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Exigent Sadism: Austerity Logics and the Antireparative Turn

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Exigent Sadism: Austerity Logics and the Antireparative Turn

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An article shared with the group by Sariyah, who writes:

"I've found the concept rhymes with the concept of 'badmind' we have in Trinidad, which is kind of like doing something 'for spite', determination brought on by anger at perceived injustice. We say, for eg, it's badmind that propelled the West Indies cricket team to give the English team licks in the 1970s after their captain said 'we will make them grovel'. There's a book/film called Fire in Babylon (2010) that refers to this story. I feel like there may be some rhyming with Gramsci's 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will' as well."

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Post-Session Summary for Session 2 of Series 3 - "WEATHER"

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Post-Session Summary for Session 2 of Series 3 - "WEATHER"

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Working Document for Session 5  of Series 2 - "Carrots & Sticks"

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Working Document for Session 5  of Series 2 - "Carrots & Sticks"

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Post-Session Summary for Session 1 of Series 3 - "WAYS"

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Post-Session Summary for Session 1 of Series 3 - "WAYS"

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I want to thank everyone who made it to last year’s sessions of AGAPE , as well as the many present-absences who shaped the sessions’ proceedings—those who send emails of affirmation, contestation, interest, and intrigue in response to the pre-session primers and post-session summaries. It is amazing to think that we’ve been running these sessions since and that in 2026 this project will be entering its third year. I have learned so much from all of you, truly. You have kept my hope alive, and you’ve inspired me to learn and do more, and to turn what we have learned together back toward myself, so I can act and do better in/against this world.

What follows is a review of what we learned over the last year and a preview for the next year.

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AGAPE 2.0 / Year in Review — solutionsforpostmodernliving

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Over the course of five sessions in 2025, we examined five modalities of imperial violence and the traps that so often accompany resistance. As we open into 2026, it is time to ask the question that has been gathering underneath all along: how do we defend not only ourselves but, more profoundly, ou

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Next Session // “Carrots & Sticks” - Behavioral Violence

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Next Session // “Carrots & Sticks” - Behavioral Violence

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During our reset and catch-up session on October 19th, a small group gathered, but the intimate conversation opened into something expansive: a reframing of how we understand human nature, relational life, and the forces that try to tame them. This primer grows directly out of that conversation and prepares the ground for our next session on “Carrots and Sticks”—behavioral violence, reward and punishment, and the disciplining/domestication of the wilds within and without.

Our next session is now scheduled for Sunday, December 7, 11AM – 1PM (Chicago / GMT -5).

Stay tuned for more information.

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“Carrots & Sticks” - Behavioral Violence — solutionsforpostmodernliving

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During our reset and catch-up session on October 19th, a small group gathered, but the intimate conversation opened into something expansive: a reframing of how we understand human nature, relational life, and the forces that try to tame them. This primer grows directly out of that conversation and

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This website offers visualizations of historical patterns of deportations. Racism in US immigration enforcement emerges through this data as a consistent phenomenon since 1790.

A Project by Mariah Tso, a Diné Cartographer and GIS Specialist with the Million Dollar Hoods (MDH) Project at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA

Learned about this through this Red Nation podcast episode:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mapping-deportations-w-mariah-tso-and-kelly-lytle/id1482834485?i=1000730358410

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Mapping Deportations – U.S. Immigration Control since 1790

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Mapping deportations invites you to see the history of U.S. immigration enforcement not as a series of disconnected events, but as a pattern. For more than two centuries, U.S. immigration enforcement has favored Europeans and their descendants while targeting non-white migrants for exclusion, removal, and punishment. Although U.S. immigration law and policy have shifted over time, the nation’s immigration enforcement regime has consistently produced this result.

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Working Document for Session 1  of Series 2 - "Guns & Bombs"

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Working Document for Session 1  of Series 2 - "Guns & Bombs"

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Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

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Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

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"…traces the cultural shifts that led to the predominance of prison via the body and power. Prison is used by the "disciplines" – new technological powers that can also be found, according to Foucault, in places such as schools, hospitals, and military barracks. … The main ideas of Discipline and Punish can be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline, and prison."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

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Fragile States - an archive of interviews with former political prisoners who have been incarcerated for climate activism

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Fragile States - an archive of interviews with former political prisoners who have been incarcerated for climate activism

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It is an ongoing project to celebrate and financially support those who have faced retaliatory state violence for engaging in direct action.

The extreme legal and police response to climate resistance is a tacit acknowledgment of the incredible potential opened by those attempting to enact a livable future.

Each interviewee was paid $1000 for their participation out of an NYU grant. There's an invitation to others with access to academic funding to consider how university resources might best be allocated in this era of crisis.

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Fragile States is an archive of interviews with former political prisoners who have been incarcerated for climate activism. It is an ongoing project to celebrate and financially support those who have faced retaliatory state violence for engaging in direct action.

As the climate crisis deepens, governments around the world are using every means at their disposal to crack down on protest and activism. However, in exercising their power, they simultaneously reveal their own fragility. The extreme legal and police response to climate resistance is a tacit acknowledgment of the incredible potential opened by those attempting to enact a livable future.

This work is supported by a research grant from New York University. We have redistributed these funds to pay each interviewee $1000 for their participation. We invite others with access to academic funding to join us in considering how university resources might best be allocated in this era of crisis.

By Sam Lavigne & Tega Brain, with special thanks to Nīkau and Kate Silzer.

Blockade Australia

My name is Max Curmi. I'm 27. I grew up in Victoria, in so-called Australia, and I've been involved in climate activism of some sort since I was a teenager. Over time I've drifted away from approaches that are appealing to the political class, towards taking part in direct action because my assessment of the situation is that the people in control on this continent have little or no interest at all in doing the responsible thing and looking after life. So, for the last five years, I have been organizing full-time on this continent, with a focus primarily on non-violent direct action in several different campaigns and movements.

Blockade Australia was set up to try to move the conversation around climate beyond the "we need to stop the next bad project," and towards the need for transformational or system change in order to respond to the crisis. You hear a lot of people talking about "the system's broken," "the system is malfunctioning," "we need to fix the system," but our framing is that it's actually not broken. It's performing exactly the way it was set up by the English when they came here to so-called Australia. For the climate movement to actually start to engage with this in an effective way we have to acknowledge the situation that we are currently facing. And it's not a couple of bad politicians or a couple of bad corporations, it's an entire economic and legal framework that prevents change from happening and that locks in an extraction-based economy that is fundamentally about exploiting people and the environment for as much profit as possible for the rich.

Our positioning with Blockade Australia is that we are trying to frame Australia as an organized system that is doing harmful things. Take for example the Adani coal mine. Much of the movement against Adani framed them as a bad corporation that was going to do bad things. But we want to expand that to say no, it's much more than just bad corporations. It's a bad system. And as everyday people, we haven't got political and legal avenues to stop the harm that's being done so we have to go and start to engage in the sort of resistance politics you see around the world when regimes refuse to listen to experts and behave in a way that's opposed to the interests of the population.

We are not trying to appeal to people in power, we are trying to force them to deal with the fact that we are powerful ourselves.

With Blockade Australia we are targeting the most important bits of the economy. We targeted the world's largest coal port in Newcastle and shut that down for two weeks. We then targeted the port of Botany which is the first port that was set up on this continent and we shut that down for a week.

I was involved in an action there. I climbed up a crane in the port and shut that section of the port down for eight hours. It was Friday morning on the fourth day of actions. We'd been targeting different sections of the port, the roadways, and the rail leading into the port for the previous couple of days.

At dawn we set up a bipod, which is two 7 or 8 meter poles that are tied together at the top. We positioned the bipod off a rail bridge over a river. A friend of mine climbed up there and hung down from a rope that was tied to the top of the bipod, over the train lines, so no trains could go in or out of the port for the next four hours.

When that friend was taken down, another lady, a 65-year-old woman, climbed on top of one of the stopped trains and halted the use of the railway line for another three hours.

Then, at about 2 o'clock that day, I ran into the container terminal itself. This is where the containers are taken off the ships and put onto the land. It was a solo action. I had climbing equipment with me and a lock-on device which is two bits of steel pipe welded together so I could lock my arms around something and they would have to grind me out. My plan was to go in and climb up one of those cranes and lock myself on there somewhere where they couldn't get to me.

It was one of the biggest experiences of my life. It was a long run in, with a lot of weight. I had to climb over a lot of fences. I ended up getting to the top of the crane, which in hindsight was very lucky. I climbed off the edge and abseiled down to a position on the main arm of the crane. I was hanging out over where the ship was, and I was livestreaming on the Blockade Australia page, encouraging people to look at the actions that we were doing as an extended period of resistance.

I hung on the crane for about six hours. A storm actually came in while I was up there so I got really wet and really cold, and then the cops got me down with another massive crane and I spent the next 18 days in jail.

I had five charges.

The first one was "endangering life on a rail," which was actually the one that got me sentenced to four months in jail. On my way into the port I ran along a railway line for about 50 meters so they charged me with endangering life on a rail. I got "trespass in a waterside area" and something like "unregulated high risk activity," which was the climbing. I also got "refusal to comply with the directions of an officer" and the last one was an incitement charge. Because I was live-streaming, I was charged with inciting a future indictable offense. This is a mid-range offense that normally carries jail time. I guess these are the things the cops were starting to do because at that stage, they hadn't stopped any of the actions. So the way they decided to respond was to hit us with a lot of ridiculous charges.

I think the most scary thing to the ruling class is people participating in organized direct action. We are moving away from a protest and persuasion sort of positioning, which is what the climate movement generally was, to a political resistance framing. The actions we are doing have slowly escalated, but the politics that have come along with that action have developed, and now we are talking about things that are much more threatening to the people in power.

This continent has a long history of persecuting people. The communists were persecuted in the late 1940s, and First Nations people have been hunted and hanged when they stood up and said: "this system is shit, it doesn't contribute to the betterment of the general population." We have been trying to forge a new path for the climate movement and there is always a high risk for the people who put their hands up to push that early on. Exposing yourself as an organizer means they are going to crack down on you hard.

The response fits in with the anglo-American empire, which Australia is part of, that has always dealt with resistance by attacking it really hard and when it's at its infancy so it doesn't get any momentum. There are some smart political thinkers in the ruling establishment and they have a textbook that goes: "When we're being threatened, even if that threat is small, crush the hell out of it and make it as scary as possible for people to join." This is the approach across the board.

I was arrested again one week before the start of our first public mobilization. The previous mobilizations were organized in secret because we wanted to give ourselves some advantage, but we ultimately want to be organizing in the open so that people who aren't connected to our networks can join in. So the police had a long time to get ready, and so did we, but they have more resources. We had a camp on the outskirts of Sydney on a private property, owned by someone who is part of the movement who was happy to lend their land to us.

We were out there running non-violent direct action trainings and doing community building work. Some people saw some other people in camouflage up the hill and went up to them to ask them what they were doing. They lay there until the people who spotted them were standing right over them. One of our group reached down and asked, "what are you doing?" and they got up and said, "we're compromised, we're compromised" into their radio. They got into a car that came speeding through our camp. Some of us, not me, but others, stood in front of the car to prevent it from leaving. The car ran over two people and one of them still has significant injuries from that, but the car ended up stopping. They ended up being undercover police.

A massive amount of police came in. Within the hour, between 50-100 police, with the dog squad, the riot squad, and a police helicopter, came in and were chasing people down. It was a really hectic thing. I was arrested on false accusations. I got charged with a series of riot offenses, also with a conspiracy to help others take part in what they describe as "illegal protest." I was arrested along with nine others. Everyone else, apart from me and one other person, got bail, and me and the other person got sent to jail. So I was back in for 22 days.

There is now a 10 day mandatory isolation period to try to keep COVID out of the jails. And because I'd been in there before, I was pushing really hard to be put in the same cell as my friend as this was their first time in there and luckily we were able to do our 10 days together. You are locked in a box for 10 days. There is no going outside. Food comes in through a little hole in the wall. You can make a phone call a day once you've got money coming in from the outside, but that generally takes 7-9 days if you're lucky. There is no other access to any sort of communications at all.

I was in a privatized jail, so we ended up staying in that isolation cell for 17 days before they moved us out. Then we got put into the general wing in jail. Jail is a very horrible dehumanizing place. A lot of largely poor people in there, who have been picked up going about their lives. There are a lot of people suffering. But my experience with the other prisoners was generally pretty good.

That said, I'm a vegan, you just have to eat the meat. My friend had his medication denied to him the whole time so he was having a really hard time with that. And there is nothing to do, so you are just in there looking at a concrete box. I guess it feels like being a hen or a pig in one of those factories - sensorially deprived without any kind of contact with nature or fresh air. And when you do get out into the main wing, there are dangerous people there. You've got people living in really shit conditions and you have prison guards who know how to use their position of power to give people a shit time. They definitely knew who me and my friend were and they gave us a shit time. I had a very bad time one day, got hassled and I don't really want to say more than that. But it had come down from the screws. They had put people up to beat the shit out of me really.

But that was kind of a one-off thing. There are rules in jail, like most people are in there for some unfortunate thing and people want to be looked after. Very quickly after that happened a lot of the people in there, particularly some of the First Nations guys, organized themselves and came to my protection. So I was pretty safe reasonably quickly but always at the mercy of the guards who can just grab you and take you and put you somewhere else where no one can protect you. So I was totally on edge the whole time I was in there and definitely didn't know if I was going to get out until I did. It's like being in an alien world and then you get popped back out into society which has moved on. It's very strange.

While I was in jail, the police were running a shock and awe campaign on the rest of my group. They were doing things like going into people's hotel rooms at 11 o'clock at night, filming everybody, and basically carrying out a super hectic response to what was just a climate change protest in the city. I think the people on the outside had a heaps more hectic time than me on the inside, as they were getting chased around by a hell of a lot of police for a couple of weeks.

I just got out again last week and was sent back to Victoria because they wouldn't let me out in New South Wales. I have a massive list of known associations so I can't talk to any of my friends, can't talk to most of the community who were involved with organizing the protest. What they've done effectively is use all the bike gang laws. They are treating us like an outlaw motorcycle gang and we're trying to get the charges off, but from my experience over the past six months, I'm not really holding my breath that a lot of that stuff is going to be taken away. And because they have charged a lot of people with ridiculous charges, we had to plead not guilty so we are probably going to be on these bail conditions for six months or longer. I've been on bail for years before. That's what they are trying to do to break us up. They are using bail as a punishment.

Standing Rock

I want to give a heartfelt thank you and respect to everybody reading this. I come to you with a good heart and a good mind.

My name is Red Fawn and my Lakota name is Good Hearted Woman, which was given to me during ceremony. I'm an Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge, South Dakota. I was raised in Denver, Colorado. I was raised in the American Indian Movement. I come from generations of family members and friends that have stood up against injustice against Mother Earth, against our way of life, our ceremonies. I grew up with a raised fist in the air.

In the beginning of summer in 2016, my grandma, who was one of the pillars in my life, passed away. Then in June my mother passed away from cancer, and she was the other pillar in my life, so I was literally at a crossroads. My mom was a traditional canupa carrier, which is a pipe carrier and a sun dancer and I really wanted to honor her in that way. We buried her ceremonially.

We're part of the Oceti Ŝakowiŋ which is the seven bounds of the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota nations who roam through the plains of Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, North Dakota, and then over to mostly the east and west side of the Missouri River on the borderlands. In our language, the Missouri River is called Mnisose, which is the muddy waters. In our culture, in our spiritual beliefs, our first medicine was water; Mni Wakan is water. It's sacred to us because it's our medicine. It's how we carry our children within our bodies. It's how we live and what our body operates on.

I have Lakota relatives from the American Indian Movement who are from Standing Rock and who live there. One of my friends, my brothers, calls me and he's like, "Hey. They're going to be starting pre-construction on a pipeline that's going to be going underneath the Missouri River around Standing Rock." I was like, "Are you serious?" And he said, "Yes. We should go." I was thinking he meant we should go sometime later on. I was like, "When?" He's like, "Now." I'm like, "Literally?" The call came in and we went.

That land was very sacred to us. People would come and bring their hocokah - what would it be translated into? Their altar. Medicine men would bring their altar, set it down and they'd pray and have ceremony there. When that pipeline was proposed with that easement of the electrical line and gas lines, it went right through those sacred lands.

When we first arrived at Sacred Stone Camp in the first week of August, I would estimate there were probably about 70 people at the most. People that were staying there permanently, saying they were here for the long haul. Then it just started growing.

We went and we were sitting along that easement line on Highway 1806. I looked around me and there were people of every color. There were white kids, black kids, brown kids, red kids, Asian kids. There were all these different people from everywhere, all over, and more and more were coming in every day.

I think that's really when my healing began because it enabled me to step away from the us/them mentality that you're raised with as a minority. It's always like "them, they did this, they did that," and it's a real separation, and it doesn't allow us to be human beings anymore because we categorize ourselves and differentiate ourselves from one another. That's something that I learned. That's a healing that was ignited at Standing Rock on those front lines those first days.

Before Standing Rock, I'd never built a fire. I'd never slept in a tent. I grew up in the city, but I was out there living where my ancestors roamed. I worked the front gate for 8 hours, 10 hours straight on some days and we'd see hundreds of people come and go. I got to meet all these people and shake their hands and get personal with them. It was so amazing. They'd have pow wows, they'd wake us up every morning. We'd go down to the river and we'd make tobacco offerings and we pray. We would go around at night at dinner time, and we would trade stories, and we'd trade songs, and trade food. Just do things that you don't get the opportunity to do in this day and age anymore. It was like its own little city.

Then I remember the security came with their guns and they had big high-powered rifles. More and more people came in, and the security started getting tighter and tighter, bringing more people, more guns. It started becoming intense, but as Lakota people and Dakota people we said, "We are in ceremony and we're supposed to stay in prayer." In our spiritual way of life, prayer is reverence. You don't go against that. If we say, "We're going to do this whole stand as a ceremony and a prayer," then that means we're not going to have violence. We're not going to have drugs. We're not going to have alcohol. We're going to conduct ourselves like we're in one of our sacred ceremonies. That's how we were and that was really important to us.

So many people at Standing Rock were like, "I just got this feeling that I needed to be here, and I needed to come and do this." So many people left important jobs, lives, all this stuff. There were so many volunteers who were willing to be arrested just for the cause. Every few days we were having actions, severe actions, where we would go get chased by cops, get pepper sprayed, gas, all kinds of stuff by the police. But even on the front lines, everybody stuck together and really learned how to be together again.

I would help out on the front line with my ATV, evacuating people because they were injured, because they were terrified, because they were traumatized by law enforcement, chasing them down in military vehicles, gassing them, spraying them, hitting them with batons, pointing loaded guns at them. I remember evacuating elderly women that were screaming, crying.They were so traumatized and so scared that they clung onto me and each other, like four or five deep on one ATV, just clinging to each other until we were at safety.

I remember another time, some people wrapped their hands in red ribbon and sage, and they jumped the fence while DPO security pointed rifles at them. They ran all the way to the river. They were scared because they had live rounds pointed at them like they were being hunted. I think that the hardest part for me was understanding that we could lose our lives because of big oil interests.

I was one of the first people to be arrested. I got arrested again in September and then the third time I got arrested was October 27th. The very first day when we got arrested, the pipeline people were like, "Okay, the tractors are going to come through here, and they're going to cut to this fence. They're going to build it up and make it so the trucks can come in." We're like, "No, they're not, we're not moving." They would try to psych us out by changing the construction date. Then one day they really did come. They had so many officers. They took this orange vinyl fence thing, and they pushed us back. I remember one cool, for lack of a better term or whatever, some cool white dude. He was like, "Let's lock arms. Let's lock arms and not let him push us."

There were a lot of people and the cops were pushing us, and somebody went down. I remember picking him back up, and I was like, "Get up, get up. You can't go down. Just lock arms and stand strong." Then they just started plucking us out of the crowd: "You come here, you're getting arrested."

Towards the end of August, I met Heath, my cousin's brother-in-law. He's just one of those people where you're like, "Dang, this is Mr. Nice Guy. He's so helpful." He'd take our clothes and wash them and all this stuff. I was just in a very vulnerable place in my life and he was always cool. He came outside of my tent, played the flute, and just seemed like a really respectful person.

He was from the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes. That's the three affiliated tribes that sell the oil off their land to the oil company. His brother was a cop and he lived with his mom in Madan, and he would come down all the time but he never went to actions. He was always like, "I have to work," when it was time for action. He contributed a lot financially, probably with the money the Feds paid him.

Heath started coming around more and more. I would be at the front gate all day and he'd come by after work and just hang out. Then he started offering to do the fire for the ceremonies. Then he made friends with all of us that weren't related to him through marriage. My cousins, my aunt whose daughter married his brother, they never said "Watch out for this guy." We were all camped together in this one little circle.

I didn't think twice. Did the notion that he was an infiltrator for the Feds ever cross my mind? No, but it should have. And that's what the Federal government and governments are capable of. Putting someone in there who could pretend to be so honourable, making fire for our sweat lodge, bringing wood.

I later found out that Heath wasn't even approached by the FBI. He volunteered to be an infiltrator way before the camp started building. Fortunately, I never put him in a position where he had too much information or anything. My uncle was head of security and when we would have meetings Heath was never around.

The day I got arrested we ate some dinner, then went to my trailer and put gas in my ATV. Heath gave me my backpack. I put on my black and white American Indian Movement jacket and then he tried to jump on the ATV with me.

He wanted to give me his jacket, and I was like, "I already have a jacket." He's like, "It's cold and you're going to be driving on that thing." I was like, "All right." I was just like, snap, snap, snap, fast, just trying to hurry up and get out of there. Then I went to the front line and he never came, which was really confusing to me. I didn't know where he was until I saw the aerial video footage when we were filing my case a year later.

As I headed back to the front line, I saw my aunt Phyllis looking so distressed. She pulled her car right up to the front line, right in the middle of the street and moved all the protesters out of the way. Before I got off my ATV, I put on my gas mask, because they were spraying people. I was like, "Auntie, what's wrong? Is everything okay?" She's like, "They shot a young boy off of a horse. He got injured, and I'm tired of this. They're getting carried away now. They're hurting our children." We turned around, she got out of the car, and she started telling the police, "I want something done about this. You guys are going overboard. We're here peacefully."

I said, "Yes, we're praying for each of you." I remember waving my hand at them. It was me standing about three-quarters of a car's distance away from the line of police. Our security was in between, so it wasn't a face-to-face confrontation with the police.

Then I turned to go back to my ATV and that's when I got tackled. They tackled me so hard - I remember trying to struggle and panicking. I didn't even hear the shots being fired.

There were a lot of officers on top of me. One had his knee so hard on my throat that I think I lost consciousness at some point. In the video, you see my legs just go straight out. I remember one of the officers said, "Are you okay? Can you breathe?" Then I said, "Yes." He goes, "Okay, I'm going to cuff you now." I just laid there. They handcuffed me. Then when they stood me up, one of the white cops had a smile on his face and said, "Oh, yes, now you're going to jail for attempted murder on police officers. How do you feel about that?"

I just looked at him and I didn't say anything. I didn't say anything the whole way to jail. I didn't say anything to anybody until I talked to my uncle. They put me in a cell by myself. I just kept praying and praying and praying and I didn't know what was going to happen. They never did gunshot residue tests on me, they never tested my clothing. They just left me in the cell and they put me in general population. Then I was able to make a call two days later.

At that point, I still didn't know what happened. I didn't know anything. I just knew I was in jail and it was serious. When everything just started unravelling and coming into play it was surreal, that's the only way I can describe it. They said I shot a gun three times from underneath me, somehow without shooting myself or shooting any of the six officers that were on top of me. They all weigh in at 250 or more and I literally weighed 110 pounds. I never wielded a gun, shot a gun, let alone while I'm facedown on the ground. They said that it came flying out while they were arresting me. But they never fingerprinted the gun and they never did a gunpowder residue test on me.

We had aerial footage of Heath who was there. He was standing way back behind me. There were police and Federal ATF agents convened up a little ways north and that's where he signaled to them. In the footage, you can see the ATF agent walk over from the front line of the police and tap Heath on the shoulder. Then Heath pointed me out. That's why I was arrested. That's why they grabbed me.

The charges against me included attempted murder on the police, and a gun theft charge which was really confusing. I didn't even have a gun that day. We went into court and then I found out the gun theft charge was from Heath. I thought, "Why would he say I stole his gun? He knows damn well I didn't steal his gun." I called him on the phone and I'm like, "What the fuck, dude? I just went to court for gun theft and in the affidavit, it says that you said I went up to your house to wash clothes and that I dug through your drawers and stole your gun."

He said, "That's what my lawyer advised me to say or do because otherwise, I'm going to be found liable because of what happened."

A couple of days later the public defender came and saw me. He told me that the affidavit said that Heath's FBI handler told him to go make the missing gun and theft report, and so that's what he did.

I found out he got paid $16,000 by the FBI.

We have pictures that the protectors took of what was happening when I was arrested. But there should have been all this video evidence. There's a lady with a camera, video cameras, a police officer standing right above me while I'm being arrested and everybody's wearing body cams. When we asked for this video evidence and they said there was none. They must have just deleted it. They gave us a bunch of useless stuff that wasn't even around the timeline of me getting arrested. They said that their batteries died and that they went through the videos and that there wasn't any relevant information.

My public defender told me I could get a deal if I told them who the camp leaders were. I refused. I went into federal custody and I ended up taking a plea bargain to drop the 15 to life charge, which was a consecutive sentence for discharging a firearm during a violent crime. I pled to civil disorder and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. I got 57 months in federal prison, which is four years and nine months.

For some people, Standing Rock was like, "Oh my God, I went to Standing Rock. I'm a water protector. I got this tattoo." For me, I went to Standing Rock and I lost four years of life with my son. My uncle kept telling me, "Don't internalize any of this. Whatever they say in court, whatever they're saying about you, don't believe them. No matter what their court of law says, we have spiritual law. The Creator's going to take care of you because he knows what's in your heart."

I served four and a half years, and I have three years of federal probation, but I'm petitioning for early release in like a week or two. Hopefully, I'll get it because I've done everything that I'm supposed to do above and beyond. I sit on two nonprofit boards, one for a healing center, which is Cuetlachtepetl Wolf Mountain, and we offer an opportunity for people to come to learn about wolves and heal with them and build a relationship with our wolf relatives.

Then I sit on the board of Four Winds Indian Council. That is an organization that opens a space for people to come and have ceremonies and funerals. It's just a building, it's a liberated zone. We have a garden and we have a women's empowerment project which is a house where we allow women to come and live until they get back on their feet.

I also work for Servicios de la Raza, which is a nonprofit organization, which means services for the people. It's a 50-year-old organization that was founded in the north side of Denver where I grew up. I work for them as a state opioid response grant peer navigator, and so I help people get into treatment and get on their path to recovery.

I also founded the Defend All Things sacred pow wow, which is a thank you pow wow that's held once a year on Labor Day weekend. It's a three-day pow wow and it's to bring our community together, to honor our elders, and to say thank you for all the solidarity that was shown throughout my incarceration.

Extinction Rebellion, Sudan

I'm Rose. I'm from Sudan and I'm 27 years old.

I've been a nature lover since I was little, and I began to feel that there was a really big problem with the climate. Rain fell out of season, temperatures were rising, crops were failing, and livestock were suffering. I also began to wonder why cancer cases in Sudan were steadily rising, and why we had increasing numbers of children born with birth defects.

School didn't give the climate crisis the attention it deserved. They would talk about the rising temperatures and the ozone hole, but that was it. They never explained the implications of the crisis.

So I started looking for answers. I came across many climate conferences and lots of summits where heads of state would talk and talk and talk, but they would do nothing immediately and concretely to change things on the ground. Then, at the end of 2018, I came across reporting on Extinction Rebellion (XR) in Britain, and I found out they were doing actions and protests about what was happening. I realized the objectives of XR were aligned with what I was thinking as well.

So, on January 2, 2019, I started an Extinction Rebellion chapter in Sudan.

I started meeting with groups of young people trying to expose the ideas of XR and explaining some concepts of the climate situation to those who were interested. And once I found a group of interested people we started mainly campaigning to raise awareness of the dangers of climate change, focusing on universities in Khartoum, which is the capital of Sudan.

We also campaigned in primary schools, trying to teach children the importance of the environment through activities like planting trees. When COVID-19 hit, we also campaigned about how to respond to COVID-19.

We participated with other initiatives in Sudan around the floods that happened in August of 2021. And we organized an activity around the G7 summit last year, as well as around the international day for environment, land, and water.

We mainly did awareness raising and education. Students were responding and protesting and we were gathering momentum. We would talk about issues like what gold mining companies are doing, what toxic products they are using on our soil, and also about how radioactive waste is buried in many areas and regions of Sudan. We were trying to take our activities out into the streets. There were a lot of protests already happening in Sudan and we wanted to put climate issues on the agenda at these larger gatherings, and we were getting traction.

There were protests about mining companies in a place called Talodi. The companies are not Sudanese companies, they are mainly Russian and from the United Arab Emirates, but in Sudan they are being managed and protected by militias. These are forces called the Rapid Support Forces, a special unit which belongs to the state security. In Arabic they are known as Janjaweed. The Janjaweed are the ones managing and protecting these companies.

And of course the government has a financial interest in the work of these companies. Many of the people who participated in these protests against the mining company were targeted, arrested, disappeared, and some were even killed.

There was an Italian researcher, a woman, who was working in Khartoum University, and she had a project called "Climate and Immigration." She wanted me to collaborate with her on her project and research in some way.

I met her on the university campus. After our meeting, I went to the student activity center and there was a large group of students discussing the political situation.

This is a space to talk, so I presented on the topic of the mining companies. Then, as I was leaving the campus, a group of guys came up to me. They were in civilian clothing. They had a similar car to a police car - like it was the type of vehicle you see when you are about to be arrested, but it didn't have plates.

They couldn't arrest me in front of all of the students, so they tried to convince me to go with them. I felt that something was really off, so I ran away.

The next day, I went to Omdurman with two of my friends to visit a local library and bookstore and to put some posters up in the local market. I saw the same group of people from the other day at the university. At that point I started feeling that I was in danger, that someone was seriously following what we were doing.

On October 25th, 2021, there was a military coup. There was a huge gathering, and we attended it to talk about the crimes against the environment. There were four of us. The Rapid Response Forces started firing at people, and we were being targeted. They were coming at us, and shooting at us, and one of my friends was shot and died that day. His name was Mohamed Abdel Rahim Al Sauodi.

The other three of us disappeared among the protesters and we managed to get away that day. Then on the 28th of October, we went to our friend's funeral, and all three of us were arrested at the funeral. We were incarcerated in a new prison called Soba Prison that was built mainly for political prisoners, and which is managed by the militias.

They would fill the floor with water, and had pipes to let insects and dirt in. The conditions were so bad that you couldn't sleep. In the beginning it was quite empty but after a while it began to get very crowded as they were arresting a lot of people.

For the first week they didn't bring in the other political prisoners of the resistance and the opposition, so it was pretty much just us. We were subjected to interrogations by the intelligence service of the Rapid Support Forces.

They brought in pre-filled forms and they would ask us questions but not wait to hear the answers. And when the interrogation was done, they forced us to fingerprint these forms and sign things we never said. Each one of us were accused of a number of serious crimes, things we had never even heard about including organizing a terrorist organization, working against the interests of the state, being in touch with foreign entities, and espionage. Very, very serious crimes of state security.

Then, on the 21st of November, they just opened the prisons and we left with many of the other prisoners, with no special procedures, no nothing.

But then on that same day, late at night, they came back for us, asking around, asking for us by name, looking for us individually. I started receiving phone calls from neighbors, friends, and family. Everyone was asking me: "What did you do, what has happened?"

I had to flee. I looked for a really isolated place, far away, and I hid myself there. I am still in hiding.

←Daniel McGowan

Earth Liberation Front

My name is Daniel McGowan. I am from Queens, New York. I'm 48 years old. I'm a former political prisoner and I did seven years in prison for actions I took with the Earth Liberation Front in the early 2000s. I now work as a paralegal.

I got involved in activism during my time at a study abroad program in Southeast Asia. When I was there, I met this guy at a bar or cafe and we were talking, and he was from a group that I think still exists called Earth Rights International. They were doing work in Burma, now Myanmar, where just a few years prior to that there was a coup. The State Law and Order Restoration Committee, which is the name of their dictatorship, had been going into the Burmese forests and logging, and really being a menace to the various hill tribes that lived in the Burmese forests. I had never really seen the intersection of human rights and environmental work. It was really interesting. I came home and I was like, "I want to do environmental activism."

We were told about the ozone layer and greenhouse gasses in the '80s. On TV, I saw actions taken to protect whales by Greenpeace and groups like that. I always thought that was really cool, but I'm from a really small neighborhood and I never thought I could do anything like that. So I came back to the United States after my study abroad trip and I tried my best to find groups doing environmental activism.

I ran into this lady at the Union Square greenmarket who was getting signatures for spaying and neutering becoming a law or something. I remember her telling me I should check out wetlands. I was like, "Wetlands, what the hell is that? We have wetlands in New York City?" She's like, "No, it's the name of a club." She told me Wetlands was a bar on the Lower East Side that also had an environmental center. I was like, "Well, that sounds pretty cool." I remember getting out of my totally square job at this PR agency still in work clothes - in khakis and a button-down shirt - looking just like a young kid that the cops would send. And they were so paranoid there. Just paranoid to any newcomers. I showed up and I went to this meeting about animal rights. I was vegetarian at the time and I remember I saw this video and it was so horrific that I became vegan at that moment. There were people coming in, and they were talking about protests and using all these terms like "direct action." I had no idea what they were talking about. There was a person who came in and she was like, "I just got back from Yorkies," which apparently was a primate research center in Atlanta. She showed a video on VHS, because it was 1997, of people at this protest and just fucking shit up and attacking a cop car and trying to get into the primate research center to do I'm not really sure what. But at the time I was like, "This is cool, man." That was the animal rights action team meeting. They had a meeting every Tuesday and it was about different issues and they had different speakers.

When Earth First groups were on little road tours, they'd stop in and tell you about what was going on out west. I got fully immersed in that world and ended up going to the Earth First gathering, getting arrested, and spending a week in jail. It was wild, but that was my introduction to activism: just totally on the radical direct action side. They didn't use the word "intersectional" there, but their whole idea of it was that there was "one struggle."

Wetlands was a protest machine. They just protested everywhere. I went to more protests in 1997 and '98 than I have been to since. I remember there'd be times that multiple protest targets would be in the same neighborhood and we would literally bring our signs for both protests.

I got arrested in front of Mitsubishi headquarters and Madison Avenue on 49th street. I got arrested at Home Depot in Red Hook. It was all mostly about old growth logging and stuff like that. After a while, I decided to go out west. I wanted to work on this campaign called Headwaters, which is in Northern California. It's privately owned, old-growth logging. But when I arrived, they told me that the campaign was shut down and they were in mourning and figuring out what was next. There was a kid named David Chain who got killed by a logger.

I ended up going into this cafe with my friend David and we ran into a guy who was involved in throwing pies as political theater. And I was like, "If you need someone to throw a pie, just let me know. Here's my friend's number." We get home and there's a message: "Hey, you should go up to this party in Berkeley." "Berkeley? Where the fuck is Berkeley?" We ended up going to this party and at the party they were like, "Yo, we want you to pie this guy." I'm like, "Who is it?" They said, "It's the president of the Sierra Club." It was all from people that worked at the Sierra Club that were just dissidents who were just pissed off. I did it and got away with it, and I did another pie in action two months later. I ended up catching a case for that one. I got arrested on the Berkeley campus, while I was pieing the head of a biotech corporation called Novartis.

Anyhow, we had been hearing about the World Trade Organization and I didn't really know much about it, but we heard they were meeting in Seattle, which was such a weird spot to be meeting. I went up to Seattle with some friends, and we started squatting in these buildings in various neighborhoods and just got plugged into the local anarchist scene there. I ended up getting into a very large affinity group. We didn't know what we were going to do. We had a few ideas, but they all fell through, and we ended up doing our fallback option, which was just going into the streets, rampaging and targeting corporate property. Two of our friends got arrested by undercovers. Cops pepper sprayed us and dropped tear gas in the middle of our group. I stayed in Seattle for a couple of weeks until my friends got bailed out and then left.

After that I ended up going to the Earth First! Journal, and somehow hooking up with an Earth Liberation Front cell. I use that term very loosely, it's just a way of describing a group of people. It wasn't an organization with a PO Box. At the time, I had already engaged in a lot of property destruction regarding genetically modified organisms so I pushed hard for us to focus on that. Most of my focus for the next two and a half years was on GMOs and old-growth forests. I took part in two arsons, and I took part in a bunch of other actions with the ELF people.

We targeted corporations that were logging ancient forests and that were promoting genetically modified organisms and genetically modified trees. And the long and short of it is that I felt like we were putting the cart before the horse. We were ahead of the movement, and we were hoping that people would mimic what we were doing. But we ended up doing our direct actions so well that I think people were intimidated and didn't end up mimicking us.

There are two actions I can talk about. In one, I was the lookout for an arson of a logging company called Superior Lumber in Southern Oregon. We didn't go after their mill. We went after their administrative offices. Obviously, these are things that we did when nobody was there; we knew that by watching them over and over and knowing what the schedule was.

We watched them and secured the spot before setting incendiary devices that were designed to burn and not explode. We usually did everything really big so that we would have an impact before the fire trucks came. We only went after buildings that weren't attached to other buildings, so there was no threat to people, animals, or humans. That was on January 1, 2000, I believe.

The second was May, 2001. It was at a tree farm in Northwest Oregon that we believed was involved in growing genetically modified trees.

That one was big because two actions happened that night, one in Washington and one in Oregon. In Oregon we went after three different properties on the same site, including an open-air garage of 15 trucks, and then two offices. In one of the offices, the devices failed. The other ones both went off, but it was super intense. We used a lot of gasoline and it was just a very intense action. I think it was the fumes that got to me and I was just like, "This is insane. This is an insane way to be going about stuff."

I had been having problems, and the group had internal divisions that were manifesting and so it seemed like a time to say bye. I did that with the caveat that I would never tell anyone about it. I was just going to carry it with me, which I did and still do.

Direct action and DIY politics are good, but I don't view them as the only way of doing things. I just viewed it that lobbying and begging the politicians to do something different has not been working so what are we going to do? I still feel that way.

I thought taking action was my responsibility as a young, relatively healthy white guy, and compared to the rest of the world, affluent fucking person. I didn't have the same level of fear, I just felt that it was necessary to do what we can, that everyone has to give their all and this was what I was doing. What can I do to obstruct these monsters?

It's a little simplistic for sure. On some level, it's a little bit like throwing your body on the machine, and it has its cost that I didn't realize at the time, although I obviously knew that incarceration or death was a possibility. What I didn't realize is that there would be this massive terrorist attack that would give the US government millions and millions of dollars to then go back and pay people to build cases, which is what they did. It was a cold case review.

So I went back to New York. One day I was at work and getting ready to leave and there was a guy standing in the doorway. He said my name, I was just like, "Oh, shit." He covered the ground between the cubicle and my body in two seconds. I was on the desk and he was like, "You're going back to Oregon." When he said Oregon, I was just like, "Oh, shit." That was it.

I ended up going out west and I spent two months in jail before I got bailed out. I fought my case for about a year and a half. I was facing a maximum of life plus 30 years in prison because anytime they use the word terrorism to describe any of your charges it usually carries a bigger penalty. I ended up going to sentencing, asking for five years, and the government asked for 10 years, and I got seven. I got seven years, $1.9 million for restitution, and the federal crime of terrorism enhancement, which was then used to put me at special so-called terrorist units in the Bureau of Prisons.

I think the reason that they were so hard on us was that we were attacking something that the state holds sacrosanct, which is property. They find actions like this shocking because it's not a bunch of drunk college kids destroying shit with no politics. That kind of destruction is not a disagreement with the status quo. Essentially what we were doing was calling bullshit both on the fact that inanimate objects matter and on the belief that we have to destroy our environment because people need jobs.

The other thing is that they were also always petrified of people copying us. And that was part of our thing: we wanted people to copy us. At the end of the day, it really truly is in people's hands, what happens.

I feel like we were treated harshly because the case was political. It went all the way to DC and everything that the local prosecution did had to be fucking justified by Alberto Gonzalez and George Bush. The Joint Terrorism Task Force were the people that prosecuted us and investigated the case. That's a mixture of the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, it's everyone, it's all them working together. They went through our lives, they went through our accounts and paperwork and stuff. They raided my apartment, they took everything.

I got arrested five years after the actions. What happened was a person in my case got in trouble with the law. He wore a wiretap and he came out to New York. I ran into him at a conference, which should have given me pause, right? I pretty much incriminated myself on the recordings. Unfortunately, my goose was cooked because I implicated myself in these actions.

I was sent to a "Communication Management Unit" in Terre Haute, Indiana and Marion, Illinois. But they should have been called "communication restriction units," self-contained units where people with high profile cases were held, and not allowed to communicate with the rest of the prison. We were only allowed one phone call a week at first. It had to be at a scheduled time and it was monitored live. Our visits were non-contact through glass. We found out later through Freedom of Information Act requests and our lawsuit that an agency in West Virginia called the Counter-Terrorist Unit was monitoring our communications. The mail was squatted on very heavily. A lot of stuff was rejected. I got all kinds of shit rejected, like political stuff more than anything.

They established the units after the Inspector General said that people at the super max were in contact with the Madrid bombers. They established the units before they were legal, and filled them up mostly with Muslims. I was in a unit with all these really interesting people, which was cool actually. It just felt really oppressive to be kept in this one place. We couldn't go anywhere and we were far from home. It was miserable for a long period of time.

We eventually pushed back, ended up with two phone calls a week and two visits a month. They were short visits and it's hard to ask people to come to Indiana to visit you for four hours and sit in a fucking booth. I used up all my phone calls, and we eventually got access to email. At a certain point I got out of one of the CMUs and I was transferred to general population.

I filed a lawsuit and they put me back in another Communication Management Unit. I was in a CMU for 48 months out of my sentence.

I met really interesting people in there, people that were in for so-called "material aids to support terrorism." Some of them were in for just running charities. I met the kid that the movie Captain Phillips was based on, the Somali pirate. He's a really nice guy and was basically a minor. I also met the people from the Holy Land Foundation who were given really bad sentences for essentially just being a Muslim charity. They had provided soccer balls and blankets for children in Gaza and the government accused them of aiding Hamas by doing that.

After prison, I started working on two non-profits. One is called New York City Books Through Bars, which sends books to people in prison. We've been working for 22 years and we send free books and educational materials to people in 40 different states. We're located out of a bookstore's basement in Brooklyn. We gather tons of donations and hustle books and then send them to people in prison, which sounds pretty simplistic but we send a massive amount of books and we send them to individuals. We tend to prioritize people that are in New York, but also people that are in super maxes that have no access to good books. We send people really what they ask for to the extent that we can.

The second project I work for is a calendar called Certain Days. It's a calendar started by three political prisoners from upstate New York state prisons, all of whom are out right now. Herman Bell, Seth Hayes, and David Gilbert. It's an educational calendar but it also has all this beautiful art in it, every year around a central theme. We donate the funds that we raise to different social justice groups.

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Fragile States is an archive of interviews with former political prisoners who have been incarcerated for climate activism.

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https://sites.saic.edu/cate/2013/11/12/interview-with-tirtza-even/

"Natural Life is a project I began working on in the winter of 2011, a few months after I arrived to Chicago. The piece focuses on the stories of five individuals who were sentenced to life without parole (natural life) for crimes they committed as youth. The degree of responsibility for the crimes they were charged with varies from merely being in a room with an adult who committed a murder, to being accused of partaking in a premeditated act of killing. None of them, however, will ever be evaluated for change, difference, or growth. They will remain in prison till they die.

…

In 2009 I was collaborating with a young inmate who was serving life in a Michigan prison for a crime he committed as a juvenile. Together we conceived and generated a short 3-D animation that told the story of his crime and sentence by weaving actual facts and images with fabricated and constructed ones. When I left Michigan to move to Chicago, I decided to tackle the severity of his and other youth’s natural life sentencing in a more straightforward way, and to develop a documentary project that would allow these kids’ voices to be heard by a broad and diverse audience."

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Natural Life, produced in conjunction with the legal efforts of the Law Offices of Deborah LaBelle (LODL), is a three fold experimental documentary comprised of a single channel video (77 min.), a gallery installation and an interactive archive. The piece challenges inequities in the juvenile justic

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"Riot and Refrain" from "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval" by Saidiya Hartman

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"Riot and Refrain" from "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval" by Saidiya Hartman

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"April, 1970" letter from Soledad Brother by George Jackson

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"April, 1970" letter from Soledad Brother by George Jackson

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Working document for Session 4 of Series 2 - "Prisons & Fortresses"

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Working document for Session 4 of Series 2 - "Prisons & Fortresses"

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“The Men of Attica Were Different Than Their Captors” Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear and Attica as Abolition

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“The Men of Attica Were Different Than Their Captors” Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear and Attica as Abolition

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Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: “The Men of Attica Were Different Than Their Captors” Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear and Attica as Abolition

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Content Notice: This episode contains discussions of sexual violence & rape This is the conclusion of our discussion on Orisanmi Burton’s forthcoming book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. This discussion was recorded on the same day as the , so you may catch references back to that conversation or to we’ve had with Burton over the last couple of years. We’ll link those in the show notes. Here we largely move into discussion of Attica itself, but this is not the blow by blow rendition that you have likely heard elsewhere. We talk about Attica through George Jackson’s idea of the Black Commune, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography, we talk about how in the words of the Institute of the Black World “the men of Attica were different than their captors,” and we talk about the demand that prisoners be repatriated to a non-imperialist country. We also talk about Burton’s findings on the repression faced by the prisoners after the slaughter of 39 men 52 years ago today. While we don’t talk in graphic detail about all of that repression, a trigger warning is still necessary as we talk about sexual violence in that discussion.  We close by talking about Burton’s work on the Black Liberation Army and how examining the prison as a site of struggle helped him develop a more capacious view of the BLA than what we find in most representations of who they were and what animated their activities. We’re very grateful for the time that Orisanmi Burton has spent with us over the course of this interview and our other conversations over the past couple of years. We hope folks get as much out of these conversations as we do, and we strongly recommend that people if they haven’t already. This is our 4th episode for the month of September. If you appreciate the work that we do, the best way to keep it coming is to join the amazing folks who make this show possible at  by giving as little as $1 a month or $10.80 per year.  Links:

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“Attica Is an Ongoing Structure of Revolt” - Orisanmi Burton on Tip of the Spear, Black Radicalism, Prison Rebellion, and the Long Attica Revolt

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“Attica Is an Ongoing Structure of Revolt” - Orisanmi Burton on Tip of the Spear, Black Radicalism, Prison Rebellion, and the Long Attica Revolt

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Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: “Attica Is an Ongoing Structure of Revolt” - Orisanmi Burton on Tip of the Spear, Black Radicalism, Prison Rebellion, and the Long Attica Revolt

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Orisanmi Burton returns to the podcast to discuss his forthcoming book . We recorded this episode on August 21st the anniversary of the assassination of George Jackson, and we release it on September 9th, the 52nd anniversary of the Attica Rebellion. We spoke with Dr. Burton for over three hours and will release the conversation in segments. In this episode we talk about Dr. Burton’s methodology and why this book is different from other historical renderings of Attica, something that will immediately be apparent as we get into the discussion.  We talk in this episode about the relationship between prisons, slavery, war and the law. Burton also shares reflections on the New York City Jail Rebellions of 1970, also known as the Tombs Rebellion or the Tombs Uprising. We talk about ways that Dr. Burton works with political Blackness and different notions of manhood through meditations from Queen Mother Moore and Kuwasi Balagoon. Burton reflects on how rebels gained leverage in zones of captivity and recalibrate our understanding of the Panther 21 by examining their impact and influence as political actors amid their repression. We also discuss different aspects of the lesser known November 1970 Auburn Prison Rebellion. In the remainder of our conversation with Orisanmi Burton we will discuss his work’s treatment specifically on the Attica Revolt. This is our 4th conversation with Orisanmi Burton and we will link the others as even though they are on separate writings, they all relate to this book and interventions within it and fill in gaps we don’t cover in this episode.  If you haven’t already, go out and . I mean no disrespect to the other authors who’ve written great books this year, there are some other great contenders, but this is the best book that I’ve read this year. And if you like what we do, please become a patron of the show. As I mentioned last time, this podcast keeps me more than busy with full-time work. And I know it keeps Josh extremely busy as well. You can become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at . We have some special announcements coming soon there too that you won’t want to miss. 

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The wonderful American poet Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent lecture about poetry that "this year, a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics finds that one out of every 136 residents of the United States is behind bars-many in jails, unconvicted."

In the same lecture she quoted the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos:

In the field the last swallow had lingered late,

balancing in the air like a black ribbon on the sleeve

of autumn.

Nothing else remained. Only the burned houses

smouldering still.

***
I picked up the phone and knew immediately it was an unexpected call from you, speaking from your flat in the Via Paolo Sarpi. (Two days after the election results and Berlusconi's comeback.) The speed with which we identify a familiar voice coming out of the blue is comforting, but also somewhat mysterious. Because the measures, the units we use in calculating the clear distinction that exists between one voice and another, are unformulated and nameless. They don't have a code. These days more and more is encoded.
So I wonder whether there aren't other measures, equally uncoded yet precise, by which we calculate other givens. For example, the amount of circumstantial freedom existing in a certain situation, its extent and its strict limits. Prisoners become experts at this. They develop a particular sensitivity toward liberty, not as a principle, but as a granular substance. They spot fragments of liberty almost immediately whenever they occur.

***
On an ordinary day, when nothing is happening and the crises announced hourly are the old familiar ones-and the politicians are declaring yet again that without them there would be catastrophe-people as they pass one another exchange glances, and some of their glances check whether the others are envisaging the same thing when they say to themselves, So this is life!
Often they are envisaging the same thing and in this primary sharing there is a kind of solidarity before anything further has been said or discussed.

I'm searching for words to describe the period of history we're living through. To say it's unprecedented means little because all periods were unprecedented since history was first discovered.

No, it's not a metaphor, the imprisonment is real, but to describe it one has to think historically.

I'm not searching for a complex definition-there are a number of thinkers, such as Zygmunt Bauman, who have taken on this essential task. I'm looking for nothing more than a figurative image to serve as a landmark. Landmarks don't fully explain themselves, but they offer a reference point that can be shared. In this they are like the tacit assumptions contained in popular proverbs. Without landmarks there is the great human risk of turning in circles.

***
The landmark I've found is that of prison. Nothing less. Across the planet we are living in a prison.
The word we, when printed or pronounced on screens, has become suspect, for it's continually used by those with power in the demagogic claim that they are also speaking for those who are denied power. Let's talk of ourselves as they. They are living in a prison.

What kind of prison? How is it constructed? Where is it situated? Or am I only using the word as a figure of speech?

No, it's not a metaphor, the imprisonment is real, but to describe it one has to think historically.

Michel Foucault has graphically shown how the penitentiary was a late-eighteenth-, early-nineteenth-century invention closely linked to industrial production, its factories and its utilitarian philosophy. Earlier, there were jails that were extensions of the cage and the dungeon. What distinguishes the penitentiary is the number of prisoners it can pack in-and the fact that all of them are under continuous surveillance thanks to the model of the Pantopticon, as conceived by Jeremy Bentham, who introduced the principle of accountancy into ethics.

Accountancy demands that every transaction be noted. Hence the penitentiary's circular walls with the cells arranged around the screw's watchtower at the center. Bentham, who was John Stuart Mill's tutor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was the principal utilitarian apologist for industrial capitalism.

Today, in the era of globalization, the world is dominated by financial, not industrial, capital, and the dogmas defining criminality and the logics of imprisonment have changed radically. Penitentiaries still exist and more and more are being built. But prison walls now serve a different purpose. What constitutes an incarceration area has been transformed.

***
Twenty years ago, Nella Bielski and I wrote A Question of Geography, a play about the Gulag. In act two, a zek (a political prisoner) talks to a boy who has just arrived about choice, about the limits of what can be chosen in a labor camp: when you drag yourself back after a day's work in the taiga, when you are marched back, half dead with fatigue and hunger, you are given your ration of soup and bread. About the soup you have no choice-it has to be eaten whilst it's hot, or whilst it's at least warm. About the four hundred grams of bread you have choice. For instance, you can cut it into three little bits: one to eat now with the soup, one to suck in the mouth before going to sleep in your bunk, and the third to keep until next morning at ten, when you're working in the taiga and the emptiness in your stomach feels like a stone.

The Gulag equation "criminal = slave laborer" has been rewritten by neoliberalism to become "worker = hidden criminal."

You empty a wheelbarrow full of rock. About pushing the barrow to the dump you have no choice. Now it's empty you have a choice. You can walk your barrow back just like you came, or-if you're clever, and survival makes you clever-you push it back like this, almost upright. If you choose the second way you give your shoulders a rest. If you are a zek and you become a team leader, you have the choice of playing at being a screw, or of never forgetting that you are a zek.

The Gulag no longer exists. Millions work, however, under conditions that are not very different. What has changed is the forensic logic applied to workers and criminals.

During the Gulag, political prisoners, categorized as criminals, were reduced to slave laborers. Today millions of brutally exploited workers are being reduced to the status of criminals.

The Gulag equation "criminal = slave laborer" has been rewritten by neoliberalism to become "worker = hidden criminal." The whole drama of global migration is expressed in this new formula; those who work are latent criminals. When accused, they are found guilty of trying at all costs to survive.

Over six million Mexican women and men work in the US without papers and are consequently illegal. A concrete wall of over one thousand kilometers and a "virtual" wall of eighteen hundred watchtowers were planned along the frontier between the US and Mexico, although the projects have recently been scrapped. Ways around them-though all of them dangerous-will of course be found.

Between industrial capitalism, dependent on manufacture and factories, and financial capitalism, dependent on free-market speculation and front office traders, the incarceration area has changed. Speculative financial transactions add up to, each day, $1,300 billion, fifty times more than the sum of the commercial exchanges. The prison is now as large as the planet and its allotted zones can vary and can be termed worksite, refugee camp, shopping mall, periphery, ghetto, office block, favela, suburb. What is essential is that those incarcerated in these zones are fellow prisoners.

***
It's the first week in May and on the hillsides and mountains, along the avenues and around the gates in the northern hemisphere, the leaves of most of the trees are coming out. Not only are all their different varieties of green still distinct, people also have the impression that each single leaf is distinct, and so they are confronting billions-no, not billions (the word has been corrupted by dollars), they are confronting an infinite multitude of new leaves.
For prisoners, small visible signs of nature's continuity have always been, and still are, a covert encouragement.

***
Today the purpose of most prison walls (concrete, electronic, patrolled, or interrogatory) is not to keep prisoners in and correct them, but to keep prisoners out and exclude them.
Most of the excluded are anonymous-hence the obsession of all security forces with identity. They are also numberless, for two reasons. First because their numbers fluctuate; every famine, natural disaster and military intervention (now called policing) either diminishes or increases their multitude. And second, because to assess their number is to confront the fact that they constitute most of those living on the surface of the earth-and to acknowledge this is to plummet into absolute absurdity.

***
Have you noticed small commodities are increasingly difficult to remove from their packaging? Something similar has happened with the lives of the gainfully employed. Those who have legal employment and are not poor are living in a very reduced space that allows them fewer and fewer choices-except the continual binary choice between obedience and disobedience. Their working hours, their place of residence, their past skills and experience, their health, the future of their children, everything outside their function as employees has to take a small second place beside the unforeseeable and vast demands of liquid profit. Furthermore, the rigidity of this house rule is called flexibility. In prison, words get turned upside down.
The alarming pressure of high-grade working conditions has obliged the courts in Japan to recognize and define a new coroners' category of "death by overwork."

No other system, the gainfully employed are told, is feasible. There is no alternative. Take the elevator. The elevator is a small cell.

Somewhere in the prison I'm watching a five-year-old girl having a swimming lesson in a municipal indoor swimming pool. She's wearing a dark blue costume. She can swim but doesn't yet have the confidence to swim alone without any support. The instructor takes her to the deep end of the pool. The girl is going to jump into the water whilst grasping a long rod held out toward her by her teacher. It's a way of getting over her fear of water. They did the same thing yesterday.

Today she wants the girl to jump without clutching the rod. One, two, three! The girl jumps, but at the last moment seizes the rod. Not a word is spoken. A faint smile passes between the woman and the girl, the girl cheeky, the woman patient.

The girl clambers up the ladder out of the pool and returns to the edge. Again! she hisses. She jumps, hands to her sides, holding nothing. When she comes up to the surface the tip of the rod is there in front of her very nose. The girl swims two strokes to the ladder without touching the rod.

Am I proposing that the girl in the dark blue costume and the swimming instructor in her sandals are prisoners? Certainly at the moment when the girl jumped without the rod, neither of them was in prison. If I think, however, of the years to come or look back at the recent past, I fear that, notwithstanding what I describe, both of them risk becoming or re-becoming a prisoner.

***
Look at the power structure of the surrounding world, and how its authority functions. Every tyranny finds and improvises its own set of controls. Which is why they are often, at first, not recognized as the vicious controls they are.
The market forces dominating the world assert that they are inevitably stronger than any nation-state. The assertion is corroborated every minute. From an unsolicited telephone call trying to persuade the subscriber to take out private health insurance or a pension, to the latest ultimatum of the World Trade Organization.

As a result, most governments no longer govern. A government no longer steers toward its chosen destination. The word "horizon," with its promise of a hoped-for future, has vanished from political discourse on both right and left. All that remains for debate is how to measure what is there. Opinion polls replace direction and replace desire.

Most governments herd instead of steer. (In US prison slang, "herders" is one of the many words for jailers.)

In the nineteenth century, long-term imprisonment was approvingly defined as a punishment of "civic death." Two centuries later, governments are imposing-by law, force, economic threats and their buzz-mass regimes of civic death.

***
Wasn't living under any tyranny in the past a form of imprisonment? Not in the sense I'm describing. What is being lived today is new because of its relationship with space.
It's here that the thinking of Zygmunt Bauman is illuminating. He points out that the corporate market forces now running the world are ex-territorial, that's to say "free from territorial constraints-the constraints of locality." They are perpetually remote, anonymous, and thus never have to take account of the territorial, physical consequences of their actions. He quotes Hans Tietmeyer, former president of the German Federal Bank: "Today's stake is to create conditions favorable to the confidence of investors." The single supreme priority.

Following this, the control of the world's populations, consisting of producers, consumers, and the marginalized poor, is the task allotted to the obedient national governments.

The planet is a prison and the obedient governments, whether of left or right, are the herders.

***
The prison system operates thanks to cyberspace. Cyberspace offers the market a speed of exchange which is almost instantaneous and used across the world day and night for trading. From this speed, the market tyranny gains its ex-territorial license. Such velocity, however, has a pathological effect on its practitioners: it anesthetizes them. No matter what has befallen, "business as usual."
There is no place for pain in that velocity; announcements of pain perhaps, but not the suffering of it. Consequently, the human condition is banished, excluded from those operating the system. They are alone because utterly heartless.

Earlier, tyrants were pitiless and inaccessible, but they were neighbors who were subject to pain. This is no longer the case, and therein lies the system's probable weakness.

***

The tall doors swing background

We're inside the prison yard

in a new season.

They (we) are fellow prisoners. That recognition, in whatever tone of voice it may be declared, contains a refusal. Nowhere more than in prison is the future calculated and awaited as something utterly opposed to the present. The incarcerated never accept the present as final.

Meanwhile, how to live this present? What conclusions to draw? What decisions to take? How to act? I have a few guidelines to suggest, now that the landmark has been established.

On this side of the walls experience is listened to, no experience is considered obsolete. Here survival is respected, and it's a commonplace that survival frequently depends upon solidarity between fellow prisoners. The authorities know this-hence their use of solitary confinement, either through physical isolation from history, from heritage, from the earth and, above all, from a common future.

Ignore the jailers' talk. There are of course bad jailers and less bad. In certain conditions it's useful to note the difference. But what they say-including the less evil ones-is bullshit. Their hymns, their shibboleths, their incanted words security, democracy, identity, civilization, flexibility, productivity, human rights, integration, terrorism, freedom are repeated and repeated in order to confuse, divide, distract, and sedate all fellow prisoners. On this side of the walls, words spoken by the jailers are meaningless and are no longer useful for thought. They cut through nothing. Reject them even when thinking silently to oneself.

By contrast, prisoners have their own vocabulary with which they think. Many words are kept secret and many are local, with countless variations. Small words and phrases, small yet containing a world: I'll-show-you-my-way, sometimes-wonder, pajarillo, something-happening-in-B-wing, stripped, take-this-small-earring, died-for-us, go-for-it, etc.

Between fellow prisoners there are conflicts, sometimes violent. All prisoners are deprived, yet there are degrees of deprivation and the differences of degree provoke envy. On this side of the walls life is cheap. The very facelessness of the global tyranny encourages hunts to find scapegoats, to find instantly definable enemies among other prisoners. The asphyxiating cells then become a madhouse. The poor attack the poor, the invaded pillage the invaded. Fellow prisoners should not be idealized.

For fellow prisoners the opposite is true. Cells have walls that touch across the world. Effective acts of sustained resistance will be embedded in the local, near and far. Outback resistance, listening to the earth.

Without idealization, simply take note that what they have in common-which is their unnecessary suffering, their endurance, their cunning-is more significant, more telling, than what separates them. And from this, new forms of solidarity are being born. The new solidarities start with the mutual recognition of differences and multiplicity. So this is life! A solidarity, not of masses but of interconnectivity, far more appropriate to the conditions of prison.

***
The authorities do their systematic best to keep fellow prisoners misinformed about what is happening elsewhere in the world prison. They do not, in the aggressive sense of the term, indoctrinate. Indoctrination is reserved for the training of the small élite of traders and managerial and market experts. For the mass prison population the aim is not to activate them, but to keep them in a state of passive uncertainty, to remind them remorselessly that there is nothing in life but risk, and that the earth is an unsafe place.
This is done with carefully selected information, with misinformation, commentaries, rumors, fictions. Insofar as the operation succeeds, it proposes and maintains a hallucinating paradox, for it tricks a prison population into believing that the priority for each one of them is to make arrangements for their own personal protection and to acquire somehow, even though incarcerated, their own particular exemption from the common fate. This image of mankind as transmitted through a view of the world is truly without precedent. Mankind is presented as a coward; only winners are brave. In addition, there are no gifts; there are only prizes.

Prisoners have always found ways of communicating with one another. In today's global prison, cyberspace can be used against the interests of those who first installed it. Like this, prisoners inform themselves about what the world does each day, and they follow suppressed stories from the past and so stand shoulder to shoulder with the dead.

In doing so, they rediscover little gifts, examples of courage, a single rose in a kitchen where there's not enough to eat, indelible pains, the indefatigability of mothers, laughter, mutual aid, silence, ever-widening resistance, willing sacrifice, more laughter...

The messages are brief but they extend in the solitude of their (our) nights.

***
The final guideline is not tactical but strategic.
The fact that the world's tyrants are ex-territorial explains the extent of their overseeing power, yet it also indicates a coming weakness. They operate in cyberspace and they lodge in guarded condominiums. They have no knowledge of the surrounding earth. Furthermore, they dismiss such knowledge as superficial, not profound. Only extracted resources count. They cannot listen to the earth. On the ground they are blind. In the local they are lost.

For fellow prisoners the opposite is true. Cells have walls that touch across the world. Effective acts of sustained resistance will be embedded in the local, near and far. Outback resistance, listening to the earth.

Liberty is slowly being found not outside but in the depths of the prison.

***
Not only did I immediately recognize your voice, speaking from your flat in the Via Paolo Sarpi, I could also guess, thanks to your voice, how you were feeling. I sensed your exasperation or, rather, an exasperated endurance combined-and this is so typical of you-with the quick steps of our next hope.
Copyright ©johnberger2011.

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The best way to understand the world is not as a metaphorical prison but a literal one.

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From Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton //  "Gender War: Sexual Revenge and White Masculine Repair"

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From Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton //  "Gender War: Sexual Revenge and White Masculine Repair"

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Gender War Sexual Revenge and White Masculine Repair - Pages from Orisanmi Burton - Tip of the Spear_ Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt-University of California Press (2023)-2

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From Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton //  "The War on Black Revolutionary Minds: Failed Experiments in Scientific Subjugation"

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From Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton //  "The War on Black Revolutionary Minds: Failed Experiments in Scientific Subjugation"

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"The War on Black Revolutionary Minds Failed Experiments in Scientific Subjugation" from Orisanmi Burton - Tip of the Spear_ Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt-University of California Press (2023)

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Preliminaries to Any Struggle Against Prisons

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Preliminaries to Any Struggle Against Prisons

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Technology & Ethos
Vol. 2 Book of Life
by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
from Raise Rage Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965
© 1969, 1970, 1971 by LeRoi Jones

ISBN: 0-394-71706-6. This essay first appeared in Amistad2, published by Random House, Inc.

Machines (as Norbert Weiner said) are an extension of their inventor-creators. That is not simple once you think. Machines, the entire technology of the West, is just that, the technology of the West.

Nothing has to look or function the way it does. The West man's freedom, unscientifically got at the expense of the rest of the world's people, has allowed him to xpand his mind–spread his sensibility wherever it cdgo, & so shaped the world, & its powerful artifact-engines.

Political power is also the power to create–not only what you will–but to be freed to go where ever you can go–(mentally physically as well). Black creation–creation powered by the Black ethos brings very special results,

Think of yourself, Black creator, freed of european restraint which first means the restraint of self determined mind development. Think what would be the results of the unfettered blood inventor-creator with the resources of a nation behind him. To imagine–to think–to construct–to energize!!!

How do you communicate with the great masses of Black people? How do you use the earth to feed masses of people? How do you cure illness? How do you prevent illness? What are the Black purposes of space travel?

It staggers the mind. To be free go let the mind do what it will as constructive progress force, availed of the total knowledge resource energy of a nation.

These white scientists on lifetime fellowships, or pondering problems at Princeton's Institute For Advanced Study.

So that a telephone is one culture's solution to the problem of sending words through space. It is political power that has allowed this technology to emerge, & seem the sole direction for the result desired.

A typewriter?–why shd it only make use of the tips of the fingers as contact points of flowing multi directional creativity. If I invented a word placing machine, an "expression-scriber," if you will, then I would have a kind of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, itches, I'd have magnetically recorded, at the same time, & translated into word–or perhaps even the final xpressed thought/feeling wd not be merely word or sheet, but itself, the xpression, three dimensional–able to be touched, or tasted or felt, or entered, or heard or carried like a speaking singing constantly communicating charm. A typewriter is corny!!

The so called fine artist realizes, those of us who have freed ourselves, that our creations need not emulate the white man's, but it is time the engineers, architects, chemists, electronics craftsmen, ie film too, radio, sound, &c., that learning western technology must not be the end of our understanding of the particular discipline we're involved in. Most of that west shaped information is like mud and sand when you're panning for gold!

The actual beginnings of our expression are post Western (just as they certainly are pre-western). It is only necessary that we arm ourselves with complete self knowledge the whole technology (which is after all just expression of who ever) will change to reflect the essence of a freed people. Freed of an oppressor, but also as Touré has reminded we must be "free from the oppressor's spirit," as well. It is this spirit as emotional construct that can manifest as expression as art or technology or any form.

But what is our spirit, what will it project? What machines will it produce? What will they achieve? What will be their morality? Check the different morality of the Chinese birthday celebration firecracker & the white boy's bomb. Machines have the morality of their inventors.

See everything fresh and "without form"–then make forms that will express us truthfully and totally and by this certainly free us eventually.

The new technology must be spiritually oriented because it must aspire to raise man's spirituality and expand man's consciousness. It must begin by being "humanistic" though the white boy has yet to achieve this. Witness a technology that kills both plants & animals, poisons the air & degenerates or enslaves man.

The technology itself must represent human striving. It must represent at each point the temporary perfection of the evolutional man. And be obsolete only because nothing is ever perfect, the only constant is change.

Amiri Baraka
Amistad 2, 1970

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Technology & Ethos Vol. 2 Book of Life by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) from Raise Rage Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 © 1969, 1970, 1971 by LeRoi Jones ISBN: 0-394-71706-6. This essay first appeared in Amistad2, published by Random House, Inc. Machines (as Norbert Weiner said) are an extension of their inventor-creators.

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This iteration shifts from reading to sharing. We will not gather to process texts but to learn each other's actual conditions for genuine readiness. Sun Tzu names five factors that determine the outcome of any undertaking: the Way, the Weather, the Terrain, the Guides, and the Maneuvers. These concern something prior to strategy and tactics: the conditions under which any undertaking can be sustained at all.

Over five sessions, we will share our answers to the questions these factors pose:

April — Ways You know the Way when you can tell a compelling story about your undertaking, one that keeps you committed and draws others in. For the self-defense of the surround, the Way cannot be a hero's journey. It must be a story of entanglement: how you came to be bound up in others' survival, how you remain so, how you will continue to be so regardless of what you as an individual choose. We will share the stories that orient us.

June — Weather The Weather is favorable when there are no feelings you deny because they stand in your Way. Fear, grief, rage, despair: these are weather. Suppressing them does not make them disappear; it makes them operate underground, sabotaging from within. Favorable Weather is not the absence of difficult feelings but their acknowledgment. We will share the feelings we are actually contending with.

August — Terrains The Terrain is favorable when there are no facts you deny because they stand in your Way. Empire excels at producing false maps, but counter-maps that show what we wish were true are equally fatal. Favorable Terrain means knowing the actual landscape: where networks of care run, where surveillance sees, where policy contradicts itself, where the gaps are. We will share something of the actual terrains we are navigating.

October — Guides You have trustworthy Guides when the theories informing your undertaking can account for the facts on the ground, the feelings in the air, and the turns of events you imagine possible along the Way. Trustworthy Guides have been tested against reality and not found wanting—not because reality is kind but because the framework is honest. We will share the frameworks actually orienting our practice.

December — Maneuvers You have practiced your Maneuvers when you have developed skills to handle the turns of events your Guides indicate are possible along the Way. The Maneuvers are not a single skill but a repertoire. They develop through repetition, not inspiration. When the moment comes, you do not rise to the occasion; you fall to the level of your training. We will share what we have rehearsed, are rehearsing, and have yet to rehearse.

By the end of this iteration, we will know each other's actual situations: the specific conditions under which each person's practices of recognition, recollection, resistance, and repair can or cannot be sustained. This is about learning the surround by learning each other.

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In the wake of the "non-events" of emancipation and decolonization, Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide have become the primary means and ends of the War on Terra - the unnamable biopolitical and necropolitical war that the forces of colonialism and racial capitalism have waged for nearly six centuries against our planet and her multitudes, with an extreme prejudice against her Black and Indigenous multitudes.

"Global Apartheid" names the inter-national and intra-national racial hierarchies and regimes of organized abandonment that have maintained and advanced the privileges of colonizers and their proxies/redeemers in the wake of the "non-events" of emancipation and decolonization.

"Planetary Ecocide" names the "managed depletion" of the planet's natural resources by those bent on maximizing the pleasures and profits that they enjoy at the top of the aforementioned inter-national and intra-national racial hierarchies.

The terms "Global Apartheid" and "Planetary Ecocide" do not name well thought out elite conspiracies. Rather to the contrary, they name the accretion of centuries of desperate and hasty marriages of convenience that have enabled colonizers and their proxies/redeemers to maintain and advance privileges to which they are trauma bound: a loose consensus formed around numerous local solutions to cascading social crises - solutions designed to overcome short-term difficulties at the time of their formulation.

This AREA Studies Seminar & Studio will invite participants to make plans with one another to deconstruct the statements, implements, and built environments that maintain and advance Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide.

This Seminar & Studio will revolve around curated readings from seven texts:

The bi-weekly Seminar & Studio sessions will be hybrid, taking place in-person in Portland, Oregon and virtually via Zoom.

Seminar & Studio sessions will abide by the principle of intellectual generosity. Participants will be encouraged to come as they are, to drop in whenever they can find the time and for however long they can find the time, regardless of whether they read the texts in advance. Participants who can only drop by for 15 minutes in the middle of a session without having done the readings will be just as welcome as participants who read every text twice over in advance and stay for full sessions.

There is no cost to participate, but those who have the means are encouraged to make a donation to support the Seminar & Studio organizer.
The first Seminar & Studio session will take place in November 2023.

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Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide - solutionsforpostmodernliving

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"Global Apartheid" names the inter-national and intra-national racial hierarchies and regimes of organized abandonment that have maintained and advanced the privileges of colonizers and their proxies/redeemers in the wake of the "non-events" of emancipation and decolonization.

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Discussion Questions - "Policies & Procedures"

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Discussion Questions - "Policies & Procedures"

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The Gap Between Procedure and Reality

What is the space between watching institutions bend and break their own procedures and asking, “How can they do it?” How does this gap—between observing institutional violence and questioning its legitimacy—shape our perception of governance and compliance?

Compare this to the space between following procedure dutifully in a meeting and stepping out to the bar afterward to laugh with colleagues about its absurdity. What happens in these moments where belief in procedure and recognition of its absurdity coexist?

Consider police procedurals on television, where bending or breaking the rules is framed as necessary to catch the “bad guy.” How does this narrative reflect and reinforce the dissonance between procedural promises and institutional behavior?

The Aesthetic of Neutrality

Gray walls, uniform furniture, and impersonal language—how do institutions use aesthetics to convey objectivity and suppress dissent?

Are policy and procedure a style guide masquerading as rationality? How does deviation from this style create friction and reveal cracks in the system?

Institutionalized Promises and Their Failures

Policies promise safety, prosperity, and fairness, yet their failures often leave harm unaccounted for. How do these failures manifest physically and psychologically in those navigating institutional spaces?

What does survival look like for those who need these promises to be kept if they are to have a life and livelihood?

Friction as a Clue

Friction often arises when individuals fail to conform to the style guide and behave in an “off-brand” manner. How can we read these moments of friction as clues to systemic contradictions?

How do people navigate and resist institutional violence in these moments of rupture?

Who Gets to Break the Rules?

Let’s talk about who has to comply with procedure as a matter of survival, who can break it when it suits them, and who couldn’t care less about the rules in the first place.

What does it mean to live in a world where some people’s improvisations and deviations from procedure are excused (or even celebrated), while others are punished harshly for the smallest infractions? How does this disparity shape experiences of power and resistance?

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Pre-Session Primer - "Policies and Procedures"

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Pre-Session Primer - "Policies and Procedures"

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The next session of the Against Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) research group, "Policies & Procedures", is on institutional violence. Empire uses institutional violence to surveil, administer, and control lives, often through bureaucratic means that appear neutral. Policies and procedures identify and suppress potential rebels, policing livelihoods in insidious ways. This dispatch serves as both a reflection on the gathering of this session's co-facilitators and a primer for our upcoming conversation. At the end of this primer, you will find links to suggested media offerings to explore in preparation for our meeting.

Discussion Questions:

The Gap Between Procedure and Reality

What is the space between watching institutions bend and break their own procedures and asking, "How can they do it?" How does this gap-between observing institutional violence and questioning its legitimacy-shape our perception of governance and compliance?

Compare this to the space between following procedure dutifully in a meeting and stepping out to the bar afterward to laugh with colleagues about its absurdity. What happens in these moments where belief in procedure and recognition of its absurdity coexist?

Consider police procedurals on television, where bending or breaking the rules is framed as necessary to catch the "bad guy." How does this narrative reflect and reinforce the dissonance between procedural promises and institutional behavior?

The Aesthetic of Neutrality

Gray walls, uniform furniture, and impersonal language-how do institutions use aesthetics to convey objectivity and suppress dissent?

Are policy and procedure a style guide masquerading as rationality? How does deviation from this style create friction and reveal cracks in the system?

Institutionalized Promises and Their Failures

Policies promise safety, prosperity, and fairness, yet their failures often leave harm unaccounted for. How do these failures manifest physically and psychologically in those navigating institutional spaces?

What does survival look like for those who need these promises to be kept if they are to have a life and livelihood?

Friction as a Clue

Who Gets to Break the Rules?

Let's talk about who has to comply with procedure as a matter of survival, who can break it when it suits them, and who couldn't care less about the rules in the first place.

What does it mean to live in a world where some people's improvisations and deviations from procedure are excused (or even celebrated), while others are punished harshly for the smallest infractions? How does this disparity shape experiences of power and resistance?

Pre-Session Primer

It is fitting that this session on institutional violence-policies and procedures-follows our discussions of physical violence-guns and bombs-and cultural violence-smoke and mirrors. Institutional violence does not sustain itself; it is upheld by the threat of physical force and legitimized through cultural obfuscation. Its power lies in its ability to appear neutral, objective, inevitable. To see through this illusion, let us begin with a story.

Imagine a pronghorn antelope moving across the region now known as the U.S.-Mexico border. For the antelope, the border does not exist-there is no "crossing," only movement.

Now contrast this with the white nationalist militiamen who patrol these lands. They do make sense of the border. Picture a few of them, armed with AR-15s, watching an antelope to their south as it moves northward. As it approaches, one of them fires a shot, killing it. He turns to his companion and sneers, "Ain't nuthin' gonna cross the border without papers on my watch." His companion laughs.

Whether or not you find the joke amusing, you can likely make sense of it-despite its absurdity. Governments do not issue papers to antelopes. Antelopes do not seek permission before migrating. The very notion is ludicrous. And yet, we understand the joke because its underlying message is clear:

We have the right-or if not the right, then the might-to kill those we decide are trespassers.

The killing of the antelope is not simply an act of "border enforcement"; it is a performance of power. The militiaman asserts his prerogative to name, his prerogative to kill. The absurdity of naming the antelope a trespasser-when it cannot possibly recognize itself as such-is precisely what clarifies the nature of his power.

When he kills a migrant, we are conditioned to blame the migrant-they should have known better, they didn't follow proper procedure, and the policy is to detain or kill those who do not cross according to procedure. This logic distorts our perception of the border, so that we argue about policy and proper procedure, masking the physical violence that structures its existence. Paradoxically, the meaning of the border is most fully revealed not when it disciplines those who "should have known better," but when it destroys those who could not have known-when its violence is laid bare against beings who cannot even conceive of their supposed crime, those who cannot be expected to know the policy and follow the proper procedure.

The clearest articulations of the border's function emerge in the caging of children torn from their caregivers, in the disruption of animals' migratory routes, in the production of dead zones where no vegetal life can take root, and in the damming of freshwater flows. These acts are not incidental-they are constitutive.

I do not say this to frame these beings-human or otherwise-as the "innocent victims" of bordering regimes, but to expose a deeper reality. Global Apartheid, as a regime of governance, as an assemblage of policies and procedures, guns and bombs, smoke and mirrors, cannot fathom the significance or agency of these forms of life and is thus unconcerned with their extermination. It can only recognize the significance and agency of those who ought to know better-what psychoanalysts call "subjects supposed to know"-not those who could never have known.

This is why Global Apartheid does not merely result in Planetary Ecocide-it necessitates it. The elimination of those who "should have known better" is not its ultimate aim; rather, it serves as the alibi that justifies the mass destruction of those who could never have known. Global Apartheid ensures that their extermination appears not as an atrocity, but as a regrettable side effect of order-an administrative accident, a necessary cost of optimization.

That is its logic. That is its horror. And this is the meaning of policies and procedures.

Policies and procedures do not prevent dispossession, denigration, or extermination. They merely demand that those subject to them accept blame for their own suffering-that they internalize the belief that their exclusion, displacement, or death is the result of their own failure to know the policy, to follow the proper procedure. Even when knowing and following such procedures would have made little or no difference.

Because the deeper horror is this: knowing ourselves to be the antelope-the one who could be killed to prove a point-is too much for us to bear. We would rather suffer for breaching policies and failing to follow procedures than confront the fact that, often, there is nothing to justify our suffering but the raw power of those who make us suffer. And so, we obsess over policy and procedure, disavowing the reality that no policy, no procedure, no compliance can grant us immunity from violence that was never about rules to begin with.

Those with power-those who do not live in terror of dying as the unintended consequence of routine disciplinary action, as a regrettable side effect of order, as the collateral damage of society's pursuit of progressive optimization-do not take policy and procedure seriously. This is not to say that they do not follow them, but rather that they play them like a game. They move freely within and around the rules, reframing their deviations as nimbleness, flexibility, or strategic adaptation. Those without power, meanwhile, must adhere strictly-every misstep punished as incompetence, disorder, or defiance. The same authorities that grant themselves the permission to bend their own policies enforce procedural obedience upon those they govern.

This asymmetry is everywhere. Those who improvise freely are rewarded for their agility, their audacity, their refusal to be bound by rules. But those who resist power-whether through formal opposition or institutional procedures-must follow every rule to the letter. It is the logic of politics, the logic of governance, the logic of the workplace. Donald Trump moves through the world like a man in perpetual improvisation, rewriting norms, ignoring conventions, making it all up as he goes along. Those who would oppose him-from journalists to politicians to civil servants-must prove their legitimacy by demonstrating procedural correctness at every step. Look at him. He does whatever he wants. I follow the rules. Therefore, you should side with me. But it never quite works. Because rule-following does not determine power-power determines whether rules even apply.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Western musical tradition and training, where improvisation is framed not as a birthright, but as a privilege earned through discipline. One may only improvise after mastering the fundamentals. In classical music, in choral singing, in conservatory jazz programs, free improvisation is reserved for those who have first demonstrated technical mastery. Learn the rules, then you may break them. But who determines when mastery has been achieved? Who grants permission to break the rules?

A singer who joins a classical choir without formal training is not told, You have a voice, sing-they are told, You must first learn the notation and the theory. Only after proving one's literacy is there room for instinct, for the ear that hears harmonies without reading notation, for the voice that understands intervals without calculation. The unspoken message is clear: if you do not have the proper training, you do not belong here. The freedom to improvise is not merely a matter of skill-it is a matter of legitimacy.

This logic is not about ensuring competence. There are those who can cite every definition, every guideline, every historical reference, and still produce nothing that resonates. They wield technical knowledge as a shield, insisting that their work must be correct because it follows the rules, because it adheres to the proper procedure. And when their failures are exposed, when the results do not match the performance of competence, they respond not by listening but by retreating deeper into proceduralism. We have followed the rules; therefore, we must be right.

The same pattern plays out in institutions, where those in power weaponize policy and procedure as a shield against accountability. Loyalty to procedure is not an accident. It is not an oversight. It is not a bureaucratic quirk. It is a deliberate strategy-an intentional, near-religious commitment to ensuring that any challenge, any critique, any demand for transformation can be dismissed as improper, premature, illegitimate. It is a mechanism for maintaining control, ensuring that change, if it must happen, occurs only through prescribed channels, only at the discretion of those who already hold power. And if those channels are slow, if they are inaccessible, if they are structurally incapable of producing the change required, that is not a flaw in the system-that is the system functioning exactly as intended.

Movement is not illegal, but it is made impossibly difficult for some. Travel is not forbidden, but only certain passports can improvise, can be spontaneous, can move without preemptive justification. Someone with a Swedish passport can decide today that they want to fly anywhere in the world, and-so long as they have the money-they can go. No visas, no background checks, no waiting in embassy lines for weeks or months or years. Even when restrictions exist, they are minor inconveniences, not barriers.

Contrast this with those for whom movement is a high-stakes gamble, a desperate improvisation requiring calculation, sacrifice, and risk. Someone with a Kenyan passport might spend years attempting to secure a visa, learning every policy, obeying every procedure at every turn, only to be denied for reasons that are arbitrary, opaque, or simply never explained. And yet, when the Kenyan migrant recognizes that the policies and procedures are rigged, when they improvise to achieve greater mobility, it is they who are cast as the violator, as someone who has failed to follow proper procedure. The improvisation required for them to move is not to be seen as skill, as resilience, as adaptation-it is framed as deception, as an illegitimate attempt to bypass the rightful order of things.

And what of those who wait instead of improvising? Those suspended in bureaucratic limbo, waiting for decisions that never come? A woman in Portugal spends three and a half years waiting for an immigration appointment, caught in a system where time itself becomes a form of control. A person seeking asylum waits indefinitely, because delay is not a failure of the system-it is the system.

Waiting is not incidental. It is a sorting mechanism.

For some, time is rigid, structured, mapped in linear progression: school, university, job, retirement. To deviate from this path is to risk failure. Parents and grandparents, having built their lives within this framework, insist that the structure is necessary, that to improvise is to invite ruin.

But what happens when the rules are outdated? When the plan that once guaranteed stability no longer holds? What happens when we realize-too late-that we have spent years following a path that no longer leads anywhere?

What happens when we realize that the waiting itself was never necessary?

A person spends their life believing they must endure, that they must be patient, that their time will come. And then, years later, they look back and ask: Why did I wait so long? Not because they should have known better, but because everything in the world around them trained them to believe that waiting was the only option.

And so the question remains:

If we did not wait-if we refused to wait-what might we do? What might we create if we embraced improvisation, moving freely and spontaneously? What might we claim for ourselves?

The next session of the Against Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) research group, "Policies & Procedures", is on institutional violence. Empire uses institutional violence to surveil, administer, and control lives, often through bureaucratic means that appear neutral. Policies and procedures identify and suppress potential rebels, policing livelihoods in insidious ways. This dispatch serves as both a reflection on the gathering of this session's co-facilitators and a primer for our upcoming conversation. At the end of this primer, you will find links to suggested media offerings to explore in preparation for our meeting.

Discussion Questions:

The Gap Between Procedure and Reality

What is the space between watching institutions bend and break their own procedures and asking, "How can they do it?" How does this gap-between observing institutional violence and questioning its legitimacy-shape our perception of governance and compliance?

Compare this to the space between following procedure dutifully in a meeting and stepping out to the bar afterward to laugh with colleagues about its absurdity. What happens in these moments where belief in procedure and recognition of its absurdity coexist?

Consider police procedurals on television, where bending or breaking the rules is framed as necessary to catch the "bad guy." How does this narrative reflect and reinforce the dissonance between procedural promises and institutional behavior?

The Aesthetic of Neutrality

Gray walls, uniform furniture, and impersonal language-how do institutions use aesthetics to convey objectivity and suppress dissent?

Are policy and procedure a style guide masquerading as rationality? How does deviation from this style create friction and reveal cracks in the system?

Institutionalized Promises and Their Failures

Policies promise safety, prosperity, and fairness, yet their failures often leave harm unaccounted for. How do these failures manifest physically and psychologically in those navigating institutional spaces?

What does survival look like for those who need these promises to be kept if they are to have a life and livelihood?

Friction as a Clue

Who Gets to Break the Rules?

Let's talk about who has to comply with procedure as a matter of survival, who can break it when it suits them, and who couldn't care less about the rules in the first place.

What does it mean to live in a world where some people's improvisations and deviations from procedure are excused (or even celebrated), while others are punished harshly for the smallest infractions? How does this disparity shape experiences of power and resistance?

Pre-Session Primer

It is fitting that this session on institutional violence-policies and procedures-follows our discussions of physical violence-guns and bombs-and cultural violence-smoke and mirrors. Institutional violence does not sustain itself; it is upheld by the threat of physical force and legitimized through cultural obfuscation. Its power lies in its ability to appear neutral, objective, inevitable. To see through this illusion, let us begin with a story.

Imagine a pronghorn antelope moving across the region now known as the U.S.-Mexico border. For the antelope, the border does not exist-there is no "crossing," only movement.

Now contrast this with the white nationalist militiamen who patrol these lands. They do make sense of the border. Picture a few of them, armed with AR-15s, watching an antelope to their south as it moves northward. As it approaches, one of them fires a shot, killing it. He turns to his companion and sneers, "Ain't nuthin' gonna cross the border without papers on my watch." His companion laughs.

Whether or not you find the joke amusing, you can likely make sense of it-despite its absurdity. Governments do not issue papers to antelopes. Antelopes do not seek permission before migrating. The very notion is ludicrous. And yet, we understand the joke because its underlying message is clear:

We have the right-or if not the right, then the might-to kill those we decide are trespassers.

The killing of the antelope is not simply an act of "border enforcement"; it is a performance of power. The militiaman asserts his prerogative to name, his prerogative to kill. The absurdity of naming the antelope a trespasser-when it cannot possibly recognize itself as such-is precisely what clarifies the nature of his power.

When he kills a migrant, we are conditioned to blame the migrant-they should have known better, they didn't follow proper procedure, and the policy is to detain or kill those who do not cross according to procedure. This logic distorts our perception of the border, so that we argue about policy and proper procedure, masking the physical violence that structures its existence. Paradoxically, the meaning of the border is most fully revealed not when it disciplines those who "should have known better," but when it destroys those who could not have known-when its violence is laid bare against beings who cannot even conceive of their supposed crime, those who cannot be expected to know the policy and follow the proper procedure.

The clearest articulations of the border's function emerge in the caging of children torn from their caregivers, in the disruption of animals' migratory routes, in the production of dead zones where no vegetal life can take root, and in the damming of freshwater flows. These acts are not incidental-they are constitutive.

I do not say this to frame these beings-human or otherwise-as the "innocent victims" of bordering regimes, but to expose a deeper reality. Global Apartheid, as a regime of governance, as an assemblage of policies and procedures, guns and bombs, smoke and mirrors, cannot fathom the significance or agency of these forms of life and is thus unconcerned with their extermination. It can only recognize the significance and agency of those who ought to know better-what psychoanalysts call "subjects supposed to know"-not those who could never have known.

This is why Global Apartheid does not merely result in Planetary Ecocide-it necessitates it. The elimination of those who "should have known better" is not its ultimate aim; rather, it serves as the alibi that justifies the mass destruction of those who could never have known. Global Apartheid ensures that their extermination appears not as an atrocity, but as a regrettable side effect of order-an administrative accident, a necessary cost of optimization.

That is its logic. That is its horror. And this is the meaning of policies and procedures.

Policies and procedures do not prevent dispossession, denigration, or extermination. They merely demand that those subject to them accept blame for their own suffering-that they internalize the belief that their exclusion, displacement, or death is the result of their own failure to know the policy, to follow the proper procedure. Even when knowing and following such procedures would have made little or no difference.

Because the deeper horror is this: knowing ourselves to be the antelope-the one who could be killed to prove a point-is too much for us to bear. We would rather suffer for breaching policies and failing to follow procedures than confront the fact that, often, there is nothing to justify our suffering but the raw power of those who make us suffer. And so, we obsess over policy and procedure, disavowing the reality that no policy, no procedure, no compliance can grant us immunity from violence that was never about rules to begin with.

Those with power-those who do not live in terror of dying as the unintended consequence of routine disciplinary action, as a regrettable side effect of order, as the collateral damage of society's pursuit of progressive optimization-do not take policy and procedure seriously. This is not to say that they do not follow them, but rather that they play them like a game. They move freely within and around the rules, reframing their deviations as nimbleness, flexibility, or strategic adaptation. Those without power, meanwhile, must adhere strictly-every misstep punished as incompetence, disorder, or defiance. The same authorities that grant themselves the permission to bend their own policies enforce procedural obedience upon those they govern.

This asymmetry is everywhere. Those who improvise freely are rewarded for their agility, their audacity, their refusal to be bound by rules. But those who resist power-whether through formal opposition or institutional procedures-must follow every rule to the letter. It is the logic of politics, the logic of governance, the logic of the workplace. Donald Trump moves through the world like a man in perpetual improvisation, rewriting norms, ignoring conventions, making it all up as he goes along. Those who would oppose him-from journalists to politicians to civil servants-must prove their legitimacy by demonstrating procedural correctness at every step. Look at him. He does whatever he wants. I follow the rules. Therefore, you should side with me. But it never quite works. Because rule-following does not determine power-power determines whether rules even apply.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Western musical tradition and training, where improvisation is framed not as a birthright, but as a privilege earned through discipline. One may only improvise after mastering the fundamentals. In classical music, in choral singing, in conservatory jazz programs, free improvisation is reserved for those who have first demonstrated technical mastery. Learn the rules, then you may break them. But who determines when mastery has been achieved? Who grants permission to break the rules?

A singer who joins a classical choir without formal training is not told, You have a voice, sing-they are told, You must first learn the notation and the theory. Only after proving one's literacy is there room for instinct, for the ear that hears harmonies without reading notation, for the voice that understands intervals without calculation. The unspoken message is clear: if you do not have the proper training, you do not belong here. The freedom to improvise is not merely a matter of skill-it is a matter of legitimacy.

This logic is not about ensuring competence. There are those who can cite every definition, every guideline, every historical reference, and still produce nothing that resonates. They wield technical knowledge as a shield, insisting that their work must be correct because it follows the rules, because it adheres to the proper procedure. And when their failures are exposed, when the results do not match the performance of competence, they respond not by listening but by retreating deeper into proceduralism. We have followed the rules; therefore, we must be right.

The same pattern plays out in institutions, where those in power weaponize policy and procedure as a shield against accountability. Loyalty to procedure is not an accident. It is not an oversight. It is not a bureaucratic quirk. It is a deliberate strategy-an intentional, near-religious commitment to ensuring that any challenge, any critique, any demand for transformation can be dismissed as improper, premature, illegitimate. It is a mechanism for maintaining control, ensuring that change, if it must happen, occurs only through prescribed channels, only at the discretion of those who already hold power. And if those channels are slow, if they are inaccessible, if they are structurally incapable of producing the change required, that is not a flaw in the system-that is the system functioning exactly as intended.

Movement is not illegal, but it is made impossibly difficult for some. Travel is not forbidden, but only certain passports can improvise, can be spontaneous, can move without preemptive justification. Someone with a Swedish passport can decide today that they want to fly anywhere in the world, and-so long as they have the money-they can go. No visas, no background checks, no waiting in embassy lines for weeks or months or years. Even when restrictions exist, they are minor inconveniences, not barriers.

Contrast this with those for whom movement is a high-stakes gamble, a desperate improvisation requiring calculation, sacrifice, and risk. Someone with a Kenyan passport might spend years attempting to secure a visa, learning every policy, obeying every procedure at every turn, only to be denied for reasons that are arbitrary, opaque, or simply never explained. And yet, when the Kenyan migrant recognizes that the policies and procedures are rigged, when they improvise to achieve greater mobility, it is they who are cast as the violator, as someone who has failed to follow proper procedure. The improvisation required for them to move is not to be seen as skill, as resilience, as adaptation-it is framed as deception, as an illegitimate attempt to bypass the rightful order of things.

And what of those who wait instead of improvising? Those suspended in bureaucratic limbo, waiting for decisions that never come? A woman in Portugal spends three and a half years waiting for an immigration appointment, caught in a system where time itself becomes a form of control. A person seeking asylum waits indefinitely, because delay is not a failure of the system-it is the system.

Waiting is not incidental. It is a sorting mechanism.

For some, time is rigid, structured, mapped in linear progression: school, university, job, retirement. To deviate from this path is to risk failure. Parents and grandparents, having built their lives within this framework, insist that the structure is necessary, that to improvise is to invite ruin.

But what happens when the rules are outdated? When the plan that once guaranteed stability no longer holds? What happens when we realize-too late-that we have spent years following a path that no longer leads anywhere?

What happens when we realize that the waiting itself was never necessary?

A person spends their life believing they must endure, that they must be patient, that their time will come. And then, years later, they look back and ask: Why did I wait so long? Not because they should have known better, but because everything in the world around them trained them to believe that waiting was the only option.

And so the question remains:

If we did not wait-if we refused to wait-what might we do? What might we create if we embraced improvisation, moving freely and spontaneously? What might we claim for ourselves?

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"Policies & Procedures" - Institutional Violence - solutionsforpostmodernliving

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Empire uses institutional violence to surveil, administer, and control lives, often through bureaucratic means that appear neutral. Policies and procedures identify and suppress potential rebels, policing livelihoods in insidious ways.

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Poem - "worth the weight/wait" by Sarah Bitamazire.

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Poem - "worth the weight/wait" by Sarah Bitamazire.

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my grievances sneak up on me
beckon to be heard
unable to fly
stuck in time’s nest
impatient and desperate to live.

my grievance is not with you
drowned my god a long time ago
before I had the clarity to list
unuttered desire,
silenced cry,
ignored need,
other things worth the weight and wait, the bending and breaking and forming into

my grievance is not with time,
But with what was taken.
in conversations with
a grave, a memory.
a seance,
stuck. in time’s nest,
impatient and desperate to live.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/worth-weight-124193243?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

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Milton Nascimento, esperanza spalding - Saudade Dos Aviões Da Panair (Conversando No Bar) 

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Milton Nascimento, esperanza spalding - Saudade Dos Aviões Da Panair (Conversando No Bar) 

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Lyrics with English translation here.

Excerpt:

"Everything sad exists and isn't forgotten

Tudo de triste existe e não se esquece

Someone insists and wounds the heart

Alguém insiste e fere o coração

Nothing new exists on this planet

Nada de novo existe nesse planeta

That isn't talked about here at the bar

Que não se fale aqui na mesa de bar"

Text/Article: Clube da Esquina & What Came After

A few excerpts (my emphasis):

"Clube da Esquina’s narratives called to “those who want to break free,” and then offered multiple ideas about what that freedom might feel like. Its lyrics expressed the idealism of Woody Guthrie through the melancholy imagery of Pablo Neruda, and its lavish orchestrations and intricate arrays of vocal harmony, stirring by themselves, braided the ancient and modern together into a sound that was also a provocation. Clube da Esquina arrived at a moment in Brazilian cultural life that was defined by fear; in response, it radiated possibility. It challenged its listeners and it challenged other musicians to go big. To dream. To stand for something."

"After Clube da Esquina had been out and its related projects began to circulate, the sounds of the loosely connected collective — Nascimento maintained that Clube was not a “club” because it didn’t have an official meeting place — spread rapidly throughout the community of Brazilian recording artists."

"This group settled in a house in Rio while the rehearsal and recording of Clube da Esquina progressed. There was downtime, and during it, other projects sprouted. Each of them blossomed as a direct result of the atmosphere the musicians had cultivated on the street corner."

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Milton Nascimento, esperanza spalding - Saudade Dos Aviões Da Panair (Conversando No Bar)

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Poem: "It Doesn't Feel Like A Time To Write" By Danez Smith

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Poem: "It Doesn't Feel Like A Time To Write" By Danez Smith

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Excerpt:

"i ain’t got much left to give

these poems, black folks of every kind

of body are dying, & yes at our own

hands too & before you start

pointing fingers wash yo bloody

bloody hands. if you still say

things like we need all the info,

there must be a reason

then i can’t waste

anymore time on you. the world

is burning for real for real – some

some us burning, some staying warm.

i turn to the cards, the stars,

G-d, the gods, my sweet dead, all them

say it’s an age of smoke. i pray to everything

i’ve been taught to pray towards."

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Poem: “It Doesn’t Feel Like A Time To Write” By Danez Smith

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A new poem for BuzzFeed READER.

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Gestures in Transit – via mind, body & voice 

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Gestures in Transit – via mind, body & voice 

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2020-2022

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Gestures in Transit - via mind, body & voice
2020-2022

Imagine your are in a bus or a metro on your daily commute.
How do you take up space?
Do you tend to make yourself small or big?

Public transport between places positions bodies at the centre of a web of power relations, dominated by vehicles, algorithms, schedules, security technologies and pre-defined routes and behaviour. "Gestures in Transit" examines how power is inscribed through gestures and voice and invites participants to deconstruct power dynamics found in public transportation.

"Gestures in Transit - via mind, body & voice" invites participants to dissect the multi-layered interactions between bodies and space, between rules and systems of power, that emerge in networks of public transportation. Developed on the bases of personal interviews conducted with women* and members of marginalised groups about their experiences in buses or metro, the listening and movement exercises move between action and reflection. Through the embodied approach, participants explore how the design of public transport impacts freedom of movement and reproduces oppressive norms & ideologies.

"Gestures in Transit" was developed in collaboration with Gabriel Fontana. The production of the work was supported by Derde Wal & Mondrian Funds.

Selected activations:

Rietveld Academy, DesignLab 2, Amsterdam (NL), November 2021.

Derde Wal: Social Aspects, Nijmegen (NL), September 2021.

Design Master programme, Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam (NL), February 2021.

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Gestures in Transit - via mind, body & voice 2020-2022 Imagine your are in a bus or a metro on your daily commute. How do you take up space? Do you tend to make yourself small or big?

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The Distance from Here, by Ban Abidi (film excerpt)

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The Distance from Here, by Ban Abidi (film excerpt)

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Bani Abidi is a visual artist working with video, photography and drawing.

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Working document for Session 3 of Series 2 - "Policies & Procedures"

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Working document for Session 3 of Series 2 - "Policies & Procedures"

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"Policy and Planning" from The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

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"Policy and Planning" from The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

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My body doesn’t exist”  by  Paul B. Preciado

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My body doesn’t exist”  by  Paul B. Preciado

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From a slide deck created for an initiative to revise the Guidelines for Global Engagement at the University of Washington, highlighting inequities in knowledge production.

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From "Humans Involved" by Tiffany Lethabo King

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From "Humans Involved" by Tiffany Lethabo King

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From “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues”  by Sylvia Wynter

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From “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues”  by Sylvia Wynter

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"In 1992 the Jamaican scholar and theorist Sylvia Wynter penned a seminal text titled “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” The title refers to an internal code that was used by the Los Angeles Police Department, usually in relation to cases that disproportionately involved Black and Brown Angelenos who were often identified as sex workers, gang members, or drug traffickers. The code became public knowledge in 1992, shortly after the trial and ultimate acquittal of the four police officers charged with the use of excessive force in the brutal beating of Rodney King."

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From Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

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From Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

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I post this, alongside a passage from Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics.

From an infrastructural point of view, a splintering form of colonial occupation is characterized by a network of fast bypass roads, bridges, and tunnels that weave over and under one another in an attempt at maintaining the Fanonian “principle of reciprocal exclusivity.” According to Weizman, “the bypass roads attempt to separate Israeli traffic networks from Palestinian ones, preferably without allowing them ever to cross. They therefore emphasize the overlapping of two separate geographies that inhabit the same landscape. At points where the networks do cross, a makeshift separation is created. Most often, small dust roads are dug out to allow Palestinians to cross under the fast, wide highways on which Israeli vans and military vehicles rush between settlements.”

Under conditions of vertical sovereignty and splintering colonial occupation, communities are separated across a y-axis. This leads to a proliferation of the sites of violence. The battlegrounds are not located solely at the surface of the earth. The underground as well as the airspace are transformed into conflict zones. There is no continuity between the ground and the sky. Even the boundaries in airspace are divided between lower and upper layers. Everywhere, the symbolics of the top (who is on top) is reiterated. Occupation of the skies therefore acquires a critical importance, since most of the policing is done from the air. Various other technologies are mobilized to this effect: sensors aboard unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), aerial reconnaissance jets, early warning Hawkeye planes, assault helicopters, an Earth-observation satellite, techniques of “hologrammatization.” Killing becomes precisely targeted.

What I want to suggest is that those at the top of this Iceberg model—those who hold capital and those who command contract labor—occupy the high roads and the airspace of contemporary narrative infrastructures. Meanwhile, those at the bottom of the iceberg experience narrative infrastructure as a form of detainment.

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Working Document for Session 2  of Series 2 - "Smoke & Mirrors" 

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Working Document for Session 2  of Series 2 - "Smoke & Mirrors" 

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Aerial view of the Palestinian village of A Taybe (left) and the Israeli settlement of Ofra, near Ramallah. Photo by Milutin Labudovic for Shalom Achshav, 2002.

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An excerpt from Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe

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An excerpt from Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe

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An overview of Paris, centring on the Étoile area that Haussmann redesigned. Photograph: DigitalGlobe/Rex

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Pivots Diagrams from "A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Towards What Matters" by Steven C. Hayes

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Pivots Diagrams from "A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Towards What Matters" by Steven C. Hayes

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The First Pivot from A Liberated Mind- How to Pivot Towards What Matters by Steven C. Hayes, PhD

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http://historyof-rt.org/

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Excerpt from "The Intimacies of Four Continents" by Lisa Lowe

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Excerpt from "The Intimacies of Four Continents" by Lisa Lowe

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"Spatial Stories" from "The Practice of Everyday Life" by Michel de Certeau

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"Spatial Stories" from "The Practice of Everyday Life" by Michel de Certeau

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"A Note on Method" from "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval" by Saidiya Hartman

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"A Note on Method" from "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval" by Saidiya Hartman

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"A Note on Method" by "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval" by Saidiya Hartman 

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Working Document for Session 1 - "Guns & Bombs"

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Working Document for Session 1 - "Guns & Bombs"

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During our session this Sunday, January 26, we will engage with this document, carefully noting our thoughts and observations as we work through it together.

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"Capoeira Becoming" from Capoeira and Candomblé: Conformity and Resistance Through Afro-Brazilian Experience by Floyd Merrell 

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"Capoeira Becoming" from Capoeira and Candomblé: Conformity and Resistance Through Afro-Brazilian Experience by Floyd Merrell 

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Chapter 2: "Capoeira Becoming" from Merrell, Floyd. Capoeira and Candomblé: Conformity and Resistance Through Afro-Brazilian Experience.  

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"Tactical Imperialism in the United States 1950s– 1970s" from Policing Empires by Julian Go

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"Tactical Imperialism in the United States 1950s– 1970s" from Policing Empires by Julian Go

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1950s– 1970s

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Tactical Imperialism in the United States, 1950s–1970s

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"Cycles of Policing and Insurgency in Britain, 1960s– 1980s" from Policing Empires by Julian Go

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"Cycles of Policing and Insurgency in Britain, 1960s– 1980s" from Policing Empires by Julian Go

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Cycles of Policing and Insurgency in Britain, 1960s–1980s

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“On Violence” from The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon

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“On Violence” from The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon

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This dispatch explores how trauma is weaponized to sustain global apartheid, distorting care into complicity with oppression. Using the figures of a white boy witnessing racial violence and a Black girl navigating its aftermath, it examines how trauma conditions individuals to uphold systems of domination.

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This dispatch explores how trauma is weaponized to sustain global apartheid, distorting care into complicity with oppression. Using the figures of a white boy witnessing racial violence and a Black girl navigating its aftermath, it examines how trauma conditions individuals to uphold systems of domi

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Rape and Femicide: The Foundations of Empire’s Power

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Rape and Femicide: The Foundations of Empire’s Power

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Building on the argument that racial capitalism is a virulent variant of patriarchal imperialism, this dispatch examines the forms of patriarchal violence at its core: rape and femicide. It outlines how these violences have mutated through their co-evolution with the techniques and technologies of racializing rule and the relentless imperatives of capital accumulation.

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Rape and Femicide: The Foundations of Empire’s Power — solutionsforpostmodernliving

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Building on the argument that racial capitalism is a virulent variant of patriarchal imperialism, this dispatch examines the forms of patriarchal violence at its core: rape and femicide. It outlines how these violences have mutated through their co-evolution with the techniques and technologies of r

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This dispatch interrogates the mechanisms of control that sustain domination in the Age of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide. It explores how force, the raw application of strength, transitions into power—an insidious and systemic architecture that perpetuates dominance long after Empire’s forces have withdrawn from the battlefield. Through this lens, the text examines the interlocking forms of power—ruling, disciplinary, normalizing, and optimizing—that build and maintain Empire’s control.

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Between Force and Power — solutionsforpostmodernliving

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This dispatch interrogates the mechanisms of control that sustain Empire. It explores how force, the raw application of strength, transitions into power—an insidious and systemic architecture that perpetuates dominance long after Empire’s forces have withdrawn from the battlefield.

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This dispatch explores the intertwined forces of raciality, imperial extraction, and ecological ruin in the Anthropocene.

Building on The Desertion of Empire, which theorized the refusal of imperial domination, and The Racial Fracture, which examined racialized hierarchies in demography, geography, and history, Decomposing the Technosphere confronts the planetary ecocide wrought by Empire’s techno-political machinery.

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Building on The Desertion of Empire , which theorized the refusal of imperial domination, and The Analytics of Raciality , which examined racialized hierarchies in demography, geography, and history, this dispatch explores the intertwined forces of raciality, imperial extraction, and ecologica

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In preparation for the relaunch of AGAPE in January 2025, here is the next of a series of dispatches revisiting the histories, theories, and proposals explored in our earlier gatherings. This second dispatch analyzes the first of two defining fractures of Empire in our time: the racial fracture.

This fracture delineates a global hierarchy of inferior and superior races, with anti-Blackness at its foundation. The dispatch examines how race, space, and time are mobilized to sustain this division, focusing on Blackness as the universal marker of abjection within the global racial order.

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In preparation for the relaunch of AGAPE in January 2025, here is the second of a series of dispatches revisiting the histories, theories, and proposals explored in our earlier gatherings. This second dispatch analyzes the first of two defining fractures of Empire in our time: the racial fracture .

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In advance of the relaunch of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio in January 2025, the dispatch below digs deep into the crucial distinction between empires and Empire that was drawn in several sessions but never fully explicated in any single session. Drawing together threads from a number of earlier dispatches, this text puts this distinction in historical context and remarks upon its significance to the journey ahead.

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Towards the Desertion of Empire — solutionsforpostmodernliving

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In advance of the relaunch of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio in January 2025, the dispatch below digs deep into the crucial distinction between empires and Empire that was drawn in several sessions but never fully explicated in any single session. Drawing together threads from a number of ea

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After a brief false start in September 2024, the Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) Seminar & Studio, is set to relaunch in January 2025, reenergized and ready to deepen its engagement with radical resistance and (re-)creative world-building. This dispatch outlines the outcomes of the first iteration, charts the course for the second, and calls on collaborators to help shape the journey ahead.

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The Journey Ahead: The Second Iteration of AGAPE — solutionsforpostmodernliving

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After a brief false start in September 2024, the Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide (AGAPE) Seminar & Studio, is set to relaunch in January 2025, reenergized and ready to deepen its engagement with radical resistance and (re-)creative world-building. This dispatch outlines

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I typed this text, from a publication called Mirror Stage, written by Nora Khan. I thought it pertinent to the conversation around poetic responsa.

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Measuring Inequality within the Green Zone

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Measuring Inequality within the Green Zone

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Read the article

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Harsha Walia - There Is No “Migrant Crisis”

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Harsha Walia - There Is No “Migrant Crisis”

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Read the article

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Harsha Walia - There Is No “Migrant Crisis”

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Harsha Walia - There Is No “Migrant Crisis”

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Read the article

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Muindi Fanuel Muindi's Video - Sep 12, 2024 (1)

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Muindi Fanuel Muindi's Video - Sep 12, 2024

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The first iteration of the Against Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide research group (AGAPE) revolved around collectively becoming wise to the horrors of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide. Now, having collectively become wise to these horrors, the next iteration of AGAPE will revolve around preparing to confront the means by which the forces of patriarchal imperialism and racial capitalism repress endeavors to engage in the practices of recognition, recollection, resistance, and repair that constitute forms of anti-imperialist rebellion. These means of repression are various but they can be placed into five broad categories that differ from but defer to one another in devious ways.

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Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy

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Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy

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"We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. This appropriation roughly doubles the labour that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development. Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. We find Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income."

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Abstract

Researchers have argued that wealthy nations rely on a large net appropriation of labour and resources from the rest of the world through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains. Here we assess this empirically by measuring flows of embodied labour in the world economy from 1995-2021, accounting for skill levels, sectors and wages. We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. This appropriation roughly doubles the labour that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development. Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. We find Southern wages are 87-95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.

Introduction

Scholars of international political economy have argued that growth and capital accumulation in the wealthy 'core' states of the global North relies on the appropriation of value-labour, resources and goods-from the 'peripheries' and 'semi-peripheries' of the global South1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8. In the contemporary world economy, this appropriation occurs in large part through what scholars have defined as 'unequal exchange' in international trade9,10,11,12. Literature in this field has described how core states and firms leverage their geopolitical and commercial power to compress wages, prices and profits in the global South, both at the level of national economies as well as within global commodity chains (which account for more than 70% of trade), such that Southern prices are systematically lower relative to Northern prices13,14. Price inequalities compel Southern states and producers to export more labour and resources embodied in traded goods to the global North each year in order to pay for any given level of imports, enabling Northern economies to net-appropriate value to the benefit of Northern capital and consumers.

Dynamics of unequal exchange are understood to have intensified in the 1980s and 1990s with the imposition of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) across the global South15. SAPs devalued Southern currencies, cut public employment and removed labour and environmental protections, imposing downward pressure on wages and prices. They also curtailed industrial policy and state-led investment in technological development and compelled Southern governments to prioritise 'export-oriented' production in highly competitive sectors and in subordinate positions within global commodity chains1,16,17,18. At the same time, lead firms in the core states have shifted industrial production to the global South to take direct advantage of cheaper wages and production costs, while leveraging their dominance within global commodity chains to squeeze the wages and profits of Southern producers13,14,19. These interventions have further increased the North's relative purchasing power over Southern labour and goods15.

Several studies have sought to quantify the scale of appropriation through unequal exchange indirectly by adjusting monetary trade volumes for North-South disparities in wages9,20 or general prices15,21. More recent research has used environmentally extended multi-regional input-output (EEMRIO) models, which enable us to track the flows of resources embodied in each nation's final consumption. These studies demonstrate empirically that the core economies rely on a physical net appropriation of embodied labour and resources from the global South22,23,24. However, this research has so far not directly analyzed price dynamics associated with the labour time embodied in North-South trade. It has also been unable to answer questions about the extent to which North-South wage disparities and unequal exchange may be an effect of differences in the type of labour being performed, such as in terms of skill level or sector (for instance, if wage inequalities arise because the South trades low-skilled labour for high-skilled labour, or primary goods for secondary goods).

In this study, we use the EEMRIO model EXIOBASE to track flows of embodied labour between North and South, for the first time accounting directly for sectors, wages and skill levels (as defined by the International Labour Organisation, ILO, described in Methods). This enables us to define the scale of labour appropriation through unequal exchange in terms of physical labour time, while also representing it in terms of wage value, in a manner that accounts for the skill level composition of labour embodied in North-South trade. Our category for the global North approximates the IMF list of 'advanced economies', with the South comprising all emerging and developing economies (see Methods). All monetary units are in constant 2005 Euros, corrected for inflation, represented in market exchange rates (MER), which is appropriate for international comparisons of income purchasing power in the global economy (see Methods).

We arrive at several major conclusions. (1) We find that the labour of production in the world economy, across all skill levels and all sectors, is overwhelmingly performed in the global South (on average 90-91%), but the yields of production are disproportionately captured in the global North. (2) The North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South in 2021 (in other words, net of trade). This net appropriation occurs across all skill categories and sectors, including a large net appropriation of high-skilled labour. (3) The wage value of net-appropriated labour was €16.9 trillion in 2021, represented in Northern wages, accounting for skill level. In wage-value terms, the drain of labour from the South has more than doubled since 1995. 4) North-South wage gaps have increased dramatically over the period, across all skill categories and sectors, despite a small improvement in the South's relative position. Southern wages are 87-95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill as of 2021, and 83-98% lower for work of equal skill within the same sector. (5) Workers' share of GDP has generally declined over the period, by 1.3 percentage points in the global North and 1.6 percentage points in the global South.

Results

Contributions to global production

We find that, in 2021, the final year of data, 9.6 trillion hours of labour went into producing for the global economy. Of that, 90% was contributed by the global South (Fig. 1). The South contributed the majority of labour across all skill levels: 76% of all high-skilled labour, 91% of medium-skilled labour and 96% of low-skilled labour. In the same year, 2.1 trillion hours of labour went into the production of internationally traded goods (our use of 'traded goods' in this paper refers to both goods and services). The relative North-South contribution to the production of traded goods is similar to that of total production, with the South contributing 91% of all labour (73% of all high-skilled labour, 93% of medium-skilled labour, and 96% of low-skilled labour). Note the latter figures are underestimates, given that most global South countries are aggregated into regions in EXIOBASE (see Supplementary Table 1) and trade within these regions is not represented.

Blue indicates labour rendered by workers in the global North, while orange indicates labour rendered by workers in the global South. Skill levels are shaded from lighter (low-skilled) to darker (high-skilled). Panel a shows contributions to total production of all goods and services. Panel b shows contributions to production of traded goods and services only.

The South's contribution to total global production has increased steadily over the period since 1995, across all skill categories. The largest increase has occurred in the high-skill category, with the South's contribution to high-skill production increasing from 66% of the world's total in 1995 (1.9x more than the North) to 76% in 2021 (3.2x more than the North). In fact, the South now contributes more high-skilled labour to the world economy (1124 billion hours in 2021) than all the high-, medium- and low-skilled labour contributions of the global North combined (971 billion hours in 2021). The South also contributes the overwhelming majority of labour across all aggregated sector groupings we derived from EXIOBASE, including agriculture (99%), mining (99%), manufacturing (93%), services (80%) and 'other' (89%). See Methods for sector aggregations.

Despite contributing 90-91% of the total labour that goes into global production and the production of traded goods in 2021, including the majority of high-skilled labour, the global South received less than half (44%) of global income, and Southern workers received only 21% of global income in that year. In other words, while global production is overwhelmingly performed in the global South, the yields are disproportionately captured in the global North, indicating a disproportionate command of the global product.

Table 1 shows that the total number of employed workers and total number of hours worked has increased in both the North and the South from 1995 to 2021, with the increase substantially larger in the global South. The final rows illustrate several interesting points. First, we see that workers in the global South consistently render more labour per worker than in the North, by large margins. In the final year of data, Southern workers worked on average 466 h more than their Northern counterparts (26% more). Second, we see that in the North, labour time per worker has decreased by 7% over the period, while in the South it has increased by 1%. To the extent that increased labour time has contributed to global economic growth over the past 25 years, this burden has been shouldered overwhelmingly by people in the global South.

Table 1 Workers, labour time, and labour intensity by region, in 1995 and 2021

Unequal exchange of labour

Our analysis confirms a substantial and persistent pattern of unequal exchange between the global North and South. In 2021, the global North imported 906 billion hours of embodied labour from the South while exporting only 80 billion hours in return (a ratio of 11:1). On average across the period, the North imported 15x more labour from the South than it exported in return. In other words, the North net-appropriates large quantities of labour from the South. This net appropriation occurs across all skill categories, including high-skilled labour. On average the North imports 4x more high-skilled labour from the South than it exports, together with 17x more medium-skilled labour and 29x more low-skilled labour. Figure 2 shows labour exports and imports by the global South across the period 1995-2021.

Dark grey indicates Southern exports, light grey indicates Southern imports. Panel a shows trade in high-skilled labour. Panel b shows trade in medium-skilled labour. Panel c shows trade in low-skilled labour. Panel d shows trade in total labour across all skill-levels (the sum of a- c).

The unequal exchange of labour described above is not explained by sectoral differences. We found that the global North net-imports large quantities of labour from the South in all skill levels across all five sectors. On average, the North imported 120x more agricultural labour than it exported, 110x more mining labour, 11x more manufacturing labour, and 6x more service labour. In other words, it is not the case that the North net-imports labour in primary production from the South while net-exporting a smaller quantity of labour in secondary and tertiary production. On the contrary, the global North relies on a net appropriation of labour from the South across all sectors, including manufacturing and services. There is no sector in which the North net-exports labour to the South. This is demonstrated in Supplementary Fig. 1.

The time-series results demonstrate that the global South's position deteriorated during 1995-2005, with the South-North exchange ratio increasing from 17:1 in 1995-97 to 21:1 in 2003-2005. During this period, which was characterised by draconian structural adjustment policies applied during the 80s and 90s, Southern economies were compelled to increase their exports of embodied labour by 24% simply in order to maintain the same quantity of imports from the North. The South's position improved over the following decade (2005-2015), as the most aggressive adjustment policies were loosened and as the commodity boom took off, with the exchange ratio dropping to 10:1. This improvement was driven predominantly by an improvement in the position of China. However, improvements have ceased since 2015, and some regression has occurred.

Figures 3 and 4 show the total quantity of labour net-appropriated by the North over the period, by skill level and sector, respectively. The North net-appropriates labour across all skill levels and all sectors. It is worth noting that appropriation in the secondary and tertiary sectors (manufacturing and services) is now greater than in the primary sectors (agriculture and mining), and indeed this has been the case for most of the period covered.

Skill levels are shaded from lighter (low-skilled) to darker (high-skilled). These figures correspond to the net of imports and exports represented in Fig. 2.

The total net appropriation increased from 1995 to a peak in 2005 before declining during the decade 2005-2015. We find that the decline during 2005-2015 corresponds with an improvement in Southern wages against Northern wages. However, this improvement ceased in 2015 and wage ratios have stabilised (see section titled "Wage trends" below). The appropriation has increased in the years since, driven by an increase in the volume of trade. In 2021 the total quantity of net appropriation reached 826 billion hours. These figures are substantially larger than previous studies have found (see Supplementary Discussion 3 for details)25. Net flows from China to the North account for roughly one-sixth of total net South-North flows. It is worth noting here that the net South-North flow of embodied labour is not 'paid for' by an opposite net flow of embodied land, energy or materials (on the contrary, large net South-North flows occur across all input categories).

We find that this pattern of net appropriation plays a major role in the North's consumption (Fig. 5). In any given year, the North consumes roughly twice as much labour as it renders, thanks to appropriation through unequal exchange. In 2021, net-appropriated labour comprised 46% of the North's total consumption of labour. Figure 5 also shows that the economies of the global North have become increasingly reliant on low-skilled labour, the vast majority of which is net-appropriated from the global South (71% in 2021).

The dark grey bars represent labour net-appropriated from the global South (corresponding to the figures represented in Fig. 3). The light grey bars represent labour consumed in the North from all other sources: from the domestic workforce, from North-North trade, and from equal exchange with the South. Panel a shows Northern consumption of high-skilled labour. Panel b shows Northern consumption of medium-skilled labour. Panel c shows Northern consumption of low-skilled labour. Panel d shows Northern consumption of all labour (the sum of a- c).

While the majority of the North's net appropriation of Southern labour is comprised of medium-skilled labour, the net appropriation of high-skilled labour nonetheless constitutes a significant feature of Northern economies. We find that global North economies net-appropriate more high-skilled labour from the global South (52 billion hours in 2021) than they obtain and consume through North-North trade (31 billion hours in 2021).

The wage value of appropriation through unequal exchange

As previous studies have pointed out15,21, because wages and prices are an artefact of bargaining power in the world economy (plus the level of commodification, the extent of monopoly concentration, etc.) as well as dynamics of supply and demand, it is not possible to assign a "true" monetary value to labour. The most we can do is to represent labour in terms of the prevailing wages experienced by different agents in the existing capitalist world economy, purely as a point of reference. Previous studies of unequal exchange, including by Samir Amin9, argue that the net appropriation of hidden labour from the global South should be represented in terms of the prevailing Northern wages; in other words, from the perspective of Northern workers and producers21. This is the approach we take here.

First, we established the scale of net-appropriated labour time within each skill level for each year. We then multiplied the net-appropriated labour time by the wages that Northern workers receive for the labour of the same skill level, rendered in the production of traded goods (ignoring goods produced for final domestic consumption). Labour is therefore compared like-for-like: for example, the appropriated quantity of low-skill labour is valued at the Northern wage for low-skill work, the appropriated quantity of high-skill labour is valued at the Northern wage for high-skill work, etc. In this way, we calculated the wage value of appropriated labour in a manner that answers longstanding questions about the degree to which this is affected by the skill level composition of exchange.

Our results show that in 2021 the wage value of labour net-appropriated from the South was worth €16.9 trillion, in constant 2005 EUR (Fig. 6). In other words, if Northern workers were to perform the net-appropriated quantity of labour domestically, it would cost €16.9 trillion in terms of wages (see Supplementary Discussion 1 for further interpretation). The time series shows that the wage value of the appropriation has more than doubled since 1995. Large increases occurred during the late 1990s, continuing an upward trajectory that began during the period of neoliberal structural adjustment in the 1980s (see evidence presented in previous work15). The appropriation plateaued from the early 2000s to 2015, and since then, has increased further. Over the period 1995-2021, the total wage value of net-appropriated labour sums to €310 trillion.

For robustness, we also calculated the wage value of net-appropriated labour using Northern wages for each skill level in the relevant sector (in other words, we valued the net-appropriated quantity of high-skill labour in the services sector at the Northern wage for high-skill work in the services sector, etc.). The results are only marginally lower, €14.2 trillion in 2021. The weakness of this approach is that it takes for granted large wage inequalities between sectors within the global North, even when correcting for skill, which are due in large part to extremely low wages in agriculture (as low as 2-3 euros per hour; see Supplementary Fig. 2). However, it is nonetheless useful to demonstrate that the large scale of the wage-value of net-appropriated labour cannot be explained by sectoral differences.

Wage trends

We find that the North-South wage gap is large and has been increasing over time for all skill level categories (Fig. 7). Here again, we assess labour involved in the production of traded goods only. Southern wages are 87-95% less than Northern wages at the same skill level, i.e. for equal work as defined by the ILO. Southern wages are 87% less for high-skill labour, 93% less for medium-skill labour, and 95% less for low-skill labour. The disparity is so extreme that high-skill labour in the global South receives 68% less than low-skill labour in the global North. Stated otherwise, for every hour of work at a given skill level, Northern workers are able to consume 8-19x more of the global product than Southern workers (8x more for high-skill labour, 14x more for medium-skill labour, and 19x more for low-skill labour).

Global North wages are in blue, global South wages are in orange. Panel a shows the average wages of all labour, across all skill levels. Panel b shows the wages of high-skilled labour. Panel c shows the wages of medium-skilled labour. Panel d shows the wages of low-skilled labour.

Southern wage gains have not matched Northern wage gains in absolute terms. The average Southern wage has increased from €0.46 to €1.62 per hour (an increase of €1.16), while the average Northern wage has increased from €12.60 to €24.95 per hour (an increase of €12.35). Northern wages have increased 11x more than Southern wages. There is no "catch-up" occurring; on the contrary, it is a pattern of dramatic divergence.

These results indicate that workers in the global South, who receive an average €1.62 per hour, perform the vast majority (90%) of the labour that produces for the global economy, the vast majority (91%) of the labour that produces traded goods, and nearly half (46%) of the labour that supports growth and consumption in the global North (net of trade). The global economy is overwhelmingly characterised by a regime of cheap labour.

These wage gaps are not explained by sectoral differences. Our results show large and growing North-South wage gaps for all skill levels across all of the sectors we analysed. In agriculture, Southern wages are 85-91% lower than Northern wages for any given skill level. In mining, Southern wages are 93-98% lower. In manufacturing, 89-94% lower. In services, 83-90% lower (see Supplementary Fig. 2 for full results).

Despite growing wage gaps, there has been some reduction in the relative inequality between North and South. As of 2021, the average Southern wage was 94% lower than the average Northern wage, a small improvement from 96% in 1995 (Fig. 8). Improvements in the South's position occurred during the period from 2005 to 2015. Improvements have since ceased and, to some extent, declined.

Labour's share of GDP

We find that, globally, labour received, on average, 51.6% of world GDP during the 5-year period 2017-2021. In other words, only half of all value produced in the world economy (that is represented in prices and included in GDP accounts) is captured by workers in the form of wages. As Fig. 9 shows, this represents a decline from the late 1990s (1995-1999), when labour's share of GDP averaged 54.7%. This suggests that labour's position vis-à-vis capital has deteriorated over the period anlaysed.

Southern workers' share of Southern GDP is notably lower than the global average, at an average of 47.5% during the 2017-2021 period, while Northern workers' share of Northern GDP is higher, at an average of 54.7% during the same period. This indicates that the Southern working classes are weaker vis-à-vis national capital than the Northern working classes. In both cases, labour's position has deteriorated since the late 1990s: by 1.3 percentage points in the South and 1.6 percentage points in the North.

Discussion

The results of this study demonstrate the occurrence of large net transfers of embodied labour from the global South to the global North through unequal exchange in international trade and global supply chains, across all skill levels and all sectors, amounting to a total of 826 billion hours in 2021. These results illustrate several important features of the world economy. For one, it is clear that Northern economies rely substantially on net appropriation from the global South. Net-appropriated labour comprises approximately half of the total labour that provisions goods and services for Northern consumption. In other words, this dynamic doubles the total quantity of labour that is available to the economies of the global North, which sustains their high levels of consumption and wealth, and underpins their economic growth. An extra 826 billion hours of Southern labour is effectively appended to Northern economies as invisible "ghost workers".

Given this dynamic, it is clear that the North's development model cannot be universalised, as it relies on appropriation from elsewhere. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the North's current levels of aggregate consumption could be maintained under fair trade conditions. To maintain current consumption, Northern populations would need to substantially increase their working hours (while also committing substantially more domestic land, materials and energy to production), which would be socially and politically difficult to achieve. It is plausible that people would prefer instead to forego some kinds of production (for instance, production of goods for elite consumption) or shift to forms of provisioning that require less labour (e.g. public transit instead of private cars).

Our results also indicate that the global South is drained of a large quantity of productive capacity through unequal exchange (9-16% of its total productive capacity, in terms of labour, is drained in any given year). 826 billion hours of labour in 2021 is equivalent to 369 million workers (assuming 2236 h per worker per year, which is the global South average as presented in Table 1). This is more than the total workforce of the United States and the European Union combined. This quantity of labour could be mobilised to produce housing and nutritious food for communities within the global South, or to build and staff hospitals and schools, thus provisioning for local human needs and achieving necessary development objectives; but instead-because of the squeezing of Southern labour and producers, and because of constraints on the ability of Southern states to develop greater economic sovereignty-it is appropriated to produce within global supply chains that service Northern growth, consumption and accumulation.

Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by large North-South wage gaps. We find that Southern wages are 87-95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. Our analysis confirms arguments by others (e.g. Ruy Mauro Marini, Samir Amin, Arrighi Emmanuel, etc.) that these wage gaps cannot be explained by sectoral differences, as they prevail across all sectors of the economy: the wages of Southern workers are 83-98% lower for work of equal skill within the same sector. In absolute terms, these wage gaps have increased substantially over time, across all skill levels and all sectors, indicating a steady increase in absolute North-South income inequality, despite some improvement in the South's relative position during the 2005-2015 period. This has occurred even though there has been a steady increase in industrial manufacturing as a share of total production in (and exports from) the global South during the period studied13,14. We conclude that while Southern workers contribute the majority (90-91%) of labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global GDP. The yields of production are disproportionately captured in the global North.

It is interesting to note that our results describing the North's reliance on high-skilled labour from the South confirm statements made by the CEOs of major firms, who have claimed that the necessary quantity of high-skilled engineering labour to support their production is not available in the core states and therefore this production must be performed abroad. Apple's former CEO Steve Jobs noted that his company required 30,000 engineers; as he put it, "You can't find that many in America to hire"26. Current CEO Tim Cook has noted that Apple's production relies on large quantities of high-skilled labour in China for advanced engineering, tooling and innovation. "In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields"25. High-skilled labour in the global South is paid a fraction of that in the North, despite the fact that Northern firms cannot function without it.

Our study shows that North-South wage gaps and the unequal exchange of labour cannot be explained by skill level or sectoral differences, as both dynamics persist within all skill levels and within all sectors. However, some portion of unequal exchange may be due to productivity differences (i.e. if workers in the South produce less output per hour than workers in the North). Unequal exchange is sometimes conceptualised as a transfer net of productivity differences9,10. It is not straightforward to assess this empirically. Standard metrics of productivity measure output in terms of income or GDP per person employed, which are metrics of prices and do not reveal anything about physical output. Such metrics cannot be used for our purposes: they tell us that Southern wages and prices are lower than Northern wages and prices, but this is precisely what needs to be explained27,28. Scholarship on unequal exchange holds that prices are an artefact of power imbalances (between labour and capital, suppliers and lead firms, periphery and core) and, therefore, cannot be taken as an accurate depiction of value. If Southern wages and prices are squeezed, Southern 'productivity' will appear to deteriorate even if there is no change in the actual physical output. To properly assess productivity dynamics would require measuring physical output across comparable industries (see Supplementary Discussion 2 for further discussion).

There are several reasons to believe that physical productivity differences cannot explain the large North-South wage gaps and unequal exchange we observe. First, in the case of export industries (rather than subsistence and non-traded sectors), most production in the South is performed with modern techniques, often with technologies provided by international capital9,10,14,20. Workers in these industries have been found to produce as much or more physical output per hour than their Northern counterparts20,29. Southern production is also characterised by greater labour intensity, as workers are subject to rigid systems of control designed to maximise output to an extent that would fall foul of labour regulations in the core30,31,32. Second, in cases where Southern export industries do operate with less efficient technologies, productivity differences only account for a small share of the North-South wage gap and the net appropriation of labour time9,20. The key fact is that Northern firms choose to use Southern labour not only because wages are cheaper per hour, but because wages are cheaper per unit of physical output13. Offshoring occurs precisely because the North-South wage difference is greater than any physical productivity difference. Third, physical productivities can only meaningfully be compared for identical tasks and products. For many industries and product categories, Southern production has no counterpoint in the North, because it cannot or does not occur there (such as in the case of coffee, coltan, smartphones, fast fashion, etc.)9,10,33. In such cases, productivities cannot be compared and cannot explain wage inequalities and unequal exchange. Further analysis is available in Supplementary Discussion 2.

It is important to note that, in cases where physical productivity differences do exist, this is often because it is more profitable for capital to use cheaper, more labour-intensive methods than to invest in modern equipment-especially in cases where state investment in technological development has been curtailed by structural adjustment programmes, or where patents prevent affordable access to necessary technologies-precisely because Southern wages are maintained at artificially low levels34,35. This arrangement benefits Northern consumers with cheaper goods and benefits Northern capital with an increased surplus. In such cases, the use of labour-intensive methods facilitates value transfer and should be understood as constituting unequal exchange. Under these conditions, the South is compelled to allocate more labour to production for international trade than would be required if technology was deployed more rationally and fairly, thus draining-and wasting-a crucial productive capacity that could otherwise be allocated toward producing goods and services necessary for local well-being and development (see Supplementary Discussion 2).

This study has assessed flows of embodied labour between the core and periphery. Such an approach is clearly useful for broad world-system analysis, but it may obscure other important dynamics. Future research may find it useful to explore a more detailed regional breakdown, to assess how the periphery and semi-periphery (or low-income and middle-income countries) are differently affected by unequal exchange. It would also be worth assessing class dynamics, and inequalities within countries. It should be understood that unequal exchange is ultimately driven by the corporations and investors that control supply chains, and the states that determine the rules of international trade and finance, not by workers or consumers. Patterns of unequal exchange may also operate within countries, through the exploitation of 'internal peripheries'36 (such as extremely low-wage agricultural labour in the core, as visible in Supplementary Fig. 2). Finally, our analysis does not extend to gender dynamics, including uncompensated household labour or social reproduction, which is also constitutive of unequal exchange and should be explored in future EEMRIO research37,38.

The results of this study suggest that the persistence of global poverty and underdevelopment is, in large part, an effect of appropriation through unequal exchange, which is, in turn, an effect of wage suppression or income deflation in the periphery. People in the global South have their consumption curtailed such that labour, resources and goods are more readily available for appropriation by Northern states and firms. This dynamic also helps us understand persistent inequality between the core and periphery. Under conditions of unequal exchange-where production in poorer countries is appropriated for consumption in richer countries-convergence is not feasible to achieve. Development and poverty eradication, and any plausible trajectory for reducing global inequality, requires a shift in the balance of power between North and South, such that the latter is able to reclaim its productive capacities to meet human needs.

Toward this end, international wage floors and minimum resource prices could help reduce price inequalities and limit value transfers. Ending unequal exchange will also require ending structural adjustment conditions on finance, and democratising the institutions of global economic governance, so that global South governments are free to use industrial, fiscal and monetary policy to pursue sovereign development and reduce their dependency on Northern capital. Such reforms are unlikely to be handed down from above, however. It will require a political struggle for national self-determination and economic sovereignty similar in scope to the anti-colonial movement of the 20th century.

Methods

Deriving data from EXIOBASE

Input-output (IO) tables record the exchange of goods and services between various sectors within an economy, incorporating intermediate demand (\(Z\)), final demand (\(y\)) and value-added (\(v\))39. Complementing the monetary IO tables, extension tables record non-monetary flows connected to economic activities such as raw material extraction, energy usage, land use and labour requirements. By blending data on the economic structure of supply chains from multi-regional Input-output (MRIO) tables with information on the environmental and socioeconomic pressures that emerge throughout the supply chain, environmentally extended multi-regional input-output (EEMRIO) analysis allows for the assessment of both socioeconomic and environmental impacts throughout the supply chain network that ultimately reaches the final consumer, a phenomenon known as 'footprinting'40. For a more thorough introduction to EEMRIO, see ref. 41.

The EEMRIO method employs an MRIO table that records inter-regional trade between sectors across countries. If \({{{{\bf{y}}}}}\) is a matrix of final demand, the total output of sector i (\({{{{{\bf{x}}}}}}_{i}\)) would be given by the sum of row \(i\), where \({{{{{\bf{z}}}}}}_{{ij}}\) is the intermediate sales from sector i to sector j, and \({{{{{\bf{y}}}}}}_{{ic}}\) is the final demand for products of the sector \(i\) by country \(c\) (ref. 42):

$${{{{{\bf{x}}}}}}_{i}={{{{{\bf{z}}}}}}_{i1}+{{{{{\bf{z}}}}}}_{i2}+\ldots+{{{{{\bf{z}}}}}}_{{ij}}+{{{{{\bf{y}}}}}}_{i1}+{{{{{\bf{y}}}}}}_{i2}+\ldots+{{{{{\bf{y}}}}}}_{{ic}}$$

The demand-driven IO framework can be calculated using the equation:

$$X={(I-A)}^{-1}{{{{\bf{y}}}}}=L{{{{\bf{y}}}}}$$

where \(A\) is the direct requirements matrix. Here, the element \({a}_{{ij}}\) gives the direct inputs that sector \(j\) requires from the sector \(i\) (\({{{{{\bf{z}}}}}}_{{ij}}\)) in order to produce a unit of output \({{{{{\bf{x}}}}}}_{j}\) (ref. 42):

$${a}_{{ij}}=\frac{{{{{{\bf{z}}}}}}_{{ij}}}{{{{{{\bf{x}}}}}}_{j}}$$

\(L={(I-A)}^{-1}\) is known as the 'Leontief inverse,' whose elements quantify the total upstream direct and indirect inputs from sector \(i\) required to produce one unit of industry output \(j\) for final demand. \(L\) approximates the potentially infinite chain of production required to produce a unit of final product43; for example, an iPad sold in the United States might be assembled in China using components manufactured in South Korea, which in turn requires subcomponents produced in the Philippines from raw materials extracted and processed in other countries and sectors, etc.19. Multiplying \(L\) by final demand \({{{{\bf{y}}}}}\) yields the total upstream inputs required to produce the goods and services consumed by households, governments, and others, \(X\), in monetary units.

Environmental or socioeconomic coefficients, which determine pressures or impacts, are stored in the intensity vector \({{{{\bf{q}}}}}\) representing the pressure or impact per unit of industries' total output, such as the hours of labour required to produce a unit of output. For our purposes, we want to calculate the labour from sector \(i\) of producer country \(p\) embodied in final demand of consumer country \(c\). This simply requires multiplying the labour requirements per unit output of sector \(i\) in country \(p\) (stored in vector \({{{{\bf{q}}}}}\)) with the total output from that same country and sector required to meet final demand in consumer country c (stored in matrix \(X\)). If \({{{{\bf{y}}}}}\) is a single-column vector of final demand, the flow matrix \(F\) can be expressed in matrix notation as:

$$F=\hat{{{{{\bf{q}}}}}}L\hat{{{{{\bf{y}}}}}}$$

where a 'hat' (^) represents a diagonalized vector; it shows the labour inputs by sector and region required to satisfy each product category of final demand \({{{{\bf{y}}}}}\) 44.

We applied EEMRIO analysis using data from the MRIO database EXIOBASE v.3.8.145. EXIOBASE 3 presents a comprehensive and updated series of EEMRIO tables for 200 product sectors, covering a span of time from 1995 up to a recent year. The data comprises 44 individual countries, consisting of 28 European Union member states as well as 16 other major economies, in addition to five regional aggregations that together cover the rest of the world. To obtain consumption-based labour flows between the selected categories, we used the socioeconomic coefficients for the labour accounts, including labour time (which is represented in hours) and compensation (which is represented in constant 2005 euros) for each skill level. We examined the period from 1995, which is the earliest year available in EXIOBASE v.3.8.1, to 2021.

One key limitation of EXIOBASE is the use of now-casting since 201146. However, given we have no reason to expect large changes in labour efficiency or wage trends in the latter period, nor sudden changes in the structure of the world economy, we believe it is reasonable to use the now-casted data for our purposes.

Regional aggregations

Our analysis here focuses on flows between the core and periphery of the world system, using the country classifications set out in Supplementary Table 1. As a proxy for the core, or the global North, we used the IMF's list of 'advanced economies' as a guide and created the closest possible approximation of this list given the countries available in EXIOBASE. The category includes USA, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Estonia, Spain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Taiwan, Cyprus and the Czech Republic.

The periphery, or global South, includes all other countries (i.e. the IMF's 'emerging and developing' countries). In EXIOBASE, several of the IMF's 'advanced economies' (Singapore, San Marino, Iceland, Israel, Liechtenstein, Macao SAR, Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Monaco, Bermuda, Andorra and New Zealand) are aggregated into regions, such as 'Rest of Europe', 'Rest of Asia', etc. We were, therefore, compelled to include these countries in our 'global South' category. The consequence is that our results for wages in the global South are likely to be slightly higher, and our results for labour drain from the global South slightly lower, than what would otherwise be the case if we were able to match the IMF categories more accurately. These are small countries, however, and the effect is likely to be minimal.

Skill levels

In EXIOBASE, skill level categories are defined according to the International Labour Organisation's classification scheme for low-skilled, medium-skilled and high-skilled labour. Table 2 summarises the ILO categories by occupation and educational attainment, based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO). The ILO offers extensive descriptions of each occupation, available in further documentation47. For instance, 'Elementary occupations' involve the performance of simple tasks which may require the use of hand-held tools and physical effort, such as cleaning, restocking supplies, performing basic maintenance in buildings, performing manual labour in farming, fishing, mining, manufacturing, construction, etc.

Table 2 Description of ILO skill levels, as used in EXIOBASE

Sectors

We divided EXIOBASE production data into five sectors (agriculture, manufacturing, mining, services, and 'other'), based on recommended sectoral aggregation of product tables (available at https://ntnu.app.box.com/v/EXIOBASEconcordances/file/282981183372). The 'other' category aggregates the electricity and utilities, construction, and transport sectors. Full details on the sectoral composition are available in Supplementary Data 1.

Monetary units

EXIOBASE reports monetary units in constant 2005 euros, which control for inflation. These units are expressed in MER (with local currencies converted at the market exchange rate) rather than PPPs. PPPs are useful for understanding people's purchasing power over goods within a national economy. However, MER are more appropriate for understanding purchasing power over goods in the world market, which is the purpose of this paper. It is well established in political economy that PPP methods are not appropriate for measuring relative international wealth and power, or command over the global product12,48,49,50,51. According to Arrighi, "While PPP data allow for a more adequate description of trends in material consumption, FX-based data are a better measure of differences in the relative level of income/wealth among residents of different countries in the global economy. Wealth in a global economy is the command that people have over one another's goods and services on the world market. PPP-adjusted data actually obscure what we seek to measure"48. As Ricci writes, for these reasons "It is preferable to use... market exchange rates to compare income purchasing power in the global economy"12.

Overview of calculations

We obtained data on labour embodied in traded goods and services flowing from North to South, from South to North, between Southern countries and between Northern countries, for the three skill levels and the five sector aggregates indicated above, along with the labour compensation paid against these flows. We also obtained data on labour by skill level and sector involved in domestic production and consumption within both the global North and the global South (i.e. labour involved in the production of non-traded goods), along with compensation paid. To calculate the Northern net appropriation of labour, we subtracted Northern flows to the South from Southern flows to the North. To calculate total Northern consumption, we summed Southern flows to the North together with flows of traded goods within the North and production and consumption of non-traded goods within the North. Wages (euros/hour) for each region are calculated as the total compensation (in euros) the region receives for its exports of labour divided by its total exports of labour (in hours). To calculate labour hours per worker we divided total labour hours rendered in each region by the total number of workers employed, also obtained from EXIOBASE.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Dylan Sullivan for contributing insights and feedback on the draft manuscript and Supplementary Discussions, particularly related to sections on productivity. J.H. and M.H.L. acknowledge support from the European Research Council (ERC-2022-SYG reference number 101071647) and the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence (CEX2019-374 000940-M) grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. F.B. acknowledges funding from the Swedish Research Council Formas (2021-01006) and the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (MMW2023.0023).

Funding

Open access funding provided by Stockholm University.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB), Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Jason Hickel & Morena Hanbury Lemos

2. Department of Anthropology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Jason Hickel

3. International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom

Jason Hickel

4. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Felix Barbour

5. Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden

Felix Barbour

Contributions

JH: conceptualization, supervision, project administration, resources, methodology, formal analysis, writing-original draft, writing-review and editing. MHL: conceptualization, software, methodology, validation, data curation, investigation, formal analysis, writing-review and editing. JH and MHL conceptualized and completed the initial submission, FB contributed following the first review. FB: software, methodology, validation, data curation, investigation, formal analysis, writing-review and editing.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jason Hickel, Morena Hanbury Lemos or Felix Barbour.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Communications thanks Andrea Ricci and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.

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Hickel, J., Hanbury Lemos, M. & Barbour, F. Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy. Nat Commun 15, 6298 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49687-y
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Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy - Nature Communications

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Hickel and colleagues find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities.

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Stefano Harney, from "Involvement and Betrayal," the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry

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Stefano Harney, from "Involvement and Betrayal," the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry

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Stefano Harney, from "Involvement and Betrayal," the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry

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Stefano Harney, from "Involvement and Betrayal," the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry

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Unity and Struggle - "Post-1965 Migration"

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Unity and Struggle - "Post-1965 Migration"

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Post-1965 Migration - U&S Race Study Part 3, Section 3

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Bean Time-Lapse - 25 days | Soil cross section

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Silvia Frederici, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at the Critical Racial Anti-Colonial Study [CRACS] Lab

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Silvia Frederici, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at the Critical Racial Anti-Colonial Study [CRACS] Lab

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Critical Racial Anti-Colonial Study Co-Lab

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Possibly oblique quotes from Lauren Berlant, who writes about autobiographies of collective experience in the context of consumerism. It helped me understand contemporary political landscapes that seem to borrow so much financial language. From the introduction to The Female Complaint:

In the contemporary consumer public…all sorts of narratives are read as autobiographies of collective experience…[There is] is an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience. A certain circularity structures an intimate public, therefore: its consumer participants are perceived to be marked by a commonly lived history; its narratives and things are deemed expressive of that history while also shaping its conventions of belonging; and, expressing the sensational, embodied experience of living as a certain kind of being in the world, it promises also to provide a better experience of social belonging—partly through participation in the relevant commodity culture, and partly because of its revelations about how people can live.

Whether linked to women or other nondominant people, it flourishes as a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x. One may have chosen freely to identify as an x; one may be marked by traditional taxonomies—those details matter, but not to the general operation of the public sense that some qualities or experience are held in common. The intimate public provides anchors for realistic, critical assessment of the way things are and provides material that foments enduring, resisting, overcoming, and enjoying being an x.

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Saidiya Hartman on "Community Amongst Ourselves" From Scenes of Subjection, pt 2

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Saidiya Hartman on "Community Amongst Ourselves" From Scenes of Subjection, pt 2

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Saidiya Hartman on "Community Amongst Ourselves" From Scenes of Subjection, pt 1

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Saidiya Hartman on "Community Amongst Ourselves" From Scenes of Subjection, pt 1

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Orisanmi Burton discussing Tip of the Spear

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Orisanmi Burton discussing Tip of the Spear

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From the Red Medicine podcast.

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From "Fellow Prisoners" by John Berger, pt 1

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From "Fellow Prisoners" by John Berger, pt 1

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The Gulag equation “criminal = slave laborer” has been rewritten by neoliberalism to become “worker = hidden criminal.” The whole drama of global migration is expressed in this new formula; those who work are latent criminals. When accused, they are found guilty of trying at all costs to survive.

Over six million Mexican women and men work in the US without papers and are consequently illegal. A concrete wall of over one thousand kilometers and a “virtual” wall of eighteen hundred watchtowers were planned along the frontier between the US and Mexico, although the projects have recently been scrapped. Ways around them—though all of them dangerous—will of course be found.

Between industrial capitalism, dependent on manufacture and factories, and financial capitalism, dependent on free-market speculation and front office traders, the incarceration area has changed. Speculative financial transactions add up to, each day, $1,300 billion, fifty times more than the sum of the commercial exchanges. The prison is now as large as the planet and its allotted zones can vary and can be termed worksite, refugee camp, shopping mall, periphery, ghetto, office block, favela, suburb. What is essential is that those incarcerated in these zones are fellow prisoners.

[...]

Today the purpose of most prison walls (concrete, electronic, patrolled, or interrogatory) is not to keep prisoners in and correct them, but to keep prisoners out and exclude them.

Most of the excluded are anonymous—hence the obsession of all security forces with identity. They are also numberless, for two reasons. First because their numbers fluctuate; every famine, natural disaster and military intervention (now called policing) either diminishes or increases their multitude. And second, because to assess their number is to confront the fact that they constitute most of those living on the surface of the earth—and to acknowledge this is to plummet into absolute absurdity.

[...]

The authorities do their systematic best to keep fellow prisoners misinformed about what is happening elsewhere in the world prison. They do not, in the aggressive sense of the term, indoctrinate. Indoctrination is reserved for the training of the small élite of traders and managerial and market experts. For the mass prison population the aim is not to activate them, but to keep them in a state of passive uncertainty, to remind them remorselessly that there is nothing in life but risk, and that the earth is an unsafe place.

This is done with carefully selected information, with misinformation, commentaries, rumors, fictions. Insofar as the operation succeeds, it proposes and maintains a hallucinating paradox, for it tricks a prison population into believing that the priority for each one of them is to make arrangements for their own personal protection and to acquire somehow, even though incarcerated, their own particular exemption from the common fate. This image of mankind as transmitted through a view of the world is truly without precedent. Mankind is presented as a coward; only winners are brave. In addition, there are no gifts; there are only prizes.

Prisoners have always found ways of communicating with one another. In today’s global prison, cyberspace can be used against the interests of those who first installed it. Like this, prisoners inform themselves about what the world does each day, and they follow suppressed stories from the past and so stand shoulder to shoulder with the dead.

In doing so, they rediscover little gifts, examples of courage, a single rose in a kitchen where there’s not enough to eat, indelible pains, the indefatigability of mothers, laughter, mutual aid, silence, ever-widening resistance, willing sacrifice, more laughter…

Read the entire essay

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From "Untitled (Notes on Fascism This Time)" by Denise Ferreira da Silva

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Some Observations, Propositions, and Questions from Joy James

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Some Observations, Propositions, and Questions from Joy James

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I've been doing quite a bit of re-thinking and soul-searching upon returning home to Portland from my time facilitating the BADS_lab in Chicago -- having traveled by road, there and back again, across the logistical wastes, monocultured plains, sprawling connurbations, and down-and-out former frontier towns of settler colonial empire, not to mention mighty montane ad badland landscapes that defy colonial conquest.

Grounding and helpful for me has been listening to two talks by Joy James, the first titled "Abolition & Revolutionary Love" and the second "Caretakers, Compradors, and Captive Maternals as 'Vanguard'".

I found the observations, propositions, and questions advanced in the clips arrayed above particularly worthy of meditation. I do, however, reccommend listening to both talks in full.

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"Introduction: To See Like a Smuggler" by Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi from Seeing Like Smuggler

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"Introduction: To See Like a Smuggler" by Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi from Seeing Like Smuggler

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"Planning and Policy" from The Undercommons by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

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"Afterword: Seeing Freedom" by Nandita Sharma from Seeing Like Smuggler

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Selections from "Scenes of Subjection" by Saidiya Hartman

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A Lecture by Hortense Spillers, M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor - March 21, 2019

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When people endeavor to make sense of the genocidal and ethnocidal horrors of colonial racial capitalism, they too often endeavor to imagine the spectacular acts of mass murder and mass destruction perpetrated against Black peoples, Indigenous peoples, and other non-white peoples. The difficulty is, however, that we can only make sense of these spectacular acts of death and destruction after we have, to borrow a phrase from Saidiya Hartman, illuminated the “terror[s] of the mundane and quotidian” from which these spectacular acts emerge. As I argued in the dispatch titled “The Therapeutic Imagination”, if we fail to counter colonial racial capitalism in its mundane and quotidian forms, we will only ever find ourselves belatedly reacting to it in its most spectacularly violent forms with a spectacular violence of our own.

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When people endeavor to make sense of the genocidal and ethnocidal horrors of colonial racial capitalism, they too often endeavor to imagine the spectacular acts of mass murder and mass destruction perpetrated against Black peoples, Indigenous peoples, and other non-white peoples. The difficulty is, however, that we can only make sense of these spectacular acts of death and destruction after we have, to borrow a phrase from Saidiya Hartman, illuminated the "terror[s] of the mundane and quotidian" from which these spectacular acts emerge. As I argued in the dispatch titled "The following dispatch is composed of four autobiographical observations that illuminate how the mundane and quotidian facts of my own existence are bound up with the genocidal and ethnocidal horrors of colonial racial capitalism. I have attempted to write dispatches of this sort before. Indeed, the third note below is a revised version of an earlier attempt, a dispatch titled "Another Black Man in America". But it is my hope that more and more of my dispatches from here on out will be of this sort, working with and from the mundane and quotidian. This hope was first expressed in my first ever dispatch written two years ago, "Radical Everydayness", but this hope has languished in obscurity for much of the past two years. Reading Christina Sharpe's marvelous Ordinary Notes, twice over the course of the past two months, brought this hope back into prominence and inspired me to act on it. The Therapeutic Imagination", if we fail to counter colonial racial capitalism in its mundane and quotidian forms, we will only ever find ourselves belatedly reacting to it in its most spectacularly violent forms with a spectacular violence of our own.

First Note. Three Scrambles for Afrika

The First Scramble for Afrika, "The Slave Trade", was the proto-colonial scramble to turn Afrika into "a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins": to kidnap and deport/export the greater share of enslaved Afrikans to the New World. During this Scramble, approximately thirty million Afrikans were kidnapped, deported, and submitted to slavery and social death in other regions of the world, and approximately total of one hundred million lives were taken from Afrika, including those killed during capture, in the holding camps, on the death marches to the coast, and over the course the Middle Passage. The First Scramble was defeated by the resistance of the enslaved Afrikans of the diaspora, exemplified by the Hatian Revolution and the General Strike that decided the U.S. Civil War, which transformed slavery from a profitable luxury into a Trojan Horse that threatened to undermine New World settler colonial empires from within.

The Second Scramble for Afrika, "The Land Grab", which took off in the wake of the "non-event of emancipation" and the closing of the frontiers of the New World, was the proper colonial scramble to conquer, colonize, and exploit the Afrikan continent and its inhabitants with extreme prejudice. During the Second Scramble, Europeans overthrew the rulers whom they had propped as agents and clients, and they declared themselves the new enlightened rulers of the continent. Though Europeans claimed to have abolished slavery on the continent in the process of conquering it, they actually re-created the horrors of New World chattel slavery in the heart of the continent. The largest territorial claim on the continent, the Congo Free State was settled and run as one giant slave plantation, and half of the territory's population, an estimated 10 million Congolese people, would be murdered by the overseers of Master Leopold's plantation-state. The Second Scramble was defeated by the organized resistance of colonized Afrikans on the continent which transformed colonies from a profitable luxuries into dangerous liabilities.

The Third Scramble for Afrika, "The Debt Trap", is the ongoing neo-colonial scramble to under-develop and over-burden the postcolonies of the Afrikan continent in order to extract tribute from them in the form of debt servicing payments, valuable natural and human resources, and pledges of fealty to this or that neo-colonial economic bloc. The Third Scramble is, in a sense, a return to the modus operandi of the First. Instead of imposing foreign rule on the peoples of the continent, today's neo-colonizers bribe, corrupt, and terrorize the statesman and warlords of the postcolonies to compel them to sabotage and sell their nation-states into debt slavery, recalling the manner in which the Afrikan kings and warlords of the early modern period were bribed, corrupted and terrorized by proto-colonizers to sell their most vulnerable subjects and neighboring peoples into chattel slavery. Home to 34 of today's 50 poorest states in the world, Afrika loses more to capital flight, unequal exchanges, and brain drain than it obtains from aid, external borrowing, foreign direct investment, and remittances from Afrikans abroad. If the global economy weren't rigged, Afrika would be a "net creditor" to the rest of the world.

I am a child of the Third Scramble, born to Lacustrine Bantu peoples who migrated from the postcolony of Tanzania, amongst the poorest of the Third World, to the Settler States of the Amerikaners, the present First World Imperial hegemon, by way of the United Kingdom, the declining predecessor and forerunner of the present hegemon.

My parents secured their permits to enter the First World by way of the extraction of valuable natural and human resources from Afrika. My mother's entry permit to the First World was purchased for her by her father, an urbane merchant who made his money in the 1970s and 1980s by facilitating the extractive and unequal trade of valuable minerals from the resource rich regions surrounding Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, Congo, and Burundi, his homelands, to the European continent. By contrast, my father, the son of a rural family enlisted in a colonial agriculture "modernization" scheme, was granted an entry permit to the First World after competing in the intellectual hunger games organized by British colonial schools and proving himself a valuable human resource, worthy of extraction from the Afrikan continent, to be refined in academic and research institutions in the First World Imperial core, and, then, either installed as a comprador elite back in his peripheral homeland or, alternatively, kept on as a decorative beast in the Imperial core.

My parents met while studying in the United Kingdom in the midst of the Thatcherite neoliberal counter-revolution that began in the late 1970s, and they were granted entry permits to the Settler States of the Amerikaners a few years later in the early 1980s, when my father was offered a position as a decorative beast in the service of the National Institutes of Health, arriving in the Settler States at the height of the Reaganite neoliberal counter-revolution. These two neoliberal counter-revolutions waged against oppressed ethno-classes in the United Kingdom and the Settler States coincided, of course, with a global neoliberal counter-revolution, a period of open economic warfare and covert military operations targeting the Third World anti-colonial nationalist movements that had won national independence but had not defeated the forces of unequal geopolitical integration. This global neo-liberal counter-revolution culminated in the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s, which firmly yoked Third World postcolonies back to their (neo-)colonizers according to a logic of abjection and unequal integration that cast Afrikan nation-states, continental and diasporic, as the most abject of all nation-states.

If it wasn't for the depredations and deprivations that the Third World debt crisis inflicted upon a recalcitrant Tanzania with a peculiar harshness, it is quite possible my parents might have chosen to return to Tanzania in the late 1980s instead of choosing to make lives for themselves and their children in the Settler States of the Amerikaners.

Second Note. Four Waves of Amerikaner Settlement

It follows that I am not only a child of the Third Scramble for Afrika, I am also a child of the Fourth Wave of Amerikaner Settlement.

I was born in the neoliberal "global city" that was New York in the late 1980s, in the immediate wake of the successes of the global neoliberal counter-revolution described above, my father having secured a position as a decorative beast at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Growing up in the financial capital of the Settler States, the cruelties that the Three Scrambles inflicted upon the Afrikan continent were distant and spectral realities to me during my formative years, but the brutalities that the Four Waves of Amerikaner Setterism inflicted upon the peoples of the Afrikan diaspora in the Settlers States were proximal and palpable to me. The after-lives and present-lives of the Four Waves of Amerikaner Settlement were everywhere around me, in the built environments of the Amerikaners, in Amerikaners' ways of doing and dwelling, and in Amerikaners' habits of speaking and writing.

During the First Wave of Euro-Amerikaner Settlement, "Native Genocide and Negro Slavery", Euro-Amerikaners conquered and settled the lands East of the Mississippi River system and endeavored to either enslave or exterminate the Natives whose lands they conquered. Extermination of the Natives being deemed preferable to their enslavement, the Euro-Amerikaners imported and exploited enslaved Afrikans, racialized "Negroes", to working on chain-gangs and in forced labor camps, developing stolen land and sweating in extractive and productive industries, especially in the South.

During the Second Wave of Settlement, "Manifest Destiny", was the wave during which Euro-Amerikaners proceeded to settle the lands West of the Mississippi River system, importing indentured "Coolies" from Asia (a majority of them Chinese) to develop the newly conquered territories, as supplement to the labor of enslaved Afrikans as well as that of the Mexican settlers whom the Euro-Amerikaners were to displace and force into subservient roles as laborers.

The Third Wave of Settlement, "Industrial Empire", followed the closing of the frontier. During this Third Wave, the Euro-Amerikaners rapidly accelerated the mass importation and assimilation of impoverished working class populations from Europe in order to (i) re-populate and settle lands that were being depopulated as non-Europeans (the Native, the Afrikan, the Mexican mestizo, and the Asian) endured expulsions, ethnic cleansing, and terror campaigns to keep them in subordinate positions relative to white Euro-Amerikaners; (ii) work the factory floors that were proliferating as the Northern Settler industrial economy prevailed over the Southern Settler plantation economy in the wake of the Amerikaner Civil War; and (iii) serve in the Euro-Amerikaner military as the Settlers endeavored to acquire an overseas empire for themselves by force of arms, looking towards the then hegemonic British Empire as role model and rival.

During the ongoing Fourth Wave of Settlement, "Global Hegemony", the Euro-Amerikaners have leveraged their status as global hegemon in the wake of the Imperialist World Wars (1914-1945) in order to (i) promote an increasing portion of the assimilated European settler-citizen working class to soft-labor regimes and extend them credit on relatively easy terms to fuel their consumer habits; (ii) export the most physically and psychologically degrading hard-labor regimes over the border and overseas to neo-colonies, client states, and treaty ports in the Third World; and (iii) import migrant laborers from the Third World to do the most psychically and physically degrading forms of hard-labor remaining within the borders of the Settler States, supplementing the labor of established "national minorities" (the Native Amerikan, the Afrikan Amerikan, the Latin Amerikan mestizo, and the Asian Amerikan), and using immigration and border security measures to render Third World migrants precarious and vulnerable to expulsions.

Furthermore, during this ongoing Fourth Wave, an effective counter-insurgency strategy of the Euro-Amerikaners, deployed against "national minority" populations and Third World migrants alike, has been to fraction off the talented tenth from "national minority" populations and from foreign-born non-European migrant populations and to grant them the status of "near whites" or "honorary whites". These talented tenths are kept in relative luxury as decorative beasts in the Big Houses of Empire (the Ivory Towers, the Executive Suites, the White Cubes, and the Arenas of Sport and Entertainment), and/or they are employed to manufacture consent to forms of unequal integration and apartheid amongst their natal communities, both locally and globally, as agents of the White-Saviour Industrial Complex.

My father, a medical doctor employed at research institutions, but now retired, was counted amongst that talented tenth fractioned off from populations of foreign-born Afrikan migrants. Like many of his ilk, he spent his working life competing in the intellectual "hunger games" for individuals from oppressed ethno-classes: he never stopped having to prove himself worthy of his place in the talented tenths. He was a slave to the imperative that he outperform his peers while graciously receiving less for his labors than his peers. He was always under pressure to either produce an outstanding "contribution" or, alternatively, to service the egos of his white benefactors according to their narcissistic or masochistic tastes. Decades of performing in this degrading and embittering competition, in a hostile country an ocean away from his homeland, took its toll on his body, mind, and spirit, and it impaired his capacity to love and care for his wife and children beyond his being a "provider".

Separating from my father when I was 12, and henceforth refusing to suffer the imposition of being beholden to a patriarchal "provider", my mother went from being the kept woman of a Black man of distinction, ensconced in the talented tenths, to being a precarious and vulnerable Afrikan migrant engaged in hard-labor. After striking out on her own, she would spend the rest of her life performing underpaid and exhausting care work for persons with disabilities who had the privilege of access to social services, most of them white Amerikaners. A toxic combination of work induced stresses and illnesses misdiagnosed due to medical racism would kill her the month after my 22nd birthday.

Third Note. Another Black Man in Amerika; or, the Fact of Racial Genocide

By the time I was ten years old, the imperative had been drummed into my ears, beamed into my eyes, and even beaten into my flesh: excel intellectually, maintain good manners, be well-spoken, and, by all means, never let your appearance, bearing, and conduct slacken when you are under the Gaze of the White Man (or his proxies), lest you be taken for an uncultured, uncouth, and uncivilized Negro.

Whenever I failed in this regard - whenever I performed poorly at school, whenever I spoke and acted out of turn, whenever my appearance, bearing, and conduct was wild and unruly - I would be punished by my parents, and my punishment would inevitably be accompanied by the refrain, "Keep this up and you'll become just another Black man in Amerika."

My parents knew that I knew that being "just another Black man in Amerika" was something dreadful, even though the reasons why this was the case had never been explicitly stated to me by them or by anyone else. There was, of course, no need for them to state the obvious to me, was there? All that they had to teach me explicitly was the imperative that I save myself from the dreadful fate of becoming "just another Black man in Amerika" by and through becoming a "Black man of distinction", counted amongst the talented tenths.

Now, I must state the obvious here, lest any reader play innocent. To be taken for "just another Black man in Amerika" is to be subject to murder as an unintended consequence of routine disciplinary action, or as normal(ized) accident, or as the collateral damage of society's pursuit of progressive optimization. My murder requires little extra formal justification if I am taken for "just another Black man in Amerika", but it requires detailed formal justification if I am taken for a Black man of distinction and not "just another Black man". Intellectual achievement, good manners, proper diction, a sophisticated appearance, bearing, and code of conduct - all of this signals to the world at large that I may be a Black man of distinction and that my murder may require detailed formal justification. Knowing that my life was in real danger otherwise, my parents quite literally beat the imperative to signal distinction into me as a child, from the age of six up until the age of twelve. I am not alone in this regard: too many Black boys have been and are still being taught the imperative to signal distinction by and through injury and insult, acts of corporeal and communicative violence inflicted upon their bodies and psyches by people whom they call family, friends, mentors, and teachers. This sort of violence is but one of the many scourges of racism.

"What is racism?" Michel Foucault asked at the end of his 1975-1976 lectures at the Collège de France, titled "Society Must Be Defended". Foucault's answer to this question has stuck with me. In part, this is because being able to cite the sophisticated conjectures of erudite and esoteric Frenchmen is a mark of distinction for a Black man in Amerika, but it is also because the sophistication of Foucault's conjecture is actually rather profound. Foucault's answer runs as follows:

[Racism] is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die. [...] In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable condition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the state functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the state. [...] If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say "killing," I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.

So, what is profound about Foucault's definition of racism? Well, as Foucault himself puts it, his definition holds that "[t]he specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power." To be rather more specific, modern racism is bound up with techniques and technologies of normalizing power: normalizing statements, normalizing implements, and normalizing environments. Going a step beyond Foucault, insofar as optimizing powers are variable controllers and modulators of normalizing powers, I hold that prevailing techniques and technologies of optimizing power give rise to modular racisms or "postmodern racisms" that are more "liberal" and "progressive" than the modern racisms engendered when techniques and technologies of normalizing power prevail.

Techniques and technologies of normalizing power operate in rather obvious ways but, at the same time, they make it easy for some individuals to disavow their rather obvious operations, to mis-attribute their effects, to blame "isolated bad actors", "being at the wrong place at the wrong time", and "accidents of birth". Those who say that the police murder of another Black man in Amerika is just a "normal accident" are disavowing the obvious fact that techniques and technologies of power have effectively normalized the "accidental" murder of Black men by police in Amerika. Of course, those who find it easy to disavow this obvious fact are those for whom "accidental" murder by police has not been so normalized. By contrast, those for whom"accidental" murder by police has been normalized must perform remarkable mental gymnastics if they are to disavow this obvious fact and, what's more, they risk being murdered if they act in accord with such a disavowal.

Techniques and technologies of optimizing power are more subtle and insidious. Taking it for granted that the murder of another Black man in Amerika is a "normal accident", optimizing powers aim to find ways to decrease the occurrence of "normal accidents" by subjecting Black men to increased administration and supervision. In other words, an optimizing power asks itself, "How can we better administer and supervise the lives of Black men so as to lower their normal murder-rate?" Optimizing powers tell us that Black males must not be left to their own devices: they "prove" to us that Black males are less likely to be murdered if they are placed into special after-school detention programs as young children, placed into special summer employment programs as young adults, and live their entire lives in neighborhoods patrolled by squadrons of police officers equipped with body-mounted surveillance cameras.

Optimizing powers teach us that Black male populations are "at risk populations" or "populations in crisis" that really ought to be set apart from other populations and put under special administration and supervision. To teach us this, optimizing powers will invariably cite the "fact" that Black male populations are unusually vulnerable to the "normal accident" that is murder, conveniently forgetting that this "fact" is artificially induced, the result of the effective operation of normalizing powers. Next, optimizing powers will "prove" the virtues of special administration and supervision by running more or less "controlled" experiments: they will demonstrate that sub-populations of Black men that submit to special administration and supervision are less likely to be murdered than sub-populations that are left to their own devices. What needs to be understood here, however, is the fact that optimizing powers effectively work to maintain and increase murder-rates in sub-populations left to their own devices relative to those that receive special administration and supervision. In effect, this means that optimizing powers confront Black males with a deathly ultimatum, "If you want to reduce your chances of being murdered, you must submit to some form of special administration and supervision; there is no alternative".

Optimizing powers, in other words, constitute a protection racket that compels its victims to surrender their autonomy instead of (or in addition to) their money. To recognize this is to recognize that incarceration as a form of socio-political death in the US is only the most obvious part of the New Jim Crow power formation. To get a fuller picture of the New Jim Crow, I suggest you pay closer attention to the organs of the white savior industrial complex that operate within the US: they pass for social services and charitable organizations but they effectively compel Black people to surrender their autonomy, to submit to special administration and supervision, in order to receive protection from physical and socio-political death.

The Black man who signals to the world that they are a "Black man of distinction", one worthy of ranking in the talented tenth, is signaling to the world that they are ready, willing, and able to submit to special administration and supervision at all times. The Black man who signals to the world that they are "just another Black man" is one who signals to the world that they will resist special administration and supervision. Black parents, fearing for the lives of their Black boys, are pressured to ensure that their boys are always ready, willing, and able to receive special administration and supervision. Indeed, returning to my own example, my parents wanted to ensure that I was ready, willing, and able to submit to extra-curricular administration and supervision but, between the ages of six and twelve at least, I actively resisted submitting to the most basic curriculum of administration and supervision - I was a truant and an underachiever. Knowing that my failure to submit to administration and supervision might very well result in my being murdered, my parents employed injury and insult, corporeal and communicative violence, to teach me a lesson and to compel me to submit. This is to say, in other words, that my parents thought that it was reasonable to employ corporeal and communicative violence against their child if doing so effectively meant keeping their child from being murdered. Raising me up in New York City and Pittsburgh during 1990s, during the heyday of the superpredator myth, my parents were by no means alone in this regard.

Now, I need to reiterate that, throughout this text, I have not been referring to "simply murder as such" but "also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on." In other words, rather than "simply murder as such", I have been referring to murder disguised as unintended consequence of routine disciplinary action, to murder disguised as normal(ized) accident, and to murder disguised as the collateral damage of society's pursuit of progressive optimization. If you will allow me to interpolate a text by Friedrich Engels:

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds [...] in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live - forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence - knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

The fact that Black peoples who resist special administration and supervision are subjected, in the very manner that Engels described above, to mass murder by omission - this is precisely what George Jackson in Blood in My Eye named "the fact of racial genocide" in its most mundane and quotidian form. Recognizing this, one must realize that Black parents who "discipline" their children by inflicting corporeal and communicative violence upon them are reacting to the oppressive fact of racial genocide. Ay, and to criticize their "reactive" parenting without acknowledging the oppressive fact of racial genocide is to criticize them in bad faith. That I am alive, and that I am able to write this text with a modicum of skill and self-awareness is, in part, a testament to the ways in which their parenting succeeded in spite of the fact of racial genocide and their reactions to it.

It should also be added that my parents failure to discipline me into accepting administration and supervision was just as liable to have me taken from them as their "going too far" in disciplining me. Damned if you do, damned if you don't: Black parents are reported to child-welfare officials both when their children refuse to submit to administration and supervision and when they compel their children to submit to administration and supervision. Black parents are perpetually being punished by white Amerikaners (and their proxies) for either under-reacting and over-reacting to the fact of racial genocide. The effective result of this being that half of all Black children in the Settler States experience a child-welfare investigation by the time they reach age 18. As case in point, I should add that, for a brief time during my childhood, I was removed from my parents home and placed in the care of a child-welfare agency.

Fourth Note. Disowning Our Ancestral Tongues; or, the Workings of Ethnocide

Entangled with the psychic and physical violence inflicted upon me in order to teach me the imperative to become a Black man of distinction, there is also the matter of the cultural violence that was inflicted upon me towards the same end, which served to keep me from properly communing with other continental and diasporic Afrikans.

My older sister was found to be "delayed" in her speech by her pre-school teachers, and my parents took her to a speech language pathologist when she was around three or four and I was around one or two. The pathologist told them that the problem was that they were speaking to her in multiple languages that were grammatically incompatible. If they wanted her and, by extension, me to advance beyond our peers in English language acquisition and performance, the pathologist prescribed that they speak only one language at home: English. Thus, between the ages of one and two, my parents ceased speaking to me in an Afrikan tongue, and I never learned Swahili to any degree of competency until I made my own efforts after leaving home. This is to say nothing of learning the Lacustrine Bantu tongues (Bwari, Jita, Kerewe) which are now effectively dying off in my extended family with the passing of my grandparents' generation of speakers.

Going further and digging deeper, my parents also had a strong desire for me not to speak Afrikan American Vernacular English. Indeed, the term "Ebonics" briefly came into vogue during a formative period of my youth, and my parents latched onto it. My father went to great lengths correcting what he took to be the "bad grammar" of "Ebonics" coming out of my mouth - a grammar he recognized to be inflected by a number of "Afrikan-isms".

In sum, my parents, effectively, wanted me to speak like a well-educated white person, perhaps even with a tendency to drop more Oxbridge-esque British-isms than American-isms. Ay, and my parents pretty much succeeded in shaping my speech patterns accordingly, with their efforts having been reinforced by my primary schooling: I only attended majority Black schools for three years total between Pre-K to 12th Grade, with my elementary schooling mostly taking place on New York's extremely white Upper East Side, where I recall many little white kids with Black nannies from the Carribean. In any case, my speech was so polished that Afrikans and other international students who attended college with me in the US joked that I spoke in my classes as if I had attended an elite British or American boarding school somewhere on the continent. Prior to that, when I transferred into a majority Black school in Pittsburgh at age 10, the joke was that I talked like a book. Of course, I code switch into and out of erudite white speak but, admittedly, I speak it more fluently perhaps than any other sort of speak - excepting perhaps the Black Intellectual speak of continental and diasporic Afrikans of Generations X, Y, and Z who have been groomed to join the ranks of the talented tenths.

These days, when I reflect upon the above, I believe that my parents understood that I was undeniably Black/Afrikan in appearance and would never pass for a white person by sight but, and this would be my saving grace, I could learn to speak like (and write like) a white person, neither like a child of recent immigrants from the Dark Continent with their attendant miseries nor like a descendant of those who made the Middle Passage with their own attendant miseries. They imagined that speaking like (and writing like) a white person, instead of a Black/Afrikan, would give me an edge in the crab bucket scramble for a rank amongst the talented tenth. Signs betraying excessive Backness/Afrikanity in the realm of speech and writing - realms considered coterminous with the realm of thought - are liabilities for those who would move up or maintain their rank, excepting the rare few who have earned their rank by presenting themselves as exemplary and entertaining specimens of excessive Blackness/Afrikanity.

In the chapter titled "Writing Culture in the Negro in (Dis)Forming the American Canon, R.A. Judy helps us understand the logics at work here by pointing out how true "mastery" of the White Man's tongue, and the transcendence of Blackness, is not to be found in the speaking of the White Man's language but, rather, in the "reasoned writing" of it. That being said, however, to speak in a manner that is closer to "reasoned writing" than to the vernacular is an index of one's "mastery" of the White Man's tongue and, thus, one's transcendence of one's Blackness. This is what my parents wanted for me: to speak like a book, in the same manner that the educated white man wrote, in order to transcend Blackness and be recognized as human. They imagined this to be imperative for me in an era when being a young Black man without distinctions was to have police brutality against you written off on a police report with the catchphrase "no humans involved".

Going further and digging deeper, Judy teaches us that the enslaved Negro who writes their narrative demonstrates their full humanity and emancipates themself by proving that they have "mastered" a European language in and through the practice of "reasoned writing". But this emancipation is achieved by the Negro only by letting something die or, rather, killing something in himself. As Judy writes, "The death that is emancipating is the negation of the materiality of Afrika." Considering this, I am reminded of a story related to me in the form of a tweet. An older Afrikan immigrant hears another, young Afrikan on a call in the grocery store aisle while shopping. The older man turns to the younger man and says to him, "I hear my country in your voice." Which is to say, in other words, that the younger man's accent and the so-called "errors" that constitute the materiality of his speech indicate to the older man that the younger man is also an immigrant from his home country.

To "master" the White Man's tongue, then, is to be able to speak and write in the White Man's tongue in such a manner that obliterates the materiality of the Afrikan tongue. One could say, then, that my parents were told by the speech language pathologist that hearing Afrika in their children's voices would be a liability for their children: the materiality of Afrika in our tongues would "hold us back" and "deny us opportunities". So my parents diligently spoke English, and English only, to their children until their children were "advanced" in their English language skills for their ages, negating the possibility that an Afrika tongue would hold them back, and ensuring that their children's speech would be much more like the "reasoned writing" of the White Man.

This is how ethnocide works. In its most mundane and quotidian form: it marginalizes and pathologizes subjugated cultures and, then, goes on to prescribe conformity to the dominant culture as both (i) the cure to the pathology that it has made of the persistence of subjugated cultures and (ii) the access route from the underprivileged margins to the privileged center.

When people endeavor to make sense of the genocidal and ethnocidal horrors of colonial racial capitalism, they too often endeavor to imagine the spectacular acts of mass murder and mass destruction perpetrated against Black peoples, Indigenous peoples, and other non-white peoples. The difficulty is, however, that we can only make sense of these spectacular acts of death and destruction after we have, to borrow a phrase from Saidiya Hartman, illuminated the "terror[s] of the mundane and quotidian" from which these spectacular acts emerge. As I argued in the dispatch titled "The following dispatch is composed of four autobiographical observations that illuminate how the mundane and quotidian facts of my own existence are bound up with the genocidal and ethnocidal horrors of colonial racial capitalism. I have attempted to write dispatches of this sort before. Indeed, the third note below is a revised version of an earlier attempt, a dispatch titled "Another Black Man in America". But it is my hope that more and more of my dispatches from here on out will be of this sort, working with and from the mundane and quotidian. This hope was first expressed in my first ever dispatch written two years ago, "Radical Everydayness", but this hope has languished in obscurity for much of the past two years. Reading Christina Sharpe's marvelous Ordinary Notes, twice over the course of the past two months, brought this hope back into prominence and inspired me to act on it. The Therapeutic Imagination", if we fail to counter colonial racial capitalism in its mundane and quotidian forms, we will only ever find ourselves belatedly reacting to it in its most spectacularly violent forms with a spectacular violence of our own.

First Note. Three Scrambles for Afrika

The First Scramble for Afrika, "The Slave Trade", was the proto-colonial scramble to turn Afrika into "a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins": to kidnap and deport/export the greater share of enslaved Afrikans to the New World. During this Scramble, approximately thirty million Afrikans were kidnapped, deported, and submitted to slavery and social death in other regions of the world, and approximately total of one hundred million lives were taken from Afrika, including those killed during capture, in the holding camps, on the death marches to the coast, and over the course the Middle Passage. The First Scramble was defeated by the resistance of the enslaved Afrikans of the diaspora, exemplified by the Hatian Revolution and the General Strike that decided the U.S. Civil War, which transformed slavery from a profitable luxury into a Trojan Horse that threatened to undermine New World settler colonial empires from within.

The Second Scramble for Afrika, "The Land Grab", which took off in the wake of the "non-event of emancipation" and the closing of the frontiers of the New World, was the proper colonial scramble to conquer, colonize, and exploit the Afrikan continent and its inhabitants with extreme prejudice. During the Second Scramble, Europeans overthrew the rulers whom they had propped as agents and clients, and they declared themselves the new enlightened rulers of the continent. Though Europeans claimed to have abolished slavery on the continent in the process of conquering it, they actually re-created the horrors of New World chattel slavery in the heart of the continent. The largest territorial claim on the continent, the Congo Free State was settled and run as one giant slave plantation, and half of the territory's population, an estimated 10 million Congolese people, would be murdered by the overseers of Master Leopold's plantation-state. The Second Scramble was defeated by the organized resistance of colonized Afrikans on the continent which transformed colonies from a profitable luxuries into dangerous liabilities.

The Third Scramble for Afrika, "The Debt Trap", is the ongoing neo-colonial scramble to under-develop and over-burden the postcolonies of the Afrikan continent in order to extract tribute from them in the form of debt servicing payments, valuable natural and human resources, and pledges of fealty to this or that neo-colonial economic bloc. The Third Scramble is, in a sense, a return to the modus operandi of the First. Instead of imposing foreign rule on the peoples of the continent, today's neo-colonizers bribe, corrupt, and terrorize the statesman and warlords of the postcolonies to compel them to sabotage and sell their nation-states into debt slavery, recalling the manner in which the Afrikan kings and warlords of the early modern period were bribed, corrupted and terrorized by proto-colonizers to sell their most vulnerable subjects and neighboring peoples into chattel slavery. Home to 34 of today's 50 poorest states in the world, Afrika loses more to capital flight, unequal exchanges, and brain drain than it obtains from aid, external borrowing, foreign direct investment, and remittances from Afrikans abroad. If the global economy weren't rigged, Afrika would be a "net creditor" to the rest of the world.

I am a child of the Third Scramble, born to Lacustrine Bantu peoples who migrated from the postcolony of Tanzania, amongst the poorest of the Third World, to the Settler States of the Amerikaners, the present First World Imperial hegemon, by way of the United Kingdom, the declining predecessor and forerunner of the present hegemon.

My parents secured their permits to enter the First World by way of the extraction of valuable natural and human resources from Afrika. My mother's entry permit to the First World was purchased for her by her father, an urbane merchant who made his money in the 1970s and 1980s by facilitating the extractive and unequal trade of valuable minerals from the resource rich regions surrounding Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, Congo, and Burundi, his homelands, to the European continent. By contrast, my father, the son of a rural family enlisted in a colonial agriculture "modernization" scheme, was granted an entry permit to the First World after competing in the intellectual hunger games organized by British colonial schools and proving himself a valuable human resource, worthy of extraction from the Afrikan continent, to be refined in academic and research institutions in the First World Imperial core, and, then, either installed as a comprador elite back in his peripheral homeland or, alternatively, kept on as a decorative beast in the Imperial core.

My parents met while studying in the United Kingdom in the midst of the Thatcherite neoliberal counter-revolution that began in the late 1970s, and they were granted entry permits to the Settler States of the Amerikaners a few years later in the early 1980s, when my father was offered a position as a decorative beast in the service of the National Institutes of Health, arriving in the Settler States at the height of the Reaganite neoliberal counter-revolution. These two neoliberal counter-revolutions waged against oppressed ethno-classes in the United Kingdom and the Settler States coincided, of course, with a global neoliberal counter-revolution, a period of open economic warfare and covert military operations targeting the Third World anti-colonial nationalist movements that had won national independence but had not defeated the forces of unequal geopolitical integration. This global neo-liberal counter-revolution culminated in the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s, which firmly yoked Third World postcolonies back to their (neo-)colonizers according to a logic of abjection and unequal integration that cast Afrikan nation-states, continental and diasporic, as the most abject of all nation-states.

If it wasn't for the depredations and deprivations that the Third World debt crisis inflicted upon a recalcitrant Tanzania with a peculiar harshness, it is quite possible my parents might have chosen to return to Tanzania in the late 1980s instead of choosing to make lives for themselves and their children in the Settler States of the Amerikaners.

Second Note. Four Waves of Amerikaner Settlement

It follows that I am not only a child of the Third Scramble for Afrika, I am also a child of the Fourth Wave of Amerikaner Settlement.

I was born in the neoliberal "global city" that was New York in the late 1980s, in the immediate wake of the successes of the global neoliberal counter-revolution described above, my father having secured a position as a decorative beast at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Growing up in the financial capital of the Settler States, the cruelties that the Three Scrambles inflicted upon the Afrikan continent were distant and spectral realities to me during my formative years, but the brutalities that the Four Waves of Amerikaner Setterism inflicted upon the peoples of the Afrikan diaspora in the Settlers States were proximal and palpable to me. The after-lives and present-lives of the Four Waves of Amerikaner Settlement were everywhere around me, in the built environments of the Amerikaners, in Amerikaners' ways of doing and dwelling, and in Amerikaners' habits of speaking and writing.

During the First Wave of Euro-Amerikaner Settlement, "Native Genocide and Negro Slavery", Euro-Amerikaners conquered and settled the lands East of the Mississippi River system and endeavored to either enslave or exterminate the Natives whose lands they conquered. Extermination of the Natives being deemed preferable to their enslavement, the Euro-Amerikaners imported and exploited enslaved Afrikans, racialized "Negroes", to working on chain-gangs and in forced labor camps, developing stolen land and sweating in extractive and productive industries, especially in the South.

During the Second Wave of Settlement, "Manifest Destiny", was the wave during which Euro-Amerikaners proceeded to settle the lands West of the Mississippi River system, importing indentured "Coolies" from Asia (a majority of them Chinese) to develop the newly conquered territories, as supplement to the labor of enslaved Afrikans as well as that of the Mexican settlers whom the Euro-Amerikaners were to displace and force into subservient roles as laborers.

The Third Wave of Settlement, "Industrial Empire", followed the closing of the frontier. During this Third Wave, the Euro-Amerikaners rapidly accelerated the mass importation and assimilation of impoverished working class populations from Europe in order to (i) re-populate and settle lands that were being depopulated as non-Europeans (the Native, the Afrikan, the Mexican mestizo, and the Asian) endured expulsions, ethnic cleansing, and terror campaigns to keep them in subordinate positions relative to white Euro-Amerikaners; (ii) work the factory floors that were proliferating as the Northern Settler industrial economy prevailed over the Southern Settler plantation economy in the wake of the Amerikaner Civil War; and (iii) serve in the Euro-Amerikaner military as the Settlers endeavored to acquire an overseas empire for themselves by force of arms, looking towards the then hegemonic British Empire as role model and rival.

During the ongoing Fourth Wave of Settlement, "Global Hegemony", the Euro-Amerikaners have leveraged their status as global hegemon in the wake of the Imperialist World Wars (1914-1945) in order to (i) promote an increasing portion of the assimilated European settler-citizen working class to soft-labor regimes and extend them credit on relatively easy terms to fuel their consumer habits; (ii) export the most physically and psychologically degrading hard-labor regimes over the border and overseas to neo-colonies, client states, and treaty ports in the Third World; and (iii) import migrant laborers from the Third World to do the most psychically and physically degrading forms of hard-labor remaining within the borders of the Settler States, supplementing the labor of established "national minorities" (the Native Amerikan, the Afrikan Amerikan, the Latin Amerikan mestizo, and the Asian Amerikan), and using immigration and border security measures to render Third World migrants precarious and vulnerable to expulsions.

Furthermore, during this ongoing Fourth Wave, an effective counter-insurgency strategy of the Euro-Amerikaners, deployed against "national minority" populations and Third World migrants alike, has been to fraction off the talented tenth from "national minority" populations and from foreign-born non-European migrant populations and to grant them the status of "near whites" or "honorary whites". These talented tenths are kept in relative luxury as decorative beasts in the Big Houses of Empire (the Ivory Towers, the Executive Suites, the White Cubes, and the Arenas of Sport and Entertainment), and/or they are employed to manufacture consent to forms of unequal integration and apartheid amongst their natal communities, both locally and globally, as agents of the White-Saviour Industrial Complex.

My father, a medical doctor employed at research institutions, but now retired, was counted amongst that talented tenth fractioned off from populations of foreign-born Afrikan migrants. Like many of his ilk, he spent his working life competing in the intellectual "hunger games" for individuals from oppressed ethno-classes: he never stopped having to prove himself worthy of his place in the talented tenths. He was a slave to the imperative that he outperform his peers while graciously receiving less for his labors than his peers. He was always under pressure to either produce an outstanding "contribution" or, alternatively, to service the egos of his white benefactors according to their narcissistic or masochistic tastes. Decades of performing in this degrading and embittering competition, in a hostile country an ocean away from his homeland, took its toll on his body, mind, and spirit, and it impaired his capacity to love and care for his wife and children beyond his being a "provider".

Separating from my father when I was 12, and henceforth refusing to suffer the imposition of being beholden to a patriarchal "provider", my mother went from being the kept woman of a Black man of distinction, ensconced in the talented tenths, to being a precarious and vulnerable Afrikan migrant engaged in hard-labor. After striking out on her own, she would spend the rest of her life performing underpaid and exhausting care work for persons with disabilities who had the privilege of access to social services, most of them white Amerikaners. A toxic combination of work induced stresses and illnesses misdiagnosed due to medical racism would kill her the month after my 22nd birthday.

Third Note. Another Black Man in Amerika; or, the Fact of Racial Genocide

By the time I was ten years old, the imperative had been drummed into my ears, beamed into my eyes, and even beaten into my flesh: excel intellectually, maintain good manners, be well-spoken, and, by all means, never let your appearance, bearing, and conduct slacken when you are under the Gaze of the White Man (or his proxies), lest you be taken for an uncultured, uncouth, and uncivilized Negro.

Whenever I failed in this regard - whenever I performed poorly at school, whenever I spoke and acted out of turn, whenever my appearance, bearing, and conduct was wild and unruly - I would be punished by my parents, and my punishment would inevitably be accompanied by the refrain, "Keep this up and you'll become just another Black man in Amerika."

My parents knew that I knew that being "just another Black man in Amerika" was something dreadful, even though the reasons why this was the case had never been explicitly stated to me by them or by anyone else. There was, of course, no need for them to state the obvious to me, was there? All that they had to teach me explicitly was the imperative that I save myself from the dreadful fate of becoming "just another Black man in Amerika" by and through becoming a "Black man of distinction", counted amongst the talented tenths.

Now, I must state the obvious here, lest any reader play innocent. To be taken for "just another Black man in Amerika" is to be subject to murder as an unintended consequence of routine disciplinary action, or as normal(ized) accident, or as the collateral damage of society's pursuit of progressive optimization. My murder requires little extra formal justification if I am taken for "just another Black man in Amerika", but it requires detailed formal justification if I am taken for a Black man of distinction and not "just another Black man". Intellectual achievement, good manners, proper diction, a sophisticated appearance, bearing, and code of conduct - all of this signals to the world at large that I may be a Black man of distinction and that my murder may require detailed formal justification. Knowing that my life was in real danger otherwise, my parents quite literally beat the imperative to signal distinction into me as a child, from the age of six up until the age of twelve. I am not alone in this regard: too many Black boys have been and are still being taught the imperative to signal distinction by and through injury and insult, acts of corporeal and communicative violence inflicted upon their bodies and psyches by people whom they call family, friends, mentors, and teachers. This sort of violence is but one of the many scourges of racism.

"What is racism?" Michel Foucault asked at the end of his 1975-1976 lectures at the Collège de France, titled "Society Must Be Defended". Foucault's answer to this question has stuck with me. In part, this is because being able to cite the sophisticated conjectures of erudite and esoteric Frenchmen is a mark of distinction for a Black man in Amerika, but it is also because the sophistication of Foucault's conjecture is actually rather profound. Foucault's answer runs as follows:

[Racism] is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die. [...] In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable condition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the state functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the state. [...] If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say "killing," I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.

So, what is profound about Foucault's definition of racism? Well, as Foucault himself puts it, his definition holds that "[t]he specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power." To be rather more specific, modern racism is bound up with techniques and technologies of normalizing power: normalizing statements, normalizing implements, and normalizing environments. Going a step beyond Foucault, insofar as optimizing powers are variable controllers and modulators of normalizing powers, I hold that prevailing techniques and technologies of optimizing power give rise to modular racisms or "postmodern racisms" that are more "liberal" and "progressive" than the modern racisms engendered when techniques and technologies of normalizing power prevail.

Techniques and technologies of normalizing power operate in rather obvious ways but, at the same time, they make it easy for some individuals to disavow their rather obvious operations, to mis-attribute their effects, to blame "isolated bad actors", "being at the wrong place at the wrong time", and "accidents of birth". Those who say that the police murder of another Black man in Amerika is just a "normal accident" are disavowing the obvious fact that techniques and technologies of power have effectively normalized the "accidental" murder of Black men by police in Amerika. Of course, those who find it easy to disavow this obvious fact are those for whom "accidental" murder by police has not been so normalized. By contrast, those for whom"accidental" murder by police has been normalized must perform remarkable mental gymnastics if they are to disavow this obvious fact and, what's more, they risk being murdered if they act in accord with such a disavowal.

Techniques and technologies of optimizing power are more subtle and insidious. Taking it for granted that the murder of another Black man in Amerika is a "normal accident", optimizing powers aim to find ways to decrease the occurrence of "normal accidents" by subjecting Black men to increased administration and supervision. In other words, an optimizing power asks itself, "How can we better administer and supervise the lives of Black men so as to lower their normal murder-rate?" Optimizing powers tell us that Black males must not be left to their own devices: they "prove" to us that Black males are less likely to be murdered if they are placed into special after-school detention programs as young children, placed into special summer employment programs as young adults, and live their entire lives in neighborhoods patrolled by squadrons of police officers equipped with body-mounted surveillance cameras.

Optimizing powers teach us that Black male populations are "at risk populations" or "populations in crisis" that really ought to be set apart from other populations and put under special administration and supervision. To teach us this, optimizing powers will invariably cite the "fact" that Black male populations are unusually vulnerable to the "normal accident" that is murder, conveniently forgetting that this "fact" is artificially induced, the result of the effective operation of normalizing powers. Next, optimizing powers will "prove" the virtues of special administration and supervision by running more or less "controlled" experiments: they will demonstrate that sub-populations of Black men that submit to special administration and supervision are less likely to be murdered than sub-populations that are left to their own devices. What needs to be understood here, however, is the fact that optimizing powers effectively work to maintain and increase murder-rates in sub-populations left to their own devices relative to those that receive special administration and supervision. In effect, this means that optimizing powers confront Black males with a deathly ultimatum, "If you want to reduce your chances of being murdered, you must submit to some form of special administration and supervision; there is no alternative".

Optimizing powers, in other words, constitute a protection racket that compels its victims to surrender their autonomy instead of (or in addition to) their money. To recognize this is to recognize that incarceration as a form of socio-political death in the US is only the most obvious part of the New Jim Crow power formation. To get a fuller picture of the New Jim Crow, I suggest you pay closer attention to the organs of the white savior industrial complex that operate within the US: they pass for social services and charitable organizations but they effectively compel Black people to surrender their autonomy, to submit to special administration and supervision, in order to receive protection from physical and socio-political death.

The Black man who signals to the world that they are a "Black man of distinction", one worthy of ranking in the talented tenth, is signaling to the world that they are ready, willing, and able to submit to special administration and supervision at all times. The Black man who signals to the world that they are "just another Black man" is one who signals to the world that they will resist special administration and supervision. Black parents, fearing for the lives of their Black boys, are pressured to ensure that their boys are always ready, willing, and able to receive special administration and supervision. Indeed, returning to my own example, my parents wanted to ensure that I was ready, willing, and able to submit to extra-curricular administration and supervision but, between the ages of six and twelve at least, I actively resisted submitting to the most basic curriculum of administration and supervision - I was a truant and an underachiever. Knowing that my failure to submit to administration and supervision might very well result in my being murdered, my parents employed injury and insult, corporeal and communicative violence, to teach me a lesson and to compel me to submit. This is to say, in other words, that my parents thought that it was reasonable to employ corporeal and communicative violence against their child if doing so effectively meant keeping their child from being murdered. Raising me up in New York City and Pittsburgh during 1990s, during the heyday of the superpredator myth, my parents were by no means alone in this regard.

Now, I need to reiterate that, throughout this text, I have not been referring to "simply murder as such" but "also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on." In other words, rather than "simply murder as such", I have been referring to murder disguised as unintended consequence of routine disciplinary action, to murder disguised as normal(ized) accident, and to murder disguised as the collateral damage of society's pursuit of progressive optimization. If you will allow me to interpolate a text by Friedrich Engels:

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds [...] in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live - forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence - knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

The fact that Black peoples who resist special administration and supervision are subjected, in the very manner that Engels described above, to mass murder by omission - this is precisely what George Jackson in Blood in My Eye named "the fact of racial genocide" in its most mundane and quotidian form. Recognizing this, one must realize that Black parents who "discipline" their children by inflicting corporeal and communicative violence upon them are reacting to the oppressive fact of racial genocide. Ay, and to criticize their "reactive" parenting without acknowledging the oppressive fact of racial genocide is to criticize them in bad faith. That I am alive, and that I am able to write this text with a modicum of skill and self-awareness is, in part, a testament to the ways in which their parenting succeeded in spite of the fact of racial genocide and their reactions to it.

It should also be added that my parents failure to discipline me into accepting administration and supervision was just as liable to have me taken from them as their "going too far" in disciplining me. Damned if you do, damned if you don't: Black parents are reported to child-welfare officials both when their children refuse to submit to administration and supervision and when they compel their children to submit to administration and supervision. Black parents are perpetually being punished by white Amerikaners (and their proxies) for either under-reacting and over-reacting to the fact of racial genocide. The effective result of this being that half of all Black children in the Settler States experience a child-welfare investigation by the time they reach age 18. As case in point, I should add that, for a brief time during my childhood, I was removed from my parents home and placed in the care of a child-welfare agency.

Fourth Note. Disowning Our Ancestral Tongues; or, the Workings of Ethnocide

Entangled with the psychic and physical violence inflicted upon me in order to teach me the imperative to become a Black man of distinction, there is also the matter of the cultural violence that was inflicted upon me towards the same end, which served to keep me from properly communing with other continental and diasporic Afrikans.

My older sister was found to be "delayed" in her speech by her pre-school teachers, and my parents took her to a speech language pathologist when she was around three or four and I was around one or two. The pathologist told them that the problem was that they were speaking to her in multiple languages that were grammatically incompatible. If they wanted her and, by extension, me to advance beyond our peers in English language acquisition and performance, the pathologist prescribed that they speak only one language at home: English. Thus, between the ages of one and two, my parents ceased speaking to me in an Afrikan tongue, and I never learned Swahili to any degree of competency until I made my own efforts after leaving home. This is to say nothing of learning the Lacustrine Bantu tongues (Bwari, Jita, Kerewe) which are now effectively dying off in my extended family with the passing of my grandparents' generation of speakers.

Going further and digging deeper, my parents also had a strong desire for me not to speak Afrikan American Vernacular English. Indeed, the term "Ebonics" briefly came into vogue during a formative period of my youth, and my parents latched onto it. My father went to great lengths correcting what he took to be the "bad grammar" of "Ebonics" coming out of my mouth - a grammar he recognized to be inflected by a number of "Afrikan-isms".

In sum, my parents, effectively, wanted me to speak like a well-educated white person, perhaps even with a tendency to drop more Oxbridge-esque British-isms than American-isms. Ay, and my parents pretty much succeeded in shaping my speech patterns accordingly, with their efforts having been reinforced by my primary schooling: I only attended majority Black schools for three years total between Pre-K to 12th Grade, with my elementary schooling mostly taking place on New York's extremely white Upper East Side, where I recall many little white kids with Black nannies from the Carribean. In any case, my speech was so polished that Afrikans and other international students who attended college with me in the US joked that I spoke in my classes as if I had attended an elite British or American boarding school somewhere on the continent. Prior to that, when I transferred into a majority Black school in Pittsburgh at age 10, the joke was that I talked like a book. Of course, I code switch into and out of erudite white speak but, admittedly, I speak it more fluently perhaps than any other sort of speak - excepting perhaps the Black Intellectual speak of continental and diasporic Afrikans of Generations X, Y, and Z who have been groomed to join the ranks of the talented tenths.

These days, when I reflect upon the above, I believe that my parents understood that I was undeniably Black/Afrikan in appearance and would never pass for a white person by sight but, and this would be my saving grace, I could learn to speak like (and write like) a white person, neither like a child of recent immigrants from the Dark Continent with their attendant miseries nor like a descendant of those who made the Middle Passage with their own attendant miseries. They imagined that speaking like (and writing like) a white person, instead of a Black/Afrikan, would give me an edge in the crab bucket scramble for a rank amongst the talented tenth. Signs betraying excessive Backness/Afrikanity in the realm of speech and writing - realms considered coterminous with the realm of thought - are liabilities for those who would move up or maintain their rank, excepting the rare few who have earned their rank by presenting themselves as exemplary and entertaining specimens of excessive Blackness/Afrikanity.

In the chapter titled "Writing Culture in the Negro in (Dis)Forming the American Canon, R.A. Judy helps us understand the logics at work here by pointing out how true "mastery" of the White Man's tongue, and the transcendence of Blackness, is not to be found in the speaking of the White Man's language but, rather, in the "reasoned writing" of it. That being said, however, to speak in a manner that is closer to "reasoned writing" than to the vernacular is an index of one's "mastery" of the White Man's tongue and, thus, one's transcendence of one's Blackness. This is what my parents wanted for me: to speak like a book, in the same manner that the educated white man wrote, in order to transcend Blackness and be recognized as human. They imagined this to be imperative for me in an era when being a young Black man without distinctions was to have police brutality against you written off on a police report with the catchphrase "no humans involved".

Going further and digging deeper, Judy teaches us that the enslaved Negro who writes their narrative demonstrates their full humanity and emancipates themself by proving that they have "mastered" a European language in and through the practice of "reasoned writing". But this emancipation is achieved by the Negro only by letting something die or, rather, killing something in himself. As Judy writes, "The death that is emancipating is the negation of the materiality of Afrika." Considering this, I am reminded of a story related to me in the form of a tweet. An older Afrikan immigrant hears another, young Afrikan on a call in the grocery store aisle while shopping. The older man turns to the younger man and says to him, "I hear my country in your voice." Which is to say, in other words, that the younger man's accent and the so-called "errors" that constitute the materiality of his speech indicate to the older man that the younger man is also an immigrant from his home country.

To "master" the White Man's tongue, then, is to be able to speak and write in the White Man's tongue in such a manner that obliterates the materiality of the Afrikan tongue. One could say, then, that my parents were told by the speech language pathologist that hearing Afrika in their children's voices would be a liability for their children: the materiality of Afrika in our tongues would "hold us back" and "deny us opportunities". So my parents diligently spoke English, and English only, to their children until their children were "advanced" in their English language skills for their ages, negating the possibility that an Afrika tongue would hold them back, and ensuring that their children's speech would be much more like the "reasoned writing" of the White Man.

This is how ethnocide works. In its most mundane and quotidian form: it marginalizes and pathologizes subjugated cultures and, then, goes on to prescribe conformity to the dominant culture as both (i) the cure to the pathology that it has made of the persistence of subjugated cultures and (ii) the access route from the underprivileged margins to the privileged center.

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We can only make sense of the most spectacular genocidal and ethnocidal horrors of colonial racial capitalism after we have illuminated the "terror[s] of the mundane and quotidian" from which these spectacular horrors emerge.

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"The Last of the Loud" - Dhoruba bin Wahad, Philosopher of the Whirlwind

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"The Last of the Loud" - Dhoruba bin Wahad, Philosopher of the Whirlwind

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In this episode we interview Dhoruba bin Wahad. A leading member of the New York Black Panther Party, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21. He is a veteran and co-founder of the Black Liberation Army and a former political prisoner. He - and Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt - are, we believe, the only two Black political prisoners to use COINTELPRO documents to secure their release from political imprisonment. Both the FBI and NYPD settled with Dhoruba in lawsuits he filed against them for framing him.

There are a number of great writings and conversations with Dhoruba bin Wahad out there. But we asked Dhoruba to do this episode to discuss his political philosophy. He found our approach to that a bit humorous at times, but as one of our favorite thinkers, and someone who embodies their theory in social practice to a degree few of us can imagine, we hoped to contribute to his legacy in this way.

In this conversation we cover some common themes in Dhoruba's writing, we ask about his ideology, his frequent use of the term "whirlwind," Democratic Fascism, his emphasis on humanism, and the differing historical destinies of white and Black people in the US. Dhoruba talks about demands, encapsulation, the local nature of politics, Black sovereign thinking, solidarity, united fronts and political consequences for injustice. We also discuss the iconification of Assata Shakur and what it means to support the right of self-determination and the people who become political prisoners for exercising that right.

There were other questions and follow-ups we wanted to ask, but time did not allow for it. We hope that if possible we will be able to record a part 2 in the future.

More importantly, we want to note that we are not requesting financial support for our platform for this episode. Instead what we hope our listeners will do is contribute to the GoFundMe that Community Movement Builders has set up for Dhoruba bin Wahad's medical fund. Dhoruba has stage 4 cancer and is in need of financial support. The GoFundMe will only be up for two more weeks, so if you can give something to that, please do so now. We'll include a link to that in the show notes.

Links:
The GoFundMe
Dhoruba's website

Dhoruba's content on imixwhatilike.

Dhoruba's content on Black Power Media.
Still Black, Still Strong Look For Me In The Whirlwind Dhoruba bin Wahad's Political Writings (in French, English and German)

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"The Last of the Loud" - Dhoruba bin Wahad, Philosopher of the Whirlwind

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In this episode we interview Dhoruba bin Wahad. A leading member of the New York Black Panther Party, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21. He is a veteran and co-founder of the Black Liberation Army and a former political prisoner.