The Future Left Presents:

After-School Study

What is After-School Study?

Brought to you by the student-led club, The Future Left, “After-School Study” is a loose, informal experiment in co-education. The goal, very generally, is to engage with radical movement work and scholarship to help contextualize ongoing liberation struggle in L.A., the U.S., and across the globe. We’ll focus quite a bit on the Black Radical Tradition, which has deep roots in California, as well as Indigenous movements, radical queer and trans feminist interventions, and international people’s movements. We’ll orient our study around publicly-available lectures, conversations, podcasts, short films, etc., in an effort to provide relatively accessible entry points into this work. Many pieces (eventually) will be accompanied by notes for further reflection.

• This work is intended for and open to Upper School students, as well as faculty, parents/guardians, and the broader school community. Parental discretion is strongly advised for Middle School students. We’ll provide content warnings, but know that, by necessity, some study will include histories of violent conflict and oppression, analyses of racial and gender-based violence, and strong language.

• Submissions, suggestions, comments, and questions are welcome, but please know we’re running this with limited bandwidth on volunteer time. (Email litton@es-la.com.)

• Obviously, content here does not reflect the official views of the school or the views of folks submitting material and notes. Nor do we purport to be experts. We’re just trying to make accessible work and thought that is too often ignored.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore:

Geographies of Racial Capitalism

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a prominent abolitionist and scholar, one of the cofounders of Critical Resistance, and the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, which should be required reading for all Californians. She is currently Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and Professor of Geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the City University of New York.

This is a 2020 short film produced by the Antipode Foundation. (Click the white arrow in the center of the image above to play the film.)

Racial capitalism:

1:10: “The catastrophe of racial capitalism on a world scale—its particular form of austerity and neoliberalism and permanent war that we struggle through—requires an approach to solving problems that, however particular or local they are, have an international dimension, because it is an international problem.”

2:15: “Racial capitalism, which is to say all capitalism, is not a thing, it’s a relation. If we look back through the history of capitalism as it developed, we see that the understanding that those who own the means of production had of their differences from those whose labor they exploited were understandings that we can recognize today as racial practice.”

2:50: “All capitalism is racial from its beginning. The capitalism we have inherited is constantly reproducing itself and it will continue to depend on racial practice and racial hierarchy no matter what. This is another way of saying we can't undo racism without undoing capitalism.”

4:20: “Slavery and the slave trade were not initiated when some people who became known as Europeans encountered some people who became known as Africans. It was never limited to African slavery, and, in fact, we ought take more seriously the fact of intra-European slavery as one of the forces that shaped the modern world. The foundations of racial capitalism, the foundations of the social organization of human groupings in Western Europe during the rise of capitalism—they don't have anything to do with Africa, Asia, North America, or South America. They have to do with what was happening here in Europe between various peoples, all of whose descendants might have become white. That is the major lesson of racial capitalism, and it matters because capitalism won’t stop being racial capitalism if all the white people disappear from the story. Capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it. It started racial without what people imagine race to mean, which is Black people, and it will continue to be racial without what people imagine the not-race to be, which is white people.”

• This is a difficult point of analysis for many folks to accept or digest, so we’ll return to it in subsequent pieces. Obviously, the ramifications are far-ranging. Popular liberal formulations of “anti-racist” practice, and their horizons of “social justice,” tend to imagine, abstractly, a form of democratic capitalism with “an equal playing field”—one that no longer includes racial discrimination. If a historical and geographical analysis of racial capitalism demonstrates, however, that the system fundamentally depends upon the violent maintenance and reproduction of race-, gender-, and class-based hierarchies, then we’re forced into the uncomfortable conclusion that quite a lot of liberal or so-called progressive “anti-racist” practice is not just inadequate, but in fact actively reproduces racial violence.

• The traditional, simplified Marxist analysis tends to read contemporary anti-Black American racism as emerging essentially as an ideological tool to fracture the proletariate and prevent revolutionary practice—particularly as a response to Maroon societies or labor movements during early industrialization. Gilmore complicates this analysis and draws quite a bit from Cedric Robinson, who, in his work Black Marxism, argues that racial practice both precedes and makes possible the emergence of capitalism in Europe. Racism functions in pre- or early-modern Europe through the oppression of many peoples whose descendants, as Gilmore notes, may have become white—the Irish, the Slavs, the Roma, for example. It’s important, then, that we understand “whiteness”—and all racial categorization—as a construct and a social practice, not an essential quality.

The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC):

6:20: “I set myself the task of understanding what had happened in California between, say, the mid-1970s, when anything could have emerged as a solution to surplus labor, and what actually happened starting in the early 1980s, when California started to build prison, after prison, after prison, after prison, when it could have built anything else. So prisons, in my view, concentrate surpluses.”

7:05: “I asked questions about how the relatively powerful local elites used the state to get what they want. That brings us back to the question of criminalization. There has to be a steady stream of criminals, of those eligible to be categorized as criminal. They have to keep coming. That group has to either get bigger over time or deeper over time. The sentences have to be longer, the list of behaviors that count as crime have to grow. That is the basis of how the prison industrial complex perpetuates itself. The relationship of that to slavery is, on the one hand, very general—unfreedom is unfreedom—and, on the other hand, the racial order and hierarchy of the United States, founded on both slavery and genocide, never stopped reproducing itself through all of its iterations over time.”

• Less thorough, and sometimes dangerously misleading versions of the arguments Gilmore provides in Golden Gulag have entered the popular discourse through works like The New Jim Crow, 13th, and Just Mercy. Defanged, incomplete analysis often leads to advocacy for weak “criminal justice reform” or even a kind of liberal version of prison abolition, which attempts to decouple the movement from revolutionary practice and revolutionary horizons, focussing more narrowly on alternatives to incarceration that often, in fact, expand the carceral and surveillance state.

Abolition Geography and Place-based Struggle:

9:25: “All liberation struggle is place-based liberation struggle. The scale might differ wildly and the size might differ wildly, but it’s all place-based. Liberation struggle is specific to the needs of people where they are, and that ‘where’ has many dimensions.”

10:00: “In Amadora, there are numerous neighborhoods that, over many decades, were built by the people who live there. Some will call those informal settlements, others will call those self-built housing. The point is they’re not merely shelters; they're communities.”

10:35: “People in Cova da Moura in self-built houses discovered that they were under threat of losing their homes, and therefore losing their entire community, because none of their houses were up to code. The municipality where they’re located promised that everybody would get a new house in a social housing project somewhere, and people said, ‘No, you don't understand, we want to live here. This is our home. Not just the house. This community is our home. We have people and resources here.’ So people started to organize themselves, not only to save their houses, which was the number one impetus to organizing, but also to understand: ‘How come we, of all the people of Greater Lisbon, are under threat of losing our community and our home? What is it about us?’ At the same time, they developed study groups to understand not just their local vulnerability or how the city government works, but also the history of colonialism, the history of racism, the current history of citizenship in the EU as it has changed over time. All of these things became part of their own study program, and they debate all the time, and they create these institutions that I have come to call pop-up universities.”

A couple things that are important to understand about the Cova da Moura case study Gilmore provides:

• The community and neighborhood of Cova da Moura emerged “extra-legally,” without state sanction or capital investment. In other words, it emerged largely outside of, or perhaps “underneath” and against—even if always entangled within—the established conglomerate of state and capital.

• “Pop-up universities,” as Gilmore calls them, also emerge largely outside of and against the conglomerate of state and capital, and do not function like the institutions we normally refer to as schools or universities. They are not accredited or accrediting institutions; their primary function is not to privatize and certify—in the form of grades, transcripts, degrees—the individual accumulation of social capital. Rather, they are communal spaces where groups can get together and contend with knowledge, ideas, etc., as necessarily shared projects.

Why is this important to understand? “Progressive” analysis often frames liberation struggle in the terms of the oppressor, which inadvertently reproduces the violence of the oppressive regime. It is often put forth that folks are struggling primarily for some form of state recognition—citizenship, equal rights, even a building being up to code—and while liberation struggle often manifests in this way for pragmatic reasons (think SNCC and voter registration), this is emphatically not the foundation. An essential formulation in the Black Radical Tradition is that liberation struggle is a refusal of that which has been refused. It is, in a certain sense, a refusal of the settler colonial categories of ‘citizenship’ and ‘rights,’ which have always been either refused or in some cases forced upon—through racist practice—the undercaste or the outsider.

In other words—and this is obvious from Gilmore’s narrative—the people of Cova da Moura are not struggling, first and foremost, to be recognized by the state or receive capital investment. They are in fact struggling to preserve and grow the community they built underneath and against state and capital, and they are refusing the violent interventions of state and capital, even or especially those programs that are oriented toward “development” and “improvement.” This points to another crucial formulation in the Black Radical Tradition: revolution as preservation. This is not a reactionary or nostalgic formulation; rather, it’s a recognition that revolutionary practice is always already underway in oppressed communities. And it has everything to do with nurturing community, building solidarity, and sharing needs.

There are many analogous examples in contemporary Los Angeles.

14:15: “We have to be attentive to the many different kinds of places and processes through which people come to consciousness through fomenting liberation struggle. It’s a form of solidarity, and solidarity is something that’s made, and remade, and remade. It never just is. And I think of it in terms of radical dependency—that we come absolutely to depend on each other. And solidarity and radical dependency are about life, and living, and living together. And living together in rather beautiful ways. And that’s something that I have encountered on this hilltop, and it’s why I like it here so much.”

Robin D. G. Kelley:

What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?

Robin D. G. Kelley is an organizer, historian, and the author/editor of nearly a dozen books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. He is currently Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA.

This is a 2017 lecture at the University of Washington. (Click the white arrow in the center of the image above to play the video.)

Barbara Ransby:

Racial Capitalism, Power, and the Black Radical Tradition

Barbara Ransby is an organizer, historian, and the author of three books, including Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, and Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. She is currently Professor of African-American Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This is a pretty fascinating piece, the 2019 keynote address delivered to NFG’s “Funders for a Just Economy.” Ransby basically has to very tactfully insist to non-profit donors that they must work toward their own abolition. (Click the white arrow in the center of the image above to play the video.)

Angela Davis:

We Can’t Eradicate Racism without Eradicating Racial Capitalism