Neil and I sat down and spoke in July about his forthcoming book, Yellowing the Logarithm: Money, Value and the Political Economy of Racial Capitalism. His book considers how modern money organizes terms of difference in social life, in particular those of race, to conceptualize forms of social wealth and worthiness specific to capitalism. This is an excerpt of a longer conversation on that day and more broadly spanning a year of collaboration through the UC Davis Racial Capitalism Research Initiative and an American Association of Geographers Panel Series on Racial Regimes of Property.
Neil: I was having this conversation with somebody about the idea of inevitability. About how orthodox Marxism can sometimes be read as if its saying, “Well, capitalism is inevitably going to fail.” That if you look at the logic of capital, and its contradictions, then there is no other possibility but for the system to eventually collapse. There’s this sense of inevitability to its failure.
And people have rightly criticized this, because it can lead to a kind of passive politics. That some outcome will eventually happen, regardless of our individual actions. But one of the things I find exciting about your writing—and I think this is true of others who are also grounded in organizing—is that you seem to make sense of our present by writing from the perspective of a possible future that will be.
Mia Karisa: Yes. Actually, I have thought about this a lot. I have this whole spiel I did about afrofuturism and radical geography1, so I’ll try to condense that.
Neil: Please.
Mia Karisa: So the idea of capitalism being destined to fail is very white to me. Capitalism is failure and capitalism is death. Capitalism has been killing people and killing the planet since the jump, let’s say. So saying it’s destined to fail or it’s working now has to come from a privileged position– what you’re really saying is it’s working for me now but, one day, it’s going to kill us all. But from the position of those are being utterly failed by capitalism already, we can’t afford that luxury. The Brown Sisters speak to that in How to Survive the End of the World2. Their concept that we’re currently surviving or living in an apocalypse– I think that’s useful.
If we think about all of this spatially a bit more, rather than thinking about it temporally, we can see that capitalism is here, materially. We can feel it and taste it and choke on it. But these other systems and these other ways of living are necessarily also here because if capitalism was the only thing that existed, we would all be ash. We would just crumble. I’ll point to Cedric Robinson’s conception that oppression, as it intertwines through systems of race and capital, can necessarily only be one condition of our existence. It cannot be totalizing or universal. Culture has to survive and thrive with completely different terms than those systems– to sustain people, keep us alive, for the gears to turn. There have to be forces like the funk, I guess, that are entirely otherwise and that provide some type of sustenance.
That’s why I find Ruth Gilmore’s abolition geographies concept really important. Because that’s what she does. When she talks about abolition geographies, abolition isn’t treated a process that will one day reach success but hasn’t yet. Instead it’s something that’s in constant struggle and that is successful now. Abolition is working. Abolition has been working. It’s just up against a monster. So, I mean, we can’t see liberation everywhere, but we do see its fruits in many places, alive and well.
Neil: Yes! One of the things I take from what you’ve said is how direct action can work as both theory and method. That the way we come to know the logics of capitalism, or racial capitalism, is in their manifestation through and against struggles for liberation. There is a line often quoted from Marx that the point is not merely to understand the world, but to change it. But what I see you as pointing us to is a stronger materialist version of this, in which it is only through changing the world that we can come to fully understand it.
Related to this, I’d like for us to turn to the relationship between scholarship and activism. Ruthie Gilmore, to continue on this thread of abolition geography, has said about scholarship that “the point is not just to be right, the point is to get free.”3 And I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit about approaching scholarly work as a freedom practice?
Mia Karisa: Yeah. I resonate with that a lot, because I feel that the most powerful writers and thinkers are those who are writing to save their peoples’ lives. That’s what a true freedom practice is, right? Because unfreedom is death, or premature death to put it in terms of Gilmore’s conception of racism. And as such, this kind of radical scholarship is always uncomfortable– it comes from the hearts of those deep in struggles that could easily seem hopeless.
Neil: Mariame Kaba has made this distinction between activism and organizing, which turns on the question of accountability. Activism is about individual responses to an issue, in the sense of signing a petition or supporting a particular non-profit. Whereas being an organizer is about having a base, people that you are held accountable to. Organizers “can’t exist solo. Because who the hell are you organizing? You can’t just decide to wake up one morning and be like, “I’m just going to do this shit.’ If you’re organizing, other people are counting on you, but more importantly, your actions are accountable to somebody else.”3
I’ve been trying to think about this distinction in the context of academic work. In the context of scholarship as a practice of “getting free.” The term “scholar-activist” is often taken up to describe this kind of work. And part of the danger I think is how activism as an “individual response” can easily fit within the professional demands of academia. What would it mean then to think in terms of “scholar-organizer”? Who are we holding ourselves accountable to with our work? Dissertation committess, hiring committees, and fellowship granters, for example. But how? The forms of accountability that structure these relationships are so bound up with the institutional aspects of academia. I think we’d agree that we are accountable to mentors in ways that go beyond professional requirements. What are these other imaginings of dependency through which we hold ourselves and our knowledge practices accountable to each other? Beyond questions of readership, where is our “base”?
Mia Karisa: I also have a bone to pick with the term scholar activism– the term is so vague and easily co-opted, because what you are oriented towards as an activist could be anything. So of course, the term is snatched up by those working towards non-radical goals, liberal or multiculural goals that ultimately conserve basic structures of racism and capitalism, especially as they intersect with the university or educational setting.
So a huge part of the work for me is to continually question and correct myself to make sure I’m staying oriented towards abolition– continually questioning what that means, you know– and finding others to converse and organize with who have that critical awareness and ability to adapt. Because the system will try to suck you in at every stage.
I think Mariame Kaba’s emphasis on organizers being accountable to one another that you quoted is crucial– whether we are organizing within or outside the academy, or organizing across that dividing line. And that radical love and accountability among organizers is exciting when it happens but its also one of the biggest challenges of working for transformation, because it means acknowledging that none of us are perfect. We are all capable of causing harm no matter how many marginalized identities we hold, and we have to be willing to take feedback and actually change our habits and behaviors. That kind of growth is scary and vulnerable, but it is so critical– in a sense, that’s how we know it’s working– when change happens on the bodily or small organizational scale.
I’ll also reference Clyde Woods here and a concept from his larger idea of blues epistemology. This work helps articulate that the knowledge we need to get free is not generated in any elite academic spaces, but rather that it comes from the “university of the streets”. And those of us in academia who are trying to do radical work are lifted up by that knowledge that has been produced elsewhere, outside any western institutions.
1 Afro-futurism and Radical Geography: A Blog Post by Yours Truly
2 How to Survive the End of the World: A Podcast from the Brown Sisters
4 Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile Is Done With Other People, by Eve L. Ewing