day; in France, the police has a long history of targeting people of Muslim and/or Arab descent.24 As such, what is left unexamined when the United States is exceptionalised is the much wider global history of state-sponsored carcerality and the ways in which these logics continue to operate in the present, including in Brazil. To address this lacuna, in what follows I focus on the role of police power in the making of racial capitalism. I put forth two arguments: first, that an analysis of policing necessitates a global perspective that tracks the operations of capital across interconnected geographies of race and empire; and second, that policing is one of the key mechanisms through which the state classifies and regulates those it deems wayward, dangerous, and delinquent. As we shall see, police power is an administrative technology of difference, repression, and abandonment without which capital cannot function. Today’s violent policing of the favela is not so much an afterlife of the ‘dirty wars’, as it is part of an ongoing racial capitalist war on dirt.

Administering the Street: Policing as Racial Hygiene In Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms, Adam Smith defines the ‘objects of police’ as ‘the cheapness of commodities, public security and cleanliness’.25 Published in 1763, the text offers a discussion of police which has little to do with crime control: for Smith, police is concerned with order, governance, and ‘promoting the opulence of a state’.26 This is an expansive understanding of policing which was common throughout the eighteenth century.

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As Sal Nicolazzo notes, for many of the classical political economists ‘“police” did not indicate a uniformed, professional lawenforcement agency, but rather the capacious domain of governance dedicated to keeping the peace, preventing disorder, and anticipating future threats to property or security’.27 Derived from the Greek polis or politeia, police was a broad term used to describe ‘policy’ or ‘the science of governing’. While police eventually would come to be associated with uniformed officers tasked with preventing crime and enforcing the law, its underlying purpose – governance – would remain unchanged. As I discuss in the next few pages, the task of ordering through clean(s)ing and s­ anitising – what Adam Smith discussed as ‘the proper method of carrying dirt from the street’28 – has remained central to the police project. Conventional accounts of policing typically begin more than half a century after Smith’s lectures: namely, with the creation of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. Founded by Sir Robert Peel, the Met is commonly regarded as the world’s first professional police department, established to respond to new levels and forms of crime thrown up by the Industrial Revolution and the rapid urbanisation of the early nineteenth century. It is less often observed that this unfolded against the backdrop of empire-building, land enclosures, workers’ struggles, and anticolonial revolts.29 Consider, for example, the ‘domestic’ predecessor to the Met: namely, the Thames River Police. Established in 1797, this early police institution was tasked with protecting the cargo that was brought in from the overseas colonies. Planters and merchants were worried that the cargo – coffee, tea, sugar, and other goods – could be stolen by London’s dock workers. In response, the West India Planters Committees and the West India Merchants hired Patrick Colquhoun, a merchant and magistrate who himself owned shares in Jamaican sugar plantations. Colquhoun’s solution was to establish a new security force: the Thames River Police. Its immediate task was to protect the imperial cargo while simultaneously disciplining the workers who laboured on the banks of the Thames. As E. P. Thompson explains, Colquhoun saw London as overflowing with ‘criminals’: ‘there were in London 50,000 harlots, more than 5,000 publicans, and 10,000 thieves … the total “criminal” population of London was 115,000 out of a total population of less than one million’.30 This concern over crime was, in part, heightened by racial and colonial anxieties.31 In 1798, the Irish Rebellion had attempted to

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eliminate British rule in Ireland; seven years earlier, the revolution had begun in Haiti; and in 1789, the French Revolution overthrew the ancien régime. Fears of colonial contamination – of revolutions and uprisings finding their way back home to the metropole – fuelled the unease which contributed to the creation of the River Police. As Peter Linebaugh notes, this new institution ‘simultaneously criminalized the urban commons and efficiently linked plantation and factory … into a temporary Atlantic system’.32 Two years after the River Police began to patrol the Thames, the British Parliament passed a bill which transformed it from a private to a public institution. Now officially termed the Marine Police Office, it was the first paid, centralised, and armed police force in the British Empire. In 1839, it became part of the London Metropolitan Police, of which it remains an active part today. The success of the Marine Police was one of the main sources of inspiration for the Met, which was created in 1829. Another important source was the policing models developed in the colonies. Colonial policing was used across the world, from ‘the mining industries in French Northern Africa and British West Africa, through Southeast Asia’s rubber plantations, to the sugar estates of Jamaica, the oilfields of southern Trinidad and Katanga’s copperbelt’.33 While they were often established in response to anticolonial resistance, colonial police forces were also ‘directly linked to the commercial interests of an expanding capitalism in search of new markets and resources’.34 The British East India Company, the British South Africa Company, the Royal Nigeria Company, and the Imperial British East Africa Company all had their own policing systems which were used to discipline and manage the colonised, enslaved, and indentured workers on whose backs these global enterprises were built. George Orwell, the English novelist who would become famous for his dystopian reflections on mass surveillance and repressive policing, started his career in this colonial and racial capitalist industry: that is, as an officer in the Imperial Police Force in Burma. The creation of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829, therefore, needs to be considered against this background. Sir Robert Peel, the main architect behind the Met, had before he became Home Secretary in 1822 managed the British colonial occupation of Ireland. In Ireland, he came to the conclusion that a new, professional police force was necessary to maintain continued English rule in the context of heightened anticolonial resistance.35 Inspired by the policing

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models developed across the British Empire, Peel began to experiment with new forms of discipline and control, and eventually founded the Royal Irish Constabulary. As Home Secretary, he would later bring many of these methods and techniques back ‘home’ to London, where he founded the Met – unofficially termed ‘Bobbies’ after Sir Bob himself.36 In the 1830s, this ‘London model’ (which, of course, was just as much an Irish and Indian model) was exported to northern cities in the United States, where it fused with other methods of control that had been developed through distinct yet interconnected histories of the slave patrol, the policing of the colonial frontier, and later, the colonial occupation of the Philippines.37 As this history makes clear, domestic and colonial policing were never separate models – developed in isolation from one another – but were from the beginning interconnected articulations of the same mode of capitalist governance. The history of policing in Latin America follows broadly similar contours.38 In Brazil, the Royal Police Guard (Guarda Real de Polícia) was formed in Rio de Janeiro in May 1808. Two years earlier, Napoleon had invaded Portugal, forcing the Portuguese Court to relocate from Lisbon to its crown colony, Brazil. At the time, half of Rio’s population was enslaved. Fears of revolt were widespread among the colonial elite: only a few years earlier, the Haitian Revolution had shaken the world. The new Royal Police Guard was therefore created to preserve the status quo: in practice, this meant containing uprisings, capturing fugitives, and destroying quilombos (i.e., free maroon communities). Led by Miguel Nunes Vidigal, the Guard predominantly targeted enslaved persons, free blacks, and people of mixed race. As Thomas Holloway observes, Vidigal became the terror of the vagrants and idlers, who might meet him coming around a corner at night … Vidigal and his soldiers … proceeded to beat any participant, miscreant, or vagrant they could capture. These brutal attacks became known in the folklore of the city as ‘shrimp dinners’ (ceias de camarão), recalling the flaying necessary to get at the pink flesh of those crustaceans.39

As revolts intensified in the 1830s, the Brazilian police extended its reach. Capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art, increasingly came to be seen as a threat; enslaved persons could be arrested ‘for whistling capoeira tunes, wearing their symbolic red caps and ribbons or

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carrying the musical instruments utilized in their meetings’.40 In the next few years, the role of the police changed very little, even after 1888 when Brazil became the last Latin American country to legally abolish slavery. Instead, the introduction of the Penal Code in 1890 extended police power over the racial poor by criminalising vagrancy, prostitution, curfew violations, gambling, begging, and capoeira, which now officially became recognised as a crime. As Hinton explains, ‘long after slavery was abolished, both civilian and military governments continued to use the police as a means of keeping the poor from interrupting the lives of the elite, with military officers routinely appointed to the job of police chief for this purpose’.41 The idea that Brazilian policing was ‘corrupted’ by the later military dictatorship is here turned on its head and exposed as a myth. As this history makes clear, the police has never been a purely ‘public’ and ‘civilian’ institution, ‘guided … by the interests of the governed’, but has always operated in the service of ‘the commercial interests of expanding capitalism and the maintenance of … hegemony’.42 While repressive measures – such as safeguarding private property, curbing social unrest, and disciplining the poor – have been central to this mission, the police project has never been limited to maintaining order. As Marxist theorists writing under the label of pacification theory have shown, police power is in fact both repressive and productive. Advancing such an argument, Mark Neocleous shows that policing was central to the construction of a modern workforce of wagelabour in Britain: as he puts it, police power operates to ‘fabricate an order of wage labour and administer the class of poverty’.43 The rise of capitalism required the criminalisation all non-waged means of subsistence, including fishing without license, picking fruit and vegetables, begging, pilfering wood, and grazing cattle on side roads – as well as customary taking from the cargo left lying on the docs of the Thames, as Colquhoun had understood. Those who refused to take up work were classified as paupers, vagrants, vagabonds, itinerants, and criminals: that is, as undeserving poor who ‘preferred an idle life of vagrancy and theft to one of useful toil’.44 The new Poor Laws – which were established just five years after the creation of the London Metropolitan Police, in 1834 – formally codified this distinction between poverty and pauperism by drawing a sharp line between the deserving and undeserving poor. Under these laws, only those poor who were unable (but not unwilling) to work could claim assistance.

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Those who allegedly sought to avoid poverty without working were removed from social life and imprisoned in workhouses. As Foucault recounts in Madness and Civilization, this ‘great confinement’ began already in the seventeenth century and stretched across Europe, from the tuchthuizen in Amsterdam to the Hospital General in Paris and Bridewell in London, ‘which seemed to assign the same homeland to the poor, to the unemployed, to prisoners, and to the insane’.45 These institutions not only punished ‘idleness’ but were also designed to instil ‘proper’ work habits through discipline: according to Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon would be ‘a mill to grind rogues honest and idle men industrious’.46 State and market here emerge as two sides of the same coin: that is, ‘Police is a complement to the political economy of commercial society, rather than its opposite.’47 While pacification theorists such as Neocleous unravel the productive dimension of policing, they frequently overlook the context of empire and (settler) colonialism. This has at least two implications. First, the answer to the question ‘what does police produce?’ is never just wage-labour. As we saw in Chapter 1, capitalism has never just depended on the exploitation of wage-labour: indeed, ‘[t]he history of capitalism isn’t simply the history of the proletarianisation of an independent peasantry but of the violent racial domination of populations whose valorisation as wage labour, to reverse a common formulation, has been merely historically contingent: “socially dead” African slaves, the revocable sovereignty and terra nullius of indigenous peoples, and the nerveless, supernumerary body of the coolie labourer’.48 Consequently, if capitalism has always been racial capitalism, and if the history of policing stretches across a set of interconnected geographies, then we must also consider the role of police power in producing other regimes of extraction, exploitation, and expropriation: including chattel slavery, settler colonial dispossession, indentured servitude, reproductive extraction, and immigrant labour. Second, if metropolitan and (settler) colonial policing are different modalities of the same interconnected system of state-sponsored violence, then it is crucial to consider how policing creates racial, colonial, gendered, and ableist forms of disposability and ­extractability – not just in the (settler) colony but also at ‘home’ in the imperial metropole. As Robinson reminds us, the racialisation of the labouring classes began within Europe, long before Europe’s

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colonial encounter with the rest of the world: indeed, ‘The English working class was never the singular social and historical entity suggested by the phrase … the dialectic of proletarianization disciplined the working classes to the importance of distinctions: between ethnics and nationalities; between skilled and unskilled workers; and … in even more dramatic terms, between races.’49 To take this insight seriously is thus to inquire into the role of policing in creating hierarchy, disposability, and abandonment – not just in the colony but also in the metropole. Take, for example, the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor: that is, between those seen as ‘hardworking’ and ‘morally pure’ and those regarded as ‘waste’, ‘unproductive’, and a ‘burden’ on society. This distinction was never just a domestic normative framework, but emerged against the backdrop of empire and (settler) colonialism on a global scale: in short, ‘the problem space of the undeserving poor conjoined colony and metropole’.50 Paupers and itinerants were not just seen as a distinct class, as Neocleous suggests, but were also regarded as a ‘race of pygmies’, ‘social savages’, or, in the case of the Irish, ‘white chimpanzees’.51 London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew’s influential study from 1851, describes how the ‘vagabond and the citizen’ belong to ‘two distinct races’: whereas the latter is characterised by ‘oval or elliptical’ faces, the former is recognisable by their ‘broad lozenge-shaped faces’.52 The London slums inhabited by these undeserving poor were frequently likened to jungles and ‘a dark continent’ inhabited by ‘wild races’ and ‘wandering tribes’.53 To be undeserving – a pauper, vagrant, prostitute, or tramp – was therefore to be racialised as distinctively nonwhite. As Robbie Shilliam puts it, ‘one section of the English poor had lost – or were threatened with losing – their filiation to the English genus. Having become undeserving, whether willfully or unjustly, they were not considered to be indigenously white. Whether they deserved it or not, they were blackened.’54 These ideas of race and undeservingness were frequently parsed out through a ‘disease poetic’55 that linked ideas of crime and disorder to dirt, contagion, and eugenic fears of racial degeneration: that is, of ‘the colonies and the Orient coming home to haunt and infect the heart of whiteness’.56 From London’s sewage crisis in 1858 (more commonly known as the Great Stink) to the revolts and insurrections that spread throughout the British Empire like an ‘infection’,

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‘epidemic’, or ‘contagion’, tropes of disease and dirt were central to the construction and maintenance of racial difference throughout the Victorian era.57 As British historian John W. Kaye worried in an essay from 1850, ‘nothing is more contagious than rebellion’.58 These racialised ideas of sanitation, hygiene, and cleanliness directly informed debates about idleness, pauperism, and undeservingness, facilitating the disciplining and displacement of those deemed dirty, diseased, and degenerate, including vagrants, beggars, sex workers, and the poor. Pauperism, it was argued, spread like a disease and thus had to be contained, quarantined, and sanitised. Within this context, the task of the police was not just to maintain order but also – and as Adam Smith had understood – to construct and sanitise it by cleaning up the streets: both physically and metaphorically, by removing garbage and excrement as well as those deemed undeserving.59 In this context, it is not a coincidence that the police early on began to be referred to as ‘pigs’. While the term ‘pig’ today has a derogatory meaning, in Victorian England houses often had a ‘house-pig’ which was used to remove garbage. The police performed an analogous function: like the ‘house-pig’, the ‘police-pig’ was ‘situated between ordered domestic society and the wild criminal and expected to clear up the dirt and refuse identified as such by its masters’.60 In the same way that soap and cleaning rituals were central to the empire’s civilising mission, so policing was at the heart of the (re)production of whiteness. As a Pears soap commercial from 1899 put it, ‘the first step toward lightening the White Man’s Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness’.61 A stark example of this race-making nexus of dirt, degeneration, and undeservingness can be found in the discussions around the ‘Asiatic’ cholera epidemic that spread across Europe in the 1820s and 1830s: that is, in the decades leading up to the creation of the London Metropolitan Police. As Erin O’Conner has shown, in the Victorian imagination cholera was considered an ‘Oriental’ force that was closely linked to questions of immigration, poverty, and revolution. Cholera, it was argued, stemmed from ‘the filth of India and Egypt and of the Hindoo and Mohammedan pilgrims’ who used ‘the same water for bathing, washing soiled clothes, and drinking’.62 In London, cholera quickly became known as a ‘disease of a vagrant character’ that conjoined metropole and colony ‘in a common problematic of filth’.63 Victorian social criticism frequently compared the

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slums of London to India, insisting that London’s poor ‘were vulnerable to Asiatic cholera because they were Asiatic already’.64 This link between poverty and primitiveness was further amplified by the fact that cholera, when left untreated, led to a dark blue discoloration of the skin. Cholera victims, it was therefore concluded, were infected with blackness itself. Another instance of this state-sponsored ‘disease poetic’ is the policing of intimacy and sexuality. The distinction between deserving and undeservingness was shot through with racial connotations that linked crime with dirt and disease, as well as with norms of heteronormativity, reproductive labour, and the patriarchal nuclear family. As we will see in Chapter 6, the police clampdown on sex work, ‘sodomy’, and gender transgressions was seen as a means of protecting the body politic from ‘foreign’ filth, contagious disease, and, ultimately, from the degeneration of the racial stock.65 To be clear, the issue here is not just that the police targeted those who bend and break sexual and gender norms but also, and more fundamentally, that policing itself is central to producing and maintaining these very norms. After all, and as S. Lamble reminds us, ‘women’s prisons were designed to transform “fallen” women into better wives, mothers, homemakers, and domestic servants, whereas men’s prisons were designed to transform males into disciplined individuals, productive workers, and masculine citizens’.66 * This analysis leaves us with an understanding of police power as a form of administrative violence that creates ‘structured insecurity and (mal)distribute life chances across populations’.67 From Ireland to India, London, and across the Americas, policing has been one of the key mechanisms through which the state produces people for capitalist dispossession, exploitation, disposal, and abandonment. In other words, the main task of the police has never been about crime prevention; rather, ‘police from its origins has been a form of governing rather than the exercise of law’.68 This logic remains central to policing today: more than just a legacy of a dark past, policing and its war on dirt continue to operate in the service of capital. To see how and why, next I turn to the role of policing in fostering gentrification and urban renewal in today’s global cities.

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Blight

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Blight Since the early 1990s, Rio de Janeiro has been transformed into a global entrepreneurial city and hotspot tourist destination. This process, which was inaugurated in 2002 when Rio held the Earth Summit, culminated with the hosting of the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics Games in 2016. A central aspect of the ‘upscaling’ and ‘renewal’ of Rio has been the policing, pacification, and ‘cleaning up’ of the favelas. In 2008, a year after Rio had been chosen as the Olympic city, the Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) was launched: a special police program that operates in the favelas to ‘reclaim’ territories controlled by gangs and drug dealers. While it frames itself as a ‘policy for the improvement of life and the generation of hope’,69 the UPP has led to an intensification of police terror and routine killings. One of the most notorious instances of this police violence occurred in 2013, when twenty-five UPP officers tortured and killed the fortythree-year-old construction worker Amarildo Dias de Souza in Rio’s biggest favela, Rochina. More than ten years later, Amarildo’s body has still not been found. The UPP’s attempt to domesticate the favela is not new, but part of a long war fought by the Brazilian state against black, indigenous, migrant, and poor urban communities. As Erika Larkins documents, ‘From its inception, the favela was imagined as a hindrance to the development of the otherwise modern, “marvelous” city.’70 The favelas were initially settled by formerly enslaved Africans, who migrated to the city after the abolition of slavery in 1888. Lacking the means to buy or rent legally, they squatted and built homes in the hills surrounding the city. While barred from living in central Rio, they ‘formed a new urban working class, which (literally) constructed the bourgeoning metropolis’.71 After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1889, Brazil embarked on a number of projects to modernise its urban centres. Inspired by Baron Haussmann’s designs, officials sought to transform Rio into a ‘tropical Paris’72 with wide tree-lined boulevards, grand squares, and neoclassical buildings and monuments. The favelas quickly came to be seen as an obstacle to this campaign: they were dirty and diseased, dangerous and criminal. ‘An indispensable cleansing’, a political cartoon from 1907, captures this discourse. It depicts Oswaldo Cruz, the director general of public health 1903–09, combing favela dwellers out of the hair of an ugly head labelled ‘favella’.

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The image caption states that favelados – here referred to as ‘parasites’ and ‘pests’ – have been given ten days to leave, after which they will be thrown out on the streets and might end up in prison.73 As the cartoon suggests, Cruz did launch a number of sanitary campaigns which functioned as a pretext for evicting, displacing, and incarcerating favela residents. Today, efforts to displace the migrant, indigenous, and black poor from central Rio continue to be justified through a logic of sanitation. As one politician remarked in 2018, these communities are ‘urban garbage’: ‘crack land’ in need of a ‘cleaning’ to ‘restore order’.74 In this context, policing is called upon to clear out those who are seen as ‘antagonistic to the “clean and sanitized”, visually and spatially orderly, high modern utopian city ideal’.75 The police thus plays a central role in transforming ‘unproductive’ and ‘wasted’ urban lands into sites for real-estate development and speculation. Since the start of the pacification programs in 2008, the value of land and property in and around the favelas has increased faster than in the rest of the city, growing with anywhere between 50 and 400 per cent.76 As part of the attempt to ‘clean up the streets’, services that were previously pirated  – including water, sewage, electricity, and cable TV – have also been disconnected, privatised, and replaced with formalised market relations. Unsurprisingly, many of these pacification programs are directly funded by multinationals such as Coca-Cola and Souza Cruz (which is part of British American Tobacco).77 These dynamics are by no means unique to Rio: From Paris to Cape Town, Los Angeles to Lagos, urban regeneration projects are frequently legitimised through a racial logic that depicts poor areas as ‘wasted’, ‘dirty’, and ‘unproductive’ spaces characterised by crime, drugs, disease, teenage pregnancy, broken families, prostitution, and pimps; in short, these are areas that need to be ‘regenerated, cleansed, and reinfused with [white] middle-class sensibility’.78 In the context of Brazil, it is the favela that best captures this image of ‘blighted’ urban space; in Los Angeles, it is the ghetto; in Britain, the high-rise tower block; in Mumbai, the slum; in Paris, the banlieue; in Jakarta, the kampung; and in Cape Town, the township. Across these cities, policing is one of the main mechanisms through which local governments seek to foster urban regeneration. As Manissa Maharawal explains, ‘gentrification signifies not just the reinvestment of capital into urban spaces, but also the concomitant security forces which exert violence

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and spatial control upon poor racialized urban populations’.79 In New York, the gentrification of Harlem was partly made possible through the introduction of ‘broken windows’ policing, an escalation of the local war on drugs, and the clearing out of 125th street by 400 police dressed in riot gear.80 In Cape Town, the police and criminal justice system similarly enforce development by pacifying and controlling the black urban poor.81 Throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, ‘broken windows’ policing disproportionately targets the urban working class, in general, and the racialised urban poor, in particular: in the United Kingdom, stop-and-search policies are eight times more likely to target black people.82 In all of these cases, policing operates to enhance the desirability of gentrifying areas by creating ‘safe’ spaces for capital investment, urban redevelopment projects, and middle-class consumer habits – oftentimes by literally removing the local community. At the same time, by sorting people into categories of deserving and undeservingness, policing also helps to (re)produce the very precarious and vulnerable forms of labour that the global city requires for its daily functioning. As Françoise Vergès notes, it is predominantly racialised migrant and minority women that are tasked with cleaning the city, ‘whether they live in Maputo, Rio de Janeiro, Riyadh, Kuala Lumpur, Rabat, or Paris’. Vergès writes: Every day, in every urban center of the world, thousands of black and brown women, invisible, are ‘opening’ the city. They clean the spaces necessary for neo-patriarchy, and neoliberal and finance capitalism to function. They are doing dangerous work: they inhale toxic chemical products and push or carry heavy loads. They have usually travelled long hours in the early morning or late at night, and their work is underpaid and considered to be unskilled. They are usually in their forties or fifties. A second group, which shares with the first an intersection of class, race, and gender, go to middle class homes to cook, clean, and take care of children and the elderly, so that those who employ them can go to work in the places that the former group of women have cleaned.83

In Rio, the functioning of the city depends on the existence of this poor, disposable, and super-exploitable workforce, especially in sectors such as care, construction, cleaning, garbage collection, and platform economies. Across Brazil, the majority of black women work as domestic servants in the houses of the white elite. Hired on informal

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contracts, working an average of fifty hours per week, and earning around 60 per cent less than other workers, they are what keeps the bourgeois city comfortable, secure, and clean.84 * To summarise, an analysis of contemporary urban upscaling practices reveals the ways in which policing continues to operate as a permanent war on those classified as delinquent, dirty, and undeserving. Police, I have argued, is ultimately a street-level form of governance through which the state produces and regulates the distinction between cleanliness and dirtiness, the deserving and the undeserving, and the productive and the idle. Taking these insights seriously should push us, not only to consider arguments in favour of police abolition but also – and more radically – to extend the abolitionist critique to the state as a whole. We now turn to this.

Quilombo In 2020, 26 million people took to the streets throughout the United States following the police murder of George Floyd. In London, protestors marched across the city, declaring that ‘the UK is not innocent’. In France, Assa Traoré has led a tireless campaign demanding justice for her brother, Adama, who died in police custody in 2016. In Nigeria, organisers have called for an end to police brutality and the dismantling of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. In Hong Kong, protestors have challenged the new extradition bill and the excessive use of police force. From Minneapolis to Paris, Abuja to Hong Kong, struggles against police violence and mass incarceration have increasingly become part of the global political landscape. While abolition means different things to different organisers, most agree that it is a simultaneously deconstructive and transformative project. Angela Davis, for example, argues that abolition requires an end to prisons and police, as well as ‘the creation of an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison’.85 The Movement for Black Lives, similarly, describes abolition as the ‘Reallocation of funding currently allocated to policing and incarceration to long-term safety strategies such as quality, affordable housing, education, healthcare, and

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community-based violence prevention and response, and social safety net and employment programs that have been shown to improve community safety.’86 While most abolitionist scholars and organisers reject legal and reformist approaches, the abolitionist demand is often translated into a liberal call to ‘defund the police’ and redirect resources to other government agencies. Rather than a revolutionary program, ‘defund’ frames itself as a prudent and market-driven approach to taxpayer money. Consider, for example, the following statement from the Brookings Institute: [police] respond to everything from potholes in the street to cats stuck up a tree … reducing officer workload would increase the likelihood of solving violent crimes. Police officers are overworked and overstressed. Focusing on menial tasks throughout the day is inefficient and a waste of taxpayer money. Other government actors should be responsible for these and receive adequate funding for doing them.87

Committed abolitionists will no doubt find these claims jarring; and yet, they do highlight the ease with which abolitionist demands are emptied of their revolutionary content and translated into electoral politics. After all, there is nothing inherently antistatist, anticolonial, or anticapitalist about the project of abolishing prisons and police; such demands could be accommodated within and by the capitalist state. As the collective known as M.I. Asma puts it, ‘Calls to replace the police with brigades of social workers seem to forget that the institution of social work has a long history of complicity with state power.’88 Uniformed police are one important arm of state power but, crucially, they are not the only one. Black, decolonial, and indigenous feminists have long made this point, arguing that the welfare system – including housing, healthcare, child protection, education, and other social services – are crucial parts of the carceral machinery.89 This demonstrates the danger with approaches that delink a critique of policing from the state as a whole: ‘Shuffling around state institutions, and saying one can replace another because it is more humane, misses the point of why the police exist in the first place.’90 Black anarchists such as Marquis Bey, Zoé Samudzi, Eric Stanley, and William C. Anderson have recently responded to these concerns by explicitly conceptualising abolition as an anarchist (as opposed to integrationist and state-building) project.91 Samudzi and Anderson

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offer an ‘anarchism of Blackness’, while Bey theorises abolition as an anarchism that is ‘always already queer, always already Black feminist, and, most fundamentally, always and already trans and nonnormative’.92 The Afro-Brazilian concept of quilombismo resonates with many of their insights. Abdias Do Nascimento – a scholar, artist, poet, and founder of the Teatro Experimental do Negro – coined the term quilombismo in 1980 to describe a revolutionary vision that is ‘antiracist, anticapitalist, antilandowning, antiimperialist, [and] antineocolonialist’.93 Quilombismo invokes the legacy of quilombos – that is, maroon communities – which were common across areas and regions where Africans were enslaved. The largest of these, Palmares in Northeastern Brazil, had tens of thousands of inhabitants and lasted for almost 100 years, during which it fought off numerous attacks from Portuguese soldiers. Echoing Cedric Robinson, Nascimento argues that quilombos were more than just sites of refuge where runaways could hide. As free, autonomous, and multiracial communities consisting of African and indigenous populations, soldiers fleeing conscription, and poor whites, quilombos were also experiments in living otherwise. For Nascimento, the tradition of quilombismo therefore entails the possibility of ‘fraternal and free reunion, or encounter; solidarity, living together, existential communion’.94 In contemporary Brazil, black, indigenous, and poor communities continue to invoke quilombismo to imagine alternatives to the racial capitalist state and its violent terms of order. Grassroot campaigns such as Reaja ou Será Mortx! (React or Die!) directly contrast quilombismo with the concept of penal abolition, which they argue remains tethered to liberal ideology. For them, the problem is not just the police but the Brazilian state in its entirety, which is ‘slavist, racist, and exclusionary’ and has for centuries tried to ‘annihilate and assassinate our people, robbing us of our lives in the name of the interests of its white elite’.95 While police and prisons act as ‘an arm of the state in its ongoing project of white supremacy’, it ‘would be naive to think that a world without police would resolve our problems’.96 In place of abolition, they centre quilombismo: a practice ‘not of claiming but of seizing’.97 This is an antipolitics of refusal which strives to create autonomous spaces of freedom and care beyond the state and its terms of order. One such space is Casa das Pretas, a black feminist centre in Rio, where Marielle Franco had been leading a workshop on the night that she was killed. Organisations and communities

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I Am Because We Are

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such as these are actively evading the state: carrying forward the tradition of quilombismo, they seek to ‘create autonomous interstices away from state control, nurturing the commons that erupts into the world of containment from the ever-seething volcano underneath’.98 Quilombismo here emerges as a utopian and antipolitical worldmaking project which refuses the racial capitalist state and its war on dirt. As one quilombista puts it, ‘I want [to end prisons] a lot’ but that requires ‘destroying this whole system that has created the police that, through the ages, has the same role in upholding white supremacy’.99 Viewed antipolitically – as quilombismo – abolition requires a break, not only with carcerality but also with state logics of governance, hierarchy, and property. Avery Gordon captures this when she writes that ‘Abolition involves critique, refusal and rejection of that which you want to abolish, but it also involves being or “becoming unavailable for servitude”.’100 Abolition, then, as refusal – not just of the prison and the police, but of governance in its entirety.

I Am Because We Are In an essay written at the height of the black power movement, James Baldwin contemplates the daily spectacle of organised violence and abandonment in the black ghetto. ‘Harlem’, writes Baldwin, ‘is policed like occupied territory’. Pushing his readers to think of policing at ‘home’ and war ‘abroad’ as different modalities of the same machinery of state violence, Baldwin concludes that ‘occupied territory is occupied territory’.101 In ‘No-Bodies’, a text written almost four decades later, Denise Ferreira da Silva continues to reflect on how the police raids, killings, and terror routinely imposed on favela residents in Rio de Janeiro resonate with ‘the war scenes unfolding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and other corners of the globe’.102 Echoing Baldwin, da Silva encourages her readers to break down the conceptual barriers that keep analyses of these geographies apart: after all, ‘the “kill on site/sight” practice of Rio de Janeiro’s police does not make one wonder whether Rio’s favelas are concentration camps or battlefields, but rather prompts consideration of the question of what exactly is the difference between them’.103 In this chapter, I have followed Baldwin and da Silva in arguing that policing operates as a permanent war on those deemed wayward, delinquent, and underserving. The main function of the police

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has never been about crime prevention or detection, as is commonly argued. Rather, policing is a street-level form of governance through which the state produces disposability, extractability, and abandonment. From the colonial city to today’s global city, policing has been central to creating and maintaining the distinction between those considered worthy and unworthy, morally legitimate and racially degenerate, and clean and dirty. Quilombismo organisers not only understand these dynamics but also push us to imagine life outside of the racial capitalist state and its necropolitical police project. Channelling an antipolitics of refusal that stretches from Palmares to Rochina, they point to a utopian horizon of autonomy, relationality, and care that exists beyond the dominant terms of order. As the Ubuntu-inspired slogan of Marielle Franco’s campaign put it: ‘I am because we are.’ * In the next chapter, I extend this analysis of the carceral logics of racial capitalism by turning to the history and logics of borders and mobility controls. Policing is a key tool for the state’s (re)production of racial capitalism, but it is far from the only one. As Angela Davis and Gina Dent put it in an article from 2001, ‘We continue to find that the prison is itself a border.’ Indeed, ‘There is a very specific political economy of the prison that brings the intersections of gender and race, colonialism and capitalism, into view.’104 In Chapter 4, I argue that the history of prisons and police are closely linked to the control of mobility, and that the figure of the ‘criminal’ has historically mapped onto the mobile poor. As we shall see, borders have always been prisons, and prisons borders.

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4

Maps of Apartheid

The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by barracks and police stations. – Frantz Fanon

Umbilical Cords On the evening of 3 October 2013, an overcrowded fishing boat carrying more than 500 people sank off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa.1 Amongst the 368 found dead was an Eritrean woman who had given birth as she drowned. The divers found her a 150 feet down in the ocean together with her newborn baby, still attached by the umbilical cord. Her name was Yohanna, the Eritrean word for ‘congratulations’.2 Since 2014, more than 25,000 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean, making it the deadliest border in the world.3 Many of those who try to enter Europe lose their lives already in the Sahara Desert; others die in the back of refrigerated lorries.4 Some, such as Manuel Bravo, take their own lives in one of the many detention centres scattered across Europe;5 others, like Jimmy Mubenga, die at the hands of security guards during deportations.6 Like Yohanna, Manuel, and the thirty-nine Vietnamese nationals trapped in the back of the ‘Essex lorry’, Jimmy died from suffocation. ‘We revolt’, Fanon writes, ‘because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe’.7 The last few decades have witnessed a rapid expansion of a wide carceral network of detention estates, border walls, surveillance programs, offshore containment, community policing, and a range of other ‘hostile environment’ policies targeting people on the move – not just in Europe but all across the globe and especially along the North-South equator. From the West Bank to the US-Mexico border, Kashmir, Nauru, and the dark waters of the Mediterranean, a global 81

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war is fought against the poor and the paperless. In this chapter, I theorise this system of global apartheid as a crucial site in the antipolitical struggle against racial capitalism and the state.8 By reading the history of mobility control through the lens of racial capitalism, I show that the contemporary policing of migrant lives is part of a longer trajectory in which the state has always sought to control the movement of the displaced and the dispossessed. Today’s global border regime is ultimately a (post)colonial infrastructure of state violence which enables an ‘imperial mode of life’9 for some through the containment, abandonment, and super-exploitation of others. To develop this argument, the chapter extends the analysis of policing put forward in the previous chapter. By centring a global analysis of racial capitalism, I push against theoretical frameworks that treat criminal justice and migration control as two separate systems relating, respectively, to the domestic maintenance of order (criminal justice) and the international control of movement (migration control). Instead, my analysis shows that there is an umbilical cord that links policing and bordering as key mechanisms through which the state controls, coerces, and dispossesses those who are deemed wayward, delinquent, and undeserving. In the same way that policing unfolds as a war on dirt and disease, migration control has often functioned as ‘an instrument of hygiene, quarantine and immunization’.10 As we shall see, the dream of antipolitics requires the undoing of both alongside the wider forces of extraction, expropriation, and slow death that drive migration and compel people to leave their homes. The chapter begins by examining liberal arguments for migrant justice in Europe. This literature typically presents the violence of borders as a problem that can be overcome through humanitarian compassion, a stricter adherence to human rights, and more inclusive forms of citizenship. I argue that this rests on a form of ‘methodological statism’11 which overlooks that ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are not naturally existing categories but name a specific relation of difference imposed by the state. The second part of the chapter historicises this relation. Drawing on Robinson’s analysis of racial capitalism, I show that mobility controls have been a central mechanism through which the state produces racialised, coerced, and disposable labour across both metropole and periphery. In the third section, I argue that this violent infrastructure remains central to contemporary forms of exploitation, expropriation, and extraction, in new but old ways. Focusing on the historical

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evolution of the sweatshop, I explore how immigration restrictions have emerged as a central technology of race-making in the present. In the last section, I bring this back to the question of migrant justice. Turning to a range of migrant movements and initiatives – including the gilets noirs in Paris, Radio Ghetto in southern Italy, Migrantifa in Berlin, and Kenmure Street in Glasgow – I situate the fight for migrant justice as part of a wider antipolitical project of imagining the world without the state and its global maps of apartheid.

The Humane Border As Londoners awoke on the morning of 9 September 2012, a man fell from the sky. José Matada had been hiding in the landing gear of a British Airway flight from Angola and fell as the undercarriage opened to prepare for the plane’s descent. His body was later found on a pavement in the wealthy London suburb of East Sheen, close to Heathrow. He died on his 26 birthday, carrying a single-pound coin in his pocket.12 There are many other stories of people – migrants – who fall from aircraft high in the sky; an art installation, produced by Karen Stuke, records at least fifteen cases in London alone.13 The most notorious of these happened on a summer afternoon in 2019, when a man, still unnamed, fell from a Kenya Airways flight and landed in the garden of a home in Clapham, narrowly missing the sunbathing resident.14 There is little that is known about these falling men: they are poor and paperless, young and from the global South; perhaps they fall dreaming of the life that could have been. Travelling as a stowaway – be it on planes, ships, or in lorries – has become increasingly common as there are few legal ways for people on the move to enter Europe. Over the last three decades, the European border regime has rapidly expanded and intensified: both within, beyond, and at the actual borders of Europe. In 2005, Frontex – the European Border and Coast Guard Agency – began policing the Mediterranean; at that point, the border fences in the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla were already ten years old. In 2013, Frontex was joined by Eurosur, a mass surveillance system that uses data from drones, aircrafts, and offshore censors to track the movement of ‘illegal’ migrants. Since 2016, the European Union (EU) operates ten ‘hotspots’ in Greece and Italy where incoming migrants are identified,

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fingerprinted, and registered. Agreements struck with neighbouring countries – in particular with former colonies such as Libya, Morocco, Sudan, and Niger – have simultaneously externalised EU border control to curtail migrants well before they reach European territory. These measures have been accompanied by the roll-out of different forms of community policing and surveillance programmes designed to extend borders into public life within Europe. The number of people detained and/or deported has simultaneously reached unprecedented levels.15 Critics seeking to counteract the violence of the European border regime have overwhelmingly done so by framing the migrant ‘crisis’ as a humanitarian crisis. Many policymakers, media pundits, and NGOs have called on European publics to open their hearts and feel compassion and empathy with migrants that undertake dangerous journeys to enter Europe: Pope Francis’s ‘day of tears’, the silent minute in the European Parliament, and the hashtag #AlanKurdi are some prominent examples. Since 2015, humanitarian organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, Médecins du Monde, and Sea-Watch have launched a variety of search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. While some critics argue that these humanitarian missions frequently operate alongside – rather than as a counterweight to – border enforcement, many others have continued to hold on to the idea that humanitarian ideals are laudable in theory and simply need to be better implemented.16 Looking beyond the humanitarian moment of rescue, other critics have challenged the violence of borders by seeking to re-imagine citizenship in ways that are more inclusive, universal, and pluralistic. Some propose that citizenship needs to be uncoupled from national and ethnic lines, and made to conform with liberal principles and international human rights.17 For others, what is needed is a radical rethinking of citizenship as something that is enacted ‘from below’ rather than bestowed ‘from above’.18 Migration scholars have drawn on this to explore how non-citizen migrant groups enact themselves as citizens when they claim rights and demand recognition.19 What unites all of these approaches is the promise that citizenship is, or at least could become, a solution to migrant exclusion; in short, ‘citizenship [is] an empirically flawed but ultimately inclusive project’.20 In political theory, these approaches have been accompanied by a bourgeoning literature that calls into question the moral standing of borders. Joseph Carens, perhaps most prominently, has argued that

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immigration restrictions violate human rights and are ‘incompatible with fundamental democratic principles’.21 Unconstrained mobility is a freedom that should be protected both within and between state boundaries: in fact, there exists no morally relevant distinction between the two. Other scholars have developed similar calls for (more) open borders by highlighting the close link between emigration and immigration. The right to emigrate, they point out, is recognised by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.’ This right is, in turn, meaningless without a corresponding right to enter other states.22 Since there exists a human right to (im)migrate, it follows that borders should be open. While these approaches have generated some valuable critiques of border violence, their goal is not to dismantle state borders but to ‘humanise’ them through appeals to international law and liberal principles of justice. Because of this, the state looms large in these reformist visions of migrant justice. Take, for example, the humanitarian call for rescue, which obfuscates that migrants are not inherently vulnerable but are actively produced as such through a set of state policies ‘that deny people the possibility to fly, the physical closure of land borders through the increasingly prolific use of fencing, and geographical realities forged long ago in the geological mists of time’.23 This naturalisation of state violence is most obvious in debates about human smuggling and trafficking, which typically frame state intervention as the solution to (rather than the source of) migrant death: through harsher laws and more punitive border policing, we are told, human smuggling can be combated.24 Even the most radical of these proposals – namely, the literature on open borders – is not an argument about the illegitimacy of state borders per se. As Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright note, ‘none of the current citizenship-rights-based frameworks are … prepared to challenge frontally the rights of states to control their borders and territories, or the rights of states to exclude and deport; rather, they have often attempted to reinforce unsustainable divisions among various categories of migrants (“refugees”, “illegals”, “economic migrants”, and so on)’.25 Ultimately, most of these scholars concur that immigration restrictions would be justified in a world of open borders, and that checks should continue to control who and what enters to stop ‘terrorists’ and other ‘threats’ to national security.26

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In sum, while these calls for humanitarianism, inclusive citizenship, and (more) open borders might go some way towards countering the violence that is unleashed on migrants daily, they remain wedded to what Radhika Mongia calls ‘methodological statism’.27 That is, they overlook that ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are not naturally existing categories but name a specific relation of difference imposed by the state. As I show in the next section, borders and immigration restrictions are not ‘timeless’ features of world politics but constitute a global infrastructure of state violence which is central to the functioning of racial capitalism today. Taking this seriously, demands not just the reform or opening of borders, but the abolition of the state and the wider system of global apartheid.

The Indispensable Immigrant In Black Marxism, Robinson documents the role of racialised migrant labour in the making of racial capitalism. ‘There has never been a moment in modern European history (if before)’, he writes, ‘that migratory and/or immigrant labor was not a significant aspect of European economies’.28 Contrary to the idea that racial thinking arose through Europe’s colonial encounter with the rest of the world, capitalism emerged from a European feudal order that was already saturated with ‘racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional particularities’.29 At the bottom of this racial hierarchy were migrant workers, who formed a central component of the working classes: ‘In Ragusa it was the Morlachi; in Marseilles, the Corsicans; in Seville, the Moriscos of Andalusia; in Algiers, the Aragonese and the Berbers; in Lisbon, Black slaves; and in Venice, the immigrant proletariat was augmented by Romagnoli, Marchiani, Greeks, Persians, Armenians and Portuguese Jews.’30 Immigrant workers could be found in the army (as mercenaries), and also in ‘domestic service, handicrafts, industrial labor, the ship- and dock-workers of merchant capitalism, and the field laborers of agrarian capitalism’.31 As Robinson concludes, racial capitalism was from its inception linked to the production and exploitation of the ‘indispensable immigrant’.32 In what follows, I build on these ideas to re-examine the history of migration control. I make two arguments. First, I show that the control of mobility has been a key technology through which the state produces super-exploitable and disposable labour across both

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metropole and (post)colony. While a variety of (im)mobility regimes have existed throughout the history of racial capitalism – including vagrancy legislation, plantation slavery, indentured servitude, and contemporary immigration restrictions – their underlying purpose has been the same: namely, to produce categories of people that can be exploited, expropriated, and abandoned at will. Secondly, this reveals bordering and policing as entwined projects of capitalist governance: in short, the prison has always been a border, and vice versa.33 In the Marxist literature, the Vagrancy Acts and Poor Laws imposed on the European poor from the fourteenth century onwards are frequently recognised as one of the main roots of contemporary immigration restrictions.34 The criminalisation of free movement, it is argued, was necessary to create a disciplined, sedentary, and low-paid workforce at the dawn of capitalism: as Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos summarise, ‘The establishment of the early capitalist mode of production is founded, not only on an invention of a new system of labour productivity but also on the necessity of reconstituting wandering bodies as a disciplined and industrious class—the working class.’35 The enclosure of the commons and the expropriation of the peasants generated a new class of poor, unemployed, and highly mobile people. In the early modern period, these groups – who were variously referred to as vagrants, vagabonds, idlers, beggars, robbers, criminals, tramps, and homeless people – could be found ‘[e]verywhere … swarming, changing cities, crossing borders, sleeping in the haystacks or crowding at the gates of towns’.36 Owning no land and having no work, they were seen as a threat to the emerging capitalist order, symbolising dirt, vermin, inefficiency, and the threat of mob rule. To control this mass of ‘wandering’ people, states passed a variety of harsh laws designed to sedentarise and discipline them into wage labour.37 As Marx recounts: at the end of the fifteenth and during the whole of the sixteenth century, a bloody legislation against vagabondage was enforced throughout Western Europe. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.38

The Poor Laws in England, introduced from the fourteenth century onwards, was one such ‘bloody legislation’; another was the

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introduction of passports, which were mandatory for any person wishing to exit from – rather than enter into – specific territories.39 Those who refused to settle and take up work were forcibly returned to their parish of birth; they could also be tortured, enslaved, held in the stocks, or branded with a V. Vagrants were frequently incarcerated in workhouses, monasteries, asylums, and other carceral institutions where they were trained to develop new attitudes towards work. After the 1718 English Transportation Act, they could moreover be shipped to work in the colonies, which were said to provide ‘the ideal destination for the vagrant, poor, and unemployed of England’.40 These measures were actively shaped by racism and racialisation. Vagrancy laws not only targeted ‘gypsies’, ‘blackamoores’, Jews, and the Irish but, as we saw in Chapter 3, vagrants and other members of the ‘undeserving poor’ were often ‘blackened’ through an insistence on their idleness and delinquency.41 The mob – a supposedly ungovernable mass of people – was imagined to be distinctively non-white: chaotic, primitive, and a constant threat to social order. As such, ‘it is no coincidence that the word mobility not only refers to movement but also to the common people, the working classes, the mob’.42 Consider, for example, the repatriation of the ‘black poor’ to Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth century. At the time, London’s black population consisted of a mixture of enslaved domestic servants, fugitives, free persons, soldiers, sailors, beggars, and sex workers. In 1780, the Gordon Riots swept through London, leading to the destruction of Newgate Prison and the Clink, as well as sustained attacks on the Bank of England, various churches, and the private homes of MPs. While the uprising was eventually crushed by the army, it was widely agreed that England had been on the verge of revolution. Amongst those charged with ‘riotous and tumultuous assembly’ and sentenced to death were two black men, John Glover and Benjamin Bowsey, and one black woman, Charlotte Gardiner.43 It is within this context that the Sierra Leone Resettlement Scheme emerged. Introduced six years after the riots, the Scheme initially targeted lascars – that is, Asian sailors stranded in England – but quickly extended to cover the wider non-white population of London. Invoking the language of vagrancy, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor argued that London’s black poor were vagrants – not just to the parishes of London but to the English state as a whole. Instead of returning these groups to their home parish, the Committee thus advocated for their removal ‘across

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the ocean … framing resettlement as “repatriation” despite the fact that many of the “black poor” were not from anywhere in Africa’.44 Unsurprisingly, most black Londoners opposed the proposal. To find volunteers for the scheme, the Committee, therefore, resorted to coercive measures. As Peter Fryer recounts in Staying Power, the Committee ‘urged the Treasury to issue a proclamation threatening black people “found begging or lurking about the Streets” with action under the Vagrancy Act. A week later—a fortnight before Christmas— the committee asked the public “to suspend giving alms” to the black poor, “in order to induce them to comply with the engagement they entered into.”’45 London’s lord mayor also continued to exert pressure by ordering city marshals and constables ‘to take up all the blacks they find begging about the streets, and to bring them before him; or some other magistrate, that they may be sent home, or to the new colony which is going to be established in Africa’.46 On 9 April 1787, three ships finally left England for Sierra Leone, carrying 441 people. The voyage would end in tragedy: half of the black poor died within one year, while those who survived were captured and sold as slaves. In merging vagrancy legislation with deportation, colonisation, and poor relief (that is, welfare assistance), the Sierra Leone Resettlement Scheme demonstrates how mobility controls functioned as a racemaking mode of governance in the service of capital. These dynamics were never confined to the British Isles: across the (settler) colonies, vagrancy laws were frequently used to coerce indigenous populations into work, while also forming the backbone of the slave codes across the Caribbean and throughout the Americas.47 In the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in the United States, vagrancy legislation was further redeployed to restrict the free movement of black people by making it a criminal offence not to work, thus tying them to the plantation and sharecropping system.48 By linking metropole and colony through a shared circuit of racialised (im)mobility, vagrancy laws can thus be seen as a forerunner to contemporary immigration restrictions. Beyond vagrancy legislation, several other measures were used by states to immobilise, dispossess, and coerce the colonised, enslaved, and poor into labour, including enslavement, forced migration, contracts of indenture, penal transportation, and the encomienda system.49 After the fifteenth century, European imperial states increasingly relied on ‘producing, amassing—and moving—a global capitalist workforce’50 to plantations, mines, and sites of investment across

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the world. As the title of a book by Christopher, Pybus, and Rediker puts it, ‘many middle passages’ built the modern world.51 While exact numbers for these transfers are difficult to provide, estimates offer a glimpse of their enormous magnitude: 12.5 million Africans were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic to satisfy the enormous demand for labour on the sugar plantations of the West Indies and in Brazil. Another 11 million are believed to have died during the march to the African West coast or in confinement awaiting the ships which would carry them across the Atlantic.52 Numbers for the Indian Oceanic slave trade are even less well-known, but estimates suggest that more than 1 million enslaved Africans were taken to Mozambique alone.53 After the phasing out of slavery, indentured labour became a common form of labour recruitment: according to Lydia Potts, from 1835 to 1941 anywhere between 12 and 37 million Indian and Chinese indentured ‘coolie’ workers left for Southeast Asia, Hawaii, the West Indies, California, and Australia to work in the European settler colonies.54 Similarly, between 1860 and 1900 more than 100,000 Pacific Islanders were transported to Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia, and other Pacific locations; from 1787 to 1868, 160,000 British and Irish convicts (many of them criminalised by vagrancy laws) were shipped to Australia. The racialised technologies of mobility control that emerged through these ventures – such as ledgers and ‘wanted’ posters for fugitives, as well as contracts of indenture – would later form the basis for many contemporary immigration restrictions, including biometric surveillance, custom systems, visa regimes, and the passport.55 In contrast to today’s immigration restrictions, the mobility controls described in the previous pages were oriented around a logic of facilitation rather than constraint: that is, their goal was not to prevent people from entering new territories but to stop them from leaving.56 This logic began to change after the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1834, which generated an acute demand for new sources of cheap and exploitable labour. This was met, in part, by the recruitment and transportation of indentured workers from India and China.57 In 1835, the colonial authorities on Mauritius began to demand that indentured workers demonstrate that they had permission to move from India to Mauritius; such permission would in turn only be granted if they could provide a contract of indenture showing that they were tied to work for a specified amount of time.

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These requirements set the stage for subsequent regimes of immigration control, which quickly spread throughout the (settler) colonies in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As Sharma notes, ‘[b]y the end of coolieism in the early twentieth century, making people Migrants [had become] a well-established mechanism of labor and social control across the world’.58 Indeed, while humans have always moved, the figure of the ‘migrant’ is someone ‘whose entry into state territory was regulated and restricted’,59 born from racial capitalism’s continued search for cheap, disciplined, and super-exploitable labour. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these measures were gradually generalised – first in the settler colonies and later in imperial metropoles.60 As Asian non-indentured migration increased to white settler colonies across the Americas, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, immigration restrictions were increasingly used to prioritise the recruitment of white European migrants ‘while banning certain social, national, religious and racial groups from entry’.61 As Europe’s empires crumbled in the mid-twentieth century, a string of Citizenship Acts were implemented ‘to close the door to dark-skinned potential migrants’.62 These measures were ultimately – and as the title of Paul Gilroy’s seminal study from 1987 puts it – introduced to create the illusion that ‘there ain’t no black in the Union Jack’.63 In contrast, populations racialised as white continued to move without constraint through this period: from 1850 to 1920, as many as 70 million people left Europe for the Americas, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, settling on land cleared by the genocide of indigenous populations.64 In the United States alone, the population grew from under just 4 million in 1798 to 76 million in 1900, largely due to European migration.65 * At least two conclusions follow from this analysis. First, the history of racial capitalism can be reconstructed as a history of a series of unequal and racialised regimes of mobility. Whether through vagrancy legislation, schemes of indenture, or immigration restrictions, their purpose has remained the same: namely, to ensure a steady supply of cheap, disposable, and super-exploitable labour. The state and market, or law and accumulation, are here revealed as two sides of the same coin. As Robinson recognised in Black Marxism, the state-sponsored creation of immigrant labour is indeed ‘indispensable’ to racial capitalism.

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Second, and relatedly, this analysis reveals the deep-seated links between policing and bordering: the history of mobility control is, in part, a history of criminalisation. While we are accustomed to thinking of criminal justice and migration control as two separate systems with their own distinct logics, they emerged as entwined modes of governance under the same system of racial capitalism. As Nicolazzo puts it, state institutions designed to combat vagrancy ‘pioneered the use of incarceration as punishment long before the birth of the penitentiary, marking populations deemed vagrant as the first targets of a prison regime’.66 Similarly, the transportation of convicts to penal colonies and settlements around the world served as a form of punishment.67 In all of these cases, policing and bordering, incarceration, and deportation, operated together to produce whiteness and its constitutive outside. This history is still with us: the national liberation wars that swept across the globe in the post-1945 era may have signalled the end of a certain style of empire, but practices of racialised extraction, expropriation, and exploitation continued and often accelerated. While older and more overt forms of segregationist practices were discredited – leading to what some scholars refer to as a ‘racial break’68 – they were replaced with new and less direct systems of resource extraction and sweated labour in the global South, on the one hand, and increased reliance on migrant labour in the North, on the other. As we shall see next, today’s global border regime is a (post)colonial form of apartheid which enables an ‘imperial way of life’ for some through the containment, abandonment, and super-exploitation of others.

(Post)colonial Apartheid In 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory in Dhaka collapsed. It is one of the deadliest industrial disasters in modern history: at least 1,134 people lost their lives and another 2,500 were injured. Like so many other garment factories in Dhaka, Rana Plaza was a converted building with numerous illegal floors that had been built on top of an already weak structure. Inside, people worked long hours in unsafe conditions for minimal pay, producing clothing items for international retailers such as H&M, Gap, and Primark. Rather than an isolated incident, Rana Plaza is an example of a business model which has come to dominate the contemporary era, where multinational corporations rely on

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cheap and expendable labour in the global South to produce low-cost goods for consumers in the North. The history of the global sweatshop is often discussed in isolation from the history of the global border regime. Indeed, scholars interested in sweatshop labour69 have tended to focus on the existence of global supply chains and how corporations and workers around the globe are linked through hierarchical and feminised structures.70 While they have generated important insights about the inequalities that sustain the outsourcing of manufacturing production, there have been few reflections on why the age of the sweatshop has also been the age of border militarisation, especially alongside the North-South equator. In this section, I place these two developments within a unified frame. Focusing on the interconnected geographies of sweatshop labour in the global South and migrant precarity in the North, I argue that the contemporary global border regime is a (post)colonial form of apartheid which is central to the functioning of racial capitalism today. Let us start with a brief history of the sweatshop. Sweated labour is most often associated with exploitative forms of work in the global South, but the history of the sweatshop begins in the North.71 Sweatshops emerged in North America in the second half of the nineteenth century and from the beginning relied on migrant workers, often young women, who worked long hours bent over their sewing machines for minimal pay. In New York’s garment district, located just off the tenements of the Lower East Side, these workers were mainly of Eastern-European Jewish and Italian origin, although socalled ‘Chinatown sweatshops’ could also be found. In California, most sweatshop workers were undocumented Latina and Asian women.72 The racial character of sweatshop labour was a constant point of reference at the time: politicians and journalists were at pains to distinguish sweatshop from ‘American’ factories. As Daniel Bender shows, sweatshops were frequently regarded as ‘exotic workplaces, rife with dangers, and redolent of the smells of dirty workers and strange foods’.73 The sweatshop was seen as a distinctively ‘foreign’ place of work, and this ‘foreignness’ was in turn used to justify its exploitative practices. In the first half of the twentieth century, sweatshops were gradually pushed to the margins in the United States, largely due to militant labour organising. Yet, within only a few decades they would make

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a speedy return. Starting in the 1950s, Western companies began to shift production to postcolonial states to take advantage of union-free workplaces, lax regulations, and low wages. This accelerated in the 1970s as neoliberal restructuring led to rapid offshoring of manufacturing industries to the global South.74 Today, 79 per cent of the world’s industrial workforce lives and works in the global South, compared with just 34 per cent in 1950 and 53 per cent in 1980.75 As with the first US-based sweatshops of the nineteenth century, a large proportion of this workforce is migratory and women.76 In countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, Morocco, Taiwan, and Thailand, sweatshop labour is imported from other poor countries; in India and China, they rely on internal migration from rural areas. In both cases, labour migration is propelled by similar forces, as new forms of dispossession and enclosure drive an ever-growing number of people to migrate from the countryside to urban centres.77 There are now more than 1 billion impoverished slum dwellers in the world, with displaced people making up a majority of those who reside in urban slums.78 Sometimes, if they are ‘lucky’, they find work in one of the many garment, electronics, toy, and shoe factories scattered throughout the urban periphery. This process cannot be understood in isolation from the universalisation of state borders in the post-1945 world. As Harsha Walia shows in her work on ‘border imperialism’, there exists a direct link between the coercive extractions of neoliberal capital, on the one hand, and the fortification of borders, on the other: ‘capitalism requires precarious and exploitable workers to facilitate capital accumulation, and creates those precarious lives through hierarchies of systemic oppression along with its extractions of labor and land’.79 Military interventions, structural adjustment programs, resource extraction, and land grabbing have displaced large numbers of people throughout the global South. In suppressing free movement and preventing displaced people from emigrating to high-income countries, borders help create populations that are ‘stuck’ in what Mike Davis refers to as the ‘planet of slums’.80 That is, by producing differential zones of labour, borders naturalise a global system dependent on the hyper-extraction of surplus value from racialised workers in the global South, which in turn enables cheap prices and unsustainable consumption habits in the North. Importantly, while borders are central to producing surplus labour in the global South, they also work to lock many of those who do migrate into a state of permanent precarity, vulnerability, and

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super-exploitability. While borders are often thought of as physical walls that separate the inside from the outside, they are better understood as devices of differential inclusion. As Bridget Anderson puts it, borders are not simply ‘taps that attempt (successfully or not) to control the flows of entry of non-citizens’, but they also function as ‘moulds that shape social relations’.81 In particular, by criminalising certain types of migration, borders produce an underclass of undocumented people that lack access to benefits, labour protections, and civil and social rights. By forcing people to live and work as ‘illegal’ migrants, borders create a commodified, exploitable, flexible, and expendable workforce – not only in the South but also in the North.82 Migrant labour can thus be seen as the flipside of sweatshop labour: as the insourcing of labour, rather than the outsourcing of factories.83 This state-enforced system of creating, recruiting, and exploiting migrant labour is central to racial capitalism today. In Europe, the exploitation of undocumented migrant labour is widespread in the agricultural sector, especially in Italy, Greece, Germany, and the UK. In Italy, one-third of all agricultural workers are African migrants who earn an average of twenty to thirty euros per day. Living in squalid conditions, they work for up to fourteen hours per day picking tomatoes, oranges, and other produce.84 In countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, migrant workers – predominantly from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Pakistan – make up the majority of the population (reaching up to 80 per cent in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates).85 In China, the hukou system functions as a domestic tool of migration management which strips rural ‘peasant migrants’ from legal rights in the urban areas where they reside.86 Throughout the world, the care and domestic sector overwhelmingly depend on women migrant workers.87 These examples are not exceptional but representative of a larger system which relies on state power to produce a super-exploited, hyper-surveilled, and expendable labour pool. ‘It is doubtful’, writes Ben Selwyn, ‘whether contemporary capitalist agro-industry could exist without vast pools of impoverished workers’.88 Studies of export processing zones from Bangladesh to Mexico, and logistics networks from Dubai to Singapore, the confirm that coerced, indentured, and/or migrant labour is the condition of possibility, not just of the agricultural sector, but of the global supply chain as a whole.89 Policymakers, media, and NGOs often frame this as a problem of ‘modern slavery’. Coerced, unfree, and super-exploited labour, it is

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argued, stems from the illegal actions of private individuals: traffickers, smugglers, gangs, and other types of ‘criminals’. This is based on the idea that ‘labour exploitation and unfreedom are the result of morally culpable individuals who should be publicly vilified, rather than systemic and institutional features of state policies and practices relating to immigration and labour regulation combined with the “free market” behaviour of employers’.90 As a result, the modern slavery paradigm presents state intervention as the solution to migrant exploitation: through harsher laws and more punitive policing, it is argued, coerced labour can be combated. In contrast, an analysis rooted in racial capitalism frames state violence as the source of the problem: after all, immigration laws are the conditions of possibility for disposable and super-exploitable labour. As Sharma puts it, ‘the nation-state is not a hermetically sealed container made of its citizens’ but ‘a place where citizens and non-citizens live together in a state of apartheid’.91 This is in turn a continuation of dynamics which have long been central to racial capitalism: While today’s immigration restrictions look different from yesteryear’s mobility controls, they are interconnected mechanisms through which the racial capitalist state produces cheap and disposable workers. Migrant labour in the global North and sweated labour in the South must thus be seen as differentiated but interconnected parts of the same system. To summarise, this analysis not only troubles the widespread distinction between the native ‘white working class’ and migrants since it shows that any discussion of the labouring classes – then as well as now – has to extend beyond border regimes, citizenship, and colour lines. Moreover, and as we shall see next, it also demonstrates that struggles for migrant justice – just like struggles for Rana Plaza and the millions of workers who labour in factories and fields across the global South – must call for the abolition, rather than just the reform or opening, of borders and the global system of state-enforced apartheid.

Unmapping Apartheid On 12 July 2019, 700 undocumented migrants occupied one of Paris’s most iconic buildings, the Panthéon. The occupiers were members of the gilets noirs (black vests) collective, one of the most prolific undocumented migrant movements to emerge in recent years. Over the tombs of Voltaire and Rousseau, they delivered impassioned speeches about

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the violence of the French immigration system, police harassment, and the harsh realities of living without papers in France: while Paris has more than 200,000 empty homes, thousands of migrants ‘sleep under the inter-changes of the ring road’ in makeshift tents that lack access to basic amenities such as clean drinking water. ‘Humiliation, exploitation, deportation’, the occupiers proclaimed, is a better description of France than the cherished ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’.92 A month earlier, they seized parts of the Charles de Gaulle airport and demanded to speak to the CEO of Air France, ‘the French state’s official deporter’.93 Three days before they stormed the Panthéon, the gilets noirs also targeted Paris’s financial district. By connecting the exploitation of migrant workers in France to the expropriation of African countries by French multinational corporations, they explained that ‘France and its companies grow rich on our backs’. Examples of such colonial plunder include ‘Total and Areva who plunder Africa, Suez who steals his water, Societe Generale who steals his money and who finances the pollution from Africa with coal-fired power plants, from Thales building the weapons with which they wage war. […] The same people who destroy our lives over there are waging war here!’94 The gilets noirs, then, seek more than just citizenship and inclusion: enacting an antipolitics of refusal, they call for the overthrowal of the very ‘system which keeps us undocumented’. The analysis presented in the last few pages lends support to their arguments. As we have seen, contemporary immigration restrictions emerge from the state’s long trajectory of excluding, exploiting, and expropriating the displaced and the dispossessed. To think that the violence of immigration policies can be stamped out by fairer immigration laws and more open borders is ultimately to miss the point. As Anderson writes, ‘the modern state is a racial project, bound up with the making and maintaining of racial difference, and immigration controls are deeply implicated in this project’.95 Appeals to human rights, citizenship, and more open borders might of course go some way towards alleviating migrant suffering but, as the gilets noirs point out, such measures are incapable of uprooting the racial capitalist structures that render migrant lives disposable, precarious, and superexploitable. Borders were, and continue to be, central to the creation and maintenance of the relations of disposability and extractability that capitalism needs to profit and thrive. Migrant justice, therefore, requires more radical solutions.

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The concept of no borders – sometimes referred to as border abolition – constitutes one such radical alternative.96 No border perspectives are, just like the liberal concept of open borders, committed to freedom of movement but they frame this within a critique of the capitalist state. As Natasha King explains, ‘to refuse the border is also to refuse state sovereignty … to think of a world without borders is inherently to imagine a world without states’.97 Like the quilombismo discussed in the previous chapter, no borders is at once a rejection – of immigration controls, detention centres, mass deportations, and other forms of state violence which seek to police mobility – as well as an affirmation of other ways of being and belonging, beyond the racial capitalist state and its violent terms of order. Since the 1990s, there have been numerous no border initiatives across and beyond Europe. Consisting of people with and without papers, these include: the sans-papiers movement in France, which often is credited as the first to articulate no border politics;98 the various no border camps in Strasbourg, Calais, Brussels, and a host of other cities; the No Border School in Athens99 and the network around No Borders Morocco;100 and various campaigns to shut down detention centres, sabotage police raids, and stop deportations.101 In Naples, the Black Sardines have called for the abolition of borders and other security measures that target migrants; also in southern Italy, Radio Ghetto has since 2012 been exposing and criticising the structure of exploitation in Italian agriculture. Run by migrant tomato pickers, the radio serves as a rallying cry against the Italian border regime. Many of these movements are acutely aware of the close relationship between the criminal justice system and migration control. Some, such as the No Border Kitchen (NBK) collective, make no distinction between the two: detention centres are prisons. Based on the Greek island of Lesvos, NBK supported migrants in the nearby camp Moria which, up until it was burned down in September 2020, housed more than 20,000 people living in tents and makeshift shelters. Rather than ‘improving (or pretending to improve) the situation in this hell’,102 groups like NBK ‘demand and fight for the end of this system built on and sustained by cages, prisons and violence’.103 Like the gilets noirs, many of these movements also frame the call for border abolition within a broader critique of racial capitalism and the state. As the Berlin-based group Migrantifa puts it: ‘We believe that people of migrant descent cannot rely on the state for their

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Figure 4.1  Alessandra Ferrini, Radio Ghetto Relay, 2016 HD video, 2016, 15'24" minutes. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

protection and security and that self-organisation is necessary in order to protect the lives of people in our communities.’104 Many also seek to challenge the (neo)colonial forces of exploitation, expropriation, and dispossession that drive migration and compel people to leave their homes.105 Take, for example, Afrique-Europe-Interact (AEI), a network based in Mali and with grassroots activists – many of them self-organised migrants and deportees – scattered around West Africa and Europe, including in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Morocco, Togo, Tunisia, and Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. AEI highlights the link between racist immigration restrictions and labour exploitation in Europe and the displacement and dispossession caused by land grabbing (‘another scramble for Africa’), forced privatisation, climate change, and trade liberalisation of agricultural goods in Africa. These extractive processes have ‘had serious consequences for Africa: the worsening of the food situation, as well as the loss of rural jobs; the impoverishment of the peasant populations; and a subsequent spike in the rural urban exodus’.106 As a result, many people have been forced ‘to migrate—mostly to West Africa, some to Europe’. For AEI, struggles against these violent processes must involve a simultaneous abolition of borders as well as an end to land grabbing, resource extraction, structural adjustment programs, militarism, austerity, and other forms of dispossession and expropriation which drive mass displacement.

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This is because ‘The rich countries of the North profit from this pauperization and at the same time they are barricading themselves more and more against migration from the South and East.’107 In situating the struggle against borders within a wider anticolonial and anticapitalist frame – which links together the dark waters of the Mediterranean, sweatshops in Dhaka, peasant movements in Mali, and undocumented migrant workers in Europe – movements such as the gilets noirs, AEI, and NBK enact an antipolitics of refusal and ungovernability. As Catherine Besteman writes, the relentlessness with which the displaced and the dispossessed continue to move and organise ‘suggest the emergence of a political movement we might identify as an insurgency: an insurgency against containment, against being treated as waste by capitalism, against authoritarianism, against racism’.108 Cedric Robinson reminds us that vagrants, fugitives, and indentured workers throughout history have led the struggle against coerced (im)mobility and the wider system of racial capitalist plunder and war. So too today. In refusing the border, occupying the Panthéon, organising against the sweatshop, and contesting corporate land grabs, people on the move – and people that are stuck – point towards an antipolitical horizon of autonomy, care, and belonging: a vision of life otherwise, beyond the racial capitalist state and its violent bordering regimes.

Freedom as Place On 13 May 2021, hundreds of Glaswegians blockaded Kenmure Street to stop an immigration raid by the UK Home Office. Two Indian nationals who had lived in the UK for more than ten years, Lakhvir Singh and Sumit Sehdev, had been detained by immigration officers. As the hours wore on, the crowd on Kenmure Street kept on getting bigger as more and more people surrounded the van in which the two men were kept: parents who had just picked up their kids from school, local shopkeepers who handed out drinks and snacks, and the large Muslim community who had been celebrating Eid in the nearby mosque. ‘These are our neighbours, let them go!’ they shouted. After an eight-hour standoff, Singh and Sehdev were finally released to the jubilant cheers of the crowd. The unnamed activist, who had first climbed under the Home Office van and remained there for the full eight hours, afterwards explained that he had been able to hear Singh and Sedev ‘stamping their feet in unison with the chants … I never got to talk to them,

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maybe I never will, but we were that close. Only a steel chassis separated us. Almost as if borders and barriers don’t mean shit.’109 In this chapter, I have argued that borders and other types of mobility control are a central mode of governance under racial capitalism. From the Poor Laws and Vagrancy Acts in medieval Europe to contracts of indenture, (settler) colonial immigration restrictions, and the contemporary policing of migrant lives, mobility controls have been a core mechanism through which the state produces cheap and superexploitable labour. Today’s global border regime is ultimately a system of apartheid which ‘contain, immobilize, and exclude’ the poor and paperless and ‘open, connect, and entangle’ the business traveller, expat, and holidaymaker.110 To take these insights seriously is to reject the idea that migrant justice is attainable through more inclusive forms of citizenship or open borders. While such measures might go some way towards countering the state violence that is unleashed on migrants daily, they are incapable of uprooting the structures that render migrants disposable, precarious, and super-exploitable. Like older forms of mobility control, contemporary borders are central to upholding and reproducing regimes of extractability, disposability, and slow death. Against these structures – across and beyond Europe – local communities and ordinary people continue to make the border ungovernable. If freedom is a place, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues,111 then movements such as these render migrant justice part of a bigger project of place-making: as the freedom to leave and the freedom to stay, and as the horizon of having a home in a world without enclosed homelands. As Kenmure Street reminds us, ‘These are our neighbours.’ * In the next chapter, I continue to explore the nexus of state violence and racial capitalism by turning to processes of plunder and dispossession. These vectors of violence are not separate from systems of migration and border control. In an interview with Amir Heidari, a Kurdish man incarcerated in Sweden for human smuggling, anthropologist Shahram Khosravi asks: ‘Why are there refugees?’ Amir replies: It is simple. The rich world plunders the poor world…. This is our situation. As long as there are plunderers, the plundered ones will want to come and see where their wealth has ended up.112

We now turn to this plunder.

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Skyscrapers and steel factories sprang up where the forests used to be, rivers were bottled and sold in supermarkets, fish were tinned, mountains mined and turned into shining missiles. Massive dams lit up the cities like Christmas trees. Everyone was happy. – Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness What might it mean to own ‘nothing’ as a practice of (preparing for) freedom? – Brenna Bhandar

Royal Dutch Sixty years of oil and gas extraction have transformed the Niger Delta into a post-apocalyptic landscape. Once home to one of the most important wetlands and marine ecosystems in the world, farming and fishing are today impossible in this region. The destruction of the delta began in 1956 when Royal Dutch Shell discovered oil in the village of Oloibiri. Since then, Shell and other corporations have extracted $30 billion worth of oil, leaving behind a toxic legacy of oil spills, waste discharge, and gas flaring. As one local explains, ‘We can no longer breathe natural oxygen; rather we inhale lethal and ghastly gases. Our water can no longer be drunk unless one wants to test the effect of crude oil on the body.’1 Ogoniland, a region in the south of the delta, has been particularly devastated: between 1976 and 1991, there were an estimated 2,976 oil spills. With the groundwater poisoned and the rainwater acidic, Ogoni is one of the most polluted places on earth: a wasteland. 102

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Ken Saro-Wiwa famously described the destruction of Ogoni as ‘a deadly ecological war’.2 A writer and organiser, Saro-Wiwa was a key voice in the struggle against what he called the state-sponsored ‘recolonization’ of Ogoniland. Shell, like so many other oil companies, is a product of colonialism – both in Nigeria, where it from the start benefitted from the backing of the British Empire, as well as in the Dutch East Indies, where it received direct support from the Dutch King William III (hence, the name Royal Dutch). Today, Shell is one of the world’s largest corporations. In the Niger Delta, it has continued to work closely with the Nigerian government. As Saro-Wiwa put it, ‘The military dictatorship holds down oil-producing areas such as Ogoni by military decrees and the threat or actual use of physical violence so that Shell can wage its ecological war without hindrance.’3 His resistance to this violence eventually cost him his life: in 1995, he was hanged alongside eight other leaders of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Over the next few months, hundreds of Ogonis were detained, beaten, raped, and killed. ‘They are going to arrest us all and execute us’, Saro-Wiwa had long predicted: ‘All for Shell’.4 Since the murder of Saro-Wiwa, environmentalism has moved from the margins to the centre of global politics. Tens of millions of people today live in so-called ‘sacrifice zones’ where they are routinely exposed to toxic contamination that causes cancer, respiratory problems, and heart disease. In the first eighteen months of the coronavirus pandemic, twice as many people died from pollution than from COVID-19; according to the UN, ‘One in six deaths in the world involves diseases caused by pollution, three times more than deaths from Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined and 15 times more than from all wars, murders and other forms of violence.’5 While pollution, hurricanes, drought, toxic waste discharge, and rising sea levels are typically discussed as problems that confront all of humankind, racialised and poor communities bear the brunt of this ‘slow violence’.6 As Patrisse Cullors and Nyeusi Nguvu put it, ‘The same system which props up the violent policing of our children on the streets is responsible for allowing dangerous toxins to be emitted in our backyards.’7 In this chapter, I continue to explore the role of state power in the making of racial capitalism. By studying the ‘open veins’8 and extractive frontiers of the global South, I argue that the state-sponsored

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Figure 5.1  Josh MacPhee, Ken Saro-Wiwa 5 colour risograph print on acid-free card. Courtesy of the artist and Justseeds.org.

destruction of places such as Ogoni is part of a wider ecocidal history of racial capitalism. Focusing on the nexus of plunder and propertymaking, I show that capital from its inception has operated by turning land into extractable resources and pollutable sinks: a process that I, following Traci Brynne Voyles, call wastelanding.9 As a form of state violence, wastelanding is more than just a repressive process of dispossession, extraction, and toxic waste dumping: it also names a particular way of relating to land ‘as something to be extracted from, possessed, exploited, damaged, owned, used, and abused’.10 In short, this is a racialised possessive logic premised on property ownership. This chapter examines the extractivist logic of racial capitalism and in so doing sheds new light on questions of environmental justice. Extractivism, as specified by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilsen, refers to ‘historical and contemporary processes of forced removal of raw materials and life forms from the earth’s surface, depths, and

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biosphere’.11 By examining the repressive and productive role of state violence in extractivist projects, I develop a critique of environmentalist approaches premised on reforming, seizing, and ‘greening’ the state. Instead, I theorise land-based struggles against mega-dams, mines, plantations, oil fields, pipelines, and other extractive projects as part of a wider antipolitical project of living, breathing, and relating otherwise – beyond capital, state logic, and private property ownership. The chapter begins by examining approaches that seek to enlist the state to defend the environment: what Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright call ‘Climate Leviathan’.12 I argue that these perspectives ignore the role of policing, militarism, and other forms of state violence in facilitating and entrenching capital’s exploitation and destruction of land. Next, I deepen this argument through a historical analysis of the nexus of extractivism, property-making, and capital accumulation. Focusing on the reorganisation of land into extractable commodities, I argue that wastelanding is a form of state violence without which racial capitalism cannot function. Section 3 builds on this to demonstrate that contemporary forms of environmentalism are continuations of, rather than breaks with, racial capitalism’s state-sponsored logic of wastelanding. In the final section, I show that taking this seriously requires reconfiguring environmental justice as an antipolitical struggle against private property while fostering new ways of relating to land – beyond the capitalist state and its modes of possessive ownership. Thinking with Mujeres Creando, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and the #NoDAPL movement, I theorise this as a practice of immersion rather than mastery, where ‘water is life’13 and we are part of water.

Only the State Can Save Us Now In the last two decades, environmental degradation has come to be regarded as a – if not the – central issue confronting the planet. Once seen as a fringe question, ‘going green’ is nowadays considered a top priority by governments, corporations, NGOs, and activists around the world. As part of this green revolution, the literature on global environmental politics has rapidly expanded. Today, the state looms large in this body of work.14 Robin Eckersley, for example, has famously argued that the state needs to be transformed into an ‘ecological steward and facilitator of transboundary democracy’.15

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This entails more than simply a liberal democratic state governed by a Green party; for Eckersley, what is at stake is the creation of a postliberal state informed by ecological ideals and values. For some, such as Andrew Dobson, this would be accompanied by the emergence of new forms of ecological citizenship.16 At the heart of these proposals is an understanding of ecological destruction as driven by unfettered economic growth. The solution, it follows, is to ‘reinstate the state’ and make it ‘a facilitator of progressive environmental change’.17 These ideas have also become increasingly prominent with the rise of ‘green Keynesianism’.18 Like the theoretical arguments in favour of green sovereignty, calls for a Green New Deal seek a state-led green energy transition which squares decarbonisation with job creation and enhanced social welfare. Going further, Marxist scholars such as Andreas Malm, Jodi Dean, and Kai Heron call for a ‘green Leninism’. While they are more critical of the liberal state than theorists such as Eckersley, they ultimately agree that the state needs to be used to ‘remake the economy in the service of human and nonhuman life’.19 As Dean and Heron put it: The state is a ready-made apparatus for responding to the climate crisis. It can operate at the scales necessary to develop and implement plans for reorganizing agriculture, transportation, housing, and production. It has the capacity to transform the energy sector. It is backed by a standing army. What if all that power were channeled by the many against the few on behalf of a just response to the climate crisis?20

This statism also shapes the literature on environmental justice (EJ). The immediate focus of this scholarship is the uneven distribution of environmental harm. Challenging the universalising narrative of the Anthropocene – which typically focuses on the existential threat confronting a generalised humankind – EJ scholars have demonstrated that racialised, indigenous, migrant, and other marginalised communities are disproportionately exposed to pollution, hazardous materials, toxic waste, warmer weather, and rising sea levels.21 Yet, in focusing on the distributional inequalities of environmental harms, these approaches have often regarded environmental justice as something that can be achieved within existing social, political, and economic structures. As Erik Kojola and David Pellow explain, ‘A dominant narrative among EJ researchers and activists has been that although the state may be a perpetrator and enabler of environmental injustices,

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it is the primary vehicle through which we can imagine and enact pro-environmental justice changes.’22 This narrative is echoed at the international level, where the fight against environmental destruction often is framed as a struggle for environmental human rights and the ‘greening’ of international law. Environmental justice understood in this way is premised on the promotion and maintenance of the capitalist world order of sovereign states. In contrast to these approaches, indigenous and decolonial scholars have challenged state-centric models of environmentalism. Dina GilioWhitaker, for example, criticises paradigms of environmental justice that presume the authority of the ‘homogenizing, assimilationist, capitalist State’.23 Such perspectives frame environmental justice as a question of recognition and redistribution, and consequently occlude the state’s responsibility in creating uneven distributions of harm in the first instance. In looking to the state, the EJ movement thus ‘continues to seek justice through a system that was never intended to provide justice for marginalized peoples and nonhuman natures’.24 Echoing these concerns, other critics have highlighted the direct role played by state-sponsored violence – including warfare, policing, displacement, and dispossession – in entrenching and defending extractivist industries such as mining, fracking, chemical industries, logging, and oil drilling.25 States have historically led the destruction of global environments; today, the US military is the world’s single largest consumer of oil, while the UK military sector has a carbon footprint equivalent to sixty individual countries the size of Zambia or Madagascar.26 Communities struggling to defend land and water meanwhile continue to be met with repression, surveillance, arrests, threats, disappearances, sexual violence, and assassinations. In Ecuador, antiextractive activists are typically ‘followed and intimidated’ as ‘the police and military rove Indigenous territories, facilitating the work of national and multinational capitalist enterprises’.27 In the UK, antifracking organisers have been subjected to physical abuse, criminalisation, and stigmatisation.28 In Honduras, Lenca activist Berta Cáceres, who opposed the mega-projects and resource extraction on indigenous lands, was murdered in 2014. Between 2002 and 2017, at least 1,558 land defenders were murdered.29 Andrea Brock and Nathan Stephen-Griffin describe this as a ‘state-extraction-ecocide nexus’30 in which state violence is central to seizing land, removing local populations, safeguarding extractive industries, and repressing

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dissent. Without this organised violence, the extractive logics of racial capitalism could not function and ‘mining and fossil fuel companies would be unable to accumulate profit or expand into new markets’.31 Consider, for example, the ongoing destruction of the Niger Delta. Since the arrival of Portuguese colonisers in 1444, the delta has been subjected to various forms of state-sponsored plunder: first for enslaved labour and palm oil, later for crude oil. Nigeria is today the biggest oil producer on the African continent, pumping out 1.5 million barrels of oil every day; despite this, most of the delta’s local population lives in poverty. Reports produced by Amnesty, Platform, and Human Rights Watch confirm what Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni activists argued throughout the 1990s: namely, that Shell and the Nigerian government ‘were business partners, running the highly profitable Nigerian oil fields as a joint venture’.32 Shell not only knew that the Nigerian military and police committed grave human rights violations across the region but also encouraged and solicited their intervention. In 1993, Shell repeatedly asked the Nigerian government to deploy security forces to put an end to Ogoni community organising; it also provided logistical support and funding for the new Nigerian military force, the Internal Security Task Force (ISTF).33 The brutal campaign to silence protests culminated with the execution of the Ogoni 9 in 1995. While Shell claims that it worked behind the scenes to help Saro-Wiwa and the other convicted organisers, there is no evidence to support this. Instead, five days after the execution Shell announced a new $4 billion investment in the Nigerian government’s liquefied natural gas project in Bonny, which at the time was one of the largest investments in Africa. As Brian Anderson, the chairperson of Shell Nigeria from 1994 to 1997, admits: ‘The government and the oil industry are inextricably entangled.’34 Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas put it more starkly: the Ogoni 9 ‘may well have been hanged on Shell’s oil rig’.35 This state-market partnership is not unique to Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta. Other fossil fuel companies – including BP, Total, Chevron, and ExxonMobil – share a similar history of s­ tate-sponsored extraction and expropriation. BP, for example, was founded as the First Exploitation Company in 1903. After discovering oil in Persia, it was bought by the British government, which re-named it the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. From the 1920s, BP’s Iranian oil powered the British Empire, fuelling the ships of the Royal Navy and British cars, busses, and trucks, while the profits generated from the oil trade supported

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the British standard of living. When Mohammad Mossadegh, following his election as Prime Minister of Iran in 1951, announced that he intended to nationalise the company, Britain imposed a blockade of the port of Abadan and a series of economic sanctions. A coup, orchestrated by Britain and the United States, overthrew Mossadegh’s Government in 1953. Under the new name of British Petroleum, BP tried to reclaim its former role but after pressure from the US was forced to accept membership in a consortium of companies, which also included Chevron, Texaco, ExxonMobil, and Shell. As Timothy Mitchell summarises, ‘Petroleum companies were never strong enough to monopolise the flow or stoppage of oil by themselves. They needed outside help, both military and financial.’36 As this brief history makes clear, state and market have frequently operated together to extract and expropriate; in other words, state violence underpins the ongoing climate catastrophe. To appeal to the state for redress is thus to rely ‘on the very social forces producing environmental injustices to somehow deliver environmental justice’.37 If ‘only the state can save us now’, as is widely suggested today, then we should ask: who is this ‘we’? In the next section, I take up this question through a more explicit focus on the global history of racial capitalism.38 By foregrounding the role of state violence, I theorise wastelanding as a set of techniques and mechanisms through which capital turns land into an object of ownership, exchange, and extraction. As we shall see, the history of racial capitalism unfolds as a simultaneous war on waste, on the one hand, and a process of laying waste, on the other. State violence is at the heart of both.

A Hundred Wildernesses Subdued Sister of ice and snow I’m coming to you from the land of my ancestors, from atolls, sunken volcanoes—undersea descent of sleeping giants Sister of ocean and sand, I welcome you to the land of my ancestors —to the land where they sacrificed their lives

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to make mine possible —to the land of survivors. I’m coming to you from the land my ancestors chose. Aelon Kein Ad, Marshall Islands, a country more sea than land. I welcome you to Kalaallit Nunaat, Greenland, the biggest island on earth. … Sister of ocean and sand, Can you see our glaciers groaning with the weight of the world’s heat? … Sister of ice and snow, I come to you now in grief mourning landscapes that are always forced to change.39

In the video poem, ‘Rise: From One Island to Another’, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna reflect on the interconnected violence of environmental destruction. Through a spoken-word performance, they trace the connections between the melting glaciers of Niviâna’s Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and the rising sea levels that threaten to subsume Jetñil-Kijiner’s Marshall Islands. Both islands, the two poets remind us, are products of empire, dispossession, militarism, and capitalist extraction: the Marshall Islands have been repeatedly used by the US military as a laboratory to test atomic and hydrogen bombs, fuelling displacement and diseases such as cancer and birth defects; Greenland, similarly, has been forced to house the US Thule Air Base since the Second World War, as well as several nuclear missile launch sites. Challenging ideas of a universal Anthropocene, Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna emphasise how environmental destruction is neither new nor universally experienced, but part of a long history of colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and slow death. Halfway through the video, they turn to face the camera. Merging into a ‘we’, they declare:

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From these islands we ask we demand that the world see beyond SUV’s, ac’s, their pre-packaged convenience their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief that tomorrow will never happen, that this is merely an inconvenient truth. Let me bring my home to yours. Let’s watch as Miami, New York, Shanghai, Amsterdam, London, Rio de Janeiro, and Osaka try to breathe underwater. You think you have decades before your homes fall beneath tides? We have years. We have months before you sacrifice us again before you watch from your tv and computer screens waiting to see if we will still be breathing while you do nothing.40

Building on Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna, in this section I examine the role of state power in the making of the ‘racial Capitalocene’.41 Focusing on the creation of extractive zones such as mines, plantations, and oilfields across a range of interconnected geographies, I chart the role of state power in turning land into extractable resources and pollutable zones: a process that I, following Voyles, refer to as ‘wastelanding’.42 The state and its violence are here revealed as necessary, not just to crush antiextractive activism and to construct the pipelines, railways, dams, ports, roads, and other forms of infrastructure required to transport commodities to the world market. More fundamentally, the state is itself central to a bourgeois racial order premised on converting land into objects that can be owned, appropriated, and sold for profit. As Christian Parenti puts it, ‘the modern capitalist state does not have a relationship with nature, it is a relationship with nature’.43 Crucially, this is a propertarian relation which – as Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna insist through their poetry – is grounded in racialisation and colonial difference. Where Marxists have often regarded the Industrial Revolution as the starting point of today’s climate emergency,44 an eclectic body of scholarship has recently begun to examine the unprecedented

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ecological changes that took place as part of the colonial project.45 For example, the genocide of 50 million indigenous peoples in the Americas was so immense that it led to a decline in global temperature, marking the coldest part of the Little Ice Age and the start date of today’s climate emergency.46 Generally, across the world European colonial expansion went hand in hand with deforestation, soil erosion, pollution, and the extinction of animal species. In the Americas, silver mining was a key driver of environmental destruction. The mines, which depended on wood for heat and construction materials, ‘did not so much modify local landscapes as scour them’.47 In Potosí, located in the Andes and the heart of the silver-mining industry, the lush landscape was quickly transformed into barren land. As one Spanish observer noted at the time: Even though today, because of all the work done on the mountain, there is no sign that it had ever had a forest, when it was discovered it was fully covered with trees … today not even weeds grow on the mountain, not even in the most fertile soils where trees could have grown. This is the most frightening, because now the mountain is covered with loose gravel, with little or no fertile land, crossed with sterile mineralized outcroppings.48

Such mining-driven deforestation was repeated across the continent, as Eduardo Galeano elaborates in Open Veins of Latin America. This was exacerbated by the plantation economies and the production of cash crops such as coffee, tobacco, cocoa, cotton, and, of course, sugar. Plantations depended on forest clearances, not only to create space for crop cultivation but also, in the case of sugar, to generate wood to fuel the processing of cane juice into refined sugar, which then could be shipped to European markets.49 The introduction of European agricultural practices – including livestock – also played an important role in the destruction of indigenous lands. As Virginia Anderson has shown, ‘livestock enabled the English to extend their dominion over the New World with remarkable speed and thoroughness’.50 Cattle, pigs, and hogs were allowed to roam free, trample on, and eat the vegetation, transforming agricultural fields into pastures; in fact, livestock often ‘occupied land in advance of English settlers, forcing native peoples who stood in their way either to fend off the animals as best they could or else to move on’.51 Deforestation continued apace with the sugar boom over the seventeenth century. In Brazil, vast parts of the Atlantic Forest were cleared

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by Portuguese colonisers to satisfy the colossal demand for timber, firewood, charcoal, and land for the sugarcane plantations. At its height, 12,000 hectares of forest were cleared every year; today, less than 8 per cent of the Atlantic Forest’s original extension remains.52 This process was repeated across the American settler colonies, as landscapes were cleared to allow for agriculture and pastoralism.53 The introduction of commercial fishing and whaling, alongside the trade in profitable furs and skins, meanwhile drove the exploitation of the world’s animal population: by the mid-1800s, the sea otter, beaver, bowhead, and right whale were exterminated across North America.54 In Asia and Africa, the environmental effects of European colonialism were no less devastating. Between 1850 and 1920, 152 million hectares of tropical forests were cleared to provide space for cultivation and grasslands.55 By the start of the nineteenth century, animals such as the elephant, rhino, wildebeest, and antelope were on the brink of extinction, hunted down for meat, tusks, hides, and ‘sport’. Across these continents, forests, rivers, mountains, plains, and indigenous agricultural systems were rapidly extracted, polluted, destroyed, and/or turned into resources for capitalist production. Indigenous communities had of course modified and shaped the environment around them long before the arrival of European colonisers; the non-European world was no untouched or pristine ‘wilderness’.56 Even so, it is indisputable that the rise and expansion of the European racial capitalist order ‘differed from previous kinds of human–ecosystem relationships in the scale and intensity of environmental modifications’.57 Above all, what was new was the introduction of a system of property ownership and, through that, the reorganisation of land into extractable and tradeable objects. In contrast to indigenous societies – who frequently understood land through a lens of reciprocity58 – European colonisers regarded nature as a set of commodities that could be owned and sold for profit; rivers, forests, and mountains were not members of a complex ecosystem, but were useable, extractable, and productive resources.59 This was, in turn, anchored in what Brenna Bhandar describes as a ‘racial regime of ownership’ that cast ‘both land and its native inhabitants as in need of improvement’.60 According to this logic, land without large-scale agricultural production and commercial trade was not only not owned by anyone but was also unproductive and empty: wastelands, or terra nullius.

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Wastelands, it was argued, were inhabited by underdeveloped, uncivilised, and savage peoples. Such views were espoused by a variety of Enlightenment thinkers, including William Petty, William Blackstone, Emer de Vattel, Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, and, most famously, John Locke. In Two Treatises of Government, Locke equates civilisation and order with private property. Likening the state of nature to the ‘wild woods and uncultivated waste of America left to Nature’, he asserts that land without agricultural settlement is open to appropriation: indeed, ‘Land that is left wholly to Nature, that hath no improvement of Pasturage, Tillage, or Planting, is called, as indeed it is, wast [sic]; and we shall find the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing.’61 The problem with the ‘Indians’, Locke goes on to explain, is their subsistence mode of life: they have ‘no temptation to enlarge their Possessions of Land, or contest for wider extent of Ground’.62 This conclusion is echoed by Hobbes, who similarly maintained that the ‘Indians’ prefer to ‘range a great deal of ground’ rather than cultivating ‘a little Plot with art and labour’;63 William Stratchey, equally, argued that the ‘Indians’ do not ‘knowe howe to turne to any benefitt’ and so the land ‘lyes … vayne and idle before them’;64 for John Winthrop, meanwhile, ‘the Natives in New England … inclose noe Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to improve the Land by, and soe … the country lay open to any that could and would improve it.’65 As these passages reveal, European Enlightenment philosophers associated private property with land improvement and the creation of value. Indigenous ways of living and relating to land that defied this propertarian logic were seen as savage and underdeveloped: and thus, as waste. The juridical distinction between cultivated land and wasteland, or between private property and ‘wilderness’, thus provided a rationale for dispossession and enclosure. As Bhandar explains, populations ‘who did not cultivate their lands for the purposes of commercial trade and marketized exchange … were by definition uncivilized and could be disposed of, cast out of the borders of political citizenship.’66 Civilisation was distinct from nature, and hence, progress was equated with a ‘determination to conquer and domesticate nature, to manage it, to maximize its performance’.67 Through the imbrication of improvement, productivity, and war on waste, property-making thus functioned as a central technology of governance through which racial and colonial differences were fabricated, maintained, and renewed.68

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Such ideas would later be applied in urban contexts to justify slum removal, sanitary reforms, forced land acquisition, and a host of other ‘renewal’ practices, as discussed in Chapter 3. In Europe, the rise and development of racial capitalism similarly led to the exhaustion and destruction of local ecosystems. While the co-constitution of dispossession, property ownership, and environmental degradation is increasingly recognised and studied in the settler colonial context, European landscapes were also rapidly transformed by the expanding mining, industrial, agricultural, and shipbuilding sectors. In Poland, the forested zones of the Vistula Basin were reduced at a dramatic speed; the forests around the Mediterranean and Ireland’s oakwoods faced a similar fate. As Jason Moore explains, ‘Feudal Europe had taken centuries to deforest large expanses of western and central Europe. After 1450, however, comparable deforestation occurred in decades, not centuries.’69 Here, too, environmental destruction was aided by the introduction of private property relations. Before the rise of capitalism, the commons had given peasants access to land ‘enmeshed in a web of common right and custom that prescribed within relatively narrow bounds how land could be used— what could be planted, when, where, and how’.70 By removing nonmarket access to these lands, the enclosures ultimately transformed land into an inert object to be possessed, extracted, and sold for profit. As in the (settler) colony, the logic of improvement through waste elimination was central to this process. Thinkers such as Locke justified appropriation as a means of improvement – not just in the colonies but also at home. Indeed, Locke ‘wrote with both the “domestic” and the “international,” the “inside” and the “outside,” in mind’.71 Across these geographies, unenclosed land equalled wasteland. Locke was not alone in making such arguments: the idea that land had to be improved through waste elimination was a key mantra throughout much of the seventeenth century. Samuel Hartlieb, for example, worried that England contained ‘many hundreds of acres of waste and barren lands’;72 Roger Williams, similarly, concluded that ‘We have Indians at home, Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland.’73 A tract from 1653, entitled ‘Waste Land’s Improvement’, drew a firm line between orderly, enclosed land and the ‘wild howling wildernesses’ and ‘deformed chaos’ of the disorderly wasteland. Improvement was to be achieved through the demarcation of privately owned land, the use of fertilisers to increase productivity, and new

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techniques of husbandry. If left unimproved, the commons would be ‘wasted’. This would, in turn, encourage idleness, vagrancy, and, in the words of one commentator, ‘Begging, Filching, Robbing, Roguing, Murthering’:74 in short, the very kind of waywardness and delinquency that police, mobility controls, and other technologies of state violence were designed to guard against. The rise and development of racial capitalism thus led to a reorganisation of nature in both colony and metropole. Indeed, ‘the same ideas about “improving” the waste lands of the Old World were applied to the waste lands of the New World: the hunters and gatherers on the waste lands of England had their counterparts on the waste lands of elsewhere’.75 While there are significant differences between these two processes, there are also important connections. At home and abroad, waste was to be eliminated through improvement, which, in turn, required turning land into property. Across these geographies, the project of ‘putting the whole of nature to work for capital’76 was premised on the mobilisation of state power – through conquest, enclosure, plunder, appropriation, and/or law. More than just a repressive force which lays waste to natural environments, wastelanding here emerges as a worldmaking project through which the capitalist state turns land into useable, extractable, productive, and possessable resources – often by violently destroying other ways of knowing and relating to land.77 In a speech from 1899 calling on the US to extend its ‘Manifest Destiny’ to Pacific Asia, Senator Albert Beveridge puts it bluntly: A hundred wildernesses are to be subdued. Unpenetrated regions must be explored. Unviolated valleys must be tilled. Unmastered forests must be felled. Unriven mountains must be torn asunder and their riches of gold and iron and ores of price must be delivered to the world.78

The Violence of Green The previous pages leave us with an understanding of the role of state violence in racial capitalism’s commodification and destruction of land. At first glance, it is perhaps less obvious that this logic also structures contemporary solutions to environmental degradation, including renewable energy, low-carbon technologies, and green investments. Nonetheless, and as I detail in this section, dominant forms of environmentalism remain wedded to state-sponsored extractivism in much the same way

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that older forms of imperialism often presented themselves in the language of safeguarding nature. Addressing the climate catastrophe ultimately requires dismantling – not just the fossil fuel industry – but, more fundamentally, the racial capitalist state and its wastelanding logics. While the birth of environmentalism is often associated with the New Left and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, ideas about protecting and preserving ‘wilderness’ originally emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century as part of the Romantic movement. Framing itself as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on science, logic, and rationality, Romantic writers and artists drew inspiration from what they saw as the wild, pristine, and sublime natural world – emblematised by Caspar David Friedrich’s painting from 1818, ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’. Wilderness here came to function as a symbol of ‘frontier individualism’ and the nostalgia for a vanishing world of masculine heroism. The idea of ‘sleeping under the stars, participating in blood sports, and living off the land’ became a central tenet of the Romantic ‘back to nature’ movement.79 The problem, of course, is that this idea of wilderness was a myth; as William Cronon has argued, the concept of ‘virgin’, uninhabited land is a profoundly bourgeois creation. For all its critique of Enlightenment science, Romanticism ultimately constituted a continuation of, rather than a break with, capital’s mastery over nature. Friedrich’s painting captures this logic: after all, the ‘Wanderer’ is portrayed as the conqueror of the immense wilderness which lies beneath his feet. In the nineteenth century, Romantic ideas of nature and conservation increasingly came to function as a tool for justifying the continued expropriation of indigenous lands, forests, and fields.80 Indigenous populations, it was argued, could not rationally manage or preserve the land on which they lived. The protection of wilderness was ‘a matter of imperial stewardship’ which necessitated the spread of European colonial power. In North Africa, for example, the French colonial administration argued that the ‘primitive’ techniques of the indigenous population were the direct cause of deforestation and desertification. Saving the North African land from the ‘destructive natives’, therefore, became a core component of French colonialism.81 In the Americas, conservationist ideas spurred the creation of national parks and the removal of indigenous people to reservations. In the UK, meanwhile, the Scottish Highlands were cleared of people as part of similar conservationist efforts.82

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From its inception, environmentalism was thus infused with racist and eugenic ideas which linked the preservation of wilderness to the preservation of the white race. Madison Grant – who co-founded Save the Redwoods League, the Bronx Zoo, and the American Bison Society – was a leading proponent of eugenics who opposed interracial marriage and supported forced sterilisations.83 Similar views were expressed by a 1909 report by the US National Conservation Commission, which stated that ‘If our nation cares to make any provision for its grandchildren and its grandchildren’s grandchildren, this provision must include conservation in all its branches – but above all, the conservation of the racial stock itself.’84 Garrett Hardin’s influential paper from 1968, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, continued this eugenic theme by connecting environmental degradation to overpopulation in the global South and the need for immigration restrictions. Such ideas were also put forward in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and the Club of Rome’s bestselling The Limits of Growth (1972), which both linked environmental degradation to (non-white) population pressure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer’ has similarly come to be associated with fascist ideas of ‘Blood and Soil’. Today, environmentalism remains mired in racial and colonial logics. Not only are arguments about overpopulation still common in the green movement,85 but dominant proposals for decarbonisation and green energy continue to rely on racialised extraction, dispossession, and displacement.86 In Indonesia, for example, the demand for biofuels is now the key driver of deforestation.87 In Salar de Atacama in Chile, the extraction of lithium (a central component of the batteries used in electric cars, laptops, and smartphones) is leading to the depletion of water supplies on indigenous lands.88 In Northern Sweden, wind farms are deployed on indigenous Sami lands which threaten reindeer herding.89 Across the world, at least 80 million people have been displaced by hydroelectric dam projects.90 Carbon-pricing systems, similarly, let rich consumers ‘offset’ their emissions but depend on the creation of forestry plantations in the global South, which often leads to forced evictions and food insecurity among populations living around the acquisition land.91 Similarly, the African continent is today home to the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant: the Noor Complex in Ouarzazate, Morocco. While it will help Europe meet its renewable energy target, 600 million Africans still lack access to

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any form of power.92 Across these examples, the green energy transition is premised on continued state-sponsored extractivism. As Brock and Stephens-Griffin note, ‘police, militaries, private security services, narco groups, and mercenaries’ are used to ‘pacify the communities that resist the land grabs and dispossession pursued in the name of “green capitalism”, conservation, or “sustainability.”’93 This includes the police violence inflicted on Mapuche people resisting hydropower; the violent repression of land defenders organising against industrial wind farm development in Oaxaca, Mexico; and the violent pacification of those protesting against Rio Tinto’s Ilmenite mine in southeast Madagascar.94 Taken together, these examples illustrate how the quest for green energy is facilitating new (but in many ways old) forms of dispossession and plunder across the world – a process that often fuels the displacement and waves of migration discussed in Chapter 4.95 The dichotomy between fossil fuels and renewables – or between socalled ‘bad’ and ‘good’ energy – ultimately hides that both rely on racialised extraction, expropriation, and state-sponsored violence.96 In the same way that early conservationists sought to preserve the wild by appropriating indigenous lands for metropolitan bourgeois purposes, so today’s green energy revolution depends on the continued expansion of the racial capitalist order – typically at the expense of surplus people and places, overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) in the global South. Seen from this perspective, the green economy is old wine in new bottles: a continuation of, rather than break with, the wastelanding logics that have been central to racial capitalism from its inception.

Anarcho-ch’ixi: Unmaking Property the land is not the property of masters the land is not individual property; nor collective property; the land is mother to all living creatures – Mujeres Creando

So far, I have argued that there exists an intricate relationship between extractivism, property-making, and state violence. Nik Heynen has recently proposed the concept of ‘abolition ecology’ to capture ‘the

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Figure 5.2  Marwa Arsanios, Chart for the Usership of the Land, 2022 Billboard commissioned by The Mosaic Rooms. Installation view Peckham (London, 2022). Photo by Andy Stagg. Courtesy of the artist and The Mosaic Rooms.

interconnected ways property relations are directly enmeshed within the broader environmental politics that force ongoing harm and suffering through racial capitalism’.97 For Heynen, environmental justice requires more than just decoupling from fossil fuels and investing in ‘green’ forms of energy; indeed, it necessitates the very abolition of land as property. Crucially, and as I explore next, this project must also break with the state and its grammar of justice. The undoing of property here emerges as part of a wider antipolitical struggle of refusal and ungovernability. Indigenous organisers and scholars across the world have repeatedly underscored the link between state violence, property ownership, and environmental destruction. In the United States, the indigenous uprising against the Dakota Access Pipeline highlighted that state violence is endemic to corporate plunder. As the Red Nation explains, ‘States protect capital and the ruling class, not life. Reformists who appeal to the state for change compromise our future. We refuse to compromise.’98 Guided by the principles of ‘abolition, ­anti-capitalism, and decolonization’, groups such as the Red Nation demand a simultaneous ‘divestment away from the criminalizing, caging, and harming of

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human beings and divestment away from the exploitative and extractive violence of fossil fuels’.99 In their place, they call for new ecological imaginaries based on indigenous forms of knowledge and everyday practices. As Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon explain, ‘the Mni Sose, and water in general, is not a thing that is quantifiable according to possessive logics. Mni Sose is a relative: the Mni Oyate, the Water Nation. She is alive. Nothing owns her. Thus, the popular Lakotayapi assertion “Mni Wiconi”: water is life or, more accurately, water is alive.’ And crucially, ‘You do not sell your relative.’100 In Bolivia and Ecuador, indigenous movements have similarly insisted that an end to extractivism requires the unmaking of property and the dismantling of state power. Under the leadership of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, Bolivia and Ecuador promoted buen vivir – living sustainably by ecological principles – and institutionalised indigenous worldviews in law. Yet, Bolivia and Ecuador continue to depend on oil and gas extraction, ‘while denying the gravity of theft and contamination, as Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities acutely suffer through increased cancer rates, expanded dispossession, and life’s reduction’.101 For some, such as anarcho-indigenous thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the election of Morales signalled little but the ‘spicing up and airbrushing’ of ‘a supposed “Bolivian identity” with a few touches of “Indian” to capitalise on the symbolic surplus value of Indianness in support of a capitalist project’.102 Morales, she argues, came to function as ‘the façade of the Indian’ who ‘usurped the symbolic added value of all the social struggles’.103 Consequently, rather than decolonise and indigenise the state, ‘we have to discover the way of freedom and self-organization beyond central powers’.104 Rivera Cusicanqui links this to the long lineage of Aymara, Quechua, Guaraní, and other rural and urban community struggles against the state, including the indigenous resurgence of the Kataristas in the 1970s and the 1781 rebellion led by Túpac Katari against the Spanish colonial authorities.105 This tradition offers a ‘culturally grounded critique of internal colonialism based on the “long memory” of indigenous struggles and the more recent failure of the assimilationist and homogenising agenda of the nationalist state, and the tendency of both its white minority elites and intellectuals of the “creole” Marxist left to craft the “Bolivian nation” in the image of Western progress’.106 Instead, it draws on Andean ideas of community organisation, kinship, and mutual aid to build autonomous and pluricultural societies

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beyond the hegemony of capital and the state. For Rivera Cusicanqui, this is ultimately a vision of ‘union and articulation not based on regions, municipalities, or nations, but basins, mountain ranges, hills, and forests, which all cross borders’.107 Mujeres Creando, a mestiza and Aymara feminist group based in Bolivia and famous for its graffiti, has spearheaded similar arguments. Founded in La Paz in 1992 by Julieta Paredes, María Galindo, and Mónica Mendoza, Mujeres Creando stands for an indigenous anarchism inspired, not ‘by Bakunin or the CNT, but rather by our grandmothers’.108 As they explain, ‘we’re not interested in power, women’s offices, or ministries’ but in constructing horizontal networks of care, autonomy, and communalism, ‘in the streets’ and away from the state.109 In 2011, they published ‘The Feminist Constitution’ which at once offers a critique of Morales’s Plurinational Constitution while at the same time imagining a future guided by anarcho-indigenous feminist principles. Written from the position of ‘indigenous women, whores, and lesbians’, the document proclaims the end of police, military, and legislative power: Bolivia is here declared a country free of nationalism, which has served as a platform on which to build hatred, resentment, and power plays among elites…. No government shall exist.110

In this ‘impossible country’, there will be ‘no indigenous territories because we, the indigenous, do not need borders nor reserves’. Instead of private or collective property, ‘The entire country is a free space for the coexistence of multiple forms of understanding life, death, and happiness.’111 The document embodies what Rivera Cusicanqui calls anarcho-ch’ixi: an anarchism that is ‘stained with indigeneity. It is stained with feminism. It is stained with ecology. It is even stained with religiosity, with spirituality’.112 Elsewhere, Macarena GómezBarris describes this as an embodiment of the ‘Andean radical tradition’ which, similar to Robinson’s black radical tradition, ‘represent a form of living otherwise’ in the face of colonial subjugation, dispossession, and the racial capitalist state.113 Groups such as Mujeres Creando demonstrate that ‘the dream of “another world” is not merely a future-oriented utopia but … is already in motion, teeming with the alternatives we desire’.114 The idea of antipolitics here emerges, not as an empty or abstract pipedream, but as a mode of living and breathing otherwise which continues to be enacted in the margins.

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Taken together, the above thinkers and organisers disrupt the idea that environmental justice can be achieved without confronting the racial capitalist state and its propertarian terms of order. From Ogoni to Standing Rock, the Andes to Sápmi, these movements call, not just for an end to extraction and state violence but for the cultivation of alternative ways of relating to nature – beyond the domination of land as property. As Glen Coulthard puts it, this is a struggle ‘oriented around the question of land … not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of relationships … ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way’.115 In her essay ‘Amniotechnics’, Sophie Lewis connects this radical vision of relationality to the Lakota insistence that ‘Water is life.’ All humans in history, Lewis notes, have been manufactured under water, in amniotic fluid. Pregnancy typically ends with the draining of water; and yet, even as we enter the unwet world where drowning remains an ever-present danger, humans remain overwhelmingly water. Indeed, water ‘is by far the greater part of us, yet with just the slightest change of proportion it will drown us; it is entirely dead, yet teeming with the life that can’t exist without it; it is far bigger than us and it is utterly inhuman’.116 In the messiness of life, where water is bound to flood, spill, and drift, amniotechnics emerges as a vision of radical kinship and communised care, for human and non-human life alike. ‘It is’, Lewis writes, ‘protecting water and protecting people from water’:117 a practice of immersion rather than mastery. This theme of watery immersion also reverberates across JetñilKijiner and Niviâna’s poem ‘Rise: From One Island to Another’. The video ends with the two poets immersing themselves in water, declaring that ‘each and everyone of us has to decide / if we / will / rise’.118 Here, water is no longer ‘the figure of crisis, the enemy in the era of climate’, but instead signals ‘a connective, affective, rhythmic, power of change’ which builds ‘over vast distances’ and interconnected geographies: a vision of ‘seeing in / with / and part of the water’.119 Through this immersed perspective, Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna ultimately invite us to become part of, and through that, to rise together, with the water. Remember: She is alive. Nothing owns her.

The time to become ungovernable – unpropertied and unownable – is always now.

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What the Thunder Said In his famous poem from 1922, T. S. Eliot portrays the decay and fragmentation of Western civilisation. Europe, he writes, is on ‘on the way to Chaos’: it ‘drives drunk in sacred infatuation along the edge of the precipice, sings drunkenly…. The offended bourgeoisie laughs at the songs; the saint and the seer hear them with tears.’120 While ‘The Waste Land’ has often been interpreted as an expression of postwar anxiety and the ruins of war, fears of imperial decline and racial contamination also haunt the poem. Eliot was a staunch defender of the British aristocracy and its conservativism: ‘History’, he argued, ‘is now and England’.121 In ‘What the thunder said’, the final part of the poem, he invokes a children’s song to announce the coming apocalypse and the fall of empire: ‘London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down.’ The wasteland, we are told, is the absence of Western (or better, English) civilisation. Terra nullius. Contra Eliot, in this chapter, I have explored wastelands as marking the presence of empire. From Ogoni to the Andes and Standing Rock, sacrifice zones are continually created as a necessary by-product of global racial capitalism. As Ken Saro-Wiwa was well aware, wastelanding unfolds as a state-sponsored project of corporate plunder: ‘I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial’, he explained in his last statement to the military tribunal that finally sealed his fate: ‘On trial also is the Nigerian nation, its present rulers and those who assist them … a gaggle of politicians, lawyers, judges, academics and businessmen, all of them hiding under the claim that they are only doing their duty.’122 Thirty years after Saro-Wiwa was executed, Ogoni is still waiting for justice. * In the next chapter, I continue the analysis of racial capitalism, state violence, and the antipolitics of refusal through a focus on the history and logics of sexual governance. The control and commodification of land is closely related to the policing of sexuality: as Jack Halberstam notes, wilderness has often functioned as a ‘shorthand for the supposed savagery of Indigenous peoples and specially their “savage sexualities.”’123 As we shall see, the opposite of such wilderness is state-enforced domesticity.

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6

It Runs in the Family

Family history is colonial history. – Tao Leigh Goffe, The Other Windrush [To] become something other than what lineage, kin and genealogy beget. – Tiffany Lethabo King

Private Matters On 9 September 2017, Mona Ahmed passed away at the age of eightyone. A dancer and muse widely known as ‘Delhi’s most famous hijra’, Mona was born in 1937. Doubtful of her assigned male gender from a young age, she left home as a teenager to transition and join the hijra community. She eventually built a new home for herself in a rundown graveyard in Old Delhi, where she housed, entertained, and cared for other outcasts of the Indian (post)colonial state: hijras, sex workers, orphans, beggars, and many others.1 In the last few years of her life, the Indian Supreme Court formally recognised hijras – who have been harassed, dispossessed, and demeaned since the early days of British colonial rule – as a third gender.2 Mona welcomed the ruling but remained cautious. ‘For years’, she explained, ‘our community has lived off earnings made by dancing at weddings. Now they beg at traffic-lights and on trains.’3 As Mona knew, the growing recognition of trans rights and the attempt to incorporate hijras into the fold of Indian nationalism have done little to address the poverty, inequality, criminalisation, and marginalisation that the hijra community continues to face. Hijras are still targeted by the police for ‘public indecency’, begging on the streets, and engaging in sex work. Just months after the Supreme Court ruling, more than 200 hijras were arrested by police in Bangalore and sent to the infamous ‘Beggars’ Colony’, a ‘rehabilitation camp’ for beggars, migrants, sex workers, hijras, the homeless, and other members of the underclass.4 For Mona, the Supreme Court 125

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ruling ultimately changed very little: she continued to live as an outcast and died in the same graveyard in Old Delhi where she had been for more than two decades. In this chapter, I explore the evolving relationship between state power, capital accumulation, and reproductive (un)freedoms. Against liberal mythology – which sees the ‘private’ realm of the family as distinct from the ‘public’ sphere of the state and economy – I argue that sexual governance is central to the functioning of racial capitalism. Drawing on indigenous, black, and decolonial (queer and trans) feminisms, I show that racial capitalism operates as a state-sponsored bourgeois sexual order which shores up the white propertied family by extracting reproductive labour and casting others (such as hijras) as racially perverse, broken, and dysfunctional.5 From the enslaved Africans whose children were taken from them and sold as property, to settler colonial child removal policies, eugenics and conversion therapy, development initiatives centred on population control and sterilisation, and ongoing attempts to control black and minority women’s reproductive choices, the state has a long history of intervening in the ‘private’ sphere of those it deems delinquent, wayward, dangerous, and less than human. Domestication – by which I mean the control, disciplining, and dispossession of kinship structures seen as perverse, dysfunctional, and non-normative6 – is here revealed as a central vector through which the capitalist state cheapens and organises care and social reproduction. In theorising the family as a racialised mode of governance, this chapter contributes to the Marxist literature on family abolition. This ‘infamous proposal of the Communists’ has recently resurfaced in feminist (queer and trans) theory.7 By re-reading this literature through a Robinsonian lens, I argue that family abolition is not so much about undoing the universal family (as if such a category existed), but rather about dismantling white bourgeois domesticity and the state violence required to ensure it.8 As a struggle against the racial capitalist state and its ‘familial’ terms of order, this is part of a wider project of antipolitical worldmaking beyond capital and the state. The chapter begins by situating the Indian Supreme Court’s ruling as part of a wider global trend in which sexual and gendered minorities increasingly are granted legal protection by states. Drawing on the literature on homonormativity and carceral feminism, I argue that this move towards legal equality has been premised on a turn away from

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critiques of political economy and towards an embrace of the state and the family. The second section places these developments in a historical frame. Following Tiffany Lethabo King, I ask: What kind of violence has historically been ‘required to ensure family life’?9 Focusing on the relation between capital and the state-sanctioned production of racialised perversions, I theorise ‘family’ as a site where racial capitalism historically has been made and remade. Family, I argue, is not a universal category but a civilisational marker and product of racial capitalism. The third section applies this argument to ongoing debates about the family in the time of neoliberalism. By following contemporary chains of reproductive labour around the world, I argue that neoliberalism continues to depend on reproductive extraction and the violent policing of intimacy and care. The final section brings these arguments together through a focus on antipolitical worldmaking. Re-visiting The Communist Manifesto’s famous demand – ‘Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family!’ – through a racial capitalist lens, I reconfigure family abolition as an antipolitical struggle for otherwise forms of care, kin, and ‘homefulness’.10 As we shall see, the struggle for hijra liberation is less a fight for legal rights and recognition – as Mona Ahmed knew so well – and more a struggle for care and communitymaking beyond the patriarchal state.

Liberal Love The last few decades have witnessed a rapid institutionalisation of LGBT and women’s rights. In 2011, the UN Human Rights Council passed a historic resolution endorsing the protection of sexual minorities. Same-sex relations, once seen as a perversion, are today recognised as a human right. Many states have also adopted anti-discrimination and equal opportunity laws in areas such as employment, military inclusion, and hate crimes. In parallel, there has been a widespread push to criminalise rape and other forms of sexual violence. Rape is today recognised as a weapon of war and human rights crime. While these legal reforms have been welcomed by feminist and LGBT organisers around the world, many regard them as a pyrrhic victory. Scholars such as Lisa Duggan, Roderick Ferguson, and Dean Spade have traced how mainstream LGBT movements came to embrace a non-redistributive ‘identity politics’ which focuses on winning legal rights and equality, such as the right to same-sex marriage

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and adoption.11 As David L. Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz observe, ‘while in prior decades gays and lesbians sustained a radical critique of family and marriage, today many members of these groups have largely abandoned such critical positions, demanding access to the nuclear family and its associated rights, recognitions, and privileges from the state’.12 For Duggan, this has been anchored in what she terms homonormativity: ‘a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’.13 Others argue that the assimilation of sexual minorities into the nation-state has worked to legitimise a new form of civilisational superiority in which the West is portrayed as the historic defender of sexual freedoms. For example, throughout the global war on terror, LGBT rights have frequently been mobilised against Muslims and other racialised communities.14 India’s historic recognition of hijras as a third gender similarly emerged in a context where India’s ruling elites increasingly aspire to be recognised as a ‘rising power’. As Rahul Rao notes, it is this that has motivated ‘the Indian state to detach itself from a homophobic Third World and embrace the LGBT-friendly modernity represented by the West’.15 Alongside these critiques, black, indigenous, and decolonial (queer and trans) feminist scholars have argued that today’s hegemonic feminist and LGBT movements both rely on and buttress the coercive powers of the carceral state.16 In contrast to previous generations of organisers, who typically named the private home and family as the main site of insecurity, today’s feminist movement predominantly focuses on extrafamilial forms of sexual violence. As Elizabeth Bernstein explains, there has been ‘a secular feminist shift from a focus upon bad men inside the home (sexually abusive husbands and fathers) to sexual predators outside of it (traffickers, pimps, and clients)’.17 This shift – away from the family and towards ‘stranger’ violence – not only obfuscates that the home remains ‘the most dangerous place for women’, as one UNODC report concludes.18 It also reconfigures the state, police, and border force as partners and allies in the project of ‘rescuing’ vulnerable gendered and sexed subjects from ‘bad’ (typically racially coded) men.19 Campaigns against trafficking and so-called ‘modern slavery’ ultimately need to be seen in this light: while they seek to ‘rescue’

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trafficked women from abusive men, they do little to combat the poverty, inequality, and border regimes which create the very conditions for trafficking and sexual exploitation.20 This shift in focus – from economic inequality to criminality – also underwrites hegemonic approaches to LGBT inclusion. These campaigns typically focus on punishing individual perpetrators who – due to bias and prejudice – kill, harass, and/or discriminate against sexual minorities. This often obfuscates the structural character of sexual violence, including why it is that trans teens are more likely to be killed and/or die from suicide than any other group in the US and the UK;21 or why, equally, trans and gender-non-conforming individuals are overrepresented in unemployment, homelessness, and imprisonment data.22 Crucially, these carceral solutions ignore that gendered and sexual minorities frequently are targeted by the police and wider criminal justice system. Solutions that invest in these systems not only run the risk of increasing violence and harm, but ultimately have little to offer those that are ‘imprisoned, on welfare, homeless, in the juvenile punishment and foster care systems, in danger of deportation, or the target of continuous police harassment’.23 Overall, these critiques reveal how the growing legal recognition of previously excluded sexed and gendered subjects overwhelmingly has been premised on concealing – and in some instances, entrenching – the violence of the capitalist state. This is itself anchored in a view of sexism and homo/transphobia as ‘merely cultural’, in which capitalist modernity is seen as synonymous with the unravelling of sexual freedoms.24 In the next section, I question these assumptions through a focus on the historical entanglements of state violence, racial capitalism, and reproductive (un)freedom. The domestication of families, intimacy, gender relations, and kinship arrangements deemed nonnormative has historically been central to the capitalist state’s production of disposability and extractability. Rather than demanding rights from the state, sexual liberation requires its undoing.

Dark Continent In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously called for the abolition of the family. ‘On what foundation’, they asked, ‘is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?’ The answer, they continued, is: ‘On capital, on private gain.’25

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Marx and Engels regarded the bourgeois nuclear family as central to capitalism: it privatises property inheritance and wealth accumulation, and thus ensures the reproduction of an inherently unequal and exploitative system. Later generations of scholars have built on this to theorise capitalism as a gendered and sexed project, linked to historical formations of marriage, heterosexuality, love, and intimacy. The family is here seen as a site of violence, oppression, and unwaged labour exploitation; what Shulamith Firestone calls the ‘tapeworm of exploitation’.26 In what follows, I re-visit these arguments through a focus on racial capitalism. While Marx and Engels recognised that the family, ‘in its completely developed form … exists only among the bourgeoisie’,27 later scholars have often been prone to treat the family as a universal category. In contrast, I argue that the historical production of family has unfolded as a racial-colonial project. Rather than a self-sufficient reproductive nucleus, the (white bourgeois) family has always depended on reproductive control and extraction – often through the destruction of other non-normative structures of care and kin. Calls to abolish the family must thus grapple with the fact that racial capitalism is premised on tearing apart some families in order to prop up the white propertied family. In short, if ‘capitalism cannot survive without the family’,28 then we must ask: what kind of family? To answer this question, I explore two separate but interrelated ideas. The first is that race and sexual pathology have been co-articulated as part of the same state-sponsored project of accumulation. In the words of Anne McClintock, with the rise of racial capitalism we find that ‘domestic space became racialized’ in the same way that ‘colonial space became domesticated’.29 Freud’s description of women’s sexuality as a ‘dark continent’ (a reference, of course, to the colonial conquest of ‘virgin’ lands) captures this race/sex nexus.30 We will return to this later. The second and related idea is that the development of racial capitalism unfolded as a state-sponsored attack on non-normative kinship structures: that is, on those who did not conform to white bourgeois heteropatriarchy and its ‘cult of domesticity’.31 This history has, in part, been explored by feminist and queer Marxist theorists.32 At the heart of this literature is the idea that the advent of capitalism inaugurated a new European patriarchal order in which women were confined to the sphere of reproductive labour. Those who did not adhere to ideals of bourgeois femininity – sex workers, widows, unmarried

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pregnant, single, and/or poor women – were portrayed as ‘savage beings, mentally weak, insatiably lusty, rebellious, insubordinate, incapable of self-control’.33 Under feudalism, peasant households had often been multigenerational and characterised by a low gendered division of labour. Family, in this context, included not just biological kin but also ‘non-kin inmates, sojourners, boarders or lodgers … indentured apprentices and resident servants, employed either for domestic work about the house or as an additional resident labour force for the fields or the shop’.34 In contrast, with the rise of capitalism the family was atomised, privatised, and re-organised in accordance with heteropatriarchal norms. Women’s bodies now became the target of state control as they were ‘forced to function as a means for the reproduction and accumulation of labor’.35 As Silvia Federici shows, the criminalisation of abortion, infanticide, homosexuality, birth control, and any form of non-procreative sex were central to the making of the passive, obedient, and chaste housewife – as was the great witchhunt, which unfolded across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In essence, ‘it was in the torture chambers and on the stakes on which the witches perished that the bourgeois ideals of womanhood and domesticity were forged’.36 From the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, ‘fallen women’ were also institutionalised in Magdalene asylums. While these asylums officially operated as large commercial laundries, in practice they were penitentiary workhouses. First established in Whitechapel in London in 1758, Magdalene houses could also be found in Ireland, the US, Canada, Sweden, and Australia. Following the rise of capitalism, men’s sexuality also became more tightly controlled by the state.37 In Britain, the introduction of the Buggery Act in 1533 made sodomy punishable by death. Similarly, so-called molly houses – pubs, coffee houses, and other public places where homosexual men could meet – were frequently raided by police. Queer and transgender people were regarded as a public health problem to be cleared off the streets, much like disease, dirt, and pollution.38 There was, of course, a clear class dynamic to this state violence: when Oscar Wilde was put on trial for gross indecency in 1895, what was shocking and sensational was not that Wilde was queer, but rather that he was a member of the bourgeois class and still faced prosecution. In short, sexual and gender transgression was first and foremost seen as a pathology when it was found among the poor.39

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Marxist feminist and queer approaches have generated important insights into the sexed and gendered history of capitalist development in Europe. The family is here exposed as ‘a technology of privatization’40 which cheapens care and reproductive labour. And yet, this literature has sometimes been prone to overlook the role of empire, colonisation, and slavery in the making of cisheteropatriachy and the bourgeois nuclear family: the (settler) colonial dimension is either missing or is, at best, afforded a marginal position. In contrast, scholars working within indigenous, black, and post/decolonial traditions have explored how the policing of desire, kinship, and reproductive freedom was central to the imperial project.41 European empires frequently construed the intimate practices and kinship arrangements of those that they colonised and enslaved as perversions from the white, patriarchal, and heterosexual European family. Alternative formations of gender, desire, and kinship – including same-sex intimacy, multiple genders, matrilineality, pre-marital sex, polyandry, and polygyny – were seen as degenerate, savage, and perverse: and, consequently, in need of domestication. The violent imposition of heteronormativity and the privatised nuclear family was central to the (settler) colonial state’s attempt to assimilate, ‘civilise’, and eliminate indigenous, enslaved, and colonised people; as J. Ke¯haulani Kauanui shows, indigenous kinship systems were ‘besieged with surveillance, reform campaigns, and penalty regimes for those caught “backsliding” into so-called heathendom’.42 Child removal policies formed a core component of this war on indigenous sexualities and kinship formations. From the late nineteenth century onwards, it was common practice in Australia, Canada, Scandinavia, and the United States to forcibly remove indigenous children from their homes and communities: in the same way that indigenous lands were seen as terra nullius, so indigenous children were filius nullius (nobody’s child). Children were typically sent to state-sponsored boarding schools where they were forced to assimilate European values and customs, including heterosexism and binary gender roles. At its height, between 90,000 and 100,000 children were institutionalised in Canada; in Australia, as many as one in three indigenous children were removed from their families between 1910 and 1970. In practice, the residential schools functioned as de facto prisons and death camps, in which many children suffered from physical and emotional abuse and/or died from disease and malnutrition.43

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The destruction of kinship was also one of the pillars of the plantation economies.44 Under this system, the enslaved were prohibited from marrying and creating families of their own; children could be separated from their mothers at any point; enslaved women were sexually exploited by their owners and compelled to work as wetnurses and nannies; and men and women were coupled by slaveowners. The destruction of black kinship ultimately ensured that enslaved people were individual units of property – and not members of a ‘family’. After emancipation, black women’s reproductive labour remained central to the maintenance of white households and care for white children. Black women who ‘dared refuse the gender norms and social conventions of sexual propriety … were targeted as potential prostitutes, vagrants, deviants, and incorrigible children’.45 In the Jim Crow era, white homes even functioned as an extension of the prison in which black women inmates were forced to serve as domestic workers before they were granted their freedom.46 As Hortense Spillers has argued, gender was, therefore, more than a line drawn between the feminine and the masculine, the private and the public, and the reproductive and productive spheres: more fundamentally, gender was a racialised technology which distinguished the white human from ungendered black bestiality: that is, from property.47 The imbrication of race and sexual pathology was never just confined to the colonial periphery, but also shaped sexual governance within the European metropole. Sex workers, domestic servants, and queer and transgender people were frequently likened to the colonised and the enslaved: just like vagrants, paupers, and other members of the ‘dangerous’ classes, those who transgressed sexual and gender norms were actively ‘blackened’. As McClintock explains, in the nineteenthcentury women who ‘transgressed the Victorian boundary between private and public, labor and leisure, paid work and unpaid work became increasingly stigmatized as specimens of racial regression’.48 Women domestic servants, coal miners, and sex workers were often described in racial terms: as ‘dirty’, ‘contaminating’, ‘plagues’, and ‘primitives’.49 Arthur Munby’s sketches of Victorian working-class women capture these ideas of racial degeneration: with a thick frame, ragged clothes, and large boots, the gendered poor are portrayed as grotesque, unfeminine, and, ultimately, as black. In the nineteenth century, this link between sexual pathology and racial degeneration was actively promoted by the medical community.

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Influential eugenicists such as Cesare Lombroso, Francis Galton, and Paul Broca argued that the undeserving poor could be identified by certain ‘primitive’ physical attributes, including facial features and bone structures. These ‘defects’ were, in turn, indicative of atavism – that is, of an earlier stage in human evolution. Lombroso’s influential study from 1893 directly compared the sex worker to the African woman, underscoring their shared abnormal facial features, excessive hair growth, and ‘overdeveloped’ and diseased sexual organs. Sex workers and black women, Lombroso argued, both constitute an atavistic form of humanity: they are more chimpanzee than human.50 Saartje Baartman, an enslaved Khoikhoi woman better known as the ‘Venus Hottentot’, was frequently discussed as the prototype of such biological ‘atavism’. Baartman was enslaved in 1810 and exhibited for public entertainment in London and Paris, where crowds came to see her large ‘buttocks’. As Sandra Ponzanesi explains, the ‘show was one of the most successful in London at the time. She was exhibited much like a wild beast in a cage’.51 Baartman remained on public display until she died in 1815. A cast of her body, alongside her conserved brain and genitalia, continued to be exhibited in Musée de l’homme in Paris until 1974.52 For social reformers such as Lombroso, solving the problem of ‘crime’ required the elimination of people like Baartman. That is, the reproductive freedoms of those deemed racially degenerate – black, indigenous, and colonised populations, as well as sex workers, ‘criminals’, the homeless, queer and gender non-conforming, ‘mad’ and disabled people – had to be curtailed; be it through prisons, workhouses, psychiatric wards, and/or sterilisation.53 Early proponents of birth control, such as Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, saw themselves as progressive trailblazers of this eugenic movement. ‘Birth control’, according to Sanger, ‘is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives’.54 Stopes, similarly, opposed interracial marriage and called for the sterilisation of the ‘hopelessly rotten and racially diseased’.55 Up until the 1980s, racialised, indigenous, and poor women, as well as disabled, queer, and gender-non-conforming people, were coerced into sterilisation as part of the effort to reduce non-white reproduction and prevent miscegenation.56 This brief history reveals the role of sexual governance in the (re)making of racial capitalism. The family – as an ideal of white

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bourgeois domesticity and reproduction – has never been universal but has always depended on the state-sponsored control and extraction of reproductive labour from racialised others, and the simultaneous destruction of black, indigenous, and queer lifeworlds. As Françoise Vergès puts it, race has always been ‘the modality in which patriarchy was lived’.57 Alongside policing, bordering, and wastelanding, domestication has thus formed a central technology of state violence under racial capitalism. This is more than just an afterlife of empire or a legacy of dark past: as we shall see next, reproductive control and extraction remain central to capital accumulation in the present.

Parasite It is sometimes argued that the last forty years of neoliberal restructuring have undone the family.58 The steady growth of the two-earner household; of divorce and many choosing not to marry and/or to live as single; the increased visibility and tolerance of queer, gender nonconforming, and trans lifestyles and identities: taken together, these are seen as evidence of the decline of the family. As K. D. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson explain: ‘For conservatives, the social institution of “the family” is being destroyed…. For liberals, changes to the family represent a progressive revision of the family, adjusted to be a pluralistic, supportive site for the production of individuals.’59 According to Griffiths and Gleeson, these lamentations and celebrations both misunderstand the continued centrality of the family under neoliberalism. Neoliberal restructuring, austerity, and cuts to public spending on education, healthcare, and welfare have, in fact, turned the family into the main site of wealth transfer, (household and student) debt, and care (for children as well as for the elderly, chronically ill, and disabled). Consequently, ‘Those rejected by their families, or otherwise left without one, have faced homelessness and destitution and are left without access to treatment, housing, or other support.’60 Under neoliberalism, the family has not gone away – in fact, it has become central to survival.61 While this analysis of the growing importance of the family sheds light on a number of important aspects, it also relies on a universalised analysis of family which I began to critique in the previous section. As I show next, the experience of family remains deeply bifurcated: population control and reproductive extraction for the racial poor;

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fertility clinics, surrogacy, and cracked glass ceilings for the rich. In short, neoliberalism articulates itself as a renewed attack on the reproductive freedoms of poor racialised women in the global North and South. Domestication thus remains a central vector through which racial capitalism produces disposability and extractability across a range of interconnected geographies. In the Marxist literature, neoliberalism is often seen as a counterrevolution. Privatisation, deregulation, global outsourcing, and the empowerment of finance capital, it is argued, were part of a revanchist project against the gains made by socialist movements in the post-war era.62 Questions of intimacy, reproduction, and heightened control of black and brown women’s lives are typically left out of this story, even though they are central to it. In the aftermath of the national liberation wars and the Civil Rights Movement, the shift from ‘welfare’ to ‘workfare’ emerged as a racialised and gendered strategy of containment and counterinsurgency. As part of this, the existence of poverty, crime, and unemployment increasingly came to be regarded as a product of unruly non-white families in need of discipline and control. In the United States, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous report from 1965, entitled ‘The Negro Family: The Case for National Action’, laid the groundwork by linking black poverty, crime, protest, and unemployment to ‘the weakness of the family structure’.63 Moynihan, who was assistant secretary of labour under President Johnson, argued that: the fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle-class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working-class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.64

According to Moynihan, black urban poverty was a direct result of the rising number of single-headed black woman households and the supposed moral failings of these women. That is, the black family was a ‘tangle of pathology’65 which produced social disorder. While these ideas were not new, Moynihan’s report cemented the link between welfare, undeservingness, and broken black families: welfare would from now on be a codeword for black women and their failure ‘to do gender properly’66 – even though the majority of welfare recipients were white. The figure of the black ‘welfare queen’ – a sexually

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promiscuous welfare fraudster who refuses to work, has too many children, pays for her luxurious habits with food stamps, and lives off hardworking (white) taxpayers – consequently became the main target of neoliberal restructuring, alongside Latinx, migrant, and indigenous women.67 By 1996, Bill Clinton pledged to ‘end welfare as we know it’: the result was a transformation of public assistance into a punitive program predicated on the surveillance of the ‘undeserving’ poor through ‘a diffuse network of welfare case managers, monthly reporting and documentation of sexual behavior, children, income and daily activity’.68 In Britain, the curtailment of welfare provisions similarly unfolded as an attack on the reproductive freedom of black and other minority women. Robbie Shilliam and Arun Kundnani have both shown how British neoliberalism arose as a eugenic project premised on defending the purity of the white English genus from racial contamination.69 Britain’s first neoliberal politician was not Margaret Thatcher, but the notorious racist Enoch Powell. Powell explicitly linked the ‘evils’ of economic planning to the threat posed by non-white migrants from the Commonwealth. ‘We must be mad’, Powell argued in his infamous speech from 1968, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.70

Similar to Clinton’s welfare reforms, British neoliberalism specifically targeted ‘undeserving’ migrant and minority families through a heightened emphasis on reproductive control.71 Black poverty, it was argued, was a result of the dysfunctionality of single-parent households. Half a decade later, the British figure of the ‘welfare scrounger’ is still associated with migrant and minority women, while the ‘chav’ – a young person who lives on a council estate and is immersed in violence and criminality – indicates a form of racial degeneration. Drawn from a Romani word meaning ‘child’, a ‘chav’ is a working-class white person whose behaviour signals non-whiteness, having degenerated to such an extent that they ‘match the same non-white anti-social and sub-normal groups’.72 Tony Blair had already popularised these ideas

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linking together disorder, idleness, and non-white families, but it was David Cameron’s ‘Troubled Families’ speech which pushed them to the centre of British politics. Responding to the London riots of 2011, Cameron argued that their root cause could be found, not in poverty or police violence, but in the failure of non-white parents to discipline their children: Officialdom might call them ‘families with multiple disadvantages’. Some in the press might call them ‘neighbours from hell’. Whatever you call them, we’ve known for years that a relatively small number of families are the source of a large proportion of the problems in society. Drug addiction. Alcohol abuse. Crime. A culture of disruption and irresponsibility that cascades through generations. We’ve always known that these families cost an extraordinary amount of money.73

As Cameron concluded, ‘if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start’. In France, similar ideas about the failure of non-white and, in particular, Muslim families to live up to heteropatriarchy have been central to neoliberal welfare retrenchment. Like the London riots of 2011, the 2005 Paris uprisings were blamed – not on police violence or the devastating consequences of welfare cuts – but on single mothers and ‘dysfunctional’ families.74 In Sweden, the April 2022 riots were also attributed to ‘broken’ families: according to the chief prosecutor, mothers were so ‘failed’ that they even encouraged their children to throw stones at the police.75 Ultimately, while the neoliberal shifts from ‘welfare’ to ‘workfare’ might have been new on paper, they reproduce the logic of the Poor Laws: that is, they distinguish between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ (idle and devious) poor in order to force the latter into low-wage and hyper-exploitable jobs. Through regulation, close monitoring, and punitive measures, those deemed undeserving are to be disciplined and corrected. Impoverished non-white families are hence perceived as parasites or a ‘“virus” whose diffusion must be circumscribed if it cannot be stopped’.76 Dorothy Roberts has documented how the expansion of the child welfare system has been central to this neoliberal attack on the racial and gendered poor. While child protection is said to safeguard children from domestic abuse and neglect, in practice it functions as a ‘family policing system’. By framing abuse as stemming from parental

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pathology rather than poverty, it sanctions the idea that what is needed is more surveillance and state intervention – which, in the most extreme cases, results in forcible family separation.77 Unsurprisingly, black, indigenous, and other minority children are radically overrepresented in child protection. In the United States, as many as 35 per cent of all indigenous children were taken from their families in the 1970s;78 today, black and indigenous children are 4 and 3.3 times more likely to be in foster care than white children.79 In Canada, 52.2 per cent of children in foster care are indigenous, even though they only account for 7 per cent of the child population.80 In Australia, indigenous children are eight times more likely to receive child protection services than nonindigenous children.81 As one organiser puts it, ‘the stolen generations never ended—instead it just morphed into child protection’.82 This attack on the non-white family is not unique to neoliberal states in the global North, but also informs the development policies imposed on the global South. In the dominant development literature, poverty is often linked to ‘excessive’ population growth – in much the same way that environmental degradation is often blamed on Third World birth rates, as discussed in Chapter 5.83 Associated with Thomas Malthus’s writings on overpopulation, these ideas grew increasingly common during the Cold War.84 Today, they are widely framed in the language of women’s empowerment and reproductive rights. Since the early 2000s, there has been an explosion in development initiatives that focus on improving the economic opportunities of girls and young women. While they rarely highlight fertility reduction as a core aim, their underlying logic is one of reproductive control. State-sponsored sterilisation campaigns are an increasingly common aspect of development projects in the global South, especially in India, Nigeria, and Brazil, where sterilisation rates reach as high as 80 per cent in certain regions.85 Backed by a range of international actors, including Department for International Development, US Agency for International Development, the Gates Foundation, United Nations Population Fund, and a variety of pharmaceutical companies, these population control measures often rely on technologies such as hormonal implants and injectables. As Kalpana Wilson notes, they are ‘promoted as methods which give the woman greater “choice” and control over her own fertility’, yet in practice, they often involve ‘coercive sterilisations and testing and dumping by pharmaceutical corporations of long-acting hormonal contraceptives’.86

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Across the global South and North, these attacks on reproductive freedoms have unfolded as part of the same process of the feminisation of labour. A core feature of neoliberalism, the feminisation of labour describes a simultaneous process of women’s increased participation in the labour market, on the one hand, and the rise in flexible, precarious, part-time, and casualised work, on the other.87 The sweatshops and global outsourcing discussed in Chapter 4 are, in part, products of this process. Women today make up the majority of workers in most export processing zones, and reach up to 90 per cent in some.88 According to the UN, ‘It is by now considered a stylized fact that industrialization in the context of globalization is as much female-led as it is export-led.’89 Development initiatives focused on population control are at the heart of this process because, in reducing fertility, they ultimately encourage women to leave the ‘private’ realm of the family and take up super-exploitable (sweatshop) jobs. In the global North, attacks on reproductive freedoms have facilitated a similar process of labour feminisation. Since the 1980s, white middle-class women have increasingly taken up office work, effectively ‘leaning in’ by ‘leaning on’ other women.90 This has in part been made possible by the shift from ‘welfare’ to ‘workfare’, which has pushed poor (predominantly racialised and migrant) women into precarious and low wage work, typically within the cleaning and caring sectors. The result is a racialised system of reproductive labour, in which minority and migrant workers are forced to transfer their own familial responsibilities to other, even poorer women.91 The International Labour Organization estimates that there today are 67 million domestic workers in the world; out of these, at least a fifth are international migrants.92 In sum, there is little that is new about this process of reproductive extraction and control: while the scale might be unprecedented, the underlying logic is not. Enslaved women, indentured servants, and super-exploited racial poor (women) workers have historically been central to the organisation of care and reproduction under racial capitalism. In the neoliberal era, the ideal of the white bourgeois family continues to depend on reproductive extraction. This has typically gone hand-in-hand with the racialised production of migrant, minority, and Third World families and kinship formations as perverse, broken, and dysfunctional, in need of state intervention and control.

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Missing from all of these accounts is, of course, a discussion of the role of state violence in tearing families apart: be it through incarceration, deportations, border regimes, coerced sterilisations, punitive welfare, the adoption industry, or the child protection system. As Cynthia Dewi Oka puts it, ‘where white children are celebrated as increased human capital, Black, indigenous, and Third World children are lamented as drains on state resources, prospective criminals and more recently with the (racist) overpopulation discourse, as perpetrators of environmental degradation’.93 In a time where racially and economically privileged women have access to a new array of reproductive technologies94 – including IVF and surrogacy – the racial poor are discouraged from having children at all. In old but new ways, domestication thus remains a key technology through which capital and the state produce conditions of disposability and organised abandonment around the world.

To Become Something Other The analysis in the previous pages points to the myriad ways in which sexual governance and the cheapening of care are endemic to, and necessary for reproducing, racial capitalism. This highlights the pitfalls of models of gender and sexual justice that continue to appeal to the state for reform and recognition. In contrast to juridical and state-based movements, the last few years have witnessed the (re)emergence of demands for family abolition. Spearheaded by Sophie Lewis’s call for a gestational commune in Full Surrogacy Now, thinkers such as M. E. O’Brien, Madeleine Lane-McKinely, J. J. Gleeson, K. D. Griffiths, and Kathi Weeks have explored the continued relevance of the ‘infamous proposal of the Communists’.95 Lewis herself draws on Shulamith Firestone and Alexandra Kollontai to reject the idea that children are property that belongs to their parents. In her text from 1920, Communism and the Family, Kollontai argued for the importance of destroying the property relation that is at the heart of parenting. Children are part of the ‘great proletarian family’ and should be cared for collectively. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone agreed: what is needed is a ‘diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole’.96 Building on these arguments, Lewis argues that we need to ‘deprivatize care’.97 In short, we need:

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more surrogacy: more mutual-aid. We need ways of counteracting the exclusivity and supremacy of ‘biological’ parents in children’s lives; experiments in communizing family-support infrastructures, lifestyles that discourage competitiveness and multiply non-genetic investments in the well-being of generations.98

M. E. O’Brien extends this by drawing on the work of Charles Fourier.99 Fourier, a contemporary of Marx, argued that the destruction of capitalism necessitated the undoing of the private bourgeois household. In its place, he envisioned the creation of what he called the ‘phalanstery’, an egalitarian ‘society founded on the emancipation of the passions and proclaiming the triumph of sensual pleasure’.100 Taking inspiration from this, O’Brien calls for the communisation of care beyond the remit of the nuclear family and the creation of collective kitchens, co-housing projects, co-ops, and so on.101 Black feminists have developed similar arguments by focusing on the non-normative forms of care and kin that emerged in the context of enslavement and colonisation. In Revolutionary Mothering, Alexis Pauline Gumbs describes this as a practice of making kin that is ‘defined not by the state, but by our evolving collective relationship to each other, our moments together and a possible future’.102 The 1979 National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference, which was attended by groups such as the Combahee River Collective, the Bay Area Gay Alliance of Latin Americans, and Lambda of Mexico City, marks one instance in this struggle to revolutionise and extend care beyond biological kinship. In a statement issued at the conference, the participants declared that ‘All children of lesbians are ours.’103 As Mary Peña and Barbara Carey proclaimed in an article published the same year, children are not the property of their parents: THEY WILL NOT BELONG TO THE PATRIARCHY THEY WILL NOT BELONG TO US EITHER THEY WILL BELONG ONLY TO THEMSELVES.104

What emerges, across these interventions, is a post-familial vision in which care is collectivised and universally available. As O’Brien puts it, ‘to abolish the family is to free our capacity to care for each other into more humane forms’.105 For Gleeson, similarly, this is ‘a demand for queer joy and a blossoming of other, better ways of being together’.106 When read through the lens of racial capitalism, these calls for family abolition must grapple with the fact that the state has always sought

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to destroy and dispossess some families and kinship arrangements to shore up others. As we have seen, the nuclear family is not only oppressive to those who live within it – that is, those subjected to domestic abuse, burdened with reproductive labour, marginalised because of their gender and sexuality, and so on. It is also a race-making mechanism which produces forms of disposability, extractability, and slow death. From this perspective, family abolition is not so much about undoing the universal family (as if such a category existed), but rather about dismantling white bourgeois domesticity and the state violence required to ensure it.107 Crucially, the history of sexual governance is not only a history of conquest, policing, surveillance, bordering, and so on: it is also a story of welfare assistance and social work. The supposedly ‘benign’ welfare state is a racial-colonial state, and it has been deeply implicated in enabling and entrenching various forms of extraction, expropriation, and exploitation. Consequently, when scholars such as Michelle Barrett and Mary McIntosh argue that the goal is to ‘transform not the family—but the society that needs it’,108 that is only half the truth. Equally important is to undo the violent, dispossessive, and exploitative state structures that sustain and uphold the racialised chains of control and extraction on which the (bourgeois) family depends: including the global border regime, the child protection system, the racialised and feminised care and cleaning industry, and the welfare state as we know it. In short, this is an antipolitical struggle ‘against and beyond the family’ as much as it is ‘a struggle for families’109 in the plural: queer families, intergenerational, polyamorous, and extended families, matriarchal families of colour, and other non-normative networks of kin and care. With Fred Moten, we can think of this as a project of building ‘homeless homefulness’. If ‘home’ is typically associated with a private and enclosed sphere, then ‘homeless homefulness’ names a radical form of collectivity and care. Moten writes: homelessness is not the condition in which you ain’t got no place to stay. Homelessness is not the condition in which you ain’t got a house. Homelessness is the condition in which you share your house, literally. It’s the condition in which you give your house away, constantly, as a practice of hospitality … home is where you give home away.110

Homeless homefulness, then, indicates an antipropertarian mode of care and collectivity that arises from ‘undercommon generosity

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in shared spaces that belong to no one in no time, that we can only inhabit by constantly dislocating ourselves’.111 As the radical opposite of the privatised bourgeois family, it demands an end to the violent regimes of extraction and accumulation that enable the reproductive freedom of some through the containment, abandonment, and superexploitation of others. Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) stand as one prolific example of such an antipolitics of care, kin, and homefulness. Formed in 1970 by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, STAR was ‘a multi-racial group of revolutionary street queens’112 and a radical alternative to the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). For Johnson and Rivera, these more established organisations were ‘a white, middle-class, white club’;113 the GLF and GAA, they argued, refused to challenge the police and neglected the needs of impoverished and homeless queer and trans sex workers. In contrast, STAR centred self-defence, antipolice and antiprison organising, direct action, mutual aid, and support for ‘street gay people, the street homeless people, and anybody that needed help at that time’.114 They secretly converted hotel rooms into temporary communal living spaces, and sometimes housed as many as fifty people. As Rivera recounts, ‘We fed people and clothed people. We kept the building going. We went out and hustled the streets. We paid the rent. We didn’t want the kids out in the streets hustling. They would go out and rip off food. There was always food in the house and everyone had fun.’115 STAR House became a shelter for street-based sex workers, trans and queer people of colour, poor and homeless people, and others. STAR members shared housing, food, and money, as well as strategies for safety and survival – especially against the police. In rejecting the capitalist state and its assimilationist grammars of justice, they enacted an antipolitics of refusal. As Marquis Bey notes, this was an ‘anarchism in excess of the name’.116 The STAR manifesto, which was published in 1971, captures this anarchism otherwise: ‘We want a revolutionary peoples’ government, where transvestites, street people, women, homosexuals, Puerto Ricans, Indians, and all oppressed people are free, and not fucked over by this government who treat us like the scum of the earth and kill us off like flies, one by one, and throw us into jail to rot … POWER TO THE PEOPLE.’117 STAR’s appeal to a ‘revolutionary people’s government’ should not be seen as an affirmation of state-politics and traditional models of governance, but rather

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as a yearning for modes of being together otherwise: as Bey notes, ‘For houseless, trans, gay, and otherwise oppressed people of Color to be free, in fact, necessitates the tearing down of “government”, thus the revolutionary people’s government is no government at all—it is, in a slant and perhaps admittedly an insufficient way, anarchist society.’118 More than half a decade later, this antipolitical struggle for otherwise modes of care and kin is still ongoing: in India and elsewhere, where hijras, trans, and other gender-non-conforming people continue to fight for survival amid poverty, deportations, and police violence; across the world, where super-exploited cleaning and care workers call for dignity, better pay, and fair working conditions; in places where sex workers are still struggling for decriminalised futures, and where movements continue to demand an end to policing, militarism, bordering, and other gendered, racial, and sexual forms of state violence. These (re)productive workers, communities, and networks of care not only reject the racial capitalist state and its familial terms of order; they also reveal that, despite of everything, it is still possible to ‘become something other than what lineage, kin and genealogy beget’.119

The Sisala In 2019, the media overflowed with stories of migrant families forcibly separated at the US-Mexico border. As part of President Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy against all unauthorised border crossings, border agents removed almost 4,000 children from their parents. At the time of writing, many children have yet to be reunited with their families.120 In this chapter, I have highlighted the quotidian dimension of this state violence. State-sponsored practices of breaking families apart are not exceptional, but one of racial capitalism’s historical conditions of possibility. From the plantation economies to indigenous residential schools and the global border regime, state-sponsored reproductive control and extraction have been a central tool of capital accumulation. While the last decades have seen a widespread push to criminalise sexual violence and discrimination, this has often strengthened the patriarchal state. Meanwhile, black, indigenous, and other nonnormative family formations continue to be policed and dispossessed to shore up white bourgeois domesticity.

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In the outskirts and on the margins, a variety of state-evaders, gender-benders, and antipolitical dreamers have continued to explore alternative ways of making kin. Mona Ahmed, for example, built her own family: an extended network of birds and monkeys, spirits, friends, and other outcasts living in the shadow of global Delhi. In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – a novel partly inspired by Mona’s life  – Arundhati Roy names this place of ‘homeless homefulness’ Jannat: Paradise.121 In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman similarly writes about how the experience of fugitivity can yield new ways of living together. Offering a glimpse of what care and kinship might look like beyond racial capitalism, the state, and their familial terms of order, Hartman writes: To remember what they had lost and what they became, what had been torn apart and what had come together, the fugitives and refugees and multitudes in flight were called the Sisala, which means ‘to come together, to become together, to weave together’…. Knowing that you don’t ever regain what you’ve lost, they embraced becoming something other than who they had been and naming themselves again. Newcomers were welcome. It didn’t matter that they weren’t kin or that they spoke a different language, because genealogy didn’t matter … building a community did…. So they put down their roots in foreign soil and adopted strangers as their kin and intermarried with other migrants and runaways, and shared their gods and totems, and blended their histories. “We” was the collectivity they built from the ground up, not one they had inherited, not one that others had imposed.122

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Conclusion The New Society

Times would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not utility of goods which matter, but movement; not where you are or what you have but where you have come from and where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there. – C. L. R. James

C. L. R. James died on a morning in May 1989. Having lived a life beyond the boundary, he spent his final years in the flat above the offices of the Race Today collective at 165 Railton Road in Brixton, London. From there, he continued to reflect on what he so fondly described as the ‘new society’. The question, as always, was: ‘Where to look for it and how to bring it closer?’1 Liberation from oppression and exploitation, that much he was certain, can never be delivered by the state. Rather, the ‘new society’ will only come ‘from below’: from the autonomous struggles of the oppressed and the exploited, and the ‘mariners, renegades, and castaways’, whether they be found in Haiti, Ghana, or, indeed, in Brixton.2 ‘My idea of socialism’, he maintained, ‘is very extremely opposed to the usual. For many people, socialism is the further control by people who are put in authority. For me it is the opposite.’3 As the title of his pamphlet from 1956 puts it: ‘Every cook can govern.’4 * In this book, I have sought to radicalise – or, perhaps more appropriately, anarchise – James’s position on the state and the new society. By exploring the role of state power in the making of racial capitalism, I have tried to uproot the very question of governance. The state emerged as part of a racial capitalist conception of politics centred 147

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around the antidemocratic and hierarchical question of how to be governed. Then as well as now, state violence has been central to producing the disposability and extractability that capital requires to profit and thrive. As such, the state is not a neutral arbiter of justice, as is so commonly assumed today on both the political Right and Left. Rather, the state is a relation of violence which seeks to improve, fix, and correct people and places – often with deadly consequences.5 In place of state-centred politics and visions that merely seek better ways of being governed, I have argued that the antipolitical recasts the struggle for global justice as a revolutionary worldmaking project against racial capitalism and the state. This project has historical precedents in the maroon communities scattered throughout the Americas, in the radical poverty movements that swept across medieval Europe, and in the many-headed hydra that roamed the Atlantic world.6 Today, it can be glimpsed in numerous struggles across the globe: in police, prison, and border abolition; in movements struggling against militarism, occupation, extractivism, urban displacement, and population control; and in dreams of mutual aid, universal housing, and circles of care. From the borderlands of Europe to the queer lifeworlds of Delhi, the favelas of Rio, and the poisoned landscapes of Ogoni, there exists a motley crew of people and communities that refuse to settle for reform. In Saidiya Hartman’s formulation, they have come to ‘understand reform to be a modality of reproducing the machine, reproducing the order—sustaining it’.7 Rather than reforming and perfecting the state, these state-evaders know that the machine must be prevented from working at all.8 In anarchised Jamesian terminology, every cook must become ungovernable. In the pages that remain, I want to think about what, precisely, is at stake in such an antipolitics of refusal. After all, political theorists have recently grappled with refusal and its significance for political theory and praxis. The debate has centred on whether refusal names a flight from, or a return to, the political. One influential account is offered by Fred Moten. In a series of books, Moten argues that the state is constitutively antiblack and, hence, that black life can only be sustained by flight away from politics: ‘politics, insofar as it is predicated upon the exclusion and regulation of difference, will have always been the scene of our degradation and never the scene of our redemption, redress, or repair’.9 In place of repair and reform, Moten refuses politics in favour of black sociality. As he writes with Stefano

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Harney, ‘we’re just anti-politically romantic about existing social life. We aren’t responsible for politics.’10 This emphasis on escape and flight is echoed by Saidiya Hartman in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. The book retrieves the stories of young black women who escaped to New York and Philadelphia at the turn of the century. As ‘Sexual modernists, freelovers, radicals and anarchists’, these outcasts and wayward women enacted forms of refusal and fugitivity from the margins of the city. Waywardness in this context names the ‘practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground that enabled new possibilities and new vocabularies…. It is a beautiful experiment in how to live.’11 In contrast to Moten and Hartman, Bonnie Honig posits refusal as a return to politics. Through a re-reading of Euripides’ play The Bacchae, she theorises refusal as ‘a meaning-making practice’ that postulates not just the escape from the political but also its eventual homecoming. Refusal is for Honig an ‘arc’ which begins with flight but ends with a re-claiming of the ‘right to the city’. As such, refusal is ‘not a new beginning or a fugitive practice’, as it is for Moten and Hartman. Rather, it is ‘an entry into a contest over meaning’ and, thus, an agonistic form of politics.12 Neil Roberts reaches a similar conclusion in Freedom as Marronage. By reconceptualising flight as a political project of reconstructing ‘an order in need of systemic repair’,13 he insists that ‘[f]reedom in our contemporary world lies not in the permanent evasion of leviathan’ but in ‘taming it’.14 In this book, I have argued that the dichotomy – between escape (Moten, Hartman) and return (Honig, Roberts) – comprises a false choice. To return to the political, as Honig and Roberts both suggest, is to remain bound to the state and its grammars of justice. But equally, and as marginalised, dispossessed, and oppressed communities across the world know, ‘we cannot simply turn our back on the state and hope it goes away’.15 Rather than a project of detaching from the state, or a quest for better forms of governance, antipolitical refusal should be thought of as a creatively destructive project of building the world anew: what we, with Jack Halberstam, might think of as anarchitecture.16 Anarchitecture emerged in New York in the 1970s as a project of reimaging the urban landscape. Spearheaded by artist Gordon MattaClark, it offered a critique of urban regeneration projects which drove the construction of corporate skyscrapers and the simultaneous

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Figure C.1  Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975 Gelatin silver print photocollage. 18 × 13.3 cm2. MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. © Gordon Matta-Clark, ARS, New York. Photo: Tony Coll. Courtesy of MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

displacement and abandonment of poor city neighbourhoods. By dissecting buildings designated for demolition – literally opening them up by cutting holes and slicing them apart, so that light and air could come in – anarchitecture simultaneously offered an act of reclamation, destruction, and transformation. As Halberstam explains, ‘this surgical intervention served neither to cure nor mend, but rather to explore damage, to embrace harm and blockage, and to refuse the cure that comes in the form of containment and order’. In short, by creatively unbuilding and unmaking the city, anarchitecture sought to provide space for ‘imagining and enacting new subjectivities, new ways of being, interpreting histories, and new freedoms that lie outside the state’.17 After the cuts and incisions had been made, new horizons of possibility opened up:

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You see that light enters places it else couldn’t. Angles and depths are often perceived where they need to are hidden. Spaces are available to manoeuvre through that were previously unreachable….18

Like anarchitecture, the antipolitics of refusal is a generative project of moving towards the ‘new society’. This is neither escape nor return, but an opening – similar to Matta-Clark’s building cuts – that lets in light and air. In opening a portal to utopia – what some call the commune, and others name the wild and the wayward – the antipolitical challenges the statist political imagination that has come to dominate the contemporary era. In charting a course out of the belly of the beast and towards (un)building the world anew, it hovers as an invitation to dream and imagine otherwise. Only then will every cook become ungovernable.

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Notes

Introduction: Antipolitical Dreamworlds 1 On the carceral history of Ellis Island, see Joseph Keith, Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945–1960 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013), especially chapter 4 which focuses on the incarceration of C. L. R. James. 2 C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (London and New York: Allison & Busby, 1985), 51. 3 James, 132. 4 James, 133. 5 James, 19. 6 C. L. R., James, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick, 1974), 5. For more on James’s life, see Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Verso Books, 2017) and John L. Williams, CLR James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries (London: Hachette, 2022). 7 Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon, ‘Uneven and Combined State Capitalism’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 55, no. 1 (2021): 1. See also Paolo Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic (London: Verso Books, 2021). 8 For a typical example, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016); Angela Nagle, ‘The Left Case against Open Borders’, American Affairs Journal 2, no. 4 (2018): 17–30, https://americanaffairsjournal​ .org/2018/11/the-left-case-against-open-borders/; Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Why Europe Can’t Function as it Stands’, 7 November 2016, www.versobooks.com/ blogs/2926-wolfgang-streeck-why-europe-can-t-function-as-it-stands. 9 James Trafford, The Empire at Home: Internal Colonies and the End of Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2020), xi. As Angela Mitropoulos similarly observes, ‘the state is viewed as an instrument of protection against, or obstacle to, the abstractions of capital. Oddly enough, this is often a premise that both critics and proponents of capitalism share’. Angela Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (New York: Minor Compositions, 2012), 157.

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10 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 15. Two and a half decades earlier, Ralph Miliband had similarly argued that while we all live ‘in the shadow of the state … the remarkable paradox is that the state itself, as a subject of political study, has long been very unfashionable’. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 1. See also Stuart Hall, ‘The State – Socialism’s Old Caretaker’, Marxism Today, November 1984. 11 For an analysis of the carceral turn in feminism, see Elizabeth Bernstein, Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Lola Olufemi, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (London: Pluto Press, 2020). In the sphere of LGBT activism, the state similarly came to be seen as an ally in the struggle against hate and discrimination. See Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) and David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Introduction: What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?’, Social Text 23, no. 3–4 (2005). 12 This, of course, does not mean that all previous environmentalists were antistate. Even so, the last few decades have witnessed a pronounced turn towards the state. As Erik Kojola and David Pellow explain, today the state is seen as ‘the primary vehicle through which we can imagine and enact pro-environmental justice changes’. See Erik Kojola and David N. Pellow, ‘New Directions in Environmental Justice Studies: Examining the State and Violence’, Environmental Politics 30, no. 1–2 (2021): 5. See also Laura Pulido, Ellen Kohl, and Nicole-Marie Cotton, ‘State Regulation and Environmental Justice: The Need for Strategy Reassessment’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 2 (2016). 13 Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 2. See also Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 14 Leo Panitch, ‘The Impoverishment of State Theory’, in Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered, ed. Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 92. 15 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 121. 16 As Mark Neocleous puts it, ‘the effect of cutting off the king’s head in political theory is to cut the state off from analysis’. Mark Neocleous, Administering Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 70.

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17 Saul Newman, Postanarchism (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 114. 18 Ruth Kinna, ‘Postanarchism’, Contemporary Political Theory 16, no. 2 (2017): 279. 19 On the turn to ethics and individual rights, see Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2007) and Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004). 20 Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (London: Verso Books, 2019). 21 Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 128. See also Wendy Brown, ‘“The Most We Can Hope For…”: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2 (2004). 22 Brown, States of Injury, 18. 23 Erica R. Edwards, ‘Foreword’, in The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, ed. Cedric Robinson (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), xv. See also Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). As Stuart Hall remarked already in 1984, neoliberalism has entailed a rollback of social services and a ‘parallel expansion of the warfare state’, including: ‘the repressive, “policing” aspects of the state: the state as coercive agent, defending the social order, punishing the deviant, extending its surveillance into civil society, disciplining the citizenry on to the straight and narrow, its operations increasingly shrouded in secrecy, beyond all normal forms of accountability’. See Hall, ‘The State – Socialism’s Old Caretaker’, 26. Many other scholars have made similar arguments about how the state was reconfigured (rather than rolled back) under neoliberalism. See, indicatively, Ian Bruff, ‘The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism’, Rethinking Marxism 26, no. 1 (2014) and Loïc Wacquant, ‘Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity’, Sociological Forum 25, no. 2 (2010). 24 For a typical example, see the literature on ‘failed states’. Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 25 Thomas Sankara, Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983–1987 (Tucson, AZ: Pathfinder Press, 2007), 189. 26 Martin Wight, ‘Why Is There No International Theory’, in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays on the Theory of International Politics, ed. Martin Wight and Herbert Butterfield (London: Allen and Unwin, 2019), 37. On

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the history of stateless societies, see Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020); David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). For an excellent critique of the ‘state addiction’ of Western political thought, see H. L. T. Quan, ‘“It’s Hard to Stop Rebels That Time Travel”: Democratic Living and the Radical Reimagining of Old Worlds’, in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso Books, 2017). 27 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Penguin, 2021). See also Peter James Hudson, ‘Racial Capitalism and the Dark Proletariat’, Boston Review, 2018, https://­bostonreview​ .net/forum_response/peter-james-hudson-racial-capitalism-and/. 28 Robinson’s analysis builds on a range of black activist intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Claudia Jones, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, and Lorraine Hansberry, who before him had explored questions of racism and colonialism through a Marxist lens. On black radicalism and its evolving relation to Marxism, see Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939 (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2013); Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 29 Walter Mignolo, ‘Delinking’, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 483. Anthony Bogues describes this as a heretical practice through which black radicals sought to expose Marxism’s incompleteness when it came to the non-white and colonial world. As Bogues explains, black heretics entailed ‘a double operation—an engagement with Western radical theory and then a critique of this theory’. See Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 13. 30 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001). 31 See, indicatively, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Futures of Black Radicalism (London: Verso Books, 2017); Susan Koshy et al., Colonial Racial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); Justin Leroy and Destin Jenkins, Histories of Racial Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

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Notes to pages 7–9

32 H. L. T. Quan, ‘Emancipatory Social Inquiry: Democratic Anarchism and the Robinsonian Method’, African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 120. 33 Cedric Robinson, ‘In Search of a Pan-African Commonwealth’, Social Identities 2, no. 1 (1996): 161. 34 As described in a letter to a friend, quoted in Avery Gordon, ‘Preface’, in An Anthropology of Marxism, ed. Cedric Robinson (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), xxvii. 35 Bambara, Toni Cade, ‘Foreword’, in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Bloomington: Third Woman Press, 2002), xli. 36 I thus concur with David Theo Goldberg’s argument that ‘Race marks and orders the modern nation-state … more or less from its point of conceptual and institutional emergence.’ David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (New York: Wiley, 2002), 4. 37 Cedric Robinson, ‘Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy’, in Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, ed. H. L. T. Quan (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 142. As Robinson explains, for philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle ‘Athenian democracy was theoretically indefensible.’ Robinson, 127. On the antidemocratic philosophy of Plato, see also C. L. R. James’s essay ‘Every cook can govern’ in C. L. R. James, A New Notion: Two Works, ed. Noel Ignatiev (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2010), as well as Patricia Owens, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 38 Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 194. As Wood explains elsewhere, the Republic seeks to ‘reclaim the polis for the aristocracy’ by breaking ‘the bond between politics and democracy and making hierarchy, not equality, the essence of the polis’. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages (London: Verso Books, 2011), 66. 39 Cedric Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 71. 40 Cedric Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 1. 41 Alison Brown, ‘Platonism in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Its Contribution to Early Modern Political Thought’, The Journal of Modern History 58, no. 2 (1986): 405. This of course does not mean that Plato’s political philosophy had been universally forgotten. In the Arab world, Plato was an important interlocutor for many Islamic political theorists.

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See Antony Black, History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). 42 Kenneth Minogue, ‘Hobbes and the Just Man’, in Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Cranston and Richard Stanley Peters (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 78. 43 Robinson, The Terms of Order, 8. 44 Jared A. Loggins and Andrew J. Douglas, Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021). 45 Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘Introduction: Why Black Marxism? Why Now?’, in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, ed. Cedric Robinson (London: Penguin, 2021), xiii. Craig and Ruth Wilson Gilmore similarly argue that ‘There has never been a minute in the history of capitalism lacking the organized, centralized, and reproducible capacities of the state.’ Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, ‘Restating the Obvious’, in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State, ed. Michael Sorkin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 146. 46 This is a common claim in Marxist state theory. For example, see Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society. I return to this in Chapter 1. 47 As Dean Spade puts it, ‘administrative systems’ are not just ‘responsible for sorting and managing what “naturally” exists’; rather, these systems ‘actually invent and produce meaning for the categories they administer’. Spade, Normal Life, 11. 48 Ilan Zvi Baron et al., ‘Liberal Pacification and the Phenomenology of Violence’, International Studies Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2019): 204. 49 Taiaiake Alfred, ‘Sovereignty’, in A Companion to American Indian History, ed. Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 470. 50 Micol Seigel, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 22. 51 For a more detailed analysis of the Gwangju uprising, see chapter 6 in George Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings Volume 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2012). 52 For an introduction to anarchist theory, see Ruth Kinna, The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism (London: Penguin, 2019); Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible (New York: HarperCollins, 2012); Alex Prichard et al., Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2017). 53 Sylvain Maréchal, ‘The Manifesto of Equals’, accessed 12 October 2022, https://radicaltranslations.org/performing-translation/radical-translationtoolkit/translating-manifesto-equals/.

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54 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Freedom Press, 1923), 294. 55 Marx cited in Vladimir I. Lenin, State and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 98. 56 Engels cited in Lenin, State and Revolution, 52. 57 Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 330. 58 Macarena Gómez-Barris, ‘Anarchisms Otherwise: Pedagogies of Anarco-Indigenous Feminist Critique’, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, no. 1 (2021): 120. 59 Black Rose Anarchist Federation, Black Anarchism: A Reader, 2016, 2, https://blackrosefed.org/black-anarchism-a-reader/. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin similarly argues that the anarchist movement ‘is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and, for the most part, pacifist’. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 41. 60 For an anticolonial critique, see Adam J. Barker, ‘Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy Movements in North America’, Social Movement Studies 11, no. 3–4 (2012) and Sandy Grande, ‘Accumulation of the Primitive: The Limits of Liberalism and the Politics of Occupy Wall Street’, Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013). 61 Süreyyya Evren, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Anarchist Flag! Race, Ethnicity and Anarchism’, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism, ed. Ruth Kinna (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012). On methodological whiteness, see Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘Brexit, Trump, and “Methodological Whiteness”: On the Misrecognition of Race and Class’, The British Journal of Sociology 68, no. S1 (2017). 62 Jason Adams, ‘Nonwestern Anarchisms: Rethinking the Global Context’, 2003, 4, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-adams-nonwestern-anarchisms. 63 See, indicatively, Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso Books, 2005); Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Barry Maxwell and Raymond Craib, ed., No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2015); Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870– 1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Geoffroy de Laforcade and Kirwin R. Shaffer, In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015); David Porter, Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria (Chico, CA: AK Press,

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2011); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 64 Maia Ramnath, ‘Non-Western Anarchisms and Postcolonialism’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London and New York: Springer, 2018), 677–78. 65 Carl Levy, ‘Social Histories of Anarchism’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4, no. 2 (2010): 23. 66 Edwards, ‘Foreword’, xxiii. 67 Robinson, The Terms of Order, 188. 68 Robinson, Black Marxism, 137. 69 Robinson, 310. 70 Robinson, l. 71 Joshua Myers, Of Black Study (London: Pluto Press, 2023), 151; Joshua Myers, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2021), back cover. Andrew Douglas and Jared Loggins similarly explain that the concept of antipolitics throws up questions that are ‘not … about how we want to be governed. They are not conventionally political questions. They are, rather, questions about how we want to live, how we want to be together in the world.’ Loggins and Douglas, Prophet of Discontent, 73. 72 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019), 229. 73 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner’, Medium, 2018, https://medium.com/@merricatherine/the-anarchyof-colored-girls-assembled-in-a-riotous-manner-dfa8665a779a. 74 Robinson’s notion of antipolitics is thus radically different from that of James Ferguson’s ‘anti-politics machine’. Where Ferguson uses the term antipolitics as a synonym for depoliticisation, for Robinson antipolitics signals a different register of life altogether. See James Ferguson, The Anti-­Politics Machine: ‘Development,’ Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 75 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 74. The antipolitics of refusal also shares similarities with Halberstam’s concept of the wild. ‘Wildness’, writes Haberstam, is ‘a space/name/critical term for what lies beyond current logics of rule’. Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), xiv. On experiments in living and imagining otherwise, see Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (London: Hajar Press, 2021).

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Notes to pages 15–21

76 Seigel, Violence Work, 21. I borrow the term ‘state evaders’ from Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed. 77 The phrase ‘every cook can become ungovernable’ is, of course, a reference to Lenin’s ‘every cook can govern’, a saying later adopted and popularised by C. L. R. James. In theorising an antipolitical tradition of anarchism, my analysis goes further than Lenin and James in arguing for a complete break with politics understood as governance. On wildcatting the state, see Eric A. Stanley, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). 78 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis’, in C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, ed. Paget Henry and Paul Buhle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 69; 89. Robinson similarly observes that ‘James was formed from the interception of the bourgeois literature and culture of Victorian England (which, in a characteristically Jamesian mutation, included cricket) and the social life and racial order of his own colonial world’. Cedric Robinson, ‘C.L.R. James and the World-System’, Race & Class 34, no. 2 (1992): 50. 79 C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London: Random House, 2014). 80 On the concept of the utopian margins, see Avery F. Gordon, The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 81 Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 182. 82 This clever formulation is from Halberstam, Wild Things, 29. 83 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed. 84 As Voyles describes it, wastelanding is a project of ‘rendering resources extractable and lands and bodies pollutable’. Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 24. 85 Jack Halberstam, ‘The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons’, in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, ed. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 7.

1  A Most Bourgeois Ambition 1 For more on Assata Shakur, see Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (London: Zed Book, 2014). 2 Kuwasi Balagoon, Soldier’s Story: Revolutionary Writings by a New Afrikan Anarchist (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2019), 154. 3 The title, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, references a speech by Marcus Garvey: ‘Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me

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all around you, for, with God’s grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of Black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and by the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for liberty, freedom, and life’ (p. 19). See Sekou Odinga, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, and Jamal Joseph, Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2017). 4 See ‘Letters from Prison’ in Balagoon, Soldier’s Story, 195. 5 For an introduction to the life and writings of Kuwasi Balagoon, see Balagoon, Soldier’s Story; Akinyele Umoja, ‘Maroon: Kuwasi Balagoon and the Evolution of Revolutionary New Afrikan Anarchism’, Science & Society 79, no. 2 (2015) and Kazembe Balagun, ‘Kuwasi at 60’, The Anarchist Library, 24 December 2006, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/ library/kazembe-balagun-kuwasi-at-60. 6 See, indicatively, William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (Chico: AK Press, 2021); Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2021); Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (London: Hachette, 2017); Julio Ramos, ed., ‘Special Issue: The Legacies of Luisa Capetillo’, Small Axe: A Carribean Journal of Criticism 69, no. 11 (2022): 68–73; Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Eric A. Stanley, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). 7 Cedric Robinson, ‘In Search of a Pan-African Commonwealth’, Social Identities 2, no. 1 (1 February 1996): 161. 8 James theorised state capitalism in a number of works; see, for example, C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2013) and C. L. R. James, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick, 1974). He argued that the Soviet Union was not socialist at all, but merely a state-centred version of capitalism. 9 Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution, 97. 10 See ‘Brink’s Trial Opening Statement’, in Balagoon, Soldier’s Story. 11 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, The Truth about Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 12. 12 David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah, ‘The Westphalian Deferral’, International Studies Review 2, no. 2 (2000): 39. 13 For a typical example, see Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

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14 For an overview of this tradition, see Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Virtuous Violence and the Politics of Statecraft in Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Weber’, Political Studies 59, no. 1 (2011): 56–73. 15 Max Weber, Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 310–11. 16 Cited in Terry Maley, Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 118. 17 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European State-­Making’, in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 3–83. 18 Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making’, 42. 19 Benno Teschke, ‘Theorizing the Westphalian System of States: International Relations from Absolutism to Capitalism’, European Journal of International Relations 8, no. 1 (2002): 7. 20 As Teschke adds, ‘The political organization of the modern world in form of a territorially divided system of states is not a function of capitalism.’ Teschke, 37. 21 Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 64–65. See also Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso Books, 1994). 22 Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 33. See also Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Academic Press, 1974), 134. 23 Gurminder Bhambra, ‘The State: Postcolonial Histories of the Concept’, in Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics, ed. Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam (Abingdon: Routledge: 2020), 203. 24 Of course, Tilly does recognise that European great powers had colonies – but the process of colonialism itself is not given any explanatory power in his analysis of state formation. On small wars, see Tarak Barkawi, ‘Decolonizing War’, European Journal of International Security 1, no. 2 (2016): 199–214. 25 For example, see Andrew Delatolla, Civilization and the Making of the State in Lebanon and Syria (London and New York: Springer, 2021). 26 Irfan Habib, ‘The Rise of Capitalism in England: Reviewing the Brenner Thesis’, Studies in People’s History 1, no. 1 (2014): 112.

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27 Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2015), 278. 28 Jordan Branch, ‘“Colonial Reflection” and Territoriality: The Peripheral Origins of Sovereign Statehood’, European Journal of International Relations 18, no. 2 (2012): 277–97. 29 Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 12. 30 Jeanne Morefield, ‘Beyond Boomerang’, International Politics Reviews 8, no. 1 (2020): 7. 31 Gabrielle Dacosta, ‘The Havoc of Less’, The New Inquiry (blog), 15 September 2017, n.p., https://thenewinquiry.com/the-havoc-of-less/. 32 See Dana M. Williams, ‘Black Panther Radical Factionalization and the Development of Black Anarchism’, Journal of Black Studies 46, no. 7 (2015): 686. 33 Robyn Maynard, ‘Anarchists in the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army’, Zine, 2010, 2, https://e-artexte.ca/id/eprint/32161/. 34 Balagoon, Soldier’s Story. 35 Cedric Robinson, ‘Oliver Cromwell Cox and the Historiography of the West’, Cultural Critique, no. 17 (1990): 5–19. 36 On the African roots of Robinson’s scholarship, see Yousuf Al-Bulushi, ‘Thinking Racial Capitalism and Black Radicalism from Africa: An Intellectual Geography of Cedric Robinson’s World-System’, Geoforum 132 (2020): 252–62. 37 See Jenny Bourne, ‘Out of the Cauldron: Lessons from Cedric Robinson’, Race & Class 63, no. 3 (2022): 3–21. 38 See, indicatively, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); Siddhant Issar, ‘Theorising “Racial/Colonial Primitive Accumulation”: Settler Colonialism, Slavery and Racial Capitalism’, Race & Class 63, no. 1 (2021); Susan Koshy et al., Colonial Racial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); Justin Leroy and Destin Jenkins, Histories of Racial Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). 39 Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, ‘Restating the Obvious’, in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State, ed. Michael Sorkin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 146. 40 Cedric Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 111. 41 Robinson, 59. 42 Robinson, 59. 43 Robinson, 123. As he elaborates, ‘Marx would argue that bourgeois society was a necessary condition for socialism. He maintained that

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without the mastery of nature, the unique technological contribution of industrial society, socialism was not possible. We now know differently. The rudiments of Western socialism appeared as early as the thirteenth century—without industrial production.’ Robinson, 59. 44 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Penguin, 2021), 10. 45 Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?’, Text, Boston Review, 12 January 2017, http://bostonreview.net/ race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism. Similarly, and as Robinson elaborates, ‘to assume that feudal society dissolved before capitalist society began is to overemphasize the fragility of feudalism and to discount its uses to the development of capitalism’. Robinson, ‘Oliver Cromwell Cox and the Historiography of the West’, 13. 46 Avery Gordon, ‘Preface’, in An Anthropology of Marxism, ed. Cedric Robinson (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), xii. 47 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 192. Robinson studied with Norman Cohn during his time at the University of Sussex. For a discussion, see Joshua Myers, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2021), 96. 48 Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 137. 49 Cited in Cohn, 199. 50 Cohn, 204. 51 Cited in Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 21. 52 Robinson, Black Marxism, 17. 53 Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 21. 54 Cited in Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I, 134. 55 Ellen Meiksins Wood, Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment (London: Verso Books, 2012), 7. As Perry Anderson elaborates, the first absolutist states were not a vehicle of the capitalist bourgeoisie, but a ‘redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position’. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso Books, 2013), 18. 56 Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 49–50. Emphasis added. 57 Federici, 21. 58 Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 246.

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59 Robinson, Black Marxism, 10. 60 Robinson, 26. 61 Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 317. 62 Heng, 149. 63 See Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages and Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2004). 64 Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, 44. Emphasis added. 65 Heng, 35. 66 Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I, 38. 67 Gerald Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2020), 49. 68 See Walter Johnson, ‘To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice’, Text, Boston Review, 19 October 2016, https://­bostonreview​ .net/race/walter-johnson-slavery-human-rights-racial-capitalism. 69 Eric Mielants and Ramon Grosfuguel, ‘The Long-Durée Entanglement between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist/ Patriarchal World-System’, Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5, no. 1 (2006), https://­digitalcommons​.fairfield​.edu/ sociologyandanthropology-facultypubs/39; Satnam Virdee, ‘The Longue Durée of Racialized Capitalism: A Response to Charlie Post’, RACE. ED (blog), 16 April 2021, www​ .race.ed.ac​ .uk/the-longue-duree-ofracialized-capitalism-a-response-to-charlie-post/. 70 Robinson, Black Marxism, 108. 71 Robinson, 109. 72 A similar argument has more recently been put forward in Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Mamdani, however, does not link the rise of the state to the dominance of capital. 73 Robinson, Black Marxism, 19. 74 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (New York: Wiley, 2002), 4. 75 As Onur Ulas Ince argues, Marxists have often had a ‘tendency to imagine capitalism in a liberal mold’: that is, as system of free labour and self-­regulating markets. Onur Ulas Ince, ‘Between Equal Rights: Primitive Accumulation and Capital’s Violence’, Political Theory 46, no. 6 (2018): 96. 76 Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism’, New Left Review, I/127 (1981): 85.

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77 For Teschke, similarly, with the rise of capitalism ‘the separation between an uncoercive “economic economy” and a purely “political state”, maintaining the monopoly in the means of violence, is established. State and market turn into two structurally separated spheres. The separation between the economic and the political is built into capitalism’. Teschke, ‘Theorizing the Westphalian System of States’, 31–32. 78 On Marxist state theory, see Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso Books, 2014). 79 On the fabrication of bourgeois social order, see Mark Neocleous, Administering Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). 80 Cedric Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 1. 81 Robinson, 71. 82 Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism, 16. See also Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages (London: Verso Books, 2011) and Patricia Owens, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 83 Cedric Robinson, ‘Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy’, in Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, ed. H. L. T. Quan (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 142. For Plato, politics is a specialised art which requires expertise knowledge. 84 Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 187. 85 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: The Matter, Form, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (Auckland: The Floating ­ Press, 2009), 179. 86 Hobbes, Leviathan, 180. 87 David Gauthier, Moral Dealing: Contract, Ethics, and Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 74. See also Karl Widerquist, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy: Challenging Stone Age Stories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 88 As Goldberg summarises, ‘race stands for that which the modern state is not, what the state avoids, what it is to keep at bay’. Goldberg, The Racial State, 40. 89 Joshua Myers, Of Black Study (London: Pluto Press, 2023), 164. 90 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (North Chelmsford: Courier Corporation, 2004), 93; 99.

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91 Some Marxist scholars have theorised the relation between capital and state violence through the lens of pacification: that is, as a permanent war waged on the poor, the disposable, and the undeserving in the service of fabricating ‘a social order of wage labour’. See Mark Neocleous, ‘The Dream of Pacification: Accumulation, Class War, and the Hunt’, Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes 9, no. 2 (2013). Robinson’s analysis expands on this by showing how capitalism historically has operated through a range of distinct yet interconnected systems, including wagelabour as well as chattel slavery, racialised indentured servitude, and indigenous dispossession. 92 For example, see Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties (Latham: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1986); Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation; Marta Russell, Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019). 93 As Lauren Berlant explains, ‘slow death refers to the physical wearing out of a population’. Lauren Berlant, ‘Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)’, Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 754. 94 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘What Is to Be Done?’, American Quarterly 63, no. 2 (16 June 2011): 257. 95 Jasmine Gibson, ‘Kuwasi Balagoon: On Lineage’, Pinko, 2019, n.p., https://pinko.online/pinko-1/kuwasi-balagoon. 96 Robinson, The Terms of Order, 1.

2  Ode to Utopia 1 Cited in Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 29. 2 Cited in Lock, 26. 3 Cited in Lock, 27. 4 Cited in Lock, 28. As John Szwed explains, space is for Ra ‘a metaphor which transvalues the dominant terms so that they become aberrant, a minority position, which the terms of the outside, the beyond, the margins, become the standard’. John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2000), 140. 5 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (New York: Beacon Press, 2022), 17. See also Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); Lock, Blutopia.

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Notes to pages 44–47

6 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 132. 7 Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 223. See also Avery Gordon, ‘Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity’, Borderlands 10, no. 2 (2011): 1. 8 On the concept of otherwise, see Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 9 V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015), 86–87. 10 Vladimir Lenin, ‘Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?’, 1917, www​ .marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/01.htm. 11 Stuart Hall, ‘The State – Socialism’s Old Caretaker’, Marxism Today, November 1984, 85. Angela Mitropoulos similarly notes that ‘capital and the state are regarded as distinctive logics, the first inclined to overtake limits, the second emphasising limit as such’. Angela Mitropolous, Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (New York: Minor Compositions, 2012), 157. 12 Davina Cooper, Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 154. 13 Cooper, 3. 14 Cooper, 4. 15 Janet Newman and John Clarke, ‘States of Imagination’, Soundings 57, no. 57 (2014): 154. For a related argument, see James Ferguson, ‘Toward a Left Art of Government: From “Foucauldian Critique” to Foucauldian Politics’, History of the Human Sciences 24, no. 4 (2011): 61–68. 16 Davina Cooper, ‘Prefiguring the State’, Antipode 49, no. 2 (2017): 337–38. 17 Ferguson, ‘Toward a Left Art of Government’. 18 Patricia Owens, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 19. 19 Owens, 16. See also Mark Neocleous, Administering Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), chapter 2. 20 Cited in Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism (London: Verso Books, 2022), 25. 21 As Adom Getachew explains, the attainment of self-determination is often seen ‘as a double move of overcoming alien rule and achieving inclusion in international society. Empire comes to an end when formerly excluded colonies enter international society as full members, and central to this inclusion is the universalization of the nation-state as the

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accepted institutional form of self-determination.’ Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 16. 22 Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 23 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004); Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell, ed., Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021); C. L. R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2012). 24 James, A History of Pan-African Revolt, 117. 25 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 100. 26 Raymond B. Craib, ‘Cartography and Decolonization’, in Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation, ed. James R. Akerman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 36. For Robin Kelley, similarly, ‘the fact is, while colonialism in its formal sense might have been dismantled, the colonial state has not. Many of the problems of democracy are products of the old colonial state whose primary difference is the presence of black faces. It has to do with the rise of a new ruling class—the class Fanon warned us about—who are content with mimicking the colonial masters’. Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘A Poetics of Anticolonialism’, Monthly Review (blog), 1 November 1999, https://­monthlyreview.org/1999/11/01/a-poetics-of-anticolonialism/. Nandita Sharma also argues that ‘far from challenging the social relations of imperialism’, the new postcolonial world order implemented new, nationalist forms of regulating capitalism, managing ‘populations’ and, crucially, ‘containing the revolutionary and liberatory demands of people across the globe’. See Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 122. 27 Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2011), 4. See also Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2022), 159. 28 Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 218. On stateless societies, see also David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004) and James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 29 The line is from Walcott’s poem ‘The Schooner Flight’ included in Derek Walcott, The Star-Apple Kingdom (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014).

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Notes to pages 49–51

30 These fantasies of utopia have often been premised on settler colonial fantasies. See Karl Hardy, ‘Unsettling Hope: Contemporary Indigenous Politics, Settler Colonialism, and Utopianism’, Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal 2, no. 1 (2012). On oceans of pink lemonade, see Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022). 31 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009). See also Brown, Black Utopias and Gary Wilder, Concrete Utopianism: The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022). 32 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 3. On utopias in the present, see Avery F. Gordon, The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 33 C. L. R. James, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, Facing Reality (Detroit: Bewick, 1974), 151. 34 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 56. 35 Cedric Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 13. 36 As Robinson elaborates, Marx and Engels did not invent socialism but rather translated older socialist ‘currents into secular format’. Robinson, 16–17. For a typical example, see Eric Hobsbawm’s description of revolutionary peasants and pre-industrial revolts as ‘mob rule’, ‘millenarianism’, and ‘primitivism’. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971). 37 Cedric Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 218. 38 Robinson, 218. 39 Robinson, 188. 40 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Penguin, 2021), l. In Robin D. G. Kelley’s apt summary, ‘Black Marxism is neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist. It is a dialectical critique of Marxism that turned to the long history of Black revolt – and to Black radical intellectuals who, in confronting fascism, colonialism, and the prospect of socialism, also turned to the history of Black revolt – to construct a wholly original theory of revolution and interpretation of the history of the modern world.’ Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘Introduction: Why Black Marxism? Why Now?’, in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, ed. Cedric Robinson (London: Penguin, 2021), xix. 41 Robinson, Black Marxism, 141. 42 Robinson, 170.

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43 Cedric Robinson, ‘An Inventory of Contemporary Black Politics’, Emergency 2 (1984): 21. 44 Robinson, 21. 45 Robinson, 22. As he explains, Marxism is ‘a theory of history which argued that the agents of change were most genuinely identified in residual terms … those masses which mobilise in order to transform their lives are best understood by understanding whatever it is that has mobilized them’. Robinson, 21. 46 Cedric Robinson, ‘Manichaeism and Multiculturalism’, in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 122. 47 Cedric Robinson, ‘Coming to Terms: The Third World and the Dialectic of Imperialism’, Race & Class 22, no. 4 (1981): 383. 48 Robinson, 369. 49 Robinson, 369. As he elaborates in Black Marxism, ‘the material or “objective” power of the enemy was irrelevant to their destinies. His machines, which flung metal missiles, his vessels of smoke, gas, fire, disease, all were of lesser relevance than the integral totality of the people themselves’. Robinson, Black Marxism, 169. 50 Robinson, Black Marxism, 274. For an excellent discussion, see also Bourne, Jenny. ‘Out of the Cauldron: Lessons from Cedric Robinson’. Race & Class 63, no. 3 (2022). 51 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 86. 52 James, 243. 53 Robinson, Black Marxism, 276. 54 Robinson, 274. As he elaborates: ‘Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or decultured blanks – men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension.’ Robinson, 121–22. As Robbie Shilliam has argued, this is something that James would come to recognise later in life. Revisiting the argument of The Black Jacobin, James argued that ‘the slave brought himself [sic]; he brought with him the content of his mind, his memory. He thought in the logic and the language of his people. He recognized as socially significant that which he had been taught.’ Cited in Robbie Shilliam, ‘Race and Revolution at Bwa Kayiman’, Millennium 45, no. 3 (2017): 247. For a related argument, see also Robbie Shilliam,

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Notes to pages 52–54

The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). 55 James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 86. 56 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, 1852, www​ .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm. 57 Marx. 58 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘The Communist Manifesto (Chapter 3)’, 1848, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ ch03.htm. 59 Marx and Engels. 60 Friedrich Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, 1880, www.­marxists​ .org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch01.htm. More recently, Wallerstein has reformulated this as a quest for what he calls ‘Utopistics’. Utopistics are not abstract utopias, because they are grounded in rationalism and science: it is ‘the sober, rational, and realistic evaluation of human social systems, the constraints on what they can be, and the zones open to human creativity’. Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics, Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 1998), 1–2. 61 Robinson, Black Marxism, 170. 62 Robinson, 167. 63 Joshua Myers, Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2021), 164. 64 Robinson, ‘Manichaeism and Multiculturalism’, 122. Emphasis added. 65 On Marxism without guarantees, see Stuart Hall, ‘The Problem of ­Ideology-Marxism without Guarantees’, Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986). See also Avery Gordon, ‘Some Thoughts on the Utopian’, Anthropology & Materialism. A Journal of Social Research, no. 3 (2016). 66 Cedric Robinson and Elizabeth Robinson, ‘Preface’, in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso Books, 2017), 7. 67 Robinson, Black Marxism, l. 68 Macarena Gómez-Barris, ‘Anarchisms Otherwise: Pedagogies of Anarco-Indigenous Feminist Critique’, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, no. 1 (2021): 120. 69 Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the ­Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso Books, 2005). On the postcolonial turn in anarchist studies, see also Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870– 1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Geoffroy de Laforcade and Kirwin R. Shaffer, In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American

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History (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015); Barry Maxwell, No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2015); Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism. 70 Maia Ramnath, ‘Non-Western Anarchisms and Postcolonialism’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London and New York: Springer, 2018), 677. 71 Joshua Myers, Of Black Study (London: Pluto Press, 2023), 142. 72 Robinson, The Terms of Order, 211. 73 Robinson, 212. 74 See Robinson, 212. 75 H. L. T. Quan makes a similar observation in H. L. T. Quan, ‘Emancipatory Social Inquiry: Democratic Anarchism and the Robinsonian Method’, African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013). 76 Cited in Kelley, ‘Introduction: Why Black Marxism? Why Now?’, xxiv. 77 Cited in Kelley, xxv. 78 Ramnath, ‘Non-Western Anarchisms and Postcolonialism’, 678. 79 David Graeber, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (London: Random House, 2023), x. 80 Graeber, x. 81 Graeber, xvi. Elsewhere, Graber also discusses the ‘egalitarian and skeptical rationalist’ indigenous societies in North America as precursors to Enlightenment thought. See David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (London: Penguin, 2021). 82 On anarchism otherwise, see also Gómez-Barris, ‘Anarchisms Otherwise’. For a discussion of ‘the domain of the strange, the marvelous and the fantastic’ and its centrality to revolutionary praxis, see Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. As Kelley makes clear, there can be no freedom without poetic ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to the world, whether through dreams, poetry, spirituality, or the ecstatic. 83 Myers, Of Black Study, 142. 84 Robinson, The Terms of Order, 215. See also Myers, Of Black Study, 181. 85 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019). On black anarchism, see also William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2021); William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018); Marquis Bey, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020). 86 Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), xiv.

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87 Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Bill Weinberg, ‘Indigenous Anarchist Critique of Bolivia’s “Indigenous State”: Interview with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’, Upside Down World (blog), 3 September 2014, https:// upsidedownworld.org/archives/bolivia/indigenous-anarchist-critique-ofbolivias-indigenous-state-interview-with-silvia-rivera-cusicanqui/. 88 Ra cited in Tony Bolden, ‘Afrofuturism in Black Music: An Historical Overview’, A History of African American Music, 2022, https://timeline​ .carnegiehall.org/. 89 Lock, Blutopia, 42. 90 Jordan’s poem ‘Moving Towards Home’ is included in June Jor dan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2012). 91 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 172. 92 James, Lee, and Chaulieu, Facing Reality, 151.

3  War on Dirt 1 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both described Rio de Janeiro’s military and civil police as the most violent in the world. See ‘Brazil: You Killed My Son: Homicides by Military Police in the City of Rio de Janeiro’, Amnesty International, accessed 8 March 2022, www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr19/2068/2015/en/ and ‘Brazil: Extrajudicial Executions Undercut Rio Security’, Human Rights Watch (blog), 7 July 2016, www.hrw.org/news/2016/07/07/ brazil-extrajudicial-executions-undercut-rio-security. 2 See ‘Forum Reports Black Genocide in Brazil to UN’, accessed 8 March 2022, https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/direitos-humanos/ noticia/2017-12/forum-reports-black-genocide-brazil-un. 3 Tom Phillips, ‘Jair Bolsonaro Says Criminals Will “Die Like Cockroaches” under Proposed New Laws’, The Guardian, 5 August 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/06/jair-bolosonaro-says-­ criminals-will-die-like-cockroaches-under-proposed-new-laws. 4 Lisa Marie Cacho and Jodi Melamed, ‘“Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the Police”: Policing as Street Administration of Colonial Racial Capitalist Order’, in Colonial Racial Capitalism, ed. Susan Koshy et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 162.

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5 On black anarchism, see William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2021); Marquis Bey, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes toward a Black Anarchism (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020); Eric A. Stanley, Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). 6 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 44. 7 Douglas, 45; 44. 8 Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2004): 267. 9 Andreia Beatriz Silva dos Santos, Fábio Nascimento-Mandingo, and Amy Chazkel, ‘React or Be Killed: The History of Policing and the Struggle against Anti-Black Violence in Salvador, Brazil’, Radical History Review 2020, no. 137 (2020): 163. 10 Mariana Cavalcanti, ‘“I Am Because We Are”: Marielle Franco’s Death, Life, and Work’, Transition, no. 129 (2020): 230. 11 This includes Argentina (1976–1983), Paraguay (1954–1989), Brazil (1964–1985), Bolivia (1971–1981), Uruguay (1973–1985), and Chile (1973–1990). 12 Mercedes S. Hinton, ‘A Distant Reality: Democratic Policing in Argentina and Brazil’, Criminal Justice 5, no. 1 (2005): 82. 13 Erika Mary Robb Larkins, The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 62. 14 ‘Rio Violence: Police Killings Reach Record High in 2019’, BBC News, 23 January 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51220364. 15 The distinction between the police and death squads such as the Scuderie are not clear-cut. For example, BOPE’s badge – which depicts two pistols in front of a skull skewered by a knife – is a direct reference to the Scuderie, whose emblem similarly depicted a skull and crossbones. As Christen Smith explains, ‘Connections between formal policing and death squads are messy, vexed, and fraught with silences, erasures, and omissions that make it difficult to map where the line between on-duty and off-duty policing begins and ends.’ Christen A. Smith, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 142. 16 Marcelo Bordin and Pedro Rodolfo Bod de Moraes, ‘Police, Politics and Democracy in Brazil’, Sociology International Journal 1, no. 4 (2017): 154. 17 Markus-Michael Müller, ‘Policing as Pacification: Postcolonial Legacies, Transnational Connections, and the Militarization of Urban Security in Democratic Brazil’, in Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies, ed. Michelle D. Bonner et al. (London and New York: Springer, 2018), 223.

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18 For example, see Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (London: Hachette, 2013). 19 Christopher McMichael, ‘Pacification and Police: A Critique of the Police Militarization Thesis’, Capital & Class 41, no. 1 (2017): 118. 20 There is, by now, a sizeable literature that criticises the militarisation thesis. See, indicatively, Jan Bachmann, Colleen Bell, and Caroline Holmqvist, War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); Alison Howell, ‘Forget “Militarization”: Race, Disability and the “Martial Politics” of the Police and of the University’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 20, no. 2 (2018); Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Micol Seigel, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 21 Colonial (so-called ‘small’) wars were often seen, not as wars per se, but as insurgencies and acts of criminality that were to be crushed using police power. See Anne Orford, ‘Foreword’, in War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention, ed. Jan Bachmann, Colleen Bell, and Caroline Holmqvist (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), xxi. 22 Tamara Nopper and Mariame Kaba, ‘Itemizing Atrocity’, The Jacobin, accessed 30 December 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2014/08/ itemizing-atrocity/. 23 For a selection of this literature, see David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide (London: Verso Books, 2018); Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2017); Seigel, Violence Work; Nikhil Pal Singh, ‘The Whiteness of Police’, American Quarterly 66, no. 4. 24 Gacheke Gachihi and Esther Waigumo Njoki, ‘Police Violence and the Criminalization of the Poor in Kenya’, Versobooks.com, accessed 8 March 2022, www.versobooks.com/blogs/4791-police-violence-andthe-criminalization-of-the-poor-in-kenya; National Campaign Against Torture, ‘India: Annual Report on Torture 2019’, 2019, www.uncat​ .org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/INDIATORTURE2019.pdf; Amit Prakash, Empire on the Seine: The Policing of North Africans in Paris, 1925–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 25 Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1763), 3. 26 Smith, 3. 27 Sal Nicolazzo, Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 3. For German political economist Johann von Justi, similarly, the ‘science of policing consists, therefore, in regulating everything that relates to the present condition of society, in strengthening it and improving it, in seeing that

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all things contribute to the welfare of the members that compose it’. Cited in Patricia Owens, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 105. For a detailed discussion of this understanding of police, see Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto Press, 2000). 28 Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, 154. 29 As Seigel has argued, it is crucial to see the Bobby ‘against the political and ideological backdrops of British colonialism’. Micol Seigel, ‘The Dilemma of “Racial Profiling”: An Abolitionist Police History’, Contemporary Justice Review 20, no. 4 (2017): 477. 30 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1980), 59. 31 Randall Williams, ‘A State of Permanent Exception: The Birth of Modern Policing in Colonial Capitalism’, Interventions 5, no. 3 (2003): 332. 32 Peter Linebaugh, ‘Police and Plunder’, CounterPunch, 13 February 2015, www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/13/police-and-plunder/. 33 Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 10. See also Philip Terdoo Ahire, Imperial Policing: The Emergence and Role of the Police in Colonial Nigeria, 1860–1960 (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991); David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); David M. Anderson and David Killingray, Policing the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). 34 Mike Brogden, ‘The Emergence of the Police – The Colonial Dimension’, The British Journal of Criminology 27, no. 1 (1987): 12. As Das and Varma explain, police in the colonies were driven by ‘the commercial interests of expanding capitalism and the maintenance of British hegemony’. Dilip K. Das and Arvind Verma, ‘The Armed Police in the British Colonial Tradition: The Indian Perspective’, Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management 21, no. 2 (1998): 478. 35 On the colonial policing of Ireland, see Alex Vitale, The End of Policing (London: Verso Books, 2018); Brogden, ‘The Emergence of the Police – The Colonial Dimension’; Williams, ‘A State of Permanent Exception’. 36 Vitale, The End of Policing, 32. 37 On the link between slave patrols and policing, see Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 2001); Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘Slangin Rocks… Palestinian Style’, in Police Brutality: An Anthology, ed. Jill Nelson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001). On the policing

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Notes to pages 67–70

of the colonial frontier, see Andrew R. Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875–1910 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). For a discussion of the occupation of the Philippines and its influence on US policing, see Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 38 For an overview of the colonial history of policing in Latin America, see Conor O’Reilly, Colonial Policing and the Transnational Legacy: The Global Dynamics of Policing across the Lusophone Community (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 39 Thomas Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a Nineteenth-Century City (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 35. Christen Smith similarly argues that ‘From its very beginnings the Brazilian police were a brutal state force that operated according to racialized logics.’ Smith, Afro-Paradise, 138. 40 Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro, 33–35. 41 Hinton, ‘A Distant Reality’, 81. 42 Seigel, ‘The Dilemma of “Racial Profiling”’, 478. 43 Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order, xii. See also Neocleous, War Power, Police Power; George S. Rigakos, Security/Capital: A General Theory of Pacification (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and Mark Neocleous, George Rigakos, and Tyler Wall, ‘On Pacification: Introduction to the Special Issue’, Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes 9, no. 2 (2013). 44 Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order, 67. 45 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Psychology Press, 2001), 36. 46 Cited in Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order, 64. 47 Neocleous, 57. 48 Chris Chen, ‘The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality’, Endnotes 3, accessed 13 May 2018, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/chris-chen-the-limitpoint-of-capitalist-equality. 49 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Penguin, 2021), 42. 50 Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2018), 31. The racialisation of the undeserving poor is also discussed in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).

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51 Cited in Erin O’Connor, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 45. 52 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1861, 1. 53 Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor, 48. As McClintock explains, ‘In the metropolis, the idea of racial deviance was evoked to police the “degenerate” classes—the militant working class, the Irish, Jews, feminists, gays and lesbians, prostitutes, criminals, alcoholics and the insane— who were collectively figured as racial deviants, atavistic throwbacks to a primitive moment in human prehistory surviving ominously in the heart of the modern, imperial metropolis.’ McClintock, Imperial Leather, 43. 54 Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor, 31. 55 On disease poetics, see Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021). 56 Kolb, 3. 57 On dirt and disgust as imperial discourse, see Zachary Samalin, The Masses Are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Aesthetics of Disgust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012) and Kolb, Epidemic Empire. On the Victorian conflation of dirt with the undeserving poor, see Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) and Sophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 58 Cited in Kolb, Epidemic Empire, 3. 59 As one book from 1929, dedicated to Rio’s military police, puts it: ‘The State … maintains the police to defend the social organism from an invasion of germs and parasites that are pernicious to the collective life of society.’ See Amy Chazkel, Monica Kim, and A. Naomi Paik, ‘Worlds without Police’, Radical History Review 2020, no. 137 (2020): 3. 60 As Neocleous explains, ‘The logic was that the task of cleaning dirt and filth from the street was the task of cleaning moral filth and social dirt from those same streets; streets; the ideal city is not only physically clean, but socially clean too.’ Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order, 88; 86. 61 For a discussion of racial hygiene and Victorian cleaning rituals, see McClintock, Imperial Leather. As McClintock explains, ‘soap took shape as a technology of social purification, inextricably entwined with the semiotics of imperial racism and class denigration’. McClintock, 212. 62 William G. Eggleston, ‘Oriental Pilgrimages and Cholera’, The North American Review 155, no. 428 (1892): 128. See also David Arnold, ‘Cholera and Colonialism in British India’, Past & Present, no. 113 (1986). 63 Quoted in O’Connor, Raw Material, 28. 64 O’Connor, 31.

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Notes to pages 72–75

65 See Nicola J. Smith, Capitalism’s Sexual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 66 S. Lamble, ‘Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Using a Queer/Trans Analysis’, in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2015), 242. 67 Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 9. On policing as administrative violence, see Cacho and Melamed, ‘“Don’t Arrest Me, Arrest the Police”: Policing as Street Administration of Colonial Racial Capitalist Order’. 68 Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order, 4. Correia and Wall put it more crudely: ‘capitalism and colonialism cannot exist without a state willing and able to defend colonial domination, private property, the wage relation, and the ongoing patterns of dispossession that characterize all of these. Ain’t no colonialism and ain’t no capitalism without cops.’ Correia and Wall, Police, 6. 69 Cited in Müller, ‘Policing as Pacification: Postcolonial Legacies, Transnational Connections, and the Militarization of Urban Security in Democratic Brazil’, 222. 70 Larkins, The Spectacular Favela, 7. 71 Larkins, 7. 72 Brian J. Godfrey, ‘Modernizing the Brazilian City’, Geographical Review 81, no. 1 (1991): 28. 73 Cardoso, 38. 74 For a more detailed analysis see Desirée Poets, ‘Anything but “Urban Garbage”: Indigenous Resistance, Survival, and Resurgence in Rio de Janeiro’, RioOnWatch, 2019, https://rioonwatch.org/?p=50361. 75 Ben Campkin, ‘Placing “Matter Out of Place”: Purity and Danger as Evidence for Architecture and Urbanism’, Architectural Theory Review 18, no. 1 (2013): 57. 76 See James Freeman and Marcos Burgos, ‘Accumulation by Forced Removal: The Thinning of Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas in Preparation for the Games’, Journal of Latin American Studies 49, no. 3 (2017); John Gledhill, The New War on the Poor: The Production of Insecurity in Latin America (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). 77 Larkins, The Spectacular Favela, 19. 78 Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), 12. 79 Manissa M. Maharawal, ‘Black Lives Matter, Gentrification and the Security State in the San Francisco Bay Area’, Anthropological Theory 17, no. 3 (2017): 349.

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80 Robin D. G. Kelley, ‘Disappearing Acts: Harlem in Transition’, in The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?, ed. Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2012). 81 Tony Roshan Samara, Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 82 See Vikram Dodd, ‘Stop and Search Eight Times More Likely to Target Black People’, The Guardian, 26 October 2017, www.theguardian​.com/ law/2017/oct/26/stop-and-search-eight-times-more-likely-to-target-blackpeople; New York Civil Liberties Union, ‘Stop-and-Frisk in the de Blasio Era’, 2019, www.nyclu.org/sites/default/files/field_documents/20190314_ nyclu_stopfrisk_singles.pdf. 83 Françoise Vergès, ‘Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender’, E-Flux ­Journal, no. 100 (2019), www.e-flux.com/journal/100/269165/capital ocene-waste-race-and-gender/. 84 On the exploitation of domestic workers in Brazil, see Patricia de Santana Pinho, ‘The Dirty Body That Cleans: Representations of Domestic Workers in Brazilian Common Sense’, Meridians 13, no. 1 (2015). 85 Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (Seven Stories Press, 2011), 96. 86 The Movement for Black Lives, ‘End the War on Black Communities’, M4BL, accessed 16 February 2022, https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/ end-the-war-on-black-communities/. On abolition, see also, indicatively, Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy : Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021); Derecka Purnell, Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Astra Publishing House, 2021). 87 Rashawn Ray, ‘What Does “Defund the Police” Mean and Does It Have Merit?’, Brookings, 19 June 2020, www.brookings.edu/blog/ fixgov/2020/06/19/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-and-doesit-have-merit/. 88 M. I. Asma, ‘On Necrocapitalism: Chapter Thirteen’, On Necrocapitalism (blog), 17 July 2020, https://necrocapitalism.wordpress.com/2020/07/16/ chapter-thirteen/. 89 See, in particular, Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families – And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (New York: Basic Books, 2022). 90 M. I. Asma, ‘On Necrocapitalism: Chapter Thirteen’.

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Notes to pages 77–81

91 Bey, Anarcho-Blackness; Anderson, The Nation on No Map; William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018). 92 Bey, Anarcho-Blackness, 11. See also William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, ‘The Anarchism of Blackness’, ROAR Magazine, accessed 27 December 2021, https://roarmag.org/magazine/black-liberation-anti-fascism/. 93 Abdias Do Nascimento, ‘Quilombismo: An Afro-Brazilian Political Alternative’, Journal of Black Studies 11, no. 2 (1980): 277. 94 Nascimento, 161. 95 Cited in Smith, Afro-Paradise, 15–16. 96 As they explain, ‘to think about the possibilities of a world without police first we need to flee the naive notion that injustice is only about the police, in and of themselves’. Santos, Nascimento-Mandingo, and Chazkel, ‘React or Be Killed’, 157; 163. 97 Santos, Nascimento-Mandingo, and Chazkel, 172. 98 Santos, Nascimento-Mandingo, and Chazkel, 180. For other examples of contemporary quilombos, see Adam Bledsoe, ‘The Present Imperative of Marronage’, Afro-Hispanic Review 37, no. 2 (2018). 99 Santos, Nascimento-Mandingo, and Chazkel, ‘React or Be Killed’, 168. 100 Avery Gordon, ‘Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity’, Borderlands 10, no. 2 (2011): 8. This is perhaps also what Harney and Moten have in mind when they reconceptualise abolition as ‘Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of any thing but abolition as the founding of a new society.’ Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 42. 101 James Baldwin, ‘A Report from Occupied Territory’, The Nation, accessed 30 May 2017, www.thenation.com/article/report-occupied-territory/. 102 Denise Ferreira Da Silva, ‘No-Bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence’, Griffith Law Review 18, no. 2 (2009): 213. 103 Ferreira Da Silva, 213. Emphasis added. 104 Angela Davis and Gina Dent, ‘Prison as a Border: A Conversation on Gender, Globalization, and Punishment’, Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 1237.

4  Maps of Apartheid 1 This chapter loosely builds on arguments that I have developed elsewhere, see Ida Danewid, ‘White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History’, Third World Quarterly 38, no. 7 (2017) and Ida Danewid, ‘Policing the (Migrant) Crisis: Stuart Hall and the Defence of Whiteness’, Security Dialogue 53, no. 1 (2022).

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2 Yohanna’s story is recounted in Frances Stonor Saunders, ‘Where on Earth Are You?’, London Review of Books, 3 March 2016; Mattathias Schwartz, ‘Letter from Lampedusa: The Anchor’, The New Yorker, 21 April 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/21/the-anchor. 3 ‘Endless Tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea’, Human Rights Watch (blog), 13 September 2022, www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/13/endless-tragediesmediterranean-sea. 4 ‘All 39 Migrants Found Dead in Essex Lorry Confirmed as Vietnamese Nationals’, The Telegraph, 2 November 2019, www.telegraph .co.uk/news/2019/11/02/39-migrants-found-dead-essex-lorry-­ confirmed-vietnamese-nationals/. 5 A note left in Bravo’s room reads: ‘I kill myself because I don’t have a life to live any more. I want my son Antonio to stay in the UK to continue his studies.’ See ‘Hanged Detainee Aimed to Save Son’, BBC News, 19 September 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/beds/ bucks/herts/5361324.stm. 6 Paul Lewis, ‘Jimmy Mubenga Death: “He Was Saying I Can’t Breathe, I Can’t Breathe”’, The Guardian, 14 October 2010, sec. UK news, www​ .­theguardian.com/uk/audio/2010/oct/14/jimmy-mubenga-death-interview. 7 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, 2008), 226. See also Achille Mbembe, ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’, The Mail & Guardian (blog), 24 June 2020, https://mg.co.za/opinion/2020-06-24-achillembembe-the-universal-right-to-breathe/. 8 On the concept of global apartheid, see Catherine Besteman, Militarized Global Apartheid (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Nandita Sharma, ‘Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid’, NWSA Journal 17, no. 3 (2005); Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 9 See Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 2021). 10 Angela Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (New York: Minor Compositions, 2012), 122. The bordering of the ‘disease-bearing migrant’ and ‘foreign germ’ has a long history which predates the COVID-19 pandemic. See Alison Bashford and Sarah Howard, ‘Immigration and Health: Law and Regulation in Australia, 1901–1958’, Health and History 6, no. 1 (2004) and Alan Ingram, ‘Domopolitics and Disease: HIV/AIDS, Immigration, and Asylum in the UK’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, no. 5 (2008). 11 Radhika Mongia describes this as ‘the assumption that controlling migration across putative state borders is a long-standing and noncontentious

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Notes to pages 83–84

element of state sovereignty’. Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 5–6. 12 Peter Walker, ‘Man Found Dead on London Street “Was Probably Stowaway Who Fell from Plane”’, The Guardian, 25 April 2013, sec. UK news, www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/apr/25/man-street-stowaway-fellplane. For a discussion of Matada’s death, see also Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives (London: Verso Books, 2022). 13 Karen Stuke, ‘The Men Who Fell from Sky’, LensCulture, accessed 1 March 2023, www.lensculture.com/projects/1492421-the-men-whofell-from-sky. 14 Sirin Kale, ‘Out of Thin Air: The Mystery of the Man Who Fell from the Sky’, The Guardian, 15 April 2021, www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ apr/15/man-who-fell-from-the-sky-airplane-stowaway-kenya-london. 15 On the concept of nautical graveyards, see Liz Fekete, ‘Death at the Border – Who Is to Blame?’ Institute of Race Relations, accessed 31 August 2016, www.irr.org.uk/news/death-at-the-border-who-is-to-blame/. For a discussion of the roll-out of European border control, see among many others: Mark Akkerman, ‘Expanding the Fortress: The Policies, the Profiteers and the People Shaped by EU’s Border Externalisation Programme’ (Transnational Institute, 11 May 2018); Maribel Casas-Cortes et al., ‘New Keywords: Migration and Borders’, Cultural Studies 29, no. 1 (2015); Ida Danewid, ‘Policing the (Migrant) Crisis: Stuart Hall and the Defence of Whiteness’, Security Dialogue 53, no. 1 (2022); Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 16 Nick Vaughan-Williams, Europe’s Border Crisis: Biopolitical Security and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 32–33. On the entanglement of humanitarianism with security, see William Walters, ‘Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border’, in Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges, ed. Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann, and Thomas Lemke (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011); Miriam I. Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). For a critique of humanitarianism as white saviourism, see Ida Danewid, ‘White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History’, Third World Quarterly 38, no. 7 (2017). 17 Rainer Bauböck, Transnational Citizenship and Migration (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University

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Press, 2001); Saskia Sassen, ‘Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship’, in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin Isin and Bryan S. Turner (London: SAGE, 2002). 18 Engin Isin has been at the forefront of developing this framework, arguing that the act of claiming citizenship also brings it into being. See Engin F. Isin, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 19 Peter Nyers and Kim Rygiel, Citizenship, Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); Ilker Ataç, Kim Rygiel, and Maurice Stierl, ‘Introduction: The Contentious Politics of Refugee and Migrant Protest and Solidarity Movements: Remaking Citizenship from the Margins’, Citizenship Studies 20, no. 5 (2016). 20 Joe Turner, ‘(En)Gendering the Political: Citizenship from Marginal Spaces’, Citizenship Studies 20, no. 2 (2016): 142. 21 Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 10. On the case for open borders, see also Reece Jones, Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2019); Alex Sager, Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). On the incompatibility of borders with liberal principles of freedom and moral equality, see Phillip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). For an overview of the literature on open borders, see Sarah Fine and Lea Ypi, Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Shelley Wilcox, ‘The Open Borders Debate on Immigration’, Philosophy Compass 4, no. 5 (2009). 22 As Antoine Pécoud and Paul de Guchteneire put it, ‘an individual authorized to leave his country but not accepted by any other country would see his right to emigration violated’. Antoine Pécoud and Paul de Guchteneire, Migration Without Borders: Essays on the Free Movement of People (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 1; 9. 23 Polly Pallister-Wilkins, ‘There’s a Focus on the Boats because the Sea is Sexier than the Land: A Reflection on the Centrality of the Boats in the Recent “Migration Crisis”’, The Disorder of Things (blog), 9 December 2015, https://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/12/09/theres-a-focus-onthe-boats-because-the-sea-is-sexier-than-the-land-a-reflection-on-thecentrality-of-the-boats-in-the-recent-migration-crisis/. See also Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Humanitarian Borders. 24 For an excellent critique, see Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi, eds., Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below (London: Pluto Press, 2022).

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Notes to pages 85–87

25 Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright, ‘“We Are All Foreigners”: No Borders as a Practical Political Project’, in Citizenship, Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement, ed. Peter Nyers and Kim Rygiel (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 81. See also Bridget Anderson and Vanessa Hughes, Citizenship and Its Others (London and New York: Springer, 2015). As Sarah Fine elaborates, while this ‘frequently, if misleadingly, [is] cast as a debate between advocates of closed borders and proponents of open borders, practically everyone in the philosophical literature agrees that there are some contexts in which it is permissible to exclude some prospective entrants, and that there are some practices of exclusion which are always, or almost always, impermissible’. Sarah Fine, ‘Immigration and Discrimination’, in Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership, ed. Sarah Fine and Lea Ypi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 127. 26 Carens, for example, argues that in a world of open borders ‘[s]tates would still have to determine how people should acquire citizenship, what legal rights ought to be enjoyed by noncitizens, and what sorts of social, economic, and cultural policies they should pursue with respect to immigrants’. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration, 288. 27 Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire, 5–6. 28 Robinson, 23. 29 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Penguin, 2021), 10. 30 Robinson, 25–26. 31 Robinson, 23. 32 Robinson, 25. 33 Here I am riffing off Angela Davis and Gina Dent, ‘Prison as a Border: A Conversation on Gender, Globalization, and Punishment’, Signs 26, no. 4 (2001). 34 See, indicatively, Bridget Anderson, Us and Them?: The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright, ‘Editorial: Why No Borders?’, Refuge 26, no. 2 (2011); Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008); Leanne Weber and Benjamin Bowling, ‘Valiant Beggars and Global Vagabonds: Select, Eject, Immobilize’, Theoretical Criminology 12, no. 3 (2008). 35 Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos, Escape Routes, 42. 36 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 82. 37 Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos, Escape Routes, 52. These new methods of discipline should be understood alongside the history of

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the expropriation of women’s reproductive labour. I return to this in Chapter 6. 38 Karl Marx, ‘Capital Vol. I – Chapter 28’, accessed 1 March 2023, www​ .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm. 39 Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos, Escape Routes, 52. According to Chambliss, ‘There is little question but that these statutes were designed for one express purpose: to force laborers (whether personally free or unfree) to accept employment at a low wage in order to insure the landowner an adequate supply of labor at a price he could afford to pay.’ William J. Chambliss, ‘A Sociological Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy’, Social Problems 12, no. 1 (1964): 69. For an analysis of the importance of vagrancy law to emerging capitalist social relations see also A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985); A. L. Beier and Paul Ocobock, Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014). 40 See Sal Nicolazzo, Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 54. On the transport of vagrants to the colonies, see also Beier and Ocobock, Cast Out. 41 For example, the Vagrancy Act of 1598 names ‘counterfeit Egyptians’ as one of its main targets. See Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2018). On the blackening of the undeserving poor, see Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2018). 42 Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos, Escape Routes, 55. 43 Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Verso Books, 2003), 349. 44 Nicolazzo, Vagrant Figures, 154. 45 Fryer, Staying Power, 201–2. 46 Cited in Fryer, 202. 47 As Nicolazzo explains, ‘early colonial vagrancy laws targeted an array of populations deemed dangerous in specifically colonial conditions: fugitives from slavery and indentured servitude, as well as black and indigenous people both enslaved and free’. Nicolazzo, Vagrant Figures, 27. 48 Beier and Ocobock, Cast Out; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2013). 49 For a summary, see Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner, Migration Studies and Colonialism (New York: Wiley, 2020) and Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2021).

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0 Emphasis added; Sharma, Home Rule, 67. 5 51 Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker, eds., Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). 52 See the Transatlantic Slavery Database, available at: www.slavevoyages.org. 53 Edward Alpers, ‘The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean’, in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). 54 Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration (London: Zed Books, 1990), 72–73. 55 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 56 On the difference between the logic of facilitation and constraint, see Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire. 57 As Moon-Ho Jung explains, rather than signalling a break with enslavement, coolies were seen as ‘a natural advancement from chattel slavery and a means to maintain slavery’s worst features’. Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 8. For a discussion of the connection between the abolition of slavery and the rise of indentured servitude, see also Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) and Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire; Sharma, Home Rule. 58 As Sharma notes, the Mauritius Ordinances not only signalled the emergence of the world’s first immigration controls but also ‘marked the emergence of the figure—and state category—of the Migrant’. Sharma, Home Rule, 70; 75; 87. 59 Sharma, 87. 60 For example, see Nadine El-Enany, (B)Ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020) and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, ‘The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism’, Refuge 34, no. 1 (2018). 61 Rodríguez, ‘The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism’, 22. In the United States, immigration restrictions were first introduced with the 1875 Page Act, which specifically targeted Chinese ‘coolies’, convicts, and women deemed to be ‘prostitutes’. This was followed by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which directly prohibited immigration on the basis of race. In

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the British colony of Natal – part of today’s South Africa – immigration controls were specifically designed to target non-indentured workers from India. The Natal Act was later used as the basis for immigration legislation in Australia, including the ‘White Australia Policy’ which explicitly sought to keep out ‘any person who is an aboriginal native of Asia, Africa, or of the islands thereof’. For a more detailed analysis, see David C. Atkinson, The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); David Dutton, One of Us?: A Century of Australian Citizenship (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002); Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Reece Jones, White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2021). 62 David Mason, Race and Ethnicity in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 29. 63 Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). 64 Douglas S. Massey, ‘The Social and Economic Origins of Immigration’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 510, no. 1 (1990). Smith estimates that the total migratory flow equated to more than one-sixth of the 408 million people living in Europe in 1900. John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 108. 65 Rodríguez, ‘The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism’, 21. 66 In fact, ‘Some of the earliest precursors to what we now think of as the modern prison—a phenomenon often associated with the penitentiary of the late eighteenth century and with the rise of the bureaucratic state—emerge primarily as institutions intended specifically for the incarceration of vagrants.’ Nicolazzo, Vagrant Figures, 132; 11. 67 Clare Anderson, A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). 68 Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto Race and Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 69 The term ‘sweated’ labour is often associated with garment factories but refers to any form of labour that is without legal protection and that lacks access to collective bargaining. Other forms of highly exploitable labour – including domestic work, farm labour, and service work – can

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Notes to pages 93–95

thus also be seen as ‘sweated’. See Ashok Kumar, Monopsony Capitalism: Power and Production in the Twilight of the Sweatshop Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 70 As Wilma Dunaway explains, commodity chains are ‘the global mechanism that ensures the inequitable division of surplus among the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery’. Wilma A. Dunaway, Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women’s Work and Households in Global Production (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 13. 71 Daniel E. Bender and Richard A. Greenwald, Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Laura Hapke, Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). For a discussion of sweatshops in Britain, see Benjamin Powell, ‘Meet the Old Sweatshops: Same as the New’, The Independent Review 19, no. 1 (2014). 72 Hapke, Sweatshop, 4–5. 73 Bender and Greenwald, Sweatshop USA, 19. 74 See chapter 2 in Kumar, Monopsony Capitalism. 75 Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, 101. 76 Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory (Boston, MA: South End Press, 2001). 77 As William I. Robinson writes: ‘The transnational circulation of capital and the disruption and deprivation it causes, in turn, generates the transnational circulation of labor. In other words, global capitalism creates immigrant workers…. This must be seen as a coerced or forced migration, since global capitalism exerts a structural violence over whole populations and makes it impossible for them to survive in their homeland.’ William Robinson, ‘Globalization and the Struggle for Immigrant Rights in the United States’, ZNet (blog), 10 March 2007, https://zcomm.org/ znetarticle/globalization-and-the-struggle-for-immigrant-rights-in-theunited-states-by-william-robinson/. 78 ‘UN Sustainable Development Goals – Statistics’, accessed 22 March 2022, https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-11/. 79 Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2014). 80 On populations that are ‘stuck’, see Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 147. See also Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso Books, 2007); Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century. 81 Bridget Anderson, ‘Towards a New Politics of Migration?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 9 (2017): 1532.

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82 For a discussion of migrants and refugees as surplus labour, see Prem Kumar Rajaram, ‘Refugees as Surplus Population: Race, Migration and Capitalist Value Regimes’, New Political Economy 23, no. 5 (2018): 627–39. See also Nicholas De Genova, ‘Spectacles of Migrant “Illegality”: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 7 (2013) and Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism. This is true not only for undocumented migrant workers but also for non-nationals on renewable working permits, spousal visa holders, and students, who are tied to their jobs because of visa requirements. 83 Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2021), 139. 84 Emilia Melossi, ‘“Ghetto Tomatoes” and “Taxi Drivers”: The Exploitation and Control of Sub-Saharan African Migrant Tomato Pickers in Puglia, Southern Italy’, Journal of Rural Studies 88 (2021): 491–99. 85 ILO, ‘Labour Migration (Arab States)’, accessed 16 June 2020, www.ilo​ .org/beirut/areasofwork/labour-migration/lang--en/index.htm. 86 Leif Johnson, ‘Bordering Shanghai: China’s Hukou System and Processes of Urban Bordering’, Geoforum 80 (2017). 87 Sara R. Farris, ‘Femonationalism and the “Regular” Army of Labor Called Migrant Women’, History of the Present 2, no. 2 (2012). 88 Benjamin Selwyn, ‘A Green New Deal for Agriculture: For, within, or against Capitalism?’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 48, no. 4 (2021): 783. 89 For example, see Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (London: Verso Books, 2021); Carolina Bank Muñoz, Transnational Tortillas: Race, Gender, and Shop-Floor Politics in Mexico and the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century. 90 Judy Fudge, ‘Modern Slavery, Unfree Labour and the Labour Market: The Social Dynamics of Legal Characterization’, Social & Legal Studies 27, no. 4 (2018): 415. 91 Nandita Sharma, ‘Afterword: Seeing Freedom’, in Seeing Like a Smuggler: Borders from Below, ed. Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 172. 92 Luke Butterly, ‘The Gilet Noirs Navigate the Lockdown’, Versobooks.com, accessed 22 March 2022, https://verso-prod.us-east-1.elasticbeanstalk .com/blogs/4712-the-gilet-noirs-navigate-the-lockdown. 93 Mathilde Methieu and Rouguyata Sall, ‘The Gilets Noirs Are in the Building’, accessed 22 March 2022, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/07/ gilets-noirs-france-protesters-sans-papiers.

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94 Cited in Luke Butterly, ‘Gilets Noirs – The Undocumented Migrant Collective Taking Paris by Storm’, openDemocracy, accessed 22 March 2022, www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/giletsnoirs-the-undocumented-migrant-collective-taking-paris-by-storm/. 95 Emphasis added; Anderson, Us and Them?, 47. See also David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (New York: Wiley, 2002). 96 On no borders and border abolition, see Anderson, Sharma, and Wright, ‘Editorial: Why No Borders?’; Pam Alldred, ‘No Borders, No Nations, No Deportations’, Feminist Review 73, no. 1 (2003); Andrew Burridge, ‘“No Borders” as a Critical Politics of Mobility and Migration’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 13, no. 3 (2014); Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge, Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013); Walia, Border and Rule. 97 Natasha King, No Borders: The Politics of Immigration Control and Resistance (London: Zed Books, 2016), 26. 98 For example, see Anderson, Sharma, and Wright, ‘Editorial: Why No Borders?’, 11. 99 ‘No Border School’, accessed 2 March 2023, https://noborderschool9​ .wixsite.com/no-border-school/about. 100 ‘No Borders Morocco’, No Borders Morocco, 25 March 2018, https:// beatingborders.wordpress.com/. 101 For a map of movements in Europe and Africa, see ‘Trans Border Map’, accessed 2 March 2023, https://trans-border.net/index.php/transborder-map/. 102 No Border Kitchen Lesvos, ‘Sometimes I Think Drowning in the Sea Is Better than Living in Moria’, 2019, https://­noborderkitchenlesvos​ .noblogs.org/post/2019/11/14/sometimes-i-think-drowning-in-thesea-is-better-than-living-in-moria/. 103 No Border Kitchen Lesvos, ‘Forced Stop of Hunger Strike’, 2020, https:// noborderkitchenlesvos.noblogs.org/post/2020/04/11/forced-stopof-hunger-strike/. 104 ‘Migrantifa’, The Left Berlin (blog), 17 February 2022, www.­theleftberlin​ .com/migrantifa/. 105 For example, see the Anti-Raids Network in London argues that ‘Immigration controls are part of a vicious global system of capitalism and colonialism.’ Indeed, ‘Powerful corporations and governments are still colonising and destroying the world for profit, and the entire economy functions on plundered resources such as oil. They use immigration controls to protect the wealth they have looted over centuries, to push down wages, and to stop us from uniting.’ See Anti-Raids Network, ‘About’, accessed 16 June 2020, http://antiraids.net/about/.

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106 Mamadou Goita, ‘Food Sovereignty in Africa: The People’s Alternative’, Afrique-Europe-Interact, accessed 16 June 2020, https://afriqueeurope-interact.net/320-1-food-souvernitt-goita---english.html. 107 ‘Au Claire de La Lune’, Afrique-Europe-Interact, accessed 16 June 2020, https://afrique-europe-interact.net/153-1-Au-claire-de-la-lune.html. 108 Besteman, Militarized Global Apartheid, 129. 109 Cited in Andrew Learmonth, ‘Kenmure Street: A Community United by a Divisive Immigration Policy’, Holyrood, 24 May 2021, www​.­holyrood​ .com/inside-politics/view,political-spotlight-hostile-approach. 110 Deborah Cowen, ‘Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance’, ­Versobooks.com, accessed 2 March 2023, www.versobooks.com/blogs/ 3067-​infrastructures-of-empire-and-resistance. 111 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence’, in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso Books, 2017). 112 S. Khosravi, ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders (London and New York: Springer, 2010), 108. See also Besteman, Militarized Global Apartheid, 61.

5  Of Plunder and Property 1 Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil (London: Verso Books, 2003), 76. 2 Ken Saro-Wiwa, ‘A Deadly Ecological War in Which No Blood Is Spilled but People Die All the Time’, in Speaking of Earth: Environmental Speeches That Moved the World, ed. Alon Tai (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 3 Ken Saro-Wiwa, ‘Statement to the Ogoni Special Military Tribunal in 1995’, 10 November 2012, https://ogoninewsng.com/2012/11/10/saro-​wiwascomplete-statement-ogoni-special-military-tribunal-1995-part-1/, https://ogoninewsng.com/2012/11/10/saro-wiwas-complete-statementogoni-special-military-tribunal-1995-part-1/. 4 Cited in Andrew Rowell and Stephen Kretzmann, ‘All for Shell: The Ogoni Struggle, A Project Underground Report’, 1997, https://ratical​ .org/corporations/OgoniStruggleTL.html. 5 Damien Gayle, ‘Millions Suffering in Deadly Pollution “Sacrifice Zones”, Warns UN Expert’, The Guardian, 10 March 2022, sec. Environment, www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/10/millions-sufferingin-deadly-pollution-sacrifice-zones-warns-un-expert. 6 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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7 Patrisse Cullors and Nyeusi Nguvu, ‘From Africa to the US to Haiti, Climate Change Is a Race Issue’, The Guardian, 14 September 2017, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/14/africa-us-haiticlimate-change-black-lives-matter. 8 Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: NYU Press, 1997). 9 As Voyles describes it, wastelanding is a project of ‘rendering resources extractable and lands and bodies pollutable’. Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 24. 10 Susan Koshy et al., ‘Introduction’, in Colonial Racial Capitalism, ed. Susan Koshy et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 12. 11 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘On the Multiple Frontiers of Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism’, Cultural Studies 31, no. 2–3 (2017): 185. 12 Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan (London: Verso Books, 2018). 13 For an introduction to the indigenous uprising against the Dakota Access Pipeline, see Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso Books, 2019). 14 See, indicatively, Robyn Eckersley, The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty (Cambridge, CA: MIT Press, 2004); John Barry and Robyn Eckersley, The State and the Global Ecological Crisis (Cambridge, CA: MIT Press, 2005); Carl Death, The Green State in Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Karin Bäckstrand and Annica Kronsell, Rethinking the Green State: Environmental Governance towards Climate and Sustainability Transitions (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 15 Eckersley, The Green State, 3. As Carl Death summarises, ‘the growing literature on green states is entirely right to focus attention on the continued importance of the state within global environmental politics’. Death, The Green State in Africa, 30. 16 Andrew Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 17 Barry and Eckersley, The State and the Global Ecological Crisis, x. 18 For a discussion, see chapters 2 and 5 in Peter Newell, Global Green Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 19 Kai Heron and Jodi Dean, ‘Revolution or Ruin’, E-Flux, no. 110 (June 2020), www.e-flux.com/journal/110/335242/revolution-or-ruin/. Malm theorises this as a form of ‘war communism’, see Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the TwentyFirst Century (London: Verso Books, 2020).

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20 Heron and Dean, ‘Revolution or Ruin’. For a related argument, see Christian Parenti, ‘A Left Defense of Carbon Dioxide Removal: The State Must Be Forced to Deploy Civilization Saving Technology’, in Has It Come to This? The Promises and Pitfalls of Geoengineering, ed. J. P. Sapinski, Holly Jean Buck, and Andreas Malm (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020). 21 See, indicatively, Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, Third Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2001); Laura Pulido, ‘Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000); Julie Sze, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2020); Ingrid Waldron, There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities (Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2018). 22 Erik Kojola and David N. Pellow, ‘New Directions in Environmental Justice Studies: Examining the State and Violence’, Environmental Politics 30, no. 1–2 (2021): 104. See also Laura Pulido, Ellen Kohl, and Nicole-Marie Cotton, ‘State Regulation and Environmental Justice: The Need for Strategy Reassessment’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 2 (2016): 12–31. 23 Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2019), 25. See also Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Kyle Whyte, ‘Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice’, Environment and Society 9, no. 1 (2018). 24 David Naguib Pellow, What Is Critical Environmental Justice? (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2017). 25 See, in particular, the essays in Alexander Dunlap and Andrea Brock, Enforcing Ecocide: Power, Policing & Planetary Militarization (Berlin: Springer Nature, 2022). 26 Daniel Selwyn, ‘Martial Mining: Resisting Extractivism and War Together’ (London: London Mining Network, 2020), 32; 50. For a martial theory of the Anthropocene, see Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). 27 Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), xix.

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Notes to pages 107–109

28 Andrea Brock, ‘“Frack off”: Towards an Anarchist Political Ecology Critique of Corporate and State Responses to Anti-Fracking Resistance in the UK’, Political Geography 82 (2020). 29 Global Witness, ‘Defending Tomorrow’, accessed 10 April 2022, https:// en/campaigns/environmental-activists/defending-tomorrow/. 30 Andrea Brock and Nathan Stephens-Griffin, ‘Policing Environ mental Injustice’, IDS Bulletin, 28 October 2021, https://doi.org/ 10.19088/1968-2021.130. 31 Selwyn, ‘Martial Mining: Resisting Extractivism and War Together’, 50. As Dunlap and Brock argue, these state forces are ‘the knights of racial capitalism and ecological degradation, the arbiters of private property, and the guardians of extraction’. Dunlap and Brock, Enforcing Ecocide: Power, 5. 32 Amnesty International, ‘A Criminal Enterprise? Shell’s Involvement in Human Rights Violations in Nigeria in the 1990s’ (Amnesty International, 2017), 83. 33 Ben Amunwa, ‘Dirty Work: Shell’s Security Spending in Nigeria and Beyond’ (Platform London, 2012), https://platformlondon.org/wp-­ content/uploads/2012/08/Dirty-work-Shell%E2%80%99s-securityspending-in-Nigeria-and-beyond-Platform-August-2012.pdf. 34 Today, more than twenty-five years after the execution of the Ogoni 9, Shell continues to work closely with the Nigerian government. An investigation by Platform found that, between 2007 and 2009, Shell spent at least $1 billion on security globally. About 40 per cent of that money went into securing the operations in the Nigeria Delta, which are guarded by more than 600 police and Mobile Police – known as the ‘kill and go’ – and 700 soldiers. Shell also hires an internal police force, known as the ‘supernumerary police’ or ‘spy police’, and has continued to supply the government with arms, vehicles, and large-scale funding. See Amunwa; Amnesty International, ‘A Criminal Enterprise? Shell’s Involvement in Human Rights Violations in Nigeria in the 1990s’. 35 Okonta and Douglas, Where Vultures Feast, xi. 36 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso Books, 2013), 45. For a discussion of BP and British state power, see chapter 2 in Kojo Koram, Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (London: Hachette, 2022). 37 Kojola and Pellow, ‘New Directions in Environmental Justice Studies’, 104. 38 Other scholars who have sought to rethink the planetary ecological crisis through the lens of racial capitalism include Laura Pulido and Juan De Lara, ‘Reimagining “Justice” in Environmental Justice: Radical Ecologies, Decolonial Thought, and the Black Radical Tradition’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1–2 (2018); Françoise Vergès, ‘Racial Capitalocene’, in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye

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Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso Books, 2017); Bikrum Singh Gill, ‘A World in Reverse: The Political Ecology of Racial Capitalism’, Politics Online First (2021). 39 Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna, ‘Rise: From One Island to Another’, 350, accessed 13 March 2023, https://350.org/rise-from-oneisland-to-another/. 40 Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna. 41 Vergès, ‘Racial Capitalocene’. 42 On wastelanding, see Voyles, Wastelanding. 43 Christian Parenti, ‘The 2013 ANTIPODE AAG Lecture The Environment Making State: Territory, Nature, and Value’, Antipode 47, no. 4 (2015): 830. 44 Andreas Malm, for example, locates the origins of today’s climate crisis in the switch from waterpower to the coal-powered steam engine, which revolutionised manufacturing and propelled the industrial revolution. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso Books, 2016). 45 See, among others, Gurminder K. Bhambra and Peter Newell, ‘More than a Metaphor: “Climate Colonialism” in Perspective’, Global Social Challenges Journal OnlineFirst (2022); Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2015); Leon Sealey-Huggins, ‘“1.5°C to Stay Alive”: Climate Change, Imperialism and Justice for the Caribbean’, Third World Quarterly 38, no. 11 (2017); Farhana Sultana, ‘The Unbearable Heaviness of Climate Coloniality’, Political Geography 99 (2022); Joanne Yao, The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022); Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 46 Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature 519, no. 7542 (2015). 47 Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert and David Schecter, ‘The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810’, Environmental History 15, no. 1 (2010): 97. 48 Cited in Jason Moore, ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’, in Anthropocene Or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason Moore (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2016), 106–7. See also Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America. 49 On the history and afterlives of plantation logics, see Michitake Aso, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897–1975 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis,

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Notes to pages 112–113

MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Lynn Hollen Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Katherine McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17, no. 3 (42) (2013): 1–15. 50 Virginia Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 242. 51 Anderson, 211. 52 L. Patricia C. Morellato and Celio F. B. Haddad, ‘Introduction: The Brazilian Atlantic Forest’, Biotropica 32, no. 4b (2000): 786–92. See also Moore, ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’, 96–97. 53 Corey J. A. Bradshaw, ‘Little Left to Lose: Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Australia since European Colonization’, Journal of Plant Ecology 5, no. 1 (2012). On deforestation, see also Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 54 Kent G. Lightfoot et al., ‘European Colonialism and the Anthropocene: A View from the Pacific Coast of North America’, Anthropocene 4 (2013): 104. See also Jeremy B. C. Jackson et al., ‘Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems’, Science 293, no. 5530 (2001). 55 Corey Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 274. 56 On the colonial invention of ‘wilderness’, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 57 Lightfoot et al., ‘European Colonialism and the Anthropocene’, 104. 58 As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson summarises, ‘Indigenous bodies don’t relate to the land by possessing or owning it or having control over it. We relate to land through connection—generative, affirmative, complex, overlapping, and nonlinear relationship.’ Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 43. For Aileen Moreton-Robinson, similarly, ‘Indigenous ontological relations to land are incommensurate with those developed through capitalism.’ See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xxi. Building on this, Rob Nichols argues that settler colonial dispossession ultimately must be understood as a recursive process which merged ‘commodification (or perhaps more accurately, “propertization”) and theft into one moment’. The property was theft, but the very act of plunder simultaneously installed property relations: that is to

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say, theft is property. See Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). 59 As Cronon explains, ‘Colonists were moved to transform the soil by a property system that taught them to treat land as capital.’ Cronon, Changes in the Land, 77. Max Liboiron further notes that ‘land relations become managerial rather than reciprocal…. That is, Land becomes a Resource.’ Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021), 62. 60 Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 26. 61 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2016), 27. 62 Locke, 57. 63 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: The Matter, Forme & Power of a CommonWealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2009), 488. 64 Cited in A. Dirk Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 63. 65 Cited in Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership (London: A&C Black, 2014), 27. 66 Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property, 35. 67 Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire, 422. 68 This also had a gendered and sexed dimension. For example, colonisers typically referred to unknown lands as ‘virgin’ territory. As Anne McClintock notes, ‘Travelers’ tales abounded with visions of the monstrous sexuality of far-off lands, where, as legend had it, men sported gigantic penises and women consorted with apes, feminized men’s breasts flowed with milk and militarized women lopped theirs off…. Africa and the Americas had become what can be called a porno-tropics for the European Imagination—a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears.’ See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 22. 69 Moore estimates that the Vistula Basin was reduced by a million hectares (10,000 square kilometers), and possibly twice as much, between 1500 and 1650. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 104. See also Marjan Shokouhi, ‘Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes: The Historical Loss of Irish Woodlands’, Études Irlandaises, no. 44–1 (2019). 70 Jesse Goldstein, ‘Terra Economica: Waste and the Production of Enclosed Nature’, Antipode 45, no. 2 (2013): 363. 71 Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 60. 72 Quoted in Neocleous, 66.

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73 James Sinclair, who oversaw the Board of Agriculture set up by Parliament in 1793, similarly argued that: ‘We have begun another campaign against the foreign enemies of the country…. why should we not attempt a campaign against our great domestic foe; I mean the hitherto unconquered sterility of so large a proportion of the surface of the kingdom?.… Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath, let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement (1837:111).’ Cited in Goldstein, ‘Terra Economica’, 363. 74 Cited in Neocleous, War Power, Police Power, 66. Goldstein similarly observes that ‘it was held that the land itself was responsible for breeding laziness and inefficiency. The commons came to be seen as a deterrent to individual enterprise.’ Goldstein, ‘Terra Economica’, 371. 75 Neocleous, War Power, Police Power, 69. 76 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 86. 77 As Sandy Grande explains, ‘dispossession is about disconnection, a rupturing and wrenching of human beings from land, from each other, from nonhuman kin, and the knowledge systems designed to sustain both life and living’. Brenna Bhandar et al., ‘Histories and Afterlives of Dispossession: Symposium on Robert Nichols’s Theft Is Property!’, Political Theory 50, no. 3 (2022). See also Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive. 78 Cited in Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 46. 79 William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 14–15. 80 As Ross notes, ‘Imperialism and heritage preservation’ were from the beginning a ‘mutually reinforcing enterprise’. Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire, 245. See also Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Bernhard Gissibl, The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). 81 From the 1830s and onwards, the French colonisers introduced a series of new laws that criminalised many traditional methods of grazing and forestry: this ‘not only transformed the use of the land but also affected the appropriation of large amounts of land and resources for the settlers and the French administration’. Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 6. 82 Mark Toogood, ‘Decolonizing Highland Conservation’, in Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era, ed. William Mark Adams and Martin Mulligan (Oxford: Earthscan, 2003).

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83 See Garland E. Allen, ‘“Culling the Herd”: Eugenics and the Conservation Movement in the United States, 1900–1940’, Journal of the History of Biology 46, no. 1 (2013); Gray Brechin, ‘Conserving the Race: Natural Aristocracies, Eugenics, and the U.S. Conservation Movement’, Antipode 28, no. 3 (1996); Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Lebanon: University of Press of New England, 2009). 84 United States National Conservation Commission, Report of the National Conservation Commission, February 1909: Accompanying Papers: Lands, Minerals, and National Vitality (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), 748. 85 Today, the most extreme version of eugenic environmentalism is, of course, the eco-fascism of Anders Breivik and the El Paso and Christchurch shooters. See Bernhard Forchtner, ‘Eco-Fascism: Justifications of Terrorist Violence in the Christchurch Mosque Shooting and the El Paso Shooting’, openDemocracy, accessed 9 April 2022, www.­o pendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/eco-fascismjustifications-terrorist-violence-christchurch-mosque-shooting-andel-paso-shooting/. Eugenic arguments also inform liberal forms of environmentalism, see Lisa Tilley and Max Ajl, ‘Eco-Socialism Will Be Anti-Eugenic or It Will Be Nothing: Towards Equal Exchange and the End of Population’, Politics OnlineFirst (2022). 86 See Alexander Dunlap and Jostein Jakobsen, The Violent Technologies of Extraction: Political Ecology, Critical Agrarian Studies and the Capitalist Worldeater (Berlin: Springer Nature, 2019); James Fairhead, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones, ‘Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature?’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 39, no. 2 (2012); Indigenous Environmental Network, ‘Talking Points on the AOC-Markey Green New Deal’, 8 February 2019, www.ienearth.org/ talking-points-on-the-aoc-markey-green-new-deal-gnd-resolution/. 87 Heather Rogers, Green Gone Wrong: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Eco-Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 2013). 88 Bárbara Jerez, Ingrid Garcés, and Robinson Torres, ‘Lithium Extractivism and Water Injustices in the Salar de Atacama, Chile: The Colonial Shadow of Green Electromobility’, Political Geography 87 (2021). 89 Rebecca Lawrence, ‘Internal Colonisation and Indigenous Resource Sovereignty: Wind Power Developments on Traditional Saami Lands’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 6 (2014). 90 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, ‘Dams and Internal Displacement’ (Oregon State University, 11 April 2017), www.internal-displacement​ .org/sites/default/files/publications/documents/20170411-idmc-intro-damcase-study.pdf.

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91 Oakland Institute, ‘The Darker Side of Green: Plantation Forestry and Carbon Violence in Uganda’, oaklandinstitute.org, 23 October 2016, www.oaklandinstitute.org/darker-side-green. 92 ‘Why Are 600m Africans Still without Power?’, CNN, accessed 10 April 2022, www.cnn.com/2016/04/01/africa/africa-state-of-­electricity-feat/ index.html. 93 Brock and Stephens-Griffin, ‘Policing Environmental Injustice’. 94 Brock and Stephens-Griffin. See also David Carruthers and Patricia Rodriguez, ‘Mapuche Protest, Environmental Conflict and Social Movement Linkage in Chile’, Third World Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2009); Alexander Dunlap and Martín Correa Arce, ‘“Murderous Energy” in Oaxaca, Mexico: Wind Factories, Territorial Struggle and Social Warfare’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 49, no. 2 (2022); Amber Huff and Yvonne Orengo, ‘Resource Warfare, Pacification and the Spectacle of “Green” Development: Logics of Violence in Engineering Extraction in Southern Madagascar’, Political Geography 81 (2020). 95 UNHCR estimates that an annual average of 21.5 million people has been forcibly displaced since 2008 due to climate-induced hazards, including droughts, mass flooding, and desertification. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, ‘Frequently Asked Questions on Climate Change and Disaster Displacement’, UNHCR, accessed 9 December 2017, www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2016/11/581f52dc4/­f requently-askedquestions-climate-change-disaster-displacement.html. 96 As Dunlap puts it, ‘Industrial-scale renewable energy does nothing to remake exploitative relationships with the earth, and instead represents the renewal and expansion of the present capitalist order.’ Alexander Dunlap, ‘End the “Green” Delusions: Industrial-Scale Renewable Energy Is Fossil Fuel+’, Versobooks.com, 18 May 2018, www.versobooks.com/ blogs/3797-end-the-green-delusions-industrial-scale-renewable-energy-isfossil-fuel. 97 Nik Heynen, ‘Toward an Abolition Ecology’, Abolition (blog), 30 December 2016, https://abolitionjournal.org/toward-an-abolition-­ecology/. For a related argument, see Modibo Kadalie, Pan-African Social Ecology: Speeches, Conversations, and Essays (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019). 98 The Red Nation, ‘The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth’, n.d., 15, http://therednation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Red-Deal_ Part-I_End-The-Occupation-1.pdf. 99 The Red Nation, 12. 100 Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, ‘The Black Snake, #NoDAPL, and the Rise of a People’s Movement’, in Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, ed. Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 2–3.

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101 Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, 136. Indeed, ‘the state management of Indigenous concepts such as land protection and el buen vivir … has worked to facilitate the expansion of extractive capitalism.’ GómezBarris, 23. 102 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, cited in Geoffroy de Laforcade, ‘Indigeneity, Gender, and Resistance: Critique and Contemporaneity of Bolivian Anarchism in the Historical Imagination of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’, Anarchist Studies 28, no. 2 (2020): 34. 103 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, cited in de Laforcade, 19. Indigenous scholars focusing on North America have made similar arguments. For a critique of the limits of recognition, representations, and legal reform, see Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Simpson, As We Have Always Done. 104 Bill Weinberg, ‘Indigenous Anarchist Critique of Bolivia’s “Indigenous State”: Interview with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’, Upside Down World (blog), 3 September 2014, https://upsidedownworld.org/archives/ bolivia/indigenous-anarchist-critique-of-bolivias-indigenous-state-­ interview-with-silvia-rivera-cusicanqui/. 105 For a detailed history, see Benjamin Dangl, The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019). 106 de Laforcade, ‘Indigeneity, Gender, and Resistance’, 38. See also Raul Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2010). 107 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, cited in de Laforcade, ‘Indigeneity, Gender, and Resistance’, 35. 108 Julieta Paredes in Dark Star Collective, ‘An Interview with Mujeres Creando’, in Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2012), 126. 109 Julieta Paredes in Dark Star Collective, 126. 110 Mujeres Creando, ‘Political, Feminist Constitution of the State: The Impossible Country We Build as Women’, accessed 10 April 2022, https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-11-1-decolonial-gesture/ 11-1-dossier/constitucion-politica-feminista-del-estado-el-pais-­ imposible-que-construimos-las-mujeres.html. 111 Mujeres Creando. 112 Weinberg, ‘Indigenous Anarchist Critique of Bolivia’s “Indigenous State.”’ As Rivera Cusicanqui explains, ‘I think that it [ch’ixi] is a ­talisman-word, that enables us to go beyond the emblematic identities of ethnopolitics. And I also think that it has its aura in certain states of collective availability to make words polysemic. And it also allows for reading backwards and turning writing into a capacity for affiliation’. Verónica Gago, ‘Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: Against Internal Colonialism’,

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Viewpoint Magazine, 25 October 2016, https://viewpointmag.com/ 2016/10/25/silvia-rivera-cusicanqui-against-internal-colonialism/. 113 Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, 112–13. 114 Gómez-Barris, 134. 115 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 60. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson puts it, ‘I resist the logic of property, meaning I’m not interested in taking property back, but pushing property back. I’m not interested in thinking about getting land as property back…. I’m interested in refusing the logics of property.’ Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2022), 141. 116 Sophie Lewis, ‘Amniotechnics’, The New Inquiry (blog), 25 January 2017, https://thenewinquiry.com/amniotechnics/. 117 Lewis. 118 Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna, ‘Rise’. 119 Jaimey Hamilton Faris, ‘Sisters of Ocean and Ice: On the Hydro Feminism of Kathy Jetn¯il-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna’s Rise: From One Island to Another’, Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 13, no. 2 (2019): 93; 91. 120 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, Poetry Foundation, 18 April 2022, www​ .poetryfoundation.org/, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/thewaste-land. 121 Cited in Paul Douglass, ‘Reading the Wreckage: De-Encrypting Eliot’s Aesthetics of Empire’, Twentieth Century Literature 43, no. 1 (1997): 22. 122 Ken Saro-Wiwa, ‘Final Statement to Military Tribunal’, 13 November 1995, www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/34a/020.html. 123 Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 8.

6  It Runs in the Family 1 Mona Ahmed’s life is recounted in Myself Mona Ahmed. See Dayanita Singh and Mona Ahmed, Myself Mona Ahmed (New York: Scalo, 2001). 2 There is no exact English translation for the word hijra. Hijras are often described as transgender, but many hijras prefer the term third gender. On the colonial policing of hijras, see Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 3 Somak Ghoshal, ‘Mona Ahmed’ The Outlier, 26 April 2014, www​ .livemint.com/Leisure/tv5c2fYwS4pqS2JSKl7i7K/Mona-Ahmed--Theoutlier.html.

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4 ‘Transgenders Sent to Beggars’ Colony by Cops’, Bangalore Mirror, accessed 18 April 2022, https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes​ .com/bangalore/others/transgenders-sent-to-beggars-colony-by-cops/­ articleshow/45279235.cms. 5 As Joe Turner explains, ‘the historical formation of the family … is made possible through the dispossession and denial of affective relations and kinship to specific populations’. Joe Turner, Bordering Intimacy: Postcolonial Governance and the Policing of Family (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 53. 6 The verb domesticate derives from dominate, which, in turn, is drawn from dominus, the master of the donum (house or household). See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013) and Patricia Owens, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 7 See, indicatively, Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family (London: Verso Books, 2021); K. D. Griffiths and J. J. Gleeson, ‘Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for Its Abolition’, Ritual, 2015, https://isr​ .press/Griffiths_Gleeson_Kinderkommunismus/index.html; M. E. O’Brien, ‘Communizing Care’, pinko, accessed 18 April 2022, https://pinko.online/ pinko-1/communizing-care; Madeleine Lane-McKinley, ‘The Idea of Children’, Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, 2 August 2018, https:// blindfieldjournal.com/2018/08/02/the-idea-of-children/. 8 Tiffany Lethabo King, ‘Black “Feminisms” and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan’s Negro Family’, Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 71. 9 King, 71. 10 ‘Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: “Give Your House Away, Constantly” – Fred Moten and Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time of Pandemic And Rebellion (Part 2)’, accessed 20 March 2023, https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/give-away-yourhome-constantly-fred-moten-and-stefano-harney. 11 Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2012); Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Roderick A. Ferguson, One-Dimensional Queer (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2018). 12 David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Introduction: What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?’, Social Text 23, no. 3–4 (84–85) (2005): 11.

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13 Lisa Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism’, in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 179. Françoise Vergès similarly argues that, with this transformation, ‘Feminism would become reasonable, no longer equated with the “pétroleuses,” “hysterics,” “man-haters,” “dykes,” or “the unfucked and the unfuckable” of the 1970s.’ See Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 2021), 42. 14 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). See also Sara R. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2017). 15 Rahul Rao, ‘The Locations of Homophobia’, London Review of International Law 2, no. 2 (1 September 2014): 172, https://doi.org/10.1093/ lril/lru010. 16 See, indicatively, Kristin Bumiller, In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Angela P. Harris, ‘Heteropatriarchy Kills: Challenging Gender Violence in a Prison Nation’, Washington University Journal of Law & Policy 37, no. 1 (2011); Lola Olufemi, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (London: Pluto Press, 2020); Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021). 17 Elizabeth Bernstein, Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 244. 18 The majority of women homicide victims are killed by intimate partners or family members. UNODC, ‘Global Study on Homicide: GenderRelated Killing of Women and Girls’, UNODC, 2018, www​.unodc​ .org/­documents/data-and-analysis/GSH2018/GSH18_Gender-related_­ killing_of_women_and_girls.pdf. 19 See Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights; Turner, Bordering Intimacy. 20 Bernstein, Brokered Subjects; Nicola J. Smith, Capitalism’s Sexual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 21 Lisa Rapaport, ‘Trans Teens Much More Likely to Attempt Suicide’, Reuters, 12 September 2018, www.reuters.com/article/us-health-­ transgender-teen-suicide-idUSKCN1LS39K; Patrick Strudwick, ‘Nearly Half of Young Transgender People Have Attempted Suicide – UK Survey’, The Guardian, 19 November 2014, www.theguardian.com/ society/2014/nov/19/young-transgender-suicide-attempts-survey. 22 In the US, nearly one in six trans people has been to prison; for black trans people, the figure increases to one in two. ‘Transgender Incarcerated People in Crisis’, Lambda Legal, accessed 19 April 2022,

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www.lambdalegal.org/know-your-rights/article/trans-incarceratedpeople. On trans poverty, see ‘Almost 30 Percent of Bi Women, Trans People Live in Poverty, Report Finds’, NBC News, 30, accessed 19 April 2022, www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/almost-30-percentbisexual-women-trans-people-live-poverty-report-n1073501. 23 Spade, Normal Life, 35. See also Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2015). 24 For a discussion of this, see Rao, ‘The Locations of Homophobia’. 25 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Communist Manifesto (Chapter 2)’, accessed 18 April 2022, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/ communist-manifesto/ch02.htm. 26 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 12. See also Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bishopston: Falling Wall Press, 1975); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 2014); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation and the Law (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection (London: Zed Books, 2016); Peter Drucker, Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 27 Marx and Engels, ‘Communist Manifesto (Chapter 2)’. 28 Griffiths and Gleeson, ‘Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for Its Abolition’. 29 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 36. 30 See Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 31 For a discussion of the ‘cult om domesticity’, see McClintock, Imperial Leather. 32 This includes Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation and Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare; Smith, Capitalism’s Sexual History. 33 Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 103. As Nicola Smith argues, the ideal of the heteronormative bourgeois family was formed, not only by confining women to the home but also through the criminalisation and pathologisation of those that defied marriage: in particular, sex workers. Prostitution had been

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Notes to pages 131–32

largely tolerated in the medieval era but was, from the sixteenth century onwards, increasingly regarded as a crime, much like vagrancy, begging, and pauperism. Like other members of the undeserving poor – vagrants, beggars, paupers, and so on – the sex worker could be branded, whipped, or sent to a penal colony. The policing of sex work thus ‘formed an integral part of a politico-economic project through which the ideal of marriage that underpinned the sexual division of labor could be enforced and utilized’. Smith, Capitalism’s Sexual History, 49. 34 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1979), 135. 35 Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 16. 36 Federici, 186. 37 Christopher Chitty, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Drucker, Warped; ME O’Brien, ‘To Abolish the Family: The Working-Class Family and Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development’, Endnotes 5 (n.d.), https://endnotes.org.uk/file_hosting/EN5_To_­ Abolish_the_Family.pdf. 38 On the policing of trans and gender non-conforming people, see Stanley and Smith, Captive Genders. 39 Emma Heaney, ‘Emma Heaney on Cis Ideology and the Trans Feminine Allegory’, Rabbles, 2021, https://anchor.fm/rabbles/episodes/ Emma-Heaney-on-cis-ideology-and-the-trans-feminine-allegory-esu4e3. 40 Kathi Weeks, ‘Abolition of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal’, Feminist Theory OnlineFirst (2021). See also Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (London: Verso Books, 2022). 41 For a selection, see Joanne Barker, Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); María Lugones, ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System’, Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007); McClintock, Imperial Leather; Oyèrónké. Oyeˇwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Greg Thomas, The

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Notes to pages 132–33

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Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007); Richard C. Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Françoise Vergès, ‘María Lugones, 1944– 2020’, Radical Philosophy, no. 209 (2020). 42 J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 40. 43 The mass graves recently found in residential schools in Canada confirm what indigenous communities have long argued. See Andrew Woolford and James Gacek, ‘Genocidal Carcerality and Indian Residential Schools in Canada’, Punishment & Society 18, no. 4 (2016); Andrew Woolford, ‘Nodal Repair and Networks of Destruction: Residential Schools, Colonial Genocide, and Redress in Canada’, Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 1 (2013). Beyond boarding schools, the introduction of inheritance laws – that linked private property and the heteropatriarchal family – was one of the main mechanisms through which the state sought to eliminate indigenous structures of kin, care, and sex. See Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Aloysha Goldstein, ‘“In the Constant Flux of Its Incessant Renewal”: The Social Reproduction of Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonial Entitlement’, in Colonial Racial Capitalism, ed. Susan Koshy et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022). 44 Saidiya Hartman, ‘The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors’, Souls 18, no. 1 (2016) See also Angela Davis, ‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves’, The Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1/2 (1972) and Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 45 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019), 221. 46 On the white home as an extension of the prison, see Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 47 Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987). See also Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Cathy J. Cohen,

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‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?’, in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021). 48 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 42. As Sander Gilman explains, ‘The perception of the prostitute in the late nineteenth century thus merged with the perception of the black.’ Sander L. Gilman, ‘Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late ­Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature’, Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 229. 49 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 42. 50 Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 51 Sandra Ponzanesi, ‘Beyond the Black Venus: Colonial Sexual Politics and Contemporary Visual Practices’, in Italian Colonialism, Legacies and Memories, ed. Derek Duncan and Jacqueline Andall (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 170. 52 On Baartman, see chapter 2 of Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 53 On institutionalisation, see Liat Ben-Moshe, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 54 Cited in Carole R. McCann, Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 107. 55 Cited William Garrett, Marie Stopes: Feminist, Eroticist, Eugenicist (Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2008), lii. 56 Elena R. Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009); Françoise Vergès, The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Jane Lawrence, ‘The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women’, American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2000); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997). 57 Vergès, ‘María Lugones, 1944–2020’. 58 For an excellent discussion, see Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 9. 59 Griffiths and Gleeson, ‘Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for Its Abolition’.

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0 Griffiths and Gleeson. 6 61 As Cooper explains, neoliberals regard the family as a compensation for precarity: they aim ‘to reestablish the private family as the primary source of economic security and the comprehensive alternative to the welfare state’. Cooper, Family Values, 9. See also Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? 62 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 63 Patrick Moynihan, ‘The Moynihan Report: The Negro Family, the Case for National Action’, 21 January 2007, www.blackpast.org/ african-american-history/moynihan-report-1965/. 64 Moynihan. 65 Moynihan. 66 Priya Kandaswamy, Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 166. 67 Premilla Nadasen, ‘From Widow to “Welfare Queen”: Welfare and the Politics of Race’, Black Women, Gender & Families 1, no. 2 (2007); Kenneth J. Neubeck and Noel A. Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America’s Poor (London: Psychology Press, 2001); Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), chapter 2. 68 As King explains, the Moynihan and ‘The proliferation of studies on the “Black family” and urban communities post-1965 intensified surveillance of Black female headed households.’ See King, ‘Black “Feminisms” and Pessimism’, 75; 73. On Clinton’s welfare reform, see Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 69 Robbie Shilliam, ‘Enoch Powell: Britain’s First Neoliberal Politician’, New Political Economy 26, no. 2 (2021); Arun Kundnani, ‘Disembowel Enoch Powell’, Dissent Magazine, 18 April 2018, www​.­dissentmagazine​ .org/online_articles/enoch-powell-racism-neoliberalism-right-wingpopulism-rivers-of-blood. 70 ‘Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” Speech’, The Telegraph, 6 November 2007, www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Riversof-Blood-speech.html. 71 Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe, The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Verso Books, 2018), chapter 4. See also James Trafford, The Empire at Home: Internal Colonies and the End of Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2020), chapter 2. 72 Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2018), 126.

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73 David Cameron, ‘Troubled Families Speech’, GOV.UK, 2011, www​.gov​ .uk/government/speeches/troubled-families-speech. For a discussion of Cameron’s speech, see Smith, Capitalism’s Sexual History, 110. 74 Tanya Gold, ‘The Right Has Chosen Its Scapegoat – The Single Mum. And She Will Bleed’, The Guardian, 19 August 2011, sec. Opinion, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/19/single-mothersuk-riots-tanya-gold; Jayson Harsin, ‘Cultural Racist Frames in TF1’s French Banlieue Riots Coverage’, French Politics, Culture & Society 33, no. 3 (2015): 47–73. For a critique, see ‘Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder’ (London: The Guardian & LSE, 2011), https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/46297/1/Reading%20the%20 riots%28published%29.pdf. 75 David Peterson, ‘Åklagare: Barn och mammor kastade sten’, Sven ska Dagbladet, 21 April 2022, sec. Sverige, www.svd.se/a/1O9JWK/ aklagare-barn-och-mammor-kastade-sten-i-linkoping. 76 Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 91. 77 Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families – And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (New York: Basic Books, 2022). 78 Goldstein, ‘“In the Constant Flux of Its Incessant Renewal”: The Social Reproduction of Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonial Entitlement’, 69. 79 Dorothy Roberts, ‘Abolish Family Policing, Too’, Dissent Magazine (blog), 2021, www.dissentmagazine.org/article/abolish-family-policingtoo; Wendy Haight et al., ‘A Scoping Study of Indigenous Child Welfare: The Long Emergency and Preparations for the Next Seven Generations’, Children and Youth Services Review 93 (2018): 397. 80 Government of Canada, ‘Reducing the Number of Indigenous Children in Care’, Fact sheet, 2 November 2018, www.sac-isc.gc.ca/eng/1541187 352297/1541187392851. 81 Australian Government, ‘Child Protection Australia 2019–20’, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2021, www.aihw.gov.au/reports/ child-protection/child-protection-australia-2019-20/summary. 82 Jacynta Krakouer, ‘The Stolen Generations Never Ended – They Just Morphed into Child Protection’, The Guardian, 17 October 2019, sec. Opinion, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/17/the-stolengenerations-never-ended-they-just-morphed-into-child-protection. See also Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 83 Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016); Eric B. Ross, The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998); Kalpana

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Wilson, Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2013). 84 As Laura Briggs shows, in this time ‘Third World women’s sexual behavior’ increasingly came to be seen as ‘dangerous and unreasonable, the cause of poverty and hence of communism, and needed to be made known, managed, and regulated’. Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 117. 85 Kalpana Wilson, ‘In the Name of Reproductive Rights: Race, Neoliberalism and the Embodied Violence of Population Policies’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 91, no. 1 (2017); Farida Akhter, Depopulating Bangladesh: Essays on the Politics of Fertility (Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana, 1992). 86 Wilson, ‘In the Name of Reproductive Rights’, 57; 61. 87 Guy Standing, ‘Global Feminization through Flexible Labor’, World Development 17, no. 7 (1 July 1989): 1077–95, https://doi.org/10.1016/0305750X(89)90170-8; Wilma A. Dunaway, Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women’s Work and Households in Global Production (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 88 WTO, ‘Gender Aware Trade Policy: A Springboard for Women’s Economic Empowerment’, 2019, 5, www.wto.org/english/news_e/news17_e/ dgra_21jun17_e.pdf. 89 See John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 124. 90 As Françoise Vergès explains, ‘The comfortable life of bourgeois women around the world is possible because millions of exploited and racialized women maintain this comfort by making their clothes, cleaning their homes and the offices where they work, taking care of their children, and by taking care of the sexual needs of their husbands, brothers, and partners.’ Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism, 2–3. 91 The literature on the global division of reproductive labour is vast. See, indicatively, Nicole Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Nancy Fraser, ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’, New Left Review, no. 100 (2016); Pei-Chia Lan, Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Rhacel Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, Second Edition (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015); Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

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92 ILO, ‘Who Are Domestic Workers (Domestic Workers)’, accessed 19 April 2022, www.ilo.org/global/topics/domestic-workers/who/lang-en/index.htm; ILO, ‘Migrant Domestic Workers (Labour Migration)’, accessed 19 April 2022, www.ilo.org/global/topics/labour-migration/ policy-areas/migrant-domestic-workers/lang--en/index.htm. 93 Cynthia Dewi Oka, ‘Mothering as Revolutionary Praxis’, in Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, ed. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2016), 52. 94 On the racial and colonial history of these technologies, see Alys Eve Weinbaum, ‘Learning from Witchy and Wayward Women’, Versobooks​ .com, 2019, www.versobooks.com/blogs/4471-learning-from-witchyand-wayward-women; Sigrid Vertommen, Bronwyn Parry, and Michal Nahman, ‘Introduction: Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies’, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8, no. 1 (2022). 95 Griffiths and Gleeson, ‘Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for Its Abolition’; Lane-McKinley, ‘The Idea of Children’; Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now; O’Brien, ‘Communizing Care’; Weeks, ‘Abolition of the Family’. 96 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 238. 97 Lewis, Abolish the Family, 19. 98 Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 130. 99 O’Brien, ‘Communizing Care’. 100 Frank E Manuel, ‘Foreword’, in Design for Utopia: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, ed. Charles Fourier (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 3. See also Pettman, ‘Get Thee to a Phalanstery: Or, How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade’, The Public Domain Review, 1 May 2019, https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/get-thee-toa-­phalanstery-or-how-fourier-can-still-teach-us-to-make-lemonade//. 101 For a similar argument, see Griffiths and Gleeson, ‘Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for Its Abolition’; Lane-McKinley, ‘The Idea of Children’. 102 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, ‘M/Other Ourselves: A Black Queer Feminist Genealogy for Radical Mothering’, in Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, ed. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams (Chico, CA: PM Press, 2016), 29. 103 Gumbs, 23. 104 Cited in Gumbs, 28. Similar proposals to collectivise care have been put forward by scholars and organisers working on disability justice and mutual aid. For example, see Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp

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Press, 2018); Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (London: Verso Books, 2020). 105 O’Brien, ‘Communizing Care’. 106 Jules Joanne Gleeson, ‘This Infamous Proposal’, New Socialist, 2020, http://newsocialist.org.uk/infamous-proposal/. 107 King, ‘Black “Feminisms” and Pessimism’, 71. 108 Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family (London: New Left Books, 1982), 159. 109 Emphasis added. Sophie Lewis, ‘The Family Lottery’, Dissent Magazine, 2021, www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-family-lottery. In her more recent work, Lewis abandons the term ‘family’ altogether and argues for relations of ‘kith’ rather than ‘kin’. ‘The family’, she writes, ‘is to be abolished even when it is aspired to, mythologized, valued, and embodied by people who are neither white nor heterosexual, bourgeois nor colonizer’. While I continue to use the terms ‘family’ and ‘kin’, I agree with Lewis that these must be deprivatised and unmoored from ‘proprietary concepts of couple, blood, gene, and seed’. See Lewis, Abolish the Family, 30; 9. 110 ‘Millennials Are Killing Capitalism’. 111 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (New York: Minor Compositions, 2021), 171. See also Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s discussion of homelessness in relation to undoing land as property in Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2022). 112 Ehn Nothing, ‘Introduction: Queens against Society’, in Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle (Untorelli Press, 2013), 5, https://untorellipress​ .noblogs.org/files/2011/12/STAR.pdf. 113 Sylvia Rivera, ‘Y’all Better Quiet Down: Sylvia Rivera’s Speech at the 1973 Liberation Day Rally’, in Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle (Untorelli Press, 2013), 30, https://untorellipress.noblogs.org/files/2011/12/STAR.pdf. 114 Quoted in Leslie Feinberg, ‘Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries’, Workers World, 2006, www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-73/. 115 Feinberg. 116 Marquis Bey, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes toward a Black Anarchism (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020). 117 Vienna Austin, ‘The Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries Manifesto, 50 Years Later’, OUT FRONT (blog), 1 March 2022, www​ .outfrontmagazine.com/the-street-transvestite-action-revolutionariesmanifesto-50-years-later/. 118 Bey, Anarcho-Blackness. 119 King, ‘Black “Feminisms” and Pessimism’, 84.

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120 Maya Yang, ‘Parents of 337 Children Separated at Border under Trump Still Not Found’, The Guardian, 12 August 2021, www .theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/12/migrant-children-separatedparents-border-trump. 121 Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (London: Penguin, 2017). 122 Emphasis added. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 225. See also King, ‘Black “Feminisms” and Pessimism’, 83–84.

Conclusion: The New Society 1 This is the subtitle of C. L. R. James, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, Facing Reality (Detroit, MI: Bewick, 1974). 2 On revolution in Haiti, Ghana, and Brixton, see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Penguin, 2001); C. L. R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, ed. Leslie James (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); Leila Hassan and Farruk Dhondy, ‘Revisiting the Brixton Struggle’, 2020, https://africasacountry.com/2020/07/revisiting-​the-brixton-struggle. 3 Cited in Matthew Quest, ‘“Every Cook Can Govern”: Direct Democracy, Workers’ Self Management & the Creative Foundations of C.L.R. James’ Political Thought’, The CLR James Journal 19, no. 1/2 (2013): 375. 4 C. L. R. James, A New Notion: Two Works, ed. Noel Ignatiev (Binghamton, NY: PM Press, 2010). 5 As Harney and Moten put it, the state is thus inherently ‘correctional’. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 78. 6 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Verso, 2000). 7 Catherine Damman and Saidiya Hartman, ‘Interview: Saidiya Hartman on Insurgent Histories and the Abolitionist Imaginary’, Artforum (blog), 14 July 2020, www.artforum.com/interviews/saidiya-​hartman83579. 8 On preventing the machine from working at all, see Mario Savio – ‘Operation of the Machine’, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsO_ SlA7E8k. 9 Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 256. 10 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 20. 11 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 227.

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12 Bonnie Honig, A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), xiv. George Shulman has similarly theorised refusal as a form of radical democratic politics. Reading Moten against himself, Shulman argues that Moten in fact offers ‘resources to revise— to enlarge, complicate, enrich—what we count as political’. George Shulman, ‘Fred Moten’s Refusals and Consents: The Politics of Fugitivity’, Political Theory 49, no. 2 (2021): 275. 13 Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 105. 14 Roberts, 171. Roberts makes this argument in reference to James Scott’s claim that ‘the future of our freedom lies in the daunting task of taming Leviathan, not evading it’. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 324. 15 William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2021). 16 Jack Halberstam, ‘Unbuilding Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures in and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark’, Places Journal, 3 October 2018. 17 As Halberstam explains with reference to trans and queer politics, ‘we might take up the challenge offered by Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural projects’ in order to shift ‘from notions of respectability and inclusion, and towards the anti-political project of unmaking a world’. Halberstam, ‘Unbuilding Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark’. 18 Cited in ‘Why Gordon Matta-Clark Cut Holes in Buildings – Conical Intersect’, Public Delivery, 2020, https://publicdelivery.org/mattaclark-conical-intersect/.

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Index

abolition antipolitical, 60, 61, 78–79 border, 98–100 ecology, 119 family. See family abolition police and prison, 60, 76–78 Afrique-Europe-Interact (AEI), 99–100 Ahmed, Mona, 125–26, 146 al-Andalus, fall of, 35–36 An Anthropology of Marxism (Robinson), 29, 30 anarchism anticolonial critique of, 11 antipolitical, 13, 55–57 black, 28, 60, 77–78 classical, 10 globalising and decolonising, 12–13, 17, 54–55 indigenous, 57, 120–23 Marx’s critique of, 11 anarchitecture, 151 Anderson, Benedict, 54 Anderson, Bridget, 85, 95, 97 Anderson, Perry, 32 Anderson, William C., 21, 77 Anthropocene, 106, 110 apartheid, 40, 82, 83, 86, 92, 93, 96, 101 Baartman, Saartje, 134 Bakunin, Mikhail, 11 Balagoon, Kuwasi, 6, 21–23, 28, 42 Baldwin, James, 79 Ball, John, 31 Bambara, Toni Cade, 7 Besteman, Catherine, 100 Beveridge, Albert, 116 Bey, Marquis, 43, 77, 78, 144, 145 Bhandar, Brenna, 102, 113, 114

black family, destruction of, 133 Black Jacobins, The (James), 52 Black Liberation Army, 21 Black Marxism (Robinson), 6, 28, 33, 40, 51, 86, 91 Black Panther Party, 21, 28 black radical aesthetics, 44 black radical tradition, 7, 51–54, 122 Black Rose Anarchist Federation, 12 Blair, Tony, 137 Bloch, Ernst, 49 Bolsonaro, Jair, 59, 62 boomerang thesis, 23, 27 BOPE, 62 border imperialism, 94 bordering history of, 86–92 labour exploitation and, 92–96 resistance to, 96–101 BP, 108–9 Braudel, Fernand, 25, 26 Brazil dictatorship in, 62 forest clearance, 112 history of policing in, 67–68 police violence in, 59–60, 62 Bridewell, 69 British East India Company, 66 British South Africa Company, 66 broken windows policing, 75 Brown, Wendy, 3 buen vivir, 121 Buggery Act, 131 Cáceres, Berta, 107 Cameron, David, 138 Capetillo, Luisa, 22 capoeira, 67, 68 carceral feminism, 3, 126, 128–29 care sector/industry, 143, 145

261

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262 Carens, Joseph, 84 Césaire, Aimé, 27, 47 chav, meaning of term, 137 child protection services, 138–39 child removal policies, 126, 132–33 cholera, “Asiatic”, 71–72 cisheteropatriarchy, 19, 58 citizenship from below, 84 Clastres, Pierre, 48 cleaning sector/industry, 75, 140, 143, 145 Clinton, Bill, 137 Coca-Cola, 74 coercion, ‘extra’-economic, 6, 26, 28, 38 Cohn, Norman, 29 collective intelligence gathered from struggle, 13, 51, 54, 57 Colquhoun, Patrick, 65, 68 Columbus, Christopher, 36 Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, 88 commons, 87, 115, 116 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 19, 53, 127, 129 conservation, 117, 118 conversion therapy, 126 Cooper, Davina, 46 Correa, Rafael, 121 Coulthard, Glen, 123 Cox, Oliver Cromwell, 29 cricket, 1, 15 crime prevention, myth of, 72, 80 crusades, 34, 35 Cruz, Oswaldo, 73, 74 Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera, 57, 105 da Silva, Denise Ferreira, 79 Dakota Access Pipeline, 120 Dar es Salaam School, 29 Davis, Angela, 76, 80 decarbonisation, 106, 118 decolonisation, 1, 6, 24, 47–48 deforestation, 118 Delhi, 15, 18, 58, 125–26, 146, 148 deportation, 81, 89, 92, 98, 129, 141 Diaz, Natalie, 59 dirty wars (Latin America), 62, 63 Douglas, Mary, 60 Du Bois, W.E.B., 51 Duggan, Lisa, 127, 128

Index Eden, Garden of, 30, 39 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The (Marx), 53 Eliot, T.S., 124 Ellis Island, 1 encomienda system, 89 Engels, Friedrich, 50, 52, 53, 129, 130 Enlightenment anarchism and, 13, 17, 45, 54, 55 decolonising the, 56 linear history and, 51 property and, 114 relation to Romanticism, 117 environmental justice, 104, 106–7, 123 environmentalism, origins of, 117–18 Ervin, Lorenzo Kom’boa, 22 Essex lorry, 81 eugenics, 40, 118, 126, 133–34 Eurosur, 83 export processing zones, 95, 140 extractivism, 104, 105, 116, 119, 121, 148 family abolition, 19, 126, 141–45 Fanon, Frantz, 7, 47, 48, 81 Federici, Silvia, 32, 131 feminisation of labour, 140 Firestone, Shulamith, 130, 141 Floyd, George, 76 fossil fuels, 108, 119–21 foster care system, 129, 139 Foucault, Michel, 4, 27, 69 Fourier, Charles, 53, 142 Franco, Marielle, 18, 59–61, 78, 80 French Revolution, 11, 66 Friedrich, Caspar David, 117 Frontex, 83 Fryer, Peter, 89 Galeano, Eduardo, 45, 112 Galton, Francis, 134 gentrification, 73–76 Ghadar movement, 22 gilets noirs, 14, 83, 96–98, 100 Gilio-Whitaker, Dina, 107 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 43, 101, 157 Gilroy, Paul, 91

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263

Index Goldberg, David Theo, 37, 156 Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 57, 122 Gordon, Avery, 79 Gordon Riots (1780), 88 Graeber, David, 56 Grant, Madison, 118 green energy, 106, 118, 119 green Keynesianism, 106 Green New Deal, 106 greening the state, 105–7 Greenland, 110 Gwangju uprising, 10 Haitian Revolution, 52–53, 67 Halberstam, Jack, 1, 20, 124, 128, 149, 150 Hall, Stuart, 46 Hardin, Garrett, 118 Harney, Stefano, 14, 59, 149 Hartman, Saidiya, 6, 14, 20, 56, 146–49 Haymarket Affair, 12 Hegel, G.W.F., 40 Heng, Geraldine, 34–35 heretics. See socialism, medieval heteronormativity, 72, 132 Heynen, Nik, 119 hijras, 125–28, 145 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 39–40, 114 homonormativity, 126, 128 Honig, Bonnie, 20, 149 human rights, 4–5, 82, 84–85, 97, 107, 127 human smuggling, 85 humanitarianism, 84, 86 hygiene, race and, 71, 82 Imperial British East Africa Company, 66 indentured servitude, 6, 25, 36, 38, 69, 87, 90–91 indigenous sexualities, colonial policing of, 132–33 Inquisition, the Holy, 33 Institute of Race Relations, 29 Irish Rebellion (1798), 65 James, C.L.R., 5, 6, 22 anarchising, 54, 147, 148 black radical tradition and, 51

critique of the postcolonial state, 47 deportation of, 1 Haitian Revolution and, 52 socialism from below, 147 state capitalism, 161 thinking beyond the boundary, 15–16, 42 utopianism and, 49–50 Jetñil-Kijiner, Kathy, 109–11, 123 Johnson, Marsha P., 144–45 Jordan, June, 57 Kashmir, 81 Kataristas, 121 Kauanui, J. Ke¯haulani, 57, 132 Kelley, Robin D.G., 9, 44, 169, 170, 173 Kenmure Street, 83, 100–1 King, Tiffany Lethabo, 125, 127 Kollontai, Alexandra, 141 Kropotkin, Pyotr, 11 Lampedusa, 81 lascars, 88 leaning in by leaning on, 140 Lenin, Vladimir, 45–46 Leviathan (Hobbes), 5, 9, 39 Lewis, Sophie, 123, 141–42 Linebaugh, Peter, 66 Locke, John, 114, 115 Lombroso, Cesare, 133–34 London Metropolitan Police, 65–68 London riots (2011), 138 Look for me in the whirlwind (Panther 21), 21 Luxemburg, Rosa, 24, 47 Magdalene asylums, 131 magical Marxism, 45 Marine Police Office, 66 Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (James), 1, 2, 5 maroon society/community, 10, 51, 67, 78, 148 Marshall Islands, 110 Marx, Karl capital-labour relation, 40 colonial erasure and, 6 critique of anarchism, 11

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264 Marx, Karl (cont.) family abolition and, 129–30 poetry of the future, 53, 58 primitive accumulation, 38 revolutionary class, 51, 52 science of socialism, 50, 53 vagrancy and, 87 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 149, 151 McClintock, Anne, 130, 133 Médecins Sans Frontières, 84 medieval racism, 33 Mediterranean, 18, 81, 83, 84, 100, 115 Melville, Herman, 2 methodological statism, 82, 86 methodological whiteness, 12, 13 Mignolo, Walter, 6 migrant labour, 94–95 Migrantifa, 83, 98 Miliband, Ralph, 38 militarisation thesis, 63–64 militarism, 63, 99, 105, 110, 145, 148 millenarianism. See socialism, medieval mining, 107, 108, 112, 115 miscegenation, 134 mobility, etymology of, 88 mobility control. See bordering Moby Dick (Melville), 2 modern slavery, 95, 96 Mongia, Radhika, 27, 86 Morales, Evo, 121, 122 More, Thomas, 49 Morris, William, 31 Moten, Fred, 14, 20, 44, 59, 143, 148–49 Movement for Black Lives, 76 Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), 14, 103 Moynihan report, 136 Mubenga, Jimmy, 81 Mujeres Creando, 14, 105, 122–23 Muñoz, José Esteban, 6, 17, 44, 45, 49–50, 58, 128 Müntzer, Thomas, 31 Myers, Joshua, 13, 40, 55, 56 Nascimento, Abdias Do, 78 negative dialectics, 51–54 Neocleous, Mark, 68–70, 115

Index neoliberalism, 75 borders and, 94 human rights and, 4 social reproduction and, 127, 135–41 the state and, 3, 5, 46 Neruda, Pablo, 61 Nicolazzo, Sal, 65, 92 Niger delta, 102, 108 Niviâna, Aka, 109–11, 123 Nkrumah, Kwame, 48 No Border Kitchen (NBK), 98, 100 no borders, 98–100 nuclear family, 72, 128, 130, 132, 142, 143 Occupy Wall Street, 12 Ogoni, 102–4, 108, 123, 124 Olympics Games, 73 open borders, 84–86 Orwell, George, 66 pacification theory, 68 Pacifying Police Unit (UPP), 73 Palmares, 10, 78, 80 Panopticon, 69 Paris Commune, 10, 12 Paris uprisings (2005), 138 Parsons, Lucy, 22 Pears soap, 71 Peel, Robert, 65–67 penal transportation, 89 Plato, 8–9, 39 policing gentrification and, 73–76 history of, 64–73 struggles against, 76–79 political paradigm, 6, 42, 44, 48 making of the, 8, 22, 28, 39–41 racial capitalism and the, 9, 40–41 Poor Laws, 68, 87, 101, 138 population control, 126, 135, 139–40, 148 postanarchism, 4 Poulantzas, Nicos, 38 Powell, Enoch, 137 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 11 property ownership, 104, 105, 113–16, 120 Purity and Danger (Douglas), 60

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265

Index Quan, H.L.T., 7 quilombismo, 18, 61, 78–80, 98 Ra, Sun, 17, 43–45, 57 Race Today collective, 147 racial Capitalocene, 111 Radio Ghetto, 83, 98 Ramnath, Maia, 12 Rana Plaza garment factory, 92, 96 React or be Killed!. See Reaja ou Será Mortx! Reaja ou Será Mortx!, 14, 61, 78 reconquista, the Spanish, 35–36 Red Nation, 120 renewable energy, 116, 118, 119 Republic (Plato), 8, 39 residential schools, settler colonial, 132–33, 145 Rio de Janeiro, 18, 59, 62, 67, 73–75, 79 Rio Tinto, 119 Rivera, Sylvia, 144–45 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 121–22, 203 Roberts, Dorothy, 138 Roberts, Neil, 149 Rojava, 10 Romanticism, 117 Roy, Arundhati, 102, 146 Royal Irish Constabulary, 67 Royal Nigeria Company, 66 Samudzi, Zoé, 77 Sanger, Margaret, 134 sanitation, race and, 40, 71, 74 Sankara, Thomas, 5 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 103, 108, 124 Save the Children, 84 Scott, James, 18 Scuderie Detective Le Cocq, 62 sex work, 72, 130, 133–34, 144–45, 207 Shakur, Assata, 21 Sharma, Nandita, 85, 91, 96, 169 Shell, 102–3, 108, 109, 196 Shilliam, Robbie, 70, 137, 171 Sierra Leone Resettlement Scheme, 88–89 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 57, 198, 204, 215 slavery abolition of, 73, 89, 90

medieval, 35 modern, 95, 96, 128 plantation, 6, 12, 25, 87, 90 transatlantic, 90 transpacific, 90 white family and, 132, 133 Smith, Adam, 37, 64, 71 socialism from below, 48, 147 medieval, 22, 23, 29–32 neoliberal attack on, 4 science of, 50, 53, 54 the state and, 11 utopian, 53 space-jazz. See Ra, Sun spaceways, travel the, 43, 45, 57, 58 Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), 76 Spillers, Hortense, 133 State and Revolution, The (Lenin), 45 state formation geopolitical approaches and, 24 liberal theories of, 23, 37 Marxist theories of, 25 methodological nationalism and, 25 postcolonial theories of, 26 racial capitalism and, 7–8, 17, 22, 28–37 state of nature, 23, 30, 39–40, 114 sterilisation, 126, 134, 139 stolen generations, 139 stop-and-search, 75 Stopes, Marie, 134 Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), 14, 22, 144–45 structural adjustment programs, 94, 99 sweatshop labour, 92–94, 140 Terms of Order, The (Robinson), 8, 13, 29, 39, 44, 50, 55 terra nullius, 69, 113, 124, 132 Thames River Police, 65, 66 Thompson, E.P., 65 Tilly, Charles, 24–26 Traoré, Assa, 76 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 85 US-Mexico border, 81, 145 utopianism, 3, 17, 44, 48–50

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266 vagrancy legislation, 87–89, 91, 101 Vergès, Françoise, 75, 135 Voodoo, 52 Voyles, Traci Brynne, 19, 104, 111 Walcott, Derek, 49 Walia, Harsha, 94 Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (painting, Caspar David Friedrich), 117, 118 wasteland, 102, 113–16, 124 wasteland, The (Eliot), 124 water is life, 105, 121, 123 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Hartman), 14, 149 Weber, Max, 24–26

Index welfare queen, concept of, 136 West Bank, 81 Westphalia, Treaty of, 23 white working class, 3, 96 whiteness, the making of, 8, 34–35 Wight, Martin, 6 Wilde, Oscar, 131 wilderness, concept of, 114, 115, 117, 118, 124 witch-hunts, 33, 131 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 8, 32, 38 workfare, 136, 138, 140 workhouses, 33, 69, 88, 131, 134 World Cup, 59, 73 world-systems theory, 25, 26 Wynter, Sylvia, 15, 34, 55, 60

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