Book Forum on Ida Danewid's Resisting Racial Capitalism

Earlier this year, CRITIQUE, RACE.ED and GENDER.ED came together to host a book discussion of Ida Danewid's new book Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal. This is Danewid's response to Jared Holley's post and Hemangini Gupta's post.

Lifting the mat: a response to Hemangini Gupta and Jared Holley

Let me start by thanking Hemangini and Jared for their generous and insightful engagement with my book. I have learnt a lot from their close reading of the text and I’m grateful for the opportunity to revisit its arguments with them as my companions. I’ve chosen to organise my response to their comments around four broad themes, related to: the global dynamics of racial capitalism; the limits of state-based visions of freedom; the question of method; and finally, the relation between antipolitics and indigenous notions of grounded normativity.

First, some context: Resisting Racial Capitalism began as a PhD dissertation and grew in unruly ways over several years to finally emerge as an antipolitical manifesto calling for life and freedom beyond the racial capitalist state and its terms of order. My starting point was never an anarchist one, yet this is where the text eventually brought me: not to the classical anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin, or Goldman, but to the subterranean archive of refusal and ungovernability that emanates from the anticolonial and black radical traditions. This is an alternative genre of anarchism which finds inspiration—not so much in the European Enlightenment and its associated ideas around rationalism, science, and universal history—but in the dreamworlds, jazz grooves, anvestral visions, and otherworldly poetics of the antipolitical margins.

In her comments, Hemangini wonders how some of the book’s main arguments—about state violence, capital, and antipolitical freedom struggles—travel and translate to different geographies, especially so in the global South. One of my motivations in writing the book was precisely to break away from the North American focus which often has tended to frame the literature on racial capitalism. By bringing together local critiques of state violence from four different continents—police violence in Rio de Janeiro, bordering in the Mediterranean, extractivism in Nigeria, and sexual governance in India—I wanted to move towards a global theory of racial capitalism. In making this conceptual leap, my argument is not that all places are the same, nor that there are no local variations: the Indian police does obviously not exactly resemble the Brazilian one, and the European border regime is not identical to the US one.  And yet, what stands out—across these and other geographies—is the way in which capital relies upon state power to render populations available for capitalist dispossession, exploitation, and abandonment. The exact form that this takes unavoidably varies from context to context but, as I show in the book, the underlying logic remains the same: around the world, capitalist political economy depends on a particular model of politics associated with governance, hierarchy, and state power.

Does this mean that the state and its institutions can never be used for progressive purposes? Hemangini raises this question, noting that in India some women have mobilised the police to seek recourse to justice and gain access to a public sphere from which they have long been barred. My argument is not that appeals to the state can never be useful: organisers fighting to stop deportations frequently make use of the law, and in Sweden the Sámi community successfully sued the state to secure fishing and hunting rights. Rather than deny the strategic role that such action can play, my main concern is about its limits. Appeals to the state (through rights, recognition, and so on) may go some way towards alleviating the violence that is unleashed on minoritised and marginalised communities, but they are incapable of uprooting the underlying structures that produce disposability, dispossession, and super-exploitation. Resisting racial capitalism ultimately requires more.

This brings me to Jared’s question: Do we, as political theorists, have to think globally and historically? The book contains no methodological statement, as Jared notes, but that does not mean that there is no underlying ethos that guides its approach. It is one that finds inspiration in an eclectic mix of writers and thinkers who together underscore the importance of becoming undisciplined and thinking beyond the conventions of political theory; including, among others,Ellen Meiksins Wood’s materialist approach to social and political theory; Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulations; Jack Halberstam’s musings on wildness and anarchitecture; and Cedric Robinson’s historicisation of the dominant terms of order. From this perspective, the question is not so much “do we, as theorists, have to think historically and globally?” but, rather, “with what (and whose) history and understanding of the global is it that we need to think?” As I show in the book, most if not all Western political theory rests on an (unspoken) understanding of history and globality, but it is one that i) naturalises the racial capitalist state and its governing logics by ii) writing out the global history of colonialism, enslavement, and dispossession. In this regard, Resisting Racial Capitalism is as much a critique of the state as it is of political theory itself.

What is it, then, that we (re)turn to when we refuse the state? Jared asks this question with a nod to both Hobbes and indigenous resurgence, wondering how they differ from my Robinsonian “ode to disorder.” To be clear, life without the state is “chaotic” and “disorderly” only in so far as that is how it is understood within the dominant terms of order. From Hobbes and the other social contract theorists, we have inherited the assumption that the state is a pre-condition for rights, justice, and non-violence: in its absence, life is necessarily “nasty, brutish, and short.” The history of colonialism casts a long shadow over these ideas, not least because indigenous modes of life—which European colonisers regarded as savage, primitive, and in need of tutelage—served as inspiration for the concept of the state of nature. The idea of the state, including what exists before and beyond it, is therefore tied to a racial and colonial view of the world.

For Robinson, what we (re)turn to when we refuse the state is not a war of all against all—as it is for Hobbes—but the promise of antipolitics: that is, of genres of life and worldmaking that exist on different terms than those secured by capital and the state. Across his books and other pieces of writing, he traces this possibility of organising society otherwise through a broad archive ranging from the stateless life of the Ila-Tonga (in today’s Zambia) to the maroon communities scattered across the Americas and the millenarianism of Europe’s midieval radical poverty movements. 

As Jared notes, the concept of antipolitics thus resonates with ideas of grounded normativity and arguments put forward by indigenous thinkers such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Glen Coulthard. But are these not cosmologies that—rather than reject governance—strive for true self-governance? It will probably not surprise you, Jared, that I think that the answer to this question hinges on what we mean by governance. As Simpson herself explains, “I use terms like ‘self-determination’ and ‘nation’ as a way of pushing back against the state and forces of dispossession—as a refusal of state definitions and Western political definitions and an assertion and remaking of those terms based in Indigenous thought.” Indigenous self-determination here emerges as a form of openness and radical abundance rather than enclosure. If this is still “governance”, then it is one whose terms are radically different from those laid out by capital and the state: one rooted in communality, relationality, and care rather than hierarchy, rulership, and authoritarian power. 

Perhaps there is something useful about holding on to and reclaiming the concept of governance? I for one worry that the risks are too high: governance is too closely associated with the state and might re-introduce the very logics (of policing, hierarchy, dispossession, and abandonment) that we want to break away from. Still, what matters most—beyond these terminological quibbles—is that we hold on to the idea that there is something more, beyond the current order of politics. As Simpson and Maynard put it, we “must hold tightly to our insistence that there are, always, one hundred otherwises to the violence of contemporary governance.” 

In TIKAR/MEJA, a series of colourful woven mats that each portray a table, Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann offers a vivid depiction of this idea. The table (meja—from the Spanish mesa) was introduced in Southeast Asia by European colonisers and in I-Lann’s work becomes a symbol for the violence of administrative power: racial, patriarchal, and state-based. She contrasts this with the traditional tikar (mat), which signifies egalitarian, communal, and ancestral modes of life: what I have chosen to call antipolitics. I-Lann writes:

“Flip the table, lift the mat.

I see the table, therefore I mat.”

These are dreams of freedom that cannot be contained by the state.

TIKAR/MEJA. Yee I-Lann, 2018.

Author Bio

Ida Danewid is a social and political theorist based in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex.