BOOK REVIEW:
Beyond Racial Capitalism
Beyond Racial Capitalism:
Co-operatives in the African Diaspora
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUEMany organizers from United States cooperative movements have developed alternative methods to move us out of what can feel like stagnation. Asset mapping—counting not only our untapped resources but also our wins—is a common exercise that prompts us to analyze our shared movement histories and identify potential comrades. We don’t have to have every answer because we can count among our ranks many actors with deep wells of expertise. So, rather than beginning from the position that because we don’t know or have everything we need, we don’t have anything, this prompt reminds us that we do all know some things—and those things likely come from a discipline. Disciplines are anchored in the social and material conditions of our lives, not vague, public self-flagellations of our limits or hollow gestures to genocides past and present:
Balancing deficit and asset mapping vexes a lot of movements, from community organizing to labor (e.g. are you “black-pilled” or are you naive to the world?), affecting not only how we operate within these movements, but also how we write about and mythologize them. To return to Gibson-Graham, “To be a leftist is historically to be identified with the radical potential of the exploited and oppressed working class. Excluded from power yet fixated on the powerful, the radical subject is caught in the familiar ressentiment of the slave against the master.”1 Gibson-Graham are not arguing that this dynamic is incorrect, only that it is an incomplete and deficit-based framing of how power operates. Many of us are excluded from the power that comes with capital, but that should not lead usto assume that we have no other equally threatening assets. When we operate with a deficit-based assumption of our subjectivity, however accurate it may be, we risk producing not only a single master (capitalism! Which, yes, we can all agree is bad), but also a single theory for how the master works, unnecessarily limiting our potential to topple him.
These tensions are not exclusive to activist spaces. In academia, we can see similar tendencies in our engagement with Black radicalism, as outlined by Cedric Robinson in his 1983 work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Robinson’s critique of Western Marxism differs from (but is not necessarily refuted by) Gibson-Graham’s later arguments. Critically, Robinson argues that Western Marxism has its own historiography. It is not an objective description of our lives (even if it’s really close) but was, in fact, produced by its own Eurocentric traditions, carried forth by generations of Marxists. As Robinson writes in the first chapter, “Marxism, the dominant form that the critique of capitalism has assumed in Western thought, incorporated theoretical and ideological weaknesses that stemmed from the same social forces that provided the bases of capitalist formation.”2 It’s not that the critics of capitalism were beneficiaries of the system—that alone is not an earth-shattering finding3—but that both capitalism and its Western negation share the same blind spot of ignoring how central the production of racial difference is to the project. Western Marxism’s (and its strict adherents’) refusal to investigate this gap led to a flattened portrayal of the origins of our current class dynamics. The long history of relations between Europe and Africa were collapsed into the figure of the Black slave, “a consequence masqueraded as an anthropology and a history,”4 and the radical thought and actions of the Black diaspora were reduced to an anecdotal, homogenized story of resistance to capitalist and colonial rule. The development of the theory and forms of resistance that we call the Black Radical Tradition is therefore one counter to this flattening, as it focuses on struggle over the course of generations of scholars, organizers, and revolutionaries.
NOTES:
1. Gibson-Graham, J.K., A Postcapitalist Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 5.
2. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 10.
3. See, for example, everyone’s favorite factory-scion-turned-class-traitor Friedrich Engels.
4. Robinson, Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 4.
“Will Isreal be doing land acknowledgements in a hundred years,? Tik Tok meme by @user8273845
1. Gibson-Graham, J.K., A Postcapitalist Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 5.
2. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 10.
3. See, for example, everyone’s favorite factory-scion-turned-class-traitor Friedrich Engels.
4. Robinson, Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 4.
Many of us are excluded from the power that comes with capital, but that should not lead us to assume that we have no other equally threatening assets.
5. “The bourgeoisie that led the development of capitalism were drawn from particular ethnic and cultural groups; the European proletariats and the mercenaries of the leading states from others; its peasants from still other cultures; and its slaves from entirely different worlds. The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones. As the Slavs became the natural slaves, the racially inferior stock for domination and exploitation during the early Middle Ages, as the Tartars came to occupy a similar position in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages, so at the systemic interlocking of capitalism in the sixteenth century, the peoples of the Third World began to fill this expanding category of a civilization reproduced by capitalism.” (Robinson 1983, 26).
6. I’m fascinated by the editors’ decision to use “social” over “solidarity” here. The former is common in Western literature and while it shares a few characteristics with the Solidarity Economy, it’s of neoliberal policy origin and maintains a “poverty alleviation” orientation rather than a transformative one (hence why it includes non-profits and NGOs in its analysis). Hossein herself critiques the term extensively in a 2023 article co-authored with Megan Pearson, “Black Feminists in the Third Sector: Here Is Why We Choose to use the term Solidarity Economy”: “By choosing the solidarity economy, we highlight the contributions the Black diaspora, Indigenous, and Global South people have made to social economics. We only ever use the ‘social economy’ when the word Black is in front of it. This way, we nullify the generic use of the ‘social economy’ because its European origins do not resonate for many people (Hossein, 2018). We know that many Western countries opt for the term ‘social economy,’ but this concept fails to acknowledge the tensions and exclusions within the economy and the social economy itself.” Given this position, what does the book’s “social” modifier accomplish that “solidarity” did/does not?
7. “The Solidarity Economy in Brazil” in Vishwas Satgar’s The Solidarity Economy Alternative: Emerging Theory and Practice (2014), 172.
This is the point of departure for the recent book Beyond Racial Capitalism: Co-operatives in the African Diaspora, edited by Caroline Shenaz Hossein, Sharon D. Wright Austin, and Kevin Edmonds. The anthology uses Robinson’s definition of racial capitalism as a cornerstone for a collection of texts about how cooperatives participate in the broader Black social economy6 of the African diaspora. They frame these structures, and the anthology itself, as a response to racial capitalism, which not only continues to oppress and exploit the diaspora, but reproduces an intellectual status quo that ignores our contributions to critique.
I come to Beyond Racial Capitalism as a Solidarity Economy (SE) organizer and educator. Briefly, the Solidarity Economy is a political economy led by values of mutualism, sustainability, cooperation, and justice (rather than exploitation and privatization) with roots in Latin American responses to globalization and neoliberal capitalism. The framework includes many tools like cooperatives, which of course is where the editors focus. One of the challenges of writing and organizing in this space is that the project can often feel vague. As Brazilian theorist Euclides André Mance, who has published extensively about solidarity economies, writes, rather than making a singular demand, or emerging from a singular theoretical origin, the Solidarity Economy “create[s] an economic reality... in a collaborative way.”7 It’s a lovely albeit overwhelming sentiment. To create an economic reality, we must work across multiple movements, geographies, and scales. We have to work as broadly and with as much depth as racial capitalism operates.
This large-scale objective has led to an anxious desire to “pin” SE to a singular origin point or overarching theory. Generally speaking, we tend to assume the “economy” is one process: waged labor working in a capitalist enterprise operating in a commodity market. However, as scholars of the Diverse Economy like Gibson-Graham reinforce, we meet our needs in multiple ways on any given day (waged labor, sure, but also through gifts, bartering, pooling our resources, etc.). Nevertheless, if we lead with the assumption that the economy is singular, then we are primed to believe that its negation (the Solidarity Economy) must be similarly uniform. We then make well-intentioned organizing mistakes like operating with the belief that the strength of the movement lives and dies by its ability to proliferate a particular tool (which, in the North American context, typically means cooperatives). This makes SE organizing, on its face, a perfect place for old capitalist cultures to emerge, from liberation through private ownership to the music-man–esque development of worker co-ops. Again, “singularity” backs us into corners.
Once, when I was struggling to articulate these assumptions while facilitating a Solidarity Economy 101 workshop, a friend and comrade of mine offered, “a co-op is no more ‘Solidarity Economy’ than a chair is.” Meaning, a single entity does not make an economy; multiple collective tools and strategies must be linked together with a cooperative culture to keep us involved, hold us to our values, foster different desires, and help us move through conflict. Each of these things—the tool, the network, and the culture—are what constitute the “economic reality” Mance describes.
It is possible to recognize the principles and practices of the Black social (and solidarity) economy without risking co-optation or erosion from the state and business-forward developers.
Because a book like this addresses the bias within the peer-review culture of academic journals, this edited book in a feminist series creates a space for scholars, many of whom are Black. Authors in this book prioritize their empirical studies, and draw on the Black political economy—namely, the Black social economy—to engage with racial capitalism and ask why co-ops matter.
The contributions of these authors are so important because they are often silenced in other publications and other scholarly and professional spaces as being “too narrow.” It is difficult for scholars studying and writing about anti-Blackness in the cooperative movement to get published. This book brings together these authors, giving them an uncensored space to share their critical political economy scholarship. The Black social economy is the home for Black scholars writing on political economy.8
The contributors include economists, political scientists, scholars of the African diaspora, labor scholars, and organizers whose research ranges from ethnographic explorations of cooperation to the aforementioned empirical studies; it is a testament to the editors’ skill that these contributions sit together seamlessly.
The quantitative lens is particularly interesting: applying the Black Radical Tradition to tabular data that tracks phenomena like land theft (Chapter 6, “Maroons, Rastas, and Ganja Cooperatives: The Building of a Black Social Economy in the Eastern Caribbean,” by Edmonds) and ROSCA participation (Chapter 9, “Caribbean Banker Ladies Making Equitable Economies: An Empirical Study on Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, Trinidad, and Grenada,” by Hossein) creates nuanced analyses and pushes the standard structure of the scientific method (from hypothesis and methods to findings and discussion) to more thorough and engaging places; it’s no small act.
More broadly, the texts really succeed in places where they engage assumed boundaries—namely, in their discussions about “formality” and “formal recognition,” a theme that unites the collection: Is a ROSCA a cooperative? If not, should it be considered one? What is gained—and by whom—when we widen the tent? These questions are juicy when they appear sporadically throughout the collection; the editors make most of the theoretical and disciplinary arguments in their introductions and concluding chapters. Of course, one could write these questions off as too granular for the book’s bigger objective of explaining how these cooperative entities participate in an alternative economy that is a model outside of racial capitalism. That said, as Hossein’s introduction and other contributions exemplify, these questions do have material and ideological effects. Materially speaking, organizers see that “formalizing” cooperation—in this case, categorizing susus, tandas, ajo, chits, and other social banking systems as cooperatives (as opposed to, say, “collectives,” “collective entities,” or examples of cooperation)—opens the door for the kinds of institutional support that other cooperative entities already benefit from, like subsidization from the state or support from private capital.
However, recognition through law is a somewhat limiting, Western definition of what it means to “formalize.” The examples of collective social reproduction in Beyond Racial Capitalism are of course already formal to their participants. They have values, expectations, rules—and, as many contributors demonstrate, they benefit from operating under the radar. To the anthology’s credit, the case studies never make the argument that ROSCAs and other “informal” cooperatives should change their character in order to fit a narrow legal definition of cooperation. Instead, the authors direct their demand upward to the state (and, one can assume, to formal cooperative gatekeepers) to say that, so long as the benefits that either arbiter of formal cooperation can offer are limited to a singular model, the definition of the model itself must expand to include all of the ways people are cooperating. It is possible to recognize the principles and practices of the Black social (and solidarity) economy without risking co-optation or erosion from the state and business-forward developers.
Historian Silvane Silva’s study of Brazilian quilombolas—communities of descendants of Africans who escaped enslavement—and Edmonds’s aforementioned chapter on ganja cooperatives and marronage in the Eastern Caribbean are both revealing investigations of how politically and spatially separate communities attempt to hold the line against the state and capital. These sites and communities that they maintain are themselves, as Silva explains, the “basis for political and social organization for Black people.”9 It’s easy to read this with a Western understanding of land as something demarcated, physical, and only waiting to be extracted from. Silva’s intervention reminds us that land is a social relationship that is only realized in a physical location. Maintaining these locations as quilombolas do is therefore not about preserving an asset, but protecting an entire way we relate to the world—it protects a discipline.
In a study of tandas and cooperativas in New York and New Jersey, Patricia Campos Medina, Erika Nava, and Sol Aramendi similarly unpack the tricky politics of formality in the North American context. Here, the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative (WCBDI), a cooperative incubation project in New York City, formalized the existing mutual aid practices of its participants—most of whom were Latin American immigrant women—building cooperatives from their expertise. However, the top-down structure of the project meant that “millions of dollars in funding [went] to mostly white-led incubator non-profits that so far have failed to trickle down any resources to the mostly Indigenous-led organizations like La Colmena that play a critical initial role in organizing the workers to start the incubation and later continue to support them long after the incubation period ends.”10 Here, formality means access to (some) capital and technical assistance for emerging cooperatives and their networks, but it also reinforces the top-down power dynamics which all but guarantee that they will be replicated in our larger organizing spaces. Throughout the book, as these examples indicate, each contribution concisely explains not only the landscape of cooperation in a particular region, but the stakes of our definitions.
9. Hossein 2023, p.176
10.Hossein 2023, p. 102
The aptly titled Beyond Racial Capitalism does just that by not only expanding the intellectual territory of the Black Radical Tradition, but also drastically improving the quality of our conversations on cooperation by centering an emergent Black social economy tradition.
11. Wildly, it’s now stocked at a Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood next to the oft-dragged “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi.
12. Revolutionary Communist League of Britain, “Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement” (New Era Publications, 1986), 84, 93.
13. Robinson, Black Marxism, xx.
14. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), xxxii.
Canons are not built on single texts, but a chorus of diverse scholarship published over time. Sure, the Black Radical Tradition is associated with Robinson, but it’s more accurately Robinson holding together W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Amílcar Cabral, and many others. Of course, this holding together, or the act of making an intellectual location, has its own limits. We can cite, critique, and assign works to our students, as I eagerly intend to do with this collection. However, I also leave Beyond Racial Capitalism wondering what kinds of organizing we can develop from these case studies and their arguments. How do we animate these arguments? It’s heartening, for example, to see racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition now incorporated into Solidarity Economy workshops and trainings like the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City’s Cooperative Leadership Intensive and a training for movement leaders by PeoplesHub—an online movement school—called Mapping Our Futures. But how else can we more widely integrate these frameworks into our movement culture?
Robinson’s own preface to the 2000 edition of Black Marxism ends with, “In short, as a scholar it was never my purpose to exhaust the subject, only to suggest that it was there.”14 Now that Beyond Racial Capitalism is also here, I’m excited to see where it pushes us, what it implores us to do beyond reclassifying our efforts, and who picks it up next.